Whale Quench
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I'm going to use my sweet Rube Goldberg Dropbox upload right now.
Casey:
Get ready.
Casey:
All right.
John:
Don't forget to check your little LED before you go to sleep.
Casey:
I will because it's going to shine right in my face.
John:
Your next innovation is going to be a black piece of tape to cover the LED that's shining in your face.
Casey:
You know, I'd like to file a complaint to the two of you, and you did not know this was coming.
Casey:
Right now, as we speak, there is something that Marco and I should be watching on YouTube right now.
Casey:
Right now, there's a replay of a jam band's concert from last year.
Casey:
Want to guess which one, Marco?
Marco:
Well, I don't know.
Marco:
Phish did theirs last night, and I recorded it.
Marco:
So I don't know what you're talking about, but I'm pretty sure it's not Phish, so it must not be a jam, man.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Dave Matthews fan, last week, this week, and I think for the next several Wednesdays, are replaying concert videos on YouTube.
Casey:
And they're broadcasting them live.
Casey:
Last week I recorded it live using YouTube DL and then realized the next morning I didn't have to bother with that.
Casey:
I could just download it after the fact.
Casey:
Because sometimes on YouTube I think you can make things live and then they don't get saved, so to speak.
Casey:
I'm sure there's better terminology for this.
Casey:
And in the case of the Dave Matthews one, it was perfectly up and available the next morning.
Casey:
But yeah, I think I might have to skip the show from now on because I've got more important things to do.
Marco:
Yeah, it's a good thing that we would never possibly download an HLS stream and be able to preserve it forever in our Plex libraries.
Marco:
So we definitely have to watch these things live as your jam band does what my jam band has been doing for quite some time.
Casey:
You know, that's just mean.
Casey:
You're not wrong.
Casey:
You're not wrong, but it's just plain mean, man.
John:
Mark was going to add it to his definition of a jam band does not allow downloading of high quality.
Casey:
It really, you know, I do think I probably shouldn't say this out loud, but here we go.
Casey:
Uh, I do think not irregularly about the epiphany, um, that either you or I might've been me had several months ago when I realized that my definition of jam band, your definition of jam band are very, very different.
Casey:
And to recap, um,
Casey:
I think it's fair to say, and correct me, but your definition of jam band is kind of the style of music and less about whether or not it's improvised.
Casey:
And to me, I don't really care what style of music it is.
Casey:
It's just whether or not it's improvisation.
Casey:
And we can get into another argument for the 95th time over who was right.
Casey:
It ultimately doesn't matter.
Casey:
But it really made me feel better.
Marco:
yours is a more literal interpretation of like a jam band is like a band that jams it's almost like if your definition of country western music could not be made in New York City if by definition if somebody if a country singer came to New York City and made music here it would not be country western music that's kind of like your definition of jam band is like a band that jams like it's very literal
Marco:
And I think many people share that definition.
Marco:
But, you know, from the point of view of like, if you are a like, say a Sirius XM jam band station that totally exists, that's a genre of music that you play.
Casey:
It's not Dave Matthews is on if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
I think I don't know.
Marco:
I haven't had Sirius in a long time.
Marco:
They might be.
Marco:
The point is like a jam band is not any band that jams.
Marco:
It is a musical genre that happens to include a lot of jamming.
Marco:
But that doesn't necessarily mean that any band that jams has suddenly become a jam band.
Casey:
Yeah, and I mean, again, we've been around the block a few times on this issue.
Casey:
But it would genuinely annoy me to no end when you would just fluff off, oh, Dean Matthews isn't a jam band.
Casey:
Dean Matthews is not a jam band.
Casey:
And I feel like my world has been righted by realizing that we're just having two different arguments at the same time.
Marco:
Like so many arguments in modern culture.
Marco:
We're never going to come to a resolution because we're totally arguing different things.
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, at least we're not moving the goalposts like John always does.
Casey:
Am I right?
Casey:
So let's start with follow-up.
John:
What you were talking about was exactly that.
John:
You have two different sets of goalposts.
John:
That's why you couldn't figure out what the disagreement was.
John:
And here I am quietly not liking either band.
John:
So who's doing it right here?
Casey:
Yeah, I guess you win again.
Casey:
All right, let's start with some follow-up.
Casey:
First and clearly most importantly to everyone involved with the show, my garage door project monitor is complete.
Marco:
So Casey, is your garage door open or closed right now?
Casey:
Well, I would have to look at the app right now because I'm in the other room.
Casey:
I'm in the office and not the bedroom.
John:
Does your window have line of sight on your garage door?
John:
Could you peek?
John:
No, it does not.
Casey:
I don't know if you set me up for that on purpose or not, Marko, but either way, it was well done.
John:
Wait, wait, wait.
John:
I've got it.
John:
Can you have a camera that looks at the light?
Casey:
Yeah, that's what I should do.
John:
There we go.
John:
That's the right answer.
Casey:
I can get the new Raspberry Pi camera that's like 50 bucks or something like that.
John:
There you go.
Casey:
It's super high res and it's totally overkill for what I would need this for.
John:
And all it has is a view of this tiny LED on your nightstand.
John:
Right.
John:
Oh, goodness.
John:
That's hilarious.
Casey:
But anyways, the project is complete.
Casey:
Don't ask me to show you what most of the components look like because there's not any real good mounting setup for any of this stuff.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
It does work.
Casey:
It is complete.
Casey:
There's an LED that is in my bedroom that is illuminated when the garage door is open and it is extinguished when the garage door is closed.
Casey:
And I am very excited about this.
Casey:
And for phase one, it is complete.
Casey:
Phase two, which I haven't started yet, is – and I think we discussed this last time – is to get a – well, I have a relay, but to get that relay working such that I can hypothetically raise and lower the door via the Raspberry Pi as well as just monitor whether or not it's open or closed.
Casey:
But I think most important of all, we need to –
Casey:
We need to all celebrate the fact that I was right and John was wrong.
Casey:
And my read switch, my window, it's not necessarily specifically designed for a window, but my close proximity only read switch that John had thought would never possibly work did indeed work.
John:
Did you mention goalposts moving earlier?
John:
Because it sounds to me like what you're describing is not what happened.
John:
At this point, Marco can add the diddly-loo music and play back what I said.
Yeah.
John:
Which I believe was something like, I think you might have too much confidence in your Switch.
John:
Not that it would never work, which is what you just said.
John:
So much for correctly identifying the goalpost movers.
John:
I'm glad it worked out for you.
John:
I was pessimistic.
John:
I expressed doubt, but it looks like it worked out well.
Casey:
So, yeah, so I'm excited about that.
Casey:
And you can see in my Insta stories, you can see that I was soldering today, which I'm still just hilariously bad at.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I am good enough to make a successful solder, even though it is hideous to look at.
Casey:
And, yeah, so it's all working.
Casey:
I'm really excited about that.
Casey:
And I don't know if I'm going to be able to do any more work on this before next week's show.
Casey:
But hopefully at some point I'll be able to start toying with that relay and see if I can get that working.
Casey:
So I will take my victory lap right now.
Casey:
Moving on, I was looking through the mentions for the ATP Twitter account, which I try to keep up with and I do a terrible job of.
Casey:
And somebody wrote something that at a glance, I almost skipped over it because I was like, I don't care about this.
Casey:
And I went backwards.
Casey:
Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait.
Casey:
So Derek Van Ittersom wrote, you can use Synology's cloud sync to take a folder on the Synology and sync that with your Dropbox files.
Casey:
Yeah, I knew that.
Casey:
Okay, whatever.
Casey:
That folder can also be synced with Synology Drive.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Thus, Dropbox synced files on all devices with no Dropbox app installed anywhere.
Casey:
Hold on a second.
Casey:
Tell me more.
Casey:
So it took me a minute to parse what Derek was saying.
Casey:
But then I realized he was basically solving my problem for me.
Casey:
And I feel so dumb for not having thought of this already.
Casey:
So there's an app on the Synology.
Casey:
So this is a Synology package that runs on the Synology called Cloud Sync.
Casey:
And I'd been running it for a long time.
Casey:
to get a local backup of my Dropbox.
Casey:
And it would just act as a Dropbox client, and it would sync all of my files from Dropbox down to the Synology.
Casey:
And again, I just used it as a one-way replicator.
Casey:
That's not the only way you can use it, but that's just how I was using it.
Casey:
Meanwhile, and off to the side, there's also Synology Drive, which, although it has the same problem as Apple TV, where there's one phrase that means like 95 different things, one of the things Synology Drive means is they're like pseudo Dropbox-like thing, where the Synology is the one source of truth for all of your data, and all of your other devices can hook up to that Synology, and it acts basically like Dropbox.
Casey:
You know, it has a client app, everything stays in sync, etc., etc.,
Casey:
But it had never occurred to me to bring the two together.
Casey:
So what Derek is saying is I could and have – I could take the Synology Cloud Sync server-side stuff and have it save and replicate my Dropbox into my Synology Drive root folder.
Casey:
Am I making any sense, gentlemen?
Casey:
Are you with me?
Marco:
Totally, yeah.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
It sounds like a very Casey solution to a problem because it's –
Marco:
It's overly complicated.
Marco:
It solves a problem that doesn't need to be solved that badly.
Marco:
And it involves a synology.
John:
And it adds potential additional problems.
John:
Remember we talked about this way back when of like, you know, in general, putting a synced folder inside a synced folder inside a synced folder, like it doesn't lead to happiness.
John:
Most services won't allow you to do it.
John:
Like Dropbox won't let you put like.
John:
microsoft one drive inside it or vice versa like they have they have things to try to stop you from doing it but synology is more laissez-faire and you can do it but i would really i mean maybe two layers deep maybe that'll be mostly okay but i wouldn't go three or four layers deep that's a little bit uh sketchy and of course you know i i don't you do have to have something that syncs with dropbox so presumably is that dropbox software or is that something using some kind of public dropbox api do you know the the origin of the synology dropbox app
Casey:
You know, I don't.
Casey:
I would assume they're just using public Dropbox APIs, but I certainly do not know that for fact.
John:
They're scraping HTML from the web.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
It very well could be.
John:
You don't want to know how it works.
John:
It works.
John:
It's fine.
John:
Just close your eyes.
Casey:
Well, and to that end, I did do this earlier today when I saw this tweet and was like, wait, what?
Casey:
Oh.
Casey:
And so I tried it.
Casey:
And
Casey:
At a glance, in the last hour or two since I've tried it, it seems to be working just fine.
Casey:
Famous last words, knock on wood, et cetera.
Casey:
And so just for a test, and I don't know if either of you guys happen to be sitting at your computers when I did this, I put a different audio file into our shared Dropbox folder where we share our recordings from these episodes.
Casey:
And I did that using the Dropbox web app.
Casey:
And sure enough, maybe 15, 30 seconds after it had uploaded using the web app, it ended back up on the same computer from where it started, but inside my Synology Drive Dropbox folder.
Casey:
And then I deleted it locally using Finder.
Casey:
And almost instantaneously, it was removed from the Dropbox web app.
Casey:
So at a glance, this is working.
Casey:
And as someone who doesn't...
Casey:
really use Dropbox anymore except to share files with you guys and with Mike and a couple of other random scenarios here and there.
Casey:
I'm actually really, really excited and pleased with this because I don't think I'm going to be stressing it very much.
Casey:
And it seems to basically offload all the ickiness of Dropbox onto the Synology, which...
Casey:
For me, for now, seems good.
Casey:
So if you're in this weird scenario where you have a Synology, you're using Synology Drive, you too, all 12 of us, dozens of us maybe, we can benefit from this weird but awesome setup.
John:
The one thing I would watch for is for when you're nesting multiple servers like this is situations with very large files that actually take an appreciable amount of time to transfer.
John:
That may not be much of an issue because you have such a fast internet connection and so on and so forth, but like
John:
uh when it's just one service it can sort of say i'm not going to make the file look like it's done until i know that it's done but when you've got two services the outermost service may think oh a new file has appeared and as far as it can tell it's all set to go so let me make it appear on casey's mac but really dropbox is still syncing it in and
John:
Anyway, that's potential dangers of nesting services inside each other.
John:
But if you're just very careful and do things very slowly and are very kind to the software and you're just copying one file and you wait a long time and don't yank it out from under it, it'll probably be fine.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
I mean, when Marco starts sending me angry text messages wondering where my file is.
John:
Yeah, truncated audio files.
John:
And I would say, like, don't put your Git repo in there or anything.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Marco:
I mean, really, like, how is this incredibly complicated pile of hacks better than just using iCloud Drive?
Casey:
Oh, I'm all in on iCloud Drive.
Casey:
I'm ready.
John:
Because we're hoping that the files won't just disappear one day or just fail to sync for some inexplicable reason.
John:
I think in this scenario, you'd get an error if something failed to sync, and the chances of files just disappearing are lower.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
The more I've thought about this problem, the more I've thought, let's just try Cloud Drive and just see how it goes.
Marco:
Yes, I'm ready.
Marco:
I don't like having to run these persistent daemon services on my computers all the time unless really necessary and unless they're really providing a strong benefit.
Marco:
No matter what we do, iCloud is already running.
Marco:
iCloud Drive is already there, already syncing.
Marco:
It's already on every device that we use.
Marco:
It's already running anyway, no matter what we do.
Marco:
So it's like we're already paying the price for the usage of iCloud Drive here.
Marco:
We might as well use it, and then I can get rid of all this other crap software.
John:
but there's more price the price of hey it didn't sync my file when it's just running and it's not working correctly but we're not using it we don't pay that price so yes you're right that we have the overhead of it doing something but if we never actually use it to do anything we don't you know we're not asking it to actually run and also we don't aren't exposed to the bugs i'm still in favor of sfdp that is still my favorable solution because we all have sfdp clients and they don't run all the time
John:
And, you know, if you really want something that's mounted, it's really easy to mount an SFTP driver, whatever.
Casey:
Well, for the record, Marco, I am all in on iCloud Drive, or at least giving it a shot, if nothing else.
