292: Start a Rotate Chicken Nuggets Timer
20 Sep 2018Overcast 5, HomePod timers, and learning more about iPhone XS and Apple Watch Series 4.
Episode Description:
- Please give some money to St. Jude. It literally helps save lives.
- Follow-up:
- Ben Bajarin on A-fib detection
- 50% faster tessellation... maybe?
- Underplayed improvements to iPhone XR/XS camera and Watch Series 4
- No landscape home screens on XR/XS Max
- What did we order?
- Testing HomePod's multiple named timers
- Overcast 5
- Post-show Casey on Cars: 2018 Volkswagen Golf GTI Autobahn
Sponsored by:
- Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
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Chapters
- Finding John
- Follow-up: A-fib detection
- XS camera, reviews
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- A Simpsons reference 🖼️
- Home-screen rotation
- St. Jude fundraiser
- Apple fundraiser
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- HomePod multiple timers
- Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
- Overcast 5
- Ending theme
- Casey on Cars 🖼️
Finding John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re missing John. That’s unusual. You think his Mac Pro finally died after being celebrated for 10
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to say that that would be the best, but that would kind of be the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. Well, it’s like, see, if it made it 10 years, which it did, like that’s what we were waiting for, right? We were waiting for it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make 10 years. And so if now it did, so anytime it dies after now would not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be tragic. It would be really tragic if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it made it like nine and a half years,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? Right or like if it made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it like one week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less than but no it made it ten years So now it can die anytime and it’s not a big tragedy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now it actually becomes funnier the sooner it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dies That would be kind of amazing like does it make me a bad person if a little part of me? Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of me wants to see that this thing has just died
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t I don’t think I want that yet But I can see why it would be funny if it happened,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially like right after last week’s show Hi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re live. Wait, John, I have to know. What computer are you using?
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you mean what computer am I using? The same one I always use.
⏹️ ▶️ John What were you hoping? Were you wishing for the death of my computer?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, neither of us would do that. Why would you say it’s just a terrible
Follow-up: A-fib detection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ben Baharan writes, he got some clarity on the Apple Watch background AFib
⏹️ ▶️ Casey detection. The watch has to detect AFib six times
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before it will notify the user. This is to help minimize false positives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we’ve been seeing a lot of articles and quick hot takes come out from various people in the medical field
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people who make medical devices basically saying that the Apple Watch Series 4 sensors are horrible because they’re going to result
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in lots of false positives. And false positives are indeed a problem. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if something does result in a bunch of people thinking they have heart conditions, that is bad for lots of reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have people who stress out about that, who might get tests done,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and might even have procedures or surgeries done to correct problems they may not have, or may not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco badly enough to get them to ask for the treatment that they ask for. They might take away
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treatment for people who need it, whatever else. So it is a problem if there’s a lot of false positives, but so far
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t really have any evidence that the Apple Watch Series 4 sensors do generate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this level of false positives. I’m sure this is something that Apple thought about when they designed it. They’re probably really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco careful and conservative about that kind of thing. So I would err
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the side of assuming it’s probably okay, that they’ve probably done their diligence and it’s probably implemented reasonably conservatively.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s what this item was about, that it has to detect it six times, which if you Just think about it. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, geez, wouldn’t I want to know after the first one? But it’s like, no, you probably wouldn’t. Like the six times is the extra insurance
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, this is not a fluke. This is not a sensing error. This is not your watch was shaky on your wrist and there
⏹️ ▶️ John was some salt water underneath it for a couple seconds. And like six times, presumably spread out over time, not
⏹️ ▶️ John just six times in a row, but like six times with a gap between them saying that this is a real thing. This is not
⏹️ ▶️ John just a fluke or a sensing error. I thought about that a lot with the fall detection. We talked
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit about it in the last show where when they were describing fall detection, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ John to myself, because of the difficulty of figuring out, have I fallen or have I just waved vigorously
⏹️ ▶️ John or have I just jumped or whatever, that surely they would be off by default or
⏹️ ▶️ John it would not operate like a dead man’s switch. But then I got to that part of the presentation and said,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, if you fall, if it thinks you fell and you don’t move for a minute,
⏹️ ▶️ John it will call your emergency contact or whatever. You don’t have to do anything. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John not that calling your emergency contact or emergency number, maybe emergency number would be, I don’t know if it calls just your emergency
⏹️ ▶️ John contact or an emergency number or both or either or whatever, but you could flop onto
⏹️ ▶️ John a bed and just lay there for a minute thinking and then have your watch call you or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that they made it auto-call, like I guess they have to do that because if they don’t, it’s like, well, if you really
⏹️ ▶️ John do have a problem, you’re not gonna be awake enough or at all to press a button on your watch or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So they have to have the confidence that they can actually detect a fall
⏹️ ▶️ John and distinguish it from flopping on your bed or all sorts of other things
⏹️ ▶️ John to be able to confidently follow through on their promise to say, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna make the call now. Like our heuristic said, we think you fell and then you didn’t move, therefore we’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John send. The six times on AFib is a similar attitude.
⏹️ ▶️ John So as for the medical world’s reaction to this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I assume unless it is really bad, unless it requires a software update and there’s like tons and tons of false positives
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, that the medical world will account for this eventually. Like in the beginning it’ll be a weird novel thing
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, but eventually doctors will all know about it because they’ll have their hypochondriac patients saying, my watch said I’m dying,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? They’ll know about it. Doctors will understand the technology involved because they know the different kinds of
⏹️ ▶️ John EKGs and they understand the limitations of just having two sensing points, one on your wrist and one on
⏹️ ▶️ John your foot. I feel like it will mostly work itself out.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, I mean, we’ll see. We’ll circle back next year and see if those same doctors say this
⏹️ ▶️ John is a net negative for patient health. The problem is that Apple’s only going to ever tell us about
⏹️ ▶️ John the one or two or 10 amazing stories where the
⏹️ ▶️ John watch saves somebody’s life, which will surely exist. but Apple is not going to probably come out and
⏹️ ▶️ John say, and here are all the false positives, let’s weigh them against each other. They’re just gonna show us the inspirational
⏹️ ▶️ John story. So I think it’s kind of on the medical establishment and everyday
⏹️ ▶️ John citizens to figure out what the net health effect of
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of nerds wearing these kind of watches is. That’s the saving grace, is that how many people will have these watches?
⏹️ ▶️ John In the grand scheme of things, not that many as compared to how many people
⏹️ ▶️ John actually have heart conditions or own cell phones or anything else that has larger penetration than a specific kind of very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was interesting seeing a lot of feedback from physicians, both on Twitter and a couple via email,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and to grossly oversimplify their complaints. It seemed like they thought, A, it would create
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too much influx of people with not actual problems, which certainly could be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t know, like I find that hard to believe because of all the reasons you just enumerated,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John. And either way, I’d rather get checked out and have a false
⏹️ ▶️ Casey positive than never know that I have a heart issue. And then the other complaint that they seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have was that this isn’t a real EKG, this is a fake EKG, it doesn’t really count, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I’m not an MD, I’m not a doctor, I don’t really know what it’s like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a doctor, but it seems to me like this is unnecessary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that this is a positive step and the medical community should embrace it. And now I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a whole bunch of email and tweets and I apologize, but I just think that this is a good thing. Giving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us more awareness of what’s happening in our own bodies is a good thing and should be applauded by everyone, most especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the medical community.
XS camera, reviews
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so tell me, Marco, about the camera in the iPhone XS and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I said, I think I actually said last episode that the sensor was not larger,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I said that it didn’t maybe have to be larger because they said the pixels were larger. That doesn’t mean the sensor is larger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Turns out the sensor is larger. It’s about a 32% bigger sensor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the iPhone XS and XR and XS Max. I don’t really know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this was confirmed to John Gruber through Apple, so we know it’s real, 32% larger sensor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s great. You know, for anyone not familiar, larger sensors basically means that you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a higher ratio of detail to noise because each pixel is picking up more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco light, and so it has to do less artificial amplification of the signal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to basically see what is being shot in a scene. bigger pixels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash bigger sensors mean more light gathering ability, which means
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better pictures because you get less of the grainy noisy crap and therefore the softening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco algorithms need to do less work and so you can get more detail as well, especially in lower light.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, uh, I don’t really know why Apple didn’t make a bigger deal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that they actually did like in like one or two spots on the website. They did mention the sensor was larger,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, but it was really downplayed, I thought and they never said how much larger except for this you know this clarification to Gruber that they gave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s a really good thing. You know I think one of the themes that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I keep seeing in the reviews of the 10s and the Apple watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco series 4 because as we record this all the press reviews for both of those devices The embargoes lifted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like today and yesterday, and so while while no customers have them yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but we now have a bunch of fairly similar reviews of them from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various sites. I really got to give a special shout out to John Gruber’s reviews of both the Apple Watch Series 4
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the iPhone’s XS because they were excellent reviews. I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t gotten a lot of great quality from other people’s reviews of these phones that I’ve seen yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but Gruber’s were excellent for both. And at the event, I feel like Apple didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a very good job of selling the benefit, especially for the phones, like the watch I think they did a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay job. Although it does seem like there were a lot of benefits according to the reviews, especially Guru Review,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it sounds like, you know, not only is the screen really nice, you know, the edge to edge is nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also apparently the Taptic Engine got way better, especially in the steel model, which it desperately needed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The crown does feel noticeably different. So, you know, the crown is better and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, so there’s clearly like, there’s stuff going on there that they just didn’t even talk about. But with the phones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like they really didn’t give a great presentation about why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these phones are better than last year’s phones. You know, they talked about how great they are in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absolute terms, but not relative terms to last year’s. I know that most people don’t upgrade their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phones every year, but if you can’t say that your phone this year is a lot better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their phone last year, it still impacts the press reaction and the news reaction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the enthusiast reaction of like, is this upgrade worth it or not? So I think it is important for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually say how much better it is than last year’s, and they really didn’t do that in the presentation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The good thing is the reviews seem to be clarifying that it actually is a significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrade in a few areas. Not in all areas, and it is possibly the S-iest year
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all S-years, but I think it is clearly, like there have been noticeable upgrades
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a few areas. Again, I think Apple kind of failed to communicate that well enough. But fortunately the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews are coming in and they’re pretty positive. The only negative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point of many of the reviews seems to be the camera, while it is way better than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone X, is not as good as some Google Pixel whatever whatever. And to me that’s like, wait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a minute, wait, wait, wait, it’s way better than the X? That’s what I wanted to know. And that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the beginning of a sentence that says, but Google’s phone beats it in these few areas. And it’s like, no, no, no, that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want Google’s phone. I really, really don’t want Google’s phone. I want the iPhone, thank you. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really want to know, is this iPhone better than last year’s iPhone? So thank you for providing that, all those weird negative reviews.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s done some weird stuff over the years with how willing it is to trash its previous
⏹️ ▶️ John products. Sometimes Apple goes out of its way to tell you, look at this product we sold
⏹️ ▶️ John last year, it was garbage. Can you believe we even sold that thing? Buy the new one, it’s so much better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jobs did that himself several times. It’s happened in the post-jobs era. Like not saying it’s garbage, but
⏹️ ▶️ John really being willing to show the failings of what was previously their best
⏹️ ▶️ John product, right? But this year for the XS, they definitely didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do that. They didn’t, and here’s where I think we could have been shown about the camera. They showed the Smart HDR and they
⏹️ ▶️ John showed the pictures that you can take with it and
⏹️ ▶️ John the demonstrations at Amec Ranch. I think they even did some comparisons, but they didn’t do what most of the reviews do, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna take the same exact picture with the X and it’s gonna look bad on the X, right? It’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ John look blown out and gross and like a bad picture because I don’t think they I don’t think Apple’s ready to say
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what in some situations? the 10 will take a bad sort of as Gruber said unusable and I
⏹️ ▶️ John was said a lot last flash show your garbage photos like This is just
⏹️ ▶️ John a garbage photo and the 10s will rescue it and make it not garbage Maybe it still won’t be a great
⏹️ ▶️ John photo But you’ll be able to see the person’s face like the sky won’t be blown out. It won’t look ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t be embarrassed by it. And they didn’t go that extra step to really emphasize.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t just take good pictures. So they always show you good pictures. Of course, it’s like professional photographers and models and everything is gorgeous, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John They have to show. And by the way, this picture here, here’s how it would look on the 10. And you
⏹️ ▶️ John go, because I just don’t think they wanted to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John Or sometimes they do. Sometimes they decide leadership, but this time for whatever reason, they didn’t. Honestly, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s gonna be that big of a deal. Because, you know, like, for the people who want to know how much better it is than
⏹️ ▶️ John a 10 whatever like but for most other people upgrading it’s just a fantastic phone and everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna love it and what’s much more important about it are probably like the colors the finishes the prices
⏹️ ▶️ John then then like oh let me tell you how much better it is than the than the 10 which you can’t buy anymore it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t care I’m upgrading from a six or a seven like it’s you know it’s miles better
⏹️ ▶️ John so yeah it’s an S year um and maybe Apple could have trashed its previous products a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit more but I think they mostly hit the highlights just maybe in a in a milder form. Like there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike the watch thing where if the Taptic Engine really is better like that figure that could have been a thing worth mentioning.
