Scribble on the Shared Placemat
Marco:
It's winter now, and the temperature has finally dropped enough in our area that I'm using humidifiers again.
Marco:
It's humidifier season.
Marco:
And I'm wondering, to present a question to our well-informed and oddly specifically placed listener base in certain industries, I want to know, so every winter...
Marco:
I get super cracked hand skin around my nails.
Marco:
It just cracks and hurts.
Marco:
Do any of these hand cream things or even humidifiers, does this do anything?
Marco:
Do any of these things help?
John:
Your question, can I...
John:
This is kind of like the question that like many young children and often some adults have.
John:
It's another secret weird thing kind of in rectus parlance where they're like, sometimes I get headaches, but I don't believe that headache medicine does anything.
John:
Does it do anything?
Yeah.
John:
No, because a lot, first of all, a lot of medicines don't do anything, so that's a reasonable question.
John:
Right, right.
John:
But I'm saying, like, the idea is that the whole rest of the world, including doctors, would tell you, hey, if you have a mild headache, maybe take, like, aspirin or Tylenol or Advil, right?
John:
But you're living your whole life thinking, ah, that probably doesn't do anything, right?
John:
So here you are.
John:
You've got, like, dry, cracked hands, and your question is,
John:
do moisturizers moisturize that's what it comes yes yes putting moisturizer on your dry hands it's like what what kind of question is that or you could just not and continue to have dry hands now your humidifier question is better because that's like okay well i'm humidifying the whole air is that helping me as well but like
John:
But if you have dry hands, use moisturizer, please.
Marco:
No, and I do.
Marco:
Moisturizer sucks because then you can't use those hands for a couple of minutes as it dries in.
John:
That's a better question, which is like, tell me a good moisturizer that doesn't have the... No, I have good moisturizers.
Marco:
I have stupidly good ones that I love, like how they feel after a few minutes at least.
Marco:
I just don't know if they're doing anything.
Marco:
Like, I...
Marco:
Are they actually fixing the problem of my hands always crack and get painful in the winter?
John:
Moisturizers are not entirely placebos.
John:
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that.
John:
Most moisturizers.
Marco:
I have to say most.
John:
Is that true?
John:
That's kind of what I'm asking.
John:
It's like, I don't know.
John:
Yeah, I think it's a safe bet that not all moisturizers are placebos.
John:
Is it?
Casey:
I think it is a safe bet.
Casey:
I will say that I do not have anything that really resembles a skincare routine.
Casey:
And I don't say that with pride.
Marco:
Right.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Or winter.
Marco:
Or air that's ever dry enough for this to be an issue.
Casey:
Yes, yes, yes.
Casey:
Anyway, I think it's going to be like the low of 15 tomorrow or something like that.
Casey:
So come off it.
Casey:
Anyway, I have tried many a moisturizing lotion in my day for...
Casey:
For my money, and I'm not trying to say this is the universally correct answer, just for me, the one that I have had the best experience with by a mile is Cetaphil, C-E-T-A-P-H-I-L, which is not an uncommon lotion.
Casey:
Yeah, I've seen that before.
Casey:
It's all over the place.
Casey:
I vastly prefer this because with most lotions, I feel like gross and weird on my skin.
Casey:
You were kind of alluding to this, but I feel that way for like 20 or 30 minutes.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
With Cetaphil, it dries in the span of just a couple of minutes, and then it's like, other than the fact that your skin has moisture in it now, it's like it was never there.
Casey:
And so I would strongly encourage you to give Cetaphil a try.
Casey:
I will put a link in the show notes to what I believe is the one that I use, as with all medicines or dermatological things.
Casey:
There's a thousand variations that are all basically identical.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
This is what I use and I recommend.
Casey:
This may or may not work for you.
Casey:
But again, the reason I like it so much is because after just a minute, maybe two tops, that icky, oily feeling goes away.
Casey:
It is there at first, but it goes away super fast.
Marco:
How long after you've applied it can you open a doorknob?
Casey:
That's a fair question.
Casey:
No, it's a fair.
Casey:
Don't scoff at him, John.
Casey:
That's a reasonable question.
John:
I would say.
John:
I think you could always open the doorknob.
John:
It's just that it feels zicky to you.
John:
You don't want to get moisturizer on the doorknob.
Casey:
No, sometimes it's genuinely hard if you put it on the palms of your hands.
John:
I mean, how stiff are your doorknobs here?
Casey:
Oh, stop it.
Casey:
Anyways, I would say, to answer your question, five minutes or less.
Marco:
And how long after you apply it, could you touch a glass touchscreen and have it not smear something on it?
Casey:
Five days?
Casey:
No, I'm kidding.
Casey:
Again, I think that's a perfectly reasonable barometer.
Casey:
And I don't know off the top of my head.
Casey:
I mean, obviously, neither of us, and certainly not John, would be touching a glass screen other than maybe a phone.
Casey:
I use my iPad.
John:
What are you talking about?
Casey:
Oh, that's fair, fair, fair.
Casey:
All right, I take it back.
Marco:
I use touchscreens all day long.
Marco:
I'd rather just avoid the need for these things because I hate having goop on me.
Marco:
As I get older, I'm increasingly conservative about what kind of chemicals I'm allowing to be applied on my body or enter my body.
Marco:
I want to not take unnecessary risks with weird chemicals and stuff.
Marco:
I'm trying to figure out, are there any other solutions to this problem that don't involve...
Marco:
gooping up my hands all day with crap that i hate now my recommendation is to be 100 italian and produce so much skin oil that you never need to use moisturizer in your entire life well the other thing is i'm also like you know the the division of labor in our house um in in broad strokes there are some exceptions but in broad strokes uh tiff is in charge of soft things and i'm in charge of wires in the kitchen oh and and dog is usually me too
Marco:
Um, but the kitchen part of my duties mean that I, my hands are often getting wet and dry, you know, in cycles as I wash dishes or, you know, clean counters or whatever.
Marco:
And then the dog part of my duties mean I'm often putting on gloves, going outside, taking off gloves when I come back, like a lot of that.
Marco:
So like my hands just get destroyed in the winter.
Marco:
Um, but I just, I, I don't have a good solution here.
Marco:
Uh,
Marco:
Humidifiers seem to be more for other forms of comfort and for the happiness of the plants in the house.
Marco:
I'm not entirely sure humidifiers are doing much for my skin.
John:
I think humidifiers will help probably your sinuses and your breathing because you're breathing that in.
John:
The moisturizer, hopefully you're not breathing it in.
Marco:
but yeah for your skin moisturize this is like my annual reminder like nobody understands humidifiers really well i mean our listeners do but like you know regular people out in the world they're like yeah i just you know i put a pot of water on the radiator and that's enough for my whole house all day and i'm like i'm evaporating six gallons a day into my house with my evaporative humidifiers and that that raises the humidity like 15 like your your one pot of water on the radiator is not doing anything
Casey:
Let me tell you, though, if you are going to go outside on a dog walk and it's going to be cold, boy, do I have an answer for you on what you can do to keep yourself warm.
Casey:
John, can you tell me about this?
John:
The chicken hat.
John:
The chicken hat is back.
John:
Did you miss out on the chicken hat before?
John:
Are you disappointed that you didn't get one?
John:
Are you still wanting a chicken hat?
John:
Well, I mean, so here's the news.
John:
You too, you can miss out on the chicken hat again.
John:
You made out of the chicken hat.
John:
Listen, this is on us.
John:
We're bad at estimating how many chicken hats we need to order, and it's because we have to pay for these up front.
Marco:
No, it's because there's not a lot of data to base our decision on on how many chicken hats we should order.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so we have to buy them all up front.
John:
So we're like, oh, it's expensive and you've got to outlay this money.
John:
And what if we buy all these chicken hats and nobody wants them?
John:
Now we're just stuck with it.
John:
So we kept ordering them in increasingly large amounts.
John:
And then our sale ended.
John:
And we told people we're going to try to get more as soon as we can.
John:
So we got some more chicken hats.
John:
This is not part of one of regular sales.
John:
So there's no member only discount code like it's not this is just a one off special things.
John:
We felt bad because like even after we sold through all our chicken hats, more people wanted them.
John:
So we ordered a bunch more that we thought would satisfy the demand of all the people who signed up and said, hey, tell me when the chicken tell me when the hat is back so I can order it.
John:
We may or may not have done that because I put them on sale earlier today and I posted about the hats to Mastodon.
John:
I posted to Mastodon first and I gave those people first crack at it.
John:
So you're welcome if you're following me on Mastodon.
John:
And then I posted on Twitter.
John:
Anyway, I feel like we've already sold through half of the hats and this episode is just being recorded now.
John:
So maybe by the time you hear this, they're not there.
John:
But if you go to atp.fm slash star...
John:
you may be able to get a chicken hat and you may actually be able to get it in time for Christmas as well because these ship immediately.
John:
There's no waiting or anything.
John:
And if you live in the US, you could probably get one in time for Christmas if you order at the time you hear this.
John:
Or you could get there and find out they're sold out again, in which case we're sorry, but obviously we have no idea what we're doing with these chicken hats.
John:
Is there infinite demand for chicken hats?
John:
Should I buy one for every person in the world?
John:
I don't know.
John:
But anyway, this is probably it for the chicken hats for this year because we will have put them on enough heads
John:
for the winter this is the winter that's why we're doing this now it's a winter one-off winter sale so go to atp10fm store if you want a chicken hat there may be one available and also we have like our leftover mugs like we always keep a bunch of mugs in reserve for ones that like break and transport or whatever and now that all the mugs have gone out to everybody and we've replaced any that broke or whatever now we have like the reserve available for sale so we do have a few atp mugs hanging around as well
John:
I think they will also ship as soon as you order one.
John:
So if you want to order a mug and you didn't get one before, take a look now.
Casey:
Yeah, I can't stress enough.
Casey:
I know I say this every time.
Casey:
I know I do.
Casey:
But for real, like these hats are going like hotcakes, which selfishly is great.
John:
Don't get too strong of a speech because it could be by the time this thing is posted, they'll all be gone already.
John:
And I'll feel bad if that happens.
John:
But that's why you should follow us on Mastodon or Twitter.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
And really, act now, because I know that's such a cliche, but for real, act now, because I bet you there's a 50-50 shot that by the time you hear these words, they will already be gone.
Casey:
In fact, there's even a chance that Marco will have to edit this very speech out of the show, because by the time he goes to publish it, they may be gone.
Casey:
So, atp.fm slash store, please and thank you.
John:
yeah for the bootleg people someone in the chat room just said that they so they ordered a chicken hat last time and they like it and they're thinking of ordering a second one i endorse this behavior as a person who loves to have backups but really like this is what you're up against people who already have a chicken hat are like maybe i should get a second one anyway they're there or probably gonna be there
Marco:
i'll tell you what i i when they when i first got mine like i mean whatever it was three or four weeks ago it wasn't that cold yet and i was i put it on like oh my god this is ridiculously hot and i i couldn't wear it it was too hot now as i'm pulling it over as i'm pulling it with my dry cracked hands oh
Marco:
over my ears for my morning dog walks and it's 28 degrees now that is an appropriately warm hat for what i am doing and i'm very thankful for it yeah one other thing to scare people away from the chicken hat we're also getting a lot of people who got the chicken hat to say uh it doesn't fit me my head's too big
John:
As I said, when we originally talked about this, this hat is modeled on my my hat down to the millimeter.
John:
If you lay this hat on top of my original hat, they are exactly the same in every single dimension.
John:
And my original hat was from Easter Mountain Sports and it was listed as one size fits all.
John:
And like I said, when we talked about the hat originally, one size obviously doesn't fit all, but there was no sizing on this hat.
John:
There was no small, medium or large.
John:
I have the only size this hat was ever made in, which is one size fits all.
John:
Is this one size fits all going to fit your head?
John:
Maybe.
John:
I mean, I don't know.
John:
Like it is what it is.
John:
So if you get this hat and it's too small, I don't know, give it to someone with a smaller head, sell it to someone.
John:
There's some people reselling their hats on Twitter saying, hey, I got the hat and I like it fine, but my head's too big for it.
John:
So if you want it, you can try it.
John:
i think this this one is actually looser and like it is it provides it accommodates a larger head than my original because my original has stiffened with time and it's thicker than this one whereas this one is much much looser so this one accommodates larger heads than the original even though in every dimension it is the same so be aware uh you may get a hat that doesn't fit on your head in which case just give it to someone with a smaller head
Casey:
Also, I would like to make a request of John.
Casey:
He genuinely does not know what I'm about to say.
Casey:
So I received my chicken hat just a couple of days back.
Casey:
I went on a walk around the neighborhood.
Casey:
Actually, it was a dog walk in this particular case.
Casey:
I went on a walk around the neighborhood, and it is quite brisk by Virginian standards today.
Casey:
I think it was like mid-30s or something like that.
Casey:
And I put my chicken hat on, and I was quite happy to have it.
Casey:
It was absurdly warm.
Casey:
It genuinely was.
Casey:
I'm not really sure why or how, but it was freaking warm.
Casey:
The power of fleece.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Either way, I remember us going back and forth about the correct placement of the ATP logo and which side is supposed to be where and that everyone is doing it wrong.
Casey:
And I think I'm doing it wrong.
Casey:
So can we have like an official FAQ page or can you repost somewhere publicly the correct place to put the chicken hat?
John:
mean i don't want to be too prescriptive because honestly you wear it however the heck you want but the way it's supposed to be worn is seam in the back like that's true of most clothing if clothing has a seam very often it goes in the back like with a hat right so this i know it's confusing because people want the logo to be in the front so you can see it but it's not the logo is kind of towards the back the seam goes in the back but if you want to wear it with the seam in the front go for it i'm just saying if you're if you're asking the question of how is it supposed to be done it's seam in the back
Marco:
And for whatever it's worth, I have a fish beanie hat that has a little fish tag on it.
Marco:
And that is also in the same location near the seam in the back.
Marco:
And if you know anything about fish, you know that they know what they're talking about with fashion.
Casey:
I'm glad you made that joke before I had to.
Casey:
No, but you had posted a profile view at some point.
Casey:
And I would like that profile view of you, John, to live permanently somewhere.
John:
But the problem, I mean, it does.
John:
It's on the Studio Neat page, but the problem is that's my original hat, not the ATP one.
Casey:
See, you got to do a new one, please, and thank you.
John:
But why don't you model it?
John:
You've got the hat.
John:
Put it on the seam.
Casey:
Because I'm doing it wrong.
John:
Because I'm doing it wrong.
John:
I've told you how to do it now.
John:
I've told you how to do it now.
John:
So get Aaron to take a picture of you, like in a three-quarters view, showing the seam in the back, and you can be the model.
