369: Brown Big Bear
13 Mar 2020More useful Mac shortcuts, modifier-key symbols, and a bunch of new iOS and watchOS rumors.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: Marco's Problem
- Follow-up:
- The "coronavirus" virus itself is named SARS-CoV-2. COVID-19 is the disease it causes (formerly called "2019 novel coronavirus" or "2019-nCoV" in some places).
- Recommended info sources on COVID-19:
- Flatten the Curve
- CDC: COVID-19 (continuously updated)
- Video: Exponential Growth and Epidemics
- WWDC still not canceled
- John's internal storage situation
- Mac shortcuts
- Ellipsis is
⌥ ; - Adjective order
⌘ ⌥ ⌃ ⇧⌃ ⌥?- Command key
- Xcode symbol popup:
⌃ 6 - Drag and drop open/save dialog
- Screen shotting/screen capture
- Hot Corners and modifier keys
System Preferences→Desktop & Screen Saver→Hot Corners...
- Ellipsis is
- Casey's Computer Corner
- Huge rumor dumps
#askatp- Is the 2015 15" MBP still the best laptop ever made (via James Scariati)
- Do we have hard-drive icons on our desktop? (via Rob Fiorendino)
- How does one get hardware to make iOS apps on the cheap? (via Marcos Petri)
- Post-show: Marco's new adventures... deep underground
Sponsored by:
- BlueVine: Get a $100 gift card when you take out a loan or open a line of credit.
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Chapters
- Marco’s condition
- SARS-CoV-2 vs. COVID-19
- COVID-19 cancellations
- Update on John’s storage
- Follow-up: Apple ID prompts
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code atppodcast)
- More Mac shortcuts
- Casey’s NAS backup
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
- Rumor: Springboard list view
- Rumor: Wallpaper apps
- Rumor: Pencil-to-text
- Rumor: iMessage features
- Rumor: AirTags
- Rumor: Watch faces 🖼️
- Rumor: Watch app architecture
- Rumor: Multitasking pinning
- Sponsor: BlueVine
- #askatp: 16” now best ever?
- #askatp: Disk icons on Desktop
- #askatp: Inexpensive Macs
- Ending theme
- Marco discovers Minecraft 🖼️
Marco’s condition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The other night, I developed a condition that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have not had on any of my things in possibly over a decade,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if not ever. I’m trying to remember if I ever had this problem. Machine gun trackpad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was waiting for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My television has a stuck pixel.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh no. You mean in addition to the image retention that you stubbornly don’t see?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t see any image retention. I’ve never seen that as a problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you do it have you put the Marco test pattern on it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Good point actually I
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t tried that don’t don’t try it. I’m not advised against this ignorance is bliss.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No my my LG C7 4k OLED has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a stuck bright blue pixel, and I can’t stop seeing it Where is it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s near the top edge kind of off to the side. It’s not like right in the middle It’s it is like you know near
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the edges, but it’s not you know it’s bright blue, and so on any kind of dark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or solid colored scene, it’s very visible.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a three-year-old TV, warranty probably does not apply.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I bought the extended one-year additional warranty, so that brought it up to two years. You are correct, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is year three. So I’m very much out of warranty. There’s a thing called Pixel Refresher,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is some kind of maintenance procedure you can run. I ran it, no difference. So yeah, it just seems like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this year, the LG naming scheme is the last number, is like the digit of the
⏹️ ▶️ John year. So C6 was 2016, C7 was 2017, and so on and so forth. Last year was C9 for 2019. This year, what do you think
⏹️ ▶️ John they did? Did they not do C0? They did not do C0. C10?
⏹️ ▶️ John C20? C, and then a capital letter
⏹️ ▶️ John X, which is a Roman numeral 10, I think. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey who knows? I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John never heard anyone say it out loud. We have the BX, the CX,
⏹️ ▶️ John the EX, the WX, or 10. I don’t actually know how to pronounce it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m just, I’m so annoyed that this is a really nice TV and it lasted only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two and a half years before having a pretty significant problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not non-functional. You have one stock
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pixel. It works, but like, it’s really annoying. Like, that’s, yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t stop seeing it. So I’m, you know, I’m not gonna like immediately go out and replace it. I’m gonna try to live with it for a while and see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I can just like kind of forget about it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, you should, because on my 23 inch Apple Cinema display, like the really big one with the clear
⏹️ ▶️ John feet, I had multiple stuck pixels. I knew where they were. I can still picture
⏹️ ▶️ John them in my mind, but you know what? I just lived with it because it was a thing that you did. Like at the time,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wouldn’t even guarantee that a new one out of the box didn’t have stuck pixels. There was these rules about as long as there’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John this number of pixels with this number of inches from each other, tough luck. So I, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John What I’m saying is that it is possible to live with it, especially if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just one, especially if it’s not dead center, and especially if it’s blue and not white. I feel like you can probably
⏹️ ▶️ John get past it if you just chill and forget about it. I don’t think your eye will be drawn to it anymore. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re looking to buy a new TV, the CX slash C10 is really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the problem. I’m really not looking to buy a new TV, not after only two and a half years of buying a pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice TV. I’m just, you know what never had this problem? My plasma
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never had this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Plasma has added image retention too, but you know, everything’s, every display technology
⏹️ ▶️ John so far, even CRTs have had some kind of weird issue related
⏹️ ▶️ John to them. Disappointed. Yeah, you got unlucky. I don’t hear a lot about that. You hear about
⏹️ ▶️ John image retention all the time, but you know, plain old dead stuck pixels. You know, it’s always an option. There’s transistors
⏹️ ▶️ John behind there that can go bad or do whatever it is they do, and it’s a bummer. And there’s, you know, there’s a lot of pixels on
⏹️ ▶️ John a 4K TV, do the math especially.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am surprised that you can see a single pixel. I am jealous of your eyesight. It
⏹️ ▶️ John might be more than one. You should look in to see how many sub-pixels is it and get a magnifying glass if you really care.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, what difference does it make how many it is? It’s like, I can see it or not see it. And this one, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John can definitely see. I know, I know. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John saying, just out of curiosity’s sake, what does it take to see it on a 4K television? Does it take a cluster or can you see one?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good question. I mean, I think if it was a dead pixel, which we were just showing black all the time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might be harder to notice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuck bright blue pixel is very easy to notice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, Marco. It sounds like you might need to spend money on something, something arguably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little frivolous.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s gonna try the pay it no mind plan first. We’ll see how that goes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am looking forward to your review of your new LG TV next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, here’s the thing. I don’t want a new TV right now. And we’ll probably get into this at some point, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look at display technologies that are on the horizon, things like micro LED. I already have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that’s very close to the current best thing that there is to have.
⏹️ ▶️ John You do, and you don’t want micro LED. Again, we’ll get to it if we get to talk about that. You would get another OLED. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John your only choice if you want equal or better quality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, that’s the thing. Well, we’ll see the difference between mini LED and micro LED. One of them sucks,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other one doesn’t exist yet. Right, is that, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John kind of just. Yeah, or if you want to get the non-existent one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Or if you’re getting a non-existent one, you should get an LED television. Those also don’t exist and would be
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco better. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. Why doesn’t everybody just make 4K plasmas? Plasmas were great.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a reason. You remember the big article on why you can’t actually make 4K plasmas? Like it’s the technology does not
⏹️ ▶️ John lend itself well to density increases. Oh well.
SARS-CoV-2 vs. COVID-19
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s get started with some follow-up and obviously a lot of this is going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the thing that I can’t keep straight. So our first follow-up item is, Marco, can you explain to me what’s what when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it comes to coronavirus, COVID, and all these other things, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. So last episode, I’ve talked a lot about COVID-19, aka the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coronavirus, and a couple of people wrote in to tell me that I was mistakenly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the term COVID-19 to refer not just to the resulting disease, but also to the virus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco itself. I thought I was being correct in describing it this way, but it turns out this is kind of like the difference between HIV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and AIDS, where AIDS is the disease, but HIV is the name of the virus that gives you the disease.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The virus name here is SARS-COV-2, very similar to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first SARS, remember that outbreak a few years back? So this is basically the sequel to SARS. The disease
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that results from getting this virus is called COVID-19. People keep calling it coronavirus.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Coronavirus is a type of virus. There are many coronaviruses. this is one of them. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not particularly precise. I mean, if you say it these days, people will know what you’re talking about. But if you want to be correct,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the condition is COVID-19 and it’s caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s kind of, I feel bad for all the other coronaviruses because this is kind of ruined the name. If you just say coronavirus, they think you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about this specific one. Whereas before this happened, I’m sure scientists were saying coronavirus,
⏹️ ▶️ John meaning the category of viruses that includes all sorts of things that are not, you know, as bad as this. But now,
⏹️ ▶️ John now that ship has sailed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, it’s like red hats. Like, you know, once there’s one really bad red hat, nobody can really wear
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And am I right, and I saw something about this, I didn’t really follow through to see if it’s actually true, am I right that the 19
⏹️ ▶️ John at the end of COVID stands for the year 2019? Yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Correct, because it was first identified at the very end of 2019, so.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then they learned from Windows 2000 that you shouldn’t include year names in your, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like the 2019 Mac Pro. Yeah.
COVID-19 cancellations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t remember where we were in the timeline last week, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can tell you that I believe Google I.O. was already canceled and it still is. E3 has been canceled.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey WDC hasn’t been canceled, but also hasn’t been announced. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, one little additional thing here is that the county that it’s held in, Santa Clara County,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently banned all events for the next few weeks that are over a thousand people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This ban does not cover June, but it could be extended. There could be another one put into place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in June. You can look at why Apple hasn’t announced WBC’s cancellation or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-cancellation yet. Part of it is, it’s still a little early. They do typically announce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the conference in late March to early April, so they still have some time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One reason that might be relevant here that we’ve seen from other conferences,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco although frankly I don’t think this is the reason, but we’ve seen from the conferences that there’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a distinction with some of these companies and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their conference centers insurance policies about why the cancellation is happening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whether your insurance company will reimburse you for the cost you lose or not. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you voluntarily cancel the conference with a lot of these policies you lose all your money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the conference organizer, whereas basically if the government forces you to not hold the conference, that might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a covered condition under your insurance policy. So that’s a contributing factor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to some of these, that the governments are kind of doing conference organizers a favor by forcing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to not have their conferences in the insurance arena. And I think also in the PR arena,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of these conferences, a lot of their attendees don’t want to be canceled, and it’s easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the organizers to say, sorry, we’re canceling this, we don’t have a choice because the government is forcing us to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So in a way, it kind of helps make the decision easier. In the particular case of WBDC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think that’s the case. I think, again, I think the same thing I thought last week,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is pretty sure it’s already been decided to be canceled and Apple’s just waiting to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco organize some other, you know, arrangements like some kind of online only special, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco arrangements or expansion of the online system. As we talked about last week, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re waiting until they can announce them like that at the same time, rather than just saying, conference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is off, we have nothing else for you right now. So we’ll see how that goes. But yes, as of now, WBC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is neither announced nor canceled, but again, I think it’s extremely unlikely that
⏹️ ▶️ John have not gone up of WBC happening. They’ve only gone down. And I’m willing to
⏹️ ▶️ John believe that maybe their insurance gives them better terms if they have the government canceled but that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t mean that Apple is playing a game of chicken. For sure, Apple has already decided what it’s doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John There is no danger that if somehow the government doesn’t doesn’t issue an edict that makes them not
⏹️ ▶️ John have WTC that somehow Apple’s going to have WTC anyway. I’m pretty sure the decision has been made that it’s not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to happen. It’s just a question of us waiting. And it’s kind of weird, as people pointed out in the discussions. How
⏹️ ▶️ John do you announce the cancellation of something that was never scheduled? Like I mean, E3 was scheduled.
⏹️ ▶️ John So when they say, hey, E3 was supposed to be on these dates, people bought tickets and everything. They you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not happening. There is There is no scheduled WWC, so making an announcement that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John we were going to have a conference, but now we’re not. I mean, obviously it makes sense in the context of WWC, which has happened every
⏹️ ▶️ John year for decades and people expect it, but it is still a little bit weird. So all this is to say that
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t blame Apple for their continued silence. We will just continue to assume that’s not going to happen. Eventually, I’m assuming
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will say something about it, and that’s when we’ll know for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And as we were recording, this is on Wednesday night, apparently the United States is banning all travel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for 30 days to anywhere in Europe except the UK, I guess because they’re not in Europe.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s a thing as well. I mean, this is escalating very quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Too bad. Yeah, this is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we’re a tech show and we aren’t experts in this field. Not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’m not an amateur. We’re not even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amateurs in this field. And I was going to say, we also talk about lots of things we’re not experts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, that’s true
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too. It never stopped us before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But in all seriousness, this is a really big deal. And we don’t yet know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the full extent of how big of a deal this is, but this is something that you should all take very seriously that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not a light thing, this is not something that you should do nothing about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is not something that won’t affect you. I would make a bet that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all of you listening to this will either get this or you will know somebody who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets this. It’s spreading a lot around the world, and we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet fully know how big it’s going to be, but so far all signs point to it’s still accelerating,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s very scary.
⏹️ ▶️ John All the estimates from months ago were like, this is what percentage of the world
⏹️ ▶️ John population is gonna get it, and the percentage has been big and hasn’t really changed that much. So even though we don’t know the
⏹️ ▶️ John true extent, all the estimates have been very consistent that the answer is a lot, a whole bunch. I think Marco’s
⏹️ ▶️ John back of the envelope thing of like you’ll either get it or know someone is very accurate, especially in our country where
⏹️ ▶️ John we, in typical fashion, have waited too long to do anything about it and so now we’re screwed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it’s especially dangerous if you are one of the at-risk groups that like, you know, flus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and pneumonia can be especially bad for you. This is especially elderly people. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very bad for the elderly. And so even if you think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll be fine, you know, I don’t need to do that much, still do all the precautions that everyone is doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you don’t want to expose other people to it who are more at risk than you. Put some links in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes of good information sources here. Please read up on this, follow what’s going on. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to be like the perfect expert on everything going on at every given moment, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should know the general themes, you should know the general things, what to do and what not to do. And this is serious,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it makes a really big difference to how much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a bad problem this is for the world if people take basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco precautions. If we can reduce the rate of the spread, that makes huge differences
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in both total number of people who will be affected, and in some of the more severe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems that can result, like how quickly hospitals are overrun and run out of beds. If we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slow the spread of this, that has massive positive effects, and can save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us from massive negative effects. So please read up on this, and we’ll link in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to some good places. Please read up. Please do what you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to prevent the spread.
⏹️ ▶️ John The current trend line we’re on is matching well with Italy. Italy has a much better health care system by any
⏹️ ▶️ John objective measure than the United States, particularly certain areas of the United States. And
⏹️ ▶️ John their trend line was such that they were at the point where their hospitals were having to triage
⏹️ ▶️ John people as if it’s in wartime or after a natural disaster and that there’s not enough equipment and doctors to go
⏹️ ▶️ John around. You have to say, look, we’re going to give treatment to the people as you do in any kind of situation where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re treating to the people who have the highest chance of survival and the most years left that we could be saving.
