667: Wisdom and Treachery
25 Nov 2025Egg! Egg! Egg!
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco bought a new toy
- Follow-up:
- macOS Tahoe 26.2 β3 seems to fix Electon slowdown (per shamelectron)
- Gurman says “not so fast, my friend”
- Gaming in ARM
- Anti-cheat complications (via Tyler)
- Windows 11 on ARM (via David Gaw)
- OpenAI Egg update
- Apple N1 > Broadcom
- An iPhone camera cluster theory
- The UK is still trying to make fetch happen get themselves a back door
- Apple Fitness+ is “Under Review”
- Fast charging & battery health
- Ask ATP:
- Now that Marco owns a restaurant, does he tip differently? (via Max Velasco Knott)
- What do we think about third-party packages? (via Eric Jacobsen)
- Is organizing
/Applicationsa poor choice? (via Nathan) - Are our kids better than we are at video games yet? (via Omri Arbiv)
- Post-show: The saga of Overcast episode images
- Members-only ATP Overtime: Should we ever be forced to put away our phones? (via Philip McDermott)
Sponsored by:
- Zapier: Put AI to work across your company—for real
- PAKA: Performance apparel from alpaca fiber
- Aura Frames: Frames for every memory, gifts for every occasion
Become a member for ATP Overtime, ad-free episodes, member specials, and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Nanotexture vs. Paperlike
- Tahoe 26.2b3 fixes Electron
- Gurman vs. FT
- ARM/Linux gaming
- Sponsor: Aura Frames (code ATP)
- The egg
- Apple N1 speeds
- Camera-spacing gotcha
- UK still wants a backdoor
- Sponsor: Paka
- Fitness+ “under review”
- Fast-charging and battery health
- Sponsor: Zapier
- #askatp: Tipping at restaurants
- #askatp: Third-party code in our apps
- #askatp: Organizing /Applications
- #askatp: Kids vs. us in video games
- Ending theme
- Overcast episode images
Nanotexture vs. Paperlike
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I bought an iPad, of
⏹️ ▶️ John you did. What’d you buy? Take a guess. The big expensive one with the nanotexture on it with
⏹️ ▶️ John too much SSD space that you’re never going to use?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s right. And I already returned it. Oh no!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Seriously? Why?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, when I had said in the last couple episodes, I had said I’d try one in the store which is true, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was wondering does the pencil texture feel better on it? And the answer is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes. But it does not feel $700 better on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, the app that I was discussing in the member special,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the feasibility tests I wanted to do required the OLED screen. So I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right, let me do some kind of Black Friday deal this year and get myself one of the new iPads. Except
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was no deal on that version, of course. So. I was gonna say, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a lot of Black Friday deals on the one that nobody should buy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, there are not. But anyway, I realized that like, you know, once I had it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my office for testing against my old iPad that has the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Rock Paper Pencil screen protector on it, I realized that even though the nanotexture is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better for the pen input, it is not better than the Rock Paper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pencil. It’s a continuum that you’re optimizing for with that. Like the nanotexture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen looked better for images on the screen, for video, for content. The screen looked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better, less fuzzy, less distorted than any of the screen protectors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It also reflected even less light than anything. Like you would think that those would go hand in hand, but they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t necessarily. So nanotexture was significantly better in my opinion for everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except pencil use.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you should wait until you record the next episode of ATP before you return products, because here
⏹️ ▶️ John we have a just in time toot from Brian who suggests
⏹️ ▶️ John that you check out pen tips at pen.tips for different tips for the Apple Pencil,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually had the nanotexture iPad for about 10 days, I think, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did try both pen tips and the paper-like Apple Pencil tips,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I thought maybe that combination would be better. So basically there’s this whole industry out there of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third-party Apple Pencil tips, and they have various goals in mind. The one that comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the rock paper pencil is a metal little ball, like a ballpoint pen. But that one, I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that much, to be honest. When I’m using the rock paper pencil screen printer, I just use a regular Apple pencil tip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or I tried the pen dot tips ones. Now they have a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different versions, and I only tried one variant of it. So maybe I picked the wrong one, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re a little bit like gummy, like they’re a little rubbery. And so it actually makes the pen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like squish. it makes it feel more like a Sharpie tip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a little bit of flex. I didn’t like it for like, like I like to write really small, I didn’t like it for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The paper-like Apple Pencil tips, I think are my favorite. They are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco firm and a little bit like fine, almost like a very, very fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sandpaper. Like it doesn’t feel like it’s damaging anything, but it adds a little bit more friction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Paper-like tip with nanotexture was better than nanotexture alone, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still didn’t even come close to one of the screen films. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I instead returned that iPad and I got a nice black freddie deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Amazon for the regular kind that was $700 less, actually more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than that, it was on sale, so it’s like $850 less I believe, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just got the new version of the paper-like film which it still is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very difficult to install it perfectly but they have this very like overwrought kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing system now of like you have like these different layers of film and you peel one back and you put peel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other thing back and you put this thing and it sticks this thing on under it and it like it’s quite a system to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still have like one dust speck under it which is annoying but that’s just that’s just life
⏹️ ▶️ Marco applying these these protectors but I will say the Paperlike 3 protector is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than everything except nanotexture in terms of how clear the screen is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is very very good. It blew me away how good it was and the texture of the Paperlike 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protector along with the Paperlike tip on the pencil feels fantastic. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say my quest here is over and so far my OLED screen tests
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have actually gone very well.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s good and saving a lot of money coming back to the don’t like nanotexture camp, at least when
⏹️ ▶️ John it comes to handwriting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I love nanotexture for looking at. When I had that like 10 days span
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of using it, I was like, you know, bringing it to the coffee shop and everything, trying to really like get it, get into the nanotexture iPad life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s great. I just didn’t like the texture when using the Apple Pencil. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that was not one of my primary goals, I would probably stick with it, especially given
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how relatively infrequently I upgrade iPads. but it’s still very difficult to justify the
Tahoe 26.2b3 fixes Electron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow up. Mac OS Tahoe 26.2 beta 3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appears to have fixed the Electron slowdown as per the Shame Electron website,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which reads, quote, good news. This issue appears to be fixed in the latest betas of Mac OS 26.2. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the only report about this that I’ve seen, but it is from the person who was tracking which apps
⏹️ ▶️ John had the slowdown. And to remind everybody, the deal was that Electron, the web-based framework
⏹️ ▶️ John that a lot of Mac apps use, was using a private API that ran afoul of some optimization
⏹️ ▶️ John or something in Tahoe and then it caused like system wide slowdowns in Tahoe and the Windows server and apps were
⏹️ ▶️ John slowly being updated to use a fixed version of Electron that didn’t use this private API or used it in a different way or something but
⏹️ ▶️ John that was taking a while. Now, apparently somehow Apple has fixed it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I only saw theories about what the bug was. It was like overriding some method. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John override that method in any way, it defeats some optimization that would like not repeatedly call it like some kind of memoization
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. I’m not sure what they could have done to fix that. Did they just like rename the API or something and
⏹️ ▶️ John then make the API that everyone else was calling a no op? I mean, I guess they could have, it’s all private APIs, do whatever you want.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, that’s the report 26.2 when it comes out, apparently will make this entire electron
⏹️ ▶️ John slowdown thing moot because whether your app has got the new version of electron or not on 26.2,
⏹️ ▶️ John I won’t have this problem, in theory.
Gurman vs. FT
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Gurman says that Tim Cook’s departure is maybe not quite as eminent as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we thought. He writes, Financial Times published a report with three central claims. Apple’s intensifying succession
⏹️ ▶️ Casey planning, Ternus is likely the next CEO, and Cook is expected to step down between late January
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and June. It’s a huge deal that the Financial Times did this. Respected publications should only predict the CEO transition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey date for a company of Apple’s scale with a high level of confidence based on people legitimately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the know. This is where I have concerns. based on everything I’ve learned in recent weeks, I don’t believe a departure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the middle of next year is likely. In fact, I would be shocked if Cook steps down in time for the framed outlined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by, in the timeframe outlined, excuse me, by the Financial Times. Some people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have speculated that the story was a test balloon orchestrated by Apple or someone close to Cook to prepare Wall Street for a change,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that isn’t the case either. I believe the story was simply false. Boom.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m calling out editors again. Editor, if you see someone put in test balloon,
⏹️ ▶️ John correct it to trial balloon, I think it is a more common phrasing of that, uh, idiom. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, I don’t know if German sources are better than the financial times
⏹️ ▶️ John when it comes to these types of things. I don’t recall if he’s had, I mean, he did have the Ternus thing early,
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t he? I forget if he picked that up from somewhere else, but he’s coming right out. I believe the story was
⏹️ ▶️ John simply false. Now he’s got an out here because he says, he’s basically saying, I think it’s false that he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going to leave in the first six months of next year. So if he leaves at month seven, it’s like, see, I was right. didn’t leave in the first six months.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it is a very narrow claim, but it is a very direct claim, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John that they just blew it. They don’t have the story. I looked into it, and as he says, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John be shocked if Cook steps down in the time frame outlined in the Financial Times. So we shall see. Two
⏹️ ▶️ John stakes are in the ground here. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty bold call out from Mark Herman to basically say they’re lying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or they’re just wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or they’ve got bad info. Again, for authors, and the Financial Times is not in the Apple rumors game most
⏹️ ▶️ John of the time, but he’s just, what he basically says is, hey, I checked my sources and they
⏹️ ▶️ John say no. So I think it’s bogus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but he also called them basically irresponsible. Like that was a significant call, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I honestly, it has all of the markings of a controlled leak from Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And basically the Financial Times has a lot of bylines on this piece. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not a sensational publication. And, you know, I’m guessing they, they really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco double, triple check their sourcing on this. Meanwhile, Mark Gurman does not really have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that level of oomph behind his denial. He’s more like, eh, I don’t think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’s, that’s a very different level of authority.
⏹️ ▶️ John He does say that he essentially checked his sources that, you know, I haven’t heard anything about this, so I think it’s just bogus.
⏹️ ▶️ John But again, the exact wording is like within six months. I mean, so here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John if it is actually a trial balloon, it could be that Apple has never planned for Tim Cook to step down in the first six
⏹️ ▶️ John months. And this is a trial balloon preparing for January, 2027, to shut down or something. You know what I mean? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s still lots of room for both people to be right here because when you do a trial balloon, you’re just trying to soften
⏹️ ▶️ John things up. That’s why it looks, you know, you strategically lead it to financial times, you soften things up and in your head,
⏹️ ▶️ John in Tim Cook’s head, whatever, the plan has always been January, 2027, right? But you get the whole year for it to sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of glide out there and see how it goes. see. We’ve got six months to see. But this is a rare case
⏹️ ▶️ John where rather than just saying, here’s what because Grumman does this a lot is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this person said this, or this publication is that this and then he adds to it with whatever his sources say. But here he’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, I don’t think that’s going to happen. And it’s happened once in a while where he would say like,
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody else said some product is coming out. And I think it’s not but this one will
⏹️ ▶️ John will get the answer in six months, I guess, or seven.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would guess German’s sources are not as high up as whoever is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking to the Financial Times about this like that’s true German sources like look he he has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty good track record about a lot of things But the things that he has a track record about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think are from sources that seem like they’re up at the board level Because this is this would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a board level discussion. This is like who would know about this the board
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, what about the Ternus thing? Do you recall if he had the turnist thing first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of like turn is being like one of the the top picks or? The top pick yeah, I think he might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have because that’s pretty high level I mean sort of but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the number of people who would who would have heard that is I think a very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number than the number of people who would hear about the specific plans that the FT published about and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who would leak to the FT about it? and who the FT would trust so much to put four different bylines and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publish it like that. Look, German might be right, but I think he has a lot less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support behind him when you actually look at like, you know, what has been laid out here. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the FT is probably more likely to be right.
