311: Mutually Assured Destruction

31 Jan 2019

Facebook’s Onavo scam, Apple’s FaceTime bug, early iPhone rumors, and Overcast’s Instant Search.

Episode Description:

• Follow-up:
  • 👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻 screwed up "finsta"
  • Debate over the prevalence of the stage lighting problem
  • Silence of Siri and other IoT info
  • Wireless Accessory Config
• Does anyone doubt that Facebook is straight garbage?
  • TechCrunch summary
  • ReCode recaps Apple's response
  • Confirmation of all internal apps failing
  • Google wanted in on the snooping action too
• Apple's FaceTime bug
  • Video evidence sent to Apple
  • Other documentation sent to Apple
  • Contact Apple About Security Issues
• Bloomberg/Gurman iPhone Scoop
• #askatp
  • Is it worth cleaning dust out of MacBooks? (via Oliver Dejon)
  • Is it worth upgrading the CPU on a family iMac? (via Jeremy Kenison)
    • Geekbench Browser
  • Is tweeting a good idea? (via Andrew)
• Post-show:
  • John is very angry at WeRateDogs
  • Overcast Instant Search
  • Casey's CR-V Review

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Transcribed using Whisper large_v2 (transcription) + WAV2VEC2_ASR_LARGE_LV60K_960H (alignment) + Pyannote (speaker diaritization).

Chapters

1. Save it for the show
2. Follow-up: Finsta
3. Follow-up: Stage Light
4. Follow-up: Siri silence
5. Follow-up: WAC
6. Sponsor: Casper (code ATP)
7. Facebook flare-up
8. Sponsor: Marine Layer (code ATP)
9. FaceTime bug
10. Gurman’s vague rumors
11. Sponsor: AfterShokz (code atpbundle)
12. #askatp: Laptop dust removal
13. #askatp: Choosing CPUs
14. #askatp: Tweet management
15. Ending theme
16. Overcast Instant Search
17. Casey on CR-Vs

Save it for the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, God. I mean, on the one side, a little sliver of me does

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey feel ever so slightly bad, but 99% of me is like, you f**kers deserve this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, we’ll get to it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh, God. Just such, such obnoxious bastards.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Save it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Save it. Save it. Save it for the show. This is a show we’re about

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do, including this topic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Well, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} is I

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} need

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to get the obnoxious bits out of my system so I don’t say obnoxious you shit on the show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It gets me so fired up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Wait all this time am I supposed to have been doing that instead of saying all my obnoxious stuff on the show?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You say it, then you just edited it out. You

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} just edit out the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things that you said that you didn’t want to be in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, Most of them.

Follow-up: Finsta

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I wish to dive right in and I need to apologize for all three of us, but particularly me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Last episode we were talking about how the kids these days, the youths, have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ways around, you know, or ways to accomplish what basically Instagram Close Friends does.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I was real smug last week because I knew about this and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I knew the name of this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And I forget exactly what I said, but spoiler alert, it was wrong. So anyway, so I forget what I called it. Maybe I called

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it fake Instagram or something, but what I was thinking of and couldn’t actually emit

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey from my body was FINSTA, F-I-N-S-T-A, which does stand for fake Instagram.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I can’t remember what I called it last week. It doesn’t really matter. But yeah, it’s FINSTA. That is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the kind of like casual Instagram that all the youths are doing. And I don’t know why I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey remember that. And I was so smug about it because I was like, oh, I know this. Oh, Friendstagram. Thank you, Brian Mitchell. It was Friendstagram that I said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey God, is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, for Instagram, it actually makes sense as a name. Finsta and spam account, both are the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John opposite of what they mean, because like a spam account, it’s like we’re, well, I guess it depends on what you mean by spam. But I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John feel like your fake Instagram is the most real, because it’s the one where you are the least fake.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The actual fake one is the one where you present your beautiful life. And spam,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I feel like you’re-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Implies bad. Yeah, I mean, maybe you’re saying, if I have a garbage picture, I put it on my spam

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} account. I guess that makes some sense. And quantity,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of it because you don’t care as much to your point. But I’m with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you. Yeah, for Instagram does make more sense. Why don’t you try to, you can try to make that happen in case. You know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s gonna happen right after Fetch. Anyway, I apologize that we’re all old men and we really screwed that up.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And this will teach me never to be smug about thinking that I’m not old because I am indeed old.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I do not apologize for being old.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Now, I’m a little confused. So is the Finsta the one that you show everyone or the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco one that you show only your friends? No,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} it’s the one you show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco only your friends.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it doesn’t make any sense. But it stands for fake? Yeah. Correct.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I, I, yeah, I’m too old to understand this. Kids are

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey dumb. We, we gotta move on. We’re, we’re too old. I just wanted to apologize for being old. Uh, John

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does not. Stop, stop including, yeah, you stop including me. That’s just, Marco and Casey are, have, uh, are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John self-hating old people. I am not.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think it’s just that I don’t want to speak for Marco, but I’m still clinging to the thought that I have some amount of awareness

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of what the, what the kids are doing these days and it’s, no, I don’t. I really don’t. I just need to embrace it. So anyway, moving on.

Follow-up: Stage Light

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We talked last week about this quote unquote stage light effect on MacBooks and MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Pros where there’s like a series of spotlights that almost looks like coming from the bottom of the display.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey An anonymous person wrote in and said, I work as a genius at a very busy Apple store and my

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey colleagues and I triage and repair literally hundreds of Macs a week. When there’s a genuine manufacturing or design

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fault that affects a significant portion of devices for a particular model, it is very quickly and unambiguously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey obvious what it it is and the exact symptoms and so on and so forth. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey paraphrasing here. For instance, the keyboard issues in the post-2016 MacBook Pros were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey definitely a real problem and the eventual repair extension

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey program. Everyone kind of thought that was coming, blah, blah, blah. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so this anonymous genius says, all of us were really honestly baffled about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the brouhaha about the stage lighting thing because they apparently have seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey no pattern or increased symptoms from their customers and they see a lot of customers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And this individual is actually asked around and apparently nobody really knows

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what we were talking about last week. Now, granted, we were just going off of the news reports that we had read. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey maybe we got a maybe we got hoodwinked by some fake news. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John This type of we usually don’t have access to this type of information because it’s not as if Apple has some sort of giant

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dashboard showing the prevalence of repairs that there, you know, you don’t, there’s not public information, right? So the, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when we see a story that says there’s a problem with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple product or whatever, the only things we have to judge it by are like, how many people do we personally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John know that happened to? And we know a lot of people who know a lot of people who use Apple products. So that’s something. And also the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reputation of whatever, you know, website or is that is publishing the information.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In this case, I forget where this was, maybe it was Apple Insider or something. It’s very easy for just one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person who has a problem to be angry about it and put it online and make it seem like it’s an epidemic.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Obviously Apple knows for sure, but they’re not talking. So having leaks like this from anonymous geniuses,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think they carry a lot of weight, assuming they’re actually true. Because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to this person’s point, a single store does see hundreds and hundreds of Macs a week, and so that’s a pretty good sample

⏹️ ▶️ ^John size. And then they may not know other people who work in other Apple stores. The word kind of gets around.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John If there actually is a widespread problem, they are in the best position to know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John outside of the people who keep the spreadsheets back at Apple. So we’ll see if we hear about this problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John anymore or if it was just a thing that a few people got and were mad about, but it is not an actual

⏹️ ▶️ ^John epidemic like the keyboard issues.

Follow-up: Siri silence

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, you want to tell me about the silence of Siri and other Internet of Things information?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, we got a lot of feedback about my little smart outlet and my experiences

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with Siri. One thing I was speculating about was I was asking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if HomeKit knew what room it was in and if it was using that information to determine

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whether it talked back to me. Pretty much everybody said, yeah, it should know what room it’s in.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John My HomePod actually is in the same room as the outlets. In theory, if it’s in the same room as the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John outlets and I ask the HomePod to turn the lights on or off, it shouldn’t talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back to me at all. Some people had interesting theories about when the HomePod

⏹️ ▶️ ^John decides to talk back to you. I didn’t really test any of these, and I’m not sure if they’re based on documentation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or just like a notion. One person, I think my favorite one, said

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re far away or if you yell, it will talk back to you to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John confirm, which- interesting. I don’t know if that’s true. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John far away, my voice would be faint, but yelling it would be loud. Very confusing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Most people agree, though, if you were in a different room. So if you asked it to turn off or on something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s not in the same room as the HomePod, it will talk back. All that said, my HomePod has always been in the same room

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as these outlets, and it has talked back to me occasionally. Why? I don’t know. So there’s this mystery still

⏹️ ▶️ ^John abound, but there, in theory, it should be able to do Same thing with the other devices, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Amazon Echo devices. Like they have room awareness, you can place things in a room, and in general,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they try to be silent or less verbose if you’re doing something in the same room, if the thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re talking to is in the same room as the devices. So that’s good to know. In practice,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it hasn’t talked back to me for a while now, so maybe, I don’t know, maybe it’s just halting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a grudge or it’s giving me the silent treatment, either way I’m liking it.

Follow-up: WAC

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Moving on, but in the same vein, G** wrote that he was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey involved in creating a technology known as Wireless Accessory Config, or WAC.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This is an Apple technology that allows an app developer to basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey load the current Wi-Fi information onto an external device. And this was in the context

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of John saying that, oh, my smart outlet, you know, just kind of by magic figured

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey out what my Wi-Fi information was, et cetera, et cetera. He wrote this mechanism, or was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey involved in this mechanism that does this, and he said, you know, Apple was sick of the Wi-Fi network dance that we had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to go through for these accessories and decided it was a platform worth solving on, a problem worth solving on the platform level.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s available to any MFI partner for both AirPlay and HomeKit accessories. And you can turn on the entitlement for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your app in Xcode to allow it to find and configure these accessories as well, which I thought was pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And oh, and apparently it does automate the whole drop off your Wi-Fi,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey connect to the device’s Wi-Fi, upload the information, then get back on your regular Wi-Fi dance, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is what I had said that I had to do by hand with a lot of this stuff. I didn’t realize, because I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey seen this happen before where it just works by magic and you don’t have to go to settings and change Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey access points, whatever. Well, apparently this is just automating that whole thing. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that was surprising to me. I guess I should have guessed, but I didn’t realize it was just automating that whole dance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, he also provided links to some patents that are related to this type of technology.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s got a name, it’s got an acronym, but as is the case with a lot of stuff in HomeKit, like this is one

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing Apple’s been smart about with HomeKit, but it’s also historically been a weakness of HomeKit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John As far as you’re concerned, it’s just this one thing called HomeKit. And it has been difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for devices to get qualified with HomeKit either because you have to go through this testing and you have to buy a bunch of stuff from Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and it could be expensive and like they have all these problems in the beginning there was if if you got

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a home kit device it had a good user experience but there are far more devices from other manufacturers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just because what they had was simpler or cheaper or less of a hassle to get done or you know all sorts of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John things and Apple’s been changing that slowly but still the idea that there’s one thing you

⏹️ ▶️ ^John look for this works with home kit and under that umbrella you get a bunch of stuff like this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a technology whose name nobody probably even knows or cares about, that basically just makes the experience better, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one thing that’s attracting me to the HomeKit ecosystem. Despite the fact that the other Internet of Things ecosystems seem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much larger and more diverse, I’m impressed with how much the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John core experience of HomeKit is polished. I know people say, well, you can’t do as much with HomeKit as you can do with other things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s undoubtedly true, but I do like the fact that the main gameplay loop in HomeKit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seems to work well. I had a rough day in Destiny today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Do you want to talk about it?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We have so much stuff. Don’t worry about it. Thank God.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} Oh, thank God.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I mean, I’m sorry for your bad day, John.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It wasn’t as bad as the one I lost on my legendary charts, but don’t worry about it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well, I am sending good destiny thoughts your way or something.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey There has been some interesting things going on in the Apple ecosystem over the last

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know 48 hours This began I don’t know like six months ago a year ago something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like that With this thing that Facebook created which was called

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oh Navo and I’m probably pronouncing that wrong but Onavo Protect. And my recollection of this was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that it was pitched as one of those VPNs that like the ones

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that have sponsored this show, I believe in the past, but sleazy instead of the ones that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have sponsored, which are not sleazy. And really the point of this VPN, if you peel back

