367: Antitrust Relief Valve
27 Feb 2020Apple possibly adding default-app choice on iOS, shorter HTTPS-certificate lifespans, and Casey’s humongous-gust-of wind.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- SwitchGlass desktop-image update
- Apple Music high-quality streaming
Settings→Music→Cellular Data→High Quality Streaming - Swift and static analysis
- Overcast and UI state restoration
- Microsoft Defender ATP
- Safari and long-lived HTTPS certificates
- Apple considering allowing users switch default apps
#askatp- How do we handle the business side of the App Store? (via Stephen Gerstacker)
- Do we shop TVs based on primary usage? (via starsasumi)
- When do we use a notes app vs. a flat file? (via Future Ben)
- Post-show: Casey's Computer Woes
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Chapters
- Full-Immersion Hyphen School
- Weirdness
- Radars vs. Feedbacks
- SwitchGlass and desktops
- Marco’s Music “bug”
- Static analyzer skips Swift
- Overcast state restoration
- Microsoft Defender ATP
- Sponsor: ProClip USA (code atp10)
- Safari vs. certificate lifetimes
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
- Setting default apps
- Sponsor: Indeed
- #askatp: App Store business setup
- #askatp: TVs for gaming
- #askatp: Notes.app vs. files
- Ending theme
- Casey ♥️ Catalina
Full-Immersion Hyphen School
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Antitrust relief valve was also decent. That is decent. Antitrust should be one word, I believe, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like no hyphen. But what?
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, we don’t make these things up, Casey. It’s not like we have a choice. It’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an optional thing where from week to week, we can choose whether to add or remove hyphens.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re telling you about a truth that exists. We are not making decisions on the fly. That’s fake news, John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, we don’t just insert hyphens like in the middle of words that are single words.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or choose to remove them on our whim. It’s like antitrust is a single word and we didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s do relief, R-E-L-I-E-F. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wouldn’t be surprised with you two. I wouldn’t be surprised at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John What we’re telling you is that this is a world of information that is knowable, Casey. It is knowable to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So do I need a hyphen between relief and valve? You never know these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you can know. This is a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you can know. It’s a syntax.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very easy to understand the
⏹️ ▶️ John There are fairly consistent guidelines, and through exposure, you should be learning
⏹️ ▶️ John about how they’re used.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There are always gonna be edge
⏹️ ▶️ John that can be debated, but the basic rules you should be picking up by now. Nope. Nope. This is something
⏹️ ▶️ John I used to drive people crazy at work. One of the teams I was working with a couple years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John I constantly was trying to teach them the rules about hyphens. Surprisingly hard to do. A, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they hate you for it, obviously. But B, they should still, even though they hate you, like the many things
⏹️ ▶️ John you learn from your parents, you do eventually learn them. You may dislike the person
⏹️ ▶️ John who taught them to you, but you eventually learn how to tie your shoes or whatever. Like you end up being able to tie your shoes,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That is the end result. And ending up being able to use hyphens my success rate is like
⏹️ ▶️ John slightly more than 50%.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I don’t know if like the full immersion hyphen school was gonna work for Casey. Actually, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full immersion hyphen school, Where’s the hyphens hyphen or hyphens go?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s between full and immersion and knowing you to why why is it? Why is it between full and immersion?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because you’re specifying the kind of immersion. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco no, I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you’re correct. At least this is step one. He’s correct. No, it’s not the kind of immersion his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reason his explanation and rationale is totally bogus, but he is correct about the hyphen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we’re making progress. Our full immersion hyphen school is working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never in a million years. would I look at that phrase and think, oh, I need a hyphen between fall and immersion? No way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not saying you’re wrong. For the record, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying you’re wrong. I’m explaining to you again, which we said in the past, but I’ll explain it to you again so you can absorb it. It’s when
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a multi-word phrase that acts as an adjective that describes some other thing. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a thing in there and they’re saying, what kind of thing is that? And to describe what kind of thing it is,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s multiple words that all combine to say, it’s that kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? What kind of preschool is it? It’s a full immersion preschool, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a full immersion preschool. Full immersion
⏹️ ▶️ John is required to describe. It’s not a full preschool, and it’s not an immersion preschool, and it’s not a full, immersion
⏹️ ▶️ John preschool. It’s not a big, red bus or whatever. Like full immersion, that multi-word phrase
⏹️ ▶️ John together describes the preschool. So full hyphen immersion. That’s the basics
⏹️ ▶️ John before we go into when it’s an adverb, you don’t do a hyphen because you don’t, anyway, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like. That’s advanced
⏹️ ▶️ John the basic rule we’re trying to get through it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, so many hyphens in these titles. Oh my goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, antitrust doesn’t have one. So that’s just all one word.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s no hyphens in this episode. I’m, I am stupefied. And now we have a pre-show.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll dump it on the pre-show cause then the actual people who know grammar are going to yell at me for my description. Yelling
⏹️ ▶️ John at you. No, that’s, that’s even better. That’s even better. Is it? I don’t think it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is. You think you’re going to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more email than me about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the, all the emails go to all three of
⏹️ ▶️ John You are, it’s very easy to be successfully ignorant, but it’s more difficult to be
⏹️ ▶️ John successfully educational, right? Like I tried to explain it and they’re like, well, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ John your explanation is wrong in this subtle way, and they’re going to be right, and I’m going to have to endure that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god, a humongous gust of wind just went by. I feel like the house is about to fall down. That’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And there’s no hyphenation in any of that. A humongous gust of wind is totally unhyphenated. Oh god,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just one word describing the gust of wind. It’s just humongous. You don’t have a multi-word phrase that is describing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not humongous hyphen gust hyphen of wind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John No, because what kind of gust of wind is it? Humongous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my god, I’m kidding.
⏹️ ▶️ John You are kidding, but like I want to, I want you to internalize this. Oh god. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate everyone. I hate everything. I hate everyone. I quit. You’re both fired.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the thing I would do with the folks at work is whenever it came up is is the major thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John most people do is just don’t acknowledge the existence of hyphens, so never use them. So normally, someone would type something in Slack,
⏹️ ▶️ John which we were using then, or whatever, and I would say, what kind of whatever? That was
⏹️ ▶️ John always my cue. They’d say something about a file, and I would say, what kind of file?
⏹️ ▶️ John You must be a joy to work with, John. Right? So, and the thing is, I did this for
⏹️ ▶️ John like a year, and still, a year into it, I would say, what kind of file? And they’d answer the question,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’d be like, oh, it’s like a text file. like whenever I say that it’s because you you used a multi-word
⏹️ ▶️ John phrase to describe the file but didn’t put hyphens in it like I’ve done it a hundred times and still when I say it I say what kind of file and
⏹️ ▶️ John they would just answer the question literally so it’s very difficult to get this to penetrate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m glad that the John we have on the show is only one is the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John that exists at work and that everyone around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John is subjected to the same job subjected is a a harsh
⏹️ ▶️ John word. Gets to enjoy. How about that?
Weirdness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God, oh God, what is happening? What is happening? Do you hear weirdness?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, well, I mean besides like our usual content,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no yeah right now I’m hearing weirdness. I don’t like it. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t like it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know I’m going to I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco think I might what are you hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m hearing like like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco my goodness yeah. I don’t like not a good sign
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right now there it is okay. I’m just going to reboot so entertain everyone yeah. I’m just going to just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can all this. I will assume if you guys genuinely if you just want to start the show that’s fine I’ll just pop in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a second but one way or another I’ll be back
⏹️ ▶️ John inside the show without you you’re the one who does the yeah
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey we wouldn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know how to start the show well fair enough fair I was trying to be nice so i don’t have a lot of it but
Radars vs. Feedbacks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should note and we can call this follow-up and I guess just start the show. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have been Adding things to my radar that I had put my feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I’d put a link to in the last episode I have been adding What is it spin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dumps tailspin? Cis-diagnosis, I’ve probably got no, I’m not this is not an exaggeration I probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got like a gig to a gig and a half worth of cyst diagnosis and tailspins and whatnot’s on this feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And of course, as far as I’m concerned, I’m just barfing this into a black hole. I mean, I would not be any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wiser if it was just going to Dev Null on some Apple server somewhere. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have been adding all these things, trying to – I’ve taken videos with my phone of my god-awful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey refresh rate and of my machine gun trackpad and attached it to this feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been a good citizen and doing what I can to get my problems fixed. And I have no idea if it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to any human being, but that’s okay. But one of the things I’m trying starting today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is something that had been suggested and I had actually tried myself with my old iMac is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not using Bluetooth for my peripherals for my keyboard and mouse and instead plugging them in. So they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, I don’t know the official name for this, but the Apple extended key,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not the extended keyboard two that Gruber likes, but whatever they call the magic keyboard with the 10 key.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then the Magic Trackpad, they’re now both plugged in via lightning cables to my iMac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That seems to make things a little better so far. I’ve also seemingly seen that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of network I O in particular can really choke everything, which seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really not good. But that’s the way it is, or at least that’s some solid anecdote I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got for you. That if I’m running a time machine back up to the Synology while I’m doing something else on the Synology,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey while I’m trying to play a video from, I don’t know, NPR or Tiny Desk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Concerts, as I’ve been doing nonstop for the last few days, everything just gets real ugly real quick. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have disabled Time Machine temporarily, Crash Plan, oops, I rebooted, so it is running. I gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey turn that back off. All sorts of things I have to do to get my computer to actually frigging work. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, no, Catalina’s great and I shouldn’t complain about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can we get a ruling on feedback versus radar? I know the app is called Feedback in this new
⏹️ ▶️ John purple app and we don’t use RadarWeb anymore, right, but aren’t they still just
⏹️ ▶️ John radars under the cover? Like, referring to them as feedbacks or my feedbacks seems
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco weird to me. I’m not sure I’m ready for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, is it appropriate to be using that as a new proper noun? Are they actually called feedbacks or are people just saying
⏹️ ▶️ John that because of the app name?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think like radar made sense as both the name of the app, also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the plural of like, oh, I filed some radars. I don’t think feedback works in that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can’t say I filed some feedbacks. I mean, you can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not a, the noun does not pluralize like that. Because obviously the plural of feedback is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feedback, but that’s not how this works here. So, yeah, it’s just mechanically it doesn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, let’s just make an ATP ruling that it will be for now and forevermore, Radar.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, we don’t want to be with the times. That’s why I’m asking. I’m like, is it like internally,
⏹️ ▶️ John because internally they had an app called Radar, and then what we were using was Radar Web or whatever, because we just got to use
⏹️ ▶️ John the web interface. We didn’t see the native application, but that was ages ago. So now we have a new
⏹️ ▶️ John native app for regular people called Feedback. But given that
⏹️ ▶️ John the actual issues and numbers are all the same as they were in Radar, I’m assuming it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John just a different client for whatever is lurking behind Radar. Anyway, if some Apple person
⏹️ ▶️ John can let us know, are they still called Radars internally? Do
⏹️ ▶️ John RDAR URL schemes still work for people internally for Apple, how should
⏹️ ▶️ John we be referring to them?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I said, I’m all in on calling it Radar and forevermore, as far as I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey concerned. Don’t get stuck in your ways, Casey. You’re too young.
SwitchGlass and desktops
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s move on. Let’s get an update, John, if you don’t mind, on Switchglass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and desktop backgrounds. What is your vision quest taking you, where is your vision quest taking you these
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, just a little quick follow-up on the big discussion last week about what I was doing for desktop images.
