Antitrust Relief Valve
John:
antitrust relief valve was also decent that is decent antitrust should be one word i believe but uh like no hyphen but what you know we don't make these things up it's not like we have a choice it's not like a it's an optional thing where from from from week to week we can choose whether to add or remove hyphens
John:
We are telling you about a truth that exists.
John:
We are not making decisions on the fly.
John:
That's fake news, John.
Marco:
Yeah, we don't just insert hyphens like in the middle of words that are single words.
John:
Or choose to remove them on our whim.
John:
It's like antitrust is a single word and we didn't make that choice.
John:
Let's do relief, R-E-L-I-E-F.
Casey:
I wouldn't be surprised with you two.
Casey:
I wouldn't be surprised at all.
John:
what we're telling you is that this this is a world of information that is knowable casey it is knowable to you so do i need a do i need a hyphen between relief and valve you never know these days no you can know this is a thing that you can know yeah it's a syntax it's it's it's very easy to understand the syntax there are fairly fairly consistent guidelines and through exposure you should be learning about how they're used there are always going to be edge cases that can be debated but the basic rules you should be picking up by now
John:
nope nope something i used to drive people crazy at work uh one of the teams i was working with a couple years ago i constantly was trying to teach them the rules about hyphens surprisingly hard to do a because they hate you for it obviously but b yeah uh they should still even though they hate you like the many things you learn from your parents you do eventually learn them
John:
You may dislike the person who taught them to you.
John:
We do eventually learn how to tie your shoes or whatever.
John:
Like you end up being able to tie your shoes, right?
John:
That is the end result.
John:
And ending up being able to use hyphens, my success rate is like slightly more than 50%.
Marco:
Yeah, but I don't know if the full immersion hyphen school was going to work for Casey.
Marco:
Actually, Casey.
Marco:
Full immersion hyphen school.
Marco:
Where does the hyphen or hyphens go?
Casey:
It's between full and immersion and knowing you two.
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
Why is it between full and immersion?
Casey:
Because you're specifying the kind of immersion.
Marco:
no no no i don't know well you're correct at least this is step one he's correct i know it's not the kind of immersion his reason his explanation and rationale is totally bogus but he is correct about the hyphen so we're making progress our full immersion hyphen school is working never in a million years would i look at that phrase and think oh i need a hyphen between fall and immersion no way
Casey:
I'm not saying you're wrong, for the record.
Casey:
I'm not saying you're wrong.
John:
I'll explain it to you again, which we've said in the past, but I'll explain it to you again so you can absorb it.
John:
It's when there's a multi-word phrase that acts as an adjective that describes some other thing.
John:
So there's a thing in there, and they're saying, what kind of thing is that?
John:
And to describe what kind of thing it is, there's multiple words that all combine to say, it's that kind of thing, right?
John:
What kind of preschool is it?
John:
It's a full immersion preschool, but it's not a full...
John:
immersion preschool full immersion is required to describe it's not a full preschool and it's not an immersion preschool and it's not a full comma immersion preschool it's not a big comma red bus or whatever like full immersion that multi-word phrase together describes the preschool so full hyphen immersion that's the basics before we go into when it's an adverb you don't do a hyphen anyway but like that's that's advanced courses the basic rule we're trying to get through right
John:
So many hyphens in these titles.
John:
Anyway, Antitrust doesn't have one, so that's just all one word.
Casey:
There's no hyphens in this episode.
Casey:
I am stupefied.
John:
And now we have a pre-show.
John:
I'll dump it on the pre-show because then the actual people who know grammar are going to yell at me for my description.
Casey:
Yell at you?
Marco:
No, that's even better.
Marco:
That's even better, is it?
Marco:
I don't think it is.
Casey:
You think you're going to get more email than me about this?
Marco:
All the emails go to all three of us.
John:
It's very easy to be successfully ignorant, but it's more difficult to be successfully educational.
John:
I tried to explain it, and they're like, well, actually, your explanation is wrong in this subtle way, and they're going to be right, and I'm going to have to endure that.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
A humongous gust of wind just went by.
Casey:
I felt like the house was about to fall down.
Casey:
That's not good.
Marco:
And there's no hyphenation in any of that.
Marco:
A humongous gust of wind is totally unhyphenated.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Here we go.
John:
It's not true.
John:
Because it's just one word describing the gust of wind.
John:
It's just humongous.
John:
You don't have a multi-word phrase that is describing the wind.
Casey:
It's not humongous hyphen gust hyphen of wind.
John:
No, because what kind of gust of wind is it?
Casey:
I'm kidding, God.
Casey:
I'm kidding.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I'm kidding.
John:
you are kidding but like i want to i want you to internalize this oh god oh i hate it i hate everything i hate everyone i quit you're both fired so the thing i would do with the folks at work is whenever it came up is that they're the the major thing that most people do is just don't acknowledge existence of hypon so never use them so normally someone would type something in slack which we were using then or whatever and i would say what kind of whatever
John:
That was always my cue.
John:
You know, they'd say something about, you know, a file and I would say, what kind of file?
John:
You must be a joy to work with, John.
John:
Right?
John:
So, and the thing is, I did this for like a year and still a year into it, I would say, what kind of file?
John:
And they'd answer the question and be like, oh, it's like a text file.
John:
I'd be like, whenever I say that, it's because you used a multi-word phrase to describe the file but didn't put hyphens in it.
John:
Like, I've done it a hundred times and still when I say it, I'd say, what kind of file?
John:
And they would just answer the question literally.
John:
So it's very difficult to...
Marco:
get this to penetrate i'm glad that the john we have on the show there's only one is the same john that exists at work and that everyone around john is subjected to the same subject is a harsh word gets to enjoy how about that oh
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
What is happening?
Casey:
What is happening?
Casey:
Do you hear weirdness?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Well, I mean, besides, like, our usual content.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
No, I'm hearing weirdness.
Casey:
I don't like it.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
Marco:
Now what?
Casey:
No, I don't know.
Casey:
I think I might hear weirdness.
Casey:
What are you hearing?
Casey:
I'm hearing, like, weirdness.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't like it.
Marco:
Not a good sign.
Casey:
right nope there it is okay i'm just gonna reboot so entertain everyone yeah i'm just gonna i'm just gonna can all this i will let's see if you guys genuinely if you just want to start the show that's fine i'll just pop in in a second but uh one way or another i'll be back and start the show without you you're the one who does the uh yeah we wouldn't even know how to start the show well fair enough fair all right i was trying to be nice all right i'm hanging up now okay bye
Casey:
I should note – and we can call this follow-up and I guess just start the show.
Casey:
I have been adding things to my radar that I had put – or my feedback that I put a link to in the last episode.
Casey:
I have been adding – what is it?
Casey:
Spin dumps, tailspins, cyst diagnosis.
Casey:
I've probably got – this is not an exaggeration.
Casey:
I probably got like a gig to a gig and a half worth of cyst diagnosis and tailspins and whatnot on this feedback.
Casey:
And, of course, as far as I'm concerned, I'm just barfing this into a black hole.
Casey:
I mean, I would not be any wiser if it was just going to DevNull on some Apple server somewhere.
Casey:
But anyways, I have been adding all these things.
Casey:
I've taken videos with my phone of my god-awful refresh rate and of my machine gun trackpad.
Casey:
and attached it to this feedback.
Casey:
I've been a good citizen in doing what I can to get my problems fixed, and I have no idea if it's actually going to any human being, but that's okay.
Casey:
But one of the things I'm trying starting today is something that had been suggested, and I had actually tried myself with my old iMac, is not using Bluetooth for my peripherals, for my keyboard and mouse, and instead plugging them in.
Casey:
So they're the
Casey:
I don't know the official name for this, but the Apple Extended Key, not the Extended Keyboard 2 that Gruber likes, but whatever they call the Magic Keyboard with the 10 key.
Casey:
And then the Magic Trackpad, they're now both plugged in via lightning cables to my iMac.
Casey:
That seems to make things a little better so far.
Casey:
I've also seemingly seen that a lot of network I.O.
Casey:
in particular can really choke everything, which seems really not good.
Casey:
But that's the way it is, or at least that's some solid anecdata I've got for you.
Casey:
That, you know, if I'm running a time machine backup to the Synology while I'm doing something else on the Synology, while...
Casey:
You know, I'm trying to play a video from, I don't know, NPR, Tiny Desk Concerts, as I've been doing nonstop for the last few days.
Casey:
Everything just gets real ugly real quick.
Casey:
So I have disabled Time Machine temporarily.
Casey:
Crash plan.
Casey:
Oops, I rebooted, so it is running.
Casey:
I've got to turn that back off.
Casey:
All sorts of things I have to do to get my computer to actually friggin' work.
Casey:
But no, no, Catalina's great, and I shouldn't complain about it.
John:
Can we get a ruling on feedback versus radar?
John:
I know the app is called feedback in this new purple app and we don't use radar web anymore.
John:
Right.
John:
But aren't they still just radars under the cover?
John:
Like referring to them as feedbacks or my feedback seems weird to me.
John:
I'm not sure I'm ready for it.
John:
Like, is it appropriate to be using that as a new proper noun?
John:
Are they actually called feedbacks or are people just saying that because of the app name?
Marco:
Yeah, I think like radar made sense as both the name of the app also as the plural of like, oh, I filed some radars.
Marco:
I don't think feedback works in that way.
Marco:
You can't say I filed some feedbacks like that.
Marco:
I mean, you can.
Marco:
Yeah, but but that's not a like the noun does not pluralize like that.
Marco:
It's because obviously the plural of feedback is feedback, but that's not how this works here.
Marco:
So like, yeah, it's just mechanically it doesn't work.
Casey:
Well, let's just make an ATP ruling that it will be, for now and forevermore, Radar.
John:
No, we don't want people to be with the times.
John:
That's why I'm asking.
John:
Internally, they had an app called Radar, and then what we were using was Radar Web or whatever because we just got to use the web interface.
John:
We didn't see the native application, but that was ages ago.
John:
So now we have a new native app for regular people called Feedback.
John:
But given that the the actual issues and numbers are all the same as they were in radar, I'm assuming it's still just a different client for whatever is lurking behind radar.
John:
Anyway, if some Apple person can let us know, is it are they still called radars internally?
John:
Do our D.A.R.
John:
URL schemes still work for people internally for Apple?
John:
Like how should we be referring to them?
Casey:
like i said i'm i'm all in on calling it radar and forevermore as far as i'm concerned don't get stuck in your ways case you're too young all right let's move on uh let's get an update john if you don't mind on switch glass and desktop backgrounds what do you what is your vision quest taking you where's your vision quest taking you these days yeah just a little quick follow-up on the big discussion last week about what i was doing for desktop images um
John:
After the podcast, I delved more into the code I had for copying the desktop window, and I got a bunch of suggestions for a bunch of helpful people on Twitter and through email that gave me a lot more confidence in my ability to identify which desktop belongs to which monitor by comparing the coordinates.
John:
There was just a y-axis flip.
John:
This is the thing about the Mac.
John:
um i guess in ios it's probably easier and more consistent but the there are multiple different competing coordinate systems on the mac which is a little bit tricky and and i knew about that and i usually account for it but in this case i was being fooled by the particular placement of my little sidecar display my vast uh 6k display into me thinking that this isn't this isn't a coordinate flip i'm only off by like a little bit but i was just like unlucky with the numbers like so it looked to me as if
John:
it was like an off by 10 error when really it was a complete coordinate system flip.
John:
And just because of the nature of how they were anyway, um, once I got that straightened out and I'm like, Oh, it's, you know, it's just Y axis flip.
John:
And then once I do the Y axis flip, I could positively identify all the things.
John:
So now I'm super confident in that system.
John:
And I think the window copy system, um,
John:
uh is the way to go that is my primary thing i still have the fallbacks in there but honestly i expect the fallbacks never to be used and i'll probably remove all that code so that's what i shipped i shipped the window copy code it's out there right now um and i thank everyone for the help and clarification in uh figuring out i still think obviously there should be a sane api to get this because it's apparently something that lots of developers want to do if they ever show like a little miniature picture of your screen in like a preferences dialogue or something lots of apps do this during onboarding when they show like a little picture of your computer or a monitor or something
John:
uh, there should be an API that you just return an NS image.
