385: Temporal Smear
02 Jul 2020Audio nerdery, choosing an Apple UI framework, and filesystem changes in Big Sur.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show: hey_z_ree
- Bootleg-feed update
- ATP MEMBERSHIP IS LIVE!!
Please consider joining, but we’re still cool if you don’t. 💙 - Audio Hijack
- Fraunhofer MP3 Licensing
- NetNewsWire
- ATP MEMBERSHIP IS LIVE!!
- Overcast, Swift, and SwiftUI
- Follow-up:
- DTK update
- John ports to ARM
- Windows on ARM Macs
- Rosetta
- WWDC 2020
- Big Sur and APFS
- Big Sur release notes
- Messages in Big Sur
- Starting screen sharing via ⌘K
/System/Library/CoreServices/Applications/Screen Sharing.app
- “Play sound on startup” (Sound pane in System Preferences)
- Big Sur version number
- APFS, Time Machine, and booting changes
- Apple platform unification
- Post-show: Fitness and calorie counting
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Chapters
- hey_z_ree 🖼️
- Low-level audio holes 🖼️
- Adopting SwiftUI
- Sponsor: Linode (code atp2020)
- Apple-silicon DTK
- Windows on Apple silicon?
- Rosetta 2
- Sponsor: Mack Weldon (code ATP)
- Big Sur beta and Catalina
- Member update
- Messages in Big Sur
- Boot chime
- 10.16 or 11.0?
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Time Machine + APFS
- GOTO: Apple Platform Unification 🖼️
- Apple Platform Unification
- Ending theme
- Calorie counting
hey_z_ree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what is this thing? There’s a app or game or something where you just have to hold your finger on the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is the backstory to this, this troll thing that you posted?
⏹️ ▶️ John I know almost nothing about the app, but I, but what I gathered from context is like, it’s a, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a contest kind of like memory to like trivia, HQ, HQ trivia, whatever. It’s like a mobile game where everyone can
⏹️ ▶️ John participate. It’s like that, but the game is how long can you hold your finger on the screen? And as you can imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ John people can do that for really long. And if it’s like a worldwide group thing, like if you look at some of the timers and some of those videos that
⏹️ ▶️ John I showed I think some of them were at nine hours. So streamers do it, right? Like, oh, we’re doing this thing. How
⏹️ ▶️ John long can you keep your finger on the screen of your phone? And it’s surprisingly hard because you get lazy
⏹️ ▶️ John or you get bored after a couple of hours or I don’t know. Anyway, that’s what I assume is what’s happening. I just liked it because
⏹️ ▶️ John of people trolling the Hey Dingus thing, where the strategy was because they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like streamers, the culture of streaming is such that you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John communicate with the people in the chat essentially by reading their usernames and addressing them, right? Because you’re there
⏹️ ▶️ John for nine hours. Like, it’s the whole thing of streaming. Like, especially if someone subscribes, hey, thanks, whatever, for the two month
⏹️ ▶️ John subscription. Like, there’s things that you have to do culturally as a streamer. So, they’re susceptible to,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the social hacking called? Social engineering. Social engineering, yeah, there you go. They’re very susceptible to that. So, someone
⏹️ ▶️ John just changed their Twitch username to H-E-Y space capital Z space
⏹️ ▶️ John very good, it’s very good. So, someone, so they would say something or subscribe to the channel or whatever, and the streamer would read
⏹️ ▶️ John out, hey Z-Ri, thanks for the sub, and then they would activate Hey
⏹️ ▶️ John on their phone, and that would cause their finger to be, because it’s full screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Siri would go full screen, and they would basically take their finger off the thing after nine hours holding their finger
⏹️ ▶️ John on their phone screen. Application did resign active. Yep, and the thing is, they didn’t realize it, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they were like, oh my god, I just activated the thing on my phone, and it’s full screen, you can’t see it, it’s all black, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John when the black screen goes away, what’s left underneath it is a screen that says you lose
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey from the from the finger only
⏹️ ▶️ Casey game. Oh it’s so good, but so so bad
⏹️ ▶️ John doing it after nine hours is the best. Is it like you don’t do it
⏹️ ▶️ John in the first hour right? You don’t do it immediately and just the look on these little faces. The one person who just
⏹️ ▶️ John got up from his desk and left the room
⏹️ ▶️ John and the thing is they pronounced it that you’re like there’s no way that and that’s how this excavation is going
⏹️ ▶️ John to work. Hey-zee-ree? Like, they read it out like that, but sure enough… doo-doo! Oh, God.
Low-level audio holes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I had some fun this past week dealing with our continued
⏹️ ▶️ Marco efforts to try to add the bootleg feed to our membership in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a way that does not require a ton of extra work. Challenge number one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was, I have to figure out how to make myself sound as bad as you guys do over Skype.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or… Or… Or… Or… Or…
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or… Or… quickly and slightly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We basically have two choices for this forthcoming bootleg, and this week is not going to be the week unless
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco has news that even I haven’t heard. But— No, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We can either do the quick and dirty approach, which is basically take the recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Marco locally and the two of us via Skype and just throw that up after trimming,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the teeniest little bit in the front of the end that is just private for the three of us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that is what we broadcast over the live stream, is it’s being broadcast from my computer, It is getting my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco local track and it’s getting John and Casey via Skype, which is exactly what I’m hearing. It’s been what we’ve always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco broadcast over the live stream.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Then the alternative is, which for the record, John and I have both independently volunteered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do is we wait for all three of our files to be in the same spot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then we used for, we use forecast and other tools to just line them up and, and barf out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as quickly as possible. A lined up, uh, local recording merged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of the three of us, which would sound way better, but be somewhere between annoyingly more work and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey considerably more work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and it would sound better. It would not have any of the editing fixes that I usually do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like undoing talkovers and cutting out really boring stories that I stumble
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over and try to get out. Stuff like that. But I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resisting that plan because I know that while lining up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tracks and getting the combo mix of the three of us usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works well, it sometimes doesn’t. And it sometimes requires like 45 minutes of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco piecing together multiple files and lining stuff up and everything. Whereas the live stream I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could publish in three minutes after we finished recording. Like the live stream can be published very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly. Like just the straight up bootleg that has them via Skype and me via local.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas the put together our files thing could usually be published
⏹️ ▶️ Marco within maybe a half hour, maybe 45 minutes, but sometimes might take a couple hours. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that work all has to be done before I go to bed, for, you know, after we record, where, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all three of us are kind of reluctant to do a lot of work, you know, that late at night after we’re tired.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is a variable amount of time that is usually moderate, but can sometimes be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than moderate. So my thinking was, let’s, like, From what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco livestream bootleg fans tell us, it seems like time is of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco essence. It seems like the main reason they want it is to get it as quickly as possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if we can make it sound a lot better with half hour of work,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, that’s something. So, we’ve been debating this. Anyway, all this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to say, my initial plan has just been put up the exactly what’s broadcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from Skype, And even though it doesn’t sound as good, people who want the live stream bootleg don’t seem to care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and seem to want it quickly. So speed is important to them, it seems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I first had to figure out how to make myself sound as bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as they do over Skype. So I have combined a,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have this very long chain and audio hijack to do all this. And I combined
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a dynamics processor to basically be a crude compressor to really squish my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamics into the same range they are, so we’re all the same volume. Then the critical discovery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was I have to apply a low-pass filter to my voice, where I just lop off any frequency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco above about 8 kHz. And I realized then, well, MP3s can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then, you can reduce the sampling rate down from 44.1 kHz, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is CD audio quality, down to like 22 kHz, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything, you know, 8 kHz and below frequency-wise can be represented perfectly with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 22 kHz sampling rate. And the very first time I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco importing one of these files into our CMS, the duration detection broke.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this let me down a rabbit hole, which led me to realize, oh, dropping the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sample rate to 22 kHz made it no longer technically an MP3.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco became an mp2. What? This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is this is old like stuff from the 90s that most people have forgotten about but mp3 which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is mpeg-1 layer 3 audio only supports 32
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 44 and 48 kilohertz as the sample rate. If you actually set the sample rate lower than 32
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kilohertz and or if you set to a certain certain subset of bit rates that are only available in mp2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 2.5 kind of weird extension formats MP3 encoder can still play it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and will gladly encode it, but what it’s actually technically encoding is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an MPEG-2 file. It’s still layer 3, and it’s either MPEG-2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or this kind of like thing that’s kind of unofficially called MPEG-2.5. And all of these are part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of MP3 modern encoders and decoders, even though sometimes it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually MPEG-2 layer 3. As you can all imagine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wrote the duration detection code from scratch to read mp3s in PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for CMS. Of course I did. Of course you did. And I based this on my,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same thing I do in Overcast, where in Overcast I have my own complete mp3 timing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and seeking code because the Apple frameworks are not incredibly good always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at dealing with dynamic ad insertion from the big publisher podcasts or from doing precise seeking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when the ID 3 tag is large like if there’s a large artwork or a large lot of chapters in a file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what I do in overcast is I manually read the mp3 I have to look at every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chunk of what’s called a frame which is like a certain chunk of audio and in the MPEG format I look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every chunk I see what byte offset it’s at and I store that in a seek table so that way I can precisely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seek to exactly the right byte in a file and have the duration exactly right so so you don’t run over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and have it start counting up again at the end and stuff like that. So I did the same thing in PHP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for our CMS. So I would never have to enter a duration manually. I’d said, okay, I’m gonna do the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna read MP3s. And it turns out that I did not support MP2s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I’ve been, part of what I had to do this past week, instead of working on iOS 14 or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my new app widget or app clips or any of the new modern stuff that I’m supposed to be doing right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instead, I was writing in PHP, and then later, and we have to see to complete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the overcast implementation, expanding my MP3 parsing library to also support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MPEG 2 and 2.5 frames and all three layers. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to look up technical information on the MP3 file format
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is quite an ordeal because the actual documentation that’s publicly available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a lot of this stuff is like forum post from 2001. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a web page from like 1998 that looks like it’s from 1998. That like, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh here, here’s the MP3 frame header layout. Here’s like, how many, how do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know how many bytes the frame is? Well, MP3, it’s easy, you can find little snippets.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MP2, there’s not a lot of information on that. So you have to do, you have to like dig up like weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forum posts and if you’re lucky, obscure stack overflow answer about like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many samples are in a frame? How big is the frame? So I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do a lot of like really deep dive digging to look up very old technology that I’m re-implementing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for no good reason but for my own personal, you know, obsession reasons. All this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during the week following WWDC 2020. I’m looking up how to decode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mp2 files. You couldn’t just find the anything that definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco included a lot of that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you have to pay for it, maybe? I mean, I don’t know if it’s like an open spec, or if you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be a member of the consortium and pay money or something, but surely there is a specification somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Fraunhofer was the institute that did most of the initial inventing and had all the patents
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it. And they- I was going to
⏹️ ▶️ John say, maybe you can find the spec, but it’s in German.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, no, I mean, they sold, they had their own encoder and reference decoder, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually a very good encoder and I wish I could use it. And it’s what Apple uses in Logic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in iTunes. In almost any commercial product that encodes MP3s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually it’s using the Fraunhofer encoder, which they licensed back forever ago. Problem is, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the last MP3 patents expired a couple years back, Fraunhofer stopped licensing it, because they could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no longer make any money from it, so they just shut down the whole program. So now, you cannot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco license a new version of their encoder for a new product at any cost. Believe me, I tried, I asked, because I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it for forecasts, because it’s actually better than the LAM encoder that I use. It’s actually better than that at low bit rates for speech,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s faster. But you can’t get it. Like, they just aren’t licensing it anymore. So like, it’s such an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old format, and there’s no more patents active on it, so there’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more business in licensing it. So basically, no one has documented it. And like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the main documentation of it seems to be just like the source code to things that decode MP3s. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goodness. You have to look at something that already decodes them, and look at the source code and see, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s how they do this. OK, I guess that has to be 144 samples long this time. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, in this weird switch statement, this is 160. OK, I guess that’s the value.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There is no seeming concrete place to find this information online.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway, that’s why Overcast is not yet ready for iOS 14.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s all our fault. To be clear, as N in the chat said earlier, this all started from you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey desiring to sound worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s right. Yeah. Well, it’s me taking advantage of the fact that, well, if I’m going to sound worse, I might as well save some space in the process.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s fair. But, oh my goodness, this is a significant rabbit hole. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got nerd sniped real good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, to be fair, I basically snipe myself, but I am very good at that when it comes to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio, low-level audio hacking. I’m trying to figure out what the heck to do with my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI code in the present day, and I have some ambitious plans
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I might rewrite a whole bunch of it and everything. But dealing with UI code, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just destroys my motivation and my productivity. I don’t enjoy it at all,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which actually might inform my decision. And I want to spend as little time on that as possible because it just sucks your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time suck and it’s paralyzing to feature development. like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audio hole and I will gladly dive into that and kill like a day on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some weird hack. Like I tried writing a code to detect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dynamic ad insertion, which I actually partially succeeded at, but not enough to be to do anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco useful. But like, I just, I love low level audio digging
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, you know, things that might prove useful or generally don’t prove useful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for doing this weird mp3 hacking. I get great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco joy out of it, where I don’t get that joy out of like, I have to make another screen of UI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hate doing that. So.