⏹️ ▶️ John they mentioned everything that’s better about the S. They just maybe didn’t emphasize a few things as much as they could have.
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A Simpsons reference
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, there is a reference in this next piece of follow up and I am confident that I will not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it the appropriate justice if I have anything to do with this piece of follow up. So can you just take this away for me?
⏹️ ▶️ John Last show I mentioned that on the GPU slide for the GPU and the iPhone tennis Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John had said seemed like they had cherry-picked a thing that their GPU does faster 50% faster
⏹️ ▶️ John tessellation And I said when you’re citing something like that like a specific thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John your GPU does Maybe it’s not overall as fast as you would like it to be and you have to pick
⏹️ ▶️ John One particular operation that does much faster than its predecessor But apparently that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John what the slide actually said. And I was reminded of the Simpsons episode where Homer or somebody
⏹️ ▶️ John goes to a lawyer and he’s got a business card and the lawyer asks him for money. And he says, but your business card says you work on contingency,
⏹️ ▶️ John no money down. And he says, oh, I see your problem. And he takes the business card. It says, works
⏹️ ▶️ John on contingency, no money down. He adds a question mark after contingency and a comma
⏹️ ▶️ John after no and an exclamation point after down. It says, works on contingency? No, money down.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what the slide actually said was 50% faster, tessellation.
⏹️ ▶️ John 50% faster is its own thing. And then tessellation, because it has a capital T and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s its own bullet point, is telling you it does tessellation. And also, overall,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is 50% faster. So it’s my bad for not catching the capital T.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it has tessellation and multi-layered rendering, which is the thing that apparently the previous review didn’t have at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in general, it is 50% faster. So I apologize for missing
⏹️ ▶️ John the capitalization and sliding the GPU in the iPhone 10s,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is apparently 50% faster up to 50% up
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to. Yeah, yeah, Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specs are always up to whenever they’re talking about relative performance, like the CPU is up to 50% faster, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But then it’s like, actually, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t just say 50% faster, because it’s always not I can use it for a test or on some things. it’ll be yeah.
Home-screen rotation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve Schouten-Smith has discovered that neither the Tennis or the Tenor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a landscape home screen despite both being Plus layout models. So let’s unpack that just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how I unpack that. Thank God! Yeah, all the Plus phones before have had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this wonderful feature where like an iPad if you rotated the phone to landscape the home screen would rotate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, sort of. Basically, it was terrible. Like during the during the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco admittedly brief times that I used the Plus phones in the past, I would always enable the system-wide rotation lock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for many reasons but this was one of them that I thought this was actually worse than, you know, like it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better for me to have rotation lock on and always have to manually unlock it whenever I wanted to watch a video or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than to constantly have my home screen automatically rotating which I really, really never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted it to do. So the fact that these phones are in many ways adopting the Plus layout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and doing things like multi-column and messages and mail and stuff like that which I also hated by the way. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they’re adopting a lot of that, but they didn’t adopt the rotating home screen. That is a very good thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope that is not an oversight. I hope there’s actually a decision.
⏹️ ▶️ John This reminds me of the, the accelerated timeline in which you came to
⏹️ ▶️ John the decision, I thought it was always the right one for overcast five, which we’ll talk about later, which is when there’s a system
⏹️ ▶️ John wide feature for something like rotation lock or whatever. But users
⏹️ ▶️ John want to override an individual applications. I remember when system system-wide rotation lock came to
⏹️ ▶️ John what was then I think it was still iPhone OS. One of my favorite applications, Twitterific, said, oh, system-wide
⏹️ ▶️ John rotation lock, we can finally take that feature out of our Twitter client. And it has annoyed me ever since. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John the one application that I tend to read laying on my side in the bed is Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Using Twitterific. I would love it if, like, Twitterific version 2, I had a rotation lock
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Twitterific app. Because I almost never want to run Twitterific and allow rotation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do want to allow rotation when I watch videos on my phone or whatever like so Every night
⏹️ ▶️ John I turn on rotation rock lock read some tweets laying down Put my phone away wake
⏹️ ▶️ John up in the morning Do something with my phone eventually in the morning or afternoon and realize rotation lock is still
⏹️ ▶️ John on turn it off blah blah so I think there is an advantage to having
⏹️ ▶️ John a per application setting for a feature and also a system wide one that said
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re crazy if every single setting has the system wide amount on the per application one and it’s a redundant it can be confusing
⏹️ ▶️ John and yada yada so you got to use it judiciously what I’ve done with the the 10 max is or
⏹️ ▶️ John 10s max is not have a setting for it but just say there’s no more landscape
⏹️ ▶️ John like if you liked it sorry because it’s just not there anymore but it is effectively a per application
⏹️ ▶️ John override of a system setting which I think makes sense because I hated the rotating home
⏹️ ▶️ John screen and my wife had a plus phone as well so anyway I totally endorse the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of selectively judiciously allowing per application overrides of system wide settings because
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes that’s what people want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would also say I would very much support the idea that people have floated. I think Gruber did the two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having a setting where nothing in the system rotates except video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos. That would be awesome. Now there right now that I don’t think there’s any standard API to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to identify like a view controller in your app as this is displaying a photo. You know, so like they’d have to add some API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make this work with apps. But boy, would that be nice like that? Because I think so many people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what they want. Like I like I think when you know when the phones first came out and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like the world got used to multitouch interfaces and everything else, the idea of rotation was a fun novelty.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in some cases, like when viewing the you know, visual media, maybe when reading certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, but even that I think is rare. Usually it’s like when viewing photos or video or take or using the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want rotation for that in almost nothing else do people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually want rotation anymore so like my solution with overcast i i had that problem john of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know first i like i and i had i even had the same problem with instapaper because that instapaper
⏹️ ▶️ John i was referring to the over overcast thing that we’ll talk about later but yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah but like you know like i supporting rotation in apps has always been difficult and a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit buggy here and there. It’s easy to support it on one screen, but it becomes really tricky when,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco open a web browser, let it rotate, okay, then the web browser closes. The user goes back to a controller
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can’t rotate. Does it appear sideways? What happens if they turn the phone, or if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hold the phone the same way there for a while? Does it stay kind of in this half-rotated state? It’s very, very strange.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iOS handling of rotation has changed a lot over the years for developers, and it’s never made it easier. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always made it more complicated and more buggy. They just move the bugs around. So my position is not only should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple offer a system-wide toggle for this rotation lock except video and photos,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but also I don’t think almost any app should support rotation at all. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only apps that need to support rotation are the ones that display things like that. Most apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need support. Like I dropped rotation support from Overcast in just like a point release in the 4.x series, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know, maybe six months ago, and almost no one complained. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, and it saved me so much work when I was doing this redesign for 5, which we’ll talk about. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much less work and so much less buggy to make screens that didn’t have to rotate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it would have been with that. So huge wins for the developer, huge wins for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stability of the app and the UI by just dropping rotation to put it all together.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, when I think about phone rotation, usually to do
⏹️ ▶️ John it successfully, you have to, you have to change your grip you
⏹️ ▶️ John most of the time I imagine people have to bring up their second hand if they’re you know if you’re gonna if you’re gonna switch
⏹️ ▶️ John from I’m reading something in portrait to I’m watching something in landscape very often the other hand
⏹️ ▶️ John appears to hold the phone a different way or to read shuffle or whatever so
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe this is too complicated a gesture and I have to try it to see if it’s a good idea but sometimes I think about like
⏹️ ▶️ John the two finger twist motion that you can do you can do it on the Mac I think you can do in some phone apps too for rotation, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know? If I could just put my two fingers on whatever it is on the screen and literally rotate it,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like a per app setting, it’s like I’m looking, you know, let me give you the stupid example, when people post incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John blurry 10 times recompressed images of text on Twitter, I can’t read them when my phone is in portrait
⏹️ ▶️ John because the text is microscopic, but if I go to landscape, it’s, you know, wide enough that I can maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John read the text. You actually read those? Yeah, well sometimes. I would love to be able to just grab that
⏹️ ▶️ John image and rotate it with my two fingers. It’s not a gesture that’s used for anything else. It doesn’t do anything now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some applications do do it as rotation, so it’s not unprecedented. It may just be awkward to do because I think
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably would need the second hand, but that would get around the like, oh, like it’s certainly easier than swipe
⏹️ ▶️ John up from the bottom, turn off rotation lock, rotate the phone, wait for the accelerometers to catch that I’m rotating. Oh, they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t catch it. Put it back straight again. Put it sideways. You know that dance. Just let me twist the image. It
⏹️ ▶️ John may be awkward off to try it, but I would love for some app makers to try that out.
