126: The Web Kind of Happens to You
16 Jul 2015New iPods are actually released, sort of, and Marco compares web apps to Visual Basic.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: John being particular about his particular renovations
- Follow-up:
- Web apps versus native apps in the enterprise/government
- Browser choice on iOS
- TRIM versus over-provisioning
- Half Life is available for the Mac
- New iPod Touch
- iPod Nano
- iPod Shuffle
- Post-show:
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Chapters
- Intro: John’s home renovation
- Web apps in business
- Sponsor: Igloo
- Web vs. native app restrictions
- Browser choice on iOS
- TRIM vs. overprovisioning
- John’s egregious error
- Sponsor: MailRoute
- New iPod Touch
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- More on the “new” iPods
- After-show: Overcast development
Intro: John’s home renovation
⏹️ ▶️ John John, how’s the renovation going? Oh, it’s going. A bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff is done. A bunch of stuff still needs to be done. Sometimes it rains.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is like a description of life.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just trying to now make my peace with the fact that things are not done to
⏹️ ▶️ John my standards. And it’s like, just let it go. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey met a human being, much less a contractor, that can complete anything to your standards? Like, how does that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go for you at work?
⏹️ ▶️ John I allow myself to do some amount of nagging and some amount of asking for things to be redone in a better
⏹️ ▶️ John way, but at a certain point you have to be like, look, just, it is what it is. Just go forward.
⏹️ ▶️ John Friday, they’re doing the front door, I think. So that’ll be, that involves a lot of potential
⏹️ ▶️ John detail work and a lot of potential for me to be disappointed in what ends up happening.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the way you look at this. Is there not a lot of potential for you to be delighted? It’s a lot of potential for you to be disappointed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah, no, forget about it. And then and then finally, like painting at the end. I’m hoping even the painting I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John boy, like, you know, will the prep work be done to my satisfaction? Almost certainly not.
⏹️ ▶️ John The prep work? You don’t even- Surface prep, surface prep, like, because they’re not stripping all the paint
⏹️ ▶️ John off it. They’re just going to they just want to paint the trim and get out of there. But I want to, you know, anyway, I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Really? I had no idea. I mean this in the nicest way like I I just I can’t imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Now you would have complaints about some
⏹️ ▶️ John of these things too because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey something is like sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John You know sometimes you make a cut in the wrong spot sometimes something isn’t square when it should be sometimes corners Don’t meet
⏹️ ▶️ John up the way. They’re supposed to Anybody can look at them could see it. That’s not right This is the question of does it bother
⏹️ ▶️ John you and sometimes you just gotta just you know Just let it go and just be like all right, whatever Wow,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I’m I’m very particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How does this work out for you at work? Given that you’re so particular, how do you continue to have co-workers?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or do you just do everything single-handedly?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s great for programming. The computer is really particular too. You tell it to do the wrong thing, it just does whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John you know. You have to really get it exactly right, because if you don’t, you don’t work.
Web apps in business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you want to talk about Safari being the new ie some more nope there were actually a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things about that I wanted to get to this week but you should have put it in the follow-up then
⏹️ ▶️ John hold on they see how easy it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is for those who are listening Marco is Marco just typed into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes in the very first entry of the follow-up section Safari is the new
⏹️ ▶️ John yes so you don’t you don’t need the F you because it’s in that section as we’re done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And John has deleted the letters F U. Oh God. And then added a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sub bullet, Marco Talks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So since I will blindly read the document, it appears Marco that we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have some follow up with regard to Safari’s new IE. Would you like to tell us about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, sure. First of all, we did get a good email actually just like an hour ago from somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco named Lauren who says don’t be so dismissive of web applications I work in ocean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco freight my job involves using a wide variety of web apps almost exclusively here she goes on to list a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different things that are all like I believe these are these would be called line of business applications is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is that a fair judgment of all this stuff so you know talking about how like you know they’re all in Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco machines they use this like internal tracking app to do all this other stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then also talking about things like like the general public, accessing government websites and everything. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements to web functionality are very much appreciated by all this stuff. And also, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should not be dismissive of web apps. And I think this is the perfect example of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where cross-platform, write-once-run-anywhere, universal accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of applications make perfect sense. Any kind of line of business thing where you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are a bank and your employees have to use a management system from all the different branches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to conduct business and enter information from customers and check on systems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Make that a web app. That’s great. The web is very good at that kind of thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not arguing in whatever I’ve been arguing about this, I’m not arguing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the web is useless today or that it has no place in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market. Only that native apps have replaced quite a lot of it are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably the new hotness. In the same way, Visual Basic apps for a long time were line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of business apps, before web apps were really a big thing. And it was never a huge, massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of the software business in the parts anyone knew about. But it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still like there was big business to be had there but Adobe wasn’t running Photoshop in Visual Basic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Web apps serve a lot of that same role where there is a lot of usefulness to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. There’s tons of applications for which that is the right choice. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of those are gonna be boring types of things that are internal to companies or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco government websites and stuff like that. It’s this kind of stuff that there’s not a lot of action happening there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t get a lot of consumer attention. And if you’re launching a new consumer-focused
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service or consumer-focused application, that probably isn’t the right choice today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s mostly the angle I was coming from on that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the difference is not so much that they’re boring or anything. It’s the difference of the customers. So individual persons,
⏹️ ▶️ John like consumers, they have a different value system than
⏹️ ▶️ John governments, really big corporations, or whatever. Because those large entities made up of lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John people, there is institutional knowledge there. No one
⏹️ ▶️ John person has to be smart or wise or have forethought. There’s a lot of institutional knowledge. a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John experience with this type of thing. If you are a very large company that’s been around for any amount of time, you’ve been burned by
⏹️ ▶️ John a vendor, whether it’s like having set based your entire company on Visual Basic and having Microsoft like
⏹️ ▶️ John change things around or having their priorities change or doing everything in Java and then having Sun get bought by Oracle or like
⏹️ ▶️ John every big company has been burned by Lotus Notes. Yeah, by some proprietary system owned and
⏹️ ▶️ John controlled by a single company. And so they kind of they They act
⏹️ ▶️ John with different set of criteria. They’re like, the most important thing to us is not
⏹️ ▶️ John to get tied down to a single venture, to sort of be masters of our own destiny, to not let this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, which is supposed to be like a supporting thing that helps us run our business.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do we really want to be super tied to, like you said, Lotus Notes to IBM? Are they a trustworthy partner? Are their priorities
⏹️ ▶️ John aligned with our priorities? Or are they just trying to sell us something like getting entangled with other
⏹️ ▶️ John big companies and making your company’s fate rely on some other company’s fate is
⏹️ ▶️ John something they want to avoid. So big companies are very incentivized to find a solution that they
⏹️ ▶️ John that gives them options. So if you do it like you do it on the web doesn’t mean you’re still gonna have to develop, you’re gonna have to like migrate
⏹️ ▶️ John all your users from one browser to another and things are gonna break and maybe you did everything on IE6 with ActiveX controls,
⏹️ ▶️ John you realize you were actually kind of tying yourself to Microsoft anyway, or whatever. But that is a very different value
⏹️ ▶️ John system than consumers. consumers are not making these judgments, like I don’t want most of them. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know the people who are like, I don’t want to tell myself to one company or, you know, but the vast majority of individual
⏹️ ▶️ John consumers just don’t think that way. They’re just like, is it easy to use? Can I understand it? Is it
⏹️ ▶️ John nice? Is it convenient? Is it popular? Have I heard about it? So on and so forth. So that I think is the biggest
⏹️ ▶️ John difference. And it’s not so much the things they’re using are more or less boring than consumer applications, because sometimes they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John really interesting and sophisticated, depending on like, you know, the business they’re in.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even things like government, like government stuff, I guess it’s kind of boring by definition, but that stuff can be super important.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so much government stuff has moved to the web, as opposed to moving to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, visual basic applications or whatever. And I’m sure every parts of the government probably went through that phase where Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John did convince them that like, Oh, yeah, no, if you do this, everyone has a Windows PC, and it will be fine. And the government
⏹️ ▶️ John learns like, that’s not a great plan either. Right. I think that that heavily influences,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, the value of a solution based on like what your criteria are. And I think Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John is right that like, you know, all the people who complained about Marco, I don’t think anyone denied the overall
⏹️ ▶️ John trend of like, you know, and you said in the last show, we had this sort of web 2.0 phase where the
⏹️ ▶️ John consumer facing sort of interesting things that got written about their interesting to individuals
⏹️ ▶️ John was all a new website, a new fancy website. now we’re in sort of the app era, all
⏹️ ▶️ John the things we write about our apps and maybe 10 years from now it’ll be something else. But like that is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John something that’s going through a transition in a cycle and a trend. But the web stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John the value it has to large entities and to anyone who doesn’t want to hitch their
⏹️ ▶️ John star to some other company whose interests may or may not be aligned with them, continues to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a viable thing. And like I said in the last show, I don’t think anyone’s saying the web is going to go away. The web
⏹️ ▶️ John will probably be around as long as email. Because like once something goes out there
⏹️ ▶️ John that is as widespread as the web and that is as decentralized as the web, lots of people are incentivized
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep that being a thing. Like if suddenly the web was dwindling because all consumers
⏹️ ▶️ John were using apps or whatever, many large entities and companies and governments
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything are highly incentivized to make the web still be a thing because they don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John be. You know, can you imagine, especially if Apple’s the only game in town? Apple is does not want to
