360: Big Hole in the Middle
09 Jan 2020John’s Pro Display XDR and new app (!), Salt’s Apple TV remote, and the untimely death of a 16-inch MacBook Pro.
Episode Description:
- Intro: Casey was not consulted
- Follow-up:
- Boot camp on external drives
- Dual-booting with Bluetooth (via Robert Watkins)
- 2019 Mac Pro speaker module cable
- Removing the Mac Pro case while it's running
- Asian ladybeetle
- Full-resolution iCloud photo sharing
- KBase article (via Kyles the Gray)
- Great summary photos
- Swift is a 🍆
- John's new app, Front and Center
- Salt remote for Apple TV (via David Roessli)
- John's Pro Display XDR
- Marco's vacation tech experiences
- Post-show: Casey's Disney Trip
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Chapters
- Intro
- Rapid-fire follow-up 🖼️
- Sponsor: Techmeme Ride Home
- More on Swift-🍆
- Front and Center 🖼️
- Sponsor: Hover
- Salt Apple TV remote 🖼️
- John’s Pro Display XDR
- BTW, it’s “Front and Center” 🖼️
- Sponsor: Away (code accidentaltech)
- Marco’s vacation 🖼️
- Ending theme
- Casey goes to Disneyworld
Intro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What kind of asshole releases a Swift app without having asked me any questions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about anything? I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not asking you any… You were in the same Slack where we were talking about this for like three days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, did you use RixSwift or PrescriptionSwift or whatever it is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No. How about, did you use the Combine?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been using Combine a little bit lately and it’s pretty good until it very, very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much isn’t. It’s the story of Apple’s everything these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just like SwiftUI, right? It’s like, yeah, this is pretty fun. And then you hit a wall, you’re like, oh, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think CGP Grey has done the most perfect canonical version of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh, you know? Oh. Oh. Yep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that is both Combine slash Combine, yeehaw, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SwiftUI. But I’m jumping ahead. I’m jumping ahead. I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just. Yeehaw. Marco’s doing City 17 Combine, right? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So John, did you use SwiftUI? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, we’re jumping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John ahead, man. We’re jumping
⏹️ ▶️ John ahead. I intentionally shortened the follow-up so we can get to the topic. So we’ll have plenty of time to talk about it.
Rapid-fire follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me about boot camp
⏹️ ▶️ John boot camp on external drives I talked about my
⏹️ ▶️ John battles with that on a recent episode a couple suggestions Actually, this was something I discovered
⏹️ ▶️ John in my research, but maybe we forgot to talk about it There’s a program called a win to USB
⏹️ ▶️ John W I n to USB Which according to its website is the best way and the best?
⏹️ ▶️ John The best free windows to go creator which allows you to install and run a fully functional Windows of,
⏹️ ▶️ John God, I love this writing, it allows you to install and run a fully functional Windows on external
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I mean, I get what they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John saying. Like, do you have, my Windows is broken? Anyway, it’s a utility that lets you
⏹️ ▶️ John make bootable USB things with Windows on them. And Alexi tweeted that he likes Rufus
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of Win to USB, which does a similar job where basically you give it a USB storage device
⏹️ ▶️ John and it can make it into a bootable thing, which used to be more complicated, but apparently it’s less complicated with Windows 10.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Brad asked, once you have the boot thing enabled, like I talked
⏹️ ▶️ John about, you know, you go into the, you boot into a recovery mode and you change the security setting to say, please let my Mac boot
⏹️ ▶️ John from external drives. Does that fix the bootcamp utility? Maybe the issue all along was the
⏹️ ▶️ John bootcamp utility saw that I had the security setting set and wouldn’t let me install an external drive because it knew I couldn’t boot from it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Answer to that is no, it does not fix bootcamp. Even with the setting changed to allow booting from external drives,
⏹️ ▶️ John the bootcamp setup assistant is like, nope, no can do with external drives.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. I’m so excited to know this bit of information.
⏹️ ▶️ John You wanna learn about Win to USB and Rufus? Yay. Someday you’re gonna have to make a
⏹️ ▶️ John drive that lets you boot Windows on your Mac and you’re gonna be glad that you know about Rufus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The sick thing is you’re probably right. You really are.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got a lot of tweets from people who were like, I heard your story and coincidentally I had a time,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had occasion to do the same thing after hearing your story, and it still took me five hours, and I had to read 20 different instructions
⏹️ ▶️ John and tweak things. So it’s apparently still not as easy as it should be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. You know, you’ve got to have something that you’re interested in talking about, because that is the quickest we’ve blown through any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow-up item in at least months, but that’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is there just traditional follow-up, which is like tidbits of information about past things, not entire topics smuggled
⏹️ ▶️ John into the follow-up section? Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me about Bluetooth and rebooting into different OSes.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was another one of my complaints, like I’d reboot into Windows and it would not see my Bluetooth peripherals and you’d have to turn them off and
⏹️ ▶️ John back on again, despite the fact that they had previously been paired with my Mac running Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Robert Watkins wrote in to say, the secret to dual booting of Bluetooth is to shut down the computer, not
⏹️ ▶️ John just restart it. The Mac seems to tell devices to disconnect when it shuts down, but not on restarts. Without
⏹️ ▶️ John that, they attempt to reconnect for a couple of minutes. If you shut down, however, they’ll pair with any previously paired device, including your
⏹️ ▶️ John rebooted into Windows Mac. So that makes sense, and that totally works, rather than restarting to shut down, because
⏹️ ▶️ John what you want is your peripherals to give up looking for your Mac that has gone away and
⏹️ ▶️ John has been replaced by a doppelganger running Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so tell me about the Mac Pro speaker module. I believe the context for this was that there were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no cables within the computer, is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, and there’s one buried in there. This is in the iFixit teardown. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the exact step that shows
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I think it’s alongside the RAM modules or these little covers they have, or the little RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John shed. It’s kind of like a carport for your RAM, like a little hood over it. In between
⏹️ ▶️ John the two of them is another little block that looks like the same size and shape. And if you pull that thing off, you see that is actually attached
⏹️ ▶️ John with one tiny little like two inch long cable to the thing. You can’t see it when
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s on there because it just looks like it’s mounted flush. But if you do pull it off underneath, you see there’s a cable attaching it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely at least one cable in the Mac Pro, but very well hidden.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Quinn Nelson has some information about Mac Pro case removal while it’s running. Can you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tell me about that, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m talking about on the last show, I was very convinced that you could not take the case off
⏹️ ▶️ John of your Mac Pro because it would just shut off and it just doesn’t want to have the case off when it’s on. Well, Quinn Nelson
⏹️ ▶️ John is braver than I am and did a bunch of experiments where he would have his computer turned on and then say,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what, I’m taking the case off. What’s gonna happen? Well, the first thing that happens, and you can watch in the video,
⏹️ ▶️ John is when you twist that thing, the fans spin up to 100%. So if you want to hear
⏹️ ▶️ John what the fans are like, which by the way, I still haven’t heard in any real time scenario, I didn’t try this experiment myself,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I still haven’t heard my fans at full speed But if you want to hear them start to threaten to take that case off and they go
⏹️ ▶️ John vroom up to full speed You’re still pretty like Hushy like they’re louder,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they sounded in the video that you know the same kind of tone But then once you do that if you start trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to pull the case up You can pull it up an inch or two and the computer doesn’t turn off so I guess that interconnect
⏹️ ▶️ John on top Doesn’t actually cut power to the machine. There’s some other interconnect there that we’ll get to
⏹️ ▶️ John in a second, but it doesn’t actually cut power. So you pull the case up like an inch or two, and the fans are still
⏹️ ▶️ John going crazy and your computer is still on. But of course you can’t actually lift it off because of the things
⏹️ ▶️ John we talked about yesterday, the little rim of the case on the bottom will hit the power cable and
⏹️ ▶️ John any other cables that are connected to your computer and you can’t get past them. So there you go. It doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John like its case to be off, but it will continue running under protest with it lifted about an inch up.
⏹️ ▶️ John And an anonymous Apple genius wrote in to say The Mac Pro has a bypass to be powered on without the case
⏹️ ▶️ John attached. The round part on top of the frame has some sort of Hall effect sensor, he’s assuming,
⏹️ ▶️ John or she is assuming, as we have a guide describing how to apply a magnet to that portion of the circle to bypass
⏹️ ▶️ John the case requirement to power the computer on so we can check diagnostic LEDs.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t have a guide with me right now, but as far as I know, the computer will power on normally for as long as you leave a strong enough
⏹️ ▶️ John magnet on that spot and they use one of those little square magnets used to magnetize a screwdriver. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty weird. Where if you’re working on it, you may have to
⏹️ ▶️ John futz with it when the case is off. And apparently, you do need to sort of defeat the safety mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever to allow that to happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s interesting. That makes sense. Marco, you have a few quick hits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. The ladybug that I killed with a 30 watt Apple USB-C power adapter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Speaking of quick hits. Was not actually a ladybug. So that makes it OK now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. It was the it was an Asian lady beetle, which is apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the more like nuisance types of things. And it’s funny. I was able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to so people kept telling me like, oh, yeah, if it’s ladybug, you should never kill a ladybug. Some people said you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should never kill any bugs in your house because if you put them outside, then birds can eat them. And that’s that’s nice. A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of people were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John well, if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ladybug, you shouldn’t kill them because they’re great and they eat aphids. But if it’s a Asian lady beetle,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you should kill it because they’re awful as it turns out it was still under the USBC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power break on my desk so I just looked at the power brick and looked at it and sure enough there is the characteristic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black M on its head indicating it is an Asian lady beetle and therefore it was if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the type of person who thinks it’s okay to kill any bugs in your house it is apparently one of the ones that you should do that for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Secondly I had made fun of John last week for the use of the verb wanging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to describe a magsafe cable wanging around. It’s still funny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I had said that was not a real word. At least I couldn’t find a verb definition of the word wang. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was spelling it without an H. It turns out there is a verb, W-H-A-N-G.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You didn’t hear the H when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still don’t think it fits. So it’s according to the Apple Dictionary to make or produce a resonant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise as in the cheerleader wanged on a tambourine or to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco strike or throw an object heavily and loudly such as he wanged down the receiver.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The power brick. Yeah so I wanged down the power brick onto the lady beetle but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t think a magsafe cable is capable of wanging around so I stand by the fact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that that use of the word was incorrect but it is in fact a verb.
⏹️ ▶️ John What do you think of wanging around as in flopping around like a wang which is how I meant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it? That makes a lot more sense. Certainly
⏹️ ▶️ John more poetic and apt because you know it’s if you’ve seen the little thing. It’s kind of like springy and short,
⏹️ ▶️ John wanging around over there, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we definitely need to move on. So we got a little bit of feedback about sharing photos in full resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A friend of the show, Kyle’s the gray had some information on this. Apparently, I’m still not entirely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clear on what the story is here, but I guess if you share via iCloud doing like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quasi gallery sort of thing, it’s not actually gallery, but there’s some way you can do a VI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cloud that will give you the option of sharing full res and even full metadata. And then Mario
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Panagetti, I hope I pronounced that right, also tweeted about this and conveniently included
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a series of screenshots on how he was able to make this work and like a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set of summary photos. So I will put in the KBASE article about it, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is what Kyle sent, and also the series of photos in the tweet from Mario
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well, if you would like to see more about
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a lot like the thing we did discuss, which is the thing where you can do a mail attachment and it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually attach the thing, it just attaches a link and puts them up in an iCloud link, right? This is exactly like that
⏹️ ▶️ John and you might think it’s the same thing, but apparently it’s not. I’ve never actually done this, so I haven’t seen this UI, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you do that with a photo from within the Photos app or from like iCloud.com apparently, it will
⏹️ ▶️ John do the same thing. And like you have to say, copy iCloud link or send iCloud link or I don’t know, you do something that
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like you’re about to mail somebody a link, but instead it actually gets the photos directly
⏹️ ▶️ John on the server. This is the whole thing we were talking about before. It doesn’t pull them down to the local device. It will copy them on the server
⏹️ ▶️ John from your photo library to theirs. And I think it will also try to preserve like all of the metadata, all
⏹️ ▶️ John of the edits, like non-destructively save all of them. Like, you know, as rich a copy as you can imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ John not just like burn the thing down to a thumbnail or something and send it over to them. So I’m kind of excited to
⏹️ ▶️ John try this because it has most of the features I want. It’s just obviously not exposed in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ John most people know about it, but now that I do, I’m going to hunt for it and give it a go. Obviously, it only works if you’re sending
⏹️ ▶️ John it to another person who has Apple photos, which is fine in my case, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if not, then you’re left making an attachment or whatever.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we got a little bit of feedback about whether or not Swift is a dick. And Mark Sands wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying it’s totally a dick. Property wrappers muddy the waters with respect to Swift annotations.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not going to go into details about this because it’ll take me three hours. So if you’re familiar with Swift, hopefully this will make sense.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If not, Don’t worry about it. So anyway, property wrappers muddy the water with respect to Swift annotations, which I think is somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. Protocols with associated types requires type ratio for generic protocols. Oh, I could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go on for hours about this, but I won’t. You’re welcome. Protocols with associated types are the bane of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my existence and are so frustrating. But Mark continues, but SwiftUI really wants to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generic protocols. So language in the standard library had to do something to make the type system bearable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is where John gets all smug. Another example of this that I’ve run into recently as I’ve been doing some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey combined slash combine work is erasing to any publisher, which is kind of the same story all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over again. Mark continues, opaque result types adds an additional
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definition to the sum keyword. And then finally, Mark says, Swift used to be a language that didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be intimidating for new programmers. But if a junior programmer wants to jump into Swift UI while being forced to use combined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with at state, at published, at observable object, et cetera, then the language becomes infinitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more intimidating because the advanced features of the language show themselves in ways that become very unattractive. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought that was a pretty good summary. Now, again, I love Swift. I think Swift is great. I do not think Swift is perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I thought this was a really, really good summary of why Swift is a big fat jerk. I
⏹️ ▶️ John have two objections to that summary. The first is opaque result types are great. You actually dislike opaque result types? That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a perfect example of a pragmatic feature in response to actual programmer needs that I
⏹️ ▶️ John think is implemented in a fairly nice way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, that’s fair. I think I was, my agreement was more in the summary at the end.
