272: 60% Satisfied
01 May 2018Stale Marzipan, prescription AR sunglasses, and protecting listeners from tracking pixels.
Episode Description:
- ATP MERCHANDISE!!
- Get your clothing by May 7 @ 9 PM ATP time
- Get your pins NOW! They're about to sell out!
- Follow-up:
- More on 32-bit deprecation
- Raise to Listen and phantom audio messages on iPhone X
- What about Apple Pay and Siri? (via Andrew Milham)
- More about Marzipan
- What is left for WWDC?
- Apple's rumored AR glasses
- Overcast 4.2: The privacy update
#askatp- Apple IDs at work (via Alex Faber)
- Camera paranoia (via Ryan Taylor)
- CarPlay thoughts (via John)
Sponsored by:
- Hover: Find a domain name for your passion. Get 10% off your first purchase.
- Squarespace: Make your next move with a beautiful website. Enter code ATP for 10% off your first order.
- Rover: Rover is the largest network of 5-star pet sitters and dog walkers in North America.
Chapters
- Phishstick
- ATP Merchandise! 🖼️
- Follow-up: 32-bit removal
- iPhone X sleep delay
- Sponsor: Hover
- Gruber on Marzipan
- What’s left for WWDC?
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Apple AR glasses?
- Sponsor: Rover (code accidentaltech)
- Overcast privacy update
- #askatp: Work Apple IDs?
- #askatp: Cover the camera?
- #askatp: CarPlay?
- Ending theme
- Post-show
Phishstick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey See, all is right in the world, ladies and gentlemen. None of that can make the show because it’s heinously boring and annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is a shame because there were some good titles, but it’s not going to happen. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s start the show now that we’re all friends again.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We should make the title Fish Stick and just not include that in the show and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey have nobody know. So like what the… That would be kind of funny actually.
ATP Merchandise!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so we have to start the show with Casey Schill’s for ATP merchandise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have realized that MKBHD, the popular tech YouTuber, was selling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a shirt on Cotton Bureau at around the same time that we are, because I think his shirts have just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ended recently. And we have come to the opinion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or conclusion or have been told, I don’t remember exactly where this where this came from that that MKBHD
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sold around 4,000 shirts over the lifetime of his time at Cotton Bureau.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, this is this is inaccurate. You’re already you’re already gone off. I should have put more notes in the notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is this inaccurate?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, I’ll tell you
⏹️ ▶️ John how. I’ll tell you how it’s accurate. The people at Cotton Bureau were trying to make us feel better. But here’s here’s the sad facts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Last show I said, Oh, look at that MKBHD shirt. It’s only sold like 500 and something and there’s one day
⏹️ ▶️ John left. we can beat that, let’s go beat that guys. And we did, thanks to everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John who bought a shirt or anything else, we were, I think we were around 700 or something like, yay 700 and MKBHD had 500, we win, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that particular shirt had sold around 500
⏹️ ▶️ John with one day left in the campaign, but he has sold many more
⏹️ ▶️ John than just that shirt. One other shirt of his sold 4,000 across two campaigns.
⏹️ ▶️ John So now we’re up to 4,500 across two campaigns. He’s sold many, many shirts. Many
⏹️ ▶️ John of them had sold in the high hundreds or the thousands. So if you just look at that one shirt we were looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at, yes, he sold 4,000 of that single shirt over two campaigns. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ John look across all of his shirts, the numbers are grim. So we
⏹️ ▶️ John have no hope of beating MKBHD in terms of shirt sales, which is fine. He’s got like millions
⏹️ ▶️ John and millions of viewers. We do not have millions and millions of listeners. We are the elite, right Marco? Are we coastal
⏹️ ▶️ John elites? Yeah, yeah. So, uh, but thanks to everyone who bought something.
⏹️ ▶️ John The store is doing well. People are enjoying the pins they’ve gotten. No one has gotten any of the other merchandise yet, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John pins are shipping now and people are getting them and people are liking them. I’m still waiting for my pin, but looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually received my pins and boy are they nice. I gotta say, like, I know this is a shameless shilling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m really happy. I already put one on my 60% satisfied backpack And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John really nice.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should get that on a hat now that you can’t have a computer’s hat. Just put your hat and say 60% satisfied.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, yeah. So the campaign is going on for another week or so, I believe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you would like something, get something, please. Do not wait. Do not hesitate. Every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time—I know I made the same speech last week—but every time we get so many people who write in and say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, I really wanted a shirt, but I just, I thought, I told myself I’d do it later and I forgot. Can you get me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a shirt just for me? And the answer is no, we cannot do that. Don’t be that person. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wait. Just order a shirt. It’ll be great. The hoodies particularly are wonderful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The, um, the polo shirts, if that’s your thing, they are also wonderful. We’ve sold over a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hundred of them last I looked, which is magnificent because that makes me think that Marco will let me do this in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, because like I said, I had to fight him a little bit on that issue. So buy a shirt or a pin, anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s great. They’re great. I would appreciate if you would do that.
Follow-up: 32-bit removal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, some follow-up. We had a little bit of information on 32-bit deprecation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Somebody wrote in and said that 32-bit macOS frameworks still target the old Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey runtime, which is different than 64-bit macOS or iOS that’s always used the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey modern runtime. So this means that frameworks need to worry about the fragile base class problem,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which we can explain maybe later if you want. They have to worry about exposing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the space that’s required for each class and other limitations unless extra tricks are done manually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the implementer. The end result is that almost all new development is done for iOS first and Mac frameworks are either stuck in the past or evolved
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much slower. Removing the support for 32-bit frameworks means the same framework code is much easier to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ship on both Mac and iOS. Which is good. Which we want.
⏹️ ▶️ John The objective C runtime thing is a big factor in this, but it is, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s a little bit optimistic to think that the, you know, if this is removed, suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John frameworks will be released for both simultaneously. It’ll It’ll help, of course, but there are many other reasons why new development
⏹️ ▶️ John is done for iOS first and the Mac later. This is but one of the many reasons.
iPhone X sleep delay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, was Raise to Listen the problem? On the last episode, Marco and I were lamenting the fact that oftentimes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were getting like these misfired audio messages that were queued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and ready to send in the Messages app. And we had a case of simultaneous invention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when both of us realized, wait a second, what about Raise to Wake, or Raise to Record, or whatever it’s called, and Raise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Listen? And this is, if you’re sending a message, you can raise the phone up to your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ear and it will let you dictate like an audio message. I shouldn’t say dictate, but it’ll let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you record an audio message and then that can get sent. We thought maybe that would be it. So both of us turned that off,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turned off that feature in messages. And I am happy to report I have not had one of those misfires yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that doesn’t necessarily unequivocally confirm that that was the problem, but certainly so far
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so good. Marco, how about you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I have not had the problem recur, but it’s only been a few days because of our weird schedule this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I can’t fully say that I fixed that problem. The other thing is, so we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got a lot of feedback from people on this, lots of iPhone X owners who are tired of like accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco causing things to happen, especially audio messages and messages when putting their phones in their pockets. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco learned some interesting things. One of them I think is actually, in my opinion, this is a bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple should fix. I know why, I can see why it does it this way, but I think this is a bug.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you hit the sleep wake button, iOS will continue to accept touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input for like a half second or so after that. And the reason why seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it is trying to, it’s giving a small delay to try to tell whether you are double tapping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the button or holding the button down to activate Apple Pay or Siri respectively. Or if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a triple tap accessibility shortcut enabled, it’s waiting to see if you’re triple tapping the button. The only way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco distinguish whether you’re single tap or double tap or triple tap or tap and hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to just wait a second before it executes the single tap action. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem, and all that is I think unavoidable. There has to be some delay for it to know like did you just double
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tap this or not. The problem in my opinion is that when you single tap it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch input should be suspended. I think when you tap that sleep wake button, the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen should disable input for that half second until it knows whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is going to sleep or not. Because I can’t think of any of those situations where you’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holding it down or double tapping it or triple tapping it where you need to have screen input during that half
⏹️ ▶️ Marco second. So I think that needs to be disabled because right now, and you can test this out for yourself, open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up your phone, open up Mail or any app that has like a table view, hit the sleep wake button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then in the next half second, tap a message and you will see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it start to animate in before it goes to sleep. And then when you wake the phone back up, that message will be open.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it is definitely still accepting touch input after you hit the sleep wake button for a brief
⏹️ ▶️ Marco period. So that’s the actual cause of this problem. That needs to be fixed by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS, in my opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I agree. And somebody on Twitter suggested that if you disable all of those things,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can wait for more clicks. So basically if you turn off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri, Apple Pay, and the accessibility shortcut on the iPhone X. Somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Twitter was saying that that actually makes the sleeps skip all those delays and be instant. I didn’t actually try that though,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I don’t want to turn all that stuff off.
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Gruber on Marzipan
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, late breaking news, I have not yet yet had a chance to read this. I am falling down on my chief summarizer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and chief duties. There is a an article on during fireball entitled scuttlebutt regarding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s cross platform UI project. And this guess is with regard to what people are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey calling marzipan. But I haven’t had a chance to read this and I’m not going to try to read this while we’re recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So i’m assuming one of you has at least the short short version. They can share with us
⏹️ ▶️ John I read it when you were talking about jam bands
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No wonder you were so quiet
⏹️ ▶️ John It was just published like as we started recording it appeared on the side So it’s nice timing so
⏹️ ▶️ John kudos to gruber for making it in time for our show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey welcome for getting Getting into an argument with Marco that hopefully never made the show so most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people are scratching their heads right now
⏹️ ▶️ John So marzipan we talked about this a couple shows back when Many shows back when the rumor first broke the
⏹️ ▶️ John idea is that our cross-platform GUI project to make it easier to write
⏹️ ▶️ John applications that work on both the Mac and iOS Marzipan was supposedly the coding Wow is December 2017
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a pretty old article actually seems like only yesterday that we were talking about this and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know The the possibilities for such a thing the dangers, you know all that stuff see
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever episode number we talked about that But we haven’t heard much about it since except for us vaguely referring
⏹️ ▶️ John to it whenever we mentioned things that might appear WWDC So Gruber has some
⏹️ ▶️ John info About that most of its secondhand, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the gist of it The main thing I’m gonna skip to the end it was very
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom the article and say the main the main piece of information He has here is a suggestion that despite all the discussions and despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that this Mars band rumor Is from December that it seems like maybe it might not make
⏹️ ▶️ John W2C 2018 and that this is more of a 2019 project kind of like the Mac Pro and that it would be scheduled
⏹️ ▶️ John for Mac OS 10.15 and iOS 13 so not for this year There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John some discussion of what it might actually be other than being a cross-platform framework. Gruber
⏹️ ▶️ John has heard that it might be like a declarative UI and he likens it to both HTML
⏹️ ▶️ John and React where instead of procedurally constructing a button
⏹️ ▶️ John and setting the button up and telling it where to display or whatever, you would have a declarative thing where you just sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of describe the button and its surroundings. I’m not sure how that
⏹️ ▶️ John relates to React. I know React is like plain old web React, but of course HTML, I guess it’s redundant
⏹️ ▶️ John with HTML. But I wanted to ask Casey about this. How does this,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you hear declarative UI on Apple platforms like on iOS and the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac, does that relate in any way to RxSwift?
