534: On the Cheerleader Bus
11 May 2023Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad, and the promise of Bluesky in a crowded space.
Episode Description:
- Follow-up:
- Marco’s new Kobo
- Kobo will price-match (via Bob Pekol)
- Games breaking the fourth wall
- Metal Gear Solid Controller Swap Trick
- Blackbox (App Store link) (via Andrew Clark)
- Batman: Arkham Asylum (via David Kung)
- Business perspective on 15” MacBook Air (via Michael Lechter)
- Fully == Uplift? (via Matthew Kraft)
- Downside to camera shutters as sensor guards during cleaning (via Wade Tregaskis)
- Marco’s new Kobo
- Apple announces Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad
- Mastodon, Bluesky, Twitter, etc.
- Post-show: SwiftUI trials & tribulations
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Chapters
- One more tiny tiny follow-up
- Fourth-wall-breaking games
- 15” Airs and dual monitors
- Standing-desk manufacturers
- Sensor-dust protection
- Sponsor: Steamclock
- Final Cut & Logic for iPad
- Sponsor: Backblaze
- Bluesky
- Ending theme
- SwiftUI & Callsheet
One more tiny tiny follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually don’t really mind Google Docs. And I don’t use Google Drive. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t care for that. But Google Docs and Sheets and whatnot, it’s all fine. But my favorite thing with favorite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having no air quotes around it at all, my favorite thing is that every two to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey three or maybe four weeks, I go to record ATP. And it happens at about the same time every week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And Google Docs is like, hey, you’ve been signed out. Why? I don’t want to be signed out. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s, no, you’ve been signed out. You’ve got to do your password again. And it’s always like right as I’m sitting down to record, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John I wonder if that’s another like, whatever the hell the thing is where you get a custom domain, Google apps for
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, because I’m using the regular one and I can’t remember the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey time I signed in. Yeah, maybe. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John just always signed in, like years. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s how mine is. Like I’ve just signed in basically whenever I, you know, buy a new computer, which despite your, you know, jokes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aside, only happens every few years, usually.
⏹️ ▶️ John What? I think you want to reevaluate that estimate. Laptops don’t count as computers.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, they don’t. I would partially agree with you, but not really.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whenever I buy a new desktop. And that includes desktop laptops. It’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John whenever I buy a new car, which rarely happens, now I buy trucks and SUVs. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t count either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you seem to be going through Kobos like you go through computers, which is to say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re on number 17 at this point.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m on Kobo number two. Everything was fine about it, however,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I found the Sage, which was the first one I bought, to be a little bit big. It was just a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit large in the hand compared to my wonderful Kindle Oasis that I liked so much. Then I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw that they sell a model that’s pretty much the exact dimensions of the Kindle Oasis and almost the same weight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s called the Libra 2, and it’s a very, oh, and the other thing that happened in the meantime
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I had to charge the Kindle Oasis, and it’s micro USB.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s not happy. Yep, that’s the way mine is, and it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco happy at all.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As far as, I think the new Paperwhite might be the only USB-C Kindle, oh, the big one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Kindle Scribe now is too. But anyway, so I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I realized, once I realized that Kobo had one that was basically Kindle Oasis Dimensions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and has the page turn buttons like the Oasis, I thought, let me try that one. So I ordered that one, sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough, it’s wonderful, it’s perfect. It was so good that I sent back both Kindles. I’m like, I’m done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with Kindle. That’s it. This is better. The other thing that happened was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried Pocket and it’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that’s not good at all. No, I’m not using it for anything else other than Kindle.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, sorry Kobo. That’s gonna take a while. Other than Kobo reading. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta say the experience of saving stuff to Pocket to read on a Kobo and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reading it on the Kobo is really good. And it kills me to say it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I have that old beef with Pocket and I’m not gonna use it for anything else, but the Kobo has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a full-blown Pocket client for the most part. Like, you know, it probably doesn’t have every feature under the sun. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has what you expect. The list of your articles, you read them, you can page through them at the end, it asks you whether you wanna like archive, delete,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever, it’s really good. For my purposes of reading a mix of eBooks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and web articles, the Kobo is a better device. It’s simple as that. The Instapaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has Kindle functionality. I made it a long time ago. As far as I can tell, it hasn’t changed. It’s fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s way more clunky and limited compared to this. So for that purpose,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta give it to Pocket on the Kobo. It is a better experience for reading web stuff on E Ink.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Otherwise, I’ve been happily reading on it, and it’s great. I do still have the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issues that I brought up about the e-book availability. Another thing that I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth noting is that Amazon by its sheer scale has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tons of useful information, just stuff like its reviews and recommendations. And the Kobo store,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just by nature of being way, I think way smaller, like I think you can tell if you look at like review counts and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way smaller. You just don’t get a lot of like the user ratings,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the recommendations, like it’s not nearly the scale of Amazon. Obviously you can use stuff like Goodreads,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I know Kindle’s can log into Goodreads now, I didn’t try that, so I don’t know, because I don’t have an account there. So I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much integration there is there, but there is that. Anyway, so I think the Kindle is probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still the better device if you read a lot of eBooks, first of all, just a lot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you need to make sure they’re always available and easily available, and you want to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and they should be the cheapest, we’ll get to that in a moment, and you also want to use their built-in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recommendation engines and read reviews and stuff like that. The Kindle’s still gonna be better for that. For my purposes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t read that much stuff, and so it’s not… That’s less of a factor for me. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise, I’m so happy with the Kobo. It’s wonderful. The Kobo Libra is pretty much exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same feature set as the Kobo Sage, minus the Sage supports a stylus that you can use to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, take notes, like, by drawing on the screen. It doesn’t actually come with it. I never did that. If I was taking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco notes, I would probably use something even bigger. But anyway, so, Libra 2, great device.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then some quick follow-up. A bunch of people pointed out that Kobo has a price match policy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on e-books. You know, because one of the things they said was, not only was their availability not always as good as Amazon,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that they were sometimes more expensive. Apparently, they will price match Amazon if you, like, you know, fill out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco some claim or something like that. In practice, I’m probably never going to actually do that because I don’t want to go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through the hassle. And speaking of hassle, I bought the Kobo, I bought the Libra 2, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new one that’s OASA sized, from Amazon. I strongly recommend,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re gonna buy a Kobo device, buy it from Amazon. Because the process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of now returning the Kobo Sage, it’s a 30 day return window, no questions asked, great.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have to do a web chat. It took 25 minutes of a web chat, they send in, they have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco email you a return label, that takes two days. And so, it was a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very clunky return process. We are spoiled by how good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a retailer Amazon is for the customers. I know it’s not great for the sellers, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part for reasons like this, but Amazon makes it so easy to get stuff. It arrives
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quickly, and if it doesn’t work out, or it’s broken, or there’s a problem, you can return it really easily.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not all retailers work that way, and buying a Kobo hardware device from Kobo,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have to return it, is miserable. So I can strongly recommend buy your books
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from them fine. Don’t buy your devices straight from them. Buy your devices from Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And fortunately, Amazon seems to sell the entire Kobo lineup of physical devices and cases and everything. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s it seems like there’s a good reason to buy from them. You know, at least if you if you suspect there’s even a chance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you might be returning it. So definitely do that. The other thing is people kept recommending me that I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try these these DRM stripping tools to strip the DRM off of my Kindle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco e-books and bring them into Kobo DRM-free. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do not recommend this, and also I couldn’t get it to work on most of them. Apparently there are new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco versions of Kindle DRM that these packages have not learned to crack yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And because these were all relatively recent purchases running on a relatively recent device,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were all that new format. So I was only able to crack one which looked like it was a different format.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All of the other ones I couldn’t crack at all, so I just re-bought the couple that I wanted to keep reading and sent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Kindles back to Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ John One more thing on Kobos, some people have suggested that they have really good integration with your local
⏹️ ▶️ John library, so you can essentially borrow books from your library without doing anything else,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do it all from the Kobo.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I didn’t get a chance to try this yet because not only do I not have a library card because there isn’t a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco library on the island I live on, but none of the nearby libraries issued online cards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I tried, I went like there’s, if you go to the Libby or Overdrive, whichever one of those is the company, I think it’s Overdrive, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to their site, they will link to all the participating libraries that do these electronic library cards that will work with their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system, and it’s pretty much every library, except most of them require you to go in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in person to get a library card, and I currently don’t have one, so there’s that. But that does sound like a really good option that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wanna check out, because you can borrow both eBooks and audio books, which is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool. That’s a really cool feature, and I’ve never seen it in use before,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of people wrote in. So yeah, so tell me, how is it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve only done it a couple of times, and I’m doing this on a Kindle. Well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey should back up a half step. So when I say I’m doing this, what I mean is I am going on a computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to find the book I want to either put it on hold or check it out or what have you, and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is an integration. It’s so long since I’ve set it up, I have no idea what the setup process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was like, but there’s an integration where you can say, basically, yes, I would like this on my Kindle, please. And then the next time your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kindle syncs, it will pull down that book, and you can read it until the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loan ends. And then it will replace the book with a PDF that basically says, tough nuts, your loan ended.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it all worked really, really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco well. Does it actually say tough nuts? No,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no. That would be extremely inappropriate, but also hilarious. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nevertheless, it does work very well. But again, I’m not doing any of the browsing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the Kindle itself. And my limited understanding of the way The Kobo works is that you can do that step on the Kobo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too. You can actually go browsing through Libby or Overdrive. Like you, I always forget which one is which.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it basically means the same thing to us in this context. You go browsing on Libby or Overdrive, what have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you, I guess, and you can find the book you want and potentially even take out a loan right then and there, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is slick. But no, I strongly recommend it. I actually worked from a local library today. We’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very lucky where I am that we have excellent libraries. Libraries are great. If you want to read a book
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you want to read it once and potentially never again, you can go to a building, if you’re not doing it on a Kindle,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can go to a building and you can borrow the book and then you can bring it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey back and somebody else can read it. It’s a very novel idea. I strongly recommend checking it out. It’s quite slick.
Fourth-wall-breaking games
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, moving right along, let us talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey breaking the fourth wall, particularly around video games. And I swear we talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this last episode, but John, you put this in the show notes. So I guess we’re either talking about it again or my memory is getting even
⏹️ ▶️ John Which one of those do you think it is based on past history as in the last several years of this podcast where you seem
⏹️ ▶️ John to not remember anything that we’ve done on the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey previous episode?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like we did do this on a prior episode.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you re-listen to episodes?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey No, I used to very early on. You totally should because that’s why I
⏹️ ▶️ John know what we talked about, because I listen back.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. All right, so I talked about in my head, but never talked about with you fine
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John folks. No, no, no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you want me to tell you why this is in here? Oh, sure. Okay, go ahead. Because we did talk about this game
⏹️ ▶️ John and this thing last
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey okay. So I can have credit.
⏹️ ▶️ John But we had some questions about it, and this answers one of the questions. That’s why it’s follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. So David writes Metal Gear Solid did indeed include a system where Psycho Mantis would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey read your quote unquote mind by using controller port one switch to port two and he couldn’t anticipate you anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a separate thing from the memory card trick.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because I was talking about the memory card thing where it would look in your memory card to see what other games you’ve played and like say things that
⏹️ ▶️ John would freak you out. How does he know that it was because reading your memory card, but the person who wrote it and said there was a thing about switching
⏹️ ▶️ John ports and I didn’t remember that. So apparently those are two entirely separate things. Basically that
⏹️ ▶️ John when they say anticipate your moves, like you’d be trying to beat the boss and they had it programmed to be more difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John if your controller was put into port one or whatever. That’s, that’s what it boils down to because you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s software. I could also read your controller on port two if I wanted to, but that was what you were supposed to do is figure out that
⏹️ ▶️ John you had to change ports.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fourth wall breaking. That is very slick. And I have, I played Metal Gear Solid. I loved it. And I have zero recollection of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatsoever. Uh, Andrew Clark Clark writes, I’m actually fairly perturbed at myself for not thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of this because I loved this. Andrew Clark writes, there’s a fantastic mind-bending fourth wall breaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey puzzle game for iOS called Black Box. I feel like all of us met the developer whose name is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey escaping me like many, many years ago, WWDC, and he was a super nice fellow. Black Box is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amazing. If you’ve never played it, you absolutely should grab it. It is super, super fun
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and extremely clever in the puzzles that you have to solve.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I cannot recommend it enough. I absolutely love this thing. So we’ll put an app store link in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes. You should check it out. David Kong writes, I enjoyed the discussion on HP 533
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the Fool’s Errand and especially Metal Gear Solid and the memory card corruption fears of eternal darkness. My
⏹️ ▶️ Casey favorite memory of that was during the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 era playing Batman Arkham Asylum.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Late in the game, Scarecrow doses Batman with fear gas, but it’s subtle, and the game looks like it’s crashing. Since
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was during the Red Ring of Death era, many people were fooled. I had a PS3, had been warned, and still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thought the game had crashed and restarted my system before I realized I’d been had. Fortunately, the game realized people would do this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in autosaves right before, but still, it was a memory I will never forget.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’d be cruel if it did an autosave and wiped all your progress because you thought your thing crashed. Then you got to the
⏹️ ▶️ John same point, it crashed again, what are the odds?
15” Airs and dual monitors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Michael Lecter writes, on the subject of 15-inch MacBook Airs and businesses wanting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey them, I’m of two minds on that. Our standard corporate setup for employees globally is a desk configuration
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with either dual 24 or 27-inch displays. We have 12,000 desks set up this way
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in multiple countries with Plain Jane, Dell, Thunderbolt docking station,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and unfortunately, the M1 or an M2 MacBook Air won’t light up that second
⏹️ ▶️ Casey display where a MacBook Pro does. Needless to say, we don’t buy Airs because end users believe the Mac is broken
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when that second display doesn’t light up or just mirrors their first one. It’s seemingly an artificial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey limitation that Apple places on the airline to push pros in deeper pocketed businesses to pony up several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hundred more dollars and purchase a pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for, okay, first of all, I don’t think it’s an intentional limitation. I think it’s a real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limitation. You know, Apple doesn’t intentionally, um, you know, restrict product
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capabilities that would otherwise be technically very simple and reasonable to implement. So, So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not really a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you remember when we originally talked about this? Like when these things first came out and said they can only support one monitor.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think we threw the question out there, like, hey, what’s the deal? Why do they only support one monitor? What is the limitations that’s causing
⏹️ ▶️ John them? Is it a GPU limitation? Is it the video driver? Like what provides
⏹️ ▶️ John the limit? And I don’t think we ever got a satisfactory answer. I generally agree that Apple doesn’t sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of intentionally cripple things, but the fact that I don’t actually know what the limitation is, where
⏹️ ▶️ John the limitation resides. Is it the circuitry in the SoC? Is it a VRAM
⏹️ ▶️ John thing? I still say the jury’s out on
⏹️ ▶️ John why this is the case. And even if it is a hardware thing, that still comes down to, hey, when they were designing
⏹️ ▶️ John the plain old M1 or plain old M2 and it comes time to design the video driving circuitry,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a choice they make at that point to be that limited. Does it save power? Does it save money? Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t actually understand this trade-off. So I kind of understand the frustration because it seems like a regression because,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Intel MacBook Air that everybody loved from 2011, couldn’t that drive more than one display?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s, you know, over a decade ago. It does seem not
⏹️ ▶️ John great that this otherwise amazingly capable computer has this limitation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whether it’s a, even if it’s a real limitation, as in, you know, the hardware just can’t do it, I think that might have been
Standing-desk manufacturers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Matthew Craft writes, ‘‘Two years ago, my wife and I each did extensive research
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before buying standing desks. She chose Fully, that’s the one that I bought, and I went with the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uplift V2. When I assembled the desks, it immediately became apparent that they were from the same OEM.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The control box, keypad, etc., were all essentially identical. This is not a big deal, we love our desks, and perhaps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are other components that differ between the two. I just thought it was hilarious because we spent so much time debating between the two options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only to learn how truly similar they are. This is news to me. I can’t say I’m surprised, but news to me if this
⏹️ ▶️ John mean, part of what you’re choosing is the surface material, too, and the shape and details like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I can believe that the sort of mechanism underneath it is probably from some common manufacturer. but
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe you just like the, you know, the wood choices on one better than the other.
