251: Uninstall Your Water Reminder App!
07 Dec 2017Apple’s big bugs, Casey’s date formats, John’s Touch Bar, and Marco’s new Forecast app.
Episode Description:
- Casey argues for day/month/year instead of year/month/day (ISO 8601)
- Follow up:
- Root bug post was in the dev forums, not the support forums.
- Reporting to
[email protected] - XProtect and Xplorer
- iOS keyboard woes and Gboard
- John's Touch Bar switch
- Jony Ive hears your feedback
#askatp- Should we get rid of paper books? (via Josh Keegan)
- Will Apple ever make backlit desktop keyboards? (via Craig)
- How does dynamic podcast-ad targeting work? (via Prodan Statev)
- iOS 11.2 emergency release for December 2 bug
- "Month 13 is out of bounds" bug in High Sierra
- John's phone is full
- Post-show: Forecast
Sponsored by:
- Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Get 10% off your first order with code ATP17.
- AfterShokz: Headphones powered by bone-conduction technology.
- Linode: Get one of the fastest, most efficient SSD cloud servers for only $10/month. Use code AccidentalPodcast10 for a $10 credit.
Chapters
- Intro: Casey wiggles for a minute
- DD-MM-YYYY vs. YYYY-MM-DD
- Follow-up: Root bug
- Follow-up: XProtect
- Follow-up: Active Directory
- Sponsor: Fracture (code ATP17)
- Follow-up: iOS 11 keyboard
- Old Mac habits die hard
- Sponsor: AfterShokz
- Jony Ive hears us
- #askatp: Getting rid of books
- #askatp: Backlit desktop keyboards
- #askatp: Dynamic podcast ads
- Sponsor: Linode (code AccidentalPodcast10)
- December 2 bug
- Month 13 is out of bounds
- John’s phone is full
- Ending theme
- Post-show: Forecast 🖼️
Intro: Casey wiggles for a minute
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just as a warning a I need one more stand hour before I go to bed, which means we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to end before midnight
⏹️ ▶️ John You can stand while we podcast Standing podcast desk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have you gotten the nine o’clock hour yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what like one or two minutes of activity of standing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one minute But I got a like wiggle around and make the watch think that I’m standing
⏹️ ▶️ John it should run in place You can get if you’re under your calorie count for the day you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey run. That’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What am I doing? How am I doing? Let’s look.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you finishing all three rings on some kind of streak? Are you just doing stand? Are you still a blue ring stud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stand is the only thing I? Really care about I did have a really good streak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going for a long time, but I’m I’m ever so lightly sick So I’ve been skipping my morning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey runs And so basically I’m just a sloth as I I’m realizing my true form as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a sloth a blue ring sloth a blue ring sloth That’s right. That’s exactly it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How’d you get the exercise minutes and not get the orange ring? Because I’m out of shape,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even despite all the running up and down. So getting exercise minutes is easier than you think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, wait, wait. Okay, we’re good. Okay. We can start the show. You got it? You got like a badge or anything? Everything is alright now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in the right time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zone? Who knows? Am I in the right country? country. Is this what people tune in for?
DD-MM-YYYY vs. YYYY-MM-DD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In your preferred date format, why don’t you put the year first so that it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey lexicographically sorts properly?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a good question, which probably won’t make the show, but if I were editing would make the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is why I don’t edit, by the way. The reason you don’t do ISO,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it, 8601, is because if you’re doing something wherein
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re handling like just an unbelievable amount of files, like let’s say for the sake of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey argument that you were you had all of your pictures that you’ve ever taken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in one folder because you’re weird. So every single photograph you’ve ever taken is all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in one folder on your or one directory if you will. Were they ever called directories on the Mac John way back when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or is that just a DOS thing? They were not. Okay, so it’s a DOS thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyways. What did Unix calls them directories, right? Oh, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey calls them directories.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, fair enough. Anyway, I digress. So if you had any photo you’ve ever taken in one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folder slash directory, then absolutely 8601 that bad boy. But in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my day to day use of a computer, easily 90% of the time that I’m looking at any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey date, I know by context that it is the current year. So why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would I put year first? That just gets annoying and redundant. There are certain circumstances
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where year should go first. But generally speaking, the one true way to store a date
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is day-day, month-month, year-year. Because a day is smaller than a month,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a month is smaller than a year. 8601 is ridiculous, and anyone who says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey otherwise is preposterous. It is day, month, year. Unless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are doing machine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in which case, yes, 8601 is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no. So what I’m arguing for, which I guess is 8601, I forget, is year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s 8601.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason why this is better is that it is completely unambiguous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because nowhere ever uses year, day, month. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you see a four-digit year up front, you know that the next number is going to be the month
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the one after that is going to be the day. In addition to the benefits of it being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alphabetically sorted properly in lists, that’s a side benefit. But the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number one argument for it is that it’s unambiguous. That you can use that format anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world and people will know how to read it. And the chance of error is very, very low.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that alone should win it. But also, you know, you’re a programmer. The lexicographical sorting argument should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on you. And you know, yes, you know right now this is the current year. Guess what? It won’t be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a month. Like next month will be a different current year. And if you have a format that sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correctly, no matter what year you are in or what year the stuff you’re looking at is from, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems like it would be a win. So the correct way to write a date in a file name or in an unambiguous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco context is year, month, day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, I can’t disagree with you because you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong, but you’re also not right because I just don’t like it. I don’t like it. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same person who doesn’t put a zero in my URL slug, so I mean, who am I to talk? But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to my eyes, I think we can all agree that Americans get it wrong. That month, day, year is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preposterous. It is truly and utterly stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re trying to make us all agree on cheese here with this? Because I don’t agree on cheese. Only you are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agreeing on cheese. What does that even mean? American cheese is delicious.
⏹️ ▶️ John Month, day, year is not preposterous. For file names, sure it’s preposterous, but for display purposes,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is what we were talking about last time, you’re like, oh, I sent myself to Australia so my watch can display dates to
⏹️ ▶️ John me and I don’t want dates displayed to me in your month day. I want them in
⏹️ ▶️ John the US system. The US system makes sense for display dates because… No it doesn’t. Yeah it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John Month day is all you need to know almost all the time. And for disambiguation hanging out on the right hand side because
⏹️ ▶️ John we read from right to left, if you need to look over there, yeah there’s year. We read from right to left? You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what I mean, left to right. No you always go day month year. You always go day
⏹️ ▶️ John year. No, not in this country and you shouldn’t do it that way because…
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, not in this country,
⏹️ ▶️ John We use imperial. Monthday. Monthday makes sense. Monthday
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey makes sense for display purposes. Not, you
⏹️ ▶️ John shouldn’t put that in your file name, because that would be for the reasons Marco already outlined.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, this is preposterous, John. The reason you say monthday is right is just because it’s what you’re used to.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I’m saying there’s an argument for it. It’s not just like random or wrong. Like there are every, each one of these formats
⏹️ ▶️ John has its strengths and weaknesses and saying that we can all agree that monthday is preposterous is saying that
⏹️ ▶️ John there are no advantages to it. There are there is there is a sense there is a mnemonic there is a sensible system for why
⏹️ ▶️ John that date works not just because we’re used to it, which is obviously a big factor, but also there are things to recommend
⏹️ ▶️ John it, which is what I was just explaining. So it’s not, you know, completely, it’s not a completely write
⏹️ ▶️ John off. It’s only completely write off and file names because that would be them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can get behind I can get behind month day when year is not a part of it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey March 17. Okay, fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s the thing like you have that disambiguation like it’s month day And then in cases where you feel like you need some
⏹️ ▶️ John disambiguation like during the year changeover Or if you’re doing distant future distant past dates
⏹️ ▶️ John you can throw on the year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see but then if it’s month to year How does how are you a programmer? How are you a basically a robot
⏹️ ▶️ John say for human consumption for display purposes not for naming your files not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for a month year?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you’re saying month to year only because it’s what you’re used to
⏹️ ▶️ John by doing what you’re doing It’s like I’m going to do all my temperatures in Celsius. I’m going to have all my conversations in the United States
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? No Celsius is barbaric.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but what I’m saying is like in this country is the way we do it. There’s massive advantages to doing monthday
⏹️ ▶️ John in this country because everyone else does it that way. And if you do it the reverse you will confuse other people and potentially also
⏹️ ▶️ John confuse yourself depending on whether you remember if you wrote it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I will I will concede that it is unusual in this country. However, don’t you put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that barbaric Celsius Celsius nonsense on me. Don’t you even start, sir.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m just saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John aside from the barbarism of Celsius for human temperatures, were you to use it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be swimming against the tide in this country. Sure. And you’d have that same confusion. You should just
⏹️ ▶️ John use Kelvin, so you don’t have to have the degree symbol. There, problem solved.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All I’m saying is, all I’m saying is, I can see an argument for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey month to year. You’re wrong, but I can see it. But let me make it plain that using Celsius
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for human felt temperatures, for ambient air temperatures and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only ambient air temperatures is utterly ridiculous. And all of you heathens in Europe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who say otherwise are unequivocally wrong. Look at the scale. Zero, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s cold ish. A hundred, you’re dead. Yeah, there’s that famous GIF.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. It’s not even a GIF. It’s just an image.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco In Fahrenheit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well, it can be encoded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey as a GIF. zero
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is really, really cold, 100 is really, really hot. That’s all you need to know. For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ambient air temperatures.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re such a millennial, it’s not even animated.
⏹️ ▶️ John When GIF is synonymous with animation, I get like a triple take on that, like what is he…
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey breaking my brain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, John. I’m sorry we’re kids. Anyway, suffice to say, I can allow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an argument that I can allow the 86.01 argument, I think you’re wrong. I can allow the month-to-year argument, I think you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong. But we should all agree the official
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP stance on Celsius is that it is utterly preposterous and wrong for ambient air
⏹️ ▶️ Casey temperature. You want to talk science-y things? Well, you should be using Kelvin, but fine, use Celsius. But for ambient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air temperature, it is wrong and Europe should be ashamed. Let’s move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on and let’s start with some follow-up.
Follow-up: Root bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the root bug post in the dev forums. That was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dev forums, not the support forums. And one or all of us got that backwards last week.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was my bad. I think we all started off saying the right thing. But I very quickly shifted into talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about the support forums. So the developer forums, you have to be a registered Apple developer
⏹️ ▶️ John to even see them like they’re actually authenticated. So they’re not open to the public. They are still pretty noisy. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s also true that they are not a hey, Apple, come help me with my problem thing like it is other developers
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to other developers and you have, you know, DTS support incidents or whatever for
⏹️ ▶️ John actual, you know, you pay money and then Apple can help you with stuff. So some of what we said is
⏹️ ▶️ John true, but it’s important not to confuse the two types of forums that you’ve completely wide
⏹️ ▶️ John open public support forums are high volume and very noisy and people talk about all sorts of things.
⏹️ ▶️ John Dev forums are less so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. created. Apparently, Gregory Beatty emailed product security at apple.com about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this bug on November 12. Do you want to tell us about this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s a lot of people asking about, you know, should Apple be pouring over their
⏹️ ▶️ John forums or having some one or more employees look at all the both the dev forums and the support forums
⏹️ ▶️ John so they can see these bugs ahead of times. And a lot of people saying, oh, posting this on Twitter isn’t the way you’re supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ John disclose this, blah, blah, blah, what you’re supposed to do is email product security at apple.com. And turns out
⏹️ ▶️ John somebody did actually do exactly the right thing, which is email product security, apple.com about this exact bug
⏹️ ▶️ John on November 12, which is a long time ago. And I don’t know if they just have a big backlog
⏹️ ▶️ John or didn’t get to it or knew about it, but we’re hoping they could just sweep it under
⏹️ ▶️ John the rug until their fix came out in a later update. I don’t know what the story is. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was interesting that for all the yelling about the right and wrong way to report bugs and the
⏹️ ▶️ John right and wrong way for Apple to know about them. This particular bug long before it was widely
⏹️ ▶️ John publicized and long before it was fixed, was submitted to Apple in the correct
⏹️ ▶️ John way. Excellent. The quote unquote correct way because there’s some argument that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you have to, you know, like, uh, responsible disclosure or whatever, where you tell the,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the source of the bug about it first secretly to give them a chance to fix it. And only if they don’t fix
⏹️ ▶️ John it after a long, long time, do you go in the public versus quote unquote, irresponsible disclosure, where you just tell it to
⏹️ ▶️ John the public before, you know, at the same time, the vendor finds out the public does. And
⏹️ ▶️ John there was some debate about what actually is the the best way to do that. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you hear this, you’re like, Oh, well, of course, responsible disclosure, where you tell the vendor first, that’s the way to do it, because it protects the most people, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want the bad guys to have a blah, blah, blah. But the the problem with that approach in the past has been that the vendors are like, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John thank you for telling us. We’ll fix it when we get to it. And then you’re sitting there waiting go like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how How long do I have to wait before, you know, like maybe the bad guys already know about this. Just because
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t tell the bad guys doesn’t mean they don’t. Just because I discovered it, maybe they discovered it now too. And so you’re waiting. Come on, come on,
⏹️ ▶️ John fix the bug, fix the bug. And then you have to know how long do I wait before it’s okay for me to say in public, like what this thing is, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, and, uh, there’s, there’s an article about it a couple years ago, which was
⏹️ ▶️ John about the much more bureaucratic process of submitting things rather than the informal just email Apple policy.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’m not entirely sure that the in this world
⏹️ ▶️ John where information is so widely shared and it’s so difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to know what other people know, like how long have
⏹️ ▶️ John black hat hackers known about this bug? We don’t know and they’re not going to tell us. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the one thing we have learned from these type of incidents is that widespread
⏹️ ▶️ John publication of a bug gets it fixed really fast. And submitting it through the proper channels does not
⏹️ ▶️ John always get it fixed really fast. So I’m not quite sure what the right thing to do here is. It’s not clear cut.
Follow-up: XProtect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And do you want to tell us about what Sean writes about X protect?
⏹️ ▶️ John I expect I think is the either the internal or external both names of the malware
⏹️ ▶️ John system that Apple has on Mac OS where they have signatures of malware and they periodically update
⏹️ ▶️ John that behind the scenes without you knowing about it. And I think I mentioned the show like you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even know that it’s happening like they’re updating that malware whenever the heck they feel like it and you have no choice in the matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you can actually disable it or whatever but on the default system you are getting these updates whether you like it or not unless
⏹️ ▶️ John you go into the system preferences and turn off a little checkbox that it says you get these updates
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you’re wondering when they happen people are actually keeping track of it and you can.
