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

325: Relive Your Calculator-Watch Dreams

Analyzing the latest rumors for this year’s iOS, watchOS, and macOS releases.

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.

Sponsored by:

  • Squarespace: Make your next move. Use code ATP for 10% off your first order.
  • Fracture: Photos printed in vivid color directly on glass. Get a special discount on your first order.
  • Backblaze: Unlimited cloud backup for just $6/month. Start a free 15-day trial today.

MP3 Header

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

Chapters

  1. Recurring daymares
  2. Last call for shirts!
  3. Follow-up: MDM theory
  4. Follow-up: Jury-duty tech
  5. Sponsor: Backblaze
  6. Gurman rumors
  7. Sponsor: Fracture
  8. More Gurman rumors
  9. Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
  10. Yet more Gurman rumors
  11. #askatp: Coding music
  12. #askatp: Family Macs
  13. #askatp: Reducing white-dude ignorance
  14. Ending theme
  15. Post-show: Ronin

Recurring daymares

⏹️ ▶️ John The power of JavaScript, I believe in you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will put it on the to-do list for after I ship my app, which in turn is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey after I create a website for said app, and then fix all the hilarious bugs.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot, is that I have never written any code with regard

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to store kit. So this is anything to do with an app purchase or anything like that. And I’ve gotten

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kind of happy path and some of the more obvious not so happy pads coded,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and they’re in the most recent Tesla build. But I haven’t done some of the other stuff, like restore

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot. But I have this vision, or this recurring worry, that I’m going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to release this app, hopefully to some amount of fanfare, only to find out that my in-app

⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchase code is all broken like hell. And then either people won’t be able to buy,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or it’ll be free somehow, or something like that, which I know should be controlled on the Apple side. But you never know.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I have just the, I have these recurring like daymares. They’re not nightmares. Cause I think about it all the time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey during the day. So they’re the recurring daymares of, of I’m pretty sure that’s not a word, but you know what I mean?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of writing or releasing this app and hoping to just swim in money, which of course

⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t happen anyway, because it’s the app store, but anyway, to swim in some dollars only to find out that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my IAP code is totally broken. I mean, I’m obviously talking about step 305 and I’m on step like 10, but I don’t I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just have this fear that I’m going to release it and then everything’s going to break.

Last call for shirts!

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want me to do it? Can we shill for our shirts? I actually haven’t bought shirts yet. I need to do that. I should listen to my own advice.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only have five days left, Casey. Seriously. Stop what you’re doing right now. Pull over your motorcycle.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Safely

⏹️ ▶️ John pull over. What else did you say? Safely put down your water glass and buy a t-shirt. But not too close to your computer.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is just a couple of days before we stop sales

⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the summer edition of ATP Shirts and things. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as you’re listening to me, make the same speech for the third consecutive week.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Think to yourself, I don’t want to be that person. I don’t want to be that person that says, oh, Casey, I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey listen to you. Can I please have a shirt? Please, please, please, please. No, you can’t. Pull the car

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over. Wow. Pull the car over. That’s harsh. Stop running. Stop what you’re doing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey safely, gracefully. Go to atp.fm.store and just check

⏹️ ▶️ Casey out our wares. We have plenty of wares. We would like to share them with you. And by share I mean sell them to you. So check

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it out. You are running out of time. You are running out of time. As we record this, it is the evening of May 8th.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This episode will probably come out on the 9th or the 10th. And guess what? At the end of the day, ATP time

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Sunday the 12th, that is your last chance. ATP.FM slash store, if

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you please. Thank you everyone who has already listened to me and have made your purchases. We all appreciated, so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey thank you.

Follow-up: MDM theory

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start with some follow-up. MDM, parental control apps, conspiracy theory. So this is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to the New York Times article slash hit piece that we talked about last week.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we were talking about how we kind of thought it was silly and we didn’t really see that much

⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. But we got a bit of feedback that we sort of kind of missed the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey conjecture that some of these apps were trying to put forth. John, can you explain this to me?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it was the most ridiculous theory presented in the article, which is probably why we didn’t talk about

⏹️ ▶️ John it, but it was

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco actually in the

⏹️ ▶️ John article. It was like some of the app makers that they interviewed said things directly,

⏹️ ▶️ John not just implying this, but saying it outright. The idea is that

⏹️ ▶️ John screen time is the replacement for all these parental control MDM apps, and screen time is not as full featured

⏹️ ▶️ John as some of the third party apps. And so some of the third party app makers said,

⏹️ ▶️ John well, Apple’s doing that on purpose because Apple doesn’t want you to use your phone less.

⏹️ ▶️ John So what they want to do is introduce their own feature that does the same thing as our apps. Get rid of all our apps

⏹️ ▶️ John so the only game in town is theirs. And then screen time is bad at stopping you from using your phone.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because why would Apple ever want you to stop using your phone? Apple wants you to use your phone more, not less.

⏹️ ▶️ John So basically, yeah, screen time is intentionally bad. And that is a very, very, very silly

⏹️ ▶️ John theory for many reasons. I mean, one is just the typical reason these theories are silly is that

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s fun to think that a corporation is doing something evil, but if you can’t think of

⏹️ ▶️ John like a financial incentive for doing the evil thing, it’s probably not really evil. I mean, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John so like, it’s tricky to talk about that because lots of big tech companies do evil things, but there’s usually a very

⏹️ ▶️ John like clear reason. Like Facebook does all sorts of evil stuff, but you can say, I see why they’re doing this because

⏹️ ▶️ John how they make their money, you know, this feeds into that. They want more information about more

⏹️ ▶️ John people because they want to sell targeted ads and so on and so forth. In the

⏹️ ▶️ John case of Apple, does Apple want you to use your phone more

⏹️ ▶️ John or less? And because Apple is a business model, there is something to say about

⏹️ ▶️ John they want you to be on your phone and buying apps from the App Store and stuff like that, and you can kind of see that. But

⏹️ ▶️ John on the flip side of it, Apple’s ideal customer, at least setting

⏹️ ▶️ John aside the services story, but for the whole, the rest of their revenue, if you look at the big pie chart of where they make their money,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s ideal customer would be, buy a new iPhone every year and never use it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because then you don’t consume any of their resources, you don’t get

⏹️ ▶️ John dissatisfied because you wear down your battery and whatever, like you just give them the money, they get the profit

⏹️ ▶️ John margin, and then you never bother them again. Obviously the service revenue story means they want you to use their services, but again,

⏹️ ▶️ John they would love for you to pay for all their services and then never use them, because they get your money, but then don’t have to pay to serve

⏹️ ▶️ John you. Apple is not in the business of watching every single thing you do and selling

⏹️ ▶️ John targeted ads against it. So no, I don’t think that Apple doesn’t want

⏹️ ▶️ John you to use your phone less, and that’s why screen time is bad at making you use your phone less. That is a silly reason,

⏹️ ▶️ John and the app developers that said that are way off base.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on.

Follow-up: Jury-duty tech

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, some jury duty follow-up from Mr. Mark Warman. Can you tell me about this,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you please? I’m surprised we have any follow-up about this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I absolutely can. So I mentioned in last week’s After Show my various tech

⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs for bringing something into the jury duty waiting room because I was going to be bored and want to listen to podcasts.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I had suggested that the ideal device would be a fifth generation iPod Nano because it was the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco last Nano that had the iconic look of like the circular buttons below the screen that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be recognized by a security guard easily as like, this is just an MP3 player, not a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone or a phone-like device. And our friend, Stephen Hackett over at Relay, wrote in to say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the fifth generation iPod Nano had a video camera on the back, which would have been prohibited in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the courthouse, which I had totally forgotten about. This was like, this was released back

⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the early 2000s when I believe it was trying to compete with the flip camera

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time. And I don’t think it ever went anywhere really, But yeah, the fifth generation iPod Nano did

⏹️ ▶️ Marco indeed have a video camera, so I would have to go with a fourth gen iPod Nano

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to achieve what I wanted to achieve and still be permissible in a courthouse. Philip wrote in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to suggest something that no one else I don’t think suggested, and I didn’t even consider, a Game

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Boy. I’ve never owned a Game Boy. The Switch is my first portable console that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ve ever had, which has Wi-Fi and microphones, I think, so that wouldn’t fly. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, so a Game Boy though, most of them I think, or if not all of them, would totally

⏹️ ▶️ Marco qualify as long as they don’t have Wi-Fi or cameras or microphones. And he also pointed out, he linked me to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Play Yon MP3 player cartridge that was, I don’t think ever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco released in America, but it was like a Game Boy cartridge that you could stick an SD card into,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not on the original Game Boy, but on the Game Boy Advance SP and some other ones I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco understand. it would be able to play MP3s and some built-in games

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from this cartridge. So that is an option. I didn’t even know the MP3 player existed,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I never even considered the possibility of Game Boys. I just didn’t even think about them, because I’ve never really been in that world. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank you, Philip, for that suggestion. That was pretty cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I kind of wish you had done this.

⏹️ ▶️ John It would be cool to see you in the waiting room with a Game Boy that you never touch or look at. Just

⏹️ ▶️ John be sitting there.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would imagine the screen would probably have to be on. it would probably have to look visibly on. Yeah, it would look like

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re just ignoring your Game Boy. Just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco burning his battery. Yes, all these possible alternatives.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I felt weird enough, I did get some questions from some of the other nearby waiting

⏹️ ▶️ Marco jurors when they saw me take out what appeared to be an iPod with these white headphones.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t really hide that. People are like, I thought you couldn’t bring phones in here. I put the iPod in there like, oh wow.

⏹️ ▶️ John Is that an iPod? No, it’s much worse. Yeah, significantly worse. Do you remember the Game Boy

⏹️ ▶️ John Camera for the original Game Boy?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. I’ve never seen one. I know, I remember it existed, but it’s one of those many peripherals

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time, like the Game Gear TV Tuner, that I just would read

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about in a magazine and never in real life ever see one.

⏹️ ▶️ John Pretty sure the Game Boy Camera was kind of like the BitCam, the Icon Factory app that we talked about on a past show,

⏹️ ▶️ John that like it was a essentially a black and white camera. The only thing you could, the only thing the screen could produce

⏹️ ▶️ John was a black or a white quote unquote white pixel. And so the camera had to work

⏹️ ▶️ John with that. And it was very dotty, to say the least.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Backblaze, unlimited cloud backup for Macs and PCs for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just six bucks a month. Cloud backup is essential. These days, there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so many important files that we keep, and you really need backups. And Backblaze knows you’re going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have local backups if you’re being, you know, very responsible, that’s great. But there’s a whole class of risks that can happen

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can affect all of your local storage. So if there’s like a fire or a power surge or a flood

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or theft, there’s all sorts of problems that can happen when you only have backups on site.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Backblaze makes it super easy to have off-site backups. And look, we hope you never need to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually restore from Backblaze. That would be great, but it’s really great to have that protection if you need it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would even say priceless. But fortunately, they only charge six bucks a month for a computer, so it’s really great. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco truly unlimited. No matter how many drives you can plug into that computer. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a 12 terabyte array plugged into my Mac Mini and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Backblaze backs it up for $6 a month because it’s plugged into that computer. And so $6

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a month per computer, unlimited, there’s no problems with like throttling or speed or anything, I’ve had no problems

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with that. It is amazing. There’s no gimmicks, there’s no additional charges, $6 a month, it’s that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco simple. Restoring from Backblaze is easy too, you can do it from your website or they can even overnight you a hard

⏹️ ▶️ Marco drive. It’s really, really great. They also have business backup now. You can tell your system in at work

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about this. the same awesome servers with more admin tools for business groups and everything. So check it out today,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco backblaze.com slash ATP. Trust me, you want cloud backup, you want

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that extra insurance policy on your data, and six bucks a month is a small price to pay for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of peace of mind and the risks that this eliminates for you. You

Gurman rumors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So check it out today, backblaze.com slash ATP. Go there today, you can get a 15

⏹️ ▶️ Marco day free trial. Play with it, start protecting yourself from potential bad times. Start today.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to Backblaze for sponsoring our show and for keeping my data safe. The one big thing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we need to talk about today is, The one big thing I think we need to talk about today is,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, friend of the show, Gary Rambo, has dropped a series of different blog posts

⏹️ ▶️ Casey over the last, well, it was a week or two ago, but he spent a few days revealing things that he has

⏹️ ▶️ Casey discovered about what he expects about WWDC. Well, then, it turns out that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mark Gurman said, “‘Hold my beer, I have thoughts.’” So there was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a very large post a couple of days ago as we record that is to some degree, there

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is some prose here, but it is largely a bullet list of all the stuff that Gurman thinks is coming at DubDub.

⏹️ ▶️ John Before you dive in, before you dive into the list, I think this year is interesting in terms

⏹️ ▶️ John of everyone having all these leaks or rumors or whatever about what’s gonna be released and

⏹️ ▶️ John that it seems like there’s a lot more info than there normally is. And yet I can’t shake the feeling

⏹️ ▶️ John as we see these dueling rumors across sites that still any of the like,

⏹️ ▶️ John these are like the, not the boring features, not the obvious features, not the easy features, but

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s always something that Apple’s holding back related to something or other. Like very often that that software features

⏹️ ▶️ John related to hardware, right? Because like, there’ll be say, like after WWDC, we’ll all be

⏹️ ▶️ John using betas for a while, but none of those betas will contain any trace of the features

⏹️ ▶️ John that are going to be added to serve some piece of hardware that’s released like a month or two after WWDC, you know, that type of thing. So

⏹️ ▶️ John maybe I’m fooling myself, but I have to think that all the features listed are,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the ones that are in builds that somebody has access to, but there’s at least one or two more

⏹️ ▶️ John features that aren’t in any of the builds because they’re the super secret features. So if that’s not true and this is all the stuff, it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John still plenty. I’m not saying there has to be a super secret feature, but I’m getting that vibe from seeing these big lists that they’re

⏹️ ▶️ John all proud that they have all these things, but they have, but they’re missing something. And of course, none of them mentioned

⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac Pro or only mentioned in passing, so that makes me sad too.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think one of the big things that they’re missing is like some of the things like they’ve

⏹️ ▶️ Marco described features that sound a lot like, you know, multiple window management

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iPads, but they don’t have any idea, like, what does it look like? How does it work?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it seems like so much of the info in these reports is gleaned from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what seem like ways that are not actually seeing or playing with this software.

⏹️ ▶️ John Or they have screenshots if they saw them, or they’d have sketches, or they’d love, you know, there’s no reason they wouldn’t be drawing

⏹️ ▶️ John pictures, but all they’ve got is a vague notion, which is fine, they’re rumors, like, you know, if there’s something about windowing, will

⏹️ ▶️ John say, good, you get credit for that one. They just don’t have a lot of info, but yeah, I don’t expect them to post screenshots.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. So let’s go through this. I will just start calling out things that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought were interesting, and whenever you two are ready, just start interrupting me. We start with iOS,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, it’s kind of an amalgamation of iOS and watchOS, and watchOS gets split out later. Apple plans to add the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app store directly on the watch, so users can download apps on the go. Why?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John this does not sound compelling to me.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got a use for this feature, are you ready? So one of the big complaints about the watch that Marco

⏹️ ▶️ John gets is that you just did it on a past show, is like, I’m out of my watch and I wanna download a single episode

⏹️ ▶️ John of a podcast right now. But there’s no API for like, please watch, do

⏹️ ▶️ John a download thing right now. You can just suggest it to the watch and the watch might get to it eventually, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So true.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I bet with the App Store on the watch, if you go to the App Store on the watch and download,

⏹️ ▶️ John it will download that app right then. Like surely that’s how that feature works, right? Do you remember when

⏹️ ▶️ John e-books were single serving applications where you download an application and it was just one e-book? We need to

⏹️ ▶️ John make podcast episodes into apps.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That way you

⏹️ ▶️ John can download your podcast immediately. So starting after WWDC,

⏹️ ▶️ John each episode of ATP will be released as a single application. Pretty soon we’ll have hundreds of applications on the store.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will love us.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John See,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have some questions about the implementation details of this. Like right now,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps are delivered as one iOS app that includes an embedded

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watchOS app component. So what happens if you download

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app to your watch when your phone is not nearby that you don’t have on your phone?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hmm, that’s a very astute point. I hadn’t considered that.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming it would make you purchase the whole app, pull out just the watch part, or not that it’s doing this, but effectively,

⏹️ ▶️ John logically speaking, it would just send you the watch part, but when you look on your phone, it would be under your purchases that you had basically purchased

⏹️ ▶️ John the entire app. It still wouldn’t be on your phone to Margo’s point, so that could be a problem for your watch app

⏹️ ▶️ John when you run it and it’s like, I’m looking for my partner phone app on the phone, but that’s always been true. You could always

⏹️ ▶️ John delete an app off your phone far away from the watch that still has the thing installed. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John assuming that they’re not changing that weird, in my opinion, model where the only

⏹️ ▶️ John way to get a watch app is to buy a phone app that comes with a watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. And also, how as a developer, how do I test the case

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the watch app is installed but the phone app isn’t? Because there is no

⏹️ ▶️ Marco build and run directly to the watch. You cannot install from Xcode.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t build an app from Xcode that installs only on the watch and skips the phone. That test flight on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch too.