John:
That's the, you know, for, for, you know, it should be an NS screen API called desktop image or anyway.
John:
Um, it's harder than it needs to be, but I'm glad I found a way to do it.
John:
Um, and then as for switchgrass itself, uh, I am happy to say that thanks to all the people who listened to the show and bought a copy and then aren't using it.
John:
Thank you everybody.
John:
Uh, I now fully funded the $400 aluminum bracket that holds hard drives for my Mac pro.
John:
And it is, uh,
John:
sitting on my desk right now in its box hey although one of the things i didn't realize before i had an app on the app store is exactly how long apple takes to pay you anything so in theory oh yeah i have paid for it but uh yeah the actual payment according to the official party line at apple is after the end of the month in which you've had sales so let's say january ends you're like when am i going to get paid for all those sales i made in january apple says you will get paid 45 days after the end of the month
John:
apparently that is a little bit too pessimistic and usually you get it around 30 days but the whole the point is i still haven't received a penny for any of my apps not even front and center which was released a long time ago so eventually i will get the money to pay for this bracket but i didn't wait to buy it i i bought it with the assumption that apple will eventually pay and of course it came with that eight terabyte hard drive which i'm not sure what i'm going to do with i'll probably stick it inside my mac and see if i can tolerate the noise but if i can't we'll see
Casey:
Well, I'm glad that you have lent yourself some money in order to get this toy that you've wanted but not wanted for so long.
Casey:
So congratulations.
Casey:
Marco, Andrew Larson would like to know, have you tried enabling high-quality streaming?
Casey:
This is Andrew writing.
Casey:
I've always had this on, and I've never heard what you're referring to.
Casey:
So this was with regard to Apple Music and hearing crummy versions of songs.
Casey:
Is that correct?
Casey:
In the very beginning, that is, and then they'll get better.
Marco:
Sort of, yeah.
Marco:
So in Ask ETP last week, the question was if you could fix one little bug that you could fix in one day, what would it be?
Marco:
And mine was that when I start streaming over cellular in the music app, every track begins with a half second of very low bitrate audio that sounds awful and then it snaps to the higher bitrate responsibly as it gets the connection.
Marco:
I said, just buffer it for a second and then play the higher one from the start or preload it before you play it or whatever it is.
Marco:
And a bunch of people wrote in that basically say, there's a setting under, I think it's under Music Cellular.
Marco:
And it's high quality streaming.
Marco:
And if you turn this setting on, this doesn't happen anymore.
Marco:
So it wasn't technically a bug.
Marco:
It was a bad default setting.
Marco:
So I turned this setting on and...
Casey:
it in one day my bug got fixed so how how are you two doing on your one day bugs not well not well at all oh man that's funny all right and then at some point yesterday i don't remember yesterday at some point last week i don't remember what it was we were talking about uh the static analyzer in xcode and aaron farnham writes and i don't know if this is true but i have no reason to believe it isn't
John:
uh aaron writes that the static analyzer skips swift files and only looks at c plus c plus plus objective c and objective c plus plus which is a bummer but i can't say i am surprised that was the explanation for why i never saw any complaints in the static analyzer why is it there's no issues with it just doesn't it's skipping all my files although i do technically have a couple of objective c files mixed in there but they're small but anyway yeah
John:
Um, it's interesting.
John:
I mean, obviously the static analyzer was introduced back when, you know, before Swift existed.
John:
So that kind of makes sense why it doesn't work with Swift.
John:
It's kind of like Swift has the static analyzer built into the compiler, uh, in that Swift is all about, uh,
John:
being able to reason about everything that's going to happen in your program and know, you know, that's what optionals are about, that's what its type system is about.
John:
It's not to say that Swift doesn't need a linter or a static analyzer, but I think Swift itself, the language, goes a long way towards catching the kinds of mistakes that you could, you know, that the Objective-C compiler will not complain.
John:
That's why you need the static analyzer or some kind of linter to yell at you for doing things that are potentially dangerous in Objective-C, but in Swift, the compiler's got your back for most things.
Casey:
indeed don lives writes i was startled to hear marco complain that the ios music app loses its place in the navigation hierarchy because his own podcast player overcast has the same feature if we're launched in the background overcast forgets where it was navigated to in a smart playlist i assume regular playlists too similarly if i navigate up one level and then back down to the into the playlist overcast resets the view to the beginning of the list rather than what i was previously looking at marco would you like to defend yourself and let me state for the record i was not the person who put this in the show notes it's not my fault i'm sorry
Marco:
uh yeah sure so this was yeah i was again complaining about in the same segment about the music app that it basically forgets everything about your navigation stack every time the app quits which is very frequent uh and so if you got to whatever you're now playing thing is by say going from a playlist or going browsing through somebody's albums and going to the albums like it just loses all that and it launches you into like nothing and
Marco:
And by the way, iTunes is the same, or now Music does the same thing.
Marco:
Every time we launch it, it's like, this is the first time it's ever been launched.
Marco:
It doesn't even remember what song you were playing.
Marco:
It certainly doesn't remember your spot in the song.
Marco:
So anyway, yes, Overcast does not remember your scroll position in those lists.
Marco:
It does, however, remember what screen you were on and in what mode.
Marco:
So basically, the way Overcast is structured data-wise, and you can see this on that root screen, there's a concept of...
Marco:
playlist provider and that can be either a playlist or a podcast in that root entry and whatever however you got to what you're playing is a playlist provider so either you went to a playlist and picked an episode and hit play so in which case the playlist itself is a playlist provider and the episode is the current episode or you went to a specific podcast from the root screen which then that is the playlist provider and
Marco:
And then the episode within that is your current episode.
Marco:
And Overcast always saves the current playlist provider and the current episode.
Marco:
So when you relaunch it from scratch, it will do that.
Marco:
It will resume back to where it was.
Marco:
However, this person is right.
Marco:
It does not record your scroll position within those lists.
Marco:
That's something that, frankly, I just hadn't considered, that people would care about the scroll position.
Marco:
But honestly, I just never really considered it.
Marco:
That's not a bad complaint, and I might implement that.
Marco:
And I'm doing all this manually.
Marco:
I actually, because I learned iOS development with the first SDK, which didn't have state restoration, it didn't have...
Marco:
storyboards, it didn't have core data, all that stuff.
Casey:
It didn't have backgrounding, did it?
Marco:
No, of course not, no.
Marco:
But the iOS 2.0 SDK didn't have a lot of critical stuff, most notably interface builder and core data.
Marco:
It also didn't have state restoration APIs.
Marco:
And so I actually...
Marco:
didn't implement state restoration in any of my apps ever.
Marco:
I do it manually.
Marco:
Whatever the APIs are to do it, I'm not familiar with them at all.
Marco:
I've never used them, never even looked at them.
Marco:
I just do it manually.
Marco:
And in this case, I just save two bits of data, like the playlist provider ID and the current episode ID, and that's it.
Casey:
I know there are a lot of state restoration APIs, and I believe they were introduced right before backgrounding became a thing, or maybe it was the same time.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter when.
Casey:
But my point is they've been around for a long time.
Casey:
And I haven't looked at them in ages, but they are definitely a thing.
John:
moving on uh john i'm assuming you put in the show notes the following microsoft defender dot dot dot atp question mark yeah this is a microsoft product they have like a an antivirus product it's available for the mac there was some recent news that they're making it available for ios too which is slightly confusing because how the hell does antivirus work on ios but anyway um but it's called uh microsoft defender advanced threat protection and
John:
it's abbreviated by microsoft as their product name as microsoft depender a defender atp for mac which i think is funny um so yeah this this is in the category of a uh anti-virus or anti-malware products for the mac that do not destroy your entire computer a couple people have recommendations for things that are lighter weight and don't do giant scans and don't install kernel extensions that intercept all file io and network io and stuff like that and
John:
Apparently, the Microsoft Defender series, both for Windows and for the Mac, have a reputation for being less terrible.
John:
And in general, I would recommend virus anti-malware products from very large companies or companies that...
John:
sort of make the platform like i tend to trust more like if a company's sole purpose is to be antivirus i have to think they are highly motivated to uh make the threat you know to take the threat very seriously and do everything in their power because that's another check mark on their product like our product does this does that and the other thing whereas microsoft is highly motivated not to make your pc bog down because they get blamed for that because they're the platform vendor
John:
similarly the antivirus things anti-malware things that apple has are so invisible that people think they're not even there even you know they are the the expert tech stuff and all the stuff they do the file system behind the scenes and obviously in catalina slightly more visible with all those dialogue boxes asking you for permission so uh antivirus stuff from platform owners i tend to be more optimistic about i still don't recommend anyone get any of these things but i thought it was funny that microsoft has a product that is generally well regarded and it's available for the mac and soon ios and it's called atp
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Safari insert expiration.
Casey:
So starting in September, Safari will no longer accept HTTPS certificates older than roughly 13 months.
John:
Not true.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Tell me what's true then.
John:
You didn't do your homework.
John:
Did you read this article?
No.
Casey:
I read it very quickly, about 30 seconds ago.
John:
Does that count?
John:
You're doing your homework while the teacher is collecting it?
John:
That's right.
John:
I've done that.
John:
Tried and true method.
John:
That's why it's good to be.
John:
Sometimes it's good to be at the back of the class, but if they pass the papers forward, it's good to be in the front.
John:
This is what I learned in school.
John:
How to most efficiently do homework 30 seconds before it's due.
John:
So yeah, if Safari just started rejecting certificates that are more than X amount old, the web would break.
John:
So it's slightly more nuanced than that.
John:
Certificates that were issued before some upcoming cutoff date are grandfathered in.
John:
So if you just got a five-year certificate yesterday, I don't even know if they make them five years anymore, but anyway, if you got a long-lived certificate yesterday, you're good.
John:
Safari will not reject that certificate.
John:
But
John:
There's a point coming up or in the near future, if it hasn't already passed, if you get a cert after that point, then Safari will only consider it valid for like a year after the point you got it.
John:
So they're not breaking the entire web, but they are taking a unilateral stand to say, even though the rules about how long SSL certs can last, they don't even call SSL certs anymore, whatever.
John:
We're just going to call them that for the hell of it, like radars.
Yeah.
John:
even though the rules about how long they can last don't say that they can only be a year old safari is going to use whatever market cloud it has you know significant market cloud and mobile less so on desktop to say our pretty popular browser is not going to accept your certificate if it was issued after you know whatever it is september i don't remember the date i should look at it no september one yeah and
John:
If it was issued after that and it's more than whatever, a year old, we're going to reject it.
John:
Even though technically the certificate is still valid and Chrome will accept it and Firefox will accept it or whatever, we're going to say it's too old.
John:
And this is sort of Apple taking its ball and going home after...
John:
Losing the larger sort of committee argument of, should we make this a rule?
John:
And we'll all just agree.
John:
After this date, certificate authorities won't issue certificates that last longer than a year.
John:
And there wasn't consensus on that.
John:
So Apple's just doing it itself.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That's...
Marco:
This is one of those things like the, we have, we, we think we have things like standards bodies or official committees or whatever else.
Marco:
But when you have a really powerful vendor, they can just choose when, when to ignore the standards bodies and do things themselves.
Marco:
Apple does this.
Marco:
Google does this like,
Marco:
no one's hands are clean here no one obeys the standards committees all the time and that's just the reality of how the world works so in this case Apple is basically saying well we tried to make you all agree on this you didn't so we're going to do it anyway without your agreement there's lots of reasons why having short lifetime SSL certificates is better than having long lifetime ones
Marco:
Ultimately, though, I'm not really sure that this is worth it.
Marco:
And I know there's lots of arguments from the security people about, well, you know, if somebody compromises your certificate, then they can use it, and that's really bad.
Marco:
And it's like, okay, well, that's true.
Marco:
My two kind of arguments for that would be, number one, they can now still use it for up to a year.
Marco:
Like, that's not that much.
Marco:
It's like...
Marco:
Whatever time interval you pick, there's going to be the risk of somebody using a certificate within that time window.
Marco:
A year, instead of before, the longest cert you could get was, I think, two years recently.
Marco:
In the past, it used to be up to, I think, five years.
