The Meat Part of Multitasking
Marco:
i have a very very mini topic that is so small i decided to use it now as a pre-show because it's stupid all right everyone look at the clock let's see how this one goes all right carry on all right so i've decided that i should read more oh i'm here for this you read all day you're always staring at the computer screen there's words all over it well you know it's funny like you know for somebody who used to make a service that was primarily about reading things i was about reading things later not now
Marco:
Important distinction.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, anyway, I haven't really used it in a long time.
Marco:
And I just started again recently because I just have not really been reading web articles and stuff.
Marco:
And I mean, frankly, the web is a dumpster fire and there aren't that many articles that I really intend to save and read from the web these days, which is its own issue.
Marco:
You should make an app that makes it easier to read those without all the ads and junk in them.
Marco:
You should do that.
Marco:
By the way, God, like Apple News is...
Marco:
is such a crappy experience because there's just giant, horrible ads every two paragraphs.
Marco:
I recently mentioned in brief a while ago that I started paying for a New York Times subscription because I was tired of rationing how often I would click on their links.
Marco:
It felt stupid.
Marco:
And it is also a terrible experience.
Marco:
I pay for this.
Marco:
I pay for that.
Marco:
And I pay for Apple News through iCloud Plus or whatever.
Marco:
And both of them just fill the experience with ads constantly.
Marco:
No wonder nobody reads stuff on the web anymore.
Marco:
because they ruined it like it's it's a terrible experience like and even when you pay for it you can give the money and it's still full of horrible ads like every two paragraphs it's ridiculous anyway setting that aside i've decided i should read more just not that but you know maybe maybe the occasional book or you know longer articles or whatever
Marco:
i've kind of like lost my attention span for reading and it's very difficult and i thought that's probably not good for myself overall so anyway decided to read more and i decided what i what i should try again is an e-reader because i have used e-readers in the past i have really enjoyed using them i spent a lot of time using them i have in the meantime since mailed them all to john syracusa as packing material for other objects that are more useful but e-readers are really inexpensive and they've come a long way and i figured let me give one a shot
Marco:
so i got the uh at first i tried to get there's this uh brand called books with an x on the end b-o-o-x um that they they make these fairly interesting uh e-reader tablets that are basically android tablets and with the full google play store available so it's it's an android tablet with an e-ink screen and and so you can you can run like so i thought like what wouldn't that be interesting i could like run the instapaper app
Marco:
and even I can run the Kindle app in case I don't like their built-in bookstore or whatever.
Marco:
So I could do that, but still have the benefits of an e-reader, which, you know, I really do enjoy e-ink as a screen technology.
Marco:
I like the way it looks.
Marco:
I like reading from it.
Marco:
It has a lot of advantages in terms of battery life and a lot of versatility with things like, you know, viewing outdoors.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I thought that could be really promising.
Marco:
One of the places I read is in the summer on the ferry where I'm often sitting on the roof of the ferry outside in direct sunlight.
Marco:
And it's somewhat difficult to read an iPad or iPhone screen in direct sunlight, especially while you're wearing sunglasses.
Marco:
And when the polarizing direction of the screen is the wrong way for your sunglasses, so it makes it even dimmer.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
I thought, let me let me try a modern reader to see.
Marco:
You know, it's been it's been a number of years since I've since I've had one.
Marco:
Let me let me see what they're like today, if they've gotten any better.
Marco:
And short version is they're still really weird.
Casey:
So which which books thing did you get?
Casey:
Do you know the model name offhand?
Marco:
So I decided to get one.
Marco:
I did not know this existed at all.
Marco:
I decided to try the color one, which is not color ink.
Marco:
That's something else that is not really widespread yet.
Marco:
The color, it's the books.
Marco:
Jeez, I think it's the air to air color to.
Marco:
They have a bunch of item names that are all very, very, very similar to each other.
Marco:
I ordered this thing.
Marco:
I get it, and the box is suspiciously light.
Marco:
Oh, no.
Marco:
And in the box is just its cover, which I didn't even order, and not the device.
Casey:
Oh, no.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
So I sent it back.
Marco:
There's a long wait.
Marco:
I'm like, fine.
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
Screw this.
Marco:
Let me just try a Kindle.
Marco:
And so I got the latest Kindle Oasis because I really enjoyed the last one before I stopped using it for five years and then sent it to John Siracusa.
Marco:
So anyway, I thought, let me get the latest Oasis, see what's new with these things.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
The answer is not a lot is new.
Marco:
In fact, they're actually worse than they used to be because certain features that I used to enjoy, like the old magazine newsstand thing built in, are gone now.
Marco:
They just stopped doing them.
Marco:
So there's certain things like if you want the daily, say, The New York Times delivered to your Kindle, that used to be a thing that they would make in a custom format.
Marco:
And it was actually really nice.
Marco:
It was a nice experience if you were willing to pay for it.
Marco:
And as far as I can tell, that's mostly or entirely gone now.
Marco:
And some of those things you can get in various ways.
Marco:
Most of them you can't.
Marco:
And the experience for all of them is worse now.
Marco:
Also, the Kindle software in general has just gotten more complicated.
Marco:
The experience is way – first of all, it's really slow to navigate stuff.
Marco:
And I forget whether it was always that slow or whether it's gotten more bloated over time.
Casey:
It's always, I mean, I haven't used a modern one.
Casey:
I'm trying to figure out what the heck version of the Kindle I have.
Casey:
But I can tell you that my Kindle, and this is, I think the first one I ever had, which Stephen Hackett sent to me, but I briefly used Erin's and she's had Kindles on and off for years and hers were always dog slow.
Casey:
Mine is dog slow.
Casey:
It's just part of the experience is just it being dog slow.
Yeah.
Marco:
And to be fair, I'm not just talking about the e-ink refresh.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
I'm okay with that.
Marco:
I accept that.
Marco:
I've lived with that for a long time.
Marco:
It's fine.
Marco:
I'm talking about you push a button, one, two, three, then the screen flashes and does something.
Marco:
And even simple things like waking up the device from sleep takes forever.
Marco:
It's really a pretty poor experience.
Marco:
And as they've moved them all towards being touch screens and touch first UIs, I think that has not helped them.
Marco:
Things that I've been spoiled by in Apple world, like I'm trying to hold the Kindle to read with it.
Marco:
And occasionally the edge of my hand will just slightly register as a touch on the edge of the screen.
Marco:
And that will make me lose my page.
Marco:
Even though it has page turn buttons, I spent the ridiculous sum of money to get the one model they offer with page turn buttons.
Marco:
But there's no option, as far as I could tell, to disable tap to page.
Marco:
So you have page turn buttons that you can use, but you can also tap the screen whether you mean to or not.
Marco:
And so you end up losing your page a lot.
Marco:
And that's really frustrating, which I think removes a lot of the value of the Kindle Oasis.
Marco:
Because the whole point of it is make the thing really super small on three sides.
Marco:
So you can hold it.
Marco:
Anyway, it's...
Marco:
every every amazon kindle i've ever gotten has been a frustration experience of like i love 75 of this and then they just fall over on what seem like things that could be really basic settings or or small implementation changes and they just don't do it and they because they just don't amazon's not good at making things nice they're good at making things cheap they're not good at making things nice um so anyway
Marco:
So I decided, I think I might return the Kindle Oasis.
Marco:
Meanwhile, then the books thing pops back in stock and I'm like, let me give it a shot.
Marco:
What the heck?
Marco:
It is even weirder than I could have possibly imagined.
Marco:
So first of all,
Marco:
It's a Chinese company, and the interface is in English, but a lot of the interface that you run into ends up dropping back to Chinese because they didn't localize that part of it.
Marco:
Stuff like some of the boot screens, sometimes you'll end up seeing a wall of Chinese, and I'm like, well, I don't really understand this.
Marco:
I don't really know what to do here.
Marco:
The firmware update, the update notes will all be in Chinese.
Marco:
I don't really know what I'm doing, what I'm agreeing to.
Marco:
The good thing about the books thing is that the color screen...
Marco:
kind of works.
Marco:
So the way they do color, I think I figured it out.
Marco:
I think the way they do it is there is a regular black and white e-ink screen below, and then on top of that, they layer on a layer of LCD a little bit.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
So the e-ink shines through, is reflected through it.
Marco:
It's a weird hybrid, and it ends up making the screen really dim and low contrast, and the colors are...
Marco:
Not at all vibrant.
Marco:
They're very, very low saturation, very basic colors.
Marco:
It almost looks like you took a picture of an old box of Crayola crayons and ran it through a sepia filter.
Marco:
So those are the colors.
Marco:
Really dull, basic colors.
Marco:
And everything about the books tablet...
Marco:
made the kindle feel like you just discovered ssds for the first time like the kindle i thought was god slow oh my god the books tablet everything is even slower to the point where like you tap something and you might wait 10 seconds before it then updates the screen to go to wherever whatever you navigated like and it's not you know this is simple stuff like navigating to the library and and you know between pages of you know screens of apps or whatever it's rough like it's really rough and
Marco:
I will say I was impressed by the handwriting.
Marco:
So the books thing has a pen, and it has pen support, like a stylus.
Marco:
Very similar to the Apple Pencil, but more basic version.
Marco:
And it has a drawing app, and I'm sure there's a few more in the Play Store if you want.
Marco:
But there's one that comes with it, and it's surprisingly responsive.
Marco:
I was very impressed.
Marco:
Like I know there's a tablet called the Remarkable that's been around for a while that I frequently get Instagram ads for.
Marco:
I've never bought it because I don't really do a lot of handwriting stuff.
Marco:
But if I was like a note taker, I would probably strongly consider it.
Marco:
Anyway, going back.
Marco:
So this device was infuriating because it was like, okay, it's an Android tablet.
Marco:
That's exactly as good as you think it would be.
Marco:
Add E on top of that.
Marco:
I thought it was going to be really cool and it really wasn't.
Marco:
While this was going on, I happened to also be refreshing my test device fleet.
Marco:
As I mentioned last week, I got an iPhone SE refurb because I needed a phone to pair with Adam's watch and I didn't have an SE.
Marco:
So I thought, well, what the heck?
Marco:
Because all of my old test devices for like, you know, keep this thing on iOS 15, keep this thing on iOS 16, like all my old test devices aged out at iOS 15.
Marco:
that none of them can run 16 because they're all like, you know, the iPhone SE, the iPhone 7, like the old SE.
Marco:
So anyway, I kind of needed a couple new test devices.
Marco:
And because we're about to enter beta season, so I want to have like a set of devices I can put on all the new betas without disrupting my main stuff.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's been it's been a problem sometimes anyway.
Marco:
So I needed a couple more test devices and I happen to need for beta purposes an iPad because all of our iPads have either been given to family members or are currently in use or whatever.
Marco:
So I didn't have an iPad I could use for beta use.
Marco:
also overcast sucks on the new ipad mini it's horrible there's so many weird layout bugs that i have on the ipad mini i really need to fix it so i thought let me look around i got a good refurb deal on an ipad mini from amazon and it is about the it's like the identical size of the books whatever tablet i got it's like same size a little bit heavier but otherwise like same you know same rough dimensions and
Marco:
I thought, why don't I just set up this iPad mini?
Marco:
Since I have to have it as a test device, why don't I set up the iPad mini as an e-reader, basically?
Marco:
So it doesn't have my Apple ID.
Marco:
It has my test Apple ID signed into it.
Marco:
So none of my stuff is there.
Marco:
I can't message or check my email from it.
Marco:
None of that's there, so there's no distraction.
Marco:
It only has on it the overcast version I'm testing with, which is not my real account.
Marco:
So it doesn't even have the podcast I want signed in and everything.
Marco:
And then I put on it the Kindle app.
Marco:
I signed into my Kindle account.
Marco:
I put on it the New York Times app, Apple News and Instapaper.
Marco:
And all those are like that's all signed into my real account.
Marco:
But then nothing else is there.
Marco:
So I've created an e-reader out of an iPad mini.
Marco:
And you know what?
Marco:
It's better than the other.
Marco:
It's way better than the books.
Marco:
And it's even better than the Kindle in most circumstances.
Marco:
Not all.
Marco:
If I was reading it in direct sunlight on the top of the ferry, the Kindle is still better for that.
Marco:
But it's actually way better in most cases as an e-reader.
Marco:
There are more options.
Marco:
There's more customization to be had.
Marco:
It's way more responsive.
Marco:
You get all of Apple's built-in palm rejection, making sure you don't have erroneous touches.
Marco:
All of that's built in.
Marco:
It is just so much nicer.
Marco:
And it was so much faster to set up, so much easier to manage.
Marco:
The battery life is not going to be as good as a Kindle.
Marco:
And again, the direct sunlight viewing is not going to be as good.
Marco:
It isn't water-resistant the way a Kindle is.
Marco:
but man it like apple has ruined me for these devices like i try the other things and like this is like the the flagship kindle this is a brand new device from this other other you know weird company and it just it's no contest compared to an ipad mini that was actually fairly close to them in price
Marco:
Why don't you try the Kobo?
John:
Kobo is Jason's favorite.
John:
I'll put a link in the show notes to his most recent e-reader roundup, which was, I think, 2021.
John:
But I think he picked Kobo as his top.
John:
Kobo is book spelled backwards.
John:
That's a joke from The Incomparable.
John:
Wait, no, it's not.
John:
That's a joke from The Incomparable.
John:
Listen to The Incomparable.
John:
Is it Little Indian?
Casey:
For a second, I believed you.
Casey:
I was like, wait, that explains everything.
Casey:
But no, I was going to say the exact same thing.
John:
Is that Tobor a joke from The Incomparable?
John:
People who get it get it.
John:
People who don't, don't.
Marco:
Yeah, and I should credit Jason because I've read the Six Colors articles on e-readers every time he publishes them and
Marco:
And I did refer back to them when making these decisions and trying these things out.
Marco:
And I think he came to the same conclusions about the books that I did, basically.
Marco:
But but but it's he he cares a lot more than I do about this stuff.
Marco:
And he has way more experience with these things.
Marco:
I have never tried a Kobo.
Marco:
And and part of that is like, you know, I figure if I'm going to if I'm going to have a non you know, if I'm going to have like a non iPad reader, I figure, well, Kindle is probably best because it has the ecosystem.
Marco:
Also, for whatever it's worth, I really like the old default Kindle font, PMN Cecilia.
Marco:
I love that font.
Marco:
And that font is available in all of the Kindle apps on other platforms and on real Kindles themselves, labeled Cecilia.
Marco:
And I don't think any other reading app offers it.
Marco:
And so I kind of like, you know, I'm a snob in certain ways.
Marco:
I love reading with that font, like long stuff.
Marco:
So I even miss it when I'm using Instapaper because they don't have it.
Yeah.
Marco:
I should have put it in there, damn it, back when I had it.
Marco:
But anyway, so Kobo, where Kobo is better, I think, in Jason's experience, is I believe it offers more option to not have force-justified text.
Marco:
And this is the biggest area where Kindles fall down.
Marco:
Kindles do not offer you the option to have non-justified text all the time.
Marco:
Sometimes they offer it.
Marco:
certain content it's available certain content it isn't probably because of some weird detail about like their the weird moby format they were using and whether the publisher has enabled some other flag in the epub or whatever like bottom line though is that with a kindle you oftentimes are forced to take for justification and it's really hard to read stuff that way um so you know for a device devoted to reading you would expect it to have a really great reading experience
Marco:
And it kind of doesn't in a lot of cases, which is unfortunate.
Marco:
So Kobo is better, I think, in those areas.
Marco:
But I don't want to lose the ecosystem advantage that I get from Amazon.
Marco:
I already have a sum of a library from Amazon.
Marco:
But ultimately, if I just keep reading on my iPad mini, I have access to everything.
Marco:
I have access to Apple Books.
Marco:
I have the Kindle app itself, which the Kindle app offers...
Marco:
almost the same reading experience as hardware Kindle devices, but with smoother animations and faster responsiveness and higher resolution for images and stuff like that.
Marco:
It's actually a better experience.
Marco:
All that is to say, I've tried e-readers again.
Marco:
I think if I read a lot of novels while sitting in bathtubs or pools, I would love the Kindles.
Marco:
As it is now, the iPad mini actually solved my needs better.
Casey:
So I'm glad you phrased it exactly that way.
Casey:
Because for me, now granted, I'm on an older Kindle.
Casey:
I'm on, I think, the original Paperwhite.
Casey:
I'm not entirely sure, to be honest with you.
Casey:
But apparently, according to Amazon, I registered it with Amazon in 2016.
Casey:
And I don't think it was new at that point.
Casey:
So whatever I have, it's old.
Casey:
And it is slow.
Casey:
But I love reading novels on this.
Casey:
I don't read anything else but novels.
Casey:
So I think you and I have kind of polar opposite needs.
Casey:
I do read novels on the beach when I go to the beach in the summer.
Casey:
I don't live there, so it's a very rare occurrence.
Casey:
But what I love about my Kindle is that...
Casey:
I can always read on my Kindle, and it is always comfortable.
Casey:
I have crummy eyes, and so I crank the font size up to hilarious.
Casey:
It's ridiculous how big I have the font, but I do that so this way, whether or not I have my contact lenses in, so for example, if I'm trying to go to sleep, I might read for a little bit, but I don't have my contacts in at that point, I can still look at the Kindle in bed.
John:
You should still look at your Kindle screen with the font cranked up to see if you can fit more words than I could fit on my 160 by 160 palm screen that I read books on.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like I do wonder if the total number of words is actually similar.
John:
It might be.
John:
Yours is seven times as big.
Casey:
I mean, I'm exaggerating somewhat, but not that much because pretty much any time anyone looks at my Kindle, especially people who have Kindles, they're like, oh my God, what's wrong with your font?
Casey:
No, that's how I like it.
Casey:
But anyway, I love having the Kindle.
Casey:
There's no chance for distraction.
Casey:
I understand what you're saying, Marco, that you've kind of built yourself a similar situation, but there's no chance for distraction.
Casey:
I can use it at night and it has its own backlight, but it can get super crazy dim and
Casey:
I can use it in direct light.
Casey:
I couldn't agree with you more, Marco, that I love the reading experience of e-ink.