⏹️ ▶️ John The summary at the end, like I think Swift is doing a pretty good job
⏹️ ▶️ John of adhering to the Perl credo of, or the play, I heard this first in Perl, I don’t know if it came from Perl, but easy
⏹️ ▶️ John things should be easy, hard things should be possible. I think easy things in Swift are easy. You know, there’s some valid complaint
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, look, you’re gonna end up using the standard library, and the standard library uses a lot of this stuff, so it’s to some degree you have to understand
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Kind of, but you don’t like, all this stuff with like, oh, I need to, everything needs to be done in
⏹️ ▶️ John a protocol and I have to use generics. You don’t. Like if easy things are easy, if you have an easy program
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re a beginning programmer, you don’t have to make 20 different protocols and then type erasing protocol
⏹️ ▶️ John wrappers so you can use them through your, you don’t have to do that. You can just write classes and
⏹️ ▶️ John hook them up and it will work fine. But in Swift, hard things are possible. And all of these
⏹️ ▶️ John really complicated features, although it can be argued that some of them do actually get a little bit ugly and complicated and hard to parse with
⏹️ ▶️ John your eyeballs, hard things are possible in Swift and becoming more possible all the time. So I get the sentiment.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s this thing that every language struggles with, but I still think Swift is doing a good job
⏹️ ▶️ John to wrangle the complexity that it necessarily has to take on for being what it is. DR. CHRIS
⏹️ ▶️ John DENNAN I think you mean to wrangle. DR. MICHAEL O’BRIEN And I think it’s going in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the right direction. DR. CHRIS DENNAN Well, funny you say that, because Benjamin Mayo wrote in and said, it’s totally getting better. Whilst the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey science bike shedding threads sure do exist on the forum, I’d point out that it is simply not representative
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of actual output of the evolution process and what is actually getting changed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the language. So if you just look at the most recent handful of proposals, you can see a much more real-world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey story of Swift’s lowercase e evolution. And Ben Shuman provided a screenshot, which we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to include, but suffice to say, yeah, that it backs up what he was saying. Swift definitely has its issues,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think it’s unfair to say that the direction of the language is on the wrong track, which is pretty much what you were just saying, John. John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Grymes You can say, like, yeah, make the easy things easy. You don’t have to use the hard things. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all true, like, like 90% of the time. The problem is that in real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world use of a language, you do sometimes have to dive into other people’s code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you do have to somehow, sometimes look at the way some things are implemented in libraries or whatever else, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the details or advanced features of a language are used in sample
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code or required to take advantage of certain APIs, or, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happens all the time, some compiler error is yelling at you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for something that maybe you’re kind of accidentally using an advanced feature or it thinks you’re trying to use an advanced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature or the thing that you really want to do it seems really obvious and would be easy and some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the language requires light usage of an advanced feature and so the language designers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can tell themselves we’re letting the easy things stay easy and the language experts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and fans and enthusiasts can tell themselves, oh yeah, easy things are easy. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they know the hard things. So when they inadvertently run into one of the hard things or willfully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take one on themselves, they kind of ignore that, or they forget, they don’t realize.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very different when you are the swift novice or the person just trying to get something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done quickly and not trying to dive all the way into all this complicated stuff or, hell, the person just trying to write simple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco code because, guess what, that’s easier to read and maintain down the road by other people and your future self.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, for them, for all of them, slash us, the language is not that clean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The abstractions always leak. Always. No abstraction is ever perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco None of this complexity is ever 100% hidden from somebody. And so, all this crap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is behind the scenes, that is really complicated, and really intimidating, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just impossible for anybody but the most advanced programmers to really understand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that does leak out and that does impact the rest of us here and there or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequently even. It’s much better in my opinion and this is kind of why I don’t love Swift so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much. I much prefer languages where yeah maybe they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look as pretty as Swift in the ideal case. Like I write most of my code in Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and PHP. And C. None of which are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages that that look good on slides in presentations. But I care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about, can I fit this whole thing in my head? Obviously, I’ve had time to become an expert in these languages,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it’s kind of an unfair comparison of me to say this. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even when I was exploring new languages a few years ago, the one that kind of stuck with me was Go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I didn’t get too far into it. I use it for my crawlers, but I don’t use it for anything else. So I hardly ever actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write Go code, and I’ve actually forgotten most of what I learned place. But that, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go felt small in a good way. Like it felt like the language itself was not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco complicated. It was fairly trivial to, to fit most of it in my head.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can’t say that about Swift. And, and even now I’ve, I’ve actually used Swift way more than I’ve used go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really hard for me to understand all this stuff as I’m using it. I’m finding myself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco falling a bit behind in like the, the regular practical knowledge of what people are supposed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to know about the languages they’re using because a lot of this stuff I just don’t understand and frankly I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t really have the time or care to get to know it. Swift is a language that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is supposed to be mass market and it’s supposed to be easy for people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very quickly becoming, if it wasn’t already and I would kind of argue kind of always was this way, but it’s very quickly becoming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a language for language nerds. That’s a very different thing. Languages for language nerds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t usually become mainstream. I mean And this has market reasons why it’s kind of forced to be mainstream anyway, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages for language nerds are wonderful if you’re a language nerd, but if you’re not, they’re usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty hostile to everyone else. And I think Swift is very much that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, and the more complexity they layer onto it, the harder it gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually really become an expert in it and to fully understand what you’re doing in it. Whereas other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages make that a lot easier.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think an example of the right direction that is heading in, you mentioned like, you know, trying to use the simple parts
⏹️ ▶️ John of the language and getting a weird error message, the work they’ve done to make the diagnostic stuff better. And all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’ve said, I agree with them in like 50% as severe versions, because I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift is that complicated. I don’t think it’s impossible for only experts to understand, but there’s a kernel of truth in everything that
⏹️ ▶️ John you said. And it certainly is more complicated than Objective-C, which is what you’re coming from in most ways.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think easy things are easier in Swift than they are in Objective-C. Maybe you’re just not like you said,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the people who are experts, they don’t realize where the pitfalls are. I’ll talk about that a little bit later when I talk about app development.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, uh, it’s every decision I see them make and every design
⏹️ ▶️ John change I see them make, I think it’s heading away from what you described and towards where you would want it to
⏹️ ▶️ John be. There is, like I said, last episode, no escaping the fact that it is wedded to its types.
⏹️ ▶️ John Uh, and you know what I think is for efficiency reasons, but also because people who are working
⏹️ ▶️ John on Swift are really into types. But within those bounds, within
⏹️ ▶️ John those constraints, it is trying mightily and I think doing a pretty good job
⏹️ ▶️ John avoiding becoming C++, basically. It’s never gonna be Objective-C or Lua
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything like that because it’s, the problem space that it is addressing is
⏹️ ▶️ John so much bigger. And you can say, well, that’s a mistake. It shouldn’t try to address such a big problem space. But if it’s going to replace Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ John even alone, that is a huge problem space because it needs interoperability with Objective-C and interoperability with
⏹️ ▶️ John all of Apple’s APIs and everything, yada, yada, yada. So I am still much more optimistic about the
⏹️ ▶️ John language and having limited experience with it now, I was even more pleasantly surprised using it
⏹️ ▶️ John that it did not drive me up a wall.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think another thing that you’re not considering, Marco, is how unfriendly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Objective-C is from a syntactic or perhaps a visual level.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can only speak for myself, but coming from a C-sharp background at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time I was starting to learn Objective-C. I would even argue coming from a straight C background,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way Objective-C looks with the brackets and message passing and all that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is extremely off-putting and very, very unlike almost any other language.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, yes, all the nerds are coming out and saying, what is it, Rust or something? No, not Rust. It was older than that. What was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco simple talk?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Small talk. Yeah, there you go. I don’t care. Whatever. to do this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was the first one that I had run into in my life and it looked nothing like anything else. And that was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was really off putting and I still don’t think it looks particularly pretty and that is a silly thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be upset about. I’ll be the first to tell you, but when something just looks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really different than what you’re used to, that’s a pretty big hill to climb. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, for you, Marco, and I think even for me or John, we are familiar enough with objective C that, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we can see the matrix, you know, we don’t see the little characters, we can see the woman in the red dress or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But when you can’t yet see the matrix, it is a very intimidating
⏹️ ▶️ Casey language. I would argue that although the breadth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Objective-C is probably narrower than the breadth of Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the same time, there’s far more weird, odd, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting things – now, that can be both good and bad interesting – but weird, odd, and interesting things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be done in Objective-C by virtue of the way that Objective-C runtime works. Things like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey swizzling, for example, like, yes, you can sort of kind of do that in Swift, but that’s, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it feels like more of an Objective-C thing. What, what’s swizzling? What is that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like class clusters. Class clusters is a perfect example of a thing that you probably don’t have to know about if you use Objective-C,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you’re using them all the time, whether you know them or not. And if you get an error message from them, or you encounter behavior that
⏹️ ▶️ John has to do with class clusters, you’re like, what the hell is a class cluster? Because It doesn’t come up in when you’re writing your
⏹️ ▶️ John Objective-C, but they do use it and you do benefit from it. But still, Objective-C is so much smaller language
⏹️ ▶️ John than Swift. There’s no debating that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I don’t debate that. I agree with what you’re saying, that the bracket syntax and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is off-putting at first. And Swift is very clearly designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to look really nice with Apple’s current design aesthetic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hide everything in the junk drawer. the top really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clean and bury everything. That’s Apple’s design. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not too much in the junk drawer in Swift. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John assignments to variables and conditionals and loops and objects and structures in Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no hidden junk there. The standard library does have some hidden junk, but if you’re just doing basic
⏹️ ▶️ John programming, it is much simpler than Java, than C, than C++,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s probably about as simple as Objective-C. It’s just that there’s so much more. As soon as you get into generics and protocols, that’s where
⏹️ ▶️ John the lid comes off and you are well past the complexity of Objective-C immediately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? When you’re first learning something, usually, you know, in this context of programming language,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this applies to lots of things. When you’re first learning something, the way you start learning a language usually is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco basically copy and paste. Like, you are looking at code samples or you’re writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your own, like, Hello World kind of, you know, basic programs, and you don’t fully understand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what everything does that you’re typing. what all the keywords mean, or what all the operators
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are doing that you’re typing, and then over time, you build an understanding of what you’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You go from copy and paste, or rigid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco steps that you’re following, to actually understanding what all these keywords are doing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually understanding what the syntax is, actually understanding what the error message is saying. Swift seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco optimized for that first stage of learning when you don’t fully understand it yet, and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just looking at source code on slides or copying things down from Stack Overflow. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you want to fully understand what’s happening, that’s when the depth and complexity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a language can either be a help or a hindrance. The C-based languages are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really simple. Like, there’s not a lot of depth there to find, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re such smaller and simpler languages. Whereas something as complicated as Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If something is going not quite the way you want, or if you have a weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco error message from the compiler or something, it can often be really hard to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out why is this happening, or how do I fix this? Because there is so much depth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past that surface.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s sort of true. I think like what John said a few minutes ago, like I agree to a point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, C-based languages, is C++ not a C-based language?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re off on Mars. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I agree with your sentiment, although I do view it as a C-based language. I completely agree,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey though. They are way out in past Mars, as far as I’m concerned. Be that as it may, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree with you to a point about error messaging in Swift. As John already mentioned, it is getting better over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another thing that I’ve noticed the hard way is that the less—well, let me rephrase that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you choose to include types
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and not rely on type inference in certain situations, that oftentimes will get you more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey explicit error messaging. Now that shouldn’t have to be the case. I should be able to use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey type inference always and forever, and I should still get good error messages. But I found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I split out like a kind of compound single line, so to speak, statement, Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I sprinkle in actual type declarations throughout something that’s giving me a very weird error,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey typically I can get to an actual error relatively quickly. Not always. Your point is still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fair. I just don’t agree with quite the extent of what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, even though I definitely agree with the spirit of what you’re saying. I know we could probably go on about this for hours, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we have other things to talk crowd.
Front and Center
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, apparently all we need for John to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write code in a language made more recently than what Vietnam
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was to get you a new Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John You joke, but that’s actually kind of true. Not just the Mac Pro, but the
⏹️ ▶️ John monitor, which we’ll talk about a little bit later. Having a big monitor and lots of space to do things really
⏹️ ▶️ John helped with, you know, having the umpteen things that you need open during app development, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Even more for me because I’ve got you know help windows and other stuff that you expect to be open So anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John context there is a post one of my at least one once or twice
⏹️ ▶️ John a year Posts on hypercritical.co where I explain this at length. I’m not gonna go through the whole blog post
⏹️ ▶️ John but the the gist of it is that With the Catalina transition, which I was forced
⏹️ ▶️ John to undergo because my new Mac Pro does not boot any earlier operating system of course we lost all our 32-bit apps. One
⏹️ ▶️ John of my 32-bit apps was DragThing, which was an app that came from Classic Mac OS and eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John was written in Cocoa, and Cocoa didn’t make it to 64-bit, and to rewrite it in 64-bit would require basically rewriting the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John thing from scratch using a different API. So DragThing didn’t make it to Catalina, which is sad
⏹️ ▶️ John for me because I used DragThing for a couple, it’s like mixed floating palettes on your screen. I used
⏹️ ▶️ John it for like a floating palette with a bunch of folders in it. I used it for a floating application switcher, which is also kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John like Classic Mac OS. And I also use this random obscure feature buried in the preferences
⏹️ ▶️ John of drag thing. And it was also in a bunch of other like Mac OS X utility apps
⏹️ ▶️ John back in the day, but drag thing is the one that I’ve been using
⏹️ ▶️ John recently that restores classic Mac OS window layering to a
⏹️ ▶️ John modern Mac OS. It’s a much easier one I could say, restores it to Mac OS X, but it’s just called Mac OS now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, what the hell is classic Mac OS window layering? In classic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS, oh God, I had to try to describe this in help text many times over and it never gets any easier,
⏹️ ▶️ John workshop this in a Slack channel trying to come up with an explanation. But it’s easier on a podcast because I can ramble.