⏹️ ▶️ John how would you characterize RxSwift as declarative UI in any way?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, RxSwift really has nothing to do with creating user interfaces. So RxSwift is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a mechanism by which you can react to things that have happened in the user interface. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s unfortunate because React became a buzzword that like three or four different, wildly different projects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all started using all at the same time. So RxSwift is ReactiveX, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was an actually a.NET thing. And so in any case, RxSwift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is about reacting to a button tap on a plain vanilla
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UI button, for example. example, it has nothing to do with the creation of a button or anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that. Now this is in contrast with React Native, which is a Facebook project, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Which is about making user interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a semi but not really cross-platform way, which in putting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a kind of, is that the one that has like kind of a fake DOM in front of everything, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought React Native, I have, this is the blind lady blind here, I’ve only used
⏹️ ▶️ John React, right? So these React adjacent projects, I have limited familiarity with. But my
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny limited familiarity with React Native was that it’s actually the reverse, that the UI elements were
⏹️ ▶️ John still done with the native UI toolkit, and it was merely the, it’s kind of like a RxSwift. The
⏹️ ▶️ John cross-platform part would be the handling of events in terms of when this happens, do that, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John state management stuff, but that the actual UI would be defined and rendered by the native platform. But that comes
⏹️ ▶️ John from zero experience with React Native. But plain old React uses JSX, which is basically like
⏹️ ▶️ John HTML plus JavaScript combined. And HTML, I think is the better example here. It’s declarative in that you
⏹️ ▶️ John just write tags. You just write tags for your buttons and for your input elements and for your paragraphs and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t write procedural code that says, please draw a paragraph here. And then inside the paragraph, please
⏹️ ▶️ John draw this. There are no commands that you’re telling it to do. You just type angle brackets and letters and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. That’s what they mean by declarative. And you can make declarative UIs in all sorts of languages. You can write it in XML. There was a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of sort of XML UI definition and toolkits that have come and gone at various things. You could define it in
⏹️ ▶️ John JSON. You could define it in a PLIPS or in a ZIP file or a NIB file or a ZIP
⏹️ ▶️ John file or whatever the hell Apple’s using these days. Like, interface builder files are an example. Well, they’re more like freeze-dried
⏹️ ▶️ John objects, but declarative versus procedural is a general split. And
⏹️ ▶️ John usually people want to do things declaratively if they don’t wanna deal with the details.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I don’t care. Rather than me writing a recipe for how to build this UI,
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t I just essentially draw this UI with data instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of code? Data-driven stuff. So I don’t want to have to write the code to Google. Let me just write a
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of configuration information, and then something else comes and look at this. And say, oh, I see how you’re describing
⏹️ ▶️ John your UI. Apple has done this in a strange way before with a remarkable note. Was it
⏹️ ▶️ John auto layout that let you draw the little ASCII art diagrams of what buttons should be and stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s one of the features of auto layout. I use it all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time. Some people hate that UI. What we’re describing is like when we say ASCII art, you can draw
⏹️ ▶️ John square brackets and equal signs and greater than signs and stuff to sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco draw a little.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s called visual format language.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like a little ASCII diagram of like, I want a button, and then a space, and then another button.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then it’s very strange. Some people find it great. It’s like, oh, this is great. I can just sort of draw out my
⏹️ ▶️ John UI and pass it as a string to this API. And other people find it terrible. Oh, I can’t believe I’m passing this opaque
⏹️ ▶️ John string to an API and expecting it to do something. Why don’t you just let me make a bunch of calls?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to be fair, everything about auto layout is weird and a little and a little obtuse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a little unintuitive. It is one of the least weird, least obtuse, least unintuitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts of auto layout.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. But so this this project for this cross
⏹️ ▶️ John platform UI, the rumor here is that it is aside from the cross platform parts,
⏹️ ▶️ John the other twist on it is that is a more declarative way to define user interfaces
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than being more procedural. And if true, it would mean that
⏹️ ▶️ John we were talking before about like with the cross platform thing. If Apple is going to make a unified UI for both
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac and iOS, presumably they would use their current best idea of how
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a UI like app kit was their best was the best idea in the 90s. And then you like it was a chance to think
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s our best thinking now, you know, for in the iPhone era. And if they’re going to do one that’s cross both of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John they can take all the best ideas that come from the new one and it’s a little bit surprising to me that they would
⏹️ ▶️ John go in such a new direction as with a declarative
⏹️ ▶️ John UI because there are there are limitations there are things you want to do procedurally even something as simple
⏹️ ▶️ John as like pulling information dynamically to fill something like a scrolling table view it’s a little bit tricky
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that declaratively because you don’t it you kind of have to do it on the fly
⏹️ ▶️ John like in response to incoming data you can’t really declare the entire UI because you don’t know it ahead of time
⏹️ ▶️ John so it sometimes it’s tricky to do you know like I don’t know like there’s a place for
⏹️ ▶️ John procedural code and any sort of religiously declarative way to do UIs can run up against
⏹️ ▶️ John strange limitations whereas if you have something that works procedurally you can build a declarative language on top of it
⏹️ ▶️ John but underneath it is still the the procedural way to do everything so you can hook into that I don’t know we’ll see anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the rumor about what it may be and the idea that it being cross cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ John of course that you’d be able to make one UI using one framework and it would work
⏹️ ▶️ John in both places. Not that you would have the exact same controls in every place but that it wouldn’t be completely different like
⏹️ ▶️ John app kit versus UI kit or UI color versus NS color and all that stuff. That there would be a single
⏹️ ▶️ John shared set of classes for different widgets. You’d use the appropriate widgets in the appropriate places but in general
⏹️ ▶️ John the UI code would be the same. And the final bit is that the code, final bit of rumor and this is that
⏹️ ▶️ John the code name marzipan is, may have been the name of this thing at
⏹️ ▶️ John one point but apparently it’s not called that anymore. Not that we would ever know this because Apple doesn’t usually tell us the codenames of things but
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently marzipan is an outdated thing and who knows how outdated because the story was from many
⏹️ ▶️ John months ago but whatever it is if Apple tells us the codename chances
⏹️ ▶️ John are good that they’re not gonna say it’s marzipan according to this article.
What’s left for WWDC?
⏹️ ▶️ John So, I mean, the main reason I wanted to put this in here, aside from us fumbling in the last minute
⏹️ ▶️ John to try to characterize what a declarative UI is,
⏹️ ▶️ John is what’s… not what’s left for WWDC, but no
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro, no artist formerly named as Marzipan.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do they show us at WWDC? What’s left? What are we looking
⏹️ ▶️ John forward to now, now that all our Mac Pro hopes and dreams have been shattered and now that it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John if you believe this article perhaps no cross-platform UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco either. Maybe watchOS will finally give me background audio? Maybe SiriKit will finally give me an
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s all Marco cares about. Marco cares about one word that’s going to be floating in the background
⏹️ ▶️ John of a slide that’ll say new watchkit audio. I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s basically been my entire developer life. Like with Instapaper I was always like hoping for any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new API on UI web view because it was almost never any and I had so many hacks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was like, please make this easier. Now I’m just kind of hoping like, yeah, you know what, please just like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make me like a Siri intent for audio or make me, you know, make watchOS not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suck as much as it does suck for me right now. Give me a volume control on watchOS that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my by far my number one feature request from customers is to be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to control volume from the crown from my watch app because they can’t do and the reason they can’t do it is not within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my control to fix. And so that’s like, that’s, that’s kind of that’s what I’m hoping for here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s like you know every WWDC you the developers get like fun new API’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fun new abilities even even the kind of quieter OS releases usually have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of thing I mean heck even you know infamously Snow Leopard added Grand Central Dispatch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know the no new features release had this massive new API so you know Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s API and frameworks teams are pretty good at getting interesting useful stuff out out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much every year. So, even if there’s not like a major headlining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference for like consumers of the Apple products, and even if there is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no like massive paradigm shift for developers, like a marzipan kind of thing might be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s still, you know, there’s still gonna be stuff for us there. It just might not be like mind blowing or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensational. I’m sure they’re gonna heavily push AR and VR even further, especially AR, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone can’t really do VR. So I’m sure they’re gonna very heavily push AR stuff, even more. I honestly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t give two craps about AR and I don’t see any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco killer app on the horizon for it. So I don’t really get excited about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I do get excited about just like a bunch of little stuff and maybe one or two big things might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco become easier or possible now that weren’t before. So that’s what I like. And I think most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers, if you’re getting real about what actually matters day to day to a developer’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life, the kind of stuff that matters more.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to talk about the AR and VR stuff in a little bit, but I’m trying to think of still
⏹️ ▶️ John what they could show WWDC because they do want to have some kind of headlining thing, even if it’s mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John independent of the week’s worth of sessions. Something as the, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, what, what’s the headline feature for the tech news sites? FWC keynote could be a hardware keynote where
⏹️ ▶️ John the headline thing is that they have a newly revised laptops and that’s, you know, the number one story
⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s a lot of that would make for a compelling headline given all of
⏹️ ▶️ John the press surrounding the laptops in recent months. But that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not particularly developer focused and then just have the sessions be like, oh, and we have new versions of Xcode and everything’s better and Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John has ABI stability and AR and VR is still cool and you know, the new OS is and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, and also like, you know, you said like it isn’t exactly developer focused but like first of all, releasing new MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pros is very developer focused because almost every developer in that room will be using a MacBook Pro during that keynote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and afterwards and and the MacBook Pro is if I had to guess by far the most common machine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used by Apple developers. But also you know keep in mind that this is a like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the keynote is a public Apple event. It’s it’s an Apple keynote like it like it’s not that different from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fall keynote in terms of like how Apple needs to frame it what you know what kind of products might be announced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. It’s just kind of convention that like hardware doesn’t always get announced there But that is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco public event and that is really aimed at consumers. Developers happen to be sitting in the room while Apple talks to the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The actual developer keynote is the State of the Union two hours later that’s in the afternoon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like that’s when we actually get all like, oh, here’s this brand new big API, or here’s major changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Xcode, or like that’s when the like developer quality of life stuff actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets introduced. The keynote, the official keynote that’s live streamed to the world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really a consumer focused statement that that is couched in developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, context, but it’s it’s really talking to consumers.