⏹️ ▶️ John After the podcast, I delved more into the code I had for copying the
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop window, and I got a bunch of suggestions from a bunch of helpful people on Twitter and through email
⏹️ ▶️ John that gave me a lot more confidence in my ability to identify which desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John belongs to which monitor by comparing the coordinates. There was just a Y-axis
⏹️ ▶️ John flip. Like, this is the thing about the Mac. I guess in iOS it’s probably easier and more consistent,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there are multiple different competing coordinate systems on the Mac, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit tricky. And I knew about that, and I usually account for it, but in this case, I was being fooled by the particular
⏹️ ▶️ John placement of my little sidecar display, my vast 6K display, into me thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John that this isn’t a coordinate flip. I’m only off by like a little bit, but I was just like unlucky with
⏹️ ▶️ John the numbers. Like, so it looked to me as if it was like an off by 10 error when
⏹️ ▶️ John really it was a complete coordinate system flip and just because of the nature of how they were. Anyway, once I got that
⏹️ ▶️ John straightened out and I’m like, oh, it’s, you know, it’s just Y axis flip. And then once I do the Y axis flip, I could
⏹️ ▶️ John positively identify all the things. So now I’m super confident in that system. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John the window copy system is the way to go. That is my primary thing. I
⏹️ ▶️ John still have the fallbacks in there, but honestly I expect the fallbacks never to be used and I’ll probably remove all that code. So that’s what I shipped. I
⏹️ ▶️ John shipped the window copy code. It’s out there right now. And I thank everyone for the help and clarification
⏹️ ▶️ John in figuring this out. I still think obviously there should be a sane API to get this because it’s apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John something that lots of developers wanna do if they ever show like a little miniature picture of your screen in like a preferences dialog
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. Lots of apps do this during onboarding when they show like a little picture of your computer or a monitor or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John There should be an API. Did you just return an NS image? It
⏹️ ▶️ John should be an NS screen API called desktop image
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, it’s harder than it needs to be but I’m glad I found a way to do it. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John as for Switchgrass itself, I am happy to say that thanks to all the people who listened to the
⏹️ ▶️ John show and bought a copy and then aren’t using it, thank you everybody. I have now fully
⏹️ ▶️ John funded the $400 aluminum bracket that holds hard drives for my Mac Pro and it is
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting on my desk right now in its box. Hey! Although one of the things
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t realize before I had an app on the App Store is exactly how long Apple takes to pay you anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco So in theory, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have paid for it. But yeah, the actual payment, according to the official party line at Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John is after the end of the month in which you’ve had sales. So let’s say January ends. You’re like, when am I gonna get
⏹️ ▶️ John paid for all those sales I made in January? Apple says you will get paid 45 days after the end of
⏹️ ▶️ John the month. Apparently that is a little bit too pessimistic, usually get it around 30 days, but the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John the point is I still haven’t received a penny for any of my apps, not even front and center, which was released
⏹️ ▶️ John a long time ago. So eventually I will get the money to pay for this bracket, but I didn’t wait to buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I bought it with the assumption that Apple will eventually pay. And of course, it came with that eight terabyte hard drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I’m not sure what I’m going to do with. I’ll probably stick it inside my Mac and see if I can tolerate the noise. But if I can’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I’m glad that you have lent yourself some money in order to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this toy that you’ve been wanted but not wanted for so long. So congratulations.
Marco’s Music “bug”
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, Andrew Larson would like to know, have you tried enabling high quality streaming? I’ve had,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is Andrew writing, I’ve always had this on and I’ve never heard what you’re referring to. So this was with regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Apple Music and hearing like crummy versions of songs, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey correct? In the very beginning that is, and then they’ll get better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sort of, yeah. So in Ask ATP last week, the question was like, you know, if it was like, if you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fix one little bug that you could fix in one day, what would it be? And mine was that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I start streaming over cellular, in the music app, every track begins with a half second of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very low bitrate audio that sounds awful, and then it snaps to the higher bitrate responsibly as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets the connection. I said, just buffer it for a second and then play the higher one from the start,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or preload it before you play it, or whatever it is. And a bunch of people wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that basically say, there’s a setting under, I think it’s under Music Cellular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s high-quality streaming. And if you turn this setting on, this doesn’t happen anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it wasn’t technically a bug, it was a bad default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting. So I turned the setting on and in one day, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey how are you two doing on your one day bugs? Not well, not well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all. Oh man, that’s my…
Static analyzer skips Swift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then at some point yesterday, I don’t remember yesterday, at some point last week, I don’t remember what it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we were talking about, the static analyzer in Xcode and Aaron Farnham writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t know if this is true, but I have no reason to believe it isn’t. Aaron writes that the static analyzer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey skips Swift files and only looks at C++, Objective-C and Objective-C++, which is a bummer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I can’t say I am surprised.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was the explanation for why I never saw any complaints in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the static analyzer. Why is it?
⏹️ ▶️ John no issues with it. It just doesn’t, it’s skipping all my files. Although I do technically have a couple of Objective-C files
⏹️ ▶️ John mixed in there, but they’re small. But anyway, yeah, it’s interesting. I mean, obviously the static analyzer was introduced
⏹️ ▶️ John back when, you know, before Swift existed, so that kind of makes sense. Why it doesn’t work with Swift, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like Swift has the static analyzer built into the compiler, and that Swift is all about
⏹️ ▶️ John being able to reason about everything that’s going to happen in your program and know, you know, that’s what optionals are about,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what its type system is about. It’s not to say that Swift doesn’t need a linter or a static analyzer,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think Swift itself, the language, goes a long way towards catching the kinds of mistakes
⏹️ ▶️ John that you could, you know, that the Objective-C compiler will not complain. That’s why you need the static analyzer
⏹️ ▶️ John or some kind of linter to yell at you for doing things that are potentially dangerous in Objective-C, but in Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ John the compiler’s got your back for most things.
Overcast state restoration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don Libes writes, I was startled to hear Marco complain that the iOS music app loses its place
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the navigation hierarchy because his own podcast player, Overcast, has the same feature. If relaunched in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey background, Overcast forgets where it was navigated to in a smart playlist. I assume regular playlists too. Similarly, if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey navigate up one level and then back down into the playlist, Overcast resets the view to the beginning of the list rather than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what I was previously looking at. Marco, would you like to defend yourself? And let me state for the record, I was not the person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who put this in the show notes. It’s not my fault, I’m sorry. Yeah, sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this was, yeah, I was again complaining about, in the same segment about the music app, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it basically forgets everything about your navigation stack every time the app quits, which is very frequent.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you got to whatever you’re now playing thing is by say going from a playlist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or going browsing through somebody’s albums and going to the albums, like it just loses all that and it launches you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into like nothing. And by the way, iTunes is the same, or now music does the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every time we launch it, it’s like, this is the first time it’s ever been launched. It doesn’t even remember what song you were playing. It certainly doesn’t remember your spot in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco song. So anyway, yes, Overcast does not remember
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your scroll position in those lists. It does, however, remember what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen you were on and in what mode. So basically, the way Overcast is structured data-wise, and you can see this on that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco root screen there’s a contact there’s a concept of playlist provider and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that can be either a playlist or a podcast in that root entry and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever however you got to what you’re playing is a playlist provider so either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you went to a playlist and pick an episode and hit plays in which case the playlist itself is a playlist provider
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the episode is the current episode or you went to a specific podcast from the root screen which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then that is the playlist provider and then the episode within that is your current episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Overcast always saves the current playlist provider and the current episode. So when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relaunch it from scratch, it will do that. It will resume back to where it was. However, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco person is right, it does not record your scroll position within those lists. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that, frankly, I just hadn’t considered that people would care about the scroll position. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly, I just never really considered it. that’s not a bad complaint and I might implement that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m doing all this manually. I actually, because I learned iOS development with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first SDK, which didn’t have state restoration, it didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have storyboards, it didn’t have core data, like all that stuff. It didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco backgrounding, did it? No, of course not, no. But like the iOS 2.0 SDK didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a lot of critical stuff, most notably interface builder and core data. It also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t have state restoration APIs. And so I actually didn’t implement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state restoration in any of my apps ever. I do it manually. Like, whatever the APIs are to do it, I’m not familiar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with them at all. I’ve never used them, never even looked at them. I just do it manually. And in this case, I just save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two bits of data, like the playlist provider ID and the current episode ID, and that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know there are a lot of state restoration APIs. And I believe they were introduced right before backgrounding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey became a thing, or maybe it was the same time. It doesn’t really matter when. But my point is, they’ve been around for a long time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I haven’t looked at them in ages, but they are definitely a thing.
Microsoft Defender ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, John, I’m assuming you put in the show notes the following Microsoft Defender
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dot dot dot ATP question mark?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is a Microsoft product. They have like an antivirus product. It’s available
⏹️ ▶️ John for the Mac. There was some recent news that they’re making it available for iOS too, which is slightly confusing because how
⏹️ ▶️ John the hell does antivirus work on iOS? But anyway, but it’s called
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection. Ah, nice. It’s abbreviated by Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John as their product name as Microsoft Defender ATP for Mac, which I think is funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, this is in the category of anti-virus
⏹️ ▶️ John or anti-malware products for the Mac that do not destroy your entire computer. A couple people have recommendations for
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are lighter-weighed and don’t do giant scans and don’t install kernel extensions
⏹️ ▶️ John that intercept all file IO and network IO and stuff like that. And apparently the Microsoft Defender series,
⏹️ ▶️ John both for Windows and for the Mac, have a reputation for being less
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible. And in general, I would recommend virus
⏹️ ▶️ John anti-malware products from companies that, from very large companies
⏹️ ▶️ John or companies that sort of make the platform. Like I tend to trust more, like if
⏹️ ▶️ John a company’s sole purpose is to be anti-virus, I have to think they are highly motivated
⏹️ ▶️ John to uh, make the threat,
⏹️ ▶️ John to take the threat very seriously and do everything in their power because that’s another check mark on their product.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like our product does this, does that. And the other thing, whereas Microsoft is highly motivated not to make your PC bogged down
⏹️ ▶️ John because they get blamed for that because they’re the platform vendor. Similarly, the antivirus things, anti malware things
⏹️ ▶️ John that apple has are so invisible that people think they’re not even there. Even, you know, they are the expert tech
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff and all the stuff they do to the file system behind the scenes and obviously in Catalina slightly more visible
⏹️ ▶️ John with all those dialog boxes asking you for permission. So anti-virus stuff from platform
⏹️ ▶️ John owners I tend to be more optimistic about. I still don’t recommend anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John get any of these things but I thought it was funny that Microsoft has a product that is generally well regarded and it’s available for the Mac and soon iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s called ATP.
