264: Every Building Has Bugs
07 Mar 2018Join us for an out-of-box experience. Just watch out for the walls.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Laptop arrow keys
- Erin and Alexa
- Onboard all the things
- Apple Park is hazardous
#askatp- Automotive windowing strategies (via Vamsi)
- Slack on Mac vs. IRC (via Peter Gosling)
- The Halting Problem (via Juan Pablo Rodríguez)
- Post-show Neutral: What car would we pick for our other hosts?
Sponsored by:
- Betterment: Rethink what your money can do.
- Linode: Get one of the fastest, most efficient SSD cloud servers for only $5/month. Use code atp2018 for a $20 credit.
- Hello Fresh: A meal-kit delivery service that shops, plans, and delivers your favorite step-by-step recipes and pre- measured ingredients. Get $30 off your first week with code ATP30.
Chapters
- Follow-up: MacBook arrow keys 🖼️
- Follow-up: PC arrow keys 🖼️
- Voice-assistant basics
- Sponsor: Hello Fresh (code ATP30)
- iOS onboarding screens 🖼️
- Sponsor: Linode (code ATP2018)
- Employees in glass houses
- Sponsor: Betterment
- #askatp: Car windows
- #askatp: Slack vs. IRC on Mac
- #askatp: Halting problem
- Ending theme
- Post-show Neutral: Cars for friends
Follow-up: MacBook arrow keys
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of feel like I should have just left Tiff here and left the show because we got so much awesome feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about how not only how great she was but how much better she was than me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But unfortunately, you guys are stuck with me this week. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s start with some follow-up and Bradley Davis writes in with regard to hard to hit up down arrow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keys on the new MacBook Pros. The bottom key row of the new MacBooks is shorter than the previous generation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The bottom row used to be taller than all the other rows. Now it’s the same height. Huge loss in my opinion, especially as a programmer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who uses modifier keys more than your average person.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t even believe this, so I measured it at work, and he is totally right. Did you guys both realize
⏹️ ▶️ John that in the right up until the 2016-2017s on the MacBook Pros, the space bar
⏹️ ▶️ John in that whole row was taller than all the other rows of keys? Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey taking my hat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I’m curious. Hold
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it’s plausible, but it can’t be that much bigger. So I measured it. It’s appreciably bigger. You can, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t have, I was using the side of a credit card or whatever, but you can get a ruler and see how much bigger it’s, it’s at least like 5%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on. I don’t know if I believe this at all. Let me get out my behemoth of a work
⏹️ ▶️ John while you guys get out things to measure, the reason this is relevant is not so much that it’s hard.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey We’re actually both doing this. What are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we getting out to measure?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m getting at a digital caliper. What are you getting at to measure?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, nevermind. Uh, wow. This does look a little bit taller.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, so as I was saying, the reason it makes a difference is not because it’s easier to hit the space
⏹️ ▶️ John bar or the command key or anything but because the arrow keys…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah it’s a huge difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John The up and down arrow keys are jammed into a single key space and I was complaining I felt it was a little bit harder to hit the up
⏹️ ▶️ John and figure out the up and down arrow keys on the new Macbook Pros even though it’s like the same layout it is the same layout
⏹️ ▶️ John but with the taller keys each half the top half and the bottom half are bigger so it makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco particularly for the arrow keys. Yeah so the height of the command key on my 2015 is 17.8 millimeters and then the height of the keys in the row
⏹️ ▶️ Marco above it are only 15.2. That’s surprising.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By the way, only tangentially related, if you ever have a longing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the 17-inch MacBook Pro, which I always thought was just hilariously stupid, but I know that there are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people that love it. I do not need to hear from you. I’m just saying it’s not for me. Anyway, if you ever wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make your 15-inch feel like a 17-inch from the days of the past, spend a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of months using exclusively either a 27-inch iMac or a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more importantly, a 12-inch MacBook Adorable, and then bust out your work 15-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Pro for the first time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in two months. Holy monkey, that thing is enormous. It is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gigantic compared to the little MacBook Adorable that I’m used to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’ll tell you what, I mean, like even, you know, during my great laptop shuffle of 2016 to 2017, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, for a while there, owned the 13-inch MacBook Escape, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to me is a great such a great size and I and I do intend to go back to that probably in the next generation whenever comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out but I when I was using that even after years of using 15 inches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the time I I would occasionally see a 15 inch out in the world and it would it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look crazy to me even the brand new like the current generation ones that are better you know a little more compact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old ones once you’re used to whatever size you’re used to anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco above it looks like a monster but you know by comparison.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah it it’s it’s striking the difference but that’s okay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but today I did a half day at work for the first time since January. Oh I know. Half
⏹️ ▶️ John congratulations. Yeah. Speaking of work and giant laptops I had my 15-inch 2017 MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John at about 85% charge and I did a one-hour
⏹️ ▶️ John meeting where I projected during the meeting, drained my whole battery, the machine shut down. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. I watched it go down the whole meeting. It’s WebEx, the magic of WebEx.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, that’ll do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fan spinning, just like a single one-hour meeting from 85% to basically you can no longer run your computer, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because that’s, so WebEx is, I’ve never used WebEx, but I assume it’s pretty inefficient on the CPU,
⏹️ ▶️ John We need to have a special episode where we just make Marco use all corporate
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco enterprise software.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I would imagine too that you were plugged in, you said, to your projecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco via a cable. So that means the discrete GPU was forced on the whole time. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was basically as if you were playing a game. And like playing a game, so your GPU is on, your CPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably being maxed out because it sounds like the software is terrible. So yeah, that’s going to be about one hour
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I think the most popular advertisements that we’ve ever run on this show were the ones that Cards
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Against Humanity did where we were, John was forced to try a new, usually garbage toaster each week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it is possible if the Cards Against Humanity folks are listening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that making Marco use some piece of enterprise grade software once for,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, once per ad, that might be an even more popular, even better segment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because it would be magical. You would probably quit the show just from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being near enterprise-y sort of things that John and I have to deal with every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I would make a switch to Patreon.
⏹️ ▶️ John The trick is, though, that you have to be forced to use them, like they’re mandated by the
⏹️ ▶️ John company or because you have to teleconference, so you need to use the only approved teleconference software that you know everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John has, right? That’s the part of it. It’s not just using the software, it’s that you have to. The Toast just kind of worked because, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I’ll be making toast anyway, but there’s There’s no way Mark was going to even be doing the things
⏹️ ▶️ John programs are made to do, let alone being forced to do them.
Follow-up: PC arrow keys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Barnaby Kendall writes in, if you think the MacBook’s arrow key setup is bad, check Dell’s recipe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for annoyance, and there’s a link included. So imagine the same arrow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey key setup that we have in brand new MacBook Pros, but just for funsies,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s put page up and page down in the dead space between, so I’m sorry, I guess it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the new MacBook Pros, like the previous MacBook Pros, and we’ll put a page up and page down in the dead space to the left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and right of the up arrow key. So if you’re looking at it, it’s page up and then below that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey left. Up and down page down and below that is right. It looks terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure if you get used to it, it’s convenient, but oh man, it does not look good at a
⏹️ ▶️ John glance. It’s not convenient because like if you accidentally hit like, see, it’s above the arrow keys, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you accidentally hit the wrong key, trying to go for left, you don’t go more left, you go
⏹️ ▶️ John page up, which is totally unrelated to left, but that’s the key. That’s near there. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I would never want to like fumble to hit that and what if you didn’t notice you fumble it And then you like didn’t think you actually
⏹️ ▶️ John hit it so you hit left arrow You’ve gone left one character or whatever, but you don’t realize you’re a page up from
⏹️ ▶️ John where you are and it’s just Well, it’s really terrible and they also overloaded brightness in the up and down arrow keys But I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming that’s a modifier thing But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you kind of funny if it wasn’t like every time you want to move the cursor up you get a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco brighter The screen gets brighter You
⏹️ ▶️ John can keep moving down the document, but eventually you can’t see it anymore more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like, and part of the reason, and I swear I’m not going to make this all about Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dumb laptop keyboards, but part of the reason why Apple’s keyboard design offenses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bother me so much is because we have it so good in Apple land that usually their keyboards don’t have horrendous flaws.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you look over in the PC land, I mean, you can get a ton of really nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC desktop keyboards. But once you get into laptops, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mass market laptops, especially small laptops, you know, like you can get like the big gamer ones that have the built-in mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco key switches. But like once you get down to like mass market, small laptops,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco PC designs are all over the place and have horrendous bad design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choices about as often as the worst of Apple. You know, we just, we normally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not seeing this from Apple land because we don’t buy these things. And so we’re kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of spoiled that like when Apple does have a generation where they release a really terrible keyboard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our heads explode because we can’t take it. Whereas like on the PC side, this is a commonplace
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s sad times. Now I have a question. Are there, and Marco you wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know this, but maybe John would, are there like rabid Dell fanboys in the way there were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like five, ten years ago? Because you know how like there were the Apple fanboys, like well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us, and And then there were all the people on the PC side, they were all like devout Dell people. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like I haven’t run into any of them in years. Do they still exist?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never met someone who is super into Dell. We all know that there are people who love ThinkPads. I mean, Casey, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. And let me think. I mean, obviously, there’s there’s enthusiasm for the specialty brands
⏹️ ▶️ John like Alienware or Asus, even for, you know, gaming focused stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Dell or HP? I mean, the closest I can get to that is I think there was a lot of brand loyalty behind Gateway 2000
⏹️ ▶️ John back when they had the cow boxes and before it was 2000. But that was my first
⏹️ ▶️ John computer. Same. But that was more of like a mainstream thing and not like a computer enthusiast thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if there are Dell enthusiasts, I have not run across their path.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, like my brother-in-law, for example, was a huge Dell enthusiast as much as one can be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until a few years ago. And then he started buying Surfaces, Surfi, Surfis things, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, whatever. And he’s been really enthusiastic about those ever since. And maybe that’s what they did, is all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Dell people went and bought Surfaces. But I don’t know, it just occurred to me that I haven’t seen anyone that’s really amped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Dow in a long time.