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey all the layers of the onion, was to be able to sniff all of these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey people’s network data to see where they’re going, what they’re doing, who they’re interacting with, et cetera.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And this was called Facebook’s Onavo Protect app. And once Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey got wind of what was really going on here, which again was like six months or a year ago, something like that, they forced Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to remove it from the app store. And that did happen. Fast forward a few months, and it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that Facebook, like kind of white labeled and to some degree, rebranded

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the exact same app and started distributing it via enterprise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey deployment. Generally speaking, when you deploy to the app store, you give your binary to Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and you’ve signed it with your developer certificate, and then Apple signs it again with their certificate and puts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it on the App Store, and then in theory, anyone can download it. With enterprise deployment, it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey deliberate and blessed backdoor to that, where you can ask Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hey, we would like to distribute some things internally, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey internally is the key there. Let’s say you work for Acme Widgets Incorporated and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you have a company directory. Well, you don’t want your company directory on the App Store, and it’s probably useless even to put it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey behind a login on the App Store. The writer answer arguably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is to distribute it internally only to your own people. Somewhere within your company’s intranet,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you would have a link to where you could install the Acme Widget Company directory.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey In order to do that, like I said, you have to go to Apple and say, hey, we would like to distribute stuff internally, and they say, okay, sure.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Here’s a certificate with which you can use to do that. And then through some magic,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey if you give the person a link to the app, to the bundle, the IPA that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is the app, they can install it and run it. Well, Facebook leveraged this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in order to basically redistribute this Onavo Protect app outside

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of their internal people. So what they did was they signed basically the exact same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey app, but with their internal enterprise distribution certificate such

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that they can get around the App Store. Well, Apple found out about it and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they got angry. But before we talk about that, does my quasi-summary of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey enterprise distribution, does that ring basically true to you guys or would you like to refine anything I just said?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think I’d add is that they, you know, as you said, like they rescan the app, redistributed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a couple of people did like class dumps on it and saw they didn’t even rename all the the ONV prefixed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John classes

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} and functions.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Like, it was sort of the, I mean, what could they have really

⏹️ ▶️ ^John done? Like, I mean, the bottom line is the functionality of the app was gonna get them in trouble no matter what, but they didn’t even make the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John most trivial effort to hide themselves. All they did was basically change the name of the app and maybe reskin it, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it was like literally all the same source code underneath, which, and it’s sort of an amazing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John pattern behavior where you you get banned, like with cause, like you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doing a thing you’re not supposed to do. You get booted out of the app store and you immediately say, we need

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to find a way to distribute this outside the app store. How can we do that? Like you’re, you’re not chastened. You don’t think we

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have to find a new way to get the information we need or whatever. You just immediately switch gears and say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John how can we work around this ban? Which is like, I feel like that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John instinct. You see this sometimes I can’t recall any specific stories, but like when it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a young, usually lone, inexperienced developer who gets

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a ban or some other ruling from the app store that they think is unfair. And their immediate reaction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is to find a way to fight back, like to try to get around the ban,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to try to circumvent it, to try to find some way that they can find a loophole.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And it ends up in this back and forth. And each time they go back and forth, Apple gets angrier and angrier

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and gets bigger and bigger

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} bands until they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are no longer a developer on the App Store at all, and then they get a fake credit card. And it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John escalates in a way that you usually only see when it’s just a petulant 20-something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John versus Apple only. This is not a petulant 20-something. It is a very large, very important

⏹️ ▶️ ^John corporation acting like a petulant 20-year-old.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Corey Bachman Which is of no great surprise. Jay Haynes Yes. Corey Bachman So Apple catches wind of this,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and this happened late Tuesday, is that right? We’re recording this late Wednesday.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple caught wind of this and nobody really knew what they were going to do because Facebook has done a lot of really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey shysty and shady stuff in the past. And it seems from an outsider’s perspective

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that they’ve gotten some slaps on the wrist, some maybe harder than others, but mostly has been able

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to do whatever the crap they want because, hey, they’re Facebook. So this morning,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Wednesday morning, Apple decided to pull, if we understand things correctly, there was a little

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey bit of debate about this, but it sounds like Apple decided to pull their enterprise distribution certificate, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey means that this rebadged Facebook or NaviProtect app did in fact

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey go away because when all of these iPhones went to run it, presumably at some point or another,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they would phone home and verify that the certificate is still valid and Apple would tell them, oh, no, it’s not,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and they wouldn’t run this app. That in and of itself, okay, good. What I find fascinating about this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey though is it seems like they pulled the entire

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey enterprise distribution certificate, which is I know what I just said, but what that means is all of Facebook’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey internal apps, like their Acme Widget Company directory, in this case, the Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Company directory, that stopped working. Apparently, these poor, poor souls

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey couldn’t use their app in which they order food.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} They would have to actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like get up and walk to the free restaurant and talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to someone to order their food. See, I’m getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} angry again. It’s cruel. It’s cruel and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco unusual. I’m getting angry again. And all their internal

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} beta testing of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all their apps. This is usually how big companies do internal beta testing. It’s a lot easier than the other methods. And so it’s, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, yeah, it’s a big deal. They lost all of their internal certificate,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all their internal apps that they were assigning with their enterprise certificate, which on a number of levels

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is the result of incredible brazenness and also stupidity.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco This is not a decision by Apple to interpret a rule differently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or to punish Facebook because they don’t like them. Apple is very clear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with enterprise distribution certificates and the agreement that you agree to when you get one. It’s very,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very clear that it is for internal use by your own employees

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco only. It is not for any kind of public distribution. They couldn’t possibly be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more clear about that. And so Facebook literally sending this out to people in the public

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco brazenly, you know, because they knew they would, they knew their Facebook, they’re invincible. Like they deserve every single

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bit of this, every drop of the inconvenience this causes their employees

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every single minute of the wasted time that they’re gonna have to spend working with this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem and then hopefully routing around it in some way for themselves. They deserve every

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco single bit of this because they were literally blatantly, flagrantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco violating the very clear rules of this. It’s not even close, it isn’t up for interpretation,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It isn’t Apple overreaching. It’s a very clear, cut and dry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Facebook knew exactly what they were doing. They knew exactly that they were violating this agreement completely,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco both in spirit and in letter of the law, and they violated it anyway. And they got hit for it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t know how anybody at Facebook can possibly complain as a result of this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It’s a double whammy too, because remember, the reason this was banned from the App Store is because the app itself violates

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple’s rules for IPA selection and everything. So this is already, like the, got banned from the App Store, not because Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was a meanie, but because the app was just collecting too much data or violating Apple’s rules on how much data you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John allowed to harvest from your users, right? So this is an app that wasn’t allowed on the App Store. The app itself, by itself, does

⏹️ ▶️ ^John sneaky, gross things, which is why Facebook is paying people to install it, because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John who else has any motivation to install a thing that’s gonna monitor every single thing you do and report it back to Facebook, right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And then on top of that, the way they get, because the whole thing is, we have this app, And we’re told that it

⏹️ ▶️ ^John violates privacy, violates rules for privacy or whatever. They don’t come back and say, is there a way

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we can learn what we want to learn about our customers without basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John watching everything that they do and violating their privacy? No, they say, let’s take the application

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as it exists and find a way to distribute it. So it’s a double violation, right? So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s doing a bad thing, getting caught, and then doing a bad thing by violating a different rule.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, on so many levels, this is like, it is inexcusable. It is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco horrendous behavior by Facebook. They continue to be a completely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco appalling company. Like, everything they do is appalling. And this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is no exception to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. So I do have some sympathy for the employees who can’t order their lunch though, because-

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Well, why?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In a large company, yeah, because in a large company, those people who just want to order their lunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably didn’t even know this thing existed. Now, at this point, you could say, well, they didn’t know the specific thing existed, but they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John knew the kind of company they worked for, which is true, which is why I’m not saying I have tons of sympathy

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for them, but I have a small amount of sympathy, maybe not for the lunch ordering thing or whatever, but like…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco No, look, I will be very upfront with how I feel about this. I know people who work at Facebook.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I know good people who work at Facebook. I think if you work at Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in 2019, you have decided to work for a company that is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco morally bankrupt and you’ve decided that’s going to be okay with you. Now I’m not totally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco my hands are not totally clean here. I use Instagram. I like Instagram. Facebook owns Instagram.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t feel good about this right now. There’s never been a day where I’ve reconsidered it more than today.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I don’t feel good about this, but I think the company is abhorrent. I object to so much of what they

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do and have done, but I continue to use one of their products. So I recognize my hands are not clean here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but if you work at Facebook, you have decided this company is horrible,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but I’m going to work there anyway. And I think if you make that decision, you have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to accept the consequences that come with that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, so speaking of, I mean, this is not the first and only bad thing that Facebook has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John done, to say the least, right? And in and of itself, it might not be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like disqualifying or might not make someone decide not to work there, but there’s definitely a pattern of behavior. But speaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of pattern of behavior, another company that has some similar business models, Google, where they make

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a lot of their money by knowing information about people who use their products. Google, in fact,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had a very similar application that would monitor what you did and report

⏹️ ▶️ ^John back to Google so they could learn more about their customers. And I believe, I don’t know if they were paying people to install

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, but it was a similar type of thing. They wanted people to install this and were trying to motivate them somehow. And they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John distributed this application under the Apple Developer Enterprise Program. And they issued a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John speedy statement after Facebook got hit with the certificate revocation. This is what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Google says. Their application was called ScreenWise Meter. The ScreenWise Meter iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app should not have operated under Apple’s developer enterprise program. This was a mistake, and we apologize.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We have disabled this app on iOS devices. Very straightforward. We’re sorry, we’re doing it too. We’re sorry, we totally

⏹️ ▶️ ^John stopped. We’re not doing it anymore. Don’t look at us, don’t look at us. It’s not our fault. Leave us alone. I bet Google has a lot of internal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John applications signed by their enterprise certificate, they probably don’t want to stop working because they have a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of employees and they probably have a lot of apps. The other angle on this, by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is setting aside these these companies, weird business models and their you know, their questionable practices

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and so on and so forth. And this came up in a couple of slacks were in this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John reinforces the idea that you know, Apple controls what gets installed on Apple devices.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And I’m sure we’re going to talk about this in a second about the the appropriateness of Apple’s punishment

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of Facebook if it was too severe, not severe enough. But there

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a power dynamic between all these companies here. One thing this can

⏹️ ▶️ ^John make companies think is, well, maybe we should stop making

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all of our internal applications iOS applications, or maybe we should stop making iOS versions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of our internal applications because it’s a corporate risk. If the proper

⏹️ ▶️ ^John functioning of our company relies on these applications continuing to work, and some other company that’s not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John us and maybe isn’t even friendly to us can at any time cripple our entire enterprise by turning

⏹️ ▶️ ^John off all of our internal applications, maybe we shouldn’t make them on iOS anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Maybe we should make them on Android so we are masters of our own destiny. Imagine if

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Microsoft could turn off all your copies of Office remotely, for all I know they can these days because everything is subscription.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John one power dynamic at play here. Who is in the driver’s seat? Can Facebook actually,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John quote unquote, afford to not have IOS versions of applications? Or would that make its employees revolt

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and say, I don’t want to use an Android phone? Like what? What is the power balance? And I think like in a lot of these situations,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t I don’t think either party really knows who has

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the power. I mean, I guess we’ll slide into the the obvious question here is like could Apple have

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kicked Facebook off of the App Store? Like who has the power in that situation? On the one hand, Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^John certainly can. They control what goes on the App Store. They could say, guess what, Facebook? I’m treating you like a petulant 20 year old. You no longer

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have a developer account, which is certainly what they would have done to a petulant 20 year old. Had the 20 year old

⏹️ ▶️ ^John been banned from the App Store and then used an enterprise certificate or whatever, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, oh yeah, like let’s let’s be clear. If anyone else did this, if it was anyone other than a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco giant, very influential company, the entire developer account would have been banned. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Facebook got off relatively easily by only losing enterprise distribution

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco rights. And even then, we don’t know this could only be temporary. And they’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^John probably get them back eventually through some negotiation, because these are giants talking. The same way that Netflix gets the better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John subscription rate. It makes everyone feel good to think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple is treating everyone the same, but realistically speaking, that’s not how the world works, and it’s probably not even how the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John App Store should work, and it never has worked that way. Like it’s an illusion kind of. So it makes some kind

