Eddy Cue Shows Up at Your Door
John:
You went live before we could pre-flight.
Marco:
Oh, we're going to be doing a show.
Marco:
It's going to be about technology.
Marco:
And we're going to go through some follow-up first, followed by some topics, and then some Ask ATP if we have time.
Casey:
Pre-flight accomplished.
John:
It's not accomplished.
John:
Does that work?
John:
It's much more complicated than you think it is.
Casey:
Can you imagine if you were getting in like a Cessna or, God forbid, like a real jet and you watched the pilot do that pre-flight?
Casey:
Eh, there's wings, there's landing gear.
Casey:
Eh, screw it, we'll be fine.
Marco:
This is why I'm not a pilot.
Marco:
This is why you should never give me a job where serious injury or death might result if I do something wrong.
Casey:
Did you know, fun fact, you need to, if you ever dig out your drone again, you need to take a about 15 minute course before you're legally allowed to fly it again.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, that's interesting.
Marco:
Because I actually I registered with the FAA like a couple years back, but I'm sure the requirements have probably changed since then.
Casey:
Well, so there's that.
Casey:
That's still applicable if you have a drone that's more than 250 grams.
Casey:
But in addition to that, as of like a couple of days ago, you have to take a like 10 to 15 minutes.
Casey:
Please don't fly into other people.
Casey:
Please stay below 400 feet.
Casey:
Please don't be an idiot.
Casey:
That's the deal.
Casey:
Of course.
Casey:
And you can do it for free.
Casey:
And like I said, it doesn't take very long.
Casey:
But if you were to get questioned and you did not have that little card to show, then you could get hypothetically in trouble.
Casey:
Now, the likelihood of the FAA or even local law enforcement coming to question you is not great unless you're flying in a national park or perhaps a national seashore, in which case there's 50-50 chance.
Marco:
But I wouldn't be flying in a national seashore.
Marco:
Of course not.
Marco:
I would be flying next to a national seashore and possibly overflying it, however, standing in a place where it would be legal to pilot a drone.
Casey:
Actually, I don't know if that's okay or not.
Casey:
I do.
Casey:
I think it is.
Casey:
I think it is in the clear.
Marco:
Yeah, the rules are that you are allowed to overfly national parks as long as you are standing and taking off and landing in a place where it is legal to fly drones.
Marco:
And as long as the flight itself remains legal, which means it has to remain within your line of sight.
Marco:
So you can fly like as far as you can see into a national park while standing outside of it.
Casey:
Well, now you know.
Casey:
Yeah, I still want to get my Part 107 or whatever it's called in order to be able to do it commercially.
Casey:
Like, not that I expect to make any money off of it, but basically if there's even the whiff that you could one day make money off of something that you've done with a drone, then you should be Part 107 licensed.
Casey:
And I'd like to do that, but I told myself I'm not going to do that until I get this app that is never going to be released, released.
Casey:
So basically I'm never going to do it ever.
Yeah.
John:
Do you make some money from your drone?
John:
Do you Uber for chipmunks?
Casey:
Yes, Uber for chipmunks.
John:
Passive income from your drones.
Casey:
No, so if I took pictures of my house or a friend's house and then I wanted to give it to them, like I'm not even receiving money for it, and I give it to them to use in a real estate listing, that's falling afoul of the FAA's guidelines.
Casey:
So even though I'm not receiving money because it was a commercial use, I need to be part 107 licensed.
Casey:
So that is a stupid but silly example of, you know, even my own house.
Casey:
If I wanted to use drone pictures of my own house, if I wanted to sell it, then I would need to be licensed and I am not.
John:
I do wonder how much money the FAA has for enforcement activity considering what we've recently learned about how terrible even the IRS is about enforcing any of the tax laws, you know, because they don't go after the rich people because it costs too much money to pursue them.
John:
So they just go after a few poor people and call it a day.
John:
um how much how much uh enforcement activity is there for the faa worrying about people with drones probably near airports maybe some but like i don't think they're going to find out that you took a drone picture of your friend's house to use in a real estate listing and track you down like they don't have that i don't know you should find out i'm very interested now like do they have like you know thousands of agents wandering the internet looking for this or is it just like three people in a department somewhere so i don't
Casey:
I think so.
Casey:
And I've also understood that national parks genuinely do get real upset and real cranky real quick.
Casey:
So as an example, I would love to fly in the Shenandoah National Park, which is not too far from where I am.
Casey:
But the Shenandoah National Park is a national park.
Casey:
And because of that, I will make people very upset very quickly in no small part because they want to be peaceful in the park.
Yeah.
John:
And they don't want it filled with the carcasses of a thousand drones.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
No, you're right.
Casey:
And so I think if I were to do National Park or Airport, I could get into kind of big trouble kind of quickly.
Casey:
Outside of that, I don't think it would be terribly easy to get in trouble.
Casey:
But I mean, I don't want to.
Casey:
So I don't pay a lot of attention to Reddit at all.
Casey:
But one of the things I do pay a little bit of attention to is slash r slash drones.
Casey:
And it seems like everyone there is super...
Casey:
prickly or they're sticklers for the laws because as long as everyone's behaving, the long banhammer of the FAA will not come down upon any of us.
Casey:
But if there's a bunch of idiots flying through the national parks and so on and buzzing airports, then the FAA is going to have to start making ever-increasing regulations, making it ever harder to even just fly recreationally, which is what I do, which is just for the fun of it.
Casey:
So
Casey:
the theory is if you're not a jerk and if other people aren't jerks, then we'll probably be okay.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's like, don't ruin this for everybody.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Exactly.
John:
So in short, you're doomed.
Casey:
Absolutely.
Casey:
Without question.
Casey:
Without question.
Yeah.
Casey:
Do we want to do a pre-flight?
Casey:
That's where this all started.
Casey:
It's too late.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, let's just dive in.
Casey:
This is John's favorite.
Casey:
Let's just start with some follow-up.
Casey:
Hey, if I wanted to reload a page in Safari, how do I do that, John?
John:
How's the eternal struggle to reload pages in Safari?
John:
Only for you, John.
John:
A few tidbits.
John:
One question that a bunch of people had that I actually didn't confirm until today because I just hadn't gone around to it is does pull to refresh work on Safari and Monterey on a Mac?
John:
And as far as I can tell, nothing I could do on the trackpad in terms of pulling the page down or anything seemed to make it reload.
John:
The reason people bring up pull to refresh is especially early on when everyone was complaining about the lack of a reload button.
John:
I mean, I was specifically complaining about the lack of reload button with accompanying screenshot and link to video of the Mac version of Safari.
John:
That's why this came up.
John:
But everyone responded because, you know, it's Twitter, went off into the woods and said, oh, you just pulled a refresh, right?
John:
Because they didn't realize I was talking about the Mac version and not the iOS or iPad version.
John:
But one of the features that was touted for the new Safari on iPadOS and iOS is that you can pull to refresh the page.
John:
which is great like that should totally be a feature it makes sense it's native it's kind of native to ios people are used to pulling things to refresh them but uh practically speaking it is not a complete replacement for a reload button um because reload like well i mean again this is more of a web developer bent but even for regular users
John:
Say you are down at the lower section of some web page for your town and you're trying to see if something has been updated to let you know that you're allowed to park or that school was canceled or whatever.
John:
And it's somewhere farther down the page.
John:
People are used to, I think, even just regular web browsing people who are not web developers, scrolling a web page to a particular position and then just bouncing on command R or in Windows parlance F5 or whatever, or hitting clicking the reload button.
John:
to reload that web page and for many many many many years now most good web browsers when you click reload will try to return you to the same place where you are on the page assuming the page hasn't changed that much it's not an easy feature to implement but it's you know expected right so if you were looking at something that's you know three screens down on a web page and you hammer on reload you expect a good web browser to reload the page and not make you scroll back to find it again
John:
Well, the only way you can pull to refresh is to go back to the top of the page again and pull to refresh.
John:
On iOS, of course, you can tap the status bar or whatever at the top of the screen to zoom up to the front.
John:
Then you can pull to refresh.
John:
But now you've lost your spot and you've got to scroll back down to where you are.
John:
It's not as nice an experience as being able to be on a particular position on a page and just bounce on reload as you impatiently wait for something, you know.
John:
So pull the refresh is great.
John:
It should definitely exist, but it doesn't appear to exist at all on the Mac.
John:
And it is not like it doesn't preclude the need for any kind of reload UI, especially on iOS on a phone where you are unlikely to have a keyboard attached to it where you can't actually hit command R.
John:
your only recourse for reloading is some kind of button or ui element or going all the way back to the top of the page and scrolling i guess another one is maybe like i don't know people go to web bulletin boards if you're towards the bottom of a page in a web bulletin board and you're trying to reload to see if someone replies having to scroll back down to the bottom would be terrible so there's that um
John:
one more item on my reload button extension uh as a bunch of people noted who looked at it and as i myself of course noted for a while did i talk about this i did on the last show that the the reload glyph was kind of misaligned because the arrow sticks up from the top of it i think i talked about that last week i've been messing with various ways to fix that a lot of people sent in this suggestion it's the exact suggestion that i had been pursuing which is
John:
to try to defeat the quote-unquote smart algorithm that positions that glyph by putting some kind of technically not completely transparent pixel somewhere to shove the perimeter of the thing around.
John:
And that does work.
John:
I put a very tiny single pixel thing that is like 1% opaque.
John:
It doesn't actually show up in the UI in a way that you can see it, but it does let me reposition the button.
John:
Unfortunately...
John:
uh you're still at the mercy of the algorithm which is trying to like scale you and center your non-opaque pixels so for me to try to get it aligned the way i want first of all i can't get it all the way aligned the way i want because i can't push it up high enough like i'm there's a limit to how high the the non-transparent parts of my uh glyph can go so i can't do whatever i would want but just to align the circle with the greater than last then signs and
John:
I can align the bottom of the circle to the bottom of the greater than less than sign, but then the top of it's too small and it scales it down.
John:
So anyway, I messed with that.
John:
There's a new version of my reload button up if you want to redownload it.
John:
I keep bumping the version number every time I do something like tweak the reload lift by two pixels.
John:
But I think it is better aligned now.
John:
The bottom is not aligned and neither is the top, but it kind of splits the difference.
John:
I think it looks better.
John:
you know as gruber said it looks better at a glance but if you really squint at it it looks worse but unfortunately i can't get the result that i really want because i don't have total control over where these glyphs are drawn all i can do is essentially you know put a key in a plist that points to a pdf in my bundle that says please use this glyph as the uh the button
John:
Oh, and one final reload thing.
John:
Um, Finn Voorhees posted on Twitter, uh, that he has a reload button web extension.
John:
It's not the same thing as mine.
John:
I think it's think it's like the, you know, if you think of a Chrome extension, like that type of thing, uh,
John:
safari supports those two in fact it's the same format as the chrome extension anyway it's a web extension that puts the reload button back in the address bar so if you miss that because like i said safari doesn't even have the reload button in the address bar but if you liked the reload button being in the address bar and you wish it came back on your mac
John:
uh apparently there's a web extension that you can use to do that um i don't want that i want it in my toolbar which is why i have my extension but if you want it in the address bar uh oh this fin didn't give a link to this so i don't know if this is just a private web extension but honestly it's if you can make any kind of web extension you can make this one it shouldn't be too hard indeed can you tell me about what safari is doing to keep us safe please
John:
this was confusing to me i put this in the follow-up and and as as usual when i have time i'm like well let me see if this is actually true someone said uh this someone this is macrumors.com safari and ios 15 and macros monterey automatically upgrades web connections to https on compatible sites for improved security i'm like oh they finally added the equivalent of whatever https everywhere or whatever those various extensions
John:
that you could get for your browser what they would do is you'd go to a website and if you didn't put https in the front they would try https first and only if that failed would they fall back to http so i tried my own website because my own website supports https but it also supports http so i went to http colon slash hypercritical.co and it just went there it didn't redirect https
John:
I'm like, maybe they were just wrong about this?
John:
I'm like, but this is a story on MacRumors.
John:
It's not just a random tweet.
John:
So I read the story more closely from the article.
John:
Apple says that Safari now, quote, automatically upgrades sites known to support HTTPS from secure HTTP.
John:
So apparently my website is not known to support HTTPS.
John:
It does support it, but it's not known.
John:
So do they have just like a giant list of websites that said, hey, these are all the websites we've discovered that support HTTPS?
