153: Larger, Less Portable Pastures
22 Jan 2016The decline of iAd, iOS limitations vs. powerful Mac hacks, and saltines.
Episode Description:
- Pre-Show: Winter weather
- Follow-up:
- Protocol extensions
- Testing NSURLSession with Swift
- Studies on blue light and sleep quality
- Casey's iMac
- iAd App Network Discontinued
- New Apple music apps
- iOS limitations vs. powerful Mac hacks
- Post-show:
- Marco jailbrakes two phones
- Saltines vs. Wheat Thins
- TrumpScript
Sponsored by:
- MailRoute: Hosted spam and virus protection for email. Use this link for 10% off for the life of your account.
- Squarespace: Build it beautiful. Use code “ATP” for 10% off your first order.
- Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Use promo code atp10 for 10% off your first order.
Chapters
- Winter storm watch
- Follow-up: iMac box stacking
- Follow-up: Mocks in Swift
- Follow-up: Blue-light science
- Sponsor: Fracture (code ATP10)
- Casey’s iMac Reloaded
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- What happened to iAd?
- Sponsor: MailRoute
- Oh yeah, iTunes Radio
- New Apple music-creation apps
- Powerful hacks vs. iOS
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Marco’s jailbreaks
Winter storm watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you’re about to get a bunch of snow? You know, we’re due for like 30 inches. Consider
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this entire area shuts down over about six. As we record this Wednesday evening, the snow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t supposed to start until Friday. And on Facebook, I saw four or five different people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show images of the grocery store bread aisle, which is eviscerated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The bacon aisle, because hashtag the South, is gutted. It’s just apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a disaster out there. And there’s not been a flake on the ground as far as I’m aware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean we’re supposed to get like the tail end of what’s hitting you, so we’re supposed to get about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a foot maybe, like about a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey day later. Which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for you guys is like a dusting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean like that’s heavy snowfall, but it’s not unusual. That happens at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least once or twice every winter and it’s fine. However, I tried to buy rock salt today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there was one kind left, it was the most expensive kind of course, and it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the heavy commercial pro blend or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like a special artisanal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well if you don’t use it all you can sprinkle it all over your seared salmon or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the entire region up here is panicking for snow that we get every year. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I can’t even imagine what you guys are going through.
⏹️ ▶️ John People underestimate the amount of food in their house. Like the idea is that the roads will be impassable, which
⏹️ ▶️ John does that really ever happen? Maybe by case you will. and then we will starve to death in our home because
⏹️ ▶️ John we will not have enough food. Nevermind that it would take a really long time for most people to starve to death without any food
⏹️ ▶️ John and you don’t have to worry about water because you can always melt snow. So many things we learned from the long dark.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so like they run to the store and we gotta buy all the food because what if we can’t get to the grocery store for like
⏹️ ▶️ John two days? People don’t know how long can you live just off the food
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, see, but that’s you guys. You guys are prepared for snow, whereas for us, I guarantee,
⏹️ ▶️ John could live off the food in your house for like six months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No way. Yes. I mean, if you planned well, probably. If I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John planned well.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but you don’t realize how many calories are in things. Like just a box of granola bars, like
⏹️ ▶️ John added up, like 100 calories per bar. Like how many calories do you think you need per day? I’m not saying it would be pleasant. I’m just saying like people
⏹️ ▶️ John are not in imminent danger. Nevermind that like the house next to you has people with food and the house next to them
⏹️ ▶️ John has people with food. They’re like, we’re in civilization here, people. You’re not going to starve to death in your home. You’ll be fine. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, everyone does go to the stores. I mean, a lot of it is just, not so much that you’re gonna starve
⏹️ ▶️ John to death, but let me just get in that one last grocery run before it is annoying
⏹️ ▶️ John to drive to the grocery store. Not that the roads will be impassable, but it will be more annoying. And, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, there’ll be problems getting out of the driveway, maybe it’ll take a while to shovel, you know? And so it’s like, oh, let me just do my grocery run
⏹️ ▶️ John now. Everybody, it’s like a, what do you call it? A barrier, fence.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna help me out here, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What? A fence is a kind of barrier, that is true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the mutex thing where everyone stacks
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco up on it. Yeah, anyway. Memory barrier,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. It just causes everyone to end up going at the same time. That looks like people are panicking, but really
⏹️ ▶️ John it is just taking the normally more random distribution of their supermarket trips and putting them all
⏹️ ▶️ John on the same day. So that makes me feel better about humanity, if I think about it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason I was preparing for this today and not like three days from now when this stuff is actually about to hit us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because I feel like I’m about to get really sick because everything’s going around, my whole family’s sick, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starting to feel it. So I’m thinking I need to stock up on food to get me through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being sick. At the same time, everyone else is thinking to stock up on food to get them through the apocalypse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just stay at home and eat saltine crackers. You can live for weeks on it. But everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saltines are always stale. Doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John still are life-giving.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But nobody ever needs saltines enough for their saltines to be fresh.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everybody needs saltines like twice a year so everyone’s saltines at any given time are stale I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be quite a saltine
⏹️ ▶️ John fiend but I’m now I’m now convinced that when you when you buy them from the store
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m now convinced that they’re stale like in the store because a few times I bought like a brand new
⏹️ ▶️ John package of them intending to use them for soup like as you do and open them up and I’m like these are already
⏹️ ▶️ John still how is that even possible I feel like just you know being one of those old people and returning to the supermarket and say I picked these
⏹️ ▶️ John saltines off your shelf and they’re already stale.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to just go shopping with you sometime. Amen. That would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing. Well I mean there are so many better crackers. Wheat thins are way better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Saltines were the only cracker in my house when I was a kid so that’s what I had but I could you know
⏹️ ▶️ John I I don’t need them anymore, but I did back in the day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slim salty pickins.
Follow-up: iMac box stacking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rob wrote in to tell us, and I feel like I’ve seen some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conflicting information about this, but the general theme seems to be true, that at the very least,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iMac trapezoidal boxes are in fact shipped, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry, are stored upside down and then right side up, upside down, right side
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. And so Rob wrote in and said, as a former Apple Store employee, I can tell you that IMAX are stacked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the shelves in the right side up upside down fashion They are not however shipped this way when the computers are shipped Each one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is in a standard cardboard box like every other project product for secrecy I got to tell you mine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was shipped to me which may be different than the stores It was a standard cardboard box in that it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unmarked on the outside, but it was the same basic shape Anyway, Rob continues. They don’t care how many computers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can fit in the truck They however they do care about how many computers can be stacked on the shelves in the back where there’s already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a lot of room.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, some people sent pictures as well, like a palette of IMAX showing them alternating. Even the palette was
⏹️ ▶️ John weird. Like the one photo we had, it did show them saving space by alternating. They weren’t upside down, right set up. They were like laying
⏹️ ▶️ John laying flat, you know, pointing left and right. But then sometimes on some layers of the palette,
⏹️ ▶️ John there would be like these filler blocks feel like because I guess it didn’t work out to be completely
⏹️ ▶️ John flat. So there were these these trying these triangular filler regions. It’s very strange.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, way it was like all that’s like we’re like you put like the UK keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah you said
⏹️ ▶️ John throwing throwing the mighty mice in there or the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well they come with the mice you don’t need that but it’s like where you need like the the the things that that not everyone needs so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you put like the UK keyboard maybe the trackpad yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John you put stuff with iPod socks
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco anyway it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John at the very least in the back of the Apple stores where there is not a lot of room because they have tons of stuff back there I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ John they definitely pack them in like that and I imagine a lot of them are shipped like that but apparently at all.
Follow-up: Mocks in Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right, moving on. Joe Masolati, I hope I pronounced that right, wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and he said, Casey discussed how mocks and Swift can only be created if the language allows them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I disagree that mocks can only be created by subclassing. Actually, I think that is an anti-pattern. He continued,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mocks can be created by having the class conform to a protocol or if you’re a C-sharp guy like me, an interface.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This can be done inside your own framework and for Apple’s as well. For example, you can mock NSURL session
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by adding a new protocol URL session. Then via protocol extensions, you can have NSURL session conform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your framework. As long as you keep the method signatures the same, Swift will compile without issue. I wrote about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this extensively on my blog, and we will put a link in the show notes. I believe, I don’t think that’s entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accurate what I said. What I had said was that it’s really a lot easier if you do interface or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey protocol, or if you program to interfaces or protocols, because then mocking becomes a lot easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I said that to Joe privately in an email, and he actually just wrote back and said, In so many words, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re on the same page. Actually, let me read from his email. Designed to an interface is great until you end up with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interfaces or protocols with a single implementation of your production code. The Swift solution I proposed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost forces this. Not sure if this is tangential to the initial argument, but it’s something I’m struggling with, which is a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very fair point. There’s a lot of times that I’ve written to interfaces specifically to enable really easy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mocking for my unit tests, but in my actual code, there’s only one implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that interface, and that’s the one I use. So it’s a little bit weird and dodgy, but you can check out his blog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post and kind of see for yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I always forget about protocol extensions. Like as it’s clear that I’m not actually using Swift, but I’m just reading about it on mailing
⏹️ ▶️ John list like, Oh, yeah, protocol extensions. They’re neat. They’re useful. Even though this whole sessions that we see about them, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John already like it just if you’re not used to working that way or thinking in that way, you just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John not didn’t occur to me. But yep, that’s that’s totally possible. That’s the way to do it. And I wouldn’t bother me if I had
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing with only one implementation. It wouldn’t bother me at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, in my extensive experience with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and mocks and general testing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanks, Marco. Go team. Thanks, Marco.
