324: Automatic Kicking Machine
03 May 2019Overcast’s clip sharing, Apple vs. parental-control apps, and Marco vs. jury duty.
Episode Description:
The ATP store is back with brand new designs! Only available until May 12! Order now! Our thanks to The Iconfactory for helping us out with the T-Shirt designs this year.
- Follow-up:
- Australia Post's website link guidelines (via Robb McAlavey)
- How could one leverage copyright to block podcasts in clients?
- Clip sharing with Overcast
- Overcast for macOS
- New York Times on Apple "cracking down" on MDM apps
#askatp:- What naming convention do we use for stuff on our Macs? (via Keegan Sands)
- Why does Apple bother with AWS? (via Patrick)
- What are our favorite sports cars? (via Paul Wood III)
- Post-show: Marco gets summoned to jury duty
Sponsored by:
Chapters
- Mnenemonic
- Don’t forget about shirts
- Follow-up: Link permission
- Follow-up: Copyright law
- Sponsor: Clear
- Overcast clip sharing
- Marzipan hacks
- Sponsor: Hover
- Apple vs. parental-control apps
- Sponsor: Eero (code ATP)
- #askatp: File naming
- #askatp: Apple’s own AWS?
- #askneutral: Top 10 sports cars
- Ending theme
- Jury-duty tech 🖼️
Mnenemonic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you live in a affluent, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, why do you? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey only two ways to do it. Just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the opposite of what you think you’re going to do. It’s affluent? That just sounds wrong to
⏹️ ▶️ John going to pronounce the word. I didn’t make it up. Oh, God. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe think of like Aflac, the Aflac duck. Oh! Affluent. Aflac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a good mnemonic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s a good what now? It was a joke. I know it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mnemonic. It was a joke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It was a joke.
Don’t forget about shirts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so we should start right at the top of the show and remind everyone I know I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got really obnoxious about it last week You’re welcome on the or I should say that Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should say you’re welcome Because I noticed he cut quite a bit of my lecturing as he should have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco now is the time ladies and gentlemen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now is the time ladies and gentlemen to go to ATP dot FM slash store in order to find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey links to Cotton Bureau’s website Where we have all sorts of different merchandise up Every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey year, somebody, actually usually many somebody says, Oh, I meant to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do it and I forgot. And, uh, can, is there any way? Is there any? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is no way. Pull the car over, stop your run, do whatever you need to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to safely equip yourself to go to atp.fm slash store, please,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and buy yourself some delightful merch. And I’ll just leave it at that this week.
Follow-up: Link permission
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, let’s start with some follow up. Rob McAlevey has written in to say that the Australia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Post website terms and conditions have a whole section telling you what to do to get approval to link to their website.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This came up within the context of, what is it, Luminary, something like that? I already forgot the name of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stupid thing. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John Luminary. It was telling them that they, you can’t put my podcast in your feed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Rob writes that, you know, in the context of us saying, who’s in control of, you know, whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a podcast ends up in Luminary, and we were joking about, well, who’s in control of who links to your website?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, apparently the Australia Post has some guidelines about how you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey link to their website, which is something else. It’s not that long, but it’s surprising to me
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you’re saying this is a thing that websites used to do before they understood the web. This is notable because this is a current website
⏹️ ▶️ John that is live right now that says, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco want to establish
⏹️ ▶️ John a link to the website, you must first seek approval from Australia Post. And also if the nature
⏹️ ▶️ John or content of your website changes in any significant way, you must contact the Australia Post. Yeah, we’ll get right on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, this brings the obvious question of, are we allowed to link to this from our show notes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, that’s a good point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get us, Australia Post. Come at me bro.
Follow-up: Copyright law
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Roger Allen Ford, who is an associate professor of law somewhere, writes, this is, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whoever put this in the show notes didn’t include the where. I’m sorry, Roger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Allen Ford. I didn’t want to nail it down too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John He did give the location of where he’s an associate professor of law, but you know, I don’t know. Don’t be creepy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, by providing an app that allows members of the public to receive transmissions of album art and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast audio, Luminary could be said to perform or display those copyrighted works.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey By embedding a podcast copyrighted artwork within the app playing copyrighted episodes, a podcast player app would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey infringing on the exclusive rights to public performance or display. I don’t know why the Times and others want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey block Luminary, but they are essentially on solid legal ground doing so. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should have said context, I’m sorry. This was, you know, whether or not it’s even really possible for these podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and podcast hosts to block their shows from appearing in Luminary. And I think Roger wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey necessarily saying that this was a slam dunk case, if I recall this email correctly, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe he was basically saying it’s possible, like it is certainly plausible in the MythBusters,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, canon. It is plausible that this could be enforced in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey American copyright law.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this was a very long email that I was trying to condense here, but you know, this is another instance where,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, just because something is legal doesn’t mean it’s not also stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or reverse that, because it really is very silly. But legally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are lots of legal arguments you can make in favor of the idea that law,
⏹️ ▶️ John what can you do? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why we have lawyers. The thing with copyright law too is like much of law, if someone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes any kind of copyright legal claim against you, you can’t really fight it. You can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s never going to get to a court. You’re never going to get to argue with somebody, well, what I’m doing is fair use or what I’m doing does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not constitute public performance. You’re never going to get to argue that. What’s going to happen is if somebody has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complaint that they want their stuff off your app or platform, they’re gonna complain to you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you don’t respond, they’re gonna complain to Apple or Google, well, you know, the app store provider, and if they don’t respond,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re gonna complain to your web host, like, they can complain to, you know, different infrastructure providers up the chain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until one of them doesn’t wanna deal with it and just kicks you off. So the reality is there is no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco copyright law defense online. If somebody wants to make a stink, they make a stink, and you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to comply. So the reality here is this is not a legal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem, this is a market problem. That the only defense that anybody has against
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this kind of thing is making an app or service where it is not in anybody’s best interest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to opt out of your service. Or it is not, or like nobody would even think to do that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems so ridiculous to do that. And that’s where most podcast apps land, in that kind of area.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But Luminary, by angering everybody, everyone is looking for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things they can do because they’re mad. And I think that’s what a lot of this stuff was.
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Overcast clip sharing
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Overcast has come out with a really frickin’ cool new feature and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’d like to lodge a complaint that hopefully we can rectify right now. Let’s do it. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening to Under the Radar, which is an excellent podcast with Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our good friend Dave Smith. And you kind of fluffed over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the technical aspects of how this feature works. And we’ll explain the feature momentarily. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am here for the technical explanation of how this feature works to the degree that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are willing to share. Now, I should probably back up and explain what the hell I’m talking about. But I would like it to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on record that I am all about figuring out, or not figuring out, but hearing about how you did this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because this sounds fascinating to me. But what am I talking about? So out of nowhere, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did not know this was coming. I don’t think John knew this was coming. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you had said, maybe under the radar, that only a couple of people did know it was coming. But all of a sudden
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the last couple of days, Marco and his app Overcast have released this new Clips
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feature. And the idea is, and Marco, if I’m characterizing this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unfairly, just feel free to cut me off. But the idea is, hey, podcasts are not easy to share in the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way like a GIF or in some degree a YouTube video is. And Marco has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for years and years had timestamp links where you can go to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, the Overcast website and it will open to a specific time in the podcast, which works great,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey except for all the big shows with dynamic ad insertion for all the reasons we already spoke about, et cetera, et cetera. Plus it’s still hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to know, like, am I supposed to be listening to the last 45 minutes of this episode and I’m just starting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the middle or am I supposed to listen to 15 seconds or what’s the deal here? And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, and perhaps you can discuss motivations in a second other than that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seemed like the idea was, Hey, let’s make it easy to share this stuff. And, you know, if they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey share it with overcast clips feature, that’s some, you know, kind of subliminal, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the right word for it, but kind of, you know, quiet marketing for overcast. But then because you’re a good person,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you decided to optionally allow people to remove the overcast branding or add branding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Apple podcasts, or even some of your competitors, which I think is really tremendous. And I, and I hope I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sound sarcastic because I really do mean that. I really think that this is the right way to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Not the easy way, not both in the literal sense of the word, but also in the like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should I really be promoting my competitors kind of thing? Uh, but I think this is the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way to do it. And you’re a good man, Charlie Brown. And I used this feature for the first time a couple hours ago and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loved it. I really want to know, even if it’s privately, how you did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all this, because I am neck deep in doing things that are considerably less complex
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and considerably less advanced. And so the thought of trying to implement this just makes me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey googly-eyed. But one way or another, before we dive in, if we even do dive into implementation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just wanted to, first of all, publicly say I love this feature. I think it’s great. right by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone, including listeners, including competitors, including podcasters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really think this is a home run. But if you would like to revise anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said or add any clarity, please feel free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, you’re just saying how awesome I am. I think I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John leave it at that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to say how awesome it is first too before Marco goes. I’ll allow it. Yeah. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the parts that Casey might have left off, which I think is the the most important part of this entire feature. Actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John before I get into that, I’ll briefly touch on the links at the bottom where you
⏹️ ▶️ John could link to competitors and stuff like that. I feel like there’s a little bit of the enemy of my enemy is my friend
⏹️ ▶️ John going on here because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Marco does not link to Luminary.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I don’t care about Luminary. Luminary is not a threat to me. Spotify is a threat to all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us, but I don’t know how to link to Spotify when what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have is an iTunes ID. Every app that I link to there has a way that I can generate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a URL knowing the iTunes ID of the podcast. I don’t know how to do that for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some other services like Spotify, and so I don’t do that. If Spotify had some way that I could say, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Spotify.com slash podcast slash iTunes one, two, three, four, five, and I know that anybody I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sent there would get redirected to whatever Spotify’s giant garbage URL would be for that podcast, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John Really? I always thought you were mostly linking to open, to actual real podcast apps as in they, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s two sides of this. Like I, I do want to only support open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based podcast apps if I can, but also I want the share page
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be so useful that big publishers will be tempted to use it. And if big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publishers, you know, have a lot of their audience on Spotify, they’re not going to even consider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using a page, like a share page, that has a bunch of other apps but not Spotify.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now that being said, this might be a moot concern because big publishers would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably never use these at all anyway. They’re probably going to use only their own stuff because that’s how they usually work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, this might be a moot argument, but ideally, I would like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those pages to be as broad appeal on the client
⏹️ ▶️ John All right, well, getting back to my original point, and I think it’s the most important feature of this, and which may not have been clear in all of
⏹️ ▶️ John our descriptions, when you activate this feature, what you get in
⏹️ ▶️ John the end that you can stick in your tweet or wherever the hell is a video,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like you’re sharing podcasts. If I’m sharing podcasts, why the hell do I get a video
⏹️ ▶️ John at the end of it? It’s not a video medium, it’s audio. And Overcast already
⏹️ ▶️ John had audio share links granted without an ending timestamp, but Marco could have added an ending timestamp or a duration very easily
⏹️ ▶️ John as another query parameter or something, but he didn’t. Why is this feature video? The fact that it’s video
⏹️ ▶️ John is I think the most important and most attractive thing about this feature for a couple of reasons.
