101: Big Plastic Finger
23 Jan 2015Who wants a stylus? You have to get ‘em, and put ‘em away, and you lose ‘em… yuck. Nobody wants a stylus.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- 12" MacBook Air
- Efficient use of PCI Express lanes may be the reason for only one USB 3.1 port.
- RIP Thunderbolt?
- How do you power it?
- Reliability Probability
- 12" MacBook Air
- iPad Pro with an optional stylus?
- CES
- Audio Hijack 3
- Post-show:
- How much is Marco saving by using Go?
- WatchKit's limitations and what to expect from the first year of Apple Watch apps
Sponsored by:
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ John I have too many freaking t-shirts. Like I made the mistake of, of using my, the system I have
⏹️ ▶️ John for storing t-shirts is like my nerd t-shirts go on hangers instead of being folded up. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I figured that’s fine when I had like two nerd t-shirts and I have a thousand nerd t-shirts and half my closet
⏹️ ▶️ John is nerd t-shirts on hangers. I just really need more closet spaces.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We should probably actually start the show. So we have some followup from all the way across the planet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Australia. John, would you like to tell us about what Wade from Australia said? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the best theory I’ve heard so far, although it’s still kind of vague and shaky because
⏹️ ▶️ John based on fake products and rumors of why a 12-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John Air might only have one USB port on it instead of two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, geez, I cannot wait for this thing to come out so we can stop talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it. Yeah, no, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the worst part of the rumor. It’s like, yeah, retina’s green, really thin, blah, blah, blah, blah. But like the one they throw
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, one port? Why would you do that on purpose? And then you’re like, you know, I just I need to
⏹️ ▶️ John have a reason because. It just doesn’t make any sense otherwise. So this is about
⏹️ ▶️ John the PCI Express lanes. How many PCI Express lanes are supported by the core and chipset
⏹️ ▶️ John that we assume this fake product will use? And according to Wade from Australia,
⏹️ ▶️ John it supports 12 lanes of PCI Express, four gigabits per lane. So that
⏹️ ▶️ John means you need more than two lanes per USB three point one port if you want the full speed, which I would assume
⏹️ ▶️ John they do. So if you start adding up the ports, you end up with one lane for the PCI
⏹️ ▶️ John Express SSD and one for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and stuff like that. You can get
⏹️ ▶️ John the chipset with different combinations of lanes. Wade’s speculation is that if you can
⏹️ ▶️ John fit everything in four lanes, then you can get a
⏹️ ▶️ John chipset that just has those four lanes and you don’t need to spend power pulling the other lanes for devices. In other words, you could
⏹️ ▶️ John shut down some of the lanes. So you’re going to need more than four single
⏹️ ▶️ John lanes just for USB 3.1. You need three lanes for that and two more for
⏹️ ▶️ John the radios and the SSD. So you’re already at five. If you want to add another port, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John bump it up at least from five to eight. And I guess all this depends on do you really get a big power savings from
⏹️ ▶️ John keeping it at or under four at or under five? Like is there a point at which you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to spend like the power budget takes a leap? You know, does it not scale linearly? So
⏹️ ▶️ John PCI Express lanes are sort of the currency of the
⏹️ ▶️ John internals of modern Macs in terms of how many do you have and then what can you spend them on and stuff like that because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know once you’re out of them you’re out of them. And the other thing is that USB 3.1
⏹️ ▶️ John is not built into the chipsets. That’s why you need to use PCI Express lanes. It’s not integrated into
⏹️ ▶️ John the chipsets. So I buy more of these theories because
⏹️ ▶️ John it plays into hardware constraints that Apple doesn’t have control over and also power
⏹️ ▶️ John saving, but you know, it’s a speculated machine from a mock up and we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know exactly what kind of trade offs they have. And you never know what kind of crazy stuff that Apple has inside their laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again with the history of the repackaged chip in the original MacBook Air. Who’s to say the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are offered by Intel right now are the things that constrain Apple specifically. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we’ve ever actually seen, correct me if I’m wrong, but just off the top of my head here, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think we’ve ever actually seen Intel give Apple access to a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chip set, or even a chip itself, that wasn’t available on the market, with the one exception of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the original MacBook Air, but that was only a, that was like a physical repackaging, like to make the pins smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like the chip, the die was still the same as what everyone else was getting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I assume Apple would be willing to put another chip on the board that’s not part of Intel’s chipset. Like, oh, the
⏹️ ▶️ John chipset has this, and then we’d buy from whatever other weird manufacturer that we have some relationship with for iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware or something. This other chip that gives it, I mean, they have to add a chip anyway for the USB 3
⏹️ ▶️ John controller. And so who is making that controller chip for them? They could probably get that company
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a special chip just for them. And I don’t know. I’m not willing
⏹️ ▶️ John to rule out almost anything, because Apple has such incredible volumes and such leverage with
⏹️ ▶️ John chip makers that yeah, they more or less can’t make Intel do special things for them. But at this point, like if you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at the Iris pro graphics and everything, who has been leaning on Intel so hard for the many, many years
⏹️ ▶️ John to improve their GPUs? Uh, I, I would attribute a lot of Intel’s recent GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John focus on the things that Apple said that it needs from them and has influenced their multi-year
⏹️ ▶️ John roadmap. They don’t get it exclusively. Everybody gets it, but that kind of focus and the fact that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, these chips show up in Apple’s machines. Uh, I would assume there’s a lot of influence there
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of what Intel decides to make.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we also had some feedback from Tom Holliday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He had said that the rumored 12-inch lack of Thunderbolt sorrows me. The MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus 27-inch Thunderbolt display configuration allows Sessile components? I’ve never heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John before. Oh, look it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought it was like a typo for several. I don’t know. Nope, it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a word. Sessile. SAT word.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of an organism, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fixed in one place, or immobile.
⏹️ ▶️ John Ah, gotcha. There’s a word, I learned that word as a description of my friend’s cat when I was in
⏹️ ▶️ John high school. That was the SAT word association. Oh, wow. Dan’s cat
⏹️ ▶️ John is sessile, and it’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so the MacBook Air plus 27-inch Thunderbolt display configuration allows sessile components
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like external hard drives, scanners, and printers, and a 27-inch display to be set up for the desktop while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the MacBook retains portability.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I put this in the notes because we talked about this in the past shows,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that all these things that you get out of Thunderbolt in terms of having multiple devices going
⏹️ ▶️ John through one particular chain, you could approximate them. You
⏹️ ▶️ John get the display, you get the USB, you could have a USB type hub thing. You can connect, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could connect hard drives through USB and it wouldn’t be maybe as nice as fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John as thunderbolt is but the question that i had this brought to mind is does
⏹️ ▶️ John this mean you know if apple comes out with this thing and you know thunderbolt is off most of their machines and everything is usb3
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming they ever revise their stupid monitors does the next equivalent of the thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John display try to replace the thunderbolt display with
⏹️ ▶️ John one that connects just through usb or is that not something they’re interested in anymore because i
⏹️ ▶️ John use the same arrangement. Like you have a portable machine, you plug one cable into it, and then you have all the other ports
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t fit on the laptop. And it’s a really nice arrangement. That will go away with this unless
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple comes out with a new display that’s like their USB hub display where, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John external monitor, it’s one cable, you plug it in, and you get a USB hub where you can hook up all your hard drives and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you also get the display all through a single cable. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I would certainly hope that they would because I have lusted after the Thunderbolt display since it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a thing. And it’s been like two or three years now, right? But anyway, I’ve wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one so badly, but I’m way too cheap to buy one. And I would hope that they would still do this kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup. But I am extremely skeptical that they would do this kind of a setup because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple just I mean, when is Apple ever really believed in a docking station, there was that one where like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the whole entire folded up laptop slid into it. Stephen Hackett is furious right now. I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the name of it, but… The DuoDock. Thank you. Um, but I mean, other than that, like docking stations, not really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing, which is actually kind of frustrating to me because I work in an office full of Dells where they all have these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey docking stations, which are aesthetically hideous, but functionally awesome. And I kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wish that my Mac would do something similar, but yeah, I, I don’t know, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see them really putting too much effort into that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, the answer to that is those like Belkin and Thunderbolt dock things, but nobody really buys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those as far as I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they’re so expensive. Well, I mean, yeah. I mean now I think they’re like 200 bucks down from 300, but still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s still a lot But still like I don’t see I think if this is the direction Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going with all of their laptops They might be concerned with things like this, but for this one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model I don’t think we need to read too much into again and again this is assuming it’s all correct with these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rumors, but I don’t think we have to read too much into it because You guys are all talking about from the perspective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of people who use laptops laptops much of the time or most of the time as desktops with a bunch of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugged into them and have these heavy external needs. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a good idea for most of Apple’s laptops to cater to that because that is probably how most laptops that are sold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are actually used, especially with power users where you’re plugging a bunch of stuff in and might have an external monitor and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think there is nothing wrong with Apple having a a model in the lineup that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not cater to being plugged into stuff all the time. That won’t be good at that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean the original MacBook Air was awful about that. The newer ones only got better because of Thunderbolt.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there is nothing saying that Apple needs to solve the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem of lots of good external bandwidth or external ports or anything like that with this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model of MacBook. I think they could be just fine with this one. Mostly, mostly made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be portable, to not be used while plugged into a bunch of stuff most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. You know, I think you, you might be onto something there because now that I’m thinking about my own example of work in docking stations,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think a lot of the reason that we have the docking stations everywhere and dual monitors everywhere is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it’s nice to have it. But for non developers, you know, my.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Company that I worked for is probably half, um, business consultants and half technical consultants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like myself. Um, for the, for the business folks, I think they like having a second monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I would guess that most of them would tell you, well, you know, if it went away, whatever. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so if I think about it, typically they’re not plugging in an external hard drive. Typically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re not plugging in ethernet. Typically they, they’re not plugging in an external monitor unless it just happens to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be sitting there. So generally speaking, a lot of these folks, all they plug in is power to your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, Marco, and that’s it. And so would it really matter if this hyper portable computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only can take power in one other thing? Maybe not.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, the this MacBook Air, two things about it, like potentially, like, can’t they just have
⏹️ ▶️ John one model in the line? One, I think the rumor, maybe not this specific room we’re talking about the nine to five Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John one, but for the past few years, it was like, oh, the 11 and 13 are going away. It will just be replaced by a single 12.