⏹️ ▶️ John So things like age cutoffs and if you’re old and sick and there’s only
⏹️ ▶️ John one ventilator for 10 people, you are at the end of the list and they’re just going to not treat you because they can’t treat you and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John die. We do not want to get in a situation where people have to make those kinds of decisions. That is exactly the trend line
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re on. So the thing I would add about what exactly you can do,
⏹️ ▶️ John simple rule, if you’re not changing your behavior in any way, that’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Doesn’t it like, all you have to say, have I changed anything about how I live or what I do? If the answer to that is no,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you live in the United States, reconsider. That’s step zero.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Completely agree. But we will soldier on with this program, with that out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the way, and continue to talk about stuff that doesn’t matter.
Update on John’s storage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For example, John, your Mac Pro storage is mostly sorted out.
⏹️ ▶️ John The silver lining, as we all shelter in place and practice social
⏹️ ▶️ John distancing. Yeah, all of my storage geegos have arrived.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m now basically back to where I was with my old Mac Pro, where I have an internal
⏹️ ▶️ John time machine backup, an internal SuperDuper clone, an external time machine backup, and a cloud backup.
⏹️ ▶️ John The numbers are bigger. The disks are bigger. The noise is less because,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, I guess, yeah, the noise is less because this is a quieter machine. But yeah, that’s all sorted now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve got everything all plugged in and installed. I’m still, the only remaining thing I’m working out is I’m still working out the
⏹️ ▶️ John details of my script that when my computer wakes up at like 2 a.m.
⏹️ ▶️ John and does a bunch of stuff, one of the things I wanted to do is mount the Time Machine disk, run
⏹️ ▶️ John the Time Machine backup, and unmount it. And the script works fine after me messing with the permissions
⏹️ ▶️ John and some other crap. But right now, very often it wakes up around two
⏹️ ▶️ John and the script runs and it finds that Time Machine had already sprung into action before the disk could be mounted
⏹️ ▶️ John and it starts doing the Time Machine backup to the NAS, right, and because that
⏹️ ▶️ John backup is running, it says, oh, I can’t run, another Time Machine backup is running. So now I’ve just changed it, actually just before the show,
⏹️ ▶️ John to say just wait for the NAS backup to complete and then you go and then you unmount your disk. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this will be the first item testing that. And I actually haven’t tested the
⏹️ ▶️ John Scheduled super duper backup. I did it manually once but the scheduled one. I only do that once a week So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John things are looking good for storage on my Mac Pro I’m not backing up all 16 terabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John to backblaze, but I am backing up for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Well, I am glad that everything is is back under control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control. All right.
Follow-up: Apple ID prompts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anonymous writes us with some update Apple ID settings. I forget which one of us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was lamenting this, but this is the- It’s always John. Fair enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the thing on macOS where you randomly get prompted to update your Apple ID settings and it doesn’t really explain why or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it doesn’t do a tremendous job of explaining how, but be that as it may. This anonymous person writes, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were two things that caused this when this anonymous person worked for tech supported Apple. First one, your iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey backup is running a full backup scan to verify its integrity. Or number two, database maintenance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey broke password association to iCloud. This individual says it’s been a few years since they worked there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s quite possible that other things are broken now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is the only feedback I got and it’s slightly out of date and I think the iCloud backup thing makes me think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John actually iOS centric and not Mac OS centric. Obviously I’ve seen this on iOS as well. The wording
⏹️ ▶️ John of that update Apple ID settings is so vague that even tech nerdy people are like, but what do you mean
⏹️ ▶️ John by that? What are you trying to say? And these are some explanations of doing some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John data integrity check and requiring you to re-authenticate or password
⏹️ ▶️ John association broken. I think you also see it maybe if you change your iCloud password, you might get some of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it doesn’t really answer my real question, which was, OK, fine, whatever. Maybe that happens periodically. But
⏹️ ▶️ John what about the day, sometimes you’ll see nothing from this for weeks or months. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John one day, it will ask you 15 times during the day, repeatedly in a sequence. And then it would chill.
⏹️ ▶️ John and then an hour later it’ll ask you again and it’s like, what’s going on? Nothing is happening, my devices are all sitting there
⏹️ ▶️ John plugged in and idle, I haven’t done or changed anything with Apple ID. And that’s what makes you think it’s like server side something
⏹️ ▶️ John is weird happening, because nothing weird is happening on the client side. Anyway, knowing what’s going on doesn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John change the fact that it’s happening, I just wish it wouldn’t happen in particular when everybody first upgraded to,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it was Mojave, maybe it was Catalina, like around the time when it seemed a lot of upgrade activity,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was incessant. I think maybe the very first Catalina upgrade, as I’m remembering, the day Catalina came out and everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John upgraded, it was basically impossible to get out of those dialogues alive. You’d enter your password,
⏹️ ▶️ John you entered your Mac password, you’d stare at it, and then it would just prompt you again. Or you’d just close the window and forget
⏹️ ▶️ John about it, but then you’d see the little badge and it would be asking you again, and just the whole day it was going on and on. There was no way
⏹️ ▶️ John to get rid of it. And then finally it would be silent and you don’t know why. So whatever this is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope in Mac OS, whatever city name comes next,
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s something we don’t have to see again.
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More Mac shortcuts
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have apparently many more Mac shortcuts to discuss and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently some things about me to criticize. So let’s get through it. John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ellipsis is option semicolon, not command semicolon. Thank you very much.
⏹️ ▶️ John I misspoke. Sorry. Is it actually interestingly, if you had asked me, I think I listened to the episode before I got this
⏹️ ▶️ John feedback and like didn’t, you know, it didn’t perk my ears up or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like those Emax key bindings that I always talk about. My fingers know how to type them. But sometimes when I
⏹️ ▶️ John speak them and I have to say, what is it that you’re typing when you make an ellipsis, you know, but but like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not a word. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John muscles doing a thing. So yes, it’s totally option.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then we got at least one. I don’t know if I should say complaint,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I can’t think of a better word, complaint that I was saying the key modifiers in the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order. So what is the correct order, John? John
⏹️ ▶️ John Svazic Well, this is an instance where my ears did perk up. Yeah, I saw this feedback or whatever, and I mostly forgot about it. But then I was listening
⏹️ ▶️ John to the episode as I do. And when you started talking about the sequences, I’m like, what, what? And yeah, it jumped out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it reminded me immediately of adjective order in English, which is one of those fun grammar
⏹️ ▶️ John things where even if you know and care nothing about grammar, if you are a native English speaker, you instinctively
⏹️ ▶️ John know this rule whether you know it or not. This has gone around the internet many times over the years of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll be amazed that this is this thing you knew about English grammar that you didn’t know you knew. So
⏹️ ▶️ John to give an example, there’s a Tolkien example that I don’t want to give because it’s too like UK-ish and it doesn’t really make sense
⏹️ ▶️ John in English. But when you put a bunch of adjectives in front of a noun, a bunch of words that are describing
⏹️ ▶️ John that noun, it’s a big long string of them, there are lots of things you want to say about this particular noun, what order
⏹️ ▶️ John do they go in? If you ask someone to write down the order, like, do I do color,
⏹️ ▶️ John size, material, what order do those things go in? You’re like, I don’t know. Some of those weird grammar rules nobody knows.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if I say a brown big bear, you’re like, a brown big bear?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Are you not a native English
⏹️ ▶️ John speaker? It’s a big brown bear. Everybody knows that. It’s, huh, well, what you’ve just established is that size
⏹️ ▶️ John comes before color. And again, a native English speaker will know that instinctively. In fact, There
⏹️ ▶️ John is a particular order that all these things can go in and if you move any of them around
⏹️ ▶️ John it starts to sound weird. We’ll put a link in the show notes to the English Stack Exchange
⏹️ ▶️ John website has a question about this. I recommend that site by the way. If you do Googling for grammar, I mentioned this on a past
⏹️ ▶️ John show, hey if you just know this thing exists but you don’t know how it works just Google for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll get a lot of answers from various websites. A lot of them are kind of covered with ads and
⏹️ ▶️ John not particularly high quality. I tend to like the English Stack Exchange because it’s a mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John pleasant website and I have some faith that the answers there are somewhat authoritative. There are some
⏹️ ▶️ John other good sites too like Grammar Girl is pretty good and you know the dictionary websites are pretty good but
⏹️ ▶️ John I do like the English.StackExchange.com. Anyway there’s a bunch of answers and you can read
⏹️ ▶️ John them to see what the order is. Here’s an example. Color, origin, material, and purpose usually go
⏹️ ▶️ John in that order. So the red Spanish leather riding boots, right? wouldn’t say the leather Spanish
⏹️ ▶️ John red riding boots like it doesn’t make it doesn’t even doesn’t even parse people don’t even understand what you’re saying right
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s more goes into even more detail all that said there is an
⏹️ ▶️ John equivalent for modifier keys on the Mac it’s a little bit different than English in that I think there is more
⏹️ ▶️ John variance depending on what group of computer nerds you grow up with or hang out with
⏹️ ▶️ John seeing it written and speaking it to each other because that’s how the order comes about in English I would imagine, it’s just people using them and writing them
⏹️ ▶️ John and it just sort of consensus builds over the years. Modifier keys on the Mac have not been around as long, but there
⏹️ ▶️ John is definitely what I think is a common or dominant order. In the instance
⏹️ ▶️ John of Casey saying shift command, kind of like the brown big bear, shift command
⏹️ ▶️ John is not the order those go in. Command shift, command shift 3, command shift 4, command always comes
⏹️ ▶️ John first. So that leads to the question, well what is the order of all the different modifiers? Are they
⏹️ ▶️ John like the English adjective order where there is one defined order and you can write it down and it will seem right to everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can I guess? I think… go for it. I would love to hear what you’re both… just off the top of your head. Like don’t overthink it. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John make a modifier with… make a key combo with all the modifiers and just save in the order you think they should be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the way I would say… by the way this is also different from the way these symbols are written in the menu. Yes, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the second point. Yes, but the way I would say something that uses all the keys like Save for Web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be command option control shift shift thing because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is the kind of the direction that your fingers would find them on the key where I was pressing down from the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out right so interesting interesting post
⏹️ ▶️ John rationalization but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it command option control shift
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was going to say the same thing and there’s an example of this that I quoted which I probably didn’t say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this way because I wasn’t thinking about it but the copy qualified symbol name in Xcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is so to follow markers lead because I was thinking the same thing command command control
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shift C. I don’t know that still doesn’t sound right to me though.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so first of all, like obviously it’s rare that there is a keystroke that actually includes
⏹️ ▶️ John all the modifiers. But if you had to force rank the modifiers, that is also the order I would choose. And if you do subsets,
⏹️ ▶️ John it works out. Command S, command shift S, command option S, command option shift
⏹️ ▶️ John S, it all reads, right? Command control space bar, right? Just it’s all command control
⏹️ ▶️ John V. It all basically works out. Here’s where that I think there’s a little bit of a wrinkle and maybe there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot more wiggle room. For doing certain subsets,
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like the order starts to change. In particular, I think I would
⏹️ ▶️ John do, I don’t know, the ones that involve control,
⏹️ ▶️ John control shift I’m on board with, that’s how you would say that. But if you did,
⏹️ ▶️ John option control sounds weird to me. Control option
⏹️ ▶️ John little bit more natural than option control, you know what I mean? And Control’s always screwing things up for everybody. Because it’s not, it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey foreign modifier.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the one we’re grateful that we have because it’s for Unix and we don’t try to hog it, but occasionally we have to use it. And now if we have to combine
⏹️ ▶️ John it with Option, it’s a little bit weird. But anyway, wrinkles like that aside, if you read
⏹️ ▶️ John this English Stack Exchange article, you’ll see that there’s similar debates and nuances in the English
⏹️ ▶️ John adjective order as well. But in general, the dominant thing is as everybody had said. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems like we do all instinctively know it. know it, it’s basically L-shape on the keyboard, but that’s not why, it’s just a way to remember it.
