catatp.fm Unofficial Accidental Tech Podcast transcripts (generated by computer, so expect errors).

321: Dumbed Down, Locked Down, and Locked Out

Somebody wished on a monkey’s paw for iTunes to be broken up.

Episode Description:

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MP3 Header

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

Chapters

  1. Virginia & California
  2. FU: PBP
  3. Game of Thrones, apparently
  4. Apple News update
  5. Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
  6. Netflix removes AirPlay 🖼️
  7. Sponsor: Linode (code atp2019)
  8. Breaking up iTunes 🖼️
  9. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  10. #askatp: Fast-charging
  11. #askatp: Semantic versioning
  12. #askatp: Code snippets
  13. Ending theme
  14. Casey off cars

Virginia & California

⏹️ ▶️ John I hope I can’t catch this over the microphone. I don’t want your germs. I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want your Virginian germs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, why has it always got to be about geography?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s not always about geography. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John so far away. You should be safe from them. They grow in the south where it’s warmer.

⏹️ ▶️ John Festers.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it like that? That’s how we’re going to start the show? That’s how it’s going to be? I had

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pretty good, what was it, a Snell talk that I submitted. I don’t remember what it was now, but I remember

⏹️ ▶️ Casey being pretty enthusiastic about it. but Snell did not pick it. I was sad when you were on upgrade, which was good, by the way.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven

⏹️ ▶️ John Puckett Oh, yeah, that was good. You know the way it goes. You get a lot of questions. You can’t deal with them all. Steven

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Puckett Yeah, but mine’s the best because it’s from me. Steven Puckett

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Naturally. You’re a workshop

⏹️ ▶️ John at trisending again.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why don’t you ask me now? Steven Puckett That’s an excellent question.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so good I don’t even remember what it was. It was something along the lines of, what do you envy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about California other than weather?

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, now I remember that. You told me that question ahead of time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what do you envy about California other than the weather?

⏹️ ▶️ John That long of a list, huh? Easy travel time to WWDC.

⏹️ ▶️ John Easier travel time to WWDC.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought you were going to say easy travel time. And I’m like, where are you living in California

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John for this? Yeah, right.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why I said easier, because depending on where you live in California, it might not be that easy. But definitely, it’s less than a six-hour plane

⏹️ ▶️ John flight. So there’s that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s your big envy? I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John think

⏹️ ▶️ John you had some qualifiers, like you said, you can’t pick the weather or something. Like, why can’t I pick the weather?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, because that’s a cop-out. That’s obvious. Everyone envies Californian weather.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, not all the weather. I mean, sometimes they’re on fire for a while, and they don’t have any water. And there’s also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the earthquakes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it depends on where you are. Like, I feel like if you’re in, like, Sonoma Valley, it’s a beautiful place, and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s fewer wildfires. But I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s all burnt too crisp now, too. Not much is

⏹️ ▶️ John the real answer.

FU: PBP

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, we should start with follow-up from anonymous who writes the power by proxy acquisition

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was about acquiring people in patents period I was at Apple working on wireless charging on iPhone slash

⏹️ ▶️ Casey air power starting mid 2015 so I can say that with absolute certainty now, of course, this is an anonymous

⏹️ ▶️ Casey contributor so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John we

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know if that’s true or not, but I take this person at their word and That sounds like we really got

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong info there.

⏹️ ▶️ John I sent a follow-up question I mean we said in the first one that you know We have no idea if this is accurate or not.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the second one, I follow up questions like, I definitely believe that wireless charging and a way

⏹️ ▶️ John to wireless charge phones was at work, that Apple’s working out a long before this acquisition.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I also believe that the acquisition was probably mostly about people and patents, but none of this actually precludes the idea

⏹️ ▶️ John that the acquisition was cemented by Power BI Proxy showing them this cool multi-coil way

⏹️ ▶️ John to put that anywhere on the charge pad.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So

⏹️ ▶️ John I said a follow up question, I said, no, you’re working on air power. But were you just working on

⏹️ ▶️ John like a way to wirelessly charge phones or a way to put them on a mat anywhere? Did you

⏹️ ▶️ John have the overlapping coil things or were you taking a different approach? Anyway, I don’t know if I’ll ever get a reply. So let’s

⏹️ ▶️ John just consider it a wash and say we really don’t know what happened and as in all these things we’ll have to wait for the tell-all

⏹️ ▶️ John book 50 years from now. It’s so true.

Game of Thrones, apparently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The important part is that we found a way to talk about air power even longer.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s right. It’s a product that will never die.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the song that does not end. All

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco right. It can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco die if it has never lived.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You almost

⏹️ ▶️ John got us a Game of Thrones quote waiting right there for you, but you do watch this show? You

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco do. No, never seen it. Oh,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. We’re the only people. I’m actually, I’m kind of glad, Casey, that we have this, because I didn’t think anyone else in the world

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey seeing it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This bond between us.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figure even you have probably seen it, but nope. Nope.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hand on heart, I don’t think I’ve seen more than 15 frames of any episode of any

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of any of the seasons of that show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And it’s not from lack of desire. Soon,

⏹️ ▶️ John soon, soon, this series will be all done and then you can just binge watch it all at once.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s funny you bring that up because Aaron and I were discussing exactly that. But isn’t it something like 70 episodes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or thereabouts? I mean, the exact number doesn’t matter. And each of the episodes is roughly an hour, right? So that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a serious freaking commitment.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s fine. It’s short. And in the grand scheme of things, it’s pretty short because there’s not that many episodes per season and yes they are

⏹️ ▶️ John like an hour 90 minutes and I think this season they’re gonna be up to two hours or something each

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey episode

⏹️ ▶️ John like so it’s like seven episodes of seasons it’s easier to get through than the office for example or any other like

⏹️ ▶️ John long-running sitcom type thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know we plowed through scrubs pretty quick and those episodes are 25 minutes or something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it would go fast except for the fact you can’t watch it when kids are anywhere in the vicinity so that would put a damper on your ability to watch

⏹️ ▶️ John at all yeah there’s that but anyway uh what is dead may never die yeah

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the correct the airpower reference quote.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel better having known that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So wait, so because everyone in that show is always dying.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is not the origin of the quote. If you watch the show, you will learn this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. Is it actually like in retrospect, is it actually worth watching or is it not?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, do you like, did you like Lord of the Rings movies? Do you

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like kind of a people with swords and armor?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never seen any of the Lord of the Rings movies or any Harry Potter’s.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let me apologize to the two of you for all the email that we are going to get.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Lord of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Rings is not good. It’s not worth your time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Harry

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Potter, I actually think, I actually think Harry Potter is worth your time. The movies, I read the first

⏹️ ▶️ Casey book, didn’t really care for it. And actually, speaking of books, I read the first like 50 pages of Game of Thrones and maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s just my feeble brain, but there were so many different people introduced in the span of 50 pages that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could have had like a, what was that Russell Crow movie, Beautiful Mind, like style,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, you know, strings throughout my entire office trying to connect all these people together. And this was 50 pages

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and I just gave up because I just couldn’t keep it straight.

⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Matzkoff It’s not that complicated. I mean, if you if you like this kind of show at all, and you would,

⏹️ ▶️ John and you would like a sort of dark, gritty, quote unquote, adult version of that, this is a

⏹️ ▶️ John good implementation of that there are some bits of it that are problematic, but in general, the overall story

⏹️ ▶️ John is good. The characters are good, the effects are good. It is very epic and dramatic. It’s like watching a series

⏹️ ▶️ John of short movies. So yeah, I would definitely recommend it if you’re into that type of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John If you can’t stand this whole genre or setting or anything about it, or if you can’t stand

⏹️ ▶️ John things that are quote unquote adult for the sake of being quote unquote adult because you get annoyed

⏹️ ▶️ John about like gratuitous nudity and violence and other much more problematic things than

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe skip it. But you have to know what you’re into.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like and maybe Maybe, I mean, maybe this is just me and getting tired from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how terrible politics are in the world, but I feel like, you know how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re a kid, you reach a certain age where you start being able to use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco swear words around your friends. And for- Age is middle school. Right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around middle school through probably mid high school or so. So you have this period

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you’ve just discovered swear words and you just use them constantly between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every word.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Like, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just constant. And yeah, and some people never stop. Casey never grew out of that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at some point, like, you kind of like, you know, you’re so far past using them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for any value. You’re just way past that point. And then, you know, eventually, most people except Casey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually grow up and kind of tame it back a little bit. And you start realizing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, actually, these should be conserved to some degree so they still have any kind of value whatsoever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that we’re going through this, that we’re kind of at the tail end of this phase with TV.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because forever, almost any TV couldn’t use any kind of swearing or nudity or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most extreme violence because it wasn’t allowed on broadcast networks. And then cable networks kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of slowly opened the gate. And then eventually the premium networks like HBO

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then direct to streaming services like Netflix originals really blew the doors open.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I feel like now cursing, nudity, and violence

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so cheap, like in TV production. Like there’s pretty much no reason not to use them for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most shows now. Like there’s nothing holding them back. And they have overused them so much, like the middle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco schooler who just discovered swear words. Like now every show seemingly is just filled with gratuitous

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nudity and violence and swearing that like doesn’t really necessarily need to be there and doesn’t really add

⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. And seems like they’re just pushing that button because they’re still too happy to push

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that button. You know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Well, that’s the HBO formula. And if you watch any of the most popular HBO

⏹️ ▶️ John shows over the past decade or so, episodes one, two, and three are the most, of any series, are the most likely

⏹️ ▶️ John to have gratuitous nudity, and then they back it off because they want to get you to, okay, in general, that

⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing sells. But I think now, at this point, especially with the diversity of stuff like Netflix or whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s deployed more strategically. There are genres of show where it’s not appropriate

⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not there. Like if we were in, if it really was the extreme case, you’d have shows

⏹️ ▶️ John that are, you know, like something like, I don’t know, like Pen15 I watched recently,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is basically a sitcom. And it would be filled with gratuitous nudity because why not? Like there’s no reason not to,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they didn’t because they’re like, oh, that doesn’t fit for this show. But on the other hand, if it’s supposed

⏹️ ▶️ John to be a sort of gritty incarnation of something, they’re going to have the, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John mega ultra violence and nudity and everything, because they’re trying to show that this is a world where life is cheap and

⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, blah. So I think it is used appropriately. It just so happens that a lot of the initial

⏹️ ▶️ John set of prestige shows were all in genres where it’s appropriate, like the Sopranos or the wire, where

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m thinking mostly of violence here. But the whole point of the show is like people are killing each other all the time. And

⏹️ ▶️ John of course, they’re going to make the violence look brutal, because that’s part of the the pitch of the show is we’re not. we’re not

⏹️ ▶️ John going to kind of like smooth over the violence. We want you to show, see exactly how ugly it is.

⏹️ ▶️ John The nudity is much more problematic is very often just there to titillate the viewer. And it’s kind of pointless, but I don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we’re not at the point where just like a random family drama is going to have nudity in episodes one and two to

⏹️ ▶️ John hook the viewers. I hope we’re pretty much past that by now. But Game of Thrones is, is the kind of show where

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, I’m not going to say it’s appropriate, but it, let’s say it fits with the show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I felt like Breaking Bad, which I loved gosh that I love that whole series But I felt

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like the violence was often a bit gratuitous in that like I think some of it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco was I agree

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree with the premise of what you’re saying John that that you know a show like that is trying to show the violence for What it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really is or ostensibly I mean, I don’t know one way the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John other

⏹️ ▶️ John It wants you it wants you to feel uncomfortable. Like if you just go. Yeah Yeah, you got shot in a

⏹️ ▶️ John fake book fake book Well, if you have to feel it in the same way or closer to the same way that you would feel if you’re actually

⏹️ ▶️ John experiencing Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, I agree, but I felt like there were times that it was just there to be,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, not noteworthy isn’t the word I’m looking for, but

⏹️ ▶️ John well, sometimes they bring it over into the comedy value. Yeah, you’re horrified by it, but occasionally it there is a comic

⏹️ ▶️ John effect like in Breaking Bad, the thing with the bathtub and everything, which is gross, but it’s also kind of darkly

⏹️ ▶️ John funny. But that’s the whole Breaking Bad thing. It’s like scary and gross, but also darkly funny. But then you feel

⏹️ ▶️ John bad about thinking that it’s funny. And then, yeah, Game of Thrones is much more straightforward. people with swords

⏹️ ▶️ John and armor and big scary things and they kill each other. It’s very much a sort of medieval

⏹️ ▶️ John fantasy setting, but not not cleaned up. Not like, oh, King Arthur and we

⏹️ ▶️ John are great people with swords and I bop you with my sword and you are defeated. It’s like, no, people are going to be dismembered and

⏹️ ▶️ John like killing people with swords is inherently a lot less clean than shooting them with a bullet.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Wow, this this this went right off the rails.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Anyway, it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John good show. If you like the kind of thing, you should absolutely watch it. Just don’t watch it anywhere near kids.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. I do want to at least try Game of Thrones. Like I said, I began the books and I didn’t care

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the books, but I’d like to at least try the series. I was thinking

⏹️ ▶️ John about this the other day. Like, I like the story and the character so much that I

⏹️ ▶️ John actually wish there was a cleaned up version that took out some of the worst parts, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Because the story itself, if you just take all that out and, you know, I mean, still there have still have people get killed and,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, whatever. But take out most of the gratuitous as nudity and make some of the violence

⏹️ ▶️ John be off screen, because I’d like to show it to my kids because I think it’s a fun story, but I absolutely can’t. So that’s a bummer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I’m in the midst of watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine for the first time, and I’ve been enjoying that quite a bit.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Not a

⏹️ ▶️ John lot of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey dismemberment in that one. Nope. Thank you.