Follow-up: Blue-light science
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have a lot of follow-up about blue light. A lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people have written in about this. I don’t think I am the best of the three of us to summarize
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, so I don’t know if one of you wants to handle this for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll take it, because it was what I said that was partially, if not entirely, wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically, last week, talking about the flux slash night shift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shift, claims of blue light at night being bad for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your sleep quality. I had said that I was not able to find, in my research before the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was not able to find connections that said blue light specifically was bad. What I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finding was saying that just like bright light was bad, and that could negatively affect sleep quality, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blue light didn’t seem to be anything special. Turns out that’s totally wrong, that there’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite a bit of evidence to suggest that all brightness of light does negatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco affect your sleep quality by basically tricking your body into not producing melatonin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that’s right. Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is part of the sleep cycle and everything. It doesn’t produce enough of it or it doesn’t produce it correctly or it tricks the circadian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rhythms or some stuff that’s way above our pay grade here. But looking at any kind of bright
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light before bed will cause this problem. But there’s a point in the blue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spectrum. In fact, we got an email from Dr. Todd Stinsick, who very specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco identified it. Because there are three different kinds of things. We think of the rods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and cones in the eye. There’s also a third kind of light-sensitive cell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing back there that is specifically not for vision, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to regulate this melatonin-type thing for the sleep cycle and for the circadian
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rhythms and all this stuff. forgive me for butchering this, but anyway, this third kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light receptor back in your NRIs, it has a peak sensitivity at 479 nanometers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is… So it’s basically this shade of blue, and that is like the peak sensitivity, so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you get a lot of light on that, it activates these cells the most, and that inhibits the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco melatonin and everything else into telling your body, hey, it’s time for sleep. But it isn’t this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco narrow window where if you just don’t see that shade you’re fine. That shade is just the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco peak of sensitivity and as you get further away from that wavelength in either direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensitivity drops but it still works. So if you if you reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the blue area the blue range of the spectrum you can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more brightness without it being a problem. Whereas if you see so if you see like if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brightness is fixed seeing blue is worse than seeing other colors, you know, for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for they’re far away from that. But you still ideally should be lowering the entire light level. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically the gist of it. So that overall brightness is a problem, but you’re extra sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this to the blue region at night.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was another doctor, professor of neurology, he was more kind to you. He said that you
⏹️ ▶️ John basically got it exactly right. But the same thing, you know, that light can adjust the circadian rhythms, but there’s a particular
⏹️ ▶️ John sensitivity to the blue light lots of people sent us the study showing the particular sensitivity to the blue light
⏹️ ▶️ John but that all light accounts for that this had one extra little nugget saying that another benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John of reducing the amount of blue light at nighttime is it helps the rods in your eye stay adapted to the dark
⏹️ ▶️ John that way when you look up from the screen you won’t like trip over something in your dark house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah he likened it to like like why you why like the military stuff is all like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco red light allegedly was is that true or is that a I always thought that might have been a myth. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John we have a Professor of neurology says it’s true, so it’s probably true that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no I can tell you I have been on a military vessel when it Was out at night, and I can absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell you with for a fact that that is true
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So was everyone just falling asleep all the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no what I mean is that there’s red everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John It is keeping your eyes. It’s the same as the pirate eye patch all over again. You know
⏹️ ▶️ John The what pirate eye patch come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on people is that like when you close one eye when you go to go to the bathroom at? So then you can open it when you turn the light off and see your way
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, that’s why the pirates are the eye patch So when they go below decks where there’s no lights because they didn’t have electricity on their pirate ships
⏹️ ▶️ John They could flip up the eye patch and that eye is adjusted to the dark and they could see better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I Didn’t know that that’s crazy. You thought they all had one eye. Well, I didn’t I had no idea I never thought about a pirate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needing an eye patch before. The
⏹️ ▶️ John pirates are there to eat the saltines. There’s a lot of pirate lore you guys
Sponsor: Fracture (code ATP10)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our first sponsor this week is Fracture. Fracture prints photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in vivid color directly on glass. Go to fractureme.com and use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code ATP10 to get 10% off. With these prints, colors pop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you won’t believe. This is true photo printing on these nice, thin, lightweight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pieces of glass. So they hang on the wall, edge to edge print, and you don’t frame them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are their own thing. You don’t need to frame them. And so you just get this, it’s this complete thing you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put on the wall and it looks modern, it looks clean, it looks bold,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just look great. We have tons of them around our house, they’re great. We get them as gifts for people also and people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love these things. Comes in this solid backing, it’s ready to mount right out of the box. It’s all very affordable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price started at just $15 for a small square, suitable for like Instagram prints,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s about five by five I think, something like that. 15 bucks for the small square. And of course, as I said, these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make fantastic gifts family, friends, and loved ones. They’re the perfect way to celebrate a shared memory with something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is also a unique and modern gift by itself. And by the way, Valentine’s Day is right around the corner.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why not give a gift that says something flowers and chocolate can’t? Each fracture is hand-assembled and checked for quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by their small team in Gainesville, Florida. And if by any chance you needed another reason to buy one besides them being our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsors and me telling you that they’re very good, you can get 10% off with code ATP10.
Casey’s iMac Reloaded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to fractureme.com, check it out now. Thanks a lot to Fracture for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we should probably do a little bit of follow-up about my iMac. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where we last left our hero, he had a completely dead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac that he could not resuscitate in a Genius Bar appointment for, I think, the following day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On that bombshell.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey On that bombshell, right. In talking with another friend of mine, he had pointed out to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, you could just return this. And I thought, you know what I show, I think we talked about it on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show actually, and I thought, you know what, I am going to return it because this thing is going to be forever tainted in my mind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I try to get it repaired and they have to crack it open. So the following day I canceled my genius bar appointment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went in and returned it and I had boxed it up all nicely in the retail box.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Trapezoidal retail box. I’d done what I could to get it all back together as cleanly as I possibly could.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I brought it into the store and the gentleman on the store floor, who I happened to walk up to, said, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can handle that return for you. You know, while you’re returning it, oh, it’s basically DOA. Oh, that sucks. Okay, no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worries. All right, I just got to open it up and confirm the serial number to make sure, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I’m kind of filling in the blanks, but to make sure that you’re not doing a baiting switch or anything like that. So he
⏹️ ▶️ Casey says, I’m going to open it up. I’m going to take it out. I’m going to turn it on. Because he wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go into like about my Mac and see the serial number and realized,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hmm, that’s not going to work. Now is it? He starts looking and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I start looking on the back of the Mac trying to find a printed serial number and me having never owned an iMac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before, I had assumed that’s where it would be. It’s not. He goes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and takes this thing to the back to where like I guess the off-duty geniuses are or maybe some of the on-duty geniuses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try to get them to help him figure out where the the crap the serial number is. Do either of you guys know where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the serial number on the iMacs are?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s on a little metal plate on the dashboard. We know where to
⏹️ ▶️ John the tire pressure, and we
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know where to find the VIN number. The VIN number is
⏹️ ▶️ John in all sorts of weird places.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey They’re all.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would imagine, I mean, like where could it possibly be, right? The only place it could possibly be is
⏹️ ▶️ John what opens up on the iMac. It’s the memory door opens up, right? That’s the only thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John opens. And other than that, I’m sure it’s printed somewhere like on the motherboard or whatever, but you got to take the whole thing apart to see that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wouldn’t think it’d be on the memory door because that’s something that you can take off So that’s that’s no good. I would I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would guess it’s printed somewhere on the metal, but God knows where I mean Well, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing so I didn’t know any better having never had an iMac It turns out it’s on the bottom of the foot
⏹️ ▶️ John Sneaky was it was a sticker on the bottom of the foot or was that to the metal?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe it was printed on the metal although. I don’t recall off the top of my head And what I’m like it just occurred
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me just this moment How does that work for like snails iMac that had the visa mount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good question? and maybe it’s on the mount itself, because there is a little thing back there that it would have to mount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. It’s got to be in more than one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But either way, so that took a few minutes to get through, which was not a big deal. I mean, I was just as confused
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as the dude was. And perhaps the guy should have known it, but I mean, I didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I can’t really blame him. So anyway, so it ended up that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey returned it, no questions asked, and once they had somehow, some way confirmed the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey serial number. And then I had already, at that point, ordered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new one. And the other thing that I wanted to tell you guys about, which was a new discovery for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, did you know about expedited shipping on the Apple Store?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this when we were yelling at you last week? To pick the expensive shipping? Whenever I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying something that costs multiple thousands of dollars, and I can get it next day for an extra $40,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though it makes no sense, I don’t do that in normal stuff. If it was 40 bucks to get a shirt the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day, I wouldn’t do it. But for some reason, the psychology of the relative pricing works out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Pricing psychology, that’s how they charge you $150 for floor mats or your car, and you’re like, whatever. Exactly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it’s 40 bucks to get my awesome new computer a day earlier, I’ll usually do it. That’s like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t know that this, I knew that I could do faster shipping, but I didn’t look into how much it was. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now I’m seriously impatient, because I’ve just returned the beautiful 5K iMac that I was waiting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for for a week as I watched it march across the country on FedEx ground. And this time I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like, you know what, I’m going to do expedited, expedited shipping, darn it. Expecting that this like 20 pound box would be 50
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a hundred bucks. It was $42 to your point, Marco, $42. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the best part was it arrived at 8 30 in the morning at my doorstep. Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tip. If you’re going to buy a Mac from Apple and you’re not going to get it retail, like a bill to order, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely, definitely, definitely do the expedited shipping.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that really a pro tip? Because I think what Marco just outlined is the, the illogical
⏹️ ▶️ John pricing psychology that makes you think that’s a good deal when in reality, you could take those 42
⏹️ ▶️ John bucks and spend it on lots of other things like it’s 42. It’s the same size as if you paid $42 to
⏹️ ▶️ John ship a pen to your house, which you would never do, because the pen costs two bucks. But when you’re shipping the expensive computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey somehow that $42 for
⏹️ ▶️ John shipping is totally worth it so I would say get some books on Zen Buddhism from the library or something and learn
⏹️ ▶️ John some patience and then
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey pay for the cheap shipping because $42 is the same size
⏹️ ▶️ John no matter what it’s attached to. Who in their right mind would pay $42 of shipping to get a
⏹️ ▶️ John package of saltines delivered from Amazon? Nobody would but and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey sure $42 and you
⏹️ ▶️ John waited four days for it anyway because you had to span the weekend. Terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nobody likes saltines enough to ever do that and also if you ever want saltines
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re you’re probably within 50 feet of a store that has some 12 month old saltines on the shelf. I’m just saying $42
⏹️ ▶️ John does not change size when you put it next to the price of an expensive computer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying is, for me, and I think for Marco too, damn if it wasn’t worth it, because oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my god, I was so glad I did that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like a little touch of luxury, you know? It’s like getting the extra legroom seat on the plane.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, you know, the 27
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inches of luxury don’t count, but that $42 is great shipping.