Voice-assistant basics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway in our final bit of follow-up just a small anecdote from the kitchen in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the list household earlier tonight we were Aaron was making dinner and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was doing something with with Declan and oh I was I I was walking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around carrying Michaela in a little carrier on my chest and multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey playing Breath of the Wild at the same time because I’ve started to pick that up again and Then Declan caught wind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what I was doing and he was like, oh I want to watch and we don’t really like giving Declan a whole ton of screen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time if we can avoid it. So what I decided to do was set a timer for myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and remind me not to play Zelda for more than like five or ten minutes while Declan was watching and then I was just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a hell of a multitask.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah well you know I do what I can. So I asked the lady in a tube to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remind me to stop playing Zelda in five minutes or something like that and I think the key is that I phrased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it with remind which I’m not sure why I did that, but that’s what I did. And she got really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confused. And apparently there’s like a whole different reminders versus, uh, timers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set up, which makes sense, but I, I’d never experienced this in my week and a day with, you know, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lady in a tube in the house. So anyway, so I’m like going back and forth with, with the echo, trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get it to just set what amounts to two, like a five minute timer. And I, you know, this was my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fault. I phrased it poorly, no big deal. But what was funny was from the kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hear Aaron say something along the lines of oh, come on Siri Get your act together knowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full. Well, I was talking to the echo So here it was that she was using like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she was she was calling the echo Siri as a not derogatory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not the word I’m looking for but like as a like a put-down, you know, like she was saying oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is reminding me of how terrible Siri is in so many words and And I thought that was kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of interesting because Erin is the most normal person in the List household by a far margin. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it was interesting to me to see her kind of associate and equate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a crummy voice experience with Siri. Because, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, early on I thought that—and I was reflecting on this briefly on Twitter earlier— early
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on I actually thought Siri was extremely impressive, like the first year or two. year or two. I thought Siri was really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then it seemed like everyone else started to either create their own voice assistance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or make their own voice assistance really a whole lot better. And ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since the first year or two when Siri was brand new, I’ve really been unimpressed as we’ve talked about on the show more than once.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as we’ve used the Echo for more and more things, I’ve been more and more impressed by it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So a silly example of that, we were listening to vinyl, we were listening to the album Thriller,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the terrible song, The Girl is Mine, came on, which is a collaboration between McCartney and Jackson.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I asked, I asked the lady in a tube something along the lines of how much older is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Michael Jack, or I’m sorry, is Paul McCartney than Michael Jackson? And she knew exactly what I was talking about and gave me the answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think it was like 16 years. And I think I had even asked, if I recall correctly, I’d asked if Michael
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jackson were alive today, how old would he be? And I thought that was stretching a bit. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was not going to be surprised if the lady in the tube would not know what the crap I was asking.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And sure enough, she gave me an answer. Couldn’t tell you what it was offhand, but she gave me an answer. And that, like, if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t tried it, but if I asked Siri, how old would Michael Jackson be today? I would be very surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if Siri had any darn idea what I was talking about. And the fact that I don’t even think it’s worth trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is itself an indication of my lack of confidence in Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, next time you ask one of those questions and you’re impressed or not impressed by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how the Echo does. Take out your phone and ask Siri the same thing. It is kind of useful as commentators
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and enthusiasts in this field to do that and compare like, you know, how are these things doing with the things that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I should ask them? Because I found whenever I do that, I do find the Echo devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have better answers faster more of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But they don’t always get them, and Siri doesn’t always not get them. You know, Siri’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco average is worse for me. But the Alexa devices are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually not perfect either. They just have better averages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do think though, going back to the beginning of the story though, I wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that these devices handled the basic PDA functions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The things that all computing hardware and stuff have tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do since the beginning of time that almost everyone needs. reminders, alarms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timers, calendar. Like, these are very basic things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that everything should be able to do these days. And the fact that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, and the Echo devices, I think, do a pretty good job on the timer front. I think their timer support is excellent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Their alarms are basically just like timers. They’re excellent as well. iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, iStuff, as we’ve talked about with the HomePod launch, not having multiple timers or name timers or things like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, that’s still so far behind and it just seems like that like that stuff is not that hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a programming perspective like that isn’t that hard it just seems it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems baffling to me that anything any of these like voices and services or devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch these days without totally nailing reminders timers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alarms and it was either encounter like those should be easy and And at least like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calendar, I can kind of understand if any of them don’t because you have to like connect two different services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe you don’t they don’t support the one you use or you haven’t set it up or whatever. But like reminders should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be local on device if they if they don’t have any kind of sync thing set up like that. That’s easy. You know, remind me at this time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this like they just they should just treat that as a timer. And so like the fact that anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is that simple to do doesn’t work properly on any of these things, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be kind of embarrassing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we discussed in the past on this topic, I’m still waiting for like, forget about how
⏹️ ▶️ John far beyond Siri may be and so on and so forth. I’m still waiting for the next logical step in this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, actually, this is two. One is the advancement of the vocabulary surrounding the things Marco just said.
⏹️ ▶️ John Echo and Google Home are pretty good. And as you know, as Casey found, you just phrase it the way you think and it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly figure it out. But the next logical step is some and I think that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason this is so difficult that will require more hardware locally is some context
⏹️ ▶️ John awareness to allow the beginnings of a conversation about things. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John although these devices are flexible about how we request the things, you can phrase it a different
⏹️ ▶️ John way, so on and so forth, it ends up being single command, single response. There is no semblance
⏹️ ▶️ John of a conversation for the most part, except for in very rudimentary things where they’ll ask for confirmation or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or sometimes Siri will ask for basic clarification. I would rather be able to speak
⏹️ ▶️ John in an even more offhand manner, clarifying with a series of grunts
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as necessary, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you interact with people like that. There is a there is context like that. The thing doesn’t entirely forget
⏹️ ▶️ John about the interaction you had three seconds ago when you make some other requests that it can figure out what you mean.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah. And I forgot also blah blah blah that it hasn’t forgotten the previous context. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John basic conversation thing. I’m not saying it’s you know it’s got to have deep conversations with me. I’m not even saying it has to be like
⏹️ ▶️ John Eliza, right? But I feel like that’s the next logical step. And at this rate,
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple still can’t even do multiple timers, by the time the competitors
⏹️ ▶️ John get to the beginnings of a conversation phase, we’ll be lucky if Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John being able to do the basics of all the things Marco listed in a flexible way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real-time follow-up, I did ask Siri, how old would Michael Jackson be today? And I got a web search.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So no surprise there.
⏹️ ▶️ John The trick for, by the way, the trick for doing comparisons, you gotta make sure you word them
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly the same way, to be fair, because I think that’s the whole thing. Like I try to, when I speak to the various cylinders,
⏹️ ▶️ John I try to just not think about syntax and just say whatever occurs to me, because that’s the test, like phrase it
⏹️ ▶️ John however I wanna phrase it, but then you have to remember how you phrased it, which is convenient because it’s recording your voice and you can go play
⏹️ ▶️ John it back, Casey. So I hear. Remember how you phrased it, and then do
⏹️ ▶️ John it word for word to Siri, just to be fair, because you may say it a different way to Siri because now you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking about it and everything. And if Siri gets wrong on one phrasing, it’s very sensitive to the exact position of, you know, all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John in the sentences or whatever.
Sponsor: Hello Fresh (code ATP30)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by HelloFresh, a wonderful meal kit delivery service. For $30 off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your first week of HelloFresh, visit HelloFresh.com and enter code ATP30 at checkout.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HelloFresh is a meal kit delivery service that shops, plans, and delivers your favorite step-by-step
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recipes and pre-measured ingredients so you can just cook, eat, and enjoy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HelloFresh is very, very easy to use. You can choose your delivery day for when it works best for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco schedule. If you need to skip a week or even many weeks at a time, you can just pause your account for as long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you’d like right in their app or on their website. And all HelloFresh ingredients come pre-measured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and handy labeled meal kits. So you know exactly which ingredients go with which recipe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of this is delivered right to your door in recyclable insulated packaging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And HelloFresh offers a wide variety of chef curated recipes that change weekly. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lots of options here as well. They even have three totally separate plans to choose from, Classic, Veggie,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Family. Classic, of course, is a variety of meat, fish, and seasonal produce. Veggie is all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vegetarian recipes with plant-based proteins, grains, and seasonal produce. And Family is quick and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy meals with wonderful flavor the whole family will love. HelloFresh makes it so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to cook delicious, balanced dinners for less than $10 a meal. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful not having to plan dinner every single night or not having to spend money on takeout every night,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or worrying about gathering ingredients and having to waste a lot of them week after week. So check out HelloFresh today!
iOS onboarding screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For $30 off your first week, visit HelloFresh.com, enter code ATP30
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at checkout. Once again, that’ll get you $30 off your first week of HelloFresh. Thank you so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to HelloFresh for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So apparently there’s going to be an onboarding screen for every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey single damn app on future versions of iOS. We’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen a little of this trickle out over the last few months and how do you pronounce this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is it Gierme Rambo?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t know. I’m Mr. Rambo.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mr. Rambo, who is underscore inside on Twitter. He first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jumped into my radar screen by being one of the people that was tag teaming with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve Trout and Smith during the HomePod firmware. I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey picking about or, you know, the hyenas went and and picked at the HomePod firmware.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyways, he had tweeted earlier, Apple is busy adding onboarding screens to every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey single iOS feature. And here’s a screenshot of welcome to videos, browse your library, watch anytime, anywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoy extras, etc. And Mr. Rambo, if you please, has been going through other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iOS features and finding similar things. I don’t get this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think it’s necessarily bad, even though in any time I get asked to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an onboarding screen, I always fight tooth and nail to avoid it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean for novice users and new users, I don’t think that’s necessarily bad. But what do you guys think about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As a user, when I just install an iOS update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I get these screens in every app I try to use, I’m annoyed by them. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like them as a user. From Apple’s point of view though, from the developer point of view,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see that side as well because I’m a developer And I’ve never had one of these screens in any of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, but I kind of need them sometimes. Because when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re updating your software, it’s really hard to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco communicate to people when things have changed in a way that is helpful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not annoying. And they will actually see or read or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remember. This is a very hard problem. And so there have been lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times where I will make a change and I’ll mention it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Twitter account or I’ll write a blog post about it or something. But the fact is, some tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco percentage of my audience actually looks at those things. Most of the users of the app don’t know when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve changed anything. I can put things in the App Store update notes, which I do, but no one sees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those either for the most part because everyone auto-updates and no one ever looks at the notes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really hard to communicate feature changes and improvements and UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes that aren’t immediately obvious. It’s very hard to communicate that to an existing user base.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco New users, it isn’t a problem as much because new users, A, they don’t care how things were before they got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, so you don’t have to tell them what things have changed. And B, new users tend to be more exploratory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ll poke through settings screens to see what the app can do. So if you just added some settings or added some new features,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ll find them as they poke around the whole rest of the app. But how you communicate this to existing users is always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a challenge. So, Apple faces the same problems that any other developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does, which is, you know, some small percentage of users of Apple devices pay attention when they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like announce a new feature in a keynote or on apple.com or whatever else.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But most of their customers don’t see that. And even the ones that do don’t all remember it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the time they’re actually using these things. So, Apple has the same problem that every every other app developer has, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how do they communicate changes to their app? Or even, do they communicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes to their app, which is a valid question to ask. Or do they just kind of let the app stand on its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own and let people figure it out? So this is Apple, I think, trying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new way of doing this. So far, they’ve really not communicated changes to the apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the apps themselves. They’ve usually just made the changes, mentioned it in press events and stuff, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it. people just kind of find them when they update. This is a different approach.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is them saying, you know what, let’s put up these little helpful sheets the first time you launch some of these apps saying, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s what’s new in this app, in this version of iOS. Again, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco love these as a user, but I see why they do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It solves a problem, and it’s not a great problem, but it’s a real problem nonetheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it solves it in not a great way, but it might be like the least crappy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way we’ve thought of so far. So I don’t object very strongly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I see what they’re trying to do. It’s annoying when I go to do something and I have to go dismiss a screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of like doing the thing I actually went to that to do. But that’s a one time annoyance. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if overall it helps people find stuff, I guess I’m okay with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like this is part of, I mean, the screenshots here are from a phone, right? But I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John they might do some other things on the iPad. I don’t know. But part of the problem they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John solving here is caused by the fact that the screens are just so darn small compared
⏹️ ▶️ John to a computer screen. Like in the personal computer world, we’ve always had, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a long history in the personal computer world of splash screens. Remember those where they would just put up a big box
⏹️ ▶️ John that puts the name of the application and maybe some credits and like some loading stuff for you to watch while your application
⏹️ ▶️ John takes a year and a day to launch. Right. Um, that transition on the desk desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John to the general move away from loading screens. If you see a loading screen, you know, you’re either using like Microsoft or an Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John product, or you’re like back in time somewhere. Most desktop applications on the Mac anyway, have moved far,
⏹️ ▶️ John far away from any kind of splash screen. Right. But there is a trend that started, you know, maybe a
⏹️ ▶️ John decade ago, probably Led by office or similar things to give you that screen. I don’t know what you call it There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably a name for it where it shows a bunch of templates or like the first run
⏹️ ▶️ John experience like tutorial click-through next next next Thing to show you screenshots of the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s called Ubi the out-of-box experience.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh my god It’s not kind out of a box. Yeah But yeah, so that kind of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and sometimes that doesn’t even go away sometimes like in an office it’s a preference. You have to say every time I launch, you know, Excel,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t show me the thing with a bunch of Excel templates, right? Just don’t show me that just open it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, I can handle it myself. But in all cases, a desktop application
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac, especially, but even on most desktop platforms, there’s a place that you can
⏹️ ▶️ John go to learn more about what this application can do,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it’s the help menu, or like Apple guide in the old days, like like there’s some standard way to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John what can I do in this application? I know I see a bunch of menus up there, but you know, help me out and
⏹️ ▶️ John help various application applications. Sometimes it’s just a limited thing that you can search, but some applications have
⏹️ ▶️ John really comprehensive help, or even if they just chuck you to a website. I think the main
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that these screens are answering for new users, who again, they don’t have to be told about changes or anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John is what can I do in this application? So if you look at the welcome to videos thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John the in this tweet here, it’s not really telling you what changed since the last version. So what is what is the video
⏹️ ▶️ John app do? Because if you just launch it, forget the screen, what is the first screen that you see when you watch videos, especially if you actually have no
⏹️ ▶️ John videos, that’s always the problem on iOS. Like what do you show when there’s no stuff, it’s not really clear
⏹️ ▶️ John what you would use this application for. So this is here’s what you do for, you know, browse your library, find purchases and
⏹️ ▶️ John rentals, you know, watch anytime, anywhere, play videos over Wi Fi or cellular download to watch offline and enjoy extras,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I expect even I would if I had to describe what you do
⏹️ ▶️ John in the videos that I wouldn’t have put that enjoy extras thing, but that’s an important piece of information people might not know. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John there might be special features associated with something I purchased and I can watch them here too. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then it’s so it’s important to just convey that basic information. But unfortunately, unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John the desktop, say you’re like most people and like Yeah, like Marco said, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John generally an annoyance. And if you’re looking at the Apple’s old, you know, human interface guidelines, they’d be like, don’t stop
⏹️ ▶️ John your user from doing what they set out to do by interrupting them with a thing that you know, just before
⏹️ ▶️ John you do what you want to do, I want to tell you something about the videos app. It’s like, no, no, yeah, I’m not whatever you’re trying to tell me, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John care. Just let me get to the thing I want to do. And you reflexively hit the Continue button before you even register any
⏹️ ▶️ John words on the page, right? Which I expect that to happen a lot. But unlike in a desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John app, you know, how do you get the screen back? If later you’re wondering,
⏹️ ▶️ John is this a thing I can do in the videos app or what is this video app even for? You can’t go to the help menu and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John show me that first run experience thing again. Like I don’t even know if there is a way to get this back once you’ve dismissed it
⏹️ ▶️ John other than waiting for the next iOS update or something or resetting your thing. And it’s because there’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John no standardized place in iOS applications probably because the screen is so small
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, where do I I go to get help about this application? Or will there ever even be help within this application?