Apple News update

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Our final bit of follow-up, because guess what? We’re still in follow-up. Our final bit of follow-up

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is with regard to one of John’s Macs. Now, is this the one that is twice as old as my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey child, or is this the iMac?

⏹️ ▶️ John I was talking to somebody on this very computer that I’m talking about today,

⏹️ ▶️ John because they were saying how they weren’t fans of Apple monitors, and I was like, I love Apple monitors. And I was going

⏹️ ▶️ John to say, I have one at home that’s super old, like the one I’m looking at right now. but I realized the one I’m sitting in front of at work

⏹️ ▶️ John is also now 10 years old. Just the monitor, right? The monitor, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple 24 inch LED display, which I believe I got in 2009 with my then 2009 Mac Pro.

⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, at work I have a 2017 MacBook Pro. That is the one that is updated

⏹️ ▶️ John to the latest, greatest version of the OS. Therefore, it has Apple News and

⏹️ ▶️ John I mentioned several shows back that it crashes on launch. I just wanted to update everybody and say it still crashes

⏹️ ▶️ John on launch. I have never successfully launched Apple News. I did at one point see the window appear briefly that said

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple News, but then it crashed. Nice. Yep, so to this day, Apple News continues

⏹️ ▶️ John to crash on launch. I really thought by now, like if it’s a data thing that they would have cleaned up the data or they have some corrupted

⏹️ ▶️ John CDN or like they would have fixed this or released some kind of point update or whatever, but nope,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple News crashes forever. I launched it today like 17 or 18 times just to send

⏹️ ▶️ John all the crash reports, just to say,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey hello,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m here.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I hope that that gets fixed soon because I mean, how would you even know if it gets fixed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you can’t read it on the news?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I don’t care if it gets fixed. I just think it’s not great that they’re letting some, whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John my problem is go on that long. And I saw the other day on my calendar that

⏹️ ▶️ John I had a reminder in there for me to cancel my Apple News subscription, which is rapidly approaching. I gotta do that. And I realized

⏹️ ▶️ John I have just not used Apple News. So yes, I should definitely cancel it because I’m just not using it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Seems like a good choice on my phone where it doesn’t crash on launch. I mean.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Eero. The single router model just doesn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for our increasingly high bandwidth world. Wi-Fi doesn’t go through walls very well. Imagine asking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lightbulb in your living room to light up your master bedroom. It just doesn’t make sense. What you need is a distributed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi system. This is what offices have had for years, but they were always very expensive and very time-consuming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to set up. Now, with Eero, you can have this kind of system in your home in just a few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco minutes. You simply download the Eero app on your iOS or Android device and it walks you through each step of the process. It

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so easy. I’ve never seen another router that is easy to set up and run as Eero.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And now they have Eero Plus. This is an optional subscription designed to provide simple, reliable security

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that defends all of your home’s devices against a growing number of threats and annoyances such as malware, spyware,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phishing attacks, unsuitable content, and just ad slowdowns. Eero with Eero Plus provides complete

⏹️ ▶️ Marco protection for your network and all of the devices on it as they connect to the internet. So it offers the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ability to, for instance, block malicious and unwanted content across your entire network. And it offers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco advanced security by checking the sites you visit against a database of millions of known threats. It can prevent you from accidentally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco visiting malicious sites without slowing anything down. They also offer content blocking that can automatically

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tag sites that contain violent, illegal or adult content. And you can choose, for instance, what kind of sites your kids

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can go to all right there in the euro app. It’s also built in network wide ad blocking with Eero

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Netflix removes AirPlay

Chapter Netflix removes AirPlay image.

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey theme music ♪ Netflix no longer supporting

⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPlay. Now, I have seen a lot of back and forth about this, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey honestly, I don’t get what is happening here. here. Like I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand that Netflix doesn’t support, you know, beaming via airplay. I get that. But I’ve heard so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey many people unequivocally say, no, the reason is this, but there’s been like eight different reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so do you guys have any read on what either what you know, or what you expect

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the justification is behind this?

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, I, at first you said, Oh, I understand what the issue is. But I had to

⏹️ ▶️ John read the story a couple times just to figure what the issue is. And as far as I can tell, and you can correct me if you’re if

⏹️ ▶️ John you think I’m wrong about this is that, say you have the Netflix app on your phone, but you don’t want to

⏹️ ▶️ John watch Netflix on your phone because the screen is small, and you’re in your house, and say your house has an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John TV hooked up to your television, or you have one of those fancy new TVs that supports AirPlay. Can you,

⏹️ ▶️ John from the Netflix app on your phone, use AirPlay to send the image to your television? Apparently, that’s a thing you

⏹️ ▶️ John used to be able to do, and now it is a thing that you can’t do because Netflix has decided they don’t want to let you do it. Is

⏹️ ▶️ John that everyone’s understanding of what

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the deal is here?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey was my understanding, yes, that basically if you try to present the video that is sourced

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on an iOS device to anything else via AirPlay, it will no longer work.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So,

⏹️ ▶️ John first of all, the idea of voluntarily watching Netflix that way

⏹️ ▶️ John does not match my value system, let’s say. Netflix is already

⏹️ ▶️ John heavily compressed and then AirPlay itself adds another layer of compression. And

⏹️ ▶️ John if the whole point is I want to see it on like a nice TV, it’s going to be so filled with compression

⏹️ ▶️ John artifacts and be all gross and everything. It’s just, it’s not what I would want to do. But I understand some people like,

⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s a thing that you can do and you’re desperate and you’re like on vacation and you just want to beam a thing on TV, it’s kind of a cool thing to

⏹️ ▶️ John do. And maybe watch a show where you don’t care about compression artifacts. This is a sitcom or something. Fine, I get it.

⏹️ ▶️ John The only thing I think I agree with most of the other people who have had opinions

⏹️ ▶️ John about this that I agree with is that the stated, Netflix’s stated reason

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t make any sense. So Netflix and their PR has

⏹️ ▶️ John their reason, which they say, they wanna make sure our members have a great Netflix experience on any device they use.

⏹️ ▶️ John And with Netflix rolling out to third party devices, there isn’t a way for us to distinguish between devices or certify these experiences.

⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t want an uncertified experience, do you? Like, so it’s clear that this reason

⏹️ ▶️ John is dumb and bad. But so fine, dismiss the PR. The PR is like what you say

⏹️ ▶️ John that makes it seem like you’re looking out for customers. But customers know you’re not looking out for me. If this is the thing I want

⏹️ ▶️ John to do, stop, why are you stopping me from doing it? Like, oh, we don’t want your experience to be bad. So then you have to figure out,

⏹️ ▶️ John right, what is the real reason? And that’s where I think there’s lots of disagreement. I think everyone agrees

⏹️ ▶️ John that Netflix’s stated reason is bogus, but there are lots of theories about why would you stop it? Why do you even care,

⏹️ ▶️ John Netflix? Do you care? And so there are many theories. One of them is a

⏹️ ▶️ John data tracking thing where before Netflix could tell what device you were

⏹️ ▶️ John beaming to and now they can’t and like, oh, that information is valuable to Netflix for some reason, I guess, for the same reason, all information

⏹️ ▶️ John is valuable because they want to

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know what you’re watching,

⏹️ ▶️ John how long you’re watching and what device you’re watching it on. That could help Netflix in its various negotiations with getting

⏹️ ▶️ John their client on different devices. Why is someone using their phone to beam to it versus using the Netflix

⏹️ ▶️ John app that’s built into the Apple TV or built into their television? I don’t know. But like, that explanation

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like is like, does Netflix care that much about what device using I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ John they would like that info. They like all info. I’m sure it helps. I’m trying to think of how strategically it’s so important that Netflix would be

⏹️ ▶️ John willing to piss off its customers by removing the feature entirely.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there’s there’s a couple angles there. I mean, number one is, I don’t know how many of their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco customers they’re pissing off with this, because I don’t think that many customers are air playing Netflix to TVs,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because almost everything that you would airplay to camera on a Netflix app. So it’s not like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that common of a use case. And then secondly, there’s all sorts of Netflix playing devices like the Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV that I don’t think give Netflix the information of what TV

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s playing to.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they know they’re playing to an Apple TV. Like, that’s the bit of information that they would be losing. Because I think

⏹️ ▶️ John now the way AirPlay works is you can’t even tell whether it’s sending to an Apple TV versus something else.

⏹️ ▶️ John I believe that’s right. And I think that’s the change that they’re complaining about. I think this is a change where you used to

⏹️ ▶️ John be able to tell. Either they used to be able to tell or they could tell just because that’s the only thing you could beam to, but now that AirPlay

⏹️ ▶️ John is everywhere. I think they asked Apple, hey, can we get information about what they’re AirPlaying to? Like, that’s the theory behind

⏹️ ▶️ John this. And as far as the use case, like, I understand that like, yeah, if you can beam

⏹️ ▶️ John to it, you can probably also use the Netflix app. But that makes me think that it makes the information more valuable, is that because

⏹️ ▶️ John they might wanna know, why are people AirPlay beaming to this device when they could just use the app? Is it because the

⏹️ ▶️ John app on this TV sucks and that’s a very where we have to look into something? But again, I don’t think that information is so valuable.

⏹️ ▶️ John It just seems like a weird move. Some theories that it’s a

⏹️ ▶️ John licensing issue, like a copy protection thing, because of all the HDCP,

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, garbage copy stuff where the entire chain from the signal source to the destination

⏹️ ▶️ John has to be certified. And if you can’t tell what you’re airplaying to, you can make like a fake airplay target.

⏹️ ▶️ John And these arguments always, I haven’t seen one of these in years, and it was funny to see this pop back up again

⏹️ ▶️ John from various people saying they don’t want to do this because they’re afraid

⏹️ ▶️ John it will let people intercept the video from Netflix and pirate it. And

⏹️ ▶️ John this reason is hilarious for the same reason it’s always been. All the people have said we, the whole reason why

⏹️ ▶️ John we have DRM and these HDMI things with these big trusted passes, like, well, if we didn’t do that,

⏹️ ▶️ John people could pirate our show. It’s like, everything you want to protect is already pirated.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey There is

⏹️ ▶️ John no, like, you can make, We have to do this, otherwise people could capture it. Good thing we did this DRAM, or people

⏹️ ▶️ John could have, like, what are you protecting? Name the thing you’re protecting and I’ll find the pirated version of it. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t matter. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco know where

⏹️ ▶️ John these pirate things are coming from, but you allowing like a double, triple stream thing or the analog

⏹️ ▶️ John hole or whatever, people are getting these programs, probably in higher quality than intercepting the stream

⏹️ ▶️ John already. So there’s no point in you destroying the user experience for regular people to quote

⏹️ ▶️ John unquote, prevent piracy of something that is already pirated everywhere and will be, and there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John literally nothing you can do to stop it. Cause they get like, I mean, I don’t even know where they’re pirating from. Are they getting it from like

⏹️ ▶️ John screeners? Are they getting the original files off of the hard drives of the production? That’s what it seems like sometimes.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s like, they’re worried about making sure that the entire path from video source to television

⏹️ ▶️ John is this trusted handshaked, copy protected DRM thing inside millions of people’s homes.

⏹️ ▶️ John And really what happens is like, if you have something, you know, if you’re a nerd and you’re trying to play something

⏹️ ▶️ John and like your Mac won’t play it on your TV, or you try, this happens to me, you try to screenshot

⏹️ ▶️ John something in the HBO Go app on your iPad and realize you get a black screen because you were just trying to make like

⏹️ ▶️ John a meme or send a funny thing to a friend or whatever, right? You pay for all this stuff. I pay for HBO.

⏹️ ▶️ John I pay for all these different services. I have the app, I have the television, I have ways to view

⏹️ ▶️ John this on every single device in the house and yet some DRM thing thwarts me from taking a screenshot

⏹️ ▶️ John Because what would happen if I could take a screenshot of HBO? I could take 24 screenshots a second and then pirate

⏹️ ▶️ John the show that way. I don’t know what they’re thinking would be bad about it. And you know what my recourse is if

⏹️ ▶️ John that ever happens? Or if, like I said, my Mac won’t play to my television because it’s not a trusted connection because Macs don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John do all that stuff. I just go get the pirate

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey version and screenshot that.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, what pirate version? There couldn’t possibly be a pirate version because we don’t allow you to. Of course there’s a pirated

⏹️ ▶️ John version. I just go get it and screenshot it. That’s the solution to all this stuff. And so I haven’t seen

⏹️ ▶️ John this argument in years. So I thought everyone was on the same page, but still people believe that. And I really hope Netflix isn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John on this page. Netflix also understands that everything on the entire service is pirated.

