547: Own Your Pricing
10 Aug 2023Casey launches Callsheet!
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Follow-up:
- Mophie 3-in-1 travel charger
- Casey’s fire hazard
- John’s Photos issues
- He knows about modifier keys, y’all.
- Odd behavior with iPhone camera app
- Jason Snell’s crop macro (
.ZIPlink) - Keyboard Maestro
- Gui’s spelunking around face detection
defaults write com.apple.photoanalysisd PhotoAnalysisCoreDuetSchedulingDisabled -bool YES- Running XPC on-demand
- XPC
- In-app non-destructive photo editing (the below are App Store links)
- #caseywasright
- 🎉 Callsheet has launched! 🎉
#askatp:- Is it wise for indie developers to make a LLC? (via Nate Silva)
- Could Apple go nuts with overclocking in a Mac Pro? (via Janne Ojaniemi)
- What text editor are we using these days? (via Edward Corcoran)
- Post-show: Roku TVs are gross
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ATP
Become a member for ad-free episodes and our early-release, unedited “bootleg” feed!
Chapters
- Physical follow-up
- Apple earnings analysis
- Hypercritical shirts: last chance!
- Mophie-charger fix
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- Photo-cropping follow-up
- Detect-faces follow-up
- Non-destructive photo editing
- Never-silents
- Sponsor: Kolide
- Callsheet released!
- Sponsor: Green Chef (code atp50)
- #askatp: LLCs for developers
- #askatp: Mac Pro Turbo
- #askatp: Text editors
- Ending theme
- Creepy vacation tech
Physical follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want to spend a lot of time on call sheet. I want to hear a lot about that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s what the main thing is.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, main topic.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not a lot of follow-up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not a lot of follow-up. All right, mark your timers, everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Here we go. Buckle up.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you look at it, there’s physically not a lot in the thing. And I think the number of things that we’re going to cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does follow-up have a physicality to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it? Yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lengthen the page. Lengthen this virtual document that we have never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and will never print. We can measure it in inches,
⏹️ ▶️ John centimeters, lines, vertical height.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, number of pixels taken. Hmm, points please.
Apple earnings analysis
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, when we have a brief chat before the show,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, typically we’ll cover any urgent needs and then we’ll do pre-flight. But every great once in a while,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s something funny that happens before we go live, which is never deliberate. You know, we always try to save that for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey our beloved members and bootleggers and live listeners. But this time you missed something kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny, so we’ll have to see if it ends up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And regular listeners. Like, it’s not like our regular show is just like, okay, here as the tech news
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Plus, you don’t have to be a member
⏹️ ▶️ John to listen live, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Hey, everybody, Apple made a whole bunch of money, but not quite as much money as everybody wanted them to make, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco still many billions of dollars. And we’re going to cover this in excruciating detail
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in our financial analyst segment of today’s show, as we always do. So they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made a lot of money. Now, they made a lot of money with some of their products, but then they also made a lot of money with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other products. And don’t forget, they made a lot of money with services.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, did they make money
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with services? They did. And in fact, analysts expect they will make in the future a lot of money with services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and with old products and with new products. So we’ll see as they make a lot of money over time in different
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. It’s going to be very interesting. We’re going to report every single detail. You know, they made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a certain percentage more or less money in each of these categories that made them a lot of money this quarter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So next quarter we expect them to make a lot of money.
Hypercritical shirts: last chance!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And did you know who should also be making a lot of money this quarter, maybe next quarter, is John Syracuse,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because this is your last chance. This is it. This is your last chance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for hypercritical shirts. And it’s not a low-stakes scenario. It’s not like ATP shirts. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come back all the darn time. These ones, these are like a freaking eclipse. They’re even less
⏹️ ▶️ Casey frequent than an eclipse once every five years. I don’t remember what animal we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decided that’s like. We figured it out a few episodes ago, but Once every five years, this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is your chance to get Hypercritical shirts. So I will do the same spiel that I always do. If you are driving,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey signal, use your signal because you’re not a jerk, use your signal, pull
⏹️ ▶️ Casey over to the side of the road, and go to hypercritical.co slash shirt. If you’re walking, use your signal,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use your signal if possible, pull over to the side of the sidewalk, hypercritical.co slash shirt. This is your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey last chance for five years. To put things in perspective, five years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had a newborn and Declan was three in five years Michaela will be ten
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for goodness sakes and Declan will be in what grade will he be and he will be almost done with the middle
⏹️ ▶️ Casey school in five years This is your chance hypercritical.co slash shirt
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re listening to this and it is August 12th or earlier You can still get one if it’s after August
⏹️ ▶️ John 12th You probably can’t I say the August 12th date because I want to I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John want to do any complicated time zone math So no matter where you are on the planet, if today is August 12th
⏹️ ▶️ John or an earlier date, you can buy one right now. If today is some date after August 12th, like
⏹️ ▶️ John the 13th, I don’t know, maybe if you’re in New Zealand, you can get it or something. But just anyway, August 12th, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. And number one, we really encourage you to get this not only to support John, but also it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a really good yellow shirt. I mean, there are other colors, but yellow is the canonical color. It’s the one you probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should get. And there aren’t that many good yellow shirts. And this is one of them. It’s gold. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a good yellow. Like my Rivian. Anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Well, remains to be seen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s true. It’s a huge risk. And secondly, speaking of cars and what we just talked about, wouldn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it be amazing if people who were walking had turn signals? That
⏹️ ▶️ John You could do hand signals, you know, they make you do them on a driver test like. If your turn signals don’t work, you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you put it out the window and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down for left and up for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John right. Right, so you could do the
⏹️ ▶️ John same thing while you’re walking As long as you don’t poke somebody next to you, it’ll work just fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, bikists are supposed to use those, but I don’t, I’ve never seen one actually use them. I do it when I’m on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bicycles. I see people
⏹️ ▶️ John do it all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve literally never once seen it being used.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, we need to stop before we get a ton of feedback. I believe Marco said down for left. Isn’t it straight out for left
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then a L shape for right? Down is stop.
⏹️ ▶️ John Correct. And up is right. Oh.
⏹️ ▶️ John fail your driving test, Marco. Sorry, that new car that you ordered is going to be useless to you now. Yes, indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I mean, I love you bikists, but you are vocal. Whether you’re a majority or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a minority, you are very vocal. And we’ve already covered it. It’s covered. We got it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, I love bikists. I am frequently, you know, kind of amateur bikist here when they’re in a place with no cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is a very different experience than being a bikist in a city. But I have never once seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bikist use a hand signal or stop at a stop sign.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ve never seen them use a hand signal? I don’t know. Maybe you didn’t spend enough time in the city. You see it all the time around here.
⏹️ ▶️ John What about how about yelling on your left as they come whizzing past you?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do here, actually, because, you know, here, like, you know, you’re kind of sharing these wide sidewalk road
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of things. You’re sharing them between pedestrians and bikists. And so the bikists are expected to go on the left,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ding a bell and say, on your left, and you know, and then the people wander around because they’ve never heard it before. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, you got to slam on your brakes. It’s a whole thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Bikist is definitely a very classic Marco-ism, but it does kind of sound like people who who are prejudiced
⏹️ ▶️ John against bikes. What? You’re such a bikist, Marco. Oh, my word.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s move right along.
Mophie-charger fix
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so I have some quick follow-up with regard to my beloved Mophie 3-in-1
⏹️ ▶️ Casey charger. I don’t remember when I first started talking about this, but I think it was on the show a while back. Mophie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes a 3-in-1 charger that’s, it’s a, it’s designed for travel, but you mean you don’t have to use it that way. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a thing, it folds up on, you know, on top of itself like a tri-fold wallet, like if you’re one of those lunatics like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think John that uses a tri-fold wallet. And, and so there’s one spot for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your AirPods, There’s one spot that has a MagSafe compatible pad. I don’t think it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually strictly speaking MagSafe, but you know what I mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco And then there’s a, I think a first party- Natural
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flavors. Yeah, right. And then there’s a first party, pasteurized cheese product.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And then there’s a first party-
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chocolatey. There’s a first party flip up Apple Watch charger. And it charges, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey plugs in via USB-C. It comes with a little carrying case. Genuinely, I really, really, really like this thing. They are heinously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expensive, but I really like them. Well, it turns out they’re not perfect because back in July, MacRumors reported,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and a lot of people wrote to me about it. MacRumors writes, beginning in late June, users in Apple’s discussions community
⏹️ ▶️ Casey began pointing out an issue where an iPhone, Apple Watch or AirPods placed on the charger would fail to get a consistent charge.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The devices would constantly ping as they disconnected and reconnected to the charging source. Now, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have generally had pretty good luck with the two that I have, although I will say that I’ve gotten in the habit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of unplugging them and then plugging them back in like once a day, just to kind of reset everything because there’s apparently some amounts of smarts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside these little devices.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a classic Casey move, by the way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s very true.
⏹️ ▶️ John Using the computer with bad RAM, using a product that has to unplug and replug every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, you are right, but the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing is- Did you try taking the third party RAM out of the Mophie charger?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I should have done that. I should have, you’re right, I should have done that. But anyway, no, the reason I love these things so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much is because my GoPack, which was like 80 gazillion cables and has been shrunken down to basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey two of these, a couple HDMI cables and very little else. And that juice was worth the squeeze
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, even having to disconnect them once a day. Well, as of just a week or two ago, as we record,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Zagg, Z-A-G-G, which is the website zagg.com, it’s a company that apparently owns Mophie, they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have acknowledged the problem and they have come up with a firmware update kit, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a little dongle that you plug into the device and then you plug the standard charging cable into the dongle.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You hit the one and only button on the dongle, it flash, flash, flash, flash, flash, flash, flash, and then it flashes the firmware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inside the three-in-one charger and allegedly makes everything perfect again.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I have tried this on both of mine. And then for one night, I used my travel setup here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at home. And it all worked no problem. And when we were traveling last week, which is why the schedule
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a little wonky, when we were traveling last week and we were using these things, I definitely noticed,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for uninteresting reasons, I have a push notification come to myself when I go to sleep.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m very weird about knowing when I’m sleeping, when I’m not. It’s a secret Casey weird thing. A secret weird thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Casey does. So anyways, so I would notice after waking up that I would, that at like 2 30 in the morning,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you just charge, you’re, you’re just plugged in your charger, which is my cue that I went to sleep. Are you, Oh, you just started charging.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You just started charging. You just started charging. And none of that happened overnight on the, after I’d flashed the firmware.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I like to think all as well. Now, if you’re interested in one of these things, go to zag.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey They do sell them at Apple retail, but go to zag.com and they often have deals
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on these things. and if they don’t have a deal right now, if you sign up for their mailing list
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then immediately cancel it afterwards, they give you something like a 20% off coupon, which if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talking about $150 friggin’ dollars, that’s a great coupon. So definitely don’t pay the $150 that I did. Definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t do it twice over like I did because I’m a dummy. But now I can say without reservation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey again that these things are real nice and you should check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, this is one thing where you have to be careful with powering, power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like anything involving converting large or small amounts of power, being plugged in constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your house when you aren’t home. You have to really be careful what you buy. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mophie is one of the higher end brands here. And I can tell you, I have had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco such mixed luck with all sorts of different charger bricks and charger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equipment from different brands, including brands everyone loves like Anker. You know, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco loves Anker. And they are among the better ones, but I’ve still had problems with their gear,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like almost everyone else. Honestly, the only brand I think I’ve never had a problem with their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power adapters is Apple. And you know, when, you know, as you get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco older, maybe you get a little more conservative in some of these things, like there are like certain things in my house that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remain plugged in all the time, even when I’m not here, I lean more towards using Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power adapters for those kind of things, because I just don’t want to risk it with somebody else’s.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And Apple’s standards for that kind of stuff, for safety, for fire risk, they’re super high standards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And not everyone in the business has them. And the more complicated the product is, you know, when you have something like a three-in-one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Qi-based charging mat, like, that’s a complicated product. So the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more complicated it is, the larger the risks are. So this is one area, like, you know, there’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you go all the way to the bargain basement, like I always say, when, as you know, I’m a fan of buying refurbished
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple devices on Amazon or whatever for cheap whenever I need test devices. And they always come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with some like total no name USB cable and brick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I always throw those right in the garbage because first of all, I don’t trust them. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the amount of hacks that are out there that are like USB based zero day exploits, like I don’t wanna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even risk it with some rando cable from God knows where that came in a refurb box. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, those power bricks, that’s not worth possibly burning my house down to use this weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no-name power brick. So, again, use stuff from good brands when it comes to things like this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And even the good brands can get it wrong sometimes. So, it’s worth a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit of thought and a little bit of caution with a lot of these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually have a related story about this. I have a fire hazard in my house right now. Well, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, it’s outside my house because it’s a fire hazard. So as we’re traveling last week,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we use, I genuinely don’t remember what models they are, but they’re like 10-year-old iPhones, as water
⏹️ ▶️ Casey noises. We use an app, I think it’s called Sleep Pillow or something like that, I forget what it’s called, but we use an app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Kids have had this since they were babies. It just plays little rain noise and it helps them tune everything else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out. And it’s just kind of static white noise, which we’re gonna talk about this more later. White noise that they go to sleep to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I noticed that one of the phones that we use for this, which is old enough to have a home
⏹️ ▶️ Casey button, but it’s bigger than the 5 series. So it must’ve been like a 6 maybe. Anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was in a very, very cheap, you know, like silicone case or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was like poking out of the case. I thought, oh, that’s weird. So I tried to put the case back on it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I just ended up squishing the phone a little bit. I’m like, oh, that’s not good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh no. Oh no, this is a poofy battery, isn’t it? And sure enough, that battery is poofing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Did you install third-party RAM in that phone, Casey? Be honest.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did not in this one. I promise I did not put third-party RAM in this one. All the other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey iPhones I put third-party RAM in, not this one. But anyway, so yeah, I was like, oh, that’s not good. And so here
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we are in an Airbnb. So I immediately placed the phone outside of the Airbnb, like on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey grass or rocks or whatever in front of it. And the thing is seriously, as I sit right now, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sitting on our driveway in front of the house. It’s already been rained on twice because I keep forgetting to bring it out of the rain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Not that I’m gonna like try to, I’m not gonna try to like, you know, use it anymore, but I need to bring it to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple or someone to recycle. But what is the official, it’s not a poofy battery. What’s the term for it? Exploding battery?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expanded maybe? Who knows? Bulging?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bulging, yes, thank you. Bulging battery. Samsung? Oh, sick burn. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyways, yeah, it’s gotten real bad. Like it was just a teeny, teeny little bit at first,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and now it’s real bad. So probably tomorrow I’m going to take it to the local Apple store and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be like, please make this go away, because it is scaring me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Swollen battery. Bulging swollen battery.
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Photo-cropping follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John, you want to tell us about your secret to cropping photos appropriately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the aspect ratio you prefer?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Last episode, I complained about having to click a button 16,000
⏹️ ▶️ John times because the Apple Photos app on the Mac won’t remember that I always want to crop my photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aspect ratio. I would say, by the way, complained is putting it lightly.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco well, you know, it’s still accurate.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then we started getting feedback from the show once it was published. And I was puzzled because I was like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John one person must not have heard that part of the show. And then more feedback came and I’m like, okay, maybe it wasn’t in the final episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it was just in the bootleg. Then I listened to the bootleg and it wasn’t there either. This is on me. I could swear
⏹️ ▶️ John that I talked about this on the show and I could not figure out why my memories felt like I must be getting old until
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually the Rectifs episode came out. And I said, oh, that’s what it is. I talked about it on
⏹️ ▶️ John Rectifs, which I had recorded one day before we recorded that ATP, which gets released after because of the
⏹️ ▶️ John pre-taped call and show nature of rectifs. Anyway, I misremembered. I thought I had talked about this on
⏹️ ▶️ John ATP when really I talked about it on my other podcast the day before. What am I talking about? Everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote in to tell me, did you know that you can hold down the shift key when cropping
⏹️ ▶️ John to maintain the same aspect ratio? Yes, I know that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I got told it a lot. That’s on me. I thought I had talked about it in the show and I didn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although a couple of people when they’re writing it about it, they would say throw in
⏹️ ▶️ John some caveats. They would say, oh, you can hold down shift, but it’s kind of annoying to use. Like a lot of people said,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, I understand why you want the features is kind of annoying to use. Well, setting aside its annoyingness, which I’ll get to in a second.