⏹️ ▶️ John If that ends up being the case, it’s fine for them to have one model that would be like this. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re replacing two models with it, it seems weird that, you know, for the people who wanted something
⏹️ ▶️ John ultra portable and you don’t care about the ports, the 11 inch makes sense. And for the people who want a bigger, sort of more full size
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop in the 13 inch, but if you replace them both with the 12, it’s kind of weird for it to say
⏹️ ▶️ John that, oh, you know, you can’t use this one like you. So that was like to revert to the original MacBook Air. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there is an advantage to not using Thunderbolt, and it mostly has to do with the annoying nature
⏹️ ▶️ John of Thunderbolt. So as we have a Thunderbolt display here and a MacBook Air
⏹️ ▶️ John and It’s got the little little squid type cable coming out the end of it where it’s got the
⏹️ ▶️ John magsafe power thing to power your laptop from the monitor, and it also has the Thunderbolt
⏹️ ▶️ John cable and Part of it is that they made the little squid tentacles too short
⏹️ ▶️ John So that because they’re on opposite sides of the MacBook Air you have to put the Thunderbolt on the left side Facing you and
⏹️ ▶️ John the power on the or whatever is the opposite the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey power on the left side of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Thunderbolt on the right And the Thunderbolt connector because it has a chip in the connector itself
⏹️ ▶️ John It sticks out like an inch from the computer with this big, you know inflexible you know
⏹️ ▶️ John the hard plastic part of the connector and It’s just not it’s not great Like the cables have
⏹️ ▶️ John are sharp angles and it makes the thing wider and it’s it’s not nice-looking With
⏹️ ▶️ John the USB thing even though it can’t do all the things that Thunderbolt can do One, the cable
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t have a giant inch-long hard plastic connector sticking out of it. It can be a much, you know, smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John more flexible thing. And two, if they combine the power with it, you also won’t need to have
⏹️ ▶️ John the split squid thing where you have the MagSafe on one side and, you know, you will literally be able to plug
⏹️ ▶️ John in just one cable instead of right now, oh, it’s one cable, but it splits in two at the end. And that splitting is kind of annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every time you take it apart, you got to take it, you know, pull the things out from each other and then it slides
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the thing. If you just have one little cable that was a USB cable, it would be easier to sort of plug
⏹️ ▶️ John and unplug. And I’m generally anti-dock because of the whole docking procedure being awkward. I’d much
⏹️ ▶️ John rather just put it down on the desk and plug in one small cable.
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⏹️ ▶️ John One more thing I’ll add to the stall bottom of the power. We briefly mentioned it before, but it’s worth
⏹️ ▶️ John mentioning again. The idea, we talked about, oh, get rid of MagSafe. Can you power through
⏹️ ▶️ John USB? Yes, you can. that you could either use MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ John or USB. People also are interested in the idea of powering it the way the watch is powered,
⏹️ ▶️ John with a thing that doesn’t plug into it, but a thing that sort of attaches to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Please. It’s such a bad idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t think that makes any sense because USB will work, we know that. It’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. I’m not sure what the advantage would be to having a big, warty,
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of metal thing that you place on top
⏹️ ▶️ John of it. like space is already at a premium and I’m not sure where you would put that
⏹️ ▶️ John and then who wants to have a bunch of connectors with a big circle metal thing like I’m not even sure how that’ll work with the
⏹️ ▶️ John watch another thing is having up some kind of pad or something to use inductive
⏹️ ▶️ John charging where you put it on the pad and it charges that is a little bit better appeal because then you’re not plugging stuff in you’re just chucking
⏹️ ▶️ John it down and you know you put stuff on the pad I’m not sure how fast those chargers are but like it
⏹️ ▶️ John could be done but the problem pads have is I think you still need something you plug
⏹️ ▶️ John in because yeah you’ve got a pad in the place where you put it in your home but like when you travel do you want to travel with a big pad or a little adapter
⏹️ ▶️ John having it something to plug the smallest possible thing that you can plug in would be nice someone in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ John were asking why would the pad have to be big well if it’s small then again then you’re worrying about like alignment issues
⏹️ ▶️ John or something like the whole idea is you just want to put the thing down somewhere and not align it and not stick a little warty
⏹️ ▶️ John thing on it Plugging a little tiny thing into a little tiny port is actually very straightforward and fast
⏹️ ▶️ John Compared to at least in the past the type of things that they’ve had where you put your phone down on a certain pad or whatever That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John you want it to be kind of like a big thing where it doesn’t matter where you put it Just put it anywhere. It’ll charge. It’ll be fine
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s possible, but Apple I really hasn’t gone there I think it mostly has to do with Just the space that type
⏹️ ▶️ John of solution would take up and the fact that plugging in seems to work and the final one which is I think is the most fun one
⏹️ ▶️ John It was brought to my attention by someone whose name is now lost to the mists of time Someone sent me a link
⏹️ ▶️ John to a YouTube video called why tricity for wirelessly sending power We’ll put links
⏹️ ▶️ John to it in the show notes The website is why tricity comm you can take a look at it and it made me
⏹️ ▶️ John recall our past Conversations about the Artemis p-cell stuff for sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John doing targeted wireless to avoid interference and everything where you pre
⏹️ ▶️ John calculate the you know of these sort of interference map of all the different sources of wireless and you focus
⏹️ ▶️ John the signal destined for your laptop right on your laptop. And one of the vague
⏹️ ▶️ John rumor, he kind of hinted things was like, Oh, and we might be able to use this for something more than just sending data. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that that was a hint at like, we could do wireless power because once we have the ability to
⏹️ ▶️ John focus a particular signal on a particular location, we can power things that way as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, both of those seem crazy to me, but crazy in a fun way. I guess you could
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, accidentally slowly bake the inside of your hand if it’s aiming the wireless power
⏹️ ▶️ John at the wrong spot and it’s sort of microwaving your hand. That would be bad. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, like all of these, all these things that are possible, you know, because every time powering stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John comes up, people like this is not new technology, inductive stuff is not new. Wireless power is not new. This is the
⏹️ ▶️ John things that work. You know, someone will bring up Nikola Tesla and say that we had this hundreds of years ago. or just, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, whatever. The physics and the technology behind it all seems to be there, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John products, like the products that people, it hasn’t caught on to the degree that other technology
⏹️ ▶️ John has, where usually, you know, when, if something is going to gain traction, like really high-res
⏹️ ▶️ John screens, like, well, do people really want that? Yeah, they more or less do. Even though they can’t really tell, it just catches on,
⏹️ ▶️ John it goes through everything, and pretty soon, the giant, chunky pixels will be gone from handheld devices, just because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John better, it’s unequivocally better, everybody likes it better, you can do more things with it, look sharper even if most people can’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s good. Inductive charging, wireless power, all those things have not
⏹️ ▶️ John made that breakthrough. Is it because they just haven’t been done right or is it because the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re trying to replace is not as annoying as people think it is and people
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t mind just plugging something in and it’s more straightforward or I don’t know but
⏹️ ▶️ John I would love to see one of these things I’ve never used any of these for
⏹️ ▶️ John any appreciable period of time, but I’d love to see one of them actually end up being like the new thing because all of them have
⏹️ ▶️ John that sci-fi kind of feel where it’s like plugging things in. It’s like, you know, back to the future which we should celebrate
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the future part two which is celebrate because we are now in the year of back to the future part two where he sees the
⏹️ ▶️ John what was it the the name of the the video game in the future uh
⏹️ ▶️ John diner. What the hell was that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t seen back to the future too in years.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh anyway, uh Marty Marty McFly goes over to it and he picks up the little plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John like a gun thing at the screen like use your hands. It’s like a baby’s toy, but you plug
⏹️ ▶️ John it in how barbaric. We’re not there yet, but it would be cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I love that Marco and I have beaten you down to the point that you have to go on a preamble to make your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pop culture reference make sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just couldn’t remember the name of the thing was that I can’t no one in the chat room has it yet. Face was here. She would know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like a Western shoot him up game. gunman someone in the chat room thinks I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tell if that’s right anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think everyone who’s searching for all these crazy complex systems of charging this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco theoretical room read laptop I think you know John what you said a minute ago like almost all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these even if they worked would probably be more annoying or have other big downsides in practice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact is if it still has any ports at all, then it’s worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just charging it with a cable because that’s going to be better no matter what kind of cable that is, that’s going to be better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than any other kind of weird induction or wireless or you know mat induction or clip-on induction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of schemes like it’s just none of those things if you actually think about what it would be like to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use them in practice in real life I just don’t think any of those things would be overall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less annoying and better than just a decent cable and they already have decent cables. MagSafe is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. Like, there’s nothing wrong with MagSafe. And if they end up using the USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power thing to do that, that’s probably going to be perfectly fine, too. It’s probably not a big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal. The only reason the watch has to do it, really, is because the watch is water sealed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the watch has no openings. So they had to do some kind of other system besides a cable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just plugs in. And it clips onto this giant… Is the backplate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sapphire or is it ceramic or something? It’s something that’s not metal because if you if you would clip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with MagSafe this giant metal disc onto a metal laptop it would scratch the hell out of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just like the iPad 3 smart cover or the iPad 2 smart cover the metal one. You know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so all these things are like they’re searching for solutions to what really isn’t that big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a problem which is a laptop that has any ports at all can still have a power plug and that’ll be fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fair enough. You don’t think there’s anything wrong with MagSafe?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will admit I liked MagSafe 1 better than MagSafe 2. MagSafe 2 comes out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally more easily in the vertical direction when pressed, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not that bad. Other than that, that’s my only problem with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m a little bit… I think the weakness of MagSafe, both versions
⏹️ ▶️ John is the tiny little contacts. I’ve seen a lot of pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John of and stories about mag safe things that somehow either got it misaligned or something
⏹️ ▶️ John wedged in there or something caused a short inside that little tiny area. Cause it is, everything is so fine. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just need one little iron filing from a silly kid’s toy to float in over there and you plug it in and it
⏹️ ▶️ John fries the thing. And it would be nice if it wasn’t that, if it was more resistant
⏹️ ▶️ John to stuff. I’m not sure what you would replace it with though because I think the tiny USB connectors probably have the same problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe But yeah, I agree that MagSafe 2 is worse than 1, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure with the with the shrinking sizes I’m not sure how What
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do to MagSafe to make it better while also making it smaller whereas something that plugs
⏹️ ▶️ John in You know Again, it comes out of the question we talked about before does if the USB
⏹️ ▶️ John three connector, the tiny little one. Does that come out just as easily as MagSafe when you trip over
⏹️ ▶️ John the cable or does it not? Like what size does it start becoming like this is just as good as MagSafe in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of trip resistance? And I don’t know until someone buys one of these things or buy some other USB three device
⏹️ ▶️ John and starts tripping over it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, can we move on to any other topic?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, we have corrections for you and John with regard to reliability
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my God. I don’t think they’re really corrections because both
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of us tried so hard to stay away
⏹️ ▶️ John from the math part. Like we didn’t want to talk about the math. We just hand waved it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John yet the hand waving, because we use mathematical words about like addition, additive and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey multiplicative,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, then that was enough to trigger the math people to come tell us how wrong we were. Like, I think we all knew we
