The Cycles of Marco
There is a thunderstorm happening outdoors.
John apparently lost power for several hours earlier today.
So this is going to be a little bit more of a stressful ATP recording for us than it normally is.
We'll see how it goes.
I feel great.
I just live on a barrier island.
I'm sure your house will still be there in 15 years.
news breaking news even uh there is not another holiday to celebrate unfortunately i wish i could come up with one i'm so sorry john but i have different good news don't worry give him time listeners he will find more anniversaries you were celebrating not holidays they're all holidays to me john but anyway uh we have some breaking news it turns out that we ordered a another shipment of mugs i don't know like a month or two back it was a little while ago and january
In January.
Thank you.
And we used the little tool that our friends at Cotton Bureau put together to email those that have said, hey, email me when this comes back, please.
And it turns out that, as expected, not everyone who requested that email has actually purchased a mug.
So if you're looking for a mug, you can go to atp.fm slash store and get yourself a mug.
And John, these are the red interiors.
Is that correct?
They're almost all red interiors.
There's a handful of gray interiors left if that's what you want.
There's also a smattering of pint glasses.
There are not many.
So for both of these, I would suggest acting sooner rather than later.
But particularly for the pint glasses, there's very few of those remaining.
So if you're interested, go snatch those up at ATP.fm.
Yeah.
And this is not, to be clear, this is not our pre-WWC merch sale.
We're still working on that.
This is just some leftover stock that honestly we forgot that we even had.
so true story it's been there you could have come at any time between the last sale and now and gotten a mug but i do occasionally we do get messages from people like oh i had a mug and i dropped it and it broke when are you going to sell them again and we're like oh i don't know oh anyway they've been there the whole time sorry about that um so yeah and same thing with pint glasses if you've broken one or just want some more um uh but and um when you go to adp.fm store you will see the mug and the pint glass at the top of the page you also see a whole bunch of shirts do not buy those shirts those shirts are for the suckers
who desperately need who desperately want a shirt now now now and can't wait for the sale but you you know the wwdc is coming and you can wait for the wwdc sale where you will get the superior quality and more expensive shirts that we have for the wwdc sale um so don't be don't be distracted and think oh this must be all the shirts they have for wwdc it's not that's just our on-demand shirts which honestly i like some of them because they're like simpler and don't have stuff on the back or whatever but the printing the
process is not as fancy as the printing process that we use for the time limited sales so for all the people who listen to this show you know not to buy the shirts until we tell you hey it's a wwc merch sale but the mugs and the pint glasses are exactly the same as they've always ever been so that's what we're telling you about now
Oh, I have some other follow-up for members of the show.
This is possibly my favorite bug report I've ever gotten.
We've heard from actually a few members over the last few months.
If you were still using what used to be called iTunes, now it's called the music app on the Mac, to sync with an iPod.
If you were syncing our podcast through either our bootleg or our member feeds to an iPod,
It wouldn't have worked when I changed the CMS a few months back for any episode past when we started membership.
So whenever that was, like three years ago, two years ago.
The feed just didn't see those episodes.
Only if you were syncing to an iPod.
What?
I'm happy to report that I have fixed this bug this week.
How?
What was the bug?
So a special thanks to a member, Charlie, who wrote in and was the latest person to report this.
Earlier people had written in, I'm sorry, I don't have your names handy.
I had just let them fall on the floor after a while of giving up.
So Charlie pointed out exactly which episode was when the cutoff was that it stopped syncing.
And I took a look in the feed and I realized that was when I had changed the enclosure URLs
like the audio file name URLs that are in the feed to just be like, you know, long hashes.
And they did not end in .mp3.
And I remember when I was looking at this, I'm like, wait a minute.
I remember a long time ago, Apple used to require that podcast feeds, they used to have to end the enclosure file names in .mp3.
And I think this was even undocumented.
But if you didn't do that, your feed wouldn't... Wait, undocumented from Apple?
No.
And to be fair, the Apple podcast team has always documented the feed format they expect and work with.
And I don't know if this detail was documented, but that was a detail back forever ago.
And for some reason, that was buried in my mind.
That's what sticks in there.
Not like birthdays, holidays, homework assignments, but that sticks in there.
And I'm like, wait a minute.
I wonder if I just add .mp3 to the end of these URLs, I bet they'll start working.
And sure enough, they did.
Cool.
So file extensions live on, much to people like John's chagrin.
File name extensions.
I hate when people shorten it to file extensions because it doesn't make any sense.
File name extensions.
They're extensions on the file name.
They're not extensions on the file.
Next, Marco's going to tell you about his ATM machine.
Yeah, I wish I had access with my personal PIN number.
No, that's the opposite.
That's adding too much information.
This is removing information.
File name extensions.
Yeah, that's terrible because the world is terrible and we can't have nice things because the whole world decided that they wanted to use file name extensions.
We all suffer for it.
But for a brief time, I lived without them and it was glorious.
I'll tell my grandchildren about it.
Well, I'm glad to hear that.
Also, we have some news.
I genuinely, Marco did not tell us this before he brought it up on the show.
So that was surprising and new for me.
And then you also have some news for members in India.
Is that correct?
That was another whole thing.
There was a very difficult to find bug in our CMS or in our payment gateway in particular that would affect cards that were verified with a thing called 3D Secure, which I think is pretty much universal in India and doesn't exist in the US.
So I really didn't know about it.
And this is one of those many details that Stripe, which is what we use to process our payments,
pretty much handles for you and you don't really have to think about it except when you start customizing crap behind the scenes which of course we can't help ourselves but do sometimes and I had customized things behind the scenes in such a way that was breaking 3D secure in a really difficult to find way and some people I don't know if it's everyone in India but
Certainly, multiple members who tried to sign up in India were getting an expired payment link error, and it was very, very hard to diagnose.
But I eventually figured out it was through something I was doing on the back end to make failed payments suck less in the way they're handled.
I was being too clever, and it broke 3D Secure, and I unbroke it.
So, sorry.
And then as a final note, speaking of members, just a very heartfelt thank you to all of you who have ever been a member, and especially those who are currently members, and double especially for those who just recently signed up after us talking about it recently.
So thank you to all of you.
Our membership numbers are looking better than ever, and I'm genuinely extremely pleased and humbled and thankful for that.
So thank you, everyone.
We appreciate it.
All right, let's do some follow-up.
The WWDC lottery has come in.
I can tell you that I am not a big winner.
I'm pretty sure we can safely say we all lost.
Is that right?
Yep.
I mean, the odds were against us, so it is what it is.
No WWDC lottery winners amongst the ATP hosts, which is expected.
But congratulations to all the winners.
And honestly, we don't even want to win the lottery.
We don't want to take someone else's spot.
We want press passes, which we also probably won't get.
But still...
Yeah, that's what we want, but I'm not sure that's what we're getting.
That's a different lottery.
That's not a lottery.
That is not random.
It is the opposite of random.
Well, from our point of view, it appears like a lottery.
We get pressed things sometimes, and we are very thankful when that happens, but we have no idea when they'll be offered, and most of the time they aren't.
Or why, really, honestly, or why at all.
Because when we get them, you don't ask questions.
I mean, you don't get them, no one's going to tell you why, so it is what it is.
I also wanted to—this is completely unrelated—I wanted to make a brief correction with regard to my beloved CalDigit TS4.
This is the Thunderbolt 4 docking station that I've been espousing for like a year, year and a half now.
I think I had made mention many, many moons ago that because of the particulars of the LG UltraMeh 5K—
I was doing a two cable solution for my laptop.
One of the cables was the CalDigit TS4.
The studio display is and always has been hanging off of that.
I have a few other devices hanging off of it.
And then I would separately plug in the LG 5K because I was under the impression that you cannot have an LG 5K share with the CalDigit because it doesn't use display stream compression, if I remember correctly.
And so it just didn't work.
It had to be directly connected to the Mac.
Turns out that's not right.
Somebody I'm asked on whose name I don't have in front of me was asking for clarification on this.
And I was like, no, that doesn't work.
I'll let me just try it again.
Oh, oh, so now.
So now I am in a one cable solution for both the studio display and the LG 5K.
So if you're one of the probably four people that I scared away from the Caldigit TS4.
maybe not be so scared of it.
It actually does work when the dual monitor setup with the studio display in the 5K.
The only thing that does not work is two LG 5Ks.
That apparently is too much for one connection, and that I am 100% sure does not work.
But studio display in 5K is okay.
Did you double-check that something hasn't changed about the thing?
Like, is it not really 5K?
Does the bit depth go down or anything like that?
That is a completely fair question.
I will say I did recently upgrade the firmware on the CalDigit.
And I swear, to your point, that I swear I tried this at some point and it didn't work.
But...
It very well could have been user error.
It very well could be a firmware update.
And it very well could be that the display, the 5K Ultraman, is not showing as much as it could or should.
Or maybe if I plug anything into the back of it, because if you recall, it has a couple of USB-C ports on it.
Maybe if I plug something in, it'll all come crumbling down.
But at least for now, I'm living the one cable blissful lifestyle where I don't plug in power.
I don't plug in any monitors.
I literally just plug in the CalDigit and everything else hangs off that.
And it is wonderful.
Thank you.
Thank you.
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John, tell me about Apple Photos' deduplication in shared libraries, if you please.
That was a feature Apple rolled out in iOS 16.4, macOS 13.3, and whatever the hell iPad.
iPadOS is also on 16.4.
I don't remember if they're in sync on numbers.
Anyway, we talked about it last episode, and I wanted to try it, so I did.
And I did it in my usual cautious way.
I remember my wife has the real photo library, and I had my own private photo library, but then I had also been...
uh manually taking everything from my phone from my photo library and manually importing it to hers but i had this whole backlog of stuff in my library some of which came from her library because i'd take some pictures that were like the favorites from her library put them into my library and so when shared photo library came out if i had just taken my entire library and shoved it into the shared library
there'd be tons of duplicates, but there was no duplicate detection.
Well, now there is.
So I'm like, finally, I can essentially empty my personal library because my wife's personal library is empty.
All of her photos essentially are in the shared library, and I wanted that to be the same for me.
So we would have one big shared library and a very minimum of photos in our personal libraries.
And to give you an idea of the only photos that I wanted to keep in my personal library were...
my destiny photos and you may be wondering what that is it's screenshots it's screenshots of builds and maps and you know maps with calls written on them and you know uh raid mecan mechanics and pattern anyway it's stuff that she doesn't want
no one's ever gonna why yeah i don't know why she wouldn't want that um and the second thing is a long series of pictures of my toes which if you want to know what that's about listen to reconcilable differences but i had been taking pictures of my toes during various medical situations she did not want in a shared library and honestly i do not blame her so those stayed in my personal library but anyways
you know there's someone out there who that went from the most sexy potential thing you could have possibly said very quickly to the least sexy potential wait destiny destiny build screenshots yes that's what i was definitely not the toes okay all right anyway um
So, but, but I, you know, this feature, like I'd read a lot about it, but you know, this is, you know, I had tens of thousands of photos, maybe, you know, 60, 70,000.
I forgot how many it was.
Right.
Most of those were going to be unique, but there was going to be lots of, lots, lots of duplicates.
Right.
So I chucked a bunch in there.
I just picked like 100 or so and chucked them into the library.
And then you have to wait for like in typical Apple fashion.
It's not like you could say, now please detect duplicates.
No, you have to wait until it decides to detect duplicates.
And the way you'll be able to tell that it has decided to detect duplicates is suddenly a duplicate photos item will appear on the sidebar.
I'm doing this on the Mac, by the way.
So it's a sidebar in Mac photos.
You could have done it on iOS as well, but I wanted to do it on the big screen and everything.
And when it finds the duplicates, you click on the duplicates, and in the Mac version of photos, it shows basically a linear list, top to bottom, and each row in the list is two photos.
It shows two photos, and then underneath it, two more, underneath it, two more, which is ridiculous on the Pro Display XDR, because it's this huge, expansive white space to the right of it where there's nothing.
But whatever.
It's two by two, right?
Noah's Ark.
And then there's a little blue link above each set of two that says, merge these two photos.
why is it not a button why is it a blue web link who freaking knows so i i'm looking i'm looking at it and i click the merge on that one and it says like something i think the first one was like merge merge these two exact duplicates and it has some explanatory text that explains what it means um and i said yes um
and then it takes the one that like it throws away one puts it in the recently deleted folder so it's not really like immediately deleting it so it's still there so you can look at it uh and then it takes the other one and like we said in the last episode it puts it into the shared library and says this was added to the shared library by you know person x and person y so it shows that it came from both of those places which is great
And it's supposed to pick the highest quality copy of the photo.
And so what I did before I looked at it, it's like, okay, let me look at this.
And sometimes, you know, when it says exact duplicate, they would be the same file size, the same resolution, like pretty exact duplicate, right?
sometimes when you click the little merge these two photos thing it will say merge these two photos but it wouldn't say that they were exact duplicates in that case one of them would be a different resolution much smaller than the other so on and so forth and in that case i would click the merge and then i would confirm like okay one is one is three and a half megs and one is 174k i really want to take the three and a half meg one please right and so i'd click merge and then i go and confirm
You can like show, you know, show photo in all photos.
And I would confirm, yes, it kept the 3.3 meg one that we're looking recently deleted.
Okay, there's the 174K one, right?
I did this sort of manually spot checking many, many, many times as I scroll, merge these two photos, you know, look at the dialog, see what the options are, decide what I think it's supposed to do, let it do its thing, confirm that it did what I thought it was supposed to do.
Sometimes it would have like two raw photos, a raw versus a JPEG.