⏹️ ▶️ John This doesn’t solve the problem for me. I’ve known that you can hold down shift to resize. And by the way, you can do option to resize from the center
⏹️ ▶️ John as well. But that’s weird to do, especially if you’re doing it on a trackpad on a laptop on vacation,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s more awkward than just being able to grab the corner and move it. You have to do the modifier. And the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that makes it slightly more awkward, even than just having to hold down things at
⏹️ ▶️ John the same time, is that Photos implements it such that once
⏹️ ▶️ John you start the drag of the corner of the thing, your chance to hit the shift key has
⏹️ ▶️ John passed. You can’t hit the shift key during the drag like you can in pretty much any modern Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John app that does this. And that gets to the next point, which is the reason I knew about
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And the reason I think most people know about it is it’s a convention in
⏹️ ▶️ John the world of Mac software. Lots of people cited Photoshop as sort of like the, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, I know this because I use Photoshop and you might not know it because you just use photos, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a convention made by Photoshop. It’s actually way
⏹️ ▶️ John farther back now, like every, every user or interface platform, but especially Apple ones, have a certain
⏹️ ▶️ John culture that’s part of them. And a lot of that culture is set down really early
⏹️ ▶️ John and then just passed on through generations and generations of software developers and users. And
⏹️ ▶️ John lots of people probably think, oh, the shift to constrain drawing or selecting, that comes from Photoshop,
⏹️ ▶️ John because that’s the most recent thing that they remember and it’s very popular. This feature of holding on shift to constrain
⏹️ ▶️ John either drawing or selection, actually dates back to the original Macintosh in 1984,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I believe shipped in the box with MacPaint, MacPaint 1.0. And if you were drawing
⏹️ ▶️ John something with the rectangle tool, for example, in MacPaint, and you held down the shift key, and then you dragged it
⏹️ ▶️ John out, what you would get is a square, because it would constrain it to be, you know, a square aspect ratio instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of just a loosey-goosey freeform rectangle. That version of MacPaint, and the one that
⏹️ ▶️ John came out in 1985, also required you to hold down the shift key Before you click
⏹️ ▶️ John the mouse button because if you wait until after you click the mouse button holding down shift did nothing Mac paint 2.0 in 1988 changed
⏹️ ▶️ John that and made it so that
⏹️ ▶️ John When you were drawing the rectangle you could hold down shift and it would be a square and let go of shift and it would Not be a square all the while
⏹️ ▶️ John holding the mouse button down and in fact Mac draw in 1985 also did the same thing
⏹️ ▶️ John So this convention of shift to constrain and the innovation of realizing that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John people forgot to hit the shift key So you should let them toggle it while the drag is in motion dates
⏹️ ▶️ John back to 1985 on the Mac And it is pervasive everywhere if you don’t know about this if you’re a new Mac user if you don’t use a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of drawing programs pick any thing that lets you drag out a rectangular shape
⏹️ ▶️ John and Try the shift key to constrain proportions the option key to resize from Center And they’re also
⏹️ ▶️ John often the other modifiers to other interesting things try them out So anyway, that’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John background on constraint dragging And as for the photos thing I was asking for
⏹️ ▶️ John I phrased it as remember that I want this and a lot of people interpreted That to mean like I just remember the last thing you clicked
⏹️ ▶️ John on and do that for all things going forward The proper way to do this would be to
⏹️ ▶️ John have a setting You know in the preferences or settings or rather the hell we’re called now
⏹️ ▶️ John in photos that says hey When when we first bring up the crop tool
⏹️ ▶️ John on a photo that you’ve never edited before before Or how would you like the aspect ratio constrained?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the choices would be, you know, all the choices that are there, freeform, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you could also have a choice that says, do nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John and accept the existing ratio. Which brings me to this next bit of feedback, something I didn’t know about photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John photos on iOS, but also photos on Mac. This is from Jack Brown. He says, on iOS,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you choose a viewfinder aspect ratio other than four by three, the new ratio is kept as the default
⏹️ ▶️ John when cropping those photos with freeform still the default for four by three shots. First of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John I knew this was there vaguely, vague memory in the distant past, like I knew where to find this once he said this,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I don’t know if most people change this. If you go to the camera app on your iPhone and look for a upwards
⏹️ ▶️ John facing Chevron at the top middle of the screen, tap that and then it reveals like the
⏹️ ▶️ John second circle from the right in the toolbar says like four by three or something similar and at four colon
⏹️ ▶️ John three or whatever, tap that and pick an aspect ratio and it changes the viewfinder
⏹️ ▶️ John access ratio. Basically like what proportion is the image on my phone screen when I’m moving it around
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to frame the shot I’m going to take. So if you pick anything other than four by three and you take that picture,
⏹️ ▶️ John then if you open that picture in photos on the phone or photos on the Mac and presumably the iPad
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, it won’t be freeform. It will be the aspect ratio of the viewfinder,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is really weird. I guess it considers it like, oh, you’ve kind of already cropped it because it takes the whole picture. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John you put it on square, You put it on one by one or one colon one it will take a square photo But when you open
⏹️ ▶️ John that photo in photos on the Mac, you’ll see that it actually took a you know Normal rectangular
⏹️ ▶️ John photo, but it’s just cropped to the square thing. That doesn’t help me at all either But it just goes to show that this is a more
⏹️ ▶️ John complicated Situation than you might think because if you said Oh forced it to original all the time and you opened one of those
⏹️ ▶️ John photos that Was shot in square some interpretation of the idea of original could mean like oh But the
⏹️ ▶️ John photo was originally 4x3 and you cropped it to square with the viewfinder So original should be four by three
⏹️ ▶️ John and not square. And by cropping now, all of a sudden you’ve screwed up. You know, anyway, uh, I would trust the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who implement this feature to do something vaguely intelligent about it. Um, for example, saying, Hey, if there is no existing
⏹️ ▶️ John crop stick to original, but if there’s an existing crop, like square stick to that one, not too hard
⏹️ ▶️ John to implement, uh, probably come in photos in about five to 10 years.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And do you want to tell me about the crop macro that you have been shown, discovered,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey created? I’m not sure the lineage here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is Jason. Jason Snelly heard our episode last week and was like, you know what? I can solve
⏹️ ▶️ John this problem using computers and a solution to the problem. So if
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos was scriptable or shortcuttable or whatever we call modern Mac applications
⏹️ ▶️ John that can be automated with using some, you know, Apple technology like Apple script or shortcuts,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could make it so that every time you go to crop a photo, it automatically selects original for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Photos is not particularly scriptable, but computers can do things.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so Jason Snell used his computer to do a thing. He used a program called Keyboard Maestro, which we will link in the show notes,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is a tool that says, even if your app is not automatable, we will find a way to automate
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And how does it do it? Through the magic of screen scraping. That’s right. Jason has made
⏹️ ▶️ John a Keyboard Maestro action that does a series of steps and looks for
⏹️ ▶️ John the part of the photos UI by using a bitmap. Like to build this you take a screenshot
⏹️ ▶️ John and say see this part on the sidebar where it says original I want you to click there and so keyboard
⏹️ ▶️ John maestro looks for a region of the screen that is roughly Like that screenshot with some fuzziness
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll click on the thing for you So I have it bound to command shift C
⏹️ ▶️ John And so instead of hitting C to crop I can hit command shift C Which will then basically hit the C key for me
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for the sidebar to appear look for the word original and click on it Very silly, not a great
⏹️ ▶️ John solution, requires owning Keyboard Maestro and keeping it running all the time. Keyboard Maestro is amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John because it can do things like this when nothing else can help you, when your app is not scriptable. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John trying to do an A-Team thing, but I don’t know the original words well enough to parody it well,
⏹️ ▶️ John but just Google for the A-Team intro and you’ll see it. So thank you, Jason, for that. We will link that action
⏹️ ▶️ John in the show notes. So if you want to go buy Keyboard Maestro, you can use Jason’s thing. I renamed his action,
⏹️ ▶️ John I renamed it Crop Aspect Original because that’s what goes through my head all 16,000 times I do it. Crop aspect original, crop aspect
⏹️ ▶️ John original, crop aspect original, crop, anyway, that’s what it’s called. So check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it binds to Command Shift C, but only when Photos is the front most application.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you don’t have to worry about stealing that keyboard combo from your entire system.
Detect-faces follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then since the photos problems never end, I think it was two episodes ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you were talking about how you really, really wanted to, or maybe it was the same episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It doesn’t matter. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the same episode, but it was like two things I wanted to change
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in photos for this year. Oh, there you go. Okay. So you were saying how you really, really, really wanted to be able to kick off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a detect faces run, if you will. Well, for another show, Guy Rambeau wrote in to say, I did some quick
⏹️ ▶️ Casey spelunking and found two potential workarounds for the photos analysis issue John was reporting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s implementation seems to rely on duets, duet, right? Activity scheduler,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a daemon that manages background execution. There’s an API to force a given activity
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to start immediately, but in order to invoke it, one would have to disable SIP, what is that? System Integrity Protection,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to attach LLDB to DASD, the duet activity scheduler daemon, and call,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, some Objective-C method. However, or pass some Objective-C message. However, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also found a defaults flag that disables this intelligent scheduling, which we will put in the show notes, defaults
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write com.apple.photoanalysisd, photo analysis core duet scheduling disabled. Bool,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yes. That doesn’t guarantee analysis will start right away though, as the daemon may still run some internal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey heuristics before it decides to actually start the analysis. There are probably more defaults tags that could be tweaked in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LLDB or launch control shenanigans that could be done, but that’s about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the time I have for today. And Guy also had a link that we’ll put in the show notes for more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the scheduling system. And this is running XPC activities on demand by Bryce Palkin.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’ll put that in the show notes too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this is obviously going above and beyond, like disabling system integrity protection and attaching
⏹️ ▶️ John a debugger to the running instance of your program, hopping into that memory space and just calling a method that you found
⏹️ ▶️ John by looking at symbols. All to try to kick off, you know, basically it’s the equivalent of the button that says,
⏹️ ▶️ John do the analysis now, please. But of course that is still mediated as Guy says by,
⏹️ ▶️ John No, the system itself could have some sort of rules that says, oh, I’m not gonna run quite yet or whatever. This is really something
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple needs to solve. Obviously there’s no, well, so far it doesn’t seem like there’s no really easy way to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t wanna disable the duet scheduling thing because I don’t know, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I get that that stops using the intelligent scheduler, but then what replaces it? Is it any kind of scheduler? Is it just unscheduled
⏹️ ▶️ John entirely? Like, debugging this is hard enough without messing with things. So I appreciate the
⏹️ ▶️ John digging into this, but I would be afraid, too afraid to do any of these things because once
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve done this, I’d always be wondering, have I screwed up my photo system in some way that now all the advice
⏹️ ▶️ John I see online doesn’t apply to me because I messed it up and I don’t know how to undo it. I’m not as daring as he is.
Non-destructive photo editing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then can you explain to me, I’m asking not only to prompt the next section of the show, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey genuinely curious, can you explain to me how non-destructive photo editing works for photos?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because I don’t think I understand this.
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is something Marco brought up, like why not use another app to do all your cropping? And I was like, well, you know, when you do
⏹️ ▶️ John the cropping and photos, it’s non-destructive. Whereas if I was to use some other app to crop, even if that
⏹️ ▶️ John app itself was non-destructive, then I have the problem of, okay, now you’ve done your cropping. How do you get those now cropped photos
⏹️ ▶️ John into photos while while preserving the non-destructive crops. So that’s tricky. But as I
⏹️ ▶️ John said on the show, I do edit things with external editors within Photos. Photos has like an editing
⏹️ ▶️ John system where when you’re in edit mode, you can hit the little three dots in a circle menu, very clearly labeled,
⏹️ ▶️ John very easy to find. It’s kind of like the little eyes in a circle that Apple loves these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it will say edit in, and it will list any of the apps that can be editors for photos. So
⏹️ ▶️ John edit in Pixelmator, edit in, what was the other one that I use? raw power, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Those editors that work with photos, most of them, all the ones that I tried, but I don’t know if it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John all of them, you’ll go to edit them and it will pop up a UI that is owned and controlled by that app. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John use that app’s tools to do things. For example, I use Pixelmator Pro to do like a content aware
⏹️ ▶️ John fill kind of thing to like erase people and expand the background because it works way better than anything in the photos app.
⏹️ ▶️ John And after you’ve done all those changes, you say, okay, I did my changes. And you click basically save in that UI
⏹️ ▶️ John that popped up. Most of them will say, hey, do you want me to preserve these edits
⏹️ ▶️ John in a non-destructive way when I go back to photos or do you want me to bake them in sort of? And I always say preserve the edits
⏹️ ▶️ John because when you go back to photos, you’ll see the edit that you made, like, oh, you erased a person and you see that
⏹️ ▶️ John in the picture. But photos still, still maintains the original. So you can always say, you know what, revert
⏹️ ▶️ John to original and there’s your original photo with those edits gone from it. So you can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You could also do that for cropping, but that little three dots open in external editor is a pretty slow
⏹️ ▶️ John process because you basically have to launch the other a little miniature version of the other program I don’t know if it’s a plug-in or a bundle I don’t know how it works
⏹️ ▶️ John probably through XPC or something but it’s not as fast as just hitting C to crop because you got to hit return to edit
⏹️ ▶️ John and then probably use keyboard maestro to assign a keyboard command to edit in pixelmator pro because
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no keyboard shortcut assigned to it and have just anyway it would be slow and extremely clunky
⏹️ ▶️ John and when you’re trying to whip through a thousand photos the last thing you want to do is be waiting for your thing to launch an app and
⏹️ ▶️ John and then quit out of it and save and all and all this other stuff. So I do use those editors and we’ll put links to a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch in the show notes. There are a lot of ones that people recommended. I think we’ll probably link to Pixelmator Pro, Photomator,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I think is like a cut down version of that that’s mostly for editing photos, dark room, light room, et
⏹️ ▶️ John cetera. A lot of the apps like Raw Power and I think Photomator, take advantage of the fact that
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple lets third party apps access the photos photo library. Like you
⏹️ ▶️ John could just use, for example, Raw Power and never touch Apple Photos because it sees your Apple photo, your iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ John photo library. Like it can read that, it can read and write that. You don’t need to use photos at all. It’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like music where they have like third-party apps that can read your music library on the phone or apps that read
⏹️ ▶️ John and write your calendar on your phone. Like there’s one calendar that’s run by the system but you can use third-party
⏹️ ▶️ John apps to get at that data. The same is actually true of photos. So a lot of these apps, if you like them, you can just
⏹️ ▶️ John use them and not use photos. But I do like a lot of the features in photos. Like I do my
⏹️ ▶️ John photo books there and I have albums and the shared albums they use and all that other stuff. So I will probably continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to use photos while branching out to non-destructive apps to do fancy
⏹️ ▶️ John editing operations. But for cropping, I really don’t wanna have to leave photos for that, I just want it to work better there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it makes sense. And we’ll put a bunch of links to photos that we believe, or excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me, apps that we believe support this in the show notes, there’ll be a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John Or apps that you could use as alternatives. Like a lot of people are recommending Lightroom Lightroom classic as just
⏹️ ▶️ John like, Hey, just stop using photos and do all your photos in Lightroom. So we’ll put links to those in there as well. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I think going totally out of the Apple ecosystem is definitely not what I want to do at this point with 170,000
⏹️ ▶️ John photos, but that is more of a lift. But these are apps that don’t ask you to leave, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John say, Hey, you can use this other app instead of, or in addition to photos. that’s actually pretty neat.
Never-silents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then, Marco, if you wouldn’t mind in the future dropping in, we are the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey champions on my behalf right here, please, while we discuss how very right I am
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about how the one true way to be in your home is to have some sort of audio playing in the background.
⏹️ ▶️ John Wait a second. I’m supposed to be collecting the being right points here because the last episode when we talked about this, we
⏹️ ▶️ John were like, my question was, what do you think the breakdown of people in the world is? Do you think more people are like Casey or more people
⏹️ ▶️ John are like me? And I said, well, you know, based on what we have in the show here, here, like what percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John do we think? And we all threw out numbers. And I believe I said 70 30. I said 70 30 or maybe even 75 25. But I’m gonna say because I said 70 31st
⏹️ ▶️ John that that was my, you know, my marker. And what did it come out to be Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was 70 30. So basically, you’re claiming you’re right, even though you’re wrong. Got
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Well, no, because I was right about predicting what the ratios
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey were. I understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you’re saying. I just don’t want to give you the win on this. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John it was actually 69 31. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nice. Either way, I am pleased to see that most of the world agrees with me that you You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey need to have something playing my word. You have to have something back. Because silence is evil, man. No good.
⏹️ ▶️ John this was the tricky thing about the survey. And I waited a while to post it up, because I was trying to figure out how to phrase
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I think I mostly did OK, although there are some. I thought you did. There were some holes
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can tell you did OK if people don’t have tons of questions. One of the things that I, so here, let me read the question.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s too late now. The survey’s closed. And about 4,500 people answered it. So, Al, will the number stop changing
⏹️ ▶️ John after like 500 people answered it? See previous episodes where we discussed this. Anyway, the question was,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you are home alone or otherwise not worried about bothering anyone else, do you prefer
⏹️ ▶️ John to have some kind of audio playing? And then in parentheses, this audio can be anything, a TV,
⏹️ ▶️ John the radio, music, audio books, podcasts, whatever. The whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John tries to cover all my bases there, but I still had people say, does white noise count? And I should have
⏹️ ▶️ John included that because enough people said, I feel like white noise falls under the category of whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I kept saying, audio, why noise is audio? I mean, but maybe people have questions about it. The second thing
⏹️ ▶️ John people asked, and I’m not quite sure how I would have clarified this. They said, do headphones count?
⏹️ ▶️ John And my answer is yes, yes, headphones count. Like it doesn’t have to be in the air because that would fall into the category or
⏹️ ▶️ John of are not worried about bothering other people. Because if you’ve got headphones in and they’re not open air headphones, like Margo’s Obnoxious
⏹️ ▶️ John Things, you don’t have to worry about bothering other people. Because the question is, the reason I wanted to say home alone or
⏹️ ▶️ John not worried about bothering people, because that’s such a confounding factor because it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John I prefer to have X playing, but when the house is full of people, either it’s too noisy or I wouldn’t wanna be,
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t wanna annoy them, or we can’t agree on what to play, or some people find it distracting
⏹️ ▶️ John even though I don’t or whatever. So just eliminating all that as a variable and say, let’s say you’re in a scenario where you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John have to worry about other people because they don’t care, or you have headphones, or you’re the only one home. Do you prefer
⏹️ ▶️ John to have audio playing? And it was 70%, roughly 70%, yes, 30%, no. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who follow me on Mastodon are not a random sample of the population, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, there you have it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I just would like to repeat that I am the champion.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re like a lonely dog. Oh, wow! You need to hear those human voices.