⏹️ ▶️ John were going to be wrong. We didn’t know the math,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, there’s two posts about this. Actually, there was a good email about it, too, which unfortunately we can’t link
⏹️ ▶️ John the email, but it was too long and complicated to explain. But Dr. Drang has one explaining the actual math
⏹️ ▶️ John of the probability stuff. Kieran Healy has one explaining what he thinks we probably meant, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John think he’s closer. If I had to re-summarize this discussion, I would say there are two points, both
⏹️ ▶️ John not involving math. One is the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you have something with a certain reliability, and you add a second
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, even if the reliability is just as good as the first thing, if for your entire system to be successful
⏹️ ▶️ John they both have to work, you’ve decreased the reliability of your system, even though the thing you added is just as reliable as
⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing. So that was one counterintuitive thing that people might not think of. It’s like, oh, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I add the second thing and it’s just as reliable as the first thing, the total reliability is the same. No, it’s worse. So that’s one.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the second thing is the sort of, I don’t want to use this phrase because it’s probably wrong, but I’ll say it anyway, network
⏹️ ▶️ John effect Uh, of when you add more and more devices, you had three devices
⏹️ ▶️ John and when you had one before you don’t get three times the number of things you can do, because if they all interact with each other, the
⏹️ ▶️ John number of possible connections and interactions between them goes up much faster than linearly. And that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of multiplicative effect that I think Marco was first one to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco mention. Yeah. The handshake
⏹️ ▶️ John problem, right? Right. Yeah. That, that, that by adding, you may add one device, then another one,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t just get three times the number of things that you can do. You get much, much more than that if they all interact with
⏹️ ▶️ John each other. And so the first point combined with the second means that the sort of intuitive
⏹️ ▶️ John Sense that when I have a computer, there’s one thing and I have a computer and a phone That’s two things and
⏹️ ▶️ John it should be roughly like, you know It should First people would think
⏹️ ▶️ John if the phone is just as reliable as the computer My total system reliability has not gone down But it
⏹️ ▶️ John totally has because if they both don’t have four features that cross between them or for syncing issues or whatever it’s much
⏹️ ▶️ John worse than just having a phone or just having a computer. And the second thing is, as you get even more devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John the number of connections between them, possible interaction, it goes way up, goes up faster than linearly,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if they all interact with each other, especially if some features on one aren’t even unlocked until you get the second one. Like continuity
⏹️ ▶️ John is not even in your world unless you have two devices. So there’s a whole new feature set that wasn’t even there before that blooms
⏹️ ▶️ John on both of them. And then you have the interaction between them and then three of them and in the cloud and everything like that. That’s more
⏹️ ▶️ John or less what we were getting at. If you want to get into the nitty gritty details of the math, Dr. Durang has a good coverage there. And the person
⏹️ ▶️ John who sent us an email said that even though things do get worse when you add something to a system, if
⏹️ ▶️ John most things are generally reliable, like if the reliability is 99% or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t get that bad. The effect is maybe we’re exaggerating the effect because it’s not like we use an example like 50%
⏹️ ▶️ John reliability. Yes, that would that you’d really feel if most things are very, very reliable. Adding
⏹️ ▶️ John another one to the system of the same reliability is not going to pull down your overall reliability that much. So that’s why I think Kieran’s
⏹️ ▶️ John post about the number of possible interactions between the different devices
⏹️ ▶️ John going up is the real thrust of what we were getting at.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You with us, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ John And we still don’t know the math. We stubbornly refuse to address or learn any of the math.
⏹️ ▶️ John This will not be on the test.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco People believe, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, but that’s what I said. I wasn’t strongly advocating for any specific thing. We were both saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John stay away from the math. We both don’t know it. Look it up if you care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Look it up if you care should be the motto of our feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no, it’s like neither one of us off the top of our head was going to
⏹️ ▶️ John say this is definitively how you calculate this or whatever. We both just hand waved it and ran away from
⏹️ ▶️ John it and we still got yelled at. So what can you do?
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s been a rumor that the iPad Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey might, which we don’t even know exists, might come with a stylus, which is something different.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what are we going to do? Oh, a stylus, right? We’re going to use a stylus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. Who wants a stylus? You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to get them and put them away and you lose them. Yuck. Nobody wants a stylus. So let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not use a stylus. Yeah. If you see a stylus, then what is it? They’ve already failed. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need a stylus, you’ve already failed. The point is, one of the more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reliable supply chain, I guess, analysts, I say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I I don’t know, I hate that term, but anyway, uh, has said that the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad, or the, or the 13 inch iPad will have an optional stylus. And I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that most of us would have paid too much attention to this, or certainly I wouldn’t have, except that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this particular individual has an unbelievably good track record, which makes me think, okay, maybe this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is real. So I can’t, I don’t own any style, I styluses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my iPad. I’ve never gotten any. I’ve never really had a particular need for them. I’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, what is it? The paper pencil.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep. I got one of those too. It sits in a drawer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seemed cool, I guess, but I I’m just not. One that needs a stylist. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think I can really comment intelligently on this. It sounds like Marco, you have a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and cause you’ve spoken fondly of the cosmonaut in the past, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And of all the ones I have, that’s my favorite one for general usage. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use paper a lot, like the app Paper by 53, if you use that app a lot for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artistic purposes and sketching purposes, their stylus offers some features in that app that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other ones won’t have, the paper pencil. For general use around the rest of the iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think the pencil is better than the Cosmine. I think it’s about the same, if not a little bit worse, because it has a little bit of a weird shape.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The thing is, the reason why it’s a big deal if Apple makes one of these, is because if Apple makes a stylus,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not going to be a $25 capacitive foam tip stick,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way all the other ones are. It’s going to be integrated with the OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with the hardware. So right now, the reason why the styli on the market
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally all suck, or that they’ve basically hit a wall, that they can’t get any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better than this, is because to get better than that, you need system-wide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recognition of Bluetooth and more precision on the tip.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so certainly, like the Paper by 53 stylus, I think that is, I’m pretty sure it is Bluetooth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s some kind of wire, yeah, it must be. So that is Bluetooth, but it only works in their app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s still not as good as it can be because the app has to try to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like reject the side of your palm touching the screen and not count that as a touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things like that. And the low-level OS frameworks for touch recognition have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more recognition and way more data to work with than what’s exposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to apps in the public APIs. And so if Apple did this at the system level, they can not only use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth or some other kind of short range RF thing, probably would be Bluetooth, but they could not only use Bluetooth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they could do it system-wide so it would work in every app with all the sensitivity and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco precision, and it would be able to tie in with the touch recognition and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do better touch rejection and things like that. None of which third party stylists can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really very well or everywhere right now. So that’s why it’s a big deal if Apple makes one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They might even, if this is gonna be a big deal, they might even switch to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the different kind of touch screen. I believe it’s a resistive touch screen, or at least be able to put in a layer like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, like what the Wacom Cintiqs use, which is what the Microsoft Surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro, at least the two and the three. I don’t know if the original one did, I think it did. But the Surface Pro uses this too, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s basically, it’s like a pen tablet integrated into the screen. And artists love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things. They are, you know, if you’re a sketch artist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or an illustration artist that would use a pen for your art form, these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very, very widely recognized, very, very widely appreciated. And the iPad really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t do a very good job at that because of the imprecisions and limitations of the styluses that are available now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think if they did this, and I think they probably should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this, I think there’s a market for it. It would make sense to limit it to only one model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to make it like a high-end thing, that would make sense, just like Microsoft has done, really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And just like Wacom has done. I don’t know, by the way, I know I’m pronouncing that wrong. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the, I usually even say Wacom because it’s more fun to me, just like the F in key. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so anyway, I think it’s a very good idea. Well, I don’t know if they’ll actually do it, but I think it’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s inevitable because I mean, for the same reason, I think the bigger iPad is inevitable and multitasking and multi
⏹️ ▶️ John windowing on the iPad is inevitable, like that that this platform has to expand to do
⏹️ ▶️ John more things because it’s because people like it better than the old platform. And you have to make it expand
⏹️ ▶️ John slowly and make it not lose much of the advantages and diversify the line. So a particular product does it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like it has to happen because I mean, the amazing number of artificial fingers
⏹️ ▶️ John for sale for iOS devices just goes to show that there is a market demand for this in the same way that people wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger phones, right? And that’s why, you know, you said like, but that’s why all the
⏹️ ▶️ John existing ones stink because all they are is artificial fingers. Like all you are is simulating
⏹️ ▶️ John a finger and the OS is made for fingers and simulated fingers or real fingers or whatever. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a bunch of fingers and they’re big squishy things. They’re imprecise or whatever. If Apple comes out with a stylus,
⏹️ ▶️ John not only is how to deal with Bluetooth. But I think they have to do something different with the screen, like you said. And if you look at
⏹️ ▶️ John the huge number of patents that come out of Apple, Apple patents a million things, doesn’t mean they’re gonna make anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think in the case of the stylus, even if we didn’t see any patents, I would think that a stylus is going to eventually come
⏹️ ▶️ John when we get to that point. And Apple has tons of patents related to styluses or styli or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish we knew what the plural of that was because this is gonna be awkward for the whole time we talk about this. We should put that in a follow up
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco week. Please,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you took Latin in high school, don’t write in.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care. Mouse is mice. Anyway, I also took a lot in high school. Why would they have all those patents? Usually their patents
⏹️ ▶️ John are about like, well, user interface stuff. Like maybe they tried to use their interface and it wasn’t great. So they didn’t ship it, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to patent everything. You patent anything you do. But the number of stylus related
⏹️ ▶️ John patents that have come out of Apple over the years shows that they’ve had people doing stuff related to styluses
⏹️ ▶️ John or style or whatever for so long that like, why are those still guys? Why are those guys still doing that? It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like they just try this experiment once, It’s like just year after year after year, people are in the lab with these
⏹️ ▶️ John little sticks doing stuff. And maybe they hate all those, maybe everything they patented is something they’re not going to make.