⏹️ ▶️ John Pull a new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco build of the watch. That’s why I have to imagine either this is wrong

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or misinterpreted, or there’s some major implementation details that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe make this misleading or incomplete in some major way. Because it’s just like the reality of what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch is. And I mean, by the way, like an app store on the watch, are you going to have to accept all

⏹️ ▶️ Marco input via Siri? It’s just, when you start to think about the reality of this, what happens

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your credit card gets, oh, you have to type in the verification code. There’s all these different awkwardness

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things or methods of input. How would you find the app? Are you searching? Yeah, like, are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you doing a search and scrolling through on the tiny little screen, like with the crown, like scrolling past all the junk in the search results?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are there search ads on the watch? Who knows, right? Like, that’s why when you think about the realities

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that, what that entails, it starts getting really messy really fast. And that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I got to figure, like, this is odd, especially because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch apps have largely been such a failure. And even like, there’s even barely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco even methods to manage apps on the watch. Like right now, like one of the, we’ll get to this in a little bit, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, some of the, some of the rumors are new first party apps from Apple for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco various health things. We still can’t like hide or delete

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or bury in folders apps on the watch. So like the watch home screen is already

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a mess of like 60 apps you don’t want. Plus like the three that you use.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The entire watchOS environment is so, it’s still just so primitive

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so dependent on doing so many settings and things on the phone. And the apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco themselves are dependent on companion phone apps so much of the time. I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, A, how they could really do this, and B,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what problem it would really solve when they had, like, this is like solving problem 350 like Casey

⏹️ ▶️ Marco said. like before you solve problems one through five.

⏹️ ▶️ John Does it make sense for them to, does it make sense for many watch apps to

⏹️ ▶️ John be separate from the phone apps? Like one way this could be more sensible is a, it used to be that the only way to, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John to distribute a watch app was to make it part of your phone app distribution. But now you can make a standalone watch app because maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John you have an app that really doesn’t need anything from its companion and it’s silly to make this shell iPhone

⏹️ ▶️ John app that just has like a splash screen that says, by the way, this is a watch app and you should go use it on

⏹️ ▶️ John your, you know, I think I’ve had a couple apps that are like that that just basically contain instructions on how to

⏹️ ▶️ John launch Apple’s Apple Watch app so you can transfer the app to the thing. Like just

⏹️ ▶️ John saying that there is an independent watch store only for apps that don’t have a

⏹️ ▶️ John companion phone app. I don’t know if that makes sense. I don’t know what percentage you like that,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it would certainly make this model make a little more sense.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, I mean, I don’t think that’s gonna be like a majority of watch apps. I think the number

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be very small, that that would really be the right move for it. But also just like, so many apps still

⏹️ ▶️ Marco depend on their phone counterparts to do critical things. Because watchOS is so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredibly limited. Like, not just the US stuff I was saying a minute ago, but like the API

⏹️ ▶️ Marco layers, the power budget, the computational power available,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the CPU time your app can take up before it gets killed without warning. It’s a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco harsh, brutal environment. It’s like the programming environment of Antarctica.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have very few resources here. Use them wisely, and if you make one little misstep, we’re gonna

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kill you. That’s about what it’s like running on watchOS. So

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for instance, Overcast, my long-term idea, what I would like to do, since

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch-to-phone communication or phone-to-watch communication is so heavily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco throttled and out of my control, and restriction. This is why your downloads don’t transfer

⏹️ ▶️ Marco reliably from Overcast to your Apple Watch. Because the communication layer between

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the phone and the watch app is thoroughly and completely out of your control.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, I as the programmer give watch connectivity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a list of transfers to make, and it makes them when it damn well feels like it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no insight into that process. I can’t tell it, hey, can you make this one happen now? Or can you make this

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one go over wifi instead of Bluetooth so it doesn’t take a half hour? Like, I have so little control over all that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco My long-term goal is to make the watch app what you just said, John, to make it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally independent. Where you literally can just like, log in to your Overcast account on your watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow. Maybe, you know, maybe I just might sync it over via iCloud, but whatever. It would have its own login, it would have its own sync,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would have its own local data, and it would be totally independent from your phone app. you could

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not have the phone app installed, and that would still work that way. But for me to do that, I need a few things.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I need, first of all, way more sophisticated audio APIs, so I can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do things like smart speed, voice boost, stuff like that. And I also just need, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I need better UI in a lot of ways. You know, WatchKit is awful. We are

⏹️ ▶️ Marco still not using the same tools Apple is using for UI, and it still shows.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And more importantly, like, I need things like better support for background downloading,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for background refresh, stuff like that. Just to make a reasonable experience if the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app was totally separate from the phone. I need things that right now in watchOS are either missing or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are too primitive or too limited to really make that good. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is my long-term goal, but right now, not only can I not really reasonably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco build that, but also there isn’t that much demand for it because most of the time, people are using the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a remote to their phone, not as an independent device. So what most people want most of the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco time is for it to just be a companion app to what they’re doing on their phone. In which case,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything I just said is unnecessary.

⏹️ ▶️ John So allowing for the normal game of telephone that’s involved in these type of vague

⏹️ ▶️ John rumors, one way that this particular rumor could make a lot

⏹️ ▶️ John more sense is that the app store that they’re referring to that you can use directly on the watch

⏹️ ▶️ John exists solely so people can drum roll, please make and sell third-party watch

⏹️ ▶️ John faces. Which only need to go on the watch, don’t need a companion phone app, makes sense to download directly to

⏹️ ▶️ John the watch. But you think if that was the actual story, they would have just said third-party watch faces, because that would be a way bigger

⏹️ ▶️ John story than App Store on the watch. But if you’re just looking at headers and there’s some kind of purchase API on watchOS

⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re wondering what the hell that’s for, I don’t know, we all want watch faces. That’s my silver lining

⏹️ ▶️ John to this one. Maybe it means third-party watch faces, but probably not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey We made mention of this a moment ago. There will be new first-party health applications, a calculator,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is all for the watch still, and a books app for listening to audio books from your wrist.

⏹️ ▶️ John Sounds good. Cool. What about reading from your wrist?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my gosh. Didn’t the watch first come with news? Like, wasn’t that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the things they demoed during like 1.0 is like, you could read news on your watch?

⏹️ ▶️ John The ergonomics and size obviously are silly for the watch, but I do think about technological progress,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I think I mentioned this many times on many podcasts before, that I read the entire Lord of the Rings

⏹️ ▶️ John saga plus The Hobbit on a 160 by 160 pixel screen. Was that a Palm something?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, and the Watch has way more pixels than that, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco right? Yeah, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s also way more dense. Like, reading it on the 160, I also read a lot on my Palm Pilot, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is why Instapaper exists, hello, Avant Go, but it was like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John a 3 1⁄2 inch or 4 inch wide screen, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John I said at the beginning, size and the ergonomics of trying to read on your wrist make it ridiculous,

⏹️ ▶️ John but technologically speaking, that screen is so much more higher fidelity than

⏹️ ▶️ John screens that I did a heck of a lot of reading on. So yeah, a books app, a calculator, calculator

⏹️ ▶️ John lets you relive your calculator watch dreams from middle school or whenever when you had a calculator watch.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I never had a calculator watch. And

⏹️ ▶️ John health apps, I think that’s a good idea for Apple. Like I often forget

⏹️ ▶️ John that like the health app, the one with the little red heart and the white background thing is

⏹️ ▶️ John the clearinghouse for health data fed by other applications, but is not itself a full-featured

⏹️ ▶️ John health application for the most part. So Apple should start filling these gaps. Hopefully

⏹️ ▶️ John the apps that we just listed will be decent, but not so good that they kill the

⏹️ ▶️ John entire third-party market for similar apps.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Real-time follow-up, the News app does exist on the watch right now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I don’t think that’s recent. Like I really think that was there in like 1.0 or close to it. Like I remember

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them showing off reading news somehow, like in the watch.

⏹️ ▶️ John That actually makes sense. Like it’s not because it’s just the headline, right? Obviously you’re not going to read, read news, but news

⏹️ ▶️ John condenses down to a form that we accept as a thing, headlines, just headlines only, and

⏹️ ▶️ John a headline will fit on the watch. And so presumably you see the headline on your watch and it’s basically like a notification. Oh, here’s the thing I didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John know was happening. And then to learn more, you go to your larger device.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes sense from a notification flow standpoint. Like, you get notified, you know, tap, tap, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at some celebrity doing something stupid. You know, whereas, I think what they demoed, which was like still trying to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out like what the watch is for, was more of like, you’ll go to your watch to browse things. And it’s like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nope, that never panned

⏹️ ▶️ John out that way. Finally catch up on those New Yorker articles that you hadn’t been reading. Just earn that

⏹️ ▶️ John digital crown a lot.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, my word. Dark Mode, a black and gray heavy interface optimized for viewing at night that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be enabled in Control Center, the panel for quickly accessing settings. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t feel like this is something I yearn for, but that being said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is something I’m sure I would very much like once it showed up. And I’m assuming this is more iOS than watchOS.

⏹️ ▶️ John Didn’t you just post a screenshot that you were using dark mode and overcast?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and Tweetbot, usually anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, this is obvious. It’s already on the Mac. It’ll be on iOS. There’ll be much celebrating, very

⏹️ ▶️ John much like dynamic text and lots of other features. Some developers will incorporate

⏹️ ▶️ John it and everyone will be happy and some developers will ignore it and people will be sad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving on. Let’s see. The company is testing a new keyboard option that allows users to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey swipe across letters on the keyboard in one motion to type out words. Apple could choose to keep this feature

⏹️ ▶️ Casey internal. This is similar to options on Android handsets where it would compete with third-party iPhone apps such as SwiftKey.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I briefly, I shouldn’t even say briefly, for about six months or a year, I used a Gboard at Mike

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hurley’s recommendation. And I actually really liked it for the most

⏹️ ▶️ Casey part. And I don’t remember what it was that made me go away from it. But one of the things I liked most about

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Gboard, which is Google’s keyboard, is that it would let you do

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the swipe thing that is being discussed right here. And I actually quite

⏹️ ▶️ Casey liked that, particularly for one-handed use. So I’m really interested in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this potentially showing up as a first party solution.

⏹️ ▶️ John Wasn’t this rumor, didn’t this swipe keyboard rumor, isn’t that a couple of years they’ve talked about

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that?

⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco even

⏹️ ▶️ John one of the years was the third party keyboard year like iOS 8 or whatever and effectively dig at it through third parties there.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m not quite sure what Apple’s deal is there. I feel like by allowing third party keyboards

⏹️ ▶️ John and eventually making them work in semi-reliable fashion that this need is filled. I don’t think Apple has

⏹️ ▶️ John to be all keyboards to all people. if they want to put it out, that’s fine.

⏹️ ▶️ John You mentioned Gboard, which I think I used for a short period of time, and it definitely wasn’t for Swype. I

⏹️ ▶️ John think I was using it for Emoji Search, which, by the way, is a feature that I don’t recall seeing on this list,

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple. It’s ridiculous.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Health app also includes more comprehensive menstrual cycle tracking, and I believe there was something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey else that was more woman-oriented, which I don’t see it here, but I think there was something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey else somewhere in this list. And I’m into that. I think that’s really awesome. A new feature similar to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey popular third-party apps, Duet Display and Luna Display, which have they sponsored us? I believe they have.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That will let users use their iPad as a second Mac screen with the ability to draw with an Apple Pencil, expand the viewing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey area, and get Mac notifications. This sounds freaking cool. I am really

⏹️ ▶️ Casey interested in this.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, we talked about that on the last show. I feel kind of bad for the third parties that sort of pioneered

⏹️ ▶️ John in this area, but it is the type of feature that is probably better built into the OS because it’s like

⏹️ ▶️ John multiple monitor support, you wouldn’t want it to come from a third party on your Mac. So similar deal with this. And if it works well,

⏹️ ▶️ John it will help Apple sell more hardware and it’ll be cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, the problem is like, for the third party things to work,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it requires a certain degree of hacking. For instance, like Lunar Display,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure, I should have researched this, I’m pretty sure that the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware dongle that it requires is just like a display emulator. And then they have software

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac that interprets the things that should be shown on there and sends them over the network, over Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or USB through a different port. If this was done in the OS, like officially supported,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you wouldn’t need a little dongle to be a hardware emulator. You could save a port then and not rely on like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, I forgot my little dongle at home or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s got plenty of ports on their machines. You don’t have to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey worry about that. All right. You’re talking to a MacBook Adorable owner. Come on, man.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve always been a little hesitant to install or to start

⏹️ ▶️ Marco relying on hardware that required kernel extensions or similar low-level

⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of drivers. My computing happiness is optimized

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by not doing that. I have a Lunar Display, because I backed the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kickstarter. I’ve never installed it, because I keep putting it off and putting it off because I don’t really want to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco install software. And for a lot of people, they don’t care, but I do care about that kind of thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually just last week spent an inordinate amount of time trying

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out a way to get my MacBook Adorable and my iPad Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Casey both working via Luna Display in a hostile Wi-Fi environment, and that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kicker. And this is a multi-hour story that I will condense to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey as quickly as possible, which is to say I have a VPN that I run out of the house on my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Synology which is IPSec over L2TP or vice versa. I probably got that backwards, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey matter. But it appears that something in my network somewhere,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps an ERO, perhaps the Synology, I don’t know what,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey has decided that I cannot have two simultaneous connections to that VPN from the same NATed

⏹️ ▶️ Casey network. So I was sitting in a Wegmans trying to get both my iPad and my MacBook Adorable onto my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in-home VPN, couldn’t figure it out, which led me down the path of, oh, I’m sure I can install Open,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it called? Open VPN or something like that. You know what I’m thinking of. And so I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey tried doing that, and I have been trying to figure out a way to get this utopia

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of having my one and only port in my adorable plugged into the Luna display,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is a little frustrating, but be that as it may, and in my iPad Pro, all in a hostile Wi-Fi

⏹️ ▶️ Casey environment, all behind the VPN, all working with each other, and it’s not particularly, it’s not going

⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, and I think it’s a network problem. so, or a networking problem. So I would love for

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this to be first party because anytime I do go and work from like a Wegmans or a coffee shop or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a library or what have you, I want to do the two screen dance with my iPad Pro, but I don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to be, I don’t want to allow myself to just sit on this unsecured wifi,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it just creeps me out. And so I haven’t figured out a good solution to this problem and maybe this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey would help fix it, who knows.

⏹️ ▶️ John I vaguely recall an ad in computer magazines or maybe the 80s, and the

⏹️ ▶️ John slogan on the page, it was for some kind of network-related product, product

⏹️ ▶️ John rather, the slogan was, networking not working?

⏹️ ▶️ John Question mark. And

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the

⏹️ ▶️ John idea is if you’re networking, it’s not working, buy this product. And I can’t remember what the product was, and I did a Google search, and guess what?