Follow-up: Active Directory
⏹️ ▶️ John look at this website, we’ll put a link in the show notes that tells you when the updates
⏹️ ▶️ John are and what things they protect against. And there’s even a little shell script
⏹️ ▶️ John that will tell you the last time it updated on your computer that you can run.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. All right. So Ian Williamson writes in and says, as someone who’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey previously had to join all of our company max to Active Directory in order to enforce corporate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey security policies, I wanted to confirm that yes, it causes a multitude of issues resulting in the spinning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beach ball. Recently, though, we’re starting to disconnect them all and replace that with an Apple tool called Enterprise Connect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which communicates with AD in a much looser fashion. So in case you’re not aware, because your name is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, or you don’t really have a real job, Active Directory is the,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure there’s a term for it, is it LDAP? I don’t even know. But it’s the system by which many, many, many, many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey corporate environments manage users, and it’s a Microsoft system. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does not typically play terribly well with Macs, which I think is slightly on Microsoft’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shoulders, but is largely on Apple shoulders. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know that my IT guy at my work has been complaining and moaning about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s implementation of Active Directory, particularly recently, because I think they might have redone it or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has caused him no endless amount of woes. And he is actively inquiring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this Enterprise Connect thing that apparently is only given to the coolest of clients of apples.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t know if you guys have anything to add on that. I’m sure Marco you do. So let’s start with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t. This is an entire world that I know nothing about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m very happy to continue knowing nothing about.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I could do that too, but alas, I cannot. This
⏹️ ▶️ John response to me guessing why my computer was like slow to wake, and I got beach balls all
⏹️ ▶️ John the time. And I was attributing to Active Directory mostly because I had previously had a Mac that was not
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Active Directory network, and it was just so, it was like a normal Mac, like a normal, it was a desktop too, so that also
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You know, you’d wake
⏹️ ▶️ John it from sleep and it was immediately ready to go, and anyway, and I was blaming Active Directory,
⏹️ ▶️ John know. I think it was Margo suggested turning off power nap and
⏹️ ▶️ John and hibernate and I did that it did not really make any change as far
⏹️ ▶️ John as I can tell so I think my computer was not hibernating and power nap was not an issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still you know I left the lid I close the lid walk to my next meeting sit down open the lid and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a fairly long period of time sometimes a long period of time before I can even log in either with touch ID or
⏹️ ▶️ John otherwise I usually give up on touch ID after I put my finger there for a while and nothing has happened. And then I type my
⏹️ ▶️ John password. Nothing also happens. Like I don’t even see the little dots appear on the screen. But very
⏹️ ▶️ John often it has registered my typed password. And if I just wait, including the return key that I hit, and if
⏹️ ▶️ John I just wait and wait, and eventually it will unlock and then I’ll try to do something and then I’ll get a beach ball. So I blame this
⏹️ ▶️ John on Active Directory. And he was writing in to talk about this enterprise connect thing, which is trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John make a looser coupling between Active Directory. Here’s the thing. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know almost anything about Active Directory other than the fact that I am subjected to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if my company, my company might already be using Enterprise Connect. I might be using the
⏹️ ▶️ John good version. Like for all I know, it is worse for people who are not using Enterprise Connect. So I really have honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John no way of knowing whether I’m currently using Enterprise Connect or not. If I’m not, I would love for my company to use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But somehow I don’t think that’s in the cards because in general, like
⏹️ ▶️ John this time, in the grand scheme of things, complaining that your computer takes Takes a while before you can use it when you open the lid and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that long, maybe 20 seconds. That is a complaint that is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John falling on deaf ears in the grand scheme of enterprise IT. I wish I didn’t have to deal with
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Follow-up: iOS 11 keyboard
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last week I got just a little bit fired up with regard to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the keyboard behavior on iOS. I have two pieces of follow-up about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Number one, I had assumed it was all me and that I’m just inept. And I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a tremendous amount of people write in to say, no, no, no, it’s not just you. It’s become
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hot garbage. Now, nobody could agree on when this happened. A lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people said the same thing I did, which was right around iOS, or I’m sorry, it was iPhone 6-ish,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever iOS was around that time. Some people have said, no, no, no, it’s actually with iOS 11,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I disagree with. But a lot of people said, no, no, no, you are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not alone. I cannot type on my phone anymore. That being said,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have been mildly browbeat by Mike Hurley to try Gboard, which is Google’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey third-party keyboard, which is pretty good, but I have been trying that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and when I am typing rather than swiping, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not any better, which makes me think this is a KC problem, not an iOS problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and apparently it’s also a tons and tons of listeners problem all at the same time, because if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can’t type on the Google keyboard and I can’t type
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Apple keyboard, then that makes me think I’m the problem. Or perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was that Apple was uniquely good at figuring out what I meant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and auto-correcting things, or perhaps the touch targets were uniquely good at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being the way I expected them to be, and now they’re not. Like somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had suggested, I don’t remember who it was, that maybe their touch targets got way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bigger when they’re predicting what you’re gonna type. So like, let’s say I’m typing the word
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there, T-H-E-R-E, then so I type T-H-E and the touch target
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the letter R because Apple thinks, oh, I bet he’s gonna type an R. The touch target for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey R is just mammoth. And if I’m trying to type they, then maybe I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get T-H-E-R instead. Does that make any sense? It’s very hard to paint this word picture. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’m driving at is predictive touch target enlargement is a possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey explanation, though that is completely supposition and I have no facts to indicate that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in any case, one way or another, I’ve been trying Gboard and it’s not really working for me so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it makes me think it’s a casey problem. But I don’t know if you guys have any feedback on this
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if that means it’s a casey problem. It’s like you said, that Gboard is a totally different keyboard, right? So that,
⏹️ ▶️ John we have no idea what, how you how you are typing on G board. But you like you,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have the feeling and many, many other people who wrote in also had the feeling that they were previously better at typing
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Apple keyboard. And the weird thing about the feedback, like I put it in here is like, basically that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not alone, but incredible variance and the people people, some people saying it started two years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, it started with iOS 10. It started when I changed to a bigger phone, it started when I changed to a smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. And I don’t know if you just tapped into some sort of like
⏹️ ▶️ John deterioration of mass deterioration of typing skills, because it doesn’t seem to be any common thread
⏹️ ▶️ John like not it’s not like everyone agreed that iOS 11 hosed it. There was not that agreement, but lots of people
⏹️ ▶️ John really feel like they are now worse at typing than they used to. Maybe they’re just all getting older. And it’s like one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco first places that they’re noticing
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re getting older. What the only thing I saw that I think could be attributable
⏹️ ▶️ John to software is people complaining about
⏹️ ▶️ John autocorrect going behind them and changing their last
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco words to something nonsensical.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I’ve noticed that as well. And I think that is a new software addition where previously didn’t used to, like
⏹️ ▶️ John once you moved on from something, it would be like, oh, that’s fine. But now it has like some kind of thing where it reconsiders the
⏹️ ▶️ John last five words you’ve written and says, oh, I see you were probably trying to work this, right, this sequence of nonsense
⏹️ ▶️ John five words. And it goes back and corrects them. And that people find infuriating and infuriating, so do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I completely agree. And I’m glad you brought that up because I had forgotten about that. And yes, I’ve seen that behavior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it is driving me bananas. Marco, any thoughts about this before I move on?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, iOS changes autocorrect behavior in lots of versions. Like, you know, I’m sure iOS 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changed it one way, iOS 11 changed it different ways. Now it does like the machine learning to different differential privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco corrections that are resulting in really embarrassing bugs like that. You know, I turning into the A box thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the IT from it thing, they’re gonna work it out. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope they do, but you know, there’s definitely changes here, but there’s been changes before and they’ve worked it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only other thing I can think of that might be a factor for you is that you’re also on an iPhone 10 now, which is a different physical size
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than what you were using for the last few years. So that’s also probably contributing to just it’s different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and your body has to get used to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It could be, but I mean, this has been happening since before the Switch.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I mentioned last week, that are you sure it’s not the size? And Casey said, well, it could be, but there are other
⏹️ ▶️ John factors as well. And everyone else who said, who complained about it was very adamant that, no, it’s not the size,
⏹️ ▶️ John except for the few people who said it was the size. But yeah, it’s difficult in this type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John because even if it’s not machine learning, like yeah, machine learning is the type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where it’s not like a human programming an exact set of rules for it to behave. It’s supposed to learn on its own
⏹️ ▶️ John and improve. So it’s very difficult to know exactly how it’s behaving because it’s very much data driven. But even in the rules-based
⏹️ ▶️ John ones, if the rules are complicated enough and change often enough, it still doesn’t really help you nail down,
⏹️ ▶️ John is this a better system than the one that preceded it? Did our tweak to the set of static
⏹️ ▶️ John rules help or hurt? It’s kind of, I mean, I’m not sure how you’d even measure that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like a satisfaction, typing satisfaction measurement. You just use face ID to look at the person’s face
⏹️ ▶️ John and see if they’re making a face like they just smelled something gross as they’re trying to type. Wow.
Old Mac habits die hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of smelling something gross tell me about your touch bar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t don’t smell the touch bar, but do touch the glove don’t smell the gloves smell the glove sniff the glove
⏹️ ▶️ John Come on chat room. Help me. I’m old and my brain doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have no idea what you’re talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I noticed I didn’t even bother asking you to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Well that was wise, you know as well
⏹️ ▶️ John smell the glove Okay. Thank you. I feel a little bit better
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey What was this about? What is the history here? Oh, Spinal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’ve still never seen that. You should watch it, it’s funny. I should turn it up to 11 when I do.
⏹️ ▶️ John There you go, you know some things from it. So I just wanted to mark this point in time
⏹️ ▶️ John where I got my 2017 Touch Bar Mac Pro whenever it was, a couple months ago, and I’ve been using it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I do, despite the fact that it’s mostly in clamshell on my desk when I go to meetings and travel around the office, I
⏹️ ▶️ John do use it as an actual laptop, feel like I’ve given the touch bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, a fair shake despite continuing to hit the escape button
⏹️ ▶️ John or lack thereof. Um, but I finally did something that
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve wanted to do since day one, but I’ve been resisting, which has changed that preference in the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John settings that tells it to like the default setting is allow applications
⏹️ ▶️ John to change the touch bar. So that when you’re in so far, you see like safaris thumbnails. And when you’re in mail, You see like the mail buttons and
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff right there’s actually a setting in System preferences and the keyboard system preference
⏹️ ▶️ John that says don’t do that Just show me the like the system controls
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time So the function keys and the media control and the sound things basically making
⏹️ ▶️ John it like a little static graphical version of the regular keys that are on the MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ John escape and I resisted doing that because like look if you’re going to give the touch bar a fair shake use
⏹️ ▶️ John it how it’s supposed to be Use it in the default settings allow the applications to do all their stuff with it but who knows maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s some application that you use that you’ll find the touch bar really useful and That was not the case
⏹️ ▶️ John and so and I was finding it distracting as the touch bar like Changed from thing to thing as I like command
⏹️ ▶️ John tabbed around and so I just change it to be static now So now I’m effectively using little
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures of keys that never change And I still wish they were regular keys.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I put me down in the category of I I can’t say I’m anti touch bar because
⏹️ ▶️ John I just don’t like laptops and so if I had to buy a laptop It having a touch bar
⏹️ ▶️ John or not would probably be the least of my concerns But I didn’t find a place for the touch
⏹️ ▶️ John bar in my life. I just don’t find myself Looking at that part of the machine
⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m using it at all and maybe it’s just because I have old habits or whatever But it didn’t work out for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were You were talking with some people in one of the slacks that were in together
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and You were talking about It wasn’t window shade, but I can’t think of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what it was So let’s just call it window shade and you were talking about you know how you still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have window shade enabled again It wasn’t literally window shade, but you have window shade enabled even to this day because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can’t live without it
⏹️ ▶️ John this example people are gonna think I run window shade let’s be clear. I do not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well Yeah, I know, but I can’t remember what the
⏹️ ▶️ John was you talking about about the classic Mac window layering, that’s gotta be it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe, I don’t know, it doesn’t really matter. The point I’m driving
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s classic Mac window layering, if I remember the conversation correctly, which people don’t know what that is, but anyway, I’m pretty sure that’s what it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, do you wanna briefly describe what that is, then?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s just, when you click a window in classic Mac OS, any window on the screen, if the window belongs to a
⏹️ ▶️ John different application than the front-most one, like the window belongs to an application
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not currently the active one, it doesn’t just bring that window to the front, it brings that window
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other windows owned by that application to the front. And that’s how I use, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, use the Mac for 16 years before Mac OS 10 came along that way and that’s how I like to use
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And so I’ve, during the entire life of Mac OS 10 and
⏹️ ▶️ John on it’s Mac OS, there have been various utilities that would change the window server behavior to act that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the Mac OS X timeline,
⏹️ ▶️ John not only do you get that feature, but you also, most of the utilities I’ve used have allowed you to get back
⏹️ ▶️ John the other behavior. Because if you show up behaviors, I’m like, Oh, what if I just want one window to come to the front? That behavior is,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not what I want at all, right? It’s just a matter of what you prefer, because with the tools that
⏹️ ▶️ John I use, you’re just changing what the default is. So for me, shift click brings a single window to the front
⏹️ ▶️ John and just regular click brings all the windows that belong to that application to the front. And some people
⏹️ ▶️ John may like it the reverse, where regular click just brings that one window, and then some modifier click brings all the windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or maybe you never want all the windows to come, but how I work, based on my habits, I want the default to be all windows
⏹️ ▶️ John come to the front, so I still do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t even know, like, yeah, shift click doesn’t do it by default, it doesn’t seem,
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no, it’s the utility. I think I’m using drag thing to do it right now, but there’s various utilities to it. I think native,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the regular Mac out of the box, doesn’t have a way for you to bring all the windows to the front other than clicking like the
⏹️ ▶️ John dock icon or whatever like there’s no modifier click on a window to do it i
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think in any case the reason i bring all this up is because um
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it struck me hearing you talk about this that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and many other like old school mac people created these habits over the course
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of years that either because you’re petulantly stubborn or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just used to it, and probably both to be honest, you just can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey break yourself of them. And I am glad that the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey list of things that I have that are like that I feel like is pretty small. Now, to be fair,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, young child. Yeah, you think it’s the little small because your world hasn’t yet changed that much. Just wait until
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s in VR. And you’re gonna be like, I insist I’m using my fingers because I used my fingers for a really long time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you know what and to that end actually the obvious answer to this is no case you still prefer Mac So you’re old