⏹️ ▶️ John As Marco pointed out, the order of the little symbols in the menu, like when you pull down a menu
⏹️ ▶️ John and it has the little symbols next to the thing, is nothing like that order at all. I’m not sure it’s a complete
⏹️ ▶️ John reversal. Maybe it is? I should find a command that has all the things. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John shift command Z. We would say that as command shift Z, so maybe we’re reading it from right to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the order in the menu is seems to be option. Well option shift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco command and then control or the heck does control go?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, it’s control. It’s control first. It’s control option shift command.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so that’s all messed up because the shift is like jumping into the middle of the order, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it seems to be mostly so that the commands all line up on it like on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Yeah. I mean that that would make sense to me, but it’s not strictly reversed, right? It’s not like shift key jumps
⏹️ ▶️ John in the middle of the order. It should be, the shift key should be at the front, but the control gets to be there. Maybe because it’s less visually
⏹️ ▶️ John dominant, because the shift is the big upward facing arrow, but control is the little carrot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think also, I think most key commands that are going to appear in a menu will contain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the command key. So it’s important that the command keys all line up so they look consistent and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easy, are easy to visually scan and everything. And then everything else is kind of tacked onto the side, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s less frequently used.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. You know, we got a question at some point, I don’t know if it was related to this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if I recall correctly, the question was something along the lines of, why these symbols? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, why is control a caret? And why is command
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the little Swiss point of interest sign or whatever it is? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey perhaps most interestingly, am I crazy or is options supposed to be like a switch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey track running from left to right? Is that correct or am I retconning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it took me years to figure that out. But yeah, it looks like a fork in the road you’re taking an alternate path.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or an electric switch, an electric circuit diagram. I’m not sure what the origin of the option is as in what it’s supposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to represent, but it seems to me like the place of interest or whatever symbol,
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s chosen by humans based on a feeling of that would be a good symbol. Because it’s nothing,
⏹️ ▶️ John point of interest is not related to command key or shortcut in any way. Someone just saw that and thought
⏹️ ▶️ John it was a good symbol and picked it. And I agree with them. It is a good symbol, and it’s cool. and regardless
⏹️ ▶️ John of the actual origins in the option symbol, which I don’t know, it looks enough like option this
⏹️ ▶️ John way or that way, whether you picture it as train tracks or as a switch controlling which way current flows through
⏹️ ▶️ John a circuit, it works visually control for the carrot
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s maybe like shift makes sense because it’s pointing to the the letter, the thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John above on the key cap, right? Because traditionally on typewriters or whatever, you’d have the symbol on the key and then there’ll be the symbol that it makes
⏹️ ▶️ John when and you hold down shift and that would be above the other symbol, but then carrot, it’s like an arrow but
⏹️ ▶️ John not, and what the hell does control mean? That might have its origins in, like which came first, I don’t know, in the Unix thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the carrot is used in Unix, like in shell stuff when you want to type control
⏹️ ▶️ John characters without actually putting a literal control character in your ASCII file, you can type carrot, square bracket, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like there’s precedent there, I just don’t know which is the chicken and which is the egg, like did that come before it being used
⏹️ ▶️ John as a symbol, or after, or simultaneous? I’m not entirely sure. So
⏹️ ▶️ John to whoever asked that question, don’t have a great answer, but I bet if I had to place money, it’s mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John because human beings pick them because they felt like it based on some rationale and then
⏹️ ▶️ John after that, that fact is lost to history and it just becomes a thing we all accept.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Isn’t that all decisions ever? Humans beings picked it at some point because of some rationale.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the rationale could be like, say there was a bunch of symbols in some character set that were specifically made to be modifiers
⏹️ ▶️ John with ascending levels of specificity, and we just use them. But that’s not the case. These are pulled from
⏹️ ▶️ John all over the place. Some of them are ASCII, some of them are not, and so it’s a hodgepodge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we have more, many, many more shortcuts. This might be the rest of the show with the rate we’re going. All
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, so John, you have another one. Xcode symbol pop-up? I’m sure once you describe this, I’ll know what this means,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but just reading those words, I don’t know what you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John Especially since I discussed it with both of you before, at least in a Slack, and possibly over audio before or
⏹️ ▶️ John after the show. This was the one shortcut that I actually wanted to talk about, but because I was foolish and didn’t write it down,
⏹️ ▶️ John I forgot. I’m used to, in BBEdit for many years, activating
⏹️ ▶️ John what is called in BBEdit a function popup with a keystroke. It’s just a popup menu that’s in like the little
⏹️ ▶️ John toolbar area of BBEdit that gives you a list of the functions that are in whatever source code file you’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have that custom bound in BBEdit to Control-F. I use it so frequently.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess for functions or find or whatever it is, Control-F. When I started using Xcode, doing all these Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John apps, it has a symbol pop-up, which is like an even more flexible version of the function pop-up,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I didn’t know how to activate it with a keystroke. I’d see it there and I’d use it all the time, but I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John so used to doing it with a keystroke, I was like, I really need to bind that to Control-F so I can just feel comfortable or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I could not, and still have not, found whatever the menu command, like sometimes there’s menu
⏹️ ▶️ John commands that aren’t actually in the menus, like they’re not visible in the menus. Whatever that command is, Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John I can go to the system preferences in the keyboard preference pane and shortcuts and define
⏹️ ▶️ John a shortcut for Xcode, if I knew the title of that command, I could bind it to something in that thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t know. So I had to discover what is its actual key binding. Luckily it has one.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unfortunately, it is nonsensical, mostly nonsensical. And it will come back
⏹️ ▶️ John to you when I tell you what the binding is. The keyboard shortcut to get to the symbol pop-up The
⏹️ ▶️ John next code is control six,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco which is like the best mnemonic it has. It’s like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a carrot on top of the six. Is it? Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like, it’s like control, control. I don’t know. Anyway, it’s control six. Now I’m typing control six all day. I
⏹️ ▶️ John wish I could find a control F, but that was the one I thought would be a fun shortcut that most people probably
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know because as far as I can tell, there’s no way to discover it other than wishing it existed and then googling, which is what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did. I knew once I executed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it what you meant, and as you were describing it, I had a feeling I knew what you meant, but I hadn’t a clue that that was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John correct code for it. And in case it’s not clear, I
⏹️ ▶️ John had a bunch of people replying to me when I was talking about this on Twitter. They’re like, and also, did you know once it pops up, you can type? It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John yes, of course. That’s the whole function of the thing. The reason I want to do it from the keyboard, I don’t want to pop it up with the keyboard and then use the
⏹️ ▶️ John mouse. I want to pop it up with the keyboard and then type the first few characters of the function name and then hit return to jump to
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And that’s, that’s how it’s how I use it in BB at it. That’s how you should use it in Xcode. Xcode has this weird bug where
⏹️ ▶️ John when you start typing to narrow the list, the position of the narrowed window, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John window that has fewer entries in it is really weird. Sometimes like I expect the narrowed window to be centered on
⏹️ ▶️ John the region from which it popped. But very often the narrowed region is like up at the top of the screen because the thing was
⏹️ ▶️ John really tall. It’s I would call that a UI bug in Xcode. But anyway, it works and you should use it and it’s cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another tip that we neglected to talk about, I guess because it’s not really a keyboard shortcut,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but something that blew my mind when I found it out years ago, is that if you have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like an open or save dialogue, like let’s pick on an open dialogue, then you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go to Finder and drag a file into the open dialogue and it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jump that open dialogue to the containing folder slash directory and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey highlight the file that you dragged in. So it’s like a shortcut to drilling into that open
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or save dialog and finding that exact file, which may not have been the best description, but just try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it sometime. Drag a file into an open dialog box and watch what happens. It’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I do this. I also discovered this. It took a few years of using a Mac before I knew about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I use this all the time. It’s incredibly useful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yep. It doesn’t open the, if you drag a folder, it goes to the contents
⏹️ ▶️ John of that folder. So it won’t show you the containing folder. So that’s most frequently how I use it, I drag a folder.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you drag a file, I think it brings you to the container location. Yeah, this is, I think this came
⏹️ ▶️ John officially to macOS as a supported feature with the next stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s hard for me to remember because I ran various utilities on classic
⏹️ ▶️ John macOS that did all this and more. So it’s hard to remember, like when did it come to the US proper? One of those is default
⏹️ ▶️ John folder, which is one of those utilities that actually somehow against all odds survived into the macOS 10 era
⏹️ ▶️ John and continues to exist, it augments slash modifies the open and save dialog.
⏹️ ▶️ John The open and save dialog in Mac OS X is so much more powerful than it was in classic, but I would argue that the
⏹️ ▶️ John augmented classic open and save dialog was more powerful than the Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ John X one or the current Mac OS one by far. If you augmented it with Super Boomerang or default folder or whatever, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can do tons of things. In particular, my favorite one, as you might imagine, given my love for the classic Finder
⏹️ ▶️ John and my love for Windows in default folder, both in classic and in
⏹️ ▶️ John current Mac OS. You could hold down a modifier key. I think it was
⏹️ ▶️ John an option to even not use a modifier key, but I always had it bound to a modifier. Hold down a modifier key. Like you’ve got an open save
⏹️ ▶️ John dialog box on your screen. You hold down a modifier and then you drag your mouse cursor over
⏹️ ▶️ John where you know open windows are in the finder, even if they’re below 500 other windows and
⏹️ ▶️ John it would highlight with kind of like a dimmed outline, whatever folder
⏹️ ▶️ John you are hovering over in the Finder. So you’d hold on the control key and just mouse over to like what you know to be a window
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s buried in the Finder and you’d see this dim outline of it. And then you would click and it would jump to that folder. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was a way to essentially spatially pick, like instead of going to the Finder, finding that folder, dragging
⏹️ ▶️ John its proxy icon into the OpenSave thing, you would just do, you know, Commando, Control, click
⏹️ ▶️ John on where you know the window is, because you’re, you know, you’re using the Spatial Finder and you’re arranging your windows and you know where they all are,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though you can’t see it, even though it’s buried underneath everything else. It was so awesome. I used
⏹️ ▶️ John that for years. I actually still have a default folder, default folder X or 10,
⏹️ ▶️ John which runs on macOS, but I mostly weaned myself off of it just because I didn’t want to have one more thing that I had to
⏹️ ▶️ John have installed all the time, but I think I still have a copy of it. But I always loved that feature. If the current macOS
⏹️ ▶️ John Finder behaved in any sane way, it would be a lot more useful to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s talk about screen capture. There were some good tips, especially in a thread
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that a few people pointed us to by Corey Ginovan. I hope I pronounced that right. We’ll put a link in the show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey notes. But there’s some really great tips, some of which I had not heard enough to really stick in my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mind. My favorite being, and maybe you did bring this up last time, John, I don’t recall, but if you do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, let’s say, oh, now I gotta test myself, Command Shift 4, John. Not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Shift Command 4, mind you, but Command Shift 4. If you do that and drag a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little area of your desktop, or you’re dragging a box on top of your screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you realize, uh-oh, I missed a little bit. If you hold down the space bar, it will let you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey move that entire box around the screen, and then when you release, it’ll let you continue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make it bigger or smaller. Super useful, and I had remembered hearing that in the past, but it just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not stick. So now I’m saying it again, hopefully, so I remember and so you will remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little acrobatic, like when we say that you’re still holding down the mouse button. So you click, you hold down and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John dragging, right? And you realize you missed a little bit or whatever. You just, you keep holding down on the mouse button,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then you hold down the space bar. And so it basically makes it so you can both move and resize. You can adjust infinitely
⏹️ ▶️ John until you get it exactly where you want it, as long as you keep that mouse button held down. A
⏹️ ▶️ John couple of people pointed out that’s a shortcut sort of borrowed from Photoshop, like many of these things, sort of conventions that
⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, established in a popular application many years ago that are continuing to be copied. All the ones in this list
⏹️ ▶️ John are the ones we didn’t mention. Getting a sub-window, like so you do command shift four space bar to get the little
⏹️ ▶️ John thing to get a window. What if you just want a sheet that’s in the window, you don’t want the whole window? If you hold down,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is it, command?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I believe that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, hold down command to get the sub-window. You can option click the window to capture it without the shadow.
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey, you mentioned this last week that there’s a thing where you can turn shadows on and off. Apparently you could do it on a case by case basis with
⏹️ ▶️ John the option key. you can hold down control and pressing a shortcut, whatever it may
⏹️ ▶️ John be, to make it go directly to the clipboard. So if you’re gonna do command shift three to take a screenshot of the whole screen and
⏹️ ▶️ John send it to a file, if you do, and now you’re testing me, command control shift
⏹️ ▶️ John it will send it directly to the clipboard. Anyway, there’s too many of these to remember. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why we will link to this thread by Corey on Twitter where many, many of them are listed.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not even sure if the list is exhaustive. They’re just sure as a lot. And we’re not gonna go through like, oh, let’s just list every shortcut that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac has because there’s way too many. But because we talk so much about screen capture,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s worth just linking to a thread on that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then finally, Malaad Ali Zadeh sent in a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shortcut that John, robot himself, John Syracuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not know. Tell me about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not a robot. Not only did I not know this, but the reason I’m excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about the fact that someone sent a shortcut that I didn’t know is because I didn’t know it, and it’s the type of thing that I would
⏹️ ▶️ John use, and in fact, did use as soon as I discovered it. So there is a thing in one of the preference
⏹️ ▶️ John bands, I think it’s in the screen set or whatever, where you can assign hot corners to your screen. Like basically, when
⏹️ ▶️ John I drag my mouse cursor into this corner of the screen, I want this to happen. And by default, none of
⏹️ ▶️ John the corners do anything, which is the correct default, because you’d be surprised how often your cursor find its way into the corner.
⏹️ ▶️ John You lose track of it or whatever, you just push all in one direction and ends up in the corner, right? But
⏹️ ▶️ John I enjoy that because I use the mouse a lot, and I’ve always had lower right to be show desktop,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I used to have lower left to be dashboard, that we talked about last week when I wanted to check what the weather was and jam my cursor into
⏹️ ▶️ John the lower left and nothing happened because dashboard is gone. Upper right is traditionally activate screensaver and
⏹️ ▶️ John or lock screen. Anyway, that’s all set on the hot corners thing in system preferences.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you hold down a modifier key when opening the little pop-up menu that
⏹️ ▶️ John lets you pick what you want to happen. So like it is a pop, there’s four pop-up menus, one for each corner, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you just go to the pop-up menu, it says, what do you want to happen? Activate screen saver, show desktop, show dashboard,
⏹️ ▶️ John blah, blah, whatever it may be, right? If you hold down command when you do that, what you’re saying is,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I have the command key held down and I hit the lower right corner, do this thing. And you can do
⏹️ ▶️ John it for any set of modifiers. Like you just hold down the modifiers and then open the little menu. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John great because on my wife’s computer, she doesn’t like it when I assign hot corners to her
⏹️ ▶️ John account because she hates it when her cursor hits the corner something weird happens, now I just
⏹️ ▶️ John make it a modifier thing. There’s no way she’s gonna like hold down weird modifiers and send the cursor into the
⏹️ ▶️ John corner. So now finally when I’m on her computer I won’t needlessly jam my cursor into
⏹️ ▶️ John the corner and watch nothing happen as I just stare at the screen. Now I just need to hold down a modifier and hit the
⏹️ ▶️ John corner and it will work. So thank you Milad for sending that shortcut in because it made my life
⏹️ ▶️ John better and I honestly did not know that that was a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah I didn’t I didn’t have a I have a freaking clue that was a thing. And I am a religious, devout,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever, hot corners user, just in case anyone cares. Upper left is mission
⏹️ ▶️ Casey control, upper right is show desktop, lower right is put display to sleep, and lower left is start
⏹️ ▶️ John screensaver. Upper right is show desktop, upper right is screensaver. Come
⏹️ ▶️ John Wasn’t that true? Because it’s always been that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey way, even on Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Isn’t that the default Windows activate screensaver
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey in corner two? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think so. You very well could be right. I didn’t think that that was even a thing on Windows, but it’s been so darn long.
⏹️ ▶️ John after Dark for Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, again, you very well could be right, but that’s how I do it. Marco, do you use Hot Corners at all?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I only use Upper Left for screen sleep, nothing else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Upper Left. We don’t agree on anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like Screen Saver. It’s just the modern Screen Saver. It’s screen sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but Upper Left, well, I guess, Upper Left was more of a, sort of a no-go zone back in classic
⏹️ ▶️ John because of how prominent the use of the Apple menu was, the customizable Apple menu, because we didn’t have like launchers or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John but nowadays you tend not to go to the upper left for anything. Although I would imagine if you have a window and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re doing window where your first window appears in the upper left corner, which is basically the default, and you went
⏹️ ▶️ John to quickly go close that window and you overshot a little bit and hit that corner and triggered expose, that
⏹️ ▶️ John could be annoying. That’s why I like the, I do everything top to bottom, right to left. So I have
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing hot in the upper left corner and my hot corners in the other extremes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, to each their own.