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Safari vs. certificate lifetimes
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey expiration. So starting in September, Safari will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no longer accept HTTPS certificates older than roughly 13 months. Not true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. Tell me what’s true
⏹️ ▶️ John You didn’t do your homework. Did you read this article?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I read it very quickly, about 30 seconds ago. Does
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re doing your homework while the teacher is collecting it? That’s right. I’ve done that. Tried and true method. I know. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s good to be.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes it’s good to be at the back of the class, but if they pass the papers forward, it’s good to be in the front. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is what I learned in school. How to most efficiently do homework 30 seconds
⏹️ ▶️ John before it’s due. So yeah, if Safari just started
⏹️ ▶️ John rejecting certificates that are more than X amount old, like the web would break, right? So it’s slightly more
⏹️ ▶️ John nuanced than that. They will, like certificates that were issued before
⏹️ ▶️ John some upcoming cutoff date are grandfathered in. So if you just got a five year certificate
⏹️ ▶️ John yesterday, I don’t even know if they make them five years anymore, but anyway, if you got a long live certificate yesterday, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John good, that Safari will not reject that certificate. But there’s a point coming up or in the near future,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it hasn’t already passed, If you get a cert after that point,
⏹️ ▶️ John then Safari will only consider it valid for like a year after the point you got it. So they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John breaking the entire web, but they are taking a unilateral stand to say, even though the rules
⏹️ ▶️ John about how long SSL certs can last, they don’t even call that SSL certs anymore, whatever. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just gonna call them that for the hell of it, like radars. Even though the rules about how long they
⏹️ ▶️ John can last don’t say that they can only be a year old, Safari is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to use whatever market cloud it has, you know, significant market cloud and mobile less so on desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, our pretty popular browser is not going to accept your certificate
⏹️ ▶️ John if it was issued after, you know, whatever it is, September. I don’t remember the date. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey September 1.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And if it was issued after that, and it’s more than whatever, a year old,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to reject it. Even though technically the certificate is still valid, and Chrome will accept it, and Firefox will accept it, or whatever, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John going to say it’s too old. And this is sort of Apple taking its ball and going home
⏹️ ▶️ John after losing the larger sort of committee argument of, should we make this a rule, and we’ll all
⏹️ ▶️ John just agree after this date, certificate authorities won’t issue certificates that last
⏹️ ▶️ John longer than a year. And there wasn’t consensus on that, so Apple’s just doing it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. That’s one of those things like, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we have things like standards bodies or official committees or whatever else, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have a really powerful vendor, they can just choose when to ignore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the standards bodies and do things themselves. Apple does this, Google does this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No one’s hands are clean here. No one obeys the standards committees all the time. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the reality of how the world works. So in this case, Apple is basically saying, well, we tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make you all agree on this. you didn’t, so we’re going to do it anyway without your agreement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s lots of reasons why having short lifetime SSL
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certificates is better than having long lifetime ones. I’m ultimately though, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really sure that this is worth it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know there’s lots of arguments from the security people about, well, you know, if somebody compromises your certificate, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can use it and that’s really bad. and it’s like, okay, well, that’s true. My two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of arguments for that would be, number one, they can now still use it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up to a year. Like, that’s not that much. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever time interval you pick, there’s going to be the risk of somebody using a certificate within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that time window. A year, instead of before, the longest cert you could get was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, two years recently. In the past, it used to be up to, I think, five years, In the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last couple of years, it’s been hard to buy anything longer than, I think, two years. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that risk is still there, no matter what that duration is. It’s an arbitrary number, and shortening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it from two or three years down to one year, I mean, yeah, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco helps, but that’s still a massive risk. If you’re going to say that shirts get stolen all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the time, then this is obviously a problem that can happen now within one year instead of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within two or three. And then secondly, this just adds more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and more to the huge, annoying barrier of entry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the increasingly strict SSL requirements have brought to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who are just trying to run small websites. And I know that on a lot of levels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SSL is great, or whatever, TLS, whatever it is, HTTPS, on a lot of levels this is great and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we should be using it for a lot of things much of the time. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little more on the side of, I think people like Dave Weiner who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are like, we don’t really actually need this for as much as it’s being pushed on us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a whole lot of websites out there that are just plain content sites that, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are advantages to them using HTTPS. There’s proxies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not being able to inject JavaScript like when you’re on a plane or whatever, crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ISPs who inject JavaScript into umstressed pages. like there’s stuff like that. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like, you know, the way browsers treat HTTPS traffic a little bit differently with things like, you know, when refers or set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or when cookies can be, you know, restricted and everything like that. So there are some technical advantages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco besides the encryption itself. But ultimately for a lot of sites, they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t care and the people who are browsing them wouldn’t care. And it’s not that big of a deal. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the browsers react so aggressively now whenever you have something that’s something that’s not super current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or not using HTTPS at all. It’ll say things like not secure in the address bar, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is kind of misleading when you’re just going to like some blog and reading a blog
⏹️ ▶️ Marco post and it says not secure. That kind of suggests that you’re getting compromised. Uh, but that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really what’s going on. Like, so anyway, the browsers and everything are so aggressive about this now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everyone says, Oh, it’s easy. Just, you know, everything that begins with it’s easy. Just is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually more complicated than that in practice. And the reality is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re now forcing every website owner out there to comply with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco increasingly strict requirements and mess with it increasingly frequently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And ultimately, a good solution is probably something like Let’s Encrypt, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great idea of, Let’s Encrypt is basically this automated thing a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cert authority, they issue only 90 day long certs, and then the idea is it’s so short
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it forces you to automate the renewal. And that’s a cool idea,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s working for a lot of people. It doesn’t work everywhere. There’s a lot of context in which that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not, that can’t fly, or that’s very cumbersome and not really worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so keep in mind that when the browser makers or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whoever else ratchet up the security on this stuff, it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it harder and more cumbersome for sites to continue operation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or to start a new site. Or it raises the barrier so high that it further entrenches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the existing massive hosting platforms or massive web hosts instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of making it so that smaller players can really stay competitive. And so there’s all sorts of issues here that every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they ratchet this up, it deals with this. And it’s like a lot of the benefit of HTTPS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that stuff about like, you know, not being able to be injected by your ISP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the way browsers treat it and everything, a whole lot of that has very little to do with the actual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco encryption being used and the actual strength of that and the actual, you know, lifetime and privacy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sophistication of the key being used to encrypt it and the method and everything. A lot of that is just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the protocol and of the different ways it works. a lot of the benefit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be had with certificates that never expire. Like, you could just have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco literally non-expiring, permanent certificates that would solve a lot of problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for use cases where the data being transferred actually isn’t all that sensitive. Things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like my blog being hosted, our website, stuff like that. A lot of that stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you don’t really need the encryption for encryption’s sake. You do it for other reasons or for less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco important reasons. You’re not dealing with people’s credit cards, you’re not dealing with their personal data, you’re not dealing with anything like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead what we have is everything’s being ratcheted up so much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it’s just causing a huge tax on everybody who runs websites,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which these days is, by the way, pretty much everybody. Like every business, tons of individuals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re making it a giant pain And I’m not sure the benefit is worth
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it or necessary for the majority of sites out there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the other benefit to secure, you know, I call it SSL
⏹️ ▶️ John again, I can’t, I’m an old person. SSL is, you know, I know the thing of like secure versus insecure,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, well, this is just a blog, it’s just, you know, who cares? There’s nothing security sensitive here. Is
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that the person on the receiving end has greater confidence that
⏹️ ▶️ John what they’re seeing in their web browser is actually what was published by this website, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the authenticity, right? So if you just get HTTP, anything between you and them can completely replace the content,
⏹️ ▶️ John can replace the content of your blog with anything else and it make people think that you wrote something that you didn’t write, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John How can I be sure that the person who controls marco.org actually serves this content
⏹️ ▶️ John versus it just being, you know, corrupted or replaced or, you know, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s part of the assurance, sort of the, you know, data integrity, what they are sending me is
⏹️ ▶️ John what I’m getting. Obviously that itself is not hard and fast because there’s all sorts of men in the middle of hacks
⏹️ ▶️ John that SSL is meant to prevent, but there are situations where things can be transparently re-encrypted and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of hacks or whatever. But in general, having completely unencrypted traffic traveling between
⏹️ ▶️ John your web server and the people reading it means that anything in that flow
⏹️ ▶️ John can, you know, just modify the content easily. And the person on
⏹️ ▶️ John the receiving end has no idea and the person that’s sending it has no idea, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John That said, the sort of the pain in the butt for
⏹️ ▶️ John people is real. Like when I first read this, I kind of groaned because
⏹️ ▶️ John this is my own fault, but my web hosting situation grew organically from its origins
⏹️ ▶️ John as I don’t want to pay a lot for this web hosting, which is a good strategy when you
⏹️ ▶️ John have nothing on the web, but once you have more stuff on the web and you’ve just been adding
⏹️ ▶️ John little pieces to that strategy, it’s not great. So I’ve got many SSL
⏹️ ▶️ John certificates, many domain names, many virtual hosts, many everythings, all acquired
⏹️ ▶️ John piecemeal over long periods of time. And in recent years, I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John acquiring SSL certificates, sometimes because I’ve had to, for example, switchglass.app. I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know until I got that and front and center.app and front-n-center-, or not center-, front-n-center.app.
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t know that.apps, that domain requires SSL.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you have a.app domain, you literally cannot serve it over HTTP. Browsers will not go to it through
⏹️ ▶️ John HTTP. It’s like built into client browsing software that certain subdomains are HTTPS
⏹️ ▶️ John only and.app is one of them. So I was forced to get SSL certificates for those
⏹️ ▶️ John things. So that’s a pain and I’m dreading dealing with that because
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m bad at keeping track of these things. When do my certificates expire? Did I write it down? How do I
⏹️ ▶️ John renew them? Where did I buy them from? So on and so forth. So the countervailing force against all of this
⏹️ ▶️ John is things like Let’s Encrypt. All right, so on the one hand, you’ve got pressure of saying, long-lived certificates are bad
⏹️ ▶️ John for security. And as Marco rightly pointed out, a year is still pretty long, right? You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John any window of time is not great. Apparently the system for revoking certificates
⏹️ ▶️ John is basically useless. So if someone compromises your key, there’s not much you can do about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, which is why shorter lifetimes are better. But it’s a pain
⏹️ ▶️ John for people who have websites. And on the flip side of that is, okay, so it’s a pain for people who have websites. If we make it more and
⏹️ ▶️ John more painful by increments, hopefully something on the other side of this will say, we need a system
⏹️ ▶️ John that makes it easier. Like you were saying, Marco, about like Let’s Encrypt doing 90 days. Like, we’ll make it so short that you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to automate it because it’s so painful if you don’t automate it. And by the way, we’ll make it free. So why
⏹️ ▶️ John are you paying for your SSL certs? Go to Let’s Encrypt and they’re free. Don’t pay some company to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I see the tension between those two things. I want it to be easier. And for years and years, it
⏹️ ▶️ John hasn’t gotten easier because there hasn’t been a force on the other side saying we’re gonna make it such a pain in your butt that
⏹️ ▶️ John you better make it easier or otherwise you’re gonna be screwed. In fact, one of the parties in some of the articles
⏹️ ▶️ John that I read that doesn’t want the certificate lifetime to be shrunk are
⏹️ ▶️ John the companies that sell you SSL certs. Because from their perspective, kind of like me with Switchglass, their ideal
⏹️ ▶️ John customer gives them a big wad of money and then five years later gives them another big wad and in
⏹️ ▶️ John between, you don’t have to deal with them. Whereas if they have to give you a small amount of money every 90
⏹️ ▶️ John days or deal with, they don’t want, that’s like, and every time there’s a touch point between the customer and them, like their
⏹️ ▶️ John systems have to be more robust, they need to be more responsive, they need to deal with the customers more often, it’s much
⏹️ ▶️ John better to get a bunch of money and not hear from me in five years than hear from me every 30 days or whatever, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John their systems are designed to vend certificates Most people buy them for lasting a long time or whatever, and
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they can’t handle this. This is all just speculation, but in general, these big companies that
⏹️ ▶️ John give out certificates, you know, are just as ill-equipped to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ John a radical shortening of certificate lifetime as people who run websites are. In my particular
⏹️ ▶️ John case, I really wanted to use Let’s Encrypt because who wants to pay? I wanted to, you know, I’d rather use Let’s Encrypt and have it be free,
⏹️ ▶️ John but my hosting company does not support Let’s Encrypt. It’s one of the few companies that doesn’t support
⏹️ ▶️ John it. most of them do. They support their own thing. And I just wanted to click a bunch of buttons
⏹️ ▶️ John and give someone 10 bucks and get a certificate. And it wasn’t too painful. But because I did it through
⏹️ ▶️ John my hosting company that did it through this third party thing that shoved it into a shared host that has 57
⏹️ ▶️ John virtual hosts that all have different certificates and domain names, all on different registrars, all different IP addresses
⏹️ ▶️ John and all the different mail routes. And it’s confusing and it’s difficult.
⏹️ ▶️ John All this is to say that I really want the tooling to be
⏹️ ▶️ John easier and cheaper and ideally free for everybody. And I think history has shown
⏹️ ▶️ John if there is no force on the other side making it painful, that will never happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like SSL certificates have been a pain in the butt for decades. Like on their own, they weren’t getting
⏹️ ▶️ John easier. Let’s Encrypt is the first effort to try to make them easier. And that, I don’t know if that
⏹️ ▶️ John was a reaction to the shortening of the lifetime, but it took a long time to arrive. So while I’m dreading
⏹️ ▶️ John the potential pain that is in store for me personally for this, I’m hoping what it will do
⏹️ ▶️ John is put ever more pressure on all the different hosting companies and all the different people who
⏹️ ▶️ John sell certificates to make it ever easier to automate things, to follow in Let’s Encrypt’s footsteps.
⏹️ ▶️ John And anybody who doesn’t support Let’s Encrypt, start supporting it. Or if you don’t wanna support Let’s Encrypt, support
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the other ones that charges you, but make it way easier to deal with. Because instead of it being something
⏹️ ▶️ John that people think about every two to five years, if it was something people had to think about every 30 days, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John have to be automated, otherwise bad things would happen. And then the other thing that made me think about is we hear about
⏹️ ▶️ John this all the time. I think it happened recently where like, I think Microsoft teams let one of their certs expire. Do you remember the
⏹️ ▶️ John news on that? We use teams at work. So I’m, I think it was teams. Um, every
⏹️ ▶️ John once in a while, you hear of some giant multi bazillion dollar company where like no one was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco watching the
⏹️ ▶️ John certificates, right? And all of a sudden their entire application breaks and everyone runs around like, what’s wrong, what’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s happening is are the servers down? I don’t understand why people connect and someone says wait a second our certificates
⏹️ ▶️ John expired whose job was it to look at that and it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know we got it five years ago and the answer is it’s nobody’s job like this this happens
⏹️ ▶️ John in big companies where if you do a thing and that thing is done and doesn’t doesn’t require any additional work or even if does require
⏹️ ▶️ John additional work it’s very attractive for management to take the people who did that job
⏹️ ▶️ John off of that task and put them onto something else and so then nobody’s looking at the certificates you you your job
⏹️ ▶️ John is to get a certificate for our new product good I I got a certificate. OK, great. Now you’re assigned to this team to do this other thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then maybe you leave the company, or maybe you go into another project and forget about that. And then five years later, the
⏹️ ▶️ John cert expires, and no one was watching it. And if that can happen to Microsoft with
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of money and tons of smart people, you bet it can happen just to an individual person with a blog
⏹️ ▶️ John or something. And it’s definitely going to happen to me. I put a bunch of things in my calendar, I think, reminding me,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, two years from now, because I did get the longest certificates I could, to renew the certificates.