⏹️ ▶️ John do what the enterprise wants to do. Enterprise needs something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, not Yeah, I mean, the Apple getting that role would be the worst for everybody,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. Apple just wouldn’t take it. They’d be like, whatever, if you can figure out how to use it, like I mean, they
⏹️ ▶️ John do, you know, they have the corporate thing where you can send a you can you can push this application to all your employees and
⏹️ ▶️ John IBM wants to make iPad apps for everybody, right? Like it. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re moving in that direction. But I have to think that, you know, it’s the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing all over like as good as IBM’s iPad apps may be. I’m not saying
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a bad solution for everybody. If you are have some factory and they can give all your employees iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John and use this application to run your business, that’s probably good. But boy, there’s a there’s a ticking time bomb. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a time limit on that at some point, either iPads aren’t going to be a thing, Apple’s not going to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that OS is not going to be a thing, your apps won’t run on the new version of the OS, like it’s just a matter of time,
⏹️ ▶️ John whereas the web, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one can, no one’s decisions can make your crap stop working immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just know that I’m signing up to keep my web apps working year after year after year, but hopefully that will not
⏹️ ▶️ John be as drastic as like, you know, if IBM totally change a strategy or the Apple IBM partnership goes
⏹️ ▶️ John away or Apple decides that they’re not making iPads anymore because they can’t sell them and they’re doing everything with VR
⏹️ ▶️ John goggles or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And most of these web standards that are pushing the envelope now are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that this massive class of applications generally doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need. I mean, and that isn’t to say they can’t be made better by them, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of the time they actually can’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s a leading indicator. Like these tech, these technologies are not going to be relevant to the enterprise for many, many years. But the only
⏹️ ▶️ John way anything ever becomes relevant to the enterprise is it’s been around for many, many years, and everyone’s implemented. And this is the third
⏹️ ▶️ John implementation in every web browser. And it’s like, okay, now finally, enter, I mean, it took so long just to get a
⏹️ ▶️ John y six, like for the longest time, it doesn’t work in i six, I don’t care. And while that was going on, every other
⏹️ ▶️ John browser was getting better and better and better. So when I six finally went away, mostly because Microsoft, you know, sort of killed itself
⏹️ ▶️ John when it realized it has to start moving again. Everybody else had, you know, technologies that
⏹️ ▶️ John had been worked out in the market for so many years that by the time the enterprise woke up
⏹️ ▶️ John and installed like IE7 and IE8, or maybe gave people Chrome or Firefox or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like, wow, look at all this great new web to where did this come from? Well, it had been developing the whole time when you were stuck in IE6.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think all this, this this web tech, you think, oh, it’s not relevant to current enterprise apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to be relevant enterprise apps in five years, if any of these things actually gain widespread
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s sort of true. So I’m glad you brought up IE6 because as someone who writes websites
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for other companies for a living, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if Marco’s characterization of line of business apps on the web earlier was 100% the way I see it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The reason I see companies deploying line of business apps to the web is because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of easy deployment, not necessarily because the technology of the web in and of itself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is superior. And so I cannot tell you the amount of times that up until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very recently, like you were saying, John, we would be asked to do a website, either an internal like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intranet or sometimes a public website, and we would ask, okay, well, what are the browser requirements?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, the most modern version of Firefox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plus one back, the most modern version of Chrome plus one back, and the most modern version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Safari plus one back, oh, and all the way back to IE6. What? Why?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why? Well, you don’t understand. All of our computers, our standard build for all of our computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is still rocking IE6 because our security department hasn’t approved IE7 through 14 or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever they’re on now. So yeah, you have to make this work on IE6 too. What?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I think the reason they do this is because they want to have a way, businesses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to have a way to very easily deploy software to their users, particularly line of business software.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so the easiest way to deploy that software is to not really deploy it at all and just put it on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a web server and tell people, go to this URL. And thus, that’s why we were always targeting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IE6 for the longest time is because all of these standard builds on all these computers were on ancient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey versions of IE and typically Windows XP, sometimes even today. And so because of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, we would have to support these old versions of IE. And all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that was about deployment. It’s not about being available everywhere in the sense that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the web is available everywhere. That probably didn’t make sense. What I’m saying is it was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about getting this software onto their users’ machines. And the easiest way to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to put it on the web and target whatever browser they’re using. That’s why all these old government
⏹️ ▶️ Casey websites, like you were saying, John, all target IE6 because that’s what the government was using. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why all of these old websites were using ActiveX controls. And again, you referred to that briefly, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All of this stuff was because the only thing that these companies cared about was the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they themselves were using. And so there was no incentive to make it better for anyone else,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey except very recently when they started to realize, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having a really crappy website, that’s kind of a detriment. We should really pay attention to this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they move slower. But I’m assuming right now you see far fewer instances of
⏹️ ▶️ John ISAACs just because Microsoft is moving on. they’re killing it as best they can. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John force installing newer versions of IE, they’re stopping support of OS’s that could run IE, hell, they’re trying to kill
⏹️ ▶️ John seven and eight and nine as fast as they can as well. So Microsoft is moving again and people are gonna have to
⏹️ ▶️ John catch up. But yeah, it’s the same reason we do all the igloo ads. Like internet software,
⏹️ ▶️ John frequently companies are not incentivized to make their internet good. So it just moves slower. It doesn’t mean that it’s never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John get better, it doesn’t mean that like, it just means that for a really long time, everyone else’s web apps
⏹️ ▶️ John are gonna be way better than yours because no one cares about the intranet. But at a certain point, it just becomes embarrassing and ridiculous. And
⏹️ ▶️ John some executive somewhere is gonna realize they can get a lot of points by making everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John in the company better by bringing their intranet site or their line of business web application
⏹️ ▶️ John up to the standards of five years ago or 10 years ago. And everyone will be like, wow, this is so much better because it will be because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll stop using ActiveX controls and frames and whatever the hell they’re using to do their intranet
⏹️ ▶️ John site. So that’s a slow motion type of thing. But I mean, they could just as
⏹️ ▶️ John easily be using, be deploying everything as Java applets or,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they do control both ends of it, they can do all sorts of crazy things. Like, you know, they could do a Citrix
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and run Windows apps that you can access from everywhere. Like, enterprise is
⏹️ ▶️ John to do, because they control both ends. It’s not like they have to say, we just need this to be
⏹️ ▶️ John available everywhere and easy to deploy. And there’s lots of things that companies will sell you that are, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to install any software. People just click this icon on their desktop and they can get your app automatically up to date, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be the web. But I like to think that enough companies have been burned by the proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ John solutions now that the web has a certain appeal that the other solutions don’t. And even going as far as say,
⏹️ ▶️ John the web and also nothing like ActiveX in the web, like we’re not going to do everything in Flash, we’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do everything in Adobe Air, we’re not going to do it in ActiveX, because we’ve learned that that is a mistake. We’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John going to stick to the plain old web. It’s good enough for you know
⏹️ ▶️ John everything else we do on the web is consumers our site will be crappier it will be older it will be uglier
⏹️ ▶️ John but it won’t be won’t be based on anything that we have to pay like an annual fee to some other enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ John company for unless you’re running everything off is then I’m sorry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s my everyday John ask me what our intranet is at our company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that among other things does intranets for other companies it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John got to be SharePoint
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? What version, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I have no idea. I don’t I don’t try not to go to our SharePoints. I didn’t even know there were versions like is it the
⏹️ ▶️ John years for SharePoint like 2013? Oh, keep going. I don’t know how old it goes back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, it goes back to 2007. But we are mostly on 2010. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the year 2015. That’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s pretty good. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it usually by Microsoft standards, like was the version 2010 actually introduced in 2009? Like car model
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s true. I don’t remember off top my head. I I totally understand what you’re asking. I don’t recall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I do believe 2013 was introduced in 2013. And, um, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as with all things, you know, so SharePoint 2007 was, I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having my nails ripped out would have been a more pleasurable experience than, than coding for SharePoint 2007.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SharePoint 2010 in three years made it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey barely livable enough that I didn’t immediately quit my job when they said, oh, you have a SharePoint 2010
⏹️ ▶️ Casey project to do. And supposedly 2013 is decent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I hear from the people that do SharePoint all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s like desktop Linux. It’s always getting better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s always getting better
Sponsor: Igloo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, our first sponsor this week, I am actually serious, this is not a joke, our first sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week is Igloo. Nice. Igloo is an intranet you will actually like.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John somebody said it’s supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be read receipts. Which one am I supposed to be saying here? I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would have said read, but I flip-flop back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, well, whether it’s read receipts or read receipts, Igloo offers
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⏹️ ▶️ John And for all the people who think this was like planned, like we led into this for the internet talk you do not understand how the show
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, we are not that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deliberate. You vastly
⏹️ ▶️ John overestimate our organization.