Casey:
Super.
Casey:
A lot of people have very justifiably asked with regard to merchandise like the chicken hat, where do I put the discount code?
Casey:
Why isn't it working?
Casey:
Or how can I get it?
Casey:
We don't do discount codes for the anytime sales like this one.
Casey:
We only do them for the time-limited sales.
Casey:
Completely reasonable question.
Casey:
I meant to talk about this a minute ago.
Casey:
I apologize.
Casey:
I completely forgot.
Casey:
Completely reasonable question, but we only do the discount codes for... You need a 28-character backup code for your hat.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
You need to send us your 28-character backup code and your Apple ID, and then you can get a discount.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
Only for the time-limited stuff, so no discounts on this.
Casey:
I am sorry about that.
Casey:
I don't think we're going to do another time-limited sale until probably springtime, but no discounts on these ones.
Casey:
Our apologies.
Casey:
Let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
Hey, tell me about recovery keys and backup contacts, please.
Casey:
This is in the context of end-to-end encryption.
Casey:
What is it?
Casey:
Advanced data protection?
Casey:
Do I have that right?
Casey:
So please tell me more about this.
John:
Yeah, this is a question last time with the whole 28 character code from the Apple document.
John:
They say creating a recovery key, this 28 character code turns off account recovery.
John:
And it says account recovery is a process that would otherwise help you get back your Apple ID when you don't have enough information to reset your password.
John:
So there was the open question of, OK, so they're giving you all these warnings about when you generate 28 character code.
John:
and they say it turns off account recovery but what is account recovery and then they give that vague definition so oliver ames wrote in to say i have recovery key and three recovery contacts enabled on my icloud account i can't see any indication that a recovery key disables these three recovery contacts the two seem to coexist so i think i have three methods of recovering an encrypted key so that was the question last time can you have backup contacts and also have this 28 character recovery key and apparently the answer is yes or at least you can if you already had them um
John:
I guess account recovery does not encompass having backup contacts.
John:
I guess it is a different thing.
John:
I haven't actually gone through the process, and I'm assuming none of us have at this point, of setting it up.
John:
But I believe it prompts you and it says, hey, you're about to turn this thing on.
John:
You should do one of these things.
John:
And the choices are generate this 28-character code and designate people to be your backup person for you if you lose all your stuff.
John:
And apparently you can do both.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Ezekiel Ellen was one of many people to write in with some information with regard to getting a refund and how you can do that and be explicit about what you want to refund on.
Casey:
The context for this was one of you.
Casey:
Was it Marco buying a bunch of stuff or was it John?
Casey:
I thought it was John and then I could swear it was Marco.
Casey:
It's always John.
Casey:
Anyways, it was John looking at, oh, it was for the face thing, wasn't it?
John:
The AI image generator thing I was messing with, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So anyways, so we were, John was asking, you know, how do, how do I know what I'm requesting a refund on and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
Um, I had said, Oh, I'm pretty sure you can do that in store kit too.
Casey:
You can.
Casey:
So I'll put a link to a tech talk that Apple did.
Casey:
So anyway, on this video, they talk about exactly how you can show like the, the, a sheet that I believe is provided by the system, but it lets you ask for a refund on a particular item, asks you how, or what, what the problem is, et cetera.
Casey:
So continuing with what Ezekiel was telling us, you can look at any of your order receipts and there's a report a problem link at the kind of the bottom of the order.
Casey:
And there's also reportaproblem.apple.com.
Casey:
And on the website, it shows you all of your purchases ordered by date and group by order number.
Casey:
You can choose request a refund and then see a list of options, including in-app purchase not received.
Casey:
After selecting it, you can click in-app purchase and hit submit.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And so there is a list that you were seeking, John.
Casey:
We just didn't know where to get it.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The secret, the key for me is that I was looking at these auto receipts saying, why is there no place for me to get refund?
John:
And also, why can I not see a list of my transactions like in the app?
John:
On the receipt, the secret is look for report a problem, which I don't know.
John:
I just was glancing over that of like, oh, I don't really have a problem.
John:
I just want a refund.
Casey:
Yeah, I would have done the same.
John:
But anyway, that encompasses it.
John:
And the website, reportaproblem.apple.com, is where you can request a refund.
John:
The UI is a little bit weird, but that is the place where you can do it.
John:
And there you actually do see your transactions.
John:
There's actually many places where you can see these transactions, including on your devices.
John:
It's just not straightforward to know where they are, as anyone who's ever gone digging for something in settings or whatever.
John:
this stuff is available and uh thanks to people pointing this out i did actually request a refund for that one thing that didn't go through uh and i got it back and same thing with the store kit 2 thing like that's presenting a ui but in the end you are still asking apple for a refund the developer cannot grant or not grant you the refund so if you ask for a refund from apple and apple says no because like you're asking for a refund on like some subscription that you've you know used up all but one day of and you want to refund that and maybe apple would say no or something
John:
The developer isn't doing that.
John:
It's Apple.
John:
The good news is that Apple pretty much gives you any refund you ask for as long as it is reasonable.
John:
So you are at Apple's mercy, but they are merciful.
Casey:
That is true.
Casey:
I'm not arguing with what you're saying.
Casey:
However, in that video that I was talking about earlier, one of the things they say is when you do the in-app refund dance,
Casey:
you can provide apple with some information about um what what the user has done and this is particularly in the context of consumable in-app purchases so you know you buy a packet of of credits if you will that you're using over time um actually i guess like this you know give give me five avatars thing well anyways what you can do is you can provide as a developer you can provide apple
Casey:
with, oh, they've used two of their six credits or what have you, and then Apple puts that in their little algorithm, their black box, that decides whether or not you will actually get the refund.
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
I haven't heard from users or even the handful of times I've done it myself, I haven't heard anyone say that they've been denied, but there is some affordance in the flow and in the API to tell Apple exactly what it is that the user has done.
John:
And in my case, I remember I made it in that purchase and the app just failed to give me anything for it there.
John:
But there would be no record of that.
John:
And there's no way Apple has any information other than from as far as they can tell.
John:
I did an app purchase and then I just like regretted and asked for my money back.
John:
Right.
John:
They'd have no way to verify my story that, hey, I did it and I got nothing for it, which is true.
John:
I did get nothing for it.
John:
It disappeared into the app, but they just gave me the refund anyway.
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They have other things too, like object storage, which is like S3 compatible object storage.
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Marco:
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Casey:
So we have a definitive answer on the Shero.
Casey:
This was brought to my attention from Ilya Berman.
Casey:
I don't like to be that guy in Revels when your friends are wrong and just gets excited when your friends are wrong.
Casey:
But when you're almost never wrong, like John Syracuse, I can't help but get a little excited.
Casey:
So here I am getting more than a little excited that apparently the Shero is for real, for real, a real thing.
Casey:
So Ilya points out, WWDC 2017 Essential Design Principles, about 25 minutes in,
Casey:
The presenter introduces the box with an arrow coming out of it, and the presenter says the following.
Marco:
The glyph that we use to represent the concept of an action is an arrow that points up and away from a box.
Marco:
Because the most common action associated with this glyph is share, we affectionately call this a shero.
Marco:
Yes.
John:
2017.
John:
It is a real thing.
John:
Right.
John:
But here's the question.
John:
Have they been able to make shero happen since 2017?
John:
I'm going to say since none of us remembered this session, I don't think it's really happening.
John:
Anyway, I talked about this a lot with Merlin on the rectiffs that we recorded that will be out sometime in the future so you can hear more about it.
John:
But yeah, lots of people are, you know...
John:
have used inside of apple in apple retail uh this uh shortening of the thing uh but i feel like it hasn't really caught on i mean that's why we had all these questions about it that's why we ended up having two episodes because it wasn't like oh yeah of course shower everyone calls it that and i'm kind of surprised that given these people are inside apple talking about design that i can't go into sf symbols and type shower i went and did that i mean i made the joke last episode but i'm like but i think
John:
if they call it that it's got to be in like the synonyms or no it's not it's called like upward facing box arrow or some whatever it's called so i mean even if apple puts it as the thing in sf symbols i feel like making it catch on in the wider world uh you know i mean again i think us talking about it may actually be pushing into that direction much to my chagrin so we should just move on
Casey:
I will concede, as much as I love giving you a hard time, I will concede that the first time I remember having heard this was when Merlin brought it up on Rectifs, what, like a month or two ago or something like that.
Casey:
I don't remember having heard Sharo before then.
John:
But we all probably did, considering this is from 2017.
John:
No, I agree.
John:
It just didn't stick because it's dumb.
Casey:
It didn't stick.
Casey:
I'll leave it at that.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So tell me about enabling the aforementioned advanced data protection if you happen to really like Apple products.
John:
This is a joke I made last episode.
John:
I was like, oh, you know, you would think that people who are into Apple and are Apple enthusiasts, they're going to turn on advanced data protection right away.
John:
And the requirement that all the devices be updated to the latest OS isn't going to be a big deal because all these Apple enthusiasts and these tech nerds, they are updating their devices all the way all the time.
John:
They want to be on the latest and greatest version of everything.
John:
But the reality is, if you are an actual Apple nerd, what you end up accumulating is tons and tons of older devices that you just refuse to get rid of, even though you should sell them or give them away because you're using them as like test devices or you just want to have them or whatever.
John:
And so here is Quinn Nelson posting a video showing his experience of trying to turn it on.
John:
And it shows you that screen that says, oh, you want to turn on advanced data protection?
John:
Well, you got to have the latest version of all the OSs.
John:
So here's a list of the devices you're going to need to update.
John:
And he scrolls for like two pages.
Yeah.
John:
yeah we all have a lot of devices devices that you've forgotten about that are not running the latest os they may be turned off asleep in a drawer somewhere and now you have to either fish them out or go to the web page and like eject them from your apple id yeah that's not great i haven't done this yet i think we established earlier that none of us have but i do i do plan to but if it requires everything on latest and greatest it might take a minute
John:
i mean it's not it's unavoidable like there's a good reason for them doing they're not doing it to be mean the whole point is this is a security thing and if you leave the old ones on the old version that's a security leak like you are not protected unless you do this and it was the same thing with setting backup contacts that you had to update everything you know time heals this eventually you will update all your things eventually you'll get annoyed enough that you'll dig them out of drawers or remove them from your apple id so it's fine it's just funny yeah agreed
Casey:
all right it turns out that you can indeed quit the finder so uh john when writes in episode 512 of atp you you were asked about a quit menu item for the finder as expected it's a default right to the rescue in terminal enter and we'll put this in the show notes defaults right com.apple.finder quit menu item bool true and then just restart the finder and suddenly you'll have a quit menu item allegedly yeah it behaves a little bit weirdly i mean it's not as much fun as doing it in res edit for sure but um
John:
And I think I put this in one of my Mac OS X interviews back in the day, but I've long since forgotten about it.
John:
But when you do quit finder through that menu item, it can behave a little bit strangely in that sometimes it will hang or sometimes it will hang when it's trying to relaunch itself or sometimes it won't relaunch itself and you have to kill it.
John:
And then I got it to a state where clicking on in the dock wouldn't relaunch it.
John:
So instead I had to go to the terminal, which of course was already open, and type the open command on like, you know, open space dot to open like the directory and that will trigger the Finder to open.
John:
Just needless to say, this is not a supported configuration from Apple's perspective, but the Finder team did put the quit menu item there and maybe it will work better for you than it worked for me.
Casey:
sure enough uh hey ventura 13.1 is out it is not in beta it is for real for real in fact i upgraded uh earlier today because i'm a dummy and i do it on the day i record i don't know why i do this every time but i always do but it works so it's okay uh but the point is why because i just today installed ventura regular just because 13.1 that's worse that's worse than what casey did
Casey:
Yeah, that's aggressive.
John:
Anyway, I did it because I wanted to try the Freeform app, which we'll talk about in a little bit.
John:
But yeah, I think I did it yesterday.
Casey:
Oh, that's true.
Casey:
I forgot that it was on the Mac.
Casey:
We will talk about this.
John:
I forgot that it was any place but the Mac.
Casey:
Because I wanted to try it on iPad with my Apple Pencil and all that.
Casey:
i completely forgot it was on the mac anyway um so yeah so 13.1 brings back a relatively well hidden but their network locations uh gui which is pretty cool i know a lot of people were sad and upset about that but it's there now and where it is you go to system settings you go to network in the sidebar and these are all the way down to the bottom and there'll be a mysterious little thing that looks like a button with three dots and a v on it
John:
And that will spawn a menu.
John:
And then at the bottom of that menu will spawn another menu.
John:
And at the bottom of that menu, you can edit your network locations.
John:
It's a fairly hilarious UI, but at least it's back.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So Apple Music Sing isn't just for Atmos stuff.
Casey:
And this is sent us via Bill Klein.
Casey:
Bill writes, you mentioned the new Apple Music Sing feature this week.
Casey:
I think that was a week or two ago.
Casey:
And John posited that this is not machine learning related, but instead using Atmos encoded music objects to strip out the vocals.
Casey:
However, in my testing of this feature, I found many tracks that do not have Atmos versions on the service that function with this feature.
Casey:
For example, the band Gooses, Last Two Albums, Drip Field and Shenanigans Nightclub, that's a pretty good name for an album, do not have Atmos versions on Apple Music, but if you try playing this track, which will link, or any other track on those records on 16.2, you will get the microphone button to strip the vocals.
Casey:
This fact, plus the compatibility list for this feature, which cuts off any devices with an A12 or earlier, leads me, says Bill, to believe that this is in fact ML-powered and relies on the more powerful neural engine in the A13 and later chips.
Marco:
Can we just take a minute to appreciate that a jam band that I happen to be listening to recently...
Marco:
somebody wrote in about that like referencing music like that i'm not the only person listening to the band goose which by the way i was gonna say which one is the jam band it's goose goose yeah they're sure they just did a tour with trainastasio like kind of together as a whole thing and and it's a fantastic tour it both the tab side of it and the goose side of it anyway oh my god they're so good like if you if fish
Marco:
is like kind of in your real house but like you want something like that's a little bit more mass market palatable and a little maybe a little more like you know a more modern take on something similar you should listen to goose it's really good
Casey:
So with all that said, somebody, I think it was John, put a link in the show notes that I'm assuming is from someone that worked on all this.
John:
I don't know.
John:
See, the information we got last so about the fact that it wasn't that they're using Atmos, but the idea was that Apple has access to individual tracks in the same way that they have access to those things to do.
John:
The Atmos makes this because they have to, you know, anyway.