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it always something I have to do elsewhere? And then but but not a thing that happens in the app.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the final bit that I think Apple is leaning on here is the wish you were here
⏹️ ▶️ John people down at the bottom of this Apple’s new little logo for privacy that shows two people
⏹️ ▶️ John shaking hands with each other. Part of that is marketing and that Apple wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to emphasize it’s one of its competitive advantages, which is for every application that you launched
⏹️ ▶️ John us in Apple application, we care about your privacy and we’ll tell you exactly how we’re not using your information
⏹️ ▶️ John in a creepy way. And implicitly, how everyone else is who doesn’t have the similar disclosure
⏹️ ▶️ John is using your information in a creepy way. So you should use Apple stuff. That little logo. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is trying to associate with the good information that you will find link from. And it’s like, when you see that logo,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s Apple reminding you that they’re the privacy company that doesn’t do creepy things and tap here on the small text
⏹️ ▶️ John to find out exactly how non creepy we are. And the only way you get that in people’s faces is
⏹️ ▶️ John if you put that in people’s faces. Otherwise, you know, in the past, Apple has not been doing
⏹️ ▶️ John creepy things with your data. But there is no way as a user of these applications that
⏹️ ▶️ John you know that because you launch them, they just show whatever their initial screen is. And there’s no indication in the application of exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John how creepy and Apple it is or isn’t. And so Apple is relying on the fact that you trust them enough to
⏹️ ▶️ John believe them when they tell you that, by the way, we’re not doing creepy stuff, and they want to remind you of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have similar mixed feelings to Marco about the screen and that I understand the reasoning behind it but I
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think it is it is difficult to for it to fulfill
⏹️ ▶️ John its purpose because it’s probably so easy to dismiss quickly because there’s no way to get it back after you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done that and because it interrupts the user from doing what they wanted to
⏹️ ▶️ John do and yet I think most new users especially would benefit from
⏹️ ▶️ John not reflexively dismissing screen and from actually reading the three little bullet points so they know
⏹️ ▶️ John why you would ever want to launch the videos app or whatever. Now it can be taken to extremes here
⏹️ ▶️ John we have this follow up tweet from Micah Sargent that shows what’s new in clock
⏹️ ▶️ John where the only item is this splash screen literally just this splash screen what do you want from us but it’s still got the privacy thing at the bottom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was that real? I assume that was a photoshop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah it’s fake but it’s funny but like where does it where does this end so
⏹️ ▶️ John similar to to the trend of desktop applications, all opening up with like a template library, create a new document, pick
⏹️ ▶️ John from one of these 17 templates. Like just, no, just get out of my face, right? This type of thing can be
⏹️ ▶️ John annoying. And if Apple does it, it may encourage other people to do it. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John every new iOS application you launched, put one of these screens up,
⏹️ ▶️ John it really amplifies the, the you are stopping me from doing what I’m trying to do factor.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it makes people even more quick on the draw to reflexively dismiss these
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And it further emphasizes the fact that if you do reflexively dismiss it, there’s probably no standard
⏹️ ▶️ John way to get it back. So I think this is a difficult problem that Apple is solving in a not
⏹️ ▶️ John so great way. But I do understand why they’re doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, like, it’s really hard, you know, as I said, like, it’s really hard to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out how to communicate change like this in your app. But I think what I mentioned initially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what you just kind of confirmed and clarified for me is like, I think the biggest reason why I don’t like these things is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is almost never a good time. When I see them, it’s like, no, I didn’t come here to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read what’s new. I came here to write something down really fast or do something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I came here doing a task that I don’t have time right now to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco explore all the new features that you did for me and get through your marketing language. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem is, what percentage of the time when people are first seeing this is going to be that kind of context
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where they’re going to breeze right by it. Even if people have time, we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so conditioned to dismiss those screens that we’re not going to remember things that are on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the most sad realities of interface design, but this has been true forever and will always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be true, is that nobody reads anything. Anything you’re explaining by just a couple of bullet points
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of text, nobody will read it. small handful to do won’t remember it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so explaining things with text is just not very effective.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should never rely on that. Ultimately the best way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve the problem of how do you communicate changes in your app is with the design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the app itself. This isn’t always possible. This isn’t always practical. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ideally the changes should either be like not worth mentioning because the user doesn’t care if it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh we under the hood changes like well the user doesn’t care great dude do the other changes makes you happy makes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your users happy that like things are faster or don’t crash or whatever else great don’t need to mention that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it’s like new features in which case like those will make themselves apparent in the interface as the user is using them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard these days not only is it hard on touch screens because as you mentioned like they’re so small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes it hard for a lot of features to be visible because you don’t have space
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the screen to have like a toolbar button for everything the app can do. But also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern design trends are such that you try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to hide as much as possible in the main interface. You try to make the main interface like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as empty as possible. Everything looks super sparse and open.
⏹️ ▶️ John The way Apple would phrase that is maximize your content. They wouldn’t say you’re hiding things.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would say you’re allowing the content. They’ve said that so many it’s so so many sessions, the content
⏹️ ▶️ John maximizing the content, not minimizing UI, but in effect, you are hiding everything else if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John putting the content in front and that I think gets to what you were saying with the you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a good time application to be telling me about your features, right? That’s the beauty of the Help menu.
⏹️ ▶️ John When the user seeks out an item in the Help menu, that is their task. At that point, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to learn more about the application that is exactly the time you should tell them more. But there is no standardized
⏹️ ▶️ John interface element in iOS for almost anything like it’s part of the beauty of iOS that each
⏹️ ▶️ John application gets the entire screen back from the single testing model and maximizing the content. All those are good trends.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the lack of really any standardized interface element aside from the status bar, which
⏹️ ▶️ John at least we know you can use to scroll to the top most of the time, really does hurt discoverability.
⏹️ ▶️ John If there was some kind of standard help widget that was the same across all apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be the perfect place to stash this because when people tapped it, they would be seeking out information about your application at that
⏹️ ▶️ John moment. But in the absence of that, even if even if you have a great help widget in your app, no one knows
⏹️ ▶️ John what it means or where it is or what it does because it’s not standardized. Right. And so we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John forced to throw this in people’s faces. Otherwise, they will literally never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see it. Oh, yeah. And you know, and part of that, like, you know, a lot of a lot of I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know, people who haven’t been around this stuff that long, you know, the kids these days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. A lot of assumptions are made about current design trends
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people project as universal design rules that have always and will always be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best. And the fact is right now, we are in, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d say probably the three-quarters point of a trend of ultra-minimalism everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And The fact is, that’s just a style that’s been in style for a little while.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We have a little more of it to go, probably. That isn’t necessarily the only or best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to design apps. A lot of the minimalism of iOS apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and interfaces and getting out of the way for the content was born of limitations of the original
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone hardware being a really small screen. But as phones have gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significantly bigger, as also we’ve added things like iPads and possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac through bridge layers this fall, we hope, as we’ve added larger screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more capability and everything, the ultra minimalist thing doesn’t necessarily work or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t carry over as well. Also the software, like iOS started from zero
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with software. It started with like, every software is going to be 1.0 here. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there weren’t a lot of features in most apps for a long time and there still aren’t on iOS apps, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many apps now are pushing those boundaries and have developed over the last decade into very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature-rich, very capable apps. And the conventions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of ultra-minimalist, you know, hide-everything design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while they still look very nice, they suffer greatly from discoverability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and affordances of showing people what is possible or how to use things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is, again, this is just a design trend of hide everything that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t last forever. And, honestly, I think it’s almost over because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think its many usability flaws are really piling up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s resulting in people having to do bad hacks like those splash screens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are terrible hacks. I frequently tell the story about when I first made the magazine app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought it would be a good design principle to not need a setting screen. So I didn’t have one in 1.0.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried to get away with just, okay, there’s no settings anywhere, or there’s no setting screen right there anywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me just design the app to not need a setting screen. Wouldn’t that be great? clean and modern and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the fact is, to not have a setting screen, I had to jump through hoops.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the hoops I jumped through were worse than just having a setting screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is a very important, like, you know, lesson that I learned at that time and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco metaphor that I think is widely applicable. By the way, I still haven’t learned this lesson every time. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a significant design problem in Overcast right now that I need to revert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the now playing screen. Just guess how many emails I get per day from people asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to change the speed. It’s a significant problem that I need to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco redesign there. But in our efforts to make things clean and simple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and minimal, usability suffers big-time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think we’re finally starting to realize that. But it’s still an open question of how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we are going to solve that going forward.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s not just a design problem. It’s obvious. There’s the obvious design thing and again, Apple’s been emphasizing
⏹️ ▶️ John that, you know, make make your content, uh, give it, give it focus, make it the primary thing. You know, it’s the thing that people
⏹️ ▶️ John care about. Most people don’t use all the features. You gotta get it mostly good, but uh, especially on larger
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS devices, which may include phones now that they’re getting bigger, they still sell the se, but especially on iPads,
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially even larger things. Part of it is up to the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John to provide standardized elements for things. And the set of standardized
⏹️ ▶️ John elements you need for a 3.5 inch phone screen is not the same for the set of standardized
⏹️ ▶️ John elements that you need to make a really great application on a 12.9 inch iPad. And getting
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the help menu, not that I’m saying that they should add a menu bar, but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John leave it up to, even if this trend, the design trend ends and everybody stops making everything minimal,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they start adding just toolbars and palettes everywhere. If there is no standardization
⏹️ ▶️ John for that, the toolbars and palettes in every application will be wildly different and users still won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know where to go for common functions, like finding the help or any kind of guide or you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John any trend towards that or whatever it may be. I think one of the poster children for this was I forget what
⏹️ ▶️ John version it was, but a couple of of releases ago, Apple’s photos application that
⏹️ ▶️ John would launch and it would show like a highlighter markup with things circled in yellow
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all over the screen with one of those overlays. Oh, that’s the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was a photos. I know I movie did that, but it might
⏹️ ▶️ John application and lots of applications do this, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, don’t do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re they’re not. They’re not going super minimal because a lot of those applications, particularly Apple and that I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of that I can’t remember the chat room will tell me in a second they have tons of controls on the screen there are a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of buttons maybe the minimalism is like oh I aren’t the buttons labeled they’re all icons of which is why they’re so damn inscrutable
⏹️ ▶️ John but they were everywhere there was like 50 of them on the screen and then they would circle them all with pen
⏹️ ▶️ John and say use this for this use this for this use this for this use this for this use it’s like no one’s ever gonna remember
⏹️ ▶️ John that no one’s ever gonna read that no one’s ever gonna be able to figure out how to bring it back and the reason you need it is because
⏹️ ▶️ John without that overlay nobody knows what any of those icons do because there is no standardization for you know
⏹️ ▶️ John toolbars for common functionality and it’s somewhat like the Mac had the luxury
⏹️ ▶️ John of not having the sort of Cambrian explosion of applications that iOS did
⏹️ ▶️ John because a lot of the conventions let’s say in graphics applications on the Mac it was like seeded by
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac paint and evolved slowly through like super paint and the Adobe applications
⏹️ ▶️ John to establish over the course of several important formative years the standard
⏹️ ▶️ John language for tools and design applications. If you see a little Mickey Mouse glove,
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone knows that’s like the grabber thing. If you see a paint bucket with paint pouring out of it, everyone knows what
⏹️ ▶️ John that does. Like I’m so glad that, you know, that those those widgets have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John whoever owned the copyright on the first ones, those didn’t aggressively pursue it and say, you can’t use a paint bucket in your application
⏹️ ▶️ John because it wasn’t Adobe who did it first. It was Apple. And you know, so anyway, there is a design language
⏹️ ▶️ John within graphics applications that even if you use a new graphics app you know where to
⏹️ ▶️ John find things. But that’s application level. Beyond that the help menu is a thing that Apple defines
⏹️ ▶️ John as the OS vendor. To say there is a menu bar the menus are in this order, the help system in this
⏹️ ▶️ John era of the Mac is this shape and in this position and here’s what you can expect to find on
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Or the menu bar itself. The fact that a menu bar exists. Applications didn’t decide that that the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John decided that, again, not saying that iOS needs a menu bar, but that
⏹️ ▶️ John the combination of the OS and the applications develop
⏹️ ▶️ John a, an interface language that means when you go from one really complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John application to another really complicated application, you have a hope in hell
⏹️ ▶️ John of knowing how the second application works, because hopefully it works in some way similar to the
⏹️ ▶️ John first one. the model of iOS for the application owns the entire screen makes
⏹️ ▶️ John it very difficult to have any kind of consistency. Yeah, maybe the buttons look the same and yeah, maybe the little
⏹️ ▶️ John pop up dialogue things look the same and stuff, but the application itself, it’s almost like games where they can design their own interface
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely. And that leads us down the path of Apple being forced to put a hilarious, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, football style, tell a straight or markup illustration covering its interface
⏹️ ▶️ John that no one’s ever going to remember. And then having a thing go away and having you look at a bunch of hieroglyphics and go, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess I’ll just tap things randomly and see, is this the crop tool? Is this the crop tool? Is
⏹️ ▶️ John this, I mean, and the crop tool, they could just steal the icon from the desktop applications, but
⏹️ ▶️ John even that varies a lot. So I think iOS has a long way to go,