Casey:
So you tell me when you're ready.
John:
Why don't you just use iCloud Drive and then have that sync to your Synology and then have that sync to an SFTP server.
Casey:
Perfect.
Casey:
Nothing could go wrong.
Casey:
All right, John, tell me about RSI and voice control, if you please.
John:
We had further discussion on RSI in the last episode of Ask ATP.
John:
We've talked about it in many episodes in the past.
John:
And we got a couple of interesting examples of solutions to RSI.
John:
One is from – oh, I've got to do these names.
John:
I've got to practice.
John:
I thought you were going to read them.
Yeah.
John:
i know miyagawa i just did not used to uh pronouncing his first name and i think i got his last name right anyway tatsuhiko miyagawa has a example of someone using voice control to program in pearl which haha yes we all know it's got all those funny punctuation symbols and everything like that uh the programmer is emily shay and there's a video of her
John:
um at a conference explaining uh here's how i use voice control to be a programmer which you would think a is going to be hard no matter what because programming in general is filled with all sorts of symbols and things you have to do that aren't natural and b pearl oh my goodness and of course there's a you know a couple of humorous videos out there on the web of showing how terribly unmodified voice control software deals with pearl in particular i think she uses one of them in the presentation i don't know if this is the original funny uh
John:
You know, ha-ha trying to do voice control for Pearl, but it is one of them.
John:
So I recommend everybody check that out if you want to see what's possible.
John:
It sounds funny.
John:
It sounds a little bit humorous when you watch it, but you can't help but be impressed.
John:
It's kind of like Casey's setup, only with an actual purpose, right?
John:
So the purpose is...
John:
The purpose is, hey, this is a health issue.
John:
I need to find a way to do my job without using my body the way I was using it.
John:
So let me use my skill as a programmer to fashion something from bits and pieces, not a Raspberry Pi, but the software equivalent essentially, to make a setup where I can effectively program Perl and use my computer.
John:
And then the second one is...
John:
Philip Brokham, who has a video showing his hands-free technique of using his computer.
John:
So not just like, hey, I'm not typing when I'm programming, but like entirely hands-free as in I'm not using a mouse or a trackpad.
John:
I'm not touching the keyboard.
John:
And you might think, how can you use a computer like that?
John:
Sure, you can use voice for the text input.
John:
But what about everything else?
John:
Well, the answer is in this video.
John:
He says he's been a developer for 15 years, 10 of which have been hands-free.
John:
You should definitely check it out.
John:
And he sent this because he just wanted people to know that the idea of don't use your hands, like the humorous advice that I, you know,
John:
So that the doctor might offer you if you're having some problem is actually possible if you're willing to put in the effort.
John:
One of the examples I was super impressed with is like it shows the, you know, the strengths of voice input.
John:
We all kind of know most people can speak better than they can type.
John:
It doesn't mean they can speak faster than they can type, but most people.
John:
If it's just like an English sentence or, you know, prose sentence, they can rattle that off pretty well.
John:
And the voice input software, if it's good, will make sure there's a single space between every word, every word is spelled correctly, like all that stuff.
John:
And you won't have typos.
John:
You might have speakos where, you know, homonyms end up in a sentence or whatever, but...
John:
uh you can you know most people can rattle off a sentence faster than they can type so add to that reasonably efficient use of the rest of the computer and he does a little demo at one point in this where he's like i'm going to take a picture of myself and then email it to myself which is a silly exercise but it it does demonstrate all the things you would imagine would be such a pain to do with voice control take a picture of yourself with your computer and then mail it to yourself well now you've got a file and you're dragging things around and you got to open your mail app and you got to add the attachment and then
John:
you know he writes a line of text into into the message he does that task of take a picture of myself and email it to myself in an email with one sentence in it i think just as fast as any person using both of their hands could do it maybe not faster but i think just as fast it's very impressive demo so check both of these out if you want to see someone program pearl by voice check out the first one and if you want to see someone do look look ma no hands try the second one
Casey:
What is this pedal that he's using?
Casey:
Because I'm only now watching this for the first time and I'm not listening to it.
Casey:
So what is the pedal for?
John:
It's a three-button pedal basically.
John:
It's got a big fat middle part and then two parts on the side that you can kind of feel.
John:
And he's just got the buttons programmed to do various things.
John:
He's got the middle part programmed to be mouse click, the right one programmed to be right click, and the left one programmed to be turn on and off the mouse tracking thing.
John:
huh wow and it's tracking using his head i guess just from the looks of this it's tracking using the little reflective thing on the end of his headset mic he's got to have the headset mic for you know for good voice control and all he does is stick a little reflective sticker to the end of the headset mic et voila huh that is wild look out look how well he uses the mouse like he's targeting the mouse better than most like average people i see trying to use the mouse like they're driving a tiny arrow shaped car along the screen
John:
no this is this is really wild i cannot believe how well and how efficient he is at doing this stuff and the reason you want to watch the emily shea video is because uh one one facet of it to spoil it is that uh there is a different set of words for letters you know what is the the one called uh is it like nato radio something or other one where it's like x-ray foxtrot all that business right yeah the phonetic alphabet
John:
As she points out in the video, a lot of those words are multisyllabic, and so it's kind of a mouthful.
John:
They're multisyllabic for a reason, but when you're talking directly into a headset microphone for your computer, it can get a little bit cumbersome.
John:
So she's got a second set of words for letters in the alphabet.
John:
For those who don't know, this is like, if you had to say the letters of the alphabet over a slightly unreliable connection...
John:
like if you're trying to for example if you're old and remember the the telephone system before the age of digital phones and cell phones they're very bad at conveying speech so if you're trying to spell your name over the phone and you say b and they're like did you say p or e or g like they all kind of sound the same over you know a 22 kilohertz connection with some noise and so it's like b as in boy right you do that thing well there's a canonical set of those that are developed for nato or the military where x is x-ray and f is foxtrot and
John:
anyway that's what we're talking about and so she has a different set of them that are shorter uh she also uses vi so to to exit vi well you know exit vi while saving she has to say wq but instead of wq the the word for w is whale and the word for q is quench so she says whale quench
John:
If you just listen to it, if you just listen to a transcription of her using her computer, it sounds like ridiculous gibberish, but it's amazing to watch.
John:
So I recommend both videos.
Casey:
So, John, if you ever wondered what it sounds like to Marco and I when you talk about Destiny, from the way you described this video, it sounds exactly like that.
John:
Whale quench could totally be an exotic weapon in Destiny 3.
John:
Bungie, call me.
Casey:
I rest my case.
Marco:
The area of RSI and accessibility and similar things where there are unusual methods to interact with a computer is always fascinating because to people who are not accustomed to doing these things, it seems impossible or it seems like magic or it seems superhuman when people can...
Marco:
operate their computer or their devices with these input methods that we don't use most of the time or that we don't even know exist.
Marco:
But the reality is, every way that we interact with a computer was new to us at some point.
Marco:
The keyboard and mouse were new to all of us at one point.
Marco:
At first, when we were first learning how to use computers and use keyboards and mice...
Marco:
We were inefficient with them.
Marco:
And I'm sure seeing someone who was an expert typist blast away the 100 words per minute on their typewriter or on their keyboard, that seemed like magic to us if we didn't know anything about it, if we hadn't used it before.
Marco:
But like that and like everything else, it's possible to learn these things.
Marco:
And it's amazing the difference between when you are totally unfamiliar with a task and
Marco:
And someone who is a pro at it and whose brains have wired those pathways to be really good at something, there's a huge difference.
Marco:
And our brains are capable of so many things that we don't realize they're capable of with practice and with time investment.
Marco:
The reality is you can probably be super fast at lots of these different methods that we don't think of.
Marco:
It just takes time.
Marco:
Just like on a smaller scale, my using a trackpad on the left
Marco:
and teaching my left hand as a right-handed person teaching my left hand how to use a trackpad kind of in parallel with also using the mouse in my right hand that felt really weird for the first week or so maybe and now it doesn't anymore and now it's just something I do and my left hand is totally fine I occasionally mention this and I hear from people saying how can you do that I don't know how it's possible and say yeah we'll try it
Marco:
It feels weird at first, and you build it up, and you get faster, and you get better.
Marco:
It isn't that hard.
Marco:
And something like this, where to most of us typical computer users using keyboards and mice and trackpads, it seems magical that somebody can use voice control software or other input devices.
Marco:
If you've ever seen a visually impaired person use voiceover who's really good at it, it's a similar thing.
Marco:
It really does seem superhuman to us, because
Marco:
We can't perceive using this tool that way, but that's only because we are not accustomed to it.
Marco:
We are not familiar with it.
Marco:
We aren't already experts with it.
Marco:
We're not using it every day.
Marco:
But that isn't to say that we can't learn.
John:
Yeah, the interesting thing about a lot of these input methods demonstrated in this video is some of them are not necessarily...
John:
any less efficient than the sort of default ones that we use most of the time the reason these input methods demonstrated here aren't in widespread use is either because they have some attribute of them that's annoying so for example controlling the cursor with a little reflective thing that means you have to have something strapped to your head and that is way more of a burden just like
John:
it's annoying to have a thing strapped to your head.
John:
Like, just in terms of mass adoption, right?
John:
Convincing people to put on a headset to use a computer versus you sit down and put your hands on a thing, right?
John:
There's a reason the mouse, you know, is the superior solution in that scenario.
John:
But practically speaking, if you can get over that very tiny hurdle of you put a thing on your head, I'm not entirely convinced that that system is...
John:
less efficient than using a mouse with your hand or that people would be worse at it because we're kind of used to like pointing our heads at things that we're interested in and the second thing is a lot of these input uh solutions require computing power that didn't exist at the time where we were sort of laying the foundation for the current you know de facto set of input methods right and we're kind of stuck with things that weren't like the reason we have the keyboard looking the way it does is because of typewriters right you know so
John:
A lot of these decisions take a long time to change.
John:
And so in the beginning of computing, the idea that you could put a tiny little piece of reflective tape to the end of a headset mic or the idea of a headset mic at all for home computer users and that your computer could visually track it no matter where your head was is science fiction.
John:
But today, no problem.
John:
Right.
John:
And so.
John:
It's going to take a while for the realization that technology can do so much more than it used to to catch up with the evolution of our input methods.
John:
Arguably, the iPhone is an example of that.
John:
Touch input has been around, but it took a while for the technology to get to the point where touch input can finally be good.
John:
Same thing could be true of...
John:
you know, looking at things or pointing your head at things.
John:
And the feet are obviously very often wasted because pedals are cool.
John:
But, you know, that's another situation where the hurdle is now I have to get a thing and sit under my desk and it's on the floor and it's more expensive.
John:
There's all sorts of hurdles besides efficiency.
John:
But I'm saying if you get over all of those, it's like, yeah, but of course, using your head and a foot pedal is less efficient than a mouse.
John:
Is it?
John:
I'm not entirely sure.
John:
It's weirder.
John:
People aren't used to it.
John:
There are barriers to entry that don't exist.
John:
It takes more sophisticated computing and software.
John:
It's not built into the OS.
John:
It's all sorts of things stacked against it.
John:
But once you reach cruising speed, it might be just as good or even better in some scenarios.
John:
Same deal with voice recognition.
John:
Huge technical hurdle, but once you get over it,
John:
It's, you know, it is better.
John:
It is better than typing for a lot of scenarios.
John:
And I say this to somebody, I didn't mention this in the last time we talked about RSI, but the time before that, I think I did.
John:
When I was writing, you know, 40,000 word Mac OS 10 reviews for Ars Technica, for a large portion of them, I dictated them, right?
John:
I mean, granted, it's pros, it's easier.
John:
I'm not programming, right?
John:
But yeah, I dictated them.
John:
That saved me from typing.
John:
And it's weird to do and takes a while to get used to.
John:
And unfortunately, the software used in at least one of these videos, Dragon Dictate for Mac, they don't even make it for Mac anymore, which is kind of crappy.
John:
But yeah, I bought a piece of software and I talked to my computer and it was weird at the beginning, but eventually got used to it.
John:
And it's kind of relaxing to be able to just sort of sit back in your chair and ruminate and fire off a sentence and then change your mind.
John:
And, you know, it's all about touching anything.
John:
Your hands aren't doing anything.
John:
So that was an answer to a question a lot of people asked.
John:
Did you have used voice recognition software?
John:
Yes, I have.
John:
I haven't used it to program Pearl, but I've definitely used it to write prose.
Yeah.
Marco:
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Casey:
Was it this week or last week?
John:
apparently john you need to do your victory lap now about destiny so let's just get it over with it's not a victory lap i'm just pointing out something interesting from the interview yes it's a good interview you should check it out like this is exactly who you'd want to hear talk about that vatici the hardcore ipad user and uh craig federighi who's basically in charge of software or at least in charge of ipad os at apple talking about the uh
John:
the evolution of those two things.
John:
So definitely check it out.
John:
A couple of things jumped out at me in the interview that I thought were cool.
John:
One, and we'll put timestamped links in the show notes for these, was a bit where Craig talks about the logic they added for the thing where when you move the cursor on iPadOS, it sort of like morphs into the button, right?
John:
Like it changes from the little circle to be just highlighting the button if you kind of get near the button.
John:
And he talks about how they did some sort of
John:
essentially a client-side prediction to say if you flicked your finger you know across the trackpad on your ipad pro if you flicked your finger kind of in the direction where a button was and it looks to them like if if allowed to continue at this trajectory at this velocity it would land more or less where the button is
John:
They would do that for you and snap your cursor to the button that it looked like you were kind of flicking towards.
John:
So you're basically making a gesture.
John:
Instead of them requiring you to steer, carefully steer the little cursor there, they would snap the cursor to the button if you have that little cursor changing shape mode on.
John:
And he describes it in a little bit more detail here.
John:
But basically what he's describing is almost word for word a match for portions of the implementation of aim assist in Destiny.