⏹️ ▶️ John One, there’s the obvious one of like, when it makes the video, the content of the actual video includes like,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially the brand of the podcast, the album art or whatever the hell you wanna call it, call it of the podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is important for branding and recognition to know, instead of just following an Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ John timestamp link. And I mean, you’d go to overcast.com and you’d see the thing or whatever, but like it’s, yeah, so there
⏹️ ▶️ John is a presentational detail there. But I think the most important reason is that people want something
⏹️ ▶️ John to look at. And it seems weird, because it’s like, well, isn’t it all just about being in the headphones
⏹️ ▶️ John and just listening to the thing or whatever? Just, and the only thing that happens on it is like, there’s a progress
⏹️ ▶️ John bar that progresses. Just being able to see a progress bar to see how much longer there is in a clip individually to see the album art
⏹️ ▶️ John while you listen. People like to look at videos and like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know if this was a conscious like if you went through this whole thought process or decided this was important about it, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it is essential. I think part of the reason people share these is because all the social
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing services are optimized for sharing video. You can play it right in the thing. You don’t get sent
⏹️ ▶️ John elsewhere. You don’t get sent to website. All social media sharing type things have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John good at sharing video because all the the gifts get turned into video and all the little you know when vine was popular
⏹️ ▶️ John that was out there just like it’s part of social media part of good use of social media
⏹️ ▶️ John is to embed tiny videos. So even if you’re sharing podcasts, if you do it
⏹️ ▶️ John as embedding tiny videos, that is the the the native lingua franca of the entire
⏹️ ▶️ John social networking world. And in practice, I think people love it because it’s video. I like
⏹️ ▶️ John it because it’s video I find myself watching the little video of the thing, which has a tiny little progress
⏹️ ▶️ John bar that goes from left to right, while I sort of see the album art out of my peripheral vision. It is a very
⏹️ ▶️ John simple feature, but I think is the genius part of this feature that if you were just thinking about how to do
⏹️ ▶️ John this in a straightforward way, you would have found a way to share audio and then you would have found out how bad tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John audio clips are handled by most social media networks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that is the entire feature. The entire feature is generating video for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco social network sharing. That is the whole point. And I basically wrote the feature for Instagram.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything else has been like, oh, it’s nice to also do these other things, but the very first layout I made was the portrait
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layout for Instagram stories. The reason why the videos are 16 by nine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or nine by 16 or square is because those are the exact dimensions of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Instagram is optimized for. I even looked up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of the first questions had were like, what is the ideal resolution that you can submit to Instagram for a video?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, the pixel resolution and stuff. And by the way, there’s no information about most of this out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And there’s things like, you know, with Instagram Stories, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, it overlays certain controls in certain parts of the video. So that’s why I don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything in the very top or very bottom of Instagram Story video. So anyway, yeah, this was built
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for social networks because the fact is, like, you know, you said earlier, like audio is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the format of podcasts, but video is the format of sharing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you want to share things socially, it needs to be a photo or a video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anything that, like if you try to put something that doesn’t have those, it’s very easy for people to skim over. And I think there’s also, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I think you mentioned this, I think there’s also an appeal of like, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are playing one of these clips, there is something for your eyes to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, if it was, suppose the Twitter app or the Instagram app were really optimized for playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio, they’re not, but suppose they were. If you do that, you hit play, you keep scrolling,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you keep scrolling, you’re reading things with your eyes and the linguistic parsing parts of your brain,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so you stop listening to what’s being said, if it’s a talk segment of the audio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You need something visual to lock your eyes in place, to give them something to do, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you pay attention instead of continuing to scroll through a visual format
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed. Otherwise you wouldn’t hear what’s being said, it wouldn’t be very effective.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’ve ever seen a kid tap a YouTube video while it was playing,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, why are they tapping the screen? The video is playing, everything’s fine. You know why they’re tapping it?
⏹️ ▶️ John To find out how long this video is.
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing a progress bar, you know how far along in the clip are you. What am I signing up
⏹️ ▶️ John for? If I just hit play and it starts playing, I’m like, is this gonna be like 20 minutes of audio
⏹️ ▶️ John that I have to listen to? Am I expected to listen to 10 minutes? How long is this thing? There’s a progress bar right there
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can see very quickly, and also you’ll get to this in a second, that the actual maximum limit means
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re not gonna be there for 20 minutes no matter what, which means that when the progress bar starts to move, you’ll see, oh, this is going
⏹️ ▶️ John at a pretty good clip here. It’s gonna be over pretty soon. I’m about halfway through. You know how
⏹️ ▶️ John close you’re getting to the end. The second cool feature is that if in Twitterific anyway, some other video
⏹️ ▶️ John players, when a large video starts to play this list looks for all the world like, like a player animation
⏹️ ▶️ John in like overcast or podcast app, it has a progress bar. Let’s say if like me, you briefly
⏹️ ▶️ John forget that this is a video playing and you think it’s a player app
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can just grab the scrubber, like the little you know, play head and the progress bar and drag
⏹️ ▶️ John it to fast forward to like three quarters of the way through lots of video playing
⏹️ ▶️ John apps have a thing where when the video is playing if you swipe your finger across
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen it acts as sort of a virtual progress bar
⏹️ ▶️ John you can actually grab the little thumb in the video yeah and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I didn’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John move your thumb like you’re moving the progress bar and it doesn’t match one-to-one but it will basically do what
⏹️ ▶️ John you mean it’s like you’ve made a fake interactive video that tricks you into things like
⏹️ ▶️ John the drugs but it is not interactive it is just a video and all you’re doing is scrubbing. It’s unintentional
⏹️ ▶️ John genius. Great. I’ll take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we’ve kind of talked about what it is, the motivation. Again, I love this so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much. To the extent you’re willing to, can you pull back the curtain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and tell us kind of how, at the very least, how did it go on a qualitative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense? Like, was this pretty easy sailing or were you fighting this every step of the way? And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am happy to go as deep as you want into the actual implementation. I have a feeling that’s not going to be very far. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, but but how,
⏹️ ▶️ John how? Oh, can I can I make a guess at the implementation? Yeah, go for it. I know nothing about
⏹️ ▶️ John this. This is right. Because if there’s some easy API for doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it, I some case, you wouldn’t even be asking. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, yes or no. I mean, I have a relatively okay idea
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a lot of the surface area of the iOS API, but there’s a lot particularly in media
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. And either way, I’ve only been doing this for real for a couple of years, whereas for Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been what, 10 plus? So there is a lot I don’t know. So I appreciate the compliment, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s possible that it’s easier than I thought. That being said, I bet you it’s not as easy as I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I have two guesses, the easy one and the hard one. The easy one is, if any of this is true, I’m pretty sure
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS has a screen recording API, and if you can get an off-screen view and stick the existing screen recording
⏹️ ▶️ John API your off-screen view you just go through the view and have the screen recording thing recorded right but that
⏹️ ▶️ John might require it to be a real-time I don’t know so that would be the one we’re like I didn’t really really have to do any work because iOS already knows how to record
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen and I just have a recording off-screen screen and I just render the screen and that would work out the hard
⏹️ ▶️ John one is you know it is a video is just a series of pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John you can render a view that is in the state that you want all and the
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing that changes the progress bar so you can render a series of frames as individual states of views
⏹️ ▶️ John and capture the view as an image. And then surely there’s some video API that says, hey, I’ve got 700
⏹️ ▶️ John images, each of which is a frame of video, construct a video out of these frames. That would be the hard way.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I imagine that would be very painful and take a really long time, but it could be done given the constraints of what we
⏹️ ▶️ John see. Probably neither one of those are right, but those are the two things that immediately sprung to mind. Both of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would have been too slow. So what I wanted to do, I wanted something first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I could render using UIKit style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. So I could use my fonts and my text rendering and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the artwork render with the shadow and the rounded corners and everything. Basically using the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tools I used to render the interface, I wanted to also render the video. I also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco critically wanted you to be able to preview it immediately upon generating the trimmed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco region for the audio. So, when you trim the audio, it pushes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you say next or preview, whatever, it pushes you to the preview screen, and you can hit play, and it renders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in real time. Like, it plays it in real time. It doesn’t have to render it to a video first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the reason why is because what you’re playing is not a video. What you’re playing is a core
⏹️ ▶️ Marco animation stack, basically. All of it is rendered using core animation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that makes it so you can scrub through it with that scrubber on the bottom, And when you hit the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save thing in the corner to bring up the share sheet, that’s when it encodes all that to a video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wanted to make sure also, I wanted the preview to be exactly right. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted exactly what you see in the preview to be what’s rendered to the video. So I didn’t want the video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be using a different kind of technology that would maybe have different text rendering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or different anti-aliasing on edges or something like that. I wanted it to be exact.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I wanted instant previewing using core animation, UI kit and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that, and having the video look identical. And there is a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do this. I can tell you. I’m using AV asset
⏹️ ▶️ Marco export session. Oh god, these names are so long for these APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the preview video is not, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI views, it’s CA layers. the rendering is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a AV asset export session that somewhere buried deep in the API,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can set something called an animation tool. And the animation tool is this weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API that lets you basically overlay onto a video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a core animation composition. And the thing is, with this API,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything about AV Foundation is incredibly powerful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly poorly documented, and has the worst error reporting of anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have heard this many times, and not just from you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only documentation you’ll find, you know, the headers are basically useless, the official documentation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically useless. The only documentation that’s any good is like Stack Overflow and blog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco posts, usually, which are very old, and sometimes out of date. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because not a lot of people are doing this kind of stuff, there really isn’t that much help on Stack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overflow and places like that. Like there’s some help, but it’s not a lot. And sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you will find other people asking, like, hey, I got error negative 319 when I did this. What does that mean? And it’ll have responses, but there’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always be other people saying, I got it too. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And occasionally somebody will be like, well, I rewrote the entire thing and it fixed it. So it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right? And so there’s all, you’ve run into all sorts of weird errors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and failures. My favorite failure, astute users might’ve noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that occasionally the progress circle during the export restarts at zero.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you guys caught this happening?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, someone complained that it was taking like two progress bars. And I guess it was just the same progress bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John attempt number two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, it isn’t uncommon. I’d say it happens maybe one out of five times. What happens is, during
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the AV asset export of the video, as it’s rendering the video, which I have very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little visibility into, but I do have a progress value. You know, it’s like.5,.6, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco During the export, sometimes, for reasons I have not been able to figure out, and that are not reported to me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, progress just stops. And it just, it will never finish. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it gets to that state, when progress stops of an AV asset export session, it just never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resumes. I have no idea why this happens. I found no documentation about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have, you know, found nobody reporting this elsewhere, and there’s no error reported when it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens. It just stops one time. I tried like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pause in the debugger, and I basically, you know, I canceled it and restarted it manually.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, I kicked it, and that time it worked, and I kept
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developing it. And And then the next time I noticed that happened in one of my test runs, I kicked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it again. And it worked the second time. And I eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realized that if it stopped working and I just kicked it, it would usually work the second try.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So my solution to this problem was I filed a bug with Apple. Just kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You? No, I didn’t. Because that would have taken a lot of time and not solved the problem. Because how do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file a bug on this? I built an automatic kicking machine. Every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it detects that it has stopped for more than a few seconds, it automatically kicks it
⏹️ ▶️ John usually fixes it. 50% of the time it works 100% of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is the equivalent of this is the equivalent of when you edit that delay for the resume after Siri
⏹️ ▶️ John time delay is exactly the same type of terrible solution to a problem. Just like
⏹️ ▶️ John just try to get it probably work the second time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but this is how you have to ship things in iOS like yeah, because You know what? The reality is I could have filed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bug and it would have taken five times longer. I would have gone back and forth with, can you provide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a test project? Not really. You know, I can’t even provide reliable reproduction steps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It happens sometimes and this usually fixes it. Like that’s a terrible bug report. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, and it’s not like they’re going to fix it immediately. They might fix it this fall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but even like it’s may they’re like whatever is locked in for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WBC release of these OSs is locked in. They’re not doing bug fixes for unimportant stuff now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I could either wait for Apple to fix this bug before I ship this, because the feature was unshippable with this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because if one out of five exports just fails, that kind of sucks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t really ship that. I could have waited seven months for Apple to maybe fix this feature,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I could build the automatic clicking machine, and that worked within 10 minutes. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the solution I shipped. And I would love to not need it anymore. I would love, you know, I’m still trying to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what caused this. I’m trying a few things for the next version that maybe might avoid it. But I still haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite nailed it down. So that’s how that, if you ever see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the progress circle restart itself from zero, you know what happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it, how many times will it retry?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As many as it takes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you could in theory be there and watch that progress bar go start and then restart and then restart you’ll just never
⏹️ ▶️ John leave until it succeeds. The most I’ve ever seen is twice. This is gonna be a new contest. Who can
⏹️ ▶️ John get the most restarts? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if anybody can reliably have reproduction steps of what makes it do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, because I still can’t figure it out. So let me know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is a killer feature. I love that you’re linking to all these other competing apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Have you gotten feedback from the Castro folks, which I know you’re relatively close with the Castro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey folks. feedback is they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John all copying this feature now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but I mean that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonable. They’re all building their own automated kicking machines.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. No, but seriously, like, were they pleased with it? But or, or, or, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, how was the reception? Not necessarily from Castro. I shouldn’t single them out. I just know that you talked to those guys a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair bit. But like in a broad sense, did you speak to anyone about this after