Casey:
It feels so much more like, well, not literally feels, but it gives you that figurative feel that's much more like paper.
Casey:
I love my Kindle, and if it broke, I would replace it with either another Kindle, again, for ecosystem reasons, like Marco was saying, or I would at least try this Kobo thing and see what I thought.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I can't imagine that I personally would enjoy an iPad mini for this specific task.
Casey:
I can see how you landed there, but for me, give me e-ink all day every day because that is so much more comfortable to read in my personal opinion.
John:
well how long was that that was about 20 minutes that was your quick super quick mini topic yeah yeah super quick just had a little bit to say the merch store is open hooray it's not called the merch store please please let's not let's not sully it with this terrible name it's the atp store the atp store has returned time was that casey would herald the return to the atp store but now he keeps saying merch and i don't know why do you want to take this john no
John:
ATP store, please.
Casey:
The ATP, don't call it merch.
Casey:
Don't call it merchandise.
Casey:
It's just the ATP store.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
It's back, baby.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Sorry, Dad.
Casey:
The offending party's been sacked.
John:
I'm trying to consistency in branding, you know.
Casey:
Nevertheless, the store is back.
Casey:
We have a couple of offerings.
Casey:
We have the Mac Pro Believe shirt, which we're going to talk a little bit more about in a moment.
Casey:
Suffice to say, it is the top of the modern Mac Pro with the word Believe beneath it.
Casey:
Then we have the ATP 6 Colors
Casey:
logo, and we have that in monochrome on several flavors of material.
Casey:
We also have the OG rainbow logo on black.
Casey:
Additionally, we have brought back from the ATP vault the Promax Triumph shirt, which has all six of the Promax through the years in profile in multicolored ink, and you can do that in white or black fabric.
Casey:
uh i last i looked i think there might be a handful of mugs left we also brought back the atp polo you're welcome for the six of you that really really like it of which i'm one of them and the atp hoodie is back so if you need to perhaps re-up your hoodie i wear mine so darn much that uh i'm probably going to get a backup just to be safe all of these are available for you at atp.fm slash store now members
Casey:
Remember, you get 15% off on these time-limited sales just like this.
Casey:
So go to your member, I don't want to call it a dashboard, but the member page on ATP.fm, and you should see your special discount code that you can enter in at Cotton Bureau to save 15%.
Casey:
And additionally, this will be available until Saturday, May 6th.
Casey:
I didn't do this exercise with you last time, so we'll do it this time.
Casey:
You are somewhere right now.
Casey:
Maybe you're walking.
Casey:
Maybe you're driving.
Casey:
Maybe you're just sitting around listening.
Casey:
Wherever you are, think to yourself, is it safe and appropriate for me to buy an ATP something right now?
Casey:
Maybe it is.
Casey:
Maybe it isn't.
Casey:
If it isn't,
Casey:
Think about where you're going.
Casey:
If you're driving, think about where you're going to end up.
Casey:
Are you going to the office?
Casey:
Are you going to Whole Foods or Kroger or something?
Casey:
Wherever you end up, think about what you're going to do when you get there.
Casey:
What you're going to do is you're going to park your car or stop walking, whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And then you're going to go to hp.fm slash store.
Casey:
And you're going to do that and you're going to buy some merch.
Casey:
or merchandise or stuff.
Casey:
Whatever, John, I'm sorry.
Casey:
You're going to buy some stuff.
Casey:
And you're going to do that before May 6th.
Casey:
You're going to do that today.
Casey:
So this way, I don't get to make fun of you for being that dum-dum that says to me, oh, is it still open?
Casey:
I forgot.
Casey:
Don't be that dum-dum.
Casey:
Don't be that person.
Casey:
ATP.fm slash door.
John:
We always try to do these sales for three episodes of the show.
John:
This is the middle episode.
John:
The next episode will be the very last one.
John:
And the problem with trying to say, oh, I've got one episode left, I'll just deal with that stuff then, is that you might not listen to next week's episode immediately.
John:
And the store is only live for a couple of days after the publication of next week's episode.
John:
I myself have almost forgotten to buy... All right, so one time I did...
John:
Forget to get stuff from the store.
John:
Of course, I had an inside line in the comm bureau, folks.
John:
And I said, hey, can you get me these items?
John:
And so that worked out for me.
John:
But you don't have that option.
John:
So I would say this is the time to do your ordering.
John:
Don't wait until next week.
John:
This is only going to be a few days after the show is published.
John:
Do it now.
John:
then you'll be able to have you know this week to decide what you're going to get uh and i'll just remind everybody that if you don't care about shirts or don't want to pay for expensive shipping on a mug or whatever but you still want to give the show money membership atp.fm join um as for products i want a few clarifying points on the mac pro uh believe shirts the last episode i said it is the duty of the audience of this show
John:
To find out which of you actually got a WWDC ticket, because none of us did so far.
John:
And pick one of you to be the designated person to take one for the team, the team being ATP listeners.
John:
Buy a Mac Pro Believe shirt of your choice.
John:
Wear it to WWDC and make sure Apple executives see it.
John:
And I'll be happy to say that many people from our audience said, hey, I got a ticket and I'm planning on going and I ordered a Believe shirt.
John:
So I think people will be there with this shirt on, hopefully very visible.
John:
Lots of people suggested that we buy this shirt and send it to various Apple executives.
John:
Which seemed like a reasonable idea, but I'm not quite sure how to do that because I don't know what their mailing address is or whatever.
John:
But I figured, you know what?
John:
I'm going to give it a shot.
John:
So I ordered one shirt for John Ternus.
John:
And I had to decide what kind of shirt, you know, it's going to be an Apple Believe shirt, right?
John:
I had to decide what he would like.
John:
So I looked at his most recent, I don't know if it was, I think it was his most recent video, like the event video.
John:
I forget what they were announcing.
John:
I just went in my archive of event videos, because of course I say all these videos.
John:
Of course you do.
John:
I loaded it up and I scrubbed it until I saw John Ternus.
John:
And he was wearing black from head to toe.
John:
So I'm like, easy, black Mac Pro Believe shirt, right?
John:
Because I assume they pick their own outfits for, you know, like no one's forcing him to wear all black.
John:
Other people are wearing different stuff when he was black from head to toe.
John:
So I got a black Mac Pro Believe shirt and I sent it to John Ternus and then the address of like the spaceship in Apple Park.
John:
Will that get to him?
John:
They probably have people screening their mail to make sure they're not getting sent, you know, anthrax or whatever.
John:
I hope it gets to him.
John:
But anyway, the reason I sent it to him is because, like I said, from what I've heard, John Ternus actually does believe in the Mac Pro, and I wanted to send that to him as a form of support within the organization.
John:
Maybe he can just wear it to a meeting, you know, ask me about my shirt, right?
John:
Anyway, so I did that.
John:
And the other thing is for the people who got a ticket and who are going to wear their shirt to WWC,
John:
on the off chance that some apple person actually asked them about it like an executive or whatever like i said last time you can always just lie and say oh i really love the mac pro or whatever or you can tell the truth and say i don't care about the mac pro but uh you know some people on atp do and explain all that stuff but
John:
There's a nuance I feel like I was leaving out there because I thought of this when I was seeing something about it.
John:
I was like an interview with Tim Cook or something.
John:
Wasn't there some interview with him recently?
John:
Some article?
John:
There was an interview with Tim Cook.
John:
He was in GQ recently.
John:
Anyway, I was reading an interview with Tim Cook.
John:
I'm always thinking about, you know, we always have these conversations with the Apple community about what it's like to talk to Apple executives and how hard it is to...
John:
How hard it is to get them off message?
John:
Like they're all, you know, media trained and the people who do talk to the public usually have some practice doing it.
John:
So you're not going to get them to say something, you know, off the cuff or whatever.
John:
The only person who can get away with that was Steve Jobs.
John:
Even the CEO, especially Tim Cook, doesn't do that.
John:
You know, he could do that.
John:
Who's going to yell at him other than, you know, I don't know.
John:
board or the shareholders or whatever but steve jobs didn't care about that but anyway everybody's so controlled right so there is the problem that say you're sitting there and like you know some important apple executive comes wandering over to you and says hey nice shirt and you have this like this is it i have my opportunity to talk about this podcast shirt that i wore with an apple person and i feel like what's going to end up happening is the interaction is going to go such that the apple executive comes away thinking
John:
isn't it nice a customer likes our products right that you like you're like this is your favorite apple product and you wore a shirt talking about your favorite apple product and they'll come away thinking it wasn't that so nice even our obscure products that most people don't care about there's somebody who really cares about them all isn't that nice
John:
And I feel like that's the wrong message.
John:
And it's really hard not to have that message go through it.
John:
Because if you're an Apple executive and you exchange pleasantries with a person who's wearing a shirt with a picture of your product on it, you're going to come away thinking, a fan of our products.
John:
But the actual message is, I don't know how you would convey this.
John:
It's basically impossible.
John:
I'm not telling you what to do.
John:
I'm just acknowledging a problem here.
John:
what we want them to say is like we care that this product exists and we wish you treated it better and it's very difficult when you meet an apple executive to tell them something that you think they did poorly because a that's rude right so don't do that and b like that's not the time or place to do that and yet that's that's the whole point of the shirt you don't have to say that you can just wear it the time or places blog posts on twitter
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
You know, like whatever.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Write a blog post or, you know, just write an article in a publication of your choice or talk about it on a podcast.
John:
When you meet an Apple executive, they just want to hear the pleasantries.
John:
That's where the shirt comes in.
John:
The shirt should sort of speak on its own.
John:
I feel like you don't have to say anything about it.
John:
You can just wear it.
John:
And that will be the message, the silent message that that you believe in the Mac, bro.
John:
And the silent message is we don't think you believe Apple.
John:
We believe here in the audience.
John:
We wish you believed too.
John:
We wish you would update it more than every five years or so.
John:
We wish it wasn't always on life support.
John:
Those are all the things that you can't say that I'm hoping the shirt conveys.
John:
But I feel like if you actually had a chance to talk to one of them, that's not the right time to actually discuss that.
John:
But I don't know what you should say.
John:
Maybe you should just sit there silently and point to the shirt.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge that and the difficulty of talking to Apple executives and my hope that my shirt does some talking for us.
Casey:
Godspeed, John.
John:
Godspeed.
Casey:
Speaking of good luck to you, what's going on with your bug these days?
John:
This is the time and place to talk about bugs.
John:
If you've got a podcast that you think people might hear about your... Anyway, this is the bug I talked about on three episodes so far, one of which it was cut out of.
John:
Last episode wasn't cut out and I talked about it again.
John:
done i've got some more progress on that bug uh to refresh your memory the bug is that when i drag a window in any application around if it's near any other windows it gets super slow and laggy and jumps around right and if you hide other windows so they're not visible or you move them away from the window you're moving it chills out a little bit and doesn't do it as much so it seems kind of like a bug in like the window snapping behavior and they added to mac os many years ago where
John:
If one window comes close to another one, it snaps to its edge or whatever.
John:
And I couldn't figure out what this was.
John:
And at first I removed some third-party software and I'm like, it went away, I've solved it, but then it came back, right?
John:
And so I've been trying to track it down more, talking about it on Mastodon, you know, communicating with various people, back channeling with Apple, because of course the feedback gets no response, right?
John:
Whatever.
John:
Since then I've done some more stuff.
John:
I removed more third-party stuff because last time I said I'd removed all third-party kernel extensions and all third-party system extensions.
John:
as evidence from, what is it, kexload and system extension control or something.
John:
What the hell is the command?
John:
Yeah, system extension CTL is the one for system extensions and kextat, sorry.
John:
K-E-X-T-S-T-A-T space dash L. Both of those are showing zero, but there's more stuff that I thought.
John:
I'm going on a rampage or moving third-party stuff because the one tiny bit of back-channel information I got was that
John:
Lots of other people aren't having this problem.
John:
Some other people are, and I hear about them, I hear about it from MMS now, but lots of other people aren't.
John:
So I'm like, this has got to be something that I'm using, something that's specific to my setup.
John:
So I removed steer mouse, which is my mouse acceleration thing.
John:
And I was like, oh, that's got to be it.
John:
I can't believe I didn't think of that because it's, it shows up as a, used to be a preference pane and now it's a settings, whatever.
John:
But it's not a kernel extension or a system extension, but it is a thing that has to do with the mouse.
John:
So I installed that.
John:
Uh, then I was, uh, communicating on, uh, on Mastodon with Steve Trout and Smith.
John:
Uh, I sent him some of my, uh, spin dumps that I had sent him the feedback and he looked at them and he saw some Adobe stuff in there and he's like, I can't tell if this is like just a symptom because Adobe has like a crash reporter that catches crashes and it was showing up in the spin dump.
John:
And it was like, fine, wipe all Adobe stuff off the system, which was not easy.
John:
Let me tell you, I use the Adobe uninstaller to remove all Adobe stuff.
John:
There was still more Adobe stuff.
John:
And I know that because after I used the Adobe Uninstaller and I rebooted, upon login, I got a crash report screen from an Adobe thing.
John:
I'm like, which luckily gave me the path to the Adobe thing.
John:
So in applications, utilities, there was a bunch of old Adobe stuff.
John:
Remove everything.
John:
Delete, delete.
John:
Adobe stuff is gone.
John:
Each time I did one of these things, remove steer mouse, remove Adobe, I would reboot, you know, to clean everything out.
John:
And the problem, what I had been telling people on Mastodon is like the problem...
John:
Goes away when I reboot, but it comes back within minutes to hours, which is not a very precise thing.
John:
But that had been my experience.
John:
It always comes back, but it doesn't come back immediately.
John:
Sometimes it comes back in a few minutes.
John:
Sometimes it comes back in many hours.
John:
I didn't understand why.
John:
Right.
John:
So after removing steer mouse, I rebooted.
John:
I'm like, it's not coming back.
John:
I fixed it.
John:
But then it came back.
John:
After I wiped everything Adobe, I'm like, it's not coming back.
John:
I fixed it.
John:
but then it came back also typeinator which is my like text expander type thingy for abbreviation stuff that recently had a venture update so i there was a for pay update but like i'm gonna pay for it i use it all the time fixes compatibility venture it said yes yes updated i updated that i didn't uninstall it because it has to do with typing not mousing but um i updated that and that didn't fix it either right
John:
And I also uploaded a new YouTube video, which we'll put in the show notes, that tries to better demonstrate the problem.
John:
Again, it's using stickies, but it doesn't matter.
John:
It could be any application.
John:
So I was using TextEdit as the windows that I'm going to be near, and I was using stickies as my window that I move around.
John:
You can look at the video.
John:
The main reason I put that up there is all the conversations in Macedon, it's very difficult to tell if other people are actually having the same problem as me because there are a lot of problems that manifest as my computer feels slow and laggy.
John:
And if you are dragging windows around while your computer is slow and laggy, you'll be like, hey, I have that problem too.
John:
But I'm like, no, mine is a very specific problem.
John:
It has nothing to do with load on the system.
John:
It doesn't go away.
John:
Once it starts happening, it is like permanent and just like stays there forever, 100% reproducible for hours and days and weeks.
John:
Like it will not go away and it is always there.
John:
And it has a specific behavior with respect to other windows that are near it.
John:
So that's why I made a new video.
John:
So you can take a look at that.
John:
And through discussing it with people,
John:
Some people I limited it and say, you're having a different problem than I am.
John:
Other people still said they were having, they looked at the video, they're like, yeah, exactly what's happening to me.
John:
And I would ask them questions.
John:
Are you running any Adobe stuff?
John:
Are you running steer mouse?
John:
Like, just looking for anything.
John:
Couldn't find anything.
John:
I did have a breakthrough though, because I finally figured out
John:
after i reboot what makes the problem go back come back like what you know every time because i would always think i fix it like this is that i fix it this time and i'd almost like declare i'd fix it a master like no let me wait a day let me wait two days and it would come back i'm like damn it i didn't get rid of it right figured out what makes it come back it's whenever there is a more than one user logged in
John:
in mac os oh man and that's why it was throwing me off because i switched to my wife's account to mess with the photo library right because they don't have shared albums and stuff right so i still have to hop over to her account not as much as i used to because i can do most of the stuff with shared library but when i want to do like real organization into albums and stuff or the face recognition because it doesn't share face recognition either i have to switch to her account so it's basically like after i reboot how long before i fast use the switch into my wife's account
John:
And as soon as I fast use a switch to my wife's account, it starts happening in both of our accounts.
John:
If I switch back from her, it doesn't matter.
John:
It's permanent, right?
John:
If I go back to her account and log out, it goes away.
John:
100% reproducible.
John:
So I updated the feedback.
John:
I already updated the feedback.
John:
This video updated the feedback.
John:
I'm like, more info.
John:
I figured this out.
John:
And it's only when there's more than one user logged in.
John:
I tried a third account as well and tried, you know, like it's just when one account is logged in, everything is fine.
John:
When more than one account is logged in, the problem happens 100% of the time.
John:
So I added that to the feedback in case anyone in Apple is still looking at it.
John:
Once again, it's FB121-221-06, please.
John:
So, and I have so little third parties over my face.
John:
No, I'm just removing everything.
John:
I haven't put anything back in.
John:
I haven't put steer mouse back on.
John:
I haven't put Adobe anything back on.
John:
Like I'm removing everything that I could possibly remove.
John:
This is a hundred percent reproducible.
John:
I've uploaded new spin dumps, uploaded new cysts.
John:
Does this explain the problem?
John:
No, I still have no good theories about what it is.
John:
I mean, Steve Trout and Smith had a lot of ideas about like the Adobe things, reading the window list and stuff like that.
John:
Like that's why we thought it was Adobe, but that turned out not to be it.
John:
But like when a second user is logged in, it happens.
John:
And here's the fun thing about it.
John:
if I log out, if I go to my wife's account and then I log out of her account and it switches back to mine, because that's the only one that's remaining to be logged in, it takes like a three count before it goes away.
John:
Because I'll switch back, I'll log out of her account, switch back to mine, grab the stickies window, shake it around, it'll still be there for one, two, three, oh, it's fixed.