⏹️ ▶️ John In classic macOS, if you clicked on a window of some application that wasn’t the current front most application,
⏹️ ▶️ John not only would that window come to the front, but every window belonging to that application would come to the front. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re in terminal and you would click on the corner of a Safari window, oh, Safari didn’t exist, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John just follow me here.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That window would come to the front,
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other Safari windows would come to the front. That’s how classic Mac OS worked from the
⏹️ ▶️ John advent of its multitasking, right? And I used classic Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John for 17 years, and as I said in my post about it, those were 17
⏹️ ▶️ John very formative years for me, right? So I really, really imprinted on that
⏹️ ▶️ John style of using it, and as discussed in the Windows of Syracuse County and other podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ John about my windowing, That’s how I basically, that’s how I organize my workspace. I have a bunch of windows that are in
⏹️ ▶️ John these kind of, you know, clusters in certain positions and certain ones poke out
⏹️ ▶️ John from behind other ones. And if I want to grab the switch to the other app, I don’t like alt tab my way
⏹️ ▶️ John over to it or any other, all my habits are ingrained on snag a corner of that thing. And even if that’s not the window
⏹️ ▶️ John you want, that’ll bring all your terminal windows to the front and you know where they are. So your mouse can already be on its way to the window that you
⏹️ ▶️ John do want. It’s just the way I work. Mac OS X of course changed that. Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John X you click a window just that window comes to the front. Now you can also click a dock icon and that will bring all
⏹️ ▶️ John the windows to the front but I don’t want to have to go all the way down to the dock because the whole point of my layout is to have them arranged so
⏹️ ▶️ John that the corners are near my car yeah yada anyway point is drag thing had that feature it’s just a random preference
⏹️ ▶️ John in there because it was also made by a classic Mac OS nerd like me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Drag thing is gone I wanted that feature to come back and believe me
⏹️ ▶️ John you said why don’t you just get used to the new way to do it. I did, like Mac OS X changed tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of things and I eventually got used to almost all of them, but a few of them hung on stubbornly
⏹️ ▶️ John and this is the one of the ones that hung on. And in particular, drag thing, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John drag thing had this in, if not the earlier utilities they used to do it, had a feature where
⏹️ ▶️ John you could hold down the shift key when you clicked to get the other behavior. So if you didn’t want all of the terminal
⏹️ ▶️ John windows to come forward, you just wanted the one terminal window, you could shift click it and you’d just get that one terminal when it’ll come forward,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Classic Mac OS didn’t have that feature, but this was an enhancement that I enjoyed. So anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted that back. So I talked to James Thompson, the author of Drag Thing, and I said, hey, you gonna port Drag Thing? He said,
⏹️ ▶️ John no. I said, hey, can you just make a tiny app that just has that feature with the window switching that it was
⏹️ ▶️ John like one checkbox in your giant application? He’s like, nah, that doesn’t sound like a thing I wanna do.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I talked to a bunch of other people, like, well, can you give me a hint on how that’s done? Because honestly, I had no idea like how
⏹️ ▶️ John any of that stuff works in Mac OS. This is sort of the realm of what we used to call system extensions
⏹️ ▶️ John or other things that modify the behavior of the system overall. You’re like, can you even do that from
⏹️ ▶️ John an app? Like in the iOS world, you wouldn’t think that you can write an iOS app, ship it on the store, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then someone would launch your application and it would change the way the multitasking switcher works in iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s not even conceivable. But on the Mac, that happens all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, so I had him give me some pointers about possible apis and I’m talking with other
⏹️ ▶️ John developer friends I know like, Hey, do you want to make this app? It’s a really simple Apple needs to do is change the window layering
⏹️ ▶️ John behavior somehow. Uh, and eventually, uh, my friend, a friend of mine that
⏹️ ▶️ John I, uh, used to work with back in the day when I worked at ebook company, uh, Lee Fyuk
⏹️ ▶️ John took me up on the offer and said, yeah, I can think I can make an app that does that. And so he’s like, here you go. What do you think
⏹️ ▶️ John of this? And he sent me the app and let me join the source code repo on GitHub.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it was an app that basically did what I described. It was just simple app, you launch it,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then all of a sudden this new window mode is in effect. And that was back in the fall, actually. I was like, oh, this is cool, my problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is solved now. He made this app for me, I’ll just launch it and it’ll be fine, but of course I couldn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John leave well enough alone, I really wanted to have a menu bar icon and not a dock icon, because I hate dock
⏹️ ▶️ John icons for things that are just running all the time, but I’m never gonna actually interact with the application. I don’t want it mucking
⏹️ ▶️ John up my doc. And it didn’t have the shift override, which meant that like, if I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John just one window to come to front, I basically had to quit the app. And that wasn’t good either. So
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually I think it was like over holiday break, I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John can, I don’t know, I look at, this is a small, simple application. I understand most of
⏹️ ▶️ John the source code. I could probably add those features, right? Lee added the
⏹️ ▶️ John menu bar thing for me. So that gave me a start. I’m like, okay, well, we’ve got a menu bar icon. And he added
⏹️ ▶️ John the hiding of the dock icon too. I’m like, well, we’re almost here. Like this is practically done. All I got to do is, well, I really want the menu bar
⏹️ ▶️ John icon to have a few other options in it. And I want to be able to option click on the menu bar icon to make it toggle
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing. And I want the shift click override. And so I spent some time mucking
⏹️ ▶️ John around with it and figuring out how to do those things, doing them in terrible, awful ways. And then having my developer friends look at it and tell
⏹️ ▶️ John me that it’s terrible and revising again and again. And eventually I drew
⏹️ ▶️ John an icon for it, for the menu bar. And eventually I got everything working the way I wanted.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was like, all right, well now I’m done with solving my problem. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m really close to having an actual complete application. And he wrote it in Objective-C, getting back to what we were discussing
⏹️ ▶️ John before. And I found that I didn’t particularly enjoy working in Objective-C. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John a big surprise to me, because my whole history is working in dynamic languages. But this is an example
⏹️ ▶️ John of a thing. Like I talked last week about how I want to have nothing to do with the type system, and I don’t find
⏹️ ▶️ John any interaction with type system benefits me in any way, because
⏹️ ▶️ John problems with types are not a problem that I have, which is totally true in dynamic languages. It just, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the point of dynamic languages. They just sort of, like, I’m used to an environment where for the most part, sane things happen
⏹️ ▶️ John and reasonable things, if you look at them, happen. And there’s a few edges, but if you work in any dynamic language, you learn
⏹️ ▶️ John those one or two edges, and in general, everything else works. Some languages have more edges than other. JavaScript in particular has
⏹️ ▶️ John more edges than your average dynamic language, but usually there’s not that many. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it just lets you forget about all that stuff. So I’m like, why do I have to deal with types? I
⏹️ ▶️ John just do what I want. Objective-C is this awkward mix of a
⏹️ ▶️ John language that’s trying to be chill with you about types. Being like, hey, it’s just of type ID, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s fine. Just send the message. It might work, might not. You can send a message
⏹️ ▶️ John to anything. And like I was discussing, I can send a message to nil. Like, it’s cool. Everything’s fine here in Objective-C.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I had a bug that I spent a long time on it. A bunch of people looked at it and I wish
⏹️ ▶️ John I had checked this in. This is my bad work habits, but like I had this buggy code sitting there and eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John I got it fixed and I just, I just committed the fix and I never committed the buggy one, so I can’t find out exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John what my bug was, but I’m pretty sure it was something along these lines. I was doing some
⏹️ ▶️ John bit masking to detect whether the shift key was held down. And there’s like umpteen different ways to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you like Google search for it, you find tons of bad, wrong, are very old answers because, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John this platform has a long history. But anyway, I was bit masking, like, to try to figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out if the shift key is down. And I was gonna use that in a conditional. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John was catching the result in a bool, all caps bool type. And no matter
⏹️ ▶️ John what happened, like, when I looked at the event, the shift key was never down. I’m like, you’re lying, I’m holding
⏹️ ▶️ John the shift key down. How is the shift key not down? So I ended up writing this whole other event handler that would just detect if the shift key was down,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that worked. See, that event handler is catching the shift key now. Why aren’t you catching if the shift key is down?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then I made this crazy solution where the global event handler would detect that the shift
⏹️ ▶️ John key is down and throw a switch. And then the other event handler would notice that switch was thrown and say, oh, I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ John that the other thing noticed that the shift key was down. Therefore, this must have been a shift click. And that had terrible races, as you can imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the events wouldn’t necessarily fire in the order that you wanted them to. And I eventually did a bunch of hacks to get it to work.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was awful. But I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working. Everything that I looked up in the documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John was telling me that it should have been working. I’m pretty sure what was happening was, I was doing a bit mask
⏹️ ▶️ John of this, you know, modifier bits thing, and I was catching the results in a bool, and the bool type
⏹️ ▶️ John is too short to hold the bit that was flipped on in the masked out thing. So like I was taking, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what it is, two 64-bit values, and the one was way out there in bit 38, and then it would catch
⏹️ ▶️ John the result in bool, which is like a, you know, a define or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John or type alias for like unsigned char or something, right? And it would just happily
⏹️ ▶️ John go, doot-do-do, here you go. Oh, I’m gonna take that value and put it into this one. Well, it’s all zeros. And the first
⏹️ ▶️ John eight bits are all zeros. And then I’d put it in a conditional. I’d be like, that bool is totally false.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it would never see the shift key. And it did this absolutely silently because Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ John is trying to be chill, but it is not a dynamic language. A dynamic language would be like, you’re doing a bit
⏹️ ▶️ John mask. Are there any bits flipped in that bit mask? Or is it all zero? any bits flipped if I evaluated
⏹️ ▶️ John the result of that in Boolean context, of course it’s going to be true because I’m a dynamic language and I’ll just coerce things in the way that you think
⏹️ ▶️ John makes sense. But a C-based language with Objective-C is like, pop, pop, pop, pop, take value, stick it into shorter
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, don’t complain. I think that’s what was going on. Certainly that matches the results
⏹️ ▶️ John that I was getting. If I had done that in Swift, Swift would have said, you can’t catch the result
⏹️ ▶️ John of that bit mask in a Boolean. That doesn’t make any sense. You fool you. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to be a Boolean, check if the result that bit mask is equal to zero or not equal to zero
⏹️ ▶️ John because that will do, you know, I’ll do type inference and say, okay, well, the bit is this wide and I’m comparing it to zero.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’ll be like a long zero or an int zero. I don’t even know, I’ll handle it for you. But the comparison equal
⏹️ ▶️ John or not equal is a Boolean result. And you can catch that in a bool or you can put that right into a conditional, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John All of this leads up to this app being written. And, you know, for the longest time,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the barriers was we just didn’t have an icon for it. Like we had a menu bar icon, but I didn’t have a dock icon. I’m like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the only barrier. I just needed a dock icon. And so I kept looking around for one I could reuse, and I couldn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John find anything. So I drew a dock icon. And then I was like, now everything’s done, right? I said, no, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to deal with Objective-C. So I started a new project in Xcode, and I rewrote the entire app in
⏹️ ▶️ John Objective-C. You mean Swift? Or Swift, yeah. I rewrote it in Swift, sorry. It’s not a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of code, and it was just a straight port, basically. Some parts got to be a little bit fun. Like the parts that were not
⏹️ ▶️ John just me calling a bunch of Apple API, like there was this very simple class that we made around the preferences
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And I got to rewrite that in Swift and I got to actually use some Swift features because I’m writing some of my own code, but
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly, it’s not that complicated. So I rewrote it in Swift, which made the program smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think made me feel more comfortable that I wasn’t producing any of those kind of errors
⏹️ ▶️ John that I just described. And the process of porting into Swift was surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ John pleasant. I thought it’d be like, oh, I’m gonna be going around putting type annotations on things and finding
⏹️ ▶️ John places where Objective-C didn’t care, but now Swift does care and I have to add a bunch of types and that was not what it was like
⏹️ ▶️ John at all. So first of all, calling into Apple’s API is from Swift. I know that Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John gone through a bunch of rounds of changing their API is like work with Swift and changing how the words are renamed and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John But me coming in at the end here after the last change, it was just blessed relief
⏹️ ▶️ John to see that there are less verbose and make more sense. And once you do two or three of them, you kind of know how
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to auto complete. I’m like, Oh, I can just look at that. I know how it’s going to be. I know they’re not going to repeat that word twice. So it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John going to be whatever dot main or whatever dot standard instead of the whole big wordy thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I know the half of that method,
⏹️ ▶️ John half of that message name is going to be a parameter and the other half is going to be the name and and auto complete really helps.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when you’re calling it to apples, apis, it’s fairly straightforward. Even when you have things like constants and stuff, the fact that you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John do the dot thing and you know, you begin your, your enum or constant or whatever with
⏹️ ▶️ John dot and it will know from type inference that what the rest of it is, you know, to type it out. And if you have the objective C
⏹️ ▶️ John code, you can just look up the help on it and then in the help thing just switch from Objective-C to Swift and it gives you the Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John equivalent of it. Very straightforward, very pleasant experience. I had to do
⏹️ ▶️ John almost no mucking with types when dealing with any of Apple’s things. It all just fit together perfectly. And when I wrote sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John the one or two little bits that are, you know, my own code or like straightforward, like
⏹️ ▶️ John not calling Apple’s APIs, I got to use some fun Swift features and spend a little bit of time realizing
⏹️ ▶️ John how little I know about how this works. It’s like I look at it and I’m like, well, I would know how to do this in Perl or any other language
⏹️ ▶️ John that has like all the features that every language could ever need. And I had to see which one of these is Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco All right, we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got property wrappers, they’ve got did set, they’ve got the set and get
⏹️ ▶️ John things, they’ve got init methods, they got convenience init, and then you got to do experiments. Oh, when you’re in the init
⏹️ ▶️ John method, does the did set thing get called or not? And you know, like there’s lots of different ways you can go with these things. Having done this
⏹️ ▶️ John a million times, I knew the, in other languages, I knew the possible feature set that was out there. And it was just fun seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John which parts are are implemented in Swift and which are not. So anyway, I had
⏹️ ▶️ John a pleasant experience with it. And the only weird part was that in Swift, as far as
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been able to determine, there is no way to disable warnings for a line of code or a block of code.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can either disable it for your whole project or just live with a little yellow triangle, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is insanity. And it comes up because I got some
⏹️ ▶️ John help from another developer friend, Gus Mueller of Flying Meat Software. He came up with the fastest
⏹️ ▶️ John possible way to bring all the windows from an app to the front. Unfortunately, it uses a deprecated API.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, and you get a warning. You can’t use a deprecated API. Which is
⏹️ ▶️ John fine in the Objective-C version, just do pragma, clang, whatever, and tell it no warnings here, and then you do the other pragma
⏹️ ▶️ John to pop that off of, anyway. But in Swift, it was just a warning,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I kept Googling around to find it, and I found a Stack Overflow question that’s like, as of like 2019, there is no way to do this. I’m like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s grim. So what I did was I took that one call and I threw it into
⏹️ ▶️ John an Objective-C file and then
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco called into Objective-C from Swift for
⏹️ ▶️ John that one call. So we have this Objective-C bridging header in there, the sole purpose of which is to get you to a file that
⏹️ ▶️ John has a single function that calls a single other function that does the thing I want. And that one is wrapped
⏹️ ▶️ John in the no warnings pragmas. So that was the only sort of ugly wart. I have a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of non-deprecated ways to do it as well, but they’re all slower and laggier than the deprecated way. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m hoping Apple doesn’t deprecate that API anytime soon. Um, but yeah, that’s, that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John app. Uh, and so once I had the app in Swift and an icon and everything else, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John then I just wanted to put it up on the Mac app store. Uh, not because I think it’s going to make any money. Cause honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John who even wants an app that does this in the first place? Very few people. Uh, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the people who do want it, uh, you know, they’re probably all listening to the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I wanted the experience of what it’s like to do something on the Mac App Store, or on any app store.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talk about it all the time, but I’ve never actually done it, or dealt with it, or experienced anything about that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this is kind of the best and worst case. And the app part of it is so trivial.
⏹️ ▶️ John As I said in the thing I posted about it, it was so trivial I thought they were gonna reject it for how trivial it was. Kind of like how they rejected my reload
⏹️ ▶️ John button extension. Because this product has all the overhead associated
⏹️ ▶️ John with putting anything up in the app store with almost none of the actual development work. So like, imagine
⏹️ ▶️ John the least development you could do and then have the overhead overwhelm it of making
⏹️ ▶️ John sure everything’s set up and going through the App Store thing and doing all the signing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John and just, you know, you guys both know what it’s like, but I had never actually experienced this stuff myself,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I wanted to do it. So I did, and I have to say, like my decision
⏹️ ▶️ John to put this on the Mac App Store, the discussions about it and saying, okay, this is the thing we’re gonna do and I’m gonna put it on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store. That happened in the morning of a day, and by the evening of that day,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was available on the Mac App Store, which I think is miraculous. Not just for app review
⏹️ ▶️ John times, but for how long it took me to go through all of the things with the tax forms and setting everything up and
⏹️ ▶️ John making sure signing is done right and uploading and dealing with all the fields you have to fill in.
