502: Going Retina Again
29 Sep 2022Now that Casey’s running servers, it’s time for the rest of us to start looking for the exits.
Episode Description:
Please donate to St. Jude! Let’s cure childhood cancer together.
- Pre-show:
- Marco has glasses
- …and iPhone cases
- ATP Movie Club: Episode 3: Edge of Tomorrow
- Remember, only for members!
- Follow-up:
- iCloud Shared Photo Library limitations
- There are lots of creaky clear cases out there
- Stage Manager will support older iPads
- When the always-on iPhone display goes dark
- Black-and-white always-on Lock Screen
Settings→Focus→ {focus mode} →Options→Enable Dim Lock Screen
- Casey has some Apple Store experiences
- Apple Watch Ultra
- Returning a Solo Loop
- Marco masquerades as a wedding photographer again
#askatp:- Does the always-on display increase burn-in risk? (via Steve Holroyd)
- What is our version control strategy? (via Thomas Ferraro)
- Do we use the production or beta versions of our own apps? (via Nick Clinch)
- Post-show:
- Casey moves from Heroku → Linode
- John encourages Marco to walk through a forest and fight dragons
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Chapters
- Pre-show: Glasses 🖼️
- Pitaka & Peak Design iPhone cases
- Sponsor: Green Chef (code atp135)
- Donate to St. Jude
- ATP Movie Club: Edge of Tomorrow
- Shared Photo Library limitations
- Creaky clear cases
- Stage Manager now on A12X/Z
- When always-on isn’t
- A mediocre Apple Store experience
- Sponsor: Tailscale
- Photographing a wedding
- Sponsor: Memberful
- #askatp: Always-on burn-in?
- #askatp: Source control for hobbyists
- #askatp: Using your own dev builds
- Special ending theme
- Post-show: Running servers
Pre-show: Glasses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My desk is covered in glasses and iPhone cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s that time of year. Apparently
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw a picture of you in one of those pairs of glasses. I have notes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay for the record. I thought they looked pretty good. But apparently I’m wrong. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what should I have said John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s hard. I have to I’m not one of those people who can look at a picture and know what like
⏹️ ▶️ John Focal length the lens was that took it So it may be it was like kind of a wide-angle thing but it looked a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit too big for your face.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it’s just the iPhone front camera,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever that is. I mean, that is kind of wide angle, so I could have been fooled by the angle. But I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John although I have to say, disclaimer, we’ve been going to the eye doctor frequently,
⏹️ ▶️ John we were swapping glasses for the kids, and every time I’m there, I try on like every single pair of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco frames in the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire store. Not that I’m there to get them, but I’m like, here I am, I’m gonna try them all on. And every single one of them I think is too big for my
⏹️ ▶️ John face. So it could just be that the current trend in glasses disagrees with the way I think glasses should look on someone’s face.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I’ll tell you here. I’ll send you this other one. This is the really big ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, my. Oh, my. That’s obviously too big. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that’s one of the things I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then these are the ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you you like me have a have a narrow face. So it’s almost like you might be better off shopping
⏹️ ▶️ John in the kids glasses section or the women’s glasses section, where I frequently have to go to find glasses that I think look reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s oh, that’s second one. I’m sorry. This is not good podcasting content. But the second one is a very big Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey energy just huge Steve Jobs energy
⏹️ ▶️ John and also the glasses But all these glasses unfortunately make you look older, which is not the look you’re going for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco but yeah, thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, and so well, I mean here I have right here the Steve Jobs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I mean, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m those three you made the right choice
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here I’ll take a picture of the one of the ones that are actually the Steve Jobs These will have to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcasting headphones in them
⏹️ ▶️ John like that you found some frames that are like one of my pair of glasses have don’t have the frame around the bottom and just have the little
⏹️ ▶️ John string. I love those, but they’re very rare these days because they’re not in style apparently.
⏹️ ▶️ John do you mean by the little string? So they’re not, if you took the lenses out of those glasses, they wouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John like a metal hoop where you expect the lens to be. It would be just like a U shape.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Oh, is there like a string that goes along the bottom?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there’s like a fishing line basically. Oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey don’t think I remember that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lenses don’t fall out. Gotcha. Well, I just assumed they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John were like glued in or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just fishing line kind of stuff. All right, these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are the actual Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John glasses. Okay, well, that’s fair. Yeah, I mean, those are good for a costume, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, they don’t have real glass in them. This is like the plastic things that came with them. Anyway, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We’re gonna have to edit all that out. This is terrible podcasting content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. So I’ve learned a few things so far about it. So we had so many people write in and tell me what to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with glasses. So thank you very much to all of you. Now I actually have had a chance to try some of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and keep in mind, my quote prescription is merely a.75
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reading glasses, that’s it. there’s no like you know distance or you know other like there’s no other prescription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so like all the other squares and the prescription are empty just a little ad column says plus point seven five
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so these are just readers and I don’t need anything else so that that obviously you know changes certain things about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know what’s good and what’s not the frustrating thing I’m finding is that like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I could just wear a pair of glasses that would just fix my range of vision
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not that’s not a thing for old people, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, I’ve learned that, thank you. But like, so that’s the frustration is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no, there is no way seemingly to fix this all the way. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to either see things far or see things close, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John If you could get some of those like, what do they do? Where they take like the the blood of very young people and inject them into old people?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco To restore their
⏹️ ▶️ John youthful vigor and to make your, to make your eyeballs more flexible?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No one sounds like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Silicon Valley joke.
⏹️ ▶️ John subtly it’s a it’s a thing that rich people do because they think it works but no one has corrected me so far
⏹️ ▶️ John in my theory about the stiffening eyeball thing so I’m just gonna assume it’s correct but anyway yeah getting old sucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well anyway the what I have found is that for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual reading glasses I have the nice pair from the eye doctor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I have some cheapos from Amazon and they’re not that different actually using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reading glasses to read things close-up is amazing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like like I love like browsing my phone with the reading glasses on is incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks like having HD
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my god it’s no it’s like going retina again like it’s like I guess maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s where they got it from so no I got it but yeah so anyway the downside is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course that then you can’t see anything far away because then it blurs and so I I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get from one of the cheapo online places on someone’s recommendation,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got two different things. I got an intermediate set, which is kind of like reading glasses, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focal range is a little bit further out. And so it’s meant to be for computers. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found this was pretty good for using a laptop, like in your lap, but at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my desktop setup, my monitor is too far from my face. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of the focal range of the intermediates. So actually, if anybody out there has any idea, like, does anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a pair of intermediate readers that, where the focal distance is customizable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or like a little bit further out than the regular
⏹️ ▶️ John ones? I mean, you can just ask your eye doctor for that. Like, what I’m wearing now are my computer glasses, and I told
⏹️ ▶️ John my eye doctor, I want a pair of glasses. Here’s where I’m gonna use them. I’m gonna use them at my computer. Here’s how far
⏹️ ▶️ John away my monitor is. Get me glasses that let me see my monitor perfectly. That’s what I’m wearing right now, right? Can’t drive
⏹️ ▶️ John in them, but like, you can just tell them that and you will get a prescription for whatever that is
⏹️ ▶️ John for your eyeballs. But in terms of finding off the shelf ones that work with that, lots of people wrote in to suggest that they basically
⏹️ ▶️ John sell computer glasses, but they all probably have some assumptions about how far screens are from people. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John when people think computer nowadays, they probably mean laptop. I mean, who has a desktop? What kind of weird people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s why these intermediates are perfect for laptop distance, but I’m almost never working that way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, and for my actual desktop monitor, it’s just too far out. The good news is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one of the ones I got is a progressive that goes from nothing to reading.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is actually more interesting. Because that’s like the one thing that like, okay, if I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to wear one pair of glasses all the time to correct everything, that’s what I would
⏹️ ▶️ John If you want the whole world to look like Jell-O all the time, progressives may be for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, but you know, like right now, only using the 0.75, like it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it. Yeah, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know so I could what I can see myself doing is like in the future as this gets worse as I get older
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then I will probably start wearing progressives for that reason like more, you know closer to full-time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whereas right now, I don’t really need to wear them full-time but and and when that does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happen I can definitely see myself maybe like making some changes to my my monitor situation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the problem with the progressives
⏹️ ▶️ John is Point your nose in the air No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the opposite it’s I have to like look down a little bit over the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blurred range because the bottom range is for Stuff that’s closer than my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John mom. It’s too close so the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I have to look through only the top which means like the bottom You know fifth of my monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is blurry if I’m looking straight at it
⏹️ ▶️ John again if you get prescription Progressives you can tell the doctor what ranges you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John see through what part of your glasses and they can do that for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well anyway, so that’s It was really nice, when I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the progressives on, it’s really nice to be able to bring a soda can close to me and read the ingredient label
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really close. It’s nice to have that, and that’s when you tilt your head up and you’re peering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down through the bottom half or whatever, but yeah. So it’s okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m glad I’m learning more about this world with very inexpensive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco online brand sunglasses, or glasses rather, and kinda getting a feel for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I actually will work with when my needs get more severe, where I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to address this all the time. But right now, I don’t have to address it all the time, and so I’m probably gonna only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use these occasionally. Like, you know, I’m keeping the pair that I got from the doctor, I’m keeping them next to the bed. And that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, when I’m reading my phone at night in bed, I can put them on, and man, that’s awesome. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so great. But then, you know, when I’m at my computer, I’m still not, right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, I’m not having any trouble seeing my monitor, so, you know, right now it’s fine. but over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey time. It’s so damn
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big, how could you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, the pixels are small.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Fair. So I’m genuinely wondering, why not pull like a Jeffrey Wright
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and look over the top of like, well he has regular size glasses, but like get one of those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like half frame, like 70 year old man reading glasses and just look over the top for everything except
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reading, reading. Like is that not something that would work for you? Talk about making
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look old though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s true. I mean, I gotta, I have some self-respect. I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna do any option that I can’t say that looks good and fortunately my face is compatible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with glasses like I can put glasses on and they look fine and I can even probably find some that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look great I don’t know but you know I have to stay within modern fashion to some
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t have glasses are modern fashion for senior citizens you just got to get one of those other strings that go on them they’re on your neck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t care at all about fashion I would get those ones that that clip together with the magnet in the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah and you like drop them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down like it over you like as wear them as a necklace and you pop them up you know because those are them that’s that’s the most functional
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah when they’re like safety glasses to protect you from you know things coming up from the saw
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah you could
⏹️ ▶️ John mean what I do because I my vision is the the opposite of yours I’m constantly looking under my glasses which looks ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ John looking over your glasses where they slide down your nose imagine you have glasses you’re sweaty they’re sliding down your nose and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John craning your neck to look under them so you can see close up things because that’s what I have to do half the time with my glasses. It’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John not that bad with my little skinny like driving glasses because they’re super distant and if I need to look at my
⏹️ ▶️ John phone I cannot look through the lenses at all to see my phone. So I look underneath my lenses at the phone and
⏹️ ▶️ John that works out pretty well if you go into the supermarket or whatever and you need to look down at your phone. It’s probably down low anyway so I can
⏹️ ▶️ John stay looking straight ahead and look down below my lenses at my phone which I can see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, yeah I’m not looking forward to the day when I have to get either bifocals or progressives because my wife just got progressives
⏹️ ▶️ John and I look through hers and her prescription is like not as bad as mine and boy I
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously it’s a thing you get used to right but you can get used to anything I just asked you know but like
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I can hit up progressives at my prescription bifocals almost seem like they’d be better because I just feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like I was wearing two pairs of glasses on my face but I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it for now I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John just eternally swapping glasses. Driving, not driving. Driving, not driving. It’s fine.
Pitaka & Peak Design iPhone cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to talk about iPhone cases or do we want to save that for another time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, let’s do it. So, I just have a quick update. I finally got in the two cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people all recommended to me for the last year and I just didn’t get them for the iPhone 13
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever reason. The Pataka and the Peak Design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco These are two extremely well-regarded case options. This is the Pitaka
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MagEZ Case 3. So it’s their newest, thinnest MagSafe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compatible case for the 14 Pro. And the Peak
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design, they have this system where they have this little square
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mount in the back. So it is MagSafe compatible, but then also they have their own line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of mounts and custom chargers and things that can latch into this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco square, ridgy kind of mount hole in the back. And so you can actually have really strong mounting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco options, like for if you’re putting it on a bike or a motorcycle or something, like where you, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, MagSafe is not really strong enough for that kind of use. So, you know, so Peak Design sells this whole line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of stuff. So anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, hold on. I’m sorry. The Pitaka MagEZ case, does it look like what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m seeing on the website? Like carbon fiber? Yeah. Like, you know what, everyone got upset about the Mac Pro because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that thing where or you don’t like holes or whatever. I’m getting this like, and I don’t care about the Mac Pro in every regard,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but like the look of it never bothered me. In fact, I think it looks kind of cool. But this case, I’m getting like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey major angst over this. I don’t like this at all. Like it is a fake carbon fiber. This is like-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Well, no, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s actually, I think it’s actually real carbon fiber.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey So it’s- Is it? Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s what Aramid is, right? I have no idea. I think it is. Anyway, so yeah, we’ll go with Bataka
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first. So the Bataka case, I’ve only had it on for a few days so far. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works the best and looks the worst.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I could buy that. I could totally buy that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, it looks like, you know, it is as far as I think it’s actually real carbon fiber,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but because fake carbon fiber is so often used as a decoration
⏹️ ▶️ Marco element in lots of things, it just looks like fake carbon fiber. It looks cheap as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a result of that. This does not look good. Like I wish, I wish, and they have these alternating colors, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the black and blue one. I wish they would just do like a solid color option, because like, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you want is a solid color, they don’t offer that. So, you know, the gray one is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close, but it’s not. So anyway, you know, it doesn’t look great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a very, very minimal protection kind of case. It is a very thin and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightweight case, and rather than like having, you know, its own button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco covers or having holes for the buttons. It has these huge cutouts of the case where like the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button area on each side, the case just kind of cuts around it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are directly pressing the phone’s buttons, which in some ways is nice, in some ways is not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because you still have the ridge to contend with with your finger. It does have a mostly open
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bottom. So, you know, John could mostly be okay with it. Overall,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, the major upsides of of this are it’s very thin and light it feels not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different from having a bare phone in terms of size and bulk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it has a very good amount of grip on like and for the like the tackiness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the surface the downsides are it does not look good it does not provide much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco protection and the the camera there’s like a plastic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ridge to protect the camera area on the back and it feels really cheap
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sharp. That’s the biggest downside I think is that camera area just feels crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like this case, I don’t know if I’m going to keep it on the phone long-term.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to live with it for a while and see what I think. The Peak Design case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely looks the nicest of all the ones I have. I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Peak Design case probably looks… it’s probably one of the best-looking, if not the best looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-leather case that I have seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the everyday case for iPhone, and it looks like it’s almost like a cloth on the back, or like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like a gray kind of heathered fabric on the back with what I believe is a TPU
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outer band going around the whole outside of the case, like around the ridge. It totally covers the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buttons. It has a closed bottom, sorry, John. The button covers that, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pushing them feels very nice. It’s a very high quality case. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ridge around the camera plateau protector is smooth and it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels really nice. It looks really nice. The big square mounting hole on the back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not look crappy or bad. It looks tasteful. There is no big in-your-face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco branding. So the Peak Design looks the best by far of all the non-leather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cases I’ve ever tried. The downside is that that back fabric
⏹️ ▶️ Marco material does not provide significantly more grip than the bare phone would. The sides are a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grippy, like it’s a little bit of a rubbery TPU material, not like a silicone, and not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the clear squishy cases that I like. So it’s not that much grip
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is my main problem with it, but it does look and feel good in other ways, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a lot of grip. And it’s also a fairly thick protection band around the phone. This is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously like, you know, if you actually drop your phone, this is, I’d much rather have this on my phone than any of the other ones I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried so far. But it is a little bit thick for what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going for. So I’m not sure I’m going to stick with this either. But if I had a need, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t yet buy any of their mounts or anything, but if I had a need for one of their custom mounts to use this cool square
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mounting hole in the back, no question I would, you know, go right to this case because those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mounts all look awesome. Unfortunately, I don’t ride a motorcycle and I don’t need to mount my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my bike when I’m driving to the grocery store, so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You don’t want to mount it in the Defender adjacent to the TideWatch?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John need to. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John MagSafe would be okay inside a car.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it is, it’s totally fine. So anyway, so the, yeah, the Peak Design,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know if I’m gonna have much use for it, but I’m gonna keep it around anyway in case you need that mount for something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the Pitaka does work very well. I’m gonna keep it on for a while, but I really don’t care for the look. The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Clear case I used for most of the last week and I still don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like how little grip it provides on surfaces. So like if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lay the Apple Clear, I’m hearing your click yours.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow, my word, I can hear that
⏹️ ▶️ John going, still going strong over here, just FYI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But yeah, anyway, I don’t love the lack of like tackiness on surfaces. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John put it on. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna ask you about the carbon fiber case because that can’t possibly be grippy, can it? It’s gotta be slick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has some kind of surface treatment on it, I think, because it feels like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the squishy clear case kind of finish. That kind of like, you know, slightly rubbery kind of tacky feel.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t know, I mean, I don’t know what it’s made of. Some kind of like resin, aramid, something or other. I don’t know. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, for some reason, grips surfaces better. I actually, I devised a little test earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to try to like quantify how much surface tackiness it had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I laid them on a long plank of and when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I say plank, what I mean is an Apple Watch strap box. That’s what I had nearby.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I put it on like the far end and I slowly kept keeping one one side of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it down. I slowly lifted the box up like a big seesaw or like
⏹️ ▶️ John camera lump is really going to screw with this test because what you want to test is the friction of the flat part of it, don’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I want to test the friction of the whole thing because the whole thing is on on surfaces. So I held a tape
⏹️ ▶️ Marco measure up and I slowly raised up the the Apple Watch box as the seesaw
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and saw okay when does the phone slide down like how high can I can I rock can I raise it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before the phone slides down and so just again these numbers mean nothing except relative to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco each other you could have done some trigonometry
⏹️ ▶️ John and give us an angle here come on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah I didn’t I don’t have a protractor here anyway so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John having no case at all
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll need a protractor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah right I could just do the yeah anyway
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John trigonometry
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yep all Alright, so, no case at all, four inches. The Peak Design, four and a half.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Clear case, five and a half. Pitaka, six. Apple Silicone, six and a half. So that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of gives you some idea of the relative grippiness of all of these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple Silicone is the most grippy, unfortunately it means you can’t put it into a pocket easily. And the Pitaka
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the second place. And then Apple Clear was third. Peak Design, fourth. And No Case was last place.
