575: Walk a Little Faster
22 Feb 2024Three weeks into the Apple Vision Pro, OLED motion, PQ3, and experiments with a LOT of megapixels.
Episode Description:
- Pre-show:
- Vision Pro comfort
- ATP Movie Club: Steve Jobs
- Follow-up:
- Vision Pro motion blur (via Chase)
- Vision Pro and warped images
- Eyes as input vs. output (via Tony DiTaranto)
- Fitts’s Law and the Dock
- Apple 🤝🏻 Qualcomm
- Apple & Patents
- Mangets & Compasses (via Harvey Simon)
- Line/letter of credit (via Brian Coffey)
- Vision Pro
- Personas
- Apple defends against future iMessage attacks
- Ask ATP:
- How do we evangelize Mac-assed Mac apps? (via Ian Malczewski)
- If we could get one new API for our apps, what would it be? (via Julian Gamble)
- Could Marco best/first/favorite Phish concerts? (via Winnie Lewis)
- Post-show: Using a high-end camera and gear for Vision Pro panoramas
Sponsored by:
- Celtreos: An incredible shoot-em-up with 12 stages, a huge soundtrack, and tons of gameplay features!
- Squarespace: Save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain using code ATP.
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Chapters
- Vision Pro, 3 weeks in
- ATP Movie Club: Steve Jobs
- OLED motion blur
- AVP display warping 🖼️
- Listener job: choral conductor
- Fitts’s Law vs. Dock
- Qualcomm through Mar. 2027
- Apple rewards patent-filing
- Sponsor: Celtreos
- Magnets vs. Apple Watch
- Letter-of-credit follow-up
- Personas
- Sponsor: Squarespace (code ATP)
- PQ3 for iMessage
- #askatp: Mac-assed Mac apps
- #askatp: Apple API requests
- #askatp: Best/first/favorite Phish concerts
- Ending theme
- 100MP in Vision Pro 🖼️
Vision Pro, 3 weeks in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, are we all returning our vision pros, as the news stories
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem to indicate, as the big wave?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is what you decide to do to start the show. I was saving this, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey now you’re just going to drop this bomb right up front.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, you already returned yours?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, of course not. But I was trying very hard to make it sound believable. I’m a terrible liar, so I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think I succeeded, but I was trying very hard. No, I didn’t return mine. I mean, truth be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told, now we are getting into a topic that I don’t think you intended, but it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exceedingly overpriced. It is exceedingly heavy. I don’t think my particular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nose construction is terribly compatible with it, and I’m stubborn and obstinately
⏹️ ▶️ Casey refusing to use the probably more comfortable two-sided strap. I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the crank strap. I feel like my particular nose construction is that all of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the weight really wants to rest on my nose. Part of the problem is, and I’ve heard other people not complain as much
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about the nose thing, but complain about the fact that the Vision Pro really wants
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sit lower on your face than I think I would choose to naturally put it. And so if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I put it where I think is most comfortable and not on like, I don’t know, my nose ridge or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever, I’m sure there’s an anatomical term for it, but if I sit it where I wanna sit it, then it’s like, please move the headset
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down, it’s too high, or I forgot the messages. But if you have a Vision Pro, you’ve seen it, and if you’ve seen any of the videos, you’ve probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro equivalent of your hand is covering up the face ID camera on your iPad Pro?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yep, yep, yep. Exactly it. Exactly it. I could not think of a better analogy. And so, I have to have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it ride a little bit lower than I want. And so, for me, all of the weight tends
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sit on my nose unless I really crank the crank strap really tight,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in which case then I can transition some of that weight onto my forehead or sometimes my cheekbones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s better. Yeah, I was, I was at, I was in a room at the library again today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Uh, and yeah, after like an hour and a half, two hours, it, it was, it was hurting my schnoz a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, and comically, uh, Aaron hadn’t had a chance to try it until this past weekend. We’ve just been so very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey busy. Um, and for her, all of the weight was on her
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheekbones and, and immediately I knew I should have put the, the dual strap or whatever it’s called on there for her. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, we just wanted to go plow ahead with what I was trying to show her. And she, it was so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uncomfortable for her that she ended up like, you know, having her pointers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as like load bearing fingers under the Vision Pro just to keep it from like slamming into her cheekbones.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I mean, I don’t think Erin has exceedingly prominent cheekbones, you know, I think, you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey know, they’re regular-ish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cheekbones. Well, this is, this is part of what the different, like did you see people linked around that there was a thread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Reddit where the people were compiling basically what the light seal sizes mean.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I did not see this. So there’s the two digits and then the N or the W at the end. They’ve figured out through various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sleuthing and trial and error and stuff that it basically encodes… Each digit is separate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s not 23 millimeter versus 33 millimeter. It’s the two and the one or whatever. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are two different indicators. They can both change up or down. And one of the factors… I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco forgot the specifics, but one of the factors is whether it sits high or low on your cheekbones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like that. Hmm. And so chances are this is just, you know, for Erin to comfortably wear it, she
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would most likely need a different light seal.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which I would totally buy. That being said, the scan that she did said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same as me. That doesn’t mean that that’s, you know, the right answer. It’s just the automated scan says
⏹️ ▶️ Casey she and I have the same one. But it very well could be that if we had all of them arrayed out in front of us, I mean, hell, maybe even not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mine would be different. But I concur that, you know, it’s very likely that maybe a different light seal would work better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for her. but certainly if she were to buy her own based only on the experience she had by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey scanning her face, she would end up with the same one I’ve got.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think one of the things that’s hurting the Vision Pro initial sales
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and reactions is they’ve made this system so complicated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of how to fit it and it seems like whatever the app is saying should fit you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe is not always accurate or maybe they just are not good at presenting alternatives to people or whatever it is. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a highly, you know, fit dependent device. And I was thinking like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why do we not hear about this so much with the Quest headsets? I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, obviously part of it is I think we are applying stricter standards to Apple because everyone does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their stuff always gets more scrutiny. But I think part of it might also just be like, there’s such a weight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco difference. Like Apple chose to make a very high end headset. It’s a very heavy headset compared to its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco competitors and maybe therefore it is more sensitive to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different fit adjustments. And I was thinking, is it a mistake to have made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro in such a way that the light seal or whatever the fit mechanics
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it are, are not adjustable on the device? Now obviously that would introduce
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more mechanical complexity, probably a little bit more weight as a result of that, but would it have been a better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco choice, I know Apple would never do this, but would it have been a better choice to have like some adjustment knobs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or whatever like on the actual light seal to have it be somewhat adjustable?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, but it seems like there’s a lot of areas where Apple’s approach to this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is you find your perfect fit or more often we automatically find it for you. Here it is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco period. And like if your perfect fit is a little bit different, they’re just like, no, this is your perfect fit,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco period. and there’s just no,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alternative, right? I wonder if that’s something that they’ll tweak over time.
⏹️ ▶️ John So a third-party opportunity though, it’s kind of like how third-party sell tips for the AirPods Pro, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like old, you can buy foamy tips or plastic-y tips or tips where you can take a multiple of your ear. Because
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I know, there is no weird DRM or parts pairing with the LightShield. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John fabric and plastic and a couple of little magnets. I would imagine that if this product ever becomes popular
⏹️ ▶️ John enough, that it can sustain a third-party ecosystem for light shields, like they start selling to lots of
⏹️ ▶️ John people, there’ll be third party things that you can snap in there that are very differently
⏹️ ▶️ John shaped, maybe are adjustable. You know, like I think the rigidity of the main
⏹️ ▶️ John screen part is tough to change at this point in the technology curve because there’s a lot of stuff
⏹️ ▶️ John going on in there that really kind of has to be carefully aligned. But the replaceable light shield is
⏹️ ▶️ John actually a good design for if not Apple doing this for third parties
⏹️ ▶️ John to say, Yeah, we’ll sell you a thing for less than $200 that goes between you and the main
⏹️ ▶️ John unit. And maybe you can find one of these that fits you better.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, certainly like the Quest line does have many third-party like, you know, head gaskets or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re called. Head gaskets,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah. That’s it. It’s in your car engine and it’s on your VR headset too. Yeah, much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco easier to replace the VR headset ones though. Very true.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I don’t know, it’s, I do think that, I don’t know how I got on this tangent, which I believe I did to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey myself, but I do really like this device. I wish it was cheaper,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I wish it was lighter, but it is really cool. And since I do feel
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it is a compulsory purchase for this, for my job, both in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey terms of ATP and CallSheed, I feel like I kind of had to spend the money and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I will whine about the money I’ve spent until the end of time because, hi, have we met? Hi, this is Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I will edit out half of it until the end of time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, fair. But I do really love the device. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is incredible for media consumption. I think you and I will never see eye to eye as to whether or not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s good as a secondary monitor for your, or a replacement monitor for your Mac. And we’re gonna talk about that more later. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is extremely, extremely cool. And no, I don’t plan, I mean, my time has run out at this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey point, or I think is running out or has run out, but I don’t plan to return it. And I do really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it. It is not a perfect product by any stretch. And I don’t know if I’d go so far as to say I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love it quite yet, but I do really, really like it. And I’m enjoying having it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at hand and using it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco See, I think it’s cool, but I’m treating mine, I’m ending up using it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more like a dev kit than like a product that’s going to really have a huge place in my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life so far. Because, I mean, first of all, look, Apple reaped what it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sowed. There are no apps. There’s no games. There’s very little content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple did this 100% to themselves. The developers are just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco largely not there. So there’s not much for me to do with it besides
⏹️ ▶️ Marco watch movies. And the reality is I don’t watch that many movies. And when I do watch movies,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m rarely watching them alone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Yeah, yeah, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure I’m gonna have all the use for it. That’s not to say that no one else has use for this product. Just me, like I don’t have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ton of use for it. I was really hoping the Mac screen angle of it would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be very useful to me, especially now, as I’m in this weird housing transitional period where I really want a big monitor,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I can’t really fit one in this rental house. There’s all sorts of uses that I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might be able to squeeze out of it that ended up not really working that well for me. So for me, it’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just a dev kit, and it’s a dev kit for a branch of my app that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not really working on yet because I don’t have time because I’m working on the iPhone version. And I think this is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a story we keep hearing, something like that where like it’s going to be difficult again over time it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be difficult for developers to justify investing time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the into the Vision OS platform if there’s no customer base for it and it’s a chicken-and-egg problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if there’s not a lot of apps and content on it it’s gonna be difficult for a lot of people to justify buying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one especially with the other you know hard to justify factors like the price and the single person experience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know the some of the you know version one challenges limitations. Maybe I’m totally wrong
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe this is selling like gangbusters way above Apple’s expectations and maybe they can keep thinking that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t need developers. But the reality is what Apple has shown in their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actions around apps for policy over and over again is they believe that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grace us with a platform full of users and we should kiss their feet and thank them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and give them a third of our money or whatever you know because these are their customers, they’re bringing to us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Effectively, therefore, we are not really bringing a ton of value to the platform. They are bringing the platform full of users, and we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should be very thankful for that. And I think what we’re seeing here is maybe this is demonstrating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the value of developers to the platform. If not a lot of people are finding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much to do with it, that’s because there’s not a lot of apps and content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for it. And that’s because there’s not a lot of third-party development for it. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe, I mean, I know Apple will not change their app store policies, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe at least this helps show them a little bit like kind of where it hurts because they just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did this huge launch of this huge platform and it’s, I think it might be maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little below expectations. It’s probably too early to say, but I’m kind of getting that feeling like, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they thought there would be a lot more apps than there are. And I think they thought there would be a lot more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developer interest than there has been. Maybe they thought there’d be a lot more content deals from the big content publishers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff. And maybe that’s not really happening as quickly or yet either. This platform is starving
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for apps and content. It just, it’s starving for them. It’s just not there yet. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hope it’s coming, but what if it’s not? Like Apple’s gonna have to just make this work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco largely on their own, because they’ve done such an effective job of alienating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone else in the industry.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Other than broad changes to App Store policy, like, you know, like C-level changes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not sure what I would have done differently, but I do think, and I can’t help but wonder if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey seeding dev kits to a handful of indies would have gone a long way, especially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if it was in concert with, talk about it, you know, because I think the problem is if they had seeded,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let’s say underscore for the sake of discussion, they, they shortly would have said, well, here’s your dev kit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You may tell no one. You know, and, and then that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not really accomplishing much. Like, yes, then that gets, you know, an even more polished version of widget Smith in the store