Web vs. native app restrictions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So speaking of organization, one more thing I wanted to talk about. Websites I don’t think deserve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the abilities of native apps for one key reason. There is no app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco review for websites and you frequently visit websites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally or without opting into certain behavior. The web kind of happens to you as you’re browsing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around. You click a link, you don’t know where it’s going. And so this link opens up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whatever page you open is now executing code on your computer. Hopefully not native code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but whatever websites can do, they can do to people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t opt in, who didn’t even choose, you know what, I want to go to this website because they could just be following
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a link or it could even be a script running on somebody else’s page or an iframe embedded on someone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else’s page. So there’s all these considerations. You have to have way tighter security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for web stuff, and you have to have much stronger restrictions. And, you know, in an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco environment like we have in iOS, where apps go through this review process, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know is controversial, but I think, even though it is imperfect, I think it is definitely a net win.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, apps go through this review process, and that’s great for consumers, because so much crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is… we are protected from.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you think the iOS philosophy is the reverse of that? It’s the idea that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apps should have the same restrictions as websites Not that website should be more restricted than apps because
⏹️ ▶️ John it used to be apps can do anything in their websites Eric are held in their little box and the iOS innovation
⏹️ ▶️ John is let’s put a box around apps to their sandbox They can’t see those things They can’t get your location data unless
⏹️ ▶️ John they ask they have to have entitlements and the review process is part of that or whatever It seems almost like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re taking apps and putting them in a box and websites were always in a box Now the websites are trying to get out of their box and the apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, are they happy in their little box? It seems like they’re trying to make their box bigger, too. But they might meet in the middle where
⏹️ ▶️ John you can imagine them having a similar set of capabilities with a similar set of restrictions in it, like an app can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John get. I mean, right now, for example, a website can’t get your location data without asking, because that’s the thing they built into Safari.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they ever did enable any of these like, oh, you could spawn background jobs or local storage, it pops up a dialogue.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is not a perfect system. It’s not as fancy as apps, but it took a long time for us to even get like the whole,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, managing app notifications and app storage and which apps can use my location
⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m in the app, when I’m not in the app. It seems like the controls for both of these things for both the web
⏹️ ▶️ John and the apps are evolving. The apps are way ahead with the sophistication of the controls on stuff. And that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John you brought in the last show. Like, you can’t just let a web app do this because the controls aren’t in place to,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no place you can go in settings to decide which website can do what and whatever. But already the websites are
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty well confined. And that was one of complaints like oh i don’t want to pop up a dialogue well apps don’t want to pop up dial x when
⏹️ ▶️ John i ask for location too but guess what they have to like
⏹️ ▶️ John i think we’re figuring out uh you know even though you opt into downloading apps they’re figuring
⏹️ ▶️ John out how to contain software that’s actually a topic we ever get to in the uh el capitan
⏹️ ▶️ John rootless stuff how to contain software in a safe way and you know the web started out
⏹️ ▶️ John well much more contained than native apps uh and at this point the sophistication of how
⏹️ ▶️ John to contain apps on ios is well ahead of where it is for web
Browser choice on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, one issue that we heard from a few people on, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth discussing, is browser choice on iOS. This is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit of a multifaceted issue. There’s two main problems that people have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the desktop, you can write a browser using any rendering engine you want, and you can ship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to people, and that’s it. On iOS, that is actually forbidden. iOS, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not allowed to render web content with anything other than the built-in web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kit. So like Chrome, for instance, I mean, let’s be honest, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody says we want browser-trash on iOS, what they’re really saying is we want Chrome to be better on iOS. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are a lot of things like if Safari drags its feet on implementing some new standard, chances
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are Chrome on iOS also won’t have it because it’s that part of the rendering engine that it’s sharing from the system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s one problem. The other problem is that on the desktop you can set your default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browser or your default mail client or your default calendar app. iOS does not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the concept of default apps for these types of things. So in iOS the default app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is always the built-in system app for those kind of for those kind of roles. And so you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say if I click a link in an email message open it up in Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatically. You can’t do that. It’ll always open up in the system default browser of Safari
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first. And anything that just calls open URL on a random web URL, same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll just open up in Safari, even if you use Chrome.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one of the things that we didn’t get in iOS 8 that we’re still waiting for, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And so I’m curious. Like, you know, on the desktop, we have that system, and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much works fine. I’m curious, though, what would be the reasons on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to never bring that over? Like at this point, it seems like that might be a conscious decision that they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not doing. And I can think of a few reasons from Apple’s point of view, why not?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the biggest to me, I mean, you know, you can you can argue things like security and everything. Those are weaker arguments once we have proper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco technological sandboxing in place, as we just discussed. But
⏹️ ▶️ John what about for the web rendering is like JavaScript? I think it’s security is still a valid reason for JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John because of the incredible contortions they go through to get plain old JavaScript to run quickly with all just in time
⏹️ ▶️ John compilers. And like they basically are turning it into native code and if you can exploit that that
⏹️ ▶️ John engine you know that’s because like you said people can be redirected to websites and once if someone finds an
⏹️ ▶️ John exploit where they can somehow send a payload in a web page that
⏹️ ▶️ John confuses the the JavaScript engine in some third-party browser and causes you know
⏹️ ▶️ John code execution or they basically just have to say third like they do now third-party web or any and
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make your own web browser fine but you can’t you can’t do what we do with our JavaScript engine so So basically you’re dooming every
⏹️ ▶️ John Java convention to be slow, except for ours. We get to do the fancy, you know, insecure, potentially insecure
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but there’s just one of that and we fix the bugs and no one else can make one. In fact, you can’t even, they don’t even let you do
⏹️ ▶️ John interpreters, right? Except for like Lua or whatever, her games, you know, so I think security is still potentially
⏹️ ▶️ John an issue for stupid, slow JavaScript that they try to make fast. So your choice is,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I said, I don’t think you’re even allowed to have an interpreter. I don’t remember the exact rules, but I think security is still a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John answer for the web browser. aside the web browser and pick my pet peeve is like why can’t I pick a different
⏹️ ▶️ John default email application? I don’t want to use Apple Mail. I don’t want to enter any accounts there and get every single application when
⏹️ ▶️ John it wants to send mail sends me to that account. Email does not seem like something that needs just-in-time compiler
⏹️ ▶️ John or some native… it’s just an app. Just define a protocol, let people have a third-party mail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco application. Right, well, for the email side you lose the security reasons and I think your security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason there is very good and by the way there’s this huge misconception that Chrome is not allowed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be as fast as Safari. That used to be the case. That’s not being the case a year ago, at least, whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John think a year ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John but it has to use Apple’s. At that point, it’s just using Apple’s engine straight up. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it always was. Just before, there was only UIWebView, which wouldn’t do the JavaScript thing because it was in process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WKWebView is way more restricted from what the app can access.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you have a font loaded in your app, UIWebView will show it. WKWebView won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it doesn’t have access because it’s running and it’s running out of process. That’s why that’s why it’s allowing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to have that native JavaScript compilation because all the stuff that’s happening in that web view is not happening in your apps process.
⏹️ ▶️ John parsing fonts that have illegal values in them is apparently a terrible security all I’m going to find a good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see that article today? I just saw the headline. That’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad. So but you know, for male clients, they don’t have that kind of thing. You’re right. There is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cost with mail clients of integration. So one of the iOS API is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to show a mail composed sheet in an app. So to put up a sheet when somebody says share, share
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to mail, whatever, put up a sheet that you can pre-populate the subject, you can add attachments, you can do all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff that you know you can do some of that with a mail to like the subject but you can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much with the attachments and body and stuff like that very easily with Mailto URLs. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of that they actually wouldn’t be able to do if there was a choice. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can see areas like that where there is some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason where you can say, well, for integration reasons, it would kind of suck if the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system API would only work if their default mail client was Mail app. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John would have to define to be conformant, suitable. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not good at this. It’s it’s like the same pipe dream is saying, I would like to replace the Finder. Just tell me what sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple events I have to respond to to be a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey conformant Finder replacement.
⏹️ ▶️ John And with an email app, maybe it’s much more limited. But just you could dictate.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could pretty well dictate. Please respond to these messages, support
⏹️ ▶️ John this API, support these URL port, whatever that Apple wants to do to be a full-fledged mail
⏹️ ▶️ John app replacement. You know mail apps applications would conform to it because it shouldn’t be too onerous.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, you gotta leave something for iOS 15 or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They did a lot of stuff on iOS 8
⏹️ ▶️ John that we thought they wouldn’t do. And I think they were so dazzled that no one really cared that they didn’t do the, you pick your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and they might do that in the future. I mean, you said they certainly could. But the more I look at this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s also, there’s issues of, first of all, there’s competitive issues. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when people say, I wanna choose my own email app, they’re not looking to choose Udora. They’re looking to choose Gmail.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when they say my own browser, they’re looking at Chrome. Like this is all Google stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want to switch to. Then that is not I’m sure that is not lost on Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could be Outlook, like Microsoft bought Outlook.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’re whatever that that used to be. And like, I just reading interview, they were saying, you know, Outlook for iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John is the best Gmail client. And it may very well be because Google’s Gmail client for iOS is not that great. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John because even again, because email is more or less an open protocol. And because so far, Gmail supports
⏹️ ▶️ John IMAP and pop, there is some pot. And so does Apple for that matter. That’s why you can have a different
⏹️ ▶️ John email client, because email is an open protocol and you don’t need to. It’s not like exchange where well, even exchange Apple has exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John support, sort of. It was like, we’re almost there with the mail apps. I don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John use Apple’s applications just that every time I tap a link I go to Apple’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and now that you know, the great thing is like, you know, before when apps were all writing their own share sheets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we got this mail compose view controller and I don’t know I was five maybe you know the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app had to write okay give here’s a share to email option use the built-in system thing that is that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these features all this functionality now everyone’s just switching to the default share sheet which includes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mail and can also include any other mail app that you have installed if they have an extension so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now the the need for choosing your own mail app is going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down as more apps implement these share sheets, the system share sheet, because now you can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plug into that from any app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you still have like mail-to-links. I don’t know if mail-to-links even work on webpages. But anyway, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the share sheet does help. It definitely does, but there’s still many things in the system, including parts of Apple’s thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John will chuck you into the mail app, because it’s like, oh, you want to send an email. Share
⏹️ ▶️ John sheet is a more democratic process, that’s true, if only you would remember where the hell I dragged the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They fix that in 9 or you’re running out of the beta, you’re too responsible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the thing about that, that the whole like, it doesn’t take much to make people give up trying to arrange crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, the whole spatial thing. Like if Springboard didn’t remember where you put your icons, no one would arrange their home screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it does, so you do. ShareSheet was supposed to remember where you put things and everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John dragged them around when they first got the ability to do it and then realized it doesn’t keep track of what you do and then everyone just gave up. And I haven’t tried it again
⏹️ ▶️ John either. Like I’ve just given up, right? And so maybe when 9 comes out, I’ll give it one more try but it’s very easy
⏹️ ▶️ John to be discouraged like I spent time thinking about what should be the first second and third one in the share sheet
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I realized the next time it comes up it’s scrambled again I’m not I’m never gonna try again. It’s like, well, that was a waste of my time.