John:
Because it's got to be a really long list.
Casey:
Yeah, that's certainly not desirable, but you know, it's better than nothing.
John:
I kind of understand why they did it because those HTTPS everywhere things like if every time you went to a URL at first tried some other one, it's a lot of, you know, failed attempts that I don't know what percentage of sites that people go to on a daily basis don't support HTTPS anymore.
John:
But I can imagine when you do things at Apple scale, you kind of have to be careful with a blanket policy of let's try this thing that might or might not work before we do the thing you asked me to do.
Marco:
maybe I mean it makes sense for them to be conservative but I also like it seems like these days it would be safe enough to just try HTTPS first because like the only way that would really break is if sites like have it enabled but they don't really test on it maybe they have it enabled accidentally and you know maybe certain functionality breaks on it but I can't imagine that would be a common enough case to have to accommodate now
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
I mean, it's still an improvement, but I'd like to see it better.
Casey:
It seems like it could be better.
Casey:
And speaking of things that could be better, iCloud private relay and regions.
Casey:
So this was observed by, among others, Raleigh Rakama, who writes, I'm from Finland and Safari has put me into Russia and Germany.
Casey:
Not that close.
Casey:
And all the services complain that they see me logging in from unknown locations.
Casey:
Also, all services that use IP for localization tend to break.
Casey:
Whoopsie-dupsies.
John:
That's kind of a non-US-centric thing.
John:
We kind of think, oh, if you can get close enough to my region, that's fine.
John:
But if you're in the middle of Europe, close enough to my region, maybe in an entirely different country that speaks an entirely different language with, more importantly, entirely different laws and restrictions and websites that may or may not want them accessing it.
John:
Yeah, that's going to be a challenge.
John:
And Finland, they call it the Wyoming of Europe.
John:
Not a very high population density.
John:
But if you are in Finland and a website thinks you're from Russia, I can imagine you will not get the experience you expect.
Casey:
That is very true.
Casey:
I actually went to Helsinki once, I probably told this story before, for a very brief work trip.
Casey:
And I will never forget, it was late April, and it was freaking cold in Helsinki, go figure.
Casey:
But we were doing a thing where my company and this other company in Helsinki were trying to, you know, collaborate on something.
Casey:
And they were trying to modify their API for us a little bit.
Casey:
And they were fielding requests from us and so on.
Casey:
And this was late April.
Casey:
And I said, OK, well, we'd really like to do this, that, and the other thing.
Casey:
And they said, OK, OK, we'll get that to you in September.
Casey:
I said, what?
Casey:
Yeah, September.
Casey:
Why not, like, May?
Casey:
Like, it wasn't that much stuff to be done.
Casey:
Famous last words.
Casey:
But it wasn't that much stuff to be done, right?
Casey:
And they said, well, no, no, we can't do it over the summer.
Casey:
I said, well, why?
Casey:
Because we're not here.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
We take off from, like, May till August.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Yeah, we all go up to our lake shanties, houses, whatever they called it, sheds, whatever.
John:
Lake shanties?
John:
I'm pretty sure it's not lake shanties.
John:
Whatever it was.
John:
It loses something in translation.
John:
Yes, probably.
John:
I learned that Avara is Finnish as well, although I'm sure we're saying it incorrectly.
John:
Avara.
John:
Avara.
John:
Avara means wide open spaces.
Casey:
Either way.
Casey:
My point is just that apparently the entirety of the country just like buggers off for three months in the summer and nobody's nobody cares.
Casey:
Whereas an American can't leave work for three minutes without somebody getting perturbed about it.
Casey:
We live in the wrong country, gentlemen.
Casey:
And this has been very obvious for the last four years, four and a half.
Casey:
But but man, we are in the wrong spot.
Marco:
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Casey:
Tell me about Martin Hayswinkle.
Casey:
That's a great name that I probably mispronounced.
Casey:
What did Martin have to say?
John:
Yeah, this is a question that I actually don't know the answer to, and I tried to look it up before the show, but it didn't find anything conclusive, so I figured I'd put it out there for the public if someone, perhaps someone from Apple can let us know.
John:
A lot of people were asking after the last show regarding iClub Private Relay,
John:
What about other applications?
John:
Like we read off the stuff from the WWDC slides, like, oh, it does traffic in Safari, it does DNS lookups, and it does plain HTTP traffic from any app.
John:
But the question is like, what about like Overcast or NetNewsWire, where they embed a WebKit view
John:
and aren't doing anything different or special, does WebKit always do private relay if you're signed up for it?
John:
If you embed it in your app, are you doing private relay?
John:
Or does the WWDC slide apply and say, well, if you're doing plain HTTP, then we'll apply private relay.
John:
But if you're doing HTTPS in your embedded web view, we won't do it.
John:
So I don't actually know the answer to this in terms of how many third-party apps that are not Safari that are doing HTTPS connections will get this.
John:
I saw a bunch of interviews with people like, you know, Federici went on this long tour of visiting people.
John:
It seemed to imply that any app that uses Apple's frameworks, meaning like if you just embedded one of the modern WebKit views, you will use private relay.
John:
But the WWC session totally didn't say that.
John:
It said Safari...
John:
plain HTTP from apps, and DNS queries.
John:
So if anyone knows, please tell us.
John:
And then Renaud Lienhardt said, I learned from the talk show, I think this was a Federighi interview, and JAWS, that private relay is always used to contact known trackers, even without an active subscription to iCloud+.
John:
So I think this is part of Apple's anti-tracking thing, that Apple does have a list of, these are like the various...
John:
web you know dns entries host names that are used to track people for ad networks and everything and no matter what even if you don't have icloud private relay because you don't pay for icloud storage or whatever no matter what uh the whole os just safari again same question but either way they will use private relay to connect to those trackers no matter what which is nice
Marco:
That's a huge thing.
Marco:
The whole Safari intelligent tracking prevention feature that launched a few years back, if I remember correctly, they've amped that up every year.
Marco:
And to basically remove IP address trackability from all known trackers for all iPhone users, not just iCloud Plus subscribers, that's a big deal.
Marco:
So that's yet more wonderful anti-tracking stuff from Apple that actually...
John:
seems to have no real harm to like you know the the good side of things and seems to just only foil the crappy creepy people well foil i mean this is always a cat and mouse game right every every time apple has been doing these moves for years and every time apple has done something there's been an answer like okay well if we can't do that we'll do this so we can't do that even just the recent google thing of what the hell is it um chat room tell me the acronym that i can't remember that has an f in it
John:
Oh, their weird cohort thing?
John:
Yeah, flock, but I don't remember what it stands for.
Casey:
Federated Learning of Cohorts.
Casey:
You don't need to wait for the chat room.
John:
There you go.
John:
Anyway, there's always an answer.
John:
Before that, it was like fingerprinting based on your installed fonts, and all those doors were closed.
John:
It's a cat and mouse game.
John:
So I don't think anything that Apple does is a sort of permanent solution to this, but this latest salvo seems pretty potent, and I hope it takes longer for the creepy ad tracking companies to figure out how to hack around it.
Casey:
So for you monsters that scroll unnaturally, I hear that you cannot set that up by device like we thought last week.
Casey:
So what's going on there?
John:
That's part of the magic trick.
John:
We talked about the magic trick of universal control.
John:
Am I getting that right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Where they use the edge of the screen that you jam your cursor against as a signal of you basically telling the computer which side of your Mac the iPad is sitting on or whatever so they don't have to figure it out and they don't have to ask you.
John:
Well, last show, I mentioned that you can set the mouse and trackpad scroll directions separately, something that I've done through my entire life of using Apple devices with mice and trackpads.
John:
And you can guess where this is going.
John:
It's always worked for me because there's the magic trick.
John:
I never use them at the same time.
John:
So if I had occasion, like, oh, here's a trackpad.
John:
Oh, I rarely use a trackpad, but I'm going to hook one up for a second.
John:
And I'd be like, oh, the scroll direction is wrong.
John:
And so I would go to system preferences, and I would go to trackpad, and I would see the checkbox there and say, oh, I see the problem.
John:
It's set to the wrong direction.
John:
I would click it, and it would go back the other way.
John:
And then later on, I'd switch back to a mouse.
John:
And then the mouse would be like, oh, the scroll direction is wrong.
John:
I must have messed it up when I had the trackpad.
John:
And I'd go to the mouse preferences, and I'd change it or whatever.
John:
It was tricking me into thinking that those are two separate checkboxes, but are you getting it?
John:
These are not two separate checkboxes.
John:
They are the same checkbox.
John:
If you don't use both input devices at the same time, you may not realize that, but there is apparently only one setting.
John:
But fear not, third-party software to the rescue, because unlike iOS, Mac apps can do this.
John:
We'll put two links in the show notes, one to scroll reverser and another to a utility called MOS.
John:
Both of them let you have actual independent scroll directions.
John:
for mice and trackpads despite the fact that even though you might think you can with the os uh it's a trick you can't all right and then you had brought up avara avara whatever it's called earlier time i think i don't know i'm going with like the google translate like finnish voice thing like if you make it try to say it in finnish i don't know it's like it's like petty force like knowing how you're supposed to say it in the origin language doesn't mean you know how to say it in english
John:
Uh, but I don't know how to say it in either one.
John:
So yeah.
John:
Um, that cool mech game from the nineties, eighties.
John:
I don't know what decade anything happened in.
John:
It's gotta be nineties.
John:
Maybe it was the two thousands.
John:
Anyway.
John:
Um, this is from Dan Watson.
John:
Uh, he says wild hearing you talk about Avara this week.
John:
I and a group of old players got permission from Ambrosia and the original author to port it to modern OS's.
John:
Check it out if you want to take a trip down memory lane and we'll link to the GitHub page where you can see the source code and also download binaries for Mac and Windows.
John:
I download the Mac one.
John:
It runs on modern Mac OS and it is amazing.
John:
If you don't have nostalgia for this game, you're going to be like, what the hell is this?
John:
But if you do have nostalgia for the game, it is as you remember it.
John:
It's pretty amazing.
Casey:
This does not look good.
Casey:
And I understand it's from a very different time.
Casey:
I get that.
Casey:
You look at Descent with modern eyes, and Descent did not look good.
Casey:
But at a glance, this looks primitive.
John:
What this had over Descent, I mean, this was still in the age of software rendering.
John:
Descent was also in the age of software rendering for the most part as well.
John:
At least it started in the age of software rendering, right?
John:
So no 3D cards, just your CPU and trying to texture map stuff.
John:
What Ivara had over Descent was like what all Mac games had over things is Macs had pixels that weren't the size of boulders.
John:
So here we go.
John:
It was quote unquote high resolution.
John:
What it had against it was, hey, no texture mapping.
John:
Right.
John:
So extremely sharp, but flat shaded polygons.
Casey:
yeah see i'm not impressed because i look at descent and i'll put links in the show notes if you look at the one of the screenshots from descent that is in wicket that is on wikipedia like it looks like a video game whereas you look at one of the screenshot from wikipedia of avara first of all it's a postage stamp which may just be because of the screenshot it may not be because if you put it on your 6k monitor now from the modern version you can make it really big
John:
fair uh but it looks like garbage it looks like starfox if anything i don't even see a screenshot on the uh i just put it in the in the chat it'll be in the show notes oh no that is not that's not how big the game is i don't understand why that's so tiny uh but yeah it's flat shaded polygons and i misspoke like 12 times around the last show uh the little walker that you play it's a two-legged chicken walker not a 2d chicken walker anyway it's got two legs it looks like an ad st um
John:
And Descent, so what Descent had going for it, which apparently was too complicated to ever do again, was six degrees of freedom.
John:
Almost no games do that.
John:
I mean, I suppose technically you could say X-Wing does it, but not really.
John:
But anyway, Descent was really all possible degrees of freedom.
John:
There is no up, there is no down.
John:
There's only like you and you can face any direction, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Which is cool, and that's one of the reasons Descent was memorable.
John:
Avara, the main thing I mentioned last time, is that your movement direction and your looking direction were independent, which almost no games do these days.
John:
The simplification that almost every game does is, if you look in a direction and press forward, you will be going in the direction that you're looking.
John:
greatly simplifies moving around in a 3D world, but the possibilities where you are actually like a little mechanical two-legged tank, where your movement direction and, kind of like any kind of tank, your movement direction and where your guns are facing are independent really makes the game much more complicated and difficult and unfamiliar and why you probably won't enjoy it if you try it.