John:
So Destiny is a first person shooter.
John:
You may have heard of it on this program.
John:
It's available for personal computers and consoles.
John:
And on consoles, people use controllers, which have little thumbsticks.
John:
And it's actually pretty hard to precisely control where a little aiming point on the screen is with just your thumb on a thumbstick.
John:
There's not much range of motion and it's not absolute.
John:
It's relative, right?
John:
So it's not like when you put the cursor to the far left, it hits the left end of the screen and the far it hits the right.
John:
You're kind of like driving the cursor.
John:
So there's all sorts of limitations that make controlling the cursor with a thumbstick worse for precision than, say, using a mouse or touching the screen directly, which is what the kids these days do or whatever.
John:
So to make a first-person shooter playable, games usually have to have some kind of aim assist that has to interpret what you're doing with your thumb to control the cursor and what's on the screen.
John:
And so if it looks like, for example, you're flicking your finger up towards where somebody's head is...
John:
And they calculated that trajectory that, you know, if it continued along that course, your cursor would come more or less near the head.
John:
They will snap your aiming little aiming cursor to the head so that you can pull the fire button and get a headshot.
John:
Whereas in reality, if they let the cursor go where it was going to go, maybe it wouldn't have been anywhere near their head.
John:
Maybe you would have just fired over their shoulder or something like that.
John:
And there's all sorts of kinds of aim assist in Destiny, not just what I described.
John:
But all that stuff needs to be there to make the game playable and fun.
John:
And the interesting thing about it in terms of gaming, and I'm probably also true of, you know, hardcore iPad users like Vatici, is that
John:
If you play Destiny with a controller, you play the aim assist.
John:
Once you get to sort of a medium level of experience with the game, you realize the aim assist is there, you understand it's there, and you play it.
John:
You know that if I kind of just gesture as quick as I can in this general direction, there's a certain amount of magnetism that player's head has for my aiming cursor.
John:
And rather than taking the time to carefully get in that direction, at which point I'll be shot myself, I quickly flick towards there and time it so that
John:
The aim assist where my cursor slows down ever so slightly when it passes over their head that I can pull the trigger at the same time.
John:
By the way, I'm terrible at this.
John:
I'm the world's worst drag sniper.
John:
But I still play the aim assist even just for primary weapons.
John:
So this was exciting to me because it was hearing the application, not because it's Destiny, but hearing the application of general gaming technology because every first-person shooter that has control or support does something like this.
John:
The application of gaming technology to personal computers
John:
to non-gaming applications and i think that's a great idea i think we should see more of that uh all the same tech that make games fun to play and make them feel responsive and make it feel like the game is doing what you meant in your head and not what you did with your actual body all that it just makes using your iphone or your ipad or even your mac also feel good so more of that please
Casey:
I would just like you to know that because I feel so lost by the terminology in destiny, it was only halfway through your monologue when I realized you were saying aim assist.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
No, no, no, no.
Casey:
You pronounced it correctly, but I kept hearing in my brain amethyst, which I assumed was some sort of weird destiny thing.
Casey:
This is on me.
Casey:
You were pronouncing it just fine.
Casey:
It's just I'm so used to not understanding.
Marco:
It's the Long Island accent.
Casey:
I'm so used to not understanding anything Destiny related that I just assumed this was another case.
Casey:
And then about a minute or two ago, oh, aim assist.
John:
The more derogatory term was called auto aim.
John:
Back in the day, the PC users say, oh, you have auto aim automatically aims for you.
John:
By the way, PC users, sorry to disappoint you, but Destiny and PC also has a little bit of auto aim.
John:
Don't tell anybody.
John:
um yeah but i mean if you want to see videos on this topic just search for like on youtube just search for like uh how to make platforming feel good or all sorts of stuff like every game does this to some degree uh there's lots of platforming videos because they there's just well-known uh things that platformers do like for example coyote time which is a coin a term that was coined um
John:
i don't know maybe a decade ago or so and that everyone these video uses uh that's i have to give so much context i feel like merlin i have to give so much context to explain this coyote time refers to wiley coyote who's wiley coyote oh god wiley coyote uh used to chase a roadrunner he was a cartoon uh and one of the things that would happen in the videos is he would chase the road did he die why is this past tense is he dead
John:
I mean, I don't think they're making any new Wile E. Coyote cartoons.
John:
Maybe I'm wrong, but they make new Mickey Mouse cartoons now.
John:
I haven't checked on Disney Plus or I don't think they own.
John:
That's a Warner Brother thing, isn't it?
John:
Anyway, Wile E. Coyote would run and he was always running around where there are lots of big cliffs for comedic value.
John:
And he would run and find himself find that he had run off the edge of a cliff, but he wouldn't fall to his death until he realized that he'd fallen off the edge of the cliff.
John:
So at a certain point, he's in midair.
John:
over the edge of the cliff so we can all appreciate his comedic situation then he looks down and then he falls uh pretty much every platform game that feels good a game where you're like a side scroller where you're jumping around with a little character allows you to essentially run off the edge of a cliff and still hit jump even though you're no longer on the cliff because if they didn't you would feel cheated by the game you're like hey i hit jump i didn't fall and the game knows no actually your little character was off the edge of the cliff before you hit jump so you should by all rights fall to your death but instead
John:
we will build in some amount of coyote time, which allows you to jump.
John:
In fact, speaking of a modern game, there was a good video, I think, on the Celeste video game, a game that Tiff really enjoyed and talked about with Mike on their gaming podcast.
John:
Celeste does that and more.
John:
You can find that video.
John:
If I find it, I'll put it in the show notes.
John:
If not, just search for Celeste game mechanics or something.
John:
All that stuff, like I said, all that stuff that makes games feel good and fun also makes computers feel good and fun.
Marco:
So I like seeing it here.
Marco:
And I always like seeing some of this talent applied to things that aren't just shooting people in the head.
John:
Yeah, although shooting people in the head is not good in real life.
John:
But virtually, it's basically just like playing a game of tag, especially since you respond instantly.
John:
So I endorse it when it is in the context of space magic and not reality.
John:
And the second thing that Craig talked about was one of our pet peeves, closing apps.
John:
So he was talking about how people who grew up with technology that was less advanced get used to the idea that they have to deal with memory.
John:
Like he didn't bring this out specifically, but back on the classic Mac, you two probably don't remember this, but back in classic Mac OS, you could get info on a file in the finder in one of the fields in the get info window.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so an application would come with a default allocation.
John:
But if you want to do something, you know, if you want to open a really big document or you want to do something demanding or whatever, you can increase that amount of memory and that type of manual management of like, oh, I have to keep track of how much memory the thing needs.
John:
And if it's set, if it's limited, set too low, I have to like quit the app and make it bigger and launch it again.
John:
You know, all that sort of ridiculous stuff of managing memory.
John:
He brings it up in the more modern context of, you know, on the Mac, I have to worry about whether an application is running or not.
John:
Do we need to launch the application first?
John:
That was the whole push at various points in the history of macOS to make the distinction between running and non-running applications work.
John:
you know less visible to the user down to the point where they stuck there's still a preference where you can remove that little dot on the dock that's supposed to be underneath running applications you could just make it so there's no dots and what do you care if it's running or not if it's not running and you launch it it'll just pick up right where you left because good mac developers implement auto save and resume and state restoration just like ios developers ios developers had to do it because their app could be killed at any time and was killed at any time uh when there was no multitasking and now it's killed less frequently but still killed so every ios app has had to do this
John:
uh from day one but mac apps haven't and it's been difficult to bring up the speed of it but all this is about how that mindset of making the user worry about implementation details related to memory and running applications was you know something of the past uh and he said and craig says people who were brought up in that environment to this day we see them uh constantly force quitting applications on their iphones right
John:
Which is true.
John:
He didn't go so far as to tell those people they were bad or wrong, but they are, right?
John:
Because he's very political, right?
John:
But he did say that people who are brought up in that older world bring those habits forward and think they need to manually replace, which I think is also true.
John:
But...
John:
I would say that even kids who are brought up and have no idea what classic Mac OS is, they brought up on modern things, the first device they ever used was an iPhone or an iPad, they're doing it too.
John:
And it's not because they're used to the idea that they have to manually manage memory.
John:
So I really hope that, you know, this is just a throw offline in one podcast, but I really hope that Apple understands the root problem related to people obsessively force quitting apps is not that everyone who's doing it is an old fuddy-duddy who grew up using classic Mac OS.
John:
That's not what's causing this.
John:
There are people like that for sure, right?
John:
But that's not the root cause.
John:
And so I hope they have a deeper understanding of exactly what's going on and exactly why this phenomenon of reflexively force quitting every single application on your iOS device has swept the world like coronavirus.
John:
Anyway, bad comparison.
John:
I'm sorry.
Marco:
Yeah, if you didn't bring up this part of this angle on that interview, I was going to bring it up because I love that interview.
Marco:
The Federico and Federighi interview over on App Stories was fantastic.
Marco:
I really enjoyed it.
Marco:
But that was the one thing that stood out when he kind of disregarded or excused this behavior of people force quitting apps as, oh, well, it's just people who were used to the old way of doing things on PCs.
Marco:
Like, no.
Marco:
that's not it.
Marco:
People do it for many more reasons than that, some of which are actually good reasons, much to my chagrin as a developer because people force quit my app all the time and then complain about it not background updating and stuff, which they basically caused by force quitting it.
Marco:
Regardless, it's a real thing that people do for very good reasons, some of which are urban legends, some of which are placebo, but some of which are actually real reasons.
Marco:
And if Apple doesn't understand them yet, they really should.
John:
their reasons aren't good but their reasons exist and aren't what what craig said right so they they have their reasons for doing it they're just mistaken about uh you know the connection between you know thing that i want therefore action will get what i want and you know as you point out marco a lot of times like they may want something but their action causes the other harm like oh why doesn't overcast ever download my stuff in the background because you keep force quitting it that's why why are you force quitting it well i just always i just always force quit everything
John:
This brings me back to that idea that I had, you know, many shows ago that some new version of iOS should, you know, provide like a single button to quote unquote force quit everything.
John:
Just make all the little pictures disappear from the multitasking switcher, but not have it actually force quit everything.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Because those rules can change at any time.
John:
And they do.
John:
Like, what does force quitting do?
John:
How many people who aren't developers know all the consequences of swiping up that little thing?
John:
Like, very few, right?
John:
And they wouldn't be doing it reflexively anyway.
John:
But, like, I don't want to get too deep into it again, because we've talked about it many times in the past, but people want to clean that thing up.
John:
And every once in a while, there's a super-duper legit reason to force quit a single misbehaving app or a few misbehaving apps.
John:
But...
John:
It's just so much easier mentally to say, you know what?
John:
Look, I'm just going to clean them all up.
John:
It makes me feel good to clean them all up.
John:
Every once in a while, it fixes Facebook from killing my phone battery.
John:
So it's just a thing I'm going to do from now on is I'm going to force quit every app all the time.
John:
It's my idle animation.
John:
I'm online.
John:
Force quit, force quit, force quit.
John:
I'm going to put my phone in my pocket.
John:
Force quit, force quit, force quit, force quit.
John:
Please, everybody, don't do this for a variety of reasons.
John:
Force quit apps when they need to, not reflexively all the time because it's fun.
Casey:
It was a good interview, and it's worth your time.
Casey:
John and Marco, can you please ensure that you have given me lifetime free access to your applications?
Casey:
I want to make sure that I have all of your stuff for free.
John:
I haven't gotten that one.
John:
That's an interesting one.
Casey:
I wasn't sure which one of you this was that put this in the show notes, but the show notes reads unsolicited emails that developers receive new line quote, give me your app for free quote.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So this is just, I want to have a preface here.
John:
This is not like serious complaint, at least not for me, not, not a serious kind of complaint.
John:
or anything like that it's not like saying oh it's so hard to be developer because people email us not that at all it's just that you know as someone who as a newbie to the the apple app stores i just recently put an app into two apps into the mac app store i noticed that i started to get a bunch of emails that i did not get in the past right just because i have you know a couple of apps in the app store
John:
One of those varieties of emails that I've been listing here is essentially an email that where someone asks for a free copy of your application.
John:
Now, there are legit versions of that.
John:
Hey, I want I want to review your application for my publication.
John:
Can you give me a free copy or whatever?
John:
You can argue about the ethics of them getting a free copy and reviewing it and stuff like that.
John:
But that's what promo codes are for.
John:
You know, partially Apple gives you a system where you can generate a coupon code that you can give to somebody and they get a free copy of your app.
John:
Great.
John:
Like there are legit reasons for that.
John:
And, hey, people can ask.
John:
It doesn't hurt to ask, right?
John:
If you want a free copy of an app, maybe you just ask for it, maybe you'll get one.
John:
Maybe you have a story.
John:
Oh, I'm a student and I really want to use your app to make this thing, but I can't afford it because it's expensive.
John:
Whatever.
John:
Everyone's got a reason.
John:
The reason I bring this up, though, is that
John:
Just having two apps, I noticed a certain similarity, almost as if it's like a form letter and automation to a particular form of asking for the free app where there's no real effort to give a reason.
John:
Like I'm in financial straits or whatever, or I really need this app to do it, which makes sense for my apps, which are, you know, simple utility apps that don't cost a lot of money and honestly don't provide so much functionality.
John:
But like, I need this app for my work.
John:
No, you don't.
John:
Like, it's an app switcher and a window layering, like, you know, behavior modification.
John:
There is no work that you do that requires those applications, right?
John:
But, you know, after the, you know, 50th or 60th one of these emails that all look the same and say, please may have your application for free, I started to think, what is this?
John:
Like, what is the benefit of, you know...
John:
And mechanically, you know, through some automation, simply sending every single developer on the App Store a free request or the application.
John:
I suppose, you know, even with a very small hit rate, if you send out 300,000 emails and you get 0.01% back, you know, you've got some free apps.
John:
Great.
John:
But then of what value are those free apps?