⏹️ ▶️ John Most people, it’s more convenient to just pay for Netflix and that’s their business model. And that should be their business model. Just like

⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Jobs said back in the day, iTunes, the iTunes music store was not competing with CDs. It was

⏹️ ▶️ John competing with piracy. So it has to be easier than piracy. And that’s why it was a success. I think Netflix is

⏹️ ▶️ John easier than piracy. And that’s why one of the many reasons is it’s a success. So just removal of DRM,

⏹️ ▶️ John stop all this crap, let us do what we want with it. And everybody will be happier

⏹️ ▶️ John eventually. What is there a third theory? So they don’t have a third theory for this besides this stupid DRM thing

⏹️ ▶️ John and the can’t certify the experience thing and the data collection thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard also kind of related to the DRM thing. I’ve heard that they’re like, if they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t certify that you’re sending it to a TV that could cause license breaking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like the content providers like that. They might have certain terms in their contract where it has to only be shown

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on TVs or something like that. Like there’s like I forget the details of what people are saying, but like it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could potentially cause a contract breach in some way if they can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tell what you’re playing it on or to.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s kind of like the transitive property of the stupidity. Like that is

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not Netflix being stupid.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not, you know, Netflix understands that this is stupid, but because they’re in deals with

⏹️ ▶️ John content owners who are not as enlightened as Netflix and they’re beholden to that. I feel like, I almost

⏹️ ▶️ John feel like though, if that was the case, maybe Netflix would say that. Maybe they just don’t wanna piss off the people, but I’ve actually found that the

⏹️ ▶️ John most plausible explanation. And even though I made fun of the Netflix BS reason, like the whole certified

⏹️ ▶️ John disbias, blah, blah, blah, I still don’t think that’s the reason, but I sympathize with that

⏹️ ▶️ John because if you’re Netflix, part of the value proposition of your service

⏹️ ▶️ John is you do want it to look good for people. Like that’s why Netflix was pushing so hard into 4K. And I

⏹️ ▶️ John assume eventually Netflix will be pushing much harder into HDR. And Netflix doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John want to compress things any more than they have to, right? Netflix does want stuff to look as good

⏹️ ▶️ John as it possibly can. And Netflix also knows probably better than anyone that everyone’s TV is miscalibrated

⏹️ ▶️ John and all screwed up and everything. And so they want to do everything they can to get the best picture to people.

⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, that’s always true. And I don’t think like AirPlay is, everybody has the least

⏹️ ▶️ John of those concerns, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Reminded

⏹️ ▶️ John how many people are doing it, it’s still not the common case. But I do sympathize with that

⏹️ ▶️ John notion that regardless of this particular issue, that Netflix would want more information

⏹️ ▶️ John from Apple so it could do a better job of displaying its stuff well on the various devices that

⏹️ ▶️ John it plays on.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It just seems an odd choice to me. I mean, there’s gotta be a reason, like we’ve been discussing, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just seems odd. And also, I mean, is it so terrible to just say what the real reason is? Like, I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey know.

⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously it is. Whatever the real reason is, is it too embarrassing or too petty, or if it’s the legal thing, they

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t want to piss off the content owners. And sometimes companies do

⏹️ ▶️ John dumb things. Like, it could be that they actually really believe that the certification thing is the reason, and they’re super dedicated

⏹️ ▶️ John and standing on principle to getting the best picture policy. So they’re doing this

⏹️ ▶️ John out of spite. I mean, that would be a mistake, and that sounds kind of dumb. But

⏹️ ▶️ John companies sometimes do dumb things. So I suppose you can’t discount it entirely. They’re being honest about

⏹️ ▶️ John their own dumb reason. And we’re like, that can’t possibly be true, because companies surely are smarter. But

⏹️ ▶️ John as the demotivational poster says, none of us is as dumb as all of us. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, man, I haven’t seen one of those in a long time. That’s good stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John Meetings. That was that meetings poster? I think that’s right, yep.

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Breaking up iTunes

Chapter Breaking up iTunes image.

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey The great iTunes breakup. Fingers are crossed, toes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are crossed. We’ll see what happens here. So this is according to 9to5Mac and then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey according to sources familiar with the development of the next major version of macOS, The system will include

⏹️ ▶️ Casey standalone music, podcasts, and TV apps. And it will also include a major

⏹️ ▶️ Casey redesign of the books app. The new music podcast and TV apps will be made using Marsapan. It is not clear whether the redesigned Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey books app will also be made using Marsapan or not. This has been no small part because of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Guy Rambeau and Steve Shotton Smith and some others as well. But we actually also have icons

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for podcasts and Apple TV, which look good. I actually,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have such mixed feelings about iTunes. I don’t use it that often anymore. Almost all my music listening is done

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in Spotify these days. And so because of that, I think I don’t have as much anger toward

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iTunes as a lot of other people do. But I think it is long since time we broke

⏹️ ▶️ Casey up iTunes into its constituent components because it is one thing that does everything, you know, it is the jack

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all trades, master of definitely none. And this is very exciting and interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I also think that if, especially for music, if Apple is dogfooding

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marzipan, that’s a good thing and a good sign. I mean, obviously they already are. That’s the only thing that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is using Marzipan, some of Apple’s own apps, but it’s, it’s Apple’s apps that, that not as many people are using.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so when things like, when music is using Marzipan,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s, that’s very good and very healthy, but I don’t know, I feel like, I don’t know between

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco and John, which one of you listens to iTunes the most. I would guess it’s Marco. So let me start with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, Marco. How do you feel about this?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re going to look back on this time and we’re going to, we’re going to,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on some level think, oh, we were such fools. We didn’t realize what we had.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ve been talking for years. Everyone in the Apple commentosphere has been talking for years.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sorry, about, about how terrible iTunes is and how they should

⏹️ ▶️ Marco break it up and or rewrite it or whatever else. And this has been a topic on the show in the past before, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just, it’s such a common attitude. But, like, I did an experiment

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few years ago. I forget why, but for some reason I looked into alternatives to iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the desktop. Like, what other Mac apps can play a library of music?

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I remember this. I think we talked about it on the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco show. We

⏹️ ▶️ Marco did. And I tried whatever was out there at the time, which was probably two or three years ago. There were a couple of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that were basically like re-implementations of iTunes that weren’t very good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that iTunes was the best player to play a library of music for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most needs. Right now, today, I still use iTunes and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco frustrating because every time Apple touches iTunes they make it significantly worse.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like every, basically every iTunes update for the last probably five years at least

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has moved stuff around and redesigned stuff that didn’t need to be redesigned

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and… Removed features,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what they’ve been doing lately, is removing features. Which

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco is

⏹️ ▶️ John good in some senses, like you’re getting rid of stuff, but bad in that all I’ve heard from my non-tech nerd

⏹️ ▶️ John friends and relatives is whatever feature Apple just removed from iTunes is the one they used and they’re angry.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. And so iTunes, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco clear that Apple shouldn’t be touching it anymore because every time they touch it, they make it worse. And it’s a good thing they don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco touch it very often. So it doesn’t usually come up. But it does occasionally come up. And so that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem number one, is that they seem incapable of updating it. So that makes sense. And yes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is full of a lot of legacy, crufty stuff. And yes, it is one app that’s doing way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much. But it is still the only way to manage

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a library of music on the Mac that’s very good. And it isn’t just music. Like if you happen to also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco want like locally downloaded movies that aren’t pirated, it’s still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco either the best were the only option to get a lot of legal stuff on a Mac without gripping your own Blu-rays

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff, which is questionably legal. Anyway, but if you wanna buy a movie and have it delivered

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your computer and take it on a trip with you, you can do it on an iPad, but if you wanna bring a Mac with you,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes is how you do that. And so it’s still the only app that does a lot of this stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, in this likely future, likely near future, in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which the Mars, Japan, iOS apps to kind of replace iTunes on the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things like music, movies, stuff like that, or TV, excuse me, music, TV, I don’t care about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco books. That’s nice from a few perspectives. It’s nice in that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re moving things again, and they’re giving us more options on the Mac and everything but those

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, and I’m focusing mostly on music here because I don’t do too much with the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco others, but like so focusing on the music app, The iOS music app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still designed with, in the old principle, like when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone first came out, the recommended wisdom of how you were supposed to design iOS apps is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to literally make them like baby versions of your Mac apps, to make it so it has as few

⏹️ ▶️ Marco features as possible, totally stripped down to only what people need the most

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and remove everything else. That was actually how they were supposed to, how we were all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco told by Apple to design our iOS apps when iOS was new. And even when the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out, nobody was looking at it as a computer replacement. Everyone was like, oh, still, this should be like the baby version

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your real app, which is on the Mac or the web or something. And so for a long

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time, the design goal of iOS and the direction that we were forced to take

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and encouraged to take was make this the baby app to your real desktop app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And over time, what has happened is iOS has taken over the universe, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you designed for that first. If you’re making an iPad app, that should actually be your full

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. You shouldn’t have a baby iPad app to your desktop app. Now, the iPad app should be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the full-blown app. That’s the conventional wisdom today, but it wasn’t that way for a long time. And that’s why you saw companies

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Apple and big companies like Adobe and Microsoft first making baby

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps for iOS before they eventually realized, oh, these need to be first class, like the main

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. And then maybe we make our desktop version out of the iOS version, as

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what kind of happened with iWork’s reboot. But anyway, the problem is that that design thinking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this should only do the minimum number of things, that’s still there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is still like the design thought and design strategy that is leading

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the industry and is leading Apple. Apple is now designing with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically subtraction as a feature, and that’s infected the entire company. The entire company,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware and software, are now shoving on everyone, less

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is more, even when it isn’t. And that’s why you have things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like various port removals and feature removals and software removals and hardware removals.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of them are necessary and a lot of them aren’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you as little as possible has thoroughly taken over the company and a lot of the industry.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the problem is, you know, if you use one of the things that is being taken away

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the name of minimalism or whatever, minimalism is the laziest form of design,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you use one of those things, you’re just out of luck. You’re left in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cold. And we’re in this crazy era now where the hardware

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is more powerful than ever. We have amazing hardware. The software at the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS level is more capable than ever. We have amazing frameworks. We have amazing technologies

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we can use. But at the user level of software, everything

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is just being dumbed down, locked down, and locked out. Your computer now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is capable of doing more than ever, but you are permitted to do less than ever with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. This philosophy, the combination of lock everything down, keep the users out, don’t let them

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do anything, along with minimalism as this lazy design trend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of everyone thinks, just take everything away, that makes it good design, has led us to this place now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where we just keep getting less is more shoved down our throats. It costs more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco too, by the way, but we’re getting less, so it’s wonderful. We’re in a great place. So now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring all this ranting down to what’s going on, what’s about to happen to iTunes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes is going to be replaced and yeah it’ll probably live on in the utilities folder for a little while but that’s probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not going to be there for very long. Ask anybody who is still using QuickTime 7 because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it still does a whole lot of things QuickTime X or 10 never did and QuickTime 7 is going away

⏹️ ▶️ Marco now. It won’t run on the next version of Mac OS and we’re just out of luck. If you use it, too bad,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? You have to use this new thing that has fewer features. It’s going to be the exact same thing. iTunes is going to stick

⏹️ ▶️ Marco around in the utility folder probably for maybe a a few years and then it won’t run anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’ll be stuck with what we have now in the music app and then wherever that app goes in the future, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco however they evolve it, but the iOS music app is terrible. And maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just me, I don’t know. I don’t think I’m alone in this. It’s pretty bad on the iPhone. It’s really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad on the iPad, because they did such a half-assed job adapting it to the iPad. And I’m assuming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re about to do a similarly half-assed job adopting the iPad app to the Mac. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re replacing iTunes, which, while it has a bunch of weird cruft and a bunch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of different views and a bunch of different designs that shouldn’t be there,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can toggle it into, like I like to keep iTunes in the songs mode,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is, it’s the mode that used to be the only mode that you can view your music in. And just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have that with the two, I have the artist and album little top panes like in the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco top third of it, and the bottom is the column of music organized by album by artists last year, the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one true sorting method. And that is a pretty good music player. There’s nothing like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that on iOS. We’re about to get the iOS music app replacing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this pretty good local library music player on the Mac. And it doesn’t do that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well. And there’s a whole lot of local music library stuff it doesn’t do at all right now. And like in the version we know in iOS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco today, it really doesn’t at all allow you to do things like edit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco metadata, even display most metadata. You can’t import MP3s.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you might think, oh, no one does it anymore. I do it. Someone does it. People do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And there’s always something. iTunes does so many things. And as John said,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s somebody who uses all these features. It’s just not the same features for everybody. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if iTunes is being replaced with this version that has like 10%

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of its features, which I don’t think is an unreasonable estimate, almost everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who uses iTunes today is going to be affected by that in some way. And we’re probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never going to actually get any of that back. How likely is it that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco today’s Apple, which struggles greatly to make first party apps, especially

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac, how can anybody predict that they are going to do things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like add in local library importing and add in metadata editing. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never gonna happen. That’s not today’s Apple anymore. Again, they can barely make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps anymore. Apple really has a hard time making apps these days. They’re good at the OSes and the frameworks,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not the apps. And so I just can’t see any of this stuff coming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco back. And so if there’s enough demand, I assume one of these third-party

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps will rise to the occasion and become the new iTunes or some new thing will come along and become iTunes.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Probably not though. It’s probably gonna be like, we all just kind of tolerate this and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco keep the old iTunes around for a while and then God knows what after that. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard because there’s not a lot of market left because so many people use streaming services now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you aren’t a streaming service and don’t want to use a streaming

⏹️ ▶️ Marco service, then it’s gonna be hard for you to offer a music app that anybody wants to use except other nerds like you and me.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s apparently not very many of us. So what’s probably gonna happen is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is just gonna fragment and it’s gonna be like Apple’s music app that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you eventually will lose the ability to import anything into versus probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spotify, which I think, I don’t know enough about Spotify,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey does