TRIM vs. overprovisioning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell us about trim
⏹️ ▶️ John real follow-up topic. Yeah, why does fall take so long and let Marco put things in fall. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John happens Eric wrote in to tell us about we’re talking about that trim on SSD. So there’s another
⏹️ ▶️ John way that SSDs can deal with not knowing which space
⏹️ ▶️ John has been freed up and You know knowing which things can be erased and that’s over prison
⏹️ ▶️ John over provisioning over provisioning is something I think all SSDs do to some degree when you buy an SSD that’s like 500 gigs
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t get a bunch of chips in there that are 500 gigs you get more than that That’s for a variety of reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John one the cells wear out if you use them a lot So you have to have some extras left over because when you wear out a section of them It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John alright well those are worn out but I can I have these new ones here that are fresh and Part of what the firmware is supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to doing is wear leveling to try to wear them out evenly or whatever But the other thing you can do with over provisioning especially if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John massively over precision like 20 or 30 percent over provision like the quote unquote, enterprise class SSDs
⏹️ ▶️ John are, is that you can use that empty space. And then when the drive is idle, it can just
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of shift things around and compact them. And as it shifts things around and compacts, it makes larger regions
⏹️ ▶️ John where the where it knows that there’s nothing because it has moved everything from that space into another space. Like even when the drive is
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote, full, there’s still this empty block where you can move things around. And that empty block,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can erase because you know, you just moved everything out of it. And then that’s the whole point of trim. Like, we didn’t get into this, we
⏹️ ▶️ John got into this in the first time we talked about trim, but I realized about trim like two times and haven’t gone over this like it is slower
⏹️ ▶️ John to write to an area of an ssd that has that has to be erased first that you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not already cleared right so it’s much faster to say oh this is already cleared
⏹️ ▶️ John i can write to it directly instead of having to copy everything out clear it write everything back plus the little part that you
⏹️ ▶️ John added or whatever so if you have this big empty region and if during idle time your ssd can shift crap
⏹️ ▶️ John around to make sure that big empty region is always there and it can clear that empty region so so it knows if some new data
⏹️ ▶️ John comes in, it can write it directly to that empty region without reading it in and writing it back out or anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is a win. So that is a potential other way to deal with not having trim, is
⏹️ ▶️ John just have way more flash memory than you
⏹️ ▶️ John need, and then hope you have enough idle time for the firmware to shift stuff around to
⏹️ ▶️ John keep a large section of ready-to-go area where you can write to quickly.
John’s egregious error
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And tell us about your egregious error about Half-Life.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if I had thought about it a few more seconds, I would have remembered it. They ported it to the Source Engine a while back.
⏹️ ▶️ John In my mind, it’s like, well, that’s not the real Half-Life. That’s just when they ported it to the Source Engine. The real one
⏹️ ▶️ John was—you don’t want the original game. It looks worse. Anyway, Half-Life is available for the Mac on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Source Engine. You can buy it on Steam. We’ll put a link in the show notes. Go
⏹️ ▶️ John ahead and play it now, 15 years after we wanted to play it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I played Counter-Strike the original Counter-Strike briefly and I remember thinking it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really hard And I know the whole of the internet is now judging me and my inability to play games. That’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I played an inordinate amount of Counter-Strike when I was in college.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I played a crap load of Counter-Strike I loved that game
⏹️ ▶️ John Good game you play Team Fortress 2 now. It’s the well, is it the spiritual successor?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a successor kind of sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I even saw even that like I would I would do the weird way to play counter-strike I like I would just buy like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one really weird gun like the scout sniper rifle That was terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just try to get a kill with it because that was harder and more interesting to me than just Mowing everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down. I don’t know I’m a terrible gamer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not as bad as I am that’s okay
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco. We rock on the no land beyond in destiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t you keep tweeting these destiny things and it sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all made up doesn’t it’s like this bands from Canada that Merlin talks about. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it looks like a Markov generator makes these tweets, like I have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you’re talking about. Yep. All these words, it’s like, I think that’s a sentence, and I think it’s English.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s great for Twitter because like Bungie makes up all these basically proper nouns, makes a ton
⏹️ ▶️ John of proper nouns that are very compact, that everyone knows what you’re talking about and that abbreviations of them are also
⏹️ ▶️ John clear, but to other people those proper nouns mean nothing because they’re just made up words. So it is a high
⏹️ ▶️ John percentage of made up words per sentence.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That, yeah, when you tweet about these things, I wonder if like my brain is blue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screen of death or something, because I cannot compute what you’ve talked about. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then I’m like, what thing has happened on the internet that I’m not privy to? And then I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all concerned that there’s something important that I’m missing. And oh, no, it’s not important. It’s just destiny.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there is a potential that Tiff could get into destiny. I know it didn’t take when I showed it to her when she was over here. But at some
⏹️ ▶️ John point she could wander over into it on her own, like with no one, you know, putting it in her face and just try
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It has the capacity to suck you in. I don’t know if she is susceptible to it, but it could happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we don’t even have a PS4. Well, that can happen in two seconds. Are you kidding? PS4
⏹️ ▶️ John could be on its way to your house right now. You could do Amazon same-day delivery.
Sponsor: MailRoute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, our second sponsor this week is MailRoute. So MailRoute, what they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are is they are basically a mail proxy service. So you point your MX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco record of your domain, you point that at MailRoute servers, they filter out spam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and viruses, and then they deliver to your real mail server, the filtered out mail.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I have, oh man, I have used email services for so long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve tried, I tried my own spam filtering solutions. I’ve tried using fast mails
⏹️ ▶️ Marco built in ones. I use fast mail as my host. I once set up my own server with spam assassin and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Not only were none of those as easy as mail route, none of them were as effective as mail route. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to give you some idea of how effective this is, last week I got a spam message
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I noticed because it was so unusual to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any spam. Like it’s not like you still get three or four a day. I get zero a day. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprising and noticeable that I got one spam message that got through. That’s how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good MailRoute is. And by the way, I haven’t seen one since. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am incredibly impressed at how good MailRoute is. I’ve always heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Gmail people—I’m looking at you two—I’ve always heard from Gmail people that they have the best spam filtering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, you never heard that from me. It’s good, but it ain’t the best. Honestly, I can say this is the best. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco granted, I haven’t in Gmail, but how do you beat zero? That’s really hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to beat. Well, excuse me, now it’s one. One spam message in months. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, I can’t say enough good things about MailRoute. If you are like me and don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give Google all of your mail and information and kind of buy into that whole ecosystem,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you prefer to be non-Google for that, like I do, like I use FastMail, you can use any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IMAP post you want. The great thing is with MailRoute, you can bring world-class spam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco filtering service to any email host. Any domain you control,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any domain you own that you get email on, you can put MailRoute in front of it and really eliminate spam. It’s incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how well it works. It’s very customizable, too. If you want to be less aggressive with your filtering…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they have a thing where they will email you this digest every couple of days or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you said it to of messages they think are probably spam that they have withheld from you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that they’re not quite sure about. And there’s just little links you can click to say, all right, this is fine. This is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they if they catch anything in there, almost nothing legitimate ever gets caught in there for me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s great to have it all summarized in one little in one email that just gets sent sent out, you know, once every couple days. So that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, I know I’m really not missing anything that’s even close to legitimate, if it is important, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have to go through those constantly every day. And if it does catch something, you just click the little whitelist link
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s never a problem again. So it’s great. I am very impressed with MailRoute. It is easy to set up, reliable,
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New iPod Touch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so now that John has moved away from his beloved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPod Touch because he thought that Apple had abandoned him in the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way they have abandoned him with his god-awful file system, ding, it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out that things have changed. John, what happened today?
⏹️ ▶️ John They did abandon me. They abandoned me for years. They released new iPods, but,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, too little too late, Apple. I wouldn’t say to, I mean for you. Oh for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re just talking about me. But anyway, yeah, they released new ones and what is this, Steve Trout and Smith
⏹️ ▶️ John said, I don’t know, I haven’t confirmed this, that the new iPods are iPod 7,1, like the model
⏹️ ▶️ John number, and the last one was iPod 5,1. What happened to iPod 6,1?