ARM/Linux gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, with regard to Windows gaming on Linux and ARM, Tyler writes Proton, which is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SteamOS adapter layer for playing Windows games, runs in user space, and so does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any anti-cheat like Valve, EA, or Epic that it uses. Apex Legends, which is Electronic Arts, did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enable Linux support when the Steam Deck launched, but last year blocked it after deciding it was more trouble
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than it was worth. User space anti-cheat is always going to be trivial to circumvent, but Linux users are unlikely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to tolerate proprietary kernel anti-cheat. Why is that?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I disagree that they’re unlikely to tolerate it. People who have a Steam Deck don’t even know or care that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John running Linux. So if there’s kernel level anti-cheat on your Steam Deck, they won’t know or care. They’ll just know that they can play a game
⏹️ ▶️ John that they couldn’t play before. But I know what they’re saying, like your average person who’s like building a Linux
⏹️ ▶️ John PC that wants to game on it might be annoyed by having to recompile their kernel with something
⏹️ ▶️ John or add an extension. I don’t even know what putting anti-cheat into the Linux kernel would involve. So I get the sentiment,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for things like the Steam Deck, I don’t think it’s a barrier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well either way, Tyler continues, Valve is stuck between a rock and a hard place with no easy solution. David Gaw
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, Windows 11 on ARM is mostly indistinguishable from Windows 11 on Intel these days for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost everything thanks to reliable x86 emulation. The best Snapdragon PC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptops deliver solid performance in MacBook-like battery life. Parallels has supported Windows ARM on Apple Silicon
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a couple of years now, mostly seems fine. I run it on my M2 Pro Mini and it’s fine. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets better Geekbench CPU scores to my circa 2021 i7-10700K gaming PC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The one area it does all fall down is once again gaming, thanks to that absence of high-end GPUs. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unfortunately it’s mostly gaming, both PC and Mac, that Apple abandoned with the Apple Silicon transition.
⏹️ ▶️ John A bunch of people wrote in to say that Windows 11 on ARM on Macs is not that terrible, and that
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft’s latest x86 emulation thing works pretty well, because that’s what you want. You want Windows 11
⏹️ ▶️ John on ARM, I believe you still can’t boot Macs into Windows 11 on ARM, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John can run it in virtualization and the x86 emulation, the latest version, should make most
⏹️ ▶️ John x86 Windows applications run decently on Windows 11 on ARM on your
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM-based Mac. I’m definitely gonna try that if and when I get an
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM Mac as my main Mac. I suppose I could try it now on the other computers, but that’s funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John My dev machine and my wife’s computer, so I’m not gonna mess them up too much, but I’m glad to
⏹️ ▶️ John hear that the progress is being made there. It just annoys me that like, I mean, for extremely selfish,
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely selfish reasons, I would love it if the entire Windows PC world moved to ARM. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows PC users would also enjoy it, and Microsoft is kind of trying to do that, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John happening very quickly. So I’m impatient to get back to the world where I was, where
⏹️ ▶️ John you could boot Windows natively or run it natively in virtualization and have
⏹️ ▶️ John all Windows software run, but the Windows world moves slowly.
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The egg
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so our star-crossed lovers are back in the news again. Johnny Ive and Sam Altman apparently did an interview
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together reading from Stevie Bonifield,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who is writing for The Verge. In an interview with Lorraine Powell Jobs, Sam Altman and Johnny Ive said that they are currently prototyping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first mysterious OpenAI hardware product. When asked about a timeframe, Ive said it could arrive in quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less than quote, two years. has been revealed so far about the OpenAI device in development, but it’s rumored
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be screen-free and quote, roughly the size of a smartphone, quote. Altman described the design
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as simple in power, as simple and beautiful and playful. Adding that, there was an earlier prototype that we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite excited about, but I did not have any feeling of, I want to pick up that thing and take a bite out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it. And then finally we got there all of a sudden. Fred T on Mastodon writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s definitely an egg, isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Egg, egg, egg, egg. It sounds like it. My word. I pulled some
⏹️ ▶️ John quotes. I pulled some quotes from the rest of the interview to support the egg theory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, well, let me read some selected quotes. Ive says, There’s something about when the design gets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so simple and beautiful, and like playful, for lack of a better word. I mean, there’s not a lot of humor in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey products that are being designed and made, particularly in this area. And I really sense very clearly there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a huge desire for us not to take ourselves quite so seriously. That is pretty f***ing rich coming from Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ John egg, egg. Egg. You should watch his interview.
⏹️ ▶️ John The way it starts out, like the pretentiousness is just over the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, in many respects earned, okay. Like I granted as Johnny Ive, he’s not just like talking out of his butt
⏹️ ▶️ John like some other people we’ve seen in presentations, but they’re so, they feel
⏹️ ▶️ John deeply and think deeply about things, or at least Johnny does. And then Sam pretends to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And speaking of Sam, I remember in a very early meeting, Johnny said, we’re going to make people smile. We’re going to make people feel joy,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever the product does, it has to do that. And I thought, yeah, yeah, whatever, Johnny. People just want to be efficient.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s fine. But I’m so happy that Johnny pushed on that. And I didn’t realize until things started to come together how much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that just doesn’t exist in the current set of tech companies and how lovely it is to have some whimsy back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eggs are whimsical. I’ve said I love solutions that teeter on appearing almost naive in their simplicity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I also love incredibly intelligent, sophisticated products that you want to touch and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you feel no intimidation and you want to use almost carelessly And you use them almost without thought that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re just tools. Teetering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Altman said, I hope that when people see it, they say, that’s it. And I’ve said, yeah, they will.
⏹️ ▶️ John I, from this description, I actually don’t think it’s going to be an egg, but it is funny that lots of things that he said
⏹️ ▶️ John would fit with the egg theory. I just, I always think of the, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess the, the MacBook pros just before the current design, uh, like the Johnny, the last Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ John Ive MacBook for Pro Case Design. It was really a very pretty case design with the tapers and everything. Not practical.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it made internal packaging a pain to get that outward beauty,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it did look a little bit biteable. And I feel like, I’m just picturing something that’s kind of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, picture the, because I’m sitting here next to me on the desk, the battery for the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro, but not shaped like that, not shaped like the sort of rounded rectangular it is, but
⏹️ ▶️ John shaped more like the last generation MacBook Pro. That would be kind of biteable.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s kind of like, it’s like, I don’t know. I don’t know how to describe it, but I can picture a shape
⏹️ ▶️ John that is about the size of a smartphone that has no screen, that is not an egg, that is in fact
⏹️ ▶️ John biteable or looks biteable, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this might end up being something really great and something really amazing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the impression I’ve gotten so far These two guys are super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high on their own supply.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, they are sniffing their own farts so hard. It’s ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean Johnny is on his own and I think Sam is agreeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But well, but both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John of them I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot of that that side of
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, he does take a lot of Again, if you watch the interview, he does take a lot of cues
⏹️ ▶️ John from Johnny’s demeanor and attitude as the sort of the younger Less experienced one,
⏹️ ▶️ John right so that relationship it’s like big dog little dog kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t doubt Johnny’s sincerity. Like I believe he believes the things he believes. I’m just not
⏹️ ▶️ John convinced that his current interests align with what will make a good product,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’ll see, you know, like I’m not counting him up. But Sam, every time I hear him talk, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I rarely watch interviews with him. I’m mostly only seeing him when he’s with Johnny talking about this product, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Sam’s party line that has gotten him all these gazillions of dollars of investment
⏹️ ▶️ John is disconnected with my assessment of their technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John OpenAI is great, they’re the leader. AI stuff is great and does all sorts of wonderful things, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the way he talks about it, it’s like, do you have a dragon? It’s like, you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have something, it’s worth a lot, right? But just, he talks about it as if it’s like, and therefore,
⏹️ ▶️ John suffice it to say, yada, yada, yada, AGI.
⏹️ ▶️ John like, he talks, he talks about it working the way it could work, but has never
⏹️ ▶️ John worked. And so when I hear him say things like this, they, you know, this interview was like deferred to
⏹️ ▶️ John Johnny on design things and SM about AI stuff. And he just spins out this tapestry of wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just, all right, all right, Sam. Okay. I just, you know, we’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John like, and connecting the two, it’s like, if you have that, you know, again, that
⏹️ ▶️ John dragon or or that genie in the bottle, whatever. It doesn’t matter how awesome the egg you put it in is,
⏹️ ▶️ John or how crappy the egg you put it in is. If you’ve got that, you can put it in a toaster oven and people will love it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you have that, it does not matter where it is almost. And you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need Johnny Ive to sell it. Whereas can Johnny take your so-so
⏹️ ▶️ John chat GPT caliber voice agent and make people want to use it more than they already
⏹️ ▶️ John are by putting it in a pretty egg that they want to bite? I don’t think that will change things. I think millions of people are already using chat
⏹️ ▶️ John GPT without an egg to bite. And what is the egg gonna do other
⏹️ ▶️ John than like, oh, now I can carry it around with me, like my phone, but with no screen. And so I’m not sure they’re barking
⏹️ ▶️ John up the right tree here, but I am fascinated to see what they produce and how
⏹️ ▶️ John the world greets it. But this is all in Sam’s, it’s all an open AI escort because this product lives or
⏹️ ▶️ John dies based on the thing that lives inside the biteable egg, not the egg itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See this is where I I think I can see a Possible path because like if you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the objective path ahead of them. It’s impossible You know the objective path ahead of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is They are trying to sell we again knowing nothing about this thing yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are trying to sell Another device that you will carry around that is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone We’ve seen other people try this we there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a little like playdate AI thing there was all the way up to like you know the humane
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IE pin there were all these different attempts so far at like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes AI but hardware to augment slash compete with slash replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe your phone and what we’ve seen over and over again is don’t bet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco against the smartphone because most of those things are they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have a premise that people want to use their phones less or people are tired of their phones and that that premise simply is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not true People love their phones. And so if you’re trying to replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone and you’re trying to issue a technological gadget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is going to have great technical performance in some way like high features, high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functionality, or incredible convenience or miniaturization or whatever it is, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably gonna lose because the smartphone is gonna beat you on all those fronts. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you instead go the irrational appeal route,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can win there. Why did everybody buy the little playdate of AI? Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still can’t remember the name of. Rabbit R1. That’s it, the rabbit, yes. Why did everybody buy the rabbit?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not because they thought it was gonna probably succeed, it’s because it looked cool and it made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them happy and it made them smile. Why didn’t people buy the humane IE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pin because everybody that company seemed like an out-of-touch d-bag and their thing didn’t look cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well that’s a strike against the ultimate IVE.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I think IVE has a better chance of making something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people will will be irrationally drawn to just because it’s cool or it’s cute or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s nice or whatever like he he does have a good skill in that area and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s an area they could like people could choose to buy this thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it is just cool enough even if it doesn’t really compete on logic
⏹️ ▶️ John but then what happened to the rabbit are when everyone bought one because they look cool but it turns out it didn’t work very well and so people lost interest
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s not I don’t think that would be counted as a success if you know obviously the numbers would be bigger but if you know if
⏹️ ▶️ John a billion people buy the the biteable egg because it’s they just got to have it but then they get it and they realize
⏹️ ▶️ John oh this is just chat GPT chat GPT and a biteable egg and they lose interest and back to using it on their phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, but keep in mind,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I think you do have a bit of a blind spot here, John, in that you kind of hate chat GPT.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Most people hate chat. I use it all the time. Most people love it. Like most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who use it, love it. And there’s hundreds of millions of people who use it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, okay, so well, then I think most people maybe like it more than you do. But the reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like chat GPT has massive consumer mind share, huge market share in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John said, they have a product that people already like and use, but I’m not sure what the hardware is going to bring to that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have a huge, you know, brand recognition. They have massive ability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to market something because of their huge consumer brand recognition. And they’re trying to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a device with Johnny Ive. So it’s probably going to at least look cool. Now whether it will actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be cool, that’s a very different question. And we don’t actually know that. One thing we know about Johnny Ive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that he is a very good designer who benefits from a really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editor and collaborator. And Steve Jobs was a great one for him. They made such amazing things together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then when Johnny didn’t have as much editing in the Tim Cook era and he kind of got too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much control and not enough pushback on things, his designs weren’t as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of becoming actual products. So we don’t actually know what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of collaborator Sam Altman will be for him. That actually might be a really great pairing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it could be an awful one. We won’t know until we see the kinds of things they make. Certainly Sam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Altman is a different type of personality than I’ve collaborated with before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this could kind of go in a different direction, but I can see them having a very high likelihood
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of making something that looks cool and that people will irrationally want to buy because it looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool and that can be marketed very well. Now, is that going to be enough to overcome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the headwinds against it in terms of trying to compete with the smartphone and being a whole separate thing to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything? Honestly, probably not that. Those are some pretty large forces against you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but maybe they can make something cool. We’ll see how it goes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Sam is too much of a yes man so far. Like he really just seems to be deferring to Johnny a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of these things rather than being an editor or his own strong force So whatever he again, he just thinks these fantastical
⏹️ ▶️ John things about the things he’s got. They have talked. We talked about this last time they did
⏹️ ▶️ John that intro, whatever, how they were trying to say, oh, phones, you know, there they take too much of our
⏹️ ▶️ John time and attention. And don’t you hate your phone? No. Yeah, they like and they likened to
⏹️ ▶️ John using modern not just phones, but like modern software to like walking around in Times Square where things are blinking in your
⏹️ ▶️ John face and there’s lots of things that making demands of you. And they wanted to be they want to make a product that’s more calming and chill
⏹️ ▶️ John and relaxing and not just constantly demanding stuff for you. So again, a screen list thing that you just
⏹️ ▶️ John talk to in a pleasing way. And they wanted to know everything about you. What if you had a thing that knew everything about
⏹️ ▶️ John you and could help you? And like that’s what they spin off into like, like, you know, a human level intelligent personal
⏹️ ▶️ John assistant that knows everything about you and can do all your things for you. And that doesn’t exist as far as we’re aware out
⏹️ ▶️ John in the outside world. And so that product that they’re selling seems a bit odd. But in this particular one,
⏹️ ▶️ John Sam either forgot to stay on a message or is pushing back a little bit because they kept asking him like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, he kept mentioning the phone and he’s like, well, you know, don’t get me wrong. I love my phone. And a couple of the questions
⏹️ ▶️ John like what’s the most significant product announcement? It’s like, well, the iPhone is the biggest before after product in my life
⏹️ ▶️ John on lifetime. And they said, what kind of what later on they said, what kind of what thing do you love? What
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to use every day that you love? And he said, well, my iPhone. So for someone who’s trying to say we use our phones too much, and they’re too upsetting,
⏹️ ▶️ John Sam could not stop gushing about his iPhone, his iPhone in particular. And granted, Johnny’s right there.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he’s he’s buttering it up by saying the iPhone is the greatest thing ever made. And Johnny, you made this great phone and yada
⏹️ ▶️ John yada, nevermind that. Uh, probably the part that Sam is talking about the big before and after moment had less to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with the industrial design of the original iPhone and much more to do with the software that was on it, which Johnny had,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming almost nothing to do with. Um, but that’s not on message for people
⏹️ ▶️ John use their phones too much. You should talk to our egg, right? Which was very much the pitch earlier. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s only a 30 minute interview. You should watch it. There’s some somewhat insufferable stuff about how wonderful San Francisco
⏹️ ▶️ John is in the beginning. But once you get through that, well, just see how many times Sam
⏹️ ▶️ John says that he loves his iPhone, right? Which I feel like they should be nudging about. And then Lorene Powell
⏹️ ▶️ John Jobs does her message thing. And this is like, and of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of that social media stuff has a lot of unintended consequences. Lots of social media, I think she says, and other products
⏹️ ▶️ John have lots of unintended consequences. And I’d be like, yeah, you mean like open AI telling people to kill themselves?
