The Floor is Lava
John:
And you've had that car for several years now, right?
John:
It's a 2014 car with 30,000 miles.
John:
My kids complain that it still smells like a new car.
John:
They complain?
John:
That's the best smell in the world.
John:
That's what I say.
John:
They're like, I don't like it.
Marco:
What does it smell?
Marco:
I mean, does it actually smell like a new car or does it smell like shampoo that's scented like a new car?
John:
No, it's a new car smell.
John:
The inside has never been shampooed.
Hmm.
John:
It's just mild new car smell.
John:
Because I don't let the kids destroy it so it doesn't smell like their spilled chocolate milk and other things they've wedged into the seat and other gross stuff.
John:
It's a car mostly used by an adult who doesn't make a mess.
John:
You?
John:
I'm surprised.
Marco:
I will say, so we successfully made it through, I think, the majority of the snacking in the car age that our child went through without ever allowing him to snack in the car.
Marco:
And so none of our cars ever smelled like Cheerios or things that little kid slash baby cars usually smell like.
Marco:
Because we just said, no, we're not allowed to eat in the car.
Marco:
And we'll eat when we get there or whatever.
Marco:
And we stuck to that even on long trips.
Marco:
And it was surprisingly easy.
Marco:
It was just like, no, you can't eat.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And then we ate when we got there.
Marco:
And as a result, my car never smelled like Cheerios.
Casey:
Yeah, Aaron's car.
Casey:
It is relatively straightforward to clean out all the detritus that is everywhere, but it is chock full of detritus.
Casey:
And, you know, periodically I will clean out the inside and get it all out of there.
Casey:
But it's it's real bad.
Casey:
And she's better about it than me because, you know, she is fully aware that that is the family car and that that's what happens to the family car and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But I look at it and I'm just like, oh, God, what has happened in here?
Marco:
Well, let me assure you, it is optional.
Marco:
You can say this is not going to be a snack car, and it doesn't have to be a snack car.
John:
Well, the food comes back later, because my kids now want to grab an on-the-go breakfast on their way to school or something, so they have teenager food of...
John:
You know, cans of sparkling water and, you know, random, I mean, even just fruit stuff or like yogurt.
John:
Alex is always bringing yogurt into the car on the way to school.
John:
He wants to grab a yogurt and eat it on the way.
John:
And so he's got a yogurty spoon sitting in like, there's a middle period where there's not much food in the car.
John:
And then later they get old enough to just be like, I'm just bringing food in the car.
John:
I need a snack on the way to school because I didn't have time to eat breakfast.
Marco:
And you're not getting in the car or you're not getting breakfast because that's – like yogurt is such a joke.
Marco:
Yogurt is just melted ice cream.
John:
It's not melted ice cream.
John:
Yeah, it's dairy and sugar.
Marco:
Marco also doesn't know where food comes from.
Marco:
No, no.
Marco:
Yogurt is basically – it's like dairy plus sugar.
Marco:
It's easily spoiled.
Marco:
It's full of sugar, so it will be sticky and be covered in bees pretty soon.
Marco:
It's just – that's what happens.
Marco:
Like yogurt is –
Marco:
It's fine when you're eating it, but it's not something you want ever going near your car.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Just let him bring in an ice cream cone.
Marco:
It's the same thing.
Marco:
If you would allow yogurt, bring in an ice cream cone.
Marco:
Most yogurt has slightly less sugar than ice cream.
Marco:
You'd be surprised how little less.
Marco:
It's really quite similar.
Marco:
That's why the kids like it so much.
Marco:
Because it's ice cream, basically.
Casey:
I'd like to start the show, if I may, with Casey's complaints about his co-host corner.
Casey:
First of all, I would like to begrudgingly congratulate you.
Casey:
Game respect game.
Casey:
I was talking to somebody.
Casey:
Shoot, I can't remember who it was now.
Casey:
But I wanted to refer back to the BMW that I had built for the post-show Neutral last week.
Marco:
And BMW has this wonderful feature where whatever build that you configure on their configurator gets a unique URL.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So that you can then copy and paste that URL, send it around, save it, refer back to it later, and it just has this preset configuration of whatever you set it to.
Casey:
Exactly right.
Casey:
And so I knew that I had put my configuration, quote unquote, my configuration in the show notes and I wanted to refer back to it.
Casey:
And so I clicked on it in the, you know, I went to ATP.fm and I clicked on it and I saw a white BMW and I thought, oh, I must've clicked on the wrong thing.
Casey:
And I clicked it again and I saw the same white BMW, but it looked at this.
Casey:
Oh, oh, well, okay, fine.
Casey:
Well done, you insufferable pain in my hindquarters.
Casey:
Well done, indeed.
Casey:
It took me a minute to realize the joke.
Casey:
And then I realized the joke, and I realized that Marco had swapped my Tanzanite Blue 7 Series for a white one.
Casey:
I was quite annoyed, and I was actually more annoyed at the quality of the joke than I was the fact that you had replaced my blue car with a white one.
Casey:
In fact, I respected the joke enough to... I went to actually replace the Link with the correct one, because I had the correct one still.
Casey:
And I thought, no, no, he earned this one.
Casey:
I'll let it sit.
Casey:
And so it is still the white one on ATP.fm.
Casey:
But rest assured, listeners, I had built a blue one, damn it.
Marco:
This one just so happened to be white.
Casey:
It happened to be white, Marco.
Casey:
It can just happen.
Casey:
Also, I'd like to complain about Mr. John Syracuse.
Casey:
You had mentioned offhandedly Unreconcilable Differences No.
Casey:
121, entitled Impotent Hydra, that you don't like Wegmans, and I would like you to defend yourself, sir, because this is blasphemy.
John:
We've talked about this on this very show, I think.
John:
The one reason is that the Wegmans near me is in a very inconvenient location.
John:
It's on an annoying divided highway that's difficult to get to and always clogged, and then once you're on the side you want to get on, it's hard to get back on the other side.
John:
it's a mess so that's a big reason why we don't ever go there because even though it's not that far away as the crow flies it is terrible to get to and the parking is not great and you know just everything about it second thing is even if it wasn't terrible to get to this there's another one that's also even worse to get to that's farther away that's in a mall um
John:
it's kind of like whole foods where we go all the time because we have a whole foods close by us.
John:
Um, but whole foods like Wegmans is, I mean, you know what they're like, like they're, they're not like regular, regular grocery stores.
John:
Whole foods is worse than Wegmans in this respect.
John:
Um,
John:
where a regular supermarket that we're accustomed to, you can picture in your head of here are what the different aisles are and here's what's in them and here are the kind of products they have.
John:
Just a generic, straight-up-the-middle American supermarket.
John:
But Wegmans and Whole Foods have fancier stuff, different stuff, different brands of things, lots of prepared foods, all sorts of stuff like that.
John:
And the environment is different.
John:
It's not just aisles of stuff with carts going back and forth.
John:
It's all these weird stations and areas and stuff like that.
John:
When I want to go grocery shopping, most of the time, unless there's something special that I want to get that I know I can't get at a plain grocery store, I just want the grocery store experience of going up and down the aisles and getting the stuff and everything being where I expected and being able to find all the brands that I'm accustomed with.
John:
But Wegmans doesn't fill that.
John:
So maybe if it was close, I would go there more than I go to Whole Foods.
John:
But I always feel like I have to go to multiple places like Wegman slash Whole Foods for weird specialty items or things that we know are better there or something we want to get that's fancy.
John:
And then a regular supermarket for regular supermarket stuff.
Casey:
I actually I am sort of playing a shtick here.
Casey:
I do enjoy Wegmans.
Casey:
They just in the last couple of years came to my area.
Casey:
I do like Wegmans actually most as a place to work.
Casey:
They have a really nice patio outside one of the local Wegmans near me.
Casey:
And additionally, they have quite a large like food court kind of sitting area inside as well.
Casey:
Large enough that if you just go and sit and do some work, that's not really unusual.
Casey:
And it's it's not you know, nobody's looking at you like why you hear get out.
Casey:
For those of you who don't know, Wegmans is a supermarket chain here in the States.
Casey:
I would say it's, like John had said, more similar to Whole Foods than a traditional supermarket, but not quite all the way to bespoke, artisanal everything like Whole Foods is.
Casey:
But anyways, but yeah, Wegmans, very expensive.
Casey:
My favorite vice – well, not my favorite, but one of the things I enjoy to do for lunch –
Casey:
occasionally is go to Wegmans Hot Bar where you get like a, you know, a styrofoam or whatever container.
Casey:
It's probably not styrofoam.
Casey:
It's probably cardboard.
Casey:
But anyway, you get a cardboard, you know, to-go box and you fill it with all sorts of different things.
Casey:
And of course, if you're like me, you want the really, really heavy things like mac and cheese.
Casey:
And then you go and you go to the checkout counter and they weigh your box.
Casey:
And it's so much per, you know, half pound or pound or what have you.
Casey:
And it is preposterous how much a single human being can spend at the Wegmans Hot Bar.
Casey:
I think I have spent like $15, $20 on my meal alone.
Casey:
And this is just like cafeteria food for all intents and purposes.
Casey:
It's very tasty, cafeteria food, but consider your source.
Casey:
I have low standards.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
It is ridiculous how much you can spend at the Wegmans Hot Bar and Whole Foods is just as bad, if not worse.
Casey:
But yeah, a lot of people are devout Wegmans fans.
Casey:
I definitely like it.
Casey:
It is very expensive, even for groceries, as far as I'm concerned.
Casey:
But it's a very nice store and I enjoy it.
Casey:
And I just wanted to hear you defend yourself.
Casey:
And I can't really argue with anything you've said, unfortunately.
Marco:
I can't believe that you go to the hot bar in a grocery store and get macaroni and cheese.
Marco:
That's like – that's basically the worst thing you can get there because it is always priced by weight.
Marco:
And what you should really do – I mean there's like all sorts of hacks of like you get like all sunflower seeds or whatever and it's like –
Marco:
It's cheaper than buying sunflower seeds per pound or whatever.
Marco:
But within the realm of normal meals, I feel like a salad with a bunch of stuff added on top, like sunflower seeds or other nuts, things like that, that's almost always a way better buy than anything that is inherently very dense and heavy, like baked potatoes or pasta.
Casey:
I completely agree.
Casey:
There was a stretch of time when Wegmans was new that we were doing this once every month or two.
Casey:
The family would go for lunch or something like that.
Casey:
Over time, I realized I'm being an idiot.
Casey:
I need to get like salad with maybe a little kiss of macaroni and cheese on the side rather than an entire platter.
Casey:
I'm not an entire platter, but you know what I mean?
Casey:
Like, you know, a large portion of mac and cheese and then some other heavy thing next to it.
Casey:
And so, yeah, I completely agree with you.
John:
I don't partake of any of the prepared foods.
John:
Like I don't begrudge people them.
John:
Occasionally if you're in a crunch and you don't have time to do anything, you can get them.
John:
But they are so expensive and everybody has sneezed on them and you have no idea how old they are.
John:
Like it's just – just everything is aligned against them.
John:
The main reason we go into our local Whole Foods, aside from it being very close by, is they do milk as a loss leader.
John:
So they actually have the cheapest milk in the area.
John:
And it's a good idea because every time we want to go to milk, we end up in Whole Foods.
John:
And then if our kids are with us, they make us buy like the $2 mochi, which are good, granted, but A, not that good, and B, they're $2.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I have never found anything in the grocery store hot bar to be worth getting a second time.
Marco:
And I will forget this about maybe once every two years and I'll go get another big lunch or a couple lunches there.
Marco:
And every time I'm like, why did I why did I do that?
Marco:
And why do it's it's actually very similar to the WBDC box lunch side dishes where like you get something and you're like, you know, some kind of, you know, oh, here's like a side of, you know, macaroni salad or something.
Marco:
And you taste it and you're like, this is not anything like what I expected.
Marco:
And also somehow manages to taste like nothing and yet is also not good.
Marco:
And it's $8.
Marco:
Yeah, and it costs you $8 if you're lucky.
Marco:
In reality, I'm usually closer to $12 because I think I'm underweight.
Marco:
And then I get to the checkout and it's like, oh, that's $12.
Marco:
And afterwards, I'm like, I could have walked down the street to any casual fast food place like a Chipotle or something and gotten a way better meal for less money than what I just spent at the stupid hot bar at the grocery store.
Casey:
I actually think that Wegmans and Whole Foods both are tasty and decent food, but I completely concur that it is not worth the money that one would spend on it.
Casey:
We've gotten way off the rails already, and it's my fault, so let's just move right along.
Casey:
Why don't you tell us about what could have caused your iMac Pro's fan problems, Marco?
Marco:
actually i have a small update on that all right so first let me let me do the the feedback item here so we got feedback from chris harper who says uh i started my career as a technician in the entertainment department at large theme park one of my jobs was repairing broken equipment early in my training i was told to never use the air compressor for blowing out electronics because air compressor tanks and even the hoses often get condensation in them possibly due to the heat of the motor and
Marco:
Essentially, you'd be blowing moisture on your stuff.
Marco:
So you had to use canned air instead or vacuum them out using special electronics vacuums.
Marco:
And I think I heard it from a couple people on Twitter who also said that apparently air compressors can spray tiny drops of oil from inside themselves into electronics, which is obviously very bad, or little metal shards.
Marco:
I don't think any of that happened, and my air compressor is a very small consumer unit that probably doesn't have either... I can tell you I've never oiled it, and probably doesn't get hot enough to ever make condensation inside.
Marco:
So I don't think that was an issue here.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
after a few days of operation, my fan problem is back.
Marco:
Now, I also heard, I forget who, I'm sorry, I have to look up.
Marco:
I checked the notes, which you are not following along in very well.
John:
Because Casey was prompting you to read the feedback from Tom Bridge and you skipped several items down.
John:
Yes, you did.
John:
Oh, hold on.
Marco:
Up, up, up, up, up.
Marco:
Oh, there we go.
John:
Is this your first day, Marco?
John:
It is his first day looking at the show notes.
Ha ha ha!
Marco:
Lucky for you, I'm the editor.
Marco:
So we also heard from Tom Bridge, who said a second possible explanation for Marco's iMac Pro's reduced fan RPMs post-vacuum would be a reset of the system management controller, the SMC reset, which was accomplished when I unplugged my iMac Pro for more than 15 seconds.
Marco:
So this is a long-standing Mac spin-around-and-fix-the-problem kind of thing that you try.
Marco:
You do a rain dance, you zap PRAM, and you reset the SMC.
Marco:
That's what this is.
Marco:
So the way you reset the SMC on any modern Mac is you cut off power for 15 seconds, and you plug it back in, and the SMC resets.
Marco:
And that is the component that is responsible for things like thermal management, fan speed, stuff like that.
Marco:
So that is much... Because I said last episode...
Marco:
I'm pretty sure that not a lot came out of it, dust-wise.
Marco:
And I wasn't sure why it fixed it, because it seemed like enough stuff didn't come out of it for that to be the problem.
Marco:
So if that indeed wasn't the problem, and if the SMC is just...
Marco:
kind of getting buggy over time which does happen with Mac sometimes that's a much scarier outcome for me because now the problem is back I didn't have time to try this yet because I you know I use my computer so I didn't have time to unplug it for a while and play around today but I am a little concerned that this just might be my life now and if that's the case I'm gonna be very sad because again one of the biggest reasons I love the iMac Pro is no matter what I do to it I never hear the fans
Marco:
And now I'm hearing the fans spin up and down on a pretty regular basis as I do like Xcode builds and stuff.
Marco:
And that's really not great.
Casey:
Let it be known, listeners, that as we record, it is the evening of the 29th of January in the year 2020.
Marco:
I have not yet ordered a Mac Pro.
Marco:
In fact, go to the next follow-up item and I'll tell you why that's relevant to me.
Casey:
Well, let me just tell you, listeners, that I am putting it on the record that before WWDC, Marco will have a Mac Pro in his house.
Casey:
You've heard it here first.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Tell me about why you're supposedly not getting a Mac Pro, Marco.
John:
This is my item.
John:
He'll chime in after I explain what's actually in here, and I don't think it's actually relevant to his decision-making process.
John:
This is just a follow-up on the Pro Display XDR reference modes.
John:
We talked about them last time, like what they're used for in the P3 1600 nits versus 500 nits and all that stuff.
John:
Anyway, there is an official Apple...
John:
whatever they're called now, Tech Notes support article that explains all the different reference modes.
John:
There's many more than the ones we mentioned.
John:
So if you want to see them all and understand how they work on what they're supposed to be used for, you can check out the link in the show notes.
John:
The one interesting thing that I pulled from it is there's a section towards the bottom that's like...