St. Jude fundraiser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re going to take a quick break that’s not a sponsor break, but a break for something that is near and dear to all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of our hearts. Our very, very, very close and dear friend, Stephen Hackett and his family
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have had the unfortunate situation of having dealt with childhood cancer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And September, at least in America, is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month. And as he does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every year, Stephen Hackett tries to raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is an absolutely incredible and tremendous place that happens to be in his hometown of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Memphis, Tennessee, where families that are affected by childhood cancer can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey treatment and get that treatment for free. And the reason that works is because of donations from people like you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, you, the person listening to me right now. I’m talking to you. I know we’ve all spent a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of money on things. Maybe I actually should talk about that. Maybe there is more follow-up as it turns out. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ve all potentially spent a lot of money on things that make our lives better, but that’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for us. And it would be cool if we could make other people’s lives better. So if you, dear listener,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the person that is listening to me right now, have even a dollar that you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spare, think about that coffee or that Diet Coke or that hot cocoa that you drank today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Could you have maybe spent that couple of bucks and helped childhood cancer? You want to be cool,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Help kids get over cancer. So give some money to St. Jude if at all possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As we record, it is Wednesday evening, the 19th. There has been $16,652 funds raised by the Hackett
⏹️ ▶️ Casey family and everyone else for St. Jude.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love if we could push that over his $20,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goal as quickly as possible. So I think all three of us have donated. If not, we will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get on that immediately. I actually had to donate via PayPal. That’s how serious this was because for some reason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wouldn’t accept my credit card, But I did not want to go without donating, and so I used PayPal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that disgusting, awful service, in order to give money to St. Jude. That’s how serious I am. So if possible,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please go to the link in the show notes and give even but a dollar to St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Children’s Research Hospital. You could spend your money in much, much, much worse ways. Please, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would mean a lot to all of us, and especially to Stephen Hackett and his family. So if you have a minute and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you can, please send your money that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you don’t know about St. Jude’s, the thing that always strikes me about it is like, you know, if you’re a family dealing with childhood
⏹️ ▶️ John cancer, it is a terrible situation to be in and St. Jude’s will treat your child
⏹️ ▶️ John and you never see a bill. Like so it’s one less thing you have to worry about. Like you don’t have to worry about
⏹️ ▶️ John your kid with cancer and also dealing with medical bills. Like that’s the that’s the magic of it. And the only way that works,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, because our entire system of government is broken, is by individual people giving money. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can feel good about giving that money because it’s not just, you know, fighting cancer and helping kids. It is also
⏹️ ▶️ John relieving the entire question of how are we going to pay for the cancer
⏹️ ▶️ John treatment for my child. Your money helps families not have to worry about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s really hard to come up with better causes than this. Like yeah, I’m sure they exist,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but boy, are they hard to think about. This is kind of a no-brainer. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can spare anything, this is a really, really great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause and is a way better idea than yet another iPhone case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, or yet another iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So yeah, please send your money that way. We will have a link in the show notes and it will be very hard to miss.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So please, even just a dollar. Don’t think that’s not enough. That’s enough. A dollar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just do that. Or even more would be better. But a dollar is great. So please send some money
Apple fundraiser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To continue the follow-up I thought we missed, or I thought we were done with, I should say, what did we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order? I feel like we should quickly take care of that. I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is a terrible thing to do right after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that. We all
⏹️ ▶️ John gave money to St. Jude’s, and after we gave money to St. Jude’s, we gave money to Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s true. That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is our priority system. This is a terrible segue, but I’m committed now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please don’t buy a new iPhone, but I bought a new iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Well, let’s see. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can tell you with an honest heart, I can tell you that I have donated a pile of money to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey St. Jude’s and I have pre-ordered precisely nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I almost achieved the greatness that would be only John buying the year’s new iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Almost, but not quite. As foretold in Slack when you said, you know, I’m really thinking about not
⏹️ ▶️ John getting the new phone and I said, narrator colon, you got it. Yeah. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, because so two things changed between when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last week was saying, you know, I’m not that excited about it. And you know, this week when when I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ordered it, one was which John kind of mentioned during the show that I hadn’t thought of was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trading value. So it isn’t a question of spending zero or, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, twelve hundred dollars or whatever it is. It was a question of spending like six hundred dollars, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco admittedly is still a ton of money for what is a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minor update to the phone. So I had to, you know, really, I’m still not excited
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have spent this money on this, but the other thing that convinced me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was seeing all the stuff about the camera, especially seeing Gruber’s review and seeing some of the sample pictures and what it can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. I did quickly breeze by last week like, smart HDR, if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a real thing, could be really useful to me. And it does seem from the sample pictures that all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reviews have, it seems like smart HDR is a real thing and the sensor being larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a pretty big deal. You know, this isn’t gonna replace a full-frame camera,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it can’t with physics and cost, but it does seem like the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is noticeably better in both software and in hardware and that gives it enough value to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, the better speakers and better stereo and video, like once I started thinking about all this stuff, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, actually I would actually really like that stuff because I’m really into sound and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it all added up to be like okay I wouldn’t be happy to spend $1,200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a minor speed bump but to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spend 600 on a significantly better camera that actually
⏹️ ▶️ John and you get a fresh battery too and also the the smart HDR stuff also happens when you do
⏹️ ▶️ John panoramas it also happens when you take a still photo during video and the video has that
⏹️ ▶️ John thing where it’ll drop the frame rate down to 24 to get extra light on each frame if you take it from bright in the middle of
⏹️ ▶️ John a video if you take it from a bright into a dim scene so all sorts of stuff to help in challenging
⏹️ ▶️ John situations where previously again the previous film would have taken a movie that looked okay until you turn
⏹️ ▶️ John towards the interior and everything’s all shady and it couldn’t see anything and now maybe it’ll salvage something you’d be able to see people’s faces
⏹️ ▶️ John right and yeah the smart HDR sort of being thread throughout the entire system, not just like
⏹️ ▶️ John for one particular still image in a particular mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, a lot of people have pointed out also that there’s noticeably less shutter lag, and that’s also very important. I miss a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of shots because of shutter lag. And so to have that be reduced in a noticeable way is pretty impressive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and pretty important to me. Oh, and also my my screen is probably going to be a lot less scratched.
⏹️ ▶️ John most durable screen ever, they say. We’ll see what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means. Yeah, well, somebody I think I think it was Gruber. Somebody got clarification that that clarification, quote unquote,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s with durable, because like, you know, durability, like they said the same thing about the 10 screen, but it was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most easily scratched iPhone screen, I think, in the history of iPhones. Because what they meant with durable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was it wouldn’t shatter as easily.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the clarification was, by the way, it was about is it scratch resistance or durability? And Apple said, it’s both,
⏹️ ▶️ John which gives you no information. It’s like, okay, okay, it’s both? It’s the most durable
⏹️ ▶️ John screen ever in both? Is it the most scratch resistant screen ever? And is it also the most shatter resistant?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s both. I don’t know what they mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what specifically did you order? What color, what size, et cetera?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Tiff got a 10S Max, is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Same thing, but Max and gold. So not the same thing at all, except the 256 part.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was with you for the record. If you had just let that go, I wouldn’t have thought twice about it. All right, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not gotten any treats, like I said, however, my intention is I am going to try to go to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey local Apple store Friday morning, not necessarily to pick anything up, although if it happens to work out, sweet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I would really like to try on new watches. My intention is to buy a new watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eventually, but as of this time, I have not ordered anything, and I’d really prefer to see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on my wrist before I do so. So I’m going to probably try on Friday morning, laugh as it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complete disaster of a zoo, and then try again in like a week or two and see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is very, very wise. Because on the watch front, again, the sizes are so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different, and they will look so different because of the screen size difference inside the case body. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a few different ways you can go in this. Like in this week’s excellent episode of Cortex,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CJB Gregory, our friend who’s not gonna hear this, was talking about how he went for the bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch because he always likes big watches. He wants the biggest watch he can get, even before the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watches, he liked big watches. and he wants the biggest screen he can possibly get on his wrist, because he uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a watch that way. And then, conversely, the flip side is, like in John Gruber’s review, he mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how, like, you know, his review unit was the big one, but he said he’s kind of thinking maybe the small one, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while the big one can fit, he might be able to get away with merely the small one. And that’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how I think about it. Like, I’m not a huge watch person. There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain amount of, kind of just delight in having a watch that’s very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very small, but still looks good on you. One of my favorite watches is my Nomos Minimatic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is 35 millimeters. It is the smallest watch I own. It weighs nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is incredibly thin. It sits small on the wrist, but it has a super thin bezel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as I was mentioning last week, regarding how watch size looks with bezel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thickness, having a super thin bezel, so the dial kinda goes edge to edge, makes it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look like a bigger watch than the 35 millimeters that it is. And I’ve been wearing that watch most of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past week because I just, I mean, it’s one of my favorites and I get a certain amount of pleasure out of like, this thing is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small and lightweight, it feels like I’m not wearing anything at all, but I’m getting all the utility of it. And there’s a certain amount of pleasure in that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially when it’s hot or whatever else. And so even if you could get the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big Apple Watch, you may want the small one because it may be big enough that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s functional to you, but maybe you can get away with the smaller size you had before because of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new screen dimensions and everything. So this is again, strong recommendation to go to a store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and try them first.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin Yep, and that is my intention. John, however, it is your year,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my friend. It is your year for an upgrade. So have you already ordered and if so, what did you get?
⏹️ ▶️ John John Walker Apparently, I got an iPhone XS leather case because it’s sitting in front of me right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve McLaughlin That’s the joy of when it’s your year to You get the iPhone, you get the experience,
⏹️ ▶️ John your case being delivered before your phone. Because for the past several years, that’s been true. You make your order, you buy your phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John you buy your case, the case comes first. You get to sit and stare at it for a day or two or a week or whatever, and then eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone comes to put it in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like in the old days where AppleCare would come a week before your Mac would? Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John a little box and a piece of paper. I got, what did I get? I got the
⏹️ ▶️ John Space Gray 25610S. I didn’t want the dishwater white one.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, when I found out that the bottom of them, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, that they’re not symmetrical, they have the extra antenna line and the different holes, I figured black will hide that sin a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John better than the shiny silver. So yeah, that’s true. That’s what I got. And I have a black
⏹️ ▶️ John leather case for it. It’s supposed to arrive tomorrow, no, Friday, it’s supposed to arrive Friday,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I’ll be off to the races. Oh, I upgraded my wife’s phone to iOS 12 finally, now
⏹️ ▶️ John that the official one is out, And I put my face on it and it’s so much nicer.
