532: The Meat Part of Multitasking
27 Apr 2023E-readers, Reddit’s API changes, and our formative computing experiences from the bad old days.
Episode Description:
The ATP Store is BACK, baby! Order your merch before Saturday, 6 May.
- Pre-show: Marco re-discovers reading
- Boox Nova Air C
- Kindle Oasis (2nd-gen.)
- reMarkable
- Jason’s e-Reader Roundup
- iPad Mini (6th-gen.)
- Tobor Robot
- PMN Caecilia (the original Kindle font)
- Follow-up:
- Mac Pro Believe Shirt
- Shirt ordered for John Ternus
- John continues to fight his window-dragging lag (FB12122106)
- Belkin Releases USB-C Hub
- Google Authenticator adds account syncing for 2FA codes
- Duncan Wilcock’s Photos.app duplicate management tale of woe
- John’s receiver isn’t the panacea he thought it was (via Stephen Brandon)
- Mac Pro Believe Shirt
- Reddit starts charging for API access
- Christian’s thoughts
- Apollo (App Store link)
app.net- Officially unofficial ATP subreddit
- What was it like before multitasking? (via Torb)
- Post-show: Casey has a special treat for members. 🎁
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Chapters
- Very very mini topic: E-readers
- ATP Store 🖼️
- John’s window-dragging bug
- New USB-C hub!
- Google Authenticator sync
- Duplicate photos
- Apple TV Atmos/DTS-X
- Become a member!
- Reddit to charge for API
- Really, become a member!
- Formative computing experiences
- Ending theme
- Casey’s TestFlight for members
Very very mini topic: E-readers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have a very, very mini topic that is so small I decided to use it now as a pre-show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, everyone look at the clock. Let’s see how this one goes. All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carry on. All right, so I’ve decided that I should read more. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John You read all day. You’re staring at the computer screen. There’s words
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco all over it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you know, it’s funny. Like, you know, for somebody who used to make a service that was primarily about reading things… That was
⏹️ ▶️ John reading things later, not now. Important distinction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, well anyway, I haven’t really used it in a long time. I just started again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recently because I just have not really been reading web articles and stuff. And I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frankly, the web is a dumpster fire and there aren’t that many articles that I really intend to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save and read from the web these days, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John its own issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should make an app that makes it easier to read those without all the ads and junk in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. You should do that. like Apple News is such a crappy experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there’s just giant horrible ads, like every two paragraphs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even like I recently, I mentioned in brief a while ago that I started paying for a New York Times subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I was tired of like rationing how often I would click on their links and it felt stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it is also a terrible experience. Like I pay for this. I pay for that and I pay for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple News, and you know, through iCloud Plus or whatever. And both of them just fill the experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with ads constantly. No wonder nobody reads stuff on the web anymore, because they ruined
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Like, it’s a terrible experience. Like, and even when you pay for it, you can give the money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s still full of horrible ads, like every two paragraphs. It’s ridiculous. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco setting that aside, I’ve decided I should read more, just not that, but you know, maybe the occasional book
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, you know, longer articles or whatever. I’ve kind of like lost my attention span for reading and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very difficult and I thought that’s probably not good for myself overall. So anyway, decided to read more,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I decided what I should try again is an e-reader, because I have used e-readers in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the past, I have really enjoyed using them, I spent a lot of time using them. I have, in the meantime, since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mailed them all to John Syracuse as packing material for other objects that are more useful, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco e-readers are really inexpensive and they’ve come a long way, and I figured, let me give one a shot. So I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the, at first I tried to get, there’s this brand called Books, with an X on the end, BOOX
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they make these fairly interesting e-reader tablets that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are basically Android tablets and with the full Google Play Store available. So it’s an Android tablet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with an E-ink screen. So I thought, wouldn’t that be interesting?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could run the Instapaper app and even I could run the Kindle app in case I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like their built-in bookstore or whatever. So I could do that but still have the benefits of an e-reader which I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really do enjoy E-ink as a screen technology. I like the way it looks. I like reading from it. It has a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advantages in terms of battery life and a lot of versatility with things like, you know, viewing outdoors.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I thought that, you know, that, that could be really promising. One of the places I’ve read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is in the summer on the ferry where I’m often sitting on the roof of the ferry outside in direct sunlight. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somewhat difficult to read, you know, an iPad or iPhone screen in indirect sunlight, especially while you’re wearing sunglasses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when the polarizing direction of the screen is like the wrong way for your sunglasses, so it makes it even dimmer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, anyway, I thought, let me try a modern e-reader to see, you know, it’s been a number of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years since I’ve had one, let me see what they’re like today if they’ve gotten any better. And short version
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, they’re still really weird. So. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which book thing did you get? Do you know the model name offhand?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I decided to get, I did not know this existed at all, I decided to try
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the color one, which is not color e-ink. That’s something else that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really widespread yet. The color, it’s the books, geez, I think it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Air Color 2, I don’t know. They have a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco item names that are all very, very, very similar to each other. I ordered this thing, I get it, and the box is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suspiciously light. And in the box is just its cover, which I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even order, and not the device. Oh, God. I sent it back, the long wait, I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fine, me you know what screw this let me just try a Kindle and so I got the latest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kindle Oasis I really enjoyed the last one before I stopped using it for five years and then send it to John
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Syracuse. So anyway I thought let me get the latest Oasis to see what’s what’s new with these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things so the answer is not a lot is new in fact they’re actually worse than they used to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be because certain features that I used to enjoy like the old like magazine newsstand thing built in are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gone now like they just stopped doing so like there’s certain things Like I just, you know, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want like, you know, the daily, you know, say the New York times delivered to your Kindle, like that used to be a thing that they would make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a custom format. And it was, it was actually really nice. It was a nice experience if you, if you were willing to pay for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as far as I can tell, that’s mostly or entirely gone now. And some of those things you can get in various ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of them you can’t. And the experience for all of them is worse now. Also the Kindle software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in general has just gotten more complicated. The experience is way, first of all, it’s really slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to navigate stuff. And I forget whether it was always that slow or whether it got more bloated
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s always, I mean, I haven’t used a modern one. I’m trying to figure out what the heck version of the Kindle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have. But I can tell you that my Kindle, and I think the first one I ever had,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which Stephen Hackett sent to me, but I briefly used Erin’s and she’s had Kindles on and off for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years and hers were always dog slow. Mine is dog slow. It’s just part of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey experience is just it being dog slow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And to be fair, I’m not just talking about like the E Ink refresh. Like that’s fine. I’m OK with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I accept that. I’ve lived with that for a long time. It’s fine. I’m talking about like you push a button
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one, two, three, then the screen flashes and does something. It’s like even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and even simple things like like waking up the device from sleep takes forever. It’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty poor experience. And as they’ve moved them all towards being touch screens and touch first UIs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that has not helped them. Things that I’ve been spoiled by in Apple world, like I’m trying to hold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Kindle to read with it. And occasionally the edge of my hand will just slightly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco register as a touch on the edge of the screen. And that will make me lose my page. Even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though it has page turn buttons, I spent the ridiculous sum of money to get the one model they offer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with page turn buttons, but there’s no option as far as I could tell to disable tap to page.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have page turn buttons that you can use, but you can also tap the screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether you mean to or not. And so you end up losing your page a lot. And that’s really frustrating, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think removes a lot of the value of the Kindle Oasis because the whole point of it is make the thing really super small on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco three sides so you can hold it. Anyway, it’s every every Amazon Kindle I’ve ever gotten
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has been a frustration experience of like, I love 75% of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then they just fall over on what seemed like things that could be really basic settings or or small limitation
⏹️ ▶️ Marco changes. And they just don’t do it. And they because they they just don’t, Amazon’s not good at making things nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re good at making things cheap, they’re not good at making things nice. So anyway, so I decided, eh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I might return the Kindle Oasis. Meanwhile, then the Books thing pops back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in stock and I’m like, let me give it a shot, what the heck. It is even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weirder than I could have possibly imagined. So first of all, it’s a Chinese company and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the interface is in English, but a lot of the interface that you run into ends up dropping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to Chinese because they didn’t localize that part of it. And stuff like some of the boot screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes you’ll end up seeing a wall of Chinese and like, well, I don’t really understand this. I don’t really know what to do here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The firmware update, like the update notes will all be in Chinese. It’s like, well, I don’t really know what I’m doing, what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco agreeing to. The good thing about the books thing is that the color screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of works. So the way they do color, I think I figured it out. The way I think the way they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it is there is a regular black and white E-ink screen below.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then on top of that, they layer on a layer of LCD a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that you could, so the E-ink like, you know, shines through, you know, is reflected through it. It’s really, it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird hybrid and it ends up making the screen really dim and low contrast. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the colors are not at all vibrant. They’re very, very like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco low saturation, like very basic colors. It almost looks like you took a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco picture of an old box of Crayola crayons and ran it through a sepia filter. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those are the colors you get, really dull, basic colors. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything about the Books tablet made the Kindle feel like you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discovered SSDs for the first time. Like, the Kindle, I thought, was God slow. Oh my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco God, the Books tablet, everything is even slower. To the point where you tap something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you might wait 10 seconds before it then updates the screen to go to wherever, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you navigated. Like, and it’s not, you know, this is simple stuff, like navigating to the library and, and, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, between pages of, you know, screens of apps or whatever. It’s rough, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s really rough. I will say I was impressed by the handwriting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause it’s so that the books thing has a pen and it has pen support, like a stylus, very similar to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple pencil, but you know, more basic version. it has a drawing app. And I’m sure there’s a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more in the Play Store if you want. But there’s one that comes with it. And it’s surprisingly responsive.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was very impressed. Like I know there’s a tablet called the Remarkable that’s been around for a while that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequently get Instagram ads for. I’ve never bought it because I don’t really do a lot of handwriting stuff. But if I was like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a note taker, I would probably strongly consider it. Anyway, going back. So this device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was infuriating because it was like, Like, okay, it’s an Android tablet, that’s exactly as good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as you think it would be. Add E-Ink on top of that, I thought it was going to be really cool, and it really wasn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco While this was going on, I happened to also be refreshing my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco test device fleet. As I mentioned last week, I got an iPhone SE refurb,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I needed a phone to pair with Adam’s watch, and I didn’t have an SE, so I thought, well, what the heck. Because all of my old test devices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like, you know, keep this thing on iOS 15, keep thing on iOS 16. Like all my old test devices aged out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at iOS 15. None of them can run 16 because they’re all like, you know, the iPhone SE, the iPhone 7, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I couldn’t, the old, the old SE. So anyway, I kind of needed a couple of new test devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because we’re about to enter beta season, so I want to have like a set of devices I can put on all the new betas without disrupting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my main stuff. And then at the end of the summer, be able to keep a set of devices, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is, keep one set of devices on iOS 16 and watchOS 9 and whatever else. So that way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I update my main device to those, I have those test devices still. Because in the past, I haven’t had that and it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has worked against me a lot. It’s been a problem sometimes. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I needed a couple more test devices. And I happened to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need, for beta purposes, an iPad. Because all of our iPads have either been given
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to family members, or are currently in use, or whatever. So I didn’t have an iPad that I could use for beta
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use. Also, Overcast sucks on the new iPad Mini. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco horrible. There’s so many weird layout bugs that I have on the iPad Mini, I really need to fix it. So I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thought, let me look around. I got a good refurb deal on an iPad Mini from Amazon, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is about the identical size of the books, whatever tablet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got. It’s like, same size, a little bit heavier, but otherwise, same rough dimensions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought, why don’t I just set up this iPad Mini, since I have to have it as a test device. device, why don’t I set up the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mini as an e-reader basically? Like, so it doesn’t have my Apple ID, it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my test Apple ID signed into it, so none of my stuff is there. I can’t like message or check my email
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from it, like none of that’s there, so there’s no distraction. It only has on it the overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version I’m testing with, which is not my real account, so it doesn’t even have the podcasts I want, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, signed in and everything. And then I put on it the Kindle app. I signed into my Kindle account.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put on it the New York Times app, Apple News, and Instapaper.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And all those are signed into my real account, but then nothing else is there. So I’ve created
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an e-reader out of an iPad mini, and you know what? It’s better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the other. It’s way better than the books, and it’s even better than the Kindle in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most circumstances.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. You know, if I was reading it in direct sunlight on the top of the ferry, the The Kindle is still better for that, but it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way better in most cases as an e-reader. There are more options,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s more customization to be had, it’s way more responsive, you get all of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple’s built-in palm rejection, making sure you don’t have erroneous touches, all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that’s built-in. It is just so much nicer and it was so much faster to set up, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much easier to manage. The battery life is not going to be as good as a Kindle, and again, the direct sunlight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco viewing is not gonna be as good. It isn’t water resistant the way a Kindle is, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man, Apple has ruined me for these devices. I try the other things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is the flagship Kindle. This is a brand new device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from this other weird company. And it just, it’s no contest
⏹️ ▶️ Marco compared to an iPad mini that was actually fairly close to them in price.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t you try the Kobo?
⏹️ ▶️ John favorite. I just still put a link in the show notes, his most recent e-reader roundup, which was I
⏹️ ▶️ John think 2021, but I think he picked Kobo as his top, Kobo is book spelled backwards. That’s a joke from the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Incomparable.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey no, it’s not.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a joke from the Incomparable. Listen to the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Incomparable.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it Little Indian?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey For a second, I believed you. I was like, wait, that explains everything. But no, I was gonna say the exact same
⏹️ ▶️ John that Tobor a joke from the Incomparable? People
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco who get it, people who don’t, don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I should credit Jason because I’ve read the Six Colors articles on e-readers every time he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco publishes them. And I did refer back to them on making these decisions and trying these things out. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think he came to the same conclusions about the books that I did basically. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he cares a lot more than I do about this stuff and he has way more experience with these things. I have never tried a Kobo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And part of that is like, you know, I figure like if I’m gonna have a non,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, if I’m gonna have like a non-iPad reader, I figure well, Kindle is probably best
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it has the ecosystem. Also, for whatever it’s worth, I really like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old default Kindle font, PMN Cecilia. I love that font.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that font is available in all of the Kindle apps on other platforms and on real Kindles themselves, labeled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cecilia. And I don’t think any other reading app offers it. And so I kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of like, I’m a snob in certain ways. I love reading with that font, like long stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I even miss it when I’m using Instapaper because they don’t have it. Like, I should have put it in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, dammit, back when I had it. But anyway, so, you know, Kobo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where Kobo is better, I think, in Jason’s experience, is I believe it offers more option
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to not have forced justified text. And this is the biggest area where Kindles
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fall down. Kindles do not offer you the option to have non-justified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text all the time. Sometimes they offer it. Certain content it’s available, certain content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it isn’t, probably because of some weird detail about like the weird Mobi format they were using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and whether the publisher has enabled some other flag in the EPUB or whatever. Like bottom line though is that with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Kindle, you oftentimes are forced to take forced justification and it’s really hard to read stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that way. So, you know, for a device devoted to reading, you would expect it to have a really great reading experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it kind of doesn’t in a lot of cases, which is unfortunate. So Kobo is better, I think, in those areas,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I don’t want to lose the ecosystem advantage that I get from Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I already have a sum of a library from Amazon. But ultimately, if I just keep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reading on my iPad mini, I have access to everything. I have access to Apple Books. I have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Kindle app itself, which the Kindle app offers almost the same reading experience as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardware Kindle devices, but with smoother animations and faster responsiveness
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and higher resolution for images and stuff like that. It’s actually a better experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All that is to say, I’ve tried e-readers again. I think if I read a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco novels while sitting in bathtubs or pools, I would love the Kindles.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As it is now, the iPad mini actually solved my needs better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m glad you phrased it exactly that way because for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now granted I’m on an older Kindle, I’m on I think the original paperwhite, I’m not entirely sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be honest with you, but apparently according to Amazon, I registered it with Amazon in 2016 and I don’t think it was new at that point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So whatever I have, it’s old and it is slow, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love reading novels on this. I don’t read anything else but novels. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you and I have kind of polar opposite needs. I do read novels on the beach when I go to the beach in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey summer. I don’t live there, so it’s a very rare occurrence. But what I love about my Kindle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is that I can always read on my Kindle and it is always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comfortable. have crummy eyes and so I crank the font size up to hilarious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s, it’s ridiculous how big I have the font, but I do that. So this way, whether or not I have my contact
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lenses in. So for example, if I’m trying to go to sleep, I might read for a little bit, but I don’t have my contacts. And at that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point I can still look at the Kindle in bed.
⏹️ ▶️ John You just don’t look at the air, your Kindle screen with the font cranked up to see if you can
⏹️ ▶️ John fit, uh, more words than I could fit in my 160 by 160 palm screen that I read books on.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what I mean? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John if the total number of words is actually similar.
⏹️ ▶️ John that yours is seven times as big.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, I’m exaggerating somewhat, but not that much. Cause pretty much anytime anyone looks at my Kindle, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people who have Kindles, they’re like, oh my God, what’s wrong with your font?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that’s how I like it. But anyway, I love having the Kindle. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no chance for distraction. I understand what you’re saying, Marko, that you’ve kind of built yourself a similar situation,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there’s no chance for distraction. I can use it at night and it has its own backlight, but it can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super crazy dim. I can use it in direct light. I couldn’t agree with you more, Marco, that I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love the reading experience of E-ink. It feels so much more like, well, not literally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feels, but it gives you that figurative feel that’s much more like paper.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I love my Kindle, and if it broke, I would replace it with either another Kindle again for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ecosystem reasons like Marco was saying, or I would at least try this Kobo thing and see what I thought.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I can’t imagine that I personally would enjoy an iPad mini
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this specific task. I can see how you landed there, but for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gimme E Ink all day every day because that is so much more comfortable to read in my personal opinion.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, how long was that though? It was about 20 minutes? That was your super quick mini topic?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, super quick. Just had a little bit to say.