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it released? And were they pleased? Were they kind of like, whoa, kind of whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Seems positive. Good. Yeah, no one seemed to have a problem with it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we’re all saying we like this feature or whatever. But the real proof is that if you go on Twitter right now, at least in
⏹️ ▶️ John the circles of our followers, lots of people are using this feature to share clips from podcasts, which is exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point of the feature. Now, maybe it’s just a fad and people will stop. But honestly, I think we’re just going to continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to see more and more of this, at least among overcast users. And when every other podcast client copies this feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John then we’ll see it more in general, which is good because I have I have listened to more
⏹️ ▶️ John short clips of podcasts since you’ve introduced this feature than like the entire three years before that combined.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere. And that brings up another one of the questions like you you limited this to was it one minute maximum
⏹️ ▶️ John length? Yes. How did you come up with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number? I wanted to have a limit for lots of reasons. You know, there’s fair use concerns,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attention span concerns with people like if you post a 10 minute video on Twitter, no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one’s gonna sit and watch all 10 minutes of it. It’s just not the mode people are in. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco progress bar is not that exciting. Right, exactly. And there were technical concerns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, like that long of a video would take a lot longer to encode and that would just be tedious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so there were a number of concerns with that, but what made me choose one minute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specifically is because that is the limit of how long a video can be on Instagram.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Might as well, like I wanted to have a low limit anyway, might as well match that one. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John my feature request is the minimum length should be shorter because I wanted to post a clip of someone
⏹️ ▶️ John snorting on a podcast but the snort was not short enough. What is the minimum length? One second, two second?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually don’t know. It has to do with the width of the grab handles for the trimming thing. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have logic for the grab handles never to overlap each other or cross each other. And this is currently why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you also can’t trim a podcast from zero zero. Like from the very beginning of it, you can’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clip that. you have to clip one second in. That’s not a content decision, that’s a implementation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco detail that I’m hoping to fix in the next version.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, I guess the handles
⏹️ ▶️ John are like C-shaped and not just like flappy. The little branches on the C must be pretty long because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a big gap. But yeah, I would love to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The handle actually has a rectangular grab area that is about five times
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wider than the visual handle. Like it’s like two and a half times on each side roughly. It’s about, I think, 50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pixels wide total is the total grab area. And right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those grab areas can’t overlap. So the closest you can put the handles together is something like 100 pixels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John That could be tighter, that could be better. And if you really wanna go nuts, which you probably don’t, but it’d be good practice for your future audio
⏹️ ▶️ John editing application. One of the features that I always love, I would always love to have in,
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it’s audio or video, but particular audio, when you’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John do fine adjustments on a trim, like I’ve more or less got the beginning and the end where I want them, but I want to do fine
⏹️ ▶️ John adjustments. Being able to no longer touch the primary controls for touching the trim
⏹️ ▶️ John ends, but to have a separate set of controls for the fine adjustments, whatever those may be, right? Either
⏹️ ▶️ John whether it’s like a tiny bump thing or whatever, because usually, especially with sort of quantized data, you can know there’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John minimum step that’s reasonable to take for
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so you could even have it be a digital thing to be, you know, bump it left, left, left, right, right, right, lots of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Photoshop type applications or you know Mac paint or whatever had a way to like nudge
⏹️ ▶️ John the selection by single pixels at a time with the arrow keys and stuff like that. Something like that where you get
⏹️ ▶️ John it pretty close and then use a separate control with with less less pressure because especially
⏹️ ▶️ John on the touchscreen trying to move your thumb one retina pixel to try to get like a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just it’s very difficult to do and there’s no real zooming on that timeline I know it’s not an audio editor it’s just for trimming or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you want to go whole hog when you’re trying to make just that perfectly trimmed clip,
⏹️ ▶️ John which you should be because a lot of people are getting pretty sloppy, especially with the end while they’re cut it off in the middle of someone’s word or
⏹️ ▶️ John something. That’s no good. You want to you want it to sort of begin and end exactly where you want it to find
⏹️ ▶️ John controls would be great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s interesting. I mean, if you if you use voiceover, you can go plus or minus one second. That’s how I made it accessible. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John second is huge. I’m talking about like one sample.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s Yeah, I mean, one thing I could do is which would be technically a a pain in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butt, but one thing I could do is like if you hold down on one of the drag handles, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would zoom in like the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John time. Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like audio editor features. You can do all sorts of fancy things or like when you when you move the trim handles, you constantly rescale
⏹️ ▶️ John to like readjust the scale to say now that you’ve you’ve moved the drag handles now
⏹️ ▶️ John that is 100% and constant. But I think like that’s that’s too much. Probably just, you know, just being able
⏹️ ▶️ John to do gross adjustment and then fine adjustment. iMovie annoys me because as far as I’m aware,
⏹️ ▶️ John iMovie is what I use for all my YouTube videos. It doesn’t seem to have a great fine adjustment feature. Luckily on a 27
⏹️ ▶️ John inch screen, you make things pretty huge and set the zoom to max and get it in where you want it. But I always, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, just don’t make me, even with a mouse, like don’t make me try to move any control on the screen, a single retina pixel
⏹️ ▶️ John or a single regular or a single point. Like, give me a second set, like mechanically speaking, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always like a second set of controls with like a different sort of gear ratio or mechanical advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John ratio where you can move huge gross movements that move the actual thing you want to move a tiny amount.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it’s funny, as I was developing the clip editor there, I had to decide what is the scale,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s the zoom level? And I could make it dynamic, but that would, again, a lot more work. I didn’t really wanna tackle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that yet. So what’s the zoom level of that? And Overcast is a portrait app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is a horizontal timeline. So it’s like you only have the short side of the phone as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the width of what you’re dealing with here. As I was developing it, I actually slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zoomed out from like I would think that I had a certain time scale that was right and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I would try to make clips with it I’d be scrolling scroll scroll scroll scroll trying to find like where I wanted the end it was too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many swipes to get like a like a 45 second long clip and so I slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zoomed out and out and out and I basically solved the problem of imprecision by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just adding cross fades to the beginning and end so there’s a very brief I think it’s about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 0.2 seconds crossfade on the audio like fade in and beginning fade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out at at the end, because that way you can be a little bit sloppy and you don’t hear like an abrupt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transition. Yeah, you need that so
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t get the little pops anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, I mean I could do like a zero crossing thing, but that’s just more trouble than it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth. And I don’t know that passing that level of precision to core media is a great idea
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, these are all details. It totally passes the basic test, which is people are
⏹️ ▶️ John using it to share clips and the clips are good and enjoyable and people hear them and they
⏹️ ▶️ John understand about the person was trying to clip and they’re funny and it’s working, the system is working.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. So please everyone, share whatever you want. And I don’t want this feature to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a week of use and then die. And it’s the kind of thing, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are seeing these clips on a regular basis, you will then think when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come across a funny moment, oh, I can post a clip of that. But if you never see any of these clips,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might never even go to this menu. Like you might never even know this feature is there. I
⏹️ ▶️ John would not have known it was there. I never go to the share thing. Why would I ever even tap that button? But I only know about it because
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw the feature on Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and it’s the kind of like, and I could like put up a balloon or something in the app, but I don’t, I hate doing that. I don’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like, ideally this is the kind of feature that people see around and then they go, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can do that with Overcast too, cool. And then they would go and look for it and they should, I assume they’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be able to find it pretty easily. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s probably the biggest problem is I don’t think people will be able to. I mean, the nerdy people will know to use the share
⏹️ ▶️ John icon or whatever, but for a feature this good, it should be so much more prominent in the application. And I know now is not
⏹️ ▶️ John the time to really redesign your UI to highlight this one feature, but I think people will have a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of difficulty finding it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’ll play with it. And certainly, when I design the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of the Now Playing screen, I will certainly consider, do I want to promote
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, what do you call this? We’ve been calling it Clips, but isn’t that the name of Apple’s app for making Instagram
⏹️ ▶️ John story things? You don’t have a trademark name, is that like a?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I just call it ShareClip. SmartClip.
⏹️ ▶️ John SmartClip. InstaClip, I don’t know. Oh, there we go. InstaSmartClip. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ John word, all right, so. The feature. Oh wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey trying to get into all the
⏹️ ▶️ John Margo name slams in one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It took me a minute. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
Marzipan hacks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I would ask you, you know how the new
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AirPlay 2 stuff is going, but I already know what you’re going to be doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting next month, and you’re going to be using Marzipan to make overcast for the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, wait, never mind, Steve Trout and Smith already did it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Steve Trout If you exclude the ability to play audio, but that’s a minor feature.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. John Deere Minor issue. Steve Trout Yeah. John Deere So tell me about your side of the story. And I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in a good way. I hope that didn’t sound nasty, but you know, like what what’s going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so basically Steve Tratton Smith has been playing with the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marzipan environment on Mojave For I don’t know six months now for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he wrote a couple blog posts and has made some tools one called marzipanify that basically allow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you to take a simulator build which is therefore an Intel build
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an iOS app and If you’re willing to disable system integrity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protection and some other thing about, I think like some kind of certificate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco validation on a Mac, and you run this tool on a simulator build, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make it run in Marcipan on Mojave. And so those are two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco giant ifs, if you’re willing to do this, that I’m not willing to do. But he is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he wrote the tool. about getting this stuff to run than I do. And so I have a meeting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while to send him a simulator build of Overcast. He’s like, hey, can you just see if this runs and see what happens? Let me know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I need to do anything. And so I finally got around to doing that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what is it, a couple of days ago now. And we worked through, there were a few frameworks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I had to ifdef out the use of, things like the media toolbox things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for doing things like putting the playback controls and title information in Control Center.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that API is not there in Mojave, Marzipan. And so I had to just like ifdef that out for this build.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then there were a couple other like small things I had to ifdef out that just weren’t present. Things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the mail compose sheet. There’s a lot of frameworks that aren’t there. There’s a lot of frameworks that just don’t make sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac, things like that Control Center framework and CarPlay, like those frameworks were missing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac probably for good because that just doesn’t make sense. But like, you know, my app would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco launch and try to load them and it would crash. And so we went back and forth. I think six builds later,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after I did a few more things, I think he got it running. And that was it. And it was great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it didn’t take a lot, really, which was promising. Partly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of won here, in part because I am such a jerk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and don’t ever use anyone else’s code in my app. Like, my app contains
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost entirely my code, and the little bits of it that aren’t mine that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need to change, I can change. And it isn’t loading a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap to get there. And so I was able to fairly easily give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco him a version of the app that would run in Mojave under the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco marzipan thing when it’s hacked in this way. So I was very happy with that, and it’s really cool. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t Mac-like at all, but that’s because he’s written blog posts about, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have APIs that you can generate to do things like add toolbars, like add Mac toolbars, add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac split views, add, you know, menu bar stuff, Apple Script stuff, Touch Bar integration,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the basics of all this stuff are all there, but he doesn’t have my source
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code, so he couldn’t add those things, and I don’t want to take the time to do it yet, because I assume all that stuff is going to be more mature and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different in a month, when the official tools presumably come out. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m really excited about the possibility of making this a Mac app, and I’m really happy that it mostly works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as is, like it’s not going not going to require massive changes. One change it probably is going to require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though is AirPlay 2. And as you mentioned, it works in the sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the UI works. It does not, however, play audio, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a podcast app is not great. Already established.
⏹️ ▶️ John Overcast is all about video now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that feature works fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can watch the progress bar move from left to right in silence.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, the audio in the clip preview editor, that works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that doesn’t use my audio stack. The audio playback in the preview editor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for clips is using AVPlayer. That works fine under Mars or Pam or Mojave,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but my core audio based audio engine does not. And actually I sent him
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my AirPlay 2 test harness app, which is like a very basic app that’s running my very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alpha AirPlay 2 engine just to see like does this play audio and it did. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is moving up my priority of like I should probably switch to this sooner rather than later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m going to finish that soon I think. That’s probably going to be the next major thing I tackle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well no I don’t think we really need to spend much more time on this. I just think it’s extremely cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you had made mention of this kind of offhandedly a moment ago but he did not have source code access.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even when he decided to make himself a three-column version of the app, that was without source
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code access, which is just… If you follow Steve John Smith, this won’t surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you and shouldn’t have surprised me. And yet I found it somewhat surprising that he could go in there and swizzle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the snot out of your app in order to get a three-column version out of thin air, which is just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John incredible. Paul
⏹️ ▶️ John Matzko, Jr. When Marco’s doing the actual Mars-Japan version of Overcast, writing source code like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know, right? I was going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be thinking of Steve Trout and Smith who added a third column just by shifting selectors
⏹️ ▶️ John around it. What the hell he’s doing in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In like an hour or two. It took him like no time. I actually do want to go to a three-pane
⏹️ ▶️ Marco layout on iPads and Macs because it makes total sense. I already have three-level
⏹️ ▶️ Marco navigation. It makes complete sense. The leftmost pane would be the root screen. It’d be like playlist podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the middle pane would be the currently selected playlist or podcast and the right pane would be now playing. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course what I’m going to do. And I think modern iPads are now wide enough that I can do it there too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s great. So I intend to do that. But for me to do it, it’s gonna take me a week
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get all that worked out, even with my current structure. And he did it in an hour with no code.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is utterly preposterous. It really, really is. But that’s why we love them.