Marco:
But in the last couple of years, it's been hard to buy anything longer than, I think, two years.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
That risk is still there no matter what that duration is.
Marco:
It's an arbitrary number, and shortening it from two or three years down to one year, I mean, yeah, that helps, but that's still a massive risk.
Marco:
If you're going to say that certs get stolen all the time, then this is obviously a problem that can happen now within one year instead of within two or three.
Marco:
And then secondly...
Marco:
This just adds more and more to the huge, annoying barrier of entry that the increasingly strict SSL requirements have brought to people who are just trying to run small websites.
Marco:
And I know that on a lot of levels, SSL is great, or whatever, TLS, whatever it is, HTTPS.
Marco:
On a lot of levels, this is great, and we should be using it for a lot of things much of the time.
Marco:
I'm a little more on the side of, I think people like Dave Weiner who are like, we don't really actually need this for as much as it's being pushed on us.
Marco:
There's a whole lot of websites out there that are just like plain content sites that, yes, there are advantages to them using HTTPS.
Marco:
There's proxies not being able to inject JavaScript like when you're on a plane or whatever, crazy ISPs who inject JavaScript into pages.
Marco:
There's stuff like that.
Marco:
And there's things like the way browsers treat HTTPS traffic a little bit differently with things like when refers are said or when cookies can be restricted and everything like that.
Marco:
So there are some technical advantages besides the encryption itself.
Marco:
But ultimately for a lot of sites, they just don't care and the people who are browsing them wouldn't care and it's not that big of a deal.
Marco:
And
Marco:
The browsers react so aggressively now whenever you have something that's not super current or not using HTTPS at all.
Marco:
It'll say things like not secure in the address bar, which is kind of misleading when you're just going to like some blog and reading a blog post and it says not secure.
Marco:
That kind of suggests that you're getting compromised.
Marco:
But that's not really what's going on.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
the browsers and everything are so aggressive about this now.
Marco:
And everyone says, Oh, it's easy.
Marco:
Just, you know, everything that begins with it's easy.
Marco:
Just is, is usually more complicated than that in practice.
Marco:
And the reality is you're now forcing every website owner out there to comply with increasingly strict requirements and mess with it increasingly frequently.
And,
Marco:
And ultimately, like a good solution is probably something like Let's Encrypt, which is a great idea of, you know, Let's Encrypt is basically this automated thing that you can set up.
Marco:
They are their own cert authority.
Marco:
They issue only 90 day long certs.
Marco:
And then the idea is it's so short that it forces you to automate the renewal.
Marco:
And that's a cool idea and it's working for a lot of people.
Marco:
It doesn't work everywhere.
Marco:
There's a lot of context in which that can't fly or that's very cumbersome and not really worth it.
Marco:
And so keep in mind that when the browser makers or whoever else ratchet up the security on this stuff,
Marco:
it just makes it harder and more cumbersome for sites to continue operation or to start a new site.
Marco:
Or it raises the barrier so high that it further entrenches the existing massive hosting platforms or massive web hosts instead of making it so that smaller players can really stay competitive.
Marco:
And so there's all sorts of issues here that every time they ratchet this up, it deals with this.
Marco:
And it's like a lot of the benefit of HTTPS
Marco:
All that stuff about not being able to be injected by your ISP and the way browsers treat it and everything, a whole lot of that has very little to do with the actual encryption being used and the actual strength of that and the actual lifetime and privacy and sophistication of the key being used to encrypt it and the method and everything.
Marco:
A lot of that is just because of the protocol and of the different ways it works.
Marco:
A lot of the benefit...
Marco:
could be had with certificates that never expire.
Marco:
You could just have literally non-expiring permanent certificates that would solve a lot of problems for use cases where the data being transferred actually isn't all that sensitive.
Marco:
Things like my blog being hosted, our website, stuff like that.
Marco:
A lot of that stuff...
Marco:
you don't really need the encryption for encryption's sake.
Marco:
You do it for other reasons or for less important reasons.
Marco:
You're not dealing with people's credit cards.
Marco:
You're not dealing with their personal data.
Marco:
You're not dealing with anything like that.
Marco:
So instead, what we have is everything's being ratcheted up so much that it's just causing a huge tax on everybody who runs websites, which these days is, by the way, pretty much everybody.
Marco:
Like every business, tons of individuals.
Marco:
So they're making it a giant pain.
Marco:
And I'm not sure the benefit is worth it or necessary for the majority of sites out there.
John:
I feel like the other benefit to secure – I'm going to call it SSL again.
John:
I can't.
John:
I'm an old person.
John:
SSL is – I know the thing of secure versus insecure.
John:
It's like, well, this is just a blog.
John:
It's just who cares.
John:
There's nothing security sensitive here.
John:
It's the idea that the person on the receiving end has greater confidence that –
John:
What they're seeing in their web browser is actually what was published by this website, like the authenticity, right?
John:
So if you just get HTTP, anything between you and them can completely replace the content, can replace the content of your blog with anything else, and it makes people think that you wrote something that you didn't write, right?
John:
how can I be sure that the person who controls Marco.org actually serves this content versus it just being, you know, uh, corrupted or replaced or, you know, whatever.
John:
Uh, and so that's part of the assurance sort of, you know, data integrity, what they are sending me is what I'm getting.
John:
Obviously that itself is not hard and fast because there's all sorts of men in the middle attacks that SSL is meant to prevent, but there are situations where things can be transparently re-encrypted and there's all sorts of hacks or whatever.
John:
But in general, uh,
John:
Having completely unencrypted traffic traveling between your web server and the people reading it means that anything in that flow can, you know, just modify the content easily.
John:
And the person on the receiving end has no idea and the person on the sending end has no idea.
John:
Right.
John:
that said the the sort of the pain in the butt for people is real like when i first read this i kind of groaned because my this is this is my own fault but my web hosting situation grew organically from its origins as i don't want to pay a lot for this web hosting uh which is a good strategy when you have nothing on the web but once you have more stuff on the web and you've just been adding like little pieces to that strategy
John:
it's not great so i've got many ssl certificates many domain names many virtual hosts many many everythings all acquired piecemeal over you know long periods of time and in recent years i've been acquiring ssl certificates sometimes because i've had to for example switchglass.app i didn't know until i got that and front and center.app and front hyphen and hyphen center hyphen
John:
I didn't know that .apps, that domain requires SSL.
John:
If you have a .app domain, you literally cannot serve it over HTTP.
John:
Browsers will not go to it through HTTP.
John:
It's like built into client browsing software that certain subdomains are HTTPS only and .app is one of them.
John:
So I was forced to get SSL certificates for those things.
John:
um so that's a pain and i i'm dreading dealing with that because i'm bad at keeping track of these things when do my certificates expire expire did i write it down how do i renew them where did i buy them from so on and so forth so the countervailing force against all of this is things like let's encrypt right so on the one hand you've got pressure of saying long-lived certificates are bad for security and as marco rightly pointed out a year is still pretty long right you know any window of time is not great uh
John:
Apparently the system for revoking certificates is basically useless.
John:
So if someone compromises your key, there's not much you can do about it, which is why shorter lifetimes are better.
John:
uh but it's a pain for people who have websites and on the flip side of that is okay so it's a pain for people who have websites if we make it more and more painful by increments hopefully something on the other side of this will say we need a system that makes it easier like like you were saying marco about like let's encrypt doing 90 days like we'll make it so short that you have to automate it because it's so painful if you don't automate it and by the way we'll make it free so why are you paying for your ssl certs go to let's encrypt and they're free don't pay some company to do it um
John:
I see this tension between those two things.
John:
I want it to be easier.
John:
And for years and years, it hasn't gotten easier because there hasn't been a force on the other side saying, we're going to make it such a pain in your butt that you better make it easier or otherwise you're going to be screwed.
John:
In fact, one of the parties in some of the articles that I read that doesn't want
John:
the certificate lifetime to be shrunk are the companies that sell ussl certs because from their perspective kind of like me with switch glass their ideal customer gives them a big wad of money and then five years later gives them another big wad and in between the you don't have to deal with them
John:
Whereas if they have to give you a small amount of money every 90 days or deal with, you know, they don't, they don't want this.
John:
And every time there's a touch point between the customer and them, like their systems have to be more robust.
John:
They need to be more responsive.
John:
They need to deal with the customers more often.
John:
It's much better to get a bunch of money and not hear from me in five years and then hear from me every 30 days or whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
And, you know, their systems are designed to vend certificates.
John:
Most people buy them for lasting a long time or whatever.
John:
And maybe they can't handle this.
John:
This is all just speculation, but in general,
John:
these big companies that give out certificates you know are are just as ill-equipped to deal with a radical shortening of certificate lifetime as people who run websites are um in my particular case i really wanted to use let's encrypt because who wants to pay i wanted to you know i'd rather use let's encrypt and have it be free but my hosting company does not support let's encrypt it's one of the few companies that doesn't support it most of them do um
John:
they support their own thing.
John:
And I just wanted to click a bunch of buttons and give someone 10 bucks and get a certificate.
John:
And, you know, it wasn't too painful, but because I did it through my hosting company that, that did it through this third party thing that shoved it into a shared host that has 57 virtual hosts that all have different certificates and domain names, all in different registrars, all different IP addresses and all the different mail routes.
John:
And,
John:
It's confusing and it's difficult.
John:
All this is to say that I really want the tooling to be easier and cheaper and ideally free for everybody.
John:
And I think history has shown if there is no force on the other side making it painful, that will never happen.
John:
Like SSL certificates have been a pain in the butt for decades.
John:
like on their own they weren't getting easier let's encrypt is the first effort to try to make them easier and that i don't know if that was a reaction to the shortening of the lifetime but it took a long time to arrive so while i'm dreading the potential pain that is in store for me personally for this i'm hoping what it will do is put ever more pressure on all the different hosting companies and all the different you know people who sell certificates to
John:
Make it ever easier to automate things, to follow in Let's Encrypt's footsteps.
John:
And anybody who doesn't support Let's Encrypt, start supporting it.
John:
Or if you don't want to support Let's Encrypt, support one of the other ones that charges you, but make it way easier to deal with.
John:
Because instead of it being something that people think about every two to five years, if it was something people had to think about every 30 days, it would have to be automated otherwise.
John:
Bad things would happen.
John:
And then the other thing that made me think about is we hear about this all the time.
John:
I think it happened recently where I think Microsoft Teams let one of their certs expire.
John:
Do you remember the news on that?
John:
We use Teams at work, so I think it was Teams.
John:
Every once in a while you hear of some giant multi-bazillion dollar company
John:
where like no one was watching the certificates, right?
John:
And all of a sudden their entire application breaks and everyone runs around like, what's wrong?
John:
What's happening?
John:
Are the servers down?
John:
I don't understand why people connect and someone says, wait a second, our certificates expired.
John:
Whose job was it to look at that?
John:
And it's like, I don't know.
John:
We got it five years ago.
John:
And the answer is it's nobody's job.
John:
This happens in big companies where if you do a thing and that thing is done and doesn't require any additional work, or even if it does require additional work, it's very attractive for management to take the people who did that job off of that task and put them onto something else.
John:
And so then nobody's looking at the certificates.
John:
You, your job is to get a certificate for our new product.
John:
Good.
John:
I got a certificate.
John:
Okay, great.
John:
Now you're assigned to this team to do this other thing.
John:
And then maybe you leave the company or maybe you go into another project and forget about that.
John:
And then five years later, the cert expires and no one was watching it.
John:
And if that can happen to Microsoft with tons of money and tons of smart people, you bet it can happen to an individual person with a blog or something.
John:
And it's definitely going to happen to me.
John:
I put a bunch of things in my calendar, I think, reminding me like two years from now because I did get the longest certificates I could to renew the certificates.
John:
But by the time that event comes up, I'm going to be like...