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you’re relying on old technology. So your point is fair, but it’s just it’s striking to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me How you don’t really like new things John
⏹️ ▶️ John what it is at all I think you’re taking the wrong lesson for this lesson This is like what is the advantage for me changing my
⏹️ ▶️ John habits? There has to be an advantage just to be a reason for me to train myself out of doing something now Now one reason
⏹️ ▶️ John could be that there is literally no way to do it the old way. So guess what? That’s the stick version. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John no choice. There is no more of that thing so forget about it and whatever. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John there is a way to do it, it’s a tradeoff. What is the cost of enabling
⏹️ ▶️ John this way? Is it some hack that destroys your system stability? Is it something that you have to maintain
⏹️ ▶️ John and carefully upgrade and compile from open source software? Or is it jailbreaking
⏹️ ▶️ John where every time a new OS comes out you have to get a new jailbreak or whatever? cost. And the benefit is
⏹️ ▶️ John you just get to continue to use your old habits. And it’s not just habits in the case of window layering, the way I
⏹️ ▶️ John use windows, like my entire system of, you know, dealing with windows. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is an important part of it, the fact that I can grab a corner of a window that belongs to an application, and bring
⏹️ ▶️ John all the windows that application to the front. Like, I don’t have an alternate way to manage
⏹️ ▶️ John windows in that way. Like, if I want to bring all the windows to the front, I’ve got to go down the dock icon, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John that breaks my whole system of arranging windows, you know, spatially to have to use them as sort of grab
⏹️ ▶️ John handles and to have locality of cursor and not to constantly have to go down to the bottom of the screen or to the right or
⏹️ ▶️ John the left or whatever. So there are benefits to that system
⏹️ ▶️ John and from for this particular feature the drawbacks in terms of system stability
⏹️ ▶️ John or maintenance of a weird program or anything just haven’t been there. Unlike, for example, Windowshade,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I ran for a little while, but eventually it was clear that Apple was never going to add it and you really had to add some
⏹️ ▶️ John really nasty hacks to your system to use it. So I abandoned Windowshade. But this I didn’t abandon
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is a very minor change, very cleanly implemented by multiple products
⏹️ ▶️ John that don’t require any hacks to my system whatsoever. And so I keep doing it. So the lesson
⏹️ ▶️ John is not never learn new things or don’t pick up new habits or whatever. The lesson is, you know, don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t blindly abandon the old for no benefit if they’re, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it continues to work for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but the benefit is not having to do any sort of tweaking, right? Like, something that Dan Benjamin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said years and years and years ago, which I don’t 100% agree with, but I understand his point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was that, like, one should embrace the operating system defaults because it’s that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much less tweaking and finagling and messing about you need to do when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you get a new machine, you know, because you can just accept the defaults and move on. And to be fair, like I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a not insignificant list of software that I consider completely required for me to use a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer. For example, Alfred, for example, OnePassword, for example, Dropbox.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in terms of like tweaking the system, I don’t feel like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that particularly needy. I say that because I’m probably more needy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I realize but I don’t think I’m that bad. Whereas it seems like John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe this is just your your advanced stage Maybe it’s your advanced experience with the platform, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like you’re more needy in this department than I am
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I’m using less stuff than you as evidenced by my a nice clean menu bar, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Dan’s argument
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey only makes sense If
⏹️ ▶️ John you are forced to live in a hoteling environment where you have to sit down in front of a fresh
⏹️ ▶️ John computer every day and start your work like we have Migration assistant we have upgraded installs of operating systems like
⏹️ ▶️ John this is not an issue at all like I don’t spend time Setting up my new Mac’s like for the people who do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Maybe it’s a fun thing They like to do I just want to refresh system and reset it up I never reset up a machine from scratch
⏹️ ▶️ John I just I just do an upgrade install use migration assistant all my stuff is already there And it’s not that much stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and drag thing I’m running anyway Because I like to have a thing on the screen that I can click
⏹️ ▶️ John on that just has applications in it doesn’t have minimized windows or folders in it. So I use that
⏹️ ▶️ John as a separate application separate from its functionality for the window layering, but it just happens to
⏹️ ▶️ John also do window layering. So I’m getting a two for one out of that particular application. But no, there’s not that much stuff. I have my
⏹️ ▶️ John favorite applications I run, I think I run zero system hacks of any kind
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. Like, like literally zero, like nothing is a kernel extension
⏹️ ▶️ John or a symbol plugin or anything like that. I don’t I run very few things that even display in
⏹️ ▶️ John the menu bar. I run favorite applications. I like BB edit. I like drag thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with just a plain old application with no weird hacks. You know, I run slack like we all do,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether we like it or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I was gonna say do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of us really run slack or to slack run
⏹️ ▶️ John us like it’s it’s a yeah, it’s a it’s a fairly clean setup. And as we all know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like I get new Macs so often that I’m constantly setting up and even
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco if I was migration system handles
⏹️ ▶️ John everything for me. Like, honestly, I don’t, I don’t see any particular advantage in being able to stand in front
⏹️ ▶️ John of anybody’s random computer and be able to use it comfortably. Because first
⏹️ ▶️ John of all, it’s not true for almost anybody. Like if you sit down there and hit command space and spotlight comes up, what are you going to do? Like, where’s your Alfred now?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? Like, I don’t, there’s the whole point is it accepts
⏹️ ▶️ John software. You can install things on it that make it nicer to use. That’s why we like max. And so I have,
⏹️ ▶️ John I attach no benefit to being able to use a stock Mac comfortably.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So do you have your scroll direction as natural or the bogus old
⏹️ ▶️ John way? I have the old way and again it’s a setting that I set once back
⏹️ ▶️ John when they changed that setting like seven years ago. I’ve never touched the setting again because it just migrates from computer to computer
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How long did you try natural scrolling John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not at all like what’s the benefit? Apple added the option for that. Why would I try it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they you know it’s not Apple added the option so I didn’t feel like I had to run any hacks if Apple takes
⏹️ ▶️ John away the option guess what I’m going to switch scroll directions because what the hell choice do I have right but they haven’t taken it away it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John there and I click that checkbox once many many years ago and I never think about it again
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so Marco are you natural scrolling or now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John didn’t we talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought we did I thought we did but I couldn’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ John idea but Casey tends to forget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I’m also old scrolling because for the same reason that basically like I like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I try I tried natural scrolling when that option came out for like a half a day and I was like, nope, because God, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both sold for the same reason. No, because for the same reason I was already used to it and there was no pressure to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change. So it’s like, why should I go through the hassle of relearning this when I don’t actually have to? And maybe down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the road I will have to. Well, when that happens, I’ll learn it until then. I don’t want to.
⏹️ ▶️ John And do you spend time clicking that checkbox slot? No, you just make it once and that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even at the frequency I buy new Macs, it isn’t a big problem.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, we should move on from these turf wars that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m starting. And why doesn’t somebody tell me about this link about Johnny Ive and him hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our MacBook criticism?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s been many Johnny Ive articles recently. Most of them I’ve just Instapapered and haven’t read, but this one had
⏹️ ▶️ John a quote that I wanted to pull. It was some someone asking Johnny I have about, you know, current
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple stuff, and he was actually giving answers. And so here is a quote from this article, which
⏹️ ▶️ John we will link. Uh, this is Johnny. I’ve saying absolutely all of your feelings and
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback around the MacBook you use. We couldn’t want to listen more. And we hear boy, do
⏹️ ▶️ John we hear so this is not much of a statement, but it’s merely merely confirmation
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you think Johnny I’ve created the current line of MacBook and MacBook pros
⏹️ ▶️ John and thinks they’re perfect and has no idea that people have complaints about them. That is not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John He pretty emphatically stated basically, yes, I have heard complaints
⏹️ ▶️ John about this computer and two things. One, we want to hear your feedback about it. It’s not like we’re saying we made
⏹️ ▶️ John a perfect thing and screw you if you don’t like it. And two, they’re definitely hearing it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think that was refreshing because there’s so little communication inside Apple that you could have a bunch of podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John where a bunch of people ramble on about how it seems like Apple’s not listening to us or
⏹️ ▶️ John might live in a bubble and don’t hear the things that we’re saying. And that is not the case.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe. The Mac Pro roundtable this past spring was one of the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco straightforward, honest, and almost apologetic statements to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the public Apple has ever really given. That was the only one thing they’ve ever kind of done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mea culpa on. Like, yeah, this product, we kind of messed up and we’re going to fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think we’re going to get one of those for the problems of the current generation of MacBook Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this is about as close as you can get. I think this statement to me says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, this was not some like off the cuff accidental thing that he let slip out. Like I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he thought about that before he said it and knew what he was saying. And I think this is as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close as they’re going to come to. There’s been a lot of negative feedback about this generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of laptops and we hear you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and we don’t know what they’re going to do about it. You know, it could be that what they do is still doesn’t satisfy
⏹️ ▶️ John satisfy some people don’t satisfy those. But but you but you can’t say at this point that they have their heads in the sand, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing that you could have said because they’re so they’re so bad about giving any sort of transparency to their thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John because all you hear is like the earnings call and about how many of these things they’re selling and how their profits are great. And It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John you have this fear that like, maybe they think everything is awesome because they’re selling more like, and their customer sat
⏹️ ▶️ John is great. And you know that their their average selling price is going up, and they’ve sold
⏹️ ▶️ John more max than they ever sold before, like, all everything looks good, you know, and you you worry that that your
⏹️ ▶️ John concerns are irrelevant, because who cares what you think about the keyboard, if tons of people are buying
⏹️ ▶️ John them, then you’re wrong. And Apple should do what sells more max and makes more customers happy, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that is the fear of being marginalized. But to hear this direct feedback that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, boy do we hear like that. Not only do we, oh yeah, we hear some people have problems, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John that, that Johnny Ive in particular is probably getting an earful about like, uh, you know, slimline keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John that he insisted on or whatever, who knows what the particular details are. But I, you know, I, I like, I like the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of communicating to the public something that says we acknowledge
⏹️ ▶️ John you and, and merely acknowledging doesn’t mean we agree with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John mean you we’re going to do what you want, but it does say
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not sticking your head in the sand and pretending you don’t exist. And also that we’re not disregarding you. Like they could
⏹️ ▶️ John have said, like what kind of what he said about Apple Park, which is another quote that didn’t pull from here, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t understand when people complain about Apple Park is essentially like, we didn’t build it for you. You don’t work for Apple. It’s for
⏹️ ▶️ John people who work at Apple. And we know how people who work at Apple work and you don’t so
⏹️ ▶️ John stop complaining about our building like we’re not building a house for you that’s a different kind of feedback which is like
⏹️ ▶️ John we hear you but we think you are not what is it you don’t have standing we hear
⏹️ ▶️ John you but we don’t care yeah you don’t have standing you’re not a party in this conversation like do you work at apple
⏹️ ▶️ John then maybe we’ll listen to you about how much you like the place where you have to work if you work at apple or you know you don’t have to be there still
⏹️ ▶️ John on the old campus too but anyway uh but if you don’t work at apple you can have your opinions
⏹️ ▶️ John but we’re not gonna listen to it because we’re building the place where Apple employs.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously, I feel like if someone was more of an Apple nerd, they could come back with Johnny and said,
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but Apple employees also have complaints about the spaceship. And so you could say, These aren’t my
⏹️ ▶️ John complaints. I’m really conveying to you the things that I’ve heard Apple employees tell me anonymously
⏹️ ▶️ John or otherwise about how they want to have private offices and blah, blah, blah, separate thing. But clearly, Johnny was not ready
⏹️ ▶️ John to accept that feedback about Apple Park, but he seems ready to accept the feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John about the laptops. The question is what happens next or what has already
⏹️ ▶️ John happened? Because as we talked about before, the timelines on hardware designs are long. And for all we know,
⏹️ ▶️ John eight months ago, they already made a radical right turn about their keyboard plans for the next line of laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ll find out when they’re released. Here’s hoping.
#askatp: Getting rid of books
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right ask ATP and we begin with Josh Keegan who writes I grew up a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey huge book reader My wife did too combined. We have three or four bookcases full of paperbacks and hardcovers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I recently decided that we should get rid of them. They seem archaic to me now in the HV books My wife disagrees and so they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remain do you guys have a lot of books in the house? Does keeping paper books seem old-fashioned to you? Let me start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by saying having us adjudicate your marital Deliberations are it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a wise choice. But that being said I We Aaron and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are both pretty big readers Aaron more so than me I feel like I just don’t have time for it probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m spending too much time on Twitter because I’m an idiot But nevertheless, I do enjoy reading novels.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do quite like reading a Physical book if I if I can I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey prefer a physical book over anything else Unless I’m traveling. But anyways, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see a problem with books if you don’t need the space for anything else I don’t know why you would get rid of them But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am NOT one that is deeply bothered by by I’m gonna say clutter although it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t sound like it’s clutters and stuff contained in a book. Yes stuff. Thank you So I say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my vote is keep them unless you have a reason for that space, but that’s just me Marco What do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have some books there. They’re in a bookshelf in the living room It’s a nice big built-in thing and it would look weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it was empty And so we keep a whole lot of books there there. We don’t actually really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add or remove or use the books there very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so most of the books just sit there and look pretty, but that is a useful function. They look pretty on these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant shelves that are built into our house, and if they were gone, it would be weird. So, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, like what you just said, Casey, I don’t really see any problem with having them there. They’re not causing any harm. They don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any needs, really. And there’s nothing else that we would put on those shelves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the moment. So if If that ever changes, if we really need the space or if for some reason we want to tear those shelves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the walls, then sure, I will push to get rid of them then. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’re not causing problems for you, I don’t see why you’d get rid of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like books. I have collected books since I was very young, not just for the words on
⏹️ ▶️ John the pages, but to the point where I would buy multiple copies of a book I liked because I like the books as
⏹️ ▶️ John objects. you know, special editions of books, leather bound versions of books, books with fancy illustrations
⏹️ ▶️ John or shiny covers or really thick paper stock. I like books as objects in
⏹️ ▶️ John addition to liking the words in them. When I went to work for what was at the time
⏹️ ▶️ John the largest ebook seller in the world back in the early days before Amazon even got into the game,
⏹️ ▶️ John I got converted to ebooks pretty much wholesale. So I prefer to actually
⏹️ ▶️ John read books in electronic form, but I still have a huge soft spot for the physical
⏹️ ▶️ John books. I would do the things where I would buy the book and read it in ebook form, but then
⏹️ ▶️ John buy the first edition hardcover just to put on the shelf that I literally never opened.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m obviously very pro book. My problem is,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you if you were like this, and you really like books as physical objects, and you’re not fantastically wealthy,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually, you will run out of room to put books. Our house is essentially overflowing with books with most bookshelves
⏹️ ▶️ John double and triple stacked with books in the attic and so now I’ve mostly put a moratorium on
⏹️ ▶️ John buying more paper books because I can’t I don’t want to displace any books that I have so
⏹️ ▶️ John right now I mostly only buy very large beautiful coffee table books filled
⏹️ ▶️ John with illustrations or like those really gigantic awesome making of star
⏹️ ▶️ John wars books that have that have lots of words and illustrations in them that would be difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to do in electronic form unless someone gives me my 27-inch iPad Pro. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I am all for physical books, but like so many physical objects, If you continue
⏹️ ▶️ John down that path, you will probably eventually run out of room for books.