Sensor-dust protection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then Wade Tregeskis writes, there is a downside to using the camera shutter to protect the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sensor. Camera shutters are incredibly light because they have to move at incredible speeds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and accelerations with as little jolting as possible. And that makes them extremely fragile. If the shutter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is down when you’re swapping lenses and your finger slips just a little bit, you can easily damage the shutter, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey such that you can no longer take photos. What you want is a camera that doesn’t use a mechanical shutter at all, and instead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a more robust sensor shield that’s purely for sensor protection and can be much tougher. Nikon is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey first to start doing this with the Z9, but others will follow suit in time. P.S.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there was a similar problem before the mirrorless era when you could bump the mirror and knock it out of alignment.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That could cause the viewfinder to become a bit soft or worse cause the autofocus system to stop working properly.
⏹️ ▶️ John I have a hard time imagining my finger ever going so far inside the camera to touch
⏹️ ▶️ John the shutter. Like this, like, I’m so careful when I change lenses, Like my,
⏹️ ▶️ John my fingers are going to slip inside the camera body and I’m going to touch where the sensor would be, but the shutter
⏹️ ▶️ John is, ah, yeah. Anyway, that’s something to watch out for. Cause yeah, those,
⏹️ ▶️ John those shutters are delicate, but don’t put your fingers inside your camera, even by accident.
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Final Cut & Logic for iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is to release Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro on the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The time has finally come. Apple is trying to do something, quote unquote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey professional on the iPad. So we’ll put a link to the newsroom press release
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes. And the bare bones version of it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these will be available in the App Store starting on Tuesday, May 23rd. Final Cut Pro and Logic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Pro for iPad will each be available for $4.99 American, US per month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or $50 bucks, basically $49 bucks per year with a one month free trial.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Final Cut Pro is compatible with the M1 chip iPad models or later and Logic Pro will be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available on the A12 Bionic chip iPad models or later. Final Cut Pro for iPad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Logic Pro for iPad both require iPadOS 16.4. With regard
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to Final Cut Pro, there’s some interesting features that I called out that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought were worth discussing. You can do live drawings, so users can draw and write directly on top of the video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey content using the Apple Pencil. On the iPad Pro with an M2, the Apple Pencil Hover
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unlocks the ability for users to quickly skim and preview footage without ever touching the screen. So if you use Final Cut on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Mac, as you slide the cursor over the timeline,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re not clicking or anything, you’re just moving laterally. Then the timeline, you can see what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the video moving as you’re scrolling left and right. And apparently using the hover
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing on M2 iPad Pros, you can do the same thing, which is pretty cool. They also have some trick like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey circular control that apparently will also let you advance or rewind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the play head, which looked neat in the videos, but it was hard to tell because they only showed it very, very briefly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then they have scene removal mask. With scene removal mask, creators can quickly remove or replace the background behind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a subject in a clip without using a green screen. Auto crop also adjusts footage for vertical square or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey other aspect ratios, and with voice isolation, background noise can easily be removed from the audio captured in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey field. One thing I thought was very interesting, iPad users can go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and export their Final Cut Pro projects to the Mac, but it was pretty clear that round
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tripping is not possible, and going from Mac to iPad is no dice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So Jason over at Six Colors writes, Final Cut Pro for iPad seems
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be a subset of the Mac version. You can start on iPad, move to Mac, but the migration won’t work the other way. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of features from the Mac just aren’t there on the iPad. The lack of feature parity is unfortunate, but perhaps a bit understandable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But as someone who rarely uses those pro-level features, it’s also frustrating to realize that even my simple projects won’t be portable
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in case I need to leave home and run off somewhere with an iPad. And then,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like we said earlier, Final Cut Pro for iPad can go on a 12.9 inch iPad Pro, fifth or sixth
⏹️ ▶️ Casey gen, 11 inch third or fourth gen, iPad Air fifth gen, and again, iPad OS 16.4 or later.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Before we get to Logic Pro, any initial thoughts? I mean, this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously we haven’t used it, but at a glance, this looked like a not too watered down version
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the quote unquote real app. I mean, it looked pretty impressive in the very, very little that we’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shown so far. Marco, what did you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m going to reserve my comments for talking about the two together.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OK, fair enough. John, any thoughts particularly about Final Cut?
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, one of the differences we’ll get to in a second is the feature parity with the desktop version.
⏹️ ▶️ John We go back to the same thing we went back with the stage manager. Why a stage manager only on the M1? Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it needs virtual memory. But what about this thing that doesn’t have virtual memory but can still run it? And it was just, Apple never wants
⏹️ ▶️ John to tell you technically why the limitations are what they are.
⏹️ ▶️ John Setting aside which ones it can run on, I’m more willing to forget that, but it’s the feature priority. It’s the inability to round trip.
⏹️ ▶️ John The M1 SoC in the M1 iPads is fantastically more powerful
⏹️ ▶️ John than many, many machines the Final Cut Pro, the current version of Final Cut Pro ran on and
⏹️ ▶️ John still runs on. The only thing that I can think of that it really lacks is RAM, because you don’t get to pick how much RAM
⏹️ ▶️ John your iPad has, and even the biggest iPad does not have that much RAM.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the max is six, maybe? I don’t remember off the top of my head. But the minimum you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get on a Mac is eight. I’m just, I don’t quite understand
⏹️ ▶️ John why they wouldn’t do round tripability. Like maybe there are features that are too slow and those
⏹️ ▶️ John features would be locked out, but it really makes it, not that it makes it feel like toy Final Cut because that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not fair. It seems like it’s pretty much the full Final Cut minus features here or
⏹️ ▶️ John there, but that just makes it so much less useful because what people want to be able to do, like Jason said,
⏹️ ▶️ John is you have a Final Cut project and you need to go somewhere where you don’t have your
⏹️ ▶️ John laptop or you want to work on something quickly and you just have your iPad, but you can’t do that. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, oh, sorry, that’s a Mac thing and I can’t work on it here. And I just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I find it hard to understand why they would have made that choice because it just locks
⏹️ ▶️ John out so much stuff. And especially since like, you know, iPads just get more powerful. I would say that, again, the iMod iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John is more than, should be more than powerful enough to work with the same projects as
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac version of Final Cut. Now maybe it’s really bad at them. Well, I don’t know enough about video
⏹️ ▶️ John editing to know which features they locked out or maybe it would be terribly slow, but by just saying, look, they’re not even,
⏹️ ▶️ John the project format or whatever the file format is, they’re not even the same thing. It’s an export step to go to the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and Final Cut on the iPad just can’t open Mac projects.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is the most frustrating thing for me about this application. I wish Apple would have explained it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it will go away in the future. Again, iPads continue to get more powerful, but maybe it’s not a power thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe there’s something else about the projects. Like, my most optimistic take on it is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John project format on the iPad represents the future of the project format on the Mac, and they just haven’t gotten there, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know what I mean? Like, that this is a newer, fancier app, and they’ve come up with a better format for the
⏹️ ▶️ John projects, and that eventually the Mac version will support that better format, and then there’ll be parity. Something like that could have
⏹️ ▶️ John happened, but I find that disappointing because it just makes it seem like, again, even though this is not
⏹️ ▶️ John fair, it makes it seem like the training wheels version or the mobile version, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not as good or whatever. The good thing about it though, is looking at the screenshots, is that it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John obviously, I mean, we didn’t think it would be, but just to emphasize, it’s not the Mac version of Final Cut shoved onto a small
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. Like it is made for the iPad, it is made for the things the iPad can do, for touch, for the
⏹️ ▶️ John pencil, for pencil hover, like all that stuff is great. I hope it works well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I hope when people who actually do video editing get it into their hands, they find it useful
⏹️ ▶️ John and find that it really does let them edit video in a way they couldn’t on a Mac. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what you want out of this. Speaking of Jason at Six College, he edits audio on the iPad because
⏹️ ▶️ John you can edit audio on an iPad in ways that you can’t on a Mac. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John his workflow of using multiple touch with fingers and everything, like he does two finger tap to play, pause and stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John like that and sliding things around with the pencil and his fingers. You just can’t do that in Mac, because Macs don’t have touchscreens.
⏹️ ▶️ John Macs don’t have pens, pencils. They have different input devices, right? So it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like Final Cut does that on the iPad, and I think that’s great. Just disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ John about the file format. And the final thing, it’s the same for Logic. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John subscription pricing. Some people are disappointed by that,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I think the main reason, the main legitimate reason to get disappointed by subscription pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John for Final Cut and Logic is that they’re made by Apple. And Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John other ways to make money. So what people want is they say, hey, Apple, you make so much money
⏹️ ▶️ John on other things that you do. Can’t you subsidize your pro applications
⏹️ ▶️ John and sell them for an affordable one-time price even though
⏹️ ▶️ John your continued development of them costs money? Pay for it with your iPhone profits. Pay for it with
⏹️ ▶️ John the other stuff. pay for it with your services revenue or whatever. That’s what people think, because
⏹️ ▶️ John even if they’re willing to believe like, well, developers need to be paid some regular amount of money to maintain an application, Apple doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John because Apple’s got money from all sorts of other stuff. And that makes some sense, but remember that Apple’s also
⏹️ ▶️ John a platform vendor, and they’re already in this whole strategy tax situation where we want people to
⏹️ ▶️ John buy our hardware products, and these software applications make our hardware products more valuable,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they also compete with third-party software products like Adobe Premiere, or, you know, obviously there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer competitors in this market because it’s kind of the high end, you know, stuff or whatever, but whenever Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John makes an application, it competes with third party applications. And Apple wants third
⏹️ ▶️ John party developers to develop for its platform. So it’s this balancing act. How much does Apple compete with its third
⏹️ ▶️ John parties versus how much does it support them by making the APIs they need and so on and so forth. Already Apple has
⏹️ ▶️ John a tremendous advantage because these applications only work with an operating system that isn’t even released
⏹️ ▶️ John yet. third party managers, developers can’t do that because they’re not, they don’t get
⏹️ ▶️ John to see the builds as early. They don’t know what the plans are. Yes, there are babies or whatever, but it’s very difficult to
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly time your releases with the brand new version, especially since surely there’s stuff in iPadOS 16.4 that is there
⏹️ ▶️ John specifically to support these applications. That is an advantage that you don’t have as a third party developer most of the
⏹️ ▶️ John time, unless maybe you’re Microsoft or Adobe. Um, so they have to, Apple has to be careful and the
⏹️ ▶️ John people will say, Apple should subsidize it with their profits. What you’re saying is Apple should even more
⏹️ ▶️ John unfairly take advantage of the fact that it is the platform owner to even more unfairly compete
⏹️ ▶️ John with the other third party applications that do this same task.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think that would be unwise. I think Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John should try to have a somewhat sustainable business model for its
⏹️ ▶️ John poor applications, because the the slam on Apple and its poor applications for years is that they kind of give up on them. Like what happened
⏹️ ▶️ John to Aperture, right? Or what was that other one? Uh, shake or, you know, or is motion gone now to, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t remember like. At various times, Apple has acquired and developed pro level applications. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then just kind of said, eh, this is tough business and we’re kind of losing, so nevermind. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s disappointing for people who invest in those applications. Right. They, we built our business around, you know, this
⏹️ ▶️ John one pro application and now it’s gone. Or I put my giant photo library into Aperture and then Aperture goes away
⏹️ ▶️ John one day and it feels bad to have to make this terrible transition. Right. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if $5 a month or $50 a year actually is sustainable in terms of how much does Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, how much does it cost Apple to continue developing these versus how much money do they get from them? But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the idea of a fairly low, uh, subscription
⏹️ ▶️ John price for these applications is fine. And I would not be surprised if these prices
⏹️ ▶️ John do not cover Apple’s costs, but they come closer to covering the cost than a one-time fixed fee probably
⏹️ ▶️ John does. And the fact that there’s monthly makes it way cheaper for somebody who just needs to edit video
⏹️ ▶️ John three months out of the year than if they had to buy the $100 Final Cut.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco More than that, just for reference, Final Cut is $300, Logic is $200. So, and these are 50 bucks a year each for the iPad versions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, for the people who know, but I need
⏹️ ▶️ John it all the time and it’s like, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like you’re gonna buy that one copy of Final Cut and never buy another one. Like they do have major upgrades and you have to buy it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They don’t have paid upgrades in the Mac App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John No, I know what he means. Like, in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ John like when you have to buy the new version, like the old one stops being supported. I don’t know how often they do that with the Pro applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John but occasionally there’s a new, you can’t just keep using, you know, Final Cut Pro version four forever. Eventually you have to buy a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, to be clear though, I don’t, I mean, I own both these applications on the Mac. I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve done a version change since the Mac App Store versions came out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I’ve been using the same version of Logic for, I don’t know, probably seven or eight years that I paid $200
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for seven or eight years ago. So, you know, if I had to pay for my Mac version on this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscription plan, which frankly, this is probably the future of the Mac apps and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be a unified purchase in the future as well, who knows? Maybe it’s, maybe the Mac apps become Catalyst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps, which I’m a little nervous about that, but you know, that’s honestly, it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the direction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they go. Like maybe this just is Logic Pro 11.