John:
um but i think it was from vatici or somebody was saying like this is not uh using machine learning to do it it's actually they they have the individual tracks and the atmos was an example of why apple would have access to that but i don't know for certain so a lot of people are saying the reason it's limited to the apple tv 4k is because it uses machine learning to do this and we need the a13 or better and that's why you can't use the older apple tvs to do it
John:
But I don't know if this tweet from John Druckmann is definitive because it's someone on the inside who knows.
John:
But either way, it seems to me like it would be more straightforward to just get the individual tracks.
John:
And certainly Apple, through its connections in the music industry, could get those.
John:
How many songs could they get them for?
John:
Is this something they've been doing for a year, asking all the music labels to give them individual tracks?
John:
Or did they just apply ML to it?
John:
It's kind of weird that Apple wouldn't brag about it if they used ML.
John:
Like, hey, look at this main thing we're doing.
John:
The power of the neural engine, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But still a bit of a mystery.
John:
But most of the feedback we got is people saying it's definitely machine learning.
Casey:
Let me ask you two, did either of you try this feature at all?
Marco:
I think we are established we both can't sing, so no.
Marco:
Oh, no, no.
Marco:
I can't either.
Marco:
Well, I mean, I do sing.
Marco:
I don't know if I can, but I do in the car when I'm by myself.
John:
When you're listening to Phish, you say three words every 30 minutes?
Casey:
Well done.
Marco:
I can sing other music also, but yeah.
Marco:
But the problem is I haven't had a lot of that time since I've upgraded to 16.2 and stuff, so.
Casey:
So I did try it very briefly on my iPad, and I don't know how I got this impression.
Casey:
I presume I just vastly misunderstood.
Casey:
I thought that there was a lot to this or something more to this on the user side.
Casey:
Clearly, there's a lot to this on the implementation side, as we were just discussing.
Casey:
But on the user side, it's basically just another volume control for vocals.
Casey:
Maybe everyone knew this about me, but that's it.
Casey:
It's just you're looking at the lyrics for you.
John:
Because the lyrics already did.
John:
The things you're singing the lyrics to, the lyrics already did that.
John:
Exactly.
John:
They already looked like karaoke.
John:
They highlight the words as they come up in the song and they scroll automatically.
John:
That existed that way for years.
John:
And they just added the ability to basically turn down the vocals.
John:
And I think one of the things that will...
John:
I haven't tried this, but one of the things that may be identified is whether it's machine learning or not.
John:
If you have the individual tracks, you can put the vocals to zero and you won't hear them at all.
John:
Whereas if you're using machine learning and you put the vocals to zero, maybe you'll still pick them up a little bit.
John:
I'll have to try it.
Casey:
So I did try doing exactly that.
Casey:
Now, granted, I was doing this on my iPad, not using AirPods, just the iPad speakers.
Casey:
As far as I could tell, there was zero vocals, but I very well could be wrong about that.
Casey:
And this was in five minutes of playing about.
Casey:
Now, it is very slick that you can just get a volume slider for the vocal track.
Casey:
Like, that is cool.
Casey:
But for some reason, I thought it was more involved than that.
Casey:
And it's not.
Casey:
Like, that's all it is.
Casey:
I shouldn't say that's all it is.
Casey:
But that's all it is.
Casey:
And I was surprised to see that.
Casey:
But with that said, it was extremely well done.
Casey:
And if I could carry a tune, I could see it being a lot of fun to mess about with.
Casey:
But I cannot.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So, Marco, that Tesla that you've probably either sold or about to sell, good news.
Casey:
You can now use Apple Music in your Tesla.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
I expect that to work super well.
John:
I mean, this is not them adding CarPlay, but it is, you know, an improvement over not acknowledging that Apple Music exists at all.
Marco:
And also not acknowledging that people just play music from their phones.
Marco:
I mean, the car has a built-in cell modem for things like traffic routing and stuff like that.
Marco:
It was only one or two years of that for free.
Marco:
And then after that, you had to pay per month.
Marco:
And I just never signed up for that because I'm like, what do I need this for?
Marco:
Because they don't have CarPlay, I never use their media stuff anyway.
Marco:
I have my phone doing directions using Waze or Apple Maps.
Marco:
And then I have, you know, my own my phone also playing music via or overcast podcasts over the speakers.
Marco:
And so what do I need the vehicles built in, you know, weird stereo thing for that just playing a streaming service like I can do that on my phone and have better integration and more control and, you know, a more unified experience with the way my phone works in other ways.
Marco:
and have Bluetooth connected and ready to go.
Marco:
So it was a no-brainer for me.
Marco:
I just never used that.
Marco:
And so this adds yet another capability to that data stream that I don't have access to for a car I'm trying to sell.
Marco:
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Casey:
Moving on, we had just talked about this kind of obliquely a second ago, but the Freeform app.
Casey:
So this is new in, what is it, 16.2, something like that, whatever just came out in the last 48 hours.
Casey:
This was teased, I believe, at WWDC.
Casey:
Do I have that right?
John:
I think it was actually demoed, wasn't it?
John:
Yeah, it was they showed the app.
John:
It was it's, you know, coming soon to all of Apple platforms.
John:
It's on the Mac.
John:
It's on the iPad.
John:
Is it on the iPhone?
John:
I don't remember.
John:
Yeah, I think it's on everything.
John:
Yeah, it was one of those features they said in the free form Apple becoming whatever they said later this year.
John:
It's one of those things that didn't launch when iOS 16 launched.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So this is now out.
Casey:
It's everywhere.
Casey:
And I only spent a few minutes playing with it.
Casey:
I don't know what in my life needs an infinite canvas sketching clip art app.
Casey:
But holy cow, this app is really cool.
Casey:
Like, I really, really like it.
Casey:
So, again, what it is, it's an infinite canvas, which when we were all together, maybe, I don't know if that was the year that you were there, Marco, but when at least the Syracuses and us and the Underscores and maybe the Armands were all at the Underscores for New Year's, this is probably four or five years ago now, we did a text-based adventure game like they used to do with the Upgrade Cortex crossover.
Casey:
Well, they still do it, but they do it differently now.
Casey:
And anyways, I wanted to have an app on my iPad to draw a map.
Casey:
And
Casey:
It was surprisingly challenging four or five years ago to come up with an app that you had an infinite canvas, that you could go as far as you wanted in any direction.
Casey:
And there were some that existed, and I think there was a Microsoft one, maybe OneNote, that was actually pretty good.
Casey:
There were a couple others that I found.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
This one feels very Apple-y, which makes sense because Apple wrote it.
Casey:
But it's a really, really well done infinite canvas sketching app.
Casey:
And I really, really, really like it.
Casey:
If I was just doodling with no particular known endpoint, I really, really like Linnea.
Casey:
I think that's how we were told to pronounce it.
Casey:
Linnea by our friends at the Icon Factory is excellent.
Marco:
Yeah, I love it too.
Casey:
and I would still choose that probably in most cases in no small part because of some of the tools that they have to like draw shapes, very free form, but auto detect them and turn them into shapes.
Casey:
And, and I love that they have different like paper, if you will, they have like graph paper and, and they have, uh, I think they have a like iPhone screen so you can draw mock-ups and stuff.
Casey:
And so I really recommend Linnea.
Casey:
If I remember, I'll put a link in the show notes.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
But this Freeform thing for when you're doing Freeform doodling or whatever is really, really good.
Casey:
And I really, really like it.
Casey:
So I played with it on the iPad and there's like a bunch of things that are across the top, a bunch of tools across the top that you can play with.
Casey:
There's like the standard pen thing where you can doodle with the Apple Pencil.
Casey:
But interestingly, the tools that you can use are a little different than normal, I think.
Casey:
They have a pen that has a capital letter A on it.
Casey:
And that's basically to start a text field, if I understand it correctly.
Casey:
Then they have like a pen, a marker, a crayon, which was a little surprising and kind of cool.
Casey:
They have something, maybe John, you can tell me if you've looked at this, what this is.
Casey:
It looks like a bottle of paint, but I don't think that's actually what it is.
Casey:
The eraser and then the like squiggle blur things tool.
Casey:
They also have a ton of clip art.
Casey:
I don't know if that's even what we're supposed to call it these days, but I'm old, so I call it clip art.
Casey:
They have a bunch of stuff on here, including like an entire farm's worth of animals.
Casey:
They have a waffle, which is round, which I personally believe is the correct shape for a waffle.
Casey:
They have a food truck, which I thought was funny.
Casey:
They have John Syracuse's refrigerator, maybe.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Do you have a bottom freezer or a side freezer, John?
John:
It's French drawers on top, freezer drawer on the bottom.
Casey:
Okay, then they have your actual refrigerator because it does not have water or ice dispenser on it.
Casey:
And they have a turntable I was excited to find.
Casey:
So there's all sorts of fun clip art in here.
Casey:
I also liked that when I was noodling about with it that I was looking to move a couple of sticky notes near each other and I was just messing about.
Casey:
And sure enough, when they got close to each other, they popped up alignment guides.
Casey:
So they would align against text.
Casey:
They would align against each other.
Casey:
And it was really, really intuitive.
Casey:
And it worked really, really well.
Casey:
This whole thing, I really, really dig.
Casey:
Again, I feel like it's a solution looking for a problem in my particular case.
Casey:
But I was quite surprised at how great this was for an initial release.
Casey:
And especially for something that I was like, yeah, whatever.
Casey:
I'll just try it out and see if it's any good.
Casey:
I really like it.
Casey:
And you can sync via iCloud.
Casey:
I think it has affordances for live collaboration.
Casey:
I didn't personally try this, and I might be lying to you by accident.
John:
But that's kind of the whole point of this thing is supposed to be collaboration.
John:
And by the way, it's not my fridge.
John:
My fridge has French doors on top.
John:
That's not French doors.
John:
That's just one big door.
John:
Geez, Casey.
John:
Was it?
Casey:
Oh, shoot.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
The offending party has been sacked.
John:
So the fact that you used it on the iPad, it's almost like you're describing a slightly different app than mine.
John:
Because I was using it on the Mac, and my frustrations were with the tools available.
John:
What I wanted to do immediately was, hey, this is Infinite Canvas.
John:
I wanted to scribble on it.
John:
And I could not for the life of me on the Mac version figure out how to scribble on this thing.
John:
i have a pen tool but the pen tool only lets me make straight lines bezier curves stuff like that i could not find a scribble thing and now obviously if you have the apple pencil or your finger it lets you do that but on the mac you just can't draw with the cursor i guess they're just like no we can't i mean i grew up drawing with the cursor in in mac paint and super paint like it is a thing that you can do but this app is like no you need apple pencil
John:
Or you need a touch device.
John:
I don't understand that.
John:
All those things you said, the pen with the little A on it, the bucket, the little bottle thing, like the crayon, none of that is here.
John:
Or if it's here, I'm not finding it.
John:
Maybe I have to make my screen bigger.
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
Make your screen bigger.
Casey:
That's what you do.
John:
i'm saying like how am i not is the window not big enough on here like when i click on so the things i see on the top is i see a thing to make a sticky note i see a thing that looks like a circle in a square and in the upper right hand corner of the popover that appears i see the pen tool the tool tip says draw with the pen tool but all i can do with the pen tool is make straight lines and bezier curves and then there's a million different clip art uh things or whatever
Casey:
Yeah, I see what you're saying.
John:
Then there's make a text box, right?
John:
And you click that and it immediately makes a text box.
John:
Then there's the photo thing where you can add a photo or a movie.
John:
And then there's the choose a file to edit.
John:
There's no scribble thingy, you know, for just like scribbling.
John:
I don't understand it.
John:
yeah you're right on the mac it does not have have any of these affordances that i'm talking about and i wish i had i meant to try the collaboration thing because i feel like that's where this thing really where it's really supposed to be for us having multiple people do this but i i look at this app and not that there's anything wrong with it's fine but like it it boggles my mind that apple decided to make this because it's not like they don't have things to do like i can give them a list we do they have to show us about there's plenty of things that they could do right but
John:
But somehow, I mean, was this an acquisition?
John:
Did they acquire a company that already had this app and they brought it to the Mac?
John:
Was this just somebody's good idea?
John:
Not that I'm saying they shouldn't do this, but it's so weird for them to decide to make this specific app.
John:
In particular, the challenge that I think most of their users face when it comes to collaboratively working in a sort of multimedia environment involves...
John:
communication with people right so like that's why this is a collaborative tool but like the main communication thing that i think people use with apple devices is one messages i message right and two probably facetime and this is not facetime or messages it's a whole other application now it kind of integrates with those other things and you can sort of you know fold it into that but i feel like the entry point should be
John:
When you're in one of those existing applications, here's a new way for you to collaborate versus come through this app and then, you know, I don't know.
John:
Maybe I'm wrong about that.
John:
Maybe this is a really important tool and they need to be competitive in this market because if they have a free thing that does this, it's really important to all their users.
John:
But it seems to me that I would much rather have the ability to have us all look at a freaking photo when we're on a FaceTime call, which is a thing that iChat can do but that FaceTime still can't do in a pleasing way.
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
Do you have your iPad within reach or no?
John:
No, it's upstairs.
Marco:
So Casey just sent a link for a test link for us to collaborate on a free form board.
Marco:
I opened it.
Marco:
It's my first run experience.
Marco:
I open it up and it gives me an error that the board can't be opened.
Casey:
Cool.
Marco:
Oh, now I got it.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Oh, I can select things.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
So, I mean, I have this.
Marco:
I actually haven't used the app yet, but what I'm I think there's there's two ways to look at, you know, why did Apple make this app and what's it going to do long term, you know?
Marco:
We can look at something like Clips and Clips basically has got, you know, it was put out there and then just left to die.
Marco:
Like it just got no love, no ongoing support, no ongoing features.
Marco:
It was itself kind of redundant with their other apps already.
Marco:
You know, you could argue like, why didn't they just make iMovie better or whatever, you know?
Marco:
And so Clips, it was put out there and then just left and no follow up, no follow through.
Marco:
And Apple's really, unfortunately, kind of good at putting stuff out there and then never following through with it and kind of getting it out there 80% of the way and then just letting it die.
Marco:
So that's, I think, the pessimistic outcome here.
Marco:
That could be what happens here.
Marco:
Or it could be like Notes, where Apple Notes came out.
Marco:
I mean, obviously not the very original, like Marker Felt one, but the modern app that we know as Apple Notes.
Marco:
That came out, and everyone was like, huh, they put a lot of work into that.
Marco:
And then they just kept iterating it.
Marco:
Every OS release, Notes got a little bit better and got some new capability.
Marco:
And we all just started using it because it was just good.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Maybe that will happen here.
Marco:
You know, maybe this will actually maybe what's it called?
Marco:
I already forgot.
Marco:
Freeform.