⏹️ ▶️ John Where did that one go? That was the secret one they withheld to make me buy an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That was entirely, it was actually a big plan at Apple just to get you, because you were like this thorn in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their side, this guy would not buy an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. Yeah. They really cared about that. Thinking about why they can’t, I think I have
⏹️ ▶️ John a reason that they skipped, if this is true. Basically, why did they not
⏹️ ▶️ John release an iPod Touch for such a long time? Why was this big, long gap? Why was it the fifth generation iPod Touch and it just
⏹️ ▶️ John lingered on and on? Well, the lingering is like, we know that Apple will just keep selling a thing, even if not a lot of people buy it, because it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, we’re good at making it. We know how to make it. It doesn’t change. the cost of parts presumably goes down
⏹️ ▶️ John up to a certain point, why not keep selling them? But every time we saw sales numbers that
⏹️ ▶️ John were in any way possible to slice and dice so that you could isolate the iPod Touch numbers, they were low. They were
⏹️ ▶️ John super duper low. We know the iPod numbers were going down, and the iPod Touch was part
⏹️ ▶️ John of that, and it’s like we’re not selling a lot of iPod Touches. So I can understand them saying, is this
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing we’re going to do? Should we bother making a new iPod Touch? Maybe they were making one and said, should we even
⏹️ ▶️ John bother updating this, or should we we just keep selling the current one, do we think this new one will bump our numbers enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to be worth the cost of changing our manufacturing and making more expensive product, or do we just want this product where the margins
⏹️ ▶️ John just keep going up and up, again, up to a point? But, you know, they make most of the insides, but they can probably
⏹️ ▶️ John get all the parts for that cheaply. So the fifth gen iPod Touch, by the time they were done selling it, like, they had dropped the price
⏹️ ▶️ John a little, I think, but boy, that must have had some great margins and low volume, and I guess they
⏹️ ▶️ John did the math and said, there’s no point in releasing an iPod 6,1, because it’s not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to increase our sales enough to offset the difference in
⏹️ ▶️ John cost of parts and everything. But I guess they came around and said, they finally decided, look, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John either not going to have the iPod Touch anymore and everyone’s got to get phones, or it’s important for us to have a product
⏹️ ▶️ John in this range, even if it doesn’t sell a lot of it because it’s kind of like an entryway
⏹️ ▶️ John product for young people, or give it to your kids but you don’t want to buy them a phone or something like that. And I think that was the wise choice,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so here we have it. 7 comma one with an A8 processor in the same
⏹️ ▶️ John form factor as it was before. No more little lanyard strap, new colors.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is sort of the Apple coming out kind of like with the Mac Pro and saying, No, we still
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to make a Mac Pro and no, we still are going to make the iPod touch. And it seems like a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good iPod touch, right? Yeah, I mean, what’s interesting is they they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipped it with the A8. And I think this might be a little hint us to why they shipped it anyway, but going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back a sec, they shipped it with the A8 and historically, with the exception
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the very first iPod Touch, all the other ones have kind of been a generation behind in their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPU core. And in this, they shipped the same core,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just clopped a little bit lower, but the same CPU as the current iPhone. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco granted, the current iPhone is not going to be the current iPhone in a few months, But this is still significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that everyone expected if they were going to do an iPod update anytime soon, it would go to maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the A7 chip. And it went to the A8 instead. And so that is significant, even though it is clocked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit lower than the iPhone’s. Matthew Panzarino ran some tests. He said it’s 1.1 gigahertz. The iPhone 6 is 1.4.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So close. You know, it’s, granted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s not going to be as fast as, but still, for 200 bucks, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really cool. I think it makes sense because my prediction is they will there will be another
⏹️ ▶️ John fairly long gap before this is updated again. So it’s like we this is a product line we’re going to have. We think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John important to have this product line. Let’s give it the most longevity possible by sticking essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John last generation chip. I know it’s the current one now but like you said Mark like the new the new phones are coming with the A9
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything. This is kind of like OK we’ve ramped up on the A8 enough that we’re not supply constrained
⏹️ ▶️ John for a product that we really care about. there’s enough eights left over for the amount of iPod touches we’re going to sell them pretty soon our flagships
⏹️ ▶️ John are going to be a nine anyway. So let’s give us an A eight that will give it the most possible longevity
⏹️ ▶️ John so we don’t have to revise it next year because if they put an a seven in it, it would be aging much more rapidly the age
⏹️ ▶️ John is a big bump up and like it maybe gives an extra year extra year or two that they can like let
⏹️ ▶️ John it sit there because I don’t think it’s important as important for the iPod touch to be updated every single year, given
⏹️ ▶️ John its sales volume and its kind of place in the lineup.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And so I think, if you think back to, why does this product still exist but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t updated for three years? And I think there’s a couple of potential reasons for this. Number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, what you said, it really does not sell very well. I mean, it’s a decent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business. It’s like the same thing where people say, well, if you look at the iPad by itself, it’s bigger than McDonald’s or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. It’s a good business in isolation, but compared to Apple’s overall business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a very tiny part of it. Compared to iOS usage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco numbers, I know with my app, the usage numbers of iPod Touch are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vanishingly small compared to all the iPhones. Almost no one uses an iPod Touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my app. I think most developers I’ve talked to, I think you could say very similar things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, of course, it does tend to skew younger because a lot of kids get them. Maybe if you have a game that appeals to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kids, maybe your numbers would be different, but for the most part, it does not sell in large volumes relative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to iPhones and iPads. I think another part of maybe why they were letting it languish for a while, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe why the 6 was cancelled, the iPod 6,1, maybe that was the reason it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cancelled, assuming it existed. I think maybe they were trying to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they could move this demand or this role in the lineup to the iPad Mini.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you think about what the iPod Touch is for, an iOS device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for people who don’t have or can’t have or just for whatever reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not going to get an iPhone. When it was launched, there was no iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once the iPad came out, it was very clear that a lot of the people who would buy an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPod Touch, especially people buying them for kids, a lot of that usage was moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco towards iPads, especially for things like games. And I think what we’ve seen over the last few years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the iPad kind of petering out, or at least leveling off to some degree
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And the iPod Touch is still very hot for that use of kids’ games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and developers’ test devices and stuff like that. It’s very useful for that. And I think maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were trying to see if the iPad could take that over, and it just didn’t pan out that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I was thinking as you were talking, especially when you said that none of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey users are on iPod Touches, I thought to myself, well, that seems crazy because of kids, like you were saying.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I was just thinking about it, and I haven’t been like chronicling this in my head
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I hadn’t really been thinking about it until today. But as I reflect on, you know, going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out to eat at a regular restaurant, you know, like a Panera Bread, let’s say, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just going about my day outside of work, you know, on the weekends or whatever, I’m thinking back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, well, what are kids using when their parents just want them to shut up and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let mom and dad eat? And to my recollection, they’re either using their parents’ phones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or they’re using iPads that seem to be dedicated for kid use. And so I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re onto something and that maybe answers the question, why did Apple not really care for, what was it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two years, three years? How long was it? Three. Why did Apple not care for three years? Which by the way is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey insane, but anyway. Maybe that’s because, to your point, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nobody’s really buying these. If they want something that’s a portable kid device,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just like you said, they’re getting an iPad mini. And certainly my reflection on what I see day to day is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they’re buying iPad minis.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s one reason why they might have done this now as opposed to any other time. Another I think big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason, they also recently quietly killed the original iPad Mini that used the A5 CPU.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the iPod Touch was the last A5 iOS device, and not counting Apple TVs, that’s kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different story, but this was the last A5-based iOS device that was for sale. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now they have no more A5s left. They are also now all 64-bit once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 5C falls off the lineup, right? Is the 5C still even sold? Is it the free one right now? I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s the other thing I was saying about this. They probably had to make this hardware anyway if they’re going to make a 6C in the same form
⏹️ ▶️ John factor as a 5C. This is basically a 6C with no phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. And so, they’re going to have some economies of scale here, even though this is a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller scale than the 6C will likely sell. But assuming they have a 6C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll have basically this… I bet it’ll have the same guts, just with the phone hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco added to it. If they’ve managed to squeeze that into a $200 product here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting a little bit more hardware for the phone features and maybe a slightly better camera into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 6C, which might even have this size screen, we don’t even know that, that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a nice high-margin product to keep their margins up while still being able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beat the cheap phone in the lineup and they’d have fewer parts that are being manufactured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together. It would be a net win operationally and profit wise almost certainly as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also software wise they want to go all 64 bit. I am guessing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 10 does not support 32 bit operating system or 30 bit CPUs. Isn’t already
⏹️ ▶️ John a requirement for like you have to upload a 64 bit app for some thing. What is the what is the carrot
⏹️ ▶️ John they were dangling for there or the stick. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to have a 64 bit binary for any submission after like this past January or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was it was it was a while ago now. But you can still have a 32-bit thing as well. Yes, but also this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can now, if you want to, you can now ship only 64-bit for the first time. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iOS 9, I believe it’s the first time you can do that, where now you can say, you know what, now my app only runs on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 64-bit devices. Before you could not do that. And so now they’re going to have the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lineup, as far as I know, except maybe definitely not the 5C. But once the 5C is gone, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the whole lineup now running 64-bit chips that also can run metal. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is all like, you know, what they did to the Mac moving a bunch of stuff to metal for El Capitan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They can now do that to iOS next year with iOS 10 and move a whole bunch of stuff to requiring metal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they if they then just don’t have any devices that can’t run metal, they can they can do that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can be power savings next year, that can be performance increases. So there’s a whole bunch of reasons to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all of this is predicated on the entire currently active for sale lineup,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having 64 bit chips that can run metal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did they say at the la at this year’s WWDC that in either OS 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or iOS, that core animation is now running on metal?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think they’ve already, I think they’re already doing the thing where like, if metal is available, like they have a dual code path
⏹️ ▶️ John for a lot of the stuff, even an iOS nine, where if metal is available, they will use it. And if not,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll fall back to the other way. Uh, I don’t know if it’s pervasive. And like Marco said, there’s, there’s a big wind to be had of like, not
⏹️ ▶️ John even supporting the other code path. Like if you could just say, okay, well, iOS 10, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, is metal everywhere, it doesn’t support OpenGL, doesn’t run on devices that couldn’t run metal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll be interesting though also to see if they go this way and if iOS 10 is 64-bit only,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there still the ability to run applications that haven’t been updated since this requirement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are only 32-bit? Because right now, the way the phone works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now is if you run an app that does not have a 64-bit version up its binary, which basically means it hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updated since this past January or earlier. And the developer was really irresponsible for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the year before that. If you if you have an app that it’s only 32 bit binary,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the system has to load a whole bunch of 32 bit frameworks into memory just for that app. Having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one 32 bit app running has an abnormally large cost associated with it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resource usage on your phone. Whereas if all your apps 64-bit and there are no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 32-bit apps loaded you then save that giant chunk of memory and whatever performance and battery cost comes
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah you know I’ll go to do to help that as maybe put more RAM in its
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco devices over
⏹️ ▶️ John time over like a multi-year period that that number could change anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco over an infinite time scale so I’m saying like a couple years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah right anyway so so now like you know if they go 64-bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only with iOS 10 it would this be the first time that they would actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut off compatibility with running old apps. Because with iOS, if they’ve ever done that, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have an app that hasn’t been updated since 2008. You can still run that on an iPhone 6 Plus today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It won’t look very good, but it will run. And part of the App Store’s appeal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on paper at least, is that it has this giant library of apps. And I’m sure lots of people, myself included,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still very occasionally need to use some kind of obscure ancient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that’s still, you know, that is giant on the current phones and has the iOS 6 keyboard and everything and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn’t updated in forever. If you lose the ability to run all those, it’ll kinda hurt. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John think they’d do that? They’re gonna, like maybe not next year, but like if only to not
⏹️ ▶️ John have to support like the old ARM 7 instruction set and to be able to be like, you know, or all
⏹️ ▶️ John 7S and 7Q or whatever the hell they come up with next. Like to be able to, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re still supporting Thumb, right? the little arm for like the little tiny one. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t there like two on the original iPhone wasn’t there two instruction sets that you could use like they would
⏹️ ▶️ John just love to ditch that silicon like you know it’s just they’ll do it eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was 10 might be like a nice round number turning point. I feel like it’ll be two more years
⏹️ ▶️ John before they pull the trigger on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John knows Apple you know one or two years I think is a reasonable time frame for them deciding to can all those
⏹️ ▶️ John ancient apps that haven’t updated because really like they’ve had time it’s like it’s kind of like the whole 30-pin
⏹️ ▶️ John connector thing like where anyone anyone complaining about that it’s like you know they kept that connector for almost a
⏹️ ▶️ John decade I think yeah that is a reasonable amount of time like you know I know it might seem like well it may have been
⏹️ ▶️ John a decade but I just got an iPad last year and I bought all these cables and that’s again you’re right everyone sometimes someone buys it
⏹️ ▶️ John just the year before the transition that’s a bummer for you but in the grand scheme of things if you’re if your same binary
⏹️ ▶️ John has been running since day one of the app store on iOS 2.0, I think it’s okay now for us
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, okay, well, you didn’t update it in how many years it’s been? Uh, six years since the
⏹️ ▶️ John app store? Seven? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that, that’s fine. That is, that is a, that
⏹️ ▶️ John is a reasonable window. So I can say this year or next year, I would not be surprised to see them doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’ll do it basically in line with like, when, when do we have the system on the chip design that
⏹️ ▶️ John reaps the benefits from dropping all these instruction sets? That’s the time it will happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any other thoughts on the touch?