John:
If you see this scary icon showing a caution triangle exclamation point symbol next to a monitor that appears in the AirPlay menu, your Pro Display XDR might be in a low power mode and using limited brightness.
John:
This can occur if the ambient temperature of the room is 77 degrees Fahrenheit or higher and your display has been at 500 nits or higher for a long time.
John:
Unplug your display from your computer, wait 5 to 10 minutes, then connect your display and try again.
John:
If the issue continues and the ambient temperature of the room is less than 77 degrees, contact Apple.
John:
The reason I think this is irrelevant to Marco is because I really don't think he ever keeps his house higher than 77 degrees.
John:
And he's also probably never going to have the monitor over 500 nits because he's not doing HDR video editing slash mastering.
John:
So it's mostly irrelevant.
John:
And I can tell, like I said, when I first talked about this monitor, you cannot hear or I cannot hear the fans in the monitor.
John:
I'm assuming they're spinning right now, but I have never heard them other than when I shoved my ear against the back of the monitor when I was setting it up.
John:
And even then it was difficult.
John:
Still can hear the tower computer over there off in the distance a little bit, which is why I think still with your iMac Pro, it may be noisier under load than this.
John:
It is definitely noisier under load than this thing is because this thing never changes sound whatsoever.
John:
But its constant noise level is higher than the idle noise level of an iMac Pro, which I basically can't hear.
John:
This I can always almost hear and it just literally never changes volume at all.
Marco:
Unfortunately, my iMac Pro was like that for a long time and now isn't.
Marco:
So just wait, John.
John:
Wait until about year two or year three of your Mac Pro and we'll have a little bit more thermal overhead than you do considering how vast my cooling system is and how little is actually in the box.
John:
I'm not on the ragged edge of anything.
John:
I really need to get, I think the iStatMenus guys said they were updating their stuff to support the new temperature.
John:
They were going to send me a beta and I don't think they sent me one.
John:
Look at that.
John:
They're usually pretty fast.
John:
I do want to see, like, do the fans ever go any faster, no matter what I do?
John:
Because, like I said, I can't hear them change, you know, volume at all, even when I do disk benchmarks, GPU benchmarks, CPU benchmarks.
John:
It's just, you know, even playing games in Windows, which I assume doesn't really understand the fan control on this or whatever.
John:
Like, playing Destiny.
John:
Like, I don't know what I have to do to this computer to make it make any more noise.
John:
It just doesn't, because...
John:
I've got the wimpiest video card and a fairly wimpy CPU and three gigantic fans plus a blower fan and almost nothing in that box.
Marco:
Well, wait two years and then you'll see.
John:
We'll see.
Marco:
No, the reason why this Pro Display XDR...
Marco:
I would call it an overheating issue, maybe, in a warm environment and running in full brightness.
Marco:
It sure sounds like that.
Marco:
Apple would never use that term, but that's kind of what this is, that you basically could have problems with the XDR retaining full brightness if you're running it in a room that's hotter than 77 degrees Fahrenheit.
Marco:
Well, I do that all summer long.
Marco:
When I'm at the beach, one of the reasons I like being there is that while it is warm, it is not too hot.
Marco:
It almost never hits above 85 degrees and there's a nice breeze.
Marco:
Whether or not there's a nice breeze, I can augment it with a big ceiling fan.
Marco:
I'm able to work
John:
very comfortably with breeze and or fan blowing on me up to the low 80 degrees like up to like you know 80 to 85 degree fahrenheit the temperature outside check the temperature in the room you're sitting in it's not going to be lower than outside i think if the room you were sitting in was 77 degrees or higher you would do something about it you don't know you don't know summer mode marco
John:
Got the breeze going.
John:
Anyway, I don't think if you have the windows open and fans going in, it would be fine because you're not mastering HDR stuff.
John:
You're not going to have it over 500 nits.
John:
Put your monitor up to max brightness right now.
John:
That's not even 500 nits.
John:
You're never going to have it that bright.
John:
How bright does the iMac Pro monitor go?
Marco:
Not even up to 500, I don't think.
Marco:
I think it might.
Marco:
And I keep it most of the time at about 75 to 80 percent brightness.
Marco:
In the middle of the day in the summertime, I might crank it up because the room will be brighter.
John:
it's not a factor it's like i all right but i mean you can you should try it but i i will be shocked if because you're not doing hdr stuff and you're you're never you don't realize how bright 500 nits is and if you have the windows open and the the salt air is blowing in corroding your monitor um it's you know this is only if you're like in a stifling room with no airflow that's over 77 degrees and you're doing things for a long period of time
John:
uh we'll see because you know i don't actually have a whole house air conditioning or anything that's going to save this thing so when summer comes in my tiny little stifling room that i'm actually in uh we'll see if i ever have any issue i can imagine that not only will it i not have any problem but i also won't will continue to not hear the fans in this monitor by the real time follow-up the iMac pro does apparently have up to 500 in its brightness as do the most recent MacBook pros so what do you have you're set to now about 80 and this is at night in the winter
John:
So is the room over 77 degrees and has it been at 500 nits or higher for a long time?
John:
It's never been at 500 nits because you never crank it to full brightness probably.
John:
And the room is never over 77 because who keeps their house that hot if they can help it?
John:
And you have central air so you can help it.
Marco:
you have it all summer long i'm telling you so basically what this tells me is i probably shouldn't buy a pro display xdr for the beach now granted i probably wasn't going to anyway because it's so damn expensive uh but again that puts a pretty big uh you know thorn in the side of any possible mac pro plans like because one plan would be get a mac pro and haul it back and forth and have a monitor at both places but but that now seems like an even worse idea than it did last summer when we were first talking about this
John:
I think it's very likely you're going to buy pizza for the table.
John:
You're going to buy a computer for the house.
John:
I don't know what it's going to be yet.
John:
It could be a Mac Pro.
John:
It could be an iMac Pro.
John:
But this is going to be a computer for the house.
John:
I don't think so.
John:
Absolutely.
Marco:
You're going to get a computer for the house.
Marco:
A monitor is very likely.
John:
Everybody loves it when you get a computer for the house.
Yeah.
Marco:
I will almost certainly, if I don't haul an iMac Pro back and forth, which I think is still probably the best option, but if I don't do that, I would probably keep an LG 5K out there and then whatever the heck my home solution was.
Marco:
Computer for the house.
Casey:
Imagine if you had ever had experience with the LG 5K at the beach house.
Casey:
You would know exactly what you're getting into.
Casey:
I have.
Casey:
That's my joke, Marco.
Casey:
Good God.
Casey:
I spent a whole summer with it.
Marco:
It was really mediocre.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I know, but if you had it hooked up to a preposterously overkill Mac Pro, I think you would get over the mediocriness.
Casey:
Anyways, I think you're getting a Mac Pro.
Casey:
I think you will start by having an LG 5K at the beach.
Casey:
Don't you already have one at the beach right now at somebody else's house?
John:
You buried it in the sand.
John:
It's Mark with an X. Yeah.
Casey:
secret treasure yeah i stuck a kid's plastic shovel right above it so i could see like where it would be better if your name was casey because then it would be the secret of casey's gold but secret of marco's gold doesn't have the same ring to it no in any case i think that here's your future your future is in the next six months you're going to be getting a mac pro and i think you'll get a pro display xdr for your home in i almost said your home in new york for your home that you're sitting in right now
Casey:
And then I think you will go to the beach, you will try to convince yourself that you can live with the LG, and then before you depart the beach from the end of the summer, you will have ended up ordering a second Pro Display XDR and put it at the beach house.
John:
Just wait until the newly redesigned IMAX with built-in 6K displays come in colors, and then we'll get whatever color matches whatever room that it goes into in the house.
Marco:
See, now we'd be talking new, like 6K iMacs.
Marco:
Now I'm very interested.
Marco:
In colors.
Marco:
It's going to come in teal.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But see, I'd be very interested, not because I would want two of them, but because I would just replace my iMac Pro with the new 6K iMac Pro.
John:
You're getting two of them.
John:
I don't understand why you're resisting this.
John:
You're not going to keep plugging that thing back and forth.
John:
You're going to get two.
Yeah.
Casey:
I honestly don't think he would get two.
John:
Pizza for the table!
John:
That's going to happen.
Casey:
I honestly think that Marco will end up with two Pro Display XDRs, but I think there will only be one machine.
John:
He's rapidly getting too old to be lugging a computer on his shoulder back and forth.
John:
Just wait.
Marco:
But now I wheel it.
Marco:
It's easy.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I'll see.
Marco:
The funny thing is, it's probably an easier solution to just get a second iMac Pro.
Yeah.
Marco:
That's what I'm saying.
Marco:
That's both cheaper and easier than bringing a Mac Pro back and forth.
Marco:
I didn't say what kind of computer it would be.
John:
I would just say there's going to be a computer for the house.
Casey:
I can't handle this conversation.
Casey:
Can somebody please save me and tell me about True Tome?
John:
No, because why are we having such problems with the notes today?
John:
You go from top to bottom.
John:
In this country, we read from top to bottom.
Casey:
Oh, I'm sorry.
Casey:
I saw the Chris Harper and I went below it.
Casey:
God, we are disastrous, especially me.
John:
We?
John:
Well, some of us.
Casey:
I said especially me.
Casey:
Oh, my gosh.
John:
You and Marco both have done technical fouls in the follow-up section.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I don't want to hear about True Tone.
Casey:
Never, ever.
Casey:
What I'd love to hear... Oh, God.
Casey:
See, I skipped it.
Casey:
My subconscious skipped it because I don't give a shit about a rack mount Mac Pro.
John:
did you watch the videos i watched like four seconds of it and i realized that's your your youtube attention span all right i'll handle this one so you don't have to it's quickie uh we've been talking about the rack mount mac pro which is available for sale um someone uh put up a youtube video of unboxing it and uh comparing it to his old setup it was uh neil parfit they're they're really good videos they you know
John:
If you want to know what the deal is with the rack mount Mac Pro, you'll see it from every angle and learn all the features and learn how one person's actually using it.
John:
The interesting thing about it, I think, is when you see it, especially if you're familiar with the plain old tower Mac Pro, it is so clear that unlike the XServe, this is not a purpose-built rack mount computer.
John:
This is a tower computer turned sideways and put into a weird case that kind of goes in a rack.
John:
Which is fine.
John:
Like, you know, there's nothing terrible about that.
John:
But when you look at the X-Serve, which was absolutely purpose-built, shared nothing with anything, like all new industrial design just for being in racks, it's so clear that Apple had one brief time in the semi-distant past.
John:
was serious about making rack-mounted computers.
John:
I think with the Mac Pro, they're just realizing some pros, the situation in which they want to use a Mac Pro, they have a rack available.
John:
They don't want it to be freestanding.
John:
So can we make this tower computer rack-mountable?
John:
And Ansel is, yes, and it'll look fine.
John:
It's not particularly space efficient.
John:
It is just a Mac Pro turned on its side with some.
John:
That's why there's like weird gaps and stuff inside the case.
John:
They did some interesting solutions for you to be able to get at the different stuff because, you know, the RAM is on one side and the most of the other cards are on the other side, which makes sense when you have like the tower macro where you pull off the whole case and you have access to it from all sides.
John:
But the rack mount one is not like that.
John:
So it has a door on the top.
John:
And then it has a second door on the bottom, and it's like, why is that stuff on the bottom?
John:
Why didn't they just make everything accessible from the top?
John:
Because this is the Tower Mac Pro turned on its side, and that's the way the Tower Mac Pro works.
John:
The interesting comparison, so there was the unboxing and everything, and there was the comparison of fan noise, and again, he was very impressed that it was very quiet.
John:
Neil was filling his thing with almost every card slot filled because he does audio stuff, and he's got all these weird audio interfaces.
John:
So he stuffed it to the gills and had all these power cables going everywhere.
John:
He was really happy with it because at the end of the second video, he shows, this is what this is replacing.
John:
I have this big, giant, whatever it is, 5U rack mount thing, which seems like it's really big, but it replaced, and he does a little cut in the video showing, two trashcan Mac Pros and a billion peripherals and, like, Thunderbolt docks and cables and everything.
John:
Just this giant mess of hardware all now fits inside this one box, so...
John:
I think he was happy with it, even though I think that as a rack-mounted computer, it is a little ungainly and ugly.
John:
But it's clear that some people want exactly this.
John:
They do not want a tower computer.
John:
They want it to fit in a rack.
John:
So I'm glad Apple's making it, and I'm glad at least one person seems happy with it.
Casey:
I feel better for having known this piece of information.
Casey:
Thank you, John.
John:
You should watch the video.
John:
You get to hear the cool little snick that the door makes when you take it off the side and click it back in.
John:
It's cool.
John:
Just like Wolverine.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Would you tell me about True Tone, please?
Casey:
Because I am oh so excited to hear about it.
John:
This is Chris Harper chiming in.
John:
No, no, that's not.
John:
That's the compressed air.
John:
Now all three of us have done Fall Out Facts.
John:
Here's how the show notes work, John.
John:
You read from top to bottom.
John:
The instruction pointer is frigging... No one knows where the instruction pointer is anymore.
John:
We're just... We're lost...
John:
we're lost in follow-up someone issued a jump statement and now we have no idea where we are you are such a nerd i love you oh god christopher bowers writes regarding true tone as someone who works professionally in printing photos the ideal situation is to have the room lighting and display white points be equal that's why having true tone on is the better more accurate setting
John:
So there's another person with some professional experience chiming in and saying, true tone, yes, go for it, even if you're doing something that's important to color.
John:
And he also gives a link to ISO 12,646.
John:
I looked at that and I didn't... I think it's just, you know... Well, here's the text from the thing.
John:
Specifies the requirements for two conformance levels for the characteristics of displays to be used for soft proofing of color images.
John:
Included are requirements for color uniformity and variations and electro-optical properties when viewing...
John:
when with viewing direction for different driving signals that's a lot of jargon i think the standard is just basically saying how you should set things up to be uh judging photography on a computer device it's hard for me to tell that's a lot of jargon plus they spell color with a u so it's all very confusing anyway endorsed by one person who is claims to be a professional it's good enough for me go team i was using it already anyway
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Yes Please Coffee.
Marco:
This, I got to say, this is not in the script.
Marco:
This is one of the only coffee things that I would ever recommend.
Marco:
I've used it myself for a long time, and it's fantastic.
Marco:
So there's a lot of productivity hacks, but there's one productivity tool that performs wonders for almost everyone.
Marco:
It's coffee.
Marco:
Yes Please is a coffee subscription service.
Marco:
It's Yes PLZ.
Marco:
They want to bring the very best roasted beans into your kitchen.
Marco:
So, you know, do you really need a coffee subscription?
Marco:
How often do you run into coffee at home?
Marco:
True coffee fiends are pretty good about never running out, but you also know that scoring truly superb beans, especially reliably, can be hard.
Marco:
So, yes, please.
Marco:
This is at yesplz.coffee.
Marco:
I love the domain.
Marco:
Sources and roasts, some of the finest stuff from all over the world.
Marco:
They also change it up every week, and then they deliver it to your door.
Marco:
So it says whole bean, very freshly roasted coffee delivered weekly, fortnightly, monthly, or just whenever you need it.
Marco:
And you can pause and cancel anytime.
Marco:
No hassle.
Marco:
And you also get this cool monthly print magazine that they make featuring culture, food, music, and more.
Marco:
It's kind of fun.
Marco:
It's like a nice analog moment for your mornings in an increasingly digitally distracted world.
Marco:
So the founders of this, they have quite a strong background behind them.
Marco:
So it's from Tony Konesny and Sumi Ali.
Marco:
They are veterans of coffee's third wave scene.
Marco:
You actually might know their previous coffee subscription business called Tonks.
Marco:
That's named for Tony Konesny from back in the day.
Marco:
And these guys believe great coffee should not require much fuss.
Marco:
Making a perfect cup should be as easy as making a box of macaroni and cheese if you start with the best beans.
Marco:
And I can personally say I have used this service.
Marco:
I used it all summer long when I couldn't be home.
Marco:
Usually I'm a home roaster, but there's a lot of times when I'm too busy or I'm not home for a while.
Marco:
And whenever that's the case, I go to Yes, Please.
Marco:
This is actually the coffee service I use when I want to buy beans.
Marco:
Go to Yes, Please.
Marco:
That's Y-E-S-P-L-Z dot coffee.
Marco:
Use offer code Marco sent me, all one word, to get 25% off your first shipment.
Marco:
Upgrade your morning coffee game and you'll upgrade your whole day.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Yes, Please for making amazing coffee and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Why don't you tell me why you don't understand Xcode, please?
John:
This is about the rant last episode about me trying to do GUI layout and Xcode using the various systems.
John:
A lot of people offered advice.