Casey’s NAS backup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, any other thoughts on this before we enter Casey’s computer corner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey corner of a different kind, a corner of a different kind, indeed. So we talked a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week about how I can back up the stuff in my sonology. I’m going to try to keep this brief,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey despite the fact that this is like 15 pages of notes in the show. But I’m going to try to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this very, very quick. So first of all, something that I’m sure everyone else in the world has heard of, but I did not.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I don’t recall where I read it. I want to say it was on a backblaze page somewhere, but, or no, it was a Synology PDF
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that somebody had been kind enough to send me. The 3-2-1 rule. I don’t think this is unique to Synology. Again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure this has been around forever. I just never heard it. The 3-2-1 rule, as per what I read, three copies of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data on two different mediums or devices and at least one copy off-site,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that’s how you know you’re safe. So again, three copies of your data, two different mediums, one copy off-site.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s the 3-2-1 rule of backups. Had you two heard of this before? John, I presume you’ve already heard of this?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, I mean, oh, like I had heard this same advice, but I didn’t know that a little
⏹️ ▶️ John mnemonic 321. And I would say that for the two, I would emphasize two different devices, not mediums, because that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes people think they need to have it on like floppy disk or tape or optical, like two separate hard drive devices
⏹️ ▶️ John are fine. But two different devices means like literally not two hard drives in the same box, but like two boxes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, but yeah, this is I agree with this device as a good minimum. 321 is a good mnemonic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, had you heard of this before?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I had gotten the reference but hadn’t seen the movie.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fair enough. 3, 2, 1, contact. That
⏹️ ▶️ John You know that, was that one before your time? I guess you’re watching
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reruns. It was slightly before my time, but it was on TV a lot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In any case, so there were several different options pitched to me, which I appreciated. I really honestly did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so just to quickly recap and run through them, Marco, last episode, it had very emphatically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey advised just getting a 16 terabyte or whatever, huge hard drive, stick it on my Mac mini and use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Backblaze. And that has some problems with it. What if I eventually burst through 16 terabytes? There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the monthly fee of Backblaze, which I’m not saying is a problem, but maybe there’s a free option.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The benefits though is that it’s far and away the cheapest one-time cost. And the other benefit is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s extremely offsite. not even sneaker netted to my parents. That is like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for real professional offsite backup. Max Line had suggested something which in retrospect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was very obvious, but I hadn’t considered. I’d said many times in the last episode, well, to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a new Synology is three grand because I want a new 8-base Synology and I want to stuff it full of 12 terabyte drives.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Max was the first person I saw to point out, well, yeah, you could do that. And the reason I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do that was to basically upgrade what I’ve got and then shimmy what I’ve got to mom and dads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But Max had said, well, what if you got like a two-base Synology and then just get two 16-terabyte
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drives for replication or backup? And so some of the same problems are, you know, what if I bust your 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terabytes? And another problem is it’s $400 times two $500 hard drives. That’s $1,400
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up front. And if you look at how much it costs on Backblaze, if I could get that to work, it takes like 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years for me to break even with the monthly cost of Backblaze. On the On the plus side, there’s no recurring cost, and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is completely under my control. So there are some good and some bad. And other people suggested, OK,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, what if you get a two-base Synology and don’t do full-on replication? You don’t have two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey copies, two identical 16-terabyte drives. What if you just YOLO it with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two 8-terabyte drives? And do like, what is it? Is it RAID 0? What’s the one I’m thinking of that’s dangerous,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it gives you more space? Yep, that’s the one. OK. And there’s a couple problems there still. What if I bust
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through 16 terabytes? there’s still about $700 of upfront costs. Now that brings the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey break even to about three and a third years, which is much better and there’s no recurring costs, which is nice and it’s completely under my control,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is nice. But I don’t know, I’m still not in love with all of this. Then a few people asked, well, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why don’t you just put CrashPlan on Docker on your Synology? There’s a very simple answer, I just don’t like CrashPlan
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anymore. I really want to get off CrashPlan. Then a few other people suggested G Suite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apparently has unlimited cloud storage once you hit five or more users,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they quietly don’t enforce it for less than five. So you can like, even with one user, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still get unlimited storage, or so I’ve been told several different times. I’m not in love with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey giving Google my data any more than I already have, and I don’t really like the idea of just skirting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through this kind of exception if I can avoid it, so eh. I appreciate the heads up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like the suggestion because it fits so well with trying to skirt through the strong advice
⏹️ ▶️ John of Backblaze and Crashplan.
⏹️ ▶️ John unlimited, but this is exactly the same thing. But the Google movement, ah, it’s unlimited, but
⏹️ ▶️ John in an undocumented weird way, they could go away. And really, they’d probably frown upon it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So also worth noting, Brian Skea, who is the CTO of Backblaze, weighed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in. I don’t think Brian entirely understood what was being discussed. I don’t think he listened to the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think he was trying to pick it up from Twitter. But Brian wrote, just so you’re aware, it is against Backblaze’s terms of service to back up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey file shares, and we have a project underway to stop backing those up. You can understand our problem. 1,000 people sharing a single $6
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month backup will drive us out of business. That’s not really what I’m talking about. It’s sort of, kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what I’m talking about, but it’s not really what I’m talking about. But it’s a fair point, and it’s something worth considering.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s not that I’m really accessing a file share. In many ways, it is effectively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one huge external hard drive that is physically connected to my computer. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just physically connected via the network, not via
⏹️ ▶️ John USB. And what he was talking about is a way that the Backblaze software can detect whether you’re doing
⏹️ ▶️ John something like Marco’s iSCSI thing. He’s not saying there’s a new set
⏹️ ▶️ John of rules. He’s saying this is the way Backblaze has always been. We back up your local hard drives. We don’t back up things over NASA’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John And all he’s saying is that they’re working on ways to actually enforce that better than they do now to make it less
⏹️ ▶️ John trivial to fake it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So a long story short, I have Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running on my iMac Pro. It has been running for several days. It is backing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up as we speak. And there’s some magic involved in doing that. But what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically doing is I’m trying this out for a little while and seeing how that works out. If this doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work the way I want it to, the next step is Marco’s approach for sure. I’m just going to buy a huge friggin’ hard drive,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey attach it to the Mac Mini, and then as far as I can understand, I am well within the rules and regulations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Backblaze, and I will be so happy to be done with CrashPlan. So the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey steps are, if this doesn’t work out the way I want it to, use Marco’s approach. And then finally, if that doesn’t work
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out for some reason, then I’ll probably do the two-base analogy with two smaller
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drives that I just raid zero and call today, if for some reason the Marco approach doesn’t work. But I don’t know why it
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t. Don’t forget about JBOD instead of raid zero. That’s your other option.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is JBOD? I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco familiar. You don’t know this? This is one of the best acronyms in computing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s like DADBOD, but different. Just a box of disks, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Sorry. Which is different
⏹️ ▶️ John than RAID 0, where RAID 0 is lockstep, two mechanisms, same size, you know, writing simultaneously to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey both JBOD. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you’ve just got two disks and I make it look like one and don’t worry about the details, but they don’t have to be the same size. That’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s just a wad of storage with no redundancy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Concatenation, basically. Yep. I mean, I think that the whole idea of relying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on some kind of weird undetected or unenforced policy violation of one of these services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not great. I don’t honestly really care about the moral side of it as much as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just unwise to rely on that continuing to be the case. The Google Drive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey or the Google Drive for Business
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, it’s like, yeah, well, that might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to actually exist. But that’s like a one-line bug fix
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some code somewhere that somebody might eventually find. The Backblaze, not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco noticing that you’re mounting an SMB file share at a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular seeming location in the file system, that’s something that they can detect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And literally the CTO of Backblaze told you they are working on detection
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s taking a while for that feature. Paul Feigl-Sure, but still, it isn’t wise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to rely on that continuing to be the case even until tomorrow,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let alone just some random time in the future when all of a sudden your backup strategy needs to be replaced because something broke.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s no fun. So I would suggest still, what I suggested last week, which is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big drive connected to a Mac mini running Backblaze, because Backblaze advertises
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unlimited storage to your computer. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using it with a large hard drive plugged into a computer, running the Backblaze
⏹️ ▶️ Marco client that you’re paying for for one computer worth of a license, that is explicitly what they say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do. And it is the only other option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that kind of seems like it’s okay with the service provider besides CrashPlan here. And I totally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support your decision to not want to use CrashPlan anymore because it’s terrible. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, strongly advise just using Backblaze the way it normally works,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is using the external drive on the Mac Mini, and whatever else you do with like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, R-syncing it or somehow, you know, syncing it to your Synology, that’s up to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still see that as largely unnecessary, but that’s up to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, I completely agree with you. And it’s also funny, having used Backblaze on my iMac Pro for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of three days or whatever it’s been, Oh my God, it’s so much better than CrashPlan. It’s so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so much better than CrashPlan. I feel bad because I don’t like to beat up on people or things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but CrashPlan’s client is just so, so, so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, if there’s one thing you didn’t address and someone just brought it on the chat room again and reminded me, connecting a hard drive to
⏹️ ▶️ John use Synology through the USB port, a thing that I did for a while before I harvested that hard drive for other purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, but then how do I get that on Backblaze?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, this would just be for second redundant copy
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey as like, buy a 16
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey connect to your
⏹️ ▶️ John Synology. And then, you know, I mean, my answer to why not that is that USB interface is slow, but maybe that doesn’t bother
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And no, for a backup or something like that, I wouldn’t care. But the problem I want is that the whole, the original crux
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this is, if my house burns down, I want this data to be somewhere else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that can be mom and dad. It’s like, I personally am OK with that. I’m not saying the two of you are. I’m not saying listeners are.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I personally am OK with that amount of redundancy. But I would not be okay with just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having a second copy to fix the Synology going up in flames.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, actually, if that literally happened, it’d probably take this external thing with it, but you get my point. But I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want, even just having this currently Phantom, probably soon to be real, 16
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terabyte drive hanging off the Mac Mini, at least if the Synology crapped the bed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that drive is still okay and connected to the Mac Mini. that’s still an improvement to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over just having it hang off the back of the Synology. It is a fair question for sure, but I would want it hanging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the Mac Mini and that’s already one step removed from the Synology itself. And then it would at that point
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being, be being backed up to Backblaze, which means I am double-covered.
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Rumor: Springboard list view
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey So WWDC happened this week. Did you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s nice branding by the various websites. I’m not sure who did it first, but this was
⏹️ ▶️ John a giant rumor dump, I’m assuming, powered by a leaked build of iOS 14. These sites don’t come
⏹️ ▶️ John out and say where they’re getting the information. But lo and behold, a bunch of different websites all had a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of very detailed information to say about future Apple software products from which they gleaned
⏹️ ▶️ John things about future Apple hardware products and they branded it as WWDC week, which may be the only
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC week we get in the absence of the actual WWDC. But these are,
⏹️ ▶️ John to frame this, these are all rumors sourced from what seems like some kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John leak or other bit of information or binary stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John extracted from Apple. So I would put some stake in it, but as with all these things, this is pre-release
⏹️ ▶️ John leak software or whatever, you don’t know how things are going to turn out. But there are a lot of them. I put them all in the notes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Obviously we’re not going to cover them all. I would invite both of you to scroll down the giant list of rumors, which Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John has kindly expanded to be even larger. And if there’s anything there that you think is interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John or you want to talk about, it up. There’s plenty to choose from. Steve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey McLaughlin Yeah, so I will start running through the show notes and interrupt me, you two, when you’re ready. First one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes is I was 14 to include new home screen list view option with Siri suggestions and more.
⏹️ ▶️ John Paul Matz See, I knew you wouldn’t be able to follow my directions. So I put the one I cared about the most at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But the directions
⏹️ ▶️ John are look down the whole list, two of you, and find ones that pique your interest because
⏹️ ▶️ John they are not in any order and we’re not going to do all of them. So for once, we’re not going from top to bottom because
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll be here all week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John All right, we don’t actually have a week, but now we can get that one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John we can skip that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey now that you mentioned the iOS home screen. Wow,
⏹️ ▶️ John who put that at the top of the list? That’s actually the one I’m most interested in. And you know why? Do
⏹️ ▶️ John you know why I’m most interested in it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because you want the list view?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, but like a springboard is the finder of iOS. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, seriously, like springboard has not changed in any significant away in a really long
⏹️ ▶️ John time. It’s been a pain point. Android has so much more flexibility here. Yes, I know the iPad got the weird widget slider
⏹️ ▶️ John thing or whatever. But in general, it’s been like you got little squares, then you got little squares that are folders that don’t look like folders,
⏹️ ▶️ John but we still call them folders without squares within your squares, yo dog. And then we have the widget sliding
⏹️ ▶️ John over from the left. Finally, it seems like potentially an iOS 14
⏹️ ▶️ John springboard will change the
⏹️ ▶️ John that it changes. Will they be improvements? I use any of them? I’m not even sure. I love ListU
⏹️ ▶️ John and the Finder, but the Finder is not iOS. Who knows if it’ll even use it. I’m just excited that something is happening
⏹️ ▶️ John on Springboard. And I was excited when they increased the icon density in iOS 13 on the iPad, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But this seems like the most significant change to Springboard in the history of iOS. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m jazzed about that and can’t wait to see
⏹️ ▶️ John what kind of things they come up with. I’ll be really disappointed if they bail out and just don’t ship it, because that seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like a strong possibility for springboard changes because they’re so risky and if they’re screwed up in any way, it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John dangerous and confusing. But fingers crossed for that actually shipping.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s never shipped any springboard bugs. Don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. Well, spring springboard is also kind of like the dock of iOS and it does a bunch of crap that you wouldn’t think it’s responsible
⏹️ ▶️ John for but it totally is.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, exactly.
Rumor: Wallpaper apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, continuing on iOS 14, major accessibility features.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to do it, are you? No, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John no. Hold on. Before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey beating me up about not following your instructions, you’ll notice, John, that earlier this evening, I added comments
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and excerpts for all the things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I was interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in. I said that. I just said you had expanded them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So, you know what? This is something I’m interested in. So, buckle up, big guy. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John the next thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just happens to be number two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just happens to be number two.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just happened to be white.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it just happened to be white. It happened to me. Major accessibility features, A new feature
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that will be able to detect important sounds like fire alarms, sirens, door knocks, doorbells, and even crying babies. This
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is an excerpt from 9to5Mac. Presumably iOS will translate these alerts into haptics for people with hearing loss.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey More new accessibility features would bring support for the camera to detect hand gestures while quote, audio accommodations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can improve audio tuning over AirPods and EarPods for people with mild to moderate hearing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loss. You could also potentially run an audiogram on device. And then finally, and this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was outside of accessibility features also in the same article though. With iOS 14,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple will integrate the hashtag shot on iPhone challenges in the photos app and users can submit and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see challenge results in the app. I don’t think I dig photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app being social in that way but I do dig the general gist of this functionality
⏹️ ▶️ Casey being somewhere on the iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ John Gamifying it is kind of a fun thing. And it fits in the photos app, I suppose. Like, I mean, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John if it’s not too prominent in your face, because maybe I’m not interested and seeing other people’s photos, but if you
⏹️ ▶️ John are, it sort of incentivizes people to take cool pictures and submit them and maybe their picture will
⏹️ ▶️ John get featured and they’ll be excited that Apple featured their cool photo they took with their iPhone. It’s a good
⏹️ ▶️ John way that makes customers happy with their product and shows off a cool feature. You skipped over my favorite part from the
⏹️ ▶️ John story though, which is third-party wallpapers. Like that somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll be able to provide a wallpaper collection, I don’t know, through the App Store or something? The details aren’t clear.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like obviously, you can put whatever wallpaper you want on your phone now, you’ve been able to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John for ages. But the idea of sort of productizing it, because people do that already, there’s tons of websites,
⏹️ ▶️ John get all these cool wallpapers for your phone or your iPad or whatever, packaging
⏹️ ▶️ John them up, I don’t think it’s gonna be a big deal, it’s just, it’s a formalization of a thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John people are already doing. And I think that it will actually, it’s not gonna set
⏹️ ▶️ John the world on fire, but I think it’ll be more popular than say, our message apps, right? just because people do
⏹️ ▶️ John like customizable wallpapers and sort of trading them and sharing them and communicating them and
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe selling them or do they have to be free, whatever it is. I’m actually excited about that feature, if it ships.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I don’t think it would actually go much anywhere. I mean, there have been wallpaper apps since the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the App Store that are just like pictures that you can save and then set as your wallpaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so this could make that process a little more streamlined but I don’t think that process was really hurting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the adoption of custom wallpapers and the creation of whatever apps that wanted to exist.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it neatens it up, like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s neater than
⏹️ ▶️ John having a bunch of photos littered in your, it’s like when screenshots used to be all mixed in with your other photos. It was fine,
⏹️ ▶️ John you got along with it fine, but it was annoying and it’s better when they fixed it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I think compared to iMessage apps, while the iMessage app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea never really went anywhere, iMessage apps are very popular technically, but they’re just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the sticker pack variety basically, or like the things that are very thin app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrappers that are around something that is effectively a sticker pack like Bitmoji. The idea of like, you know, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna all coordinate with your friends using iMessage apps to like coordinate an order together for your lunch order, like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never really happened, right? But, you know, the power is there to do that, but nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John ever used that. I found my first instance of a human being that I know
⏹️ ▶️ John voluntarily using an iMessage app, like not one of the built-in ones, and it was my daughter.