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, yeah, they, unlike the poor suckers who get phones, if you get an iPod Touch, you can pick from 16, 32, 64, and 128.
⏹️ ▶️ John Still the same crazy price range between them, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no, 32’s only 50 bucks more. So they actually, like, they inserted 32 where it would go in the phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pricing if it was there. So you have 16 as the base, 64 for $100 more. In the middle, you have 32 for $50 more.
⏹️ ▶️ John know, but it’s like, uh, if you do the actual curves, they’re like, how much does this much flash memory actually cost? Like it just, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make… Anyway, it’s nice that there’s a 32 in there. It would be nicer if they dropped
⏹️ ▶️ John the 16, but if any product can justify the 16, it’s this. It’s the cheapest, you know, like the 199,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna give it to your kid, like whatever. Like this is the only product, they’d just still be selling with 16
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs of memory in it. But it’s nice that they have a 32 in there. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John in time for 32 to become like, actually a little bit too small as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? Well, and keep in mind, there’ve been a lot of changes recently that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are really making it easier to have smaller capacity devices. So, iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photo library is a huge one, because then your photos don’t have to live on your phone anymore, or on your iPod.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And with all the iOS 9 stuff, with app thinning, and all this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, that’s all designed for minimizing disk space usage of your apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, although there’s gonna be a huge lag time on that, because how long is it gonna take for people to pick that up? They have that download on demand
⏹️ ▶️ John for downloading game levels on demand, the app slicing and app thinning like all that stuff should just massively
⏹️ ▶️ John reduce things if developers actually use them and like I don’t know what the lag time is going to be on using them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope game developers are incentivized to do it because a lot of time no one’s going to buy like you know infinity
⏹️ ▶️ John blade version 17 if it’s like three gigs and you know everyone with a 16 gig every
⏹️ ▶️ John kid with a 16 gig device is just not going to have room for a three gig game but if you can download it in 200 megs and just
⏹️ ▶️ John download levels on demand. I mean, I worry about like, you know, when I
⏹️ ▶️ John watched that session, WVC, they kept showing like, Oh, you can look how small your app is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then we’ll download this thing on demand. You know, it didn’t seem
⏹️ ▶️ John like there was a progress API, it didn’t seem like there was a callback where you could show a progress bar, it didn’t seem like there was anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John it just seemed like what your game would have to say is put up a static screen that says, loading level, please wait.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if it’s a 500 meg level, and they’re, know they’re on cellular forget it right but if
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re on Wi-Fi and the Wi-Fi is slow or the server like I worry about the viability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also lots of kids go long spans during the day where they are not connected to any network with an iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll be disappointed when they advance to the next level and realize they can’t play the next level right until they get home then yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John that API looks like one of those that whole API for on-demand downloading it looks like one of those APIs that will be better next year
⏹️ ▶️ John after everyone tries it and realizes there’s insufficient amount of of, you know, sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John resolution, so to speak, of like, how can I get hooks into this API to provide
⏹️ ▶️ John a good user experience to let people know what’s going on? And, you know, and to do reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John things and not make it look like my game is broken, when in reality, it’s just either in the process of downloading a giant level,
⏹️ ▶️ John or failed to download a giant level, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, or you can, you know, if you look at it from the perspective of the game publishers, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little reason for them to adopt it. Like, it solves a problem that Apple has, but it doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve a problem developers have unless you really are trying to ship a five gig game.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, these games are big. Like I said, Infinity Blade’s already like one or two gigs and it’s just not gonna fit
⏹️ ▶️ John on a 16 gig device because the kids will fill them. And so they can’t buy your game or they’ll buy it and regret
⏹️ ▶️ John it and be angry that they can’t use it. Like, people want, they want you to tap their link and get
⏹️ ▶️ John their game on your device and play your game, especially if it’s a free to play. Like, they get no money then if it’s just, you gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John launch it, right? So I think game developers are incentivized to do some stuff, but even just plain old
⏹️ ▶️ John app developers, I really hope that people do the app thinning and slicing stuff, because it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like, from Apple’s perspective, like, look how easy we made it for you, just tag things and do this, and
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll automatically put the version and we’ll have the different binary, like, that should be a win. All it
⏹️ ▶️ John takes is for people to rebuild their apps for iOS 9 and upload new versions of them, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope that will happen for all the apps that I care about, because they’re all like, sort of actively maintained by people that are
⏹️ ▶️ John just gonna do this anyway as a matter of course.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m just so happy that I don’t have to do any of those APIs because Overcast is like four megs.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should do them anyway. You could be like two megs. Do them, well do them for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I know, I know.
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More on the “new” iPods
⏹️ ▶️ John A couple more things on the iPod Touches before we move on. What do you think of the colors? Yeah, that’s one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John things I’m going to bring up. The only black one is Space Gray. All the other ones are white on the front.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t notice that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Honestly, I think the colors look pretty good. The color, yeah, I do like them. I like them. I like these colors. This
⏹️ ▶️ John lineup of colors is more appealing to me than the past lineup of colors. I don’t like anything with a white front.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like how it looks as a product, but I don’t like looking at it. So it’s kind of disappointing me that now there’s only one
⏹️ ▶️ John with a black front.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m with you on that. and I wish there were more color options, but the ones they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think look good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Black and gold at least, come on guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they’re not gonna do black and space gray. Space gray is the new black, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean like a gold back and then black on the front. Oh. All I’m talking about is the
⏹️ ▶️ John front. All the fronts are white except for the model that is space gray on the back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that how the iPhone is? Does the gold iPhone have a black front?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it is. Obviously they don’t have 17 colors for the iPhone, so maybe you don’t notice. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John this has been this way with the iPod touch in the past as well which is why I keep buying the space gray ones but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still I worry the black one being the sole one there that it’s only a matter
⏹️ ▶️ John of time before they are not that I’m buying these for myself anyway but anyway both of my kids have they have ones that are
⏹️ ▶️ John different colors on the back but both of them are black on the front because both well one was originally bought for me and then
⏹️ ▶️ John one was bought for my kids directly
⏹️ ▶️ John when I bought it I remember thinking I can’t believe I’m buying this iPod touch that’s like two and a half years old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real-time follow-up the the gold iPhone has the white front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco however the gold MacBook one has the black bezel well
⏹️ ▶️ John I know what if they did it like they made it if they’re in a MacBook with white around the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t like white around the screen I do like how it looks like that that blue one with the white looks great the red one with the white looks
⏹️ ▶️ John great like it looks great in product shots I just I want to look at it as a screen, but other people like it. So there you go. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John cool colors, no lanyard, which I think they discovered that nobody wants to put a strap
⏹️ ▶️ John around their wrist ever. Like, I wonder what percentage of kids use the little wrist strap on the Wii when
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey using those Wii
⏹️ ▶️ John Like parents probably make them do it. They’ll destroy their TVs by chucking the remote at it or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I can honestly say that I never saw anyone in real life with the wrist strap connected to their iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John Touch. And though I had an iPod Touch with the wrist strap, I never put it on my wrist. I think it’s still in the box.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you ever fling it at your TV? No, I did.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a cost savings the space savings You don’t have that little moving part, which was kind of fun to play with
⏹️ ▶️ John a little clicky You know laying your thing in and out and in and out But yeah That’s an interesting experiment that apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t pan out because if it had panned out you’d be seeing those little things on all their products Instead of just being on one
⏹️ ▶️ John for this weird three-year period and then going away. Oh And the final thing I punch no, I’m not getting
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPod touch I have the main reason is of course I have the phone now We’ve already
⏹️ ▶️ John got like the family plan they pay for and every people asking about if I’m gonna go back to a flip phone I’m not but I think the biggest thing keeping
⏹️ ▶️ John me on my iPhone is that I’m now used to the bigger screen like it when I Pick up my kids devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t imagine using that tiny little thing. I’m now used to it. My hand is used to it I’m used to the extra space.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m used to the extra pixels. I Can’t go back again. So Congratulations Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks Obama. Right? So, are you gonna get one of the brand new iPod Nanos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or iPod Shuffles? New question mark, right? Yeah, I think it’s actually not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a question anymore. I think it’s just not new. I’m pretty sure that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John confirmed. Is it a soft, is there different software on them, maybe?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, there’s different colors. I believe that is literally the only change.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was trying to look into this, but like honestly I had no record. I was looking at the tech specs and like, I don’t remember what
⏹️ ▶️ John the old ones were. It’s kind of disappointing to me that, like there are many areas both of these
⏹️ ▶️ John products could be improved in both hardware and software. Just through like experience of like having
⏹️ ▶️ John this been in the market for a long time, people using them, knowing which buttons are hard to press, how is it weird to hold, what materials
⏹️ ▶️ John you could do better, what seam tends to open up over time, which parts of the OS are slow
⏹️ ▶️ John or don’t support a thing, but it’s like, just the product is not selling enough for them to make those changes,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess. So it’s just more of the same in different colors. I think it’s still a good idea to sell these
⏹️ ▶️ John products. New colors is a way to get more people to buy them.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s another sort of starter product for like a little kid who wants to listen to music. You’re not gonna buy them a Sony Walkman,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You’re gonna go buy them a little iPod, a little cheap iPod. You don’t care too much if they send it through the laundry
⏹️ ▶️ John or destroy it, especially like a Shuffle that like 50 bucks or whatever. It’s good that these products are in the lineup.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think of all of the iPod Nanos and Shuffles they’ve ever made, these are not the best versions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think I agree. What’s interesting though is that these are officially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know updated in quotes, but they can’t use Apple Music tracks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if you download something from Apple Music, so anything download from Apple Music is DRM’d and it’s kind of time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bombed so that you are not supposed to be able to play Apple Music tracks if you end your subscription to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Music. iPods, I guess they just I guess they decided through the DRM like they can’t really they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t really guarantee that an iPod will have its clock set properly or that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll really ever check in once it syncs or anything like that. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John do they even have clocks? I mean, they don’t have wireless. Well, they have FM radios or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s basically because they can’t validate the files. If you got your Apple Music files onto your iPod Nano,
⏹️ ▶️ John they would either never play, which is the current option, or play forever
⏹️ ▶️ John because as long as you just don’t plug your iPod Nano into anything, those are basically the only choices. So
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I’ll put a link in the show notes that Serenity wrote about this whole thing. Like it’s not surprising that if you’re, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming files that rely on you having a subscription cannot go on devices that can’t confirm that you have a subscription.