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on day one, then was already there, which is good. But I think the better approach would have been to hand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey underscore one and say, go to town, man, talk about it. Get people excited. If you can’t, well, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, not in edict, but you know what I mean? Like, you know, if he’s going bananas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doing all of this work and having all this fun and, and underscore would talk about it and underscore would be effusive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it, not because he’s full of garbage, he’s not at all, but because he’s just a person who finds the good in things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so I think, you know, you seed an underscore, you seed a James Thompson or whatever, and,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you start to build a little more enthusiasm in the indie community. And I think, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, admittedly, as I’m saying this, I’m like, well, of course you would think that cause you’re in the indie community and maybe that’s true, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. I feel like it would have done a lot to build enthusiasm amongst anyone other than Disney
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and like unity or whoever it was that I don’t even know if they got dev kits, I just have to assume. But you know, whoever it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that got the dev kits, it certainly didn’t seem to be indies from what I can tell. And I, I feel like that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a missed opportunity. And it could have been that they wanted to, and they just couldn’t produce them in time or something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey held it up. I don’t know. But it sure seems like if you were doing these labs, which admittedly were pretty controlled,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by the way, I went to a lab, but I can’t tell you anything else. You know, even despite these controlled labs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like if you had those labs, you must have had the quantity of devices at a stage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in which they were complete enough that you could have seeded a handful of like trusted Indies as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well as the Disneys of the world. And I wish they did and they didn’t. And so like you said, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reaping what they sowed and there isn’t a lot on there. There’s really not. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think part of this is exacerbated by your average iPad app is really not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey great on the Vision Pro in part because all the iPad apps are shown in light mode and all the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey apps, the native apps are not literally in dark mode, but effectively in dark mode. And part
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of it is because these iPad apps are designed for touch targets that are much smaller than eye targets.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I found that with almost every iPad app, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often prohibitively difficult to grab the right target without using a cursor of some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort. And Slack is to me the epitome of this. And I think I’ve already brought this up several times, but like changing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between different slacks, which is something I do constantly in that app is very, very difficult. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t necessarily fault slack for this, but it’s just that the targets are too small
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then it becomes difficult to use slack. And then it’s like, well, I’m just going to get my work done on my computer then.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And, and so all of these iPad apps are kind of, eh, and there’s not many vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pro apps because none of us had them. And so now what? And it’s like, it’s exactly what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said, Marco, like, where do you go from here? Apple, what are you going to do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What we’ve seen is like, I think the launch of the Vision Pro kind of is that dev
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously a lot of people are buying them for their own uses, their entertainment use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of it just kind of status or YouTubers, you know, playing with it, but like whatever it is, a lot of people buying them as early adopters.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I also think a lot of the early purchases are companies and developers who
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are wanting to start experimenting with it or get on board with it or try to look at porting their apps or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And this is just, I think this is their dev kit program largely. And it just so happens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you’ll also see them like, you know, people watching movies in first class on airplanes as well. The way it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is now with there being almost no software and almost no content, it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a failure per se. It just really hurts the argument to buy it. And it really hurts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the experience of owning it when, you know, I think people are predisposed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume any new tech product is a fad that will fail and then laugh at it. That’s a very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco common thing in media and tech commentary culture. And I think if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone who buys the Vision Pro at first ends up not using it very much a few weeks later
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because they kind of ran out of stuff to do on it, that’s not great for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reputation of that product and and its launch. None of this should come as a surprise to Apple. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they saw coming up to the launch, like they knew how many apps there weren’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, they knew which apps were being built native and which ones weren’t. They knew, you know, Netflix didn’t have their native
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app submitted to them or whatever. Like, you know, all the things that are missing, like they knew that going into it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it isn’t like this is a surprise to Apple. Again, I hope that they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are stepping on the gas behind the scenes in terms of their own content efforts. they’re going to have to do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most of this on their own. They’re not going to get a lot of help from third party developers or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco third party content makers on this. They have to be making a ton of the 3d content.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you’re making a ton of the environment content, any kind of, you know, experiential, you know, virtual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco travel stuff, they have to be the ones to kickstart that themselves because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one else is going to do it with these numbers. And with Apple having, you know, really alienated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many people over the last decade.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it’s funny too, and we should probably move on from this, but I think what’s kind of unfortunate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it is even though I’m, you know, kvetching a little bit about everything, like this is an amazing device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Leaving aside the physical comfort, which is a big deal, leaving aside the cost, which is a big deal, like if you can get past
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that or just forget it for a minute, this is a truly incredible device. And you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 3D stuff, like consuming a 3D movie in it is very cool, but the immersive content of which there is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very little, but we’re hearing more and more rumblings that that there’s more coming, in fact, statements even, that there’s more coming.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The immersive content is, it’s, what is the Tim phrase? It’s blow away. It really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just knocks your socks off.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Was that a forestallism? I think it was a forestallism.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Maybe it was. I think you might be right, actually, now that you say that. I think you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has caught on since then. It has spread.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you might be right. But anyways, the immersive stuff is just, it’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s tremendous. And for me, and I’m not saying it’s true for you, Marco, or anyone else, but for me,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I really like the Mac virtual display thing and universal control. It works pretty darn well. It’s not perfect,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but it works pretty darn well. And so, and briefly using this on a train a few weeks ago
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was amazing. And so this is a truly incredible, incredible device.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even though we’ve kind of accidentally enumerated some of the crappy parts of it, it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is incredible. And whether or not it’s the future, it is a future
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I am on board with and is super neat. And I don’t want to lose sight of that because I think we’re coming across this too grumpy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey old men, which is accurate, but there’s, there’s a good side to this as well that we’re not giving out, we’re not shining enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey light on, like it is incredible. And if you are lucky enough to be able to have one,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is very, very cool. And I really think that there’s a lot of potential here. It’s just a question
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of whether or not we’ll realize it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I think it’s going to have a slower start than anyone thought. Like, you know, cause we, we were just saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few weeks ago, like this, this is going to be, they’re going to sell as many as they can make. it’s gonna be backordered for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the whole year, it’s gonna be backordered, like it’s gonna be supply constrained or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I just looked and I can pick one of these up tomorrow or I can have it shipped to me next week.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not good for the sales figures, I think.
ATP Movie Club: Steve Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of things with a lot of potential that may or may not have been realized, two different things. First of all, the 2015
⏹️ ▶️ Casey movie, Steve Jobs, and second of all, our new member special about that movie. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we recorded this month’s members only special about Steve Jobs, the 2015 movie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Michael Fassbender and Kate Winslet and a bunch of other people. people. This is a movie
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Steve Jobs, what, four years after he passed away. And so we, like I said, we did a member special on it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you are not a member, John, what do you need to do in order to become a member?
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re waking me up from my slumber to pitch the membership program?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, man. Hey, you could have bought a Vision Pro. You could have been a part of this. You opted out of the conversation, sir.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you just got through telling me why I shouldn’t get one.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was trying to bring it back around. That was the whole point. But if you want to get one, it’s really easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John It sounds like there’s no apps for it. Unless Unless I want to watch Major League Soccer, games that have already taken
⏹️ ▶️ John place, because Apple just announced they’re providing that content.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I put you to sleep before I talked about the good parts, apparently, because there are good parts for sure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Atp.fm slash join if you’d like to become a member. Not all of our member specials are about movies, but some of them
⏹️ ▶️ John are and this one is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Great sales pitch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is accurate. It is accurate. No, it was it was a lot of fun watching this and talking about it. And I don’t want to give anything away. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, remember that if you go to atp.fm slash join, You can join on a monthly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or yearly basis. You can also go to hp.fm. Did I say com a minute ago? Whoops.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Anyway, hp.fm slash a gift, if I’m not mistaken, to gift yourself or someone else,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a membership hint, hint, hint. Uh, but yeah, we had a lot of fun recording this one. And if you become a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey member for any amount of time, you can go back in the history books and S and listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey any of our members specials. And you can do that as long as you are a member. So you can check that out. We’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one a month for almost a year now, I think, or something like that. I don’t have a count in front of me, but we have a fair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bit of member specials in the can at this point. So check it out. ATP Movie Club, Steve Jobs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And we’ll put links in the show notes to the relevant information. atp.fm join
OLED motion blur
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let’s start some follow-up at 30 minutes into recording. Chase
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writes, regarding the blur in the Vision Pro, when you turn your head, I’m pretty sure that this is just typical sample and hold display
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blur. This also affects televisions and where the idea of motion resolution comes from.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Impulse displays like CRTs and plasma have much higher motion resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To combat this, LCDs can use backlight strobing and OLEDs can use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey black frame insertion. And Blurbusters, which apparently is a website I learned today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a really good resource where you can read about blur of all kinds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A lot of headsets like the Vision, or the, excuse me, the Quest 3, use very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey low persistence to get much better motion resolution. The downside is in brightness. The upside of the micro
⏹️ ▶️ Casey LED displays and pancake lenses is that it allows the displays to be very close to the eyes, and having the weight
⏹️ ▶️ Casey closer to the head is better for comfort. The downside of pancake lenses is that they swallow much more light of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the light coming off the displays than Fresnel. I think it’s Fresnel.
⏹️ ▶️ John Fresnel, yeah. It’s those lenses that are flat, but it looks like they have a bunch of concentric circle ridges on them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so, or other aspheric lenses will. So, even if the displays are 5000 nits, once you add color filters,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey polarizers, and the pancake lenses, the brightness we see can still end up very low. The other consumer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey headset using pancake lenses and micro OLED displays is the big screen beyond three, which I had never heard of,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it is very dim, especially if you turn down the brightness to get acceptable persistence. Chase continues,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe Apple is pushing persistence further than they should in order to get more brightness back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because they want to push HDR as a thing on the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John So on this topic, I’m for the motion blur in motion. I wish I had known to look for that
⏹️ ▶️ John when I had my demo because I would have. I didn’t notice it, but clearly Marco has
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’ve heard it from other people as well. And I do wonder if I still wonder if this is what they’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about. So the sample and hold thing, this happens on OLED TVs as well, the deal
⏹️ ▶️ John with OLEDs is you light up a pixel and it stays whatever color you made it
⏹️ ▶️ John until you change it and it changes color really, really fast. And you’re like, that sounds great. This is a great display
⏹️ ▶️ John technology. What’s the problem? The problem is if you watch something like a 24
⏹️ ▶️ John frames per second movie, it will show a frame and the whole TV will
⏹️ ▶️ John show that frame, just the exact frame, exactly the way it is until the next
⏹️ ▶️ John frame comes. And again, you may be thinking, that sounds like what it’s supposed to do, right? Well, not really,
⏹️ ▶️ John because if you think about what a movie projector does, or what a CRT television does, is both of those things
⏹️ ▶️ John will show the frame, and then they’ll be, it will basically like, blast it onto
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen, like boom, here’s the frame. And then the frame will either fade away, or quickly be replaced by black,
⏹️ ▶️ John like with plasma, if you watch it in slow motion, it blasts color at the screen, and then it just fades away. Sometimes plasmas
⏹️ ▶️ John would blast some of the color, Then the second part of the color, and both of those will fade until
⏹️ ▶️ John the next frame appears. And a movie projector would show one frame of film, but then there’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be nothing as the next frame slides into view, and then it will blast that frame on.
⏹️ ▶️ John So what it’s really showing you is bright light, bright light, bright light, bright light. And in between
⏹️ ▶️ John the bright light, there’s either total blackness or a fade to black. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John think what our brain does during these intervals is say, okay, well, there’s like a train going across the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John bright light. Oh, there’s the train. And then there’s nothing or blackness. And then
⏹️ ▶️ John a second picture of the train appears. And now it’s moved a little bit to the right and our brain goes Oh, in between when I saw that first picture of the train,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then there was blackness. And then I saw the second picture of the train, I guess it must have moved between those two parts with
⏹️ ▶️ John sample and hold on an OLED where it just shows the train in the first position and just holds it there for 1 24th of a
⏹️ ▶️ John second, and then immediately shows the train in the new position, what it looks like to us and you will see
⏹️ ▶️ John this on an OLED television if you have it set up quote unquote correctly, Is it stuttery? It looks like it’s moving in segments.