ATP Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The merch store is open. Hooray! Let’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not call it the merch store, please. Please. Let’s not, let’s not sell it yet with this terrible name. It’s the ATP store.
⏹️ ▶️ John The ATP store has returned. Time was that Casey Wood Harreld had returned to the ATP store,
⏹️ ▶️ John but now he keeps saying merch and I don’t know why. Do you want to take this, John? No. ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey store, please. That’s my fault. The ATP, don’t call it merch, don’t call it merchandise. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just the ATP store.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s back, baby. Thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right. Sorry, dad. The offending party’s been sacked.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m trying to consistency in branding,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nevertheless, the store is back. We have a couple of offerings. We have the Mac Pro Believe shirt, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we’re gonna talk a little bit more about in a moment. Suffice to say, it is the top of the modern Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro with the word Believe beneath it. Then we have the ATP six colors logo,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we have that in monochrome on several flavors of material.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also have the OG rainbow logo on black.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Additionally, we have brought back from the Disney from the ATP vault the Pro Max triumph shirt
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which has all six of the Pro Max that through the years in in profile in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Multicolored ink and you can do that in white or black fabric.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I last I looked I think there might be a handful of mugs left. We also brought back the ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey polo You’re welcome for the six of you that really really like it of which I’m one of them and the ATP hoodie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is back So if you need to perhaps re-up your hoodie, I wear mine so darn much that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m probably going to get a backup just to be safe. All of these are available for you at http.fm.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now members, remember you get 15% off on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these time-limited sales just like this. So go to your member, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to call it a dashboard, but the member page on http.fm and you should see your special
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discount code that you can enter in at Cotton Bureau to save 15%. And additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this will be available until Saturday, May 6. I didn’t do this exercise with you last time, so we’ll do it this time. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are somewhere right now. Maybe you’re walking, maybe you’re driving, maybe you’re just sitting around listening. Wherever you are,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think to yourself, is it safe and appropriate for me to buy an ATP something right now?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. If it isn’t, think about where you’re going. If you’re driving, think about where you’re going to end up. Are you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to the office? Are you going to Whole Foods or Kroger or something? Wherever you end up, think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about what you’re going to do when you get there. What you’re going to do is you’re going to park your car or stop walking, whatever the case may be. And then you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey going to go to http.fm slash store and you’re going to do that. And you’re going to buy some merch or merchandise or stuff, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, I’m sorry, you’re going to buy some stuff and you’re going to do that before May 6.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You’re going to do that today. So this way, I don’t get to make fun of you for being that dum-dum
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that says to me, oh, is it still open? I forgot. Don’t be that dumb dumb. Don’t be that person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP. Dot. Fm slash store.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would say you, um, we always try to do these, uh, sales for three episodes
⏹️ ▶️ John of the show. This is the middle episode. Uh, the next episode will be the very last one. And the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John with trying to say, oh, I’ve got one episode left. I’ll just, uh, deal with that stuff then is that
⏹️ ▶️ John you might not listen to next week’s episode immediately. And the store is only alive for a couple of days
⏹️ ▶️ John after the publication of next week’s episode. I myself have almost forgotten to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy… Alright, so one time I did forget to get stuff from the store.
⏹️ ▶️ John Of course I had an inside line of the Con Bureau folks and I said, Hey, can you get me these items? And so that worked out for me,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you don’t have that option. So I would say this is the time to do your ordering. Don’t wait until next week because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s only going to be a few days after the show is published. Do it now, then you’ll be able to have, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ John week to decide what you’re going to get. And I’ll just remind everybody that if
⏹️ ▶️ John care about shirts or don’t want to pay for expensive shipping on a mug or whatever, but you still want to give the show money
⏹️ ▶️ John membership at BFM slash join. As for products, I want a few clarifying
⏹️ ▶️ John points on the Mac Pro Believe shirt. So last episode, I said it is the duty of the
⏹️ ▶️ John audience of this show to find out which of you actually got a
⏹️ ▶️ John WBC ticket because none of us did so far and pick one of you
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the designated person to take one for the team, the team being ATP listeners, buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac Pro Believe shirt of your choice, wear it to WWDC and make
⏹️ ▶️ John sure Apple executives see it. And I’ll be happy to say that many people from our
⏹️ ▶️ John audience said, Hey, I got to take it. I’m playing and going and I ordered a Believe shirt. So I think people will be there
⏹️ ▶️ John with the shirt on, hopefully very visible. Lots of people suggested that we
⏹️ ▶️ John buy this shirt and send it to various Apple executives, which seemed like a reasonable
⏹️ ▶️ John idea, but I’m not quite sure how to do that because I don’t know what their mailing address is or whatever, but I figured, you know what? I’m gonna give it
⏹️ ▶️ John a shot. So I ordered one shirt for John Ternus
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey and I had to decide what kind of shirt, it’s gonna be a Macro Believe shirt,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? I had to decide what he would like. So I looked at his most recent, I don’t know if it was, I think it was his most recent video,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the event video. I forget what they were announcing. I just went in my, my archive of event videos, because of course
⏹️ ▶️ John all these videos. Of course you do. I loaded it up and I scrubbed it until I saw John Ternus And he was wearing black from head to toe. So I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John easy, black, black, Mac Pro Believe shirt, right? Because I assume they pick their own outfits
⏹️ ▶️ John for, you know, like no one’s forcing him to wear all black. Other people are wearing different stuff when he was black from head to toe. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John got a black Mac Pro Believe shirt and I sent it to John Ternus and then the address of like the
⏹️ ▶️ John spaceship in Apple Park. Will that get to him? They probably have people screening their mail to make sure they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John getting sent, you know, anthrax or whatever. I hope it gets to him. But anyway, the reason I
⏹️ ▶️ John sent it to him is because, like I said, from what I’ve heard, John Ternus actually does believe in the Mac Pro, and I want to send that to
⏹️ ▶️ John him as a form of support within the organization. Maybe he can just wear it to a meeting, you know, ask
⏹️ ▶️ John me about my shirt, right? Anyway, so I did that. And the other thing is for the people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John who got a ticket and who are going to wear their shirt to WWDC on the off
⏹️ ▶️ John chance that some Apple person actually asked them about it, like an executive or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I said last time, you can always just lie and say, oh, I really love the Mac Pro, whatever. Or you can tell the truth and say, I don’t care
⏹️ ▶️ John about the Mac Pro, but some people on ATP do and explain all that stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a nuance I feel like I was leaving out there because I thought of this when I was seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John something about, I was like, interview with Tim Cook or something. Wasn’t there some interview with him recently? Some article that was an interview, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think it was in GQ recently. Anyway, I was reading an interview with Tim Cook and I’m always thinking about, we always have
⏹️ ▶️ John these conversations within the Apple community about what it’s like to talk to Apple executives and
⏹️ ▶️ John how hard it is to get them off message. Like they’re all media trained and the people who do talk to the public usually
⏹️ ▶️ John have some practice doing it. So you’re not gonna get them to say something off the cuff or whatever. The only person who can get over
⏹️ ▶️ John that was Steve Jobs. Even the CEO, especially Tim Cook, doesn’t do that. He could do that, who’s gonna yell
⏹️ ▶️ John at him other than, I don’t know, the board or the shareholders or whatever, but Steve Jobs didn’t care about that. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John everybody’s so controlled, right? So there is the problem that say you’re sitting there and like
⏹️ ▶️ John some important Apple executive comes wandering over to you and says, hey, nice shirt. And you have this, like, this is it. I have my opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ John to talk about this podcast shirt that I wore with an Apple person. And I feel like what’s gonna end up
⏹️ ▶️ John happening is the interaction’s gonna go such that
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple executive comes away thinking, isn’t it nice? A customer likes our products,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That you’re like, this is your favorite Apple product and you wore a shirt talking about your favorite Apple product and they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John come away thinking, it wasn’t that so nice. Even our obscure products that most people don’t care about, there’s somebody who really cares
⏹️ ▶️ John about them. Oh, isn’t that nice? And I feel like that’s the wrong message. And it’s really hard not to have that
⏹️ ▶️ John message go through because if you’re an Apple executive and you exchange pleasantries with a person who’s wearing a shirt with a picture of your product
⏹️ ▶️ John on it, you’re gonna come away thinking a fan of our products. But the actual message
⏹️ ▶️ John is, I don’t know how you would convey this. It’s basically impossible. I’m just, I’m not telling you what to
⏹️ ▶️ John do. I’m just acknowledging a problem here. It’s what we want them to say is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John we care that this product exists and we wish you treated it better. And it’s very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John when you meet an Apple executive to tell them something that you think they did poorly because A, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John rude, right? So don’t do that. And B, like that’s not the time or place to do that. And yet that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the whole point of the shirt. You don’t have to say that, you can just wear it. The time or place is
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, exactly. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John or like whatever, right? Yeah, exactly. Write a blog post or, you know, just write an article in a publication
⏹️ ▶️ John of your choice or talk about it on a podcast. When you meet an Apple executive, they just want to hear the pleasantries. That’s where the shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John comes in. The shirt should sort of speak on its own. I feel like you don’t have to say anything about it. You can just wear it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that will be the message, the silent message that you believe in the Mac Pro. And the silent
⏹️ ▶️ John message is, we don’t think you believe Apple. We believe here in the audience. We wish you believe too. We wish
⏹️ ▶️ John you would update it more than every five years or so. We wish it wasn’t always on life support. Like those are all the things
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can’t say that I’m hoping the shirt conveys. But I feel like if you actually had a chance to talk to one of them,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not the right time to actually discuss that. but I don’t know what you should say. Maybe you should just sit there silently
⏹️ ▶️ John and point to the shirt, I don’t know. Anyway, I just wanted to acknowledge that and the difficulty of talking to Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John executives and my hope that my shirt does some talking for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Godspeed, John, godspeed.
John’s window-dragging bug
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of good luck to you, what’s going on with your bug these days?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the time and place to talk about bugs. If you’ve got a podcast that
⏹️ ▶️ John you think people want to hear about your anyway, this is the bug I talked about on three episodes so far, one of which it was cut
⏹️ ▶️ John out of last episode wasn’t cut out and I talked about it again. I’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John some more progress on that bug. To refresh your memory, the bug is that when I I drag
⏹️ ▶️ John a window in any application around, if it’s near any other windows, it gets super slow
⏹️ ▶️ John and laggy and jumps around, right? And if you hide other windows so that they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not visible or you move them away from the window you’re moving, it chills out a little bit and doesn’t do it as much.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it seems kind of like a bug in like the window snapping behavior that they added to macOS many years ago, where
⏹️ ▶️ John if one window comes close to another one, it snaps to its edge or whatever. And I couldn’t figure out what this was. And
⏹️ ▶️ John at first I removed some third-party software Like it went away. I’ve solved it, but then it came back right and so I’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to track it down more talking about It on on mastodon, you know communicating with various people back
⏹️ ▶️ John channeling with Apple because of course the feedback gets no response right whatever Since then I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John done some more stuff I removed more third-party stuff because last time I said I’d removed all third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John kernel extensions and all third-party system extensions as evidence from what is it kex
⏹️ ▶️ John load and System extension control or something. What the hell is the command?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, system extension CTL is the one for system extensions and
⏹️ ▶️ John Kextat, sorry, K-E-X-T-S-T-A-T space dash L.
⏹️ ▶️ John Both of those are showing zero, but there’s more stuff that I thought, I’m going on a rampage or moving third
⏹️ ▶️ John party stuff because the one tiny bit of back channel information I got was that lots of other people aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ John having this problem. Some other people are and I hear about it from MMS now, but lots of other people aren’t. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, this has got to be something that I’m using, something that’s specific to my setup. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I removed SteerMouse, which is my mouse acceleration thing. And I was like, oh, that’s gotta be it. I can’t believe I didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think of that. Cause it’s, it shows up as a, used to be a preference pane and now it’s a settings, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s not a kernel extension or a system extension, but it is a thing that has to do with the mouse. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I installed that. Then I was communicating on Mastodon with Steve Trout and
⏹️ ▶️ John Smith. I sent him some of my spin dumps that I had sent him the feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John and he looked at them and he saw some Adobe stuff in there. And he’s like, I can’t tell if this is like just a symptom because Adobe has like a crash
⏹️ ▶️ John reporter that catches crashes and it was showing up in the spin dump. And I was like, fine, wipe all
⏹️ ▶️ John Adobe stuff off the system, which was not easy. Let me tell you, I used the Adobe uninstaller to remove all Adobe stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John There was still more Adobe stuff. And I know that because after I used the Adobe uninstaller and I rebooted,
⏹️ ▶️ John upon login, I got a crash report screen from an Adobe thing. Like it was luckily gave me the path to the Adobe
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. So in applications, utilities, there was a bunch of old Adobe stuff. Remove everything. Delete, delete. Adobe stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John is gone. Each time I did one of these things, remove steer mouse, remove Adobe. I would reboot,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, to clean everything out. And the problem, what I had been telling people on on Mastodon is
⏹️ ▶️ John like the problem goes away when I reboot, but it comes back within minutes to hours,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is not a very precise thing. But that had been my experience. It always comes back, but it doesn’t come back immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes it comes back in a few minutes. Sometimes that comes back in many hours. I didn’t understand why right?
⏹️ ▶️ John So after removing steer bouse, I rebooted I’m like, it’s not coming back. I fixed it But then it came back
⏹️ ▶️ John after I wiped everything Adobe. I’m like, it’s not coming back. I fixed it, but then it came back Also type
⏹️ ▶️ John inator which is my like text expander type thingy for abbreviation stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John That recently had a venture update. So I there was a pit for pay update, but I’m like I’m gonna pay for it I use that all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time Fixes compatibility venture it said yes. Yes updated. I updated that I didn’t uninstall it
⏹️ ▶️ John because it has to do with typing not mousing but I updated that and that didn’t fix it
⏹️ ▶️ John either right But and I also uploaded a new YouTube video which we will put in the show notes that
⏹️ ▶️ John tries to better demonstrate the problem again it’s using stickies, but doesn’t matter it could be any application, so I was using
⏹️ ▶️ John text edit as the Windows that I’m gonna be near and I was using stickies as my window that I
⏹️ ▶️ John move around You can look at the video Main reason to put that up there is all the conversations I’m asked it on it’s very
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult for to tell other people are actually having the same problem as me because there are a lot of problems that manifest
⏹️ ▶️ John as My computer feels slow and laggy and if you are dragging windows around while your computer is slow
⏹️ ▶️ John and laggy you like hey I have that problem too, but I’m like no mine is a very specific problem It has nothing to do with load
⏹️ ▶️ John on the system It doesn’t go away once it starts happening It is like permanent and just like stays
⏹️ ▶️ John there forever a hundred percent reproducible for hours and days and weeks like it will not go away and it is always
⏹️ ▶️ John there and it has a specific behavior with respect to other windows that are near it. So that’s why I made a new video
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can take a look at that. And through discussing it with people, some people I eliminated said you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John having a different problem than I am. Other people still said they were having, they looked at the video, they’re like yeah exactly what’s
⏹️ ▶️ John happening to me and I would ask them questions. Are you running any Adobe stuff? Are you running Steer Mouse? Like I’m just looking for
⏹️ ▶️ John anything. Couldn’t find anything. I did have a breakthrough though because I finally figured out
⏹️ ▶️ John after I reboot what makes the problem go back, come back, like what, you know, every time, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John would always think I’d fix it, like this is it, I fixed it this time, and I’d almost like declare I’d fix it, I’m asshole, like no, let me wait a day, let me wait
⏹️ ▶️ John two days, and it would come back, I’m like, damn it, I didn’t get rid of it, right? Figured out what makes it come back.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s whenever there is more than one user logged in,
⏹️ ▶️ John in Mac OS. Oh, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And that’s why it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John throw me off, because I switched to my wife’s account to mess with the photo library, right? Because they don’t have shared albums
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff, right? So I still have to hop over to her account, not as much as I used to, because I can do most of this stuff with
⏹️ ▶️ John shared library. But when I want to do like real organization into albums and stuff, or the face recognition,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it doesn’t share face recognition, either, I have to switch to her account. So it’s basically like after I reboot, how long
⏹️ ▶️ John before I fast use a switch into my wife’s account? And as soon as I fast use a switch to my wife’s account,
⏹️ ▶️ John it starts happening in both of our accounts. If I switch back from her, it doesn’t matter. It’s permanent, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John If I go back to her account and log out, it goes away. 100% reproducible. So I updated the feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ John I already updated the feedback, this video updated the feedback. I’m like, more info. I figured this out. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only when there’s more than one user. I tried a third account as well and tried, you know, like it’s just, when one account is
⏹️ ▶️ John logged in, everything is fine. When more than one account is logged in, the problem happens 100% of the time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I added that to the feedback in case anyone at Apple is still looking at it. Once again, it’s FB12122106, please.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, and I have so little third parties. Now I’m just
⏹️ ▶️ John removing everything. I haven’t put anything back in. I haven’t put SteerMouse back on. I haven’t put Adobe anything back on.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’m removing everything that I can possibly remove. This is a hundred percent reproducible. I uploaded
⏹️ ▶️ John new spin dumps, uploaded new sys diagnose. Does this
⏹️ ▶️ John explain the problem? No, I still have no good theories about what it is. I mean, Steve Troutman Smith had a lot of ideas
⏹️ ▶️ John about like the Adobe things, reading the window list and stuff like that. Like that’s why we thought it was Adobe, but
⏹️ ▶️ John that turned out not to be it. But like when a second user is logged in, it happens. And here’s the fun thing about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John If I log out, if I go to my wife’s account and then I log out of her account and it switches back to mine, because that’s the only
⏹️ ▶️ John one that’s remaining to be logged in, it takes like a three count before it goes away. Because I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John switch back, I’ll log out of her account, switch back to mine, grab the stickies window, shake it around, it’ll still
⏹️ ▶️ John be there for one, two, three, oh, no, it’s fixed. So it’s like logging out is like killing a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John processors or cleaning it, like whatever it’s doing behind the scenes to finish the log out of my wife’s account
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually gets done and then it fixes it. So now that I know what the problem is, I no
⏹️ ▶️ John longer have to reboot to fix it. I just have to log out of my IRIS account and everything will be fine. But man, what a weird
⏹️ ▶️ John bug. I wish if the Apple feedback system was better, I would have renamed the bug as,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, window movement laggy when more than one account is logged in, right? Because now I know what the thing is. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I hope someone at Apple looks at this or I hope it cures itself in the next update
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, but I’m glad to have a workaround, but totally baffling. But I was excited
⏹️ ▶️ John for the breakthrough. I’ll give you more updates as they come along. At this point, now that I know sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John not what’s causing it, but how to trigger it and how to work around it, I’m a little bit less inclined to keep removing
⏹️ ▶️ John software from my system, but I probably will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry, John. I mean, that explains why I think a lot of people haven’t seen it, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am, this is not scientific at all, but I can’t think of anyone I know that runs multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accounts on their Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I do. I’m sure that I know people, but- I do, I do it. See, this is not,
⏹️ ▶️ John like my wife’s Mac Studio, that’s the one where people are likely to log into it, it
⏹️ ▶️ John was all four of us are logged in at all times on that thing, it’s just like more communal, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John The only other, and I have accounts for my whole family on my computer too, but the only one I was ever logged into was
⏹️ ▶️ John my wife, so it actually happens less frequently on my computer than the other computers in the house.