#askatp: Backlit desktop keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Craig writes, why does Apple refuse to make desktop backlit keyboards? Gaming keyboards go crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with neon lights. Do you think Apple would ever make a desktop keyboard with just enough light to see your keys?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a hard time answering this question because I can touch type and I have been able to for a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very long time. So, having lights on my keyboard does not really help
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. I presume that they don’t really have any interest in this because it would, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cause the battery on your Magic Keyboard to drain even faster. faster and yes I know it’s easily rechargeable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you don’t have to harpoon a turtle to do it but nevertheless you know it’s nice not having to plug my keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in but once every month or two and so I don’t think they will personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know that’s my two cents mark we went to you first last time so John what do you think
⏹️ ▶️ John even if you touch type like the reason they have a lot of keyboards and laptop is they think people will be using them in dark places
⏹️ ▶️ John and yeah you can touch type but can you touch type the media keys can Can you touch type the function keys? Most people can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s just too far of a reach and they’re just too weird and occasionally have to glance and see, you know, where is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, F seven or where is the pause key or you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, whatever. I mean, hell, with these new keyboards, you can’t even touch type the arrow keys.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, you can eventually if you feel for the little divider and the two halves of keys for top and bottom before you
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the left or right. But anyway, it’s annoying. So I think there is a place for backlighting on keyboards,
⏹️ ▶️ John even for touch typists. But for desktop keyboards, if you’re using a
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop keyboard in a dark place, that’s kind of your choice. Probably like it’s not like a laptop where you may find
⏹️ ▶️ John yourself on a plane where everybody’s sleeping or you know, in an environment where the lighting is not ideal.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like I said, you do have the charging difficulty. So I don’t think Apple is opposed to back of the keyboards. I wouldn’t expect any
⏹️ ▶️ John neon ones. I feel like it’s a thing I can see Apple shipping if
⏹️ ▶️ John they could, if they could sort out the battery issues. they would probably ship it,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just because someone will get it in an idea that it’s a useful thing to have and they can charge a little bit more money for the
⏹️ ▶️ John backlit version, they would do it. But honestly, unless someone inside Apple is really passionate
⏹️ ▶️ John about this, I just see them leaving it as a third party opportunity, as they say, because
⏹️ ▶️ John if they haven’t come out with one by now, they obviously don’t think it’s a big need.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, using PC gaming keyboards that are full of LEDs, as an example, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a good example of why why Apple should do this. Because those things are hideous. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if Apple knows those exist, which I kind of hope that no one there knows, but if they do know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would use that as an argument why not to make these things. But yeah, also as you mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would have to be charged significantly more frequently. Also, I think that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need for it is less on desktops because desktop screens are so much bigger and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep them so much brighter usually because there’s no battery concern, but there’s a pretty good chance just the light from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screen lights up the keys enough to show you where the keys are, even in a pitch dark room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think the need for it is significantly lower. It does however just look cool. Like when it’s done right, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way apples are done with subtle white lighting as opposed to blue LEDs, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done tastefully like that, it can look really cool. It just looks like a nice luxury product like on the laptops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This isn’t to say that they should never do it, but I don’t think they will just because again, the charging needs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the less actual physical need for it because you can see your keyboard usually more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in desktops, and also that the desktop keyboards are just a pretty low priority
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Apple. They don’t really redesign them that often or put that much effort into them. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from that point of view, I think it would be very hard to argue that Apple should put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the effort to make that happen on a hardware line that they update, what, every 10
#askatp: Dynamic podcast ads
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and finally, Pradhan Stethev writes, how does dynamic ad targeting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and podcasts work? Ad companies say they can target listeners, but Marco has said that you can only really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know how many downloads the MP3 podcast file gets, and that’s about it when it comes to data, say for proprietary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps. And then he added, this one is for Casey. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco not sure why, because I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like I am deeply in an ill-equipped to answer this question. But this sounds like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two different things to me, all rolled into one or maybe I just would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like someone Marco I guess to clarify. So when I when I hear dynamic and podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I think is there is there are podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know servers for lack of a better description or networks where they know that an ad starts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at 10 minutes, and it is two minutes long. And they can run an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ad in that spot for a week or two and then change that ad to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something else and they’ll re-encode or I’m assuming re-encode the mp3 and for two weeks it’ll be the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next ad and then so on and so forth but but what Prodan is talking about is different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than that if I’m not mistaken which is oh Casey is a white male
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is in his mid-30s let’s give him these ads as opposed to different ones
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so Marco can you kind of tell me what this is all about?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah the the latter theory you have is the more correct one so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason the reason this came up and the reason I put it in here as a question I wanted to answer is that a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are starting to hear what are pretty clearly like dynamically on-demand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco inserted ads in what usually popular podcasts this past year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there have been a lot of major podcast like me for major producers like some of the public
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radio producers and some of the big networks major producers now frequently using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamic ad insertion. And what this is is new ads can be inserted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on every download on every request that the file gets every you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco download request from a client or a web browser can have different ads in it. They don’t do every encoding they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it by splicing because the mp3 file format is very very easy to splice which might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lead into a future topic if we ever get to it. So basically what they do is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your download request from your podcast player or your web browser hits their basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad splicing server and based on your IP address and anything you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glean from your headers which fortunately for a podcast app is pretty minimal but it can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least tell usually which podcast app you’re using what kind of device and what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS version it has and you know from your IP address it can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco derive your approximate location Now, if it’s a big ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network and if it’s integrated with web ads, then they can also derive other things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a web browser can pick up and they can correlate that data based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your IP address and maybe some idea of what your phone model is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They can then correlate that with other data they have from other sources like maybe Facebook or Twitter or other big ad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco networks and they can figure out more about you. But all the podcast app is providing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever whatever they would get if you fetched say an image off their servers which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your IP address and a user agent header that’s it but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is enough that you that a lot of people report hearing like an ad for a local car dealership
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the middle of a podcast from a national provider and that creeps people out and they wonder what’s going on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of times they blame overcast or they ask me like hey what’s this how does this work but But yeah, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just these big publishers are now very, very frequently using these dynamic ad insertion platforms.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the way it works is pretty simple. As I said, they derive whatever they can from your IP address and the user agent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco header, and then they throw in an ad. And MP3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a very forgiving and simple format. It’s very, very easy to take chunks out of and splice in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in their CMSs when they produce the shows, they just say, you can put an ad at these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two timestamps in the show. The main problem I have with it as a listener,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, is that it’s kind of creepy and the ads are pretty, oftentimes pretty low-value ads because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re things like car dealerships and it just turns into basically what radio ads were, which is not something any of us should ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aspire to because they’re really, you know, bargain basement, low-price, low-value ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, hopefully that’s not the world we’re heading towards here, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it causes other problems. So for instance, the mp3 file format specifies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco length in about three different ways and a lot of times these these splicing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad platforms don’t update them all correctly. So it causes weird problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in players like mine where sometimes certain files will say end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two minutes early because that’s the amount of ad they injected and they forgot to update the duration or their platform didn’t do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right or something like that or seeking will be slightly broken or something like that. The other major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem is even if you get past the technical hurdles there because the ads they insert are not consistent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lengths it starts to erode the value of timestamp links
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you can’t for instance say oh you gotta hear you know this you know NPR
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast at at 17 minutes because the 17 minutes when you download the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file might be a different part of the file than what the person who’s telling you that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had in their copy of the file. Because if you had 10 minutes of ads in yours and they had 7 minutes of ads in theirs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re going to be 3 minutes off. So it erodes the value of sharing timestamps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and of referring to timestamps, which I think is very damaging to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the spread of podcasts. But ultimately, I don’t have any real say in this. They’re going to do what they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do. They are doing it. I’ve tried to argue with some of these producers, they shouldn’t be doing this, but they are anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, oh well, this is where we live in now. And that’s how it works. It’s pretty basic,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I wish it didn’t work that way, but it does. The good thing is that it can’t ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get as bad as web tracking. You know, when you fetch a webpage, your browser
⏹️ ▶️ Marco executes code on that page’s behalf that has any JavaScript embedded, which these days it always does. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of data that a webpage can collect about you is way higher
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the amount of data that a podcast publisher can collect about you because when your podcast downloads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the file, it’s just playing a media file. It is not executing arbitrary code supplied
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the publisher. So they can’t add any more tracking or collect any more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data or observe your behavior any more than a person at this IP address and using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this app downloaded this file. That’s it, that’s all the information they have. Again, they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correlate that if they know more about that IP address from other sources. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as far as the podcast player is concerned, that’s all it’s giving them.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the scary thing though is, and I think that people don’t think about it, is that they do have a source for correlation. They
⏹️ ▶️ John know so much about your IP address because chances are very good that in the recent past you have hit a webpage
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere that has some Facebook embedded widget that got your Facebook cookies and now knows who you are on Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John and now knows your entire social graph and your first and last name and the last thing you bought from Amazon. And like those
⏹️ ▶️ John ad networks, that’s all they’re doing is correlating a user activity across multiple platforms and just
⏹️ ▶️ John synthesizing it into this, you know, up to date knowledge about a particular person or IP address or combination
⏹️ ▶️ John of IP address and user agent and whatever else they can glean from your device. Like that’s, that’s all these networks
⏹️ ▶️ John do. And so even though the podcast player is not revealing, is revealing the minimum it possibly can
⏹️ ▶️ John about you once they go off to the side and look up all the other stuff, that’s, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how they know like that you’re shopping for toilets and it’s now it’s time to show you a toilet they know where you live they they
⏹️ ▶️ John know who your friends are they know you’ve been shopping for toilets and they’re gonna insert a toilet ad and that seems terrifying
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s because of all the rest of the internet particularly the web not because of the podcast player
⏹️ ▶️ John and that that’s why these things are creepy the idea that they aggregate and and centralize this knowledge so
⏹️ ▶️ John that there’s almost nothing you can do on the internet where they can’t figure out who you are
⏹️ ▶️ John through those kinds of correlations. Um, so, you know, I don’t, I don’t know what the solution is, but,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, the, the relative purity of podcast doesn’t actually save us from anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even for, you know, for stuff like show notes, if you can put HTML and show notes, it’s only a matter of time
⏹️ ▶️ John before one or more podcast applications pre-render the show notes and are
⏹️ ▶️ John not as scrupulous as overcast about allowing what appears in that HTML and just sort of take the easy way out and just
⏹️ ▶️ John throw some content from a feed into a web view and that executes it. And has a little tracking
⏹️ ▶️ John blip and embeds a Facebook widget and runs JavaScript and who knows what else. So the web has a way
⏹️ ▶️ John of seeping into many different corners of applications and if you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly fighting against that tide, it’s really easy for creepy stuff to sneak into your application.
Sponsor: Linode (code AccidentalPodcast10)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite web host. Go to linode.com slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP to learn more and use code accidentalpodcast10 to get a $10 credit.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco at probably 10 or 15 different web hosts. And Linode just kicks their butts. It’s so
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have both managed and unmanaged services for your actual Linode themselves. So if you need help, it’s
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco chances are, if you’ve ever Googled for some kind of answer on how to run a Linux server, you’ve probably come across their help documentation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if you weren’t using Linode because that’s how good it is. It ranks highly in the search engines because people keep using it.
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December 2 bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go to linode.com slash ATP and use promo code accidentalpodcast10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get a $10 credit. Thank you so much to Linode for hosting all of my stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and supporting this show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thursday night, I’m laying in bed and I’m looking at Twitter or what have you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m starting to see that people in the future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are very perturbed. And they’re perturbed because apparently some of their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phones are endlessly rebooting. And I’m starting to see like text messages or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Slack messages from friends who live in the future. And they’re saying, oh my God,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something is deeply wrong. Change your phone’s clock. What?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Change your phone’s clock because once you hit Friday, the, or I’m sorry, once you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hit, so I guess it was Friday night, it doesn’t matter, one of these days, once you hit overnight at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 12 15 suddenly your phone will go bananas. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was Friday night and Saturday that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah it was into December 2nd.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep so change your phone Casey either turn off all notifications which there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is no big red you know abort switch for notifications so you have to go into every single
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app and turn them off or change your clock such that you will never roll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the very early morning of December 2nd which is what I did and that causes a whole new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world of problems that are not terribly interesting, but it was it was a pain in the
⏹️ ▶️ John butt. That was my first question I was gonna ask you when I was going. I’m living backwards in time, going
⏹️ ▶️ John through your old Twitter past and seeing that you and lots of other people, not just you,
⏹️ ▶️ John went with that option. Like something’s wrong. We’re not quite sure what it is at this point in time, but one of the suggested solutions
⏹️ ▶️ John is to set your clock back. And a bunch of people who I felt like should know better said, I’ll do that. I’ll set my
⏹️ ▶️ John clock back. Whoa, whoa,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whoa, slow down. What are my options? I have three options to my mind. I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wait and see and potentially end up with a phone that is not bricked but is damn near
⏹️ ▶️ Casey useless. I can pray that I don’t get zapped by this bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I can set my clock back and just deal with some inconveniences.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, and both of those two options are better than setting your clock back. In general, I would say
⏹️ ▶️ John as a computer user rule of thumb, this didn’t used to be true but has been true
⏹️ ▶️ John for the past, I don’t know, decade or so. Since SSL? Yeah, probably. But
⏹️ ▶️ John actually, maybe even before that. Don’t change the date on your computer, because unbeknownst to you, tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of things on your computer, and especially on your phone, don’t work if
⏹️ ▶️ John your date is not the real date. Things
⏹️ ▶️ John like iMessage, which you probably care about a lot, like texting is a very popular
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey application on phones these days. Oh, it worked. It was very
⏹️ ▶️ John weird, but it worked. Uh, all those things, they’re not saying they will instantly break, but they can break
⏹️ ▶️ John websites, the popular websites that you use applications that like many, many things depend
⏹️ ▶️ John on the date. So like the options you listed, like you could cross your fingers and hope,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you could wait for a different thing. Another one is you could just shut down your phone and wait with
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone turned off. So at the very least, you know, like whatever data is on your phone is safe because the thing is off,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And then just find out what the dust going to sell. But you know, for a fact that changing the date
⏹️ ▶️ John is going to mess some things up, maybe a few things, maybe a lot of things. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the main reason I wouldn’t change in this case is in a sort of an unknown type scenario where you don’t know what the deal is like, is this a big
⏹️ ▶️ John bug? Is it a little bug? What’s the fix going to be? Is Apple going to have a thing? There’s so many unknowns, I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to add to the noise with date stuff to and this happened with a lot of people who would set their date back
⏹️ ▶️ John where once the bug fix was out, they’re like, Oh, that it fixed the bug. But now I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t FaceTime with people and it was because they had set the date back. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey now there’s a face ID, whatever was
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And now they’re suffering from the fallout of their attempted fix. So it’s counterintuitive if you haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John dealt with any of the things but perhaps surprisingly, changing the data on your computer or phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John can and will cause all sorts of weird problems that are difficult to attribute or diagnose and won’t give you a nice error
⏹️ ▶️ John message that say, Oh, you changed your date. So I would suggest that if that among
⏹️ ▶️ John all the options that you have, pick that one last pick that one after,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, prefer the option of simply turning off your phone. So I disagree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d also add to the list of problems that it causes possible sync bugs and possible data loss with apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, because a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of sync engines are the a lot of thing I just try to resolve merges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes and conflicts using time. This isn’t always the best approach, but this is basically how a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them do it anyway. So