John:
A lot of people offered commiserations, saying that a lot of the things I said were familiar to them, even people with lots of experience, that some of these problems are just sort of
John:
long-standing problems and yes you do sort of get better at dealing with them and come up with techniques for them i want to call it alex kent in particular who gave a video demonstration of him basically laying out my dialogue box in uh in xcode and i think that was important because like lots of people sent like here look i made your i made your dialogue box with swift ui i made it with xcode i made it with this i made it with that see how nice it is look it looks just like yours first of all a lot of people who sent those in
John:
I applaud the effort, but many of them didn't actually look like mine.
John:
It was kind of the point of like, yeah, you can get 90% of the way there.
John:
But then if you want to get it pixel accurate, it's a little bit trickier than you might think.
John:
But whatever.
John:
But Alex's video let me see how he uses the tool to build it.
John:
First, it was refreshing to see him run into many of the things I complained about.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, we'll put a link to the video so you can check it out.
John:
It's kind of long, but if you've never used Xcode to do layout before, there are a lot of different tools available to you, a lot of different systems, a lot of different ways to use the tools.
John:
And he demonstrates one particular technique.
John:
You don't necessarily have to do what he does, but I think it was eye-opening to see someone else's workflow.
John:
I think the most useful advice he gave me, and this is one thing that a lot of I didn't mention last show and I should have.
John:
And a lot of people writing with advice were also not taking account for.
John:
I was maybe foolishly, maybe not aiming for a situation where I have no warnings because Xcode does these little yellow warning symbols.
John:
in the sidebar if you have any layout issue if it thinks you have any layout issues and always my goal was no warnings because my whole project is built no warnings you know warnings or errors all you know i do it's got to be clean right same thing with the layout so if i got a layout it was very easy for me to get a layout that i think was mostly correct and mostly look correct but it had a thousand warnings on it so that was part of what i was banging my head against even when i thought i went over the finish line like there finally everything's lined up let me run the app let me look at it let me measure with xcode boom everything's lined up and then i would look in the sidebar and there's 800 warnings
John:
I'm like, what do I have to do to make you happy, Xcode?
John:
What are you complaining about?
John:
I had all these complaints.
John:
This doesn't have an exposition.
John:
It doesn't have an exposition?
John:
Are you kidding me?
John:
It has an exact distance from the thing that it's next to, which has an exact distance to the edge of the super view.
John:
that's like it can't be anyplace else x wise that's but it was like no i need an exposition it was like what do you want from me and i have all these things like add add missing constraints or you know like all these and if you try to do that just throws constraints all the place and it makes this big mess so that was part of my frustrations i'm trying to get to zaro boogs i'm trying to get to to zero warnings in xcode right and uh alex had this one particular piece of advice which i had not figured out on my own which was very helpful uh
John:
for the localization warnings like it'll warn you oh you've you have a field that's like a fixed width if you try to localize that text the german word is going to be longer and it's not going to fit and like all right one way you can deal with that is you can just somehow i don't know how to do this but somehow i'm told that you can convince xcode that you're not going to do localization it'll shut up about that
John:
but i don't want to i don't want to like close the door to localization who knows maybe i will localize someday but i do want xcode to shut up i don't want those warnings to go to the sidebar so alex says for localization fixed with warnings they can be fixed by making the width constraint priority lower than the content compression resistance horizontal priority so the the auto layout constraints have priorities and like the maximum is a thousand and you know you can do in in
John:
number one number increments right so a lot of the defaults like this has a priority of a thousand this has a priority of 750 if you make the width constraint have lower priority than that compression resistance what that means is that yeah the width will try to keep it at this width but if the contents are too big and the compression resistance like the resistance of the contents to be squished or be clipped uh
John:
is a higher priority than the width one it will win and even though the width is supposed to be 10 because the content is too wide it will bust itself out and make itself 11 or 12 or whatever and just by setting you know it doesn't actually change the layout because again i'm not localizing but just by changing those priorities to be just you know one different from each other in either direction
John:
you can get it to get rid of those warnings.
John:
And that I think was the final thing that I really needed to get over the hump.
John:
So when I was, I'm working on, uh, my, my other app that has a Swift UI thing.
John:
It also has a regular storyboard.
John:
Like I said, and after watching his video and learning about that trick, I went back to that, uh, dialogue and relayed out the whole thing with auto layout and, uh,
John:
it was i'm not gonna say it was painless but i feel like now i have a system now i feel like i can look at a setup and figure out okay i can defeat auto layout and make a layout that looks the way i want uses auto layout everywhere and has no warnings now that i know these various tricks so thank you alex and i recommend everybody check out the video just to see how one person gets it done
Marco:
That is just it's it's so ridiculous that you have to jump through so many weird who played that.
Marco:
And then the tools are not making that easy or intuitive.
John:
There are some like there are some features in the tool that I was avoiding like Xcode will offer to fix a lot of stuff for you.
John:
Like, it's super helpful.
John:
It's like, do you want me to fix this?
John:
Do you want me to fix that?
John:
And it does, like, I can imagine the people doing these UIs.
John:
Like, what more do we want to do for you?
John:
You know, the people who are authors in Xcode.
John:
We give you, not only do we tell you what's wrong, but we give you, like, every conceivable, reasonable option on how to fix it and explain what they each mean and let you pick from it in, like, a popover.
John:
And they do.
John:
But the problem with that is you look at that and you're like, well...
John:
which one of these do I want to do?
John:
I mean, these all sound like they might fix it, but then you pick one and it has this cascading series of other consequences for your layout that you don't quite understand.
John:
And then you're like, did I pick the wrong one two steps ago?
John:
I'm not sure what to do.
John:
So I think the key is knowing which one of those tools to partake in.
John:
So if you watch Alex, what he does with the video, which I think he's maybe doing intentionally just to show how the tools can help you, is he chucks a bunch of controls onto the canvas willy-nilly.
John:
And then just makes a bunch of layout constraints using the right-click-drag shortcut thing instead of going the long way.
John:
And then just makes all the constraints.
John:
And then the feature he uses a lot of is misplaced items.
John:
The sidebar will say a bunch of items are misplaced, which means that you...
John:
You put some things on the canvas, and you put a constraint that said, this should be 10 pixels from that, but it's not 10 pixels from that.
John:
It's not even close to 10 pixels from that.
John:
That's a misplacement.
John:
And then you just hit the fix button, right?
John:
Yeah, it will fix the misplacement for you.
John:
And that one is one of the least destructive ways you can accept its health.
John:
Because otherwise, like, do you want me to add missing constraints?
John:
I don't think I ever do want you to add missing constraints.
John:
Trust me, you never want that.
John:
The constraints you think are missing...
John:
They're not actually missing.
John:
You're just, you know, whatever.
John:
But the fix-mix placement will essentially move things on the canvas for you based on your constraints.
John:
So if you put a big jumble of items and you just do a bunch of constraints and then you just fix-mix placements, they all spring into where, more or less, where they're supposed to be and then you can fine-tune.
John:
So that feature seems like a safe feature to use and I found myself using it more... Like, once you're in auto-layout mode, you don't have to do that single-pixel alignment stuff.
John:
My problem was always that, like, when I did auto-layout,
John:
I could never get the layout to look right when it actually ran the window.
John:
And I can never get all the little warning stuff to go away until I started, you know, I was chasing my own tail.
John:
I was like, well, if I do this and fix that and this warning goes away, but this other one comes, I finally get all the warnings away.
John:
And I had this ridiculous series of constraints that made no sense and didn't put things where I wanted them.
John:
But I'm doing better now.
Casey:
So are you a fan of auto layout at this juncture?
Casey:
Are you anti-auto layout?
Casey:
Where do you come down on that?
John:
See, I've been watching years, literally years, of auto layout videos at WWDC of presentations, like in person and on video.
John:
So I'm not unfamiliar with auto layout.
John:
I'm more or less sold on the idea that all layout is a cool thing.
John:
And I heard all the complaints when auto layout first came out and people's frustrations with it or whatever, but I hadn't actually used it myself.
John:
So going to use it myself...
John:
I was already bought in of the idea of like, you know, I understand springs and struts.
John:
I understand the system.
John:
And people complain about the system.
John:
But I know there were bugs about the constraint solver or whatever.
John:
But it's better now.
John:
And I mostly buy into it.
John:
But I was so frustrated by my own desire to get rid of all those little warnings, right?
John:
A lot of the warnings I didn't agree with.
John:
I'm like, there must be a way to get down to zero warnings.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And I was just chasing my tail, right?
John:
Now that I, A, have that one fix with localization thing in my back pocket to address those without screwing up my, without like adding more constraints, right?
John:
And B, sort of know how to use the minimum number of constraints to get what I want done and how to address the complaints if it says, oh, I need this.
John:
Like sometimes it still complains that it doesn't have like an exposition.
John:
And I'm like, you do have an exposition, but I know how to give it now a redundant constraint to shut it up, right?
John:
i i think i mostly prefer it to springs and struts even for static layouts and especially for resizable layouts um so i don't say i like it but i think i've i've made friends with it and i think if i had to make it if i have to if i have to make a new view i'm going to try to use auto layout first like that's my first choice now
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite web host.
Marco:
Whether you're working on a personal project or managing an entire enterprise's infrastructure, Linode has the pricing support and scale you need to take your project to the next level.
Marco:
They have 11 data centers worldwide now, including their newest one in Sydney, Australia.
Marco:
All of these feature enterprise-grade hardware.
Marco:
They now have an S3-compatible storage option and their next-generation network.
Marco:
So Linode delivers the performance you expect, but at a price that you don't.
Marco:
Get started on Linode today with a $20 credit for our show, and you can get access to their native SSD storage, a 40-gigabit network, industry-leading processors, their revamped cloud manager built with an open-source single-page app, and all their servers give you root access to your server along with their new API version 4 to automate things.
Marco:
They have a Python CLI if you want.
Marco:
I actually used that myself to set up my servers really quickly.
Marco:
They now have these nano plans that are just $5 a month that currently gets you one gig of RAM on that server, and they have all sorts of plans above that no matter what your needs might be.
Marco:
They have something for you.
Marco:
So they have specialties like dedicated CPU plans, GPU compute plans for machine learning, video processing, AI, block storage, object storage, one-click installs of the most popular apps including WordPress, the LAMP stack, and things like Minecraft servers.
Marco:
So you can get all this Linode.
Marco:
I have all of my servers hosted there.
Marco:
All of Overcast and Market.org are hosted at Linode.
Marco:
And I'm just so happy.
Marco:
I've been a customer for theirs for more than, I think, eight or nine years now.
Marco:
And it's just been wonderful the entire time.
Marco:
I have used a lot of web hosts in my career.
Marco:
And Linode is by far my favorite one.
Marco:
See for yourself by going to linode.com slash ATP.
Marco:
and using promo code ATP2020 to get a $20 credit towards your next project.
Marco:
And also they're hiring, linode.com slash careers if you want to find out more about that.
Marco:
Otherwise, once again, linode.com slash ATP, promo code ATP2020 for $20 in credit.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all my stuff and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
I want to come back to this if we have time a little bit later, but I genuinely have been excited to record this episode because I am hoping that we will be able to hear a tale of discovery, of misery, of excitement from Mr. Marco Arment.
Casey:
Marco, you have been working on something.
Casey:
You were banging your head against the wall.
Casey:
Hopefully there are no marks left on your forehead.
Casey:
What's been going on, man?
Marco:
I've been trying to write an audio app in iOS 13.
Casey:
That's a mistake.
Casey:
Why would you do that?
Marco:
I've had a lot of challenges with the latest version of Overcast in beta.
Marco:
I spent the last week or so basically issuing one to two new builds a day trying to chase down this crazy problem that I was having with my AV audio engine based playback engine.
Marco:
Sometimes, for some people, audio would not play when the screen was off.
Marco:
You could send the app to the background.
Marco:
All of that would be fine.
Marco:
So it would do background playback.
Marco:
But if you turned off the screen to your phone, it would pause.
Marco:
And the second you turn the screen back on, it would unpause.
Marco:
So it's not that the app was crashing, because it wouldn't unpause if that was the case.
Marco:
And it's not that the app didn't have background audio capability.
Marco:
If that was the case, it would not play in the background at all, even with the screen on.
Marco:
So that wasn't the issue.
Marco:
The issue was if the screen was off, this would be the problem.
Marco:
Now, I tried a whole bunch of different stuff.
Marco:
First of all, I suspected maybe my AV audio session is not getting correctly the fact that I have an active session or that it's a long-form session or whatever.
Marco:
So I did all sorts of tricks with the AV audio session, trying not deactivating it ever to...
Marco:
trying to activate it every time I hit play, and then checking it, polling it to see if it was getting deactivated or whatever.
Marco:
I tried so many things with the audio session manager, and I wasn't getting anywhere with that.
Marco:
Then I realized, or I remembered rather, when I wrote Overcast's original audio engine,
Marco:
which is still what you're hearing this through if you're playing at Novacast if my new update hasn't been approved yet.
Marco:
There is this issue that if you run an AU graph, which is Apple's old, old, old audio framework for audio units, if you run an AU graph and you want it to be backgroundable, there's a certain property that you have to set
Marco:
on all the audio units in it, that is documented only by this one tech note.
Marco:
It's like one Q&A 1606, something like that.
Marco:
And there's this maximum frames per slice setting.
Marco:
Because the idea is that when you are pumping audio through an audiograph, there's this real-time audio thread that requests a certain number of samples every time it calls back your function.
Marco:
Your function has to give it that number of samples.
Marco:
And usually that number was either 256 or 512.
Marco:
and so it was calling your function every 512 samples and keep in mind there's 44,000 of these per second most of the time so it's calling this function a lot when the screen turns off the phone switches to a lower power version of this where instead of requesting smaller blocks more frequently it starts to request much bigger blocks so it doesn't have to pull you as often so the CPU can be in a lower power state more of the time
Marco:
And so it starts, instead of asking for 512 or 256, it starts asking for, I believe, 4096.
Marco:
And if you didn't set this property on all your audio units that was barely documented, welcome to Core Audio.
Marco:
If you didn't set this property to at least that 4096 number to say, like, what's the maximum number of audio samples I can provide you at once?
Marco:
This exact problem would happen.
Marco:
If you turn the screen off, your audio would just pause.
Marco:
And then you turn it back on, it would unpause.
Marco:
The challenge of this to me is that once you have an AV audio engine type API, you can't set that property anywhere.
Marco:
There's nowhere where you can do that.
Marco:
What was extra weird is that if you do that wrong with an AU graph the old way, it fails every time.
Marco:
You can reproduce it 100% of the time in development, just turn your phone screen off and it pauses.
Marco:
You're like, oh, I got a problem.
Marco:
You can fix it and you can see if your fix works.
Marco:
But this is an intermittent problem I was having.
Marco:
It never happened to me once.
Yeah.
Marco:
I could not get it to happen in development at all, but every beta build I would send out, I would get a large number of people saying within a few hours of it going out, this is happening, this is still happening, this is still happening.
Marco:
So the only way I had to test whether my fix was working was to issue a new build to all the beta testers, send it out to thousands of people, many of them install it, and then look at feedback 8-12 hours later and see how many people were saying this and still it was feedback.
Marco:
And so I was just like blindly shooting in the dark here.
Marco:
And eventually I found... So based on that hunch of maybe it was related to that old tech node, I eventually found there's a property on ABAudioSession where you can tell it what latency duration to use, basically.
Marco:
Like you can set your preferred IO buffer.
Marco:
And if you set it to something, it effectively disables the automatic switching between more blocks, less blocks.
Marco:
So I just set it to exactly 8192 samples, which is twice the old 496.
Marco:
I set it to exactly that number, and the problem vanished.
Marco:
So I think I have solved this problem.
Marco:
I have not gotten any reports of it, or at least many.
Marco:
It's gone from like a ton to like two or three.
Marco:
So it seems like I think I have fixed it.
Marco:
And oh my goodness, it's been quite a ride.
Marco:
So anyway, that's a long, long, long story to say.
Marco:
There's this crazy audio bug in iOS 13 that happens sometimes to some people.
Marco:
I think I have fixed it in this version of Evercast that might be out by the time you listen to this.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing that just crushes my morale.
Marco:
It's so frustrating.
Marco:
I'm sure all developers go through this.
Marco:
When you have a bug, not only can you not reproduce it, it doesn't even make sense that it could happen.
Marco:
And then you go through all these crazy difficult tricks and tests and logs trying to figure out how the heck can this possibly be happening.
Marco:
And then eventually you try some really obscure thing.
Marco:
And I think this worked, but I'm like...
Marco:
First of all, it's frustrating that I can't be sure that it worked.