⏹️ ▶️ John nicer than entering in her password to unlock that thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, because now iOS 12 added you could have a second face. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey right. Oh, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I got to do that on Aaron’s phone and on my phone. Oh, I completely forgot about that. Good call.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, I must have set a reminder to do that tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait, wait, before we move on, did Marco get a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch? Don’t tell me about that, Marco. I don’t want to know
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. Did you get a watch? Of course I did. Yeah, so you tried to let him get by without mentioning that he got the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all people will understand my reasoning here.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, here we go. This is going to be good. It was better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the watch DTI. It was $10,000 better. All right, so owners of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 12 inch MacBook frequently will upgrade that thing as soon as there’s a new version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out because it is so freaking slow. Any upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is actually a meaningful difference to how usable it is to them. Like I have never seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people with as much of a love-hate relationship as people have with the 12-inch MacBook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because everyone loves how small it is and it’s cute and that’s great. I see the appeal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is just so slow and so when a new one comes out that’s like 20%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faster or something and you know something like that you jump on it you buy it because even though it’s so slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re like this will actually be a meaningful difference because I’m I’m so often limited by the slowness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this thing, right? That’s how I am with the Apple Watch, with developing an app for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Watch. App development on the Apple Watch is infuriating. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly frustrating and just grueling. Anytime you have to do a build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and run, which is where you’re editing your code and Xcode, you can run your code in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco simulator that they give you that runs on your Mac. It’s a separate app called the simulator, and that’s the fastest way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see your code, build your code and see it running is in the simulator. But if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run it on the real device, you got to plug the device in if it’s a phone and you know hit build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and run with the phone as the target and it takes a little bit longer and then it pops up on the phone. On the watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the difference between I mean even the simulator is slow for the watch which is hilarious I don’t know why it’s slow but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is and then maybe it’s accurately simulating the watch and then when you do a build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and run with the watch itself as the hardware target which Which really is like you plug your phone in and you say run
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Marco’s phone plus Marco’s watch and then it says not available for development half the time even though it’s available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for development and then you got to reboot the watch and reboot the phone and close Xcode maybe reboot your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe someday it’ll actually work anyway when you eventually get it to work and build on the watch it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 45 seconds and that’s if it works much of the time I would even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say the majority of the time it takes that long and then it says timeout
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t work I don’t know or my favorite thing is it says running on markers watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s not running at all like great thanks you have no idea what’s going on and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neither do I and there’s no rhyme or reason to it anyway even in the best-case scenario
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it actually does work that build and run cycle can take like 45 seconds or something like it’s it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long cycle the reason I’ve created the series 3 when it came out because I was already kind of not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wearing it much but I upgraded to the Series 3 because I was doing some a lot of watch work and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was like and Underscore told me that like one of his tests that he ran like the difference between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Series 2 and Series 3 deployment time for that build and run thing it would save him like 10 or 15 seconds each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time and I’m like done I will spend a thousand dollars to do that like that’s how infuriating this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this this delay play is because unlike the phone, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff works differently between the simulator and the hardware with the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the phone simulator, you can develop entirely in the simulator of the phone for lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different types of apps and different capabilities and it works pretty well. You don’t really need the hardware for much with the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With the watch, especially when you’re doing audio stuff, you need the hardware a lot to see like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how does this actually behave with the integration with the now playing stream? How does this actually behave with background audio? How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does this actually behave with AirPod controls? Or the connection and disconnection and presence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of AirPods or other Bluetooth headphones? How does it integrate with the watch faces? Stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so hard to do Apple Watch development without deploying frequently onto the watch hardware itself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is a very common thing I have to do where I have to build and run the watch and sit there and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wait and wait and wait. And that kind of waiting destroys not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only developer morale, but productivity. Because what you do while you’re waiting is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, I’m not gonna stare at the screen for 45 seconds for it to maybe work, I’m gonna go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read my RSS reader, or check my email, or check a social thing, and browse the web,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so you just get derailed because you’re just stuck waiting so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s no good, that’s one of the reasons why developers can justify, and totally reasonably,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like iMac Pros, computers that make their job faster, to make this build cycle faster, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t have this fast feedback loop from, okay, made a change, let me see it running, let me see if it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you don’t have that, it really can crush your productivity and your morale. It’s very frustrating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it really does have an impact. So, anything I can do to get the watch build cycle to be faster,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will do. Then I had the question, do I get the aluminum or the steel? Before Series 3, I only got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco steel. The other day, I was cleaning out a desk drawer full of like old tech gadgets and cables
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and crap like that. And I pulled out my old Series Zero Apple Watch. And I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugged it in in probably two years, because the Series Zero is miserable. So I haven’t plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in two years. It was the steel one. And I didn’t even have it on a strap. I had long since removed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the strap from it so I could move it on to better, newer watches. And so it’s just like the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco body itself, the little round wreck blob of steel and stuff. And I picked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up this thing in this drawer I was cleaning out, I kind of twirled it around on my hands, and it’s beautiful. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love the way the steel Apple Watch looks. It’s a really nice looking smartwatch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a decent looking watch. It’s really, really nice. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aluminum ones, more power to you if you like them. I do not think the aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones are attractive at all. And again, if you like it, I’m not saying this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to crap on everyone out there, to crap on your watch preferences. If you like it, that’s great. everyone’s fashion preference is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different. I really don’t like them. And so when I had the steel watches,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would find more excuses to wear them, even though it wasn’t very frequent, admittedly. But I would wear them more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I had the aluminum with the Series 3 this past year, I figured now I’m wearing it less than ever, I’ll get the aluminum
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s a waste to get the steel. I had the aluminum Series 3, and I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is one of the ugliest products Apple has ever made. And part of that’s the giant red dot. Part of it’s the thickness of the Series 3 being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so ridiculously thick. And part of it is just like, I don’t like this finish. And so now my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usage of the Apple Watch has gone from occasional to only when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco testing overcast and wanting to take it off as soon as possible when I get back from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a walk or whatever. And that’s not good for my app. Because increasingly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the Apple Watch first came out, I was seeing something like, I don’t know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5% of people using it in the app, something like that. Now it’s like 15, 20%, it keeps going up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For me to not use the watch ever is not good for my app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I rationalized myself getting the steel this time, even though I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not gonna wear it a ton, because when I have the steel, I feel good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it. I look at it and I think, that’s a nice looking watch. I actually feel like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks good, to the point where maybe I won’t take it off right when I get home. Maybe I’ll wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for a whole day at a time, or for a whole week at a time, instead of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco treating it like some kind of medical device that I want to get off me as soon as possible. So that’s how I rationalize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It’ll be, not only do I want the Series 4 in general for the development speed up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I also went for steel, even though it seems a little ridiculous, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly think it will make me wear it more, which will be better for my app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I honestly can’t see the difference between steel and aluminum. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John maybe if you had them next to each other— Good! If you can’t, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John great! Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I agree. You can see the difference. You’re just saying like normal distances on your wrist is not a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that stands out to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you. Well, that’s the thing. Like, I cannot remember a time I’ve looked at somebody’s wrist and been like, oh, that’s a steel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve only ever looked at them and said, like, once or twice I saw the original edition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and thought, oh my God, are you kidding me with that? But the point I’m driving at is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting here now, I don’t recall a time I’ve looked at a watch and been like, oh, that’s a steel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch. Now I completely agree. I’m sure if you set them side by side, I would think, oh, well, that’s obviously steel and that’s obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aluminum. But I mean, just sitting here and I don’t see them as that different. And I’m surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you have such a strong reaction to the aluminum versus the steel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just seems so illogical to me. And I’m not actually trying to say you’re wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my eyes it just seems so weird that you would have such a strong reaction but hey man you do you I mean you said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same thing like this is taste.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s it’s fashion it’s it’s visual it’s fashion it’s totally irrational
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s that’s it’s fashion it’s real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco irrational and if you don’t see this the same way that’s a really good thing because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey can save a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So John you didn’t order any watches for either you or Tina is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m so not sure I’m gonna for all of Marco’s extensive rationalizations of why he’s gonna do the thing We all knew he was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna do anyway Mine will be even worse because
⏹️ ▶️ John I wear my watch like
⏹️ ▶️ John less than even Marco does So it’ll be really ridiculous for me to buy one
⏹️ ▶️ John again like what how long was the series zero four years five years old? I think I got a lot of mileage out of it So I could
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s probably my rationalization be like look you wear it two times a year But if you keep it for five years,
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, I gotta see what they look like in person See if I think it will actually motivate me to wear it
⏹️ ▶️ John three times a year instead of two or whatever But yeah, I’m not doing anything involving the watch until
⏹️ ▶️ John I see them in real life, which I haven’t yet Oh, we did get a phone for my daughter though.
⏹️ ▶️ John She got after much hemming and hawing She got an eight with a supposed promise that she has
⏹️ ▶️ John to use it for the next three years. Oh Ooh, that’s bold. Yeah, we’ll see if it survives.
⏹️ ▶️ John I opted for the theft and loss protection because I know my daughter.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey In addition to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey drop and whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a giant case and we’ll see how this goes
Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Eero. Finally, Wi-Fi that works. What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to cover a lot of people’s houses or apartments with actual good coverage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high performing Wi-Fi in every single room and maybe into the backyard and front yard too is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multi-point Wi-Fi. Because no matter how many antennas you shove onto one router, it’s still not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to get through things like certain materials of walls or certain layouts of rooms. It just does, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi is not perfect. It needs to be broadcast from multiple points to actually have good coverage. That’s how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physics works. So, Eero brings this to you in a really incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco package, to be honest. I’ve used it myself. It is really, really nice. So here’s how this works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have the Eero base station, and all the Eero radios are very high-end. They have three 5GHz
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radios in there. They’re tri-band. The second generation one is twice as fast as the one that came before, which is already
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty great. I’ve used them both. They’re already great. really really fast high-end hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco packaged into really nice small attractive packaging so you have the base station
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which kind of looks like an Apple TV but white and then you have the beacons these are the satellite units you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to run wires to them you just put them you plug them into the wall and they look kind of like big nightlights almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re super nice super lean they sit flush against the wall right right on the outlet they even can be nightlights they even have little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LEDs if you want to use them that way and then the base station and beacons communicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wirelessly with each other and form this giant mesh that blankets your house in fast, reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coverage. It’s way better than one router and it’s way easier to set up and manage too. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great app, they have support if you need it, but I bet you won’t. It’s super easy, it’s the easiest router setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve ever seen, mesh or not. So check it out yourself at Eero.com, that’s E-E-R-O.com. overnight
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HomePod multiple timers
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was so excited to test out the new feature of the HomePod, multiple named
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timers. I said like I said on multiple episodes in the past, like this is like the one big feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it needed to make it more useful in my kitchen, they finally added that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it almost works! Almost? Almost! So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been testing it for the last couple of days since I installed the update. Oh Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It works in the most Siri way possible. The basic functionality of it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco indeed work most of the time in the sense that you can say so like earlier today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like so I was making two cups of tea. I was making a cup of green tea and a cup of black tea.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Green tea you got to brew for a short time, otherwise it gets really bitter. So I said start a green
⏹️ ▶️ Marco timer for two minutes and then a couple minutes later once the water got hotter and I poured it into the black tea,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I said start a black timer for five minutes and it properly knows it then it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say okay green timer set when I would ever whatever and you can ask it how much time is left on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco green timer and it it’ll say your green timer has two minutes left. When the timer goes off, it’ll make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this little chime that’ll say green timer is done or something, you know, something like that. It’ll announce which timer is done. So these are the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basics, good. The inconsistency I’m seeing, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is Siri tries to be smart with what you tell it. So I’ve talked in the past about the Amazon family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of cylinders that one of the things I like is that you can be, you can kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speak like a programmer and it won’t, it’ll take what you say pretty literally. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to start the sauce in five minutes, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can with an Amazon Echo device say, start a start the sauce timer for five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes. And it’ll say, okay, start the sauce timer five minutes. And in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five minutes, it’ll say, your start the sauce timer is done. So you can actually include like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bit of phrasing in the name of the timer and it doesn’t get tripped up by that. Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a problem with everything I do with it, including with reminders, with other types
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of intents, like using, creating things in things. Siri will kind of jumble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you say to it that sounds like part of the command, even if it’s part of what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think of as a parameter that you’re passing to the request you’re making. So it’s really hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to create a reminder that’s called something like, remind me in five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes to remember the milk, because then it’ll create a reminder that says something like the milk,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’ll see, remember, as part of the phrase of creating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a reminder, even though you already said different words for that, it’ll assume you just said it twice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. Like, it doesn’t, Siri’s not good at parsing those commands like that. Whereas the Amazon Assistant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is super literal, and it’ll, which is both good and bad in certain cases, but it was super literal in the sense that it would,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you can be, you can talk like a programmer to the Amazon one, and it gets it right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whereas Siri doesn’t. So like, one of the things you can do is you can say like, you know, start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a rotate chicken nuggets timer. And Siri got that right for me. But when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it came time to like, you know, start a start the oven timer for 15 minutes from now, it doesn’t get that right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s one thing against it. The main problem I have with it though, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco far, and hopefully this gets resolved over time, although honestly, knowing Siri, I’m not sure it will,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, so one time when I wanted to create a second timer, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was told today when the feature came out and I patched my HomePod like three days ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was told one time today in the middle of a sequence of doing these things, sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can only create one timer at once. Nice. I was like, oh yeah, really? I asked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the exact same thing with the exact same phrasing again and it said, okay, BlackTimer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco created five minutes ago. It knew.