⏹️ ▶️ John But not, you know, it’s still, that’s what was killing me about the thing, is like it always comes back. What’s
⏹️ ▶️ John determining when it comes back? It’s just whenever I switch over to that account. And I did ask other
⏹️ ▶️ John people, as soon as I figured this out, anyone who said they had the same problem as me, I asked them, are you
⏹️ ▶️ John logged into more than one account? Some of them were, some of them weren’t, so. No progress
⏹️ ▶️ John in debugging this with other people. That’s why I’m hoping all these spin dumps I’m uploading to Apple will tell them something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Godspeed, John. Yeah, and before people ask, there are limits to the
⏹️ ▶️ John amount of inconvenience I’m willing to incur to deal with this, especially now that I have a workaround, because people are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you should do safe boot. You should wipe your entire computer and make a fresh account. Like, yeah, those are things I’m probably
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna do. Like I understand how they would help narrow the problem down, but like, I’m not gonna destroy my computing life to fix
⏹️ ▶️ John this bug, especially now that I have a workaround. So I have done safe boot, by the way. I will actually try safe
⏹️ ▶️ John boot and then switching accounts, but I don’t know if either one of you who’ve done safe boot recently, it’s super weird and everything’s super janky.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have you tried that recently? No, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco even know how. I
⏹️ ▶️ John haven’t in a while. Well, on your computers it’s different, but back on Intel computers, you hold down shift during boot. on your computers, you hold
⏹️ ▶️ John down the power button and there’s something that’s a safe boot. Like it basically doesn’t load anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it doesn’t load the good graphics drivers, which is the most painful one. So like transparency doesn’t work and the
⏹️ ▶️ John graphics are slow and janky and doesn’t load any third party anything. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really, it’s just, you know, it’s safe mode, right? It’s like, let’s not load any
⏹️ ▶️ John of the software that might be causing crashes. And so it’s not a tenable way to really run your computer. So that’s why,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I should probably boot into safe mode again and then just try switching, doing fast user switching and see if that makes it
⏹️ ▶️ John come back. But beyond that, no, I’m not going to like, you know, sign out of my Apple ID,
⏹️ ▶️ John delete all the user accounts or anything like that. Cause like, you know, I’ll just, I’ll just make sure I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John only logged into my wife’s account briefly. Although it is kind of annoying to know when I switched over to her account, unless I’m going to log out
⏹️ ▶️ John of my account, which I’m not going to cause I have too many windows open. I have to deal with the, I have to deal with the
⏹️ ▶️ John window dragging bug on her account. Cause like I said, when it starts happening, it happens at all logged in accounts, not just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Stinky, I’m sorry. But hopefully you’ll have a fix in the next version of macOS, right? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. I’ll give it five years, come on.
New USB-C hub!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of five years, long time follow-up, I think it was Marco that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey originally lamenting the lack of just a USB-C hub. There’s a gazillion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and seven traditional USB, what is it, A or B, I always forget, traditional USB hubs, but there weren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really any USB-C hubs. And breaking news earlier today, Belkin has released
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a brand new USB-C hub that is four USB-C ports, one of which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is power delivery. And so that basically leaves you three other ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And apparently it’s available right now. It is between $45 and $55 here in America. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can buy from Belkin directly or from Amazon. I don’t personally have a need for this. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey still rocking my CalDigit TS4, which I really, really like. But hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, this is the answer to all your problems, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope, I mean, the good thing is, look, I’m glad this finally exists. Unfortunately, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John But I will, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently I don’t need it because Apple has added more ports to the computers and generally speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has dramatically lightened the load on my dongle needs. But fortunately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this now exists. I hope it’s good. Time will tell. There are a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of kind of USB-C hubs that have come out on the market. Most of them though are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco similar to the various Thunderbolt thingies. Most of them are really high power things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that have their own giant power bricks and all that stuff. It’s not really like a hub
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as we would think of it. And on most of them, because the bandwidth needs are so high
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on USB-C, the number of ports is fairly low and the cost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per port is fairly high on many of them. So it’s been tough to get into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this world. If you want to convert everything over to USB-C, and again, there’s many other reasons why it’s been tough that we’ve gone over,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you want to convert everything over to USB-C, cables and everything, it has been tough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because products like this didn’t really exist. So now it exists and I hope it’s good and I hope more continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to come out. And I hope we, now and for many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, you’ve been able to get like a 10 port USB-A hub that had USB 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speeds on many of those ports and wasn’t that expensive and didn’t have a giant power brick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I hope we get something like that for USB-C because we don’t need like 18 high-speed, 10 gigabit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco per second ports. We need maybe two or three of those and then a whole bunch of ports that mostly provide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power and low-speed data. So I hope we get to that world soon with USB-C, but this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an important step to get there. I’m really glad we have these.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. I mean, again, I don’t have a need for this like you were saying, But I’m pleased that this is a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just like you said.
Google Authenticator sync
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, your Google Authenticator woes have been solved, allegedly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The Google Authenticator now will sync your 2FA codes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you wanted to, which is super exciting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I would have liked this before I had to spend three and a half hours sitting in the Apple Store to
⏹️ ▶️ John my – or I was getting my phone replaced because of the camera. Anyway, better late than never, it does a syncing
⏹️ ▶️ John now. dealing with that, I have actually migrated all of my
⏹️ ▶️ John two-factor stuff into iCloud Keychain, which was a little bit tedious, but I got it done. But
⏹️ ▶️ John now, being typical of me, I am maintaining it in both places, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Kind of like how
⏹️ ▶️ John I use Chrome and Safari all day long, and Chrome doesn’t integrate with iCloud Keychain.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But the only reason I- Wait, I thought it did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought they have an extension for it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John or something. Yeah, for Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, whoopsie-doopsie. It’s really dumb, yeah. I mean, you can always just go and copy and paste it, but that gets to why I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ John running Google Authenticator, right? Everything’s in iCloud Keychain, and I maintained it in there, like
⏹️ ▶️ John as, you know, sort of my main place. But even with the cool shortcut
⏹️ ▶️ John from Ricky Mandela that lets you jump into the passwords, I
⏹️ ▶️ John was gonna say preference pane, the password setting thing in iOS, which is, it’s not buried, it’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John second level thing, but you can put that on your home screen and jump right to it. Then you’re faced with all of your passwords,
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you have to use the search field. So search for the domain you’re interested in, find the one and tap into it, and then get
⏹️ ▶️ John to the two factor thing and tap at the copy and so on and so forth. Whereas in Google Authenticator, the only thing that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in there are two factor codes. There’s no passwords, no nothing else. So even though it may
⏹️ ▶️ John be a screen or two, it’s huge font, it’s on the top level, you launch the
⏹️ ▶️ John app, you can see all your stuff there and you just tap the one that you want. It’s much faster for me to get my two factor
⏹️ ▶️ John code from Google Authenticator than it is to get it from my Cloud Keychain. Now, if you use Safari,
⏹️ ▶️ John you never need to do either one of those things because it’s integrated into the browser and it just fills it in for you. Like that’s the point of it. But Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John does not integrate with iCloud Keychain on Apple devices. So if you are using Chrome and you are faced
⏹️ ▶️ John with a two-factor text box, you can’t just click in it and auto-fill
⏹️ ▶️ John from iCloud Keychain because it doesn’t do that integration. It could, the APIs exist for it, it just doesn’t because
⏹️ ▶️ John Google, whatever. So I still maintain both of them. But I’m glad it has syncing because that’ll save
⏹️ ▶️ John me a lot of headaches next time I upgrade my devices. Thing to know about the syncing is it is not end-to-end encrypted.
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud keychain is end-to-end encrypted, which means that Apple can’t see anything in my
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud keychain, right? That’s the point of end-to-end encryption. Apple does not have the keys to it. It’s only on all of my devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Google intentionally chose not to do that. You can see an explanation on this Twitter thread that we’ll put in the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes from, I’m assuming it’s someone from Google. I actually didn’t check. Christian
⏹️ ▶️ John Brand, let’s see. Yes, well, the URL on his thing
⏹️ ▶️ John says Google. Yeah, someone at Google. Explains they intentionally didn’t do this just because it gives Google the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to save people’s bacon if they screw up real bad. Right, that’s their explanation. And you know, that is a trade-off,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I just want people to know, don’t enable this syncing if you care about Google,
⏹️ ▶️ John the company, having access to your two-factor codes. Again, this is not for passwords, This is just for two-factor authentication
Duplicate photos
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, tell me about Duncan Wilcox’s woes with regard to duplicates in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is the shared library feature that we’ve talked about in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos. Apple Photos had duplicate detection for a while, but not for shared libraries. So they recently
⏹️ ▶️ John added it for shared libraries. And I’ve been working through that with my giant collection. The last episode, I said that
⏹️ ▶️ John I had been informed that duplicate detection is not as smart as you might think it is. So I backed up
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the duplicates that duplicate detection found like I, you know, because it puts them in recently
⏹️ ▶️ John deleted or whatever. And I just backed them all up and shove them in an archive somewhere so that if it did screw up something,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have that thing there to save my bacon, you know, so that way I don’t have to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John visually vet every single duplicate that resolved because it literally resolved 30,000 of them for me. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John just, I’m just going to back them up and forget about it. Here’s a new twist. Duncan says, says, regarding Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John photo duplicates, check your photos projects, especially if you made some recently with motif or similar.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by projects, he means like the like the little photo books that you can make or whatever. They’re in the sidebar in Apple photos
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac. You see all the list of all your products if you’ve made a calendar or printed book or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John So Duncan says, I think mine are missing photos like Swiss cheese following the deleting of many duplicates. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John about 90,000 photos. And it continues is merge duplicates does not, merge
⏹️ ▶️ John duplicates does figure out if a photo is in an album and preserve that relationship. For example, a
⏹️ ▶️ John low res version of a photo in an album, the low res version is deleted from the library, but the higher res version is
⏹️ ▶️ John now on the album. So Apple Photos itself does the right thing. Like when it merges
⏹️ ▶️ John duplicates, you don’t have to worry about, oh, the one that threw out is the one that was in my
⏹️ ▶️ John album and now it’s missing from my album. No, it takes whatever one it picks to be the winner in the duplicate fight,
⏹️ ▶️ John that one takes the place of where all the other ones that got chucked away ended up being. But for photos
⏹️ ▶️ John projects, that doesn’t always happen. So I went and looked, because I have tons of photo books. I make
⏹️ ▶️ John a photo book at least once a year, sometimes more, for my long island vacation, maybe other vacations.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I looked at those books, and sure enough, many photos were missing. I would click on the
⏹️ ▶️ John project, and I get a little dialogue box that would say, some photos are missing. Some photos have
⏹️ ▶️ John been modified, moved, or deleted outside of the application, are removed from some sections of this project. And the example that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have here, pages one, five, six, nine, 10, 12, 14, I’m not gonna read all the numbers. A lot of pages are missing
⏹️ ▶️ John covers, okay? I was like, oh, that’s not great. So
⏹️ ▶️ John why do I care if photos are suddenly missing from my photo book projects? I’ve already printed the books, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John sitting on my shelf, right? The whole reason I keep these products around is that someday
⏹️ ▶️ John those books get destroyed, my house burns down in a fire, there’s a flood, you know, whatever, whatever happens to those books.
⏹️ ▶️ John I did spend a lot of time making those books, which means picking the photographs that are gonna be in
⏹️ ▶️ John the books, picking how those photos are gonna be arranged on the page, how are they’re going to be cropped,
⏹️ ▶️ John picking the cover image, picking the back, if there’s any text, like I spent time making that. I
⏹️ ▶️ John want that effort to be preserved. And I had been doing that by just keeping the photo book products.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I was like, hey, if I lose a book or it gets to the house burns down, I can restore my backups in my new
⏹️ ▶️ John house and just reprint all those books at massive expense. But still, I
⏹️ ▶️ John would have the ability to do it. So that’s why I’m saving those projects. And now they’re missing a bunch of photos.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I investigated, I looked at one of the books and these are all done with at this point, third party software. I use the Mimeo
⏹️ ▶️ John photos extension. Motif is another one that does something similar. Both of those companies I think were involved in
⏹️ ▶️ John printing the books when Apple did it. So I picked a book, I picked my most recent photo book that was missing photos from tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of pages. I went to the first page where it said it was missing photos and sure enough where there should have been a photo it was just the gray,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know, photo goes here. And it wanted me to select a photo. But the thing is, all
⏹️ ▶️ John the photos that it said were missing, they were still in the projects. Because when I opened up the little photo sidebar
⏹️ ▶️ John to pick a photo to go in that spot, the photo that should be in that spot was in
⏹️ ▶️ John the sidebar. So I think what’s happening is, Apple Photos is doing the
⏹️ ▶️ John right thing, but this third-party software is confused about the fact that previously,
⏹️ ▶️ John photo with some identifier, internal identifier was on that page and Apple photos
⏹️ ▶️ John replaced it with like the one that it picked out of the merge duplicate and the sidebar, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, the project showing which photos to pick from that understood that, but the page did not understand it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so what I had to do was for my most recent few books, and I’ll explain why in a second,
⏹️ ▶️ John I didn’t have to do all of them. I just went, I have the paper book in front of me, found the
⏹️ ▶️ John missing photo, uh, looked at the paper book and said, okay, it should should be this photo and it should be cropped in this way and I just reselected
⏹️ ▶️ John it from the sidebar put it in there and repaired the the most recent three books and the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John I only had to repair the most recent three books is because the whole reason I’m doing this is sort of preserve the work that I have
⏹️ ▶️ John done so I know which photos are on which page and how they’re arranged and all that but there’s a better way to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John the better way to do that is to make a digital version of the book and
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s photo books had a way to do this and so do all these third part at least so does Mimeo the third-party extension
⏹️ ▶️ John that I use. You can export your book as a PDF. It doesn’t really look like a book anymore
⏹️ ▶️ John but it does show every single page in the print layout and I had exported the PDFs dutifully
⏹️ ▶️ John for every photo book that I have ever done over the many years except for the past three years when apparently I forgot all about it. So
⏹️ ▶️ John the last three years of photo books, I exported them as PDF, used to be able to export as two kinds of PDF,
⏹️ ▶️ John one was called like a regular PDF for viewing, the other was called a quote-unquote production PDF which presumably you
⏹️ ▶️ John could give to the printer and they could print again, but anyway There’s only one choice now in Mimeo which is export as PDF and so
⏹️ ▶️ John I did that. So now I have backups of all my books like their layouts their
⏹️ ▶️ John their actual print style layouts for every single page of all my books in a digital form
⏹️ ▶️ John which of course is nicely backed up and Now I don’t feel the need to go back through every single one of my
⏹️ ▶️ John photo books and repair the missing photos Which are surely there by the way, and there is some hope that these third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John extensions realize that this is going on and figure out how to
⏹️ ▶️ John how to swap in the newly winner of the duplicate merge process
⏹️ ▶️ John into the place where the old one was. But I didn’t want to wait around for that. So hopefully,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is hopefully the final wrinkle in the shared lively duplicate thing, check your projects.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you care about this at all, check your projects. And if you have to, you can repair
⏹️ ▶️ John them without too much work, as long as you have the print one to refer to. And I would suggest that if you do care about
⏹️ ▶️ John the layout, Export to PDF because then all your work will be preserved. In the worst case scenario, you could recreate
⏹️ ▶️ John the book from scratch by looking at the PDF.
Apple TV Atmos/DTS-X
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, we have yet more feedback with regard to receivers and such.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Steven Brandon writes, this is kind of a lot, but we did our best. And by that, I mean, John did his best to pare
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it down. With regard to Atmos and DTSX on Apple TV, although the listener
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a past episode said that they had an HTA-9 system, that was not actually the source of the problem they were talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The issue is that the Apple TV will not even pass through the Atmos or DTSX metadata on anything other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than EAC-3. The Apple TV will not let apps bitstream anything other than a few formats
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a receiver or anything else, and instead generally re-encodes audio data as PCM before sending it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the receiver. This is fine for regular surround audio, as the conversion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to PCM is lossless, but it also means you lose out on the Atmos-type metadata, including
⏹️ ▶️ Casey height data, etc. This might seem like it would make it impossible to pass along the height and other Atmos-type metadata,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but there is a solution. Apple does use a technology called Dolby MAT to embed this data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into PCM audio for some audio, mostly audio coming from its own apps and some streaming apps that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support Atmos, which apparently modern receivers can understand. But Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem to allow third-party app makers to access this option. The Infuse post linked to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last week does an even better job explaining all this. With every tvOS release, I always hope that we’ll find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out that Apple has opened this up to the makers of apps like Plex and Infuse. All of this is to say that those of us with high-end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey receivers, John, still have the problem with Apple TV of not being able to take full advantage of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey audio on our ripped Blu-ray collections. It is not a problem isolated to the HTA-9. Sad
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so obviously I don’t have high channels, but the other thing is, uh, the, I have a Blu-ray player.