John:
Like, did someone write a script and do this and then they get like three or four free apps each day and they're excited by them, but they never actually run them?
John:
Because they're going to be...
John:
random apps someone replies okay here's a free copy of my app and you're like oh well I don't need this app is it just kind of like a collecting thing where you never actually use the apps you just you just want to have the free copies and you can compare like who has the most free apps like you know look how many free apps I have you know like you compete to see who has the most if you can break the purchase page in the app store by having hundreds of thousands you know or hundreds of thousands of apps anyway I just thought this was interesting and it made me think about the kinds of
John:
emails that you expose yourself to by participating in an ecosystem and in this case it's the app store or whatever and i have my two little dinky apps and this is the one i could think of but i just thought you two probably have similar stories especially marco about the kinds of emails you start getting once you're in the app store especially if you have like a significant application with kind of a high profile but i guess i'll start by asking do you two get the give me a free copy of your app email and does it look to you like some kind of automation
Casey:
No, I almost, I don't, I can't remember a single time I've gotten that.
Casey:
So maybe my apps aren't as good or aren't as popular or aren't as visible, but not as expensive as mine.
John:
Your apps are free though, right?
Casey:
That's maybe that's why I'm free to download.
John:
And then, uh, they're both five bucks, but it's a different, a different form letter to say, can I please have your own app purchase for free?
Casey:
Again, it surely has happened at some point, but off the top of my head, I can't remember it having happened.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I used to get these all the time for Instapaper because when I ran it, Instapaper had a paid upfront app and I didn't use an app purchase at the time.
Marco:
or at least not, anyway, for a while.
Marco:
Anyway, so it was paid up front.
Marco:
So I got these emails all the time.
Marco:
So one of the reasons people would get it is, hey, I want to review it, or I'm just a poor college student, please give me people begging for it.
Marco:
And there was not much value, honestly, in giving most of these people free copies of your app.
Marco:
It's one thing if you are serving some kind of
Marco:
humanitarian or charitable purpose.
Marco:
But if you're looking at it purely from a business point of view, what's the value to me of a few people having a free copy?
Marco:
It's usually not even worth your time to respond.
Marco:
What about exposure, Marco?
Marco:
Yeah, so that's one of the most common variants that I got was along the lines of
Marco:
Hi, I'm so-and-so.
Marco:
I have a popular YouTube channel in country X that is not your country.
Marco:
If you give me a promo code for your app plus like three other promo codes to give away on my channel, I'll talk about you and you can have exposure, that kind of thing.
Marco:
So you were asking, John, what people do with their free codes.
Marco:
If they get more than one, they usually will use one for themselves, and they will give one away as some kind of contest on their YouTube channel or their blog or whatever.
Marco:
These days, it's usually a YouTube channel.
Marco:
And the funny thing is, if you actually look at these people's YouTube channels, they have, what, 30 subscribers maybe?
Marco:
You're never going to get any kind of meaningful value out of that.
Marco:
I would also say, just as anecdotal counterargument to those kinds of things...
Marco:
I have gotten lots of press reviews of my apps so far throughout my career, and they never asked for a promo code.
Marco:
The ones that actually mattered, the ones that actually got significant attention that actually possibly might have moved the needle of sales of my apps at all,
Marco:
were never anything that requested a promo code from me.
Marco:
So for whatever it's worth, but I get those emails all the time for Instapaper.
Marco:
For Overcast, I haven't.
Marco:
And I think it's because these are free apps up front.
Marco:
For a long time, you couldn't even have promo codes for in-app purchases.
Marco:
I'm not sure you can now.
Marco:
And if you can now, I'm not sure whether you can do it for subscription purchases or not.
Marco:
And since Overcast currently only has a subscription purchase, I don't know if there's any real way for me to do that.
John:
but either way nobody ever asks um but yeah certainly the uh you know exposure on my youtube channel give me five codes to give away for like 30 subscribers that's that was a very common thing to get this was an interesting uh some amount of savvy that they must know that there's no such thing that for as a promo code for a subscription based in app purchase or whatever otherwise they would just ask anyway and you know whether or not you can actually give it to them so there's feels like there's knowledge on the other end um
John:
yeah the exposure or whatever like my apps no one's buying them anymore anyway so it doesn't matter but like i i give away free apps all the time like i don't care if i if i'm if i happen to have the app store connect window open and i want to generate a promo i can generate a promo i'll just give them like i don't i'm not begrudging these people these apps i just at a certain point i became amazed at the sameness
John:
At the sameness and then like – in the case of my weird little apps, I'm amazed that anyone would go through the effort to write an email for a free copy for this weird app.
John:
I feel like saying, do you know what this app does?
John:
You're probably not going to like it.
John:
Like especially if you're an automated form thing like –
John:
It's just going to be, like, here you go, but, like, of all the free things to ask for, like, you really, you know, especially if they write more than one sentence and have some kind of explanation, it's like, ask for a free copy of Photoshop or something.
John:
Like, Switch Glass is not going to change your world too much.
Marco:
Well, and people did.
Marco:
I mean, and I think this kind of thing made more sense when software cost hundreds of dollars.
Marco:
But these days when, you know, most of the things that are receiving these emails cost, like,
John:
one to five dollars you know that's it's a lot less of i'm at the top of that range five dollars is the hundred dollars of today's app store yeah it is my app is incredibly expensive at 499 but you know i understand some people can't some some people can't afford that exchange rates that people don't have money kids or whatever that fine here's a free copy like i'm glad you like it tell all your friends right but it's just weird that that's that is a a steady trickle of people just
John:
people and or scripts asking for free copies apps the other thing is that then i never hear from them again right no one ever replies and say gee thanks for the free app like you will never hear from them again you send you send the promo code they redeem it and that's that's it struggle is real so what other what other things have you gotten uh what other kinds strains of emails that you get just by being on the app store well first of all you will hear from dun and brad street oh god are they a scam
Casey:
I feel like every three to six months I send a DM to Marco and underscore in Slack saying, hey, I just got this thing from Dun & Bradstreet.
Casey:
This is total garbage, right?
Casey:
And usually it's like a race between the two of them to see which one of them will say, yes, total garbage.
Casey:
Throw it away.
Marco:
Yeah, so Dun & Bradstreet, they're some kind of business directory company or something that's been around forever.
Marco:
And Apple uses them to, during your account setup, when you set up a business app store account, Apple uses Dun & Bradstreet to verify your info.
Marco:
It basically has almost like a credit or verification agency.
Marco:
They're using them in that role.
Marco:
And so you have to submit your info.
Marco:
And Apple makes it easy.
Marco:
It used to be way harder.
Marco:
Apple now makes it pretty easy to go through this process, but basically you are submitting all of your business info, your EIN, your name and address and everything, to this private company down in Bradstreet for Apple to verify through them that you seem to be a legit business.
Marco:
And then, after that, Dunham Bradstreet will, for the rest of time, spam you with the most hilariously misleading, scammy, both phone calls and postal mail stuff.
Marco:
And I think maybe also email.
Marco:
So it typically will say something along the lines of, you need to complete your business credit report.
Marco:
And finish your business credit report today by filling out this form or paying us this money or whatever.
Marco:
And all it is is Dun & Bradstreet basically selling you fake verification for fake spots and fake yellow pages, that kind of crap.
Marco:
And every business gets weird, scammy solicitation attempts from services, usually in the mail, just by having registered a business somewhere in some database somewhere.
Marco:
But Dun & Bradstreet really takes it to another level by how scammy their stuff looks.
Marco:
And it makes it really just dirty feeling that Apple is so involved with them, or at least was.
Marco:
I don't know if they still are, but Apple basically forces all developers with business accounts to subject themselves to this other company and give them all this information.
Marco:
But I wonder if they still do it.
John:
Yeah, I had to do it.
John:
Oh, great.
John:
So they still do it.
John:
As of the beginning of this year, and I was just registering as an individual.
John:
I didn't have an LLC at that point, and I still had to do it.
John:
And they did call me.
Marco:
For a company that values privacy so much, it's kind of crappy that Apple forces everyone to submit themselves to this really terrible company.
John:
their checking wasn't even that thorough you know what you reminded me of when you mentioned snail mails do you guys still get the snail mail of uh this isn't being the app store but if you have any domain names registered there's a reasonable chance that you're going to get a actual piece of paper mail to your house that says your domain is going to expire renew today and it's basically another registrar trying to essentially get you to transfer your domain name from your registrar to them what no i don't think i've ever gotten one of these
Marco:
I do a pretty good job of not having my address on any of my Whois anywhere.
Marco:
Most of the time, I don't get those for domains.
Marco:
I do get them occasionally for business registration stuff.
Marco:
I will frequently get stuff that's like New York tax scams.
Marco:
It'll look like I owe money to the state
Marco:
and it's really you have to look really carefully and find like the one line of text on this piece of paper somewhere that says like this is a service but by a third party like but it's real scammy like it's and but that's just any business in new york state and probably any state yeah the domain name stuff like uh in the days before hover uh domain privacy was either not common or very expensive for both and so i'd
John:
do have domains or did have domains where i didn't have domain privacy and now i think it's just you know they're forever gonna be sending me snail mail with some kind of domain name come i think i still think every year i go check this and i just say like are there any domains that i still haven't transferred to hover which frequent sponsor of the show you know disclaimer disclaimer but like i i legit put my own i don't i don't get any kind of you know free domains i'm legit paying for my own domains to be on hover just because it's convenient to have them all in one place and hover is a nice service yada yada this is not an ad anyway
John:
Some domains like I bought a long time ago that on like five year, like long expiration dates or something.
John:
And every year I go and say, are all my domains on hover?
John:
And it's like, Oh, there's still that one over there.
John:
And it has like multiple years left on it.
John:
And I'm like, do I want to go through the transfer thing?
John:
I'm like,
John:
yeah no i'll just wait a little longer so i keep deferring it so it could be some or like i think actually hover doesn't do some subdomains as well some really super obscure ones that hover either didn't do or doesn't do anyway all this is to say is that i'm hoping someday when all my domains are on hover that has who is privacy by default i think uh this will be solved not that i look at my snail mail anyway but i do recall seeing one of those in the past several years and still continue to boggle my mind that this is a thing that people do
Marco:
Another very significant scam that app developers get once you go to a certain size, there's this company, I cannot think of what it's called.
Marco:
They email you cold, and it sounds like what they want to do is...
Marco:
Get your app featured on their TV show that airs on some cable channel.
Casey:
Oh, yes, yes.
Casey:
Oh, man, I know what you're thinking of.
Casey:
Oh, what is that called?
Marco:
I can't find it in my email.
Marco:
I can't remember even what cable channel.
Marco:
It was like Bravo or something.
Marco:
I can't find it.
Marco:
Anyway.
Casey:
No, it wasn't Bravo.
Casey:
I know what you're thinking of, though.
Marco:
Yeah, you got it.
Marco:
Probably every developer gets this.
Marco:
So it's like we produce a video segment on technology on cable TV, and it gets millions of people, whatever, whatever.
Marco:
And we'd love to feature your app in a segment on our show.
Marco:
It's very salesy.
Marco:
It's like, you know, contact us if you want to talk more and everything.
Marco:
So one time I actually did.
Marco:
I was curious.
Marco:
I'm like, well, that sounds like a lot of people.
Marco:
What do they want from me to get featured on their show?
Marco:
If they just want to talk about my app, it's no skin off my back.
Marco:
So I scheduled a phone call with them.
Marco:
And what you eventually learn on the phone call is that
Marco:
They are going to you have to pay them thousands of dollars and they will produce a video segment.
Marco:
And it doesn't actually really air to any number of people like whatever cable channel it is might show it once at like two in the morning or something.
Marco:
And they have this YouTube channel that they also will publish it to, and many of their advertised numbers of, like, you'll get this many subscribers are actually, like, YouTube views, and their YouTube channel looks horrendously sketchy, and it looks terrible, and it doesn't seem like anybody watches it or anybody real watches it.
Marco:
But it takes you quite a lot of engagement with them before you can even get to the point where you can realize this, where you can realize, like, okay, A...
Marco:
they don't seem to have the audience they claim to have and B, they want me to pay them a lot of money for this.
Marco:
So really what they are is like a video production.
Marco:
You pay them to make kind of an infomercial about your app and nobody will ever see it.
Marco:
And it's, I actually went and watched some of the things they make and they're hilariously like low effort, formulaic, low value.
Marco:
It's just amazing.
Marco:
And they wanted, I forget what they said, but I think they wanted like,
Casey:
at least like five thousand dollars it was a lot of money anybody on the app store for a non-trivial amount of time you're very likely to get that oh god i gotta look up what this is jelly has found it jelly has found it uh so this was addressed to jelly whose actual name is daniel hi daniel i'm reaching out to you because one of our senior producers here at newswatch that's it newswatch came across
Casey:
Came across GIFRAFT and thought it would be great for a feature on our nationwide show.
Casey:
In case you haven't had a chance to watch an episode, Newswatch's 30-minute morning – I can't believe I'm reading this, but it's so bad.
Casey:
30-minute morning news show brings our audience up to date on the latest innovations for both consumers and businesses, from apps and tech products to B2B services.
Casey:
I'm surprised you got through B2B and didn't just immediately delete this, Marco.
Casey:
And even interviews with celebrities.
Casey:
The program is broadcast nationwide on the AMC network in over 200 markets and reaches over 95 million households across the U.S.
Marco:
Yeah, so that's what I got.
Marco:
I scheduled to call them.
Marco:
This is back in early 2019.
Marco:
Oh, here.
Marco:
Their standard plan is $4,500.
Marco:
They go all the way up to the exposure package, $9,500.
Marco:
Exposure package.
Marco:
All the metrics are still the same.
Marco:
I wonder what's different.
Marco:
It's standard interview or exposure for $4,500, $7,000, $9,500.
Marco:
But all the metrics say they're the same.
Marco:
What does exposure get me for $9,500?
Marco:
Yeah, that's...