⏹️ ▶️ John You spend a lot of time convincing yourself to do nice things for yourself by buying yourself fancy things.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems like a skill we all have. We’re all really good at.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I can teach you this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey skill. You have seminars. Marco, as I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said to you in the past, you are the best worst influence. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My seminars would totally have extra legroom seats at the front for an extra 20 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I am talking to you right now from a 5K Retina iMac. This thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is magnificent. To recap, I had bought the mid-range one because it was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crummiest one that could support the 1TB SSD, which is what I got.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got it with 8GB of RAM and then immediately for this one had put in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 32GB of other world computing, Mac sales, whatever they call themselves, RAM. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a 1TB drive, 32GB RAM, the 4GHz processor, and I am in love.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Couple of quick immediate thoughts for those who may be like me and leaving a laptop behind or considering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaving a laptop behind, oh my God, 27 inches is magnificent. And I have never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looked at my 15-inch MacBook Pro and thought, oh my God, the screen is so tiny until now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is insane. And one of the things that I’ve noticed is I’ve gotten really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into using spaces on my MacBook Pro, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t use them nearly as heavily here because I have so much frigging real estate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a million windows on the screen, by a million I mean like five, John, but I can put a million windows on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same screen and have them tiled and not feel overwhelmed. It’s magnificent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Welcome. I’ve been trying to get you to walk through this door for so long. You can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only bring the horse to water, as they say. Believe me, you don’t need help with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so the only complaints I have so far, first of all, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have no good solution for this really, but having the ports on the back of a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey curved surface, I’m not really into that. It’s kind of wonky to plug in like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a USB key or USB devices. I mean, not a big deal, but it’s a little wonkier than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m used to on my laptop. Yes, I know, first world problems. However, the SD card slot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does not trip my SD card’s write protect switch like both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my MacBook Pros did every single time. That’s a big win.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The new Magic Keyboard or whatever they’re calling this thing, very thin, I like it a lot. Charges via lightning, I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a lot. That being said, this arrow key situation that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought John was completely overblowing, oh God, it’s the worst. It’s the worst. Having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the full height left and right just totally throws off my arrow key game.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just, I know I’m gonna get used to it over time, but right now it’s driving me up a
⏹️ ▶️ John have to get used to it. You can buy an Apple keyboard with an inverted T that you can feel with your fingers and you never miss and every
⏹️ ▶️ John single key is full size. It’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you can also get the Microsoft Sculpt ergonomic keyboard that I recommend so much for like 60 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and solve this problem really quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that on the shipping. I couldn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco get that out of the space.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I tried so hard to sell that, I lost it. Oh God. So anyway, so I have just this very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moment, I am tweeting a picture of my setup that I had queued up I don’t want to spoil the fun for those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who listen live. And I am really digging this. I think I had mentioned last episode that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cleaned up my office quite a bit. My desk used to be a total disaster,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now it actually looks nice and clean. The floor you can actually see now, which is really exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m feeling good. I’m feeling like this is a fresh start.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I’m so happy. I’m just so happy that you finally are on something real. What? Come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, I did the 15-inch laptop with the second monitor on a desk thing for years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s fine. But if you can do this instead, this is better. And it’s not a little bit better, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. It’s so far so good, I really like it. And I haven’t yet missed having a laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Give me time, I might, but I mean, we have enough other laptops that aren’t quite as new, but we have enough other laptops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey floating around between my work laptop, which actually is fairly new, my personal laptop, which I’m thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey putting a really tiny SSD in, even though it’s from 2011. You know, you could probably get an SSD for 40 bucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m thinking like a 64 or 128 gig SSD would be more than enough for an occasional computer. But yeah, so far I’m really enjoying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. So far I’m really, really, really happy. And we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I know for some people, this is like completely old and boring news, but there’s a lot of people, in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most people that I know are full-time laptop users. And so if you’re one of those people like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was until just this past Monday, you know, it doesn’t have to be that way. There are,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wouldn’t say there are greener pastures, but there are. There are larger, less portable pastures.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yes, there are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey larger and less portable pastures around. So yeah, that’s my follow-up about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and also, I mean, if anybody is thinking like, oh, why are they talking about one person’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computer choice, you would be amazed how much email we get and how many tweets we get from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people asking what computers we use or what they should buy or asking us to talk more about this kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff. This is the kind of thing that a lot of people care about this and I do too. I’m one of those people and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why I love talking about this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, completely agree. We’ve got one of those emails earlier today, in fact. So that’s the deal. But so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so good. So far, two thumbs up on the iMac. John, any thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think your keyboard’s too high. I’m concerned about you. So this is one of the things when you’re switching from laptop
⏹️ ▶️ John to, I mean, it depends on what you do with your laptop. If you literally put your laptop on your lap,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you can pretty easily have your arms at a right angle while you’re typing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re sitting at a desk the way most people sit at a desk, like with a chair and desk kite, like a typical chair
⏹️ ▶️ John and desk kite, the keyboard is way too high. So you either need to raise your chair,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in which case the
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor is probably too low, and then you need to raise your monitor, or you need to lower your keyboard by using
⏹️ ▶️ John a keyboard tray or something like that. So I’m concerned that if you’re gonna use the computer for a long time, you may be in a different
⏹️ ▶️ John position than you were with your laptop. Now, if you’re using your laptop on top of the same desk in the same position, you already have that problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just saying I think your keyboard is too high. I’m also concerned about you hanging your headphones on the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco arm for the mic. That seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John putting undue stress on the arm. And you are revealing yourself as a left side dock user which is…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, I’m a left side dock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John user and also… No, please, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That looks like the Rode boom arm. It is. And the Rode Podcaster is way heavier than the combination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of those headphones and that microphone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, what’s wrong with… Are you a dock on the bottom kind of guy or you a right side doc?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m I wish the doc didn’t exist kind of guy.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, right. Given old school,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey given that’s the case, where do you keep your doc, john?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like on laptops, I keep it on the right because the screens too damn small, and you can’t do it. And on desktops
⏹️ ▶️ John with big screens, I keep it on the bottom and I grumble about it. But the left is madness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so the reason I have it on the left is a holdover for my laptop days. But generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would have in any of my working environments, at work or home or what have you, I always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had the laptop directly in front of me and then I would have an external monitor to the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the laptop. And thus, the dock was on the leftmost edge of my two-screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup. I guess alternatively, I could have done the exact same thing and had it on the far right side of the external
⏹️ ▶️ Casey monitor, but I’ve just always liked it on the left. And it seems insane to me, to your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, more so on laptops than desktops. But on these widescreen displays, why in God’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey green earth would you keep the dock on the bottom. And I should also note that mine auto hides, which will probably drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you crazy as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m not a fan of auto hide. Now you keep it on the bottom because once the screen is humongous, it’s not like it’s really eating into your screen
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, yeah, it is wider than it is tall. But this thing is so freaking big, like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re eating up the space. So it’s fine. And the bottom is wider, because if you have lots of stuff in your
⏹️ ▶️ John dock, whether it’s lots of docked items or lots of applications, it’s more room for them to line up before they start
⏹️ ▶️ John shrinking, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I guess so. I don’t know. I’m a left dock kind of guy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m with you on that Casey. Solidarity in the left arm.
⏹️ ▶️ John I so wish we didn’t have to run the dock. Like this is the one like one of the few handful of remaining persistent OS
⏹️ ▶️ John X things that annoy me. Like because I run drag thing and I would only run drag if I could,
⏹️ ▶️ John but notifications still can only be received by the dock and notifications are important enough to see the
⏹️ ▶️ John little badge and an icon or see a little bounce and drag thing can’t get them and only the dock can
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m forced to run the dock and I could hide the dock but I don’t like They’re having
⏹️ ▶️ John to go down there when the little thing pops up and you can if you hide the doc you can’t see badges Like slack just badges. It doesn’t bounce
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t like bouncing It’s just it’s an uncomfortable situation with the doc where I wish I didn’t have to run
⏹️ ▶️ John it But I do and it seems like that’s never gonna change Anyway, I the doc I think is the right as I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John written many times I think the doc is at this point the right choice for most people but for me specifically
⏹️ ▶️ John I really wish there was some way I didn’t have to run it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I should also note just to really drive you up a wall that I also use magnification and I like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t go that far, but I respect you for being that guy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s me. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John am that guy.
⏹️ ▶️ John A left side auto-hide magnifying dog. It’s like you’re, I was going to say, it’s like you’re a new Mac user, but you
⏹️ ▶️ John are. You actually are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, there’s an infinite time scale joke here somewhere. All right, what else is awesome these days, Marco?
Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are also sponsored this week by Squarespace. Start building your website today at squarespace.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off. Squarespace, build it beautiful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, I’ve tried building websites through a lot of different things. I build my own CMSs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve hosted my stuff, I’ve done other hosted platforms and other CMSs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace is the easiest thing I’ve ever used, bar none. It’s as easy as that. If you wanna make a website, just try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making it with Squarespace first. And if you think you might need something else, Just take an hour.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Try it. See how much you can get done in one hour. If you don’t like it, no harm done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, it’s a free trial. They won’t auto-bill you or anything. That’s it, you’re done, move on. If you do like it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just saved you a ton of time. So it’s really, it’s very, very easy. So sites look professionally designed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regardless of your skill level. No coding is required, although you can code it if you want to. All these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things are intuitive, easy to use. What you see is what you get. Tools and editors. If you sign up for a whole year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up front, you can even get a free domain name. So start your free trial site today at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco squarespace.com if you are making a website. Try it there first because it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably do what you need to do way more than you expect. They host it, they support it. If you’re making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a website for somebody else, it’s even more of a no-brainer because then again, they host it, they support it, you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s way better for that. So check it out today at squarespace.com. Start your free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trial. When you decide to sign up for Squarespace, make sure to use offer code ATP to get 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off your first purchase.
What happened to iAd?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace, build it beautiful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So there’s been some news from IAD, which is something I didn’t think I’d ever really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care enough to say on this show. But there’s been some things going on. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was an announcement this week. So tell me about that one of you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was confusing because I originally had this in the notes. I read their like, again, I don’t care about IAD. It doesn’t really affect
⏹️ ▶️ John my life at all. I don’t really have apps that use it. I’m not a developer. But like, oh, yeah, I had is still a thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s this little tiny announcement and like I guess everyone just read it quickly and was confused.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a paragraph long. I had app network will be discontinued is the headline. I had app network will be discontinued
⏹️ ▶️ John as of June 30th, 2016, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It’s like a paragraph of text saying, oh, I guess they’re, are they
⏹️ ▶️ John not doing I had anymore? Well, whatever. They were never good at it. Didn’t seem like ads. Didn’t seem like Apple’s heart where
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t ads or whatever. But I and many other people miss that second word
⏹️ ▶️ John in there. iad app network not iad itself as a concept
⏹️ ▶️ John but the iad app network which is a way that you can advertise apps in the app store
⏹️ ▶️ John through iads so they’re not doing that anymore but iad is still going to be a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and i guess we can continue to go back you know we can go back to ignoring it like we always did um i was actually kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of hoping i was kind of disappointed when i learned that they’re only talking about the thing that lets you advertise
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that are in the app store through iad i wish the whole thing would go away because As far as I’m concerned, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not like a value ad. To me as a user, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care that Apple has an advertising thing that people sell ads on. You may
⏹️ ▶️ John say, oh, it enables people to have free apps in the App Store, but I really don’t think people need more ways to have free
⏹️ ▶️ John apps in the App Store. I don’t think that iAds are particularly better than other kinds
⏹️ ▶️ John of ads. Maybe they are. Maybe I don’t buy enough apps with ads. Maybe Apple’s ads really are as fancy as they say
⏹️ ▶️ John and so much better than the other. It just doesn’t appeal to me. It doesn’t make me feel better about Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John as a company. And I would be glad if they said, you know what, that IAD thing we were doing, forget it. We’re just not doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it all anymore. We’re going to phase it up. Instead, they’re just phasing out this small component of it. So I’m actually kind of disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ John that my misreading of this announcement is not what’s actually going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, IAD is a weird beast, and obviously it has not gone the way Apple hoped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would. I mean, keep in mind, when they first made this, they were showing off those fancy like Nissan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Leaf, one of the first ads for that was like all interactive and you tap it and you spin the car around all this crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they were envisioning this very, very expensive and kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, you know, clean ad format that almost immediately flopped. I mean, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think they got past… I honestly don’t think they got past their launch partners on it. I don’t think they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever had any other ads that were that fancy, like super interactive kind after the launch partners.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the pipe dream of advertisers thinking that you’re going to be spending time like
⏹️ ▶️ John like using their like you’ll you will sit there and willingly interact with an ad
⏹️ ▶️ John like oh I can spend the nice like that is a fantasy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t this fun I’m engaging all over your brand
⏹️ ▶️ John mean there are ways to get people to do things but you have to be like you have to have like a
⏹️ ▶️ John you know a funny viral video or a game or whatever but the idea that someone’s gonna be so interested in the Nissan Leaf
⏹️ ▶️ John that an ad that pops up in an iOS app, an ad in an iOS app, you went to the app to do
⏹️ ▶️ John something and then he suddenly pops up on your screen and be like, you know what, I was going to do something, but let me spend 10 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey around inside this interactive ad.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is that is a fantasy of an advertising person who just has convinced
⏹️ ▶️ John themselves that people are going to I mean, unless you’re giving them free money, or
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re, you know, like, there’s a limited number of ways to actually get that interaction, interaction,
⏹️ ▶️ John and all of them are pretty terrible. And so So trying to make a classy, nice one, like
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone’s really interested in the Nissan Leaf, they’re going to go to the Nissan website or maybe they’ll download the Nissan app or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re sure as hell not going to take a break from going to play a game they were going to play
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever application they were using and derail themselves and interact with your ad. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that just seemed doomed from the start.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and you know, not only was it the advertiser pipe dream, I think moreover, it was Apple’s pipe dream
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that this is the kind of thing advertisers would actually do and would want in a way that would be compatible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with what Apple wanted. What Apple wanted, from what we all heard from the stories at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, Apple wanted tons of control, way huge buy-ins up front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from big brand companies, brand advertising like Coke and Nissan, not small stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would advertise on podcasts. Big stuff that advertise on TV. That kind of stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine working with Apple as an advertiser. That’s just not compatible. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants a certain degree of control and everything. And the fact is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order for ads to work, they have to do things that conflict with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Apple does most of the time. It only takes… If an advertiser is looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of possible platforms they can advertise on. And they’re like, well, we can work with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and spend a ton of money for an ad that gets X click-through rate. Or we can make our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own and put it on these many other mobile ad networks that is maybe a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit more annoying, or a little bit more flashy, or a little bit less user polite.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that’ll get twice the click-through rate and twice the conversion rate, because it turns out being annoying works.