⏹️ ▶️ John So as we get closer, maybe we’ll know better. But for now, like I was disappointed when it seemed like the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro is not going to well, Apple announced the Macro is not gonna make it. And now it seems like they’re not even going to tease it. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John why would they the whole point of them telling us that it’s only coming in 2019 was to make it so we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John help for anything. I still would love to tease but this just doesn’t seem like something they’re gonna do and now this
⏹️ ▶️ John is just a rumor but still a rumor with you know a fairly reliable source group usually gets this stuff right
⏹️ ▶️ John that whatever marzipan is or was don’t be looking for a new declarative
⏹️ ▶️ John cross-platform framework to be announced wavc so that takes away the other
⏹️ ▶️ John you know the big hardware story as far as I was concerned was the Mac Pro and the big software story was this marzipan rumor both
⏹️ ▶️ John gone if you believe everything and then all you’ve got left is all like last
⏹️ ▶️ John year there’s gonna be new version of iOS, there’s gonna be a new version of Mac OS, maybe there’ll be some new hardware, there’s a new
⏹️ ▶️ John version of Xcode, there’s a new version of Swift, like just a typical WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I suppose as we get closer, you know, the rumors will get more accurate rumors. But right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John not feeling bummed about it. But I’m when the Mac Pro was taken away, I was like, Oh, well, at least maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll show that cross platform framework. The only thing I have a hold on to is my like, dark
⏹️ ▶️ John horse ridiculous, probably not going to happen. But if you want something to hope about is if Apple is changing
⏹️ ▶️ John CPU architectures in any way, one potential strategy is to super duper pre announced
⏹️ ▶️ John it so that developers have plenty of time to adjust. They pre announced the Intel transition, but not by that
⏹️ ▶️ John much. But there was a period of time when developers were shipped like
⏹️ ▶️ John Power Mac G fives with Pentium fours in them and stuff and ported their software and stuff like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if Apple really wants get ahead of the game and say, we’re pre-announcing this by two and a half years. But just so
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we’re going to change architectures and here’s a bunch of things on it. That would be cool and super exciting,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it doesn’t sound like a thing they’re doing. So, oh, well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think one more thing to be optimistic about for this, you know, for like, what’s left for WBDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WBDC keynotes have been pretty poorly predicted in recent years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s always There’s always been a lot of stuff that gets announced that we had no clue, that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had no expectation of beforehand. There were no rumors about it. Apple is getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot better at secrecy recently. And when it comes to things that aren’t hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that don’t have things like supply chain leaks and everything, like a lot of the stuff that gets announced at WWDC, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APIs, Swift, stuff like that, there have been a lot of major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WWDC announcements in recent years that nobody expected and nobody predicted. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wouldn’t say like, oh, what’s left? I don’t know, it could just be a boring one. There’s really not a strong correlation between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we know and can think to expect now versus what actually comes in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s true. I don’t think this is an appropriate time to do our official
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WWDC pontificating episode. But that being said, since we’ve kind of opened up this whole conversation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a couple of things that jumped to mind that would be really cool, especially for developers anyway, is having more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey UI kit on the watch rather than watch kit. So having any UI kit for us on the watch would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool. A potential for custom watch faces in any capacity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think either of these things is particularly likely, but both of them would make a pretty big splash amongst the people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who care about the Apple Watch. We could see like Xcode or an Xcode equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for iPad, which I still am hyper skeptical that that is gonna be a thing anytime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey soon, but there seems to be enough smoke there that I’m starting to think that I’m the one that’s wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe it is coming soon. And this is not Apple style at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all, but what if the headlining feature of iOS 12
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that there’s no headlining feature?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John What if they really- I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna get at, we had that story about downscaling. What was it like? Apple, I think it was just a rumor, like
⏹️ ▶️ John that there was a bunch of things planned for iOS 12 and now they’ve been pushed aside because Apple’s worried about stability and ditto
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Mac thing. That was what’s making me think that there’ll be even less here than we expect. And yeah, they
⏹️ ▶️ John could spin it like you were saying, Casey, like, oh, the feature is no new features, even though they already did that once.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would get a lot of applause, but it doesn’t really make for a lot of really interesting sessions. Right. Guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Things are more stable and we fix a lot of bugs. That’s exactly what we want, but you can’t really do a one
⏹️ ▶️ John hour W3C session about how a bunch of bugs are fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. I don’t know. Well, we’ll presumably talk about this again in a few weeks, but it is an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting predicament because any of the Thing any of the places where we all were looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for smoke It seems that those those fires have been extinguished. So I’m not sure what’s left
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so the like Tomo Margo was talking about before the thing about WWDC things being
⏹️ ▶️ John surprises is Software doesn’t have supply chain
⏹️ ▶️ John leaks, right for the most part It’s not like people all over the world have to build millions of these things and it’s inevitably
⏹️ ▶️ John leak out. It all happens in California for the most part and those people are really good at keeping secrets so we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have any visibility into them. And the process, from what I can tell
⏹️ ▶️ John from the outside of how things appear at WWDC is they’re worked on for years and
⏹️ ▶️ John years and years inside Apple and the most large important projects have like
⏹️ ▶️ John at least one, sometimes two years where they think they’re going to to be shown at WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John and they say, no, actually, let’s wait till next year, right? So if you’re outside Apple, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John wow, look at this amazing thing, when did they do that? And if you’re inside Apple, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John did that get, what year did we release that? Because I know we were gonna release it this year, but then we didn’t, and then the next
⏹️ ▶️ John year, oh yeah, that’s the year we actually released it, but we’ve been working on it for five and a half years, so it’s hard to keep track of when we actually released
⏹️ ▶️ John it. The rumors are that the HomePod was like that, Swift was certainly in development for
⏹️ ▶️ John years and years inside Apple before it was shown to the world. God knows APFS and every file system project inside
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple spent a long time not being released until it finally was released. Every year we thought it was gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be the year of the file system until it finally was. So that’s kinda why they catch you by surprise
⏹️ ▶️ John because when APFS comes out, although I think I did predict that one correctly, but the prediction
⏹️ ▶️ John was factoring into the formula that they had been working on this for years and even though it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is the year it should come out, it won’t, it will be next year. Swift was mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John out of nowhere, like no one knew it was a real thing. But again, worked on for years. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John anything that we’re hearing rumors about now, like a project that started recently, like this, you know, this don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John call it Marzipan thing, that probably has to incubate inside Apple for many
⏹️ ▶️ John years and miss a bunch of WWDCs because it’s not ready yet before it actually appears. So
⏹️ ▶️ John having it miss this year actually isn’t that surprising. With the file system stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John they missed so many years that we eventually stopped talking about it until we can start talking about it again. Or they made that they, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they went down the realm of ZFS and that almost got out and even got onto an Apple web page. And ditto
⏹️ ▶️ John for all sorts of objective C changes and things that are in X code. It
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to me that things like an like any big company, Apple, Apple usually is
⏹️ ▶️ John cautious and not in a hurry to put out features like
⏹️ ▶️ John that, especially if they have large developer impact, they want to be sure that they work. Sometimes they want to dog food themselves for a
⏹️ ▶️ John while. Um, so that’s why I think it’s so surprising when it comes out. It’s a project
⏹️ ▶️ John that was hot inside Apple five years ago when it was really getting going. And by the time it
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out, you know, if you didn’t know about it five years ago and it’s like, wow, where did this come from? Yeah, it’s like, yeah, we’ve been working on this for five
⏹️ ▶️ John years. Like that’s entire teams of people been doing this and it was practically ready last year. And the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so good this year is because it was practically ready to write last year. So I’m hoping any sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of cross-platform declarative UI follows that path where by the time we see
⏹️ ▶️ John it Apple is super sure that it’s great they’ve dog-footed internally it’s really polished it’s good
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s when it comes out and not like oh it’s in a somewhat releasable state and we could show people
⏹️ ▶️ John now let’s just do that because that’s not a great way to go.
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Apple AR glasses?
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⏹️ ▶️ John And I guess this is still on WC topics why I moved it up briefly Marco talked about how he doesn’t care about AR
⏹️ ▶️ John VR And there’s no killer app for it. And I mostly agree
⏹️ ▶️ John with that. Although I still think placing furnitures is a is a killer app, but it’s a good obligation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was doing some AR stuff on my phone that I actually found somewhat useful or at least fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco placing furniture, if you’re like trying to ballpark a measurement on something, like there are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting and useful uses for it. But what I’m saying is like, I don’t think we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a killer app yet. And usually, I mentioned a little bit of this on under the radar this week or last week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I forget which one, but usually it’s if a new technology
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes around and nobody can figure out the killer app for it like almost right away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there generally doesn’t come one like it doesn’t usually happen later usually the killer app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for something if there’s going to be one is pretty obvious right from the start so right you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know we’ve had ar now for a while and we’ve had a few like cool uses for the you know pokemon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go is by far the biggest use i think for for the world um there’s always going to be like you know fun little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game integration and stuff there’s going to be occasional utility functions like measuring or like placing furniture,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I just don’t see the killer app that’s going to make something like AR goggles,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is what this rumor is about. I don’t imagine that’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worthwhile. Nothing about AR has motivated me that like, oh wow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I can look at something on a table. Cool. I can also look at something not on a table
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I brought up this article here about the rumor about Apple AR VR glasses. First of
⏹️ ▶️ John all, this is like the second or third iteration of a years old rumor about Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John supposedly working on things that you put over your eyeballs that have screens incorporated with them. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John most recent one was that Apple, several years ago, that Apple had canned their internal glasses project
⏹️ ▶️ John because the tech wasn’t ready or they didn’t like it or they spent some time looking into it and they figured, let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John put this on the shelf. Here comes the rumor back again. time with a wireless
⏹️ ▶️ John angle of like, Oh, but it’s different than other headsets because you don’t have to have a connected with wires, which is a big hassle for
⏹️ ▶️ John a R and VR goggles of some from some other companies. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John for a R to, you know, it’s kill. We call it killer app because it’s done in terms of like the software being
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason you buy the hardware. But in this case, kind of like the iPhone, the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John is what enables the software. If you couldn’t make a flat, small, all-screen
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, it doesn’t matter how good your iPhone software is, no one’s gonna wanna use that. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the killer app is the phone hardware itself. And once you have a big touchscreen, the software
⏹️ ▶️ John can finally run on it, and you can hold it in your pocket, and the battery can last the amount of time, and the screen is responsive, and so on and so forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John That enables you to have all these applications. So I think one of the reasons AR is
⏹️ ▶️ John less compelling and more of a specialized technology at this point is
⏹️ ▶️ John because you have to kind of hold your phone up and you can put it in front of signs and have it translate them or put things on tables and stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not particularly comfortable or common activity unlike
⏹️ ▶️ John the plain old non-augmented reality of looking at your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco and also known as reality well you know
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at your phone and flicking around with your thumb that interface to your phone right well if there
⏹️ ▶️ John ever is and i don’t entirely buy this rumor because It seems it doesn’t have enough substance there, but this rumor is about
⏹️ ▶️ John 8k displays in front of each eye AR glasses wireless AR glasses with 8k displays
⏹️ ▶️ John in front of each eye which is far beyond what most expensive huge VR sets use
⏹️ ▶️ John these days But if you could have something that you could put on your face They
⏹️ ▶️ John will let you see normally see the rest of the world, but also see 8k display
⏹️ ▶️ John overlaid on it controlled wirelessly by some powerful device and this this rumor has it being
⏹️ ▶️ John some box but that just whatever okay I’m sure that’s what it is inside Apple but I’m not sure that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John what they would ship I think that that changes the AR game because I don’t want to hold something
⏹️ ▶️ John up in front of my face I don’t want to look through a phone sized portal into a augmented
⏹️ ▶️ John reality world but if I can wear perhaps not this product but
⏹️ ▶️ John in the somewhat distant future if I can wear something on my head that is not too much different than the glasses I’m wearing right now
⏹️ ▶️ John and can have a powerful computing device overlay useful information
⏹️ ▶️ John onto that world I’m much more likely to find that useful and it’s much more likely to find
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual killer app when the hardware is able to support that because I don’t think anyone wants to launch
⏹️ ▶️ John an app and hold a phone up at something but I think if people could walk around all day and see information
⏹️ ▶️ John readily available to even even it’s just driving directions I know they have heads-up displays to do that in cars now
⏹️ ▶️ John if you could get turn-by-turn turn driving directions overlaid with AR in your car
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be a killer app because glancing at the nav screen is dangerous and much more difficult and