Sponsor: Kolide
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Callsheet released!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, anything going on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week? I released a new app. Oh, wait, that was you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, no, that was me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me check my notes for a second. No, that was me. That was me that did that. I did that. That was me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so now is the time. If you were or are an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ATP member and were or are on the call sheet test flight, well, be gone with you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You need to go to the app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco store. This is Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way of saying thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, I genuinely do have to talk about that in a minute because there’s a lot to be said about that. But anyway, but CallSheet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is out. It came out Monday, asterisk, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John been out. What is CallSheet, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CallSheet is, thank you. Usually I’m the one prompting you knuckleheads to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ John decided this could be the first episode someone listens to, like, what the hell is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, you’re right, no, no, no, I agree with you. I’m just saying, usually I’m good about this. And when it’s me, I forget.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, CallSheet is an app for iPhone and iPad that lets you do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look up movies, cast members, crew members, TV shows, and trivia
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and information about them. And it does it in a super fast, super user-friendly way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is free to try. Then you have to subscribe after 20 searches.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You get a one week free trial on your subscription. The cost is $1 per month
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the US or $9 per year. and you can optionally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pay more if you so choose. I’ll describe that in a minute. But anyways, it’s what I’ve been working on for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the last six months, and I’m really proud of it. I think it’s pretty darn good, and I’m excited to finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have it out in the wild. So that is what it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so I actually hit the go button on this very, very, very quietly on Saturday
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I was finally back from our Pennsylvania vacation, and I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make sure that at least one person, that would be me, tried the in-app purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it ensured that it worked, and didn’t just bomb miserably. Because on Saturday,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I might still have the time to do an expedited review on Sunday potentially or just say to the people who I knew were going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to talk about it in the press, oh my gosh, just kidding. But thankfully, the in-app purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey code seemed to work, knock on wood. And so on Monday at 9am,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I let everyone know that it was out. It was very funny actually, because, you know, I said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Mastodon, oh, it’s coming tomorrow, I said on Sunday. And a lot of people did exactly what I expected
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and went and searched for it anyway, and found it and started using it, which was fine. There’s nothing wrong with that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think everyone kind of freaked out a little bit on my behalf, thinking that was an accident, and it wasn’t. I knew exactly what was going
⏹️ ▶️ John for the most part, like people who haven’t released an app on the App Store, there is no other way to do it. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no way to say it’s gonna be out at nine and then click a button and everyone sees it at nine. That’s not possible due
⏹️ ▶️ John to propagation and store propagation. So you have to do everything, every app that you’ve ever seen released
⏹️ ▶️ John on the app store has done this, where it launches and it doesn’t show up in search for a while and it doesn’t show up in Australia
⏹️ ▶️ John for a while, like it just propagates across the world, but they haven’t announced it yet. And then at some date, like
⏹️ ▶️ John on a Monday or a Tuesday at 9 a.m., it quote unquote launches, right? But it’s been on the store for a
⏹️ ▶️ John while. You’re just waiting for it to spread to everywhere so that on Monday at nine, if anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John anywhere in the world searches for CallSheet, hopefully, fingers crossed, they’ll find it. Although I have to say, two days
⏹️ ▶️ John to get into App Store search may not be sufficient in some cases because that
⏹️ ▶️ John search is so bad and so slow. It takes so long for things to get into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s exactly it. And there is a mechanism, you know, before everyone writes in, there is a mechanism that you can tell the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey App Store, I would like it to be live at such and such a time in such and such a place. But the problem with that is have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decide that at submission time or I believe that to be true I might be I might be lying to you accidentally but I believe that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John true you can you can hold for developer you know there’s no like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hold for developer release is what I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you hold for developer release and you hit and you hit go I think the going is a little bit faster
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but the problem is with the app store is that it’s you one of the problems the app store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s usually pretty timely for almost everyone but that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John work for the search if it’s a brand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new app though that’s what I’d be worried And that’s the thing, there’s a lot of squishiness in that, there’s a lot of usual-ies and a lot of probably-ies.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so if you want to launch an app and make a big splash and you’ve timed press and stuff like that, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to take those risks. So it is better usually to hit the button the night before. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if people find it early, good, good for them. That’s great. But it doesn’t really matter. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s much better to have, when you’re gonna announce it, and if there’s gonna be any press or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any yelling about it on social media or anything, it’s better that every single person who goes to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find it will find it. So you don’t wanna take any risks with, it’s not yet showing up in New Zealand,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or it’s not yet showing up in search, or like you don’t wanna take any of those risks. You want any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco press, any buzz you generate, you want someone who’s searching for it to find it no matter what. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually you don’t need to put it that far ahead of time, but the smart people all do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and also for a brand new app that has never been on the store, that’s the worst case scenario for the search
⏹️ ▶️ John index. If you’re launching in version 2.0 and you haven’t renamed your app, you’re probably good. Like everything will probably
⏹️ ▶️ John work out. But for an app that has never been on the store and has never appeared in search, you really want to get that out there because
⏹️ ▶️ John we have no visibility into or control over when things appear in search, which you would think, doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John it appear in search as soon as it’s on the store? No, absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ John You can get the URL to the app and if you click the URL, you’ll see the app, but then you’ll search for call sheet, zero
⏹️ ▶️ John hits, or not zero hits, you’ll get a bunch of other garbage that’s not call sheet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right, exactly. And that’s the thing. And oftentimes, if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I were to have hit go when I really wanted it to be available, then sometimes maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Americans can search for it, but people in the UK can’t, or vice versa. It’s just a mess. So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had actually intended on doing all this on Sunday, but I had gotten home from our trip on Saturday, and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was champing at the bit to just make sure this is all functional, good, it works, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’d done it on Saturday, quietly, And then, like I said, a bunch of people found it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that was fine. They reported it into me, which was lovely. And I appreciate that. But I didn’t want to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I replied to as many as I could. But I didn’t want to publicly say, don’t worry. It’s there. But don’t tell anyone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because obviously then everyone will go looking for it. And I wanted the big press push, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, so I appreciate all of you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who are looking out for me. But it was deliberate, I promise. So yeah, so the press was far and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey away the best press response I’ve gotten from anything I’ve done. I am extremely,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey extremely thankful for all the press I’ve gotten, it has been extremely kind. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bracing for impact from a couple of spots, particularly on Mac stories, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know how much John and Federico love their iPads. And I was bracing for impact on, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad support and call sheet, admittedly being pretty bad.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was going to ask about that, because I don’t think I’ve actually even tried it on the iPad. What is it like?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Neither have I. No, just kidding. Barely. Wait, it runs on the iPad?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it turns out. The reason I bring this up is because I’ve wanted the app on my Mac several times. I’m like, I should just run
⏹️ ▶️ John the iPad version of it, which then I have two things. A, I can’t do that because I have an Intel Mac, and B, I was like, did
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Casey even allow
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the Mac? Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we should talk about that. I will probably forget, so try to keep me honest, but we should talk about that later. But no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is on the iPad, but I have no iPad-specific affordances. I’ve done nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to it specific for the iPad, and it’s not particularly great. Like the more- Is it set to allow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to be run on Mac? It was on TestFlight. It is not in the App Store, and I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, so here’s the thinking on that. And I’m being convinced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that my thinking is
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you could write a Mac app if you want, but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just saying it just works easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s the thing. So on TestFlight, I was like, who cares? It’s TestFlight, everyone knows it’s garbage. But when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was in the App Store, I thought, well, I don’t think, given that the iPad experience is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey subpar, to put it mildly, I didn’t think I wanted to also introduce
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a subpar Mac app because it just seemed like it was too much subpar stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ve literally never run it on the Mac. I know it can be done. I have heard people that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were doing it on test flight, but I didn’t desire to, or I didn’t have the time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really before I wanted to launch to do any testing for iPad or for the Mac. And so my thought was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the iPad was bad enough, but I think it’s required. I’ll let it go on iPad, but on the Mac, it just seemed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that was not wise. And enough people have written to basically say, dude, I’ll take it. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey care. That I think for the next release, I will probably turn on the Mac version,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I’m interested if either of you have opinions or feedback one way or the other.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I would work on the iPad version a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, definitely. Definitely.
⏹️ ▶️ John Before worrying about turning on the Mac. Like the reason I think you didn’t see a lot of pushback about this from reviews is because it’s clearly
⏹️ ▶️ John like the phone is where everyone’s going to use it. Like you’re on the couch, you’ve got your phone. You don’t have your Mac with you. Probably you probably don’t have your iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the phone is the right platform for this. Like, So I don’t think the lack
⏹️ ▶️ John of an iPad version is that, or not the lack of an iPad.
⏹️ ▶️ John think a subpar iPad version really matters that much at all, especially for 1.0. But I would say, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually, when you get around to it, shore up the iPad version. And then once the iPad version is not crappy,
⏹️ ▶️ John decide what you want. The reason people don’t put it on the Mac is because they’re like, oh, but if we put it on the Mac, what if someday we want to make money from them by
⏹️ ▶️ John making a Mac version? If
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey you know you’re not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do that, just put it on the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now that I don’t think I care about. Remind me of this, but I don’t think I care about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So for whatever it’s worth, my podcast app, which is not really something that many people want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their iPads or their Macs. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey for whatever- Oh, I use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on the Mac all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, for whatever it’s worth, right now my Mac use and my iPad use are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roughly tied. The iPad is slightly ahead, but not by much. They’re about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the same in terms of percentage of use across all of our casts right now. So that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that says something. I will say supporting the Mac in that way, in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad compatibility mode, it comes with a few little weird caveats for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps that have certain features. Like audio apps, for instance, AirPlay doesn’t work. I don’t know why. It just says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s unavailable all the time. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. There’s occasionally some weird bugs where like some,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like on the Mac version, it will crash if you use this one API and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s no way to know that until you do it or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like, is Casey’s video player not gonna work?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should look, I should definitely look into that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but for the most part, I think what your app is doing, you know, it’s pretty much showing information and,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, and lists and images and stuff like that. That should be fine. I can’t off the top of my head come up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with any, like, major problem you’d run into. But it is, you know, once you go
⏹️ ▶️ Marco onto a platform, like, you know, whether it’s, even if it’s just leaving that thing on on the Mac, you will start getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews from people who are using it that way. So you gotta think about, like, am I running a big risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here? you know, you can’t and then once you do it, you can’t really take it away with anger a bunch of people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, be go into it carefully. Like I thought when I was going into it, I thought this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. I don’t have to do anything. This will cost me nothing and there will be no downside. It just runs and it’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s almost the case, but not quite. There people do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have expectations. They have feature requests. They, you know, they whenever there is a bug or a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shortcoming, they will either email me about it or leave like a a mediocre
⏹️ ▶️ Marco review saying, why doesn’t AirPlay work on the Mac or whatever? Like so, you will run into occasional
⏹️ ▶️ Marco downsides of it, but overall, I would say it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is worth doing. Once you have your iPad app situated, just check the box and let
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it run on the Mac too.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, fair enough. But anyway, so yeah, press has been incredible. It was covered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at Mac Stories. I did an interview, I keep forgetting to look up when it was, but it was a month or two ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I did an interview with D. Griffin Jones at Cult of Mac, which I really enjoyed. We talked for like 90 minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that. And then it was cut down in a good way to about 30 minutes. And that’s a video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interview. So if you want to see me talking at my normal podcasting desk with my normal podcasting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey setup, if memory serves. However, you can actually watch me talk and gesture and articulate with my arms and so
⏹️ ▶️ John Is it your normal podcasting setup? Is the closet door open or closed?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, that’s true. In this one, I believe the closet door was closed, but it is currently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco open. because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco’s eagle ears, or whatever, not eagle ears, you know what I’m saying, Marco’s bat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ears would detect.
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny holes in the side of his head look like the ears of an eagle. Something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyways, he would have noticed if I had closed the closet door. But yeah, so there’s a video interview there,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Chance Miller at 95 Mac, our friend Stephen Hackett at 5 Filter Pixels, and then much to my surprise,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sarah Perez at TechCrunch reached out, so I was on TechCrunch, which is extremely cool, And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then our mutual friend, John Gruber at Daring Fireball wrote it up, which I was very, very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flattered to see his link post about it. Our friend Jason Snell. And then somebody pointed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out to me that Florian Innocente at iGeneration, excuse me, which is a French
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blog apparently, that wrote it up this morning. So I got a lot of good press on it, and I’m really,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really pleased with that. The response seems to be pretty, pretty good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A lot of people seem really happy with it. there were some curmudgeons that were yelling at me about how I’m offering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey software for rent, which is exactly what I expected and was frustrating, but here we are. If only there
⏹️ ▶️ John podcast episodes they could listen to where you talked about this.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s the thing about, so I know everyone, you’re always, you knew you’re gonna get those things because first of all,
⏹️ ▶️ John if your app is not free, flat out for everyone forever, there’s always gonna be complaints,
⏹️ ▶️ John but especially with subscriptions, because you’ve got people who are tired of them, they don’t wanna keep paying for something on a regular basis and they’re gonna complain and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John fine. But in this case, in the case of this app, I think most of the complainers,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you were to explain to them the reasoning, which it is, look, I’m building this on a third-party API, and though that API
⏹️ ▶️ John is free right now, that could change, and if it changes, I could be on the hook for a lot of money. See these recent examples
⏹️ ▶️ John in the press that you may have seen? Like, it’s not just a hypothetical theory, even though it was hypothetical, it’s just smart
⏹️ ▶️ John and defensive business, but it’s not so hypothetical these days. So I feel like if you explain that, they’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, I didn’t realize your app used an API, or I didn’t realize your app used an API and it was free, but it may
⏹️ ▶️ John charge in the future. Of course, there will still be some people who will say, well, it’s free now, so you should make it free.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not gonna get everything. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reality is, you’ve already spent too many words on these people. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying that, you don’t need to answer every single one of these people, but if you were to. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have to answer effectively none. Because look, the reality is, anything you put out there that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want that is not free, you’ll get some complaints. And there are a lot, look, every time we talk about this, we’ll hear from a handful of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people who are like, I don’t like subscription apps because of super strongly held belief XYZ.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, look, that’s… you can hold those positions and that’s fine. The reality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, this is where software has gone. Not even is going, like, has gone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s over. The transition is over. We are here in a subscription-priced world for almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything. And no matter, you know, anything you’re gonna use is gonna have some form of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Whether it is making money from you constantly via ads and tracking BS, or making money from you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco constantly via a subscription plan. But in some form, everything has gone this direction. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look, you are now, like, by having a subscription-priced app, you are now in the mainstream.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is not a fringe thing, this is not a risk you are taking. This is the mainstream, and everyone who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is on the other side, who is yelling, their numbers are dwindling, and frankly, they’re not gonna be your customers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway. So you’re better off serving the people who are going to be your customers as best as you can.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those people can find apps that are pay once or whatever. Like, you know, I think the affinity apps have made a big
⏹️ ▶️ John deal about not being, uh, not requiring a subscription like Photoshop does. And I think that’s worked for them.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re sort of in the old model where, you know, you buy new versions and they cost you a certain amount of money. And I have a bunch of the affinity
⏹️ ▶️ John apps and, uh, they’re part of that. That is what attracted me to it. So for the people who don’t don’t want to pay subscriptions,
⏹️ ▶️ John there are still places you can go. But in the same way that Casey’s
⏹️ ▶️ John choices don’t dictate the choices of everybody else’s, your preferences as a consumer also don’t dictate
⏹️ ▶️ John the choices of every software developer. So you can say you’re not going to buy it and then don’t buy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Done and done. There are still some things you can buy without a subscription, but the people who are
⏹️ ▶️ John willing to pay a subscription have different choices than you do. Some people might not want to pay hundreds of dollars upfront, but they just want to rent illustrator
⏹️ ▶️ John for one month for 20 bucks or something. I don’t even know if you can still do that because Adobe is weird, but yeah, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a complicated world of software pricing and it has changed a lot. So if people are in the mindset that this is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John Marco was getting at, alluding to, that this is an aberration and a new bad thing that will eventually go
⏹️ ▶️ John away, it’s not really. Like, you know, Microsoft Office is subscription, Photoshop is subscription,
⏹️ ▶️ John tons of iOS apps are subscription. The only things that aren’t are either things that are sort of intentionally
⏹️ ▶️ John reactions to that. So affinity not being subscription is sort of a competitive differentiator against one of the main
⏹️ ▶️ John competitors, which is Photoshop and whether there are other Adobe apps there are, or their apps like mine that
⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, dinky little things that aren’t a big deal. You pay $5 for my apps once, and apparently you get free
⏹️ ▶️ John upgrades forever and ever. So, uh, and until I decided to start trying to get a subscription, so buy yours now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. Yeah. And a handful of people were like, well, what about a one-time purchase? Even if it’s way, way, way expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you know, the handful of people that I did answer who are the ones that were not jerks and clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seem to be willing to have at least a modicum of a conversation about it. I totally understand their point. Like I’m,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not as a user, I’m not in love with subscriptions either. Like I’m kind of tired of them too, but I had, I had to take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off the user hat and put on the business hat. And I don’t think that there’s any way I could offer this app other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than subscriptions, see the two or three episodes of this very program where we discussed it and, you know, people would say, well, what about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like a really, really expensive one-time purchase? And, you know, as soon as I said to them, look, I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey end up in a Twitter or Reddit scenario. Pretty much everyone was like, Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey okay. Yep. Okay. I get it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John And not everyone bought it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you know, at least, at least now I have prior art to point to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could also give a timestamp link to the episodes where we talked about it. Although speaking of software costs, when I was looking up the,
⏹️ ▶️ John uh, the differences in Mac paint 1.0 and 2.0 and everything, uh, I had occasion to, because
⏹️ ▶️ John I was looking at the pages with the version history had occasion to see the price again, uh, and in 2023 dollars,
⏹️ ▶️ John the combination, you can get Mac paint and MacWrite in a single box, that was $553 for those two programs. Oh!
⏹️ ▶️ John And so here’s the thing, it’s like, yeah, but you only had to pay that once. I would pay it once to get
⏹️ ▶️ John the best word processor for the Mac and the best paint program, like the only word processor and paint program, because the Mac was
⏹️ ▶️ John just out in 1984. If you paid that $553 in 1984, guess what? 2.0 came out in 1988, four years later.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it cost even more just for Mac paint. So it’s like, you know, I’ll pay that money,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll never need to pay it again. The old model was they would charge you huge amounts for software, you could use it as long
⏹️ ▶️ John as you wanted and you quote unquote never needed to upgrade, but practically speaking, you’d eventually get a new Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John and eventually the operating system would be upgraded and eventually the old version of MacPaint that you got wouldn’t even run
⏹️ ▶️ John on the new Mac on the new version of Mac operating system that you had. And then you’d
⏹️ ▶️ John quote unquote, have to buy MacPaint 2.0 because MacPaint 1.0 1.5 like stop running
⏹️ ▶️ John and MacPaint is a bad example because it ran for a long time. Although I did find out that MacPaint 1.0 broke really
⏹️ ▶️ John fast because I’m using like, know, what is it called? Infinite Mac dot org, those various websites to run emulators
⏹️ ▶️ John and plus mini V Mac on my local Mac to double check all this stuff. Um, and Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John paint one point no does not like to run on operating systems and simulated max
⏹️ ▶️ John that are much newer than like the one 28 or the 5 12 right? Very quickly. One
⏹️ ▶️ John point version 1.5 come out in 1985 and that one had more legs. So anyway, the old model
⏹️ ▶️ John had its problems too, but you know, people like what they like. And so seek out software that offers
⏹️ ▶️ John the pricing model that you prefer, but know that the landscape is changing and you
⏹️ ▶️ John may be hopping from island to island as the water rises around you. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would say also, Casey, when you talk about the price, this is both, I saw a little bit of this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in your blog post or even in the app UI. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are very kind of apologetic about the price. You’re very careful to introduce people to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe that’s a better approach than my approach, but the way you approach the price when you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about it is along the lines of, here’s the app, you can use it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free for a little while, but after that you have to pay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When you, like that kind of, that but there, that shift
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in attitude suggests that this is a downside. And I would suggest just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reframe it. You can use it for free, end, then you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to pay. Change the but to an and? No, it’s a fair point.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s a fair point.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, I would flip it around entirely and say, the app is x dollars for y and y dollars for x,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it also includes a week free trial plus 20 free
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco searches. That’s even better. Make
⏹️ ▶️ John the but be like, here’s the app, here’s how much it costs. Oh, and if you don’t want to pay that, don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ John And by the way, I know we talk so much about pricing, and I hadn’t kept track of what you had decided.