I couldn't quite tell why in some situations it would show me a raw and a JPEG and consider them duplicates.
In other cases, it wouldn't.
So I just basically made sure that it always did what I wanted it to do.
And I did this for dozens of photos manually.
And then I was like, all right, so I'm pretty sure this is working the way Apple said it would.
It never made a mistake.
Every time I looked at two photos, I would agree that we should only keep one of them and I would decide which one it should be and I would let Apple's thing do it and it would pick the one that I thought it should.
So good.
Thumbs up.
It's working.
And it took me a little while to figure out, okay, do I have to sit here and click the little merge these two, merge these two, merge these two, and then hit the return key to select the default button on the dialog that appears?
Merge, return, merge, return.
Do I have to do that for all of them?
So I glanced up to the duplicates thing and said, how many duplicates are there?
And the answer was 30,000.
Oh, goodness.
so i was not going to sit there and click the blue link and click return 30 000 times right and so since it's a mac it works the way most mac things do you can just you know select all or click one and then scroll down to the end and shift click all sorts of things that i imagine i would have a little bit more trouble doing on a phone just because of how fidgety things are with the scroll bars and the small screen and my big fat finger so i was glad i was doing it on a mac
But I didn't select them all first.
First, I selected, you know, a thousand and said, you know, merge these duplicates.
And it did.
And then I, you know, I tried to spot check the thousand that I picked and they all looked good.
And then I did two thousand.
And eventually I'm like, OK, I am thoroughly satisfied that this thing is working.
Select all merge all these things.
and it merged them all uh and it as far as i can tell everything went off without a hitch no as far as i can tell i didn't lose any photos it didn't you know i went into the recently deleted thing and looked through what it had deleted and i'm like yeah these look like the ones that i would want deleted and didn't do anything weird and i emptied my library except for toe photos and destiny photos uh you know and actually i put what i did you know i actually just merged them all and then i unmerged the toe and the destiny ones right
probably i probably unemerged them before they even synced to anybody else so that was the easiest way to do it because i had them in folders or whatever so thumbs up on this feature just like the shared photo library i'm pretty sure it works exactly the way apple said it would uh and my only complaints continue to be the lack of features and not the features that they did add right so i still want shared albums zone and so forth but as they add the features the features appear to work and
i think i'm giving these things a pretty good workout with my 150 160 000 photo library and you know merging 30 000 duplicates and there was a typical kind of like sometimes there was lag and then i went over to different computers and i saw this one still thinks there's some duplicates so there was like one day worth of me visiting each computer and saying do you think all the duplicates are gone do you think all the duplicates are gone and occasionally
A few more would pop up, but now everything has settled down.
And during that whole time, I don't think it did anything wrong.
So if you are afraid of this thing, this duplicate feature, know that at least one person has tried it and it has not been disastrous.
Yay.
Glowing recommendation.
Right, right.
All right.
So tell me about disasters with regard to your bug reports.
this is about my analyst tracking area bug and i said that it seemed like maybe the team that made the change was hoping they could make a change to a framework but sort of not tell anybody about it in the hopes that like probably no one will notice this and so we can just make this change we don't have to put it in the release notes we don't have to you know make a change to the documentation we could just you know no one is probably relying on this this existing behavior right and it turns out i was relying on that existing behavior
And so I, you know, wrote a bug about it.
And then they had to say, oh, yeah, no, the new behavior is new behavior.
So here's some anonymous feedback regarding this phenomenon within Apple.
This person says, I was on a team at Apple 10 years ago.
You know, this is the problem with these stories.
You get info from people who are willing to talk.
They're willing to talk when they were at Apple 10 years ago.
They're not really going to talk, you know, right now or whatever.
But anyway, take it for what it's worth.
I was on a team at Apple 10 years ago that worked on a tool that would ingest all iOS apps in the store nightly and run analysis to see what frameworks and methods they were using.
We would frequently get asked by other teams to provide usage information of specific framework calls to see if any of the top 100 apps used them.
I assume this information will be used to determine the effects of removing or changing frameworks.
This was 10 years ago, and I would assume they have better methods for this now.
This makes me think that Apple would definitely know if Microsoft Office or Photoshop would be affected by these types of changes.
So, a few things about this.
First, there's lots of reasons why you would examine API usage of apps in the App Store beyond letting teams know whether they can change an API.
Second, Photoshop is sold outside the App Store.
I know there are versions of Photoshop inside the App Store, but like the real Photoshop is outside the App Store.
And Microsoft Office, I believe, is sold both outside and inside the App Store.
So I'm not entirely sure if this would let you know.
But yes, Apple obviously...
does lots of analysis of the apps in the app store that's one of the advantages of running the app store is that and the advantage of it reviewing every application is any kind of automated thing like this of just saying like what frameworks are popular who's using them how we introduced the new framework at wwdc how long does it take for that framework to start appearing in apps who is using it what apis are they using if we made a framework how much of the api surface is being used and by what and especially for sort of the top 100 apps like you know
The apps that we really care about, I don't know how they even determine top 100 apps.
It's all casino games for children at this point.
So I'm not sure how representative that is of what APIs they should work on.
But yeah, I do think Apple has good visibility into that.
But of course, Apple being Apple, the team making changes to the framework,
has to ask some other team the you know whatever the api usage app store analysis team to find out and and of course my api in question was on the mac and so they have to ask about the mac app store and i think the top 10 apps in the mac app store are probably not representative of the top 10 apps used by mac users and so there's a little bit more difficulty there but uh anyway there's there's one take from the inside on uh apple's you know unsurprising awareness and analysis of the software that passes through their ecosystem
We also got some feedback from another anonymous person, which indicates that maybe the radar grass is not actually greener on the other side.
I'm going to read most of it.
I work for a big developer in the games industry, and we definitely get a very different support experience from Apple, though I'm not sure the outcomes are any different.
At the corporate level, which is way above my level, we have whole teams of developer relationships people from Apple talking to our first-party relationships people about business deals or whatever.
I have only the tiniest insight into this, and I can't share it.
My team is direct contact with someone in Apple Developer Relations and several engineers that work with them.
We have monthly meetings between our engineers and this team in which we raise issues, ask for advice, etc.
We also have a private Slack channel with that same DevRel team where we can raise issues and get a response at any time.
It seems like this should be great, right?
Right?
But we end up with broadly the same frustrations.
Da-da-da-da.
Whoa.
Responses to our bug reports are slow.
Granted, less slow because we have more ability to nag them about it.
We continually have to prod the Slack thread and ask, what's happening with this issue?
We see the, we think we've fixed it, or try in the latest beta responses from Apple, but they haven't fixed it.
And it's still difficult to figure out which beta that will supposedly have the fix.
They still can't share any details of how things work under the hood to help us come up with viable workarounds, which in some cases we would need even if the bugs were fixed because we want to support a broader range of OS versions.
They often can't answer straightforward questions like, what are the performance implications of X versus Y?
Either because they don't know, can't say, or it depends.
And they can't tell us on what.
I guess my point is it isn't just the feedback radar system itself that's the problem.
Apple's organization seems to be set up with such a focus on secrecy that they just can't provide the transparency that you need as an external developer to really believe that they do actually care about and are working on your problems.
I'm going to read it again because I think it's that good.
Apple's organization seems to be set up with such a focus on secrecy that they just can't provide the transparency that you need as an external developer to really believe that they do actually care about and are working on your problems.
Amen to that.
I know this was framed as, oh, our deal for us is different when we're at a big company, but the outcomes are the same.
But how much would you kill for a private Slack channel with Apple engineers so you could prod them in threads?
Like I know that still they are held back by being unresponsive and, you know, like, oh, they can't tell you.
And like, yeah, it is frustrating.
It is worse than I think what they'd be comparing it to is say you're a big, important company, big, important company would get better support from, say, Microsoft than they get from Apple, you know, for right now.
We're not expecting that dinky little developers will get the same support as a big, giant company.
I think where they come from here is we are a big, important company, so we know how big and important companies get treated by different platform owners, and Apple is the worst, right?
Because of secrecy, because they can't tell us things, and because they're unresponsive, and because there's layers... That the organization is not set up to...
be responsive to demand so as jealous as we are as individual developers of having these kind of touch points it's unrealistic to assume that any individual would have this but in within each sort of you know cohort within each strata of developers it seems like if you were to compare like to like big company how do you how do you get support from apple versus how you get it from microsoft versus how you get it from google apple is always in last place seemingly for structural and secrecy reasons
Thank you.
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Oh.
All right, and thus we enter the camera portion of the show, which begins in follow-up, but will continue into the main topic.
I believe this is all Marco, is that correct?
It's certainly a lot, me.
Although I'm sure John will jump in, and I hope he does, because there's going to be a lot.
All right, so...
I've gone through my brief camera buying phase of the five-year span that we're in because it's about as often as I buy cameras.
It's a pattern.
I recognize it at this point.
About every five years, I see what modern cameras can do.
It blows me away.
I buy one or two modern cameras.
And then over the next few years, I stop using them because they're too much to carry around.
iPhones get better and more convenient.
And I say, I'm never going to buy a camera again.
uh and then what inevitably happens is you know a few years later the cycle repeats as cameras get better has this cycle repeated that much i think you may be on the first round of this particular cycle because i think you basically you were like big cameras are good i'm into big cameras and then the iphone camera got good and then you switched all iphone i think this is your first backslide unless i'm remembering it no that sounds right i think i think this is the first loop i mean i i agree with you that's probably going to repeat because let's history be a guide there are there are the cycles of marco uh i
to be fair to you this is your first your first time through this maybe yeah maybe maybe my first it's certainly my first time in you know a while in about five years um i guess there was my brief uh flirtation with being a video producer where i bought a couple of you know objects for video production never use them and eventually mail them to you i mean i mean you made some videos you actually made videos with them right
I think I made a video.
No, you had like a Mac mini video and some other thing.
And the iPad, the iPad Pro 2018.
I think it was the same event.
But in that one, I don't think you had a period where you were like, you know, big video cameras are crappy.
You should just use your iPhone for everything.
Yeah.
But anyway, as usual during this phase, I was trying to figure out how do I make my new cool camera as convenient as the iPhone?
And of course, that's impossible.
But I ran into a couple of issues.
Number one was I was torn between the physical size of the Ricoh GR3X, which is awesome.
I was not super thrilled with the color of its pictures and
And then I was very impressed by the Fujifilm X100V, but it was a little bit less technically easy to use and technically sharp as the Ricoh GR3X.
But the Fuji produced pictures that I just love the colors from.
And so I've got a bunch of feedback on this.
So first of all, a number of people sent in this website.
It's ricorecipes.com.
This is Richie's Ricorecipes.
And the Ricoh has these various customization options where you can set for custom mode number two, set color plus two, saturation minus one, sharpness plus one, that kind of thing.
And so what this person, Richie, has done is made a whole bunch of
presets for those settings that you can enter into your camera to achieve different looks.
And the idea is to get much of the same benefit as Fuji's film emulation modes, which are very appealing and very popular with Ricoh cameras.
I tried them.
They are better than the Ricoh's defaults, but I was not able to find one that I really thought was comparable to what I was getting out of the Fuji with no effort whatsoever.
If what you want is really cool colors in the photos and if you like the way Fuji's render color, there is no direct substitution in camera hardware.
Now, you can get like Lightroom presets and stuff that people have made to try to emulate Fuji's modes and they might come closer.
But I have not yet found anything that offers what Fuji does in like in-camera JPEG processing.
So you can just dump it right onto something and use it immediately.
um on the fuji itself um i i talked about how crappy all the camera apps are about transferring photos over wi-fi to your phone or whatever like all these different schemes everyone has and they're all crappy and terrible and slow fuji has this this feature called pc auto save and i assume it's how you pronounce it because it's in all capitals
pc load letter what the f does that mean abort retry fail there you go let's pull out all the old pc tropes where everything was in caps yeah so anyway pc auto save um is on most fuji cameras uh at least you know most reasonably modern ones um although it's funny i decided in the intervening time to cancel my return for the xt5
i kept the xt5 and i love it and shut up um so anyway pc auto save is on the x100v and many other modern fuji cameras and it's on the xt3 and 4 i think for some reason i don't think it's on the xt5 i can't find it anywhere and it's not on the compatibility list and it's not in the instruction manual and i can't find it anywhere on the menus so did you do a firmware update
Yes, I did.
It's the modern version of everything.
Thank you for... John, you were the one who taught me that camera firmware updates exist.
So that's the first thing I tried.
Like, oh, maybe I got an early version and it didn't help.
And it's listed nowhere.
It's documented nowhere.
It's not in the instructions.
So...
I'm pretty sure it just doesn't have this feature for some reason.
But anyway, what PC autosave is, is you run this horrendous little Fuji app on your Mac or PC or whatever.
You set up the camera.
You kind of pair the camera to this app on your computer that's always running in your menu bar with a hideous icon and an even more hideous interface.
And you can tell the camera.
You can go to the playback menu and select PC autosave.
And it will then begin to very slowly...
Connect to your Wi-Fi network, find your PC, and then very slowly, automatically save the pictures to it over your Wi-Fi network.
And it is a comically slow process, but it does work.
So if you happen to have your computer on the same Wi-Fi network as your camera...
This method is a little bit less horrible than using the apps to transfer.
But ultimately, all of these methods are so much more horrible than just plugging the camera directly into your computer or popping the card out and using a card reader.
You're better off just doing that.
And I think once the iPhone goes USB-C, I would imagine you will probably be able to just plug in any USB-C card reader to the iPhone, and I bet it will import it directly.
Because right now, Apple has sold various camera connection kit accessories over the years.