⏹️ ▶️ John even once we get over the design trend of minimalism, to realize the dream
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac, that the interface consistency allows you to understand how a new application
⏹️ ▶️ John would work by reusing knowledge about a previous application.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’m not even sure that we’re ever gonna have that again, because the companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and platforms these days are just so much bigger than they used to be. Like, you know, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a huge company now, way bigger than even, you know, five, 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago, when they were doing a lot of these, like initial little iPhone designs and everything. They’re way bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, there are way more apps, there’s way more departments and divisions and services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and apps and platforms and everything else. Like, you know, the Apple Watch looks nothing like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rest of iOS. Apple TV is a whole different ball game as well. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS, there’s tons of different design languages. Like, you have Apple Music,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have Maps, you have some of the older stuff that wasn’t really, that’s still kind of very iOS 70.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, there’s all these different designs being followed now. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that modern Apple, that it’s realistic to expect design coherency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from them. They’re just too big. There’s too many things. And I think if there was any chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of design coherency, it would happen now when design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at Apple runs Apple. There is no more powerful department in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now than the design department. they’re a company that heavily prioritizes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design, it heavily funds it with allocations of time and resources and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else. If anybody could have a coherent design right now, it’s Apple, and they don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the problem set is just too big now. I don’t think we’re ever gonna see that kind of coherence like what we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to have again. Instead, it’s gonna be mostly left up to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, third parties to slowly evolve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standards standards over time that just kind of become, you know, the de facto standards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s a much messier and slower process. But I think that’s kind of what’s going to happen in reality.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the design department lately has not added any of new sort of standardized
⏹️ ▶️ John controls or standard interface elements. They’ve mostly just been dressing up the ones that are there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as if iOS doesn’t have these elements. It doesn’t, again, it doesn’t have the same ones, doesn’t have a menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar. just to give an example, I don’t, Marco will tell me what the class name is, but is it UI navigation controller, the thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John the right, left thing with the back and done button? Yeah. Like, that’s been around since iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John since iPhone OS 1.0, iPhone OS firmware 1.0. Like the fact that you have at the top of the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, you have, you know, left to right sliding transition interface, they used to
⏹️ ▶️ John have the little arrow shape on it or whatever. That was a standard interface element that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was the same way any standard interface element works. Hey, you don’t have to write this GUI widget.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ve actually written it for you, and it provides some important functionality. So now you don’t have to worry about that part of your application.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you decide you want your application to be like master detail view, and you go into the right and out to the left,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you wanna have cancel and done buttons, or like, we’ve provided that control for you, so don’t bother writing it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John by providing it for you, we standardize the interface. So think of all the applications from the day one of the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John that work that way, where the top part of the screen was for you to go back and forth, and there was done and cancel buttons and arrows and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. That’s a standard element. That interface element is still with us, despite the fact the top
⏹️ ▶️ John of our phone is like a mile and a half away now. And
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 7 days, they’ve jammed other crap up there, like the little arrow thing, which has always looked super weird from a
⏹️ ▶️ John aesthetic point of view, that little tiny, you know, go back to Safari, which is super convenient functionality-wise, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it shows they didn’t rethink anything. But still, that one interface element does provide
⏹️ ▶️ John an important degree of consistency across all applications, not just Apple’s, because it generally does look the
⏹️ ▶️ John same and it generally does kind of work the same and people know to look up there for stuff. But again,
⏹️ ▶️ John if there had really been design innovation, design being how it works and not just how it looks,
⏹️ ▶️ John at some point you have to rethink the fact that the top of the phone is really far away, and at some point you have to think about,
⏹️ ▶️ John are there other standard interface elements that are appropriate in the age of 12.9 inch iPads that we should introduce?
⏹️ ▶️ John Standard movable palettes or tab interfaces like in Safari on the iPad or anything
⏹️ ▶️ John like that, just any kind of standard interface element other applications can use that is appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ John for the modern iOS usage. The more of those they can produce, including perhaps standard
⏹️ ▶️ John icons or widgets for things like help or, you know, a quick way to get to settings for an application
⏹️ ▶️ John from within an application. If they don’t want to give up on the whole idea of settings being a separate app, which I think is also a dinosaur,
⏹️ ▶️ John a bygone era of much less RAM usage and also the whole, you know, we don’t want anything
⏹️ ▶️ John in our application, so hide all the complexity into another application. That never worked, by the way. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of stuff needs to be rethought about the design of iOS. And almost none of it has to do with what applications look like.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like we need, we need more, we need more help from
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the OS and the foundational classes to get to the next level
⏹️ ▶️ John of functionality on iOS applications.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s mostly true. I think to go back a step though, part of the reason that I think we haven’t standardized
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on any one like design or any one like set of iconography
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is because it didn’t take long in my recollection starting, you know, with iPhone OS 2,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t too long after that that it became kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blasé to, or maybe that’s not the word I’m looking for, but kind of gross to use vanilla UI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kit for most of your app. And I think that there’s plenty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of vanilla UI kit controls in any app. But I mean, looking at Overcast as a great example, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plenty of vanilla UI kit there, but so much of it is hidden in so many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different custom controls. I mean, look at the card interface, Marco, that you were rolling for a long time. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was completely and utterly custom.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And from what you’ve said on the show and from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I’ve heard elsewhere, you know, you bent over backwards to do it. And we can have a different discussion another time as to whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether or not that was wise. But the fact of the matter that I’m driving toward is that for better or worse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one way or another, in order to stand out on this ever more crowded app store, you need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a more and more custom UI, or at least in most cases,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the case. I’m sure you could well actually meet a death on this one. But it seems to me that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your average consumer, be it design-minded or otherwise, tends to like things that are very opinionated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and somewhat different. I mean, look at Tweetbot as a great example of that. I wouldn’t say that I see a whole lot of vanilla
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UIKit and TweetBot, but I would say that it looks like it belongs on the platform
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it looks like it has its own personality. And I would say the same of Overcast, actually. And so I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because everyone was branching out in their own direction, everyone was creating their own personal or perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company-wide conventions and things. I think that may be why we’ve splintered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in so many different directions. And that kind of bums me out, partially because I’m really bad at customizing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UIKit to do weird things like Marco does, but it’s understandable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, because in this ever more crowded space, you need to do something to stand out.
⏹️ ▶️ John You do need to be differentiated, but that’s separate from, do you need to do like super custom
⏹️ ▶️ John controls? Like, I think that’s part of the skill of making an application on any platform is
⏹️ ▶️ John use standard controls, but add some kind of branding and flair to them. And I think every
⏹️ ▶️ John application also needs at least one or two unique interface elements, because historically
⏹️ ▶️ John advances in the sort of quote unquote standard UI have very often come from third parties like
⏹️ ▶️ John the first you know just look at pull to refresh for crying out loud on iOS but I was going to do is a bunch of old Mac examples
⏹️ ▶️ John granted Mac Paint seeded a lot of the the the DNA of graphic applications
⏹️ ▶️ John across all GUI platforms but subsequent applications like you know
⏹️ ▶️ John Illustrator and Super Paint and Photoshop especially had their own
⏹️ ▶️ John innovations in UI that informed the whole rest of the
⏹️ ▶️ John genre. And in the best case, new interface elements, whether they be
⏹️ ▶️ John tabs or whatever, you know, should eventually be co opted by the OS
⏹️ ▶️ John and become standard controls. I’m not saying Apple has to do it all, but I think you can get away
⏹️ ▶️ John with having an application that is 100% standard controls with a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit of flair, plus one or two things that totally don’t look like standard controls, even if they are under
⏹️ ▶️ John the covers that they give you want your app to have personality, right? Like tweetbot has
⏹️ ▶️ John a personality. And you wanted to have some some kind of differentiating thing like, oh, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John this feature that only this application has, or this UI element is fun to use flicking the thing away or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if that’s really a great idea, a couple years down the line, Apple should
⏹️ ▶️ John adapt the the iOS interface say, oh, here’s a way you can pop up sort of a thing on the screen and people can flick it away
⏹️ ▶️ John in a like physics-based, you know, fun kind of way. Because so many applications do that, that should be
⏹️ ▶️ John a standard type thing. And that should be the feedback cycle. I don’t think you need to go, even on iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think you need to go whole hog and say, everything I do is custom, it’s basically a game. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey controls are awesome, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, I’m not gonna say that’s too much differentiation, because maybe like people
⏹️ ▶️ John still do like that, but you’re in for a world of hurt. And I think it’s not necessary. You do want people
⏹️ ▶️ John to notice you, but you don’t need to like reinvent
⏹️ ▶️ John everything, especially with the flexibility Apple gives you in most modern UI kit controls. You can really customize them
⏹️ ▶️ John to look almost nothing like what you would think they look like. Generic things like the collection of views and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John where you have a lot of control over exactly what is drawn on the screen. Like you can make a collection view into something
⏹️ ▶️ John that no longer resembles a collection view at all with some cleverness, right? So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John app developers have the freedom to be differentiable, staying in standard
⏹️ ▶️ John controls, but I still think it’s on Apple to see what’s out there, see what’s popular, see what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John worked, and come up with some of their own innovations to give a better
⏹️ ▶️ John palette of tools in the interface builder sense, even if nobody uses that in iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t say that, I wouldn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I don’t know what’s popular these days with the kids, but to be able to say, I’m going to make the
⏹️ ▶️ John next great iPad graphics application of which there are many. And
⏹️ ▶️ John but I, you know, I don’t want to have to invent everything from old
⏹️ ▶️ John cloth. I want to, you know, I want Apple to help me here by saying, Oh, are you going
⏹️ ▶️ John to have floating palettes in your graphics application? But we have a standard control for that because everyone seems to be making their own
⏹️ ▶️ John all the way down to all the little experiments. Speaking of Steve Trout and Smith earlier of like floating with quote unquote windows
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever Stuff like that, if it comes from a third party application first and it’s popular, fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s exactly the type of stuff that Apple should be looking into, trying to figure out a more sophisticated
⏹️ ▶️ John bucket of parts for people to build their fancy iOS applications out of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think it’s also worth pointing out, like the timing of talking about this now, I think is interesting because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone 10, I think really changes a lot of how things in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS should be designed. You know, again, it’s, and this isn’t news, I’ll be quick, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we have now like culminated this trend that we’ve been going on for a little while now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Plus phones, where now a lot of iOS interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have critical functions and buttons and things on the top area of the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is now very hard to reach for a lot of people a lot of the time on a lot of devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this is like a fundamental thing that so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much of iOS design has been based on putting important controls in those top corners
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and now that should be rethought. I’m sure Apple is feeling this too. I’m sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are thinking about this and are hopefully working on this. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is also a time where they have a lot of software quality problems that they have to like slow down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the like move forward aggressively side of things to let the quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco catch up really. We’ve heard rumblings here and there that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was some kind of iOS 12 redesign plan but that maybe that’s been pushed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next year, next version of iOS because of the quality push.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That seems reasonable to me. So assuming that either it’s coming this year or next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year, I do expect Apple is probably working on a big iOS redesign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to better accommodate the iPhone X. Not to mention the fact that they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to update the look and feel of it to just be fresh and new and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no longer iOS 7 stale. But I do expect that to happen soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope it does. And even if it’s next year, for quality reasons, that’s fine with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me, I really would love to see what Apple has in mind for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a coherent direction to bring iOS in now. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope we get that. I don’t think it’s a sure thing that we will ever get that because of what I said earlier, but I hope we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get that, whether it’s this year or next, and I really look forward to seeing what they think the direction is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I hope it’s not just for the iPhone X, because I think as much as the iPhone X needs it, because things really
⏹️ ▶️ John are farther away from your thumb than they ever have been, it’s not like the Plus phones haven’t been around for a while, but I feel like the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad needs it more, because I do see a lot of people, I mean, a lot of it’s graphics applications used with the pencil, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John see a lot of increasingly sophisticated applications on the iPad, and they all still look like games to me
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of the interface. I see very little consistency among them. Everybody having to roll their own controls for everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John which increases the barrier to entry for good graphics applications. Like, I just think of something
⏹️ ▶️ John like Acorn, which I’m sure has some custom interface elements, but in general, it’s using AppKit to its fullest
⏹️ ▶️ John effect, taking advantage of all the controls Apple gives to design an interface. doesn’t look like other graphics
⏹️ ▶️ John application interfaces, but it looks Mac like you know how it’s going to work. And the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, both on the front end on the back end, that a corner is able to leverage the
⏹️ ▶️ John frameworks that Apple provides for UI and for image processing itself allows a
⏹️ ▶️ John one person software shop to make a graphics application that is basically like a mini Photoshop.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s, that’s the platform advantage that Apple should be selling come develop on our platform. Look what a single
⏹️ ▶️ John person can do. It’s unbelievable. On the iPad, I feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s only three people teams, but I feel like it just looks like a hell of a lot of work to make a top tier
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad graphics application and that when you’re done, you have, unless
⏹️ ▶️ John you exactly ape your competitor’s interface, you have little chance of being familiar to the users
⏹️ ▶️ John of your competitor’s product. So your pitch is now, use my application, which has fewer features, and by the way, the
⏹️ ▶️ John interface looks nothing like your interface and it works totally differently, so come learn it from scratch. It’s a tough sell.