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes that’s all. Sometimes all you got depending on how the sync service works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? And there’s all sorts of methods to sync, but that but using time to help resolve like who changed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what last and whose version of this should be the authoritative version is a very, very common way to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you change your date back, not only are you likely to not only you causing a whole bunch of other weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff to happen, for instance, now created like two copies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of December 1st in your computing environment and like so like things can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco written to the to the file system or things can be changed or things can be dated in a way that makes them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem like they were sequential in one direction but they were actually sequential in the other direction or like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so many weird things that can happen this doesn’t usually happen with daylight saving time bugs because a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that doesn’t actually change the underlying Unix time value of the computer and be you’re normally asleep between 2 and 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the morning so it doesn’t usually affect you and you’re because you’re not usually using a computer at that point. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changing your clock back by a whole day gives you a large opportunity to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a whole bunch of changes and create data and make edits to things and things like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that will very much confuse software and cause weird bugs to happen that you might not immediately see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, and I understand that, but I think two different comments in the chat room kind of sum up my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opinion. Psycho Machead said, tons of things not working is better than everything not working. And I agree with that because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you guys aren’t wrong. You’re absolutely right. But I didn’t know at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I knew I was about to go to sleep for the evening and cross into this no man’s land. I didn’t know at the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how bad the error was like I heard it was just a constant respring. But I didn’t know if it was a constant respring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every two seconds, every two minutes, every two hours. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to leave myself the ability to say, I don’t know, do a software update without having to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worry about the respring happening every two seconds. Now, as it turns out, it was not every two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seconds. It was every like two or three minutes, but I didn’t know at the time and I knew I was about to go to sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you also, but like, like Margo said, data loss, like turning your phone off is still the preferable
⏹️ ▶️ John one, like until the dust settles, because if you had
⏹️ ▶️ John that now thinks the server side version is newer than your than your day old data, which is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John updated a second ago, and it overwrites your locally edited information with stuff from the server, like you haven’t actually done anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you merely change the date back. So it’s confused about what the latest stuff is. And it brings that like, you could
⏹️ ▶️ John have data loss, whereas, you know, the respring thing, or even just restarting,
⏹️ ▶️ John there was not a mention of data loss in that. And either way, if you want to avoid entirely turn your phone, turn your phone off, shut
⏹️ ▶️ John it down and wait to find out what the deal is. That is that is the safest possible default. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying like, you know, setting like, say, it’s not the end of the world, like it’s, you know, you made you made a call, you probably
⏹️ ▶️ John knew the risks better than most people. This is This is mostly for other people who think that changing the date has no risks associated with it
⏹️ ▶️ John to emphasize that it has lots of risks and the fallout from it can ripple
⏹️ ▶️ John through for a long time and can be hard to distinguish problems
⏹️ ▶️ John caused by you changing the date and problems caused by the bug and problems that still linger after
⏹️ ▶️ John the bug is fixed. And like I said, I think that happened. People who changed the date had problems when they tried to
⏹️ ▶️ John apply the software update because they had changed the date.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s see, but the thing is though we didn’t know or at least I didn’t know at the time I made this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decision what was gonna happen and and I don’t think just turning off my phone and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Waiting to the next day and trying on another device to see what the fix was That to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me is not a valid option because what if for the sake of discussion? It was a re-spring every two seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What am I how am I going to to accomplish anything at that point? So my phone goes off and everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working like I by that. I mean I turn it off Friday night. Everything’s working Saturday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morning I wake up and I turn it on Immediately re Springs re Springs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey re Springs now. What
⏹️ ▶️ John well you don’t turn on you don’t turn on the phone until you know there’s a fix like or do you know what the Situation is because like at
⏹️ ▶️ John information came out like we don’t know what we don’t know now But presumably by the next day you wake up and you read
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what the deal is is there fixes or not a fix? How bad is the bug? What are the possible workarounds? It was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, like waiting for more information to come out, essentially, because more information did come out in about a day. You learn the shape
⏹️ ▶️ John of this bug. You learn what what it actually caused. You learn multiple workarounds, including the date thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by then, people were learning about the problems about having the date bug. Like just I’m just saying like patience. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, no, your phone’s not going to fix itself when it’s turned off, but it’s also not going to get worse. So like, presumably,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will fix this. Apple’s not going to allow this if it’s an important bug. It’s not like Apple’s going to be silent for six months about this
⏹️ ▶️ John bug. And no one can turn on their phones like you’re not going to be stuck with a turned off phone forever There will be a fix
⏹️ ▶️ John and the more serious is the the sooner the fix will be so I’m saying it’s like that is the it’s Perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ John the most annoying option but is also the most conservative and probably the safest and that’s why I would rank it above changing
⏹️ ▶️ John the date because that is That’s that’s more of a risky option. It’s a way like can I continue? Can I do something? They’ll expose
⏹️ ▶️ John me to a small amount of risk, but let me not have to let me continue to use my phone essentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s exactly the math I did and to me being able to still use my phone was worth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that risk. And I’m not saying that I’m right, I’m just saying I stand by the decision I made at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, as it turns out it was not as dire as I thought and to be honest John’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey approach in retrospect was the best answer which would have been to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn off your phone just wait it out see what happens. And as I think I said a moment ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it turns out that I guess something with local notifications was causing an error within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Springboard and And Springboard is the home screen, among other things. And so Springboard would crash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every two or three minutes. And this was only if you had an app that used a local notification. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re not a iOS developer, that may not mean a lot to you. And so a local notification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a user looks identical in almost every scenario, pretty much actually every scenario I can think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of, to a push notification. But the difference is rather than coming from an external to your device server,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s coming from your phone itself. So your phone is either saying, maybe in a background process, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to send a, you know, have a notification show up. Or perhaps in the case of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do DUE, hey, this person has asked for a reminder about this thing they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to do at, you know, nine o’clock in the evening. They, they, the, the person has asked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be reminded that ATP is being recorded. And so they’ll schedule a reminder
⏹️ ▶️ Casey locally on the device for nine o’clock on Wednesday evening. And those were the things that were causing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the problem. And by the time I woke up, there was actually a fix available.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And before we talk about what that fix was, do we have any other commentary about the bug itself?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, I do. I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, before you get to Marcos commentary, the best solution obviously is always luck,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is what I had going for me the day because I was way behind in Twitter. So like I said, I’m reading about the bug like
⏹️ ▶️ John hours and hours, like I’m reading hours and hours old tweets. So the whole rest of the world knows how it turns out already.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t know. I’m reading, you know, five hours ago tweets. Right. And I’m like, huh, look at this bug and I’m rolling through. And so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John learning about it in real time on my phone. All the while I’m, I’m like, I can’t wait to see how this turns out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it going to turn out that my phone is affected by it? And I’m like, well, it’s not rebooting to springboard constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Right. You won’t believe what happens next.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Right. Um, so basically I lucked out because I guess I don’t have any applications that do local notifications. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John got to read the story of my present, uh, uh, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John backwards in time. And that was fun. And so yeah, if you can rely on luck, I highly recommend it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My solution was to be a member of multiple slack groups where Casey was also a member.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because on the night of December 1st, when this was all coming out, like right before midnight,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it was going to start happening, Casey posted in every slack that he was in about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John thing. I was very
⏹️ ▶️ John nervous. I read his slack things backwards in time too. I’m like, oh wow, Casey really went all out warning the world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because again at the time like I didn’t have a whole lot of facts But what I did know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was that people in the future and by that I mean in like Australia New Zealand were Were having serious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problems with their phones. And so these are all like especially in the slacks, you know I didn’t really sign sound the alarm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too heavily on Twitter But for for my friends and slack I want you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be able to react and do something about this be that turn off Your phone be it set your clocks Whatever the case may be because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the initial reports of course because it was a game of telephone What was oh my god, your phone is going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey explode if you cross. I think it’s 1215 on on Saturday morning And so yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was spamming everyone, but I stand by that as well because I would much rather, you know rolls reversed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would much rather see Marco or John spam me in two or three different slacks and say oh god set your clock back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And at least be or make a decision, you know what I want to do, rather than have Marco or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John be like, eh, I’m sure it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I appreciate it, because that’s how I heard about it. Because, like, so, you know, I had like a night, like, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forget what I was doing that night, but I was like, you know, spending time with family. So I wasn’t browsing the internet, I wasn’t on Twitter that night. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I mentioned in previous episodes, I don’t have Twitter on my phone anymore. So I don’t browse Twitter on my phone. So I was getting ready, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brushing my teeth and reading my phone, because I’m a hopeless technology addict, and I read my phone while I brush my teeth. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? Yep. You got to hold the toothbrush like straight down so face ID will recognize you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You first open it up anyway. How else you can spend two minutes thinking? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh so so anyway um so I’m brushing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my teeth and I started seeing all these messages from you and I started thinking and by that time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I we we had known by that point this was this was like four minutes before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco midnight, but we knew at that point that it had to do with recurring local
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notifications only. So as I’m sitting there brushing my teeth, I’m like, oh my god, wait, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know quick inventory of like household devices. What’s gonna be a problem? Like all right, all my stuff’s on the beta,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m fine. Tiff, oh no, her stuff is not on the beta. I’m thinking like what’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fastest way I can solve this problem in the next four minutes? Well, Tiff’s trying to like read her phone in bed, like you know, read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instagram and like go to sleep and I rush it. I run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey into the bedroom. her
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand. I run to the bedroom with the toothbrush in my mouth. I’m like to uninstall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your water reminder app sometime in the next four minutes. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what why like just just do it what she’s like freaking like why because she could tell I was super freaked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out about it. She had no idea what the hell I was talking about because I realized that like I was thinking like thinking through the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what she would have on her phone that would send recurring local notifications. She had some kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drink more water reminding application. So I knew that was a thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like I, you know, finished my teeth, you know, ran back in, I had like two minutes left. I was like, Are there any other apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have on your phone that send you notifications that are not from a big company?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the thing is, like every other app from a big company is going to send remote push notifications,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re never going to use local, they’re all they’re only going to ever use remote. The only apps that really ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Low notifications at all are apps that really need to for some reason like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know Reminding apps or alarm apps or to-do apps or overcast for that’s an implementation detail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so you know and I knew because it was recurring local notifications like that that cuts out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of Potential app types like very few apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use recurring local notifications So that’s why this why this was a huge problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. It was a huge problem only for people who use a relatively small subset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of app types. So this was actually not nearly as bad as it could have been.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, if this was a problem with anybody who had any kind of notifications, that would have been a much bigger problem than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was. And it was pretty big, but it could have been way worse. So anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco she got off okay after installing the water reminder app. Because I was even thinking, like, can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco install a beta in four minutes. Nope. That’s not gonna be fast enough. Didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the profile installed. It’s not gonna work. Like, yeah. So anyway, how did Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve this problem, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So as it turns out, and we’ve kind of put these pieces, not the three of us, just in general,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the communities put these pieces together after the fact. As it turns out, iOS 11.2 is due to come out this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week. And I’ve heard conflicting reports what day of the week it was supposed to come out. And it doesn’t really matter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be honest. But it It probably wasn’t Friday night at midnight. Yeah, exactly. So 11.2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was in the hopper, so to speak, and it was imminently going to be released. And so one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would assume that it had been heavily QA’d, it was pretty much ready to go, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were just waiting to make sure that their servers were up to snuff, that the emergency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey response team was there and ready to act when they hit the go button or whatever it is that Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does when they release a new iOS point release. And so, if you think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it, Apple had a couple of choices, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can… I’m kind of imagining like Johnny Ive in a totally white room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a big white button on a perfectly formed wooden Apple Store table.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go! It wouldn’t even be labeled, though. I know, he hates buttons. It would just be a spot on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. …that he would have to just apply some pressure to, and it would be a force click button.
⏹️ ▶️ John He just gives it a meaningful look. He doesn’t have to touch it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, the point is that, you know, Apple, all kidding aside, had basically two choices. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could either put together a fix just for this issue and try to like emergency
⏹️ ▶️ Casey QA test it and try to put together an emergency patch and start shipping this patch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or it was very quickly obvious that people on the beta were not having this problem, like Marco had said.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so they could alternatively just say, you know what, the hell with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 11.2 wasn’t supposed to go out, like Marco said, at midnight Eastern on a Friday evening. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gosh knows that if you’ve ever done anything with software, you never want to deploy on a Friday night, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that means you’re really on a Friday at all. Because that means your weekend is all but assuredly screwed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But at this point, they were screwed anyway. So we why not? And what they ended up doing was releasing 11.2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey early, which I think was a smart choice. I mean, it’s easy for me to armchair quarterback,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but hey, that’s what we do. To me, I think that was the best choice they could have made, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it certainly had its own set of penalties in no small part because, say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the release notes, for example, if I’m not mistaken, mentioned Apple Pay Cash.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that what it’s called? Basically, peer-to-peer Apple Pay. Apple Venmo. Apple Venmo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash Apple Square Cash. Well, anyways, so that was mentioned in the release notes And then all of us including me went to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find it and it wasn’t there and we were like well What what’s going on here? And as it turns out there was a server-side switch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They needed to flip which I think they did Monday or it was early this week regardless But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, it was it was clear that this was not their intention But given the the hand they had in front of them, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think this was the best decision they could have made I mean Marco do would you say that you would do the same thing in their shoes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I don’t really have enough information to know what their options really were here, but probably. I mean, see, like I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the 11.2 beta for a while and it seemed fine to me, but that’s, you know, that’s just one person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If it was truly just like a couple of days from release, then yeah, that seems like a totally fine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solution. The problem is embarrassing. The fact that they keep having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems with iPhones with related to date and time is concerning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like alarms not going off in certain days for people and weird daylight savings bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m definitely concerned at the number of bugs that iOS specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has about local date and time issues. I thought we were done with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those a few years ago, and apparently we’re not. That, I think, could use some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco investigation on Apple’s part. Maybe some auditing and really making sure that code is solid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we shouldn’t be having those kinds of bugs in 2017. You know, Apple’s better than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as for the actual fix they did to fix this horribly embarrassing bug. Yeah, it seems
Month 13 is out of bounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, and I should also mention there was something going on with Mac OS as well, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I never really got a clear read on what it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, have you guys heard that month 13 is out of bounds?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I have heard
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Have you heard the good news about month 13? Tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me again why I should update to High Sierra?
⏹️ ▶️ John Month 13, is it in bounds or is it out of bounds? I forget.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’ll never know. No, but it wasn’t even the month 13 thing. There’s something to do with like spotlight, I think, or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I forget exactly what it was, but there was a not widespread, but medium
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spread. I don’t even know if that’s really a phrase, but a medium spread bug that was affecting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe, High Sierra as well. And I can’t remember what the hell it was, but it was something to do with like your menu bar
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spotlight or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t seen that one. And I’m afraid to look at my console for the month 13 messages, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the month 13 one is still going on, isn’t it? Did 10 point whatever point two fix it?