Marco:
Maybe this is just going to become one of those Apple system apps that, you know, it doesn't get a lot of a lot of like attention, but people just slowly start using it.
Marco:
And then it eventually becomes this thing that, yeah, a lot of people just use this and they get stuff done on it and it's fine.
Marco:
And even though, you know, people don't often talk about it, it's just one of those useful utility apps that, you know, people like, you know, like us Apple users tend to just enjoy and use as part of our day and not really think about.
Marco:
So that's, I think, the ideal outcome here.
Marco:
And I think that's possible.
Marco:
You know, even if the collaboration features, which Apple has always done at best an OK to poor job at, even if those end up not being as good as something like, you know, what we see from the G Suite or, you know, from from Microsoft or whatever, like.
Marco:
even if it's never quite to that level, if it's good enough to be like, okay, usable within a small group like us or within a family, you know, that's how we use notes.
Marco:
Like we have shared notes within our family and we, you know, we have a couple for us for various, various ATP things.
Marco:
Like if it ends up being that kind of app,
Marco:
then that's fine.
Marco:
That's great.
Marco:
Because, you know, it's not going to take over.
Marco:
It's not going to suddenly, like, you know, make businesses stop buying Office.
Marco:
It's not going to make schools stop buying Chromebooks.
Marco:
You know, it's not going to radically change collaboration forever.
Marco:
But it could just be a really nice thing that Apple users get to enjoy and use for themselves and their families and, you know, small groups here and there.
Marco:
And if that's, quote, all it is, that's great.
Marco:
For it to be that thing instead of ending up like Clips,
Marco:
merely requires that it's useful to some people in some certain ways, which I think it probably is on track to that now, if not already there.
Marco:
And then secondly, it requires Apple to actually invest in it ongoing, to actually care about this app, make sure it has a staff of more than zero people after this week.
Marco:
And really follow through and make sure, like, is this getting love every OS release?
Marco:
Are they listening to customer feedback and making tweaks and making adjustments and fixing problems and addressing shortcomings?
Marco:
If they can do that on an anywhere near regular basis and keep this thing from dying on the vine...
John:
this could be really cool yeah i think it could definitely benefit from it's not like uh you know i was just complaining about the feature set and i do feel like the mac is getting the short end of the stick here but like it's not like it needs a tons of tons of features but for version one i think its main strength that apple should leverage is system integration right kind of like the quick note thing where you can you know make a note by going up in the corner took a long time for that to arrive but that's the type of thing that apple can do that third-party developers have a harder time with so this is a
John:
you know, across all of Apple's platforms, in theory, a useful app, but it shouldn't feel so much like an island.
John:
Like it should be thoroughly integrated with FaceTime and messages, I feel like.
John:
You should be able to sort of seamlessly, you know, open doc style transition from like, hey, I'm in a message thread and now everyone on this message thread is scribbling on this document.
John:
Oh, sorry, Mac users, you can't scribble because everyone knows that's impossible with a mouse.
John:
But anyway, like you don't need sophisticated tools and and, you know, grid snapping and like it doesn't need to become illustrator or whatever.
John:
But if it just had integration, I think I think that would get people using it more because right now no one's going to even know this app is installed.
John:
Like it comes in.
John:
It came in an update.
John:
It comes in 16.2 and 13.1.
Marco:
Oh, don't worry.
Marco:
It puts itself on the dock.
John:
I know, but that's why people have tons of things in the box.
John:
They have no idea what those icons are.
John:
Whereas if it was well integrated into messages and if the messages team would get their head out of their butts and put the thing to add a photo to messages back prominently placed and get rid of the microphone thing, there's a lot of things we can do to messages to find the most common things that people do.
John:
And when you have that real estate...
John:
you could put your new app in that position to say we think that this is a thing people would like to do even though they hadn't never realized it before like because they're not used to having this kind of collaboration but just like how we put the the one tap way to add a photo to a message thread back in a prominent place where you don't have to dig for it likewise we decided that we think freeform is equally important and so we put a little icon up on there too and we put it in place of the microphone or something you know anyway like
John:
put it in people's faces where they're like, huh, maybe we would like to do this.
John:
And then people find it useful for like, imagine if you could pull up a map and then scribble on the map and a message thread and real-time collaboration on your phones, right?
John:
That might be useful.
John:
Whereas this is like a curiosity of like, oh, well, if you launch the app and if other people also know the app exists and you send them a link, you can both scribble together.
John:
It's like, it's more of a corporate thing.
John:
Like your coworkers will definitely do this and use an app like this.
John:
Although your coworkers are going to say, well, that's great and all, but we can only use the worst version that comes with Microsoft.
John:
uh you know office suite which what else is new but if apple wants to make this thing i feel like it needs much better system integration i still question like maybe they know something i don't about a a gaping hole in the uh the lineup of sort of default installed stuff that people get apple devices and like what i really want is an infinite canvas where i can collaborate right
John:
uh because this app like they're not selling it it comes free with your devices which is great but when apple does stuff like that it's to fill a need that they think is big like you get a web browser because everybody needs that you get a mail client because it's a really common thing you get a notes app it's not the best notes app in the world but it's a pretty good one and lots of people need notes especially when they need to write long apologies on twitter or whatever like it's an important application right but they don't need to include everything like it doesn't i was going to say it doesn't include like a multi-track audio editor like logic but it does include garage band i suppose
John:
But yeah, the question of which applications is Apple going to pay to develop and then give away for free as a way to add value to its devices.
John:
And that list really has to be, you know, either things that they already know people want to do, like email and web browse or things they're pretty sure that a lot of people are going to want to do.
John:
And maybe this qualifies.
John:
Maybe I'm totally off base about it.
John:
But right now it seems like a bit of a curiosity.
Casey:
I think this is really slick, and I saw Marco doodling in there to a degree while I was working in there, and it didn't seem to completely fall apart.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
Again, after only having used this for a few minutes, I'm pretty impressed.
John:
I'm just so angry that I can't scribble.
John:
I'm unreasonably angry.
John:
I don't understand it.
John:
Who doesn't want to scribble on the shared placemat?
John:
right that's that's the whole fun of it and you guys are all having fun and doing your little messages with your handwriting with your fingers or your apple pencil and here i am i can draw like look it's a box it's a square i can draw it's just so terrible it's just i don't i don't understand i don't understand why i'm being left out of the of the scribble party because you insist on using a mac and putting your ipad up near your bed that's why
Marco:
I don't even currently have an iPad that I'm signed into with my Apple IDs.
Marco:
I can't even do, like, I guess, like, I always want to be the kind of person who writes and draws, like, with pencils or pens or Apple pencils.
Marco:
I always want to be that kind of person, and I'm just not.
Marco:
I end up wanting to draw something and actually doing it.
Marco:
Maybe three times a year.
Marco:
And then I'll take out Linnea and do it on the iPad with the pencil and everything.
Marco:
The pencil's, of course, dead.
Marco:
I have to wait for it to charge a little bit.
Marco:
I want so badly to be that kind of person because Apple pencils and notebooks and pens are so cool.
Marco:
And I'm just not that kind of person.
John:
it doesn't i just take it back it doesn't even have like a circle and a square tool it's just got the pen tool like i can't even make i can draw a circle with the pen tool or a square it's just i don't understand it like it just it seems like the tools here are more limited than they are in the the what are they called they call it markup like when you do the share sheet and you get the little pen like that seems to have more extensive tools on the mac than this does which is really mind-boggling
John:
And the other thing is like you can do little sticky notes.
John:
That's why I've been moving these sticky notes around.
John:
You can make a little sticky note.
John:
Yeah, but they have to be square.
John:
Yeah, it has to be square, first of all, which kind of makes sense because it stops reading as a sticky note if it's not square, although they do make sticky notes that aren't square.
John:
But anyway, you can put stuff on it like text and scribbles.
John:
But then when you move the note, text and scribbles don't go with it.
Casey:
Yeah, I noticed that too.
John:
That is a bummer.
John:
I don't know.
John:
That seems like a decision and not a mistake to me because they're like, okay, if the stuff went with it, that makes sense.
John:
But then what if someone's rights outside the edges?
John:
How does that work?
John:
So I kind of see how they arrived at this decision, but it really does break the illusion.
Casey:
I would agree with that.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
All told, John gives us a triple F minus and I give it a B plus, maybe an A minus.
John:
No, like I am impressed by the collaboration.
John:
This is one of the first apps that I've ever seen from Apple where I can actually see you two doing things in real time and the app isn't crashing.
John:
And it seems to be like, you know, I think I'm seeing you do stuff as you do it, as opposed to Apple's previous avert set collaboration, which was not like that.
Marco:
Yeah, like when you're editing notes together with someone else, it's like, you know, they're basically sending it via carrier pigeon.
Marco:
Like, you know, at some point, the person's going to see what you wrote.
Marco:
But I mean, well, geez, first of all, your own stuff doesn't sync that quickly between your own devices.
Marco:
It's like, ugh.
John:
The problem with notes is I think, especially on iOS and iPadOS, I don't think it syncs in the background.
John:
So I think you actually have to launch the notes app to make it sync, which is, again, mind boggling to me.
Marco:
That's to me.
Marco:
That's my number one feature request for notes.
Marco:
Like if they just make notes always sync itself in the background.
Marco:
You are Apple.
Marco:
You can do that.
Marco:
I can't do that with overcast, but that makes sense.
Marco:
You, Apple, should be able to do that.
Marco:
Always keep it up to date in the background.
John:
And it's not going to kill our batteries because people shouldn't be sharing 60 megapixel images.
John:
It's notes.
John:
It's probably just syntax.
John:
Just send it.
John:
Right.
John:
uh this collaboration seems pretty good although i think notes has also gotten an update in 16.2 that i think they mentioned that you can now see other people's cursors in notes which is kind of a google doc style thing i wonder if that is just a cosmetic change or if they've also revamped the syncing yeah oh i mean i agree with what you're saying about syncing but yeah i believe notes in 16.2 adds real-time collaboration which i have not tried yet uh but i've understood to be pretty good i mean i'm looking at a shared note in 16.2 right now but no one is editing it and i don't know i'll experiment with it for next week
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
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Casey:
Hey, John, tell me what convergent encryption is, please.
John:
This was something that Ben Thompson noticed in the Apple's advanced data protection announcement that I thought was interesting and worth surfacing.
John:
He talked about it in his Stratechery newsletter.
John:
I'll put a link.
John:
This is not one of the free things.
John:
You have to be a subscriber to read it.
John:
But it was in the Apple document that we linked last week that's like an explanation of how this stuff works.
John:
It's talking about some things that advanced data protection doesn't encrypt.
John:
And it gives some details on the little nitty-gritty things here.
John:
And it says...
John:
iCloud stores some data without protection of user-specific cloud kit service keys, even when the advanced data protection is turned on.
John:
Dates and times when a file or object was modified are used to sort a user's information.
John:
And checksums of a file and photo data are used to help Apple deduplicate and optimize the user's iCloud device storage, all without having access to the files and photos themselves.
John:
So it's saying some of your data is not encrypted.
John:
And one of the things that is not encrypted is a checksum.
John:
files and photos right like just you know a hash of the of the the file or photo they don't encrypt that hash or whatever and the reason they're doing it is for data deduplication this is uh we talked about last time of like by encrypting everything end to end and by taking the keys away from apple in theory apple doesn't have a way to scan things on the server side to look for you know child sexual abuse material and other things like that because they can't see your files right but they can see the checksum of your file and
John:
Now, this doesn't help with their previous system where they're like, we have this database of known bad material and we use this procedural or was it perceptual hash or something?
John:
It was like a hash that was saying, OK, we're looking for this photo that we know is bad.
John:
And even if you scale the photo, crop it a little bit, rotate it a little bit, make it black and white, we'll still find it.
John:
And that is a fuzzy system that is not 100 percent accurate.
John:
uh they can't do that because they don't have access to your photo's data but they do have access to a checksum of your photo so if you have uh an image one of those images that's in that database of bad images that is not modified in any way the checksum will match now the problem with checksums and the reason you use checksums the beauty of checksums is if you change just one bit in the image the checksum is totally different that's the point of checksums right
John:
so it's not really they can't really do what they were proposing to do before because it's trivially easy to uh defeat this by just changing you know one pixel in an image and now you have a totally different checksum and no one can find it uh but setting all the csam stuff aside the checksums will let them deduplicate because when they're deduplicating they're just trying to save storage and say okay look if we have literally the same file 700 times let's just store it once and then just point everybody at that one
John:
thing and even within your own data if you accidentally have 17 copies of the same photo there's that deduplicating function in photos that will say hey we found duplics of this photo it will only i mean obviously when you're doing with your own photos you have access to the data but apple on its end can deduplicate the storage on i was going to say on your behalf but really it's on apple's behalf because they pay for all that storage right this lets them do that
John:
And it's pretty interesting if you look at the Wikipedia page on convergent encryption, like how do they do that?
John:
Basically, they use the hash as the encryption key, and then they use your encryption key to encrypt the hash.
John:
It sounds kind of like, as Merlin would say, locking your keys inside your keys.
John:
Read the Wikipedia page.
John:
It's not actually that complicated.
John:
But it lets them have an unencrypted version of the checksum or hash of your photo while still not knowing what's actually in your photo.
John:
In theory, this is a possible security hole because let's say there is, you know, somehow it gets out into the world that, hey, this photo has this checksum.
John:
You know, this exact photo has this checksum.
John:
Then they could find every single user on iCloud who has that photo in their library.
John:
But...
John:
again considering if you change any aspect of the photo in any way the checksum is entirely different it's probably not that big of a deal but that's why they put it in this document if you're wondering do they keep a checksum of your of your files they do and that's for storage to duplication purposes because you know they can't be giving you that five gigabytes of free storage without doing this
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't want to get myself on a tear about iCloud storage stuff.
Casey:
So I will just let this go.
Casey:
But yeah, this is clever.
Casey:
And I don't think I have any particular problem with it.
Casey:
But it definitely gets me a little, you know, I'm tugging at my collar just a little bit hoping and wondering if this is exposing data that I don't want it to.
Casey:
But I think we're in the clear here.
Casey:
All right, tell me what's going on in Europe these days.
Casey:
Or soon, I guess I should say.
Casey:
It's not these days, but allegedly it will be happening soon.
John:
This is a confusing story because we started seeing these stories earlier this week that, hey, it was a Bloomberg-German rumor thing saying Apple is preparing to allow third-party app store or whatever things because they're going to have to do it to comply with this issue.
John:
new EU regulation.
John:
What is it called?
John:
The DMA, the Digital Markets Act, right?
John:
Yeah, the Digital Markets Act, right?