⏹️ ▶️ John like they did with the new version of iMovie eventually became the new version of Final Cut kind of.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, like, you know, kind of a redo, you know, starting from the iPad version as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Catalyst version to become the new Mac version. Like that wouldn’t surprise me if that’s what they do, and then maybe it would be unified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchase. Anyway, all that is to say, if you’re, you know, I’ve been using the same version of Logic for many,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many years, so I would be paying more under this subscription plan, but not by that much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And granted, I mean, for the amount of use, Like if you’re using Logic or Final Cut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for more than four years, then not only are you getting your money’s worth, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you can probably afford it if you’re using those programs for that long, you’re probably doing something somewhat serious with
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and that idea that they haven’t been updated in a while, that’s another thing. Like subscription pricing,
⏹️ ▶️ John in theory, provides a revenue stream that will give the customer a sustainable
⏹️ ▶️ John model for future updates, that is not, that, you know, that some,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s money coming in all the time to fund the continued development of this application. And, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, if Aperture had subscription pricing, maybe they would have had enough critical mass to keep going, but
⏹️ ▶️ John with the way they were selling it, apparently it wasn’t a viable business for Apple and they bailed out of it, right? So I think
⏹️ ▶️ John these prices seem low. Like if you’ve priced out, you know, Adobe Photoshop, I
⏹️ ▶️ John believe it does not cost $50 a year to get Photoshop.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Sure does. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so these seem like good prices, but I still think it should not be
⏹️ ▶️ John free or one-time purchase of $30 or one-time purchase of $100 or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just because this type of subscription pricing, though it may be low and subsidized by other stuff, I think still
⏹️ ▶️ John leaves enough space for third-party applications to continue to
⏹️ ▶️ John exist. So I have no complaints whatsoever with the pricing. In fact, I was shocked at how low it was. And I love the
⏹️ ▶️ John fact that there is monthly, because if I ever needed Final Cut Pro for just to try something or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever, my previous option was pay a couple hundred dollars and then hope
⏹️ ▶️ John for the best and now I can pay five bucks and try it out. So I give a thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I too, I would have, like I would gladly have paid $5 for a month of using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it because I hardly ever use Final Cut. I bought it because I thought I would use it more than I did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ended up hardly ever using it and there goes $300. No, I think the pricing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is reasonable and not unexpected. The interesting thing, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe this is Apple’s first subscription price software. So that’s interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the sense that you’re not paying for any kind of service behind this, you’re literally just paying a subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price to use the app, like many apps are priced these days. But that is new to Apple. So that’s interesting, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco otherwise, I think it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you think they’ll apply the same rules about, remember they had the whole thing when they first came out with subscription
⏹️ ▶️ John software where there was like these vague App Store rules that you have to add substantial additional software on
⏹️ ▶️ John some regular basis to justify your subscription. I have a feeling that Apple is not going to hold itself to that standard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even think they hold anybody to that standard anymore. Like all the apps in the app store that, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can crop photos for $3 a week. Like I don’t think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. When subscription pricing first came out, there was like, well, what about, you know, productivity app? Remember it
⏹️ ▶️ John was like subscription if you have like content drops or whatever. If you’re adding new content to the app, people can subscribe to that.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you want to, if you have a productivity style application, there was some vague wording about
⏹️ ▶️ John like, well, if you just have like a note taking application, you need to justify the fact that,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming that went away, like many of the worst app store rules, but I just find it funny
⏹️ ▶️ John that like, even if that rule does still exist or did still exist, that’s another example
⏹️ ▶️ John of how Apple doesn’t have to worry about that. Like they could, in theory, put a final cut
⏹️ ▶️ John in the app store for the iPad and just not update it for six years still charge subscription pricing and no
⏹️ ▶️ John one’s going to stop them because they own the platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and to be fair, I don’t know about Final Cut because I don’t really use it much, but Logic is updated all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like they actually do a really good job of updating Logic on the Mac. It’s never with anything that benefits me as a podcaster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because Logic is not made for the kind of use that I do at all. And it never stopped reminding me of that at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every single turn. But for actual like musicians who are using it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to compose music, which is what it’s really for, there’s constant updates to it. So I trust
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them to not, you know, abandon these things, at least on the Mac on the iPad. We’ll see. I mean, to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think the big story about these apps, first of all, there’s there’s kind of the meta story
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of why did this drop now before WWDC? And the likely answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, it’s going to be a pretty full WWDC of other stuff, which is very promising and very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exciting. So that’s, you know, I love like the May Apple drops of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff that that gets kicked out of the keynote for space, generally speaking. You can release it now or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in July or whatever, so that’s always fun. The big story here is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are pretty serious professional apps being released on the iPad. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone has a hot take on this, I’m sure. There’s the good thing in the sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that if you use an iPad for your work and you run into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco limitations of the existing video and audio editing options that you had,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might help you. And that’s great. This also might help Apple sell more iPad Pros,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which will kind of reinforce the the chicken-and-egg situation and make it better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make there a larger market for Pro apps to be made on the iPad. So that’s good too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, using the iPad Pro as a professional, doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, doing the kind of things these apps do, which often involves moving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco files around, getting different assets together from different places, lots of data management, asset management,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file management, downloads, moving stuff, converting stuff, integration with other tools.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Those are all areas that the iPad. OS is just not good at like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many of those things are not possible. Many of those things are possible, but clunky and, and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, hind and kind of a hindrance to actually do. I see a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying they’re really happy these apps exist. I have not seen a lot of people saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will use these apps on my iPad Pro to do my work. I don’t think I’ve seen anybody saying they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to use them. Obviously, I have a small sample size of the handful of people I follow on social networks that we’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to talk about in a little bit. But I see a lot of like, oh, that’s good for other people who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use iPads. Not me, of course. No, no, not me. But other people. They’ll use this like crazy.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, so speaking of other people though, we just got done talking about pricing. I do feel like that is
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the important upsides of these applications. It’s the person who currently is not
⏹️ ▶️ John editing video with Final Cut because they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have $300 to spend on it and maybe they don’t even have a fancy Mac, but maybe they
⏹️ ▶️ John can swing an iPad. In fact, maybe they already have like an old M1 iPad Pro, right? Suddenly
⏹️ ▶️ John they realize, you know what? I can get Final Cut Pro. I’ve never even used it, I don’t know how to use it, but it’s an iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John app, I’m comfortable with an iPad, let me give it a try. The new creators who may be like,
⏹️ ▶️ John for the same way that, I can’t think of a good example, but like many times there’s people who are in an industry
⏹️ ▶️ John using a technology stack and a software stack that is familiar to them,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they say you can’t do real work in field X unless you do what I’m doing, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then some kid comes up using much worse stuff on much worse hardware and much worse software using an application
⏹️ ▶️ John that the old folks had never even heard of, and they become the next generation that does all that stuff. I’m sure there’s an analogy of like,
⏹️ ▶️ John how the original YouTubers did their stuff versus how the next generation of YouTubers did their stuff. $5 a
⏹️ ▶️ John month to try out Final Cut on an iPad you might already have. Granted, it’s the Pro iPad and they’re expensive,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you know, maybe you got parents who are well off and they got you an iPad Pro. I mean, my
⏹️ ▶️ John kids, one of my kids has an iPad Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Or at least, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give it a few years and it’ll probably run on most iPads that are available then. You know, even though right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, the iPad Pro is so like absurdly expensive. I don’t think a lot of people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not just kids, I don’t think a lot of people period buy the iPad Pro now.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it is still limited, but it is less limited than convincing your parents to buy your $300 software application,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Whereas a $5 a month thing, you could swing that on your own, you know, income of a job, right? So
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is important for Final Cut because it is not the leader in its industry.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so if you can get a new generation to try it out, like you say the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John are like, we know, those are the people who existing Final Cut users probably have some big fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John beefy Mac that they do their work on. It’s some kid somewhere who’s gonna, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John try this out for $5 a month and learn Final Cut, or like they’ll take a course in video editing
⏹️ ▶️ John and the course will give everybody iPads or something, you know, like that, not that I’m saying that’s the,
⏹️ ▶️ John what, you know, the killer app for this thing. I just think it’s an additional upside to consider when thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ John who is going to use this. And as for the pro people who are saying like, I think it’s good that it exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they might be like, oh, if I’m on the go with my iPad, I can try it or whatever. But I did immediately when I saw this, I thought about,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, all the fancy YouTubers essentially that I’m aware of that they ever talk about their
⏹️ ▶️ John work. It’s like, well, here’s my sand with my giant, you know, stack of
⏹️ ▶️ John storage that costs more than all of your cars combined. And here’s how I connected it, connect to it with 10 gig
⏹️ ▶️ John ethernet and you know, it’s like, the iPad does not have that kind of connectivity.
⏹️ ▶️ John And for the idea of like, oh, I’m gonna take it with me and do some editing on the plane, how are you gonna get the media files onto the iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess it has Thunderbolt, but then you have to find some way to connect your iPad with a Thunderbolt cable
⏹️ ▶️ John to your 10 gig SAN.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, that whole story, that’s why I don’t think the lack of round tripping is that big of a deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Mac version, because I don’t think there’s a lot of people who are going to be trying to round trip stuff between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their iPad and their Mac who are doing Final Cut Pro projects.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not sending the data back and forth that’s bad, it’s the fact that they’re a different format. Like that they’re not even compatible.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like that’s-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it’s also sending the data off. Like the current, like the ways to send large amounts of data to and from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS devices are not great. The iPad’s better than the phone in that regard, but it’s not that much better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have speed issues, you have interface issues. Like that’s why I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s gonna be large market of people who are using these apps as satellites
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the Mac apps trying to work concurrently on the same projects. I don’t see that happening. I see this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as the new market. So like what you’re saying, this is going to be people who don’t have the Mac apps, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t even have a Mac, who want to try these out or want to like, you know, amp up their ability to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff on their iPads. That’s going to be what this is for. I can’t see professional video editors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco taking an iPad on a plane and, oh, I’ll just pop the project over here. No, that’s not gonna be a market.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that’s why I kind of miss out on Apple not having this in the keynote. Because if it was in the keynote, I think they would
⏹️ ▶️ John try to show scenarios like this. And I think they might explain, like one of the things I wonder, again, I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John a video editor, but I know back in the bad old days, proxy editing was essentially, you couldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John edit and mess with in real time, like the full resolution stuff. And part of the
⏹️ ▶️ John revolution of, oh, hardware gets better now, you’ve got more memory and dedicated encoders.
⏹️ ▶️ John like you can do non-proxy workflows where you’re actually working with your own real video files and you can scrub
⏹️ ▶️ John through in real time and see the effects applied in real time and not wait for things to render. And it’s like, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ John great, look at all the new technology we have. But going to the iPad version, it’s not like the iPad doesn’t have that
⏹️ ▶️ John power. Again, M1 iPad is fantastically more powerful than most of the machines that have ever run Final Cut, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John But the iPad itself is so anemic in terms of IO that I do wonder
⏹️ ▶️ John if it uses a proxy workflow not for computation or rendering reasons, but purely so
⏹️ ▶️ John they don’t have to find a way to bring the full fledged media files to and from
⏹️ ▶️ John your iPad, right? That maybe it will, you know, there’s some kind of, oh, when you bring a
⏹️ ▶️ John project onto your iPad, it will, you know, from these full media files, it will only work with the proxies
⏹️ ▶️ John just so you, to reduce bandwidth, but that doesn’t make any sense either because if you can’t bring them from the Mac onto there, they have to be
⏹️ ▶️ John created on the iPad to begin with. So I don’t know, I would have liked to see an Apple try to,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know there was that video they released showing people messing with it, but they didn’t really talk about, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s what we think you could do. You could, you know, they showed, like you can use the iPad to record
⏹️ ▶️ John video with the amazing iPad camera. And it records in ProRes, which is great,
⏹️ ▶️ John okay. And now we’re taking, you know, video of this guy skateboarding, and then we edit it right here in real Final Cut.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is that really a common scenario? Again, for the kid in the bedroom, yes, sure. Because it’s an all-in-one
⏹️ ▶️ John amazing video editing station. but for anybody doing quote unquote real video work, even YouTubers
⏹️ ▶️ John probably aren’t if they can avoid it unless it’s they’re just starting out, you know, capturing
⏹️ ▶️ John video with the iPad camera. So that leaves you with the question, how do I get the video onto this thing? How do I get the video off?
⏹️ ▶️ John Did I put the full video on it? Do I just do a proxy workflow and then have the real videos elsewhere? And how does it all come together?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know the answers to all those questions, but it just, I’m still stuck on the fact that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a different format because I don’t like thinking that this is the lesser final cut. I would want it
⏹️ ▶️ John to be full real Final Cut that works on full real Final Cut projects and whatever the limitations are
⏹️ ▶️ John caused by the small amount of RAM or whatever, throw up a dialogue and say, oh, on this project because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an 8K project and we just can’t deal with them here. We can open the file and we can let you scrub through it, but I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually do the work because I don’t have enough RAM, so put it back to your Mac. But it being a separate format,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still crossing my fingers that this is just the new Final Cut format and the Mac version will catch up, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple hasn’t said anything one way or the other, So it makes me think that this is, you know, Final Cut Pro Junior.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of that I think is unavoidable just because when you look at, you know, a lot of stuff you were just mentioning, when you look at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actual needs of Final Cut Pro users in the field today, they scale
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up dramatically past what the iPad could do or what you could easily get into or onto
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or off of the iPad. So they can’t really do everything that Final Cut Pro does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac on the iPad. So there had to be some emissions and cuts and everything. The file format
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, that could be for other reasons. It could be that this is the future format of Final Cut.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It could be that the old format, or that the desktop format just has stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad can’t do well or won’t handle well. So there’s all sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plausible reasons for
⏹️ ▶️ John that. It would be easier to make technical arguments if Max didn’t literally have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco M1 SoC, like this is not an iPad SoC.