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Apple vs. parental-control apps
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was an article in the New York Times where they said there used to be lots of apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would allow parents to control slash restrict
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or at least have visibility into, if nothing else, what their children are doing on their phones. And a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these apps were using MDM, which is mobile device management. Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I think so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is a tool that Apple really developed in order for corporations to control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their assets. So if your company issues you an iPhone, then you could use MDM in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order to maintain that iPhone and make sure that only the right apps are being used and that you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey knew where the iPhone was physically on the planet and so on and so forth. But a lot of these companies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that were doing the the kind of stalker vision for your kids so you could see exactly what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing, where they are and so on and so forth, we’re using MDM. And Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whether or not they did a good job of explaining, it seems to have come to the opinion that using MDM for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some, if not all of these things, isn’t really what it’s meant for. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some amount of debate how they message this to these companies, but one way or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they told the companies, Hey, you’re either not going be able to do this anymore and thus your company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will maybe go away. Or you really need to rethink the mechanism by which you’re doing this, which may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also make your company go away. But we’re not cool with the way this works right now. And so this New York Times piece,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I really didn’t care for, was basically a bunch of kvetching and moaning from these companies
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about why Apple is big and unfair and terrible. And there are a lot of reasons why Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be big and unfair and terrible, but this one, this didn’t strike me as that unreasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the response from Apple was basically, look, it’s a privacy thing, and this isn’t how it was supposed to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be used, and we’re not comfortable with this, so we’re not going to allow it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I think Apple did make a bunch of mistakes here. But first of all, we can start with this New York Times article, which sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John kicked this off. The angle in the article, the sort of sensational angle
⏹️ ▶️ John and the story put forward by the software developers affected by this is like, well, isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it convenient? comes out with its own screen time feature for dealing with restrictions on,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, you know, family members or children’s phones and stuff. And all of a sudden it doesn’t want to let us,
⏹️ ▶️ John the third party developers who have been offering the same functionality, it doesn’t want to let us sell our applications anymore. Isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it nefarious and evil? Uh, Apple, once Apple enters the market, they want to kick everybody else out.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, and then Apple had like this PR thing that was partially quoted in the New York times article saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple treats third party applications the same as it treats its own, yada yada, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is not true in any way, and is like
⏹️ ▶️ John worst thing that Apple could have, you know, the one quote they could have pulled is the one that those in the know know is not
⏹️ ▶️ John actually true. But that’s not the issue. The whole point is the angle, it’s kind of like Apple is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John this because they’re mean slash evil and have their own interests at heart.
⏹️ ▶️ John But here are the mistakes that I feel like Apple made in this, and some of them are understandable and
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody’s perfect, but like there are mistakes that made the situation more fraught than it
⏹️ ▶️ John needed to be. The first one I feel like is letting third party developers distribute parental control
⏹️ ▶️ John applications using MDM, right? Because MDM, yeah, Casey, you described it well.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like for companies who let their employees have iPhones who want to control what those employees put on their
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhones and want to be able to remote wipe them and stop people from using applications and like any kind of thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re in a big company and they give you computer hardware to use, have some degree
⏹️ ▶️ John of terrible evil control over it because that’s how it works. Like it’s the company’s phone, it’s not your phone, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the company’s laptop, it’s not your laptop, you’re just using it. And MDM
⏹️ ▶️ John gives the company control of your laptop. The MDM scenario for parental controls,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the reason they use them is because it is literally the only way without jailbreaking to provide
⏹️ ▶️ John this functionality on iOS devices. But in the scenario,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the company scenario, The company is, I don’t know what that I don’t know the right terminology of this. The company is the is
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing that sort of is controlling the MDM thing and the employee has the phone, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s just two parties. It’s the company and the employee. Well, actually, I suppose there’s the vendor of the thing uses
⏹️ ▶️ John MDM. Either way, when a parent buys this application and uses it
⏹️ ▶️ John to control their children’s phone, I may be wrong about this, but my impression is that
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, the parent has the ability to control the control the child’s phone, but also the vendor
⏹️ ▶️ John of the MDM application effectively has some control in this chain as well because they
⏹️ ▶️ John are the creators of the application.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I may be wrong about that. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John They have full control. Yeah, so it’s like it’s a three-party scenario instead of two.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that third party is one that a parent downloading this application might not
⏹️ ▶️ John realize is in the mix here. A company surely knows that it is the one controlling the thing, yada yada, like, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the parent might think, I’m just controlling my kid’s phone, but the The company that makes this software
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have any untoward access to my kids phone and they do. It’s just not the right tool
⏹️ ▶️ John for the job. And it’s on Apple that they allowed this entire ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ John of applications to flourish. Now I can kind of understand where Apple’s come from. They’re like, well, there is no other way to do
⏹️ ▶️ John this. And this is functionality people want and we don’t have a solution for it. So why shouldn’t we let third parties do this?
⏹️ ▶️ John So while we work on screentime or while we figure out what we’re going to do, let’s just allow
⏹️ ▶️ John these third party applications to go on this to go with MDM. In hindsight, that was a mistake because eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ John when Apple comes out with a similar feature, and this is the kernel of truth truth in the story in the New York Times, when Apple comes up with a similar
⏹️ ▶️ John feature, they’d be like, Alright, well, finally, we have screen time. Now we can get rid
⏹️ ▶️ John of all those applications that use MDM and say, please stop doing that, because it’s really not great. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s putting parents in a situation where they might not realize but they’re providing third parties with access
⏹️ ▶️ John to their phones that is not great. And like it’s and I know you’re a good company, but really this is
⏹️ ▶️ John not what MDM is for. And the M is for, you know, companies and their employees. So it’s not for parents and their kids. So for
⏹️ ▶️ John the parental situation, you screen time, so on and so forth. That is a bad situation, though, because
⏹️ ▶️ John there remains no other way to provide this functionality and third party app this extent of the
⏹️ ▶️ John functionality and third party app than using MDM. So if Apple says, please, company that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John been in business for a long time and has lots of customers, stop using MDM in your app. It’s like, well, you’re basically
⏹️ ▶️ John telling us to stop selling a wrap because there is no other way for us to do what we do on our app without using MDM.
⏹️ ▶️ John So and how did Apple get into the situation? They allowed these developers to sell their apps
⏹️ ▶️ John using MDM for a long time and be successful. And now they’re saying you have to stop. Basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a product killing decision. You know, and the third mistake is when
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has to communicate this. Like, I don’t I don’t know the right way to communicate this
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s a hard conversation to have to call up a developer and say, yeah, I know you’ve been selling
⏹️ ▶️ John this application for a long time and are very successful with it. But basically, you need to stop selling
⏹️ ▶️ John it because we’re not going to let you use MDM anymore. And there’s no other way for you to provide this
⏹️ ▶️ John functionality. So basically, your product is dead. Sorry about that. Our bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, we have a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco screen time. You didn’t say sorry?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Screen time is available, but it’s not as full featured as your application. But it’s built into the OS, and we control
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And that is effectively what is happening to
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of these people who make products like this. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no good way to communicate that. You’re going to be sad either way. But perhaps one of the worst ways to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John that is the passive or aggressive app store rejection way, which is basically to just send terse responses that say
⏹️ ▶️ John something very clinical, that your use of API blah, blah, blah is disallowed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Please remove the use of this application and resubmit. Something like that, that doesn’t, like, that
⏹️ ▶️ John just seems like it was from a machine that says MDM is not allowed, doesn’t acknowledge that it was allowed before, that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you that Apple understands what this means for your application, right? And this is true of all the
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store frustrations. You’ll do a thing in an app for years and years that Apple thinks is fine, then you’ll do a bug fix update
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ll reject your application for a feature that’s been there for a year. And with a thing that says, this application
⏹️ ▶️ John does X, please remove X and resubmit. With no acknowledgement, like, but I’ve been doing X for years.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve approved a hundred versions that do X. Communicate to me as a human to tell me what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John on. You’re just like mechanical rejections, right? Maybe that’s the quote unquote right way to communicate from a legal
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective because it opens you up to less liability because it doesn’t make you, but it’s not the human way to communicate that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, maybe there’s no right way. Maybe the wrong approach would try to be human because if you do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re opening yourself up to legal liability or who knows. I don’t know what goes into the thing behind this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s a difficult conversation to have, but the difficult conversation stems from earlier decisions that were
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s decisions to make that I think they made the wrong call on. So they allowed these stores, these things to be in the
⏹️ ▶️ John store for a long time. Then when it came time to essentially kill a bunch of products, it seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John at least in the few cases of people complaining, it was communicated in the most terse and sort of impersonal
⏹️ ▶️ John way possible and it just makes everybody feel bad, right? So there is, there
⏹️ ▶️ John is fault to go around here, but in the end, Apple is, I think Apple is doing the right thing. MDM shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John be isn’t the right tool for parents to do that. And there is no other better API.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, I understand these apps are potentially better and more full featured than screen time. And I know it looks like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is killing these things with screen time, but they kind of are. And that’s just part of software. Like if you implement
⏹️ ▶️ John if you are a third party that implements a feature that rightfully should be part of the US, don’t be surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John when eventually it does become part of the US and the app store era or in the not the app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in the sort of the privacy focus, security focused error of today. Don’t be surprised also
⏹️ ▶️ John that not only does it get built into the US, but that you are no longer allowed to use whatever weird
⏹️ ▶️ John side door you were using before, because this is a security concern. So I feel bad
⏹️ ▶️ John for these companies and, uh, I also kind of feel bad for Apple, but there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit of a enough land to go around. What I don’t believe is that this is some nefarious, you know, schemes. and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John ha ha, finally we’ll destroy all those companies with our amazing screen time that we bundle for free
⏹️ ▶️ John with our OS. This is not a massive money-making scheme. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is part of Apple’s security focus. And it stems from an earlier
⏹️ ▶️ John mistake. An earlier mistake, by the way, where Apple was being, if you want to look at it, more magnanimous than they should
⏹️ ▶️ John be, of basically saying, we don’t have a solution to this. Why shouldn’t we let third parties use MDM? The answer is
⏹️ ▶️ John because someday you’re going to have to stop them, and then everyone’s going to be sad. But they made a bunch of money in the meantime
⏹️ ▶️ John that they wouldn’t have made if Apple had said, you know what, we don’t have the ability to provide this functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’re not going to let third parties provide it with MDM ever. And so we’ll just all have to wait for iOS 12
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever screen time came in. So tough situation. But
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is not being unnecessarily evil. They’re all just
⏹️ ▶️ John reaping what they sow from past mistakes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like this is an extension of what we went through a few months ago, or maybe even less than that, with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps that allowed you to sideload stuff. So there was like, you know, getting…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Oh, using enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certificates, you mean? I feel like the enterprise cert thing was far worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was both more nefarious on the vendors, so not Apple, but these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other people. It was pretty clearly nefarious on their part, and pretty clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not in the spirit of what Enterprise search are for. This I do think is more gray, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s that dissimilar in ideas that, hey, you’re taking a technology that we really want to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for A, B, and C, and you’re using it for, I was going to say X, Y, Z, but maybe that’s a bit aggressive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you’re using it for, I don’t know, L and M, and that’s not good. And this analogy is really falling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John apart. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the point is that it’s using this MDM technology in a way that it’s really not meant for.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And just like John said, like if you get burned for that. Whose fault is that really?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mostly agree with John and a little bit from Casey, except I think that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would be surprised if the development of screen time had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything at all to do with this. I think it’s purely coincidental that it happened to be developed during this because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has been cracking down on things like enterprise distribution,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco abuse, things like VPN apps that maybe shouldn’t be, that are using VPNs to do things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are not really what VPNs are for, apps that are using profiles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like MDM to do things. This has been a crackdown that’s been going on for a year or something like that. It’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over a while. And I think one thing that became apparent, I think we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco signs of this here and there, but I think one thing that became apparent during the Enterprise Certificate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kerfuffle It doesn’t seem like Apple has a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea at decision-making levels of power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how some of this stuff is being abused. It just, it kind of seems like the App Store is so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big and the ecosystem is so big that sometimes stuff gets through and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t have a super powerful person in the company making a policy decision on every one of these things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s just too big to keep up with. I get the feeling, I think what happens is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At some point, something is brought to the attention of the higher-ups, whether it’s through the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco press or through internal channels, whatever it is. And then decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can be made, and then they’re executed down below again at the lower level of the company where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more people are. That’s kind of the impression I get. And so whenever there’s an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco store policy change, I think it’s something like that, where somebody in the press or somewhere calls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, hey, these apps are doing this thing, why are they allowed to do that? and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone who matters notices, and they say, hey, that’s wrong, they shouldn’t be allowed to do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they go tell App Review, hey, get rid of these things, or enforce this policy, or change this policy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what I think happens. And it’s a big company, it’s a really big company. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower level people are probably not empowered to be incredibly communicative and verbose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the outside world. So if the lower level people get a directive like, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this app is doing this thing that we actually don’t want to permit, all they can probably tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the developer is, you are being rejected for rule 2.4 point whatever, you know, it’s like, they can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only give those robotic responses probably, because of that’s, you know, policy, and as John said, maybe legal concerns and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. But what we see from the outside when this happens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you have an app in the store, and like if you’re a developer, you have an app in the store, it’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it gets updated, it goes through app review every couple of weeks when you change something, that’s fine, until it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not. And all you’re getting from Apple is this kind of like stonewall response of either no reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco given or a very robotic minimal reason given. It’s not really helpful and not really explaining
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like why was this okay last month and now it’s not. So it makes sense on both sides.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I can totally see, I can understand why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s side of it is the way it is, but the developer side of it, Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we see on the outside in this kind of situation is terrible. And you might occasionally, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe if you’re lucky, like when you’re on this side of a rule change or reinterpretation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re lucky, after a while you might get a phone call, which I’ve always termed the Agent Smith
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone calls, because you get a phone call from like the Apple main switchboard number, so you can’t call
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them back. You are not given a name, usually, if ever. You are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco given the bad news from this person, So usually the conversation is usually quite civil, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will then tell you the reason, basically, during those phone calls. But of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s a phone call, you don’t have a solid record of it, really. You can’t really quote them very easily because it was a phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco call. You get this random phone call from Apple that’s like a nice but terse person telling you really what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t do. And then that’s it, and you have no way to ever reach them again. I actually, I heard a rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while back that all of those phone calls were made by this one guy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who was like the nicest guy in the world, but was also ex-military and just had like- There was an article about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, I think. Oh, really?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there was like- Yeah, I heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he just had like, you know, like the willpower of stone and he could just make these calls and get through them with people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like probably giving him all sorts of crap on the other end, but he could just get through them and apparently he was super nice and apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he stopped doing that job like last year or something like that. Anyway, I don’t know if that’s true, but I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was kind of funny that it’s like this one super nice guy doing all this. Anyway, you know, Apple has this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem of like, they changed a policy, something was allowed, now they don’t want to allow it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s gonna be uncomfortable, as John said. Developers have this problem of, Apple changes something right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from under us, and we’re getting terrible to no communication on it, and we seem to be powerless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Both sides of it suck. I think the solution here, you know, it’s never gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be problem free, but Apple has to get way better at the communication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when this kind of thing happens. they are just horrendous at it. I think their motivations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here were fine. Like I don’t think they were badly motivated. Again, I don’t think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had anything to do with screen time at all. I don’t think anybody at Apple at like decision-making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-up levels knew about these apps using MDM for this purpose a year ago and said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re gonna wait till we launch screen time and then kick them out. Like I seriously doubt that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s plausible and I’ll tell you why. The only reason Apple made screen time because they think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a feature that users want. That there is something that people want to do with their phones that are not currently able to do,
⏹️ ▶️ John we should make a feature that does that. It’s not like they frivolously add features to iOS. It’s filling a user need. And
⏹️ ▶️ John whoever was on the team to fulfill this need, to say, let’s add
⏹️ ▶️ John this feature to iOS, you have to figure out, OK, what should this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John do? What feature should it have? What functionality should it have?