Marco:
yeah so there's the thing is the app store is uh an active market where people are making lots of money and there's lots of traffic and lots of everything so there's going to be a million vultures out there there's going to be scammers there's going to be just opportunistic vultures who aren't quite running scams but they're at least doing things kind of not in a great way uh there's going to be all sorts of stuff because it's an active market it is possible to make money here and
Marco:
through legit and non-legit ways.
Marco:
And so people will try, and many of them will succeed.
Marco:
There are so many scams on the App Store and around the App Store.
Marco:
This is just scratching the surface.
John:
I'd say the general advice for anyone listening to this apps in the App Store is, if you have an app that you know is an app you made, it's cool, you like it, but it's not super popular, like my apps.
John:
They're little toy apps that I like and think are cool, but they're not super popular.
John:
If you get people approaching you with business deals, they're probably scams.
John:
If you are a big app developer and you have a popular, sophisticated, well-regarded, well-reviewed app, you're going to get legit people talking to you like, hey, let's do this thing, right?
John:
But be suspicious if your app has like 10 downloads ever.
John:
And you're getting people who want to do business deals with your great app.
John:
Like just it's sometimes it feels good to think that, oh, hey, someone noticed my app.
John:
But chances are like, you know, compare, compare your compare your sales numbers to the supposed attention you think you're getting.
John:
Marco needs to be a little more careful because he does have an actual popular app that people know about that people want to do legit business deals with them all the time, which he also rejects.
John:
But whatever, like there's legitimate people are doing that.
John:
But if you just put your first app in the app store next week, someone wants to do a great, important business deal with you.
John:
Probably a scam.
Marco:
Something's up recently.
Marco:
I don't know what the market force is that's happening right now, but in the last month, I've heard from three different companies who expressed serious interest in buying my app, not because they wanted a podcast app necessarily, but because they wanted to just buy my app and just stick their ads in the bottom of it and they can make enough money through those ads to pay good prices for apps.
Marco:
Is that market somehow hot?
John:
right now harder than usual i don't know if they can buy your app for a little enough money and it's an automated process you make it up in volume i guess you buy a bunch of apps you put your ads in the bottom you they you know they fit people takes about a week for people to notice you get your impressions during that week and you're done and you just depend on the app or delete it from the store and just rinse and repeat right
John:
but this was like actual humans reaching out specifically for actual like this app with substantial offers like you got to compare like the more users an app has the more it's worth their time to actually engage humans and try to actually you know what i mean like it's i don't know how the math works out but maybe they do you know yeah we'll see if you keep getting offers like this five years from now assuming we're all still here um then it's obviously a viable business for somebody i advise you don't sell by the way
John:
thank you yeah i i don't really want to usually i like everyone has a price right yeah i would i would sell if somebody offered enough money uh but that number is very high my number is lower call me actually no my number actually well yeah all right it is lower but still not as low as you think because if someone you know bought my little utility apps and ruin them i would have to write them again because i run them all day so i do actually need them to continue working yeah
Marco:
yeah i i just at this like i i learned my my past story with like having an app having apps and then selling them like it was it was fraught there were problems like one of the reasons i have no interest in selling is because things are going well and and you know i don't really have anything else i want to be working on uh but also like i don't want my podcast app to suck like
Marco:
And if I sell my app to somebody who is going to ruin it in some way, then I won't have a good podcast app to use anymore because I don't like anyone else's.
Marco:
That's the reason I made mine.
Marco:
So I would probably just make another one.
Marco:
Like, I don't know.
John:
I'm not sure how well that would go over with the deal.
John:
The Brent Simmons approach.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
I think you have to wait like 10 years in between those two events, though.
John:
Yeah, and I probably wouldn't be able to do that.
Casey:
Well, that's how you know you're a cool kid is if Marco puts you on the test flight for Sunny, the replacement for Overcast.
Casey:
John, is this going to be a happy story about importing old footage or is this going to be a sad story?
Casey:
Because I don't know if I can handle a sad story right now.
John:
uh it's an in-betweeny one oh goodness yeah no it's not not you'll see anyway all right tell me about importing mini dv videos so when i first had my kids the state-of-the-art technology my or at least my my first kid the state-of-the-art technology for taking videos of your kids was still uh mini dv camcorders this is a tiny little magnetic tape in this adorable little mini
John:
Yeah.
John:
It didn't take long for iPhones and, in my case, iPod Touches and other things to come out and video to be taken in more convenient packages, right?
John:
But before that happened, I recorded many, many tapes of my kids, both my kids, in fact, although the first more than the second.
John:
You know how that goes, parents.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And but many DV tapes, especially in the time I was making them, I had like my blue and white G3.
John:
I think when I first started making these, that's actually a lot of data.
John:
Like if you just pull the digital, the DV files off of the many DV tapes, it was gigs and gigs.
John:
And that used to be a lot back in the days before, you know, multi terabyte hard drives.
John:
So I'd have them on the tape.
John:
And the tapes are digital, right?
John:
But I can't actually take them off the tape and put them on, like, my computer.
John:
They wouldn't fit.
John:
They were, like, 100 times larger than the capacity of the hard drives on my computer.
John:
So they're never going to go on my computer.
John:
But I did, you know, I would take snippets of the footage and I would edit them in iMovie and I'd make a little movie and share it with their relatives.
John:
Like, I'd do all that.
John:
But even just doing that one iMovie project for, like, a 60-second clip or something was...
John:
you know significant amount of data and then i would just throw away the files and just keep the finished video right so i had all those i had all my little projects of little things but i had the raw material hours and hours literally hours of mini tv footage and all these tapes and i wanted to have them like available in some way on my computer so way back in the day it was in the mac os 10 era i got an app called i dive
John:
that unfortunately no longer exists and what iDive would do is you'd hook up your camcorder and it would essentially do two things one it could take like a take like a tiny thumb blurry little thumbnail every n seconds so you'd have like a scrubbable thumbnail you know highly compressed thumbnail timeline of your video and two you could also make massively compressed postage stamp size you know h.264 or whatever was the
John:
The algorithm of the day.
John:
I think this might predate H.264.
John:
Tiny, heavily compressed, miniature versions of your stuff.
John:
And you could fit all of that on my computer at the time.
John:
So what I did was I used iDive to transfer these thumbnail and heavily compressed tiny versions of the video.
John:
to my computer just so if i ever said oh where's that video of you know my daughter doing this cute thing i didn't have to remember which tape it was on i could go and physically look you know scrub through the video oh it's that one and then pull out the tape and get the quote unquote high quality footage off of the mini dv and do stuff with it in iMovie right um
John:
And if anyone doesn't remember or never knew what importing DV footage was like, at least with my camcorder, the only option I had was essentially press play on the camcorder and allow the computer to record in real time.
John:
So if you have 90 minutes of mini DV, that's going to take 90 minutes to import.
John:
Repeat for your shoebox full of tapes.
John:
It took a long time.
Marco:
Yeah, because the mini DV format, I think, was very closely tied to FireWire.
Marco:
I think it was basically sending a raw FireWire stream.
Marco:
It was like 400 megabits per second.
Marco:
It was something like that.
Marco:
It was very closely related to the FireWire spec, and FireWire was basically made for DV.
John:
Yeah, they were tied closer together.
John:
A lot of the selling points of FireWire was that it could handle the latency and the strict timing required to have that constant stream of video coming down so it didn't have any hiccups or anything.
John:
Anyway, the FireWire USB battles were long over, but back in the day it was important.
John:
My camcorder did have a FireWire 400 port because that was the only FireWire at the time I got it.
John:
So I did that.
John:
I spent the hours importing everything into iDive.
John:
And I brought that iDive library with me along from, you know, my Power Macs into my Mac Pro.
John:
And then eventually I brought it on to my current Mac Pro.
John:
And this is long after iDive stopped being developed.
John:
This is long after iDive stopped working, I think, even.
John:
I think it broke in one of the old versions of macOS.
John:
But if it hadn't broken then, it certainly would have broken now because it was a 32-bit app.
John:
And, of course, you know.
John:
Anyway, and the company that makes it, like, just has a sad little web page.
John:
It's like...
John:
We don't make iDev anymore.
John:
Sorry.
John:
But I had all this footage in iDive, and I was like, well, can I rescue that?
John:
Or do I want to rescue that?
John:
So, you know, I did.
John:
This is kind of a Casey solution.
John:
You know, fire up a VM with an old version of Mac OS X on it.
John:
You know, and...
John:
Yeah, that works.
John:
And you can run iDive.
John:
I don't recommend it, but I got it working well enough to be able to sort of look at what's in iDive.
John:
And with modern eyes, it's like, yeah, this isn't really worth saving.
John:
The total size was like 50 gigs or something, but it's 50 gigs of postage stamp size garbage thing.
John:
So I'm like, okay, well...
John:
uh that was fun having i dive there was useful as a way to look things up quickly but now it is no value to me but i do actually want the contents of those videos so i had to eventually face the reality that i would i have to re-import everything and that meant you know 90 minutes per tape i did that over the course of many many weeks and
John:
and i imported and i use modern compression these like h.265 and the the full quality ones they're still big by the way if you'd import them like i don't know if it's uncompressed but it seems minimally compressed or uncompressed they're they're big but even by modern standards but if you h.265 compress them you can get really good quality and they end up being kind of small so i re-imported every single one of these tapes and then i deleted my iDrive library notice casey the order that i did that in by the way
John:
Yes, yes.
John:
Reimport the new ones first.
John:
Then, anyway, because for all I know, the tapes are all entirely bad.
John:
And that's the one wrinkle in this is that when I was reimporting them, a couple of them, especially at the beginning of the tapes, would have all sorts of digital noise and stuff all over them, like these giant blocks of, you know, white and blue and pink and stuff like that.
John:
I'm like, hmm, well, you know, these tapes are very old.
John:
They may have deteriorated, stretched out, you know, got demagnetized or whatever.
John:
But very frequently, if I saw that, I would stop, rewind the tape.
John:
Everyone loves rewinding.
John:
And then start the import over again.
John:
And either the noise would go away or I'd get different noise.
John:
And so each tape that I had noise on, I took two or three attempts to see.
John:
And I would only let it run if I got past the first minute or so with minimal noise.
John:
But it was interesting.
John:
This is my first actual experience with trying to rescue digitally stored media from my distant past and having some of it deteriorate.
John:
The good thing about whatever algorithm or whatever format they're using is that just because there's some noise and garbage and, you know, it's not, I say noise, it's analog noise.
John:
Just because some of the bits are obviously flipped and screwed up on this thing,
John:
it didn't stop it from importing it didn't stop it from mostly working there's just some garbage on the screen and it eventually clears up i'm glad the entire tapes weren't like this like it was mostly just at the beginning uh but a few of them you know i did have some data loss like there are sections of the picture of the first few minutes of a couple of these dozens of tapes that have a bunch of garbage in and we're going to get those back so
John:
What can you do?
John:
But I'm mostly glad that it worked and that I now have a hopefully more robust digital copy of this.
John:
Fingers crossed for BitRot not to bite me.
John:
And then, of course, it has entered my patented backup Vortex and is now copied in a thousand places.
John:
Including, by the way, putting them into my photo library.
John:
Because why the hell not?
John:
That puts it in five more places.
John:
So...
John:
That's it.
John:
It was mostly a good story.
John:
I didn't actually lose any.
John:
None of the tapes were unreadable, but maybe three or four minutes of video total are kind of scrambled a little bit out of the hundreds and hundreds of minutes that I recorded.
John:
Not just technology-wise, but it became clear to me when watching it that I, at least personally, used to record video in a very different way back then.
John:
Every shot was like...
John:
they were long right i mean i would film 90 minute tapes no one is taking 90 minute videos of their kids on their iphone unless there's some like very enthusiastic relative who wants to record little timmy's entire birthday party people are taking clips and honestly if you try to do 4k 60 on your iphone of timmy's birthday party you're gonna fill it right like that stuff takes up a lot of room people take much shorter including me i take much shorter movies oh the dog is doing something cute you
John:
fine you take a 60 second movie maybe at most but looking at this footage i'm like wow i just kept rolling just like you know minute after minute hour after hour just like and it's great because you get to see my kids doing you know things in an extended way and not just trying to catch the one cute thing but like you know here's here's an entire feeding and the cleanup afterwards right um
John:
so it was fun uh i enjoyed i enjoyed uh watching the videos out of the corner of my eye as they as they totally monopolized my computer for hours and hours on end oh and uh the other fun part of this was of course finding the series of dongles required to go from firewire 400 into a 2019 uh mac pro wasn't that bad that's the other reason i did this look if i keep waiting eventually no series of dongles will get me where i want to go and those tapes are not getting any younger so i better just do it so i did
Casey:
I'm glad it mostly worked out.
John:
Yeah, my kids were cute.
John:
The MiniDV video quality is terrible.
John:
And the audio on the camcorder was not good.
John:
Yep.
John:
But hey, my childhood movies are on Super 8, which has its charms.
John:
Casey would love it for the ceremony, of course.
John:
But A, there's no audio whatsoever.
John:
B, the frame rate is what?
John:
12 frames per second?
John:
What is Super 8?
John:
It's really low frame rate.
John:
And C, it looks worse than MiniDV, even with the digital noise.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
I remember I might have told this story on the show, but dad, it was maybe when I was like newborn or maybe it was my immediate younger brother.
Casey:
But this thing lingered for long enough for me to have a memory of it to this day.
Casey:
uh dad had some sort of camcorder where the camera did not have any sort of apparatus with which to save the data it was capturing so what he ended up having to do was carrying an entire vcr on a shoulder strap so this is like i mean for those of you who are not old like
Casey:
us that was very early in camcorder days yeah yeah so imagine like i know some of the kids these days don't even know what a blu-ray player is but just for the sake of discussion imagine a like a playstation that use that you put on a shoulder put on a shoulder strap and wear it and it's hooked up via a cable to a camera the size of like a professional film camera that is taking video so just indescribably bad with burn-in that lasts for like 20 minutes anytime you get anywhere near a light
Casey:
And that was his setup in the, surely the batteries lasted all of like four and a half seconds, but that's what he had to do was, you know, actually hit the record button on the VCR that was hooked up to the camcorder.