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit, but a lot. The race to the bottom in advertising. I mean, there’s is a reason you
⏹️ ▶️ John know the one weird trick things are everywhere like you just go right to the bottom like what are the base brainstem
⏹️ ▶️ John like reaction thing is just you put up a picture of a pretty lady you put up a gross thing you put
⏹️ ▶️ John out a tease about celebrities you put you know so stupid boxes that are the bottom of every website I’m so depressed when I see them
⏹️ ▶️ John now like I like punch the monkey better than this like the bottom of every website all of a sudden there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John these you know nine squares attempting to tap into the nine most primal
⏹️ ▶️ John instincts of human beings to get you to click on something. And like a scroll down, like I’ll be reading
⏹️ ▶️ John a website that I think is a good website. I’d be like, Oh, not you too. Really, everybody. Like it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s just terrible. And, and those and they do that for a reason, because they’re effective,
⏹️ ▶️ John right. And so that’s totally like you said, Marco, that’s totally against what Apple wants. Apple wishes people were different than they are, but they are
⏹️ ▶️ John not what people actually click on our one weird trick ads and Apple does not want one weird trick
⏹️ ▶️ John or didn’t originally. So this utopian vision of I had I still think I had is better probably about
⏹️ ▶️ John keeping out the worst of the worst scammy ads, but you know that it’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a cross purposes the advertisers want effectiveness and Apple wants to
⏹️ ▶️ John not annoy people and those don’t really go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right and Apple also has you know, straight privacy controls and and advertisers, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for advertisers invading your privacy is very profitable. It helps them better target their ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they even tell themselves it’s better for you. Whether you agree is up to you. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole idea of don’t annoy our customers and respect their privacy, and we’re only gonna give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you access to this little sandbox of information, and you’re only allowed to do these things, that goes against what every advertiser
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants and what many other ad networks would demand. So the only ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make this work would really be if they banned any other kind of ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network from running on on ios which they could do i’m surprised they didn’t do that i honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco i am too um but they they could do that no question but uh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe they will in the future i i doubt it but they could it would be a little hard to enforce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could you start getting into getting into questions of like maybe like what is an ad but app review has never shied
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vagaries and difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John distinctions all that would make is all that i mean is all the advertisements of becoming as push notifications instead of only 15% of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So iad started out this way with this fancy Nissan Leaf stuff. It very, very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did not fill up with those things and instead started filling up with crappier ads. Your earlier point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, I think, fair of why they even run this at all. And I’ve also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heard from developers that complaints that the fill rate was never very good on iad. And so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fill rate for people who aren’t in this business is literally just like, you know, if you have an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and you have an iad banner in the app, what percentage of the time does iad actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have an ad to serve in there? And if they don’t have an ad to serve in there, it’s just like blank,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, so what percentage of the time do they actually have something and you as the app publisher want that to be 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least as close as you can get to 100% the iad people basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have never had that kind of fill rate as far as what I’ve understood. And so what usually happens if you’re implementing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iad, usually you have a fallback network where you can supply to the iad thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can say, if you don’t have an ad, show this. And then there you put in another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad network that will presumably have something to show there for you. So on one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand, I can see, you can say, if you can think about why Apple might want to keep iad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me, the biggest argument is they think it’s the lesser of the two evils. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, if you’re going to have ad-supported apps, which seem to be a common enough thing now, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a given. There are going to be ad-supported apps. So if there’s going to be ad-supported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, might as well be our nice, respectful-of-your-privacy ad network
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rather than someone else’s. That is the best argument for iAd still existing. But in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because everyone’s using these backfill networks in addition to iAd, we’re not even achieving that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goal. not getting the nice privacy and everything else. We’re not getting that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re running ad-supported apps, you’re running arbitrary code from God knows who from these other ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco networks that’s doing God knows what on your phone. And at least iOS has things nicely sandboxed and everything to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it a little bit harder to be creepy. But there is still creepiness to be had. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the theoretical goal of iAd being like, well, better us than them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think works in practice. So I think I’m with you, john, like, I don’t really see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they keep running it.
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like a previous generation ad network, because these days, the thing to do
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we all know about native advertising, but like the in between where it’s not completely native advertising,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s like, in the flow of what you’re normally doing. It’s not a banner on the top or bottom of the page while the rest
⏹️ ▶️ John of your app can use its business. If your app has any kind of timeline, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John the ads would be put in the timeline, like Instagram ads. They just appear to be another picture, but oh wow, my friends
⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly became better photographers. Oh, it’s an ad. It’s not a banner that appears
⏹️ ▶️ John coming down from the top of the Instagram app while you’re using it. That’s the old model. Like you want it to be integrated. So
⏹️ ▶️ John not everyone has an app that’s like that. Obviously they can’t work for games and stuff like that. Although actually it can, because you put billboards inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the games and do all this stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Flappy Bird made all of its money via ads.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, that one did have just a little banner, but like advertising that’s better integrated into the application
⏹️ ▶️ John is certainly the trend and I doesn’t give you any help there. I agree that it’s mostly it seems like it’s mostly there just
⏹️ ▶️ John because like, hey, we want to make it easy as possible for developers to write apps for iOS. And
⏹️ ▶️ John since some developers want to be free with ads, we provide a way to make ads.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you don’t like it, do your own way. But when you’re starting out as a developer in the same way that you may not have credit
⏹️ ▶️ John card processing setup and be able to deal with customers and be able to do all this other things. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John the App Store will do that for you. And you want to put ads, don’t worry about negotiating a deal with an ad network, we’ll do all that
⏹️ ▶️ John for you. Like it seems like a sort of starter kit training wheels type thing that also happens to give
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple a little bit of control. But the fact that it’s not super popular means that I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t see it evolving into a more sophisticated framework for for you know, like so you have a timeline app,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s a new WWDC session how you use the iad network to have native
⏹️ ▶️ John advertising filling in your application instead of just having banners above and below and stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know I just it just seems like one of those products that apple doesn’t really seem to care about that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not important to the company that’s probably not going to get a lot of attention the only announcement that is a paragraph
⏹️ ▶️ John little thing saying you can’t advertise your apps in it anymore it’s just it just doesn’t seem like a winner
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’re going to keep doing iad they should go all the way. They should ban
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other ad networks and make iAds so good that actually works. But now they have this weird,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, kind of, you know, half-butted way of doing it with, like, it’s just kind of like, well, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing, it mostly sucks, you can also do these other things, and everyone who ever tries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both will end up doing this other thing because it’s going to be way better than us.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that they can’t go back and close the door on third-party ads now because I I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that would put them at an even bigger competitive disadvantage against Android. You’re probably right.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, like, it’s maybe when Android was really weak and they were the big game in town they could have
⏹️ ▶️ John set a precedent like they did with so many of their strong arm app store things, right? But at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s too late. The horse is out. Can’t close the barn door. Whatever, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Half butted is right.
Sponsor: MailRoute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our last sponsor this week is MailRoute. Go to MailRoute.net slash ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, in my opinion, really, really great spam and virus filtering for your email.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So IT departments are expected to do more in 2016, but with less money. This includes the really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important stuff like stopping spam and virus attacks. EOL announcements for trusted hardware and software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options make these decisions more difficult. First Postini went away, now MXLogic. Now, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knew what either of those things were, who can you trust to replace them? Who can you trust you this job well and stick around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Try mail route. Mail route will protect your email and your hardware against spam viruses and other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attacks. There is no hardware or software to install. If you own your own domain, that’s all you need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use mail route. It is a hosted cloud service for filtering spam and viruses from your email. Their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco team is focused exclusively on email protection since 1997. Their interface is easy to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use and loaded with admin tools including an API. And it’s all designed to make your life spam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free. Right now, MailRoute is offering price matching for McAfee and MXLogic customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Stop spam today with a free 30-day trial of MailRoute at MailRoute.net slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or you can email them if you’re a salesperson. You can email them sales at MailRoute.net. Listeners of this show can get 10%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off for the lifetime of their account. This is an amazing deal. It isn’t just 10% off one time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or if you’re a first order. 10% every time they bill you for the entire lifetime of your account by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to MailRoute.net slash ATP. protect your email from spam and viruses. That’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s all they do. They do it better and they’ve been doing it longer than anybody else out there. Go to MailRoute.net
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks a lot to MailRoute. So I use them myself and I like them a lot.
Oh yeah, iTunes Radio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So check it out. MailRoute.net slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iTunes Radio. Apparently that’s going away-ish. The free stuff is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going away. As a listener of ad-supported radio and Apple Music, we want you to know that it is being discontinued starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey January 28th, which is probably about a week after this episode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is released. Additionally, with an Apple Music membership, you can access dozens of radio stations handcrafted by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our team of music experts, commercial free with unlimited skips. So they’re kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of pulling in the reins on iTunes Radio
⏹️ ▶️ John too. Yeah, you still have Beats 1. Beats 1 is still free, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess the other ad-supported, I mean, maybe people aren’t listening to them, maybe it’s just a reaction to the market or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s just an excuse to, you know, another opportunity to say, you know, if you pay for Apple Music, you get lots of cool stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re not getting these ad-supported radio stations anymore. You just get Beats 1.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Beats 1 is free even if you’re not an Apple Music subscriber?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I totally forgot that iTunes Radio was a thing. This news made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no sense to me until just now, when I finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John remembered, oh yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like I had, and this is also like, services that you forgot existed, that
⏹️ ▶️ John are now being changed or canceled, and you’re like, well, alright, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean a lot of people were upset about this part of it. I saw a lot of people talking about it, but I thought there was some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like Apple music like indefinite trial mode. But I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was just iTunes Radio, which they launched a year or two earlier. And that was basically their Pandora
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clone. So that one had a free ad mode and a paid mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was there a paid mode? I don’t even remember. It was such a weird kind of half-baked service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all that time. So Apple Music has always been paid only, but was Beats 1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allowed to be available for free? The chat
⏹️ ▶️ John room says Beats 1 has always been free.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I did not realize. I never knew that. Yeah, me neither. Well, we should do some homework from once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every now and again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, your homework is to listen to Beats 1 for a week. Good luck.