⏹️ ▶️ John but by the time that event comes up, I’m gonna be like, renew the certificates.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco What certificates was I talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ John And how did I get those? And I’ll be going through my email receipts. What company did I get them from? Did I use Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Encrypt for that one? Did I not? What was that company called? What domain is this for?
⏹️ ▶️ John So, yeah. And then finally, as for Apple unilaterally doing this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the judgment call, like, does Apple have the weight to do this? On the desktop, I would say no.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the desktop, I think today, the default answer for, certainly for any sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of enterprise thing is, Safari support on the desktop? It’s a nice to have, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t have it, it’s not a big deal. Safari Mobile is obviously way more important, just because they have bigger market
⏹️ ▶️ John share and bigger sort of money share. But there is the possibility that if Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John does too many things off on its own, they become a pariah and people say, oh, we’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John support Safari anymore because it’s doing too many annoying things. Like our website works fine in Chrome. It even works fine in Edge,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it doesn’t work in Safari because it complains about our cert. Our cert doesn’t expire for another year. Screw Safari,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? It’s, you know, it’s a game of chicken to see who’s gonna win that one. Depending on who the vendor
⏹️ ▶️ John and who the customers are, Apple may lose that fight. But in
⏹️ ▶️ John general, especially on the iPhone, which is so incredibly popular, if an iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John user can’t load your webpage and you try to blame Apple, that’s not gonna work. People who have the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John are gonna say, It’s an iPhone. Make your website work with the iPhone, and then you’re just gonna have to get a new cert.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s how that’s gonna happen. So, I mean, at the very least, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apple trying to do the right thing. Like, it doesn’t want these short inserts
⏹️ ▶️ John because it helps it increase its revenue for ad tracking, or like, it doesn’t help it sell more iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t help it sell more Macs. It doesn’t help it sell more Apple TV Plus subscriptions. Like, this does not help
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s bottom line at all, really. They’re just doing what they think is right,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re basically potentially harming their own business to do it. So I give them kudos for having the guts
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. I’m not entirely sure that it’s going to work out as well as they think, But I
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t think of any particularly nefarious motive for them doing it.
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Setting default apps
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco you so much to Linode, my favorite web host, for sponsoring our show and hosting all my stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was an interesting article from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg recently wherein Gurman
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is claiming that Apple is at least considering letting users switch some default
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhone apps to those of rivals. So they’re considering apparently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey letting you set maybe Chrome or some other browser as the default.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even keep up with the alternative mail apps because it’s silly to use one. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever the alternative…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Trey Lockerbie I used to think that until iOS 13. And now I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I the fool for sticking with the built-in
⏹️ ▶️ John one? John Dorey That’s fair. That’s fair. Trevor Burrus Well, why is it silly to use one? Isn’t it just because you can’t change the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is that why it’s silly? John Dorey No, I was just snarking. But since I’ve now dug this hole for myself, I’m going to have to try to dig
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it deeper. I mean, try to climb out. I just personally, I think fighting a platform is silly. I also think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying to staple on functionality that email just wasn’t designed for, like snoozing and things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, is also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fairly silly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Steven O’Reilly Wasn’t designed for? You’re like an email originalist? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, it wasn’t designed for styled text either. You’re going to reject that? Do you view all your email
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And don’t answer that question because I know people who do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Why? You know when
⏹️ ▶️ John the people use Outlook in plain text mode, and they send you everything, and it comes through with whatever your configured monospace
⏹️ ▶️ John font is, and they can’t do like, yeah. Anyway, go
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Sorry to interrupt.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t realize that you were a bad cop this week. I’m sorry. Anyway, so point being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can maybe change Safari to Chrome or something. You can change Mail to something else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And potentially, you might even be able to use Spotify through your HomePod, which would be excellent.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it might even be the default through Siri. If you recall, I think it was iOS 13 that allowed you to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, you know, hey, Dingus play the latest album from Mute Math using Spotify.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then it would actually, you know, pipe that through to Spotify and that works reasonably well. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is not being announced, obviously, because it wasn’t even Apple that made this, that wrote this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey article. And furthermore, German said, they’re just considering it. But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t see why not. Like this sounds excellent to me. I’m assuming,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as many others have, that this is because there’s been a little bit of smoke around the thought of there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being potential antitrust investigations into Apple for locking people into this stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know. Marco, what do you think about all this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think from a user point of view, this makes total sense. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple is never gonna give up more control than they need to, ever, in anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But sometimes they get pressured to in ways that are compelling, and they eventually just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. And almost always, it actually works out better for everybody, including them. Usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it makes their stuff better, it makes them sell more, whatever it is. And you can look at tons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of examples. Things like, obviously, the old running iTunes on Windows to let people buy iPods
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who weren’t Mac owners, stuff like that, but in general, iOS has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, obviously it started out from a very locked down state, and in many ways it still is very locked down, and Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps still have lots of custom abilities that third party apps can’t do. But over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with almost every version of iOS, Apple has somehow enabled third party apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to integrate better with the OS, or to have like a more first class experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do things that previously only Apple apps could do, or to behave in ways that only Apple apps could behave.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And over time, they’ve just kept knocking down those walls many, many times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so from one point of view, you could see this as like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe they were gonna eventually get to this anyway, they just hadn’t gotten to it yet, or that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were complexities behind this they didn’t wanna deal with, so they put it off, but eventually it becomes more compelling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as other factors, as you mentioned, any trust is, I think, a big one, which I’ll get to in a second. But, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, so over time, Apple does knock down these limitations, and they do allow third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco integrations in ways that we previously wouldn’t, didn’t think they ever would.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then every day we see, we are like, oh my God, they’re now letting apps do this thing. We never thought they’d let us do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s, it’s a common pattern. This was noteworthy because it’s been such a longstanding request,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever since app stores, ever since the app store, ever since there were third-party apps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever since, well, ever since shortly after the App Store, when Apple relaxed the rule that said
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t make apps that replicate the built-in apps functionalities. Remember that, when podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps were illegal for a little while? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, it’s still true. If you try to make a springboard clone, they’re gonna reject that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John for sure. Oh, totally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, yeah. Any kind of app launcher that contains other multiple apps, unless it’s WeChat.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasn’t afraid I was gonna get rejected for Switch Class, because it’s like the dock.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, same here. With Peek-a-View, I was expecting them to be like, no, just use photos, go away.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s still very rarely gets enforced in weird ways like that, but for the most part, that rule
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hasn’t existed for a very long time, which is why we have things like podcast apps, notes apps, we literally didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have those things for the first couple years for that reason. Anyway, over time, you know, Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relaxed the system and allowed more third-party integrations at various different endpoints.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they’ve also pushed the iPad specifically into the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco territory in a lot of different ways of how this thing can be used, what users need and want from it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what degree of, quote, professional or power usage can be done with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And a lot of that requires more Mac-like features to be adopted. So things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Files app coming over to the iOS, to multiple windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and apps having multiple windows in the same app on the iPad, stuff like that. Like they’re slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco breaking down some of these walls. One. So for this, the rumor is they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to allow you to set your own default mail app and browser, which the Mac has offered forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like there’s a preference in Safari and in mail and you can set your default mail app and apps apparently have some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API to call it, which is why every single time you launch Chrome for a long time after you install
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, Hey, you should set this as your default browser. And they’re always fighting back and forth. And now apparently Safari shows a notification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first time you launch Chrome on Catalina, saying like, hey, you should try Safari,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something like that. I don’t know. It’s this glorious eggplant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waving match between those two companies. But anyway, so they’ve had this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ability in the Mac forever of you can set your default browser to something else. In the same way that there’s a system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for file extensions and associating a file extension with a given app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be its default app when you double click files of that type. There’s the same thing for URL schemes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there, and it’s simply, you know, HTTP or HTTPS URL schemes will open the default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browser, whatever that’s set to mail to links will open the default mail app, whatever that’s set to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the phone. You have a few others. You have things like tell to make phone calls. You have some messages things and a few others that are special.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, iOS to date has not had a way to, first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If multiple apps can open the same file type or accept the same URL scheme, iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has dealt with that very poorly so far. URL schemes, it doesn’t deal with it at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. It actually just kind of picks one and just makes them all open in that, you have no choice over it, and it won’t let apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco register for the ones like HTTP or Mailto to let them do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For file extensions, it has a system that’s kind of wonky and kind of works sometimes. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them to add the system to iOS to basically allow web browsers on iOS to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco register for the HTTP and HTTPS schemes and to have some kind of UI somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the system to choose which app that supports those schemes is going to be your default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. It’s a big step because we’ve wanted it for so long, but that seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it’s right in line with that gradual progression of both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple letting third-party apps integrate with the system more and more over time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Apple pushing the iPad to be more of a Mac replacement for more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people. Because, look at what else has come to the iPad recently. They recently brought over in the latest beta,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have the keyboard modifier keys panel. So now, you can do what I’ve been doing forever on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Macs. You can change the cap slot key to escape, which you could never do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iPad before. Now you can do that because they brought over that little preference pane that’s in the modifier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco key section of the keyboard preferences. That’s now in the iOS beta. They are clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making the iPad more and more Mac-like in feature set. Not like necessarily in the way it works, but like in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature set. They’re bringing over like some pretty good Mac-isms that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco help power users get their work done the way they want. So this could just be one of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the combination of adding third-party capabilities and progressing iPadOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be more of a Mac replacement totally could make this plausible on its own.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the antitrust angle, I think, is what is the driving force here that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making them go a little bit further, or pushing them to do a thing that was probably not high on the priority list,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and is probably a pain in the butt in certain ways. And I think now the antitrust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco angle is getting substantial, because Apple clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has a problematic monopoly over software and purchases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happen on the iPhone, because it is such a massive and important computing platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the world. And so—and they have already had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco antitrust probes and investigations and claims in various countries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The EU has been pretty good about it so far. The U.S., of course, we don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco functioning antitrust anymore, so I don’t think we would ever be a problem for them in the foreseeable future. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if our antitrust worked the way it should, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If government worked, it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco start. Yes, exactly. Yeah, that’s the larger problem. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know, countries that actually have functioning governments and that care about functioning markets are actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already opening probes and Spotify has been very loud and I believe they’ve been filing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco legal things in the EU. And I haven’t been paying attention to the specifics of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so forgive me if I’m misstating any of that. But anyway, the antitrust pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is mounting on Apple from from a number of angles. And to me, like I said in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past episodes of this show, I think the two big escape valves that they have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they could pull, but they did, I’m sure they don’t want to, one is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side-loading apps into, like to allow apps to be installed outside of the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that’s ever going to happen on iOS. Ever, ever, ever. I also, by the way, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the Mac is ever gonna go the other way. I don’t think the Mac is ever gonna go App Store only, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would break things in a lot of other ways. But on iOS, I never see them enabling side loading.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just, I think for so many reasons, that’s never gonna happen. The other thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would really have a lot of antitrust pressure from them is to drop the requirement that all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchases that are done in apps use their in-app purchase system. To basically allow somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Amazon to build in ebook purchasing right in their Kindle app, or to allow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Netflix to take your credit card information right in the Netflix app and sign up for their service without going through that purchase, without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paying the 30% slash 15%. And that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relieve almost all the antitrust pressure that’s on them. But that would also cost them a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of money. And I don’t think they’re ever gonna do that either. So I think they’re looking for other ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they could maybe relieve some of the antitrust pressure without doing the expensive thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, Apple would be fine without that. It’s like whatever amount of money they would lose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by enabling people like the big companies to not use a net purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I think it’s not that much money in the grand scheme of Apple. Second of all, I think the amount of money is going down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time as most of those companies give Apple the finger and just leave anyway and just don’t accept purchases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all in their iOS apps anymore, which is an increasing, like YouTube is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing that now. You can’t buy YouTube Premium anymore or Red, whatever it’s called this month. You can’t buy that anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as of, I think, March 1st. You can’t do Netflix anymore. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t know if you can still do HBO. So many of the big top grossing in-app purchases by big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco companies have dropped Apple’s system because they’re just losing too much money on the fees.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I actually think that the amount of money Apple would lose if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they started allowing external purchase systems is not as big as it was a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago and is probably not gonna matter in the grand scheme of things. But Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is really good at making money and they’re really stingy. And so they’re not gonna give this up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco without a major fight. So instead, they’re probably looking for other antitrust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco relief valves that they can swallow, that they’re willing to pull to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reduce some of the complaining from people like Spotify and other powerful entities,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe like Google, for Chrome. So they have a good reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to start looking for those handles to pull that are not the ones that will cost them money. That’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a major driving force here. All that being said, I would like them to go slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco further than what this rumor suggests. This rumor is suggesting basically browser, mail, and music.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope, and if not, if this isn’t what they have planned, I suggest this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This should apply to anything that you can operate with a Siri context where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multiple apps are supported. But for me, one of the things I would definitely use it for is reminders.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As I mentioned before on this show, I use the app Things. Great app. I almost always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enter Things into Things using Siri on my phone. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the syntax you have to use to do that, as you mentioned earlier with Spotify, you have to say something like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remind me at 10 o’clock in Things to do x, y, z.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love to just not have to say in things on every single invocation of that phrase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this is like this infrastructure already exists for apps to expose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their capabilities via intense and they have classifications of okay, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a reminders thing. This is a notes thing this like and you can apps can say which of those things they can respond to what kind of app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are. So the system already exists for Apple to make a preference pane somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the settings app that says all right, what is your what’s going to be your default reminders app, what’s gonna be your default notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, et cetera. I think everything supported by Siri Intents should have that ability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as well, not just mail and web
⏹️ ▶️ John The interesting thing here is interesting because everything you said about the, especially about the
⏹️ ▶️ John purchases and access to customers like and all the things with the
⏹️ ▶️ John Spotify complaining in the EU, like that pressure is real and is there. But
⏹️ ▶️ John this default app thing, although it’s related, I still feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s the type of thing that Apple would have eventually done on its own anyway. Like we’ve been talking about it
⏹️ ▶️ John for years and it’s always just been a question of when do you wanna pay that cost? Cause it’s added complexity
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s weird and in the beginning of the iPhone’s life it’s not appropriate cause you wanna just establish, you know, the platform
⏹️ ▶️ John for what it is and then in the middle you’re like, well we could do it now, it wouldn’t be a big deal but we have more important things to do And now
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like we’re kind of into the natural portion of iOS’s lifetime when Apple would be looking
⏹️ ▶️ John at this anyway. So even though all that antitrust stuff is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John a real thing and is surely influencing how they consider what they’re doing to the platform,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this stuff might’ve just, like it’s time just might’ve come anyway. Maybe it was accelerated
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit. It’s so hard to tell, because you don’t know what’s going on inside the company. But all that said,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think on Iowa on this this the speculation about iOS but even on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John The way Apple handles this now is not great. Like you were you were staying it
⏹️ ▶️ John with an eye towards it working the way it does on You know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like it like under the covers
⏹️ ▶️ John like oh there’s a URL scheme or a file type or whatever and you have a thing where you map an
⏹️ ▶️ John application to it and you can Choose from all the ones that can handle it, but that’s not even how it’s been on the Mac for
⏹️ ▶️ John ages You just mentioned it before with a launch in Chrome. Like how do you change your default browser
⏹️ ▶️ John in Mac OS? Well, it’s in Safari’s preferences. And if you launch Chrome, you might get prompted
⏹️ ▶️ John and Chrome will prompt you. Like it’s basically just a shouting match between the participants to say, over here, I’m over
⏹️ ▶️ John here, set me as a default. No, set me as a default, right? And there are places where you can find this, like it’s buried or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like doing it that way, just extending that system. Hey, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John how you pick your default browser on the Mac? If you said to Mac users, they’ll be like, no, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know that. Well, what if we extended that system that you don’t know about already to everything? It’s like, that’s not attractive.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was a time in the past when
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco this was a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ John straightforward and work more or less the way Marco explained, which is there was a control panel
⏹️ ▶️ John where you could list, I mean, it was techie and nerdy and that’s the difficult part of it. But like, I, I believe that Apple could
⏹️ ▶️ John overcome this. Here are all the protocols. Maybe you can’t call them protocols. Here are all
⏹️ ▶️ John the use cases, and here is what you’ve chosen as your
⏹️ ▶️ John application to handle that by default. And here are all the other choices that you could choose from in a single
⏹️ ▶️ John place. I hate when they spread these things out. I don’t want to go to each individual application’s
⏹️ ▶️ John preferences and hunt in their individual preferences to find the thing that lets them, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John retain or surrender their defaultness. And I don’t want them yelling at me about make me the default.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, make me the default. There’s a limited amount you can do to fix that. but if I could just go to a single preference pane and system preferences on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac and see all that information, that would be extremely helpful. Because there’s more than just
⏹️ ▶️ John the protocols that you just listed. There’s all sorts of weird secret things like the universal links or whatever, like
⏹️ ▶️ John on iOS where if you go to twitter.com, what if I don’t want to go to the Twitter app? What if I want to go to twitter.com? Is there
⏹️ ▶️ John one central place where I can control not only who controls this URL scheme, but also for universal links, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John I go to the web or to the application? That’s not easily under user’s control.
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably there’s some technique or when you go there go there But then how long press on this and force open
⏹️ ▶️ John to the brow like there are ways to do this, but it’s so Byzantine right so I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it could be way better on the Mac And I hope what they do on iOS is not what they do on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John because they’re just repeating that problem I hope they take both of them and say Imagine if all these settings could be in a single
⏹️ ▶️ John place because honestly it’s not that many settings like Start small web browser mail
⏹️ ▶️ John you know reminders podcast app, like this, you know, they’d fit on a screen, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John then for universal links, a section for anything that claims a universal link and say, should I use the app
⏹️ ▶️ John or should I use the web? Like just something, anything, like it’s not like Apple’s afraid of having too many settings.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you seen settings on a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey phone really? There’s a million of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s, you know, just centralize them and make it more, you know, that was the promise of settings. It’s like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John we won’t have the settings in apps on iOS because there’s not much room and it’s a full screen thing or whatever. We’ll put it all in the settings
⏹️ ▶️ John app and then just things got spread everywhere and on the Mac I don’t know why honestly they got rid of the
⏹️ ▶️ John old-style internet config thing where you just had a single control panel where you set up all this stuff but they
⏹️ ▶️ John did get rid of it and the system is worse and it’s all sorts of weird command-line incantations
⏹️ ▶️ John that people try to deal with to change all this stuff but it’s just it’s like dark matter on both of these things why
⏹️ ▶️ John is my computing device that I ostensibly control acting in this way why does this app launch when I do this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, right? Why does this go to an app instead of a web browser? How do I change
⏹️ ▶️ John my default app for this type of thing? It needs improvement
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not a super big technical hurdle. I think all the plumbing is there on both systems for all
⏹️ ▶️ John this stuff to work. It is just a fairly straightforward sort of UI
⏹️ ▶️ John task, a thing that Apple has done before on much weaker platforms with
⏹️ ▶️ John much more difficult technical hurdles. they can make a preference
⏹️ ▶️ John pane and make a setting screen for some upcoming major versions of both iOS and MacOS
⏹️ ▶️ John to let us do all these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just want Spotify to be my default. Is that so terrible?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s terrible for Apple’s perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John as selling Apple music subscriptions. That’s where I think the antitrust thing was. Apple doesn’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you to be able to use
⏹️ ▶️ John your home pod for Spotify. There’s no way in hell they want that. No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple sure as hell also doesn’t want Chrome to become a popular app on their iPhone because they see how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browser market share they’ve lost on the desktop to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, the thing that the other thing that people are talking about this is like alternate browsers on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John is pointless because Apple forces them all to use WebKit, which is yet another onerous restriction, arbitrary
⏹️ ▶️ John onerous restriction that Apple, you know, applied in the beginning, some much better reasons,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like in terms of security and reliability. Now, those reasons are less good, but still somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ John relevant given the nature of or web technologies, like WebGL could own your phone, you know, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, making Chrome your default is like, now you have a different candy
⏹️ ▶️ John color wrapping around the exact same browser engine that Safari is. Which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still, Apple doesn’t like it. Well, but there’s a lot more to a browser’s functionality in today’s world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the rendering engine. Like, you know, there’s all the stuff about syncing your preferences and your tabs and all that, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the whole UI can be different. Keep keeping track of what you do. Yeah, oh definitely keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s why do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the world’s biggest advertising company wants to do this?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or just like you said, Safari rejects certificates that are issued after whatever date that are older than a year long,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Chrome doesn’t. But yeah, it’s like you said before. Why give up that
⏹️ ▶️ John control if you can’t, if you don’t have to? I’ve never found Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John on iOS to be remotely tolerable. I still feel like Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John on iOS can probably still win on the merits in terms of what it’s like as a user to
⏹️ ▶️ John use that application. On the desktop, people have differing
⏹️ ▶️ John opinions. I run both all day long and I actually like Chrome, despite it being this weird mutant beast.