Some of which have USB ports.
Some of which just have SD card slots.
I believe the ones of those that use the lightning port, I think, do already work on the iPhone.
But I'm not positive about that.
I don't have one here to test.
And I wasn't going to buy one a few months before the USB-C iPhone comes out.
So I could be wrong on that.
But anyway, that's an option maybe to go directly to a phone.
I know it at least works on iPads and definitely works on Macs.
So that's the way to go if you want to transfer photos to your cool Apple hardware is just dump them onto the computer directly with the card or the cable.
Also got a wonderful tip.
My complaint about the X100V was I was having trouble getting the autofocus to really nail the focus, especially on eyes.
It would sometimes focus on the tip of the eyelashes instead of the actual eye surface.
Stuff like that.
It was slightly missing focus a lot, and I was having trouble getting sharp shots.
Anonymous wrote in to say that the F100V ships with the release-slash-focus priority setting on shutter, meaning it will prioritize taking a picture over actually getting the right focus.
Changing it to focus improved my hit rate noticeably and seemed to have little impact on shutter lag in most situations.
So to explain this, basically almost every modern camera, at least in default mode, usually if you push the shutter button but the lens has not focused yet,
usually it will wait until it locks on focus and then take the picture.
So that's shutter lag.
And sometimes it's really frustrating if you're maybe in the dark and the camera's having trouble focusing and you're like, just push it, just take it.
And the camera's going, going back and forth and can't really focus on something.
So oftentimes this feature in more pro modes or more pro models,
will be set to shutter priority, which means as soon as you hit the shutter button all the way down, just take the picture regardless of whether the autofocus engine thinks it has focus or not.
So the X100V ships in that mode by default where it just takes the picture even if it's not focused all the way.
So I changed this the way Anonymous said to change it to focus priority.
So the former where it waits for focus even if it introduces some lag before it actually takes the picture.
And I agree.
It seems to have improved the hit rate and it does not seem to introduce noticeable lag in any situation I've encountered so far.
Are you not a fan of back button focusing, which would also solve this problem for you?
like the af on button on cannons and stuff like that like we're like you hit the you hit the button there without because normally i just half press the shutter and then go all right so so most people phones uh phones cameras uh big cameras ship uh so that if you press the shutter button halfway down it will start focusing and then if you press the rest of the way down it will take the picture and at that point everything you just described takes place it says it's
Should I really take the picture or should I wait for the focusing motor to finish getting to where I know it's supposed to focus and so on and so forth, right?
The other technique is often called back button focusing, which means you assign some button on the back of your camera to be the please do autofocus now button.
And then the shutter button is, and you turn off the feature that makes the camera try to focus when you push the shutter button halfway down.
So you separate the two functions.
So you decide when you want your camera to do autofocusing with the back button.
And then once you're happy with the focus, you can press the shutter button.
You can do both of them at the same time.
And then you would still have the same situation where, should I wait for the motor or whatever?
But you can also do your focus.
And then once you're happy, yes, you've got the focus to my satisfaction.
And the thing isn't moving, the person isn't moving or whatever.
Then when you press the shutter button, it's going to take it immediately because no part of pressing the shutter button tells it to do focus again.
Focusing is separated from shutter.
I am not a big fan of this, but I see the situations where it could be advantageous.
And some people, this is the only way they use a camera and they consider it broken to use the other way.
But I feel like it's just kind of a muscle memory type thing a lot of the times.
But you see, the advantage is like if you get it focused on somebody and they're not moving, very often with cameras, with modern cameras being so good at focusing on stuff,
Like someone in the background will move and turn their head towards the camera and the camera will be like, ooh, a pair of eyes.
I'm totally going to focus on that.
It's like, no, no.
Focus on the ear of the person I just focused on.
Like, you know, if you get the focus the way you want and the person you focus on turns their head away.
So now their ear is facing you, but you're happy with that focal plane.
You don't want it to jump to the person in the background.
whose two eyes just face that you want it to stay where you left it and so in that situation you do back button focusing to get the focus you want so you get perfect eye focus on that person and even if they turn their head slightly you don't want it to pick some other subjects so then you use the shutter button for it so if you got used to that technique of focusing i think that will that would essentially do the same thing as you saying shutter priority because you know in that case the shutter never activates autofocus it just fires the shutter
yeah i never shot that style but you know it's a lot of people do so there's there's probably some i probably should be using that style i think i it's it's more cumbersome a lot of the time but and especially if you forget that you've you've you previously selected this focal plane and i'm never going to change it unless you hit the back button again and you think oh i you know because you get used to just using the half the other way to to solve this problem with lag or maybe the focus is to
Get a Sony camera or some other camera that has insanely good, really, really fast, really smart focus selection that's just been getting better and better over time.
And to be fair, all camera manufacturers have been getting better and better.
Sony used to have a huge lead and now it just has a smaller lead.
But Sony still is a really good focusing system where it will...
Like the reason you don't notice it on Sonys is it's so fast.
First of all, Sony lenses are very fast to physically focus.
And second, the Sony like image detection system is really good at finding the thing you want to focus on and tracking it and not getting distracted when something moves.
So that's one of the advantages of the Sony cameras.
But other ones have been catching up.
And these type of settings are a good way to sort of shore up the minor inefficiencies as compared to the best of the best.
Yeah, and in all fairness, as much as I love the Fuji color processing, they are not close to class leading with autofocus sophistication.
That is one area where they are, I think, behind the competitors, and I think all the reviews agree with that.
So I have noticed that it is not as smart as Sony's autofocus, but...
It's smart enough for me, and I'm loving the pictures that it's getting.
If I was a sports photographer, I would definitely not use Fuji, but for taking pictures that I like a lot in other situations, it's proving to be fantastic.
One thing I noticed as I was taking pictures with these cameras for the first time since using an iPhone, I missed the iPhone HDR photography.
And I don't mean the... So cameras have caught up in a number of ways.
So...
since i since i you know the previous last camera i bought was the um sony a7r3 which is at this point probably something like five years old in that ballpark and what cameras have gotten really good at eating away some of the iphone's advantages in the meantime not all of them uh and they never will get all of them uh but some of them and one of the things is you know the iphones have always been really not always but
Modern iPhones have always been really good at dealing with high dynamic range scenes, scenes where you have something very bright, like maybe maybe something, you know, water reflecting the sun or the actual sun or the moon or something in your shot, something very bright.
But you still want to have detail in the darker shadow areas.
So, you know, you have to have a lot of dynamic range in the image and modern camera sensors in big cameras can capture that dynamic range very well.
Modern camera sensors have incredible dynamic range, but usually where they lacked is in processing down that dynamic range to a useful photo that you would actually want and look good without losing all the details in the highlights or the shadows.
And usually you had to shoot raw to really make the most of that.
And I've,
I am so done shooting raw.
Like the pictures are so huge and they break in everything.
And I, I'm just not, and that's, that's for a more editing focused workflow than what I ever want.
Yeah.
You might be back to the raw eventually, but, but I, I think, I think, so this is relevant to a link that we'll put in the show notes from a petapixel that is actually from today and out two days ago.
uh where the headline is gen z discovers modern digital cameras are better than iphones and it shows a bunch of pictures on like tiktok where they're like look uh you know this person was sitting on the beach and we want to take a picture of them here's what it looks like on the iphone here's what looks like on a real camera and there's situations in which the iphone sensor is too small to gather enough light and the real camera like is able to gather enough light to correctly expose the person right but a lot of these pictures like you know look how look how dark everything is in the iphone i think they're terrible examples because what you just said is so true
Where the iPhone excels, it's not being good at low-light photography in that it gathers lots of light on the sensor and can sort of see in the dark.
No, that's not why the iPhone photos come out well.
They come out well because it does the high-dynamic HDR photos, meaning... And we're setting aside what you're going to get to eventually, right?
With just the EDR stuff.
But like...
When the iPhone does high dynamic range, it does it in the same way that big cameras can do it, but it does it without involving the user at all.
You just press the shutter button on the iPhone and what the iPhone does, it's not like, oh, it processes its dynamic range better.
It takes multiple exposures.
right it doesn't it takes one underexposed it takes one overexposed i don't know how many exposures it takes it takes at least two maybe more and it combines them so it's not a single photo because a single photo has crap dynamic range on a on a sensor that's like the size of the the end of an eraser on a pencil right it's going through this tiny little lens with this tiny little it's just there's not a lot of light there so why do the iphone cameras actually look better where is the real camera because it takes multiple exposures and combines them
If you take a single exposure with a full frame camera in a very challenging lighting situation, like a person with a bright sunset behind them, you can choose to expose so the sunset is not blown out and then the person is all dark.
You can choose to expose the person so their skin tone looks good and then the sky behind them is blown out.
with any single exposure you can try to get as much you know big camera sensors have a lot of dynamic range you can try to get a compromise between them but in very challenging situation where there's a really bright light behind somebody you can't have both but big cameras can also take multiple exposures and try to combine them they just there's so much worse at it than phones right because first of all there's the contract when you're using a big camera which is you press the shutter button we do a single exposure
Oh, do you want to do exposure bracketing?
Well, that's a setting, and you get to do it, and maybe you want to use electronic shutter, or maybe we're going to take multiple ones, and I hope you don't shake the camera because our software is not very good at aligning the pictures and combining them.
The iPhone totally wins there.
So I feel like this Petapixel article is showing a bunch of photos where I'm like...
The iPhone probably would do better here unless you're in a situation that is within the realm of the dynamic range of a real camera that you don't need.
If you have a big sensor in a real camera, you don't need to do multiple exposures, whereas the iPhone does need to do multiple exposures and it ends up looking worse.
And I guess that's what their examples are here.
But I think.
You know, you've said in the past, Marco, like, you know, iPhones are better at low light.
And then we get all this feedback saying, are you crazy?
iPhones aren't better at low light.
They have a tiny sensor.
They can't gather any light or whatever.
And it's like, no, they're not better physically speaking in terms of photons, but they're better because they take, you know, one, they take two or more exposures.
I honestly don't know how many they take.
And they find a way to combine them, even if your hand is shaking, even if, you know, like the processing of the multiple exposures that they take, exposing for the sky, exposing for the person's face, exposing for this.
And then they do all this processing and they mush it up into this thing that they call a photo, which is a combination of multiple photos.
That's what they're better at.
And big cameras can do that, but it's a setting and you have to know how to use it.
And they're still not as good at doing the combination of those exposures as possible.
apple is let alone doing them seamlessly when you just press a single shutter button maybe they'll get there someday but i do kind of feel like there is that implied contract with the real camera which is you press that shutter button once we do want exposure and if you want something different you have to ask for it explicitly well and they're actually there is an hdr mode on the xt5 um i i gotta see if the x100v has it but you're talking about multiple exposures are you talking about oh the thing where we add a brightness channel that shows the bright stuff brighter
so there's multiple options so there is the multiple exposure thing you flip a knob over to hdr it's right right at your thumb you hit the shutter and it goes and it takes three pictures and it merges them and you get a jpeg out and it's done um that's and that's you know using using the exposure bracketing you know one dark one light one medium different settings for like you know how much range you want to cover there how much you want to you know crush into the final picture
But then modern cameras also have usually some form of extended dynamic range shooting mode.
So what this and the various details of how they do this are, you know, they vary by manufacturer and everything.
Some of them will have like dynamic range priority modes.
But the idea basically is they use a larger range, like they capture a larger range than they normally would and then map that to like, you know, the zero to one color space, you know, for the JPEG.
Um, so what ends up happening is it looks, you know, if you've seen HDR pictures, uh, online, like they can look a little bit odd.
It like in terms of like the contrast is maybe too low and everything kind of looks almost like a painting, like not texture wise, but like color wise.
Are you thinking again, I feel like we need to distinguish.
You're talking about HDR with multiple exposures.
No one exposure.
All right.
So then what you're talking about is if you take a photo with your iPhone, for example, of a sunset, you may notice that when you view that on your iPhone with an HDR screen that the sun looks brighter.
That's different.
So this there's three different things.
I'm talking about like extended dynamic range modes on big cameras.
uh where they they kind of they use the range they have differently they like they map it differently to capture more range at the expense of usually contrast um and and possibly noise because it's kind of like they kind of like shoot at a higher iso than they would need to and then kind of capture the i don't know the details of how it works but speaking of details i should find this in a future show i actually had it in the notes that
i learned something recently we're watching a video about sony cameras iso in particular you probably already knew this and maybe we've mentioned on a past show but i if we did i totally forgot it that sony's sensors on their cameras have two different capture modes essentially depending on what iso level they're at there's like a low sensitivity one and a high sensitivity one and when you cross an iso threshold which differs from camera to camera it kicks into the other mode
which i had no idea about but it explains so much if you look at the test results you can say i can see and on this camera and iso 400 it switches to the other thing which is you know it's a trade-off between dynamic range and noise and stuff like that but that's it's something that uh they don't sony doesn't really mention because they don't consider it to be a feature that you can count on uh i forget what the the term of art is but their their uh their video cameras do it explicitly and and they only talk about it there because the video cameras are able to be equally good in both of the ranges
But it explains a lot if you if you have a Sony camera of like why when I was cranking up the ISO, everything kept looking worse and worse until I crossed the threshold and all of a sudden it got better and then started on a whole new curve.
It's because the sensors have two different modes.
It makes sense when you see the underlying stuff.
I'll try to find it for a future episode or maybe even for this one.
But it was fascinating.
And that's.
That's the type of technical detail that is buried inside your cameras that is good to know because on a real camera, you have control over that stuff on the iPhone.