John:
So it's like logging out is like killing a bunch of process or cleaning it, like whatever it's doing behind the scenes to finish the log out of my wife's account eventually gets done and then it fixes it.
John:
So...
John:
Now that I know what the problem is, I no longer have to reboot to fix it.
John:
I just have to log out of my iOS account and everything will be fine.
John:
But man, what a weird bug.
John:
I wish if the Apple feedback system was better, I would have renamed the bug as, you know, window movement laggy when more than one account is logged in, right?
John:
Because now I know what the thing is, but...
John:
Anyway, I hope someone at Apple looks at this, or I hope it cures itself on the next update or something.
John:
But I'm glad to have a workaround, but totally baffling.
John:
But I was excited for the breakthrough.
John:
I'll give you more updates as they come along.
John:
At this point, now that I know sort of...
John:
Not what's causing it, but how to trigger it and how to work around it.
John:
I'm a little bit less inclined to keep removing software from my system, but I probably will.
Casey:
I'm sorry, John.
Casey:
I mean, that explains why I think a lot of people haven't seen it because –
Casey:
This is not scientific at all, but I can't think of anyone I know that runs multiple accounts on their Mac other than you.
Casey:
I'm sure I know people.
Casey:
I do.
John:
My wife's Mac Studio, that's the one where people are likely to log into it.
John:
All four of us are logged in at all times on that thing.
John:
It's just more communal, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
The only other, and I have accounts for my whole family on my computer too, but the only one it's ever logged into is my wife.
John:
So it actually happens less frequently on my computer than the other computers in the house.
John:
But not, you know, it's still, that's what was killing me about the thing.
John:
It's like, it always comes back.
John:
What's determining when it comes back?
John:
It's just whenever I switch over to that account.
John:
And I did ask other people, as soon as I figured this out, anyone who said they had the same problem as me, I asked them, are you logged into more than one account?
John:
Some of them were, some of them weren't, so...
John:
No progress in debugging this with other people.
John:
That's why I'm hoping all these spin dumps I'm uploading to Apple will tell them something.
John:
Godspeed, John.
John:
Yeah, and before people ask, like, there are limits to the amount of inconvenience I'm willing to incur to deal with this, especially now that I have a workaround, because people are like...
John:
You should do safe boot.
John:
You should wipe your entire computer and make a fresh account.
John:
Like, yeah, those are things I'm probably not going to do.
John:
Like, I understand how they would help narrow the problem down, but, like, I'm not going to destroy my computing life to fix this bug, especially now that I have a workaround.
John:
So I have done safe boot, by the way.
John:
I will actually try safe boot and then switching accounts, but I don't know if either one of you who done safe boot recently.
John:
It's super weird and everything's super janky.
John:
Have you tried that recently?
John:
No, I don't even know how.
Casey:
In a while.
John:
uh well on your computers is different but on the back on intel computers you hold down shift during boot on your computers you hold down the power button and there's something that's a safe boot like it basically doesn't load any thing like it doesn't load the good graphics drivers which is the most painful one so like transparency doesn't work and the graphics are slow and janky and doesn't load any third party anything like it's it's really it's just you know it's safe mode right it's it's like let's not load load any of the software that might be causing crashes and so it's not a tenable way to really run your computer
John:
So that's why, you know, I should probably boot into safe mode again and then just try switching, doing faster switching and see if that makes it come back.
John:
But beyond that, no, I'm not going to like, you know, sign out of my Apple ID, delete all the user accounts or anything like that.
John:
Cause like, you know, I'll just,
John:
I'll just make sure I'm only logged into my wife's account briefly.
John:
Although it is kind of annoying to know when I, when I switched over to her account, unless I'm going to log out of my account, which I'm not going to cause I have too many windows open.
John:
Uh, I have to deal with it.
John:
I have to deal with the window dragging bug on her account.
John:
Cause like I said, when it starts happening, it happens at all logged in accounts, not just, you know, on mine.
Casey:
Stinky.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
But hopefully you'll have a fix in the next version of macOS, right?
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
Give it five years.
John:
Come on.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
Speaking of five years, long time follow-up.
Casey:
I think it was Marco that was originally lamenting the lack of just a USB-C hub.
Casey:
There's a gazillion and seven, you know, traditional USB.
Casey:
What is it, A or B?
Casey:
I always forget.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
traditional USB hubs, but there weren't really any USB-C hubs.
Casey:
And breaking news earlier today, Belkin has released a brand new USB-C hub that is four USB-C ports, one of which is power delivery.
Casey:
And so that basically leaves you three other ports.
Casey:
And apparently it's available right now.
Casey:
It is between $45 and $55 here in America.
Casey:
You can buy from Belkin directly or from Amazon.
Casey:
I don't personally have a need for this.
Casey:
I'm still rocking my CalDigit TS4, which I really, really like.
Casey:
But hey, Marco, this is the answer to all your problems, right?
Marco:
I hope.
Marco:
I mean, the good thing is, look, I'm glad this finally exists.
Marco:
Unfortunately, I don't need it anymore.
Marco:
But I will.
Marco:
Currently, I don't need it because Apple has added more ports to the computers.
Marco:
And generally speaking, that has dramatically lightened the load on my dongle needs.
Marco:
But fortunately, this now exists.
Marco:
I hope it's good.
Marco:
Time will tell.
Marco:
There are a bunch of kind of USB-C hubs that have come out on the market.
Marco:
Most of them, though, are similar to the various Thunderbolt thingies.
Marco:
Most of them are really high-power things that have their own giant power bricks and all that stuff.
Marco:
It's not really like a hub as we would think of it.
Marco:
and on most of them because the bandwidth needs are so high on usbc the number of ports is fairly low and the cost per port is fairly high on many of them so you know it's been tough to get into this world it's like if you want to convert everything over to usbc and again there's many other reasons why it's been tough that we've gone over but
Marco:
If you want to convert everything over to USB-C cables and everything, it has been tough because products like this didn't really exist.
Marco:
So now it exists.
Marco:
And I hope it's good.
Marco:
And I hope more continue to come out.
Marco:
And, you know, and I hope we, you know, now and for many years, you've been able to get like a 10 port USB-A hub.
Marco:
that had usb3 speeds on many of those ports and wasn't that expensive and didn't have a giant power brick so i hope we get something like that for usbc because we don't need like 18 high speed 10 gigabit per second ports we need maybe two or three of those and then a whole bunch of ports that mostly provide power and low speed data so i hope we get to that world soon with usbc but this is an important step to get there i'm really glad we have these
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I mean, again, I don't have a need for this, like you were saying, but I'm pleased that this is a thing, just like you said.
Casey:
All right, John, your Google Authenticator woes have been solved, allegedly.
Casey:
Google Authenticator now will sync your 2FA codes if you wanted to, which is super exciting.
John:
yeah i would have liked this before i had to spend three and a half hours sitting in the apple store uh to update my uh or was i i was getting my phone replaced because of the camera anyway better late than never it does a syncing now i have since dealing with that i have actually migrated all of my two-factor stuff into icloud keychain uh which is a little bit tedious but i got it done but now being typical of me i'm maintaining it in both places right
John:
Kind of like how I use Chrome and Safari all day long.
John:
And Chrome doesn't integrate with iCloud Keychain.
John:
Wait, I thought it did.
Casey:
I thought they have like an extension for it or something.
John:
Yeah, for Windows.
John:
Oh, whoops.
John:
It's really dumb.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, you can always just go and copy and paste it.
John:
But that gets to why I'm still running Google Authenticator, right?
John:
Everything's in iCloud Keychain.
John:
And I maintain it in there like as, you know, sort of my main place.
John:
But...
John:
Even with the cool shortcut from Ricky Mandela that lets you jump into the passwords.
John:
I was going to say preference pane.
John:
The password setting thing in iOS, which is not buried.
John:
It's the second level thing, but you can put that on your home screen and jump right to it.
John:
Then you're faced with all of your passwords.
John:
And then you have to use the search field.
John:
So search for the domain you're interested in, find the one and tap into it, and then get to the two-factor thing and tap at the copy and so on and so forth.
John:
Whereas in Google Authenticator, the only thing that's in there are two-factor codes.
John:
There's no passwords, no nothing else.
John:
So even though it may be a screen or two, it's a huge font.
John:
It's on the top level.
John:
You launch the app.
John:
You can see all your stuff there, and you just tap the one that you want.
John:
It's much faster for me to get my two-factor code.
John:
from google authenticator than it is to get it from icloud keychain now if you use safari you never need to do either one of those things because it's integrated into the browser and it just fills it in for you like that's the point of it but chrome does not integrate with icloud keychain on apple devices so if you are using chrome and you are faced with a two-factor text box you can't just click in it and autofill from icloud keychain because it doesn't do that integration it could the apis exist for it it just doesn't because google whatever so i still maintain both of them um
John:
But I'm glad it has syncing because that'll save me a lot of haste next time I upgrade my devices.
John:
Thing to know about the syncing is it is not end-to-end encrypted.
John:
iCloud Keychain is end-to-end encrypted, which means that Apple can't see anything in my iCloud Keychain, right?
John:
That's the point of end-to-end encryption.
John:
Apple does not have the keys to it.
John:
It's only on all of my devices.
John:
Google intentionally chose not to do that.
John:
You can see an explanation on this Twitter thread that we'll put in the show notes from, I'm assuming it's someone from Google I actually didn't check.
John:
uh christian brand uh let's see yes well the url on his thing says google yeah some someone at google explains they intentionally didn't do this because it gives google the ability to save people's bacon if they screw up real bad right that's their explanation and you know that that is a trade-off but i just want people to know don't enable this syncing if you care about google the company having access to your two-factor codes again this is not for passwords this is just for two-factor authentication code things
Casey:
All right, tell me about Duncan Wilcox's woes with regard to duplicates in Apple Photos.
John:
So this is the shared library feature that we've talked about in Apple Photos.
John:
Apple Photos had duplicate detection for a while, but not for shared libraries.
John:
So they recently added it for shared libraries.
John:
And I've been working through that with my giant collection.
John:
The last episode, I said that I had been informed that duplicate detection is not as smart as you might think it is.
John:
So I backed up all of the duplicates that duplicate detection found.
John:
Like, you know, because it puts them in recently deleted or whatever, and I just back them all up and shove them in an archive somewhere so that if it did screw up something, I have that thing there to save my bacon, you know.
John:
So that way I don't have to, you know, visually vet every single duplicate that resolved because it literally resolved 30,000 of them for me.
John:
So I just I'm just going to back them up and forget about it.
John:
Here's a new twist.
John:
Duncan says, regarding Apple photo duplicates, check your photos projects, especially if you made some recently with motif or similar.
John:
And by projects, he means like the like the little photo books that you can make or whatever.
John:
They're in the sidebar on Apple photos on the Mac.
John:
You see all the list of all your products if you've made a calendar or printed book or whatever.
John:
So Duncan says, I think mine are missing photos like Swiss cheese following the deleting of many duplicates.
John:
i have about 90 000 photos uh and it continues merge duplicates does not merge duplicates does figure out if a photo is in an album and preserve that relationship for example a low-res version of a photo in an album the low-res version is deleted from the library but the higher-res version is now in the album so apple photos itself does the right thing like when it merges duplicates you don't have to worry about
John:
Oh, the one that threw out is the one that was in my album and now it's missing from my album.
John:
No, it takes whatever one it picks to be the winner in the duplicate fight.
John:
That one takes the place of where all the other ones that got chucked away ended up being.
John:
But for photos projects, that doesn't always happen.
John:
So I went and looked because I have tons of photo books.
John:
I make a photo book at least once a year, sometimes more for my Long Island vacation and maybe other vacations.
John:
and i looked at those books and sure enough many photos were missing i would click on the the the project and i got a little dialogue box it would say some photos are missing some photos have been modified moved or deleted outside of the application or removed from some sections of this project and my the example that i have here pages 1 5 6 9 10 12 14 i'm not going to read all the numbers a lot of pages are missing covers okay uh
John:
And I was like, oh, that's not great.
John:
So why do I care if photos are suddenly missing from my photo book products?
John:
I've already printed the books.
John:
They're sitting on my shelf, right?
John:
The whole reason I keep these products around is that someday those books get destroyed.
John:
My house burns down in a fire.
John:
There's a flood, you know, whatever.
John:
Whatever happens to those books.
John:
I did spend a lot of time making those books, which means picking the photographs that are going to be in the books, picking how those photos are going to be arranged on the page, how they're going to be cropped.
John:
Picking the cover image, picking the back, if there's any text, like I spent time making that.
John:
I want that effort to be preserved.
John:
And I had been doing that by just keeping the photo book products.
John:
Hey, if I lose a book or it gets the house burns down, I can restore my backups in my new house and just reprint all those books at massive expense.
John:
But still, I would have the ability to do it.
John:
So that's why I'm saving those projects.
John:
And now they're missing a bunch of photos.
John:
So I investigated.
John:
I looked at one of the books, and these are all done with, at this point, third-party software.
John:
I use the Mimeo Photos extension.
John:
Motif is another one that does something similar.
John:
Both of those companies, I think, were involved in printing the books when Apple did it.
John:
So I picked a book.
John:
I picked my most recent photo book that was missing photos from tons of pages.
John:
I went to the first page where it said it was missing photos, and sure enough, where there should have been a photo that was just the gray, like, you know, photo goes here.
John:
and it wanted me to select a photo.
John:
But the thing is, all the photos that it said were missing, they were still in the projects because when I opened up the little photo sidebar to pick a photo to go in that spot, the photo that should be in that spot was in the sidebar.
John:
So I think what's happening is Apple Photos is doing the right thing, but this third-party software is confused about the fact that previously the photo with some internal identifier was on that page, and Apple Photos replaced it with the one that it picked out of the merged duplicate.
John:
And the sidebar, you know, the project showing which photos to pick from that understood that, but the page did not understand it.
John:
And so what I had to do was for my most recent few books, and I'll explain why in a second, I didn't have to do all of them.
John:
I just went, I had the paper book in front of me, found the missing photo, looked at the paper book and said, okay, it should be this photo and it should be cropped in this way.
John:
And I just reselected it from the sidebar, put it in there and repaired the most recent three books.
John:
And the reason I only had to repair the most recent three books is because the whole reason I'm doing this is sort of preserve the work that I have done.
John:
So I know which photos are on which page and how they're arranged and all that.
John:
But there's a better way to do that.
John:
The better way to do that is to make a digital version of the book.
John:
And Apple's photo books had a way to do this.
John:
And so do all these third part.
John:
So does Mimeo, the third party extension that I use.
John:
You can export your book as a PDF.
John:
It doesn't really look like a book anymore, but it does show every single page in the print layout.
John:
And I had exported the PDFs dutifully for every photo book that I have ever done over the many years, except for the past three years when apparently I forgot all about it.
John:
So I repaired the last three years of photo books.
John:
I exported them as PDF.
John:
It used to be able to export as two kinds of PDF.
John:
One was called like a regular PDF reviewing.
John:
The other was called a quote unquote production PDF.
John:
which presumably you could give to the printer and they could print again.
John:
But anyway, there's only one choice now in Mimeo, which is export as PDF.
John:
And so I did that.
John:
So now I have backups of all my books, like their layouts, their actual print style layouts for every single page of all of my books in a digital form, which of course is nicely backed up.
John:
And now I don't feel the need to go back through every single one of my photo books and repair the missing photos, which are surely there, by the way.
John:
And there is some hope that these third party extensions
John:
realize that this is going on and figure out how to uh you know swap in the the newly winner of the winner of the duplicate merge process into the place where the old one was but i didn't want to wait around for that so uh hopefully in what is hopefully the final wrinkle in the share lively duplicate thing check your projects if you care about this at all check your projects and
John:
uh and if you have to you can repair them without too much work as long as you have the print one to refer to and i would suggest that if you do care about the layout uh export to pdf because then all your work will be preserved in the worst case scenario you could recreate the book from scratch by looking at the pdf
Casey:
All right, we have yet more feedback with regard to receivers and such.
Casey:
Stephen Brandon writes, this is kind of a lot, but we did our best, and by that I mean John did his best to pare it down.
Casey:
With regard to Atmos and DTSX on an Apple TV, although the listener on a past episode said that they had an HTA-9 system, that was not actually the source of the problem they were talking about.
Casey:
The issue is that the Apple TV will not even pass through the Atmos or DTSX system.
Casey:
Metadata on anything other than EAC3.
Casey:
The Apple TV will not let apps bitstream anything other than a few formats to a receiver or anything else, and instead generally re-encodes audio data as PCM before sending it to the receiver.
Casey:
This is fine for regular surround audio, as the conversion to PCM is lossless, but it also means you lose out on the Atmos type metadata, including height data, etc.,
Casey:
This might seem like it would make it impossible to pass along the height and other Atmos-type metadata, but there's a solution.
Casey:
Apple does use a technology called Dolby MAT to embed this data into PCM audio for some audio, mostly audio coming from its own apps and some streaming apps that support Atmos, which apparently modern receivers can understand.
Casey:
But Apple doesn't seem to allow third-party app makers to access this option.
Casey:
The Infuse post linked to last week does an even better job explaining all this.
Casey:
With every tvOS release, I always hope that we'll find out that Apple has opened this up to the makers of apps like Plex and Infuse.
Casey:
All of this is to say that those of us with high-end receivers, John, still have the problem with Apple TV of not being able to take full advantage of the audio on our ripped Blu-ray collections.
Casey:
It is not a problem isolated to the HTA 9.
Casey:
Sad trombone.
John:
yeah so obviously i don't have height channels but the other thing is uh the i have a blu-ray player like i don't have ripped blu-rays like so there's a lot of people with synologies and ripped blu-rays writing in feel the spin that's why i'm saying use nvidia shield it's the only thing that does this right there's lots of other possible solutions it's kind of disappointing that the apple tv literally won't even pass it through that seems like something they could hopefully fix with a software update um
John:
But yeah, like that's why, you know, part of having the receiver is then you can hook all sorts of stuff up to it, like an actual Blu-ray player, and then your Apple TV is entirely out of the mix.
John:
Jonathan LaCour had a few other suggestions here.
John:
He says, this and other limitations led me to invest in a Zidu Z9 Xbox.