⏹️ ▶️ John A thousand people have used that similar slogan over the years, so I’m never gonna find it. Of course.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Networking

⏹️ ▶️ John not working, Casey? Get out of a Wegmans, go back to your house.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, well, that’s the thing is that occasionally I want to be somewhere

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John else to help, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really juice my creativity. Try the library. I did, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s still a hostile Wi-Fi environment, my friend. Come on, man. Well,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the thing is, like, if this was a built-in feature of the OS, they wouldn’t even have to use Wi-Fi,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in infrastructure mode. They could actually use peer-to-peer Wi-Fi,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what AirDrop uses

⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the two devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And so they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco could totally bypass the need for both things to be on a solid Wi-Fi connection.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would be extremely cool. Man, I would love that. All right, moving on.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey An updated Reminders app that better competes with the several to-do list programs available on the App Store. The new app has a main screen with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey four default sections laid out in a grid. Speaking of seeing screenshots, gentlemen. Tasks to be done today, all tasks,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey scheduled tasks, and flag tasks. Each section has its own different colored page users can add items to.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t use the Reminders app very often. I use the app DUE, which I would do,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I was browbeat by Mike Hurley into using, and now I can’t live without. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I still think, you know, a more robust first party app that is, you know, not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a powerful, powerful app, but more powerful than like just something

⏹️ ▶️ Casey super simple, um, you know, this is the same thing that went through that we went through with notes. Notes used to be super simple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and kind of not that useful. And then suddenly it became very useful when it gained just a a little

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit more functionality. And that’s what I kind of see happening here. And again, I think that sounds good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that honestly sounds great. I mean, what they did to Notes, it was

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fantastic. They took an app that was so basic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and outdated that it was the butt of jokes, literally, and they made,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to replace it, an incredibly good, versatile, highly featured

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that yet is simple and is well integrated.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The new, the current Notes app, I would say, is one of the best new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps Apple has made in the last decade. Because they really, they haven’t made a lot of new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps in that time, and many of them have not been incredibly great. They haven’t walked

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that wonderful line of power versus ease of use versus

⏹️ ▶️ Marco integration and everything. Notes is one example where they absolutely have. The Notes app is fantastic

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all the platforms. It’s a pretty good Mac app, it’s a great iPad app, it’s a great iPhone app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is wonderful. And they talked about this on Connected this week, or on Upgrade,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe, this week, about how Notes didn’t kill other Notes apps. No, no,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it very much did. Like, when Notes came out, a lot of other Notes apps became

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fairly uncompetitive by comparison. It’s that good. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco while I don’t wish harm upon to-do app makers, to have

⏹️ ▶️ Marco another great option, if they’re giving the Notes treatment to Reminders,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which it badly needs, because Reminders is now in a similar state as Notes was before, of like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a pretty basic, pretty terrible, incredibly outdated app, and that is not anywhere

⏹️ ▶️ Marco near competitive with the rest of the market. So for Apple to give some attention to that and to bring

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it into this generation, this decade, And if they do a good job with that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s awesome. Because, you know, the market’s probably gonna be okay because everyone has different needs for to-do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. That’s one of the reasons there’s so many of them. But to have a solid first-party option

⏹️ ▶️ Marco again that isn’t the butt of jokes, that is actually a good app, I’m very much looking forward

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to that. And I think they can do it based on how well they did Notes.

⏹️ ▶️ John Notes might have been in a little bit different situation because Notes, then Reminders, is because Notes was just really,

⏹️ ▶️ John just really bad. Like there’s simple and there’s just like, it doesn’t even have enough functionality and it

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t like, you know, it doesn’t do basic stuff that people want like syncing between all the Mac stuff. And you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, like it just, it was falling down on the basics. So I think it did really affect the market for

⏹️ ▶️ John note apps because once it went from incompetence to competence, then all of a sudden everybody

⏹️ ▶️ John had a competent note app and that would hurt things. Now I think Reminders is not incompetent.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I think Reminders has an advantage that other reminder type

⏹️ ▶️ John applications might not have is that you can say, hey, Dingus, remind me to blah, blah, blah, and it gets added to

⏹️ ▶️ John reminders. Like, you don’t have to learn any weird Siri incantations.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Remind me today in things to blah, blah, blah.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Right.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I use reminders. And it not only does it not have a lot of features,

⏹️ ▶️ John but the features that it does have are frustratingly hidden behind sort of an

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 4 style interface. Like I just, I so want to be able to do what I do in like Google,

⏹️ ▶️ John like no matter how I type a reminder, like sometimes I’ll be typing a reminder in

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS because I don’t want to talk out loud or whatever and I’ll just type like 1 p.m. haircut and I’ll just

⏹️ ▶️ John see it makes a reminder called 1 p.m. haircut and I’ll just be like, come on Apple, come on.

⏹️ ▶️ John The worst is sometimes I get the indication like haircut at 1 p.m. or whatever, something like that and it sets

⏹️ ▶️ John it to 1 p.m. but still leaves 1 p.m. in the title of the reminder, and you know I have to go edit that out.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like, yo,

⏹️ ▶️ John you pulled it out, you extracted it, you correctly surmised that I meant today at 1 p.m. and you made the

⏹️ ▶️ John time in the thing, but you didn’t take it out of the title, that’s terrible. And then the final thing is, if you actually

⏹️ ▶️ John have to manually set up the date and the time, because it’s complicated, using

⏹️ ▶️ John their date picker, like the little I for info, remind me

⏹️ ▶️ John on a day, going through the time, I mean, there’s just so many different controls and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John so just barbaric, right? But all that said, I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it does do reminders. They actually work. They have always more or less, you know, synced between

⏹️ ▶️ John systems. Like it’s very basic, but it’s easy to figure out. And when you say, remind me, it does it.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m thinking that them making reminders more sophisticated

⏹️ ▶️ John is not going to take reminders from incompetence to competence. it’s gonna take it from borderline competence

⏹️ ▶️ John to into the realm of all the other reminder apps, which is, oh, well, this isn’t how our

⏹️ ▶️ John reminders work, because the current thing is like, who can argue with it? It’s like a vertical list of little things, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John so simple that it’s like, well, it’s not fancy, but whatever. But as soon as you start adding features to it, now

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re making a choice. And in the reminder to do app space, like those choices, people are like, I don’t want

⏹️ ▶️ John it arranged this way, I don’t wanna see today and to do whatever, just bring back my regular list of reminders, And off you are into the

⏹️ ▶️ John wild west of reminder applications and to-do applications where you have a million different options. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I think it will be less impactful than Notes for that reason. And I think

⏹️ ▶️ John it might even be more controversial because I think a lot of people do like the Reminders app for its simplicity. And if the

⏹️ ▶️ John main screen is now like four panes that might be confusing to people, people might go and seek out

⏹️ ▶️ John a simpler Reminders app, which would be a hell of a thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But anyway, I commend Apple for

⏹️ ▶️ John improving it’s built-in applications. I hope I end up liking it because I use reminders

⏹️ ▶️ John rarely, but often enough that I do want to have a reminders app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Fracture, who prints photos in vivid color

⏹️ ▶️ Marco onto glass. Visit fractureme.com slash ATP for a special discount on your first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco order. Almost all of us take and share photos. But most of those photos

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just end up in online social feeds and they’re there for like two seconds and they fall off the timeline and you never

⏹️ ▶️ Marco see them again. Very few of those photos end up getting printed or put on display to enjoy.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Focus on the moments that mean the most in your life by turning your favorite digital memories into actual

⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos that are printed that you can hang on the wall or put on your desk. Fracture is the best

⏹️ ▶️ Marco way to do this. Fracture prints are beautiful. They go edge to edge. It is literally printed

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the rear surface of a piece of glass and it shines through the front. And so it looks like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like a square or a rectangle of just the image. It goes edge to edge. There’s no like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco added padding or anything like that. And they’re very thin so they’re very close to the wall. It’s just an edge-to-edge print.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t put a frame around them or anything. You don’t need it. They’re their own objects, and they fit into any decor.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They look fantastic. They make your photos look fantastic, and they can really fit in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter where you want to put them. And whether it’s for you or somebody else, they make fantastic gifts as well. We have fracture

⏹️ ▶️ Marco prints all over our house, and people come with them all the time. We also give them as gifts, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people love those too. So for whatever occasion you might want to celebrate, any kind of holidays

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or birthdays or anything else, Fracture Prints are amazing gifts for friends and family. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fracture is a great company too. These are all handmade in the US, in Gainesville, Florida,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from US source materials. They have a green company operating a carbon neutral factory,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they are just wonderful to work with. So check out Fracture today at fractureme.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP, and you can get a discount on your first Fracture order. They will ask you where

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you came from in a survey after checkout. Just make sure to tell them you came from ATP. So once again,

More Gurman rumors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Once again, fractureme.com slash ATP for a special discount on your first order. Thank you so much to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fracture for making awesome photo prints and for sponsoring our show.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey A new feature in screen time, Apple’s tool for controlling device usage will let parents limit who their kids can

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and cannot contact at certain times. For example, a parent could make it so their kid can’t contact

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone but them during the evenings. I am not in a position where I have turned

⏹️ ▶️ Casey on like screen time or parental controls or anything like that on any device that the kids would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey use because they’re too young to really know what to do with them. But that being said,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this does strike me as a really cool idea and a really good idea. If you’re the kind

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of parent that wants to do that sort of thing, which I very well may be in my future, I think that’s awesome to limit

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kids so they don’t stay up until three in the morning sending texts back and forth with their friends or

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like that. So this sounds cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the this is a good idea because I do I do use this feature on my kids devices and

⏹️ ▶️ John like my main usage of it is to shut everything down after a certain

⏹️ ▶️ John part of night but to exclude all the applications that I think they might need sort of in an emergency.

⏹️ ▶️ John So they need like maps and they need phone and they need message and they need like all you know you want to give them

⏹️ ▶️ John access like those are never banned. You can always use those applications but as you said Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John messages well you want them be able to message you. But if you say messages will never be banned, yes, they could text

⏹️ ▶️ John their friends all night long, right? So being able to say, uh, messages,

⏹️ ▶️ John the app isn’t banned, but whitelist just these contacts is a welcome change to

⏹️ ▶️ John ensure that your kids can, you know, do what they need to do with their phone

⏹️ ▶️ John if they find themselves stranded somewhere in an emergency while still basically making it so you

⏹️ ▶️ John have, you know, I think we talked about this when screen time came out. Like, it’s not that you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John delegating parenting to the thing. You still have to do parenting yourself, but it makes

⏹️ ▶️ John it it makes the sort of the confrontation a lot easier when the impersonal machine is the thing that’s turning things off.

⏹️ ▶️ John Surprisingly, you would think it would make them angrier, but I think it just works out better. A, you can’t forget to do it.

⏹️ ▶️ John And B, I think my kids anyway, accept it more as just a thing that happens

⏹️ ▶️ John in the world when it’s not you saying, OK, it’s X o’clock, no more texting. If the

⏹️ ▶️ John phone just does it, it, you know, I don’t know. It’s working out better for me anyway. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to use this feature when it comes out.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. iMessage gets, oh God, I forgot about this one. We talked about this on the forthcoming

⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode of Analog. If you’d like to hear more thoughts about this and you understand why I’m sighing momentarily. iMessage gets

⏹️ ▶️ Casey an upgrade with a WhatsApp-like enhancement that lets people set a profile picture and display name and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey choose who sees it. Super. There’s also a dedicated

⏹️ ▶️ Casey menu in the conversation view to send sticker versions of animojis, the virtual characters that users

⏹️ ▶️ Casey can control with the latest iPhone and iPad cameras and Memojis, which are virtual representations

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the users themselves. So cool. Cool, cool, cool, cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John I see. I’m not sure what you said in the analog episode, but I don’t think this is as bad as you might think for your

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Cause this is just talking about the image that you present to the public through messages.

⏹️ ▶️ John Now you might be thinking like, well, why is that a separate thing at all? Why don’t,

⏹️ ▶️ John uh, yeah, I’ve often thought this because you know, it works for my worldview, but I understand why it’s not a feature.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the Apple’s products very often prompt you in

⏹️ ▶️ John various ways to take a picture of yourself for, to be associated with your contact.

⏹️ ▶️ John That is yourself, your me contact or whatever. And once you know

⏹️ ▶️ John you do that, like while you’re setting up your Mac, it’ll turn on your camera and do it or you can pick a picture like

⏹️ ▶️ John if everyone just did that for themselves, we wouldn’t need an app like yours, Casey, because you could

⏹️ ▶️ John sync everyone’s picture of themselves every time they talk to you like it’s a picture associated

⏹️ ▶️ John with your Apple ID. And that way when you communicate with anybody over iMessage, and they have an Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John ID, if you’re communicating with them, or you can use their picture, but that’s not how the world works. People don’t always want

⏹️ ▶️ John their picture of themselves to be seen by everybody. So having a separate avatar or whatever for

⏹️ ▶️ John just for the messaging service is a thing that is so entrenched that it makes some kind of sense.

⏹️ ▶️ John Um, but all that said, people like I have like my skype icon is like link. I think my aim

⏹️ ▶️ John icon was a little link icon and stuff like that. That’s not my contact picture. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ John but an app like yours, even if people set their iMessage avatar

⏹️ ▶️ John picture to something, I might not want their iMessage avatar as a thing associated with their contacts. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John still in the same position where I want nice pictures associated to all my contacts and I want to see

⏹️ ▶️ John those instead of the one that they set. And I hope that’s an option to say, don’t use, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John if I have a contact picture set for this person, don’t use whatever they said as their iMessage avatar thing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Use my picture instead. Like it’s, it starts to get complicated allowing for this, you know, sort of

⏹️ ▶️ John dual-faced to the world, but I understand that’s the thing that people want. I just hope I have the ability

⏹️ ▶️ John on my phone to see the pictures I want to see, and I would still use your application or similar to

⏹️ ▶️ John populate my contact pictures with nice pictures of people that remind me what the heck they look like and isn’t just a picture

⏹️ ▶️ John of their favorite cartoon character.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin Indeed. Yeah, and that’s largely what the forthcoming episode of Analog

⏹️ ▶️ Casey discussed was that, hey, this may not be as terrible as it seemed at first glance. But man, I was really,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really kind of depressed on Monday or whatever day it was that this came out. A

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick app update, I’m getting pretty darn close and I’m feeling

⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually fairly proud of it. I’m scared of a lot of things, as previously discussed, but

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m mostly proud of it. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey really feeling, or was anyway, really feeling like the wind was taken out of my sails by this. So hopefully,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey hopefully it’ll be an on issue. Otherwise I will, I’m sure everyone who loved making fun of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my feet in my icon, I’m sure you will have plenty of ammunition now, if I get Sherlocked

⏹️ ▶️ Casey within days or perhaps even before having released my app. Moving on.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s combining the Find My Friends and Find My iPhone services into a new single app internally known as Green Torch.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey This could go along with a physical beacon to attach to non-Apple devices like a backpack, according to 9to5Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t really have any issue with the way Find My Friends and Find My iPhone works

⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now, but I think it was on upgrade, but it wasn’t the most recent one. I think it was a week or two back. That

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jason had made the really good point that there are occasions when, say, one of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey either his wife’s or his children’s devices is in one place, but one of their

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other devices is in another place.

⏹️ ▶️ John JS That was me on this program. CW

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Was it? I thought that was Jason.