⏹️ ▶️ John None of us were into that part of Apple Music.
New Apple music-creation apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So speaking about things that we know nothing about, let’s talk about the new Apple music apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John A little bit about them. I downloaded it. I tried to do things with it. So they
⏹️ ▶️ John announced a new version of GarageBand for iOS, which is great. You know, it looks cool. It’s interesting for people who use
⏹️ ▶️ John GarageBand on iOS. And they have one, a new app called, what the heck is it
⏹️ ▶️ John called? Music memos. I believe that’s right. And this app probably makes a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of sense if you are the type of person who had previously been using the bundled
⏹️ ▶️ John voice memos app to record little snippets when you get ideas for songs like if you’re a musician and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re on the go and you’re like a little tune is stuck in my head and you want to like make a note of it for later rather than calling yourself and leaving
⏹️ ▶️ John it on your voicemail which is also a thing that I’ve heard musicians do. You can use the voicemail was apt to just
⏹️ ▶️ John hum a little tune into whatever music memos is an app that says it’s for as far as I can tell.
⏹️ ▶️ John Stop doing that. app instead because that’s what it’s made for. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John do something into it with either your voice, guitar, piano, and then it will like auto put auto
⏹️ ▶️ John accompaniments accompaniments with it with like their little you know, sort of AI tempo matching thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with different kind of music lines. And then you can export it into GarageBand and go on with it. Now, I really
⏹️ ▶️ John have no idea how I would ever use this app. I probably wouldn’t at all. But serenity Caldwell wrote up wrote about it on I’m more
⏹️ ▶️ John so you should read this article. The headline is very straight to the point. I wrote and publish a song in 30 minutes with Apple’s music
Powerful hacks vs. iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is starts to get into our area. And Marco’s area specifically iOS devices,
⏹️ ▶️ John as platforms are doing audio stuff, they seem so perfect because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re small, battery powered, they have more than enough CPU power to do most of
⏹️ ▶️ John the things you want to do with audio. Because audio is wimpier. Like I mean, these days, you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing video things with them. But audio is wimpy enough that the CPUs in the modern
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS devices absolutely crush it. like, yeah, no, we can do all sorts of amazing things. It’s just a question of screen size
⏹️ ▶️ John and inputs and outputs. So every time I see Apple trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John make iOS devices more viable hardware accompaniments to audio things,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it be music or podcasting or whatever. I think that’s a great move because they just it just seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like such a natural fit. And I mean, I Marco can probably speak to this better than anyone, but like the frustrations
⏹️ ▶️ John with knowing that the power is in there, that you could do really awesome audio things with
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS, except for, and I would imagine it’s usually input and output but maybe, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John software, and the market for that software or whatever, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, basically, I mean, this is, I had the same opinion as you of this app, of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really happy to see Apple’s doing stuff like this. It looks like a great app that I will never use because I don’t have that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco creative talent, and I wish I did, but I don’t. Yeah, I mean, in general, like, you know, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was Unconnected where our friend Mike Hurley mentioned that iOS is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the happening place to be in software right now. All the exciting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco software is happening on iOS. All the innovation, for the most part, is happening on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you want an app to do something cool on iOS, you probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have at least five or ten different choices for what that app might be. if you’re looking for a similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of Mac app, you might have one or two. iOS is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the action is right now. And it is unfortunate that there is so much about iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that limits or makes it difficult to do certain kinds of work or certain kinds of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multitasking or activities. And over time, they keep trying to lift those with varying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degrees of success. Sometimes they work, sometimes they don’t. But iOS is where this kind of stuff happens
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking about what is the new Roga me back loopback loopback yeah so
⏹️ ▶️ John imagine I mean again it’s not it’s not a hardware issue imagine if you could have an iPad that
⏹️ ▶️ John had the power of audio hijack and loopback like you like we’re always thinking of going
⏹️ ▶️ John to get into something that we know something about podcasting can we have like a little portable podcasting studio
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can record multiple people you know some of them local some of them remote,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Do do like the equivalent of Skype calls or FaceTime or whatever and record
⏹️ ▶️ John them in their locations and record locally people and then do all the editing for like can you produce
⏹️ ▶️ John a podcast with just an iOS device and hardware wise you totally can there’s plenty of storage space for a
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast. The screens are big enough to do editing Jason Snell recently edited
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the incomparable episodes on audio editor on the pipe like this is all possible. It’s just a question
⏹️ ▶️ John of IO getting the software out there that can do this
⏹️ ▶️ John and then having some hopefully nice OS supported facility for doing
⏹️ ▶️ John all the sort of system level things we just described that the Rogamiba apps do on the Mac where you do
⏹️ ▶️ John have access like a loopback lets you make artificial virtual audio devices essentially. So you
⏹️ ▶️ John say I want the audio from these three microphones to be presented to Skype as a single input because Skype is dumb and just
⏹️ ▶️ John wants a single input I really have three people talking here. And Audio Hijack lets
⏹️ ▶️ John you set up audio pipelines from this app to that app to this app. Like say you wanna have like a soundboard app where you can insert
⏹️ ▶️ John sounds into the podcast in real time and have the other people who are on the call hear it. Like these are all things that we all do today
⏹️ ▶️ John on a Mac. You know, it’s why Macs are powerful and we love them. But hardware wise, there’s no reason
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad can’t do all of that. It’s just software barriers. And then I guess hardware barriers for
⏹️ ▶️ John connectivity. Like how the hell are you gonna hook up all these mics to your thing? lightning connectors hanging off the end? Is there some kind of hub
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever? So we seem so close to I mean, I know there’s tons of things like you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John for for music, I think it’s much better like musical instrument apps for sequencing
⏹️ ▶️ John things and for performing music on them and for composing songs and garage band
⏹️ ▶️ John on like music, the music industry seems better served by it than like the the podcasting industry. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it frustrates me because I still see reasons why video you might need a beefier rig to do like video
⏹️ ▶️ John you hit the storage requirements are much bigger, the IO requirements are bigger, you probably want more space to do stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John So we’re still not quite there. But audio, we just seem like eternally on the cusp. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m really happy that Apple that Apple also sees this because if someone had said, Hey, what do you think the first new
⏹️ ▶️ John app for iOS that Apple’s going to announce in 2016? I doubt many people would have thought of something like music memos, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m glad that Apple did because it shows that they understand, like the strengths of the platform they have. And we just this
⏹️ ▶️ John has got to keep going. And it’s got to, it’s It’s got to get down to the OS level and the multitasking level and the
⏹️ ▶️ John access to audio on the device and then eventually the I.O. And I think we will, maybe five years from
⏹️ ▶️ John now, be able to do full podcast recording and production on the go with
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that what Fraser Spears is doing with Canvas with Federico Vatici?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is he recording on the iPad as well? I know- I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, I thought so too. It says in this blog post, which we’ll link, that we are walking the walk to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show itself has edited and published entirely on iOS using Ferrite, which is what Jason Snow has been talking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. I thought that they had said that they were also recording it on iOS, but I’m not 100% sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know Fraser does. I’m not sure if Federico does, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe that’s what it is. It’s that only Fraser does, and that’s why I didn’t say it in his blog post.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think Apple has this view of how the world should be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how modern computing should be, and what they mean by that is iOS, and how things should be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isolated from each how things should be should be safe and should be you know secure and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco locked down and if you look at you know the what kind of innovation happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac and on on historically on desktop computing it tends to very frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco involve some kind of hack that is just not possible on iOS devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance what you’re talking about so like if you want to record something for podcasting there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are special tools that basically try to do like you know voice over IP and also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco record it so that you can use it for podcasting. They tend to not be as good as just using Skype.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what everyone does is we just use Skype and then we use apps on the Mac to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco record our Skype calls that mostly are hacks. Sometimes they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like like PSO is a pretty straightforward recorder because like it can share the input but like what a lot of people do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for to record Skype is just use Skype call recorder from Ecamm which is a complete hack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is impossible on iOS because it basically like injects itself into Skype and records
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know that way and on iOS there is a Skype app for iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can’t record out of it in software the only way to do that would be to have two devices and like to run the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio out from one into some kind of lightning connected USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio interface which believe me that’s a whole world of pain if you I’ve done that it’s not great um
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know to have like these weird, cheaply made, unreliable $70
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio interfaces for iOS devices, some of which might be able to keep it charged,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of which won’t. They all have these big plastic garbage knobs on them. It’s like trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy a high-quality USB hub. It’s very, very difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John What you’re doing there is you’re doing the hardware version. You’re doing a reverse skeuomorphic
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware version of Audio Hijack.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You are literally connecting
⏹️ ▶️ John boxes with actual wires in the real world instead of dragging and dropping the little boxes.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even things like audio hijack like that, you know, I think loopback must be using supported facilities for
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, creating virtual devices or something like even an OS 10. Like you said, a lot of these things
⏹️ ▶️ John that we’re using right now I’m using call recorder right now are kind of hacks. But every time I
⏹️ ▶️ John see hacks on any system, whether it’s always 10 or you know, iOS, or we can’t really have them or whatever. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that so many people like the fact that people are building businesses selling these hacks, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John very difficult to do because you have to be really careful and you can’t screw up stuff and like it shows there’s such an incredible
⏹️ ▶️ John market need that software developers are willing to fill that need that it is lucrative for them to fill that need even though it is super
⏹️ ▶️ John hard work and they’re the stuff breaks when you know Apple changes things out from underneath them. It shows
⏹️ ▶️ John that like they’re crying out for your OS to have supported facilities for this functionality. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of things on iOS that aren’t even possible. I always wonder like, if we can have the hacks, is that removing a signal
⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple, but then I look at the Mac and I’m like, they’re not getting that signal either. It’s so clear that we want to do more sophisticated things with
⏹️ ▶️ John audio. That like, you know, that we just named Ecamm and Rogamiba, two businesses basically
⏹️ ▶️ John built, I don’t know, Ecamm sells a lot of things, but Rogamiba built around selling audio stuff to do things
⏹️ ▶️ John with your Mac that people clearly want to do, that they’re willing to pay good money for, that they have to