Marco:
Really selling it, John.
Marco:
This looks like back in probably 1995 or something, the local science center in Columbus, Ohio, where I grew up, called COSI, they had this VR demo.
Marco:
It was like a huge demo.
Marco:
do you remember like around that time those were going around oh yeah and it was you know way before you could get vr anything for any kind of home hardware but they like you know there were some you know big installations of it you could you could go try at these science center places for kids and it was very much like this i tried it for like five seconds and it was very much looking like this this screenshot of this game were just like a very small number of very big flat shaded polygons and
Marco:
no not even like you know lighting effects like there's no gradients or any shadows it's just like flat shaded polygons one color per face you know vague 3d perspective not really anything fun and it was barely even impressive but the idea of like vr sounded really cool this is like back when back when there was the rumor that the sega genesis was gonna get a vr headset it would have been about this good
John:
Yeah, these VR demos were always running on like $60,000 worth of SGI hardware, you realize, like to get these flat polygons.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right, with some very old follow-up with regard to Apple Podcasts and show notes, which one of you would like to explain to me what's going on?
John:
I threw this in here just because I think it's fascinating to watch how Apple's podcast stuff is...
John:
evolving slash breaking slash getting fixed we were trying to figure out what the deal we mentioned on a past show that apple podcasts the application on ios is bad at displaying show notes right but then we were getting reports in from our listeners hey you know the show notes look messed up or some people saying the show notes look fine here i can see all the links and so gathering the feedback eventually what we learned was that the atp member feed displays correctly in apple podcast but the atp public feed does not
John:
And I thought, well, maybe there's something weird about the feeds.
John:
So I diffed them.
John:
Nope.
John:
The only thing that is different in the feeds are the URLs and a couple other things that have nothing to do with the content.
John:
And yet I could reproduce this on Apple Podcasts on my own phone.
John:
I would look at the member feed and the show notes would be a nicely indented list with links and everything like that.
John:
And then I'd look at the public feed and it was just a giant mess and there was no links.
John:
I have no explanation for this.
John:
I do.
John:
I will defer to Marco what the heck is going on.
John:
But we're just telling you that this was reported to us and was reproducible and we don't know what's causing it.
John:
But I can tell you that the feeds are not different from each other in any way that would cause this.
Marco:
So the reason why is not the feed, it's how Apple is getting and managing it, as far as I can tell.
Marco:
So Apple Podcasts, until this update, every version, like every client out there was downloading the feeds directly from their publishers.
Marco:
This is not what almost any other modern podcast app does.
Marco:
Almost all our modern podcast apps, they'll download the audio files directly from the publishers.
Marco:
but they won't download the feed.
Marco:
The feed is getting refreshed centrally by their app servers, and they're just pushing out notifications to the apps to say, all right, hey, download this, download this, download this, whatever.
Marco:
And Apple Podcasts does not work that way, at least did not work that way until this update.
Marco:
And as a result, it got some interesting benefits.
Marco:
So Overcast does server-side crawling and has since the beginning.
Marco:
One limitation of server-side crawling is that you can't crawl podcast feeds that are not public, like that are not on the public internet.
Marco:
So if some business has an internal RSS feed for an internal podcast that's only accessible on their network, you can't listen to that in Overcast.
Marco:
You can listen to that in Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
You've always been able to.
Marco:
And there's very few apps that still do that these days that are among the ones that people really know.
Marco:
Well, when Apple released this big update a couple months ago that enabled all this new stuff,
Marco:
they move to server-side crawling, but only for podcasts that are in their directory.
Marco:
If you still add a URL directly from the app, like subscribe by URL, rather than subscribing through their directory, it will still crawl that feed the old way directly from the app.
Marco:
So there's two different paths for the data to get into the Apple Podcasts app.
Marco:
The server-side crawling path...
Marco:
that most feeds in their directory are now using, strips out HTML for show notes.
Marco:
The local path, where the app crawls the feed directly, which is what would happen for our member feeds, and any other feed that you add by URL, the app is keeping those...
Marco:
it's keeping the HTML in the show notes and it's not doing the same kind of filtering as going through a whole different path.
Marco:
And my guess is they didn't write that code into the app.
Marco:
Uh, so that's why this is this, these two different things that are happening.
Marco:
It's not a good reason, but I'm pretty sure that's the reason.
John:
Yeah, just to make it clear, we're not doing this to punish people on the public feed.
John:
Really, you're being punished by using Apple's podcast app, which is not great.
John:
You should use a different app.
John:
Even if it's not overcast, any app will do better, I think, with the show notes.
John:
But for the members, I guess this is a fringe benefit you're getting without knowing it.
John:
You get non-broken show notes if you use Apple Podcasts.
John:
But really, maybe don't use Apple Podcasts.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
SSD wear reporting in Mac OS.
Marco:
Remember this?
Casey:
Apple Insider reports that a source they spoke to at Apple confirmed that the problem was always an issue with what the OS was displaying, not what it was actually doing behind the scenes.
Casey:
So help me remind myself and the listeners.
Casey:
So this is that people were getting Apple Silicon Macs and they were seemingly absolutely thrashing the SSDs to a point that was deeply concerning.
Casey:
And so it sounds like that's really just a display issue, not an actual thrashing issue.
John:
Yeah, using some tool that was showing a bunch of stats and the stats look terrifying.
John:
And as when we discussed in the show, we said, well, we don't know if these stats are necessarily accurate, but we'll have to wait and see.
John:
Well, this is the long term follow up we waited and saw and.
John:
apparently this was a display issue i mean again this is from apple insider an anonymous apple source you know it is not like apples that making an official statement on this the other part of this is that in mac os 11.4 which i think was just being released when this story uh was written um it now properly reports the numbers like so the same tool will get better numbers from the os um
John:
So it's a combination of, okay, well, if you run those tools now, you will see more reassuring numbers.
John:
And also, by the way, supposedly back when you were seeing the numbers that were scaring you, those numbers weren't accurate.
John:
So if this is all true, it is good news for everybody with an ARM Mac.
John:
That their SSDs are not going to prematurely wear out.
Marco:
That's a very big if, but it is plausible that this would be true.
Marco:
And that I think is more plausible than SSDs somehow writing like hundreds of gigs of data without any correspondingly obvious file system activity or anything like that.
John:
Yeah, or without like bogging down your whole system.
John:
Like it's always been the problem with the whole Chrome thing.
John:
It's like, look, if this is a real problem, eventually we should be able to have some kind of reproduction.
John:
And so same thing with the SSD.
John:
If those numbers are real, where is that data coming from and going to?
John:
And shouldn't we be able to see that happening somehow?
John:
If not the file system, then at least some tacit amount of CPU involvement.
John:
uh yeah so i didn't again this is not conclusive but i just did want to follow up if someone is out there still being terrified that their their m1 max ssd is destroying itself probably isn't hopefully maybe all right and then john if you wanted to email yourself how would you do that
John:
Oh, this is the best app.
John:
This is my app of the year.
John:
My personal app of the year, maybe the app of last year.
John:
I've been beta testing this for a while on a show a long time ago.
John:
I was complaining about my inability to find a good replacement app for my old app that would mail something to myself.
John:
And the main thing that I'm mailing to myself is tweets.
John:
I know this is a terrible workflow that everybody hates and will tell me I shouldn't do it, but I've been doing it for a long time and it works for me.
Casey:
Oh, hold on.
Casey:
You get to do that with your tweet email workflow and everyone just says, okay?
John:
I mean, it's a one-step workflow.
John:
It's not quite that as Byzantine.
Casey:
Don't you ever talk about my photos again, sir.
John:
And also, there's no sort of Apple-supplied equivalent one, right?
John:
Anyway, very often I wanted to mail a tweet to myself because I want to, you know, say, talk about it on the next ATP.
John:
And there's not like really a good with my third party Twitter clients.
John:
There's not really a way to like bookmark those tweets or anything like that.
John:
So mailing them to myself is the way to go.
John:
And I had this like mail to self app, you know, from years ago.
John:
uh that would make a nicely formatted email that would include the entire tweet and any attachments and who it was from and a link to the original tweet it would make a nice email to me so i had all the information there i wouldn't have to go dig it out again right and that app eventually i think uh gdpr killed it maybe
John:
Or the developer just stopped doing it.
John:
Anyway, it broke years ago.
John:
And I was like, all right, I need some equivalent.
John:
I tried to make a bunch of shortcuts to do it, and I just couldn't figure it out because some combinations of me hitting shortcuts, me not using the official Twitter client, and just generally, it's mostly me hitting shortcuts.
John:
If I bang my head against it, I probably could have come up with a shortcut that would have worked, but I didn't.
John:
And there's a million mail things to yourself apps on the App Store, and I think I bought all of them.
John:
None of them quite worked the way I wanted, and I complained about it on ATP ages ago, and somebody heard me and said, oh, we're making an app.
John:
I don't know if they were already making this app, but anyway, they made an app that mails stuff to yourself, and they added a bunch of features just for me.
John:
It's got this advanced pane for mailing tweets specifically where you can do sort of a...
John:
printf style format string where you can basically say here's here's what the message is going to look like you know with little you know percent sender percent date percent message percent you know you can just basically make the email look like exactly what you want it to look like including the the subject line and the body um so i did that and i've been using this beta i don't know it seems like for a year now and they finally released the app the app is called melo i don't like the icon but i don't care it is
John:
It is the best app because it lets me do with one tap, send this tweet to me in an email format of the way I want it.
John:
You can use the mail share sheet.
John:
You can use a million other apps.
John:
My whole thing was I needed to be one tap.
John:
I don't want to enter anything.
John:
I don't want to enter an address.
John:
I don't want to type anything.
John:
I just want to do one tap.
John:
Of course, around the exact time that this thing came out of beta into release, my favorite Twitter client switched to making me do two taps to get to the share sheet, which kind of bummed me out.
John:
But still, once I get to the share sheet,
John:
It is just one tap.
John:
So if you ever wanted to mail yourself something with one tap, specifically if that might be a tweet, check out Melo.
John:
This is an app just for you.
John:
Not a sponsor of the show.
John:
And I'm pretty sure they didn't make the app entirely for me, but it seems like an app is just for me.
John:
Goodness.
Casey:
All right, let's do a couple of WWDC quick hits before we move on to Ask ATP.
Casey:
This is my favorite piece of feedback that we've gotten in a decent amount of time.
Casey:
Jake Moore writes that there's a refund API, and I think we briefly touched on this, that we thought would let app developers actually issue refunds back to users.
Casey:
And that's not actually the case.
Casey:
And Jake Moore writes...
Casey:
The refund API doesn't let you programmatically issue a refund to your customers.
Casey:
It merely lets you show a sheet to customers so that they can request a refund from Apple.
Casey:
They hear back within 48 hours.
Casey:
And Jake continues, thank you, Apple, for giving a sheet.
Casey:
Nailed it.
Casey:
Well done, Jake.
Casey:
Love it.
Casey:
Absolutely love it.
Marco:
This is something that I'm a little disappointed that they didn't give us what we actually thought we were getting when it kind of breezed by in the keynote in the State of the Union.
Marco:
Because one of the biggest challenges for app developers is that we can't issue refunds.
Marco:
The only way for users to get refunds is to submit a request to Apple and then they'll hear back within 24 to 48 hours or whatever.
Marco:
And so it kind of sucks to solve certain customer service problems that we can't do this for people.
Marco:
And it isn't just people who buy it and think they got ripped off or whatever.
Marco:
It's what if somebody buys it...
Marco:
thinking it'll do something and then it turns out it doesn't do it and they email you and say hey you know why isn't it doing this and you have to write back and say that's not what it does or sorry that's impossible or whatever else like there's all sorts of cases like that where like you need the ability when running any kind of business like this to be able to tell customers hey i'm sorry this didn't work out the way you wanted or i i'd rather not take your money for this here's a refund and they didn't give us that
Marco:
They did give us something that makes it a little bit better.
Marco:
The only downside to the system they've done here – so what they've done basically is allow you to, as Casey said, to pop up a sheet that basically submits the refund request to Apple easily for them.
Marco:
The problem there is that there's this expectation that customers think that developers have control over the money.
Marco:
and customers think that if the developer wants to refund them, they can, and that this is a choice and an ability that the developers have.