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of sense.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, because like ultimately, like you know, Facebook has so much power here because like if Apple actually removed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the Facebook app from the iPhone, who do you think is gonna get hurt more by that?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, that’s the question. So I mean, both of these parties probably have a notion of who they think is in the driver’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John seat. But it assert, like I think the accepted wisdom has been Apple can’t afford to not have Facebook on it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to not have the Facebook app on its phone. That Facebook was in the power position because Apple can,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you know, huff and puff, but they need Facebook more than Facebook needs them. I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that’s what we’ve thought for a long time. But at a certain point, the iPhone installed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John base and sort of the entrenched love for the iPhone maybe

⏹️ ▶️ ^John starts to tip that the other way. If you ask the world of iPhone users, you have a choice. You can either

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keep your iPhone, but not have the Facebook app, or keep the Facebook app, but you gotta get an Android phone. How

⏹️ ▶️ ^John would that turn out? And I don’t think either party wants to find out. Like, it’s like, who would win World War

⏹️ ▶️ ^John III? What do you think? It’s like, let’s not find out. I don’t really wanna, because no one’s gonna come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out 100%. There’s no scenario in which 100% of iPhone users would stick with their iPhone, right? So like, there’s never, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like World War III. There’s not gonna be like a victor who’s unscathed. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no one wants to even try that. But the more I think about it, the more I’m thinking that, like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I no longer accept that it’s a slam dunk that the iPhone can’t survive

⏹️ ▶️ ^John without the Facebook app. Partially because, yes, people can still go to Facebook on the web, but partially because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of just the year of bad news of Facebook. I don’t know what Facebook’s numbers are like or whatever, but all I know is that it has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a relentlessly bad, deserved, relentlessly bad news about Facebook, and I feel like that has to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John be having some kind of effect.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, I think your World War III comparison is apt. I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like this is kind of a mutually assured destruction scenario here, that neither company can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco really afford to totally blow off the other one on their platform. That would be very bad for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco either company if Apple kicked Facebook’s app off the platform. And by the way,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco again, Facebook owns multiple things. If Apple actually revoked Facebook’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco entire developer ability, that would also include WhatsApp and Instagram. That would have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a massive effect. Think about every single news report that would happen from this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every single non-nerd out there would have the exact same opinion.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple took away Facebook from my phone. Apple took away Instagram from my phone. Apple took away WhatsApp from my phone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They would 100% blame Apple for that, and not in a good light. Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can’t afford that. They can’t do that. I think ultimately,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Facebook holds the power in this relationship because if Apple were to ever remove

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Facebook’s ability to ship their apps, all of the blowback would fall on Apple, not Facebook,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco from their actual customers.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But I feel like at a certain point, because we all accept that is probably the way things are, and I think Apple accepts it,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John at a certain point, Apple could find itself in a position where that is way less true than it used to be,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and they just don’t realize it. This happened with web browsers a couple times too, where the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John power shifts but nobody noticed because the conventional wisdom is just so strong, like the conventional

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wisdom that IE is dominant, and then eventually you wake up one day and it’s like, What the hell happened to IE? Right?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You don’t adjust your thinking. And on the flip side of that, if the conventional wisdom still is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John true, which it probably is, if Facebook wants its enterprise certificates back, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just like World War III, they can say, Apple, you should probably give us an enterprise certificates back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or we’re gonna pull the Instagram and Facebook and WhatsApp apps from the iOS app store. Because Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John can unilaterally pull its own apps from the iOS app store. Like they can use some or

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all of the power they have or hold it as a threat to try to get what they want back, which is why in any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John kind of, you know, this kind of flare up of PR and Yankee certificate, whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like these two behemoths will probably talk to each other, you know, over the phone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or in person and work something out, you know, billionaire to billionaire, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John come to an understanding in the same, again, in the same way as the cold war did that, like no one wants to launch

⏹️ ▶️ ^John any of the nukes. Everyone’s got enough nukes to destroy each other times over. No one thinks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’re ever going to come at anything like that on scale. They all just in the end just want to go back to making money. So I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like they will come to some kind of agreement. Facebook will get his enterprise certificate back. They will not pull their things

⏹️ ▶️ ^John from the store and we will just continue to lurch forward.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know offhand how granular a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey big red button Apple has. So said differently, could Apple have turned off just

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this one app?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that’s what I was gonna say. I suspect so, but I don’t know. And on the one side, I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like, isn’t that the rightest, most mature answer is to turn off this one app and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey leave everything else alone?

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Well, no,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because they violated the terms of enterprise distribution. Yeah, the terms are for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the certificate. And they were stupid enough to use their main enterprise distribution

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco certificate for this app.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But either way, it seems to me like I don’t think that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Apple turning off this app, whatever it’s called now, it doesn’t matter, turning off this sleazy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey VPN app— O-not-vo.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s not O-navo, we swear.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, exactly right. Fo-navo. Instagram. Anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey turning off the Fo-navo app won’t do anything. It won’t accomplish anything. Facebook’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just going to go trudging along. from an outsider’s point of view, if there

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is anyone that has even more hubris than Apple, it’s Facebook.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You know, like Facebook seems to be pretty self-obsessed and it seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to an outsider’s perspective that if Facebook thinks that Facebook can do no wrong. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so I think that I’m okay with Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey just completely turning off the enterprise certificate because it seems like, to me, it seems like that punishment

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is commensurate with the crime committed. Developed crime isn’t the right word, but you know what I mean. It just seems

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey really fricking gross. The offense. Yeah. Thank you. That’s a very, very good word for it. And it just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know. I, I, I think I’m okay with this. And like one of you said earlier, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it was John, you know, some of the slacks that we’re in, we’re going back and forth about whether or not this was fair and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey whether or not this is the right answer and whether or not Apple should have that kind of control in,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I see the argument there that maybe Apple shouldn’t be able to turn off to some degree the livelihood

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of another corporation. But I don’t know, man, it’s their swimming pool. And if you’re choosing to swim

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in that pool, shouldn’t you have to abide by the rules? I mean, if it’s adult swim, shouldn’t the kids

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey have to get out of the pool?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah. I don’t think everyone’s arguing that. They were just getting back to the root thing from that’s been with the app store the entire time that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t like these rules. We got it. We got to choke them down because being in the app store is better

⏹️ ▶️ ^John than not being in the app store, but the idea that there’s a platform that’s so tightly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John locked down with no side loading at all. And even the side loading that is allowed to enter as Pacific

⏹️ ▶️ ^John certificates is still locked down to, you know, like I remember before test flight, everything people

⏹️ ▶️ ^John were just so angry about the fact that they couldn’t even just make betas and give it to people like that’s that is a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John developer experience question that has been with the app store since its introduction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and probably will never leave. It just comes up again in the in this context, because this is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a fairly high profile example of Apple flexing those muscles like They have the ability to do this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Everyone knows they always have it, but it’s mostly academic until you see, oh God,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m getting so old, people are getting so old, and I’m just thinking about my bad day in Destiny.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Now witness the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John power of this fully operational app store? Close,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} maybe? Oh, wow, wow.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m surprised that didn’t roll right off your tongue.

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FaceTime bug

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco show.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Last night, I tested this thing that let me spy on Erin. Now, granted, she was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sitting three feet away from me, and I told her exactly what I was doing, but, ooh, this FaceTime thing, not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey good, not good at all. So if you start a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey FaceTime video call with another person, and then you do the little swipe

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up thing in order to add a person to that call, so say I was starting to call Marco and then I wanted to add John

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to the call, well, instead, what I do is I call Marco, I swipe up, and instead

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of adding John, I add myself. If you do that, suddenly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco’s phone, with no intervention on Marco’s part, starts broadcasting Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey microphone to me without Marco’s permission. Then if Marco thinks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to himself, hmm, I know how to make this stop. I will hit the side button, whatever they call that, the lock button, the power button,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t care. I’ll hit the side button to silence this ring.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I think it actually is called the side button now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Oh, is it okay? I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think so. Um, and so I’ll silence this ring and make it go away. Well, guess what? Now I’m looking at Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey front facing camera without Marco’s permission. And I tried both of these with Aaron

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and honest to God, both of these worked. Like, well, they don’t work if you know what I mean, but like these

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey exploits accomplished what they set out to accomplish and,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey ooh, that did not make me happy and it went around the internet fast and it makes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sense because people were turning off FaceTime left and right until Apple distressingly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey slowly eventually turned off group FaceTime at the server level, which is the right thing to do,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but it took, from what I could tell, several hours for that to happen, which I’m not keen on.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So that bug is bad in and of itself, and I’ll leave a chance to talk about that. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what’s worse is, apparently Apple is known about this for at least a week, which is really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey gross, but we’ll talk about that in a minute. Gentlemen, thoughts about this bug and what it means.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, look, everybody ships bugs. Like I said, that’s on Twitter. I’ll say it here I don’t blame Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for this bug existing. Like, everyone ships bugs. What’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco important is how you respond when you have accidentally shipped a bug. Alright, that’s how, and it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when you have something that is a very severe security bug like this, one of the key

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco elements is speed of your response. And on one level,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they did a really good job actually. Like, the bug hit the press, And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco then within a couple hours of it hitting the press, all group FaceTime was disabled

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco server side, which effectively neutralizes the bug and makes it impossible to exploit again. So that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco alone, that in itself was an adequate response. Like that was fine. Yeah, sure, I would have liked

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if it was less than a few hours, but it was, hell, it was later that night. Like it was fine, that’s fine. I give

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them full marks for that. But there is this other problem, which is a pretty big problem,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco which is that this was reported to them like a week earlier through the official channel,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco through like security at apple.com or whatever it is, product security. They have an official channel to report security

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco flaws in their products. And it was reported almost a week earlier.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And it was fully documented, and apparently the woman who reported it was told

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to file a radar. So she did, even though this was a security thing. That,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John oh. This reminds me of the movie Die Hard, which got, Marco, have you seen Die Hard, please? Yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It was my number one

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} Christmas

⏹️ ▶️ ^John movie. We did it. We did it, everybody. I just showed it to my son recently. And there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a scene in Die Hard where, I think it’s Bruce Willis, finally manages to call emergency

⏹️ ▶️ ^John services or whatever. And he gets on the line and is telling them the building is under attack, whatever. You’ve got to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John come send the police or whatever. And the person on the other end of the line is like, this is a restricted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John channel. If you have an emergency, please call 911. Essentially saying, this is not the right way for you to report an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John incredibly severe security bug. file a radar. So it’s like Bruce Willis was having none

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of that. He’s yelling and screaming. But this this person, this poor person is like, I have to get a I have to file

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it with a bug report. Like I’m talking to you now. You’re Apple, right? Like, look, this is severe. I’m like, Nope, sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John wrong channel. Like, this is not how you report bugs to us. Please do it through the proper channels. So the person did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John do it through the proper channels. But I was thinking the same way of like, if someone comes to you and telling you there’s an emergency

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and your only reaction is to say, I’m not the person you’re supposed to tell about emergencies.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I’m not going to take any action on this. I’m just going to redirect you to the right channel. And then you go to the right channel, which is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just signing up for an account, and going through, and filing a rater, or whatever. And still, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John get to the right people. This is sort of the faceless cooperation that we always complain about,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we think of a company as this giant entity, but it’s really this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big group of people with very different incentives and motivations, there is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no one consciousness that is Apple that you can talk to. So trying to get the corporation

⏹️ ▶️ ^John writ large to be aware of a thing in the world is very difficult

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you are interacting with even the correct one or two people who are touching

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the outside world, which is why when things go to the press, the giant entity that is Apple becomes

⏹️ ▶️ ^John all of a sudden very conscious, like, and how does it work? I mean, maybe like the press is seen

⏹️ ▶️ ^John by people at the top and the people at the top make everyone below them aware of it. But like, if you start it through the right channel,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s, it’s dysfunctional and baffling, but not actually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a very, a very rare occurrence that you can present

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what you would imagine is like incredibly important, critical information. And because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it is presented alongside tons and tons of other information, that’s just garbage,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that it gets lost in the shuffle. Like there’s no, you can’t distinguish it from the 800 other cranks who emailed

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you that day and said, I have a way to secretly destroy every iPhone by pressing a big red button, right? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tons of garbage comes into that same channel. And here is this tiny little gem that is like a legit

⏹️ ▶️ ^John super serious security bug. In hindsight, we all say, why didn’t they jump into action