⏹️ ▶️ John most cars don’t have HUDs and I wouldn’t trust that to automakers anyway but if it could be displayed inside my glasses
⏹️ ▶️ John my eyes on the road the whole time I wouldn’t miss turn because I can’t tell if it was telling me in 500 feet or in 300 feet I can’t correctly estimate what 500 and 300 feet
⏹️ ▶️ John is and I can’t tell the thing is lagging so I miss my turn if it’s a big green line on the ground I
⏹️ ▶️ John can figure it out. So I think there’s not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a really big AR killer app until we get hardware like this, which is why I’m interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in rumors like this. Not that I think anything is coming anytime soon, but I am happy when I see rumors like
⏹️ ▶️ John this because I want to believe them and I want to believe that Apple does continue to investigate both AR
⏹️ ▶️ John and VR. The release of ARKit makes it even more plausible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, Apple actually is doing this internally. What do they have so far? They’ve got a bunch of frameworks that they’re working on and improving and the frameworks
⏹️ ▶️ John are really good and they they improved last year and I hope they improve more this year. Killer
⏹️ ▶️ John app? We don’t see it yet. Hardware? Glasses like that? We don’t see it yet but if and when it does come
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it will it will be the game changer for AR
⏹️ ▶️ John and until that happens it will you know I’m glad that Apple is not like holding this stuff back and say oh we shouldn’t even bother
⏹️ ▶️ John releasing ARKit until we have glasses. They should and they are um but I’m I’m hopeful
⏹️ ▶️ John this is for like I guess wac 2021 when the glasses come out. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe they come free with your mac pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. Yeah, right apple would ship anything for free
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember how the glasses used to come with like, uh, the three crappy 3d tvs and you’d get like
⏹️ ▶️ John one pair of glasses with it But if your family wants to watch each new pair of glasses with like 100 bucks I never had one of
⏹️ ▶️ John those. I got a free pair with my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I totally missed the 3d era when I was buying TVs. Thank God. Be
⏹️ ▶️ John I used it. I used it exactly twice. I think both doing the same thing. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John playing the PlayStation 3 remaster of Shadow of the Colossus, which had a
⏹️ ▶️ John 3D mode and I used the glasses to game with my TV. It’s kind of interesting. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. The funny thing is we can kind of predict like if Apple does release this week, we kind of know how it will go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this point based on previous releases. Like I’m not I wouldn’t expect another iPhone. I would expect it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be announced way too early, to ship late,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to ship with incomplete buggy software, and to be really slow and generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird for about two years before they finally get something that’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Possibly but like every time I look at these rumors even you know the oh 8k display in front of each
⏹️ ▶️ John eye I’m like how good how far advanced would technology
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be before it’s a product that people would actually want to use because
⏹️ ▶️ John I even Apple in the state it is today I don’t see them releasing something like the Oculus
⏹️ ▶️ John or the the HTC Viver Vive where it’s like a giant shoe box in your head
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple just won’t do that it’s just too too much or even like the HoloLens Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we are so far from technology that lets it be glasses like the ones I have on my face.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, so far, like there’s, there’s a long gap. On the other hand, as I’ve said about phone thinness, many times
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t just immediately release the thing. It looks like a regular pair of glasses. You have to do
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things in between and work your way up to it slowly. Is that what Apple’s doing internally? Or are they going to actually
⏹️ ▶️ John release the big thicker thing? And then, like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, go through two or three years of it being thick and ridiculous and geeky and unwieldy until we finally get down to the nice
⏹️ ▶️ John one. It’s rare that you can jump immediately to the iPhone, which was
⏹️ ▶️ John already pretty thin, pretty light and did all the things we wanted it to do. That’s why it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing. But an 8K display in front of each eye, wirelessly
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the batteries,
⏹️ ▶️ John the batteries alone to power this would be substantial. This by the way, ties into I can’t believe this article didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tie it in, but it ties into the micro led thing, right? If you’re gonna if Apple’s doing micro
⏹️ ▶️ John led displays, as far as I understand about that technology, as with
⏹️ ▶️ John any new screen technology, initially, it’s really expensive and really hard to make.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you’re gonna start it on a product started on the one with the small screen, the obvious answer is to watch like the whole reason
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple be doing this micro led stuff is because they want to micro led display on a watch in the future because the screens
⏹️ ▶️ John are small, but you know what else has a small screen, potential glasses, right? So don’t expect
⏹️ ▶️ John micro LED displays on your giant 27 inch display. First, expect them on your watch
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe on your glasses in 2021.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just I thought this rumor was hilarious because to a case screens wirelessly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, not not today. Now, that doesn’t mean in the future, it can’t happen by any means. And, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if there’s anything I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older is that the future is far closer to today than I ever think it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I I don’t know, man, that’s a whole lot of data to be pushed over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no wires at all really, really fast. I mean, remember how much time the three of us spent pontificating about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey external retina displays and that still is, I guess you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can say it’s here now, but it took a long time from when we first started talking about it and arguing about whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thunderbolt had the bandwidth to do it. It’s just, I don’t see how this can happen even close
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the way they want it to in 2018. But who knows, maybe in 2020 it is possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can use lots of compression. Like the things that the glasses have going for it, the watch has going for
⏹️ ▶️ John it is obviously its size. Like it’s a really small screen, all things considered. So if you’re gonna debut a new
⏹️ ▶️ John display technology that you’re working on, make it the size of a postage stamp, great. The thing glasses have going for it
⏹️ ▶️ John is that, depending on how they handle the lensing and all that stuff like that, you can make
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual screen very, very small. because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John right next to your eyeball and it doesn’t have to be that bright because it’s right next to your eyeball.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you have the possibility of using lenses and stuff which you don’t have the possibility. It’s in a fixed position very close to your eyeball
⏹️ ▶️ John so there’s lots of things you can do that let you make the screen, I’m thinking mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John of battery, make it so this thing can take way less battery power than
⏹️ ▶️ John an 8K desktop display which has to spray light all over the
⏹️ ▶️ John room hoping that it will find its way into your eyeballs. This thing knows where your eyeballs are. It doesn’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be as bright. It can be very, very tiny. You can use lenses to magnify things. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it’s, in labs, I can imagine somewhere in some university right
⏹️ ▶️ John now, there’s some AR pair of glasses that has 8K displays in front of each eyes that cost $200,000
⏹️ ▶️ John to make. And probably that’s what’s inside Apple as well. How do you turn that
⏹️ ▶️ John into a product? I don’t know. That’s Apple’s job to figure out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What do you think like if you think about the logistics of if Apple releases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AR glasses and if they become as popular as say the Apple watch like I think that I think it’s a good comparison
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like of what they might expect like early you know what might be a realistic outcome is that they become as popular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the watch. Do you guys get kind of first of all like there’s there’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco logistical questions of like well what about people who wear prescription glasses?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What about sunglasses? Like do you does Apple sell lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different glass that can go into these? Do they do they become a prescription company and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you tell them your prescription and and they they have a bunch that they can make or they can custom make for you? What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the future you know the quote the future involves wearing a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of glasses that people with certain weird weird eyesight problems like Casey, what if they just never make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one for you? And then you can’t participate in the future of computing? What if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make one, but in Apple style, they basically only make one style, and then all of society
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is walking around with the same pair of glasses? Like, that’s a little creepy. Like, I just like the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Watch creeps me out enough that I kind of feel like everyone’s part of the Borg, which I don’t even understand that reference. I never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even saw that show. But I just I kind of feel like Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I see a pretty large number of people out in public all wearing the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch as a watcher, I find that kind of creepy and corporate takeover overlord kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of thing. And then if everybody was also wearing the same kind of glasses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the same frames and everything, like, I don’t know. I just don’t…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want that world because I would feel like everyone is just kind of corporate, a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little too far like a little too much like you know we love apple for for even my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taste and I’m a pretty big fan of apple but even that’s I think too far and also like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is all these you know logistical and practical challenges of glasses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are first of all pretty diverse second of all not everybody even can wear glasses third of all people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can wear glasses don’t always want to fourth people who can and want to wear glasses need different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kinds of glasses and different types of lenses, different types of optics, different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shading and tint for those lenses. Like there’s so many logistical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenges with this kind of product and even if it succeeds, it’s kind of creepy and weird in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of different ways and makes a bunch of aspects of society creepy and weird as we kind of got previewed from,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, glass holes. How do we, how does this work?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like how do they get past all that stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s why I think you’re thinking that it might be as successful as the watch is very optimistic because the watch
⏹️ ▶️ John is a known quantity and the only real hurdles you have to overcome are like you said fashion, but
⏹️ ▶️ John for the most part, uh, you don’t have all those concerns about like, you know, people, people don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John prescription, uh, wrist watches, right? Like if it fits around your wrist with an adjustable strap, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much good to go. Uh, if you can wear a regular watch, which is already a thing and an own quantity, you
⏹️ ▶️ John you can wear one of these and it doesn’t have to be that different from them. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ John the adoption for glasses has to be a slower. First of all, it’s on your face, which is the thing you didn’t mention.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes. Wrists are, uh, you know, watches are on your wrist and it’s a personal, the most personal product Apple has made, but it’s not on your face.
⏹️ ▶️ John On your face is a whole other realm. Just ask anyone who gets tattoos. Yes. People have tattoos. Do you have a tattoo on your face?
⏹️ ▶️ John No. Why not? It’s a little bit different. That’s your face. Your face is your face to the world as they say.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, So, anything that goes on your face, there is a lot of problems in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John how weird and embarrassing this is, how comfortable it is, even before you get into vision,
⏹️ ▶️ John before you get into anything like that. So I think the uptake is definitely going to be slow. But long term,
⏹️ ▶️ John with any of these things, it’s the whole semiconductor industry mantra from
⏹️ ▶️ John two years ago or whatever. As the price of compute drops to zero, many new applications become possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right now the price of compute and the size of compute and the power constraints of compute is not zero, but it’s going down
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. But imagine if you could get the computing power of the iPhone 10
⏹️ ▶️ John into something that sips power and is the size of a grain of rice. Obviously this is, you know, far
⏹️ ▶️ John future or whatever. Then a lot of your concerns about how do you do this with the glasses? Well, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the size of a grain of rice. Just get whatever glasses you want and stick the grain of rice in it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that it is such a small thing that it doesn’t come to dominate. Not only is it not a product in its
⏹️ ▶️ John own right, but it doesn’t even come to dominate the products that it’s part of. The watch is not quite there yet
⏹️ ▶️ John because, but, but it’s, it’s, it’s closer than we might think in it. The computing power of the, of the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple watch does not dominate the band. The band doesn’t care what about
⏹️ ▶️ John the computing aspect of the watch. The entirety of the computing part of the watch is in the little watch thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s still thicker than we would like. It’s still bigger. But imagine if that computing part of the screen part, again, the computing part
⏹️ ▶️ John is the grand as the size of a grain of rice. And the screen is a flappy piece of paper that sips power. Suddenly,
⏹️ ▶️ John your possibilities for what that watch could look like are no longer led by the technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John So with glasses, I have to think that the endgame is you get whatever glasses you want and you apply to them some
⏹️ ▶️ John very small thing that projects something into your eyeball that lets you see stuff that communicates wirelessly
⏹️ ▶️ John with something else that drives them, right? That’s the endgame. In between there
⏹️ ▶️ John are all the phases where it looks large and clunky, where you either have to wear your prescription glasses
⏹️ ▶️ John inside it or they’re incorporated with it or it attaches awkwardly to your existing glasses, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you could even start it as an accessory to regular glasses as long as you can find a way to aim into someone’s eyeball, but all
⏹️ ▶️ John the initial products are not like that. All the initial products are, it’s a thing right next to your
⏹️ ▶️ John eye that incorporates glasses and either you can wear glasses with it or you can’t. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that means it will necessarily be much more constrained than the watch. Lots of people won’t even be able to use it. It will be for early adopters
⏹️ ▶️ John only, but you’re hoping that the people who can use it it, recognize the value
⏹️ ▶️ John in it, and rant and rave about it, and can’t wait for it to be more widely available.
⏹️ ▶️ John And obviously, Apple’s not dumb. Like, they know all these things about… I
⏹️ ▶️ John bet there are some people who work at Apple who wear glasses. I’m just, you know, guessing. It’s not as if this is an unknown
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. This is, again, one of the things that they have to tackle in terms of making
⏹️ ▶️ John this a product that they can sell in any form. What is their answer to that?