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell if you have a subscription and they could have updated them to know you could have updated them, but that would have been,
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess, more time and effort and technology and software that they’re willing to invest in this product line.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And if groupers right that like the reason like the reason the the nano still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has the iOS 6 look to its fake iOS UI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Gruber’s sources say that there’s literally like nobody left in the team. Apparently the team that did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was poached for the watch team and so there’s basically just nobody who can work on it right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that sounds plausible and because you know imagine if you’re if you work at Apple like you do you really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want the job of updating the iPod nano software every three years to look more like fake iOS like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably not a great thing to be working on if you can help it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the ADP tipster wants us to know that if you have trusted time on the device that you can still use that and there’d be you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you tried to reset the time it would invalidate things and so on and so forth. But all of that I would assume would require investment
⏹️ ▶️ John and and software at the very least and possibly also hardware that doesn’t exist. And so they’re not going to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John investment that you know, they’re not going to add away for these devices to know maybe that maybe he’s saying they already
⏹️ ▶️ John have this feature. It just seems like kind of investment in changing
⏹️ ▶️ John the feature set of these products was just not in the cards for this revision. Changing the colors is something they could just do in manufacturing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the iPod Nano is 150 bucks, 16 gigs. For 50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks more you get the iPod Touch. Now granted it is a larger device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but otherwise like why does the Nano still exist? Why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would anybody get the Nano for 150 bucks if for 50 bucks more you get to get the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capacity in a full-blown pretty good iOS device.
⏹️ ▶️ John Smaller, lighter, simpler, has an FM radio. I mean, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not a big area, it’s not a growth market, but I mean the Shuffle I’m assuming you’re excluding that one because you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh well the Shuffle is so damn small that if you want something that’s like microscopic and weighs nothing this is your only option.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sucks but the Shuffle has always sucked. I’ve owned multiple Shuffles in my life they’ve all sucked they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it’s a terrible device
⏹️ ▶️ John it is awful I like that remember the stick of gum on the original on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re all yeah yes I had the stick of gum on that was that was one of
⏹️ ▶️ John them I’m sad that one broke cuz I love that one I thought that was a very clever design I mean obviously it’s way too big by modern
⏹️ ▶️ John standards but back then like I I really like that design I like the fact that had a little thing winner on your
⏹️ ▶️ John neck I like the little stick of gum thing and it was nice and lightweight I like
⏹️ ▶️ John the shuffle before they pulled in the margins and sort of wrap the shuffle more tightly
⏹️ ▶️ John around that circular control because that one had a place for you to put your fingers to open the little chomper
⏹️ ▶️ John like the little clamp on the back
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco without accidentally hitting
⏹️ ▶️ John the the previous track button button you know this one is just too small to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John with that circular button on the on the shuffle has never really been great but it does have the advantage that it’s super microscopic I
⏹️ ▶️ John remember the one that was like the trident gum that had no buttons on it yeah that was short-lived For good
⏹️ ▶️ John reason those are the days yeah There’s a lot of interesting innovation and like how
⏹️ ▶️ John small we can make this it’s just kind of sad to see it not You know like this is it this little square
⏹️ ▶️ John that you clip onto things anyway It’s not that bad, but it’s a why the nano exists. I think it is different enough
⏹️ ▶️ John I you know I think it’s differentiated is differentiated from the shuffle by having a screen and a place where you can do stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and It’s differentiated from the iPod by being I think from the perspective of people who want to jog with it or something
⏹️ ▶️ John The nano is the size that you could like, then you wouldn’t notice it. It’s still, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John below the threshold of, you know, even if not so much from weight, but just from like having a
⏹️ ▶️ John big playing card side stiff thing like strapped to your body somewhere, whereas the Nano, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John is down in the range of, you know, more towards the shuffle end of things where you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John someplace inobtrusive to shove it. You wouldn’t even have to buy like a dedicated case for it, I would imagine, but maybe you’d want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The shuffle to me is the, I’m going to do some sort of aggressive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working out with this and I don’t want to break any other device. And if I do break this, it’s not the end of the earth.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Nano though, I agree with you guys, it’s kind of a weird gray area. And the only thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can think of is what if it’s for a kid who doesn’t necessarily, isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily old enough to be able to handle, or maybe you don’t want them to handle a full on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey device. But you know, like the iPod touch, but maybe this is sort of a halfway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s more interesting and allows you affords you some amount of control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet is still not a full on iPod touch.