⏹️ ▶️ John have ripped Blu-rays. Like, so there’s a lot of people with Synologies and ripped Blu-rays writing in field of spin. That’s what
⏹️ ▶️ John I was saying. Use Nvidia Shield. It’s the only thing that does this, right? There’s lots of other possible solutions. It’s kind of disappointing that the Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John TV literally won’t even pass it through. That seems like something they could hopefully fix with a software update.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, like that’s why, you know, part of having a receiver is then you can hook all sorts of stuff up to it, like an actual Blu-ray
⏹️ ▶️ John player, and then your Apple TV is entirely out of the mix. Jonathan LaCour had a few other
⏹️ ▶️ John suggestions here. He says, this and other limitations led me to invest in a Zidoo
⏹️ ▶️ John Z9 Xbox. I have no idea what that is. He says, it’s Android, clunky, and weird.
⏹️ ▶️ John like something Marco might be interested in. But it supports literally everything. That said, you are
⏹️ ▶️ John correct that most people probably shouldn’t care. If you don’t have high channels, it’s irrelevant. If you don’t have high quality speakers, it’s irrelevant.
⏹️ ▶️ John And most critically, if you consume content exclusively through streaming, it literally doesn’t matter. But of course, he says, those of us
⏹️ ▶️ John who have invested in high channels and Synology, so with Blu-ray rips are the only people who should care. So some people should
⏹️ ▶️ John care. And honestly, Apple should get on this. Like fine, you can’t deal with it. At least pass it through. It’s kind of disappointing
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t do that. But just FYI. Bye now.
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Reddit to charge for API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Moving on, there was some breaking news that happened, I think, as we were recording last week that I don’t know if we’ll have too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much to say about this, famous last words, but I wanted to call it to our attention, to your attention.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Reddit has decided to start charging for API access. And this is particularly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relevant to me because if you recall from a couple episodes ago when we were talking about FlukeUp, as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Erin continues to make fun of me for. Anyways, As we were talking about that, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying, even though there doesn’t appear to be very much if any charge
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for using the Movie Database’s API right now, you never know what will happen, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so that’s exactly what’s going on with Reddit. My limited understanding is that pretty much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of the API was free. And it sounds like at first they kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of took the Twitter, or one of the 17 iterations of Twitter’s approach, in that they said, OK, well, bots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will remain free. But other things, like full featured apps, like Apollo, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is my preferred app for looking at Reddit, the API access for Apollo will not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be free. And additionally, sexually explicit material will not be available via the API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at all. That seems to be the TLDR, from what I can gather. So a quote from their announcement, which we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will link in the show notes. We are introducing a premium access point for third parties who require additional capabilities, higher use limits, and broader
⏹️ ▶️ Casey usage rights. Our data API will still be open for appropriate use cases and accessible via
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our developer platform. So of course, Christian who writes Apollo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was pooping his pants when this all went down and apparently had a couple of phone calls
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Reddit. And he put together a really, really, really good post on Reddit, of course, about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what this really seems to mean based on his conversations with Reddit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so quoting Christian, to this end, Reddit is moving to a paid API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey model for apps. The goal is not to make this inherently a big profit center, but to cover both the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cost of usage as well as the opportunity costs of users not using the official app, lost ad views, et
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cetera. The API cost will be usage-based, not a flat fee, and will not require Reddit Premium,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is, I believe, Reddit’s paid thing, for users to use it, nor will it have ads in the feed. The goal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is to be reasonable with pricing, not prohibitively expensive. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought this was all interesting given what I’m going through. Also, it’s worth noting that Imgur, I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s how it’s pronounced, has, I guess, recently banned sexually explicit uploads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So there’s apparently a big kerfuffle about that. I don’t personally care about that at all, but it’s kind of tangentially related,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so worth noting. But yeah, this is why pricing for anything where you’re not controlling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the API is tough, right? You know, because you never know what the future will bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you don’t want to have to renege on a lifetime unlock that was like just a bit more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than a monthly fee or something like that. you probably wouldn’t price a lifetime unlock that cheaply. But you see what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m saying that, you know, if you never know what the future will bring and reneging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on what you already had going is a real bad look. Even if it’s not really your fault, it’s just not a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look. And so I don’t know. I don’t know if I if either of you have anything to note on this. If not, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can just move right along. But it was an interesting and relevant thing for me anyway, given what I’m working on right
⏹️ ▶️ John is Apollo subscription or pay once. I mean, the escape hatch for things like this, it’s not great.
⏹️ ▶️ John and customers hate it and developers don’t like to do it, but you just make Apollo 2 and that one is subscription only, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s fair.
⏹️ ▶️ John With all of these terrible options that we’re kind of accustomed to as both customers and developers on the App Store,
⏹️ ▶️ John like we can’t do upgrade pricing, we can’t do this, we can’t do that, but there’s, you know, the way to do it is you
⏹️ ▶️ John just, well, this product is dead now, sorry, here’s version two of the product, which would have just been the next update
⏹️ ▶️ John to this one, but can’t be for reasons related to how the business of the App Store works. So, and then everyone yells at
⏹️ ▶️ John you and they give you the one-star reviews And it’s just like, it’s a very sort of very, very
⏹️ ▶️ John unhealthy dynamic, I feel like in a lot of ways between customers and developers, because
⏹️ ▶️ John in many cases, developers would like to do things that are
⏹️ ▶️ John that customers would like better. Like we would, you know, upgrade pricing, for example, or like somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John giving lower prices to people who recently brought a thing like, you know, I make a new version of a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s an upgrade price. But if you bought the old one recently, you get the upgrade for free. All the things that Mac developers would
⏹️ ▶️ John do before the App Store, you know, where you had the flexibility to
⏹️ ▶️ John be nicer to your customers. And the App Store does more of those things than it used to, but still not nearly
⏹️ ▶️ John as many as good Apple developers used to do back in the days before they were constrained.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is an example. Hey, our app used to be like, you could do a one-time unlock, but that was when the API was free.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the API is not free anymore. And eventually we’re gonna go into the red on all those users because
⏹️ ▶️ John their lifetime unlock is going to run out, essentially. And then we’ll be losing money every time they
⏹️ ▶️ John use our application and that’s not tenable. So how do we deal with that? You’d like to just be able to say to
⏹️ ▶️ John those people, you know, after your money runs out, start paying the monthly
⏹️ ▶️ John thing or whatever, or it’ll stop working or like, you can do something that is better than, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John the app you’re using is dead. Now here’s Apollo 2. And you’ve never purchased anything in Apollo 2
⏹️ ▶️ John so you’re starting from zero. And that will make people feel bad because they’re like, I bought a lifetime unlock and you’ll be like, well, you did get a lifetime unlock
⏹️ ▶️ John for Apollo one. It’s just, it’s such a stupid situation that nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John likes and it just makes everybody upset. Part of it obviously is what you’re talking about Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is like, well, isn’t the root problem here that you sold an application with a flat rate unlock and you didn’t control the API
⏹️ ▶️ John and you just assumed it would be free forever. Yeah, that is kind of the root problem here. But a lot of things work like that
⏹️ ▶️ John because free APIs often exist. I don’t know quite know why Reddit had it. Maybe they’re just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, management was not, uh, uh, paying too much attention, but a lot of times it’s like a company’s in
⏹️ ▶️ John early growth phase, right? And they’re VC funded and they just need to get big real fast. And so, yeah, everything’s free.
⏹️ ▶️ John The accounts are free. Using it as free. The API is free, free, free, free, because we need to get users, users, users, eyeballs
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever you want to call them. Whatever the lingo is, because we need to,
⏹️ ▶️ John get a big enough growth numbers to get our next round of funding. But then eventually like the check check comes due, either you actually did
⏹️ ▶️ John get big and it’s time to start turning on the money tap. also Netflix, Amazon and many other big companies,
⏹️ ▶️ John or you didn’t get big and now the company’s going down the tubes, they need to make money. I don’t think either one of those applies
⏹️ ▶️ John to Reddit. They’ve been around for a long time, they did. They’re not in their growth phase. They’re already did grow pretty big. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they have management now that’s saying you know, running this API is actually costing us a lot of money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Let’s see if we can get some return on that investment. And they’re doing it in a, it’s what seems like a fairly thoughtful
⏹️ ▶️ John way to try to get money from people who can afford to pay it while not destroying the value
⏹️ ▶️ John of their service, you know, by allowing bots and stuff like that. Basically the opposite of whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Twitter’s doing. Yeah, I mean, I think you can look at this and you can see this is probably what Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should have done. Like Twitter probably should have taken an approach like this. Should be run by people with a clue,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah. Yeah, I mean, people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care and are competent. But you know, the age that Reddit came up in, you know, as John was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying, like it kind of started as, you know, it was a very nerdy thing launched by very nerdy people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during a very nerdy time of the internet. Reddit’s been around for quite some time. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it was coming up, that was the era of the web 2.0, everything has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an API, that kind of age. And as we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before with Twitter, at some point people realize, companies realize, why are we giving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away value? And why are we, in many cases more importantly, why are we giving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up control? So Reddit came right out and said, Part of their reason for this was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that people who use third-party apps like Apollo aren’t necessarily seeing Reddit’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads or aren’t in some other way benefiting whatever Reddit’s newest business direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or revenue opportunity might be because they’re not using the Reddit official apps or website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so obviously, many companies would look at that and have looked at that situation and would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco say, well, we don’t wanna give up any control. We don’t wanna give up control of our product or our monetization strategies
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever, So we’re just gonna not have a public API or shut down the public API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how Overcast is. Overcast does not offer an API for lots of reasons, including that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can see why companies would get there, but it is difficult when you have a product like Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where the API is such a key part of what makes it useful to a lot of people. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to have a bit of a different calculus there to do it right and to support the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that cause your service to have value to a lot of people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or like Reddit, where you have years and years of people using an API. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John deal as Twitter, whereas the third-party clients were such a big part of its growth. But you’ve got a legacy
⏹️ ▶️ John of people using applications like Apollo. Some of your best Reddit users probably use Apollo.
⏹️ ▶️ John So making the decision to say, no more third-party clients would be the wrong move. But at the same token,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t lose money on those people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. And in the case of Twitter, I think they called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wrong. Twitter saw a problem, which is a real problem, which is we have these third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that are making people not use our first-party apps and are not showing ads and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are eating into the control of our product experience. And we don’t control them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re run by other random people who we don’t control. And so we have limited ways
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to deal with this. And so we’re just gonna shut it down. That’s kind of a brute
⏹️ ▶️ Marco force approach that I don’t think was the right move for them for lots of reasons. I think they destroyed a lot of value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for both them and other people, but especially just for Twitter itself. They destroyed a lot of value of Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by doing that, like not being able to run simple bot accounts that people actually use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for various useful, legitimate purposes. That is, I think, destroying lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of value of Twitter and will ultimately, I think, serve them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco poorly with these decisions among many other decisions they’ve made.
⏹️ ▶️ John And to be clear, like that was the stuff we’re talking about here is most recently what Eon did. But
⏹️ ▶️ John prior to that many, many years prior, Twitter tried to thread this needle by having the same
⏹️ ▶️ John realization that Oh, third party clients, they’ve been such an important part of Twitter. But we can’t get rid of them entirely,
⏹️ ▶️ John because our best users use them. So what can we do? And they basically tried to sunset essentially third party clients
⏹️ ▶️ John where they sort of said, If you have an existing third party client and you have a lot of customers,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll let you have, I don’t remember what the calculus was, it was like say you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got 100,000 customers, you can have 100,000 more, but then that’s it, right? And they have this
⏹️ ▶️ John whole token based system where every customer you got, you were using up one of your tokens. And I don’t remember, it was like you
⏹️ ▶️ John got to double your customer base or triple it or whatever the calculus was. They basically said, no more third party
⏹️ ▶️ John clients, but anyone who already exists, you can keep running your business up
⏹️ ▶️ John to a limit. And the limit was pretty big. That’s why for years and years after they did that, I was still using Twitterific,
⏹️ ▶️ John which was, you know, I think the original third party Twitter client that I used for the entire history of Twitter until it went down
⏹️ ▶️ John the tubes. That’s how they tried to thread the needle. And at that time, everyone was pissed off
⏹️ ▶️ John then. That’s why my Mastodon accounts are all from 2017. Or app.net or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John We went to app.net, we went to Mastodon, right? Because we were annoyed by the way they tried to thread that needle.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like, don’t you realize how important third party clients are. And that was the kinder, gentler way to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. It’s that we’re not just gonna kill all third party clients. We’re not gonna just remove the free API, but we do
⏹️ ▶️ John want to take back control of the experience. And basically we don’t want there to be any more
⏹️ ▶️ John clients, just the existing ones can continue to have a business. And then the Elon Musk way to do it is just to turn everything
⏹️ ▶️ John off and shoot yourself in the foot over and over and over again. But the Reddit way I feel like is
⏹️ ▶️ John even better than what Twitter did because it’s like, look, all those third party clients, They’re important to our business.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we can literally make money from them. Not a huge amount of money, but hopefully enough to pay
⏹️ ▶️ John for, to offset the cost. So we won’t lose money on them. And we will keep the people, the users of Apollo
⏹️ ▶️ John who are in theory, very avid, you know, good customers for Reddit in terms of they
⏹️ ▶️ John use the product a lot. We can get money from them through third-party clients by charging
⏹️ ▶️ John for an API. And maybe that will cover costs. We’ll see how their plan goes for them, but it definitely seems nicer
⏹️ ▶️ John than either one of them. Certainly nicer than the current Twitter plan, but also nicer than the whatever year
⏹️ ▶️ John that was, 2017-ish plan from Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The only thing I would criticize about this, so Redis plan, so far, the big thing, we don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the pricing yet. But they have said that the way it will be structured, at least in their current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea of this, the way it will be structured is the users won’t pay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app developers will pay. And I think that’s backwards. I always thought this is what Twitter should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do, make the user accounts pay the service for API access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with those accounts. So, for instance, if Twitter’s gonna have their monthly premium plan, whatever, you know, Twitter Blue,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever it would be, charge users a few bucks a month for whatever that account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco level is, and then you could use that account level with any app using the API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then the app developers are never financially involved directly with the company or the users.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m not sure, I know what you’re going for for that, it seems better from a user’s perspective, But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John allowing the app developers to essentially skim off the top and be like in the middle there is
⏹️ ▶️ John important because here’s the deal, it still costs money to maintain and develop Apollo.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so like, you know, good third party applications may still wanna try to subscription,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s so much harder for them to do that. Say, oh, so I have to pay for a subscription for the API to Reddit. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to pay for a subscription to Apollo. If you just combine those two together and added a profit margin for Apollo, even
⏹️ ▶️ John though it would be more total expense, you just feel like, oh, I’m subscribing to Apollo. And basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John your money is passing through the developers of Apollo and they take a cut and then the rest of it goes to pay for the API,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like weather applications. We don’t pay for whatever the weather API is, AccuWeather
⏹️ ▶️ John API, individual customers don’t sign up with AccuWeather to get an API and then shop for clients. We all just buy
⏹️ ▶️ John a weather app. We pay for the subscription to the weather app. The weather app takes a cut of that and then passes the rest
⏹️ ▶️ John of the API thing. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey mean, I guess it hasn’t been
⏹️ ▶️ John tried the way you’re describing. So it could work kind of like, it worked like that with
⏹️ ▶️ John RSS. We’d pay for Feedbin or Feedly, right? And then we’d like, you know, use a newsreader
⏹️ ▶️ John on top of that. So I think it can work. I just wonder if in this case, it would be
⏹️ ▶️ John too much subscription, but you know, we’ll see. Like just from reading the subscription, it doesn’t seem unreasonable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t know what, well, I kind of know what Reddit users are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey but anyway, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know how this is gonna turn out because every customer base is different. And I’m gonna say that the customer base
⏹️ ▶️ John Reddit API usage is probably not like the general public. Yeah, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I would agree with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, and I think the other advantage of doing it this way is that Reddit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is likely to come out looking like a good guy. Because unless you’re deeply in tune as to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s going on in the machinations of what’s happening behind the scenes, what it looks like is that Christian is going to have to start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charging more, I’m assuming I don’t know this, but Christian is going to have start charging more or just, you know, kill
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the free version of Apollo. And from a user’s perspective, unless you’re really plugged
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, that just means Christian’s a big jerk. Well, it’s obviously not true, but that’s what it seems like. Right. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if, if Christian instead says, oh, well you have to open a release, a direct relationship with Reddit and give me, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey access and blah, blah, blah, then Reddit’s the jerk because you have to go in and talk to mom and dad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it. But the way it works now, the way Reddit wants it to be is that, oh, Christian’s a big jerk. He’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the one that needs extra money. I mean, it’s not us, well, really it is, but don’t look behind the curtain. It’s Christian that’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem. And so from a business perspective, it’s a win-win, right? Because they get more money and they don’t have to be the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bad person. And so I totally understand why they’re doing it. But again, if they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really doing this just to recoup the expense and a little bit of the opportunity cost,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that really is true, this may not be bad at all, but time will to.
Really, become a member!