John:
I have no idea what that is.
John:
He says, it's Android, clunky, and weird.
John:
Sounds like something Marco might be interested in.
John:
But it supports literally everything.
John:
That said, you are correct that most people probably shouldn't care.
John:
If you don't have high channels, it's irrelevant.
John:
If you don't have high quality speakers, it's irrelevant.
John:
And most critically, if you consume content exclusively through streaming, it literally doesn't matter.
John:
But of course, he says, those of us who have invested in height channels and Synology still with Blu-ray reps are the only people who should care.
John:
So some people should care.
John:
And honestly, Apple should get on this.
John:
Like, fine, you can't deal with it.
John:
At least pass it through.
John:
It's kind of disappointing they don't do that.
John:
But just FYI.
Marco:
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Marco:
We decided this week to have a special where we don't have any regular ads in the show.
Marco:
It is devoted entirely to our wonderful merchandise sale, which you heard about earlier and ATP membership.
Marco:
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Marco:
If you become a member, that sale we talked about earlier, you get 15% off everything that you could buy right now in our time-bound sales.
Marco:
These are like the big sales that we announce in the show and do for a few weeks here and there.
Marco:
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Marco:
And that's great.
Marco:
Right now, if you're buying a t-shirt or a mug or a few different things, it actually might be cheaper to buy a membership than to pay the full price of the items that you're buying, even though these are wonderful prices, et cetera, et cetera.
Marco:
But you get a merch discount if you're a member.
Marco:
You also won't hear spots like this in the member version of the show, because members, the key benefit that most people sign up for is the ad-free version of the show.
Marco:
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Marco:
When there's a podcast I love that offers membership with an ad-free feed, I always buy it, because it's such a nicer experience, honestly.
Marco:
You don't have to like, you know, look, we love our sponsors, but you've probably heard some of them more than once, and you might have a value in not having ads in your feed.
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Marco:
We offer the ad free feed for members, too.
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I'll be back to tell you more in a little while.
Casey:
Moving on, there was some breaking news that happened, I think, as we were recording last week that I don't know if we'll have too much to say about this famous last words, but I wanted to call it to our attention, to your attention.
Casey:
Reddit has decided to start charging for API access.
Casey:
And this is particularly relevant to me because, if you recall from a couple episodes ago when we were talking about FlukeUp, as Aaron said,
Casey:
continues to make fun of me for um anyways uh as we were talking about that i was saying you know even though the the there doesn't appear to be very much if any charge for using the movie databases api right now you never know what'll happen right and so that's exactly what's going on with reddit
Casey:
My limited understanding is that pretty much all of the API was free.
Casey:
And it sounds like at first they kind of took the Twitter or one of the 17 iterations of Twitter's approach in that they said, okay, well, bots will remain free.
Casey:
But other things like full-featured apps like Apollo, which is my preferred app for looking at Reddit –
Casey:
The API access for Apollo will not be free.
Casey:
And additionally, sexually explicit material will not be available via the API at all.
Casey:
That seems to be the TLDR, from what I can gather.
Casey:
So a quote from their announcement, which we will link in the show notes.
Casey:
We are introducing a premium access point for third parties who require additional capabilities, higher use limits, and broader usage rights.
Casey:
Our data API will still be open for appropriate use cases and accessible via our developer platform.
Casey:
So, of course, Christian who writes Apollo was pooping his pants when this all went down and apparently had a couple of phone calls with Reddit.
Casey:
And he put together a really, really, really good post on Reddit, of course, about what this really seems to mean based on his conversations with Reddit.
Casey:
And so, quoting Christian,
Casey:
to this end reddit is moving to a paid api model for apps the goal is not to make this inherently a big profit center but to cover both the cost of usage as well as the opportunity cost of users not using the official app lost ad views etc the api cost will be usage based not a flat fee and will not require reddit premium which is i believe reddit's paid thing for users to use it nor will it have ads in the feed the goal is to be reasonable with pricing not prohibitively expensive
Casey:
And so I thought this was all interesting, given what I'm going through.
Casey:
Also, it's worth noting that Imgur, I guess that's how it's pronounced, has, I guess, recently banned sexually explicit uploads.
Casey:
So there's apparently a big kerfuffle about that.
Casey:
I don't personally care about that at all, but it's kind of tangentially related, so worth noting.
Casey:
But yeah, this is why pricing for anything where you're not controlling the API is tough, right?
Casey:
You know, because you never know what the future will bring and you don't want to have to renege on a lifetime unlock that was like just a bit more than a monthly fee or something like that.
Casey:
Like obviously you probably wouldn't price a lifetime unlock that cheaply, but you see what I'm saying that, you know, if you never know what the future will bring and reneging on what you already had going is a real bad look.
Casey:
even if it's not really your fault, it's just not a good look.
Casey:
And so I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know if either of you have anything to note on this.
Casey:
If not, we can just move right along.
Casey:
But it was an interesting and relevant thing for me anyway, given what I'm working on right now.
John:
Is Apollo subscription or pay once?
John:
I mean, the escape hatch for things like this, it's not great, and, you know, customers hate it, and developers don't like to do it, but you just, you know, you make Apollo 2, and that one is subscription only, right?
John:
That's fair.
John:
With all these terrible options that we're kind of accustomed to as both customers and developers on the App Store, like, we can't do upgrade pricing, we can't do this, we can't do that, but there's, you know, the way to do it is you just, well, this product is dead now, sorry, here's version 2 of the product, which would have just been the next update to this one, but can't be for reasons related to how the business of the App Store works, so...
John:
And then everyone yells at you and they give you the one star reviews.
John:
And it's just like it's a very sort of very unhealthy dynamic, I feel like, in a lot of ways between customers and developers, because in many cases, developers would like to do things that are
John:
that customers would like better like we would you know upgrade pricing for example or like somehow giving lower prices to people who recently brought a thing like you know make a new version of a thing and there's an upgrade price but if you bought the old one recently you get the upgrade for free and all the things that mac developers would do before the app store you know
John:
where you have the flexibility to be nicer to your customers.
John:
And the App Store does more of those things than it used to, but still not nearly as many as good Apple developers used to do back in the days before they were constrained.
John:
And this is an example.
John:
Hey, our app used to be like you could do a one-time unlock, but that was when the API was free.
John:
Now the API is not free anymore.
John:
And eventually we're going to go into the red on all those users because their lifetime unlock is going to run out.
John:
essentially and then we'll be losing money every time they use your application and that's not tenable so how do we deal with that you'd like to just be able to say to those people uh you know after your money runs out start paying the monthly thing or whatever or it'll stop working or like you could do something that is better than hey i the app you're using is dead now here's apollo 2 and you've never purchased anything in apollo 2 so you're starting from zero and that will make people feel bad because they're like i bought a lifetime unlock and you're like well you did get a lifetime unlock
John:
for apollo one it's just it's such a stupid situation that nobody likes and it just makes everybody upset uh part of it obviously is what you're talking about casey which is like well isn't the root problem here that you've sold an application with a flat rate unlock and you didn't control the api you just assumed it would be free forever yeah that is kind of the root problem here but a lot of things work like that because you know free apis often exist i don't know quite know why reddit had it maybe they're just you know uh management was not uh
John:
paying too much attention but a lot of times it's like companies that are in a growth phase right and they're VC funded and they just need to get big real fast and so yeah everything's free the accounts are free using it is free the API is free free free free because we need to get users users eyeballs or whatever you want to call them whatever the lingo is because we need to you know
John:
get a big enough growth numbers to get our next round of funding but then eventually like the check check comes due either you actually did get big and it's time to start turning on the money tap see also netflix amazon and many other big companies or you didn't get big and now the company's going down the tubes they need to make money uh i don't think either one of those applies to reddit they've been around for a long time they did they're not in their growth phase they already did grow pretty big but i think they have management now that's saying you know uh running this api is actually costing us a lot of money let's see if we can get some return on that investment and they're doing it in a
John:
But it seems like a fairly thoughtful way to try to get money from people who can afford to pay it while not destroying the value of their service, you know, by allowing bots and stuff like that.
John:
Basically the opposite of whatever Twitter is doing.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think you can look at this and you can see this is probably what Twitter should have done.
Marco:
Like Twitter probably should have taken an approach like this.
John:
Should be run by people with a clue?
Marco:
Yeah, that would be a really good idea.
Marco:
I mean, people who care and are competent.
Marco:
But, you know, the age that Reddit came up in, you know, as John was saying, it kind of started as, you know, it was a very nerdy thing launched by very nerdy people during a very nerdy time of the internet.
Marco:
Reddit's been around for quite some time.
Marco:
Uh, and when it was coming up, that was the era of like the web 2.0.
Marco:
Everything has an API like that, that kind of, that kind of age.
Marco:
And as we talked about before with Twitter, like at some point people realize, you know, companies realize like, why are we giving away value?
Marco:
And why are we in, in many cases, more importantly, why are we giving up control?
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
So Reddit came right out and said like part of their reason for this was that people who use third party apps like Apollo aren't necessarily seeing Reddit's ads or aren't aren't in some other way like benefiting whatever Reddit's newest business direction or revenue opportunity might be because they're not using the Reddit official apps or website.
Marco:
And so obviously, many companies would look at that and have looked at that situation and would say, well, we don't want to give up any control.
Marco:
We don't want to give up control of our product or our monetization strategies or whatever.
Marco:
So we're just going to not have a public API or shut down the public API.
Marco:
That's how Overcast is.
Marco:
Overcast does not offer an API for lots of reasons, including that.
Marco:
And so you can see why companies would get there.
Marco:
But it is difficult when you have a product like Twitter where the API is such a key part of what makes it useful to a lot of people.
Marco:
And so you have to have a bit of a different calculus there to do it right and to support the things that cause your service to have value to a lot of people.
John:
Or like Reddit, where you have years and years of people using an API.
John:
Like it's not as big a deal as Twitter, whereas like the third party clients were such a big part of its growth.
John:
But like you've got a legacy of people using applications like Apollo.
John:
Some of your best Reddit users probably use Apollo.
John:
So making the decision to say no more third party clients would be the wrong move.
John:
But at the same token, you can't like lose money on those people.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
And, you know, in the case of Twitter, I think they called it wrong.
Marco:
You know, Twitter saw a problem, which is a real problem, which is we have these third party apps that are making people not use our first party apps and are not showing ads and are eating into the control of our product experience.
Marco:
And we don't and we don't control them.
Marco:
They're run by, you know, other random people who we don't control.
Marco:
And so we have limited ways to deal with this.
Marco:
And so we're going to shut it down.
Marco:
That's kind of a brute force approach that I don't think was the right move for them for lots of reasons.
Marco:
I think they destroyed a lot of value for both them and other people, but especially just for Twitter itself, they destroyed a lot of value of Twitter by doing that, like not being able to run simple bot accounts that people actually use for various useful, legitimate purposes.
Marco:
That is, I think, destroying lots of value of Twitter and will ultimately, I think, serve them poorly with these decisions among many other decisions they've made.
John:
And to be clear, the stuff we're talking about here is most recently what Elon did.
John:
But prior to that, many, many years prior, Twitter tried to thread this needle by having the same realization that, oh, third-party clients, they've been such an important part of Twitter, but we can't get rid of them entirely entirely.
John:
Because our best users use them.
John:
So what can we do?
John:
And they basically tried to sunset essentially third-party clients where they sort of said, if you have an existing third-party client and you have a lot of customers, we'll let you have, I don't remember what the calculus was.
John:
It was like, say you've got 100,000 customers.
John:
You can have 100,000 more.
John:
but then that's it, right?
John:
And they had this whole token-based system where every customer you got, you were using up one of your tokens.
John:
And I don't remember, it was like you got to double your customer base or triple it or whatever the calculus was.
John:
They basically said, no more third-party clients, but anyone who already exists, you can keep running your business up to a limit.
John:
And the limit was pretty big.
John:
That's why for years and years after they did that, I was still using Twitterific, which was, you know, I think the original third-party Twitter client that I used for the entire history of Twitter until it went down the tubes.
John:
That's how they tried to throw the needle.
John:
And at that time, everyone was pissed off then.
John:
That's why my Mastodon accounts are all from 2017.
John:
Or app.net or whatever.
John:
We went to app.net.
John:
We went to Mastodon, right?
John:
Because we were annoyed by the way they tried to throw that needle.
John:
It was like, don't you realize how important third-party clients are?
John:
And that was the kinder, gentler way to try to do it.
John:
It's like, we're not just going to kill all third-party clients.
John:
We're not going to just remove the free API.
John:
But we do want to take back control of the experience itself.
John:
And basically we don't want there to be any more clients.
John:
Just the existing ones can continue to have a business.
John:
And then the Elon Musk way to do it is just to turn everything off and shoot yourself in the foot over and over and over again.
John:
So, but the Reddit way I feel like is even better than what Twitter did because it's like, look, all those third party clients, they're important to our business.
John:
And we can literally make money from them.
John:
Not a huge amount of money, but hopefully enough to pay for, to offset the cost.
John:
So we won't lose money on them.
John:
And we will keep the people, the users of Apollo, who are in theory very avid, you know, good customers for Reddit in terms of they use the product a lot.
John:
We can get money from them through third-party clients by charging for an API.
John:
And maybe that will cover costs.
John:
We'll see how their plan goes for them.
John:
But it definitely seems...
John:
nicer than either one of the, certainly nicer than the current Twitter plan, but also nicer than the whatever year that was, 2017-ish plan from Twitter.
Marco:
The only thing I would criticize about this, so Reddit's plan, so far, the big thing, we don't know the pricing yet.
Marco:
But they have said that the way it will be structured, at least in their current idea of this, the way it will be structured is the users won't pay, the app developers will pay.
Marco:
And I think that's backwards.
Marco:
I always thought this is what Twitter should do.
Marco:
Make the user accounts pay the service for API access with those accounts.
Marco:
So for instance, if Twitter is going to have their monthly premium plan, whatever, you know, Twitter blue, whatever, whatever it would be, charge users a few bucks a month for whatever that account level is.
Marco:
And then you can use that account level with any app using the API.
Marco:
And then the app developers are never financially involved directly with the company or the users.
John:
yeah i don't i'm not sure i know what you're going for for that it seems better from a user's perspective but i think allowing the app developers to essentially skim off the top and be uh like in the middle there is important because here's the deal it still costs money to maintain and develop apollo uh and so like you know good third-party applications may still want to charge a subscription but it's so much harder for them to do that oh so i have to pay for a subscription for the api to reddit
John:
And I have to pay for a subscription to Apollo.
John:
If you just combine those two together and added a profit margin for Apollo, even though it would be more total expense, you just feel like I'm subscribing to Apollo.
John:
And basically, you know, your money is passing through the developers of Apollo and they take a cut.
John:
And then the rest of it goes to pay for the API, kind of like weather applications.
John:
We don't pay for.
John:
you know, whatever the weather API is, uh, you know, AccuWeather API, individual customers don't sign up with AccuWeather to get an API and then shop for clients.
John:
We all just buy a weather app.
John:
We pay for the subscription to the weather app.
John:
The weather app takes a cut of that and then passes the rest of the API thing.
Um,
John:
i guess it hasn't been tried the way you're describing so it could work kind of like it worked like that with rss we'd pay for feedbin or feedly right uh and then we'd like you know use a newsreader on top of that so i i think it can work i just wonder if in this case it would be uh too much subscription but well
John:
you know we'll see like it just just from reading the description it doesn't seem unreasonable but i don't know what well i kind of know what reddit users are like but anyway i don't know how this is going to turn out because every customer base is different and i'm going to say that the the customer base for reddit api usage is probably not like the general public
Casey:
I would agree with that.
Casey:
And I think the other advantage of doing it this way is that Reddit is likely to come out looking like a good guy, because unless you're deeply in tune as to what's going on and the machinations of what's happening behind the scenes...
Casey:
What it looks like is that Christian's going to have to start charging more.
Casey:
I'm assuming, I don't know this, but Christian's going to have to start charging more or just kill the free version of Apollo.
Casey:
And from a user's perspective, unless you're really plugged in, that just means Christian's a big jerk.
Casey:
Well, it's obviously not true, but that's what it seems like, right?
Casey:
Whereas if Christian instead says, oh, well, you have to open a direct relationship with Reddit and give me access and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
then Reddit's the jerk because you have to go and talk to mom and dad about it.
Casey:
But the way it works now, the way Reddit wants it to be is that, oh, Christian's the big jerk.
Casey:
He's the one that needs extra money.
Casey:
It's not us.
Casey:
Well, really it is, but don't look behind the curtain.
Casey:
It's Christian that's the problem.
Casey:
And so from a business perspective, it's a win-win, right?
Casey:
Because they get more money and they don't have to be the bad person.
Casey:
And so I totally understand why they're doing it.
Casey:
But again, if they're really doing this just to recoup the expense and a little bit of the opportunity cost,
Marco:
it if that really is true this may not be bad at all but you know time will tell we are brought to you this week exclusively again by you our audience and our members consider becoming a member membership is the best way to support the show and you get some fun perks so i mentioned earlier you get the discount on merchandise 15 when you were doing the time-bound sales like we're doing now
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
quite a challenge if i may say so myself it's pretty entertaining to listen to and then you also get the bootleg feed as a member and this is an option you can listen this way if you want to many people love this option so what this is is our live broadcast that we broadcast you know as we're recording the show unedited
Marco:
post it to a feed that gets automatically delivered to your podcast app as soon as we finish recording the show.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
You hear my mistimed jokes there.
Marco:
That didn't quite land right.
Marco:
You hear us occasionally get stuff wrong.
Marco:
You hear us pick titles at the end, and you get to hear any kind of segment at the beginning or end that we don't, you know, segment or chatter that we don't really include in the full edited show.
Marco:
Maybe it just doesn't quite fit right or isn't quite on topic enough.
Marco:
I know, knowing us, but you know.
Marco:
So you get all that included in the bootleg.
Marco:
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It is one of our top used member benefits.
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It is by far the best way to support the show.
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You get a bunch of cool extra stuff like this, and we really appreciate it.
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Thank you so much.
Casey:
So we had an Ask ATP from probably a while ago, knowing us, that we decided to promote to a full-on topic, because I thought this would be kind of fun for the old dudes here to reminisce a little bit.