⏹️ ▶️ John One day from, I think I should put this in the App Store to I can go to the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John application and see my thing. I was flabbergasted by that. My app review time was
⏹️ ▶️ John measured in minutes. And all the other stuff of it, it was annoying, and there was lots of stuff to go
⏹️ ▶️ John through. But basically, without even having to Google anything, but just clicking around on the UI, I was able
⏹️ ▶️ John to figure it out. I was gonna say that their web UI for App Store Connect is really good, except
⏹️ ▶️ John at one point I did make the mistake of trying to type something into one of the text fields. And
⏹️ ▶️ John something happened and it ate it. It didn’t reload the page, but all of a sudden half of my text was gone. I’m like, okay, well not typing anything
⏹️ ▶️ John into this webpage anymore. I did everything in a separate text file, which is probably what I should have been doing in the
⏹️ ▶️ John first place. But yeah, I did all that. I put it up in the app store. I did want to make it a paid app because I want
⏹️ ▶️ John that part of the experience as well. Just the whole getting the payment stuff set up and dealing with all
⏹️ ▶️ John of that. I debated, discussed with Lee how much we should charge for
⏹️ ▶️ John the app. I was thinking I should charge a lot to keep people away from
⏹️ ▶️ John it because I don’t want people to download it and be like, oh, it’s your app and it’s stupid, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything. I’m like, yeah, you probably shouldn’t download it. But for the people who want it, like me,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I wanted the app so much that I like wielded it into existence, right? I would pay a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of money to someone else. I would pay $10 if someone put this app up and I didn’t have to write it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I would pay a lot for it. So I think that, and the people who use it, it’s not just like you take
⏹️ ▶️ John the app and you don’t use it. You run it all day long and use it hundreds of times a day you click around in Windows. Like it gets
⏹️ ▶️ John used a lot if you have it. Like it changes the way your Mac works. So I was in favor of a very high
⏹️ ▶️ John price. But on the other hand, this is literally the simplest app that Apple would probably ever allow. The App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John does nothing, does like one thing and it has like one window with a couple of checkboxes
⏹️ ▶️ John in it. Like it is incredibly simple so it couldn’t be too expensive. So it’s $2.99. If you think
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re interested in trying classic window mode, you should try this out. Even if you’re not interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in trying it, you can just run it in the other mode in modern mode where it just works normally, but then you can
⏹️ ▶️ John still shift click if you want to bring all the windows forward and don’t want to go all the way down to the dock icon
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. So every listener to this show should obviously go and buy it. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John You can buy it and then just throw it in the trash. That’s fine with me. That’s ideal actually. Or you can buy it and just run
⏹️ ▶️ John it all day long. I recommend, I recommend running it without the dock icon. Like honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ John the only reason it has a dock icon is like, cause I thought you had to get rejected if if I automatically hit the dog icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, run it without the icon, run it with just the menu bar icon. The secret that no one else knows except
⏹️ ▶️ John for listeners of the show is that you can option click on the dog icon to toggle the modes if that’s what you wanna do.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s about it. Oh, I think I got to experience everything that you are supposed to experience about
⏹️ ▶️ John doing an app on the Mac App Store. All the rookie mistakes I think I made, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then some. My first submission was rejected. Like I got, I passed, this is like achievements, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John in like console game style. Achievement unlocked, first submission rejected. Can you guess what
⏹️ ▶️ John my submission was rejected for? Metadata.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh boy, yeah, metadata’s a common one. If you mentioned the price in the metadata, that’s a common
⏹️ ▶️ John one. I was afraid of mentioning like Mac OS. Like get classic, I was counting, like can I
⏹️ ▶️ John mention Mac OS? Like I’m aware of, I’m less rookie than most people because I’m aware of many
⏹️ ▶️ John of the problems people encounter, but you really gotta think really rookie. Like think of like, has never
⏹️ ▶️ John submitted an app. I’ll give you a hint, it doesn’t have to do with the app submission process, it has to do with the actual app. What did I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you leave it with like a 0.1 version number or something like that, that suggested that it was a beta or incomplete?
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know that would get me rejected,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but no. It does, yep. I
⏹️ ▶️ John did not do that. Hmm, this is probably something, well, I don’t know, Marco doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do, maybe, did you have, Marco might have had this happen to Forecast, because that was your first Mac app, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Forecast has never, I’ve never submitted a Mac app. It’s not App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or then maybe you don’t know. If you haven’t submitted a Mac app, maybe this hasn’t occurred to you, but I’ll just save you from this rookie mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you make a new Mac app project in Xcode, like I did making a new project
⏹️ ▶️ John in Swift, it gives you a whole bunch of crap. Like you don’t just start off with nothing. Like it gives you like the
⏹️ ▶️ John skeleton of an app, right? It even gives you like a window, like it does a bunch of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. Yeah, like the menu and about screen and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Mm-hmm, which is like great, nice. Like we’re using that about screen. Like, I didn’t have to write the about screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like standard about screen. You know, I didn’t even override the delegate method or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John What I forgot was it gives you a ton of other menus. And all the menus, they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John filled out. Like, it gives you print and page setup and a help item.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole edit and view and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, tons of stuff that is not relevant at all to my application. And what does App Review do? They go through every one of your menus
⏹️ ▶️ John and they try every function. Yeah. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s not like it
⏹️ ▶️ John crashes when you do them. When you go to print, it brings up a nice dialogue that says this application
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot print. But they reject you for that. They’re like, you forgot to, you didn’t hook up any
⏹️ ▶️ John of these, you know, they basically said, they called it an error, I got an error. I’m like, you didn’t get an error, you got a beautiful dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ John box that says this application cannot print. Yes, so if you are submitting your first
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac application, go through your menus that were given to you as part of the skeleton and delete
⏹️ ▶️ John all the items that are not relevant to your application. I did actually hook up the help item, it just takes you to the website, but honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not much help for the app. All the help for the app is in the dialogue. So that was my rejection.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was happy to see that rejection rather than being rejected for having too simple a functionality, which would
⏹️ ▶️ John be crappy. What else did I do? I immediately released the 1.0.1 version because
⏹️ ▶️ John I realized, this is a super rookie mistake, I realized after developing it for so long that
⏹️ ▶️ John on first run when you have no prefs file, my code that was trying to set the prefs to default values
⏹️ ▶️ John wasn’t working right because I didn’t, it was just a bug, right? But I never saw that myself, because I always had a prefs
⏹️ ▶️ John file, because I’ve been developing it, right? First run, new user first run, delete the container,
⏹️ ▶️ John kill cfprefsd, like simulate the experience of a computer that has literally never run
⏹️ ▶️ John this application, because if you don’t, that’s what they’re gonna do. And that wasn’t like, it didn’t cause
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem, it’s just that when you first launch it, all the prefs were like off, and that was the opposite of what a later one
⏹️ ▶️ John of the default values to be, so I fixed that. And then the final one is a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of niggling UI issue that isn’t worth releasing a new version for, but that gets seen immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John after the thing is up, which you and Brent
⏹️ ▶️ John noticed in the Slack, that one of my labels is not correctly aligned in the
⏹️ ▶️ John one window that appears. And I tell you, it is not for lack of trying. God, that UI is killing me. The fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can’t zoom in that UI, and there’s so many things in there, and the auto layout constraints. You’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about like the Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, or just dragging the labels. You know how it snaps things in the Storyboard interface? It snaps
⏹️ ▶️ John things to grid things, and there’s so many things that it thinks it’s snapping to, and there’s the auto layout constraints. And I swear,
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to align everything. My intentions, I know how they should be aligned, and I thought they were aligned,
⏹️ ▶️ John but retina screens are very small pixels, and you can’t zoom that interface at
⏹️ ▶️ John all, and so I shipped to the app store a thing with a misaligned label. So I fixed that in Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s committed to the repo, but am I gonna release version 1.0.2
⏹️ ▶️ John with a change that says, label moved down one pixel. Because that’s the change
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that I made.
⏹️ ▶️ John I figure I’ll wait for more bug reports before I put out that release. So you can go to the App Store
⏹️ ▶️ John now and get version 1.0.1 for the low price of $2.99. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John stare at the misaligned label and wait for me to release an update.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, congratulations, John. I am excited that you are now officially a Swift developer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, like I said, I enjoyed it. And it’s not really that fair because like this app
⏹️ ▶️ John is just calling a bunch of Apple APIs with like a one new class defined,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? There’s no business logic, there’s no data model, there’s no, it’s not really a fair assessment.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I did see and work with that code in Objective-C and I did rewrite it all
⏹️ ▶️ John in Swift. So I feel like I can have a reasonable comparison of how nice is, A, how
⏹️ ▶️ John hard is it to port from Objective-C to Swift? And B, how nice is it to call into Apple’s APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John in Swift? And I think the answer is surprisingly nice, given where it came from and how kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of gross it used to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, every time I look at Objective-C enumeration names
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are 3,000 characters long, as is everything else in Objective-C, I just go, oh.
⏹️ ▶️ John And Xcode with the fixits, super impressed. So not only can you use type inference to
⏹️ ▶️ John make those shorter, but a lot of the names, they change the wording on them and stuff. And the Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ John thing would say, this enumeration constant or whatever is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s unknown or whatever. And it would say, by the way, that was renamed from X to Y. Like they have some
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of metadata in their headers or whatever that says the old name for this was X. So if someone types X, don’t just say
⏹️ ▶️ John unknown symbol or whatever. Tell them, oh, I see. Yeah, we renamed that. We changed the noun and the verb positions
⏹️ ▶️ John or we moved this around or whatever. And it knows what you were trying to type and you can just hit the fix in the fix it thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John super impressed with Xcode. Oh, more beginner stuff. I did have to delete the drive data directory
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m hitting all the milestones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh man, I’m proud of you, John. This is good times.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you have a new toy in your house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco News broke a few weeks back that Swiss TV company
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Salt had made an alternative Apple TV remote for their customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Switzerland. The reporting was like, oh, it was like with Apple’s cooperation and it’s fully compatible. It looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a bigger Apple TV remote with regular buttons on it. And listener
⏹️ ▶️ Marco David Rosely actually sent me one. So thank you David, that was awesome. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta say, it’s really nice actually. Like, it’s not perfect, and I’m not sure I’m gonna stick with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it forever. So first impressions, it’s very big, it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very light and feels very cheap. The plastic on the outside is like a very like, just kind of cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plastic. The top edge is kind of sharp, like the bezel edge on the top.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it doesn’t feel like a premium thing. The surface with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the buttons on it though does feel nicer. It has that kind of like soft-touch silicone rubbery kind of feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a lot of stuff has now. It’s a very high contrast look. There’s no logo on it. There’s no like Salt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TV logo anywhere on it. It has the big white circled menu button on top. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks kind of like the Apple TV style. And then it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good, the buttons feel good. The only thing is that the buttons are very low, it’s a very shallow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depth, and having most of them have just like, it’s mostly just black with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco white labels, and only the menu button has a circle around it. And so in practice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco especially in a dark TV room, it’s hard to see the edges of the buttons. And so you do have to do a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit of feel, and the edges are so shallow on them that it’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to feel around just based on feel alone. The iconography on it is nice and bold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and high contrast, but like, you know, and there aren’t that many buttons on it so it’s fairly easy to navigate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is a little hard to see like in the dark and where this is most concerning or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most clunky is operating the D-pad because it is also like the direction,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, up, down, left and right buttons are just this one big round rect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re not like separate, four separate like ridges that you can feel, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this big round blob. So it’s a little bit hard to precisely navigate that, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a touch surface like the Apple TV remote. Like it’s actually just four buttons. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, it actually works really well. Where it falls down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is text input. Because this remote, it doesn’t have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trackpad-like surface. So text input, if you’re gonna do it on here, you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit the left and right buttons over and over and over again to like get over to the right letters and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no Siri on it. Because I assume the way this works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I think it’s just an infrared remote that comes pre-programmed to send the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right codes to Apple. Like the reporting on it was kind of like, oh Apple cooperated with them and let them do it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t know how much cooperation there was. I think what really happened is they just shipped a remote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was compatible without without pairing or anything because it sends the same infrared commands that the old Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IR remote sent. That’s my best guess. But it does really work that way. Like there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setup, there’s no pairing. You just point it at the Apple TV and it just starts working.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that part is awesome. But not having Siri and having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to move the text cursor back and forth by like hitting the buttons over and over again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is clunky and painful. If you’re going to go this route, you’re probably going to want to do all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text input on your phone or keeping the Apple remote around and just using it for Siri.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But otherwise, the rest of the operation of this is actually pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice. The buttons do click in nicely. I haven’t had any accidental input.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are a few niceties, like there’s a power button. Now on the Apple TV remote, you can hold the home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button down for a few seconds and it puts up like a sleep dialogue and you hit that and turns off the TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the Apple TV. This has a power button that doesn’t do that. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to only turn off the TV. Oh and it has a volume up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down button that doesn’t initially work unless you have I think a Samsung TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it comes by default but there’s a there’s a little instruction sheet that comes with the remote. If you hold down a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button combo you can toggle it between different brands of TVs for like like universal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IR compatibility. And once you find your TV, then volume up and down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and power work. I have an LG, I hit like the switch button one time and it went to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the LG, so it’s fine. So that part is great. So I have volume, I have power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s no actual home button. There’s menu, but there’s no home button. If you hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down the menu button for a couple of seconds, it performs a single home button click,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can’t do the double click thing to bring up the app switcher to force quit Netflix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it breaks. So that’s a little annoying. There’s no way to go to the app switcher as far as I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can find. What’s nice though, is that it has these dedicated buttons at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom for not only play pause, but also rewind, fast forward,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jump back and jump forward 10 seconds. And these are all things you can do on the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remote with certain gestures and things, but I’ve found them incredibly error prone and incredibly hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do reliably. And with this, just having those as buttons is actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really nice. So overall, it’s pretty nice. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been using it for a few days and so far I think I’m gonna keep it out, but not having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri or the home button will prevent me from putting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my Apple remote away forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you’re gonna have two remotes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, right. All the things that are wrong with this are ways in which it tried to copy the Apple remote. The shallow
⏹️ ▶️ John buttons are so clearly trying to imitate the very shallow button on the Apple remote, right down to the
⏹️ ▶️ John ring around the menu thing. The general size and shape, they know they want it to be larger, but it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John basically a thin, fairly narrow rectangle. I’m pretty sure this feature is still in the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple TV, and this is what I suggest to people. The Apple TV has a feature where it will learn any IR remote
⏹️ ▶️ John that you happen to have, like the Apple TV will learn your remote and not the other way around. And I,
⏹️ ▶️ John for years, used an old TiVo remote with my Apple TV. I just put a little sticker on it that said Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV, so we know this is because we have another TiVo remote that looks exactly the same, right? And you
⏹️ ▶️ John just teach the TiVo that, and it has all the same features you just talked about. TiVo has a skip forward and skip back and
⏹️ ▶️ John fast forward. It has dedicated buttons for all that, so you get all those features. It doesn’t have a Siri thing, so you’re missing that.