⏹️ ▶️ John Having used the Apple Silicone one and the non-apple leather one. Despite the
⏹️ ▶️ John obvious difficulty of pocket, like this is where it highlights how silicone interacts differently
⏹️ ▶️ John with different surfaces because the inside of your pockets are lined with like whatever cotton fabric and that’s the worst and
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re tight and that’s the worst case scenario for the silicone case. But I find in one of my scenarios
⏹️ ▶️ John or two of my scenarios where I care about grip, one, being picked up with my hand and two, being rested
⏹️ ▶️ John on the arm or back of a piece of furniture or specifically my couches, I find
⏹️ ▶️ John the leather does better in both of those situations. I always found the Apple silicone one ever so slightly
⏹️ ▶️ John more slick and less secure in my hand than the leather one. I don’t know, just because of like the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the sweatiness and the break-in-iness of leather where it just kind of starts to be more grippy or whatever. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the leather would do worse on your incline test than the silicone because I think silicone grips better
⏹️ ▶️ John on that very flat surface of cardboard than it feels in my hand. But they’re both pretty good in terms of grip.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the clear one, which I’ve been using since I got my phone, it’s pretty good in terms of grip. Like I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like it’s super slick, definitely way more slick than a silicone case or a leather case, but it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John so bad that I feel like the phone is slipping out of my hand. The only weird thing is sometimes when I reach into my pocket, I think for
⏹️ ▶️ John a second, maybe because you mentioned in the last show, did I accidentally face the screen out? No, that’s just the back
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It feels kind of like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say also, like I really came to appreciate the look of the clear case with the white
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone. I think the darker phone colors you probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have, the MagSafe ring probably stands out a bit too much against them to look very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good on that clear case. But on the white phone, it’s not that bad. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really did appreciate, like I was at a wedding this past weekend, which we’ll get to in a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I wanted to look like, I was all dressed up, I wanted my phone to not look too crappy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I had the clear case and that’s what I used. and it looked fine, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked like a nice piece of equipment. The combined look of the Clear Case with the white phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looked nice, it did not look ridiculously out of place with formal wear, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was nice. And I definitely wouldn’t say that about the Pataka, I think the Peak Design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be the nicest looking option I have, but I didn’t have it then.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna say on the Clear Case too, the wall that surrounds the giant camera thing on the 14 Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ John it is a wall, And it’s, you know, if you don’t want a big wall, don’t get this one. But it
⏹️ ▶️ John is it doesn’t feel cheap. The wall around it is nicely rounded over. Agreed. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not sharp. It’s not flimsy. You know, it is what it is. It’s a wall. But I think they
⏹️ ▶️ John did a good job of making it as inoffensive as they could.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yeah. This peak one really does look pretty good. But gosh, I do not like the look of the pitaka
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is very nice feeling in certain ways. But yeah, it’s it’s hard to get over that look. Thank you.
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Donate to St. Jude
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a little bit of housekeeping to do. First of all, for the very last time this year, we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask, nay, beg you to go to stjude.org
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and throw a few bucks in the direction of kids with cancer and the doctors that are trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey help them. Hey, so here’s the thing. If you listen to this show, you are likely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have at least a dollar or two to scrape together and send in the direction of Memphis, Tennessee to St. Jude Children’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Research Hospital. Why would you do that, you ask? Well, because they do everything that they can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to try to cure childhood cancer. And September is National Childhood Cancer Awareness Month,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we and Relay, especially Relay, get behind St. Jude in order to try
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to raise money on their behalf. We do that because Relay co-founder Stephen Hackett, a dear friend of all three of us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his eldest son was stricken with childhood cancer at six months old. Stephen and his son
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and his family received literally millions of dollars of treatment from St. Jude and have paid
⏹️ ▶️ Casey literally nothing for it. If you live in a sane and a good country, that might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be a little bit unremarkable, but for those of us here in the very broken America, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely cool. And you might say to me, well, hey, Casey, I don’t care because I don’t live in a broken country like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey America. Well, you should care because St. Jude does a lot of research and they share—I don’t I don’t know if donate’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the right word for it, but they share a lot of that research with hospitals and doctors and whatnot around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the world. So you’ve probably spent a bunch of money on stuff you don’t need, and I’m parroting Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here. I’m taking all of Marco’s thunder, and I’m sorry, but I’m not sorry. You’ve probably bought a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bunch of stuff you don’t need. I certainly have, and we’re going to talk about that soon. So you should, in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order to kind of offset that, it’s not a carbon offset, it’s a frivolous expenditure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey offset, you should go to stjude.org and donate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The donations are accepted until the end of the month at that address, but certainly feel free to donate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any time you want to St. Jude. We’re not going to stop you. And also, with related housekeeping, we have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new leader on the leaderboard, taking over from the entire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey company of 1Password, one individual, the famous James Neal, who donated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something like seven or eight grand last year. I forget exactly what the total was, but it was nuts. This year, James
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Neal, a single human by himself donated $32,000.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey He bought a Civic and donated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to St. Jude. 32,000. Actually, that’s a really nice Civic. That’s probably almost an accord, isn’t it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John John? $32,000.
⏹️ ▶️ John Civic has gotten pretty expensive. It’s probably close to the top of the line Civic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s not quite a Type R, but it’s a really nice Civic. So anyway, $32,000. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regardless, the three of us each individually donated a used Camry, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blows us out of the water. I mean, my God, James Neal is incredible. He is
⏹️ ▶️ John is incredible. Get out the sticker cannon.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, get out the sticker cannon. I actually offered, he never said anything to me, I offered to shoot the sticker
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cannon in his general direction one more time. And he very politely and very kindly said, I’ve got plenty from
⏹️ ▶️ John got enough of your stupid stickers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly. So, so don’t worry about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But we should order a new production right and have them sent directly to his house.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should. I really should. But here’s the thing. I might have this wrong, but I think last year, relay
⏹️ ▶️ Casey raised something like $700,000. If I’m lying to you, it’s not on purpose. I promise. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting here now, we’re at $550,000. Let’s get to 700, baby. Let’s get to $700,000. Do what you can to donate $150,000 in just a couple days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A tall order. I don’t know if we’re going to make it, but let’s try. going to hurt to try. stg.org.atp.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that is the last time we’re going to talk about that for now.
ATP Movie Club: Edge of Tomorrow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Similarly, last time we’re going to talk about something else. ATP Movie Club is back, baby. And we’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one final episode for you, at least for now. And this episode is John’s episode. John, would you like to tell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey us anything about what we have done?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just going to tell you the name of the movie we picked, because that’s what we do on this show. So this is the third and final movie.
⏹️ ▶️ John And as we talk about in the episode, I had a difficult time finding a movie to pick for these
⏹️ ▶️ John two. I what I picked is not one of the things that lots of people have been sending tweets
⏹️ ▶️ John and emails saying, I bet John picked this. I bet John picked this. Nope. I didn’t pick any of those things that you’re guessing. Nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John guessed this movie, but it’s what I picked. I picked Edge of Tomorrow. If you’ve seen that movie or you’ve heard me
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about it on other podcasts, maybe that’s not surprising to you, but no one guessed it. Everyone was guessing
⏹️ ▶️ John other big name movies. And if you listen to the show, I will explain why I ended up picking what I picked and then we talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. So this is just for members as a thank you for sticking around with us all the way through episode 500.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can become a member at atp.fm join. Uh, certainly you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and should stay a member forever, but you could do the John thing where you just sign up briefly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get the episodes and leave, but we don’t want you to do that. Please. Atp.fm join. Um, all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey snark and jokes and whatnot, leaving the room for a moment, sitting here now, I am sure at some point we will do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more membership only content, but we are not planning to make a habit of it. We will maybe do it like once
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year or something sitting here. here now, we genuinely have no, even vaguely concrete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plans. We have basically no plans at all. We have a bunch of ideas, but no actual plans. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re not in a position where you can sign up for a membership, we totally understand. That’s totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t want you to feel like you’re missing out on something forever more. We’ll do this from time to time,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for now we’re going to put it to bed and let these three episodes live in infamy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And at any time in the future, if you become a member, of course you’ll have access to these episodes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s an excellent point. Thank you, John. Thank you.
Shared Photo Library limitations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. John, can you tell me about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shared photo library limitations? This is still in beta, isn’t it? I don’t think this is in the release version,
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, yeah, and occasionally I update the beta as I updated my Ventura boot disk a little while ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think I talked about this in the past show, but one of the things that had been tripping me up in trying to test the
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple shared photo library thing was my complete inability to create a new Apple ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John because I needed an Apple, I had gone through this Apple ID purge a while back that I also talked about on the show, getting rid of
⏹️ ▶️ John like a bunch of my testing Apple IDs. I still had one testing Apple ID, which is the one I’m using in Ventura, like I’m not using my
⏹️ ▶️ John real Apple ID, but I needed another one to be part of my family so I could do, they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need to be part of my family, you can share it with anybody. But anyway, I needed another Apple ID that was not a real person
⏹️ ▶️ John that I could share my shared photo library with. I didn’t wanna share it with any actual people in my family
⏹️ ▶️ John for fear of inducing any bugs. I didn’t want anything to touch my real Apple ID until Ventura is done.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I just could not create an Apple ID. So anyway, we’re on beta six, beta eight, whatever we’re on in Ventura,
⏹️ ▶️ John finally I was able to create an Apple ID. And by the way, I tried creating Apple IDs outside of Ventura,
⏹️ ▶️ John tried it on the web, tried it from all sorts of places, and it was just never working for me. Just, I don’t know, bad
⏹️ ▶️ John internet weather on the days when I tried it, Apple was having server problems. Whatever the problem was, I’d get
⏹️ ▶️ John halfway through the process and I’d be close to the end and it’d be like, sorry, this failed. And it was the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John explanation. Anyway, I created a second app, ladies. Now I’m sharing a photo library. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t need to do this test to figure this out. It should have been obvious from our past
⏹️ ▶️ John discussions and the description of the feature, but I just didn’t think about it, and it really hit home once I actually did the sharing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because when I was just doing it by myself, I was like, oh, look, you can toggle any photo if you want it to be in the shared library and your private
⏹️ ▶️ John library, and you can view both of them merged together, and it’s real convenient. That’s when I’m just looking at, it’s a shared
⏹️ ▶️ John library with one person. Once I had a second person, I really see the limits and I immediately
⏹️ ▶️ John filed a feedback request to say, Hey, please improve this. And it was a, you know, it’s, it’s not a bug report.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a suggestion. They call it, they don’t call it a feature regress, but it’s a suggestion. And you know, if this is a 1.0 fine, good 1.0, but there
⏹️ ▶️ John needs to be a 1.1, a 1.2, 1.5 and maybe a 2.0, right? Here’s what it’s missing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Shared photo library makes it sound like you’re sharing an entire photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library, but you’re not because what is part of a photo library? Obviously the photos are part of a photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library, but there’s way more than just photos in a photo library. There are albums,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are smart albums, there are slideshows, there are book projects. That’s all part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John library. There’s ratings, there’s keywords, there’s favorites. That’s all part of the library. Like, that’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John photo library, right? When you share it, none of those things are shared, nor can they be
⏹️ ▶️ John shared. And when I look at my actual family photo library that is owned by my wife’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID currently, We have tons of albums. We have folders full of smart albums. We
⏹️ ▶️ John have all the old book projects that I did. We have slide shows. It’s just, we have all the metadata,
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the keywords, all the favoriting, all of the ratings, all just tons of
⏹️ ▶️ John metadata. None of that is shared. So what that means is,
⏹️ ▶️ John although the main selling point of this future, which I think is great and I’m gonna be excited to have,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll finally be able to see all of my family’s photos on my phone and on my Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I have to go in and basically work with the photo library, I’m still gonna be logging into my wife’s Apple ID.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because what am I doing when I’m working in the photo library? I am not
⏹️ ▶️ John just modifying pictures, which those would be shared, but I’m marking things as favorites, I’m adding a
⏹️ ▶️ John location metadata, I’m putting things into folders, I’m labeling things with keywords, I’m setting
⏹️ ▶️ John person information. None of that is shared, right? The edits to the photos, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ John are shared, but the other stuff is not. So, you know, good job for a 1.0. Like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna get everything in the very first version and the 1.0 looks like it does a really good job of exposing the features that it has,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I really hope that feedback request lands in someone’s inbox and they say, oh yeah, we’re totally already
⏹️ ▶️ John working on that for the next version two years from now. Please do work on it because until
⏹️ ▶️ John that comes to fruition, I’m still going to be logging in to my wife’s account to work on our photo library, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I can understand how they ended up there with not sharing albums and whatnot, but that is kind of crummy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s in the name. It says shared photo library. It doesn’t say shared photos, because yes, you are sharing photos, but
⏹️ ▶️ John the library has tons of stuff in it. And when I’m working with it, it’s mostly what I’m doing is working with the metadata.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m rearranging things, I’m tagging things, I’m organizing things and stuff like that. So I would like to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John do that from my account, But that is not going to be possible.