⏹️ ▶️ John In the business, we call that green-blue deployment, Mark.
⏹️ ▶️ John version one servers are still floating around out there that hadn’t actually killed them all off. It’s a slightly botched screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boot. Yes, it’s so and this happens here all the time like it’s this is one of the biggest failure modes of Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like you you issue a command it just fails for some dumb reason that it shouldn’t have failed for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say the exact same thing again and it works like this happens all the time with Siri so it’s it’s it’s really disheartening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see that this still happens even with a brand new that fairly simple seeming feature right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also Also I’ve now set multiple timers, I think five or six times with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Three of those times, if you ask it for the status of all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the timers that are running, it has gotten it wrong and it has reported only one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s lots of different ways you can ask. On the Amazon things you can say timer check, timer status. On the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Siri I tried what, how much time is left on all of my timers? And try the big verbose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones. If it works properly, you can just say, hey Siri, timers, which is really nice. It’s like a nice short thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can say timer check, timer status, timer, you know. So whatever phrase I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for three of the timer sets, and it didn’t matter how often I asked after this point, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three of the sets of timers, when I asked what’s the statuses of all the timers, it gave me just one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them, usually the last one that was created. But the first one wasn’t canceled. You could still ask for the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like whichever one it wasn’t reporting, I could still ask for it by name, And it still went off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on time. So like, it’s still there, which is comforting, I guess it’d be worse if they just disappeared.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the fact that it’s still inconsistent, and they still, like, such a simple thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this was one of the only new features of the HomePod since, you know, April or something, and they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t even get this right on the server side, like it’s still intermittently failing for dumb reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, for God’s sakes, what is going on at Siri? This is such an almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great product. I really, I like the HomePod in so many ways. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as Amazon moves forward with their stuff, I generally trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them less, because it seems like they’re doing weird things sometimes with their setups, and they’re pushing it in weird directions. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I generally don’t trust Amazon to be a good steward of their platform long-term.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re gonna start doing weirder and weirder stuff with it, like with their weird voice chat stuff, and building in more things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They just want more of your info, and they want to dominate more of your life. And I know Amazon’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna ruin what they have because they always do with this kind of stuff. See also Kindles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I know they’re gonna ruin this. And so I want so badly to switch to the HomePod,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if it can’t do basic stuff reliably, come on. That’s the basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco requirement. I’m okay paying their crazy prices. I’m okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not having all the skills that the Amazon series has. I’m, I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it is a nicer looking thing, I love that it sounds way, way better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love all the privacy stuff that Apple does, it just has to work! And Siri
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still doesn’t do basic things reliably. What year is this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why hasn’t somebody changed this? Like, they have all the resources. Other companies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have demonstrated for years that it is possible to do this with way more reliable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco results than what Apple does I Got I mean if they’re not doing like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they’re doing with maps with like the big article that came out a few months back Or they’re doing this big reset of maps if they aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing that with Siri. I have serious concerns And I really I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope so badly they’re doing that because it something is deeply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functional and rotten about Siri that they can’t get basic stuff to work reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even some something as simple as this They like this is a critical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of infrastructure for the company and its products. They have to make a change
⏹️ ▶️ John I was joking before about blue-green deployment, which by the way Please don’t send me your emails and tweets about because I said
⏹️ ▶️ John green blue. I meant blue green. It’s fine Anyway, but it is the case of
⏹️ ▶️ John this feature just came out and you just updated your home pod So it could be just one of those transitional
⏹️ ▶️ John hiccups and if you try again like today for instance now that they transition all the way or wait a week or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John that all of the old servers that think they can only do one time or time at a time or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no this was right before the show this was the tea I just finished drinking this is like
⏹️ ▶️ John oh well here’s that there and honestly I don’t even know how much of that is server-side anyway so it is pretty baffling.
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Overcast 5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Congratulations, my friend, because you have shipped Overcast 5. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from my experience and from the experience of everyone I’ve seen comment on it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things are going pretty well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, thank you. You are right. I mean, it has really been very well received.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m very, very happy with it. So Overcast 5 is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty substantial redesign to the now playing screen. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did this for a lot of reasons. We can get into it if you want, but basically, it’s a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big redesign. So there was a lot of potential for people to dislike the change because nobody likes when you change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. Then they’ll email you asking you to change things. So it’s a very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard line to walk when you want to make a change to an app and please the old customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least not anger the old customers while making your app better for new customers. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very, very hard thing to do. And I have not always been very good at that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in this case, this worked out well. And the new now playing screen is way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more discoverable and usable and I think looks nicer than the old one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it has worked. There’s a lot of other things about the update too, but that’s the big thing. That was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing that I was most proud of and was most scared of the reaction.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t remember during the beta process if you had tried this or if it maybe was before
⏹️ ▶️ John the beta but did you ever try going with three dots under
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing instead of the things poking in from the sides I’m now playing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what Overcast 4 was. The only so there were a couple of issues with that so number one was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was really no good place to put the chapter title when you had the three dots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interface and you know this is a common you know iPhone interface thing that you know the three page
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dots that you get under anything that’s multiple pages and that indicates you can swipe this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there are multiple pages to this thing so I thought with the previous design just had the artwork edge to edge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big square and it was scrollable and on on you know on a page to the left was the like speed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and settings and stuff and on the page to the right was show notes I would I was getting emails every day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from people saying I would love your app if it had speed controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I changed the speed I I don’t know how to change it back. Everyone’s talking too fast, help. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was very clear to me from all sorts of feedback that the previous design just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was not discoverable enough. That those three dots, there were two problems. Number one, the three dots weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very discoverable even when they were shown. Number two, they were hidden and replaced with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chapter bar when podcasts had chapters. And it’s how I added this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature. When I was designing that screen, very few podcasts had chapters. So it wasn’t that big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a problem. Then I released an app that made it really easy to make chapters and this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably poor timing. So, then a lot more podcasts, especially those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco popular and overcast, started adding chapters. And so, the percentage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of time these dots would display was going down. But even when they were displayed, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of like most like novice users were listening to podcasts from like, you know, big producers, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never use chapters because they use low production value on the files despite all the money they spend on the production
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself. So, you know, most people weren’t seeing or weren’t having the dots hidden from them by the chapter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bar. Most people were seeing the dots, but they just weren’t noticing it or knowing what it meant. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is, this has been a problem that I faced with Overcast since 1.0 of anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is hidden behind a swipe or a gesture, any,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything that is not really visually obvious, visually is on screen, people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco won’t find and they won’t use and they’ll think the app just doesn’t have that feature or they’ll email me asking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that feature or they’ll get really mad because it doesn’t have the feature and all this time it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the feature but it just wasn’t in an obvious enough place in the design. My entire design arc
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Overcast for the last couple years has been slowly surfacing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco features visually instead of making things just behind swipes or just behind menus or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it else or just behind like the edit state of a controller or anything else like that because those things I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just people don’t find them and so the now playing screen like those the big swipey area
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on top that was just always a big problem with it that just nobody would ever find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two other pages so that’s the main thing I wanted to solve with this and if you look around like Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, Apple’s podcast app and the music app both have similar issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remember like, remember when the music app, I think it was iOS 10 or 11, when it first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put the repeat and shuffle buttons where you have to scroll the now playing screen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see them like below everything else, remember that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but there’s no affordance for that though, unless you have some content cut off. When there was no content cut
⏹️ ▶️ John off, like at least the dots give you something. Like what I was thinking with the dots with the Overcast 5 is, I
⏹️ ▶️ John always felt that Overcast 4, because it was edge to edge, right to left, it didn’t look like there
⏹️ ▶️ John was anything to the right or left. And then with the new design, just by shrinking the art to have margins
⏹️ ▶️ John around it, maybe even without like the things peeking out of the side, like this, this design with
⏹️ ▶️ John the dots would be more discoverable than the 4 design with the dots. Obviously I think it’s even more discoverable
⏹️ ▶️ John with the lines, but I wonder if people are going to figure out what it means that there’s these little gray lines on
⏹️ ▶️ John the side. I mean, you’ll find out, I guess, from the feedback, but I was thinking, like, why not belt and suspenders?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why not have things poking out from the side, little grip handles and three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dots? The main thing is, I mean, first of all, like, I would have the same problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with chapter stuff where, like, the best place to put chapters in this UI is right where the dots would go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, like, do you do the same thing where the dots are hidden when the chapters are shown? And then even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then, like, I’ve also moved the the main time slider down below the art,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before it was always above the art. Now it’s below the art, so it’s more easily reachable on super tall phones. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would look really crowded there with the three dots and then a small gap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then this time slider right there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you made the time slider so skinny. That’s one of the things I miss is being able to glance at it and see how much of orange
⏹️ ▶️ John is filled up. Is it a halfway orange or three quarters orange? Now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John this really skinny line with a little tiny dot. It’s much harder to read at a distance. It looks more
⏹️ ▶️ John elegant, but I’m not sure it is as Fisher-Price friendly as the old one was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, part of this is also just fashion. It’s app design fashion. App designs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, fashion’s come and go, trends come and go. The previous design was incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 70, and it was really looking dated to me, like very, very, very dated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you look around at where design trends are going now, it really is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away from a lot of like straight thin edge to edge lines and towards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot more like you know rounded shapes line widths of maybe like three pixels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you know 1.5 stroke kind of things like you know and and like like one little detail I have like on the scrubber
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the the actual like scrubber head of that timeline there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco background color stroke around it so what you see is a circle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small like one pixel gap and then the bar behind it. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a trend recently. Like, there’s stuff like that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want your app to look modern all the time, you have to evolve the design over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you don’t, your app looks old and stale and geeky and boring. And this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lesson I have slowly learned. I’m not all the way there yet. I’m not saying I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am. But I have slowly learned, like, I have to keep the design up to date. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to keep evolving it. I have to keep looking around and noticing what’s going on in the world of popular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, because I’m not making this app just for nerds like us. I’m making this app for the mass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market. That is my goal. It has always been my goal, and that is the audience that it thankfully has.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’m really having to pay attention to things like trends, and to things like keeping it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updated and fresh. So anyway, that’s where that came from. But anyway, so what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was saying earlier with the music thing, Laying out a now playing screen in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks nice, is modern, but also has a lot of functionality,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and also has a functionality be discoverable, is incredibly hard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m not the only person struggling with this. Like if you look around, music apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and especially podcast apps, because podcast apps have more features they have to cram into that screen, it’s a really big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenge of how the heck do you have a lot of accessible features there that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are also discoverable and also look nice. This is a challenge I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been struggling with for all of Overcast’s history. And again, look at every other app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including Apple’s. They have the same struggle. When Apple put the shuffle and repeat below
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the scroll thing on the music screen, no one found it. And then in the next version of iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple added a little help tip the first time you launched it, saying, did you know these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were down here? Which is like the worst way to solve that kind of problem. Even Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets this wrong sometimes because that’s how big of a design challenge it is. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m saying, I say design here, not in the sense of making it look pretty, because that isn’t what this kind of design is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is like deciding what should be on the screen and how it should be presented
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and how it should work. Like that’s the kind of design I’m talking about. And it’s just a really hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. And if you look around different podcast apps, we’ve all struggled with this exact same problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’ve all come up with different solutions to different degrees of success, but it’s a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard problem. So that’s one of the reasons I was so excited about this design that I think I actually have a pretty good solution this time. Like I think I finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got it right. For the first time in Overcast history, I finally got a modern looking design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is also highly functional and also highly discoverable. And the rest of the app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still have a lot of work to do, but the Now Playing Screen, I think I’m proud of that. I think it turned out well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I definitely like it. I never really had an issue with the side-to-side swipe, but I can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see how it would not be discoverable to a lot of people. And this looks good. I also like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey haptics that you’ve done with it. And I saw a tweet, I think earlier today, about how that’s been controversial, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought you did it very well. I didn’t think it was too aggressive. I thought it was good.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I was referring to before, where he’s turning it into a setting, because he