Marco:
And it's extra frustrating that there's this weird undocumented thing or barely documented thing.
Marco:
What hope does anyone else have of ever figuring this stuff out?
Marco:
I happen to know from having written this old audio engine five years ago, I happen to know that there was this little weird thing in the API that you had to do to make a background properly.
Marco:
Had I not known that, I never would have figured this out.
Marco:
There's nothing on Stack Overflow.
Marco:
There's nothing anywhere that's useful.
Marco:
There's one discussion thread on Apple forums that references this Q&A, which is how I eventually found it.
Marco:
I can't overstate how important it is that Apple document their damn APIs.
Marco:
Like so much of Apple development, you're shooting in the dark here.
Marco:
And the documentation is either wrong or incomplete or just totally missing.
Marco:
Audio is definitely one of those areas where there's almost no documentation for audio.
Marco:
And what's there is usually incredibly incomplete.
Marco:
And the errors that you get are usually incomprehensible to the non-existent.
Marco:
Weird stuff happens like...
Marco:
the main thread will get blocked for like five seconds by a random audio call to like start playing audio.
Marco:
It's just weird stuff happens with the audio subsystem.
Marco:
And then whenever there's a new OS version or a new beta season, audio gets really messed up.
Marco:
I don't know why, like...
Marco:
It doesn't seem like the kind of thing they would be changing often, but they do change it often.
Marco:
And some of it makes sense, like when they launch new things like AirPods, and you've got to have all the support in place for that, and stuff like the audio sharing, and AirPlay 2.
Marco:
They do a lot of stuff in the audio realm, but the audio subsystem is...
Marco:
So buggy and so undocumented and so just bad at reporting errors and the tooling around it is nonexistent so it's hard to even test most of these error cases.
Marco:
It's so hard to make an app that just plays audio reliably.
Marco:
The audio APIs on iOS are so incredibly difficult to work with for unnecessary reasons.
Marco:
You know, things like bugs and documentation problems.
Marco:
Not the APIs themselves.
Marco:
They have some problems, but they don't have major problems.
Marco:
I would never have guessed when I set out to write an audio app that I would be fighting the platform so often.
John:
I would imagine that the common cases that they use, whatever it is, AV AudioPlayer, like the super high-level API, which is like, don't you worry about audio.
John:
You just tell us what you want to play, and we'll handle all the details.
John:
And no, you can't control anything about it or have limited control.
John:
But don't worry.
John:
We'll get it done.
John:
That, I feel like, is probably...
John:
The most, you know, the paved road, as they say, for audio.
John:
Obviously, you are going off the beaten path.
John:
You want to get at the guts.
John:
You want to get right in there.
John:
You want to make your own engine.
John:
You want to have total control over the whole stack.
John:
And then you are essentially working with...
John:
the guts of their system which you know it doesn't surprise me that they're totally undocumented and buggy and weird because they're like well no one's gonna ever i know they're public apis i know you're not using private apis but they're like well no one's gonna ever use these things i mean who knows if they even have tests for them or what or how they would test it they're like as long as our top level front door just please play an audio file for me as long as that works fine we'll test that and make sure that mostly works but
John:
anyone mucking around on the internals like and and you don't have the source code to it right so if they're like oh i could write a good audio engine because here next to me is the source code to the audio system and i can see how it's all working and i can step through it into the bugger and say oh i see what the problem is i see right here there's this conditional saying oh you if you just gone into the background and changed the buffer size and do it like you'd you'd see that if you were working at the on the guts you're working with the guts but you don't have access to the guts so you're just like fumbling around the dark saying does this work
John:
Does this work?
John:
This thing's not documented, but it seems like it has these functions, and I guess you're supposed to use them this way, right?
John:
Like, if you could just see, like, the comments above that function to be like, oh, here's what you got to do with this, and keep in mind x, y. But you can't see any of that.
John:
It's just a bunch of binary libraries.
John:
So I feel your pain.
John:
Yeah, and it doesn't, you know... Lobbying for them to make that better is probably much more difficult than if you said, like, oh, I just tried to play an audio file with your top-level audio API and it didn't work.
Marco:
Yeah, and it goes beyond just, you know, that I'm using special APIs.
Marco:
It's also, in a lot of cases...
Marco:
it's really hard to tell if it's even my bug because ios 13 in general has had a lot of audio bugs like i i find even just like switching in and out of airpods or eat like i i find bugs in the music app trying to play music you know between itself or home pods or against airpods like switching devices carplay
Marco:
There's so many problems that are audio-related in iOS 13, not to mention all of iOS 13's other issues.
Marco:
Like, for instance, I still have to go back to the all-inboxes list in mail and then back into the inbox to refresh messages sometimes.
Marco:
And again, I don't know...
Marco:
I don't know why Apple thinks it's okay to break the mail app so often, but they do.
Marco:
But they also seem to break audio very often.
Marco:
I don't even know if this is my bug or not sometimes.
Marco:
A lot of times, if the audio engine just hangs...
Marco:
And I've given it the exact same conditions that I've always given it, and this time it hangs, and last time it didn't.
Marco:
How am I supposed to know, is this my issue, or is this that that person's phone had a weird little glitch with iOS 13.1 point whatever, and that's actually an OS issue?
Marco:
It's just, again, it adds to the massive rippling effects of iOS 13 being such a buggy release.
Marco:
It puts a huge tax on developers all year long because we have to also fight around the bugs with our own apps and try to figure out, first of all, is this our bug or is it not our bug?
Marco:
And if it's not our bug, do we have to work around it somehow anyway because Apple's not fixing it?
Casey:
Which framework is all of this stuff in?
Casey:
Is this Audio Toolbox or AV Foundation or none of the above?
Marco:
There's a lot of overlap there.
Marco:
Most of this that I've been telling you about is AV Foundation, but under the hood it uses a bunch of Audio Toolbox stuff.
Casey:
Well, but Marco, AV Foundation is 88.2% documented as per no overview available.
Casey:
Surely there's almost nothing missing.
Marco:
Well, the great thing is, you know, a lot of times this is like this won't be measured correctly because most of these functions actually do have official like sentences to describe what they do in the documentation.
Marco:
They're just incredibly incomplete and sometimes wrong.
Casey:
No argument.
Casey:
I'm snarking.
Casey:
But no overview available was done, I believe, by Matt from NS Hipster, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
But anyways, we've talked about it in the past, but it just visually shows you how god-awful Apple documentation has become over the last few years.
Casey:
And I'm assuming it was better in the past.
Casey:
Maybe it wasn't.
Casey:
But there is a lot of stuff here that is just really, really poorly documented.
Casey:
And I have been...
Casey:
whining and complaining and moaning and fetching to anyone who i know inside apple who will listen to me which is basically nobody i know a lot of people that don't listen to me um saying this is bull this is awful like i can't do my job as effectively as i want because you guys for political reasons for for i don't know uh for
Casey:
I don't know what it would be other than political reasons.
Casey:
I mean, they have enough people, they have enough money.
Casey:
I know that there are teams working on documentation, but somehow it never makes it out.
Casey:
And just pointing to a WWDC video and saying there's your documentation is obnoxious at best and just plain wrong at worst.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
This is a bugbear that's really been driving me nuts recently.
Casey:
And I ran up against this as recently as earlier today.
Casey:
And so I've got a real bee in my bonnet about it.
Casey:
But it's just so frustrating.
Casey:
I guess...
Casey:
Maybe ultimately the problem is that I think of myself as more important to Apple, not me, Casey, but like developers, third-party developers is more important to Apple than we really are.
Casey:
But you would think for a company that wants to provide really robust, well-done APIs, and often does, yet they don't spend the time to actually document anything.
Casey:
And to your point, Marco, half the time it's documented, it's incompletely documented or wrongly documented.
Casey:
It's just unfair.
Casey:
Like I know I'm kind of whining right now, but it's just plain unfair.
Marco:
I think it speaks to a bigger problem of the technical foundations of this company are rotting.
Marco:
This is a company that is doing way too much and is pushing way too hard on the new stuff and is not allocating its resources properly to keep things at a high quality level.
Marco:
This goes...
Marco:
All levels of the company.
Marco:
This goes from the front end apps.
Marco:
I was complaining last week about how they haven't really designed good UIs in a long time.
Marco:
Their design is all over the place and they seem to not have time or the care to lead that correctly.
Marco:
And then this also goes for things like software quality and API stability and documentation and the released OSs.
Marco:
This is all related.
Marco:
This is all the company not being able to keep up with itself.
Marco:
And this is an entirely self-created problem.
Marco:
It's management problems.
Marco:
It's like how you allocate resources, what kind of timelines you set, how you decide when to release something versus when not to.
Marco:
This is all within their control.
Marco:
And it's not being balanced well right now at all.
Marco:
And it hasn't been for years.
Marco:
And I don't know how to fix that because I don't know enough about their internal workings or their people or whatever.
Marco:
I don't think this is just a purely like, oh, fire Tim Cook kind of problem.
Marco:
I think it's probably more complicated than that.
Marco:
But
Marco:
This is ultimately on management and leadership to fix.
Marco:
It's about allocating resources and setting deadlines and choosing what to focus on and what's important to you.
Marco:
And it seems like software quality is not important enough to them at all.
Marco:
And that goes to everything from documentation to the APIs to the OSs to the software itself.
John:
I think one thing, I don't know if we talked about this in our previous conversations about Apple's software strategy and stability problems and their release cadence and all the other stuff.
John:
But it occurs to me, partly part of the conversation that's been happening this past week about the 10th anniversary of the iPad, which we probably won't get to talk about today.
John:
Oh, we should.
John:
Which has been cycling around.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Different products are at different points in their lifetime, different Apple products.
John:
And even if they start at the same time, they might progress at a different time.
John:
And during the various life stages of any product or product category, different strategies are appropriate.
John:
And at this point –
John:
With the iPhone in particular, even though it is still the majority of Apple's business and by far their biggest product and super important and everything like that, the category of smartphone has slowed down
John:
progress and innovation wise as compared to you know a decade ago or whatever like in the beginning and we went you know if you look at the first iphone up to the iphone 4 it's like whoa like there's some big changes hardware and software wise and uh at this point software wise if you look across the entire market
John:
there are important new software features that you have to have photography face id was important or whatever but in general the pace of change of smartphone operating system software and sort of platform features has slowed significantly and so i feel like it is an appropriate time for apple to consider the
John:
Leaning more towards the iOS 12 strategy of like, let's just keep making what we have faster and pick one or two or three important new features that are required to stay ahead in the industry or keep pace in the industry, but not feel like...
John:
You know, iOS N plus one has to advance on all fronts every time because that's just not the nature of the smartphone market anymore.
John:
There is not... I don't think there's pressure to do that.
John:
And I think the internal pressure, the sort of self-imposed internal pressure of like the next iOS has got to be better in every way and have all new features and subsystems.
John:
That's not what users want.
John:
That's not what the market demands.
John:
And it's not required to stay ahead.
John:
And it is actually detrimental to staying ahead because what's required to stay ahead is...
John:
One or two or three really important new features that advance probably with some hardware component.
John:
That's important to keep doing.
John:
Don't just say, okay, well, it's done and we never need to add anything.
John:
You'll never get Face ID that way.
John:
And Face ID was important, right?
John:
So pick the way you're going to advance.
John:
But then all the other stuff, you're like, do we need to change this?
John:
Is this one of the tentpole features of the new OS?
John:
If not...
John:
Let's dedicate all those resources to an iOS 12 strategy of refinement, fix bugs, make it faster, you know, just document, do all the things that you supposedly never have time to do.
John:
And that should sort of be the default.
John:
And then only a few things are blessed in each major release as the...
John:
you know this is going to be where we're making some big advances these are going to be our big customer facing marketing features i don't i haven't been keeping up with the rumors for ios 14 i did hear briefly in some story that there was some rumor that it was going to support all the same phones as 13 and it immediately made me think slash hope like oh maybe that means 14 is going to be more like 12 again where they'll try to sort of regroup and make everything less buggy and faster you
John:
There was nothing in the one headline that I saw that indicated that, but the fact that I was hoping that that was the case makes you feel like that's at least what I want as a consumer is when iOS 14 comes out, I want it to be a no-brainer update that is as stable as iOS 12 was and is as pleasing as iOS 12 was.
John:
Oh, everything's a little bit faster, and there aren't any weird bugs, and maybe there's one or two new cool features I want.
John:
That, I think, is appropriate for the smartphone market, and it came up in the context of the iPad because the iPad is in a very different place.
John:
the ipad's pace of innovation has been slow and there is tons of room for major new advancements in that area so i think the strategy for ipad os which now has its own name but unfortunately under the covers is very much ios but slightly different i don't know how they square that but like ios needs to make some major advances maybe not competitive pressure wise but just product wise
John:
because the tablet market is different than the phone market, because the tablet market has not blossomed and matured and had this sort of, you know, competitive pressure to evolve through competition to what the smartphone market has.
John:
And since those are basically both the same OSes under the cover, it's difficult to strike that bounce.
John:
But hey, they did give it a separate name, and I'm perfectly fine if they fork off from each other.
John:
and continue advancing that way and also because most of the features on the ipad that the ipad needs to deal with shouldn't require major guts redesigns i hope and i don't i don't actually know like maybe there is something that needs to be done to to the guts to to mess with that but all right that's my thinking on the the software quality and in particular on the phone and ios that it is i'm not going to say it's time for apple to slow down or the time to apple to give up or whatever anything like that i'm just saying that like
John:
they may not be choosing the right strategy for each of their products particular stage it's like picking dog food food for your dog like what life stage is your dog in you know you get you get the puppy chow you get the what is it called like the geriatric dog chow you get the adult dog chow i think it's time for the iphone to have the adult dog chow
Marco:
There seems to be this disconnect between the pace of change and feature evolution and new stuff that Apple keeps doing and what customers actually want and need.
Marco:
Another thing that I'm doing in this Overcast release is here now, four or five months after iOS 13 launched, I'm restoring support for iOS 12 in this release.
Marco:
Because not enough people have updated to iOS 13, and adoption seems to have flattened out pretty significantly.
Marco:
So we're standing at something like 75% adoption, depending on how you measure it.
Marco:
And that's good, but it's not good in the sense that a quarter of the user base seems to not want iOS 13 at all.
Marco:
That's bad in the sense that if you want your app to run on 25% of devices, which is not a small number, you can't use all this new stuff yet because iOS 13 has been such a botched release with bugs and everything like that.
Marco:
People are avoiding it and holding on to 12.
Marco:
The same way I'm still not on Catalina for all the same reasons because I'm holding on to whatever the heck this is.
Marco:
Hi Mojave, whatever I'm running.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
What Apple's customers want is not, you know, new ways to pose Animoji with faces and glue them together with iPad drag and drop.
Marco:
Like, no.
Marco:
What Apple's customers want is reliable phones and good battery life and good performance on their older stuff.
Marco:
When you introduce something like iOS 13, like, yeah, there's some fun new stuff in it here and there, some nice features, but...
Marco:
There's a big price to pay in the much more important stuff of everything needs to work well.
Marco:
And again, to a lot of people, it has to work quickly on old phones and it has to support their old phone to begin with and stuff like that.
Marco:
And if they're falling down on those fronts, nobody cares about the new features.
Marco:
And we have this series of releases now where it seems like the new features are less compelling than ever at the same time that the basics are getting screwed up more often than ever.
Marco:
And that's dangerous.
Marco:
That shows that things are not being managed correctly.
Marco:
This is a problem.
Marco:
I don't know...
Marco:
whose problem it is or how to solve it but this is ultimately a management and a resource allocation and release planning type problem and this doesn't seem it doesn't seem like Apple is taking this seriously it doesn't seem like they're actually making changes like we hear rumors about like you know Federici having memos or meetings where they say they're going to like you know get better but what have they actually changed to make that happen are they not going to release every year anymore
Marco:
Are they going to cut back significantly on new features?
Marco:
Are they going to make the old OS run on new hardware?
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
It doesn't seem like they've actually changed anything.
Marco:
It seems like all they've done is say they're going to get better.
Marco:
But we haven't heard anything about actual changes that have actually happened that would be material to that.
Marco:
So that I'm still very much concerned about.
Marco:
Anybody can say I'm going to get better, but without actually changing significant things that will enable that change, I don't know how that's ever going to happen.
John:
well they did ios 12 which shows that they can do a release like that of course we don't have any transparency so we don't know like i was saying is ios 14 on an ios 12 like path or is it not we're not going to find that out until basically they announce ios 14 and then they'll either brag about the fact that they concentrated on performance and stability enhancements or they won't and we'll have to surmise from what they say publicly whether it was like that if
Marco:
They're going to say that anyway because 13 had a bad reputation.