Casey:
And the VCR was like specifically designed to do this, but nevertheless, it's still like a household VCR that you're carrying on your shoulder.
Casey:
It probably weighed like 10 or 15 pounds and God knows how much power it drank.
Casey:
It was preposterous.
Casey:
And yeah,
Casey:
That was early videos of maybe not me, but certainly my younger brothers.
Casey:
It was just the worst.
John:
The Super 8s had such bad light sensitivity.
John:
This is probably also true of your VHS setup, that my parents had this incredibly blaring, presumably also super hot white light that would blind everybody.
John:
It was like a light on a movie set.
John:
You always hear people talk about being on movie sets and how there's so many lights and it's so hot and they're so bright.
John:
But
John:
That's what you had to do to take any kind of video where you could see people.
John:
So even though it's just indoors and normal indoor lighting, like during the day, everyone looks like you found them in a cave, right?
John:
Because it's total blackness outside the radius of this white, hot, burning sun that you have to have mounted on top of your camera.
Marco:
Yeah, my first camcorder experience was only a small generation after Casey's.
Marco:
It wasn't even ours.
Marco:
It's like our family friend had one, and we could borrow it whenever we had a school play or something.
Marco:
This is interesting.
Marco:
So Ryber in the chat is saying that the term camcorder actually refers to a camera with a built-in recorder.
Marco:
So that's what the one that I first used was.
Marco:
They had figured out how to miniaturize VCRs enough that it was still a full-size VHS cassette,
Marco:
but you could put this full-size vhs tape into the camcorder which was approximately the size of a vcr you know vertically yeah and so it weighed a ton it came in this giant black carrying case like it it was the size of the size of like a desktop computer like the case and inside you have you get you'd pull out this heavy giant camcorder with a battery that was probably about the size of like the sole of a shoe like there's a
Marco:
huge long rectangle like big thick thing and i remember like having it on your shoulder and i must have been maybe i don't know 11 12 when we were using this thing and so like having that on my shoulder i'm like i'm like the scrawny kid it you could only hold it up for maybe 15 minutes before your shoulder would hurt like hell because it was just so heavy but it was it was a full vcr like you could actually
Marco:
you know you could connect it to your tv and you could actually watch movies on it like you could you could put in any vhs tape and hit play and you could watch movies either on the little tiny black and white eyepiece uh screen which was actually i think a little crt in there uh or you could you know connect to your tv and have that be your vcr if you really wanted to but it was
Marco:
Man, people don't know how good they have it these days.
John:
This is all analog, by the way.
John:
There's no digital anywhere.
John:
This is all just analog, quote-unquote, standard def, because there was nothing else, videos.
John:
JVC had the first breakthrough product, the...
John:
The one that was red, red and black, that was the kind of one where it broke through to the point where people would look at it and not be horrified that this is an actual product.
John:
The JVC one was like, ah, it looks like a camera until you got it.
John:
The original JVC was also huge, but at least it wasn't like a shoulder bag like Casey's dad thing.
John:
That was the early adopter model.
Casey:
So I put in the chat, there's an RCA camcorder, and this matches my mental model of what these things used to look like.
Casey:
And if you're used to holding up, like I joke about how we're old and kids these days, but really and truly –
Casey:
You know, people that are 10, 15 years younger than us have probably never seen this.
Casey:
And this is the highest possible tech option that you had.
Casey:
And really the only option that you had in the prosumer or consumer category was something that was basically a VCR that was mounted, like Marco said, on your shoulder that had a lens in front of it.
John:
I found the JVC one.
John:
I think it's the JVC GRC1, the old red and black model.
John:
It's so small compared to that RCA one, isn't it?
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
Didn't MKBHD do one of his discovering old tech videos on this camera?
Marco:
It was on either this or something very similar to this.
John:
Yeah, it's a very famous thing.
John:
I think my aunt had this one, too.
John:
I think there was also a similar-looking VCR at the time, and I remember it because it was the first remote control I can recall seeing, and it had a wire.
John:
It had a long wire, but it had a wire.
John:
It's remote, though.
John:
You could be on the couch, and you could hit play.
John:
Man, that is some stuff.
John:
Yeah, in some respects, it makes you think that the Super 8 and 16mm and the film ones had a certain...
John:
classiness that maybe this rca1 did not like it looks impressive and everything but in the end like like the idea of film like actual photo sensitive film flying past an aperture at you know 16 or 12 frames per second or whatever and that you would get that film developed and that you would that you would show it using a projector in your house that you had that you could project the film onto your screen that you also would have to have a big reflective movie screen in your house my you know my parents had all these things the idea that uh
John:
you could do it all electronically with this the edge called the vcr on your tv like it was amazing but in some ways like huh but our tv is 21 inches the projector screen was huge and i don't get to hear the chicka chicka chicka chicka chicka chicka anymore
Casey:
I remember when I was in elementary school, you would know you were in for a good day because the reel-to-reel projector would come into your room, and that's how you would watch a movie.
Casey:
Do you remember this?
Casey:
Because there wasn't any sort of portable TV situation.
Casey:
Because as I got older in elementary school or perhaps middle school, they would eventually stick these 50-pound CRT TVs and VCRs onto a cart, right?
John:
How did we not all die from those TV cards?
John:
It's the most top-heavy thing in the world.
John:
Like, take this huge CRT and put it as high up as possible on this stand that weighs nothing, this rickety metal stand with wheels on the bottom.
John:
And it's amazing we're not all crushed to death underneath those TVs right now.
Marco:
and put it in a room full of, like, hyper kids, like, wiggling and running around.
Marco:
And then, of course, you have to run a cord to it, too.
John:
Yeah, the kids can trip over it.
John:
I mean, to be fair, it was, you know, kind of a trapezoid in profile.
John:
The base was slightly bigger than the top, but...
John:
It was not well balanced.
John:
I never even heard any stories of those falling on people.
John:
I guess we just all thought they were stable.
John:
But yeah, the film projectors were certainly more fun because there was more of a possibility of fire and melting.
John:
Oh, great.
John:
I had to explain this to my kids.
John:
What were we watching?
John:
We were watching some movie.
John:
No, it wasn't a movie.
John:
It was Little America, an Apple TV Plus show, which I can actually recommend that I didn't look at until someone tweeted at us, and I checked it out.
John:
Actually, the episodes are hit and miss, but the good thing is that they're all standalone episodes.
John:
It's not a series.
John:
So I would say just watch the first three episodes of Little America.
John:
You'll know if you like it.
John:
It's only like 10 total.
John:
Anyway, at one point, they're showing a thing that's supposed to have taken place in the 60s or something, and a bunch of people are outdoors watching a movie, like an American movie in a foreign country.
John:
And they get to some dramatic scene and then the film gets stuck and it melts.
John:
Right.
John:
And it occurred to me that my kids probably didn't know what they were seeing.
John:
Like, I guess people have seen this in movies.
John:
You know, they still do it as a kind of a trope.
John:
But like instead of showing the picture, all of a sudden a white blob appears in the center of the picture and it starts to expand and there's color fringing around it.
John:
I explained to my kids what's happening there is that the film that you can shine light through to make the picture that's flying past the light and the projector, the film got stuck.
John:
And the only way you could get light bright enough to project was to have a very big and very hot light.
John:
And if any piece of film stays in front of that bright hot light for more than a couple of seconds, it melts.
John:
And that's what you're seeing on the screen.
John:
What you're seeing is the white hot light of the projector melting through the frame of film that got stuck in front of the light.
John:
And that's why it looks like a big melty thing.
John:
I enjoy explaining stuff like that to my kids.
John:
Soon I'll be explaining to people what the little icon of the phone handset means on their iPhones.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
It's true.
John:
What is that shape?
John:
Is that a C?
John:
What is that?
John:
What is that supposed to be?
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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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:
Thank you.
Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And let's start with Jamie Bender, who writes, if Apple does release an ARM-based Mac, would we be willing to buy the first-gen machines that run it, or would we wait until they sort out any major issues?
John:
I know Marco's answer.
Casey:
Marco's answer is absolutely yes.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I'd buy it on day one.
Casey:
Uh, for me, I don't know.
Casey:
I honestly don't.
Casey:
I mean, generally speaking, this is where I say, no, it's not for me.
Casey:
I'd wait.
Casey:
And then I ended up buying it on the first day.
Casey:
So probably that's what I would do.
Casey:
But, uh, it's, it, it's, it's a much more, uh, invasive, let's say change than a lot of the things that I've lived through as an Apple user, maybe not John, but for me.
Casey:
And so I don't know what I would do.
Casey:
I'm, I'm really not sure.
Casey:
I would like to think I would wait until at least the second model, if not the second generation, but I do like me a new shiny.
Casey:
So I don't know what I would end up doing, John.
John:
An Apple user.
John:
It's such a weirdo.
John:
Um,
John:
Initially, I'm thinking like, well, of course, I'm not going to buy it on day one because I got this big hunk and expensive computer that I'm going to be using for a long time, right?
John:
Even if they do come out with a new one, I can't afford to get a new umpteen thousand dollar, you know.
John:
So, of course not.
John:
But what I think about is, especially in these days of remote learning and all sorts of other stuff, how my kids are fighting over the one laptop we have because none of them want to use the desktop computer because desktops are for old people, I guess.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I could potentially be in the market for another laptop to deal with having two teens in school where they need laptops.
John:
So they could each have sort of one of their own.
John:
We've got the previous generation.
John:
Yeah, I'm losing track of that.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The butterfly keyboard retina MacBook Air is what we've got.
John:
2017 MacBook Air.
John:
And it's fine for their purposes.
John:
And the keyboard hasn't broken yet.
John:
But if they came out with the very first ARM computer and it happened to be a laptop in that sort of the MacBook Air class price range, I might get it just to give the kids another laptop.
John:
And because, of course, I'd be curious about technically what it's like or whatever.
John:
So it's not out of the question.
John:
It really depends on what computer is first.
John:
If the first one is a 16-inch MacBook Pro, no, I'm not getting it because I'm probably never going to get that computer.
John:
But if it's a kid-appropriate laptop, I might get it on day one.
Yeah.
John:
So this is part of this question about whether they're sorting out major issues.
John:
Yeah, like there's going to be issues, right?
John:
But that hasn't stopped me before.
John:
I got the very first Power Mac G5.
John:
There was a lot of inherent risk in that, and mine did have a weird chirping power supply.
John:
But there is also the excitement of having the new thing, you know, ASAP.
John:
So if I bought it on day one, I wouldn't be buying it expecting it to be perfect.
John:
I'd be buying it knowing there could be weird problems.
John:
But if you go into that with your eyes open and that's part of the experience you expect, it can still be fun.
Marco:
I think the most likely source of weird problems is going to be the OS and the application ecosystem.
Marco:
It's going to be the software side of things.
Marco:
The hardware is probably going to be rock solid because it's probably not going to be that different from iOS hardware, which their record on that is very strong.
Marco:
So really, the bigger challenge is going to be how ready will both macOS, presumably it is macOS, and the apps that will run on it, how...
Marco:
ready are those like how how mature is that going to be on day one and the answer is probably going to be like i'm sure most stuff will work most of the time but there's going to be problems and there's going to be certain apps that you just can't run for a while while they get updated and some of them it's you know like any other transition some of them will never get updated and they won't make the transition and so there's going to be issues like that but that's probably going to be true for the first few years of them being in existence probably through multiple revisions of the actual hardware
Casey:
Unai Haran writes, Hey Casey, which file system did you use to format your big external drive?
Casey:
Maybe it's a question for John, but an accumulated experience in the last months, I think you were the one.
Casey:
So this is with reference to the Best Buy 12-terabyte drive that I got in desperation and made a duplicate of my Synology onto.
Casey:
I formatted it APFS because it seemed like the most appropriate thing to do and the path of least resistance when I'm hooking it up to a Mac Mini.
Casey:
Now, John can tell me what I should have done, but...
Casey:
To quickly answer the question, it is APFS.
Casey:
John, what should I have done?
John:
A lot of people have asked about this.
John:
APFS does not perform well on spinning disks.
John:
It was not designed for spinning disks.
John:
That's not its strong suit.
John:
It is kind of an anti-pattern to put APFS on a spinning disk.
John:
But the reason...
John:
A lot of people end up doing it, including me.
John:
My internal clone of my boot drive is a spinning disk that is formed with APFS.
John:
The path of least resistance when cloning a drive with most cloning software is to just actually make a clone.
John:
So if the disk you're cloning is APFS, so is the clone.
John:
I use SuperDuper to do that.
John:
I'm not even sure if SuperDuper can do an APFS clone to HFS+, but it's just more straightforward to me to say...
John:
If you're going to make a clone of a disk, make it identical to that disk.
John:
I don't run anything off that I mentioned, I think, on a previous episode that I accidentally booted into that and couldn't understand why it was making so much noise.
John:
I don't recommend people use APFS on spinning disks unless they're using it as a backup that's just there, just in case, or a clone or something similar.
John:
HFS Plus and HFS before it were made in an era when the layout of the structures of the file system on the disk were tailored to the idea that you had a disk head zooming back and forth on a spinning platter and you had to wait for the platter to spin around the part that you wanted and you had to move the disk head from one place to another and you had to wait for it to stop shaking so it stabilized on a little thing.
John:
And so HFS Plus does a lot of work to jam all of its important structures into continuous blocks in a single location so that that little diskhead doesn't need to fly all over the disk to do a simple operation.
John:
APFS does not do that because APFS was born in the world of SSDs where random access is a thing and there is no more diskhead and there's no more spinning platters.
John:
So...
John:
I think Casey did basically the same thing I would do, but if he was actually going to ever try to use that disk as opposed to just having it as a backup, it would be a bad scene.