⏹️ ▶️ John There are lots of possible answers, but like the most recent rumor about this project being
⏹️ ▶️ John put on the shelf at Apple could have been, we just can’t make anything of this yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John The technology’s not there. There is no combination of things that makes a product that is remotely
⏹️ ▶️ John viable. So let’s revisit this in a few years. And this rumor could be, hey, guess what? Apple’s revisiting it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m mostly content with that. I just want to make sure that they’re pursuing it because it seems like the potential upside is
⏹️ ▶️ John very big and you’d rather see Apple doing this research building
⏹️ ▶️ John AR kit into a powerful robust stable feature-rich framework
⏹️ ▶️ John you know building devices with powerful GPUs to do AR and VR
⏹️ ▶️ John keep doing that so that if and when the hardware comes out of your labs and it’s you get something
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s even remotely viable for some subset of the population all the software pieces are in place because
⏹️ ▶️ John I think and this is the reason this isn’t a lot of science fiction movies or whatever, the potential upsides are really big. Being
⏹️ ▶️ John able to just look around and have information in your field of vision when you need it,
⏹️ ▶️ John overlaid onto the real world, is potentially incredibly powerful. Yes, it can be dystopian
⏹️ ▶️ John and stupid and, you know, all sorts of sci-fi movies take advantage of that, but there are plenty of completely benign, really
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome applications that are just waiting for the hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially. Even if it’s something to put someone’s name next to their face. If you work in a big office like I do and and you’re in trouble with
⏹️ ▶️ John names like me, that’s a killer feature right there. When I look at somebody, it does face recognition and puts their
⏹️ ▶️ John name underneath it, because I always forget people’s names. That’s not an exciting feature. It does not require
⏹️ ▶️ John massive computing hardware. The application itself that does it involves technology that existed for many,
⏹️ ▶️ John many years in a very reliable form. Why don’t we have it now? Because there’s no way to get information
⏹️ ▶️ John in your eyeballs when you look at somebody. That’s the limiting factor. Not the reading of faces,
⏹️ ▶️ John not the looking up of names, not the constructing a raster image to overlay on something. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John if I hold my phone to people I look like I’m crazy but if I just look at them with my glasses everything’s fine. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope I live long after season like this because I can’t remember your name. I’m very sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s Casey. We’ve been doing the show for almost five
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, I know almost three cases.
Sponsor: Rover (code accidentaltech)
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Overcast privacy update
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco off your first booking Thank you so much to Rover for sponsoring our show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco you just released a couple of updates for overcast most particularly your GDPR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey update and Had a post about that. Would you like to summarize anything about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this update before I ask you a couple questions about it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, basically this was my privacy update for Overcast. It bundled in a few bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixes, like one or two very minor enhancements.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The most visible change for it is that on first launch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are now asked if you have an email address as your login to Overcast. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asked if you want to convert it to anonymous and with that option being pretty well promoted in that screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also new registrations when you start the app like clean, you are prompted to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco create an anonymous account as like the primary encouraged action and like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of buried at the bottom is you can log in with email if you want to and there is no longer even a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco create an email based account from scratch in the app like anymore. You have to create
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an anonymous account first and add an email later if that’s what you want. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John all this… Did you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco describe what an anonymous account is? Yeah, and this has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very hard to properly communicate to people in the interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and on Twitter and everything. So basically, all Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users have a sync account on the server. Overcast is server-based. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses the servers to crawl the feeds, to sync things for the app to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether you have new episodes and everything. So all overcast usage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is being based on having some kind of account on the server. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically, I have two different types. You can have an email and a password, so you can just log into a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular login form, type in your email, type in your password. You can have forgot password, you can change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your email, you can change your password, all the regular user stuff. That’s one way you can do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other option is the server just generates random number for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you and gives it to your app as the login token and there’s no email and no password
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are anonymous accounts so basically those columns in the database are null and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which makes my SQL you know keying easy so they’re there you know you have a null email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco null password you can’t log into the website because there is no you know because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that token is not available to the website right now and the devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can maintain your account through multiple device logins or through like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restore or an upgrade of your of your main device because it stores that login token in iCloud.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s it totally bypasses the need for an email and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco password. It’s still using an account and you still get a login token
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you lose that login token you have no way to access the account, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in actual real world usage, most people use that type of account just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine like like even before I did this update about a third of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast accounts were this anonymous kind and I’d never hear from people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying I lost my account and it locked me out like I’d never hear from that so it this seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be just fine for pretty much everybody who uses it so now that is that is the default and that is the encouraged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and like official way to do things and this is all in the service of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting me out of the business of having this many email addresses. Like I posted,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I made this big blog post I mentioned how I think it was 68% starting, about 68%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of overcast accounts so far were email accounts and I would like to drop that as far as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I don’t know what’s realistic to expect here. I have a few options if I want to kind of boost things but none of them are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very pleasant. You know, what I want is for at least new accounts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to drop down to very few of them being email-based. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did that prompting screen in part for GDPR compliance, which I actually…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s… One of the problems with GDPR is that it’s a little bit vague on certain points, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s mostly a feature, not a bug, because then people should interpret it pretty conservatively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be extra cautious about dealing with your private data. There is some question
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about whether I even have qualifying private data and whether I even have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of like usage of that data for marketing reasons that would even require consent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or explicit consent in this way, but I’m assuming that I do. I’m assuming that email addresses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco count as personal data, and I’m assuming that just having your email address requires some kind of consent, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco therefore I am making people opt in to accept the privacy policy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to even keep using their email address in the app. So I think I’m covered there, but this is this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is partly about GDPR. That’s kind of what motivated it, but it’s much more about I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want to have people’s emails like to me. That’s a liability like I talked a few months back at least on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at least under the radar and I think I did here too about how I was trying to come up with a plan to you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the similar to how any any like right thinking service doesn’t store your password. store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a hash of your password in a way that is, hopefully, if they use a secure hash,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that makes it impossible or impractical, at least, to get your password
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if somebody steals your database and gets that hash. I was investigating for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while, can I do that with emails too and hash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the email so I don’t even have a copy of your email? And there’s a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of challenges to doing that, like just practical challenges of things is like how do you look up an email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a database index if it’s a hash that doesn’t have a fixed key
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or salt to it rather. Like the key would have to be fixed, but the salt would presumably change with every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iteration with any secure hash. You have problems with that. So there’s lots of different challenges of hashing emails
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I might tackle them in the future, but for now I realized, why don’t I just try to store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way fewer emails? Like that’s step one is like, let me store a lot less personal data to begin with and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then I’ll start looking at ways to maybe erase it completely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It makes a lot of sense. I will probably forever hold on to my email-based account because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I occasionally upload things. And I don’t use the website near as much as I used to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since getting AirPods because it’s so easy to flip back and forth between my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer and my phone for what’s being piped into my AirPods. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will probably still hold on to email addresses and make your life miserable for as long as I can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and so there’s a couple of things here. So you mentioned you wanna still upload files.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So right now, the only way to upload files is on the website and the only way to log into the website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is with an email address and password. And I should clarify too, for anybody who wants to, who’s thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about going and deleting your email from Overcast, you can always switch both ways. You can add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an email to an account and you can remove an email from an account at any time right from the app in the settings screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you want to try anonymous for a while and see if you ever actually need to log in with email, you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, it’s no problem. And then you can always change your mind later. So please, I don’t want your email, please lose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So the other thing is, right now, you can’t log into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the website through any other method besides email and password, but I can change that. And the reason why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m able to encourage people to use all these anonymous accounts at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because almost nobody uses the website. it’s it’s very infrequently used it’s used by a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very small percentage of logged in users you can use the website without being logged in for things like looking up a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco share link looking at a podcast viewing share link stuff like that you don’t have to be logged in for that you’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be logged in to basically have like synced playback from your from your account and the website
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is terrible and has been terrible since day one and there’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the reasons it’s terrible and that I haven’t really fixed it up or added features to it is that almost nobody uses it and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small chicken and egg problem there. But for the most part, there just isn’t that much demand for people to listen to podcasts in their web browsers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By far, the most listening happens on iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ John The most important feature of the website is so you can give someone a URL to listen to a timestamp in a podcast and they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t need to have the application. They could just go to the web and it plays. That, I feel like, is the main reason that a
⏹️ ▶️ John website needs to exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Agreed. And you don’t need a login for that. You can generate those links on the phone and then anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can view them without logging in. The only reason to log in is if you want to play stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your Mac or Windows PC or something like that in the browser that also syncs to the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same account you use for the iPhone. And while there are people who do that, there aren’t that many of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Relative to the user base, it’s a very, very small percentage that does that. For instance, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CarPlay is more popular than that by a lot, actually. Possibly by 10 times. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a very small number of people who use the website. file uploads are also you know that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a big feature for some people. It’s not a big feature for a lot of people. It’s only available to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paying subscribers which is already a fairly small percentage of the active user base and even among them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know not all paying subscribers upload files. Many of them just subscribe because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they want to support the app or because they don’t want to see the ads. So the number of people who are actually needing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to upload files is fairly small. And there are also ways like I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on ways to allow that either through the iOS app or through other means.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or I can make, you know, different various ways to log into the website without using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an email. Like if I can, like, link your account from your phone to the website, like there are ways to do it basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m not totally out of
⏹️ ▶️ John luck. That’s going to be my next question. Lots of people suggested using cloud kit API is to let you use
⏹️ ▶️ John basically let you pull that token off of iCloud for the people by using a
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript API that you can run on your website that has access to the same information that your iOS application
⏹️ ▶️ John has access to. And you don’t have to handle any of the authentication stuff. They just have to be logged into
⏹️ ▶️ John their iCloud account. But as far as your website is concerned, it just gets the token from there and goes through
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole shebang. But that I mean, that would allow Casey to go email this, I suppose.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if so few people use the website. I don’t see why you wouldn’t just keep it so that if you want to use the website you
⏹️ ▶️ John need an email address.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean you’re right that would do it and I haven’t looked at the CloudKit.js
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff before. I know it exists. I know a few people have used it probably but I don’t know anything about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. I don’t know if it’s good. I don’t know if it’s reliable. I don’t know what it requires from the websites but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I would like to investigate that. There’s also various things you can do like I can have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone like send a one-time link that you to your email that you can open up in a browser and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that log you in. Like there’s stuff like that you can do that, you know, it’s not that big of a deal. So I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be investigating that kind of thing in the near future, probably, but it isn’t a burning problem right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I have a question. One of the things you talked about in your post is blocking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tracking pixels. And a tracking pixel basically is an image that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey effectively invisible, but when Overcaster or some other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey client goes to get that image to display in like Show Notes, for example, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inherently passes some information about that user to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey server that’s serving that image. So it’s kind of a backdoor into getting a little bit information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about users without their consent. I have heard of tracking pixels, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve seen it used plenty of times on the web. I had no idea that this was a thing in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Show show notes for podcasts. I mean, it makes sense. I’m not saying it’s unreasonable from a technological
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perspective, but I had no idea that that was a thing. How did you even find out about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you know, I follow the podcast industry news, and tracking pixels have been a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing in RSS feeds for a long time. I think FeedBurner even offered them to the masses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there’s been various feed hosting and analytics platforms and packages that have offered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracking pixels for a while. The podcast industry like everybody about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this in the post like the fundamental behavior of a podcast player that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no publisher can break without cutting off large portions of their audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they publish an RSS feed in that RSS feed are URLs of audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files and the podcast player at some point if for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know if you are subscribed in your podcast app at some point the podcast app downloads that audio file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s listed in the RSS feed for the episode that you are going to listen to and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after that the publisher hears nothing from the player so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of information void here is the publisher of that podcast all the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all they know is that they served a copy of this audio file to a person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this IP address at at this time. That’s it. They don’t know if you listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it at all. If you do, they don’t know when you listen to it. It could have downloaded it onto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your phone and you listened six months later. They don’t know if you listen to the first five seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then deleted it or never went back to it. They don’t know if you skipped the ads, which a lot of them want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know. They don’t know how far you got. They don’t know like if certain segments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the show are boring to people and they always skip over them, Although, really what they want to know is ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there’s also like they want to know content decisions. As podcasting becomes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bigger and bigger business, the big players in the business are people coming from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big content world, from the web, from TV, from radio, etc. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re used to the kinds of things they can do on web pages. If you’re running a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web publication, you can track everything about what people are doing while they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read. You can track how long they spend on the page, how far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they scroll down the page, how quickly they scroll, whether they’re the kind of person who highlights text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they read or not, and what parts they highlight, and whether they click around the page. You can measure so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. And then you can embed tracking codes with cookies and things like that that follow those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people around the web. So you can say, not only does this person click around when they read, but this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person that a little while ago went to Amazon and looked up, you know, patio chairs and now they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over on my site reading about sunglasses and it sounds like they may be going to the beach. Like you can you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make this kind of correlations and then later on the things that your website tells Facebook about them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can then be used to advertise to them an Instagram about the article they read on your site three hours ago. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s this whole like crazy web of data and also this less for things like they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can algorithmically generate articles. Bots can generate articles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they know people will like based on previous data. They can analyze how those articles perform in real time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They can A-B test different arrangements of sentences and paragraphs, different types of construction, different topics,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they can A-B test that to generate even more articles that are even more effective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco later. And podcast publishers want to bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of world to podcasts. Now I should clarify, not all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast publishers, not even most podcast publishers, a few of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco biggest ones. Like the biggest ones that have massive companies, massive budgets,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive listener counts, big podcasting basically. They want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more data so they can sell more accurate ads, more targeted ads for higher rates to big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand advertisers like Coca-Cola who want that kind of data. That’s what they want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nobody like us wants this. And oh, and also, those, you know, the big publishers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to be able to make content decisions based on that kind of data.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they want to know like, oh, if we structure the intro this way, and if we do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this segment before this segment, then listenership drops 4%,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if we rearrange them, then the data shows that this is better this way because people will hang on, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, 2% longer time or something like that. And what that leads to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, in my opinion, what the web has now, which is a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of spam, a lot of garbage content, a lot of micromanaging of creative content and creative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people and consumption of that content by data people, a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of privacy invasion and tracking that is creepy and that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want or like or even know about, and just kind of a general