⏹️ ▶️ John The power and the volume work the same way on TiVo remotes. It’s IR as well, even though TiVo
⏹️ ▶️ John remotes also have Bluetooth. I’ve never used it with Bluetooth with the Apple TV, I don’t think you even can. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if this feature still exists on Apple TV, and I think it does, and you have a remote that you like that you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John using anymore, and maybe this is a rare scenario, but like if you ever use TiVo, you probably accumulated these TiVo remotes, TiVo remotes are amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The buttons are high, you can see them without ever looking at them. They have a distinctive size and shape and position.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s glorious. I found something today with a TiVo streaming box, which I’m assuming is terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John because TiVo software these days is terrible, but it comes with a tiny TiVo remote. like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the same as the TiVo peanut remote, but it’s really, really small, I think this would be an ideal Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John remote because the Apple TV itself is small and so is the real remote for it. So it’d be nice to have a sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John black, sleek, small Apple TV remote. So the TiVo streaming box is like 70 bucks
⏹️ ▶️ John and it comes with a remote. So just buy it, throw away the streaming box and take that remote and use it with your Apple TV.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, thank you to David Rosely for giving me this remote. It’s pretty awesome. And yeah, I’m going to keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it, I think.
John’s Pro Display XDR
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, on your birthday, you got very good news,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then several days later, you got another package.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did, another two packages. I got a package with the stand and the display. The stand box is way bigger
⏹️ ▶️ John than I thought it would be. It’s just, it’s tremendous. I don’t, I mean, the stand itself is also big, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge. All that money had to go
⏹️ ▶️ John somewhere. Yeah, I’ve got the display and the stand. They are connected to each
⏹️ ▶️ John other. It is on my desk. impression having set up
⏹️ ▶️ John and using it, you know, to give context before I go into that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not using this monitor for its intended purpose. I don’t need a reference monitor. I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ John excellent color fidelity beyond what the iMac offers. I appreciate it because I do do photos and this thing or whatever, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s this. There is no actual use case that requires this thing, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I did want a really big, nice Apple monitor, right? So If they
⏹️ ▶️ John had offered a 6K display that was not a bazillion dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John and was just like the iMac display but bigger, I would have got that. And my first impression of using it
⏹️ ▶️ John had to do with the size. I was going, remember, for my 23-inch monitor, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of small even by today’s standards. That was my old monitor. And then I had a 24 temporarily
⏹️ ▶️ John on the desk, not that much bigger. And the resolution was only 4K.
⏹️ ▶️ John I just felt overwhelmed by how big it was. I mentioned before my window arranging, where
⏹️ ▶️ John I have places where windows go, and my window arranging pattern has evolved, how screen sizes have changed.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously I started my window arranging patterns on a nine inch screen that was, whatever it is, 512 by 342, or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever the classic map was. And it’s moved up from there. I haven’t made a significant
⏹️ ▶️ John jump in point size, like not pixels, you know, because it’s retina
⏹️ ▶️ John versus non-retina, but just like how many computer points are on the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John which used to be pixels, but now are little clusters of four actual pixels in retina mode. Haven’t made
⏹️ ▶️ John a big jump like that for a while. I made a big jump from the CRT days to my 23
⏹️ ▶️ John inch Apple Cinema display back in the day, which was what? 1900 by 1920 by 1200, I don’t even remember anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John But that was a 23 inch LCD. And after that with my Mac Pro, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was also using a 23 inch LCD. I think it had more pixels because it was taller,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I’m not entirely sure. But that was the last big jump I made. And so the jump
⏹️ ▶️ John from CRT to 23 inch LCD, and then I’m with 23 inch LCD until 2019. Wow. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then I go up to 6K. Obviously, I, you know, my wife has a 5K iMac and I use it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was something about sitting at my desk in my familiar place in this huge screen. And then like I
⏹️ ▶️ John launched my applications and they’re all shoved into the upper left hand corner because it remembers the window positions.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I just see all this space around me. Where, you know, like space that didn’t exist before.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I started doing my window arranging and I realized my old patterns, they were like anchored in the corners,
⏹️ ▶️ John where like in the upper left, I have web browsers in the upper right. That’s where like my Skype window goes when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John podcasting and the lower left is like audio hijack and in the center is Skype and like, and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, my terminal windows are anchored at various places. I ended up with this giant hole in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ John of the monitor because when I did that sort of corner anchoring, there was this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco giant space in the middle where there was nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, I’ve got all this extra space. I need to rethink everything. I need to rethink all my
⏹️ ▶️ John patterns. So I’m evolving how I’m going, but it just- To rethink cities. Yeah, there’s just wide
⏹️ ▶️ John open spaces. And I also felt like, I felt like the thing was looming over
⏹️ ▶️ John me. Like, it was just like this huge wall in front of my eyes. Like I had to like turn my head to
⏹️ ▶️ John take it all in, right? It was just unbelievable, right? And I did, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have anything that I could show on this monitor to show off its capabilities, so I just started Googling for like
⏹️ ▶️ John 8K HDR content, like demo reels that they show at like, you know, CES or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John for your televisions. And I found a bunch of them, Samsung has a bunch. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ John got like this either 6K or 8K footage at 60 frames per second in HDR,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I tried to find an app to play it. And by the way, like this is, you know, When it’s not in QuickTime compatible
⏹️ ▶️ John format, you have to use the other things. That one that we talked about in the last show, I think it was Optimist Player, you remember that app? Yep,
⏹️ ▶️ John that was the winner. Like I tried a bunch of other apps I had, I tried like VLC, I tried the
⏹️ ▶️ John IINA, whatever app, and it was having some trouble with it. I’m like, is my computer too slow to play this? No,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just like the particular codec that these demos had, Optimist Player
⏹️ ▶️ John just did it fine. And it looks amazing. It looks amazing in HDR at 60 frames per second at 8K.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks, I’m not gonna say it looks better than my TV and I’ll get to that in a little bit because in some respects it doesn’t, but it does
⏹️ ▶️ John look absolutely amazing. Like, this is the first time I’ve seen, first HDR display I have in the house besides
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess like the iPad Pro one that’s, I don’t remember, anyway. Or the phones I
⏹️ ▶️ John guess are HDR, but this is, you know, has way more nits as they say on stage.
⏹️ ▶️ John Super impressive. I can watch the demo reel, I like the best was this person taking their golden retriever through
⏹️ ▶️ John Italy and showing pictures of food and everything, so I was predisposed to like it, but it looks amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t spend my day looking at HDR content. Most of the time I’m just looking at regular computer screens.
⏹️ ▶️ John I enjoy editing my photos on it. I enjoyed making my photos window like three times as big because again,
⏹️ ▶️ John I launched photos and it’s on the upper left-hand corner. It’s like, you can zoom that out. God, I can see
⏹️ ▶️ John so many photos. The magic part of it is that three days later,
⏹️ ▶️ John now this is just my life now. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the monitor does not feel big.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just feels like a computer monitor. I’ve rearranged everything and have new patterns. When I was doing the development
⏹️ ▶️ John of my app and I had Xcode open and I had my web browsers, then I had the
⏹️ ▶️ John help window, I had Photoshop open for doing all the icon work, and I had like icon slate
⏹️ ▶️ John open and candy bar looking at my old icons to try to find things and what else did I have?
⏹️ ▶️ John I had so many apps open that when I brought up the app switcher, it hit the edges of my monitor. You know, 6,000, 16 pixel monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John The app switcher was going from edge to, because again, 96 gigs of RAM, right? I had so much going on and it could
⏹️ ▶️ John handle it because there was a place for everything to go. Why ever quit anything? It was, but like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so terrifying how quickly you get used to. Like, you know, like, oh, this monitor is so big. And then you’re just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, as they say on television, this is me now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m curious, like one thing that I always tried to maintain, I always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried to make sure that I was using the same monitor sizes and setup at work and at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco home because I hated the idea of having to switch and have a nice big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one in one of those places and have to go to a smaller one for the other place. Is that gonna be a problem for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with this? Or are you gonna somehow make work buy you
⏹️ ▶️ John one of these? Oh no, it’s not gonna be a problem. Because the things I’m doing at home and the things I’m doing at work
⏹️ ▶️ John are not the same at all. I love coming home to this big setup and this faster computer
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the other stuff, but I’m doing different things. At work I do
⏹️ ▶️ John have the stupid laptop and I have the external 24 inch monitor, but it’s fine for what I do at work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember, at work I’m not running Photoshop and Xcode and
⏹️ ▶️ John two web browsers at the same time. Like, that’s not what I’m doing. Like, I’m not multitasking to that degree. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, you know, I don’t have as much RAM either. You know, it’s just, it’s not a problem for me. Let me talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about the stand a little bit. The height adjustment is, I didn’t think I would use it. I like the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John it was there, but I figured I’ll find the height that’s good for me, and then that’ll be that. And I like that it’s adjustable because
⏹️ ▶️ John who knows what the right height for me will be. And I did find it that the right height for my
⏹️ ▶️ John particular setup actually is pretty low. It’s not the bottom of the travel, but it’s pretty low because my desk is high, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a keyboard tray, yada, yada. But I did find that the height adjustment I do use more often than you might think
⏹️ ▶️ John because sometimes I have my work laptop at home open in front of the monitor and the
⏹️ ▶️ John rim of it can like block the bottom of my screen. Just take the bottom, take my finger and move the bottom of the screen
⏹️ ▶️ John up an inch and now they, you know, don’t block each other, which is nice. I
⏹️ ▶️ John did try rotating it into portrait. That, I mean, I just got through saying you get used
⏹️ ▶️ John to anything, but I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John getting used to it. Because in portrait, it is so tall, I have to like bend my neck to see the top of
⏹️ ▶️ John the monitor. It is, on my particular desk, even in the lowest position, it is so tall,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is hilariously unpractical. Like I would spend my day, if I had to look at the menu bar,
⏹️ ▶️ John my neck would be strained from from looking upwards. It is just I need a standing
⏹️ ▶️ John desk or something else to deal with that. And it is even with a standing desk, I feel like even if it’s correctly
⏹️ ▶️ John aligned with your eye line, you’re going to have to bend your head up and down to see the top and the bottom in the way that you don’t when
⏹️ ▶️ John you I don’t know, maybe my eyes move side to side better than they move up and down. But vertical,
⏹️ ▶️ John this monitor seems too big for vertical except for sort of like boutique applications like they had the
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC thing where they were showing like portraits on it or using it for display purposes but if you’re doing like text editing
⏹️ ▶️ John like you can you can certainly see a lot of lines of code at nine point text but it’s just it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John too much uh at least for me so horizontal it is um one interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John thing about this is that the the monitor rotation thing like there’s an unlock thing that lets you rotate
⏹️ ▶️ John it right but even when it’s in locked mode there’s a little bit of play in the rotation
⏹️ ▶️ John like it doesn’t lock into straight 90 degrees which is bad and then it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John loosey Goosey-goosey and you’re like, but I just want you to lock into your regular Landscape orientation,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s good in that if your desk isn’t perfectly level you can still level the monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John My desk is perfectly level because I leveled it when I cleaned everything Before naturally. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John so for me, it’s mostly a downside, but I did have to actually level the monitor with my little level
⏹️ ▶️ John After I got it back to the horizontal position it stays there like it’s not you know, it’s not gonna go anywhere where
⏹️ ▶️ John the stand does its job, it holds the monitor up, the motion of it is not as smooth or nice feeling as the,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Flower iMac with the arm. That arm felt better than this monitor stand, which is kind of amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, kind of like the turny knob handle thing on the top of the Mac Pro. It
⏹️ ▶️ John feels a little like scrappy aluminum, turning in scrappy aluminum. Like it’s precise
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not crumbly, but it’s also not smooth. Like there
⏹️ ▶️ John are no bearings in there. It is like metal on metal. very smooth, precise metal on very smooth, precise metal, but
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no sort of bushings or slick plastic or other lubrication or ball bearings or anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else in there. So it’s smooth and you can move it with one finger and it feels solid and doesn’t wiggle
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s no play, but it’s a little bit, it’s not particularly pleasant feeling
⏹️ ▶️ John to move up and down. It feels a little scrappy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a little, that’s a little disappointing. Apple is the kind of company that would care a lot about making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that feel really nice. and for something that is so high-end, such a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco flagship product, and so expensive, you would think they, I mean, maybe it just wasn’t possible, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to the old iMac, I know this is obviously a lot more weight.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it doesn’t feel bad, and my thinking is that the things that might make it feel
⏹️ ▶️ John smoother also decrease durability, so maybe it’s designed to like be
⏹️ ▶️ John the same year after year, being thrown into Pelican cases and moved in different places on a movie set or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, I don’t know the thinking. Like, it doesn’t feel cheap, but it also doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, you should go to an Apple store and move one and just see what it’s like. Like, it’s just, it feels very solid
⏹️ ▶️ John and sturdy, but there’s a little bit of, you know, screepiness you can feel in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even think there’s any stores near me that are gonna stock it. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac Pro is only gonna be like in select stores, and so I don’t even know if any of mine are gonna have it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. I think also like, Apple really has to nail this stand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because if they’re gonna have the sheer audacity to ship an optional $1,000
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stand for their monitor, it has to be really awesome. Like it better be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a damn nice stand and have no obvious problems. And so, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the details have to be really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, one thing it does impress with is the, I mean, I mentioned the size and it is fairly big in the box,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the weight, it is so much more sort of substantial than even the little L-shaped
⏹️ ▶️ John tongue that’s under an iMac. It’s thicker all around, it doesn’t taper, it is surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ John heavy, which is nice for a base for the monitor. You never feel like this thing is gonna tip over. In particular,
⏹️ ▶️ John I appreciate, I don’t know if this is just psychological or it’s a real thing, but I appreciate the fact that it’s not an
⏹️ ▶️ John L-shape, that it’s more of an I-beam, that behind the monitor, where the thing goes up, there’s another little
⏹️ ▶️ John inch of stuff that sticks out behind it. Oh, interesting. It just makes it feel even more sturdy, like that you
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like, Even if I just shove the top of this monitor, there’s no way I could get it to tip over because of the extra little
⏹️ ▶️ John leg. It really solidly anchors the monitor. If you are the type of person who wants to move
⏹️ ▶️ John it around a lot, I think that’s part of the thing that helps. Like if you move the monitor up, you’re not gonna lift the foot up off the thing because
⏹️ ▶️ John it just weighs so much. So it does the job. I don’t think much about the stand. I try not to
⏹️ ▶️ John think about how much it costs. I wish I could see the back of the monitor more because now that these holes have grown on me, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John cool looking. There’s a fan back there. And when I plugged it in and put my head behind the monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could hear it, but kind of like we discussed with the iMac last time, because it’s behind a solid thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John not audible. Like, maybe it becomes audible if you run HDR content for a half an hour at a time, but I haven’t done that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is not, especially since if it’s on my, the Mac Pro next to it is on, maybe it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be audible if the Mac Pro wasn’t on, but the fan on the monitor is more on, but it is very small and very quiet. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming they’re spinning now, but I can’t hear them. So that’s all good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the fact that it has a uniform bezel around it, which is the thing that we haven’t had with an iMac in forever, because it’s always got the
⏹️ ▶️ John chin, right? It looks nice, and it looks nice and uniform. Some people have
⏹️ ▶️ John been complaining about the viewing angles. I’m coming from a monitor that’s 10 years old, so as
⏹️ ▶️ John far as I’m concerned, it looks amazing. And you know, I’m used to the five, again, used to the 5K iMac, it looks about the same.