⏹️ ▶️ John I like this set of things. I like $1 a month. It’s really simple. like $9 a year, and I like
⏹️ ▶️ John a one week free trial, obviously. So I think that, I think eventually through all this hemming and hawing,
⏹️ ▶️ John we came up with what I think is a pretty good pricing structure
⏹️ ▶️ John that has all, like it has everything that people want. The 20 free searches, you don’t have to start a trial to use
⏹️ ▶️ John them. You don’t have to like, you don’t have to make any decision. You just get them, right? And you’re trying to be friendly with the searches and then
⏹️ ▶️ John having the trial, if you decide to do it within enough time, decide whether you want this app, and then the pricing I think is totally fair,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially, especially if you have used the IMDB app to try to do this task. And if
⏹️ ▶️ John you have, you know, a dollar a month lying around for this task, if this is worth a dollar a month to you, you will throw
⏹️ ▶️ John that money in case in a second to not have to use the IMDB app. Like when I was trying to like, you know, post,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was gonna say tweet, but whatever, post about it on the various social media networks on launch day, I launched the IMDB
⏹️ ▶️ John app again just to remind myself what it was like and took a bunch of screenshot of the various interstitials that it threw in my face. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ John does it want me to sign up for a streaming service? because it threw like Netflix logos in my face. I’m like, what the hell is
⏹️ ▶️ John this? And I went back and looked at the screenshot and it’s like, it’s not that evil. What it was trying to say is, hey,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can tell the IMDb app which streaming services you subscribe to. So it knows like, just like you can
⏹️ ▶️ John in Just Watch, which is integrated with Casey’s app. So it knows which ones to recommend to you. I’m like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a good feature IMDb app. What’s not good is when I launched the app, when I want to look something
⏹️ ▶️ John up to throw a full screen thing in my face telling me that feature exists. That I don’t like, because
⏹️ ▶️ John at that point I’m so angry, I just want to get to the search box so I can type something that I dismiss it without reading it anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so anyway, just own your pricing as like, here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app and this is what it costs. Like that’s it, like look, that’s what Apple does. Apple, when Apple introduces a new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco billion dollar thing, they come out and say, here’s this good thing and here’s what it costs,
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, they say, well, Apple gets to say starts at. Oh, you can say that too, Casey. You can say it starts at $1 a month. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it starts at whatever. No, it starts at $0.80 a month or whatever, right? Whatever. When you divide out the value. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what everyone else does. Well, whatever. You can do the start side. You could say, if you want the blacked out logo, though, it’s another $1,500. Good grief.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Porsche option pricing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s Porsche for sure. But yeah, it’s funny you bring up all this pricing stuff, too, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were a handful of misses, I think, on my part. None of them so far seem to be too
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dramatic or catastrophic. But one of the misses on my part is When I was setting up the pricing for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the four different IAPs, I said to Apple, you know, here’s the price I want,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey compute the equivalent across the planet. And they said, sure, we’re happy to do that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were four countries that I’ve become aware of so far that I’m aware of so far,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying to figure out if I can find them real quick, maybe not. But, um, there were four countries, Sweden was one of them. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to say Japan was another, um, where apparently the yearly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cost. was either the exact same or more than the monthly cost. It was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sweden, Japan, Vietnam, and Canada, surprisingly. I need to look into this, but I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how this happened. Like it was not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco deliberate. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey weird. If right, and maybe it was user error. Darn if I know how, but it could have been.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think it makes sense to me because here’s the thing. I don’t know exactly how this works, but I do know that pricing
⏹️ ▶️ John is abstracted where you pick like a, what are they called?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Tiers or something? A tier, yeah. But you can customize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for subscriptions. You can customize it per region or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John per country. Right,
⏹️ ▶️ John so you can, but most people don’t because they don’t wanna have to do exchange rates in their head and if you pick a tier, Apple adjusts
⏹️ ▶️ John them for you as the currency fluctuates at some interval, I don’t know what they do. Occasionally they send an email
⏹️ ▶️ John that tells me they’re adjusting things and like whatever. But the thing is, the tier for your yearly, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a different number. You’re picking the US dollars number and that maps to all sorts of weird numbers across
⏹️ ▶️ John the world. And I think that big number maps differently than the smaller monthly number.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it’s not a linear thing, like, because they wanna hit, I don’t know how they do it, But I think they sort of bin them into these little
⏹️ ▶️ John buckets. And I think your small monthly number ends up in a bucket that’s less
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the US bucket. But then your big
⏹️ ▶️ John number ends up in a bucket that’s greater. And then the math doesn’t end up working. That’s difficult
⏹️ ▶️ John to do. But like Marco said, you can actually go in there and just fix it manually.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, which I plan to do. I just haven’t had the chance yet.
⏹️ ▶️ John As someone in the chat room said, foreign exchange headwinds. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s so true. Going back to our analyst discussion earlier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s exactly right. Using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make money. But yeah, no, I’ve been really, really pleased with the response.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sales, it’s pretty early to tell, especially since everyone who has bought is in a one week free trial.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh no, you won’t know for a week.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, exactly. I’m looking at App Store Connect, I’ve never done a subscription app before, and looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at App Store Connect, sales seem okay. They don’t seem stellar,
⏹️ ▶️ John You get to see that they started the trial though, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It seems that way, yes. Again, I’ve never looked at App Store Connect for subscription stuff, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it seems that I am getting a vague notion for how many people have started the trial. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not displeased with the numbers I’m seeing, but especially given that the press was really complimentary,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I was very thankful for it, it is not as good as I would have hoped. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see. Well, keep in mind, many of the people haven’t hit their free limit yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, that’s true.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So a lot of people will download this app, and then they might not have any questions about people and movie
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and TV shows right that second.
⏹️ ▶️ John wait for a couch incident.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, exactly. Exactly, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, I think it’s gonna be kind of a slow burn here, you know, because you have to first wait for people to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco couch incidents where they, all of us, oh, I can look it up in this new app I downloaded the other day.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they have to remember that they got the new app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and remember what it’s called, and find it on their phone, and so, you know, what you’re gonna do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, you’re gonna build patterns of usage, you know, and so I think it’s gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a surprisingly gradual build, But the good thing is once somebody is in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the habit of going to call sheet for this information, not IMDB, not the web,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once you build that habit, that habit’s very unlikely to change over time. So it is gonna,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, be a slow buildup to get people in, but then I think they’re gonna stick around for a long time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think you’re gonna be in a good spot, but it might not be visible like this week, but maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like in a month after people have had more time to have catch incidents and actually use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, and then surpass their free limits, then maybe you’ll start to see like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, now it’s actually, this is decent numbers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and Mike and I talked about this on Analog. We recorded yesterday, but in, as I think Mike
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called it, the ATP Time Warp or something like that, which is accurate. That episode won’t be out until
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sunday. We’ll put a link in the show notes with a note that it’s gonna 404 for a while. But anyways,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we talked about this a bit, and I think something that occurred to me when I was talking to Mike, if memory serves, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been programmed for all my other apps and for years of following people like Marco, you know, pre-subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time, I’ve been programmed that the way the App Store works is you make all your money in the first, you know, three days or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey week or what have you, and then you make nothing after that. And so I think part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of my kind of more morose or forlorn point of view right now is because I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, that’s so internalized and I’m trying to break my brain away from that. And I think you’re right, Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think there’s a lot to be said for this being a much slower burn. certainly compared to my other apps and maybe just in general because of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nature of this app. But it’s hard for me to remember that. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if this is a slow burn, then I’m actually sitting pretty good right now. But if I’m judging it by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the immense cliff in the good way and then the cliff in the bad way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey then it’s okay. It’s not bad, but it’s not great either. But it’s certainly done better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than the prior two apps, which is good and not a terribly high bar, but good nonetheless. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all told, I think I did a bad job of verbalizing this on analog and Mike very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey justifiably called me out on it. But I am really proud of this. I don’t think the app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is perfect, but I think it’s a pretty damn good app. And there’s plenty of places that I’d like to improve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. My issues, jeez, how many GitHub issues do I have right now? I have 45
⏹️ ▶️ Casey GitHub issues, almost all of which are enhancements. There are some bugs for sure, but almost all of those are enhancements I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey planning. And so I have plenty of work that I’d like to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do on this app. And I really think that it’s a good app that I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is well considered. I think it’s in a pretty good spot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Again, not perfect, but it’s a pretty damn good spot. And I’m really proud of it. And I really think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that if you, a listener, give it a shot, you will probably like it too. You know, I’ve had a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey write on Mastodon in various amounts of rudeness to say, Oh, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wanted nothing to do with this app. It was a total waste of my time. And then I tried it and it turns out it’s great. And I totally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just subscribed. It’s like, well, thank you. You know, thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for that backhanded compliment. But, um, but no, I genuinely think that it’s, it’s a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey good app that will serve more people than you would expect. You know, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re kind of sitting on the fence or just, you know, snubbing your nose at this and saying, Oh, this isn’t for me. Give it a shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It doesn’t hurt. You don’t have to even sign up. You don’t, there’s no subscription required, um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey until after your first 20 searches. And in fact, one of my favorite pieces of feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I got were a handful of people saying, oh my God, I installed the app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then it ran. There were no prompts. There’s no permissions. There’s no nothing. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey here’s the app. You know, there’s no, what about Bluetooth? What about local network? What about this? What about location
⏹️ ▶️ Casey services? What about this? What about that? Well, let’s do a 17 step on
⏹️ ▶️ John turn on notifications, please?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey I’m amazed at the
⏹️ ▶️ John number of apps that beg me to turn notifications like what will you ever want to notify me? Oh, God,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco no quick and quick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aside on this by the way So just a very you know obscure follow-up Fuji has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a new Fujifilm has a new app for their cameras They like redid the whole app and it’s compatible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with with the ones I got so I downloaded the app and set it up The Fujifilm app will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not let you progress and use the apps core functionality which is and it’s it’s stuff like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pulling pictures off the camera using a remote shutter to like remotely display the cameras display so you can you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know use the phone as a shutter like basic camera app stuff it will not let you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do those things until you allow full-time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco including background always location access to what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey no it says oh you have no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we need this so we can geotag your photos automatically but it will like the the like you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ubi screen the out-of-box experience like that in Microsoft terms like the the setup screen process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going through there you cannot access the app until you grant it full always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco background location access how that got through app review I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no idea because they were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey distracted by Disney and Pixar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they were too busy looking at your screenshots anyway but like that you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again when you look around the app ecosystem that’s every app every single app I mean it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco usually that that egregious and again Apple for the love of God reject that app like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your job at the App Store like why do they have to give full-time background location
⏹️ ▶️ Marco access always for an app that is supposed to be about getting pictures off your camera and showing a live shutter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s ridiculous and that is a failure of app review at the highest level like that that’s so egregious
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway sorry but that you know the thing is like that’s when when customers are complimenting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your app for like not having all that BS, it’s because the rest of the app ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is that bad now. There is so much garbage, there is so much harassment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of users for constant permissions to creepy private stuff that the app really doesn’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or at least really shouldn’t be asking for yet. You know, that is such a thing now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so just ubiquitous that your app really does stand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out if you just respect people and and don’t barrage them with permission dialogues in first launch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like that does make you stand out and that’s a very good thing. But yeah, honestly,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think, number one, I think this is absolutely the best app you’ve made yet. Number two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it is by far the most likely to succeed long-term because it has the broadest market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your previous apps have been like a little more specialized for, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you have this particular need, you know, this app, a lot of people need this app and a lot of people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could benefit from it. So I think if you keep the marketing up, and by the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you really, you know, the press that you got is great. First of all, that’s wonderful. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the biggest marketing channel you have is this show. And you know, in terms of, not in terms
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of raw audience, you know, the combined audiences of all those press outlets is larger than our show’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audience. But the rate of conversion that you get from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a press article about your app to downloads of your app is not nearly as high as you would think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been doing this a long time. It’s wonderful getting press. There’s a lot of benefits to it besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco immediate downloads, but the immediate download number is never that great. It’s never what you think it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be from press, even from big press. That’s just the reality of the market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you’re building here. You’re building long term. You’re building word of mouth advertising.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re building over-the-shoulder kind of advertising, experiential advertising. that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you’re gonna build over time with this app because people are going to download it, maybe remember to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it, maybe then actually use it, and they’re gonna be like, oh, that’s fast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John That was nice,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? And then like next time they have a couch incident where they need to know who that guy is, they’re gonna go back to that app maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And over time, you’re gonna build that habit with them. And that’s gonna be how this app succeeds. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really do think, I mean, look, I don’t know what your expectations are, but I really do think this is going to succeed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in what you know, unless you have totally unreasonable expectations, I think this will do well over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It just might take a little bit to get there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and it’s funny, bring that up. I actually just today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did something I’ve never done before. Spoiler alert. I have purchased
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some podcast advertisements. So I know a guy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who knows a lady. And so I was able to purchase a couple of spots
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the incomparable. I don’t know exactly when they’re running and a couple of spots on downstream because my thought process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is downstream is, you know, industry people and people who really care about streaming media and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the incomparable is, you know, pop culture. And so, although I think that the incomparable probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a fair bit of crossover with this audience, I thought it doesn’t have, you know, a hundred percent crossover
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I’m willing to throw a little bit of money at it. And then downstream, I think probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has considerably less crossover with our audience and is more likely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to have an audience outside of my own. You know what I mean? That was very clunky the way I described that, but hopefully that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey makes sense. And so there’s going to be a couple of spots, I believe this month on both shows,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’re going to see how that goes. And I have no idea if it’s going to work. I’ve never advertised any of my apps before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I’m going to give it a shot. And I also reached out to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Maximum Fund people to see if it’s as hilariously unaffordable as I expect to sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Flophouse. They have not gotten back to me yet, but I suspect it will be a gazillion dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or maybe seven gazillion dollars, which I will not spend, but it can’t hurt to ask the question. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m trying new avenues. And something that occurred to me as we were recording Analog, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you just said the exact same thing, the addressable market for this app is arguably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anyone who watches television or movies. Which is basically everybody. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, it’s hard to capture that market, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonably sure that whatever marketing and reputation you build,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that part of the funnel is not going to be your limiting factor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can love my app. can go around their whole family and say, oh my god, you gotta try Overcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And most of their family’s gonna be like, what are you talking about? I use the podcast app or what’s a podcast?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a much narrower appeal. Your app, Call Sheet has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco significantly more appeal in that area. Any random person around someone who’s using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, if they like it enough to mention it, or if the person oversees it, or if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whoever says, oh, who’s that guy? It’s, oh, it’s that one guy. And they look it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re probably in a conversation with someone else or there’s someone else on the couch next to them. So that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I think you’re gonna do well over time. It’s gonna take a while to get there. I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also suggest in terms of maximizing your ad spend,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App Store search ads are probably better than podcast ads for what you’re looking at.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I actually need to talk to you about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so first of all, when you go sign up for App Store search ads, do the advanced, don’t do the basic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the problem is, the advanced is the kind that used to be the only kind.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I very briefly tried to use basic, and when I saw what it took away, like what kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of controls it took away, I backed right out. Because I have enough experience with advanced to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see, like with advanced, you can see every single keyword and phrase and stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it thinks your app is relevant to, that it’ll match it to, and you kind of have to babysit it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because like, you know, for my LLC, which we’ll get to in a little while actually, My LLC
⏹️ ▶️ Marco name for Overcast is Overcast Radio LLC. This was stupid.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason why is that New York already had an Overcast LLC when I went to Register, so I had to, like, add some other word to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I—when I was—when I was in that stage of the app development, which was very,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very, very early on, I briefly had the idea, what if I—you know, what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if one of the features of the app would be, like, it could play podcasts like radio? And,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course, everyone else has done this since then, and it doesn’t work, doesn’t work and nobody actually wants that. But, you know, it’s like, oh, what if you could just play, you know, put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on a station and it would just play it. So I briefly thought, how about I call it Overcast Radio to make it like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forward looking, like it isn’t just about podcasts, it’s gonna replace radio. So my company name is Overcast Radio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco LLC and I don’t know how the hell to change it. So what I really should do is call it Overcast Podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco App LLC, because that’s how App Store search works. And I keep meaning to change it to that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just haven’t yet for whatever reason. I don’t even know if Apple will let me change it. As far as I know, they won’t, but I think maybe if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco email them, who knows? Anyway, because my name is Overcast Radio LLC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though my app does not mention radio anywhere in the text, anywhere in the title, anywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the keywords, it doesn’t mention radio anywhere else. But because that keyword
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is in the company name, Overcast gets matched by search ads to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco radio type searches, radio
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s police radio scanners. this is way off what I’m going for, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, the problem is, so when you do the App Store basic search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads, you lose a lot of the controls that allow you to tell them not that, not that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not that, not that, because their search is really dumb, and their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco matching algorithms are really rudimentary and really very stupid. So to maximize
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your effectiveness of your dollars of search ads, you have to tell it what not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to match you to, And you have to go in there periodically and say, oh, I spent 45
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cents matching to free police scanner. Like, okay, let me X that out so I don’t get more of those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the future. I’m not gonna spend my money there. So that’s why I recommend doing the advanced,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that you actually get those controls. Because you will need them if you really wanna maximize what it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how your money is spent. But the good thing about app store search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads is that you can see then how much you’re actually spending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to acquire people. It actually tells you that. So that helps you make, first of all, it helps you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know how much to spend on ads. But then that also helps you, it helps you see your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco return. And then it helps you kind of figure out, you know, if you need to make a future pricing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco decision or future product decisions, like you can figure out like, well, what does it cost me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to acquire a user and to keep that user over time? So that’s why I recommend app store