Casey:
Pascal Lindelof writes, What are the chances of Apple ever making iPadOS a multi-user OS?
Casey:
I have a new model, iPad Air, which is used by the family around the house, but when it's not in use by them, I like to use it as a second sidecar screen.
Casey:
However, that requires it to switch from the family iCloud account to my own iCloud account.
Casey:
This is a very tedious process.
Casey:
I want to have a separate iCloud account for the family on the iPad to prevent my photo library from getting swamped with pictures taken by the kids on the iPad or having my YouTube recommendations being overgrown by Shaun the Sheep.
Casey:
You know, iPads are multi-user in the education environment, but that requires a whole bunch of specific scenarios and circumstances and software.
Casey:
What is it, Apple Classroom or something like that?
Casey:
I...
Casey:
I really don't see it coming to the iPad, if at all.
Casey:
I don't see it anytime soon.
Casey:
I mean, you could say, John, on an infinite timescale, maybe it would happen.
Casey:
But personally, I just don't see it in the next few years.
Casey:
But John, what do you think?
John:
This is actually I was thinking about this and the reason I put this question in here.
John:
This is actually a miniature version of my old hobby horses.
John:
Like back in the day, you know, Apple's big problem, technologically speaking, their biggest amount of tech debt to use modern lingo that the, you know, office drones will understand.
John:
The biggest chunk of tech debt was they had an operating system that did not support preemptive multitasking or protected memory.
John:
And that became an increasingly big deal as its competitors got those features and as it continued to not get them because so much of its software stack was built on the idea of a single continuous memory space that every app could access at the same time and cooperative multitasking.
John:
Right.
John:
And those were not the answers for the future.
John:
It made sense when they made the decisions, but eventually it became this huge tech debt burden.
John:
And the company basically almost went out of business while it tried to figure out how the hell are we going to get a modern version of the Mac operating system while not losing literally all of our customers.
John:
It came very, very close to going out of business.
John:
They had like, what, 90 days worth of money before they left when they bought Steve Jobs in and Nex and everything.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Close call.
John:
That's obviously a much bigger boulder than this.
John:
And, you know, I used to complain about their file system, and they addressed that.
John:
What were my other technological peeves?
John:
I've had a bunch of these of varying size.
John:
Swift?
John:
Oh, yeah, new programming language.
John:
Yep, they more or less addressed that, too, right?
John:
So good on Apple.
John:
I think...
John:
The one time I actually met Craig Federighi at WWDC a couple years back, his opening line to me was like, well, you got everything you wanted.
John:
You have nothing left to complain about, right?
John:
You got your modern operating system.
John:
You got your new programming language.
John:
You got your new file system.
John:
And he was partly right.
John:
But there's always something else, right?
John:
So this little thing here, hey, why isn't iPad OS multi-user?
John:
ios from day one again for explicable and good reasons was not made like mac os where you would log in as a user and all your files would be owned by you the user and like like ios on the original it wasn't ios iphone os the firmware on the original iphone they called it firmware it wasn't even an os
John:
Yeah, it runs OS X. That's what Steve said, but they never use that name.
John:
Anyway, if you know how that was working under the covers, it was not working like Mac OS X. You did not log in as a user.
John:
You didn't have your own user home directory.
John:
It was weird.
John:
Lots of stuff ran as root.
John:
Lots of stuff was sort of, you know, it was like a, not that it was single user because under the covers it's still Unix and it's still got the same Unix security model and there was the sandbox and thing and whatever, but it just, it was just weird and it wasn't laid out or it didn't run like
John:
into mac os 10 and it still doesn't right to this day there's weirdness about it where it is not like oh well we can ask multi-user to ios anytime because it's exactly like mac os 10 it's darwin and you're you don't know it but you're already running all your apps out of your own home directory not really that's not quite how it works like the classroom stuff does this weird user space reboot and you know like
John:
everything the solution they've had to that has been kind of a hack so this is a fairly big piece of tech debt assuming that apple ever wants to have this feature which i think they should want to have it eventually it's not easy to add like adding you know preemptive multitasking memory protection like coming up with a whole new programming language like writing a new file system that will work across all the devices it's not the type of thing that you can bang out you know in a couple months we'll get that you know no problem we'll just we'll just make that when we need it
John:
If there comes a point where they want that, and arguably they've already passed that point because if they could get it easily, they would have done it for classrooms, a place where it is actually necessary.
John:
They had to do it as a hack because doing it the quote-unquote real way where it's an actual real multi-user system like the Mac is so different than the way iOS works now that it would be really, really hard to do.
John:
Now, again, this is much smaller than even a new file system and certainly much smaller than how we get a modern operating system.
John:
Those are much bigger tasks.
John:
And this probably won't hurt them in the long run.
John:
But if I had to pick my next area to watch where Apple's got some core technological problem that is thorny and annoying and is never going to be easy to deal with on the iOS platform, this would be in my top five for sure.
John:
Because it always struck me as a little bit of a shame that like...
John:
the iPhone was so, so forward thinking, so ahead of its time, so barely possible.
John:
Like that's part of the miracle, like, like the original Mac, so barely possible that, you know, people thought it was fake and didn't understand how it was done.
John:
You know, the original Mac I would argue was even more so if you consider what it did with 128 kilobytes of Ram and, you know, all those other things.
John:
Right.
John:
Um,
John:
that it had to be designed with all sorts of expedient hacks just to even make it possible.
John:
And thanks to its success, again, the iPhone much more so than the Mac, many of those hacks became enshrined, and Apple has slowly unwound them and slowly addressed its tech debt over the years such that iOS of today is way more sort of sturdy and reasonably constructed and built, but the legacy of the original iPhone is still in there right down to this...
John:
inability to do multi-user in a straightforward way because you just couldn't afford to do that from day one with the original iPhone.
Marco:
Yeah, to add a little bit to that, not only has iOS grown up not having multi-user support, but iOS has also grown up at a ridiculous pace in a frantic software update ecosystem where iOS in general does not get a lot of opportunity to pay off its technical debt.
Marco:
because it's constantly moving and having stuff added and the market is changing and the hardware is changing and everything is changing so much, there's probably not a lot of good times that the people who work on core iOS services and core UI have a chance to work on things that might make this possible or at least easier to do later.
Marco:
That technical debt is so baked in and stretches across so much of the OS that
Marco:
I don't think they're ever going to be able to repay it because it's never going to be important enough.
Marco:
It's never going to be a top priority thing to add multi-year support to iOS for a number of reasons.
Marco:
First of all,
Marco:
I never really used Mac multi-user support until about the last year or so.
Marco:
As we've been various like, you know, Beaks travels and now, you know, with home school work and stuff like that, we've had more needs over the last year for a Mac to be used by two or three people in our household.
Marco:
And so that's become a very common thing for us.
Marco:
And even on the Mac, where multi-user support's been there since the beginning, or at least Mac OS X, it's been there since the beginning, and it's really baked into the OS, it's still kind of weird, and still a lot of stuff kind of breaks with it.
Marco:
And that's a mature system that was designed that way, right?
Marco:
So even when it's baked in...
Marco:
So the OS is really most of the time and the applications on the OS most of the time are assuming that it's going to be used by one user on one device period.
John:
What kind of problems are you having by the way?
John:
Because I use multi-user all the time and it works the way I expect it to.
John:
What kind of things are you running into?
Marco:
Usually it's apps that don't think that they have their registration information, or Skype keeps trying to install helpers over and over again and it can't.
Marco:
Oh, and how different Apple IDs work with different passwords and keychain storage.
Marco:
Somehow on one of the computers, TIFF set up Adam's account using parental control,
Marco:
and it's now entered this state i haven't done any research on how to fix this so i'm sorry everyone's going to try to email and help me and i appreciate that but i i probably can fix it myself with 10 minutes of research but i just haven't done it yet where it gets to the state where we can't turn off the parental controls now on his account and they're super obnoxious uh it
Marco:
Obviously, no one uses Mac parental controls, really, because try to do anything on an account that has parental controls, and it's quite a disaster.
John:
They're both obnoxious and hard to circumvent, and easy to circumvent, rather.
John:
So it's a double whammy.
John:
The only one that you listed I've seen is the
John:
software, non-Mac App Store, like traditional Mac software, that wants you to register on each account.
John:
And I'm not entirely convinced those are bugs because it just could be their licensing model.
John:
Maybe the licensing model is each user and your computer needs to have a license to it.
John:
But other than that, I haven't had any of those issues.
John:
The worst I could think is that maybe it's not entirely clear to me when I'm on one user's account what kind of priority tasks get on the other user's account.
John:
Like if there are apps that think they're not...
John:
I think they're not running in the foreground.
John:
Therefore, they're never going to do some check or whatever.
John:
But in general, I've been using it, you know, multi-user from day one.
John:
And I think it works exactly the way you would expect it to and with no problems because it's, you know, it is actually baked into the OS.
John:
You do actually have your own home directory.
John:
You do actually have your own user.
John:
The operating system has no problem running multiple copies of the same application owned by different users.
John:
All works out fine.
Marco:
Well, I'm glad it works for you.
Marco:
It works okay for us, but yeah, we do run into weird little issues here and there.
Marco:
But anyway, so I think the bigger challenge here is that most of the market doesn't really want this anymore.
Marco:
What it would take from a user perspective, first of all, like...
Marco:
Say you wanted to share an iPad.
Marco:
The idea of how would that work with things like apps, with the home screen, with notifications, with a lot of the security stuff, with store kit.
Marco:
There are so many things about how it would have to work that would greatly complexify things.
Marco:
It doesn't seem like that's necessarily worthwhile.
Marco:
Finally, the bigger challenge with this is
Marco:
is that market-wise, I think Apple just wants everyone to buy their own devices, and the market largely has accepted that.
Marco:
If you're going to have multiple people in a household who are going to want their own stuff on a device...
Marco:
you probably are going to wind up having them each have their own device.
Marco:
And even though it costs more money, this also is a world where people's primary computing device could be a $400 phone or a $300 iPad.
Marco:
And back when the mainstream computer platforms were designed, back in the 80s and 90s, computers cost $2,000.
Marco:
So it was a much bigger deal that, okay, you're going to get a $2,000 computer for your household.
Marco:
You're going to have it in the computer room or in the den or whatever, and it's going to be in the computer cabinet, and your family will share this.
Marco:
It was like a major appliance.
Marco:
It was like a washing machine.
Marco:
It was like, your family's going to share this major appliance.
Marco:
It's a major investment for them at this one station in the household.
Marco:
It wasn't like your computer, mom's computer, dad's computer.
Marco:
It was just like, here is the family computer.
Marco:
And so multiple user accounts were more important as things were bigger, more expensive, younger.
Marco:
Now, technology is so ubiquitous and so much of it is so inexpensive.
Marco:
that everyone just gets their own devices.
Marco:
If you can afford to do that, which is increasingly accessible as devices get cheaper, everyone gets their own devices and that's fine.
Marco:
And so the usage demand for multi-user stuff on one device is greatly reduced.
Marco:
And the need for it is greatly reduced at the same time that the OSs now, like the iOS side of things, it would be harder than ever to add that to them.
Marco:
That's why I suspect we're not really going to see that come to iOS more than it already has as this weird educational hack thing that regular people don't have access to.
John:
At a certain point, it will become a little bit easier, not just because they're paying down the other tech debt that's lurking in the operating system, but just because the resources will expand.
John:
iPhone used to be so RAM-starved and such as those CPUs.
John:
Fast forward 20 years, there's a huge amount of RAM in everybody's phones and iPads, and you can afford to do multi-user switching in an efficient way and all that other stuff.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
and we've actually cleaned up a lot of the operating system in ipad os we're pretty close to doing a one-year-long project to get real multi-user for for ipad and we could just have a better implementation of our classroom thing doesn't mean they even need to use it for the other things uh for you know for regular consumers but the second thing is that there are people with shared devices especially ipads you know ipads cost a thousand dollars now obviously it's a thousand dollars in 2020 money not two thousand dollars in 1980 money
John:
But they're not cheap.
John:
And because of the way, because of how regimented things are, because of how they are such single user focused devices, trying to have someone else use them is disruptive.
John:
Like not just because you, you know, get your kids YouTube recommendations, but you can't even unlock the device if it doesn't know who you are, if you're not registered on the, you know.
John:
It doesn't have an awareness of multiple people.
John:
Granted, I am an alternate appearance of my wife and vice versa, but that's stretching the limits so we can just get into our other devices.
John:
It's not an important use case.
John:
Apple is correctly prioritizing.
John:
There are much more important things they need to be doing, but it's one of those type of things where eventually, unlike that tech that coming home to roost and being a company killer, it'll be more like...
John:
eventually we're close enough we're in shooting distance of that anyway and we do actually want to do this thing for the classroom because that is that's always going to be a shared device situation if apple keeps its prices the way they are right a one-to-one ipad thing is very expensive in the grand scheme of things especially in this country in terms of how much money we spend on education that having shared ipads will probably always make sense in an educational setting and so hey wouldn't it be nice to have a better version of that
John:
It's a low priority, but I don't think it's a zero priority.
John:
And like I said, it's kind of a shame that if the iPhone had come out five years later, maybe multi-user would have been baked in from the start and we would have complained about how slow it was switching users.
John:
But the other way Apple can do it, this is...
John:
No, they shouldn't do this, but every time I see one of these messages about why someone might want multi-user or sharing an iOS device or even sharing, well, sharing a Mac, they have multi-user, right?
John:
But iCloud, signing out of iCloud is another reason I want to use iCloud Drive.
John:
Signing out of iCloud is like the end of the world.
John:
do you want me to delete every piece of information and so you have to painfully and hopefully restore it all the next time like it is not it's a big deal especially if you have a huge photo library like I will never sign out of my iCloud account ever anywhere if I can possibly help it so
John:
you know if you just like oh we have an ios device but that is on little timmy's photo collection i want to pull that photo uh and i don't know about icloud.com the web interface so how do we do that well i guess i could just sign out of my icloud account and sign into timmy's like no turn back don't do it but if you could just switch to timmy's account for a second to grab that that would be cool i mean again storage space ram like this you know i'm not saying this needs to be done today or tomorrow but um
John:
It's out on the horizon as a piece of tech debt that Apple could address that would make its devices a little more convenient.