Marco:
By putting this sheet up in your app, you're blurring that line even more.
Marco:
You're making it look even more like the developer has control over this.
Marco:
So if somebody submits a request for a refund...
Marco:
and then it doesn't work out for whatever reason, they're probably going to blame the developer even more and be even less happy and leave even more one-star reviews as if it's our fault, but it's not.
Marco:
So this is a good step in the sense that
Marco:
it shows Apple's listening to a problematic area.
Marco:
We have this problem area.
Marco:
Apple, for the first time ever, is making something a little bit better and easier about refunds from within apps.
Marco:
And that's good.
Marco:
That's a good first step.
Marco:
But this isn't really solving the problem we actually have.
Marco:
So hopefully, the good intentions that went into this first step
Marco:
They'll take that forward maybe next year in next year's releases and give us the real second step that we actually want, which is let us actually issue refunds if we want to.
John:
It's fascinating to me that Apple seems to not want to do that.
John:
I mean, I guess it's like, do they still do the thing where if you give someone a refund, you still have to pay Apple the 30%?
Marco:
I don't think they ever did that.
Marco:
I think that is a misunderstanding of certain language or maybe just like an urban legend.
Marco:
As far as I know, that was never actually the case.
John:
Either way, the existing rule they have about... Not rule.
John:
The policy that they have about perhaps not explaining the situation clearly to the customer, I'm assuming applies here.
John:
So for example, if you threw up your own sheet before the official one that said...
John:
I'm going to throw up a UI right now that's going to let you refund stuff.
John:
I know it's going to be inside my app, but keep in mind that that I, the developer of this app, can't actually give you a refund.
John:
Only Apple can.
John:
And the only thing the sheet you're about to see does is submit a thing to Apple and then you trigger the sheet.
John:
I'm assuming Apple will reject you for that because Apple doesn't really like you explaining to people how things work.
Marco:
I mean, I have an email snippet that does exactly that because I get the question so often.
John:
No, every developer does.
John:
That's why this is a problem, right?
John:
But I'm trying to think of why doesn't Apple want developers to be able to refund stuff?
John:
Because a developer seems to have the same incentives as Apple to either give or not give refunds because you're giving back money, right?
John:
And so good customer services, you give back the money, but of course that means you make less money.
John:
And if Apple never really did keep its 30%,
John:
then like what are they afraid of they afraid that if we let developers refund they'll just refund everybody why would a developer do that they would lose all their money i'm just i'm gonna refund everyone who's ever bought my app i'm mad with power now that i can officially issue refunds the developer has like it's not a threat to if you give developers this power like what is the bad thing that will happen right i
John:
Now, I can see the reverse where people say, well, Apple will issue refunds in the case where the developer can't.
John:
By all means, have an escalation path, as in developers can issue refunds, but also Apple gets to see the request and Apple can make its own decision.
John:
So even the developer says, no, I'm not giving you a refund.
John:
Apple can say, actually, we are giving this person a refund, right?
John:
That seems perfectly plausible.
John:
And I don't see any harm in giving the developers power on the sort of the opt-in side, as in
John:
developers can immediately give a refund anytime they want and also customers can go directly to apple and ignore the developer and just say apple give me a refund this developer's a jerk right but we don't have those instead we just have a ui maybe this is a step on the road to that right sometimes these things roll out slowly we'll see uh but yeah it's kind of a kind of a bummer that we all thought developers wouldn't have the ability to give refunds and really it's just
John:
the ability to throw up, as Marco pointed out, a very confusing UI that's only going to make customers even angrier at developers.
John:
Because I can imagine what your little text expander snippet or whatever says.
John:
But I know for a fact, having told this to many people in the real world, nobody believes you when you say that.
John:
no it seems absurd that that the developer of an app can't issue you a refund and when you say that you sound like you're scamming them you sound like a scammer like oh sorry we can't do that yeah you have to wire the money to a special you know it's like it sounds like a scam but it's the truth of the app store and it's so absurd nobody believes it no i mean and to be fair like i i do think
Marco:
There are legitimate reasons why Apple would be really cautious about going into something like this.
Marco:
In part, it's because it has to do with money.
John:
You use it for money laundering.
John:
You just buy expensive applications, then refund.
Marco:
Yet possibly.
Marco:
I mean, like the way the system is set up right now, developers don't get paid for a long time.
Marco:
I think it's like 45 to 90 days or 60 days after you actually make the sale.
Marco:
That's when you actually get the money.
Marco:
And you can only request a refund within that time period.
Marco:
So if you get a refund through Apple, the developer has not yet been paid that money.
Marco:
If you get a refund during that 30-day period or whatever, Apple just subtracts it from what they owe you.
Marco:
No money actually changed hands between Apple and the developer in that process.
Marco:
That end is probably fairly safe.
Marco:
When you're talking about the App Store and something where somebody can automatically...
Marco:
do something to the money that opens it up to potentials for ridiculous scams on ridiculous scales that we can't even imagine because the app store is such a like all of apple stuff but especially the app store it's such a massive target for any like any potential scam with the money side of things will be exploited in mass and so i think apple probably goes about that extremely cautiously and and not to mention the fact
Marco:
that when you're talking about the money side of things and adding capabilities to it, you're talking about modifying a very important and very old part of Apple's tech stack.
Marco:
The whole App Store, iTunes Store, that whole infrastructure is really old and really important.
Marco:
And
Marco:
It's like modifying old banking software.
Marco:
There's never a good time to do that.
Marco:
Nobody ever wants to do that.
Marco:
What manager is ever going to say, I want to take on that project?
Marco:
The incentives are all wrong.
Marco:
No one's ever going to want to do that.
Marco:
So it makes sense why I think Apple's going to put in relatively little resources into actually making that kind of thing happen because...
Marco:
the incentives don't make sense for anybody taking on those problems and the risks are very high to the company, even though it is something that we want as developers.
John:
As a developer of two dinky apps that no longer sell, I've often wondered how the refund stuff works because my apps are also confusing and people buy them and don't understand what they do and it's not their fault.
John:
They're really weird apps, right?
John:
And they ask for refunds.
John:
So very often when I look at my app figures graphs or whatever, what did you make today?
John:
I made negative $4.
John:
frequently i make negative money which hopefully is offset by a positive day somewhere else in the month but i do wonder if i have if i go a whole month with like a net negative balance from people getting refunds for my apps what does apple do do they just do they come and collect that for me or do they just assume that i will have future income from which they can subtract it because i'm not sure if that's entirely the case eddie q she's up at your door
Marco:
yeah he just goes you owe us 15 bucks i'm like all right i guess here like all right do you take cash or do i have to apple pay as far as i know i don't think that would be possible because again like i think you can only get a refund for sales for which the developer hasn't been paid yet so i i don't think it would be reasonably possible for you to actually have like a negative sales statement yeah i mean like the the day's income may be negative but like a previous day was positive and it's just you know i
John:
right yeah i don't i don't know um anyway buy my apps nice don't get refunds and i don't get refunds like read the descriptions i try really hard in the descriptions to explain every like literally everything they do if it's not if it's like what what it's just what you see on the menu right like if it's not listed in the description my app doesn't do it people have all these fantasies about what my apps will do and i'm like no it doesn't do that uh if it did i would have written it in the description but i didn't
Marco:
my favorite one star review ever for instapaper one star not a very good game
Casey:
True.
Casey:
Got you there.
Casey:
Congratulations.
Casey:
You played yourself.
Casey:
We have good news for people who are old and or blind, which I think basically covers all three of us per app text size in iOS 15.
Casey:
So I have not played with this myself, but apparently I think in control center, you can set the text size per application, which is very, very cool.
Marco:
this is fantastic.
Marco:
This is another thing that's so badly needed for so long.
Marco:
In this case, though, it should be fairly straightforward for Apple and not involve potential for massive Russian money laundering at scale.
Marco:
So, in this case, every developer who's ever made an app
Marco:
has had user requests saying, can you add feature X that would allow me to override some system preference just for your app?
Marco:
It could be rotation, it could be dark mode, it could be font size.
Marco:
Those are like the three big ones.
Marco:
That's why so many apps have options in their setting screens that for like rotation lock of just this app or override dark mode with your theme, override light mode with a dark theme, because it's a very common request.
Marco:
And font size is one of those things.
Marco:
So to have a feature built into the system where people can now adjust the font size for your app independently of the system font size removes the need for lots of those features to exist and gives people who want to customize or need to customize the font size
Marco:
Way more control over exactly how and when that happens.
Marco:
So this is great.
John:
Does anyone know where this UI comes from?
John:
I just have the screenshot here, but I don't know.
John:
It does look like a control center UI.
Casey:
This looks like control center to me, but I don't know.
Casey:
And the device that I have the beta on is downstairs.
Casey:
So if you really care, I can run and get it.
John:
I put iOS 15 beta on my iPad.
Casey:
Oh, that's true.
Casey:
I do.
Casey:
I have it on there and the iPad is up with me.
John:
Hold on.
John:
I was like, ah, it seems like it's stable enough and I don't really care that much on my iPad.
John:
The one thing I wanted to play with was like Safari and the iPad.
John:
That's why I put it on.
John:
Every time I tap on the, I guess you still call it the address bar.
John:
Anyway, the tab where the address, whatever, the active tab with the web address in it.
John:
Anytime I try to put the insertion point into that text field, Safari immediately crashes.
Yeah.
John:
reproducible across restarts.
John:
So iOS 15 beta 1, not really working for me so far, but I will continue to look into it as it hopefully improves.
Casey:
So I'm on my iPad, which is the 2018 13-inch, and it's on the beta.
Casey:
And I go into Settings, Control Center, and I can add Text Size as one of the controls in Control Center.
Casey:
So I'm doing this live while we're all listening.
Casey:
And then I went into Fantastical, and I see...
John:
yeah i can change the tech size in fantastical which is you know not it's in the shipping version of fantastical so so that's kind of a weird ui because i think of a control center as a global thing and for people who aren't looking at the screenshot right now it's a giant tech size bar with like a you know like the volume slider kind of but the big version and then at the bottom it has a little slider that says uh and what does this one say slack only or all apps and
John:
So if you switch it to all apps, yeah, it's global.
John:
You're changing the text size for the whole OS just like you would do in settings.
John:
But if you slide it over to the left, it applies only to the current app.
John:
And I can't think of – maybe I'm missing something.
John:
Is there anything else in Control Center that applies to the active app and not to like – not globally?
John:
Maybe they're now playing –
John:
widget or something but that's now that's globally playing right yes it's applicable to one app but it is kind of weird to think that that uh the control center now has a context now has like an implied target right the implied target is the app you're currently using it they try to make it clear with ui i think this is a reasonable ui and honestly i'm not sure where else you would do this except for burying it in settings somewhere which no one would ever find so i'm not really saying this is a bad place for it it's just a change from
John:
the way i conceptualize what control center is but anyway definitely a good feature because i wanted this feature myself like changing the the text size for the whole os is kind of a big commitment and not every app deals with text size changes that much but if you have one app that for example handles it really well and the the text is just you know generally too small by default on this app to really be able to crank it up in that app without screwing up all your other ones that's great
Casey:
You know, it's funny.
Casey:
I try to do a decent job of testing with preposterously large text, you know, because this is something that I need, especially if I don't have my contacts in.
Casey:
I'm freaking blind.
Casey:
Well, I am in, again, on my iPad.
Casey:
I went to Control Center.
Casey:
I went, and again, I happen to be in Fantastical.
Casey:
And when I go to all apps, I have a six-position slider, which is a little different than what you see in the screenshot.
Casey:
I'm not sure why.
Casey:
If I go to Fantastical only, I have a 10 position slider.
Casey:
If I crank it all the way up to a text size of 310%, the 310% is visually below the slider.
Casey:
So even Apple has instances where they haven't quite accounted for the biggest possible text size because it is freaking big.
Casey:
And that makes me happy.
Casey:
That is not just me.
Casey:
TVOS 15 will supposedly let you sign into apps with an iPhone or an iPad.
Casey:
Tell me how this works.
John:
I mean, it works the way that we had discussed.
John:
So for a variety of reasons, there's no way for you to authenticate with just the Apple TV.
John:
You need some other device where you can essentially say, oh, it's totally me here.
John:
Free up all those passwords that are in my iCloud keychain.
John:
Despite the fact that...
John:
presumably your Apple TV is signed into your same Apple ID and would have access to your iCloud keychain if only there was a way to connect those dots.