Sponsor: Linode (code ATP2018)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Linode. Go to linode.com slash ATP and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use code ATP2018 to get a $20 credit to your Linode plan.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode is a wonderful web host. They have the fastest, most efficient
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSD cloud servers and you can get one yourself starting at just $5 a month. That $5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plan gets you one gig of RAM these days. That’s awesome. I don’t know of a better value in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the web hosting business. And of course you can scale up from there. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of plans including high memory plans that start at 16 gigs and if you need lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of RAM, maybe not so much of the other stuff, you can get that for a more manageable price. It’s wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode. You can get a server running in under a minute. If you need any help
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, they have 24-7 support. They even have phone support if you need that. And Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is incredibly fast for what you get. You have native SSD storage, a 40 gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco network backing it all, and everything’s running on Intel Xeon E5 processors. Linode is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco top tier in the web hosting business. I use them for all my stuff, and I’ve been there for,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco geez, I think almost a decade now. I’m very happy at Linode. They have all sorts of wonderful features,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backups, node balancers, long view for stats. You can do so much stuff with your Linode server.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can run Docker containers, you can have encrypted disks, you can use block storage, you can run a VPN, or of course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any web application that you might wanna run. Check it out today at linode.com slash ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See for yourself how good Linode is. Again, there’s a seven day money back guarantee if you have any concerns or it doesn’t work out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you, So there’s really nothing to lose. So try it out.
Employees in glass houses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at today, linode.com slash ATP. Use code ATP2018 for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a $20 credit. That could be four months on that one gig plan for just five bucks a month. Check out today. Thank you so much to Linode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s been some interesting news coming out of Apple Park, previously known as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Campus 2. It seems that it’s a hazardous place to work, and it seems that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people are running into glass walls. I don’t even know where the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genesis of this story was, but apparently somebody has amassed—I’ve seen a link at some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point—somebody has amassed 911 calls that relate to people walking into the glass walls
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Apple Park or something like that. What’s going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this is a problem that almost every office building that does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a glass design or a glass redesign has at some point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I remember when I interviewed, as I was job seeking for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the job that eventually ended up being Tumblr back in 2006, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had an interview at Bloomberg here in New York, and they had all glass everywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was very, very hard for me to navigate that office. Like, I couldn’t, I’d look around the room
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find, like, where’s the door out of the room I am in? Like, you had to really look hard to see, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which of these walls is a door, actually. It was very, very strange. I was part of the interview process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was part of the test. Oh, God, I failed so many tests in that interview. I failed every test, including
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to escape the room. But anyway, and I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was a fairly moderate, like the building was fairly young at that point. And I remember a few of the employees telling me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they had to install rows of logo stickers at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eye level on all the glass because people kept running into it. Now as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this story has played out today with Apple Park, we’ve heard so many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter responses and people in the chat talking about it, about how this happens in every office building
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that goes with all glass for all the walls inside. People always run into them all the time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they always have to end up installing some kind of sticker or something to make the glass not transparent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a really obvious eye-level place. So the fact that people are running
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into glass with apparently no decoration or insufficient decoration on it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surprising at all. That is, I think it’s a well proven thing that that happens. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that isn’t surprising at all. The only surprising part of this to me and the kind of sad part is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did they not know this would happen? This is not a new thing that happens in glass buildings. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surely someone had to have told Johnny Ives somewhere along the design of this. Like someone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had to have mentioned this. Like so how did this come? How does this, how does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the building get designed with this ignored? That’s what I want to know. Like again, it’s like, it’s almost like the HomePod ring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. It’s like, did they not know? Like I don’t know. It, it’s concerning either way. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they should have known. And this is again, this is a small thing. This is not, I mean, the only reason we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about this is because we spent too long on the last topic and you know, it’s too late to start a new big topic right now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, this is not a huge topic. is not a huge deal. Just like the HomePod ring, not a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deal. But just kind of an embarrassing story that like, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting and worrisome part about it is not the actual thing that is happening,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that it seems to indicate a pretty substantial failure in process along the way. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why didn’t they foresee this? This is not a new problem. Everyone who’s ever designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or worked in glass office buildings probably knows about this problem. So why didn’t they accommodate
⏹️ ▶️ John But it looks so nice. I mean, that’s really part of it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John every building has bugs. It’s not like a software thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John every building, especially new buildings, large complexes, they have bugs. Whether it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John a particular way that it was constructed that wears out sooner than you thought, or
⏹️ ▶️ John people walk in a path that you didn’t expect and so you got to move some things around or sight lines
⏹️ ▶️ John that you didn’t expect to be a problem when the Sun is at a particular angle and reflects off this particular thing goes into this person’s
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes or whatever like but buildings have bugs and so you work you expect there’s gonna be stuff like that in every building but
⏹️ ▶️ John as you said Marco like for the glass stuff it’s not an unforeseen thing and it’s not an emergent property of a complex
⏹️ ▶️ John system it’s they very deliberately picked materials and they didn’t just use them a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit like this is a glass-heavy building tremendously glass heavy like it sounds like the Bloomberg
⏹️ ▶️ John thing was It’s not like you’re just using it as an interface element along with everything else. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John very heavily used. Like the largest pieces of glass in the world are here.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it does look really good. And like I was tempted to say this is another example of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, form over function where if I think when we talked about this building before I said I didn’t have confidence
⏹️ ▶️ John that Johnny Ive really understood what it took to make a functional building, although I knew
⏹️ ▶️ John he would make a beautiful one. And this might call into that category. But I think there is actually a functional aspect to all
⏹️ ▶️ John this glass, which is part of the part of the utility of the building is not just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, can you find all the places you want to go very well? Is there room for everything? Is the air circulate? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John all those sort of like, what makes good use of a center building, but aesthetics actually are part
⏹️ ▶️ John of like any product, but perhaps even more so for a building, allowing natural light in being inspired
⏹️ ▶️ John by the views feeling like you’re, you know, inside indoors, outdoors with like a complete glass thing from
⏹️ ▶️ John floor to ceiling gives a different feeling than than it would if it was just a window in a wall, right? So there is, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John a functional aspect to all of this glass, and unfortunately, a lot of the solutions that
⏹️ ▶️ John fix this problem, like the stickers that I love or whatever, fly in the face of all the
⏹️ ▶️ John advantages that you’re getting. You don’t feel like you’re outdoors, indoors type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John when your beautiful wall of glass is marred by a bunch of Apple stickers. Johnny, I would have a heart attack if you just put a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of Apple stickers all over these things. Well, that’s what they’re doing in some cases, is like putting, you know, tape or anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s just, it’s gaudy, it breaks up the appearance that you want. It kills
⏹️ ▶️ John the illusion of transparency of the glass. It makes everything
⏹️ ▶️ John uglier and worse. Like I was thinking they’d do it like they do in the diving pool in the Olympics where they have a constant
⏹️ ▶️ John spray of water agitating the surface so you can see where the surface of the water is. You know, for the diver as they come down,
⏹️ ▶️ John they just have to have constant sprays of water onto the walls and do some of those glass
⏹️ ▶️ John waterfall effects. But that would kind of ruin the aesthetic as well. So I don’t know what the
⏹️ ▶️ John solution to this is because I kind of understand that
⏹️ ▶️ John the glass stuff is not just an aesthetic so the building looks pretty. I really do believe it probably
⏹️ ▶️ John enhances the experience of being in the building in an important way, right, for the people in the building,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the people outside looking at it. But, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, maybe there was a little bit of wishful thinking in terms of, all right, So we know this is a problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John we know people run into glass a lot, but after a breaking in period, eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John people will develop flinch reflexes or something, like people will adjust their daily paths
⏹️ ▶️ John to not do this, so they’ll become more aware, or this door that people keep running into, we’ll make sure we keep it open 24 hours a day
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure it’s not a factor anymore. I think they might have been optimistic about how much people will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John adjust to it, and we’ll see, maybe they- Oh no! You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what they should do? When you first walk into the building, just slide up a little splash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey screen that tells people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, just so you know, there’s glass everywhere, watch
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Walk with your hands straight out in front of you. Yeah, and
⏹️ ▶️ John for all we know, maybe they will get used to it. Like, this is the growing pains of this building, it’s early days, maybe people will eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John get used to it, but if they don’t, the solution, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to keep the glass is, I think what you have to do is change
⏹️ ▶️ John the non-glass parts of the building to essentially herd people to
⏹️ ▶️ John the openings, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John you want the building to guide you. It should be less work to just go where
⏹️ ▶️ John the building wants you to go, and you should find yourself coming to the place where the door is.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the door, hopefully, will have a handle in it so you see that, yes, this is the place where the door is, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The idea of just having a giant expanse of glass that sometimes is open and sometimes is closed that’s like three football fields
⏹️ ▶️ John wide, like the cafeteria doors, strikes me as a bad idea because there’s no hurting of anybody, and
⏹️ ▶️ John when the door is closed it looks just like it’s open. So I think if you want to keep
⏹️ ▶️ John the glass, you have to make the building accommodate to us. And maybe that’s exactly what they’ve been trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to do everywhere and they just missed a couple spots, and in that case they just need to rearrange the furniture and put a different
⏹️ ▶️ John pattern on the floor and do all those other tricks that sort of subtly guide you to where
⏹️ ▶️ John the building wants you to go and flow with the traffic, especially with large groups of people. It’s easy for one or
⏹️ ▶️ John two people in a house to guide people around, but in a giant campus, you have to have large apertures to accommodate
⏹️ ▶️ John hundreds or thousands of people going to and from lunch or whatever. And that’s the challenge
⏹️ ▶️ John they face. I really, really hope the eventual solution is not to put a bunch of Bloomberg
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey level, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John since it would be weird to have Bloomberg stickers on Apple’s campus because that is just that’s just design failure
⏹️ ▶️ John on all levels. It’s aesthetically gross and it just it ruins all
⏹️ ▶️ John the benefits that you’re supposedly getting from the glass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s how you do this. Hold the glass at exactly a 78 degree angle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Get a can of compressed air.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Turn the can upside
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the spread the constant spray of water just a constant spray of compressed air going on the glass that fogs it up and lets you
⏹️ ▶️ John see all the time. Or they could do what they do on the ski jumps where they put pine bows and everything. They just
⏹️ ▶️ John you ever see them where they go to the back flips off the ski jump at the Olympics so they don’t want the slope that they land on to be completely white because
⏹️ ▶️ John then they can’t again they can’t do depth perception to see where it is when they flip it through the air so they put like dirt and other
⏹️ ▶️ John dark colored junk all over it. At least that would be natural just just a bunch of pine needles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco windows. What if they use like like kind of like fiber optic style like light guide lighting in the glass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panes so that all the panes of glass can eat like each department can pick a different like neon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco color that all their glass will be lit with.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I got it. This is a perfectly not that we’re going to transition to accidental neutral quite at this point, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they need driver aids, right? So if you are approaching if you are approaching a glass wall to speed that
⏹️ ▶️ John they feel a collision is imminent, the glass wall should change to like one of those transparent LCD screens
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, warning, stop walls in front of you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, goodness. So there’s some transcripts on the San Francisco Chronicle website. Dispatcher,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me exactly what happened. Patient. I walked into a glass door on the first floor of Apple Park when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was trying to go outside, which was very silly. Dispatcher, you keep breaking up. You walk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through a glass door. Patient. I didn’t walk through a glass door. I walked into a glass door.