Marco:
The same way iOS 11 had a bad reputation, which is why iOS 12's marketing message was basically, we're focused on stability and performance because 11 was a mess.
Marco:
But they did, though.
John:
But what they did in 12, I feel like they succeeded in that strategy of giving a stable OS that has fewer features that was far less buggy than 13 for sure and also than 11.
John:
And it was generally a well-received OS.
John:
Customers liked it.
John:
People upgraded to it.
John:
It was stable.
John:
It did what they said.
John:
It wasn't just marketing BS, right?
John:
But we didn't know that until 12 basically was announced.
John:
So if Apple is doing that now, we're not going to know about it because they're not going to tell us about what they're doing internally.
John:
But I think when iOS 14 is announced, they'll tell us.
John:
And 13, they didn't make the same pitch as 12.
John:
13, it was like, look at all these new features.
John:
The pitch was not.
John:
We really regrouped them.
John:
We're mostly concentrating on performance.
John:
That wasn't the 13 pitch at all.
John:
So I think it is totally conceivable they could be doing that.
John:
But yes, it's frustrating that...
John:
We don't actually know because that's sort of their own internal business and you don't know their internal business.
John:
We'll find out when they announce iOS 14.
John:
But, you know, here's hoping.
Casey:
Well, we don't know except when we do.
Casey:
There was a Gurman article from late November.
Casey:
Inside Apple iPhone software shakeup after buggy iOS 13 debut.
Casey:
And this article talks about how apparently Federici got everyone, all the troops in the same room and basically said, hey, we're going to do a whole bunch of things totally different.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I don't remember the exact details.
Casey:
I haven't read this article since it came out.
Casey:
But the short short of it is that they're planning or they were planning on changing kind of the way they develop stuff leading up to release.
Casey:
And I had heard from a couple of different people that this article, while the details were wrong, surprise, surprise, but the general gist of it was accurate.
Casey:
That
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
More process.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
More process.
Casey:
And so it very well could be that this is just going to make things worse and not better.
Casey:
But it's at least a small step in the right direction.
Casey:
And I think that we should acknowledge that, even though I do agree with everything both of you guys said.
John:
I think that's what Marco was getting at, though.
John:
Like when we hear stories like that, which obviously are not coming directly from Apple.
John:
So it's always, you know, a game of game of telephone or whatever.
John:
That always sounds like the stuff you hear in any company when something bad goes wrong.
John:
They're always going to say we're going to do things differently or we're going to try harder or whatever.
John:
And I feel like.
John:
because we're not privy to what's actually going on, rumors like that could go either way because they're going to say that internally no matter what.
John:
And it could be they're just like, don't actually make any changes that effectively change things.
John:
But I feel like when they announced the OS, Apple knows by that point, have we pulled it off?
John:
Like when they were announcing iOS 12, it wasn't just like iOS 12 was going to be a stability release.
John:
They had been looking at iOS 12.
John:
They know.
John:
Guess what?
John:
it's pretty, the number of bugs is low.
John:
We did what we set out to do.
John:
By the time they're announcing it to us, they know whether the thing they said nine months earlier turned out to just be a bunch of BS or whether it actually changed things for the better, whether their process changes actually, you know.
John:
So that's why I feel like because we don't have a view of the internals,
John:
I think it's we just have to assume anything they say to themselves internally is meaningless and could go either way.
John:
But when they say when they say it to us and we get the bits, you know, and when they say it, they're honest.
John:
When they say it to us, if they emphasize that it's stable and performant.
John:
it probably is because they already know like they you know it's the wwc build is a good way to judge things sometimes the ww we always know the wwc build is early but if the wwc build is actually kind of okay that is a very good sign right and if it's not okay it could still go either way but it's not a good sign so that you know i'm i'm waiting for june
Marco:
I'm also not entirely sure that their alleged process changes from the article are going to be enough, even if they do it.
Marco:
I mean, honestly, it did kind of sound like, we're going to fix this by working harder, which is not ever the solution to any real problem.
Marco:
But right now, iOS 13 is still full of tiny little paper cut bugs.
Marco:
And it's been like five months.
Marco:
If they make it so that the initial releases are better, what does that put them at?
Marco:
About where we are now?
Marco:
This still isn't good enough.
Marco:
And from what I'm hearing, Catalina, which is only slightly younger, is not doing that much better.
Marco:
It's similar to the issue of what I said last week, that I honestly don't think Apple is capable of making great UIs anymore.
Marco:
It's almost seeming like they're not capable of shipping high-quality software anymore, and that's really scary because if you look at what they've actually shipped over the last, I don't know, five years, there's not a lot of bright spots in quality.
Marco:
There's not a lot of releases you can point to and say, that one was really good.
Marco:
Even iOS 12 had some issues.
Marco:
It wasn't as bad as 13. iOS 12 is pretty good, but I think that's been the best one.
Marco:
Even whatever the macOS version I'm running now was not great.
Marco:
MacOS seems to have even more issues than iOS a lot of times.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm concerned.
Marco:
What they need to change are fundamental...
Marco:
priorities and resource allocations and process things and I don't know that they've changed those and I don't know that I mean a lot of that might even be above Craig Federighi's head so we don't even know if he can change those but regardless it's unclear whether that level of change has happened and anything less than that if they're just saying we're going to work harder and we're going to feature flag disable bad stuff until we know it's ready that isn't necessarily going to be enough
John:
I'm glad at least I have a sort of canary for OS quality, kind of like the app modal preference dialog box, and iTunes was a good canary for whether they've actually changed the app.
John:
Now I have the undead toolbars that keep popping up in my Finder window.
John:
I'll know that someone has finally paid attention to Mac OS when that bug gets fixed.
John:
I figure it will probably last another three or four releases before anyone even acknowledges its existence, and then in five or six years it'll get fixed because...
John:
nobody cares about these bugs because everyone just leaves the toolbar visible all the time so why should anyone care um but yeah there's it it's good to it's good to have some way to measure like is you know is my personal experience of mac os stability or ios stability representative is there a systemic problem obviously the part of that is you just look at the press and see what other people are complaining about or whatever but paper cut bugs like marco was talking about
John:
Sometimes those last for a really long time because no one cares about that paper cut or no one is staffed to work on that application at all.
John:
So it is not being changed at all.
John:
Or if it's being changed, this was the thing back in the early days of macOS that was an epidemic and people on Apple used to complain about it.
John:
Like, you know, in 10.2 or 10.3 or whatever, you'd be responsible for the whatever, the mail app finder.
John:
And the only thing you'd get to do in a release is you would be told that what you have to do is implement support for insert new headlining feature of Mac OS here, whether it's spotlight or some new graphic system or make a dashboard widget or whatever.
John:
It's like,
John:
But I wanted to do feature X with my application or I wanted to refactor something or work on stability and performance.
John:
It's like, nope, you're doing spotlight support because that's the thing that we all – there were so many major new features to the OS that it was important for Apple to be able to say, look, here's a major new technology or feature.
John:
And all our applications use it to great benefit to show you how good it is.
John:
And that would mean that with small teams, that's all they could do during the release.
John:
So they wouldn't have time to address just –
John:
basic bugs with the boring functionality because they would be worried about just making their app work with the new feature integrating it in a good way and making sure that their thing doesn't crash because now they're linking to some library that you know is being released for the very first time that i don't think is happening anymore but i can definitely see signs that applications that need some love and attention are getting very little of it probably a fraction of some single person's time
John:
just to make sure they still build and function more or less correctly in the new os but beyond that not much hopefully like mail on ios does not fall into that category hopefully mail on ios does not have a fraction of a single person's time working on it but uh the finder i look at the finder and i say well in this release it's clear that they mostly worked on the thing where it replaces itunes for your device management and that must have been a super pain in the butt filled with tons of old creaky code pulled out of itunes so i feel for that team
John:
uh how toolbars are suddenly spawning it's probably unrelated to that work but i you know i'm not surprised that they didn't have time to fix it and won't in the near future because that the itunes integration stuff is probably buggy and they'll probably have to fix that in the next release
Casey:
On the other side of the coin, though, how quickly all three of us forget that they changed out the file system on, like, what, two billion devices?
Casey:
And I have not heard a single problem with any of them.
Casey:
Not to say that I'm the clearinghouse of it.
John:
That was a project that took, depending on how you measure, like a decade.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So certain internal projects have slightly longer timelines.
John:
Nobody was saying, we need a new file system, we need it by this release.
John:
Or maybe they said that a couple times when they pre-announced ZFS, but it's like, I don't know the political things that made that happen, but tech-wise...
John:
And practically speaking, that was worked on for so long at a seemingly leisurely pace, which is the right thing to do for the file system.
John:
And that, you know, I'm glad they pulled it off.
John:
And with many sort of false starts of like, what kind of file system do we want to have?
John:
But what about one like this?
John:
What about one like that?
John:
I heard a story recently.
John:
i think it was some ex-apple person like spilling some beans from from long dead stuff but like spotlight uh the i don't know if this is true i don't remember the source i see a lot of things on the internet but the the the idea was that spotlight search engine we know and love well at least the search engine we know yeah
John:
It began its life with one of the many, many efforts to figure out what to do about the file system.
John:
Because HFS and HFS Plus had been creaky for a long time.
John:
And the idea was, let's just do, instead of doing everything with file hierarchy, let's make a file system that does everything just by indexing metadata.
John:
And just treat FilePath as another piece of metadata, which...
John:
semantically is what every file system does but like let's do it like physically like let's not privilege paths and anything else in the file system that have other metadata hanging off let's just make everything arbitrary metadata in this big sea of things and you can view it as a file system if you view it in terms of that one piece of metadata but it is not privileged over any other and apparently that didn't work out but by the time they'd done that enough to experiment with it they said well
John:
This is not going to be our new file system because it doesn't fulfill that purpose very well, but it's a pretty good search engine, so can we reuse it for that?
John:
And that's what they did.
John:
They just made it a search index system that lives on top of HFS+, but is not itself a replacement for the file systems.
John:
According to the story anyway, one of their experiments about what to do about the file system actually did ship, but not as a file system.
John:
So eventually we got APFS, but there were many other things, including ZFS, APFS,
John:
in between now and then and that is a a project in an effort that probably didn't have that many people on it like a handful of engineers but they worked on it for like seven to ten years and had many blind alleys and restarts or whatever and obviously not every project especially a project that's like for competitive purposes like oh to to be competitive we need to have like a face id like feature you can't spend seven years on that because the world will pass you by but
John:
For file systems, they dragged it out pretty much as long as they can, and they did pull it off, so props to them.
Marco:
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Casey:
Marco, are you using your iPad these days?
Casey:
Every day.
Casey:
For anything other than playing Overcast in the kitchen?
Marco:
Well, I use it for email and stuff like that sometimes.
Marco:
Light web browsing.
Marco:
Occasional Amazon ordering and stuff.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
It's funny.
Marco:
Like literally just today, I was booking a trip where I just had to book like, you know, a flight in a hotel, standard stuff.
Marco:
And I started doing it on my iPad, like look up flights and everything.
Marco:
And then I went to my computer to actually book it because I knew I'd have to be like juggling multiple tabs and pulling stuff out of one password and getting like my TSA pre number or stuff like that.
Marco:
Like, and I knew that would just be, I knew I could do it all on the iPad, right?
Marco:
But I also knew it would be a lot easier to just do it on my Mac.
Marco:
So I went to the office and did the whole thing here instead.
Casey:
Don't blame you.
Casey:
Don't blame you at all.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I have such a... I'm not love-hate, because I like my iPad.
Casey:
So I have, and I presume you do as well, as we are recording this, the most recent iPad Pro.
Casey:
I have an 11-inch.
Casey:
So this is the first one with Face ID.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I was at Declan's swim lesson this afternoon, and I was trying to draft a blog post.
Casey:
And I was using the excellent Working Copy app, which is a Git client that's actually a pretty decent text editor, especially for Markdown.
Casey:
And I was able to set the iPad wherever Michaela happened to be standing at that moment as she was running around playing with things.
Casey:
and write a bit.
Casey:
And then if she ran somewhere else, it was so easy to just grab it, fold it up, and go somewhere else with it.
Casey:
And it was light, and I didn't even really have to think about it when I was carrying it.
Casey:
And in so many ways, I love it so much.
Casey:
But then I was trying to book our summer vacation just a few days ago, and I was doing a lot of preliminary research on the iPad and realizing that
Casey:
It's just frustrating.
Casey:
Like even though I have about the same amount of real estate as my MacBook Adorable, I just can't use it the way I want to because the multitasking and iPad, as I'm sure we'll discuss and Gruber has talked about a lot recently, is difficult to unintelligible, to incoherent, to incomprehensible, depending on where or what you're trying to do.
Casey:
And it ends up that all too often if I'm doing anything even remotely serious, even something like just trying to plan a trip, I'm reaching for a computer.
Casey:
And oftentimes I'm going to my office and going to the 27-inch screen because that's the easiest one to get things done on.
Casey:
And so I completely echo what you've said.
Casey:
What's a computer?
Casey:
What is a computer even?
Casey:
It's a thing where you can actually get things done.
Marco:
That's what it is.
Marco:
Oh, God, please don't.
Marco:
Oh, God, all the emails.
Marco:
I can feel the emails from here.
Casey:
Please email Marco.
Casey:
So anyway, it's tough because when my iPad does what I want it to do,
Casey:
It feels like the future, man.
Casey:
But all too often, it feels like a future that hasn't quite arrived yet.
Casey:
So, John, I think of the three of us, you're probably the most consistent iPad fan and probably use yours the most.
Casey:
What are you on these days and what are you doing with it?
John:
I'm still just using a regular iPad Pro.
John:
I need to upgrade.
John:
I also have – this is a personal issue, but as my eyes get worse, I'm constantly adjusting my glasses prescription because I'm having more trouble seeing close up.
John:
And so at a certain point, you go to bifocals, and my eye doctor keeps telling me I'm not quite there yet for bifocals.
John:
But it is still – with my glasses on, especially when my eyes are tired –
John:
It gets harder and harder for me to focus on something held in my hand close to my face.
John:
Right.
John:
So when I use my iPad now, there's like a, you know, a distance like I can't I can't bring it.
John:
I don't have to put hold it at arm's length, but I used to apparently hold it much closer to myself than I do now.
John:
So now I have to put it back like one or two inches.
John:
to be able to focus on it when my eyes are tired at night.
John:
And that is actually cutting into my iPad time.
John:
A lot of times what I will switch to instead is using my phone super close to my face with my glasses off just as a more comfortable thing to do at night when my eyes are tired.
John:
But that's nothing to do with the iPad.
John:
That's just me personally.
John:
All that is to say that I'm using my iPad slightly less than I used to be.
John:
But no, I do use it.
John:
And I do, what Marco described is absolutely true of my experience as well in that
John:
When I want to do anything complicated, I want to do it on the Mac.
John:
And complicated means I'm going to be juggling multiple things.
John:
I'm going to be, like, a good example is a thing that I often start on my iPad and then switch to the Mac is, like, if I'm looking for something, to give an example, all the crap I bought when I was preparing the way for my Mac Pro, the things like the little end table and, you know, cables and cable guides and the UPS and, you know...
John:
power plugs that go into them and adapters and pigtail things and just you know all that stuff a lot of that i started out i'd be like in bed on my ipad and i'd be like oh let's look at this let's look and see you know i'd do a search for ups things and watch some reviews and especially like watching youtube videos or reviews but
John:
At a certain point, I say, okay, now I'm in serious research mode.
John:
I'm going to open 500 temps about UPSs, right?
John:
Or I'm going to open every furniture site in the entire world, every store, Target, Walmart, Wayfair, Ethan Allen, Crate and Barrel.
John:
They're all going to be open in 100 windows and 100 tabs, and I'm going to be taking screenshots and copying images into a notes document and saving URLs and typing down measurements.
John:
That is time for the Mac because,
John:
i could do that on the ipad but i would drive myself insane with the text selection alone right so i i will go to and i think that's not a condemnation of the ipad because the whole point of the mac is it's supposed to give you more space more flexibility more precise input than a thing that you can carry around with you like it it's a desktop i'm using anyway desktop computer and my screens are huge now to casey's point that's not always true there are macs that have smaller screens and they also have a lot of these benefits but um
John:
But anyway, I do feel that tension in, like, at a certain point, like, let me just go to the Mac.
John:
And a lot of that is also because the Mac is what I grew up with.
John:
It's what I'm most comfortable with.
John:
And when I was reading Gruber's thing where he was sort of slamming the iPad's crappy multitasking and how undiscoverable and awkward it is.