⏹️ ▶️ John One thing about that is, I didn’t get the nanotexture ridiculous screen because I was terrified of it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this does not look as glossy as the 5K iMac. I don’t know if it’s at a different place in the
⏹️ ▶️ John room, but it almost looks like a matte monitor. It looks pretty amazing. So I’m so happy that I chose this thing because
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t have the nanotextured finish, which I thought like made it look a kind of misty, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t get any glare or reflections on it. Again, it could just be because this is in a different place in the room, but this basically
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like the miracle matte monitor of my dreams.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s really nice. And I’ve immediately gotten used to it and now I can never go back to anything
⏹️ ▶️ John else, which makes me hope that someday Apple doesn’t make just a 5K monitor that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John iMac without the iMac behind it, but that they make a 6K monitor that is just not
⏹️ ▶️ John this fancy thing. One final bit on the actual supposed attributes of this monitor, who
⏹️ ▶️ John was it in this suite? Juan Salvo put up on Twitter a thing about comparing this
⏹️ ▶️ John to actual reference monitors that cost $40,000 or whatever. I kind of talked about this
⏹️ ▶️ John when we discussed the technology behind this monitor, the fact that it’s a bunch of, it’s basically
⏹️ ▶️ John a local dimming LCD, LED backlit LCD television, a technology with which I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ John familiar. There’s a reason the best televisions in terms of picture qualities do not use,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, full array local dimming LED backlit LCDs. And that reason is bloom. If you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a giant star field that’s all black with pinpricks of white light at maximum brightness,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have a quote unquote full array local dimming backlight that turns on the backlight just
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the regions of the screen that have light in them, the regions are big. There are hundreds
⏹️ ▶️ John of reasons, but there are millions of pixels. So if you have a star field where there’s tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John pinpricks of really bright light, you have to turn on like a one inch by one inch bright white
⏹️ ▶️ John LED behind that. And when you do that, yeah, the bright LED light comes out the little pinprick
⏹️ ▶️ John hole, but it also bleeds through a little bit of all the region around the little star prick.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s called bloom in the TV world. And so there’s, we’ll link to the
⏹️ ▶️ John tweets that Juan did. You can see it compared to a reference monitor. One of the things reference monitors do is
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of them have multiple layers of LCDs where the backlight
⏹️ ▶️ John is broken into regions, but then that backlight shines through a exactly one-to-one
⏹️ ▶️ John pixel grid LCD, whose only job is to filter the backlight. And then in front of that, there’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John actual LCD that has the pixels on it, right? So it really does a good job of blocking out as much light
⏹️ ▶️ John as possible to try to give you maximum contrast between the tiny star
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s supposed to be 100% bright white and the inky black is space right next to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Technology like OLED and plasma don’t have this problem because they literally don’t light up the pixels that are black.
⏹️ ▶️ John The pixels themselves are emissive. There is no backlight shining through a grid, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John in this comparison, the XDR has way more bloom than a quote unquote real reference monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you’re thinking you’re getting an XDR and you’re gonna pay $6,000 and get the same performance as
⏹️ ▶️ John a $40,000 reference monitor, surprise, you are not. And also, surprise, full array local dimming is not
⏹️ ▶️ John the best technology for maximum contrast. OLED is better, plasma was better,
⏹️ ▶️ John and the reference monitors that use LCDs with multiple layers of LCDs, which apparently the XDR does not,
⏹️ ▶️ John are also better. This doesn’t disappoint me in the least. This looks phenomenal compared to my old monitor, and
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly looks better than my current TV, with the caveat that my current TV can just not
⏹️ ▶️ John emit light from the black regions and therefore has better contrast. But, you know, it’s only 1080. So
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, XDR, no one should probably buy it, but I’m super glad that I have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a great summary. I’m glad. I feel like after 10
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years of using the same computer, I feel like you’ve earned a totally ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco upgrade. And this is that. This is a totally ridiculous upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is awesome in all the ways that you care about. I don’t know anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else who should buy that monitor, but I’m glad you did. It is right that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s kind of like I talked about last time, the thing you notice is the removal of limitations. So I used to be
⏹️ ▶️ John on the edge of my disk space all the time, which is a constant source of stress, and not having
⏹️ ▶️ John enough RAM, and things starting to thrash because you’re opening too many applications or whatever. Screen space
⏹️ ▶️ John is the same deal. Suddenly, it’s like, all these windows used to be packed together. before
⏹️ ▶️ John I would not have considered running as many programs I was running at once, not just because you know I’d be worried about them
⏹️ ▶️ John all fitting into RAM, but also because where the hell would I put them on the screen? It eventually just becomes this mess and you can’t find anything,
⏹️ ▶️ John but having so much more screen space, like I can come up with new ways to arrange things. And
⏹️ ▶️ John this is even with the size inflation, because one of the things I did was I said like my default sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of, I used to have kind of like eight and a half by eleven-ish size piece of paper, that was my browser window,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I was like, I can make all of my browser their windows just bigger. Like just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they’ll, instead of keeping them the same size and having more of them, I can make them all bigger. Obviously I can make them taller
⏹️ ▶️ John if I want, so they can cover the same portion of the room, but I can make them bigger. So every window got bigger. My Slack window got
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger. My terminal windows got bigger. I increased the font and size in my terminal. Like all sorts of things
⏹️ ▶️ John that I couldn’t do before. Like it’s, you know, having those limits removed.
⏹️ ▶️ John And like I said, for the screen, it’s a honeymoon period and then you’re like, oh, I’m just used to it. But I like
⏹️ ▶️ John being used to it. I like thinking when I get home, I have all my space and all my stuff and my computer will never break
⏹️ ▶️ John a sweat and I’ll be able to do all the things that I wanna do. I’ve even started to come around
⏹️ ▶️ John appreciating the thing that, you know, we talked about how crappy my GPU is a little before and I do wanna eventually get
⏹️ ▶️ John a new GPU. But while I have the crappy one, one of the benefits of the crappy GPU
⏹️ ▶️ John that we discussed before but I appreciate even more, no fan, there’s no fan in the GPU. Like there’s just the
⏹️ ▶️ John three fans in the front of the thing and then the blower fan in the back. there is and the GPU like
⏹️ ▶️ John everything else inside this computer is entirely just passively cooled by the fans that are
⏹️ ▶️ John already in the case and so it’s silent so if I got a gaming GPU it would have its own cooler
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would make more noise and I would not like that as much and might have to banish the computer to be under
⏹️ ▶️ John the desk so in summary I am in enjoying my new setup I enjoyed
⏹️ ▶️ John like putting it through its paces like doing probably the most complicated thing I’ve ever done
⏹️ ▶️ John which was trying to learn how to use Xcode and program a Mac app at the same time as I’m doing umpteen other
⏹️ ▶️ John things on my computer and it handles it well and I didn’t have any hitches. I do want to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John the peripherals next week my mouse peripherals and some of the issues that I’ve been having
⏹️ ▶️ John with Catalina and one issue that I had with my hardware which was really more
⏹️ ▶️ John of a software issue or a third-party hardware issue but anyway we’ll save that for next week as a tease more Mac Pro stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John to come but monitor and the overall setup, thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Congratulations, you have earned it. Thank you.
BTW, it’s “Front and Center”
⏹️ ▶️ John the way, before we go into the after show, we just assume what we’re about to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I forgot to mention the name of my application that I want everyone to buy. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ John gosh. Thus completing my my trip through the rookie mistakes
⏹️ ▶️ John that you make when talking about things. I mentioned it a lot in the blog post and the show notes, but there’s a lot of people that know where the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John are. Go to the App Store and search for Front and Center. That’s a name that Lee came up with this app and I think great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can also search the App Store for John Syracuse because that’s under your name and it’s your only
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll find it that way too and a front and center will be keyboard spammed by people
⏹️ ▶️ John buying ads against it but I don’t think anyone’s buying ads against my name
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Marco’s vacation
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco had an interesting vacation experience with my Apple products
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forgot about this vacation experience. Ah, yes. I am anxious to hear the result of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My wife and I, my wonderful wife and I, went to Cancun for after Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because we discovered that, you know, all these years that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been hating winter and being depressed all winter and trying to add light
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and warmth and humidity to my house artificially in the winter and getting all depressed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the darkness and the cold and the dryness and everything else. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco various ways you can, you know, light some wood on fire and make some warmth,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you light a big pile of money on fire, you can actually create summer in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the middle of winter. Oh my word, I had never never anything like this before and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh man, it was nice to have a week of summer. Oh, and I went into another ocean john
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and we took pictures for john to show that I went that I went to another person
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your hat on well. I got a headburn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John otherwise and your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glasses. Well, it was bright, so A little while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the trip, there was this bar that started flickering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the screen of my 16-inch MacBook Pro. It was as if the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is divided into six vertical stripes, like six vertical segments.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Segment number two was flaking out like crazy. And at first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was, it seemed almost like analog interference. Like it was like smeary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and blurry interference. It wasn’t like digital blocky artifacts like you’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect. So at first I thought, oh, it must be like the display cable or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s annoying, but you know, I’ll, I’ll make the rest of the trip and I’ll bring it home and get it serviced or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then as the trip went on, it became worse and more interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The interference started becoming blockier and more digital looking, so then I started respecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, oh, the GPU is going bad. Like the computer continued to work just fine. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would assume that if you have significant GPU issues, at some point the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would lock up. Like, but it didn’t affect the computing part of the computer at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What was also weird about it is that the glitching out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco area started having a memory of what was being shown below it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would have like a window that had that was up for a while and then I would hide that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window and bits of that window would still be showing in distorted scrambled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways in the defective area. It even went as far as I rebooted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the computer and ran Apple hardware diagnostic test at boot up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco window contents from the previous OS session before the reboot were still displaying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what in the stripe.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what did the hardware diagnostics say? It said everything was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John seemed fine. Were you by any chance sitting in a chair with a hydraulic lift on it? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Did you see that? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t look into the know whether it’s BS or not, but the idea was that hydraulic list chairs, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John sit on them and compress the gases in them, it lets out the equivalent of an EMP. They can mess with your display if your cable
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t shielded well, sounded like BS to me, but who knows? Stranger things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that also doesn’t sound right to me. But anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have this weird GPU problem, but the computer continues to work fine. And I had to edit last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week’s episode of this show in this state. We had Tiff’s laptop. Tiff has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an early 2019 15-inch with the butterfly keyboard, the very last 15-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the butterfly keyboard, the new materials one. So I transferred all the files to that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like once I started glitching out I figured like my laptop’s about to die so let me let me move all my files over that I need to edit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP just in case my laptop dies then I can edit it onto this computer. Just transferring the files over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to her computer required me to type about five or six
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keystrokes on the butterfly keyboard and after typing those five or six keystrokes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like no no I can’t I can’t do this I can’t go back there I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna do it on my computer even with a sixth of the screen having this giant stripe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through it that’s unusable. So I would rather use my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco half-broken computer to do work than to use a perfectly functioning butterfly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard MacBook Pro again. So anyway, as the trip goes on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the interference gets worse and worse, and I start seeing a few little glitches where the whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen would have a blip of color shifting or something and thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, like it’s it’s no longer the stripe anymore. That’s causing the problem. Like now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the stripe is expanding and the whole screen is starting to have issues. And did you start to see glimpses
⏹️ ▶️ John of your future life? There’s me as an old man. What am I doing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Halfway through the flight home, the entire screen scrambles and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now it’s totally unusable. Now you really have to see the matrix
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco computer. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Unscramble it in your mind. At least it waited till after I’d done ATP. You know, I was able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do the work on the computer the rest of the week and, and you know, use it occasionally. So like that was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had, I had posted about this on Instagram stories and I had gotten an interesting tip from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody. I, my plan was to just bring it home and bring it to the Apple store and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have them do the thing where they probably send it out and I’m without it for maybe a a week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I hate. And I’m so annoyed, this laptop, I just got this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco laptop a few months ago. It’s brand new, it’s the highest I’m on. Meanwhile,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m also like, I’m hoping this is not a thing for the new 16-inch MacBook Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m hoping this is not an actual issue that’s widespread. I hope this is an isolated incident. I did hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from a couple of people when I posted on Instagram that they had similar problems, and so I’m a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concerned, but I’m gonna set that aside for now. I hope this is not a thing. Please, Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t let this product have a big defect. Please, for the love of God. Because otherwise, I love this computer, like besides this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, so I’m thinking like, I gotta have this thing sent in and I’m gonna be without it. And then like, I’m gonna get it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back and it’s gonna be serviced. John, you understand this completely. It’s like, somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will have taken this apart and reassembled it. And what if it’s not quite right after that? What
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if- It’s never the same again. Right, like, what if it’s like a little unreliable?