⏹️ ▶️ John won. Yes. Speaking of those big glass doors, like the, I guess the cafeteria
⏹️ ▶️ John doors, wherever, like the, the, the eating place. I’m sure they don’t call it a cafeteria because that’s not fancy enough, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John has like what four-story or three-story high glass doors that weigh some astronomical amount,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And they slide open like barn doors, and they’re just huge
⏹️ ▶️ John expanses of glass. And I was thinking about this about a month ago, looking at the pictures of the
⏹️ ▶️ John final building being constructed. Now, I’m sure this building, having been constructed in California,
⏹️ ▶️ John has all sorts of earthquake readiness stuff built into it, because surely the codes require that, and surely Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John would do that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Had they considered the possibility that these doors cause earthquakes when they open? They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John very smooth.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a very well-lubricated mechanism. It’s almost noiseless. It’s beautiful.
⏹️ ▶️ John But and I know glass bends, right? But these are very large,
⏹️ ▶️ John very heavy pieces of glass. And probably the last place I would want to be during an earthquake is
⏹️ ▶️ John near one of these giant sheets of glass because I don’t want a chunk of glass
⏹️ ▶️ John falling from four stories up onto my head. No matter how much it’s like safety grass and breaks into
⏹️ ▶️ John small pieces or just from the sheer weight like forget about sharpness Pretend it is completely dull because it’s safety glass
⏹️ ▶️ John and breaks into small pieces It’s like a clear rock landing on your head from four stories up
⏹️ ▶️ John which I think is a You know maybe also problem in skyscrapers when you’re on the outside of them like
⏹️ ▶️ John the glass shatters or whatever and it falls down onto The street and kills people, but it just I would
⏹️ ▶️ John love to know exactly what the earthquake mitigation techniques
⏹️ ▶️ John were to make it safe to have four stories of like inch and a half thick glass
⏹️ ▶️ John like 17 tons of it just sitting where people could be right next to it people could literally be touching
⏹️ ▶️ John it or in the process of walking into it at the time it starts to wobble and parts of it crack off and fall down
⏹️ ▶️ John into the ground so it seems a little bit Scary to me.
Sponsor: Betterment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Betterment. Rethink what your money can do. Visit Betterment.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP for more information. Betterment is the largest independent online financial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advisor designed to help improve customers long-term returns and lower your taxes for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco retirement planning, building wealth, and your other financial goals. Betterment takes advanced investment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strategies and uses technologies to deliver them to more than 300,000 customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Based on the information you tell them, they make tailored recommendations, for how much to invest, how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco risk to take on, and the types of investment accounts you should have. Betterment’s experts have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your back. They believe you should be able to get financial advice anytime, anywhere. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all customers can receive advice from Betterment’s team of licensed financial experts through their mobile apps messaging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature anytime. And Betterment is a fiduciary. This means they don’t get commissions for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recommending certain funds, and they don’t have any funds of their own. They just do what they believe is right for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you, and they bring you all of this with very low, transparent advisory fees compared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to traditional services, with only a 0.25% annual fee that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco includes unlimited messaging access to their team of licensed financial experts. If you have a more complex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco financial situation, Betterment Premium gives you unlimited phone call access to their team of certified financial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco planners for only 0.4% annually. And Betterment can give you a clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view of your net worth and all of your assets when you sync your outside accounts if you want to, such as bank accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and other investments. They can show you how much your outside brokerage accounts may be costing you in fees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and uninvested cash as well. Investing involves risk. Listeners can get up to one year
#askatp: Car windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For more information, visit Betterment.com slash ATP. That’s Betterment.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Thank you to Betterment for sponsoring our show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So let’s do some Ask ATP. Vamsi writes, they would apparently like to know all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of rules, protocol, and strategies with regard to windowing in our cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how do you use the windows in your car? Always closed? Always open? We’ll start and we’ll do a round
⏹️ ▶️ Casey robin. I tend to leave the windows and the doors closed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost always, unless it is a particularly nice day, in which case they will usually be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opened all the way. It is very rare that I have anything but a binary treatment of my windows. One example
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of when they are cracked, however, which is very rare, is if I have any sort of food in the car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in which case I will try to ventilate the outside air by cracking the windows. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we will get to sunroofs in a moment. So John, how do you use the windows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your car? Does your car have a sunroof? I don’t recall.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, can’t because I’ve had to remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I knew you preferred not. I couldn’t remember if it did or not. Nope.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Okay, so with your windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Windows I’m almost always an always closed person.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mostly for two reasons. One, yes, the hair musing because it is a real thing. Like if I
⏹️ ▶️ John have my windows open and I show up at work, my hair will be crazy. Yep, ditto. And two,
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the cars that I’ve owned have required a complex series of baffles to not
⏹️ ▶️ John have weird thrumming noises. You’ve got to have alternate windows open, one on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey one side, one on the other, the front and back,
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that. It doesn’t make for a pleasing auditory environment, even if I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about my hair. So I am an all-closed person most of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, Marco? Most of the time they’re closed because most of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time the temperature outside is not pleasant in one direction or the other. But when the temperature outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pleasant and if I’m at low speeds, like around town, like not on the highway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll open a window here and there. Sometimes I will just crack the window to feel the cool air cleanse my every pore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I pour my poor heart out. But usually I will just open one either all the way or not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t know that song.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kathy? No, I did not. Of course you didn’t. I
⏹️ ▶️ John what it was. Was it fish?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be fish, there’s too many words. No. All right, and the follow-up, of course, is how to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the sunroof. And then Vamsi adds, “‘This I really don’t get, just got a car with one. “‘Australian summer’s boiling, “‘so I haven’t had a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to open it.’” Again, I will start, and we will do another round robin. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my sunroof. I will open it in truly absurd, well, maybe not absurd, but in temperatures where I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shouldn’t have a sunroof open. So as soon as it hits about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and I don’t care what that is in Celsius,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because Celsius is stupid for ambient air temperature, don’t at me. Whatever 50 degrees is in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stupid units, I will start opening my sunroof from time to time, and it will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey open pretty much until it hits about 80 degrees, and that’s about when I decide that air conditioning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is absolutely required, and there’s no other way about it. Marco, let’s start with you this time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I use the sunroof during the winter a lot, during spring and fall sometimes, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during summer not at all, because as I believe I previously mentioned, I don’t have that much hair and I get a headburn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really easily if it gets a lot of sun. I keep a hat in my car mainly for the purpose of being able to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my sunroof, but in the summertime, sometimes I just don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the liability of the hat blowing off. And so I get a lot of sunroof
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use in the cooler temperatures when sunburn is less likely or less of a concern.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of my favorite things to do with a sunroof is to open it during the winter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because you can have the heat on in the car, but have the sunroof partially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or totally open. So
⏹️ ▶️ John much for saving the environment, am
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I right? Well, compared to what your car is burning, compared to what my car is burning, I think so. Well, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco turning on the heat and then opening the sunroof. And you can also do things like, you know, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the heated seat, but not use the air heating so then you are kept warm but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have fresh air. So there’s lots of options of combining the sunroof with heat or, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the lack of heat in the car, but it’s a very pleasant thing to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fresh air coming in but to not be freezing your butt off in the winter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That to me is the best reason to have a sunroof is the use of it in the wintertime.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will say that a good solid floor heat with a ventilated roof is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a nice thing. I don’t usually do that. It’s not something I enjoy often, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know having the heat coming up from the floor, rising up, and then escaping out the sunroof is actually quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pleasant. John, if you had a sunroof, hypothetically, do you ever fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a time that you would use it?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we have one on one of my old Civics. My parents’ cars have had them, so I’ve had them enough to know
⏹️ ▶️ John whether I use them or not. And basically I treat it like a window. In general, no, I don’t want it open for the same reasons, hair
⏹️ ▶️ John musting and thrumming noises. I don’t and now that my hair is standing on top, I’d probably have the same
⏹️ ▶️ John problem with a head burn. So I think I would probably not
⏹️ ▶️ John use it even if I had it. Head burn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As someone who is far and away the fussiest about his hair, I can tell you that I can rock the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sunroof reasonably frequently without worrying about my hair getting too messed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. Whereas that is not typically true with the side windows if I open them more than just a
⏹️ ▶️ John crack. You got more product in your hair than I do though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s pretty much welded at this point. There’s so much junk in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. You know, if anybody out there feels bad for me that I don’t have good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hair, just know that I don’t have to worry about any of that BS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My hair cannot be messed up. It’s glorious. I can leave all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco windows down in the Sun River open and drive on the highway and get just tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of wind to the point where like, if I have like a loose tissue in the back of my car, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco might blow out the window so I have to like make sure I like everything is like here anchor down in the vehicle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I can I can drive in pure wind like that which is awesome in the summertime when you drive next to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco beach by the way and it’s wonderful and I get to where I’m going and my hair is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco messed up because it can’t be it’s amazing I got to the shower and it’s dry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s done I just walk out of the bathroom it’s wonderful like so yeah don’t feel bad for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me as these two are talking about comparing the amount of product in their hair and and how they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t enjoy wind movement because it might mess up their hair. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s only for going to work. I’m glad you brought up the beach. Beach is the one time where I do open windows and I probably would open the sunroof
⏹️ ▶️ John just to smell the beach air and because no one should ever care what the hair looks like when they’re going to or from the beach and I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And finally, when do you turn your recirculation on or recirculating the the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey air conditioning? I I don’t typically mess with this unless there is an odor or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m in a hurry to get the car either colder or warmer. My car does have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an automatic recirculation feature. I have no idea if that’s like a complete placebo or if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it actually does flip recirculation on and off. And so typically, I just leave that on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in prior cars, I would only ever really turn recirculation on if I was in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real big hurry to reach the temperature I wanted. John, I think it’s your turn
⏹️ ▶️ John now. I am a manual control. Even though now my car has automatic climate control, I am a manual
⏹️ ▶️ John controller. A micromanager of climate control and recirculation is no different.