John:
i mostly agree with him but there is an angle on that which is like well if you grew up using this it wouldn't be so weird to you right it's not quite the same as the uh god i forgot the name of the thing what the hell is the uh app that had intentionally obscure ui snapchat uh to make you know it's not quite snapchat but it's it's similar in that if you grew up you know anything you grew up using a seems you know it seems natural to you because it's all you know and b there is a certain kind of uh
John:
cachet to like you're young you have a lot of time to invest in learning a weird thing and once you know it it's part of your you know personality and self-image that of course you know how to use this thing and anyone who doesn't is a square using a term from the 50s um
John:
reading gruber's thing you can look at it and say you know well grandpa uh you may feel comfortable with the mac but if you grew up using the ipad uh or if you adopted it in early enough in your life it is totally natural and none of this stuff is weird and you learn it once and it's no big deal and you just sound like an old fuddy-duddy right
John:
But I think that angle is there, and there is a tiny bit of truth to that, but there is much more truth to the idea that, like, look, there's ways you can measure how good a UI is.
John:
And Gruber touches on a lot of them in the article that we'll put in the show notes.
John:
One of the ways is...
John:
just across the entire customer base for this product all the people who own it how many people use this feature how many people know that exists how many people enjoy it how many people find it indispensable and useful to use right how many and on the other side how many people if you describe the problem that this feature is supposed to solve would say oh i have that problem too and then when you say to them oh well then why don't you use feature x to solve that problem
John:
They'll be like, I didn't know how to use Feature X. I didn't know existed.
John:
And once you tell me it's too awkward to use, like there are ways to measure the success of any feature.
John:
And that way is not find the person who is the most expert in using this product and see if they like it.
John:
Like you can actually look at the customer, you know, how many people, and this is true of weird features in the Mac too, but you can say like, how many people who own the Mac use the dock?
John:
I think it is widely used.
John:
I think it's very widely used.
John:
Whatever problem the dock is solving is a problem that people have because they use the dock, and I think most people use it, right?
John:
Or how many people ever have more than one window open on their Mac?
John:
I think that number is also high.
John:
People discover how to open a second window because it solves a problem that they have that they want to see more than one thing at the same time, and they're able to successfully do that with a Mac.
John:
It is a thing that happens all the time.
John:
On the iPad, very similar fundamental things, like how many people have more than one thing open on the iPad at once?
John:
if it's a fraction of the people do it on the mac how many people know how to do it on the ipad also a fraction of people on the mac how many people know but still don't do it right those things i think are mostly you know uncontested it doesn't mean the ipad is necessarily bad but in a weird way it frames the ipad as
John:
most useful to deep experts.
John:
Then there's a big gulf and then useful to people who only need simple functionality.
John:
And it's that gulf that the iPad needs to span.
John:
I was thinking about this.
John:
I had what I thought was a coherent thought and I put a note to myself in the show notes.
John:
And then I looked at my note and I realized either my thought was not as coherent as I thought it was or I forgot what I thought.
Casey:
Oh, this happens to me all the time.
John:
They're trying to write down a dream.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
But it was basically this.
John:
The guru wrote this thing about how the multitasking on the iPad is weird and all this stuff.
John:
And it's like...
John:
The iPad, the things that are great about the iPad, and we've talked about this many times, and the reason people are enthusiastic about it and the reason I'm still enthusiastic about it is that it provides – it gets rid of a lot of crap from the world of PCs that you don't have to deal with anymore.
John:
Someone called a simplification, but I think it's mostly just dropping stuff that only exists for weird historical historical reasons.
John:
So like smartphones, the iPad is more comfortable for people to use.
John:
They're not worried that they're going to screw it up or that they don't know how to get stuff done.
John:
It's generally tractable and low maintenance.
John:
That is the big thing that makes people keep saying, why do people keep saying the iPad is a future of computering?
John:
And why do people like phones instead of their PCs?
John:
Like writ large, the answer is they're less of a pain in the butt to deal with.
John:
Right.
John:
And that is the greatest feature of all these things.
John:
And that's why it's so weird that where the iPad falls down, like in terms of like, oh, let's try to also make it possible to do more powerful things.
John:
It falls down in like just stepping out of that and expanding its power by including a multitasking system that's the opposite of that.
John:
It's more weird and complicated than the PC.
John:
It brings more obscure rules and strange, physically difficult gestures.
John:
It doesn't make as much sense, and it is more obscure.
John:
It's not like they took... The problem is not that they said, okay, well, we want to make the iPad more powerful, so let's give it some of the power of the Mac, but in a simplified form.
John:
Maybe they thought that we were doing that, but what they ended up doing was...
John:
giving it the power of the mac in a more complicated form that's harder to use and it's so weird because you don't need like there's i think what i was trying to get is like you you don't this is not a problem that the ipad had like that the problem was that you know we need to
John:
we need to come up with a whole new way of working with multiple things that is simpler or maybe that was a problem that had but they didn't do it they come up with a whole new way of working with multiple things that's harder and more obscure and more complicated and more difficult to use and and bottom line less used less like it it is less successful as a feature because fewer people actually use it so are you really helping people if they say oh well
John:
I don't do that because it's just too weird and too complicated.
John:
And again, you can't look at the outliers and say, look at how this maestro of the iPad is able to get tons of work done.
John:
That's good that it's able to do that.
John:
But part of the reason it's so impressive is, you know, what is it like a bear riding the unicycle?
John:
It's like impressive that they can do it at all because it's generally acknowledged to be difficult and complicated.
John:
And that's not how it should be.
John:
No one sees someone on the Mac with two windows open and goes, wow, you must be a Mac expert.
John:
Right.
John:
You see someone with three things in split screen and an iPad and a slide over, and you assume they're an iPad expert.
John:
And that is probably the biggest condemnation of the iPad's advancement.
John:
And Gruber is pretty harsh in the article saying, look –
John:
They need to just start over.
John:
Clean slate.
John:
It's not unprecedented.
John:
It's been done plenty of times before.
John:
Rethink this.
John:
Whatever paradigm you thought you were going for is not resonating and not working.
John:
Come up with some sort of new consistent paradigm.
John:
Or if you can't do that...
John:
you know, use the old paradigm of a bunch of windows that you can move around, which I don't think anyone is asking for, because, like, that's the nightmare of any iPad enthusiast.
John:
But, like, the current system is not succeeding.
John:
It is failing in all the same ways that the whole rest of the iPad succeeds.
John:
Like, it's too complicated and too obscure.
John:
So...
John:
you know i i'm not demanding that apple you know wipe the slate clean but i also don't quite know how they can salvage what they have without at least one or two fundamental adjustments to how they think about doing more complicated things on the ipad because it's got the cpu power a lot of them have the screen space now and the input methods are there as well you've got the pencil and the finger and
John:
and you know all these different sensors and everything it's the software that's not that's falling down it's a software that's not and it's not you know it's not uh bugs or whatever it is software design you know that the but there's bugs too well i suppose but the i try using keyboard shortcuts and mail
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
The iPad has evolved to this point through a series of small steps, none of which really seem like they ever had the big think, right, of like, you know, someone did the big, you know, Xerox, and Xerox and the Mac team did various big thinks of like,
John:
Yeah.
John:
If there had been no foundation, but it had just been like, well, we've got kind of a GUI, but we can probably... We have some kind of graphical interface.
John:
Let's add this feature.
John:
Let's add that feature.
John:
Let's let people have more than one thing.
John:
Let's do this thing.
John:
If you grow it piecemeal like that and never have sort of a...
John:
a solid extensible underlying philosophy you will end up in something that's a complicated mess so that that's i think what the ipad what they need to do with the ipad is step back and rethink uh they did that for the iphone let's rethink oh the application takes over the whole screen it's edge to edge blah blah they came up with a paradigm for phone applications and for simple ipad applications that totally works and people love and use it's the next step that where they're falling down where
John:
what what about when you want to do something more complicated than you could do on a phone because we have this big powerful ipad how do we deal with that i think the answer is not what they've currently done i think you know they need to they need to regroup and i'm not saying they need to totally redesign our eyes the next thing after we got through we're saying they're supposed to do refinement releases and fix stability but this is a design thing that i totally give them a few years to work on i just hope they their plan is not we'll continue to refine what we have because i just don't think it's working
Marco:
the biggest characterization of the iPad that, that I've, that I've felt and, and that I think, and I think you actually just basically agreed with implicitly is like, if you, if you think about, and I should blog this, but I'm not going to, so, cause I don't want, I don't want the response.
Marco:
So if, if you think about, um, like a, a graph, you know, standard X, Y, two, two dimensional graph on one axis, you have the complexity of what you're trying to do.
Marco:
And on the other axis, you have how easy it is to do.
Um,
Marco:
I think for most standard computer, Mac PC kind of things, that line is kind of a gentle slope.
Marco:
The complexity of what you want to do versus how easy it is to do it kind of ramps smoothly for most things.
Marco:
Yeah, there are some bumps along the way.
Marco:
That being said, where that starts, like the zero point of that graph, is high.
Marco:
There's a certain baseline of knowledge required to use a computer at all and do tasks at all, and there's a certain baseline level of complexity you have to deal with, even for easy things.
Marco:
However, as you scale up, that line climbs, but there's not a lot of huge spikes in it.
Marco:
Whereas...
Marco:
iPad usage the ease of use of easy things is way lower that line starts way lower however as you progress towards trying to do more complicated things it just shoots way up easy stuff is easier but hard stuff is way harder and what is even considered a hard thing on iOS is
Marco:
is oftentimes not a very hard or uncommon thing in the PC-Mac world.
Marco:
I don't think iPads, or phones for that matter, but I think it's more of a problem than iPad, I don't think they have ever really found a good way around this.
Marco:
The whole reason the iPad is easier to use for simple things...
Marco:
are fundamental aspects of its design things like the that all apps at least start out full screen and that all apps only have at least normally one window and that all apps you know you tap the icon and that just shows and then you hit the home button if you still have one and then you know then you you see all your apps and you hit the next one and they take away the concept of files and that's all great when you're doing really simple things
Marco:
But as soon as you have to do something that's slightly outside of that golden path of easiness, the barrier of complexity and difficulty goes way up.
Marco:
Like as John was saying, you really have to be an iPad expert.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
and then god knows how to close it i have never figured this out i eventually have to like you know start like getting stuff out of the force quit thing and eventually i and i never can recover that tab like i just gotta start a new one like that tab's gone like it's just it's not just expertise like that's the important point of like when i'm saying you can actually measure this it's not just you know it's like well if you have to be an expert to know all these secrets it's not knowing it's like physical capabilities like how hard is it physically to do this
John:
part of the beauty of the Mac user, and again, Gruber touched on this with double-clicking, is you can say, this is how a feature works.
John:
Can people do it?
John:
Is it actually physically hard?
John:
And I'm not talking about people who have disabilities.
John:
It's just all of us, everybody.
John:
Everyone is disabled to some degree.
John:
It's just a question of what that degree is.
John:
There is no discontinuity.
John:
It's just a smooth spectrum from supposedly able to supposedly disabled.
John:
It's difficult to precisely control
John:
things as you drag like you you have to hold pressure on the screen because if you pick your finger up on the on ipad or any touch device it cancels the drag and you know the edges are hot like a game of operation right if you accidentally go to the edge something different is going to happen i've you know i had the big rant a couple you know many shows ago about trying to rearrange icons and springboard on the phone and
John:
And, you know, to add to that, like, if you're going to pick up multiple items and do all those multi finger things, it is actually physically difficult to do those, even if you are a quote unquote expert and know exactly what you're supposed to be doing.
John:
And that's the sign of a feature that you get that is measurably bad for most users.
John:
even very dexterous, very careful ones, it's frustrating because you don't know where the live hot areas are.
John:
There's no visual indication.
John:
Even if you have incredibly precise motor control and you're in a situation where you can do that because the iPad is well supported and you're not on the go, like...
John:
that's not hard because it's an expert feature that's hard because it's a bad feature it is hard for human beings to use and fundamentally because it is a thing that you carry and because there's no pointing device and because you know whatever like there are there are some that's the problem they have to solve but
John:
But there are other parts of it that they've chosen to do themselves, the fact that there is no Chrome in any of the windows.
John:
Again, a simplification, but it also means there is no affordances visually and touch-wise in the UI for you to have a safe area to grab or move things to or anything like that.
John:
So that's the challenge they face, and I feel like there are solutions to it.
John:
are measurably not as successful as they should be just because they're so hard that lots of people can't do it.
John:
Like, Marco, you know what you're trying to do with that stupid tab, but you just physically can't.
John:
It's like a video game that's hard to play, and that's not a good UI.
Marco:
Yeah, I just have a very high error rate for this common task.
Marco:
And I think a lot of that, by the way, we're hearing from a few people in the chat, that apparently you can long press on the tabs icon, and there's a merge all windows button to solve my attack.
John:
What?
John:
That's the undiscoverability because there's no Chrome or menu bar or anything like that.
Marco:
I would never have found that.
Marco:
I had no chance of ever knowing that.
Marco:
So yeah.
Marco:
And I think this is part of the thing.
Marco:
What makes it so simple to do the simple tasks is
Marco:
is a large degree of both physical and of design, both hardware and software simplicity visually.
Marco:
Everything app is full screen, and you said there's no window chrome and everything, and then that's great.
Marco:
It keeps simple things simple.
Marco:
But then...
Marco:
Where do you put the advanced stuff?
Marco:
If you're not going to just have an icon or a button on screen that can do something, how do you show people that they can do it?
Marco:
That is a largely unsolved design problem among touch devices.
Marco:
We have a few bad solutions.
Marco:
We have the first launch overlay or arrow saying, oh, click here to see all these options.
Marco:
Those are terrible.
Marco:
We have the junk drawer design.
Marco:
First was the hamburger menu.
Marco:
Then it was the action menu.
Marco:
Now it's the dot, dot, dot menu.
Marco:
They're all the same thing.
Marco:
It's all just like more.
Marco:
Shove a whole bunch of stuff into the more button and people will push it to find more, you know, in the
Marco:
All of these solutions are mediocre at best.
Marco:
They just don't have the kind of discoverability that you have in a typical PC interface where you typically have way more real estate on screen and you have smaller buttons because you're controlling it with a more precise pointing device.
Marco:
So usually you can fit more
Marco:
buttons or icons in a toolbar.
Marco:
Then you have the whole menu system and you can pull down the series of menus and see what things are.
Marco:
Or you can right-click on things to see what you can do.
John:
Right-click is a great example because that is an example of a thing with no visual affordance that seems to be totally non-discoverable.
John:
But because it is so unfailingly consistent in the PC-Mac interface, it becomes...
John:
culturally successful like there is there's no visual indication that you can right click on things but again look out into the world how many people who use a personal computer of any kind know that right clicking exists now it is less than 100 but the percentage is way higher than the people like who who right clicks stuff on their bc it's way higher than the number of people who use split screen and multitasking sophisticated multitasking on the ipad because it is it is one additional thing to learn which is you know one thing that you wouldn't have to learn for simple things but
John:
It is just it's everywhere.
John:
If you see something and you don't see a visual way to interact with it,
John:
One of the things you can try and usually your first instinct is let me try right clicking it because people have been trained through very consistent use of that.
John:
But even though there is no indication this is going to be successful, it's a good first guess.
John:
Can I right click it?
John:
Is there some menu to write?
John:
Can I right click on this?
John:
And then there's a menu that says delete.
John:
Can I right click it to get info about it?
John:
And right clicking is incredibly successful.
John:
So successful that Apple, which insisted on single button mice for a long time, had to come around to basically enable right click.
John:
You know, by control click in the beginning, then eventually by making us a single button mouse that lets you do right clicking.
John:
There are solutions to these problems.
John:
They're tricky.
John:
And getting back to the double clicking thing that Gruber pointed out, just to clarify what we're talking about, if you don't bother to read the article, double clicking on the Mac is a tricky situation where they added this thing, which is like, well, single click to select and double click to open.
John:
Right.
John:
And it's a very simple, very consistent paradigm on the Mac.
John:
But it has the problem that double clicking is a physically tricky thing to do.
John:
Not that tricky.
John:
You're like double clicking.
John:
It's not like I'm doing a multi finger five finger drag on the iPad, right?
John:
Double clicking.
John:
How hard is it to double click, right?
John:
It is actually physically difficult because what determines if something is a double click is the space between the clicks.
John:
And that's why since the beginning, the Mac has had a feature where you can adjust the tolerance for what the OS, you know, considers a double click.
John:
There's a setting, I believe, to this day in system preferences and on the original Macintosh.
John:
It says, should I give you lots of time if you go click click click?
John:
Is that a double click or do you have to go click click click?
John:
Right.
John:
Because it is difficult for people to do that.
John:
In particular, I saw this early on with the Mac when mice were new.