⏹️ ▶️ John Surely you look at the space and you say, well, Are there any other applications out there that already do something similar?
⏹️ ▶️ John In your exploration of the space, that’s when you discover, hey, there’s 75 applications that do this with millions
⏹️ ▶️ John of downloads, and they all use MDM to do it. At that point, I feel like you now have the knowledge.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s still at a high enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level, the company like, oh, it’s a big company. That’s two different divisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. I’m saying those people have the knowledge that there’s a bunch of apps out there that are using MDM. And I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John at that high enough level, team coming up with a feature that’s that’s on the slate for potentially being added to iOS 12
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. At that level, I feel like that that’s enough to disseminate
⏹️ ▶️ John the information to the to the the company at large at the very top. And I think at that point, you have the discussion
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, well, we’re exploring this feature, we looked at the space, we think we’re gonna we think we’re gonna add, you know, these are the
⏹️ ▶️ John bullet points we’re gonna have these are the you know, the, the benefits and the you know, functionality we’re gonna have.
⏹️ ▶️ John And also, We probably also think probably that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John that these apps are using MDM shouldn’t do it. But let’s not kill those apps yet. Let’s wait until we get screen time
⏹️ ▶️ John out the door because the next consideration is that our users are you know, this need
⏹️ ▶️ John that we think our users have, they’re currently getting it filled by third parties. So let them continue to
⏹️ ▶️ John have the third party apps until we have some semblance of a replacement, then deliver the bad
⏹️ ▶️ John news. I’m not saying this is what happened. I’m saying it’s a plausible scenario where Apple what Apple is trying to do is
⏹️ ▶️ John provide a feature to its users in the safest way possible. And also not screw all those users. Remember, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like what Apple users, developers, the three level hierarchy of apples priorities, right? There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John way more users than developers. So the calculus has to be not like, oh, let’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John let’s sneakily wait until screen times out and screw the developers. It’s let’s not screw our millions of users, because our millions of users
⏹️ ▶️ John want this functionality. So until we deliver screen time, let’s just not do anything to that thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John put it on the agenda for some point after screen time ships to eventually get those MDM apps
⏹️ ▶️ John out of there. Like I think that is a plausible scenario because I think there’s no way Apple implemented this feature without looking at what
⏹️ ▶️ John what exists in the space at a high enough level that the company might know. And again, there’s a I’m ascribing basically
⏹️ ▶️ John kind motivations to everything involved that Apple is looking at trying to find features that are useful to its users.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s thinking of its users who are using third party apps. And then in third place, unfortunately, the
⏹️ ▶️ John who is probably not thinking of that much. But again, the user priority wins. We don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John a parent putting an app on their kid’s phone that unwittingly gives control to a to the third party developer
⏹️ ▶️ John without the parent understanding exactly what they’ve just given away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I first read the story, I pretty much immediately sided with Apple in my head
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the decision side of it. Like, you know, the communication side, I think, is it was not great. But the decision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side of it makes total sense to me because like, as an iOS developer, I didn’t even know these apps existed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if somebody would have asked me, hey, I have an idea for an app, it’s a parental control app that limits how many,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, how long you can run apps on your phone, can I make this? I would have said, no, it’s not possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Any iOS developer would know, like, there is no way for apps on your phone to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look around in your phone and see what other apps are running, or to have any control over that. Like, most developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would assume that’s not possible. And if somebody would, if somebody in, like in the back of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco room would raise their hand and be like, hey, what if we install an MDM profile on every user’s device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we use that to control these, any experienced iOS developer would be like, well, they’re never gonna allow that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s definitely gonna be against App Store policy. I think it’s like developer, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experienced iOS developer common sense that this kind of thing would probably not be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allowed, because that is clearly not what MDM is for. Similar thing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco VPNs. Like, there’s a lot of apps that were using VPNs to do certain things, and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cracked down on them over like the last year or so as well. Because that’s a similar kind of tool where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re taking this tool that is intended for a relatively specific type of use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if you make a VPN like Onavo, like Facebook’s Onavo thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has pretty horrible privacy implications that most of its users are probably not really gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be aware of and maybe are installing for other reasons. a VPN is not a great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tool to use for that job or to be permitted to be used that way because that’s not really what it’s for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and most users don’t realize all the power it gives the other party and things like that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the same reasons that MDM profiles are, I think, common sense,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not allowed to be used in ways like this, VPNs also develop a common sense, shouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be allowed to be doing this kind of stuff. And I think Apple’s policy on both of those things has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slowly tightening, but not outside of the realm of common sense. Like, clearly they are responding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the problems that we’ve seen over the App Store, like in recent years of like, wow, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco large scale thing is using this API in a way that we think is creepy. You know, see also enterprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certificate abuse, stuff like that. Apple’s finding ways that are being abused like this, and they’re closing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those loopholes. And I don’t think that’s the wrong decision. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only failures are that the loopholes were allowed to be exploited in the first place,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they and the policy change was so badly communicated almost every time.
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#askatp: File naming
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, let’s do some Ask ATP, starting with Keegan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sands, who writes, what naming convention do you use for directories and files on your Mac? CamelCase, hyphen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delimiter, underscore delimiter, et cetera. Underscore is good for many things. I just like to put that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out there. Uh, for me, I, uh, I generally just use like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey windows 95. Oh my God, I can put spaces and capitals and whatever I want in my file name.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will do that. Thank you very much. And so that’s what I do. I use spaces. I don’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particularly strong feelings about Camel or Pascal case or anything else. I named things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the most appropriate way I see possible because that’s what the file system
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enables me to do. Uh, I’m going to assume that Marco is slightly more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey particular than me. So let me ask you first.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, anything that’s like, like me, like you, like user facing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just use spaces and proper capitalization and it’s fine. Exactly. Um, I, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will use all lowercase, no spaces using hyphens between words
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for things like developer directory. So things like my git checkouts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like I have like, you know, overcast dash web and it’s all lowercase. That’s, that’s the get checkout. So it’s, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in the, in the paths that will be used by developer stuff, there’s no spaces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because just in case something weird happens, I don’t want to deal with it. Right. So, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just for some reason, and like I do the same thing on my servers, like the servers all have like lowercase with dashes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um, as, as the delimiters and just, you know, because it’s easier on Linux to do things that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, anything like documents for myself that are just like in my home documents directory or anything that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or stuff on my desktop, that’s all just with spaces and capital letters and stuff, it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think shell scripts are another good example of like all lowercase and hyphens. Yep, me too. Yep, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are occasions that that’ll be more particular, but not usually. All right, John, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only have but so much time, but please tell me your rules for file naming
⏹️ ▶️ John system? Since more than a decade before Windows 95, I was naming all my files insane ways, because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what you can do on a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Mac. And by the way, I was naming
⏹️ ▶️ John them whatever I wanted to name them, literally whatever I wanted to name. There was no part of the file name that
⏹️ ▶️ John I was required to put any sort of secret code in there that the operating system would then interpret and try to take action based on.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco literally name it.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about the colon? I could literally name my files whatever I wanted. No, that’s a forbidden character, but there was no
⏹️ ▶️ John part that if you wrote it, the operating system would look at that part of the file name and interpret it in a weird-ass way that can break things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You are so, I’ve never met a human being that is more angry about extensions
⏹️ ▶️ John than you are. So angry, forever. Anyway, and how did I actually
⏹️ ▶️ John choose to name them? Mostly title case. Like, you know my obsession with title case. It was mostly title case. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John say. Yeah, because they were like the titles of folders. Applications were named essentially in title case
⏹️ ▶️ John since the beginning of the Mac. So that’s the way, you know, everything’s named that way. That said, so the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John now has Unix, two great tastes that taste great together. I do sort of code
⏹️ ▶️ John switching, to pull a word, to code switch slightly here. Code switching, when I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ John work, if I am working, let’s say, in a programming language that itself has some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of strong cultural convention for what you name your source files or what you name your directories, or sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ John a mandated convention, like Perl, where the package name corresponds to a directory path that has to
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly match the package name and the language has an informal convention for how packages should be named.
⏹️ ▶️ John I totally use those conventions. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. If you asked a random
⏹️ ▶️ John person in the street what is Node’s naming convention for JavaScript files, some
⏹️ ▶️ John person might say hyphen separating words all lowercase, some person might say underscores. In the end it doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John matter that much and it’s a cultural thing, but certainly no one would say that the convention for
⏹️ ▶️ John Node.js is to generally do title cases with spaces between words. not the convention.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can do it, but it’s not the convention. So I do code switch. My personal preference
⏹️ ▶️ John if I don’t think I would say in the absence of any other overriding cultural concern for a programming
⏹️ ▶️ John language or environment, what would I choose? But there is no context like that. Like every
⏹️ ▶️ John in every context, whether it’s shell or pearl or C or whatever, there’s some kind of cultural surrounding
⏹️ ▶️ John influence to suggest how you might consider naming your files. And I generally just tend to stick with
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the dominant and culture is within the thing. Which means that on my Mac, there are a bunch of files and folders
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything that look, you know, that are named the way I want them to be named, especially with extensions hidden.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then there are whole directory trees that are in this sort of culture and parlance
⏹️ ▶️ John of whatever programming language or environment they’re in.