Even if you're using a third party camera app and tweaking all the settings, not quite as much control.
Yeah.
And so rounding out the dynamic range topic, one of the things I missed also was what John said a minute ago.
When you take a picture with a modern iPhone of a high dynamic range environment, like there's a sunset or something,
You notice when you view it, it cranks the brightness up way past normal, pure white brightness levels for those parts of the photo that are super bright, like the tips of the waves, the sun, the light in the background, the moon, whatever it is.
Those get higher brightness levels.
Same thing happens on any kind of modern Mac with... Do they call them EDR or HDR for the screens?
They call them XDR.
Yeah, it's called...
EDR, I think, is what they call the technology of, hey, we're going to show your screen the way we normally do.
But if you show one of those photos that was taken how you describe, we will also show that on the same screen without changing your display mode or anything like that.
That's the EDR.
It's like the ability to combine.
regular dynamic range your windows and you know web pages and stuff like that but oh here this little square of it is high dynamic range just that little square we've talked about before with like the aerial screensaver when when you show a preview of it in like system settings or whatever that it's like this little tiny window that's suddenly hdr but the whole rest of your screen is normal
I was wondering, well, if I'm using a camera that can capture all this dynamic range, how can I get my pictures to render in that mode on my Pro Display XDR or my MacBook Pro?
It's obviously just some kind of metadata somewhere.
Like, how do I set that?
So I was looking for an app that can do this, that can be like, all right, take this photo from my camera.
Turn on EDR display mode for it and then let me map in the image like, all right, what levels correspond to what?
So, you know, because what EDR, the way EDR works, basically, if your regular screen brightness is like 0.0 to 1.0, EDR would be like, all right, in this photo, we have some areas that are 1.5 bright.
So, you know, map map what the photo has from zero to one map it really to zero to one point five and show that that way in the screen.
So there's a way you can map the the the brightness levels and tone levels from the picture onto a different range for display on the screen.
Did you look up how the iPhone does this?
No, I didn't have time for that.
I believe my vague recollection is that the way Apple decided to do exactly what you're describing, they wanted to do it in a way so that when you share that photo with somebody who doesn't have an HDR screen, like they have a MacBook Air or they have an iMac 24-inch or something like that and they don't have an HDR screen, that it still looks normal to them, like that nothing goes wonky.
So my vague recollection is that what Apple did is
It's, you know, the JPEG or whatever, the Heek image is just the regular dynamic range.
And then there's a separate, sort of a separate channel that's like the brightness enhancing channel.
Oh, yeah.
And non-HDR screens will just ignore that channel and just show it normal.
But if you have an HDR screen, it takes like the brightness channel and smushes it together with the picture and then produces the output.
What you're describing sounds more like you've got the image data and...
And then you're just like telling it to reinterpret it.
But I do wonder if the the Fuji thing is doing the, you know, separating the brightness channel from the regular image for backup compatibility reasons, or if it's really just like baking it into the photo and then just reinterpreting it according to some flag that says, hey, when you look at this thing, interpret it this way.
Well, so as far as I can tell, I don't think any modern standalone cameras shoot that way.
Whatever that metadata is that makes Apple display them super bright, I don't think any modern cameras do that.
So I was wondering, how can I apply that in editing?
Is there some app that can toggle that flag and generate that brightness data for my pictures?
and i looked around um so i have pixelmator i so pixelmator on the mac can do it if you go to the color adjustment section hit customize you can add an edr toggle the problem is this only works for raw files as far as i can tell and it seems like the xt5 raw files are supported by nothing right now including not pixelmator not mac photos like nothing seems to support the xt5 raw files even though this camera came out like last fall i think
It's not super new, but anyway, Pixelmator on the Mac can do it only for raw files.
Pixelmator Photo is their iOS app.
This can do it for all files.
If you go to the adjustment sliders, hit the ellipsis menu, and then there's an option that says turn on EDR.
So that's what this, it's called EDR in Pixelmator, and so that's what you want to turn on if you want to play with this.
I separately found an app called Radiance Plus.
I'll link to it.
It's $3 a month or $30 lifetime.
And I converted two photos with it and instantly paid the $30 lifetime fee.
It's a very, very simple app.
It just has like two sliders.
It's like, you know, brightness and strength or something like that.
I converted these two pictures I had taken with the Fuji X100V.
They look awesome.
And these pictures were awesome by themselves, like before I did this.
But they're even more awesome when I added this flag.
It much better captures the actual range that the scene actually looked like.
And I'm very, very happy that I can basically take awesome camera input.
and make them look as nice as the iPhone photos do in this particular way.
And then that syncs.
I added them to my library.
It works in your photo library.
And so now those show up on all my devices in that cool EDR mode, and it looks great.
So I will link to these apps in the show notes.
If you want to do it, I strongly recommend giving these apps a try.
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While I was doing all this, I was in camera mode.
And so one of the one of the most common times that we use big cameras in our household is we can occasionally see some wildlife from our deck of our house.
And so I wanted something that had a big zoom.
And I gave Tiff as a gift a couple of years ago.
I gave her a super zoom lens for our Sony, the 200 to 600 millimeter Sony zoom with a 2x teleconverter so that it reaches to 1200 millimeters.
It's a very far reach.
We've tried to shoot with this a lot.
We haven't had great success with it.
in part because it's just not a very sharp lens.
And so we've gotten some pictures that just were very soft and very low contrast.
And I thought at first, maybe that's just the teleconverter.
So I took the teleconverter off, less reach, faster, etc.
And it just still was not very good.
And some of it is just distance.
If we're taking a picture of something that's very, very far away...
you know the atmospheric haze the water vapor in the air like it just it makes it hard to capture anything very sharp at a very great distance because that's just how air works and you can't really get around that you can like we you know we put a uv filter on and everything that doesn't really do much it's it's not really you know you're dealing with the atmosphere so that's there's only so much you can do
But I was curious, now that I was in the Fuji system, you know, Fuji has a similar reach lens.
I also know that there's this whole category of super zoom cameras.
And I had never tried one before.
I know John has occasionally tried things like this, right?
yeah before i got interchangeable lens cameras i went from like little handheld like you know point and shoot type things uh which are my first digital cameras to super zoom which i used for many years because what you get with a super zoom i remember i was taking pictures of my kids playing in the waves in the water is you get a really good quality incredibly long zoom lens for the price of never being able to take it off your camera because it's not an interchangeable lens camera it is a camera it comes with this built in and it is what it is and i was able to get i think my last one that i got was like it was like uh you know uh
2.8 aperture through the entire zoom range which is absolutely unheard of unless you're willing to spend like thousands of dollars on a like interchangeable lens zoom thing because normally that you're lucky if the lowest end of the zoom range is you know f2.8 usually it starts off much worse than that and gets worse as you zoom but i was able to get for a very low price a tiny sensor in a not very you know good camera but it comes
built in with a extremely long zoom that's f 2.8 through the whole aperture range like there's no if i had to try to get that in a quote-unquote real camera equivalent it would have cost like thousands of dollars more um so that's i endorse that type of camera and they're really cool but of course
that's all you're getting like there's no you can't put a prime lens on it you know it's not the the sensors tend not to be very big and every or if you do get one with a big sensor or whatever then it does also cost thousands of dollars but it is a very inexpensive way to get a really good quality really long zoom as long as you're okay with that being the only thing this camera can do
Yeah.
And usually, you know, there's other compromises.
It might not have the best optical quality.
Usually the sensor is substantially smaller than you would get in like a big camera.
Resolution is usually not as good.
It doesn't have as many pro features.
Like, you know, there's other downsides to it.
But overall, it's, you know, super zooms can be pretty good.
And so I was curious.
And also the super zooms are almost always way, way, way smaller than an equivalent focal length range would be on like a full frame camera or something like smaller, lighter, like some of them are comical.
You put this picture up.
Some of the biggest super zooms do get comical, but they're still smaller.
They're still smaller than if you were to get that same focal length.
smaller lighter if you get the same focal length in an interchangeable lens so it is i love that category because it's like we're going to make compromises in it for the sake of having really good zoom and not being so big that you need like an extra person to hold the front of the lens up for you
yeah so here i just posted this link i'll put this i'll make this the image of the chapter art this is all the different cameras and so i don't own most of these i went to lens rentals and i rented a whole bunch of stuff from them because i'm like i want to try out modern super zooms to see how good are they how how do they compare to the sony super zoom that we have and do i want to maybe you know sell the sony thing and buy something else
And by the way, you're calling something a super zoom.
I think super zoom only applies to the cameras that don't have interchangeable lenses and long zoom.
No, I'm the only person I'm just talking.
Yeah, I'm just talking about a giant telephoto lens.
Yes, exactly.
But I consider the combined unit of the camera and the giant telephoto lens.
I will call that a super zoom.
I know it's technically not.
There's other things in here that also aren't super zooms, but I'll explain why in a minute.
But anyway, I decided to rent all this stuff to see like, how do I like modern, you know, long reach camera options?
How do they compare to my giant Sony full frame, you know, 600 millimeter telephoto?
Like, how does all this stuff compare?
And maybe it's something else fit my needs better.
Maybe I could, you know, trade the Sony for it, you know, with B&H or something like that.
So anyway, I rent all the stuff from Lens Rentals.
They were great as usual.
um i also wanted to try with all so i i rented what seemed to be according to dp review which is i i've been on that site so much recently and i'm i'm still so sad it's going away i i went to their reviews and ratings and everything and did some research and found it seemed like the two generally best regarded super zooms right now are the um sony rx 10 mark 4
And the Nikon Coolpix P1000.
The Nikon is about $1,000.
The Sony RX10 is almost $2,000.
So it's a pretty big price difference.
The Sony only, quote, only goes to an equivalent of 600 millimeters.
So it's not a massive reach, but that is still pretty far, especially for something that is as small as it is.
And if you look at this picture of the overview of all these cameras, the Sony RX10 is the one in the bottom left corner.
And you can see it is way smaller than the telephoto cameras, than the full frame telephotos.
And it's even significantly smaller than the next one to its right.
That other black camera is the Nikon P1000.
But the P1000 doesn't just go to 600 millimeters.
It goes to 3,000 millimeters.
Oh, my goodness.
I also want to point out, if you're looking at this photo, which you should be, it'll be the chapter art and it'll probably also be in the show notes, that when Marco says the one in the lower left corner goes to 600 millimeters, that's how far at least one of the white ones on the right goes.
The one on the far right is the same.
The far right lens has the same zoom distance as the far left camera.
So when we say you save size and weight by going with the super zoom, this is what we mean.
yeah oh and in all fairness i did have the lens hoods attached to the two to everything but you should there's a lens hood on the one left too yes you and you and you really should for you know when you're trying to minimize you know any kind of thing that could cause haziness and try to maximize contrast you want the lens hoods on i think the lens hood on the camera on the right is bigger than the entire camera on the left i think you're right
and i also you'll you'll note right above the nikon p1000 is a little tiny black camera that is the sony rx100 mark 7 the this is not a super zoom uh but the reason i rented the rx100 first of all it's very inexpensive to rent i'm like i'm already renting all this other stuff let me throw this in too i wanted to try it um the rx100 series um
I first rented it from Lens Rentals, actually.
Back in 2013, I rented the very first one.
And now they're on Mark 7.
Unfortunately, Mark 7 seems to be... This might be the last one.
They released this Mark 7 in 2019, and there's been nothing on that front since.
But what's interesting about it is that it's...
Kind of pocketable.
Not really.
You wouldn't want this in your pocket.
A jacket pocket you could do.
Definitely not like a pants or other clothing pocket.
You could easily put it in pretty much any size bag and larger jackets.
I was interested in the ARCH 100, the new one, because I had heard it had gotten a lot better since the one I had tried in 2013.
And the one in 2013 was pretty underwhelming in terms of image quality.
The ARCH 100 series is very small, and it has a zoom range of 24 to 200 equivalent.
So I thought, that's really interesting to be in that size.
How good could the optics possibly be in that?
And I saw sample pictures on dpreview.com, and I was like, that seems impossible.
They look pretty good.
For a camera that's that size, has a little, I think it's like a one-inch sensor, still bigger than a phone by a mile, still a small sensor for a standalone camera, and these little tiny optics that go to 200mm, how good could that possibly be?
But the reviews were stellar.
So I thought, let me rent this thing.
I think it was like $60 to rent.
I'm like, fine, let me rent it.
I want to try this.
Where big cameras can still very much shine is areas that the iPhone really cannot compete in.
And one of those areas is long reach.
Now, we will see.
I know this fall there's the rumors of the Pro Max phone having the periscope arrangement of its optics, which would almost certainly result in a much better zoom reach.
But I would be surprised if it was competitive with anything else here, frankly.
Um, so anyway, so that's, I decided, let me see something that is approximately, you know, pocketable ish, almost size class.
Let me see its reach as a competitor to a phone.
I was thinking if I really love this little tiny Sony camera, maybe I would buy one and just kind of keep it in my backpack wherever I go and occasionally use it because that can cover roles that the iPhone really can't cover.
And sometimes I want that.
So anyway, rented all this stuff, and I tried it all out, and I made a little sample gallery.
I will link to that in the show notes as well.
Found out a couple of, I think, useful comparison points.
I'll try to be quick.
I know it's not super entertaining listening to a podcast about photos, but I will try to be quick.
What surprised me the most, so I went outside and I tried to take the same approximate set of pictures with all of these cameras when possible at the same focal lengths and just kind of compare to see how are they in handling, what kind of quality am I getting, what kind of sharpness and stabilization can I get at the long reaches, and how do the pictures end up looking.