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it have the ability to add your own MP3s to it? I think it does, right? It

⏹️ ▶️ Casey does, if I’m not mistaken. On the desktop, I believe it will crawl your iTunes library and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey leverage that if necessary.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Paul Matzkoff Right. I’m guessing it’s just going to be this big battle now between Apple and Spotify over the next coming years

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of they’re both going to half-assedly add these features to their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco music apps, and they’re going to half-assedly work on the Mac. But ultimately,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there are too few people like me who

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still use a local library as our primary music source for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of the big software companies to care about it, and also probably too few of us for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco indie developers to be able to make a decent living if they target it with a custom app, especially because any,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like if I were to make, like you know, Musicast or whatever, if I were to make a music app

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this myself, I wouldn’t be able to play songs from any streaming services because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not a streaming service. Who’s gonna buy that besides me? Like, and you know, maybe

⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, but like no one else, right? I’m sad that this type of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app seems to be really going away quickly, and the dawn of these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco marzipan apps coming in the next version of Mac OS, and the inevitable, eventual killing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the ability to run the old iTunes, I worry about how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this will affect me. And it’s sad, but I have to realize that this is one area where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tech industry is just moving on. consumers have moved on largely,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will have to go back to using terrible tools to listen to local

⏹️ ▶️ Marco music libraries, and that’s kind of sad. So I don’t think this is great,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly. I think anyone who looks at this and says, this is an awesome move,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s awesome in the conceptual sense of, great, we’re finally replacing iTunes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco except if you think about it really more than a second, you realize that we’re replacing iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that are worse.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you don’t know that, but I think that is a pretty safe guess. Now, I wonder, and I do want to hear John’s take on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this as well, but I wonder if we, instead

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of killing iTunes, what if there was a mythical future wherein all of the superfluous

⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff that does not involve music playback goes away? So maybe there’s a music

⏹️ ▶️ Casey store that’s outside of iTunes. all the iOS device management stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is outside of iTunes. Maybe the video stuff even is potentially outside

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of iTunes. In this magical fantasy world where the only thing within iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is music playback, and I’ll even allow that to be Apple Music or local stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that wouldn’t necessarily be that bad, would it? I mean, if iTunes came back

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to just being for music, What was it when MTV2 came out? They were like, oh, this is the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey MTV where it’s actually music videos instead of all the garbage that we put on regular MTV now. You know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wonder, would that satisfy you? Do you think, Marco?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s basically how I use iTunes now. I hardly ever go to any of the other areas of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. I’m almost always in that music songs view, and that’s it. And that’s iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me, and it works fine for that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I feel like to me, that wouldn’t be so bad. And I know a lot of people, I personally don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey understand why, but a lot of people seem to be really upset at the thought of losing smart playlists. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really ever use smart playlists.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey smart playlists are awesome. So tell me why. Cause I clearly have not seen the light on this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a filter. It’s just, it’s a programmable filter. Like, like right now on the phone you have recently

⏹️ ▶️ Marco added, but they’re like, they’re like a, it’s like a handful of baked in things. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can create those and anything else you want. If you want to say recently added everything,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything recently added, but redefine what recently means, you can do that. If you want to exclude certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco types of things, or certain artists or whatever, you can do that. You can have, like I have, let’s see,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have recently added, I also have recently played. I have top 25 most played. I have my top rated,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco general most played. It’s a quick way to find iTunes match failures.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, like smart playlists, it’s one of those things, like, it’s a computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have the ability to process billions of whatever’s per second.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Use the power of the computer to enable users to do smart

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. Let users access that computing power. Create

⏹️ ▶️ Marco features that allow users to not just be dumb consumers of just, I’ll take whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you give me, but let us program our music app in some way, even some little thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what smart playlists are. Same thing, you know, like mail has smart mailboxes. Like, it’s that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like smart filter where you can customize what’s in it and it live updates. That’s incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco powerful, and lots of people find great uses for that. And to replace

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that with either nothing or a very small number of like pre-baked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart filters, like recently played in the iOS app, like that’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re taking the power of this computer and you’re just wasting it. throwing it away.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re not letting people access the power of their computer.

⏹️ ▶️ John I just looked on my phone and I have 29 smart playlists. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John another weakness of the music app on the phone, which is I have 29 of them, but in the car I use about three of

⏹️ ▶️ John them scrolling through my smart and non smart playlists to find those three.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not easy. If it knew that every time I’m in the car, I play one of those three, or if I could arrange them to the top, or if it would like

⏹️ ▶️ John do something smarter with the UI, that would be nicer. You mentioned before that we

⏹️ ▶️ John had talked about the breakup of iTunes, probably from the first year of the show, at the very least. We’ve been talking about

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it

⏹️ ▶️ John forever, because iTunes, ever since the dawn of ATP, has been this gigantic monster filled with stuff and

⏹️ ▶️ John a application modal preferences dialogue box that has never been eliminated and now it looks like it never will be.

⏹️ ▶️ John Not a great app. But I feel like somebody wished on a monkey’s paw

⏹️ ▶️ John that iTunes would be broken up into visual apps. Do I have to explain the monkey

⏹️ ▶️ John paw to you too? I realize

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m. No, is it, yeah. Is it like the smart ass genie thing where like, you get your wish, but it’s terrible in some way. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. It’s one of the, yeah. One of the canonical stories of you make a wish on the monkey’s paw and you get

⏹️ ▶️ John what you wanted, but not in the way that you want it. So that’s exactly what’s happening here. When we talked about this on Upgrade with

⏹️ ▶️ John Jason and it occurred to me in real time on Upgrade that essentially iTunes, this

⏹️ ▶️ John application that we’ve been bashing on for years, it was just been this giant bloated thing that needs to be broken up because it’s got

⏹️ ▶️ John too much stuff in it and it’s bad at all the things that it does. It’s just a bad old creaky app. We

⏹️ ▶️ John want to get rid of that, right? And unfortunately, one of us or somebody else missed on the monkey’s paw

⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re getting our wish. And what’s actually happening is that iTunes becomes the new QuickTime Player 7,

⏹️ ▶️ John which for people who don’t know Mac history, QuickTime Player has been on the Mac for a long

⏹️ ▶️ John time. The latest version of it was QuickTime Player 7. That was replaced by QuickTime Player

⏹️ ▶️ John X or 10, depending on how you want to pronounce it, which was totally different and

⏹️ ▶️ John had vastly fewer features, but Apple kept shipping QuickTime Player 7 or kept making

⏹️ ▶️ John it downloadable because if you wanted those features, you could get them, but really

⏹️ ▶️ John you should just use the QuickTime Player that comes with your Mac that is really just a front end for AV foundation.

⏹️ ▶️ John And so there became this love, this irrational love of QuickTime Player 7

⏹️ ▶️ John among old Mac nerds, because it was so powerful for a little player app because it revealed the entirety

⏹️ ▶️ John of the QuickTime framework. You could do all these editing and splicing and copying and pasting and extract tracks and delete

⏹️ ▶️ John tracks and silence them and just do, you know, re-encode video

⏹️ ▶️ John and crop it and change the codecs and do like the entire power of the QuickTime

⏹️ ▶️ John framework was revealed in this one simple player application that was free and came on your Mac. And it was replaced by an

⏹️ ▶️ John app that essentially let you play movies and like trim the ends off them and that’s it.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because that’s all AV rendition would

⏹️ ▶️ John do. And QuickTime is going away and so will QuickTime Player 7 going away, but like, but anyway, that

⏹️ ▶️ John love for QuickTime Player 7 and otherwise creaky and weird looking old app.

⏹️ ▶️ John The difference is with iTunes, we had all these years of hating it and it’s switching directly from being hated

⏹️ ▶️ John to probably quickly, and I agree with Marco, becoming beloved because the

⏹️ ▶️ John apps that will replace it are going to be hateful iOS clones, right? And I was thinking about like, what is it that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John bad about the iOS music app? Like I just, you know, obviously on the phone, it’s very limited and you can’t fit that much UI,

⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m not sure depending on how far Apple has taken Mars up and we’ll have to see because you know The

⏹️ ▶️ John Mars band apps we have now are like the first ones and for all we know that Apple’s come a long way with it Or maybe they haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ John come a long way. We’ll find out but Conceptually the interface widgets

⏹️ ▶️ John available on iOS Are just there I’m not gonna say they’re more limited,

⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re a different set than the widgets that are available in Mac OS This is complicated by the fact that

⏹️ ▶️ John iTunes from its very beginning and its origins is sound jam all the episodes today It’s always had some weird

⏹️ ▶️ John custom not really using a widget toolkit that you think it’s using kind of controls at various

⏹️ ▶️ John times I to instance looks very strange because because of that custom UI Sometimes iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ John would look like what the OS is gonna look like a little bit later Sometimes iTunes is just like weird iTunes,

⏹️ ▶️ John but at all times it had strange controls But anyway, the strange controls that has had have been

⏹️ ▶️ John Look alike work alike versions of standard Mac controls Marco mentioned the songs view which is also

⏹️ ▶️ John how I use it But one of the major elements of iTunes from the beginning, and still today

⏹️ ▶️ John in those more traditional views, is a table view with sortable column headers,

⏹️ ▶️ John which is a control that as far as I’m aware doesn’t exist in the same form on iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ John at least not in a recognizable

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. It doesn’t exist at all on iOS, and I tried to make one on Overcast and nobody ever finds

⏹️ ▶️ John it. Yeah, like, I mean, obviously there are table views and there are collection views in iOS which are interesting and appropriate for

⏹️ ▶️ John different uses, but that’s kind of like thing with sortable columns and rows,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s appropriate for larger screens. Like you don’t have room to put that on a phone, obviously, and maybe on the big

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad, you could pull it off, but then like maybe the tap targets for the columns. Anyway, I can imagine an iOS-ified version, but

⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point is the power it provides you. That if you have this view, and by the way, that you can pick which columns

⏹️ ▶️ John you want, you can reorder the columns, you can use some interface to select which columns you would like to see.

⏹️ ▶️ John Tons of Mac apps have that, right? Whether it’s hitting Command J to get view options or right clicking on the thing,

⏹️ ▶️ John like in Microsoft’s application to pick which columns you want to see, and then sorting them and then

⏹️ ▶️ John resizing them. And, you know, like Apple mail does that Outlook does that,

⏹️ ▶️ John like for all of time, anything where you have lots of stuff, lots of email messages, uh, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, lots of files in the finder, lots of songs in iTunes, and you want to be able

⏹️ ▶️ John to arrange them and deal with them. Having a UI where you can decide

⏹️ ▶️ John that type of that, you know, having a table view where you can decide how you want to view that table, how you want to sort it, how much room

⏹️ ▶️ John for each column you want. That type of thing seems like, do you need that kind of customizability? That’s kind of like

⏹️ ▶️ John options that no one needs. What if you just choose a nice layout and people take it? And I met people just do take the default layout.

⏹️ ▶️ John But again, the power of the Mac, the power of having a bigger screen and a precision pointing device

⏹️ ▶️ John should also include the power to do this type of things. Like when in my email applications, since the

⏹️ ▶️ John dawning of GUI email applications, I know that I like a

⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of little columns on the left for things like red status attachments, whether I replied or whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John those little tiny columns, then I want most of the space to be taken up by subject.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then I want a from column and then I want a date column and on the date column to be small enough to fit the date and the

⏹️ ▶️ John time but no no bigger than that. And I want the from column to be big enough to fit a reasonable person’s name but I want

⏹️ ▶️ John subject column to be all the rest of the space.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wait, you put the subject to the left of the from? Yes. Oh my God.

⏹️ ▶️ John And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco then,

⏹️ ▶️ John and then I want to have, then I want to have the date as the final thing. Usually date sent instead of date received because sometimes you receive

⏹️ ▶️ John them and weird things and I want to know when they were actually sent and then I sort reverse chronological way it sent anyway, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s my arrangement that I use. I can do that in basically any Mac mail application

⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ve used many, many Mac mail applications over the years cause that’s just the way I like to do it. And it’s It’s not

⏹️ ▶️ John like the all those Mac mail applications had to anticipate my need, or I

⏹️ ▶️ John can only use the one Mac mail application that shows the mail the way I like it. They all just use

⏹️ ▶️ John fairly standard facsimiles of sortable table view

⏹️ ▶️ John with customizable headers. Very often they come out of the box with all sorts of columns I don’t even care about

⏹️ ▶️ John the archive flag category, you know, all sorts of stuff that like

⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m not interested I just remove those columns and I rearrange the ones that I want there and I size them the way I want

⏹️ ▶️ John and That’s how you make it that that’s again the power of the Mac That’s not saying that’s a pro application

⏹️ ▶️ John feature. But if you care about your applications in your working environment, it’s a great relationship

⏹️ ▶️ John where the Application maker doesn’t need to either make one size fit all or anticipate

⏹️ ▶️ John everyone’s needs they just need to use a standard flexible control and then the user is empowered to either accept the developers

⏹️ ▶️ John defaults and not have to decide about it at all or or make it the way they want it. And also I should

⏹️ ▶️ John add that it is incumbent upon the application developer on the Mac to make sure that if the

⏹️ ▶️ John user does resize all those columns, rearrange them, change the sorting order, and do all that stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John that you remember that they did it. So the next time they launch the application, it’s the way they put it. Because if it’s not, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John never going to do that again, your application is essentially broken. All this is to say that iTunes is basically just a big

⏹️ ▶️ John table view with column things and a bunch of different views and that you can arrange and blah blah blah. And I do arrange my views

⏹️ ▶️ John in iTunes the the way I want them to be arranged and you know the things that I want to sort on

⏹️ ▶️ John and that that’s basically what makes iTunes to me and because iOS doesn’t even have that control

⏹️ ▶️ John at all I can’t imagine Apple trying to reimplement ticket control with custom controls

⏹️ ▶️ John because that just seems crazy they should implement that control in iOS so it can be

⏹️ ▶️ John used in iPads apps but I don’t think they will and that means the music application

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do the basic functionality of the most basic view

⏹️ ▶️ John of iTunes, the one and only view on the original implementation of iTunes. It can do all sorts of collection

⏹️ ▶️ John views with album covers. It can do the really anemic list view that you see on

⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad or on a phone of music, but those things don’t give you any of the power.