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on this one big thing? And it’s like, well, you didn’t see the 8000 other radars that were filed that day. And you didn’t have the you know, the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John millions of other things that got into that. So it’s frustrating from the outside. It’s explicable on the inside, but it is a a dysfunction

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like the way you want to design an organization such that if some

⏹️ ▶️ ^John well meaning person is nice enough to tell you about a super duper important problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that that finds its way in less than a week to the collective

⏹️ ▶️ ^John consciousness of the company and that they take action on it. And you don’t have to wait for it to go all over the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John press and come sort of top down through the executive suit just make all their underlings have a giant fire drill about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. Yeah, and this and this is not like I mean, so first of all, like I was about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to insult the whole like, you know, bug reporter radar system. But the funny thing is, like, that wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the right channel for this. The right channel for this was product security. She went there first,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and they told her, you know, buzz off, basically, it sounds

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like some weird bug. You probably don’t know how to use computers follow radar.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, right. So like, she went to the proper channel first, and they told her to go to the incorrect

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco channel. Now, the incorrect channel she was directed to, which is the bug reporter slash radar system,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is horrible. The pipeline, whatever the process is that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Apple uses to filter and respond to and close

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those bugs that get reported is horrible. Any developer who’s ever filed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bugs will tell you that most of the time it’s a waste of your time to even bother

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with it. Most of the time you don’t get a response at all. If you do get a response,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s basically them asking you to provide a sample project and sysdiagnose files. Both of which take a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of time to gather and prepare. Both of which are usually not necessary for lots

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of the bugs that you report, and it seems like they request those things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco before they’ve actually really read what you wrote. It seems like Apple has tech,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco has, oh, and then every time there’s a new beta released of anything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they will seemingly go through in bulk to all the open bugs that haven’t been responded to yet

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and say, let us know if this is still a problem or we’ll automatically close it in like a day.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And what this leads to is a whole bunch of legitimate bugs either

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco going back to the filer and asking for them to spend way more time on it when that wasn’t necessarily,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like when Apple didn’t really pay enough attention to it to see whether it needed that or not, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a whole bunch of valid bugs being closed that are still bugs, but that the person didn’t get

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to in time to say, yes, it’s still a problem. And so you have Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over-filtering the inputs on that system dramatically. It seems, I mean, I don’t know how this works

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco internally, but it sure seems like there are people whose job it is to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just close as many bugs as possible as a performance metric, and not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco anything about the actual outcomes of those things. So just they find they seem to find ways to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just close them in mass. If you’re lucky that they even close them at all. Most of the bugs that I report

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco are just left open forever. They never get a single response. But some of them do get these wonderful, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco mass closures that happen to them that, you know, the bugs are still there and nothing ever happened.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And this is this is why when Apple employees tell us on Twitter, file a radar, it really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco helps. It really matters. I don’t appreciate that very much because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco filing a radar from the outside, from our point of view, is a massive waste of our time. 99% of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the time. The vast majority of bugs you file are a total waste of your time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the way Apple deals with them and the people who file them, the message it sends

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us from the parts of it that we see, which apparently is very little of it, the parts of it that we see tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco us we are wasting our time. Whether that’s true or not, internally, we can’t see. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the part we see is you don’t care about us. You are dismissive if you respond at all.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And we are wasting our time doing this. So that’s just a little rant about radar. But the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco fact is, for this story, the woman who was reporting this bug shouldn’t have even been sent to radar in the first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco place because this wasn’t that kind of bug. It was a product security thing. And she emailed product security.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey This makes me so angry that she was told, oh, just go file a radar. That is such a…

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s dismissive and it shows that they weren’t really reading things very closely. Exactly the same problem that happens with the radar

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bug screeners. It’s exactly the same. It’s like you ask us to file bugs, you ask people to report security

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problems, like you ask us to do this, and those of us who take our time, and this doesn’t take a small amount

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of time to do this kind of stuff, those of us who take our time to do it, more often than not, get dismissed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in a way that suggests they didn’t even read it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Right. This is such a big f*** you to this poor lady who took the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to actually do this the right way. My understanding is there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a series of tweets from a person with the Twitter handle Beast Mode,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which I am quite impressed by. Anyway, John H. Meyer, who I guess got in touch with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey woman whose child initially discovered the problem. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey she apparently made a video of it. She sent like a whole write up to Apple about it. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the response from them was, Oh, go file a radar. How off putting is that? How

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey obnoxious and off putting is that? It makes, it makes my blood boil. It’s so ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s just so obnoxious and it makes me so angry.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the more charitable interpretation is not that there’s any malice or a dismissiveness there, but that the just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the volume of stuff comes in as such that they are overwhelmed with information and their sort of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John first pass filtering algorithm identifies this as probably just some person who has some kind of bug they want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to report. And that’s that’s the this person is the mom who reported this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is a lawyer. And if you look at the letter, it’s not lawyer ease. But like, I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John maybe if you saw something that was from a lawyer or look like it was written by a lawyer, like maybe that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t, you know, like when you get a lot of input, you get a lot of Apple sure gets lots of people telling them all sorts of things.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John You have to have some sort of way of filtering it. In the letter, I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the person asked about bug bounties. A lot of companies pay people to find bugs. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think one of the benefits of bug bounties, which Apple has, by the way, I think they just recently started a bunch of them, I think we were talking about an

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ATP a while back, is that if you have a program where you’re going to pay

⏹️ ▶️ ^John people for finding bugs, I think the people at the other end of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that fire hose of incoming information probably have slightly different

⏹️ ▶️ ^John incentives because they’re, like the whole point of that program is to find the super valuable stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whereas the product security one probably gets way more like just random people with opinions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about Apple stuff or like people who think that their phone is spying on them at night because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it wakes up on a notification, like who knows what kind of stuff they get, but the bug bounty ones,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the only people who even know that that channel exists are people who are out there looking for bugs or think they found some super

⏹️ ▶️ ^John big security bugs. everything that comes in there in theory is like, the sender thinks it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a super important security thing, whereas product security probably gets just, you know, who knows what kind of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John random stuff. So it’s hard to tell from the outside whether it actually is sort of jaded dismissiveness,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or if it’s we are not good at dealing with the volume and type of information

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that we have, or understaffed, we don’t have good heuristics for figuring it out, we have tier one, two,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and three, I would get this impression like there’s tier one, two, and three radar stuff before it ever even gets to a developer, it has to go through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this sort of, or kind of like the App Store used to be, and probably still is to some degree, like a mechanical

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rules-based thing implemented by people who don’t have any awareness and don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John need to, by design, don’t need to have any awareness of security or App Store rules or anything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like that, and are just doing sort of a first pass following whatever rules they’ve been told. And eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you get down to a human who understands this is an application, this is for the App Store, this is what security is like, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But as with so many things, From the outside, we can’t tell which one of those things it is. So it’s just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a black box that does the wrong thing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s funny to me too, because, you know, all of us have friends within Apple and I’ll talk to them about

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey radar and, and they’ll try to say, well, you know, Oh, you don’t understand the volume, which I think you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, John. Like that’s true. And Oh, you know, there’s this and there’s that and there’s this and there’s that. And it just makes us

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey sad that you guys always assume the worst of us. And that also kind of grinds my, I don’t know why I’m so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey angry tonight, but that kind of grinds my gears too because if you don’t want us to think the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey worst of you, then talk to us. Tell us what’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} going

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on. This is your fault, not my fault. It’s not my fault I’m assuming the worst. This is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey your fault for being so secretive. You can’t have it both ways. You can’t be so secretive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about what’s going on inside and you can’t be so just a black

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey box. You can’t be such a black box and expect us to just assume it’s roses and pansies and daffodils inside.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Like this is a self-created problem.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Right. It’s like Apple is saying like, you keep mispronouncing my name. And we’re like, all right, how you pronounce it? And they’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like, I told you before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} That’s not what

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} it’s like at all. They don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John us. They would never tell us. I mean, here’s the thing with like, we want more transparency and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple, I think has been more transparent than it has been

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} past.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John But for a large company like this, you don’t want complete transparency because that’s just chaos. Like the company

⏹️ ▶️ ^John does have to speak like there’s a reason PR exists. You can’t have every employee in the company purporting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to speak for the company or even for the little section of the company because it’s madness, right? Um, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple still, when it comes time to speak with one voice about this type of thing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John uh, does probably the smart thing from a PR perspective, but that nevertheless leaves us in the dark, which

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is we’re not here to explain to you exactly, exactly what happened here. Like Like in this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whole thing, they said, we had their statement and you read part of it. Like Google or Facebook did

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this thing with their internet certificates, it’s against the rules, so we revoked their certificate, blah, blah, blah. That’s what they said. They didn’t go into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John this whole sort of like postmortem of like, oh, how do we miss this? They didn’t mention this

⏹️ ▶️ ^John person and her son and finding the security thing a week ago. They didn’t even acknowledge that even exists as far

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as I know. Like, why would they? There is no, like, that’s not as far, it’s like, we’re going forward. Like, it’s the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John smart PR thing to do to say, here’s the situation, here’s what we did. boom, not to say,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Oh, how do we miss this? And you have some sort of back and forth with the press about, you know, scolding Apple about how they should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have found this and soul searching about how they like, they’ll do that internally, but they will never do that externally.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And so, because of that, which I think is probably mostly the right thing to do, we are left with

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just, you know, an unknown, and then we’re free to map all of our past experiences

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and prejudices onto it and think either the best of the worst or about what’s happening. But I I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John honestly, it doesn’t really matter whether it was malice

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or understaffing or whatever. The end result is the same as far

⏹️ ▶️ ^John as the company’s concerned. They were not appropriately reactive to a very serious,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very cleanly, well-presented, helpful thing from the outside.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So it’s not like an edge case. They really need to make systems that, in the best case scenario,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John where a conscientious, motivated person who’s found a legit bug, does everything

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you tell them to do, does all the right things, and still can’t get you to pay attention for a week.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Kind of makes you wonder what else they’re missing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, well, that’s the best case. The worst case scenario is people find tons of bugs and never tell

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple about them, because why the hell would you tell Apple? They’d either use them themselves or sell them on the black market.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John That’s why bug bounties exist, where you try to pay more money than the bad people are going to pay to find

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out your bugs.

Gurman’s vague rumors

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey So maybe we can talk about something a little happier. Just a couple hours before we

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey recorded, Mark Gurman had a scoop at Bloomberg where he had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a bunch of information about the next iPhone, about iPads, and about iOS 13. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey hard for me to really get too anxious about this, because maybe anxious

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey isn’t the right word, excited I guess about this, because it seems like Bloomberg can get some details right and a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lot of things wrong. And I think Marco had summarized this best in saying, he’ll get the little specific things

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey right, but then he’ll try to put it in a narrative and it all falls apart at that point. But there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a article on Bloomberg, we’ll link it in the show notes, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey German talks about all of this stuff. And one of the big features apparently of the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iPhone V Next, I don’t know if it’s XT or whatever, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very much camera related. And there was no information about any sort of knockoff of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Google’s seemingly very impressive night shift. But apparently, Apple’s starting

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to really angle toward, I shouldn’t say starting to, it was really angling toward augmented reality.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so what’s being said in this article is that there’s going to be a more powerful, longer range

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey 3D camera, which is quote, designed to scan the environment to create three-dimensional reconstructions

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of the real world. Supposedly, it’s going to work up to about 15 feet away from the phone. uses

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey a laser scanner instead of dot projection because the dot projection, you know, goes to crap over long distances.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it got really—I don’t think Gorman’s a very good writer. It was very unclear

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to me what is or is not getting the third camera because

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey early in the article he says there’s a third, more advanced camera. Then later on he says the third

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey camera is only in the Max and then immediately after says and other handsets could eventually come with the upgraded system.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, that’s not, I don’t think that’s like, you know, a mistake. I think that’s hedging. Anytime

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you see a rumor article like this, especially one from a publication that’s, you know, edited

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like Bloomberg, not fact-checked like Bloomberg, but edited,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it’s generally a result of they don’t actually know for sure. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco they’re offering, like, it’s like, this could come out this year or in the future. Like whenever, you know, they write stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that. Like it’s rumor articles that have, that they literally heard a rumor. They don’t really, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not really firm knowledge or they don’t wanna commit. So they use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco flexible language to give themselves an out. So that, yeah, basically like anything that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is not very clearly stated and unambiguously and unequivocally stated in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco an article like this, you can assume they’re just guessing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And on the night sight thing, you said night shift before, but you meant night