⏹️ ▶️ John But someone is being employed at Apple to do stuff that produces things that are patentable related
⏹️ ▶️ John to drawing with a stick on a screen. So it seems to me that
⏹️ ▶️ John that is definitely something that they’re working on, not just once, but over the years, and they’re eventually going to get
⏹️ ▶️ John something they like. Maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but I think it’s inevitable. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if they don’t, if they don’t hurry up, like the surface getting, you know, the cache with the artists, because finally it was a
⏹️ ▶️ John portable tablet type thing that had the hardware support for a decent stylus interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple doesn’t do it soon enough, eventually it’s going to be like, well, every artist knows that if you,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to do art on the road, you have to get a Microsoft surface because you’re not going to use a big plastic finger to scribble
⏹️ ▶️ John on an iPad. Right. say now is the correct time for them to do something. I hope they do something
⏹️ ▶️ John that is at least as good as what the Surface does, and I’m really hoping that at least one or two of those weird patents
⏹️ ▶️ John are something we haven’t seen before because patents take a long time to come out. Something we haven’t even seen that’s patent pending
⏹️ ▶️ John will provide an interface that’s even better. Now the kind of the scary
⏹️ ▶️ John ghost floating around this has nothing to do with drawing pretty pictures on your iPad and has everything to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with the other thing that you might do with a pen or pencil or writing implement on a flat surface, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John write letters. And that’s, you know, as in
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has big, scary egg freckles all over this topic.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the thing is, once you once you ship, once you make a stylus and you’re able to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, do fine art with it or whatever. Are you going to say, no, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John write notes that will translate into text? I mean, that’s one way to get out of it just to avoid it entirely. say it’s just for
⏹️ ▶️ John drawing. Now you can write words but it’ll just state like we won’t translate it into text but
⏹️ ▶️ John boy I think there’s no way for them to avoid having to resurrect and
⏹️ ▶️ John finally defeat the ghosts of the Newton by doing handwriting recognition that is not embarrassing and I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John technology is there to do it and I think they more or less have to support it system wide in a nice way
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think very few people will use it because who likes writing with a pen and a pencil? Everyone who likes writing will send a cml
⏹️ ▶️ John which is fine, but I really feel like…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, I don’t like it that much either, but that’s a pretty big group that does.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t, is that, here’s the thing. In
⏹️ ▶️ John what context are you going to use it? I can imagine using it for things like
⏹️ ▶️ John checking things off or scribbling a quick little note without bringing up the keyboard to tap things out,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I can’t imagine someone using it to do text messages or write a long email or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe that’s just me. Maybe I just don’t see that anymore. But if you’re going to write
⏹️ ▶️ John a long, unless it does cursive, because people are really fast with cursive, because those are the type of people who like to write handwriting, unless
⏹️ ▶️ John they tackle cursive, which
⏹️ ▶️ John Those people are jerks. Yeah. To just do a long handwritten letter in cursive
⏹️ ▶️ John and have it translate that into text for you. But having really good stylus support
⏹️ ▶️ John in this day and age, you can let them write it in cursive and just send it as a giant image. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John do that now. That wasn’t an option before. had to translate it to text. I think now this
⏹️ ▶️ John beautiful handwriting you know that people have or you know they want to convey their that you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to see someone’s handwriting why not just transfer it as you know a vector or a bitmap or something like that why do you have to turn
⏹️ ▶️ John it into text I guess you have to turn it into text to make it searchable and so on and so forth and I don’t know there’s lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of different ways where they can go with this but I think the the art angle is a slam dunk they’re gonna do it it’s gonna be good
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope if it doesn’t happen this year they better hurry up because everyone else is doing it
⏹️ ▶️ John and then the handwriting thing I have no idea what they’re gonna do and I see all sorts of crazy pitfalls there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the opportunity is big. I would be surprised if anybody at Apple with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ability to make such a decision would restrict or stay away from these areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of the Newton. I think they just don’t care anymore. That was ancient history and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the public, most of the public doesn’t even remember the Newton and doesn’t even care about
⏹️ ▶️ John Not stay away from it because of the Newton but because it’s still a hard problem. Like look at how like the surface
⏹️ ▶️ John does it now. Microsoft does it and they do it obviously better than the Newton, right? You got way more computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’ve been doing it for like a decade. Microsoft’s been doing it for a long time and they’ve and it’s and their version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty good. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John good, but it’s like here’s the thing with it’s not so people don’t need to remember where the Newton is. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s a hard enough problem, kind of like a lot of the stuff. And unfortunately, we’re not going to talk about this this week because I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think anyone’s had time to watch it. But you know, the Windows 10 announcement and the holographic stuff or in the past,
⏹️ ▶️ John connect or whatever things that are that was real things that are really hard problems
⏹️ ▶️ John that make a really awesome tech demo that make you feel like you’re living in the future but if they don’t deliver on
⏹️ ▶️ John it like if they if they don’t cross the threshold like kind of like how Siri didn’t cross the threshold in
⏹️ ▶️ John the beginning of like well a demo as well but if it doesn’t quite work for you enough of the time you just kind of give up on it and that came
⏹️ ▶️ John up again because Daniel Jaco was talking about how Siri has gotten much better and that went around the sort of Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John nerd sites this past week or so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh by the way about that so I sorry interrupt for a second so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I have not used Siri in a long time because it just never works for me like the reliability was so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad for so long I just stopped trying because I would say I would say a complete command it would sit there and spin for 20
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds and then say I’m sorry I can’t help you right now there’s been an error you know like so I stopped trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after seeing all these things about Siri I’m like alright maybe I’ll give it another shot first thing I try yesterday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri start the stopwatch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, Marco, I can’t help you with the stopwatch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It can do everything else in the clock app. It can’t start the stopwatch. Yep. Like really? Come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s this is easy stuff. Why? Why?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, but at least it worked. You know, it understood
⏹️ ▶️ John said and gave you a reasonable answer. But but it’s similar in that like Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of bad or any kind of voice recognition thing. You just let a kid use it and you’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ John it because like as soon as you start talking to it and it talks back to you, people are like, oh, well, I guess this is a complete human
⏹️ ▶️ John and if it doesn’t do exactly what I say, I consider it stupid, right? And handwriting
⏹️ ▶️ John recognition is similar. As soon as it changes anything you write into text, you’re like, oh, it understands handwriting
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you write something else and it doesn’t. You’re like, this thing is stupid because you’re only you’re only analog
⏹️ ▶️ John for something that understands spoken text and can read handwritten writing is other humans. And it’s like, well, if you can read this
⏹️ ▶️ John word on the shopping list, why couldn’t you read this one? It’s there’s no, you know, to a human being.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you can read one of those words, you can read both like there one is not incredibly sloppier than the other but to
⏹️ ▶️ John a computer which is not like a human and not even close, you know, it’s not even at the level of like a kindergarten
⏹️ ▶️ John student in terms of recognizing letters. It just has a bunch of heuristics as long as they get tripped up by things that make no sense
⏹️ ▶️ John to you because you have no idea how it’s recognizing things. You also have no idea how your own brain is recognizing things. And it just works in us,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Our brains just where that’s the real it just works, right? We can be taught to read
⏹️ ▶️ John and write. It just works, right? For the most part and
⏹️ ▶️ John people. I still can’t read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these cursive cards I get from old people.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You got dyslexia and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got people who are out of practice and you’ve got people with terrible handwriting but handwriting recognition is a promise
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you don’t pass a certain bar it’s like… that’s why I think the bitmap thing is a way
⏹️ ▶️ John out because maybe you try to do handwriting recognition. Even if you do it better than Microsoft I still think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s below the minimum that will be acceptable by the general public where people will say, oh it understands your handwriting.
⏹️ ▶️ John What they’ll say instead is sometimes it kind of understands your handwriting, which is not a ringing
⏹️ ▶️ John endorsement. But if you can use it to send bitmaps of your writing, then your only problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is the person at the other end can read your writing. And we’ve all had that where, you know, a spouse writes a shopping list for you
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can’t make out whatever the last word is and you’re not sure if it’s like carrots or cucumbers
⏹️ ▶️ John or something with a C and then a bunch of squiggles. So if humans can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do it sometimes, you know, I don’t know. I think that is a difficult thing and And really,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re mostly talking about tablets here. I can’t imagine someone doing it on the phone, but once you have it working on the tablet,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you put it in the 6 Plus? So a little place to put a stylus or something? Would you see,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I know people see this now, someone with the Galaxy Note or whatever, holding a big giant
⏹️ ▶️ John phone and stabbing at it with a little pencil thing. My own mother uses a little fake finger
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to stab at her iPod Touch. Some people just wanna poke something with a stick.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you seen that? Have you seen
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco people using a
⏹️ ▶️ John phone with a stylus? Obviously not an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone. Not a phone. I have my father-in-law uses his iPad very often with the Cosmonaut.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He just prefers to interact with it that way. It’s just tapping UI buttons and everything. I totally get that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the era of Apple sticking with a very small product line,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they’re really holding dearly to that. Just look at the iPad lineup. You mentioned earlier about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new 12-inch MacBook Air thing, possibly needing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace the 11 and 13 Air. Even that, not anytime soon, maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever, because they are fine having a bigger lineup. I think the Tim Cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco era, and this didn’t start with Tim, it started with Steve, but certainly I think the Tim Cook era has expanded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this of Apple is fine keeping old products around and having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more versions of new products now to address markets that they weren’t serving before that were possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re sticking to the, you know, we remember the old quadrant thing with like pro consumer laptop desktop.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was a simpler time, right? There was no watches, no phones, no tablets, whatever. But within their
⏹️ ▶️ John product setup, it’s not crazy. Like they have a laptop line that they have more or less simplified
⏹️ ▶️ John by trying to, you know, MacBook Pro and MacBook versus the air and you’re getting rid of the the non
⏹️ ▶️ John pro MacBooks and everything or whatever. They have tablets, they have phones, they have laptops in a couple varieties,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have desktop and a couple varieties. What they’re doing is within those sort of nameplates and brands diversifying,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, how many different iPads are there. But the simplification thing is like, it’s just an iPad, you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to know, like, do I want an iPad or another tablet product? They’re all iPads,
⏹️ ▶️ John like perception wise, and all it is is just like get buying different size of closing or you know, whatever. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s as if a car manufacturer had one kind of car and you could get that car in
⏹️ ▶️ John SUV, wagon, you know, tricycle, motorcycle, but they called it all the same,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, line of things. You know what I mean? Maybe it’s not quite that bit, but like- Actually, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that far from what BMW actually does.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s true, but like, so,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in the, in Apple’s world, the three and the five series would not be different cars, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you’d have like the electric one would be a different line. Like, I think the iPad is the best example because these
⏹️ ▶️ John are all iPads. And it’s like, well, they’re all rectangles of screen, but like huge diversity of
⏹️ ▶️ John different guts, different X outsides, different form factors. And the phone has slowly been diverse. They’re all iPhones. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John what variety of iPhones. And there’s a range there as well. The iPod touches off in the corner or whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John with the MacBook Air and the MacBook Pro, maybe there’s still a little division there, but they’re kind of unified
⏹️ ▶️ John in a MacBook. So I think Apple’s appetite for taking existing product lines and
⏹️ ▶️ John just making more varieties is demonstrated, But their
⏹️ ▶️ John their appetite for splitting, say, the MacBook line further
⏹️ ▶️ John splitting into MacBook MacBook Pro MacBook Air MacBook, whatever. I think they instead they’re going the
⏹️ ▶️ John other direction, you know, making everything getting rid of the plastic models, making it all aluminum, getting rid of the non pro
⏹️ ▶️ John MacBooks. And, you know, who knows how long the air if this new one is called like MacBook stealth and the errors
⏹️ ▶️ John go away or something? I don’t know. That kind of diversification is like having your cake and
⏹️ ▶️ John eating it, too, because you address more of the customer base while still making it seem like
⏹️ ▶️ John you only need to have, you know, two or three tables in an Apple store and you can put all your products on
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So CES has already ended by like a week or two. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s always hard to tell with CES, like if it’s a real thing, if anything matters. I wonder if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can, if we can just paste in the verges summary of CES from last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year and just paste it in this year, would anybody notice?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, anyone who isn’t John would have no idea that it was the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regurgitated. But John would notice and John has noticed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the first thing I have in here related to this is the Wirecutter did what they do, which is like they
⏹️ ▶️ John distill it down to the things they thought were actually interesting and important out of CES. And CES, it actually is an
⏹️ ▶️ John important show if you care about consumer electronics. But there is so much there
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s like, what is the what is the important thing this year? And so for me, I’m interested in televisions
⏹️ ▶️ John every year at CES. It’s like, like, what did the new crop of televisions look like? Because people
⏹️ ▶️ John tend to announce their upcoming things. They have new technologies. Is this the first year?