⏹️ ▶️ John On laptops, as we’ve talked about in the past, Chrome is a lot less desirable than Safari because it will eat your battery
⏹️ ▶️ John much more than Safari will.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and then now imagine that on the phone. Like imagine, I know the reasons would be very different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it probably wouldn’t be this way, but what if Chrome on the iPhone was a huge battery hog?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s part of what we’re getting at. It’s like, if you let the apps compete on their
⏹️ ▶️ John merits, people can choose not to use Chrome because it eats your battery. Same way they choose not to use Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John on their Macs, even over Safari laptops, because it eats your battery.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, but Apple’s point of view might be like, what if Chrome eats your battery and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco becomes really popular on iOS, because now it’s a lot easier to use because it can be set as the default browser. And then instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of blaming Chrome, people blame their iPhones for having bad battery life. Well, don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will pop up a dialogue that says, Did you know Chrome’s been eating your battery for the past 24 hours?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Try Safari, it’s much more efficient. Are you
⏹️ ▶️ John sure you want to give this application location service, Owet? Apple’s gotten really good about nagging you about what other
⏹️ ▶️ John applications are doing that it thinks they shouldn’t, even if you’ve already given it permission. Yeah, anyway, the web browser one
⏹️ ▶️ John is fraught. Honestly, that one is, I think, the least important, from my perspective, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John The mail one kills me. I know Casey said he thinks it’s, you know, who wants to use a third-party mail app or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and about the nature of mail apps, trying to do things that mail wasn’t designed to do, but forget about all that. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes you don’t wanna use a mail application
⏹️ ▶️ John because you like some other one better that does basically exactly the same thing. Nothing weird, no weird
⏹️ ▶️ John alternate interface to email and snoozing and different threading views. It just, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it basically works like mail does, but let’s say better. Like, you don’t have to go back
⏹️ ▶️ John to the inbox list and go back in again to see all your messages or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way, I have an update on that bug. That bug is still there in the 13.4 betas. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got, somebody tipped me off, I forget who on Twitter, I’m sorry. But the messages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are missing, so the bug is like, you’re looking at your inbox view, and new messages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are actually arriving in your email account, but they’re not showing up in the list. They actually are showing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up, they show up at the very bottom of the list. So, it basically breaks the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sorting, and so it thinks you’re showing all your messages, is like they’re in the data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list that’s being shown on screen. But if you don’t scroll all the way down to the bottom of your inbox, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people don’t, if it’s more than a couple screens long, you’re not seeing the new messages a lot of times. And you have to go back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then go back in. So they’re there, but they’re in the wrong place, which makes me think that this is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really possibly tricky bug, maybe with like combine or whatever the UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John source thing is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it’s a UI choice to not make the screen reshuffle when you’re staring at it. Maybe it’s intentional.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, but I bet like iOS 13 added a whole bunch of stuff about like diffable data sources
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having table views be able to like insert stuff dynamically, automatically based on responses in the data model and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. I’m guessing there’s a bug somewhere in that or the way that’s being used here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is resulting in this. And that’s why it’s been in every single iOS 13 version of Mail.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, probably. But yeah, like the thing about Mail
⏹️ ▶️ John applications is Like, if you don’t, I don’t know, maybe it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John as bad, but like, I feel like it is, because web browsers, I know you can have bookmarks and all sorts of other stuff, but in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not lots of data there. They’re mostly stateless. Whereas email, like, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you configure a mail client with your email account, it’s gonna receive that email, and
⏹️ ▶️ John especially on iOS, depending on the app, you have limited control over how much it does, right? So on iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t ever want to use the mail app, but I am forced to have it both installed
⏹️ ▶️ John and configured with a working email address because anytime I tap any mail thing on my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone, it’s going to launch mail. And if I don’t have any email accounts configured, I can’t send any
⏹️ ▶️ John mail, which means I have to configure at least one email account, which means it’s gonna be receiving that email, even though I’m never
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be looking there. And I have a lot of email and I have a limited control over how much of that email gets downloaded.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I really, really, really want to use something other than mail on my phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John just so I don’t have to have this sort of stub email application that exists
⏹️ ▶️ John solely so I can send mail, but must also be configured to receive mail from one
⏹️ ▶️ John of my actual accounts. And I hate it so much, which is not the case in browsers.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a second browser, and I always wanted to use it. Yeah, it’s a pain. But my browser isn’t constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John downloading web pages or something. You don’t need to configure it in a way. You can just have it installed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another valid reason I could think of, I shouldn’t say valid as though I’m the arbiter of such things, but whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another decent reason I can think of that you would want a different mail app is if you have some sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like corporate situation where you have to use some blessed corporate app that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only, you know, something like Outlook, although Outlook is reasonably standards compliant, if I remember right. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, you know, something where it’s Acme Co’s proprietary mail app, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you want to use on, say, your work phone, then that would make perfect sense to me. And And that’s one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a million different reasons why one would genuinely want to do a separate mail app, even if they don’t do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you said, the snoozing and all the weird stuff that’s stapled on the side of email these
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the pessimistic take on this whole default app thing is like, is the flip side of the
⏹️ ▶️ John reasoning behind Apple having such control in the beginning? Like when the iPhone was first introduced, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, there’s obviously no third-party apps, right? Like, but the whole, the product image, like how
⏹️ ▶️ John does the iPhone, How is it received by customers? What is it that they see? It’s entirely defined by
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple apps because they were the only apps in the platform. And even when third-party apps started coming in, Apple was still very sensitive
⏹️ ▶️ John to the idea that if you get an iPhone, we, Apple, want to make sure that you have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, a good experience with the basics. So we’re gonna give you a web browser that we think
⏹️ ▶️ John is good, a mail client that we think is good, eventually a podcast app that we think is good, which wasn’t really in the beginning.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, like they’re trying to define the experience, by saying, we’ll give you, they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John the fanciest, like the whole point is they’re supposed to be simple and Apple quality, but good quality applications. Cause we
⏹️ ▶️ John know most people, if they get a phone, they just want to start using it and it should work and it should be pleasing. We don’t want like you to unbox
⏹️ ▶️ John your phone and then say, now I have to spend 10, you know, an hour wandering through the app store,
⏹️ ▶️ John the giant forest of applications, trying to find the one that is
⏹️ ▶️ John free or cheap, that is well-reviewed. Like I don’t, I don’t want to have to go shopping. I mean, I want to get the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John out and say, I can already browse the web. I can already send email. I can already read the news. I can already listen to podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can already, you know, like, comes bundled with that stuff. And that, it’s important for that stuff both to be
⏹️ ▶️ John there and to be good. And in recent years, a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of the complaints that we’ve had on this show and that other people have had is that Apple’s first party
⏹️ ▶️ John applications, while not terrible, are no longer like the shining
⏹️ ▶️ John example of saying, this is how, and insert whatever application should be made.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Safari is great, right? That’s one of their best examples. But the mail application,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has never been bad, but I don’t think people look at it and say, boy,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you really wanna see how to make an email client, look at Apple Mail. I haven’t heard that in a long time, either on the desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John or on iOS. And even for podcasts, they made that really weird app with the reel-to-reel tape thing in the beginning,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was kind of a misfire, and it was entering into a market that already had some applications. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is not clearly the leader, even in the sort of simple to
⏹️ ▶️ John use, like I just want a basic app that does a basic thing. In many categories, third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John applications are clearly better in all ways than stuff that Apple offers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not just because they’re more complicated and have tons of features and they’re pro and expert, but even just within the same
⏹️ ▶️ John realm of simple applications that do a basic thing and understandable, there are many categories where
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is not the leader. One way Apple could deal with that is double down and make their apps
⏹️ ▶️ John better like they did with Notes. For a long time, Notes was just not a good Notes application even
⏹️ ▶️ John for simple purposes. The new Notes is way better. Also not being more complicated. It’s not like the new Notes
⏹️ ▶️ John is overwhelming and people can’t handle it. It’s just a better Notes app, right? That’s one path you can take to this
⏹️ ▶️ John is if you don’t want people to constantly complain about not allowing third-party apps, make sure all your apps keep
⏹️ ▶️ John up. Make sure every apps has a Notes-like revival where maybe it falls behind a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe people are like, oh, I don’t even wanna use the default notes app. It just, it’s like, it’s not bad, but it’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ John And just make it, just make it better, right? But that doesn’t seem to be happening that quickly. And
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, you know, that’s potentially a waste of resources. The whole point of Apple having this rich
⏹️ ▶️ John ecosystem of these developers that they brag about all the time is that those people can make a really good
⏹️ ▶️ John reminders app like things. And then it’s not on Apple to also have a team internally that
⏹️ ▶️ John also makes the best reminders app in the world or whatever. Like if there’s a million, you know, to-do lists and all those other things,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Apple should be investing in making a great web browser, and I think they continue to with Safari,
⏹️ ▶️ John but does Apple need to continue to invest and worry about reminders
⏹️ ▶️ John being great? They just did this big reminder revision too, but I feel like they’re always gonna lag behind the
⏹️ ▶️ John really good third-party applications. So it’s leaving money on the table for Apple not to say,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you get the phone, you will have good apps in all these categories, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John there are even better ones on the App Store that you can go buy or download. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really easy for you to say, I’m gonna use that one instead. That makes people like their phones better, not worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John So they get the benefit of not having to go shopping, getting something with batteries included that
⏹️ ▶️ John does all the stuff. But if they’re interested in one particular thing, like I’m not really into these things,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m really into reminders or note-taking apps, they can just go and
⏹️ ▶️ John swap out that one component that they’re interested in with one of the many third-party things that Apple has, like take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of their ecosystem and they’ll like their phones better. So that’s the world that I would like to see. And I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple should have the courage to do that, both because they should have some confidence that on a level
⏹️ ▶️ John playing field, they’re good apps like Safari will compete pretty well. And also because
⏹️ ▶️ John they shouldn’t be afraid of someone getting a thing and deciding they want to replace reminders with things. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s good for Apple. They’re not making any money on reminders. It has to be there and it has to be good.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if someone replaces it with things and they love their phone more, that’s good for Apple too because they’ll buy another phone. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m, I really hope this rumor is true and I really hope they do it and do it in a better way and the Mac is currently
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#askatp: App Store business setup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m in a similar situation to John where I have a handful of apps that I ultimately wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for myself and I’ve made a very minimal amount of money from it. The app store setup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can be daunting, so I’d love to know how you guys set yourselves up from hobbies development to full-blown self-employment development.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I understand the words that are written here, but I’m not clear what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven is looking for. So, John, since he seems most interested in you, what did you
⏹️ ▶️ John Willis I think I talked about this when I talked about first getting front and center up, that there is a surprising
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of forms that that you have to click around through and things that you have to fill out. But in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I think just you don’t need that much handholding. If you go to the web,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple’s web pages and you just go through all the screens and fill out all the things,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get it to the point where Apple can successfully give you money. And if you’re not making any real money
⏹️ ▶️ John like I am, like, you know, on applications that you just made for yourself or whatever, I think that’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you as an individual person, there is. I don’t think there was anything I needed to do. You can just
⏹️ ▶️ John come off the street as an adult human, at least in the US, maybe it’s different for in other countries,
⏹️ ▶️ John and go to Apple’s website and sign up for a developer account and download Xcode and build an app
⏹️ ▶️ John and upload it and click around through many, many, many screens of things on Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John website. And eventually you’ll have an app on a store. And in theory, Apple will be able to pay you if you have
⏹️ ▶️ John a bank account of some kind that you could enter information for. That’s what I’m doing because I’m not an app developer
⏹️ ▶️ John by trade. It is the most simple possible setup you can have. It’s just me as an individual person and Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, paying me as an individual person. And that’s it. Obviously, I think the
⏹️ ▶️ John next step up would be someone like Casey and then Marco, even a farther step up. And then a step up from that would be a
⏹️ ▶️ John large company with multiple developers and multiple teams and multiple applications and so on and so forth. I don’t know anything about
⏹️ ▶️ John them. But I’m here to say that if you just have a bunch of little apps you wrote yourself or are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to write yourself and you just want to sell them on the store, you can do that. You don’t need any
⏹️ ▶️ John anything else. You don’t need a lawyer. You don’t need to create a company
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need to have employees. You don’t need to do. I don’t know if you need to do weird tech stuff I guess I’ll find
⏹️ ▶️ John think it’s other than some a few wrinkles about selling things in other countries I’m hoping it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna be too intimidating. I guess I’ll find out but I think the barrier
⏹️ ▶️ John is actually pretty low and I think if you are just a hobbyist doing it for fun and a little extra money.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no real need to go farther than that. But you know, I’m a beginner at this site,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously. Ask me again next year and maybe I’ll eat all these words. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin So I’m not, I’m still not entirely clear what Stephen was after, but for what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth, for fast text, may it rest in peace, just doing this on for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a peek of you and vignette, I am using the LLC that I’d set up for basically all of my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then extracurriculars and now my life. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was mostly unremarkable because I’d set up the LLC previously. You do need to get a Dunn’s number,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Dunn and Bradstreet number, which I forget exactly what that involved, but I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it being terribly bad. And I remember them really, really wanting me to pay them a whole pile of money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do something in Marco and Underscore saying, for the love of God, don’t do it. So that was good. This is Dunn’s to be clear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is Dunn’s, not Apple. But Marco, perhaps when we get to your section, you can explain
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DUNS. I’m still not entirely clear what the purpose it serves is, but nevertheless – but yeah, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LLC gets paid by Apple. Apple’s relationship is with the LLC. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice, but my very limited, mostly ignorant understanding is that if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something went wrong somewhere somehow, my LLC could be sued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and all of the LLC’s money could you know, go up in smoke, but hypothetically from a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legal perspective, me, the person in my family would be protected. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s part of the reason why I did it. Again, not legal advice. Don’t trust me on this. Look it up for yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is obviously very, very different depending on where you live, but that’s the way I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have set mine up. And I don’t think it’s that dissimilar from you, Marco, although maybe if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to at least throw in a comment about when you choose to set up a new LLC and a new setup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Apple because my understanding was a while ago it was very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey difficult to sell an app and you had to basically sell an entire company in order to make it easier on the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey side. Can you perhaps talk a little bit about that in addition to whatever else you’d like to add?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, on that point, they didn’t have before. Now they have something called like an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco transfer that you can do. And at least when that launched, it wouldn’t work if you ever used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain entitlements, including iCloud or CloudKit or anything that used iCloud.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So like you just couldn’t transfer it then. I don’t know if that’s still true. I haven’t listened to it recently. It might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still be. But yeah, in general, it’s a lot easier to sell an entire developer account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to another company than to try to break an app out of your account and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give it to them. It used to be and probably still is possible to upload apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the App Store using your personal Apple ID. Because of what I just said about how it’s very hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to ever transfer an app out of a developer account, I don’t recommend doing this. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you truly are doing it just for like, you know, a pure hobby thing and you never expect to make significant money from it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your use case would never have anybody want to buy it, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to buy the app from you, then fine, you know, then use your personal one. Otherwise, setting up a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business one is probably the right move. I, too, use LLCs. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do pretty much everything under LLCs. That’s at all professional for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reasons Casey mentioned of legal protection and everything. As Casey also mentioned, we are not lawyers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And these things vary depending on where you are. So speak to a lawyer if you’re concerned about liability protection.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, that’s how we do it. Yeah, that’s it. You should
⏹️ ▶️ John have told me that before I uploaded these lucrative apps under my personal Apple ID. What if I want to sell front and center?