John:
renew the certificates what certificates was i talking about and how did i get those and i'll be going through my email receipts what company did i get them from did i use let's encrypt for that one did i not what was that company called what domain is this for so yeah um and then finally as for apple being unilaterally doing this
John:
you know the judgment call like does apple have the weight to do this on the desktop i would say no on the desktop i think today the default answer for certainly for any sort of enterprise thing is safari support on the desktop it's a nice to have but if you don't have it it's not a big deal safari mobile is obviously way more important just because they have bigger market share and
John:
bigger sort of money share but there is the possibility that if safari does too many things off on its own they become a pariah and people say oh we're not going to support safari anymore because it's doing too many annoying things like our website works fine in chrome it even works fine in edge but it doesn't work in safari because it complains about our cert our cert doesn't expire for another year screw safari
John:
right it's you know it's a game of chicken to see who's going to win that one and depending on who the vendor and who the customers are uh apple may lose that fight but in general especially on the iphone which is so incredibly popular if an iphone user can't load your web page and you try to blame apple that's not going to work people who have the iphone are going to say
John:
it's an iPhone make your website work with the iPhone then you're just gonna have to get a new cert like that's how that's gonna happen so uh I mean at the very least this is Apple trying to do the right thing like it doesn't want these shortened certs because it helps it increase its revenue for ad tracking or like it doesn't help it sell more iPhones it doesn't help it sell more Macs doesn't help it sell more Apple TV plus subscriptions like this does not help Apple's bottom line at all really um
John:
They're just doing what they think is right, and they're basically potentially harming their own business to do it.
John:
So I give them kudos for having the guts to do that.
John:
I'm not entirely sure that it's going to work out as well as they think, but I can't think of any particularly nefarious motive for them doing it.
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Marco:
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Thank you so much to Linode, my favorite web host, for sponsoring our show and hosting all my stuff.
Casey:
There was an interesting article from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg recently wherein Gurman is claiming that Apple is at least considering letting users switch some default iPhone apps to those of rivals.
Casey:
So they're considering apparently letting you set maybe Chrome or some other browser as a default.
Casey:
I don't even keep up with the alternative mail apps because it's silly to use one.
Casey:
And so whatever the alternative.
Marco:
I used to think that until iOS 13.
Marco:
And now I'm like, am I the fool for sticking with the built-in one?
John:
That's fair.
John:
Why is it silly to use one?
John:
Isn't it just because you can't change the default?
John:
Is that why it's silly?
Casey:
No, I was just snarking.
Casey:
But since I've now dug this hole for myself, I'm going to have to try to dig it deeper.
Casey:
I mean, try to climb out.
Casey:
I just personally, I think fighting a platform is silly.
Casey:
I also think that trying to staple on functionality that email just wasn't designed for, like snoozing and things like that,
John:
is also fairly so it wasn't designed for are you like an email originalist i mean it wasn't designed for styled text either you're going to reject that dude you view all your email in plain text and don't answer that question because i know people will do that oh my god you know when other people use like outlook in plain text mode and they send you everything and it comes through with like whatever your configured monospace font is and they can't they can't do like
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, go on.
Casey:
Sorry to derail.
Casey:
I didn't realize that you were a bad cop this week.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Anyway, so point being that you can maybe change Safari to Chrome or something.
Casey:
You can change Mail to something else.
Casey:
And potentially, you might even be able to use Spotify through your HomePod, which would be excellent.
Casey:
And it might even be the default through Siri.
Casey:
If you recall, I think it was iOS 13 that allowed you to say, you know, hey, Dingus, play...
Casey:
the latest album from new math using Spotify.
Casey:
And then it would actually, you know, pipe that through to Spotify and that works reasonably well.
Casey:
So this is not being announced obviously, because it wasn't even Apple that made this or that wrote this article.
Casey:
And furthermore, German said, they're just considering it.
Casey:
Um, I don't see why not like this sounds excellent to me.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
I'm assuming, as many others have, that this is because there's been a little bit of smoke around the thought of there being potential antitrust investigations into Apple for locking people into this stuff.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
Marco, what do you think about all this?
Marco:
I think from a user point of view, this makes total sense.
Marco:
Apple is never going to give up more control than they need to, ever, in anything.
Marco:
But sometimes they get pressured to in ways that are compelling, and they eventually just do it.
Marco:
And almost always...
Marco:
it actually works out better for everybody, including them.
Marco:
Usually it makes their stuff better, it makes them sell more, whatever it is.
Marco:
And you can look at tons of examples, things like, obviously, the old running iTunes on Windows to let people buy iPods who weren't Mac owners, stuff like that.
Marco:
But in general, iOS has...
Marco:
Obviously, it started out from a very locked down state, and in many ways, it still is very locked down.
Marco:
And Apple's apps still have lots of custom abilities that third-party apps can't do.
Marco:
But over time, with almost every version of iOS, Apple has somehow enabled third-party apps to integrate better with the OS or to have a more first-class experience to do things that previously only Apple apps could do or to behave in ways that only Apple apps could behave.
Marco:
Over time, they've just kept knocking down those walls many, many times.
Marco:
From one point of view, you could see this as maybe they were going to eventually get to this anyway.
Marco:
They just hadn't gotten to it yet, or that there were complexities behind this that they didn't want to deal with, so they put it off, but eventually it becomes more compelling as
Marco:
Other factors, as you mentioned, any trust is, I think, a big one, which I'll get to in a second.
Marco:
But, you know, so over time, Apple does knock down these limitations, and they do allow third-party integrations in ways that we previously didn't think they ever would.
Marco:
And then every WBC, we are like, oh, my God, they're now letting apps do this thing.
Marco:
We never thought they'd let us do this.
Marco:
Um, so that's, it's a common pattern.
Marco:
This was noteworthy because it's been such a longstanding request ever since app stores, ever since the app store, ever since like there were third party apps ever since, well, ever since shortly after the app store, when Apple relaxed the rule that said you can't make apps that replicate the built-in apps functionalities.
Yeah.
Marco:
Remember that when podcast apps were illegal for a little while?
John:
I mean, it's still true.
John:
If you try to make a Springboard clone, they're going to reject that for sure.
Marco:
Oh, totally.
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
Any kind of app launcher that contains other multiple apps, unless it's WeChat.
John:
I was afraid I was going to get rejected for Switchglass because it's like the dock.
Casey:
Yeah, same here.
Casey:
With Peekaview, I was expecting them to be like, no, just use Photos.
Casey:
Go away.
Marco:
I think it still very rarely gets enforced in weird ways like that, but for the most part, that rule hasn't existed for a very long time, which is why we have things like podcast apps, notes apps.
Marco:
We literally didn't have those things for the first couple years for that reason.
Marco:
Anyway, over time, Apple has relaxed the system and allowed more third-party integrations at various different endpoints, and they've also pushed the iPad specifically to
Marco:
into the Mac territory and a lot of different ways of how this thing can be used, what users need and want from it, what degree of, quote, professional or power usage can be done with it.
Marco:
And a lot of that requires more Mac-like features to be adopted.
Marco:
So things like the Files app coming over to the iOS, to multiple windows and apps having multiple windows in the same app on the iPad, stuff like that.
Marco:
They're slowly breaking down some of these walls.
Marco:
So for this, the rumor is they're going to allow you to set your own default mail app and browser, which the Mac has offered forever.
Marco:
There's a preference in Safari and in Mail, and you can set your default mail app.
Marco:
And apps apparently have some API to call it, which is why every single time you launch Chrome for a long time after you install it, hey, you should set this as your default browser.
Marco:
And they're always fighting back and forth.
Marco:
And now apparently Safari shows a notification the first time you launch Chrome on Catalina.
Marco:
saying like, hey, you should try Safari, something like that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It's this glorious eggplant-waving match between those two companies.
Marco:
But anyway, so they've had this ability in the Mac forever of you can set your default browser to something else.
Marco:
In the same way that there's a system for file extensions and associating a file extension with a given app to be its default app when you double-click files of that type,
Marco:
There's the same thing for URL schemes.
Marco:
And it's simply, you know, HTTP or HTTPS URL schemes will open the default browser, whatever that's set to.
Marco:
Mail to links will open the default mail app, whatever that's set to.
Marco:
On the phone, you have a few others.
Marco:
You have things like tell to make phone calls.
Marco:
You have some messages, things, a few others that are special.
Marco:
But anyway...
Marco:
iOS to date has not had a way to, first of all, if multiple apps can open the same file type or accept the same URL scheme, iOS has dealt with that very poorly so far.
Marco:
URL schemes, it doesn't deal with it at all.
Marco:
It actually just kind of picks one and just makes them all open in that and you have no choice over it.
Marco:
And it won't let apps register for the ones like HTTP or Mail2 to let them do that.
Marco:
For file extensions, it has a system that's kind of wonky and kind of works sometimes.
Marco:
For them to add the system to iOS to basically allow web browsers on iOS to register for the HTTP and HTTPS schemes and to have some kind of UI somewhere in the system to choose which app that supports those schemes is going to be your default app,
Marco:
It's a big step because we've wanted it for so long, but that seems like it's right in line with that gradual progression of both Apple letting third-party apps integrate with the system more and more over time, and with Apple pushing the iPad to be more of a Mac replacement for more people.
Marco:
Because
Marco:
Look at what else has come to the iPad recently.
Marco:
They recently brought over in the latest beta, they have the keyboard modifier keys panel.
Marco:
So now you can do what I've been doing forever on Macs.
Marco:
You can change the cap slot key to escape, which you could never do on the iPad before.
Marco:
Now you can do that because they brought over that little preference pane that's in the modifier key section of the keyboard preferences.
Marco:
That's now in the iOS beta.
Marco:
they are clearly making the iPad more and more Mac-like in feature set.
Marco:
Not necessarily in the way it works, but in feature set.
Marco:
They're bringing over some pretty good Mac-isms that help power users get their work done the way they want.
Marco:
So this could just be one of those things.
Marco:
And the combination of adding third-party capabilities and progressing iPadOS to be more of a Mac replacement totally could make this plausible on its own.
Marco:
But the antitrust angle, I think, is what is the driving force here that is making them go a little bit further or pushing them to do a thing that was probably not high on the priority list and is probably a pain in the butt in certain ways.
Marco:
And I think now the antitrust angle is getting substantial because
Marco:
Apple clearly has a problematic monopoly over software and purchases that happen on the iPhone because it is such a massive and important computing platform in the world.
Marco:
And they have already had antitrust probes and investigations and claims in various countries.
Marco:
The EU has been pretty good about it so far.
Marco:
The US, of course, we don't have functioning antitrust anymore, so I don't think we would ever be a problem for them in the foreseeable future.
Marco:
But if our antitrust worked the way it should, we would.
Casey:
If our government worked, it would be a good
Marco:
Yeah, that's the larger problem.
Marco:
But anyway, countries that actually have functioning governments and that care about functioning markets are actually already opening probes.
Marco:
Spotify's been very loud, and I believe they've been filing legal things in the EU.
Marco:
I haven't been paying attention to the specifics of them, so forgive me if I'm misstating any of that.
Marco:
Anyway, the antitrust pressure is mounting on Apple from a number of angles, and
Marco:
To me, like I said in past episodes of the show, I think the two big escape valves that they have that they could pull, but I'm sure they don't want to.
Marco:
One is sideloading apps to allow apps to be installed outside of the App Store.
Marco:
I don't think that's ever going to happen on iOS.
Marco:
Ever, ever, ever.
Marco:
By the way, I don't think the Mac is ever going to go the other way.
Marco:
I don't think the Mac is ever going to go App Store only because that would break things in a lot of other ways.
Marco:
But on iOS, I never see them enabling sideloading.
Marco:
I think for so many reasons, that's never going to happen.
Marco:
The other thing that would relieve a lot of antitrust pressure from them is to drop the requirement that all purchases that are done in apps use their in-app purchase system.
Marco:
to basically allow somebody like Amazon to build in e-book purchasing right in their Kindle app, or to allow Netflix to take your credit card information right in the Netflix app and sign up for their service without going through that purchase, without paying the 30% slash 15%.
Marco:
And that would relieve almost all the antitrust pressure that's on them.
Marco:
But that would also cost them a lot of money.
Marco:
And I don't think they're ever going to do that either.
Marco:
So I think they're looking for other ways that they could maybe relieve some of the antitrust pressure without doing the expensive thing.
Marco:
And by the way, Apple would be fine without that.
Marco:
Whatever amount of money they would lose by enabling people like the big companies to not use a net purchase, first of all, I think it's not that much money in the grand scheme of Apple.