⏹️ ▶️ John Another example, smart playlists. We just talked about them. How much of a pain in the butt is it to make any kind

⏹️ ▶️ John of playlist and iOS music, let alone making complicated smart playlists. I think still some smart

⏹️ ▶️ John playlists don’t sync. Maybe I’m thinking of photos, some smart playlists and some apps don’t even sync to the iOS versions

⏹️ ▶️ John at all, let alone be let you be able to make one. Some of Apple’s applications with very

⏹️ ▶️ John smart things or third party applications on the Mac, let you make smart, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, safe searches essentially with nested Boolean logic where you can say, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John was taken in London and was with this camera or with that camera,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s a compound logical condition. It’s not just a bunch of conditions and a bunch of conditions or it’s basically as

⏹️ ▶️ John parentheses. That’s extremely powerful. You can simulate that in iTunes by saying condition

⏹️ ▶️ John a or in smart playlist B and smart playlist. Please your parenthesized expression.

⏹️ ▶️ John This sounds all super nerdy, but it’s actually not that complicated. And even though it’s something

⏹️ ▶️ John that a lot of people won’t do, it’s one of the situations where

⏹️ ▶️ John they might not do it or know to do it, but people want it. Like I will be over a relative’s

⏹️ ▶️ John house and they will say, can you just make a thing that shows me all the pictures of my kids but not the ones taken

⏹️ ▶️ John on my phone? Like if it even occurs to them to ask for that, or they might just say wistfully,

⏹️ ▶️ John like it would be cool if I could just see that. And it’s like, you know what, you actually can do that. And I know maybe you don’t know how to set

⏹️ ▶️ John it up that way, but I can make that view for you and it just appears in your sidebar. And then you’re like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John great, I love this application now. Can you make me want to do this? Can you make me want to do that? soon they have five smart playlists

⏹️ ▶️ John that they never touch again for the rest of their life, but that constantly provide utility to them. That

⏹️ ▶️ John again, I would say is the power. I mean, it’s not like Marco was making sound like it’s the computing power or whatever. It’s, it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s basically the power of the, the form factor of having all this room on the screen to put all

⏹️ ▶️ John these kinds of controls, having a precision pointing device, having all these controls, these Mac like controls out of the, out of the box

⏹️ ▶️ John for context menus, dialogue boxes, the menu bar all that other stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John to make complicated powerful applications that are simple enough that if you don’t care about any stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John you can just use it and it works like people were playing their music on iTunes 1.0 but it’s complicated enough that if there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John something you want to do with it you probably can’t do it or if you can’t do it someone can do it for you and set

⏹️ ▶️ John it up and then hopefully it syncs to all your devices or whatever like this goes back to the uh

⏹️ ▶️ John gruber thing from years ago that the uh the heaviness of macOS allows iOS to be light or something

⏹️ ▶️ John similar like that. A lot of the features of the music app on iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John exist because there’s a thing that you can do in iTunes on the Mac that then is reflected

⏹️ ▶️ John on the phone, but that you can’t actually do on the phone. Like lots of the smart playlist setup is like that.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is not tenable if you take away the place where you can do all that stuff. If you take away iTunes and replace it with the music

⏹️ ▶️ John app on the Mac, then suddenly you can’t do these things anywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you legacy have them synced into your iCloud, whatever, then maybe you have them, but how are you going to create

⏹️ ▶️ John new ones? I think the only thing I’m optimistic about is I think there has

⏹️ ▶️ John to be a way to add music to your iTunes music library. So I

⏹️ ▶️ John think as terrible as this marzipan music app is going to be, there’s got to be some terrible way,

⏹️ ▶️ John probably through some weird modal dialogue or popover or something to add a song in some way.

⏹️ ▶️ John If that’s not true, it’s gonna be really depressing, but that’s my one hope so

⏹️ ▶️ John far. It can’t literally be like the iPad music app.

⏹️ ▶️ John It has to be a little bit better than that, I hope. But maybe version one, it doesn’t have to be, I’m not sure.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I love how you brought up the column headers and being able to rearrange them and resize

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and choose which ones you see it all and sort by different things and combine that with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the creation of the smart playlist and everything else. And that’s what I feel like we, the world of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mobile, and mobile is now increasingly all of computing, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the mobile design paradigms basically consider all of that to be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco unnecessary, and if you try to do it, it’s considered bad design to allow that kind of customizability on mobile.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mobile apps are discouraged, actively discouraged from having any kind of interface,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like any kind of customizability in the interface and anything like that, and part of it’s just because it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco small screens, but that really encapsulates what it seems like we’re losing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it seems like the direction we’re going, mobile software taking over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and becoming all software, is going to be taking away things like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of those things are what have made the Mac the Mac,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what have made the Mac the platform that we all love and use and are so happy and productive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on for so much of the time. And I really am concerned as we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go in this direction. First of all, it seems like whoever at Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is left who can do that kind of thing, it seems like they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are no longer empowered to do it. I’m sure they still have the talent left there who can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make user empowering software, but they’re not running the show anymore.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s pretty clear. And so I’m concerned, in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many ways, way beyond iTunes, I’m concerned that in a much larger way, we are losing these abilities.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See also the Mail app. There’s a huge difference between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mail app on macOS and the Mail app on iOS. Tons of huge features that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can benefit from on both platforms, but might have to set it up on just the Mac, or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco features that really are only good on the Mac Mail app and are either absent or terrible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iOS version like Search. Search is just the worst on iOS. It finds

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing and takes a long time to do it. And Mac Mail Search occasionally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a corrupt index and finds nothing, at least it finds nothing very quickly, but usually when it’s working right,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can search your entire mail archive in seconds with advanced

⏹️ ▶️ Marco operators if you want to and everything. Stuff that you just think the iOS version can’t do at all and should be able to do, just,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, they haven’t added it yet. I don’t know what they’re waiting for exactly, but it doesn’t seem imminent.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so like, I feel like we’re going in this direction so hard with Apple leading the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, but with everyone else following, it seems. But certainly Apple’s going hard in this direction of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reducing the amount of power user features that even exist.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it was, it used to be that like they were present, maybe not clearly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exposed. So if you were a power user, you could find them, but it wasn’t overwhelming to non-power

⏹️ ▶️ Marco users. You know, a great example of that kind of thing is keyboard shortcuts, where like, non-power users

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really notice the little symbols in the menu next to the things they’re selecting, and it never gets in their way, and it’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Power users, eventually, you figure out those symbols, mean keyboard shortcuts, and you eventually might learn some of those shortcuts, and try them,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you get more productive. And so, that kind of like, progressive disclosure of complexity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is wonderful, and it’s one thing that has made the Mac the Mac for most of its life.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is, you know, it had power user headroom for you to get into if you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to or if you needed those features, but it kept things simple enough for regular users that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those things wouldn’t get in the way. Now, the current design trend

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to not even have that headroom at all. To cut it off if you do have it even. We are losing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ability for power users to exist And where we can still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exist, our capabilities are getting limited over time by this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oversimplification, overreduction, and the continued

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like walling of the gardens and locking down of the little fiefdoms that everyone

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has like between the different companies and services and apps and everything else, plus the increasing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of walls enforced by the OSs themselves. And I just, I don’t like how this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is going and I’m really concerned that we’re just dumbing everything down,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not with any like actual measurable benefit. Like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we make up these users in our heads and we use, we argue that like X, Y, or Z is too complicated for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote regular people. And you know what? Regular people are fine. They figure stuff out. We

⏹️ ▶️ Marco cut things out because we think it makes for a clean design. more pure,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco down to the essence, or we make up these people and say it’s easier for all people, people who are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco novices, to figure it out. Most of that’s just total bullshit, though. Most of that we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are just making up. We think it’s better, or we are clouded, our judgment’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco clouded because what we’re actually doing is going to save us a bunch of work by not implementing features, or will allow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco us to delete a bunch of old code that we don’t want to maintain anymore, that we don’t want to deal with because it’s too hard.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what we’re really doing is we’re just lopping off capabilities off of computers. That like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the computers that we had in the 90s and early 2000s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many generations ago of hardware sophistication, but like we could, we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco were more, they were more flexible to how we could use them than

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the newest iPad Pro. And so I, and like, I worry that we keep going this direction of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like locking down and locking down and locking down and deleting features and deleting capabilities

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and making things even more isolated and it’s it’s ruining the power of computers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Steve Jobs famously you know the whole like bicycle for the mind thing but increasingly computers are being dumbed down

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much that they’re more just like I don’t know like shopping terminals and ad terminals

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I just anything that looks like it’s attacking what I love about computers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is their power and my ability to use that power, their ability to expose

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that let me use that power, the ability for me to customize my computer and use it the way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to instead of using it the one true way, anything that attacks

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I worry because clearly that is the direction the industry is going. So even small

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like if the new music app replaces iTunes and it doesn’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all all these power user features, that I take as like a personal attack on what I view

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as what computing is and should always be. Because it’s this conflicting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco view that Apple has that everything should be simple and dumbed down and locked down. And I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco strongly disagree with that. And it’s extra concerning coming from the company that for so long

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made a really good balance of power usability versus ease of use.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I mostly agree with Apple that the the simplification is appropriate.

⏹️ ▶️ John But in the big picture, like in the analogy to use some more terrible analogies to

⏹️ ▶️ John go with the bicycle for the mind analogy, right? So the bicycle for the mind was the I’m sure Steve Jobs got

⏹️ ▶️ John it from somewhere like so many of the things he said is, you know, he used

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to Henry Ford.

⏹️ ▶️ John The Yeah, the the analogy of like, uh, uh, transportation

⏹️ ▶️ John efficiency, like how how much energy does it take to travel over a certain distance and humans

⏹️ ▶️ John walking have a certain efficiency. And I think you go through all the different kinds of animals.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then it was like the condor was the most efficient because it would just spread its big wings and like glide and it was really efficient

⏹️ ▶️ John way. You didn’t didn’t have to expend a lot of energy to travel long distances. But then the bicycle thing was like, but if you put a human

⏹️ ▶️ John on the bicycle, it becomes the most efficient animal because it’s way more efficient to travel

⏹️ ▶️ John five miles on a bicycle in terms of energy expended than even the condor soaring. It isn’t the bicycle great. So the computer is the bicycle

⏹️ ▶️ John for the mind, yada yada, right? The sort of iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John touch revolution or whatever is like the bicycle for the mind is one thing, but bicycles do take some skill

⏹️ ▶️ John to use. And you can ride a bicycle on a smooth path, but if you have to ride a bicycle

⏹️ ▶️ John like up a rocky hill or upstairs or through a building, it can be done. You see people do

⏹️ ▶️ John it on YouTube, but it’s really hard to do and it takes some skill. So yeah, it’s the bicycle for the mind. What the iPhone is

⏹️ ▶️ John is sneakers for the mind. It’s like, well, you just put them on your feet and it’s better than bare feet, and you don’t really have to know

⏹️ ▶️ John much to use them. Like there’s no learning curve, there’s no balance, and they’re better than bare feet,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so much better. And in fact, you can sell sneakers to the whole world. You can sell bikes to a lot of the world,

⏹️ ▶️ John but sneakers, like go on everybody, kids, adults, everybody, just put the sneakers on your feet, and way better

⏹️ ▶️ John than stepping on hard, sharp rocks with, you know, you don’t have to really learn anything. You just put them on, and once you

⏹️ ▶️ John can walk, you can use them. And so that’s, I kind of feel like the, and to be clear, I

⏹️ ▶️ John agree with that, Like that there’s a reason everybody has an iPhone and uses it constantly,

⏹️ ▶️ John but a far smaller fraction of people had a Mac and used it constantly. Like it was

⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of people, but it was a smaller fraction. Part of that is because the Mac was big and not portable and more expensive. There’s lots of reasons,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the sort of touch revolution and simplification in general has been a good thing. And here comes another

⏹️ ▶️ John big but. But given that that’s the world we live in, what

⏹️ ▶️ John then is the role for the Mac? The role for the Mac is to be the other stuff, is to be the

⏹️ ▶️ John bicycle, because you’ve got something covering all those other bases. You’ve got, you know, you’ve made the product that sells to billions

⏹️ ▶️ John of people, and even the iPad, you can argue, is like more in that direction. Fine, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John That leaves the Mac to fill the needs of the people who need something more than a sneaker. That’s what

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s there for. It’s the only reason it even exists. Why have it at all? It’s to fill that role. So

⏹️ ▶️ John even if you agree, which I do, in the argument that simpler interfaces are better for most people

⏹️ ▶️ John and that there’s too much complexity. Still, I think you have to say, okay, and then

⏹️ ▶️ John the more complex stuff goes where in Apple’s product line? It goes on the Mac, that’s what it’s for. That’s the argument

⏹️ ▶️ John I would make to Apple. It’s like, let the Mac be the Mac, let it do Mac things. It’s not the argument

⏹️ ▶️ John that the whole world should be adjusting their column headers and this crap. That’s not the argument at all. The argument is,

⏹️ ▶️ John if there are any people who want to customize their column headers and use a table view and do that crap,

⏹️ ▶️ John those people, they’ll buy a Mac from you. That’s who you sell the Macs to.