⏹️ ▶️ John No one says that on stage. The three of them have three
⏹️ ▶️ John subtly different messages that they wanna put out, and I wonder how something coherent is going to come out of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s a way to say- It sounds like nothing coherent
⏹️ ▶️ John did. In some ways it is unfair to judge an unreleased product. We don’t know what OpenAI’s got. Like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve solved some important problem or whatever, but it just, as I’ve said in the past, it seems weird to me that they would wait
⏹️ ▶️ John for the egg to do that and not just, you know, put it in chat GPT 5.1 or whatever they’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and by the way, a brief aside just to give my, uh, uh, bona fides or however you pronounce
⏹️ ▶️ John that of, uh, using chat GPT. What did I use chat GPT for earlier today? I was,
⏹️ ▶️ John I, for reasons that annoy me, my, well, one of my banks, uh, updated
⏹️ ▶️ John all of our account numbers. So anything that had any kind of like auto pay on a credit card
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey or whatever, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John direct, you gotta go into all those things and enjoy finding where you can change the the auto pay
⏹️ ▶️ John or delete and add a new one, or, you know, they changed all our account numbers. The routing numbers are the same, but the account numbers changed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Luckily not my business stuff, but this is personal stuff. And I was doing it and during the course
⏹️ ▶️ John of doing it, you will encounter pages that are like, okay, you’re lucky enough that we have an edit screen, which is rare.
⏹️ ▶️ John Usually they’re just like, oh, delete it and make a new one. But they had an actual edit screen. And here’s a text field. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got a bunch of like asterisks in it or something, like little asterisks. Cause anyway, it’s not a password field.
⏹️ ▶️ John delete that and I was gonna paste in my new account number because it’s account number confirm. And I had, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, in a secure note, I can copy and paste it, right? Nope, copy and paste is disabled on this webpage.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I got so sick of it. And I said, chat GPT, a webpage that doesn’t allow copy and paste. What can I type into the web browsers
⏹️ ▶️ John dev tool console to enable copy and paste? Because I just wanted the JavaScript code that would like stop
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that forbids copy and paste. And chat GPT gave me a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript to put into the console, all of which I looked at and
⏹️ ▶️ John understood. Unfortunately, it did not work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m surprised you’re not running Stop the Madness.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I should. Like, that’s what, I know there are things that just, like, I was in Chrome at the time, and I know there’s Chrome extensions that explicitly,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I have autocomplete everywhere on that, you know, stops websites from forbidding autocomplete.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I thought I had one that stops websites from forbidding copy and paste.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t know if Stop the Madness has a Chrome extension as well as a Safari extension, but anyway, I was in Chrome at
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. There’s your problem. Yep. My problem is that the reason I’m in Chrome is when I’m doing bank stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have no confidence that banks websites work in Safari, but I do have confidence they work in Chrome.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s been a long time since I can remember going to a bank’s website that didn’t work in Safari.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your banks are probably better than the ones I’m dealing with but anyway, chat GPT, I use it every day. I know what
⏹️ ▶️ John it can do, I know what it can’t do. It does not know everything about my life nor is there a clear pathway to it
⏹️ ▶️ John knowing everything about my life forever. Like, it annoys me
⏹️ ▶️ John when he talks like that because it’s just constant vaporware. And as you pointed
⏹️ ▶️ John out, Marco, it’s vaporware in a situation where there are hundreds of millions of people using a product that they like, but he never wants to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John that. He wants to talk about the product that doesn’t exist, that would be cool if it did exist. And I agree, it
⏹️ ▶️ John would be cool, but how about just concentrating on the product that you’ve got and make that one better? And they are, to be fair, they do make
⏹️ ▶️ John it better by bits and bits, but there’s a gap there. There’s a hype gap between
⏹️ ▶️ John what he talks about and the products his company is shipping.
Apple N1 speeds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right with regard to the Apple n1 Wi-Fi chip apparently it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the older Broadcom chips look kind of stinky Andrew Cunningham at ours writes ukla the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folks behind the speed test app and website have analyzed about five weeks worth of users testing Data to get an idea of how the iPhone 17
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lineup stacks up to the iPhone 16 There’s also the Android phones with Wi-Fi chips from Qualcomm MediaTek and others
⏹️ ▶️ Casey While the n1 isn’t at the top of the charts ukla says that Apple’s Wi-Fi chip quote quote, delivered higher
⏹️ ▶️ Casey download and upload speeds on Wi-Fi compared to the iPhone 16 across every studied percentile and virtually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every region, unquote. Ookla noted that the N1’s best performance seemed to improve scores most of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all in the bottom tenth percentile performance tests, implying Apple’s custom silicon lifts the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey floor more than the ceiling. The iPhone 17 also didn’t top Ookla’s global performance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charts. Ookla found that the Pixel 10 Pro series slightly edges out the iPhone 17 download speed, while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Xiaomi 15T Pro with MediaTek Wi-Fi Silicon, feared better in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with featured better upload speeds.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s pretty good. We know, I mean, we spent all this time talking about how are their cell chips doing? Are the other not as good as Qualcomm, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah. But mostly for the N1, we’re like, well, you know, I hope it just works, but it turns out that
⏹️ ▶️ John it is better than it was in the iPhone 16. So good job, and presumably uses less power.
⏹️ ▶️ John So good job Apple on the N1, it’s testing very well.
Camera-spacing gotcha
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Several weeks ago, we were thinking about why the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are situated the way they are in the back of the phone and thinking, oh, maybe they could be separated or whatever the case may be. And Anonymous,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amongst many other people, wrote, maybe the triangle camera cluster helps keep a stable perspective when switching lenses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the user zooms in. If the physical sensors were spread across the width of the Pro Max, there would be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jarring jump when moving from 1x to 4x. This might also help fusion processing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we’ve brought this up in the past while talking about the stovetop burners, that’s worth remembering.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still think it’s worth it. Like, yes, it will jump it. It jumps now. It will jump more if they
⏹️ ▶️ John separated them. It’s not the end of the world. Like tons of tons of other phones do it. The distances
⏹️ ▶️ John are not. It’s not like going from inches to feet. It is just, you know, you know, less than
⏹️ ▶️ John a centimeter to one or two centimeters. So I think it’s worth it. And I think they should do it. but this would be one of the trade-offs.
UK still wants a backdoor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then speaking of bringing out your dead, the UK still wants an iCloud backdoor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reading from 9to5Mac from October, the Financial Times reports that the British government did indeed withdraw its
⏹️ ▶️ Casey initial worldwide order, but it has now replaced it with another one, applying only to its own citizens. The Financial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Times says, UK government has issued a new order to Apple to create a backdoor into its cloud storage service,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this time targeting only British users’ data. Back to 9to5Mac, the White House has suggested
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the time, had suggested at the time, that Britain was completely abandoning its attempt to force Apple’s hand.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now that it has obtained protection for US iCloud users, however, it seems that pressure has been removed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Financial Times continues, members of the US delegation raised the issue of the request to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around the time of Trump’s visit, according to two people briefed on the matter. However, two senior British government figures
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said the US administration was no longer leaning on the UK government to rescind the order.
⏹️ ▶️ John Disappointed to be exactly right, to doubt the previous government’s statements about this
⏹️ ▶️ John and to also doubt their follow through, but there you have it. They declared victory
⏹️ ▶️ John when there was none and the UK government still wants something stupid. And so I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John what Apple’s gonna do here, but I don’t think they’re going to be any more particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John inclined to backdoor iCloud just for UK citizens.
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Fitness+ “under review”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s do some topics. Apparently, Apple Fitness Plus is under review.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I put this in here because the Mac Pro, you got all this fun about my Mac Pro potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey bye bye. Well, now it’s your turn, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my God. German writes, Fitness Plus, the company’s app-based peloton rival, remains
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of its weakest digital offerings. The $10 a month service suffers from high churn and offers little revenue upside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Still, Fitness Plus has enough loyalty for its small fan base hi, that Apple can’t simply shut it down without a backlash.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And given how inexpensive it is to operate, there’s little incentive for a nearly $4 trillion company to pull the plug,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially if such a move would generate negative headlines. That said, the future of Fitness Plus is under review. The division is getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new management, with Apple health head Sumbul Desai adding Fitness Plus to her portfolio.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Both she and that group will now report to services cheap at EQ.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With that new arrangement in place, the service will be under fresh pressure to improve results.