⏹️ ▶️ John started off saying, I don’t need this app as a setting. It’s a system-wide setting, but now some people want it system-wide, but not in Overcast, so it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting. Yeah, exactly. Like when I was, and actually I did the haptics pretty late in the beta. I’ve only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been using them myself for a few weeks. But there is a system wide setting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in iOS preferences to turn off haptics. And so I assumed that people who didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like haptics would just use that setting. But once again, just like rotation, there’s a lot of demand for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who want to leave that setting on for other ways the system uses haptics. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe live photo previewing, or peak and pop previewing, stuff like that. there’s lots of other ways to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use this haptic notifications. But so the people they want that to be on, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t want it in certain apps. And at first, I thought that would be almost nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who would want that turns out it’s a decent number of people. So I’m gonna add a preference.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyone pretty haptic gravy like when you when you do the side to side swipe on the huge region at the top, you get a haptic just
⏹️ ▶️ John in case you can’t tell that something changed when you swipe like literally the whole top half of the screen to the right or left, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the button presses where it makes more sense. Because you’re like, did I hit the button? Is my finger too dry that I just brush it? The haptics says, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, it registered. It registered my thing, but I feel like we’re doing it at the swipe at the top is a little overboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but see, this is like, everyone has a different opinion of what is overboard. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the reaction to the haptics was simply, this is too much, I would just turn, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would just like, you know, remove some of them or tune them down or whatever. And by the way, I don’t actually have a whole lot of control over like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the strength of them or the style of them. The system provides a very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of preset haptics you can fire. And they have semantic meanings attached to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. The API, it’s things like notification haptic, it’s things like impact,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where one view slides up and hits another one, like when a screen slides into place and locks into place.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s one for selection changed. And you’re supposed to use these semantically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supposed to like you know not use the wrong you know named haptic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though it might feel better for what you think you’re doing and so I thought by following
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these guidelines and by you know by using them semantically and everything else that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would like it and a lot of people love it but enough people don’t love it that I need a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well they’re all wrong because I love it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like it too a lot for whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s worth what about a a watch playback that’s back that’s exciting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah this that’s really exciting that i i almost have forgotten about it because it was the first thing i did this summer that seems like forever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago now but it was like i’m so freaking happy like overcast history
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with watch standalone playback is long and colorful and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly awful because it’s a feature that i tried to do a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time ago and I don’t know watch OS yeah watch OS 3 when I was doing the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS 3 version I tried to do it I don’t think I ever said this anywhere the reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried to do it was because somebody at Apple had asked me to do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when somebody from Apple asked you to do something you say yes that’s that’s generally good for your app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like he probably should say yes to that and and so I thought well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know if they’re asking I you know I’ll prioritize this so I spent like three months on it. I discovered during the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco course of that three months that the API was just totally impossible to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make this good or functional. It was especially frustrating because like you know somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there had asked me to do it so I assumed like they had probably checked with someone and they knew it was possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it just wasn’t and I was just battling the API for months and I lost a good three months on this and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was very demoralizing and very frustrating. Later on in watchOS 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple apps came out that offered this and they used a trick where they basically identified themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a certain type of workout monitoring app, but without actually needing to use HealthKit for anything. Like, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was just some kind of fluke where, like, if you put the certain key in your plist or your watch app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could use a much better API. You could use AV audio file player instead of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WK audio file player, which is terrible. You could use this much better in-process API. I think I’ve talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this before, but, like, in-process versus out-of-process. At least I have it under the radar. And so this became possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decided you know what I already built almost everything else for this feature with minimal effort
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can use this workaround and ship this feature like today so I did then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overcast or then watch OS 4 was slated to come out and I got a phone call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from some friends who said hey this is gonna stop working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason it worked was a bug we fixed the bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s not a fun phone call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nope and And they were very nice and apologetic about it, but it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear that they were not gonna unfix the bug just for me. And so I had to remove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this feature. Because I had this feature at one time, there are articles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there on the web that say, use Overcast to have offline watch playback. Okay?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they of course weren’t updated after I removed it. So I have gotten an email like every two days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the last year or so, sit from somebody saying, I can’t figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out how to send to my Apple Watch. This option is not showing up, I can’t figure it out what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. The real killer is at least half of those emails say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I even paid for the premium version and now I can’t find this feature, I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a refund. This feature was never behind the premium paywall. This is just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what people do. It’s like, it’s a common failing of like, they look for a feature that they heard was in an app, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there and they see an option to pay for a premium thing in the app. No one ever reads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything in text in apps. You can put whatever text you want in the app. They’re not going to read it. They see, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got to pay for something and I’m not finding this feature. Okay, I’ll pay. And now, now I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the feature, obviously, even though it never says that anywhere. But again, no one, no one reads texts and apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they, so they, I would, they would pay for it, still not find it and get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really mad. And they just got ripped off even though I never promised it, but that was, It doesn’t matter what I promised them, it matters
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s in their head. It was just a bad situation to be in, but I couldn’t really do much about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only thing I could do is offer that feature again. And so when watchOS 5 came out,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or when it was announced in June, and Apple actually made a lot of meaningful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco improvements and changes to the way watch background audio playback works, I could finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually offer this feature well. Not super well, because file transfers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still suck, but well enough to be shippable and functional again. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even better than it was before, honestly. And so I finally was able to do that. And that launched again two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days ago with Overcast 5, and I’m just so freaking happy that this is finally done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ve done a few changes for how it’s done. Like one of the main things is I’m now automatically syncing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your most recent X podcast to your watch rather than making you send them individually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which kind of helps minimize the problem of transfers just taking forever because they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over Bluetooth. But overall it’s so nice. You can finally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like take only your watch out for a run with headphones and it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s super awesome and I actually haven’t had a chance to use this yet because I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gone for a run once I had the new beta installed and all that. but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super exciting and I’m really looking forward to trying it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah and volume control this was fun too. So by far the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common feature request besides standalone watch playback maybe even more common than that for the watch app has always been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume control in the watch app. This wasn’t possible in the API. There was no API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I could use to programmatically control the volume of watch playback ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there is one that you can use to programmatically control volume of the iPhone. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API to do that on the phone is deprecated. I didn’t want to build a major feature against an API that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been deprecated for like five years because that means Apple can remove it at any time and or I could start getting rejected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for using it. And so the process, so basically I had a watch app that didn’t have volume control.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WatchOS 4 introduced a feature, which is nice when it’s what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want, introduced a feature that by default it’s called something like audio apps, but you know, active audio apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like that, it’s in the watch settings. The feature is that when you are playing an audio app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone and you glance at your watch, that app, if it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a watch app that’s installed, it will show up even if it wasn’t your last used watch app. So it kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco auto launches your current phone audio app on your watch when it’s playing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is a nice feature. The problem is that my app didn’t have a volume control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and AirPods came out and AirPods have no good way to control the volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the AirPods. And so there was all of a sudden a very popular Bluetooth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphone that had no volume control on it, which is pretty unusual. Almost every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bluetooth headphone before it had volume control. So this was like a new issue with AirPods. They were also very popular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had no volume control, and there’s a feature of watchOS that brought the audio app that was currently playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the front automatically. And most people left it on, it was on by default. So I got a lot of people saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the best way to use Overcast on your watch is to delete Overcast off your watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because if you deleted it, then the now playing card from the system would show up and that had a volume control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it. And I couldn’t match that. In my head, I couldn’t do my own volume control because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API wasn’t there for it. And so the actual outcome was the best way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to listen to Overcast with AirPods was to delete it off your watch. That’s a terrible outcome!
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that was the reality of all of WatchOS 4. WatchOS 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally gave me a frickin’ volume widget that I could put in my interface, and they did it in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most bare-bones way possible. It is a pre-made widget. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only thing I can customize about it is the color of the line that goes around it. That’s it. Oh, and you can customize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether it’s controlling the watches volume or the phones volume. But you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t change it programmatically because the watch volume widget is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco private class. You can put it in a storyboard, but it is a private
⏹️ ▶️ Marco class that you can’t call from your code. Nice. You can’t assign it to an outlet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t modify its properties at runtime. So to offer a screen that has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both local volume control in one mode and watch volume control in another mode,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have two of those widgets in that sorted board. Just one of them’s hidden at any given time. It’s the craziest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hack that you have to do to make this work. It’s such a weird, like, bare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bones thing. But the fact is, it does work, and it takes up a fricking third of the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t care. It’s worth it because it’s such an important feature. So, finally I was able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco offer offline playback and volume control on the watch. And those are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major, major feature requests that a lot of people had. And the API
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was too limited before, I couldn’t offer either of them through no fault of my own. And of course, people don’t know that, you know, they still, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they still kind of blame me for it not being there. And so, you know, to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to finally offer these things is a pretty big deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s awesome. I assume the next step is freshening up the rest of the UI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I’m not in a huge rush to do that, because it’s, I mean, any kind of like major UI change to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the basic screens of the app is a pretty big undertaking. Not as big as an app playing screen, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the biggest, I think. But the app playing screen took me like two months. That was a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Because it impacts so much other stuff, and there were so many other things that needed to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changed for it. So like all the card controllers, like the effects controller,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the chapter controller. The chapter controller didn’t exist before, it was part of show notes. The show notes controller, all these things have to be modified to fit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with it. All the buttons, I kind of modernized the look of all the buttons to match the new style.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, like the stroke width is changing on lots of the icons, it’s getting thicker. Some of them were restyled.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I totally rewrote the sleep timer because it sucked before and now it doesn’t, or it sucks less at least. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of things in it that had to get updated or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be modified in some way to work with the new layout. So doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that to other screens, while not as big of a deal, is still a lot of work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and at the end of it, what you get is something that a lot of users don’t care about.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s a hard balance. I have to balance between what I want to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a developer of like, I wanna make my app fresh and new. That’ll help get new customers and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But also, my existing customers, a lot of them don’t care about a redesign.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that’s kind of an indulgent thing that I do for me, and not for them so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They want features. And so, I have to balance how much time I spend. If I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a whole bunch of redesign stuff and not enough feature stuff, I’m kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neglecting my existing customer base, trying to get new customers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if I only get new customers by doing a bunch of redesign stuff, anyway, it’s a balance you gotta strike.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m excited to try offline playback. And in general, the app has been great. It works really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well. I think it’s very pretty, very well done. I like it. It’s my podcast app of choice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you. Oh, and I search was a big thing. It was bigger than I expected.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to do an entire episode of Under the Radar, I think, this week. Entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco episode on Under the Radar about implementing search. It is surprisingly deep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a topic. And so I’m not going to cover it here. But see this week’s Under the Radar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for how to implement search. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week. Squarespace,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Eero, and Casper, and we’ll see you next week!