Adopting SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John But you’ll love it once you start using Swift UI, right? Then it’ll be fun again.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think he might actually find it less tedious. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would require Marco to put on his big boy pants and actually learn Swift.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, he should really wait another year because he’ll find it less tedious until he hits his first roadblock. And then he’ll be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I should just do this in UIKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and well, yeah. So first of all, you’re both right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think, okay, so I guess we’re talking about this now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Part of my thinking, I guess this may be his follow-up, because it’s about Overcast, which exists. Part
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my thinking is that my skill set is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rapidly aging. The longer I go without really using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of Swift, which has been the case, I will occasionally write one quick thing in it, but I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mostly not using it. So the longer that goes, I look at the content from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco WWDC and any modern documentation, pretty much any modern sample code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco online, blog posts explaining new technologies and everything, and I only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of understand it. So far I know Swift the way I know JavaScript.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can read it, I can write it, but I never really learned it and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not very good at it. And so I tend to avoid it. at my own expense, often at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significant expense to what my stuff can do or what it should do or how it should be written. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can keep doing this and I can keep kind of like, you know, knowing enough Swift to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by, but still often finding myself like translating a Swift snippet I see online
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to Objective-C because the file I’m writing is already Objective-C and I might as well leave it that way. But my skill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco set is aging very quickly. And it’s been aging for, you know, what, six years, seven years now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Swift has been out? first couple years I think it made sense to hold off let it get polished
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know let all the all the stuff settle down but we’re past that point now for Swift by a good couple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years at least so I need to be writing a lot more Swift than I am because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I keep going the way I’m going where I basically never learn it I’m never gonna be good at it the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way I’m not good at JavaScript but I can get away with not being good at JavaScript because I don’t mostly write web apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do mostly write iOS apps and I can no longer get away with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with not knowing it as badly as I have not been knowing it and not been using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And SwiftUI is very young still. SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a couple years behind Swift, you know, obviously in that pattern of like, when is it a good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea to really jump in on it? But SwiftUI is clearly, if not the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future, it is going to probably at least be a significant part of the future. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything is getting more cross-platform. thing that Apple’s doing is getting more like, hey, use this thing and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you can run it on iPad and iPhone and the Mac and maybe the Apple TV and who knows,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? And if they continue to push forward into things like possibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AR goggles, glasses, whatever we’re gonna call them or, you know, again, including stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the watch, these kind of like specialized things. Swift UI is becoming increasingly important.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Swift already is very, very important. And I really don’t know either of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if I’m going to continue to have the career that I have, I need to know them. Like it’s simple as that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need to jump in. I need to learn them extremely well because this is my career
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I can keep not knowing them, but I’m just making my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knowledge totally obsolete. And if I went back right now and tried to get a career as a web developer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really couldn’t. I’d be screwed because I did let that part of my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expertise get obsolete and, And I fell so far behind because I haven’t been doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and I frankly don’t want to, but I’ve been so far behind web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco development that I basically can’t be a web developer anymore, and it would take me years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to catch up if I really wanted to. I can’t let myself get that way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the iOS side as well. So one thing I’m thinking about doing is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking the next six to eight months probably and rewriting large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco parts of my UI in Swift and SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, Marco, no, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going in and adopting it heavily. Because if I don’t do that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m never going to. Like, I’m never gonna jump in. I’m never gonna really get myself in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this might be a little early for SwiftUI, but it’s not too early for Swift. No. And my UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is simple enough. And there’s parts of this where I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to modernize. Like, keep in mind, I wrote most of Overcast’s code, like most of the basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI code, stuff like most of the basic lists, the table views, like the list screens, which is most of the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wrote most of that six years ago. So it predates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of modern technologies. It’s still, like, I use auto layout pretty sparingly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still don’t do a great job of adopting to dynamic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text sizes, which is an accessibility issue, which I do want to solve, and I currently do a pretty bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco job of it. And there’s a whole bunch of other stuff you get for free that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t do, or that I don’t support. Things like, I have to manually do all the dark mode stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to manually do all the font sizing stuff. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a lot of cruft and technical debt in my UI layer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I did all this great modernization of the audio layer this past year, and that felt great, but the UI is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really stale. And there’s things that I wanna do, there’s features I wanna do, there’s UI changes I wanna make, there’s redesign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need to do, because the app is also, by the way, looking, I think, very dated right now, especially the list screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and especially the root screen. It’s looking very, very dated. It does not fit in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modern aesthetic at all. And so I wanna do all this, I wanna do all this redesigning, I wanna jump in, I wanna modernize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my skills. It is a little aggressive feeling to do that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this fall or winter, which is when it would probably be released. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also at the same time, like I control the whole app. I can do whatever I want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no boss saying you have to support back to iOS 9. Like I don’t have that. I don’t have that problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t know. Do you think it’s too soon? Like if I, suppose I like jump into this, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco summer, like probably next week I’ll start, you know, really modernizing stuff and like in a nice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally broken Git branch. So if I start doing that this summer, I can probably ship
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it somewhere around December, January. It would require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 14. Last year, it kind of bit me to require 13 at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like week two. And so I ended up going back and reverting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that and going back to requiring 12 like about a month later. But 13 and 14 have the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compatibility matrix. So I’m not losing any devices
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know. So I think it is long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since time for you to learn Swift. I think you are a couple of years late on when it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasonably acceptable to learn Swift. I agree that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco the first couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years was a bit aggressive to learn Swift, and I think that now you’re a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of years behind when I think it was reasonable to do so. SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I have not touched any of the new SwiftUI stuff in iOS 14.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the experience I had with it in 13, I would characterize as pretty negative.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I need to throw out the caveat that I never really took the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to properly learn it. I was doing much like what you and I do with JavaScript, where I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey threw some junk against the wall and some of it stuck and okay, fine, that’s good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think that I gave it a fair shake, but that being said, I was not doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complicated things at all. I basically only used it for static screens in Peek-a-View.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think like two thirds of them I ripped out and went back to UIKit because I just couldn’t get like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rotation to work properly or I couldn’t get something else to work properly. Things that I felt like I should have gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for free. Now, again, very well could have been user error. very, very well could have been user error.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it seems to me like unless you’re doing something that explicitly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey requires SwiftUI, widgets for example, the new complication stuff, I personally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still think it’s a bit early for SwiftUI. I think that I might be wrong in saying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I might be Marco a few years ago saying, I don’t want to touch Swift. You know what I mean? Like I think maybe this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is my own failings expressing themselves verbally. But I strongly encourage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you to embrace Swift. I am pretty hesitant
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about you embracing SwiftUI. Coincidentally, I think, John, you’ve done more SwiftUI than I have at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point because a lot of your Mac apps are SwiftUI, aren’t they? John
⏹️ ▶️ John Svazic Well, I mean, there’s not a lot to my apps, but yeah, I intentionally use SwiftUI for
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the UI that you actually see in Switch Glass, which is not much, but it’s SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was a fun experiment. And a lot of, even for that that limited amount that I did, like oh, it’s just one little window
⏹️ ▶️ John with a bunch of icons on it. Well, it’s a weird window, right? Like it’s not a normal window, and so a lot of the
⏹️ ▶️ John hoops that I had to jump through to make my weird window out of SwiftUI, which is decidedly not
⏹️ ▶️ John about that kind of weirdness, you know what I mean? Like all the SwiftUI is like, oh, here you are on your phone and you wanna list a bunch of vegetables.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s always what it is, right? It’s like, what if I wanna have a window with no Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s not a rectangle and it’s partially transparent and it accepts all kinds of clicks, including right
⏹️ ▶️ John clicks and has to process them successfully, but there’s no first responder in SwiftUI. And like, it, you know, it is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John a fairly tricky use case. And even in this tiny little thing, the stuff they introduced
⏹️ ▶️ John this year, I was like, oh my God, I wish I had that last year. That would have made stuff a lot easier.
⏹️ ▶️ John As you would expect, it was year, literally year two of SwiftUI, right? So I think it is early,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the jump from year one to year two is pretty significant in terms of like, I would have killed for that last year. And unfortunately
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like, oh, I can’t, I’ll run out and use it now. Well, no I won’t, because I would be cutting off, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Catalina people, and I’m not quite ready to do that, although I don’t know how many people are gonna stay in Catalina once Big Sur
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out. But what I would suggest for you, considering it’s year two and there has been a big leap here, and
⏹️ ▶️ John knowing most of what Overcast screens look like, I think it is
⏹️ ▶️ John plausible that you could do all of Overcast’s UI,
⏹️ ▶️ John except for maybe one or two tricky bits, in a fairly straightforward way with SwiftUI. But what I would
⏹️ ▶️ John suggest to you is make a new dummy thing with just a bunch of fixture
⏹️ ▶️ John data that is the shape of your internal model logic, but is not real, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And then just make a quote unquote mock-up UI, entirely in SwiftUI. It’s like a non-functional app,
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t actually play any music, but you can go through all the screens and do all the things, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John just see where that takes you. You could end up like Casey and be like, I’m on screen number one and I can’t get this freaking
⏹️ ▶️ John label to be where I want, or it screws up when I rotate, or dynamic text is weird, or there’s this weird drawing bug. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John you could just say, then you just stop there, and say, all right, I’ll visit this next year, because there’s no way in hell, because that’s a lot of what was
⏹️ ▶️ John happening with me. I’d bang my head against something, and it’d be like, even me, having written one Mac app at that point, I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know how to do this in AppKit. I could be done in two minutes, but not in SwiftUI, so
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d spend an hour banging my head against how to do this thing I already know how to do in this different API, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John frustrating. But assuming you don’t hit anything like that, make essentially the mock-up
⏹️ ▶️ John version of Overcast with all the screens and all the texts and just a bunch of fixture data, and you just wander through
⏹️ ▶️ John it with your finger and the play button does nothing and you just navigate. If you can build
⏹️ ▶️ John that, and if you build that once in this empty app, if you do that and you realize after the
⏹️ ▶️ John first day you’ve got half the screens on, you’re like, wow, this is way faster than UIKick. Because that is possible, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the promise of SwiftUI. It’s really easy to mock stuff up real quickly that looks essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John finished. Threading the data through it is trickier, and if you hit one of those weird bugs, it’s tricky, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John think that would be the least waste of your time is to sort of do that one-off that you plan to throw
⏹️ ▶️ John away just to assess, is this a thing worth pursuing? Because if you go into the guts of your real app and try to rip a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John out and put a real view in, it’s always gonna be weird and you’re gonna be trying to wedge it in with the data that you have and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not gonna fit the Swift model. I would say just make a test app to assess,
⏹️ ▶️ John is this the time to do it or should I wait till next year? Because I think you’ll get the answer pretty quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s very reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s a good idea, thanks. because actually, I’ve done little test harness projects
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before. A couple years ago, I basically wrote my own replacement for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a UI split view controller, humorously enough to achieve a lot of the stuff that it now supports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco natively. But I wrote that whole thing, and I did the same thing then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I created a test, a sample project that ran my custom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco container controller here and blue screens for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each, okay, the red is the detail, the other one is the primary, and it was just solid color
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screens and just large buttons just for like, push to the next screen, pop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to the previous one, stuff like that. So I think it’s probably a good idea to do this too, you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically see how far I get.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could even go all the way if you wanted to go a log, you now have the ability to do a top-to-bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John SwiftUI app, You there is no like main function. There’s no app delegate. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no like it’s just Swift UI from top to bottom I don’t think that’s gonna work for you But for
⏹️ ▶️ John your mock-up purposes that might be a fun way to learn that because that also gives you all like that It’s an easy place
⏹️ ▶️ John You can have window groups and scenes and you know in addition to all the navigation controller push pop stuff So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not that familiar with what it looks like on the on the UI kit side of things But there’s so much more this year than there was last
⏹️ ▶️ John year that doing a quick mock-up like that seems Like, you’d learn a lot in the process,
⏹️ ▶️ John first of all, and I think as soon as you start to do one of your first actual real screen
⏹️ ▶️ John with fake data, then you’d find out if you’re going to hit these layout issues or not.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because it’s really easy to do simple things, and it’s medium okay to do like
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit tricky things, and it seems like it’s still, you have to be a bit of a wizard to do very hard things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Mm-hmm. I think that’s a very reasonable assessment. I mean SwiftUI, when you’re doing things that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wants you to do is the work of freaking magic. It is incredible what it can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do. But when you go even slightly off the beaten path, just like you said, John, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gets real ugly, real quick, or at least that’s my experience. Plus, very similar to like Combine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Rx, it’s a very, very, very different approach to UI development, which doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make it worse by any means, but it’s very different. If I were a betting man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would guess that Marco, you will try SwiftUI, you will find it wanting,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then you will start digging into some of the last two years worth of CollectionView updates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because, oh boy, there’s good stuff there. Because you don’t really even need TableView anymore. You can do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything with CollectionView. You can do a lot of the same SwiftUI style, composable, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the word I’m looking for? I think it is composable layouts. You can do incredible, incredible stuff with CollectionView now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think for me, that’s what I turned to. We might talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about this in the post show, but I’ve been thinking about some new stuff for the summer for myself. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having the same debate earlier today, like, do I want to do SwiftUI for this or do I want to do some of it in SwiftUI, some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it in UIKit. What I came down to was, especially in the summer where I would want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this to ship right as iOS 14 lands, I don’t want to be trying to bite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off a big SwiftUI project. I want to do whatever I can UI kit and use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SwiftUI only where I have to. Your mileage may vary, especially if you’re not trying to hit any sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of urgent deadline. Um, but yeah, I think if I were a betting man, you’ll end up using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some of the really awesome new stuff in UI kit. And I say that with not a drip of sarcasm, there’s some really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great stuff there, particularly around collection view, but I don’t see you going all in on SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. I mean, well, the good thing is you don’t need to go at all in on SwiftUI. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey They let you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it piecemeal. And some kind of hybrid approach is probably what I will end up with, and it’s probably what most people would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still end up with these days. But the good thing is, as time goes on,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m caring less and less about the fine details of exactly how my app looks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pixel perfectly. Because what we’re seeing is the way Apple is moving. For a while, if you would open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up an old Mac app, A great example of this was the old version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of NetNewswire. As macOS changed over time, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the theme of macOS, the graphical theme got tweaked over time, not to the extent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that we just got with Big Sur, but just the small tweaks, as it lost its brushed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little bit more flat and a little bit grayer, and then occasional translucency and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lack of translucency, But all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those changes, if you were using the basic Mac app kit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controls, the appearance of your app, like NetNewsWire, the appearance would change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the system. Every time the system changed appearance, your app would just basically get it for free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you were using the stock stuff and not totally hacking the crap out of it or customizing stuff from scratch. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the closer you adhered to the system look, the more you would get for free whenever the system
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had a redesign. you would occasionally get even new functionality from the built-in widgets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your app without again without having to like rewrite everything and often without even issuing new builds sometimes just the old
⏹️ ▶️ Marco build to just inherit this stuff almost always. On iOS never quite worked that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco On iOS you know we started out from this era of everything designed pixel perfect down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the pixel the whole screen you know was designed perfectly and so that as the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware and as the iOS theme evolved over time apps wouldn’t get it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free. They would give you this compatibility shim that your app would run in so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your app would still continue to look old or be the size of the old phones on new hardware or new OSes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because apps weren’t scalable. Like the way apps were designed, the way the system framers were designed,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you try to scale stuff without the developer opting into it, you’d break a lot of apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like where we’re going is closer towards where the Mac has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been in that regard. where what Apple is clearly showing us that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wants us to do, and what it’s doing with its apps to a large degree, is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push everything towards more and more stock components,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less customization, less custom controls, more just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using the stock stuff without modifying it too much, and then letting the platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s running on interpret that in different ways. So that way you could have like one code base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with relatively few tweaks, be able to have iPhone, iPad,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac via Catalyst now, and then maybe in the future, direct Swift UI compilation for Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depending on how much your app needs it and stuff like that. You know, you could have components of your app running on the watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you could have components in your app running on the TV, God knows what else Apple’s gonna do in the future. They’re obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pushing more and more towards this thing of just like stock use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the components as much as possible. Right now, my app is buried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under a mountain of technical debt and custom crap in the UI department because I wrote most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it five or six years ago when you had to do a lot of that stuff to get good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco results and to have your app look competitive, to have it look like a nicely made app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think we’re heading away from that now. Like we’re clearly heading more towards that old Mac style of doing things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And these days, breadth of having your app run and everything, having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it look right on everything, or at least look decent on everything, and having it fit in on every platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is becoming more important for a lot of different audiences. So I think what I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do is drop a lot of the custom stuff I’m doing, or significantly reduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of the custom stuff I’m doing, and just use a bunch of stock stuff. This might even extend to dropping my custom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco font, I’ve even thought about that, because that’s more complicated than you might think of a decision. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we’re heading this direction now. And there’s always gonna be, like, you know, like the apps that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have 600 iOS developers, and you’re like, what the heck are they all doing all day? Like, those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, they can make custom UIs in every platform, although they don’t usually. They usually use like electronic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crap somehow. But anyway, like apps that have massive teams, let them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do all the pixel-perfect design. But when you got an indie app like mine, that’s really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, losing a lot of the need to do that kind of stuff. And it’s certainly losing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the value of, like, is it really worth doing all that stuff? Meanwhile, what customers want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is to take advantage of all the new iOS stuff every year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Preston Pyshko I think I mostly agree with you. I would say that I think a well-designed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app stands out, period. Not to say that you’re implying otherwise or saying otherwise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think there is still an appreciation for a really well-designed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app. But I think that you’re right that it seems clear that Apple desires,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I suspect that we, the users, will desire breadth across platforms
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over pixel perfectness on each platform. And it’s not that pixel perfect isn’t important, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just that it’s less important than it used to be and breadth is more important than it used to be, which I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is mostly what you were saying. But I don’t know. I really think that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is for the best for me anyway, as a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey crummy designer and an even worse UI implementer, if I can rely on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stock controls and get away with it. And I think one of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the nice things about SwiftUI is that it makes it pretty easy to tweak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a stock control without having to completely throw the baby out with the bathwater. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to add a corner radius, if I recall correctly, is pretty easy. You know, things which actually isn’t terrible in UIKit,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I remember early on it was real bad. I don’t know, it’s I feel like SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey does have some benefits there, but I still stand by, I don’t know if it’s really quite ready
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my personal opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the other issue is if I do jump in and require iOS 14
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like this winter so you know probably after it’s been out for maybe three months is when I might require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and by the way that’s optimistic like maybe this UI redesign takes me a very long time maybe it’s actually not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until like next spring or summer who knows but suppose it’s like you know December January kind of range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and assuming iOS 14 comes out roughly when iOS has usually come out which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually mid-september or so So maybe it’s going to be later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this year because everything’s delayed because of the virus, who knows. But assuming it comes out roughly mid-September
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it usually does, I’m going to have a few months of install base if I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco release this stuff that requires it. How long is it going to be before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can stop supporting iOS 12 and 13? I got to do it sometime,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t envy you. I actually have my own problems, like I said, that I want to talk to you guys about at some point. We may or may not get to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it today. But yeah, it’s a tough spot to be in.