⏹️ ▶️ John I preemptively turn it on when I know I’m going to be coming to a stop behind a smoker because smokers are disgusting and
⏹️ ▶️ John flick their stupid ashes out their window, which they leave cracked open so the entire world can enjoy their stupid smoke.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then they flick the cigarette that they’re half done without the window, too. I
⏹️ ▶️ John put recirc on, again, preemptively when I’m gonna be stopped behind a big truck that’s spewing its
⏹️ ▶️ John stinky exhaust. Basically, any time I know there’s going to be an odor from the outside, I turn it on. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John final time that I do it is, yeah, in the summer, when I wanna get the car cooler, faster, but only
⏹️ ▶️ John after I allow enough fresh air in so that the inside and outside temperatures are equalized. And in the winter, when my
⏹️ ▶️ John car’s poor heating system can’t keep up,
⏹️ ▶️ John like literally can’t make the car warm enough because it is so freaking cold that
⏹️ ▶️ John the air coming out of the vents gets appreciably warmer when I put a recirc on. Like in the really
⏹️ ▶️ John cold spell that we have where it’s like below zero for several days in a row, the car will
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually warm up and be comfortable enough. But if you’re on a shortest drive where you don’t have time
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that, you just gotta put on recirc just to get it, just for me to not to be freezing my bottle. I don’t have heated seats. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that would really help me get around with that. But that’s when I do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wow. Marco? I used to manually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manage recirculation. I don’t anymore because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern nice cars not only do it for you and their defaults of when to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it versus when not to seem pretty good, but also like the smoker issue I too like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one way to really make me very angry is to make me smell cigarette smoke for some reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and but the good thing is about like and I don’t know if it’s a Tesla and BMW thing or whatever but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually the intake air filters seem to be so good on some of these cars now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t usually smell outside smells if my windows are up and my sunroof is closed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now occasionally I will still smell cigarette because my window is cracked or something but that’s coming in through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the window not the ventilation system. So I almost never have any reason to manually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adjust whether recirculation is on or off I’ve just let the system handle it and it’s working.
#askatp: Slack vs. IRC on Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Peter Gosling writes in, there seems to be a lot of disappointment to Slack Mac client, justifiably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so. Why not stick with IRC like the live show? The native Mac IRC clients are a joy to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and aren’t half-baked like Slack is. So a little bit of background. Slack is written using Electron,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which does not by necessity mean that it’s a pile of garbage, but it turns out it is in fact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pile of garbage. But a little known fact about Slack, which I probably will not remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to put in the show notes, So you can actually access Slack, chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rooms, teams, whatever the terminology is, via IRC. There’s an IRC front end to Slack. So you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use any IRC client and connect to Slack. And that’s what Peter’s talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where this falls down is a couple of things. One, Peter said the native Mac IRC clients are a joy to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use and I must not be using the ones that he’s using. I use Colloquy, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. Whatever Peter’s using must be much better than that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta agree with you on that by the way. Like I’ve used colloquy, I’ve also used textual, and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one more I’ve used, one’s before I forget what it is. And I can only describe any of them as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. Yeah, but anyway, so you can use IRC to get to Slack. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason that I don’t do this, well, there’s a couple of reasons, but mostly the reason, the biggest reason I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t do this is because one of the better things about Slack, and one of the reasons why I do understand if I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love the fact that they use Electron, is that so much of the things you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put into a Slack chat will auto-expand. So think about what’s going on with iMessage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When you put a tweet in or a link to a website, it will try to grab
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hero image, or if there’s a tweet with an image, it’ll grab the image, and it will put it right in line in that iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conversation. Well, Slack does the same thing, but it does it for all sorts of different data, and it’s really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice. I mean that genuinely. And that I think I would really miss if I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have that. And so like another example of that is, say, if somebody pastes in an animated GIF or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a URL to an animated GIF, I would want to see that in line. Like part of what makes Slack fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that kind of shucking and jiving back and forth with GIFs and things like that. And I think I would miss out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on that if it was just in a traditional IRC client. But it is a fair point and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I should try it just to see, but I don’t know. That’s, that’s my two cents. Do you guys have anything to add about that?
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think in this contest between
⏹️ ▶️ John various applications that let you type words to other people, even if they’re various friends to Slack in the case of the
⏹️ ▶️ John IRC gateway to Slack or whatever, I think the Slack application on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John won fair and square based on its features and ease of use. That’s what it comes down to. Like, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John IRC has existed forever, and yes, lots of IRC clients are good, but slack offered a combination
⏹️ ▶️ John of functionality and application that gives you a front end for that functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John that is simply more attractive to most people than all of the alternatives. Like it’s not like slack one accidentally,
⏹️ ▶️ John or because it was bundled as part of some monopolistic thing and you, we couldn’t help but have slack force down our throats.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, slack has lots of warts, but it has the right balance of stuff. It is a fun,
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting, easy to use application that provides, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John more fun and more features focused on exactly what it does in an IRC client and
⏹️ ▶️ John enough speed and functionality that we all you know, grit our teeth and deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John the electron weirdness and everything like this because on balance, it is better than all those things. Otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ John we would still all be using those things. I was in tons of IRC channels before slack came along. And most of
⏹️ ▶️ John them have been replaced by slack because that’s what more people want to use. I can understand being in a situation where it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like, yeah, but I like the IRC better. Sure. But I think most people did not like IRC better
⏹️ ▶️ John or didn’t like IRC at all, which is why Slack is as successful as it is. So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason we don’t use it is because Slack is better in general.
#askatp: Halting problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Juan Pablo Rodriguez writes in, John, I saw your tweet about the halting problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to hear how you would explain it. So the context, this was just a couple of days ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and John jump in and cut me off whenever you’re ready. Quote, why is this program taking so long to run?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey End quote. Big milestone today, my son’s first infinite loop. Then he asked why the programming courseware website
⏹️ ▶️ Casey he’s using can’t just tell him there’s an infinite loop instead of trying to run the program as written. I introduced him to the halting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem, but he wasn’t impressed. So do you want to fill in any other context or just jump into the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is the halting problem?
⏹️ ▶️ John So the context here is that I tried to show my kids both of my kids
⏹️ ▶️ John programming at various early ages. So if you’re interested, this is the thing I can show you how to do. But of course, me being their father,
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t want to have anything to do with anything that I know how to do. So fine, whatever. So I just laid off like they’re into whatever they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into. But my son is in eighth grade now. And he’s looking to take
⏹️ ▶️ John he wants to take a computer science course in ninth grade which is awesome that it’s even offered i didn’t have any computer science courses in my high
⏹️ ▶️ John school yes they had computers but they were apple twos but anyway um he’s interested in taking that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John just because his friends are interested i can’t tell if he’s really interested in it but uh he’s trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to get into an advanced level computer science course and he wants to have some experience so he’s going through
⏹️ ▶️ John this online course or a thing with his friends right this is all this is all him right but i’m offering to
⏹️ ▶️ John help him with it um so that’s why he’s doing any kind kind of programming stuff at all. And it’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John late in the game in the grand scheme of things because you got like five year olds who are running iOS apps and going up on stage at Apple things and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John know, he’s not a precocious programmer, but he’s getting into it. And so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to help them, you know, as laid back way as possible because you don’t want to help too much, you know, because like
⏹️ ▶️ John becomes uncool if dad’s into it, whatever. And he did write an infinite loop. And he did ask me like
⏹️ ▶️ John the course where it’s like running his program for it. And like it just shows like a spinner on the web page. And he’s like, Why is it taking so long?
⏹️ ▶️ John He did write an infinite loop, which I feel like it really is a milestone, like the first time you do that, and then don’t understand what the hell’s going on in your program.
⏹️ ▶️ John Specifically, he was, he was iterating over an array. And in inside
⏹️ ▶️ John the loop, he was adding an item to the end of the array, which is a pretty fun way to do your first infinite loop as opposed to just like forgetting
⏹️ ▶️ John check for termination condition, he was iterating over a list that he kept growing at the same pace he was iterating over it. So that was
⏹️ ▶️ John fun. Apologies to the courseware website for the for the infinite loop bomb my son
⏹️ ▶️ John invoked on you as he opened up tab after tab and tried to run the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey same program over and over again
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t understand why it wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do a fork bomb but he’s not he’s not up at that process level yet so I did try to say actually there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a general problem about this the halting problem and to finally get to answer this is a question how would you go about explaining
⏹️ ▶️ John it part of the the the knowledge and wisdom I’m trying to impart
⏹️ ▶️ John on him as part of this is not the specifics of whatever he’s doing about programming which I feel like will come on his own, but
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you, how do you, how do programmers do this? How do you figure stuff out? Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John and early on, I wanted to show him if you have a question about how something works, the magic of the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, after me saying, you know, uphill both ways, how I had to do it in my day, so on and so forth,
⏹️ ▶️ John just type your question into Google and there’ll be like a stack overflow answer of like, you know, how to concatenate strings,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, in Python or whatever. Like the answer is right there. You don’t have to ask me, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to wonder, just type it into Google search box. So for the halting problem, rather than me trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to explain this is what the halting problem is based on like my memory of it from school, you know, or
⏹️ ▶️ John just like even just in broad strokes, just go to the Wikipedia page for the halting problem
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s like a paragraph at the top that does a pretty good job of explaining more or less what the halting problem is in links to examples
⏹️ ▶️ John and so on and so forth. But the idea is that you shouldn’t ask your dad or ask someone next to you to explain
⏹️ ▶️ John what the halting problem is. You are empowered because you have the whole internet at your fingertips to find out the
⏹️ ▶️ John answer to this question quickly and in a much more authoritative way than me trying to, you know, recite
⏹️ ▶️ John it from memory. Because if I was going to recite it from memory, if I was going to talk about the halting problem on this show, I almost
⏹️ ▶️ John did it when I saw this question, I was like, Oh, I should go to the Wikipedia page and paste the first part. But no, like the lesson
⏹️ ▶️ John is, you this is one of those things that you don’t have to memorize. And even if you know it backwards and forwards,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s difficult sometimes to explain something that you know, if you haven’t like taught a course in five or six times. So
⏹️ ▶️ John use the internet, Use the tools that are available to you. Don’t rely on other people to explain things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t yet explained to him about Wikipedia being a tertiary source and all of that crap, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey well, here we
⏹️ ▶️ John go. One step at a time. There’s only so much dad that kids can take in one dose.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Betterment, Linode, and HelloFresh, and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even mean to begin, because it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. John didn’t do any research, Margo and
⏹️ ▶️ John cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at ATP.FM. And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to. Accidental, tech podcast so long.
Post-show Neutral: Cars for friends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so last week we, uh, what was the, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genesis of the question I should have left in the show notes, but, uh, we were talking about like cars and things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and, uh, Roland double zero in the chat suggested something that hopefully you guys
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have at least put two minutes of thought into, which I know Marco hasn’t and John maybe has.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, I put exactly two minutes thought into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Oh, all right. Well, that, that works for me. Uh, what car would you pick for your other hosts?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, I didn’t ask Roland00, nor did I clarify,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what do you mean by that? Is it the car you think they would enjoy the most? Is it the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car you would most like to see them in? Is it the car that you would get to just troll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them? And I didn’t want to give you guys any sort of direction about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of this. So, I have answered the question in my own way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t have to go first this time since I was very aggressively first during Ask ATP.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So which one of you would like to volunteer to tell each of us what cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we should be driving? I’ll do it if you want. All
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right, Marco, feel free. All right. This is fairly easy for Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You would have the new M3, period.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, so what’s the your criteria is what car would I most like to drive, I guess?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, my criteria basically, I mean, if we’re assuming that like, you know, I don’t have to worry about how much these cars cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’re just being paid for somehow and that I just get to decide Which car you have?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then my rationale here is which car would you be most happy with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know? What is the car that you should have? And so I think it’s the m3 done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and John a Little bit harder. I I was kind of thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe the m5 or Or if he doesn’t want to go necessarily that large, because I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like your parking situation is a little bit tight over there. So I figured maybe you might also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go with something in the three series range. Maybe your dad’s old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three series that you liked, but like a faster one. So like, maybe like the 335 of that generation, maybe something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But probably just, I think John, I think my answer is actually going to be just the new M5. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new M3 for Casey, new M5 for John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why for me? I understand you’re reasoning for Casey. What’s your reasoning for me? Like why are you even picking for me and W’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me? Well, I know you wouldn’t actually enjoy owning a Ferrari. I know that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Mercedes, but I’m too young to know how to select one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I went with the brand that I know how to use and how to pick from that gives you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you want, which is similar to what I want, which is a nice big fast sedan. Like you like those and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know you’re not going to get see here’s the problem though I know you like stick a lot and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t you can’t have that in stick so maybe I try to find you an f10 generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a stick which they probably made like three of those total but maybe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the right answer
⏹️ ▶️ John people didn’t like those those stick shifts they said that the manual was not very good in that car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah see this it’s it’s picking for you is very challenging Picking for KC is easy because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what he wants, so it’s easy. Picking for you is harder. But you know, I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mercedes makes any sticks either that you would want. But I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t. Yeah, I don’t know. But I think so. I’m going to stand by my answer of the new M5, but with some reservations.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was proud of KC for recognizing what a terrible question this is, but then I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco was unproud of him by saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t care and I’m not going to clarify, so let’s just all interpret the question however the heck we want. This question
⏹️ ▶️ John is terrible because it just has no parameters whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, just have a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fun, John. Come on.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just, it’s not, yeah, it’s not useful. Anyway, so if I had to pick,
⏹️ ▶️ John first I would have to pick how to interpret this question, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think- How did you interpret the question?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m mostly interpreting as a car, I think, that you
⏹️ ▶️ John would enjoy that you wouldn’t buy for yourself. So like the gifts giving type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I like that interpretation.