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} sight. Oh

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yes, thank you. There is a thing about that with the multiple cameras in terms of like catching a wider, wider field of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John view and more pixels, whatever. But for something like a night sight type feature,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is probably, I mean, there is a component of that that deals with the cameras, but it’s very much a software

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing. And the software is not going to leak from these same channels. Like that’s the thing that you have the most difficulty finding out because

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that is just kept in Apple, you know, in Apple proper. It’s not in, there’s no manufacturing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or parts or any other places where that can leak. So we tend not to know as much about the software and what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we do know comes much later. So it doesn’t surprise me there’s no mention of a predominantly software only feature. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they have to go on is probably a bunch of parts leaks or drawings or whatever of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John phones with a bunch of different cameras on the back and information about them. So I am still optimistic that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Apple will copy that, copy that feature to some degree and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John they’ll do it in software and we’ll find out about it like, you know, the day before the keynote or the keynote.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, we’ll see. I sure hope so. But it was interesting. They also had a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey couple other tidbits. The third camera, which may or may not only be on the Max, has a larger field of view

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and a wider range of zoom. It will also, and this is now a direct quote, it will also capture more pixels,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so Apple software could, for example, automatically repair a photo or video to fit in a subject that may have been accidentally

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey cut from the initial shot. Finally, enhanced live photos, which they say is basically just doubling

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the time from three seconds to six seconds. There will be updates for the XS, XS Max,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and XR. And then this is another thing that seemed contradictory

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to me, but maybe my reading comprehension is bad. They said that the laser-powered 3D thing could debut

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey in an upgrade to the iPad Pro in spring 2020, even though they started talking about it in the iPhone.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Whatever. They also apparently are testing, Apple is testing an iPhone with USB-C, which I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey think I’m pretty excited by. I think I would like to go all USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} now.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So again, that’s not information. They are testing it. Well, of course they’re testing it. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that doesn’t mean anything. Chances are, by now, I would assume, based on the iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco production scale and everything, they have probably already decided whether the 2019 iPhones will be USB-C

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or Lightning. And so, by Grumman saying that they’re still testing it, like, that just means he doesn’t know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And that’s true. The iPad thing actually makes some amount of sense to me, because this is kind of a coincidence that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yesterday in a different Slack, I forget what the context of talking about. I forget what we’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about. And I made some joke about just wait until you get your Apple AR glasses. You’ll just walk around the house and look at all

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the rooms and it’ll make a 3D map of your house. I think it was you Casey asking about like CAD applicant or talk

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} about Linnea

⏹️ ▶️ ^John making floor plans and stuff, right? And so here we are with this rumor a day later about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John basically a way to get a 3D image of the stuff around you at a longer distance. That basically room distance

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like 15 feet ish or whatever rather than face ID distance, which is, you know, a foot or two.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John On an iPad, you’re like, well, iPads, like people don’t carry around iPads as cameras for the most part. They usually have their phones with them, despite

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the fact that we see people taking pictures of the iPads. But if you wanted to do some kind of AR thing and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John scan your whole room and then manipulate it, an iPad’s a perfect device for that. You’re in your house already, you’ve got your iPad, hold

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it up, show it all the walls of your house, and then you have a nice big screen on which you can move your furniture around

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in AR or whatever, you know what I mean? Like, it makes sense as an iPad thing. Not

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that, you know, gives me any more stake in any of these rumors, because they take every side of everything,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even on the USB-C thing. Like, they’re testing a phone with USB-C, but they might not include it in this phone. All right, well, so you’ve offered no

⏹️ ▶️ ^John information. USB-C could be there, but it might not. Great, thanks.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I mean, VGA could be there. It might not. Right, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s not that bad. But anyway, the iPad Pro thing, I would actually be excited

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about an iPad Pro that had the laser camera thing on it, because the iPad, in many

⏹️ ▶️ ^John contexts, is a better device for AR because it has a bigger screen for you to, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a bigger window into the world to see through than the tiny little porthole that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John is your phone, even if you have one of the really big phones. So I think that would be neat. Although it coming out ahead

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of the phone is a little bit weird, like that’s what they were saying, like that they would ship new

⏹️ ▶️ ^John iPad Pros with this new camera. It seemed like it would steal a little bit of the iPhone’s thunder because they would

⏹️ ▶️ ^John demo this camera. Look, it’s got lasers and it does all these things. Isn’t it amazing? And then the new phones came out, they’re like, yeah, it’s got that camera

⏹️ ▶️ ^John too. It’s kind of underwhelming. So I don’t know how they would deal

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with timing of that, but I fully endorse an iPad with this 3D scanning laser

⏹️ ▶️ ^John thing on the back of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah, me too. I was just confused because it seemed like early in the article they were saying, it’s coming to the phone next, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh wait, it’s coming to the iPad next. All right, weird, whatever. Look, look, it’s just got a bucket

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of parts, Casey. Just like, take a bucket of parts, you dump it on the table, like, can you make an article out of this? Like, yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I can give it a shot.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Why not? Uh, they also had some other interesting news. Uh, apparently there’s going to be an updated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey lower cost iPad with a 10 inch screen and lightning. And what would have been of interest to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey me, although now I think I’ve converted myself to the large-ish iPad world, a new cheaper

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey iPad mini. And I was a devout mini fan up until I got this brand new iPad a couple of months

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey back, and now I really love this iPad, but a new iPad mini sounds very cool. I, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey would love to see that come back. And then finally, iOS 13 apparently will have dark mode. It will have improvements

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey to CarPlay. I actually am a fan of CarPlay. I think CarPlay’s pretty good. It’s not fantastic, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey it’s pretty good. And I’m curious to see what improvements means. Apparently

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey there’s going to be a new iPad-specific home screen. So I don’t know if that means, I think Steve Trout and Smith

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey kind of implied this. I’m not sure if that means that instead of springboard, there would be some

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey equivalent to springboard that is not the exact same, you know, some different home screen app, if you will.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think that could be very cool, because certainly the home screen on the iPad seems like a place that it could be treated

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey very differently and a lot more done with it. And then a couple of direct quotes. Ability to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey tab through multiple versions of a single app like pages in a web browser. That’s not something

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I feel like I need right now, but I bet you once I have it, I’ll say, oh, this is amazing, I can’t believe I didn’t have it before.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What do you think that means? We’re gonna move on from that. Like, again, with the vague writing. ability

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to tab through multiple versions of a single app like pages in a web browser. There’s a lot going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on in that sentence, right? So some people may read that and think, do they mean like command tab?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Because you don’t use command tab on a Mac to go through multiple versions of a single

⏹️ ▶️ ^John app like pages in a web browser, you do command tilde for multiple windows. And it’s a different keystroke,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John usually command shift square bracket or whatever, to go through multiple tabs, or do they mean tab through

⏹️ ▶️ ^John multiple versions of a single app, as in tabbed windows, where there’s room we heard where if you wanted to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John have multiple versions of an application running like the tabbing would be the sort of the windowing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John interface kind of like Safari tabs having like it’s so confusing. It’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s a sentence that says almost nothing other than the fact that there will be some new way to handle multiple versions

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of something that there are not currently multiple versions of. So I don’t know how do you guys interpret tab?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Is it do they mean the tab key as an analogy to what what you do on a Mac or do they mean tabs as in Safari

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tabs?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think tabs as in Safari tabs. I think the idea here is that if you wanted to have multiple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey copies of Google Docs running at the same time, you could do that. I’m not sure the exact mechanism,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but something like a tabbed Safari experience, you know, where, or, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey actually in Safari on the iPad, you can create two side-by-side Safari

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey quote-unquote windows, if you will, and they’re each their own tab, and you’re looking at two tabs or two windows simultaneously.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think something like that, God, this terminology is terrible, but it’s something

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} like that, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John The vocabulary reflects the mess that is the actual UI.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Well put. But I think it’s something where basically you could have two copies of the same app open at the same

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Just like Windows.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know, Marco, any thoughts on that? No. All right, and then finally, improvements to file management,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey which would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} great.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John As vague as you can get without saying nothing, Literally nothing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But everyone wants it. I was just thinking today about how I feel like if I had file system access in a couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey places, my iPad could really potentially replace my computer for anything.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Would you like that file system access to be improved, Casey?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It would be great. I would love that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John So the most exciting thing, I think, here, buried at the bottom of this article, I read this whole article, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the very end has something I think is the most significant. I’ve told this story

⏹️ ▶️ ^John before. I’ll keep telling it again for the people who didn’t listen to every single episode of the show or weren’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John alive in 2010 or whatever the hell Um when the ipad came out before it came out We all knew they were going to come

⏹️ ▶️ ^John out with a tablet and we were all talking about it and a big topic of discussion was

⏹️ ▶️ ^John What will this this apple tablet look like when you turn it on? Right like

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what because the phone we know what the phones look like the phones look like a bunch of icons and a grid They

⏹️ ▶️ ^John had springboard on them But when you have an iPad, what will that look like? And the leading contender

⏹️ ▶️ ^John was not it will look like a phone, but the icons will be more spread out like that was. There was I’m not gonna

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say it wasn’t in contention because it was brought up, but it was so distant. Everyone was thinking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John about what could it look like? Like, it’s not going to be the finder. Obviously, it’s not running Mac OS. It’s going to run iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ ^John OS or a variant of iPhone OS. But with all that screen space, what could you do?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And when they came out and said, we’re not doing anything. It’s just it’s exactly like the phone, but spread out.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} It’s like, all right, well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s, it’s the first version of this, right? And in practice, it works

⏹️ ▶️ ^John fine. And it’s an interface everyone is familiar with, right? And here we are, what is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it, eight years later, nine years later. And just now we’re getting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rumors, hopefully substantiated in some way, that now they’re going to take a crack at doing something

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other than having just the big grid of icons spread out a little bit more. It’s so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John far overdue and I’m not even like a super iPad power user. Just every time I hear

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the umpteenth seven hour dissertation of how people are arranging their icons into folders with spacers

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and color coding them and stuff, I’m like, oh, this is so little, so little flexibility

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in such an important interface. I mean, it’s nice that, you know, folders were an addition, so that’s good, right? But

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it’s nice that you can, that people can find ways to make these two Lego pieces fit together

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in different patterns, because you’ve got the icons and you’ve got the folders and we can do creative things with them. But that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a pretty big screen, especially on the really big iPads. There’s so much more you could do

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to let people build a more efficient place to go back

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to when they’re not in an application. I don’t know how far Apple will go with this, but I’m I will be

⏹️ ▶️ ^John very happy when they do something. I mean, they maybe unlike my Mac Pro, they’re going to get it in under decade

⏹️ ▶️ ^John line and say, see, we

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^John addressed what was a burning question about an Apple tablet in less than a decade.

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⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and using promo code ATPBUNNY.