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Apple-silicon DTK
⏹️ ▶️ John Speaking of not getting to things today, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey spent a long time before the show
⏹️ ▶️ John organizing the show notes and I put like cut points like because we have so much stuff that we can’t get through it all. So I was
⏹️ ▶️ John like, all right, well, I’ll just divide this up and say, here’s how much I think we can get through today. And then the next section, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how much I think we can get through today. And now I got to move all those cut points up. That’s we’re going to do a very long
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was not my intention. We’ll see what goes. All right. rest of follow up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’ll see how lightning round we can make this lightning round. Famous last words.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think I can go pretty quick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, even more famous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John last words. Oh, I did
⏹️ ▶️ John it last time. Hey, I said I could do it last time. I did it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John My first way to go fast would be to cut this first item.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, moving on. The DTK update. I’ll give you one guest who wrote this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first item, ladies and gentlemen. All right, DTK update. I did not apply for one. I believe, did we talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about on the show whether or not you guys had registered? I don’t recall.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we did. Yeah, I don’t have it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you did register. John, you also registered and did you get one?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s supposed to be coming tomorrow. Excellent. Yeah. And the other thing is like when you sign up
⏹️ ▶️ John for these things, if you actually read the little agreement, there’s an NDA that says basically if you get this hardware, you’re not allowed to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about the hardware. So since none of us have it, we can talk about it. But once we have it, we can’t really say anything about the hardware. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John still talking about on the show, I think the process of like porting your software, but we can’t really talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about the hardware itself. But that’s fine because other people don’t follow the rules and so instead we can just link
⏹️ ▶️ John you to the show notes to this Mac rumors article it has benchmarks of the DTK
⏹️ ▶️ John which just looks like a little Mac Mini I don’t think anyone has really cracked it open yet I did see one shot of the inside that show like these little
⏹️ ▶️ John button batteries that run the real-time clock and everything it’s a weird piece of hardware but
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway the upshot is that the benchmarks show in the word of this Steve John Smith tweet
⏹️ ▶️ John the DTK with a two-year-old iPad chip runs x86 64 code in emulation
⏹️ ▶️ John faster than the Surface Pro X runs it natively,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey which is kind of sad for Microsoft, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John because this really, if people say, oh, it’s like, it’s like, uh, the, the, the current iPad chip. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s, it’s a two year old thing. It’s an a 12 granted the Z it’s got better GPU so on and so forth, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John even the eight 13 let alone the 14 variant that’s going to power the actual Mac. So this two year old
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple chip is in when running x86 code in emulation is
⏹️ ▶️ John already faster than some other contemporary shipping arm stuff running their own native code.
⏹️ ▶️ John Um, anyway, you can read the thing to look at more info about the benchmark again. Benchmarks only matter. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John no Mac is ever going to ship with the ship. It’s just for the DTK. It’s weird in a bunch of different ways. Um, and speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John of weird stuff, I thought this was fun to see a picture of what the pen team for DTK looked like for the intel transition
⏹️ ▶️ John and how strange and lonely this weird PC motherboard looks inside the giant cheese grater case. So
⏹️ ▶️ John check that out if you’re interested in what those things are like. So yeah, we will be getting them. I will be porting my apps
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll talk about the process of porting but we can’t actually talk about the guts of the hardware or anything like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Trying to figure out like how fast is the is the you know the ARM version of Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS running on this iPad chip like you know if you measure it with benchmarks you know right now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know this had to run an emulation because Geekbench is not yet compiled for ARM on the Mac but you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assuming that sometime soon somebody will probably run this on on one of these things that that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be running a native version somehow if that comes to exist, it’s probably going to perform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like the iPad. Like, it’s probably not going to be that noteworthy in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, how it runs ARM code. You know what? The modern iPads are super fast. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I bet this is going to run ARM code that’s similarly designed to be a benchmark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on on macOS. It’s probably going to benchmark just like the iPad Pro does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, the real, I think the real thing is that this actually shows off how good Rosetta It seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far and this is a beta running on like pre-release Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a hardware that’s slower than it’s ever gonna ship on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right like if anything it really shows that Rosetta is actually not probably gonna be too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bad of a solution for you know for the transition I mean, I wouldn’t want to run like super performance sensitive stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it But if Rosetta runs this well on this pre-release OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on this pre-release hardware, that’s pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John awesome Yeah, it’s basically going to be fine. Like, this is running as if you had a kind of an old Mac at home.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s what it’s going to be like. Like, fast forward a year when the real Macs come out, they’ll be faster than this. When you run
⏹️ ▶️ John your old software on it and the software hasn’t been ported, it’ll be
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, this feels like software running on my current Mac, probably, if you don’t get a new Mac every year. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all good news in the performance front. No one has had anything bad to say about this, about
⏹️ ▶️ John the DDK hardware. It’s all upside from here. And speaking of porting stuff, I did,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve already ported my two apps, ported in quotes because of course, I don’t have any ARM hardware to test
⏹️ ▶️ John it on, but even with the current Xcode, you can build for ARM. I can’t run that binary,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I trust Xcode when it tells me that it has successfully built it. But just getting to the point where you build if you’re using
⏹️ ▶️ John any stuff that needs to change or any libraries, and bottom line is I wasn’t. I had to do more changes for Big Sur
⏹️ ▶️ John than I did for anything having to do with ARM, because I’m mostly doing just standard stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John A bunch of stuff is deprecated in Big Sur, and I had to mess with that. And I made some tweaks
⏹️ ▶️ John to a few of my things to conditionally apply some new APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John when I’m running on Big Sur. But yeah, ARM was the most consequential
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of work I had to do for ARM was figuring out the build settings to figure out how to make it actually build for
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM. It had nothing to do with the code. It just had to do with fighting Xcode. I mean, granted, my apps are very, very simple.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is not representative of, for example, what it’s going to take to port Photoshop or something. But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John no news is good news as far as I’m concerned.
Windows on Apple silicon?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also have some news about running Windows on ARM-based Macs, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it appears like that’s not going to happen, or at least not legally anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. That’s not how I read this, right? So, I mean, we know that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no technical reason why Microsoft and Apple can’t get together and make sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM Macs can boot Windows. But we also know that Apple didn’t demo it, and you can’t currently
⏹️ ▶️ John do it for a variety of reasons, some of which have to do with the specifics of the hardware and the DTK, which is the only ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac thing that exists. I think the page size is wrong, but more importantly,
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft only, Microsoft, unlike Windows for x86, where Microsoft works hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to make sure Windows can run on any weird piece of PC hardware, they don’t do that with Windows for
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM. Like, it’s not like Windows, which grew up in the sort of open PC world where
⏹️ ▶️ John its job was to like, I don’t care, whatever weird vendor PC that they slap together, Windows will figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John how to boot and run on it. ARM is specifically, Windows for ARM is specifically tailored to the
⏹️ ▶️ John exact ARM hardware that Windows says it supports. And not including that hardware is anything that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple makes. And so the statement from Microsoft’s spokesperson in this Verge article says,
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft only licenses Windows 10 on ARM to OEMs. And they asked if they
⏹️ ▶️ John were going to change this policy to allow Windows to run ARM-based Macs. Microsoft said, we have nothing further to share
⏹️ ▶️ John at this time. Which is not the answer you give if you’re categorically ruling it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, it’s the answer you give if you’re currently fighting with Apple about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John So practically speaking, no, you can’t. But I still maintain hope that these two companies can figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out a way to make it happen. Because I think Apple wants it to happen, and I think Microsoft knows Apple wants it to happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John and has a tiny, teeny bit of leverage, and are using that leverage to presumably get something they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John Probably having to do with Office 365 subscriptions or something
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco through the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the page size thing, like, you know, so the way memory is mapped, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, everything is done by these, you know, pages of memory. And on most systems, most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco x86 systems, it’s been four kilobytes. And on these R-Macs, it’s actually documented to be 16.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And somewhere, either Apple or somebody actually said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Windows can’t run because of this. Like, it can’t run on Mac, on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Apple. On the
⏹️ ▶️ John DTK specifically is what they said. And they also said, I think they said that these issues will not, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it there won’t be the same issue with the real Mac hardware, whether that means the page size will change on the real
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac hardware or whether they think that we’ll have sorted out the issue with Microsoft. I don’t know, but I recall hearing something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that’s interesting. Cause I, I, I interpreted the documentation on the like the transition guide for WDC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. It sounded like they were saying that all our Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will have 16 kilobyte pages and you know, period. So that, And that’s why this basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t work until Microsoft adds support for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Apple being Apple, they’re not gonna tell us what our Mac hardware is gonna be like. They just vaguely allude to
⏹️ ▶️ John things that are weird about the DTK that will prevent Windows from running it. And again, this statement from Microsoft doesn’t say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, there’s some technical incompatibility and we just make it happen. They said, we have nothing further to share at this time, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is the total corporate speak for, this is a thing that may or may not happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s in like, we have nothing to announce at this time, means they’re still talking to Apple about it. If they
⏹️ ▶️ John had stopped talking to Apple about it, they would have made a more definitive statement. So my fingers are still crossed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What would people do with Windows on ARM,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like on the Mac? Isn’t the whole point of running Windows to run the vast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco library of new and very much old x86 software for Windows on your Mac? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey that much demand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the other aspects of Windows that you’d want to run Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for ARM on the Mac? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet a lot of people run just the Microsoft Apps Outlook and all the Excel
⏹️ ▶️ John and Microsoft, all the Office applications in their Windows form, interacting with SharePoint and
⏹️ ▶️ John Teams and the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey big Office suite. Why
⏹️ ▶️ John do you bring up that word? But that’s what Microsoft wants everyone to do. And the other thing is, I’ve talked about this
⏹️ ▶️ John a million times, it’s still not clear that this is going to happen. But it is still a possibility
⏹️ ▶️ John that once Apple gets off x86, eventually Windows starts going in that direction too.
⏹️ ▶️ John And basically everybody moves to ARM, like eventually, in many years in the future.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not ridiculous that that could eventually happen. It’s not happening now for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’re right, Marco, you get this Windows-based ARM. Like, yeah, I can boot into Windows. What can you do with it? Well, I can run these
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft applications. But I think a lot of people, that’s all they do all day is they run the Office suite of
⏹️ ▶️ John applications and then they download Chrome and then that’s it. they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re off you know so i don’t know i i’ve wanted to happen it’s not going to suddenly make my x86 games run it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to make a gaming pc but i i’m kind of holding out hope that the whole sort of pc
⏹️ ▶️ John world moves in slow motion to arm uh over the next many years just
⏹️ ▶️ John because because we’ve had enough of x86.
Rosetta 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on Rosetta. Tell me about when code is translated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and what’s going on there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is a bit of Follow-up on the exact nature of Rosetta
⏹️ ▶️ John or talked about it doing Going through great pains to be able to do all the things so that like even
⏹️ ▶️ John you can even load Intel Plugins and everything like that. There are Limitations to what
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve decided to implement and limitations that they didn’t implement for the power PC transition I think which caused
⏹️ ▶️ John them a lot of pain. I think they learn from But before we get to that, the first thing is that the code translation
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, where you know it’ll translate statically your application on install or on first
⏹️ ▶️ John launch or whatever and then it keeps that code around so it doesn’t have to do it again. That translated code also participates
⏹️ ▶️ John in the code signing process too, which is nice. So the signature will encompass the translated code so you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not more susceptible to hacking just because you have it translated in theory if they did their job right. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John going the extra mile in security. But unlike, I think, maybe some person who has a better memory than me
⏹️ ▶️ John can correct me. Unlike I think 68K and PowerPC, there’s no mixed mode. You can’t, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John are an Intel process running on ARM in translation, you can’t load
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM plugins and vice versa. Like in a single process, you can’t have the two types of code mixing together with each
⏹️ ▶️ John other, right? But you can load plugins across architectures as long as you use XPC,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s cross process communication thing, where you spawn another process. So say you’re a native
⏹️ ▶️ John ARM Mac, but you want to load a plugin that’s Intel only, like it’s a binary Intel only plugin. You can do
⏹️ ▶️ John that if you do it in a separate process and communicate through XPC. You just can’t do it in the same process.
⏹️ ▶️ John My vague recollection is that Apple did support mixed mode, which is an amazing feat if you think about it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John your app is running one instruction set and your plugin is running the other and they’re both in the same memory space, but one of them is being translated,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But that is tricky and adds all sorts of complications that they just as soon
⏹️ ▶️ John avoid. So I think they didn’t do it for Intel and they’re not doing it again for this one.
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Big Sur beta and Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Big Sur on existing systems. I have put Big Sur on an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey external drive for my iMac Pro. I attempted to do it on the internal, and we’ll talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that in a second, but I couldn’t resize my existing container. I get my terminology
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong, but apparently, even though it’s a four gig drive and I’m only using like half of that right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I couldn’t get disk utility to resize it. Maybe I could have done some command line jockeying to do it, but I just gave
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up and put it on an external. And then on my, uh, shiny new MacBook Pro, it is on the external. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did, I was very thankful to see Daniel Jowkats tweet that warned us
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not to put it on a, well, jump in and save me here, John. What is the normal way you used to do it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Like, so one of the advantages of APFS is get within a given APFS container, you can just make volumes
⏹️ ▶️ John all day long. You can just keep adding volumes. Each one of them can be the full size of the container. You can add a hundred of them. It doesn’t matter. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. There’s probably some limit. But making volumes inside an APFS container is cheap because they share all the space with each
⏹️ ▶️ John other. So you might think, and I think we did this with path OS, is if you have APFS, oh, I’ll just make a new container
⏹️ ▶️ John and then I’ll install the new operating system on that new, or make a new volume within this container and I’ll install
⏹️ ▶️ John the new operating system on the new volume. And you don’t have to worry about partitioning it or anything like that. It’s just like, oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you all get all the space and then you, they’ll just fight over who actually gets the space, right? But then when you’re done with that OS, you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John delete that volume, freeing up all that space and returning it to the other thing. resizing partitions, none
⏹️ ▶️ John of that stuff. It’s all dynamic, right? Big Sur, I’m sorry this show is getting to you too late if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John listening and thinking of installing Big Sur, do not do this with Big Sur. Do not take an existing APFS container
⏹️ ▶️ John and quickly make a new volume in it and say, great, I’m going to install Big Sur there. Because if you do
⏹️ ▶️ John that, the limitation is that any other versions of Mac OS in that same container, according
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple, uh, will no longer get system updates. So that’s bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you’d like, I don’t know even why, no, they allow you to do this. Like basically if you have Catalina
⏹️ ▶️ John and you make a volume and you install big, sir, you’re not getting any more Catalina updates on that particular Catalina. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t even know if you can reverse it by deleting the big sir volume. Um, and I honestly, I don’t even know why it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John possible. Also, Apple says that if you ask containers with non default allocation block sizes aren’t currently supported, but
⏹️ ▶️ John If you know what that is, presumably you know what you’re doing. So what Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John was trying to do is, OK, I’m not going to do that. I’m not going to do the easy thing and make
⏹️ ▶️ John a Big Sur container in my existing container. Big Sur volume. I keep saying container instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of volume. The nomenclature is annoying. I’m not going to make a new Big Sur volume in my existing container. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John going to make a new partition, like old school, old fashioned, separate section
⏹️ ▶️ John of the disk. And to do that, especially with disk utility, It’s cranky about like, oh, if you have data and I can’t all
⏹️ ▶️ John squish it into one place. And I don’t know what the limitations are, but it’s limited. Depending on how much free space you
⏹️ ▶️ John have and where things are arranged, sometimes it says, nope, I can’t partition your disk. Because in theory, if you could partition your
⏹️ ▶️ John disk, in that second partition, you can make a brand new APFS container and put a single
⏹️ ▶️ John volume in it and do Big Sur into that. Nevermind that Big Sur makes umpteen volumes on
⏹️ ▶️ John its own. There’s a reason for this, and maybe we’ll get to it later, depending on how much time we have, because Big
⏹️ ▶️ John Sur makes a bunch of changes to APFS. makes a bunch of changes that are not compatible with Catalina. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re thinking of trying out Big Sur, give it its own partition for sure,
⏹️ ▶️ John but to be safe, give it its own empty disk with nothing else on it that you won’t be,
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t care if it screws it up in some way or just don’t run the beta. That’s also a way to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s so pretty though. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty. Wait, what? Casey really likes it. We’ll get to that later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no. Don’t hate on me old man.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It looks good. Oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hey, it’s just Marco saying oh no. Not me. I have different things to say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should center them so they’re easier to listen to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh god. Well, yeah, the dialogues are terrible. The dialogues are terrible and notification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John settings are terrible. We’re not talking about
Member update
⏹️ ▶️ John there. We don’t have to do this thing because we already talked about the bootleg stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Excellent. Well, I will say thank you, though, to all the people who have signed up for for ATP membership.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We really appreciate it. There’s no timetable on the bootleg, obviously, but it is forthcoming. Coming soon. It will happen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey After I rewrite my entire app in SwiftUI. Oh, it’s never coming. I took it
⏹️ ▶️ John all back. Definitely before that. Someone put in here a point that is worth
⏹️ ▶️ John making. If and when the bootleg does appear, it will have curses in it because we’re not going to edit it. Like it’s the whole
⏹️ ▶️ John point. It’s not edited. So if you really are dying to hear Casey curse with that bleeps, which honestly I think is
⏹️ ▶️ John less, less funny than with the bleeps, then you’ll get that as part of the bootleg.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The bleeps are funnier than actual curse words.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I think too. But unedited is unedited. So you get what you get. All right.