⏹️ ▶️ John The first year an LCD TV is available. The first year an HD TV is available. And those are the exciting years
⏹️ ▶️ John where there’s some kind of technological advance. And then there are all the in-between years where you’re like, OK, what is this current
⏹️ ▶️ John year’s crop of plasma TVs like? Are they better than last year’s problem? And so on and so forth. Those are more boring.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just picking television as one category. But for every category, there’s something like that. And there’s just tons and tons of noise.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the wire cutter thing gives a good summary out of the wire cutter summary of interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John gadgets and stuff from CES. I’m really, really interested in the TV part. So it’s the only part I’ve highlighted
⏹️ ▶️ John here, but we’ll put the link in the show notes and you can check it out. Because you can’t if you try to follow like CES coverage, you can’t it’s just there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John too much stuff. And a lot of the times the things that are covered by sort of live from CES stuff, or
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that demo well, but you’re never going to see them again. It’s not a real product. not a real thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the booth and the demo is impressive. And then just forget that it exists because you’ll never see anything about it again. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the technology stuff, which is like more of the boring written stories that does not have anything fun to look at. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John announcements of products. This is just, I mean, we talked about it last year on the
⏹️ ▶️ John television front. 4K television and the technologies related
⏹️ ▶️ John to that are slowly, steadily marching forward. 4K, we don’t probably care too much about because of the size
⏹️ ▶️ John of the televisions we have have in the distance we sit from them. It’s probably not a factor, but as we discussed last year,
⏹️ ▶️ John 4k comes with more than just higher resolution. It also comes for a larger color gamut, different frame rates,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, and all sorts of stuff like that that people will notice. And then the one I was really interested in last year was this crazy. This is not really
⏹️ ▶️ John a product tech demo type thing from Dolby, which was like high dynamic range to be able to have
⏹️ ▶️ John darker darks and brighter brights in your television. And that is something much more
⏹️ ▶️ John so than 4K that you would notice if you put a regular TV next to one with this
⏹️ ▶️ John high dynamic range thing, you would be able to tell the difference immediately in the same way that
⏹️ ▶️ John most people could with high definition television versus standard depth. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John exciting but boring announcement related to that is this UHD Alliance, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is a consortium of a bunch of people who make hardware and a bunch of people who make content to try to get together on
⏹️ ▶️ John these standards because you don’t want this to turn into a weird format war or whatever if any of these things if any
⏹️ ▶️ John of this sort of enhanced 4k with high dynamic range that’s ever going to become a thing it can’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John confined to one vendor it can’t be confined to one distributor and I think now it’s good to see
⏹️ ▶️ John that the companies at least understand this a little bit. At various times they’ve been good and bad about this like getting together on
⏹️ ▶️ John you know making a decision on blu-ray finally after having the HD DVD thing or you know I
⏹️ ▶️ John think CDs they kind of came together a little bit it’s always an argument over who owns the patents and who’s going to get the money and all that crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John But no, but nobody benefits if it’s like if it’s competing standards or if it’s just available,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if just Sony had like this high dynamic range thing, right, if there was exclusively licensed through them and just
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony movies were out like that, nobody cares. Like who would ever get that TV? You’re like, well, that’s great. But you only watch
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony movies. No one knows what a Sony movie is. It has to be an industry standard. So I’m glad to see them doing this
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m much more excited about the high dynamic range stuff and the color enhanced
⏹️ ▶️ John and frame rate enhancements of 4K TV than I am about the 4K resolution itself.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m hoping good things will come from the UHD Alliance and it won’t splinter apart into a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John petty squabbling and other crap. And then the final thing is like, speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that are sort of evergreen about CES, like you mentioned, we just reposted the Verge story. Every time I think
⏹️ ▶️ John about actually writing something about CES, which I actually do think about, I don’t actually write anything, but I think about it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then I think back to the post I wrote in 2013 on hypercritical.co,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is CES colon worst products through software. And I don’t want this
⏹️ ▶️ John to be an evergreen article. I want it to be, remember that moment in time when consumer
⏹️ ▶️ John electronics companies realized that they needed software in their products and they were super bad at it. And every time they
⏹️ ▶️ John added software, it made their products worse. And I’m hoping this will be a time
⏹️ ▶️ John that passes. be a decade or something but I want this article to be out of date
⏹️ ▶️ John and look antiquated and look old-fashioned but this year I think it still applies.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every consumer electronics product that is not made by a company with
⏹️ ▶️ John a computing platform, Google, Apple, Microsoft, maybe kind of even
⏹️ ▶️ John Amazon, those are pretty much the only companies. Companies that maintain, that have
⏹️ ▶️ John a software platform and that they maintain and advance it, they’re the
⏹️ ▶️ John only companies that can do software worth a damn. Every other company that tries to add software to their product, it
⏹️ ▶️ John just makes the product worse because the software is awful and it replaces something that wasn’t quite as awful
⏹️ ▶️ John and the new capabilities never make up for the difficulty of dealing with it. Like if your refrigerator comes with software, it’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be worse than your refrigerator without software, like guaranteed because, you know, refrigerator makers have
⏹️ ▶️ John no idea what they’re doing when it comes to software. far neither do TV makers. They’re terrible about updates,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re terrible at bug fixes, and the product itself doesn’t start off very good and doesn’t get any better. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not writing anything new about that. It’s still true. I wish it wasn’t. So that’s CES
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco worse products through software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m not in the TV world, but I totally agree with that statement in other areas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, things I’ve gotten off of Kickstarter that have like, oh, this is an oven thermometer that has an app on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone to see the results and it’s like… Ugh. And I threw it away and bought a real opentherometer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an actual display and this stupid thing. You know, like the microphone interface I got for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a week and then returned because it was broken anyway, but like, this thing that has this screen with just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one button on it and everything else is controlled by software. And then of course the software is terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I get this- I replace it with this box that is covered in knobs and buttons and it’s way better and it will last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way longer. I mean, just… I hate software so much and I’m a software developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I hate software. I mean it’s Use software intelligently use software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it really does benefit things But that is not everywhere and that is not always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessary and it is often better without it And the
⏹️ ▶️ John worst part is like even in the places where you could totally see the benefit like there are things that have had
⏹️ ▶️ John Sort of you know visual interfaces for a long time like for example thermostats or something like that’s a perfect
⏹️ ▶️ John place for software because having a bunch of little buttons under a panel that you open up on this little dinky screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, boy, if I could have real software to do this, that would be better. And the next approach is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of tied up with also don’t make it programmable or whatever. But so many opportunities exist for something
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re software really is appropriate. But awful software is worse than
⏹️ ▶️ John just give me a bunch of frickin buttons in a dial, right? And what you were talking about, like on the thermometer type thing is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is actually not an appropriate place for software at this point, just give me a mechanical device that works. And the cars
⏹️ ▶️ John are the best example because like there are ample opportunities for good software to improve the experience
⏹️ ▶️ John inside a car, but they take the software and put it where it’s not needed. And then the software that is there is
⏹️ ▶️ John usually pretty terrible. And you know, we all use cars. And so we’re all just kind of suffering as companies
⏹️ ▶️ John that do not know how to make software, I guess, hopefully slowly learn to make software
⏹️ ▶️ John better. I don’t know if they’re even learning. I mean, I mean, like you just talked about the last show, the BMW key fob
⏹️ ▶️ John with a screen on it. Like that is not an appropriate place for software.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco For something
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in your pocket that you wanna feel, to be able to feel the buttons or maybe you don’t wanna touch it at all. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and speaking of software, our friends at Rogue Amoeba released something new
⏹️ ▶️ John Audio Hijack 3. Indeed. It’s not pro though, so forget it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that just means it doesn’t have Thunderbolt ports on it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John People don’t get the joke. They used to be called Auto Hijack Pro and with the version 3, they removed Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John from the name because it was just like, you know, it’s like Netscape Navigator Gold,
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro Gold. We don’t need the suffixes and the modifiers.
⏹️ ▶️ John We can just say Audio Hijacked and it’s version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 3. Yep. And I have been fiddling with it. I have not used it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey record a podcast yet. Um, I didn’t have enough time today to get my, um, I don’t know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess workflow almost, um, a session, I think is what they, they, the term they use. I didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough time to get my session squared away before we recorded tonight, but I’m hoping to in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the next week, um, be able to set it up so that it records not only a copy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of just my mic, but also a copy of you guys as well. And this will be super helpful for analog.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s really, really slick the way they’ve done the kind of workflow-y
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interface where you’re dragging boxes around. And it’s, again, a very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gentle way of trying to do very powerful things, much like the workflow app that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve talked about quite a few times, both on my website and here on the show. It’s a very cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea, very well done. And the thought of writing that UI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scares the crap out of me because I’m a terrible UI developer as it is. And writing something that complex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with like that kind of a dynamic layout just scares the bejesus out of me,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s cool. I wouldn’t just describe it as gentle. And by the way, this is not a paid sponsorship. We’re saying this
⏹️ ▶️ John because we think this app is neat. And the reason I’m excited about this app is because it takes an idea that like
⏹️ ▶️ John concepts that have been related to audio for a long time. And it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John these capabilities, a lot of these capabilities more or less existed already in the previous versions of audio hijack,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you could have done yourselves with different audio things. The major innovation of this is kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John people are familiar with quartz composer is it lets you visually design the flow of
⏹️ ▶️ John audio. Like if you were to die, you know, if you were to try to explain to somebody, what I need is I need to have the audio from this
⏹️ ▶️ John source going into over here, and I need to record into a file over there, but then be mixed with this one over here and have a volume
⏹️ ▶️ John adjustment and go through this output device and you would draw it on an app and you’re boy, how the hell am I going to configure that in an app?