⏹️ ▶️ John do as hacks because Apple doesn’t have a good, supportive way to do it. And it’s just, the signal’s just not getting through.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’ll pass in the grass hacksies thing, like this is where people are walking, Apple. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John pave the dirt paths. like it’s such a clear signal. It’s frustrating to
⏹️ ▶️ John not see them take advantage of. Anyway, sorry, I derailed your connecting of boxes with crappy plastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but it’s what you’re saying like this. It’s exactly it ties in earlier of what you’re saying with I had where like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with I had it’s like Apple had this view of how they thought the world was or maybe it was wishful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thinking how they thought the world would become if they would build these you know, beautiful, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clean concrete rooms for people to fill with all this respect fear of privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in an industry that just doesn’t do that. Apple thought that the world would adapt to their vision for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iAd and it just didn’t. That was a foolish thing to even think would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible. I think you can look at the bigger picture of how they lock down iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to an increasing degree the Mac, but the Mac is still nowhere near the level of lockdown that iOS is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can look at that versus the pressures of us needing some of these hacks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get our work done or to innovate. So much innovation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has happened through hacks like this. A few months ago, we mentioned things like Dropbox,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finding integration, all this crazy stuff that now is either not possible anymore or harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or more limited as the OS keeps getting more and more locked down. Enabling these hacks to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some degree is very productive and to some degree necessary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for us to get our work done and to push things forward. And like earlier today, I was—maybe I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do the after show on how I jailbroke two iPhones today for the first time in like six years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. But, you know, and it’s for the same reason of like Apple has this vision of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how things should be and everything is locked down and isolated and it will allegedly work perfectly and it’s the future of computing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they’re the ones saying it’s the future of computing because certainly if you’re the one talking and you’re making computing devices, you want to say yours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the future of computing. It doesn’t I mean you can say as much as you want, it doesn’t make it true. It might become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true, but there’s no guarantee of that. But you know they’re saying this is the future computing, but they have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very highly opinionated view of them being in extreme control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of quite a bit more than what their users can do and what of course developers can do as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. And the reality of that is you have people saying I can’t get worked on an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS device because of reasons X, Y, or Z and Apple’s trying to knock those reasons down. They’re trying to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. They want people to be able to get their work done on Apple devices, but there are these major barriers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple won’t budge on that are just fatal barriers to a lot of these uses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Podcast recording with Skype is, yes, it’s a narrow thing that only podcasters care about, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is a very good representative of the problem as a whole of so much of what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we do today is these big, private, centralized power holders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we have to deal with. So in this case, Skype. out Skype is the best VoIP thing for podcasters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use to communicate with each other while they’re recording. And if you want to record a Skype call, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sit around and wait for Skype to release an iOS app update that will enable recording
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in their iOS app because they probably will never do it. You have no input on that. That’s out of your control as a user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or developer. What you can do on the Mac is you can kind of hack around. You can make this work. On iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t do that. That’s a big problem. And so you can you can extend this to so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many problems that chances are like if you look around at you know like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what any given person does on their Mac I bet almost everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who uses a Mac depends on at least one weird hack that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not possible on iOS they depend on that on the mass to do what they need to do and sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are Apple doing these acts because they can do it they can hack as much as they want sometimes it’s other companies and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac we can still do that. And on iOS, we’ve never been able to. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does limit things in the same way that Apple’s insistence on the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being the strictly walled container for your data has been so limiting so far with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS. They’re starting to break down some of those walls with iCloud Drive and stuff, but with mixed degrees of success
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and mixed degrees of confusion.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the big paradigm switch. The difficulty of the monolithic app. Because like you’re saying, you’re waiting
⏹️ ▶️ John for Skype to add that feature. Or those people, the apps that you have to say, Oh, this Apple that you record multiple people
⏹️ ▶️ John and a new voice over IP, like you have to have one app to do it all because it’s not even on the Mac, it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhat difficult, but at least on the Mac, historically, we’ve had the ability to mix and match. Here’s the best app for
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to someone over the internet. Here’s the best app for recording. Here’s the best app for editing my podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the you know, like that we could that we had job specific apps that you could use to work
⏹️ ▶️ John together to perform a single single job or an iOS. It’s like, well, it’s kind of easy you just have one
⏹️ ▶️ John app that’s like called podcast recording studio, whatever, you know, that does everything
⏹️ ▶️ John that you know, it has to have its own voice over IP client to talk to people remotely has to have its own microphone
⏹️ ▶️ John interfacing thing, it has to have its own editor has to have its own denoising filter. It’s like, because if you didn’t, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, someone has to export this audio to this other app. Talking to Jason Stella
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast production, he’s using some super fancy audio processing program on his Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John that he’s really impressed that does an amazing job of like intelligently removing noise even better than the ones he was using before.
⏹️ ▶️ John He can mix that into his workflow to say, Oh, I was using this, you know, I think he’s used like three different apps for
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Every time he finds a better one, he just swaps it out. And maybe it would be better if there was one big integrated
⏹️ ▶️ John app that did everything, but then he couldn’t like upgrade it piecemeal to say, this part of my workflow, I have just
⏹️ ▶️ John made a lot better. And it is kind of frustrating to have to incorporate all those apps together and deal with it, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, but like, there’s advantages and disadvantages. And iOS is totally on the you launch one
⏹️ ▶️ John app, your device becomes that app. And that app does everything for you. And if it doesn’t, like no one’s leaving garage band to go out to
⏹️ ▶️ John some other thing constantly back and forth, right? It’s more of like a more of the waterfall model, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you’re doing the for podcast production, it’s a great example where you’d want to at the very least separate
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that like remotely talks to people, whether it’s FaceTime, audio or Skype, or whatever, like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John is best for that. That is a complicated application in its own right. And you’re like, let that app do what it wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. I just need to in audio hijack parlance, connect the little tube that has the audio coming
⏹️ ▶️ John out of it from whatever app I’m using fat into this app that’s also recording from my local microphones, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then I can see the waveforms or whatever. Anyway, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not there yet. And the kind of power that enables is like loopback the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new argument, we’re gonna be talking about and before that audio hijack. These are apps that like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this can not only make things possible that were impossible before, but this can this can like eliminate the need for hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s very powerful, especially for things like affordability or just like speed of deployment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and experimentation of things. Like, I mean, there are so many, I’ve hacked with audio so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have a closet full of dumb wires and dumb little boxes that do one stupid thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there’s no software thing to do it. Like everyone who’s ever had to do anything with audio has probably had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this experience where, oh well, I could do this because I need this one weird cable to go between these two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ports to loop this thing into this thing first and then I can do this like it’s it’s a it’s a audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a huge pile of hacks most of which are have been in the past hardware things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you needed to buy and manage and and have on hand and and connect up in certain weird ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hope nothing breaks and once you get it working never touch anything and then when you get the software side of this you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you can like move this stuff around you can play with it you can you can do things for free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with no hardware in seconds that you could never do before. That’s very powerful.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the kind of innovation that computers are all about. This is what computers have always been about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco breaking down barriers of what can you not do in the physical world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or in the previous world before your computer came around. What were you either not able to do because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was too complicated or out of reach, or what was too expensive for you to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before with dedicated hardware or special needs or anything? And the And the computer knocks down those walls and says, now you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It is very kind of democratized. If you move towards this world of the monolithic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, like you’re saying, John, the monolithic app is not only more restrictive than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, and it eliminates a lot of those gains or significantly reduces them, but also it is kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of less democratic in a way because the number of people who can make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really great noise removal tool for audio is way bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the number of people who can make a complete audio production studio app and backend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco service. And the monolithic app requires that each app be way more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advanced than the kind of Unix philosophy of a tool does one thing and does that one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing well and you have multiple tools involved in a workflow.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’re not even close to that. Like if you think about Photoshop, that is a massive application. It does tons and
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of things, but there’s still Illustrator. Like there’s still room for it. Like it doesn’t matter how
⏹️ ▶️ John big you make the pieces. There’s still MS Paint. Well, you know, I’m just saying like that, that Photoshop,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite all the vector tools that they keep adding to Photoshop, Illustrator still has a role. Those are two massive
⏹️ ▶️ John applications. We’re not saying like every tool is like, oh, this is a tool for making circles. This is a tool for making squares. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it can be ridiculous. Because whenever you say Unix pipeline, they’re like, oh, one tool does one thing well. Like no matter how big
⏹️ ▶️ John you make it, there’s always a certain point where you’re making Photoshop and it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John if we’re doing page layout, should we add that to Photoshop? No, like keep it in InDesign or whatever. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s always something else. So like we were saying, for podcast production, there are so many aspects of it, no matter how big you make
⏹️ ▶️ John any aspect of that. Like you can imagine an amazing Skype equivalent for iOS that
⏹️ ▶️ John is really reliable. Like it’s an incredibly hard app to make. That’s it, just do that. Even that alone is basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not as big as Photoshop, but it’s a big problem. Fine, take that and move it off. And then if
⏹️ ▶️ John you wanna go down to all I do is reduce noise, like that can be a very small app. But there’s so many things in between.