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of you know cutthroat bargain basement penny scraping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad market that I right now podcasting has none of these things and podcasting is awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now and we’ve gone like a decade without having any of these things so I don’t know why anybody wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this well I know why they want it but I think they’re misguided and wrong so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there because the big publishers want this and because podcasting is hot and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of money being made here both the big publishers want it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also there’s tons of ad tech companies trying to break into podcasting see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically they smell money and they’re like oh you know we’ll use the tools we have to expand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into this market so the tools that ad tech has are tracking maybe testing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that this is why a lot of podcasts now serve you local ads it’s It’s just another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of this movement where they literally inject ads into the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the moment you download it that are tailored to your IP address and anything else they know about you from that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ad tech companies are selling all sorts of wonderful solutions to podcast publishers saying we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can solve your data problem. We can track people past the download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with our proprietary technology. Most of it is total BS. Most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it is just totally like they are not really knowing anything here. They’re not really getting any data or they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco getting data from very few people. But the way… So I’m always on the lookout for whenever any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ad tech company says, we’ve solved podcast data. We can tell you more about where your customers are coming from,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how far they’re listening and everything. It all boils down to a few very small things they can do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Number one, they can embed images in the feed. They can embed tracking pixels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they can assume that if somebody downloads the podcast and then the tracking pixel shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they got they know they can assume that person is playing the episode and has viewed the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then they can maybe extrapolate from that what percentage people are viewing that or whatever and that’s fine and number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two they can try to like slow stream the file to you basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so to try to measure how far you listen instead of sending the file as fast as you can download
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it they if they can tell that you’re streaming it whether you’re in a web browser or an app they control or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if if they can just kind of figure through heuristics that you might be streaming, so downloading for some other reason, then they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will serve it to you like just a little bit ahead of the play head so that if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you cut off the stream after listening for five seconds, it hasn’t served you much more than that, so they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know how much they served you so they can tell how far you listened. That’s basically every podcast ad tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. It’s like dynamic ad insertion, tracking pixels in the body, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow streaming files. That’s about the extent of it. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s lots of efforts to change this. I don’t know how that’s going to ever get off the ground, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine. I should also point out, by the way, that a few months ago, Apple launched Podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Analytics. For forever now, the podcasters have been begging Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to give them more data because Apple is the biggest podcast player out there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for most general audience podcasts, Apple Podcasts is something like 60 or 70% of their audience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you have data, but you don’t have data from Apple Podcasts, your data is not that useful. Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually gave people data. They didn’t give personal data, but now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a podcaster, ever since I think about November or so, you can log into the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Podcasts backend and you can see what percentage of people listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how far into your show. And you can see what segments they skip. It’s funny, you can look at the graph of an episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can see the ad breaks, because can see there’s like a small drop off for the ad breaks and and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a you know a slow curve or a slow slope down as you get to the end of the episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you can tell people are like you know not everybody finishes the episode of course right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the funny thing is we’ve had this instance like October November December something like that and that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically told us everything that podcasters say they want to know it didn’t give any personal info
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is what they what they really want but but it did say you know what it It turns out most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who download it listen to it. Most people who listen to it listen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the end and don’t skip the ads. That’s about all we needed to know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which guess what? We already kind of knew that. We already kind of thought that because our advertisers use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like special URLs and coupon codes and everything and that’s how they can gauge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly how many people are hearing their ads and responding to them. That’s why podcasts have repeat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advertisers because they can measure these things in like the old-fashioned way and they don’t need all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this tracking data. No one needs all that. Anyway all this is a long-winded way of saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I’m very good at a long-winded way of of saying that the podcast industry is trying very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to get more data about people and I am interested in supporting none
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that. I would like to keep them keep giving them the exact data they have gotten forever which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you download the mp3 of the episode they by the nature of a download get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your IP address and they get a user agent string that says they’re using overcast and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all I want to tell them that is the minimum look I mean technically I could remove the user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agent string but they’re not really using that for analytics purposes anyway they’re using your IP address
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s I think that’s fine the like I don’t think I’m hurting anybody by doing that that’s how the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry’s always worked and I’m just trying to prevent new things from invading our privacy in weird ways that we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t consider. So in Overcast 4.2 I block tracking pixels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way I do that is by blocking image loads from the UI web view and replacing them with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco placeholder like rectangles that if you want to see the image you can tap the placeholder rectangle and it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco load. Most people don’t look at the show notes to begin with and most people who do look at the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most show notes don’t even have images in them that are like of legitimate content use. So it isn’t that big of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a problem for the consumer. And for the ad tech people, they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two tools at their disposal and I use disabled one of them for overcast users.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So is there an API within like WKWebView or whatever that allows that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey calls you specifically for images or are you doing some sort of more advanced technique to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intercept these things?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m doing an advanced technique. So I’m using UIWebView not WKWebView and this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for historical reasons. It’s mostly because when WKWebView came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was not, I couldn’t find a way to nicely make it use my custom fonts from my app bundle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there probably are ways to do that now that I just didn’t find at the time. But it was more like, you know, I’d already written all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code with WebView and this was not performance sensitive code. So it was totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other thing is, I’m pretty sure the way I’m doing this actually wouldn’t work in WKWebView. So the way I’m doing it now is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so on the server side ever since Overcast 1.0 I have run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a an HTML filter on the body HTML
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of podcast episodes called HTMLod.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been this like this PHP HTML filtering library that’s been around for a long time and it was pretty well regarded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forever ago when I when I last researched these things. I’m running that on the HTML and there have been a few problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that. One of them is that it broke under image source
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set tags because the version I’m using predates that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can try to update that or I can try to swap out another library for server-side filtering but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server-side filtering is expensive. Computationally it’s expensive and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just filtering the strings that are HTML strings I think is kind of a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cat and mouse game. always going to be like new security vulnerabilities that can come up for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know oh we found a way to execute arbitrary JavaScript if you put a line break here and move this byte over here and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use this weird Unicode character sequence here and everything so like you know libraries
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like HTML are supposed to be really good about that but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always you’re always playing catch-up and it’s it’s kind of hard to really guarantee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just by parsing the strings from some library and PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’re accurately like filtering the HTML in a safe way that doesn’t allow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arbitrary code to execute or things like that. Fortunately, also around the time I developed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast 1.0, there was this wonderful new browser ability called Content Security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Policy or CSP. And Content Security Policy is a header you can use on web pages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you guys are I’ll be aware of that basically lets the server side software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say in the HTTP header so before there’s even any content in the page although you can use a meta tag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too if you want but it lets people say right in the header what domains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to accept things like JavaScript and images and other embeds from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can you can lock it down so that even if somebody gives you a cross-site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scripting vulnerability on some kind of content showing on your web page, you can block that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all modern browsers by having a strict enough content security policy in your headers. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s not much reason not to do it. The only downsides to it are that you need to be a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more structured and controlled about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you put JavaScript and styles and stuff like that. So you can’t just throw inline
⏹️ ▶️ Marco JavaScript and inline CSS styles all over your pages. have to actually put them in you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know templates files or external files that you are declaring correctly and the or things like that so like you have to be a little more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know structured about how you write your code but you should probably doing that anyway so ever since overcast 1.0 I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using content security policy on overcast website so that even if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would display unfiltered body text from people’s podcast feeds on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast FM it shouldn’t actually be dangerous. Now, I don’t do that. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a feature, I just don’t display body text on the page. But I figured like in case I ever want to, or just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a safety measure, like I have no reason not to support this. So I do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although I’m like the the iOS app situation on the web, it’s less
⏹️ ▶️ John of a secure thing because you’re relying on the browser to honor that thing. But on on the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone app, you know what the browser is going to be, you know, it actually will honor your content security policy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco true. And also, you know, content security policy is not new anymore. It was new in 2014 when I was writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this stuff. It’s not new in 2018. So now, I think with a web browser,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should still be very secure in things like, you know, XSS prevention and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco escaping HTML stuff and stuff like that. But I think now CSP will cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you pretty effectively in the vast majority of modern web browsing usage if you screw up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But you still shouldn’t screw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up. 1.0. They can’t see anything on my side anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in fact, doesn’t doesn’t modern HTTPS stuff not even work well
⏹️ ▶️ John at all? Yeah, I was I was running like Netscape 3 the other day in emulation and yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Anyway, so so what I’m doing on the iOS app is I’m actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using content security policy in the app by by using NSURL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protocol to serve the show notes, it’s almost like running a local
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web server, but without the overhead of like, you know, opening a port and having it to go to localhost colon 8075 or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s, it is using the part of the Cocoa URL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loading system that is kind of designed for you to hook in and make custom URL schemes. So I define a custom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast local URL, it’s responded to by this app library that’s there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that serves the show notes. And with it, it It serves at the CSP header and the CSP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco header restricts images and everything, JavaScript, everything to only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its known resources. And then, you know, even when you proxy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even when you tap the image to load it, it is still one of those URLs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t modify the CSP. It just, it just loads the image like in the back end of the code from the server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then shoves it in there and displays it. So it’s basically using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco web browser security technology, which is pretty well tested and pretty well supported
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to restrict what can be done in my show notes. And my plan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is once this version has large widespread support, my plan is to disable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HTML, however that’s pronounced, disable that on the server side because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s breaking all the Germans podcast CMSs that use source sets. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s been breaking it for a long time and they’re very upset with me over that. And it’s just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to save me a lot of computation time on the servers too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So NSURL protocol, I’m just curious about this because I’ve not used it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re kind of intercepting the call as much as you are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey responding to it. Can you tell me a little bit more and summarize what this is doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, sure. So basically, the way NSURL protocol works is you define you can define a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco class that is a subclass of NSURL protocol. And you can say, you know, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco URL scheme is say, you know, Casey lists colon. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can then you can you can have your web view load Casey list colon slash slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever. And then instead of it trying to load that off the internet or the system,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will first check your registered NSURL protocol to say, we have a URL that begins with a casey list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco colon can you handle this and if you and you can say yes I can and then it’ll come back to you later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and say all right here we got a request for this URL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let us know when you have the data and give it to us and then so your class can kick off whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it needs to kick off or can we turn it synchronously and just when it has data it tells us my has the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data and and the web view loads it as if as if you were loading an internet URL so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a it’s a wonderful system I use it with instapaper for a different things too. Put it back when I was doing a lot more web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco view hacking. It’s a wonderful system and so it lets you, you know, basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do all the benefits of having a local web server in an app without actually running one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So then when you get one of these calls for show notes, what is actually happening under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the hood? You’re making a call to your servers to get the slightly sanitized version or no?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The app already has the body text downloaded from the server. It’s part of the sync payload. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you display the webview, I’m literally loading a URL that’s like, ocinfo://
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bunch of stuff. And then that library in the app is saying, Oh, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want the show notes for episode ID, whatever. And here’s that HTML. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s also a CSP header to make sure it doesn’t do anything crazy. So in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have to be filtering the HTML at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fascinating. I had no idea how you were doing this and I thought you were doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of ridiculous parsing of the HTML trying to figure out what is a tracking pixel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or what is an image even and what’s not. I had a feeling that was not the approach you took but I didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what the approach was. That was very interesting for me, if nobody else. So thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s one other aspect of it that I think is also useful. I am doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very small amount to filtering, but I’m doing it client side in JavaScript.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m having the JavaScript. There’s, I guess, I mean, recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in absolute terms, but you know in relative terms it’s probably been like, you know, five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years old or something, but like in the recent era, JavaScript got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ability without using third-party libraries to import a DOM from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an HTML string and let you work on it as a dom node or as a dom document.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so what I’m doing now also is there’s a few things that I want to filter out things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I didn’t want people to do like meta refreshes that could somehow get past me and stuff like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was so I I passed like as part of the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HTML page that I’m showing. I don’t just I don’t just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insert the you know hostile body HTML from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publisher into the template and serve it. I pass it to the JavaScript as a string
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the that it it then interprets that as a DOM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and filters it using JavaScript for you know the the handful of things that I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit afraid of so things like meta tags and that that also does that it also uses that DOM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for image replacements to to you know rather than just showing a broken image which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would happen if I paste it in the full image and the CSP locked it it replaces it with the placeholder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and let’s me do that and I do all that in JavaScript because that way like I don’t have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what if my string parsing library doesn’t parse HTML in quite the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way as WebKit you know I don’t have to worry when you’re using JavaScript it is parsing at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same way so it’s again it’s kind of like shifting shifting the security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on to the the you know well tested built-in functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of WebKit that like if there’s ever some kind of weird variants some kind of weird security
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hole that’s going to get fixed before I even know about it and I want and it isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my problem that I have to go update some HTML parsing library.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s super clever. Thank you.