Marco:
Second of all, I think the amount of money is going down over time as most of those companies give Apple the finger and just leave anyway and just don't accept purchases at all in their iOS apps anymore, which is an increasing... YouTube is just doing that now.
Marco:
You can't buy YouTube Premium anymore or whatever it's called this month.
Marco:
You can't buy that anymore as of, I think, March 1st.
Marco:
You can't do Netflix anymore.
Marco:
I don't know if you can still do HBO.
Marco:
So many of the big, top-grossing in-app purchases by big companies have dropped Apple's system because they're just losing too much money on the fees.
Marco:
So I actually think that the amount of money Apple would lose if they started allowing external purchase systems...
Marco:
is not as big as it was a couple years ago and is probably not going to matter in the grand scheme of things.
Marco:
But Apple is really good at making money and they're really stingy.
Marco:
And so they're not going to give this up without a major fight.
Marco:
So instead, they're probably looking for other antitrust relief valves that they can swallow, that they're willing to pull to...
Marco:
reduce some of the complaining from people like Spotify and other powerful entities, maybe like Google for Chrome.
Marco:
So they have a good reason to start looking for those handles to pull that are not the ones that will cost them money.
Marco:
That's probably a major driving force here.
Marco:
All that being said, I would like them to go slightly further than what this rumor suggests.
Marco:
This rumor is suggesting basically browser, mail, and music.
Marco:
I hope, and if not, if this isn't what they have planned, I suggest this.
Marco:
This should apply to anything that you can operate with a Siri context where multiple apps are supported.
Marco:
For me, one of the things I would definitely use it for is reminders.
Marco:
As I mentioned before on this show, I use the app Things.
Marco:
Great app.
Marco:
I almost always enter things into things using Siri on my phone.
Marco:
And the syntax you have to use to do that, as you mentioned earlier with Spotify, you have to say something like, remind me at 10 o'clock in things to do XYZ.
Marco:
And I would love to just not have to say in things on every single invocation of that phrase.
Marco:
And so this infrastructure already exists for apps to expose their capabilities via intents.
Marco:
And they have classifications of, okay, this is a reminders thing.
Marco:
This is a notes thing.
Marco:
And apps can say which of those things they can respond to, what kind of app they are.
Marco:
So the system already exists for Apple to make a preference pane somewhere in the settings app that says, all right, what's going to be your default reminders app?
Marco:
What's going to be your default notes app, et cetera?
Marco:
I think everything supported by Siri Intense should have that ability as well, not just mail and web and music.
John:
Yeah, the interest thing here is interesting because everything you said about that, especially about the in-app purchases and access to customers and all the things with Spotify complaining and the EU, that pressure is real and is there.
John:
But this default app thing, although it's related, I still feel like it's the type of thing that Apple would have eventually done on its own anyway.
John:
Like we've been talking about it for years and it's always just been a question of when do you want to pay that cost?
John:
Because it's at a complexity and it's weird.
John:
And in the beginning of the iPhone's life, it's not appropriate because you want to just establish, you know, the platform for what it is.
John:
And then in the middle, you're like, well, we could do it now.
John:
It wouldn't be a big deal, but we have more important things to do.
John:
And now I feel like we're kind of into...
John:
the natural portion of ios's lifetime when apple would be looking at this anyway uh so even though all that antitrust stuff is definitely a real thing and and is surely influencing how they consider what they're doing to the platform i think this stuff might have just like its time just might have come anyway maybe it was accelerated a little bit it's so hard to tell because you don't know what's going on inside the company uh but all that said um
John:
I think on the speculation about iOS, but even on the Mac, the way Apple handles this now is not great.
John:
You were staying with an eye towards it working the way it does on...
John:
you know like like under the cover it's like oh there's a url scheme or a file type or whatever and you have a thing where you map an application to it and you can choose from all the ones that can handle it but that's not even how it's been on the mac for ages you just mentioned it before with a launching chrome like how do you change your default browser in mac os
John:
Well, it's in Safari's preferences, and if you launch Chrome, you might get prompted, and Chrome will prompt you.
John:
It's basically just a shouting match between the participants to say, over here, I'm over here, set me as a default.
John:
No, set me as a default.
John:
And there are places where you can find this, like it's buried or whatever, but I feel like...
John:
Doing it that way, just extending that system.
John:
Hey, you know how you pick your default browser on the Mac?
John:
If you set it to a Mac user, they'll be like, no, I don't know that.
John:
Well, what if we extended that system that you don't know about already to everything?
John:
It's like, that's not attractive.
John:
There was time in the past.
John:
When this was a lot more straightforward and worked more or less the way Marco explained, which is there was a control panel where you could list.
John:
I mean, it was techie and nerdy and that's the difficult part of it.
John:
But like, I believe that Apple could overcome this.
John:
Here are all the protocols.
John:
Maybe you can't call them protocols.
John:
Here are all the use cases.
John:
And here is what you've chosen as your application to handle that by default.
John:
And here are all the other choices that you could choose from in a single place.
John:
I hate when they spread these things out.
John:
I don't want to go to each individual application's preferences and hunt in their individual preferences to find the thing that lets them...
John:
you know, retain or surrender their defaultness.
John:
And I don't want them yelling at me about make me the default.
John:
No, maybe there's a limited amount you can do to fix that.
John:
But if I could just go to a single preference pane and system preferences on the Mac and see all that information, that would be extremely helpful because there's more than just the protocols, you know,
John:
that you just listed there's all sorts of weird secret things like the universal links or whatever like on ios where if you go to twitter.com what if i don't want to go to the twitter app what if i want to go to twitter.com is there one central place where i can control not only who controls this url scheme but also for universal links whether i go to the web or to the application that's not easily under users control
John:
probably there's some technique or when you go there go there but then hold long press on this and force it open to the brow like there are ways to do this but it's so byzantine right so i think it could be way better on the mac and i hope what they do on ios is not what they do on the mac because they're just repeating that problem i hope they take both of them and say imagine if all these settings could be in a single place because honestly it's not that many settings like
John:
start small web browser mail you know reminders podcast app like this you know they'd fit on a screen right and then for universal links a section for anything that claims a universal link and say should i use the app or should i use the web like just something anything like it's not it's not like apple's afraid of having too many settings have you seen settings on a phone really there's a million of them right
John:
that it's you know just just centralize them and make it more that you know that was the promise of settings like oh we won't have the settings in apps and ios because there's not much room and it's a full screen thing or whatever we'll put it all in the settings app and then just things got spread everywhere and on the mac i don't know why honestly they got rid of
John:
the old style internet config thing where you just had a single control panel where you set up all this stuff.
John:
But they did get rid of it, and the system is worse.
John:
And it's all sorts of weird command line incantations that people try to deal with to change all this stuff.
John:
But it's just like dark matter on both of these things.
John:
Why...
John:
is my computing device that i ostensibly control acting in this way why does this app launch when i do this thing right why does this go to an app instead of a web browser how do i change my default app for this type of thing it's you know it it needs improvement and it's not a super big technical hurdle i think all the plumbing is there on both systems for all this stuff to work it is just a fairly straightforward
John:
sort of ui task a thing that is apple has done before on much weaker platforms with much you know more difficult technical hurdles surely they can make a preference pane and make a setting screen for some upcoming major versions of both ios and mac os to let us do all these things
Casey:
I just want Spotify to be my fault.
Casey:
Is that so terrible?
John:
I just want it.
John:
I mean, it's terrible for Apple's perspective as far as selling Apple music subscriptions.
John:
Like that's where I think the antitrust.
John:
Apple doesn't want you to be able to use your home mod for Spotify.
John:
There's no way the hell they want that.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
And Apple sure as hell also doesn't want Chrome to become a popular app on their iPhone because they see how much browser market share they've lost on the desktop to it.
John:
yeah I mean the thing that the other thing that people are talking about this is like alternate browsers on iOS is pointless because Apple forces them all to use WebKit which is yet another onerous restriction arbitrary onerous restriction that Apple you know applied in the beginning some much better reasons you know like in terms of security and reliability now those reasons are less good but still somewhat relevant given the nature of web technologies like WebGL could own your phone you know whatever but anyway making Chrome your default
John:
It's like now you have a different candy color wrapping around the exact same browser engine that Safari is.
Marco:
But still, Apple doesn't like it.
Marco:
Well, but there's a lot more to a browser's functionality in today's world than the rendering engine.
Marco:
There's all the stuff about syncing your preferences and your tabs and all that.
Marco:
The whole UI can be different.
Marco:
Keeping track of what you do.
John:
yeah we'll definitely keep track of that and that's why do you think the world's biggest advertising company wants to do this yeah or like just so you said safari rejects certificates that are issued after whatever date that are older than the year long but chrome doesn't um but yeah like it's like you said before why give up that control if you can't uh if you don't have to uh
John:
I've never found Chrome on iOS to be remotely tolerable.
John:
I still feel like Safari on iOS can probably still win on the merits in terms of what it's like as a user to use that application.
John:
On the desktop, people have differing opinions.
John:
I run both all day long, and I actually like Chrome, despite it being this weird mutant beast.
John:
On laptops, as we've talked about in the past, Chrome is a lot less desirable than Safari because it will eat your battery much more than Safari will.
Marco:
And then now imagine that on the phone.
Marco:
I know the reasons would be very different and it probably wouldn't be this way, but what if Chrome on the iPhone was a huge battery hog?
John:
I mean, that's part of what we're getting at.
John:
If you let the apps compete on their merits, people can choose not to use Chrome because it eats your battery.
John:
Same way they choose not to use Chrome on their Macs, even over Safari laptops because it eats your battery.
Marco:
Right, but Apple...
Marco:
Apple's point of view might be like, what if Chrome eats your battery and it becomes really popular on iOS because now it's a lot easier to use because it can be set as the default browser.
Marco:
And then instead of blaming Chrome, people blame their iPhones for having bad battery life.
John:
Well, don't worry.
John:
Apple will pop up a dialogue that says, did you know Chrome's been eating your battery for the past 24 hours?
John:
Try Safari.
John:
It's much more efficient.
John:
Are you sure you want to give this application a location service?
John:
I can't.
John:
i've gotten really good about nagging you about what other applications are doing that it thinks they shouldn't even if you're already given information yeah anyway the web browser one is is fraught honestly that one is i think the least important from my perspective anyway the mail one kills me i know casey said he thinks it's you know who wants to use a third-party mail app or whatever and about the nature of mail apps trying to do things that mail wasn't designed to do but forget about all that just sometimes you don't want to use a mail application uh
John:
because you like some other one better that does basically exactly the same thing nothing weird no weird alternate interface to email and snoozing and different threading views just like it basically works like mail does but let's say better like like you don't have to go back to the inbox list and go back in again to see all your messages or whatever by the way i have an update on that bug
Marco:
That bug is still there in the 13.4 betas.
Marco:
However, I got... Somebody tipped me off.
Marco:
I forget who on Twitter.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
Marco:
But the messages that are missing... So the bug is like you're looking at your inbox view and new messages are actually arriving in your email account, but they're not showing up in the list.
Marco:
They actually are showing up.
Marco:
They show up at the very bottom of the list.
Marco:
So it basically breaks the sorting.
Marco:
And so it thinks you're showing all your messages because they're in the data list that's being shown on screen.
Marco:
But if you don't scroll all the way down to the bottom of your inbox, which most people don't if it's more than a couple screens long...
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
i don't know but i i bet like ios 13 added a whole bunch of stuff about like diffable data sources and having table views be able to like insert stuff dynamically automatically based on responses in the data model and everything i'm guessing there's a bug somewhere in that or the way it's being used here uh that is resulting in this and that's why it's been in every single ios 13 version of mail
John:
yeah probably um but but yeah like the the thing about uh mail applications is like if you don't i don't know i mean maybe it's not as bad but like i feel like it is because web browsers i know you can have bookmarks and all sorts of other stuff but in general there there's not lots of data there they're mostly stateless whereas email is
John:
Like if you configure a mail client with your email account, it's going to receive that email.
John:
And especially on iOS, depending on the app, you have limited control over how much it does.
John:
Right.