⏹️ ▶️ John And all this stuff with the music app or whatever, it just kind of feels like,

⏹️ ▶️ John and this is another optimistic I think, that the limitations of the

⏹️ ▶️ John UI kit essentially are like one big phone hangover. Because a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John the decisions were absolutely the appropriate and only thing to do on a phone. There’s no way in

⏹️ ▶️ John hell that this stuff should be jammed onto the original iPhone 3.5 screen like the original iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ John UI was brilliant and the iPhone UI continues to be rolling because it’s a tiny screen you

⏹️ ▶️ John can’t use a Mac UI on it like I remember Windows phone that had like a start menu and stuff like it I had

⏹️ ▶️ John one of those that’s the wrong way to go you can’t just take the desktop UI and make it small right

⏹️ ▶️ John but as it scaled up to the iPad and now basically it is scaling up to the Mac in the form of marzipan

⏹️ ▶️ John those aren’t the right decisions for these larger platforms certainly they’re not the right decisions for the Mac probably

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re not the right right decisions for the iPad. It’s a little bit tricky on the iPad because a lot of those paradigms

⏹️ ▶️ John like again take the table view with the column headers I’m not sure how well that would work on the iPad without some rethinking

⏹️ ▶️ John because you’d like you’d have to make the columns bigger and if I accidentally tapped one or like swiped

⏹️ ▶️ John it and something weird happened like it might not be you might have to rethink it a little bit there like so I understand

⏹️ ▶️ John some hesitation to figure out how do you make essentially a pro UI on the iPad and lots of companies

⏹️ ▶️ John are working through that with graphics apps mostly but like lots of, you can’t do exactly the same thing you do on the Mac. But

⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac, guess what? You can do the same thing you do on the Mac because it’s the Mac. Like column view tables, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, tables with adjustable columns. There’s a reason that’s basically a standard

⏹️ ▶️ John control in Mac apps and has been for decades. It works fine, it works great with mouse cursors. Just ship

⏹️ ▶️ John that. And part of the phone hangover is that Apple,

⏹️ ▶️ John not that they can’t, but they no longer put the resources behind making,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not going to say pro level, but making traditional complicated Mac applications.

⏹️ ▶️ John They just don’t make them anymore. Uh, the ones that they do make, they’re stopping making them slowly. The ones that used to make some

⏹️ ▶️ John of them have been simplified, like photos who went to UX kit or whatever, that basically became a weird phone app,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? They used to make apps like that, but Apple just doesn’t anymore, probably because

⏹️ ▶️ John they put all the resources behind doing other things, but possibly also because in Marco’s darker theory

⏹️ ▶️ John that they really believe that the simplification that’s been successful on the phone necessarily

⏹️ ▶️ John needs to sweep through their entire product line. And I think that’s wrong. I think the one place where it

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t need to extend to is certainly the Mac. And, uh, and that leads me to like another

⏹️ ▶️ John idea, which again is never going to happen, but it’s like, it’s kind of one of those things where accident

⏹️ ▶️ John of history could have made things different. Um, one of the accidents of history is that email is a system

⏹️ ▶️ John with no proprietary vendor behind it, kind of like the web, which is why we can have things

⏹️ ▶️ John like mail clients, right? Apple makes a mail client and it’s fairly complicated as far

⏹️ ▶️ John as like compared to iOS applications, but in the grand scheme of things, it’s not as complicated as other mail applications.

⏹️ ▶️ John You can, and you can make a web mail application like Gmail because web is just a thing that people don’t own.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one extreme. In the middle ground are things like contacts for a variety of weird historical reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ John Contacts on the Mac and on all of Apple’s platforms are this database with an API

⏹️ ▶️ John in front of it. And you can make an application that lets you, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, view and edit your contacts. Apple makes one, it’s called contacts. And they also, there’s an API where

⏹️ ▶️ John you can do that from lots of other apps, but other companies can make them too. Like that card hop application that the fantastic Cal people

⏹️ ▶️ John just came out with because it is a, a database essentially, and an API and

⏹️ ▶️ John a cloud syncing backend. Apple makes all that part of it. There’s one system contacts thing and

⏹️ ▶️ John they handle all the syncing and theory between everything and they provide the public API which allows people to

⏹️ ▶️ John have all sorts of different applications that either access contacts or dedicated applications to modify the contacts.

⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple did the same thing with music, turned music basically made the iTunes music library,

⏹️ ▶️ John the the Apple Music iCloud, whatever the hell they’re calling it, the collection of all the the music that you have

⏹️ ▶️ John synchronized in the cloud with your apple ID. If that was treated like the contacts database

⏹️ ▶️ John and apple ship the music application that was just like this marzipan port that was very simple

⏹️ ▶️ John because they because apple doesn’t want to put the resources behind or is philosophically opposed to a more complicated one

⏹️ ▶️ John fine. Then a third party could come and make an application that talks to that same library

⏹️ ▶️ John and provided there were also a P. I. S. Like stream apple music and stuff from it. Someone could make Marco’s

⏹️ ▶️ John dream application that would be able to stream all Apple music stuff and have a direct interface to

⏹️ ▶️ John Marcos collection of music and just make a really complicated pro level application and sell it to a

⏹️ ▶️ John handful of people. And that would be viable in the same way that fantastic cow with calendars or

⏹️ ▶️ John card hop or whatever are viable third party applications, even though most people just use the defaults.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not going to happen for, you know, for many reasons, many, many reasons.

⏹️ ▶️ John But the fact that it has happened for like contacts and calendar and kind of for email

⏹️ ▶️ John outside of Apple’s control. Kind of I think to me proves that concept that it would

⏹️ ▶️ John be good for customers. I’m not sure it would be good for Apple, which is why I don’t think they’re going to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if they don’t, there’s not really any room, like Marco said, for a iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ John caliber of complexity music player application, because it won’t be able

⏹️ ▶️ John to use any streaming services. And so it, you know, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John really a narrow use case. Now, when the new music app comes and has no features

⏹️ ▶️ John and makes a bunch of people angry, maybe the market for that application will grow because

⏹️ ▶️ John suddenly there’s a bunch of angry customers and someone can swoop down and scoop them up. But I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know. I mean, all we have now are rumors and the current state of MarzBand apps

⏹️ ▶️ John and some icons. For all we know behind the music application icon, which

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey we

⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t seen, right? We just see the podcast ones and the TV one. Behind the music application icon, There

⏹️ ▶️ John could be an impressive music application that has way more features than even the

⏹️ ▶️ John iPad version. We don’t know, but I think the safe money is that

⏹️ ▶️ John it will not have, you know, 50% of the features that iTunes has when it comes to playing music.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then we’ll all just have to deal with it. And hopefully Apple snaps out of this, because

⏹️ ▶️ John in this type of situation where Apple is the only company that can make this, like Spotify can make their app, and Apple can make their app,

⏹️ ▶️ John and no one else can make any app, because you don’t have access to any streaming services, they should really

⏹️ ▶️ John make a better, more powerful application. But looking at Apple’s recent

⏹️ ▶️ John history of making new applications, whether it be the new version of photos that replaced iPhoto

⏹️ ▶️ John or the iBooks application,

⏹️ ▶️ John or any other, what’s a new application that Apple has made on the Mac recently? Any of those, if you look at all of them, they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John all in this kind of simplified thing. And it could be conservation of resources

⏹️ ▶️ John and all that other stuff. And it could be now that everyone’s working on the same code base, they can suddenly start adding features again. But

⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s their philosophical opposition to anything that is not purely simple, I

⏹️ ▶️ John think you either change that philosophy or continue that philosophy, but

⏹️ ▶️ John allow third parties to fill the gap that you’re not willing to fill by like making the library centralized or something

⏹️ ▶️ John like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just so hard to say because when I think about these sorts of things,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think about what I love about computers and what I love about the Mac specifically,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of the things that I love about computers and about the Mac, they’re the things that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey are, I would argue, in many ways unique to me. I like being able to write code.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like being able to customize things in certain ways, in certain contexts. A

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lot of the things that I love, as an example, let’s take writing code.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why would I want to write code on an iPad? I have this beautiful 27-inch iMac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a few years old now, but it’s a beautiful 27-inch iMac that I’m talking to you on right now that has more,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, three times the real estate of my iPad or something. I don’t know. It feels like that anyway. It has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really precise ways for me to control where my text insertion point is with a mouse

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or a trackpad if I so fancy. I can do many, many things at once. I can have many windows open at once.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like in so many ways, this Mac that I’m sitting in front of is the correct tool

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for writing code. But yet, I can’t help but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have my iPad on my lap or near me when I’m sitting on the couch watching TV

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and think, Oh, you know that problem I was working on earlier at my desk? I wonder if I could do it this other

⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. And I just want to spend a couple of minutes just trying something out. And I cannot tell you the amount of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey times I’ve wished for Xcode on the iPad, so that I could just try something out

⏹️ ▶️ Casey real quick. And yes, I am fully aware of the existence of Swift Playgrounds, but oftentimes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would take me so long to get to the position that I could kind of mock the problem I’m trying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to solve that it’s just easier to get off my lazy butt and go upstairs and mess with it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I bring all this up to say, on the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one hand, I would never want to write code on the iPad, but on the other hand, I cannot wait until I can write code

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the iPad. And it’s hard for me to separate how much of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my feelings about I don’t want the computer and the Mac to change that much. How much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of that is me just living in the past and not being willing to adapt? And how much of that is that the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is legitimately the correct tool for the job? And I think with all things, it’s a little column A and a little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey column B. I think that the Mac is probably the most appropriate tool for the job when it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey comes to writing code, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be the only one. And I’m kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of extrapolating a bit from the specifics about iTunes. But to bring it back to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iTunes, you know, like, is it so terrible

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I can’t have a smart playlist that does these sorts of things? And yes, I know all the smart playlists

⏹️ ▶️ Casey people are going to write me now, but I’m picking on that as an example just because I don’t use it. But I’m trying to think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of something esoteric in iTunes that I use, and I can’t think of anything specifically. Or like, let’s take editing metadata.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do edit metadata in my iTunes library from time to time, you know, in adding artwork or something like that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is it so terrible if that’s not necessarily done in the stock iTunes app? And to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey your guys’ point earlier, could that need be filled with other things? Today, the answer is yes, but tomorrow,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. So I guess it’s just hard for me to, am I just an old man

⏹️ ▶️ Casey shouting at the cloud, is I guess what I’m asking in summary.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think so. I mean, I think what you were getting at is like, I don’t think anyone demands Apple make all the fanciest

⏹️ ▶️ John apps for everybody. There just needs to be a way for those needs to be filled. And I get to get back to what I was saying before, that

⏹️ ▶️ John like, that the mass, this is not talking about the mass market. Like me personally, at least I’m totally

⏹️ ▶️ John on board with the idea that the mass market wants things to be much more simplified, you know, powerful, but like

⏹️ ▶️ John that, that power behind a simplified face. It was a great example of that. Marco mentioned search before

⏹️ ▶️ John with the different Boolean operators and stuff. A great example of that is how Gmail handles it, right? the whole Google

⏹️ ▶️ John philosophy is tremendous complexity hidden behind a single search field.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s what most people want. Like the whole, the Google value proposition is like, I want to find something in my

⏹️ ▶️ John email. I don’t know how to find it. I’m not a computer programmer. I’m just a person who has a lot of

⏹️ ▶️ John email. I just want to type vaguely what I mean. And I want the magic of Google to

⏹️ ▶️ John show me the handful of mail messages, one of which is immediately, obviously, the one I’m interested in.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is very complicated from a computational perspective, and it’s a lot of development. But the correct way to present

⏹️ ▶️ John it to people is not to say, here is an interface for doing nested Boolean

⏹️ ▶️ John logic and queries with a query syntax. On the flip side of that is, if you wanted to cater

⏹️ ▶️ John to the minority of people who do understand how searches work, and you

⏹️ ▶️ John present them with that interface, they find it frustrating because they’re like, yes, I love that most of the time. But occasionally, I want

⏹️ ▶️ John to do basically advanced search let me use exact operators and essentially write a query because

⏹️ ▶️ John I am a programmer and sometimes I can’t find what I want using your do what I mean box, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And that is a smaller market, but it is still a market and the only way you can cater to that market is if

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s some common way to access everybody’s mail. So multiple people get a shot at writing a mail client,

⏹️ ▶️ John which may be a bad example because even though that’s true of email, the market for mail clients

⏹️ ▶️ John is a rough one, just ask Mike Hurley, his experience

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey trying to find male

⏹️ ▶️ John clients that he likes. There’s a lot of them out there, but they tend to die and it’s hard to be sustainable. Um, but anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John on, on that real time follow up from people in the chat room pointed out music kit, which is a framework on iOS. That’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to play music from in, inside your iOS application, use music kit and you have

⏹️ ▶️ John access to the current users music library. And also you have access to Apple music if they have

⏹️ ▶️ John an account and you can add songs and make playlists and stuff. It’s It’s not entirely the same

⏹️ ▶️ John as like the context database interface or the calendar where it’s complete read write, but you can imagine a new version of music

⏹️ ▶️ John kit providing essentially enough functionality to write an iTunes replacement on top of.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I totally forgotten about this, uh, mostly because every time you see the WWC, they’re showing you basically how you can

⏹️ ▶️ John use it to play music in your account. But like, but it does have some right permissions, albeit extremely limited.