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Formative computing experiences
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we had an ask ATP from probably a while ago, knowing us,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we decided to promote to a full on topic, because I thought this would be kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of fun for the old dudes here to reminisce a little bit. So Torb wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they had watched the Verge video about the Lisa, which is only about 10 minutes long. It’s pretty good. Delightful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s very good. mentioned offhand that the original Mac didn’t have multitasking!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just really wondered what would that have been like? I think John would know. And then I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought I’d love to hear all of you talk about how computers you used when growing up were different and how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they affected your usage patterns. So I have a little tour of like seminal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey moments of my childhood with regard to computing, but perhaps we should start by John answering the question,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so how did multitasking work on the original Macintosh, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I guess, you know, as we get older, young people don’t realize exactly how
⏹️ ▶️ John primitive things were. I often think, I’ve heard this from other people
⏹️ ▶️ John my age, I often think that I’m very lucky to have been born when I was in terms of technology,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think we all kind of were, because we got to see both sides of the big
⏹️ ▶️ John internet divide. What was life like before the internet was pervasive, and what was life like
⏹️ ▶️ John after? And we were there for that transition. So we have those two experiences. We did have
⏹️ ▶️ John a time in our life without the internet, and we know what that was like. And that’s kids born today never have that
⏹️ ▶️ John time, right? And that was important. For me, I also got to see the
⏹️ ▶️ John personal computer revolution. I existed at a time when personal computers were not a thing, and then they became a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, and I was there for that happening. Many things like that I think about, the dawn of the web, I was there for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Makes us all old fogies, but it is very interesting. It’s kind of like people who were born during the Industrial Revolution or the advent of cars.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s lots of very important technological inflection points in history, and we got to
⏹️ ▶️ John live through some really important ones. That does mean I have the perspective of what things
⏹️ ▶️ John were like before. Like, even with video games, going from literal Pong
⏹️ ▶️ John to what we have today is a leap that is going to be a while
⏹️ ▶️ John before the next leap like that happens. Maybe it’s AR, VR, but honestly, I think it’s going to have to be something past that with
⏹️ ▶️ John some kind of neural interface to have the same impact as going from Pong to today’s games.
⏹️ ▶️ John So for the Apple platforms in particular, I mean, this implies all for personal computing, for the Apple platforms in particular,
⏹️ ▶️ John remember the Lisa was like 10 grand in 1983 money or something? It
⏹️ ▶️ John it was not an affordable computer. It costs as much as a car, more than a car, right? That’s why
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac succeeded. One of the reasons why the Mac succeeded and the Lisa didn’t, it was just too darn expensive. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it was also much more powerful. Like all that money was going to making a more powerful computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Mac, even though the Mac was also expensive, it was, you know, $2,400 in 1984 money. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John a quarter of the price of the Lisa, right? And so while the Lisa had some
⏹️ ▶️ John rudimentary form of multitasking, the Mac absolutely did not. Remember the original Macintosh had 128 kilobytes of RAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John kilobytes, and that’s like, oh, like Commodore 64, Vic-20, they had even less. This
⏹️ ▶️ John thing ran a full GUI, a full complete GUI, right? 128 kilobytes of RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John There wasn’t much room for anything like, and it got around it by using lots of ROM. One
⏹️ ▶️ John of the things you would learn about back in the early days of the personal computer is very important in your first computer, the first course where you learned about computers, you
⏹️ ▶️ John learned this is the keyboard, this is the monitor, there were no mice because they didn’t know about them. Computer, monitor, and like literally
⏹️ ▶️ John the next thing you would learn is the difference between RAM and ROM, which is a distinction that has not really been important in anyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John life, but boy, they wanted you to know it. Anyway, the Mac had a bunch of ROM and that saved a bunch of memory because that stuff could
⏹️ ▶️ John be in read-only memory that was always accessible and you didn’t need to waste RAM on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway. But so just really quickly to put things in perspective. So you said 128 kilobytes, is that right? Mm-hmm. Of RAM?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the icon for my forthcoming app is 125 kilobytes, just the icon. Is that compressed?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yeah, probably, it’s a JPEG. But never, the point is just that- Your icon’s not a JPEG, please. It is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John absolutely, it doesn’t matter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco here. Why is it a JPEG? It’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John JPEG. Please don’t make it a JPEG.
⏹️ ▶️ John absolutely not a JPEG.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m looking in the asset catalog in the file system. It’s a JPEG in the file system. It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t freaking matter.
⏹️ ▶️ John You are not using a JPEG.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Jesus Christ.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Concentrate. Why don’t you paste a
⏹️ ▶️ John screenshot into a Word document? Get a PNG, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will bother Jelly who was kind enough to do this and is probably listening to this mortified because I bet you he sent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me a a ping and then somehow it ended up a JPEG. I don’t even know how.
⏹️ ▶️ John concentrate John. All right, all right. Anyway, here’s the thing about bitmaps. The uncompressed version of the bitmap
⏹️ ▶️ John of your thing, add it up, add up the RGB values. The uncompressed size of that is way bigger than 128 kilobytes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Exactly, and I’m not running a full operating system in this space. I’m just storing a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very large icon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if you just want to, if you can run a store one icon asset, that’s it, all your RAM is gone. All right, so
⏹️ ▶️ John the way this manifested in multitasking is a couple of different ways. So like my,
⏹️ ▶️ John remember, I did have a VIC-20 before this, which had 20 kilobytes of RAM, just even less, but it did nothing. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John attached to your television set. It had a keyboard, it had no mouse, it had no GUI. It was a command line or N-Basic,
⏹️ ▶️ John like very simple stuff. But this was a full-fledged GUI, right? And it
⏹️ ▶️ John had, the original Macintosh had one floppy drive built into the computer. I didn’t have an external one. So you got one
⏹️ ▶️ John 400K floppy drive. That’s all your data, right? And what you do is you’d stick in a floppy disk it would boot,
⏹️ ▶️ John you turn the computer on, stick in a floppy disk, you know, cause we can turn the computer on and it would just have a flashing question mark icon and you stick in a floppy disk
⏹️ ▶️ John and it boots, right? That floppy disk has the operating system on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I think you, I feel like you need to slow down here again. There was no hard drive, right? Like-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Oh yeah, no hard drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It did not exist. There was no storage on the computer. The Lisa had a hard drive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. But on the original Mac, there was nowhere to put your stuff except the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey floppy disk drive, which granted wasn’t floppy, but-
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, those are all personal computers. I mean, you know- Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey yeah, yeah. The
⏹️ ▶️ John Commodore 64 didn’t have a hard drive. The VIC-20 didn’t have a hard drive. The Apple II didn’t have a hard drive. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I agreed. No, it’s just, if you’re less than a million years old like we are,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is probably not really making any sense.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re booting and running from this floppy drive, right? So the floppy drive had the operating system on it. You could also
⏹️ ▶️ John wedge onto that floppiness. You could also put like one application. So you could put like maybe Mac Paint on there,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So then you could boot from the operating system on the floppy drive and then you’d see the operating system and you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John see Mac Paint and you’d double click Mac Paint and when you double click Mac Paint, everything goes away and just Mac Paint is running.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you save the document in Mac Paint, you could save that to the floppy disk drive too, but not too many documents, because if you
⏹️ ▶️ John save too many documents, up now you’ve filled your floppy drive. Because remember, the floppy disk, the 400K floppy disk has the OS,
⏹️ ▶️ John the one application you’re using, and all the files you’re saving from that application.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like how big was the OS? Like how much free space would you tend to have on a floppy drive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John on a floppy disk?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the OS was maybe half, I mean, I should fire up a mini V Mac and check what
⏹️ ▶️ John it is. but like it seemed like there was enough room. You could have more than one application on there. Like it
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t seem like it was taking up more than half, but maybe it was, maybe it was like 300K. I can look it up, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it was small. But so here’s the workaround for this, right? Eventually, if you’re a power user like me,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d be like, okay, but I’ve got a lot. I’ve got Mac Paint, I’ve got Mac Write, I’ve got all my school papers. It would be better to,
⏹️ ▶️ John I have this box of floppy disks here. What I would want is I can have like a, you know, an operating
⏹️ ▶️ John system disk and maybe, you know, whatever, but I would also like to have like a data disk or maybe a disc that just has MacWrite and all
⏹️ ▶️ John my papers on it, right? Remember, MacWrite came on a floppy disk from Apple that said
⏹️ ▶️ John MacWrite, it was printed or whatever. But you’d also wanna have like, what about all these other floppy disks, I’ll just store my papers
⏹️ ▶️ John on those. So the way it would work is you’d boot from your startup
⏹️ ▶️ John disk or whatever, then you would eject that floppy disk. And what would happen, so the floppy disk icons
⏹️ ▶️ John would appear on the desktop. I think that’s not even a default on macOS anymore, but the floppy disk icon would appear on the desktop. And when
⏹️ ▶️ John you ejected it, you’d see like a grayed out, not gray, cause it was a black and white screen, but
⏹️ ▶️ John a black and white dithered grayed out icon, we would call it a ghost icon of the
⏹️ ▶️ John floppy disk that you just ejected, right? It would still be visible there, you could see it, but it was a ghost of its former self.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then you would stick in your other floppy disk with the one that has a different application,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, MacDraw or something on it, right? Or it has your files on it or something. You’d stick that one
⏹️ ▶️ John in and you’d say, okay, here’s my school paper. And I double click my school paper. double clicking the school paper would launch
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac write, but Mac write was back on the other disc. So what it would do, is it would eject your disk and say, please put in
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the system disk that I had Mac write on it. And you put in the system disc and it would grind, grind, grind and then it rejected it. It
⏹️ ▶️ John would say, please put in the design of the document and you’d put that in and it’d go grind, grind, grind and it would eject it. It would say, please put in
⏹️ ▶️ John the and you would swap the discs back and forth because they would need to like, I’m running the application,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I need the document but I need the application but I need the document back and forth, back and forth such
⏹️ ▶️ John that I, there was a, you’d see both people with their hands who got good at doing this, like basically
⏹️ ▶️ John using a single hand to catch an auto-ejecting 3.5 inch floppy disk and insert another one
⏹️ ▶️ John back and forth, right? And you had a long breaks between, but there was also like mechanisms that would help you with that. That was
⏹️ ▶️ John the dance. It was again, amazing feat of resource usage that this tiny amount of RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John and the data from the application and the data from the document that you could essentially run the system sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of manually swapping back and forth each resource that the computer needed at the time that it
⏹️ ▶️ John needed it. And it would take forever because floppy disks are slow. You’d have to wait for
⏹️ ▶️ John it to read, find the place, get the data, put a little bit in RAM, eject it, get the other thing back and forth.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then when you want it to save, you’d have to do the same thing. And then when you quit the application, you’d have to go back to the finder. So you gotta put the system
⏹️ ▶️ John disk back in. That experience, to get back to the point of this question,
⏹️ ▶️ John was very formative because, well, for one thing, it showed you kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John the mechanics of multitasking because you are the part of the multitasking system, essentially, you
⏹️ ▶️ John were the meat part of the multitasking system. And you could see, look, it’s not doing more than one thing
⏹️ ▶️ John at a time. It’s just doing multiple things one after the other interleaved. You were literally interleaving
⏹️ ▶️ John by swapping disks back and forth. So you could see the mechanics of, now the computer needs this, now the computer needs that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It needs to write here, it needs to read from that. And you knew that there was a limited resource of RAM and that
⏹️ ▶️ John it was pulling things in and out of there or whatever. And so when multitasking started to
⏹️ ▶️ John slowly arrive with the advent of the Mac Plus, which had one megabyte of RAM, and hard
⏹️ ▶️ John drives and stuff like that, you could see the mechanics, you could see those mechanics like
⏹️ ▶️ John compressed. But I did eventually get an external floppy drive. Then I had to get two floppy disks in at the same time
⏹️ ▶️ John and you wouldn’t have to swap. One had the operating system and the applications and the other had your data.
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time and you would see how much faster that was than swapping disks. It wasn’t twice as fast. It was like 50
⏹️ ▶️ John times as fast, because you didn’t have to wait for a mechanism to eject a disk and put it back in everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was great. And then the hard drive coming in, right? That was an important experience I felt like,
⏹️ ▶️ John because it made me appreciate multitasking, made me understand what was going on. And also like the primitive approaches
⏹️ ▶️ John to multitasking, like one of them was called, I think this was called Mini Finder. If you were in an application
⏹️ ▶️ John and you wanted to launch another application, you’d have to quit back to the Finder
⏹️ ▶️ John and then find the other application and launch it. Mini Finder lets you quit one application,
⏹️ ▶️ John not go all the way back to the Finder, but just go to a Mini Finder, which would just be like a little dialogue
⏹️ ▶️ John in your screen that would just show the installed applications that are currently on any disks that are
⏹️ ▶️ John in, right? And launch it from there. You’d be like, that’s so dumb, why not go back to the Finder? Because going back
⏹️ ▶️ John to the Finder, everything took forever. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey see, I think people don’t realize, everything took
⏹️ ▶️ John forever. So you’re like, oh, it takes too long to quit back to the Finder. I’d rather
⏹️ ▶️ John quit back to Mini Finder and save myself literally 25 seconds every time
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanna do this. This was multitasking, right? It’s faster than the Kindle. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or no, it was way slower than the Kindle. You think
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the Kindle is faster? All right, it’s faster than
⏹️ ▶️ John the book’s tablet. So, see, the Mini Finder was a feature and you’re saying, yes, this is what I want.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want to be able to switch between more than one thing at a time without having to wait 67 seconds
⏹️ ▶️ John between things. I wanna wait 22 seconds. I can go back to Mini Finder, then launch MacWrite. Because I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to have to load the whole Finder and all the information that, you know, I didn’t have to load the whole Finder program, I wanted to just
⏹️ ▶️ John load Mini Finder. So coming from that, it’s kind of like people who grew up in the Depression, and are
⏹️ ▶️ John saving like, you know, boxes and twine and stuff. It’s like, you never know when we’re gonna need this stuff, because
⏹️ ▶️ John things are good now, and we’re able to afford food, but someday we might not. So we’ve got to save all these containers,
⏹️ ▶️ John and save this warm clothing, you know. So I feel like I was kind of brought up in depression
⏹️ ▶️ John error computing resources where I don’t expect to have lots of RAM or lots of memory, which is kind of rich
⏹️ ▶️ John coming from me now, my gigantic computer with my huge screen and my huge amounts of RAM. But maybe that’s my reaction to it, is
⏹️ ▶️ John that I’m just like making sure that, you know, as God as my witness, I’ll never be RAM hungry
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey reference that neither one of you have
⏹️ ▶️ John seen that movie, but it’s fine. That’s where I’m coming from.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it makes me in some ways appreciate where I am because I came from that, and because I grew
⏹️ ▶️ John up doing that, it does not make me nostalgic for those times. I do not have nostalgia,
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike Casey with his vinyl records, for the time when I had to do that. When I was in that, when I
⏹️ ▶️ John was doing that, all I wanted was more. Two floppy drives, a hard drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John like a color screen. I wanted that stuff so bad. And eventually I got it, it just took, you know, decades.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right? And so it makes me appreciate what I have now. And I still have that same attitude, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, whatever I have now, I’ve never felt like, oh, this is probably just about enough.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey poor 640K will
⏹️ ▶️ John be enough for anybody, kind of misattributed quote type thing. But that whole idea that we ever arrive at some
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of ending point and computing resources are sufficient is not a thing. Not an illusion
⏹️ ▶️ John I ever had or never will experience because I always wanted more. Because when you see the multitasking with
⏹️ ▶️ John the floppy drives going back and forth, you can see how much better this would be with more computing resources
⏹️ ▶️ John and more money. And you know how computing has been improving over your life. and so you can see the future and you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John be there. And that has never changed for me. So I look at my gigantic screen now and my huge Mac or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I can see, yes, but could you actually use 10 times more computing resources,
⏹️ ▶️ John a hundred times? I say, yes, I totally can. Because there’s plenty of things that I feel like are not up to
⏹️ ▶️ John snuff and that could be better, right? Do I need a screen that’s the size of my house? No, but if you could spray
⏹️ ▶️ John images onto my retinas, I’m all for that, as long as it doesn’t burn my retinas out. So like, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not content with the status quo I can see how things can get better. And because I’ve seen how things have advanced
⏹️ ▶️ John and how, you know, where we came from, I see how the pieces fit together also helps that I, you know, was a
⏹️ ▶️ John computer engineering major and, uh, been a developer for 20 mumble years or whatever, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I, I still feel like I’m traveling that road and I never feel like I’m going to get to a point where things are satisfactory.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think future further progress is pointless. It just makes me hungry for more.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny hearing you talk about that. I remember, I’ve brought this story up many times, but I vividly remember,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, I don’t recall exactly when it was given the house we were in, I want to say it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey early nineties, but I remember having an argument with like a distant cousin of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mine who was quite a bit older than me that one could never, it would be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey impossible to fill a one gigabyte hard drive because he had one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for whatever reason, this was long before that was really a thing. And I was like, well, what do you need that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for? You would never fill a gigabyte. What could you possibly fill a gigabyte with? It
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will never happen. And that lasted like a year, maybe two before that was clearly incorrect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But, um, no, this got me thinking about. Uh, some of the pain. So that’s all the pain that John had to live
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through, but Marco and I had our own pain. And
⏹️ ▶️ John on your one gigabyte hard drive store, I think I said this last time you told the story as well. Um, this is a great example
⏹️ ▶️ John of us not getting quite what we want. I remember having similar conversations about, Oh, you know, hard drives are so
⏹️ ▶️ John big you’ll never be able to fill them and every time I saw a bigger hard drive size what I would say is I want to
⏹️ ▶️ John be able to fit all the files from all my past computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John this big box of floppy disks? I want all those floppy disks to be on there. I also want
⏹️ ▶️ John the hard drive of my previous computer just like you know just the whole hard drive and then
⏹️ ▶️ John I want all my new stuff and I want to repeat that process for every new computer that I get so that when I get a new computer
⏹️ ▶️ John it literally has all my files from all my my past computers plus the new files. And I have to say, as fast as hard drives have
⏹️ ▶️ John advanced in size, I have not been able to do that. They’re just not big enough. I am bursting at the
⏹️ ▶️ John seams on a four terabyte drive on this Mac Pro and it does not have all my files. Now, all my
⏹️ ▶️ John files from my fast computers are small, but they’re not small enough to fit on here. Yeah, my classic
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac OS files could probably fit, but not my previous Mac Pro. That had a multi terabyte thing too. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John the one before that was like maybe one terabyte. The one before that was 500 gigs. So I still feel like,
⏹️ ▶️ John boy, if only I had a petabyte, then maybe I could fulfill my dream of all
⏹️ ▶️ John my past computers are on every computer. And when I buy a new computer, it has to be big enough to fit all my past computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s like starting from zero. Then that’s just like the tear button on the scale. And then all my new