#askatp: Apple’s own AWS?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Patrick writes, with Apple willing to spend big money on controlling important pieces of tech, why are they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paying so much for AWS instead of making their own cloud? It’s an interesting question, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think Apple has any interest in managing something that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like their cloud stuff. I mean, they have that huge data center in North
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Carolina, which is used for something. But by and large, I just don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that them doing an AWS clone or an AWS-alike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really how does that help the user? Because AWS seems by and large
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be pretty good at what it does. I don’t know, John, why am I being wrong? Why am I
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong? This used to be a much less interesting question. If you’d asked the same question a couple of decades ago, it would be like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John duh. Like there are things that Apple does that are part of its core competency
⏹️ ▶️ John and value proposition and there are things that it asks another company to do, right? It doesn’t decide
⏹️ ▶️ John to run its own construction company to build its buildings. In the current Apple, every example I can
⏹️ ▶️ John think of is actually much more plausible than you might think, but let’s say decades ago. Like it doesn’t, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things- First, Johnny
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco bulldozer. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are not, like reinvents concrete. Right. It doesn’t make the machines that make its computers. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t, you know, it doesn’t make the bulldozers that mine for the chemicals that go into it. Like Like that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John what the core competency of the company is. It’s like what is, what should we put our effort and money behind?
⏹️ ▶️ John Outsource things that are not part of your value proposition to a company that does them exclusively and does them
⏹️ ▶️ John better. That’s that’s the way you do things. And practically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John both decades ago and today, I’m going to say everybody uses AWS, but the public cloud
⏹️ ▶️ John writ large is extremely popular. If you don’t work for a company
⏹️ ▶️ John that does things online, perhaps you don’t realize how much of all the cool products you use
⏹️ ▶️ John are powered by AWS or to a lesser extent, Azure or Google Cloud.
⏹️ ▶️ John The companies don’t advertise that fact, but that’s how the world works today. And it works
⏹️ ▶️ John that way. Like, why does Netflix use AWS? Why don’t they run all their own data centers? Netflix’s core
⏹️ ▶️ John competency is these days making original content and doing content deals and delivering
⏹️ ▶️ John you a video. is not writing cloud infrastructure to run servers and stuff, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That is not, you know, like, that’s, that’s not where they want to be spending the money. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, that’s sort of the current business model. But today, with Apple today, it’s a more difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John question because there are very few companies that
⏹️ ▶️ John should be trying to run their own cloud. But arguably, Apple might be one
⏹️ ▶️ John of them that should at least be considering it. Amazon runs its own cloud, it’s called AWS. Google runs its own cloud,
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft runs its own cloud. Apple is kind of in that camp, and services are a
⏹️ ▶️ John big part of Apple things, and yada, yada, yada. You could still make a very strong argument that Apple should absolutely not
⏹️ ▶️ John be running its own cloud and they should outsource this, but some of its competitors actually
⏹️ ▶️ John do derive advantage from running their own clouds. Google certainly does. Their entire business was
⏹️ ▶️ John founded on the fact that they would run their own data centers and design their own hardware and drill their own machines and do a lot of this stuff, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it gives them an advantage, both in terms of cost and innovation and lots of lots of other areas. Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John has an advantage because you know, they, they built AWS is kind of this weird
⏹️ ▶️ John side business. Now it is a huge business because as I said, every other freaking company in the world is using the public cloud to run their
⏹️ ▶️ John businesses on and that’s a pretty darn good business. Look at like Bezos is like a yearly report or whatever. Any
⏹️ ▶️ John of us is a good business. It’s nice to have a, you know, it’s maybe it’s not an iPhone size business, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a big business and it’s nice to have that. And by the way, there’s synergy between that business and when Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John does and all that other stuff. Apple, a lot of the same things are true. It would gain both a cost and
⏹️ ▶️ John innovative innovation advantage to running its own cloud. It if they decided to ever sell
⏹️ ▶️ John their services like Google and Microsoft and Amazon do, that could be a big business. But
⏹️ ▶️ John on the other hand, it’s also a crowded market and Apple is not traditionally being particularly good at this. But on the other other
⏹️ ▶️ John hand, maybe they should be good at it. So it is way more complicated question today than it
⏹️ ▶️ John used to be. Used to be the answer super simple, nobody should run their own cloud, it’s stupid. Today the answer is,
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody should run their own cloud, except maybe Apple might think about it. Like there’s like five
⏹️ ▶️ John companies in the world that should run their own cloud and Apple might be one of them. So I think this is an interesting question
⏹️ ▶️ John and I don’t think it’s a really good answer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think it’s even simpler than that. I mean, this is a role
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is easily outsourced because it is separate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from, like it’s easy to separate this role out of dumb server stuff or dumb online services.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s easy to outsource that to AWS or various companies like AWS. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s hard for Apple to build that up to a large scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonably quickly. Apple’s cloud needs and backend needs have grown
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ton over the last decade. Apple itself seems to have a lot of trouble multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a company in general. They seem to have a lot of trouble scaling their company, scaling their headcount in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they just seem like they don’t do that very quickly or very easily. And when they try, it seems like they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trouble. This seems like an easy thing to take this big, boring, highly commoditized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco role and have someone else do it for us. Because not only can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we then not build all that out ourselves and save some headcount and save some complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, it’s also possible that Amazon can do it cheaper than we can.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not, you’ve spoken like someone who hasn’t paid a big AWS bill lately.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, they certainly can do it cheaper, but it won’t be cheaper to you, because they charge a profit
⏹️ ▶️ John margin on those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They do, but it’s a highly commoditized market that’s very competitive and easily switched between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John providers if you’re using it right. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John as commoditized as you would think it is. Like, there’s, it really depends. Like, I see
⏹️ ▶️ John what, like, you’re making the argument for the old Apple, but I think what you’re really saying is Apple’s so late to the market that it’s too late for them to
⏹️ ▶️ John be competitive, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, both. Like, I’m saying that they are pretty late to this market, especially as you mentioned,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this is not historically an area where they’ve been incredibly competent or cared very strongly to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco become competent. So like, this is something that they don’t really value much as a company.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the whole thing of like, you know, like the, I think the Tim Cook doctrine of like, we want to do things that we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add value to, they can’t add value to data center
⏹️ ▶️ John they could, like if they did what Google did. Google and Amazon both add value to that, but they add value to their own
⏹️ ▶️ John businesses and they add value in terms of they sell it to other people. It’s a good business and what Google does,
⏹️ ▶️ John how they can make their, Google paid for AWS, it would cost them so much money. And
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, they’d also be paying a potential competitor, right? Google does their own stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re Google and they do it really, really well for their own purposes. Google Cloud is
⏹️ ▶️ John a good example. Google Cloud is the best example Apple shouldn’t do. Google has their public cloud service
⏹️ ▶️ John And even though I think Google has best in class, best in the entire world, data center management and systems
⏹️ ▶️ John for their own stuff, like the Google search engine and all that other stuff, they are behind Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John in terms of selling that to the public because they came in too late. And if Google’s having trouble catching
⏹️ ▶️ John AWS, what chance does Apple have, right? But that’s kind of the pessimistic taste. And on the other hand,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple was considering making a car. So like we live in a strange world.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, good point. Yeah, I think, I think, honestly, I think Apple should
⏹️ ▶️ John have already been in on the public cloud and many, many years ago, but they haven’t. So maybe it is
⏹️ ▶️ John too late, but I think it is not. It’s not entirely slam dunk. And depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on how this shakes out long term, Apple may seriously regret not getting into
⏹️ ▶️ John the space because I can tell you that there’s a lot of money to be made selling
⏹️ ▶️ John these services to other people. AWS bills really add up and
⏹️ ▶️ John No matter who you go to who’s got Apple gonna go to their public cloud. They’re not gonna run their own They’re either gonna pay Microsoft Google
⏹️ ▶️ John or Amazon That’s not a great situation to be in and they’re gonna pay them a lot of money That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John if they’re gonna be a big that’s not a good situation to be in for Apple Like you don’t want to be it’s kind of like Google paying Apple billions of
⏹️ ▶️ John dollars to be the default search on iOS It’s you really don’t want to be giving
⏹️ ▶️ John that much money to your competitors especially when they know they kind of have you over a barrel, because what are you going to do?
⏹️ ▶️ John Move all your crap from AWS into Azure? It’s not an easy lift.
#askneutral: Top 10 sports cars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, this next piece of Ask ATP has been lingering in our document
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for probably two or three months and we keep just putting it off, putting it off, putting it off, putting it off.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But sometime forever ago, Paul Wood III wrote, hey, you know, John Roderick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has, and Merlin, I guess is what he was intending, have discussed their top 10 sports
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cars on Roderick on the Line. Can we get that list on ATP and hear from Marco and Casey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well? Oh, did you discuss this with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Roderick, John? Yeah, when he
⏹️ ▶️ John was on RECTIFS a while back, I think we talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. Ah, okay, right, right. So anyway, so I put this in the show notes and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then apparently John has added a tweet wherein this was already decided in 2016.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So would you like to tell me about that,
⏹️ ▶️ John John? Yeah, I think that’s when I had Roderick on Reconcilable Differences with me and we discussed this and I think I tweeted
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. My list hasn’t changed that much. I start, this is the list
⏹️ ▶️ John I put in the tweet and it’s tweet length so you can’t go into super detail, But there are nuances to it. And it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John top 10. I don’t think I came up to 10. But my list is basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll describe it. And then we can fill in the variables later. Like whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John the current mid-engine Ferrari V8 sports car
⏹️ ▶️ John is, like whatever the latest model, that’s usually on my list. So at the time, it was a 488. But now it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the, what the hell is the thing called? Tributo, F8 Tributo, or something like that. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever that one is, the current one, that one keeps changing. Then the Ferrari 458, because it’s the last naturally
⏹️ ▶️ John aspirated iteration of that model line. BMW M3, but I mean
⏹️ ▶️ John the M3 that was around in like the, what I always forget is the E46 is the one that I like, the one that was around,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was new in like 95, 96. I think it’s- That’s E36. No, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s the E46 is the one I like.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, E46 was early 2000s.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I like, whatever the one is
⏹️ ▶️ John that has the little slats by the M3 badge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know which one you’re talking about. Are you talking about a Rich Seagulls M3? Because that’s an E46. If you’re talking about a little boxier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than that, it’s E36. Yeah, it’s Rich Seagulls, E46.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s early 2000s. Yeah, that’s the M3 that I’m talking about. Mercedes S600, which I didn’t put a year
⏹️ ▶️ John on that, but it varies from year to year. Sometimes I like them, I don’t like them. But what I’m basically saying is the big
⏹️ ▶️ John V12, ridiculously huge Mercedes sedan that’s like driving a living room, that
⏹️ ▶️ John one. I had Tesla Model S on here in 2016, but honestly I think I would remove that now because I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John really down on Tesla and I’m just angry and scared of the company. And then of course, McLaren F1,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, for me, I thought the, well, I have to explain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty much all of these. The C3 Corvette, which is like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mid to late 70s-ish, which by most standards is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the worst, if not the worst Corvette of all time. However, my dad had a 77 Vette for a long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time when I was growing up, which I probably told that story about 15 times on this show and on Neutral. But the C3 Corvette,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to have one of those. The Z32, so this is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nissan 300ZX from the early 1990s. I had a 91 non-turbo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, many years ago. I love that car. I don’t regret selling that car, but I regret selling that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey car. An Aston Martin DBS of pretty much any vintage, something modern,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should say, but be that brand new or five years old or 10 years old, whatever, I’d be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine with it. Lamborghini Diablo, I don’t care what specific flavor of the Diablo, but that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was my ultimate car when I was really coming of age, when I was a little kid, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I loved that thing. Even though I’m sure I would hate to drive it, I would still love to have one. E39
⏹️ ▶️ Casey M5, because it’s been one of my favorite cars of all time pretty much since the moment I laid eyes on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I echo your V8 mid-engine Ferraris like the 488 or what have you. I echo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your McLaren F1 and I’d also I would love to you know have a Bugatti Veyron just because I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would be a cool thing to have as… Puke.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John So ugly. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco pretty. It looks pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool in person. I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in person. I do not like that car.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just feel like it’s the we spared no expense version of the automobile and I kind
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Well they spare no pound that’s for sure. Well they spare no expense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Brutal. Alright Marco hit me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Alright you’re gonna hate my list.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna have an MR2 on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s good. One of the entries I begin with quote Ferrari whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know enough about Ferraris to say which
⏹️ ▶️ John one. You should get a Ferrari California for this your punishment for putting that on the list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh god. Yeah cuz I I know I should I should want them because they’re like the driver enthusiasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car, but I don’t know anything about them. So I figured I’d let John pick my Ferrari.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, current mid-engine. Actually, I would just wait or I would get the 458.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are your two choices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, whatever you said that. I also thought in the, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like my large, fast, electric cars. Like, I like that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have Model S, Model 3, the Porsche Taycan, or is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it the Mission… Wait,
⏹️ ▶️ John why are you putting Model 3 on the list? Why Why would you want, you have a Model S, why would you want a Model 3, which is just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco okay. No, you didn’t. I didn’t have 10. I just listed good ones. Don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worry about that. Don’t worry about that. Don’t get that Model 3 off my list. All right, so Model S, Porsche Taycan, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M5. I thought, like, you know, I had one, it was great, and I haven’t tried the new one yet. The new one’s really good, they say. Right, and so that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be certainly on the list to consider. I like large stands. In the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smaller category, I’m very curious about the new Tesla Roadster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not enough to buy one, but it looks pretty cool. Also Aston Martin, whatever, you know, Casey can tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me which Aston Martin to get. And then also, I’ve never been in one, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not sure that I would actually enjoy it, but I find the BMW i8 very attractive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in person. I think it looks striking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, in person. I would agree with that. The other thing, and I’ve said this in other places, I think, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other car that I think does not photograph terribly well, but I think is gorgeous in person,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey those do not like the look of those on paper, but I think they are very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John pretty. They look
⏹️ ▶️ John better in person than they do in photos, but it is not to my taste. I can’t handle the two-tone panel on the side. It’s just…