John:
And the story was Apple is working on this and it's going to be in iOS 17, right?
John:
And as Apple has said in past interviews, obviously they will comply with
John:
The laws that they have to comply with, right?
John:
That's where the confusion begins.
John:
Okay, what does Apple have to do to comply with this law?
John:
And the more I read about this, the more it seemed to me that either I don't understand this law at all, or this law is really dumb and is not going to have the intended effect.
John:
It might be both.
Casey:
It's a little column A, little column B, I reckon.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So digging into this, Ben Thompson's analysis was that one of the important things in this law is that it says Apple has to allow third-party applications to be installed or to allow third-party stores.
John:
So it has to either allow sideloading or third-party app stores.
John:
And his interpretation was that you can do one or the other.
John:
So for Apple to comply, they can either allow you to sideload, which means allow you to install applications without going through the app store, or allow third-party app stores.
John:
So like Epic could have their own app store where they sell their games, right?
John:
But then other people read that same text and say, no, this is saying you need to allow both of them.
John:
Like, people can either do A or B, but you have to allow both of them.
John:
But even setting that aside, and you keep reading the text, it's like, okay, but what does this actually mean?
John:
Does that mean that Apple has to allow this, but then they can't charge money?
John:
Well, no, it seems like they can charge money.
John:
Okay, does it mean that Apple has to allow this, but then they don't have any control over what's in those stores?
John:
Well, no, Apple can ask to see everything that's in the stores and be able to approve them.
John:
Okay, but does this mean that Apple can't stop someone from having a third-party store?
John:
No, maybe it means that Apple's allowed to tell you whether you're allowed to have a third party store or not.
John:
Like it's like all past leave through Apple.
John:
And there's no way to avoid, you know, getting Apple's permission to do something and also paying them probably the same amount of money you're already paying them.
John:
Also, they can comply with a law so that in the end, this doesn't increase competition or make anybody's lives better.
John:
All it does is that Apple let's Apple say, yes, we are compliant with the wall, the law.
John:
And yes, we understand that nobody likes it and it hasn't proved anything for anybody.
John:
But it's because you made a dumb law.
Marco:
first of all i think we we have not seen anything yet with like you know what what apple's gonna do in response to the dma is anything else like this you know is is the dma gonna you know be the way it is now is it gonna be changing over time is the u.s or other places gonna do similar laws and how how will they be similar and how will they not be will this just be in europe and it's totally irrelevant to anybody who doesn't live in the eu
Marco:
Right, and there's so many angles of this.
Marco:
This is actually very, very well covered by Ben Thompson in today's Stratechery Daily Update.
Marco:
If you are a Stratechery subscriber, definitely check that out.
Marco:
If you are not, you should honestly really consider it.
Marco:
It's a very good buy, and there's a lot of good stuff there.
Marco:
Anyway, so...
Marco:
So there's multiple angles to the DMA, and we probably can't talk about all of them today.
Marco:
One of them is basically message and FaceTime interoperability requirements, and that's, I think, a whole can of worms that is probably practically impossible.
Marco:
I thought they backed off on that one.
Marco:
No, I think it's still in it.
John:
Other of them didn't make it into the thing.
Marco:
I think it did.
Marco:
Anyway, so we're going to set that aside.
Marco:
Let's just talk about the App Store stuff today.
Marco:
So I agree with Ben's take that the wording certainly says that they can allow sideloading or alternative App Stores.
Marco:
Um, but you know, and let's assume that they won't have to do both.
Marco:
Um, as a user of this platform and as a developer on this platform, I would greatly prefer if they have to do one or the other, I would greatly prefer them to do sideloading and not alternative app stores, which, you know, they could easily technically do that.
Marco:
They could just say, all right, well, we will allow third party apps to be sideloaded, like, you know, from links or whatever, similar to enterprise provisioning, how that works now.
Marco:
But third-party apps can't themselves install other third-party apps.
Marco:
That would be greatly preferable to me as a user and a developer.
Marco:
I don't want to have to deal with other app stores.
Marco:
Sideloading itself brings enough gotchas and possibilities for weirdness without as many downsides as third-party app stores.
Marco:
I do not want to deal with third-party app stores.
Marco:
I don't want to have to list my app in third-party app stores.
Marco:
I don't want to have to install third-party app stores because who's going to be the app stores?
Marco:
It's going to be big companies to leverage big apps they already own to get people to install their store so they can have more control over more apps and more of the economy.
Marco:
So think Facebook.
Marco:
Say you're going to be required to install Instagram and the Facebook app and WhatsApp
Marco:
from the Facebook app store excuse me the meta meta app store and these things will require the meta and then once you have the meta app store installed oh well actually you can get all these wonderful great deals here in exchange for selling your soul and then if that becomes popular am I going to have to list Overcast there are developers going to have to list our apps in these other stores so that's that's a whole thing that both as a user and a developer I don't want any of that like that's that to me is not good
Marco:
Side-loading, I think, takes care of the anti-competitive angles here.
Marco:
Apple has refused to self-regulate.
Marco:
They have acted extremely anti-competitively.
Marco:
They continue to act extremely anti-competitively.
Marco:
And so this is being forced upon them, and it's entirely 1,000% their own fault.
Marco:
But side-loading, I think, takes care of a lot of that anti-competitive...
Marco:
It removes a lot of that pressure.
John:
Does it take care of any of it, though?
John:
Like, that's my question about all those requirements.
John:
I look at all of them and kind of like Gruber's most recently posted thing.
John:
I look at them and I look at what I've seen of the regulation they're trying to comply with.
John:
And it's like.
John:
the things the things that we're trying to solve here there's some competitive problems don't appear to be solved at all by allowing the but sideloading according to this requirement because like okay so sideloading it allows you know say there's some app that apple can't put on the one i always think of and the one that jason snell also thought of in a six colors thing is like emulators like we all love emulators for like like you were playing with that palm emulator recently
John:
Why can't there be a cool palm emulator on the app store or like an old Atari emulator or whatever?
John:
Like Apple just doesn't allow emulators and Nintendo emulators, all sorts of emulators that you could get for the Mac and the PC, but Apple tends not to allow them on the app store either for intellectual property reasons or just because they don't want you to have JIT compiled code or all sorts of stuff like that.
John:
So great, sideloading will allow those things to be on the store, right?
John:
But then you get into the details and it's like, okay, well, so sideloading.
John:
How are things going to get sideloading?
John:
Well, Apple probably won't allow things to be sideloading unless they're notarized.
John:
Okay, well, who notarizes them?
John:
Well, Apple notarizes them.
John:
And who's allowed to notarize an app?
John:
Well, someone who has an Apple developer account.
John:
And so there's like 17 different places where Apple can prevent something from being sideloaded, not by saying you're not allowed to sideload it, by saying, oh, you can't be a developer.
John:
Oh, I'm not going to notarize that app.
John:
And they would still be complying with the letter of the law.
John:
And the other thing is like, OK, I don't want I want to be able to buy Kindle books from the Kindle app.
John:
I don't want to you know, I don't.
John:
Apple doesn't let me do that because I have to pay 30 percent.
John:
Well, now I'll be able to sideload the Kindle app and get around that.
John:
Well, no, you won't, because Apple still is going to want twenty nine point nine percent of the in-app purchase that you make.
John:
And Apple will still control whether you're even allowed to, you know,
John:
uh load that application by deleting your developer account or denying you notarization services like it's almost like the people who wrote this law didn't understand how apple was going to react to it didn't see all the ways that apple could technically comply with this without giving any of the things that it's supposed to be providing more competition you know cheaper payment processing more kinds of app that apple doesn't allow like i don't know if apple's going to do this and be this particularly evil
John:
But looking at it, it seems like if they wanted to, they could have all the same control.
John:
And the only thing this law would do, to Marco's point, is make it worse for users.
John:
Because now there's confusion, and people are going to try to make alternate app stores.
Marco:
And there will be worse security, you know, in the sense that, like, you know, obviously some of this is OS-level security.
Marco:
But, like, you know that the version of the Facebook apps from the meta store, they're going to be a lot...
John:
creepier they're gonna you know stay running in the background all the time they're gonna take more of your data you know that brings up the notarization thing again right so lots of things you can't do on ios is because apple doesn't let you use private apis there's all sorts of cool things that your phone and ipad can do that are like you know apis that apple hasn't published yet and so you technically shouldn't be using them and the next os update could break them but if you really really want to do you could do it but you can't because apple scans your app for the use of these private apis like even my stupid switch class app
John:
I wanted to know on what edge of the screen the dock is, even if it's hidden.
John:
And there's no API for that in the public API on Mac OS.
John:
But there's a private API for it.
John:
And so I tried submitting a version of Switch Glass that used private API.
John:
And sure enough, the automatic scanner said, you can't use that framework for knowing where the dock is.
John:
That's not public.
John:
Naughty app.
John:
Sorry.
John:
So you're like, OK, well, now with sideloading,
John:
or with third-party app stores, I can just use that API.
John:
They can't stop me to do it, right?
John:
And I could do that on the Mac.
John:
I would just have to be outside the Mac app store, right?
John:
But let's say on iOS where you don't have that option.
John:
Now I have that option.
John:
But the notarization service that Apple runs may scan your app for private API usage to prevent security problems.
John:
And they won't notarize your app.
John:
And that will make your app harder to sideload or more scary warnings, or maybe you won't be able to do it at all.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think that we, as both the tech press and as enthusiasts of this platform, we see a law like this coming through and the reporting that Apple's going to do something maybe to comply with it.
Marco:
We see this as, oh, great, they're going to do what is most obvious to us, which is, okay, we give up, you win, here's sideloading on alternative app stores.
Marco:
But what's much more likely to happen, if you look at what Apple has...
Marco:
actually done in in relation to you know various laws that have been passed around the world in recent years um you look at the the korean thing you look at the um uh the japan fair trade commission you look at the uh what was the what was the dating app one was that in norway where was that uh netherlands
Marco:
yeah right um so you look at these at how they've complied with these and it has been like first of all like fighting them tooth and nail and then when they do finally quote comply they do it in the most narrow and extraordinarily middle finger way possible
Marco:
Because look, Apple does not think they're doing anything wrong here.
Marco:
They don't think that they deserve any less than what they're getting.
Marco:
They don't think they should be forced to compete in the areas that these are trying to force them to compete in.
Marco:
They believe they are entitled to a third of everyone's money that goes through a phone no matter what it's doing.
Marco:
The only reason they don't collect everything, like they don't collect 30% of your bank transfers because they can't...
Marco:
but otherwise like whatever they can they want to i know whatever they can they do and they they are so far up their own butts about this stuff they really don't think they're doing anything wrong and so they feel fully entitled to extract every single thing they can so here's what they're actually probably going to do they're not going to just do this and say all right we give up you know hands up you win everyone here you can sideload your emulators if you want to no
Marco:
What's actually much more likely to happen is, first of all, anything they loosen here will most likely only apply in the EU.
Marco:
So that's big step number one.
Marco:
All of us here in the US and everyone else...
Marco:
Tough luck.
Marco:
You're not going to have it on your phones.
Marco:
Then they're going to say, okay, if you actually want a developer account that can create and sign apps that will run this way, you're going to have to find some other way to pay us the 27% that you owe us.
Marco:
And the law might say, oh, they aren't allowed to pull it from in-app purchases or whatever.
Marco:
But the law doesn't say that Apple has to charge $99 for a developer certificate.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So Apple can go right back and say, okay, actually, we now have enterprise pricing for these certificates.
Marco:
And that means that we're going to look into your pockets and see how much money you have.
Marco:
And we're going to take 27% of it.
John:
And they can just ask you to do that auditing yourself.
John:
Isn't that what they did with the dating apps?
John:
They would just say, basically, hey, you have to tell us how many people went through your in-app purchase system that's not ours and give us 27% of it.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
That's exactly what they do with the dating apps.
Marco:
And part of the contract is they reserve the right to come audit your finances themselves or have their auditors do it.
Marco:
So there's no way Apple's going to just do the right thing here because Apple doesn't believe it's in the wrong.
Marco:
Apple believes it is 1,000% in the right.
Marco:
And therefore, they are going to fight this tooth and nail, and they're going to be massive dickwads about it.
Marco:
Because that's what they do with the App Store money stuff.
Marco:
They're massive dickwads.
Marco:
And again, they are so self-righteous.
Marco:
They think they're doing the right thing here.
Marco:
Because the reality is...
Marco:
Apple as a company largely does pretty good things a lot of the time in a lot of areas.
Marco:
They feel a lot of self-righteousness because they are often righteous.
Marco:
And that bleeds, unfortunately, into areas where they're not.
Marco:
And this is probably the biggest one of those areas where we see their worst behavior.
Marco:
So this is not going to be some easy thing where we just kind of get what some of us want and that's the end of it.
Marco:
This is going to be fighting tooth and nail for outcomes that nobody is really going to get what they think they're going to get.
Marco:
It's going to, again, look at the dating thing, the dating apps thing in the Netherlands.
Marco:
Did anybody actually benefit from that besides Apple?
Marco:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
When they write these laws, it's almost like they don't understand how they can tell when they've succeeded.
John:
They should write on a lightboard, how will we tell when we have succeeded?
John:
And the answer is not people don't have to use Apple's in-app purchase.
John:
That's not the thing people are complaining about.
John:
People were complaining that they have to pay Apple 30%, right?
John:
And there's no way, apparently, with any of these regulations that they can stop that from happening.
John:
So they make it difficult for everybody, and they say, yay, you don't need to use Apple's in-app purchase, but you still need to pay Apple the same amount, only now you have extra bookkeeping to do.
John:
Are you happy?
John:
No, nobody's happy.
John:
Apple's not happy because they had to do a thing they didn't want to do.
John:
And the developers aren't really happy.
John:
It's like, well, we still have to pay.
John:
Like, so, you know, the whole thing of like, there's not, I've talked about this ages ago when I wrote about ebooks and when I worked for the ebook company, there's not another 30% in ebooks available to pay Apple.
John:
You have to pay of the amount that people pay for e-books.
John:
A portion goes to the publisher and a portion goes to the seller.
John:
There is not an additional 30% to go to the platform owner.
John:
There's just not, which is why you don't see e-books being sold through the, you know, the Kindle app and paying Apple 30%.
John:
It's not financially viable, right?
John:
So what is the solution to that?
John:
The solution to allow the Kindle app to be sold someplace else where they don't have to pay Apple 30%.
John:
But none of these regulations make that happen.
John:
Because they don't give enough freedom.
John:
They don't say, hey, like on the Mac, you could sell an app that sold Kindle books through it and you wouldn't have to pay Apple 30% because the Mac is a platform that allows you to do that.