John:
So on iOS, I don't ever want to use the mail app, but I am forced to have it both installed and configured with a working email address, because anytime I tap any mail thing on my phone, it's
John:
it's going to launch mail.
John:
And if I don't have any email accounts configured, I can't send any mail, which means I have to configure at least one email account, which means it's going to be receiving that email, even though I'm never going to be looking there.
John:
And I have a lot of email and I have a limited control over how much of that email gets downloaded.
John:
So I really, really, really want to use something other than mail on my phone, just so I don't have to have this sort of stub email application
John:
that exists solely so i can send mail but must also be configured to receive mail from one of my actual accounts and i hate it so much which is not the case in browsers like i have a second browser and i always wanted to use it yeah it's a pain that but like my my browser doesn't have isn't constantly downloading web pages or you know something like you don't need to configure it in a way you can just have it installed
Casey:
Another valid reason I could think of, well, I shouldn't say valid as though I'm the arbiter of such things, but whatever.
Casey:
Another decent reason I can think of that you would want a different mail app is if you have some sort of like corporate situation where you have to use some blessed corporate app that only, you know, something like Outlook, although Outlook is reasonably standards compliant, if I remember right.
Casey:
But anyways, you know, something where it's Acme Co.
Casey:
's proprietary mail app, and that's what you want to use on, say, your work phone.
Casey:
then that would make perfect sense to me.
Casey:
And that's one of a million different reasons why one would genuinely want to do a separate mail app, even if they don't do, like you said, the snoozing and all the weird stuff that's stapled on the side of email these days.
John:
The pessimistic take on this whole default app thing is like it's the flip side of the reasoning behind Apple.
Yeah.
John:
having such control in the beginning like when the iphone was first introduced you know there's obviously no third-party apps right like but the whole the product image like how does the iphone how is it received by customers what is it that they see it's entirely defined by apple apps because they were the only apps in the platform and even when third-party apps started coming in apple was still very sensitive to the idea that if you get an iphone we apple want to make sure that you have
John:
you know a good experience with the basics so we're going to give you a web browser that we think is good a mail client that we think is good eventually a podcast app that we think is good which wasn't really in the beginning but anyway like they're trying to define the experience right by saying we'll give you they're not the fanciest like the whole point is they're supposed to be simple and apple quality but good quality applications because we know most people if they get a phone they just want to start using it and it should work and it should be pleasing we don't want like you to unbox your phone and then say now i have to spend 10 you know an hour
John:
wandering through the app store, the giant forest of applications, trying to find the one that is free or cheap, that is well-reviewed.
John:
I don't want to have to go shopping.
John:
I want to get the phone out and say, I can already browse the web.
John:
I can already send email.
John:
I can already read the news.
John:
I can already listen to podcasts.
John:
It comes bundled with that stuff.
John:
It's important for that stuff both to be there and to be good.
John:
And in recent years, a lot of the complaints that we've had on the show and that other people have had is that Apple's first-party applications, while not terrible, are no longer like the shining example of saying, this is how an insert whatever application should be made.
John:
I think Safari is great, right?
John:
That's one of their best examples.
John:
But the mail application...
John:
It has never been bad, but I don't think people look at it and say, boy, if you really want to see how to make an email client, look at Apple Mail.
John:
I haven't heard that in a long time, either on the desktop or on iOS.
John:
And even for podcasts, they made that really weird app with the reel-to-reel tape thing in the beginning, which was kind of a misfire, and it was entering into a market that already had some applications.
John:
Like...
John:
Apple is not clearly the leader, even in these sort of simple to use, like I just want a basic app that does a basic thing.
John:
In many categories, third-party applications are clearly better in all ways than stuff that Apple offers.
John:
Not just because they're more complicated and have tons of features and they're pro and expert, but even just within the same realm of simple applications that do a basic thing and understandable, there are many categories where Apple is not the leader.
John:
Uh, one way Apple could deal with that is double down and make their apps better.
John:
Like they did with notes for a long time.
John:
Notes was just not a good notes application.
John:
Even for simple purposes, the new notes is way better.
John:
Also not being more complicated.
John:
It's not like the new notes is overwhelming and people can't handle it.
John:
It's just a better notes app, right?
John:
That's one path you can take to this is if you don't want people to constantly complain about not allowing third party apps, make sure all your apps keep up.
John:
Make sure every app has a Notes-like revival where maybe it falls behind a little bit.
John:
Maybe people are like, oh, I don't even want to use the default Notes app.
John:
It's not bad, but it's not good.
John:
And just make it better, right?
John:
But that doesn't seem to be happening that quickly.
John:
And maybe that's potentially a waste of resources.
John:
The whole point of Apple having this rich ecosystem of these developers that they brag about all the time is that those people...
John:
can make a really good reminders app like things.
John:
And then it's not on Apple to also have a team internally that also makes the best reminders app in the world or whatever.
John:
Like if there's a million, you know, to-do lists and all those other things, right?
John:
Apple should be investing in making a great web browser.
John:
And I think they continue to with Safari.
John:
But does Apple need to continue to invest and worry about
John:
uh reminders being great they just did this big reminders revision too but i feel like they're always they're always going to lag behind the really good third-party applications so it's leaving money on the table for apple not to say when you get the phone you will have good apps in all these categories but also there are even better ones on the app store that you can go you know buy or download and it's really easy for you to say i'm going to use that one instead that makes people like their phones better not worse
John:
So they get the benefit of not having to go shopping, you know, getting something with batteries included that does all the stuff.
John:
But if they're interested in one particular thing, like I'm not really into these things, but I'm really into, you know, reminders or note taking apps.
John:
They can just go and swap out that one component that they're interested in with one of the many third party things that Apple has, like take advantage of their ecosystem and they'll like their phones better.
John:
So that's the world that I would like to see.
John:
And I feel like Apple should have the courage to do that.
John:
Both because they should have some confidence that on a level playing field, their good apps like Safari will compete pretty well.
John:
And also because they shouldn't be afraid of someone getting a thing and deciding they want to replace Reminders with Things.
John:
Like, that's good for Apple.
John:
They're not making any money on Reminders.
John:
It has to be there and it has to be good.
John:
But if someone replaces it with Things and they love their phone more, that's good for Apple too because they'll buy another phone.
John:
So I really hope this rumor is true and I really hope they do it and do it in a better way than the Mac has currently done.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Alright, let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Stephen Gerstacker writes,
Casey:
I understand the words that are written here, but I'm not clear what Stephen is looking for.
Casey:
So, John, since he seems most interested in you, what did you do?
John:
I think I talked about this when I talked about first getting front and center up, that there is a surprising amount of, like, forms that you have to click around through and things that you have to fill out.
John:
But in general...
John:
you know i think just you don't need that much hand-holding if you go to the web apple's web pages and you just go through all the screens and fill out all the things uh you can get it to the point where apple can successfully give you money
John:
And if you're not making any real money like I am on applications that you just made for yourself or whatever, I think that's fine.
John:
As an individual person, I don't think there was anything I needed to do.
John:
You can just come off the street as an adult human, at least in the U.S., maybe it's different in other countries, and go to Apple's website and sign up for a developer account and download Xcode and build an app and upload it and click around through many, many, many screens of things on Apple's website.
John:
And eventually you'll have an app on a store.
John:
And in theory, Apple will be able to pay you if you have a bank account of some kind that you can enter information for.
John:
That's what I'm doing because I'm not an app developer by trade is the most simple possible setup you can have is just me as an individual person and Apple, in theory, paying me as an individual person.
John:
And that's it.
John:
Obviously, you know, the next step up would be someone like Casey and then Marco, even a farther step up.
John:
And then a step up from that would be
John:
a large company with multiple developers and multiple teams and multiple applications and so on and so forth.
John:
I don't know anything about them, but I'm here to say that if you just have a bunch of little apps you wrote yourself or are going to write yourself and you just want to sell them on the store, you can do that and you don't need anything else.
John:
You don't need a lawyer.
John:
You don't need to create a company.
John:
you don't need to have employees.
John:
You don't need to do, Oh, I don't know if you need to do weird tech stuff.
John:
I guess I'll find out, but I think it's other than some, a few wrinkles about selling things in other countries.
John:
I'm hoping it's not going to be too intimidating.
John:
I guess I'll find out, but, uh, I think the barrier is actually pretty low.
John:
And I think if you are just a hobbyist doing it for fun and a little extra money, there's no real need to go farther than that.
John:
But you know, I'm a beginner at this site, obviously ask me again next year and maybe I'll eat all these words.
Um,
Casey:
So I'm not I'm still not entirely clear what Stephen was after, but what it's worth for fast text.
Casey:
May it rest in peace is doing this on for a peek of you and vignette.
Casey:
I am using the LLC that I'd set up for basically all of my then extracurriculars and now my my life.
Casey:
And that was mostly unremarkable because I'd set up the LLC previously.
Casey:
You do need to get a Dunn's number, a Dunn and Bradstreet number, which I forget exactly what that involved, but I don't remember it being terribly bad.
Casey:
And I remember them really, really wanting me to pay them a whole pile of money to do something in Marco and underscore saying, for the love of God, don't do it.
Casey:
So that was good.
Casey:
This is Dunn's to be clear.
Casey:
This is Dunn's, not Apple.
Casey:
But Marco, perhaps when we get to your section, you can explain Dunn's.
Casey:
I'm still not entirely clear what the purpose it serves is.
Casey:
But nevertheless, my LLC gets paid by Apple.
Casey:
Apple's relationship is with the LLC.
Casey:
And I am not a lawyer.
Casey:
This is not legal advice.
Casey:
But my very limited, mostly ignorant understanding is that if something went wrong somewhere, somehow...
Casey:
You know, I could my LLC could be sued and all of the LLC's money could go up in smoke.
Casey:
But hypothetically, from a legal perspective, me, the person in my family would be protected.
Casey:
And so that's part of the reason why I did it.
Casey:
Again, not legal advice.
Casey:
Don't trust me on this.
Casey:
Look it up for yourself.
Casey:
This is obviously very, very, very different depending on where you live.
Casey:
But.
Casey:
That's the way I have set mine up.
Casey:
And I don't think it's that dissimilar from you, Marco, although maybe if you wanted to at least throw in a comment about when you choose to set up a new LLC and a new setup with Apple, because my understanding was a while ago, it was very, very difficult to sell an app and you had to basically sell an entire company in order to make it easier on the Apple side.
Casey:
Can you perhaps talk a little bit about that in addition to whatever else you'd like to add?
Marco:
Yeah, on that point, now they have something called an app transfer that you can do.
Marco:
And at least when that launched, it wouldn't work if you ever used certain entitlements, including iCloud or CloudKit or anything that used iCloud.
Marco:
So you just couldn't transfer it then.
Marco:
I don't know if that's still true.
Marco:
I haven't listened to it recently.
Marco:
It might still be.
Marco:
But yeah, in general, it's a lot easier to sell an entire developer account to another company than to try to break an app out of your account.
Marco:
and then give it to them.
Marco:
It used to be and probably still is possible to upload apps to the App Store using your personal Apple ID because of what I just said about how it's very hard to ever transfer an app out of a developer account.
Marco:
I don't recommend doing this because unless you truly are doing it just for a pure hobby thing and you never expect to make significant money from it and your use case would never have anybody want to buy it, want to buy the app from you.
Marco:
then fine, then use your personal one.
Marco:
But otherwise, setting up a business one is probably the right move.
Marco:
I too use LLCs.
Marco:
I do pretty much everything under LLCs that's at all professional for the reasons Casey mentioned of legal protection and everything.
Marco:
As Casey also mentioned, we are not lawyers and these things vary depending on where you are.
Marco:
So speak to a lawyer if you're concerned about liability protection.
Marco:
But yeah, that's how we do it.
Marco:
Yeah, that's it.
John:
You should have told me that before I uploaded these lucrative apps onto my personal Apple ID.
John:
What if I want to sell front and center and now it's tied in the same account?
John:
It's not actually my personal Apple ID.
John:
It is a separate Apple ID, but both of them are in the same Apple ID.
John:
They'll have to buy them as a set.
John:
Collect the whole set.
John:
Billionaires, don't worry.
John:
I'll sell you both.
John:
The prices are very reasonable.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
Star Sasumi writes, what's the different consideration when shopping for a TV for a console, a monitor for a console, or a monitor for a gaming PC?