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, I can understand that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It definitely, it allows for some pretty ugly color combos. They aren’t all ugly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even when it’s not, there’s a texture difference there that bothers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. And then finally, in the small, fast, like kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enthusiast category, I have the Porsche Cayman, which I’ve also never been in, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard they’re wonderful to drive and they’re mid-engine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never driven. And so I’m curious about that. The only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downside with the Cayman is that you’re basically sitting on the ground from what I can tell. And so my final pick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the BMW M2. I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco were gonna pick a cheaper Wrangler. No, because the M2, it seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very similar to the 1M that I had, and that was a really fun car. And what I especially liked about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 1M is that it was a small, fast, sporty car, but that you were sitting at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular sedan height, not like sitting on the ground. And the M2 appears to basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be like the next version of that. And so I’m very curious to possibly try one of those. Ultimately though, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so converted to electric at this point, what I really want BMW to make is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an electric 2-series, but they don’t seem interested in doing that anytime soon. Well, thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to our sponsors this week, Hover, Ero, and Clear, and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at ATP.FM And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, tech podcast so long
Jury-duty tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was summoned to jury duty this week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I recognize this is not a popular opinion. I really hate jury duty. It makes me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what some would call unreasonably angry. I call it perfectly reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really don’t like jury duty and I recognize why we do it the way we do. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s an incredibly broken imperfect system and not the right solution. But that’s just me. And everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else seems to care about it a lot more than I do, so I’ll just stop my complaining there. Going to jury duty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes me very angry. I don’t like going, I don’t like being there, I especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t like how much they spend all this time showing you videos and stuff that thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for going. Because I don’t think it’s dignified to be thanked for something you were forced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to attend. That seems insulting at best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to legally kidnap me, force me to be there, and then say thanks for coming. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last time I served jury duty, I never got to a trial. It just basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made me wait in a jury waiting room to be maybe called to a courtroom for a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days. Eventually, I believe I even talked about it on the show, eventually I was called up for a court,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a courtroom, and I was kicked out during Vardir because I said I didn’t trust authority.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey forgotten about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes. Yeah. Anyway, but the vast majority of the time was not even in a courtroom. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sitting in a jury waiting room with other potential jurors with nothing to do. And these are federal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco courts that I get summoned to. This is the Southern District of New York federal court. and the federal courts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are extremely strict that you cannot bring any kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of electronics into the courtroom and so last or into the building
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even and so as I was sitting there last time in this jury waiting room, I had nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do like I I had printed out articles to read and I brought like a magazine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or two and I had just totally under provisioned for like how much material
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would need for the amount of time that I was going to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a good thing you’re such an avid reader of novels so you have plenty to fill your time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, exactly. Yeah, like so, anyway, so last time I was dramatically underprepared and I was bored out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my mind and I was super mad which made it even worse. So this time I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it right. Now, as John mentioned, I think a normal person’s solution to this would be to bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a book. And this time I did. I brought the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Creativity Inc book that John recommended, because I said, I’m gonna bring a book this time, damn it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like reading books very much. So I wanted more options than that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my mental health, I wanted a way to have my two favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, music and podcasts. Now, you might assume, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one would, that I was out of luck, because you aren’t allowed to bring electronic devices to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jury duty. And that makes sense in people’s picture of jury duty where they picture you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco immediately going to a courtroom and sitting and being paying attention. You wouldn’t want jurors using their phones during a trial.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s all true. But that isn’t what jury duty is. That’s what jury
⏹️ ▶️ Marco duty really is, at least in this federal court. I keep being summoned to because it’s random law is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you go and sit in this room for a long time, possibly for days without going to a courtroom.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you’re basically just sitting in a waiting room. I see no harm in having electronics in that room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I decided to, this time, try to push the boundaries a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey could bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that could play music and podcasts while I was in this waiting room, waiting around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do nothing. And ideally, I was even thinking like, it’d be nice if I could have an e-reader
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something so I wouldn’t have to carry around paper books. I have a few e-books I’d like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to read. I didn’t own any paper books that I really wanted to read that I haven’t yet, so I don’t want to just buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a paper book just to bring here, like if I have e-books that I can read. So I’d like to bring an e-reader if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible, and something that can play mp3s, and maybe one device that can do both would be ideal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I decided to be a lawyer about it, like I looked at the exact wording of what the rule was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The summons that you get in the mail, it says, and I quote, do not bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco electronic equipment, cell phones, BlackBerrys, PDAs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptops, and the like to the courthouse. So of course, I mean my first question is like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s the last time somebody tried to bring a BlackBerry or a PDA in the courthouse? But like, so it says do not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bring electronic equipment including blah blah blah and the like. Electronic equipment is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very broad, but there’s a lot of it that is not like those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like is a digital watch electronic equipment that’s like PDAs, laptops, and Blackberries?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. What about a Fitbit? One question is, what about an e-reader?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is that like a cell phone, PDA, or laptop? Maybe, maybe not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the good thing is that I called, that you have to like call the night before to listen to a recording
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see if you actually have to go in that day, and the phone message had different wording. Matthew Feeney
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh God. Tim Cynova It said, no pocket knives, cell phones, Blackberries,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or internet capable devices
⏹️ ▶️ John are allowed in the court. Oh, that last one that killed what I was going to say because you were mentioned digital watches and there is a kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of watch that you can use to listen to both music and podcasts. But unfortunately, it is internet capable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? So I saw I don’t I don’t have a pocket knife. That one’s easy. You don’t have a pocket knife. No, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a knife person. No cell phones, BlackBerry’s or internet capable devices. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now this is much more specific. Internet capable. Okay, so nothing with cellular obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nothing with Wi-Fi either. It’s questionable what they mean by internet capable, but you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s say nothing with Wi-Fi either. Now, there’s also a separate rule that you aren’t allowed to have image or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sound recording devices in a courtroom. So nothing with a camera or microphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So before I move on, if you were in this position, what if anything would you bring?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The obvious answer is some sort of portable turntable,
⏹️ ▶️ John duh. You could bring a five-piece band.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. There’s nothing about musical
⏹️ ▶️ John instruments. Nobody says you can’t bring a wedding band in with you and just entertain the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco entire waiting room. Can I bring Mike and Jason to come have a conversation in front of
⏹️ ▶️ John me about the Apple News of the week? Yeah, and then the podcasting, you just bring a bunch of people who will sit behind a table and talk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s awesome. Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what would you bring? All kidding aside, I would certainly bring a backpack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full of magazines and novels and and so on and so forth. Like if I couldn’t bring a Kindle, then I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would bring a series of novels or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So e-reading was the first thing I tried to tackle. So an e-reader is probably the easiest thing to get away with.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The problem is, no Kindle has ever been made that doesn’t have either Wi-Fi, cellular,
⏹️ ▶️ John both. I was gonna say, they’re all internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capable. Yes, now the old Sony readers were neither of those things. The old Sony readers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would pass this test, but I believe I mailed mine to you, John, years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as part of packing material with other Kindles around it. I had one Sony reader like forever ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can’t really buy them quickly these days. So I thought a Kindle would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not pass the test, but what matters isn’t whether something has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wi-Fi, but whether a courtroom security guard is likely to know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it has Wi-Fi. So I figured I could actually probably get away with a Kindle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what I really wanted ideally, I figured trying to carry a bunch of stuff in there was risky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted to only try to get one thing past them that was a questionable electronic device. So I really wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Kindle with a headphone jack so I could also play music and podcasts from it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the only problem is I gave all those to John too. Many Kindles have headphone jacks. I don’t own
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of them right now. The only one I right now, the only Kindle I own is a first generation Oasis.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not the current, the current one’s the second generation. And the first generation Oasis has no audio output at all. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all it could do for me was the reading functions and just replace like a book, well I could just bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a book. Like that’s not that big of a deal. If this device is only gonna replace one book, it isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth the risk if it can’t also be an audio player. Now I looked, the newest Kindles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all support Bluetooth audio output. That could be great, except that they only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support this for Audible audiobooks, but in the Audible app on the Kindle. So previous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kindles, back when they had headphone jacks, you could sideload music onto its memory by just like plugging it in through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB to your computer. You could like put music in a folder and it could play it. Modern Kindles can’t do that anymore apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I didn’t actually have one that could do this to test with, but the information I could find basically said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will only play stuff from the Audible app, you can’t load stuff on them anymore. So I couldn’t like load podcasts onto them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So between that and you know, my situation here, I figured e-readers were not gonna work out. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too little upside for too much risk. So I decided to stick with paper for my reading needs and only try to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solve for music and podcasts electronically. The correct modern solution, as John alluded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a minute ago, would probably be an Apple Watch with AirPods. But the Apple Watch has Wi-Fi,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some of them have cellular, and they all have microphones. And the Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is instantly recognizable to most people, and most people know that Apple Watches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are kind of like phones, and they have phone-like features. So I think any security guard,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be a pretty high risk. Like they’re probably not gonna let an Apple Watch through because they know an Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like a phone. And Bluetooth, again, I wasn’t sure if I could really rely on that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not usually used to provide an internet service, although it can be. It’s also, it is a wireless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco electronic communication method and I figured the guards probably wouldn’t be willing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to debate this with me. You know? So I actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought a little music player would be ideal. I actually have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little Sony music player that is otherwise perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except that it’s very obviously an audio recorder. That’s what it really is. It has these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two giant microphones on the top and it has a giant red record button on the front. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figured that was too risky because you aren’t allowed to record stuff so clearly that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a good idea. So what I needed really was was an iPod. You know, something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks old and basic enough that any security guard would recognize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it as just a music player. And they would know this has no internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or phone capabilities whatsoever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was hoping you were going to say a Rio PMP 300 like I had way back in the day. Or Nomad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Were you one of the Nomad people? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco don’t remember. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I briefly had one of the ones that was a big hard drive, but it wasn’t the Nomad brand. It was another brand. I forget which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one it was, but it was some other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brand. Well, it was a creative something something nomad, is that right? You know what I’m thinking of, right? The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco looks like a disk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man. Yeah, you’re thinking of the creative nomad jukebox, which is the one that looks like a fat disk man and it had like a 5 gig hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey in it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had one that was by a different company that had a hard drive. Then I had one that played MP3 CDRs, which is much better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, I decided iPod is the way to go here. People recognize iPods, they know what they look like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They know what they are and they know what they aren’t. And they know it’s clearly just an iPod, right? So that’s what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted. Problem is, we don’t have a working iPod. Whoops. And most, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Tiff has her own iPod mini, but it’s, I don’t even think we have a 30-pin cable anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I don’t think I could plug it in if I wanted to, and I’m pretty sure the battery would be dead, because most iPods that are still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around today have batteries that are like 10 or 15 years old, and so they can’t hold a charge anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you can actually still today buy new iPods that are refurbished
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with new batteries. The problem is, these are like $200 and up. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPod Nano refurbished with a new battery is like $180 for most places. A small price to pay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they retailed for $150 when they were new. They’re actually more than MSRP now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an iPod Classic, they’re even more. iPod Classics are like over $300 for one in good shape that has a new battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I also thought, though, looking at the iPod Nano availability, the seventh generation Nano, the latest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, is the one that looks like a tiny iPhone. Like it has the home button and a big touch screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I figured the security guards might not let that one through because it was never very popular. Like by the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time that came out, iPhones were taken over. So like it wasn’t very popular and it looks like a small phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I figured there’s actually a risk. So the one I really wanted was the fifth generation. That was the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that had the iconic iPod Nano shape with the screen on top and the buttons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a circle below it. Like that’s the last one that looks like, you know, the iPod shaped iPod was the seventh generation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPod Nano or the, sorry, the fifth generation iPod Nano. Problem is those were, those were again, like $200 for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco refurbished one with a new battery. And I was like, am I going to spend $200 on something that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next time I need this thing, it’s probably going to be when they call me back in another five years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and five years from now, will that battery still work? And more importantly, will I still be able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to sync files to an iPod using iTunes in five years?