Creaky clear cases
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of disappointments. Do you want to tell me about creaky clear cases?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, people are discussing this
⏹️ ▶️ John in the chat room when I made the creaky noises my case lots of people are experiencing this. Lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of people think it’s like your case must be defective return it or it’s not defective. Like if you look at it, like
⏹️ ▶️ John it looks like it fits perfectly. There are no obvious gaps. It is all even around the all the sides
⏹️ ▶️ John like this is a question of micrometers. It is not bulging, deformed,
⏹️ ▶️ John warped. Some people said, hey, did you get the wrong case? Maybe what what you got us for the 14 instead of the 14 pro it’s not the wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John case it’s everything is right and lots of people were sending feedback tweeting emailing
⏹️ ▶️ John saying hey I have the clear case and it also creaks right I think
⏹️ ▶️ John and some people were saying I have it and it doesn’t creak at all it may just be a matter of
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe people don’t squeeze their case as much maybe it creaks and they don’t notice like it’s it’s I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think there is this big you know bifurcation in the production run where half of the cases creak and
⏹️ ▶️ John half the cases don’t I think it’s just sensitivity to minor differences
⏹️ ▶️ John in, it’s not even differences in fit. Cause I think it’s material really, cause I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John any case I’ve ever had from my phone fit any better than this. It’s just a question of when it doesn’t fit, how does that manifest
⏹️ ▶️ John in the case? And it’s this particular kind of clear plastic material that’s like tacky and sticky
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of like clings to the sides of the phone and then releases, making that
⏹️ ▶️ John little noise like that. That’s, I think it’s the material. I think every case does that, but if it’s not made of this material, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make that noise and doesn’t feel as insecure. I don’t know. I’ll let you know when one or both of
⏹️ ▶️ John my leather cases come in, how they do. Some people also had a theory it was because I had the black Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe the black finish on the stainless steel is prone to this and it’s gonna happen with every case I get.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. But anyway, just wanted to let people know that I am not the only person who got the clear case on their
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone 14 Pro and hears it creaking doesn’t like it.
Stage Manager now on A12X/Z
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, breaking news from earlier today, do-do-do-do-do-do-do-do, Stage Manager will support older
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPads, which is very selfishly exciting because I have an older iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a 2018 era, original iPad Pro with Face ID, and allegedly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Stage Manager will support even my creaky four-year-old iPad, which actually isn’t that creaky,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s still surprisingly peppy, as long as I don’t use it with an external display, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think is a perfectly fair trade, to be honest with you, and I’m pretty excited about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not alleged, there’s an actual quote from Apple in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey there. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John to be specific, it’ll be available on the 2018 and 2020 models that use the A12X and the A12Z chips. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you wanted to know, that’s not specifically. But with the limitation that those
⏹️ ▶️ John iPads cannot use external displays with Stage Manager.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then on top of that, in the latest beta of iPadOS 16, they just removed external
⏹️ ▶️ John display support for everybody, even the M1 iPads. That’s a temporary condition that will be coming back later.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, the whole stage manager situation seems to be not going great.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey great over there at Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they gave, you know, in the press release, they’re like, we worked hard to make sure this works on older iPads. We heard your feedback. Well, that’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John good and everything. But the feedback from the folks who are messing with every one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John new iPad OS 16 betas on their M1 iPads is that stage manager is still
⏹️ ▶️ John a mess. Not only, last time we heard about this, we said like, Oh, it’s it’s a mess, because Apple can’t figure out how it should work or
⏹️ ▶️ John like the way they made it work is not pleasing to the users. Right. But now on top of that, people think, Oh, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ John also, it crashes all the time. So those are two things that are also not good. It
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s working, we don’t like it. But most of the time doesn’t work and it crashes. So I really hope they figure out this stage
⏹️ ▶️ John manager thing and on some reasonable timeline.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s it’s been a mess all summer long. Like I, I don’t know anybody all summer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long who has been using stage manager and says this is ready to ship. You know on one hand a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s fantastic that they have added the support for the you know older iPad pros that’s great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could have saved me a thousand dollars earlier this summer thanks thanks for the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one hey that’s it’s great for everybody else I’m you know you can have this win over me everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s better that they’re disabling the external display support now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than shipping it in as broken of a state as it was in. So that’s I’m glad they’re at least like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco willing to pull something before shipping if it’s not working out. I’m surprised stage manager
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is making it into the release at all. Based on the feedback from people again, people who have actually been using it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all summer long. It’s not a positive overall sentiment out there about stage manager.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It seems like everyone pretty much says that it needs some some significant design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and functionality changes before and reliability changes before it can actually be be shippable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so many of us were thinking they’re gonna pull stage manager entirely before release I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they might still they might still you’re right but seems like this is what they’re doing instead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that and so you know okay we’ll see maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know they know better than we do maybe things are better than we think they are. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope because we know what again, what we’ve heard is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. But you know, maybe maybe things are getting better in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last few betas. We’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see. I have to say I’m running the latest iPod s beta on my iPad. It’s an m one iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you never use stage manager so far, it doesn’t bother you. I just you know, just to be clear, this
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a feature that you have to use if you don’t want to. Obviously, I mean, it’s a headlining feature, you would hope
⏹️ ▶️ John it would work and it would be useful and you want to use it. And I, after my initial experimentation with stage manager,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t mess with it at all. And it does not affect my life. So it has that going for it. But that’s not a great thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to say about it. What’s supposed to be a headlining feature of your new OS. Also,
⏹️ ▶️ John do we have a date for I know they delayed iPadOS 16. But do they have a date? Or they just say
⏹️ ▶️ John fall? Did they say October? I forget what they said for iPadOS 16. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t believe we have a date except for fall.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think so either. So here’s the here’s the problem with the whole thing. So they took external display, they said flat
⏹️ ▶️ John out external displays aren’t gonna work on the older iPads. Maybe that’s a RAM limit or whatever, right? But they took it away
⏹️ ▶️ John from all of them. And this is a direct quote from Apple that they sent to, I forget where they sent this,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is from MacRumors, but this is from Apple. External display support for Stage Manager on M1 iPads
⏹️ ▶️ John will be available in a software update later this year. There’s not that much of this year left.
⏹️ ▶️ John And fall, like later this year, Like if iPadOS 16
⏹️ ▶️ John comes out, you know, on December 1st and it
⏹️ ▶️ John ships with external display support, like it doesn’t say that, hey, first
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re gonna release iPadOS 16 and then after iPadOS 16 is out and released to the public,
⏹️ ▶️ John some point after that, we’ll roll out external display support for M1 iPads. This doesn’t say that at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. It just says, we’ll be releasing a software update later this year. So I don’t know, like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of outs in this plan where they could comply with the letter of this law and do all sorts of weird things in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of external display support, including potentially like missing this deadline
⏹️ ▶️ John of update later this year and have it. Actually, it’ll be updated later this spring. Although,
⏹️ ▶️ John it seems weird to you that they would pull external display support for the M1 at this point
⏹️ ▶️ John because like, is it crashing because it’s running out of
⏹️ ▶️ John RAM? Like the limitation of the older machines not be able to do external displays for it makes some
⏹️ ▶️ John sense in terms of resource limits, right? Because you can have more apps running and more windows displayed and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that. But the M one doesn’t suffer from those limits. So why is that part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the feature being pulled at this point? It’s mysterious, and I don’t understand the motivation behind
⏹️ ▶️ John the changes. But it all just leads to continuing uncertainty about
⏹️ ▶️ John what is this going to look like when it ships to users and it in the current
⏹️ ▶️ John situation, even if they fix all the crashing bugs and they shipped it the way it works today, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John people would be like me and just be happy that they can turn it off and be sad that like it
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t turn out better than it did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think when you’re when you’re talking about a second screen that that changes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot. And yeah, I mean, you know, their iOS has supported secondary screens in the API levels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a while now. But this is I think the first case where things can be pretty different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in ways that regular people will run into a lot if you happen to a second screen. And that a lot of apps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get away with making a lot of assumptions about like UIScreen.main that just don’t, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you just can’t do that anymore. Like that’s like, I believe .main is actually deprecated in iOS 16 now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so like it all throughout iOS history of software development, both in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and in the App Store, you know, devs like us, we’ve been able to assume that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UIScreen.main would give us whatever aspect of the screen we were looking for, whether it was like the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scale to know like, you know, what kind of retina level we’re talking about, like the, you know, things like, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different attributes of what’s going on with the screen, the screen size, like, we’ve been able to count on that for all this time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being this the singleton that we could just refer to and just know things. This external display support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with stage manager is the first time that assumption is really broken for lots of apps. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I think by saying they’re going to disable this part right now, regardless of the hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that suggests to me, this is not about resources like hardware resources. This is about bugs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so many bugs will and have crop up because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that assumption being broken now for the first time ever in iOS, I think it’s going to be a while and a lot more work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before that is going to be really reliable. And that’s going to be made worse
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the simple reality that almost no one, relatively speaking, is going to be doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, like almost no users of your app, whatever your app might be, Like the percentage of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your apps users who are actually going to have an external display with their iPad using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stage manager is so low that it’s not really worth a lot of developers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time to make that work. I mean look at how many developers even make basic iPad resizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and multitasking work. Not a large number. And you know when you look at something like this, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco odds are low. Anyway, so all this is to say I have a feeling this is about software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bugginess and not hardware resources.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a little trivia from you know, you got all those you UI kit folks have all these uh apis with UI
⏹️ ▶️ John something in the name. Well back here on the Mac slash next all our stuff begins with NS. So you got UI
⏹️ ▶️ John screen dot main uh any guess what NS screen dot main is on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the dock or something weird?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the monitor that contains the doc
⏹️ ▶️ John so Screen dot main might seem well. What’s your guess? What is the main screen on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well on a laptop It’s the built-in
⏹️ ▶️ John one right but just assume you have a desktop like think about next because this is an API from like the next Days you have a next computer. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got it’s got monitors. There’s no built-in monitors. There’s no next laptop So those that would be awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, what’s what’s the end of screen dot main
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess you have to be a Mac user for the, the obvious thing that would come to mind for me is nsscreen.main is the screen with the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar, right? Right. Of course,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco modern versions
⏹️ ▶️ John of Mac OS screwed that up by putting the menu bar on all the screens. Remember when they made that change a while back? It used to be that the menu
⏹️ ▶️ John bar was only one screen and in the little displays arrangement, you could drag the little menu bar to different screens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You can still do that, I think, to set the primary display, if I’m not mistaken.
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t you think that would be nsscreen.main? I would assume. Yeah, but it is not. It is absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John to Apple’s credit in the documentation, it says the main screen is not necessarily the same screen that
⏹️ ▶️ John contains the menu bar. And by the way, the main screen, the one with the menu bar has its origin at zero,
⏹️ ▶️ John zero with the coordinate system and all that stuff. The coordinate system on screens in the Mac is super weird. Yeah, no, that’s not nsscreen.main.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you guess how you find that? The screen with the menu bar on it? If it’s not nsscreen.main?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. I mean, I assume you have to do some NS workspace hack or something, I don’t know, what
⏹️ ▶️ John No, NSScreen has a screens plural method that returns a list of all the screens
⏹️ ▶️ John and the one with the menu bar is the first one. Oh God. It’s the worst, it’s the worst! It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, it’s not what anyone will ever guess. NSScreen.screens.first
⏹️ ▶️ John is the menu bar screen. NSScreen.main refers to the screen containing the window that is
⏹️ ▶️ John currently receiving keyboard events.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, so it changes constantly? Oh yeah, oh yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John which makes some kind of sense. Oh my gosh. I mean, you can do everything you need to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with these APIs, but boy, so it makes me wonder, what does uiscreen.main refer to
⏹️ ▶️ John in a multi-screen iPad scenario? Is it the screen that is receiving keyboard input?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it’s deprecated, like Marco said. There is no uiscreen.main anymore, for all intents and purposes.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder what the replacement API for that’s going to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s terrible. You have to basically go through the scene manager and all this stuff. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no like singleton way to refer to it. You basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John have to- Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t like arrange, you can’t arrange screens on the iPad, right? Shows I’ve never used an external screen with
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPad. You can’t like do like you can on the Mac where you arrange them, like one is like half overlapping with the other on the right
⏹️ ▶️ John hand side and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would assume you can, but darned if I know how.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I honestly have no idea. This is something I like, I have screens. I guess I could plug
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, But I have never even attempted this.
When always-on isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, speaking of screens, you want to tell me about when the always on iPhone screen goes dark.
⏹️ ▶️ John We talked about this last show, two things having to do with us not liking the always on screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of them was I put on my nightstand and it’s lit up and we talked about different ways to deal with that in terms of sleep
⏹️ ▶️ John focus and things like that. We’ll get to that in a second. But Apple has a document on this that we got a link to last time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think we even talked about it on the show, but I just wanted to read off the items. If you just turn on the always on screen and don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything special to it, there are scenarios where even though you have always on screen
⏹️ ▶️ John on the screen will turn off. And what the Apple document says always on display goes dark when you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need it. To save battery life the display is completely dark when your phone is lying
⏹️ ▶️ John face down, your phone is in your pocket or bag, sleep focus is on, low power mode is on, your phone is connected to CarPlay,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re using continuity camera, you haven’t used your phone in a while parentheses, your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John learns your activity patterns and turns off display off and on accordingly including if you set up an alarm or sleep
⏹️ ▶️ John schedule. Finally your phone detects that you moved away from it with a paired Apple watch always on display
⏹️ ▶️ John will turn on when your Apple watch Close to your phone again So the phone is trying hard not to bother
⏹️ ▶️ John having it’s always on screen on when it’s pretty sure You’re not using it or you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to possibly look at it So kudos for Apple figuring out all that stuff But
⏹️ ▶️ John then the snare I was describing doesn’t fit any of those Except for the sleep focus thing which if you don’t use smoke phones
⏹️ ▶️ John that won’t work and the whole learns your activity patterns Obviously I don’t have the patience for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco If I were to eventually learn my activity patterns, oh well.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, but the other way to deal with that is black and white, always on lock screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you go to settings, focus, select one of your focus modes, options, there is an enable
⏹️ ▶️ John dim lock screen option. And when you’re in that focus mode, your lock screen will basically
⏹️ ▶️ John be all black, but just with like the time and other stuff in it. I’m not sure if it works with widgets, but this is selectable
⏹️ ▶️ John on a per focus mode basis. It doesn’t have to be your sleep focus, you can do this for any focus mode. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John interested in having a darker lock screen in the Always On feature,
⏹️ ▶️ John try that out. Otherwise, you can rely on, apparently, Apple’s smarts
⏹️ ▶️ John to eventually figure out when you’re probably not using the phone.