And number one thing I noticed was, wow, the iPhone really sucks.
i've thought for a while wow the iphone is is an amazing camera but it's not an amazing camera when you want reach the 3x lens on the iphone 14 pro that i was using for these comparisons sucks i have noticed so far this year of using this phone the amount of over processing and over sharpening is kind of irritating to me a lot of the time
Not every time.
I still get a lot of good photos with it.
And it's still going to be the camera that I use by far the most because it's always in my pocket.
But the amount of processing that it does is a little off-putting.
And so I might try to experiment with apps like Halide to see maybe if I do more manual control, maybe I can get a better balance that I like more.
But I am not super thrilled with the iPhone 14 Pro's camera system in the sense that I have tried to make it replace a big camera.
And at first I thought it really could.
And now I see it really can't.
It does really well for what it is.
But at the end of the day, it is still a tiny little sensor with tiny little optics that have to cost probably like $40 or $50.
And so there's going to be a lot of limitations there for physics, for components, for quality.
There's so much that's limiting it.
And it makes up for a lot of that with its smarts and its various processing and intelligence and what it does with that sensor and how it dumps data off and how it deals with everything.
There's a lot of intelligence there.
And it really is incredible for what it is.
But there's a lot more out there.
And so what this experiment has taught me is there's still a place in my life for other cameras.
So anyway, I took pictures of far away objects with all these cameras, including the iPhone and the RX100.
And the iPhone, I showed the regular 3X resolution, the regular 3X perspective, and I zoomed it all the way in with a digital zoom just so you could see what that looks like.
It's not good.
I would not recommend using the digital zoom for anything, but it's there, so you can compare.
First of all, I was very, very impressed with the little Sony RX100.
If you look at the pictures it got...
It blows away the iPhone for reach.
And it's really not bad.
It's not great.
And I think I've decided for the moment not to buy one.
And it also doesn't have USB-C because it's so old.
But anyway...
It's not an amazing optical quality, but for its size, it's fantastic.
And I could very easily see at some point me justifying the plan of just keeping one in my backpack all the time because it really is an incredibly versatile camera.
It even has my favorite part about the RX100 is it has this cute little pop-up viewfinder.
You hit this little tab on its side, and this little tiny cube goes pop, and it pops up this little, it's the cutest little viewfinder.
And it works.
I use it outside because it's so bright.
It works.
It was great.
um anyway it's an adorable camera it is it is not something i want to ever put in a pocket it is something i would occasionally carry in a jacket and i would very much carry in a backpack if i had more frequent needs like that because they really just cover a lot that the iphone doesn't cover and for what it is and for its size i'm extremely impressed by the rx107
All right, moving on.
In rough order of price, the Nikon Coolpix 1000, this is the one that can go to 3,000 millimeter equivalent.
It does that by using a much smaller sensor.
You'll even notice its pictures are 4x3, not 3x2, the way most cameras are, because it's basically a phone sensor, as far as I can tell.
The reviews kind of said that I'm like, hmm, that's interesting.
And then I noticed it shoots natively in 4x3, so it's like, oh, maybe there's something to that.
But anyway...
3000 millimeter equivalent is kind of hilarious.
It is also kind of like the iPhone digital zoom, not especially useful because the problem is when you get to 3000 millimeters, when you're like, you know, in that kind of range, stabilization becomes extremely difficult.
Like I was standing on a deck and even if I put it on a tripod, the vibrations of the deck from wind, from like a slight breeze were making it jiggle visibly.
And so even to get these pictures, I had to, I had to have the shutter speed way up, like 2,500th of a second, like way, way up, super fast shutter on, on, you know, right in the middle of the day, just so I could get some kind of, you
most of the pictures i shot at those far reaches were totally blurry and unusable these that i got in my sample gallery were the best ones that i that i shot and i i did everything i could to make that happen i i shot it also at 600 millimeters and just so you kind of see like you know how does that look compared to the other ones and it's fine when you're zoomed out like when if you're not like looking too closely at the pixels and
if you look too close to the pixels it's it's a mess even at 600 millimeters and it gets way worse at 3000 like when you zoom in it's a mess like it is not good so the p1000 i think it's a fun novelty but ultimately it's very hard to get good pictures out of it when even when you do the it's just not a very sophisticated sensor in there
And I found the stabilization, even the stabilization at 600 millimeters was not as good as the other cameras and lenses at that same length.
So it's not a very good stabilizer.
It's and it's a very like plasticky, like kind of light, cheap kind of feeling camera.
It's a fun novelty to rent.
But I was not impressed by it, honestly.
And this looks big.
This is not the bottom left, but the one directly to the right of it, correct?
Correct, yeah.
So those cameras, that's in their off position.
When you turn them on and when you zoom in, the lens sticks out like a Pringles can at the front.
It extends outward.
It looks really hilarious.
It looks ridiculous.
But it was... Anyway, this is not their fully activated state.
So anyway...
The reason I bring that up is only because it's not like you can shrug this off as well.
The pictures aren't the greatest, but the camera is tiny.
Like the camera is pretty big until you start comparing to the lenses.
And so this doesn't seem like it has very many redeeming qualities at all from what I'm hearing.
No, but I mean, but it is half the price of the next one, which is the Sony RX10, which is the one in the bottom left corner.
So Sony RX10, it is almost double the price of the P1000.
The RX10 IV really impressed me for what it is, for how big it is, or rather isn't.
for how heavy it isn't and how easily it handled, I was very impressed with the RX10 Mark IV.
It took pretty good pictures.
It only goes to 600 millimeters, which is pretty great.
Again, the only reason I say, quote, only 600 millimeters is relative to some of the other ones.
That's not the furthest, but it's pretty great, and it achieves pretty good detail relative to its price and size and trade-offs.
So I was pretty impressed by the RX10 4.
And I think if I was in the market to buy an integrated super zoom camera, that's the one I would buy.
It isn't worth trading in my giant full frame, you know, my giant gear for that, just because the bigger gear surprise is better.
But it's not, you know, the bigger gear is like three times the total cost or two times the total cost and probably three times the total size and weight.
And I wouldn't say it's three times better.
So anyway, that's the RX10 for a very solid contender.
There's a reason why that camera is so well rated.
Next I have my new Fuji X-T5 and I rented the Fuji 150-600mm giant telephoto lens with that.
As usual, it, I think, had the most pleasing colors.
I would say the Fuji 150-600 is a substantially sharper and nicer lens than the Sony 200-600, even though it is not as optically fast.
What's interesting is that because the Fuji is made for its crop sensor cameras, it's made for APS-C size sensors, its 600 millimeters is an equivalent of 900 millimeters.
So I shot all these, you know, and you can see like it's it is more zoomed in.
And you get pretty sharp results.
It is a little tricky to focus in certain lighting.
Again, that's, I think, mostly due to Fuji's focus system, not the lens.
But it is surprisingly good and surprisingly detailed.
overall very impressed by the fuji and then finally i have my trusty old sony a7r3 with its 200 600 millimeter lens i i did two sets one with the teleconverter to get it to 1200 millimeters and one without the teleconverter and it did fantastically in terms of detail like like the the text on the sign on the right set the text i think is the best on the sony series uh but the lens overall is just not a very sharp lens
You say that, but I was definitely looking at the text in the same thing.
And I have to say, the Sony, the very bottom one, either with or without the teleconverter, has sharper text than any of the other ones.
So you say, oh, the lens isn't as sharp.
Well, the text is sharp.
That's why I was looking for text, because we know what text can look like.
In particular, if you look at ripcurrents.noaa.gov, the descender in the G in .gov is right on top of a rivet.
yeah that rivet reads way better on either one of the sony pictures than it does on the fuji one that's interesting yeah if you pixel peep that and go in that like it's just it's just it's just sharper it's sharper it's not as fuzzy it's not i can't even tell that it's a river than the other ones i definitely looking at all these pictures i was surprised to see that even with the teleconverter which usually hurts your you know sharpness and light gathering or whatever
that the the sony is comes out on top as far as i'm concerned i mean and it's close like it's not like the fuji with that giant lens is much worse than the sony with the giant lens but i would i would definitely say that the the sony is sharper now i i think if you had not that you need an excuse to spend more money but like
You know, the a7r is up to the a7r5 now, and that is not the most recent big, giant, ridiculous expensive white zoom lens from Sony.
So if you, you know, refreshed all that with modern Sony stuff to compete against your modern Fuji stuff, I think it would probably widen the gap even more.
It's possible.
I mean, certainly, you know, it would have more resolution and everything.
But yeah, I was surprised, you know, just owning the Sony ones, I've been surprised like how little I like the pictures that I ever get out of it.
And I don't know what, maybe that's just... And I have to say, I've heard this from other people as well.
And so you're not, you know, this is you, but either I like what the Sonys do or whatever difference you're seeing, I don't see or don't care about.
Like the way they call the color science or whatever.
I see the differences from camera to camera.
but like i would never choose a camera based on it like because i always just feel like i can i guess it's because what it comes down to is like you said i'm editing these things i mean any picture picture i care about i'm editing so like if there's something i dislike about you know the jpeg that came out i'll go to the raw and change it to the way i want it i really don't care how the jpegs look especially when you're talking about one of these gigantic camera rigs where you're like i'm done shooting in raw right
But if you've got that gigantic camera that's the, you know, longer than your arm and it weighs a ton and you're setting it all up or whatever, spend the five minutes to edit it.
Like, you know, but I need the JPEGs to come out exactly how I want them.
But I'm willing to lug around a camera that's smaller than my, that's bigger than my child to take the photo.
Like, I don't quite understand that trade off.
For the pocketable one, sure.
But for the, you know, white colored camera lens that is gigantic and cost a bazillion dollars, edit those photos.
Sometimes I find with the Sonys that no matter what I do with the edit, I can't get the colors to look what I want them to look like.
But I do wonder what you're looking for.
I think the Sonys look okay.
Maybe it's a little bit like the Fugees I've always felt look a little bit...
It's kind of like when people... Sony's always, to me, look mostly neutral, whereas the Fuji's remind me more of film.
Just setting aside the ones where it's trying to look like film, like you were talking about.
And I don't want the film look, whether intentionally trying to look like film or just kind of like...
accidentally looking like film i want it to be i wouldn't call the sony more neutral but that's how i think of it as like the sony is just showing me the colors that were there without trying to massage much and that wasn't true the sony has its own bent about how it handles reds and stuff like that like i can see that but it's it i definitely wouldn't choose a camera based on it it's strange to hear that it is such a factor in your decision making about which cameras you want even ones that are even when we're talking about giant zoom lens on a giant big camera
I've lived in Sony land for a while now.
We used to be a Canon family.
Tiff still has her old Canon gear because she never ended up liking the Sony pictures very much.
She has the same complaints I have of like, you just can't get them to look the way you want.
Sony excels in extreme technical skill at the expense of being really boring.
Actually, it's kind of my greatest strengths and weaknesses as well.
as a person but like you know sony there's not a lot of of pizzazz or or excitement in the way sony renders things it doesn't make you go wow but it's technically very much very very high and it's it beats everyone else on technical specs most of the time and so there are lots of situations where that's okay or that's what you want like if you're going to be heavily editing the pictures afterwards that makes a lot of sense
I know myself well enough to know that I'm not going to edit.
A long time ago, at some point for a Christmas one year, we rented this crazy high-priced Leica camera, also from Lens Rentals.
We've done a lot of stuff with them over the years.
Whatever Leica was their digital rangefinder at the time, I think I made a blog post about it,
My impression of it when we had it was, first of all, being a rangefinder was such a giant pain in the butt to use.
If you've never used a rangefinder, consider yourself lucky.
If you have, I'm sorry, you probably hate me right now.
But such a massive pain in the butt to shoot things with a rangefinder.
At the end of the day, I was disappointed by the camera's high ISO performance.
It sucked in low light.
Being a rangefinder, it didn't have autofocus at all.
The technical side of it, I was very disappointed by.
But over the following years, I would always look back on those photos and be like, man, I love these pictures.
I love the way they look.
And it's not because of its technical perfection because it didn't have that.
It wasn't because it did great in low light because it didn't.
It wasn't because it had the highest resolution because it didn't.
I just liked the way they rendered colors between Leica's optics and whatever they were doing in the camera to process those colors.
I just liked the pictures a lot better than the other ones I was getting at the time.
I liked... It's indescribable, but you like what you like, right?
And so, anyway...
We didn't go the Leica direction for many reasons.
Although, honestly, I considered renting a Q2 during this run, but it would have doubled the price of my entire rental.
I'm like, I don't want to do that.
But anyway, for a while, we left Canon land, or I did at least, to go to Sony World because Sony World had just the amazing technical chops.
So good in low light.
The Sony full-frame sensors, back with the first Sony A series cameras, were just kicking Canon's butt.
They were so much better back in that time.
And so that got me over to Sony land.
But while I've taken a lot of decent pictures with the Sony...
i'm not loving the pictures i get out of my sony cameras as much as i used to love some of the canon stuff i was getting as much as i love those rented leica pictures and as much as i love the handful of pictures i've shot so far with the fuji gear it just doesn't fit me and and i've tried i've edited them and i've tried processing them and doing different things and i just can't get out of the sony what i want in terms of
niceness something i love it's not about technical specs you know i'm not sure this is a good analogy but but when i listen to you say this it makes me think of the the somewhat similar situation in the audio world of people who we've talked about in the past people who like the smile curve because it makes movies exciting where you boost the bass and you boost the treble and you dip the mids and people who want a more neutral sound and then there are people who think a neutral sound is super boring and it sounds to me like
you like the Leica smile curve, and neutrophotos seem like poison to you, and also that you're unable to reproduce the smile curve when you try to manually edit it.