⏹️ ▶️ John And now it’s tied in the same account. It’s not actually my personal Apple ID. It is a separate Apple ID, but both of them are in the same
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID. They’ll have to buy them as a set. Collect the whole set. Billionaires, don’t worry, I’ll sell you both.
⏹️ ▶️ John The prices are very reasonable.
#askatp: TVs for gaming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey goodness. Star Susumi writes, what’s the different, what’s the different consideration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when shopping for a TV for a console, a monitor for a console or a monitor for a gaming PC? I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no input on this and I’m guessing that Marco may not either. So let’s just cut straight to the chase. And John,
⏹️ ▶️ John here? It used to be that there weren’t, I mean, there were always some answers to this, but it wasn’t that complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like, well, TVs, they’re bigger and they do TV things. Generally, you can’t connect
⏹️ ▶️ John computers to them. And consoles connect to TVs, not computers. And computer monitors have a
⏹️ ▶️ John couple of things to worry about, different kinds of flat panels or different kinds of CRTs back in the day.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it wasn’t that complicated. Now it is much more complicated than it used to be, partly because
⏹️ ▶️ John every TV can also more or less double as a computer monitor. Every console can connect
⏹️ ▶️ John to your television or a computer monitor, like the convergence of monitor and TV thing. Like to the
⏹️ ▶️ John point where it’s CES this year, TV makers are really pushing television sets essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John made to be gaming monitors, right? There’s a major convergence going on here, but there are concerns
⏹️ ▶️ John that are different in each domain. Even though the actual physical devices and software related
⏹️ ▶️ John to them has a huge amount of overlap, they are tailored for certain purposes. So these days, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re looking for something that you’re gonna play a game on, there are some features that you’re interested in that
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t care about if you’re just gonna watch TV on it. and those are the latest HDMI spec
⏹️ ▶️ John and some of the ancillary things related to, what are they called, adaptive
⏹️ ▶️ John frame rate, or, I should have written these things down. There’s a bunch of acronyms for
⏹️ ▶️ John things that let you change the frame rate from a moment to moment basis, and there’s a bunch of standards for that related
⏹️ ▶️ John to the HDMI spec. There’s some proprietary things,
⏹️ ▶️ John depending on what you’re gonna be connecting to it, like Nvidia’s G-Sync, which do similar things.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s auto low latency mode on televisions, which tries to detect that you have a console
⏹️ ▶️ John connected and goes into a mode where you have the lowest amount of input lag. Years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John TV manufacturers didn’t even know what input lag was. They didn’t even list it in their specs. Nobody cared
⏹️ ▶️ John about it except for video gamers and they would test it themselves using these light rigs. Nowadays, they’re building
⏹️ ▶️ John in features for it. It used to be called game mode, now it’s auto low latency mode. What the hell is the frame rate thing called? someone
⏹️ ▶️ John in the chat room could tell me. There’s an acronym for it. Anyway, if you are gaming, care about
⏹️ ▶️ John those things. Look at the input lag, look for auto latency mode, look for variable refresh
⏹️ ▶️ John rate. That’s another thing, thank you chat room. It’s not what I was trying to think of. The
⏹️ ▶️ John variable refresh rate is the, not just variable refresh rate, the actual refresh rate, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John televisions used to only have to refresh at like some reasonable multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John of the frame rate of television and maybe movies, right? But video games,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially for hardcore gamers, like higher and higher refresh rates. It’s no point in having 100
⏹️ ▶️ John frames per second on your game if your screen is updating 60 times a second. That’s just wasted, right? So gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John monitors and now televisions that support gaming applications have higher refresh rates.
⏹️ ▶️ John So don’t get a television that has a maximum refresh rate of 60 Hertz expecting to play 120 frames per second.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s pointless. you’re not going to get any benefit. So if you’re going to game on
⏹️ ▶️ John it, look for all those things. High refresh rate, variable refresh rate, auto latency mode,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then also all the things that we normally talk about. Picture quality, price, size, heat,
⏹️ ▶️ John fan noise, the whole nine yards, right? So it’s more complicated than it used to be, but there are a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of things that you should look at that only apply to games. You’re just gonna watch TV on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You actually do care about frame rate a little bit if you wanna see those weird high frame rate movies at like 60 frames per second, but as far
⏹️ ▶️ John as I’m aware, So it’s not a lot of television or movie content at 144 frames per second, so you don’t have to worry about that too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John A variable refresh rate is not really an important thing for video because most video content has a
⏹️ ▶️ John single refresh rate through the whole thing and it certainly isn’t changing from moment to moment, although that’s not entirely true, there are some things
⏹️ ▶️ John where it varies. And yeah, auto latency mode doesn’t matter when there’s no input.
#askatp: Notes.app vs. files
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matzko, Ph.D.: Finally, Future Ben writes, I’ve been tearing my hair out over this question for years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey When to use a notes app like Apple Notes versus traditional files? For casual users, they may not be an issue,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the further down the rabbit hole you go, the more these paradigms compete with one another. For
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, if I am writing something down or copying a URL or something along those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lines, it goes into Apple Notes, and if it’s like a PDF or something like that, it goes into the file system, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. Marco, how do you handle this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have a great system for this honestly. Like Notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is when I basically, Notes is like my scratch pad. And I do actually use it for like some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long-term storage or some things, but I’m not very consistent about it. I’m using it more over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This wasn’t part of the question, but I do wish that Notes had a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file system representation that was meaningful and that could be backed up and imported and exported.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is one thing, as I use Notes for more and more stuff, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am a little bit afraid of someday losing all my notes because of some iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mishap or some local whatever. And I don’t know how to back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it up and I don’t know how to restore it. And I think there are apps where you can export your notes out in various formats,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t know of any kind of import after that. So I don’t know. That makes me a little,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the fact that Notes doesn’t just store your notes in an easily parsed file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system representation makes me a little bit uneasy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Marco hit the major point that I wanted to hit, which is the decision point
⏹️ ▶️ John about this is, do you want to use and trust an app
⏹️ ▶️ John that owns a collection of data, whether it be Apple Notes or any other app that mediates
⏹️ ▶️ John the data store? Because once you do that, bugs in that app,
⏹️ ▶️ John changes in business models of that app, anything having to do with that app can get between you
⏹️ ▶️ John and your information. Whereas if you do it as individual files, especially if those are plain text files,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s more annoying and loosey-goosey and you lose some of the features, but you also don’t have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about the app that controls them. Even just changing
⏹️ ▶️ John in a way you don’t like. Oh, I put all my life in Insert App X and then App X changed
⏹️ ▶️ John their user interface and now I hate it. And now you’re like, well, that’s all wrong. My data is they have a good export
⏹️ ▶️ John functionality. Can I get an import? Like there are good apps and bad apps for that. You’re looking for an app that does
⏹️ ▶️ John have good export ability, ability to back up to a standard format and
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe an import ability to go in the other direction. But you’re worried about syncing
⏹️ ▶️ John bugs. You worry about business model changes. You worry about app UI changes, all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John On a recent episode of Rectos, I was talking about exactly that thing with notes. I’m putting an increasing amount of stuff in notes too. when I was getting paranoid
⏹️ ▶️ John about backups, Merlin recommended this Notes Exporter app. There’s a couple of apps out there that do similar things
⏹️ ▶️ John where they will, I think they just use the AppleScript dictionary or something like that. They will go through all your notes and export each one as like a
⏹️ ▶️ John PDF or something, which is not great, but it’s better than nothing. So I ran that to
⏹️ ▶️ John export all my notes. A lot of people tried to make shortcuts for it and other sort of automations, and apparently at a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John point, Notes just surrenders and stops exporting things. And I don’t know if it’s a bug with the automation or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s been a challenge to do with shortcuts. but Notes is an example
⏹️ ▶️ John of an application that I think is pretty solid and I haven’t had any problems with it, but it does not
⏹️ ▶️ John have really good export and import functionality built into the app as far as I’m aware, which is why we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to use the third party app. So I kind of organically grew into Notes. That’s the thing to
⏹️ ▶️ John watch for. If you decide I’m gonna use an app and not a bunch of individual files because individual files are a pain
⏹️ ▶️ John in my butt and it’s so much easier to just take out my phone and use Notes, that’s an easy decision to make in the
⏹️ ▶️ John moment and then fast forward six months and now you have substantial amount of valuable data in notes and now you’re worried about how to back
⏹️ ▶️ John it up. So, happens to the best of us, but that I feel like is the distinction. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John trusting a sort of mediator and owner for the data versus you having to do all that stuff yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like notes to me, it’s like nuclear power. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, chances are nothing will ever go wrong. And as long as nothing ever goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong, there’s a lot of things to like about it. And you just hope nothing ever goes wrong, because if something goes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong, it’s gonna go really wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it produce waste that we have to dispose of in ways that we haven’t figured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out yet? We’re just gonna put that question off to another time. Thanks to our sponsors this week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode, Indeed, and Proclip USA, and we’ll talk to you.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him, cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them At
⏹️ ▶️ Marco c-a-s-e-y-l-i-s-s So that’s Casey Liss
⏹️ ▶️ Marco N-t Marco Armin S-i-r-a-c-u-s-a
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to accidental Accidental Tech Podcasts
Casey ♥️ Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really, really did not want to downgrade this machine to Mojave.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This mother** is going to get in Mojave tomorrow. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco my god, I am so angry. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happened? So all of a sudden the bzzz bzzz came back and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m like, okay. And then all of a sudden you guys disappeared.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but Audio Hijack is still counting. Skype is still counting. Everything’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then I heard and Skype said, Oh, your microphone is screwed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unplug it and try again. So Marco, you’re going to have a fun at it. I’m sorry, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am. I am putting it on record that if I am still on Catalina this time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey next week, please, some way, somehow send somebody to kick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me square in the gentleman region because this, this is intolerable and I can’t stand it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t stand it. Oh my God, we got so much flack last week after I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey went on a tear about Catalina. Somebody would say, why did you say it’s unusable?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, here’s why I think Catalina is unusable, because I am trying to do my job and I cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because things failed while I was trying to do my job. Is that a satisfactory enough reason for you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everyone? So this is getting Mojave tomorrow and I am so cranky right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now and you’re going to be cranky when you deal with my 400 files tomorrow. So, and that makes me cranky, because I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t like making other people cranky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’re going to be cranky the first time you go to use SwiftUI on Mojave after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John having it on Catalina.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re going to be cranky when you revert to SwiftUI, and I’m going to revert to SwiftUI, when you revert to Mojave and
⏹️ ▶️ John you still have these problems. Then, then what will we say?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then AppleCare, AppleCare Plus becomes a thing, or whatever it’s called on this,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think some evil spirit has inhabited your computer room at least,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if not your whole
⏹️ ▶️ Casey house. I hear you. I honestly hear you and if I were in your shoes, I would say the same thing. But all I know is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this machine was bulletproof on Mojave. And since I put Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on because I’m a darn fool, everything has gotten worse. Everything, everything, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John All signs point to that being the case. I hope you’re downgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything. Oh my God, I hope so too. The only question is, do I use the super duper backup that I took and have not modified
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right before I did the upgrade or do I just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey throw everything
⏹️ ▶️ John away? your own house. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Every night, someone could
⏹️ ▶️ John come and erase your whole computer and you wouldn’t notice because you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t actually store any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. You’re right. You’re right. Which in a lot of ways, and we talked about this a few weeks ago, in a lot of ways, I think that’s a testament to GitHub and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use Dropbox anymore, but Dropbox and things like that. But the good news from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having to do this 84 times over the last few months is that I’ve become very, very good at it. So it’s a very streamlined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey operation. My dad when he was – I think I might have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just born. He had a Plymouth Duster if I remember correctly and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget what the issue ended up being. Something was misaligned but they didn’t know it for the longest time. I might have told this story
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as well. The house that we had lived in when I was freshly born,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my dad had the house built and in the garage, he actually had a pit. So you would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive the car onto like boards or planks or I don’t know, like maybe it metal for all I know, but you would drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on these pieces of metal let’s say and then you could climb down under the car. So it’s like the inverse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a lift. And what had happened is he kept going through clutches in this duster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And my understanding of family legend tells me that mom and dad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could do an entire clutch in this car in like the span of two or three hours or something like that, like something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely preposterous because they were doing it like once every two months or something like that and they eventually figured out the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and fixed it properly. But yeah, that’s me with this with this darn computer. So all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kidding aside, I have what I thought to be a bulletproof super duper backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Mojave sitting on a hard drive on my desk. Starting with Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then John, would you trust and use that and just plow what’s currently on the machine? Or would you just go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for broke and install fresh?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would maybe first boot it and see how it boots, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then maybe decide after that. stuff would happen if you just went back in time and like you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have any of your files and like it I don’t know it I think that that’s a recipe for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidental data loss of stuff you’ve made in the meantime.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I mean, the first thing I want to do is is go through my list of places where I do store stuff you know like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are a handful of things on my desktop there may be some things and downloads that I care about you know etc etc and I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back up my Plex you know database and so on and so forth all that stuff will happen before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I even worry about you know, booting off of the SuperDuper backup, but assuming that the SuperDuper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backup boots reasonably well, do you think you would use it? But you know, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey take it and put it onto the machine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, how old is it at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point? I don’t know, three weeks, a month?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s too far back. I mean, I saw actual data. I would never, like, that’s too far back for me. I would be missing too much
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff and I have no way to sort of like diff it. I don’t know. If I had down,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I actually had to downgrade my machine, which obviously I can’t, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey if I had to, I would
⏹️ ▶️ John install Mojave on top of Catalina. I know that’s not what you want to do, especially if you want to eliminate the source
⏹️ ▶️ John of weird errors, but you’re into the hotelling lifestyle anyway. You should just wipe this machine and put a fresh,
⏹️ ▶️ John like save your, if you think you actually know how to save your data, do that. I would suggest making a full clone and setting
⏹️ ▶️ John that aside. So then you know, if you just remember it, oh, by the way, I was also keeping something in this obscure directory.