⏹️ ▶️ John She wanted to get an iMessage app because her and her friends were, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John doing whatever it is, I’m assuming it was some kind of game or whatever. So that’s using an iMessage app for
⏹️ ▶️ John its intended purpose, doing a thing that doesn’t have any analog on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John I forget if it was a card game or some kind of whatever. Whatever it was, it was some kind of iMessage-based game. And
⏹️ ▶️ John she totally unprompted said, can I get this iMessage app? I’m like, it’s happened.
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy. Someone wanted an iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. Did she then also then go to her Apple TV to look for real estate?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. She was shopping for sweaters and giant pictures
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on her television. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I tell you what, I don’t know how either of you survive without the GIF wrapped iMessage. Well, GIF wrapped in general, but particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iMessage app. I live in that darn
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. That’s the one story that I didn’t see about iOS 14. All I want to see is, hey, the thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John you grab a photo out of photos is no longer an extra tap away.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Remember those days? Yes. I miss it.
Rumor: Pencil-to-text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright, Marco, would you like to pick one or shall I trudge along?
⏹️ ▶️ John You can’t pick number three,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the rule. I mean, at this point, I don’t even care about number three, but now I’m going to pick number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three. No, I care very much about number
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John three, actually. Yeah, actually, number three is
⏹️ ▶️ John probably what I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pick. Oh, actually, yeah, sorry, I only read the first line. Alright, yeah, so iOS 14 allegedly features
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new OCR capabilities that will convert handwritten text from Apple Pencil into typed text. The idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here is that you can handwrite text in any text field and it will pop it in as text.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I read this, I was so happy. Not simply because I’m gonna use it a lot, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I won’t. I’m rarely entering text on my iPad. When I do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am using the keyboard almost 100% of the time. And, because it’s like the physical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keyboard that I have physically attached to it, so this would be slower. And there is no Apple Pencil
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for iPhone at the moment, so I wouldn’t have it there. But I always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loved a feature that was on my Pocket PC when I briefly had a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pocket PC in like 2003 or so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco called Transcriber. This was built into whatever Windows Mobile was called that year. I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was Pocket PC 2002, whatever it was. And you could take the stylus and you could draw on the screen when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a text field was currently active and it would draw directly onto whatever you wrote on. Like, you know, it would just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overlay the screen. You didn’t have to draw on a certain area. anywhere on the screen, draw anywhere on the screen, it would overlay the screen with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco red markers of whatever you were writing, and then it would pop that text OCR’d into the text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco field that was selected. For a device like a phone, this makes tons of sense, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might have, if you have something to write with, like either a stylus or a pencil, whatever, that would be wonderful,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love this, because it really is faster a lot of times than typing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain things on the phone. Now, this, you know, my last experience with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this was, something like 15 years ago or something, or 20 years ago. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe things have gotten a little bit different since then, but I think this would be really fun on the phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On the iPad, I don’t know how much sense it makes unless you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do a lot of text entry without having the smart keyboard. Then, you know, that could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be interesting. So I think I might use it sometimes. I think it would be fun. And yeah, I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m hoping this isn’t like a GM part spin feature
⏹️ ▶️ John this handwriting recognition, so there’s a question here about the Newton. Like obviously Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John made the Newton way back when and that handwriting recognition and it was one of the headlining features and one of the features they had a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of trouble with. And it’s a sort of typical sort of 90s Apple thing where they did something
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly ambitious, did it really, really well, but not quite well enough. And so they don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ John get credit for how good it was. And then the rest of the industry, the lesson they learned is don’t try that. it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John too hard and so they did stuff like graffiti which worked better in practice but also made people write
⏹️ ▶️ John these weird hieroglyphics that are not quite like letters whereas Apple was like no we’re not going to make you make an upside down V for
⏹️ ▶️ John an A you can just write an A however the hell you want it we’ll figure it out and you know it didn’t quite work out right so
⏹️ ▶️ John then in Mac OS X Apple introduced in around 10.4 or something or 10.3 Inkwell
⏹️ ▶️ John which hey lets you use a tablet to draw things and text on your Mac and it would figure out what
⏹️ ▶️ John you said and it was like, is this the Newton handwriting recognition tech or is it just something
⏹️ ▶️ John similar? Nobody knows about that feature. I wrote it in a Mac OS X review. It
⏹️ ▶️ John probably didn’t work. I don’t think it even worked as well as the Newton one because the Newton one also
⏹️ ▶️ John did cursive, believe it or not. The Newton one was actually pretty impressive when it worked. When it didn’t, it was infuriating.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, Inkwell, nobody used it. Who cares? It was on the Mac. Is it still on the Mac? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it is. I think if you connect a Wacom tablet, I think that enables that, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John on. But yeah, same, same deal. Like in what context do you find yourself using a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John where you want to write things with a pen? I suppose if you’re using a tablet all day and you don’t want to reach for the keyboard, but honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s almost impossible to do anything graphically intensive in a modern app without using the keyboard. Like it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though those tablets have tons of buttons on them themselves. Anyway, it’s not a popular feature, so to say.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it’s a natural fit for iOS with the pencil because you’re very likely
⏹️ ▶️ John not to have a keyboard. And you are increasingly likely to have a pen.
⏹️ ▶️ John That said, the whole reason, one of the many reasons I was drawn to computers is that it let
⏹️ ▶️ John me enter text without writing with a pencil. I
⏹️ ▶️ John did enough handwriting and I had to learn cursive in school and I had to hand in assignments in cursive,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like the hand cramps and the suffering and the general constriction of the
⏹️ ▶️ John path between my brain and the printed word or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not a fast typist, but I can type way faster than I can write, and I can type way longer
⏹️ ▶️ John than I can write comfortably.
⏹️ ▶️ John any context outside of one where you have no other option is not attractive to me. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John think there are lots of applications where it would be attractive to give one example. Uh, one of the apps, the
⏹️ ▶️ John app, uh, popular app made by someone we all know and also an app that my dad uses
⏹️ ▶️ John constantly. It’s a crossword app. Uh, then jacket makes black ink. Check it out. It’s available on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think there’s also an iOS version. Maybe it’s still in development. Anyway. Um, if you’re doing a
⏹️ ▶️ John crossword, Lots of people like to do crosswords because they’re old and used to it. They do it with
⏹️ ▶️ John a pencil or a pen in a newspaper. And when you have a crossword app on an iPad, like, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is an ideal app for a crossword, it’s a little thing you can hold in your hand, you can see all the squares. Oh, but how do you enter the text?
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, now I gotta bring up a keyboard and it covers half the board, or it covers the clues and I have to
⏹️ ▶️ John type. And it doesn’t feel like when you just have the newspaper and you’re scribbling away on it on a Sunday morning
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. And you can get the pencil and have people do it that way, but then how can
⏹️ ▶️ John you know whether you got the right word? These apps always like, you know, do something to tell you that you got it correct if you’re in a particular
⏹️ ▶️ John hint mode, or how do you know when you’ve solved the puzzle versus when you just filled in every square with gibberish? It has to know what you wrote.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is a perfect application of that. Now it will know when you make a little A, and it can even translate
⏹️ ▶️ John it from your little chicken scratch into text to show you what it recognized. That’s just one example
⏹️ ▶️ John of an application that is dying for this feature. And, you know, I’m sure there are many more. So this
⏹️ ▶️ John is long overdue for iOS, and I’m pretty excited about it, even though I will never ever use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I had put that thing in the show notes about the Newton. Did you have a Newton when they were current? I don’t recall.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wish I had a Newton when they were
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco current. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John me too. I was young then, and they were very expensive, and I got to use them. I got to
⏹️ ▶️ John go to the store and write my name in cursive and watch it get it correct. And that’s what I did. I went out and grabbed the thing, and I wrote
⏹️ ▶️ John my signature, my whatever old 12-year-old, my 12-year-old signature. I wrote my name in cursive in weird
⏹️ ▶️ John stylized signature cursive, and then one, two, blink, and it changed to my name in perfect text with perfect capitalization.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, this is amazing. And then I tried to write something else and it didn’t get it at all. But it was still, first
⏹️ ▶️ John impression was good. You could draw shapes, like you’d draw a circle and it would make a perfect circle for you, a feature
⏹️ ▶️ John that is in many modern graphical applications. The Newton was amazing, but I did not have one.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have one now, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course you do. By the way, Marco, I love that when you selected the third item on the list, you actually selected the fourth,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I noticed that right after. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like, oh, wait a minute, I skipped one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is top four all over again.
Rumor: iMessage features
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, the third item, which I am genuinely very excited about is, or at least I think I am, is Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey testing new iMessage features, such as mentions and retracting messages, and that could extend to a Mac app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So they’re talking about this is actually on Mac Rumors. Most of what we’ve already talked about was on 9to5Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is for Mac Rumors. For starters, there’s a new Slack-like mention system that would allow users to tag other contacts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with their name, like at Joe or at Jane. When you type the at sign, a list of suggested contacts would appear.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This would be particularly useful in busy group chat conversations, as it would be possible to enable the hide alert setting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and only receive push notifications when you’re mentioned directly. I only have three or four group chats that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am on that are chatty and they can get quite chatty.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I’ve, well, all of us have basically started doing, you know, at Casey, at,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, John, at Marco or whatever. And so to have this as like an actually recognized thing, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think would be really great. And I especially like that idea about being able to hide alerts, but still get push notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for when you’re mentioned. I think this sounds very, very good. What I’m wrestling with a little bit is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do, one of the things I do like about iMessage is that it is very simple and it’s very easy to understand, both for me and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for everyone else. And I don’t want it to get, I don’t want to have full on slack in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iMessage. And as much as I don’t like the five or six, or I wish there were more than the five
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or six little reactions that you can give, ultimately it’s probably for the best if there’s only like five or six of them, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thumbs up, thumbs down, double exclamation point, et cetera. But yeah, I’m really on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey board with this sort of thing. I would like to hear your guys’ opinion, but let me just finish this thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The other things that are apparently being tested is the ability to retract iMessages after sending them, and then presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it would say something like, this message was deleted or something like that. And some smaller features, typing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey indicators and group chats. I actually don’t know if I care one way or another about that, but I think it should be there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The ability to mark the last message of a conversation is unread after opening it. Yes, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, please. I so often will leave things unread as a note to myself that I need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to handle that in some way, some form later. And when I do occasionally mark something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as read by accident, it drives me bananas. So yes, please to this one. And then finally, fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fact, I don’t know if many of you, the listeners knew this, I presume you two both knew this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you do an emote like a slash me is slapping you with a wet trout or whatever where it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used to be on IRC. Slash me is doing something. It, on the Mac, will actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show differently. And it will show centered and in gray text, like Casey is slapping Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with a wet trout. But on iOS, it doesn’t really recognize that. It just shows slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. Casey is blah, blah, blah. Well, apparently, they’re talking about bringing that or expanding on this slash me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey emote thing in order to have, amongst other things, status updates. And I think that would be pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cool, too. So I dig that. Marco, thoughts on this? You seemed pretty enthusiastic about the unread
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff. Are you enthusiastic about anything else? Are you on board with the idea of iMessage getting more complicated?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think so because over time, you know, iMessage is one of Apple’s greatest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assets. It is an incredibly, extremely important and high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco volume communication platform for a very large number of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anything Apple does to make it richer in functionality or more expressive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or more useful to people, chances are I will probably use it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if I don’t use it, chances are I know people who will. This is like anything that adds to iMessage, it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really, really big impact, I think, on the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this could be really great. Almost all this stuff sounds like it would be useful to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In particular, I enjoy the idea of the retractions, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now, if you just send a message to the wrong window, you gotta be like, oh, sorry, wrong window, and then that’s just sitting there forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At least this, you could delete it, and then you could then message the person saying, sorry, wrong window, just so they know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why you just deleted something that you sent to them. But it would just clean things up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit to be able to do that a lot of times. So that could be nice. A
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of the stuff, you know, stuff that I wouldn’t necessarily use, like, you know, typing indicators and in group chats. I don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need that. Um, market, Martha last message goes unread. I would definitely use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. As you mentioned, I use, I leave things on read sometimes for a couple of hours until I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can like get to the situation where I can deal with them properly. It’s just so I don’t forget about them. I know you can do things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like remind me about this at 4pm with Siri, but, uh, that’s, you know, I can’t always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that or it doesn’t always work the way I want. So anyway, I love anything that expands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iMessage. One thing I do hope they also address, which this doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mention at all, which means it probably isn’t there, I still, as John said right at the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, I still think that the way that you add photos or insert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos into an iMessage conversation is still unintuitive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a hard interface challenge, I get that, but they still have not nailed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to expose functionality in messages in a way that people can actually discover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s reasonably intuitive. So I hope they tweak that a little bit, but I don’t see anything here about
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the photos thing, my initial thought, like I understand why they went with the system they did, where they went to the
⏹️ ▶️ John system with his iMessage apps and what used to be essentially a fixed toolbar with a few options,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of which was the very common shove a photo here, said now we have iMessage apps and it’s not just gonna be shovel
⏹️ ▶️ John photo here, you can make your own apps to do all sorts of things. And refactoring it so that adding a
⏹️ ▶️ John photo is just another app, it fits with that sort of programmer mindset. Now we’ve made a
⏹️ ▶️ John system. I have a system for things. And this is not a special snowflake, it is just another thing in the system.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the interface will be, you can get at the apps and they’ll be visible in a second toolbar and you can rearrange
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And like we’ve made the perfect system. But because one
⏹️ ▶️ John use of that is so dominant, putting pictures into messages, it’s old privileged
⏹️ ▶️ John place was appropriate given how frequently it’s used and making it be an equal sibling,
⏹️ ▶️ John even when you can arrange them in a particular order or whatever, made people choose between having that bar visible all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time with a bunch of colorful icons that they may not care about, or having it not visible and then making it even harder to
⏹️ ▶️ John get at that thing, right? And so they just need to go one more step. This is a path that many apps on
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac, at least, have gone through. Have a fixed interface, change the fixed interface to a system
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s modular, and make the existing fixed features into modules in the modular system. Then finally,
⏹️ ▶️ John have a modular system where you can privilege certain modules to have the
⏹️ ▶️ John interface dominance that the old fixed system had, so that you can choose what is the thing you use most frequently
⏹️ ▶️ John and essentially recreate the convenience, in terms of number of taps and positioning the prominence,
⏹️ ▶️ John of the old interface with the modules of your choosing. And then finally have the default be,
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks just like the old fix toolbar because that was actually a good choice for the number of things. But if you don’t like it, you can check that one out and put
⏹️ ▶️ John your own one or two things in that fix location. So I have hope that
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ll travel that road fixes. As for all of these features, having seen Slack in action
⏹️ ▶️ John in a very large company setting amongst non-developers, like I’m not just among like
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch of programmers using Slack, right? I am very confident that people who
⏹️ ▶️ John are not programmers or not super into techie nerd stuff do fine in Slack. Do they know all
⏹️ ▶️ John the weird features? No, they don’t care either, but if they don’t find it intimidating and they do pick up through cultural
⏹️ ▶️ John osmosis, the things like at mention and stuff, like I don’t think it’ll be no problem. So adopting
⏹️ ▶️ John features of Slack, which I really like and think is a really good application into iMessage, I give a total thumbs up.