⏹️ ▶️ John It looks like chunk, chunk, chunk, chunk. It’s like, why doesn’t it look smooth? I watch the same movie in the movie theater, the train smoothly
⏹️ ▶️ John moves from left to right. But suddenly when I watch it on my OLED TV, it’s stuttering or something? And it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John stuttering, it is carefully, if you have it set up correctly, it’s showing 1 24th of a second
⏹️ ▶️ John and then 1 24th. The thing is it never goes black between the frames. It instantly changes from frame number
⏹️ ▶️ John one to frame number two. Instead of showing frame number one for a tiny fraction of a second and then showing blackness,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then showing the next frame. So this has been a thing for headsets since they’ve been rolled out. And
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the innovations of Oculus, you can see John Carmack talking about this and everything is like, we need displays that can
⏹️ ▶️ John blast that frame really brightly for a tiny, tiny fraction of a second, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John fade to black and do nothing until the next frame is ready, because we want the brain to
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially fill in the blanks. Because if we show the frame the whole time until the next one is ready, even though we
⏹️ ▶️ John can do that with OLED screens, it looks jerky because your brain doesn’t get a chance to fill
⏹️ ▶️ John in any of the intermediary spots. Like if you think about the train moving, you see the train in position one and train in position two,
⏹️ ▶️ John but if you blank out in between then, your brain will fill in train in position 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, your brain will fill those in for
⏹️ ▶️ John you. Those frames don’t exist, but your brain will fill you them in. But if you never do that, your brain will say,
⏹️ ▶️ John train is in position one, still in position one, still in position one. Oh my God, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John in position two. What happened to between?
⏹️ ▶️ John instantly moved to position two and that appears jerky. This is a big thing with OLED televisions, which is why
⏹️ ▶️ John some people say, I have to turn on motion smoothing. I can’t have it set up quote unquote correctly because it looks wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John to me. Because when there’s a slow panning shot, I see every one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John 124th frames and it looks jerky to me. So that’s what I would expect
⏹️ ▶️ John you would see in the headset if that was the problem. Marco would be saying, I turned my head and everything looks jerky,
⏹️ ▶️ John but that’s not what people are saying. They’re saying it looks blurry.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the same thing. Maybe it’s a misinterpretation. Again, I wish I had known to look for this. I didn’t notice either jerkiness
⏹️ ▶️ John or blurriness, but my eyes aren’t great and it was just a half an hour demo. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John interested to see how this develops, but this story about Apple pushing brightness rings true to
⏹️ ▶️ John me because things are very bright in there. And obviously you can get more brightness by holding that
⏹️ ▶️ John image longer and not fading to black between, or not fading to black as long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m curious, John, because when I went from Plasma to OLED, I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this too, where, I remember watching The Office, this regular TV show shot, I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco assume on film or whatever. But I remember panning shots, I noticed immediately the difference. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh wait, motion looks bad on OLED. Everything else looked great, but motion looked worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And my OLED, it’s probably now seven or eight years old, so it’s nowhere near
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cutting edge now. But I’m wondering, do modern OLEDs today, are they better with things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco black frame insertion? Because I believe mine was one of the first ones supported it, but it just is not fast enough of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a TV. Like I tried it and it just looked terrible. I could almost see the black frames. Like it was, it was not,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was not smooth enough. Is it better now? So modern
⏹️ ▶️ John TVs are better at black frame insertion than your old one was, but still not good enough that I think you would
⏹️ ▶️ John ever want to use it. Cause here’s the nature of the nature of OLEDs is they change
⏹️ ▶️ John really fast. And I think that makes it harder to do black frame insertion. Like the way
⏹️ ▶️ John they do it now to try to make it better is they’re like double or triple the frame rate so that the black frames are like faster.
⏹️ ▶️ John But OLEDs quote unquote problem is they change so fast. Like LCDs, there’s all these tricks we
⏹️ ▶️ John have to play to make the pixels change from one color to another really fast. OLEDs, you don’t need to play any tricks. They change
⏹️ ▶️ John really fast. So that means they’re changing really fast to blackness, which means you have only
⏹️ ▶️ John a brief time that the light exists, and then immediately it’s completely 100% black. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s why you felt like you could see the blackness because it’s not like it smoothly fades like a CRT, like
⏹️ ▶️ John a dying star. That’s not how it works.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if we crank the frame rate up enough, can it fade to black between each frame?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it’s really fast. But anyway, like-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saying like, can you just insert like, you know, a faded frame and then another faded frame and like, I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John of a frame rate. Yeah, so what you’re getting at there is alternate solutions, which is basically what they do. But just to finish
⏹️ ▶️ John the black frame insertion, there are ones now that are fast enough that you can’t see a flickering, but they do hit the brightness. and for
⏹️ ▶️ John the most part you don’t want to make your TV dimmer, especially OLEDs, right? Because
⏹️ ▶️ John up until recently, OLEDs have not been, you know, people would consider them not bright enough for a very bright
⏹️ ▶️ John room. Now they are very bright, but then their competition is brighter still. Anyway, what they
⏹️ ▶️ John actually do, the actual solution to the stuttering problem is, the good televisions have essentially added
⏹️ ▶️ John a form of motion smoothing that is like the most delicate form. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t detect it as a soap opera effect, but it smooths that out just enough
⏹️ ▶️ John for it to not look jumpy to you. So it’s basically like motion smoothing, but turned down to
⏹️ ▶️ John the lowest possible setting, the lower than you’d ever imagine. And that basically cures
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem. And what that is doing is instead of making faded frames, it is essentially interpolating between frames, but
⏹️ ▶️ John just barely, just barely enough to make it, this doesn’t take much, 24 is close. Like if
⏹️ ▶️ John the motion picture, or even 30 frames, which is probably what the office was, you don’t need much more frame
⏹️ ▶️ John rate above that, They don’t need to fill in a lot for it to just smooth out I still watch
⏹️ ▶️ John mine in straight-up 24 frames per second mode I can still see it on slow panning shots and movies
⏹️ ▶️ John sometimes But it doesn’t bother me as much as it bothers some people But yeah That’s one of the reasons you want a fancy TV because they
⏹️ ▶️ John will have a setting that says motion smoothing for people who hate motion smoothing and it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John the Turn it up to one or low or super low or whatever and sometimes they also separate
⏹️ ▶️ John the different aspects of motion smoothing so you don’t have to apply both of them at the same time, or you can set them to different
⏹️ ▶️ John values. That is essentially the solution to dealing with 24 frames per second
⏹️ ▶️ John content if you are sensitive to it, or 30 frames per second in the case of the Office, I imagine.
AVP display warping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Speaking of, you know, display technology and screens and trade-offs and the Vision Pro, as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we were speaking about a minute ago, there’s been this great series, you know, ever since Vision Pro was announced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything, that there’s a blog called KG on Tech by someone named Carl Gutag,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Carl goes through it and is very knowledgeable about VR and displays
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hardware and optics and, you know, how all this stuff works. This kind of helps show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the various trade-offs involved in the Vision Pro’s screens and optics and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what it does, why it is limited in certain ways, what the other, you know, headsets
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Quest and other things, like what they do sometimes the same way or certain choices they make differently
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and why they choose differently and what the trade-offs are there. It’s very, very interesting. So Carl had this article
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other day about some of the trade-offs about the resolution inside the Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there was a shot in the iFixit Teardown video, the second iFixit Teardown, where they actually show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the raw image on the actual little tiny screen panel. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco image looks like it’s being viewed through a fisheye lens. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco curved, it’s warped, with a whole bunch of resolution spent on the middle of it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and towards the edges it warps out. The screens have to kind of warp the image to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up for what the lenses in front of them are going to do as they project the image
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around to it so it looks like a giant field of view around your eye to give you that whole immersive effect. Since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the image on the screens has that fisheye warping effect,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever is in the center of the screen has way more resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than what is in the periphery of each eye. So I think this kind of helps
⏹️ ▶️ Marco explain first of all some of the you know, optical effects that you see when you’re using a Vision Pro. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, I think this might be part of my problem with the Max Screen Mode. Whatever you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looking at in the Vision Pro, when you are looking straight ahead, that, it has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way more pixels, like, per degree than whatever is on the edge of the screen. Now, if you turn your head,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco obviously, you’re going to turn the high-resolution part of the screen towards what you’re looking at. But if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are looking towards the corners of the screen only by moving your eyes and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not by turning your head, then what you are looking at has way less resolution than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s in the middle of the screen. And also other, you know, there’s other kind of optical trade-offs that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get when you’re looking near the edges. So for instance, when you’re looking towards the middle, both eyes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can see what you’re looking at in their respective screens. Their screens don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco overlap perfectly. The left eye screen can see a little bit further on the left,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the right eye screen can see a little bit further on the right, then their opposite screens can. If you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past like the overlap area, where like if you’re looking, you know, far to the left, only your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco left eye might be seeing that in its screen. So that’s even less information it’s getting. And it’s in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lower res, you know, warped edge of the screen optic trade-off, you know, pipeline.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I think maybe my problem with the Mac screen mode is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you don’t have to to think about that kind of stuff when you’re using a physical monitor. A physical monitor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has the same resolution across the whole thing. And you can just move your eyes and not move your whole head
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you will see pretty much the full resolution. I mean, yeah, your eyes aren’t super perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in all ways either, but they’re, you know, I think they have fewer trade-offs than the Vision Pro screens
⏹️ ▶️ John do. That’s what we said last week. I was saying about like, when you move your eyes, your field of view moves with your eyes. So
⏹️ ▶️ John even though your eyes only see the things that are in focus, that are directly in the center, you can move that center.
⏹️ ▶️ John But when you’re in the headset and you move that center by moving your eyes, the screens don’t care. They don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t, imagine if that high res center of the screen followed your
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes as you move them around. Like maybe the screens are motorized, they’re saying in front of your pupils or something, that’s what happens
⏹️ ▶️ John in reality. In reality, you move your eyes and I, you know, your field of view is just as janky, even
⏹️ ▶️ John probably jankier than this screen, which is why foveated rendering works as well as it does. But you get to move
⏹️ ▶️ John it wherever you want. And so you can take the dead center, highest resolution part of your eyes and point
⏹️ ▶️ John it at the Apple menu. But if you keep your head dead straight and you point your eyes at the Apple menu
⏹️ ▶️ John inside the Vision Pro, yeah, that Apple menu is probably gonna look pretty janky because it’s on the corner of
⏹️ ▶️ John the screens and the screens didn’t move when your eyes did.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve been trying to figure out, you know, ever since I got the Vision Pro, why is it that everyone else says the max screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is sharp and it’s not that sharp for me? And I think this might be one of the reasons
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, like, I think the people for whom it’s working well for, maybe they are just moving their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco head more. Is there
⏹️ ▶️ John like Casey? Right. All coming together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or maybe they are making the virtual window smaller in the Vision Pro field
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, that’s not what I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ John But maybe are you turning your head because you’re used to having like your three 5K monitors, you’re constantly
⏹️ ▶️ John turning your head in real life, so you’re used to it? I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey guess, I mean, I haven’t really thought about it that much, but yeah, I mean, it stands to reason that’s true. And I mean, again, I was using
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this earlier today And I thought to myself, like, what is Marco talking about?
⏹️ ▶️ John I really don’t. So supposedly improved this and the one point one beta, like the the max screen
⏹️ ▶️ John sharing is a little bit sharper for people. So when that update comes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And just to be clear, I’m not trying to imply that, Marco, you’re full of it or lying or anything. It’s just it’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey funny to me that this device is so personal and based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a way that I don’t think that any of us have ever really dealt with. It’s based on your own like body’s abilities and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey physiology. Is that what I’m looking for? You know what I mean?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And habits and like habits like turning your head
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or not. Right. And so I think I made a big stink about this last episode. I’ll just briefly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say again, like, I’m not trying to imply, Marco, that you’re wrong or you’re lying or anything like that. It’s just so weird to me that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your experience does not match mine on what is effectively identical hardware. And it’s just a funny
⏹️ ▶️ Casey quirk of this brave new world we’re entering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It turns out our eyes and brains are not identical hardware. Maybe that’s the problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John This can all be solved by screens that are four times as big with eight times the resolution.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no problem. I’m sure we’ll be right
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Hey, you know, we got retina Mac monitors eventually. It’s just got to be patient.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think there’s always going to be certain trade-offs. There are, for example, like certain principles of optics that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to make some of this stuff more difficult, but certainly the higher resolution they can get those screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can paper over a lot of those problems or you can dramatically minimize
⏹️ ▶️ John them. Kind of like on the iPhone screens where, you know, on I think most modern iPhone screens essentially, they use the pentile
⏹️ ▶️ John subpixel pattern where you don’t even get an RG and a B subpixel for every quote unquote pixel on the screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Like if you zoom in on the screens that they use this pattern where, like, I forget which one is, but one of the subpixels is shared
⏹️ ▶️ John with neighboring pixels. You’re like, how can that look good? What a garbage screen, they couldn’t even give every pixel an
⏹️ ▶️ John RGB, that must look terrible. And the answer is no, you can’t tell they’re so small. Like, nope, nobody notices.
⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody cares, right? Because they’re so small.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, even like, I mean, please, designers out there, cover your ears for just this moment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I draw icons and think about font weights and icon stroke
⏹️ ▶️ Marco widths for my app, I used to have to think about, you got to make everything exactly 1.5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco points or 3 points or whatever it was so it would perfectly line up on pixel boundaries.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so it would look good on retina screens and non-retina screens and it would perfectly align with everything. And these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, I don’t think about that anymore. Once Once we went to 3x density iOS screens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which I believe happened at the same time, I believe that was all with the iPhone X and forward, I have yet to find
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any stroke width that I choose to use that looks blurry or bad compared to other ones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So now I just do them semantically. I’m like, alright, I want this icon to be semi-bold. I want this one to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco medium. I just do that and kind of let the system do what it wants with thicknesses, and they are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always perfect integer multiples, and it turns out it’s totally fine because we have such incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high density on those screens now. So I think with Vision Pro, I think you’re right. Once, way down the road,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think this is coming soon, but way down the road, maybe 10 years from now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when they can double the resolution of the screens or more, I think a lot of these problems will get a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less noticeable. But until then, there’s just gonna be trade-offs that we live with, and that’s just the reality of the technology
Listener job: choral conductor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tony D. Taranto writes, adding to the categories of ATP listeners with jobs in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every profession, I am a professional choral conductor and longtime listener to the show. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is my favorite corner. It really is. I had a funny thought while listening to john described window management
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and vision OS and episode 574 specifically about how our eyes normally function as input devices and not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey output devices. In the course of my work and in my professional training at music school, I’ve learned an important
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing that most people who aren’t conductors don’t think about when giving cues conveying information. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey important what you do with your arms and hands, but it’s arguably more important what you do with your eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eye contact and directing your gaze is an even stronger form of communication and control than arm and hand gestures.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey From when I first started conducting technique in college, when I first studied, excuse me, conducting technique in college,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had to train my gaze as much, if not more, than my gesture to achieve the desired
⏹️ ▶️ Casey result from the group. I just wanted to provide this as an example of how, Although I’m no Superman, I feel like I use
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my eyes as an output device for my work.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, those conductors, they just see all the people in the chorus or the orchestra as
⏹️ ▶️ John tiny instruments to be controlled by their eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, there was a line for the movie, wasn’t it? You know, they play the music, I play the orchestra or something
⏹️ ▶️ John No, no spoilers for Steve Jobs. Come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John. John. Http.fm.
Fitts’s Law vs. Dock
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Schaub writes, what frustrated me is that dropping, oh, this is with regard to Fitz’s law,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sorry. Whoever put this in, not enough context, John.
⏹️ ▶️ John Mm-hmm, well, you know, you gotta read ahead of sometimes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey David Schaub writes with regard to Fitz’s law, what frustrated me is that dropping files
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Mac OS dock breaks Fitz’s law. If you drag a file to the dock, you can drag it past the icons,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which according to David Schaub is ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is ridiculous, so it’s a longstanding thing. It’s kind of like when you put a folder alias
⏹️ ▶️ John in the dock, you can’t drag things into it. It’s one of those things that could be fixed in numerous ways. For example,
⏹️ ▶️ John you could just disallow dragging folder aliases into the dock if you’re not gonna support it. But hasn’t been because apparently nobody
⏹️ ▶️ John cares. But yeah, dragging things to the dock. We get away with it because in the grand scheme of things, the dock is pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John big on most people’s monitor. I bet most people don’t have their dock smaller than the menu bar. But yeah, try
⏹️ ▶️ John it. Take something, if you have a folder in the dock, take a file and try to drag it into the folder and
⏹️ ▶️ John go past the folder, go all the way to the screen edge and you’ll notice the folder is like, Nope, nothing’s on top of me anymore.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s crappy. I might’ve even filed a feedback on it years ago. Maybe I’ll file one again.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m sure other people have, but I don’t think Apple cares. But it’s sad, they should.
Qualcomm through Mar. 2027
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, this is wildly unrelated, Apple extends their modem licensing deal with Qualcomm through
⏹️ ▶️ Casey March of 2027. So to recap, Apple bought, what was it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Intel’s modem business a few years back?
⏹️ ▶️ John Intel’s cell modem business, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. And, and, you know, they said, without saying, oh, we’re going to make our own modems so we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to continue to pay Qualcomm. And then they realized, oh, this is harder than we thought. And they continued
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to pay Qualcomm. And now they’ve apparently realized, no, it’s still harder than we thought. And so they, they are extending
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their deal even Further reading from Mac rumors, Apple has extended its modem chip licensing agreement with Qualcomm through March, 2027.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Qualcomm said today during its first earnings call of 2024, Apple’s existing agreement has now been extended for two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years. So we can expect to see Qualcomm modems in the next several iPhone generations.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, upgrade for Apple. I still think they really should make that modem and maybe think about integrating
⏹️ ▶️ John it into the SoC or near the SoC, but first they gotta make one that works. Good luck.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think you might also like, just because they have a license to deal with Qualcomm through 2027,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t necessarily mean that Apple is not going to ship its own modems before then. It probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means that, but this could be like, Apple is going to need Qualcomm’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chips until, through March, 2027 for some parts of their lineup. So like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s possible that, you know, next year one of the iPhones gets it or some variant of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, whether it’s the iPhone SE
⏹️ ▶️ John or. Yeah, but they’re gonna wanna start this slow, I think. It’s not gonna debut in the pro phone probably. I think they’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna be wary and like, you know, put it out in the SE first or something like just, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know what they’re gonna do but like given how hard it’s been, I don’t think this is a bet your flagship
⏹️ ▶️ John product on. I don’t even think they can make enough of them at that. Oh, I guess the TSMC would do it for them or whatever. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think given how this has gone, a gradual
⏹️ ▶️ John rollout of Apple’s modems is a good idea. Remember last time they use Intel modems in their phones and what
⏹️ ▶️ John was it? to get the Intel modem and the Qualcomm one, and nobody wanted the Intel one because it wasn’t great.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was kind of on their flagship phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yep, I had the Intel one. That was the AT&T iPhone 7. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John pfft. So it’s tough.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s tough, so I hope Apple does take this slow. Keep extending that deal, lock in whatever deal you
⏹️ ▶️ John have to get with Qualcomm. I know these two companies hate each other, but you kind of need cell modems for cell phones.
Apple rewards patent-filing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Going back many episodes now, probably five or ten episodes, we were talking a lot about patents, and an anonymous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person wrote in to say, Apple employees are heavily incentivized to file patents. It’s one of the few ways to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey make additional income at Apple outside of your normal job responsibilities. Apple has an entire department and online
⏹️ ▶️ Casey portal to streamline the process. I can’t find the exact numbers right now, but I believe employees receive at least $1,000
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if a patent is accepted and approved. The caveat, of course, is that Apple owns all of the intellectual rights
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the invention. I don’t mean to sneeze at $1,000. $1,000 is a lot of money,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but like… That seems chintzy, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Yeah. For Apple, for instance, like that does seem like a little… It seems lower than I would have
⏹️ ▶️ John guessed. Well, that’s Apple’s MO. Their whole rep is that they don’t pay as much as their competitors because everyone should
⏹️ ▶️ John just be happy to be working there because of Apple. But yeah, $1,000 is like, why bother? Give me one share of stock.
Sponsor: Celtreos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We are sponsored this episode by Celtrios. This is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SHMUP, a shoot-em-up game. They actually sponsored us a while ago and they’re back with even more updates.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So here’s the idea. It’s a shoot-em-up. So, tiny ship, big weapons, waves of foes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and power-ups, and obstacles, and all of this is brought to you with no ads, no in-app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco purchases, no subscription, and nothing is locked. You can play Celtrios
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over and over again as long as you want, with lots of customization options to keep it fresh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Seltrios is available exclusively for Apple platforms. Mac, iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad and Apple TV. So Seltrios has 13 different stages you can start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from whichever one you want. You can also of course resume play later if you quit the app. You have a million different possibilities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re configuring your ship. Dozens of abilities and then of course you know randomizing options,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full screen options, huge amount of ways to play both you know kind of mechanically and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also just how your ship is configured. It’s great. Celtrios also has a huge, high-quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco soundtrack with over 45 minutes of music. And Celtrios keeps expanding.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There have been over 75 free updates to it so far. And the entire thing was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made by an independent developer. So of course, this is right in my heart, you know? So, Celtrios
⏹️ ▶️ Marco supports one or two players at a time. On the Mac, you can do various input methods. With iOS, the second player needs a game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controller, but hey, it works. So it’s just a great shoot-‘em-up or shmup kind of game. I love this genre
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of game. It’s so fun. You know, it’s like the old arcade games taken to the extreme with all the modern capabilities.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s wonderful. So, get Celtrios if you love traditional shmups or you just want a quality
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Magnets vs. Apple Watch
⏹️ ▶️ John Harvey Simon writes in regards to the magnetically attached Apple watch bands
⏹️ ▶️ John that are rumors magnets screw with compasses. Apple watches have compasses. Ergo,
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple is unlikely to add magnetic attachments for Apple watch bands. So I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not an expert in magnets, but that makes sense to me. If you’re waiting for
⏹️ ▶️ John extremely powerful magnets to be connecting your Apple watch band, maybe that
⏹️ ▶️ John won’t work well with the compass feature of the watch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Time will tell. I think working around magnetic strength limitations is not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard because again, I’m not a scientist, but I’m pretty sure magnetic strength falls off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dramatically with distance. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if you have fixed magnets inside the Apple Watch that are always in the same position,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would expect it would not be super hard to just calibrate that out from the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensor. Third party watch bands might throw a
⏹️ ▶️ John monkey wrench into that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, it depends like where are the magnets? Are the magnets in the body or are they in the band? I
⏹️ ▶️ John would imagine they have to be in both places, kind of like the MagSafe cases, you know, like the ones that work well, the cases
⏹️ ▶️ John also have magnets in them and third party ones tend to be stronger than Apple’s in my experience.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe, but like, I think if they’re in the watch body, which I mean, actually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does the charging disc on the bottom, are there any magnets on the watch side of that? There probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, I would imagine.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s electricity, so there’s also magnetism. It’s complicated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I think they could design around this. I don’t think it would be that big of a deal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, we’ll see. We’ll see. This is still just a rumor. We haven’t seen any concrete anything concrete on the watch
⏹️ ▶️ John strap thing since we talked about it except for vague notions of watch strap magnets. Okay. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John so give me give me a drawing. Give me something. We don’t have anything yet. Fair enough.
Letter-of-credit follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, and then finally for follow up this week, more on the line or letter of credit from Brian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey coffee. As someone who also works in commercial banking, specifically problem commercial loans, I need
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to clarify the comments on the requirements to get a letter of credit. Drawing a letter of credit. Yes, Apple could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey draw on the letter of credit, but in the agreement, they must have a good and valid reason. The typical use for a letter of credit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is for international shipping where you ship the goods before getting paid. The letter of credit ensures the overseas recipient
⏹️ ▶️ Casey won’t stiff you the shipper who got stiffed must go to their bank to work with the Shippease Bank to claim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the shipper never got paid. And with regard to getting a letter of credit, a letter of credit is a credit product
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the bank. Once a letter of credit is drawn upon, it instantly becomes a loan. A company can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get an unsecured letter of credit if they’re producing enough cash flow to show they’re quote unquote good for the money. If
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the letter of credit ever gets drawn upon if a potential borrower doesn’t have strong enough cash flows to support this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there are alternatives. Smallish businesses could put up their homes or retirement accounts collateral. You could also be 50%
⏹️ ▶️ Casey secured or really any percent secure depending on the strength of your cash flows. All this is to say, you don’t absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have to put a million in cash in the bank, but you do have to show a bank that you could reasonably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come up with a million if you had to and prove it. So it’s not exactly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey handing the bank a million bucks or million euros, but it’s not that far away either.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I mean, like any bank thing, if you can convince some bank to do something for you, then fine, but yeah, I feel like
⏹️ ▶️ John the bank basically wants to know, uh, you have something that we can get a million dollars from, even if we
⏹️ ▶️ John need to like repossess your home or whatever. So it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John as bad as you must have a million dollars in cash, but I feel like you still kind of have to have some way to get a million dollars
⏹️ ▶️ John for a bank to agree to this, because that’s kind of the whole deal. Unless you have a really friendly bank and it’s like, we like your face.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll front you a million bucks because we like your face. That sounds reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Yay, yay, yay.