⏹️ ▶️ John Trying to do podcast studio editor production suite, too much for like anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John to bite off, especially if you can only charge 99 cents for it or have iads in the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I wanted to come back to something John was saying earlier about paving over where people were making the paths
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this in the grass. And that’s a reference. It is, among other things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to this very program. Anyway, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we should be considering that Apple has done that in many occasions, but also with with AudioBus,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because AudioBus, if memory serves, was an iOS app that would let you kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey route audio between apps, and didn’t Apple start supporting that in GarageBand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a year or two ago?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it was basically a third-party protocol that people had just kind of made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to kind of hack local networking into sending audio between apps so that you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually have like an audio effects app that was just like a certain effect that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be in a chain that would be supported by other apps that supported AudioBus. And so the big deal there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that not only did Apple not ban that from the App Store, but they built in support to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco GarageBand on iOS to work with AudioBus apps. So that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very powerful. And so audio is a slight exception to this rule on iOS in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they did support AudioBus. However, only apps that work with AudioBus work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this system, and Skype doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was thinking of like audio buses like using the local network attacker and like it’s good that they that they didn’t like
⏹️ ▶️ John for example rejected and say you can’t do that but using loopback network interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ John as your IPC mechanism like surely there is a better way to get
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s iOS John this is all we have I just like I seem to recall have vague memories
⏹️ ▶️ John of us seeing a demo showing drag and drop between two side-by-side iPad applications
⏹️ ▶️ John that also use loopback like you can do a lot of stuff with loopback network interfaces doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean it’s the right solution. So again, Apple at the signal that should have been to Apple is like, I guess it’s good
⏹️ ▶️ John that they had a positive reaction to put what they should have done is like, man, there is a clear market need
⏹️ ▶️ John for audio applications to be able to work together and generally to have better like audio routing
⏹️ ▶️ John within the system. That is like a real supported API for shuttling audio
⏹️ ▶️ John buffers around, you know, and maybe it’s difficult because it’s kernel level stuff or whatever, whatever they have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. I guess supporting using local network interfaces for it is better
⏹️ ▶️ John than nothing, but that’s not the answer. That’s the final answer. They can’t go, well, we solved that problem. Now
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s move on to the next one. You haven’t solved it. There is a need for it. And letting a third
⏹️ ▶️ John party dictate the protocol is just so un-Apple-like. So I would just love for them
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep advancing in this realm and to address the clear market needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and to kind of break some rules here and there. you know? Like, AudioBus was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, as you said, I think that was an exception. That was a fluke. That was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the common pattern that Apple’s doing here. But you look at something like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only apps that opt into it are compatible with this system, and Skype doesn’t support it. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world of desktop computing, which is still wonderful, by the way, still, hey, by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey guys, still here, still wonderful. world of desktop computing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can break those rules. We can say, you know what, Skype doesn’t support this. Well, we’re going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clever as e-cam or users of e-cam software or other people like this. We can be clever, you know, we’re going to give us stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We can say, you know what, even if your app doesn’t support this, we can work around that in this technical,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco semi-hacky way. And we’re going to say, we’re going to enable this. And that is so powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for just enabling people to do things. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On iOS, that category of value and that category of innovation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is almost impossible. There are some areas for it, but it’s very, very limited compared to what you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Mac OS X or on Windows or anything like that. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel like we’re missing out. We’re making computing almost like the same way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hardware that Apple’s selling is so not hackable anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can buy what Apple offers and everything’s soldered to the motherboard now and you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco replace anything. Like there was a time back in the day, I think I made my big post about the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MB whatever 101 non-random MacBook Pro, where like at a time when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple didn’t sell 120 gig hard drives, you could buy one off Newegg
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like 200 bucks and put it in and you could have a configuration that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t sell. Whoa! And it was super powerful because it and you could replace the DVD drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with another hard drive if you wanted a laptop with two hard drives or tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of capacity or one small SSD and one big hard drive you could do stuff like that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you can’t everything’s locked down you can only buy what Apple sells in support configurations for most of their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware and that’s that and in iOS it’s the same kind of thing in the software it’s because it’s becoming the same kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing where it’s like you can only do what is prescribed to you by Apple and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each app in its own monolithic silo and And that is it. And that is very limiting. And I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am concerned long-term for this kind of dumbing down of computing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is value in making things more approachable, but I don’t think you have to eliminate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways people can innovate in order to do that, necessarily. I think there’s other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solutions to that problem, and that these things are being conflated when that isn’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I Tend to agree with what you just said, but I think it’s worth noting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that We’re really tainted as desktop users as people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as people who really love desktops I mean, I love desktop so much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that I just yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I literally went from a laptop to a desktop just recently But what you perceive as handcuffs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think other people perceive as wings in that it’s less less complex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a good way. It’s less intimidating. It’s less daunting. You know, complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is scary for a lot of users. And I’d say even for each of us, there are things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we don’t know how to do with our computers where that sort of complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is scary and frustrating and prohibitive. And I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like there’s the right tool for the job. And I think that a lot of jobs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my opinion, recording podcasts being one of them, as we’ve used as an example, I think the full-bore computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be it a laptop or desktop, is the right tool for that job. But you can make a really good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey argument that there are a lot of other jobs where an iOS device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is, if not the rightest tool, it is a perfectly acceptable tool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t think any one thing needs to be all things to all people. And it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of unfortunate that none of us is a really, really devout iOS user for productivity-related
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things, because I really think that Federico, for example, would have some strong counterpoints here. And because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cut from the same mold that you guys are, I’m having a hard time arguing, playing devil’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advocate in their favor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, again, I really do think it’s worth clarifying here that you can have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complexity, And you can have the ability to do complex things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without making something harder to use necessarily. You don’t need to lock it down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it easier to use.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think it’s like there’s an accident of history here. Like a lot of the locking down things they’re doing is because a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of the things we just described on the Mac are unsafe. And we know what happens if you allow them to run rampant. You
⏹️ ▶️ John get it. It’s not a stable system. Like what we really want is, and I hope what we’re all working
⏹️ ▶️ John towards is the ability for people to have new ideas and do
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting things without compromising stability, safety, predictability, like essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John wandering into another apps memory space and screwing with it is like the worst possible thing you can do. It’s terrible, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And but on the other hand, if you have to wait for Apple to provide you supported API is like maybe that’s not a great solution. What we’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ John for is, I mean, you know, this is still, you know, distant future stuff or whatever, like, we would like
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to do interesting, innovative
⏹️ ▶️ John things in safe ways. And because we can’t do them in safe ways, because like the alternatives
⏹️ ▶️ John are basically, if that app developer didn’t think of it, you can either, you know, parachute
⏹️ ▶️ John into their memory space and cross your fingers and be really smart, which is terrible, or you can’t do a damn thing
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. And what we’re looking for is, they may not have thought of it. And hey, here’s a way you can do something and
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t screw it up like that, that I think we want we want both we want and we’re getting it, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John in bits and pieces here, like, it’s like, that’s why the solution isn’t Hey, Apple, you should allow
⏹️ ▶️ John memory injection on iOS, like, that’s not the solution, right? That doesn’t help anybody. But because of the
⏹️ ▶️ John state of our languages, and the way we do, you know, everything having to do with computers, we’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John move away from the bad old days where it was the Wild West, but we haven’t quite gotten to the new golden age, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is, now, finally, we have the freedom to do what we want, without the things that no or downsides
⏹️ ▶️ John from past technology. So it is it’s a it’s an uncomfortable transitional phase where we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have the safety we want. And we’re trying to like, I guess the transition is step one, make everything
⏹️ ▶️ John safe. Step to find the ways to do all the things we used to do in unsafe ways. And I just want to
⏹️ ▶️ John hurry up with the step two. And like, that’s why I think, like, Marco said, it doesn’t have to increase complexity
⏹️ ▶️ John or be scary or whatever. We just don’t have the new ways to do it yet. So Apple is more or less doing the right things
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, look, we know these things are bad, we just stop them. And you say, Yeah, but I can’t do x, I can’t do y.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it’s like, All right, well, you know, we’re on board with you, Apple, we agree, it’s not good, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it’s final default, or sandboxing or any other things, but like, but at some point, you
⏹️ ▶️ John got to give us the new, safer, supported, better, like, you have to give us the better way to
⏹️ ▶️ John do these things, because we want to do these things. And if you don’t give us away, we’re gonna do them the old bad way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or, you know, like, it’s not you can’t just pretend, This is getting to the core of what Marco’s point
⏹️ ▶️ John is very often is you can’t just pretend that those things were unsafe and bad
⏹️ ▶️ John and Will never need to do them again So just throw them in the dustbin like The the task that people
⏹️ ▶️ John were trying to accomplish is still a task they want to accomplish it if you give them a different better Way to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. They will take it if you give them no way to do it Then they will just find some other way to accomplish that task
⏹️ ▶️ John probably going back to the old bad way So I definitely feel like we’re in a transitional period with
⏹️ ▶️ John all this iOS stuff on the iPad Pro and everything like that And it’s just like it’s an exercise in figuring out how
⏹️ ▶️ John we can Evolve this new clearly safer clearly easier to use,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know less less stuff that you shouldn’t have to be concerned about That’s what it boils down to things
⏹️ ▶️ John on iOS that you you know that are on the Mac You have to be worried about X Y & Z and on iOS you don’t worry about them at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s good thumbs up up. Now let me also use those iOS devices or whatever to do
⏹️ ▶️ John the things I could do with my Mac but in this new safer way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week Fracture, Squarespace, and MailRoute. and we will see you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ 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
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, tech podcast so long.
Post-show: Marco’s jailbreaks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What on God’s green earth possessed you to jailbreak a device? Two devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Two devices in 2016. He
⏹️ ▶️ John want to pay for a game. He didn’t want to pay 99 cents for a game.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, that was it. Oh my God.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So here’s the deal here, which fits in perfectly with what we were just talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about. In developing the next version of Overcast, I’m trying, you know, people have been complaining about battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage. So I’m trying to reduce its power consumption. And that’s one of the reasons why I’ve actually replaced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the visualizer, the little animated bars i replace that with it with a different one for the next version that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way way lower power and because that was that was a big power suck but i also you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know i want to test with the core audio engine and i made i made some improvements there but i want to be able to test this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like i can do things that reduce like the percentage of cpu usage while i’m running it from xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like i can do that but that doesn’t tell me how much power it’s using an xcode hat and there is an instruments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like power instrument but it really just tells you like you know you’re using the radio right now oh you use the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPU at this much at this point it doesn’t tell you you know the change you just made just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reduced battery life when running on an iPhone 5s from two hours to one hour like it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t tell you that it doesn’t tell you how it’ll actually behave on devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or so it’s very hard to know if you’re actually making progress with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with making things more battery efficient in the real world on real devices when you’re dealing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relatively small changes. Like, if you’re using 100% CPU and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you go to 20, that’s probably going to be a pretty clear win. You don’t really need to test on a device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know that that’s a better idea, or to do a full battery test. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re trying to test whether something is better on the battery, one way to do it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to run it on a phone, like fully charge up the phone, try to control everything as much as you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run it when the phone is 100% charged and see how long it takes for the phone’s battery to die completely.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is probably the best way to do it. That is also very hard to control in all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways and is extremely time-consuming because I found out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I took my my my closest spare device to something that was relevant. So I got my 6
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus and I’m like you know what this will be good because turns out the battery in the 6 plus is quite large.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I I ran this test last night where I’m like I was playing it into and trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to measure like you know when does a device turn off like that’s hard to measure accurately if you’re not staring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at it constantly so I had this big setup where I’m like all right I had I had the the success of the six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plus playing through the headphone jack into a USB sound card that was recording
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on to my laptop and the laptop was kind of like in the corner like you know just recording just like record
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as possible and then in the morning I’ll get up and I’ll see like you know where it where it stopped and I’ll see like you know how long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of playback that I have playing files continuously off this off this thing and then I can compare to like the built-in podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app to see like what’s my target like what should I be trying for what what what can a podcast app do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s like totally integrated using all the official API’s versus what can mine do and I’ll try to try to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those comparable so I wake up in the morning and the phone has gone from a hundred percent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 92 percent and I realize oh oh no, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John So you just need like another week of testing and you’ll get down to zero.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was expecting, you know, because it has wifi on, so like, you know, I want any kind of sync
⏹️ ▶️ Marco activity, I want that to be counted. So wifi’s on, it’s logged into iCloud, to an iCloud account,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, but there’s no other ads, you know, it’s a restored phone, everything else is off, and airplane mode is on, but wifi’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. So like, so it’s not using the cell radio, because I don’t have an extra SIM anyway, it doesn’t matter. Like, you know, that would kind of be unfair,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because conditions can change and everything. So I’m like, all right, we’ll just use Wi-Fi. Turns out a 6