⏹️ ▶️ John So if apple wanted to, you know, enhance the music kit to make it as powerful

⏹️ ▶️ John as the contacts and calendar and all that other stuff, they could and that would open the door for third party music players.

⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe that’s their strategy. They’ll make the crap marzipan music port that lets people

⏹️ ▶️ John play their music and someone else can make the good one that we’ll all use. But you know, this is

⏹️ ▶️ John what we’ll find out at WWDC, I suppose.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and I also like I would not want to rely on music kit, because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is an API that Apple makes only for other people. I bet nothing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple makes uses music kit themselves. and that’s never gonna be a high priority

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them. And so it’s probably full of bugs already, and those bugs probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco never get fixed. And it’s full of limitations that your app will be limited by and everything. So I have a feeling, like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would not feel great building an app where Music Kit was something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it really needed for its value.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a web version too, if you wanna play stuff from Apple Music in a web page. Talk about things

⏹️ ▶️ John that are gonna have spotty support. Any kind of web technology from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple. Real core competencies going on there.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s interesting that the pieces are there for Apple to

⏹️ ▶️ John have its cake and eat it too. The having its cake is Apple deciding, do we really have to

⏹️ ▶️ John make the very best, most complicated version of every application on the Mac? Even if Apple suddenly

⏹️ ▶️ John agrees that the Mac is the appropriate venue for very complicated applications, does Apple need to be the one to make the most complicated?

⏹️ ▶️ John The answer to that used to be yes. Apple used to make iMovie and Final Cut Pro, right, and they still do, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, and Photos and Aperture, like they would make a nice version

⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, the sort of consumer version, and even the consumer versions were very complicated, but you could see the attitude towards

⏹️ ▶️ John simplicity, like an iDVD or whatever with Steve Jobs’ insistence that it’d be one window and all that stuff. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John they wanted it to be powerful because it was still the age where you would wow people by showing them the amazing

⏹️ ▶️ John things you could do with your Mac, basically features. Like I can do this, I can do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the interface would be nice and simple, but it’s kind of like the Google search box. Like I can look how easily

⏹️ ▶️ John I can find these things. Look how I can add a transition. Look how I can add a title. This is way easier to do in this cool interface

⏹️ ▶️ John than it would be in like Adobe Premiere that existed before the iLife suite or whatever. But then Apple also

⏹️ ▶️ John would make the super duper complicated Pro one. And if they couldn’t make it, they would buy

⏹️ ▶️ John a company to make it. They bought the, what was it? The spin-off for Macromedia where Final Cut came from.

⏹️ ▶️ John They bought shake. They bought motion, I think. They bought logic, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they wrote Aperture themselves, but I forget where the provenance of that came from.

⏹️ ▶️ John But those things have been falling by the wayside. And even the new version of essentially iPhotos, even though iPhotos

⏹️ ▶️ John was already the, not the dumbed down version of Aperture, but the little brother to Aperture. Aperture

⏹️ ▶️ John was the pro one and iPhoto was the regular one. But even, like, remember that state when iPhoto, like iPhoto 5

⏹️ ▶️ John and Aperture alongside each other. iPhoto was

⏹️ ▶️ John still pretty complicated and had tons of features and Aperture had even more. They got rid of Aperture

⏹️ ▶️ John and they took iPhoto and replaced it with an application with a quarter of the functionality. And that’s where we’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John been stuck for a long time. And that wasn’t even Mars band, it was UX kit, right? So that I think that’s why we were

⏹️ ▶️ John all have our concerns about the feature set and power of these upcoming

⏹️ ▶️ John Mars band applications are well founded in history. I mean, Apple can’t change. Apple can,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, make things, but. And a turnaround in this way, there’s no evidence of it, first of

⏹️ ▶️ John all. Like the turnaround in Mac hardware, we have some evidence of, but the turnaround in Mac software, there’s no

⏹️ ▶️ John evidence of it. And even if they had decided, it would take many, many years. So I think we just have to

⏹️ ▶️ John brace ourselves for the monkey’s paw curse that we deserve, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John getting rid of iTunes, thus turning iTunes into our most beloved application. you

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⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP and let’s kick off with Sean Kelker who writes, I’ve read on the Apple Store

⏹️ ▶️ Casey forums that using a big Mac Pro charger to charge an iPad is all right, but it causes a noticeable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey heat on my iPad. I know this extra heat is detrimental to battery health, so am I ruining my battery

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or should I just trust Apple and ignore it?” What do you think about that, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John I put this question in here because I do this from time to time because it’s a question we get all the time and I think it’s okay

⏹️ ▶️ John to answer it once every six months or so. So it’s time for us to answer this question again. I mean, sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe our answers will change, but yeah, the whole idea of I have a way to charge a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that either someone says is okay or is faster or whatever, but it has this side effect that

⏹️ ▶️ John I think is detrimental, what should I do? In this case it’s the idea that I can charge it from a big charger but it gets warm and

⏹️ ▶️ John my, you know, is it detrimental to my battery health? And I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ John try to give the same answer I always give in this which is yeah, if

⏹️ ▶️ John things like heat, extreme temperature, and really really fast charging, and really really fast discharging,

⏹️ ▶️ John those are all things that are bad for your battery. But your battery exists for you use it and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John going to deteriorate no matter what anyway. So I would say if it’s an appropriate supported

⏹️ ▶️ John charging device that you think charges and you are in a hurry, use it. Will it shorten the life of your battery slightly?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, but it will shorten your life if you have to wait around for your iPad to be charged.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just more of your life that you don’t get to use your iPad, right? So I’m not saying you should just abuse

⏹️ ▶️ John your batteries like treat them as gently as possible, but don’t avoid entire types of charging

⏹️ ▶️ John just because it gets a little bit warmer. It would be better if it didn’t get warmer, but the warmth is how you

⏹️ ▶️ John know it’s working. It’s charging faster. Like more heat is dissipated over a shorter amount

⏹️ ▶️ John of time, which makes it feel hotter. Like I understand the concern, but as long as it’s actually supported and is okay,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re in a hurry, do it. And don’t fret about, oh, now I’m shortening my battery life. Like all the batteries are all gonna

⏹️ ▶️ John be dead after a thousand cycles anyway, just…

#askatp: Semantic versioning

⏹️ ▶️ John do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, 80 writes, many people are describing the new air pods is not version

⏹️ ▶️ Casey two, but something more like version 1.2. And I’ve written a couple of small scripts and don’t understand when

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and by how much to increment version numbers. What should one do if each commit is just a small change? What do each of you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do? What is it semantic versioning? Is that is that what I’m thinking of? That’s the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey major minor something something I

⏹️ ▶️ John like this question, by the way, because it starts off being an iPad, an air pod question and takes a hard left turn

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to be a

⏹️ ▶️ John programmer in question.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It has nothing to

⏹️ ▶️ John do with AirPods. Yeah, semver.org is the answer to this question, is a website. If you go

⏹️ ▶️ John to semver.org and read the website, this

⏹️ ▶️ John is a version numbering scheme that has been informally

⏹️ ▶️ John used for many, many years and was formalized at some point in the last decade or so. And you can read it. It’s not the

⏹️ ▶️ John only way to version things, but it’s a reasonable way to version things. And if you’re wondering, if you don’t have a system of your own that you really

⏹️ ▶️ John like, use Semver.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so the summary of this is, it’s three numerals. The first one is major

⏹️ ▶️ Casey version, the middle one is minor version, and the last one is a patch version, or at least that’s what they call

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it here. And the idea is, if you have 2.0.0, and you then release 2.1.0, then that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey should be backwards compatible with, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things that relied on you. But if you go from 2.1.0 to to 3.0, then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something is different enough that it’s going to cause or it could potentially cause problems. So that may be something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that could cause problems in human beings that use your app or script or what have you, it could be something that causes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey problems in the clients of your code, you know, so if you’re writing some sort of API, but basically,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if the major version number changes, then it is expected that other things will break. If the minor

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one in the middle changes, everything should keep working. And if that last one, the patch changes, it’s basically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a bug fix release or something like it.

⏹️ ▶️ John That was a long winded way of not very well summarizing the summary on Sembrand

⏹️ ▶️ John at Arc.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey The one point you

⏹️ ▶️ John missed is when the minor version increases, you’re adding a feature.

⏹️ ▶️ John So major version is backward incompatible. Minor version is all you did was add a thing and patches

⏹️ ▶️ John is not incompatible. You didn’t add anything. You just fixed something that wasn’t working the way it was supposed to.

#askatp: Code snippets

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. Vincent Steinman writes, in recent months, I’ve been having more and more situations

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in which I’m writing code, and I remember that I had a nice solution for this particular problem that I either wrote

⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself or got from the web. What mostly happens then is that I search my projects and try to remember where I may have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey used that code snippet. I’ve found various apps like Snippets Lab that try to solve this problem, but none of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey them fully satisfy my needs. Maybe a simple folder of text files is the best way to organize code snippets and add comments.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was wondering if you guys have a system for this. totally sympathize with this problem. I have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey no such system for it. There was an app that I was using. I don’t know if I’ll even be able to find it while we’re recording, but there was an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app I was using that allegedly did this sort of thing, but I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey used it for 10 seconds and decided it was just too clunky and so I don’t really have a great

⏹️ ▶️ Casey answer for this. John, do you have something good here?

⏹️ ▶️ John I do save. I don’t save them as snippets, but I save all my code,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, on my disk on my Mac and have a way to search. It’s just text

⏹️ ▶️ John files, you know, so it’s easy, fairly easy to search. I seem to have a pretty good memory of

⏹️ ▶️ John when I did a thing and I can usually find it either by date or just by searching

⏹️ ▶️ John for the contents of the file. Like, to give an example, I worked extensively

⏹️ ▶️ John with the Postgres database for several years and then, and then I didn’t use it for about a decade and then I had occasion

⏹️ ▶️ John to use it again at work and I didn’t remember I don’t remember every detail of using Postgres,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I had used it a lot in the past, right? So when I was using it in my job and we had to do a

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, I was like, oh, I’ve done that thing before and there was a particular way I wanted to do it

⏹️ ▶️ John that I worked on for a while that I really liked. Let me go, I could remember that I did

⏹️ ▶️ John that. So then I could say, let me go find that. And I would go dig back through my old code where I knew

⏹️ ▶️ John more or less where it was in it. So I don’t have a system for filing it.

⏹️ ▶️ John My brain is system for remembering, oh, you did that in Postgres lots of years ago. You tried three different systems

⏹️ ▶️ John for doing that and you come up with a good one that you liked. Remember that you did that. I didn’t remember the details

⏹️ ▶️ John of it, but those two pieces and plus the fact that I save all my code, let me go back and

⏹️ ▶️ John dig it out. The other way to do this, the more modern way,

⏹️ ▶️ John and again, I don’t think this is a particularly good solution, but it’s the more modern way that I have done from time to time is,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of one of these milestones of being a programmer where you are trying to figure out how to

⏹️ ▶️ John do something or remember how to do something, and you do a web search, and you land

⏹️ ▶️ John on a Stack Overflow answer that you read, you’re like, yep, this is awesome, this is what I want, and then you realize you wrote the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey answer.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve had that happen. And that’s basically using Stack Overflow as your outboard brain, where

⏹️ ▶️ John either when you learn something or because you’re into Stack Overflow and you figured out how to do something,

⏹️ ▶️ John you write it into Stack Overflow knowing that Google will continue to index that. And so when you search for

⏹️ ▶️ John it later, it can find it in your outboard brain, which is Stack Overflow.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, do you have solutions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for this? Most of the code that I write is related.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So almost all the code that I write is part of Overcast, or part of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Forecast, or part of the various PHP backends and everything. And I have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco utility libraries in each one, like in each place, that I can just add to over time.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s usually what I do. So, like all the audio engine stuff

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has its own repository that is added as a submodule to both Overcast and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Forecast. Many of my, like any iOS app I write

⏹️ ▶️ Marco includes my FC model and FC utilities libraries. I also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, which are both public, I also have a private version of FC utilities that has like stuff that I haven’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco made public yet or don’t want to make public of like common utility things. And then on the PHP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco side, I have my own PHP framework that I’ve kind of taken from project to project and evolved over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. And there’s like places in there for various utility code and everything. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly that’s how I do it is I have like utility areas

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in each language that I work in that themselves are versioned and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco managed and just are part of my like my Git footprint I guess.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, fair enough. I mean, the best I do is try to keep just a pile

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of all the old code I’ve written. And there have definitely been times that I’ll refer back to it. And typically

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, since most of the code I’ve been writing has been reflective of stuff I’ve done only in the last couple of years,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that means I actually have a prayer of remembering where I’ve done it. And so I can refer back to old code like John was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying. But if I need something from five, 10 plus years ago, I am pretty much screwed.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, the other outboard brain thing is contribute to open source things So like I have tons of C pan modules or

⏹️ ▶️ John npm packages if there’s a public repository Of code for your language rather when you solve some problem

⏹️ ▶️ John like oh I I found a cool way to do a thing with strings Instead of just saving that in utility

⏹️ ▶️ John library or like putting it in a snippets thing or whatever Release it as a package into

⏹️ ▶️ John a public repository And then if you need to find it again later, it will be there I mean, obviously there’s lots of

⏹️ ▶️ John caveats that we’ve talked about that in lots of past shows like well what responsibility do you have to the public at large if you release

⏹️ ▶️ John something that you’re going to be annoyed by support email or whatever. Like it’s not the best tool for the job, but I’ve also

⏹️ ▶️ John done that where, you know, and GitHub is kind of the medium thing where you put it on GitHub, but you don’t actually put it anywhere

⏹️ ▶️ John public. You just have a private GitHub page. Like there’s lots of ways. And notice none

⏹️ ▶️ John of the things that we’ve said are snippet libraries. Like it’s not like, oh, here’s the thing for reversing a linked list. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John I guess you can find that in interview questions and stuff, but it’s actual full fledged code, either

⏹️ ▶️ John full-fledged packages or libraries, not just a snippet. And those can be

⏹️ ▶️ John put in all sorts of places where you can find them again later, whether it’s on the public internet or on your computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I’m with you that Stack Overflow is the world’s snippet library. And we

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really need individual ones. Stack

⏹️ ▶️ John Overflow has a lot of snippets, but

⏹️ ▶️ John I think having your own snippet library is like, you trust yourself that at one time this was reasonably valid, whereas

⏹️ ▶️ John Stack Overflow, you really have to look carefully at this point to know what it is that you’re copying and pasting, because there’s lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of bad and wrong or just plain outdated code on Stack Overflow.