⏹️ ▶️ Marco search ads. With podcast ads, and I say this as somebody who makes a lot of my living from podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads, although decreasingly so, but you know, rapidly decreasingly so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but anyway, please, adf.fm slash join. A whore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash sponsor, either one is fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. Let’s be honest, slash join is better at this point, I think, but anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you know, podcast ads, when you have a smaller budget, it’s much harder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have the impact that you want because a lot of, you know, spoken ads like this, like most forms of advertising,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depend on repetition for it to really like stick in people’s minds. So if you only have the budget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to buy one podcast ad, don’t buy a podcast ad. Like you might get some return, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not gonna be nearly as much as if you bought like four podcast ads, like you know, every week for four weeks. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a much more effective marketing plan than just buying one and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have it be one-off and that’s it. because people won’t remember it nearly as well. But, you know, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I, and also with podcast ads, again, because of things that are actually very good about the podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco medium, it’s really hard to know the direct response rate of those ads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for an app. You know, the reason why podcast ads say, hey, go to whatever slash ATP, use coupon code
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ATP for 10% off your first purchase, is so that way the sponsor knows how many people heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ad and how many new customers they got through that ad. It’s direct response advertising. That’s why this has been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so popular with podcasts over time, because they can then attribute, they can say, well, it turns out, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, the ATP does really well for something like Squarespace, so they’re willing to spend more money with
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, and I still have to do the guesswork of all the people who went and didn’t use the link or didn’t type
⏹️ ▶️ John in the code or forgot there was a code or didn’t go to the landing page. So it’s not, you know, it’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ John perfect knowledge that, you know, search, App Store search ads have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, yeah, but it’s at least closer. it’s very hard to do that for an app. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can make a custom link and have it add a tag, but no one does that, no one remembers those links.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s not, that’s gonna be above your pay grade for this app. So really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what you should do here is the most money that you spend acquiring people should probably be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with App Store search ads. Or at least the first money you spend. Well I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you’ve already committed to, fine, I’m not saying back out, but I am saying definitely start buying search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads now. because you’ll have data in a day of how much you’re spending
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what you’re being matched to, what keywords you’re being matched to, and you’ll be able to see,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you’ll be able to adjust very quickly. Like, all right, well, this bid, I gotta raise this bid to 50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cents or whatever for this keyword, or I’m not getting shown enough when I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buying IMDB, I’m not being shown enough there, so I need to either increase my bid or bid on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something else. You can start getting that data very quickly in a pretty tight feedback loop,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then you can finally see, if it turns out that you end up making, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco percentage of your downloads result in that five or $10 value
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody might have for you, as long as they stay subscribed, which could be actually much higher than that over time,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but suppose you’re like, all right, well, 5% of downloads result in a purchase.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know what your number’s gonna be there. I don’t know if that’s high or low, I have no idea. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that varies a lot per app and what the offering is. But then you can go and say, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well, if it only costs me 50 cents or five cents or one cent to acquire a user, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now I have numbers I can work with. Now you can start doing the math and figuring out what works for you. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy App Store search ads.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s on the to-do list. I was clicking around as you were talking and I went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and landed on searchads.apple.com and I was not reading, cause I’m trying to listen to you, but I found
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a start now button and I clicked it. And then the piehole said, no, you can’t do that because it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an advertising domain.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s filled with ads, it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, that’s where all the ads live. I’m gonna need to approve that domain, which I thought was kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of funny. There’s still no search ads in the Mac App Store, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey since last time I’ve looked at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Mac App Store. Yeah, I was gonna say, the Mac App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Store is such a wild, there’s no users in the Mac App Store. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know we talked about when Apple came out with this, like you could buy search ads against your competitors’ apps and stuff like that and it would show you at
⏹️ ▶️ John the bottom. Remember that whole thing? I don’t think, like I said, I don’t think there’s search ads on the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John App Store, but I know this from searching for my own apps. When I search for my own apps on the Mac App Store, other
⏹️ ▶️ John competing apps come up. So they must be putting my app name in their keywords. Oh, totally. Which I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John think you’re supposed to do, but I don’t actually know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When the App Store first launched, like in the early days, you were not officially,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you were not allowed to put other apps’ names in your keywords field, because the keywords
⏹️ ▶️ Marco field in App Store Connect is not shown to the public. Apple uses it in search indexing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I think they’ve used it less over time as people have spammed the crap out of it, but again, Apple search algorithms are really dumb
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and really rudimentary, so they do still use that kind of stuff as far as I can tell. And everyone started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco putting their competitors’ names in their keywords field. Everyone did that. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could complain, you could say, look, they’re not supposed to be doing this, or it’s my trademark, or whatever. You could do all that, and mostly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your complaints would be ignored because the App Store is not policed nearly as much as we often want it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be in the ways we want it to be. And this is one of those ways. Anything that’s considered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like App Store optimization, it’s kind of the Wild West. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can kind of do whatever you want and Apple mostly won’t have a problem with it because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone else is doing it too and worse, including Apple itself in many cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you might have to do some of that stuff, depending on what you’re being matched with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, or how you’re ranking. You might have to start doing some of those things that are a little bit icky
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sounding to a pure mind, but the App Store does that to you over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, look, I even converted to the screenshots that show different shaped iPhones in the, rather than just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being screenshots, I even converted to that recently. There are certain things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you don’t wanna do, and then eventually, the title of my app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was Overcast colon podcast player for a long time, you know, until they added that subtitle
⏹️ ▶️ Marco field, which no one uses and they still make their app called something whatever colon keyword spam.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s just the app store.
⏹️ ▶️ John You gotta go full Amazon product name for your app. Yeah, exactly. Overcast podcast player,
⏹️ ▶️ John audio, sound, like I can’t even, it’s so hard to come up with those titles.
⏹️ ▶️ John can come up with one that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco average. Free
⏹️ ▶️ Marco podcast, not police radio. Like, I will say, I don’t put my competitors’ names
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my keywords field. My keywords field is like, you know, podcast, podcatcher, free podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco free download, it’s like that kind of stuff. I do, however, bid on their names in app store search
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ads. Because A, there’s nothing wrong with that, B, they do it to me, and C,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s expressly allowed by Apple, like Phil Schiller expressly said, we want people to be able to do this. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think when you are buying yours, you should absolutely bid on IMDB as your top bid. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it tells you when you type in a keyword into the app store, in the search ads buying thing, it’ll tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you these little colored bars that kind of indicate roughly how popular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is, and then roughly how strong your bid will be against other people’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bids. And my bids are almost all in the red. It’s like, your bids are weak, don’t even bother. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I put them in anyway, and then I get downloads. So someone’s clicking on them, and I’m winning some of those auctions.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, and that’s not because I’m super cheap, It’s because it’s literally like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get it in the green for some of my keywords, it would be like $5 per tap. They’re like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco absurd amounts of money that I could never justify. But anyway, buy search ads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be aggressive with what you bid on, the keywords you bid on, all that stuff, be aggressive,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be totally blatant, bid right against your competitors and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see how it does. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is the plan. Again, I’ve never done any advertising, much less App Store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey search ads or anything like that. But it is absolutely the plan. And I will probably be needling you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with questions about this over the next few days. But to go back quite a bit, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey keep dancing around this, but I wanted to make this point, which I think I talked about on Analog as well. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when I had the idea of tying access to the test flight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to membership, to be completely forthright, the only goal I had in doing that was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey juicing our member numbers. Like I really thought it was a win-win, right? I’m giving the members
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that they wouldn’t have otherwise, and they’re giving me money I wouldn’t have otherwise. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought everyone’s happy, right? And that was really the only purpose in having
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the members have access to the test flight. Well, as it turns out,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey having a test flight that had quite a few more people on it than would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey otherwise have been there was really great. And I really owe the members
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that used the test flight a debt of gratitude, because I really think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app is better for having been used by way more people than would otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have used it. Because I think my group, you can have different groups of people in App Store Connect. And my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey friends and family group is something to the order of 50 to 100 people. I forget exactly how many are in there right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But the members test flight was quite a bit more than that. And that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, really helped make this app better. And one of the very obvious ways
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is there were international people. And granted, I had a handful of people from other countries in my friends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and family list, but there were way more, in way more countries on the members
⏹️ ▶️ Casey test flight. And they came up with legitimate problems or tweaks or things that I should change.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I do think the app is far, far better for it. So if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a member, whether or not you joined for the test flight, I really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey appreciate you using the app via test flight. And I appreciate those of you who did report feedback.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I appreciate those who maybe reported feedback and never heard anything back from me, because there was a lot of it. But it did make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the app better. And I read all of it. And I’m really, really thankful for all of you members that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey took the time to do any of these things, because I genuinely think the app is better for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With that said, I think it was a build or two ago, I did expire
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all the old builds and test flights. So I think I might have left the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey recent one, I don’t recall, but I expired either all of them or all but the most recent one for the members
⏹️ ▶️ Casey test flight. Now, to the best of my knowledge, that means you cannot install it again,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but if it’s already installed, you’re clear to use it for up to 90 days
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from when the build was posted. And so I’m thinking to myself, oh, god, here we are again with the slow burn. I had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a week delay from free trials. Now I’ve got three months delay from all of the test
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flight people, many of whom I’m assuming will wait until they can’t use the app anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in order to switch over to the paid one. But it turns out, and Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the king of this, I am but the court jester by comparison, but it turns out procrastination
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wins the day. And let me tell you why. It turns out that when I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working on it, on the test flight builds, I really, really wanted to add some sort of detection
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that, oh, if you’re in test flight, you get the whole thing for free. Or, oh, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a while there, I had a way in which you could go into settings and like insta-buy the app. You didn’t have to go through the whole flow.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the reason I wanted to do all these things is because the way test flight works is it deliberately shortens the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey real world time that a subscription takes. So if you have a year subscription, it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a day or a month or a week. I forget exactly how how long it is. It doesn’t really matter. But what I got from, from test
⏹️ ▶️ Casey flight users was constant questions and I don’t blame them because I would ask the same thing. Dude, why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do I have to buy it every single day? And you can’t face ID, you have to enter your damn password. It’s such
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pain in the hind quarters. Why do I have to do this every day? This sucks. Well, yeah, it does, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve got other bigger fish to fry. I’m genuinely sorry that it’s a pain in the butt, but I got other things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to worry about right now. I’m sorry. I can’t do anything about it. Well, I had a bunch of people write to me and say, Oh, thank God, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t have to do the stupid nag every single day. So, so my, my, my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey negligence and my procrastination has saved the day. And so a lot of test flight users have been kind enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to purchase the full board version of the app, just so they don’t have to log in, repurchase it every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So thank you to all of you. And I’m sorry for being I’m sorry for you being nagged, except I’m not sorry. So sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ John Does anybody know why you can’t do face ID? I’m very familiar with this phenomenon. But I assumed
⏹️ ▶️ John as one of those things, I assume someone else’s reported of this, right? Because it’s ridiculous. Like I don’t, what’s the, is there any kind of reasoning
⏹️ ▶️ John there or is it just like, Oh, it’s always been that way. Sorry about it. It’s probably like, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole way that like the, the sandbox purchasing environment works over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has always been really hacky and it used to be a lot worse. Like it used to be that sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would get into a state where your sandbox environment purchase on your phone would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like not be able to complete a purchase and it would put up the box that like the random system modal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alert every so often saying, you know, you got to enter your password to complete this purchase or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it would say environment sandbox in brackets. And it would pop that up, it would ruin a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you would have to like reformat and reinstall, like reformat and restore your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get to have this stop, like it was awful. So the current
⏹️ ▶️ Marco system is a lot less bad, but it’s still very bad. It’s still based on a pile of hacks, I think.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s kind of how it feels. So what I usually recommend is don’t do any test flight purchase
⏹️ ▶️ Marco testing. Like I usually recommend for test flight builds, disable all purchasing because it is just not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not worth the many, many hassles about it. Like do all your purchase testing internally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Uh, and then when you give it a tester, just have a flag that just like makes everything free or blocks out the purchase screen or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And like I said, for a long time, when I wasn’t actively testing my, my very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey late in my build process, rejiggered, rejiggered purchase flow, I just had a button in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey settings that you could go into and instantly buy the It wouldn’t ask you for the, you know, it would fake it on my end. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know what I mean? And I will probably put that back for the handful of people who are listening that do have the test flight still,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but for ATP members, you know, you’re going to have to buy the app, sorry. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so it was a royal pain in the butt for test flight users. And now that has, that pain in the butt is now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the stick, or maybe it’s the carrot, depending on how you look at it, that is compelling people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to go ahead and buy the paid version, which is pretty great, but genuinely, I wanted to thank all the ATP members
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one more time. It really did make the app better and thank you for that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and congrats on the launch. This is a really big deal. You put a lot of work into it, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows, and it looks like it’s gonna be successful. I think it’s gonna be very successful. Hey, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there, go buy the app, make me right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yes, please.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco just a couple of them. I think it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco work, I really do.
⏹️ ▶️ John sure hope so and I appreciate it. And also I wanna say that the, I don’t know what your original
⏹️ ▶️ John plan was or whatever, but I’m glad that you took the time you did to pick this set of features for
⏹️ ▶️ John a 1.0 because you could have launched before this. Like there are features that are in this that didn’t necessarily need to be there.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I think the set that you landed on as the 1.0 set is
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s generous. Like it is, it didn’t have to have this many features but because it does,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really a fleshed out 1.0. It’s not like a 1.0, it’s not like a skateboard as
⏹️ ▶️ John they would say, or an MVP or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It is- People say that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you’d be glad you don’t know about the business knowledge. It’s like talking about like a minimum viable product
⏹️ ▶️ John is not like a pile of wheels or whatever. It’s not a car either, it’s a skateboard because it rolls, it’s got
⏹️ ▶️ John four wheels, it’s got a thing you can stand on. Anyway, just it’s crappy business. Oh God.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey But the point
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey think this 1.0
⏹️ ▶️ John has a good, kind of like the pricing, it has a good set of features. Not every feature you could possibly imagine, but you could have launched
⏹️ ▶️ John with less than it would have been quote unquote okay. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you could have waited, you know, another six more months and be way more full feature. But the set of features in here now
⏹️ ▶️ John definitely covers most of the common needs that people want with a couple extra things
⏹️ ▶️ John thrown in there. I’m glad that you waited as long as you did because it seemed like you were anxious to launch just months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was like, I think you probably need some more features. But I think you did the right thing, took your time,
⏹️ ▶️ John added those features in. As it turns out, as you were implementing them, they didn’t take that long to add, and they add
⏹️ ▶️ John so much value to the app. Like being able to look it up on Just Watch, or even a little thing we were talking about before of showing
⏹️ ▶️ John the popover of what time the movie would end, which maybe shouldn’t be a popover, but still like stuff like that. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in your 1.0. That’s in your very first version, right? And so you have, and you already have that big list of things that you want to add.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think you picked a good feature set for 1.0. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I appreciate that. And you know, as I do this more and more, I’m no underscore, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am getting better at it and I feel like I’m getting better at it, which is great. You know, you never want to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bored in your job and you never want to feel like like you’re not improving. And I feel like I’m improving. I got a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long way to go, but I feel like I’m improving.
⏹️ ▶️ John You only got like, what, 63 more apps to catch up on the score? Something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m sure it’ll be any day now. Very quickly, a couple of other notes. First of all, if you are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looking to purchase the app or subscribe, I should say, one of the things I did, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t know if Apple was gonna complain about it, but surprisingly, they said not a peep. If you are going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey through the purchase flow, the first screen you see says, oh, you can do it monthly or you can do it yearly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And under the two options, You can choose between, there’s text that says, more purchase options. If you like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the work that I do, if you like me, if you think I’m a kind of okay guy, you can hit more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey purchase options. And in there is a quasi tip jar sort of thing, but it’s a subscription
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tip jar. So what that means is for, instead of paying $9 a year, you can pay $20 a year or your local equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or $50 a year. You get no perks other
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than my undying love, but that is it. That is all you get. I am not expecting anyone to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Some people seem to have done that, and I am extremely thankful for all of you that have.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But you can elect to do that, and I’m pretty sure you can go in and manage your subscription and change to it during your free trial if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fancy doing that. So something to look for. Very quickly, since this is a nerd podcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I put this at the bottom of my blog post, but a few things that I think are kind of funny. Total commits in GitHub, 727.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The first commit was the 30th of January, 2023. The build for the App Store was done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the 27th of July, which is 178 days or about six months between the two.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey According to clock on the command line, 14,232 lines of Swift, 673 lines of text or XML or Markdown
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a total of just shy of 15,000 lines of code, 102 beta builds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the first screenshot, which we will link to in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey show notes, is hilariously basic. And that I took on the 3rd of February. And you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can see it has come a long way, baby, because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John not at all- Your
⏹️ ▶️ John app is a good advertisement for SwiftUI because one of my Mac apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John Switch Glass, has almost the same number of lines of Swift code as yours and substantially
⏹️ ▶️ John fewer features and less UI. And where is all that code? It’s not in the SwiftUI view, although my SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John view is fairly girthy, as the kids would say. Ew. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like that the slang, it’s the kids. Anyway, it’s all the stupid AppKit code because when you do anything
⏹️ ▶️ John with AppKit and UI, you’re making all these outlets and actions it’s so barbaric, like, you know, not
⏹️ ▶️ John declarative, right? So the fact that you have that many screens and that many features and my networking
⏹️ ▶️ John code and all sorts of other stuff that my app doesn’t have, and we’re within a couple thousand, like, I think I’m like, 12 or 13,000
⏹️ ▶️ John lines of Swift and you’re at 14. You’re a great advertisement for SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. So yeah, I think that’s all I have for now. I appreciate you talking to me about it. If you want to check it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, you know, there will be links in the show notes, don’t you worry, but you can go to www.caselist.com
⏹️ ▶️ Casey slash call sheet and that is my blog post and if you click the title of that blog post it will push you over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the app store. I’d love for you to check it out. Even if you don’t think it’s for you, like I was saying earlier, even if you don’t think it’s for you, that’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Check it out. What’s it going to hurt? It’s free. You don’t have to subscribe. There’s no harm done. Go ahead and check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you’ll like it. You didn’t get a.app domain? Oh, actually, it’s funny you bring that up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe we can talk about this in the after show. But I did get callsheetapp.com and there was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all sorts of agita earlier today trying to figure out how to do redirects with that, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey domain. No, it’s not because I have callsheets.app, but callsheet.app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bummer. Yeah. So what are you going to do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the reality is the domain name for your app really does not matter at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John just a fun thing to do when you make an app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like it could literally be be like you know call sheet dot but and it would be fine like you still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it wouldn’t matter at all.