⏹️ ▶️ John I would I looked at the release notes for it briefly and I thought the very first item would be month 13 is now no longer out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve added a new month 13 to the calendar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to fix this bug. Yeah people are so
⏹️ ▶️ John far as to find like the code and core foundation that runs this assertion that is
⏹️ ▶️ John printing this message and like I know and in the grand scheme of all things we talked about with the
⏹️ ▶️ John you know springboard crashing repeatedly and you know the all whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the the problem was last week that I’ve already forgotten, like month 13 being out of bounds, which to be clear, what we’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about is a message that appears in the console on your Mac that repeatedly tells you that month 13
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bounds. Like multiple times per second, like slowing down your Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it depends on where it’s coming from, what applications you have running, but it sounds like, you know, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, your Mac still works, you just got a bunch of noise in the console, not a big deal. But something
⏹️ ▶️ John about the sort of, you know, the hygienic programmer in me finds that one
⏹️ ▶️ John all the more bothersome because it hasn’t been fixed and sort of knowing that your computer is
⏹️ ▶️ John as emitting 10 or 20 of this identical log message per second every
⏹️ ▶️ John second every day that you’re using it and Apple hasn’t fixed it kind of like gnaws
⏹️ ▶️ John at the back of my mind like it is it doesn’t it doesn’t sit well with me
⏹️ ▶️ John that regardless of the actual implications like no they use a database format and it coalesces duplicates
⏹️ ▶️ John and really is just incrementing the counter and you’re not actually storing duplicates and blah, blah, blah, blah, like whatever, I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about technical things like it’s just, you know, and maybe also as a server side programmer,
⏹️ ▶️ John noise and logs is bad. Noise and logs prevent you from seeing signal. Stop spewing
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff to logs like it’s the thing that makes you go around the company with the big virtual stick and bought people on the head
⏹️ ▶️ John and say stop, stop filling logs with crap. If you’re debugging fine debug and then turn off your log
⏹️ ▶️ John messages like keep the logs clean. So I really hope that month 13
⏹️ ▶️ John will no longer be out of bounds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s that’s the one big thing like that when they introduce this new logging framework I think it was what last year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the year before when they introduced the new logging framework that like they tattered like oh it’s so lightweight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can just leave you know incredibly verbose logging enable all the time and the system will handle it because like oh it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so efficient and like if no one’s looking if no one’s looking at the log, it doesn’t get written anywhere or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. There’s all sorts of details that make it super efficient. But like, yeah, I’m with you. Like, like, first of all, looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at console or even the Xcode developer log is nearly useless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since this change because the, the apparent message with an Apple when they, when they did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was now that we’ve made logging really cheap, we can just dump diarrhea in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco logs constantly from everything. And it makes it really hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually look at the logs when you’re having a problem and find anything useful at all. Or to run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything on a tethered device with Xcode. And even if you do the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS disable mode disable, whatever that macro is you’re supposed to set, it doesn’t actually work. It doesn’t actually do what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want. And it’s just like, every part of iOS and MacOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now just dumps so much crap to the log that it has made the log useless. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only for developers, but also just for users. Sometimes some forum answer will be like, Hey, go look at console.app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the for something like this. And that might tell us an answer. I really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strongly disagree with the Apple, you know, way of doing this now where logging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of unnecessary crap all the time is considered okay because they made logs really cheap.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and for the developers, like I think it’s actually more reasonable to say, Oh, just whitelist your application,
⏹️ ▶️ John like use our filtering features to just see logs from applications but for for users
⏹️ ▶️ John like console has historically been granted one of the last resorts but like when you’re really desperate to see what
⏹️ ▶️ John the deal is you will probably find yourself launching
⏹️ ▶️ John console and saying maybe there’s a messaging console that will let me know what the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ John and in that case you can’t run any filters because you don’t know what you want to filter you don’t know what application
⏹️ ▶️ John or what part of the system you don’t know what to filter for you can’t whitelist you could selectively blacklist
⏹️ ▶️ John if you had eliminated sources of things, but like sort of an overview
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, is anything weird going on in my system? That’s why in server side applications, the general best
⏹️ ▶️ John practices to not have noisy law to have at least one log that is basically, when everything’s okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John the log is relatively quiet, or there’s only one kind of log message there, or like some way where you can
⏹️ ▶️ John say, Look, if anything other than this normal state appears here, we have a problem and
⏹️ ▶️ John the normal state may be total quiet. So which would mean that every Every single line to this log means there’s a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or the normal state could mean, log messages of this type are fine, but if you see any other kind of log message,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s an indicative of a problem. That’s what you need. If you just have a big dumping ground, no matter how good your filtering facilities
⏹️ ▶️ John are, no matter how good you are at keeping up your white lists or black lists of filtering, it’s very difficult to,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially in the case of an emergency, you have no place to look anymore where a human being can look at
⏹️ ▶️ John it and say, does that look normal to you? It’s like, I don’t know, it’s just a bunch of crap. Is it more crap
⏹️ ▶️ John or less crap than we were before? And then finally, like month 13 is out of bounds. It represents
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of error. Is it a programming error? Is it a data error? Whatever the source of the error is, there’s an assertion that it’s failing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we all agree that there is no month 13 in the calendar that we all use. So something somewhere is wrong, so someone should
⏹️ ▶️ John fix it. And so we don’t want to see that message 20 times a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Should this be a log message? Shouldn’t this be an assertion? Shouldn’t it crash? Like that’s… Yeah, let’s, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, also for the record, I have 10.13.2 on my laptop. I just booted it up. This,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m still getting month 13 is out of bounds errors in the console. So 10.13.2 does not fix this bug. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also doesn’t fix my font smoothing bug because the unchecking the use font smoothing when available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco box still is completely broken. Now, what, three months after the release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this OS, two major point releases in. If you have that box off, everything is still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco completely broken. So thanks Apple. Why am I being pushed so hard to use this OS? Why is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this being pushed forcibly through my app store? Like, promote it when it’s ready.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not ready. Sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, the month 13 thing, I don’t think crashing is probably appropriate because if it’s a data-driven error, the data is bad,
⏹️ ▶️ John the code is not. The code is just telling you the data is bad and in a verbose way, in the tradition that you just said
⏹️ ▶️ John of like, oh, if you find something wrong and you’re not going to throw an exception, just log it so you’ll know about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if it happens 20 times a second, it’s not great. So I’m assuming this is some sort of data bug where
⏹️ ▶️ John some piece of data somewhere, either from the network or on the system, has a bad date in it, or some bad date
⏹️ ▶️ John math added one to a 12 and got a 13. Not a reason for
⏹️ ▶️ John the code in question to throw an exception in that case, because it could be inside some important subsystem that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to take down the whole system just because it got some bad data or whatever. I’m just saying, find where the bug is and fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And obviously, it is less urgent than everything else we’ve talked about. But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John irrationally, like I said, hygiene-wise, For me, it feels mentally urgent to me that
⏹️ ▶️ John this stopped being on in the console.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So not a good week for Apple last week between the root bug and this bug.
⏹️ ▶️ John good, but not actually I’m going to say not, you know, so it’s not good. Lots of bugs, but not actually that bad either because in the
⏹️ ▶️ John grand scheme of things, Apple like either through luck partially through luck, but also partially through
⏹️ ▶️ John things working the way they’re supposed to. Apple got fixes out in a timely manner.
⏹️ ▶️ John The fixes more or less work, plus or minus some minor fixes to the fixes.
⏹️ ▶️ John The user base in general, you know, could have been, it could have been much worse,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it wasn’t. I mean, the reasons Marco said local notifications only the fact that the fixes came
⏹️ ▶️ John out pretty quickly. I’m not sure if any of these things even made it out of the little tech nerd circle
⏹️ ▶️ John onto like the evening news or whatever into the wider world. Like was there a front page New New York Times story about everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones bricking like that would be worse, right? So, it was unfortunate and there was definitely some
⏹️ ▶️ John bad luck involved, but there was also some good luck and I think Apple more or less functioned the way it’s supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to. Oh, you’ve got an emergency and a bug all hands on deck. Let’s fix the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John and they fixed it. So, you know, you can get pessimistic about the fact that there’s all these bugs
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ve talked about that at length, but I’m mostly satisfied that Apple handled
⏹️ ▶️ John the situation the way you would expect a professional good organization to handle the situation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agree with that. Yeah, I mean, they they’re not like as as angry as I am about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how crappy they’re treating High Sierra right now. And how it should not be. It should not have been released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco period like this at this OS is still a beta and should not have been released.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if they insisted on releasing it, they should not be promoting it as hard as they are. They should not be automatically prompting people to install
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as much as they are. But all that being said they are making software bugs happen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are fixing them you know bugs happen on both platforms now like this isn’t just a Mac thing like iOS has problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac has problems as long as they fix the problems they’re doing their job yeah but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco High Sierra is not ready I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean I don’t know why you say that it’s I have it on every one of my machines and it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just very upset about fonts moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently well and root and month 13 like this It’s not that it has one problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ice Sierra has lots of problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I mean, it depends on if you encounter the problems. Like if,
⏹️ ▶️ John the example is that I always had all these trepidations about installing it, right? And then eventually I just did install it on my wife’s computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s been fine. I mean, I’m sure her console is feeling right now with month 13 being out of bounds, but beyond
⏹️ ▶️ John that, it’s more or less works. It’s hard for me to gauge like what is the stability of this thing across
⏹️ ▶️ John the entire user base? Some people have more problems with than others. None of us have the Windows
⏹️ ▶️ John server crashing bug, which would certainly be something that we make us all screaming that we shouldn’t have upgraded, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because if your computer crashes every 30 to 60 minutes, like, or it crashes,
⏹️ ▶️ John kernel panics, that’s bad. But I don’t know. I like, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple probably knows what the stability is like. Certainly it feels shakier than we wish the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system ever would feel. early early releases of all major updates
⏹️ ▶️ John are like that. And certainly, as we said in my show, it doesn’t live up to the billing as a stability
⏹️ ▶️ John release like as as it was pitched. But it’s hard for me to gauge exactly how dire
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. And I still remember the bad old days of ten five zero and even ten six zero.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like the zero releases back in the old days were just were just so much worse. Like like
⏹️ ▶️ John you make your computer unusable. But Margo’s right in that they didn’t push those. They didn’t automatically download those and throw
⏹️ ▶️ John things in your face, tell you to upgrade. Like no one even knew Leopard was out until
⏹️ ▶️ John of us had suffered through 10.5.0, 10.51 and 10.52. So it’s a different world. Yeah.
John’s phone is full
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell us about your iPhone, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do we have time for this? I guess we do. My iPhone is full.
⏹️ ▶️ John that? So, wait, what size did you get? I didn’t… Here’s the thing. When…
⏹️ ▶️ John go. We’ve all seen the Google ads where they like part of their advertising campaign is they show up that little dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ John that says like never see this again and it’s a little iOS dialogue that comes up and says like whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ John says, your iPhone is full or you’re out of storage. I don’t remember the exact wording, but that’s been in ad campaigns for Android
⏹️ ▶️ John devices specifically for Google Android devices I think for a while now and I had never
⏹️ ▶️ John seen that and so when it appeared my first question was how big is
⏹️ ▶️ John this phone because I had forgotten it’s an iPhone 7 I bought it a long time ago I don’t remember what size I got
⏹️ ▶️ John I was surprised to learn that I got a 128 which I normally don’t do like I normally get the smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John size so I’m like oh I don’t have that much stuff on it and it’s not a big deal used to be that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know back in the old days when the cameras on phones and iPod Touches really sucked,
⏹️ ▶️ John the biggest thing on your phone or iPod Touch, which I keep saying because that’s what I had at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John was your music. And I was like, oh, I’m not gonna put my whole music collection on there. I’ll just put my Three Star Plus playlist
⏹️ ▶️ John on there, which is like the songs that I like from my music collection, essentially. I’ll just put them on there
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s not that big. And that’s the biggest thing that’s gonna be on my phone and my music collection doesn’t grow that much. So all I need to
⏹️ ▶️ John do is get a phone or iPod Touch that fits my music collection and I’ll be fine. But now the cameras on
⏹️ ▶️ John phones and maybe iPod touches are super awesome. And we all take lots of pictures with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the pictures are big. And I filled my 128 gig phone
⏹️ ▶️ John with, yes, my music collection, which doesn’t get that much bigger very often, but with photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John I filled it with photos. So, you know, you go to the dollar box offices, go to manage storage. You look at what’s taking up all this
⏹️ ▶️ John room and you’re like, guess what? Photos and then second place music and then third place everything else. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now I’m in this situation. And I’m like, I saw this ad came in, so I’m like, yeah, but if your phone fills up, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could fix that, right? It’s pretty easy to fix. And to its credit, iOS has this pretty nice storage management
⏹️ ▶️ John screen where it will suggest a whole bunch of things you can do to get space back, and it will tell you exactly how much space
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll get back in priority order, the biggest things first. You can do the thing where you let
⏹️ ▶️ John the operating system offload apps that you don’t use, and it tells you what the consequences of that are, and it tells you how much space you’ll save.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get rid of attachments on messages, and it tells you how much space you’ll save. You can delete old messages older
⏹️ ▶️ John than a year and it tells you how much space that will save and all sorts of stuff like that. I was really impressed with
⏹️ ▶️ John that screen, which I had never seen before. My problem was I didn’t want to do any of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I wanted to happen was iCloud Photo Library to say, I am now going to eject
⏹️ ▶️ John photos that you haven’t looked at in a long time and save only the tiniest of thumbnails for them. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to do that across your entire photo library, shrinking it dramatically. And I should have done that 17
⏹️ ▶️ John hours ago when I saw you were running out of room and you phone but I didn’t instead I waited for your phone to completely fill up and stopped you in
⏹️ ▶️ John the middle of filming a video of your cute dog and popped up literally in the middle of filming a video of my cute dog
⏹️ ▶️ John and popped up a dialogue that says your phone is full like well make it unful like the whole point of
⏹️ ▶️ John optimized storage on my phone get rid of photos that I haven’t looked out like I have thousands
⏹️ ▶️ John of photos that I have never looked at on my phone get them off my phone that’s the whole point of optimized storage
⏹️ ▶️ John right and I know people have had the same frustration on their Mac that like they set their Mac to optimize storage,
⏹️ ▶️ John and their max disk fills up and they’re like, Come on photos, optimize storage, like the whole point
⏹️ ▶️ John is they’re stored in the cloud, I don’t need the full res ones here, download them on demand,
⏹️ ▶️ John get the full res ones off of my system. So I didn’t know what to do. So I’m like, I guess I’ll try
⏹️ ▶️ John deleting some big apps, I guess I’ll find delete garage band that I never use, because it’s like 600 megs or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, I deleted some stuff thinking, maybe it’s just a lag, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I the photos thing which takes a little while to catch up and it’ll flush stuff out but
⏹️ ▶️ John sure enough like a couple hours later phone full again I deleted some more stuff next day phone full again
⏹️ ▶️ John like every time I try to take a picture it would happen literally when I’m taking pictures and videos just like on the ads because that’s when
⏹️ ▶️ John like the thing would fill up or hit some threshold so I was like I you know I have
⏹️ ▶️ John no choice I have to basically turn off iCloud photo library to convince it to delete
⏹️ ▶️ John these photos off my Mac because it’s just not doing it. So I turned off iCloud photo library and it said
⏹️ ▶️ John do you want to keep these photos in your Mac or do you want to trash them? I said go ahead and trash them because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all safe in the cloud they’re all safe on my Mac like you know there are many million different places I don’t need them to be on my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone I never look at them on my phone anyway. And by the way remember the the photos on
⏹️ ▶️ John my photo library is not the family photo library it’s just my photos the family photo library belongs to my wife
⏹️ ▶️ John so I’m only talking about a tiny subset of the vast amount of photos I have and
⏹️ ▶️ John I import all of my photos into the family photo library like painfully manually
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no good way to do this so I wasn’t really worried about the data right
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not it’s not the real photos and they’re all in the other thing so I told it to delete my photo library
⏹️ ▶️ John and and I click delete and it went through and now it’s like it’s removing space and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing space come back I get many many gigs free. I’m like, I gotta solve this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I found myself in the in the managed storage screen. I guess I was just trying to look up at the progress or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I noticed in the managed storage screen it said, here’s some things you can do to save space.