Casey:
So Torb wrote that they had watched the Verge video about the Lisa, which is only about 10 minutes long.
Casey:
It's pretty good.
Marco:
Delightful.
Casey:
Yeah, it's very good.
Casey:
They mentioned offhand that the original Mac didn't have multitasking, exclamation point.
Casey:
I just really wondered what would that have been like?
Casey:
I think John would know.
Casey:
And then I thought I'd love to hear all of you talk about how computers you used when growing up were different and how they affected your usage patterns.
Casey:
So I have a little tour of like seminal moments of my childhood with regard to computing, but perhaps we should start by John answering the question.
Casey:
So how did multitasking work on the original Macintosh, John?
John:
Yeah, I guess, you know, as as we get older, young people don't realize exactly how primitive things were.
John:
I often think I've heard this from other people my age often think that I'm very lucky to have been born when I was in terms of technology.
John:
And I think we all kind of were.
John:
because we got to see both sides of the big internet divide what was life like before the internet was pervasive and what was life like after and we were there for that transition so we have those two experiences we did have a time in our life without the internet and we know what that was like and that's you know kids born today never have that time right
John:
Uh, and you know, that, and that was, that was important for me.
John:
I also got to see the personal computer revolution.
John:
Like I existed at a time when personal computers were not a thing and then they became a thing.
John:
And I was there for that happening.
John:
Many things like that.
John:
I think about the, the dawn of the web.
John:
I was there for that, like makes us all old fogies, but it is very interesting.
John:
It's kind of like people who like born during the industrial revolution or the advent of cars.
John:
Like there's lots of very important technological inflection points in history.
John:
And we got to live through some really important ones.
John:
That does mean I have the perspective of, you know, what things were like before, like even like video games, like going from literal Pong, right, to what we have today is a leap that is, you know, it's going to be a while before the next leap like that happens.
John:
Maybe it's AR VR, but honestly, I think it's going to have to be something past that with some kind of neural interface to have the same impact as going from Pong to today's games.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So for the Apple platforms in particular, I mean, this applies to all personal computer.
John:
For the Apple platforms in particular, remember the Lisa was...
John:
It was like 10 grand in 1983 money or something.
John:
It was like, it was not an affordable computer.
John:
It costs as much as a car, more than a car, right?
John:
That's why the Mac succeeded.
John:
One of the reasons why the Mac succeeded and the Lisa didn't, it was just too darn expensive, but it was also much more powerful.
John:
Like with all that money was going to making a more powerful computer.
John:
The Mac, even though the Mac was also expensive, it was, you know, $2,400 in 1984 money.
John:
It was a quarter of the price of the Lisa, right?
John:
Um,
John:
And so while the Lisa had some rudimentary form of multitasking, the Mac absolutely did not.
John:
Remember, the original Macintosh had 128 kilobytes of RAM, kilobytes.
John:
And that's like, oh, the Commodore 64, VIC-20, they had even less.
John:
This thing ran a full GUI, a full, complete GUI, right?
John:
128 kilobytes of RAM.
John:
There wasn't much room for anything.
John:
And it got around it by using lots of ROM.
John:
One of the things you would learn about back in the early days of the personal computer is very important in your first course where you learn about computers, you learn this is the keyboard, this is the monitor, there were no mice because they didn't know about them.
John:
Computer, monitor, literally the next thing you would learn is the difference between RAM and ROM, which is a distinction that has not really been important in anyone's life.
John:
But boy, they wanted you to know it.
John:
Anyway, the Mac had a bunch of ROM and that saved a bunch of memory because that stuff could be in read-only memory that was always accessible and you didn't need to waste a RAM on it.
Casey:
anyway but so just really quickly to put things in perspective so you said 128 kilobytes is that right of ram so the icon for my forthcoming app is 125 kilobytes just the icon is that compressed well yeah probably it's a jpeg but never the point is just that icon is not a jpeg please it's it is absolutely it doesn't matter to concentrate here why is it a jpeg it's not a jpeg please don't make it a jpeg it's not it's absolutely not a jpeg
Casey:
I'm looking in the asset catalog in the file system.
Casey:
It's a JPEG in the file system.
Casey:
It doesn't freaking matter, Mike.
John:
You are not using a JPEG.
Casey:
Jesus Christ.
Casey:
Please.
John:
Concentrate.
John:
Why don't you paste a screenshot into a Word document?
John:
Get a PNG, please.
Casey:
I will bother Jelly, who was kind enough to do this and is probably listening to this mortified because I bet you he sent me a ping and then somehow it ended up a JPEG.
Casey:
I don't even know how.
Casey:
Concentrate.
Casey:
Concentrate, John.
John:
All right.
John:
All right.
John:
Anyway, here's the thing about bitmaps.
John:
The uncompressed version of the bitmap of your thing, add it up.
John:
Add up the RGB values.
John:
The uncompressed size of that is way bigger than 128 gigabytes.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
And I'm not running a full operating system in this space.
Casey:
I'm just storing a very, very large icon.
John:
Yeah, if you just wanted to start one icon asset, that's it, all your RAM was gone.
John:
So the way this manifested in multitasking is a couple different ways.
John:
Remember, I did have a VIC-20 before this, which had 20 kilobytes of RAM, which is even less, but it did nothing.
John:
It was attached to your television set.
John:
It had a keyboard.
John:
It had no mouse.
John:
It had no GUI.
John:
It was a command line or NBASIC, like very simple stuff, right?
John:
But this was a full-fledged GUI, right?
John:
And it had...
John:
The original Macintosh had one floppy drive built into the computer.
John:
I didn't have an external one.
John:
So you got one 400K floppy drive.
John:
That's all your data, right?
John:
And what you do is you'd stick in a floppy disk.
John:
You'd turn the computer on, stick in a floppy disk.
John:
Because if you turn the computer on, it would just have a flashing question mark icon.
John:
You stick in a floppy disk and it boots, right?
John:
That floppy disk has the operating system on it.
Casey:
I feel like you need to slow down here again.
Casey:
There was no hard drive, right?
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
John:
No hard drive.
Casey:
It did not exist.
Casey:
There was no storage on the computer.
John:
The Lisa had a hard drive.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
But on the original Mac, there was nowhere to put your stuff except the floppy disk drive, which granted wasn't floppy.
John:
I mean, those are all personal computers.
John:
The Commodore 64 didn't have a hard drive.
John:
The VIC-20 didn't have a hard drive.
John:
The Apple II didn't have a hard drive.
Casey:
Agreed.
Casey:
If you're less than a million years old like we are, this is probably not really making any sense.
John:
You're booting and running from this floppy drive, right?
John:
So the floppy drive had the operating system on it.
John:
You could also wedge onto that floppy disk.
John:
You could also put, like, one application.
John:
So you could put, like, maybe Mac Paint on there, right?
John:
So then you could boot from the operating system on the floppy drive, and then you'd see the operating system, and you'd see Mac Paint, and you'd double-click Mac Paint.
John:
And when you double-click Mac Paint, everything goes away, and just Mac Paint is running, right?
John:
And if you save the document in Mac Paint, you could save that to the floppy disk drive, too, but not too many documents.
John:
Because if you save too many documents, up now you've filled your floppy drive.
John:
Because remember, the floppy disk, the 400k floppy disk has the OS, the one application you're using, and all the files you're saving from that application.
Marco:
Like, how big was the OS?
Marco:
Like, how much free space would you tend to have on a floppy drive?
John:
I think the OS was maybe half.
John:
I mean, I should fire up Mini VMac and check what it is.
John:
But it seemed like there was enough room.
John:
You could have more than one application on there.
John:
It didn't seem like it was taking up more than half, but maybe it was.
John:
Maybe it was like 300K.
John:
I can look it up, but it was small.
John:
But here's the workaround for this, right?
John:
Eventually, if you're a power user like me, you'd be like, okay, but I've got a lot.
John:
I've got Mac Paint.
John:
I've got MacWrite.
John:
I've got all my school papers.
John:
It would be better.
John:
I have this box of floppy disks here.
John:
What I would want is I can have like a, you know, an operating system disk and maybe, you know, whatever.
John:
But I would also like to have like a data disk or maybe a disk that just has MacWrite and all my papers on it, right?
John:
Remember, MacWrite came on a, you know, a floppy disk from Apple that said MacWrite.
John:
It was printed or whatever.
John:
uh but you'd also want to have like what about all these other floppy disks i'll just store my papers on those so the way it would work is you would boot from your your startup disk or whatever then you would eject that floppy disk and what would happen so the floppy disk icons would appear on the desktop i think that's not even the default on mac os anymore but the floppy disk icon would appear on the desktop and when you ejected it you'd see like a grayed out not gray because it was a black and white screen but a a black and white dithered
John:
grayed out icon we call a ghost icon of the floppy disk that you just ejected right it would still be visible there you could see it but it was a ghost of its former self then you would stick in your other floppy disk with the one that has you know a different application you know mac draw or something on it right or it has your your your files on it or something you'd stick that one in and say okay here's my school paper and i double click my school paper
John:
Double-clicking the school paper would launch MacWrite.
John:
But MacWrite was back on the other disk.
John:
So what it would do is it would eject your disk and say, please put in the system disk that had MacWrite on it.
John:
And you put in the system disk.
John:
And it would grind, grind, grind.
John:
Then it would eject it.
John:
And it would say, please put in the disk that had document.
John:
And you'd put that in.
John:
And it would go grind, grind, grind.
John:
And it would eject it.
John:
And it would say, please put in it.
John:
And you would swap the disks back and forth.
John:
Because it would need to, like, I'm running the application.
John:
But I need the document.
John:
But I need the application.
John:
But I need the document.
John:
Back and forth.
John:
Back and forth.
John:
such that you'd see both people with their hands who got good at doing this, like basically using a single hand to catch an auto-ejecting 3.5-inch floppy disk and insert another one back and forth, right?
John:
And you had a long breaks between, but there was also like mechanisms that would help you with that.
John:
That was the dance.
John:
It was, again, amazing feat of resource usage that this tiny amount of RAM and the data from the application and the data from the document that you could essentially run the system sort of manually swapping back and forth each resource that the computer needed at the time that it needed it.
John:
And it would take forever because floppy disks are slow.
John:
You'd have to wait for it to read, find the place, get the data, put a little bit in RAM, eject it, get the other thing back and forth.
John:
And then when you wanted to save, you'd have to do the same thing.
John:
And then when you quit the application, you'd have to go back to the finder.
John:
So you got to put the system disk back in.
John:
That experience, to get back to the point of this question, was very formative because, well, for one thing, it showed you kind of the mechanics of multitasking because you are the part of the multitasking system.
John:
Essentially, you were the meat part of the multitasking system.
John:
And you could see, look, it's not doing more than one thing at a time.
John:
It's just doing multiple things one after the other interleaved.
John:
You were literally interleaving by swapping disks back and forth.
John:
You could see the mechanics of now the computer needs this.
John:
Now the computer needs that.
John:
It needs to write here.
John:
It needs to read from that.
John:
And you knew that there was a limited resource of RAM and that it was, you know, pulling things in and out of there or whatever.
John:
And so when multitasking started to slowly arrive with the advent of the Mac Plus, which had one megabyte of RAM and hard drives and stuff like that, you could see the mechanics.
John:
You could see those mechanics like compressed.
John:
I did eventually get an external floppy drive.
John:
Then you have two floppy disks at the same time and you wouldn't have to swap.
John:
One had the operating system, the applications, and the other had your data.
John:
And they were both in at the same time, and you would see how much faster that was than swapping disks.
John:
It wasn't twice as fast.
John:
It was like 50 times as fast because you didn't have to wait for a mechanism to eject a disk and put it back in everything.
John:
It was great.
John:
And then the hard drive coming in, right?
John:
That was an important experience, I felt like, because it made me appreciate multitasking, made me understand what was going on, and also the primitive approaches to multitasking.
John:
One of them was called, I think this was called Mini Finder.
John:
If you were in an application and you wanted to
John:
launch another application, you'd have to quit back to the Finder and then find the other application and launch it.
John:
Mini Finder lets you quit one application, not go all the way back to the Finder, but just go to a Mini Finder, which would just be like a little dialogue in your screen that would just show the installed applications that are currently on any disks that are in, right?
John:
And launch it from there.
John:
You'd be like, that's so dumb.
John:
Why not go back to the finder?
John:
Because going back to the finder, everything took forever.
John:
Like the other thing people don't realize, everything took forever.
John:
So you're like, oh, it takes too long to quit back to the finder.
John:
I'd rather quit back to mini finder and save myself literally 25 seconds.
John:
every time i want to do this this was multitasking right it's faster than the kindle yeah exactly no it was way slower than the kindle like you think all right it's faster than the books tablet so see the mini finder was a feature and you're saying yes this is this is what i want i want to be able to switch between more than one thing at a time without having to wait 67 seconds between things i want to wait 22 seconds i can go back to mini finder then launch mac right
John:
Because I don't want to have to load the whole Finder and all the information that, you know, I didn't have to load the whole Finder program.
John:
I wanted to just load Mini Finder.
John:
So, coming from that, it's kind of like people who grew up in the Depression and are saving, like, you know, boxes and twine and stuff.
John:
It's like, you never know when we're going to need this stuff because things are good now and we're able to afford food, but someday we might not.
John:
So, we've got to save all these containers and save this warm clothing and, you know, so...
John:
i feel like i was kind of brought up in in depression or computing resources where i don't expect to have lots of ram or lots of memory uh which is kind of rich coming from me now my gigantic computer with my huge screen and my huge amounts of ram but maybe that's my reaction to it is that i'm just like making sure that uh you know as god as my witness i'll never be ram hungry again that's a reference neither one of you have seen that movie but it's fine um
John:
that's where I'm coming from and it makes me in some ways appreciate where I am because I came from that and because I grew up doing that it does not make me nostalgic for those times I do not have nostalgia unlike Casey with his vinyl records for the time when I had to do that when I was in that when I was doing that all I wanted was more two floppy drives a hard drive like a color screen I wanted that stuff so bad and eventually I got it it just took you know decades right and
John:
And so it makes me appreciate what I have now.
John:
And I still have that same attitude, which is like whatever I have now, I've never felt like, oh, this is probably just about enough.
John:
You know, the poor 640K will be enough for anybody kind of misattributed quote type thing.
John:
But that whole idea that we ever arrive at some sort of ending point and computing resources are sufficient is not a thing.
John:
Not an illusion I ever had and never experienced because –
John:
I always wanted more because when you see the multitasking with the floppy drives going back and forth, you can see how much better this would be with more computing resources and more money.
John:
And you know how computing has been improving over your life.
John:
And so you can see the future and you want to be there.
John:
And that has never changed for me.
John:
So I look at my gigantic screen now and my huge Mac or whatever, and I can see, yes, but, you know, but could you actually use 10 times more computing resources, 100 times?
John:
I say, yes, I totally can.
John:
Because there's plenty of things that I feel like are not up to snuff and they could be better.
John:
Do I need a screen that's the size of my house?
John:
No.
John:
But if you could spray images onto my retinas, I'm all for that as long as it doesn't burn my retinas out.
John:
So I'm not content with the status quo because I can see how things can get better.
John:
And because I've seen how things have advanced and where we came from...
John:
I see how the pieces fit together also helps that I, you know, computer engineering major and been a developer for 20 mumble years or whatever.
John:
But like, I still feel like I'm traveling that road and I never feel like I'm going to get to a point where things are satisfactory.
John:
And I think future further progress is pointless.
John:
It just makes me hungry for more.
Casey:
It's funny hearing you talk about that.
Casey:
I've brought this story up many times, but I vividly remember.
Casey:
I don't recall exactly when it was.
Casey:
Given the house we were in, I want to say it was early 90s, but I remember having an argument with a distant cousin of mine who was quite a bit older than me that one could never, it would be impossible to fill a one gigabyte hard drive because he had one for whatever reason.
Casey:
This was long before that was really a thing.
Casey:
And I was like, well, what do you need that for?
Casey:
You would never fill a gigabyte.
Casey:
What could you possibly fill a gigabyte with?
Casey:
It will never happen.
Casey:
And that lasted like a year, maybe two, before that was clearly incorrect.
Casey:
But no, this got me thinking about some of the pain.
Casey:
So that's all the pain that John had to live through.
Casey:
But Marco and I had our own pain.
John:
On your one gigabyte hard drive story, I think I said this last time you told the story as well.
John:
This is a great example of us not getting quite what we want.
John:
I remember having similar conversations about, oh, hard drives are so big, you'll never be able to fill them.
John:
And every time I saw a bigger hard drive size, what I would say is, I want to be able to fit all the files from all my past computers.
John:
You know this big box of floppy disks?
John:
I want all those floppy disks to be on there.
John:
I also want the hard drive of my previous computer, just like, you know, just the whole hard drive.
John:
And then I want all my new stuff.
John:
And I want to repeat that process for every new computer that I get.
John:
So that when I get a new computer, it literally has all my files from all my past computers plus the new files.
John:
And I have to say, as fast as hard drives have advanced in size, I have not been able to do that.
John:
They're just not big enough.
John:
I am bursting at the seams on a four terabyte drive on this Mac Pro, and it does not have all my files.
John:
Now, all my files from my fast computers are small, but they're not small enough to fit on here.
John:
Yeah, my classic macOS files could probably fit, but not my previous Mac Pro.
John:
I had a multi-terabyte thing too.
John:
And then the one before that was like maybe one terabyte.
John:
The one before that was 500 gigs.
John:
So I still feel like, boy, if only I had a petabyte, then maybe I could fulfill my dream of all my past computers are on every computer.
John:
And when I buy a new computer...
Casey:
it has to be big enough to fit all my past computers and that's like starting from zero then that's just like that like the tear button on the scale and then all my new storage is above that and we haven't achieved that dream so keep trying everybody yeah we're working on it right but no you know you were talking about how you had to swap floppies and i remember doing some of that uh when i was really little the difference though is that your computer was fancy enough that it would actually eject the floppy itself whereas mark and i had to hit a button in order to eject the floppy when we were told to but you can
John:
hit that anytime you wanted and just destroy all your files because your computers were garbage let's not go too far but but yes the the file destruction part is true yes auto auto inject auto eject and auto inject let's not forget the auto inject because when you're swapping floppies back and forth which i was doing all the time auto inject is you'd press it and you'd press it in and it would get you there's like a spring force that you'd feel and instead of like on a pc where you had to shove it all the way in with your thumb and then close the little door
John:
You would push it in, and this is 3.5-inch, not 5.25.