⏹️ ▶️ John storage is above that. And we haven’t achieved that dream. So keep trying everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, we’re working on it, right? But you were talking about how you had to swap floppies. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember doing some of that when I was really little. The difference though is that your computer was fancy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enough that it would actually eject the floppy itself. Whereas Marco and I had to hit a button in order to eject the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey floppy when we were told
⏹️ ▶️ John to. But you could hit that anytime you wanted and just destroy all your files because your computers were garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s not go too far, but yes, the file destruction part is true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, auto eject and auto inject. Let’s not forget the auto inject because when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John swapping floppies back and forth, which I was doing all the time, auto inject is you’d press it and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’d press it in and it would get, there’s like a spring force that you’d feel, and instead of like on a PC where you had to shove it
⏹️ ▶️ John all the way in with your thumb and then close the little door, you would push it in, and this is 3.5 inch, not 5 1⁄4, 5 1⁄4 slid in smooth and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you turn the door. With 3.5 inch, there was always spring resistance, but on a PC, you had to shove it all the
⏹️ ▶️ John way in, but on Macs, they had auto inject and auto eject, and inject meant that once you pressed it past a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John point, it would suck it out of your hand and go in, so you didn’t have to shove your thumb all the way into the mouth of your computer,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just push it in a little bit. And of course, auto eject means it would go, And the disc would pop
⏹️ ▶️ John out by an inch, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Meanwhile, we solved this with a button and it worked fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Auto-inject and auto-eject were essential if your life was spent swapping 400K
⏹️ ▶️ John floppy disks. And even when the swapping wasn’t there, auto-inject and auto-eject definitely differentiated
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs from PCs. As did the 3 1⁄2 inch floppy disks, because 5 1⁄4 were literally
⏹️ ▶️ John floppy and had exposed magnetic media and were just barbaric. And 3 1⁄2 were obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, but the PCs got those very shortly after the Macs. Let’s not be too
⏹️ ▶️ John that shortly, at least not in childhood years. Because you know, when you’re a kid, like, you know, from the age
⏹️ ▶️ John of like seven to eight, seems like a millennia, you know, with them, and
⏹️ ▶️ John from 35, 36, you don’t even remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, so back in the day that, and I forget Marco, when you had a computer in the house, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know you were exposed to them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay. So when I was little, I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanting to play various computer games, like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shoot, I’m trying to remember what else.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco SimCity. The first SimCity. Sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then eventually SimCity 2000, much, much, much later. But early on, when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first exposed to DOS, like Windows, that’s disk operating system, that was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely barbaric version of what John was doing on his fancy, fancy Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There was no Windows. If it existed, it had not reached mainstream at this point. It probably did exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but nobody was using it at this point. And so we had to do everything via the command
⏹️ ▶️ Casey line. And I’ve told the story many times. I’ll tell it very briefly again. That I was always
⏹️ ▶️ Casey asking my dad for help. Like, dad, how do you do this? How do you do that? How do you do this? How do you do that? And eventually, for all my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dad’s many perks, patience is not one of them. And eventually, he literally handed me the DOS 3.3,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe, owner’s manual or user’s manual or whatever, and said, just read this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I did. And here I am, you know, 20, 30 years later, 30 years later. But anyway, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what Marco and I had to manage was we had to write our own config dot sys, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey remember it’s 8.3 file names, John’s favorite thing in the world. Uh, we had to write our own config dot sys,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which would explain to the computer what like the sort of kind of drivers it would need to load. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we had to write our own auto exec dot bat, which would then finish the startup process by, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, running things, running different things, uh, after the computer, it reached like a bare minimum
⏹️ ▶️ Casey level of functionality. And I remember vividly that I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to make a decision and like swap my config sys and autoexec bat files with different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ones based on whether or not I needed a mouse because to load the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mouse driver used some of, I think it was 640K of conventional memory.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then you also had like RAM on top of that, but conventional memory was where stuff like drivers sat.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I needed to be aware of whether or not the game I was about to play needed the mouse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and run the right config system, autoexec bat in order to make sure that I have either enabled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or disabled the mouse, because if I don’t need the mouse, I want to save some of that conventional memory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because some of the, some of the games I’m playing, they’re like bumping up against the edge of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available conventional memory that I have right now. It’s, it’s barbaric. It was ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also remember, and this is probably something that Marco can chime in on, you know, when the Sound Blaster came out, when, you know, sound
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cards came out and things like that, you needed to do like this whole dance with interrupt request ports,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IRQ ports, and make sure that you like told the software and the hardware, okay, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want the Sound Blaster and IRQ 12 or whatever the case may be. And that was always a fricking nightmare because you never knew which one was the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right one. And then as I got a little bit older, I would write like, you know, menuing systems for my auto
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exec bat. So it would be like this ridiculous, think of it as shell scripts, but like this ridiculous This menuing system where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would type, okay, G for games, and it would bring up a new menu
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for all the games you could play, and it would load them up and whatever. This is what we did because we didn’t have a graphical user interface. We
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just kind of faked it.
⏹️ ▶️ John And remember, this is on 640 kilobytes of RAM, which is massively more than 128.
⏹️ ▶️ John always talk about the original iPhone and how amazing it was that it was so smooth and responsive for the
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly limited hardware of the time, but the 128K Mac is kind of in a way that no other
⏹️ ▶️ John product except maybe a couple of well-known game consoles were. Like, they were able to wring out
⏹️ ▶️ John such amazing performance of such incredibly limited hardware. A full
⏹️ ▶️ John GUI with the mouse driver always loaded in 128 kilobytes with like,
⏹️ ▶️ John not a shell on top of a command line thing, but a full GUI operating system from top to bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John with everything working with, you know, sound car, like, you know, full, full like, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like 22 kilohertz sound, so I wouldn’t see the quality, but it wasn’t like the bleeps and boops of the
⏹️ ▶️ John MS-DOS thing. So you got a quote unquote sound card, like everything, everything a more modern PC
⏹️ ▶️ John wouldn’t have for such a long time with so much more resources that they’ve somehow managed to get to work
⏹️ ▶️ John on a 120. And obviously it didn’t stay at 128 for long, 512 came out of that one megabyte and ramped up pretty quick. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why like the tales of the original Mac team are fun to read, is it’s kind of like reading, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like Apollo 13, you’ve got to fix this problem and you’ve got this set of stuff and some tape,
⏹️ ▶️ John parts into a complete GUI operating system? No, you can’t have more RAM. No, you can’t have a bigger screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, you can’t have a hard drive. Good luck. And that’s why, you know, Mac users are insufferable.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only time I had to deal with AutoexecBAT and Config.Sys was when I was at my friend’s house trying to get PC games to
⏹️ ▶️ John run. And then you got to play with both of those files until the game ran. And then I just, you know, I played the game and I left.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Yep. It was the worst. And speaking of the worst, I remember when my dad and I originally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted to get an internet service provider, an ISP, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey needed to figure out how to use the modem. And so we had to write our own, I don’t know why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was the case, but I vividly remember doing this. We spent literally like a week writing the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hays, like ATDR, AT whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Everybody had to do that. That was just part of being on the internet back then. Even on the Mac when I had to run my Z modem
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, I know the AT modem and it strings and all that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, yep, yep, yep. We had to do that by hand. There was no documentation anywhere. You just kind of threw junk against the wall and hoped for the best.
⏹️ ▶️ John you can get the documentation on the internet, though.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yeah, but you gotta get on the internet to get the documentation off the internet.
⏹️ ▶️ John I know, it’s a chicken egg, but good thing was, I was in college then, so I could just go down to the computer lab and look up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If somebody says plus plus plus on a podcast, does it mute and disconnect? Mm-mm. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair. And then, you know, so at this point, you know, you really want to play games with your friends and you could do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dial up, where you could literally dial your friend’s house using the game software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it would create a connection. You could play each other over dial up, which was impossibly slow and you couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do anything other than play the game. There was no chatting with them in most cases. You just play the game, that was that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then eventually, we got to the point that we wanted to do quote unquote LAN parties, but LANs weren’t a thing, or at least not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for kids my age. So what we would do is we would bring our tower computers and our 7,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pound CRT monitors that were only 13 inches, and we would bring them to our friends’ houses,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then we would set them up in a very small and very stinky room where you would use something called a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey serial cable. So it was a serial cable, but I think it was like a crossover on the inside,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so you could connect two serial ports, to a serial port on one machine to a serial port on another machine,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then you could play each other locally, which was so much better than doing it over dial-up, because it had,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by comparison, infinite bandwidth. And then over time, then there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some modicum of networking in DOS, like IPX networking. And there was eventually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some software I know I’ve talked about this several times in the past, called Kali, K-A-L-I, which would mimic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey IPX networking, but do it over TCPIP. So you could do these games, all these old DOS games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that were never intended to be played on the internet, you could now play on the internet, which was amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then the other fun thing about being on the internet is when you had your one ISP, well, what happens if you happen to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a laptop happen to have a modem and you happen to go traveling. Well, in order to get on the internet, you would have to dial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your ISP, which is presumably a local ISP in your area code. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was traveling away from Richmond, I would be making a long distance phone call that was also a thing to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something in the 804 area code. And so then I would have, I would be accruing charges
⏹️ ▶️ Casey potentially from the ISP. I’d be accruing charges for the long distance call. And it was a mess. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was the one time I was jealous of America online users was because AOL had, you know, endpoints,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, everywhere. And there was like a database inside the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey AOL app and you would just say, okay, here’s where I am, and you’d scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scroll, Richmond, Virginia, scroll, scroll, scroll, okay, there. That looks like a local number. Then you could dial your local number and not have to pay long-distance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charges to get on, quote-unquote, the
⏹️ ▶️ John What was your ISP that didn’t have local numbers? What were you using?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, I was, it was local when I was in, yeah, I wasn’t in Richmond at the time, but for the sake of discussion,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was local to Richmond. Yeah, but what was that ISP? Oh God, I don’t remember. It was forever ago. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was- There used to be local ISPs. It would be like an ISP in your town or in your region.
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I know. Because I remember having the same situation. So I knew the BU
⏹️ ▶️ John number, 3535000. But I don’t call that. I don’t know if it’s still a modem.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it was 617. And I could call it from campus and I could long distance it from home during the summer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because this is the other thing that I remember. So my first experience of the internet was at to college in 1993, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when I came home for the summer, up, where’d the internet go? It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey back at college. So
⏹️ ▶️ John like Casey, I could call on my modem, which I brought home with me, I could call
⏹️ ▶️ John the BU dial-up number, but it’s long distance to Boston. So I had, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John rather than doing that, to get a quote unquote local ISP, but even then, even in 93,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I had Netcom. And netcom was a guest semi national ISP
⏹️ ▶️ John and they had dialed numbers in most major metropolitan areas. So I got to call a New
⏹️ ▶️ John York dial up number to get on the internet. And then I could hop over to the BU stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I was at this point, that was not what I had. And I racking my brain. I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pretty sure this was when we were living in Austin, Texas. And I’m pretty sure it was North American
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internet and the domain for it was na.net. And I just went went to it and it’s like been bought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up a thousand times. It’s not what it is anymore. But I’m pretty sure when we were in Austin, when we were writing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, you know, modem codes and so on and so forth, the Hayes codes, I’m pretty sure it was, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey NAI.net. I’m almost sure of it. And they only had an established, they were only established in Austin.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or again, maybe it wasn’t Austin, but I’m pretty sure it was. Um, and that’s, that’s what we had. That was, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was it. And it was, dad had a tremendous advantage because IBM obviously had like end point, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you would call them, but like end points everywhere. And so I could get on the internet briefly and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey check my email using dad’s work dial up. But it was just a very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very different time. Like, you know, when we wanted to transfer a file from
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one person to another, you would put it on a diskette or a disc, depending on how old you are and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you would want to call it, and you would walk it to somebody else and hand them that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey disc. And now you have transferred that file because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco there was no internet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, you might have transferred the file. You have to actually read it off the disc to see if it was actually readable first.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s another archaic thing from all of our use. A big
⏹️ ▶️ John subject of advertising and competition in the computing marketplace was surrounding file format
⏹️ ▶️ John compatibility. It’s part of the reason why Macs were like boxed out of the business market or whatever. And there was
⏹️ ▶️ John all sorts of Mac products like, this will let you open files from PCs. Like the notion was that basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you had a PC, any of the files that you made in that PC, the Mac could do nothing with and vice
⏹️ ▶️ John versa, right? which I think is a concept that’s mostly foreign to people these days, because basically we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John set it on standardized formats, like for images, for example, they’re all JPEGs, PNGs, well, those are not platform specific file
⏹️ ▶️ John formats. Like, you know, through the magic of the web, the platform that nobody owns, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the web pages can be viewed from different platforms, the images can be viewed, and we still have Microsoft Word and stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ John that, but it used to be that literally every single file you made, no matter what it was, no matter what was in it, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you made that on a PC, well, of course a Mac can’t read that without some special software that knows how to read PC
⏹️ ▶️ John files because there was no standardized format and no internet to sort of force that standardization. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that whole concept has mostly disappeared, especially now that if any application is
⏹️ ▶️ John remotely viable in any platform, it’s probably cross-platform. Like there are very few, I guess there
⏹️ ▶️ John are probably a bunch of Mac programs that don’t exist on the PC and I suppose vice versa, but like Microsoft
⏹️ ▶️ John Word is everywhere. Every image format is readable everywhere. Photoshop is everywhere. You know, like it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John the portability of data is much better now. And I mean like in terms of being able to read it, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if we’re not carrying floppy disks around. So yeah, I could take my Mac floppy disk, PCs couldn’t even read the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John floppy disk. They would ask to initialize it or they would, however they would
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco format it. John, the word is format. Format
⏹️ ▶️ John This disk is uninitialized, would you like to initialize it? I know that message well. And vice versa
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time, that if you had a quote unquote PC disk and you brought it to a Mac, unless again, unless you have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could tell the Mac was the lesser platform, like the less market share because on the Mac, there were tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of utilities and stuff to help you read files from the PC, read DOS formatted floppies,
⏹️ ▶️ John much less so in the other direction because Windows didn’t have to, so why would it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, we didn’t even have like text encoding. So like, you know, this was before Unicode.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, we had ASCII, but like nothing stored stuff in ASCII. Once word processing started to have
⏹️ ▶️ John like bold and italic, it’s like so much, right? Even RTF is, I mean, RTF is still kind of a horror
⏹️ ▶️ John show, but that was as close as we got to cross-platform style text before the beautiful advent
⏹️ ▶️ John of PDF and HTML and all those other things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Man, you guys and your fancy modems and ISPs and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers before 1994, I had a very different experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, you both had the advantage that your parents were a little bit more computer-friendly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In Casey’s case, a lot more computer-friendly, I think. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. My parents were computer friendly. They were susceptible to other people telling them this is the thing they need to
⏹️ ▶️ John do for the kid, but they knew nothing. Casey actually had a computer knowledgeable parent. I did not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but you at least had like computer enabling parents. Yes, for sure. I did not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. My mom, you know, so number one was, you know, my mom,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super non-technical. My dad died when I was very, very young. So I was raised by a single mom. We didn’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money really. Like we weren’t poor. We were, you know, lower middle class. we got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by, but we couldn’t buy fancy stuff at all. The only reason we were able to get a computer is that one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my grandmothers had passed away and left us like $2,000. And so we used that to buy our first computer in 94.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was a wonderful Gateway 2000.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I loved those so much at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A 486 PC running Windows 3.11 for work groups and a black and white inkjet printer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which existed then. But anyway, so because we really didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any money, we were able to buy this computer like once in 94, but then not really able to upgrade
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it ever. So I was using that 1994, 486 computer until 1998 or 1999.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I entirely, it couldn’t run Windows 95.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I entirely skipped Windows 95. I didn’t use it at all. I went straight from 3.1 to a very short-lived stay on 98.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And by the way, people were saying, so
⏹️ ▶️ John what, use a five-year-old computer, who cares? You don’t understand how fast
⏹️ ▶️ John computers were changing. The five years from 1994 to 1998 were very different than the five years from 2015 to 2020, for example.
⏹️ ▶️ John Very different. Things were changing
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where all the jokes about, oh, you buy it and you bring it home, it’s obsolete.