John:
Apple does not extract 30% of every transaction that happens on the Mac, right?
John:
Nor do they do it through a web browser.
John:
Hey, if you use Safari to buy something at Amazon, Apple doesn't take 30%, right?
John:
But on iOS and iPadOS, they do.
John:
that's the problem and they keep making these laws to try to say can we make ipad and ios and these other platforms like the web like the mac and all these laws they write fail to do that in every way they don't they don't give the technical freedom they don't give the financial freedom they just make everything more complicated for everybody and it's they're failing to do what they're setting out to do and i don't quite understand why they keep screwing up in that way
John:
just to clarify something i said earlier notarization for mac apps does not scan for private apis that's app store submission that does that but there's no reason it couldn't like there's nothing in this law that says oh and by the way apple you have to notarize everything or by the way that doesn't say anything about notarization doesn't get into that level of detail like i feel like these i don't know how to write laws but it almost seems like the law should be written to say hey the end goal is
John:
you should be able to sell things that people can run on their phones without paying apple any money and that's you know obviously that would be the most extreme version of this and that's you know not what they asked for right or that you'd have to pay a nominal fee a nominal flat fee to be a developer and then you would be allowed to sell things and not pay apple any money but like all these things are written such that apple can continue to
John:
extract all the money and all the power it wants just in different, more annoying ways.
John:
So again, Apple's not happy about it.
John:
And I don't think any of the developers are going to be, even the ones that make a go of it.
John:
Epic makes their game store, right?
John:
Valve makes the Steam store, you know, Meta makes their store.
John:
Even if they all try to do it, I think it's just going to be...
John:
unsatisfactory for everybody involved uh including the customers right and and developers who are like oh do i have to put something in the epic store do i have to put my game in the steam store do you know it's just it's just worse for everybody and and it's not because i like i'm for like third-party stores and sideloading all the other stuff but only if it's done in a way that actually delivers the benefits right
John:
Because what I want to happen is I want Apple to feel competitive pressure to do better.
John:
If there was competitive pressure, say, OK, well, I could put my my app on the app store and have to pay Apple 30 percent or I can put my app on this store and pay 10 percent.
John:
That's competitive pressure.
John:
Now I have a place where I can get more of my money from customers and the store takes less.
John:
How annoying is it to deal with payments?
John:
Does this store let me issue refunds directly to customers myself?
John:
That's better than Apple.
John:
They need competitive pressure.
John:
But every time they write a law to try to do this, they don't actually provide any competitive pressure because in all situations, Apple finds a way to say, I'm going to make sure that your store cannot possibly be better than mine.
John:
It can't be better for developers.
John:
It can't be better for users.
John:
It's just a question of how much worse it's going to be.
John:
That's not competition.
John:
That is not like the whole point of these things is we feel like Apple has too much power.
John:
If there was more competition, things would be better.
John:
And they're written in such a way that Apple ensures that there will be no competition as in something that that is preferable to the Apple store in some way for everybody involved.
John:
And that is extremely depressing.
Casey:
The thing that I find most frustrating and to some degree depressing about all this is something that Marco had said earlier and that we have all touched on many times over the years is that Apple could, I think, have gotten in front of this and could have avoided government intervention in a lot of this.
Casey:
But because they're so petulantly convinced that they are owed, and this is exactly what Marco said earlier, that they are owed all of this money, that they refuse to take what I think are common sense and reasonable half measures in order to prevent this sort of thing from happening.
Casey:
As an example, if you were allowed as the Kindle app, for example, to link to a specific buy page on the Amazon website, I think that would have made a lot of people or companies in the situation, that would have probably been enough.
Casey:
Of course, they still would have wanted to use native UIs in order to do this sort of thing.
John:
You could if you use Apple Pay, which does not charge 30%.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
Actually, that's a good point.
Casey:
But you know what I'm driving at, right?
Casey:
They could have let you do something as simple as link to your own website.
Casey:
And I didn't actually realize this, but obviously up until semi-recently, you weren't even allowed to mention that something else existed in other places.
Casey:
Or goodness, if it was cheaper off of the App Store, that was absolutely forbidden.
Casey:
And I believe they've relaxed on that.
John:
How did you not realize this until recently?
John:
We've talked about it for years on the podcast, this one, the one that you're on.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, but I forget everything that I do ever and always.
John:
You did know.
John:
Past Casey knew.
Casey:
Past Casey knew.
Casey:
Current Casey had forgotten.
Casey:
But anyways, yeah, so there are things that they could have done to make this less egregious and to make themselves seem less obnoxious.
Casey:
And that's the thing, is for a company that I really enjoy, despite all my complaining about it—
Casey:
I don't like it when they're bullies, which is probably more often than I give them credit for.
Casey:
But certainly when it comes to the App Store, they are freaking bullies.
Casey:
And I don't like it when they're just obnoxious.
Casey:
And that's exactly what this is.
Casey:
It is just obnoxious.
Casey:
And it's so wild to me that the same company that does something as delightful as Freeform can be just such jerks.
Casey:
And I know it's different parts of the company.
Casey:
I know it's a big company.
Casey:
Like, conceptually, I can understand it.
Casey:
But it just, it kind of blows my mind that they can build these amazing products and this amazing software, sometimes, and yet they can be such turds about the App Store.
Casey:
And it didn't
Casey:
have to come to this it didn't have to come to this and yet they looked at the governments of every country on the planet and basically said you try me and that's just not gonna work you guys it's it's not gonna work you are not gonna win this battle but here we are they think that because they did this genuinely incredible stuff back in 2007 they think what is it 15 years for 18 years later
Casey:
That they are still entitled to all this money?
Casey:
Like, oh, my word.
Casey:
And I could not agree with you both more.
Casey:
Like, they will get their money.
Casey:
They will find a way.
John:
That's why I said it's not going to work by challenging the government.
John:
But apparently it is because the government can't write laws that achieve the desire to
John:
Like the desired effect is increased competition because when there's competition, Apple feels pressure to make their stuff better.
John:
And right now where they don't have that competition, they don't feel pressure.
John:
Like the pressure to do all, like, you know, the pressure from developers, like, oh, you take a lot of my money.
John:
You give me poor tools.
John:
You don't let me refund my developer, my customers.
John:
You know, you don't let me even know who my customers are.
John:
You don't reward me for being a good developer.
John:
App review is capricious.
John:
Like all the things that the developers have complaints about,
John:
The reason those complaints just go so poorly addressed over years and years is there's like the developers are captive audience.
John:
Where else are you going to go?
John:
The App Store is the only thing.
John:
Competition will make Apple's products better.
John:
Competition from Android has made the iPhone phenomenally better.
John:
Android didn't exist and it was just the iPhone.
John:
Who knows if we'd have copy and paste now?
John:
I mean, that's an exaggeration, but like, like it's competition.
John:
And obviously it's hard.
John:
Like when you're a company, why would I invite competition?
John:
Like that makes my life more miserable.
John:
It makes me make less money.
John:
It puts more pressure on me.
John:
You know, if you're a company, you don't like competition.
John:
So that's why when Apple is presented with these laws, is there a way we can comply with this law without increasing competition in the market at all?
John:
The answer is yes.
John:
Okay.
John:
We're going to do that.
John:
And that's what you're both characterizing as being a big jerk, but.
John:
it is really just like any company that saw this it's like we have to comply with this law should we do so in a way that gives our competitors advantages against us no of course not they're gonna they're gonna you know and i agree with you casey that they could have avoided this regulation by by you know giving earlier or whatever but i think they have correctly calculated that no one knows how to write a law that will actually increase competition in the market so like
John:
Just let them write the law.
John:
And then when they're done, we'll be able to comply with it in a way that it just proves our case that this was a bad idea to begin with.
John:
You have an increased competition and everybody's sadder.
John:
And then they're going to use that to say, well, we have to comply with the law.
John:
Talk to your lawmakers.
John:
I know everything is worse in the EU now and your iPhone, but it's not our fault.
John:
We told them this wouldn't do anything because there was a way to comply with it without increasing competition.
John:
And I'm a big proponent of increased competition because there's lots of places where Apple needs competition to drive them to be better.
John:
If they're so confident that they are so amazing, if the app store is so great, if their developer experience is so great, if their in-app purchase system is so wonderful...
John:
then it should stand up to competition.
John:
We all know that it won't because it charges a lot of money and doesn't have a lot of features and annoys people.
John:
Same thing with AppReview.
John:
What we're hoping for is that if there was another store that could compete against Apple, they could just do everything a little bit better than Apple in the areas that developers care about, and that would be competition.
John:
But it doesn't seem like this law is going to make that happen.
John:
It's just going to make things more difficult for Apple to comply with it, but mostly it'll make things more difficult and confusing for customers and possibly more difficult and confusing for developers.
Casey:
Yeah, it just bums me out so much that this entitlement just is gross in that they just wouldn't listen and just get ahead of it.
Casey:
Give us an inch.
Casey:
You know, we're in hell and a drop of cold water would have been amazing.
John:
They have given several inches.
John:
They released the in-app purchase.
John:
They did the subscriptions.
John:
They do improved things.
John:
But the thing is, those are concessions.
John:
They were trying to stave off dissatisfaction and trying a little bit to stave off regulation.
John:
But they wouldn't go far enough to actually stave off regulation.
John:
Again, like I said, perhaps correctly calculating that the regulators will not understand the problem well enough to write regulations that actually increase competition.
John:
And so far, that's been true.
John:
Regulators have done a bunch of stuff and none of them have had what I think should have been the desired effect, which is increased competition that drives Apple to
John:
to improve, to compete, to improve their products in the ways that they are bad, right?
John:
They haven't had to do that.
John:
They have improved things.
John:
They have reduced the cut.
John:
They have made the app store better in small ways over the many years, but not to the satisfaction of developers.
John:
So developers are still dissatisfied that they, you know, longstanding complaints have not been addressed to their satisfaction, right?
John:
And Apple would say, well, users don't care because they don't see any of this.
John:
And so it's just kind of like this infighting behind the scenes, but users are
John:
You know, like the fact that there's just one app store or whatever, because you just have no idea how it works anyway.
John:
Right.
John:
But this is really just, you know, a battle between, you know, the competitors, developers, Apple and other people who would want to do similar things to the app store, whether it's payment processing or actually having a full fledged app store or even just sideloading apps.
John:
And users mostly are collateral damage in this battle, but it does affect them.
John:
It affects them because of all the apps that users never got to see because they did not fit into Apple's design because Apple didn't allow them because, you know, even just something as simple as for all these years, you could have been buying ebooks in the Kindle app and you haven't been able to.
John:
Maybe users don't know or care about that.
John:
But if you went an alternate timeline and took someone from that timeline where you've always been able to buy Kindle books on your iPhone and said, OK, well, in this timeline, the iPhone's been out since 2007 and you still can't do that.
John:
And they'd be like, what?
John:
That sucks.
John:
I buy them all the time.
John:
I go on vacation.
John:
I'm on the plane.
John:
I'm waiting to board.
John:
I buy myself an e-book in the Kindle app and I'm right.
John:
It's like, well, this one, you have to know to go to the Amazon app and have it delivered to your Kindle and then relaunch the Kindle app and it syncs with your library.
John:
I'm like, why do you have to do that?
John:
Oh, different timeline.
John:
It's
Marco:
it's depressing well and i think apple also i mean we've said it many times before you know the the app store in general really brings out the worst in apple like it represents the worst that they are it brings out the worst characteristics of them they introduce the worst justifications that
Marco:
And anger the most people with all of their policies and comments on the App Store.
Marco:
Anytime they have to testify in front of Congress or a court about the App Store, they always just have the maximum level of BS and the most inflammatory comments that just anger all of us.
Marco:
And I think they, you know, they largely are blind to the problems here because they're making so much money.
Marco:
And again, for mention, because they feel so entitled to demand whatever they want out of the commerce that they have, quote, created on, quote, their platform.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It is actually, you know, in many ways that John was just saying and in a couple others, I think it's actually better for Apple and their products to have more competition.
Marco:
And it's better for them to break this addiction they have to the app store revenue.
Marco:
And I'm not sure that they ever will.
Marco:
but you know we've talked recently about like there's a lot of garbage in the app store but because apple makes so much money from it they turn the other way you know you can you can do all sorts of manipulation and scams and just overall toxic behavior that makes worse experiences for your customers but as long as apple's making 30 of that they are okay with it uh you know and
Marco:
And that's very corrosive and has a lot of negative effects on their products.
John:
And even not like for that thing with the garbage in the App Store, some of it, they make a lot of money off of it.
John:
But the other problem that they have is there's just so much on the App Store that they can't actually police it all.
John:
So there's this whole sort of like, you know, long tail of apps that don't actually make Apple a lot of money, but there's just so many of them that Apple has not invested enough to police them.
John:
And Apple is stuck in this place that we talked about on past shows where it's like,
John:
uh they want the the app store to be a high quality experience but also since they are literally the only app store they can't be as restrictive as would be required to make sure all the apps are good and so they have to say well we want we don't want to be like the arbiters of what is it what is a good app what is not a good apple basically allow anything subject to these rules and that results in this huge long tail of garbage apps that are kind of scammy that don't really make apple a lot of money
John:
But Apple doesn't get rid of, not because they're like, oh, we need the money from those scam apps, because the scam apps to give the money they can probably put on one sheet of paper, right?
John:
Apple does want those, to be clear, right?
John:
But all the rest of those apps, the ones that most people are going to run across, the thousands and thousands of garbagey scam apps that don't make much money for Apple, but are still there.
John:
Apple can't snap their finger and get rid of those and be like, but like, there's just too many of them.
John:
And we don't want to be so restrictive.
John:
So again, another thing that they've done to themselves by not allowing any other distribution technique for their platform, they are stuck.
John:
between a rock and a hard place of we would like it to be high quality, but also we don't want to be so restrictive because when we're restrictive, developers don't like that either.
John:
Which one is it?
John:
Do you want me to allow every app to be in the app store or do you want the app store to be nice?
John:
And developers are like, well, we just want you to let the good apps like mine on there.
John:
But every developer says that.
John:
This is why when you're the only app store, you're kind of screwed because there's no solution to this problem other than, hey, imagine if there was competition.
John:
then Apple could be super restricted and if you didn't like it, go to one of the other app stores.
John:
But that's not the world we live in.
Marco:
I think the other angle to consider here too is that, you know, again, Apple seems totally a thousand percent blind to any problems with their current approach to the app store and to developer relations largely because they make so much money off of it and they think they're gods and their farts smell amazing.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
They also rely on developers to make their platforms useful and marketable and popular.
Marco:
And that works really well on the iPhone because there are a lot of iPhones.