Messages in Big Sur
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s move right along and let’s continue talking about WWDC. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I assume we left off where the top of this document left.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I shuffled things around.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to I did my best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Well, I appreciate it. You shouldn’t have done homework, but I appreciate the fact that you have messages in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Big Sur specifically. Screen sharing still there, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, someone tweeted at me early on like, Oh, screen sharing is gone. No, it’s just hidden where it’s always been hidden. It’s always
⏹️ ▶️ John weird to find it to like click on the icon of the person and you’re talking to but it’s there you can do screen sharing
⏹️ ▶️ John and messages I mean I didn’t actually try it but the feature still exists they they ported it to the KLS app so I was very excited
⏹️ ▶️ John about that although unfortunately because it is a catalyst app now the AppleScript dictionary is gone which some people
⏹️ ▶️ John are upset about because AppleScript is on its way out and there’s no good replacement except for shortcuts
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not really a replacement but anyway that’s one thing to note also Anders Norberg
⏹️ ▶️ John said that you can use command K in the finder you know the thing that brings up connect to server dialogue, and if you enter an Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John ID, it will send an invite, which is not true, because I’m like, that can’t possibly be true. I tried it, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s not true, right? But, if you do VNC colon slash slash
⏹️ ▶️ John someone’s Apple ID, it will launch the screen sharing app, and screen share to that Apple ID, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is almost as good. So you can’t just enter an Apple ID, right? And by the way, Apple IDs these
⏹️ ▶️ John days, unless you’re still hanging on to an old one, they all look like email addresses, so it’s weird. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John clearly not treating it as a URL, because vnc://jdoeatexample.com
⏹️ ▶️ John does not say look up the jdoeexample.com app ID. That’s not what that, it tries, you know, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ John It works, so if you wanna try that, you can do it, but we’ll put it in the show notes, the full path to the screen sharing app, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you say screen sharing app? My Mac doesn’t have a screen sharing app. It does, there’s lots of stuff hidden in system library core services
⏹️ ▶️ John applications, and the screen sharing app is one of them, and apparently it understands how to find people based on their Apple ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John so try it next time you’re trying to help somebody out with something. They have to be on a Mac, obviously, although the
⏹️ ▶️ John VNC nature of the URL means you can probably connect to them if they have a VNC server, but that gets complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, I use Command K constantly to do this sort of thing, VNC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into my other Macs and so on and so forth. To do SMB colon slash slash to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get to Samba shares on my Synology, yep, this is a useful tip. I had no idea that you could do it with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Apple ID. That’s very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s easier in messages, like, because you’ll be messaging, because you can all use this for tech support. So if that other person is on a Mac and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re on a reasonably modern Mac, message with them, and then while you’re in messages, you can find the screen sharing thing by
⏹️ ▶️ John clicking on the icon of the person. And it says, ask to share their screen, and you’ll be off to the races. Behind the scenes, it’s just gonna launch screen
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing app anyway.
Boot chime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One delightful thing that came from me putting Big Sur on both my machines, other than looking at how beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is, right, Marco, is that when you do that, it seems to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from what I can tell, change for the system in its entirety, that it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brings back the boot noise. And I guess this is optional in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Big Sur or optional in Catalina?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In Catalina, you can do it with that NVRAM hack thing that I did on my laptop that a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in Big Sur, it is now an actual checkbox in System Preferences that
⏹️ ▶️ John go, very cool. Yeah, and I did mess with it with the NVR. I’m thinking, I forget when it went away. Did you have the exact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it was Catalina that it went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away. It went away, it wasn’t an OS thing, it was hardware based. It went away with all of the 2016
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wonderful redesigns of the MacBook Pro, and then all the desktops that followed after that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iMac Pro didn’t have it. I think anything with the T2
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even the T1 didn’t have it.
⏹️ ▶️ John How about that? I mean, this is why it’s confusing for people, because a lot of people are like, oh, thank God, I’ve always wanted to turn that off. And I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s been off for years. But it’s only on hardware. If you buy a new Mac frequently,
⏹️ ▶️ John the way you would experience it going away is you would buy a new Mac, right? That’s the only way you would experience
⏹️ ▶️ John it. It didn’t go away on existing Macs, right? So if you have an old Mac, it never went away for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And now you see this checkbox, you’re like finally a way to get rid of it. But if you’ve been buying a new Mac every year or something,
⏹️ ▶️ John it went away for you a while ago, now it’s back. Who would do that? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did the NVRAM thing to turn it back on just because I like the bong, right? But when I installed
⏹️ ▶️ John only bong I ever liked. When
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I installed Big Sur,
⏹️ ▶️ John I checked the checkbox. I mean, I don’t know, I forget if it was checked by default. I’d already messed with the NVRM thing manually,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I, but I made sure it was on again in Big Sur. And then like when I rebooted
⏹️ ▶️ John Big Sur, it made the bong sound, but it was like at maximum volume, so loud
⏹️ ▶️ John that it was distorting the tiny, terrible little speaker on my Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John even it wasn’t distorting it, it was too loud. Like not that that speaker is that loud, but you don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John to be startled at literally maximum volume. Like how the hell did that change? Is there a volume control?
⏹️ ▶️ John I did a bunch of Googling, a bunch of old Macs did have like a system volume thing in NVRAM. My Mac doesn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it doesn’t matter. The system volume is correct. I couldn’t figure out how to make it quiet again. So I unchecked the checkbox. I had to
⏹️ ▶️ John go back to silent bong. I think it’s probably just a Big Sur beta bug. Like I think if I was Justin Cattleena, I wouldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to worry about that. But most of the time I’m rebooting. I’m rebooting into Big Sur, so that’s when I hear the bong. So I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got some startup sound issues. But anyway, I’m glad there’s a checkbox for it. But of
⏹️ ▶️ John all the weird things to give a checkbox to, it’s like, like, make up your mind. Are they gonna have a startup chimer or are they not? You got rid
⏹️ ▶️ John of the Happy Mac and you didn’t have an option to bring it back. It just went away. The startup chime went away several
⏹️ ▶️ John years ago on new hardware, but now it’s back. I mean, I suppose it serves some diagnostic purpose,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in general, people love to be able to silence that because
⏹️ ▶️ John many librarians say that they are glad that it is silent on new
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs because people restarting their computers and the library and constantly going bong, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that took a turn I was not expecting. Are you part of their crack marketing team, John?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We just didn’t know it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, think about this, like of all the things to give options to, we’re gonna change the GUI of
⏹️ ▶️ John this, of like, I think it’s like the general preferences or something, and we’re gonna put a checkbox for the startup chime? so weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if that’ll last till release.
10.16 or 11.0?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all right. All right. So what version is Big Sur? Is it 10.16 or 11.0? What’s the story here? I told you in
⏹️ ▶️ John the last show. It’s like, oh, don’t tell us because by the time you tell us, like, we’ll have already
⏹️ ▶️ John known because, you know, because that was we recorded on the day of the keynote and, you know, we didn’t know anything yet. But, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I figured by the next day we’ll have this all sorted out. It turns out the situation is way more complicated than I thought it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John for reasons that are not quite explicable. So name doesn’t give you any good
⏹️ ▶️ John info other than it’s Darwin 20.0 instead of 19.5 which is what
⏹️ ▶️ John Catalina was. If you do sw underscore vers to give software version on
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re running Big Sur you get product version 10.16 and if
⏹️ ▶️ John you look at the about screen as we saw in the keynote sure enough you get 11.0. All right
⏹️ ▶️ John well that’s like okay well fine maybe the real version is 10.16 but like they just put 11.0 in the about box it’s just the marketing
⏹️ ▶️ John version right. Then you go into Xcode and you look at your Mac OS deployment target and you can choose
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS 10.16 or you can choose Mac OS 11.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where I started to get real confused and like, OK, what what’s going on here? Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John So a lot of people have been experimenting with this. I forget who this was. Maybe this is Guy
⏹️ ▶️ John Rambo. He built an app with a deployment target set to 11.0, built a Mac app with
⏹️ ▶️ John a deployment target set to 11.0. and you run it on Big Sur running on an Intel Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is not the DTK or anything. You build it on an Intel Mac and you run it on an Intel
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac on Big Sur and you get an alert that says, you can’t use this version of this application with
⏹️ ▶️ John this version of macOS. You have macOS 10.16. This application requires macOS 11.0 or later.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just built it on that machine. It’s an Intel app. You pick, basically you were able to pick a deployment
⏹️ ▶️ John target. I mean, I guess that makes some sense. Can you, have you ever do this in like in Xcode before? pick a deployment target
⏹️ ▶️ John that is newer than the one you’re building
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on? I don’t think. I mean, I’ve only ever done it for iOS, so it didn’t really apply.
⏹️ ▶️ John usually you’d go the other way. You’re like, okay, my deployment target, like my deployment target for front and center is 10.12, because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no reason I can’t reach back that far, right? But you pick the deployment target that’s newer than
⏹️ ▶️ John the machine you built it on, right? So the Homebrew folks have been looking into this because they’ve got to deal with this stuff as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John And there’s a GitHub thread that we’ll link in the show notes. and said, I’m told that for Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ John SWVers reports 10.16, but if you’re on Apple Silicon, it reports 11.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John None of us have our DDK, so we can’t confirm that. At the time this was written, nobody had any DDK. Fraser Hess
⏹️ ▶️ John said he confirmed this with someone in a lab. In a later beta, 11.0 will get reported
⏹️ ▶️ John to apps, but apps built on 10.15 and earlier SDKs will get the 10.16 reported to them. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John saying if you build it on the 10.15 SDK, Like if you
⏹️ ▶️ John use that bundle of libraries and everything to build your thing, then your app will get 10.16 reported.
⏹️ ▶️ John But apparently in a later beta, you’ll get 11.0. So I don’t know where we stand here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Clearly, the Big Sur beta that we’re all running reports 10.16. Clearly, it really is 10.16,
⏹️ ▶️ John but clearly Xcode says you can target 11.0, wherever the hell that is. And since we don’t have our DTKs, and even
⏹️ ▶️ John after we get them, we probably can’t say, they may report 11.0 from SWVerse. So
⏹️ ▶️ John it was all very confusing. I’m sure it will get sorted out in some reasonable way. Apple seems very committed to the 11.0
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, so I feel like that’s where we’re going, regardless of any weird 10.16 things that
⏹️ ▶️ John might be there for backward compatibility with apps built against 10.15 SDK.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the one minor point related to this, which has come up in the discussion last week, is what happens next year?
⏹️ ▶️ John Do we get 11.1 or 12.0? 11.1.
⏹️ ▶️ John I had just assumed 11.1 until I heard lots and lots of people talking about it. I’m like, well, most of the people in this world are
⏹️ ▶️ John used to iOS, which doesn’t do that. iOS does, you know, 13.0, 13.0.1, like, and then the next year they go to 14.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. That’s what iOS has always been doing. So I’m like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John just because Mac OS did 10.0, 10.1, 10.2, it doesn’t mean that it has to keep doing that. Maybe they do 11 this year and
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe they do 12 this year. So I, I am have no idea what they’re going to do, regardless
⏹️ ▶️ John of this whole 10.16 business I feel like that will get resolved it would make some sense to
⏹️ ▶️ John make Mac OS do the 12 13 14 I think that would be
⏹️ ▶️ John potentially a mistake because like I said iOS 14 is already the numbers are getting big like
⏹️ ▶️ John the we were going to be running iOS 36 it’s kind of weird whereas the if you do 11
⏹️ ▶️ John dot something? You got a long runaway before you run out of 11s? I don’t know.
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Time Machine + APFS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, tell me about APFS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time machine and booting changes.
⏹️ ▶️ John So here’s all the stuff. I was so sad they didn’t have a file system session at WWDC where they talk about this stuff, but they didn’t. But guess
⏹️ ▶️ John what? File system stuff changed in Big Sur a lot in ways that have an impact
⏹️ ▶️ John on your life to the point where, as I think everyone who has run Big Sur has found out, when you reboot back into Catalina,
⏹️ ▶️ John Catalina does not know what the hell to make of the stuff you just put Big Sur on. will
⏹️ ▶️ John complain in the finder that some file system is incompatible. Casey, if you’ve done this, have you
⏹️ ▶️ John seen a little volume? Do you have volumes on your desktop? You probably don’t, do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you? I don’t. Well, no, I don’t actually. Only removable ones. But yeah, every time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I boot back into Catalina on my laptop, which is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one that I did the partition dance on, and so it can still see one or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more of the 34 volumes or containers that’s created during in the Big Sur
⏹️ ▶️ Casey installation process, every single time it complains and moans that there’s an incompatibility or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something. I forget exactly what the dialogue is. I think I tweeted about
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an incompatible file system. It basically saying, I don’t under, one of these volumes, I can’t, I don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John the format. It’s newer than I can handle, which is absolutely true. Like, it’s working as designed. Like, that’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John file systems have version numbers so that the operating system can know when it’s looking at a file
⏹️ ▶️ John system that it doesn’t know how to handle it, therefore not touch it and complain to you about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. Incompatible disk, this disk uses features that are not supported on this version of Mac OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John Totally true. Very good error message there. Do you see, though, do you see a mounted
⏹️ ▶️ John volume called update?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe so. Let me look. Hold on. I do have it booted, so just give me one second. We’ll put in some Jeopardy music or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do I have here? Oh, no. I’m sorry. I’m in Big Sur. That doesn’t help us. Never mind.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would have to reboot.
⏹️ ▶️ John No. If you’re in Catalina and you have your Big Sur disconnected, you will see this random
⏹️ ▶️ John volume called update. and like, what the hell is that? Is that malware? Am I, like, is someone hacking me here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Why is, did I leave a disk image mounted? Why is there a volume called update? So
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s all very confusing, and it would have really helped if there was a session explaining all this, because some of the features are pretty cool. Now, the
⏹️ ▶️ John first thing to know about Big Sur and Apple on Mac OS on ARM and all that stuff is that
⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, predictable reasons, basically the process of booting
⏹️ ▶️ John and updating the Mac on ARM is very much like it is on the iPad and the iPhone, because why wouldn’t it be?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, that’s the hardware, that’s the system they have. There is actually a WWDC session vaguely
⏹️ ▶️ John related to this, which is explore the new system architecture of Apple Silicon Macs.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll put the link in the show notes to that one. Lots of interesting stuff there. There are many more technical details that they didn’t go
⏹️ ▶️ John into related to the file system. One of which is that we know in Catalina, like the system,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the OS volume was read only, right? And there was a separate data volume with your stuff on it, and then it would sort of merge
⏹️ ▶️ John them together for you to protect the system volume. Well, in iOS and iPadOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s even more strict than that. And so it is too on Big Sur on all hardware, not just ARM
⏹️ ▶️ John hardware. The boot volume is not just read only. It is now
⏹️ ▶️ John what they call sealed. It is a cryptographically signed system volume where
⏹️ ▶️ John every single byte of data has associated checksums. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve talked in the past about data integrity and data write or whatever. Well, one volume that is not going to
⏹️ ▶️ John experience data rod without being detected is a Big Sur
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system volume, because it’s read-only, first of all. And if any of the bits get flipped, it will know,
⏹️ ▶️ John because every piece of data and metadata is checksummed all the way up to the very
⏹️ ▶️ John top checksum, and it’s cryptographically signed. Basically, the running system will know, has
⏹️ ▶️ John any part of this operating system been modified in any way, either through corruption
⏹️ ▶️ John or a malicious thing or whatever. So that’s great. That’s great for security. And it’s great for,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Apple’s first foray into actual data integrity. The bad thing is the only volume that you can do that to
⏹️ ▶️ John right now is the system volume. And that doesn’t have any of your data on it. Like it’s just for the operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t change, right? So that’s kind of a shame. They basically boot off of
⏹️ ▶️ John a read-only snapshot of that, because APFS supports snapshots. The updating process is just like it is
⏹️ ▶️ John on your phone. I’m assuming your phone and your iPad already do this, but practically speaking and
⏹️ ▶️ John technically speaking, the best and cleanest way to do an update with APFS is
⏹️ ▶️ John let the system run off a snapshot that’s read-only and then do your update
⏹️ ▶️ John in essentially another, so like you would, you know, the update system can mount the volume again from someplace
⏹️ ▶️ John other than that snapshot in read-write mode and put the update there, like write all the update files,
⏹️ ▶️ John write, you know, write essentially a new cryptographically sealed volume,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? The old volume your system’s running off of, it’s not changing, every single byte of it is exactly the same, so it’s running off a snapshot.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then the update process in the background while it’s doing the update is building and signing
⏹️ ▶️ John a new sealed volume. And then when you reboot, it just does a switcheroo and say, now we’re going to boot from that
⏹️ ▶️ John sealed volume, and you can verify the signatures and integrity of that volume. So you either get
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the update or none of the update. And you can be sure that the update didn’t screw up, that,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there wasn’t like a bad sector. You know, whatever they call them in SSDs. There wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John some bit flipped or cosmic ray or something, right? So the update process is much more reliable. It
⏹️ ▶️ John can happen in the background without disturbing your current system. And that’s great. And
⏹️ ▶️ John speaking of things using snapshots, time machine, I believe since Catalina, I forget when they did this,
⏹️ ▶️ John does it back up from a snapshot? So it doesn’t have like the painting the Golden Gate Bridge problem where you start painting the
⏹️ ▶️ John Golden Gate Bridge and by the time you get to the other side, you have to start over again because the salt has rotted away
⏹️ ▶️ John the painting. I guess it takes you so long. Time machine in HFS Plus would essentially say, I’m about to
⏹️ ▶️ John back up your four terabyte volume, so I’m gonna start reading files. It would read files, and it’s reading files, and it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John writing to the backup disk, and it’s reading files. It would take hours to do that, and by the time it’s done, anything that happened
⏹️ ▶️ John in the hours that it’s been running hasn’t been backed up, like depending on where it happened
⏹️ ▶️ John in the disk, because it’s walking, it’s like painting a golden gate bridge, it’s walking, it’s going, painting, painting, painting, and then someone
⏹️ ▶️ John puts a dirty footprint where you already painted, oh, now you gotta repaint that. But if someone puts a dirty footprint
⏹️ ▶️ John before, you know, ahead of where you’ve painted so far, you’ll eventually get to that. So you have no idea what happened. Your
⏹️ ▶️ John time machine backup is just like this temporal smear of things that happened
⏹️ ▶️ John on your disk. And time machine would do like, hey, let me just go back to the beginning and get in catch up. Okay, let me go back to the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ John and catch up. Like you can keep doing that, but you’ll always be behind by some window because you’re trying to backup
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially a live file system that’s being modified. When you take a snapshot in APFS, one of the great
⏹️ ▶️ John features is like, look, this is a point in time snapshot of what the disk looks like. Nothing is changing in this snapshot.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna back up this snapshot. This is exactly how the entire disk was at point
⏹️ ▶️ John X in time. And no matter how long that backup takes, it’s gonna be internally consistent,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So it’s been doing that for a while. Last year, they announced that there was a way
⏹️ ▶️ John to do efficient deltas between snapshots. So you could take one snapshot, and then an hour later,
⏹️ ▶️ John take a second snapshot, and you could efficiently say, what’s the difference between these two snapshots, without like
⏹️ ▶️ John walking over every single file. And that’s a big problem with Time Machine. It’s always gotta say, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John changed since the last time I backed up? Because I need to know what to put in this new backup, right? APFS last
⏹️ ▶️ John year got a feature that made it efficient for you to get that answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John This year, I think possibly that Time Machine is finally using that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the first thing is that for the first time, Time Machine can back up to an APFS disk. This
⏹️ ▶️ John has not been possible before. Catalina and prior can only do a time machine backup to an HFS plus disk.