John:
But still they're using the phone and the iPad for that.
John:
But now it is, you know, aside from you just using your phone as a remote, right, where, yes, you're still accessing the same passwords, but you're accessing them so you can put them into a text field on your phone.
John:
Apparently now you can use your phone or iPad just as sort of the access key to say, yes, I approve on my phone, therefore let me in.
John:
And hopefully that will further streamline the sign in.
John:
I had in my mind but did not write in the notes the technical explanation for why the Apple TV can't just do this on its own.
John:
But I didn't write it down, so now I don't remember what it was.
John:
Presumably, it's because there's no sort of way to authenticate yourself on the Apple TV.
John:
Like, for example, when you turn on your television...
John:
You don't have to constantly sort of unlock your Apple TV or sign into it like you would with a laptop or a Mac or something like that.
John:
The Apple TV, once you enter your Apple ID and everything, is perpetually unlocked.
John:
I know there's a setting for don't allow purchases after 15 minutes after entering your password and a bunch of stuff like that, but it just seems like the Apple TV, its current mode is that it's not...
John:
it doesn't have the same level of security as any of apple's other devices so for it to have unfettered access to all the passwords in your icloud keychain uh without another device somewhere else that has higher security confirming it like a watch or a phone or an iphone or you know an ipad or whatever it just seems like something apple's not quite ready to do but they did apparently make it better with tv os 15 i don't have this beta installed but we'll find out when we get installed but if it
John:
If it saves me, even if it just saves me having to enter a text field and do the password completion there, if it's just instead a UI that I can just, you know, stare at my phone or have it, you know, or do watch unlock, like the watch works for unlocking a Mac, that'll be an improvement.
John:
And I will enjoy that the next time I, the next time I buy another Apple TV for some inexplicable reason, because we all just keep buying every new one that they put out.
Marco:
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Casey:
Let's do some Ask ATP.
Casey:
And Ian writes, Hey, I'm curious if any of you have cut the cord or if you still have cable.
Casey:
Classic cable or one of the... What is OTT?
John:
Over the... Over the top, I believe.
John:
Over the tear.
John:
I think it's supposed to be over the air, maybe?
Marco:
No, no.
Marco:
OTT is... It's like you pay stuff in addition to other stuff.
Hmm.
Casey:
Well, anyway, I will start.
Casey:
I still do have a cable plan.
Casey:
I wonder all the time why I do, to be honest with you.
Casey:
But but no, I still have a cable plan and I we use it enough that I'm not actively looking to get rid of it.
Casey:
And my understanding is if one was to look at the shows that they watch, oftentimes if you don't have a cable plan, and I've not done this math myself, but oftentimes if you don't have a cable plan, by the time you piecemeal all the different things to get all the shows you want, you end up basically at a cable plan anyway.
Casey:
Um, so I'm still playing, paying, uh, Verizon files for cable TV and I have a single set top box that consumes it as well as a past sponsor channels, um, which uses TV everywhere.
Casey:
I think it's called in order to be able to consume it as well.
Casey:
Uh, and that's what I do.
Casey:
John, I think you're in a slightly similar, uh, boat is me.
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
Yeah, I still pay for all the channels in a regular cable thing.
John:
I still have multiple TiVos in the house.
John:
They have cable cards.
John:
They record things off of the television.
John:
I'm kind of in a similar situation to Casey in that occasionally I look at it and say, could we drop cable and just do it all on streaming?
John:
I mean, maybe it's slightly different in that I already pay for like so many streaming services, but it would probably not save me that much money due to the big bundle that I get with my internet and telephone and everything.
John:
And it would be more of a pain to seek out and subscribe to and deal with all the various channels I do.
John:
And still, we are still using the TiVos, right?
John:
I do watch tons of stuff on streaming.
John:
but the TiVos do catch a lot of stuff.
John:
It's kind of frustrating how streaming-centric my viewing is now, because sometimes I forget to set up the TiVo to record a thing, and then I realize I don't have any way to see the most recent episode of Show X if I didn't tell the TiVo to record it.
John:
But the show aired, and I could have recorded it, but I didn't, but it's not on any streaming yet.
John:
But if I didn't have cable at all, I would have no chance of seeing that, because sometimes they're still sort of cable-first or cable-only things, or...
John:
Anyway, I know there are other options like YouTube TV and Hulu has a TV thing.
John:
Like you don't have to pay for traditional cable to get sort of broadcast television.
John:
But I still do just because it's what I'm used to.
John:
And I think it actually is saving me a little bit of money.
John:
And some of the other things like, you know, I pay for HBO, like plain old fashioned cable HBO.
John:
It means I get HBO Max, quote unquote, for free.
John:
uh because it's part of my cable channel same thing with like when i'm looking for something on streaming i have no idea where anything is so i go to the just watch app or site and it tells me oh that's on epics i'm like what the hell is epics do i have epics turns out i do i have everything so i go to the epics app and it says hey sign in with your cable provider and i do and i've got epics like same thing with everything showtime but i have all the channels and very often by having all the channels with plain old-fashioned cable means i also have all the streaming apps with no commercials
John:
so i've still got the cable and i like it and by the way the cord cutting thing is such it's like mechanical keyboard right or doing something in hardware versus software right it's a nonsensical phrase if you think about it i'm gonna cut the cord and only do stuff over the internet which comes to my house probably through a cord but it's not the same corpus sorry maybe it is the same but still it's not the same thing as in most cases i think it is the same cord
John:
But you know what I mean?
John:
I mean cable, not like the cable, but cable as in cable town with a K, you know, from 30 Rock.
John:
Like that's what I mean.
John:
English is a confusing language and cutting, cutting the cord.
John:
So you can then use a different cord or the same cord, but it's not.
John:
Anyway, it's confusing.
John:
Mechanical keyboards.
John:
Very dumb too.
John:
Anyway, go on.
Marco:
marco what's your situation um i cut the cord sorry i uh i canceled cable something like 11 years ago or more okay as you cut the cord and canceled cable every single one of those words in the k in front of it i think it was 15 years ago it was a it was it's been a while um
Marco:
Because I – the thing is like what keeps people on cable longer, like even people who are nerds, usually it's either you watch a truly absurd amount of TV like John or you are super into sports.
Marco:
And I'm neither of those things.
Marco:
I watch some TV and no sports, no live news, nothing like that.
Marco:
So it was very easy for me.
Okay.
John:
And I'm going to say you watch substantially less television than the average American.
Marco:
Most likely, yeah.
John:
Substantially, not just less in terms of hours spent, but also fewer things.
John:
Correct.
John:
You're very selective with your TV watching.
Marco:
Yeah, and one of the things is that there's so much stuff on Netflix and everything else that we pay for.
Marco:
Because right now we have Netflix, the Disney thing, the HBO thing, and the ad-free Hulu thing.
Marco:
Between all those – I mean they're so – oh, I guess we also have Amazon Prime Video because everyone has Amazon Prime Video accidentally.
Marco:
So we have all these things.
Marco:
We don't watch most of what's on most of them.
Marco:
Our needs are low and I don't want cable TV.
Marco:
I will occasionally get a chance to watch TV like over-the-air TV or cable TV like in a hotel or something or at family houses or whatever.
Marco:
And I can't stand it.
Marco:
I can't stand the commercials and the channels and everything.
Marco:
This is why I've never been into the whole TiVo option because you still have to deal with the commercials.
Marco:
I mean, you can fast forward through them.
John:
You don't see the commercials.
John:
That experience you described, that's exactly why people got TiVos.
John:
I said goodbye to that experience in 2003 or whenever the hell I got my first TiVo.
John:
I haven't seen broadcast television with commercials.
John:
like the only time i ever see it is the super bowl and then i'm the only there to watch the commercials but you still have to like fast forward through them right there's a single is a single button press like literally a single button press you just press the button it jumps to the end of the car why do they make you press that button instead of doing it automatically i don't know they're afraid of getting sued but anyway it's down to a single button press no that's still too much for me but anyway i i have no interest in in that whole thing
John:
It's way better than like if I am doomed to watch something on a streaming service that either doesn't have a way for you to give them money to get rid of the commercials or you don't feel like giving them money to watch this one episode of the show and they have unskippable commercials on a streaming service.
John:
That makes me beg for my little green button on my Tivo remote.
John:
Please, please just let me skip.
Marco:
I literally won't watch a show if that's the only reason.
Marco:
If that's the only way I can watch it, I just won't watch it.
John:
Because it's always the same commercial three times too.
Marco:
oh yeah that's why like i didn't have hulu until relatively recently when they launched a like truly ad-free thing because i i will not do that like i i don't care i don't care how good people say the show is if that's what i have to do to watch it i won't watch it yeah i know hulu has some other kind of like broadcast television thing or whatever but whatever hulu i'm paying for never has commercials but i don't think i'm paying for the one where people try to use hulu to replace cable i just pay for like hulu so i can watch like
John:
uh the madman woman dressed all in red handmaid's tail i got it eventually i'm sold uh but yeah handmaid's tail and a bunch of like hulu quote-unquote originals that's what i watch in hulu and they don't have commercials but i always dread wandering around hulu and accidentally getting something with a commercial that's bad
John:
Speaking of streaming services and cable television, despite me having just said that I subscribe to a million streaming services and pay for like all the things you can pay a cable company for, I recently experienced something very frustrating, which I'm sure is very familiar for people who live outside the US, which is that there's a thing that aired on quote unquote television that for reasons having to do with like
John:
region or like rights i don't even understand the reason but like i was unable to watch this so this is uh it's a weird show to begin with it's a remake of war of the worlds first season aired what seems like ages ago it was probably only like a year and a half but you know the covid you really screwed everything up
John:
But whenever the first season aired, I watched and I'm like, oh, that was cute.
John:
I wonder if there will be a season two.
John:
Well, there is a season two and it was just released.
John:
And according to everything I can find on the internet, it was released all at once in a big dump on a French streaming service.
John:
And it was also released...
John:
one episode every two weeks on like Fox or epics, speaking of epics from before, right?
John:
But like everywhere I go on the internet, it says, oh yeah, no, totally.
John:
They dropped this whole season, all like 10 episodes.
John:
They were available since May 24th.
John:
I'm like,
John:
But how?
John:
Who do I have to give money to?
John:
By the way, it's in English for the most part.
John:
There's some French subtitles in some part.
John:
But anyway, it's a show with American-ish actors or at least British actors or whatever.
John:
It's not a foreign program where I'm trying to get their content or whatever.
John:
Seems like a show that's made for me, but I can't figure out how to give anyone money for me to see the things that everyone in the rest of the world was able to see apparently in its entirety on March 24th.
John:
Or not March, it was May 24th or whatever.
John:
So I'm sitting here waiting around because some local television stations are getting episodes, like two episodes every week or something.
John:
So I'm assuming waiting around for a new episode of the show to be released.
John:
and it feels terrible i can feel when when the shows are released one you know at a time like an apple tv plus i feel like hey the rest of the world's waiting with me but for this middle of the road war of the worlds remake series season two i feel like the whole rest of the world has seen it and i'm just sitting around here like a schlub waiting for something to happen so i can get the next episode again i'm totally willing to give people money but apparently that is not possible and it's frustrating
Casey:
I'm so sorry, John.
Casey:
All right, Kyle Mattson writes, what are your favorite keyboards?
Casey:
I, like Marco, I believe, have been using the Microsoft Sculpt for a while, but the thing has an average lifespan of about 11 months in my experience.
Casey:
For me, I am using the keyboard that came with the iMac Pro, which is the space gray or black or what have you edition of the Magic Keyboard with Numeric Keypad.
Casey:
I like this one.
Casey:
I don't use a numeric keypad that often, and I could make a strong argument with myself to get the 10 keyless version of this.
Casey:
But nevertheless, this is what I've been using, and I quite like it both aesthetically and the feel of it.
Casey:
As I've been saying for years and years, I love the feel of the Magic Keyboard.
Casey:
I have not yet gotten to the point of getting like the cherry taster pack, whatever it's called, sample pack, because I know...
Casey:
Yes, for tasting.
Casey:
Because I know if I do, I'm going to turn into an imposter Mike Hurley.
Casey:
But nevertheless, that's what I'm using.
Casey:
Marco, let's start with you, or continue with you since you were mentioned.
Casey:
Are you using the Sculpt still?
Marco:
I sure am.