#askatp: Work Apple IDs?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All righty, let’s do some Ask ATP. And Alex Faber writes, you’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WorkiWork in the past and using Max at Work. I’m wondering how you guys handle private Apple IDs and work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple IDs. How do you guys looking particularly at Casey and John here deal with this? Do you guys keep working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey private strictly split or do you have a work private watch, for example, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you just not care? John would you like to start?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d like to start by saying that WorkiWork is not a valid companion to JobbyJob. I know it seems like it should
⏹️ ▶️ John by parallel construction, but no
⏹️ ▶️ John agree job. Yes work you work No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree jobby job or not
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so as we all know if we use Macs or other Apple devices
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re not really great at letting you juggle multiple Apple IDs on the same computer iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and and to some degree the Mac lets you pick different Apple IDs for different specific
⏹️ ▶️ John things, but But you’re not going to be swapping between your personal
⏹️ ▶️ John and work Apple IDs on the fly to do certain things and you can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John assign on a per application basis. All right, messages I want you to use this Apple ID, but photos I want you to use this
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID, but notes I want you to use this Apple ID. Not going to happen. Apple doesn’t have that feature. They could
⏹️ ▶️ John have it, but they don’t. So given that, I have never done the thing where you
⏹️ ▶️ John have a work Apple ID and a home Apple ID. I have a bunch of Apple IDs, most of
⏹️ ▶️ John the one I have my real Apple ID and then I have tons of other Apple IDs and mostly I use for like
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS reviews back in the day. But at work, I use
⏹️ ▶️ John my real Apple ID and I just disable most of the things that I don’t need to have at work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mainly what I want to work is messages. If I get a message, I like to be able to see it on my Mac and not just on my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone. So I’m signed into iMessage with that Apple ID. But of course I’m not signed into iMessage with that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID I’m signed in to that Apple ID in the iCloud preference pane And then I just have
⏹️ ▶️ John different things toggled on and off that situation is not ideal Especially if you actually need to have a work Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID like I don’t do development in Xcode So I don’t you know I’m not uploading things to Apple servers,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t need I don’t need an Apple ID for my work at all So that’s a luxury I have doing server-side stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John But if I had to have a work Apple ID I would probably be signed into my work Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ John on my Mac if I needed to I really don’t think I would switch back and forth, but I’m interested to hear what Casey does because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming he does need to have a work Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ID. I do. So my work Apple ID is what I use to publish work apps to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store and things of that nature. But I am not logged in in any capacity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in any operating system level capacity to my work Apple ID. The only thing I have logged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in an iCloud is my personal Apple ID, the same one I use on all my personal devices for much of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same reasons that you just that you were talking about. So the only time I ever really use my work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple ID is when I need to sign into iTunes Connect or equivalent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s about it. And so when you’re in Xcode, it’s actually pretty good about allowing you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have, recently, this is very recently, pretty good about having multiple Apple IDs associated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Xcode. And it generally speaking does a reasonably decent job of picking the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one for the particular moment. So I have the same Apple ID I use everywhere. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that mostly for messages and for apps because there are some Mac App Store apps that I bought. Yes, Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey App Store is still a thing. It is still a product in their lineup. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to use the same apps I’ve already paid for at home at work. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also wanna have messages among many other things. And notes actually. I’ve been using notes a lot more recently because it’s gotten really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So it’s basically the same story for the both of us. Marco, your boss is a real turd. So how does this work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Funnily, I know that, you know, lol, I don’t have a job, but I have the exact same setup that you have, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like I have Apple IDs for apps, and then I have a personal Apple ID that I have logged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into things like the store. And obviously this question is harder if you have to log
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the App Store or to iCloud for work. We don’t have that issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We use our personal Apple IDs for the actual login on the phone, and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use our work Apple IDs for iTunes Connect and submitting apps.
#askatp: Cover the camera?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ryan Taylor asks, do you cover the camera on your laptop with Post-it or other material? Do you advise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your non-tech friends to do so? Is it possible to design a webcam that always indicates when it’s recording, perhaps something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mechanical instead of light? Why are people paranoid about laptop cameras but not microphones?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Does the designer of the MacBook find it offensive when people put Post-its on their cameras? Is that a design failure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a user failure? I don’t get why people do this personally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do trust the little green light on my Apple devices, and I do not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put Post-its on any of my cameras or anything like that. If I had a PC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would consider it. I especially am confident in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lack of ability for the camera to turn on without proper user authorization on the new MacBook Pros, where they use—what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that? That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the T1. It’s the T312. Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the T1 is a touch bar. You know, actually, I don’t know if the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Escape and 12-inch MacBook have this protection. I’m guessing they don’t. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they do. Because they don’t have a secure enclave anywhere, because that requires, you know, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specific implementation of this kind of thing requires an ARM chip that they don’t have. So I think you’re talking only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about Touch Bar models
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the iMac Pro. Right, right. So those that have the secure enclave and all that, I am 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey confident that they cannot turn on without, you know, user intervention or unless there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some sort of really terrible bug. But I’ve never covered any of my devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cameras ever. I just, I mean, if you really wanna watch me pick in my nose or whatever, you go to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey town, man, because I just, I don’t lead an interesting life. I don’t think it’s a big deal. John?