⏹️ ▶️ John It keeps the kid off the internet. Basically, they want to listen to music. This keeps them off. It allows parents to delay
⏹️ ▶️ John facing the inevitable, which is how do I handle my child who has access to the internet? Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John push it off for a couple more years, right? Although they still have to deal with my home.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you put this music on my iPod, please? Because they have no way to get music on it without connecting to
⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes for crying out loud.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m asking this honestly. Do kids still care about music? Yeah, they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I honestly didn’t know because it seems like music is very generational, but also that in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recent generations we are actually moving more away from it, if that makes sense. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco music is becoming less important as the generational, cultural entertainment
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know does that make sense seems about the same like my you know They your kids one day will come home And they will
⏹️ ▶️ John know a pop song that you have never played or heard
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey of and they know all the words to
⏹️ ▶️ John it like how Did this happen? Yeah, that’s appears they have you know
⏹️ ▶️ John They find out about music they get interested in music They eventually have demands for songs that they want on their iPods,
⏹️ ▶️ John and yeah, it’s still a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right fair enough Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Igloo, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MailRout, 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, It was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them At
⏹️ ▶️ Casey C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anti-Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s accidental It’s accidental They didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcasts So long
After-show: Overcast development
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What’s going on in Overcast these days? I haven’t heard much about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh man, I mean I’m working my butt off on it basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a couple hours a day?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, pretty much. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey maybe half hour, 45 minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m working on a big 2.0 and I’m still like… I mean I’ve said this on Twitter a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times, it’s not news that I’m working on 2.0. For me, 2.0 will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a few big new features, but it’s mostly about kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of nailing down all the different parts. Like this week I was working on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drumroll please, the downloader as usual. Really? Uh-huh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I finally figured out there’s one of the problems that people keep reporting to me is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that storage usage just seems to just keep growing over time for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any given installation. It’s temp files that are created by the background download system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the background download process in iOS, which I hate with a passion. There are temp files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that generates, and then if a download is interrupted for any reason, like if you force quit the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app or if the app crashes or sometimes even just if the download fails, and then it retries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, it’s creating a new file and starting over again. And the old file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just gets abandoned. So the old temp file where it was downloaded to where it was partially downloaded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to is never deleted. And I actually discovered this behavior months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago. And I issued a fix back then to basically scan for these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco temp files and any temp file that was above a certain age that hadn’t been touched for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a couple of days or something, I would delete. That caused lots of problems because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the download system does not expect its files to be deleted from under itself. And they’re also downloaded to this undocumented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco location that you’re not really supposed to know about inside your app sandbox. also recently moved that location
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a different location. That’s the problem. So now all of a sudden I thought I had this problem under
⏹️ ▶️ Marco control. And now people are saying, Oh, it’s, you know, I’m all the space usage, it’s mostly because of that it’s mostly because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they move the location of these files. So now I’m scanning the old directory, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new one. And so I have to go look at that again, and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously change where it’s deleting, but also then now test to make sure it’s not messing up too badly when it does delete them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sure that the downloader doesn’t then have weird behavior or crash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it finds that its files are gone. It’s a whole ordeal. The background download system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just incredibly unreliable for me. I know some developers seem to have good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco luck with it. It has been insanely unreliable for me in all of my usage
⏹️ ▶️ John You download more things and I think probably for more creaky servers like because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know tons of things you’re downloading all the time is practically the whole point of your application and I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John seen lots of really slow downloads from wherever people are hosting their podcasts so it’s a it’s a formula to exercise
⏹️ ▶️ John a downloader but if everything is in the caches folder like there are jobs I assume that wandering
⏹️ ▶️ John that are wandering through iOS like purging the caches folder when you’re under disk pressure there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s nothing that you can do as an app developer to try to say hey system uh if you would
⏹️ ▶️ John like to come by and reclaim space from my caches folder please do that now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think you can trigger it it automatically triggers when disk space is actually filling up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then that’s when if you ever spotted an app that says that where the icon is dimmed out for a minute and under it if replace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the title with the word cleaning dot dot dot that’s what it’s doing is it’s it’s deleting all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cache and temporary files from that app sandbox in order to reclaim disk space so I’m working on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that also I overhauled the artwork system because it was not only buggy but it was causing bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scrolling performance on the main list of episodes that everybody was complaining about and they were right. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I fixed that. There’s a couple of sources of common crashes that I fixed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most importantly, there’s been a bug for months, literally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since I think February. There’s been a bug for months where you would occasionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you manually reordered a playlist, sometimes that ordering would be reset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to the default ordering of whatever that playlist is, whatever the sort method is for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So your custom ordering would be lost. And this drives people crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Understandably. It drives me crazy. It happened to me, too. It drives me crazy. Because it is kind of a form
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of data loss. It’s really annoying. It’s like, I organized this a certain way, and now it’s just undid it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this took me months to find this bug. And it turns out to be a concurrency bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the way… So basically, getting into the weeds for a brief minute here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast data storage layer is built on a library that I wrote that’s open source called FC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco model. And it’s basically a little model layer between SQLite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you. And so it does not use core data. It uses FC model, which kind of replaces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco core data in the role here. In the initial design of FC model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instances of your models in memory were unique. So that if you requested
⏹️ ▶️ Marco post ID one from one thread and then some other thread also requested post ID one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the first one was still in memory, the second one would just get another pointer to the same object. So that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, there was only one post with ID one in memory at any given time. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you modified that, it would be the same with between all the places that was being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accessed. If you modified a value on it and didn’t save it yet, you would get that from everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In practice, that caused a bunch of weird concurrency issues and weird potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs, weird actual bugs. So this past February, I switched it so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you requested ID 1 from one thread and then requested ID 1 from somewhere else, those got separate copies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so all writes were being done separately. And there were some things in place to make sure it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t get stale data here and there and everything but basically I changed the way that worked and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has for the most part it didn’t cause any problems and it solved a few other problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unfortunately the playlist reordering bug is caused by this and I haven’t quite nailed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the details yet because it’s it has taken me months to have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen in a debugger once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah because you know it’s this weird like concurrency related debug and it’s very hard to reproduce.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ve asked people for months like, if you find a way to reliably reproduce this, please
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve just thrown some sleep calls now that you know that you’re pretty sure that you know where it is you can confirm it by throwing in some sleep calls
⏹️ ▶️ John to induce the race.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the one time I caught it in the debugger, I kind of I got a pretty good idea that it was due to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco due to this model being unique in memory kind of thing. Pretty sure it was from that anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now I have a different branch of my FC model now called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unique to that goes back to the unique in memory model system.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t you just use optimistic locking with the the one where they’re not unique? I don’t think I know what optimistic locking is.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like your version everything and then when you go to do the update you say do this update but only do the update if the version
⏹️ ▶️ John is the version that it was when I read it and if it’s not then you know you have a conflict you know you lost a race and then you have you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John resolve it in some way. But basically, like, instead of checking every single time, because you get two guys got a thing, one guy’s gonna write first.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re not the guy who got the right first, when you write your thing, you could be overwriting the other guys changes. So you do the
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s the SQL thing, like update, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and ID equals blah, blah, blah. And you see, you see zero
⏹️ ▶️ John rows update, you’re like, Oh, actually, I thought I read and then wrote it back, we’re really someone else wrote back. So I have to reread
⏹️ ▶️ John incorporate those changes before I can write back. It’s just, you know, like, or you got to go to the Brent Simmons route, and
⏹️ ▶️ John only do updates to your model from a single thread.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right well so database access has always been serialized onto one thread.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You could use you could read them for anywhere but it was all being serialized behind the scenes on a serial queue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you couldn’t actually be doing simultaneous reads and writes but you could like you know hold on to things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weren’t not they weren’t quite saved and have it be changed under you and everything and then I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few months back I did change it so that rights were all being done inside serial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blocks to so that rather than saying, you know, model dot name equals Bob model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save. Instead of that, you would say model reload and save in this block. And then in the block, you would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name equals Bob or whatever. And so those are all serialized as well. So that way, and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally a reload and save, like you would first do a select, then do your changes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then save them back automatically on a serial thread. So it should have solved that problem. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it solved it in a few in lots of places. But I guess for something was still happening that it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite getting it everywhere. So the new system, the unique to also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does the Brent Simmons thing where now it’s all just happening on the main thread.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for a while, I thought, there is no way I should have, you know, database stuff on the main thread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will cause UI performance problems and everything. And I have such big databases for some of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some users. no way I can afford that. So I just never tried it. And then last week, I tried it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it turns out it’s fine. And there are so many problems it solves.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Having all the database stuff on the main thread. First of all, it’s fast enough, doesn’t matter at all. Second of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of places where there was UI lag before from blocking on a database on like a massive database operation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, like the initial sync. A lot of times, you know, you think you’re offloading it to this background thread,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the background thread triggers an update that post notification. And the UI says,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, the data change, I have to reload the data to show my UI. So then it’s blocking the it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blocking the UI anyway, while it’s waiting for that reload to come through. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turns out the whole idea of getting these operations off the main thread in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually didn’t solve the problem, because usually the UI was still blocked waiting for the database thread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to finish what it was doing. Anyway, so once you move things to the main thread all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco database stuff then it like it oh my god it becomes so much simpler once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again Brent Simmons is right Brent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually right and when it comes to stuff like this he’s really usually right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so with this like if you make a change on the main thread what what happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with so many changes as I said is the UI responds to the notification and does something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco update something when all that’s happening on the main thread, it removes so many like dispatch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco async calls and so many. Oh, well, you know, so many potential deadlocks of well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the database did this now update, update the UI to reflect this, then the UI calls in the database again, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some it’s just solve so many problems. So anyway, this is very long and boring. But that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is why the playlist reordering bug happened. I made that change a week ago in development.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this used to hit me every few days. it hasn’t hit me once since. So I’m pretty sure I got it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it sure looks like the rest of the app still works fine. But I’m reserving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying that definitively. But it sure looks like I’m not having any other problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I asked you about this before, but now it’s even more relevant if you’re doing your database access on the main thread. Do you
⏹️ ▶️ John use any of the SQLite pragmas to fiddle with the defaults to make it faster?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do, yeah. I started doing that about six months ago. you turn do you turn off the synchronous
⏹️ ▶️ John thing let me see the thing that makes it like the thing that says like really seriously flush it to disk before
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re done turning it off says like it’ll say yep no i’m totally done when really it isn’t but like
⏹️ ▶️ John because we’re using flash like i mean that’s the risky one that’s like the dangerous one and then i guess uh temp store
⏹️ ▶️ John memory instead of temp store disk or whatever but some of those make a big difference used to make a big difference back when i
⏹️ ▶️ John was screwing with sequel light and so once you’re doing it on the main thread it’s probably worthwhile to revisit
⏹️ ▶️ John the pragma page and see if there’s anything else you could tweak. I would probably not recommend the synchronous one because you don’t want to corrupt your database
⏹️ ▶️ John because then you’re SOL, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am doing synchronous off and journal mode memory. There you go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you’re living the dangerous life. I mean, I guess a power failure is like, it’s just, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, it’s a battery powered device. It can’t get unplugged, I guess, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, and also this is just data that this is basically an offline cache of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that’s synced to the web. So, you know, if local database gets corrupted somehow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is very unlikely, as you said, but if it gets corrupted and it can’t be opened, then it just redownloads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the web. So it’s like, it’s not like I’m, I’m not losing meaningful user data here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, what was the occasion that you had for fiddling with SQLite out of curiosity?
⏹️ ▶️ John Web applications, database backed web applications, and the database that backs them has been all sorts of things at various
⏹️ ▶️ John And I, and you know, if you’re just doing something you don’t you want to do database stuff with
⏹️ ▶️ John especially in languages that have sort of a uniform interface to any database it’s just a question of picking the driver
⏹️ ▶️ John like Perl does and like many other languages do you’re like well I’ll prototype this with SQL like isn’t you don’t have to worry about starting
⏹️ ▶️ John a server and doing all that crap you’re just you know it’s just convenient I mean hell even if you just do
⏹️ ▶️ John SQLite you know in memory database like it’s a great way to just prototype something it doesn’t even litter your file with this you just tell
⏹️ ▶️ John it database name and don’t give it don’t it a file name and it will just do everything in memory.