#askatp: Laptop dust removal

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco That’s atp.aftersocks.com code ATP bundle for $50

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco off the weightless wireless trex air bundle Thank you so much to after socks for sponsoring

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Oliver Dijon writes currently I have a MacBook Pro 13-inch mid 2014 with my previous Mac books I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey always updated the hard disk drive or RAM at some point for this You had to remove the lower case and I always use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey this opportunity to remove dust with some compressed air and with a brush for the fans. I cannot tell you if it caused the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey MacBook’s fans to spin up more rarely or not. However, I thought it couldn’t hurt. On my current MacBook, the memory is soldered in place,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and I also had no reason to replace the SSD yet. So until now, I haven’t removed the lower case on this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey machine. After four and a half years of usage, I’m wondering if it would still make sense to open the lower case and remove some dust. What do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey you think? I don’t think I’ve removed any part of any of my MacBooks for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey years. At most, I would just blow some compressed air in the vents and call it a day. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, what would you do?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would say if you’re not having actual problems with the fans and cooling, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if it’s not broken, don’t fix it. Because you run two big risks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco here if you do this. I mean number one, even if you just blast compressed air into the vents,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you run the risk of shoving some dust where it wasn’t before that could possibly cause

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problems. And if you take the bottom case off, not only do you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco run that same risk, but you also run the risk of of damaging something in the process of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco taking it off or putting it back on. There’s a, as we learned from the stage lighting thing, there’s a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco very, very small, very sensitive, very weak components that are in these. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for somebody who has not been formally trained on how to service each model, like some of the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco geniuses and service places, and for people who don’t do this for a living, and maybe this is your first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco time or 10th time or fifth time opening up a laptop ever, the risk I think is too

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco high, unless you’re having a problem. And even if you are having a problem, I think my first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco step would be bring it to Apple, like have them do it if it’s still under warranty.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Just because the risks of slightly or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco less than slightly breaking something I think are too high.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Yeah, I mostly agree. Like, especially with laptops and these tiny little devices, I never liked the idea of them

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ever being opened by anyone, even a professional who’s opened 100 of these this week. Like, you don’t, it’s never

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the same. Like, it, no matter how good you are, it’s just never the same. That said,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John we don’t know all of his life. If you know that you live in a house with 75 cats

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and a smoker. I think you have other problems at this point. Right, but if you know your devices are constantly

⏹️ ▶️ ^John filled with stuff, it really depends, right? I wouldn’t say, if you know that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John a problem, if you know all your devices are going to get choked with cat hair and dander, you should

⏹️ ▶️ ^John think about doing something, right? But if it’s just like a sort of a hang up,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like you lead an otherwise normal life and your devices do not fail at

⏹️ ▶️ ^John an incredibly higher rate and they aren’t all choked with dust or sawdust or whatever, like who knows what’s going

⏹️ ▶️ ^John on. If you don’t live in an exceptional scenario and you just feel like, if you look at your MacBook

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and you look at the vents of like any other person’s MacBook they’re more or less the same, yeah, don’t open it, don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^John mess with it, don’t blow things into it. Like hopefully you can assess this and know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John whether you have a problem or not. But I can tell you that I have never opened up any of my little devices

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to remove dust. That said, my Power Mac G5 and my Power Mac G3

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and my Mac Pro all have a side that opens up really easily and occasionally. When I’m in there for other reasons, I will

⏹️ ▶️ ^John blow out dust. But they are cavernous and they are meant to be opened by people. There are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John no screws, it’s just a little handle and that’s a totally different ball game. And speaking of the delicate parts in there, I was reminded

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of a sad thing I just heard today of someone who remained anonymous

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to protect the innocent, who opened up his brand new Mac Mini to replace the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John RAM and accidentally cracked some tiny little connector that connects the Wi-Fi antenna,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John because they’re super delicate and if you pull it off the wrong way, it just goes chink. And so now all the time

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and money this person was saving by doing the RAM themselves has gone down the drain as they have to go crawling back to Apple and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say, yeah, I opened it up myself and I pulled a little bit too hard on this tiny, delicate plastic thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and now please tell me how much money I’m gonna have to Prepare to get this fixed.

#askatp: Choosing CPUs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey All right, moving on. Jeremy Kenniston writes, I’m planning to get an iMac, not an iMac Pro,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for the family to use. No video editing, no coding, or high intensity use. Honestly, the only hardcore thing would be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey playing Firewatch, which, by the way, if you haven’t played it, you should. Is there any difference that I should care about between the 3.4 gigahertz, 3.5 gigahertz,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey or 3.8 gigahertz, if they’re all core i5 or whatever, says Jeremy. I feel

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like storage and RAM are more important than the processor for typical non-coding, non-developer user.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey In my mind, this is not something I should worry about need to pay extra for. My personal opinion

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is, when you’re buying a new computer, it’s exactly what Jeremy said. Start with RAM, get as much as you can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey afford. Then storage, get as much as you can afford. And then if you need to worry about the processor, so be it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Obviously, that’s not true for everyone. You don’t need DMLs. But for an average rule of thumb, that’s my two cents.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey We started with Marco last time. John, what are your thoughts on this?

⏹️ ▶️ ^John In rare circumstances, there can be differences between CPUs that are all out of proportion

⏹️ ▶️ ^John with a difference in price. If it’s just the case where it’s like, oh, slightly higher clock speed or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and there’s no real differences, then yeah, you should know what you’re, what

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you wanna do with your computer. And if stuff that you do with your computer will not see an appreciable difference, don’t pay 300 bucks

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for the faster CPU. But every once in a while, not recently, but every once in a while, there’s like the quote unquote

⏹️ ▶️ ^John good CPU, and the one that’s $100 less is way worse. And the one that’s $300 more is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John just slightly better. Like there is sometimes discontinuities in the line. So it’s good to be aware. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John if you’re not following the CPU world or whatever, you can just look at benchmarks and say like, look, here’s how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much faster this one is and here’s how much more money it costs. And if you know you’re never gonna see

⏹️ ▶️ ^John or feel that speed, it can actually be better to get the slower one, especially in a portable device because it could use less power. So

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I think Jeremy correctly assessed his needs and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John should not be chasing the best CPU. And to Casey’s point, the thing that

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you will regret about your computer much more than if it feels a little bit slow after years, when

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you run out of space, or when, I mean it’s less now because you don’t have spinning disks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John when you run out of RAM, or like it ends up swapping. And again, with SSDs it’s much better than it used to be, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^John yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} RAM

⏹️ ▶️ ^John and storage over CPU if you’re not doing anything where you need the absolute fastest CPU.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, you pretty much covered it. You know, the one thing to be aware of is that the CPU

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco performance within a family does not scale linearly with the advertised clock speeds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s lots of complexity these days in real-world performance. One of the biggest things is turbo

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco boost, which is, you know, like the CPUs are not always operating at the speed they advertise.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco They’re often operating at higher speeds. And when you have, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco three different clock speeds within one CPU family, that’s like, it’s the same generation of processor.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It’s, you know, everything else is the same. They’re all branded i7 or they’re all branded i5, or it’s a mix of i5s and i7s or whatever. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the actual difference between different models is smaller than you might think

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because of all these complicating factors. One of the easiest things to do, as John said, is like, you can go do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco research. Like, for me, my favorite place to do research is the Geekbench browser. If you go to browse.primatelabs.com

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or something like that, we’ll put the link in the show notes, you can look up every Mac model with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every processor going back a number of years. And so, you can see right there, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can say, all right, look at the single core and the multi-core. And you can see, all right, here is the 2018 MacBook Pro, whatever it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is, right? And you can see, all right, here’s the top CPU here,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco middle CPU here, bottom CPU here. And if you look at what the actual variance between these is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco most of the time, with a few exceptions, like if the high-end model has more cores, like is the case with the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Mac Mini and some of the MacBook Pros right now, if the high-end model has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco more cores than the low-end model, it will have a significant advantage multi-core benchmarks,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, on the order of like, you know, 20 to 50% maybe, it depends on, you know, what the difference

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is. But usually within a family, usually you don’t have that choice. Usually it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just like, here’s three different clock speeds. And if you look at the actual differences on GeekBench, you’ll

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco see that usually the range between the low-end processor and the high-end processor is like 15%

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe. It’s like in that ballpark. And so it’s It’s probably not worth you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco spending an extra $300 or $400 to get 15% more performance.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Most people are not well served to spend the amount of money it takes to get such a small

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco percentage performance increase. Whereas, as John and Casey said, these days

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco SSD size, storage size, is the premium. And so if you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco have a limited budget and you’re looking for which aspect of this computer should I upgrade or focus on,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I would focus on SSD size because even the lowest end CPU in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco almost every Mac family is totally fine and not that different from the highest end on!

#askatp: Tweet management

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Steve McLaughlin All right. And finally, Andrew writes, What tweet management approach do you have? I ask

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey because Marco’s tweet count seems to be decreasing since Andrew named Marco. Why don’t we start with you? Andrew

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Horne

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, I don’t really have much of an approach necessarily. It’s not like a methodology or a formal thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco where I’m like, you know, having standups every morning in the parking lot and

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} whiteboarding my action item.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Steve McLaughlin

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, John} You

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco beat me to it, you jerk. Andrew Horne But so it’s not really a formal thing. I’ve I’ve been tweeting less because Twitter

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sucks. And that’s about it. Like every time, like, it’s like, you know how,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if you eat a certain type of food and you vomit after eating it, you tend not

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to want to eat that type of food for a while, if ever. Imagine that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco feeling in a smaller way every time I go to Twitter. It’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every time I use Twitter, I feel a little bit worse about using Twitter more in the future.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so that feeling is accumulating over time.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wonder if your tweet count actually is decreasing though. Like I’d like to see some charts because my impression is

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’ve been tweeting more than usual lately. Or maybe it’s just they’re more like bursts. I don’t know.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I would have to see some numbers on it. But I’m wondering how this person came to the conclusion that your tweet count, they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John said, seems to be decreasing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey don’t know. Well, did you delete a bunch of tweets when that was trendy like a month or two

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ago? Yes. tweet count probably does go up and down a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because I have one of those things that just deletes tweets older than X days but I don’t think it didn’t sound

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like this is what this person was talking about.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah I read it the way you read it the first time and then I came back to that you know

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey week or not a week I guess a few days later and I thought what he meant was did you delete a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of tweets?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh yes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey But to kind of come back to your your interpretation of this, Marco, I, I found that I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey am paying less and less attention to Twitter over time. I’m still addicted, but less

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so. So that’s good. If you can consider there a gray area in this conversation. Um, I find that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m tweeting less and less because more and more frequently, even when I tweet innocuous things,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I get angry tweets in return. And, uh, I, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey typically pay attention to my timeline anymore. I think I’ve said this either on here or on analog, but I have a list

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of roughly 30 or 40 people. It’s a private list that I do pay attention to and I am a completionist

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey on that list. But my main timeline I’ll only look at if I get really bored. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so I just have been slowly backing away from Twitter.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Slowly. I mean the thing is like if you go to a place where you’re hanging out with your friends and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco suppose it’s like a bar that you all go to with your friends right? I love these kind of metaphors on Twitter because they’re almost as I always overuse

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco those car metaphors on computers. So it’s like hanging out at a bar with your friends.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you keep going there, because all your friends are there, and it used to be a really good bar. And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco every time you go there, someone walks up to you and slaps you in the face and walks away.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And you’re like, well, that kind of sucks, but my friends are chill. And then a few minutes later, someone comes up and just farts and it just stinks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up the whole place. And then they walk away. And I go, God, this, okay, this is kind of unpleasant.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a crazy person, like, what are you doing? You’re doing everything wrong. It’s like, okay, and eventually you’re gonna be like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hey guys, you wanna go somewhere else? And that’s kinda what I’ve been doing.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John John, any thoughts? That’s another vague question. Tweet management approach? Speaking

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of managing Twitter in general, Casey, I have a recommendation for you. Take that list

⏹️ ▶️ ^John of 40 people where you read the timeline and make that your new list of followers and unfollow everybody else.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s funny you said that. I really mean this, it’s funny you said that. I have thought about doing exactly

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that a lot. The reason I haven’t yet is because there are a lot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of people who I really, really, really, really like in the real world

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that I don’t want to upset by

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} unfollowing

⏹️ ▶️ ^John them. That’s not how, that’s not, you should change your mental model of Twitter. Come to my mental model of Twitter, which is me

⏹️ ▶️ ^John following you doesn’t mean I like you and me not following you doesn’t mean I don’t like you. I follow people whose tweets I want

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to see. That’s, that is the whole criteria. Just because I don’t want to see your tweets doesn’t mean I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t like you. Maybe you’re awesome. Maybe you tweet about a thing that I love, but you tweet about it just slightly too much. Like I love

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dogs, but maybe you tweet about dogs too much. I won’t follow you. Don’t take it personally. I just don’t want to see all your

⏹️ ▶️ ^John dog tweets. It’s fine. Anyway, everyone can decide how they want to follow up, but like tweet

⏹️ ▶️ ^John management approach. I mean, I guess we did this broad brush. Marco talked about his deleting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John tweets with some automated thing and why he’s not liking Twitter too much and you have your list and then

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your other timeline. I mean, everyone knows my approach. Who’s listened to the show for a long time. I’m a completionist.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I trim my follow list so I can read everybody’s tweets. Pretty much nobody else in the world does that because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not the way most people use Twitter. Which makes me think, again, how could Andrew know

⏹️ ▶️ ^John what Marco’s tweet count is? I get this a lot from other people reply to me and it’s so clear from all the replies

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I get. People don’t have time to read everybody’s tweets. So they’ll ask about something that I tweeted about an hour ago.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Why don’t they know I tweeted about an hour ago? Why would they? It was an hour ago. I thought they’re not like their Twitter completionists. All