Personas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s move on to some topics. And of course we have a little bit more Vision Pro to talk about. And John,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you seem to be very enthusiastic to talk about personas, baby. So what you got?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was kind of like when we talked about eyesight last week. The reason this feature exists
⏹️ ▶️ John is obvious and I think is not really going to go away. So personas are the little fake computer people
⏹️ ▶️ John that you use to represent yourself when you’re on a FaceTime call. And the reason for them is obvious.
⏹️ ▶️ John Being on a video call in a Zoom meeting for your work in a FaceTime or whatever, it’s so common
⏹️ ▶️ John today. It’s a very common part of using computers. But if you’ve got weird ski goggles strapped to your face,
⏹️ ▶️ John how do you get yourself into a video call? Do you let your Mac’s webcam show your weird
⏹️ ▶️ John ski goggly face? I think people would find that off-putting even with the creepy eyesight
⏹️ ▶️ John things on it. So Apple’s solution is, hey, we’ll make a little computer version of you. And when you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John in your FaceTime call or your Zoom meeting, the little computer puppet of you will talk. And
⏹️ ▶️ John that problem is not gonna go away until we’re actually wearing
⏹️ ▶️ John glasses that just look like regular glasses, which is many, many, many years in the future, if it ever
⏹️ ▶️ John comes in any form. So you’re gonna need some way
⏹️ ▶️ John to show your face in these meetings. And I guess the other solution is, oh, we’re having a Zoom meeting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, why isn’t your video turned on? Oh, I’m wearing a headset, so you can’t see me. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s necessarily gonna fly. And you wouldn’t want it to, because there’s a lot of bandwidth, you know, a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John communication that happens from your facial expressions. So Apple’s solution to this is these weird, creepy
⏹️ ▶️ John computer models. And as weird as they are,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Apple’s gonna keep plugging away at this. You know, they’ve taken
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of flack for this during the rollout, because they do look kind of creepy and scary.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think that Apple is going to be scared away, nor should they, because I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, video conferencing is not going away. And it’s going to be a long time before these
⏹️ ▶️ John things on our face don’t look like sea goggles and kind of hide everything about our most things
⏹️ ▶️ John about our face. So I think they just need to keep plugging away at it as embarrassing as it is now. And
⏹️ ▶️ John as for how embarrassing it is, like we like last episode, I think we when we tooted about it. We showed
⏹️ ▶️ John Casey’s persona and like the graphic for that episode. They look silly, but
⏹️ ▶️ John only if you, you have a more, I think you have a more appreciation for them. If you have
⏹️ ▶️ John any experience with this type of thing before, and most of my experience with this type of thing comes from
⏹️ ▶️ John video games and similar tech where they would, you know, put your face in the game, make a skin for your
⏹️ ▶️ John player character or whatever. And the things that have been built into games have been so
⏹️ ▶️ John much worse than what Apple did. They They really are one of the best instances I’ve ever seen
⏹️ ▶️ John of this particular technology. And we’ll put a link in the show notes to someone demonstrating this. The
⏹️ ▶️ John thing I think that’s most impressive about Apple stuff, well, two things. One, that they’re able to make something
⏹️ ▶️ John that looks as good as it does. I know you’re hearing that and you’re like, what do you mean? They look terrible, look like a death mask.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could be so much worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John at a video game. Let’s do this. It could be so much worse, right? And yes, they all blur the edges to hide their sins or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they do an amazing job with just a, with a face scan that you can do. not a professional scan, like
⏹️ ▶️ John go look at things where they have like a famous Hollywood actor in a video game and they have that person go into
⏹️ ▶️ John a full motion capture studio and have them stand there with like balls on their shoulders and lasers
⏹️ ▶️ John shooting them for a million angers, like incredibly controlled environment where they spend the entire day getting their face
⏹️ ▶️ John scanned and they put them in the game and they look awful. And this is, oh, just hold the ski goggles in front of your face for two seconds,
⏹️ ▶️ John turn to the side and Apple’s doing a better job. So that’s impressive. But the second thing is, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John demoed in this video, how well it tracks the expressions you’re making
⏹️ ▶️ John wearing ski goggles and you’re raising your eyebrows and you’re blinking and you’re twisting your
⏹️ ▶️ John mouth and you’re sticking out your tongue and you’re smiling and you’re frowning and you’re furrowing your brow. And somehow
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple’s able to detect all of those things. Some of those things are happening inside the headset. Some of those things are
⏹️ ▶️ John happening outside the headset. It is phenomenal what they do. Now, does the little puppet look like
⏹️ ▶️ John you when it’s doing that? You know, it’s got fake. Everyone’s got the same perfect fake teeth and everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ John got the same weird artificial tongue. And it’s not, you know, if you can make the W shape with your tongue,
⏹️ ▶️ John the avatar is not going to write. But like it, it does a really good.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it does a good enough job, kind of like a really well articulated puppet would do of
⏹️ ▶️ John letting the people who are on the Zoom call with you or whatever, know what expression you’re making. Are you, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John are you happy about that? Are you skeptical? Are you angry? Are you not paying attention? like
⏹️ ▶️ John I feel like they do an amazing job of matching the movements
⏹️ ▶️ John of the various parts of your face and reflecting those. No, it’s not perfect. It’s not capturing all the subtleties of your acting performance.
⏹️ ▶️ John It might not even really look like you, but kind of like I was, you know, talking about the cartoon
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes, sometimes just sort of a, not a cartoon eyes, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John a decomposed, less granular version of you captures a
⏹️ ▶️ John lot of it. It’s the reason Animation can look so good animation doesn’t look photorealistic But the right lines in the
⏹️ ▶️ John right places can be very expressive in animation and I feel like that’s what Apple’s going for This isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John exactly you But if they catch enough if they put the right lines in the right places, they can
⏹️ ▶️ John convey most of the information your face is expressing and again I’m really impressed that
⏹️ ▶️ John some of that expression is underneath these the the the goggles and some of it is outside and they
⏹️ ▶️ John put it back together into a cohesive whole so I’m not, I don’t relish seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John these personas talking to me, but I think this is just one of those hard problems that Apple and anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John who wants to do what Apple is doing has to be resigned to tackling over the next several decades
⏹️ ▶️ John because it’s not going to go away again until we just get plain old glasses. Until then, people are going to want to be in
⏹️ ▶️ John meetings and people are going to want to see their faces and they’re going to want to be able to use their faces again, but talk about our coral conductor
⏹️ ▶️ John as an output device because that’s part of the way we communicate with other people. You want to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John scowl at someone meaningfully and have that, uh, have an effect on them in the meeting.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, no, I want to build on what you were saying earlier, like as a technical achievement,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is stunning how good these are at, at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expressing what your face is expressing. Cause remember, you’ve got cameras on the inside that are figuring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out when you’re blinking because the persona reflects that, that figure out when you’re raising your eyebrows because because the persona reflects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. I don’t recall if it reflects where your eyes are looking, but I think it does?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it does, pretty sure. And it’s certainly, you can turn your face left and right, and up and down. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your smile, like, that’s happening outside the device. And granted, there are cameras, you know, pretty much everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this thing. But still, there’s, you know, it’s outside the device that you’re smiling or sticking your tongue out, like you had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey said. And whether or not, like, leaving aside the creepiness factor
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or the uncanny valley, which again, just like I was saying in the beginning of the show, Like that’s a big thing to just push
⏹️ ▶️ Casey under the carpet. But leaving that aside, the technical achievement is really just phenomenal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and stunning how good, how good it is. And you know, I had a, I do a monthly FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ Casey call with James Thompson. We had one this morning and because we’re both idiots, we jumped on the call unbeknownst
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to either of us, but we, I think we both kind of assumed it. You know, we jumped on the call, you know, started off the calls and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in, in our vision pros with our personas and so on and so forth and had a good
⏹️ ▶️ Casey laugh about it and chuckled about how ridiculous we both look. And then we hung up and got on the computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like we usually do. But I mean, I think if we had stuck with the personas, it would have been awkward
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a few minutes. And this is a very common refrain from people who’ve done it. It would have been awkward for a few minutes, then it would have felt pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Casey normal all in all. And I think that’s how it typically ends up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like I’m not saying it’s not weird. I’m not even necessarily saying it’s not creepy. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. You settle into it. And again, as a technical exercise, it is
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you look at the Charlie Chapman video, by the way, the one that I was referring to? Do you have a chance to look at it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think I skimmed through it super quickly, if memory serves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Some of the things he does, for example, are like puffing air underneath his like,
⏹️ ▶️ John into his behind his lips and into his cheeks, and also talking out of like the side of
⏹️ ▶️ John his mouth. Like that’s what I’m talking about, where it’s not just like a puppet where it’s like, I can tell when you’re opening your mouth and you said
⏹️ ▶️ John a T sound, so I’ll make it look like you’re making a T sound with your tongue. Like you can do weird stuff with your
⏹️ ▶️ John face that is not normal, like puffing your lips up and talking
⏹️ ▶️ John weird. And it’s, I mean, is it tracking it exactly? No, but they’re accounting for the fact that you might do
⏹️ ▶️ John that and they’re mapping it to whatever their little puppet model is of your face, going far beyond
⏹️ ▶️ John just simply making it so that your mouth moves when you talk. Please, everyone should definitely look at this video. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John and again, ignore the fact that his whole head is all fuzzed out and he looks like a weird death mask to himself.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, but I think you are correct at how incredibly impressive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this accomplishment is, but it’s still not good enough. And I think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is largely the story of Vision Pro in general right now. Most products, like most new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco groundbreaking products, you tend to have mostly routine
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that has been done before, plus like one or two big new challenges.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not the Vision Pro. The Vision Pro is a very small number of things that have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done before, like here’s an M2-based, you know, iPad-based OS in a computing environment with Windows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and stuff. And then they tackled ten different massive challenges at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least, and they have achieved remarkable things. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way ahead of the industry in so many ways with the Vision Pro. But the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is, they’re not selling the Vision Pro and pitching the Vision Pro to people in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the VR industry. They’re not selling and pitching the use of personas to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only gamers. They’ve tackled these massive problems and they’ve done very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco respectable jobs in their solutions to them. But the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re still not where most people want them to be. And they probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have some kind of like resentment whenever people criticize it on some level. Like I bet there’s people in Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who are like, how can you criticize the personas because look at how amazing they are compared to the state
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the art. And that’s true. But when you’re presenting them as an alternative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to people, then people are going to hold them to a much higher standard.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why they made the studio display camera so cruddy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like, you know, the Vision Pro in many ways it’s pitching itself
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as like an alternative to various aspects of reality that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people are very good at noticing the differences between the real stuff and the fake stuff. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have achieved remarkable stuff and yet it is still not good enough for what most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people expect as like the basics. Oh, you’re going to show a virtual version of me? it needs to look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like me. Like it needs to be a stand-in replacement. And it’s sort of, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, it’s in the ballpark for a lot of people, but it’s not, you know, a stand-in replacement. In many cases it looks creepy and weird,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, still even with 1.1. And so I think this is gonna be, you know, just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco part of the Vision Pro’s uphill battle over the coming years is like, even though
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have achieved remarkable things, they still need to push it even further than what they’ve already done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to match what most people’s expectations are who are not VR industry
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think they picked mostly the right challenges because there are so many different challenges they could have chosen. And you might look
⏹️ ▶️ John at this, I think a lot of people look at the outside, like why did Apple even try to do this? And the answer is because this is one of the problems
⏹️ ▶️ John they eventually need to solve. And if you don’t start working on it now, don’t expect you’re just gonna snap your fingers sometime 10 years
⏹️ ▶️ John from now and it’ll be perfect. You gotta make the janky version first. Right, so they’re doing it, but they can’t ignore this problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like they can’t ignore it unless they see a time horizon of just wearing like clear glasses
⏹️ ▶️ John instead of these goggle things. Otherwise this is just gonna be out there as an issue and so they better start
⏹️ ▶️ John plugging away at it. And I bet this was like a big time sink and a big, you know, like a lot of technology
⏹️ ▶️ John went into this. And to your point, Margo, a lot of technology and time went into it, into a feature that we know regular people are
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna look at and go, ugh. I look at it and go, ugh. But it’s like, you just
⏹️ ▶️ John gotta, like this is a problem that has to be solved. If you want to make this product, there are a small
⏹️ ▶️ John number of problems that you basically just have to solve and you’re not going to be able to do a great job on them even if you do better than anyone else has
⏹️ ▶️ John ever done before, but you better start cracking on it because next year you make a better version next year. Like they
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t ignore this one. They can’t like even more so than eyesight or eyesight where you can say, okay, we’ll make the cheaper one without
⏹️ ▶️ John eyesight or we’ll use cartoon eyes or whatever. Like you could maybe sweep that one under the covers, but people are
⏹️ ▶️ John on video calls all the time and I don’t think it’s acceptable to them to say either
⏹️ ▶️ John you just can’t show or your face, or your face is gonna have these giant ski gogs on it. And all of those are less
⏹️ ▶️ John acceptable than even this janky thing. So they just have to be like, okay, we’re gonna put ourselves out there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m gonna say we gave it our best shot because we recognize this is a problem that we need to solve. And next
⏹️ ▶️ John year we hope we’ll do better. And you know, it’s gonna be a while, but like I said, it is impressive
⏹️ ▶️ John from a technical perspective what they’ve achieved. And I think they struck a reasonable balance in the beginning. People were like, why don’t you just
⏹️ ▶️ John use Memoji’s? I think Memoji’s would be worse. Like I know they have Memoji’s, I know this whole scene
⏹️ ▶️ John kit versus reality kit, political internal API thing that they have going on there. But setting that aside,
⏹️ ▶️ John Memojis are not as expressive as personas are. Again, watch the video. We’ll link in the show notes of Charlie
⏹️ ▶️ John Chapman showing his different facial expressions. Memojis are cartoons that are not what I was
⏹️ ▶️ John using before, the example of animation where you draw just the right lines to be expressive. Memojis are not that. Memojis are
⏹️ ▶️ John bad, rigid-headed, Chuck E. Cheese, Pizza Time band, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John to slack on the Memoji team. What they did is amazing to emojis had to walk. So personas could
⏹️ ▶️ John walk a little faster, but, uh, but, uh, personas are,
⏹️ ▶️ John are better able to communicate you across a computer
⏹️ ▶️ John while you’re wearing that goggles than me emojis would be. And. And what people want
⏹️ ▶️ John is personas, but not bad. Right. And so you got, I guess you have to start, you know, you could either just
⏹️ ▶️ John never ship, uh, or you could ship what you have, which is personas, which are, you know, better than emojis,
⏹️ ▶️ John but still not good enough. So I give Apple an E for effort here. And
⏹️ ▶️ John if they have to choose where to add the resources to pursue better things, I would say,
⏹️ ▶️ John put more resources into personas than eyesight for going forward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t know. I, I stand by eyesight as well, and we don’t need to belabor this, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I, I, I get why people are turned off by both personas and eyesight,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I I genuinely think this would be a far worse product without both
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of those components.