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A-N-T-Marco-Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John to, accidental, tech podcast so long.
Casey on Cars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, you have released sort of another video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. As we record this, the video is not out. It is queued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and ready to rock, but I have not pushed the go button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet. You have released to us a new video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I have released to the two of you and a couple of other friends a new video. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey videos of the 2018 Volkswagen GTI Autobahn. So this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as close as one gets to a Golf R without actually being a Golf R.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, this one had the direct shift gearbox, which I continually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and will forever call a dual clutch transmission because that’s the BMW version of it, but basically the same idea. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway, this is the latest episode of Casey on Cars, there will be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey text review, a blog post review that you guys have not seen but is written and queued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up. I will put a link to that in the show notes, and of course there is a video which you guys have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seen. So, all right, do your worst. Tell me what I did wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, John didn’t do his homework, so he can’t tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Ah, that’s right! I did like a quarter of my homework.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, so I’m going to start with the negatives so I can end with the positives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Number one negative I noticed, which you will hear from a lot of people, and including John, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the part he saw, is there are there is some jittery camera motion during some of your movement shots,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m pretty sure I know what it is. If I had to guess, you were shooting that on a modern iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a gimbal. Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Well, so I used a gimbal, I used a gimbal only when I was doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moving shots of the car from the outside.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So moving shots of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. So you’re like walking up to it or panning around it kind of things, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yes, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there’s some jittery movement that happens during this. And so what I’m pretty sure you’re seeing, I’m not positive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I haven’t looked at the DGI app that I haven’t launched in a very long time for my gimbal that I haven’t used in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very long time. But I think what you’re seeing is the camera’s image stabilization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fighting the gimbal. This is a thing that ever since the dawn of image stabilized cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lenses, you’ve had to disable image stabilization
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when using them on a tripod or another gimbal, if you’re doing like a panning mode on a tripod,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because basically what happens is the image stabilizer doesn’t know that it’s being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stabilized by something else, and so if you’re like doing a panning shot on a tripod,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the image stabilizer on the lens will kind of like jump a little bit, as like it’ll try to correct the pan that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing, reach the end of what it can do and then jump back and then correct it again and then jump back. So you have this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of jumpy motions in the panning motion as it moves. And similarly, when you’re on a gimbal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the gimbal is doing the stabilization, but again, the phone doesn’t know that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so phones that have optical image stabilization during video shots, which I believe is everything after the seven, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but anyway, optical image stabilization during video now fights when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re on a gimbal. it does the same thing where it kinda like jumps a little bit, like every bit of motion, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe every second or two you’ll have like a little bit, like a correction, where the stabilizer kinda corrects for the motion that just happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, what you need to do, I’m not sure you can, but what you need to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is disable image stabilization in the phone when you’re using it on a gimbal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Somehow, there is a, I think there’s a way, if there isn’t, you shouldn’t use a modern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone on a gimbal like this. you should use one up to a seven that doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stabilization. You may want, and this is more advanced, you may
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to learn how to use it without auto focus either. You know, like one of the biggest effects that video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people try to avoid by usually not using auto focus or using it very carefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is what you don’t want to see in a video is focus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey hunting. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing where the camera like blurs in and blurs out because the camera itself is moving the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focal point forward and back, looking for the correct auto focus point. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the easiest way to not have that is to manually focus. And that’s hard, you know, that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will get it wrong sometimes and just have blurry shots that you might not be able to use. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally, an occasional blurry shot that you may have to reshoot or not use or hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nobody notices is less noticeable and less bad than seeing focus hunting happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you may want to consider learning how to do this without autofocus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, there was one shot toward the end where I kind of walked up to the GTI logo that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John clearly see it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I noticed it and I thought about cutting it, but I felt like it’s okay enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to pass my test, at least for this video, and I didn’t wanna fight it anymore. But I know exactly what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying. And actually, for most of the tripod shots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I’m talking to the camera, I did that with FiLMiC Pro, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did that in such a way that I locked the focus and locked the exposure,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because something I noticed as well in prior videos of my own, is that there was some not only focus
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hunting, but exposure hunting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Where it’s kind of trying to figure out is what is the user focusing on here,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and how should I expose the entire image in order to get that thing exposed properly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so with Filmic, you can lock not only exposure, but lock focus. And so I tried to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for pretty much any of the shots, like I said, where I’m outside the car talking to the camera directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and so that’s, again, it’s hard to solve that. I actually find, just when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I shoot like casual video, I find the auto exposure on the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during video is actually pretty good, and I don’t usually find myself fighting it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey but the- I agree. In this particular case, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. And in this particular case, I think it makes sense for me to expose your and focus lock.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Generally speaking, I completely agree with you that the focus, yeah, sometimes it’s great. Sometimes it’s not, but the exposure is usually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very good. But I noticed in prior videos of my own that sometimes it isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I should warn you with this next part. I took one video production intro class
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to tell you is from like video 101, it’s probably oversimplified and and actual video people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are listening to this are going to want to kill me because it’s probably gonna be awful. When you’re doing a two-camera setup,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s this concept of the 180 line. Are you familiar with this? No, not at all. So the idea basically, and again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who know what they’re talking about, I apologize, I’m very, very sorry. I’m probably gonna butcher this and tell him all the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information and I’m sure you’re gonna write in and tell us the right stuff. The basic idea, as I remember it from college
⏹️ ▶️ Marco film 101, is so if you think about, if you have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two-camera shot, Think about like filming two people like sitting talking to each other. The idea is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have a line that’s kind of like the plane of what you’re looking at, like the line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between them. And the whole idea of doing multi-camera with this rule, the 180 rule,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like basically make a semi-circle that comes from that line around them. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can kind of position the cameras like any point around that line. So you have half of a circle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the people are in the flat line in the middle of that circle and the camera can go around the perimeter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The idea is you only have that front half of that circle to put the cameras. You never cross
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over that line and go behind them. Like what would be like visually behind them. Do you get what I’m saying?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so. And so the idea is like, if the camera, if you’re alternating between shots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and one of the cameras crosses over this windy line, it disorients the viewer. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it hard to follow like what, wait, where am I? What am I, what perspective am I seeing this from? It’s disorienting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it looks weird and it doesn’t look good. And there was a shot, there were a set of shots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you did with two GoPros in the car. And it was funny, because you could see the other GoPro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey in the shot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? And the angles that you had these set up, I think it was getting a little too uncomfortably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close to cross, they were almost 180 degrees from each other. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it felt like you were breaking this rule. A few times there were a few cuts that you would do between those two cameras where I would think, ooh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like I’m backwards now. Like it was a weird
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cut. Yeah, I can understand that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, when you’re doing two camera shots, or when you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even one camera shot, it helps when you’re doing a cut to avoid the look of a jump cut. You know what a jump cut is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Yeah, and it’s a little different now because now jump cuts are kind of popular among the popular vloggers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the idea of avoiding a jump cut where it looks like the camera just like, it looks like you just cut part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a video out of it and the person just kind of jumps, instead of looking like an intentional cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where like you change the angle,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? There were one or two jump cuts that I left kind of deliberately,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there were actually quite a few that I masked by also simultaneously doing a camera cut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. So I would clip a bit of video and then at the moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where I went from the prior bit to the new bit, I would also switch cameras in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Right, and so one of the ways that when you’re doing multi-cam like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the ways it looks better, and you didn’t have this issue so much, but I think it would be an improvement,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is when you’re doing a cut from one camera to another, not only should you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco vary it by not a small amount, because if the two cameras only vary by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a small amount, it looks like a jump cut, it looks kind of weird, they should be noticeably different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco angles, but also, if possible, they should be noticeably different zoom perspective
⏹️ ▶️ Marco levels. Because that, like, basically, when you’re doing between two cameras, the more different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two cameras look without being too disoriented, like breaking the 180 line, the more different they look, generally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the better and more professional it looks, and the less it will ever look like a jump cut. So again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorry film people, I’m probably butchering this, I apologize, but this is what I remember from my 101 class. You can write in if there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a good resource for Casey to look at that’s better than me, feel free. The two GoPros that you had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the car during those shots, not only were they basically 180 degrees from each other,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I felt like the angles, even though they were so different, the perspective I was getting, it was too similar.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your framing between where you appeared was so similar. I felt like those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have looked better if one of them had a more different perspective
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the other one. Yeah, I never really was satisfied with any of the placement
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had for the GoPros any of the times I was in the car. Um, the, well, that’s not fair. The one that was basically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, a close shot of me, I was fine with, I mean, it’s, it’s, I didn’t have any particular issue with that, but with the other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one, I never, which happens to be the silver one, cause you can see it in some of these shots,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was never particularly satisfied with where that was and in the, in the R I put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that basically at my left ear, which I didn’t mind so much because I felt like it was giving a nice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perspective of what I was looking at, but it seemed like I was, that, that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was alone in that opinion, or maybe not literally alone, but you know, I feel like I got a lot of feedback that, that people didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly love seeing the side of my face like that. And so I was trying to figure out something that was kind of a halfway
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you can see my entire like face and some of my body, but also see what’s going on in front of me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I agree that I was not in love with the, the placement I had for it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I couldn’t really come up with a better one. And maybe the answer is I just give up on showing me at all. Maybe I just have it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, pointing directly out the front of the car. I’m not sure,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John but this 180
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing, I’m not, I’m not sure, but this 180 thing you’re talking about that to some degree,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, verbalizes or, or, or. Uh, like personifies is the word I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, but verbalizes, I guess, you know, the, the, the kind of icky feeling I had about it, I just couldn’t figure out how to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better. You know what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean? Yeah. Oh, by the way, thank you very much to Colby underscore underscore in the chat room, who’s linked to something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t know existed, the 30 degree rule, which is saying that basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re doing, when you’re transitioning between two cameras and you’re doing a cut, that the second, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera you’re going to should be at least 30 degrees different in where it is oriented perspective-wise to the subject