⏹️ ▶️ John You you just take that diagram and you make it in this thing. They have these little blocks you can pull out for for
⏹️ ▶️ John sources of audio. They have a little meter block, which I think is genius and shows the greatness of this approach is
⏹️ ▶️ John like what is the meter block do? Doesn’t do anything lets you know if you’re clipping and that and that source right and
⏹️ ▶️ John then you have adjusters for different channels and volume things and you have a recorder where you can put the track down you can put
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple tracks down into one recording split them all into separate ones. The interface
⏹️ ▶️ John is the entire thing of this application. The capabilities were there and that you could have used it with an old version of Audio Hijack
⏹️ ▶️ John or other applications. But take a look at the screenshots of this. If you do anything related to audio and maybe you don’t, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just a bunch of podcasters who care about this stuff. But if you do anything related to audio or recording audio,
⏹️ ▶️ John this one interface, this one window, like just drag a bunch of things and connect them with lines, lets
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody do things that previously almost nobody could do because you’d have to understand like some crazy arcane
⏹️ ▶️ John interface and a bunch of weird vocabulary. It’s like this is all visual vocabulary. Very simple, very straightforward.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was super impressed by this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s a very neat app and I’m hoping to get everything squared away so I can use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to record this next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John We should have held out because they probably would have sponsored and I could have done a good sponsor read for them but
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And you were, and Marco, you were on the beta for this, weren’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I was. Yeah, I like it a lot. It’s, what I like about it, I said in this in a blog post too, like, in audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a pretty, like dealing with audio and like, oh, I just need to record this and then run it through this mixer and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco combine it with this and then be able to mix this in and record over here and split this off and apply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an EQ and a compressor over here like Doing stuff like that can very quickly lead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you into hardware complexity and and just a hell of wires
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cheap or expensive little boxes all over the place and lots of like just boxes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all over your desk and complexity and not knowing where things are and and and costs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this app is able to replace so much complexity, so much hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even like, if you try to do a lot of these things in software, there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free open source things out there that you can do some of these things with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or that you can combine in certain ways to do some of these things, and they’re usually way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco harder to set up, and you gotta install these three different packages, and one of them is really made for Linux, and all this stuff, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you hit all these little bottlenecks and and frustrations and limitations and just challenges and setting it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all up. So to have it all in one app is pretty amazing. This this kind of makes me sad because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this is the kind of awesome utility that we will never see on iOS and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can never be in the Mac App Store. And those things make me very sad. A second point
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to bring up is like the the innovation of this app. Like this is exactly like
⏹️ ▶️ John the original GUI. It’s like previously I could not do this with a computer because it was too complicated. But
⏹️ ▶️ John now when you make all my files, little pictures, now I can actually arrange them. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know. I don’t know how to
⏹️ ▶️ John type commands to move files. I can’t keep, you know, like simple things like file management. Once you made the files, little pictures that
⏹️ ▶️ John people could drag around with the mouse, suddenly they were able to do it. And you know, for professionals who are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to have actual audio hardware with the XLR interfaces or all that stuff like this is not replacing
⏹️ ▶️ John a giant recording studio for them. But it’s saying like you have a Mac that is capable of doing a lot of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John in software that you can also do a better job of a more fancy job of with hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John but maybe you don’t want to buy thousands of dollars worth of audio hardware and that, like Marco said, that is a whole other world of complexity.
⏹️ ▶️ John What if you just want to do something like I have a Mac, everything here is happening on the back. I’ve got a Skype call.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got, you know, a Google Hangout. I’ve got some music playing. I’ve got like, why can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I? I know my Mac is capable of this. It hears all the audio. I can route it in a simple way using the
⏹️ ▶️ John input and output control panels. Why can’t I just do this one thing that I to do is not that much more complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would say this is like when I tweeted about us, I was like, if you don’t have a big budget for hardware, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you want to do something like what Marco does, but like playing some music and mixing it to a live stream and stuff like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, or you know, on the incomparable where we just want to play clips from on our clip show, play clips from past episodes,
⏹️ ▶️ John or drop in sound effects and like a game show type thing. You’re not asking for much. It’s pretty simple. But it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, I can add stuff in but it won’t record my sound effects. You just hear them over the Skype chat or The only place I can get my
⏹️ ▶️ John sound effects is out of the completely mixed Skype chat or I’ll play this clip and the other people in the show won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John hear it. But eventually it’ll be in the final recording. Silly things like that are limitations of the simplicity of the way we can
⏹️ ▶️ John mix audio here. And providing an application that does that, it’s just such an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ John shame. Like this is this is like the kind of innovative application that you’d expect from a great Mac developer, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can’t be on the Mac App Store. Can’t be on iOS because of the way it works, because, you know, hijacks the
⏹️ ▶️ John audio from other applications and stuff like that. And I understand like it doesn’t have any kernel extensions or anything, but it’s using, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s getting into other processes and like, you know, grabbing audio from them. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like it’s my computer. I there should be security restrictions about that. Like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John do you want to hijack audio from this application? You know, confirm that it’s done. Have some sort of system level thing that prevents
⏹️ ▶️ John like. I feel like this application could be on the Mac App Store if Apple cared enough
⏹️ ▶️ John about the functionality it provides to, you know, to provide sort of the gateways of like, oh, do you want
⏹️ ▶️ John to give this app access to contacts. The person says, yes, that app has access to contacts. That’s the only kind of barrier I
⏹️ ▶️ John think you need. It just it’s kind of sad that you cannot buy this in the Mac app
⏹️ ▶️ John store. You have to buy it direct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think we’re good. Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week. Harvest, Backblaze,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lynda.com, and we will see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M Anti-Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental They didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean to accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John Check my cast so long
⏹️ ▶️ John And find out how much money Marco is saving from Go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t that impressive. It’s like a few hundred dollars a month. I mean it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know. That’s what we want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know. It’s a few hundred dollars a month. There you go. It’s not like, we’re not talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thousands. Because hosting overcast was already inexpensive compared to like Instapaper or Tumblr or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You say it like it’s nothing. A few hundred dollars a month is not nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s a car payment. Well, but in my last business, I was spending like $5,000 to $7,000 a month. So for this one, this is a lot smaller, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like $500 to $700 a month, as opposed to $1,000. It’s a pretty good bang for the buck, though.
⏹️ ▶️ John How long did you spend rewriting it in Go? And then the savings will be realized going forward.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’ve got a pretty good return on
⏹️ ▶️ John the investment and the time you spent to learn Go and rewrite this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, and ultimately, I’m going to spend a little more time on it because the current model I have is a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of little problems, but it’s overall, it’s been a huge win and I learned a new language
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that is valuable too. And now I have a very, very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tool for certain types of problems in my tool belt, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I learned something new, it gave us something to talk about on the show here and there, and let’s be seeing some money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, like John said, a few hundred dollars a month, that’s, that’s significant, that’s impressive. And that’s really awesome. And it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s kind of crazy that you just choosing to attack this problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit differently has had what I think to be a pretty big,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, tangible impact on, on your financial situation for overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, that that’s, that’s awesome. And who would have thought that ditching PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would save you hundreds on cards? I mean on server costs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And just not even ditching all of it, just ditching it for like this one hotspot, this one like major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottleneck that was a huge resource hog. And that’s why I like that I now have this in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tool belt because now I know like problems like this, I have another way to attack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. I have something else that I know well enough and that I trust enough to do this kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing that’s now available to me and that will enable certain you know new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things and like you know like I didn’t I didn’t want to learn certain things like Python or Ruby that much because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they didn’t seem to provide a lot of like enough of an advantage to make it worth me adding that complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having that that burden of having to learn that over a few weeks and you know be you know dumping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that time into it. Go is different enough and and good enough at certain things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it was worth it to me and I’m glad I did it.