Casey:
I have no input on this, and I'm guessing that Marco may not either.
Casey:
So let's just cut straight to the chase.
Casey:
And John, what do you do here?
John:
It used to be that there weren't – I mean, there were always some answers to this, but it wasn't that complicated.
John:
It was like, well, TVs, they're bigger, and they do TV things, and generally you can't connect computers to them, and consoles connect to TVs, not computers, and computer monitors have a couple things to worry about, different kinds of flat panels or different kinds of CRTs back in the day, but it wasn't that complicated.
John:
Now it is –
John:
much more complicated than it used to be, partly because every TV can also more or less double as a computer monitor.
John:
Every console can connect to your television or computer monitor, like the convergence of monitor and TV thing, like to the point where it's CES this year, TV makers were really pushing television sets essentially made to be gaming monitors, right?
John:
There's a major convergence going on here, but there are concerns that are different in each domain, even though the actual physical devices and software
John:
related to them there has a huge amount of overlap they are tailored for certain purposes so these days if you're looking for something that you're going to play a game on there are some features that you're interested in that you don't care about if you're just going to watch tv on it and those are uh the the hdmi spec the latest hdmi spec and some of the ancillary uh things related to uh what are they called uh
John:
adaptive frame rate or i should have written these things down there's there's a bunch of acronyms for things that let you change the frame rate uh from a moment to moment basis and there's a bunch of standards for that related to the hdmi spec um there's some
John:
It's proprietary things, depending on what you're going to be connecting to it, like NVIDIA's G-Sync, which do similar things.
John:
There's auto low latency mode on televisions, which tries to detect that you have a console connected and goes into a mode where you have the lowest amount of input lag.
John:
Years ago, TV manufacturers didn't even know what input lag was.
John:
They didn't even list it in their specs.
John:
Nobody cared about it except for video gamers, and they would test it themselves using these light rigs.
John:
Nowadays, they're building in features for it.
John:
It used to be called game mode.
John:
Now it's auto latency mode.
John:
What the hell is the frame rate thing called?
John:
Someone in the chat room could tell me.
John:
There's an acronym for it.
John:
Anyway.
John:
If you are gaming, care about those things.
John:
Look at the input lag, look for auto latency mode, look for variable refresh rate.
John:
That's another thing.
John:
Thank you, chat room.
John:
It's not what I was trying to think of.
John:
The variable refresh rate is not just variable refresh rate, the actual refresh rate, right?
John:
So televisions used to only have to refresh it like...
John:
some reasonable multiple of the frame rate of television and maybe movies right but video games especially for hardcore gamers like higher and higher refresh rates it's no point in having 100 frames per second on your game if your screen is updating 60 times a second that's just wasted right so gaming monitors and now televisions that support gaming applications have higher refresh rates so
John:
So don't get a television that has a maximum refresh rate of 60 hertz expecting to play 120 frames per second.
John:
It's pointless.
John:
You're not going to get any benefit.
John:
So if you're going to game on it, look for all those things.
John:
High refresh rate, variable refresh rate, auto latency mode, and then also all the things that we normally talk about.
John:
picture quality price size heat fan noise the whole nine yards right so it's more complicated than it used to be but there are a bunch of things that you should look at that are only apply to games you're just going to watch tv on it you actually do care about frame rate a little bit if you want to see those weird high frame rate movies at like 60 frames per second but as far as i'm aware there's not a lot of television or movie content at 144 frames per second so you don't have to worry about that too much
John:
variable refresh rate is not really an important thing for video because most video content has a single refresh rate through the whole thing and it certainly isn't changing from moment to moment although that's not entirely true there are some things where it varies um and yeah auto latency mode doesn't matter when there's no input so there you go
Casey:
Finally, Future Ben writes, I've been tearing my hair out over this question for years.
Casey:
When to use a Notes app like Apple Notes versus traditional files?
Casey:
For casual users, they may not be an issue.
Casey:
But the further down the rabbit hole you go, the more these paradigms compete with one another.
Casey:
For me, if I am writing something down or copying a URL or something along those lines, it goes into Apple Notes.
Casey:
And if it's like a PDF or something like that, it goes into the file system.
Casey:
And that's about it.
Casey:
Marco, how do you handle this?
Marco:
I don't have a great system for this, honestly.
Marco:
Notes is like my scratch pad.
Marco:
And I do actually use it for some long-term storage or some things, but I'm not very consistent about it.
Marco:
I'm using it more over time.
Marco:
This wasn't part of the question, but I do wish that Notes had a...
Marco:
file system representation that was meaningful and that could be backed up and imported and exported.
Marco:
That is one thing.
Marco:
As I use notes for more and more stuff, I am a little bit afraid of someday losing all my notes because of some iCloud mishap or some local whatever.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I don't know how to back it up, and I don't know how to restore it.
Marco:
And I think there are apps where you can export your notes out in various formats, but I don't know of any kind of import after that.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
The fact that notes doesn't just store your notes in an easily parsed file system representation makes me a little bit uneasy.
Casey:
John?
John:
Yeah, Marco hit the major point that I wanted to hit, which is the decision point about this is, do you want to use and trust an app that owns a collection of data, whether it be Apple Notes or any other app that mediates the data store?
John:
Because once you do that...
John:
Bugs in that app, changes in business models of that app, anything having to do with that app can get between you and your information.
John:
Whereas if you do it as individual files, especially if those are plain text files, it's more annoying and loosey-goosey and you lose some of the features, but you also don't have to worry about...
John:
uh you know the app that controls them even just changing in a way you don't like oh i put all my life in insert app x and then app x changed their user interface and now i hate it now you're like well that's all my data is they have a good export functionality can i get an import like there are good apps and bad apps for that you're looking for an app that does have good export ability ability to back up to a standard format and maybe an import ability to go in the other direction and
John:
uh but you're worried about syncing bugs you worry about business model changes you worry about app ui changes all that stuff uh on a recent episode of rectives i was talking about exactly that thing with notes i'm putting an increasing amount of stuff in notes too and i was getting paranoid about backups merlin recommended this notes exporter app there's a couple of apps out there that do similar things where they will i think they just use the apple script dictionary or something like that they will go through all your notes and export each one as like a pdf or something which is
John:
not great but it's better than nothing so i ran that to export all my notes a lot of people tried to make shortcuts for it and other sort of automations and apparently at a certain point notes just surrenders and stops exporting things and i don't know if it's a bug with the automation or something like that but uh
John:
It's been a challenge to do with shortcuts, but Notes is an example of an application that I think is pretty solid, and I haven't had any problems with it, but it does not have really good export and import functionality built into the app as far as I'm aware, which is why we're trying to use the third-party app.
John:
So...
John:
I kind of organically grew into notes.
John:
That's the thing to watch for.
John:
If you decide I'm going to use an app and not a bunch of individual files because individual files are a pain in my butt and it's so much easier to just take up my phone and use notes, that's an easy decision to make in the moment.
John:
And then fast forward six months and now you have substantial amount of valuable data and notes and now you're worried about how to back it up.
John:
So it happens to the best of us, but that I feel like is the distinction.
John:
It's trusting a sort of mediator and owner for the data versus you having to do all that stuff yourself.
Marco:
yeah it's like notes to me it's like nuclear power it's like like i can't wait for this analogy go ahead chances are chances are nothing will ever go wrong and as long as nothing ever goes wrong there's a lot of things to like about it and you just hope nothing ever goes wrong because if something goes wrong it's gonna go really wrong
John:
Does it produce waste that we have to dispose of in ways that we haven't figured out yet?
Marco:
We're just going to put that question off to her another time.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Indeed, and ProClip USA.
Marco:
And we'll talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Because it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, it was accidental, and you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
I really, really did not want to downgrade this machine to Mojave.
Casey:
This much is getting Mojave tomorrow.
Casey:
Oh my God, I am so angry.
Casey:
What happened?
Casey:
So all of a sudden the came back and I'm like, okay.
Casey:
And then all of a sudden you guys disappeared.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
But audio hijack is still counting.
Casey:
Skype is still counting.
Casey:
Everything's fine.
Casey:
And then I heard and Skype said, Oh, your microphone is screwed.
Casey:
Unplug it and try again.
Casey:
So Marco, you're going to have a fun edit.
Casey:
I'm sorry, but I, I am, I am.
Casey:
Putting it on record that if I am still on Catalina this time next week, please, some way, somehow, send somebody to kick me square in the gentleman region because this is intolerable and I can't stand it.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
We got so much flack last week after I went on a tear about Catalina.
Casey:
And, you know, somebody would say, oh, why did you say it's unusable?
Casey:
OK, here's why I think Catalina is unusable, because I am trying to do my job and I cannot because things failed while I was trying to do my job.
Casey:
Is that a satisfactory enough reason for you, everyone?
Casey:
So this is getting Mojave tomorrow and I am so cranky right now.
Casey:
And you're going to be cranky when you deal with my 400 files tomorrow.
Casey:
So and that makes me cranky because I don't like making other people cranky.
Marco:
And you're going to be cranky the first time you go to use SwiftUI on Mojave after having it on Catalina.
John:
You're going to be cranky when you revert to SwiftUI.
John:
When you revert to Mojave and you still have these problems.
John:
Then what will we say?
Casey:
Then AppleCare Plus becomes a thing or whatever it's called on this.
John:
I think some evil spirit has inhabited your computer room at least.
Casey:
I hear you.
Casey:
I honestly hear you.
Casey:
And if I were in your shoes, I would say the same thing.
Casey:
But all I know is this machine was bulletproof on Mojave.
Casey:
And since I put Catalina on because I'm a darn fool, everything has gotten worse.
Casey:
Everything, everything, everything has gotten worse.
John:
All signs point to that being the case.
John:
I hope your downgrade fixes everything.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
I hope so, too.
Casey:
The only question is, do I use the super-duper backup that I took and have not modified right before I did the upgrade, or do I just throw everything away?
John:
You're like hoteling in your own house.
John:
You have no data.
John:
Every night, someone could come and erase your whole computer, and you wouldn't notice because you don't actually store any data on it.
You're right.
Casey:
Which, in a lot of ways, and we talked about this a few weeks ago, in a lot of ways, I think that's a testament to GitHub, and I don't use Dropbox anymore, but Dropbox and things like that, but
Casey:
The good news from having to do this 84 times over the last few months is that I've become very, very good at it.
Casey:
So it's a very streamlined operation.
Casey:
My dad, when he was, well, no, I think I might have been just born.
Casey:
He had a Plymouth Duster, if I remember correctly.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I forget what the issue ended up being.
Casey:
Something was misaligned, but they didn't know it for the longest time.
Casey:
I might have told this story as well.
Casey:
But the house that we had lived in when I was freshly born, my dad had had the house built.
Casey:
And in the garage, he actually had a pit.
Casey:
So you would drive the car onto boards or planks or, I don't know, maybe it was metal for all I know.
Casey:
But you would drive it on these pieces of metal, let's say.
Casey:
And then you could climb down under the car.
Casey:
So it's like the inverse of a lift.
Casey:
And what had happened is he kept going through clutches in this duster.
Casey:
And my understanding of family legend tells me that mom and dad could do an entire clutch in this car in like the span of two or three hours or something like that, like something absolutely preposterous.
Casey:
Because they were doing it like once every two months or something like that.
Casey:
And they eventually figured out the problem and fixed it properly.
Casey:
But yeah, that's me with this darn computer.
Casey:
So all kidding aside, I have what I thought to be a bulletproof, super-duper backup of Mojave sitting on a hard drive on my desk.
Casey:
Starting with Marco and then John, would you trust and use that and just plow what's currently on the machine?
Casey:
Or would you just go for broke and install fresh?
Marco:
I would maybe first boot it and see how it boots and then maybe decide after that.
Marco:
Weird stuff would happen if you just went back in time and you don't have any of your files.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think that's a recipe for accidental data loss of stuff you've made in the meantime.
Casey:
Well, I mean, the first thing I want to do is go through my list of places where I do store stuff.
Casey:
You know, like there are a handful of things on my desktop.
Casey:
There may be some things and downloads that I care about, you know, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
And I'll back up my Plex, you know, database and so on and so forth.