⏹️ ▶️ John You better do more workouts, Casey. You want to keep that service around.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, you know, I haven’t used Fitness Plus in a while, which is kind of damning given the support. But I do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really enjoy it. I really honestly do. And typically, as I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said many times in the past, there is a service called Beachbody. Now it’s called Body. It’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know. It was basically an MLM, which they’ve largely abandoned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, as far as I’m aware. And you don’t have to get involved in the MLM part. You can just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the fitness videos and the shoe, the supplements in the pre workout and all that other junk that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was really gross. Um, and that’s what, you know, Aaron and I always did. And, uh, there’s a workout
⏹️ ▶️ Casey videos I really enjoy and I, and typically Aaron and I will go back and forth going through several programs that they have. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I really like body, uh, again, nay beach body. Um, and usually after I finished like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an eight week program on that, I’ll do a couple of weeks of fitness plus to kind of like have a palate cleanser. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really enjoy fitness plus. I think it’s really, really, really good. But I will be sad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if not surprised if it goes away and it wouldn’t surprise me if it goes away
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s also some news that CNN was pulling out of news plus because they’ve got their own pay offering for news stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I just see that fly by
⏹️ ▶️ John like yeah news pluses It’s fitness plus makes perfect sense to me like it’s sad that maybe not enough people
⏹️ ▶️ John using it or whatever, but seems like a very Apple style fitness offering
⏹️ ▶️ John with no real bad parts about it if you like what they’re offering like it
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s part of a bundle. I’m not sure. Can you buy it separately? Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, yeah, it’s 10 bucks a
⏹️ ▶️ John month. Yeah, well, anyway, it seems fine. News Plus, on the other hand, has always seemed
⏹️ ▶️ John weird and un-Apple-like because it’s filled with terrible ads and the app isn’t very good. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in that thing we talked about last week of Apple not really
⏹️ ▶️ John being known as a web-first company. So News Plus is an app
⏹️ ▶️ John that lets you read things that are also available on the web, but you’re not really reading them on the web, but there are Apple News URLs
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can read them on the web, but it will launch the app and it’s just, what are you Apple? And then the terrible ads, like what
⏹️ ▶️ John are you doing? And then losing CNN, like I still appreciate News Plus for the purposes of this show
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’ve subscribed to the Apple One bundle, otherwise I wouldn’t get News Plus, but it lets me read like the Wall Street Journal
⏹️ ▶️ John without subscribing to the Wall Street Journal because they get the Wall Street Journal articles. But even that is such a weird dance of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, find the Wall Street Journal article, it’s behind a paywall and then use the share sheet to open an Apple News,
⏹️ ▶️ John which isn’t available. I think it’s not available in the in-app browser, but it’s available in Safari. Anyway, it’s confusing
⏹️ ▶️ John and annoying, but it does let me read things that otherwise would have to pay separately for. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I appreciate that. But every time I look at Apple News Plus, I’m like, I can’t believe people would open this. This would
⏹️ ▶️ John be like their main news source because it’s filled with all the worst ads that you see on the web.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s not Apple like, but Fitness Plus is Apple like it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John so important that out of the chat room fitness services surely have a lot of churn because you know people
⏹️ ▶️ John uh are dedicated for to working out and then you know fall out of the
⏹️ ▶️ John habit and then go back and forth you know some but it’s uh i mean it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the type of thing this is the thing that always annoys me about apple or the current apple anyway like
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say you know they don’t put numbers behind this or whatever but you might think
⏹️ ▶️ John oh well as long as it’s as long as the money that it brings in exceeds the money that it costs to run it, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John keep doing it. But that’s not the way a company Apple size seems to think, which is it’s not worth our time
⏹️ ▶️ John unless it’s gonna make us this amount of profit. Merely being profitable is
⏹️ ▶️ John not sufficient to stay alive, which, you know, again, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John certain things you should do because you think they’re an important part of your product before they are getting to the Mac Pro. But
⏹️ ▶️ John just like Apple Fitness Pro seems like an offering that fits in
⏹️ ▶️ John with their online service offering, and it is very Apple-like and clean and doesn’t have anything gross in it and
⏹️ ▶️ John is a good version of the thing that it’s trying to be. So as long as it’s even if it was losing
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of money or breaking even, I would still keep doing it. But I will also be disappointed. It goes away despite the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact I’ve never done Apple Fitness Plus and it doesn’t appeal to me at all. I just think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a good example of what it’s trying to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And just very, very, very quickly. What I like about it is, first of all, the trainers are,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the bubbly, happy Apple trainers you would expect. Like there are men
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and women, they’re all different shapes and sizes, and they’re really, really enjoyable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they’re not all American. There’s a bunch of Brits. I’m pretty sure there’s other nationalities as well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m not thinking of. But they’re really, really good at what they do. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the things I like about it is the integration. So if you have an Apple Watch, then your rings will show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and assuming you’re doing a workout on your Apple TV, your rings will show right there on the TV and update live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you’re doing your workouts so you can watch your green and your red rings close, which is really nice. Uh, additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you pause the workout on your watch, it will pause playback on the TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is really neat. Is this earth shattering? Absolutely not, but it’s neat and I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And again, the workouts you can do like a five minute core up to, I think they might have a 40
⏹️ ▶️ Casey minute something or other, but they have up to like 30 minute hit and strength workouts. Um, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really like them. I haven’t done, like I said, I haven’t done them in a few months now, But I really do like them and I really think they’re really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well done. They’re very pretty to look at. They’re, they’re nicely executed. They’re,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re, they’re, uh, uh, accomplishable by people of varying fitness levels,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they always have one person that’s like, not remedial, but you know, not working quite as strenuously.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, I really do think it’s a really well executed and I would be sad if it went away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know how strong of a position. Apple’s services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are in besides the taxes and fees. Like, are people absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco running to the other ones? Maybe? It seems like Apple TV Plus, now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s called Apple TV. It seems like TV is seemingly, I think, doing
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t know if TV makes money, but it does make headlines. They won Oscar, they win Emmys.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is, it buffs the brand, whether or not it makes money.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and like the other services that we, like the other kind of content services, News+,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Arcade, and then Fitness, I don’t think they do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that much. Like we almost never hear about them. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t hear that much about them. But I think it’s important for Apple, if they’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell their bundle and their subscription, what they’re trying to say is, hey, everybody come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign up for Apple One and you get all this cool stuff. Look at all the school stuff you get. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think in that context, having a fitness service is actually more important
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than how many people actually end up using the fitness service. So even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that many people are using it, I hope Apple can see like in the bigger picture, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice, first of all, that’s a very aspirational thing. A lot of people- Like a gym membership. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a lot of people-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And not to use it, just gotta pay for it. Exactly. And a lot of people will pay for it because like, yeah, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what? if I get the, if I spend the extra six bucks a month to get this whole bundle, compared to the pieces I was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy separately, I’ll get these few other things, and yeah, maybe I will start using fitness.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, that sounds good. I mean, not this week, but next week maybe. Right, sometime.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that still helps the bundle overall sell, and it helps Apple show, like, here’s a broad selection of different services.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when you look at, like, what does it cost them to keep it going? They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already built out the studios. They’ve already set everything up. They’ve already built the software. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already built it all. The actual cost of them to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it going is trivial, especially for Apple. It’s trivial. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope that they can see in the big picture, having the service, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it doesn’t get amazing numbers of direct usage, it does provide a net benefit that might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be bigger than that, and it’s costing very little to keep it going. So I’d say keep it going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I don’t work at Apple, so who knows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they are cheap. If they’re anything, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco are cheap. Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re very, very cheap. You don’t usually get that rich without being that
Fast-charging and battery health
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, there was a very interesting video that went around a couple of weeks ago, I think. Fast charging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and battery degradation. So, HTX Studio tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to answer the question, is fast charging killing the battery? A two-year test on 40 phones. And so, Julie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Clover and MacRumors summarized it. Using six iPhone 12 models, the channel set up a system to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drain batteries from 5% and charge them to 100% over and over again. Three were fast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charged and three were slow charged. Another set of iPhones underwent the same test, but with charging initiated at 30%, stopped at 80%.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the iPhones were always in that range. This was done, I forget the specific hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they used, but they had a combination of hardware and software that would work together to have the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell the hardware I need to be charged now or stop charging me. It was very, very, very clever how this was done. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going back to Julie, the results suggest there’s minimal additional battery drain from fast charging, but keeping an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between 30 and 80% charge could be minimally beneficial.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s such a weird way to test this, you know, cause it’s kind of like, I guess you would describe it as like integration testing or
⏹️ ▶️ John a system testing. Cause they’re, you know, they’re charging phones as you noted, like automating
⏹️ ▶️ John the charging of phones. But like the battery manufacturers know how the batteries perform.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they, you know, this lithium ion battery manufacturers are well aware of the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, limits of their batteries and how they behave under various scenarios and whether fast charging
⏹️ ▶️ John and slow charging and yada yada. Like that’s their job done. But that’s just a battery in isolation. So they’re testing the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John system. Well, you don’t care how the battery performs. You care how your phone performance in the phone is
⏹️ ▶️ John the battery and the thing that converts the voltage and the charging system and the software and the operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John and the case and the heat dissipation and like a million other variables. So they’re trying to test that at the system level. But even
⏹️ ▶️ John there, it’s like, okay, well, where were these phones while they were being charged? Were they in your pocket?
⏹️ ▶️ John Were they in your jacket pocket? Were they on your nightstand? Like how cold was the weather? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just, it’s all sorts of other variables that affect your phone when you’re charging it? Is it in a Sunbeam while it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John charging? Cause you put it on your kitchen countertop. Like there’s so much, but like they’re just sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of rediscovering the same things that the battery manufacturer could have told them, which is that
⏹️ ▶️ John fast charging is not as good as slow charging where the difference isn’t that big. And the battery manufacturers, I’m sure, pride themselves on
⏹️ ▶️ John narrowing that gap further and further because they want to sell a battery to phone makers that can tolerate
⏹️ ▶️ John fast charging without hurting the battery. Like they want to be able to charge fast. They want to be able to discharge fast. You wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to do a lot of cycles without losing capacity. That’s how battery manufacturers compete with each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is just sort of proving that out with modern phones of saying, yep, fast charging hurts the battery more,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the gap isn’t that big. And the conclusion of the video is what we always say about this, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you really need to pinch those pennies on resale and you think your battery life is gonna fail, just use your phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just use your phone, how are you gonna use your phone? How you use your phone is how your battery is gonna turn out. If you constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John use it, you charge it in your pocket, you do MagSafe charging instead of a
⏹️ ▶️ John wire, like you fast charge all the time, then that’s how you have to use your phone. And that means your phone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John battery is gonna be in worse condition after two years than it wouldn’t have been otherwise. But like, what’s the alternative? To change
⏹️ ▶️ John your entire life around babying the battery? Just use your phone how you’re gonna use your phone. You can be aware,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, if you’re a tech nerd, you can be aware of the things that batteries like and don’t like, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s worth changing your life to satisfy the battery. The phone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John job is to be a tool for you, and do it the other way around.