⏹️ ▶️ John The M does not stand for iPad. It’s like, you know, it was like, again, the
⏹️ ▶️ John only thing that it really has against it is just lower RAM. And I don’t even know off the top of my head, some
⏹️ ▶️ John of the big iPads might even have eight and you can find Final Cut on eight, which is, you know, not great,
⏹️ ▶️ John but anyway. Apple didn’t explain. So this is an area to watch. In the coming years,
⏹️ ▶️ John assuming this application continues to be a thing, iPads will get more powerful and eventually
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll be at the point where, Like the cheapest iPad Pro you can get is more powerful than,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the Macs that are running, the minimum spec Mac that you can run real Final Cut
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in the interest of being completionist, we should probably have a little bit about Logic Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey specifically. Creators can make precision edits and draw detailed track
⏹️ ▶️ Casey automation with the Apple Pencil and connect to smart keyboard fully or magic keyboard to utilize key commands and speed up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey production. That’s also true of Final Cut Pro. Logic Pro for iPad supports round trip, capabilities, hey-o,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making it easy to move projects between Logic Pro for Mac and the iPad. But then Jason
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Snell clarifies, except there’s just one thing, many Logic users also use third-party audio
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plugins. You may not know it, but iPadOS supports Apple’s Audio Unit Plugin format and has for a while
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now. But the only catch is that the maker of the plugins you rely on must make iPad versions available or your quote-unquote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey round-trip Logic project really won’t be. Some pro-filter makers like FabFilter
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support the iPad. like iZotope seem to have not even heard of the iPad. Sad trombone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry, Marco. Your mileage may vary. So, full marks for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey supporting round trip in principle, but a bit of a bummer. And I guess it’s at least
⏹️ ▶️ Casey partially beyond Apple’s control, but a bit of a bummer that the plugin story is lacking at this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and this, I mean, again, like this is that this particular thing, I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t use iZotope’s plugins. I use the iZotope editor app because I find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the use of plugins adds a lot of latency and burden to the actual logic editing process. So I just, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pre-process the files in iZotope’s own app and then I import them into logic. But like, again, trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figure out how to do that kind of stuff on an iPad, think about all the limitations the iPad OS will fight me on this. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, my podcasting workflow. I use Audio Hijack Pro to record and do a bunch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of other stuff. It broadcasts the live stream, It records a different backup format. It splits the formats of different parts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m also, I’m recording the contents of our Zoom call. This is all stuff you literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cannot do on iPadOS. And then I take those files, I upload
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one by dragging and dropping to our CMS. You can do that on iPadOS. It’s clunky,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can do it. And then I run a command
⏹️ ▶️ Marco line script that I wrote, a batch script.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what’s that? What’s that? I don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, because meanwhile in the background, My Dropbox app, which is actually Maestro, but my Dropbox client
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was running and got the files that the two of you put in the shared folder that we have. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco run a shell script that I wrote in Bash that takes those files, puts them in the right directory that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I actually run some stuff on, runs FFmpeg to convert a couple things, like between formats
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and sample rates and whatever else, then runs a custom app I wrote to line up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tracks that I’ve never released, and I’m probably not going to, so please don’t ask, it’s sloppy, you don’t want it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, so it automatically syncs up the tracks, runs them through my voice boost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco command line utility that I also haven’t released, that applies EQ and volume normalization to each of our voices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco based on a profile I’ve created for each of us. Then it gives me those wave files that I can either import into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iZotope if I need to do any kind of de-reverb, or in most cases I don’t, so I just import them directly into Logic. Those files, by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way, are about a gig each, so a gig per person per ATP episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now imagine the process of trying to do that kind of workflow on an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad, because on my Mac it’s running one shell script that I wrote eight years ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve been reusing this entire time. You can do some of that with shortcuts. Some of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps exist on the iPad, but it’s a way, way smaller ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the process of dealing with all these different files and different processes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is much more clunky and much more cumbersome on an iPad OS. Some of these things aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possible at all, like the application that records the output of another application that doesn’t cooperate with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it normally. So again, I think these apps will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good for people who have, first of all, very different needs than me. Obviously, Logic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not made for podcasting. Again, it never stops reminding me of that when I’m using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, you know, these are apps that people who use these have complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco workflows sometimes and complicated needs that iPad OS is going to keep getting in their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way. So on one hand, I’m really glad that Apple did this. I was not expecting this. This came out of nowhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me. It shows that they, you know, this is a large amount of software effort that they put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in here. And Apple does not put in large amounts of software effort for their applications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days. Like, when’s the last time Apple made really great first-party app. Not OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not platform, app. It’s few, they’re few and far between these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so to do this kind of effort is unexpected and very, very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see. That being said, it also does highlight for a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and will highlight for a lot of people who try to use it, the limitations of iPad OS for doing this kind of work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you’re having to integrate stuff from a lot of different apps. You’re having to pull in different files and different formats and use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different tools operate on them. That’s not the strength of iPadOS at all. It fights you at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every turn. So hopefully this is one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of a larger effort to maybe make iPadOS better at dealing with those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. And I know it’s a tall order because we’ve seen over time it’s very difficult
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to add power to iPadOS without making it confusing for the people who want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to be simple. And so that’s going to be something that hopefully we’ll see more of at WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe we’ll see some kind of direction for iPadOS that is more than what it seemed like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last year or so, which is basically, you know, half abandoned.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would rephrase that, though. You said we’ve seen that it is difficult to add more functionality
⏹️ ▶️ John without making it harder for the casual user. I think Apple has been unable
⏹️ ▶️ John to do that. I don’t actually think it’s difficult. What Apple has always been trying to do
⏹️ ▶️ John is to sort of strike a balance, to have their cake and eat it too. We wanna add pro-level features, but we want to
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of make them accessible to casual users as well, which is an admirable
⏹️ ▶️ John goal, but they’ve been failing at that goal. If you want to add pro-level
⏹️ ▶️ John features and not trip up casual people, it’s real easy to hide them. It’s real easy to have them
⏹️ ▶️ John all turned off by default, all completely invisible, you know, Like that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John ideal. You don’t wanna do that. You don’t want there to be this hidden underbelly or whatever, but you can do that. An
⏹️ ▶️ John example of that is the Unix stuff on macOS. It’s there, but
⏹️ ▶️ John if the casual user never even seems to know the terminal application exists, it’s in the utilities folder. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not even an application. So they never even need to see it. But so much functionality is under
⏹️ ▶️ John there for the advanced users who know where it is, but it does not shove its head in, you know, shove,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it doesn’t rear its head. It’s not in your face. You don’t have to know it exists at all to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a casual Mac user. Apple could have done stuff like that on iPad OS.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could have, you know, made it possible to have multiple audio streams and more generic file, complete
⏹️ ▶️ John file system access and all sorts of other things like, you know, a terminal, a command line, like
⏹️ ▶️ John all that stuff is under there and could be there in a way that does not impair the casual
⏹️ ▶️ John user. It’s just that every time Apple has tried to do that, they’ve tried to not
⏹️ ▶️ John bury it away. They’ve tried to integrate it. To give an example of when they’ve succeeded, cursor support in iPadOS.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is a more advanced feature that they surfaced in a way that does not interfere with casual users, but also
⏹️ ▶️ John provides casual users with additional functionality. It meets them where they’re at. You
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t have to know every single detail of all the fancy stuff or whatever. It is very iPad-like, it’s friendly, and you can
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of gradually work your way up to it. An example where they’ve not done that is multitasking,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco where they keep trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John have new paradigms and things and they haven’t paired the casual use
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’ve also been non-satisfactory. So yeah, the way I would phrase it is Apple has thus far
⏹️ ▶️ John proven unwilling to just do the simple thing, which is to hide all the advanced features away. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I, you know, like I said, that’s admirable. I admire them for not taking the lousy
⏹️ ▶️ John way out, which is, ah, we’ll just hide it all under a terminal and you gotta do all this stuff from the command line. But practically speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ John it means that the stuff you were talking about, just plain as impossible for anyone. Like every time I see a 700 step shortcut,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s impressive in the way that House of Cards is impressive but it’s like, come on. As
⏹️ ▶️ John clunky as your shell script might be, for someone who knows programming,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so much more tractable than a shortcut that scrolls for 17 pages. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also, it’s a really short shell. Like, it sounds like it’s really complicated. Oh my God, I run my files through a shell script. It’s really not that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like 20 lines. It’s not much.
⏹️ ▶️ John that in shortcuts, it would not be 20 lines. No, definitely not. Nope. It wouldn’t be possible, first of all, as
⏹️ ▶️ John you pointed out, like literally not possible due to sandboxing and restrictions and stuff like that. But even if it was
⏹️ ▶️ John possible, it would be so much more complicated. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, I think this is overall a very promising story. Like again, this shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a level of investment in the iPad platform that frankly, I don’t think anybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was expecting Apple to be doing right now. Like I think everybody who uses the iPad to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pro stuff done. If there’s any of those people left, they had kind of felt like Apple’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Apple has one foot at the door with this platform like it for pro use. I don’t I don’t know a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who are happily using iPads for pro use in this past year. I know, I think stage manager
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really threw everyone for a loop. And the the kind of built up frustrations over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Apple’s lack of progress in this area, I think turned a lot of people off and sent a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back to back to or to the Mac to do pro level work and I don’t know that this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is enough to change that. Obviously for people with certain needs maybe it will be but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a really good first step to show like no they’re not giving up on the idea of a pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad workflow platform and you know I don’t know if it’s going to work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m really happy that they’re doing it. I think this is healthy for them. As a user of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Logic every week for my work I’m a little concerned that they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know axe the Mac version and make this the new version by a catalyst and maybe it will be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even less suited to podcast work than it currently is for some reason I don’t know yet time will tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but as just an Apple watcher in general this is a kind of a cool surprise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again it shows investment that I wasn’t expecting in the platforms and in their applications frankly so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m tentatively optimistic I think it’s pretty cool thing overall hopefully it doesn’t bite anybody in the but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future in terms of what these apps are on the Mac and we’ll see what happens with the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I would like a little bit more bottom up on this. This is top-down stuff. Like you need, let’s make the pro
⏹️ ▶️ John applications for the iPad. A similar top-down type of thing is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John we were always wondering about asking for, speculating about Xcode for the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead we got Playgrounds, right? That’s top-down stuff. It’s like, here
⏹️ ▶️ John is the stuff that the user interacts with. who are bringing pro-level functionality to the iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John You need bottom-up stuff as well. And they’ve added a little bit of that. They added, what, they added virtual memory
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPads that are capable of it. That’s the type of bottom-up stuff that you need to support the top-down things.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s a lot of bottom-up stuff that is lagging behind the top-down stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, Logic and Final Cut could surely benefit from a more sophisticated
⏹️ ▶️ John audio-video underlying system in terms of interaction between other applications. You know, like Final
⏹️ ▶️ John Cut has the plugin system that it uses with audio units. Not Final Cut, Logic does.
⏹️ ▶️ John Final Cut, I think, has some integration with if not third-party stuff, then like Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John compressor app. Is that still a thing? Apple’s compressor app is a separate app?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is, and I own it. I don’t know if it will continue to be a thing. It’s basically Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of FFmpeg.
⏹️ ▶️ John but that type of coordination is more difficult on iPadOS, you know, or even just like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, we can’t do recording, the audio subsystem, the fact that Audio Hijack,
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing like Audio Hijack exists on the iPad and can’t exist. And iPadOS itself
⏹️ ▶️ John seems to have limitations in terms of controlling multiple audio streams from multiple applications, let alone
⏹️ ▶️ John hijacking them or coordinating between them. That’s the lower level stuff that lets the higher level
⏹️ ▶️ John applications actually achieve parity with the Mac’s ones, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John the Mac can do all those things. And now, you know, Apple can cheat, like Apple’s applications can
⏹️ ▶️ John use private APIs, Apple can put things in the OS only for them. Again, without an Apple presentation about the
⏹️ ▶️ John technical underpinnings of this, we don’t know how much of that stuff they did, how much bottom up stuff did they have to do in 16.4
⏹️ ▶️ John to make these two applications possible? And can that stuff benefit third party applications on iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John OS? They feel like now they’re a little bit top heavy. And on that front, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s great that they did this for the iPad, but it’s all about the follow through, right? you know, are they going to continue to update
⏹️ ▶️ John them? Is there some kind of target they need to hit in terms of usage to keep these teams together?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are these teams gonna go off and do something else, right? Are they really dedicated to this? In those ways, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John actually benefit the longevity of this software on both platforms
⏹️ ▶️ John for these to be the secret future Mac versions. Because then at least they have just, you know, everybody’s
⏹️ ▶️ John working on the same project and they can try to improve it. Again, kind of like they did when they made the new version of iMovie, which
⏹️ ▶️ John did such a bad job of covering the feature set of the previous version that Apple continued to ship the previous version. I
⏹️ ▶️ John forget what the numbers were. It was like iMovie 8 or something. It was kind of embarrassing,
⏹️ ▶️ John but Apple believed that the underpinnings of the new version of iMovie were important enough to get
⏹️ ▶️ John out there. And eventually the underpinnings of the new version of iMovie became the only version of iMovie. And I think
⏹️ ▶️ John they use a lot of that technology and foundation for the future version of Final Cut, which also
⏹️ ▶️ John was a disaster in its own way because it took away a bunch of features that the old version used. You know, hopefully Apple learns from
⏹️ ▶️ John this, but I do worry about them spending what must have been
⏹️ ▶️ John years or however long to make these seemingly very good versions of Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John applications on the iPad, and then just kind of like forgetting about them, going, oh, we tried that
⏹️ ▶️ John and it wasn’t that great, so nevermind. Like, we talk about this with the Pro Max,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, are they really dedicated to the Mac Pro? Are they going to be
⏹️ ▶️ John behind this machine? Are they going to update it? Pro software is the same thing. They make
⏹️ ▶️ John these things. They seem like they’re really great. They seem to support them. And then some of them just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John fade away or just like, you know, live on in undead form or get canceled unceremoniously.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the life of the quote unquote pro user of Apple stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John both on the hardware and the software front. So fingers crossed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And I think ultimately, though, like I think the odds of these becoming the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac apps also, I think is so high in part because of that factor that Apple does not multitask
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. And Apple does not like to repeat work between platforms. I think we’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over the last several years, whenever Apple has a chance to unify something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between Mac OS and iOS, they’ll take it. And they don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to keep making a Mac app if they have an iPad and iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that they can just port over to the Mac and make it one unified app. And frankly, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco while I wish this was different, I also can’t blame them. I mean, I don’t like writing a Mac app either. Like, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco currently like trying to do everything in SwiftUI and I’m like, you know, having to port everything over between, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the UI kit stuff and all the NS everything stuff is terrible. And it’s, it feels
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like wasted effort. And so anyway, I think what we’ve seen from Apple is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they will unify when possible. And ultimately, as much as the transition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of hurts in the meantime, you know, look at messages on the Mac. It was pretty rough at the beginning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it became a catalyst app, but now it is a better app than the old,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, AppKit native version of messages, because now it has feature parity with the iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version, which we were all using anyway. And this is a little bit different in the sense that these apps were,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, these pro apps are Mac apps first. And so, you know, we’re not crying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for future parody on the Mac. However, this is going to allow Apple to,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, after maybe a bumpy intermediate period to update them more often, if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can justify the effort to say, we’re going to have one version of these apps that runs on all of our major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco platforms, uh, that will help them justify having engineering time on them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And while it would be great if Apple could use their vast resources to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work on both, like in parallel tracks, we know by this point, we know Apple well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough to know they won’t do that. Like they will half-ass one of them at least. And if you’re lucky, it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be just one. If not both. And so if they have less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of a surface area that they have to work on, odds are better they will keep it updated and keep moving forward. forward.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this is probably going to be the future of these apps on the Mac at some point. I don’t know when they’ll make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the changeover, probably soon. And I think at that point we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will have round-tripping between them and we’ll and the pros will all complain about all the stuff they’re losing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the transition and it’ll be bumpy for a while and we’ll get through it and at the end of the day we’ll have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that are eventually good and updated.
⏹️ ▶️ John Can’t wait for Final Cut Pro for watchOS.
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Bluesky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So in the show notes for two or three weeks now, we’ve had a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heading Mastodon, Blue Sky, Twitter, et cetera. And I guess
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this was cued by an Ask ATP question from Steven Wood.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How are you guys finding Mastodon engagement compared to Twitter? I’ve stayed on Twitter, but missed some of the people that have moved away, including yourselves.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Just curious if you’re enjoying it more. And it seemed to me that John, you had thoughts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you wanted to share. Would you like to share some thoughts?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So Blue Sky, I believe we talked about it on this show ages and ages ago when I was talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about it as a, I think maybe when we first talked about Mastodon, I said, well, there’s this project
⏹️ ▶️ John Blue Sky that Twitter started that is trying to make a decentralized,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Twitter-like service, and they’re working on their own protocol, and so it’s supposed to be
⏹️ ▶️ John all open and so on and so forth. And I don’t know if that’s going to come to anything, but in the meantime, we’ve got mass done, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John I had signed up for the Blue Sky, whatever it was like, hey, sign up here if you want to appear when we actually
⏹️ ▶️ John do anything. I signed up for that, you know, months and months ago, maybe years ago, whenever the project first came
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Eventually my number did come up and they said, hey, Blue Sky is ready for you to check it out. So I signed
⏹️ ▶️ John up for it, this was months ago and got onto it and used the app
⏹️ ▶️ John on iOS. And I was like, well, here it is. It’s kind of like Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s on my phone. And the app is not great. And whatever. And I just ignored it
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while. And Mass Denial, of course, we’ve talked about it in many past episodes. We were all on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’re all doing all sorts of stuff. We talked about the various applications. Twitter continues to, in its
⏹️ ▶️ John slow decline in functionality and enjoyment. Most of us are mostly off of it. Some people are still there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But recently, in recent weeks, Blue Sky has seen a surge
⏹️ ▶️ John in awareness, let’s say. Not say a surge in popularity, because Blue Sky is still invite
⏹️ ▶️ John only. And so the population of Blue Sky is being kept artificially
⏹️ ▶️ John limited by the number of invites, which is very small in the tens of thousands, I believe, as
⏹️ ▶️ John compared to the millions that are on Mastodon and the many, many more millions that are on Twitter. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it is in the public consciousness. And so I think it is worth talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about how these different platforms are shaping up. And my main thought on this topic
⏹️ ▶️ John is that the way these platform services protocols,
⏹️ ▶️ John so on and so forth, are developing has
⏹️ ▶️ John almost nothing to do with any of the technology on either one of them. The technology
⏹️ ▶️ John itself is interesting. We can talk about activity pub versus AT protocol and versus Twitter thing or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John but I really feel like that is not the story. And I think it is apt for social networks
⏹️ ▶️ John to not be driven by technology. It is entirely driven by social aspects.