⏹️ ▶️ John That is much less true of the unibodies, though, to be fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s, yeah, that’s fair. Yeah, like there’s fewer seams and everything, right? But still, what if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit different? What if it’s slightly unreliable forever? I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John What if a surgeon left a sponge in there? Oh, my goodness. That’s basically what you’re worried about,
⏹️ ▶️ John some little thing rattling around in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, what if there was a rattle or a new pop or something? Who knows, right? I’m like, that sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s brand new, almost. only a couple months old. Well, I happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have purchased this by walking into an Apple store and buying it on November
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 15th. November 15th is a special day for Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John retail this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco November 15th unbeknownst to me at the time I was buying it on November 15th. November
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 15th was the first day of the Apple extended holiday return period.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You Jared Polin, Ph.D.: And the Apple extended holiday return period lasts until tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Matthew Fischer, Ph.D.: Wow, that’s good timing. Jared Polin, Ph.D.: On the trip, like a day before I got home,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had ordered myself a replacement. By the way, since this is just the high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stock config, that 2799 config, other retailers stock it, and it happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be almost $300 cheaper because it was on sale at like everywhere, like Adorama, B&H,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like all the retailers. It was on sale. So it was like $300 there’s less money than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I had actually paid on November fifteenth. So I order myself a replacement. I got home.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did the transfer, transferred everything over. I put it back in the box, brought to the store like I like to return
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. Please the screen doesn’t work anymore. Did where they like what that the guy was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all right and like because if you ever return anything in an apple store before it is one of the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nonchalant process like you would expect. If you’re returning an almost three thousand dollar computer that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brand new and you say the screen doesn’t work anymore Like you would think they would like look at it, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The guy didn’t even open it up. He was just like, all right. He’s like, do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to order another one? I’m like, I already did. He was like, all right. Wow. He took it back. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco got the money back on my car. Problem solved. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway, I hope this is not a widespread issue and thank you Apple for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco holiday extended return period. So now I have another new 16-inch MacBook Pro that has never been opened and altered by anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I hope this one does not have this issue. I will say on the positive side,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this trip, I also brought only the AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro as my only headphones. And so I had to both edit ATP, which I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was like some latency with Bluetooth, so it’s a little annoying to edit audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Bluetooth latency, but it’s possible, and I was used to that. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really wanted to test out the AirPods Pro as my only headphones on air travel. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was kicking myself as I listened earlier today to John Gruber do this exact same segment on the talk show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week, but I’m gonna pretend like he didn’t. So I brought the AirPods Pro instead of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Bose noise-canceling headphones, which I’ve only had for a few months that replaced my Sony noise-canceling headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the Boses and the Sonys are really good noise-canceling over-ear Bluetooth headphones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re fantastic. You kinda can’t go wrong with either of them. The AirPods Pro, I thought,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are probably gonna be not as good as those, but let’s see how they go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the AirPods Pro, as your only headphones for travel, are awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The noise cancellation for me, and this might depend on how they fit you, but the noise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cancellation for me was pretty much exactly as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the Bose and the Sony. They’re all a little bit different in the way they sound with noise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cancellation, but I would say they’re all pretty similar in the degree of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noise cancellation that you get, like the severity or the strength of it. It’s all pretty similar between them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there is actually not much reason for me to bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other headphones anymore because they were also comfortable for the entire flight. It was about three or four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours, and they were comfortable the whole time. The only downside to them is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t have enough battery life to make it through very long flights.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The battery life of them when you’re using them on a plane is something like four or five hours. And so if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re on like a six hour flight or something, you know, then you might have to take a break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from them for a half hour, put them in the charger, you know, and then put them back in your reverse once they have enough charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep going. So you might need like a short break of noise cancellation, or you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can just buy a second pair of them, keep them in your bag and still take up way less space in your bag. Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the thing. Like all those noise canceling headphones are huge and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re all a pain in the butt with moving between multiple devices. The best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones that are the bows cause they have like multi pairing and they’ll announce through a voice in the ears, like which device they’re connected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to. So that’s, that’s nice. The Sony’s are garbage at dealing with multiple devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, but like, If you’re frequently, like I do, move between a phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a laptop on a flight, or especially a phone, a laptop, and an iPad, if you happen to have all three,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s always a very clunky thing with anything that’s not based on Apple’s AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips, basically, like the W1 and H1 chips. And so to have this, have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all those features. Oh, another thing. Tiff and I used to, a while back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we were flying together somewhere and we would want to watch like TV or movies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I brought on my laptop. We each had a pair of Sony noise canceling headphones, which can be operated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wireless or wired. And I would bring with me a wired headphone splitter cable,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then the two cables that would go to the headphones, and then whatever dongle I would need to plug in a headphone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cable to a modern Apple device, to whatever I was playing it off of, and we could both listen to the same audio.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On this trip, we both just had AirPods Pro, and we used the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio sharing feature in iOS 13 and had the movies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing to both of us using my iPad and that sharing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature. I don’t know, is that sharing feature on the Mac yet? Probably not. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That would be great if they ever do that, Apple. You know, remember the Mac? So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s such a different thing to have, to go from two full-size pairs of headphones between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two of us and like this, you know, big Y cable arrangement to try to listen to the same thing together
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to two pairs of AirPod Pros that are so tiny that do everything wirelessly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and switch between devices super easily and everything. It’s like a revelation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like going from that setup to this setup. And because headphones,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like full-size headphones, are so large to pack in a travel bag, like they take up a pretty big chunk of the backpack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you have on the plane with you, I don’t think I’m ever gonna use them again. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still love full-size headphones for my desk and for podcasting, they’re great for that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but for bringing on a plane, I don’t think I have any reason to bring big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco headphones on a plane anymore because the AirPods Pro are just so damn good at that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Way better than I expected. Like I thought it would be a big compromise that the noise cancellation wouldn’t be very good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not a compromise. It’s the real deal. It is like first class in this way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if they fit you, I would strongly recommend them if you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for airplane travel headphones. Because like you can use them everywhere. You can use the exact
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same pair of headphones now almost everywhere. The only thing I can’t do with the AirPods Pro is podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with them. Everything else I can do with them if I want to. And that’s pretty amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then finally, the iPhone 11 camera system. Most vacations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days, we don’t take big cameras anymore. We almost never use big cameras anymore for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything, actually, except like occasional nice pictures of our family here in the house at home,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like taking with us for Christmas, and we take nice pictures on Christmas. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had our iPhone 11s with us for this trip, and we were like, you know, going to the beach, and going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the pool, and everything, and we just had our phones. And the cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are so good. We never felt for one moment. Oh, man We wish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had our big camera with us right now so we could take you know x y or z picture because it would be Way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that moment never came I? Think the iPhone 11 camera system has finally crossed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a threshold where? Not only is it really good for a phone camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just really good for a camera period and while big cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will still always handily defeat it for for resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and raw pixel gathering ability in different lighting conditions, if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big sensor. There are things about the iPhone that are actually not only good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough in most of those ways, but are actually better than all pro cameras.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There were situations where I know if I had my big Sony camera with me that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could try to take a low light picture, crank the ISO up to 25,000, and crank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the aperture way down try to get like a low light picture, but the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco camera’s night mode actually did a better job and actually produced better output than what I would have gotten out of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or I could have maybe gotten similar output out of the Sony with a ton of effort and a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, you know, all right, try it this way, and then pixel peep and see, oh, that’s kind of crappy. Try it again, you know, re-expose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And I didn’t have to do any of that. And also the phone is water resistant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and small and pocketable. And so we were able to bring it with us when we went to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the beach, and bring it with us when we went in the pool. We didn’t submerge the phone, but we could hold it near the pool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and operate it with wet hands and not worry about it, because we knew it’s designed for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was so good. And to do video and the HDR,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the crazy pictures we were able to get that my regular camera wouldn’t have the dynamic range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to capture the screen on my laptop in the room as I edited this podcast from last week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while also not blowing out the ocean through the windows outside that’s way brighter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than it. Like, it’s just incredibly impressive camera performance to the point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it is actually better than good cameras in a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of situations. And so this sounds like an Apple commercial besides my broken laptop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like traveling with the AirPods Pro and the iPhone 11
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro is just such an incredibly pleasant experience and everything is so advanced and everything works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so well in the hardware side of things. Software, I’m always gonna have nitpicks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the hardware side of things is amazing right now, especially AirPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the iPhone cameras, just incredible. It makes life simpler. Like now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna downsize my camera gear because I almost never want to use it anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna downsize my headphone collection because I need almost none of these now. Like it allows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me to simplify my life and that’s really great. So, you know, we have our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nitpicks with Apple and you know, things like software quality are still not where they should be, but like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the hardware stuff is solid. And this is, I’m very impressed by these products.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I went to Disney recently and we’re gonna talk about that at some point, maybe even later this evening. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the things I noticed was I did bring the big camera and in certain occasions,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was glad I had it. But generally speaking, I could not agree with you more that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for the most part, it was genuinely, I was getting genuinely better photographs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of the iPhone than I was my Micro Four Thirds camera. Now my Micro Four Thirds camera
⏹️ ▶️ Casey isn’t as fancy as your Sony and isn’t as nice as your Sony in the glass, may or may not be as nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but. It isn’t that different. Like in the way that you have to operate the camera, it’s the same.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In what it’s good at and what it’s not good at, it’s about the same. Like you’re dealing with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exact same issues with any mirrorless or SLR camera. The fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones like the full-frame Sonys, they just have better specs. Like they can go to higher ISOs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without a lot of noise or they have more resolution or the lenses are sharper. It’s better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco specs, but it’s all the same types of limitations, just like the numbers were a little bit different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah. And the couple of occasions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I could think of when I really was glad I had the big camera with me, Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Declan were on a ride where I could view them from a distance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I have a zoom lens for my big camera that zooms quite a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey closer and works quite a bit better than the, you know, 2x telephoto lens on the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I got some really great photos of the two of them on this ride because I had a zoom lens with me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a proper zoom lens. And there was, I’m not even sure I can think of any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey others, but there were one or two other occasions I think when I used the big camera and was happy to have had it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally for 90% of the trip, particularly when I went to Galaxy’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Edge at night, which is the new Star Wars land, I was so unbelievably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happy to have had this iPhone 11 Pro with with me and I cannot say enough good things about the camera. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey miss being able to have really good bokeh or bokeh. I can never get it right. I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sorry everyone. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco um… Every way you say it is wrong. It’s like ricotta cheese. It’s like you’re gonna piss off somebody no matter what.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Well, and a friend of the show, Will Haynes, tutored me on it, but it was like two months ago and I’ve already forgotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what he said.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you forgot already. Just like you forgot my middle name and how to pronounce affluent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. It’s Charles. That’s your middle name. Charles and affluent, right? Yeah, Charles and Affluent, that’s correct.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyways, so I miss having that really lovely background blur, I really do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the other thing I’m a little worried about is I tried to restrain myself with the ultra-wide, but I’m a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worried that I’m gonna look back at the trip pictures from a few years from now and be like, why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is everything just, oh right, the ultra-wide was brand new, right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep, everything that has to do with computational photography, Apple is fairly far ahead of the
⏹️ ▶️ John big camera vendors. Anything having to do with optical quality, obviously they can’t compete because
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have all the big glass. But you mentioned zoom, which is what I was thinking of, because again,
⏹️ ▶️ John physics and how much glass there is, you can’t really get a good zoom out of it. The other one is, and this is actually kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of computational and I wonder how the iPhone deals with it, but it’s related to zoom, catching fast moving
⏹️ ▶️ John things. If you’re trying to take action shots, The computational part is Sony cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John in particular, especially the new ones are really good at finding the thing that’s moving really quickly through your frame
⏹️ ▶️ John and grabbing focus quickly so you can fire off a couple of shots. The iPhone, my impression, at
⏹️ ▶️ John least based on the UI, is that it takes a little bit longer to find the thing you want to focus on. Yeah, you can tap on something, but try
⏹️ ▶️ John doing that when you’re trying to, you know, capture sports or kids running around or people crashing through the waves and the surf and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like it’s, that’s an area where I don’t think Apple has concentrated too much, mostly because without Zoom,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not going to be doing kind of action photography anyway. Like if you’re two feet from the person, then good luck getting
⏹️ ▶️ John that shot, period, right? And if you’re far away, the motion is greatly diminished
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s all moving within this giant frame. So in the vacation photos
⏹️ ▶️ John with adults, there’s probably not a lot of fast moving action, right? Maybe there was someone running down a beach
⏹️ ▶️ John towards you and that’s pretty within the wheelhouse of an iPhone. But if you’re trying to catch a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John kids in the surf or people playing a soccer game or race cars going around or a horse
⏹️ ▶️ John race or dogs running or something like that. And you want pictures that are
⏹️ ▶️ John not sort of wide angle shots of just a bunch of dogs running around, then yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John big cameras are gonna win there. But the computational photography of night mode, there’s no reason
⏹️ ▶️ John real cameras can’t do better than that, except that they’re not as good as software. Like they don’t have the software chops to make that happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re behind Apple, right? They could put processors in close to as powerful as the one in the iPhone for
⏹️ ▶️ John in their $3,000 cameras or whatever. and they could hire people to do all the math that
⏹️ ▶️ John Google and Apple and everybody are doing to make the night mode shots, but they don’t. That’s why Margaret was talking about, yeah, you could do it, but you’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting there, sort of you being the computer yourself, manually adjusting all the exposure and trying it and checking it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John As for pixel peeping, that I feel like is the other area where even the iPhone 11 camera falls down. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John bring that thing on your big Mac and in the monitor and look at it at native res, you start
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing how it’s denoising aggressively and you zoom in on the person’s face and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a little like, you know, you’re not going to get a nice crop of a thing. And if you do a big
⏹️ ▶️ John print of it, you might see that like it’s, there are still benefits if you care about things at that pixel level.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Overall, though, I was extraordinarily surprised how little I missed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my big camera for most everything. And the other thing we haven’t mentioned is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the iPhone and some big cameras do this, but not many that I’m aware of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone has a GPS on it. and it has the ability to, by default,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey geotag every image you take. And I think I’m extremely nerdy about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a way pretty much nobody else in the world is, but I try my darndest to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put geotags, so put location information in the metadata of every photograph I take,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey including in the big camera, which means I’m either using like this Olympus really crummy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app to track where the phone is and the timestamps of where the phone is and then correlate that with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the pictures that were taken on the big camera and do their best job, which usually it does work to their credit, of like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stamping, geotagging all the pictures on the big camera based on where the phone was, or I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going in after the fact, like days later and recreating in my mind, okay, I was standing right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about here or I was roughly in Star Wars land at the very least when this picture was taken. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s something that I like to do because occasionally I will search for photos based on where they happened,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not necessarily a date or something like that. Google photos is really good about this. And I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really used Apple photos for that, but maybe, maybe Apple does just as good a job, but one way or another,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of this is to say that the iPhone does that automatically for free every time I take a picture. And even video, I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at geotags, which is incredible and so nice because then it’s one less thing I have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. And also. I’m not one to really do a lot of edits to my pictures. The most I’ll ever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really do is white balance. And I’m not saying that’s right. I’m not saying that’s, you know, the best approach,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but that’s just the way I, I work and I don’t have a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interest in trying to tweak the pictures in my big camera to be just just right. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more often than not to my eye what comes out of the iPhone is just right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that is also extremely freeing and really lovely. So it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not yet an outright replacement for my big camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But to your point, Marco, it’s becoming that—just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple of years ago with my iPhone X, if I left the house for a family event,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a birthday or something like that, without the big camera, I was really upset with myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like really unnecessarily upset with myself. Now I’ll just be like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, that stinks. Like whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no big deal. the geo tagging and it’s like that. That’s one one part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of why to me like using a standalone camera now feels incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco clunky. Another thing is like the standalone camera probably doesn’t have exactly the right time set.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it might be have like a slightly wrong clock. It’s not a certain clock or maybe you never change it for daily saving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time or something or like yeah and so like you’ll import your pictures and there’ll be an hour off as the interleave