Sponsor: Zapier
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was trying to integrate this into my company, that’s where I would I would start with those kinds of tools, marketing, brainstorming,
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#askatp: Tipping at restaurants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. We haven’t done Ask ATP in like 34 years, so we’re going to do some Ask ATP. And we’re going to start with Max
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Velasco-Knott, who writes, Marco, now that you run a restaurant and have a staff, has that affected your tipping culture or tipping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preferences, et cetera, when you dine at other restaurants?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, because I was already tipping pretty well. So here’s the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The way tips work in restaurants. In America. In America. Qualification.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Workers in restaurants usually are paid below minimum wage as their base salary because they’re expected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make more in tips. And then that should push them well above the minimum wage in a good restaurant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hopefully at least above it in kind of a slow, inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one maybe. But anyway, these people are on their feet constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you are a server at a restaurant, you generally don’t stop moving during your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shift. constantly moving. It is a hard job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you’re a good person, you kind of have also the burden
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have to bring up the average from the bad people. So this includes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both you know people who don’t tip very well, which there are a lot of them, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who are just kind of jerks. So my goal in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service situation like this is not to necessarily be super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticed, just I want to make sure that I’m doing what I can to make this person’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day a little bit better. Because there are a lot of people doing the opposite. My goal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is always, you know what, I’m gonna be an easy customer. Also keep in mind too,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kinds of things servers get blamed for or praised for, oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not the fault in either direction. Because the server is like the face of the restaurant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the customer for the most part. The server is usually the only employee that most customers are interacting with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe a host up front for a minute, and the server’s the rest of it. And so the server gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the blame or the praise for everything. Now the praise, great, you know, good for them. But they also will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the blame for things like if the food is slow to come out, which is not their fault usually. Usually it’s like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, things get really busy, maybe the kitchen’s backed up a little bit. Or, you know, if the food
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tastes good, that’s also not the server’s fault, either direction, you know? Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers get a lot of people who, you know, blame them a lot or are rude to them, treat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them like subservient humans. Like there’s a lot of people who are rude
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or worse to restaurant staff. I like to go the opposite direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve always been nice and polite. Even when I had no money, I’ve always been nice and polite and easy customer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even, again, even back like in high school, I would still tip reasonably. You know, I wouldn’t, even when I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that much, if I couldn’t afford the tip, I wouldn’t go to the restaurant. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of been my philosophy all the time. Now, as I’ve gotten older and I’ve gotten more money, I’ve been able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tip better. Even before we own the restaurant, it’s kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a very, very small form of altruism, I consider that life has been very good to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I like to leave a nice tip because it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paying it forward. It’s like, hey, you know what? Life’s been very good to me. I kinda got lucky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna try to give this person some of that luck, make their day a little bit better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I will leave a ridiculous tip if I can. And that’s usually the case. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll go 50% maybe for a restaurant I like a lot, or unless it’s like $1,000,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might be a little crazy, but like, you know. I’ll go, I’ll tip well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m lucky that I can do that. For those of you out there who can tip well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suggest you do. Because chances are, if you have that kind of resources yourself, chances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are giving that money to the server, they’ll make better use of it than you will. It’ll mean more to them than it means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you. And you’re making the world a little bit better place. And you’re making up a lot for all the people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who don’t do that. Because it’s a tough job. They really work their butts off. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s the right thing to do if you can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, couldn’t agree more. John, any thoughts to add?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, I don’t go out to restaurants that much, but I, uh, I tend to tip like pragmatically
⏹️ ▶️ John for like delivery food. Uh, I tip with the, the urgency
⏹️ ▶️ John of me wanting these places to stay in business. I guess it may be the start during like, you know, the COVID lockdown.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, my tipping became much more generous, uh, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was tipping fine before, but like now, you know, like Marco level tips, cause it’s like, I don’t want you to go out of
⏹️ ▶️ John business because you’re close by to my house. You just opened, you’re close by to my house, you delivered to my address, your prompt,
⏹️ ▶️ John your food is good. I don’t know how many other people are going there. So hopefully this will keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you going. The tip is not going to the restaurant in that case. You know that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, these are places that deliver themselves. They’re not using like DoorDash or whatever. Oh, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Some places actually have their own delivery. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John hard to believe, but in
⏹️ ▶️ John that I live, some places have their own. We just had some of it tonight. Their actual own delivery where
⏹️ ▶️ John people, probably the kids of the people in the restaurant, deliver whatever. But it’s takeout. like, what are you what are
⏹️ ▶️ John you tipping for? There’s a delivery fee, like they do charge a delivery fee, but there’s also a place for a tip.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I tip like I was at a sit down restaurant and I tip, you know, basically saying, please stay around
⏹️ ▶️ John this one sandwich place. I keep trying to do that. But they’re never open when I want a sandwich. I’m like, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John buy things from you if you’re not open. I don’t I don’t know how long that place is for this world. But I like their sandwiches. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, that’s the only thing I think COVID lockdown has probably changed my my tipping culture to be extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John generous tipping for people I’d never see in person on top of the delivery fee for delivery
#askatp: Third-party code in our apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eric Jacobson writes, what do you think about using third party packages in your apps? I know Marco tries to use packages rarely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if at all, a stance that I find admirable, but not exactly pragmatic. Call sheet doesn’t strike me as something that would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need many, but we’ve all worked on enough apps to know that unexpected needs are the rule.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hyperspace, on the other hand, I’m sure could benefit from all sorts of outside work. I’m not entirely sure how Eric jumped to those conclusions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll start by saying, call sheet has, shoot, I should have had the project open. I don’t know. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll go off the top of my head. Call sheet has a couple of third party projects.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, there’s a socket project that I use for talking to Plex. Um, and then I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this week adopted, um, Swift, uh, one of the, it’s, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first party, but, uh, it’s a first party. Project, but it’s, it’s one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you have to bring in using swift package manager. It’s not, um, async algorithms, which is kind of like combined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey meets, um, async wait. But there’s another one that Apple does wherein
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they have different data structures, and I needed an orderable dictionary for something that’s coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out fairly soon. And so I pulled that in recently. But that’s, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. I don’t think I’m using anything else. Marco, you have some pretty strong stances about this. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me, I’m sorry, before I pitched you, Marco, let me interrupt myself. I— Marco Amiro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Only you would apologize for interrupting yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I told you you were up and then I said I was a liar. So anyway, I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have anything against third party code, but generally speaking, I’ve come to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey land on Marco’s side of things, which is I avoid it if reasonably possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not because I think my code is necessarily better or anything like that, but I feel like having 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ownership over everything that happens in the app is something to aspire to the degree that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can using SwiftUI and UIKit and so on and so forth. And so generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I can just write whatever I need to write, and especially if I have any interest in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writing the thing I want to write, generally speaking, I’ll just do that. Now, I could have written a orderable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dictionary, but I didn’t have any interest in it and it wouldn’t have really served any useful purpose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And since it was a first-party project, I thought, hey, I’ll just suck that in. But generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not an absolutist about it, but I do generally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey try to avoid it now. Now, Marco, for real this time, what are your thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously, like I discussed before, I do try to avoid using third-party code in my app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it comes from experience of third-party code having bitten me in the butt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of the time that I have used it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. And I’m not 100% against it. But the barrier is high.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has to be really worth it. And not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it has to be really bad. For instance, I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discuss it in a few minutes. I’m going to be talking about how I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to switch an S3 compatible provider to a different S3 compatible provider on Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backend. And I write my own S3 PHP accessing class. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrote it a few years back. I believe I even posted it to GitHub as a gist or something. But I wrote it a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few years back because I just needed some kind of like S3 compatible basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IO library. And everything out there for PHP that I could find was these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, usually the official Amazon one or some third party one that just like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absolutely massive, giant library with hundreds of files, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this complexity that I didn’t really need. And I know, like, you know, for me to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this myself, I know it’s not that much code. It’s, I think doing it myself was something like 200 lines of code. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was not a lot of code. And just literally a few, like two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weeks ago, I had to look at that code and be like, all right, I have to modify it slightly to be compatible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this other service. Is this worth it to me? And you know what? It really was unpleasant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for about two hours. And then I found what I was doing slightly wrong that one service tolerated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the other service didn’t, and I fixed it. Now it’s fine. And now I won’t have to touch that code again for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And meanwhile, that code, because it’s so small, and I’ve written it entirely myself, number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, it is just lighter on the servers. It will literally directly save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me money over time. Number two, I know it. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any part of it has to change, or if I have to debug a problem, I know all the code, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small enough that even if I have to look at it again, you know, three years from now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I’ve definitely, you know, it has definitely fallen out of my L3 cache by then in my mind, but I’ll be able to look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at it and figure it out really fast because it’s small. So that’s the kind of benefit that I tend to go for when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a library, like I could use someone else’s, or I can write my own.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now sometimes the complexity is not worth it. So like the main third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco library I use on the servers is the Stripe API, Because dealing with like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Stripe stuff, like I know I don’t offer Stripe subscriptions for the app, but I do use Stripe to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell my ads on the website. And so, and dealing with Stripe for that, like it’s super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to use their API, and for me to, or for me to use their SDK rather, and for me to not use their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PHP SDK, would be a decent amount of work with the feature set that I use. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could do it, but it’s, I don’t need to, it’s fine. And that’s something that’s like, Stripe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has proven over time that their SDK is very trustworthy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and very low needs. I don’t like one thing I would not enjoy is if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the copy of it that I had needed to be updated frequently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So far, I forget when I built my Stripe ad system. I think it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like eight years ago, maybe nine years ago, seven years ago, something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’ve had to update the code once in that entire time. And so again, this is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a low needs library. It’s a high cost to do it myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve never had any problems with it. So I’m okay doing that. But that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has not been the case for things like S3 libraries or things like, you know, a lot of the iOS side stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And frankly, on the iOS side, I really don’t frequently have a need for third
⏹️ ▶️ Marco party code. the kind of code I’m writing on the iOS side is custom code that only I could write because it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s integrating stuff in within my app to other stuff within my app. I don’t have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these like orthogonal problems that I can have one library import just totally solve a problem for me. I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have a lot of that and if I for some reason need something smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know give me a function to calculate the tangent between you know these two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco triangle points I’ll just ask chat GPT and I’ll look at the ten lines of code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it wrote, I’ll adapt them so they fit and work, and then it’s a 10-line function. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have a lot of needs for things that are larger than that, that a third-party library might
⏹️ ▶️ John I come from the web development world, and ever since the web had any
⏹️ ▶️ John libraries at all to speak of, they have constituted the vast majority of the code. Like even you can
⏹️ ▶️ John think back in the jQuery days, you’d load jQuery and then write a paragraph of code. Well, jQuery is way more than a paragraph of code.
⏹️ ▶️ John It always has been. I don’t know, they try to minify themselves and make them small, but the fact is that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, client side web libraries have grown, server side web libraries. I’ve written tons of web frameworks
⏹️ ▶️ John in Perl in my career. Even when I’m using a framework that I wrote myself, still
⏹️ ▶️ John the vast majority of the code is third-party code because of CPAN, the Comprehensive Perl
⏹️ ▶️ John Archive Network, one of the original package management open source things.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I would build my web frameworks on top of libraries, on top of C-band modules, because that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John the way things were done. So both client side and server side and the web, libraries made up the vast majority
⏹️ ▶️ John of the code. That’s not that different from the world on Apple platforms. They’re just, we
⏹️ ▶️ John think of it differently because it’s like, well, there’s the operating system and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all the frameworks that lead up to the pinnacle framework, which is UIKit or AppKit or whatever, but underneath that is
⏹️ ▶️ John frameworks on top of frameworks on top of frameworks on top of libraries on top of the operating system. None of that is your code,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s first party code. It’s not third party. But anyway, the vast majority of the code that makes up quote unquote your app
⏹️ ▶️ John is almost certainly not your code. It’s, you know, the operating system and the frameworks, even though it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all first party. So I’m very used to the idea that what I’m doing is writing on
⏹️ ▶️ John top of a mountain of someone else’s code. I did enjoy my career as a web
⏹️ ▶️ John developer having the source code to all of that code that I’m writing on top of, which is not
⏹️ ▶️ John true in Apple platforms. You have some of the source code, but not all of it, which is disappointing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But all that is to say, I am not allergic to using libraries. That
⏹️ ▶️ John said, part of the reason we like Apple’s platforms is the first party stuff on frameworks provides you a lot of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re like, it’s not like it is in, you know, Perl or, you know, to make the extreme case like a
⏹️ ▶️ John Node.js where doing almost anything requires importing a hodgillion libraries, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can just start a project and use UIKit or AppKit or SwiftUI or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John just use that first party top level framework and do a lot of stuff without ever having to go anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John to a third party thing. That said, my apps do have third party stuff. Again, I’m not quite sure why Hyperspace
⏹️ ▶️ John got the call out for a thing that’s gonna need third party libraries. The only third party libraries that you even use
⏹️ ▶️ John in Hyperspace, one library is for, I don’t know if you’ve looked at the UI, but I do like a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that imitates like the path bar in the finder kind of where it shows like the, I
⏹️ ▶️ John had to represent a folder hierarchy without, I didn’t wanna use a path with slashes because that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John user-friendly if you’re not Unix. So like, how does Mac OS do it in the Finder? It shows like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John a folder icon, a folder name, and then like a little, you know, arrow or whatever. Like, I don’t know, what do you call
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Is it called the path bar? There’s, I don’t know what it’s called in the Finder, but they show you a path without making it a
⏹️ ▶️ John Unix path. So I wanted to make a thing that did that. And that requires, you know, making a little image
⏹️ ▶️ John and some text and doing truncation and doing wrapping of the images and the text with truncation.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I wanted to do a thing where if you moused over the truncated ones, it would expand them so you could see the full name on them
⏹️ ▶️ John and has to flow correctly and overflow if it gets too big. That’s a fairly complicated thing. And I implemented
⏹️ ▶️ John that all myself and it wasn’t fun in SwiftUI to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then after I implemented myself, I think I forget if it was after 1.0, but I think it was, I found a third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John library that did exactly that. And like, oh, thank God. It wasn’t nice. I’m not a SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John expert. And yeah, I got it to work and it was fine, but I am more than happy to use
⏹️ ▶️ John a third party, you know, Swift package manager package that does reflowable
⏹️ ▶️ John like collections. And I really, honestly, Apple really needs to up their Swift UI game to sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John reach parity with like UI kit and app kit with like their collection views, you know? Swift UI does
⏹️ ▶️ John not have very robust collection views. They would make my life a lot easier if they did. But anyway, there’s a library called Flow that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John on GitHub that I used and I, that was glorious. deleted all my code,
⏹️ ▶️ John all my stupid custom view layout thing or whatever, and just imported that package and used it. That’s a UI
⏹️ ▶️ John other main library I use in Hyperspace is a library
⏹️ ▶️ John to implement the Easter egg. There’s a Hyperspace themed Easter egg that does some fun graphics.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I didn’t want to write myself. And there’s a third party library from a well-known Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John developer, teacher in the Swift community who did like a fun library to do fun graphics. I will
⏹️ ▶️ John gladly use that library instead of rolling that up by myself. That’s it. All of the stuff that touches
⏹️ ▶️ John files, that’s all my code on top of Apple’s frameworks,
⏹️ ▶️ John Unix APIs, all that other stuff. So no frameworks for any of the actual functionality, just
⏹️ ▶️ John a framework for a UI layout and a framework for an Easter egg. And then in Swift Glass, Switch
⏹️ ▶️ John Glass, I mean, actually in all of these, I’d use, well, not in Hyperspace, because Hyperspace doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have purchase because it’s free download, but Switch Glass is paid up front. And this always annoyed me once
⏹️ ▶️ John I discovered this with Mac development. If you do a paid up front Mac app
⏹️ ▶️ John and you just write it naively, your app does nothing to make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that someone actually paid for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You have to write some code.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought this, you got this for free as part of the Mac app store. Nope, nope, nope, nope. You have to write some code
⏹️ ▶️ John that says, oh, and by the way, when you’re running, make sure someone didn’t just copy this to another machine. Like make sure
⏹️ ▶️ John it actually is downloaded from the Mac App Store. And does Apple provide code for you to do that? Not really.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, not in a good way. And so there are third party libraries that will
⏹️ ▶️ John check to see that you have the Mac App Store receipt and that it’s valid and signed and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those third party libraries have to keep pace with all whatever Apple does. Oh, we’re changing the algorithm, we use
⏹️ ▶️ John a different hash or whatever. I don’t wanna have to deal with that. So I just use a library. Again, it’s an open source
⏹️ ▶️ John library that does receipt validation on Mac OS. and I use that to make it so that my app
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot be naively copied to another Mac and run in my paid up front app. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John with Hyperspace where it’s in-app purchase, the whole in-app purchase system handles that, but yeah, Apple should
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely do a better job there. But I use that package in Switch Glass and
⏹️ ▶️ John then it in turn uses other packages that are also open source, like Swift Crypto and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Anyway, so that’s what I use in my Apple apps, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not allowed to do third-party code. I think of it very much like Marco does, where it’s like, do I wanna deal with this? Is this gonna change
⏹️ ▶️ John often? And you know, the reason I gave the layout example is like, even if I’ve already written all the code for
⏹️ ▶️ John it, is that code like the core competency of my app? No, it’s just something, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a layout that I, it’s a layout that I wanna have that I don’t even have to have. I could pick a different layout, I just wanted to have that one,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m not, the value of my app doesn’t rely on, wow, look at this great layout code he wrote. No, I will gladly
⏹️ ▶️ John use a library for that. And then I will be praying for the day when Apple sort of Sherlock’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that library and says, oh, you don’t need that library anymore cause we built it into Swift UI and then I’ll be able to delete that dependency just
⏹️ ▶️ John use Apple’s first party implementation.