John:
5.25, slid in smooth, and then you'd turn the door.
John:
3.5-inch, there was always spring resistance, but on a PC, you had to shove it all the way in.
John:
But on Macs, they had to auto-inject and auto-eject.
John:
And inject meant that once you pressed it past a certain point, it would suck it out of your hand and go in.
John:
So you didn't have to shove your thumb all the way into the mouth of your computer.
John:
You just push it in a little bit.
John:
And, of course, auto-eject means it would go, and the disc would pop out by an inch, right?
John:
meanwhile we solved this with a button and it worked fine yeah auto inject and auto eject were essential if your life was spent swapping 400k floppy disks and even when it was the swapping wasn't there auto inject and auto eject were definitely differentiated max from pcs as did the three and a half inch floppy disk because five and a quarters were literally floppy and uh you know had exposed magnetic media and were just barbaric and three and a half were obviously superior
Casey:
yes but the pc's got those very shortly after the max let's not be too smart that shortly at least not not in uh not in childhood years because you know when your kid like you know from the age of like seven to eight seems like a millennia you know when you're 30 from 35 36 you don't even remember anyway it's like that so yeah so back in the day that um and i forget marco when when you had a computer in the house but i know you were exposed to them 94 okay
Casey:
So when I was little, I remember wanting to play various computer games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?
Casey:
And shoot, I'm trying to remember what else.
Casey:
SimCity.
Casey:
The first SimCity.
Casey:
SimCity.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
Then eventually SimCity 2000, much, much, much later.
Casey:
But early on, when I was first exposed to DOS, like Windows, that's disk operating system, that was the absolutely barbaric version of what John was doing on his fancy, fancy Mac.
Casey:
There was no Windows.
Casey:
If it existed, it had not reached mainstream at this point.
Casey:
It probably did exist, but nobody was using it at this point.
Casey:
And so we had to do everything via the command line.
Casey:
And I've told this story many times.
Casey:
I'll tell it very briefly again.
Casey:
I was always asking my dad for help.
Casey:
Like, Dad, how do you do this?
Casey:
How do you do that?
Casey:
How do you do this?
Casey:
How do you do that?
Casey:
And eventually, for all my dad's many perks...
Casey:
Patience is not one of them.
Casey:
And eventually he literally handed me the DOS 3.3, I believe, owner's manual or user's manual or whatever, and said, just read this.
Casey:
And I did.
Casey:
And here I am, you know, 20, 30 years later, 30 years later.
Casey:
But anyway, what Marco and I had to manage was we had to write our own config.sys, because remember, it's 8.3 file names, John's favorite thing in the world.
Casey:
We had to write our own config.sys, which would explain to the computer what sort of kind of drivers it would need to load.
Casey:
And we had to write our own autoexec.bat, which would then finish the startup process by running different things after the computer had reached a bare minimum level of functionality.
Casey:
And I remember vividly that I would have to make a decision and swap my config.sys and autoexec.bat files with different ones that
Casey:
based on whether or not I needed a mouse, because to load the mouse driver used some of, I think it was 640K of conventional memory.
Casey:
And then you also had like RAM on top of that, but conventional memory was where stuff like drivers sat.
Casey:
And so I needed to be aware of whether or not the game I was about to play needed the mouse.
Casey:
and run the right config sys and auto exec bat in order to make sure that I have either enabled or disabled the mouse.
Casey:
Because if I don't need the mouse, I want to save some of that conventional memory because some of the games I'm playing, they're like bumping up against the edge of the available conventional memory that I have right now.
Casey:
It's barbaric.
Casey:
It was ridiculous.
Casey:
I also remember, and this is probably something that Marco can chime in on,
Casey:
When the Sound Blaster came out, when sound cards came out and things like that, you needed to do this whole dance with interrupt request ports, IRQ ports, and make sure that you told the software and the hardware, okay, you want the Sound Blaster and IRQ 12 or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And that was always a freaking nightmare because you never knew which one was the right one.
Casey:
and then as i got a little bit older i would write like you know menuing systems for my auto exec bat so it would be like this ridiculous think of it as shell scripts but like this ridiculous menuing system where you know you would you would click okay you would type okay g for games and it would bring up a new menu for all the games you could play and it would load them up and whatever this is what we did because this we didn't have a graphical user interface we just kind of faked it and remember this is on 640 kilobytes of ram which
John:
It's massively more than 128.
John:
People always talk about the original iPhone and how amazing it was that it was so smooth and responsive for the incredibly limited hardware of the time.
John:
But the 128K Mac is kind of in a way that no other product except maybe a couple of well-known game consoles were.
John:
Like they were able to ring out such amazing performance of such incredibly limited hardware.
John:
A full GUI with the mouse driver always loaded in 128 kilobytes with like not a shell on top of a command line thing, but a full GUI operating system from top to bottom.
John:
with everything working with you know sound car like you know full full like it was i think it was like 22 kilohertz sound so it wasn't cd quality but it wasn't like the bleeps and boops of the you know ms-dos thing so you got a quote-unquote sound car like everything everything a a more modern pc wouldn't have for such a long time with so much more resources they somehow managed to get to work on a 128 obviously it didn't stay 128 for long 512 came out then one megabyte and it
John:
ramped up pretty quick but that's why like the tales of the original mac team are fun to read is it's kind of like reading you know uh kind of like apollo 13 uh you've got to fix this problem and you've got this set of stuff and some tape can you make these parts into a complete gui operating system no you can't have more ram no you can't have a bigger screen no you can't have a hard drive uh good luck
John:
And that's why, you know, Mac uses are insufferable.
John:
And the only time I had to deal with auto exec bat and config.sys was when I was at my friend's house trying to get PC games to run.
John:
And then you got to play with both of those files until the game ran.
John:
And then I just, you know, I played the game and I left.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
It was the worst.
Casey:
And speaking of the worst, I remember when my dad and I originally wanted to get an internet service provider, an ISP, we needed to figure out how to use the modem.
Casey:
And so we had to write our own, I don't know why this was the case, but I vividly remember doing this.
Casey:
We spent literally like a week writing the Haze, like ATB,
John:
dr at whatever whatever everybody had to do that that was just part of being on the internet back then even on the mac when i had to you know run my z modem thing i i knew the uh the at modem and it strings and all that yep yep yep we had to do that by hand there was no documentation anywhere you just kind of threw junk against the wall and hope for the best you get the documentation on the internet though
Casey:
Well, yeah, but you got to get on the internet to get the documentation off the internet.
John:
I know, it's a chicken egg, but good thing was I was in college then, so I could just go down to the computer lab and look up stuff.
Marco:
If somebody says plus, plus, plus on a podcast, does it mute and disconnect?
Casey:
Fair.
Casey:
Fair.
Casey:
And then, you know, so at this point, you know, you really want to play games with your friends and you could do dial up, you know, where you could literally dial your friend's house using the game software and it would create a connection.
Casey:
You could play each other, you know, over dial up, which was impossibly slow and you couldn't do anything other than play the game.
Casey:
There was no chatting with them in most cases.
Casey:
You just play the game.
Casey:
That was that.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And then eventually, you know, we got to the point that we wanted to do quote unquote LAN parties, but LANs weren't a thing, or at least not for kids my age.
Casey:
So what we would do is we would bring our tower computers and our 7,000 pound CRT monitors that were only 13 inches, and we would bring them to our friends' houses.
Casey:
And then we would set them up in a very small and very stinky room where you would use something called a serial cable.
Casey:
So there was a serial cable, but I think it was like a crossover on the inside.
Casey:
So you could connect two serial ports together.
Casey:
to, you know, a serial port on one machine to a serial port on another machine.
Casey:
And then you could play each other locally, which was so much better than doing it over dial-up because it had, by comparison, infinite bandwidth.
Casey:
And then over time, then there was some modicum of networking in DOS, like IPX networking.
Casey:
And there was eventually some software, I know I've talked about this several times in the past, called Kali, K-A-L-I.
Casey:
which would mimic IPX networking, but do it over TCP IP.
Casey:
So you could do these games, all these old DOS games that were never intended to be played on the internet, you could now play on the internet, which was amazing.
Casey:
And then the other fun thing about being on the internet is when you had your one ISP, well, what happens if you happen to have a laptop and happen to have a modem and you happen to go traveling?
Casey:
Well, in order to get on the internet, you would have to dial your ISP, which is presumably a local ISP in your area code.
Casey:
So if I was traveling away from Richmond, I would be making a long distance phone call.
Casey:
That was also a thing to something in the 804 area code.
Casey:
And so then I would have, I would be accruing charges potentially from the ISP.
Casey:
I'd be accruing charges for the long distance call.
Casey:
And it was a mess.
Casey:
And that was the one time I was jealous of American online users was because AOL had, you know, endpoints, if you will,
Casey:
everywhere and there was some there was like a database inside the AOL app and you would just say okay well here's where I am and you would go scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll scroll Richmond Virginia scroll scroll scroll okay there that looks like a local number and then you could dial your local number and not have to pay long distance charges to get on quote unquote the internet what was your ISP that didn't have local numbers what were you using
Casey:
No, no, I was – it was local when I was in – I wasn't in Richmond at the time.
Casey:
But let's take a discussion.
Casey:
It was local to Richmond.
Marco:
Yeah, but what was that ISP?
Casey:
Oh, God, I don't remember.
Casey:
It was forever ago.
Marco:
There used to be local ISPs.
Marco:
Like it would be like an ISP in your town or in your region.
John:
I know, I know.
John:
But like – because I remember having the same situation.
John:
Like so I knew the BU number, 3535,000.
John:
Uh, but I don't call that.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know if it's still a modem.
John:
Uh, I guess it was six one seven.
John:
Uh, you know, and I could call it from campus and I could long distance it from home during the summer.
John:
Cause this is the other thing to remember.
John:
So like my first experience of the internet was at college in, in 1993, I guess.
John:
But when I came home for the summer, up, where'd the internet go?
John:
It's back in college.
John:
So like Casey, I could call on my modem, which I brought home with me.
John:
I could call the BU dial-up number, but it's long distance to Boston.
John:
So I had, you know, rather than doing that, to get a quote-unquote local ISP, but even then, even in 93, I think I had Netcom, and Netcom was a, I guess, semi-national ISP, and they had dial-up numbers in most
Casey:
major metropolitan areas so i got to call a new york dial-up number to get on the internet and then i could hop over to the bu stuff or whatever yeah see i was at this point that was not what i had and i racking my brain i am pretty sure this was when we were living in austin texas and i'm pretty sure it was north american internet and the domain for it was nai.net and i just went to it and it's like been bought up a thousand times it's not what it is anymore and
Casey:
But I'm pretty sure when we were in Austin, when we were writing the modem codes and so on and so forth, the Hays codes, I'm pretty sure it was NAI.net.
Casey:
I'm almost sure of it.
Casey:
And they were only established in Austin.
Casey:
Again, maybe it wasn't Austin, but I'm pretty sure it was.
Casey:
And that's what we had.
Casey:
That was it.
Casey:
And Dad had a tremendous advantage because IBM obviously had like endpoints, I don't know what you would call them, but like endpoints everywhere.
Casey:
And so I could get on the internet briefly and check my email using dad's work dial-up.
Casey:
But it was just a very, very different time.
Casey:
When we wanted to transfer a file from one person to another, you would put it on a diskette or a disk, depending on how old you are and what you would want to call it, and you would walk it directly.
Casey:
to somebody else and hand them that disk.
Casey:
And now you have transferred that file because there was no internet.
Marco:
Well, you might have transferred the file.
Marco:
You have to actually read it off the disk to see if it was actually readable first.
John:
That's another archaic thing from all of our youths is a big subject of advertising and competition in the computing marketplace was surrounding file format compatibility.
John:
It's part of the reason why Macs were like boxed out of the business market or whatever.
John:
And there was all sorts of Mac products like this will let you open files from PCs.
John:
Like the notion was that basically, you know, if you had a PC, any of the files that you made in that PC, the Mac could do nothing with and vice versa.
John:
Right.
John:
Which I think is a concept that's mostly foreign to people these days because basically we've set it on standardized formats.
John:
Like for images, for example, they're all JPEGs, Pings.
John:
Well, those are not platform specific file formats.
John:
Like,
John:
You know, through the magic of the web, the platform that nobody owns, you know, the web pages can be viewed from different platforms.
John:
The images can be viewed.
John:
And we still have Microsoft Word and stuff like that.
John:
But it used to be that literally every single file you made, no matter what it was, no matter what was in it.
John:
Oh, you made that on a PC.
John:
Well, of course, a Mac can't read that without some space.
John:
special software that nodes had to read pc files because there was no standardized format and no internet to sort of force that standardization and that that whole concept is mostly disappeared especially now that if any application is remotely viable in any platform it's probably cross-platform like there are very few i guess there are probably a bunch of mac programs that don't exist on the pc and i suppose vice versa but like
John:
microsoft word is everywhere every image format is readable everywhere photoshop is everywhere you know like it's we're the the portability of data is much better now and i mean like in terms of being able to read it um even if we're not carrying floppy disks around so yeah i could take my mac floppy disk pcs couldn't even read the mac floppy disk they would they would ask to initialize it or they would however they would format john the word is format format this disc is uninitialized would you like to initialize it i know that message well yeah
John:
And vice versa for a long time that if you had a quote unquote PC disk and you brought it to a Mac, unless again, unless you have, you could tell the Mac was the lesser platform, like the less market share, because on the Mac, there were tons of utilities and stuff to help you read files from the PC, read DOS formatted floppies, much less so in the other direction because, you know, Windows didn't have to.
John:
So why would it?
Marco:
I mean, we didn't even have like text encoding.
John:
So like, you know, this was before Unicode.
John:
Oh, we had ASCII, but like nothing stores stuff in ASCII.
John:
Once word processing started to have like bold and italic, it's like so much.
John:
Even RTF is I mean, RTF is still kind of a horror show, but that was close as we got to style cross platform style text before before the beautiful advent of PDF and HTML and all those other things.
Marco:
Man, you guys and your fancy modems and ISPs and computers before 1994, I had a very different experience.
Marco:
See, you both had the advantage that your parents were a little bit more computer-friendly.
Marco:
In Casey's case, a lot more computer-friendly, I think.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
My parents weren't computer friendly.
John:
They were susceptible to other people telling them that this is the thing they need to do for the kid, but they knew nothing.
John:
Casey actually had a computer knowledgeable parent.
John:
I did not.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But you, you at least had like computer enabling parents.
Marco:
Yes, for sure.
Marco:
I did not have that.
Marco:
Uh,
Marco:
My mom, you know, so number one was, you know, my mom, super non-technical.
Marco:
My dad died when I was very, very young.
Marco:
So I was raised by a single mom.
Marco:
We didn't have any money, really.
Marco:
Like, we weren't poor.
Marco:
We were, you know, lower middle class.
Marco:
We got by, but we couldn't buy fancy stuff at all.
Marco:
The only reason we were able to get a computer is that one of my grandmothers had passed away and left us, like, $2,000.
Marco:
And so we used that to buy our first computer in 94.
Marco:
It was a wonderful Gateway 2008.
Casey:
I loved those so much at the time.
Marco:
A 486 PC running Windows 3.11 for work groups and a black and white inkjet printer, which existed then.
Marco:
But anyway, so because we really didn't have any money, we were able to buy this computer like once.
Marco:
in 94 but then not really able to upgrade it ever so i was using that 1994 486 computer until 1998 or 1999 like i entirely it couldn't run windows 95 so i entirely skipped windows 95 i didn't use it at all i went straight from 3.1 to a very short-lived stay on 98 and
John:
And by the way, people are saying, so what?
John:
You use a five-year-old computer.
John:
Who cares?
John:
You don't understand how fast computers were changing.
John:
The five years from 1994 to 1998 were very different than the five years from 2015 to 2020, for example.
Casey:
Yes.
John:
Very different.
John:
Yes.
John:
Things were changing so fast.
John:
That's where all the jokes about, oh, you buy it and you bring it home, it's obsolete.
John:
Things were getting better so fast at that point that a five-year-old computer was like, why even bother?
Marco:
right even even you know it wasn't even top of the line when we bought it because we bought like a mid-range one two thousand dollars bought a mid-range desktop not a top-of-the-line desktop in 94 still true still true of apple today yeah but this was gateway 2000 i know it was two thousand dollars in 1994 money which is anyway
Marco:
yeah but anyway the so that computer that was like and i i was entirely self-taught because my you know my mom was very very non-technical you know my sister didn't care and that was it that was the whole household my mom my sister and me so i was the only it was in my room because no one else cared which is great um that computer i use that for so long and again going back to the you know not really having any money thing
Marco:
No one in my house was going to agree that we should pay for a dial-up account or even a modem.
Marco:
So for the first few years of having that computer... For the first year, I didn't have any connectivity to the internet because that wasn't actually a given why you'd get a computer.
Marco:
It wasn't to put it on the internet.
Marco:
There was barely any internet at all back then.
Marco:
So for the first year or so or two that I had it...
Marco:
i just used local software i would you know play around and you know ms paint or use microsoft word uh figure out various things play some games that i would like buy on cds like you'd go to a store in the mall and you'd buy like that cd that had they would say like 200 games and it was all shareware demos oh yeah yeah yeah
Marco:
It was like 200 shareware demos for 10 bucks on this.
Marco:
So I'd have like the first two levels of 200 different games that all sucked.
Marco:
So that was my gaming situation for a while.
Marco:
I had to add on the sound card and CD-ROM as a set for Christmas that following Christmas because like it would have been too much to get that with the computer.