Marco:
I have tried almost every other ergonomic keyboard that I've ever heard of or been told about.
Marco:
And many of them are okay.
Marco:
Many of them are even decent.
Marco:
But none of them are as comfortable on me and fit me as well as... Was it a pair of pants?
Marco:
Yes, as the Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard.
Marco:
Not the Surface keyboard.
Marco:
That's even worse.
Marco:
Doesn't work with Macs.
Marco:
Don't get it.
Marco:
Believe me, all the various super boutique-y custom ones, the ones with those giant wooden rests, I've tried all of them.
Marco:
The Logitech one, everything.
Marco:
I've tried them all, and the Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard is still my favorite keyboard.
Marco:
It is most comfortable for me.
Marco:
I never have RSI problems when I use this keyboard, so I'm still very much into it.
Marco:
Now,
Marco:
It is correct that they're not very well made and they do tend to die between, you know, one and two years of use and experience.
Marco:
So I just have like four spares.
Marco:
It's your cheese grater.
Marco:
It's got a design flaw, breaks, but you really like it.
John:
So you bought a bunch of them.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
There are a couple of tips I can give you.
Marco:
Number one, if you are into this keyboard as much as I am, don't buy the big box set for $100 that has the mouse that you have to keep throwing away.
Marco:
They have one called the Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard for Business.
Marco:
The serial SKU is 5KV-00001.
Marco:
We'll put a link in the show notes.
Marco:
It's only about $60 most of the time.
Marco:
And Amazon sells it.
Marco:
And it only has the keyboard and the little numpad that I keep throwing away.
Marco:
So I'm only throwing away a numpad instead of a numpad and a mouse.
Marco:
And it's less packaging, less waste.
Marco:
So when it dies, you can get this one for less money than the whole set.
Marco:
And I just consider it a cost of doing business that I have to use a new $60-ish keyboard every 18 months or so whenever it flakes out.
Marco:
The second thing I can recommend is...
Marco:
The way it flakes out seems to be like... It kind of feels like low reception.
Marco:
Things like dropped keys or lag while typing.
Marco:
And you might think, replace the batteries.
Marco:
It usually doesn't do it.
Marco:
Which is how you know it's... If replacing the batteries still makes it flake out, that's how you know it's dead.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
The reception on it is kind of weak in general.
Marco:
And it's not Bluetooth.
Marco:
It's one of those ones that has its own little USB transceiver thing.
Marco:
And so what you can do is get a USB extension cord, tape it to the underside of your desk, and stick the receiver in the end of it, and tape it so it's right below the keyboard on your desk.
Marco:
And so therefore it only has to travel.
Marco:
I mean, it's still traveling through your desktop, but it's only traveling like, you know, four inches or whatever, instead of however many, you know, feet it is between you and the back of your computer where the USB thing is plugged in.
Marco:
I have found that helps a lot.
Marco:
It makes it much more reliable and you might be able to get a little more time out of one when you have the USB transceiver like taped very, very close to it somewhere.
Yeah.
Casey:
That's wild.
John:
My experience is that Bluetooth is the one with bad signal.
John:
And I love the little Logitech things because their signal works from like across the room.
John:
So I have the opposite experience.
Casey:
I hear people pooping all over Bluetooth all the time for like keyboards and mice and stuff.
Casey:
I guess I'm a CEC and a Bluetooth unicorn because I have never had those kinds of issues with Bluetooth.
Casey:
And the idea of relying on a wart, especially on a laptop, is just disgusting to me.
Casey:
So I am sad for you that you have not been able to live the glorious Bluetooth life that I have.
Marco:
Yeah, I still haven't either.
Marco:
For my pointy devices, I still use an Apple Magic trackpad on the left and an Apple Magic mouse on the right.
Marco:
and there are i'm still getting bluetooth problems with my m1 mac which is worse on the m1s but was never really good even on the intels and this is like using apple's hardware paired with apple's computer and apple's os everything is new everything is perfect like it should be it should be perfect and i still have like bluetooth flake outs which feel like a software issue but still regardless of whose fault it is it's an issue that is constant with bluetooth peripherals
Marco:
And the things with their own little USB dongles never gave me those issues.
John:
Anyway, John, what are you using?
John:
So I used the Apple Extended 2 keyboard for most of my life after the introduction of that keyboard, but then RSI made me switch off to a keyboard that is easier to press the keys on, that requires less force, even though I prefer the Apple Extended 2, just RSI and health said you need a keyboard with nicer keys.
John:
And so I eventually switched to Apple's
John:
sort of slim aluminum line of keyboards that have changed over the years in subtle ways i always use the extended one i do use the numpad i'm reminded of how much i rely on the numpad every time i'm booted into windows doing something i start typing numbers into a web form and nothing happens because numlock isn't on because if there was a good article like you know how how long ago like where did numlock come from and why was it added for like to add cursor keys for keyboards without arrows on them it's like a
John:
50 year old decision that windows users continue to suffer with much like drive letters anyway i do use the numpad to enter uh text but that said i would buy an apple extended keyboard without the numpad probably like this is speculative because i've never actually done it probably
John:
if i could get one that still had real arrow keys and page up page down home end right like those keys i use all the time and i love having full-sized arrow keys you know a just every single one of the arrow keys is completely full size people are just begging on their laptops obviously where it's a more space constrained environment to get the left and right keys to be half-sized so you can feel for them guess what i can feel for them
John:
And they're all full-size.
John:
This is the ultimate luxury.
John:
Everyone should have a full-size extended keyboard.
John:
Yes, I know it pushes your mouse off to the right because of the dumb numpad.
John:
But like I said, the numpad is actually kind of cool.
John:
When you're good at entering numbers with it, I mean, half the time I feel like I'm actually entering is like two-factor codes and stuff.
John:
The numpad is actually kind of great.
John:
But yeah, arrow keys and hominem.
John:
So what am I actually using now?
John:
uh pretty much as i've continued to buy mac computers every time they came with one of those slim aluminum ones i would just rotate like my previous slim aluminum one for the new one and they changed in size and color of the key caps or whatever i'm currently using the keyboard that came with my mac pro which i believe is the same keyboard that casey was talking about they have what is it magic keyboard or whatever uh and it has black keys on it because that's what comes with the mac pro um
John:
and up in the attic i have a bunch of apple aluminum keyboards of various messages i have worn out slash broken two aluminum keyboards in my life one of them was the one i used at work for like eight years and the d key started to fail and i feel like that one put in some hard some hard hours uh so i don't feel too bad about that but in general they have been pretty reliable um
John:
And that's why I have the spares up in the attic because I stop using them if I get a new one, but the old ones are perfectly fine.
John:
And all my peripherals are connected with a wire because my computer probably has bad Bluetooth connection, but it's also far away from my mouse and keyboard.
John:
And you know what doesn't glitch out?
John:
Wired USB.
John:
Not through a hub.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So this is probably going to take us a minute.
Casey:
Lewis O'Neill wrote a long time ago, and then things keep happening.
Casey:
But Lewis wrote, Tim Cook said in a recent interview that allowing sideloading would destroy the iPhone security and privacy measures.
Casey:
Lots of people seem to disagree and say that it doesn't add up.
Casey:
What specifically would you say would be detrimental to users who wouldn't sideload if other users were allowed to sideload or use third-party app stores?
Casey:
There's kind of a lot to unpack there.
Casey:
But in short, like, what's the deal with sideloading anyway?
Marco:
I think this topic was sideloaded into SKTV.
Casey:
Yeah, I think you're right.
Casey:
Actually, well done.
John:
Apple put out this big PDF that's like, oh, here's how the world would end if we allowed sideloading.
John:
And there's lots of people commenting on it and so on and so forth.
John:
As has been the case with all of Apple's interactions with the courts and our government, Apple presents...
John:
a sort of a unified theory of what they're trying to do that glosses over technical nuances that seemingly no one involved in the court cases or the government proceedings knows enough to challenge them on.
John:
But that every single technical person who looks at Apple's, you know, sort of larger argument says...
John:
Yeah, but Apple, all those things you said, you're kind of lumping everything into one big ball of mud.
John:
But we know, like between us technical people, that these are separable things.
John:
And just because you like to think of them as a big hole doesn't mean they are a big hole.
John:
That said, there are a lot of nuances to this.
John:
So this has become a big story recently.
John:
A bunch of people have been writing about it and tweeting about it.
John:
And again, Apple has put out this PDF that you can look at.
John:
This paints this picture of what Apple's doing and why.
John:
But I think the nuances are worth getting into.
John:
So just to be clear, to start the sideloading means, can I put apps on my iPhone or iPad that come from someplace other than the App Store?
John:
Obviously, you've always been able to do that.
John:
If you're a developer, you can build your own app and stick it on there.
John:
Test flight betas, enterprise certificates, there's a bunch of places that qualify for that.
John:
But really what we're talking about is like,
John:
a regular person who's not a developer who's not on a beta who's not getting apps pushing them from an enterprise certificate just like oh i heard about this cool new app you should try it out and you tell your friend and they can go get it and that app comes from someplace other than the apple app store that is the scenario that apple is painting as this apocalyptic thing that will destroy the universe and destroy apple's business and destroy customers confidence and so on and so forth right and so lewis is asking uh
John:
What would be the harm in sideloading?
John:
If you don't want to sideload, don't sideload.
John:
But what if I want to?
John:
Why can't you just let me do it?
John:
What would be detrimental to users who wouldn't sideload if other people were allowed to?
John:
How does allowing someone over there to sideload hurt me?
John:
And that, I think, is a good question.
John:
That's why I put it in here.
John:
Because, and Apple kind of makes this argument, but they spend a lot of time making a bunch of bogus arguments, so it's distracting.
John:
But the sort of real damage that would be done by sideloading isn't what Apple spends most of its time talking about, like
John:
oh it'll have viruses or there'll be scams and you know there's all these things you can look at and say okay well but there's scams on the app store too and well viruses you'd still be subject to sandboxing you can get all these sort of technical arguments but here's here's what i think uh the the biggest damage would be
John:
It's not damage as in like, oh, the freedom of these users to sideload apps would cause a problem.
John:
The problem is sort of in the supply and demand arrangement, right?
John:
This is the scenario that I think would play out pretty quickly.
John:
All you need is one app that is desirable to a large number of people.
John:
Let's say Fortnite.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
I don't want to pick Fortnite.
John:
Pick anything.
John:
Some app.
John:
An app that we've never heard of before.
John:
A new app, right?
John:
The equivalent of Fortnite 10 years now.
John:
Some app that is super popular, that is desirable, that this app controls demand because people want this app.
John:
When there is something like that, individuals will overcome a lot of barriers to get that thing.
John:
Witness having a hit show on a streaming service.
John:
Suddenly people who had no interest in streaming service and maybe hate streaming services will say, but everyone's talking about the show.
John:
I got to get Netflix because it's got the show that everyone's talking about.
John:
I don't know what Netflix is, but people keep talking about the show, so I'm going to get it or insert a streaming service, right?
John:
All you need is one app that is desired by a lot of people.
John:
that is only available through sideloading to essentially bootstrap the entire world to a first approximation into sideloading your thing.
John:
And once they've sideloaded your thing and have started bypassing the app store, this is the whole like, how does it harm me if I don't want to sideload?
John:
Like, well, what if I just want to sideload but other people don't want to?
John:
That's not something that Apple or you or users can control.
John:
App developers essentially control how many people are going to be sideloading, right?
John:
Because by creating a desirable app and then only offering it for sideloading, that will sort of
John:
require everyone to do whatever it takes to make their phone able to sideload this popular app so for people who say sideloading it wouldn't be a big deal because not a lot of people would do it that i think is not true initially sure who cares about sideloading no one would do it they would be behind a million toggles or whatever but one popular act cracks that door open and once everyone's phones are able to sideload
John:
Because they all did it so they could run Hyper Fortnite 2057, whatever the popular app is.
John:
Flappy Birds.
John:
It doesn't matter what it is.
Marco:
Facebook.
Marco:
Imagine if it's Facebook.
John:
God knows what they would do.
John:
Once you've done that, then you've essentially opened up everyone's phone to sideline.
John:
So what's the harm in sideline?
John:
What can possibly happen?
John:
What I was thinking about this and what it really comes down to is...
John:
you're giving up, at the least, you are giving up one extra set of eyes on crap that goes on, right?