Marco:
That has not worked as nearly as well on all of their other platforms.
Marco:
That really has hampered the iPad in particular.
Marco:
The Mac is a deteriorating wasteland of software.
Marco:
And the Apple Watch...
Marco:
Apple has some third-party apps, but fairly minimally now, and many of them have been abandoned, even by big companies who have the resources to do it, because it's not worth them dealing with it, or it doesn't work as well as they want, or whatever.
Marco:
Apple TV...
Marco:
never took off as a third-party platform for anything but video watching stuff.
Marco:
They have all these different ways in the system that you can hook into the system and make richer experiences, things like iMessage apps, ShareTime, SharePlay, yeah, SharePlay, all these different ways they can hook in there, different extension points that most big apps by big companies that people are actually using, they just don't use those features.
Marco:
And let me remind them,
Marco:
They are apparently about to launch a completely new class of device in the alleged AR or mixed reality headset family that will presumably depend to some level on people writing software for it.
Marco:
And if they continue to run the App Store with the attitude they have been running it...
Marco:
The amount of developer goodwill they have torpedoed from indies over the years is massive and always going up.
Marco:
And they've also angered all the big companies now so much that the big companies, for various reasons, some of which are because of the way they're treated or because of the rules or because of the economics, and some of which are just because big companies suck at this stuff.
John:
And because the big companies, they want to be the rent seekers, not Apple, to be clear.
John:
They just want to replace Apple in doing exactly the same thing.
Marco:
Largely, yes.
Marco:
And also more so just because big companies don't like being told what to do, which Apple is one.
Marco:
Anyway, so they're about to launch this new family of hardware at a time when...
Marco:
I don't really see a lot of developers that will be super interested in making new apps for it because so many of us are just tired of Apple's BS and we can see it coming a mile away.
Marco:
And so it's not to say there won't be any software for it in the same way that there are lots of iPad and Apple Watch apps.
Marco:
Well, there are lots of iPad apps.
Marco:
But how many really great ones will there be?
Marco:
Will the next big thing be made there?
Marco:
Apple is so restrictive.
Marco:
that could really cost them in big ways that they will never know when they go to launch a new hardware platform that doesn't start out with a huge installed base.
Marco:
Maybe they don't care.
Marco:
I mean, chances are they're telling themselves two big delusions.
Marco:
Number one, they're telling themselves, our software is going to be so great for this thing, we won't even need that much third-party software.
Marco:
Then number two, they're telling themselves, but the third parties will line up to make software for this.
Marco:
It'll be great.
Marco:
There will be so many people just dying to make software for this that they'll put up with all the crap they'll put up with.
Marco:
And
Marco:
that doesn't always happen with their platforms.
Marco:
That happened occasionally.
Marco:
Mainly that happened with the iPhone because there were so many of them and we all use them and love them.
Marco:
And if they launch something new like an AR headset, that might happen there, but it would be much better chances of that happening if Apple was better to developers and to companies developing for them.
Marco:
And I think they're too...
Marco:
delusional about about their own grandiosity and generosity um to see that i don't think they're ever going to see that they're never going to see that hey maybe maybe like we should look at companies like how microsoft treats its developers like
Marco:
way better like maybe there's something we can learn from from the way other people treat developers that might result in our current and future hardware platforms having bigger and healthier software ecosystems than they have now because you know you look at again look at the iPad the iPad has amazing hardware that has been
Marco:
ridiculously, tragically held back by software for its entire life.
Marco:
Both application software and Apple's own OS for it.
Marco:
Just hugely held back by software.
Marco:
And then you look at, again, the Mac is really...
Marco:
The Mac hardware is in an amazing place.
Marco:
They're making these ridiculously awesome Mac hardware devices, and the software ecosystem is really iffy on the Mac.
Marco:
It's getting worrisome.
John:
I think the Mac example is a counterexample to what you were just saying, though, because the Mac is the platform where you can make a living selling software without involving Apple at all.
John:
It is the most free platform that Apple has.
John:
And still it suffers from a lack of developer interest in part.
John:
And I think this is not the Mac is suffering for different reasons than the iPad.
John:
We're just suffering from different reasons and the AR headset will suffer.
John:
So the iPad suffers because
John:
The OS is so limited and you have to go through Apple's distribution.
John:
There's lots of really cool killer apps that could have been made for the iPad if developers were allowed to sort of use the full power of the device without going through Apple.
John:
But they haven't been, so they haven't.
John:
Right.
John:
And even Apple hasn't ported its pro app.
John:
So Apple is to blame for that one for sure.
John:
the ar headset if you know the first thing apple would have to do is sell a lot of them because you need to have you need to have the the market out there to for developers to sell them to but if they sold a lot of them i think there would be a little bit of a gold rush there and if they were able if it was if it was a hit product developers will come you can't no matter how mean apple is if they have a hit product so that's apple's job on the ar headset that's why we're all on the iphone even if the iphone wasn't a hit when the iphone was announced the
John:
All of these sort of diehard Apple developers were dying to make apps for the phone, even before Apple allowed you to make apps for the phone, even before the app, certainly before the phone was a success.
John:
The phone wasn't even out yet, and the really hard ones were dying to make stuff for it.
John:
That could also be the case with the AR headset because it's really cool.
John:
But then after that, you have to actually make the headset a success.
John:
And then the Mac...
John:
the mac is having problems with software not because apple restricts things that are on it but because apple hasn't paid enough attention to it as a platform to make sure that its apis are sort of up to snuff like it seems to it has always been like the third place child in terms of the stuff and swift ui is helping sort of with the unification of that or whatever but that's why
Marco:
Swift UI is not helping anything on the Mac.
Marco:
I'm sorry.
John:
It is because the alternative was that they were just, well, we're just not going to develop AppKit anymore.
John:
And also, there's no way for you to write an application that runs on the Mac, the iPad and the phone.
Marco:
So Swift UI is.
Marco:
Yeah, but Swift UI is totally broken on the Mac.
Marco:
I don't know anybody who uses Swift UI on the Mac who comes away not regretting that.
John:
But it is, but like speculatively, that is what they're trying to do.
John:
They're trying to make it so that you can use a one familiar API to more or less make apps on all their different platforms.
John:
Whereas before you could make an app for the iPhone and iPad and the Mac had this entirely different thing that had been neglected for a while.
John:
so it's it's it's three different problems that have to has to address on its three different platforms uh the sort of the this is not three different problems yeah well no it is it is three different this is one problem and it's called the app store well no the the one problem because the app store again the app store doesn't limit stuff on the mac the one problem is sort of developers being cranked although well i think the mac app store did a lot to uh damage the relationship of mac developers on apple
John:
It did, but it also allowed Mac developers like me who otherwise wouldn't be able to sell anything on the Mac because our apps are just too, you know, like there's tons of apps on the Mac app store that are made by developers who wouldn't it wouldn't have been worth their while to even just hook up to Stripe and do all that stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
That's like that.
John:
That's why I'm on the Mac app store and not elsewhere, because my apps don't sell enough.
John:
It's not worth my time.
John:
So they didn't have to be freeware.
John:
which is not great, or I can make a little bit of money on the Mac App Store.
John:
But that's not the show, like, clearly, right?
John:
That, you know, Photoshop and all these big apps and, you know, BB Edit going in and out of the Mac App Store, right?
John:
But, you know, again, on the Mac, the reason there's been that pressure and the reason Apple has done anything is because BB Edit could just leave the Mac App Store and say, ah, we tried it, it was too annoying, we're going back at it.
John:
And that forced Apple to come back to the table and say, hey, we want, we would like you to come back to the Mac App Store, what do we got to do to get you back into the Mac App Store?
John:
are at this time right but they still have the problem of you know what do we do against web apps all the apps people use every day either web browsers or electron apps or web views like we're losing the battle for the desktop uh but still if you want to use final cut pro or whatever the hell it's called now uh it's just called final cut i think no more pro i believe you can't use that on your ipad because ipad pro doesn't have any pro apps like logic pro or final cut pro anyway
John:
But yeah, the tax across all of this is general dissatisfaction with Apple being mean, right?
John:
And that hurts them across all the platforms.
John:
That is the one unifying thing.
John:
And you feel that it has different strength.
John:
Mac users, like someone who's a user or developer on the Mac may also have sour feelings because they can't get an NES emulator on the App Store, right?
John:
It's not even a Mac thing.
John:
We're talking about iOS, right?
John:
Why are they mad about that?
John:
Well, your iOS customers probably also have a Mac, right?
John:
uh you know are likely to also have a mac and so yeah they're a little bit sore i don't think that's true of a large portion of them yeah and certainly all your developers do because it's the only way to make apps because you can't make apps in xcode on your ipad yet
John:
They have a lot of problems here.
John:
But yeah.
John:
And meanwhile, all these regulations, all these regulations and laws and things that they're skirting are not helping.
John:
They're not helping Apple to get better and they're not helping the market to become more competitive to force Apple to get better.
John:
Instead, it's forcing Apple to do things that they're mad about and the things they do will make us mad.
Marco:
And Apple's continued refusal to behave in a more reasonable way in some of these areas is going to make governments keep trying to make even more ridiculous laws.
Marco:
And every time a government tries to make a law, that runs the risk of them really messing stuff up.
Marco:
And that, you know, long term with Apple, I think that's a huge risk of them.
Marco:
Like, look, as part of this DMA law, that was, I think, mostly theoretically about app stores and in-app purchase, they tacked on this messaging thing that is a huge problem for Apple and for all their stuff.
Marco:
Like, you know, and maybe if Apple was less anti-competitive in the money areas, maybe this whole thing wouldn't have happened.
Marco:
and they didn't have now this huge messaging and FaceTime interopting to deal with.
Marco:
The longer Apple goes, not addressing their worst anti-competitive behavior, and the more loopholes they pull when these laws are passed, the more laws they're going to try to make.
Marco:
And again, we really...
Marco:
We've been lucky in tech.
Marco:
Most of the time we're allowed to kind of do what we want, and lawmakers and regulators don't really keep up, and therefore they don't really interfere that much.
Marco:
That has been largely a good thing overall.
Marco:
Not 100% of the time, but I think overall it's been a net win.
Marco:
Now that tech is such a big part of the world and controls so much of all of commerce and business –
Marco:
we are inviting regulation whenever we behave anti-competitively we have to really be careful when we invite regulation as an industry that doesn't always work very well and governments are so bad at understanding tech and regulators and lawmakers are so so bad at understanding tech that we really don't want them doing this more than necessary we don't want them to be making laws that are going to
Marco:
issue these blanket regulations and requirements that actually could do a lot of damage because they don't think them through or they don't understand stuff well enough or whatever.
Marco:
And so it is in our best interest as an industry to self-regulate as much as possible to avoid the need for governments to do it for us.
Marco:
And Apple is just rolling that dice every single time that for any every given day that they keep going, you know, being the way they're being.
Marco:
And then if they react to the DMA the way that we're all fearing that they probably will in this weird, like, you know, piecemeal FU kind of way where they still make all their all their tax in some way.
Marco:
you know that's gonna it's gonna just keep happening we're gonna get more laws and and they're gonna roll the dice that that they don't get ruined too badly by them but you know meanwhile we the users we are the ones who are going to pay the price for all this thanks to our sponsors this week squarespace linode and collide and thanks to our members who support us directly you can join at atp.fm slash join and we will talk to you next week
Marco:
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
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They didn't
Casey:
So I went on a self-created useless adventure over the last week and a half to two weeks, and I thought I'd tell the tale.
Casey:
I have on my Synology...
John:
I never had to do this with file system.
John:
I would just rely on him.
John:
He'd be there.
John:
He would catch it.
John:
But poor Casey, every time he says Synology, who knows?
John:
Marco has to go into another room and get his Viberslap and come back to the seat.
John:
And you did this to yourself, Marco.
John:
No one made you decide that Viberslap was going to be Synology.
John:
You decided to do that, but you're not on the ball.
Marco:
The bell is one-handed operation.
Marco:
It's right next to my mute switch.
Marco:
No one made you do this.
Marco:
You chose this.
Marco:
I can hit the bell with one hand so fast that it's right here.
John:
It could have been the Synology Bongo.
John:
It could have been so many other things that could have been easier to have close in hand.
Marco:
So the Vibra Slap, it's like across the desk.
Marco:
So I've got to lean over, reach over, and you have to pick it up and then hit it with the other hand.
Marco:
It's a two-handed operation.
John:
Okay.
John:
I understand, but you, again, this was a choice you made.
John:
I feel like you didn't think it through.
Marco:
I gotta get one of those desktop gongs.
John:
It could have just been the Synology clap.
John:
Your hands are right there, you know?
Marco:
Still a two-handed operation.
Casey:
That is true.
John:
You could just smack yourself in the face.
John:
The Synology slap.
Casey:
The Synology facepalm.
Casey:
Congratulations, you played yourself.
Casey:
Anyway, so I had a series of containers, Docker containers, running on the Synology.
Casey:
And I'm not going to talk about what specifically there are, but there are four of them.
Casey:
Well, there's actually more than just the four of them, but four of them in particular were important to me.
Marco:
Wait, how many of them are involved in your garage door automation situation?
Casey:
One of them.
Casey:
because one of them is Homebridge, which does the interaction between HomeKit and the garage door apparatus.
Casey:
But anyway, so I have these four containers that are working in unison in order to do something.
Casey:
And we're not going to talk about what that something is.
Casey:
Don't worry about it.
Casey:
But those of you who know, you know.
Casey:
So anyway...
Casey:
I realized that my 10-year-old Synology, which I love, I still love this thing.
Casey:
It's an 1813 plus.
Casey:
This was given to us for free 10 years ago, or just shy of 10 years ago at this point.
Casey:
And it's getting old.
Casey:
I love it.
Casey:
I plan to upgrade to the latest and greatest version of it probably in the next couple of months.
Casey:
But this one was free, and I adore it, as we well know.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
With that said, it's getting old and it's getting a little slow.
Casey:
And I think running all of these containers on the Synology was not helping things.
Casey:
And sometimes they would seem to fail to respond to network requests.
Casey:
And I don't think it was because the containers were falling down or anything like that.
Casey:
It's just that the Synology was overwhelmed.
Casey:
And I decide, all right, I really feel like I need to move these containers off of the Synology and put them somewhere else.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
My initial thought was, okay, perfect.
Casey:
I'm going to move them to the Mac Mini.
Casey:
The Mac Mini currently hosts my media empire, which is to say it hosts channels and Plex.
Casey:
And it does very little else, to be honest.
Casey:
And yes, it is overkill to have an M1 Mac Mini to do basically two things.
Casey:
But this is my system.
Casey:
There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Casey:
That's a reference, John.