Marco:
that i got the computer in spring 94 and then in december 94 i got the sound blaster 16 sound card with cd-rom combo the sound card actually drove the cd-rom drive like it had the sound card itself word had a a ribbon cable and i don't even know what protocol it spoke but it was some probably some early like form of ata and that drove the cd-rom
Marco:
didn't the joystick also plug into the sound card yes it did yeah i didn't have a joystick but yeah game pads yeah that would they would plug in uh anyway so that computer lasted me a long time because it had to um to the point where even it even lasted me into the early internet usage but again like i didn't have a modem
Marco:
because we couldn't buy a modem because they were expensive and who the hell was going to buy a modem and then buy an isp so eventually some some like friend of my mom's felt sorry for me and gave me like a hand-me-down for first i got a hand-me-down 2400 baud modem and this was in like probably 1996 like it was way late for that speed it was
Marco:
this giant thing and i remember like i i was i was playing with visual basic at the time and i needed for somehow i had lost my copy of the vbrun whatever dot dll file that you need to run it's like the runtime for visual basic project you need to run anything from visual basic so i had to download a copy of it so i somebody told me about some bbs i had to like dial up this bbs and try to download this 300 kilobyte file on a 2400 baud modem which i don't i'm not gonna do the math now but i think i think it ended up it needed like two hours or something
John:
Do you remember how much 2400 baud modem cost at that point?
John:
Because you got the used one, right?
John:
Why couldn't you buy one new?
Marco:
It was a hand-me-down.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But at the time, the current speed at the time was 28.8.
Marco:
So it was old.
Marco:
Oh, that's right.
John:
I was trying to remember.
John:
My first modem was also 2400, but that was the fastest speed you could get at the time.
Marco:
That was not the case in 1995, 1996, whenever this was.
John:
You definitely are offset by several years in history.
John:
I was just looking up one Christmas.
John:
I got my second floppy drive, which, as I previously said, is super important.
John:
That second floppy drive in today's dollars was $1,200.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
John:
For a 400K external floppy drive.
John:
That's all it did.
Casey:
That's bananas.
Casey:
And just to build on what Marco was saying, by the way, I don't know if I have the words to express how slow a 2400 baud modem is.
John:
You could watch the characters appearing.
Casey:
That is 1,000%.
Casey:
Again, vivid memory.
Casey:
This was early in my computing life.
Casey:
Early, early, early.
Casey:
I have a vivid memory of using Prodigy, which we briefly had an account on.
Casey:
And you would literally watch the text come in as it was being downloaded.
Casey:
Like you see in movies a day.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
You go to a movie and you'll see some kind of thing.
John:
And not only will you see the letters appear one at a time, like they did over a 1,200, 2,400-bought modem, but each one will make a beep.
Brrr.
Marco:
well now now you can watch all the large language models very slowly generating text but but it's thinking it's not taking time to transfer it right right but yeah it is that was like my my whole internet experience growing up was really weird because so i came to it late um i had very very basic like that that computer was so basic for the internet that when mp3s were starting to become a thing was right at the end of me having that computer i
Marco:
so my first two mp3s i had on that 486 computer with a 400 meg hard drive so not only could you know but after i've been using this computer for like four years the hard drive was nearly full so to add like a three megabyte mp3 was a big deal for a 400 megabyte hard drive and a 486 can't play mp3s in real time it's too slow to decode them
Marco:
So I had to actually play them at like 22 kilohertz.
Marco:
I had to cut the quality and just not decode the upper frequency range because it was too slow.
Marco:
I bet somebody could make an MP3 decoder written in assembly for a 486 that would work.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
I mean, this was obviously very early in MP3 days, so I'm sure it wasn't that optimized yet, but it was bad.
John:
It was written in Pascal.
Yeah.
Marco:
yeah eventually somebody eventually a family friend um for like some other birthday or christmas gift bought me a 33.6 modem and then that changed everything that was like oh my god now i can actually dial things but still didn't have an isp my family wasn't going to pay 20 bucks a month and i was like a young teenager i was i couldn't do that myself so i had a i had a rich friend though yeah
Marco:
whose dad had an aol account and and and it was this was right before aol went flat rate you were still paying like whatever like three dollars an hour to use it but he would let me occasionally sign in to a screen name that he created his account problem is aol accounts wouldn't allow account sharing so if somebody was signed in you couldn't sign in also to the same account so
Marco:
I would have to leave the call waiting non-disabled on my modem init string, leave call waiting enabled, and change the init string so the modem speaker would stay on the whole time.
Marco:
So the whole time using the internet, I'm hearing chhhh next to me.
Marco:
And if I heard chhhh, boop, chhhh.
Marco:
if I heard that call waiting beep come in, I would have to flip the modem off so it would hang up, instantly disconnect.
Marco:
I'd pick up the phone.
Marco:
Hey, sorry.
Marco:
And, you know, hang up.
Marco:
And then he'd go sign on on his account, like from his house.
Casey:
It was this whole terrible thing.
Casey:
This is also... I had moments of this as well.
Casey:
I think specifically with AOL.
Casey:
I don't know why.
Casey:
Maybe I really wanted to get on AOL specifically because there was something I wanted there.
Casey:
That's probably what it was.
Casey:
But you would find a friend, like Marco was describing, whose parents...
Casey:
had an AOL account.
Casey:
And then he would either, well, in my case, he, but they would give you a login or something like that.
Casey:
But like Marco said, if the parent wanted to get online or the kid wanted to get online, you don't want them to, especially the parent, to see, oh, you know, Casey is online.
Casey:
Well,
Casey:
what the hell is this?
Casey:
Why was Casey online?
Casey:
And so you had to be like, you had to be real committed when you dialed up with somebody else's account and you had to be real sure you were real fast with whatever you were trying to do because it was like super dangerous, not in a literal sense, but it was like dangerous.
Casey:
You don't want the parent to know that you're leeching off their account
Casey:
especially during the time that it wasn't unlimited because yeah, for a long time, ISPs were like, uh, particularly AOL was, was, it was built hourly.
Casey:
It was, it was built by the time you used.
Casey:
And so, yeah, this was, this was like the most dangerous game.
Casey:
Uh, that's a reference.
Casey:
And it was, it was, it was so stressful and so frustrating.
Casey:
I mean, again, I was, I was thinking about this topic earlier today, like we just assume that the internet is everywhere.
Casey:
I'm not even talking about our cell phones, just, uh,
Casey:
In general, like every building you go in today probably has the internet running through it in some way, shape or form.
Casey:
And that could not have been further from the truth at this era in computing.
John:
When I came home from college, I left the internet behind because the internet was at school.
John:
When I came back to my house, my house didn't have the internet.
John:
Where did the internet come into your house from?
John:
And so I had to like...
John:
Like I brought my modem home, but the only thing I could dial was the Boston University number.
John:
And so I was just like, I got to get an ISP.
John:
And then we had the, you know, well, we only have one phone line.
John:
And I essentially wanted to be on the internet 24 hours a day, which was incompatible with having a phone.
John:
So how do you figure that out?
John:
And I did actually, we did have AOL and some other things like that, which I despised, right?
John:
Because my first experience was with the real internet.
John:
So I could see that AOL was not where I wanted to be.
John:
Something you both said reminded me of another thing from my computing past that gives me a different perspective on computers.
John:
I just mentioned that with the original Macintosh, when you turned it on, it would make a little beep, the screen would come on, and then it would show a floppy disk icon with a question mark on it, and it would be blinking.
John:
It's basically saying, you know, disk?
John:
You've got to stick in a disk.
John:
That's all the Mac did when you turned it on.
John:
But I had had computers before that.
John:
Like I said, my first computer was a VIC-20, which we rented, not bought, because it was too expensive to buy.
John:
So you used to be able to rent computers.
John:
I don't know how much the rental costs, but presumably it was cheaper than buying.
John:
Anyway, VIC-20, I think this was true of Commodore 64, Commodore PET, my original computers.
John:
If you took that out of the box and you turned it on, it didn't have a blinking floppy disk icon.
John:
It didn't have graphics, right?
John:
And you connected it to your television.
John:
That was your monitor.
Marco:
but those early computers when you turn them on i mean i don't know if you did you you know what are you experiencing these computers when you turn them on what do they do i mean i never use anything that old but i remember like you know the old apple twos that i would have in computer school at school computer labs like you just flip it on and it would beep and it would have and the crt would warm up over a few seconds and you'd see a cursor yeah and you'd see what a cursor and what do you what can you do with that cursor what the hell is the cursor there for
Marco:
With those old Apple IIs, it was a basic cursor.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Computers, my very first computer and the original personal computers that I experienced with the VIC-20 on, when you turn them on, you got a place where you could type.
John:
And what could you type?
John:
Basic programs.
John:
A computer was a thing that you programmed.
John:
That was what it was.
John:
My VIC-20 did not have a floppy drive or a cassette tape drive or literally anything else.
John:
You turned it on and you got a prompt.
John:
What could you do?
John:
Well, you could take a computer magazine that you got from library at school and you could type in a basic program.
John:
Or you could type your own basic programs.
John:
Or you could make little colorful squares on the screen by figuring out which key makes a different colorful square on the screen, right?
John:
But built into the computers was the basic programming language.
John:
And you would type a line number and type a basic thing, and that was it.
John:
And you could load your program and run your program and do stuff like that.
John:
So the Mac was a very big change for me in many ways.
John:
Obviously, it was my first GUI computer and the first GUI computer most people have ever seen.
John:
But also, the Mac, when you turned it on,
John:
there was nothing there you had to boot into an operating system run some software whatever it did not it did not put you at a basic prompt it was the first computer i used that was not essentially this is a tool for writing and running programs the mac was a tool for running applications essentially programs that other people wrote yes you could write your own programs too but boy was it more complicated than basic let me tell you
Marco:
Going back to Torb's question, which I think was great, how did all this old stuff, how does it affect our usage patterns today?
Marco:
I think for my story, it's a very complicated mess of lots of these things.
Marco:
From what John was saying a minute ago, having programming be just built into everything.
Marco:
It makes me really resent platforms that lock that away or make it impossible to write software for them or very difficult.
Marco:
I don't love that.
Marco:
I love when computers are programmable themselves, when you can use a computing device and write programs for it on it.
Marco:
I love that.
Marco:
But in general, too, my whole history here, I didn't have much...
Marco:
I couldn't afford upgrades very often.
Marco:
After that 486, I ended up doing a series of self-built computers because that was the way to get a computer less expensively, was build it yourself.
Marco:
And I learned how to do all that, which honestly served me very well.
Marco:
I learned how to build PCs, how to upgrade PCs, how to get different parts together.
Marco:
I spent so much time building PCs for either myself or for my friends and having to figure out problems with
Marco:
So much time with drivers reinstalling Windows.
Marco:
Why does this hard drive not show up?
Marco:
So many problems.
Marco:
So much time spent dealing with all that crap.
Marco:
So much time spent reinstalling Windows.
Marco:
And as a result, now...
Marco:
I'm fortunate enough that I can buy good hardware now, and so I do.
Marco:
Because I went so long without having it.
Marco:
Like, as John was saying, when you're a kid, this feels like an eternity.
Marco:
Like, when I was a teenager, using these slow computers, and I cannot possibly express to anybody who wasn't alive back then how slow everything was.
Marco:
You know, we talked about it a little bit earlier, but just everything was so slow back then.
Marco:
It was that slow through the entire 90s and even the early 2000s.
Marco:
It wasn't quite as bad once RAM started getting cheaper in the mid-2000s, but it was really slow in the 90s because everything was RAM-starved.
Marco:
You just hear hard drive grinding noises constantly.
John:
I mean, did either you run software off floppy disks?
John:
Because the switch to hard drives is basically like the switch to SSDs.
John:
Most of us lived through the switch to SSDs.
John:
You would think, what's the difference?
John:
Floppy disk, hard drive, they're both spinning media.
John:
You both got to wait for the disk to spin around to where you are, and you got to move ahead.
John:
But boy, was it different running.
John:
Because I ran software off floppy drives for a long time, or what seemed like a long time.
John:
And it's the worst.
John:
And that was back in the era when you could listen to computers and hear how they're doing because they made mechanical noises that you could interpret their health.
John:
And so I'm very familiar with floppy drive noises and what it sounds like when things are going well and not going well.
John:
And yeah, so that was a whole other level of slow.
John:
There was...
John:
I suppose there was cassette tape slow, which is you got to rewind and load the program.
John:
And that was like, oh, nothing's happening.
John:
We're loading the program.
John:
Come back when it's loaded.
John:
So that's one level.
John:
So the next was floppy disks, which was random access, but super slow.
John:
Then there was hard drives.
John:
Then there was SSDs.
John:
And each of those leads.
Casey:
Oh, you're skipping a step.
Casey:
You're skipping an important step.
Casey:
And I skipped it earlier, too.
Casey:
The CD-ROM drive.
Casey:
Oh, my word.
John:
I'm putting that off to the side because that was like backsliding because we had hard drives.
John:
And it's like, yeah, but what if you had a really big hard drive that was incredibly slow?
Yeah.
John:
No thanks, but it's 650 gigs and you can play Myst.
John:
All right, fine.
Casey:
Not gigs, 650 megs.
John:
650 megs, sorry.
John:
650 megs.
John:
Yeah, it's hard.
Marco:
My favorite part of the CD-ROM era was at the end when they got really fast.
Marco:
And so, and everything, like, so, you know, what happened was early CD-ROM drives, they'd be like, you know, 2X, 4X.
John:
I had a 1X drive.
Marco:
Oh, I'm sorry.
John:
I think it was $800 when I bought it in whatever 1990s money that was.
John:
That's rough.
John:
That's 150 kilobytes a second.
Casey:
We had one of those too.
Casey:
And again, a differentiator between the Mac and a PC was our original CD-ROM drive, which was external.
Casey:
You had to put the CD in a caddy.
John:
Yeah, no, the first Mac drive was in a caddy too.
John:
It just cost 10 times as much as the PC one.
Marco:
Yeah, it was probably SCSI.
Marco:
It was.
Marco:
It was SCSI.
Marco:
My favorite part is when we got to the 52X CD-ROM era of the mid-2000s.
Marco:
It's too fast.
Marco:
So every time the CD would be accessed,
Marco:
everything on the computer would freeze and for like four seconds and you hear and it was like a plane and it was because it had to spin up to its ridiculous spindle speed to and it wouldn't read anything until it was spun all the way up so it would have this like in this four second like just lock of every whatever was trying to read it would just freeze for a few seconds and you hear this jet engine taking off in your computer and
Marco:
And that was normal for probably six years, seven years.
Marco:
For a long time, every CD-ROM drive in a PC did that.
John:
They all did that.
John:
Speaking of multitasking, on the original Mac, I just described how you couldn't run more than programming at once, but you couldn't do more than one thing at once because the resources were so limited.
John:
The famous example is if you held down a pull-down menu, I've already talked about how you couldn't click a menu.
John:
So if you click the mouse button and held it down in the file menu...
John:
everything on the on the computer would stop nothing else is happening all it's doing is concentrating and drawing that menu for you any program that like mac paint it stopped doing anything nothing else is happening right same thing was true for floppy drives in the finder if you were copying a file from a floppy drive to the other floppy drive if you were lucky enough to have two of them or whatever
John:
Nothing else is happening while that copy is happening.
John:
There's a system modal dialogue showing a progress bar.
John:
You could do literally nothing else.
John:
You couldn't go mess around in the finder, do something else.
John:
It was like, you're just going to watch that progress bar go as it copies of stuff.
John:
And the reason I bring this up is because...
John:
Like that era of like, oh, it's the floppy drive era.
John:
No one has any RAM.
John:
Multitasking is too expensive.
John:
Like everything, you know, if you have a GUI computer, like you're not gonna be able, by the time we get multitasking, everyone had hard drives and like that kind of fit.
John:
But I have this one sort of discontinuous experience where somebody I knew had an OS2 computer with a floppy drive.
John:
And in the whatever it was, maybe Casey knows, what was the file manager called in OS2?
John:
Some work shell thing or whatever.
Casey:
Oh, gosh, yes.
Casey:
I know what you're thinking of, but I don't remember anymore.
John:
Anyway, it was the Finder equivalent in OS2.
John:
And he was showing me his OS2 computer, and I was like, yeah, yeah, Macs are better, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And then he copied a file from a floppy drive.
John:
I think he copied it from a floppy onto his hard drive.
John:
And then he started to do other things.
John:
I'm like, you can't do anything but not floppy.
John:
You're copying from a floppy drive.
John:
What witchcraft is this?
John:
Because it has been so burned into my brain that when you're doing like, like Marco was saying, like CD-ROM, like when you're waiting for that thing to spin up, nothing else is happening.
John:
Like it's just, you're waiting for an IO.
John:
And I had lived so long with the idea with like, oh, so you're copying something from a floppy drive.
John:
That is literally the only thing your computer is doing right now.
John:
You can't even use anything else in the file manager.
John:
But then in OS2, you could copy something from a floppy drive and go do something else.
John:
And it was like this amazing, the magic of preemptive multitasking
John:
multitasking that's when i knew the mac needed a new operating system that was it that was the moment yeah i knew before that but you know it was still like it just it blew my mind in a way that like it hadn't even occurred to me that this is a thing an operating could do just because the floppiness was from the era when you couldn't do that of course when you copy from hard drives you can do other stuff but not a floppy drive because that was like so associated with the arrow and all there were were floppy drives
Marco:
See, this is like, here you are wondering about, we need a new operating system.
Marco:
For me, my operating system at the time, which was Windows, it was just telling me over and over again, every couple of months when I'd have to reinstall the whole thing to make it work right, I should be using a different operating system.
Marco:
like i like that's why you know i ended up jumping ship to mac in about 2004 you know looking back through through this history like all the all the computers i built all the time i spent debugging windows and managing drivers and you know oh god install the nvidia driver so the screen resolution fixes itself and oh now it's conflicting with the weird scuzzy driver for the cdr like
John:
Yeah, you could have been just debugging scope determination problems like Mac users.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
And all this, that entire history, that's why, going back to Tor, how it affects my switch pattern today, that's why I have zero patience now for dealing with OS bugs and cruft and having to reinstall or restore things and having to reset everything up.
Marco:
I hate doing that now.
Marco:
Because I spent my entire youth doing that and not getting much else done.