Rumor: AirTags
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. I think it’s your turn, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hmm. Let’s see what we got here. Boy, air tags is always in here where we never talk about it. No
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I care. It’s like it’s one of those things like it’d be like if Apple made a new power brick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I would probably find this useful, but it’s not that interesting to talk about
⏹️ ▶️ John not like it’s more. It’s more interesting to have the meta discussion of like of all the things that Apple could do. Why are
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is the ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John wide band angle. There’s a bunch of interesting tech sort of angles on it, but the problem anyway, I don’t talk about.
Rumor: Watch faces
⏹️ ▶️ John One thing I put this section in here just because I thought Marco would have an aneurysm
⏹️ ▶️ John over it. It’s the, in the long list of watchOS 7 changes,
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the rumors was like, new flag faces. And it’s like, your watch
⏹️ ▶️ John face is a flag of insert country here. And it’s like, all the people who have all these watch face complaints,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, flags, really? That’s like, you can’t fix the whatever watch
⏹️ ▶️ John face to be the way I, the watch nerd, want it, but you’re gonna let people have a bunch of flags. And I kept thinking like,
⏹️ ▶️ John watch people will hate the fact that Apple’s wasting its time making flag faces and everyone else will
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, cool, flag faces. It’s just such a such a great snapshot
⏹️ ▶️ John of how it seems like watch people think of the Apple watch faces and how
⏹️ ▶️ John non watch people think of the Apple watch faces and how there doesn’t seem to be a meeting of the minds and that. Am I correct
⏹️ ▶️ John in my assessment that Marco, you think of watch, you’re not going to find yourself using a flag face.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Every version of watchOS adds quote new watch faces
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and usually a good portion of those quote new watch faces are just the digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time showing above a new image or animation. Like there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know there’s no other effort put into like different ways to show the time, different complication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibilities, you know different design styles. I was like, no, it’s just like, here’s a new like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco static image or repeated animation that will go below the digital
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time that’s been showing the same way forever, right? Like, this is just more of that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple can keep saying, look how new this is. But we all know you just put images
⏹️ ▶️ John old thing. But people like it. I’m actually kind of surprised they did with flags because we know the flags
⏹️ ▶️ John like politically fraught, like the whole thing of not showing the flag emoji based on whatever totalitarian government yells
⏹️ ▶️ John at you if you do it, you know, like, it seems like a politically weird thing to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do people wear like, where would you, so it’s kind of vague with the description here as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to whether like, whether the face can show multiple flags at once. So you, so you know, suppose you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have like, you know, one side of your families from this country, another side of families from that country, you want to show both of those flags at once.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That makes it slightly more interesting, but like, who is this for? And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when would you want this to be displayed. You probably wouldn’t want this displayed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the country you are from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John because it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh God. What are you talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about? You wouldn’t want it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They call it the jingoism face. Yeah, like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mind. Apple can add whatever garbage, you know, repeatable image, fluffy faces they want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They do this every year. They add more faces that have very, very little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco value, have very little innovation, very little, you know, just they’re just like little,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh that’s fun to try for an hour and then you change it back, right? And then everyone uses the same four phases.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you change it back. I think people find a face and they like it and they don’t change it. That’s what I’m saying.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the watch, the people who are not into watches like are cool, a puppy, and they leave it on that forever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still see most people using the same like four watch phases. So look, if Apple wants to keep adding fun garbage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this, that’s fine if the rest of the watch face,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, ecosystem is being properly maintained and it simply
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so like it’s hard to enjoy stuff like this when it’s like like if they’re gonna be like look look at the cool new thing we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did and it’s like yeah okay but look at all of the other massive amount of low-hanging fruit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could do to make all the other watch faces better or to make the ability to have new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch faces that you didn’t design, which I love. My favorite part of this rumor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the share your face rumor that users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be able to allegedly share specific watch face configurations with others using the share
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sheet from the watch app on iOS. So first of all, the watch app on iOS is a garbage fire. Who would ever want to go there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unnecessarily? And second of all, sharing your configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of your watch face, is this really…
⏹️ ▶️ John asymptotically approaching third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch faces. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not even, but like, but like the, the asymptote is like a mile from the line. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like getting closer. Are we? Like, it’s barely, yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, oh god, like why, why is this being worked on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when so much low-hanging fruit and then one big piece of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-hanging fruit of custom watch faces, There are so many little things Apple could do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make the watch faces better, to make them function better, to make them look better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yet they’re doing this. This is not what anybody wants.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s not what you want, clearly, and obviously we’re all in favor of third-party watch faces, but these features all make
⏹️ ▶️ John sense to me as stepping stones to approaching third-party watch faces. Like, you mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John that most people use the same four faces. I think this is a problem on Apple Watch in
⏹️ ▶️ John general, despite them being nice and showing you how to use it in the Apple Store or whatever, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John easy to even figure out how to change faces or to realize that you can customize
⏹️ ▶️ John them or how you can customize them. So I feel like the sharing feature is a way of short-cutting that because many people
⏹️ ▶️ John will see someone with an Apple Watch and maybe they get to talking about it and they’re like, oh, why does yours look like this? And like, oh, you can customize
⏹️ ▶️ John it and do this and that or whatever. And it’s, you’re right, they’re putting it in the iOS Watch app is a bad idea. but
⏹️ ▶️ John having some way to lower the barrier to entry to people
⏹️ ▶️ John customizing their watch faces to their liking. Because right now I think the barrier is a little bit too high. Changing faces,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though I know you can just force press and swipe, it’s so easy if you already know how to do it. But trust me, if you don’t know how to do it already,
⏹️ ▶️ John it might not even occur to you that it’s possible. And you might think, oh, well that person’s Apple watch looks different because they bought a different Apple watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s a thing that people think, right? So helping with that system in
⏹️ ▶️ John some way, and I think the share your face thing, would be a way to help is a trend in the right direction. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not enough. Third-party watch races would be better. Even that would have a barrier to letting people understand
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s a thing that they can get and install. Plus the interface between iOS and the watch is still a little bit fraught.
⏹️ ▶️ John So there are many areas of improvement here, but despite the frivolity of this, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John this is a reasonable batch truckload, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John of, as Marco puts it, fun garbage
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey for a watchOS
⏹️ ▶️ John release. Like there’s always a bucket of this stuff, and I think it needs to be there, and I think the rest of the world likes it a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John more than Marco. And from Marco, they have a feature whose name I can’t pronounce that I never heard of before that he probably
⏹️ ▶️ John knows about, and it seems pointless to me. The tachymeter?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. This is, if you’ve ever seen a chronograph watch, on the outside ridge of a chronograph
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch, there is usually a scale that it says tachymeter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it counts down, usually from about 300 down through 60 to zero, down to 60.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And the idea here is if you have a typical chronograph
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has the seconds hand that’s stuck at the top most of the time And then you start the chronograph to start timing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something chronographs count up. So the seconds hand moves You know through and suppose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you stop it at 15 seconds or suppose you stop at 30 seconds And then it’ll be pointing to the number 120
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the tachymeter scale lets you measure if you’ve measured from the top How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many seconds have you lapsed and you stop it what it’s pointing to is the number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of cycles per minute that your thing will do if you just measured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one cycle. So for instance you can measure speed of a car by measuring how long it takes you to go to mile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that’s why you hit start if 30 seconds go by and you’ve hit a mile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you’re going 120 miles an hour and that’s why at the very bottom of the tachymeter scale is the number 120.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At the very top is 60 because if you let it go a whole minute then you’re going 60 miles an hour.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is a very, very common thing on chronograph watches, basically because it’s one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the only things you can do with a chronograph, like in a static dial that traditional watches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t be able to do fancy computations, but they can have a static bezel around the watch that has certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco numbers on it. So this is why they do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I read the description of this feature, I’m like, so it’s a slide rule that doesn’t slide for people
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey do multiplication or division.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I was thinking same thing you said it’s like well you don’t have a ring that turns so you’re like we can
⏹️ ▶️ John paint numbers on the ring why don’t we do that right well can’t people just do math like they could do math
⏹️ ▶️ John but isn’t it easier if we do it for them oh like a slide road no it doesn’t slide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again it’s like it’s just it’s another thing of Apple watch face designers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seemingly taking only the worst stuff from analog watches like the fact that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hands can cover up the date window
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like yeah they’re taking only the worst stuff and and replicating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it on their computer watch that should be able to do so much more than it currently does.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, this, this, tachymeter, tachymeter, I’ll get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how it’s pronounced, I’m gonna go with tachymeter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, this thing, this ring, this one ring to rule them all, that’s reference. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems like such a stupid thing to put on a digital watch. You’re exactly right, Marco. Like, I don’t understand. It’s visual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clutter. I would assume, maybe I’m wrong, but if it looks anything like the physical world,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s clutter. It accomplishes something that could be done so much better digitally.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just feel like this is the, and I’m sorry, Marco, but this is the annoying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mechanical watch people infecting my otherwise superior digital watch and making it look like your inferior
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mechanical watch is again. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want it. First of all, two things. Number one, you are correct. It does add a lot of visual clutter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Normally in the physical watch world, watches that have a tachymeter, Usually it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, they’re usually larger watches. It’s rare to see one under about 40 millimeters. And then also it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually set in a very different font and style than the rest of the watch. So it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco competing for like visual attention. So usually it’ll be like a black bezel around the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this will be etched in very tiny text on the bezel, something like that. Secondly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my defense, in my world of traditional watches defense, I don’t think any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us are designing these damn watch faces. Like, I don’t think Apple has ever, like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who design Apple watch faces seem to know about as much about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch design as the people who design the Game Center interface knew about games.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco brutal. It’s like they like read a book about it once, 30 years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and decided to, they were now experts. Like, the work of the Apple watch face design team
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not the work of people who know watches. It’s the work of graphic designers who were asked to draw a watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely sure that’s the wrong answer. I know, again, watch people don’t like it, but the assumption
⏹️ ▶️ John in your criticism is that if you know how to make good physical watch faces, those
⏹️ ▶️ John same skills and knowledge are directly applicable to a computer watch. But you also got
⏹️ ▶️ John done saying that’s not actually true. So I think having user interface designers design the watch face, if anything, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re being too dedicated to nods in the direction of physical watches, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I don’t really care that much about watch redesign. I use the Apple watch and I don’t really have a dog in this fight. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that if you got like, we hired the world’s best physical watch designers and hooked
⏹️ ▶️ John them up with somebody who knows how to use Photoshop and that’s how we designed our watch faces. I think that outcome would be worse than
⏹️ ▶️ John the current situation for the mass market, even though you personally, Marco, might like it better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, but some of these other watch changes do seem positive. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if share your face, which is such a funny term. I don’t know if it will
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go anywhere, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t… I’ll share your face. They’re going to change it to force face touch. Oh, God.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Share your face. Please, no. Oh, goodness. Please, no. Whatever it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ends up being, I think the premise of it is fine. I don’t see this being something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would use, but the premise of it is fine as far as I’m concerned. We glossed over that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either with hardware or perhaps just with software, the Apple Watch will supposedly be able to detect blood oxygen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saturation, which is critical for heart and brain health, apparently, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John That feature’s rumored forever. I’m not sure. Is there any more smoke around this that we think is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to ship this time or not?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I don’t know. I agree with you. It’s been around forever, but the news sites are saying it’s happening. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco least for this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey conversation, this could be the one. was also a bunch of chatter about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you could set a shared album as the, as your photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch face. And I found that very weird because Aaron’s watch, she has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey set to a shared photo album and what occurred to me was. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go and try to set up a new photos, watch face and try to target that photos, watch face
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a shared photo album, it won’t let you. And what occurred? So I was wondering, well, how the crap did she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I, probably she set this up And what I think happened was that she
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or I probably, she set the watch to sync our like Declan and Michaela
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shared photo album that we shared with like family and friends and stuff. And that was the blessed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey album on the watch that syncs all the photos onto the watch. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the photos, watch face thing, app, whatever, you can set the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey synced album as the one that’s shown on the watch face. So this is presumably a much easier
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way of accomplishing a similar thing, especially if you don’t want your shared album to be your one and only synced album.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it is worth noting that you can do this already today. Another thing that I thought was very interesting is watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for kids and perhaps John, you would be the best to talk about this, but apparently the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gist is Apple’s going to let you, supposedly set up a watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as not your everyday watch, your night watch. It’s your not, not your everyday watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, and you, So presumably you’ll have more than one watch synced to your phone, which is already possible. But you can specifically say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is for a child. It will let you manage whether or not they can do certain things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at certain time. A new feature called School Time will allow parents to manage which apps and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complications can be used during certain hours like class time. I don’t know how I feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this because my kids are way too little, and maybe your kids are too big, John, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’re perhaps the best equipped to talk about this. sounds really cool or like a great idea if nothing else.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s a good idea, but I mean, my kids, they both have Apple watches. They have hand-me-down Apple watches, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re a little bit too old for this to be useful. And the main reason is what I was getting at before.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the kind of controls this offers are only an issue
⏹️ ▶️ John if you think that your kids actually know or will figure out how to use the full functionality of
⏹️ ▶️ John the watch. And I can tell you from experience that they do not. You think, oh, you give new technology to kids and they just figure
⏹️ ▶️ John it out. Look, I gave my two-year-old an iPad and she’s a whiz with it now. Sure, right, fine. It’s a great demonstration
⏹️ ▶️ John of exactly how unintuitive and weird watchOS is and its interaction with the phones. They both have totally unrestricted,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple watches that are connected to their iPhones that, you know, none of this stuff exists
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have changed like nothing about their watch. Either they don’t want to or don’t know, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s both. Do they even know that that watch app exists? Do they know what they can do with it? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the screen is so small, the sort of discoverability and accessibility of features on the
⏹️ ▶️ John watch, there’s a lot of functionality in Apple Watches that is very hidden from a large portion of the population
⏹️ ▶️ John just because it’s not obvious that the thing can even do that. And I’m not sure what the solution is because, I mean, the root
⏹️ ▶️ John problem is, it’s a very tiny screen and you can’t really put much stuff there and it’s hard to use.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, having an app on the phone that corresponds with it and makes sense and gives people a better interface
⏹️ ▶️ John for it, but there’s the discoverability problem. There’s the desire and the discoverability problem. So I personally wouldn’t use this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it would be more useful for younger kids who, through just
⏹️ ▶️ John senseless button mashing, could screw up their watches or something to sort of lock it down a little bit more.
⏹️ ▶️ John But, you know, I am I endorse the feature. I think it’s a good idea, but it’s not useful for my family.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the root problem like this, this root problem of kids with unlimited access
⏹️ ▶️ John to all this watch power is partially, quote unquote, solved by how hard it is to access that power for regular people.