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t cover any of my cameras either, although I totally believe
⏹️ ▶️ John that every camera attached to any computer can be hacked. But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, like you said, the microphone and all that stuff like it’s there are too many things in
⏹️ ▶️ John this world that are potentially watching and listening to us and all of them are hackable and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not actually getting much additional protection by putting a piece of paper over something
⏹️ ▶️ John like your your net vulnerability to hacking is about the same as it was
⏹️ ▶️ John before and we’re all mostly relying on the fact that we are not interesting targets that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what’s protecting us honestly, not anything else that we do in our lives. If you were a really interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John target putting a piece of paper or piece of tape over your thing is not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to stop people because you know the hackers don’t go through the door with a lock
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, right? They go through the open ones or they don’t go through the door at all. They get you to come out of the house or they social engineer
⏹️ ▶️ John you like. Yeah, so if it makes you feel more comfortable to do it, feel free. I would not recommend
⏹️ ▶️ John my non-tech friend do it. I’ve never advised a non-tech person or anybody for that matter that this is
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that they should do because it’s just I don’t think it is a
⏹️ ▶️ John useful I think obviously the drawbacks are obvious that you have to keep adding and removing
⏹️ ▶️ John that thing and remembering to put it on and off and worrying about it and all the other stuff it makes using your devices
⏹️ ▶️ John less convenient for example say you did it on your phone I had to keep peeling this piece of tape off every time you did a FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ John call or something or I had some kind of muffler over the microphone that every time you had a phone call you had to remove that in convenience
⏹️ ▶️ John is not worth the additional security if anything you’re getting. So no, I would not recommend someone else
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. But if you want to do it, it makes you feel better. Feel free. But just perhaps think about what you’re doing with your life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m with you. I think this is it’s the kind of thing where it looks like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing something to increase your security. It probably feels good. You’re like, Oh, yeah, I’m really blocking out those hackers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this circular sticker that I’m putting over this piece of tape that I’m putting over my my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera here. But ultimately, as John said, it doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make you that much more secure. And I think Ryan Taylor, the listener who asked this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question, brings up a very good point of what about microphones? I think most sensitive information
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from companies that could be gleaned from a webcam would be via
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio, not video. I don’t think anybody’s worried about watching you pick your nose while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you work. if you’re having a conversation about something confidential, that’s probably the more damaging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Although, if somebody is to the level of hacking your camera, like hacking the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware that your computer is using, I imagine the contents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your data on your computer are probably way more questionable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and vulnerable and valuable to people. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but at the same time, I don’t know if there’s any reliable way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to block the microphone input from the built-in microphones on a modern Mac. Like what do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like shove sticky putty into the holes? Are you sure you even have the right holes? Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of the holes? Like there’s multiple microphones on all these machines now. Some of them are going to be behind speaker grills
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can’t really actually plug up. So like there’s really no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good way to block off microphones. So nobody does it. I think the reason why people do it to the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is because it’s easy and there’s no real downsides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you are somebody who uses a video chatting a lot on your laptop. But like otherwise you know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that IT departments can mandate and look like they’re doing their job and say look we’re covering our butts. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying we need to make our computers more secure and we’ll give you this eight sent sticker
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put over the camera and your laptop will look secure and we can make sure you have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on there because we can see it and we can look like we’re doing our job and we can feel secure. And the reality is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s mostly security theater.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, if you’re trying to come up with like part was part of this question, is there any way to make a light that any way
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a camera that you can be sure that the green light is you know, is real and it can’t be hacked
⏹️ ▶️ John like perhaps something mechanical and mechanical the way you do it. You’d have an actual opaque piece of metal
⏹️ ▶️ John that when it slides in front of the camera and the only way for the camera to get a picture is for it to slide out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you want to tell whether the camera is on, just assume every single time that metal doors open, the camera is on.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would do it. And I think the we’re thinking of this mostly from our perspectives or from
⏹️ ▶️ John the perspective of like we’re a giant corporation and what might we want to protect. But But the reason people
⏹️ ▶️ John hack webcams, obviously, is to get pictures of people in
⏹️ ▶️ John their bedrooms or whatever, and then either blackmail them or sell that footage or whatever. So it’s a vulnerability that we
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think about because no one wants to see us naked, but it is a vulnerability that half the population has to worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about. So if you find yourself in that situation, again, I would recommend
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t put stickers over your thing. Close the lid on your laptop, turn it off.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like don’t don’t have your your computer running all the time
⏹️ ▶️ John and pointing at your bedroom and I know that’s You know perhaps even more inconvenient than just putting
⏹️ ▶️ John a sticker over it and again if you want to put a sticker over it to go for it, but I Think a better idea would
⏹️ ▶️ John be to buy a computer where you have slightly more faith that it’s harder to hack the camera I don’t know if I’m just shilling for
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple there But like I said Apple’s that was not gonna protect you there have been proven hacks to get around
⏹️ ▶️ John that little a little light so maybe the best choice is to get one of the PC
⏹️ ▶️ John laptops I’ve seen that you don’t have to buy something that covers the camera that it comes with a little mechanical door
⏹️ ▶️ John over the camera you have to use your hand to move it but but that’s you know
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s that’s the only way to be sure and you’re not you’re not safer microphones
⏹️ ▶️ John as Marco pointed out so they might not be able to hear your bedroom see your bedroom but they can hear it and can they produce some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of blackmail out of that too who knows Yeah, technology in the bedroom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and also just like there’s also there’s a lot more cameras and microphones in most people’s houses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than just the one on your laptop now with a lot with a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ John lack security than hopefully than your laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, and it’s just yeah and and to finish the like 19 questions that Ryan Taylor asked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does the designer of the MacBook fun defensive when people put post-its on their cameras? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assuming that you’re talking about Johnny Ive because I don’t know which of his staff designed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say probably they find everything offensive because they design these things to look good in pictures with nothing put into them that they actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. They should find the dongle hell offensive that we have to do in practice. They should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find the terrible cable management on the current power brick offensive. But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think Johnny Ive spends two seconds thinking about Macs anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the design of the camera on Apple laptops reflects the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple design philosophy of like, say this was even part of the design brief, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John one problem is that people wanna know when the camera is recording them, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And they wanna feel secure that they can tell, if it looks like
⏹️ ▶️ John the camera is not recording, then it really isn’t. So their solution, their elegant solution is, rather than having a clunky
⏹️ ▶️ John mechanical door, Let’s have a light next to the camera that’s on when it’s recording and
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s use some very clever technology to make it so that light actually is representative. And they
⏹️ ▶️ John did a pretty good job of making the light hard to hack, but it was indeed hacked at one point
⏹️ ▶️ John on one of the older things showing that no matter how hard you try, you’re never sure if you’ve really got it 100% hack-proof.
⏹️ ▶️ John You look at the circuit diagram and you’re like, oh, there’s just no way that camera can be on with that light being on, but they did something very clever. There was a good article
⏹️ ▶️ John about it a while back to get around it. I don’t know if the modern ones have now worked around that if a secure enclave is better
⏹️ ▶️ John so on and so forth but you can never be sure but that’s their solution is It’s clunky
⏹️ ▶️ John to have a door. It’s it’s fidgety to have a door. It would be fidgety to have a computer-controlled door
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s it’s kind of silly to have a manual door So let’s not have a door at all Let’s just simply have a camera
⏹️ ▶️ John and solve the prop solve the harder problem Which is how can we have a light that is always representative
⏹️ ▶️ John that is always true if I look at that light it really tells me other things on. That was their attempt.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unfortunately, it is less reliable than the clunky solutions. But
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe with the Sierra, Sierra on flight, maybe it’s it hasn’t been hacked. And maybe it is really reliable. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that would be the Apple philosophy is, let’s not resort to the easy solution of a door. Let’s instead
⏹️ ▶️ John keep keep trying to harder and harder to make a very secure piece of hardware where we actually do
⏹️ ▶️ John have control over the light because we make the whole widget, we make the silicon, we make the hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John we make the OS, we should be able to make this work. And they have a pretty good shot at making it
⏹️ ▶️ John not 100% hack-proof, because nothing is, especially if you have physical access to it, but very,
⏹️ ▶️ John very robust, to the point of very diminishing returns. They may already be at that point with a secure
⏹️ ▶️ John enclave. So I don’t entirely fault them for this approach, but it’s certainly not the simplest solution,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a door. And then the microphone solution, well, you got nothing there, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screwed. Well, there’s an even simpler solution. make the camera optional
⏹️ ▶️ John uh… everything they get a preference could all make a difference mark what they call her every
⏹️ ▶️ John have a lot of other things that is what that a preference that’s what i remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from and look at how many like how many apple fans have given us crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially give me crap because i can plan they remove something i use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it will you know it’s the future and almost nobody use that well how many people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use the camera really Like I know people use it for Skype and stuff, but like, and occasionally FaceTime,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can also use your phone for that now, and I think most people probably do that more often. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does it really need to be on every single laptop they sell anymore? Or,
⏹️ ▶️ John it does. Really, does it? Why? I mean, it’s like, obviously, nobody uses every feature 100%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the time, right? Not even the keyboard. I bet some people only ever use a clamshell. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the camera is well past the threshold of commonly used enough that it should be on everyone. Now if they wanted to make
⏹️ ▶️ John an option, like I wouldn’t object to a big option. Who can object to options? You know, like sure, let me
⏹️ ▶️ John configure my laptop with exactly what I need. But in the grand scheme of things that might be options,
⏹️ ▶️ John this would be pretty low down on the list because so many people need occasional use of the camera. It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to add after the fact. Maybe, again, maybe not with workplace stuff, you underestimate
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly how much video conferencing goes on in the modern workplace.
⏹️ ▶️ John just because it’s the default of a lot of, uh, you know, tele telecommunication applications for work.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s nice to see other people’s faces. Um, I mean, I’ve had video conferences
⏹️ ▶️ John with people in the same building. I had like three video conferences today. Like it just, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just a thing that happens today. And sometimes I think about it. And like if I had told myself, uh, you know, as a kid
⏹️ ▶️ John that when you’re an adult in the workplace, you’ll have video conferences over there. It would sound also cool and futuristic.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now it’s just like, uh, meetings. But I think it’s used a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, well follow up question then, if it’s that important and used that often, why are these cameras still
⏹️ ▶️ John It does because it doesn’t matter for video conferencing, the compression is brutal.
⏹️ ▶️ John reason it’s, you know, there’s like six people and these little postage stamps and this terribly over compressed stuff, the quality
⏹️ ▶️ John is far below what the camera is even capable of. But I agree the camera should be better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just because we pay so much money for these computers, put better cameras in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember when I was a kid, I used to watch Double Dare on Nickelodeon. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grand prize was not irregularly a video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone from some manufacturer like AT&T or something like that, where I think you got like two video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phones, one to put in your house, one to put in the one other person you can talk to’s house. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the, if I’m a kid, maybe our house and my grandparents’ house,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and those are the only two people we can talk to with video phones. And it was like a refresh rate measured in seconds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, like there’s one new image every four seconds and it was a postage stamp and it was terrible, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it was amazing. One of the many reasons why I wanted to go on Double Dare. Anyway.
#askatp: CarPlay?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, not the one in the room right now, asks, do any of you have CarPlay? If so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do you use it? How does it work for you? CarPlay crashes about once every 30 or 40 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, often when we aren’t asking it to do anything. iPhone 10, genuine Apple cable, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For me, we recently got Erin a new car. We got her a Volvo XC90 that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does have CarPlay. It is wired only. And I really, really like it, a lot more than I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expected. It is not perfect. It is by no means perfect. But what I like about it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have my phone paired with her car. And if I ever drive her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car somewhere and she’s not with me, then all I have to do to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have my phone kind of take over her car is plug it in and start car play. And then I can listen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to overcast. I can listen to Spotify. I can do just about anything. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been surprisingly efficient at maintaining a text message conversation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By way of just conversing with Siri, you know, I’m not looking at the screen at all I don’t think it’s possible to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a text message on screen at most you can see who it’s from and I’ve had entire conversations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via text message or via iMessages really via Siri via CarPlay and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s actually worked out pretty well. Maybe if I lived with it every day, I would find it frustrating It certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infuriates me as we talked about not too long ago ago that you can’t use Waze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Google Maps with CarPlay. That is very annoying. But since I’m only ever in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the car for like 15-20 minutes at a time, I don’t mind any of the limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s actually worked pretty consistently for me. Now I know, Marco, that you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it in the Tesla, but I believe TIFSCAR does,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? That is correct. However, I almost never drive TIFSCAR.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically I almost never use CarPlay. I hear from people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it, who love it, so it seems very popular. I will say as an audio app developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s often like weird CarPlay bugs I hear about that are just very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to debug or ever fix really. Because sometimes, like, you know, CarPlay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is subtly different depending on implementations. From what I can gather,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems to be mostly an iOS thing. I think the car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manufacturers themselves, or the head unit manufacturers, are not doing much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco logic on their side. It seems to be an interface that’s entirely rendered by the iPhone, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just kind of sent as a video signal to the head unit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is there are small differences in how cars will do things like send the Bluetooth commands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or some playback commands and things like that. So there is some car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to car variation or head unit to head unit variation. So it’s a little hard to generalize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and say it’s always this or always that or always stable or always unstable. But most of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco logic is happening on the phones as far as I’m aware. So I think it is fair to characterize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your experience with one is going to be pretty similar to your experience with it in a different car. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that said, I’ve had very little experience with it. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does look nice, and my usage stats show that a heck of a lot of people use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I can’t use it because it isn’t available in my car. If it was available, I would get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although I would probably still map my phone in little docks so I could run Waze.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin John, neither of your cars support it. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Walker That’s right. I have never used it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s too bad. It’s not. It’s good stuff. I mean, it’s again, nowhere near perfect, but it’s pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As usual, I’d say the biggest problem with it is Siri. Although again, for the purposes of text messaging only, Siri does work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty well for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Squarespace, and Rover. We’ll see you next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, tech podcasts so long.
Post-show
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, after show starting, exciting baby stuff going on, Casey. Yeah, how’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your whole like family life going?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Things are generally okay. Mikaela is a much happier baby now that her insides
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aren’t on fire, which is great. If you recall, she has either a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey milk and or soy, it’s not an allergy, what did they call it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco intolerance? Intolerance,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah. Yeah, so, you know, she was an extremely fussy baby, at least by List
⏹️ ▶️ Casey family standards. And so we went to the doc, figured out, oh, it’s this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey intolerance, you know, put her on this really crazy formula. It seems to be making her a much happier baby, which is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That being said, I think we are hitting the three and a half to four month sleep
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regression that seems to be a normal thing, which from what we remember from Declan was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible and seems like it’s probably going to be the same for Michaela.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m going out of town for a few days starting tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should have added some sleep unit tests.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should have, you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco absolutely should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have. Wow. That’s a good regression joke. I’m proud