⏹️ ▶️ John Who is going to each of these services? Why and
⏹️ ▶️ John what forces are moving them there? Because kind of like any empty building,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the services are defined by who shows up. Who shows up, who is there, what
⏹️ ▶️ John do they want to do? what do they do when they’re there? And that
⏹️ ▶️ John really shapes the services. So despite the fact that all the activity
⏹️ ▶️ John pub people and the Blue Sky people are arguing back and forth about their technology stacks and stuff like that, that is not
⏹️ ▶️ John the story here. The story is entirely about the people that arrive. And
⏹️ ▶️ John in particular, Blue Sky, having been spawned off from Twitter, I
⏹️ ▶️ John believe it was started by Jack Dorsey, Twitter, maybe his baby or maybe the
⏹️ ▶️ John CTO who then became CEO’s baby. And it got spun off of Twitter. So now it is
⏹️ ▶️ John not owned by them, I believe. But anyway, Blue Sky was backed by money from rich
⏹️ ▶️ John people. Let’s put it that way, right? I don’t know if it’s a venture capital thing or whatever, but like Jack Dorsey’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a rich person. They’ve got not a lot of money, but millions of dollars, right? Behind
⏹️ ▶️ John them to develop this protocol to hire a bunch of people who worked for a while with nothing to show for it, who are
⏹️ ▶️ John still working on this protocol and have shipped this sort of prototype application. There is no business
⏹️ ▶️ John model. There is no money coming into this. This is entirely a cost center that millions of dollars are being funneled into
⏹️ ▶️ John at this point, right? Mastodon is an open source project started by one person.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the sort of pedigree and origin of Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John versus Bluestyle could not be more different. And I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John difference in origin actually does have a lot to do with who has shown up.
⏹️ ▶️ John Blue Sky being the thing that was started by millionaires with millions of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John poured into it has ended up attracting people
⏹️ ▶️ John who did not end up on Mastodon because, not
⏹️ ▶️ John because there’s anything wrong with this, this is not a value judgment, but I’m just gonna say this as what I believe to be a fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John rich people know other rich people. Like the circles that rich and powerful people travel
⏹️ ▶️ John in, they touch each other, right? You are more likely to know a Senator if you are a rich person. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is just the way it is. And if you’re a Senator, you will know way more rich people than you will if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not a Senator, let’s say. Same thing with celebrities, rich people, powerful people. Not
⏹️ ▶️ John that they’re all one big happy family and they all know each other, but you will have occasion to be fewer degrees
⏹️ ▶️ John separated from them. The same way in a tech nerd circle that I may not know people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John like rust programmers for Android or something, but they are way closer to me in my Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac circle than they are to someone who is into rock climbing. Because just the
⏹️ ▶️ John social networking, like who knows who? I know this person knows it. How many degrees away are you
⏹️ ▶️ John from Kevin Bacon or whatever? Like literal Kevin Bacon is way closer to
⏹️ ▶️ John the rich people who funded Blue Sky than he is to most of the people who are on Amazon.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think, not that that is the one and only explanation for why celebrities are on Blue Sky and
⏹️ ▶️ John not on Mastodon, but it has a surprisingly large amount to do
⏹️ ▶️ John with it. Because, and I say that because having been used both services for,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, almost their entire existence, practically speaking, Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John has more people, has better applications, has more features. And despite
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that they’re all arguing about, oh, but Mastodon makes you pick a server or whatever, A, that’s not actually true anymore. Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John defaults to one application. B, BlueSky gives you the exact same option. It says, do you want BlueSky or some other thing? And
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no other thing you can pick right now, but that is not the difference. The difference isn’t that
⏹️ ▶️ John your favorite senator tried to sign up for Mastodon and got scared away by the thing where it asks you to pick a server.
⏹️ ▶️ John That did not happen. Your senator did not ever try Mastodon. Your senator had never heard of Mastodon, or if they
⏹️ ▶️ John did, they heard it once and ignored it. But when enough of their rich, powerful friends mention
⏹️ ▶️ John Blue Sky, that made them, the same way you’re gonna go astride if you hear something from a friend of a friend than if you just
⏹️ ▶️ John see it randomly on the internet. Like, oh, maybe that’s something I should check out. If you’re thinking about
⏹️ ▶️ John checking out Blue Sky, think about where you heard it from. How many degrees away from yourself did you hear about
⏹️ ▶️ John Blue Sky? And what made you check it out? It’s because you trust those two or three connections
⏹️ ▶️ John to say maybe that’s something that I might be interested in because a friend of a friend of a friend says, hey, Blue Sky, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe you wanna check it out because you heard your favorite celebrities on Blue Sky. That is the degrees of separation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I am a fan of Tom Cruise. Tom Cruise is on Blue Sky. I don’t know if he actually is or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nothing to do with the actual services. Blue Sky is worse than Mastodon right now because it’s younger. It is younger,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re just working on it. The protocol’s not done. The client is bad. The client’s not done. Like it is very
⏹️ ▶️ John young compared to Mastodon. Mastodon has been around for literal years. Even though it’s only had one person working on it,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’ve got a huge head start. But there’s the X factor.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not an X factor. Celebrities are on Blue Sky, celebrities are on Twitter, fewer,
⏹️ ▶️ John not none, but fewer celebrities are on Mastodon. And right now in the very, very
⏹️ ▶️ John early days of Mastodon, that is defining the big difference between these platforms. And I’ve seen a lot of people say, well, Blue Sky
⏹️ ▶️ John is more fun and Blue Sky is just better in this way. It’s like, that may well be true,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think it’s because of the people that are on Blue Sky. That has nothing to do with the app, which
⏹️ ▶️ John I hate with a fiery passion. It has nothing to do with the protocol, which actually is very interesting and cool
⏹️ ▶️ John and has some advantages over the Mastodon protocol and it’s all to do with the people that are there. That’s the game in social
⏹️ ▶️ John networking. It’s network effects, it’s who’s there, it’s, you know, you could call it
⏹️ ▶️ John marketing or whatever, but honestly, I don’t think either Mastodon or Blue Sky have some sort of master marketing plan that is causing this to
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. It’s happening more or less organically because of the seed
⏹️ ▶️ John of where these things came from, what their pedigree is, and who knows who and whatever. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t mean it’s set in stone forever, things can change real fast. It’s early days in both of these services now. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re wondering what the difference is, technically speaking, that’s not the answer. Practically speaking
⏹️ ▶️ John is, who’s there and do I want to be there? My favorite celebrity and or
⏹️ ▶️ John government person and or whatever is on this service and I want to be in there because I want to see their tweets. The big fun
⏹️ ▶️ John threads, Reverend’s posting pictures of their butts and the hell thread and all that. You’re hearing about that because
⏹️ ▶️ John powerful people, people with big audiences, celebrities, they’re all there. When AOC is posting
⏹️ ▶️ John funny things, off the cuff on Blue Sky, it’s because there’s only, you know, 50,000 people there, and
⏹️ ▶️ John she feels more comfortable. And why is she even there? Because, you know, connection to connection to connection.
⏹️ ▶️ John I really, what I’m rooting for right now is I really hope the Blue Sky apps will get better. There are third-party Blue
⏹️ ▶️ John Sky apps, but they’re not any better in my experience than the first-party one. None of them preserve my timeline position,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a deadly sin for me. But boy, if you’re currently on Mastodon,
⏹️ ▶️ John enjoying the wide selection of really good applications including the one really
⏹️ ▶️ John good one that I use, ivory, uh, appreciate what you have, but
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you may be sad that
⏹️ ▶️ John your favorite celebrity is not there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I heard sometime in the last week or so somebody described, uh, the two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey services approximately thusly. They said, if you were a Twitter person
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then you decided to leave Twitter, but you, you really, you like Twitter, you still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey enjoy Twitter. Then you’re going to probably end up on blue sky because blue sky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks like Twitter, feels like Twitter. I just got an account in the last like two or three days and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey casually lurking and occasionally replying to things. Blue Sky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks, feels, smells, walks, quacks like Twitter or Twitter of, you know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a year ago. If you were on Twitter and wanted to leave Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you were kind of sick of Twitter, then Mastodon is for you. And, and I think that obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are exceptions and that’s not a universal truth, but I think by and large, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that rings true for me. And I’ve been enjoying Mastodon quite a bit. I’ve been using Ivory
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s excellent. I cannot begin to tell you how much I dislike the apps. Just like John
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had said, the web app for blue sky is not great. The mobile app it, well, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the web app and mobile app are both deeply impressive, given that it hasn’t been that long to my knowledge that they’ve been in development, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they are not great. Um, the, the whole, the whole vibe on blue sky is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very different than mastodon. Mastodon is a bunch of nerds. That’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s bad. It’s a little both, but it’s a bunch of nerds. Uh, blue sky is not blue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sky is. Oh, it seems to me anyway, to be a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just kind of kicking the tires and, and kind of posting for the fun of it, not necessarily in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a, in an angry, like evil way, like it used to be on Twitter, although I’m sure that’s that’s happening too,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but more in a ha ha kind of way, which that probably doesn’t seem like a strong distinction,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but in my eyes it is. It, it’s not a bad vibe over at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blue sky. It’s just very, very, very different. And I agree with you, John, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think it will continue to be very different because regular people seem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to be embracing blue sky to the speed that they can, given that it’s all invite only, whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the nerds are embracing Mastodon. And, and I do agree that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up until very, very recently, the onboarding process for Mastodon was gross. And I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why it was the way it was. I get the, the, the decisions that were made to land there, but it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was tough. It was gross. And Blue Skies
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t say it was gross, but part of it, it was, it was, it was derived from the fact that Mastodon is many
⏹️ ▶️ John years old. Because they were, they were, Mastodon is already decentralized. And so when you have a service
⏹️ ▶️ John that is already decentralized, you have to present that decentralization in some way. Otherwise it’s not really
⏹️ ▶️ John decentralized. Blue sky doesn’t have that problem. It’s not actually yet decentralized, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John In the beginning, mass and I wasn’t decentralized either. When that guy put up his first server, there was only one because he
⏹️ ▶️ John was the guy who just made it. And there was no, you know, and so, but in, you know, they’re like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John mass on as many years old, we have a, a rich tapestry of instances for you to choose from.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because we’re many years old, we’re literally decentralized. Of course, that has to be in the application. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a competitive advantage for BlueSky to say, we only have one thing for you to choose from. But like I
⏹️ ▶️ John said, BlueSky still puts up the screen that says, please choose your instance. And the choices are the
⏹️ ▶️ John one that exists and please enter like other underscore, underscore.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And it’s just like,
⏹️ ▶️ John and there is no other. This far as I know, there’s literally nothing else, but the UI is still there for it. If we could
⏹️ ▶️ John fast forward seven years and BlueSky still exists, and it actually is decentralized, they’re gonna have the
⏹️ ▶️ John exact same problem that Mastodon has, which is, oh, Blue Sky is decentralized and there are 27 instances.
⏹️ ▶️ John Which one do you wanna pick? We’ll default to this one, but you get to pick from other ones. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t buy that argument at all, even in the sort of like hurdle type thing, because I
⏹️ ▶️ John feel like if those same people who came to Blue Sky and are all having fun in the big
⏹️ ▶️ John threads, if those people all showed up on Mastodon, they would be having more fun because they’d be using Ivory,
⏹️ ▶️ John better client, and they’d be posting all the same things. And because it’s so few people now, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like all these people, these are the people who could, don’t, but could survive without
⏹️ ▶️ John the algorithmic timeline. Mastodon doesn’t have a big algorithmic timeline thing. Blue Sky has
⏹️ ▶️ John one bad algorithmic timeline called What’s Hot that keeps changing all the time. But the
⏹️ ▶️ John numbers are so small that if all these people showed up on Mastodon, they’d be having all the same amounts of
⏹️ ▶️ John fun. The only thing they might get derailed complaining about is the quote tweets or whatever. but like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s so new on Blue Sky. It’s like, hey everybody, check out this new thing. And the reason I know this is because
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember Hive. Do you remember Hive?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the thing from like a few months ago that was done by like two kids or something?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, two million people signed up for it in like two days. Again, Blue Sky has like 50, 60,000 or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John Two million people signed up for Hive. You know what Hive was like? It was like the Blue Sky health thread.
⏹️ ▶️ John was a bunch of people from a specific community and they were the celebrities from the gaming world were there and
⏹️ ▶️ John they were all posting and having fun and like, woo, isn’t this a fun service? then of course, it all collapsed because it was run by two people or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that was centralized, you know, setting it aside, people can have this kind of fun. If they all show
⏹️ ▶️ John up, and it’s like a flash mob, everyone shows up at a particular location, and they have all the fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a question of whether they’ll be able to stay that I don’t think blue skies, obviously, not probably not going to collapse like hive did.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then again, hive did have way more users for a brief moment before it went down the tubes. Mass Online
⏹️ ▶️ John is just a more mature platform that these people could have come and have of fun on. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then you get into the things that are actually different as in what is mass? Don wanted to be. What is blue sky
⏹️ ▶️ John wanted to be? They do have different aims there in terms of, you know, blue sky is big on.
⏹️ ▶️ John They do want to have different pluggable algorithms and pluggable moderation systems, things that are
⏹️ ▶️ John not sort of in the goal set of what mass done on is doing. Blue sky wants to be decentralized,
⏹️ ▶️ John but isn’t blue sky hasn’t figured out their protocol to the degree that active activity pub has
⏹️ ▶️ John activity. Pub is an open documented protocol supported by, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John W3C or whatever. Blue sky doesn’t even have that protocol done yet. Right? So these are two things that are in different stages
⏹️ ▶️ John of development and the vibe is different on them because they’re, they’re just doing different things.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re, they’re different ages, they’re different stages, they’re different populations of people. They’re very,
⏹️ ▶️ John very different. But in the end, I think both of them do want to be like the
⏹️ ▶️ John best of Twitter. Like Margaret was talking about when he finally came on board, of Mastodon, once he started using Ivory, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is essentially Tweetbot for Mastodon, it was like, oh, this is essentially Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because Twitter to me looks like Tweetbot. And now I have essentially Tweetbot for Mastodon, and I
⏹️ ▶️ John just slide right in. If you love Twitter, you’re gonna love Ivory on Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that is a totally valid statement. You will eventually be able to make the same statement
⏹️ ▶️ John of Blue Sky. I think they both wanna be like the best Twitter ever was. They’re just at different
⏹️ ▶️ John stages along the path to getting there, and they’ve taken a few different turns here and there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I would say though, the crowd being different, like what Casey said earlier,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a massive difference in what it’s like to use these two services. I mean, you’re right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the apps are very different. The MassDOT apps are great. The BlueSky app is terrible,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like, if you’ll forgive a quick story,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in high school, I was in the drum section of the marching band. And so, and there came a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time when a few of the drummers were asked to ride
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the equipment that would go to the away games, but the equipment wouldn’t fit on the bus with the rest of the band.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would fit in an empty section in the little half bus that the cheerleaders took.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So for about a year, whenever there was an away game, like three
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of us drummers would ride in the back of the cheerleader bus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would be so terrifying for me as a high schooler, all my work.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this sounds like it would be amazing. Like if you just hear it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Oh my God, that must, that what a dream. And what it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, is kind of terrifying because you’re these like three dudes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are completely invisible in this environment and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you think you think the, Oh, maybe they’ll talk to us. No.