Rumor: Watch app architecture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then perhaps finally in this section, other than sleep tracking, which like, what was the other thing we were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just saying is going to land every year? Oh, the blood oxygen stuff. Sleep tracking is going to land this year, fellas. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happening, apparently, maybe. But the other interesting piece was watch app architecture.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In watchOS 6, you had the ability to release standalone watch apps like Geneva Moon through the App Store and you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need an iPhone companion app, but they were still based on the existing extension architecture. And supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey starting with watchOS 7, Apple Watch apps will no longer be based on extensions. I have only very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very tiny bits of dabbling in watchOS. Marco, can you tell me what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does this mean to you, or perhaps nothing at all?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It depends on the details. That’s what it means. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depends a lot on, does that mean, what if your app is still based on an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extension? Does that not work anymore on watchOS 7? What happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the entire watch connectivity framework, which which is what apps use to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talk to each other between the phone and the watch, and is very unreliable and very slow and very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full of bugs, that could be a problem because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that is actually basically removed or at least deprecated,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then apps have to figure out new ways for their phone app and their watch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app to communicate. And that are not easy ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way the current watch connectivity framework works is fairly straightforward.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you can just say, you know, like send this message from my phone app to my watch app. And from the watch app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can say, send this message back to my phone app and reply with this or whatever. And it’s a very easy way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like message pass between those two apps. If I’m interpreting this in like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most scary way, which is that those apps are no longer even extensions of each other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all, then it would become harder for them to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with each other. You might have to do things like just using network,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like local peer-to-peer networking, and using that manually. Or obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could sync to a cloud service and just hope they sync back and forth on a regular basis, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is probably the approach I would take. But either way, this has the potential,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think likelihood, to accomplish two major goals. One
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like, it’s going to force a lot of watch apps that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco written using the old way to totally rewrite the way they communicate with each other and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly add things like a cloud backend, which is obviously way more complicated. And the result of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that will be a whole lot of watch apps just won’t work anymore. Like they’ll just disappear, they’ll be discontinued, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the upside is whatever’s left should in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they do their job right, should work better. Because this is the direction I’ve wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to go anyway, because watch connectivity sucks. Like the framework is terrible. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full of bugs, full of problems. It’s slow, it’s unreliable, it’s incredibly picky,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it seems like Apple doesn’t use it for anything themselves, because if they did, they would’ve found these problems already. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the end, if we have basically a forced retirement, or at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least a strong replacement of watch connectivity, the framework, that’s going to result in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably fewer, but better watch apps. And that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
Rumor: Multitasking pinning
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. What’s next on your list, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let me see, what’s left? A bunch of keyboard crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey don’t know. I’m good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, there’s a rumored multitasking pinning feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you can possibly pin an app to the multitasking screen depending on the state
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this lock that this person saw. I don’t know. I think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too early to say what this even means what multitasking enhancements or changes might be present. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco multitasking is something, at least on the iPad, on the iPhone people seem to get it. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t fully understand what quitting their apps means, but oh well. On the iPad, multitasking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is still so confusing that anything Apple does to try to change it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows that they also think it’s confusing, or at least they don’t think it’s done, and that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco investing further into trying to make it better. So I don’t know if this will be good or not, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it is a change to I’ve had multitasking, it’s just promising to see movement there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I put this one in here because I was delighted in the possibility, like again, I can’t tell if this is even a thing they’re gonna ship or
⏹️ ▶️ John what it is, or it just shows a little lock icon, what does that even mean? It’s so small on the phone, it makes me think they would never ship it. But like
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that that screen on the phone could have some kind of function
⏹️ ▶️ John that locks one of the things that appears in the multitasker, like locks
⏹️ ▶️ John it in a way that keeps it there or like is indicating that it has to stay there. Two ways that could
⏹️ ▶️ John go. One, it would be delightful if you could like go on someone’s phone and like lock all the things in
⏹️ ▶️ John the multitasking screen because it wouldn’t actually keep them all in memory, but people don’t know that. And they’d be like, Oh no, I can’t quit
⏹️ ▶️ John my apps because this one is locked on the screen. It’s just always there. And it’s like all it is is like literally an image of an app that
⏹️ ▶️ John hadn’t run in three days, but it’s driving them crazy because it’s quote unquote locked on the multitasking screen. That would be
⏹️ ▶️ John a delightful revenge on all the people who are constantly force quitting all their
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote force quitting all their apps that they think are quote unquote running that are like 500
⏹️ ▶️ John screens away from the things that are actually running. Anyway, that’s personal peeve. The other possibility, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is almost equally delightful, is it could be the type of feature where
⏹️ ▶️ John it lets you sort of arrange the multitasking switcher by locking things into position like that’s one of the possibilities
⏹️ ▶️ John that like lets you sort of pin things in a particular location. So no matter what other apps
⏹️ ▶️ John you launch and quit, this one’s always pinned in that location. And people could get used to that feature.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it could like, you know, go through the culture as a cool thing that you might not have known that you can do. But look, I
⏹️ ▶️ John can pin my thing. So every time I go to my multi access and switch, our message is always here and safari is always there or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it could become a power user feature that’s accessible enough that people start using it, leading to a situation
⏹️ ▶️ John where people who used to force quit all their apps now have, you know, a set of three or four
⏹️ ▶️ John or five quote-unquote pinned apps that are quote-unquote always running because they can
⏹️ ▶️ John see a picture of it on the multitasking screen and I would find that delightful. Switching entirely from the
⏹️ ▶️ John reflexive upward flicking of every single little rectangle they see on the screen thinking that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing something to the opposite. I always want to see these four rectangles here. That means those apps are always running.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ John right. I think this is just not going to ship. I don’t even know what that like because you see the movie like look how tiny that lock
⏹️ ▶️ John I kind of like I barely even see it. I can’t imagine them shipping that in this form but who knows
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey James Scariotti writes, Marco famously proclaimed a few years ago that the 2015 15-inch MacBook Pro was the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laptop ever made. After having gotten this new 16-inch MacBook Pro and its new keyboard, would Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say that the 16-inch has displaced the old 15 as the best laptop ever? Or does he still consider the 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the better overall model due to other factors like ports, touch bar, etc.? Before you answer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like to wager that you will say that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is still the best laptop ever made, in part because you still have a chapter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey behind with regard to the SD card slot. John, what are your thoughts? What Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John It depends on how we frame this. I think he’s going to say the correct answer, which is that in its
⏹️ ▶️ John given time period, the 15-inch was better than the 16-inches now. But if you frame the question as,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay, but if you had to pick a laptop to use now, you’d obviously pick the 16-inches because it’s so much faster and more modern or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John wins. Yeah, basically that the 2015 15-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro is and was an amazing laptop, But it’s five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years old, and even when it was introduced, some of its guts were kind of old. Like, Intel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was at a really weird time, and the processor isn’t that much better than the one that’s like a few years before that and everything. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty out of date now for a lot of like high-end use. Now, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need especially high-end resources to do your work, it’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still fine for you, and that’s great. And you know, and honestly, I could probably do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of my work on it just fine and not even notice any difference at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, yeah, unfortunately, it is pretty old, and the 16-inch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty good. I don’t think I would, in the grand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scheme of things, looking back, suppose it’s like three to four years from now, and we’re looking back,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I would look back to the 16-inch and say, that was the best laptop I ever made. Because it’s just not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that noteworthy, compared to like, the 2015 really was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pinnacle of user-friendly design, of utilitarian design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was like, here’s a laptop that, even at the time, didn’t have really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco major complaints. Back in 2012, it did. People were upset about the non-serviceable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAM, SSD, and the lack of optical drive a little bit. But that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was pretty quickly gotten past, Whereas the problems of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco butterfly keyboard generation weren’t quickly gotten past. Like a few years into that, people still hated the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the ports and everything else. So the 16-inch, it fixed the keyboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It didn’t really fix anything else. It’s still a laptop that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more expensive than what most people want to pay and what it is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth. It still forces you to get the touch bar, which is controversial and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people don’t like it and would prefer an option without that. It still only has four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB-C ports and nothing else, one of which will be consumed most of the time by power, so it just really basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has three ports. It still doesn’t have an SD card slot, which many people still want and would still use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it doesn’t have, you know, built-in HDMI, which many more people would still want and still use. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it still has many of the downsides of the awful 2016 to 2019 generation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It only fixes the keyboard. Now that’s a big one, that is the biggest one it fixed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And overall I love this computer, you know, in general I wouldn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say I love it. I like it, it’s a nice computer. I enjoy using it, I’m very happy with the keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the 2015 I truly loved because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 16-inch still retains all of that like Johnny Ive punitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minimal design of it’s like the worst of Johnny and Tim it’s like let’s give it the least ports possible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and charge as much money as possible like that’s that’s basically like you know the John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Johnny and Tim will be remembered for is like over minimal design for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overly high prices and it still represents that. Whereas the 2012
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 2015 generation still seemed like it was designed with our needs in mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It still seemed like it was designed for us to accommodate us rather than forcing us to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accommodate it. And that’s, they’ve turned slightly back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco towards the good side of that balance, but it was only one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco step of many that they should have taken and that I hope they eventually will take.
#askatp: Disk icons on Desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Rob Fiorandino writes, do you still have hard drive icons displayed on your desktop
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now that Mac OS gives you the option to hide them? I do not. I hide the, well, I hide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Macintosh HD or whatever the default is. I’m sorry, John, I don’t even care. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do allow like thumb drives and things of that nature to end up on the desktop. John, what
⏹️ ▶️ John No surprise, I make it behave like it’s always behaved. I show my hard drives on the desktop. I show servers on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So much stuff. You like Windows, you like icons, you just like clutter,
⏹️ ▶️ John man. Well, right now I only have one hard drive icon on my desktop because all the other ones are unmounted. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gosh. Marco, what do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t have any of those displayed. Now, I’m not a clean desktop person. My desktop is full of garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s full of a whole bunch of files that are always around and it’s basically my working set for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way too long and it’s full of clutter. full to clutter and people who like a clean desktop would cringe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at best if you saw my desktop, but I just yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never I don’t I don’t put the discs there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to suggest to Marco before we get into the more of the flaws for this
⏹️ ▶️ John for messy desktop people try the strategy that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John gone with recently, which is don’t it’s hard to be like Casey who it seems like keeps a very neat
⏹️ ▶️ John desktop, is that correct?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I have four icons on my
⏹️ ▶️ John right now. And like, you know what they are, and they’re there with purpose and so on. Oh yeah. For some people that’s difficult,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco and me, I find it difficult to be like, completely disciplined and clean.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But on the other hand-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have 141 items on my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John desktop right now. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ John God. On the other hand, just giving up entirely and saying- I need a bigger screen just to fit.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh my God. Saying, you know
⏹️ ▶️ John what? The desktop is just my junk drawer. I feel like there’s a happy medium that you can strike, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ John accept the fact that junk is gonna build on a desktop, but add
⏹️ ▶️ John a sort of periodic ritual, kind of like spring cleaning, where you go through
⏹️ ▶️ John and you deal with the clutter. I know the cliche of like, I’m going to make a folder called old and select all
⏹️ ▶️ John and drag into it, and I’m going to do that once every two and a half years. That’s not what I’m suggesting. There are bad ways to do that. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John saying on a more regular schedule, clean up the piles on your desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John because doing that is fun and gives the kind of like the same small thrill you get from like
⏹️ ▶️ John spring cleaning and when you get to open the windows and clean all the stuff or whatever. And if you don’t want the junk pile up too much and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to maintain, I think more people do this with their houses. I’m going to maintain some semblance
⏹️ ▶️ John of order. I’m not going to let the things build up to the point where it’s like a fire hazard and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to die. You know, when the stack of newspaper falls on top of me or whatever, right? I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John to maintain some kind of order. And that does give you like the positive. The reward is the little thrill you get
⏹️ ▶️ John from organizing. It doesn’t mean you’re going to end up with Casey’s desktop even when you’re done organizing. It just means that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re committed to the idea that you’re not going to give up entirely. That’s my suggestion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What’s the oldest item on your desktop?
⏹️ ▶️ John As in like creation date? Like file or folder? Because I have
⏹️ ▶️ John do kind of like Casey, I have a fixed set of folders that are in a fixed position that just never moving or never quote
⏹️ ▶️ John unquote cleaned up. And those are probably super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old. Alright, so things that are not permanent fixtures. What’s the oldest non-permanent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fixture in your desktop? Mine is December 8th, 2017. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey God, Marco, you’re stressing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much. So I haven’t like cleaned up my desktop in two years.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Two and a half. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John God. This goes to show, I mean obviously with mine, I got the new Mac, it kind of reset the time, but this shows that I do
⏹️ ▶️ John practice what I preach and what I just said about the cleaning up stuff. I have some fixed folders that are, the dates
⏹️ ▶️ John on them, because they’re not folders, their aliases to folders because they wouldn’t actually literally keep the folders in the desktop because they’re not a monster.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That is the most John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in a while. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ John goodness. They’re folders that are filed. This is my replacement for sort of pop-up folders from Classic. Do you guys remember those?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never had a Classic Mac. I’ve heard of them from people like you complaining, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never actually used Classic Mac OS on my own computer and I’ve only ever used other people’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Classic Mac OS’s briefly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, it’s a feature that doesn’t really make sense in the current non-spatial find a paradigm. But anyway, it’s four folders that I want to access
⏹️ ▶️ John recently and they’re there. And they are the oldest things on my desktop and they’re dated December 22nd, 2019 because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John when I set up my Mac Pro. Every file or other thing in there, the oldest one I have is January
⏹️ ▶️ John 8th. So that’s like the last time I did a desktop squeep and clean up is. What is it? I
⏹️ ▶️ John got an image file from January 8th and it is a picture of Marco’s house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have, remember when I rented an RV?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, I was just thinking about that like
⏹️ ▶️ John or two ago. was a long time ago. Is that on your desktop? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have still on my desktop today the receipt for when I rented the RV,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John which was in April
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It’s not a good filing system.
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco, why? Why? You
⏹️ ▶️ John should do, I mean, you need to do the big sweep now because you’ve waited too
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco long. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ John sweeps every month or two, do a mini sweep, clean up the piles, file things away, it’ll feel good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe I shouldn’t get the bigger monitor. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John Induced demand, they call
⏹️ ▶️ John in the traffic business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like if you move to a tiny house and it’s like, go back to a 14-inch CRT.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re also not doing well on the move to tiny house
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah. Our house is full. What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry. I’m sorry.