A mediocre Apple Store experience
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I went to the Apple Store twice today. First of all, Apple Stores, even, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, not remarkable ones like mine, apparently have the Apple Watch Ultra in stock to look at.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or, I shouldn’t say in stock, they have it available to look at. They have display models. And I briefly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very briefly, put one on my wrist, and it is freaking mammoth. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a monster of a watch. I should have taken a picture, but I was trying to accomplish other things, which we’ll talk about momentarily.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it was huge. I will say I liked the orange band. I forget what it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called, like the Adventure Band or something like that. But I thought that was pretty cool with like the titanium clip in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did like that. I didn’t really play with the software on the Ultra, but holy cow, it’s huge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I happened to be there with Aaron and I think I heard this from Marco on the last, or one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the recent episodes of this very program, but maybe I heard it from somewhere else, but I said, Oh my gosh, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing is enormous. And Aaron said, I actually don’t think it looks that bad. And Marco, I think, had said a couple episodes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, like, whatever you think when you look down at your wrist, that’s not necessarily what everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else thinks, but oh my gosh, when I looked down, I was like, this thing is eight sizes too big, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ridiculous. Was that you Marco, or am I making this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like watch fashion is very personal and it varies a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between like who you ask. If you ask the watch world, you know, how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big of a watch is too big, generally the the only thing people can agree on is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if the lugs, which on a regular watch are like those little metal things that come up and down from the top and bottom
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that hold the strap on. So if those extend over your wrist,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like on top and bottom, that’s generally considered too big. But the Apple Watch doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have lugs. It has the strap slots, so it’s kind of a different way to look at it. But generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking, whatever watch that you can rock with confidence will look good on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you. And so it’s basically whatever you think looks good on you because if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it looks good, you’ll rock it with confidence. So that’s how actual watch fashion works is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you think you’re pulling it off, you’re probably pulling it off. And so you can kind of wear whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes you feel good and it’ll be fine. Fair
⏹️ ▶️ John enough. I’ve seen a lot of people, all the videos of people wearing the Ultra and everything. And I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like the design of the watch, not excuses, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John explains or makes sensible its size. Because when I see people wearing
⏹️ ▶️ John it, I don’t know if I, like, I feel like they’re using the, what is it, the Pip-Boy or whatever from, from
⏹️ ▶️ John the Fallout games. Like it’s like, it’s utilitarian. And in the same way I would, if
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw someone wearing like a, you know, a really old Garmin GPS watch, you know, ages ago or whatever, it’s like, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, it’s big and clunky, but like that’s what it has to be to do what it does. And not that the
⏹️ ▶️ John Ultra is big and clunky or anything, but it’s just like, it looks tool-y
⏹️ ▶️ John enough, you know what I mean? Like it looks like a, it looks utilitarian, it looks,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know, it looks more like a practical thing that you’re wearing for a purpose. Now granted, I know it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just the same as any other Apple Watch with a bunch of extra features, like it’s not actually that different, but when I
⏹️ ▶️ John see that, and even like the flat screen, that helps with that, when I see that, I say, oh, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John no longer judging it as a fashion accessory, I’m now judging it like the same way. If you saw someone running
⏹️ ▶️ John and they have one of those like straps to go across their chest for heart rate or whatever. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ John You wouldn’t like judge that as a fashion accessory and go, Oh, I feel like that heart rate sensor is a little bit bulky. Like, you know, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John match their outfit. It’s like, no, it’s it’s a utilitarian thing. And that’s what I think when I see the watch. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ John not that I care what watches look like on people or whatever, but like I think the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John watch ultra looks really good in that role. And, you know, again, maybe it’s the flat screen that
⏹️ ▶️ John helps it. I see it as a little computer on the wrist and I go, hey, that’s a cool little computer you got on your wrist. I don’t think, hey, that’s a giant watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But why did I go to the Apple store, you wonder? Well, I had ordered myself and Aaron’s Solo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Loops with our new Apple Watch Series 8s. So these are the things that, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey made of similar material to the Sportband, not exactly the same, but similar material to the Sportband that is like the quintessential
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Watch band, but they’re a little bit stretchier and there’s no like clasp
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or anything like that. It’s just one single piece of this fluoroelastomer rubber, whatever it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I actually think they look really good and feel really nice because instead of having all the lumpiness where you have the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey band folded over on itself on the sport, sport loop or whatever it’s called, it’s just a single piece
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of rubber for, for lack of a better way of describing it. And I really do like it. And I had one for my Series 6.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I liked that until it eventually got a crack and then one day split in two, which was a little undesirable,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you know, what are you going to do? So anyway, so when I ordered my Apple Watch and Aaron’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple Watch, I did the thing where you print out a sheet of paper and you cut out a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey faux Apple Watch sizing tool. And I tried this, and I tried it with Aaron, and tried it with me, and I got it all wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just got it completely wrong. And I had ordered a size 7 for myself, and it turns out that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually prefer a size 5, so I was not even close. For Aaron, I believe I ordered a size 5, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she needed a 4. So Aaron and I went to the Apple Store because we wanted to just exchange
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these bands for the exact same thing, but different sizes. I had a vague recollection that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a nightmare. Two years ago when I had last gotten an Apple watch and these Solo Loops were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brand new. I had thought that Apple had said, Oh no, no, no, no. We’ll, we’ll fix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. It’s going to be better. It’s going to be better because again, two years ago, it was not better. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quite bad. So I go to the Apple store and I talked to a very nice person and I said, Oh, I’d like to exchange this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they said, okay, I’m going to need the watch too. I’m sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what? Yeah, because you bought it with a watch. I’m going to need to return the watch. I’m sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what now? That’s still a thing? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s because it’s in the system. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So I go home and I do what, you know, any privileged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person does. I write a moany tweet about it and a bunch of people, and a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of people, including Marco replied to it. And Marco confirmed what I had thought, which was, wait a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey didn’t they say this got better? And then a bunch of people replied to the two of us saying, yes, they did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In fact, almost exactly two years ago on the 24th of September in 2020, there is a post
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on TechCrunch where Apple is quoted as having, or it says, Apple has since clarified and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey addressed some of the issues. For starters, users can now just replace the band rather than the entire watch,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey either in store or by mail. That’s exactly what I want to do. That’s what I want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So okay, fine. So we drive the like 15 minutes back home, which isn’t like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I said to some friends of ours, like if this is the biggest of my problems today, I’m doing pretty frigging well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But in the heat of the moment, it’s really damn frustrating. So nevertheless, we drive home. I collect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her, I take Erin’s watch off of her wrist. I leave mine on my wrist because I figured
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s the worst thing, I’ll just take it off and hand it to him. I collect the Apple Watch boxes. I put them all back in the foldy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing. for context here. As of a couple of years ago, when you get an Apple Watch and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey band, what they do is they take an Apple Watch box that has the watch and the charging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cable and nothing else, and then they put that below or above or whatever next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a band box. The same band box you would buy if you just went and bought that band
⏹️ ▶️ Casey straight out of nowhere. You know, you didn’t buy a watch, you just bought the band. It’s the same thing. They They put both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these together in like this kind of origami papery thing, and then they fold that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all up and that becomes your purchased Apple Watch. It’s very clever. But the thing is, that makes me think,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why can’t I just take the band box and bring it in and return that? Well, oh no, my friend, oh no.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So fine. Erin needed to go pick up Michaela from preschool, so she went off her way. I went back to the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store and I talked to someone who I think was a little more senior. I said, okay, I’d like to, you know, return
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or exchange these two. Oh yeah, I remember you from before. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Uh, so what ended up happening
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was they didn’t need the watches. Well, cause the impression they had given me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually the same fellow had given me earlier in the day was that I needed to literally return the watch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and potentially maybe even get a new one in order to just exchange these bands. I don’t want to return the bands.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t want to do a totally different band. I just want a different size of the same band. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I go back to do it and I have Aaron’s watch in the box. I have my box with my watch on my wrist and I say, okay, I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like to do these exchanges, please. Oh, well, we don’t have a, I forget the technical term for it, but we don’t have a starlight blue band.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have a midnight blue band. Oh, okay, fine. Can I, can I see that one, please?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I bet it looks the same. Sure enough, it looks exactly the same, but whatever. But so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they bring me the two bands that I want. And he ended up scanning a barcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the back of the Apple watch boxes, but could not have cared less whether
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not there was anything but air in those boxes. It was the weirdest thing. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like Apple has a record of my purchase and the serial numbers associated with my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchase. Like, why are we still doing this two years on? Has, am I the first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person to have bought the wrong solo loop? I can’t imagine I am. Like again, in the grand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scheme of things, it’s fine, but it was just so startling because, you know, Aaron’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little perturbed with some of the things that have been going on with her phone and her watch and whatnot. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey her Series 6, the battery life has just become atrocious over the span of two years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The battery life on her 14 Pro has actually been very disappointing to the point that she turned off the always-on display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and still is complaining about her battery life as compared to the 13 Pro. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin’s already fired up about everything. And she keeps saying to me, and she’s kind of right, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what happened to the, it just works. it easier for the customer. Like, Oh, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything is roses and daffodils. Like that’s, that’s just not the Apple today. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sucks, dude. Like that’s just not cool. And it makes me sad. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, this in the grand scheme of things, not a big deal. Like it really could be so many way worse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and so many inches, infinite ways. But I just, I miss the time when, when,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe I’m making this up, maybe it’s rose colored glasses, but I feel like I could go to the Apple store years and years and years ago. and know I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was gonna have a decent experience. Another silly example, when I picked up my phones, or her phone and my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone, when they were brand new, I got like the real, not a runaround,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not like Marco had to do at Staples back in the day, but like, oh, do you want a screen protector? No, I’m good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are you sure you don’t want a screen protector? Yes, I’m fine. Well, if you get a screen protector and we put it on ourselves,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then there’s like this super fancy guarantee from Belkin or whoever makes, no, really, I promise,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m okay. Can I offer you the gold-plated screen protector, which will protect your screen even faster?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. What about, do you want AppleCare? Are you sure you don’t want AppleCare? No, really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really, are you really sure you don’t want AppleCare? And it’s like, on the one side, the complimentary
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way of looking at this is they’re just trying to help me out. Like, and I can make a solid argument that that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey legitimately what they were trying to do, but I don’t know, man. It just felt kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of slimy. And leaving aside the fact that Californians don’t believe in lines slash queues,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leaving Leaving aside the fact that you walk in and just look like a friggin’ dummy until somebody takes pity on you and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asks what you need. Leaving all that aside, it’s just not great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in an Apple store these days. And it stinks. And I just, I feel so bad. I kept thinking to myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, the last place I lived before here is Charlottesville, Virginia, which has a bad reputation because of the gross people that came
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in and did terrible things in 2016, but is actually a very, very wonderful place to be. It’s super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey progressive. I really miss it. And Charlottesville is about an hour west of where I am. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the nearest Apple store to Charlottesville is my store. So imagine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had driven to Richmond for an hour, gone to the Apple store, wanted to exchange my band, and they say, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey screw right off. You have to go home and get your box for your Apple Watch. Like, how annoyed would I be? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s places in Virginia, which is not a small state. And granted, a lot of Virginia is relatively rural, if not very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rural, but there are places that have people. I promise, they exist. Despite what John thinks,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people exist below the Mason-Dixon. And so, like Roanoke, Virginia, Blacksburg, where I went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to school, the nearest Apple stores to these places are either mine, which is like two, two and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a half, three, three and a half hours away, or somewhere in North Carolina. Like, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can’t fathom how upset I would be if I had made one of these drives and been turned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away because he just needed to scan a barcode. It would be, it’s so off-putting, and it just, I don’t know, bums
Sponsor: Tailscale
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This week’s episode is brought to you by Tailscale. Tailscale is, to use their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey own line, a secure network that just works, which honestly is true. I’ve been a Tailscale
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey these devices are on your same tail scale network, you can communicate between them as
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Photographing a wedding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This past weekend we had a wedding in our family and people who have been listening for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very long time might remember that a long time ago my wife was a wedding photographer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and during this time I would be her second shooter. So she was the main photographer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’d be like you know standing off to the side with a long lens like sniping pictures of people when they were smiling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and not looking at me. And so we were at a family wedding and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were not the photographers. You know, they had other professional photographers there doing it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I was like, well, I might as well, you know, stick the 90 millimeter lens on my Sony and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to get some good pictures. And I also used the iPhone, the 14 Pro. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so this is the first time I had actually like used a big camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a while. So this was my Sony a7R III, I think. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a three, yeah. Yeah, I don’t think I’ve got the four. Anyway, a7R
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the 90 millimeter Sony Prime macro lens, which is an awesome lens. Extremely sharp,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco handles pretty well. A little slow to focus, but otherwise, you know, pretty good. It’s the longest Sony Prime I had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I mounted that, and I was gonna be, you know, from audience distance to everything, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couldn’t like, because there was like a real photographer there, my goal was to never be in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real photographer’s way. Because I know from having shot weddings, that’s really annoying when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someone who’s not the photographer who’s just an attendee of the wedding is walking in front of you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stealing your shot, or constantly being in your shot with their big camera sticking up. So I knew
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stay out of their way, and stay out of their shots and everything. So shot a bunch of pictures with the Sony,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I quickly wanted to pick through and edit them in some basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way and give them to them the next day. So I had kind of a quick turnaround.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So happy that I had the laptop. I had my 16 inch with the SD card slot. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what, so nice. So I popped the card out, did all that. I first tried, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, we talked a while, maybe a year or two ago, we talked about like photo ingest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps. You know, apps that would be better than Apple Photos at picking through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pictures from a camera card, like from a shoot. Like picking through and quickly like deleting the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones that were blurry, you know, you have a multi-shot burst, delete the one or two that aren’t as good and keep the other one, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being able to quickly review photos like that and like, you know, pick and choose without first importing them all into Apple Photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and having them all, you know, cluttering up your library and everything else. I remember back when we did that, I was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super thrilled with things I had tried. And then right afterwards, people all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrote in to say, try Photo Mechanic. Well, it took me a year or two, but here we are, this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the next time. So I tried Photo Mechanic. It was indeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very fast to load all the thumbnails. It was not at all for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, this is an app designed for very specific workflows that are way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more specific and needy than what I needed, which was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just want to quickly look through these photos and pick the ones that are good and then import
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them into something that can edit them in raw form to look nice. I haven’t used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Adobe Lightroom in a very long time. It was my preferred app to do that in the past. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did this on a regular basis now, I’d probably go back to it, but I didn’t even have it installed. I didn’t want to bother installing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. So I’m like, all right, let me just, I’ll pick through things with Photo Mechanic, which I eventually figured out how to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I imported them all into Apple Photos on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to edit the RAW. And I had very little time to do this. So I wanted to basically like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hit the auto light button on all of them, do a couple of minor, like, you know, mostly like pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the shadows up on the ones that needed it, you know, a couple of slight white balance tweaks, but I’m not doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy editing, you know, just some very quick basics so I can get these photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all to them and then tell them like, hey, if there’s any of these that you really love, let me know and I’ll like really do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a nice edit on them. This process reminded me of just how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco painful so much of this is. Figuring out how Photo Mechanic works and then getting these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photos into Apple Photos. And then Apple Photos, the editing interface,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has gotten a little bit less hostile over the last couple of years, but it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do things like occasionally lose the base file
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the photo. I edited about 150 photos is what I ended up with, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would go back to drag them all out as JPEGs to send somewhere, and it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only have 140. where what happened to the other ones? Or I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drag them out and it would give me an error message saying, you know, these nine files or whatever, you know, had errors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too bad. What what error? Who knows? Too bad. And so and where and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then when I eventually figured out like they were missing their originals, what happened to them? I’m doing this all like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on one Mac, like locally, like what happened to the files?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Eventually, I finally fight it and I do all my edits and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I get to the point where, okay, I’m ready to add these to the shared album, you know, that we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all putting all these photos in. I try to do it and I get a random
⏹️ ▶️ Marco error message with like an error code number. I eventually find that it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apparently an undocumented limitation that you can’t add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco raw photos to shared albums within Apple Photos. Whoopsies! Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though Apple Photos can operate on RAW, it even badges it with a little RAW icon so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know. There also seems to be no option to convert
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RAW to JPEG inside of Apple Photos. If I wanted to add these to the shared
⏹️ ▶️ Marco album, apparently I can’t do that. Well, that sucks. Okay, then give me an option to convert them to JPEGs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nope. Like, so, here’s these photos that I put in here. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sync everywhere, they’re viewable everywhere, they can be edited everywhere, but I can’t add them to a shared
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So did you like, did you retro batch them all or something like that and then re-ingest?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I exported them all out of the app by dragging into a folder, which created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco JPEGs for all of them. I deleted them all out of my photo library in raw form.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still had the original raw files, of course, but you know, deleted them out of the, out of Apple photos in raw, went to the like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, trash can whatever it’s called in Apple Photos, delete deleted them out of there. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re really gone, because otherwise it would consider them duplicates because it considers duplicates even if they’re in your trash,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks. And then finally re-imported them as JPEGs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then finally, it all was shareable and worked. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how to do that in case anybody wants to. And this whole thing just reminded me like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the weird limitations, the loss of files, which was scary, the nondescript
⏹️ ▶️ Marco error messages that didn’t give any information. Apple Photos is just horrible for anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was not shot on an iPhone. It is actively hostile towards any other camera’s photos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is especially hostile towards RAW handling, which is a shame because Apple has the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capability to do that. They had it with Aperture long ago. Photos has RAW editing built in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Frankly, if I’m really wanting to do a good job of it, I think Lightroom is a better RAW editor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But regardless, you know, it’s a separate day. This is just so hostile and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glad I don’t do this on a regular basis because it’s very frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that being said, when I looked at the pictures of that day, when I compare the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone pictures versus the Sony pictures, the Sony pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kick the iPhone pictures’ asses so hard in so many ways.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not always, mind you. Like, where the iPhone still shines, and will probably always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be better than any other camera, is areas where computational photography
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really can benefit. So that’s things like HDR, where there is massive exposure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco range in the shot. And yes, you can, like, you know, expose to the highlights and then try to bring
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up the shadows and all that. You know, you can do that with raw editing, but you have to do that. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of work and it’s still tricky and it’s still hard to achieve certain dynamic range
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like regular cameras, whereas the iPhone can do like super fast multi-shot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bursts that are merged instantly and perfectly into one shot. Like it can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do things that that’s similar cameras really can’t do still. So there were certain areas where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone camera did win, especially as light got lower.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I cranked the ISO up as far as I knew that I could and the Sony did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much as I could with high ISO, wide open shooting, image stabilization,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but in low light, the iPhone, with its computational chops, was still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to do a much better job. Obviously video, the iPhone does a much better job, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the well-lit photos I could get with that 90 millimeter lens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh my God, they looked so good and so much more detail and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such more pleasing optics, and even to some degree, more natural colors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to what the iPhone could give. It was a very good,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but frustrating experience. It was good in the sense like, I’m really glad I brought this big camera to this important event
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the family, and I’m really glad they have these nice pictures now. On the other hand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of can’t believe how crappy of an experience this still is all these years later.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, I think it was actually a better experience before iCloud photo libraries, when we just had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Lightroom versus Aperture versus iPhoto. I think things were better back then. Not in like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rose colored glasses, like I’m forgetting how crappy other things were. No, I think in this particular area, they
⏹️ ▶️ John They were definitely slower, that’s for sure. I mean, I think-
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna blame photo mechanic for your missing photo things, because I’ve literally never seen that. And I exercise
⏹️ ▶️ John photos a lot, a lot, and the exact workflow you’re describing when I’m on my Long Island vacations where
⏹️ ▶️ John I come back from the beach and then I process photos so we can see them and process 1,500, 2,000 photos in
⏹️ ▶️ John time for us to be able to see a slideshow after dinner. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m familiar with that workflow and Photos is not a great application. I complain about it all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time, but it’s never lost the base files. So I think that was a photo mechanic thing. Photos sucks
⏹️ ▶️ John at RAW. I totally agree with that. That’s why I have the external editing support where I can use like that
⏹️ ▶️ John RAW power program or Pixelmator or all sorts of other external editors,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t bother trying to do anything with RAWs in photos. I have them in photos, but when I want
⏹️ ▶️ John to do anything with them, I take them out to another program that gives me way more control over that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s where we really feel like the loss of aperture. You mentioned they have this tech or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos is still like, they don’t expose that type of stuff. I’m sure it’s doing stuff with the RAWs that’s smart under the
⏹️ ▶️ John covers and it understands that they’re RAW, but it’s not a very detailed photo editor.