⏹️ ▶️ John You got to talk to them, Marco. You gotta go make some friends.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, they spent the time talking to each other and we spent the time embarrassed to say a word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it was very clear, oh, this is the cool kids up in front of us here and then there’s us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we are probably better off not saying anything so we don’t make asses of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ourselves. And so we just didn’t. That’s kinda how it felt when I got to Blue Sky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I only got there recently, like a few days ago. And that’s kinda how it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, Oh God, this is, okay, first of all, this is where all the cool people are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not the nerds, and believe me, I love us nerds. But it’s like, oh, this is where the cool people from Twitter went.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They didn’t go to Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna say the popular people, not the cool people.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, okay, fine. I’m gonna draw that distinction. Okay, fair.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is where the popular people went, all right? And it was very clear. And it was also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely clear right from the get-go, oh, this is where all the women
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people of color went. because that’s something you don’t see a lot of on Mastodon. Maybe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the circles that I’m in. The thing is with social networks, it’s all about who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you follow. And your experience, your picture of the network is defined
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by who you have chosen to follow. And so you might have a picture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of something, like you might think the entire social network is person type X
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or is missing person type Y, but in reality, you just don’t follow them or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you follow too many of this person or whatever. So it’s hard for me to say with any certainty that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the case. And obviously the numbers are very different, but Blue Sky seems at the moment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be way less white nerdy, white male nerdy especially,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than who I have found and mastered on. Now, again, part of that’s my fault, I’m sure. It’s who I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chosen to follow. I did notice though, so for like the first couple days when it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only the popular kids, I was afraid to say anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was just like being on that cheerleader bus, like I’m gonna keep my mouth shut because I don’t fit in here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am not qualified to speak in the presence of all these cool people, excuse me, popular people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it was exactly that same feeling again. And then what happened was I found
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a couple of people I knew, then I started looking through their follower lists and their follower lists
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their follower lists and I found, first of all, a bunch of people who I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know and I followed them. I also found a bunch of new people of much greater
⏹️ ▶️ Marco diversity than what I’ve been finding in my crowds on Mastodon. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of found, oh, here’s where the nerds are. The cool nerds still, excuse me, the popular nerds,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the cool people, the nerds on the list, like, okay, I’m starting to find my people, they’re starting to be there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a good sign. And so now I’m kind of making it my own and the app does suck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s not a lot of people there but the people who are there, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to have a level of appeal and broad appeal that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more broad than what Mastodon has attracted so far. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of that is the people on Twitter who are getting it, part of it is the influence of the celebrities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the rich people, as John was saying. Part of that is just that this is where people are going.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s hard to nail down what gives something traction,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what makes something popular or cool socially in different groups of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a hard thing to pin down or control or predict or explain, but there is traction
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there. And so what I think we are heading towards is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hopefully a future where both of these networks will continue to exist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be healthy. Blue Sky, again, it’s super early days. They’re gonna have a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of challenges ahead of them, especially once things get messy. You know, right now they’re really small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s invite only. Well, at some point they’re gonna either die or they’re gonna get bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And when they get bigger, they’re gonna have bigger problems to deal with. Just like we were saying with Mastodon a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco months ago, they’re gonna have to deal with abuse and Nazis and harassment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and racism and all these threats. Like, they’re gonna have to deal with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the stuff that makes it hard to run social networks and hard to moderate. Jack Dorsey
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not have a great track record in that area.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, the Protocol
⏹️ ▶️ John some ideas in that area, which are different than the Mastodon ideas. But in theory, people might say,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, they’re ignoring the issue. They’re not ignoring it. They’re just way, way farther behind
⏹️ ▶️ John on what they think their path is to dealing with it. Will their path be successful? There’s reason to doubt,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, based on what they’ve done in the past. Maybe they learned from their mistakes. They have some interesting ideas that have not
⏹️ ▶️ John been tried in the same way. So that’s part of what’s interesting. but when you’re invited only to 50,000 people, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can get away with stuff that you can not get away with when you’re multi-instance 10 million people. So we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John see how that turns out. But I do think a lot of the things you’re experiencing are
⏹️ ▶️ John more explicable than just like, oh, that’s just the people you follow. Because Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John is more mature, because there are multiple instances and because it is decentralized,
⏹️ ▶️ John it has allowed by design, and I would say it’s a good thing that it has allowed,
⏹️ ▶️ John communities to form with, you know, surrounding
⏹️ ▶️ John certain sets of values. That’s what decentralization provides. You can have an instance with a set of rules that you
⏹️ ▶️ John find comfortable and acceptable. This is where you want to be. These are the people you want to be with.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s lots of different instances with lots of different sets of rules. People disagree about the rules, but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s great about being centralized. Because Mastodon was inherently a nerdy thing and
⏹️ ▶️ John was founded many, many years ago, the seed, the sort of the seed of the communities
⏹️ ▶️ John was a bunch of weird nerds. That was, it seems to have been the seed of many Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John communities. But the Mastodon communities have had years to grow and develop their own cultures
⏹️ ▶️ John and their own sort of values and their own moderation rules and their own moderation systems.
⏹️ ▶️ John And communities have already had time to grow and then fizzle out and die on Mastodon multiple times
⏹️ ▶️ John over like stars coming into existence and then fading away or supernovae-ing, right? That’s happened many times over
⏹️ ▶️ John at Mastodon. What that meant was that when new people show up to Mastodon, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like you showing up on the cheerleader bus again. There is an established community there,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you’re not a part of it. There are multiple established communities. And I think a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of what has happened on Mastodon is people would show up, especially people who did not fit
⏹️ ▶️ John into the same mold as the seed communities, and they felt like, this is not a place
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. And granted, Mastodon has multiple places, but you can’t try them
⏹️ ▶️ John all. Maybe you try one place and it doesn’t feel like the place to you, and maybe you’re like, that’s it. Like, that’s your impression of Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you don’t know if there are other short buses with different groups of people who are talking about computer stuff. But you’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John the short buses with the cheerleaders, that is not the place for me. And so you just bail on that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I have heard from many people of color who have come to Mastodon and said,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not welcoming me, because they would come into a community And they would say, my concerns
⏹️ ▶️ John as a black person seem to fall on deaf ears in this community because what they tell me is,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, in this community, here’s our set of rules and here’s the way we deal with things. And I’m telling them
⏹️ ▶️ John as a black person, those rules don’t work for me because reasons X, Y, and Z, and they’re not hearing me.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that person bounces off Mastodon. It was like, well, you didn’t try all of so many other
⏹️ ▶️ John communities. Like, what am I going to do? Try every single community and figure out if I can find the one that fits with me.
⏹️ ▶️ John So that is the strengths and the weaknesses of decentralization. It allows sub-communities
⏹️ ▶️ John to form, but the weakness is sub-communities form. And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John their own rules. And there’s no way you can have, you know, a universal view of every Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John community and know exactly where you should go and where you’ll become. Maybe there isn’t a Mastodon community
⏹️ ▶️ John that works the way you would like it to be. Oh, you should form your own. That is way harder than just signing up for one simple
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. Blue Sky doesn’t have that problem. only seeded by you know fancy people
⏹️ ▶️ John who invite other fancy people like again the invite system you know makes it hard coded
⏹️ ▶️ John dictates essentially you will be it’s not just open to everyone the
⏹️ ▶️ John seed round of people invite other people who invite other people and it’s people who you know or whatever and it’s small
⏹️ ▶️ John enough that it doesn’t matter and so then when when somebody shows up there and says I felt unwelcome
⏹️ ▶️ John in the one mastodon community that I tried When I show up here,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a bunch of celebrities and a bunch of people, you know, posting. And I don’t I don’t know if
⏹️ ▶️ John this is my community. But I feel like I have just as much right to be here as anyone
⏹️ ▶️ John else, because it’s just a bunch of invite only people like it’s early days. And that is an advantage of being young and not having
⏹️ ▶️ John established communities of not being decentralized. If but if blue sky wants to travel that road,
⏹️ ▶️ John seven years from now, if it really is decentralized, And if the decentralization really does
⏹️ ▶️ John have like algorithmic, uh, you know, plug in algorithms and plug in moderation systems
⏹️ ▶️ John in different instances, it’ll be in exactly the same situation as a Macedon just with different
⏹️ ▶️ John seed groups. So then maybe at that point, maybe a nerdy person shows up to blue sky and they feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Oh, I don’t, I can’t find my community here because all these communities are talking about, you know, things that I’m not interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in or whatever. What we want to see as we like in the whole people who promote the idea
⏹️ ▶️ John of no more centralized social networks because we’ve tried that many times and they all suck eventually.
⏹️ ▶️ John What we want is for there to be lots of different communities and for everyone to be able to find a place where
⏹️ ▶️ John they feel comfortable. We’re so far from that it’s not even funny, right? We don’t even know if that’s a feasible thing that could
⏹️ ▶️ John even happen because the closest things we have, like people keep comparing it to email, but there’s not really any culture
⏹️ ▶️ John in email. Your inbox doesn’t really affect other people’s. In fact, they shouldn’t really cross over with each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John So email is federated and it is decentralized and you can choose your provider, but honestly
⏹️ ▶️ John it does not really change your experience that much. Whereas social networking totally does.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think any kind of like bridging between Blue Sky versus you know, ActivityPub
⏹️ ▶️ John versus AT Protocol versus whatever is gonna be extremely tricky and very unlikely to
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. And so currently I’m in the terrible position that I do not like
⏹️ ▶️ John of you know, previously I was still checking Twitter, but spending most of my time and energy in Macedon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now I’m still checking Twitter and still spending most of my time and energy on Mastodon, but now I’m also
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And it’s like, this is untenable. I’m checking
⏹️ ▶️ John three places. I never left Twitter, and now I’m not leaving Mastodon, and now I’m on Blue
⏹️ ▶️ John Skies too. And three places to check, it’s just too many. But the problem is,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I didn’t leave Twitter was there was people still on Twitter who weren’t on Mastodon, and I was still getting value
⏹️ ▶️ John from them. And I try to put most of my energy into Mastodon, but I’m like, but I still wanna read what people
⏹️ ▶️ John say on Twitter. Now there’s Blue Sky. And on Blue Sky, unfortunately, it’s not just like I wanna
⏹️ ▶️ John read people who are over there, I also wanna participate a little bit over there. So it’s like, oh, this
⏹️ ▶️ John cannot, I cannot scale like this. I cannot be continuing to check three places.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think there will be some sort of, I’m hoping there will eventually be some sort of consolidation
⏹️ ▶️ John and resolution. I’m excited by the fact that people are trying lots of different things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m excited by different protocols and different apps. I’m not excited by checking three different places. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I will live in this world for as long as I can, but I
⏹️ ▶️ John would, it’s not that I want one thing to win, but that’s the beauty of decentralized things and open protocols
⏹️ ▶️ John is if an actual open protocol and decentralized thing wins, you just need
⏹️ ▶️ John the one. We don’t need seven competing versions of web technology. We’ve got the web, we’ve got HTTP,
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ve got HTML, we’ve got CSS, we don’t need, oh, well, you use HTTP, well, I use Gopher,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? No, we don’t need that. just the web is fine. We just need the one web. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John that will also be true of, if this type of decentralized social network can work at all which is
⏹️ ▶️ John remains to be seen, we only need one. It just needs to be at least as good as the
⏹️ ▶️ John web in terms of being open and the platform that nobody owns. And despite the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that W3C is populated by Apple, Microsoft, Google, like, oh, it’s the web is corporate
⏹️ ▶️ John controlled or whatever. It’s not ideal, but it’s the best we have ever had.
⏹️ ▶️ John I love the web. If tweet-like social networking could get to the same
⏹️ ▶️ John level of openness and decentralization as the web, I would call that a big win. But
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t have seven webs, despite the web three idiocy.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You just have the one.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I would like us eventually to come together. Now, what
⏹️ ▶️ John was the web? It was a thing started by one person. I’m not saying that means that
⏹️ ▶️ John Mastodon’s gonna win because it was started by one person and so is the web. Doesn’t mean that at all. All I’m saying is that you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to have millions of dollars funding you, although technically that one person did kind of have millions of dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John behind them. I mean, he was using a NeXT to do it for crying out loud. No person in their bedroom
⏹️ ▶️ John has a $10,000 NeXT cube to develop their funny idea of how to publish scientific papers
⏹️ ▶️ John so that other people can read them. But I want there to be one of these things,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I want the one thing to be good, and I want there to be a lot of third-party applications for it. Right
⏹️ ▶️ John now I have three things and one of them is hopefully going down the tubes with just Twitter and the other two are intriguing but
⏹️ ▶️ John at very different places in their life and I’m checking all three of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I think when you look at the protocols and everything, yeah, they’re different. I don’t anticipate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the servers like, you know, Twitter is Twitter has isolated itself because of its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leader and his decision making. They have isolated themselves so that they’re off on an island. They
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have nowhere to go but down. whatever you think of their current state,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the age of Twitter getting better or bigger is done. Like Twitter is only ever going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stay the same or go down from where it is now. So that problem will slowly solve itself. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you have Mastodon and whatever else comes along. You know, Mastodon I think has enough mass and enough usage,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not going anywhere. It’s not going away, you know, like for the foreseeable future, it’s here. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let’s take a look at Blue Sky now. You know, I think if you look at these two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of traction BlueSky has is strong. It’s very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very strong. So it is probably gonna be here for a while too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hopefully, I don’t see, I don’t know enough about the protocols to know on the server
⏹️ ▶️ Marco side how complicated and possible it would be for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco following to work across servers, say. Between AT protocol
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and ActivityPub. I don’t think that’s going to really become a thing at the server side,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that can probably become a thing on the client side. So what I expect is that in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the near future, or maybe even already, I don’t even know, like whatever people are doing in test flights and stuff, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it is probably pretty reasonable to expect there to be unified client apps where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can log into your Masson account and log into your BlueSky account and follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco using both protocols, see the tweets and post the tweets in one app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That will probably come soon if it isn’t here yet. And I think that will solve a lot of these problems for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Because- Will
⏹️ ▶️ John it solve them? I mean, I think, sure, you can make that happen. It’s great that you can do that because Twitter explicitly, by the way, didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John allow that at all because they’re a centralized company and they just said no. But it doesn’t solve
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem for me because, yeah, that can be implemented from a technical perspective, but you, that’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t like reply to one. Like you can’t have a unified conversation in that context because
⏹️ ▶️ John like if threads can only take place on one platform, you can’t have a thread with mixing people from
⏹️ ▶️ John two different platforms. Like it’s insanity, that you would never be able to keep track of who can see what and who’s replying to what and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not replying there or I’m not replying. Even if you try to duplicate all your replies to the, like it just, it just doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work. Although in all fairness, that’s a problem on Mastodon too.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, but in my experience in Mastodon, it works pretty well because Mastodon is designed for
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone to have the same conversation in the same thread. I see threads all the time on Mastodon, the whole point of it.
⏹️ ▶️ John The people from different instances, they’re all participating in the same thread because they can all see the same things in the same thread.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not true when you’re crossing when you’re crossing between Mastodon and Blue Sky.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, in practice, there’s a lot of things that subtly break on Mastodon when you cross instance
⏹️ ▶️ Marco boundaries. It shouldn’t, but it does.