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into your photo library with the iPhone pictures you also took right And, or it’ll be like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco day you change your battery and the date will reset and it’ll be like 1970 or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, that kind of stuff happens with standalone cameras. And also just now, like, maybe I’m just getting lazier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but having to import photos off of an SD card now feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like getting your film developed felt when digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came out. Like when digital cameras first came out, you were like, this is the most amazing thing in the world. Getting your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco film developed seems barbaric. Now, having to import your pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off the camera feels that same level of barbarism to me. Like that’s, it’s like I can’t believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to, I have to what? I have to take this card out of this camera, plug it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into a computer somehow, through a dongle maybe if it’s a laptop, or you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, connect it with a cable, and like yeah, there’s wifi transfer. It always sucks and rarely works
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s slow as hell. Like that whole process is so clunky now that I hardly ever actually want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. and the cameras on the phones are so good. Yeah, you’re right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you need high resolution, if you’re gonna look at it on a really big screen, yeah, you do start to see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the edges, but most of the time, I don’t have those needs. And the convenience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so high, and you get all these benefits. Things like live photos. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get super easy, you never mis-expose it, or it’s really hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to mis-focus it. You get all the conveniences of the AI stuff, and the auto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco correction and yeah, you know what? The rendered JPEGs by default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are usually pretty good. They’re usually well white balanced and usually like well exposed and well tone mapped and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, hey, you know what? It’s actually really, really good with really little effort.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That, I think for me, has finally crossed the line where I no longer care about the benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a big camera gets me almost ever. There’s a couple times a year where I care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even then, those are decreasing. And there are newer cameras now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I no longer have the latest and greatest. I think I’m at least one, if not two, model
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years behind now and I don’t care. I have no desire to upgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if my cameras broke or got stolen tomorrow, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think I’d replace them. That’s how little I’m using them because the phone is just so good now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the conveniences of it are so high compared to doing anything with a photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taken by a standalone camera. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Sony, Olympus, and Canon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, just kidding. Thanks to our sponsors this week. Hover, Away,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and TechMeme Ride Home. and we will see you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-E-R It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so
Casey goes to Disneyworld
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Casey, you also, you just mentioned a few minutes ago, you went to Disney.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I’ve been, I’ve had this in the show notes pretty much since we came back and I’m gonna try to keep it brief
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in part because I forgot all the things I wanted to talk about, but in part because we’re running a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long. You gotta take notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I know. The problem is, I thought we were, and it’s not your guys’s fault, I hope I’m not implying or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stating that it’s your fault, it’s just that we had other things to talk about, we really honestly did, and so it just kept getting, kept getting pushed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s fine. But we went for Declan’s fifth birthday at the end of October.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We were there from the 23rd through the 30th. And I’ve been asked somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consistently, you know, hey, I’m considering a Disney vacation. Like, what did you learn? What did you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What should I do? Et cetera. And I wanted to very quickly, very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quickly hit a few quick items that I think were interesting that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had either learned or or done differently during this trip. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you would like to know more, we can either ask me via Twitter or something, and I’ll either reply there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I’ll talk about something in detail if there’s that much interest in another show. But first and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey foremost, it was hilarious to me, I wanna get the negative out of the way first, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hilarious to me that while I was there, I would open up the Disney Parks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app, I forget exactly what it’s called, And the splash screen at the bottom would say, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the AT&T, the official wireless sponsor of Disney or something like that. And I cannot tell you how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frigging terrible AT&T is there. It was like going back to like 2009, 2010. It wasn’t as bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as like 2007, 2008, whatever it was when the iPhone first came out, when it was effectively useless, but, oh gosh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then in the, in the hotels, which have free wifi and actually I think a lot of the park did as well. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, the hotels, they’re free Wi-Fi. I got to tell you, it turns out that when most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people are at the hotel relaxing after their long day at the parks in the Florida sun, I’ll give you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one guess what they’re all doing, they’re messing around with their phones, doing stuff on the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I was ecstatic. I was ecstatic if I could get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five megabits per second down in the hotel room over the Wi-Fi. And this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is why a little while ago, I don’t think this bled too much into the show, but a little while ago I was asking about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey alternatives, you know, this is before I bought the iMac Pro, alternatives for Plex servers and everyone was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, Oh, just use Infuse or Oh, just do this or just do that. It’s great. It’s great. It’s great. But one of the things that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a lot of people realize is there are times that I will stream movies,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TV, whatever, from my house to a place with a really crummy internet connection. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all week when we were at Disney, when the kids were in bed and we couldn’t really go anywhere because what are we going to do? Leave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the kids by themselves? would stay and we would watch movies or TV shows or whatever, oftentimes from Plex.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it was important that I had Plex running on hardware that was fast enough to transcode stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because if I tried to run a 1080p movie through, you know, two megabits per
⏹️ ▶️ Casey second, which I often saw, it’s just never going to work. And so, uh, that really stank and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was frustrating, but onto the good. Uh, first of all, I should state for the record,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love Disney. Uh, I, I enjoy Disney like films and properties and things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, but Disney World, I just adore. I honeymooned there. I surprised Erin for her 30th
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there. I love Disney and not everyone does and that’s okay. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of think if you haven’t tried it that you should try it. Even those of you who say that on paper this is everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate, Marco, you’re probably right. You’re probably right. And I bet you, Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a pretty good shot you would hate it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey selling it. Because, but I do think it’s worth experiencing at least once. And Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have the advantage of the only person whose schedule gets ruined by you going at a time when no one else is there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Adam. Because the rule of thumb is if you go and the kids are in school, it’s comparatively empty. And if you go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the kids are out of school, good luck. So we were there at the end of October, which ran us into a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of the Halloween push. But generally speaking, it was not terribly busy, which was great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as compared to the summers that we had gone for our anniversary and for her birthday.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Couple of quick things that I wanted to bring up. We used for the very first time David’s Vacation Club
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rentals, and I will put a link in the show notes to this. This alone could take up 40 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of conversation, but the extraordinarily cut down version is Disney has a timeshare program
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can rent a timeshare room just like any other hotel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room, but it’s a fortune because they’re typically bigger, they have full kitchens, et cetera, et cetera, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of them at Fall Kitchens anyway. But I guess the way and the details don’t really matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the general gist of it is, if you are a Timeshare member and you get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your allotment of points, which is, I guess, their currency or what have you, and you don’t use them in a year, I guess you lose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them. So you’ve paid a whole pile of money and you get nothing out of it. Maybe you couldn’t go on vacation that year for whatever reason. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know. So there’s third party brokers that if Marco is a vacation club owner,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as they call them, you know, Marco is in the timeshare program, but he can’t go anywhere this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I do want to go, but I am not a timeshare owner. Marco can put his points up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, I don’t know, bid or whatever, put them up for somebody else to buy and he’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a relationship with this third-party broker. Meanwhile, I will go to the same third-party broker and say, I would like points so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could stay in a room and they will arbitrate that whole process. It sounded kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shady when I was looking at it, but I had heard a lot of people say that it works and it works great.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so what ended up happening was we were able to get a one-bedroom, I don’t know if it was really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a suite, but a one-bedroom room at the Bay Lake Tower, which if you’re familiar with Disney
⏹️ ▶️ Casey World is the vacation club resort that is adjacent to the Contemporary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Contemporary being the A-frame building that the monorail literally drives through.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so we got a one-bedroom room at the Bay Lake Tower adjacent to the contemporary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for, and I did look this up, for approximately half the cost it would have been if I just went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Disney and said, I would like that exact same room, please. So, definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recommend one of the two or three brokers. We happen to use, I believe it’s called David’s Vacation Club Rentals. I promise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll put it in the show notes. But I really recommend it. It seems shady as anything, but they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all Canadian and as it turns out, they’re super nice. Who knew? And it worked out real well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing to think about is, although we did get the Disney meal plan, again, this is like a four-hour conversation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m cutting into four minutes or less. The Disney meal plan being like a cruise, from my understanding,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you pay a whole pile of money in advance and then you can eat, quote-unquote, for free. Gratuity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not included, but one alcoholic drink per meal is included.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally like this because then I’m not nickel and diming myself the entire week that we’re there. Not everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will feel the same way. I do think if I didn’t do the meal plan, we probably would have saved a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of money. But when you’re talking about a disincentivization, as John well knows, you’re talking about just flushing piles of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey money down the drain. And so is saving a little bit really that big a deal? Probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not. All that said, if you want to save a little money on groceries and stuff or on food and stuff, you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grocery delivery, which is not new to anyone in a metropolitan area. And it’s not even that new to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me here in Podunk, Richmond, but there are companies that are specifically oriented around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey delivering groceries to Disney hotels. And if you have a full kitchen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your fancy pants timeshare, that works out really well. So we did grocery delivery and we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got basically breakfast food delivered to us and then bread and peanut butter so the kids could have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sandwiches in the park if they wanted for lunch. And that was super convenient. You should check that out. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as it turns out, they’ll deliver the food to you, to the hotel before you even arrive. We were literally in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the air somewhere between Virginia and Florida when our food arrived at the hotel and they put it in the refrigerator
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a freezer at the hotel and it works out real well. Another thing is stroller rental. You can rent from third parties
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to save yourself a whole pile of money. One of the not so great experiences or parts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of our Disney trip was that Michaela, who is turning two within a couple of days of this being aired,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Michaela refused to ride in the stroller, which was oh, so super delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John because she just wanted to walk her teeny, teeny little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legs. She won’t get tired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and cranky and upset at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And she’s not overwhelmed by all this at all. So that was a little bit delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But we did have a very nice side-by-side stroller that we rented for not all that much money, all told,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but we didn’t barely use it because of Michaela. So that was great. But you can rent a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stroller from someone other than Disney other than Disney and they’re much nicer, et cetera, et cetera. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all, all told again, whether or not you’re into Disney, uh, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey may not be the sort of thing you like. And if you’re really, really, really turned off by crowds of any size, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, maybe this isn’t going to be a thing you like, but from the moment we gave the luggage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the airport in Richmond, it was basically a magical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience, Michaela’s insistence on walking, notwithstanding, until we arrived
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back in Richmond. We got to Richmond, we got to the airport, we gave them our luggage,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which had been pre-tagged by us with the special tags that Disney sends you. The next time I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saw our luggage was in our hotel room after we had gone into the park that very first day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, when we arrived in Orlando, we walked down to the special area, got on what they call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Magical Express, which is to say a series of coach buses that will take you directly to your resort. You check into your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resort, they say, okay, have fun. And then you go have fun. And when, by the time you’re back from having fun,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your luggage is in your room. It’s not down at the front desk. It’s not with the bell hop. It’s in your room.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then the entire week, like everything is taken care of. Yes, you are paying an obscene amount of money for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not arguing that. Yes, it is busy and crowded in Florida is so hot and so wet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is absurd, even in late October, But all told it was amazing and for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would have paid all of the money to see Declan’s face when he saw Mickey
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mouse at the little like meet and greet dinner that we did where, you know, they have the people dressed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up as the characters walking around the restaurant saying hi to all the tables. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting misty-eyed just thinking about how wide that little boy’s smile was and and how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unbelievably excited he was to meet Mickey Mouse, and how excited he was to show Mickey Mouse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his little stuffed animal, Mickey Mouse, that he’d carried with him for most of the trip. It is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially at about five years old, and maybe Adam is too old, and certainly, John, your kids are way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too old for this kind of experience, but for Declan to see that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and to believe in his heart that he was seeing the real Mickey Mouse was one of the most amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experiences I’ve ever had. And I don’t know if that’s exactly unique to Disney, but there’s something magical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the way it happens at Disney that I can’t recommend enough. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could give you a million and 10 reasons why Disney World is the worst place on earth, but I can give you 10 million and 500
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trillion reasons why it’s one of my favorite places in the world. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love it so much. And I hope even those of you who think you wouldn’t enjoy it, I hope that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe you give it a try. Maybe not a full week, maybe only go for two or three nights or something like that. But I hope you give it a try at some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point in your lives, especially if you have children in your life, because it is so, so cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re gonna be sad for another reason when you realize that Declan’s not gonna remember that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I know. But you will. You’re exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John right. You’ll remember it and you’re the one who paid for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so that’s what’s important. No, you’re exactly right. And in some ways, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moment, that memory was for me. It was for him at the time, but it’s for me now. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for me, it was worth every penny. It was amazing. It’s so incredible, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so lucky that we were able to do it. And I’m so thankful to the people that listen to the show that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bought Vignette, that bought Front and Center, I almost said Front to Back, that bought Front and Center,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Front to Back by John Craig. But anyways, I’m so thankful for everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that listens to the show and has ever bought anything from a sponsor and used our coupon code or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So much of that was possible because of all of you listeners and because of the two of you gentlemen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’m speaking to right now. And I’m so thankful for it. It was such an amazing trip. You know, it’s funny because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the heat of the trip when Mikayla was screaming and yelling and refusing to ride in the stroller, I’m not sure I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as happy as I reflect on it now. But if nothing else,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have the rosiest of rose-colored glasses.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I remember being angry at my parents because they took me to Disney when I was around that age.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then later in life, my friends would be going there and we never went, and I was like, why don’t you ever take us
⏹️ ▶️ John to Disney? They’re like, we took you to Disney. I’m like, yeah, but I don’t remember that one. It doesn’t count.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need to take me again, but I’m old enough to remember. We probably waited a little bit too long to take our kids, but when we took them,
⏹️ ▶️ John my daughter was just barely still young enough to enjoy the character dinners. And I’m glad
⏹️ ▶️ John that we got that in, because now they’d be super jaded about the whole thing, obviously. It’s too cool for school teens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah. I almost wonder, I have no experience with this, experience for this, but I almost wonder if like there’s a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a real golden time that I suspect Adam is probably reaching the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end of in the next year or two, if maybe he’s already there, I don’t know, but reaching the end of, if not already there. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think there’s like a dark age, I suspect when it’s, they probably wouldn’t enjoy, you know, they being,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the royal child, probably not enjoy it. But then like I went,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, the, the last time I’d went before my honeymoon was right after my freshman year of college.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I loved it. So I don’t know if maybe I’m just a loser.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey at heart. Maybe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what it is. I don’t know. I think kids of all ages actually do enjoy it. But tweens and teens are going to
⏹️ ▶️ John moan about it the whole time because enjoying it would be uncool,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really do think that kids of any age and adults of any age can go there and enjoy it. And especially kids,
⏹️ ▶️ John despite how much they moan, they will. And you’ve got fun rides, and it’s a cool place to be, and you’re not in school. It
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t take much to be enjoyable for kids. COREY
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WHITING Yeah. You should try it, Marco. I know it’s probably not something you’re even mildly enthusiastic about, but I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do believe that it’s worth trying once. And if you hate it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And you have to go in understanding what you’re getting into, but I really think—and I know you’re not going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to listen to me, but I really think you should try
⏹️ ▶️ John it once. Because— MARCUS MORTON You go to Vegas all the time, which is so much worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey COREY WHITING It really is. It’s so, it’s so—well, it’s—I don’t know if worse is the right word. It’s—
⏹️ ▶️ John of the happiest place on Earth,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I can tell you that. Well, that’s very true.
⏹️ ▶️ John More people are unhappy in Vegas than are unhappy in Disney.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, hmm. I don’t know, man. I haven’t been to Vegas in a couple of years, but. You got
⏹️ ▶️ John to remember the alcoholics and the gambling addicts. There are much more of them in Vegas than in Disney.
⏹️ ▶️ John Disney has a lot of really upset children. Yeah, but even they’re still having fun. Because they’re going to get candy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey later. Right. Generally speaking, they’re having fun. And plus, you forget how amazing it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not to be the parent of an upset child. to look over there and be like, ha ha, that’s not me.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t see too many upset children on our trip that we took with our kids. I don’t remember seeing screaming
⏹️ ▶️ John children. Or maybe I have screaming children blindness from being a parent? I don’t know.