⏹️ ▶️ John So HFS plus has all those features for like hard links to directories and all sorts of mumbo jumbo that makes time machine work. APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have those features. APFS still doesn’t have those features. How exactly
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s working under the covers, I don’t know. I’ve just been experimenting with it a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John First of all, when you back up to an APFS disk, you can’t just format a disk as APFS or like take an
⏹️ ▶️ John existing APFS disk and say, oh, back up to that one. When you want to choose an APFS disk to be a Time Machine target, Time
⏹️ ▶️ John Machine says, oh great, well can I erase that for you? And you’d be like, why do you need to erase it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Can’t you just, it’s empty. Like for me, it was an empty disk. I had a new empty disk. Why can’t you just back up to
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Oh, and the other thing is, the first thing I tried, my old Mac OS X reviewer trick is, you just make a second
⏹️ ▶️ John volume on the same disk and you make Time Machine back up to that, which is terrible. It’s not a real backup, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And Time Machine used to yell at you and say, you know you’re backing up the disk to itself, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’d be like, yeah, I know. I’m not actually making a backup. I just wanna turn on Time Machine so I can take screenshots for review,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You can’t do that now. I made a new APFS volume on my big serve
⏹️ ▶️ John volume, and I went to say, okay, I’m gonna select that as my backup disk in Time Machine, and Time Machine wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John even list it as a selection. It’s like, I don’t even see that. That’s not even an option. I thought they’d finally got smart and said,
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t let people back up to the same disk because that’s stupid. But that’s not why. Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ John can only back up to an APS volume with the role backup. APFS has this concept of volume roles.
⏹️ ▶️ John An example of a volume role is read-only system volume, recovery volume.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a volume used for broadband updates. You can see where a lot of these volume roles came from, not from the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And like, I forget what the others, there’s a bunch of other ones for like firmware
⏹️ ▶️ John updates, system software updates, pre-boot. There’s this whole system where it can boot a miniature version
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac OS, so you can have more stuff running on the login screen before you
⏹️ ▶️ John decrypt the disk. Anyway, one of the volume roles is backup. So basically you need to make a new APFS
⏹️ ▶️ John volume whose role is backup. When you just go to disk utility and make an APS volume, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a backup volume. What’s different about a backup volume? I don’t know, something’s different, they’re weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John When I made one, I tried to go over it to the command line and it was like operation not permitted. Anytime I tried
⏹️ ▶️ John to do anything, you try to run LS in a directory, it’s like, nope, what if I do it as root? It’s like, nope.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes you can poke around in it. I think it’s still using hard link somewhere because the link count is high,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it only shows one volume. I think it might be using snapshots and each snapshot is mounted
⏹️ ▶️ John as its own separate volume. Anyway, there’s a bunch of weird technical stuff going on in here. We will link
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show notes, Apple’s new APFS file system reference, which gives you some clue about the capabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can look at all the different volume roles. It’s really a programmer’s reference to say like, what are the values for all the constants and
⏹️ ▶️ John what bits are flipped in the bit fields for each volume role thing. in one paragraph of text about
⏹️ ▶️ John how sealed volumes work and what the checksum data structures are and how many different SHA variants it uses
⏹️ ▶️ John for the checksums. It’s very complicated, but there was no sort of session explaining all of this. So I had
⏹️ ▶️ John to, I didn’t want to go too far into this, but I’m trying to figure out basically, are you using snapshot
⏹️ ▶️ John diffing deltas, you know, the feature from last year to make backups fast? So I made a backup
⏹️ ▶️ John in Big Sur to a time machine volume. and then I duplicated one megabyte
⏹️ ▶️ John image. So now I’ve made a change to the disk and now I wanna run a Time Machine backup again. And in theory,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously stuff’s going on in the background so who knows, but in theory it has at least one file that needs to back up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did a second backup. I did one backup and it was clean. I did the second backup and it completed
⏹️ ▶️ John in one minute and 20 seconds, which may not sound fast to you, but I would encourage you
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac of your choice right now that’s not running Big Sur, do a time machine backup and just let it finish,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And the second it finishes, do a second time machine backup, which you would think is
⏹️ ▶️ John basically a no op backup, right? Especially if it’s working off snapshots and you haven’t been doing anything. Obviously some
⏹️ ▶️ John files have changed, but you think that’s as fast as a backup’s ever gonna be. In fact, do it five times.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do a time machine backup, wait for it to finish, do another, do another, do another. See how fast you can make
⏹️ ▶️ John a time machine backup in Catalina. I tried to run this experiment before the show And
⏹️ ▶️ John it was taking a very long time to do a backup. Like I just did, the fastest one I could get was five minutes.
⏹️ ▶️ John Does that mean that Big Sur is using the APFS diffing? No, it doesn’t. I could have, you know, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John new disk. It doesn’t have any data on it. The FS event log isn’t very long. Like it could be doing everything old fashioned
⏹️ ▶️ John way. So the jury’s still out on that. Anyone at Apple, I asked on Twitter and got no response.
⏹️ ▶️ John If there’s someone at Apple who can tell me definitively If Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ John is using the inter-snapshot efficient diffing mechanism to make Time Machine
⏹️ ▶️ John faster, let me know. I’m not obviously brave enough to try it on my real system with my real data,
⏹️ ▶️ John but so far it seems like there’s a possibility that Time Machine might be faster. And even if it’s not, I
⏹️ ▶️ John do like the idea of backing up to APFS in one of these special volumes that’s read-only and
⏹️ ▶️ John has all these snapshotting features and everything. Not gonna help me backing up to my Synology, unfortunately, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that is over SMB and is decidedly not APFS on the other end of it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I was excited to learn through various other people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John tweets and articles that there are a bunch of changes related to this. We’ll link in the show, it’s the Eclectic Light Company.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it? Yeah, Eclectic Light Company, I think. Howard Oakley is the person who runs it.
⏹️ ▶️ John He had two articles about this, about the backups and the sealed system volumes. So check those out
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re interested.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you feel better having some APFS news? I know you were yearning for it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do, I mean, like this has been the slowest, the slowest thing ever. After they introduced it, it’s like, when are they gonna make Time Machine? But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I talked about it on the show before W3C, and the answer seems to be that, yeah, they did a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John APFS-related work to Time Machine. So I’m excited to change all my local backup volumes to APFS,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though they’re spinning disks, and it’s gonna be gross, because APFS is bad on spinning disks. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if the inter-snapshot diffing is fast, I’ll take it, it, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s certainly not fastening on a backup to HFS+. I can tell you that.
GOTO: Apple Platform Unification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We haven’t done ask ATP in forever in a day. I’m inclined to say let’s do some, especially since if you indulge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me in the after show, that’s going to take a while.
⏹️ ▶️ John But disagree. Notice in the show notes what it says. Say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where? Oh, go to Apple platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You know, go to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fail. You put a go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to statement in the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John New chance. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done this multiple times in case he continues not to follow him. He’s a bad basic interpreter.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, so sorry. Why wouldn’t you just copy and paste?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Why are you doing this to me? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John I have these long sections and I had to put dividers. We went through a quarter of follow-up and then I had the stop here.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then we go through a couple of topics and then I say stop here. And there’s more WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey scrolling. There always will be!
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. But I want to skip down to this topic, which just touches on a bunch of stuff that Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about earlier. And I think a lot of people have been asking about it. I want to talk about it before, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John time goes too long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steve McLaughlin First! Exclamation, exclamation, one, one, one. Yes.
Apple Platform Unification
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, tell me about Apple platform unification. So it seems clear to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone that’s paying any bit of attention that everything seems to be muddied. All everything’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting squished into everything else. What’s the trash compactor from star Wars? Well, I don’t even remember what it’s called.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John happening, right? Yeah. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, and, and, oh, I assumed it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John had some garbage manager. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assumed it had some ridiculous name or some world that it was a part of. It doesn’t matter anyway. Uh, the point being that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything seems to be getting squished together. So what’s going on here?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this gets to what Marco was talking about earlier, about like, what’s the deal? I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the stuff he was talking about. What should I write my new UI in? What’s happening
⏹️ ▶️ John in the world of applications in terms of do they do custom controls, or do they do use all the standard stuff?
⏹️ ▶️ John And what is the nature of the standard stuff? Does it support all sorts of dynamic type and sizing? Is it not pixel perfect?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you trying to use standard controls so you can follow along with Apple’s changes in fashion? And
⏹️ ▶️ John on the more technical level, I think there still is this question mostly unanswered
⏹️ ▶️ John by anything Apple has said which is You’ve got a lot of API’s Apple for a lot of different
⏹️ ▶️ John platforms. What’s your guidance on? What people should
⏹️ ▶️ John do and Apple’s answers there? I mean, they’ve been fine, but they say what they always say
⏹️ ▶️ John Which is like, okay. Well if you’re you know, if you’re making a thing for The phone and you have existing
⏹️ ▶️ John code base and UI kit you can keep using that if you got an existing App you keep using that if you want to try SwiftUI you can
⏹️ ▶️ John but of course it’s kind of new and then catalysis You know like we know all the answers like there are straightforward answers if you ask any from
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple There’s an answer they can give you and you say sure that makes sense, right? But people people want to
⏹️ ▶️ John know At this point is okay But what’s the plan and Apple’s not big about telling you
⏹️ ▶️ John the plan for good reasons like it’s a fairly good strategy not to tell people the plan
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think You know here’s the thing with plans You can have a plan,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the plan might change. And if you didn’t tell anybody about the plan, they don’t have to know that you had to change the plan.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like that’s Apple’s general strategy with this.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Hello, AirPower.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, yeah. And don’t announce the product. But even for stuff like this. So
⏹️ ▶️ John two angles. One, last show, I talked about, like, oh, it was cool when we had a Mac Pro that was Intel,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I got a machine that could run, like, Unicy stuff, because Mac OS X was Unix. And I could run all the Mac-native
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. And also I could run all the Windows and Windows games, right? It was a one piece of hardware that I could buy
⏹️ ▶️ John that did everything. It was a, you know, first class, pure boot right into Windows, play all
⏹️ ▶️ John the Windows games, 100% extremely expensive, fancy Windows PC.
⏹️ ▶️ John Also, it was an awesome Mac. Also, it had a bunch of Unix stuff, right? The machine that could do anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on the keynote episode, we talked about how, OK, you’re not going to be able to do all that
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel Windows stuff anymore and ARM Windows is currently not a thing. But
⏹️ ▶️ John what you have instead is a single platform that can run all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John as long as all those things are Apple. And there’s a lot of, I mean not all of them, but there’s a lot of Apple things.
⏹️ ▶️ John That announcement that your Mac will be able to run iPad and iPhone apps in addition to Mac apps, in addition
⏹️ ▶️ John to Catalyst apps. It seems like the Mac has become, in a slightly different way, the platform
⏹️ ▶️ John that runs everything. Which brings us to this Apple platform unification question again. So
⏹️ ▶️ John where, where are they going with that? The API question is tied into that. If you had asked
⏹️ ▶️ John someone at Apple many years ago, I see you’ve got this new operating system
⏹️ ▶️ John and you have an API called carbon and this cocoa thing with this weird language with angle brackets,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m starting a new Mac app. What should I use? That answer has changed. Like they, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’d asked about carbon earlier like oh if you have an existing map app of course use carbon that’s what it’s there for it so you can bring
⏹️ ▶️ John your existing mac apps to our new platform you’ll have to change some stuff but you know you can reuse a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of your code use carbon if you’re starting a new app try out this coco thing don’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John scared of the square brackets they won’t hurt you like it’ll be cool right eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John and there was a diversion into java let’s just set that aside all right eventually uh
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people started to make new objective c apps and they’re like wow a single person can make a really full featured app
⏹️ ▶️ John with Coco. Oh but some controls only available in Carbons. But you can mix Carbon and Coco.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh well there’s here’s a new WWDC session about this cool new layout or control thing. Oh but it’s only in Coco.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh but this one’s only in Carbon. Hey Apple why do you why are Carbon why do Carbon and Coco
⏹️ ▶️ John not have the same feature set? Because if I’ve got an existing Carbon app I want this new control but it’s only Coco
⏹️ ▶️ John and some Coco app wants this new thing but it’s only in Carbon and why do I always have to use Carbon I use QuickTime and do video things
⏹️ ▶️ John and like what’s What’s the deal? What is your API strategy? And Apple would never tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ John like up until the very last moment, they would never say, just write a thing in Cocoa
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey because we’re getting rid of carbon. In case you haven’t figured that out, just write it in Cocoa.
⏹️ ▶️ John They would never say that because you wouldn’t want to say that to like, you know, Adobe whose Photoshop was, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, brought over as a carbon application, right? Right up to the point where they did an air power, speaking of what Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John said, they announced a carbon for 64 bit. And the last minute they said, you know what?
⏹️ ▶️ John going to 64-bit is a great time to finally cut the cord on Carbon. And
⏹️ ▶️ John said, ah, even though we announced Carbon for 64-bit, and actually I think they shipped some version of it in
⏹️ ▶️ John some dev build or something, we’re not actually going to do that. So if you want your
⏹️ ▶️ John app to come over to 64-bit, which you probably do eventually, because we’re going to eventually stop selling 32-bit Macs,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you can see the writing on the wall, Cocoa is the future. But at no point prior
⏹️ ▶️ John to that, would they have told you, oh, you should do everything in Cocoa, Carbon is dead.