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#askatp: LLCs for developers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some Ask ATP. Nate Silva writes, Casey, congratulations on publishing Call Sheet and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the well-deserved great reviews you’re getting. Thank you so much. I’ve noticed that Call Sheet is published by Limitless LLC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Is there a reason you chose to use an LLC? Is it something you would recommend for other developers? So I’m going to take a stab at this. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey am not a lawyer. I have only been doing this for a handful of years, not nearly as long as Marco. Marco
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is probably the right person to listen to, but I’ve got the floor. Here we go. And LLC here in America
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a limited liability corporation, I believe. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John basically what that means is, for the purposes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of legal liability, I, Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have some amount of protection. And as long as I keep my finances separate, the company finances separate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from my finances, the worst thing that can happen, I am not a lawyer, I am not a lawyer, I am not a lawyer,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the worst thing that can happen is the company’s finances drained, but I personally will not lose
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of my money if something bad happens because of the work that I do. And so yes, it is something I recommend.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In Virginia it was extremely easy to set up an LLC. It was extremely cheap and extremely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey straightforward. I was able to do it all by myself. I definitely recommend it. Marco, can you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey add the color commentary and or clarifications to that please?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s the gist of my understanding as well. Again, none of us are lawyers or accountants, so take this with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a grain of salt. And you definitely it’s worth consulting with a lawyer and an accountant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when making this decision. However, at least in the US and most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco states and possibly all states, it is a state construct, so check with your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco state with specifics of it. But at least in New York,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having an LLC is fairly easy and inexpensive. So what it takes to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have one is you got to register it and you got to fill out of form every couple of years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to basically renew its registration.
⏹️ ▶️ John Every couple of years? I was going to ask you. What is it for both of your states? What
⏹️ ▶️ John is the burden? And for Massachusetts, it’s annual and substantial.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s like $25 every two years in New York. It’s not much. What?
⏹️ ▶️ John I got to move to New York. It’s right. No,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really, the taxes will kill
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you. Don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ John Massachusetts doesn’t have a lot of taxes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they get it in other ways. Don’t worry about that. But yeah, Yeah, so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco depends on the state, but it is something like 25 bucks every two years. It’s something like that in New York. What about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, for me, I am almost sure it is $50 every single year. What?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What do you pay? More.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why is this a state secret? Just to have an LLC? Yes. Are you going through some of those scam
⏹️ ▶️ Marco services that does it for you?
⏹️ ▶️ John I am going through a scam service, but even accounting for the 500% markup, it’s more. Oh God, well anyway, all you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do here is you have to register, you have to have like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it’s good to have either a lawyer or an accountant file the paperwork for you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the first time just so you don’t mess anything up, but in most states this is a fairly simple thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you go to your bank, once you have the forms from the state, you go to your bank and say, I need a bank account for this please.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then you just have every transaction that is for the company go through that bank account.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then when you want to take money out to pay yourself, you take it out of that bank account and put it in your personal bank account. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about all you really have to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But never, never cross the beams, the streams, the beams,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco whatever. Yes, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely not. Like, you never purchase anything for personal use from that account. Like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, that account has its own debit card or credit card. You buy things on that that are for the business,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only buy things for the business on that. Like, you know, keep everything nice and separate. And then by doing that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what Casey said, You have a pretty large amount of limited liability.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what the LL stands for, in the sense that, yeah, if somebody wants to sue Overcast,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t get to take my house. They can take Overcast’s assets in the worst
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case, but they wouldn’t get to take all of my personal assets. So it’s a way to cover
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your butt in a fairly easy way. And as long as you follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the relatively simple rules of operating it separately from your other stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It isn’t hard to operate an LLC, or expensive if you’re not in Massachusetts. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s worth looking, like anything that’s gonna be, like an app that’s gonna be possibly making real money,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would suggest having an LLC. And then the second thing is, if you think your app might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco someday be sold to somebody else, it is much better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have it be on a separate Apple ID than your personal Apple ID. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple has since devised some weird like app transfer wizard things. Some of them,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve had limitations, like I believe, I don’t know if this is still the case, but previously if your app had ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used iCloud or any iCloud based service, it could not be transferred using this mechanism.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But anyway, it’s awkward and it’s a lot easier if someone’s gonna buy your app, it’s a lot easier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to say, you’re buying the LLC and its assets And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here, here’s the Apple ID for that LLC. It’s a whole different developer account, a whole different Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ID, totally separate from your other stuff. Again, it’s part of that, the reason you make these separations,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re gonna make an app that might make real money and that might be sold someday or whatever, it’s to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those outcomes easier and to limit the risk to your personal stuff of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business stuff seeping in too much. And an LLC is generally the first step of that and it makes all that stuff a lot easier.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Goodness, these fees in Massachusetts, which John has put in the chat, they are,
⏹️ ▶️ John of a lot. They’re very high, and the burden, it’s onerous. Like, to fill out the paperwork yourself is, like, annoying, and you’d be
⏹️ ▶️ John afraid you screwed up, which is why you pay for these companies. There are companies that will do it for you, right, for some fee on top of this,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I pay even more on top to not to deal with it. Look at the fee structure. Like, there’s stuff you have to do every year, and everything
⏹️ ▶️ John costs, like, hundreds of dollars.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco $500 to register an LLC, is that
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And forget about the one-time cost. The recurring annual cost just to maintain the
⏹️ ▶️ John LLC, a basic LLC, is just very, anyway, there’s a reason the nickname for my state for those people who don’t live
⏹️ ▶️ John in the US is Taxachusetts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ridiculous. This is ridiculous. Holy jamolis.
⏹️ ▶️ John Should’ve incorporated in Delaware, I guess. Right? Goodness. Anyway, in the grand scheme
⏹️ ▶️ John of things, it’s a drop in the bucket, and I just, you know, consider it a cost of doing business, and, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John there it goes. But anyway, just to chime in for the LLC, yes, I do have an LLC, and I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John understand all the things that it’s supposedly doing for me, but my understanding is just like the two of you said, is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John if someone uses my application switcher and it burns down their house, and they sue me for millions of dollars,
⏹️ ▶️ John even if they win, all they can get is all the assets of Hypercritical LLC. And those assets, let me tell
⏹️ ▶️ John you, are not substantial. So they cannot take my house, they cannot take all
⏹️ ▶️ John the money from all my savings accounts and the money that my kids are gonna use to go to college or anything like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can only take the very meager assets of my LLC, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John not worth suing me over, so don’t bother.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what I understand, it’s basically like however much is in the checking account of that LLC,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like, it’s not, they can’t take like, you know, all past earnings that it ever had, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s whatever you keep in the, you know, whatever money you keep in the business, which is usually not a ton of money for most people.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s one thing I did save money on, so I got a separate bank account for the business and a separate debit
⏹️ ▶️ John card for the business and a separate credit card for the business and it’s all registered to the business. It’s like, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s a business. And I found one that’s a bank that’s local to me that has no
⏹️ ▶️ John fees for anything. It’s like, as long as you have under 500 transactions a month, I’m like, don’t worry.
⏹️ ▶️ John I get a transaction from Apple. What do they pay, like monthly, right? Or I forget
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, once a month from Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John one big deposit. I get one from Apple and then that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey basically it. And
⏹️ ▶️ John so I have checks, but everything is no fees. Like I just have a minimum balance that
⏹️ ▶️ John I have to keep, which is very low. And I pay $0 for this account in exchange for having
⏹️ ▶️ John a credit card that I use for business expenses and a debit card and checks that I never use. Although occasionally I have had
⏹️ ▶️ John to do like voided checks or whatever for things. But that’s the easiest stuff to get. But the trick
⏹️ ▶️ John is to get all that and not have it have your name on it or not be, you have to have a legal entity that
⏹️ ▶️ John it can be in the name of. And mine is Hypercritical LLC.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. And then the final note, at least here in America, for tax purposes, it’s different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey depending on the flavor of your LLC, but mine, oh shoot, I forget what it’s called, but mine basically- It’s a pass-through.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yes, thank you. Mine does not exist for tax purposes. It’s only for legal liability purposes. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my taxes, anything that Limitless LLC makes is effectively Casey List money
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a tax perspective. It’s only from the legal liability perspective that this is a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And we can do that because we don’t have any employees. We’re not, I’m not gonna say we’re not real businesses because
⏹️ ▶️ John we are, but we’re intentionally like, it’s a pass through for tax purposes. It makes doing our taxes
⏹️ ▶️ John easier, even though both Casey and I have accountants do our taxes. If you have a company and you wanna have
⏹️ ▶️ John multiple partners and employees and salary, and having to deal with like
⏹️ ▶️ John healthcare for your employees, like a quote unquote real business, accounting and taxes
⏹️ ▶️ John get way, way more complicated. Whereas if you know you’ll have basically a single employee
⏹️ ▶️ John company that’s just you, the LLC will give you legal protection while not
⏹️ ▶️ John overcomplicating your accounting or your taxes. And obviously that stops working if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John have a company with multiple employees and everything or whatever, but if you’re still in this sort of easy mode where you’re not planning on doing
⏹️ ▶️ John that, having a pass-through simplifies things greatly.
#askatp: Mac Pro Turbo
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Jan Ogeniemi, I’m so sorry, writes, with all that empty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey space in the Mac Pro, would it be feasible for Apple to just slap a huge heat sink on the processor and overclock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it by 30 or 40% over the standard Ultra? That way there would be a performance difference between the Studio and the Pro. Call
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it the Ultra Turbo.
⏹️ ▶️ John You put a turbo button on the front, you just press it and your computer goes faster. Oh, those were the days. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m assuming the person who wrote this doesn’t have a lot of experience overclocking PCs, but overclocking in general,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not as simple as like, well, if you turn up the clock speed, it’ll produce more heat, and then you just have to get rid of that heat.
⏹️ ▶️ John Although, that alone is much harder than you would think, because it’s not like, oh, we can get rid of as much heat
⏹️ ▶️ John as we want, we’ll just put a bigger heatsink on there. The problem, especially with modern CPUs, is that heat
⏹️ ▶️ John is concentrated in a tiny little area, so no matter how big a heatsink you put on it,
⏹️ ▶️ John all the heat is emanating from this tiny little rectangle, and it has to spread from that
⏹️ ▶️ John rectangle quickly elsewhere to get the hell out of there before it can get to your big giant
⏹️ ▶️ John heat sink or fan or whatever evaporative cooler, whatever, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s the- In all fairness, the Ultra is a pretty large rectangle.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, compared to the size of like a heat sink that’s like eight inches on a side or something, right? Or some kind of evaporative cooler,
⏹️ ▶️ John or even a water cooler, like getting the heat out of that little tiny area is the difficult part. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, heat is not your big problem here because we do have things that can get that heat out of there pretty quickly. Your
⏹️ ▶️ John real problem is how fast can the chip go before it stops working? And 30
⏹️ ▶️ John to 40% overclocking is ambitious. So, because
⏹️ ▶️ John the faster you make it go, you have a bunch of problems. One is how fast can your transistors actually switch? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John transistors don’t instantly change from one state to another. They have some sort of transition time. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to make sure all of your transistors involved in your CPU or GPU or whatever, can switch
⏹️ ▶️ John as fast as you want them to switch successfully, getting from one state to the other. The second thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you need signals to be able to propagate from point A on the chip to point B on the chip. And yes, it’s a very small
⏹️ ▶️ John area, like postage stamp size or whatever, but at the speeds we’re talking about, multiple gigahertz,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is actually transit time for signals to travel. And if you clock it too high, by the time the next clock
⏹️ ▶️ John comes, the signal hasn’t propagated from where it needed to, from where it started to where it needs to get to
⏹️ ▶️ John by the next clock cycle, and then your CPU doesn’t work. There’s all sorts of things that will literally
⏹️ ▶️ John stop the thing from functioning correctly if you clock it too high. And that percentage
⏹️ ▶️ John is not 30 to 40% most of the time. You can get lucky, because some people, if you get, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John why overclockers are looking like, you know, CPUs that are quote unquote good for overclocking, where they’re manufactured in
⏹️ ▶️ John such a way that the defect rate is low, and that you know there’s actually a lot of headroom. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John the, well, they do things like, you know, cool it with liquid nitrogen, because they’re like, in this case, cooling really is our limiting factor,
⏹️ ▶️ John so we’ll cool the thing with liquid nitrogen, which is, you know, a silly stunt or whatever, and then see how fast it will go. And
⏹️ ▶️ John even being cool with liquid nitrogen, you can’t make it go like 800% faster or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John because eventually it just stops working. But what you’re looking for is a chip where, let’s say you’re either
⏹️ ▶️ John not on the bleeding edge, which Apple usually is, especially with the upcoming three nanometer stuff or whatever. And it’s a design
⏹️ ▶️ John that has sort of all the bugs worked out of it, because it all takes this one dark corner of your chip to be
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit iffy. And if that part of the chip, the transistors there are a little bit wonky
⏹️ ▶️ John because the masking was all kind of screwed up And it works fine, but it only works at the bin to
⏹️ ▶️ John clock speed plus like 2%. The rest of the chip has, you know, 5 or 10% headroom,
⏹️ ▶️ John but because that part of the chip doesn’t, your whole thing doesn’t work. So it would be cool.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could probably overclock it a little bit and extract some extra heat. But 30
⏹️ ▶️ John to 40% is probably not realistic, especially when we moved 3 nanometer and Apple is
⏹️ ▶️ John the very first customer in the world to be using these chips from TSMC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Also like when you think about the market of the Mac Pro, and by that I mean the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac Studio PCI breakout box, it seems like, you know, if you could actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, whatever the number would be that they could actually achieve reliably for the overclock would probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be maybe more on the order of like 10 or 15 percent. And I don’t think the buyers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of this machine would be willing to buy something that might be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a little bit very slightly less reliable than the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular version of the chip. You know, because overclocking, the problem is like it’s kind of a risk game.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You roll the dice, like you see how can I push it a little bit higher? And then you run, you know, some like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco massive stress test thing to see like put as much stress in the CPU as possible. Like does it crash?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does it does it keep running? Like, let’s see. And can you push a little bit higher? And maybe maybe you got to raise the voltage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit. And you know, and what you what you typically end end up with is having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have rapidly rising power and heat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get relatively decreasing gains after that point.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so that’s another good point, by the way. As you increase clock speed, the heat output
⏹️ ▶️ John does not increase linearly. It’s like a square. It’s like a square of the, so if you increase the clock
⏹️ ▶️ John speed by, I can’t do the math in my head, but if you double the clock speed, you
⏹️ ▶️ John are way more than doubling the heat generated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you need way more cooling, not just a little bit. You don’t just need 10% more cooling. You need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the cooling. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you see, what does the parabola look like? The parabola graph you must’ve done in school with
⏹️ ▶️ John an exponent of two. The slope goes up real, real fast. So it doesn’t take long before you’re saying, I am
⏹️ ▶️ John now producing infinite heat, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John It becomes unfeasible way faster than you think, which is why people use liquid nitrogen. You’re like, they’re using liquid nitrogen?
⏹️ ▶️ John That must be overclocked by 8,000%. No, it’s like 150%. And typically, like John was saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of chips people look for when overclocking, usually you’re looking for some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of Intel or AMD, whatever, where they sell a pretty wide range of chips,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of speeds, of clock speeds, within a certain family of chips. And maybe you buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the lower clocked ones, assuming you could probably push it higher. And that’s not how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple sells the Apple Silicon CPUs. There are no clock speed options.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just one. It’s like, here, we made this one. We’ve designed the entire chip to work at this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one ideal speed range, and that’s the one everyone gets. That, you know, you can’t pay more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get the next— to get, like, the faster one. It’s just— you have this one chip. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would imagine there actually might not be as much headroom as you think, in the sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, like, they’ve— they’ve set these parameters for good reasons. They— if they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could push a bunch of them higher, they probably would. But they’re not and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s probably good reasons for that also these are massive chips
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know the when you’re looking at the you know the ultra or even just the m1 max, but especially the ultra
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is such a large chip. I Haven’t overclocked in a very long time so all my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knowledge could be super outdated and not relevant to modern chips But I would expect with that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much Chip with that much surface area with that many transistors I would I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expect that as you push things past their spec The the likelihood of you having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a problem I think would be higher than the old days where you were overclocking this little tiny Celeron thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I would I would guess That these massive, you know multi-core,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know all-in-one giant die kind of chips that Apple’s making here I would guess you actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t have the headroom that you think you do
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah I think the overclocking is a little bit trickier because keep in mind it with modern chips But especially modern
⏹️ ▶️ John SOC system on a chip like we have now There’s multiple clock speeds going on that the GPU is not running at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John clock lead as CPU and all of them are on Some kind of clock speed curve in response to heat
⏹️ ▶️ John So heat is a factor and having better cooling can let you stay at higher clock speeds for longer but different parts of the chips
⏹️ ▶️ John are running at different clock speeds anyway and Unlike the situation where you don’t have an SOC like a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John common and PC overclocking or whatever is to choose like your memory speed independently from your CPU
⏹️ ▶️ John speed when you’re overclocking. I don’t think you have that kind of flexibility with an SoC because
⏹️ ▶️ John the RAM is right there on the package. And I’m not sure if you could overclock the GPU, but underclock
⏹️ ▶️ John the CPU, but increase the speed of the RAM. I don’t actually know the mechanisms you’d have to use to overclock
⏹️ ▶️ John this. But to your point about Apple picking the speed, like whenever they bin these, whenever they say, these chips
⏹️ ▶️ John will run at this speed and these chips have a broken GPU core. So the cheaper ones or whatever, they do all this binning.