#askatp: Organizing /Applications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Nathan writes, I’ve been thinking about the subfolders in the applications folder, and I’m curious about your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thoughts. I know it might seem a bit unconventional, but I’ve noticed some apps acting strangely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey others refusing to launch, and some just refuse to budge from the root of the applications folder.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use Spotlight and Alfred, but I’ve always felt like my applications folder could be more organized and user-friendly. It’s like a cluttered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mess that I’m constantly wishing to tidy up. Have you ever tried organizing your applications folder and subfolders?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What have you found to be the benefits and drawbacks? Has this ever been a thing on the Mac? Or should should I just give up and pretend it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there? Uh, this is something I’ve never once thought about. Do not think about, will not think about, do not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care about. And just, just stop worrying about it. Nathan, you have many other things to worry about. Stop worrying about
⏹️ ▶️ John You can answer the question. Has this ever been a thing on a Mac? Yes, it absolutely has. Cue
⏹️ ▶️ John the line that I cannot remember from the intro from the, uh, uh, fellowship of the ring movie.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, something, something things were lost because none now live who remember them. I’m still alive.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember I used to arrange all my applications
⏹️ ▶️ John into beautifully arranged subfolders with their own custom icons in classic Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because in classic Mac OS, the computer belonged to the user as did the file names. You could name things
⏹️ ▶️ John whenever you wanted. You could put them mostly wherever you wanted with exceptions of certain things
⏹️ ▶️ John having to do with the operating system. That freedom was lost in the transition to Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John X. Apple tried to do the best they could. Do applications
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be in applications, the applications folder? Well, no. Obviously, Apple itself ships the utilities
⏹️ ▶️ John folder. Inside the applications folder is a folder called utilities. Inside there are applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, you can make an applications folder in your home directory, which is so well supported that it will get a little application folder badge,
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple knows that it’s gonna be there, and it’s gonna hold over from the next days when you can have local applications, user applications, network
⏹️ ▶️ John applications, so on and so forth. So there are a bunch of designated okay spots
⏹️ ▶️ John for applications and Apple itself has subfolders in the application folders
⏹️ ▶️ John that they put applications in. There’s also those things in system library core services. There’s applications in lots of different places.
⏹️ ▶️ John But as Casey was expressing in his Casey way, the culture
⏹️ ▶️ John on Mac OS X is that applications go in the applications folder.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Apple encourages you to do this in various ways in the UI. If you’ve ever tried to run an application
⏹️ ▶️ John from like a disk image or run it from the downloads folder. Sometimes the applications themselves will say, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John I noticed you’re running me from not in the applications folder. Do you want movie there? And I think there’s an OS
⏹️ ▶️ John feature that will like translocate them there and say, hey, I’m not running an application. Do you want me to move me there?
⏹️ ▶️ John Should it make a difference where they are? Not really, but I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John running it from disk image is bad because disk image is a read only, but these days applications shouldn’t be writing things to their own bundles, but who knows what
⏹️ ▶️ John happens. But anyway, what has happened is that the culture on macOS of applications just
⏹️ ▶️ John expecting to be in the applications folder has produced a
⏹️ ▶️ John brood of applications, many of which don’t behave correctly when they’re not in the applications
⏹️ ▶️ John folder. I think that is antisocial and bad. I think applications should behave just fine when they’re on the
⏹️ ▶️ John applications folder. And if they have to be in there for some good explicable reason, they should
⏹️ ▶️ John notice when they’re not running there and offer to move themselves there. but that should be a very
⏹️ ▶️ John rare edge case. Otherwise, they should, like most of Apple’s applications, run from anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, system library core services, like it’s not a special folder, they should
⏹️ ▶️ John run from anywhere. So I think it’s bad that they can’t, but some of them do get cranky when they run outside there. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to subdivide, I do have some subfolders. Like I have a games subfolder in my applications folder,
⏹️ ▶️ John and in there are a bunch of games. They’re all fine, they all run fine from there. Again, like
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes I have subfolders within subfolders, Like most applications will be fine, but if you’re nervous
⏹️ ▶️ John at all, or you have any application that looks like it’s misbehaving, put it into the top level applications folder. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John never had anything misbehave in my home directories applications folder. So take that for what you will, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s more of a blessed location, but yeah, it’s bad. It used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be better. There used to be more flexibility, but most people don’t care where their applications are and don’t want to organize them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so if you’re having any problems, just stick it in applications.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, do you also organize your applications folder?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course not. I don’t even open my applications folder. Yeah, same. I almost never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey do. It’s all
#askatp: Kids vs. us in video games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Omri Arbiv writes, I recall an old hypercritical episode in which John said he will always be better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than his children in video games. Now that John’s children are in college, is there any video game that either of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them plays better than John have Marco or Casey’s kids surpassed their video game skill? Let’s start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with me and Marco and end with John on this one. Cause I think John will have the most to say. Uh, for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can no longer consistently beat Declan in Mario Kart. That’s the only thing that we play semi-regularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey together. We haven’t played in a while though to be honest. More often than not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can beat him but there’s a handful of tracks that he’s better than me on. I forget which one’s off the top of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my head but generally speaking I can still whip his butt. Marco, how’s it going with Adam in that department?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are some games that I am better than him at. Typically games that rely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on old platform game mechanics in the 2D world that we grew up in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Adam and I play a game called ultimate chicken horse that is basically Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like a new party and well new to me It’s probably like 15 years old But like it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it it’s it’s a modern kind of like 2d side-scrolling party game where you like jump Through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like difficult scenarios that you make up in a 2d platforming kind of world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Play that with a Super Nintendo style controller And I’m really good at it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can beat him much of the time in that game not all the time But much of the time that game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s it in all other games. He’s way better than me like not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same league I know so far ahead of me But in that kind of game that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relies on like old platform mechanics that I’m actually good at that So that I can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but those like anything else anything involving like certainly combat.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean forget it I don’t stand a chance in general in life. He’s just much faster than me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like his brain works a lot faster than mine and he he is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know tuned in to video games and how to play video games and like he will spend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours getting good at them and building The skills and getting the muscle memory and like so he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he is starting from a better place already because he’s not only younger than Me, but he’s mentally faster and physically faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than me But then also he has so much practice with the games and he’ll go and do the research and he’ll watch the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco YouTube videos and he’ll Dive into all the stuff and so like any game that we play he will know everything about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it before I’ve even seen it So I don’t stand a chance in most games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. We do play games together Anyway, like like we generally like playing games that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, maybe more co-op
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or games that are so simple like ultimate chicken horse that it doesn’t really matter But we can do things like, you know, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco played like the Bloons TD games together, where just as co-op, we’re both playing like the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco team, just trying to beat the big mobs of whatever coming into the tower defense arena. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we’re actually playing against each other, he’s better than me in every possible way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, what’s the situation? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t remember if I said this on the Hypercritical episode, but I hope I did, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that… I was going to say, it
⏹️ ▶️ John And, and no, not that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this thing I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John about to say. I did definitely say that I was going to always be better than my kids. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John if I explained the, uh, something that would have helped you too, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John that, um, as you get older and you’re, you know, your kids get older, of course, your kids
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to have better reflexes than you. They’re going to be faster. They’re, you know, they will have the advantage of
⏹️ ▶️ John youth. And the reason you can, the reason I said that I’ve always been better than them is because of what I
⏹️ ▶️ John will have is wisdom and treachery
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and also the psychological barrier
⏹️ ▶️ John of being their dad. You must play to your strengths. Your strengths are no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John your reflexes that you can’t, you can’t lean on that. You have to use what you
⏹️ ▶️ John have, which is life experience and the ability to ruthlessly
⏹️ ▶️ John and be sneaky and, and you know, use your wisdom and experience. Now, how is
⏹️ ▶️ John the, how is me always being better than my kids working out? I hope I also said this, which is maybe I didn’t, Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t foresee this, which is like, that we would be interested in different games. So there are games that my son
⏹️ ▶️ John plays that I have never played and have no interest in, and presumably he’s better than me in them, but I still think
⏹️ ▶️ John that if I did play those games and was interested in them, that I would still beat him.