⏹️ ▶️ John spent many more months arguing with everyone else about why you didn’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey rewrite. So true. Like you would have just spent
⏹️ ▶️ John the amount of time and energy you would have spent defending your decision not to rewrite it and go
⏹️ ▶️ John would dwarf very quickly dwarf the amount of time it actually took you to rewrite it and go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, no, this is what happens when there’s a lot of money to be made on one side of an argument.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, it’s all speculative. You’re like, oh, I don’t think it’ll be that much faster. Maybe I can reduce the number of machines from
⏹️ ▶️ John one to two. Even now you’re saying it’s not that much money, although I think it totally is. And then, you know, the whole the
⏹️ ▶️ John arguments you just made about having this in your tool, but and so on and so forth. You know, we could have made those arguments, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you him and you know, it doesn’t seem like a big deal, is that a whatever. And so I hope you you’ve learned from this that
⏹️ ▶️ John like trying new things is awesome and saves you money. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the lesson I usually take from that is like, I get this work all the time. I
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do the calculation of like, how much energy will it be for me to argue against this versus how much energy will take for me to
⏹️ ▶️ John just do it. And surprising amount of time. It’s like it’s more exhausting for me to think
⏹️ ▶️ John about arguing against it. That is to just do it like it’s actually less work because then you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, it’s done when it’s done. The argument is over. There’s no argument to be had. And it was less mentally
⏹️ ▶️ John exhausting than having to try to, you know, argue about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, you know, in my case, it was really just about like, you know, I’m not I’m not going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take like a sideways step and learn a language that is generally similar to PHP and what it does well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what it doesn’t do well. Because there’s not a whole lot of upside for
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we’ll work on that one next. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know that’s what you think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But like with Go, like the reason I went to it was because I had this problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I was doing that PHP is especially bad at. Like if it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just something that PHP is kind of inconvenient for or not that well designed for, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less of a gain. That’s more like, well, in an ideal world, on an infinite time scale thing, maybe I would do something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. But in most cases, most of the problems I have to solve with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web apps, the other languages don’t solve it better than PHP enough to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it worth the jump and the hassle of having to rewrite things. I mean, this is gonna cost me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably two months of web programming time because I not only had to rewrite the crawlers and debug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the problems that came with them, but I also had to rewrite a lot of these supporting tools, things like the logging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco infrastructure and like the things that allow me to check and see when feeds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were last crawled, how often, monitoring if there’s delays, if there’s queue congestion,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being able to force one to crawl immediately, like there’s all sorts of like little infrastructure supporting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pieces that tie into the crawling system that I now have to modify or rewrite because it’s a different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system. So it is a pretty expensive change up front. It will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pay off over time but it’s certainly taking a lot of time. And so that’s why I’m not going to rewrite the whole rest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the app in Python or something, because there doesn’t seem to be enough benefit to doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that for the amount of time and work it would take. If I’m faced with a problem that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PHP does really badly, like lots of parallel network requests,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I’m not going to use it for that. So that’s where the
⏹️ ▶️ John benefit is. When you sell Overcast, your next product, the parts that are appropriate for Go,
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t write in PHP to begin with and it’ll be go from the beginning. And the same thing with your queue management stuff. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you ever if we ever across the next hurdle which is like third-party products for dealing with queues of things
⏹️ ▶️ John and managing the queues and dealing with failures and reporting and logging. There are lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John infrastructure type tools that deal with that. I know you probably don’t like anything would rather just write the thing straightforward thing yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the similar way that if you were to try to use one of those you’d be like I have this infrastructure that already works now I have to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and I have this weird system where some of them use this system some use that. It’s like again the next time you do a project. If you have
⏹️ ▶️ John that tool in your tool belt, then you will say, okay, this part of the system I’m going to write in PHP,
⏹️ ▶️ John this part I’m going to write in go this thing I’m going to use, you know, this queue system and this whatever, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll work on the third party stuff next. But like, I feel like having having it, this is one of the things that having a
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy job forces you to deal with because if you have either one crappy job or even better, multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John crappy jobs, crappy, meaning just like regular job jobs where you work for somebody else, you don’t get to pick half
⏹️ ▶️ John the time what you’re working with, what database you’re working with, what what logging infrastructure you’re working with, what
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system, what you know, just, you don’t get to pick, right. And a lot of times you work with crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And but eventually you work with a whole bunch of different things. So that when you come to a new situation, you’re like, Look, I’ve tried
⏹️ ▶️ John these five things, and these seven things in this realm, or whatever, and you have, you’re forced to have experience
⏹️ ▶️ John with lots of different things. And so you have a deeper tool chest to pull from, whereas if you’re not forced by some
⏹️ ▶️ John pointy haired boss, to to use a particular technology, it’s always up to you to do the cost benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John and like, I’m the only person here. Is it really worth me learning to do this on my own, so on and so forth. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John much harder to, you don’t have the time to just screw around with stuff and try everything
⏹️ ▶️ John out and survey the landscape. You really just have to go with what you know. And so now,
⏹️ ▶️ John you overcoming that hurdle to say, I am going to screw around for a little while just because I think there’ll be a benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John from it. It’s a sort of a slow motion version of having a series crappy J-O-B jobs for you for it to use 50
⏹️ ▶️ John different technologies.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so true. I also think it’s kind of funny for you to just kind of wave your hand at, oh, it won’t be any better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s not what I said. I said it won’t be better enough to make it worth the transition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Even then, I think that’s a very bold claim for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not for Go necessarily because you know Go, but to just kind of wave off, I don’t know, Python
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as an example, and just assume that it’s not going to be that beneficial.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s pretty bold. Now, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wrong. It just means it’s pretty bold.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am proud of you and remain proud of you for having explored Go. And I echo what John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is saying that I think this is a baby step in the right direction for you understanding that you don’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to personally solve every problem under the sun. And there are more than one ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s more than one way to skin a cat and that’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John The part where Marco is right about this thing though is like it’s not even you know Python versus PHP. It’s that
⏹️ ▶️ John he found the hot spot right like you reduce your number of service but like half didn’t you
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t matter how much better something is than PHP. This was clearly the hot spot like he’s not going to have
⏹️ ▶️ John it again right. Yeah, you know what I mean like so that’s the you know again that’s just true of anything not just working
⏹️ ▶️ John at yourself but especially when you’re working yourself put your effort towards the thing that’s going to give you the biggest bang for your buck and
⏹️ ▶️ John so if you if you have the number of services it’s it’s silly to expect that the next change will
⏹️ ▶️ John also have the number of servers. Eventually, it’ll have 1,000th of a server. And that’s not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John So decide where the bottleneck is and address that. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John if the current state of things is fine, then your work is done. You don’t need to work further. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think, for example, if he decided the hotspot is PHP, I need to replace PHP with Python, he would not have had the
⏹️ ▶️ John number of servers. That’s the type of thing, even without using language, you can kind of ballpark and say, Are these at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John level of abstraction? Go is clearly lower level and it’s clearly giving him something. The PHP wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John that he knew would be a big bang for the buck.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, definitely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’ve been doing watch a lot. Lots of watch it this week. I’m liking it a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it’s so limited that there’s not a lot of pressure on me to make something amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like like that’s like that. Like there’s there’s not a lot of pressure on me to cram the entire app into this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you because I just can’t like it is not possible to so the limit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limits I have are very challenging and and in that way kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of interesting to me
⏹️ ▶️ John can you do a thing with like do you have accelerometer access on the watch like if I if I shake
⏹️ ▶️ John my wrist nope no sensors no like I could a lot of the time when I’m listening to a
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast or something I hate I’ve talked to you about this before I hate the stupid little clicker like going forward and
⏹️ ▶️ John back of doing two clicks and three clicks when you have cold fingers. And like, I don’t know if I accidentally hold
⏹️ ▶️ John too long and it ends up being the click in the hole. Like I know all the patterns, but I just can’t make my fingers do with the stupid Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John clicker. But you just you run out of gestures like you can’t. You don’t have enough. There’s not enough
⏹️ ▶️ John input. You don’t have enough buttons. So a lot of time it’s like, you know, I just missed the last few seconds of what
⏹️ ▶️ John was said on a podcast. I would shake my wrist for it to go back seven seconds and just have that be the
⏹️ ▶️ John one on ambiguous, vigorous risk shaking. Like, you know, I feel like you could make it vigorous enough so you
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have to, so you wouldn’t accidentally do it or whatever, and that is much easier than me trying to triple click the
⏹️ ▶️ John stupid headset thing to go back and hear what somebody said.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Actually, I have a prototype class that’s a pocket tap recognizer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will try to recognize if you tap the phone while it’s in your pocket, like if you just hit it with your finger from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside of your jeans or whatever, and I got that working decently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I could never get it working reliably enough to actually ship it, like it’s just not good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s too many false responses in either direction. Like falsely detecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you just step really hard as a tap and missing real taps. I just could not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get it to work properly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and it’s kind of small for gestures. That’s why I was thinking the one input you have is the shake. And the shake
⏹️ ▶️ John to undo is silly in iOS. But I’m pretty sure I’ve never accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ John done it. And I very frequently have A, done it on purpose, and be
⏹️ ▶️ John shaking an app in the dim hope that this app will actually support undo through
⏹️ ▶️ John shake. And I’m really excited when it does, and when it doesn’t, I’m just sad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’ve never kicked that off accidentally?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I do it all the time, because I’ll be holding my iPad, so I’ll be in bed on my back, holding my iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up with both hands using it, and then I’ll kind of like drop it intentionally to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let it land on my chest so I can like type or something like that and not support the weight of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPad with my hands anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have an iPad 3. If I did it, it would break
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my ribs. That’s true. That is an excellent point, sir.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, every time I do that deliberate drop onto my chest in order to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make it so that I don’t have to support it anymore, then it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kicks the undo. Do you want to undo the typing you just did? And it drives me nuts every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. But as a developer, I know that it makes perfect sense why that’s happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not my fault, but it’s kind of my fault.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, for all I know, I am accidentally triggering it. I’m just doing it in apps that don’t support undo.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’ve never seen stuff go away on my screen and realize it’s because I jostled the thing too much. And like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, I very frequently, after accidentally performing some action, just futilely shake the device.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if it doesn’t undo, it lets me get revenge, I guess, on the device. You stupid phone. Didn’t mean
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t mean to stop that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s I’ve actually I’ve been doing a lot of watch kit stuff. I’m just gonna talk about it now. Screw it. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like so I like it a lot. I think it’s important for people’s expectations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what watch kit apps will actually be to actually know how it works a little bit. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically, so you know, when Apple Watch launches in a few months or whenever, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t matter. Developers can only Apple can do whatever they want with their apps. But third party developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can only make watch apps with watch kit. So what this is, is the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kit watch is actually an extension that runs on the phone from the main like parent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. And it runs in the background. Whenever whenever you select like the apps icon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the watch, it launches the watch get extension on the phone to like, you know, boot up, give it data and control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And then the third party developers code never actually runs on the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the third party code is running on the phone and it’s literally just like it’s reading data from the parent app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone if you’re making a network calls it’s also happening on the phone and then you send
⏹️ ▶️ Marco commands to the watch to just update the screen and the watch is playing through a static storyboard where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve defined your your controllers and everything and the elements they have those are all static you can’t generate elements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamically at runtime you can hide and show them but you can’t generate new ones and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the phone is basically commanding the watch over Bluetooth how to update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your interface in it. So it’s sending over commands like set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this labels text to this string and like all the commands it’s hilarious all the commands they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right only you can’t read from them so you can set the color of the text but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t read it back because it’s literally just like this thin layer on top of this command circuit just like telling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch how to update its interface. So So there’s a number of challenges with this and the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one is the latency because Bluetooth has some latency. In modern Bluetooth it’s pretty small,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there is some latency and there’s also just a lot of, there’s pretty limited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bandwidth there. And the watch, as far as we can tell from hints and things here and there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch is not going to keep your app running for very long. Like as soon as you stop looking at it, it closes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the extension closes and everything’s cut off. So there’s going to be major challenges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in just getting these watch apps to be dynamic and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be useful and to be rich. Because if you’re sending over images, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’m having this problem with the album art of how do you send over album art in a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is efficient? And you can have it cache up to 20 megs of album art
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you, and it’s not a lot. all these little limitations, little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems, but overall, the biggest thing about it is just this lack of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamic interface and the latency involved in updating things. And everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is based around trying to minimize it. Also, if you’re really chatty over that protocol, over the Bluetooth, you’re gonna keep the radios
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, and you’re gonna burn a bunch of battery life on both sides. So there’s a lot of challenges,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of limitations here. I would say, for the first wave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of third-party apps, which I think is going to be a year, roughly. I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t expect a lot of dynamic interaction. It is like a static menu that you’re dealing with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like static interface elements. There’s almost nothing dynamic that you can do. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not expect a whole lot from games. I think some games will work on it. Things where you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have very simple controls, like which of these five actions do you want to do next? Touch this button, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it. Like there’s not a lot of interaction to be reasonably possible with this system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the plus side, it’s really quick to develop for and it’s really easy to get something going and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a, I think, I think it’s a smart move overall from Apple and the tools are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty good. There’s a couple of bugs here and there, but overall for this limited set of things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s doing, it’s pretty well suited for that. So I’m actually really happy about it. I’m, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I mentioned earlier, I’m happy that I don’t have to kind of be forced to cram the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app into it because I just can’t. So instead, I can this limited subset that I can do in you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco month or two and be and have a really great app out there and be done with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So overall, I like it. Again, set expectations below. If you’re if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re going to be buying one of these things, don’t expect a whole lot from third party apps, but what you have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think will be interesting and certainly will be enough for the first year.