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple could choose to say, we’re gonna put only the ones that can run 10% faster
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Mac Pro, but it would be even more expensive because every time they do that, they say, okay, only
⏹️ ▶️ John the very best ones go in the Mac Pro. Guess how many of the very best ones there are? Way, way fewer. It’s not like, and the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pro already costs so much money. So you think, okay, it would just cost 10% more to get 10% more clock speed. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, because like your yields, like how many of this, you build them all and you think they have to pick some
⏹️ ▶️ John number. It’s like, okay, 80% past the bar for Mac Studio use. How many past the bar for 10%
⏹️ ▶️ John more than that? Okay, 1%.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And now figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John how much you have to charge for that one. It’s like, okay, 80% of our chips are suitable in the Mac Studio, 1% of our
⏹️ ▶️ John chips are suitable for the Mac Pro. Granted, it’s good that the Mac Pro doesn’t sell many, so maybe they could still make it work. But like, the
⏹️ ▶️ John more you bin it, the more you say, I will reject any SoC unless it can run at X gigahertz.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you find out, okay, that’s like one in 10,000. Now it becomes way more expensive to put
⏹️ ▶️ John that in something because you have to mend your extra 10,000 of those chips just to get one of those. So yeah, overclocking
⏹️ ▶️ John is a fun thing to do as a hobby on PCs and I think Apple probably has a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John of thermal headroom to push it on the Mac Pro and still stay within a reliability
⏹️ ▶️ John envelope, but they’ve chosen not to, mostly because like it’s just one more thing to make the Mac Pro
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive. Like it’s not that big of a benefit. It would be single digit percentage if that. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re making an already expensive machine even more expensive and rare, even if you could qualify it and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John it passes all of our reliability things, we’ve tested it the same way to everything else, and this one can go 5% faster,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s probably not worth it. What you want from the Mac Pro, as we’ve said before, is twice
⏹️ ▶️ John as many cores, that is way more valuable than the same number of cores, but 5% faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Even I was just thinking too, even another big reason for them not to offer that kind of thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is it would also then kind of dilute the Mac Studio, which they probably sell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole lot more of. And if you think like, you know, right now they have these great, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have these names. They have these compact names for these chips. M1 Pro, M1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Max, M1 Ultra, you know, M2. Like, they have these nice, short, compact names.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’re very simple. They’re reasonably easy for people to understand. If they start adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco variants, like, oh, this is the M2 Max Turbo.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like the iPhone Pro Max, it’s just confusing. Yeah, I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right? It is not a perfect system that we have now, but the more variations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they add, it’ll start to seem, first of all, it’ll be more confusing, and people won’t necessarily know what they’re buying or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why they should buy it. But also then, imagine if, might that actually hurt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Max Studio in the sense that the Max Studio would then have the reputation of like, well, yeah, it says
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it has the M2 Ultra, but it’s not like the really good M2 Ultra.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s intentionally underclocked
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco so you can fit in that case. Right, right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kind of is, but not the way you think. Like it’s not, like the cooling
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Ultra can absolutely handle that SOC in the M2 generation.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, you can get a couple more percentage if you put a bigger cooler on it, but that’s like, yeah, it’s just not,
⏹️ ▶️ John that kind of distinction, they would never get another name like the M2 Turbo for 5%. Like the Ultra
⏹️ ▶️ John is not a 5% difference from the Max. It’s a big difference. It’s literally two maxes in there. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think you’d get a new name for 5%.
#askatp: Text editors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Edward Corcoran writes, what text editor are all three of you using these days?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve used TextMate for around a decade based on Marco’s recommendation. A few Mac OSs ago, TextMate started
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loading really slowly due to some checks on unsigned code. Macromates can’t fix the issue, so I’m looking to switch to a new editor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I also started using TextMate forever ago, I think because of Marco, and also noticed it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a freaking eternity to start. I have no idea if this unsigned code thing is true or not. I have no idea of macromates
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can or can’t fix it. But that at least explains potentially explains why this thing has become
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just intolerably painful to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by the way, thank you, Edward, for pointing this out. I didn’t know why text mate launches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just assumed, you know, I have, you know, I usually have a bunch of windows, and it saves all those and restores them. So I just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figured like, Oh, I guess for some reason, this is taking a very long time. I will say it hasn’t been a problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me, because text mate is always running, Like I will hide it using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the command H, I’ll hide it if I’m not actively using it. But it’s always running. So the only time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I ever actually launch it is in the relatively infrequent case where I reboot my computer, then I will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then when it comes back up, I’ll have to launch it at some point. And I do notice God is taking forever to launch. But then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then it’s launched in that the problem is gone. So I don’t really I don’t really have a problem that I need to move away from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it very suddenly, based on that. But it is nice to know at least one possible reason why it’s doing this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Indeed. John, what is the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco correct answer? Hey, so Casey, what are you using?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I still just use TextMate. Well, the thing is, I only use TextMate for like ephemeral, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quick things, because I’m using Visual Studio Code for web development to the small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey degree I do any, and I’m using Xcode for everything else. So, it’s very unusual I’m in anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey else to begin with. Usually, I just need like a place to drop something briefly, but I use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TextMate. I just wait an eternity for it to open, which is not the rightest answer. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could use Visual Studio Code, but I view, I perceive Visual Studio Code
⏹️ ▶️ Casey more like an IDE and less like a quick and dirty text editor. And what I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would like is some new or replacement quick and dirty text editor.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Luke Denny Yeah, like, and so I’m also, I’m all text made still,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco although I mean, you know, I write most of my code in Xcode. Like, Like I’m not most of my code writing is not web development. I very rarely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to do anything to my web code. And thank God for that, because I hate it. But, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not text mates fault. I just hate web programming these days, and server work and stuff. So I try to spend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as much time as possible in Xcode. Things that are not, you know, things that are more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like note based, I will usually just keep an Apple Notes. So that’s that, you know, takes that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco load off of my text editor. And then, you know, sometimes things that I’m like, kind of working
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on an idea, oh, how what if I do this, this, or this? A lot of times that’s happening in Solver, because if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s numbers involved. So a lot of other apps have kind of taken chunks out of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my text editor role. That being said, my general purpose text editor is still TextMate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because, again, once it’s launched, the performance is fine, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess I can tolerate that. A long time ago, I did a brief experiment, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this might have even been during the build and analyze days, I did an experiment where I tried out whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two new-ish text editors at the time were, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everybody was using. I spent a little while with each one, a few days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with each one, getting to know them, and I came out of it thinking, yeah, these are fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I had to switch away from TextMate, this would be fine. And then I went back to TextMate, and I liked it better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it fit me better. It’s not perfect. It has a lot of problems. It is very, very old and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems pretty unmaintained at this point. But, I still like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what I came to after that experiment was, once TextMate stops working for me for whatever reason, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plenty of great options out there that I will gladly look at and try out, and I’ll switch to one of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But that time hasn’t come yet. So as long as you’re willing to tolerate the long launch time of TextMate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that’s still your favorite one, then there’s not a lot of reason to move away from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it right this second. But, you know, if you like something more modern, you know, better,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then great, then switch by all means. You know, we have lots of good options these days.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, I mean, the reason I put this question in Ask ATP is it’s one of those ones we answer every few years just to check
⏹️ ▶️ John in. And I think checking in, we’re finding out that none of us have changed, myself included.
⏹️ ▶️ John I started using BBEditor during its first public release. I’m still using it. I’ve written basically everything in my entire
⏹️ ▶️ John life in this app, all my Mac OS X articles, all my development and work that I’ve done in my entire
⏹️ ▶️ John career as a web developer. The exceptions are, I use
⏹️ ▶️ John Xcodes Editor for doing my Mac apps, mostly because Xcodes Editor, it’s integrated
⏹️ ▶️ John with the IDE. So the debugger is integrated with it. It knows about all the symbols and all the SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John things. It’s got auto-complete, it looks up the help, blah, blah, you know, like, that’s why I use the Xcodes Editor.
⏹️ ▶️ John I do still occasionally copy and paste either the entire contents of files or sections
⏹️ ▶️ John of text into BBEdit when my fingers become frustrated by
⏹️ ▶️ John something that I would like to do that my fingers know how to do in BBEdit, but I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how to do in Xcode or it’s awkward or weird or whatever. I’m like, I don’t wanna bother clicking around
⏹️ ▶️ John that stupid find or replace interface for something complicated when I know I can get this done in two seconds in BBEdit.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so I will occasionally pull text out, put it into BBEdit, do a thing to it, bring it back.
⏹️ ▶️ John I use BBEdit for tons of stuff. Like I realized this when I installed BBEdit
⏹️ ▶️ John like on my wife’s account or on my son’s laptop or whatever and I launched it on their
⏹️ ▶️ John account and I realized I kind of like an Emacs user and I’ll get to that in a second. I realized I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use BBEdit in its default mode anymore because I’ve spent literal decades
⏹️ ▶️ John customizing it and I don’t even know what like, I’m like, wait, that’s not a default keystroke.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I can’t tell anyone, oh, do this in BBEdit because for all I know, I’m telling them to do a key combination that is not the
⏹️ ▶️ John default. So I don’t even know how to use default BBEdit. I’m like, it looks weird, it behaves
⏹️ ▶️ John weird. My fingers do things and weird dialogues pop up. I’m like, what the hell, I rebound that? When did I rebind
⏹️ ▶️ John that, in 1996? Like, it just, anyway. But I do have lots of customizations
⏹️ ▶️ John in BBEdit and my fingers just know them. The only other text editor I’ve ever really used in my life is Emacs,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I started using on Unix systems in the 90s. And it used
⏹️ ▶️ John to be the Mac OS X shipped with Emacs. I think they stopped shipping it and I install it because I don’t wanna use VI.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll use VI if I have to, but I don’t like it. So why would I ever use Emacs?
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m just used to using it to edit my dot files, I guess, like from ages ago, it just,
⏹️ ▶️ John I could open my dot files in bbedit, I’ve got the bbedit command line, in fact, it’s the alias to bb, right? So I just say bb
⏹️ ▶️ John space whatever, but I also have weird aliases that I made in 1993,
⏹️ ▶️ John like E-M-A-L to edit my.alias file. I know it’s weird,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it’s four characters long and my fingers type it before I can even think about it. So Emacs is really the only other editor
⏹️ ▶️ John that I actually use, but BBEdit, write everything in there. Any important email, I’m gonna write it
⏹️ ▶️ John right in BBEdit. Like writing, just, you know, scratch pad, writing metadata
⏹️ ▶️ John for my apps in the Mac App Store, writing HTML, writing all my weird Perl scripts,
⏹️ ▶️ John just everything is in BBEdit with the exception of Mac development and a couple of weird command line
⏹️ ▶️ John things. And BBEdit is still maintained and launches fast and gets new features and new versions
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. Highly recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Yeah, I think if, first of all, I think VI is way better than Emacs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fight me. And it’s actually sad, the author of VI just passed away.
⏹️ ▶️ John Vim, the author of Vim passed away, not the author of VI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, that’s true, but what everyone calls VI is really Vim. So that’s what everyone’s thinking of when they say VI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does the Mac even have Vim installed? I don’t even know. I believe it comes with it, yeah. I’ve never had to install
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I mean, I always just type VI and get in and out as fast as I can, so I don’t really wanna hang around in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, anyway, but yeah, I think if I were to be forced to move today,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I would look at two alternatives right away. Number one, I would absolutely look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BBEdit because it is by far like, first of all, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the only other really Mac native great modern text editor that exists besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco TextMate, which again is aging. Anyway, so it is like, you know, the most Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco text editor, I think, out there. And then I would also check out Visual Studio Code because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone says like, it’s amazing for working with, you know, stuff. Like, the most common thing I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in my non-Xcode, non-Apple Notes text editor, it’s usually PHP.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s usually what I’m writing. Or at least a shell script, but, you know, usually PHP. And so something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could actually have some kind of like code, you know, reading integration,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco autocomplete, that kind of stuff. I should probably be looking at that in reality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’ve never used VS Code at all. And I’ve only used BBEdit very briefly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I can’t really say for sure. But that would be where I would look.
⏹️ ▶️ John VS Code is a very full feature, but it definitely does not feel like a Mac app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m looking at screenshots. It looks horrendous, like for what I’m looking
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It does not.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not bad, but it’s different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s the thing. It’s different. It is Electron, but it’s the only Electron app I can think of that isn’t a pile of garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I would never know it’s Electron, except for the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John fact that it’s-
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if I’d want to throw a 500 megabyte log file on it like I routinely do to bbedit. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco I would expect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to crumble. Bbedit, you can throw anything at bbedit, and it will read. I know that. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John why I would go for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and bbedit does have things where I can make it cry when I try to soft wrap a log file
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s, you know, seven million lines long, like literally seven million. It’ll do it, but it’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John think for a second. Maybe your Mac Pro’s too slow. Yeah, kind of like Marco was saying, I leave BBEdit running
⏹️ ▶️ John all the time. It is just always running. And knowing me, I end up having a lot of windows open in
⏹️ ▶️ John it and because I just leave them open. Because another great thing that BBEdit does is, if
⏹️ ▶️ John you quit BBEdit, it doesn’t nag you about anything. It doesn’t say, oh, but wait, you’ve got unsaved
⏹️ ▶️ John changes and this is an untitled document and you never saved it. It just says, you wanna quit? Fine, I’ll quit.
⏹️ ▶️ John launch, everything is back exactly where it was, including all your untitled windows, all your edits. It’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John so like, why would I, I never quit it, but even when I reboot and I relaunch it, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is back, including all my untitled windows and all my unsaved changes. So it’s just constantly running. It’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John if I need to dash off some text, it’s there. And this is a thing you can’t transfer to other people. It’s kind of like weird
⏹️ ▶️ John Emacs people. It’s like, your experience with BBM is not gonna be like mine, because mine is just, I have literal
⏹️ ▶️ John decades of finger muscle memory for these weird things that I do. Like I do data processing
⏹️ ▶️ John in BBEdit. I’ll take a big file full of things, rattle off a bunch of regular expressions with my weird keystrokes, which
⏹️ ▶️ John honestly I couldn’t even tell you what they are, but my fingers know what they are, which is like copy matching
⏹️ ▶️ John line sub expressions into new document, sort lines in new document, unique lines, copy matching
⏹️ ▶️ John lines into new document. It’s kind of like using, remember, you don’t remember this, but channel operations in Photoshop. I know I’ve mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John it several times in the show. Before Photoshop had layers, and in ProtoShop before version three,
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t have layers. So if you wanted to do anything, you would do an operation and the result
⏹️ ▶️ John of that operation would be a modified, basically a new window, you can tell I loved it, a new window containing
⏹️ ▶️ John a modified version of the thing. So if you’re like, I wanna combine this image with this image using
⏹️ ▶️ John the multiply command, you could do that as a layer option now, right? Instead, you would get a new window
⏹️ ▶️ John that has the multiplied version and you would just proliferate these windows. Well, in BBEdit,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do data processing by selecting the contents of windows and running regular expressions about
⏹️ ▶️ John them. And BBEdit has a feature that says, I’ll do the thing that you asked and I’ll either put the matching lines in the new window,
⏹️ ▶️ John matching sub-expressions, things that don’t match the thing in a new window. Like, and so you get a series of windows where you’re sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John winnowing down and processing the data. And then of course you can run scripts against them. You can write a Perl script
⏹️ ▶️ John and run it with the menu command. And I do, I wrote Perl scripts to intelligently, quote aware, smart wrap
⏹️ ▶️ John things in the way that I want. You just select a region, hit a key combo that my fingers know, but my mind doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John that will do the thing that I want. That’s not gonna be your experience by using BBEdit. That took me decades to
⏹️ ▶️ John build up and that’s why I can’t use BBEdit in its default state anymore. But it’s worth
⏹️ ▶️ John it to me to not move from BBEdit because if I moved elsewhere, I would have to
⏹️ ▶️ John recreate all of that stuff. It would be like recreating my.emacs files where although I’m not, I don’t have a giant.emacs
⏹️ ▶️ John file. It’s reasonable size. but my BB edit setup is just too Byzantine. And most text
⏹️ ▶️ John editors have most of the features, but not all of them. And what you really need is an escape hatch, which is like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, if the editor doesn’t have this, can I just write something in Perl, in Python, in Shell script,
⏹️ ▶️ John in Swift, in language of my choice, and have it take text as input and replace
⏹️ ▶️ John the contents with this output? Most text editors have a way to do that. I have to re-implement all my things to work
⏹️ ▶️ John with the new text editor. So someday, someday, sorry, Rich, but someday Rich
⏹️ ▶️ John Siegel’s gonna die, hopefully before me because he’s older than me. So.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, I mean, he’s at least gonna retire at some point. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John or he could retire, but I think death is the only thing that’s gonna stop him
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco from developing his
⏹️ ▶️ John application because he’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco very dedicated.
⏹️ ▶️ John He’s very dedicated and I thank him for it, but someday the BBEdit
⏹️ ▶️ John train will come to an end and like Marco, I’ll have to pick a new text editor. And at that day, I’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ John be so old that I won’t be able to recreate all of my old setup and I’ll just become, I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know what I’ll become. I’ll just become like less capable on the computer. It was like, I remember when I could do
⏹️ ▶️ John this in BBEdit, but BBEdit’s gone now. So all I could do is write a Perl script.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m looking up the links for the show notes and I look up, you know, the, the text mate link,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is macromates.com. And I went and I thought, you know, what does their blog have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say about any of this? Is this really abandoned? You know, cause I feel like I haven’t seen a text mate update in years. The
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most recent blog post dated 22 of May, 2020 begins as follows. In episode 379 of ATP, both Marco Armin and John Siracusa
⏹️ ▶️ Casey describe noticeable delays and stalls after upgrading to Mac OS 10.15.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve been struggling with this issue myself, and I found several system operations that can cause delays,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which I will detail below. And then the author does. So imagine my surprise as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John is talking. And I look to see the most recent blog post on this website.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And sure enough, it literally begins in episode 379 of ATP. It’s amazing. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco remember this now. I had forgotten about this, but I did see this when the author
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrote it, when Alan Alcott wrote it. I did see this back then, but yeah, I had forgotten today about
⏹️ ▶️ John have no recollection of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t either. 379 was May 21 of 2020, and in the after show, we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about life at home status updates because COVID.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say, though, like, you know, like, text me. It really has not gotten a lot of love in many, many,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many years, but it does still work. Yeah. Like whenever Rick Siegel hopefully retires,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, BBI is not going to instantly stop working. Like in all likelihood, it will continue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to work for years until some OS change breaks it, you know, on Apple’s side.