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Plus, in airplane mode, just using Wi-Fi with the screen off,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only playing audio out of its headphone jack, is insanely power efficient. And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually want to use Overcast to do that, you can expect something like 100 hours of playback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. But that makes it difficult to actually develop and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notice any big changes, because if it takes you 100 hours to run a full test to see,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did what I just do make a difference? Did the change I made today, did that meaningfully change battery life?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s kind of a crappy cycle to be on. I could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use a 5S, which has way less battery life, or a regular 6S,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but those mostly have the same problem. The 5S would be the smallest battery in the group,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but my 5S is also from when 5Ss were new, so it’s a very old battery,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the 5S hardware is very different from the 6 and 6S hardware. Like the CPUs have gotten better, the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is different, the screens are different. So like the power profile might not be the same. Something that is way more efficient on a 5S,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, some change that makes it way more efficient might be less efficient on a 6 or a 6S. Most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my users are on 6s and 6Ss, so like that’s what I should be testing on. But still, like how do you do this without it taking 100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours or 80 hours or you know, these massive time spans? So the other way to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be run it for a while. run it overnight, look at the battery percentage when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you start, and then in the morning, look at the battery percentage when it’s ending, and then just extrapolate. You can be like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it took eight hours to go from 80% to 60%, then battery life would be X if it had a whole charge.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s an okay way to do it. It isn’t the best, because the percentage meter isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always exactly accurate. Battery life is not linear. Exactly, so it isn’t the best way to do it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can at least give you a reasonable approximation in a short amount of time. One of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems with that is that it’s just imprecise. You’re using this two digit percentage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s nothing you can do with that that’s that precise. It took my, the 6 Plus,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it took it an hour to move one percentage point when I was watching it earlier today. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, if you want to actually look at the screen, you’re turning the screen on to check the battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level. So that’s kind of messing with the data. You’re tarnishing the data because you’re turning the screen on. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the things that iOS does the screen turns on running background refreshes doing system checks, whatever, that’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening every time you have to even check the level. So you don’t want to be checking it very often. But if it takes like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an hour to move one percentage point, then that’s very imprecise. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my idea was, let’s let me you know, dive into the API and try to get a more precise try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get like the milliamp hour rating for the battery, like what is the more precise charge level, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an API on UI device called battery level or something like that. But it only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates in 5% increments. So that’s even less precise than looking at the screen and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco checking that. So like, let me just find something. Is there anything else that can read this? Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll use a private API, because I don’t, I’ll just make a little quick test app to show me the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charts I want the phone, I don’t need to submit it to the store can use a private API fine. Well, it turns out the private API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to have the Iokit DILIB file, the framework,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamic library file. You need to have the binary from a device. How do I get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an Iokit DILIB from a modern device? And there are a few online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are all 32-bit. You can’t build 32-bit apps with any recent version of Xcode. And I’m like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not going to install Snow Leopard or whatever. I try to do the old version route
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. that’s too much work. I’m not going to do that. All right, so what else can I do? What’s faster? And it turns out you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can browse the file system on an iOS device if you have a jailbroken phone. You can browse the file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system and pull arbitrary stuff off of it. PhoneView works for a lot of stuff without jailbreaking, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it couldn’t get to the system directory that would have these frameworks in it. So, okay, I guess I need to jailbreak something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll take one of my iPhone 6s from last year that’s been sitting in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drawer discharged, charge it up, jailbreak it, and get get this file off of it so I can make an app that would do this that would actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run in 64-bit mode. The process of jailbreaking today, so I should point out the only time I’ve ever jailbroken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before was with the iPhone 1. Shortly after it came out there was a site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called I think it was jailbreakme.com or something like that where it was like literally like a Safari exploit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would just you’d visit a website and tap a button and it would jailbreak your phone for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Total security hole. It’s terrible that was possible and it’s terrible whenever that is possible again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that ever happens again. That is a terrible thing that Apple should definitely always close up because that’s a horrible hole.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I did it for like, I ran it for like a day and I loaded my phone with garbage and I’m like, you know what, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stupid. My phone works worse now, everything’s garbage-y, there’s nothing in here that I actually need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I restored my phone like two days later. It was so quick, I’m like, you know, this is stupid. And I’ve never jailbroked since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then. But the fact is, it’s very, very popular. Tons of, literally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably tens of millions of people jailbreak. It is a significant slice of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS user base that is jailbroken. It is not a small percentage. It is not a fringe thing. It is a very, very common thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figure, you know, the tools must be, you know, let me see what it’s like today. So the procedure of jailbreaking today is you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to find a device that doesn’t have anything newer than iOS 9.0.2 on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So I had like, you know, oh, this one in my drawer happened to be 9.0.1. Okay, I’ll use that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Boot that up and try to search for like how to jailbreak a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is basically saying, like, how do I download Photoshop? You know everything you get is going to be a scam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of some kind. It’s going to be malware, it’s going to be ads, it’s going to be garbage. You’re going to find all this garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. So searching for how to jailbreak actually was very easy. There’s this thing called the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pangu jailbreak, one of those. My impression of this, as somebody who doesn’t know anything about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that the way you jailbreak is that you basically download a closed source application from a Chinese
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hacking group that’s unsigned binary and you tell and you force your Mac to run it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how you jailbreak. You plug your phone in, you run this arbitrary code from a Chinese
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hacking group on your Mac. That sounds safe. I did this on my laptop I don’t care about because there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John running that on my real computer. Now it’s infected your entire network but on the bright side your Apple TV won’t have a number after
⏹️ ▶️ John its name anymore. Because while this malware
⏹️ ▶️ John wanders through your network it’ll fix that just on a drive by. It’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common courtesy. So anyway, so here I am like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco creating my teeth like shit. I really need to be doing this. But like, okay, you know, I’ll run it on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same laptop or like if I buy any hardware that requires some kind of Java installer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I run that on this laptop as well. It’s like my garbage like anything that requires like software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t want anywhere near my real computer. I run on this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the homepage for your web browser on that computer is now yahoo right because you install job
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tool bar yeah anyway so yeah ran it and it turns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out it’s you know it’s stupid easy so anyway I generally to make a long story short jailbreak this phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it boots up I I go to city which is who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the UI for city it’s it’s like when the App Store first launched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people just put random parameters into UI kit widgets and just I just spewed them all over the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s Cydia still today. Like it was… I posted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a screenshot in the release. I’m like, I can’t believe this is even real. Like this is how this app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually looks today. But anyway, so sorry, Jailbreakers. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have some improvement opportunities in corporate speak, maybe a coaching opportunity. Oh my God. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put it in the parking lot for now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long story short, the file’s not there. I install
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey these apps tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me and like the dial image is not there. And so I and I’m like well maybe like people say oh things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change in iOS 9 maybe things will be better on an older version but I still need 64 bits. I’m like alright let me pull out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tips old 5s which has been powered off in the closet for like two years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pull that out it’s still running iOS 7 great I jailbreak that with another app from the pangu
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hackers that friends That’s why I’ve never read two of their apps on this laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it’s a different app to Jailbreak iOS 7. Run that, turns out not there either. And it turns out that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently, dial-ups have not existed on iOS for quite some time because they lump them all into one giant blob
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they kind of load out of that. And there’s this cache you can try to hack, but it doesn’t really work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I’m like, this whole thing failed. I’m just like, forget it. I found one Jailbreak app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after much searching, I found one jailbreak app in the interesting Cydia
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app quote store, where it would display the milliamp hours of the battery for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. I’m like, alright, good enough. I’ll just run that. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put that on the iPhone 6. And now I have an iPhone 6 that has this interesting app from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this interesting app store on it that will show me the milliamp hour rating. So now I can at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch the app at start, run my testing, 12 hours later, open the app again and see what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the milliamp hour level is of the battery and do basically a better, more precise version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the percentage interpolation and have, you know, faster turnaround time. That’s my incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long, boring story about jailbreaking today. And I would not recommend this to anybody. This is…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If anybody knows an easier way, just using private APIs that I could just do in development that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t involve jailbreaking, please let me know. But yeah, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I haven’t jailbroken since I think my 3GS and I did it at the time for SP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings, which basically was control center long before a control center existed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it was pretty magical. But even then, I think I only had my phone jailbroken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for like a couple of months or something like that because it just felt gross to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I wasn’t really gaining anything that justified all the icky feelings I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by going through that whole process. So I can understand both why you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did and why you hated every moment of it. But it’s an interesting story, to say the least. The lengths that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I mean, I think so. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the lengths that a good developer will go to, to try to figure something out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Again, it’s just like one more thing. It’s like, if there was just an official API, or a developer tool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you could enable on the phone. Because the problem is, even if they put it into Xcode, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run it while connected because it’ll charge. And there’s no Wi-Fi debugging yet. And I know there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like some support for that to make the watch work, but it’s not for phones yet. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s just like, there’s something, there are so many failures here that led me to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe the answer is I should just not care this much, which is a terrible answer. Because it’s like, how does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple manage their battery usage? They probably have tools to tell them this kind of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while they’re developing core iOS functionality and iOS apps. Like, I assume people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inside Apple have a way to know, am I making battery life better or worse with this change I’m making to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app? That it’s probably easier than jailbreaking their phones and running the Cydia app quote store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In summary, please Apple, break down some of these walls, where it makes sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, titles. I think Salty and Fiend has to win.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nothing in this show was about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The whole first four minutes of the show were about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh yeah, totally. I really need to put some sort of Syracuse County prevention
⏹️ ▶️ John They’ll just use Unicode. You can’t stop them because JavaScript doesn’t understand text.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t understand numbers either. Try going above 53 bits. Moving
⏹️ ▶️ John Your wonderful language. Did you see the Trump programming language? No. No? It was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John only uses integers because Trump doesn’t do anything halfway. All right, I put
⏹️ ▶️ John Trump script. I think Trump script is the one I saw. numbers are strictly greater than 1 million
⏹️ ▶️ John there are no import statements
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey allowed all code has to be homegrown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making making Python great again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey magnificent what about I like to punch the monkey better than this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco telling you saltine fiend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s cool it’s funny
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’ve discussed this whole team the thing on this show haven’t I in the past I didn’t think so I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John so. No, I think remember when we were talking about super taster stuff I know we’ve talked about super taster stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John super taste like That’s why I’m able to enjoy a good saltine because I can I can get the every other
⏹️ ▶️ John bit everyone else tastes like he’s a salty cardboard, especially if they’re stale, but there are subtle nuances
⏹️ ▶️ John to the flavor of saltine that can be enjoyed by people with Very sensitive taste buds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The wheat thin is so sweet as far superior.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s not larger and less portable pastures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey you’re like the master of like junk food. Like how do you not love wheat thins?
⏹️ ▶️ John Wheat thins are not great They’re not terrible, but they’re not great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re cardboardy. Stale ones, like with Johnson. Stale versions of any cracker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or chip are cardboardy. But Wheat Thins are,
⏹️ ▶️ John man. Wheat Thins are like, they are the Pringles of the cracker world in that they
⏹️ ▶️ John are just compressed sawdust. Oh, Pringles are magnificent though. No, Pringles are compressed sawdust and so
⏹️ ▶️ John are Wheat Thins, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco pretty sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I mean, formulation wise, you are right that Pringles are not like slices of potatoes. are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like you know they’re compressed powder versions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but i mean that’s like that’s how flour works in every wheat-based cracker
⏹️ ▶️ John no no you don’t like here’s the difference you don’t just take like the idea with pringles is that there is like a dehydrated
⏹️ ▶️ John potatoes that is in powder form that is merely pressed to make it into
⏹️ ▶️ John chip shape it’s not as if you take flour and water and mix them to make a dough and like you know because that’s what a cracker
⏹️ ▶️ John is saltines are legit dough that is cooked right right there a cracker right
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m pretty sure wheat thins are dehydrated powdery crap that is compressed into
⏹️ ▶️ John cracker shape and then covered with salt and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grease I don’t think it’s true because they are not of uniform shape maybe maybe they do maybe they do cook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them there is an edge and you can like some of them will have a slight curl down on one side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it looks like and and and the part that curls down is slightly burnt compared to the rest of the cracker and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of them occasionally will have a ripple also so I do think they’re actually baking these in big sheets and then
⏹️ ▶️ John As with any industrial food, we probably don’t want to know how these things are actually made.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You’re probably right. Probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. Yeah. I love that you think that your saltines are somehow made in a better way than wheat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thins. I do think that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really do believe that. I really doubt it. The bubbles on top. fake