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Do that and wipe the whole machine and Mojave from scratch. Like wipe, wipe, as in repartition,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco rid of all Catalina,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the whole nine yards. Like, go to the
⏹️ ▶️ John actual partition level, not the APFS container level, but the actual GPT partition level and then
⏹️ ▶️ John get rid of all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, yeah, I think you probably convinced me first of all that I’ll do a super duper of this one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just for safety sake and then I’ll go into internet recovery, delete everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this hard drive to your point and then start fresh with Mojave.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just a super duper, also get caught up on Time Machine. You need to have all your data in two places before you erase it from your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least two places. That’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, I promise, gentlemen, that by this time next week, I will no longer be on Catalina because this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey driving me absolutely batty. And I do love dark mode. I really do in the dark, when it’s evening, that is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do love dark mode and I do love having that sweet, sweet SwiftUI preview, but it is just not worth it. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not worth it. Not for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. I wonder, like, what’s your long-term game plan here?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I honestly don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I hope that… You’ll skip Catalina.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, either skip
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Catalina or perhaps wait another few point releases and see what happens. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, what is it right now?
⏹️ ▶️ John What are you going to use to gauge whether it’s safe to upload to 10, 15, 5, 10, 15, 6? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this is why, like, I’ve never downgraded like this before because my strategy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically like once I’m on, like, I don’t go backwards. I only go, you know, I’m only on defense.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I only go forward because… That’s offense. Whatever. Going back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a, a big deal, it’s hard and potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco destructive to certain things, and then b, you’re going to have to go forward again at some point anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but what do I do in the meantime though? You know, like this is unacceptable for me and for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I think the other answer is like, there’s lots of us who are doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasts on Catalina without this problem. So Catalina is probably not the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something as being worse on Catalina. Maybe it’s a coincidence of timing. Who knows? But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I’m podcasting on Catalina using the same USB device that you that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using. Well I did last week and it was fine. Yeah you did last week and it was fine. So so obviously like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is possible to use Catalina without having the specific problems you’re having right now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the OS version itself is probably not the problem. It may have exacerbated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. It may have brought things to the foreground or it may just be a coincidence. So I would start investigating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other potential explanations and solutions. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like changing out the trackpad for a trackpad that like it’s just swapping it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t you have two?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So just try the other one. Do you use it in wired mode?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually am tonight. That’s the first time. Which,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco okay, so to that end… Unplug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, no, no, but here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. Well, maybe, maybe you’re right. Or at the very least unplug it when I’m podcasting. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually a very interesting point. But the reason it got plugged in in the first place was because of all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the issues I was having, you know, with like really bad latency and the machine gun trackpad and all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. So it seems like my choices are use it on Bluetooth where I’ve got machine gun trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and really bad pointer latency or use it when it’s plugged in and potentially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have some sort of issue with my microphone. So I guess the answer is I unplug when I record and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plug in when I’m not recording. Blake, this shouldn’t be a
⏹️ ▶️ John problem. Do you have any other stuff connected to your computer? Like that’s the usual dance you do is like start removing, disconnecting
⏹️ ▶️ John everything from your computer
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco until it is just
⏹️ ▶️ John the computer by itself with nothing connected to it. And then you connect a keyboard and then you try it and it says, okay.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you connect the pointing device. Like do you have anything else? Do you have any external drives? Do you have an ethernet cable?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plugged in? I mean like I have a bunch of things that are hanging on, like a bunch of USB cords that aren’t connected to anything right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. So as an example, like I have a cord connected to my computer that I could plug into an external hard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drive but it’s not presently plugged into an external hard drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s probably not it, but I would unplug those anyway. Just, you know, it’s typical troubleshooting. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John remove all variables, try to figure out what the hell is the problem with the thing. Like with that staticky thing, like maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it was the simulator, maybe it was just a simulator hangover and maybe the only way to cure that, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reboot. No, but I rebooted afterwards. I did reboot,
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And you got it again. I mean, maybe your audio box is fritzing, who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about like, there’s possible other explanations like, or other things to try, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making sure that the audio interface and the trackpad are not sharing a USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bus. I don’t know how you can do that. Maybe certain ports are different buses. Maybe you can put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the trackpad on a hub and not put the audio interface on a hub. Like put the audio interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco directly into one of the ports in the back and then put the trackpad interface on, or to put the trackpad on its own hub or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or use one of the USB-A ports for the trackpad and use a USB-C port for the audio interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using a C to B cable. Like there’s options like that, that’s what I do honestly, I do the C to B cable thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ways to just try to separate this device that you think is possibly causing you problems with the trackpad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from things that are critical to work for your job, like the audio interface. So have it be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two separate parts of the computer. You can probably look up somewhere, Like, I bet certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco port pairs or sets are on certain USB buses. It probably isn’t all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one bus. It’s probably like, you know, two or three different controllers in there. So I would try that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause like USB is a weird protocol with weird devices that flake out sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like one bad USB device can wreak havoc on a system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the more you can do to like try to isolate it or try to swap out the trackpad for a different one and see if that works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Trying that first is easier and probably more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likely to work than changing your entire OS version.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I feel like I want the nuclear option, but the two of you are convincing me that maybe I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John getting a little
⏹️ ▶️ John aggressive. But if you didn’t have this problem with Mojave, it really is quite a timing convincement. It could be
⏹️ ▶️ John some bad behavior that, unless you did actually move things to different ports or connect new things, but it could just be some bad
⏹️ ▶️ John behavior that Mojave handles differently. Thank god. So downgrading may actually solve
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem without actually letting you know what it was. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John problem might be some chatty USB thing or the fact that you refuse to go into your own attic and get
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey out from the other computer. All right, I super duper promise.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, let me ask you, I’m not trying to snark. Would the two of you rather me try a different trackpad or go back to a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouse? Because I’m perfect, I don’t have an issue with the mouse. I used the mouse up until literally like six months
⏹️ ▶️ John So. I would, like, I have so much data that I would never want to downgrade.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would, my first choice would always be debug it, figure out what the hell is
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. Like the same thing I did with my sleep issues when I got my Mac Pro. It wasn’t sleeping and it kept waking up
⏹️ ▶️ John and like what option do I have that I couldn’t, you know, I was gonna figure out what the hell is waking it up and by process of
⏹️ ▶️ John elimination and figuring out and disconnecting everything and connecting one device at a time and you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John running a bare operating system and saying what if I have this program, but you know, eventually got it mostly under
⏹️ ▶️ John control because that was my only option. That’s always my first choice is to actually debug
⏹️ ▶️ John it which is annoying and laborious, but usually can be done, or at least leads you to
⏹️ ▶️ John a conclusion that’s like, I found the problem and I have no fix for it, therefore Mojave downgrade
⏹️ ▶️ John is the only option, right? But at least you’ll know something about it then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, that’s fair. All right, so I’m sorry, where did we land? So would you rather me get a different, again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to the attic and get a different trackpad, or just issue trackpads entirely and just go to a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey regular magic mouse? I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, I think trackpads are garbage, so you should use a
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mouse, but either one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Change that part of the equation. Like, remove all the variables, disconnect everything from your computer, find a reproducible
⏹️ ▶️ John test case that causes the problem, and then just start subtracting even more. Like, okay, now I can get this thing to do weird crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does it still do weird crap with a mouse? Does it still do weird crap with my other trackpad? Like, whatever, just start
⏹️ ▶️ John running experiments until you can make it misbehave, and then figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John when it does and when it doesn’t misbehave.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think get the other trackpad out of the attic, use it in Bluetooth mode, and see if you have the machine gun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue. That’s step one. And then if you do, you know, then possibly try the USB
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in different port kind of situation. But I would say first try it as Bluetooth. I would also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I heard, as I was frequently complaining about various like, you know, Bluetooth disconnect bugs that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been having for years on my Macs with the mouse and the trackpad, a few people have told me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the years that this can happen with 2.4 gigahertz interference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that trying to minimize that as much as possible had a pretty good effect for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this could be things like switching as much of your wifi stuff as possible over to 5.8. And especially
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that would be in or near your office where your computer is. You could try that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although, actually I hate to jinx anything here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe I should knock on, if I could find some actual wood around here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not had the Bluetooth mouse and trackpad random disconnection bug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a little while. I don’t know I remember exactly when the last time that it happened was but it hasn’t been recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been probably at least a month or two. So I think they might have fixed that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally after like three years of it being a constant problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think that I that my bug is fixed. Just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my music bug. Yeah, I’m doing great. Sorry Casey, you’re not, but you know. Great. Yeah, so anyway, I,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so if there’s anything to that, try to reduce 2.4 gigahertz
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radio traffic in the area and try and switch over to Bluetooth to try to test
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the machine gun trackpad thing to see if it still is, still applies to the new trackpad that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should have been switching to a long time ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, I will try the trackpad first. The problem is I don’t have any real, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a bunch of anecdata, like I said earlier, on things that seem to make it worse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I don’t have anything where I can say, do this, then this, then this, then this, and bam, it happens, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know? Yeah, it’s just so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ John And sleep-wake problems are the same thing. I had to wait for hours. You’d put it to sleep, and then you’d have to come back in the
⏹️ ▶️ John morning and see when it woke up and how frequently and why. And yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a tough debug cycle. But I mean, if it actually is a problem, you should be able to make it happen just by
⏹️ ▶️ John using your computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to, hook up your podcast microphone and just be recording all day long
⏹️ ▶️ John with your headphones
⏹️ ▶️ John you do development work. And eventually, if it starts glitching out, you’ll be like, aha! And then you have to already have console open and,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, I don’t know. It’s annoying. But I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John Debugging programs is no fun, and debugging your computer setup is also no fun. They are
⏹️ ▶️ John very similar. At least you’re sitting there in front of your computer. I spent today debugging a Switch glass
⏹️ ▶️ John bug on someone else’s computer across the internet, which is worse. Oh God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it does not seem fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John But through email, to be clear, not through screen sharing, which would have been so much easier.
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, and you’re just like, I need to run Xcode on your machine and step through the debugger,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s not possible. So you just builds back and forth with print statements.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s great. Found the bug though.