John:
And it would be nice for Uniformity.
John:
Macs can do it.
John:
iOS devices should be able to do it too.
John:
It'd be neat.
John:
That way everyone can use their shared 27-inch iPad that's, you know, in the computer room.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, ExpressVPN and Notion.
John:
And we will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
John:
And if you're into Twitter...
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean it.
Casey:
We'll be right back.
Casey:
I have excellent, excellent news, gentlemen.
Casey:
The Mark VIII GTI, so this is the brand new, not yet released GTI, will offer a manual six-speed transmission.
Casey:
John, when Honda inevitably abandons you, you can come to the Volkswagen Auto Group side of the world.
John:
Drive around in an ugly hatchback?
John:
I think your generation of...
Casey:
your generation of the golf r looks way nicer than this new generation i'm not a fan of the new look it's it's okay the squinty eyes i don't really i don't love but i don't know i don't like those weird fog lights what are they doing with like the like the five dice dot yeah apparently they're fitting it in the in the in the what is that hexagonal grill and i don't know why there's five of them the whole grill looks stupid
Casey:
I don't mind the grill.
Casey:
I am a sucker for big front fascia, as I've said many, many times about the M Sport package on BMWs.
Casey:
But, yeah, the fog lights are a little odd to me.
Casey:
I also don't like that black, like, C just outside the grill area.
Casey:
Do you see what I'm talking about?
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's too busy.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's...
Casey:
It looks okay.
Casey:
I mean, I've seen render, not renderings.
Casey:
I've seen some like camouflage pictures of Golf R and it looks okay.
Casey:
Um, I don't know if I'm falling into the same trap as, as BMW where the, the generation of car that I came to the brand, that is the last good one.
Casey:
And everything that comes after is garbage, you know, every BMW owner.
Casey:
Yeah, because I mean, I'll tell you, the last good three series was easily the E90 and the F30 was trash and whatever the current one is, has got to be garbage, too.
Casey:
So I am definitely that when it comes to BMW.
Casey:
And perhaps I'm doing that again with Volkswagen.
Casey:
But I am I am overjoyed to know that if, you know, if I ever have a reason to drive anywhere ever again and if I need to get a new car for some reason, at least for now, Volkswagen and the GTI trim has me covered.
John:
I don't like either of these wheels.
John:
What kind of person is deciding to show a GTI in red?
John:
Why would you?
John:
The whole signature of the GTI is the red line across the grill.
John:
You can't see that when the whole car is red.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I mean, I like the GTI pretty good, the existing one.
Casey:
Obviously, I prefer the R, but it's still a very nice, very fun car.
Casey:
And I'm enthusiastic that this is getting a stick.
Casey:
Now, what will be terrible but hilarious is if this gets the stick, but the R is a DCT only, which would be just my luck.
Casey:
And again, I'm not looking to replace my car anytime soon.
Casey:
I mean, hell, at this point, I'm ensuring I'm driving my car every couple of weeks just so it's still functional.
John:
That's all I've done with my car is go on essentially joyrides to give the car exercise.
John:
I would love to see your joyride.
Casey:
The same here.
Casey:
It's got to be the slowest, most boring joyride in the world.
John:
There's not a lot of cars on the road.
John:
I let the engine warm up a little bit because I'm old and think that's still a thing.
John:
And then I go for some high revs.
John:
That's fun.
Casey:
No, I think that is still a thing.
Casey:
I'm not joking.
Casey:
I really think that is still a thing where you should have your oil a little bit warmed up before you act like a turd.
Casey:
I mean, look, Marco's M5, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
Wasn't your M5 one of the ones where the red line would increase as the oil got warm?
Marco:
I don't remember that at all.
Marco:
I mean, I never probably approached the red line, so I don't know.
Marco:
But yeah, I think what's interesting to me is that you're talking about this as if you're as if, you know, this is very likely that by the time you need to buy your next car, because your current car is what, a year, two, two years old, something like that.
Marco:
year and a half ish yeah so by the time you need to buy your next car which is probably not for at least three to five more years right oh i hope so yeah right i hope right unless something goes really wrong with this one so hopefully you know you're talking on like probably like you know a five-ish year time span at the minimum you honestly think that you're still gonna have a gas car or that you're that you're still gonna want to buy a gas car five years from now
Casey:
You know, it's a very good question.
Casey:
And the stubborn child within me says, of course.
Casey:
Because, I mean, what monster would buy an electric car where you can't shift for yourself and so on and so forth?
John:
But the reality is... There was that one stick shift electric car.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
There was that one-off build.
Casey:
But the reality of the situation is I'm already sort of giving... What's the happy equivalent of side-eye?
Casey:
Because side-eye kind of implies anger.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
happy side eye to electric cars like my parents i think we've talked about this on the show my parents got a chevy bolt and it's not remarkable but it's surprisingly great given what it is now it's also not as cheap as you would hope it would be you know it's it's it was expensive and it's it's
Casey:
got problems but by and large it's much nicer than i expected and you know if tesla wasn't completely canceled by now and more affordable maybe i would consider tesla but god knows i'm not giving that man any of my money ever and so as i think i said to you privately marco and i'll say publicly i cannot wait for us to reboot neutral while you go on the journey of picking out what replaces your tesla because i don't think you should be buying any more teslas or at least not the way things are right now
Marco:
Man, does that guy really make it hard to be a fan of this brand.
Marco:
And I love the cars.
Marco:
The cars are so good.
Marco:
And look, they're not perfect.
Marco:
No car is ever perfect.
Marco:
But I love this car so much that if I didn't have anything else to consider, like this guy and his often offensive behavior –
Marco:
if my car was stolen tomorrow and i had to replace it i would literally get the exact same thing and i i i have said that for the last what five years that i've that i've had model s's like i love this car so much i actually don't love the model three that much it's other people like it so that's fine it hasn't it has enough fans i love the model s i
Marco:
Absolutely love the Model S. It is my car, and it feels so much like my car, and I love so much about it.
Marco:
And the things I like about it, nothing else really offers yet.
Marco:
Maybe that giant Porsche thing, but I honestly, it has some other compromises that I don't love, and it costs more money, and so, yeah, I'm not super into the Porsche thing.
Marco:
But there's no other car I want to drive than a Model S. I love it that much.
Marco:
And so I just – I wish that that guy would stop making an ass of himself so often because I don't want to have to make excuses for why I drive the car that I drive because the car is great.
Marco:
And he just makes such an ass of himself so often.
Marco:
It's really hard to deal with.
John:
i think this will solve itself uh assuming tesla can a survive and b get its act together enough they will ruin your car because they will eventually make a new model s or model s replacement that is significantly different from your car and you won't like it and their problem solves then you're like okay well now suddenly options are open i can they keep buying used model s's of my generation you know the good generation when i back when i first started buying them
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
It's essentially the quote-unquote first-generation Model S, right, even though it's been heavily revised.
John:
I'm assuming eventually they will make a new Model S that, and if you look at Tesla's recent cars like the Cybertruck and the new Roadster and the Model 3, they have different sets of compromises which seem to appeal to you less.
John:
So this may solve your problem for you.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You won't be so tempted, and then you'll have to really gauge what is my desire to have a used model.
Marco:
my generation model s based on battery lifetime and all that stuff oh yeah no literally earlier today i was driving today and i was literally thinking you know maybe at the end of this lease i might buy it out because i i just like this car so much and you know nothing on the horizon has me particularly excited yet and you know
Marco:
maybe i mean i have another roughly year and a half left on this lease so maybe by by the end of this maybe we'll have a lot more electric car models than one will tempt me but honestly i don't see any on the horizon that that are tempting yet and i think get you back to bmw your old favorite
Marco:
yeah i don't know there's so much more there's so much about tesla that i like better like i like so much about like the the ui of the car the like the the app the key like so much so much about it like all this little stuff adds up yeah like the carplay integration is phenomenal yeah that's carplay is the one big thing that i wish they had that they don't um but
Marco:
I'd rather interact with my phone on the little mount, the ProClip USA mount sponsor.
Marco:
I'd rather interact with that and then have the giant screen for all the car stuff than interact with Tiff's car's CarPlay because CarPlay... The way BMW integrates CarPlay is very clumsy.
Marco:
CarPlay is not a...
Marco:
built-in automatic thing that just works seamlessly it's like a mode that iDrive's system can show or not show and it's very clunky to get in and out of it also frankly carplay needs a touch screen so iDrive uses like the knob on in the center console and you like wheel through everything with that with a knob and doesn't have touch screens carplay while it works that way you can navigate carplay with knobs it sucks it's way better with a touch screen and
Casey:
I would agree with that because my car has like a volume knob close to the driver.
Casey:
And on the passenger side, it has like another almost identical knob that's just used for like scrolling and manipulation and whatnot.
Casey:
And you can use that right side knob for using CarPlay, which I didn't even realize for months.
Casey:
But you can do it.
Casey:
And I've done it from time to time just to try it.
Casey:
And it sucks.
Casey:
It definitely sucks.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
And even though I stand by sort of what I said in neutral, that having a touchscreen in a car is not the greatest because, you know, you're bouncing around the road and you have this...
Casey:
Your finger is so far away from your shoulder, so it boings even more and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But ultimately, I think I would rather have a touchscreen than not, even with all of its troubles and issues with it.
Casey:
So, yeah, I can only imagine that if Tiff's car is still just the knob, that it would not be terribly fun, even despite it being wireless CarPlay, which I'm very jealous of, because mine is wired only, and I really wish it was wireless.
Casey:
But you win some, you lose some.
Marco:
Having everything on a touchscreen, it sounds crazy, but now that I've driven a car for five years that has a giant, pretty good touchscreen, I can tell you it's fine.
Marco:
It's totally fine.
Marco:
I don't find that it's significantly worse or less safe with...
Marco:
or harder to operate, or more error-prone.
Marco:
I find it's totally fine, and anything about it that is kind of iffy is down to the design of how they've laid out certain controls, not necessarily that it's a touchscreen or that it isn't a touchscreen.
Marco:
um and part of this is like at least on the model s this is not this is less true than the model three on the model s you actually do have physical controls on the steering wheel and the two stalks that cover so many common needs that you actually don't use the touchscreen as much as you think you would on the three it's the three has a lot more on the screen and it has like a whole i think it has one fewer stalk completely and and some of the things you can set are a
Marco:
But yes, on the Model S, it's a really good balance.
John:
You can see your speed right in front of you.
John:
Imagine that.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
What a radical idea.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't care for the three.
Marco:
But I'm glad they're selling a whole lot of them.
Marco:
And it's a pretty good car for a lot of people.
Marco:
But it's not for me.
Marco:
But I just love the Model S so much.
Marco:
And the reason I was thinking about buying it out is like, I just want this car.
Marco:
And even if Tesla explodes and flames out and goes under, which honestly, everyone always thinks they're about to do that.
Marco:
And I don't follow the finances enough to know.
Marco:
They've been around long enough now that I would meet any of those speculations with quite a lot of skepticism at this point.
Marco:
But man, I just love this car.
Marco:
And I love it so much that I'd rather have the Tesla I have now with no CarPlay
Marco:
than the best possible CarPlay thing that I can think of that exists in the market today.
Marco:
Now, in the future, if that changes, who knows?
Marco:
I love that little Honda e-concept thing that is still not available in the US, unfortunately.
Marco:
I love the way that thing looks.
Marco:
That thing looks awesome.
Marco:
I haven't driven one, and everyone says it's not that exciting of a car to drive, but it looks so cool, and it's so compact.
Marco:
It's such a fun little design.
Marco:
The interior looks like it has a really good design, too.
Marco:
That I'm very interested in as just a fun option, but that's probably not going to come to the U.S.
Marco:
anytime soon.
Marco:
I think right now, I can look at what's on the horizon for the next year and a half, and I can pretty much know what are my options going to be when this lease is up.
Marco:
I don't think there's any like massive bombshells that are going to drop there.
Marco:
Oh, all of a sudden, this new car model comes out of nowhere.
Marco:
No one knew about it.
Marco:
Like, no, I think we pretty much know what's going to be there in a year and a half.
Marco:
And I think I'm going to stick with this in some form, whether it's buying this out or getting a new one that's probably the same.
John:
Yeah, you should get a fresh battery.
John:
You don't want to keep using that used battery.
John:
I know there's a risk if you get a new one, it might be like, you know.
John:
Might have some manufacturing problems, the steering wheel might come off in your hand or whatever.
John:
But a fresh battery, I feel like if you're going to buy out the same model of car, you should really get one with a fresh battery.
John:
So it'll last you the longest, right?
John:
So you can wait the longest for something that you like equally as much or better.
John:
And I think if and when you do get a more traditional car with a more traditional interior, one of the things that you will appreciate is, oh, this one physical button that was annoying to get to on the touchscreen, it's so nice to have a physical button for this one task, right?
Yeah.
John:
because it still is a thing i think even your model s goes a little bit overboard with the touchscreen just to sort of prove a point and the model 3 does it even in a more pig-headed fashion knobs and buttons they're awesome i'm not even saying don't have it on the touchscreen by all means put it there but certain things being able to have knobs and buttons were like striking that balance is the the current exercise of interior car design and
John:
If you look at all the cars that are out there, forget about electric, just your cars in general, you've got a touchscreen and you've got knobs and you've got buttons and you've got stocks.
John:
How do you balance your controls among them?
John:
I think putting everything on the screen is the incorrect balance, just like not having a screen at all is the incorrect balance.
John:
You just got to find the right balance and get the, you know, use each thing, use each input area for its strengths and not have some kind of philosophy where like everything's got to be a knob or a button or everything's got to be on the touchscreen.