⏹️ ▶️ John Things were getting better so fast at that point that a five-year-old computer was like, why even bother?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and even, you know, it wasn’t even top of the line when we bought it because we bought like a mid-range one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco $2,000 bought a mid-range desktop, not a top of the line desktop in 94. Still true of
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco today. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this was Gateway 2000.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I know, it was $2,000 in 1994 money, which is, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so that computer, that was like, and I was entirely self-taught because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my mom was very, very non-technical. You know, my sister didn’t care, and that was it. That was the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole household. My mom, my sister, and me. That’s why I was the only, it was in my room because no one else cared, which is great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That computer, I used that for so long. And again, going back to the not really having any money thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one in my house was going to agree that we should pay for a dial-up account or even a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco modem. So for the first few years of having that computer, for the first year I didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any connectivity to the internet because that wasn’t actually a given like why you’d get a computer. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t to put it on the internet. Like there was barely any internet at all back then. So for the first like year or so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or two that I had it, I just used local software. I would, you know, play around in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MS Paint or use Microsoft Word, figure out various things, play some games that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like buy on CDs. You’d go to a store in the mall and you’d buy like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that CD that had they would say like 200 games And it was all shareware demos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like 200 shareware demos for 10 bucks on this So I’d have like the first two levels of 200 different games
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that all sucked So that that was my gaming situation for a while I had to add
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the sound card and CD-ROM as a Set for Christmas that following
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Christmas because like it would have been too much to get that with the computer I got the computer in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spring 94 and then in December 94 I got the Sound Blaster 16 sound card with CD-ROM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco combo. The sound card actually drove the CD-ROM drive. Like it had the sound card itself. Oh my word. Had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a ribbon cable and I don’t even know what protocol it spoke but it was probably some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco early like form of ATA and that drove the CD-ROM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John drive. Didn’t the joystick
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco sound card? Yes it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did. Yeah I didn’t have a joystick but yeah gamepads yeah they would plug in. Anyway, so that computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lasted me a long time, because it had to, to the point where it even lasted me into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the early internet usage. But again, I didn’t have a modem, because we couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy a modem, because they were expensive, and who the hell was gonna buy a modem, and then buy an ISP? So eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some friend of my mom’s felt sorry for me, and gave me a hand-me-down. First I got a hand-me-down, 2400
⏹️ ▶️ Marco baud modem, and this was in probably like 1986, it was way late for that speed. It was this giant thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I remember I was playing with Visual Basic at the time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somehow I had lost my copy of the VBRun.dll file that you need to run. It’s like the runtime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Visual Basic projects. You need to run anything from Visual Basic. So I had to download a copy of it. So somebody told
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me about some BBS. I had to dial up this BBS and try to download this 300 kilobyte file on a 2400 baud modem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which I don’t know, I’m not gonna do the math now, but I think it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needed like two hours or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you remember how much 2400 bought modem cost at that point, because you got the used one, right? Why couldn’t you buy one
⏹️ ▶️ John new? Like what was the,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco how much did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it cost? It was a hand-me-down, like I don’t know. But at the time, the current speed at the time was like 28.8, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was old. Oh, that’s right, so
⏹️ ▶️ John you were on, all right. I was trying to remember, like my first modem was also 2400, but that was the fastest speed you
⏹️ ▶️ John could get at the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that was not the case in 1995, 1996, whenever this was.
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely are offset by several years in history. I was just looking up one Christmas I asked for,
⏹️ ▶️ John I got my second floppy drive, which as I previously said is super important. That second floppy
⏹️ ▶️ John drive in today’s dollars was $1,200. Oh my word. For a
⏹️ ▶️ John 400K external floppy drive, that’s all it did.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s bananas. And just to build on what Marco was saying, by the way, I can’t, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know if I have the words to express how slow a 2400 baud modem is. Like-
⏹️ ▶️ John You could watch the characters appearing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, that is 1000%. I, again, vivid memory. This was early in my computing life. Early, early, early. I have a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vivid memory of using Prodigy, which we briefly had an account on. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would literally watch the text come in as it was being downloaded one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John at a time. Like you see in movies today. Yeah, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John You go to a movie and you’ll see some kind of thing. And not only will you see the letters appear one at a time, they
⏹️ ▶️ John did over a 1200-2400 modem but, each one will make a beep. Well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, you can watch all the large language models very slowly generating text! Yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John that’s true. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s thinking, it’s not taking time to transfer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Right right. But yeah. That was like my whole internet experience growing up was really weird because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I came to it late. Um I had very, very basic, like that computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was so basic for the Internet that when mp3s were starting to become a thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was right at the end of me having that computer. So my first two MP3s I had on that 486 computer with a 400 meg
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard drive. So not only could, you know, but after I’ve been using this computer for like four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, the hard drive was nearly full. So to add like a three megabyte MP3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was a big deal for a 400 megabyte hard drive. And a 486
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can’t play MP3s in real time. It’s too slow to decode them. So I had to actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play them at like 22 kilohertz. Like I had to cut the quality and just not decode the upper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frequency range because it was too slow.
⏹️ ▶️ John I bet somebody could make an MP3 decoder written in assembly for 486, it would work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, I mean, yeah, this was obviously very early in MP3 days, so I’m sure it wasn’t that optimized yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was bad. It was written in Pascal. Yeah, eventually somebody,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eventually a family friend for like some other birthday or Christmas gift bought me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a 33 six modem and then that changed everything that was like oh my god now I can actually dial things but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still didn’t have an ISP my family wasn’t gonna pay 20 bucks a month and I was like a young teenager
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m was like I couldn’t do that myself so I had a I had a rich friend though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whose dad had an AOL account and and and it was this was right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before AOL went flat rate you were still paying like whatever like three dollars an hour to use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it but he would let me occasionally sign in to a screen name that he created in his account.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Problem is, AOL accounts wouldn’t allow account sharing. So if somebody was signed in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you couldn’t sign in also to the same account. So I would have to leave the call waiting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco non-disabled on my modem init string, leave call waiting enabled, and change the init string
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so the modem speaker would stay on the whole time. So the whole time using the internet, I’m hearing, shh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco next to me. And if I heard, boop, if I heard that call waiting beep
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come in, I would have to flip the modem off so it would hang up, instantly disconnect.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’d pick up the phone, hey, sorry, and you know, hang up and then he’d go sign on his account like from his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was this whole terrible thing. This is also, I had moments of this as well. I think specifically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with AOL. I don’t know why, maybe I really wanted to get on AOL specifically because there was something I wanted there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s probably what it was. But you would find a friend, like Marco was describing, whose parents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had an AOL account, and then he would either, well, in my case, he, but they would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey give you a login or something like that. But like Marco said, if the parent wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get online or the kid wanted to get online, you don’t want them to, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the parent, to see, oh, Casey is online. What the hell is this? Why was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, right. You had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be like, you had to be real committed when you dialed up with somebody else’s account
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you had to be real sure you were real fast with whatever you were trying to do because it was like super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dangerous, not in a literal sense, but it was like dangerous. You don’t want the parent to know that you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey leeching off their account, especially during the time that it wasn’t unlimited because yeah, for a long time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ISPs were like, particularly AOL, was built hourly. It was build by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the time you used. And so, yeah, this was like the most dangerous game.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a reference. And it was so stressful and so frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, again, as I was thinking about this topic earlier today, we just assume that the internet is everywhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not even talking about our cell phones, just in general. Like every building you go in today
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably has the internet running through it in some way, shape, or form. And that could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not have have been further from the truth at this era in
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought so. When I came home from college, I left the internet behind because the internet was at school. But I came back to my house, my house
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t have the internet. Where does the internet come into your house from? And so I brought my modem home, but the only thing I
⏹️ ▶️ John could dial was the Boston University number. And so I was just like, I got to get an ISP. And then we had the,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, we only have one phone line. And I essentially wanted to be on the internet 24 hours a day, which was incompatible
⏹️ ▶️ John with having a phone. So I had to figure that out. And I did actually, we did have AOL and some other things like that,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I despised, right? Because my first experience
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey was with the real internet.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I could see that AOL was not where I wanted to be. Something you both said
⏹️ ▶️ John reminded me of another thing that from my computing past, that gives me a different perspective on
⏹️ ▶️ John computers. I just mentioned that like with the original Macintosh, when you turned it on, it would make a little beep, the screen would come
⏹️ ▶️ John on and then it would show a floppy disk icon with a question mark on it and it’d be blinking. It’s basically saying, you know, disk, you got
⏹️ ▶️ John to stick in a disk. That’s all the Mac did when you turned it on. But I had had computers before that. Like I said, my first computer
⏹️ ▶️ John was a VIC-20, which we rented, not bought, because it was too expensive to buy. So you used to be able to rent computers. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John how much the rental costs, but presumably it was cheaper than buying. Anyway, VIC-20,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think this is true of Commodore 64, Commodore PET, my original computers. You,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you took that out of the box and you turned it on, it didn’t have a blinking floppy disk icon. It didn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John graphics, right? And you connected it to your television. That was your monitor. But those early computers, when
⏹️ ▶️ John you turn them on, I mean, I don’t know, did you, did one of you experience any computers? When you turn
⏹️ ▶️ John them on, what do they do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I never used anything that old, but I remember like, you know, the old Apple IIs that I would have in computer school, in school computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco labs. Like, you just flip it on and it would beep and it would have, and the CRT would warm up over a few seconds and you’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see a cursor. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you’d see what? A cursor. And what can you do with that cursor? What the hell is the cursor there for?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco With those old Apple IIs, it was a basic cursor.
⏹️ ▶️ John Exactly. Computers, my very first computer and the original personal computers that I experienced from the
⏹️ ▶️ John VIC-20 on, when you turn them on, you got a place where you could type. And what could you type?
⏹️ ▶️ John Basic programs. A computer was a thing that you programmed. That was what it was. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and my VIC-20 did not have a floppy drive or a cassette tape drive or literally anything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John You turned it on and you got a prompt. What could you do? Well, you could take a computer magazine that you got from library at school and you could type in a
⏹️ ▶️ John basic program. Or you could type your your own basic programs. Or you could make little colorful squares on the screen by figuring out which key
⏹️ ▶️ John makes a different colorful square on the screen, right? But like, built into the
⏹️ ▶️ John computers was the basic programming language. And you would type a line number and type a basic
⏹️ ▶️ John thing and that was it. And you could load your program and run your program and do stuff like that. So, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac was a very big change for me for many ways. Obviously it was my first GUI computer and the first
⏹️ ▶️ John GUI computer most people had ever seen. But also, the Mac, when you turned it on, there was nothing there.
⏹️ ▶️ John You had to boot into an operating system, run some software, whatever. It
⏹️ ▶️ John did not put you at a basic prompt. It was the first computer I used that was not essentially, this is a tool
⏹️ ▶️ John for writing and running programs. The Mac was a tool for running applications, essentially,
⏹️ ▶️ John programs that other people wrote. And yes, you could write your own programs too, but boy, was it more complicated than basic, let me tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, like going back to Torb’s question, which I think was great, like, how did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all this old stuff, how does it affect our usage patterns today? You know, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for my story, it’s a very complicated mess of lots of these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you know, from what John was saying a minute ago, having programming be just built into everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes me really resent platforms that lock that away or make it impossible to write software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for them or very difficult. I don’t love that. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when computers are programmable themselves, and you can use a computing device and write programs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it on it. I love that. But, you know, in general, too, like, you know, like my whole history here with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t have much, I couldn’t afford upgrades very often. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after that 46, I ended up doing a series of self-built computers because that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way to get a computer less expensively was build it yourself. Like and I learned how to do all that, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco honestly served me very well. You know, I learned how to build PCs, how to upgrade PCs, how to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different parts together. I spent so much time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco building PCs for either myself or for my friends, and having to figure out problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So much time with, like, drivers, reinstalling Windows, all, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, why does this hard drive not show up? So many problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So much time spent dealing with all that crap. I have so much time spent reinstalling Windows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco result, now, I’m fortunate enough that I can buy good hardware now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so I do. Because I went so long without having it, like as John was saying, when you’re a kid, this feels like an eternity.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like when I was a teenager, using these slow computers, and I cannot possibly express to anybody who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t alive back then, how slow everything was. You know, we talked about it a little bit earlier, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just everything was so slow back then. It was that slow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the entire 90s and even the early 2000s. Like it wasn’t quite as bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once RAM started getting cheaper in the mid 2000s, but it was really slow in the 90s because everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was RAM starved. Everything, you just hear hard drive grinding noises constantly.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or I mean, did you either run software on floppy disks? Because that was, the switch to hard drives
⏹️ ▶️ John is basically like the switch to SSDs. Like we’ve, most
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have lived through this. Relatively. We’ve lived
⏹️ ▶️ John through the switch to SSDs. Like you would think, what’s the difference? floppy disk hard drive, they’re both spinning media. You both gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for the disk to spin around to where you are and you gotta move ahead. But boy, was it different running. Because I ran software
⏹️ ▶️ John on floppy drives for a long time, or it seemed like a long time, and it’s the worst. And that was back in
⏹️ ▶️ John the era when you could, you know, when you could listen to computers and hear how they’re doing because they made
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey noises, mechanical noises that you
⏹️ ▶️ John could interpret, you could interpret their health. And so I’m very familiar with floppy drive noises
⏹️ ▶️ John and what it sounds like when things are going well and not going well. And yeah, so that was a whole other level of slow. There was,
⏹️ ▶️ John I suppose there was cassette tape slow, which is you gotta rewind and load the program. And that was like, oh, nothing’s happening.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re loading the program, come back when it’s loaded. So that’s one level. So the next was floppy disks, which was random access, but
⏹️ ▶️ John super slow. Then there was hard drives, then there was SSDs. And each of those leads to-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you’re skipping a step. You’re skipping an important step. And I skipped it earlier too. The CD-ROM
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John word. I’m putting
⏹️ ▶️ John that off to the side because that was like backsliding because we had hard drives and it’s like, yeah, but what if you had a really big hard
⏹️ ▶️ John drive that was incredibly slow? No thanks, but it’s 650 gigs and
⏹️ ▶️ John you can play Myst. All right, fine. Not gigs, 650 megs. 650 megs, sorry.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey 650 megs. Yeah, it’s hard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My favorite part of the CD-ROM era was at the end when they got really fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so, and everything, like so, you know, what happened was early CD-ROM drives, they’d be like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, 2X, 4X. I had a 1X drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I’m sorry. I think it was $800. Yeah. When I bought
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it in whatever 1990s money
⏹️ ▶️ John that was. That’s rough, that’s 150 kilobytes a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We had one of those too, and again, a differentiator between the Mac and a PC was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our original CD-ROM drive, which was external. You had to put the CD in a caddy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, no, the first Mac drive was in a caddy too. It just cost 10 times as much as the PC one, yeah. Yeah, it was probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was, it was scuzzy. My favorite part is when we got to the 52X CD-ROM era of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mid-2000s. It’s too fast. So every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the CD would be accessed, everything on the computer would freeze and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for like four seconds you’d hear rrroooorrrrrr.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And it was like, spin up, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was, because it had to spin up to it’s ridiculous spindle speed to, and it wouldn’t read anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until it was spun all the way up. So it would have this like, you know this four second like just lock of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever was trying to read it would just freeze for a few seconds and you hear this jet engine taking off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your computer. And that was normal for probably six years, seven years, like for a long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time. Every CD-ROM drive in a PC did that. Like, they all did it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That reminds me, speaking of multitasking, so on the original Mac, you know, I just described how you couldn’t run
⏹️ ▶️ John more than programming at once, but you couldn’t do more than one thing at once because the resources were so limited. The
⏹️ ▶️ John famous example is if you held down a pull-down menu, I’ve already talked about how you couldn’t click a menu, right, so if you click
⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse button and held it down on the file menu, everything on the computer would stop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nothing else is happening. All it’s doing is concentrating and drawing that menu for you. Any program that, like MacPaint,
⏹️ ▶️ John it stopped doing anything, nothing else is happening, right? Same thing was true for floppy
⏹️ ▶️ John drives in the Finder. If you were copying a file from a floppy drive to the other floppy drive,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were lucky enough to have two of them or whatever, nothing else is happening while that copy is happening. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a system modal dialogue showing a progress bar. You could do literally nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John else. You couldn’t go mess around in the Finder, do something else. It was like, you’re just gonna watch that progress bar
⏹️ ▶️ John go, mm, mm, mm, mm, as it copies the stuff. And the reason I bring this up is because like that
⏹️ ▶️ John era of like, oh, it’s a floppy drive era. No one has any RAM, multitasking is too expensive. Like everything, you know, if you have a
⏹️ ▶️ John GUI computer, like you’re not gonna be able, by the time we got multitasking, everyone had hard drives and like that kind of fit. But I
⏹️ ▶️ John have this one sort of discontinuous experience where somebody I knew had an
⏹️ ▶️ John OS2 computer with a floppy drive. And in the, whatever it was, maybe Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John knows, what was the file manager called in OS2? Some workshell thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes, I know what you’re thinking of and I don’t remember anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, it was the Finder equivalent in OS2. And he was showing me his OS2 computer, and
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, yeah, yeah, Max is better, blah, blah, blah. And then he copied a file from a floppy drive, I think he copied it from a
⏹️ ▶️ John floppy onto his hard drive, and then he started to do other things. I’m like, you can’t do anything when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re copying from a floppy drive, what witchcraft is this? Because it’s been so burned into my brain that when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re doing, like Marco was saying, with like CD-ROM, like when you’re waiting for that thing to spin up, nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John else is happening. Like it’s just, you’re waiting for an I-O. And I had lived so long with the idea with like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, so you’re copying something from a floppy drive? That is literally the only thing your computer is doing right now. You can’t even use
⏹️ ▶️ John anything else in the file manager. But then in OS2, you could copy something from a floppy drive and go do
⏹️ ▶️ John something else. And it was like this amazing, the magic of preemptive multitasking.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s when I
⏹️ ▶️ John knew the Mac needed a new operating system.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That was it. That was the moment.