⏹️ ▶️ John But for the actual edits that it’s doing to the photos, I think the very limited
⏹️ ▶️ John set of editing controls they have there, bugs aside and slowness aside, do a pretty good
⏹️ ▶️ John job of being okay. And my only suggestion that would have made things
⏹️ ▶️ John go smoother for you would have been to just avoid photo mechanic, which obviously you were trying out or whatever, but like import
⏹️ ▶️ John directly into photos. And then anytime you need to do stuff to work around the dumb limitations in the shared photo
⏹️ ▶️ John library thing whatever, rather than dragging things out to get JPEGs, select
⏹️ ▶️ John them all and do export because when you do export, A, I have more faith in that process like that it’s not trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ John some big you know drag destination API blah blah blah but it’s just like a batch process and B,
⏹️ ▶️ John then you get to pick the details of what you’re exporting so you can pick the JPEG compression level, you can pick the size, you can pick
⏹️ ▶️ John what metadata you want to include, it’s just one dialogue it’s not a big deal but I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean maybe your case doesn’t matter because you just wanted JPEGs and who cares just take the defaults but it it gives you way more control,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you could pull those JPEGs back in. I think I was aware of the RAW
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing thing, but shared photo libraries down-res everything you dump into them anyway, so it just always
⏹️ ▶️ John feels like, kind of like you’re sharing thumbnails with people. But yeah, that’s another example of how
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, it’s willing to acknowledge the existence of RAWs, but it does not prefer
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And that’s why, by the way, with my photo workflow, is I kind of do, like you know when
⏹️ ▶️ John you said, hey, if you see any of these pictures that you like, let me know and I’ll give you a good edit. The way I deal with my photos
⏹️ ▶️ John is I do all of my, everything with them with JPEGs.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then after I’ve done all of my things and I favorited them or whatever, anything that I favorited,
⏹️ ▶️ John I go pull the RAWs for those and dump them into the library. So I have the JPEG plus the RAW and the RAW
⏹️ ▶️ John is not edited, but the JPEG is. So I have like, basically like this, and this is only with the
⏹️ ▶️ John advent of your fancy camera that you sent me where I shoot in JPEG plus RAW on two separate cards at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I pull the RAWs in as the, you know, this photo is a favorite. It was good
⏹️ ▶️ John enough for me to invest all this time in editing and also I have the RAW, which I would need to re-edit
⏹️ ▶️ John to match the JPEG if I wanted to, but it’s my backstop against, like I have the best quality version of this as
⏹️ ▶️ John I can. And in practice, most of the time, if you have your JPEG settings cranked on the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera, the JPEG is fine. But every once in a while, I’ll have a favorite and be like, oh, this would be better if only I could
⏹️ ▶️ John pull those shadows up a little bit And then I chuck the JPEG and go right to the RAW. I’m like, but I can, and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so, but most of the time the JPEGs
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco are good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, I really wish, I really wish photos was better,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of ways, but better about understanding RAWs is definitely a big one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You said, Marco, that you were really pleased with the output of the big camera. Did you enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shooting on the big camera? Because when I do get out, my big camera, which is considerably less fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than what you’re talking about, I find that not only do I actually kind of enjoy shooting and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of not in several different ways. But certainly, especially like you were saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a well-lit day, because I find that for my camera, and I think it would be much,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much better with the Sony, but for my camera, which is an Olympus Micro Four Thirds, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey falls on its face when the light gets low and the iPhone is just so much better in low light. But in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey daytime, man, even my Micro Four Thirds really can capture a phenomenal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey picture. And in a lot of ways, I enjoy having something big and heavy that I have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dials and knobs and things to focus on what I’m doing. Do you enjoy that at all?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you enjoy the tea ceremony, dare I say, of having a big camera?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Or was this- It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a tea ceremony. Those knobs actually do something.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, I’m just trying to make a joke, John, Jesus. But anyway, the point is, did you enjoy using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the big camera? Do you think this would cause you to bring it out more often or was this kind of like a burden that you felt was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth it in order to get the output on the other end?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I enjoyed parts of it. I mean, in certain ways, I did feel like I was fighting with it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And part of that was just like, you know, certain choices or certain advancements that, you know, this is now a somewhat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old camera body that is missing on some of the newer stuff. Autofocus was definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one area where this was not a great combo. And I don’t know if that’s because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the lens has like, you know, it’s a macro lens. So it has a very different kind of focusing system than like a high performance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sports lens would have. So it’s, you know, it was a little slow. It often just like the camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often just shows wrong, like what to focus on. So that was not great. It was not great at tracking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco motion. Like if I was taking a subject, taking a picture of a subject, like walking down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the aisle, while they’re moving diagonally towards me or away from me. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it has to like track the focus between, you know, shutter shots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever as they’re moving, you know, since I have pushed the button to focus it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in areas like that, the actual, like the focus performance was hard. And there’s a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shots where I had the light, I had the speed, and I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco missed the focus. Because usually because of subject motion.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you do a firmware update before you went?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course not, why would I do that?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that’s too much like hard
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s too much like hard work. The software has changed significantly since you got that camera. Although it sounds like your limitation
⏹️ ▶️ John might have been the lens. That’s kind of why, like, you know, when I got my fancy lens, like I was excited to get it is the latest and greatest
⏹️ ▶️ John and their focusing motors get better and better. And it sounds like yours is just not even even when it was new, it was
⏹️ ▶️ John not really built for this purpose. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not said the software for, you know, object tracking
⏹️ ▶️ John and continuous autofocus or whatever has only improved over the years. And yeah, you should have probably done a firmware
⏹️ ▶️ John remember I talked about how I thought this camera didn’t have pet eye detection, but then I did the firmware update and it did
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, software marches on you should do right now. But check how far behind your firmware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Um, I probably better off not knowing. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John really, I was the next wedding update from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me. Like I love like the the the experience of using it like that, you know, at certain times,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you know, the lighting situation in certain times was fairly challenging, because like there was a lot of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the reception, there was a lot of backlighting because there was like a big open door. There was situations like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where I knew I wanted to manually adjust the exposure. And I knew that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by my thumb is a hardware knob, and I can just turn it and get a plus one or a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minus one exposure really easily by turning this knob three clicks, and I know I’m going to get that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s displayed in the viewfinder, and I don’t have to put it down or check or go into a menu or anything like that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having that kind of muscle memory and physical controls is extremely pleasing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re doing something like this and you can just do stuff faster. I knew that I wouldn’t have to worry about things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like storage or battery life because I knew the capacity of the camera were massive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I knew I’d be fine all day. I didn’t have to monitor everything and baby it. So all that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. I loved having quick review where I could, you know, if I took a shot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I wasn’t sure, like am I going fast enough to get this sharp? I could just hit the little play
⏹️ ▶️ Marco button and zoom right in and in two button presses I could tell instantly, did I get this, is this sharp or not?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ultimately though, I did miss a lot of the computational advantages. Like again,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the exposure, HDR, that’s what I really, really missed overall.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I did enjoy the process to some degree.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t, first of all, I’m not artistic enough or a good enough photographer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to want to do photography as a general hobby. And that’s why like for my, for almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of my day to day use, the iPhone is way more than I actually need. And I appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And I use only it almost all the time. But when there’s like a really important family
⏹️ ▶️ Marco event like this, I did really enjoy having this, you know, much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more specialized tool for the job. Even though as john said, my lens was definitely not meant for this job.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But But I really did enjoy having this there and playing this role,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in part because it meant I didn’t have to dance, because I had something else to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And in part because I knew that somebody in the family would appreciate what I was doing. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was trying to make this event better for people and make people happy. And I knew this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would do a really good job of it. And when I compare the iPhone pictures of the same event,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re fine, but they’re not great. These, they aren’t all great,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they aren’t even mostly great, but some of them are really great. And the iPhone couldn’t have gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pictures from here that were really great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, both of you were saying like, oh, the iPhone does better in low light due to computational stuff. Yeah, as long
⏹️ ▶️ John as you never look at those pixels, because it’s a mess down there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Let me tell you, that
⏹️ ▶️ John computational stuff does not come for free, and it just makes a hash out of people’s faces if you zoom in even
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit. Not that you’re pixel peeping even, but just like, if you really, like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, When we say like, oh, the iPhone did a good job in the light, it’s doing its darndest to try to make it
⏹️ ▶️ John so the people’s faces are visible and then you can see them or whatever, but they are basically oil paintings.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they’re not, it’s not, you get farther and farther away from
⏹️ ▶️ John the, you know, the photons that might hit your eye and it now becomes more like this abstract
⏹️ ▶️ John representation of what might’ve been there on the day. Which is what you want, like when you’re looking at on your phone
⏹️ ▶️ John at phone sizes, that’s exactly what you want. Hey, here’s all our friends and we’re at this concert and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John see everyone’s faces and recognize them and you can see the concert in the background and it’s all lit well enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you were to actually look at that photo on a big computer screen and see what the pixels
⏹️ ▶️ John that actually make up your friend’s face, they are a monster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, exactly. So that’s where it starts to fall apart once you actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need a lot of resolution and detail and phone cameras just cannot provide that. They can simulate it in a way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that looks really good on phone screens, which is how most of us care about stuff these days. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you have a situation like this where you want something more than that, the big cameras still win.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m still, I’m very pleased with my big camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once every three years when I actually need it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, like I said, I enjoy getting my camera out from time to time, but I find myself with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey each passing day reaching for it less and less often because it’s just, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my needs, I find that it’s just often not the best choice, especially like I said, if the light
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is anything but perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say too, David Schaub, underscore Mac in the chat, brings up the obvious question here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that whether the ProRAW 48 megapixel images on the iPhone 14
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro might be more competitive. And to be honest, I haven’t tried them yet,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but reviewers have said that the shot to shot time with ProRAW 48 megapixels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is like multiple seconds. And that’s just too slow for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of context. Like you can’t, it seems like if you’re setting up like an artistic shot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe a landscape or some kind of like still scene at night, like sure, that sounds like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great idea. But for like event photography where you’re trying to shoot a moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco event where timing matters and you can’t have somebody just do something again, it’s just too slow. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Sony can fire off multiple shots a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think it does, I think, what is it? Like 41 megapixels, your camera, and you could do like 10, at least 10
⏹️ ▶️ John frames a second in raw, I think something like that, as opposed to three seconds per frame. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reviews I saw of the 48 megapixel Ron, I had taken a bunch of them myself. It did a good comparison as they compare with the
⏹️ ▶️ John 13 pro and they like when I remember seeing was like a picture of sailboats like in a harbor or whatever and they
⏹️ ▶️ John showed the 48 megapixel next to the iPhone 13 pro 12 megapixel and you could see
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more detail on the sailboats like you really saw the sort of Mosaic e oil paint a pattern of the
⏹️ ▶️ John actual 12 megapixel sensor on the 13 pro and the 14 pro Yeah, it was noisy But like
⏹️ ▶️ John you could actually make out the various railings and lines and stuff that you could not see at all in the in the 13
⏹️ ▶️ John Pro so it you know Those 48 megapixels are doing work for you to give you more detail
⏹️ ▶️ John to make the the pictures more resilient to let’s say a crop Or you know
⏹️ ▶️ John zooming in a little bit to see the details, right? And I’m just taking some very sunny landscape
⏹️ ▶️ John photos with it in there They’re probably the photos probably aren’t good enough for me to waste 80 megabytes
⏹️ ▶️ John on them, but they do look pretty good
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#askatp: Always-on burn-in?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, let’s do some Ask ATP. We haven’t had the chance to do some in quite a while, so let’s start clear in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decks. Steve Holroyd asks, with the new always-on lock screen on the iPhone 14
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro, do you think there’s any increased risk of burn-in developing on the screens, or is burn-in no longer a potential
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem for modern iPhone screens? That’s a great question, and I think of the three of us, John, you’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most equipped, best equipped to answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the always on lock screen does try to be dimmer than the regular screen and Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John touted their color adjustments. So if you have like a person’s face on the lock
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, it will try to make the colors look lifelike even though it’s dimming, whatever it’s doing there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the key part is that they’re dimming and burn-in happens much more at higher brightness levels.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the fact that they’re dimming it down is helping to protect against burn-in. Is there an increased
⏹️ ▶️ John risk of burn-in versus a screen that’s off? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco having the screen on increases your risk of burn-in versus having
⏹️ ▶️ John a screen that’s off, especially a screen where the background isn’t changing. And your lock
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, I think maybe some of them do rotate over time, but like there’s not a lot moving or changing on your
⏹️ ▶️ John always on lock screen. And the time does change digits, but like if you have, and
⏹️ ▶️ John because the user can pick whatever picture they want, if they pick a picture that has a big
⏹️ ▶️ John bright circle on a black background or something, I think there is an increased risk of burn-in.