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the first cut was. Does that make sense? Like you should move at least 30 degrees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the position of the second camera from the first one. So thank you, Colby underscore underscore for that. I didn’t know about that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, so that’s, yeah. So ultimately though, you’re getting really good at this. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can see a progression of what you’re doing and problems you’re solving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you go. Like you can see like when you watch your videos in order, you can see how you’re getting better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s pretty noticeable. I would say you have almost completely solved your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in-car audio challenges. And that’s a big one. I know that was really hard. And that was an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area that really needed it before. And pretty good, like the in-car lavalier mic stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you did was pretty good. There were a few places where you clipped, when like, you know, and you can hear the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clipping distortion. And there were, I would suggest doing some level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compression and volume level matching. There are ways to do this in various apps and things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can maybe tell you about sometime, I don’t know. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like there were a few issues of level matching where like, you know, one recording session would be much louder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the other one or whatever, but it was better on this one than it’s been in the past videos for sure in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. And the in-car audio was way better with the lavalier mic. And the other thing is the placement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it was such that when you would turn your head over the shoulder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like your mouth would get closer to the mic, it was way louder. And that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play with the positioning of it and maybe the directionality of it, you can play with that a little bit. Ultimately, that always happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with lavaliers to some degree. So what you should probably do there is look into level compression,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in volume normalization, where you just compress your levels such that no matter where your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco head was turned, you sound roughly of similar loudness. This is not an easy problem to solve, but it is solvable. This is what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people do. But for the most part, pretty good. Content-wise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I loved a lot of this. I loved
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially about the transmission preference and how it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey made you so uncomfortable to admit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that was really fun. I really enjoyed that actually. And content wise, I thought that was very interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Very nice. It was a good balance of like nerd Casey versus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what the rest of the world wants to hear about. Cause it’s like, like this is something that you wouldn’t get this in. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s the review from, you know, Edmonds for this car. Should you buy it details at 11
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. But like, you know, you wouldn’t get it in like a video, like, you know, for like every consumer, you get it from a car
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerd and it’s like, that’s really nice. I actually really enjoyed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part. To fill in really quickly what you, what Marco’s referring to a little bit of spoilers here, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had this DSG gearbox and, or I, there it went again, or no, it is DSG, not DCT. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John train myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, the point is I had a two pedal manual transmission car. And.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the conclusion I came to was that I actually preferred the completely automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ZF eight speed from the Julia over the DSG and the GTI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I kind of talked about, and I won’t totally spoil it, and it’ll take a while, but suffice to say, I talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that a lot in the video because that was one of the big differences between the cars, and again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s an uncomfortable conclusion I came to, but I actually kind of preferred the automatic, which made me feel really gross and icky. So that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco’s referring to, is that whole kind of conversation I have with the viewer as this video’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then finally, I would just say on the content, there was never a point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I looked down at the time scrubber to see how much time was left.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, that is a flawless victory in my book. That’s extremely good to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hear. Yeah, when watching almost any video on YouTube, I almost always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point end up moving the mouse up to the video screen to unhide the time slider and to see how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time is left because I’m getting a little bit bored. And that didn’t happen. That was, I made it through the entire video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not doing that once. And that’s unusual and that’s commendable. So good job.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I appreciate it. And John, I know you haven’t watched much of it, but do you have any thoughts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the brief window of time that you did spend watching
⏹️ ▶️ John it? I’ve been watching it without audio while you’ve been talking here, so I’ve seen it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to applaud the banishment of the ugly parking garage in favor of the nice grassy
⏹️ ▶️ John places, although I feel bad for whoever’s house that was that you caught in the shot at some point. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John if they want their house to be in your video, but yeah, the car looks so much better on green grass with trees behind it.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of your shots, I think your sunroof shot. I love that, by the way. The camera’s not level,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think, by a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John You get a little leveling. You can probably fix that in a final cut.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s all right. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Yeah, and since I haven’t heard all the content of it, the other camera thing I wanna add,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mark already covered stabilization stuff, is some of the actual trajectories, like the actual
⏹️ ▶️ John moves, are weird. Like, again, if you’re looking up the 180 roll and stuff like that, you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John find the five basic camera moves or whatever. In general, stick
⏹️ ▶️ John to the basic camera moves and don’t have the one where you’re like, move to the side, then
⏹️ ▶️ John go over the railing, and then go back down to the ground. Like all the individual shots.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I like that one. I mean, I’m not saying you’re wrong, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John liked it. The individual components of that are good. It’s good to be low to the ground when the car comes by, because it loads dramatic. It’s good
⏹️ ▶️ John to go to the side while the car is curving, and it’s good not to ram into the railing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when you combine that into one camera move, it’s not a thing. So, yeah, so
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to, you know, less is more in terms of the camera moves, like, you know, plot a trajectory and do
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Don’t have too many lumps and bumps, you know, or split it up into two shots or whatever. Um, yeah, I’ll,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll watch the rest of it when I get a chance and actually hear what you have to say. Um, I like the wheels on this one.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s different wheels, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, these are a very standard GTI wheels. I think they’ve been roughly that look for at least a year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two now. I like them. I wouldn’t say I love them, but I like them.
⏹️ ▶️ John type R wheels. So I’m getting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a type R is Honda. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you’re thinking about whatever the hell it is. I see how it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Speaking of
⏹️ ▶️ John type R, it’s got these black, it’s got these black plastic vent things on the front bumpers. It’s kind of type
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I see. I’m not familiar enough with the type R to know what’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John what’s typical. You
⏹️ ▶️ John know what I mean? You know, you’re familiar enough to know
⏹️ ▶️ John contrasting, uh, like fake plastic
⏹️ ▶️ John show arrow things that do nothing but poke out of your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car. But like if we were half of our current ages, we would be too old to buy a civic car.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco someone’s got one
⏹️ ▶️ John at work. I see it driving around. It’s such a such a monstrosity.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It really is. I saw one yesterday. I think it was maybe it was today. I saw in the last 24 hours
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it is hideous to look at. Maybe if I was 17, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John make it work.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there was any stage in my life where I would have liked a car that was that busy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that busy busy is a very good word for it. I very much like that because that’s exactly what it
⏹️ ▶️ John is. It’s interesting because the what’s the the fancy Impreza? The WRX?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s so the WRX is interesting is that it has like the big hood scoop and like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s, I think that kind of, you know, walks the line where
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey all that crap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went down. They calm that down a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John year. But but the key is that all that crap on the civic is fake, like none of those vents lead anywhere nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that is functional
⏹️ ▶️ John whereas at least at least the hood scoop on the the Impreza was an actual hood scoop that you know
⏹️ ▶️ John led to the engine and wasn’t just like a big black plastic thing and I think that kind of makes a difference like that
⏹️ ▶️ John that for all the ridiculousness if it’s functional then it starts to be reasonable but
⏹️ ▶️ John if it looks ridiculous and is also non-functional it’s the worst of both worlds all right oh yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John other comment on your video the audio in inside the car and when you’re narrating is still too
⏹️ ▶️ John different like I think you should not use your podcast, Mike, when
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you do outside of the current
⏹️ ▶️ John narration, I think you should use the lab for the whole thing or whatever it takes to get them to sound the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey same. I used the left with whole thing in
⏹️ ▶️ John and in fact, well, then then it must be just your energy level.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, maybe that’s it. The only way to really make it sound that consistent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to read the entire script in one session, like during one of your video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shots, like if you’re if every shot of you talking is like in one place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you read it when filming all in one shot and then every shot of you not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking or every shot of you know different places is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just video and you just use the sound from you talking over it the whole time. That’s the only way to do that but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it requires you to basically write the entire video script ahead of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s just a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey lot of work. That’s not. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like you know for the place you are in like how much time you can spend on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, how much you know how many videos you should be putting out, you know, per unit of time, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you shouldn’t be doing that amount of pre prep, like you should just be making more and accepting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the audio will sound different between different sessions. You know, try to minimize it if you can, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like to achieve what john wants. That’s what you have to do. Record the entire audio as like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one long stand up shot. And that’s not going to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, I feel like it’s also the you know, the energy level like if you’re not being quiet
⏹️ ▶️ John to try not to wake up kids. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the other way you can go. No, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wasn’t it this time. That was it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in the past. I know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, but I’m saying like it was closer this time, but it was still like, there was still a difference in like, maybe it felt
⏹️ ▶️ John more like you were reading something because you were versus when you’re not. I mean, the other way to go is you can embrace the difference and have
⏹️ ▶️ John the audio, the voice over audio sound intentionally very different than the live audio. A
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of, a lot of videos do that where they’re like, they will insert like background white noise into the live video and
⏹️ ▶️ John then the voiceover video is usually like boomier and more distance and doesn’t have background noise
⏹️ ▶️ John to just, you know, so it’s like the live and then the voice of God, then alive, the voice of God, like you can go that direction
⏹️ ▶️ John to to, you know, even now, but now they’re like, you can tell they’re trying to be similar,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re not. And it might just be a performance thing. But anyway, I think that’s still, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John to work on. I like your your ATP shirt. It looks very, very clean and neat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanks. Yeah, I use that probably too much for these videos.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I should use all the time it’s great. Yeah, you got to promote.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. I’m glad that, Marco, that you enjoyed it. And I think that my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey piece of feedback that you’ve given me is that you didn’t have to look at the scrubber, because I definitely know what you’re talking about. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a victory in my book. And yeah, I think you nailed it with the GoPro positioning.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I said, I never quite was happy with it. I’m still not sure. And I would actually love, particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey via Twitter, I’d love feedback on this like what is what are the right places maybe I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John go back and look at Top Gear. Yeah exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Tons of in-car shots and like you don’t think about where the cameras are but the fact that you don’t think about it means they must have nailed
⏹️ ▶️ John some good angles so just watch some of your favorite car reviews and back back solve and say where is the camera for this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyway. I agree and I think part of the problem is is that I want to be able
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do the multi-camera thing and so I think sometimes certainly not always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but sometimes in Top Gear I think what they do is they film, you know, a bunch of footage with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera in one specific spot and then they film a separate batch of footage with a camera in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John spot. Does that make sense? So,
⏹️ ▶️ John which means they’re going through their spiel multiple times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John is fine. You maybe get alternate take on it, you know, the second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. Yeah, but, um, I, I don’t know. I, I, I really want to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out a better, like one or two or three different like setups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I can use. And I have obviously mounted GoPros outside the car because some of the shots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’ve seen in this video and the one prior are GoPros mounted on the exterior of the car,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it really, really freaks me out. Like I really don’t like doing that a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I think in some cases, like Top Gear will mount a GoPro on the hood and maybe I’m just being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a big baby, but it just weirds me out. The idea of mounting something on the hood that could potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fly off and like injure somebody. Leaving me out of it, leaving the car out of it. What if it flies off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and like hits a bystander or something like that? Just, I don’t like the idea of that at all. And maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just need to get over it, but I really wanna find preferably in-car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey places that I can mount GoPros that really work well. And so I’m gonna have to look at this 180 degree rule and 30
⏹️ ▶️ Casey degree rule and see what I can make work with that. So yeah, so by the time you’ve listened to this, the video should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be out. Links will be in the show notes. And I appreciate Marco doing your homework because I know how much of a slog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is for you is doing any homework. But I appreciate it and John I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know you’re busy busy be so I’ll give you a pass this once
⏹️ ▶️ John Thanks start a rotate chicken nuggets timer I
⏹️ ▶️ John Have said that Why are you rotating the chicken nuggets like is it essential? I know you
⏹️ ▶️ John have uneven cooking in the oven but like is this the type of meal where you’re like no they need to be Super evenly cooked we got to rotate them
⏹️ ▶️ John Like how uneven is the cooking in your oven? It’s gonna ruin the chicken nuggets. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John very delicate meals, like soufflés and chicken nuggets. That’s what they say. Both very, very sensitive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, like this from the guy who like, the one time I tried to make kids macaroni and cheese in your kitchen,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried to like hand it off to you like halfway through and you’re like, well, you’ve already ruined it. But I guess I can take this over. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t say you ruined it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You sound like me. I’m sure I fixed it for you, but I’m sure it wasn’t ruined.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to cook the noodles for the time they say on the box or something crazy like that. No, no, it wasn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. Were they dinosaur shaped chicken nuggets?