⏹️ ▶️ John For the games that we both play equally, I must rely on my wisdom
⏹️ ▶️ John and treasuring to defeat
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s pretty close in a lot of them, especially first-person shooters. I think I’m mostly better just because I make better decisions,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is most of what being good at first person shooters actually is. It’s not actually reflexes most of the time, but because his
⏹️ ▶️ John reflexes are so much better than mine, I really have to outthink him to sort of level that
⏹️ ▶️ John playing field, but it can happen. You mentioned like Adam watching all the YouTube videos.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m doing that. I subscribe to so many gaming YouTube channels. All I do is like half of my
⏹️ ▶️ John YouTube watching is learning things about like destiny videos. I subscribe to so many
⏹️ ▶️ John destiny channels. Now that I’m playing Arc Raiders, I’m just constantly watching our creators videos to learn things So
⏹️ ▶️ John that is part of sort of being into the games And I don’t expect him to be better than me in the games that I’m playing
⏹️ ▶️ John and he’s not for example so that’s sort of the The you know the calculus there the caveat should
⏹️ ▶️ John have been always better than my kids in video games if we both play the game But if one of us plays are the other one doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously it’s unfair and on that note I recently was over a friend of mine’s house, and he suggested
⏹️ ▶️ John that we play It’s an Apple arcade game which luckily we’re all Apple arcade
⏹️ ▶️ John subscribers but it basically, you know, network name that tune. What is it called?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not actually a very nice application. So I’m a little bit annoyed at it. I think it’s called- I’m so surprised to hear
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It’s called Songpop Party. Songpop is all one word, capital S, capital P,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then a space and then the word party. It’s network name that tune. And their UI is inscrutable. Like they’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John never seen, like information architecture is foreign to them. They have no idea what a hierarchy is. It’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do I get from here to there and shoot? You just want to like, I just want to pick a playlist and play
⏹️ ▶️ John the game with these songs. And it’s maddening. Anyway, it’s available on
⏹️ ▶️ John a phone and iPad and you can play it on Apple TV. And it’s just name that tune. It’s multiple choice name that tune. So everyone gets the
⏹️ ▶️ John app on their phone or whatever. You should play it on the phone because using the Apple TV remote is a massive disadvantage because it sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s multiple choice. You all hear the song, start playing immediately and you have four buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John on the screen and you have to press the button that’s the right answer. Sometimes the button that’s the right answer is the title of the
⏹️ ▶️ John song, sometimes it’s the artist. That’s basically the whole game. It’s Apple Arcade, so there’s no in-app purchase,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you do have to unlock things by earning keys. It’s like, come on, Apple Arcade, I already pay for
⏹️ ▶️ John you. There’s no in-app purchase, you’re not making any money. Why are you time-gating these things behind XP? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so stupid. Anyway. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s just because like, you know, in the same way that like, when we were growing up, arcade games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were a thing, and then a lot of times they would be ported to the home consoles, but they still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco acted like arcade games. where you’d have to insert credits or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still had arcade game remnants. This is like all the Apple arcade games that were like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports from regular app store games. They all have remnants of the in-app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchase grinding garbage mechanics that all these games have now. Those remnants are still there
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes. I’m not sure if this is an Apple arcade game that existed outside of it. What I think it might be is
⏹️ ▶️ John you might get paid based on play time. Like an Apple arcade. And so if you’re incentivized to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John people playing your game, then you’re going to lock all the stuff behind. Like, you know, anyway, I’m not sure the details.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s annoying. But if you consider this a game, this is an interesting one to play with your kids.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a grant. It’s not really a video game. It’s it’s named that tune, but like it works exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John how you would expect. If I pick like the 80s TV show playlist, I will
⏹️ ▶️ John crush everybody. Right. But if my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco kids pick like
⏹️ ▶️ John Current music. I have no idea what these people are It’s you really it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John struggled to find a playlist for like a round of the game That is remotely
⏹️ ▶️ John fair because our cultural differences are so huge You can also by the way play with strangers
⏹️ ▶️ John When you play with strangers you get to sort of pick like i’d like this to be the playlist and it just randomly Every person
⏹️ ▶️ John picks what playlist they wish it was and then it randomly picks amongst them And like, you know, i’ll pick like billy
⏹️ ▶️ John joel. You can do artist-based ones I crush pretty much everybody in Billy Joel because the odds of you getting another
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m guessing there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a fish live performance one
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that might be tricky I didn’t see fish in there but you have to unlock the things I unlocked Billy Joel and
⏹️ ▶️ John you too and like I think the police or something and I unlocked a bunch of 80s things including like movie
⏹️ ▶️ John soundtracks and TV show themes although sometimes the TV show themes
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ll play a portion that didn’t play at the beginning of TV show which I think is bad and wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you should, I know the songs are longer, often longer than they were at the beginning of the show, but you can only play the
⏹️ ▶️ John part that played in front of the TV show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought actually a good engagement mechanic might be that the Fish playlist starts out on lock and you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to rank up to lock it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, no, the Fish one would be hard because I don’t, I’m not sure if humans choose the excerpt. You know what I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean? Like if they don’t, if you randomly choose an excerpt from a Fish song, I think even you would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, I mean, there’s a lot of them that, you know, once they kind of go off in the wilderness for a while, you’re like, I don’t know what the heck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, they would have,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it would be fitting for instead of it being like five second snippets, the fish ones, they play three minutes of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and still no one knows what the heck it is. I think this was a
⏹️ ▶️ John carini 20 minutes ago. It’s multiple choices. The most fun part is like, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re playing with like strangers online, they’ll play one and it’s clear nobody in the game,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the lobby or whatever, has any idea, but then they’ll sing the lyric that is the title and then everyone picks it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can see it happen. That makes me think that it’s not human curated because you should never pick
⏹️ ▶️ John a snippet that has the title in like where they say the title of the song with the Leonardo DiCaprio
⏹️ ▶️ John gif, right? So anyway, a network name that tune
⏹️ ▶️ John is a fun game. I just like draw something. A network Pictionary is also a fun game idea. This is a poor implementation
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, but if you have Apple Arcade, you get it for free. And it’s an interesting quote unquote video game to
⏹️ ▶️ John play with your kids because there is very often not that much overlap between the world
⏹️ ▶️ John of your cultural references and the world of theirs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, to show the variance in gaming selection,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the game that Adam is currently very heavily playing is called Ultra Kill.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what he is doing in it is basically trying to beat his best times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the level in a speed running kind of method. Now, when I, as a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, as an old person, see this game, and I see the way he is speedrunning it, he,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, it’s, you know, it looks like kind of a regular shooter, but he’s basically flying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through it. Cause he’s like doing these like crazy speedrun jumps and jumping and soaring and flying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like, Whoa! How did you get all the way over there in three seconds? Oh, I shaved off.1 seconds off my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco best time. It’s like, Oh my god, like there’s so much going on. This
⏹️ ▶️ John game is retro and Adam probably doesn’t even know it. It looks very much like Quake one or Quake two,
⏹️ ▶️ John but much faster obviously, but like the graphics are like intentionally retro, but for a time that wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John retro to me when I was living through it.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh yeah, well my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing is like, the font used throughout the entire UI is that like VCR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bitmap font. And it’s, and I love it, like I saw it, I was delighted by it. I’m like, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though this, at no point did anything with that font look like this. Like those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are two not overlapping time spans. But it was delightful. But like when you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this game, you’re like I have no idea what’s going on here. And it’s just so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it. Like this is, and like, you know, besides this he’ll play those kind of like grinding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco economy games. Or just like, you know, some like Roblox pile of hacks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’ll be like, well, now, you know, I just traded in the Megasword for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultrasword, but to get the Diamond Sword I have to get five million of these bags of rice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s like, oh my God, that sounds, I mean, honestly, to me it sounds super unfun,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but he has fun with it, so you know, whatever. And I see games like this, but I’m just like, he’s doing things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are impossible in this game. I can’t believe what’s going on in this game.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should try Universal Paperclips, one of the, I think that was what it was called, one of the original web-based ones. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I did. Sort of like economy games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually did play that for a few days.
⏹️ ▶️ John Has Adam played it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. He also, there’s all these clickers now that are basically that same kind of game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He was just telling me about one the other day, like one of the many, oh it was Cookie Clicker. That was the one. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the kids are playing now or recently. And that’s, it sounds exactly like all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those games. But it’s like, I just need five million more of these things and I’ll have it in 35 days. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my God. He likes Ultra Kill.
⏹️ ▶️ John He might like the recent entries in the Doom franchise. I don’t know if you two know, but they keep making
⏹️ ▶️ John Doom games and they are very much
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra Kill, but with a little bit better graphics. Huh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t know that. I knew that they were putting, well, not they, but people were putting Doom on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all sorts of hilarious pieces of hardware, but I did not know that new Doom was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John happening. There have
⏹️ ▶️ John been many, many Doom games since the original Doom, and they keep making them, and they keep making
⏹️ ▶️ John them faster, very much like Ultra Kill, where you move real fast, you go real fast, there’s lots of bullets, it’s not attempting
⏹️ ▶️ John to be realistic in any way. It’s not quite as speed-running as it seems to be, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thank you to our sponsors this week, Aura Frames, Zapier, and Paka.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly, you can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime, we’re gonna be talking about should we ever be forced to put away our phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have phone-free experiences? Things like events and things that require your phone to be away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how they do that. interesting topic I think. So we’re going to talk about that in overtime. You can join if you want to listen to that and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else we do for members exclusively atb.fm slash join. Thank you everybody. and we’ll talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John can find the show notes at atp.fm And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re into Mastodon, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Accidental, check podcast
Overcast episode images
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I just did an Overcast update a few days back that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adds the number one customer requested feature for probably the last year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by far. Episode images.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me more about what that means.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, so podcasts have always had like the main podcast image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is like the artwork that shows to represent a podcast. A very, very long time ago, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been support basically since the beginning of podcasting for images to be embedded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the mp3 files because mp3s themselves support images being embedded in the ID3 tags and they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a thousand years. So you could also you had your podcast image that was specified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the feed as a URL and just an image URL on the feed and you’ve been able to embed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco images in the mp3s themselves and in many podcast players
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you would play a podcast with an embedded image, that image would show on the now playing screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of the main artwork if one was present. Now a long time ago that actually caused me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a problem with overcast early, early on in the development because the wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, I believe now totally over podcast Core Intuition by our friends Dano
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jockett and Manton Rees. Core Intuition was one of my test shows a thousand years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they used to embed a lower resolution version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of their main image as their embedded image in every file. And overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or initial logic was, if there is an embedded image, display that. And if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, display the main artwork. Now, the result of this was, when playing Core
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Intuition back then, it would quickly pop in a worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of the main image, because that was the embedded image, because it had to be kind of smaller to fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into limits and stuff. And so I originally episode artwork meant that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even that, I had to like develop, basically I did something where like I resized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both images down to like 16 by 16 pixels and measured the differences and like how different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these two images are. And if the embedded image was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deemed to be like basically the same image as the main feed image, I would just show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main feed one and just ignore the embedded
⏹️ ▶️ John one. You’re probably ruining a lot of people’s subtle jokes where they changed like one letter in the title of their name as a
⏹️ ▶️ John joke artwork, but you replaced it with the real artwork because it’s shrunk down there the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the good news is the embedded artwork feature of the MP3 spec and a podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps has hardly ever been used. Now the world has moved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on since then and Overcast still supports that and has the entire time. But- And we use it all the time in this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Or no, we use chapter images.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, see we stopped. We did use it in this show and chapter images we did. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we moved on, the world has moved on, no one ever really used those in great numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And just to be clear, the distinction we’re making is chapter images are a different thing where images are embedded in the mp3
⏹️ ▶️ John file, which is separate from episode images where there is a artwork image embedded in the mp3 file
⏹️ ▶️ John saying for this episode, this is the artwork.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. So, over the last few years, it’s become fairly common,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially for larger podcasts who have production staffs and designers on staff and stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Larger podcasts will often have individual images made for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each episode. And what they do is Apple Podcasts added support, I think a couple of years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least, for images to be specified in the feed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per episode. So it’s just in the feed, it’s just another URL and the feed has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to download it or the client has to download it and show it. And then this takes it out of the file. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the advantage of this is that you can show them before the episodes have been downloaded. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re presenting like a list of episodes that have not yet been downloaded,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those images that are present, they can be shown on that list. So it’s helpful and it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of nicer for like the rich display of podcasts now with big budgets and all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assets and design things that they can have now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a long time now, my number one feature request has been support for these episode images.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course, I try to go implement them and I run into so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little problems. So first of all, the scope and the scale that you’re dealing with now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, Overcast is hosting metadata for and crawling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco millions of podcasts. Now, every podcast has one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco main image. You’re going now from the potential of a podcast having one main image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 2,000 episode images, maybe. So you’re dealing with potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco orders of magnitude more images that need to be dealt with. Now, the most obvious way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this is just ignore them on the server side and just have the client
⏹️ ▶️ Marco download them directly from publishers at full size. Then the servers don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to know anything about them except this is the image URL. Go nuts. The problem with that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a number of problems with that so I’ll get to that in a minute but that is what I prototyped first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, the very first thing I had to do was build an all new downloader for Overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because what this means in the before support times of this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast had to download one file for every episode. So the downloader