⏹️ ▶️ John That said, we’ve had OLED screens on phones for a while now and if there was, because it’s the iPhone and because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple, if there was any epidemic of burn-in from people just like having their status bar burn-in
⏹️ ▶️ John or playing a game constantly or having Facebook burn-in, I think we would have heard about it by now. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple’s selection of the panels for their screen and their management of the brightness levels,
⏹️ ▶️ John particularly managing them, this is what televisions do as well, managing the OLED panel
⏹️ ▶️ John within the limits that will keep burn-in away. like, because lots of these panels can go way
⏹️ ▶️ John brighter than they’re driven. But if you drive them to their absolute maximum brightness, you’re going to get
⏹️ ▶️ John burn in. Right. And so manufacturers have to choose how far do we want to push this part? And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Apple is very conservative in this regard, even with the always on screen. So we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see, you know, that the always on screens are brand new. The risk is increased. But my read on
⏹️ ▶️ John the way Apple deals with OLED screens is that they are always very conscious not to push
⏹️ ▶️ John the limits of what the panel is capable of and to avoid burning at all costs. Because as you can imagine, that
⏹️ ▶️ John would be a big story and it would be a disaster when you sell several hundred million, billion? I don’t know how many iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple sells, but it’s a lot. so they’re going to be real careful with it.
#askatp: Source control for hobbyists
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thomas Ferraro writes, I am at best a hobbyist developer. My only public facing application is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Roku TV app for the radio station that I volunteer for, the great WFMU. I am trying to do the right thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and use version control. I sometimes get lost in trying out different ways to do something and think, darn, the way I did it two days ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was better. But it seems crazy. I should branch for every line of code I write and commit every time I get something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compiles and runs. So what’s your best practice? Oh, man, how many hours do we have available?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Is this good go all day?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think, put very simply and kind of oversimplifying a bit, what I tend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do is whenever I’m doing almost anything, I like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey create a branch. Typically, I try to associate that branch with an issue in GitHub. That’s how I do issue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tracking. And then I’ll do my work in that branch. I’ll check in whenever I feel like I’m at a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decent stopping point, or I’ve made a particular, pardon the pun, but development, you know, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m at a point that I may want to fall back to later, I’ll check into that branch. And then I’m probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit bananas, but I actually quite like issuing a pull request from me to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me to get that branch merged back into main. And I will go through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that pull request, similar to how I would do it at my last jobby job, and look at the diffs, and look at what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going on. And I find that for me, that context switch of looking at the code within the GitHub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pull request, whatever, that actually really does help me find issues and bugs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and problems and so on and so forth. And so I really like that flow. I think there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a name for this, and it’s one of the like the flows that GitHub recommends. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey basically, like I said, branch when you’re doing things and issue a pull request to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things back into the main branch. And I really like that. And that really works well for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Obviously, everyone’s different. Marco, what do you like to do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my main branch, I try to keep always shippable. Whenever I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something that is like a quick bug fix, I’ll just work on the main branch and I’ll commit it when it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done. So I might be, you know, putting a commit in, you know, after a day of work, maybe or maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit more, maybe a little bit less depends. But, you know, generally speaking, like what is in the main branch is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shippable. At any moment, I can take what’s in the main branch and send it to the app store. Anything that I’m working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that may not be shippable yet. So for whatever reason, so for instance, every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco June when we get the new betas, I make a you know, I had an iOS 16 branch, and all my and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I, I branch in June and I, you know, I, that branch is built with the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new SDK. It’s built with the assumption that I’m requiring some new version of iOS, maybe 15, maybe 16.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I can start like fishing deprecations and adopting some of the new API’s and stuff like that, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, using some of the new Xcode features for the project file in that branch and everything but then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that branch is not going to get merged in until the GM or RC SDK
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is released right before the OS is released and then I merge it in and then I release it. Branches for me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are either things that aren’t going to be ready for some time like a future OS update
⏹️ ▶️ Marco experiments that I’m not sure I’m going to keep. So for instance if I’m doing like a redesign of a screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll make a branch for that or Or if I’m doing like, you know, a revamping of the sync protocol, that’s again, that’s clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a branch, because that’s something that you know, I’m not going to get into a shippable definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this kind of state for a little while, I’m going to want some commits in the meantime to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just save my work or to be able to send it to other people in test flight or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is how I use branches, I don’t branch very aggressively, nor do I commit very aggressively.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I commit when something is done, whether it’s a step along a road, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an OS thing, like a branch would be for, or whether it’s a really simple thing like, hey, I just fixed a stupid little bug that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was two lines of code. That’s a commit. But I don’t use them as aggressively
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as most people do, from what I hear.
⏹️ ▶️ John So having worked at big companies with hundreds, maybe thousands of developers and
⏹️ ▶️ John literal millions of lines of code, often in like giant mono repos.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been subjected to, let’s say, lots and lots of different ways of dealing with version
⏹️ ▶️ John control in terms of branching models, how it integrates with issue tracking, how it integrates with
⏹️ ▶️ John projects and features, and just so many different ways, many of
⏹️ ▶️ John them motivated by whatever the exciting ideas or fads or trends in the
⏹️ ▶️ John industry are. Sometimes it’s just someone has an idea. Sometimes it’s just this was the founder of the company and it’s the way they wanted to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And when I heard Casey describing his thing, I always felt like you have like Stockholm syndrome for
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’d worked in a corporate environment so long that you were reproducing that in a project that you’re just working on by yourself.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know, there are some benefits to it. But from my personal perspective is having gone
⏹️ ▶️ John through all of those different systems and branching models and different versions, pieces of version control
⏹️ ▶️ John software and everything, one of the luxuries of working on a hobby level project by yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John is you do not have to subject yourself to all of the bookkeeping that was involved with
⏹️ ▶️ John all the various branching and feature models and issue tracking that you had to do in a corporate environment
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’d have to do in a project where you work with other people. So it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John pleasant thing to realize that you’re the only person working on it and the only thing you have to worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about is what makes you feel comfortable. And to that end, most of my use of version control in my little,
⏹️ ▶️ John my dinky apps where I am the sole developer is motivated by surprise,
⏹️ ▶️ John my desire not to lose data. Which you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco not think would be a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but especially with programming, when you’re banging your head against some problem and you’re working on it for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ John I get that feeling, which is like, if my computer went up in flames now, I would not wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John have to redo or refigure out what I just figured out, right? Would I remember all the details?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because this has happened to me a few times in the past, is why I have this motivation. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it’s one of those jobs. catch a spire?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but just like you lose some work
⏹️ ▶️ John because usually through to like a carelessness back in the early days of, you know, didn’t hit save on the,
⏹️ ▶️ John and didn’t go to the floppy disk or something, you know, like all sorts of, you know, foibles where you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to redo a probing task. And you’d be surprised to, or maybe not, to see yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John go all through all the same things. You’d go into the same three dead ends you went the first time you did it. And it’s like, couldn’t I have just
⏹️ ▶️ John skipped to the end there or I went, I re-implemented the solution and I eventually figured out, no, apparently not. Apparently your brain has to make the same stupid
⏹️ ▶️ John mistakes again. So I always want to avoid that. So my strategy around version control
⏹️ ▶️ John has a lot to do with the thought that, like, where are these bits? Are these bits only on this
⏹️ ▶️ John SSD on my Mac? In that situation, you know, if you’re using Git, Git commit
⏹️ ▶️ John is not doing anything for you. Oh, I made a bunch of commits, so I know the data’s safe. No, it’s on
⏹️ ▶️ John your Mac’s SSD, and if that thing goes up in flames, oh, there goes all your Git commits.
⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta push, right? And now once you’re pushing, I’m like, oh, but if I gotta push, that gets the bits off
⏹️ ▶️ John your machine, if your origin is GitHub or whatever, gets the bits off your machine and
⏹️ ▶️ John onto another machine that is far away and hopefully not gonna go up in flames at the same time. But once you do that, you’re like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John do I wanna push things to the origin repo when I’m in the middle of stuff and I made a big
⏹️ ▶️ John mess of things, right? And that gets you into the situation where you’re like, ah, but then if I had made a branch
⏹️ ▶️ John for it, if it’s a mess, it’s fine. Like all those disciplines that are so much more important when you’re in a multi-billion
⏹️ ▶️ John dollar company with this really important giant code base with hundreds of developers, always keeping branches shippable, doing
⏹️ ▶️ John patches on maintenance branches, feature branches, all that stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of becomes important as you, an individual developer, but to give you the freedom, you should never feel afraid
⏹️ ▶️ John to push to get the bits off your machine as an individual hobbyist developer. So if to give yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John that freedom, you need to do all your work in branches, do all your work in branches. They’re lightweight, it’s not a big deal. Your repos
⏹️ ▶️ John aren’t gonna be bazillions of lines of code. Just make a branch for everything that you wanna do. And that way
⏹️ ▶️ John you can make a big mess in that branch. Have a totally non-compiling app, have it be a giant mess. That’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John whole point of that branch is that you should never feel like, oh, I’m stashing things or I’m just doing local
⏹️ ▶️ John commits. No, push, push, push, push. Check that check mark in Xcode that says, do you wanna also
⏹️ ▶️ John push to the remote repo? Yes, you always wanna push to the remote repo. Why? So if your Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John goes up in flames or crashes, or you don’t lose any data, right? And so that’s my strategy is,
⏹️ ▶️ John I never wanna be afraid to push. I do my major work in branches. I don’t have the discipline
⏹️ ▶️ John that I used to have in terms of branch management. To give an example, I’m working on a, I made a branch for a feature that
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to add to Switchglass, right? And I called, I named the branch after the feature that I wanted to add, and that branch
⏹️ ▶️ John became my 2.0 branch. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s not a thing. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a thing that would ever happen in the disciplined world of, you know, corporate software. Because that’s just not, you
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t accidentally find it. But if you’re a single person working on an app, whatever. Like, I’d already, to implement
⏹️ ▶️ John the feature, I’d already destroyed the app and made it totally broken and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco non-functional and everything about
⏹️ ▶️ John it, right? So at that point, you know, and once I got the feature working, I’m like, ah, this is just gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be the 2.0 branch. That is a luxury you have as a lone hobbyist developer. No one’s gonna tell you,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, you shouldn’t do that. You should make a separate branch for that. And no, tough luck. I’m just doing it in the one branch that I have here.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know, as I get closer, I will push this up to the main line. I will probably pull off a 1.x branch.
⏹️ ▶️ John Unfortunately, the Mac App Store policies don’t allow me to do same things like continuing to maintain and patch 1.X.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can you imagine? Can you imagine if the Mac App Store understood the type of model? Especially since
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the reasons I’m not releasing 2.0 is because I have to bump the minimum system version. So I would love to keep 1.0 alive and well
⏹️ ▶️ John and patched for people with older OSes, but the Mac App Store does not have anything to do with it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John enough ranting about Apple’s stupid policies. My advice is take advantage
⏹️ ▶️ John of the things that you can do as a hobbyist developer that you couldn’t working in large teams, but
⏹️ ▶️ John also try to make sure your bits are at least in more than one place.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and I think you hit the nail on the head earlier. Like, yes, I can totally understand how my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey process and procedures that I’ve set for myself could feel overblown to, sounds like both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of you. And maybe it is, but I’ve found that what I like to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the bare minimum that makes me feel confident that I can always undo an oops. And I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not saying that I’m right for you or anyone else, but for me, I found that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I have several different features that I’m juggling at once, I have definitely done the thing where, oops,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this branch is now the branch like you were describing, John. But generally speaking, I like to be able to go back and forth in different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey branches to different features to work on different things and so on. I like having GitHub
⏹️ ▶️ Casey issues to keep track of what I need to do and the rough order in which I need to do it. So all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of these are to give me just an array of parachutes that I can rely upon, so that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no matter how bad I am at my job, which sometimes is very bad, or how dumb I am, which sometimes is very dumb,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I always have some parachute I can latch onto and save myself from myself.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s all this is for me. And you were kind of saying that, John, that whatever your particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey threshold is, that’s what you should do. And then that’s where I ended up. And I found that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I cheat and when I don’t kind of follow my own rules, I almost always end up regretting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. And I think that whatever your rules may be, you should stick with them and do what you think is best.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And really quick, real-time follow-up. I only glanced at it because I’m trying to record a podcast right now, but I believe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that GitHub Flow is what GitHub calls the kind of process I use. And I’ll put a link in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assuming it’s not garbage when I read it later, that kind of describes the basic gist of
⏹️ ▶️ John And part of the, when you do pull requests yourself, part of that is just sort of making an excuse slash mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ John to use reviewing tools that you prefer. because technically you could review in the little Xcode window
⏹️ ▶️ John and you push, right? But maybe that interface sucks. Maybe you can’t annotate, blah, blah, blah. And then you’re like, I would prefer,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so much easier to review and annotate in GitHub with a pull request. So make yourself a pull request.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s just, you don’t, if the only reason you’re doing this to use the tool, that’s a perfectly good reason. Because if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how you prefer to use it. And in terms of being able to get back to a point in time, I wish I knew Git as well as I know other
⏹️ ▶️ John version control systems, but I do have confidence that if there is something I wanna do with Git, as long
⏹️ ▶️ John as I actually did commits and pushes and so on and so forth, I can
⏹️ ▶️ John get to any point in time. I mean, I’ll have to Google first, because I never remember how to do anything in Git,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I know the data is safe. I know because I committed and I know because I always push that all that stuff is in
⏹️ ▶️ John repo, in a branch, in desperation, I can get back to any point in time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s, I guess that’s the other advice is, you have to actually use version control. Even if you don’t have my paranoia
⏹️ ▶️ John about, you know, losing data. If you just like work all day on a file and just
⏹️ ▶️ John rewrite it and rewrite it, rewrite it and rewrite it in Xcode, and then do a commit at the end of the day, the
⏹️ ▶️ John 15th rewrite in the middle of the day is actually gone, right? Like you don’t have that
⏹️ ▶️ John anymore. So do actually commit at any point where you think I may ever want to get back to
⏹️ ▶️ John this data. Whether or not you push, you can base on your paranoia or whatever, but you have to commit. That’s one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ John why when I use BBEdit, I have a feature enabled in BBEdit that I’ve used since its introduction, much is
⏹️ ▶️ John literally every time I hit save and BB edit it saves a copy of the file as it
⏹️ ▶️ John existed I think as existed before I hit save I forget which one it is I was confused but anyway it saves
⏹️ ▶️ John a copy of a file and do another folder on my hard drive it’s called the BB edit backups folder and it’s organized
⏹️ ▶️ John by date and that folder has a lot of files in it
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey oh wow that’s one
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s one literally every time I’d say that’s one of the ways when I did like my ebooks from my Mac OS 10 reviews
⏹️ ▶️ John I could tell you like how many times I hit save on a a document or how many
⏹️ ▶️ John times I did a thing, because I would just count the BBI to backup files for a thing. And that has saved my butt
⏹️ ▶️ John so many times. That is not version control. That’s what people did before version control. I’m not recommending this as a form of version control.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just saying, you’re not gonna use version control for a random text file you’re gonna make, but
⏹️ ▶️ John having the ability, always knowing that you can go back to something, you have to actually hit that save. And in Git, hitting that save
⏹️ ▶️ John is stash or commit. So do that.
#askatp: Using your own dev builds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, finally, Nick Clinch writes, as a developer, do you use the production version or the latest beta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of your own apps for daily use? If you use the production versions, do you subscribe to your own in-app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchases to get all the features? Yes, of course, if one uses your own app, you subscribe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your own stuff. But generally speaking, I’ll use betas on my phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just because I want to test the latest and greatest. What are you doing? Well, John, it’s not your phone, but what are you doing on your Mac?