⏹️ ▶️ John JS It probably made the same point. It’s an obvious point, but we discussed this feature in the past, and I made

⏹️ ▶️ John that point. And I think both of you will eventually be in that situation, because right now your kids,

⏹️ ▶️ John they have iOS devices that they use, but it’s not quite the same. Eventually, if your kids get to, when they get older,

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re wearing a hand-me-down Apple Watch, but they leave their phone at home, yada, yada, yada. So I think you will find the utility of this

⏹️ ▶️ John eventually.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agree. All right. The built-in mail app will be updated with the ability to mute individual threads, block

⏹️ ▶️ Casey incoming email from certain contacts and we’ll have simpler folder management. I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey am not really one to talk about this because I use the built-in mail app and I think it’s just fine.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I happen to think that if you need, well, for me anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t like relying on these kind of snooze and other sorts of

⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird email features that typically were never first party. I would probably be more

⏹️ ▶️ Casey apt to use those sorts of things if it was first party. But then again, if I ever like use the Gmail web interface,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey then what happens? So I don’t know. This doesn’t really do much for me. But I know that some of our

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mutual friends, like Mike Hurley, for example, who loves to change email apps as frequently as he changes his

⏹️ ▶️ Casey underwear. I’m sorry, is it pants? Whatever. Anyway, he will, I’m sure

⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite like this.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, this a little bit scares me and a little bit intrigues me. If you look at the first

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two things. The ability to mute threads and to block email from certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco contacts. That is not very useful if it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only on your phone version of the mail app. And so it brings the question,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco well is it gonna sync? Are they gonna sync this with iCloud maybe between all of your instances of your mail

⏹️ ▶️ Marco clients? And then what about the Mac? You know,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think if they’re going to be putting significant effort into the mail

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app on the phone, maybe this is the year when Mail on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac gets updated, possibly via Marzipan. That would be a pretty big deal. Mail

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac is a huge and very important and very complicated app, so to replace

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it with a Marzipan version or with any kind of significant rewrite is a pretty big job.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have heard rumblings here and there, I think in other podcasts, that there is a mail

⏹️ ▶️ Marco rewrite underway, but I don’t know anything more about it than those rumblings.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t know if this is the right time for that or if it’s even happening, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the idea that mail could be getting significant attention would be very intriguing and very interesting,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I too am a user of the Apple Mail app and I pretty much always have been since I switched to Macs. I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco briefly used Thunderbird when I was back in a mixed PC and Mac environment, and now I’m all mail,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s great. So I would love for this kind of thing, but historically the updates to mail

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS have been very minimal, and on the Mac have been not only minimal, but also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like breaking, whenever like every other Mac OS release that breaks Gmail integration or something.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, to have a major new mail app would be very interesting, and I kind

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hope it happens, but I’m a little scared that they might do it badly or incompletely. And then the last part

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this, the end of the sentence says, and we’ll have simpler folder management.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Simpler, with modern Apple doing it, sounds a lot like feature deletion.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want Apple to make certain things simpler. Like, things I use, it’s almost

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Apple has taken the thing you love and made it thinner.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, what did that cost me? Like, that’s no longer a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pure benefit thing. Like, that has a cost. What did I lose?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco What am I now paying more for? What did I lose? And what is now worse by them making it thinner?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can say this exact same thing about simpler. If something’s been made simpler, that probably

⏹️ ▶️ Marco means it’s been rewritten and is more limited than it was before. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it will have simpler folder management, what exactly does that mean?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m guessing that’s not what people want in a mail app. Because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you think about what, you know, the kind of users who use mail apps these days, what modern usage tends to be,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have the Gmail crowd, which is substantial, who largely don’t use folders at all, or use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tags or whatever else, but most of the method for Gmail users is just archive everything and use search.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, search in iOS mail is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John terrible

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and needs to be a lot better. And any major update to mail on iOS, I would hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco would address search first before anything else. So you have search, and for search people, folders don’t really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco matter. Like, Apple can do whatever they want with folders, and those search people usually won’t see the folders, so it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco really matter. No one’s asking them to make that simpler. And for folders users, like I actually use folders, not extensively,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mostly throw everything into one big archive, but I have a couple folders I use also. For folders

⏹️ ▶️ Marco users, you probably don’t want things to be made simpler.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You probably are fine the way things are, because it is already quite simple. It is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a basic hierarchy of folders. It’s kind of hard to make it simpler

⏹️ ▶️ Marco without losing critical functionality of like, can folders no longer be

⏹️ ▶️ Marco nested? Or can you still even make arbitrary numbers of folders? Who knows?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, in this context, simpler folder management, I consider

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bit of a red flag.

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m always kind of amazed at how many people use the Apple Mail app on iOS, because I always

⏹️ ▶️ John found it so under featured and so basic that it doesn’t even come close to.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m a Gmail person, so Gmail has all sorts of features and things, but

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why I think any story about them improving the iOS app by adding features is good, because it needs

⏹️ ▶️ John more features than it has. It is very basic and bare bones. It has its strengths,

⏹️ ▶️ John in particular, the basic stuff of like it supporting dynamic type or whatever that feature is. I noticed

⏹️ ▶️ John that my mother who has bad vision uses different applications. Entire popular

⏹️ ▶️ John categories of applications or manufacturers of applications are just out because they don’t allow

⏹️ ▶️ John her to make the text as big as she wants to make it. And Apple Mail, for

⏹️ ▶️ John all its simplicity and faults, does. It looks terrible, but when you make the

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco text big, but you

⏹️ ▶️ John can

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco make

⏹️ ▶️ John the text really big. So I’m glad they’re adding features to it. You mentioned the

⏹️ ▶️ John two features that potentially could be implemented, quote unquote, client side. Like you could mute things and you could

⏹️ ▶️ John have blocking and all sorts of stuff and that could just happen in the app. I remember

⏹️ ▶️ John the bad old world before I went Gmail. I mean, it wasn’t bad. I loved some of the applications I

⏹️ ▶️ John used, but I had this struggle where I would, I’m a big

⏹️ ▶️ John mail rules and mail filter type user. I would set up a bunch of mail rules for

⏹️ ▶️ John IMAP or POP or whatever for my 700 email accounts and I’d set it up in Entourage or Alphalete Express

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever Mac client that I was using at the time. And then I would also get email while I’m at work,

⏹️ ▶️ John and especially if there was an iMap backend behind them, if the work Mac didn’t file stuff,

⏹️ ▶️ John the home Mac would never get a chance to file stuff. Or if you were doing pop, they need to be filed

⏹️ ▶️ John in both places and it wouldn’t be reflected. And so you had to constantly try to like, make sure I have the same mail

⏹️ ▶️ John rules set up on my home Mac and my work Mac. Like doing things client side was a nightmare. But

⏹️ ▶️ John today, in the world we live in today, when you said, what are they going to do? Sync this stuff with you? I think that’s the minimum

⏹️ ▶️ John bar. Any application that you make, that there’s a Mac version and an iOS

⏹️ ▶️ John version or whatever, that has any kind of things like that, even just preferences, but maybe you

⏹️ ▶️ John can set it aside, but things like mail rules, absolutely. All of that stuff should sync. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple has their own in-house APIs for all that type of stuff. That’s the whole point

⏹️ ▶️ John of having an app in both places, not so you can maintain two entirely separate sets of rules. With preferences,

⏹️ ▶️ John it gets a little weird, sometimes you want different preferences, but at least that should be the option. So if I encounter

⏹️ ▶️ John an application that is on multiple Apple platforms, but has no way to synchronize any, you

⏹️ ▶️ John know, settings or rules between them, that’s terrible. And so I really hope

⏹️ ▶️ John if and when they enhance the iOS version of mail and replace the Mac version of mail, the

⏹️ ▶️ John minimum bar is Oh, yeah. And of course, any kind of rules or muting or whatever sort of stuff

⏹️ ▶️ John we do client side, of course, that syncs instantly between all your copies of mail, because it really doesn’t make

⏹️ ▶️ John much sense to have different mail rules for the same mail back and like if you’re using IMAP or something,

⏹️ ▶️ John and if you get the mail on one client, it sorts into one folder and if you get the mail on it, like it doesn’t make any sense. It absolutely

⏹️ ▶️ John has to sync. So I really hope that’s what they’re doing. The Mac version of mail is not as simple,

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s say as the as the iOS version. I’m not sure it needs a bunch more features,

⏹️ ▶️ John but it sure is kind of old and crufty. And so I feel like I feel like at this point, The Apple

⏹️ ▶️ John Mail application on the Mac is about to get the iPhoto to Photos

⏹️ ▶️ John transition, where it’s going to be a new application. You might be excited until you see all the stuff that you used to be able to do

⏹️ ▶️ John in the old version that you can’t do anymore. I think that’s coming for Mail, and it’s

⏹️ ▶️ John probably overdue, but I think a lot of Apple Mail users are going to be sad. But I’ll be fine because I use Gmail,

⏹️ ▶️ John and I stay the hell away from Apple’s Mail apps.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I just don’t need much of my mail app. And I have eventually succumbed to the Marco

⏹️ ▶️ Casey approach of email, which is read everything. Well, I don’t know if you read everything, but I read everything and ignore

⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost all of it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, email is really a self-solving problem. Like if you just don’t answer emails,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually the need for them goes away in a couple of weeks at most.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s very true. I just, I still haven’t quite shaken the guilt associated with that, though. I need to, I need to take a lesson

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco set it down and walk away.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Apple’s also planning to let HomePod speakers respond to different users’ voices, creating a much requested multi-user

⏹️ ▶️ Casey mode. I still do not have a HomePod in the house, although I’m sure if I did, or two, or like the teachy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey eight, then I’m sure I would like this. But I don’t know, since I don’t have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of these, it’s not really doing much for me. Now, both of you guys have one, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John Google Home has this multi-voice thing. I remember when it came out, I

⏹️ ▶️ John think I had my daughter add her voice to it, because she was the other person who talked to the thing at that point.

⏹️ ▶️ John And at this point, and by the way, speaking of home, cylindery things that you talk to,

⏹️ ▶️ John because I pay for like whatever the maximum amount of storage that Google will sell you for their Google Drive

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, they sent a promotion, presumably to all people who pay for this amount and said, hey, do you want a free

⏹️ ▶️ John Google Home Mini, shipping included? And I said yes.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So they sent me another free one. It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John like, because you subscribe to our two terabyte plan and we’re overcharging you for it, we’ll just give you this for free.

⏹️ ▶️ John So we got one for free and we put it in my daughter’s room because she asks the weather every morning so she knows how to get dressed or whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I recalled that like, oh, we did that thing a while ago where we trained it to know your

⏹️ ▶️ John voice. But because these cylinder things are just like faceless, like

⏹️ ▶️ John I was struck sitting there like, does it know your voice? How do you

⏹️ ▶️ John teach it another voice? What features are available with the voice? And in the

⏹️ ▶️ John end, we just didn’t do anything because she mostly just asked at the weather and it’s probably fine. But what I would have liked to say

⏹️ ▶️ John is, do you recognize my voice? Who am I? Can I add another voice? Like again, every

⏹️ ▶️ John time this topic comes up with someone, I want to have a very basic, simple conversation with where

⏹️ ▶️ John it understands something about the meaning of what I’m saying, so we can go back and forth and arrive at a solution. Instead,

⏹️ ▶️ John I probably have to remember whatever incantation is required. Like for example, if my daughter

⏹️ ▶️ John said, do I have any new email? Not that she would ever say that I guess she does not check her email ever, ever,

⏹️ ▶️ John ever. Neither do any young children emails for old people. I would hope that it would know that it’s her

⏹️ ▶️ John voice and know what email address is associated with her. Maybe that information is in there,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t know how to verify that. I don’t know how to access it. And I feel like the same challenge is gonna be

⏹️ ▶️ John presented with a HomePod. Great, so you can distinguish voices. What does that mean practically for the user? And

⏹️ ▶️ John how do they get visibility into what HomePod thinks of the world? Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John does it recognize you as a separate person? Does it know what things are associated with you? If you

⏹️ ▶️ John have an Apple Music subscription but someone else doesn’t, if you ask for a song, will it play it for you but the other person, it won’t. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ John in this place where there’s no screen and where sort of the thing inside the cylinder is just

⏹️ ▶️ John this sort of very terse monk that mostly just hits you with a bamboo

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco switch on the back of your

⏹️ ▶️ John hand and doesn’t really give you much. It’s such a mystery what’s going on

⏹️ ▶️ John in there. So for now, I assume mostly what I’ll continue to do with my HomePod is

⏹️ ▶️ John ask it to turn my lights on and off. But I’m glad that they’re getting multi-voice support because that’s the

⏹️ ▶️ John first step towards it having a better understanding of what’s actually going on around it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, goodness. All right, more organized share sheet interface for sharing photos and web links. The software

⏹️ ▶️ Casey will suggest people to send content to based on how frequently you interact with them. Cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John What does more organized mean? I mean, it’s not organized now. You can drag the things around, and sometimes it

⏹️ ▶️ John remembers what position you drag them to.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Like

⏹️ ▶️ John what I thought they were going to say when it said, how freq, based on how frequently, it’s talking about like the airdrop contacts and blah, blah,

⏹️ ▶️ John blah. I thought I already did that, first of all. But second of all, a clever way to do the share sheet thing

⏹️ ▶️ John would be to have a mode where it starts bubbling up the ones you use more frequently,

⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s not great because then things will move around and it’s not as predictable, but I think the number,

⏹️ ▶️ John the percentage of users that actually rearrange their share icons is very,

⏹️ ▶️ John very low. I do. And I, you know, but even, even, even though I try to do it in every single app

⏹️ ▶️ John and arrange the things just so I want every once in a while, like they’ll, like a new share icon will appear because of

⏹️ ▶️ John some new feature and I’ll forget and it’ll start pushing off my frequently used ones to the right. And I realized I keep scrolling to the right

⏹️ ▶️ John to get to the copy link thing. I should move that, but I don’t, I am late, get lazy. So

⏹️ ▶️ John I might even activate the mode that says just bubble up the ones I I frequently use, I’ll hunt for them every

⏹️ ▶️ John time. Because at this point, because the, is it per app? I don’t know what

⏹️ ▶️ John it is. Is it per app? Is it per share sheet? Is it per data type? You have to arrange them multiple

⏹️ ▶️ John times in multiple places. And it gets a little bit tedious. So I would be all for arranging based on frequency

⏹️ ▶️ John of use. But that’s not what they’re talking about, unless that’s what more organized means.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, who knows? The company is testing a downloads manager for its Safari web browser, so users can access downloads in

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a single place like they can on a computer. An updated files app will work better with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey third party software. Man, I am all in on improvements to the files app. Like the Safari

⏹️ ▶️ Casey download manager, yeah, I guess that’s cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John But- Well, but I don’t think you can skip over the download manager because the idea of downloading anything in Safari

⏹️ ▶️ John and iOS is like downloading it to where? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Where is it downloading it to? You can’t download anywhere. Oh, maybe I can download to the files app, which might actually

⏹️ ▶️ John be worth a damn in this version of the OS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would be amazing.

⏹️ ▶️ John Because seriously though, like if they had a download manager, What would it show? Like that you,

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s very confusing to me. Have you ever downloaded anything in Safari on iOS?

⏹️ ▶️ John As in actually downloaded, not just displayed in a webpage that allowed you to play audio or video?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. Like I wouldn’t download things mostly because I don’t have anything to do with them in my iOS

⏹️ ▶️ Marco workflow.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. Like if I was doing all my work on iOS and I had a bunch of different tools to do various things, yeah, that might make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco some sense. Like I’m sure our friends, the iPad Power users, I’m sure would love this kind of thing. But

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think most iPad users would use this because there’s a huge question of like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco where does the file go and why am I downloading it in the first place?

⏹️ ▶️ John And people, what people would expect in a download manager is finally, when I

⏹️ ▶️ John tap on something that Safari can’t display in iOS, whatever it is, it’s a zip file

⏹️ ▶️ John to whatever, it would ask me, hey, where on your phone do you want me to put this? And you’d have some kind of file

⏹️ ▶️ John hierarchy that would let you put stuff there. And that exists on the phone. Even if it just showed you

⏹️ ▶️ John the iCloud folders, there’s folders per file type, there’s folders per apps. There’s places to put stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ John But Safari doesn’t, there’s no open save dialog on iOS. And so, with the introduction

⏹️ ▶️ John of a download manager, I hope this is part and parcel to the entire, hopefully,

⏹️ ▶️ John revolution of file management on iOS, where finally, they will allow some

⏹️ ▶️ John semblance of file system access in some controlled way in any application that wants it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would hope so, but like, I, like, where do you even put it? Like, I think on the Mac, it makes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more sense because the environment that you are using all the time, like the, like the home

⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen of the Mac is the desktop and the doc, which has the downloads folder

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right in it. Like they’re like the folders and, and folder locations on disc

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are integrated into the UI of everything you’re doing on the Mac, whereas an iOS, like there is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no desktop on iOS. Maybe that’s the new feature of iOS 13. The

⏹️ ▶️ Marco desktop, you can litter this with files now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Hooray. That’d be cool.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you’re joking there. So we already talked about the iCloud folders. There are places in iCloud

⏹️ ▶️ John to put stuff. But you do actually need some representation in

⏹️ ▶️ John the UI of iOS of local only storage. Because we’re all talking about, oh, if I plug

⏹️ ▶️ John in a USB thing or an SD card or whatever, some large amount of storage If your only

⏹️ ▶️ John option is put this into iCloud Drive, A, you’re gonna run out of iCloud space or Dropbox or whatever, pick your cloud service.

⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll run out of space. And B, what if you don’t wanna upload that 17 gig video

⏹️ ▶️ John file to a cloud service? You just wanna edit it on your iPad. There has to be the concept of local

⏹️ ▶️ John storage and how you represent that in the sort of the files

⏹️ ▶️ John interface from the perspective of the application. That’s a difficult problem. It could just be a free for all, like the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John file system is, but Apple’s been fighting that so hard that I feel like they’re not gonna give up in its entirety,

⏹️ ▶️ John but that distinction is important, and it’s important enough to surface in the UI.

⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple has been, for too long, chasing the dream of transparent network storage,

⏹️ ▶️ John where you don’t have to worry about whether it’s cloud or not, but you do. You do have to worry, especially with the prices Apple charges

⏹️ ▶️ John and the meager amount they give you. You absolutely have to worry. Only, you know, the only company that can chase that

⏹️ ▶️ John is somebody like Google, where they do their photos, like never run out of room, because we’ll accept your photos forever

⏹️ ▶️ John at a reduced quality because we recompress them, but whatever, like from a user perspective, they can wave their hand

⏹️ ▶️ John and say, oh, it’s fine and we won’t upload it if you’re on sale. Like they can make

⏹️ ▶️ John all the decisions for you and you never run out of space and it’s weird and slow, but it’s transparent. But Apple is not following that path

⏹️ ▶️ John at all. So Apple has to distinguish cloud, Dropbox, OneDrive,

⏹️ ▶️ John Google Drive, whatever, and local. And local, especially with the iPad Pros, is becoming

⏹️ ▶️ John increasingly important. And so I really hope they have a representation and a clear distinction in the UI

⏹️ ▶️ John of what is local storage versus what is cloud.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, because it’s one of those things like using old Jolan software parlance,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a leaky abstraction. Any kind of network file-based

⏹️ ▶️ Marco operation that you’re trying to make appear local, that you’re syncing to a network, you’re syncing between computers

⏹️ ▶️ Marco via a network like Dropbox, it’s a leaky abstraction because network conditions

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make everything complicated. And so, you know, you try to, like Apple would try to design things

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that appear very simple and work very simply to you and expose no controls to you and tell you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco no errors or anything, like just make it perfect and make it appear everywhere. But the reality is,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really complicated and there’s all these complicated conditions that you can’t paper over

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time. And you have to have some kind of UI for things like conflict

⏹️ ▶️ Marco resolution or error dialogues, or trying to fix

⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync problems, like resyncing or foresyncing or pausing sync. Like there’s all these things, and Apple

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has mostly not been very good about dealing with that complexity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the user’s perspective. They instead, it seems like the way they usually deal with it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fail silently and leave no error message anywhere, leave nothing for the user to possibly do to control

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or fix or diagnose a problem, and just tell people to restore their phones if something goes wrong.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I hope they’re getting better at that over time. I think they might be.

⏹️ ▶️ John So speaking of that, a brief aside. My son is using,

⏹️ ▶️ John I finally have convinced my son to use Xcode instead of the terrible web application

⏹️ ▶️ John to do his Swift programming for his class in school. So now he’s in Xcode, and he’s constantly asking me

⏹️ ▶️ John questions about Xcode, and I have no idea how Xcode works. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, I

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know. I know what features must exist, but I have no idea where they are. Anyway.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If only you knew two people who live and breathe it every single day.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, how are you not knowing about my favorite bit of wonderfulness in Xcode?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the only app I’ve ever seen that assigns a really important action to right dragging.

⏹️ ▶️ John Right dragging? I can’t get him to use the arrow keys.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco We’re starting

⏹️ ▶️ John very soon. He’s a someone who did not grow up with personal computers, so he has no idea what he’s doing. He

⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t know what a debugger is and so on and so forth. Anyway, setting that aside, he’s been encountering issues.

⏹️ ▶️ John He’ll go over to the computer and he will, I haven’t seen him do it. I’m assuming he’s

⏹️ ▶️ John double clicking on the.xcodeproj, whatever file, but honestly, I don’t even know. But anyway,

⏹️ ▶️ John what happens is Xcode launches and he gets a spinner and

⏹️ ▶️ John then a beach ball. And then he comes and gets me, finds me in the house and said, I’m trying to launch

⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode and it’s just sitting there. And like the first time it happened, I’m like, I don’t know, reboot, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ John But then it kept happening. And I was like, well, why don’t you just reboot? It worked last time. He was like, actually, it didn’t.

⏹️ ▶️ John Last time I rebooted the whole computer, and he said, last time I rebooted, and it’s still beach balled. I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John like, when you say reboot, he didn’t mean reboot. He meant he logged out. So anyway, I showed him

⏹️ ▶️ John what actual reboot is. And then I said, oh, it must be working now. But then he came back and said, no, the reboot

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t fix it. So basically, every time he launches his Xcode project, he gets a beach ball. I’m like, well, then if it didn’t work

⏹️ ▶️ John last time, you didn’t come back and find me. So how did you resolve that? And he’s like, well, eventually the

⏹️ ▶️ John beach ball went away after like 20 minutes, which is typical teenage exaggeration.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like 20 seconds. Yeah, so I tried it myself. I launched his project on a freshly restarted

⏹️ ▶️ John 5K iMac in Xcode. And sure enough, the Xcode window comes up, a little

⏹️ ▶️ John indeterminate progress, spinner goes in the window, and then a couple of seconds later, we get the good old beach ball cursor. And

⏹️ ▶️ John it spent a while on that beach ball cursor. And the reason this is relevant to this topic you know what I thought of immediately?

⏹️ ▶️ John I bet when we set up his account, I foolishly enabled sync

⏹️ ▶️ John documents on a desktop, document folder on desktop into iCloud. And I bet what’s

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco happening

⏹️ ▶️ John is these three fricking text files that constitute his Swift program, that

⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the iCloud thing syncing them is having some sort of weird, he’s never accessed

⏹️ ▶️ John them from another computer, right? And so I was like, I gotta turn that feature off. But then I was terrified. I’m like, I can’t

⏹️ ▶️ John turn that feature off. Because if I do, it’s going to erase all of his files, and I don’t know what the hell to do. So he’s in this

⏹️ ▶️ John weird situation where he can never quit Xcode, but each time you launch it. And it’s a while. It’s not 20 minutes, but it’s more than a

⏹️ ▶️ John minute. I have no idea what he’s doing during that minute. This computer is connected to ethernet. Like, it doesn’t make any sense

⏹️ ▶️ John whatsoever. But I wondered if you had any ideas besides deleting everything in my derived data folder.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is the one cure-all. That will fix all of your

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John problems.

⏹️ ▶️ John There’s literally four Swift files that are each a page long. This is not a sophisticated program. There is no

⏹️ ▶️ John UI. There is no, I mean, I think he imports foundation, but

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, you wouldn’t be the first person to have performance problems with Xcode using Swift.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s just launching it. You’ve got to the point where Swift doesn’t even appear on the screen yet. It’s just an

⏹️ ▶️ John empty window.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s trying to render it. It’s all that syntactic complexity. It’s having trouble highlighting it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Such a cool project, though. I’m so jealous because I didn’t have literally any programming classes

⏹️ ▶️ John at all when I was in high school because I’m old. But his project is like

⏹️ ▶️ John a game design class, and they’re doing like tank warfare. And so you have to make a tank

⏹️ ▶️ John game with tanks on a grid, and it’s like rendered nasty art. Like the grid is rendered with hyphens and stuff. Oh, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John awesome. Tanks can shoot at each other, whatever. And it’s a contest. So you do the game as the assignment, but then they have a

⏹️ ▶️ John battle at the end where you program your tank as like a class or something with rules about how it’s supposed to battle.

⏹️ ▶️ John And then I’m assuming they just copy and paste everybody’s classes into one big project and run all the tanks against

⏹️ ▶️ John each other. That’s fantastic.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is super cool.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’d be a lot less fun if it was in watchOS, and the tanks would get killed after using two seconds of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPU. Yeah.

⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, he was asking me, how do I use machine learning to hone my

⏹️ ▶️ John tank strategy? And I’m like, that is the thing that’s possible. But you should probably start

⏹️ ▶️ John with just the basics. He wants to go for, he knows machine learning is a

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, and he knows it might help him make his tank better. But he’s at the point where just

⏹️ ▶️ John learning the very basics of programming, like conditionals and loops and functions and classes

⏹️ ▶️ John and structures. And you can get surprisingly far without actually knowing anything, which we

⏹️ ▶️ John all know from when we were beginning programmers. You can actually get pretty far without having any idea

⏹️ ▶️ John how, say, structures actually work or knowing anything about it. There’s a whole

⏹️ ▶️ John section of the language that he has no idea about, but autocomplete saves him. I already gave him the old man

⏹️ ▶️ John speech about that. I’m like, you know, I had to type my variables out. I couldn’t auto complete. How does

⏹️ ▶️ John that API spell that? It looked up in a book on paper. Like an animal. That’s right. Everything

⏹️ ▶️ John is auto completing. So spoiled, these children.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve made this speech before on this very program, but it’s been a while. One of the funniest things about being

⏹️ ▶️ Casey a longtime Microsoft person is that when I can’t remember

⏹️ ▶️ Casey instances when it happened, other than the occasional times I had the opportunity to watch a Microsoft

⏹️ ▶️ Casey person, and by that I mean somebody who’s cut their teeth on Microsoft Visual Studio,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey jump into Xcode. And especially, it’s actually gotten, the autocomplete has gotten pretty good in the last couple of versions of Xcode,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey but up until the last couple of versions, it was a disaster. And watching a Microsoft,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a C-sharp developer, try to get by an Xcode where there was no real autocomplete, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you write C-sharp, is you just keep figuring things out by autocomplete and eventually you’ll come up up with

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something good.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never learned C Sharp. All I knew was if you started by typing system dot, you would be able to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. So I just type system dot, and then I’d get a pop-up menu. Oh, I want, I don’t know, how

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about IO? All right, dot. And then you just keep going until you find what you want. It basically is writing your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco code for you.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, basically. Anyway. I think

⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode’s autocomplete is really good now, because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m watching them

⏹️ ▶️ John use it. It is. They got rid of the things of constantly giving you the alphabetical first one,

⏹️ ▶️ John even though you never want that one. canonical example of that, I forget. It was like NSString versus NS, what was the,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco stream? Yeah, I think that was it,

⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. Yeah, but it’s alphabetically first. But anyway, that’s all fixed and it’s fast and he rides

⏹️ ▶️ John that autocomplete. That’s how he gets anything done because he doesn’t know what these APIs are. For the arguments,

⏹️ ▶️ John half the time it’s like, you watch kids and adults dismiss dialog boxes without ever

⏹️ ▶️ John reading them. I feel like he autocompletes APIs without ever reading what they are. Yep, that’s fine, no, whatever. You have to read what

⏹️ ▶️ John it says. If you actually wanted to subtract him, it said add. That makes a difference in your code. Anyway, he’s learning.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this week by Squarespace. Start building your website today at squarespace.com

⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Enter offer code ATP at checkout to get 10% off. Make

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace. Squarespace sites are super

⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy to make. So whatever your needs are for a website in these days, that could be something simple like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a page with a couple of pages of content, some text, maybe like your business’s opening hours

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it could be something more complicated. It could be something like hosting a storefront or a podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or a calendar or various widgets and dynamic functionality. Squarespace can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do all of these things with incredible ease. Everything is intuitive. Everything is easy

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to use no matter what your skill level. You don’t have to be a coder. You don’t have to be a web developer. You

⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have to be any kind of developer. You can just make a website. It’s all visual. It’s all what you see is what you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco get. Live previewing. They let you customize everything to your heart’s content, fit your branding requirements, fit

⏹️ ▶️ Marco your preferences, you know, colors, fonts, logos, everything. It’s super easy to do whatever

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want on Squarespace. Once you get it set up, they support it fully for you. So you don’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to worry about upgrades or patches or downtime or anything like that. Squarespace

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has you covered. If you need any help, they also, of course, offer support for you. It’s 24-7 award-winning

⏹️ ▶️ Marco support if you ever need any help. Honestly, it’s so easy, you probably won’t need any help. When you decide to sign up,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to squarespace.com slash ATP and use offer code ATP

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get 10% off your first purchase. But you don’t have to do that yet. You can go start a free trial with no credit card

⏹️ ▶️ Marco required. Start a free trial set today and see for yourself how awesome Squarespace is. And once again, when you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco do want to sign up after that free trial,

Yet more Gurman rumors

⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sure to go to squarespace.com slash ATP and use offer code ATP to get 10%

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off your first purchase Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show make your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco next move with a beautiful website from Squarespace

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally rounding out the iOS section the iPad is getting some unique features including an updated interface for multitasking

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No details tweaks to the home screen No details and the ability to cycle through different versions of the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey same app. No details

⏹️ ▶️ John There were details in somebody’s story. I forget which person’s story these bullet points are from, but the story I read

⏹️ ▶️ John today had some more details, like about what is the tweaked home screen

⏹️ ▶️ John and what are the multitasking features, but it wasn’t much more than

⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, the home screen will basically look the same, but have a few more places where

⏹️ ▶️ John you can customize stuff. And the multitasking was like maybe the ability to juggle more

⏹️ ▶️ John apps at once. And like, it’s still vague, But I feel like more information is coming out about this. Kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John like the multiple window panel thing. Like, it’s less vague than it was before, but it’s still

⏹️ ▶️ John vague enough that their butts are covered if they show anything remotely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco related to Windows. But it kind of sounds like I’m not getting my desktop on my iPad, huh?

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I don’t know. Stranger things have happened. Like, did you see the mock-up? A bunch of people had mock-ups

⏹️ ▶️ John of- I already have a dock. Yeah, mock-ups of things that they would like in iOS, and one of them had like Finder for iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ John And silly things like that, like the desktop on your iPad or finder for iPad.

⏹️ ▶️ John What makes them silly or not is entirely dependent on how much sort of goodwill and marketing

⏹️ ▶️ John cachet Apple believes a particular word has. Because you can take almost anything you do to springboard

⏹️ ▶️ John or anything you do to files or whatever and apply that label to it. Like, so say iOS 13 has local storage

⏹️ ▶️ John to distinguish from remote storage and it’s like a first-class citizen and the UI is built around it.

⏹️ ▶️ John If Apple thinks, if Apple’s marketing department thinks that people like their desktops and have

⏹️ ▶️ John good association with that word, it would be like, your desktop on iOS. And they could even

⏹️ ▶️ John sync the same contents from your Mac, you know, cloud desktop sync thing that I was just talking about. If they

⏹️ ▶️ John don’t, they won’t call it desktop. Same thing with the Finder. If they change the files application and greatly enhance it

⏹️ ▶️ John and make it better, and they think Finder has cache, it doesn’t. But if they think

⏹️ ▶️ John Finder has cache, the marketing people think, they could say, now iOS has the Finder.

⏹️ ▶️ John And we would all cheer. But in reality, the only person who has any good feelings associated with that name is me

⏹️ ▶️ John and 10 other old people. So they’re not going to do that. But that type of approach of taking a thing

⏹️ ▶️ John that really has no connection to the desktop or the finder, but it’s like kind of performs

⏹️ ▶️ John a similar function and spirit and just applying a beloved name to it is totally a thing Apple has done and would

⏹️ ▶️ John do. So I wouldn’t put desktop on iOS past the Marco. Your dream could come true

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one day. Maybe. The thing that really bumps me out about this is that I have not heard any

⏹️ ▶️ Casey real commentary about the Files app getting access to like SD cards and stuff like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John that because one thing I would… That’s all

⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone wants. I know. I’m serious. Like all I want in the world is to be able to sit on the couch with an

⏹️ ▶️ Casey SD card plugged into my USB-C port and go through the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey pictures on my SD card and decide, oh, I want this one, I don’t want this one, I don’t want this one, I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey do want that one, and take care of them on the couch instead of like up here on my

⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMac. It would be so wonderful. And I can imagine that there would be plenty of amazing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps that would assist with that process. Like a friend of mine wrote an app. I believe it’s called Best Photos. I’ll

⏹️ ▶️ Casey try to link it in the show notes. That would be perfect for doing this kind of thing. And I, I would

⏹️ ▶️ Casey love to be able to do that on my iPad, but if I don’t have, well, not me, but you know, if, if developers don’t have file system access,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a non-starter, so I am going to be, you know, John, you’re going to be inconsolable

⏹️ ▶️ Casey if there’s no mention of the Mac Pro, and of course I’ll be cackling, but you’ll be inconsolable.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I won’t be inconsolable if I don’t get file system access in like files or something, or an API or something like that, but I’m

⏹️ ▶️ Casey gonna be really freaking annoyed.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I hope it’s done in a, if they do this, I hope they do this in a general purpose way.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, we already have areas of iOS, like SiriKit,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are very like domain specific. Like, you can integrate with Siri,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as what you want to do is one of these like 12 things that you’re allowed to do. And you know, it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are so many apps that you can come up with that could use something with Siri, but, oh, it doesn’t

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit within these 12 things. And so you just can’t do it. If they do some kind of like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, file, like third party mass storage access API, but say it only

⏹️ ▶️ Marco works for photos, that’s not very good because there’s lots of reasons is to use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mass storage devices or storage cards, I guess, SD cards, that are not for photos

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or video. You know, like right now, you can import photos to the camera roll on the device

⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the camera connection kit or things like that, but there’s problems. Like A, what

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your camera or whatever is not supported by it or whatever it is? And then B, what if what you want to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco import is not photos or video? And C, what if you don’t want what you’re importing

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all being dumped into your iCloud photo library. If you deviate from the rails

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they have set forth, you can import photos and videos to photos.app and nothing else.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If what you want falls outside of that, you’re just kinda out of luck. What I hope they do when they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco tackle this problem, because they inevitably have to tackle this problem, if you look at the iPad

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro reviews from this past fall, every single review, even from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mainstream press publications, every single review when talking about the iPad Pro

⏹️ ▶️ Marco dinged it for not having mass storage device support and files. Because it’s,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, as much as we want to pretend like we live in this world where you never need a

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thumb drive or whatever, the reality is sometimes you need a fricking thumb drive. Like sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is the best solution to a problem or the only solution to a problem that you have out there in the world. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have the ability to just plug in a thumb drive and copy files from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to it, from or to the iPad, like that is a very common thing.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you’re gonna say the iPad is a computer or a computer replacement, it needs to be able to do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this sort of thing. It’s no question that that’s why the reviews of these

⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-end expensive devices that are marketed to be computer replacements dinged it for that, it’s very important.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So what I hope they do here is not try to define 12 domains that say, OK,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco for these 12 use cases, you can use this new API to have your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app integrate with a plugged-in memory stick or something. No. Just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have file system access. Make it so that you can plug in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco mass storage devices, and apps can copy files to or from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. That is what we want. I know it’s hard if you want to access the files

⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly on it. then you have to deal with things like unmounting being potentially problematic. So just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a copy API. Copy files off of it, copy files onto it. Or even

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you allow writes, if you allow deletes, whatever it is, make it work so that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps can access the files and modify the files on mass storage devices.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I really hope they do it in a general purpose way, not defining these narrow

⏹️ ▶️ Marco domains that, of course, our needs are not going to be completely expressed by.