⏹️ ▶️ John There are rough edges there, but like the basic model of like every thread I’ve ever participated in Mastodon
⏹️ ▶️ John has people from different instances, and they’re all more or less seeing the same thing. Yes, there are rough edges. Yes, there’s annoyances.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that some of that is client stuff. Some of that is protocol stuff. And blue sky hasn’t even come close to dealing
⏹️ ▶️ John with any of those issues. They’re so they don’t even have their basic single instance functionality down yet, let alone their multi
⏹️ ▶️ John instance, because they’re gonna have to deal with all the same stuff, right. But across blue sky and Macedon, a
⏹️ ▶️ John unified client can exist and would save me swapping apps. But the combining them into
⏹️ ▶️ John a single chronological timeline, for instance, like a unified timeline across services,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think is tenable. I don’t think it will ever be tenable. And honestly, who would want to do that? The only people would
⏹️ ▶️ John be like people, super nerds who are like, I’m across all social networks or whatever. Even the
⏹️ ▶️ John most, as they say, extremely online people, they just want to be extremely online in one thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like so I don’t. I don’t think it’s kind of like saying I have a single application
⏹️ ▶️ John lets me browse Gopher sites and websites. And I can I can combine all the comments on this YouTube
⏹️ ▶️ John article with the people who are commenting on Gopher and the people are commenting on the web. No, like it’s yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could do that technically speaking. There’s nothing stopping you. Gopher is an open protocol, HTTP is an open protocol. You could make
⏹️ ▶️ John it work. But the people who are only using Gopher would only see the Gopher comments and the people only seeing the web would
⏹️ ▶️ John only see the web comments and it would make no sense to either one of them because they don’t know some people can see both of them. I am not
⏹️ ▶️ John optimistic about that kind of scenario. I prefer there to be,
⏹️ ▶️ John for this to be, the platform nobody owns is not 17 platforms nobody owns. We just need
⏹️ ▶️ John one platform nobody owns that covers the problem space and that has a viable path
⏹️ ▶️ John forward for continuing to advance. And the web, it’s been a bumpy road. If you look at the,
⏹️ ▶️ John how has the web advanced as the platform that nobody owns, but nevertheless is massively influenced by trillion dollar corporations.
⏹️ ▶️ John It has not been smooth, but it has mostly worked and I can say it has worked way better
⏹️ ▶️ John than Twitter has worked. So that’s all I’m saying is like, you know, if, if we could get
⏹️ ▶️ John half as good is the web, I think that would be great. I just don’t. I wish I could think of a third
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Go for the web, I guess, Usenet. I mean, we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the phone system. That’s a social network in a
⏹️ ▶️ John of, but like, but yeah, like that’s, that’s more, that’s more peer to peer, even though we have party lines and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco stuff. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John I, I’m not, I don’t, I don’t see a future in which
⏹️ ▶️ John Blue Sky and Rastanon both thrive as in like a decade from now. And if we are in that situation.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, it’s kind of like, you know, we were in that place. We’re like, Oh, well, there’s Facebook and there’s Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s the web. And it’s like, yeah, kind of, I guess. But these, these centralized
⏹️ ▶️ John social networks have burned us all so many times. They’ve burned the people invested in them. They burned the people who
⏹️ ▶️ John worked them. They burned all the users of them. And everyone who thinks like Facebook will live forever. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it won’t, I hope. Uh, but it’s lasted much longer than the previous So there is kind of a lengthening
⏹️ ▶️ John of the timelines. We are still in the Friendster phase of non-Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, Twitter-like services. And in the Friendster phase, a lot of names came and went,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one remembers them. We’re not even at MySpace yet. Like Mastodon is not MySpace,
⏹️ ▶️ John and Blue Sky is not MySpace. One of them might become MySpace, but I don’t think either one of them is Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ John either. And again, that’s an analogy with the centralized systems. I want the web.
⏹️ ▶️ John I want the web for Twitter-like social networking because I think Twitter-like social
⏹️ ▶️ John networking is a valuable form. Email is valuable, the web itself is valuable,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, instant messaging in the form of WhatsApp and iMessage and all that is valuable. This form,
⏹️ ▶️ John small message, like the way Twitter, that thing that Twitter established,
⏹️ ▶️ John that is useful and valuable and apparently very hard to do well. I hope we
⏹️ ▶️ John come up with a better way to do that that is not owned and controlled by a small group of people
⏹️ ▶️ John who make terrible decisions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, and part of you know, so just before I move on, like the the unified client
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app thing, you know, maybe we won’t see unified timeline, maybe we will start with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the way that like multiple accounts show up in an app, maybe, maybe you can have multiple account types
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can like, you can have the same interface, but you’d have to switch between the two accounts, you know, fine,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s probably how we start. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing because there’s a lot of feature overlap and that’s that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably pretty straightforward. But ultimately. My biggest concern
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with blue sky is the same concern I have with Mastodon. I don’t know how these things are going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to scale in either the technological sense or the financial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sense or the moderation sense. Those are the three big areas. And Mastodon is way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ahead of blue sky in its scale. And they’ve had a long time to work out some of those things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like looking at at the realities of how ActivityPub works, the realities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of running large instances, or having people with large followings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ActivityPub does not seem to scale very well. It seems like it’s holding up okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under the existing scale of Mastodon most of the time. That’s a lot of qualifiers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mastodon does not feel like something that has a lot of headroom in its design in terms of technical
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scaling. Blue Sky, obviously a way smaller scale currently,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but because there’s so many Twitter people designing it and running it, Twitter for all of its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco faults, and even though it had a rough start, scaled really well to a scale that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco none of these other services can even dream of.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco This is what we talked about when we talked about Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ John Early Twitter was very much like Mastodon and absolutely did not scale, and they basically redid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and that, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco granted, Like, yeah, it had a rough early time, but that’s ancient history now. Modern Twitter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scaled really well, really impressively. Everything was extremely fast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco extremely reliable, hardly ever had any downtime, hardly ever had delays and stuff showing up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That is not how Mastodon is right now, and it’s at a fraction of the scale. And so I’m concerned about Mastodon’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and ActivityPub’s ability to scale. And in some of the protocol arguments, they’ve actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the people who were attacking the AT protocol technical means, like it seems like the AT protocol, again, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much about it yet. But it seems like they have they have taken scaling in a different way, that is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably more likely to scale better. And I and I would trust the people who are building blue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sky to know that stuff better at the scale that we’re talking about with, you know, possibly becoming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Twitter like replacement. I would trust those people to know how to do that better than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco activity pub does it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, so the thing about well, Mastodon, interestingly, uses very similar technology stack to early
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, which is kind of why we know it’s not gonna scale well. But because it’s decentralized, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John always the out of like, well, an individual instance can never get that big or whatever. But anyway, I will point out the mass
⏹️ ▶️ John done is only one order of magnitude away from Twitter scale, which granted order of magnitude is a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot. They’re at 10 million, Twitter is a couple hundred million, right? This is one order of magnitude away.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that may be sufficient, with decentralization, they could potentially get there. Blue Sky
⏹️ ▶️ John looks like they have a better handle on scaling, at least a better idea of how scaling will work,
⏹️ ▶️ John but you don’t know until you actually try it,
⏹️ ▶️ John And they’re, like, cause we have to see them actually do it. The other thing about Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter started off, you know, like a Ruby application that didn’t scale with a, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, a bad database back end. And then they fixed it all and redid it all with the
⏹️ ▶️ John addition of millions and millions and millions of dollars, right? Don’t forget
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like they just, it’s not like the person who wrote the original implementation of Twitter gave it a second try and
⏹️ ▶️ John it worked out. No, it was, they have many employees, tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of money. A lot of that was VC, but eventually they found a business model that did actually produce many
⏹️ ▶️ John millions of dollars in revenue. Not enough to make them a gangbuster successful corporation, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is why they sold to that idiot. But still, that is an ingredient that is
⏹️ ▶️ John in, that is absent from both Mastodon and Blue Sky. Because Blue Sky, yeah, they
⏹️ ▶️ John got millions of dollars poured into them, but nothing like the amount of money Twitter had poured into it. And also,
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter eventually found a way to have revenue and Blue Sky is not a glimmer
⏹️ ▶️ John in their eye. So, the decentralization
⏹️ ▶️ John as your ultimate out to scaling is not entirely valid,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you just wanna scale a little bit more and you can be like hand wave, hand wave, as long as we have more
⏹️ ▶️ John instances instead of bigger instances, and as long as our bigger instance scales up, like
⏹️ ▶️ John when I look at ActivityBub, I think of someone looking at the web in the 90s and saying, oh, this will never scale. And they were
⏹️ ▶️ John right. HTTP 1.0 with Apache or whatever, NCSA
⏹️ ▶️ John web server, NCSA HTTP, that wouldn’t have scaled to the current scale of the web. But
⏹️ ▶️ John somehow, starting off with that janky technology, through a very
⏹️ ▶️ John bumpy path, we got to where we are today, where the web is, as they say, web scale.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not because the people who originally made it had the forethought to make something that was scalable, because they
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t. They just made something that they thought worked or whatever, and it had to be revised, and it had to
⏹️ ▶️ John be improved, and lots of other third parties had to come up with ideas. And a company
⏹️ ▶️ John funded by something else entirely, which is Google figured out how to search the web and made bazillions of dollars,
⏹️ ▶️ John has now contributed to the advancement of the web by coming up with the new versions of HTTP
⏹️ ▶️ John that are in turn more efficient and making browsers that are efficient. ActivityPub
⏹️ ▶️ John looks way more like the early web than BlueSky does. Now, BlueSky is like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John why do we repeat the same mistakes? The people making BlueSky understand how to scale and they have some interesting ideas about how
⏹️ ▶️ John this could be done well. But the thing about interesting ideas is they’re interesting because they’re like, oh, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think anyone’s tried that before. And that’s kind of a danger zone where it’s like, you know, it’s the worst is better
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. We’ve done the thing where you start off with something simple and unscalable and figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out how to make it bigger. The ones where you start out with something that is novel
⏹️ ▶️ John and interesting and scale better than anything came before it, it happens, it can
⏹️ ▶️ John be done, but even in the best case scenarios, which I’m thinking of this because part of what they’re doing with the
⏹️ ▶️ John data model and everything is a little bit like Git, not really, but like they use some of the same terminology
⏹️ ▶️ John as in terms of having a repository, the approvably correct repository with transactions committed to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You squint and it might look like a database, might look like Git or whatever. Git is a good example. It is a very interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John model for dealing with change management and fantastically successful,
⏹️ ▶️ John partially because of its pedigree, kind of like perhaps Blue Sky maybe one day. But Git is
⏹️ ▶️ John not universally better than all the centralized services that came before it. Git does not scale
⏹️ ▶️ John as easily as some of the centralized ones due to the way it’s designed. If you have a single
⏹️ ▶️ John repository with millions and millions of files doing anything, Git all of a sudden starts slowing down. And the answer to that from
⏹️ ▶️ John Git perspective is don’t do that. Don’t have a repository with billions and millions of files.
⏹️ ▶️ John Have fewer smaller repositories, use Git modules, do this, do that, do the other thing. It’s not to say that Git
⏹️ ▶️ John is bad. It’s just that like as novel and interesting as Git was, and it brought all this value
⏹️ ▶️ John with, you know, again, the fact that it was novel and it did have features other things didn’t have,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not universally better. So I don’t know how Blue Sky is gonna turn out. Again, they’re not done
⏹️ ▶️ John making Blue Sky. They’re still working on the basics of the protocol. They’re just getting around to figuring
⏹️ ▶️ John out how blocking works, for crying out loud. They’re in very early days. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I do like a lot of the ideas they have, in particular, the fact that when you change instances, you bring your posts with you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although the way they do that seems a little janky. But anyway, I applaud the efforts in these
⏹️ ▶️ John areas, but I do, right now, I kind of feel like ActivityPub, for all its warts,
⏹️ ▶️ John is following a path that looks familiar to me, that where you start out primitive and
⏹️ ▶️ John not great and having scaling problems, and you eventually figure them out. And Blue Sky,
⏹️ ▶️ John the reason I signed up for it, like when they first came out, it was like these people have thought hard
⏹️ ▶️ John about the problem. These people are not just coming in blind and saying, oh, I’ll just get something simple working and I’m sure it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John all work out. They’re not doing that. They’re saying, we know here are the hard problems to solve and we have some
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas about how to solve them. And we’re gonna come in and we’re gonna start off on third base. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, yes, these guys get it, they’re gonna do it. I’m rooting for them, I just don’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John know if they’re gonna do it. And so it seems like a higher risk factor, where he
⏹️ ▶️ John seems unfamiliar. And the fact that Jack Dorsey’s involved doesn’t really make me that excited anyway. I
⏹️ ▶️ John appreciate his millions of dollars, I don’t appreciate his personal involvement in any way. The good thing is he’s been distracted and
⏹️ ▶️ John has gone off to deal with N-O-S-T-R, Noster, Noster? He’s involved with that too? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John what is that? He’s given up on, not he’s given up on Blue Sky, but that’s his new darling is that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that I know even less about, and it seems like their goals are different. When I read the AT
⏹️ ▶️ John Protocol thing, I felt like, yeah, they’re thinking about the hard problems. And when I read about the Noster
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff, I was like, you’re thinking about different problems, and I’m not really interested
⏹️ ▶️ John in what you’re doing. Even if you succeed, doesn’t sound cool. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John I read the AT Protocol thing, and I said, if you succeed, Yeah, that’ll be a thing I’d want to use. So we’ll see how this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need another app.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. You know, and I check four places. I did sign up for Noster twice.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidentally. Because that’s how it works. It’s confusing. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John more updates on Noster in 2045. Stay tuned. Not my word.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I just, to me, like those scaling questions, that’s the biggest thing. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who knows how this is going to end up, but what Blue Sky is going through now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is the easy fun phase. This is like, you have only the cool people, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a small number of people, you don’t have a lot of skill and challenges, you’re spending someone else’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money, you’re not thinking about how to make money later. Like, that’s the stakes they’re in now. It gets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much worse after this. Like, you know, you tell people like, oh, it gets better, like with some different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of things. When it comes to running a social network, it gets worse. Everything just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets worse over time running a social network.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey What do you even know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about that, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So they’re going to have to start facing these tough problems. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new cool darling phase we’re in now is going to end. And they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco face, how do you pay for this? What does that do to the openness and the protocol
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the client and everything else? They’re going to face, how do we deal with Nazis and blocking and everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco else? They’re just starting to deal with that now. That’s going to quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ramp up. The fun part will be how do you deal with technical scaling? Because that at least is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little less controversial. But the harder problems of how do you pay for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this and how do you handle moderation? I don’t see any evidence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, as smart as Blue Sky is on their technical side, I don’t see any evidence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’re going to have an easier time solving those other problems than any other
⏹️ ▶️ Marco big social network has in the past. I do think it is where a lot of people are,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s where a lot of people are going, and it’s pulling people off of Twitter who never made it to Mastodon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it was delightful, as I was going through and following people on Blue Sky, like reading other people’s follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lists, I was finding people that I’ve missed these last few months that I haven’t been on Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they never came to Mastodon. Like they’ve just been on Twitter, and so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Mastodon didn’t bring everyone over who I wanted to follow. So I’m happy that this other place
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is attracting them so that I can see their stuff and I can keep contact with them and keep following
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them and have them keep following me without having to go back to Twitter where I really don’t want to go. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I like that part of it, but again, the challenges have yet to come and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the technical side is one thing, but the messy problems are not technical.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so far, we have no idea where Blue Sky is going to land
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that. Mastodon does an okay job of that stuff, not even a great job. Blue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sky is a question mark. So we’ll see. Anyway, thanks to our sponsors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week, Steam Clock and Backblaze. And thanks to our members who support us directly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can join us at atp.fm join and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even mean to begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental John didn’t do any research, Marco and
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John Syracuse It’s accidental, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean to Accidental, check podcast
SwiftUI & Callsheet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been fighting SwiftUI so much. It’s been good though. It’s been like, talked about a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco under the radar this week. Like my,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I mean. Yeah, I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listening to that earlier today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like my main pattern has been, I’ll run into a problem, I will explode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my solution in complexity, trying to solve the problem. You? Then I will find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really simple way around the problem, and I’ll delete all the complexity. And so I’m left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with like a one-liner. So you know, some modifier or some weird little technique
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or, oh, this state should have been a binding, you know, like something like that. And I’ll fix the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’ll be glorious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I ran into this earlier this week. I was working on
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tapping on a person’s picture or a movie poster, what have you, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zooming in and taking up basically the whole screen. And I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, oh, god, I’m going to have to do geometry readers up and down and inside now, which is,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s probably one or two geometry readers in CallSheet right now, but there’s very, very few. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a lot of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, for the record, I know there’s a lot of people who are like, geometry readers make it hacky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever. I think geometry readers are fine. There are ways to use them very easily,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They are totally fine. I do not hesitate to use a geometry reader if I have
⏹️ ▶️ John I would hesitate a little bit. It’s not because they’re bad. It’s just that very often when
⏹️ ▶️ John you use a geometry reader, there’s a cleaner way to do it without
⏹️ ▶️ John one. Sometimes there’s not, sometimes you gotta use it. That’s why it’s there. It’s there for you to use it, right? So don’t be afraid to use it when you have to
⏹️ ▶️ John use it. But not, I’m gonna say in every instance, but in many, many of the instances
⏹️ ▶️ John that I start out using geometry reader, I came back later and realized, oh, there’s actually a
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do this without geometry readers that is cleaner. Sure, and that feels too good to get rid of them. And the problem
⏹️ ▶️ John is, because, well, This actually gets into something that I’ve been thinking about when I hear you talking about SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John and you Casey as well, with the complaints about it. Geometry reader can be thought of as
⏹️ ▶️ John a lower level of abstraction than the rest of SwiftUI. Because it’s like, look, when you got to drop down a level
⏹️ ▶️ John here you can get at the raw geometry. And it’s kind of a weird clunky way to do it where this thing
⏹️ ▶️ John exists and this whole point is like, I just, I’m not a thing. I just exist to extract these numbers for you
⏹️ ▶️ John that you’re gonna find really handy. So use them for something and you do when it solves your problem, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John What I found is that a lot of the difficulty in SwiftUI, people say, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John if it does what you want, you’re fine, but if you wanna do something fancier, you have a problem. It’s because SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have enough layers. Like it’s not built on, everything that’s cool
⏹️ ▶️ John in SwiftUI is not built on slightly less cool pieces that are built on slightly less cool, like, you know, the sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John the layer of abstraction. A good API or a mature API will say, Here
⏹️ ▶️ John you can do the easy thing, drop down one level. Here is another whole world that is also really
⏹️ ▶️ John nice has public APIs as well thought out, but the pieces are just a little bit lower level. And guess what?