⏹️ ▶️ John I do run, I try to run whatever my dev version is, like that I’m working on
⏹️ ▶️ John and it helps with my programs that they literally run all the time like they’re always resident. I run them 24 hours
⏹️ ▶️ John a day and I’m always running whatever is the the latest thing. So luckily with the advent
⏹️ ▶️ John of TestFlight for the Mac, I’m running the TestFlight versions of all my apps, but sometimes that’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ John latest. When I’m actually doing active development, I’m working on the app for days or weeks without submitting
⏹️ ▶️ John a TestFlight build because I’m making a mess of it and I force myself to run like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m dog footings, whatever crap I’m doing, which means that I have to make it so it like, it doesn’t crash
⏹️ ▶️ John or you know, whatever. But I want to be running that all the time, just because if there’s some weird problem that only happens after like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, running it for 72 hours straight, I need to find it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What are you doing, Marco with overcast?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pretty much the same thing. You know, I don’t run beta builds. I run dev builds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey means like, whatever to say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, whatever the last version was that I hit build and run from Xcode onto to my phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I’m running. Oftentimes, it’s hilariously broken, and I consider that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a motivator to fix it. It’s a critical part of my QA, such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it is, process. Anything that I change, I know is going to affect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me directly for days or weeks or months afterwards. I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make sure that whatever I’m working on, I am using to give me the highest chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of catching any bugs or problems or shortcomings before I ship it even to beta users, let alone to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all of my customers. I am my first beta tester, and I’m always running the absolute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco latest version I can run, which is the last thing I wrote. It’s on my phone. Thanks to our sponsors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week, Green Chef, Memberful, and Tail Scale. And thank you to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our members who support us directly. You can join at atp.fm slash join, and hear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the current last version of the ATP Movie Club, and who knows what else we’ll think of in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the future. Not to mention you get the bootleg feed, ad-free episodes, all sorts of fun stuff. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thank you very much to all of you, and we will talk to you next week.
Special ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now that the show is over, it’s time to give to St. Jude’s.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re funding research, curing diseases.
⏹️ ▶️ John year you get a new iPhone, now think about the
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll do when you’re funding
⏹️ ▶️ John for childhood diseases. Our friends
⏹️ ▶️ John at Relay organize this annually. It’s time to do your
⏹️ ▶️ John part and give directly to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-T-J-U-D-E-C-H-I-L-D-R-E-N-S-R-E-S-E-A-R-H-C-H-O-S-P-I-T-A-L
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fund the research If they’re curing diseases,
⏹️ ▶️ John The link is in the show notes now.
Post-show: Running servers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I mentioned, I don’t even know if this made it on the released version of the show, but I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several weeks ago, I think it was right before we did our Apple event
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show, so like the Monday before, I decided that that was the most appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time to flip the switch and move from Heroku to Linode. So for some context, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey website ran on Heroku since my website existed, so that was like 2013, 2014.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I chose Heroku because I wanted something that nerds that I knew seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like, and Heroku at the time at least was very much that. I wanted something that seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it was fairly straightforward for me to use, which here again, Heroku definitely check that box. I wasn’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interested in doing any of what I would call the lower level maintenance of owning a server. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have to worry about software updates, I don’t want to have to worry about any of the administrivia,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t have to worry about hardening the server or anything like that. I just want to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what basically amounts to two Node apps that I could throw over the wall and would run.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Heroku did that for me for almost eight years, something like that. But then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much like my AT&T to Verizon story, Heroku justifiably decided that they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were no longer going to allow any free they call their processes, Dynos, D-Y-N-O.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They weren’t going to allow free Dynos, which was fine for my website because I was paying $7 a month for that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I needed, at the time, and maybe this isn’t true anymore, but at the time I started paying for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it, it was because I really wanted to support SSL, and in order to do that, you needed to have a level
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Dino that was not free. I think what mine was called was Hobby, if I’m not mistaken, so it’s not particularly powerful,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not particularly robust, but it’s enough that they’ll let you, you know, do a Let’s Encrypt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certificate, or perhaps a certificate of your own that you bring to them. So I was paying $7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a month for my website, And then the show bot that gathers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey titles from IRC as we’re recording, that was on a separate dyno that was running
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on their free plan. And they said a month or two ago, Hey, FYI, in the next several months, we’re going to start charging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for free dynos. It’s not going to be free anymore. And it occurred to me, okay, I’m already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey paying more than the either $5 or $6 a month that Linode charges for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their most basic VPS. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why don’t I just see if I can move all of this to Linode? Because it seems like that should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be something that I’m capable of. And I don’t plan to go through the in and out of everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s involved in that. But I thought I’d call just a couple of things out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as things that I thought were interesting or unique. First of all, I haven’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey done anything with a raw Linux server in like a decade plus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this whole process, I don’t know if you gentlemen remember this, but this whole process started with me asking the two of you,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what are people using for Linux servers now? Like, are we still on Ubuntu? Is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still a thing? Because last time I was paying attention, that’s what I was using.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, and this is totally fair, like when you are setting up a new server that you haven’t done in a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the first question everyone asks. What distro do I get? Of course, that’s a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing to not know if you haven’t been in it, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. And I actually should say that even though the two of you are dear, dear,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dear, some of my best friends in the world, nevertheless, I felt like such a dunce coming to you like hat in hand, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, puss in boots style, like, guys, what do I do? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s been so long, I need help. And we’re going to talk a little more about that in a minute. But you were both very gracious,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I very much appreciate that you didn’t make fun of me. Like I probably would have done to you too, if the roles were reversed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I appreciate you not poking fun at a time of need. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had a few different, several different balls in the air, plates spinning all at the same time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey One of the things I realized is that my website, it’s this custom software that I wrote for myself, as the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three of us and many others want to do. Honestly, I don’t have any particular love for this engine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I wrote in 2014. And if I wasn’t so lazy, I would probably start using something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different, either like a package. I would probably start by really at least looking at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John Sundell’s engine. I forget what it’s called now. It’s on my head, but right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now it’s a node app. And at the time in which I started to want to go down this road,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was still using node version four. And of the three of us, John would probably know even better than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I that node version four is quite old now. Like very, very old. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know exactly when, but it is quite old. John, you don’t, you don’t have any idea when that was from, do you?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s old even to my ears. I don’t even know if we used that version of Node ever
⏹️ ▶️ John at work. I think by the time my old
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey job, when we started using Node,
⏹️ ▶️ John we were past that. What are they on now? Like 20-something, 30-something? I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey thought it was 12, but maybe I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wrong about that. I don’t even recall anymore. No, I’m farther along than that. LTS
⏹️ ▶️ John is 16, current is 18. OK, so there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anyway, so I knew I needed to upgrade from Node 4.x to whatever is current.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It sounds like 16 or 18. Another thing that I needed to worry about is certificates because I was using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s Encrypt at Heroku, but I needed to do something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else. Because unless I’m missing something, and perhaps if I was using a load balancer or something fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, maybe it would be a little more magic. But I was going to have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figure out how to use certificates. The way that Heroku worked is you basically had them figure things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out with Let’s Encrypt, and I forget the terminology, Marco, jump in when you’re ready, but they would terminate the SSL
⏹️ ▶️ Casey connection at their stuff, and then just roll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unencrypted internally in their own network and ask my server or my process for things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So now I need to handle this myself. I need my node instance to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey deal with certificates. Then finally, I have a server that is on the Internet, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey granted, I will try to do the obvious things to lock it down, but there’s a lot of non-obvious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things I probably need to do to harden this. And Marco really saved my bacon on that in particular.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But… Well, no, Linux saved your bacon on that one. Because the reality is like, all modern Linuxes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are pretty good with pretty minimal setup in terms of like, internet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ready security. Like you have to basically like, yeah, you know, make SSH not take passwords. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about all you have to do. Like, there’s not like everything is pretty secure by default these
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s fair, but you gave me a lot of good tips. And I don’t remember the specifics, but I took copious notes for future Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because current Casey has already forgotten. But you gave me a lot of great notes of things that you do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for your servers, which were genuinely extremely, extremely helpful, and I really appreciate it. The upgrade from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Node 4.x to whatever I’m on now was actually surprisingly straightforward. I had to change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very little code, which was stunning to me. I assumed I was going to have to rewrite half the STAM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey engine. And I had to change almost nothing, which was great. Getting the certificate squared away,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it? Certbot is the command line tool that seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco is the… Yeah, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco acme.sh is like the Certbot client or
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey You were saying the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John When you did the big node upgrade though, did you happen to run NPM audit?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did, yes, I did. And it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John was a mess. And what did that say?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it said that everything was broken and it was a miracle that my server was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not on fire.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just a giant security hole. Basically, yeah. But here again, like upgrading everything, which took
⏹️ ▶️ Casey several incantations and it took me several tries, But upgrading everything, for the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey part, I had to change so very little code. I’m still stunned by that. And I am, at last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I looked anyway, I’m auditing cleanly. I’m on node either 16 or 18. I forget which one off the top of my head. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hardened the server. I turned off passworded log.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re auditing cleanly. Did you, you didn’t have to do any major version breaking change updates to packages?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, I absolutely did, but it didn’t break my code. Like I’m stunned by it. I’m telling you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know, I’m very impressed. Either that or I’m totally wrong, either is possible. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m pretty sure I’m on latest and greatest of basically everything and it was fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway, yeah, so now I’m doing certificates with a combination of CertBot or Acme.sh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever it is. And piping and pumping those certificates into Node and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Node is looking for these certificates on the file system so it can use them appropriately. And all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in all, it seems good. Let me be clear, wonderful listeners who we love so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much and value incredibly. This is not an invitation to hack me. I am not looking for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asking you. I am not asking you to do like we did when the show bot was new and try to break it in every
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way imaginable. No, thank you. No, you do not get a sticker for breaking me. No, you do not. You might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get a thank you if you break me in a very gentle way and explain how to fix it. Maybe you’ll get a thank you, but even still,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey please, just no, not a challenge. Challenge not accepted. Challenge not offered, challenge not accepted. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had to do all these things And granted Linode is a past and I’m sure future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sponsor. I got to tell you, it is really nice. And for another project,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I inherited something that was on DigitalOcean. And it is not as nice if you ask
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me on DigitalOcean. Like I, I really liked the way Linode works. They think the way my brain thinks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Their, their tools are very robust and reasonably straightforward. This isn’t an ad for Linode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but hand to hand to God, like I really did enjoy it quite a bit. I wanted to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very briefly about sponsor of this episode. This is purely coincidental because this has been in the show notes for literally a month.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I am using Tailscale on this server, which is super cool. As I briefly talked about in the sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read, which you may or may not have heard, Tailscale is basically like, let’s put all of your devices on the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey virtual network. So any of these devices can talk to any of the other devices, despite the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my server is at Linode and my home computer is at home on Verizon Fios. we can talk to each
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other and it’s transparent. It’s as though we’re on the same network, which is super duper cool and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really like. Is it necessary? Well, no, maybe not in this particular context, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in other contexts, I think it would be necessary. Either way, it’s still just very, very convenient and I really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dig it. But one of the perks of doing all this is that in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey room, may or may not have noticed this recently, but now the ShowBot can roll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on SSL. It can be HTTPS. For those who don’t listen to the chat, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this robot that lives in IRC and you can go to, it used to be http://www.caselist.com.showbot,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you would see the titles that people suggested in semi-real-time. I could never
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put that behind SSL or behind, it was never secure because I was running on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a free dyno at Heroku. Maybe I could have done something to make this work, but I never really cared enough. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, I’m on my own server, baby and virtual or not, I can do this all myself. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I’m doing. So for the last few weeks, even the show bot is now HTTPS colon slash
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash, etc. So that’s really cool and I dig that. But finally, the thing that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think blew my mind the most about this, was I remember hearing some vague
⏹️ ▶️ Casey smattering about how Visual Studio Code, which is my preferred editor for doing web-related things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can do some sort of like you attach to something, and then magic happens
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you’re editing stuff on the server, even though you’re running it locally or something
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you never used this feature of Visual Studio Code? I thought this is why you loved it so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No. What I would do in the past is I would run an instance of node locally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like not even in Docker or anything like that, it would just straight up be a local instance of node running my website locally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I would edit the local file system using Visual Studio Code. It was all local.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Everything about it was local. So I went digging into how to make this work and it seems to me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that there are several different ways of this happening. Maybe John, you know better than me. But there’s several different ways to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But what I landed on and oh my gosh, it is so cool, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because Visual Studio Code is an electron app, which 99 percent of the time stinks. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really not like the fact that it’s electron. Well, you don’t notice it with code, but electron apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tend to be pretty bad. I’m not going to say anything nasty about one password because I donated a lot of money to St.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jude recently. But let’s just say that I’m not in love with some of the things that have gone to Electron recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, or excuse me, code has always been Electron and I almost never noticed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can from time to time, but it’s very rare that I notice. Well, hey, guess what? What is an Electron app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really running in behind the scenes? A browser. So what if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hosted this Electron app in a browser? So there’s a way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can run Visual Studio Code server on the command line. So I can SSH into my Linode box,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey run a command that starts up a Visual Studio Code server, and then I just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey load a bespoke URL that it spits out on the command line. Suddenly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m running a full bore instance of code. I’m running it in a browser
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the browser is running locally, but Visual Studio Code is running on the Linode box, and I’m making my edits.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m debugging, I’m doing everything on the Linode box. Then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wanted to upload a picture, an image. I thought, oh man, now I’m going to have to SCP it and blah, blah. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wonder what happens if I try to do this in code. Sure enough, I can upload stuff via Visual Studio Code,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey running in the browser, running against my Linode box. This is the coolest freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing I’ve ever seen. As much as I love to slag on Electron, and oh boy, do I love
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to slag on Electron, This is Electron at its finest. It is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey freaking cool. Yes, I know there are other ways to do this. I know that you can mimic your file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system via SSH, and you can do all these other sorts of things. But having a full-bore IDE
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is for all intents and purposes running remotely, but you’re interacting with it with a mouse and a keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and whatnot and copy and paste locally, it is so freaking cool. If you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not familiar with this, you got to look into it because it is amazing. Again, not for everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have a feeling that neither of you guys are interested in that. And I don’t mean that dismissively. You’re older school, you’ve been doing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this longer, you’ve done more web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John stuff than me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Older school, yeah, I did this already when it was called X Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I take your point. And I don’t mean that dismissively. I’m not saying this is the best approach for everyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but holy cow, it was super freaking cool and I love using it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I would suggest though, because the downside of this is you got to run it in a in a browser or whatever, there are lots of, I mean, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they have for, they might have them for Lint or whatever, but like Visual Studio Code’s plugin system is such that there
⏹️ ▶️ John are these beefy plugins that essentially shove a bunch of node
⏹️ ▶️ John code onto your Linux machine or whatever, that runs all sorts
⏹️ ▶️ John of stuff on the Linux machine, but still communicates with your local instance of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey VS Code. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s what I had initially set out to do, but I must have screwed it up somewhere because that’s not where I ended up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, for what you’re doing, you maybe don’t need something that heavy weighted, but it really depends on like, it’s especially handy if
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re running more complicated things. So obviously Visual Studio Code is still running locally, but tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of node code that is part of the plugin. Like if you go look at what like it shoved, because you know, it’s just, good thing
⏹️ ▶️ John about node is it’s just text files on the file system. It shoves them in there and you can look at what it,
⏹️ ▶️ John threw onto your remote server. And then it’s got a language server going, it’s got the debugger server going,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re talking over the network, and it’s like you’re doing everything locally, except you get to run Visual Studio Code
⏹️ ▶️ John on your M1 processor while the debugging stuff and everything happens over on the machine where
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re debugging. And the experience is similar to using what you’re doing in the browser, except that you, in
⏹️ ▶️ John theory, get the advantage of running some stuff on your local machine, which is way faster than the CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John cycles you’re getting on a shared server.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, totally, totally. So here again, the names for all these are so terrible. So Visual Studio Code, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. that’s the general IDE slash editor or whatever. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have this right. So what I stumbled upon and ended up running and what I’ve been talking about is Visual Studio Code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Server. What I think you’re talking about is Visual Studio Code Remote Development,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is what I had set out to use and then ended up just accidentally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ending up on Visual Studio Code Server. It’s been working pretty darn well for me. It’s not perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by any means, but it works pretty well. So maybe I should try this VS Code remote development thing. I’ll put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey links for both of these in the show notes. Again, I’m not trying to say it’s for everyone. I’m not trying to say it’s for either of you too,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I just thought it was super freaking cool. Oh man, the way that things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have progressed over the last 10 years, since I’ve really, 15 maybe, since I’ve been running a Linux server.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s just all so cool and so slick, and I’m so glad that these tools exist. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tailscale, which admittedly is a sponsor, but I was using them before they sponsored. Linode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously I wasn’t aware of them until John, excuse me, that Marco had talked about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I chose to use Linode. I’m paying Linode my own money. Like this is not a sponsorship for them. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey choosing to do that. So yeah, I mean, this stuff is also cool. And again, I really do appreciate both of your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey help, especially Marco, sent me a lot of really good tips and tricks and whatnot that really, really saved me a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole ton of time and hopefully a whole lot of, you know, burdensome learning from learning the hard way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I don’t know, I just thought it was super cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John tuned in five years when Casey goes serverless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, you never know. Could happen. See, now my job, now that you’ve moved into servers, my style, I need to leave them now. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I need to go serverless.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Next thing you know, Marco’s gonna be running Docker, Kubernetes, or something like that. Weirder things have happened.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m trying to get myself out of the server business, not weirdly more into it. Yeah, you should go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco serverless. Yeah, but what does that mean? I feel like that doesn’t mean what I think it means.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, what I think it means is I’m no longer running services. But that’s not what that
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, you’re using managed services, most of which should not involve your software running on a persistent
⏹️ ▶️ John server virtual or otherwise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, which means that they are going to manage their way into taking all of my money.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, part of it is it actually can be cheaper because you’re only paying for what you’re using. But anyway, you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco got to get your data. Spoiler,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at my scale, it’s very, very, very much not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John cheaper. You’ve got to get all your data out of your database before
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do stuff like this. Yeah, I’m currently looking into that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I’m really, I’m so close to just saying eff it, I’m gonna use CloudKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’ve just heard so many. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s the solution. I know, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John like I’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of mixed things about that, and so I’m not.