⏹️ ▶️ John But Carbon was a dead API walking for a long time. And you could
⏹️ ▶️ John have arguments about it, and you could say, well, the finder is in Carbon, and Apple supports Carbon, and it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John peer, and they’ve been getting better about putting both features in both things all the time. But a good rule
⏹️ ▶️ John of thumb is, if you picture all of the API you use to write for a platform on like a timeline
⏹️ ▶️ John from left to right, the past is on the left, the future is on the right, and each API has a starting point
⏹️ ▶️ John and an ending point, The APIs whose starting point is farther to the left,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re usually gonna stop sooner. Now it’s difficult for things like Carbon, because how far
⏹️ ▶️ John back do I do that? Well Carbon is brand new with Mac OS X. It starts in year one in 2001. Well not really,
⏹️ ▶️ John because Carbon has its roots in Mac Toolbox stuff, which goes back to like 1984. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Cocoa, that started in Mac OS X, right? Well not really, it’s from Next, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John actually from the late 80s. But if you line those things up you’re pushing back to the farthest point, the Mac stuff is older than
⏹️ ▶️ John the next stuff. So even setting aside the acquisition and the modernness or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you had to bet just based on this heuristic of basically the older API is going to die first, you
⏹️ ▶️ John would say carbon is going to die first because carbon was the past. Carbon started before the next step
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff and it ended before the next step stuff. AppKit, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, still trucks along. It is the native Mac API
⏹️ ▶️ John for doing Mac only stuff, but AppKit doesn’t run on the phone or on your TV
⏹️ ▶️ John or on your watch or anything like that. UIKit started with the iPhone, so it’s 2007
⏹️ ▶️ John or so, right? So you can extend that line out.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you had to bet UIKit versus AppKit, you’d say, well, UIKit is way younger, So you think AppKit is
⏹️ ▶️ John going to die first, but if AppKit dies, what the hell people are going to write Mac apps in, right? Then there’s Catalyst.
⏹️ ▶️ John Very new. It’s a way for you to get UIKit stuff onto your Mac. So you might
⏹️ ▶️ John think, well, the Catalyst is really new. That’s probably going to stick around, but it’s really just an extension of the UIKit
⏹️ ▶️ John line, isn’t it? And then there’s SwiftUI, which is super new. It’s only been around for
⏹️ ▶️ John two years, but SwiftUI’s intention from the beginning is you can run SwiftUI on all
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple’s platforms. You can run it on the watch. you can run it on the Mac. You’re like, really?
⏹️ ▶️ John The same API for that? And it’s like, well, it doesn’t quite work that great yet, but we’re working on it, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Another way to look at these, and we’ll put this image in the show notes because it’s unlike the one I just described. It’s not just something
⏹️ ▶️ John in my head. Who is it? Dario Rubic made this image on Twitter, which
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of showing the APIs along a timeline, shows them as bars that extend underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s platforms. And so you can see AppKit works on
⏹️ ▶️ John macOS for Intel and ARM, and UIKit works on iPad, iPadOS, and macOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John and UIKit and Catalyst works on just the two Mac platforms, and UIKit works on
⏹️ ▶️ John tvOS, and then SwiftUI, at the bottom of this diagram, is a
⏹️ ▶️ John bar that goes across every one of the platforms, because in theory it works on all of
⏹️ ▶️ John them. So, Apple’s not gonna tell you that AppKit is dead. Apple’s not gonna tell you that UIKit is dead.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s not gonna tell you that Catalyst is dead, and Apple’s certainly not gonna tell you 50 why is dead but one of these things is gonna die
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re gonna die in an order they’re not all gonna go at once and they’re not all going to go on perpetually
⏹️ ▶️ John so if you’re looking at Apple’s platforms and saying what is the future look like out past where Apple’s ever gonna give
⏹️ ▶️ John me a straight answer out past where Apple even knows because here’s the thing I bet if you had
⏹️ ▶️ John asked certain people on year one of Mac OS 10 they would have said oh Coco’s the future no question
⏹️ ▶️ John but they haven’t they hadn’t proved that at that point they can say that all they want but like who’s gonna who’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John learn objective C. Who’s going to use this weird A. P. I. All Mac apps are carbon, right? You just have these
⏹️ ▶️ John weird ported next apps that are cocoa. No one’s ever going to do that. But people would say, well, I believe I believe that
⏹️ ▶️ John cocoa is going to be the future. I believe new crop of developers will learn objective C and they’ll learn it to write
⏹️ ▶️ John on the thing that doesn’t exist yet, which is the iPhone. And it’ll just, you know, that’ll be the future. But at that point
⏹️ ▶️ John that wasn’t clear, right? I bet today if you ask some people inside Apple they would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s my vision. Swift you I everywhere. It’s the way you write for all of Apple’s platforms. It’s a single
⏹️ ▶️ John language. It’s a single API. You can tailor it to the strengths of each system. That is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be the future. But like Coco back in 2001, you could say, okay, that’s a great idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John But realistically speaking, that’s not the that’s not the reality. You have not convinced me. You have not proven that Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John UI can even do that. Like, that’s not a thing, right? It’s a plan. That’s an idea,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not a thing. And at some point, not today,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not next year, but at some point, like with carbon and cocoa, you hit an inflection point where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like cocoa really can do all the things they said. And it seems like carbon is fading.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then for the next three years, Apple will tell you if you ever asked them carbon and cocoa, their peers, they’re both great use the one that
⏹️ ▶️ John makes the most sense to you right up into the point where they say carbon totally dead. Sorry. Right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe not the best transition they ever had. But that’s the reality. So I’ve been looking at these diagrams
⏹️ ▶️ John and thinking about at the low level and at the high level what’s the future of Apple’s platforms look like. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think going from the top and maybe eventually getting into Casey’s love of the way Big Sur looks,
⏹️ ▶️ John the last episode we talked a lot about how we don’t like certain aspects of the way things look, in particular
⏹️ ▶️ John the similarities between iOS and Mac OS. I listened back to the show and I’m not sure this was
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely clear from what I said, although I did do think I mentioned it at one point, but you could be forgiven
⏹️ ▶️ John for hearing that and saying, oh, they don’t like it because it looks too much like iOS. And they said there’s no reason
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to look like iOS, but actually there is a reason. Mostly we don’t like it because they look bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I was like, that was Marco’s complaint about the alerts,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like it’s, it’s not that we dislike it cause it looks like iOS cause consistency
⏹️ ▶️ John is good and it has a purpose I think, but we want it to be readable.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s a downgrade in terms of usability. So if you want consistency, which I think you do want, make it consistent, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John good across platforms and the consistency argument is compelling I I think, because
⏹️ ▶️ John if you envision the Mac, for example, as the sort of the mother platform
⏹️ ▶️ John that can run everything, because on the Mac you can run iPhone apps, you can run iPad apps, maybe eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll be able to run watchOS apps outside of simulator, maybe eventually you’ll be able to run tvOS apps, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s platforms will all be on Apple Silicon, they’ll all be on APIs that Apple controls with the language that
⏹️ ▶️ John it invented, right? This is the platform unification, this world where you can run all the things, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac is the thing that can build for all of them and run all of them. And if you can run all of them and you
⏹️ ▶️ John can build all of them, you’d want the experience to be unified. You don’t want the iPhone apps to look
⏹️ ▶️ John weird running on the Mac. You don’t want the iPad apps look weird running on the Mac. You want it all to look like a piece.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the icons changed in Big Sur to look closer to what the icons look like on iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John and iPadOS, right? Everything moves around in the UI to be better for touch
⏹️ ▶️ John targets, right? So in the last show, touch Macs are coming. How are you gonna use iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John and iPhone apps on the Mac without multi-touch? Well, probably the ARM Macs will be touch-based,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? You start to get a picture of a single sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of Apple platform where devices can run all of the apps that make sense for that device.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the biggest and baddest platform can run all of them and has to have all the features, including a touchscreen.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the phone, you can’t run iPad apps because it’s too small, right? What can you run on the phone? Just the iPhone apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the iPad, you can run the phone apps and the iPad apps. On the watch, you can just do watch apps.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think watch apps make sense on the phone, but technically it would definitely be possible, right? You start to get this picture
⏹️ ▶️ John of a unified Apple world where apps look similar enough to each other
⏹️ ▶️ John to be comfortable hanging around with each other, and every Apple device gives you all the input
⏹️ ▶️ John methods and interaction models that make sense for that device.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the Macs have to have touch because sometimes it makes sense to use touch. So you need to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John plausible for touch to be useful in the same way that the iPad makes it plausible for keyboards
⏹️ ▶️ John to be useful, plausible for trackpads to be useful. That took effort on the iPad to make
⏹️ ▶️ John the trackpad useful. By the way, there’s a great session about a cursor on the iPad to show how they did that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t mean suddenly you never touch the screen on the iPad in the same way that it’s not going to mean that you never touch the mouse or keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac. It just needs to be a plausible input method. And if you buy
⏹️ ▶️ John into that model, which I totally do, that plan, that vision, which Apple, by the way, has not articulated, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting there like staring you in the face. If you just look at what they’re releasing, they’re not going to articulate that grand
⏹️ ▶️ John vision quite yet, but it’s there. Then you go back to the API question. How do we get from where we are now to
⏹️ ▶️ John that grand vision? And the answer is obviously Swift UI, but it’s not there yet. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple wisely is not going to tell everybody, uh, you, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a great app kit app you’ve got there and UI kit is awesome and catalyst. Great. That’s cool. Port your stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John But like the future eventually is Swift UI everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can’t say that because it’s not true now. They have to prove it right. They have three or four or five years to prove
⏹️ ▶️ John that Swift UI can even freaking do that job. And then they have to convince everybody like like Adobe and
⏹️ ▶️ John Microsoft to get on board that train, right? If you had told someone back in 2001,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will eventually convince Adobe and Microsoft and all these other big companies
⏹️ ▶️ John to essentially quote unquote port their apps to Cocoa, right? What about old school
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac developers like BB Edit, it’s been around for a million years. They’re not gonna rewrite BB Edit and Cocoa. It’s gonna be carbon
⏹️ ▶️ John forever or the app’s gonna die. Guess what? BB Edit runs in 64 bit. It
⏹️ ▶️ John was a Mac toolbox application, then it was a carbon application, and now it is essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John a Cocoa application. Nature finds a way. It is possible, but you have to do it slowly.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like trying to, you know, introduce the pet to a new home. Like, you can’t just
⏹️ ▶️ John all at once say, AppKit is dead and UIKit is going away. Because people will flip out. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not true. It’s not actually true that that’s going to happen, but that’s going to happen,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Eventually, it all goes to plan. If it doesn’t go to plan, then it comes with other plans. But even if that doesn’t go to plan,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the battle between AppKit and UIKit, which one of those things is carbon in this scenario? UIKit
⏹️ ▶️ John spans a bunch of platforms, AppKit does not. AppKit only gets to be a longer bar in this diagram because
⏹️ ▶️ John they decided that ARM Mac and Intel Mac are two platforms. You just do Mac as one, AppKit looks like a tiny, tiny
⏹️ ▶️ John little thing. So as much as I love AppKit, as much as people
⏹️ ▶️ John love UIKit, and as much as Catalyst is gonna help bring that stuff over, I feel like Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John grand vision, Apple’s unarticulated but existing, I contend, grand
⏹️ ▶️ John vision for their platform relies on the eventual
⏹️ ▶️ John success of Swift UI. And if Swift UI has to coexist with an imperative
⏹️ ▶️ John API, I don’t know if AppKit is gonna,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Like I suppose if it takes a long time for Swift UI to come to primacy, AppKit and UIKit can
⏹️ ▶️ John just continue to exist as the way you bail out of Swift UI when you can’t get something to work.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I’m having a hard time not looking at AppKit especially as
⏹️ ▶️ John today’s carbon. And I’m having a hard time looking at UIKit as having a super
⏹️ ▶️ John bright future in the face of SwiftUI, which is just absolutely gunning for every single thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John UIKit does from top to bottom. And this is year two, and already you can make a SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John app from top to bottom, and in theory, not touch UIKit. Which is not true, by the way, like SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John uses AppKit controls on the Mac. It uses UIKit controls on the, like that’s the reality of today. That’s what I’m saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you say, oh, SwiftUI is never gonna replace it. It uses them just like Coco used to use carbon controls,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like Coco used to have to use carbon to play video. That’s where we are today,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is where I think we’re going. Do I sound insane or is this making sense to you two?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You absolutely do not sound insane.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think you’re right. I mean, what’s interesting is that Apple has said, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe Craig Federighi said exactly in the Gruber interview this year,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can keep writing your app in, all the UIKit, AppKit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re not going anywhere, you keep running it in everything. But I think you’re right that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not going to be the case forever and that these technologies are not all going to die at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same time. That they will definitely have, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think AppKit dies first out of these three. significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer, but is, you know, when the time comes, it’s gonna be the next one to go. At this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point, if you wanna write an app that runs on all of Apple’s major platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco AppKit doesn’t do that at all. You know, as you mentioned, that awesome tweet graphic where it shows, you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco languages, you know, span them all. You basically have two choices. You can either,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco unless you wanna write, like, you know, three different code bases, but if you’re gonna have, like, just pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much one main code base and have most of the UI represented in that code base, you only have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two choices really, UIKit or SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so AppKit, it’s gotta get the boot. Like, well, if you’re gonna only focus on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one code base, it’s not gonna be AppKit. At least it shouldn’t be AppKit. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I say this like, I like parts of AppKit. I don’t like it or not to write my apps in it very much, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, I like what it does. like what other apps are able to do with it. There are a lot of things about the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Catalyst app that I don’t like, still, even in Big Sur.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But as a programmer of an app that has a bunch of UI code and where people on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all platforms are demanding ports of it, it is really hard to argue with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should be using probably UIKit everywhere, which I’m already using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the whole app so far on iOS, but I should be taking UIKit to the Mac via Catalyst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And also, I should definitely be writing most new stuff that can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be written reasonably in SwiftUI in SwiftUI. And that is clearly the
⏹️ ▶️ John future. I mean, eventually, maybe not today, because it’s like Cocoa in the
⏹️ ▶️ John beginning. You can think that all you want, but if you tried to make an app that did
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things that a good app needed to do in the early days with Cocoa, you couldn’t. It was weird, it didn’t behave right, the features
⏹️ ▶️ John weren’t there, right? And that’s where SwiftUI is now. But here’s the thing. SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ John pretend SwiftUI didn’t exist. This would be a lot simpler. The fact that they made SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John at all means they don’t think it’s UIKit forever. Because why would you
⏹️ ▶️ John make a second API to do essentially the same job as UIKit? Because UIKit is older.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not as old as AppKit, but it’s older. And you look at the difference between AppKit and UIKit. They learn
⏹️ ▶️ John so much. The AppKit people who, you know, learn all the lessons of AppKit and they use those lessons in UIKit.
⏹️ ▶️ John SwiftUI is very different from both of those, in theory incorporating lessons
⏹️ ▶️ John learned, but also kind of a new take on how you do UI. And if you listen to Apple’s pitches for SwiftUI,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you listen closely, obviously, from the true believers in SwiftUI, from the people who made it, they tell you it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John just a different weird way to do things, like maybe Casey with his combined
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Like it’s not, it’s a, I know. But actually it’s related, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John What they pitch to you is like, look, If you have to manually do stuff with an imperative UI, there’s so much that can go
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong. You have to worry about lots of things and deal with them manually. SwiftUI lets you not
⏹️ ▶️ John have to worry about a lot of that because of the programming model. Not because it’s a different API with like different function names and
⏹️ ▶️ John different arguments. That’s not what it is. It’s because there are certain things that categorically are not
⏹️ ▶️ John an issue. Like the same reason that Casey loves reactive programming. Certain things categorically, you don’t have to deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with anymore because they don’t happen. Like the state isn’t there. It’s represented in the call graph, right? you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the things that, that allow these declarative UIs to be simpler
⏹️ ▶️ John and allow you to write good code with fewer bucks. Like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John itself believes that whether you believe it or not, and whether Swift UI currently embodies that, which arguably it doesn’t quite
⏹️ ▶️ John yet, but it’s two years old, right? Um, they made this new API
⏹️ ▶️ John and that’s essentially a vote of no confidence in UI kit and app kit saying, we think there’s a better
⏹️ ▶️ John way. We’re gonna make her better way because UI kit traces lineage to app kit
⏹️ ▶️ John which traces lineage to next step which traces lineage to the 80s and we’ve got a
⏹️ ▶️ John new language and We’ve now we’ve got a new API that suits it and that’s their
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s their goal Could end up like air power, right? But right now it seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like that’s where they’re going So and unlike the diagram like, you know carbon with this bar diagram in my
⏹️ ▶️ John head that I should have made in real life but didn’t. Carbon has a hard cutoff. It was like, well, 64 bit, see
⏹️ ▶️ John a carbon, like just not going to happen. But in reality, all the API’s don’t die. They just fade
⏹️ ▶️ John away. Like there’s no real reason to do a hard cutoff. So UI kits fade out like the
⏹️ ▶️ John gradient on the right side of that bar is going to be pretty long. Same thing with app kit. Cause like they work,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re fine. Apkits going to be around for as long as it takes. Uh, Adobe and Microsoft to port
⏹️ ▶️ John their apps. So if you, I, which could take a decade and a half, right,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey whatever, let’s to be really
⏹️ ▶️ John secure, right? But those lines don’t go on forever. And the Swift
⏹️ ▶️ John UI line has just started. And so if it is successful in any possible way,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s gonna, same thing with, I didn’t mention this, but Objective-C and Swift. When Swift was announced, Apple was
⏹️ ▶️ John all like, yeah, we got this cool language, it’s really nice. Yeah, we should check it out, it’s 1.0, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna change it, blah, blah, blah. And if you had said in that WWDC, see ya, Objective-C,
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna be in the Objective-C, they’d be like, eh, well, this is a new language, we’ll see how it goes, and they’d be right. Like, you have to see how it will
⏹️ ▶️ John go. Many years now, if someone said, I think Objective-C will
⏹️ ▶️ John be the preferred way to write apps on Apple’s platforms, it’s like, it’s already not.