Casey:
So anyway, so I decide, all right, I'm going to install Docker Desktop, the free, you know, community or whatever edition on my Mac mini.
Casey:
And I'm going to move all of these containers, these four particular containers over to the Mac mini.
Casey:
And by moving them, I mean, I'm just going to basically use the export features on the software that these containers are running to export all my settings and whatnot.
Casey:
And then I will make new instances of these containers.
Casey:
I will do that on the Mac mini.
Casey:
Then I will import the settings and data and whatnot that I had generated off the Synology version of the containers.
Casey:
And I will import them onto the Mac mini.
Casey:
And then I should be right as rain.
Casey:
And so I did all of this, and my exposure to Docker and my use of Docker is very, very limited.
Casey:
I'm pretty ignorant about most things Docker-related.
Casey:
And with the Synology, they have their own Docker front end, which now I know is kind of sort of similar to a crummy version of Portainer, but it gets the job done, even though it's not stupendous.
Casey:
And I've occasionally dabbled with using Docker on the command line, but I've done it very, very rarely, and I'm very bad at it.
Casey:
I am aware of Docker Compose as a thing.
Casey:
Fast forwarding, I actually now am using it.
Casey:
But at this point, I'm aware of Docker Compose as a thing.
Casey:
Marco, since you probably have no idea what I'm talking about, it's basically you use YAML, which I don't particularly care for, but whatever.
Casey:
You use YAML to specify, okay, I want these containers in.
Casey:
and here's how each of these containers are going to be set up.
Casey:
It's kind of like writing an INI file, but in a more modern format.
Marco:
I hate YAML, for the record.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't like it.
Casey:
I don't think it's very good.
Marco:
It's like as picky as things are that are made for programmers, but with none of the mechanics that programmers would expect.
Casey:
Yeah, well put.
Casey:
I don't love it.
Casey:
But that's not the point.
Casey:
That's neither here nor there.
Casey:
So at this point, I'm not using Docker Compose.
Casey:
I am just, you know, running things either via the Synology UI or now I'm getting to the point that I'm doing it via the command line.
Casey:
I get everything set up on the Mac Mini.
Casey:
Things are going great.
Casey:
I am loving life.
Casey:
The Synology seems like it's working better.
Casey:
Maybe it's a placebo.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
But the Synology seems a little bit faster, a little bit more peppy.
Casey:
The Mac mini is looking at these four containers and laughing like, oh, that's nothing.
Casey:
I got this.
Casey:
And things are going well for like a few hours.
Casey:
And then all of a sudden, I go to look at one of these containers.
Casey:
And what these containers are doing is, again, don't worry about it.
Casey:
But you interact with these containers via websites hosted one per container.
Casey:
And so I go to go to one of the containers via the web on my MacBook Pro.
Casey:
And it just hangs like there's no response.
Casey:
It's clear.
Casey:
It doesn't, you know, hang up on you, so to speak, and say, nope, there's nothing here.
Casey:
It just hangs.
Casey:
It's just waiting for a response for the web server.
Casey:
It doesn't get anything.
Casey:
So, huh, that's weird.
Casey:
So I restart Docker on the Mac mini.
Casey:
Everything comes right back.
Casey:
I'm right as rain.
Casey:
Then I go to do something with one of these containers that involves a lot of network access.
Casey:
And all of a sudden it hangs.
Casey:
Okay, that's weird.
Casey:
restart the docker you know restart docker desktop restart all these containers everything's right as rain again i go through this cycle more times than i care to admit and i come to realize just something ain't right here and after doing a whole bunch of digging it appears that running docker desktop on a mac is
Casey:
It's something you're supposed to be able to do, but is really unreliable.
Casey:
And I guess they're on version like 4.16 or something like that.
Casey:
And around version 4.12, they introduced a different way of interacting with the network stack on Mac OS.
Casey:
And apparently everything got real bad at that point.
Casey:
I tried to roll back all the way to 4.11 and it didn't make anything better.
Casey:
I am commenting on a couple of GitHub issues with regards to this, and I'm not really getting anywhere.
Casey:
So it occurs to me, okay, obviously I can't do this on the Mac Mini.
Casey:
I'd rather not do this on the Synology, even though by and large everything was working.
Casey:
It was just not as peppy as I wanted it to be.
Casey:
So if I can't do it on the Mac Mini, I can't do it on the Synology, and I don't think I want to do something like go to Linode and host it there, what else do I have left?
Casey:
Can either of you guess?
Yeah.
John:
Raspberry Pi?
John:
I can look in the show notes and know the answer.
Casey:
Yes, the answer is the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
I have a Raspberry Pi 4, I think with two gigs of RAM.
Casey:
I bought it so long ago, I don't even remember.
Casey:
I have a Raspberry Pi 4 sitting here.
Casey:
Why don't I try that?
Casey:
Great.
Casey:
So, okay, I decide to install Docker on the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
I load up one of my containers and the container says, and I forget the exact error message, but something along the lines of, hey, this is the 32-bit version of me and this is like not supported anymore.
Casey:
You really should be running the 64-bit version.
Casey:
Huh, okay.
Casey:
Well, do a little bit of digging and come to find out, oh, I'm running the 32-bit version of Raspbian, which is the Raspberry Pi OS, you know, their flavor of Linux.
Casey:
And there doesn't seem to be, understandably, any real upgrade path to the 64-bit version, or at least I couldn't find one at the time.
Casey:
So now I've got to...
Casey:
reload my entire Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
So, what started as, huh, I wonder if I could make the Synology faster, has gone through the Mac Mini into the Raspberry Pi, and now I am reloading my Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
Now, Raspberry Pi...
Casey:
it already has a fairly integral part in my networking life.
Casey:
It hosts my, Marco, my pie hole, and it also hosts my WireGuard VPN.
Casey:
And so those are the two primary things it does.
Casey:
It does a couple of other things that are less important.
Casey:
But
Casey:
Anytime I leave the house, I tend to want to be, if I'm on a Wi-Fi connection, I don't bother when I'm on cellular, but anytime I leave the house on Wi-Fi, I really, really, really, really feel safer and better if I am connected to my own VPN here at the house.
Casey:
And I really, really, really don't like the state of web advertising these days, so I prefer to have my pie hole in the house.
Casey:
And when I'm on the VPN, I get it for free anyway.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
At this point, I realized, okay, I'm going to take this thing that second to the synology, I would even potentially say it's more critical than the Mac Mini, because I feel like my entire computing life is wrong and upside down without the Raspberry Pi, where it's just my media empire that's wrong and upside down without the Mac Mini.
Casey:
So I decided, all right, we're going to give it a shot.
Casey:
So luckily I had a spare SD card, because remember the Raspberry Pi's hard drive is an SD card.
Casey:
I have a spare SD card, so I'm going to try, and I'm going to leave the existing one alone.
Casey:
I'm not going to format the one that I've already got.
Casey:
I'm just going to put it aside.
Casey:
And I'm going to start anew on this new SD card.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
I reinstall everything.
Casey:
I install a 64-bit version of Raspbian, which, by the way, is only a few months old, I think, or maybe a couple of years old.
Casey:
This is a relatively recent development.
Casey:
I install that.
Casey:
I install PyVPN for WireGuard.
Casey:
I install PyHole.
Casey:
I install all my things.
Casey:
I install Docker.
Casey:
At this point, I think to myself, okay, I should probably figure out what the hell Docker Compose is.
Casey:
And I teach myself how to use Docker Compose.
Casey:
About five minutes later, I decide I really hate YAML.
Casey:
So there's that.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I now have everything running on the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
I have my four containers on the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
Then later I came back and decided, you know what, I've got to figure out what this Portainer thing is all about.
Casey:
I never really understood what that's about.
Casey:
I should give this a shot.
Casey:
Short, short version.
Casey:
It's basically like a front end to managing all your Docker containers.
Casey:
I got that installed.
Casey:
And so now I have my four, don't worry about it, look over there, containers that were really critical and Portainer all running on the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
And I thought this would now move the sluggishness from the Synology into the Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
But as far as I can tell, knock on wood, the Raspberry Pi also is laughing at the load from these four containers.
Casey:
So baby, I'm back and better than ever.
Casey:
And I am very happy with this.
Casey:
But I bring all this up just because it's so funny when you're a super nerd.
Casey:
how one small thing it's like that Malcolm in the Middle clip do you remember that where he like comes home and decides he wants to change oil in his car and next thing you know he's like rebuilding his bathroom or something like that I'm sure I have that wrong but you get the idea so I started with man wouldn't it be nice if I could move this stuff off of the Synology to somehow reloading my Raspberry Pi from scratch which ended up being not that big a deal but when I started that portion of the project I was like I don't know if this is going to go this might not be a good idea at all
Casey:
The only problem that I have lingering at this point, other than everything I've just said, is that I really want to get myself a new Pi, a new Raspberry Pi 4, because they have an 8 gig of RAM version now.
Casey:
But I don't know if you two have happened to glance at all.
Marco:
Are they acquirable yet?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Casey:
Not unless you want to spend way more money than you should.
Casey:
They actually, at Raspberry Pi, just the foundation or whatever, just had a post in the last week or two talking about supply chain and how supposedly it's going to get way, way, way better starting really soon after the new year.
Casey:
But nevertheless...
Casey:
I really would love a 8GB Pi 4, and I can't get my hands on one at the moment.
Casey:
But with that said, my 2GB one, or it might be 4, actually, it might be 4, I don't recall.
Casey:
But whatever it is, it's actually working really well, and I am really...
Casey:
really impressed that this little teeny tiny computer that I think was like 40 or 50 bucks a couple of years ago is so happy with these containers.
Casey:
Now, granted, these containers have to be fairly straightforward.
Casey:
There's not a lot to them, but it's working really well and I'm really happy with it.
Casey:
And then yesterday, maybe the day before, I went back and thought, you know what?
Casey:
I bet I could connect Portainer to the...
Casey:
Docker instance running on the Synology because there were, like I said, like Homebridge is still there.
Casey:
There's a couple other small ones that are unrelated to these four important ones that are still there.
Casey:
And so I thought, man, I should be able to get Portainer connected to the Synology.
Casey:
And it took a little bit of time because I made a bunch of dumb mistakes because I'm ignorant.
Casey:
But I learned, and I got it working, and man, I am happy.
Casey:
Everything has clicked into place, and I'm very happy about it.
Casey:
In a perfect world, I would have preferred to have all this on the Mac Mini because it has so much spare power that it's not using.
Casey:
But I am really happy with where this is, and I'm glad that I spent all this time doing all this.
Casey:
I wish I didn't have to, but I'm glad I did.
Casey:
And I've learned from my mistakes, the key thing is, when it was all done,
Casey:
I wrote notes for myself.
Casey:
So when I eventually have to, for some reason or another, go back and do all this again, I'll have notes on what the hell I did so I don't have to go spelunking in the Raspberry Pi file system realizing, oh, crap, I forgot this way off in the ether.
Casey:
Oh, crap, I forgot I made some changes to Etsy or ETC or however you pronounce it, John.
Casey:
Etsy such and such and such and such.
Casey:
I need to go grab that file from the old hard drive.
Casey:
So I hopefully have pretty copious notes at this point, but...
Casey:
When you get Docker working and when Docker is on a host that it actually wants to be on, Docker is pretty, pretty cool.
Casey:
It is really impressive how quick you can go from nothing on a device to having this entire stack or swarm, I don't even know the right terminology, but this entire group of four containers up and running lickety-split.
Casey:
It is very good stuff.
John:
Did you hear the joke description of what Docker is?
John:
It was like a solution to the problem of a developer making software and saying, oh, it works on my computer.
John:
I don't know what the problem is.
John:
The solution was, okay, we're going to ship your computer.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
What if every computer was your computer?
John:
Yeah, a little heavyweight.
John:
To that end, though, is your Mac mini Intel?
Casey:
No, it's a M1 Mac Mini.
John:
I was going to say, if you're Mac Mini with Intel, you just got to run a Linux VM and then run Docker inside the Linux VM because you do have the power to spare?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
And it's funny because a lot of people recommended doing exactly that.
Casey:
I mean, you can still do that.
John:
Can you still do that on ARM base Macs with Rosetta?
Casey:
think you can and it probably would be fast enough for the purposes i needed but i don't have a license like vmware fusion anymore i've never used parallels and i bet i could probably work this up virtual boxes another free one yeah but i never liked virtual box i just felt it was kind of gross anyway because you do have the power to spare if you just run linux on your mac in a in a container in some kind of virtualized container you could do it
Casey:
But then I'm putting a hat on a hat to use a Merlinism, and it's just – there's a container in a container, and it just seemed like – in a container.
John:
I mean, it would still be fine.
John:
Like what you're doing is working on a Raspberry Pi.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
But anyway, I just thought it was interesting.
Casey:
And even if none of that was interesting to you, I will say as someone who doesn't really do web development anymore –
Casey:
The whole idea of Docker and having entire environments installable as an app, I'm dramatically oversimplifying, but that's kind of sort of what Docker does.
Casey:
That is really, really slick.
Casey:
And once you wrap your mind around it, it is really, really cool.
Casey:
And if you've never dabbled with it, and I'm not at the point that I'm creating my own Docker containers or anything like that, but it is good stuff.
Casey:
You were using this a bunch before you left your jobby job, right?
John:
I put my website, hypercritical.co.
John:
I've got a Docker container with it.
John:
Not that it really – I just did it because I just got paranoid because I don't like running it in a Docker container.
John:
I don't really like the Docker desktop app.
John:
But I'm like, you know what?
John:
I should probably have a containerized version of my website.
John:
So now I do.
John:
but I don't really mess with it.
John:
You probably know more about it than I do at this point because I've forgotten so much, but I did use Docker Compose and plain old Docker and looked into Docker Swarm.
John:
It is a fruitful area of investigation, but I never got to the point where I felt like I was comfortable with sort of running a production service off of Docker.
John:
So doing hobbyist things is about my level of comfort.
Casey:
Yeah, like I wouldn't advocate necessarily running Overcast through Docker, although I presume there's no reason why hypothetically one couldn't.
John:
I probably should, honestly.
John:
Not the database, though.
Casey:
Well, but what's really neat about it is, especially for development purposes, and I'm not saying that this is a problem that needs solving, Marco, but just for the sake of discussion, you could have like a Docker-composed YAML file, and once you stop vomiting over YAML, and I'm right there with you,
Casey:
You know, you could have this one file and you can say to Docker, OK, look at this file and stand up all the stuff you need to stand up in order to make an entire overcast system on this computer, which, again, I don't know that that's a need you really have.
Casey:
I would argue it's probably not.
Casey:
But just the fact that it can be done, I think, is pretty darn slick.