⏹️ ▶️ John And one of the top items was, you should enable iCloud photo library because that’ll save you 50
⏹️ ▶️ John gigs. I was like, what? How
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud photo library save me 50 gigs? Is it thinking, well, I see on
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone, you’ve got gigs and gigs of photos, but if you enable iCloud photo library, I can upload
⏹️ ▶️ John all those to the cloud and then dump the full res versions, leaving only the thumbnail, saving you 50 gigs?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s the only way I could reason about that. Like that’s how it was telling me it would think it would save space. And I would
⏹️ ▶️ John say, look, let me tell you, I had it enabled and that’s when my phone filled and it didn’t seem like it saved me space. But anyway, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it offered that to me, I said, all right, I’ll take that bet phone. I’ll enable my iCloud photo library
⏹️ ▶️ John right now. Let’s see if you save me 50 gigs of space.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re beating me up about setting my clock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John back and this is the sort of thing that you do? Like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I really should clarify, these photos are all safe and sound somewhere else. This is not the real family photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library. This is just me versus the phone to see. If you’re gonna tell me that I’m gonna save 50 gigs,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll enable it. And so I enabled it, and I think what I did was I enabled it so quickly after I had disabled
⏹️ ▶️ John that it hadn’t deleted all the photos on my phone, it just deleted many, many gigs of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I re enabled it. And it went through this thing that said, you know, uploading photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I was like, Oh, no, is it uploading like duplicates of these photos? Surely knows that that has already uploaded all
⏹️ ▶️ John these like, and it did it figured it out. It said, it’s like, I got to upload like 9000 photos. And it was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m all done. Because, you know, all those photos were already uploaded. So didn’t actually re upload them, no duplicates.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it just sat there in a steady state. I’m like well this this technique worked disable
⏹️ ▶️ John icon photo library tell it to delete wait a short time for it delete several gigs then re-enable
⏹️ ▶️ John it let it figure out that everything that’s on the phone has already been uploaded and let it just say well there’s nothing for me to do I guess everything’s fine
⏹️ ▶️ John on this phone so that is my update on my my full phone I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not sure if I deal with it and dealt with it in the right way I’m not sure what the right way really would
⏹️ ▶️ John be and and just to go through the things that I didn’t want to do I didn’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to delete message attachments just because I’m stubborn and I’m waiting for that stupid iCloud message sync thing to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John so that all my messages would be in the cloud and I could delete them locally. Like I didn’t want, you know, people send me cute videos.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to save them to my video library, but I want them to be gone, right? I didn’t want to delete a bunch of applications, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John ones that I might not be able to redownload from the store. Although there’s fewer of them these days because of the 64 bit thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that killed a lot of my cool 32 bit apps. Um, RIP flight control.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t want and delete any big games and stuff that I play, because I may not play them that
⏹️ ▶️ John often, but when I do want to play them, I like the fact that it’s there, and I can just launch it and play with it. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to delete any of my music, because I already had a minimal set of my music on there, and I didn’t want to stream music, like it was just
⏹️ ▶️ John another option that I could have done, but I like the fact that the music is on there. What I did want to happen was for the photos to flush
⏹️ ▶️ John out. So anyway, I took the phone up on its bet, and it sure didn’t save me 50 gigs, but
⏹️ ▶️ John my phone is no longer full again, and I guess what this means is the next time I get a phone, I’ll be sure to get the 256
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever the biggest size they offer is because now apparently one of those people who fills his phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say a useful tip that somebody told me somewhere or I found somewhere when I was setting up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my laptop last is you know on iOS you’re screwed you’re up to the you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iCloud gods to do what they need to do with optimizing storage which they seem to not do reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but on the Mac I strongly recommend this tactic where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know if you’re gonna have like your main Mac download all the files and not download originals, fine. Do it normally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re gonna use iCloud Photo Library and have an optimized storage on a Mac, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have an idea of how much disk space you want that to use at most, create a sparse bundle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disk image and locate your photos library on that and you can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it auto mount by adding it as a login item in your login items. And so I have a disk image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called photos that I that I set as a maximum size of, I think it was like 20 gigs that I chose, something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. That’s what I’ve been doing on my new old laptop, and it is wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it filled that up maybe two-thirds of the way and then just stopped.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so now I can control exactly how much disk space it uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it will never exceed the limit on this Sparse Bundle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s glorious. I don’t know why this isn’t a setting. they should
⏹️ ▶️ John setting. Can you imagine some other way to implement that feature that doesn’t involve disk image? Imagine if they just had a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting for it. Yeah, maybe, yeah, imagine a storage limit setting. That would be amazing, but they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that. So in the absence of them being willing to add such an incredibly useful, obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting that everyone needs on a laptop because the SSDs are expensive and small, make a sparse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bundle disk image in Disk Utility, and you can locate the photo library on that, add it as a login item, and it automatically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mounts, and everything just works, except you have a defined limit to how big your photos library can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be and it will stay under it. It is wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna make fun of the inefficiency of the solution because now you’ve got like another layer of pseudo file system that all your IO
⏹️ ▶️ John is going through, which you know, can’t be efficient. But I do something even worse for
⏹️ ▶️ John time machine, network time machine backups. And what I probably should be doing is, I think what both you use is
⏹️ ▶️ John quotas on Synology, like you set the quotas per user,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey right? Yep, works
⏹️ ▶️ John great. Yep, I think I actually do have the quotas set, but I think I’m slightly over provisioned
⏹️ ▶️ John in typical fashion. So usually I just, if things start to fill up, I use the
⏹️ ▶️ John TMU tail thing to delete historic backups because at least in the case of Time Machine, there is a physical way for me to
⏹️ ▶️ John do what the system should be doing anyway, which is cleaning up old backups. But sometimes it gets cranky when you get close to
⏹️ ▶️ John too much space. So I have on my network Time Machine volume a
⏹️ ▶️ John non-sparse disk image as a space-filling placeholder.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like many gigs. If I ever get to the point where I’m really super full and time machine needs like too
⏹️ ▶️ John much need scratch space to get it out of its bind, guess what? I take the space filler, chuck
⏹️ ▶️ John it in the trash, empty, you know, delete it, uh, resolve the time machine thing and put back the space
⏹️ ▶️ John filler, which is, I, you know, it’s disgusting. It reminds me of that awesome story. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope it’s not a pocket roll. It’s one of my favorite internet stories of the, uh, the experienced game developer
⏹️ ▶️ John who who has some mandate to fit all some I figure I’m gonna messing up the details, but to fit all the assets
⏹️ ▶️ John for this game in a certain amount of memory. And it’s like getting to be crunch time and they have to ship and they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, 200 k. This is the old days of PC gaming, like 200 k over their RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John limit, and they can’t figure out how to wring any more RAM out. And at the beginning of project, he’d made a two megabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM buffer as a static variable and then some C file, he just comments that line out and says done ship it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I think is obviously much worse than that and not clever at all, but it is a thing that I do and it has actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to make so much fun of you, John, but that is actually very, very clever.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not. It’s stupid. I should use quotas,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but I’m just saying it’s a thing I do. Well, fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, is that that much worse than Mike Friese’s sparse bundle hack?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, you know, the sparse bundle, like, the sparse bundle thing just makes me so angry about how
⏹️ ▶️ John the automated, these automated systems, like for version one, fine, but this is obviously a thing that people want. want more control
⏹️ ▶️ John over how much space your thing is taking. And if the optimized thing really worked the way it was supposed to where you don’t have to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll take care of it. No one would complain. Like that’s a great goal. But many years later,
⏹️ ▶️ John on all their systems, their sort of optimized storage thing does not work the way people expect. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s, it lets it fill up, it doesn’t catch it before it fills up in scenarios where you’re it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not like I’m flooding. I mean, I suppose video I’m kind of flooding the phone with with lots of data. But
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s not unforeseeable by the system that we’re getting close to the disk storage limit. And
⏹️ ▶️ John when it does hit the limit, it seems like no part of the system scrambles to get your space back. They’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, you’ve hit your limit. Now we’re not gonna do anything about it. Like maybe maybe that demon will wake up and
⏹️ ▶️ John consider thinning some but maybe it won’t like we’re not in a hurry is it wise. It’s just an urgency
⏹️ ▶️ John about this. Perhaps you should go to the settings app on the managed storage screen so you can clear that red badge will make it makes you
⏹️ ▶️ John look at that by the way it makes you look at that managed storage screen to clear that badge every time it tells you that message.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know that because it would tell me that message a lot. And there’s no way to get rid of it until you go into that screen and let it grind
⏹️ ▶️ John say, here’s all the things you can do to save space. I’m like, you know what you could do to save space? Gets rid of some photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Goodness. Thanks for sponsors this week, fracture, aftershocks and lino 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
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M N-T Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse, it’s accidental Accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t mean to. Accidental, check the podcast, it’s so long
Post-show: Forecast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How’s the weather up there, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rainy. How’s the forecast, though?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is! There we go. It’s overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nicely done. Nicely done. We’ll be here all week, kids. Anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve released a Mac app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Congratulations. Yeah, my second Mac app. Don’t forget Quitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John I noticed that on my system the other day when I was command spacing it. I think I mistyped and Twitter came up. I’m like, oh yeah, I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I released Forecast. It’s a Mac app. It’s for producing your own podcasts. It is an MP3 encoder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and chapter tool and lets you input some of the MP3 metadata right in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. And I’ve mentioned this on this show a number of times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last two years or so that I’ve been developing it. It is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parallelized version of the Lame MP3 encoder under the hood. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parallelization is actually done fairly boringly. It’s done entirely outside of Lame.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lame is a terrible name. That’s kind of like an ableist problem name now, but this was named a very long time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago before we were as aware of these things, and I didn’t name it, but it happens to be the best MP3 encoder. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I apologize for the terrible name, but it is called the Lame MP3 encoder. It is the pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much the only way you can encode an MP3 legally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco today without using software that had a pre-existing deal with the Fraunhofer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Institute that was the creator of the MP3 originally back in like the late 80s and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was them whose patents expired this past spring. When their patents expired, they stopped
⏹️ ▶️ Marco licensing their encoder at any price. Believe me, I tried. The only way to encode MP3s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco legally today, if you don’t already have a copy or a license of the LAME MP3 encoder like Apple does with iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Logic, is to use the LAME open source project.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, that’s what Forecast does, and the parallelization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens outside of that. I basically split the file into chunks, send them each to a copy of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the regular standard libmp3 LAME that comes with the source distribution from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Homebrew, rejoin those chunks after the after they are encoded into one particular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MP3 file. Because as I mentioned earlier in the show, during the question about dynamic ad insertion, MP3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file format is easily spliced and easily rejoined and hacked up like that without causing too many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems, as long as you’re a little bit careful. So that’s what it does. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is optimized for the workflow that me and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of my podcaster friends have, which is we create
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mp3 chapters as markers in Logic Pro. You can also do this from Adobe Audition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t think there’s a good way to do it from Audacity, unfortunately. I know people are trying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not yet aware of a way to do it. But anything that can export
⏹️ ▶️ Marco markers as metadata in a WAV file, Forecast will try to import that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as chapters. You can also create them manually, but I wouldn’t recommend that because the interface for doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so is awful because I don’t do that. Also, it’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a table view with Cocoa Bindings and that makes a bunch of weird little behaviors and inconsistencies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and bugs that I need to get rid of by dumping Cocoa Bindings, but that’s a lot of work and I haven’t gotten there yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I released this app and I released it for free for lots of reasons that I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can talk about it if you want to, if you care. I’ve talked a little bit about some of this stuff on Under the Radar, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, what do you guys want to know? Where should I start here?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what was the motivation? It was simply just efficiency?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, pretty much. It was, you know, I wanted, first of all, the way I was encoding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this show before was by using the command line version of LAME.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was doing that, you know, I wasn’t using the built-in MP3 encoder in Logic, which is the Fraunhofer encoder, which is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit better quality for low bitrate speech and also a little bit faster. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wasn’t using that because I wanted as part of my workflow to automate things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco putting in the right artwork for the show, putting in the right podcast title and episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number and everything. So I had like some shell scripts to do that before and I would shell out to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lame mp3 encoder on the command line and encoding an episode of the show would take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like four or five minutes. It was and you know that’s to an impatient programmer that’s just death.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d just have to sit there and wait. And every time, like if I wanted to change the file, would I have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then wait another five minutes for it to re-encode, and it was a pain. So, and I’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loved hacking audio stuff, you know, as you can tell from some of my career choices, always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loved it, always loved dealing with audio. And so I decided, you know what, there has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a way to make this parallel. I have all these cores sitting around doing nothing on my computer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while one core works its butt off for five minutes. this is incredibly offensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me. Let me let me figure out a way to solve this. And in addition, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realize like if I control like a gooey version of the encoder, I can save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco myself some time in other ways. For instance, we host this podcast on Squarespace. We host the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco website and the feed on Squarespace. The files are hosted at Libsyn. And that’s a setup I recommend, by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. But anyway, the Squarespace requires that you paste in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file size and the duration of the podcast file that you’re hosting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco elsewhere. It doesn’t just fetch that it requires that you paste it in. So I figured like, Oh, if I can have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tool that like helps me easily copy those things to the clipboard, I can save a few steps there. If I have a tool that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can maybe pre fill a certain things based on what I did last for that same podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can save some time there. I also wanted to get involved with a chapter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my show, uh, our show and you know, the Germans kind of convinced me to do it. The Germans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are frustratingly right a lot of the time. And, man, I love the Germans.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so they convinced us all over time. They wore us down and convinced us all that we should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably have chapters on our show. And I wanted to do that, and I was not happy with the state of the tools to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that two years ago. They were pretty minimal and almost non-existent. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to basically solve all these problems at once. And so I did, I made an app that was basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my ideal app for podcast encoding and post-production work, I basically made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for myself to save myself time, and it does, dramatically so. It saves me tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of time every week now that I produce multiple shows, and even if I just produced this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, it would still be worth doing. So, and I had a private beta with many of our podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco friends, probably most notably the people at Relay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mike, Steven, Jason Snell, They were wonderful beta testers and they uncovered lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bugs over the years and we’ve hopefully fixed them all. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So why free? And I know you talked about this on Under the Radar, but what’s the kind of short short version?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The main reason is that my expected number of paid customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this, like if I would have charged money for this, the total number of paid customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would expect to get is maybe a hundred. Like there aren’t that many podcast producers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relative to other professions. Among podcast producers, there aren’t that many of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are willing to try some random tool like this from me. And because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the volume would be so low, I would have to price it at like 50 bucks or more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it worthwhile. And I just figured the market would be so small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, you know, if this was a paid app, the market would be so small that the total amount of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money I would make from this is not that great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the cost of supporting an app that was paid to that level is very high.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like if someone pays $50 for an app or more, they expect a certain level of support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that money. And I did not want to offer that level of support for the anticipated very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low customer volume that this would probably generate. And then secondarily, I realized there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually strategic benefits to this for Overcast, where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I supply the encoder and I control the encoder’s UI and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features for a bunch of popular podcasts and I also control the podcast app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I can do cool features. I can implement new features. I can extend the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco implementations of current features. So for instance, one of the features that observant listeners might have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticed in in ATP and in Overcast over the last couple of months
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that I’ve had the ability to basically create invisible chapters, chapters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that don’t show up in the chapter list, but that at a certain timestamp show a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco image or a link or both, but just are not in the table of contents,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not in the list of chapters. This is part of the MP3 chapter spec. They actually say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, not every chapter needs to be a member of a table of contents. You could, for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just show something at a certain time. But no apps implemented that, both in the encoding or the playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side. Because I controlled the encoder and the player, I implemented that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now we have this cool feature that we can do with podcasts, where you can have invisible chapters. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to show a certain link, like right now, or a certain picture right now, without disrupting the semantic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco structure of the chapter that you’re currently in, or if you want to show links
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or images at certain times without having the rest of the show even have chapters,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without having a chapter structure for the rest of the show at all, you can now do that. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a cool feature, and I’m only able to do that feature because I control an encoder and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco player. And so I realized, like, the more people who use this encoder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the better it works out for Overcast and for podcasting as a whole. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided, you know what, because of the combination of those strategic benefits and the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any paid income would probably be pretty small and would probably bring a large support burden for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that smallness, I decided free was the better approach. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s not just free. You have an interesting business model, sort of, at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the bottom of the forecast page at overcast.fm. Oh yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I say something along the lines of like, you know, if you use this and you find it useful for your podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would appreciate if you occasionally promoted overcast and you don’t have to do it. It’s not a requirement. And if,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s, if it’s a show where that doesn’t make sense, like I was thinking of like you look nice today. Like I know it’s, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really in production anymore, but like a show, like you look nice today or even like Dubai Friday, which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of use it’s like spiritual successor. Um, it doesn’t make sense to promote things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a show like that. that doesn’t contextually fit. It would sound weird. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want you promoting overcast in a show like that. But if you have a show, which most people do, of like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the end, you have like, oh, please rate us on iTunes and subscribe and stitch here or whatever else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Occasionally throw an overcast there. That’s it. That’s my business model. If you feel like it and if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can, I’d appreciate it if you promoted overcast sometimes, but you don’t have to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where are you hiding this application? I read the webpage when you linked on Twitter, but now I’m looking for it. Marco.org
⏹️ ▶️ John slash apps doesn’t list it. That seems like an oversight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I still have a lot of places I need to update this. It was kind of a soft launch. I’ve basically launched it on Twitter. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast site does not link to it from anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John is it? Like, I’m realizing I haven’t I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Overcast FM slash forecast.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right. I don’t even know what the icon looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like. The icon is is a tongue in cheek joke.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It was created by the wonderful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The wonderful forgotten towel, the designer who does all of the relayfm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco artwork. I hired him to do this icon and… It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John 0.9? Come on. You’re better than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What is it? A 1.0? No.