⏹️ ▶️ John Every one of those pieces, it was built on other pieces that are also really nice, also with a really nice public
⏹️ ▶️ John API. In fact, you can write your whole application on this level if you wanted. And it’s all beautiful and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just documented and it works in a sensible way. And like that all the way down.
⏹️ ▶️ John That makes it so easy to do whatever you want because if you’re doing everything at the very
⏹️ ▶️ John top level, it’s beautiful. And if you wanna do one custom thing, peek underneath the covers
⏹️ ▶️ John and there is another layer underneath that that is also beautiful. It’s not underneath there is pipes and
⏹️ ▶️ John wires and like sparks are flying everywhere and everything’s made of oatmeal. That’s not what you want. Like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John I gotta start swizzling symbols and I’m like, I’m, you know, doing stuff with
⏹️ ▶️ John unsafe pointers and like, that’s not what we’re talking about. We’re talking about when you open up one box, inside
⏹️ ▶️ John is another beautifully wrapped box with documentation and tests and everything, right? And SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John is not that. And it’s not because SwiftUI, the model is wrong or it’s inherently wrong, it’s just that
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s not, like, sometimes there are levels of pieces. You can see piece
⏹️ ▶️ John X of SwiftUI is built on pieces Y and Z. But very often it’s like, this is the top
⏹️ ▶️ John level thing and underneath it is no user serviceable parts,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the saying used to go on the stairs. Do
⏹️ ▶️ John not, do not look. And I feel that so much when I’m using it, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John since I spend a lot of time at AppKit as well, which does have user serviceable parts underneath
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of stuff. If you go all the way down, there’s like a hierarchy. NSView is a class
⏹️ ▶️ John you can use and understand and was designed and is documented for humans to use and it underlies so
⏹️ ▶️ John much stuff. So it’s like, I hope I never have to drop down to NSView. I hope I can use it at this level.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted to use NSTableView and whatever, I don’t know what the collection view is called. and NSLan,
⏹️ ▶️ John but there’s like five layers. And every single one of those layers is a public API that is supported
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can use. And you just need to drop down until you can solve your problem. Whereas SwiftUI is
⏹️ ▶️ John so often one layer and there’s no reason it has to be. SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t, and Geometry Reader is an example of that. It’s not that everything is built on Geometry Reader, but it’s kind of like they made
⏹️ ▶️ John a fake layer. It’s like, well, underneath the scenes, Geometry Reader isn’t what we’re building on, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what Geometry Reader is built on? that’s underneath all these other pieces, but you can’t see that part. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, I started off saying, you should feel kind of bad for using Geometry Reader because there may be a simpler way to do it, which is true.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the main reason I’m saying that is because Geometry Reader is not really the next layer down in
⏹️ ▶️ John abstraction. Geometry Reader is just like, them poking up a little thing as like
⏹️ ▶️ John an apology of like, no
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey user serviceable
⏹️ ▶️ John parts, but if you just want the dimensions, this thing will give them to you. Good luck. And then you run away.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I don’t know how best to phrase that. I think I used to have a better term for this. I used to talk about it all the
⏹️ ▶️ John time when I would make frameworks in my jobby jobs is that you have to have, you have to be built
⏹️ ▶️ John on layers and layers and each one of those layers is a perfectly serviceable top layer. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the beauty of it. Whether you start from top down or bottom up, it can’t just be one amorphous
⏹️ ▶️ John blob and you can’t say this is the interface and everything else is internals. Great frameworks, great APIs
⏹️ ▶️ John are, you can use them at whatever level you want to use them. And every level is designed,
⏹️ ▶️ John every level is thought out, every level is documented. And that makes for an experience that everybody loves.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I feel like SwiftUI can get there as long as the people making it have that philosophy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because right now it seems like the people making SwiftUI have the philosophy of like, oh, if you’re having that problem, just
⏹️ ▶️ John tell me and I’ll add another parameter to the top level API. That is not a scalable solution. We appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Sometimes you should, sometimes the top level API is too poor. is too, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have enough features, it should have another parameter, or there should be another method. But sometimes the solution
⏹️ ▶️ John is stop adding stuff to the top level, show me what’s underneath it. Oh, there’s nothing underneath it, you need to build
⏹️ ▶️ John something underneath it, like whatever the next it’s still SwiftUI. It’s just like, just like, you know, NS view
⏹️ ▶️ John is part of AppKit. And so is NS table view, they are part of the same family, but they are different levels
⏹️ ▶️ John in the hierarchy. SwiftUI needs that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. It’s just funny because the thing I was running into is the zooming stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we got sidetracked from. And I thought, OK, well, I’m going to need to use geometry readers and figure out where I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the screen. And then I’m going to have to do some crazy math in order to move the frame of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey view and blah, blah, blah. And then by sheer circumstance, I stumbled on a matched
⏹️ ▶️ Casey geometry effect, which is a view modifier that basically you put this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on two different views and then say, OK, I want to go from one view to the other. And magic happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s not perfect, but it’s good enough. And the conversation that you guys were having under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the radar was very, very relevant because I know, and if you look closely, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably shouldn’t say this out loud because other people notice now, but I know that the animation for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey zooming of the images is not 100% correct, but you know what? It’s close enough. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have other things I should be working on than making that pixel perfect. I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to be pixel perfect. I will hopefully one day make it pixel perfect. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey been in the back of my head, you know, underscore talks a lot about this. You know, it’s just like my subconscious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brain has been chewing on it a lot over the last 48 hours trying to figure out how to make it pixel perfect.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But ultimately now is not the time to make it pixel perfect. It is serviceable as it is, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than nothing. And that’s what I plan to ship at least for now. But yeah, this week’s under
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the radar. They’re all good, but this week’s certainly struck home for me as I’m trying
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out, okay, what juice is worth the squeeze and what isn’t?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, how close are you, I think, to shipping 1.0?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I was saying to you privately before the show, and I think it’s very true, I need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscores, sailboat emoji, no new features, sailboat emoji, you know, his
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little sheet that he’ll put up from time to time. He’ll probably send you a PDF
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you ask him. He probably will. knowing him, it’ll probably be in my inbox by the time I wake up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But no, so I have 13 issues in GitHub at the moment, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have labeled all but two of them as not right now. You know, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a list of things I want to do eventually, but not right now. And there’s only two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things left for right now. One of them is to see about improving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way I do layout such that there’s some very, very of small shifts as images
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are loaded and things of that nature and the UI will shift around a little bit. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit annoying but not devastating and I’d like to at least spend a few minutes to see if I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can improve that. And then the other thing I need to do is properly implement my paywall,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is to say I’m going to do the whole dance of, you know, you get some number of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey searches for free. I haven’t figured out what that number is yet. And then subsequent to that, you’re going going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to pay in order to do anything else. And so I was looking into,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it? Oh, NSUbiquitous Key Value Store, which I’ve never used before. I’m using Cloud Kit for stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in this app, and I’ve used a teeny bit of Cloud Kit in Masquerade.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m using a fair bit of Cloud Kit in this app, but I’ve never used the Ubiquitous Key Value Store. And I was thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about using that to store, basically, how many searches you’ve done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s so much better than any other iCloud thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually quite like the CloudKit fake database thing. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey written a pretty good facade in front of that that I’m pretty happy with. But I’ve heard horror stories about some of the stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey preceded it, like Core Data for iCloud, I’ve heard was a nightmare from the moment it launched and is still a nightmare today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, the Key Value Store was one of the original three iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was Core Data, that, and I believe the document You
⏹️ ▶️ John CloudKit, not iCloud,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean iCloud. When iCloud first launched as an API,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was three things. It was iCloud core data, which was a disaster and is, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco totally discontinued. There was also this key value store and, I believe, a document thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is the only thing that has survived.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But to John’s point, the thing I’m talking about, the thing I just said I have a facade in front of, that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is definitely 100%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco CloudKit. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CloudKit. Yep, yep, yep. But I’ve never used the Key Value Store before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I need to take a quick look at that. It doesn’t look to be particularly complicated. It looks to be pretty straightforward,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s really simple. It’s very similar to just using NSUserDefaults or UserDefaults.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very, very similar to that. You’ll see. You have to watch for some notification
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s about it. It’s very simple, very old. And I have found that’s what I use for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overcast’s login account thing and it’s been fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like I’ve never had a problem attributable to that. And I could be wrong, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think that requires the user to have iCloud Drive enabled. Like remember I hit that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem when I was looking at CloudKit where CloudKit’s database and everything does not work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for users who have iCloud Drive disabled, that’s where it stores its data. As far as I know, the Key Value Store does not have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that restriction, I don’t think. And I should probably test that. But I think anybody with an iCloud account
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all signed into the device, I think can do that. The downside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that you are limited in terms of like, there’s it only allows a certain number of records and they have to each be a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco size or smaller. But for what you’re talking about you it’d be totally fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And so that so I need to do that. So the two items are you know, take away the shiftiness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s with an F, take away the shiftiness and set a total limit of free lookups
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lookups, would you say?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s right. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John it a total per day, per week, or total all time?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Honestly, I hadn’t thought too much about it, but my current thinking is all time. So you’ll get, and again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what the number would be, but you’ll get 10 searches or something like that. Maybe it’ll be five, maybe it’ll be 50, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John don’t know. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of in favor of per unit time, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Have you decided what price you’re gonna charge for the premium?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, I don’t, I don’t know. It’s all over the place, right? Because the feedback I’ve gotten, which has generally been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very good, But some people are like, oh my God, take my money, I’ll give you infinite money for this, which of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, they’re being facetious. But the point is, you know, they would potentially pay like $10 a month,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I think is too much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve heard people say, you know, I’ll pay one or $2 a month. And for a month,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think that’s completely reasonable. For a year, that’s not enough. So I’m thinking,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we discussed when we first had the conversation about what is now CallSheet, I’m currently thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere to the order of $8 a year. And the other thing I am having really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey complicated thoughts about is whether or not I should offer a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lifetime unlock for something to the order of like 40 or 50 bucks. And- No, don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t do anything lifetime. Trust me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey you will regret it. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s the thing is I don’t know. And I was talking to our friend, Ryan Jones, and he had extremely strong feelings about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how I should do the lifetime thing. And he made some pretty compelling arguments, which I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not in a position to try to verbalize here in the heat of the moment. But suffice
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to say, his arguments were very compelling. So I’m not sure what I’m gonna do. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey here’s what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your lifetime customers will be the fewest. You’ll make the least money overall in total from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them. And they will be your biggest pains in the butt because the entitlement they will have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes it not worth it. Trust me, you do not want those customers. And you won’t get many anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it doesn’t matter. Focus on your subscription price that everybody else will pay. That’s your product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think a dollar a month or up to $10 a year, I think you could easily do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I mean, again, this is all current thinking, but knock on wood, if I can,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m only gonna, I’m gonna time box, which is a very corporate thing to say, but I’m gonna time box the taking away the shiftiness
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to like a day or something like that. You know, just give myself a little time to see if I can improve it, but if I can’t, oh
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well. And then I think the task for the remainder of this week, what little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is left and next week is, you know, getting the paywall squared away. I need to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey rejigger the actual paywall screen itself because it looks like garbage right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to rejigger that. I need to actually, you know, track, you know, how many searches you’ve done and so on and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then put up a paywall when you’ve hit your limit. But hypothetically,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, as early as about, you know, a week, week and a half from now, I might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be pushing the first build to App Store review, hopefully, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey famous last words.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now you gotta factor in time to get rejected because your paywall screen doesn’t comply with
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey whatever they want. Yep, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this is my first time doing subscriptions, so surely I’ll get some sort of issue with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Who knows? But one way or another, that is the hope. So given that I told you, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’ll be a week to week and a half, that means it’ll be about three to four weeks before
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I push it to the app store. Because you always multiply by two, is my lesson I learned over my many years in corporate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey America. Whatever I think it’ll be, it’ll be twice as long.