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was kind of tightly bound to one-to-one relationship between episodes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and files that can be downloaded for those episodes. So I first had to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refactor the downloader and in fact I ended up writing a whole new one for for other reasons, but refactor the downloader and design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it such that a podcast can have more than one file associated with downloading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. And there’s all sorts of tricks to that, like, okay, well, what happens if one of them gets deleted?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What happens if one of them is downloaded, but the other ones aren’t?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What happens if the file is being streamed during playback and not downloaded?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What should happen if it’s in your list, but it is not downloaded? What should show there?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all sorts of these considerations. There’s also a privacy angle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because keep in mind, the world of podcasts is all about ad tech in all of its forms now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, fortunately, it can’t do quite as much as it can on the web because of the limitation of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco medium, but any little bit of information you give these big ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco networks that are now serving podcasts, they’ll use it against you. So it’s like talking to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco police. Give them as little as possible. making a second request from the same IP,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, when do you make that request? Do you download every image, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you haven’t downloaded the file? But then you’re making a request two different times, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they can like bind two different IPs to your data profile if they’re keeping on you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then they can figure, oh, this is your home IP and this is your work IP. There’s all sorts of stuff that you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think about with that kind of stuff. You know, what if they specify a quote pixel, and then you have to think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like, are they gonna change the URL over and over again to make sure that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you keep downloading it so they can keep tracking you as you go throughout your life and as you move to different IPs and different locations?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The answer is yes, of course, the people are gonna try to do that. If they’re not doing it yet, they’re going to. So you have to design any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature like this with privacy like significantly in mind. And then the second problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, okay, you’re downloading images now. What happens if the image changes after you’ve downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? How often are you checking? What happens if the URL changes? What happens if the URL doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change, but somebody replaces the image on their server? Do you keep the cached version forever? Do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to pull potentially thousands of image URLs client side every single time? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you think about what actually has to happen here to do this well, it’s not a small amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. So I refactor my downloader to download the images directly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the publisher, so that way my servers wouldn’t have to deal with millions more images and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever that might mean. Okay, I try it out, I run it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the iOS simulator on a test account that has a handful of podcasts in it, and it was 500
⏹️ ▶️ Marco megs of images on a test account with a handful of podcasts. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the heck is going on? And so at first I look and I see there’s one image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have about 100 copies of. It’s the artwork for Hypercritical.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it turns out that one thing that that you know 5x5 feed now has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is they specify images per episode even if there never were images
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per episode for like a very old podcast. They just specify the same URL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for every image. Like oh no duplicates and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t count on podcast feeds doing anything in a regular logical way. They’re gonna do whatever they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna do. So then I had to go, alright now re-index
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things with the consideration that maybe you shouldn’t count an image as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being an episode image if it’s been used before in the same feed. If it’s the main artwork episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if they’re using it for a bunch of other episodes. So I had to de-dupe all those URLs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ignore any URL that appeared more than once. But then in a later test I learned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that breaks dithering because dithering uses different URLs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it uses each image for like a month so every episode so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll have like you know eight episodes of dithering in a row that have the same image URL but then it’ll change.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need content addressable storage. What? You need to be storing them based on their content not based
⏹️ ▶️ John on their name or anything so then you can say when you download one you can say oh I can discard this because I’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then you’re still downloading it a million times.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s true but you’re not keeping it a million times. It wouldn’t take up 500 megs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but then I’m basically building like a file system at that point. Then I’m like, all right, well, this thing references
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this block, or then you can delete this
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, no. The content of S3 has things that will kind of do this for
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, yeah, go on. You’ll get there eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so my deduplication thing had to be revised a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It still didn’t get there, but whatever. All right, then I’m like, okay, now, now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes the other problem. So I try it out and it’s like, the images are way too big,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they’re still not available without downloading the full-size images from the publishers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So as you are scrolling a list of episodes that you don’t have downloaded yet, those are having to download these huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco images, popping them in, and if you make the iPhone download an image from a publisher,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to be very, very careful not to do anything with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that image that might load it into memory and blow up the phone before you know for sure that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s safe. And I don’t necessarily mean safe in terms of security vulnerabilities. I mean safe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it won’t exceed the memory limits of the phone or cause a huge amount of processing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. So like there used to be back in the day, I remember Jason and Mike were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco joking about this, that like at some point, I think one of them accidentally published the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrade artwork as a JPEG 2000 file. Oh, I remember this. It was served
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was fine. And because Apple’s image processing frameworks can read it, Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was dutifully reading it. Maybe it was just a chapter or whatever it was. It was reading it, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was incredibly slow to read. And while that, I think, yeah, it was while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that chapter was playing, the interface would lag like crazy because it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to parse this giant JPEG as an image. And so you have to be very careful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like, you know, kind of untrusted input. And so I have all these things in place that like use certain image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IO functions on the client side to like first read the dimensions of the image. And if it’s above a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dimension, don’t even try to decode it. And then also check the format of the image. And if it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, JPEG ping, you know, if it’s not one of like the simple, well-known ones, don’t even bother, don’t try to read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So like there’s all these different checks I have to do. This is just to illustrate kind of the complexity of having the client
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process images. So then I get to the problem of like, not being able to see them in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scrolling lists without downloading all of these giant images from publishers and I’m like, oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to thumbnail them server side and put them behind a CDN. That’s like, that’s the real answer here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really just had like, and that’s what I do for main podcast artwork also. The client is not downloading
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast artwork from the publisher. It’s downloading it from my CDN. And my CDN is doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like my servers are doing the resizing and sticking them on the S3 compatible storage thing. and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being served through CloudFlare, so it’s free. And that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole process. But then I’m like, okay, now I gotta be careful because now I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start thumbnailing millions of images
⏹️ ▶️ John On the thumbnailing front, I just ran across this because I was looking at some code for an app that you
⏹️ ▶️ John will never guess because it has nothing to do with thumbnails. But it was like someone posting fast core graphics
⏹️ ▶️ John thumbnailing code that I think its pitch was it never has to have a full big image in memory, like essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John you can, if you’ve got the full size image somewhere accessible, like on the file system, that you could make a thumbnail
⏹️ ▶️ John without ever reading and putting into, without ever expanding sort of like, uncompressing
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire JPEG 2000, that somehow it would make you a thumbnail while iteratively reading the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing in chunks or something. And that, I mean, I know you’re probably doing it server-side using whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, server-side library you have, but I’m wondering if you ran across that in your travels in terms of, can I make
⏹️ ▶️ John thumbnails without loading the whole image.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve seen a bunch of those articles. Like, cause you know, every few years, either some new API will come out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or somebody will find some new, you know, method or they’ll run like some little benchmark and make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a blog post about it saying this method, you know, changes images this much faster or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I am, it’s all happening server-side now. It’s all using like ImageMagick, you know, server-side. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s- Is it in PHP?
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not- But ImageMagick is doing the actual-
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, yeah, exactly. the K. Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I’m like, all right, now I got to build this stuff. So I then I go and build that and it you know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco takes weeks to start like filling the back catalog, doing all the thumbnailing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then I’m about to launch the feature and one morning I start seeing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all my S3 put commands are returning 403s. What is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on? Now the the object service I was using to store it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was way cheaper than S3 and it was local to my servers was Linode Object Storage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Their S3 compatible block storage, almost every web hosting thing has their own S3 compatible block storage kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing. And so I was putting it there because it was very inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I put Cloudflare in front of it to serve it really fast so that part didn’t really matter. Well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it turns out I created my little object storage bucket on their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like legacy version of it and now they have buckets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have high limits but the one I hit had a limit of like 50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco million objects or something like that. A 5 with a lot of zeros at the end. I think it was 50 million.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just an artificial limit, that many objects and once you hit it they don’t email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you or warn you in advance or anything, you can start getting four or three hours whenever you try to write any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new images to it. So that was fun to figure out. I opened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a support ticket, I’m like, hey, can I get a higher limit? And they’re like, nope, you gotta move to a whole different data center to do that. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God. So this is now a bucket that has 50 million things in it, and I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to, and I was literally about to release that bill to the App Store. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh God, now I have to delay this again because I hit Liner Object Storage’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old limit for the number of items in a bucket, which I didn’t even know was a thing. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ugh! So, then I took another week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to slowly migrate all of those 50 million things to Cloudflare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco R2, which is Cloudflare’s S3 clone for their block storage, change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the code and overcast to point to that, and to make sure that all the stuff works to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read and write to that properly. You all that all the image URLs change
⏹️ ▶️ John did you look up what the limits are the for the new object storage?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, because I know Cloudflare wouldn’t have stupid limits like that. I would look them up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would still look them up even though I agree with
⏹️ ▶️ John Just write them down somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then finally, I was able to launch the feature last week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The number one customer request now. Can I have a setting to turn that off?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cool. Thanks everybody. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Cause sometimes episode artwork is gross. I mean, I, I have a problem with main
⏹️ ▶️ John show artwork. Some podcasts I listened to have changed their, like their main, you know, the, the artwork,
⏹️ ▶️ John the main artwork for the entire show to be hideous. And I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I could just like, like custom artwork, kind of like custom icons in the finder. I don’t like the, the icon. This app
⏹️ ▶️ John changed and I changed it. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. I’m surprised you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have some like Perl script that’s just putting a facade in front of the official RSS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but inserting your own preferred
⏹️ ▶️ John I could do that if I really cared that much. But I mean, there’s there’s so there’s enough problems dealing with podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John RSS feeds that I don’t want to add another layer there. So I can
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco just blame Marco for everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that works for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Everyone else does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right? Well, so it’s shipped and other than people saying I hate this because different,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone is happy, by and large.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, for the most part. And there’s also, by the way, there’s the massive UI question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of where and when do these images get displayed during playback or not during playback. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a number of schools of thought here. So where I’m displaying them now is if you are viewing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an individual podcast’s screen and you’re seeing its list of episodes, they will show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And it will show during playback in the now playing screen and anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that now playing image would show. things like CarPlay, the lock screen, Control Center.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you have a playlist or a widget, a context where you’re seeing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episodes from different podcasts possibly being blended together, they are not showing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. I’m showing the regular podcast artwork there, like the main show artwork there. Because my rationale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is like, in a context where you need to distinguish podcasts from each other,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main artwork is how you visually identify that podcast. But again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I think is not necessarily what everyone thinks, and so that many people are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking that’s not what they want. So it’s a very tricky problem to solve.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I even, I played with briefly, I played with like, having in a mixed podcast contest like a playlist,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having the regular podcast artwork show with the individual episode artwork in some form.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like maybe, I tried having the regular podcast album art as a little tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inset thing, like on the lower right corner of the main, but it just looked cluttered and confusing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you’re obstructing the artwork. It was, there were so many problems with everything else I tried.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s why I went with this, but even that, like it’s a really tough feature to get right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it sounds so simple. Episode images, yeah. And then every single one of these details
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was harder and more cumbersome and time consuming than I thought it would be, which I guess is software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development, But this was, this I thought was an especially long saga for something that seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny you say that. I don’t want to go too deep into this for a bunch of different reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at least not now anyway. But one of my most frequent requests was the discover screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on call sheet, the main screen you land on those things like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey popular movies, popular TV shows, new movies, new TV shows. A lot of times the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey entries there that that TMDB provides are kind of inexplicable. And a lot of people have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been asking, can I turn some of these off? Can I rearrange them? Can I do both, et cetera? And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just finished rolling out in the last 24 or 48 hours is the ability to turn on or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off each of those sections, which a lot of people have been asking for for a long time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I am mostly done with implementing the ability to rearrange
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those sections, which is not currently possible. And it’s funny because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both of these things I knew people wanted for months and months and months and months. And I kept kicking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the can, kicking the can, kicking the can, kicking the can. Cause I felt like it was going to be really, really difficult to implement. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then when I finally told myself, stop being a baby and do it, it actually wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that bad. It was not without peril for sure, but it was one of those things, unlike what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re describing, where it’s so far been mostly straightforward. And I’m kind of mad at myself for kicking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the can, but there are definitely been times that I kick the can for a long time, go to finally implement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it and go, oh, oh, this was a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey multiple lists of pins is a great example of that. Like I got there, but it was way messier than I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought it would be. And I already thought it was going to be messy as hell. So, I’ve been on both sides of this. Sometimes you just got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to buckle down and give it a shot and see what happens. And I’m sorry for your sake that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one was not an easy one, but I’m glad you got it across the line and it’s got to be a big weight off your shoulders.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it really is. And now it’s a big weight onto Cloudflare shoulders, but hey, that’s That’s not