⏹️ ▶️ ^John right, so that’s, yeah, anyway. Yeah, I tweet when I feel like it. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John read Twitter when I feel like it. The only thing that I’ve been doing more in the past

⏹️ ▶️ ^John few years than I have earlier is I am getting much quicker with the block button,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John like,

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} and

⏹️ ▶️ ^John much proactively blocking. Just blocking and muting

⏹️ ▶️ ^John are the two biggest new tools, say, in the past three years that I’ve used. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I don’t need to use them that much, but that’s the only thing that I’ve added to my normal practice of

⏹️ ▶️ ^John keeping my follow lists small. And I don’t know. Uh, you know, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John don’t, I don’t, no one slaps me in the face or farts when I go on Twitter for the most part. I, I have the,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John the, uh, discipline not to respond to most people, which really helps, but the people I do respond to are nice and I have fun.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And sometimes I do see pictures of dogs and they’re cute. Except for WeRayDogs who

⏹️ ▶️ ^John rejected my dog picture a year ago and then post one that looks exactly the same. Not that we’re bitter. So angry about

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that. Thanks to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco our sponsors this week. Aftershocks, Marine Layer, and Casper. and we will see you next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Now the show is over, they didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental, oh it was

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey accidental. John didn’t do any

⏹️ ▶️ ^John research, Margo and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the show

⏹️ ▶️ ^John notes at atp.fm, And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Twitter, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco 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, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco T. Marco Harmon,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John accidental, they didn’t mean to

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Accidental, accidental, tech broadcast so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John long

Overcast Instant Search

⏹️ ▶️ ^John We rate dogs is all, oh if you have a cute picture of your dog just DM it to me, maybe I’ll include

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it on my thing. Great, I’ve got a cute dog, check out this cute picture. Nothing, silence, no response

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for a year. A year later, We Rate Dogs is like, look at this dog that like blends

⏹️ ▶️ ^John into the surface that it’s on. Which, you know, there’s been a million of those pictures from We Rate Dogs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I sent you a perfectly good dog blending into the surface that it’s on picture a year ago and you never posted

⏹️ ▶️ ^John it. Are you trying to say my dog isn’t cute or isn’t blending with its surroundings? Nothing. Nothing from

⏹️ ▶️ ^John me right dogs.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Very, very sad times.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} I’m sorry,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John John. It is. My dog is cute. Everyone should see my dog.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Marco, you shipped something this week. You shipped Instant Search, and I’m assuming

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey that you used RxSwift for that. Is that correct?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Oh, yeah. I always use Prescription Swift for everything. You should have called

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it Insta Search.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey That’s true. That’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Marco, Casey} miscalculation. See, I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco can’t use Insta anymore because I came out with Instapaper, And then

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a couple years later, Instagram came out. And now if I would use

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Insta something, everyone would think I was just aping Instagram. Just call it Finsta

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Search. Wow, fake Insta Search.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Anyway, I haven’t actually taken the time to play with this because I’m a terrible

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey person, but you said in your blog post about it, which we’ll link in the show notes, you

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey said, this was a lot of fun to build and I’m proud of it. Which means now I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey need you to tell me why was it fun to build and tell me not that you shouldn’t be, why you’re proud of it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Well, all right. So what instant search is for, for a long time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’ve had this fantasy for overcast of, wouldn’t it be cool to move

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the most common search items, like the most commonly searched podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco into a local cache that just is bundled with the app and will therefore

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like be instantly searchable. Also, when you’re typing in the name of something that you want to add,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco like the name of a new podcast you just heard about, you want to go add it, it just shows up immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I’ve tried lots of different ways to do this. And the main problem

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I kept coming back to, you know, I basically tried this every six months for the last few years,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the main problem I kept coming back to was the index that it would create, the search index it would create, would just be

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco too big. And so I would shelf the idea, like, okay, it isn’t worth the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco size, I’ll shelve it for now and I’ll come back later. What I started doing,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe about a year ago, I forget exactly, is I started recording

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco with new subscriptions for new podcasts what search queries

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco led to that podcast being subscribed to. And so that gives me, when I combine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that with popularity rankings on Overcast, just how many people subscribe to each one,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that combination is able to give way more relevant results than

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco straight up title relevance matching with no weighting. Imagine

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Google without page rank, that’s kind of crappy, it’s just a keyword search at that point. That’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how most podcast apps are able to search, is they just kind of do

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a dumb text relevance score. There’s algorithms like BM25 and stuff like that, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco algorithms where if you search for Accidental tech and our podcast

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco shows up in the list because it includes those keywords And you might rank it because it was part of the title which is more important

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco than the body and it was two-thirds of the title of this show and Some other show it might

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco only be like two of ten words in the title and the words are next to each other as you might Rank it highly like there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all these different algorithms that search engines used to rank to see what’s most important and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that are that you can use without any knowledge of the like the results set of like how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco how important they are. All you know is how well does it match the text of the query. So that’s what I was doing for years

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and it’s been mediocre, it’s been fine. Anyway, so I started in more recent times

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco adding popularity rankings to that and episode recency. So that way if

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you search for the talk show, you get John Gruber’s more recent

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco The Talk Show podcast, not the one that was on 5x5 five years ago there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all sorts of like matching things you gotta do to kind of account for this. You have, I factor in recency of episodes,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I factor in popularity on overcast, so that way like if you launch a podcast called This

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco American Lives, you know, and like you shouldn’t get every search for This American

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Life because you kind of didn’t earn that. Like people who search for that probably meant the first, probably meant the big,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the big public radio show, not yours. Right? So like you got to account for stuff like that. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the more factors you can put in that are based on like popularity or like the merits

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco of this as verified by human beings, the more relevant your search can be. So I started building

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in this thing about like whatever people typed and then whatever they actually subscribe to,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco weight that more highly. So over time if you figure it like that will eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco make like if you type in a search query and it brings up three results and the one

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that everybody really wants always shows up third, over time that will actually rise in the list

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up to first place because if everyone types in this American life and above it is this

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco American lives and this American love and then this American life below that like eventually people

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will type this American something subscribe to this American life and eventually that will rise

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco up to the top until it is the first result in that list. So because I had this increased relevance

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco building algorithm I was able to then make a downloadable local search index

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco using that combined with my other or popularity and stuff like that, that was way, way, way smaller,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but that actually had significant relevance to most searches.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And the index of that takes about three megs. And I could make it smaller

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I made it slower, but I include in that three meg index

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco everything that is needed to show it in the search result list, like the artwork URL, the title, the description,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the author, like I include all that in the database, even though I could fetch it, but just so it shows up

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco faster. And so the result of this is, I’ve been able to achieve my dream.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You can go to the search box and you can type in a single letter. Effectively, immediately,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you will get three results right there on top. You type in letter number two, and you get a different three results, or

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco maybe one of the same ones. But like, letter number two, you refine your search even further. And chances are,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco by letter number two or three, if you’re searching for a popular show, it’s probably already on screen.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you’re bearing the lead here. The most important feature, which you demonstrated in your movie, is now, finally,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John you can go to Overcast. Go to the search feature and type the letters

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} A-T-P.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John And the number one hit is this podcast, which does not contain any words with the sequence of letters A-T-P

⏹️ ▶️ ^John in them. Nevertheless, it will be the number one hit.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You’ve been able to search for A-T-P by the phrase A-T-P in Overcast for about six months now?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Because about six months ago, I started indexing keywords

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in domain names as part of search results. And our domain name, as you heard in the song, is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ATP.fm. And so I separate tokenized based on the dot, I discard the TLD.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so our domain names, keywords are ATP. And so it would show up in relevance for

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a long time, if you type in ATP for about six months. And over time that that search,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you know, query leads to result algorithm made it slowly rise in that list, and now it’s on top when you search

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for ATP. Was it number one before? I don’t know, I don’t remember.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Well, anyway, it’s the number one result now, as it should be, and honestly, Marco should have added special

⏹️ ▶️ ^John case code for this a long time

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco ago. So, Overcast, people always accuse me of this, Overcast has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no special case code for ATP, with one very, very, very small exception. I do have

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a flag in the database. So normally, when a show, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you have a show like This American Life where it only usually includes the one most recent episode in the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco feed, and then any old episodes you can’t download fresh anymore, like you have to go buy their app or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to get them, like they remove it from the public feed. So Overcast has a feature, it’s been there for a while, where

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it keeps track of what episodes it knows about from a feed that are no longer

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the feed. And for people who are newly arriving at that podcast, it doesn’t show

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the ones that are no longer in the feed because the assumption is you probably can’t download them anymore. ATP

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is posted on Squarespace. Squarespace has a limit of 100 items in RSS feeds.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So because Overcast have been running for long enough to catch ATP from episode one in that feed,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Overcast knows about all the episodes because they were at one time in the feed that it saw.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It just has many of them marked as no longer in the feed. I do have a special

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco flag in the backend that I can set for a podcast that says, ignore what’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no longer in the feed and just show everything I know about that has ever been in the feed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And so I have that set for ATP and a handful of other shows where I know this is a problem. And therefore,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Overcast can see all the back catalog of ATP, even though the RSS feed only ever includes

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the last 100 episodes. But other than that, that is the only special case handling of ATP in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Overcast, and that’s not applied only to ATP.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey fun to write other than just accomplishing this thing that you’ve wanted to accomplish for so long?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco It was a fun technical challenge for me because it involved a lot of low-level stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I love low-level optimization code. Take this enclosed

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco problem that it’s not, it doesn’t really involve anything frustrating.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco There’s no weird concurrency stuff. There’s no weird

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco UI conditions and testing in weird states. There’s no time-based anything. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no network-based anything. It’s just a very, like, here’s a bunch of

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco data that you need to operate on in low-level ways and make it really fast and keep it really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco small. And I love problems like that. So it was a very fun problem to work on of, how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco do I make the index in the first place? How do I decide what goes into the index? How do I rank what’s in the index?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And then how do I make the index as small as possible? And then how do I make the app read and display contents

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the index as quickly as possible. And all of that was, oh, and then how do I make the servers

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco serve the index as quickly as possible through the CDN and everything so the servers don’t all get hammered when all the apps

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco come down with the update. There’s all sorts of fun little challenges that were involved here that I just,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I just love that kind of work. I get a lot of joy out of it. That’s why I’ve been doing this. And then the result of it is

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco sheer delight. Like the result of seeing instant search because most search

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco boxes don’t work this way? Like most search boxes in any other podcast app and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco even in many other kinds of apps in general where you’re searching a catalog of things like the App Store, you know, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you type in a letter and you don’t immediately get results.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco You might, after a few letters, get one of those like suggested search things where it just shows like the text below the box

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you can tap on it to actually run that search. You might get that, but I don’t know of anyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco else who does search like this where you’re actually searching What is technically remote content, but it shows up instantly thanks

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to this local cache. So I really, I’m very proud of it. I think it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a very delightful feature. And as I wrote up my blog post, it’s an important feature

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco because search is incredibly important to podcast apps. And I think overall,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco we as podcast app makers have not done a great job prioritizing search for the importance that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it actually has. Like it is a really important feature. I kind of learned this like I had

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco over winter break, I had some server issues. Mostly it wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a problem that people couldn’t sync their playback. The biggest problem was you couldn’t easily

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco search to add new podcasts. And that made me realize quite how important search is because the first

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco thing you do when you install a new podcast app is use the search box to add the shows you want to hear.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And what people do frequently throughout their usage of the app is, oh, they hear about a new show. I want to go add

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it. the search box. It’s such-

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Speaking of that, by the way, that use case I run across all the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John time. Someone mentions a cool podcast and I want to go add it to Overcast.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John I wish search was more available in the UI, more prominent in the UI. Now that you’ve improved it so

⏹️ ▶️ ^John vastly, I would love it if everywhere I could get access to from wherever I

⏹️ ▶️ ^John am and it was context aware. If I’m on a playlist and I want to go find an episode and stick it in the playlist

⏹️ ▶️ ^John that I’m currently looking on, I don’t want to leave the playlist and go back to the home screen and do a search or whatever, I want to do it right there. So I think

⏹️ ▶️ ^John now that you’ve improved search, you should, in whatever your next UI redesign is, think about how

⏹️ ▶️ ^John to feature it more prominently and make it more useful and more context because now, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John even the old search I wanted to use frequently, and now that it’s fast, I would love to just use it immediately.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Yeah, thanks. That’s actually, that’s a good idea. I mean, I, it’s a little tricky in that the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco combination of the search box and the way iOS