⏹️ ▶️ John But DynamoDB, maybe look into that. Put that into Google search.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I need to really do some soul searching here and figure out like do I really want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be running what I’m running now? Like the other day, normally my servers are very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stable and they normally need very little babysitting. Like I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey just went on- This sounds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a Casey setup if I’ve ever heard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco one. Oh my goodness. But like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just went on this wedding weekend, where I was traveling for almost a week, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between various family events surrounding it. And at no time did my servers need any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attention whatsoever, except when I first arrived upstate. When
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, I’m upstate, in the middle of nowhere, no cell reception, everything I started unpacking my stuff, my laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets on Wi Fi, and it starts exploding with alerts. What is going on? And for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some reason, out of the blue on a random weekday, my primary database
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server is having extreme high load, and everything it’s maxing out its connection limit and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco connections are dropping and things are failing. And what is going on? I spend the next
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, 1520 minutes trying to figure out what’s going on trying to alleviate It started shutting down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-essential services and stuff so I can let it recover a little bit. And eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I shut some stuff down for a little while, like non-essential stuff. The load eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it started to come down. I’m like, you know what, just in case, let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. It’s already barely working. I might as well reboot it, take the downtime, and maybe it’ll come back up in a better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state. So I rebooted it, it comes back up, still under a very heavy load for the first 10 minutes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way past cash warmup kind of time. And then the load just falls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back down. And it fixes itself. And I re-enable all the non-essential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services and everything just goes back to normal. I’m like, what the hell was that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, I still have no idea what it was.
⏹️ ▶️ John You have insufficient monitoring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I looked at all the monitoring and I’m like, there was not an increase in traffic. There was not an increase in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reported, even memory usage. Like, it’s like, I have no clue what that was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That never happens, except, oh, it just happened, like in the middle of, or in the beginning of this vacation, I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take, like, and again, normally, this is, but like, this is the kind of stuff, like, the amount of stress
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that brought me, and like, you know, intrusion into my life that brought me, I’m like, you know what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what can I do to reduce my reliance on this kind of stuff? Like, how can I design my service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in such a way that I’m lightening the load on the servers?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but if it was CloudKit, you wouldn’t even be able to do the things that you did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey true. Yeah, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’ve heard so many things about what happens with random Apple ID
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sign-outs. I still, I actually do use CloudKit in the app. It’s just for a very insignificant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the app. It’s the part where when you first log in to a brand new installation of Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it checks for a list of your accounts that you’ve used in the past. That list,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is basically a list of login tokens, is stored in CloudKit. So it says, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your Apple ID is, here’s the accounts I know about you. Because I’m trying to not use email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and password for most accounts, so they’re mostly just anonymous tokens. And they’re stored in Cloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kit, so they’re associated with your Apple ID. I get so many weird crash reports
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from that screen. From random Cloud Kit record deep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the stack trace where my app is nowhere to be found. Random crash reports. This is the simplest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible use of this thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John The data volume is not high.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Right. So that’s why I think I don’t necessarily know if I want to do that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s a lot of things in between Cloud Kit and what I’m currently doing, which is a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy database setup.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m going to pitch you to move away from relational for most of your stuff. I think a lot of your data,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially the vast majority of your data, I would imagine, is not actually relational. So you could get
⏹️ ▶️ John away with a scalable document store with a managed service and a scalable document store that will let you sleep
⏹️ ▶️ John much better at night and keep the relational stuff into a basically fixed
⏹️ ▶️ John size smaller relational thing with a good cache in front of it and that will really alleviate
⏹️ ▶️ John your problems at the price of making you learn AWS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a big price.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price. Well and not to mention the big price of actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John paying for it. I think you
⏹️ ▶️ John can absolutely run your service for like one-eighth of the money but finding that solution again it’s an RPG,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s going to be a quest. But absolutely, you could maybe cut it down by
⏹️ ▶️ John an order of magnitude. It’s just a question of finding the right arrangement.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And then, by the way, rewriting your
⏹️ ▶️ John whole app to work with that. Ha ha.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. But there’s a lot of options between that. Because this is inherently what used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be called shardable or partitionable, you don’t need a lot of cross-user data
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access. So because of that, there are better things could be doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, but you don’t need that to be relational at all. And once you give that up, there are these easy, managed,
⏹️ ▶️ John scalable data stores that cost pennies on the dollar of what you’re paying for this monster MySQL instance, even if you sharded
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s, yeah, that’s fair. But when I look at them, a lot of them, they’ll charge like per read or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco write, or there’s some other gotcha in the pricing that would kill me.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re cheaper than you think. But anyway, well, it’s a big project. I’m not making this,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not easy. But there is a solution out there. I’m pretty confident. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a question of how much effort do you want to put into that and how much money you’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save on it. Yeah. But honestly, anything that I do to massively re-architect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how I’m storing stuff to reduce my server dependence, Cloud Kit really is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something to seriously consider because I’m already tied to Apple IDs with my anonymous logins.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m already using it. And so if I can figure out how to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its monsters, I would much rather go that direction and have my I still have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco servers for things like feed crawling but my ideal outcome would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be that my servers contain no user data that the user data is all in cloud kit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and that my servers are only doing public data like the feed index
⏹️ ▶️ John cloud kit is the obvious solution if it wasn’t for all the horror stories I hear about it
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah and the complete
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you you have. Well, and to be fair, I wouldn’t do their magical, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to sync your database for you, connect core data to Cloud Kit. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that I’ve heard horrible things about. Yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the problem is always, hey, it’s not working, and we have no visibility
⏹️ ▶️ John into why, and we can’t do anything about it to fix. And in some ways, that’s refreshing. It’s like, well, it’s not my problem. But it
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of is your problem, because now your users can’t use your app, and all you can say is, it’s not working,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s nothing I can do about it. no user wants to hear that from the developer of their app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, although to be fair, if I design it right and the failure case is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, I can’t get your data to sync back to Cloud Kit, well, most of my users
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only use it on one device. So if the sync is not working well for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them in some edge case context, that actually might not matter to most of my users. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not going to be the failure. The failure is going to be like you said, some crash deep inside some Cloud Kit API. You’re like, how could that
⏹️ ▶️ John ever crash? It’s like, well, it is. And every time I launch my app and try to play, it instantly crashes.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s only so much you can do with defensive programming to not make that happen. Because it’s like, look, if I have to call this
⏹️ ▶️ John API to check for a thing and that crashes, it takes down my whole app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or it’s like some background thread throwing an exception. Like, well, I can’t do anything about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not your code. It’s not your code at all. You don’t have the source code to it. You can’t fix it. You don’t know why
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s crashing. That’s the worst situation to be in for something as critical to your app. And that’s why people
⏹️ ▶️ John get fresh. Not because it’s unreliable or bad. It’s very reliable and very good, but when it does have
⏹️ ▶️ John a problem, you feel completely powerless because you are. You don’t have the source, it’s not your stuff, you don’t control
⏹️ ▶️ John the server side, you don’t control the client side, you don’t control anything about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But can’t you say a lot of that same stuff about managed services?
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of, but managed services, like there’s something you can do about it, even though they are managed,
⏹️ ▶️ John like first of all, there’s managed and unmanaged versions of everything, and so worst case scenario, if the managed service
⏹️ ▶️ John is not working for you, you can just take it and go to the unmanaged version of it. And second, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not as opaque as Apple. Like, even if it’s just as simple as like, hey, it’s an open source product. So like
⏹️ ▶️ John you actually do have the source code and can run a local instance of it and can try to reproduce the crash
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever. Like that’s, you can’t do that with CloudKit. It’s not open source. They’re not using, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John they probably are using open source things behind the scenes but like you don’t have access to it in the same way as even the
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote proprietary things that are running in public clouds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See right now, look, I just checked my status page. Nothing’s been going on. Everything’s been fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And for some reason, my replica databases in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my main cluster are behind by like eight minutes. Like they’re normally, you know, zero seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Marco behind. Sometimes they fall behind by eight minutes or some, you know, who
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re running on the ragged edge of what are this hardware can handle for you and what could it be? Who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But I’m not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The replicas are doing almost nothing. They’re only replicating
⏹️ ▶️ John the rights. Somebody’s doing something. contending for a latch inside the MySQL replication code or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This is like, this is, this is, so annoying to deal with stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MySQL 8, this is what’s driving me, MySQL 8’s gonna make me leave servers. Like that’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s gonna make me quit the business. This stuff never happened with MySQL 5, ever, it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be worse, could be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s true. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John so many things that can go wrong inside these databases. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco god, I need to get out of this business. Like this is, this is the kind of problem, this is infuriating. Like, what can I do about this? Nothing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder what will happen first? Will I switch to Postgres or stop running servers?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not entirely sure if Postgres is going to solve your problem here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, my friend, I have no experience with it whatsoever. And everyone always tells me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how like the Postgres people say it’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, it is. I love it. It’s my favorite database. Node Contest I’ve used. I think I’ve used all the major current
⏹️ ▶️ John relational databases, Postgres is by far my favorite. But when you
⏹️ ▶️ John push any database, you start to need to either become or have a database guru who can
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out how to get your thing to scale the way you want it. But at least Postgres, I feel like Postgres is
⏹️ ▶️ John consistent and understandable. Unlike, let’s say Oracle,
⏹️ ▶️ John just understandable to some people, definitely not consistent. And there’s not so many
⏹️ ▶️ John dark corners. But at Postgres in my experience because of that. It’s like, it’s straightforward,
⏹️ ▶️ John but, and you’ll get the straightforward scaling you expect. You’ll be like, yeah, but what if I want it to be
⏹️ ▶️ John better? And it’s like, nope, this is the way it goes. I can explain to you why it’s this way and it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be consistently this way. It’s like, yeah, but I wish it was better or faster in some way. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John get a bigger server? And that’s, and MySQL is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we can be super fast and most of the time until something goes wrong And then who knows what’s going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I feel like Postgres would give you worse performance
⏹️ ▶️ John in a more consistent way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is like, you know, my favorite database engine by far, frickin SQLite.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It never gives me problems. The only thing is I can’t do this like
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot scale. Did I tell you this time when I was doing messing with SQLite, it uses my toy database thing
⏹️ ▶️ John for stuff at work. And I was trying to do like a scale test on it. let me tell you, once you get a few million rows
⏹️ ▶️ John into SQLite, it falls over. I mean, it’s not what it’s for, but it falls over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard. I mean, it’s, it’s incredible at a lot of things. And it can do high traffic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on smaller stuff for sure. But it’s, it’s, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s, it’s not made for currency,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? It’s not made for like a client server thing. We have a whole bunch of, you know, server processes. It can’t do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it can’t do concurrency. But even with just a single user, you get millions of rows into SQLite. It
⏹️ ▶️ John says no, it just falls over performance goes off a cliff. and it’s, you know, that’s that’s not what it’s for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but man, it’s, I love it, because it never gives me problems, like, because really, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you look at like what I’m running, like I’m running, you know, a very large server side, my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SQL installation, a few of them, actually, a few different clusters doing different things. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all of my client side app installations, that’s all against SQLite.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the servers are basically just syncing changes between your different instances of SQLite between your different devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I would say Overcast is in a way more dependent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on SQLite than on anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John way. Imagine if you had to run one SQLite database that was equivalent to all your distributed ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John That would be bad. That’s what you’re doing with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, exactly. And that’s why I have some changes I’m brainstorming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like how do I dig myself out of this hole, but it involves getting rid of the table that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco associates Users progress of individual episodes as individual rows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it turns out that’s a really big table It
⏹️ ▶️ John should not be it. That’s what I’m saying Like that’s why I’m looking at document stores because there’s like some data that is just
⏹️ ▶️ John not relational It’s just a bucket of data for users and putting that in one table
⏹️ ▶️ John is just making like this monster table It’s gonna eat you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so here so I captured these numbers the other day when I was trying to figure out what to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The table that maps what you’ve subscribed to, so it’s basically users to feeds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s every row is like user ID, feed ID, and then some options, whatever your options are for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscription. That table is three gigs. The table that maps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users to episodes, 450 gigs. Oh my word, Mark.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John word mark and
⏹️ ▶️ John most of that is indexes 271 gigs of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the 450 is index and so like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alright so so my current one one option I’m thinking of is a new table
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would replace the feed subscription table and would have basically a binary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco column on the end of it that would be a a packed binary form
⏹️ ▶️ John no take all this data and throw it into a document store in AWS and see how fast it is to query
⏹️ ▶️ John one user’s worth of data. It’s so fast, you never have to worry about scaling. It’s just, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m not trying to be funny. You’ve never really messed with like a MongoDB or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that’s not what I would suggest, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Well, okay, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know enough about it either then, but what would you suggest?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I’m just saying, look at Dynamo, look at Cassandra. Like there’s lots of options, but I’m just saying like, it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need, this is a, it’s the same reason you get away with having a local SQLite. This is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s relational within itself, but within all your users, there is no relation between them. So these are
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny little islands of data. So you want something that divides these up and, you know, sharding by user.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, there is some, there’s some relation in the sense that I do have to do some cross-user
⏹️ ▶️ Marco queries that I would have to restructure. So for instance, there’s a few things in Overcast that are based
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the number of recent recommendations or stars that you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John gotten. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, no, you got, but that’s like batch job stuff, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I would have to like branch that out and like, you know, maybe have a separate table that is relational for like recently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starred episodes among everybody and then I could query that really quickly or something like that. Like, you know, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would still have to branch out some of those things, mostly stars, but for the most part,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need to do a lot of aggregate queries against everyone’s data on this certain thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta just friggin figure out how to make CloudKit work and get myself out of this business.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to happen, though, is you’re going to do that. And then it’s going to break catastrophically one time, even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if for but 10 minutes, and then you’re going to throw all that out the window. And the next thing you know, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John be using Oh, he’ll rewritten the entire client app and the whole server side by then. So he’s not gonna be able to throw it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, then what he’ll do is because have you met Marco, he really likes to control everything. And so what you’ll end up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing is doing like a Cassandra DynamoDB or something, maybe it’s not AWS, maybe it’s something else,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you’ll end up doing something else that is at least reducing your reliance on MySQL.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it’s Postgres, who knows?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I still think my binary episodes data thing has some leg.
⏹️ ▶️ John There should be like an alarm sound when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John thinking of using binary coms to pack data into a relational database. Someone should come to your house and say, stop, what
⏹️ ▶️ John are What are you doing? What decade do you think this is?