John:
It's difficult for people to double click without accidentally moving the mouse between the two clicks, which makes it kind of not count as much as a double click, depending on the heuristics of the operating system.
John:
right that is you know compared to multi-finger drag that's nothing but that is an epidemic problem that has never really gotten better some people still have trouble with double click and the second thing is unlike culturally with right click where everybody knows i can't figure out how to use this thing let me try right clicking it which is generally a safe thing to do it's not going to do anything harmful like culturally it's understood or whatever single click versus double click despite being
John:
i think a very clear easily explained paradigm from day one on graphical user interfaces still is a source of confusion for people you see people double click links in web browsers you see people double click literally everything because it's basically like i clicked it and it didn't work so maybe i should double click it and then people very often short circuit that to say if i see anything on the screen and i really want it to work i should double click it instead of single click it and in general
John:
that will work like if it requires a single clicking you double click most of the time it will do the thing so maybe that's why people are trained to do it but even that one minor complexity through decades of use like human nature is such that single click versus double click if you had to go back and say what is the what is the paradigm that you might want to rethink about the the wimp you know aggressively user interface
John:
Single click versus double click turned out to be surprisingly tricky for people to master.
John:
And if they haven't done by now, they probably never will.
John:
So it's always going to be slightly less successful than you'd want it to be.
John:
Versus right click, which wasn't thought of back then, even though the Xerox mouse had like five buttons on it or three buttons or whatever and was even more complicated.
John:
Right click, I think, has been much more successful.
John:
So I do have some hope that there are solutions that don't require visual affordances that can be culturally successful and physically easy to do.
John:
You could argue, oh, that's long press, or that's forced press.
John:
Apple has tried a whole bunch of things in that area, but none of them have been consistent or popular enough to get by.
John:
I think maybe long presses is getting there.
John:
People do kind of understand that you can long press things and touch interfaces, and you might get options or whatever.
John:
Do they?
John:
I think more than people know how to do split screen on the iPad, that's for sure.
John:
I've seen people in my family do long press on things, but I've never seen anyone in my family do split screen on an iPad.
Marco:
I'm not even sure how I'm supposed to be doing a split screen.
Marco:
Every time I try to do it, I occasionally will use it.
Marco:
And every time I try to do it, it takes me a very long time to figure out the exact combination of...
Marco:
Where I press and hold, where I drag it, where I let it go, do I stick it down or stick it up?
Marco:
It takes me a very long time.
Marco:
And I officially know it.
Marco:
I ostensibly know how to do this.
Marco:
And yeah, there's a lot of waiting.
Marco:
There's a lot of like, oh, I accidentally didn't stick this down in the right spot so it wiggles back to somewhere else.
Marco:
I'm good at computers.
Marco:
I do this for a living.
Marco:
I use an iPad every day and I have multitasked on every version of iOS that has supported multitasking.
Marco:
And I'm still bad at doing it on the iPad because, I mean, I guess I don't do it enough.
Marco:
But I think the bigger problem is it's just so fiddly.
Marco:
And a lot of this is down to factors like we're saying about undiscoverability of text gestures.
Marco:
And a lot of it is down to because there are basically no buttons in the hardware and because the software UI paradigm is to make everything full screen and to not have things like window chrome or menus –
Marco:
That inherently makes it really hard to design these things in a way that is intuitive and discoverable.
Marco:
It'd be one thing, if Apple redesigned iPadOS so that every app by default had a title bar that had some buttons in the corner that would do things like...
John:
maximize it to the full screen or shrink it to half screen that would have to be big chrome like that's that's the reason they're resisting is because your pointing device is so imprecise that it would have to be comically large and now you're eating into your limited screen space like i understand why they don't but yeah but they just made all this they just made all the screens bigger
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
If they really want to make multitasking on the iPad intuitive and something that everyone is able to do reliably and able to figure out, they have to put it on screen.
Marco:
They have to have on-screen controls.
Marco:
For multitasking to be really easy.
Marco:
And that just goes completely against the software design paradigm of iPadOS.
Marco:
And that may make certain things worse that may that might make that floor of how simple things can be.
Marco:
It might raise it very slightly because you could accidentally hit the window controls when you didn't mean to.
John:
And they're like, oh, where'd my window go?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But I would argue that's actually better overall than where we are now, which is you have these kind of secret gestures that come up when you move near edges or do weird things that it would be not at all surprising to me if the vast majority of invocations for iPad multitasking were accidental.
Mm-hmm.
John:
Yeah, everything's hot on your screen.
John:
Yes, which raises that floor.
John:
Yeah, I use SlideOver a lot, surprisingly.
John:
I more or less know how it works, and I like the thing where you can switch between the SlideOver stuff.
John:
I've worked that into my workflow, and it mostly is okay.
John:
But because the floor is lava, because everything is hot in iPadOS, when I'm watching, for example, Netflix...
John:
And, like, sometimes I'll be watching Netflix and I'll bring over Twitter to just look at something because I'm watching something cruddy or whatever.
John:
Like, I'm multitasking on my iPad.
John:
Look at me go.
John:
Sometimes when I bring over slide over, that gesture gets registered by the underlying, like, Netflix or Hulu player.
John:
And, like, the slide over comes on, but the video I'm watching goes back 30 seconds because that app has a gesture for a swipe backwards.
John:
Nice.
John:
And depending on the speed that you do it, like because you can to slide over, you have to start in a certain position and bring it over.
John:
But if you go a little bit too fast, the underlying app registers at a gesture.
John:
Arguably, that's a bug in the app below it.
John:
But you can't blame the app author to like, look, if someone swipes their finger from left from right to left.
John:
I should go back 30 seconds.
John:
And as far as they're concerned, that's exactly what's happened.
John:
But as far as the OS is concerned, they're like, oh no, they were activating slide over.
John:
But both of the things get it.
John:
There is no safe area.
John:
And I think the experts, talking about doing split screen and multitasking and dragging things, the experts learn mentally...
John:
the map of the safe hot regions and like how long you have to hover and how long you have to press and when it's safe to move and what areas you should avoid like that's part of the expertise is learning this invisible heat map and this invisible like four-dimensional timing map of like it's not intellectually doing but you know through through repetition
John:
Like, I know I've gotten better about putting things into slider, slide over and going into multitasking just by sort of learning the routes and everything.
John:
And that can have a feeling of like mastering a video game and being good at it and can give like positive feelings towards the...
John:
the experience because they're like i i invested time into this and now i'm good at it now i feel like a real maestro but again that's not a characteristic of a good user interface it shouldn't it shouldn't be it's fun to master a game it's not fun to have to master something that just you know you're just trying to shop around for you know
John:
new ups for your fancy computer whatever it is you're doing like like you want you want more people to be successful you don't want to the people who master it to feel an incredible amount of satisfaction right you want everyone to feel that satisfaction because everybody is able to successfully have more than one window on the screen or whatever
Casey:
So to that end, this is my favorite thing in the world.
Casey:
And by favorite, I mean least favorite thing in the world.
Casey:
So let's suppose that you have your iPad Pro or iPad or whatever, and you have your smart keyboard attached and open and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And let's suppose you're looking at Safari full screen, right?
Casey:
And you want to get a second app in split view.
Casey:
The most direct way to do this, at least on the iPad Pro that I have, is you swipe up just a little bit from the bottom.
Casey:
Because if you swipe up too much, you're going to go home.
Casey:
You don't want to go home.
Casey:
You just want to swipe up a little bit.
Casey:
You swipe up a little bit and you grab one of the things in your dock.
Casey:
And then you just drag that icon over to the side and suddenly you have split view.
Casey:
Yeah, split view, right?
Casey:
I don't even know the damn terminology for this stuff.
Casey:
Anyway, so that's all well and good.
Casey:
But what if you don't?
Casey:
have what you want in your dock so let's suppose that i don't have notes in my dock even though i actually do let's suppose notes is on one of my home screens and i'm looking at safari full screen and i want to get notes off to the side well i can't go to the dock because it's not there so when i have the keyboard attached it's actually slightly straightforward i just command space
Casey:
and type in notes, and then I get the notes icon, and I drag it from the spotlight window over to the side, and now all is well.
Casey:
So far, so good.
Casey:
How do I do that if I can't hit command space?
Casey:
I have an answer to this question, but can you guys tell me how you do this?
Marco:
I read an answer earlier, so I'm spoiled, but it's ridiculous.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So what I've figured out, and maybe this isn't the best way, but what I've figured out is you start by going home.
Casey:
So I'm now looking at my home screen.
Casey:
I find notes on the home screen.
Casey:
I pick up the notes icon and I drag it, which of course is starting to make me rearrange the home screen.
Casey:
Or delete notes.
Casey:
Or delete notes.
Casey:
Then I swipe up from the bottom with a different hand, just a bit, not too much now, just a bit.
Casey:
Now I've got multitasking up.
Casey:
I'm still holding with the other hand.
Casey:
I select Safari for multitasking.
Casey:
Now the icon becomes a window and I drag the window off to the side.
Casey:
Once I've done this 10 times, it vaguely, I wouldn't even say it makes sense, but it's a repeatable series of actions.
Casey:
Let's put it that way.
Casey:
But how preposterous is this?
Casey:
How does any human being figure this out without being instructed directly?
Casey:
How do you figure this out?
John:
And even if you're instructed, can you imagine teaching someone to do that?
John:
Oh, don't go too far.
John:
Oh, wait, no, hold that, but don't hold it.
John:
Like, there's so many hot regions that if you hold it over this for too long, it does this thing, but you want to not let it go.
John:
And remember, don't take your finger off the glass, but pull up just a little bit, but go to the left, and now they use the second finger to do this.
John:
Right, exactly.
John:
It's like trying to teach someone to dance, but it's like, what most people will say is, it's already too complicated, I'll just do it the other way.
John:
Like, it's not, they give up on trying to
John:
have two applications there at the same time like i know how to switch between the old-fashioned way i'll just do that even though it's less convenient no you know it's not it's not worth it to go over that hurdle and that's not a successful feature if what you're trying to do is enable people to use two apps at once and they're bailing on it because it's too weird rethink
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
My other favorite part of this is, so let's assume I'm trying to do this all over again.
Casey:
So I was in Safari.
Casey:
I go home.
Casey:
I'm looking at my home screen.
Casey:
I pick up the notes icon.
Casey:
I'm moving it around.
Casey:
And then I see, oh, Safari is also on the screen, perhaps on the dock, perhaps just on the home screen.
Casey:
I want to bring that back.
Casey:
So what do I do?
Casey:
I tap the Safari icon.
Casey:
Oh, shit.
Casey:
I'm now collecting two icons.
Casey:
That's not what I wanted at all.
Casey:
It's like you said, the floor is lava.
John:
But it's so easy to drop that second icon, Casey.
John:
You know how to do that, don't you?
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
Where's the safe place to drop it?
Casey:
It beats me.
Casey:
It's so frustrating because it could be so good.
Casey:
It could be so, so good.
Casey:
And when I do get that moment, and it happens, and it doesn't happen infrequently, when I get that moment, a great example of this is I've taken a screenshot of something and I want to mark it up.
Casey:
Well, on the Mac, that's kind of a pain in the hindquarters.
Casey:
I have to figure out some way of doing this on the Mac.
Casey:
On the iPad, I grab the pointing device connected to the iPad.
Casey:
That's amazing.
Casey:
That is so much better than anything I would have to do on the Mac.
Casey:
And it works so much more nicely.
Casey:
But so much of using the iPad is an exercise in frustration.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I don't really want to open this can of worms, but here I go.
Casey:
If I need to write a series of shortcuts in order to do the things that I can do so much easier on the Mac, then I'm just going to do them on the Mac.
Casey:
And yes, I understand that there are human beings that prefer iOS.
Casey:
I get that.
Casey:
I really, truly do.
Casey:
But for me, even if I don't have a particular preference between macOS and iOS, I can tell you that because I'm fluent in both, it is so much faster for me and easier for me to do stuff on the Mac that all too often that's what I'm choosing.
Casey:
And it's so frustrating because the physical hardware of the iPad Pro, especially with Face ID, it's beautiful.
Casey:
It's light.
Casey:
It's powerful.
Casey:
It's fast.
Casey:
Cellular.
Casey:
It's cellular.
Casey:
It's so much what I want.
Casey:
It's so much what I want.
Casey:
But the software just falls on its face, and it makes me so sad.
Marco:
And I would even say there are lots of things that the software is better at, too.
Marco:
It isn't that iPadOS is just bad and macOS is good.
Marco:
There's a lot of differences in the OSs and especially in the apps on those OSs.
Marco:
There's no clear way.
Marco:
I can't just say everything on macOS is better or everything on iOS is better.
Marco:
But it just seems like...
Marco:
There is so much about iPad multitasking and iPad UI use that relies on modes or timing or hidden gestures.
Marco:
Ask anybody who's ever tried to design computer interfaces.
Marco:
Modes, timing tricks, and hidden gestures are recipes for total disasters of usability.
Marco:
and what makes the ipad great and especially what made it great initially is none of that what makes it great is the opposite it's the simplicity it's a it's that when you're on that golden simple path of doing like you know everything full screen and you know just doing simple things where you never have to deal with files or multitasking or anything when you're just doing that you don't have any of those problems and it's glorious but
Marco:
But as you try to do more stuff on your iPad, you slam into those walls pretty quickly, and to get over those walls is so cumbersome.
Marco:
And it's all because you have this device that Apple really wants to keep simple, without losing what's good about that low barrier to entry for it.
Marco:
And I think the only solution to this...
Marco:
is to put goddamn controls on the screen.
Marco:
Like, put them in the UI.
Marco:
You have buttons that you can push to do things.
Marco:
That's how you solve this.
Marco:
And it's not always going to look pretty.
Marco:
And it's not always going to be conceptually design purity maximum.
Marco:
But design purity maximum is how you get pretty things, not usable things.
Marco:
And it is possible to have both.
Marco:
If you have a nicely designed UI, it has its own form of beauty.
Marco:
Nice, easy-to-use UI is itself beautiful.
Marco:
It's a different version of beauty than clean, minimalism, Johnny White Room, junk drawer design, like what they do now.
Marco:
It's a different style.
Marco:
But it's not worse.
Marco:
It's not ugly.
Marco:
It's just different.
Marco:
And I don't see how...
Marco:
you add the complexity that power users want to the... Or that all users want, honestly.
Marco:
There's many of them.
Marco:
I don't know how you add that complexity and power to iOS without sacrificing some of that visual purity.
Marco:
Because, again, like...
Marco:
You know, having a title bar with windows, like, on the screen, even if you can't freeform shape those windows, even if you don't, like, drag the corner to resize it, which, I don't, I mean, you know, there's different choices you can make there, but, like, if there was just, like, a basic amount of window chrome, think of the functionality you get out of window chrome on the Mac.
Marco:
You know, not only do you have sizing controls, you also have hiding and showing that window and you have closing that window for good, like getting rid of it, minimizing it, you know, big, small.
Marco:
Then you also have the title bar, which tells you what app you're in or what thing you are viewing.
Marco:
Then you have the proxy icon, which is a shortcut to tons of power.
Marco:
And then, of course, if it's visually combined, you have the whole toolbar, which itself is a massive amount of potential power.
Marco:
Buttons, and you have navigation back forward.
Marco:
You might have a search box.
Marco:
There's so much that is in standard window chrome.
Marco:
And that's not even – again, not even including like if you want to drag the corners to resize it because that may or may not be a good idea on iPadOS.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But if you just had a small amount of window chrome on every window for apps that supported this, that would expose a ton of basic multitasking functionality in a really easy way that wouldn't require all these weird gestures that are too easy to do accidentally and too hard to do intentionally.
Marco:
there's a reason why people do this.
Marco:
It's like, it's like when I made the magazine and I tried to make no setting screen and I had such incredible complexity because I didn't want a setting screen and that the result ended up being worse and harder to use.
Marco:
And then I had to eventually just put a damn setting screen in it because that was actually better.
Marco:
I feel like, think about all of the,
John:
hoops apple has jumped through and made its users jump through to avoid having like basic window controls on on ipad os is it really worth it they're trying to preserve the simplicity like that seems to be their job one which you can kind of understand because the simplicity is the big selling point but they haven't found like the solutions we're always going to i think you know many many shows ago when we discussed this we were just talking about having menu bars
John:
Yeah.
John:
how about just window chrome?
John:
Like, cause you haven't come up with something better.
John:
I'm not saying window chrome is a solution.
John:
And in fact, when you're discussing window chrome, it made me think about some of the regressions they've had on the Mac.
John:
Um, as you know, if you're staring at a Mac right now, there isn't window chrome to speak of.