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PQ3 for iMessage
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s news today that Apple is already defending iMessage against
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tomorrow’s quantum computing attacks. I’m sorry, what? So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple and security professionals that have probably known about this for a long time, but I don’t often have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to think about this. But one of the things that security professionals are thinking about is, hey, there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey will one day be a quantum computer. And what happens if you somehow,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably nefariously, capture a bunch of encrypted traffic today, but what if you save it off for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years and years and years? And eventually, you finally
⏹️ ▶️ Casey get your hands or build that quantum computer, and you can go back to all of that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey years and years and years of data that you captured with our comparatively weak
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encryption that we use here in 2024? Well, suddenly your quantum computer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can just decrypt all of that, right? That’s how it’s going to work. And nobody really knows
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that’s true or not. It certainly stands to reason that it’s true. And Apple is already starting the process
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of defending iMessage against tomorrow’s quantum computing attacks. So they had a blog
⏹️ ▶️ Casey post about this, which I’ll link in the show notes, and The Verge covered it, and I will read from The Verge a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple security team claims to have achieved a breakthrough that, quote, advances the state of the art of end-to-end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey messaging.” With the upcoming release of iOS 17.4 and MacOS 14.4 and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the equivalent iPad WatchOS, the company is bringing a new cryptographic protocol
⏹️ ▶️ Casey called PQ3 to iMessage that purports to offer even more robust encryption in defenses
⏹️ ▶️ Casey against sophisticated quantum computing attacks. So now from Apple’s blog post, today we are announcing the most
⏹️ ▶️ Casey significant cryptographic security upgrade in iMessage history with the induction of PQ3, a groundbreaking post-quantum
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cryptographic protocol that advances the state of the art of end-to-end secure messaging. PQ3 is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the first messaging protocol to reach what we like to call Level 3 security, providing protocol
⏹️ ▶️ Casey protections that surpass those in all the other widely deployed messaging apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To our knowledge, PQ3 has the strongest security properties of any at-scale messaging protocol in the world. PQ3 employs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a hybrid design that combines elliptic curve cryptography with post-quantum encryption,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey both during the initial key establishment and during re-keying. Thus, the new cryptography is purely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey additive, and defeating PQ3 security requires defeating both the existing classical
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ECC cryptography and the new post-quantum primitives.
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought that bit was interesting because basically they’re covering their butts to say, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John what if we screwed this up? What if we came up with this new, you know, quantum, you know, post-quantum
⏹️ ▶️ John encryption, but we are, we have a bug in the implementation. We’re just just rolling this out and oops we got something wrong
⏹️ ▶️ John and there’s some kind of bug or buffer overflow or whatever. Making this additive to the existing
⏹️ ▶️ John encryption hopefully makes it so that if they really screwed this up and oh
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s trivially easy to crack this post quantum encryption because of a bug in Apple software. Well once you crack it what you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John left with is the stuff that was encrypted the way it’s currently encrypted now. Like that it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John layered on top of it is my understanding which I think is really smart thing to do to sort of,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, we all kind of wish we could do this. Like you kind of want to have the old way there as a fallback, even
⏹️ ▶️ John if you totally screw up the new way. I’m not entirely sure if that’s, that’s true, but my reading, this paragraph makes me
⏹️ ▶️ John think that it might be, and it’s a clever idea, which is like belt and suspenders. Uh, we’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John getting rid of the old encryption. We’re just encrypting it one more time, even better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep. Yep. And so Apple, as mentioned, has come up with its own, uh, a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey four plus stage, I guess five plus stage level system. They’ve defined
⏹️ ▶️ Casey classical cryptography, which is not quantum secure. There’s level zero, which is no end-to-end
⏹️ ▶️ Casey encryption by default. And
⏹️ ▶️ John by the way, you can kind of tell, it’s kind of weird that like Apple’s marketing department really doesn’t ever really like to name
⏹️ ▶️ John competitors at all, ever. Like even though we know who they’re talking about when they allude to something, but
⏹️ ▶️ John whoever’s doing the security blog has no problem naming names. So you undertake the level zero thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John Level zero, no end-to-end encryption. They just named names. Skype, Telegram, WeChat, whatever that QQ
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, level one, end-to-end encryption by default, which includes Line, Viber, WhatsApp, Signal previously,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and iMessage previously. Level two, now we’re in the post-quantum cryptography, or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PQC, and also has end-to-end encryption by default. So level two is PQC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey key establishment only, which is Signal with PQXDH, whatever the heck that means.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then level three, which is PQC key establishment and ongoing PQC rekeying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is the new iMessage with PQ3. And then in the future, not given a level, but I guess it would be level four,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PQC establishment plus ongoing PQC rekeying plus PQC authentication. And then there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey potentially even more after that. So this is really cool. I’m happy that Apple was working
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on this, even though I don’t think anyone gives a crap about what I say in iMessage, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do think that that’s really cool that this is something that they’re actively working on, hopefully, and presumably so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long before it’s ever going to be necessary.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s interesting in the, the fact that they have like the level four written there, if you read the big document, the blog post,
⏹️ ▶️ John they explain like that they essentially chose not to do, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the, the thing that makes us level four, because it’s just like level three, except for the ad, the PQC authentication,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they explain why they chose not to do that. They said like, look, we don’t, um,
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t want to do that right now. And we don’t think it’s necessary right now because it happens in the moment.
⏹️ ▶️ John So it’s not one of those things. The authentication is like establishing the authenticity of who you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John communicating with before you start communicating. And that has to happen each time. And so what they
⏹️ ▶️ John say is like, this is not like you could save this for later and then decrypt it later because there’s no useful information
⏹️ ▶️ John exchanged yet. So saving that exchange is useless to you because that exchange has already
⏹️ ▶️ John happened. So even if you crack the encryption out with your quantum computer 10 years from now, it’s pointless. there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no data there and that conversation happened long ago and those keys are all useless, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ John so they said, well, until someone can get a quantum computer that can intercept your traffic and then in real time
⏹️ ▶️ John crack it, we don’t have to worry about that. So that’s why they pushed it off to the future. And the other thing they talk about in implementation
⏹️ ▶️ John trade-offs is the post quantum cryptography stuff, the data is bigger, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John keys are bigger and whatever other info they have to exchange is significantly bigger than their old encryption scheme.
⏹️ ▶️ John And their old encryption scheme sends new keys like every single message, but to
⏹️ ▶️ John like basically tamp down on the bandwidth use of, you know, if you’re gonna tack something onto every iMessage that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John sent, that adds up real fast because a lot of iMessages are sent per hour, per day, per minute, per second,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So they say with the post-quantum stuff, they only are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do like the rekeying periodically, and they do it based on an algorithm of like, if you’re on a crappy connection,
⏹️ ▶️ John we won’t try to shove these new keys down as fast as we normally do. If you’re on a faster connection,
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll send them more frequently. And what they basically said is we’re trying to narrow the window that an attacker
⏹️ ▶️ John could do something. So if an attacker someday cracks this, the only thing that they’ll be able to see
⏹️ ▶️ John is the brief period before we rekeyed. They cracked just that little segment. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know how big that is. They didn’t actually say whether it’s like two lines of text or five minutes or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s another trade-off they made. And that’s another fun thing of like seeing security people write something instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of marketing people, because they’ll tell you, here were the engineering trade-offs and here’s why we made them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Instead of just saying, this is the best and no one else has anything like this and it’s super obscure, let engineers
⏹️ ▶️ John write it and they’ll tell you about the trade-offs. So I thought this was super interesting. I highly recommend everybody read the blog post
⏹️ ▶️ John we link because it might seem like it’s kind of got a little bit of technical jargon, but they do a really good job
⏹️ ▶️ John of explaining it well enough for you to follow what they’re saying. And it’s pretty cool stuff.