John:
Because there's a million protections in iOS, and you can leave every single one of those protections in.
John:
Sandboxing is in.
John:
App has to be notarized by Apple.
John:
No private APIs because Apple will scan them for it.
John:
You can include every single restriction that exists in the App Store, just subtract one.
John:
And the one you would subtract is a human being saying...
John:
you know, you can't tell people your website exists, right?
John:
It's the human oversight is the one thing that you're giving up in sideloading.
John:
But everything else that is protecting our phones would still be there.
John:
But the human oversight is not nothing, right?
John:
It's terrible in that they say, oh yeah, we don't like your business model, therefore you can't be on the store.
John:
That's why people want sideloading.
John:
That's why Apple is dumb to be fighting this fight, right?
John:
But it is actually a thing.
John:
And the lack of that human oversight means that because the sideloading door has been opened by Fortnite or Facebook or Flappy Bird or whatever, that allows the world's worst scams to sort of freely flow in.
John:
We're not using private APIs.
John:
We don't break out of the sandbox, but we do present a user experience that's filled with dark patterns and terrible things that would never get past a human being anymore.
John:
or we hope, wouldn't get past the human being in Apple.
John:
Now, we all know tons of scam things get past the App Store, which is why we complain about it, because it seems like we're getting the worst of all possible worlds.
John:
But I feel like with a sideloading door open, there would be more of that.
John:
So I don't think sideloading would be an apocalypse, but for the people who think...
John:
There is this rosy picture where sideloading would just be for the nerds and everyone else wouldn't have to wouldn't have to deal with it.
John:
And they would just buy everything from the app store.
John:
I don't think that is plausible because the motivation to sideload is extremely strong for, quote unquote, benign reasons.
John:
Oh, I want a different business model.
John:
All the reasons we all want, you know, we want these restrictions to be lowered.
John:
So that we don't have to follow Apple's idea of what should be in the App Store.
John:
But then once you've done that, now every possible app can flow through that door.
John:
And even if every single one of those apps is just as safe as the current apps, but just has one fewer step to get in front of people's eyes.
John:
That one fewer step is still one fewer step.
John:
And, you know, you give these people an inch and they'll take a mile.
John:
So, you know, I read the Apple PDF.
John:
I think that most of what they say in there is bogus because they they lay out the case of like every protection will go by the wayside and won't be able to do everything.
John:
And I feel like the actual reality is side loading can be done with every single protection still there except for one.
John:
And Apple doesn't make that case.
John:
Apple makes the case that if you take away one protection, you take away them all.
John:
And I think that's kind of messed up.
Casey:
So I'm not trying to be funny, but I feel like I'm getting two different vibes from you.
Casey:
You're saying that Apple's PDF is garbage.
Casey:
Maybe that's a bit extreme, but Apple's PDF is disingenuous and sideloading ain't so bad.
Casey:
But then again, sideloading could be really crummy.
John:
I'm kind of doing the thing where like the people who are super optimistic about sideloading,
John:
they're not thinking it through.
John:
They're thinking only nerds are going to sideload and it's not going to be a big deal.
John:
And I think that is not the case.
John:
And that's more towards Lewis's question.
John:
He's like, what's the big deal?
John:
Sideloading.
John:
If I sideload, how does that hurt you?
John:
It's not realizing that
John:
The motivation to essentially get everyone in the world to jump through a million hoops to enable sideloading will exist rapidly.
John:
And so if you if you think sideloading is not harmful because most people won't do it, that's bogus.
John:
But Apple's thing, on the other hand, of saying if you have sideloading, that means it's a free for all is obviously not true.
John:
Like, it's not the same as jailbreaking.
John:
Apple can still require notarization.
John:
They can still scan for private AVI usage.
John:
Like, you're just subtracting one step, and it's the step that we all hate where Apple says, like, oh, you can't tell people your website exists.
John:
That's the step people want to get rid of.
John:
Or you can't use a third-party payment service, right?
John:
Those are all technically possible within all the restrictions that I listed.
John:
Can you use a third party payment service while still applying all the restrictions?
John:
Yes, there are apps in the app store right now that collect your credit card, right?
John:
Because they have physical goods, right?
John:
It's clear that you can that you can comply with every single one of the app stores restrictions, except for that very last one where someone says, Oh, yeah, you can't take credit card numbers.
John:
And you know, the world doesn't end.
Marco:
Yeah, I feel like this – like you can both say most of Apple's PDF is garbage and also agree with the general idea that sideloading on iOS is probably a bad idea.
Marco:
I think also – see also John Gruber's post on Daring Fireball today, which makes a lot of similar arguments to what John was just saying.
Marco:
I thought that was pretty good.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I think I'm mostly with John and John that I really don't want sideloading on iOS to become a thing.
Marco:
I do think it would dramatically change the platform not for the better.
Marco:
Because again, like what the Johns were saying, it's not like only nerds will do it.
Marco:
There will be major apps that
Marco:
instantly that that just want to be out of the app store process that will just bail out like you know facebook netflix whatever it is like amazon like they'll they'll they'll bail out and then tons of customers will will all of a sudden become like sideloaders and that'll just become a norm and that introduces at that kind of scale that introduces potential for problems um
Marco:
Not all the problems Apple said in their PDF.
Marco:
Not even close.
Marco:
But some problems nonetheless.
Marco:
This is why, you know, whenever we criticize the way Apple's handling this in-app purchase stuff and all their weird studies and PR BSE statements and their terrible testimony that they gave during Epic's trial, whenever we criticize that or whenever I complain on Twitter about it,
Marco:
wow do i see a lot of people jumping to defend apple and to excuse every single greedy thing they try to do saying well they built their platform they can do what they want or shouldn't they be entitled today i had somebody tell me that if they give up their in-app purchase requirement they would have to start charging me to use their apis which i thought was funny um given that it's like it's like well did they do that on the mac
Marco:
That's weird anyway.
Marco:
But – and the Mac is obviously a great example of like, well, the Mac is already this way that they say is impossible slash would bankrupt them slash would become a virus-ridden hellscape, and it's not, and it's fine.
Marco:
But anyway –
Marco:
For all those people out there who are super defensive of Apple in this way, who really want to keep arguing with us to say, Apple deserves all this money for themselves, and how are they going to pay for themselves?
Marco:
I'm sure they're going to have trouble.
Marco:
For all those people out there who jump to that defense, I ask you to consider what happens in...
Marco:
If U.S.
Marco:
Congress people get to decide what Apple can and can't do with their platform, do we really want that?
Marco:
Think about that really hard.
Marco:
Look at the history of how well U.S.
Marco:
congressional representatives –
Marco:
understand and know about and handle technology issues these are not the people we want to make massive controlling decisions about our little world of tech over here we've grown and we've been great and we've had a wonderful time in this little world over here of tech but
Marco:
mostly because we move too quickly for all those ignorant dinosaurs to interfere with us if they're going to start interfering with us we're not going to like the outcome there's lots of really good important reasons why if you like the way apple does things if you like the way the tech business does things if
Marco:
You really, really don't want to have the U.S.
Marco:
government start writing the rules in a big way.
Marco:
And that's what they're doing.
Marco:
And the primary concern – like if you look at like what Apple is doing here strategically –
Marco:
And I think it says a lot that people like Ben Thompson and John Gruber are making this case as well.
Marco:
Strategically, it makes very little sense for Apple to be so vehemently defending a very small part of their revenue.
Marco:
in a way that might make legislators interfere in a very big way with the way they make their products like that's that is strategically bizarre it's it's almost like i think if we look back if suppose in 20 years we're looking back on like this era of apple and we're trying to figure and people are enumerating like you know what what went well and what was maybe a strategic blunder that they made um
Marco:
I think there are going to be two massive strategic blunders that we're going to point to at this time in Apple history in the future.
Marco:
Number one is the over-reliance on China.
Marco:
And number two is this decision right here.
Marco:
I think this is a massive strategic blunder for Apple to be holding on so tightly to their in-app purchase exclusivity and non-competition rules, the anti-steering rules.
Marco:
They're holding on so tightly to that.
Marco:
which is probably, if they relax those rules, might cost them a few percentage points of their service.
Marco:
It wouldn't even be a big amount.
Marco:
They're holding on so tightly to that while kind of like playing chicken with legislators and saying, what are you going to do?
Marco:
What are you going to do?
Marco:
Well, they're trying to do a lot.
Marco:
And yeah, the U.S.
Marco:
is pretty messed up in our legislative branch, and most of the stuff probably won't get through because we can't get a lot of things through these days.
Marco:
But what if they do?
Marco:
What if any of these bills get through?
Marco:
If any of these bills get through, Apple has a problem.
Marco:
And depending on which of the bills might get through, they have bigger problems.
Marco:
They really shouldn't be playing with this much fire.
Marco:
And they are doing it.
Marco:
They're gambling their own future ability to operate in basic ways that they need to operate in.
Marco:
in order to not potentially lose a few percent of their service revenue.
Marco:
It seems like a gamble that is not worth taking.
Marco:
And so if you are out there saying Apple deserves to do whatever they want and they should keep all their money, can they just keep making more and they need people like me to defend them?
Marco:
They don't.
Marco:
But if you're that kind of person, if that's your point of view, you want them to do what it takes to relieve the regulatory pressure and get the government off their back.
Marco:
Because if the government stays on their back, things are going to go badly for all of us.
Marco:
We don't want that.
Marco:
You don't want that.
Marco:
And they shouldn't want that.
Marco:
So what we need is to relieve the government pressure.
Marco:
And the best way to do that is for them to relax the in-app purchase rules just enough.
Marco:
so that people like spotify can have their own business off to the side not using that purchase maybe kick them out to a web view to do the purchase who cares maybe if you if you have to carve out an exclusion to say all right games can't do it but everything else can that's not great but that that would also probably be enough to get most regulation off their back if you could just do that
Marco:
This entire barrage of crap that's all over Apple right now from regulators around the world mostly or entirely disappears.
Marco:
And then the government has way less steam in it to try to make larger changes to Apple, like banning integration of their own stuff, banning bundling of their own services.
Marco:
Believe me, we don't want that.
Marco:
As an industry and certainly as Apple people and Apple itself, you do not want those kind of laws to even be floated, let alone to get anywhere near passing.
Marco:
So we want Apple to get the government off their back and be self-regulatable.
Marco:
And the only way to do that at this point is relieve those in-app purchase rules a little bit
Marco:
Let people like Spotify and Netflix and Amazon link out to a payment method that's not in their app.
Marco:
That is the compromise that's going to be necessary here.
Marco:
And if Apple continues to refuse to do that, they're playing with fire.
Marco:
And that is a massive strategic blunder.
John:
I do wonder if it is already too late.
John:
Like I think about like, you know, we've been saying this forever, but it's like at a certain point, once the ball starts rolling, Apple says, ah, no, we changed our mind.
John:
You can use your own payment method.
John:
People are like, ah, yeah, well, too late.
John:
We're already kind of doing this thing here.
John:
It's like, but no, we're going to be nicer.
John:
We're going to do it.
John:
It's like,
John:
Yeah, but you don't understand.
John:
See, we already kind of like we have things like drafted up and we're going to like vote on them and stuff.
John:
And we would have to like sort of relitigate this whole thing and rediscuss it because of your last minute.
John:
Like now what Apple, I think, really wants or is expecting to like, OK, if it looks like we're going to lose this, we will essentially...
John:
come to the negotiating table and sort of plea bargain our way down to okay uh you if you don't pass these laws we'll do x y and z like i think they're hoping that that's what's going to happen but i can't tell if that really is happening but at a certain point when momentum gets going like maybe it's too late like no matter what apple does for sort of reasonable fixes that just like it's a thing that's sort of you know trundling down the tracks and something's going to happen now you know as you noted um
John:
uh our country is not particularly good at passing laws even when everyone in the country wants them this is kind of popular but it's not as popular as many other things that we're not able to get past and there's always good old money in politics and corruption all the other things that can stop this from happening so it seems like from the outside that apple is of the opinion that uh there's no way you're going to do this to us because we just have too much money and power and so we are going not going to give an inch
John:
uh and we are just going to press and press our case as hard as we possibly can and just assume that we are too rich and powerful to be subject to your laws and then maybe they're right like you know marco you're saying this is going to come out as a big blunder but if they play this game of chicken and win it's going to look genius right you know we stared it down we didn't give an inch or whatever um but the thing about giving setting aside like the current situation with these laws most of which i think have no chance of going anywhere but some of them might um
John:
If you think about where Apple has to give, like, in general, you want to boil it down.