John:
And I have seen many people, uh,
John:
have difficulty resizing mac windows because to do it there is a very small region of pixels near the edge of a window where you will get the appropriate arrow cursor and there's different arrow cursors because mac windows are resizable from all sides which power users love but regular users
John:
might not understand that if you reach for the corner and you end up grabbing a side and you get the little arrow, you can only resize in one direction now, and that's frustrating.
John:
And in general, just getting to the point where you get the appropriate resize cursor, because there's no visual affordance for it, and because the windows are basically borderless, which looks very clean...
John:
there's a very small region where you have to do that compared to you know mac os you know the old mac os with the platinum interface that had a big textured square with little grippy things which wasn't a huge target but it was absolutely visual and it was big enough where you could get it and you know when windows weren't resizable from the edges you didn't have that problem so even in systems that are tried and true it's possible to
John:
through visual refinement end up making interfaces harder to use even if people aren't confused about how to resize windows i think resizing mac windows is now harder than it used to be for that reason um and the the purity argument of like oh the interface isn't as pure i think the i keep calling it wimp i hate that acronym but anyway it's my you know the the mac user interface i know it's not just the mac but anyway
John:
has incredible purity menu bar at the top of the screen windows with scroll bars that are resizable with closed widgets and you know with with window widgets like and even the dock like that there is incredible purity to that paradigm and incredible flexibility it has stood the test of time you are able to do amazing things with it it is more pure than the ipad os interface
John:
which has many different paradigms all fighting with each other and various things tacked on to the end, and none of them are sort of composable and flexible enough to get the job done on their own, all so they can preserve the simple interface, which I'm all for preserving the simplicity.
John:
It's just that you need to find a way to enable...
John:
more sophisticated actions without killing that simplicity, but also by making a consistent system.
John:
And they haven't done it yet.
John:
And so we say, well, have you tried just sticking a menu bar?
John:
Think of how much flexibility putting just a plain old menu bar at the top of the screen on an iPad would do.
John:
you'd have to make it like a finger capable menu bar or whatever but we you know and we said oh that's that's old thinking you just want it to be the way the mac is i don't actually i want something better but if you can't think of something better i'll take the compromise of we couldn't come up with any better ideas so here is a finger accessible menu bar right we couldn't come up with any ideas so here is some kind of window chrome and ipad os which necessarily has to be larger and
John:
you know and hurts the complexity it hurts the simplicity or whatever but you do that's the challenge that's the challenge apple faces come up with something that preserves the best of both but provides the power and is consistent and they have not risen to that challenge and honestly i don't think we have risen to that challenge either because everything we're suggesting i think would be mostly an abomination and terrible but
John:
on on the high end it would make the complicated things that we're describing easier and better to do it's just that on the low end they would make people you know confused and frustrated and i think in general the public would think an ipad that works that way is worse than an ipad that works the way it does now because one of the you know i was saying how we never see people using multitasking the ipad also for all the ipad users that i are intimately familiar in my life who aren't tech nerds
John:
they're mostly satisfied with their iPad experience of not using those expert features.
John:
They don't care that the iPad has a very inconsistent, inflexible, difficult-to-use interface for doing more complex things.
John:
And if you try to show them, they mostly bail, but their satisfaction with the product remains.
John:
So...
John:
I'm not saying that the current compromise is successful because clearly it's not, but it does have the beneficial characteristic of most of our users will still be satisfied even as we screw up our ability to do this high end.
John:
So it's kind of like the, the super high end experts are satisfied because it's a video game they can master.
John:
Most people are fine because they never have to do that.
John:
But then there is like, you're leaving money on the table and that like these devices, we know these devices could enable people to do more complicated things and
John:
And it's just that they're not good at bridging that gap.
John:
It's one of the things that the Mac was always good at.
John:
Hey, you're not a computer expert, but if you sit down in front of this computer and learn some basics, you can be successful at doing things you never thought you could do.
John:
And the iPad does that for the low end.
John:
Hey, you can browse the web.
John:
You can send people email.
John:
You can chat with people.
John:
You will be successful.
John:
If you buy this product, it's not too complicated.
John:
You'll figure it out.
John:
But that stops.
John:
And it's like, you want to do anything more than that?
John:
You're going to have serious problems.
John:
And unless you want to be a super duper expert, just retreat to the simple things.
Marco:
I would also, you know, just one final closing thought on like the purity angle here.
Marco:
The history of the iPad is filled with starting out doing very little, having things very restricted, and then somebody or some third party starts proposing like, hey, what if we add a keyboard?
Marco:
Although, by the way, Apple shipped a keyboard on day one, but nobody bought it.
Marco:
But hey, what if we add a keyboard?
Marco:
What if we make these capacitive stylus things?
Marco:
And yeah, Steve Jobs made fun of styluses a long time ago, but...
Marco:
Turns out they're kind of nice.
Marco:
And then eventually, you know, someone does, you know, Microsoft does it or third parties do it.
Marco:
And then eventually, Apple adds their own option.
Marco:
And before Apple does it, everyone's like, no, you should never have a stylus.
Marco:
That would ruin everything.
Marco:
You should never have, you don't need a keyboard.
Marco:
That would make it a laptop.
Marco:
Just buy a laptop.
Marco:
Blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
And then Apple does it.
Marco:
They release a new thing.
Marco:
They release their own stylus, and it's good.
Marco:
They release their own keyboard, and it's good.
Marco:
They add multitasking to a system that didn't have multitasking before, and that is okay.
Marco:
But eventually, the market keeps wanting this device to get more capable.
Marco:
Well, again, although, John, you're right, not all of its market, and possibly not even most of its market.
Marco:
But a portion of this market, especially its high-end for sure, wants these devices to get more capable.
Marco:
And in most cases, the way that has happened is to make them more like laptops.
Marco:
And everyone b****s and moans and complains beforehand.
Marco:
And then somebody allows them, usually Apple, to make it more like a laptop.
Marco:
And everyone's like, oh, oh yeah, that actually is nice.
Marco:
And for me, that's what changed.
Marco:
What changed the iPad for me from a cool toy I kept buying and never using to something I use every day is the keyboard.
Marco:
Apple made a really good keyboard for, and it turns out the difficulty of text input was holding me back quite a lot and discouraging me from using it very often.
Marco:
And once I had better text input via a physical keyboard, I now use it way more.
Marco:
You know, for a lot of people, the Pencil did that.
Marco:
You know, where like...
Marco:
drawing things on it or you know precise touch precise input in other styles was difficult or impossible or limited and and the apple pencil fix that and open up whole new worlds to to that kind of use and you know then everyone's like oh it should never have a way to browse files well then apple adds the files app which mostly works
Casey:
I don't know about that, but I don't want to derail your point.
Marco:
And then Apple adds the files app, which occasionally works and kind of does what people want.
Marco:
And the conceptual purists, when they saw that, were like, why do you need that?
Marco:
It's an iPad.
Marco:
Just keep data in apps.
Marco:
But no, they added it, and it actually solved a lot of problems and opened up a lot of doors for people.
Marco:
Not well, but it started knocking down some of those walls.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
There's this whole history throughout the entire iPad of people wanting to defend its purity for ideological sake or for fear that it'll ruin it somehow, make it more complicated.
Marco:
But then eventually Apple does make it more complicated because that's what certain use cases need.
Marco:
And then it's fine.
Marco:
And people, with the exception of a lot of this multitasking stuff that's hard to use because it's weirdly designed and the gestures are all weird, most of this stuff doesn't have a negative impact on people who want to keep it simple at all.
Marco:
Most of it is simply additive.
Marco:
So if making it
Marco:
a little bit more like laptops here and there, has made it so much better for power users and so much more capable of a platform.
Marco:
We shouldn't be afraid of things that are in that direction that sound scary that we haven't tried yet that might have a big impact.
Marco:
Things like, as I said, basic window chrome.
Marco:
That sounds really weird right now because we don't have it and we haven't seen it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
In three years, all iPad apps might have window chrome by default.
Marco:
They might have a title bar with simple multitasking buttons on the left or whatever, and that might just be fine.
Marco:
And we might look back on the time before that the same way we look back now on the time before the keyboard and the pencil.
Marco:
Or copy and paste.
Marco:
Yeah, or copy and paste.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Making the iPad a little more laptop-like when that is the best solution, which is not never.
Marco:
It isn't always, but it's not never.
Marco:
When the best solution is to borrow something from the laptop world, the iPad has done it a lot of the time.
Marco:
And there's lots of ways it hasn't.
Marco:
And I'm putting off for now a lot of discussion about...
Marco:
the apps themselves and what they can do and what they can't do and various like, you know, sandboxing issues and file dealing with issues and stuff like the app store issues.
Marco:
There's a lot of other issues that we could talk about, but just talking about like the basics of usability, the device, getting around apps, you know, getting in and out of apps, multitasking, physical interface.
Marco:
borrowing from the laptop world so far has succeeded very well on ipads when they in the few times they've done it and so doing it one or two more times for something as rudimentary as like the way the multitasking system works which they've already heavily borrowed from they already have a dock and an alt tab switcher or command tab switcher they already have a lot of the same things you know the search box like there's a lot of a lot of overlap already and it's worked mostly okay
Marco:
To borrow a couple more things to make the multi-test system way more easy for anybody who's not Federico to use, I think would go a long way.
Marco:
And we shouldn't rule it out simply because, oh, why don't you just use a Mac?
Marco:
No, it turns out there's good ideas.
Marco:
And we've already borrowed a lot of them.
Marco:
It wouldn't harm the world to borrow a couple more.
John:
So what we're saying, as usual, is that Microsoft Surface got it right.
John:
And their only problem is they started from a crappy desktop operating system.
John:
And it's only a matter of time before Apple figures it out and ends up like I saw some good graphic recently.
John:
It was like show the Microsoft Surface line.
John:
And someone was like, this is what I expected the iPad line to look like by now.
John:
It had the giant Surface Studio 27-inch touchscreen thing, and it had the small ones that looked like laptops with removable screens.
John:
And Microsoft has the unified OS strategy of they have Windows with window chrome on their tablets, sort of, kind of, like, you know, obviously...
John:
you know starting with windows was a serious detriment and i'm not saying apple should have just put mac os on their tablets because that would have been the wrong thing too but what you're describing marco is essentially where microsoft is now uh but with the details different right so they you know
John:
having having something that works and looks and borrows a lot from a laptop but is also a touch device and works in that mode as well just better all right that's what really and and details matter yeah the details definitely do matter there's a reason we're not realizing microsoft service but you know the the overall strategy if you didn't look at the details and just described it in broad strokes that's more or less what you're talking about and i still contend that like
John:
ideally you come up with a solution that is better but if you if you try for a long time and can't think of anything it's time to just to consider the menu bar like i i would consider the menu bar before window chrome actually because i just feel like it's a simpler element and you could put one of them up there and they already have a status bar it's almost like a menu bar anyway and so on and so forth but that's the type of stuff you can't just add piecemeal you have to have a good rethink right just you know step back and say next gen ipad os
John:
describe the paradigm and then you can choose which things from the mac world are we going to pull in and you know if someone says oh we don't want to pull that in it's like well then what's your better idea right because we tried these things and they're worse if you don't have a better idea it's time to consider does the menu bar fit in right does a menu bar fit in does window chrome fit in in some fashion and you know so i hope that happens eventually
John:
If it doesn't, I don't think actually it's the end of the world, but I still think that people are generally, most people are satisfied with their iPads using them in simple mode, right?
John:
But it also means that the iPad is never going to threaten the Mac for complicated tasks if they can't figure out how to make it, you know,
John:
easy to do you know make it comfortable and fun and easy for even experts to do uh on the ipad it's not it's too it's too difficult it's too complicated and only if you really really love the ipad will you go through that effort and everyone else will just run to the thing they're more more comfortable with and
John:
We are continuing to make generations of people who are comfortable to some degree doing complicated tasks on desktop computers.
John:
So it's not like those people are dying out either.
John:
New generations of people know how to use Macs and PCs because they have to use them to do all the things that they generally can't do on an iPad.
John:
So...
John:
that uh that divide will remain and ipad customers will be happy and mac customers will be happy but the future where ipad eventually expands to absorb the the problem space of the mac will never happen if they don't figure this out thanks to our sponsors this week linode blue vine and yes please and we will see you next week
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean it.
Casey:
I have, uh, I had the op.
John:
I didn't get that time to shove it in because we were going along anyway, but I have the opposite of Marco's bug.
John:
I had a beginner bug that.
John:
is not the result of, but is adjacent to the fact that there is tons of documentation for AppKit.
John:
AppKit, if you go look at the documentation for some common class in AppKit, there are so many attributes, there are so many methods, and
John:
uh you know one failure mode is oh you didn't see this method or this attribute because if you had read it it's obviously what you want but it was on a page with 500 methods you didn't happen to see it so this bug was you know again a total dead beginner's bug but uh but it baffled me for a while i was just trying to uh make a window appear uh and then you know let you close it and then so i had a menu command and you pick the menu command and a window appears and then when you're done with that window you close it
John:
And then my bug was, all right, so I did it.
John:
You know, you select the menu command.
John:
I would make a new window.
John:
I'd say, window, please show yourself.
John:
It would show itself.
John:
And then you close the window.
John:
And then I would invoke that same menu command right after that.
John:
And it would hit the same code and say, OK, I'm about to show a window.
John:
uh and i tried it both the naive and the quote-unquote fancy way the fancy way was i don't need to make the window every time i'll just keep that window around the next time they take the menu command i'll just show it because i already made it right simple straightforward uh the problem was that every time i did the command the second time the app would crash
John:
nice right and i was and i was in i'm using swift here so i was in the you know my my great pearl motto when it's seg faults it's not your fault because that's the promise of pearl it's a high level language and if it's seg faults that's not on you you should that's you know pearl's broken that's a you know it's a compiler problem it's not your fault you shouldn't even be able to do that right john syracuse says pearl's broken
John:
yeah well and if it's seg faults that's you know that's not your fault unless you're writing c code to interface with pearl what you can do but in general if you're writing pearl code so in swift i know that's not actually true but i was having that attitude and up up to this point i'd never had a crashing bug because i'm doing simple things and swift is you know handles the allocation and everything for i'm sure i was making memory leaks here and my apps are so dinky doesn't matter anyway um
John:
but yeah, it was, it was like, but I'm just making.
John:
And so I said, all right, stop trying to be fancy.
John:
And just every time they do the command, make the window and ask it to show it.
John:
And for some reason that wasn't working either.
John:
And I couldn't for the life of me figure out like, why does it work the first time?
John:
But then the second time it doesn't.
John:
and like app kit the thing about app kit is there's a long legacy of the way it used to work back in the next days and the early mac days and so on and so forth and there's a million different attributes and so i you know i've been heavily leaning on one of the slacks i'm in that's filled with you know a vast wealth of experience of mac development and next development going back ages and i'm like you know i come in there only with like my tail between my legs after i've spent an hour doing this and like look
John:
I'm just trying to make a window appear and then close it and be able to do it a second time and my app is crashing.
John:
What super obvious thing am I missing?
John:
And someone with experience said, oh, what you're missing is that unbeknownst to you, every window, every NS window has an attribute called is released after close or something.
John:
And it's set to true by default.
John:
So if you show the window and then close it, the memory for that window is released behind your back in the system.
John:
And that is the correct default for this particular mode working with nibs back in the day, right?
John:
But it lives on as an attribute in every single window.
John:
And why didn't you know about that?
John:
Because if you go to the NS window documentation, which is incredibly extensive, there's a million things there.
John:
And if you're not looking for an attribute called is released after close, you'd be like, why is my app crashing?
John:
So it would show the window.
John:
I would close it.
John:
It would release that memory.
John:
And the place where it used to be is now just initialized garbage memory.
John:
And the next time you go and try to do something with that, it crashes.
John:
Yeah.
John:
cool isn't this a failure of arc like shouldn't arc be holding on to that set is released after closed well the is released thing just you know ditches the memory for it and that just calling causing the well no d
John:
dialog ditches the memory for it release just loses a ref count i don't know i don't know what actually does i understand what the attribute was called i don't know if i got the name right it's release after close or something similar but for all we know it is the allocing i don't know what it's doing behind the scenes all i know is there's an attribute among the million many million attributes i mean the lesson is don't try to hide and show your own windows use ns window controller instead because it will handle all these things for you and if you use nibs this also would be handled for you like this is all the machinery that's behind the scenes that you don't know about but it is
John:
A brain dead simple thing that I'm assuming, I didn't even look up the docs, but I'm assuming totally is documented like everything else.
John:
But if you don't know where to look or you're not familiar with the weird history of how AppKit works and how it works with nibs and how you're supposed to use it and you try to be like, I know how to make my own window.
John:
I'll construct it and ask it to show itself and it will work great.
John:
It does the first time, but then your window is gone.