#askatp: Mac-assed Mac apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s been a little while, so let’s do some Ask ATP. And let’s start tonight with Ian
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Malkiszewski, who writes, what is your advice on how to best communicate to non-tech people the value and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey benefits of native Mac-ass Mac apps? I work at a small under 10 people company where everyone works on a Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but some are new to the platform and most of their software experience is using Electron apps and other apps that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are at best so-so citizens of the platform. We’re contemplating hiring a developer to make an app to help us with an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internal project. I want to be able to make the case to hire someone who knows how to make good Mac software. If I put an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey app like Fantastical next to Outlook, most of my teammates just see two calendar apps with cosmetic differences and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey shrug off the idea that there’s anything notably different between them. I’d love any advice on how to make the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey case to non-technical people that Mac-ass Mac apps have a real user-facing benefits beyond just feeling better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Hot take, I don’t know that you really want a Mac-ass Mac app in this context. Like if you’re just writing stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for your own team of 10 people, I wouldn’t spend the time personally. I know that’s probably going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to make everyone shudder and hate me, but there are bigger problems and more important problems to solve than making
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a Mac-ass Mac app. But that’s my opinion, wrong as it may be. Marco, correct me.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t think I’m going to disagree with you on this. So it depends so much on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nature of the app that you’re going to build. So Ian said this is an internal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app. I think it will be challenging for the higher ups to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco justify what it would take to make a really good, you know, quote, Mac-assed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mac app. And what that means is, you know, basically native Mac code,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco native Mac controls, you know, kind of the standard Mac UI design paradigm,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like that, as opposed to things like Electron. And I think for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most software, I mean, let alone most internal use software,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very difficult to justify that kind of investment on the Mac, because first of all, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mentioned wanting to hire someone who could do that, that’s difficult. There’s not a lot of programmers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there who are qualified to make this style of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco high-quality, native, traditional style Mac app. It’s a very small talent pool.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Including inside Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Yeah, Apple can’t even make them anymore. Sorry,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s true. It is. So, problem number one is, could you even find someone to do this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Problem number two is, would you be able to pay them what they are probably worth? And then problem Problem number three is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can you convince the higher-ups in your company that that’s worth doing? And I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the only way that is really easily done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is if the higher-ups in your company are Mac nerds and also not good business people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because what you’re ultimately looking at—and by the way, I’m both of those things. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it was my internal app, I would absolutely do this. But the problem is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re talking about having that style of app with the realities
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of today and the markets and the tech needs around it today, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more of an indulgence than something that you can make a good business case for.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So if you’re able to convince them, hey, indulge me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in having this thing that we’re going to build be very nice in these ways that you don’t care about but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do, then good for you. great. I think you’re in for an uphill battle. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also, even if you can get someone to build it, and you can get the higher ups
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to agree to indulge you in this, what happens down the road when you have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco change it or update it? How hard is it going to be to get someone in to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do that down the road? Because it’s already hard enough now. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s I think it’s gonna be a tough sell.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s to just don’t have enough experience dealing with giant and corporate bureaucracies. Let me tell you how to do this. Okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John so the first thing you need to do is establish things
⏹️ ▶️ John that are not in this question that I don’t know the answer to. For example, this seems to imply that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re gonna hire a developer to make an app for an internal project and that you only need a
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac app. If that’s really true, confirm that and say, just so we’re clear, we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not planning on making a Windows version of this app later. It’s an internal app. Are we ever gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John need a Windows version? Do we need a Linux version? And if you can get past that hurdle of clarifying the requirements
⏹️ ▶️ John and they say, no, no, no, we’re never gonna make a Windows version, never gonna need a web version. This is gonna be a Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John app. It’s an internal thing. We just only ever gonna run on Macs. There’s never gonna be any other version.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then you’re set because then what you can do is not say what Marco just said because that will
⏹️ ▶️ John discourage them. What you have to say then is, okay, if it’s gonna be a Mac app, the reason
⏹️ ▶️ John we wanna hire some, you know, an experienced Mac developer is because
⏹️ ▶️ John the straightest path to make a Mac app is to use Apple’s frameworks in a
⏹️ ▶️ John straightforward way. No weird custom stuff. No, I’ve come up with a framework of
⏹️ ▶️ John my own for doing GUIs. Just use, and you’ll have to like hash this out, whether they want you to use SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John or they want you to use AppKit, whatever it is they pick, whatever path you go down. Don’t pick SwiftUI on the Mac. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John find someone who will do that in the most straightforward way possible. and the pitch is
⏹️ ▶️ John when this person disappears, I want anybody to be able to look at this and say, oh, this is a straightforward
⏹️ ▶️ John SwiftUI app, straightforward AppKit app that doesn’t do any weird custom stuff that
⏹️ ▶️ John has no custom controls, that Apple’s documentation explains how to do it, that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s really easy to find, example code documentation, that it
⏹️ ▶️ John is straightforward and they’re gonna be done faster. This was the old pitch with like the Next stuff when it was
⏹️ ▶️ John next and Objective-C and everything, you can make a highly functional
⏹️ ▶️ John app with fewer lines of code and in less time because the frameworks do so much for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the pitch you make. Your goal is I want a good, to get an experienced Mac developer
⏹️ ▶️ John in, and the pitch is we need someone who, we can’t get someone who’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t even know what APIs Macs offer, I’m just gonna use like the Quartz 2D drawing API and draw
⏹️ ▶️ John my own GUI because I don’t know what this whole AppKit thing is, it’s confusing to me, I’m a good programmer, so I’m gonna make my
⏹️ ▶️ John own UI framework like Lauren Brickner out of OpenGL or whatever You know what I mean? Like that is not what you want And
⏹️ ▶️ John so that’s how I would pitch it I would say and you’re never gonna get sort of like To know the culture and
⏹️ ▶️ John the idioms, but at the very least you should get someone in there For example, you decide it’s gonna be app kit get someone who
⏹️ ▶️ John knows app kit I know it sounds dumb, but like I’ve seen corporate hiring and it’s like I could figure it
⏹️ ▶️ John out It’ll be fine, right and you know, if someone comes in you know I’ve made a Mac app and they show you an electron app and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s like hmm Did you make an app Mac app though? Are you really a web developer? Are you using like react native
⏹️ ▶️ John and electron and all these other things? Like that’s not what we’re looking for. And that I feel like will be
⏹️ ▶️ John harder to wrangle, because if you’re making some kind of internal tool app and someone uses electron,
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes 500 megs of RAM when you just launch the thing like that’s another case against it. Right. Just
⏹️ ▶️ John find a Mac developer who can make a straightforward, simple thing that will be done quickly, have lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of functionality and be easy for any future Mac developer to understand. It’s I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John saying it’s a slam dunk case, but that’s your best shot.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Entry sorted.
#askatp: Apple API requests
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Julian Gamble writes, if you could ask Apple for one new API to help your apps this year, what would it be?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Julian’s guesses are Marco for Overcast. WatchOS, an API to make syncing files, like podcast
⏹️ ▶️ Casey files, work on demand and reliably on schedule and in general much easier. We can stop there. I’m not even, I don’t even write
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a watch app and I’m in. I’m ready.
⏹️ ▶️ John what, that’s, I don’t think an API can change physics in the size of the watch’s battery. And I know Marco says
⏹️ ▶️ John they should loosen up a little bit, but in the end, an API that did that would burn your battery pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Okay, first of all this would not be my guess or this might be my pick for this question But just for the sake of argument
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I would want in this area would be if a user has initiated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a download while the app is in the foreground let me start a back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco roundable download that begins immediately and uses Wi-Fi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it has to Because right now it will you know wait for a while and maybe do it later when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I saw the charger or it’ll use the Bluetooth connection of the phone because it’s lower power.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And if a user, while using the app in the foreground, initiates a download,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that signifies pretty clear user intent. I want this to happen, like kind of now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I make a pretty strong argument for that, but honestly, that is not my biggest problem on watchOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco My biggest problem on watchOS is every few days when I get an email from a customer saying, why don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I support the double tap gesture on the Series 9 and Ultra 2 yet? And the answer is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is no API to do that. Apple released the double tap feature in the fall, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they said, hey, third party apps, you can just let this do the default response on notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s it. So literally there is no API to respond to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco double tap, and it’s such a glaring omission that my customers assume that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the one being negligent, not Apple. So that would be my number one request on watchOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that isn’t even my number one request overall. My number one request
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at this moment is for SwiftUI’s list
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have feature parity with UI table view.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Now that is not a small thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco However, that would be a huge improvement to the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coding that I’m doing this year. Julian said this year. That’s what helped me is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make SwiftUI list have more capabilities. For instance, one that I ran into most recently is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the kind of drag to reorder mechanic in it does not support multiple items.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In UITableView, you can pick up multiple items as you drag your finger around with a second finger and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drop them all in one spot. The equivalent in SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not support that. The API appears to be written to support it because when it tells you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drop here, it passes you a set of indexes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to drop there. So the API seems to be built to support multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things being dropped, but there is no physical implementation of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just one case of many where I keep running into areas where SwiftUI list is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oddly limited in ways that UI table view is not. And UITableView
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a super important API for iOS. Almost every app uses TableViews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some way, and UITableView has been added to over time like crazy because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s such a huge part of interaction on iOS. There’s tons of features that UITableView supports.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco SwiftUI List kind of started from scratch and kind of did the basics and has been very slowly and carefully
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adding little bits and pieces. Oh, you want to customize this inset? Okay, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one way to do that. You want to customize whether this border shows up over here. Okay, fine. We’ll give you another small way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that. But there’s some big areas like the multi-select drag and drop that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just has not enough feature parity. And that is making my life difficult as I’m trying to work on the SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco rewrite for the biggest part of the biggest part of my user base, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iOS app and the table views within it. Like that is, those are major areas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I just keep hitting walls that just aren’t there yet in SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It rocked my world when I want to say it was like four or five years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was maybe more than that. But somebody described all of professional iOS
⏹️ ▶️ Casey development as turning JSON into table views. And I was like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mother of God, that is exactly right. So if that doesn’t mean anything to you, so JSON is, you know, a plain text way of transmitting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey data. Typically, when you get something from like a web server, not as a person, but as a,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, as an app, you’re going to get data back in JSON format, JSON.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And like Marco said, TableViews run the majority of all iOS apps. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you could summarize iOS development as turning JSON into TableViews for money.
⏹️ ▶️ John Web development too these days. Not TableViews, I guess, but same thing. Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John a JSON API, you get the result. You lay it out in an HTML page.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yep, exactly. So anyway, so yeah, that rocked my world, even though it was five years ago. I still think it’s hilarious
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and accurate. John, continuing with Julian, John, for front and center
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Mac OS, an API to enable preserving icon arrangement in folders as per classic Mac OS,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s Julian’s guess.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a misunderstanding what would be required to get that. It’s not an API that’s missing. It’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Finder application would have to behave differently. There’s no API they could roll out that would make
⏹️ ▶️ John that work, unfortunately. Back to what Marco was saying about lists. I was telling him before when we were talking
⏹️ ▶️ John about this Slack, they should count as blessings because a list was so
⏹️ ▶️ John under featured and buggy for me in SwiftUI and MacOS that I can’t even use lists
⏹️ ▶️ John in my thing that has a list of things that are reorderable and I had to basically roll my own list. It’s like having to roll
⏹️ ▶️ John your own UI table view because table view is too janky for you. So it could be worse, but yeah, it could definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John be better. What I actually want for an API to make my, help make my app better this year,
⏹️ ▶️ John I actually filed feedbacks on this in the fall of last year, a whole bunch of them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll just read off the titles of them because I tried to separate it into like, I don’t know why I bother, but like, I tried to separate
⏹️ ▶️ John it into things that I hope would be like if I put them all in one feedback, they’d say, Oh, we’re not doing all this crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John I tried to break it down, like maybe they’ll pick one of them. So the first is add a modern window list API,
⏹️ ▶️ John an API and Mac OS that lets me list all the windows on the system. There are existing APIs that do that,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re super old. Most of them are deprecated and they’re just terrible. On your computer, they would just crash.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just like I just, and when I say list the windows, I don’t mean get the windows contents like screen capture
⏹️ ▶️ John kit. I don’t mean control them like accessibility APIs, which are also kind of old and cruddy. I mean, just literally list
⏹️ ▶️ John them, list them, which apps on them, what are their sizes, what are their positions? Sounds so simple.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can do it with the 16 APIs, but Apple really doesn’t want you to. And there are a bunch of caveats and
⏹️ ▶️ John a bunch so the stuff is deprecated. Second one was add a system wide window layering and visibility API.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can give it, you can list all those windows and you know where they are and how big they are and which app
⏹️ ▶️ John owned them. Wouldn’t it be great if you could tell them to come forward, go to the back, go behind some other window?
⏹️ ▶️ John Again, still I have no idea, these APIs have no idea what’s in the windows. They can’t see the window contents at all. They don’t want
⏹️ ▶️ John the window contents. They’re just a bunch of anonymous rectangles that are owned by processes, right? An
⏹️ ▶️ John API where you could tell them what to do. and the Mac window layer APIs are extremely
⏹️ ▶️ John limited. People are shocked to hear that you can’t do something as simple as take one window and change its layering because
⏹️ ▶️ John those windows belong to other applications. And my application has a very limited ability to screw with windows in
⏹️ ▶️ John other applications. Again, modularly accessibility APIs, which are all other can of worms that I’ve found other bugs with.