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco standard controllers display search results by overlaying the table view with a new table view that has

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco just the search results in it and like kind of like it dims the background and moves the search box up. The way that’s all

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco done is through this thing called UI Search Controller. UI Search Controller has been notoriously

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco buggy and hard to work with over time. The current version is no better. It is very buggy

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and hard to work with. It especially is buggy when dealing with navigation

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco pushes and pops where you have multiple levels of navigation like Overcast has and where you might you might want to search

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco controller in a deeper level of it than the root level or you might want one in both but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or one or the other and Overcast also has a bug since 5.0 and when I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco added search which is search controllers just totally break

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco when used in combination with pull to refresh. Apple has UI refresh

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco control it is a built-in pull to refresh thing and if you use that with Apple’s built-in search controller

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to display search boxes and navigation bars they just conflict and you have animation bugs all over the place

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco this is I know this is a bug in overcast the reason why I haven’t fixed it yet is because it’s merely a minor cosmetic

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco bug if you pull to refresh and then you get the search box kind of stuck on screen for a second it’s a cosmetic bug and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it is to fix it will involve me writing my own UI search

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco controller or and or UI refresh control and that has not been

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a pressing enough need yet to justify the amount of work that it will be.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Tell me about the video player for this thing that appears to be a GIF on your website,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey but actually has play pause controls, which are emoji by the way, and I vastly approve.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So that’s yeah. So when marketing this feature, it was important to me to show the video. Like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco so a couple of weeks ago, I did a tweet from the Overcast account saying like coming soon, this like fast search thing

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and the response to it was massive. So I knew people really like this. This really resonated with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco people. And so I wanted to really market it right with the blog post. And so it had to be a video.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco As far as I could tell, I didn’t look too much into it, honestly, but as far as I could tell, animated GIFs, there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no good way for browsers to pause their playback. Some of them will allow you to click

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco them to stop them or hit the stop button to stop them, but I couldn’t find a way to offer a play pause button

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in the actual content of the page and give the users that control reliably. And so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I didn’t want this big animated thing to be forcibly animating for everyone

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco as they try to read the text below it necessarily. Like I wanted it to be animating upon upon loading

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the page, but to be stoppable. I also like the gif quality was okay,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco but it was like two megs and I thought, well, let me see if I can get better quality with, you know, H264, H265, Webham, whatever else

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I can get. Right. I use this opportunity

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to revisit what can the HTML5 video tag do these days? And

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that is an HTML5 video. It is literally, it is three versions of the file. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco H.265, which plays in most modern Safaris, and that is the smallest of the files. It also

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is H.264, which plays in almost everything else, and WebM, which plays in Google’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco whatever BS that plays WebM. That, I think, covers all modern browsers that have a chance to do this.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco In order to, at first I thought like, oh, let me use just the built-in controls, maybe this’ll make it super simple.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco But the built-in controls, at least in Safari, overlaid the search box in the video. And I thought, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco not great. That’s kind of ruining the point here. So I did no controls,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco autoplay, play in line, and there’s no sound, so I don’t have to worry about that.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco And I thought, well, I’ll make it so that if you click on it or tap on it, playback

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco stops. And if you click on it again, it’ll start again. people will figure that out. But then I thought,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco no, people won’t figure that out. I can’t depend on that. So it does that, if you click on it, it

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco will stop playing, and it’ll click on it again, it’ll resume. But I also wanted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco some kind of very, very small play button, and I tried different things. I tried first a link that just said

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco play slash pause, or pause, or whatever, and it didn’t, it was ugly and big. And eventually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I’m just like, let me just make a little emoji thing. I searched, found the emoji play and pause buttons, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I wrote the smallest video player that I possibly could. It uses,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you can view source, it’s right there. It’s like, you know, a couple lines of JavaScript and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that’s it. And so, it’s very, very simple and I’m actually kind of proud of how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco easy and simple it ended up being. And it was kind of a fun little thing to just play with HTML. I even did

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a, I thought like, what is the equivalent of an alt tag

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco for video so that people using screen readers can know what this is.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I learned of this thing called WebVTT, and it’s basically a caption and transcription

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco format, like a subtitle kind of format. And you can use WebVTT formatted

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco caption files to use them either as subtitles for the video

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco or as something called text descriptions. Now, semantically,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco subtitles are not for this purpose. Like the purpose of a subtitle is not for a visually

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco impaired user to learn what’s in a video. It’s for a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco hearing impaired user to be able to read what is being spoken in a video. Now my video

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco had no sound. All I wanted was the equivalent of a video alt tag of like to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco describe in text the image that is showing in the video. And so there’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco a thing for that called WebVTT and you can use the track sub element of HTML5

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and you can give it the role, like the semantic role of text description or something like that. It’s all in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the specs somewhere. And so I did all that, and I transcribed, like I have, I transcribed the video, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco great. Except no browser actually supports that yet, turns out. So,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco if I label it as subtitles, then the built-in controls, which I’ve disabled, because they were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco covering up the search bar, the built-in controls would be able to display it as subtitles if you turn them

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco on, But they’re not subtitles, and that kind of sucks. And as far as I can tell,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the built-in screen reader on iOS and MacOS, VoiceOver, just skips right over the video element no matter what

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I did. Whether it was subtitles or text descriptions or whatever, like VoiceOver just skips right over the whole video. Does it, like

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco you, it pretends it isn’t even there. So I don’t, as far as I can tell,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco that was not a good use of time to do this. But hopefully in the future, that will be useful

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco to somebody, I don’t know. And at least I learned how to do it. So if browsers ever do support that, then that’ll be nice. But

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco it was kind of like a fun little thing to make this little experiment of this totally self-contained little video player

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco in this blog post and just see how easy can HTML5 make this for me and how minimal can

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I make it while still being functional.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I dig it. It’s cool. When do you fall back to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey doing a search across the internet against your servers? Like at what point do you say the local cache

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey is not enough and you go and ask overcast servers for help?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I always will run a remote search once you’ve typed your third character. So, and one thing too,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the instant search cache results never move. Once they’re on screen, when the remote

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco results from my servers come in, they will only ever go below them. Because what I didn’t want

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is for you to type in something, see the instant search results, go to tap it, and then as you’re going to

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco tap it, it changes that from under you to something else, and you tap the wrong thing accidentally. That’s exactly how

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco the iOS app search works

⏹️ ▶️ ^John for me

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco all the time. Yeah, exactly. That’s a terrible experience. So I didn’t want to do that. So, so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco basically, like the results are stable, whereas like the only way to make the contents of the list change

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco is for you to enter more text or different text in the text box. So if you have typed a query

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco and then you go to tap something without typing any more letters, whatever you go to tap on will still be there when you get there.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco I dig it. That’s cool.

Casey on CR-Vs

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco So Casey, you published a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey video. I did. I win the competition between me.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} Hooray.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Not to my surprise. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey so I published the CRV video, what is that? Yesterday morning.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And it has been up for a while. Unsurprisingly, it hasn’t made a tremendous splash. I didn’t promote it quite as aggressively

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey as I have in the past. And I think the subject matter is slightly less interesting than some of the stuff I’ve had in

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the past. But the video is out. I’m mostly happy with

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey how it’s turned out. And we talked about this a lot last episode, so I don’t really need to relive

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey the motivations and trials and tribulations of the video. But all told,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I am pleased that it’s out the door. I am going to start on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey next video probably tomorrow. And in general,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’m happy with it. There are definitely problems with it. The one thing that slipped through the cracks, and I’ll beat probably

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey John, if not both of you on this is that at one point, hand to God, I don’t know how this happened. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey know if I did it and then never caught it. I did, I did notice it at one point and then it slipped my mind

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey after that. But at one point when I’m discussing how chatty the car is,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I have the video flipped in such a way. It looks like it’s a right-hand drive car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I don’t know how that slipped through, slipped my mind to fix that. I don’t even know how the video got that way, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey somehow that happened. And somehow, the one time I noticed it, I didn’t fix it immediately and then forgot

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey about it. And that really, really ticked me off. It was a self-created problem. There were a couple

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey audio hiccups here and there, but mostly I don’t think they’re nearly as egregious as

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey they had been in the past. And mostly I’m happy with it. Cool.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, Marco} That’s easy. I

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey mean, I don’t, we don’t need to belabor it any more than that. I’m assuming John is about to beat me up with a whole bunch

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of complaints and criticisms. But if we’re done at this point,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey then I’d say go watch the video, mash that subscribe, and hit the bell or whatever I’m supposed to say, and

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey we’re good.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Marco Paul

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Matz John? John Greenewald Oh, this is a video from the past, so we’re going to talk about – I want to talk about his future videos.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John When you release one that’s newer than the one you released before, then we can talk about it. Yeah, it’s fine. Although

⏹️ ▶️ ^John your opinion of the CR-V is warped by your contact with these luxury cars, of course, but

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} like – Paul Matz

⏹️ ▶️ ^John It is, it is. John Greenewald You can say

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey what you want to say. Paul Matz It is, you’re right. And like I recorded, as I stated on the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey video, that wasn’t a lie. I recorded what I thought was going to be darn near all the footage

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey for the car, where I basically said it’s a piece of trash. And then it occurred to me, it’s really

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not. It’s actually a very nice car. It’s just that it’s

⏹️ ▶️ ^John not… It’s not as nice as the car that costs twice as much, which is weird. Right. No, no, no. You make…

⏹️ ▶️ ^John My XC90 is nicer than this. Is it? Is it nicer? It is nicer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ ^John lost two times as much.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{Casey, John} Well,

⏹️ ▶️ ^John there’s that. I hope it’s nicer.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey You’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John absolutely right. How do you feel about two CRVs versus

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John X9?

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey No, you’re absolutely right. And that’s why I ended

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey up reshooting a lot of it. Not to say I did it perfectly, but my initial cuts at this were

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey like, oh, this is a piece of crap, and it doesn’t do anything nice. And that’s not true, actually. It’s really genuinely

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey not true. It’s actually a very, very nice car.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Casey} And it just

⏹️ ▶️ ^John doesn’t. It is an SUV. I mean, you can slam it for that. But you have to compare it to the comparables, as they

⏹️ ▶️ ^John say in the real estate business.

⏹️ ▶️ ^{John, Marco} There are

⏹️ ▶️ ^John other SUVs that cost about the same amount of money. And how does this compare to them? When you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John running one of the fancy cars, like the

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Quadrifoglio or whatever, you’re comparing it to other cars of the same type in the same price class. And that’s a

⏹️ ▶️ ^John valid comparison. But if you’re going to constantly be comparing cars to cars that cost twice as much, you’re

⏹️ ▶️ ^John always going to be disappointed.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Yeah. And you’re absolutely right. And I think I, I should have been more cognizant

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey of that when I was, when I was filming, but you know, you live, you learn. Um, but yeah, so I’m going to hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey be able to make heads or tails of this Tesla footage I shot in November. I think within the

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey next couple of working days, I’m going to know whether or not I can do anything with it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I certainly hope to, I plan to, it’s not going to be as long a video as this was.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s not going to be as involved a video as this was, but I hope to be able to put something short out based on it.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Even if I end up like, I’m really worried about the audio cause I don’t think I had my lavalier gain dialed in correctly.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey Um, so even if I end up just, you know, doing a voiceover with a bit of B roll that

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I might just try to do that. We’ll see, uh, once I go digging through this footage, but, uh,

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I’ve, I’ve set up a schedule for the next several months of what I want to review and when I want to do it, and so

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey I think if I don’t do the Tesla video for February, then I’m going to do like a

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey here’s my golf R after having lived with it for several months and what do I like and what do I not like.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey And so that’s the plan for February and then I think the XC90 in March

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey and then we’ll see where it goes from there. So yeah, go check it out. YouTube.CaseyList.com.

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey It’s only 10 minutes.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Could you not get your, don’t you have a vanity URL? YouTube.com slash Casey

⏹️ ▶️ ^Casey List? I haven’t done it yet. I need to do that, but I haven’t done it yet.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John YouTube.com slash Syracusa. The name I never pronounce, Marco. Yep.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John Speaking of which, I should have recorded my day of woe and destiny, because that would have made a great video.

⏹️ ▶️ ^John ABR, always be recording.