⏹️ ▶️ John not. Let’s just all sit back and appreciate the fact that you are even considering making
⏹️ ▶️ John a one-time $200 purchase for a single day activity that may repeat every five years. Correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just appreciate that. It felt rich to me. This is what it’s like to be Marco. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, honestly, the price really put me off. If it was like $50, I would have done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no question. 200 felt a little ridiculous for this purpose. But the good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing is, I am not the first person to have ever wanted a cheap iPod.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The iPod spawned a thousand clones, and many of them are still around today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and still being made, still brand new, and because it is 2019, they cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically nothing. So I’ll put in the show notes the one I shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I bought the AGP Tech MP3 player 8GB Bluetooth 4.0 upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A02T lossless sport music player with FM radio voice recorder expandable up to 228 gigs black for kids and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adult voice recorder. So I selected this one in part because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looked very similar to an iPod Nano also in part because I was ordering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on a Saturday and it was guaranteed to arrive on Sunday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in part because it was $26. I should clarify the price has since gone to $29
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but when I bought it was $26. Now John noticed a few problematic keywords.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does have Bluetooth and it does include a little microphone to make voice recordings but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco neither of those things were visually apparent. The microphone as far as I don’t even test where it was but there’s a small hole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the back of it I think that’s the microphone it might not even even be it might just be like it might just use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a microphone that’s on the earbuds if you happen to be using like a TRS earbud set so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know I never tried the voice recorder
⏹️ ▶️ John I assume it was recording everything and transmitting it back to a day center in China the whole time you were there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so maybe so anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Bloomberg said anyway right yeah exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so because the voice recorder aspect of it was not visually apparent at all and I wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even sure it even had a microphone. I figured that would probably not be a problem. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I loaded it up and you know it’s there is no sync software to be had you just you plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it in and it’s a USB device and you copy stuff over to folders on it. It’s great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I load it up with music. I put some podcasts on it and I wrapped an old wired
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pair of white Apple earbuds around it like it’s 2005 you know and I brought to the courthouse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now they were very very clear in the instructions. don’t even bring your phone into the building.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Just don’t even bring it with you that day at all or leave it in your car. So I left it locked in my glove box because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wasn’t gonna not bring it, obviously. I gotta get there somehow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t leave your phone in your car. That’s not, I mean, you probably got away with it because, you know, whatever, and the Tesla is kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of climate controlled, but that’s bad for your phone. Don’t leave your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your car. Sorry. Anyway, so I left it in the glove box, locked up. The first thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to do was figure out where to park. I had to go into a big municipal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco city parking garage, and I had my phone until I parked, but then I had to leave my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the car. So the first thing I had to do was figure out how to pay for this parking. And there’s signs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up saying, remember your parking spot. My usual solution to this would be to take a picture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the parking spot. And if not that, I would at least usually take a picture of the sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the elevator that told me what floor I was on and whether it’s east or north or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I couldn’t do those things. I had to like, I like, my short term memory for these things is gone. Like I, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skill I have to remember parking spots is gone. Because I haven’t used it in, you know, what, 10 years?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I, I took out a notebook and a pencil, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had to buy for this trip. Oh my gosh. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is where you need the Mike Hurley in your life. You got a bunch of expensive hipster notebooks and a million pens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well fortunately I have Tiff, but our tastes aren’t, they don’t overlap that much in this
⏹️ ▶️ John I need a gigantic sparkly fountain pen to write down what parking spot you’re in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I took out a brand new notebook and a brand new mechanical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pencil and I had to write down my parking spot and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Couldn’t you just look for the big red Tesla? I mean, how many other red Teslas were there in the parking lot at the time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was lost, man, it was terrible. And so anyway, so I eventually found the pay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco station in the elevators and everything and I paid and I couldn’t use Apple Pay. I had to use my credit card like an animal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I had to find the courthouse from the parking garage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which was about a block and a half or two away. And so I walked out of the parking garage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and basically immediately got lost. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco walked up and down the block, went different directions, and I’m like, where the hell? I had already forgotten even the name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the street that the courtroom was on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, you should have just printed map quest directions like we did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John back in the day.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I used to do. You just need a haggstrom is what you need. You should have driven there without navigation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too. Yeah right. And so like eventually I found like somebody was walking by in a suit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I figured he probably knows where the courthouse is. So he’s wearing a suit on a weekday morning.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I asked him like, hey you know where the courthouse is? And I couldn’t have lucked out with a better guy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He points like across like diagonally across the street and he’s like that one’s county, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one city and around the corner from that one is federal like great. All right, thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I went to the around the corner one eventually found the federal like I thank God I would never would have found it on my own like it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was I was going to walk around a very long time before finding that so it’s like finally like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m a human without a phone like I’m totally lost. Finally, I find this place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I of course I I’m so mad when I get there that to do all this that I immediately want to take a picture of myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outside the courtroom or outside the building like flipping it off and realize I had no camera with me and couldn’t do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like oh here we go modern life tracks again
⏹️ ▶️ John you can still flip off the building even with no camera there to record it it’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John anyway so so the so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get in go through security the security guards seem pretty nice and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know take everything out to get everything to get And then he glanced at the mp3 player and initially he said he gave it a quick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glance and he said no electronics but of course I was Trying to get I’m like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just an mp3 player sir And and he stopped for a minute and he looked more closely at it because you could tell you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know It’s like like it’s like TSA like they get they have to say the same thing a million times to everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who comes in So they’re sick of it Then they’re not really thinking when they first say it He actually took a look at it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and he realized it looks like an iPod nano with white headphones wrapped around it and he He
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like asked the guard in the next lane over, like, hey, we allow these now, right? And so they mumbled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to each other, and then he waved me through. He said, all right, it’s fine. So I had it, I got it through. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to bring an iPod-like MP3 player into the courthouse,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was fine. So I can tell you finally, with my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day of using it in the waiting room, which fortunately, they sent us home early, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were done, and I don’t have to go back. Because it turns out, this week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there weren’t a lot of cases needing juries in white planes. So it was a short, I only actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needed it for like two thirds of a day. But, in my two thirds of a day of using it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can tell you my review of the AGP Tech A02T $26 MP3 player in 2019.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Please carry on. It looks and feels like a $26
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device. The body of it is that like, that like cheap,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soft touch, rubbery plastic, you know what I’m talking about? Yeah. Like it’s, like every, every super cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco device is made from that now. Um, the screen is horrendous looking, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resolution is terrible, the viewing angle, like I don’t think there is a good angle to view it. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just, if there is, I couldn’t find it. Um, none of the buttons or switches feel remotely good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use. The buttons only work about two-thirds of the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and lots of navigation just requires like, you know, oh, just push it again. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my kicking machine, like just push it again and it’ll solve the problem. It doesn’t support the remote control
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clicker buttons on the iPod headphones for like volume up and down or play pause,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I immediately missed. For listening to podcasts, I had, using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a command line tool, of course, I had pre processed the files to bacon smart speed. Of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you did, but they were all still at one X and there was no easy 30 seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skip forward and back buttons, so it wasn’t really ideal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for podcasts. The device has some other issues as well upon boot up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about one out of five times. It says no files found, which is terrifying when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve loaded this up to go to jury duty but then you just wait a second and they’re all there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sometimes it doesn’t resume from sleep and needs to be power cycled. When you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do this, this is one of many conditions I found where it will lose the position in whatever you’re listening to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is another thing that made listening to podcasts fairly non-ideal on this device. It does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support video playback, but it only plays 128 by 160 AMV files.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What? If you look up AMV on Wikipedia, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is actually a format. That’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a music video? No, it’s actually a format that’s like, it’s made for like cell phones and like certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things use a certain type of chip set that’s optimized to play only that. And it came with a sample
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video. So I was able to look at that video like an FFMPEG and it’s like, what is this? What are the specs in this? but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have been unable to encode any other videos that it’ll actually play for whatever it’s worth.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you play a video, normally to get out of what you’re doing, you would hit the menu
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button, like the M button on top. If you do that, it shows you a menu, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of the options are like quit. It took me a long time to figure out how to exit video playback mode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the options is update playlist. That’s how you leave. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goodness. So, you know, for video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not so good. Podcasts, not so good. For music, it’s fine. You know, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, but fine. To play or pause, you often need to wake it up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first, which often involves multiple button presses that often get lost or ignored.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my favorite thing is adjusting volume. To change the volume, which is a fairly common action
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you often have to do quickly, You have to wake it up, so hit play or pause maybe one to five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco times over the course of a few seconds to wake it up. Then you have to, there’s a volume button on the bottom,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you push it, nothing happens. You have to hold it down for a few seconds to enter the volume
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you hit up or down a few times to your desired volume level, then you hit play to be like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enter to set it. So this thing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty much a piece of garbage, but it worked and I was able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slowly and clumsily listen to music and podcasts while I waited around all day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do nothing in jury duty and that was totally worth 26 dollars to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So while this is a terrible product in absolute terms, I would actually say it’s a pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value and I still I find it amazing just like in modern life that I decided
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted an mp3 player I found one in a few seconds I ordered it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a Saturday and it was delivered on Sunday for $26 that’s pretty cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is pretty cool
⏹️ ▶️ John should have tried an iPod shuffle because I know you about the battery that is really old and it won’t hold a charge but like the shuffle
⏹️ ▶️ John does everything you describe better retains your playback position easy to change the volume wakes up
⏹️ ▶️ John instantly does all the things you’re supposed to do and is is much less likely to be flagged as electronics by a
⏹️ ▶️ John random security guard. That’s what I would have gone with. But I didn’t have one. You don’t have a Shuffle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the house somewhere? No, the only iPod we own is Tiff’s old Mini. What happened to all the other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones? You sold them all? I never had that many. I think we had a total of two Shuffles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever, and at least one of them died. I don’t know whether I have any other one. We had Tiff’s iPod Mini,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I had a iPod Video, the 5G, I think, whatever the first video one was. I had that one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s it, I never owned a Nano, neither did TIFF, and I never owned any other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco classic ones except for the video, and that was it. And that one, I think that one died like 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ago or something. It died not recently.
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably could have found a Chinese knockoff iPod Shuffle, but then that wouldn’t have actually worked.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like an actual Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John iPod Shuffle would work. Yeah. It’s kind of amazing that they can screw that up that badly. And the volume changing
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, when you go into the volume menu and change it, do you get to hear what the new volume sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changing it? Yes, but you have to hit the enter play button to exit the volume menu.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So are you holding onto this for the next jury duty experience?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might as well. I mean, it’s more likely to work in five years than an ancient iPod.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, we’ll see. Put it in the box
⏹️ ▶️ John that says jury duty and you’ll open it up and it’ll just be an exploded battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, the plastic will all be like liquefied.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh gosh. Now I’m also wondering If you were to do this again tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the sake of discussion, would you be spending any time splitting your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey podcast MP3s like in every minute so it’s easier to seek effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to where you left off or like mark to yourself where you’ve left off because you say that it loses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your place a lot and it’s just not a very good music player. So that’s something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my dad used to do all the time with like audio books that he would download via MP3
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that, that he would slice them up so that instead of having each file be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, a chapter or something like that, instead each file would be like 30 seconds or a minute or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what have you so that it was easier for him to come back to where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was. That was going to be my next move. So I went to Jury Duty for one day and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then was not needed after that. And so I had a very short term of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using this. If I were gonna be there longer, I think I would probably actually then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at that point go buy an iPod Nano, spend the $200, and if I was gonna be there for a long time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have an opportunity to use this more than once, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably go that route. I also, I think if I knew, like if I go back and do it again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I didn’t do that option, there’s a Sony player that is basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the version of my little nice Sony recorder that isn’t a recorder. Like it’s like the iPod Nano version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my little audio recorder that I have. It’s like the same generation, has lots of the same parts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, it’s $75, so it’s more, but I would probably try that first before I did this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any crazy hacks to make my $26 one work that much better. Because it is, it seems like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nicer built thing. The reviews are a little bit mixed, but, because, you know, the problem is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new MP3 player in 2019, this is not a high volume market. Like there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are digital audio players, like there are like portable audio players that are for audiophiles, like for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end audio listeners that support like high bitrate stuff and everything, but those all look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like phones because they all have these, like they’re all like the size of phones and they have like a big touch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen on them. There’s actually very few that aren’t touch screens, but I wanted something that looked more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like an iPod because I figured it’d be more likely to get through. Whereas something that looks just like a phone, which is all the high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco models, I figured that was not likely to get through.