Marco:
At the time, it was vaguely fun because it was all I had to do and it was the only hardware I had and so fine.
Marco:
But then as soon as I switched to Mac, like I got a Mac laptop in 2004 because I needed a laptop and they were good.
Marco:
And I was instantly hooked on Mac OS and my PC usage quickly fell off and I quickly stopped buying PCs because it was just crazy.
Marco:
so much better for my my purposes i was at that point i was so burnt out from just the overhead of having a pc and trying to keep it in working order i was so burnt out from that even though i liked it for a while i was ready to move on and the mac was that way to move on and i was so thankful to do it and at the time you know i still couldn't afford much so you know the mac i have was not super fast but man it was so much better in terms of like not having to deal with a
Marco:
And then I fell in love with all the nice little details and the delightfulness and the power user features and the good design.
Marco:
But what got me there was I wanted a good laptop that I didn't have to mess with all the time.
Marco:
And it was just so, so good.
Marco:
And that's why, again, if you look at me today, what we all joke about today, like, oh, I keep buying stuff.
Marco:
And if something doesn't work, I get rid of it.
Marco:
Like, yeah, because I spent my entire youth not being able to buy anything and with tons of stuff that didn't work.
Marco:
So now I went the other opposite direction.
Marco:
Now I'm like, I have no patience for hardware that's insufficient for my needs or stuff that doesn't work very well or stuff I have to manage and mess with a lot.
Marco:
No patience whatsoever.
Marco:
I got better things to do now.
Marco:
I paid my dues.
Marco:
I've moved on.
John:
in 2004 did you care about uh the unix the fact that you know the the mac was unix under the covers or is that not yet a factor in your decision no that wasn't a factor at all i didn't i didn't really know to what degree that was the case yet did you uh i mean this is before you were in like php doing the web stuff and everything like that
Marco:
It was right when that was starting, because it was when I graduated from college.
Marco:
Right after I graduated from college, I was starting to move around a lot, and I wanted something portable, and I had always ventured into the Mac section of Micro Center.
Marco:
They would always have this sectioned-off room, sectioned-off with glass walls from the rest of Micro Center, and that would be the little Mac paradise.
Marco:
And you'd go in there, and you'd shrink the windows, and you'd see the genie effects.
Marco:
This was early OS X days.
John:
I'm not sure paradise is the word I would use to describe it.
John:
It was...
John:
More like a little prison.
Marco:
Well, the Mac prison with, you know, the Mac area, you know, it would have like.
Marco:
I feel like the Mac was marginalized in retail stores.
John:
This is the reason Apple opened its own stores.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But at least at least you knew that, like, if you had a Mac, at least you knew you could go in there and you could see the four apps they actually had for the Mac that you could buy.
Marco:
Oh, sorry.
John:
sick bird this this is 2004 this was 2004 though so this is post imac this is post mac os 10 if you remember in the bad old days if you went into a store that sold computers before mac os 10 before the ipod before the imac there was a section with max and it was sneered upon by everybody and it was not well loved the only place that i that i ever experienced that had any kind of well-loved
John:
display of mac hardware was a place that didn't even sell mac hardware and that's egghead software because they would have a mac there a fancy mac that you couldn't afford because it costs as much as your house uh and they would show it running the mac applications that they sold egghead treated its macs well but nobody else did
John:
Do you remember where I got?
John:
That was National Chain, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
I don't think we had them in Columbus.
Casey:
I don't think we had them, but I remember it being a thing that I was aware of.
John:
That's where I had to go to be at, because I was reading all the Mac magazines.
John:
I had a subscription to Mac user, Mac world.
John:
I tried to get a subscription to Mac week by lying about who I was and I could never pull it off.
John:
So I had to read.
John:
mac week from the uh the the desks of uh relatives offices where they got it but the only place i could go to see the things that i was reading in magazines was egghead software because i couldn't afford a color mac they cost i mean i was just looking up today a mac 2 the very first color macintosh with the default smallest possible color monitor that was 13 inches 17 000 in today's money yeah
John:
so that's why i didn't have a mac 2 but if i wanted to see one in person it was like going to see like a lamborghini at the car show you're not going to own one but if you want to see one in person i'd go to egghead software and they had a mac 2 setup and then i could be like there it is i can touch it right and the people at the store wouldn't yell at you eventually that went downhill too because you'd go see the poor mac that was sitting in egghead software which eventually was like some terrible performer and all the desktop would be 100 folders named zzzz from little kids who would just like make a new folder and just put it match their hands on the keyboard
John:
It was sad, but for a while there, it was nice.
Marco:
Thank you so much to our sponsor this week, which is you, the audience.
Marco:
We decided to do a special episode this week where we are entirely audience-supported this episode.
Marco:
So our wonderful ATP store, not merch store, John, our wonderful ATP store.
Marco:
You can buy merchandise there.
Marco:
And thank you so much to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You've made this show possible this week.
Marco:
And you can join us if you're not a member yet, atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
And we will talk to you next week.
John:
Now the show is over.
John:
They didn't even mean to begin.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research.
John:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
John:
Cause it was accidental.
John:
Oh, 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.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
so I had an idea I don't know if it's a good idea but I had an idea
Casey:
We haven't done it yet, so I don't want anyone to get too excited and go looking right now.
Casey:
But it occurred to me.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, I got to do this.
Casey:
You don't have to do it right this minute.
John:
Marco's doing it in real time while Casey talks.
John:
I'll just edit the file right on the publisher.
John:
It's really the server.
John:
Who cares?
John:
Casey does no web development.
Casey:
Oh, stop.
Casey:
I did plenty of web development.
Casey:
Edit it in production.
Casey:
The old ways are best.
John:
I always edit it in production.
Oh, God.
Casey:
It's fine.
John:
Emacs makes a temporary file and then renames it atomically when you save.
Casey:
Anyway, I had an idea.
Casey:
I want to make it plain.
Casey:
I'm not trying to be funny.
Casey:
I want to make it plain.
Casey:
I am reserving the right to take this idea back.
Casey:
I'm reserving the right to cancel it all.
Casey:
I'm reserving the right to say just kidding for any reason I so desire.
Casey:
But I thought it would be neat if as a kind of accidental membership perk...
Casey:
What if we slash I put a link to the test flight for my forthcoming app on your member page right next to your ATP store discount or maybe really above or below or nearby one way or the other?
Marco:
You mean flukup?
Marco:
It's pronounced flukup.
Casey:
It's pronounced fluke up.
Casey:
Thank you very much.
Casey:
And no, it's trading under a different name now.
Casey:
It's doing business as D slash B slash A. But anyways, so I think what I'm going to try is we're going to put a link to the test flight for the app into the ATP membership page where you would find your store discount and so on and so forth.
Casey:
But here's the deal.
Casey:
First of all, if it.
Casey:
Oh, all right.
Casey:
Look at that.
Casey:
If you are whenever the app is officially released, I'm going to shut this.
Casey:
I'm going to kill everyone's access.
Casey:
Like I'm telling you right now, when the app is out for real, this beta, this beta is going away.
Casey:
Additionally, I am reserving the right to cancel it at any time for any reason whatsoever.
Casey:
This is a for-fun perk that members have for five minutes or more, depending on how I feel about the whole thing.
Casey:
I thought it would be fun to give it a shot, and...
Casey:
If I'm completely honest, that link will work for anyone under the sun.
Casey:
But here's the thing.
Casey:
I limited it to roughly the membership count of ATP members right now.
Casey:
So if you share that link with other people, you're taking away from one of your fellow ATP members.
Casey:
Don't be that person.
Casey:
Don't be that person.
Casey:
That's not cool.
Casey:
Don't do that.
Casey:
Keep the link for yourself, please.
Casey:
And thank you.
Marco:
No, honestly, I think we can trust our members.
Marco:
So most people don't know this.
Marco:
I actually, when we were building the CMS, when I was building the CMS, not letting Casey and John talk.
Casey:
Yeah, there was no we about it, which is both great and occasionally annoying, but mostly great.
John:
I have the JavaScript show notes validator.
John:
It's a very important part of the system that Casey loves.
Casey:
I love it so much.
Marco:
So when I was building the CMS, you know, we were building it to support a membership program.
Marco:
And so I built it that way from the start.
Marco:
But I wasn't sure, like, are people going to, like, pirate our member episodes and put them all over, you know, and just, you know, then make a bunch of feeds for other people to get our member episodes without paying.
Marco:
And I was actually really worried about that.
Marco:
And so I built this whole system to fingerprint the MP3s that were served to embed, like, a member ID into...
Marco:
in various areas of the mp3 that like wouldn't affect the audio playback because because i might work with overcast i know of a lot of ways to do that a lot of places that you can shove stuff in the mp3 format and not be seen really and not be a problem and so i actually built this whole thing to like serve files with individual member ids embedded in them so that if anybody ever did start sharing stuff we could like you know cut off their account or whatever i ended up disabling it in a later update because
Marco:
that just hasn't been a problem like no one does that or you know or effectively no one does it and so i really i want to just express how much i appreciate that through our members that like you're you're not ripping us off like you're not being jerks with their stuff like i i really appreciate that and you know it just goes to show that you know that our our previous statement that we have the best audience in the world really is true like you know other podcasts i'm sure yeah your audiences are great we have the best audience yeah
Marco:
let's be honest like we like you all out there you're the best like i really you are the best we we very much appreciate that um so thank you very much and so i think with all that said i think we can trust them not to share your test fight link yes please or at least for some percentage of them not to be interested in testing the program leaving the other ones for pirates
Casey:
I guess that's one way of looking at it, isn't it?
Casey:
But yeah, so the link is currently, as I record this right now, it is sitting, thank you, Marco, on your member page just below where you can find your store discount code.
Casey:
Again, I want to stress, I'm just trying this out.
Casey:
I thought it would be a fun experiment.
Casey:
I might kill it tomorrow.
Casey:
We don't know, but we're going to give it a shot and see what happens.
John:
I think one good thing about this is if you're listening to this and you're like, you know, what is TestFlight?
John:
How do I use a beta of an iOS application?
John:
Even if you have no interest in Casey's application, just going through the TestFlight experience is fun.
John:
TestFlight used to be a third-party company that Apple bought, and now it's part of the Apple...
John:
developer experience it's pretty easy you'll go there and you'll see a link and like what am i supposed to do with this url if you go to that url on your phone i think it'll show you something that says basically hey step one get the test flight app and then it'll have a link to the app store where you'll download an app called test flight with a little blueprint of a propeller on it
John:
and then it will say step two after you've installed the test flight app tap this link and it will open the test flight application and it will say hey do you want to join the test flight app for casey's app and you'll say yes and then you'll see a list of applications that you have in test flight which will just be the one you did and you'll there'll be a button for you to install it and it'll install it on your phone and it'll just appear like any other application on your phone and every time casey pushes a new update to the test flight it'll automatically update itself or not i think there's some setting for it but anyway
John:
If you've never done an iOS beta test, you should try it because it's actually pretty easy.
John:
Like there's no sort of technical expertise required other than sort of knowing how to follow a link and dealing with the app store a little bit.
John:
And then once you get one test flight, every other test flight from any other iOS application from any developer works exactly the same way.
John:
So then you can become like all of us in this program and half our applications have a little colored dot excellent because we're on a million different betas.
Casey:
That's exactly what I was going to say.
Casey:
One thing you'll notice is on your home screen on Springboard, there's, what is it, an orange dot?
Casey:
Yeah, orange.
John:
It's blue, and it's just been updated.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Yes, yep.
Casey:
And so you'll see a little dot next to the app, and that's normal.
Casey:
But yeah, again, I think this could be fun.
Casey:
I think it'll be a neat experiment.
Casey:
My intention, sitting here now, is to let this go until I release the app, and then no matter what, when I release the app, I plan to kill all this off.
Casey:
But
Casey:
I am making no guarantees.
Casey:
So if you sign up for membership, I love you.
Casey:
I appreciate that.
Casey:
But you might have access for a day, an hour, a week, or maybe a month or two.
Casey:
I am making no promises.
Casey:
I just want to make that extremely clear.
Casey:
I don't want anyone to have their feelings hurt if this goes away quickly.
Casey:
But we're going to give it a shot and see what happens.
Casey:
I thought it would be kind of fun.
Casey:
Uh, go into the membership panel.
Casey:
If you are a member, if you're not atp.fm slash join in that membership page, uh, you can see again, the ATP store discount code for you and a link to the test flight beta, uh, which is also just for you and the fellow listeners.
John:
And if you're wondering where the link to your membership page is, if you go to atp.fm slash store, the link is there in the little paragraph explaining how to get your discount code.
John:
Uh,
John:
The other thing that you can do from TestFlight, by the way, is if you're testing this application and you have some feedback for Casey right inside the TestFlight application itself, I believe.
Casey:
No, not so much.
Casey:
Not so much.
Casey:
I turned it off.
Casey:
Oh, you turned it off.
Marco:
No, because there's no good way to like, you have to go through App Store Connect and dig through its terrible interface.
John:
I know.
John:
I'm aware.
John:
I accept feedback through that on my beta.
John:
So TestFlight is also available for the Mac OS.
Casey:
Well, no, no.
Casey:
Hold on.
Casey:
Slow down.
Casey:
So I turned it off specifically for this group.
Casey:
So the way TestFlight works is you can have several groups of testers.
Casey:
And so I made an ATP members group, which this link is associated with.
Casey:
And that group alone does not have the ability to do feedback.
Casey:
And if I'm completely honest, it's not that I don't care about the feedback, but I'm already kind of overwhelmed with feedback from the testers I already have, almost all of whom are friends or whatever.
Casey:
But even still, I have enough users now, even before all this, that I'm pretty overwhelmed by the feedback.
Casey:
And I didn't want to make it worse on myself.
Casey:
And I knew that if I got a firehose of feedback from listeners, I would just be apt to shut the whole thing down.
Casey:
And I didn't want to do that.
Casey:
And again, that's not to say that I'm not interested in feedback.
Casey:
But I can only take but so much.
Casey:
And so what John is talking about, though, it is pretty slick.
Casey:
I haven't done this in a while, but if memory serves, if you take a screenshot of an app that you've installed via TestLite, and if this thing is enabled, which, again, it is not for members, I'm sorry, then what it'll do is it'll pop up a screen that says something like, do you want to send this to the developer?
Casey:
Describe what you were doing at the time.
Casey:
I think it'll even let you annotate it.
Casey:
I think, again, it's been a while since I've done this.
Casey:
But it is pretty cool what you can do.
Casey:
And then that's all excellent.
Casey:
But the problem comes, and this is what Marco was driving at, to get to that information.
Casey:
First of all, you never get notified as a developer when somebody has given you feedback.
Casey:
Secondly, to get to that feedback, you have to dig through App Store Connect, which is the website.
John:
You can't do it in Xcode?
John:
I'm pretty sure you can do it.
John:
For Mac apps, you can do it in Xcode.
Casey:
Oh, maybe you can.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I've never done it that way.
John:
Go to the organizer and then look next to crashes.
John:
There should be a feedback item.
John:
Again, I don't know if this is true for iOS, but for Mac apps, you can get it there.
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
If that's the case, that's news to me.
John:
Do the little command option shift O, whatever the hell the thing is for organizer.
Casey:
Hold on, I've got to switch floppies.
Marco:
Give me a second.
John:
Yeah, Xcode takes a few seconds to open up.
John:
This computer is too slow.
John:
I need a new one.
John:
I'm still running Xcode.
John:
I used to run the release version of my apps, or then I would run the test flight ones when I'm in the middle of test flight.
John:
But then a bug appeared in my app yesterday, and I was like...
John:
damn it if i was just running this mother it is there i could hit a break point right so now i'm just running my app in xcode all the time just in case this bug reappears then i can go grab a break point so yeah xcode is always running on my computer because i have a lot of ram but yeah check out organizer you can see uh feedback where is it it's in it's it's a yoda organizer under reports crashes feedback yeah oh feedback look at that
Casey:
Who knew?
Casey:
Oh my God.
John:
The interface is hilarious.
Marco:
This is where this is.
John:
You can click the email button.
John:
If you do an email, it'll compose an email on your email client with the quoted text of their thing.
John:
But like, I think the most fun thing is when you, if you double click one of these feedback items,
John:
like look at the interface oh it's terrible it shows a like a like a capsule with an x in it and that's how you go back like if you hit that little x capsule it says showing one feedback that's really weird it's i don't i don't know who made this i don't know if i've ever seen a computer before but it is there oh my god i never i had no idea this was the thing you can see what device they're on what what notes they wrote you can mark it as resolved
John:
Oh my God.
John:
This is, this is great.
Casey:
This is, this is, this was worth the proof.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
I'm shutting the test flight down because I've got what I needed off of it.
John:
Can I respond?
John:
You can see the button that says email, Joe Schmo at the top.
John:
Look at that.
John:
Tester name.
Casey:
Whoa.
Casey:
And if you hit that email button, it puts in a whole bunch of data.
John:
It'll compose an email and it'll quote the text or it'll include the text from my thing.
Casey:
Whoa.
Casey:
This is so cool.
Casey:
John, I love you.
Casey:
Hand to God, I had no idea this was the thing.
John:
And if you scroll up to the top there, if you're under reports, it has another item called crashes that you might want to look at.
Marco:
Yeah, that, the rest of these I've seen.
Marco:
Yeah, crashes, you know, the battery usage, all that stuff.
Marco:
That I'm very aware of.
John:
I always see the hangs item.
John:
I'm like, oh, that's just for iOS, isn't it?
John:
I'm pretty sure hangs is not for the Mac.
John:
Hangs logs are not available for macOS apps.
Marco:
Yeah, because macOS apps never hang.
Marco:
Especially calendar.
Marco:
energy logs are not available for mac os apps come on max have batteries what the hell disc write logs are not available for mac os apps but crashes are yeah it's most the crashes are mostly watch kit it's like like every time i go to the crash thing it's always like all right here's like three or four crashes from the ios app and 40 different crashes from watch kit all within like ui kit core and everything you know stuff it's not even my code
John:
Well, you should write a Mac app.
John:
Then all your crashes will be in KVO.
John:
At least that's where all my crashes are.