#askatp: Inexpensive Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. And then finally, Marcos Petri writes, I’m a Windows user and I’ve never had a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m thinking about making small iOS apps. I live in a developing country and unfortunately Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey aren’t the most accessible devices for me right now. Newer models are prohibitively expensive. What are the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey best options for someone who wants to start developing iOS apps on a very tight budget? Is it possible to build on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used Mac mini? Does MacBook Air with two gigs of RAM and 64 gig SSD with an i5 CPU do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the job? Should I consider a Hackintosh, depending on what kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of app you’re doing, you’d be surprised what kind of hardware is capable of doing it. Like my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey adorable, which is what, like three years old now, something like that, and was slower than dirt when it was brand new,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it works now to be fair. It’s 16 gigs of Ram, which is quite a bit more than two,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it will do the trick. Um, I haven’t touched Hackintoshes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in well over a decade, but I have heard that they are surprisingly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good given that literally the word hack is in the name.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So consider what you’re working with, but they’re surprisingly good given that they’re just one big
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pile of hacks. I think it’s such an obvious answer, but buy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the most Mac you can possibly afford, and it should probably work. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know. Marco, thoughts on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It depends a lot on what you’re doing. One thing that I think makes iOS development
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier than you expect is I would suggest if you can find one that’s affordable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get a retina screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good point. You do a lot of development in the iOS simulator and every iOS device currently for sale and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s been for sale for some time has a retina screen. And so if you, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think the simulator will scale now. now used to not do that but I think it will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale down so it isn’t just displaying twice as large as it needs to to get all those pixels in but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s gonna be difficult to design an iOS app correctly without running on the retina simulator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I would suggest you know the if it weren’t for that requirement I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the you know the 2012 ish to 2015 MacBook Air would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine and if that’s all you can get for your price range and situation you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still can do that, it would still be fine, but you would see a lot of value out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even swapping it out for like the similar age 13 inch MacBook Pro. So a 13 inch Retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pro from 2012 through 2015 would be significantly better for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS development, just for the reason of the Retina screen alone. It’s probably gonna be a little bit faster, but at this point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not gonna matter that much. Retina screen, I would say, if you can get that. Another way to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get that, inexpensively at least, might be to plug in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an inexpensive PC 4K monitor into something else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into something, but unfortunately I don’t follow that market too closely, so I don’t know if that’s actually that much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheaper or not. And then finally, if it doesn’t need to be a laptop, again, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what prices are like in the entire world here for the used market, but frequently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the cheapest Retina Mac you can get is an iMac. So don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rule out Retina iMac options. The Retina 5Ks are probably still fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive compared to like, you know, a 2015 laptop would be. But the Retina 4K
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iMac also exists. And if you get one with a hard drive, it’s not gonna be fast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you will have a very large Retina screen compared to a laptop. So that screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco space also helps a lot in development. And so that’s something to consider as well. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say if you don’t need it to be portable, my rank list here would be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 4K iMac first, 13-inch MacBook Pro Retina second, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 13-inch Air third.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, any thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re really trying to save money and you’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, my obvious advice would be my usual
⏹️ ▶️ John advice, which is avoid laptops and go with desktops, which makes much more sense in a context where Apple actually
⏹️ ▶️ John made desktop computers. That’s much less the case these days, but I still think that laptops are probably gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be more desirable and therefore more expensive on the used market. What you want is an ugly ducking computer that
⏹️ ▶️ John nobody wants. So I think the idea of a used Mac mini hooked up to a very cheap 4K monitor
⏹️ ▶️ John is probably your best bang for the buck. I feel like you’d be able to get into that for less than
⏹️ ▶️ John even a 4K iMac. And that’s my suggestion. And I haven’t done enough
⏹️ ▶️ John development on a spinning disc to know what kind of impact it would have. But the thing is here, like a MacBook Air with two gigs of
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM, Two gigs feels like it’s pushing it to me and MacBook Air, if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not the Retina one, which it isn’t, because if it only has two gigs of RAM, it’s definitely not the Retina model. Try to,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the specs that they’ve given here, I would not get
⏹️ ▶️ John that little RAM. So find a Mac mini, maybe one that has been upgraded or could
⏹️ ▶️ John be upgraded that nobody wants because who the heck wants a Mac mini? I know that’s not true in this country because everyone seems to want them because they’re cool
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. I was gonna say, actually, like Mac minis don’t go down in value as quickly as you think
⏹️ ▶️ John they do. I know, they should, because nobody seems to buy them, but the people who like them really want them. Again, I don’t know what the
⏹️ ▶️ John market is like, but yeah, I’m looking at like an ugly duckling computer, and I’m thinking like, in general, if people
⏹️ ▶️ John want a Mac laptop, so used Mac laptops, there’s many more of them, and they’re the type of thing you want. If you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find somebody who has a Mini, and you’re not in a culture that values Mac Minis, because they’re cool little computers,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you can get one for cheap, and then hook it up to cheap PC peripherals.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Linode, Mack Weldon, and Blue Vine. and we will talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him, Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John find the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, the anti-Marco Armin
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I started playing Minecraft. Oh, whoa,
⏹️ ▶️ John what? Why? Because Adam is playing it. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why. Yeah. Yeah. So I here I am learning a, you know, what? Ten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco year old game that everyone else is finally like I’m learning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a like ten year old game that has been like the most popular game in the world for
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re learning it for the same reason that everybody else learns it, because they have a kid of a certain age and it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco law. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I’m not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sporty guy. My kid is made of half me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so he’s not particularly sporty either, which should not be a big surprise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, you know, there’s the stereotype of like you know a dad should like throw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ball around with his kids right and you know I’m probably unlikely to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and my kid is unlikely to want that what my kid really wants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to play Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ John once a diamond sword is what he
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco wants oh here
⏹️ ▶️ John has one okay I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making sure and to to talk to me about Minecraft and to read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco books about Minecraft and to watch videos about Minecraft, everything he wants is about Minecraft. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the previous thing he was into before Minecraft was Pokemon, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never really got into that, and I don’t understand it, and it was fairly hard for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to bond with my kid over this thing, as he would be rattling off all these stats and things and talking about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pokemon stuff that I had just no clue whatsoever about, and I never got into it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I felt like I kind of probably should have. I felt like, you know, this is what my kid is into and I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really communicate with him about this or bomb with him over this. That’s, that’s not great. Uh, and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Minecraft, I decided, you know what, if this is what my kid is into and yeah, as John said, it’s, it’s likely to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue for some time because this is what every kid is into for a very long time around this age group. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to be able to like do things with my kid that are relevant to him. And if I’m not going to be throwing a baseball
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back and forth to him or whatever people do who are normal, uh, then I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should do this. So we’ve actually been playing as a family. Me, Tiff, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Adam all play together in the same world that’s currently running off of Adam’s iPad, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff’s gaming PC, she’s using the Switch on the giant TV with the dead pixel, and I’m using his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad. And it’s surprisingly fun. I finally have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discovered this game. I’m like, it’s fully infected my brain now, where like last night I couldn’t sleep, I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, can you create a waterfall? I want to make our cave lobby nicer and I want to put a water
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feature in. And it turns out, yes, you can. But I was like, keep myself awake thinking about this. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, I should dig a tunnel over there and put a sign up so I can find my way back and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this stuff. So we’ve been playing as a family together every few days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally. And it’s really fun. It’s like this fun family activity that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all being super nerds. And by the way, this is a really good time to develop a family activity that requires staying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is, yeah, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John convenient. That’s the point that I meant to bring up last week and I meant to bring up this week and forgotten. I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John squeeze it in here. Podcasting. Podcasting is a thing that we all do. I know
⏹️ ▶️ John some people don’t know this, but we live in three different states. So we are not in contact with each other when
⏹️ ▶️ John we create this podcast. And you, person who should probably stay in your house,
⏹️ ▶️ John One great thing that you can do when you’re stuck in your house is listen to podcasts. This is podcast
⏹️ ▶️ John time to shine. It will keep us all healthier. Listen to more podcasts. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco continue. I’m actually a little bit worried because podcast listening generally goes down when people are not commuting to work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So because like when people are parked at home, they usually just watch more video. They don’t do as much audio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening as when they’re commuting. So that actually might not be a great time for podcasts, but
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, well, that’s why I’m promoting it. I’m saying, remember that podcasting exists and it’s a great thing to do
⏹️ ▶️ John that will keep you in your house when you’ve watched all the shows that you want to watch, remember the podcast exists. Hello,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us. As you are scrubbing down every surface in your kitchen over and over again to disinfect everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every day, multiple times a day, as you are washing your hands for at least the recommended amount of seconds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco singing yourself songs, you don’t have to sing yourself songs, listen to podcasts. During all these like around the house tasks, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listen to podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway. Our podcast even has a song in it. It sure does. You get both. You’ll be extra safe
⏹️ ▶️ John if you listen to ATP and wash your hands.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, right away. I’m playing Minecraft now. I there’s a whole lot about it. I don’t know and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Haven’t explored yet, but I’m enjoying it. I’m like we’ve all kind of taken like our own little roles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the game Because you know we’re in the same world Tiff is is usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mining special things exploring new caves or Making a really awesome house
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for us on the surface and making cool like little like me like storage rooms and like an underwater
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like lab and the house like all this like cool stuff like that my job is typically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to manage the infrastructure and wayfinding I have a I have a terrible sense of direction like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I’m just dropped in a place I’ve never been before and I and I like start exploring I will never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find my way back I will like I have a very hard time with wayfinding in real life and in Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’ve taken it upon myself to make basically standards and conventions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so it’s like oh like I’ll make pylons that have this block pattern so I know that’s the path and I’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco signs and the signs in all the mine shafts I’ll put signs up to say exit this way and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll light them up with a certain like you know like I’m basically like the one mapping the world like or rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding navigation your Minecraft OSHA
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah yeah basically yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like cuz you know the first thing I did in the game get lost. So you gotta figure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out how to prevent that. And yeah, so like I’m the one who’s like basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco signing everything and helping everybody not get lost. Which is primarily for myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m actually really enjoying it. It’s fun. Now I see why people love this game. I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why it’s been such a big deal all this time. It is kind of funny to discover it now. Although it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nice because like, so like we’re playing the Bedrock Edition because we don’t care about the Java mods or anything. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re just playing the Bedrock Rock Edition, and that runs on all the platforms. You gotta get past the whole Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco login system, which is annoying and sometimes fails.
⏹️ ▶️ John Believe me, it is all better than it was before Microsoft owned it. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco gonna say, you missed the generation
⏹️ ▶️ John when I had to deal with all those mods and everything. Microsoft owning it has added some sort of adults
⏹️ ▶️ John in the room, much more reasonable system than it used to exist. I think there might even be official
⏹️ ▶️ John mod system now. I don’t know, I haven’t kept up with it because my kids are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too old now. Yeah, I don’t know. But anyway, what’s also nice is like, I’m playing on a Windows PC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Tiff is playing on the Nintendo Switch, Adam is playing on the iPad, and we all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a good experience, we all have all the same features, at least among what we’re using, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re all playing together on these three different devices in these totally different ecosystems because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finally established this common baseline and these common servers.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s called cross-play. Now you know another gaming
⏹️ ▶️ John right! Cross-save is in Destiny. Destiny’s still waiting for cross-play. You’re enjoying cross-play. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John why people want it, it’s cool. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and by the way, to answer the question in the chat, whether it runs on Mac OS, I don’t think it does. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the Bedrock Edition though.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I don’t know if the modern ones. Minecraft runs on the Mac for sure. That’s where all my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, but the Java version runs on the Mac, but I’m not gonna install Java on my Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So yeah, I’m pretty sure the answer to if you wanna play the Bedrock Edition, which is like the native code version, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is no, it doesn’t. If it did, I would be playing on my Mac Pro. You can always boot into Windows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? I don’t have boot camp. I don’t want to set up boot camp,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to offer to tell you how to install it on an external drive, but at this point, I don’t remember anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s probably different now anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That’s right, it’s already changed. I know it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the T2’s fault,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John but I forgot all the details. It worked
⏹️ ▶️ John once. Yeah, no, I didn’t write anything down. I put in the show notes that will link to my favorite
⏹️ ▶️ John webcomic about Minecraft. It’s Penny Arcade from, coincidentally, 20 years, 10 years ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John Take a look at it if you haven’t seen it. It’s a good one. Yeah. It’s more about the single
⏹️ ▶️ John player experience and getting into the earlier comic. It’s a two part comic that I’m giving the second part of getting
⏹️ ▶️ John into Minecraft. Say, what’s the big deal with this thing? Why do people get into it? It’s the same type of vibe you were talking about where
⏹️ ▶️ John you get into it and it’s the type of thing you think about because it’s, I experience a lot of these type of
⏹️ ▶️ John games where you’re building something. Now, it’s not a real thing. You’re not actually building it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it taps into all those same instincts of like building
⏹️ ▶️ John a society, a civilization, a home, nesting, exploring, consolidating,
⏹️ ▶️ John all those instincts that are in humans, this gives you an outlet for them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or in my case, putting up signs that tell you where the exit to the mine
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco handrails, making sure
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you built anything cool or particularly cool that you might wanna do a screenshot of and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco send us? At this point, I don’t even know how to do that. I don’t even know how to screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the PC I play it on.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Print screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John man. You hit the print screen button. It’s right there on the key caps. It’s print screen. Oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t that just copy to the clipboard? I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know how Windows works, but I think that’ll work. I’m pretty sure that’s right. And on the Switch, you just hit the share button to
⏹️ ▶️ John save a screenshot. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco really easy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, the Switch does that. Although, the Switch has terrible compression. Like it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John everything as a
⏹️ ▶️ John JPEG. It’s not gonna do justice to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco creations. No, well, we just finished this wonderful, where I put the water feature. We finished this wonderful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lobby in our underground mine where we replaced all the blocks with the polished version of the blocks that have nice steps and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. I got a polished ceiling and
⏹️ ▶️ John all this. So there is the danger in this type of situation where the family’s playing together, especially if you’re playing with a Marco,
⏹️ ▶️ John that mom and dad end up sort of taking over the game and doing all this stuff and Adam’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this was supposed to be my
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco world. We can build
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing and we can do this thing. Like you get super into it and then it’s like, but I wanna blow this all up with dynamite now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, so far, one thing is we’re playing in survival mode. And so there’s not an abundance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like just magic things like dynamite that are kind of expensive otherwise. Like there’s not like we’re not there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a whole lot of that lying around. But also we just we play well together. I guess like I guess we’re just lucky with what we want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do. Like he also enjoys building nice things.
Marco discovers Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ John you with- Putting in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John handrails and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exit signs. Yeah, like he helped with all, with making like the nice polished marble lobby and everything. Like it was nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like we all kind of have the same, like earlier tonight I made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an escape tunnel that goes from our house to our main mine so that in case it’s nighttime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you want to go back from the mine to the house, you don’t have to run outside at night and get attacked by things. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that was like a family engineering project. I was like digging, trying to like reach the mine with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the nicest tunnel possible So like no ups and downs, only one right angle turn. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he was like above ground helping me navigate to know like how far have I gone? Is it time to turn yet?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, stuff like that. Like watching just like watching my name tag under him to see like where I was. Like we actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we work pretty well together as a family doing stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would suggest taking screenshots because I think about all the things that my kids built in Minecraft and I did take a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ John of screenshots mostly because I was so proud of like, look how my kids are all geniuses. Look at these amazing things they made in Minecraft. But
⏹️ ▶️ John looking back on it now, I think I still have all their worlds, but how long will I have them and do
⏹️ ▶️ John they still run? Like, it’s the type of thing that, you know, they do it and you’re super into it and then you kind of forget
⏹️ ▶️ John about it. Take screenshots, like preserve them at the very least in your photo memory. It’d be great if you could take
⏹️ ▶️ John movies and other things like that, because you’re putting all this time into it and having such a good time with it, it’s the type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’d wanna look back on. And because it’s digital, you can. You can, you know, you can take
⏹️ ▶️ John screenshots, you can save the worlds, you can take little videos. It’s, you’ll appreciate it later when Adam is too cool for Minecraft.