⏹️ ▶️ John That time has already passed. Well, I think Objective-C will be around forever? No, don’t think so. It’ll be around for
⏹️ ▶️ John a really long time, but its line is fading out, and no one argues that anymore. Like, everything is Swift,
⏹️ ▶️ John as Marco said earlier in the show, everything is Swift. all, you know, from day one,
⏹️ ▶️ John every, all the code examples had at the Swift, at least Swift and Objective-C. And today everything is Swift, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Swift, I think has proven itself to Apple, at least, that this is the language of Apple’s platform future,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though yes, they will continue to support and improve, by the way, there’s a bunch of cool Objective-C improvements this year for like performance improvements and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. They’ll continue to support it, but its line is fading. Swift UI’s line is
⏹️ ▶️ John fading in at this point, instead of fading out. UI kit is totally solid. App kit, would argue is already
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of fading out. And Catalyst is just a way to scribble over Apkits
⏹️ ▶️ John line even more by saying, ha ha, UI kid, I’m in your base. What is that one? I can’t remember it. Killing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I just say, but it does seem to me like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is extremely obvious that Apkits time is limited. And I think it was very obvious before I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heard your monologue. I think it’s extremely obvious to me now that AppKit’s time is limited. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t see a world where UIKit is going away as quickly as you seem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be implying, but I agree that if there is only one way forward, it is almost
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly SwiftUI, which as someone who really likes UIKit, that slightly pains
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, but logically it’s the answer that makes the most sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, yeah, like all the people who love the objective C in Carbon, like you’ll eventually get over it. The
⏹️ ▶️ John change happens slow enough that it doesn’t seem so bad. Like, it happens, the change happens slow
⏹️ ▶️ John enough that even Microsoft and Adobe can handle it. So certainly individual developers will not be bowled over.
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, Carbon is the exception where it was just this hard cutoff that was really tough on even Indies. But everything else that I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John talked about, it was, you know, it’s a slow, you know, apocryphal boiling the frog type of thing where
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco has been stewing in Swift for so long and he’s mostly been able to just chill and ignore it
⏹️ ▶️ John and continue to be productive. Now he’s feeling the water get a little bit warm, but no one’s
⏹️ ▶️ John forcing him to use Swift. He can still get his job done with Objective-C. It’s gonna be supported for years,
⏹️ ▶️ John if not decades, but that’s how these transitions take place. The more interesting story
⏹️ ▶️ John from a consumer’s perspective, if you’re not a developer listening to all this API mumbo-jumbo is what I said before about what does the experience
⏹️ ▶️ John look like of using Apple devices? And that’s the experience that I feel like Apple, I was surprised
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t more forcefully pitch it. They, again, were timid about it. The idea that five years
⏹️ ▶️ John in the future, there is one app store with apps that can run
⏹️ ▶️ John various platforms. Every app doesn’t run on every platform, but you just go to the app store and get
⏹️ ▶️ John an app, and some of the apps will run on every platform, some will just run on the watch, some will run on the iPad and the Mac, some will run on the phone
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever, and it’s all just in one big stew. And the Mac, the whole point that the Mac exists is it’s the place
⏹️ ▶️ John where you can run all the things. Again, maybe it doesn’t make that much sense to run anything from watchOS on your Mac, but
⏹️ ▶️ John technically you could. tvOS I think makes more sense actually to run that on a Mac with a big screen
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, right? But you can do all the things on the Mac. You can develop on the Mac. This is
⏹️ ▶️ John another reason, by the way, that you don’t necessarily have to ever have Xcode on the Mac. Instead, you have iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John apps on the Mac and, you know, instead of the other way around. Or, you know, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John when they eventually make the drafting table touch iPad that I’ve been begging for since Hypercritical days,
⏹️ ▶️ John does that have to be an iPad or can that be a Mac? Once Macs get touch and can run iPad apps, there’s no reason that needs
⏹️ ▶️ John to be an iPad. So the Mac will continue to be the shield, as I think Gruber said in one of
⏹️ ▶️ John his articles, to allow the iPad and the iPhone to remain sort of lighter in terms of conceptual load
⏹️ ▶️ John and complexity by doing all the things. A touch-based
⏹️ ▶️ John drafting table iMac that runs macOS on ARM and can run all iPad apps with
⏹️ ▶️ John multi-touch, problem solved, right? So easy to do. I don’t know how many years we have to wait for that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s the future I see. And by the way, yes, in that future, everything looks similar enough
⏹️ ▶️ John to each other that having it all together on the same screen is not jarring.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that the Mac controls aren’t all teeny tiny and the iPad and
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone controls are all big. They’re getting close enough to each other that there’s a family resemblance
⏹️ ▶️ John and that all input methods that are plausible can be used.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Mac Weldon, and Linode. And thanks to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our members. If you want to become a member, go to atp.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Otherwise, thank you very much. will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they didn’t even mean to begin, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. John didn’t do any research, Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t let him, Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental. And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at ATP.FM And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco D-N-T, Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A Syracuse It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to to Accidental, Accidental, Tech Podcasts
Calorie counting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey, I noticed that on Twitter you were talking about calorie counting as a thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were starting. I’d like to hear more about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Uh, well, how, how, that’s fine. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I’ve been on a meandering fitness journey for the last, I don’t know, year
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two. Um, I don’t remember exactly when it started, but. Uh, something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year or two ago, um, Aaron started doing, um, some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exercise videos at home and the, the particular one she was doing were through, um, beach body, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think we may have talked about this on the show before, but if you’re, if you’re familiar with beach body and going, Oh God, Oh God, Oh God. So beach
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bodies without doubt, 100% in MLM, like pyramid scheme, a million
⏹️ ▶️ Casey million percent and you can easily get sucked into the become a coach thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Beachbody where you’re trying to recruit people and blah, blah, blah. Total MLM garbage, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not denying that at all. However, the other side of Beachbody is they put out a whole crud load.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They basically have a Netflix of exercise videos and I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of their programs a couple of tours, maybe even four times through now and I actually really like it. And Erin’s done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several of their programs and she really likes them. So putting aside the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey MLM portion of it, if you just focus on the Netflixy exercise portion of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s actually pretty good. And so I’ve done a kind of weightlifting oriented program
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a few times through. And I also like to run on occasion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my Achilles heel. I had it looked at about a year ago and it supposedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my right Achilles has a bone spur on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I’m sorry. I mean literally. in
⏹️ ▶️ John a sentence like my Achilles heel
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey no, no, literal. Literal. I spend too much time on
⏹️ ▶️ John projects dealing with my garage door. It’s my, your actual Achilles heel.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, my biggest fault is that I can find no faults. My
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literal tendon, or something in that region, it gets a little finicky. So if I run too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much, it’s not a good idea. And plus, running is really kind of terrible for you anyway. But I love it. I do enjoy running.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No small part, thanks to overcast for the Apple watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving right along. But anyway so we were at the beach last week and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is deeply embarrassing, but I’ll just come out and say it. There was a couple with two small children, bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than our small children, but still with two small children. And the two of them were like ridiculously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey toned and stick thin. And I just looked over and I was like, how do you do that? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t view myself as a particularly large fellow, but these two were like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ridiculously like picturesque adult man and woman. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yet they had children, which is when usually your body falls apart, especially for women, but even for men.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I look over at them and I’m like, man, I got it. There’s gotta be somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between where I am and there that I can try to reach for. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I got home about the same time, Aaron and I both independently thought, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what, we should start paying attention again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Someone in the chat just said, Timo Cowell in the chat said, Casey List is not a large fellow, but is he a big sir?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s very good. That’s very, very good. Sorry, I got totally derailed there. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so we thought to ourselves independently and then said to each other, you know, we should probably start paying more attention to what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we eat again. again. And I used, on and off over the years, I’ve used an app called Lose It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to kind of calorie count and track. And I mean, again, I don’t think I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in desperate need of, I don’t even really think I need to lose weight as much as I need to move
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it around. I wish I could just push it from my, a little bit larger than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want midsection area to like my stick thin legs and arms. You know, like if I could just squeeze it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other parts of my body, that’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be great. I think I could do that with hair. That’d be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco thing, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Take it all off my back and just move it straight up. I don’t think you want the back hair on your head.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At this point, I’ll take whatever I can get.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, this is going to be the best episode ever. So anyway, so I went casting out because I started using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LoseIt again for literally a day and LoseIt is very full-featured. Like you can scan barcodes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it has a very robust database of foods and calorie counts and nutrition
⏹️ ▶️ Casey information. I haven’t paid for it to be honest. Um, but I didn’t really feel like I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needed any of the perks that came from paying for it. And I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking at this app and it’s just visually it’s an, it’s an assault on the eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s, it’s, it’s, it’s offensive how ugly it is. I just, I hate how it looks and using it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is not all that much better. And so I went casting about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for an alternative to it and what I’ve been using for the last 48 hours, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a lot. I don’t know if it’s quite perfect, but I like it a lot. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love the name. It’s called Food Noms, F-O-O-D-N-O-M-S. And it’s actually by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the husband of a friend of mine, which is super cool. And I didn’t even know that his husband
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did this app, which is also super cool. I wish I’d known it. But anyways, it’s very well designed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely well designed. A couple of interactions I don’t totally love,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’ve already been exchanging tweets with the developer and he seems super responsive to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, you know, making changes and improving the app in any way possible. Uh, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, many, many words to say. I think it’s probably unwise for me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to continue to only lightly pay attention to what I eat and calorie counting is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arguably more about weight loss than anything else. I don’t necessarily, I don’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to lose weight as much as I feel like I want to be more conscious of what I eat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and get a little bit more toned and just try to be healthier. Now coincidentally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes for in our after show section, you had made a one-off comment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco at some point about running and I’d like to explore that but I’m not trying to necessarily take the spotlight off me if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have any follow-up questions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll gladly keep it on you for a little while longer. So yeah, I mean basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you seem like you’re on the right track here. I used to use Lose It,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jeez, probably 10 years ago now. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey not a new app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was basically the first time I’d ever tried to diet. And so I started there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I read the whole, like, you know, the hacker diet thing, calories in and calories out. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, that’s not entirely accurate, but it at least gets you in the ballpark. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually found calorie counting extremely helpful. It basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taught me like, what is expensive and what is cheap to eat?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not, it’s hard for me to keep that up as a weight loss tool, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just hit a point where I just am miserable all the time, if that’s the only thing I’m doing. I have found much, for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weight loss, I’ve found it much more effective to reduce carbs than to strictly reduce calories, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reducing carbs, I have found, makes it easier for me to keep the calories down, because the things I’m still eating keep me full for longer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s a whole thing. that you will probably discover if you haven’t already. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you are wise to separate out the concerns between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fitness and weight loss. Those are two very different things, and I think one of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the great failings of American culture is that we seem to have convinced ourselves that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are the same thing. That if you want to lose weight, the thing you should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do is go to the gym sometimes. And that is terrible advice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are totally separate things, and you should have your weight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a healthy range if possible, and you should keep your body in a state
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of relative fitness if at all possible, but those are two totally separate things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can do one or the other. Ideally, you do some of both, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in order to lose weight, running a couple times a week or going to the gym a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couple times a week, or hell, even if you go to the gym for like an hour a day, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still eating a whole bunch of garbage, like you’re not gonna lose any weight. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very helpful to treat those things. Oh, sorry for all the thunder sounds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey This is really getting- Oh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco goodness, there it is. It’s really getting quite loud over here, but I’m gonna keep going. I swear it isn’t this spooky of a topic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You should lose weight,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, stop eating everything that tastes good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. But like, you know, I feel like the more that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can do, and you are listeners as well, and I’m talking to myself as much as anybody, the more you can do to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco separate out fitness from weight loss, the more effective you’ll be at both. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they are two very different things. Fitness, there’s lots of options for. Weight loss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you can do it a bunch of different ways. There’s a whole bunch of stuff that works a little bit, a whole bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff that doesn’t work at all. There’s a few things that work a lot. I think generally, calorie restriction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is the way to do it, for the most part. Again, talk to your doctor, et cetera. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are healthier and less healthy ways to do calorie restriction. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, I think carb reduction is one of the easiest, because you start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing how much, for instance, if you drink calories, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not just talking about alcohol, just stuff like drinking soda, or having sugar and milk in your coffee, that stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adds up. you can cut out drinking as many calories as possible. That’s an easy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco win, because drinking calories don’t do anything for you. They’re not helping you at all, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not keeping you full. And then, in the way that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco calorie counting taught me to start looking at nutrition labels a little more carefully, and to start learning,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know what, turns out our obsession with things like olive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oil and everything, you don’t need oil in most things, and it’s horribly unhealthy for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Olive oil is good for you. Hold on, hold on a second. Italian coming in here. Olive oil is the good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fat. I’m Italian too. Guess what? Oils are terrible for you. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you can have a tiny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amount of, no, it really, that is also terrible for you. Like just don’t have much of it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and definitely don’t heat it. Just drink a cup of
⏹️ ▶️ John olive oil a day and you’ll be great. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh my goodness. God. But yeah, like there are things that people think are healthy that aren’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There are things that you assume that you have to have in your diet that you might not need to, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you might need a lot less of. Carb reduction can get you very far down the road
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of calorie reduction. Now, there are ways to do it stupidly, and there are ways to do it smartly. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my way of doing it for the last couple years has been, I’m not gonna count the carbs in vegetables.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, I mean, and I’m not considering potato a vegetable, that’s just cheating. But like, I’m not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco count like, whatever’s in leafy greens. I eat as many leafy greens as I want to. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so ungraceful. I will literally buy the boxes of the pre-washed lettuce, one of those medium-sized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boxes, it’s about the size of two books stacked up. I’ll just eat one of those with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a meal by hand, just grabbing the lettuce, eating it like chips, just as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the meal for lunch. I’ll have a box of lettuce and some chicken salad or something,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know? Don’t count calories in greens. Oh, you know, God, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big thunder. Oh, wow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John You are. You’re assuming power.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re assuming Casey eats any greens. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey true. Excuse me, sir. Do you know what I have for lunch every day? I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco salad. I will. Last time we asked you, you said you had a grilled cheese sandwich every day. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think my cholesterol spiked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John is. So now I eat a salad every
⏹️ ▶️ John day. Cheese is a vegetable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Yeah, that’s that’s how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, in this is this thing that Margo set up between fitness and weight loss. My advice to you, Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John is forget about the weight loss, just do the fitness. Because nobody cares what you look like.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? But you’re not a model for your profession. You’re going to look like
⏹️ ▶️ John what you’re going to look like. Within reason, obviously, if you’re controlling your diet in some reasonable way. But
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t think that you’re going to have the chiseled physique, because you’re not. What it takes to get a chiseled physique
⏹️ ▶️ John at your age is way more time and everything you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey to want to put into it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not going to happen. But fitness keeps you alive. All the things about like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re slightly overweight, you’re gonna die earlier. That’s not necessarily the case.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you are fit, if your internal organs all work well, if you can get oxygen to your blood easily,
⏹️ ▶️ John if your heart is strong, that will keep you alive until Alzheimer’s gets you. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John fitness is way more important than quote unquote weight
⏹️ ▶️ John loss. Because if you’re trying to lose weight for some vanity reason, that’s the wrong way. You want
⏹️ ▶️ John fitness to live to see your grandkids, right? Fitness is what you want to go
⏹️ ▶️ John for. And by the way, if you go for fitness, you will as a side effect experience
⏹️ ▶️ John some amount of what you want, which may not manifest as weight loss, but will manifest as a body
⏹️ ▶️ John shape that is nicer. Because it’s impossible to doggedly pursue fitness and not essentially redistribute
⏹️ ▶️ John your weight at the very least, if not lose weight. So I would say, forget about weight loss, go for
⏹️ ▶️ John fitness. And everything else will follow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Much of what John is saying is true, but I think having course corrections in both
⏹️ ▶️ John better. You can’t pig out, but look at Casey. He’s not pigging out. Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John does not have a massive weight problem that we need to address because he’s having 12 dozen eggs every day for breakfast. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is not happening. His diet is reasonable-ish. He’s probably eating garbage, but reasonable-ish in terms of calorie
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like six foot something, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you weigh? I’m six foot and I was about 160 this morning, roughly. So, like, what are you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John even worried about?