John:
Nobody cares about this stuff until you mess with their money, right?
John:
And the only people who count are the people who are also rich and powerful.
John:
So if you mess with the money of other rich and powerful companies and people, you find yourself in this situation.
John:
So if there's anything Apple's doing in the App Store, ask yourself, are they messing with somebody's money here?
John:
And if the answer is yes, those are the places where if Apple wants to not be forced to do sideloading or whatever, Apple has to change the rules.
John:
Am I messing with someone's money by taking 30% of all their in-app purchases?
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Am I messing with someone's money by telling them, you can't run that kind of business on the app store because we don't like it?
John:
Yeah, you're messing with their money.
John:
Like, if you're basically saying, you've got a great idea for an app...
John:
We don't think that's the right fit for the App Store.
John:
So you just can't have an app like that, period.
John:
No, any app like that.
John:
It's not your specific app.
John:
It's just this whole category of app.
John:
You feel like, but, you know, especially if you've already built that app, you have big problems.
John:
But even if you're not, right?
John:
That's, if you just turn those relief valves of Apple will mess with your money, not at all, but less, much less.
John:
There will be less messing with your money.
John:
suddenly all the other legitimate complaints that people have mostly disappear because it's like, yeah, but no one who's rich and powerful cares.
John:
So, you know, abstract arguments about innovation or whatever.
John:
It's like, look, is there some big company that's not able to make money or make as much money because of some rule that is essentially self-serving for Apple?
John:
Then you've got a problem.
John:
But if not, everything's fine.
John:
So it's not as, you know, if Apple wants to triage this and do sort of a plea bargain type deal,
John:
they know what they have to do right it's just painful for them to ever give up money that they're currently getting and as marco pointed out it's not like this is like oh if they give up this money they're going to go bankrupt like this is not the majority of their income it's not even that big a percentage of their income in the grand scheme of things and especially if they carve out for games which is like 85 of their in-app purchase revenue anyway if they set aside that carve out which seems perfectly plausible
John:
because of how the whole rest of the game industry works, the hit to their income would be minuscule, but you would stop messing with people's money.
John:
Oh, and by the way, on top of all that, there's all this stuff that we've talked about for ages, which is like, oh yeah, and maybe it would be nice to buy Kindle books inside the Kindle app.
John:
That's not why they're doing it.
John:
They would be doing it to stop messing with Amazon's money, but as a side effect, customers would also get a better experience from using their phones, because wouldn't it be great if on your iPhone you could use the Kindle app and find a book and buy it and read it?
John:
imagine that it's not asking for too much but that's not why they're doing it that's all these highfalutin reasons that we talk about like oh wouldn't that be better apple can't we appeal to their sense of like providing the user experience that's not the right appeal the appeal has to be you're messing with amazon's money and amazon is angry and you know dot dot dot now you're now you're facing congressional you know possible congressional action there's a bunch of things in those dot dot dots but basically
John:
Apple has messed with the money of too many rich and powerful people for too long.
John:
And collectively, they are able to rally the will of elected slash bought representatives to the point where now there are some very terrifying laws coming down, which I agree with Marco.
John:
If you look at a lot of these.
John:
they have a at best you could say a utopian view of what the new world would be like by essentially restricting apple from doing the things that apple does which is integrating hardware software and services in a way that quote-unquote only apple can do i know the alternative of that i've even talked about on this program like wouldn't it be great if just everything was an open platform with interchangeable parts and companies can compete on those parts and like wasn't it great when like
John:
Apple did the hardware on the OS and Google did the services, right?
John:
And everyone sort of stayed in their lane and Google was good at doing maps and Apple was good at doing OSs and apps and, you know, just was the best of everything.
John:
But that's not the way the world works.
John:
It will never work that way.
John:
Eventually Google made its own phone and Apple made its own maps and, you know, like everyone wants to do everything, right?
John:
And I understand the laws thinking like, well, if we had laws against that, that wouldn't happen.
John:
If the OS vendor wasn't allowed to have a music service, then there'd be more competition for the music service.
John:
And the OS vendor would benefit from making it the best OS for you to plug in your music service.
John:
And there'd be general hooks for plugging in your music service into iOS so that every music service could have the same integration that Apple Music has today.
John:
Wouldn't that be great?
John:
It would be, but I think history has shown that never actually happens.
John:
Even with laws to try to make it happen, there's always deals and preferred vendors and things you can do with APIs within the letter of the law that are perfectly legal, but that nevertheless favor or disfavor your friends slash enemies and
John:
I understand the vision that they're going for, but the laws as written, if implemented, would certainly destroy the good we have now and I think would not be successful in replacing it with the good that is envisioned.
John:
It's not the same as OpenDoc, but it's a similar type of thing that if you describe it, it sounds like a great thing from both a technological and a economic and capitalistic thing.
John:
But in practice, OpenDoc didn't work for the same reason these schemes won't work, is that it's not...
John:
It's not in human nature to be as magnanimous as these things are required.
John:
It's not in human nature for companies to give up power that they have.
John:
And if it's taken from them, they won't just say, oh, shucks, let's be great citizens and make a super open platform where everyone plugs in.
John:
They'll just find new ways to collude and compete and favor and attack because that's what people do.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Memberful, and Made In.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can join at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
We will talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
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 mean.
Marco:
Speaking of difficult problems, I replayed for the first time in about 30 years the game Tasmania for the Sega Genesis.
Casey:
Oh, we haven't spoken about your, uh, I almost said emulation, but God forbid it was, it is not emulation.
Casey:
We haven't spoken about your adventures in old video games in a while.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I recently, I, I played through it over the last couple of days.
Marco:
Uh, wow.
Marco:
Is that game like just comically hard?
Casey:
Like there's Tasmania, like the Tasmanian devil.
Casey:
Yes.
Marco:
Yes, it was one of those annoyingly cheap licensed things.
Marco:
And I had this game.
Marco:
I actually own this game.
Marco:
So Tiff has this game on her phone that I think is called Super Trap World or something like that.
Marco:
And there's this whole genre of games.
Marco:
I forget what it's called, but it's like something core, like Massacore, I think.
Marco:
uh where the idea is to just be as ridiculously hard as possible like just like comically frustrating like you jump on a platform and it just like falls over and then like something else comes in but it crushes you like the only way to get through the game is to basically try getting through just keep dying memorize what's going to happen and just plow through until you can actually get past like you know the very first level and
Marco:
no matter how you play it, no matter how good of a player you are, you will run into something that, like, the first time you do this, well, you're just going to die.
Marco:
Because you had no way to possibly know that that would happen.
Marco:
Nothing indicated this would happen.
Marco:
Or you have to, like, you know, take a blind jump and not even see what you're jumping toward and just hope there's something there.
Marco:
And then the first three times you do it, you'd fall and die because you don't know where that other platform is.
Marco:
Eventually you'll get there, right?
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Tasmania for the Genesis is like the very early version of this style of game.
Marco:
I know this wasn't the first one.
Marco:
I'm sure people will talk about Pitfall and stuff like that, but my god, people often talk about how games have become easier over time, and certainly they've become less tedious with things like save games and various ways that you don't have to beat the entire game in one sitting like you did with the old consoles that didn't have battery backup or anything like that.
Marco:
But like,
Marco:
playing through tasmania was so i just i was laughing at how ridiculously like cruelly difficult it was at times which is like you just yeah again like you you just jump and you just land somewhere oh you're dead like that's i laugh myself like in the minecart level which is like one of the great minecart levels in video game history there's actually two of them they're so great
Marco:
um because they're just brutal like just the most like ridiculous levels you've ever seen you will just go through so many deaths just trying to like just memorize the order of things that you have to do in the minecart level to get through it like it's it's comical so if anybody wants if you're into that kind of game of just like the the like kind of masochistic humor of trying to get through it tasmania for sega genesis
John:
Watching a YouTube video on this game looks terrible.
John:
Everyone should just play Battletoads.
Casey:
I remember Battletoads being really hard, too, by the way.
John:
Yep, it's really hard.
John:
And it doesn't look as bad as Tasmania.
John:
Tasmania looks like what it is, like a licensed game.
John:
The animation of the sprites and the main character and everything just don't...
John:
they don't look they don't fit in they don't it doesn't look graceful it's not you know i mean i'm sure it plays like any other sort of you know instant death platformer of the era plays like that's everything marco said about it i'm sure it's true but aesthetically it's kind of like not great so it's like avara no avara is elegant beautiful oh god i wouldn't say either of those things
John:
You can download the Mac version and play it.
John:
Hard pass.
Marco:
I will say, in the era of terrible licensed Genesis games, this was not the only one I owned.
Marco:
I also owned Cool Spot.
Casey:
Oh, is that 7-Up?
Casey:
Yeah, the 7-Up logo guy.
John:
I was trying to think.
John:
What is this?
John:
The tie-in Cool Spot?
John:
Is it an ice brand?
John:
no it's also a like brutal platformer with like just yeah no that's that's what like if you if you had a sort of a if you had the white label like you know a thing for laundry detergent right it's just going to be a 2d platformer that's really hard and you're just going to put the laundry detergent as the main character and you're done
Marco:
But Cool Spot, I really enjoyed it because Tasmania is just kind of cruel.
Marco:
Cool Spot is kind of whimsical in a lot of the ways because you're playing as a miniature.
Marco:
The scale of everything, you're playing as...
Marco:
the spot character who's basically the size of like, it's kind of Vegas, whether it's the size of like a bug or like a dog.
Marco:
It's, it's, I think it kind of varies, really different levels.
John:
It's a big difference there.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
They're not super consistent in like they're scaling.
John:
That's like the movie cats.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marco:
but uh cool spot is is less about like things coming in and just crushing you and killing you instantly and more about comically frustrating jumping puzzles where like you just keep jumping and jumping and you eventually fall down the level and have to start all the way at the bottom which tasmania does contain some of those as well but cool spot is like an entire game made of difficult jumping puzzles but it's it's a little bit whimsical and the guy's so cute the little spot he's really cute he's wearing sunglasses
John:
The modern versions of all those games are so much better, presumably the ones that are typically like Celeste, a game that really likes it.
John:
It's a similar type of thing, but there's so much more to the game than that.
John:
And on the 3D side of it, there's the quote unquote Souls games, like, you know, popularized by Dark Souls, where it's a...
John:
3d third person adventure game with high fidelity graphics but also has a similar type of if you can imagine a 3d version of that where you're going to face a boss and they will kill you with one hit and you don't know how to fight them yet but you throw yourselves at them and eventually memorize that you know it's like sort of high stakes right where you're not sort of a a sponge for damage you can just go in there and just button mash your way through it no you know some everything in the world is deadly and
John:
And you have to approach things cautiously and have a strategy and learn how to do them in the same way that you would be in Tasmania, where like before you go into the level, you have no idea what's going to kill you and anything can kill you.
John:
And eventually you figure out, OK, it's sort of the pattern, right?
John:
Imagine that.
John:
But in super high fidelity, third person, 3D sort of.
John:
medieval people with swords and giant monster settings and those games are very popular because they're moody and atmospheric and the ever-present threat of death fits with that type of game uh and you know things like celeste where there's so much more to the game than the platforming but also it's that kind of platforming and even before that there's the bullet hell games yeah you know top down spaceship a million bullets coming at you and those just ramped up to an absurd level where you know
John:
it seems like there's no way anyone could possibly survive this, but eventually you figure out how to weave your way through the, I was thinking of them rather than being bullet, how I think of them as the, uh, you know, when you get like, it's probably a progressive, but maybe also Campbell, you know, the soup where you get the little dots of pasta, right?
John:
uh what like it's not noodles it's not it's it's not chicken noodles it's like orzo no it was orzo's oval right actual circular little dots of pasta yeah i think i know they're almost like tapioca beads but pasta version yeah exactly right anyway whenever i see a bullet hole hell game i think all the bullets look like those little things in the soup because you know in the soup they have a little red around them it was like a tomato soup and it's just like these tiny little uh beads of pasta coming at you and spraying in all directions i don't know
Marco:
well i i will agree that in general uh the storyline of tasmania doesn't really hold up to the storyline of celeste or similar what about the seven up game is there a moving story in that one i i don't think cool spot is known for its plot either unfortunately