⏹️ ▶️ John Work for two more major versions until some sandboxing thing breaks it. I mean, and he’s not the, he’s not the sole developer
⏹️ ▶️ John to be clear, but he is, you know, it’s, it’s his baby. And I do think that when he,
⏹️ ▶️ John when he finally gives it up I hope he finds it a new home, but boy, talk about a legacy
⏹️ ▶️ John code base. This is a code base that, I mean, it’s been substantially rewritten many times over, but here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I mean, I would imagine, like, you know, I can’t imagine anybody besides him, you know, taking on that crown.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s, but yeah, and that’s not really a reason not to use something. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I feel like if you look at, like, I think the safest option would probably be VS Code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because that seems to be- I don’t know, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think Bibietic can outload, Bibietic’s been around for 30 years. It’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey the competitors
⏹️ ▶️ John have come and gone. it’s competitive, oh, alpha is better. That’s the, you can extend it using Tickle. And people are like, what
⏹️ ▶️ John the hell is alpha? What’s Tickle? There have been so many competitors, Atom,
⏹️ ▶️ John the more recent, I was thinking of like, what, you might be using VS Code, Atom, Textmate. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John those editors come, they flare up people’s interest, they leave, BBI is still there. It is the
⏹️ ▶️ John rock. And eventually everything comes to an end, but come on. It’s, I mean, might as well be VI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, although I think VI is a lot easier for other people to take on the mantle of, frankly, compared to something like BB edit, but,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but still, like, I think the, you know, you can, you can look at this, like, the way I look at it as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t want to invest my like, such a such a key part of my work habits, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to invest that into something that might not have a long life. So you have to pick something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is likely to stick around for a long time. And I think you’re I think BB edit is one of those topics,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that will stick around. As long as Rick Siegel wants to be a programmer or is able to program,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that I I think it will stick around as long as possible. And then for a few years, even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco after that. But again, like TextMate really has not been worked on much in recent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years, and it’s still fine as well. So I think these things have longer lives. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if it’s fine. I definitely got some Casey vibes with both of you saying, yeah, it takes forever to launch, but once
⏹️ ▶️ John it gets running, it’s okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But, and the thing is like, when you look at something that’s made by a big company, you know, that can go both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. Like if it’s made by a big company and it’s successful, and it’s core to their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco business interests in some way, then it’s probably going to stick around for a while. Like I don’t think Microsoft is going to discontinue
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Excel and PowerPoint for quite a while. You know, I think those are pretty safe investments for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your time. Whereas you know, VS Code, like it seems like that’s serving them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty well. I think that’s probably the most likely to be long-lived
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of all these options that I see in the market today. But you’re still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the whims of a company and whatever directions it might take. If they have a leadership change, or if they start having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of bad quarters, and they got to start making cuts or whatever, there’s always risks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of that being companies too. So we’ll see what happens with all this stuff. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think either BBEdit or VS Code are both pretty safe options for a long time,
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow, it looks like Alpha made it to Mac OS X. I didn’t even realize that. Someone did Alpha Coco is a project to rewrite
⏹️ ▶️ John alpha for Mac OS X based on the Coco framework. I don’t know how old this page is, but
⏹️ ▶️ John remembers alpha except for really old school BBeta users.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The funny thing too is like the ones that I tried when I was looking for a text mate replacement,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first of all, I can’t remember either of the names. One of them was Brown and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John one of them-
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s got to be Adam. Adam had to be one of them. A-T-O-M.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it wasn’t out yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was before that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of them I think began with an S and it was really popular at the time and all of its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John configuration-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, I tried that that was that’s way earlier And all of its configuration was in one giant text
⏹️ ▶️ Marco file that opened up in the editor And it was a big pain in the butt
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I think I know the editor talking about it I’m not sure you have the name right, but I know it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was cross-platform, but I think this was even pre electron though, but yeah I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that one and there was like a sublime sublime yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s it Yeah, and there was like a there was a brown one Came out around the same time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I can’t remember what it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, this was probably around like 2010. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tried both of those and they were fine. But now, I never hear of anyone using those anymore. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the ones I tried 10 or 15 years ago, whenever. VS
⏹️ ▶️ John Code has kind of blotted out the sun for those type of editors, because once you have Microsoft funding you, it’s tough
⏹️ ▶️ John to compete with that as a small dev team.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I never would have guessed at the time that these new ones I was trying out to replace TextMate,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never would have guessed TextMate would outlive them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Or out-zombie them, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wasn’t the original VS Code, I thought that was a fork of Atom, actually, if I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think VS Code is derived from that lineage in some way. Either Atom
⏹️ ▶️ John or Sublime or something like that. All those editors are kind of the same. But VS Code has definitely gone its own way and is
⏹️ ▶️ John now incredibly full-featured, probably maybe a little bit too full-featured.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, yeah, hopefully, I’m gonna be, it’s driving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me nuts what the name of the brown one was. I got, I got. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John well, you’ll figure it out. I’m gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be like. You’ll have to remember something more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than the color. I’m gonna be like lying in bed tonight. It’s gonna be like, oh, espresso or whatever. You know, something like that. Like, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John can’t. Maybe it was,
⏹️ ▶️ John is an editor. It was a web editor, you know. It was, I forget
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco what it was derived
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from. No, but it was native. I gotta look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it up. I think espresso,
⏹️ ▶️ John CSS edit become espresso, I think, maybe.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s why it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John edit was amazing back in the day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really gotta figure out, I gotta like go back to my history, I guess if it was built and analyzed, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gotta like find whatever episode it was so I can find the link. Yeah, it’ll be in the show notes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah. Oh my. All right, anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought build and analyze fell off the internet,
⏹️ ▶️ John thought it did. Margo, like a diligent person like me, has a backup web archives of all those pages, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I do have a local, yeah, five by five,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, Dan’s taken a whole bunch of his stuff offline, but I have a backup of everything, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s right. Well, and plus we can all agree as we close that Emacs is indeed better than VI.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do not agree to that, thank you very much. VI kicks butt. Anyway, thank you so much to our sponsors
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this week, Squarespace, Collide, and Green Chef. And thank you to our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco members very much for supporting us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join, and we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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 notes
⏹️ ▶️ John at atp.fm And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you 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-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John mean to Accidental, Tech Podcasts,
Creepy vacation tech
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gotta find this. I gotta…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You’re gonna have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to let it go.
⏹️ ▶️ John Search for, um, what was it? Search for sublime, because that’s… wherever you find sublime, you’ll find the other
⏹️ ▶️ John one. I doubt that word is common in show notes, other than when you’re talking about the editor.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, while Marco’s looking for that, so we were traveling last week, as I had mentioned a couple of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey times on the show, and we were traveling just a couple of weeks before that, actually, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John and I were concurrently on separate beach vacations. Separate, but at the same time. the same
⏹️ ▶️ Casey time. And when we were at our beach house, something happened that I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey absolutely disgusted by and then forgot about it. And then it happened again when we were at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an Airbnb in northeastern Pennsylvania. And what had happened was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had, because I’m me, brought a travel router, as we talked about last
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode, I believe, or maybe the episode before. I had brought a travel Apple TV because I’m that kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of jerk, I mean, a dork. And I had plugged the travel router into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the, um, you know, into the router that was at the place, both at the beach and at the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Airbnb. And I was, I plugged the travel Apple TV into the TV, et
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cetera, et cetera. And so on both of these TVs, which I forget what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey brand the TVs were. I want to say it was like TCL or something, speaking of tickle. Um,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but they were both, you know, Roku powered TVs, you know, so they use all the Roku software
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to do it, to do all their stuff. I have no control over these TVs. You know, I, I didn’t set them up,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, I’m, I believe that they were both designed to be on the internet because the idea is if you’re a guest
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in these Airbnbs or whatever, then you could watch, you know, prime video or what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you on the TV. They’re quote unquote smart TVs, et cetera, et cetera.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m so happy for you, Marco. I am so happy for you. Breaking news. Do, do, do,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco do, do, do, do, do, do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. I did a blog post about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would never have come up with that. Although, sorry, it does make sense that it’s brown.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And the website’s totally gone. Like it’s, I guess it’s dead long, probably long dead.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sorry. That’s all right. Text made is over August 10th, 2012. Mark Raman declares.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, no, I remember.
⏹️ ▶️ John I remember it now. Now that I see the spelling. Yeah, that’s a bummer.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John uh, so I’m watching TV. No, no, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fine. I’m genuinely glad that, uh, figured it out. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am watching TV using the Apple TV on, you know, on these TCL or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Roku powered TVs. And as I’m watching, and I don’t remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I was watching something I’d seen before, something new, but one way or the other, a little banner comes up in the bottom,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like 10th or maybe 5th of the screen. And I wish I had taken a picture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it or a screenshot or what have you. I didn’t think of it at the time, but it said something like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey watch this episode from alternate providers.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What? What? What? As you’re watching it already?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I am watching something on an Apple TV that I provided,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but these TVs are creeping on the video I’m watching,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scanning the video I’m watching, doing some sort of like shizam for video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or something like that and figuring out what I’m watching and then are advertising
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me, oh, you can watch this other places. How gross
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that? That is so gross.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Not only is that so gross, but that’s not even a very good sales proposition. You’re already watching it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like why would you need to watch it somewhere else when you’re already watching it? Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I didn’t want you to
⏹️ ▶️ John go elsewhere. So I know you love to talk about TV, this is a big thing in the television industry,
⏹️ ▶️ John has been for many, many years, and it is a trend that is only increasing. And that trend is television companies
⏹️ ▶️ John realizing that they can’t make money selling televisions, they need to make money some other way. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John some of these sort of pioneer brands that you’ve mentioned, like Vizio, TCL, Roku,
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of these brands used to make televisions, but now don’t anymore. Like Vizio
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t make television hardware, they used to. Oh, is that true? I didn’t know that. that someone else makes the hardware
⏹️ ▶️ John for them and they resell it, but what is Vizio actually selling? They’re selling a software
⏹️ ▶️ John platform. And what does a software platform do? It watches what you’re watching and sells that information to other people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that business turns out to be way more lucrative than selling television sets.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the number of companies that are still willing to manufacture television sets has
⏹️ ▶️ John been shrinking and there’s sort of a race to the bottom where the less premium, let’s say,
⏹️ ▶️ John companies that make cheaper televisions that you would see at a lower price retailers,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re still out there cranking them out, but there’s a very dwindling number of companies that do that with names that you
⏹️ ▶️ John might not even recognize if you’re not into the television space. And they’re resold often under other brand names,
⏹️ ▶️ John but those companies that are reselling them are just adding the, I’m gonna say the spyware to
⏹️ ▶️ John the television sets. And you’d be like, oh, that’s bad. I wanna stay out of this market. I’m gonna buy a good TV.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the latest developments are that even the quote unquote good television makers are like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know if there’s money in making better screens anymore. LG, have you heard of LG? They make fancy OLED televisions.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re very popular. They’re very highly regarded. LG even is like, I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ John about this whole trying to make the picture quality better thing. It seems like a loser business. Can we stop
⏹️ ▶️ John making panels and instead do what Vizio does and just spy on everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John and sell software and sell the information that does that? And like Sony
⏹️ ▶️ John and these other high-end companies that wanna sell $1,000 televisions, all of them are looking at Vizio and saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John like LG, LG Display, I think has lost money for the past year. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John has not, not just not made enough profit, but literally they’ve been losing money. And Vizio, their profits
⏹️ ▶️ John are going up because they don’t make those stinky televisions anymore, they just make the spyware. And that’s a great business.
⏹️ ▶️ John So, you know, you also see the company that will give you a free television set. As long as you agree
⏹️ ▶️ John to have underneath the television a long skinny display that shows ads, like an ad banner.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey size thing that shows ads. So you get the
⏹️ ▶️ John TV for free, but you have to basically see an ad banner and it’s underneath it in a separate screen. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if you cover that screen, the television turns off or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John is where televisions are going, where it’s like the lucrative business is spying on what everybody’s watching
⏹️ ▶️ John and selling it. And only losers make screens. And it’s like, but somebody’s got to make the screens. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like a bunch of, you know, bargain-based manufacturers like, yeah, yeah, we turn out the cheapest television
⏹️ ▶️ John sets we can using whatever the most economically feasible technology is, which would be like
⏹️ ▶️ John a cheap LCD with terrible viewing angles and black levels. Yeah, we’ll make a million of those. We’ll make them in really big sizes.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll sell them to you at Super Bowl Sunday for $250 and we’ll spy on everything you watch for the rest of your entire life. And
⏹️ ▶️ John Sony’s over here trying to make $4,000 television sets with Samsung displays in them and they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not making any money. And Vizio is like, ha ha, you losers, we just spy on everybody.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s really got me worried because like having that be a market, fine. But having that market
⏹️ ▶️ John become the only market, the only way you can buy, kind of like how you can’t buy a dumb TV now, you can only
⏹️ ▶️ John buy smart ones. Soon, I fear it will be, you can only buy a television with
⏹️ ▶️ John a crappy screen that spies on you and that’s literally your only choice. So I’m like, Sony, hold strong.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we may have lost LG. LG may be deciding, yeah, we’re not gonna try to make better screens anymore, that business sucks.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that will mean no more advancement in OLED technology from LG and I’ll leave
⏹️ ▶️ John basically only Samsung in the entire world trying to make screens that have better picture year
⏹️ ▶️ John over year and selling those screens to Sony and itself. It’s depressing. So, yeah, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John seen a glimpse of the future with that Roku.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And I don’t want it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, that’s not a new thing. These things have always been spying on everything that you watch. They’re just now being more blatant about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, exactly. And actually, I have a corollary, like ethical question for you. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this Airbnb that I was staying in for a couple of nights last week, It was a little teeny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tiny cottage off of Lake Wampapack. It’s it, it was probably 600, 900
⏹️ ▶️ Casey square feet or something like that. It was, you know, two beds, one bath, a little teeny tiny kitchen and a little teeny tiny living
⏹️ ▶️ Casey area. Well, in a closet was there like cable motor or what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you and an Eero, which I was like, Oh, that’s, that’s cool. I’m happy to see that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a fleeting moment, I thought rather than plug my travel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey router into the Eero, which is what I ended up doing. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m double-nadding, but that doesn’t matter because nothing is inbound, it’s no big deal. But, you know, it’s not as direct
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as I would want it to be. What I did was, or what I considered, unplugging
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Eero and replacing it temporarily with my travel router.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the reason I didn’t was because I noticed that they had a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera mounted on the external portion of the house to see the front door, And I also noticed that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their like mini split system, you know The thing that John should be doing to his house their mini split system had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what appeared to be a Wi-Fi icon on it So it appeared that there is some sort
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of remote control or at least monitoring for the mini split And I had a feeling that if I unplug their
⏹️ ▶️ Casey router, you know Obviously the Wi-Fi network information is going to change and all of these things will die
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and the Airbnb Actual owners will probably poop themselves. And so I didn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it it? Is that what did I make the ethically correct choice or is it YOLO? You know, who cares unplug
⏹️ ▶️ John You made the practically correct choice because you know sometimes when you unplug the router that is actually connected to the ISP,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey is like, Oh, I don’t know where the hell this new router is.
⏹️ ▶️ John Call our customer support line. I know it’s not like that in most places, but I would never risk that because then you’re without
⏹️ ▶️ John internet access and you have to admit to the people who you were
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey renting the house from that you screwed it up.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They’re afraid of
⏹️ ▶️ John breaking their cameras. I don’t want to A, be without internet and B, have to explain that I was messing around stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is totally fair. But leaving that aside, let’s assume, which I wouldn’t be, but let’s assume I could,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I could guarantee that the internet would come back. What is it still ethically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John questionable choice? As long
⏹️ ▶️ John as you put it back, as long as you can successfully put it back the way it was, if you screw up your own internet when you’re there, that’s your own problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the problem arises because A, you’ll be without internet and B, you will refuse to be without internet, so then you will
⏹️ ▶️ John have to go crawling to the owner and say, I screwed up your internet. Yeah, fair. That’s why people lock these things
⏹️ ▶️ John in a shed outdoors.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, yeah, exactly. Marco, what’s your ruling on this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would, I would say in any kind of rental situation, you’re better off not messing with it. It like that’s, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you to mess with.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you feel like it was inappropriate for me to hang my travel router off of the Eero or is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that acceptable in your mind?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That I think is fine, but I think as soon as you start attaching things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to their network or modifying their network in such a way that you’re running the the risk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of causing problems, at that point, you become a thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco percent liable for anything that happens as a result. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I wouldn’t probably mess with it myself, just
⏹️ ▶️ John because- You would mess with it if it didn’t work, though. That’s the thing. You get in there and it’s like, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John this wifi is so bad, it might as well not even exist. And then suddenly you’re very willing to mess with it. You’re like, it’s already
⏹️ ▶️ John broken. I can’t possibly make it work. It already doesn’t do the thing it’s supposed to do. So that’s when you
⏹️ ▶️ John get in there and start trying to find where the router is and you find it locked in a shed and then you cry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It would have to be so bad that I also couldn’t use the built-in just LTE
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5G connections on my phone. So I would rather just use my phone and tether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it with a laptop than deal with someone’s bad Wi-Fi if my phone works well at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all. Now, if you’re somewhere where you don’t have reception.
⏹️ ▶️ John course, of course, we would all just love to use the phone but then of course your vacation house is in a place with no signal,
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s not an option either.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that becomes a problem then. So yeah, look, you gotta do what you gotta do. Like, internet connectivity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a basic need. It’s like, well, if the toilet’s broken, you’re not gonna just not flush the toilet all weekend.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, you’ll make it work. Similarly, yeah, like, if there is no internet connectivity, you’re gonna do what you gotta do as a nerd
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make it work for you and your family, but.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Including finding
⏹️ ▶️ John neighbors without a protected wifi, which I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey way back in the day
⏹️ ▶️ John when we were going on my Long Island vacations. The houses didn’t even have wifi, but some of the
⏹️ ▶️ John neighbors did, and some of them didn’t have passwords. that we would sit like in the room closest to them or go in the backyard
⏹️ ▶️ John against the fence to get signal. Yeah, you gotta do what you gotta do.