⏹️ ▶️ John Fitness is all you care about. And then finding the right way to get
⏹️ ▶️ John fitness. Like, you’re six foot 160. Our listeners are screaming at you right now.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco of our listeners who are
⏹️ ▶️ John screaming at you and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are not that much heavier than me for being so much taller than me. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I mean, the thing of it is is that I have been, I’ve not been as consistent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with exercise as I’d like, but I’m in probably the best shape I’ve ever been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in my life in terms of my physical abilities. Just the other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey day, it was a week or two back, I ran a mile hard. I typically would run about a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5K if I’m going to go for a run. Just a couple of weeks back, I ran a mile hard and I was within 20
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seconds of the fastest mile I ever ran in high school. Now, to be clear, I always have been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a deeply unathletic human being. is why I’m a computer nerd. But, or maybe, I don’t know, maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey computer nerd came first. Who knew? But anyway, I ran a reasonably quick mile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my body. And I think, you know, certainly that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that I’m proud of. I have something that vaguely resembles a bicep and something that vaguely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey resembles a tricep, which is new for me. I’ve never had those before. So that’s kind of neat. Now, if anyone else looked at it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’d be like, huh, what? But I can tell, and that’s kind of all that really matters.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ve been relatively consistent with the fitness over the last year or two,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but my choices with regard to diet have ranged from don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to, well, I should probably be a little more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey considered than I am. And then occasionally I’ll go through spits and spurts of, you know, I’m actually doing a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good job. I mean, generally speaking, my daily diet is I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fruit smoothie for breakfast and it’s just, you know, like half a banana, handful of strawberries, handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of blueberries and some protein powder and some soy milk. And that’s it. That’s the whole thing. That’s my whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco breakfast. Massive amount of sugar. Yeah. Yeah. Huge amount
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of sugar. It is a fair bit of sugar. No doubt. No doubt. But it’s, it’s a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than having, it’s a lot better than having a couple Eggos, which I did 20, 15, 20 years ago. You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Probably less sugar in the Eggos,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s slightly better. Maybe. At least you get some fiber with the fruit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My point is that there are many, many worse choices that I could be making. Can we at least agree
⏹️ ▶️ John that? Yeah. No, that’s what I’m saying. I think, I mean, your diet is probably, if you just like, if you just did the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John where you take like the amount of whatever you’re currently eating, take less than the normal amount that you would make,
⏹️ ▶️ John that small adjustment would probably have you shedding small amounts of pounds, like literally without changing anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then if you actually go far enough and say, well, maybe I shouldn’t have a sugar-filled smooth fruit smoothie
⏹️ ▶️ John every single day for breakfast, but instead have like, I don’t I don’t know, something else, like just fruit by itself
⏹️ ▶️ John and with like an egg or something, one of those days. Like, anyway, like minor adjustments would have a big
⏹️ ▶️ John effect on you. But like, honestly, you’re six foot and 160. Like what is your
⏹️ ▶️ John target weight? Like you don’t need to lose weight. You just need to redistribute a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit. I don’t think I do need to lose very much. I just, I look down at my gut and it’s not, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the frigging six pack that this guy who must’ve been about the same age as me cause his kids were quite
⏹️ ▶️ John older. You’re not gonna get a six pack without massive
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey restriction on
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey intake and huge
⏹️ ▶️ John amounts of working out. But you can move some of that gut around by just doing a couple more weightlifting
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey exercises. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey agree, we agree. And what I haven’t had a chance to say is, because I keep interrupting myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much less the two of you, is that I, no, I mean that. I keep going on these tangents.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think one of the benefits that I have from entering the food I consume, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is not unique to Casey, and this is a very common thing, But one of the biggest benefits I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is just being more considered about it because I will idly go grab something that is truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terrible for me to eat if left to my own devices. I’ll throw down
⏹️ ▶️ Casey club crackers like they’re going out of style.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, those are so good and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John so bad for you. They’re so delicious. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John terrible. You just eat yourself hacks, don’t have them in the house, no food after 8 p.m. all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ John very simple rules that you can use to trim the worst of your bad habits. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, why are you buying Club Crackers? Like, I, to me, like, Because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John taste so good. They’re, they’re like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drugs for me, but that’s, I haven’t bought them in like 15
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John years because I know that,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. I luckily do not like a lot of these garbage foods, so I’m saved from being tempted by them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, but the thing of it is, is by just the, the fact of me entering, like when I, if I were to go and grab
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or two or something, And then you have to shamefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco enter that. And then I have to shamefully
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enter it. Then I’m going to choose differently. And like almost every night after we put the kids to bed, there’s a couple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hours that Aaron and I’ll stay up and nine times out of 10, I’ll grab something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to munch on. And what I’m teaching myself over just the last couple of days when I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey re- when I’ve been entering stuff again, is that I don’t, I’m not hungry. I just want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eat. Like I don’t need to eat anything. I’m not actively hungry most times. I just want to, I just like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the act of eating. And again, I don’t think this is unique to me, but just by virtue of having something,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some amount of accountability, I think it’s made me make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better choices, not only in terms of what I grabbed to eat. The other day I grabbed an apple instead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 15 Club Crackers or whatever. I mean, I’m overemphasizing how many crackers I eat, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco point. No, you’re not. No, because the plastic sleeves of Club Crackers have the similar problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the Girl Scout thin mint cookies, which is that there is no way to open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the package that comes, that they come in, without exposing like five or six cracker edges
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to the air. And then it’s like, well, then you have to eat them, otherwise they’ll go stale. Yeah, you have to, you have no choice. In
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the process of getting those out of the bag, the crack spreads down the bag and exposes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five more crackers. And then it’s like, well, you have to be able to like roll up the bag nicely so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t stop here. You have to just take these five first, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you can dump
⏹️ ▶️ John them. They will not be in your house long enough to go stale. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not actually a
⏹️ ▶️ John You can just, just wait, Casey. You want a glimpse of your future, by the way. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John wait until your kids enter their teen years and start eating a bazillion calories,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they will be modeling a behavior that you cannot and should not follow.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because you remember
⏹️ ▶️ John what it was like when you were a teenage boy, and you didn’t know the amount of calories you ate. You see them
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, and A, they eat all your food, and B, if you’re anywhere near them, you like mirror their
⏹️ ▶️ John behavior. Oh, we’ll sit down at the table, have lunch together. Here’s your lunch and here’s my lunch. And you’re still in the mode where it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John daddy’s lunch is bigger than the kid’s lunch. That’s gonna reverse. It better reverse because you should
⏹️ ▶️ John not be eating the same lunch as your teenage son. So just keep that in mind for your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco future. Whatever you’re doing now that like maintains your current weight, you’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to be more strict as time goes on. As we get older, if we don’t change our habits,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like it gets harder to get in shape, it gets harder to stay in shape, it gets harder to maintain weight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and easier to gain weight. So it’s good to start this process now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to make minor course corrections if you have to, even if it doesn’t seem like anything’s urgent right
⏹️ ▶️ John and- Also plan on gaining a pound a year for the rest of your life, just FYI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or say no, say you know what, I’m not going to. Like it’s one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey it’s hard. It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John hard not to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, you have to fight against it. For example, to control the snacking, like that is largely a habitual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you know, there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is certainly a habit of like, that many of us get into, I have, of like, oh, when we’re sitting there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to watch TV, we grab a snack. Like, that’s, once you’re in that habit, it’s hard to break. But also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of that is the food you’re choosing to eat. If you eat like a really like, you know, protein,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fat, heavy dinner, then you’re gonna be too full to wanna eat. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re just not gonna wanna think about it. One of the things that I learned going lower carb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was like the blood sugar up and down cycle that you get on. Like when you’re eating a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of sugary stuff, a lot of carb stuff, like you eat and then your sugar rush
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually crashes and then a couple hours later, you want a snack.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And once you break that and you’re not having a lot of sugar or carbs anymore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that up and down pattern, that roller coaster levels out big time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a lot easier not to eat more. it’s a lot easier not to snack more, it’s a lot easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make better choices. And fruit, I hate to tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fruits up there with oil is like, things that most people overestimate the health benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of and things that are best enjoyed in extremely small amounts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For instance, anything, when you make a smoothie, I don’t know what kind of ratio you use, but when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one makes a smoothie, when most people make a smoothie, there’s quite a bit of fruit in there. Now to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mention the fact that the other ingredients of a smoothie might also be sugary. So things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like… Soy milk, quote unquote, milk. Right. It’s just sugar. Every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco milk, from cow milk to all the alternatives, that tastes like anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is sweetened. You know because you can buy unsweetened versions of some of them and they taste like nothing and they’re horrible and nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wants them. Almost all of those milks, including actual cow milk that we just call milk, do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a non-trivial amount of sugar in them. So that’s, You’re getting sugar there, you’re getting sugar in the fruits.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also the way your body processes sugar is different if it’s already all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ground up versus if you’re eating a blueberry and just chewing it once before you swallow it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you also don’t wanna have a rapid spike in sugar, which you get if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something’s already been blended or processed versus if you’re eating, if you’re munching on an apple,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna have a slower processing, which is better for you, better for things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco insulin resistance over time and stuff like that. It’s fairly complicated and we don’t have a great understanding of all this and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how this works yet, and I’m certainly no pro to even be trying to communicate what our science is these days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but all that stuff matters. And so if you can get yourself off of that train of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having pretty sweet cuisine, really, and having carb-heavy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff which, once you eat it, it basically is treated like sugar in your body after
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that long of a time, and especially the more refined stuff. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this stuff all matters, and it all adds to body sugar spikes, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time, problems like insulin resistance and various things that that causes that are pretty common
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems for people. So generally reducing the carbs, and that includes both sugars and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carbohydrate in other forms, really helps a lot. And I know it sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crazy, it sounds ridiculous, but trust me, it helps a lot. And again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t do the thing that I did that everyone does where you just have bacon and cheese for every meal because then you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna have cholesterol problems again. So that’s not great. But there are other things. Like for instance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lean meats, having a lot more vegetables that are not potatoes and not just fruits. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a small amount of fruit as a treat but having carrots. Carrots have some sweetness but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not too bad. Have a lot of greens, other green vegetables.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco zucchini, like there’s a whole bunch of stuff you can eat that is pretty much like, you know, free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco health-wise, that is filling and nutritious and everything else. You know, occasional, you know, dairy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff is fine. I found Greek yogurt is a really kind of magical food for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as long as you can tolerate that much dairy, which is non-trivial for some, like I can’t have a whole ton
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it, but like it’s a really good snack to have like if you’re hungry and it’s not a meal time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you want to like bridge the gap to the next bridge the gap to the next meal, a couple of spoonfuls of unsweetened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Greek yogurt with like one blueberry on top of each spoonful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it a sweet snack that is tasty, but it’s not, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost no sugar in that. There’s a ton of protein and it keeps you full for a long time. This whole world
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, you know, low carb eating,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of value to it in a lot of reasons beyond strictly wanting to lose weight. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I highly suggest that since you’re already taking steps to lose weight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as part of this process, try low carb also. The same way you’re looking at calories now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at carbs and try to keep it into the low carb range, depending on whatever diet you’re looking at. That’s generally something like 20
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to 40 grams a day. Look at the labels of everything and keep it under that and see how it feels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And see, you don’t have to do it for long, do it for two weeks and just see how your body feels. Do you feel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good? How is your energy level throughout the day? is the snacking cravings and everything. It makes a pretty big difference.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna say something about low carb. Sounds like the thing you described before, Margo, of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I could do that kind of diet where I count calories, but then it’d be miserable. That’s what low carb sounds like to me. Low carb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, because your entire diet is like massive amounts of pasta and stuff, which is great.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not my entire diet, but I do love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So do I. But I can’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John it anymore. I know, I know all the things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, pasta’s awesome. But you know, it’s, and I’m really good at making and eating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey But I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it. Like I very rarely have to, can have it now because I now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve gotten to the point now where I actually feel bad if I eat like a whole bowl of pasta. Like if I eat a very carb heavy meal,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get like a stomachache. It actually feels
⏹️ ▶️ John bad. That’s one of the good things about doing any of this stuff, especially even like minor calorie restriction or portion control
⏹️ ▶️ John is that eventually you can’t even eat the portions that you used to eat. Like you physically, they make you feel bad. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you want to get into the goal state like Marco said, where like if you were like, oh, as my treat now, I’ve been so good for a month,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to have my normal portion of whatever. And you eat your normal portion of whatever and you feel so
⏹️ ▶️ John full that you feel like you’re going to die. Success. Yeah. Occasionally I do
⏹️ ▶️ John that. Like I did that recently where we hadn’t had Indian food in forever and I got takeout. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John ah, and then I ate like what I think is a normal portion of my like treating myself and I was like, nope Too much.
⏹️ ▶️ John Too you don’t eat that much food anymore too much And then you’re miserable and you’re like the next time you
⏹️ ▶️ John learn it’s like you can’t even as your treat You cannot eat that much of that kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of food anymore used to be able to when you were acclimated to it But you become unacclimated and you
⏹️ ▶️ John want to be unacclimated to it. You want to not be able to pull that off without feeling bad That’s the,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the great pace you get into. Cause that’s sustaining. Cause then you like, you don’t want to make yourself feel sick.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you’ll take half the portion and success. You got your treat and you get half of what you normally would.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to talk to you about your running Marco, because like I said, you made that one off, but we’re running real long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s not much to say yet. I started running, uh, not even like too aggressively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, but, uh, yeah, just started doing it. I’ve been doing various exercise things for a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years now. This is just the newest thing that I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ John here. We are I’m gonna suggest this you’re probably not gonna go for this But anyway, there is when when
⏹️ ▶️ John I lived in Long Island My parents always did the summer run series where you have races all over Long Island
⏹️ ▶️ John some of them are At least one of them. They usually do a one-mile run on the
⏹️ ▶️ John beach at Robert Moses, which sounds like a one-mile race That’s so stupid. Try running a mile on the beach
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a hell of a race Anyway, they do races all over the island and it is a great way to sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John get out and about and see things. Obviously this is not applicable in covid time. So pretend we eventually come out of this.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a great way to sort of have a fun thing to do on, you know, on evenings
⏹️ ▶️ John in the summer. Go to see a different new park somewhere. It’s usually very scenic. Some of them are on beaches, some of
⏹️ ▶️ John them aren’t. And then participate in actual competitive race where you’re in age groups, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So you have a chance of finishing, uh, you know, meddling if you are reasonable for for your age group,
⏹️ ▶️ John and as you get older, it gets easier as your competitors die. It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ John Great. Yeah, my dad never got onto the podium until he was like the only 70 plus year old one running,
⏹️ ▶️ John and he’s like, guess what, I’m gonna win my age group now. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I recommend that because running, unlike other things, like most people don’t usually do competitive
⏹️ ▶️ John weightlifting, but running, there is a potential for it to be competitive, and it sounds like, oh, I’m not gonna be competitive, I don’t care about
⏹️ ▶️ John racing or anything, but it’s fun to participate in a race. You’re not gonna win, you’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John win your age group, you’re not even gonna run fast, but just participating in a race with people
⏹️ ▶️ John is fun. Like, especially if you’ve never done, before you never ran in school or anything like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a surprisingly fun social activity of like everyone, we’re all in this together, we’re all gonna go out and we’re gonna compete
⏹️ ▶️ John and everyone supports each other and you get to travel all over Long Island and see nice places and
⏹️ ▶️ John get a bunch of junk food at the end as your reward. Some of them have beer at the end too. And after
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve, you know, after you run 5K in the blazing sun, you’re allowed to have a beer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, 5K is a lot more than one mile, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t remember when I came home from school one year, like I’d come home from school and they’d be like, oh, we’re going to the summer run
⏹️ ▶️ John series. You want to come with us or whatever? I was like, yeah. I forget what year it was in college. It was like maybe a sophomore or junior.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll come do the run with you. So I come home from school, it’s like a holiday or, you know, or maybe it was like the end of the school year. I just come
⏹️ ▶️ John home from school and back home, we go do the run with them. I’m like, I guess I’ll do it. It was a ten K. It’s the longest
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’ve ever run in my
⏹️ ▶️ John entire life, but didn’t even tell me I’m running the race. I’m like when does this end? We ran by the start finish line a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ John times like are we just going to run forever and I finished the race and like oh my God, how long was that? I was a ten
⏹️ ▶️ John time to this day, the longest race I ran and the most miserable ever been ever running.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they’re fun. Now I just take pictures. It’s a lot easier.