⏹️ ▶️ John For Casey, I think I would go with a Cayman slash Boxster, whichever one comes
⏹️ ▶️ John with a sunroof and or convertible, 718, whatever the hell it’s called now. Or I would actually
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe go with the previous generation, the naturally aspirated, because I think you would really enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ John a stick shift Cayman because you’d get that open air driving experience. I think it would be a more fun dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ John driving experience than all of your like regular car cars. And it’s just an all around great car, Like not
⏹️ ▶️ John super, too super fast, not too super loud, not as
⏹️ ▶️ John small and wimpy as a Miata, which I think you would also enjoy,
⏹️ ▶️ John way. Oh, I bet I would. It’s like the big boy Miata, so I would go with a Cayman.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like that choice. I drove, I probably told the story, maybe on neutral, I drove
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Boxster S early on in the lifetime of the Boxster. So this was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey circa 2005, maybe 2006, And I think the Boxster had only been out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a couple of years at that point. I might have these dates wrong, but you get the idea. And I got in that car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expecting to hate it. Oh, it’s a poor man’s 911. It’s just garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is going to be crap. And I loved it. I couldn’t believe how much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I loved it. And that was 10 plus years ago. So I can only imagine a Cayman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever the new
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like the Cayman S, the naturally aspirated one right before they changed to 718. It’s just just an amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John all-around balanced fun, not too ridiculous car. And you wouldn’t buy it for yourself because you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, I gotta have a car that I can put car seat in and all that other stuff. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it’s, I feel like with the giant shoebox
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you’ve got going on for the whole family
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that you should have a Boxster
⏹️ ▶️ John for yourself. And it would be a nice compromise of like a small, small-ish fun,
⏹️ ▶️ John interesting, fast enough to be cool, open air kind of car.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for Marco? For Marco, a little bit torn on this. My go-to would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John and especially if I’m not allowed to pick from future models, because a lot of people are coming out with cars that I think he would enjoy more than most of my
⏹️ ▶️ John picks because all the other Tesla competitors are coming, but they’re not here yet, so I can’t pick them. Agreed.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would go, I would probably shop in the Mercedes range because I continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to think that Marco would actually really enjoy a Mercedes, perhaps more than he enjoyed his M5.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I’d probably go kind of like what I said, pick with myself in that previous show, like an AMG E-Class,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I could find the right balance of options and features to satisfy. And if not, believe it or not, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John probably look at Audi. It’s another brand that Marco seems to have not wanted to really consider
⏹️ ▶️ John for himself, but I think there are models in that range that he would really enjoy. So those would be my picks. Like midsize
⏹️ ▶️ John Mercedes, and if I can’t find the right set of options in car and model year, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go Audi. I think those are good choices. Marco, thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable. Yeah. I mean, I haven’t driven a Mercedes or an Audi a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, when I have driven those cars, I have been incredibly unimpressed with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their media and navigation systems, but you know, I would give it a
⏹️ ▶️ John shot. And the thing is, it’s wouldn’t buy for yourself because you’re all electric. So basically all gas cars
⏹️ ▶️ John cars that Marco wouldn’t buy for himself.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And, and he had the one M right. So I feel like, uh, if that
⏹️ ▶️ John was a thing that he still wanted, he would have gone back to that well, but he hasn’t. So that’s why I’m picking like regular normal
⏹️ ▶️ John size, you know, mid-sized cars.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think those are good choices. All right. So I interpreted this as what do I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think would be the best fit for my co-host? And they may or may not buy this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my, my rule was I couldn’t just say like, Oh, well, Marco just wants another Tesla.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I actually thought it was a little easier to pick for John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because the The options I came up with were a new Mazda 6, which I think you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite like, and is basically what you already have, just a different manufacturer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ve always thought the Mazda 6 is—there was one really crummy generation, which was the generation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey after Aaron’s. So this was like late 2000s, early 2010s, which was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not attractive at all. But every other Mazda 6 has always been pretty attractive in my eyes. And we loved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Aaron’s Mazda 6. It treated us so really, really well. And I think, John, you would like that. But the other thing I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thinking about, even though I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think hatchbacks are dumb, sorry, Europeans, I think you would love a GTI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really think you would love a GTI, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s definitely a car I would not buy for myself, but that wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, but like leaving aside the fact that hatchbacks are stupid, do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have any interest in a GTI whatsoever? I mean, you can get it with a stick.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the main thing I would enjoy about a GTI is the small-ish
⏹️ ▶️ John size, both in length and width,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not as small as they used to be, and they’re definitely not as light as they used to be, so I’m not sure I would
⏹️ ▶️ John get that much enjoyment out of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Fair enough. Well, those were my picks for John. And obviously, the clear answer was the Ferrari,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is like Marco said, that would actually probably make John more unhappy than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John happy. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, the question is so vague, you could say a Ferrari and a mansion
⏹️ ▶️ John with a heated garage to store it in, and something I’d be happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Marco, I actually found harder, because I really do think that the Tesla,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the current iteration of Marco, in Marco version 2017 or 2018, I think this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Model S is probably the perfect car for you, Marco. However, if I couldn’t choose that, what would I choose? And the obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer is a brand new M5. I think you would quite like that. It gives you the all-wheel drive that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t have for the last iteration. It’s just as quick as your Tesla or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey near as makes no difference if not quicker. But then I thought, okay, what are some more interesting choices?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I thought to myself, well, what about a Prius Prime, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco somewhat insulting and I don’t mean it to be, but my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey parents have a Prius Prime, which is a plug-in Prius, and it is for what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John a nice car. It is not what is your criteria suddenly switch to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey punishment? No Not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco deliberately. What do I do to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey deserve this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case? But i’m thinking like what would you if you’re so bent on electric? Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, then what would what would I mean? I guess a chevy volt maybe but that seems like an even poor
⏹️ ▶️ John answer Any you can’t get any electric you’re gonna get him a much worse Electric slash hybrid
⏹️ ▶️ John car than what he has now That’s a bad idea and the prius prime is the perhaps the ugliest car on
⏹️ ▶️ John the road today now that the Aztec is out of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey production. Is that, that’s possible. It’s saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot. No, that wasn’t designed to be a punishment. It was taking your insistence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on having an electric car in mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t think that’s a terribly good answer either. I was just throwing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it out there as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a point of conversation. I agree. And then I thought to myself, well, let me think about Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less as a driver, but more as just like, let me think about Marco’s personality
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and disposition. Marco tends to obsess over things. And I have this quality
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in me as well, so I can recognize it in others, you know, tends to obsess over things and get just like really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really deep into something and just, I’m going to explore it to the, to the most extreme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey depths. And I will explore every Avenue of it. I will know something front to back in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and out, left and right. What kind of car would Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be able to do that sort of thing with? You would need a car that’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, like an erector set or like a, like a, like a Lego set. What car?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know Marco should have a Wrangler because you could have 17 different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tops. You can have 17 different doors. You can have a six speed if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want it. And you could go rock crawling in, in the little hills and mountains of New York. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could go driving off road up, you know, up in a Tiff’s parents’ house. You could do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all those things. You could have different winches. Imagine the fun you would have, Marco, figuring out the exact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right winch you should put on the front of that car. And getting the extraordinarily expensive winch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that weighs just five pounds less than the one that’s half the cost, but you know you’re saving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that weight, and you know it’s better off that way. Imagine deciding exactly how big a gas can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want to put on the rear bumper for when you’re going off-road. Do you want five gallons? Oh, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think I want six. This is like your perfect car. It is nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but useless decisions that you can throw oodles of money at. This car is made for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re thinking of Porsche with the oodles of money and useless decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The Wrangler is…
⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t you hear the discussion of head burn? This is not a good car for him.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can get it with a hard top. But I know you’re not going to agree with this, but I stand by this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decision. This is what I get for all the Mac Pro talk. I get it. I totally…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speechless. You have done it. I commend you. Excellent job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I could not top this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you don’t have any interest in a Wrangler. Like I get that. But if you just put aside the fact you have no interest in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing I want you to have interest in. Like there’s so many ways you can customize this. You could have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a soft top. You could have a soft top that makes it look kind of like a pickup. You could have a hard top.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You could have hardtop with a little convertible section. You could have a winch. You could have an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on-board air inflation system. You can have different spare tire setup.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, all the different things you could do to this car. Oh my word. I think it’s perfect for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, the actual answer I have is either an M5 or an E63 AMG. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my God. I’m just thinking, is it possible to make a custom configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the Jeep Wrangler that I would tolerate and I’m pretty sure the answer is no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I I don’t think you do it I challenge you to try I don’t think it’s possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think the problem is what I really want is like a Wrangler equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a sedan that’s like a go-fast sedan you know something where you can mess with the tops and you could have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean you can put different wheels on any car but like I really stand by that you would just get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrapped around the axle but I’m Wrapped around the axle with all these different decisions you can make and all the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different tweaks you can make like this is why I Think and I feel I get I would guess that you and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would enjoy Camping an equivalent amount in the differences you’ve actually gone camping and I have not But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a similar thing where I could see really either of us all these things I’m really just projecting on to you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could see either of us obsessing over well the the aluminum spoon and fork
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and knife set weighs one ounce But the titanium spoon fork and knife set weighs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a half an ounce and even though it’s literally ten times the cost That half an ounce and aggregate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an aggregate adds up like it’s the same sort of thing, right? Like I could see you going or me going ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about camping equipment in the same way I could see you or me going ridiculous with your tinker toys
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’ve got to expand our silly unconfined question to say, okay Marco all of
⏹️ ▶️ John a sudden you live in the middle of nowhere where there are no paved roads to your house
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have like hundreds of acres that you have to patrol to hunt for your own food. Then all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco’s interested in a Jeep Wrangler because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey he has a reason to have
⏹️ ▶️ John a pretty good off-road, easy to get into and out
⏹️ ▶️ John of four-wheel drive vehicle to wander around his property with. And so he can
⏹️ ▶️ John get out when he needs to get to the hospital 50 miles away. You can construct a scenario in
⏹️ ▶️ John which Marco would want a Jeep Wrangler, but the scenario of where he lives now is not it. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you’re not picking up what I’m putting down on this one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are you surprised by that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I’m not. Can we at least concede, though? Can you at least concede that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can see that the tweakiness of it, that you can just dial it in just right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I concede nothing. Oh, come on. I completely disagree because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tweaking a bunch of things that I don’t care about. No matter what you tweak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that build, I still don’t want it and never will. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking me, how do I want to set the EQ for my Dave Matthews band?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tweak a lot of things. Look, I’d love to tweak a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey EQ. Silent. That’s how you would tweak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Every band minus 90 decibels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how I would set it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was proud of my response, dammit, and I stand by it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s okay. Stick with the M5. That was a good response.