⏹️ ▶️ John good for Apple, because what they want to say is, boy, the the Apple Watch is out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And already there are insert very large number of third party applications
⏹️ ▶️ John for it. Because if it’s really easy for you to add, like, you know, why don’t you just add trivial Apple Watch support?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, all Apple Watch support at this point is trivial without native apps and stuff like that, and incredible limitations. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John you make it easy for people to go, that’s a nice bullet point we could add to our iPhone app, I can say we have watch support. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone is thinking of is there anything sensible I can show on the watch? And if there’s anything remotely sensible, no matter how
⏹️ ▶️ John simple it is, you don’t feel too bad. It’s like everyone has to be simple. So I think this will help Apple have a lot of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a lot of quote unquote phone apps, you know, I always apps that support the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John watch apps. I always have to support the watch out of the gate because that’s what they want to say. They want to say our platform
⏹️ ▶️ John is exciting. It’s popular. And if it was possible to make full fledged applications, then
⏹️ ▶️ John if you just made some silly thing that was barely interactive, you would look bad. now everyone will look bad together
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know comparatively you’ll look good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I mean it’s it really does serve their interests very well and again I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helps us too I mean I know a lot of developers are probably very frustrated with the limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what you all the very long list of things you can’t do things you don’t have access to like for instance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as if your phone moves out of range of the watch from what we’ve been told we don’t know that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t have hardware yet but from what we’re what we’ve been told if your phone loses that Bluetooth connection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the watch. So like if you go running with it or whatever, your app just terminates. Like it just ends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it can’t keep the UI updated anymore. Like it just, it’s like, you know, the head gets cut off, like it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ends. Um, so nothing can run detached from a phone that’s third party.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, and again, there’s so many limitations of like on, on the things, the kind of, the kinds of things you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do with the interface is very long and we still like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the simulator they have they have attempted to simulate latency with some of these commands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s just artificial insertion of like you know a sleep command in the UI so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t we don’t really know what the latency will be like on a real device like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like if I’m showing a list of of podcast episodes like I do in the playlist screen I want to have artwork
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on each one showing you what show they’re from at this point and and I’m I’m compressing the images down so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re really tiny. They’re like a couple of kilobytes each maybe, but in the simulator, it takes a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time to load that. And I don’t know if that’s a bug. I don’t know if that’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s simulating latency like per request instead of by byte size. Or I don’t know if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really how latent it’s going to be in which case I’m gonna have to change that design entirely.
⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta think like Yosemite in iTunes 7 and just average the color of the album
⏹️ ▶️ John art, pick one color out of it, and then just set it square to that one color.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have an honest question, and you may choose not to answer it, but you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked several times about how limited WatchKit is, which makes sense. Can you give a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of examples of things you really wish you could do or have tried to do but couldn’t make work with the current
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set of WatchKit limitations?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, sure. I mean, one of the biggest ones is I can’t do my play animation at all. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could render it to a bunch of images and try to send the commands over to be like, all right, set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this bar of the EQ to be this
⏹️ ▶️ John no, no, no, put them all on the storyboard and you just cycle between those four frames in the storyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, yeah. Done. Remember the old, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John the old, you know, a lot of UIs do this, where they want it to look like level meters, but they just have like four images that they
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey randomly. Oh, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Put that on the storyboard, it’s all static, Marco, you’re overthinking it. No one will know, no one knows what the waveform is supposed to look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how Apple does it in iOS 7 and on the watch when they have their music app and they have the little now playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco animation bars. Those are fake.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think the one in the QuickTime 7 player is real, isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I think so. But yeah, the ones in iOS 7, like the little three bar animation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you, on the now playing item, that’s totally fake. And like seeing that and being annoyed that it was fake is what made me try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do my own that was real and see that it worked.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the fake ones do serve a purpose. Like I’m joking about doing a fake one with storyboards, but like something
⏹️ ▶️ John to let people know that audio is playing is probably a good idea. And if you do, I guess it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John much better to do it with a static thing, like a red light on the camera that shows, camera is on or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John people are, if you show anyone that looks anything like a level meter, people know, oh, that means something is playing
⏹️ ▶️ John now. And if I can’t hear it, something is screwed up because maybe my headphones don’t work. Is the music playing? Like you would think most
⏹️ ▶️ John people can just look at it and see the pause symbol and say, of course it’s playing. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a pause symbol. But I found my experience
⏹️ ▶️ John that people do not recognize that that reality that’s staring them in the face but if you show a level meter anywhere they
⏹️ ▶️ John know something should be playing it I’m not hearing it something’s broken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right I mean so Casey I mean to answer your question like you know limitations I’ve hit directly I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I get one of the biggest ones is just you know not not knowing how much latency I can actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect in real life when sending images over and stuff like that but you know some of the actual like hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limits are things like I can’t even even show efficiently the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seconds remaining indicator. Because there is, there’s like a built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in widget that you don’t have to keep updating for counting up or down to a certain time or a certain time interval or showing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current time. So I can’t, like, the only way for me to have it count down with like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second, with the actual seconds remaining is to update it every time that number changes. So at least once per
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second. Which I probably can’t and probably shouldn’t be doing. So instead I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it actually update a minutes remaining counter. And whenever the number of minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remaining changes I send an update over the Bluetooth and have it update the label to show that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I have a progress bar in the current mockup that only it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco images and it only has you know like I think 150 increments across
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen and so whenever like the progress through the episode changes by enough to matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be worth a couple of pixels I update that image to be the new value. You’re still doing better than Windows 95. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John that was just palette cycling, right? No, Windows 95 is a segmented progress bars. Oh yeah, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. And you have more than a hundred, it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco didn’t have 150 segments.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, so there’s like, there’s limitations like that, that I just, I just can’t get around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The biggest limitation is the width of the screen is just really narrow, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just can’t fit a lot on the screen and I’ve I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco managed to make it work, I think. I won’t know until I actually get one of these watches and start using it, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve managed to make it work acceptably. But that is, I mean, the hardest challenge is just a design challenge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right there. But then there’s also like, there’s like little details. Like, so if you have a navigation stack,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you have like your root controller, and then it pushes, when you select an element on the table view, it pushes the new one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then, you know, you select again, it pushes another one. Any of the ones that are below the current item in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stack that you’ve pushed something on top of. Those stop receiving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI updates and those can no longer send UI updates for themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So let’s say you have, at the base of the navigation hierarchy, a list of the podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you subscribe to. Then you push on top of that, the playlist view and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now playing view. So you’re in the middle of a podcast. The list of podcasts you subscribe to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes for some reason. Something new comes into download, you delete one, whatever the case, the list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes. So now the root controller, which is not currently shown on screen because it’s buried below the now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing, the root controller needs to update itself. If you, it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco memory, it will recognize, if your data layer is set up, it’ll recognize that there’s been a change, but you have to check
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see if it’s active, and if it’s not active, you have to just enqueue that and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set like a Boolean flag somewhere saying, this is invalid data that I have now and I need to reload it next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time I’m shown. And the next time it’s shown, you have to check for that flag and say, Oh, if I’m invalid, reload
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the data. Like all this stuff, like this doesn’t really exist in UI kit on the, on the phone. Like these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, these problems don’t really exist. You can just kind of do things anytime you want and it’s fine. Um, the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really like the watch kit communication is really basic. As I said, like it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s right only it’s very limited. It’s all like just like sending like remote desktop commands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the wire basically. And uh, so there’s, there’s really, There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of stuff you have to do very manually. A lot of stuff you just have to choose not to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or choose to do in very minimal or clever ways. And that’s kind of why I like it, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enjoy challenges like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then you’re gonna get like screen flicker though, when you go back to the podcast list, only
⏹️ ▶️ John once that thing is active will it even have a chance to update its UI. So as soon as you go back to that screen, if that boolean is set,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just now within a couple fractions of a second, it’s gonna update everything. Whereas before it could
⏹️ ▶️ John have been updated behind the scenes sort of. So now you’re putting that UI flicker in people’s faces, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy. Yeah, and again, it sucks, and I don’t think there’s anything I can do about it. But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, there’s just, yeah, there’s nothing you can do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone needs to discover the hack of like, if you just make the currently active view larger than the actual screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re like, you know, sort of like CSS sprites, CSS sprites for UI. Yeah, right. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I’m not really pushing a view, I’m just shifting the viewport, and so really, this view is
⏹️ ▶️ John always active, so I can update the podcast list whenever it’s an update.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, nope, can’t even do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m sure they would reject your app if you tried to anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I would also, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do like the force press gesture on the watch, which is, functionally it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like a right click, it shows that menu of like, of overlaid icons. That’s when you use the force to press your watch?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you just concentrate really hard and this menu comes up. And that, you can only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it per screen. Like you can’t force press on say, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco table list item and get options for that item. You just have to do it for like the whole screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like this screen has the force press.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the force press is on the screen, but then it ignores what part of the screen your finger is touching. And I can kind of see that
⏹️ ▶️ John because if that gesture becomes part of the vocabulary of using the watch, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of weird to make people care about where their finger is on the screen, you know what I mean? Like that’s two different
⏹️ ▶️ John things because then you have to be thinking, is this one of those force presses in this app where it doesn’t matter
⏹️ ▶️ John where my finger is? Or is this one of those force presses in this app where it does matter where my finger is? Now you can just shove your
⏹️ ▶️ John meaty paw into the watch and just press it and it’ll do something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. But I mean, really, like, I was not really that excited about the watch until I started playing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WatchKit. Now I’m very excited. Like, now that I see what I can do with not that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effort, and how useful that would probably actually be in practice, which I think is pretty useful. Like, there’s a lot of situations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I’m like, I’m walking my dog all bundled up in the cold, and I’m like, man, I would really like to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a basic little watch controller right now. A lot of situations where this is coming up where I’m like, you know, this would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually be nice to have. So I’m looking forward to
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Got to wait five years before we can live in the real future where we can have a great view of your nose hair
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re out on your walk because you’ll have live video on your watch just like Dick Tracy and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll all be able to see up each other’s noses.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That sounds awesome. The future. I can’t wait.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because like the whole thing, you just look at your watch and you know, your wrist, know, vibrates
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit and you pick up your wrist and there’s your wife’s tiny little face on there telling you something