⏹️ ▶️ John You released it. You gotta go with 1.0.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple released High
⏹️ ▶️ John too. Don’t you know that Simver has weird problems with version numbers that begin with 0? You don’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I should probably put the icon on the app
⏹️ ▶️ John page. I downloaded it to see the icon, so what is the joke?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t get the joke? Oh, it’s so good. It’s the German flag, but an F.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, yeah, I see that. I thought it was like some sort of, I should have known, some sports thing, like it’s a sports logo or
⏹️ ▶️ John something, but yeah, I see the German flag colors now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes. Yeah, and a few Germans got it, and therefore they made it worth
⏹️ ▶️ John it. So how do you, I look at this application, And how do you feel about,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I know this is like a utility and you’re like, you don’t really care that much about the UI. It’s very utilitarian applications for all
⏹️ ▶️ John the reasons you listed and even some part of the UI you don’t even use. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it also doesn’t look like you spent much time worrying about what the window would look like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you might have if this was going to be a commercial application. Like it just kind of, it’s just kind of there. Like it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John things aren’t badly aligned except for maybe a little bit too much space between the buttons and the rest of the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it certainly is not a particularly showy application let’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say. No, it really isn’t at all and I take full ownership of that. This is not a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI. This is not a highly polished UI. If you do what I said I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never do, which is if you manually enter chapters, it’s really unpolished.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is not something that I’m really proud of the UI. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to me is a highly functional app. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned on the show a few times before that I also have a tool that helps align
⏹️ ▶️ Marco double ender files and remove drift in them. This is not that tool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I understand why people think it might be because I talked about that tool before. This is a separate tool. That tool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is an even less polished command line app that has tons of weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugs and edge cases if you don’t use it exactly the way I use it and even then sometimes if you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so that is nowhere near releasable state it doesn’t even have a GUI at all and even the command-line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version is really not particularly releasable. This is a small step above that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know this has a GUI it is not a good interface it is not a polished interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but this is a tool for pro workflows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are like mine. Even if no one else ever uses it, it works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great for me and so I’m happy with that. It’s hard to justify spending a lot of time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it, like polishing it up, when I also am maintaining overcast and having to update that and move
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that forward and everything. So it’s probably never gonna be incredibly polished
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the UI. I just want to make sure that it’s really useful. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know like many pro tools it’s kind of ugly but just functional.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should have a drawer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually had a drawer in one of the in one of the early versions. I was thinking like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it would be like one of the things that is an obvious next step for features for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app is to have a little player and to have it like preview and simulate like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know how the chapters would look in a player and and be able to speak to them and play them and everything to make sure that they’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta bring back the visualizer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I still have all that code obviously yeah so and and so if you’re gonna add a player
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to this a drawer is kind of the obvious way to do it no
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco obvious joke way to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John just didn’t they just deprecate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like this year I probably know I mean I wouldn’t do it but I was tempted to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John a floating brush metal window is the clear way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that oh yeah definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John textured sorry it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco brush man yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah look like I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I have two questions for you. Number one, do you have any kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of analytics anywhere, just so you know? Was this market as small as you thought, or have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you had, you know, 11 billion downloads and it turns out you might have miscalculated?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can figure this out now or later. I don’t need to do this in the app, and so I haven’t yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In order to distribute this app outside of the App Store, which, and honestly, I wasn’t trying to make some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of giant political statement by not being in the App Store. there was just no need for me to be in the App Store. So I wasn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t feel that it was worth the burdens of being in the App Store for no benefit really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m not in the App Store, so I had to build in distribution functionality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to build in auto updating. And the way you do auto updating in Mac apps is through the Sparkle framework.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is how pretty much everyone does it. Everyone who uses a Mac app that is not from the App Store has seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the little windows that say like, you know, an update’s available. Do you want to install now or run me later?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or skip this version and you would click install now and it shows like a little like you know progress bar then it quits and relaunches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app. There’s a reason why those are the same across pretty much every app. They all use the same framework
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called Sparkle and so the way Sparkle works is once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a day or whatever when you launch the app it checks a server’s RSS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed and it’s a special RSS feed that is for versions of the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for me to distribute this I I had to basically build all that. And when I made Quitter, I built a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very basic version of that that’s just basically all shell scripts that would generate static files
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then upload them to my server. For Forecast, this is an Overcast product. I wanted this to live on the Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers. I wanted to finally do a little bit better of a job, so I kind of made my own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crappy little version of iTunes Connect for it, where I can upload a build,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a script in the server reads the build number and the version number out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that build, signs it for Sparkle update mechanism, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a signature involved. So signs it for that and then creates like an entry then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can enter release notes in that entry and I can say whether it’s released or not. So I can actually very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easily add a thing to the system that remembers how many people check that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RSS feed every day and reports to me roughly how many users there are. Or I can just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco log like how many downloads the file has, which I also don’t do. I probably should be doing that, but I’m not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But overall, the response I’ve gotten on Twitter so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been huge. It’s been way bigger than I expected. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think this is really a good sign. There’s a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast producers out there than the people I know. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco isn’t so many that I regret releasing it for free. I think if it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free, many of them wouldn’t try it because they don’t know me and this is just some random thing. But because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s free, it is spreading pretty wide, wider than I expected it to spread so quickly, especially since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m linking to it from nowhere on the site. So yeah, so far it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Good. And because it’s my favorite thing to ask,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what was the either hardest or crummiest part of the entire process? And I think that your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Under the Radar episode talked about a lot of the like, oh, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app is done, but there’s so much more to do. And like you were talking about, like your Marco Connect, you know, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your fake iTunes Connect, you know, all that had to be written. But over the entire process from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey start to finish, including all this administrivia you had to do, what would you say was either the hardest or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most difficult or crummiest part to deal with?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By far the hardest part of this app is just learning AppKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s learning how to make Mac apps. I had made Quitter before and I made a couple of little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experimental dumb crap before that, but this is the first time that I really have made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Mac app of any kind of substance. Now the good thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, AppKit provides a lot of really rich functionality built in. So like the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco document model, I don’t have to worry that much about like windowing, opening, saving,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save as, stuff like that, like a lot of that comes for free. And so that’s pretty great. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way that the actual UI works, like the way those table views work and the text fields inside the table
⏹️ ▶️ Marco views and the formatters and the bindings to an array controller and all this weird stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, to an iOS developer mainly, it might as well be Android. Like, it’s so different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the way iOS works that it’s like starting over from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zero. So I’m making Mac apps as though I’m a complete novice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because for the Mac, I am. That has been the hardest part is that, you know, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to working at a certain speed and proficiency and design proficiency on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS that I just don’t have when making Mac OS apps. So that’s been a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very slow learning process. And it’s also just harder on the Mac because the APIs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot more legacy because they’re much older. So the APIs are a lot clunkier. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have not gotten nearly as much attention in the last decade as iOS has. So they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in many ways a lot harder to use or have a lot of antiquated or clunky things you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do to use them. And the biggest problem with all of it is that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS is so incredibly popular and Mac OS development relatively isn’t, it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to find answers if you have questions for Mac OS development. There’s not, like, with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS, you can search anything under the sun, and you’re gonna get 1,000 Google results.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Half of them are gonna be really great tutorials on exactly what you have to do, or great Stack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overflow answers on exactly the problem you’re having. And on Mac OS, that’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case most of the time. Most of the time, what you’re searching for, you will get either nothing helpful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like one ancient mailing list post that you have to like scan through the web version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a mailing list to find somebody who might maybe be talking about what you’re talking about. It’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ John I was trying to think of an excuse to use this application. Maybe I should produce a podcast. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s funny, you’re on so many podcasts, but you’ve never produced one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Drop artwork here. Okay, why are you yelling at me? It looked better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, this isn’t like me designing Mac OS apps. It’s like the way everyone designs Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. It’s like, I don’t know what the hell’s good here. Like, just throw something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John there that looks good
⏹️ ▶️ John to me. This is where you start using the GuideSnap things in Interface Builder, or did you not use Interface Builder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all? No, I use it, and I use the GuideSnap things. No, I mean, and I told you, like, I built most of the interface with Cocoa
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bindings, just so I wouldn’t have to learn a lot of the intricacies of table views.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then all the experienced Mac developers scolded you for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, and then everyone’s like, oh, yeah, don’t use Cocoa Bindings. I was like, yeah, thanks a lot. It is really nice to do certain,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, And you know, Cocoa bindings are great for like really simple stuff like like enabled disabled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco states of certain buttons, tracking certain, you know, properties or things being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nil or things like that. It’s, there’s a lot of value to Cocoa bindings, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to fix the main problem the app has, which is the manual entry of chapters is very clunky and weird.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, that is going to basically require dumping bindings for the table view. And that’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a, you know, I’m not going to say it’s going to be a huge pain, but it’s going to be a decent amount of work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least, especially because I’m totally unfamiliar with it. If it was iOS, I could do it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half a day, but because it’s Mac OS, it’s going to take me a lot longer than that. And the good thing is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app has gotten such a strong reception that I’m actually motivated to do things like this, to fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird bugs that don’t affect me personally. But I do have to also keep that in check with like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not my primary job. My primary job is Overcast and I need to make sure that Overcast is not going to suffer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me working too much on forecast. The good thing is I don’t think it’s that I don’t think it’s very likely because like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been working on a forecast for two years and the way I usually work on it is I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix some things I’ve wanted to fix for a while like for over like a week and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t touch it for six months and then I spent another week tweaking it up and then I go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go to the six months out touching it because it pretty much works like it doesn’t need a lot of attention.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So hopefully this this won’t be a huge time sake and I don’t think it will.
⏹️ ▶️ John How is Forecast choosing where to put its window when I hit Command N?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Write a number generator?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, so there’s that weird thing in Interface Builder, that little window
⏹️ ▶️ Marco graphic thing where you say, all right, kind of position it in the middle of the window on the left, just like, there’s something in Interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Builder that lets you
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It is kind of in the middle on the left, I’m just, I’m wondering if this was a conscious choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John It does remember the window position between quits, which I’m assuming you’re picking up for free as part of the save restore
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you close all the windows and hit command N, a new window appears in a location that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean it’s not random, it’s always the same place, but it’s off-center to the left,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco kind of the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vertically. Yeah, I’ve selected that in the thing in interface builder that does that. I wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aware that was a global, I figured it would just use the last one and that would be the very first time it ever made a window
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would create it there. No, no. No, see this is the problem, I don’t know how to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yet. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John The other thing that surprised me is that you use a Mac every day, but when you laid out the preferences dialog,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s laid out like no preference dialog in any Mac app.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And you use Mac apps all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time. You see preference dialogs, but- There’s like three preferences. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know. And yet surprisingly, laid out in kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco a weird Marco kind of way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the thing is, this is the thing I want to emphasize. Just because you use a Mac application
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time doesn’t mean you consciously know If I’m making a dialogue from scratch and I have like
⏹️ ▶️ John two text boxes, two radio buttons and a button, how do I put them so it looks like correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and I had so, like, this stuff took me so long to try to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out because I am not a Mac developer. It was very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow going. Again, it’s like I was a novice, because for the Mac, I am a novice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even using a Mac for all these
⏹️ ▶️ John years… Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. You don’t think about it if you’re not actually dragging the controls out. Because when you see a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John dialog box, you’re like, oh, it looks more or less right. But then you see one that doesn’t quite look right. There’s something off about it, but you can’t quite place it. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, what would fix this? Is it just because the button on the bottom is centered? Is it,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is the problem about it? I don’t know. Anyway, it’s fine. I appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Your icon doesn’t look like a sports logo, though. I don’t know why I keep thinking that.