And I would have to think the inability to reproduce the thing you want from a neutrophoto mostly comes down to not knowing what it is that you need to do to a neutrophoto to make it look like those Leica photos, right?
Because it's an indescribable thing that you know you like it, you see it, you know you like it, but if you don't know
All right.
How do I go from neutral to that?
You're never going to be able to do it just by, you know, randomly poking at curves and stuff to try to make it happen.
Yeah.
And part of that is because it's really complicated.
And, you know, it's like when you try to correct.
Yeah.
It's not as simple as just push this dial up on the equalizer and you're done.
Right.
Right, yeah.
It's like trying to correct something you like about headphones with EQ.
It's like you can sometimes do that a little bit, but the whole frequency response and distortion characteristics and reflection characteristics of a headphone are so much more complicated than just the basic EQ controls you have.
And that's how I feel with photos.
I can use something like Lightroom or the built-in photos app and use the editing controls.
I've done that before.
I did that for years.
And sometimes it would work out for me.
Usually not.
And it's partly because it's more complicated than that.
It's also largely because I'm not very good at it, and I'm never going to be very good at it.
And you'd have to start from RAW to have a fighting chance, because if you start from the JPEG, you're just, you know, you're screwed.
Exactly.
So I've decided that my camera journey is I'm going to abandon technical class leadership, I think.
And just go with what I love.
Go with what gives me the pictures I love.
And right now, that is Fuji.
And I never tried Fuji before because they weren't leading in the technical stuff.
They never had the best high ISO noise performance.
They usually didn't have the best megapixel resolution.
I didn't really know anything about their lens situation.
They didn't have anything full frame.
It's funny.
They don't have full frame.
They have APS-C.
And they went right to medium format.
And they have nothing in between.
But anyway, you know, I thought for a long time that what I wanted was technical perfection.
But I now know what I want is pictures I love.
And some of those are going to come from iPhones.
Some of those are going to come from Fujis.
Some of those are going to come from random rented Sonys here and there.
But I'm getting a lot more of them from Fujis.
And my hit rate is quite good.
I will give your Sony gear a good home.
I will probably be sending some of it to you.
First, I'm going to trade some of it to Beck, probably to B&H, to buy this Fuji lens, and then we'll talk.
Yeah.
All right.
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Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes At ATP.FM
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So long.
I'm going to do my dear friend Mike Dirty and talk about something that we spoke about a little bit on Analog this week, but isn't out yet.
This is the pain that comes from Analog recording on a Tuesday, but not typically being released until Sunday.
So I'm sort of taking away Mike's exclusive.
And I'm sorry, Mike.
I'm sorry.
It wasn't my intention.
Hey, we were here first.
Well, he was there first.
It's just nobody heard it but the two of us.
No.
Marco's rapid production cycle wins again.
You got a ship, a real artist ship, you know?
Oh, brutal.
Poor Mike.
I'm sorry, Mike.
So anyway, so what we talked about, Mike and myself, and I will put a link to the, as we record this forthcoming episode of Analog, but we'll soon, by Sunday, will be the released episode of Analog.
Mike and I talked about my forthcoming app, and I am pretty...
pretty pretty sure this one's actually going to see the light of day it is not ready yet it is getting pretty close um but i thought i would try something different and talk about it a bit and i'm not really sure why i wanted to try something different other than it's different but i figured we could talk about it the three of us and and the listeners kind of by proxy and and see what we think so
What am I up to?
As usual, I don't have a good name.
If you recall, in the past, I didn't come up with... Well, actually, I think it was my friend Steve that came up with Masquerade, if memory serves, but that didn't happen until pretty late in the development cycle.
I don't have a good name for it, and I have an even worse icon for it for those who are on the test flight, which is basically just friends at this point.
Can you... Do you want to share the terrible name?
You have to.
Just so you can tell me how you came up with this terrible name.
Okay, so the... Oh, wait, no, I think I figured it out.
Go ahead and see if I'm right.
So the code name is, well, I don't want to pronounce it because I'm trying to say it.
No, no, no.
So the code name is the word lookup with an F in front of it, which is supposed to be a portmanteau of film lookup to become flukup, right?
Well, I said this to Erin or I showed Erin the name.
I did not verbalize it to her.
And she says, flukup?
What the hell is flukup?
Flukup?
it does look like fluke up now that i see like i i instantly read in my head fluke up when i saw first but but i can see why you get fluke up yep i read fluke up and then i tried to look up and i was like no they're both bad they're both bad i mean full stop they're both bad look up p fast look up feet
Yeah, it's no feed on this one.
Not yet, anyway.
See, I need a name.
I'm still working on that.
And I need an icon.
I like Flookup.
I think it's a funny name, but I think it works.
No, do not listen to Marco.
It's a terrible name.
I always like your initial terrible names.
Well, it's probably better than Face Splash, but that's neither here nor there.
Oh, God.
But anyway.
In any case, we're getting off track already.
So what the heck is it?
The thesis statement, if you will, is imagine IMDB, but written by someone who has self-respect.
And so what...
this is born from is I often, when I'm watching a television show or a movie or some such, I would want to know, oh, who is this person?
Or where do I know this person from?
Or what have you.
And for years and years and years and years, I would use the IMDb app or the website.
The website is still mostly okay.
Disagree.
Disagree.
So bad.
It's unusable so much.
I hate it.
Well, I can use the website and I can do it without actively vomiting on myself.
Without scrolling up and down the page seven times.
It's got to be here, right?
That is fair.
That is totally fair.
That is the experience of IMDb.
I hate it so much.
However, I will say that the IMDb app, in my personal opinion, is unusable and has been for like two or three years now.
So the reasons I don't like the IMDB app, not to belabor it, it's constantly like playing videos or trying to play videos or show you images at like three quarters the size of the screen.
I don't want to log in.
I don't want to log in.
Stop asking.
I don't want to log in.
Just stop.
So that in and of itself is enough to drive me nuts.
And it's very gross now.
It's clear that Amazon owns it.
It's clear they want you to either watch their shows or buy things from them.
And it's just frustrating.
And so I started wondering, well, could I fix this problem?
And there's a pretty great website called The Movie Database.
And we'll put a link to The Movie Database in the show notes.
It is a kind of, I don't want to say knockoff, that's kind of disrespectful, but it's an alternative to IMDB.
I'll be the first to tell you the data is not quite as good as IMDBs, but it's pretty close.
And for any of the major stuff, it'll be there.
And so I started digging and looking and, well, wow, they have an API.
And
wow, this API seems to make sense.
It's not completely bananas.
And if all you're doing is reading stuff, you don't need to log into anything.
And so that's how Flickup was born, or whatever I ended up calling it.
And the idea is, what if it's IMDB by someone who actually cares?
And it lets you look up TV, movies, episodes of TV shows, seasons of TV shows, and people as well.
And I started... The first commit... I should have this handy.
I'm sorry.
But the first commit on this was something like...
January 25th or thereabouts.
And I think I am in a position that, barring the name and icon, I could send this to AppReview in the next few days, I think.
So I am pretty darn proud of how fast it's come together.
It's 100% SwiftUI.
I'm literally not using UIKit for anything as far as I can recall.
It's using AsyncAwait, which has gone really, really well.
And I'm just really enjoying writing it.
And we're having a lot of fun with it, which is cool.
The most interesting thing at the moment is how do you monetize it?
But actually, I should interrupt and say, do you two have anything you want to talk about ad or ask before I start talking about monetization?
First of all, I will nitpick.
When you sent me the very first version, I nitpicked a few things in my trademark video tour.
I've been holding back until things calmed down a little bit to send my final design nitpicks.
But this is coming together really well.
This might be your best app yet.
It's really good.
And it's very useful.
I think this is going to be useful to a lot of people.
um this this could be this could be it and i'm happy to hear that you've you know quote only worked on it for you know about three or four months now because that's how to become you know a successful ios developer is like try stuff you know you got to put stuff out there you got to try it and see like what's gonna work and and you know what's gonna stick what's gonna find an audience what's not that's what you got to do and you know if you if you're spending like
a whole year on an app and you put it out there and it's actually a pretty specialized thing that doesn't have a huge audience that's not a great use of your time and if you want this to become a bigger part of what you do this is how to do that you get an app like this where it's like you identified a pretty substantially sized market it's a big market
You built something that doesn't seem to have major costs to you.
Like you're not running the servers.
You're not running any kind of back end service for this.
You know, you're not paying for the API, it seems.
Right.
So there's a whole story there.
We'll get back to that.
But suffice to say, so far, that is correct.
Right.
So there's that.
And you and you made something that looks and feels pretty good without taking a ton of time to do it.
That's a great story.
And the result is really good.
Like it's it's very useful.
It is something that, you know, I've used a couple of times so far.
The only reason I haven't used it more is that I don't watch a lot of movies.
But when I do, I have the same need.
And I'll do the same thing during TV shows.
Oh, it's that guy.
What's he from again?
And I'll go look it up or whatever.
And I think this is great.
I really do.
I think this shows your growth as an independent iOS developer.
You are getting better and your ideas are getting more mainstream.
And this is, I think, a pretty good opportunity.
And I will nitpick things differently.
obviously but that's why you're here that's why but i have i have less to nitpick here than any of your previous apps when i've when i've first seen them like way less yeah and it's come a long way it's come a long way and i think some of that is me some of that is uh our mutual friend ben mccarthy um who makes obscura among other things i'll put a link to obscura in the show notes it's a uh like an alternative uh camera app
Ben had some really phenomenal UI ideas that they shared with me.
And that, I think, made a tremendous, tremendous difference.
Anything looks good is either them or me.
And anything looks bad is 100% me.
So that's what we can agree on.
Wait, I'm taking credit for my PG-13 R, like the styling of the rating.
Oh, that's true.
That's true.
I'm sorry.
No, you're right.
I completely forgot about that.
You're 100% correct.
I'm the one who first ripped off the MPAA for you.
Yeah.
No, I do feel like it looks pretty good.
It's not perfect by any means, but it looks pretty good.
I'm pretty happy with it.
John, any commentary before we talk monetization and API stuff?
I was going to say, when I was thinking of this app, I immediately understood what you were making.
Even when the app did nothing, it was terrible.
But I understood.
It was clear to me.
And to be clear, you sent this app to us.
You didn't explain anything about it.
And I saw the icon, and I didn't understand what the heck it was, and it was terrible.
But then I launched it.
I'm like, oh, I get it.
IMDb, but not sucking.
all right so thumbs up on the on the concept um i have to say for me personally and this does not affect your market because your market is much more mass market but for me personally your biggest competition which is currently way way ahead of you because they've been out for years and years and years is letterboxd
right and i know they don't do tv and i know it's not really the point of that site but they have had so many years to polish their experience of finding movies and who's in them and what other things they might be in and stuff like that and their site and their app which is just really just their website is not junked up like imdb so i feel like within the realm of people who even know what that letterboxd is
It is very strong competition because it is not.
I mean, I think it's way better than the movie database site.
It's certainly better than IMDB.
It is the same ethos as you is, hey, guess what?
A thing that people might want to use to find information that is nicely organized and laid out.
and they this site was not created in the last three months right so they have a big lead on you your advantage is nobody who's not a giant film nerd knows about letterboxd and honestly it's overkill for the simple use cases if i'm on the couch i want to find out what this person's in i go to it because i use letterboxd all the time and i do movie stuff or whatever but marco is not the target audience for letterboxd and he would use your app so you
And this is also to say, if you want some good ideas about how to lay things out and how to do UI and stuff like that, go to Letterboxd, their website.
And again, their quote-unquote app, I think, is just a web view onto their mobile version of their site, which is a testament to how good the mobile version of their site is.
But I would say check that out for some good ideas.
I should do that.
Yeah.
It's funny because a lot of the people that I've sent the beta to seem to the cross section between my friends and Letterboxd users seems to be quite strong.
I am not a Letterboxd user.
It's not something I think I need or want in my life, but I can totally understand why one would want it.
Like I use Goodreads fairly religiously to track the things that I've read.
And it's a very similar idea.
I want to congratulate you for your ability to pronounce the name of that site differently than me in the same conversation and not giving in like the gif-jif people do when you're conversing about somebody with it and you can't help but just start copying the other person's pronunciation like whoever said it first.
But no, you're holding strong.
And to be clear, Casey is pronouncing it the right way and I'm pronouncing it the John way.
What?
We'll see how well I do.
But in any case, so yeah, so I think if this continues to be a thing and if it's not just a flop, then one thing that I've gotten some very clear interest in, at least because of the small test group I've sent it to, is having Letterboxd integration and marking.
I don't even know what that would mean, to be honest, because again, I don't really use Letterboxd, but I would investigate that and see what makes sense to be
in both places.
But that's, you know, that's another version way down the road.
So with regard to monetization, so yeah, so Marco touched on this earlier.
It's a little bit of a squishy thing because the movie database...
seems to not want my money.
So they have a couple of different... And this is just for the listeners, not even just the members, but for the listeners, because this is kind of putting me in a little bit of an awkward spot.
So I could belabor this story quite a bit, but suffice to say, I've asked several times to get a commercial key, like API key from the movie database.
I've asked in this one place over here and another place over there, and
So far, they refuse to give one to me.
They keep ghosting me when I ask them.
And I'm like, hey, you know, I'm currently using a developer key.
That's fine.
But this will be sold at some point.
Can I have a commercial key?
Crickets.
So I've back-channeled a little bit with some people that are using the Movie Database API in other uses.
And I don't think they're ever going to want my money.