⏹️ ▶️ John And if you don’t know how to do it and you’re searching around, you might not be in a position to be able to tell that, so

⏹️ ▶️ John be careful.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Eero, Squarespace, and Linode. and we will talk to you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next week.

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they

⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. John didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the

⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into

⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anti-Marco Armen S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental They didn’t mean to accidental

⏹️ ▶️ John Tech Podcasts, it’s so long

Casey off cars

⏹️ ▶️ John I watched a little bit of your live car review on Instagram today, Casey.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, mm-hmm.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s interesting. Like, I wanted to say, I watch all your Instagram stories and

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco everything, but like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ John heard

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you were

⏹️ ▶️ John doing this car thing. I didn’t catch it in real time or whatever. I just saw it after the fact. I thought, I thought it was

⏹️ ▶️ John interesting. How is Casey live talking about cars different than Casey,

⏹️ ▶️ John like pre-recorded on an edited video? It’s very different. The live

⏹️ ▶️ John Casey is, I’m not going to say more like Doug DeMuro, but kind of more like Doug DeMuro.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tell me, tell me why you

⏹️ ▶️ John say that. Live Casey is very animated. Live Casey is loose and relaxed. Live Casey is not reading a script.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well no, no Casey ever reads a script, but I do take your point.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, obviously the camera’s all over the place and it’s not organized and you know, it’s, it’s, it’s an Instagram

⏹️ ▶️ John story, but I thought there was a certain looseness and fun that I found

⏹️ ▶️ John enjoyable in that vertical video and all,

⏹️ ▶️ John that I think you could inject some of into your prepared videos, where you’re still doing prepared videos.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin Yeah. So what this is about is, after a month or two ago, I told you

⏹️ ▶️ Casey guys and the listeners that I was probably going to sunset my brand

⏹️ ▶️ Casey when it comes to Casey on Cars. Paul Sherman That was like two weeks ago. Steve McLaughlin Was it?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I feel like it was more than that. Paul

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sherman So long ago on Casey’s time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Steve McLaughlin It felt like it was more than that.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I felt like it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John was more. Yeah, well, it was it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a BS before

⏹️ ▶️ John the sickness.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, fair enough. Whatever the case may be, whenever it was, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey had planned on mostly, you know, retiring Casey on cars. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my contacted Alfa Romeo reached out and said, Hey, I actually have the Stelvio Quadrifoglio

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the DC area. Would you like one? To which I immediately said yes, I would without really thinking about it. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that sounded like a a great idea at the time. And then my whole family got sick and we were

⏹️ ▶️ Casey sick for like three days and that kind of put a damper on everything. But this morning,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is Thursday morning as we were recording, I thought, you know what,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty darn sure I’m gonna try to do a prepared video for this. I’ve certainly filmed a little bit of a prepared video for this. And the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey advantage of this particular car is that it’s basically a mash-up of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey very first Casey on Cars, the Julia Quadrifoglio, take that motor and slam it into the Alfa

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Romeo Stelvio, their SUV, and voila, that’s what I have sitting in my driveway right now. Well, anyways,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I thought, you know, it’s clear that I’m probably never going to be a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey YouTube star. So with that in mind, not that I expect to be an Instagram star, but is there any attention

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there? Is there any real interest there? And I haven’t had a chance to look at

⏹️ ▶️ Casey metrics or whatever Instagram gives me, but based simply on on likes and follows and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey things. It doesn’t seem like my video really got any traction. But anyway, what I did was I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey filmed a, I would guess a five or so minute video of me just talking at the camera and talking about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the car. And it’s funny you bring that up, John, about me being more animated, because I was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey being a little more, like the way I felt was that I was being more goofy about everything. You were.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I felt like that was okay because it was just Instagram, it’s casual, it’s live. You know, it’s unfiltered, you know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wish I remembered the real world theme song or whatever. But anyway, the point

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that it doesn’t matter because it’s more casual, right? But then after I stopped the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey live stream, I actually thought to myself, you know, you were a little bit over the top,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that probably was for the best and you should really try to capture that when you do any further filming.

⏹️ ▶️ John You were a lot over the top. Like, I’m not saying you should be exactly the same way, but it was just, it was so far in the other

⏹️ ▶️ John direction that I feel like it was, It establishes the endpoints of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey spectrum. Yeah, fair enough. Now I will say that after I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey came into the office to record, I received the following text message from my lovely wife.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just watch the full live Instagram thing you did. John and Marco are totally gonna yell at you for basically doing your whole video on Instagram.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I am surprised that you have not yet done, neither of you have yet done exactly that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco That actually is a totally defensible thing. You can just pretend for a minute that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you didn’t accidentally do this. Pretend like you are really telling us, you know I’ve decided that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco YouTube is on the way down, Instagram’s on the way up, and I wanna be where the people are, and today the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are going to Instagram.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just call it a strategy. No, Instagram stories is a separate skill though. I think if you

⏹️ ▶️ John did it as an Instagram story, it still could have been tighter. It was

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey pretty long. Oh sure, oh

⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely. Yeah, yeah, oh absolutely. I don’t know how people do that, by the way. I see lots of Instagram stories that almost

⏹️ ▶️ John seem like they’re edited, but you can’t edit it,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? I guess it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco no you can’t.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can import video that you’ve created elsewhere and make it a story. I mean, so here’s the,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, the answer to like, how is X person so good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Instagram? The answer is always that they’re putting in way more effort into it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you think they are and then it appears they are. Like, the way people have these amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking Instagram photos and these amazing stories is that like, they’re making that their

⏹️ ▶️ Marco job and they’re taking hours, and they might have a crew to help them or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just like making good video and good photos anywhere else. If you wanna do really, really good video

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and photos, especially to the levels that a lot of these high follower people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are doing it, you pretty much need, that has to be your job, that has to be your life,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to have help, you have to have a staff, you have to have money. That’s the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco answer to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that

⏹️ ▶️ John usually. The stories you can do, like, it’s mostly just where the cuts are placed. Like, I didn’t realize, you can tell I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ John literally never done an Instagram story, even though I watch them every single day. But like, it’s still all

⏹️ ▶️ John just handheld shaky, bad picture, bad sound. It’s just that the cuts are in the right place, right? So in theory,

⏹️ ▶️ John if you were clever, you could do that directly on the thing. But it makes so much more sense that they just

⏹️ ▶️ John record raw footage with their phone, bring it into an editing application, slice it all together, and then upload

⏹️ ▶️ John it as a story.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I think the real difficulty from what little I’ve understood, having not really looked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey into this, is that not a lot of video editing suites are really designed to edit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey portrait video, which makes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John things

⏹️ ▶️ John quite… There’s the application that’s just for that. What is it called? Rush? Adobe Rush?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s one of those big

⏹️ ▶️ John selling points. I forgot

⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that. It’s edit vertical video. Yeah, but anyways, I think you’re exactly right that in using

⏹️ ▶️ Casey me as a particular case Like, it was completely extemporaneous. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not really designed to be a long-lived thing. By the time listeners listen to this, it will probably not be

⏹️ ▶️ Casey available on Instagram anymore. But it could have been tighter.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t really have any particular agenda to it. I was just kind of talking. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do think with a little bit more thought, it

⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be be an interesting avenue if I wanted to continue this Casey Onkar stuff because I think if I were

⏹️ ▶️ Casey taking it more seriously, I like the idea of being live.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that that’s kind of neat. I think being live at something like 11 o’clock in the morning

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eastern time is not the correct time to do that sort of thing if you want any real viewers because people are working.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I could totally see doing something like announcing a week

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two in advance, hey, you know, six o’clock in the evening or seven or nine or whatever in the evening. I’m going to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey be live for 10, 15 minutes talking about the Stelvio Quattrolio. Join me.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I could see that being interesting and fun. And what’s really interesting about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Instagram, doing Instagram stuff live is that it’s to some small degree,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a two-way street, right? When people are listening to this podcast, unless they’re in the chat room

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and unless one of the three of us happens to look at what they’re saying, it is very much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a one-way conversation. Whereas Instagram Live, I guess it’s actually not that different from podcasting because you can replay

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it for at least a short duration. But my point is just, at the end of it, I thought I’d see

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if there were any questions. I only did that for a minute or two, but I asked, do you have any questions? And a couple of people asked questions and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I answered them. And that was very cool to have that happen live and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have that happen with an audience that isn’t there to make fun of everything about what you’ve said and what you’ve done, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is exactly what happens in YouTube comments. Maybe it’s just that I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a more positive feeling about Instagram, despite being owned by Facebook, than I do about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey YouTube. But it just seems like the odd, or my audience there is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey more respectful and kind, and maybe that’s just the problem entirely, is that for better

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or for worse, I’m only getting my audience on Instagram, where I am getting at least a smattering

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of other random people on YouTube, and maybe I’m confusing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the audience crossover with just the temperament of the platform.

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know of Instagram and sort of an ephemeral thing like story. It’s just the correct

⏹️ ▶️ John venue for footage of a big, expensive thing that somebody loaned

⏹️ ▶️ John you because you want you want the value of that. You want that to be like car videos. You have that big, expensive

⏹️ ▶️ John thing for a short period of time. It’s a rare thing to have. You want to record that and put it somewhere where people can watch it all the time.

⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like a much better fit for Instagram stories is drawing Pokemon for your kids’ lunches

⏹️ ▶️ John like

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Marco did, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is like, the whole value in that is being there for the experience. Like the replay

⏹️ ▶️ John is less valuable, you don’t get to ask questions, but even so it’s more of like a personal, like vlogging essentially. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John here’s a snippet from my life and you can watch it in real time or a little bit later but 24 hours later you probably don’t care what I did yesterday

⏹️ ▶️ John and it doesn’t involve someone loaning me $85,000 worth of metal. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I haven’t really looked into Instagram TV yet, but I wonder,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I mean that genuinely, I honestly don’t know. So I wonder if that may be the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey equivalent venue for it,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco but I’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Casey never

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco watched

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Instagram TV.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so Instagram TV is like YouTube, but no one’s watching

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Well, right. Exactly. Exactly.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I want to take back what I said about the about the Pokemon because now that I think about it, I would watch a pre recorded

⏹️ ▶️ John version of Marco during Pokemon forever. But I think the live experience of it is

⏹️ ▶️ John important. You know why? Like, the live experience is what makes the recorded thing better. This is this

⏹️ ▶️ John is the best part of Marco during things. So he’s there. Tiff’s gone, he’s trying to do the Pokemon

⏹️ ▶️ John for the lunch. He’s got Tiff’s art supplies, and he’s using them and narrating what he’s doing while he’s doing it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And he has musings that he muses out loud about like, maybe I should use this

⏹️ ▶️ John marker here, or I’ll put the clear thing on or whatever. And then like on a two second delay, the

⏹️ ▶️ John entire quote unquote chat room is like,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey no, don’t use the clear marker on that, it will mess things

⏹️ ▶️ John up and just start scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. And the super turbo version of that is when he thinks about

⏹️ ▶️ John doing something and Tiff herself chimes in and says, don’t do that.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, don’t touch my, use

⏹️ ▶️ John the other thing. And then you’re biting your nails, saying, is he gonna see that? Or is he, because he’s not, he can’t look at

⏹️ ▶️ John all the chat all the time and they’re scrolling so fast. And I feel like at a certain point, I was hoping that Tiff would call

⏹️ ▶️ John him on the phone and say, don’t use that marker. You’re not allowed to use those. You’re just gonna mess them up. Just,

⏹️ ▶️ John and that drama happens in real time, but you can appreciate it later when it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John replaying. So it’s still, I think it’s still a better fit than a car review,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I guess I’m coming down on the side that if some content is good, Making

⏹️ ▶️ John it available more permanently than 24 hours is probably a good idea.