Casey:
All that stuff will happen before I even worry about, you know, booting off of the super duper backup.
Casey:
But assuming that the super duper backup boots reasonably well, do you think you would use it?
Casey:
But, you know, like, you know, take it and put it onto the machine.
John:
I mean, how old is it at this point?
Casey:
It's three weeks, a month.
John:
That's too far back.
John:
I mean, I saw actual data.
John:
I would never, like, that's too far back for me.
John:
I would be missing too much stuff, and I have no way to sort of, like, diff it.
John:
I don't know.
John:
If I actually had to downgrade my machine, which obviously I can't, but if I had to, I would install Mojave on top.
John:
of Catalina I know that's not what you want to do especially if you want to eliminate the source of weird errors but you're into the hoteling lifestyle anyway you should just wipe this machine and put a fresh like save your if you think you actually know how to save your data do that I would suggest making a full clone and setting that aside so then you know if you just remember it oh by the way I was also keeping something in this obscure directory you've got it right yeah
John:
Do that and wipe the whole machine and Mojave from scratch.
John:
Like wipe, wipe, as in repartition, as in get rid of all Catalina, like, you know, the whole nine yards.
John:
Like, you know, go to the actual partition level, not the APFS container level, but the actual GPT partition level and then get rid of all that stuff.
Casey:
No, yeah.
Casey:
I think you probably convinced me, first of all, that I'll do a super-duper of this one just for safety's sake, and then I'll go into internet recovery, delete everything on this hard drive to your point, and then start fresh with Mojave.
John:
Don't just do a super-duper.
John:
Also, get caught up on Time Machine.
John:
You need to have all your data in two places before you erase it from your computer, at least two places.
John:
That's fair.
Casey:
But anyway, I promise, gentlemen, that by this time next week, I will no longer be on Catalina because this is driving me absolutely batty.
Casey:
And I do love dark mode.
Casey:
I really do.
Casey:
When it's evening, that is.
Casey:
I do love dark mode.
Casey:
And I do love having that sweet, sweet Swift UI preview.
Casey:
But it is just not worth it.
Casey:
It is not worth it.
Casey:
Not for me.
Marco:
Well, I wonder, like, what's your long-term game plan here?
Casey:
I honestly don't know.
Marco:
He's going to skip Catalina.
Casey:
Yeah, either skip Catalina or perhaps wait another few point releases and see what happens.
Casey:
What is it right now?
John:
What are you going to use to gauge whether it's safe to play to 10, 15, 5, 10, 15, 6?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
I've never downgraded like this before because my strategy is basically once I'm on, I don't go backwards.
Marco:
I'm only on defense.
Marco:
I only go forward because that's offense.
Marco:
whatever going back is a you know a big deal it's it's hard and and potentially destructive to certain things and then b you're gonna have to go forward again at some point anyway yeah but what do i do in the meantime though you know like this is unacceptable for me and for you yeah so so i think i think the other answer is like there's lots of us who are doing podcasts on catalina without this problem so catalina is probably not the problem
Marco:
Maybe something is being worse on Catalina.
Marco:
Maybe it's a coincidence of timing.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But I'm podcasting on Catalina using the same USB device that you're using.
Marco:
Well, I did last week and it was fine.
Marco:
Yeah, you did last week and it was fine.
Marco:
So obviously it is possible to use Catalina without having the specific problems you're having right now.
Marco:
So the OS version itself is probably not the problem.
Marco:
It may have exacerbated things, it may have brought things to the foreground, or it may just be a coincidence.
Marco:
So, I would start investigating other potential explanations and solutions.
Marco:
Like what, though?
Marco:
So, you know, things like changing out the trackpad for a trackpad that, like, it's just swapping it out.
Marco:
Don't you have two?
Casey:
I do.
Marco:
Yeah, so just try the other one.
Marco:
Do you use it in wired mode?
Casey:
I actually am tonight.
Casey:
That's the first time.
Casey:
Okay, so to that end... Oh, unplug it.
Casey:
Well, no, no, but here's the thing.
Casey:
Well, maybe.
Casey:
Maybe you're right.
Casey:
Or at the very least, unplug it when I'm podcasting.
Casey:
That's actually a very interesting point.
Casey:
But the reason it got plugged in in the first place was because of all the issues I was having with really bad latency and the machine gun trackpad and all that.
Casey:
So it seems like my choices are use it on Bluetooth where I've got machine gun trackpad and really bad pointer latency or...
Casey:
Or use it when it's plugged in and potentially have some sort of issue with my microphone.
Casey:
So I guess the answer is I unplug when I record and plug in when I'm not recording.
Casey:
But this shouldn't be a problem.
John:
Do you have any other stuff connected to your computer?
John:
That's the usual dance you do is start removing, disconnecting everything from your computer until it is just the computer.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
by itself with nothing connected to it and then you connect a keyboard and then you try it and it's okay and then you connect the pointing device like do you have anything else do you have any external drives do you have an ethernet cable like presently plugged in i mean like i have a bunch of things that are hanging on like a bunch of usb cords that aren't connected to anything right now so as an example like i have a cord connected to my computer that that i could plug into an external hard drive but it's not presently plugged into an external hard drive that's that's
John:
probably not it but i would unplug those anyway just you know it's typical troubleshooting like remove all variables try to figure out what the hell is the problem with the thing like with that staticky thing like maybe it was the simulator maybe that's just a simulator hangover and maybe the only way to cure that it was a reboot no but i rebooted afterwards i did reboot
John:
And you got it again?
John:
Maybe your audio box is fritzing?
John:
Who knows?
Marco:
There's possible other explanations or other things to try, like making sure that the audio interface and the trackpad are not sharing a USB bus.
Marco:
I don't know how you can do that.
Marco:
Maybe certain ports are different buses.
Marco:
Maybe you can put the trackpad on a hub and not put the audio interface on a hub.
Marco:
Put the audio interface directly into one of the ports in the back and then put the trackpad on its own hub or something.
Marco:
Or use one of the USB-A ports for the trackpad and use the USB-C port for the audio interface.
Marco:
using a C to B cable.
Marco:
There's options like that.
Marco:
That's what I do, honestly.
Marco:
I do the C to B cable thing.
Marco:
Ways to just try to separate this device that you think is possibly causing you problems, which is the trackpad, from things that are critical to work for your job, like the audio interface.
Marco:
Have it be two separate parts of the computer.
Marco:
You can probably look up somewhere.
Marco:
I bet certain port...
Marco:
pairs or sets are on certain usb buses it probably isn't all one bus it's probably like you know two or three different controllers in there so i would try that um and because like you like usb is a weird uh protocol with weird devices that flake out sometimes and like one bad usb device can wreak havoc on a system
Marco:
So the more you can do to try to isolate it or try to swap out the trackpad for a different one and see if that works, trying that first is easier and probably more likely to work than changing your entire OS version.
Casey:
Yeah, I just I feel like I want the nuclear option, but you're convinced the two of you are convincing me that maybe I'm getting a little aggressive.
John:
But if you didn't have this problem with Mojave, it really is quite a timing coincidence.
John:
It could be like some bad behavior that unless you did actually move things to different ports or connect new things, but it could just be some bad behavior that Mojave handles differently.
John:
Thank Catalina.
John:
So downgrading may actually solve the problem without actually letting you know what it was.
John:
Like the problem might be some chatty USB thing or the fact that you refuse to go into your own attic and get the trackpad out from the other computer.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I super duper promise.
Casey:
Well, let me ask you.
Casey:
I'm not trying to snark.
Casey:
Would the two of you rather me try a different trackpad or go back to a mouse?
Casey:
Because I'm perfect.
Casey:
I don't have an issue with the mouse.
Casey:
I used the mouse up until literally like six months ago.
John:
I would like –
John:
I have so much data that I would never want to downgrade.
John:
So I would, I would, my first choice would always be debug it, figure out what the hell is wrong.
John:
Like the same thing I did with my sleep issues.
John:
When I got my Mac pro, it wasn't sleeping and it kept waking up.
John:
And like, what option do I have that I couldn't, you know, I was going to figure out what the hell is waking it up and by process of elimination and figuring out, um,
John:
And disconnecting everything and connecting one device at a time and, you know, running a bare operating system and saying, what if I have this program?
John:
But, you know, eventually got it mostly under control because that was my only option.
John:
That's always my first choice is to actually debug it, which is annoying and laborious, but usually can be done or at least leads you to a conclusion.
John:
It's like I found the problem and I have no fix for it.
John:
Therefore, Mojave downgrade is the only option.
John:
Right.
John:
But at least you'll know something about it then.
Casey:
Yeah, that's fair.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So I'm sorry.
Casey:
Where did we land?
Casey:
So would you rather me get a different trackpad or just eschew trackpads entirely and just go to a regular magic mouse?
John:
I think trackpads are garbage if you use a mouse.
John:
But either one, change that part of the equation.
John:
Remove all the variables, disconnect everything from your computer, find a reproducible test case that causes the problem, and then just start subtracting even more.
John:
Like, okay, now I can get this thing to do weird crap correctly.
John:
does it still do weird crap with the mouse?
John:
Does it still do weird crap with my other track pad?
John:
Like whatever, just start, you know, running experiments until you can figure, so you can make it misbehave and then figure out when it does and when it doesn't misbehave.
Marco:
Yeah, I think get the other trackpad out of the attic, use it in Bluetooth mode, and see if you have the machine gun issue.
Marco:
That's step one.
Marco:
And then if you do, then possibly try the USB in different port kind of situation.
Marco:
But I would say first try it as Bluetooth.
Marco:
I would also, I heard, as I was frequently complaining about various Bluetooth disconnect bugs that I've been having for years on my Macs with the mouse and the trackpad,
Marco:
A few people have told me over the years that this can happen with 2.4 gigahertz interference and that trying to minimize that as much as possible had a pretty good effect for them.
Marco:
And so this could be things like switching as much as your Wi-Fi stuff as possible over to 5.8, especially stuff that would be in or near your office where your computer is.
Marco:
You could try that as well.
Marco:
Although, actually, I hate to jinx anything here.
Marco:
And maybe I should knock on if I could find some actual wood around here.
Marco:
I have not had the Bluetooth mouse and trackpad random disconnection bug in a little while.
Marco:
I don't remember exactly when the last time that it happened was, but it hasn't been recently.
Marco:
It's been probably at least a month or two.
Marco:
So I think they might have fixed that, finally, after like three years of it being a constant problem.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I think that my bug is fixed, just like my music bug.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm doing great.
Marco:
Sorry, Casey, you're not.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Yeah, so anyway, if there's anything to that, try to reduce 2.4 gigahertz radio traffic in the area and switch over to Bluetooth to try to test the machine gun trackpad thing to see if it still applies to the new trackpad that you should have been switching to a long time ago.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I will try the trackpad first.
Casey:
The problem is I don't have any, like I have a bunch of anecdotal, like I said earlier, on things that seem to make it worse, but I don't have anything where I can say, do this, then this, then this, then this, and bam, it happens, you know?
Casey:
Yeah, it's just so frustrating.
John:
sleep-wake problems are the same thing i had to wait for hours you'd put it to sleep and then you'd have to come back in the morning and see when it woke up and how frequently and why and you know it's it's it's a tough uh it's a tough debug cycle but i mean if it actually is a problem you should be able to make it happen just by using your computer right if you have to hook up your podcast microphone and just be recording all day long you know with your headphones on while you do development work and eventually if it starts glitching out you'd be like aha and then you have to already have console open and
John:
you know like i don't know it's it's annoying but uh i don't you know debugging is debugging programs is no fun and debugging your computer setup is also no fun and they are very similar at least at least you're sitting there in front of your computer i spent today debugging uh a switch glass bug on someone else's computer across the internet which is worse oh god yeah it does not seem fun
John:
Through email, to be clear, not through screen sharing, which would have been so much easier.
John:
And you're just like, I need to run Xcode on your machine and step through the debugger, but that's not possible.
John:
So it just builds back and forth with print statements.
John:
It's great.
John:
Found the bug, though.
Casey:
Oh, good.
Casey:
Oh, good.
Casey:
That's exciting.
John:
Yeah, a lot of print statements.