But that's not like it's in writing or anything, right?
So, like, I need to...
account for the fact that this is an API that I don't own and I don't control.
And it is perfectly within their rights to say, you've got to pony up, big guy.
So since this is something that hopefully people would use a lot, and hopefully a lot of people would use, I need to have some sort of recurring revenue.
I don't want to be put in a situation where suddenly my weather API, so to speak, not in a literal sense, you know, the weather app, the weather API that goes from free to not free to, oh my gosh, expensive.
So I think what I'm going to do is make this a subscription app.
And I did not start down that path, but I think it was Underscore in a conversation we were having said to me, look, you got to go subscription because you never know what the future will bring.
I hope I'm not putting words in Underscore's mouth.
I'm pretty sure it was him that started this in my head.
But that makes me think, okay, I should do a subscription.
But that in turn...
I don't think it's the right use of begs the question, but begs the question.
Raises the question.
There it is.
Thank you.
How much does one charge for this?
And honestly, I don't have a great answer because I was looking at what can I think of as something that has a clear and obvious cost, recurring cost to the company that
And even an end user would understand that.
And how much does that cost?
Well, there's an app called Overcast that has a clear and recurring cost to the person or persons that run Overcast.
And I should look at how much that is.
No, you shouldn't.
Well, if I'm not mistaken, Overcast is $10 a year.
So to me, that sets a high threshold that I don't think I should be even that particularly close to $10 a year.
But then where should I be?
And honestly, I don't know.
I'm not sure.
Yeah.
See, I get what you're saying.
It was like, oh, I have a comparable, as they say in the real estate industry.
But it's not comparable.
Setting aside whether Marcos pricing is right.
It's not.
Right.
But here's the deal.
No one who is...
interested in buying your app knows or cares what overcast goes for they're not they're not competitors they might not even know overcast exists right it's the question not that this makes it easier but i'm just saying the question is how much are people willing to pay for an app that does what your app does
When there's a very, very clear free alternative.
And that has almost no connection to how much are they willing to pay for a podcast app that does what Overcast does.
Sure.
And then the second question is, oh, is Overcast charging the right amount?
It's not.
And I'm assuming, Marco, you think you should be charging more?
Yeah, definitely.
I agree.
When I launched Overcast Premium, God knows how many years ago, subscriptions for non-content apps, subscriptions for newsstand apps were common, stuff like that.
But subscriptions for regular app functionality, that was not that common still back then.
And $10 a year felt like a bit of a reach, but like a doable reach.
So I did it.
Now, I mean, look, I just told you five hours ago when we began this episode, I just told you that there was this app that made the EDR photos for me.
It's a one feature app that I'm going to use here and there occasionally.
It's $3 a month or $30 lifetime, and I jump right for the $30 lifetime purchase.
But if I didn't, it was $3 a month.
And I'm charging $10 a year for an app that people use typically multiple hours a day.
So the comparison, as John said, is not super direct between what many different apps do.
But if I was launching today...
I would not charge $10 a year.
I would probably... I mean, look, even my competitors.
If you look at other podcast apps that charge money for anything at all, I'm cheaper than all of them for the premium feature set.
I think all of us are free up front now, but the premium feature set, I'm by far the cheapest, I think.
I think by half or more.
And so if I were doing this today, I would probably go to $20 a year maybe, or maybe I'd have some kind of monthly, I don't know.
Maybe I'd have to do like a free trial, which I still have not done.
So I don't know necessarily what I would do, but it wouldn't be $10 a year.
It would be substantially more in some way.
That being said, Overcast is not $10 a year.
Overcast is free with ads or $10 a year.
Mm hmm.
You can put ads in this and that's what most people would do.
And it would be, you know, you would crap up the experience and be exactly what you are trying to not do.
Exactly.
But, you know, you would make some money from ads like that's that's the thing.
And you could have most people would leave them and you'd make a few pennies here and there from those people.
And then people like me who are who are jerks about ads, you know, not not wanting to see ads in my ass if I don't have to.
we would pay for whatever the unlock would be and that would be it and and you know you get some purchases for the no ads purchase and you get some purchases for the ads or some money from the ads and that that would be it that is probably the best way to do it um whether you want to do that or not it's a different story but that's like if you want to maximize your money that's what you should do is put ads in it and you know and tolerate some crappiness um but again that's not that's not the way to make the best app necessarily that's the way to make the most money
So you complete the trifecta of not taking any pricing advice from your podcast co-hosts.
The tiny number of people who use my two apps run them 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
So I should be charging tons of money.
Instead, it's a one-time price that never repeats.
don't don't price like my apps and apparently don't price like marco's apps well i guess he's saying yes price like his app but don't price just like the premium portion of his app for don't forget there's the free part with ads yeah and and by the way um you know what you said a minute ago about you don't know what the future holds but in terms of your api access to the service that your app depends on and is useless without um to me that's a giant red flag for a subscription purchase
Because what just happened with the Twitter apps that were cut off and had to refund?
And I would say, even if that API is free forever, even if they never charge you any money for it, and I would say that any app, and setting aside what Marco was just saying, look, every app charges subscriptions no matter what they do now, but any app that...
that accesses a third-party api that you don't control should charge a subscription doesn't to be expensive subscription but it should charge a subscription it could be one dollar a year but whatever it is because that app is guaranteed to require some kind of ongoing maintenance above and beyond the just keeping up with the latest version of ios because apis change unless they're dead i mean if the api is dead then you have separate problems right
Because APIs change, and that means you'll have to update your app, or you'll want to update your app.
You are essentially writing on top of a thing that you don't control.
We're all writing on top of the Apple platform, and we have to keep up with those changes.
We have no choice.
But I think once you go the extra step of saying, oh, and by the way, my app is essentially a front end for an API that has nothing to do with me, you will have to ride that bear in the Steve Ballmer sense.
You will have to continue to...
chase that api wherever that api goes you don't have control over it and wherever it goes you have to follow it or your app it doesn't work or breaks or is worse and so that argues for unless you're just going to give up on the app after a year or something that argues for some tiny little subscription fee or a one-time purchase that's enough to fund your ongoing maintenance and development for what you think the life of the app is going to be
Yeah, and that's what makes it tough, is if I knew for sure that it was free forever, I would probably just charge, like I always do, like a one-time fee and call it a day.
But even considering the Twitter debacle from a month or two back,
I still feel like it makes sense to account for the possibility of, oh, they've decided to charge me.
That money's got to come from somewhere.
Otherwise, I am utterly doomed.
And so it seems to me like a subscription is the right answer.
Now, I echo what you're saying, Marco, that if I was really going for a money grab,
Without question, advertisements and then an unlock or remove ads, unlock or whatever, that would make way more sense and surely be way more lucrative.
But I just don't want to do that, I don't think.
And that's fair.
That's a totally valid answer.
And the advantage of having ATP and analog and the apps that I have is that in terms of finances, I don't need to do that, or at least not today.
Ask me again in a week.
But sitting here now, I don't need to do that.
Like, I don't need this thing to go gangbusters in order to put food on the table.
And so...
I'd rather do something that I'm, well, this is going to sound a little flippant and I'm sorry, but I'd rather do something I'm extremely proud of than junk the app up with ads that I don't control.
I think Overcast is a bit of a weird exception because that's your own ads and that's a very different beast, but that's not something I could do.
And also the major selling proposition of your app is it's like that other thing familiar with, but not junked up and ads are part of that.
Right.
And so you'd have to have like an asterisk like, oh, unless you have the free version, which is what most people less junked up.
Right.
There's fewer there's fewer pieces of junk, but there's still it's like when Twitter tried to, you know, like a Twitter blue.
They said, pay for Twitter blue and you'll get fewer ads.
Yeah, right.
Not no ads, just fewer ads.
What does that mean?
It's like my New York Times subscription.
I pay to have the worst reading experience in their app.
Anyway... Hooray!
But keep in mind, though, this is a double-edged sword.
People's alternative...
is to just go to IMDB or whatever and get this information for free covered in ads.
So if you are offering something covered in ads too, that's going to hurt you a little bit.
But also, if you're putting up a paywall too soon, that's also going to hurt you a lot.
Because people are going to try this app and be like, oh, this is kind of nice.
It's like IMDB, but nice.
Then they're going to slam into a paywall, and most of them are going to be like, all right, bye.
And that's it.
That's exactly right.
So it is going to...
If your paywall is too aggressive, people are going to bounce right out, and then word of mouth isn't going to happen, ranking isn't going to happen, and no one's going to use it.
If you have the paywall be too generous and give too much away for free, you'll make no money because nobody will go past the paywall.
So it's a hard thing to do.
I mean, look, developers have debates and arguments and anguish about this all the time because this is a very hard problem to solve.
And, I mean, look, it took me a long time to get it right in Overcast.
It took me like three or four years before I came up with a system I have now that fortunately does work for me, but it took a while to get there.
It took a lot of attempts, a lot of different systems to do it.
So...
I can't necessarily say anything's going to work.
I think ads, the ad-based business model with the option to pay to remove them is the cleanest conceptually.
And it is the best in terms of maximizing the number of people you will get to install the app, the number of people who keep it installed and who will keep using it.
and the number of people who and the amount of money you make like all of that will be maximized if you have ads and an option to remove the ads for some you know x per year or x one time or whatever that will make you the most money you get the most users but if that's not the app you want to make then don't do it that's that's not you know you don't no one's forcing you to do this so you should make the app that you want to make and so i totally get that so the question is then what do you do
Subscription does concern me from the point of view of the API thing.
That's part of why the ad option makes that really clean.
As long as the app works, you are seeing ads and we are making money.
As soon as the app stops working, you'll stop using it and everything stops and that's clean.
Anything you do involving taking people's money is going to be less clean than that and could bite you in the butt if things go badly down the road with the provider.
i wouldn't worry about that especially if you stick to monthly and don't even do an annual or something but like whatever like you know the whole thing where apple's gonna refund everybody for the twitter apps because they shut it down or whatever that's an extreme scenario and i feel like the odds of that happening again are low and if they happen yeah you just eat that and if you're not expecting again if you're not expecting this to be like your main source of income that's gonna bankrupt you if that happens then you would just be like oh that'll be a bummer if it happens but honestly the odds of it are so low like is is the movie database run by a giant jerk like probably not
or at least not an Elon Musk caliber jerk.
So I wouldn't spend too much time fretting about that.
I mean, so many apps on the App Store have subscriptions, and many of them have a thing that if it was run by a jerk like Elon who cut the thing off and nobody noticed, they'd be in the same situation.
It just doesn't happen that often.
That's why it was so shocking when he did it, that it is not a common thing, and I don't expect it to be a common thing.
So I wouldn't lose too much sleep over that.
Well, and furthermore, I think the difference is that even if that were to happen, it is unlikely, not impossible, but unlikely it would be flick of a switch like it basically was for the Twitter apps.
That's what I'm saying.
They'd phase it out and you can sunset the app and, you know, whatever.
Yeah.
So the other thing to consider is, you know, when when we, you know, fancy iOS people, you know, when we like, you know, Apple enthusiasts and and podcasters in this space, like when we think about value of an app, we are thinking of it from our perspective, from what we think is valuable, from what we think is a reasonable price and from the quality level that we set for ourselves as kind of a community.
If you look at the App Store, it's not that.
It's very far from that.
Pretty much everything else in the App Store, it's a ton of garbage with massive quantities of ads, tricky upsell things that try to shove you into a subscription deceptively, and then every app wants like $2 a week from you.
Like, oh, you want to be able to crop photos?
$5 a week.
That's the App Store.
That's the market you're in.
Most people's phones are filled with garbage apps to crop photos and stuff that are these thinly veiled subscription scams that are full of ads and are charging them six bucks a week and just extracting as much as possible.
That's most of the app store.
So first of all, it doesn't take much to be better than that.
Second of all, that's the price expectation or ad expectation that people have of apps because that's what most apps are.
Most apps are not the boutique apps from people who we know on formerly Twitter and now Mastodon.
That's not most apps.
Most apps that most people are using are big corporate apps like Facebook stuff that are just their own form of specially abusive garbage.
And then the huge long tail of all the garbage photo cropping apps that are full of these massive weekly subscriptions and stuff like that.
So that's the market you're playing into here.
So it's tricky.
It can be tricky to figure out what's right for you.
I think if you really don't want to do ads, which it sounds like you don't, and that's fine again.
If you really don't want to do ads, then do a subscription.
But keep in mind with the pricing of it that a lot of people are going to bounce right off.
I mean, there is kind of an argument to be made for a one-time purchase because I think people are so burned by subscriptions recently.
I think a one-time purchase is seen as refreshing to a lot of people.
And since you don't have ongoing server costs for this now, and you probably will... Well, and then maybe you could change your mind down the road, but like...
Since you don't have ongoing costs now, there is something to be said for that, but I think ultimately I would probably agree with underscore.
You should probably have recurring revenue, but that will turn more people off at the door, so you kind of have to price it accordingly, and
You can with App Store subscriptions.
They recently did add the option, which I think I might at some point use, that you can raise the price of a subscription without losing all your old subscribers.
You couldn't do that before.
You couldn't do that before about, I think, a year or two ago.
They added it for Disney+, and they made it available for everybody.
Or was it HBO?
One of those.
Anyway, one thing you could do... My worry with subscriptions would have been if you're charging people a buck or two a month...
and then you all of a sudden have to pay for your API access, and it's more than that, that could be a problem for you.
But you don't have to worry about that.
So what I would say is start people on a subscription plan, but make it a really cheap one.
If you have to raise prices down the road because some API cost happens, so be it.