⏹️ ▶️ John And the other way they could screw it up, and I don’t think they’ll do this, but I’m reminded of it because this is a way people have been working around it, is

⏹️ ▶️ John make a bunch of APIs, but then say, and these are just APIs, it’s up to you third-party

⏹️ ▶️ John developers to make applications that when launched can see mass storage through the

⏹️ ▶️ John USB-C port on iPad Pro. And then it’s up to those applications to put the thing

⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere. Do you remember that? Like there was one that let you read USB-C sticks or something with some

⏹️ ▶️ John hardware-software synergy between the app and the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing. Yeah, there have been things like this, where it’s like somebody like SanDisk

⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something will make their memory stick, will have its own app that can read the files

⏹️ ▶️ Marco off of it. But that’s a terrible solution

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John for a general purpose.

⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Bateman Yeah, it is super terrible. That would be the second worst way they

⏹️ ▶️ John can do it. Yours is probably the first worst, where it’s like we have a narrow set of APIs, like Siri, Intents, and you can’t deviate. The second worst is,

⏹️ ▶️ John we didn’t want to make an app like this So instead, here’s a framework, here’s some APIs, and

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a third party opportunity. But honestly, I think Casey, you will be satisfied.

⏹️ ▶️ John They are going to extend the Files app to not be as dumb. They’re just gonna do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sure hope so. All right, let’s move on to macOS.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s not that much here because macOS. There are only four bullets that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pulled. Well hey, no, no, hold on, that’s not fair. There’s a really big thing here for macOS that I think is going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be the focus of most of our summer and fall. Yeah, that’s

⏹️ ▶️ John fair. So that’s not mentioned in these stories, like marzipan is a whole separate thing. Aside from

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey marzipan,

⏹️ ▶️ John what else is going on in macOS? And that’s what they always mention in these articles.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, no, no, no. I mean, the very first bullet in my list, which I pulled from the article, is the biggest change coming to the Mac this

⏹️ ▶️ Casey year is the ability for iPad apps to run on laptops and desktops.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know, but they don’t go into it. It’s like, yeah, yeah, marzipan. Like, we know.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, but that’s huge. Like, I mean, we don’t have to talk about it a lot today because we’ve already talked about it a lot

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we don’t know anything new yet, but marzipan is massive. And if it happens

⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all the way that we think it’s going to happen, I know a lot of people are not happy about Marzipan

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and are afraid of it. I will most likely very heartily embrace it. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m very excited about it.

⏹️ ▶️ John Well, we’re all going to embrace it whether we like it or not. Right. We’re all going to be running a lot of iOS apps pretty

⏹️ ▶️ John soon. Yep. And it will mostly be good. We talked about it before. But yeah, like aside from Marzipan, which

⏹️ ▶️ John is kind of pre-announced by Apple because of what they talked about last year, although of course they didn’t give

⏹️ ▶️ John deadlines. But that’s the obvious one. I think the real question is, is there anything else going on in MacOS

⏹️ ▶️ John besides marzipanification? And I think we might have, oh, maybe it’s down

⏹️ ▶️ John this list or whatever. But the other fun thing, and it’s related to marzipan, is how many

⏹️ ▶️ John Mac applications shipped by Apple will become marzipanified? And there’s lots

⏹️ ▶️ John of really good candidates that are almost sure to go. And then there’s some questionable ones like mail, you’re not sure. And then

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s the iTunes question or whatever. A lot of these other features are actually that in disguise.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So let me run a few by you that Bloomberg cites. Apple is also planning to bring over a couple

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of its own iPad apps to the Mac this year, a podcast app and the new merged Find My iPhone and Find My Friends

⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. There will also be a new Apple Music app, which is being developed as a standard Mac program. Actually,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s come back to that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco in a moment. I love that wording. Yeah. Standard. Yeah. Let’s come

⏹️ ▶️ Casey back to it. Let’s come back to it. Program. Other in-house software coming to the Mac includes Screen Time, effects and stickers for the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Messages app. and integration with the Siri shortcuts app, the company’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey new service writing on Siri commands, the new reminders app and upgrades to Apple Books. So

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that all I think is exactly what you were talking about, John. It’s a lot of iOS stuff coming to the Mac.

⏹️ ▶️ John Who was it who wrote this one? Because this is another one of those things where it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, this is Gurman. This is like, you could tell it was like the Bloomberg style guide interfering quite a bit here.

⏹️ ▶️ John But no, but like, it’s also a typical Gurman thing. Effects and stickers for the messages app.

⏹️ ▶️ John What you mean, surely, is that Messages is Marzipanified. Why not just say

⏹️ ▶️ John that? Why not just say that instead of saying effects and stickers come to the app? Just say it’s gonna be the

⏹️ ▶️ John iOS Messages app running on your Mac. That’s one of the almost sure bets because the Mac Messages app has been so

⏹️ ▶️ John far behind the iOS one for so long and there’s nothing, and it’s so

⏹️ ▶️ John underfeatured that it’s just a massive upgrade to get the iOS Messages app. But to phrase that by saying

⏹️ ▶️ John that it will have effects and stickers, yeah, it will, because those are things that are on the iOS app and not on the Mac, but why not just say

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the Marzipan version? We know about Marzipan, you just, ugh. It drives me nuts. Anyway, messages, Marzipan for

⏹️ ▶️ John sure. Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the biggest thing for me in this list is the Apple Music app,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco quote, which is being developed as a standard Mac program. Now, we discussed a few episodes ago,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was very concerned that they were going to marzipanify the iOS Music

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and replace iTunes with iOS Music on the Mac. And even though iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets a bunch of crap, I was concerned about that because iTunes actually, for just music, is a very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-featured and fairly advanced app, and the iOS music app is not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I really don’t like the iOS music app, and there’s a lot of things that we would lose if that was the direction they took

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac. But this certainly sounds, from

⏹️ ▶️ Marco every possible way, from both German and other rumblings, it sounds like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new Apple Music app on the Mac is not a Marzipan app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which of course raises the question of what it is, and I think it’s most likely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be one of the options we theorized earlier, which is it’s just iTunes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco with some of the other stuff stripped out and renamed to music.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that sounds exactly like what they should do. I really hope

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what they’re doing, and it sure does sound like that’s what they’re doing, which is a very good sign. because

⏹️ ▶️ Marco iTunes, the music part of iTunes, is not iTunes’ problem.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason why iTunes got so terrible and bloated and everything is all the other crap that got lumped into it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco If they strip it down to just be music again, or if you never have any reason to go to any other parts of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it and you just live in what is now what we have as a music app, that sounds fine. That’s, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly what they should do and I’m very happy to see that that’s probably what they are doing.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just for the sake of discussion, what if it’s some sort of Spotify ask run into the Apple Music Service

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and nothing else and like maybe doesn’t even touch local files?

⏹️ ▶️ John That would be that’s back to the bad scenario.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, I don’t see why they would do that and not then just marzipanify the iOS app at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that point. Like what’s why, what would they get by having this not be a marzipan app but still be a brand

⏹️ ▶️ Marco new app? I mean it’s possible that like that was a separate team that was doing the, that started the app long ago before

⏹️ ▶️ Marco marzipan was officially going to be the thing or whatever. That’s possible, but I think it’s unlikely

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple would be devoting that much resources into

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a music app for the Mac that many years ago. That doesn’t seem very likely.

⏹️ ▶️ John All right. Also, the iOS music app does play local files.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco To make the Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John one not play local files would seem pretty mean. Of course, the fastest way

⏹️ ▶️ John to tell, or one of the ways to tell without actually having any technical knowledge, the provenance

⏹️ ▶️ John of the Mac music application will be launch it launch preferences and see if

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s app model,

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because if it has a model preferences dialog

⏹️ ▶️ John box, guess what, it’s iTunes under there. If it doesn’t have an app model preference

⏹️ ▶️ John dialogue, it doesn’t mean it’s not iTunes under there just means they did such a comprehensive gut job that they finally

⏹️ ▶️ John changed the one defining characteristic of iTunes, which is when you bring up the preferences window,

⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not doing anything else in that app.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, one little detail about local file playback. I don’t think Apple wants

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get rid of local file playback because local file playback saves

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them money. For the same reason that Spotify wants to buy podcast

⏹️ ▶️ Marco people because every minute you spend listening to Spotify that you’re not listening

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to a commercial music track, Spotify is saving money because they don’t pay per play on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts, but they do pay per play for music. Similarly, Apple Music

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pays per play, like Apple has to pay the artists

⏹️ ▶️ Marco per, or their labels more specifically, per play of a commercial music track,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you play something out of your own purchased or imported library, they don’t. This

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is why one of, I think, one of the worst features of the HomePod,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s kind of a good thing and a bad thing, the HomePod, I think, leans too heavily

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your collection and doesn’t frequently enough venture out to Apple Music when you

⏹️ ▶️ Marco ask it to play things that you aren’t very specific about. So if you say like, you know, if you say, hey,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cylinder, play some music that I like, or play something I might like, or just play some music, like even if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could say things like that, it will almost always default to your library first,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is, in my opinion, like if I’m giving a vague command like that, that’s actually not what I want. I want it to go find new

⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff for me. You mean you don’t wanna hear Phish,

⏹️ ▶️ John because

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco percentage-wise, you’re gonna be hearing

⏹️ ▶️ John Phish.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and there’s plenty of times where I want that, and when I want that,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just play it. I don’t have to ask it. I usually go to my iPad, and I’ll pick it

⏹️ ▶️ Marco right from the Terral Music app, and I’ll AirPlay it to the HomePods in that case. But you could tell

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they clearly are defaulting to your own library a lot from the HomePod,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think there’s probably a monetary reason there. It’s probably because they can just save a bunch of money

⏹️ ▶️ Marco by not playing that stuff, by not playing from Apple Music so often if they can use

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a library instead. So I think they have the strong incentive to maintain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco local library support in all these devices because that literally directly contributes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco to their profit margin on what is one of their very important services.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on to watchOS, Apple’s bringing the Voice Memos app from the iPhone, iPad, and Mac so that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey users can record the voice memos from their wrist. I am super into this because there have been times that I’ve really wanted

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to record something, say when I’m on a run, and the only real mechanism I have to do that is

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my watch. And I tried to do this with voice memos once just a few weeks ago, not realizing it wasn’t already there,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was a total bummer. So I dig it.

⏹️ ▶️ John How did you try to do it? Like, are you going, hey, ding us into your watch, and then saying, take a

⏹️ ▶️ John memo?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I think I, while I was, well, I broke stride to some degree, but if I recall correctly,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went to the app launcher thing, which I keep in alphabetical mode, I think I went down to the and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was like,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a long way to go. Like it has to be some way where you can just raise your wrists and do something fairly simple without looking at

⏹️ ▶️ John it. If you have to search through the honeycomb or your alphabetical list or something, find the tiny voice

⏹️ ▶️ John memos thing, launch it, wait for it to launch, press a record button and then talk into it. That’s not good.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, agreed. But I mean, I’d still prefer that over nothing though.

⏹️ ▶️ John Take a memo should work. I wonder if that you should try the next time.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey bet that but directly on the watch like right now.

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like is I mean, I granted this is future. voice memos doesn’t exist yet, but

⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no facility for it to just listen to what you say and record it somewhere, or

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Seems like a thing the watch should

⏹️ ▶️ Casey already do. Hey, take a memo. I love ATP. Sorry, I can’t help you with notes on

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Watch.

⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to make a note out of it, I guess. Take a memo, it went to the notes thing. It was going to transcribe it, I suppose. I

⏹️ ▶️ John guess. Wait, why can’t it do that?

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, I don’t know. It just

⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s amazing. They have these very specific messages that make it so clear that the watch

⏹️ ▶️ John knows what you wanted to do and you know for a fact that like the capability is there, but it’s not gonna do it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri and the watch both make me so sad.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Apple’s also planning on to add Animoji and Memoji’s stickers to the

⏹️ ▶️ Casey device that synchronize from an iPhone. That’s cool. Why?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because, reasons. There’ll be two new health-related apps for the watch, one dubbed Dose inside

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple for pill reminders and another called Cycles to track menstrual cycles. We kind of touched on this earlier. I dig it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s adding more watch face complications, which I like that there’s scare quotes around that, which show additional snippets

⏹️ ▶️ Casey of information beyond just the time. There will be one that shows the status of audio books. Meh. Another showing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the battery life of hearing aids. Okay, that’s cool. And others that measure external noise and rain data. Eh, whatever.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s, again, that’s cool, I guess. The complication API is yet another

⏹️ ▶️ Marco area where third parties can’t do what Apple does. we have a much more

⏹️ ▶️ Marco restricted set of capabilities than what Apple has. In particular, watch apps

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t update complications on like infinitely. Like we can only update

⏹️ ▶️ Marco them every so often up to a certain limit per hour or per day or whatever. And so

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like they just said, like the status of audio books, that sounds like basically a now playing or a progress

⏹️ ▶️ Marco complication for audio books. And that’s fine. I wish I could offer that for my watch audio

⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, but I can’t because I can’t be sure that you’re not going to

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit play or pause less than 30 times in an hour.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And therefore, I’ll start losing updates to it or they’ll start being throttled. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of problems that basically make it so I can’t do that. So yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes me sad. But you know what would make you happy? The company is also planning several new watch faces, a gradient

⏹️ ▶️ Casey face that makes a gradient look out of a color that the user chooses, at least two new

⏹️ ▶️ Casey extra large faces that show jumbo numbers in different fonts and colors, a California dial that looks like a classic

⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch face and mixes Roman numerals with Arabic numerals, a redesigned solar

⏹️ ▶️ Casey analog watch face that looks like a sun dial, and a new Infograph sub-dial, one that includes

⏹️ ▶️ Casey larger complication views like a stock market chart or the weather. This actually sounds pretty

⏹️ ▶️ Marco good. Yeah, for the most part. I mean, watch, I mean, again, I still think we need custom third-party

⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch faces for the Apple Watch. I think Apple’s Those faces are underserved,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco under-maintained. Visually, I think they’re fairly stale most of the time. There’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco very little movement there that I think is good or up-to-date or shows any level

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of maintenance. And this list looks like they’re just continuing the same direction that they have been going in since

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the beginning with the Apple Watch. So the gradient face is just the photo face.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s the same thing, it sounds like. Like, here’s a new way to make a basic clock with

⏹️ ▶️ Marco an image behind it. We already have like 40 of those.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, the gradient phase is probably going to be some cool generated thing that, you know, remember they had like the ones last

⏹️ ▶️ John time, it was like the particle effects one, and then the ones they filmed in a giant tank, like I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sure. Right, and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are cool for like five seconds, and then you realize, oh, actually I need something with more functionality.