⏹️ ▶️ John I knew before that, but you know, it was still like, it just, it blew my mind in a way that like, it hadn’t even occurred
⏹️ ▶️ John to me that this is a thing and operating could do just because the floppiness was from the error when you couldn’t do that. Of course, when you copy from
⏹️ ▶️ John hard drives, you can do other stuff, but not a floppy drive, because that was like so associated with the error when
⏹️ ▶️ John all there were were floppy drives.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, this is like, like, here you are, like wondering about like, you know, we need a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco operating system. For me, my operating system at the time, which was Windows, it was just telling me over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and over again, every every couple of months when I’d have to reinstall the whole thing to make it work right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should be using a different operating system. Like, that’s why I ended up jumping ship to Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in about 2004, looking back through this history, like all the computers I built,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time I spent debugging Windows and managing drivers and oh, got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to install the Nvidia driver so the screen resolution fixes itself, and oh, now it’s conflicting with the weird SCSI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driver for the CDR, like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you could have been just debugging SCSI termination problems like Mac users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, like, this, and like all this, that entire history, that’s why, you know, going back to Tor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like how it affects my usage pattern today, that’s why I have zero patience now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for dealing with OS bugs and cruft and having to reinstall
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or restore things and having to reset everything up. I hate doing that now, because I spent my entire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco youth doing that and not getting much else done. At the time, it was vaguely fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it was all I had to do and it was the only hardware I had, and so fine. But then as soon as I switched
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Mac, like I got a Mac laptop in 2004, because I needed a laptop and they were good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I was instantly hooked on Mac OS, and my PC usage quickly fell off, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I quickly stopped buying PCs, because it was just so much better for my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purposes. At that point, I was so burnt out from just the overhead
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of having a PC and trying to keep it in working order. I was so burnt out from that, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I liked it for a while, I was ready to move on. And the Mac was that way to move on. And I was so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thankful to do it. And at the time, you know, I still couldn’t afford much. So, you know, the Mac I had was not super fast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but man, it was so much better in terms of like, not having to deal with a bunch of crap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I fell in love with all the, you know, nice little details and the delightfulness and the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power user features and the, you know, the good design. But what, you know, what got me there was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanted a good laptop that I didn’t have to mess with all the time. And it was just so, so good. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s why, again, if you look at me today, what we all joke about today, oh, I keep buying stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if something doesn’t work, I get rid of it. Yeah, because I spent my entire youth not being able
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy anything, and with tons of stuff that didn’t work. So now I went the other opposite direction.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now I have no patience for hardware that’s insufficient for my needs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or stuff that doesn’t work very well, or stuff I have to manage and mess with a lot. No
⏹️ ▶️ Marco patience for that whatsoever. I’ve got better things to do now. I paid my dues, I’ve moved on.
⏹️ ▶️ John In 2004, did you care about the Unix, the fact that the Mac was Unix
⏹️ ▶️ John under the covers, or was that not yet a factor in your decision?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t a factor at all. I didn’t really know to what degree that was the case yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you, I mean, this is before you were in like PHP, doing the web stuff and everything like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was right when that was starting, because it was when I graduated from college. Right after I graduated from college, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starting to move around a lot, and I needed, I wanted something portable, And I had always like ventured
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the Mac section of Micro Center. You know, like they would always have like this, like sectioned off room,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like sectioned off with glass walls from the rest of Micro Center. And that would be the little like Mac paradise.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you’d go in there and you’d like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John shrink the windows and you’d see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the genie effects. This was early OS X days. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John sure paradise is the word I would use to describe it. It was more like a little prison or,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you know. Well, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little, the Mac prison with, you know, the Mac area, you know, it would have like- I
⏹️ ▶️ John felt like the Mac was marginalized in retail stores. This is the reason Apple opened its own stores.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but at least you knew that if you had a Mac, at least you knew you could go in there and you could see the four
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps they actually had for the Mac that you could buy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, this was 2004, though, so this is post iMac, this is post Mac OS X. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John remember, in the bad old days, if you went into a store that sold computers before Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John OS X, before the iPod, before the iMac, there was a section with Macs, and it was
⏹️ ▶️ John sneered upon by everybody, and it was not well loved. The only place that I ever experienced had any kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John well-loved display of Mac hardware was a place that didn’t even sell Mac hardware, and that’s Egghead Software,
⏹️ ▶️ John because they would have a Mac there, a fancy Mac that you couldn’t afford because it costs as much as your house,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they would show it running the Mac applications that they sold. Egghead treated its Macs well, but nobody else did.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you remember Egghead? That was a national chain, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think we had them in Columbus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think we had them, but I remember it being a thing that I was aware of.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s where I had to go to be, because I was reading all the Mac magazines. that a subscription to Mac user,
⏹️ ▶️ John Macworld. I tried to get a subscription to Mac Week by lying about who I was and I could never pull it off. So I had to read Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Week from the desks of relatives’ offices where they got it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John the only place I could go to see the things that I was reading in magazines was Egghead Software,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I couldn’t afford a color Mac. They cost, I mean, I was just looking it up today. A Mac 2, the very first color
⏹️ ▶️ John Macintosh with the default smallest possible color monitor that was 13 inches, $17,000 in today’s money.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s why I didn’t have a Mac too.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But if I wanted to see one in person,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was like going to see like a Lamborghini at the car show. You’re not gonna own one, but if you wanna see
⏹️ ▶️ John one in person, I had to go to Egghead Software and they had a Mac too set up and then I could be
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey like, there it is. I can touch it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and the people at the store wouldn’t yell at you. Eventually that went downhill too. Because you’d go see the poor Mac that was sitting
⏹️ ▶️ John in Egghead Software, which eventually was like some terrible performer. And all of the desktop would be a hundred folders named ZZZZZ
⏹️ ▶️ John from little kids who would just like make a new folder and just put it, match their hands on the keyboard. It was sad, but for a while there, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thank you so much to our sponsor this week, which is you, the audience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We decided to do a special episode this week where we are entirely audience-supported this episode. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our wonderful ATP store, not Merc Store, John, our wonderful ATP store. You can buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco merchandise there. And thank you so much to our members who support us directly. You’ve made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this show possible this week. And you can join us, if you’re not a member yet, atb.fm join
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental John didn’t do any research, Margo
⏹️ ▶️ John and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so
Casey’s TestFlight for members
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I had an idea. I don’t know if it’s a good idea, but I had an idea.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We haven’t done it yet, so I don’t want anyone to get too excited and go looking right now, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey occurred to me. Oh yeah, I got to do this. You don’t have to do it right this minute. I’m going to do it in real time while Casey talks. It’s the rest. Gosh, I hope I don’t. I’ll just edit the file
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John right on the publisher or right
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco cares? Casey does no web development. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey stop. I did plenty of web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey development. Edited
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John in production. The old ways are best. I always edit it in production.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh God. Easy peasy.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey It’s fine. Emax
⏹️ ▶️ John makes a temporary as file and then renames it atomically when you save.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, I had an idea. I want to make it plain. I’m not trying to be funny.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want to make it plain. I am reserving the right to take this idea back. I’m reserving the right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to cancel it all. I’m reserving the right to say just kidding for any reason I so desire.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I thought it would be neat if as a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of accidental membership perk, what if we slash I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put a link to the test flight for my forthcoming app on your member page
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right next to your ATP store discount or maybe really above or below or nearby one way or the other.
⏹️ ▶️ John You mean Flookup? It’s pronounced Fluke
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s pronounced Fluke up. Thank you very much. And no, it’s trading under a different name now. It’s doing business
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as D slash B slash A. But anyways, so my,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think what I’m going to try is we’re going to put a link to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey test flight for the app into the ATP membership page
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you would find your store discount and so on and so forth. But here’s the deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, if it, Oh, all right. Look at that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you, or whenever the app is officially released, I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shut this, I’m gonna kill everyone’s access. Like I’m telling you right now, when the app is out for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real, this beta is going away. Additionally, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am reserving the right to cancel it at any time for any reason whatsoever. This is a for fun perk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that members have for five minutes or more, depending on how I feel about the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whole thing. I thought it would be fun to give it a shot. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I’m completely honest, that link will work for anyone under the sun. But here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the thing. I limited it to roughly the membership count of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP members right now. So if you share that link with other people,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re taking away from one of your fellow ATP members. Don’t be that person. Don’t be that person.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not cool. Don’t do that. Keep the link for yourself, please and thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, honestly, I think we can trust our members. So most people don’t know this. I actually, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were building the CMS, when I was building the CMS, not letting Casey and John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. Yeah, there was no we about it, which is both great and occasionally annoying, but mostly
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript churn on its validator. It’s a very important part of the system that Casey loves. I love
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So when I was building the CMS, we were building it to support a membership program. And so I built it that way from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the start. But I wasn’t sure, are people going to pirate our our member episodes and put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them all over, you know, and just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then make a bunch of feeds for other people to get our member episodes without paying. And I was actually really worried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that. And so I built this whole system to fingerprint the MP3s that were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco served, to embed like a member ID in various areas of the MP3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that like wouldn’t affect the audio playback, because I work with Overcast, I know of a lot of ways to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of places that you can shove stuff in the MP3 format not be seen really and not be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. And so I actually built this whole thing to like serve files with individual member IDs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco embedded in them. So that if anybody ever did start sharing stuff, we could like, you know, cut off their account or whatever. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ended up disabling it in a later update, because that just hasn’t been a problem. Like no one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does that. Or, you know, or effectively, no one does it. And so I really I want to just express
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much I appreciate that for our members that like you’re not ripping us off, like you’re not being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco jerks with our stuff. Like I really appreciate that. And you know, it just goes to show that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that our previous statement that we have the best audience in the world really is true. Like, you know, other podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure, yeah, your audience is a great, we have the best audience. Let’s be honest, like we like you all out there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re the best. Like, I really, you’re the best. We very much appreciate that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So thank you very much. And so I think with all that said, I think we can can trust them not to share your test flight link.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yes, please. Or at least for some percentage of them not to be interested in testing the program, leaving the other ones for pirates.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess that’s one way of looking at it, isn’t it? But yeah, so the link is currently, as I record this right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now, it is sitting, thank you Marco, on your member page just below where you can find your store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey discount code. Again, I want to stress, I’m just trying this out. I thought it would be a fun experiment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I might kill it tomorrow. We don’t know. But we’re going to give it a shot and see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think one good thing about this So if you’re listening to this and you’re like, you know, what is TestFlight?
⏹️ ▶️ John How do I use a beta of an iOS application? Even if you have no interest in Casey’s application, just going
⏹️ ▶️ John through the TestFlight experience is fun. TestFlight used to be a third-party company that Apple bought, and now
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s part of the Apple developer experience. It’s pretty easy. You’ll go there and you’ll see a link, and like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John am I supposed to do with this URL? If you go to that URL on your phone, I think it’ll show you something that says basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John hey, step one, get the TestFlight app, and then it’ll have a link to the app store where you’ll download an app called
⏹️ ▶️ John TestFlight with a little blueprint of a propeller on it. And then it will say, step two,
⏹️ ▶️ John after you’ve installed the TestFlight app, tap this link and it will open the TestFlight application and it will say, hey, do you wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John join the TestFlight app for Casey’s app? And you’ll say yes. And then you’ll see a list of applications that you have in TestFlight,
⏹️ ▶️ John which will just be the one you did. And there’ll be a button for you to install it and it’ll install it on your phone and it’ll just appear like any
⏹️ ▶️ John other application on your phone. And every time Casey pushes a new update to the TestFlight, it’ll automatically update
⏹️ ▶️ John itself or not. I think there’s some setting for it. But anyway, if you’ve never done an iOS beta test, you should
⏹️ ▶️ John try it, because it’s actually pretty easy. Like there’s no sort of technical expertise required other than sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of knowing how to follow a link and dealing with the app store a little bit. And then once you get one test flight,
⏹️ ▶️ John every other test flight from any other iOS application from any developer works exactly the same
⏹️ ▶️ John way. So then you can become like all of us in this program and half our applications have a low color dot exon
⏹️ ▶️ John because we run a million different betas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exactly what I was gonna say. It’s one thing you’ll notice is on your home screen on springboard, there’s, what is it, an orange dot?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, orange. It’s blue and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just been updated.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes. Yep. And so you’ll see a little dot next to the app and that’s normal. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again, I think this could be fun. I think it’d be a neat, I think it’ll be a neat experiment. My intention
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting here now is to let this go until I release the app. And then no matter what,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I release the app, I plan to kill all this off, but I am making no guarantees.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you sign up for membership, I love you. I appreciate that. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you might have access for a day, an hour, a week, or maybe a month or two. I am making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no promises. I just want to make that extremely clear. I don’t want anyone to have their feelings hurt if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this goes away quickly. But we’re going to give it a shot and see what happens. I thought it would be kind of fun. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go into the membership panel if you are a member. If you’re not atp.fm slash join
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in that membership page, you can see again the ATP store discount code for you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a link to the test flight beta, which is also just for you and the fellow listeners
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John wondering where the link to your membership pages, if you go to atp.fm slash store, the link is there and a little paragraph
⏹️ ▶️ John explaining how to get your discount code. The other thing that you can do from test flight,
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, is if you’re testing this application and you have some feedback for Casey right inside the test flight
⏹️ ▶️ John application itself, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey believe. No, not so much. Not so much. I turned it off. Oh, he turned it off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because there’s no good way to like, you have to go through App Store Connect and dig through its terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m aware. I accept feedback through that on my beta. So TestFlight is also available for the macOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, no, no. Hold on. Slow down. So I turned it off specifically for this group. So the way TestFlight works is you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have several groups of testers. And so I made an ATP members group, which this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey link is associated with, and that group alone does not have the ability to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feedback. And if I’m completely honest, it’s not that I don’t care about the feedback, but I’m already kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overwhelmed with feedback from the testers I already have, almost all of whom are friends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or whatever. But nevertheless, even still, I have enough users now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even before all this, that I’m pretty overwhelmed by the feedback, and I didn’t want to make it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worse on myself. And I knew that if I got a fire hose of feedback from listeners,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would just be apt to shut the whole thing down. And I didn’t want to do that. And again, that’s not to say that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not interested in feedback. But I can only take but so much. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so what John is talking about, though, it is pretty slick. I haven’t done this in a while. But if memory serves, if you take a screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of an app that you’ve installed via Test Light, and if this thing is enabled, which again, it is not for members, I’m sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then what it’ll do is it’ll pop up a screen that says something like, Do you want to send this to the developer?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Describe what you were doing at the time. I think it’ll even let you annotate it. I think, again, it’s been a while since I’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this, but it is pretty cool what you can do. And then that’s all excellent,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the problem comes, and this is what Marco was driving at, to get to that information. First of all, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never get notified as a developer when somebody has given you feedback. Secondly, to get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to that feedback, you have to dig through App Store Connect, which is the website.
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do it in Xcode? I’m pretty sure you can do it. For Mac apps, you can do it in Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, maybe you can. I don’t know. I’ve never done it that way.
⏹️ ▶️ John Go to the organizer and then look next to crashes. There should be a feedback item. Again, I don’t know if this is true for iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John but for Mac apps, you can get it there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Really? I don’t know. If that’s the case, that’s news to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do the little command, option, shift O, whatever the hell the thing is for organizer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta switch floppies. Give me a second. Oh yeah, Xcode, it takes a few seconds to open up. This computer is too slow. I need a
⏹️ ▶️ John new one. Oh, yeah, no. I’m still running Xcode. I used to like, I run
⏹️ ▶️ John like the release version of my apps or then I would run the test flight ones when I’m in the middle of test flight. But then a bug
⏹️ ▶️ John appeared in my app yesterday. And I was like, damn it, if I was just running
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey this through
⏹️ ▶️ John Xcode, I could- Motherfucker, it is there. I could hit a break point, right? So now I’m just running my app in Xcode all the time just in case this
⏹️ ▶️ John bug reappears and then I can go grab a break point. So yeah, Xcode is always running on my computer because I have a lot of RAM. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John check out Organizer. You can see feedback. Wait, where is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s in, it’s a Yota Organizer.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Under reports crashes? Feedback, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Oh, feedback,
⏹️ ▶️ John The interface is hilarious.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This is where
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco where it says you
⏹️ ▶️ John can click the email button? If you do an email, it’ll compose an email on your email client with the quoted text of their
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. But I think the most fun thing is when you, if you double click one of these feedback
⏹️ ▶️ John items, like look at the interface.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, it’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John It shows a capsule with an X in it, and that’s how you go back. If you hit that little
⏹️ ▶️ John X capsule, it says showing one feedback. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John weird. I don’t know who made this. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a computer before, but it is there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh my God. I had no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John this was a thing. You can see what device they’re on, what notes they wrote. You can mark it as resolved.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This was worth the… Okay, I’m shutting the test flight down because I’ve got what I needed off of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can see the button that says email, Joe Schmo at the top.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Look at that! It has tester name. Oh, and if you hit that email button, it puts in a whole bunch of data.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’ll compose an email and it’ll quote the text or it’ll include
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the text in my thing, yeah. Whoa! This is so cool. John, I love you. I, hand to God, I had no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey idea this was a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you scroll up to the top there, so you’re under reports, it has another item called crashes that you might wanna look at.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, yeah, that, I, the rest of these I’ve seen. All right, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wanted to make sure. Yeah, crashes, you know, the battery
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff, that I’m very aware of. I always see the Hangs item, I’m like, oh, that’s just for iOS, isn’t it?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I’m pretty sure Hangs is not for the Mac. Hangs logs are not
⏹️ ▶️ John available for Mac OS apps. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Mac OS apps never hang. Especially calendar.
⏹️ ▶️ John Energy logs are not available for Mac OS apps? Come on, Macs have batteries, what the hell?
⏹️ ▶️ John Disk write logs are not available for Mac OS apps. But crashes are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the crashes are mostly watch kit. It’s like every time I go to the crash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing, it’s always like, all right, here’s like three or four crashes from the iOS app and 40 different crashes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from WatchKit, all within like UIKit core and everything, you know, it’s not even my code.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you should write a Mac app and all your crashes will be in KVO. At least that’s where all my crashes are.