If not or until then, you will just keep making lots of lots of sales that you wouldn't have made otherwise if it was too expensive.
One of the one of the consideration, if you want to minimize your like refund liability down the road, if things go really bad, monthly would be better than annual.
But that being said, if you want it to seem really cheap, annual's the way to go.
Right, yep, exactly.
And that's what I'm struggling against is I know that anyone who is likely to already have had an interest in the sorts of thing that Flookup, or whatever I end up calling it, does, probably already has the IMDB app installed on their phone.
So I have to overcome fear.
free and already working.
And that's tough.
So my current thought, which I have no idea if it's wise or not, is $6 a year because it's like 50 cents a month.
That's not that much.
And it doesn't seem too aggressive.
Even a dollar or two a month seems like kind of a lot to me.
And so $6 a year, it's more than nothing, but it's like
It's a coffee at Starbucks or something like that.
Do eight?
What makes you say that?
$7.99 is a nice-looking price.
It still is under $10.
People think it's cheap, but it doesn't seem that much more expensive than $5.99.
You'll get more money, and I think it's the same perceived price class.
I think also you're talking about like, oh, the one-time cost.
People are tired of subscriptions and so on and so forth.
It depends on how you're looking at the app because if you start with a subscription and if you price it like high that it scares a lot of people away –
If the app has any kind of success at all and you decide, yes, this is worth me working on, you can make the app grow into your price.
Whereas if you started the app with a fixed price, you will grow out of your price.
Like if the app turns out to be popular, then you will make the app better and better.
And soon the app is good enough that you shouldn't be charging a one-time price of $5 or something.
And it's so much harder, I feel like, to go from a one-time price of $5 to say,
hey, everybody who bought this app that's actually getting some traction and becoming popular, guess what?
It's a subscription now.
Whereas if you started out at that subscription that was kind of expensive and the app grows into it, the original customers are satisfied because they're like, I bought it when it was a 1.0 and now it's so much better and I'm paying the same subscription.
And then when you grow into the price, people look at the price and aren't as scared away because it's a better app now.
It just seems like...
I feel like I've seen that happen too often where someone underprices it initially because the app's not that good and everyone's app's not that good in the first release, right?
But you have to think about if this app works, if it works in the market at all, what will the app be like?
And I always feel like it's better to price it like that because that produces the least amount of regret among your customers.
Because the people who are willing to buy it early when it was a 1.0 and it seemed kind of expensive, they'll be happy when your app improves and grows into it.
And the people who weren't, they'll only arrive after your app goes into its price.
But in both of those scenarios, everyone more or less is satisfied with and understands the deal.
Whereas...
I hate seeing apps that's like, oh, it's just a 1.0 and it's not that good.
So it's a $3 one-time purchase.
And then like two years into development, the app is amazing and the developer is not making any money because the development costs and the maintenance overhead is high.
But they feel like they can't increase the price, let alone go to subscription.
Because you know what happens when you go from a fixed price to subscription.
Everyone hates it.
Yeah, yeah.
And that's the other thing I'm, you know, looking at is, I don't ever want to have to renege and go into subscription.
It's another thing if I choose to, I'm making this up, but if I choose to do like a forever unlock for $100 or something like that, again, I'm making this up.
I feel like that's different, but to go from a one-time only IAP to, oh, just kidding.
I'll need your money periodically now.
That's just really, really hard.
That's just really hard.
Buy my apps to the forever unlock price of $5.
Oh, God.
I'm still regretting.
I sold for, I think, one year, Overcast's first year in 2014.
I sold a $5 unlock.
How did I not buy that?
Is it because I was on the beta?
Probably.
Or maybe you might have bought it.
So I have a special case in the app.
So if you have that $5 unlock, you don't get the premium feature of the uploads because that's a monthly S3 cost that I have to pay.
And that wasn't there back then.
That came later.
But you do have no ads shown if you have that original unlock because there were no ads in the original app.
And I have thought for a long time, I actually track my analytics, like how many of those people are still using the app?
And it's a lot of people like it's it's a substantial portion of my user base.
And I've thought for a while, like I should really end that ad exclusion from them because I've these people paid five dollars nine years ago.
and i've i'm now like literally just you know four days ago five days ago my web host just raised prices 20 for no reason um so it's like now my cost just went up by 20 awesome like and i've been paying all these server costs for nine years to support these people and yet those people will be they'll be so mad when it happens too because if you explain to them you paid five dollars nine years ago and they'll say and kind of rightly yeah but nine years ago you said this is a forever unlock for five dollars and you're bad right
Oh, yeah.
That's why I haven't done it because I know it'll result in a million one-star reviews.
And the reality is customers hold that.
One-star review system, it basically holds us hostage as app developers.
We can't do anything about that.
That's why I haven't done it.
I'm losing money every single time those people use my app.
But it's not worth the hostage situation of having all these people one-star review me and kill my business.
So I can't really do it.
I just have to support them forever.
So Casey, don't do that maybe.
But again, you don't have server costs yet at least to worry about.
So that's a huge difference.
But you do have that API to chase.
You're like, oh, they'll be free forever.
Does that mean it won't change forever?
They could change the API or they can add things to the API or they can break the API.
Oops, they rolled out a new release and it broke your app and now you're scrambling to fix that.
They didn't do that to screw you.
It's just a thing that happens because you don't control them.
They probably don't even know you exist considering they won't answer your emails.
Which means that things they do can affect your app immediately with no notice and that is the type of thing that you have to
be willing to wrangle.
So either the app works and you're on board to wrangle that, in which case you kind of need some minimum amount of money to keep doing that, whether it's from acquiring new customers or subscription, or the app doesn't work and then you just sunset it and whatever.
Right, exactly.
And so that's why I'm leaning towards subscription.
And for what it's worth, I was always planning on having like a one week free trial process.
But you still, it's still tough because I still need to have some amount of functionality that is there to give you a taste so that when I present the paywall, you're not like, no.
And so in a Slack that we're all a part of, you know, I've been going back and forth with a few mutual friends where, you know, initially I was told, and I think justifiably, well, my paywall was too aggressive too soon, et cetera.
And
My thinking at the time was, well, you know, that's what the one week free trial is for.
But I can see how that would appear to be exploitative and that it would appear that I'm just hoping and praying that people forget to cancel that free trial.
And so I wouldn't characterize it that way for the for the record.
But go ahead.
Well, and so, and I'm happy to be convinced that I'm wrong about this as well, but, but, and so I moved the paywall back a little bit, but then, you know, some, some mutual friends were saying, well, you've moved it back so far that now I probably would never bother paying for the app at all.
And that's also not good.
So I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out where is the, where's the appropriate line and where do I say tough noogies, you're going to have to sign up now.
I haven't been in that conversation too much.
I've seen a little bit of it.
But has the idea come up, which used to be very common in shareware type things, of allowing the full functionality a limited number of times and saying, you know, if someone actually wants to buy the app, they'll use it more than that number of times.
And so they get to experience the full breadth of the functionality.
But then after they use it the fifth time, it's like, OK, well, you've used up your, you know, for free uses for the day or whatever, like whatever, like that type of thing where you're not choosing, not simply choosing functionality that is in front of or behind the paywall, but instead like following usage patterns and saying you can use the app this amount over this period of time for free.
But once you exceed that, you have to pay.
presuming that someone who gets enough utility of it will use it more than that number of times and hit the paywall but they will hit it after having experienced the full functionality of your app you know what i mean yeah and that actually was recommended earlier today and i'm probably going to go that route i got to see if how ugly it would be to implement but you're just moving the problem to a different place which is like okay but what is the right number of exactly over what period of time right because what if what if someone watches like one movie a week that week they're never going to hit it right
That's exactly right.
And I think it would be a fairly small number.
Like, it would be enough for what I would consider to be a day or two of, you know, average use.
And then again, I would stick with the free trial, I think.
And if people really only use the app for a week and a day or something like that, and then that's it, okay, then maybe it's not for them.
Like, I don't want to take your money unless you want to – I want you to give me your money.
I don't want to take your money.
You know what I mean?
Yeah.
Marco was saying about what the App Store is actually like.
What the App Store is actually like is you launch the app and you can't do a single damn thing until you absolutely positively agree to start a free trial right now.
Which is closer to the way this was.
That's how the App Store works.
So few apps, you can't even see what the UI looks like until you agree to pay for the in-app purchase, which has a seven-day free trial, which is nice, and you can cancel and pay nothing, but we're hoping you forget.
Yeah, and keep in mind also, Casey, I never make a stink about this because I always forget to with my people who give me test flights, but subscriptions on test flights are horrible.
Fuck.
they suck so bad it makes me type my password casey make it stop well and then they only last like a day you know and then they reset you have to type your password again and my password is long and complicated and it's hard it's just i can't do it yeah like anybody out there who's trying to send a test flight out to your friends to test internet purchase or apple fix don't bother like
yeah like just don't even bother because a test flight paywall sucks it's it's impossible it's it drives people crazy you will lose everybody everyone will jump off your beta it's hard enough to get people to keep beta testing your app like a paywall instantly makes all your friends say i forget it and they quit and they move but of course you want to test the iap so you actually do want people to test it but they don't want to do that because they make it's not like the real experience the real experience you can pay by like double tapping the home button and using your face but not in test flight because
reasons that apple you know like so it's just such a this is just a beta tester thing but it's not you know regular customers have to deal with this but i've seen what i've seen a couple different purchases one uh to make the restore purchases thing just always say yes totally you're fine right so you leave all the pay balls in there but then you present people with like or restore purchases and anybody who taps your store purchases says oh you totally paid and then so you would avoid the whole authentication problem but then you're not exercising your iap flow really so right exactly it's a pain
Yeah, there's no good answer.
The good answer is for Apple to make test flight IAP work like the real one does.
Yeah, exactly.
I'll have to add some sort of hack.
I hadn't considered that, but you're exactly right.
But honestly, I mean, the whole idea of having it be basically you have to subscribe to do almost anything, but it's a free trial.
That's fine.
I don't think that's that bad of a solution.
And there's a reason why so many apps do that, because it works.
It's effective.
And people like free trials.
People like that.
That's not a bad idea, honestly.
And so many apps, as John was saying, so many apps in the App Store, that's how they work.
that are that are way crappier than yours like that have way less value to people you don't have to put it like literally the first thing that they see like you can give them one or two searches for free and then make it a third thing they see yeah yeah and that's the thing is so like at first my thought was oh you i forget exactly where i put the line but basically you can search but you can't drill into anything like it'll show you search results
But then you don't get to see.
So let's say I did a search for Ryan Reynolds.
You could see that, oh, Ryan Reynolds is right there at the top.
That's what I expect.
But the moment you try to drill into Ryan Reynolds and see the details about Ryan Reynolds, then it would throw up the paywall, which is, I think, probably a little too aggressive.
So now what I was thinking is, in the way it currently is, which is probably too lenient,
is, oh, you can see the results, like you can go from search to details, but anything that's linked from there, so like, if you're looking at Ryan Reynolds, you couldn't drill into Deadpool or any of the other roles that he's had.
At that point, when you try to drill into one of Ryan Reynolds' roles, then it would throw up the paywall.
But then that means worst case, you just go back up and search for Deadpool, and then you get to see Deadpool, you know?
And so I think that's a little too permissive, and I'm not sure what the right answer is.
But I mean, certainly in a Slack that we're all a part of, there was a visceral reaction that a free trial alone and putting up the paywall that quickly was absolutely the wrong answer, and I'm a fool for even thinking it was okay.
So I don't know.
I got to figure out what the right answer is, and obviously I don't know.
Keep in mind also, once you've decided, all right, I'm going to go subscription with a free trial of this duration with this annual price, then you can tweak the rest of it afterwards.
You can ship that way and, all right, this is the business model, period.
But then the detail of, well, how much do you get for free?
When do I show the paywall?
That can change over time.
You can play with that.
Yeah, that's exactly right.
So, I don't know.
We'll see.
But I'm excited for it.
I think it was Marco, but one of you said this earlier.
This, I think, has an even bigger space or potential market than anything I've done so far.
Like, well, Vignette was different, but that was short-lived, and that got sunset real quick.
But if you look at Peek of View, you know, well, it's parents or people who hand their phones to other people a lot.
And then Masquerade, well, it's people who actually care about privacy, which these days is almost no one.
And I'm not saying that everyone in the world is looking for an IMDB replacement, but I think it's probably more people than are looking potentially for either of my other apps.
And so here again, ignorance is bliss slash list.
No, no list puns.
We're not doing that.
So sitting here now, I'm hopeful.
And again, I'm proud of the work.
Whether or not it's interesting to anyone, I'm proud of the work.
And even if it ends up being a complete flop, I do think I'm getting better at my craft, which is what you were saying earlier, Marco, and I appreciate you having said that.
I think I'm getting better at my craft, and I am proud of that.
It is not a perfect app.
It is not fantastic.
flawless it probably has bugs somewhere although it's been reasonably bug free so far which i'm pretty proud of um but it's it's it's the best i think i've got going so far and it's a little bit better if not a lot better than masquerade which was i think a little to a lot better than peak of view and so we're making progress and i'm pretty happy about that and even in a worst case scenario you know this doesn't take off atp suddenly goes away analog goes away and i need to find a big boy job again
then I have something to show for what I've been doing for the last several years, right?
Well, in this case, the last couple of months, but more broadly, the last several years.
And I think that's a positive thing as well.
And I'm learning how to use new stuff.
And all of these things, I think, are nothing but good.
So even if the app flops, which certainly I hope it doesn't, but even if it flopped, I still feel pretty good about what I've learned and how I've grown during the process.