⏹️ ▶️ John But I think the gradient phase is going to be one of those. If it actually literally is like a graphical gradient,

⏹️ ▶️ John that sounds like something Android would do.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Well, and then, you know, two new X large phases that you just have different fonts and colors.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great. Okay. Well, we already had one and it’s, you know, not incredibly useful for most people, the people

⏹️ ▶️ Marco who need it. That’s fine. But that isn’t that exciting. Uh, California dial, which is a term in the watch

⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry for watches that combine, uh, Roman numerals with Arabic numerals.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I was going to say that’s such a, that’s a gross combination. I’m glad to hear that it’s actually a term of art where the modifier

⏹️ ▶️ John California gets added something to make it grosser. Yeah. California pizza,

⏹️ ▶️ John California dial Ferrari California all the bad variants

⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things yeah I’m not personally a fan of California does but I know people are so oh well

⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe California people who knows I’m interested in the solar analog watch face because I like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the solar face a lot this is the current solar face which has been there since 1.0 is a digital face

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so to see movement there sounds promising infograph sub dial that sounds like it just has larger

⏹️ ▶️ Marco complications that’s cool anything to do to infograph I think I think the infograph face is need

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of help. That’s why I made that blog post a few months back about why Infograph has such poor

⏹️ ▶️ Marco legibility. Maybe they’re working on that. Maybe this is a way to improve that. Maybe there’s just another alternative

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has a little bit better legibility. But ultimately, if

⏹️ ▶️ Marco we still can’t do custom faces, they still have the same problems that we’ve had, which

⏹️ ▶️ Marco is there is not enough true variety, not enough true choice,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not enough faces that are are really, truly general purpose useful.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a whole bunch that are gonna be like five minute novelties, and like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco three that people will actually use. And that’s been the status quo for a while now, and I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope they improve that somehow, but it doesn’t sound like they are.

⏹️ ▶️ John You know, I was just thinking about the third party watch face marketplace and what

⏹️ ▶️ John that might look like, and an interesting test of Apple’s will, Apple’s

⏹️ ▶️ John value system, is to see if they allow third-party watch faces

⏹️ ▶️ John with the subscription pricing plan. You can use this watch face

⏹️ ▶️ John as long as you pay $1.99 a month.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Is that a thing that

⏹️ ▶️ John Apple would allow in the store? Why or why not?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I think three years ago, no. But now

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they are so dependent on pushing that services revenue up, because every time

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have a subscription that is sold by in-app purchase in an app. Apple counts

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that as an Apple subscription, which sounds ridiculous at

⏹️ ▶️ Marco first until you realize that when you subscribe to Overcast for $10 a year, you’re really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscribing to Overcast for $7 a year and to Apple for $3 a year.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so it actually makes sense why they would count all of these subscriptions in

⏹️ ▶️ Marco the App Store as their subscriptions. Anyway, they make a lot of money from all those subscriptions.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, and they are pushing the services narrative and it’s doing really well financially for them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, it actually wouldn’t surprise me if today’s Apple would

⏹️ ▶️ Marco allow that, whereas three years ago, Apple probably would not.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Also remember, it’s not a direct comparison, but BMW now charges for car play

⏹️ ▶️ Casey after the first year, which I just find to be offensive and preposterous. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, you get a year of car play, or maybe it’s more than that, but you get some amount of time for free. I thought it was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a year. And then after that, it’s like $100 or $200 a year to continue to use CarPlay, which

⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just asinine. So yeah, I take your point, John.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think, I don’t know if they would allow it, but it is an interesting thought exercise.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have to say, though, I have to go back just a half step. I didn’t realize what a California Dial was until you explained it, Marco, and I went

⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your beloved Nomos and found the club campus, which has,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, you know, it has numerals for 12 to 4, 8, and 10, and then just

⏹️ ▶️ Casey lines for all the other hours or other numerals, the 10, 12, and 2.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the stuff that is on the top half of the watch face are Arabic numbers. And then the four

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the eight. Are Roman numerals. And this looks frigging stupid

⏹️ ▶️ John to me. This looks worse than I thought it would. I was picturing it in my head as sort of like some kind of, I don’t know what I

⏹️ ▶️ John was picturing. or maybe I was picturing an alternation, but I hadn’t taken into account the variable lengths of Roman numerals and the fact that 10

⏹️ ▶️ John and two are different. Like, oh, this is terrible. Why would anyone ever do this? Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, this is awful.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I am not a fan of the look. Panerai also

⏹️ ▶️ Marco has done a few that I think look, that I think have a more balanced look. They have put the

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Roman numerals on the top half of the dial, so they’re shorter. There’s no like eight to deal with, basically. The eight is really

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long. So that’s, if you search for Panerai California Dial, you see a bunch of images of them.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They look a little bit better, I think. But it’s still, California Dials are a rarity

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and an acquired taste in the watch fashion world. Some people enjoy them. They’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco not for me, but fortunately, it’s not usually a thing that comes up because there aren’t that many of them.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I just, no thank you.

#askatp: Coding music

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Tom Bullock writes, hey, what do we listen to when we code? I think we’ve talked about this before, but it’s

⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of those questions we get asked constantly, so I thought we could review it. For me, if I’m doing

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that’s not terribly intense, I can listen to podcasts and often do.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I’m doing something that’s mildly intense, I listen to just about any sort of music.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Usually I’ll start with my two weekly playlists on Spotify, my Discover Weekly and Release Radar.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then if I’m having a particularly intense coding session, I will either listen to a movie soundtrack

⏹️ ▶️ Casey or equivalent. So like, shoot, is it the Journey soundtrack? That’s by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Austin something something, John?

⏹️ ▶️ John John

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Greenewald Wintery, yes. Steven Connelly Yeah, Austin Wintery. That’s really good. The Social Network

⏹️ ▶️ Casey soundtrack by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross is really good. And then I believe I’ve told the story

⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least a couple times on the show, but Tools 10,000 Days is my, I am beating

⏹️ ▶️ Casey my head against the wall because I can’t figure this out. I need my magical totem, my whatever,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to get me through this. How do I do it? I use tools 10,000 days. And I have to deploy

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that extremely tactically because otherwise I don’t want it to lose its charm. But

⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically, in short, podcasts for a lot of the time and music for the rest of the time.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, owl fish all the time?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pretty much. Like not 100%, but close. Because what’s nice about

⏹️ ▶️ Marco fish is, so I can’t listen to podcasts at all. Like if I’m doing anything work-wise,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t also listen to podcasts. Like I just won’t listen, I won’t pay attention. I’ll miss 100% of what’s said.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I want something that is music for sure. And what’s great about Phish is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I don’t have to, so I listen straight through. I don’t listen on shuffle, I listen like straight through. And when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not Phish, I do the same thing with albums. And so what’s nice about like straight through

⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening is you don’t have like per song decisions you have to make that like distract

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you from what you’re doing to see, oh, this one’s not so good, I want to skip this, skip, skip, skip, like that I find

⏹️ ▶️ Marco distracting during work, so I want to be able to put on like one good album or one good show and have it just play

⏹️ ▶️ Marco through. And the great thing about Phish is that not only are there a lot of them,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s always, you know, every time they tour, they release new ones, and I like pay for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the downloads from there, from livephish.com, and so I

⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically have like new shows to listen to pretty frequently, Like they do something like 20

⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows a year. And then the shows each are so long, which everyone makes fun of,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco but they’re so long that if I’m listening all the way through, I don’t have to make another decision

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about what to listen to for a long time. Whereas even if I’m listening to an album,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco most albums from most bands for the last couple decades are maybe 45 minutes long,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re lucky. Maybe an hour, if it’s a very long album. So that means every 45 minutes,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to make another decision about what to play next. Or something else starts playing next and it distracts you and

⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not what you want, you gotta go fix that or whatever. So I find I want something optimized for

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long spans of stimulating my ears and my brain in this one way

⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I can focus on the other things I’m doing on the computer that doesn’t distract

⏹️ ▶️ Marco me by all of a sudden playing like da da da. And you’re like, where the hell did that come from? I want something

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I can just focus on what I’m doing and not constantly be futzing with the music.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John?

⏹️ ▶️ John If I’m not engaging my brain particularly hard, I can listen to music.

⏹️ ▶️ John But if I’m working on a hard programming problem, no music. Can’t deal with it. Like, I’m

⏹️ ▶️ John actually writing the code. And also, I can’t listen to any music with words if I’m writing prose,

⏹️ ▶️ John which you think wouldn’t apply to coding. But it does, because there’s a thing called comments, and I write a lot of them. And you should,

⏹️ ▶️ John too. And so if I’m listening to music with words, I find it difficult

⏹️ ▶️ John to write comments or I find myself stopping listening. I’m an active music listener. Like I have to actually be listening to the music.

⏹️ ▶️ John So if I can’t actively listen to the music, I don’t want to be listening to music and it starts to bother me.

⏹️ ▶️ John The only exception is occasionally inspirational debugging music, but debugging is kind of,

⏹️ ▶️ John not that it’s not engaging my brain, but there is a mechanical

⏹️ ▶️ John nature to debugging. Like you just start running, debugging the algorithm and you’ve debugged enough.

⏹️ ▶️ John You kind of know the series of steps you’re going to do it, you’re narrowing it down. And it is very mechanical. You can kind of do it the same way. You can

⏹️ ▶️ John drive to work on autopilot without thinking too hard about where you have to go. I can debug like that sometimes, too. And so

⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes I’ll listen to instrumental music when debugging. But same deal. If the debugging starts to get hard, it’s like, oh,

⏹️ ▶️ John now, I thought I was going to immediately find where this problem is and fix it. But now I can’t, and I’m stumped. Music goes

⏹️ ▶️ John off. So in general, my answer is no, with minor exceptions for when I’m doing

⏹️ ▶️ John relaxing programming that doesn’t involve a lot of my brain.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m curious, John. And I think I know the answer to this. Are you a music person or

⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lyrics person?

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if we’ve talked about this before. I probably, if you had to like, you know,

⏹️ ▶️ John what is, tips to one side or the other, I probably tip towards music, but it’s close to an even split. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John I do like my lyrics and I do enjoy it, but when push comes to shove, there are songs that I like that

⏹️ ▶️ John have garbage lyrics. So I have to say

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. But like you pay attention a lot to lyrics, it seems. I mean, I know you like, you know, you ran your U2

⏹️ ▶️ Marco site, like, you know, Like you have a history of caring a lot about lyrics.

⏹️ ▶️ John I do care a lot about them. And that’s why I know that a lot of the songs I like have dumb lyrics, because I know the lyrics, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John But I still like the song. So in the end, the music is the most important. It’s the dominant factor, but it’s important for me

⏹️ ▶️ John to also know what they’re saying. And I can appreciate songs more based on it and so on and so forth. It’s just, it’s not a deal breaker. Because

⏹️ ▶️ John let’s face it, lots of pop songs have very simple or repetitive lyrics, but if the music’s good, I still like it.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s why I think whether you are a music person or a lyrics person, I think,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco might affect whether you’re able to listen to music while you do all kinds of work, or only certain

⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, or no things. Like, I’m, like, Tiff is a lyrics person. I am very much not.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I pay almost no attention to the lyrics of anything, which is why I can listen to Phish.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And why, and whereas, like, and the music I really love, but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m, like, whenever there’s lyrics, like, I zone out, I tune them out. So like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco my brain is not, the linguistic processing parts of my brain are not engaged when

⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening to any music, even music with lyrics, because I’m not listening to them really. I’m listening only to the music.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I don’t have restrictions like, oh, I can’t write code comments while

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hear music with lyrics. Like that doesn’t matter to me. Whereas I hear lots of people that are like you, where like they

⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t listen to music that they know, or they can’t listen to music that they don’t know, or they can

⏹️ ▶️ Marco only listen to instrumental music when they’re doing certain kinds of work. and I don’t have that problem at all.

⏹️ ▶️ John But even for instrumental music, I’m just gonna say when I’m an active listener, I’m sort of, I’m writing that,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m mentally writing that music, I’m actively listening to that music, I’m actively engaged with just the music part,

⏹️ ▶️ John even for totally instrumental stuff, which is why if I come to like a hard part of programming and I have to start

⏹️ ▶️ John thinking about what I’m doing more, I feel like it’s tearing me away from the music and then it’s like, well, then why

⏹️ ▶️ John is the music even on and now it’s just noise in the background that’s bothering me? I have to be actively listening, which is the

⏹️ ▶️ John same way like, you see this in cars a lot. Some people will turn on, I was gonna say turn

⏹️ ▶️ John on the radio, but you know what I mean. Will turn on the radio in their car, but then also have a conversation

⏹️ ▶️ John when the radio’s on, and that makes no sense to me. We’re either listening to music or we’re talking, we’re not doing both,

⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s impossible to do both.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, I can’t be listening to

⏹️ ▶️ John music. And so, yeah, if we’re talking in the car, if we’re talking, all the

⏹️ ▶️ John music is doing is making it harder to understand the people talking, but I’m either actively listening to the music

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s playing, or I’m actively listening to the person I’m talking to, but I can’t do both at once. That’s what I mean when I’m active listening.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s same for instrumental. It doesn’t matter if the song has lyrics or not. That’s what I mean by active music

⏹️ ▶️ John listener. So what do

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do? Are you a headphone person at

⏹️ ▶️ John work? I can’t, spoken like someone who hasn’t been to work in a while. Everyone’s a headphone

⏹️ ▶️ John person at work because we’re all in stupid open offices and there’s no- That’s

⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I thought. So how do you operate as a programmer in the modern workplace where they’re

⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all working in open environments, like do you just put on headphones and not play anything sometimes and just have silence?

⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody has headphones, yes. Hey, a lot of people do that. They get noise canceling headphones and they put them on

⏹️ ▶️ John and don’t play music through them. That is extremely common. I tend not to do that partly

⏹️ ▶️ John because our office, and I think this is common, has white noise machines throughout the entire office,

⏹️ ▶️ John like spread throughout the ceiling, right? Like it’s just piped in, piped in everywhere.

⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s kind of like you’re wearing, not noise canceling, but kind of like you’re wearing

⏹️ ▶️ John earmuffs the entire time. So it makes it somewhat more tolerable, but it all costs also just as giant,

⏹️ ▶️ John oppressive, hush noise, like you’re a baby trying to go to sleep or something. Um,

⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah, I’ll, I’ll wear headphones sometimes and sometimes, you know, I’ll be listening to music doing

⏹️ ▶️ John a non mentally taxing task and then it will become mentally taxing and I will stop the music, but I’ll leave the headphones on.

⏹️ ▶️ John Man. I don’t know. I don’t know how anybody gets any work done. It’s a, it’s a grim world out there in the open office.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so true.

#askatp: Family Macs

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, Nick writes, how do we configure Macs used by other family members? I

⏹️ ▶️ Casey haven’t really run into this yet because Erin has her laptop, the one that has been underwater a couple times,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have my 44 computers, so I don’t really have any input on this. I think

⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one who is most likely to have a story about this is probably John. So John, how do you configure your Macs used by

⏹️ ▶️ Casey other family members?

⏹️ ▶️ John Very carefully. It’s actually a difficult thing to do and there’s no one policy

⏹️ ▶️ John you can apply. the main bit of knowledge I think you need is you need to know

⏹️ ▶️ John like sort of a reliability score

⏹️ ▶️ John and a, you know, a prognosis for features because

⏹️ ▶️ John for me it’s like I’m visiting a relative and setting up their computer for them. I might not be back

⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time. So if I enable some feature that’s a turkey, I

⏹️ ▶️ John now I have to explain how to carefully disable that feature or deal with the bugs or whatever over the phone

⏹️ ▶️ John or FaceTime or whatever. And I don’t want to do that. So I have to know, I want to set this up for you. And generally what

⏹️ ▶️ John I want to do is like get everybody’s, you know, integrate, give them a system

⏹️ ▶️ John for everything. So some kind of cloud file storage

⏹️ ▶️ John thing, whether that be Dropbox or iCloud drive or, you know, insert whatever

⏹️ ▶️ John Google drive or whatever, get your email set up one system for email, hopefully with some kind of cloud

⏹️ ▶️ John component. Like for all of their problems, they have to have a system. And the key

⏹️ ▶️ John is knowing what’s safe to set up. It might not be the things that I use. Maybe the things that I use are real

⏹️ ▶️ John fidgety and unreliable, but I just deal with it because I need some sophisticated feature. I have to know like, what is the thing that’s safe

⏹️ ▶️ John for them? So it’s important for me that they have systems for everything. I don’t do like a bare bones, like no apps

⏹️ ▶️ John are installed, just the Apple stuff, blah, blah, blah, and let them figure it out. I don’t do that at all. Like I will

⏹️ ▶️ John install Dropbox for them. I will set it to launch on login, and I will show them where it is, and I will put it in their

⏹️ ▶️ John dock, and I’ll put all their files in it, and I’ll be like, whether you like it or not, guess what, now you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John using Dropbox, because it will solve more problems for you than if I just left you here, where you

⏹️ ▶️ John just put everything on your desktop locally, and then your hard drive crashes, because you never did the backup. I will set up their backups

⏹️ ▶️ John for them. I will set up Time Machine, and I’ll attach a drive, I will install SuperDuper, I will put it on a schedule, I will do,

⏹️ ▶️ John I want this thing to just run on autopilot with a set of reliable applications that I think will continue to work for a long time.

⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s generally my goal. And also, setting up is a little bit different when you come like cleaning up.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like, let’s see what havoc they’ve wreaked on their computer in my absence. What kind of weird stuff have they installed?

⏹️ ▶️ John What’s sitting in the downloads folder? Do they have three copies of Microsoft Office now because they duplicated the

⏹️ ▶️ John folder three times? Look, let’s deal with that, you know. Check their disk. What is taking up all their disk space?

⏹️ ▶️ John Do they have like giant video files they don’t need anymore? Did they accidentally download a YouTube video using some weird

⏹️ ▶️ John extension it’s sitting on their desktop and it’s three gigs, like that’s a whole process.

⏹️ ▶️ John It’s time consuming, it’s difficult, and there’s no real right answer. And the bottom line is you have to know,

⏹️ ▶️ John you have to be deep enough into the Mac world to know what’s safe in the Mac world. Is Dropbox a safe thing to

⏹️ ▶️ John install or is it now a CPU pig? How is iCloud working these days? What

⏹️ ▶️ John email applications should people use? And then accounting for their special needs, yada yada, like do they need an application

⏹️ ▶️ John that has dynamic text and it syncs with their iOS devices? It’s a surprisingly complicated problem. So there’s

⏹️ ▶️ John no clear answer, but my particular technique is get them all set, essentially.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like the other end of the spectrum is, just give them a bare computer and then stand back.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I do not endorse that plan.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, any thoughts on

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this? No, I mean, Tiff sets up her own stuff and Adam doesn’t have a Mac

⏹️ ▶️ John yet. Yep, like Adam would let you set up his computer for him. Just wait, it’s not gonna let you near it. If

⏹️ ▶️ John he knows how to use it at all, which is still up for debate, It’ll be interesting to see if either the two of you can actually

⏹️ ▶️ John successfully teach your children how to use a computer, because I have failed twice now.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, for whatever it’s worth, he does use his iPad very well and without a lot of explanation.

⏹️ ▶️ John I have, that’s not a computer, we already covered that. Oh, shots fired. I don’t mean to, but yeah, like my kids

⏹️ ▶️ John use their iOS devices and they don’t really know how to use them, but they know so much more about how to

⏹️ ▶️ John use their iPads than they do about how to use a Mac or God forbid a PC. There’s computers, They’re just

⏹️ ▶️ John not interested in them at all. So, I’ve taken to the watch too, surprisingly well. They can do

⏹️ ▶️ John more with their watch than I can. Like they know how to like text people from their watch and respond and like, they just,

⏹️ ▶️ John I’d never showed them any of this and they just use it. And I think the watch is not intuitive at all. So I’m glad to see they’re figuring

⏹️ ▶️ John that out. It’s just that they just have no interest in computers or email or any of that I’ll be able to.

#askatp: Reducing white-dude ignorance

⏹️ ▶️ John stuff.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Finally, Bree McNish writes, hey, what resources, and I’m paraphrasing here,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey what resources have helped us become slightly less ignorant white dudes?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was kind of the premise of what she was saying or what they were saying. It was

⏹️ ▶️ Casey not verbatim. So for me, it’s just listening, particularly to

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, but listening in general to not just John, but anyone who is not

⏹️ ▶️ Casey like me and believing them when they say that my experience is the following. And

⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the most obvious thing. I try to add

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and inject more and more voices into my, say, like Twitter timeline

⏹️ ▶️ Casey and stuff like that that are not like me, both in terms of interest, in terms of the way I look,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey etc. But I don’t have any really awesome answers for this.

⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, is it we’re on a streak of answering questions we’ve answered before.

⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, so the my whole pitch has always been find

⏹️ ▶️ John somebody talking about some issues that you’re not familiar with, but want to learn more about.

⏹️ ▶️ John And I mean, I’m using the Twitter thing of like, follow them on Twitter, but whatever it may be, if you’re looking at them on Facebook

⏹️ ▶️ John or any sort of social network or whatever, and just be a receiver. Don’t engage

⏹️ ▶️ John in conversation in the beginning anyway. Don’t like don’t take it as an opportunity to interact or ask questions

⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Just be just be there receiving what they’re putting out

⏹️ ▶️ John and do that for a long time. And you will because you take the pressure off yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John to have to respond or to view it from the beginning as an engagement with the person, you will prevent

⏹️ ▶️ John yourself from doing a lot of boneheaded things. You will prevent yourself from getting defensive because it’ll be like TV. Like

⏹️ ▶️ John you can yell back to the TV, but you know, it’s just a one way experience. the picture comes to you and you watch it and either like it

⏹️ ▶️ John or you don’t just being exposed to different people’s point of views and experiences in a situation

⏹️ ▶️ John where you do not expect there’s no expectation of yourself to engage or respond

⏹️ ▶️ John or debate or do anything like that. You will learn things that way. And I’ve said that

⏹️ ▶️ John same thing many times before. The one twist I’ll add now it’s not really a twist, but

⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a project that I’ve been working on for a little while, which is, you know, a more concrete

⏹️ ▶️ John version of this because that device is kind of vague. So I follow people on Twitter and I have, I’m a completionist.

⏹️ ▶️ John I read everyone’s tweets and so I’m constantly trimming my follows. If I feel like

⏹️ ▶️ John there are too many tweets going by somebody who’s particularly robust, I’ll unfollow again. Don’t

⏹️ ▶️ John take it personally. If I unfollow you, it doesn’t mean I’m not friends with you. Just means you’re tweeting a lot, like whatever. That’s how I manage

⏹️ ▶️ John my follower list. And I’ve had a policy for several years now, which is

⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re adding someone to follow, prefer prefer adding somebody who’s not a white

⏹️ ▶️ John tech dude. Uh, for me, that’s like 90% of the people who I follow, right? And

⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to alter the percentage. And on the flip side, if you’re unfollowing somebody because, because

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re verbose or because you feel like you’re being overwhelmed by tweets, prefer to unfollow

⏹️ ▶️ John a white tech dude. And what I’m trying to do through these two simple rules of like, they’re not hard and

⏹️ ▶️ John fast rules. They’re just guidelines. And just saying like, if you have a choice between them, maybe make that choice is over time

⏹️ ▶️ John shift the percentage of people I follow to to be like the percentage of white

⏹️ ▶️ John tech dudes that I follow to be lower than it was before. And this is a very slow process. And I didn’t do some radical

⏹️ ▶️ John thing of like, I’m unfollowing everybody. And I’m just following, you know, different kinds of people didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t do that at all. Because I feel like that’s that wouldn’t work for me. It’s too radical. But this gradual thing of just two simple

⏹️ ▶️ John rules applied over time. And I don’t follow and unfollow that often. But over the course of a year or two,

⏹️ ▶️ John I think I follow, you know, five or six new people who are not white tech dudes,

⏹️ ▶️ John and unfollow five or six white tech dudes and start shifting the balance. Again,

⏹️ ▶️ John with the same rules about if you’re following people and you’re not familiar with their

⏹️ ▶️ John point of view, or the things that they tweet about or whatever, don’t engage for the first year or two.

⏹️ ▶️ John Just just read their tweets, and maybe they infuriate you because you don’t agree with it, fine, then unfollow them, like don’t make yourself

⏹️ ▶️ John sad. But if something you want to learn more about, just start exposing yourself to it because people

⏹️ ▶️ John have lots of things to say. And if you prevent yourself from being your own worst enemy,

⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t help but broaden your worldview.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Fracture, and Backblaze, and we will see you next

⏹️ ▶️ Marco week!

Ending theme

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin cause

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Margo and Casey

⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him cause it was accidental,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can

⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re

⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them At

⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M

⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Anti-Marco Armen

⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s

⏹️ ▶️ John accidental

⏹️ ▶️ Casey They didn’t

⏹️ ▶️ John mean to accidentally check for more podcasts

⏹️ ▶️ John in so

⏹️ ▶️ Casey long

Post-show: Ronin

⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can talk about Ronin if you’d

⏹️ ▶️ John like. Yeah, we’re going to hear the report.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So, to set some context, I asked Mike to do a

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mike at the Movies with me of the something like late 90s, no, it was early 90s, I don’t know,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey something in the 1990s movie Ronin. And this, I don’t remember if this was spurned, I believe

⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was spurned by you talking about heist movies for Top Four.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I watched Ronin again with Mike, and I’ve seen it many, many, many,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, many times. But I watched it and tried to come at it like

⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of honestly, if, I don’t know if that’s the right word for it, but I tried to imagine what it would be like to have

⏹️ ▶️ Casey watched this for the first time and not have all the baggage that I have of just fricking loving

⏹️ ▶️ Casey this movie. And the conclusion that I came to, spoiler alert, is that

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love Ronin, as I always have, but it’s not a very good movie.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I had asked Marco to, ask is also being generous to myself,

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I basically told Marco he needs to include this on his list of heist

⏹️ ▶️ Casey movies, and he rightfully ignored me. But then you did end up watching it, and

⏹️ ▶️ Casey we didn’t have a chance to discuss it. So I would love to know, Marco, what did you think of Ronin?

⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought that your treatment of it on analog was pretty fair. Okay, good. With all the incredibly

⏹️ ▶️ Marco long car chase scenes, I thought, I can see why Casey likes this movie.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I actually, I didn’t think it was a fantastic movie, but it wasn’t that bad. I overall

⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought it was a decent movie. I enjoyed watching it. One thing I liked a lot about it is

⏹️ ▶️ Marco how little gets explained in dialogue or even in display, like showing you.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So much of the movie is based on subtext or just

⏹️ ▶️ Marco figuring stuff out that happened off-screen at a different time or that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t explicitly stated or explicitly shown. And I found that interesting. In

⏹️ ▶️ Marco many ways, it was kind of brave. brave like a movie for grownups. Yeah, like like to to assume

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ll figure stuff out and not have to like hold your hand through the whole

⏹️ ▶️ John thing. You should watch Siriana.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, I don’t know. I mean,

⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a joke. That’s like the ultimate movie that doesn’t explain things to you and people hate it because like I don’t know what’s going

⏹️ ▶️ Marco on. Yeah, this this I think walked the line for me like this is just about as much of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that as I can figure out like so anything that’s more more subtle

⏹️ ▶️ Marco than this, I probably would have a problem following,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey but

⏹️ ▶️ Marco this I actually followed pretty well, I think I got most of it. And as you mentioned, there

⏹️ ▶️ Marco are certain things, like movie tricks, like one of the things, one of the times said,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, you got your instructions from the man in the wheelchair. And so your movie-watching

⏹️ ▶️ Marco brain thinks, we’re gonna see this person later, this is gonna be a character that comes up, and they just never come

⏹️ ▶️ Marco up again. And there’s references like that, references to people and places and events that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that the characters will use occasionally in dialogue that in any other movie that would be like

⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was there for a reason that reason will come up later like it’s like they they drop these breadcrumbs and they go

⏹️ ▶️ Marco pick them all up late and this one like drops breadcrumbs that it never picks up because that’s just how people talk sometimes

⏹️ ▶️ Marco like sometimes you just don’t get things resolved you don’t get things explained you don’t you don’t know what they’re talking

⏹️ ▶️ Marco about sometimes and it just stays that way and I found that pretty good one of my favorite

⏹️ ▶️ Marco scenes is is the make out in the car scene. Interesting.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco So he kisses her as a cover for something, and then you could tell the decision

⏹️ ▶️ Marco process in her head of she’s like, first she kind of wipes her lips because they’re wet. And

⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could tell she’s like, all right, I’m gonna take more of this, and just takes it into her own hands. And then

⏹️ ▶️ Marco two seconds, and cut, that’s it. And you never see any other part of that

⏹️ ▶️ Marco relationship in the romantic context. All that stuff is like, it’s very subtle.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco They give you like two thirds of what you would get, of what you’d get in any other movie. Like,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco they give you two thirds of the explanation that you would get, or the elaboration in any other movie.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s just enough that you get what’s going on and it’s actually kind of

⏹️ ▶️ Marco more intellectually fun to be a viewer of that kind of movie, I think.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I presume you’ve seen this a hundred times.

⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t seen it that much. I think I haven’t seen it in a long time. I mean, I think maybe only seen it two or

⏹️ ▶️ John three times. And I remember being middle of the road on it. Like I enjoyed

⏹️ ▶️ John it. I liked the performances. I like the sort of tension in a lot of those sort of character driven scenes where

⏹️ ▶️ John they’re, you know, these people are in a higher high pressure situation and have doubts about each other. That I

⏹️ ▶️ John always go for that type of thing. I didn’t think it was particularly,

⏹️ ▶️ John you know, sort of terse or subtle or difficult to follow, but I tend to

⏹️ ▶️ John like movies that are obnoxiously that way. Again, I’m a big fan of Siriana,

⏹️ ▶️ John but I understand why most people hate it. I tend not to recommend it to people because it’s not everyone’s cup of tea.

⏹️ ▶️ Marco You seem like you wanna be intellectually punished by a movie.

⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s like people who, games like Myst, right?

⏹️ ▶️ John And that whole sort of puzzle solving type game. I’ve played a lot of those games, but I’m not that

⏹️ ▶️ John into them. Or some people are like, give me the hardest puzzle you have in the world. Like I just the more

⏹️ ▶️ John obscure and difficult it is, the more they like it. So I can I can understand why people appreciate that. But I would

⏹️ ▶️ John not choose to play a game that that would say, missed this for babies. Try this one.

⏹️ ▶️ John Like a lot of people trying to get me into The Witness, right, which I think is kind of a cool game. And I played a little bit of but that’s above my

⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t want to be I don’t want puzzles to be that integral to a game and to challenge

⏹️ ▶️ John me to that degree. But with movies, I tend to like all the things you just described are important

⏹️ ▶️ John aspects of movies that I like. So I did like that aspect of Ronin. But on the other hand, it also

⏹️ ▶️ John read to me in my recollection of it, which is somewhat vague is a little bit kind of

⏹️ ▶️ John mainstream middle of the road action movie with a little bit of flair. And that’s not really my particular

⏹️ ▶️ John genre.

⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey So

⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m here.

⏹️ ▶️ John We can find out what did what did I think of Ronin?

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you looking at letterboxd or whatever?

⏹️ ▶️ John Of course. I rate every movie that I watch on Letterboxd and when I first

⏹️ ▶️ John used the service, I went through and tried to retroactively rate every movie I had ever seen in my entire

⏹️ ▶️ John life, which is extremely difficult to do. And if I rewatch a movie, I adjust the rating.

⏹️ ▶️ John So I have a more up-to-date thing. Let’s look for predictions before I find it.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are we out of? Five, 10?

⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah,

⏹️ ▶️ Marco five stars. Three. probably liked it a little bit, but you’re probably also very

⏹️ ▶️ Marco harsh with your ratings and very stingy with your

⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey stars.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey So good point. Good

⏹️ ▶️ Marco point.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m going to say two. I could go either way, but I’m sticking with my

⏹️ ▶️ John three. All right. Survey says three and a half. Oh, all right.

⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, look

⏹️ ▶️ John at me go. All right. So, but that was not based on a rewatch. That’s like based on my memory of it. So I

⏹️ ▶️ John bet if I watch it today, I would probably downgrade to three or something, but I don’t know. I haven’t seen it in a long time. So there’s definitely

⏹️ ▶️ John aspects that I liked of it. And that is, that is pretty high For me, I am very stingy with my stars.

⏹️ ▶️ John He said, surprising no one. Yeah, exactly. It’s not that I’m stingy. It’s just that I feel like I want to use

⏹️ ▶️ John the whole range. Although they don’t let you give zero. Which I tried to do recently

⏹️ ▶️ John after a movie that I watched that I do not recommend anyone else watch.