⏹️ ▶️ John And let’s see, the ones I get even more ambitious, add support for window manipulation extensions.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the idea, this is more of kind of more ambitious, but like the idea that when
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re doing operations with the Windows server, like moving windows around or clicking on them to bring them to the front or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John that there would be a plugin system where you could affect that interaction. Once again, still having
⏹️ ▶️ John no idea what’s in any of these windows. All you know is, hey, a window is being moved. It’s owned by this application. It’s in this size
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s in this position. I’m about to move it to here. Is there anything you’d like to do to modify that
⏹️ ▶️ John operation? Like say snapping to a grid or giving you a chance to draw a bunch of guides like you’re in a graphics
⏹️ ▶️ John application. You know, like you could do so many cool things with this. Apple is currently not doing them. Third
⏹️ ▶️ John party applications try to do them, but it’s so hard because Mac OS fights you at every step. So anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John my answer to this is basically like a modern, you know, swift, savvy,
⏹️ ▶️ John like not something that’s in core foundation, not something that’s an ancient carbon API,
⏹️ ▶️ John but like a modern API that lets you participate in the window
⏹️ ▶️ John management system in Mac OS. Changing window layers, knowing where they all are,
⏹️ ▶️ John and being able to do things as they’re moved around. That would be a dream, not just for me and for my apps,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I think if Apple provided those APIs, all those apps that are out there now that try to do this
⏹️ ▶️ John with like the accessibility APIs and the janky ones that we have now would become so much better,
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more full featured. I’ve said this on past programs, stage manager. If Apple did
⏹️ ▶️ John my wishlist of APIs here, stage manager should have been something that a third party could have implemented.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, because if you have all the APIs and a third party had the idea of like, I think it would be cool if Windows worked like this,
⏹️ ▶️ John a third party should have been able to implement stage manager. As we know, a third party can absolutely not implement
⏹️ ▶️ John stage manager. Only Apple can do it. And now only Apple can ever make it better. And only Apple, we have to wait for the next
⏹️ ▶️ John idea that Apple has in five years. Third parties are out there with lots of cool ideas about window management
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Mac. They can’t implement them because Apple does not provide robust enough APIs. And like
⏹️ ▶️ John I said, you can do pretty much all of these with zero access to the contents of
⏹️ ▶️ John any of these windows. So it is privacy preserving, but it is, you know, annoying for Apple to implement because
⏹️ ▶️ John they may think this is not important. But I’m like, Apple, your heart doesn’t seem into this window management thing. Every once in a while, some
⏹️ ▶️ John team manages to squeak something out and it gets added to the giant pile of Mac window management stuff. Let third
⏹️ ▶️ John parties do it. We’ll figure out what works. just copy whatever the most popular app is in five years.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s, that’s what I want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. Julian continues. Casey, this is a tough one has to be Apple and not another company for Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Casey OS and API and Apple TV for call sheet to pull out the current movie or show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name and be able to prompt with the movie show info required. Yeah, kind of. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really, the one thing I would kill for right now is I want to have a way to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ask any of the Apple TVs on the same network. What are you playing right now? And I get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey why that isn’t a thing because somebody like Facebook would use it for nefarious purposes. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe you could have, I mean, there’s so many other freaking user prompts like, you know, Windows Vista
⏹️ ▶️ Casey style. Why not prompt to some security prompt that says, hey, is it cool if CallSheet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks at what you’re watching? And I would love that. And it’ll never happen, but that would be what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would want. Please and thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Why don’t you just do what everybody else does, which is just have microphones or a visual
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey system. Yeah, right. Exactly. Detect
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s playing and look it up Shazam style to figure it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, that’s what I should do.
#askatp: Best/first/favorite Phish concerts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Winnie Lewis writes, could Marco please best first favorite fish concerts? I wasn’t aware
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fish had a lore and I’m curious where to start.
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you need me to explain best first favorite Marco? We should explain it to the listener anyway. Yeah, please. Yeah. So best first favorite is a thing
⏹️ ▶️ John from one of my other podcasts, reconcilable differences. My cohost Merlin came up with it. It is
⏹️ ▶️ John the idea that when you’re trying to discuss a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing like the band fish or a television show or, you know, a set of movies or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John you are challenged to come up with which one of these things you think is the best, the best Beatles album for example,
⏹️ ▶️ John which one you think is someone who is new to the Beatles should listen to first, so what Beatles album should I
⏹️ ▶️ John start with, and what is your favorite Beatles album, and they may all be the same thing or they may all
⏹️ ▶️ John be different. So best first favorite fish concert is what’s the best fish concert, what’s your favorite fish concert, and if someone is new to
⏹️ ▶️ John fish and you had to tell them this is the concert you should start with, which one is it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t really have a good answer. So the reason Winnie Lewis asked this question is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was shortly after New Year’s this year, because Phish did a really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fan service amazing thing for their New Year’s Eve concert that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’ve been a Phish fan for a very long time, this was an especially big one that played upon a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whole bunch of stuff in Phish lore from forever ago that fans really enjoyed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I don’t really know how to tell you to get started in Phish in a way that you would appreciate that. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of like saying like, oh here we have a podcast with over 500 episodes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco How do I go about getting all of the old references? You could go listen to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all 500 episodes of our show and by that point you will understand all the references.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a bit of a commitment and I wouldn’t necessarily recommend that most people do it just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s quite a lot to
⏹️ ▶️ John tackle. But that New Year’s one could be your favorite though still or could be the best.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fish has 40 years they’ve been playing together. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no one is going, like you’re not going to go into a band with a 40 year history
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and get all the context to understand all the different lore. I don’t even know a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. And I’ve been a very diehard fan of the band since like 2007-ish, 2008-ish.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Much of the old Fish lore goes over my head even because I wasn’t there in the 90s when when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the fandom was really building up. So I’m actually not even qualified
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to answer this question and I have purchased the live download of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every show they’ve done since 2009.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can answer favorite for sure. Answer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t do that either. I don’t frequently listen to old shows.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll pull one up occasionally. And in fact, one of the reasons why I want to make a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jam Band listening app, as I discussed in previous episodes at some point, that the app that will have an audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of four people. And so I should never make this app. But one of the features that I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of this app is kind of a way to like deep mine my collection
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of old Phish concerts for like gems of shows. And I have a couple of ideas on how that could be made more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco interesting and things like that. But the reality is what I usually am listening to is the last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco few months worth of live shows. So of course that’s a rolling window. They’re literally doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a show right now. I cannot wait until tomorrow morning when I can download it and listen to it. Usually that’s what I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing, is I’m listening to whatever the last few months of shows are I’ll kind of go through. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I’m going through a show, I will give star ratings in the Mac music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app, formerly called iTunes. Anything that I rate of a certain level, I’ll kind of go back and revisit more often.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then I have a playlist in iTunes slash music called Best of Fish. any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real standout songs, not shows, I will add to that list. It’s not a huge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco list, but then whenever I’m somewhere, if I’m like, oh, shuffle my best of fish playlist, like then I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m gonna get some real, you know, rockin’ standouts. But I don’t, even I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am not qualified to tell you which entire performance is best or my favorite.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would say for first, your best off for first fish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco concert, Just finding any of them. So the service that they release them through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is called Live Fish. You can buy a whole show worth of MP3s there for I think it’s 10 bucks for a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night. You can also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try, they have their own streaming service that spotlights certain shows. You can stream the whole catalog from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. They have a free trial on that streaming service. So you can even just try, like sign up for the streaming service for a month and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play some shows. I think it’s 12 bucks or whatever. Like we’re not talking a ton of money here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what I would suggest. Get into it that way, because the way most fans get into Phish
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is maybe you’ll hear one of their studio albums or two. You can go to whatever music streaming service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you already have and listen to some of their studio albums, but what the band really is about is live
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shows. So getting any live show exposure will give you an idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of what this band actually is. Some of them are available on YouTube for free. Some of them you can get on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certain streaming services for free. most of them you’re gonna have to go to live fish to get because most of them are not released through the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco official like streaming service channels. And then the second thing is, if you’re into this, go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a concert. Many people, if you don’t get into fish through listening to the albums first,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you usually get into fish because someone brought you to a concert and you enjoyed it. Uh, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, that’s what I would suggest. That’s like for first, go to the streaming services and listen to whatever you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco live generally is preferred to studio albums and go to a show if that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your jam, so to speak. And that’s it. Unfortunately, I don’t have a good answer to like, what are my things?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Cause my things are always shifting around. I don’t have one show I go back to all the time. I’m constantly just listening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to whatever is recent, whatever I can get.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is a very on brand for Fish, for the band and for you in particular, to
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially not be able to name best first or favorite because it’s all just music, man. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said, but that is the result. Thank you to our sponsors this week, Celtrios
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Squarespace. And thanks to our members who support us directly. you can join us at atp.fm slash
⏹️ ▶️ Marco join. And we will talk to you next week.
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find
⏹️ ▶️ John the show notes at atp.fm And if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John into Twitter, 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
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so long
100MP in Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I went on a small adventure. I mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a while ago, and a couple of listeners have called me out on it recently, I mentioned that I may or may not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have recently bought a higher resolution camera in preparation for Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco content. I was tempted for a while to go with a higher resolution camera system, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I did. And what pushed me over the edge happened
⏹️ ▶️ Marco around the time that Casey visited me in New York in the fall. There was a reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey came to New York in the fall. We got pizza together and did a couple other things. That was the only reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the pizza. For some reason during that trip I was inspired that maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I should start capturing higher resolution photos, especially interesting like panoramas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know. Was
⏹️ ▶️ John it because of that really janky jpeg that your phone took of you on the beach and at night trying to get your car unstuck?
⏹️ ▶️ John No! We talked about it on the show, just how terrible that thing
⏹️ ▶️ John was. He’s like, man, you know what I need? I need a higher resolution camera.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, so anyway, so there was an event that Casey and I attended in November.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And anyway, so I decided I needed to capture more high resolution content. Coincidentally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not at all related to that. I got a Vision Pro recently and I was able to view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my panoramas and my other photo and video content in the Vision Pro and was disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the resolution of them when viewed at that scale because of course you’re looking at,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m looking at like phone captured panoramas from old iPhones from like five, six, seven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco years ago being displayed in this virtual like a hundred foot tall view I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing inside the Vision Pro. So I decided, let me see what I can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do with higher resolution stuff. And I wanted for a while to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get into the Fuji GFX line.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Last year I mentioned how I had fallen in love with cameras again
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I had discovered Fuji cameras. And I just love the way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fujis render color. just the out of camera JPEGs that I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able finally to take pictures that I loved without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having to mess with them in Lightroom and everything first. I was just super thrilled with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just the out the straight out of the camera performance of Fujifilm’s cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this was this kind of was inspired because Tiff wanted the X100V for her birthday last year.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes I know they just released the sequel to that like yesterday I’m very much aware of that Thank you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very much. So I got Tiff an X100V for her birthday last year. I got to try it a few times, fell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in love with it, got myself an X-T5. The X-T5 is an amazing camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in so many ways. It is by far my favorite handling and controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve ever had on a camera. Like the way it just has it has just a whole bunch of knobs, but for all the main stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to adjust, you don’t have to go into menus, you don’t have to like hold buttons and turn a wheel and hope something changes. No, it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knobs. It’s wonderful, and I love the X-T5. The only thing with the X-T5 that’s a little bit of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a downer is that Well, there’s two things number one Fuji’s autofocus system is not as good as Sony’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we talked about us I don’t want to go too far into this the autofocus is not as good as Sony’s and also because they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APS-C sized crop sensors They don’t have the very high resolution
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or the very low light abilities of full-frame sensors Well, it turns out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fuji makes a larger sensor camera system. They jumped right over full frame,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have never made one as far as I can tell. Instead they make medium format digital cameras. And yes,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s some asterisks on what that means, but generally this is what is accepted as digital for what medium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco format means. So this is basically the next step up beyond full frame
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in sensor size. So you have the little crop sensors that many of the small mirrorless
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras use, then Then you have full frame, which is what the really nice cameras use. And then above that you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have medium format. The sensor is just giant. And I’ve been eyeing this for a while. I’m like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco man, if I could get amazing resolution and low light performance with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Fuji’s colors, that would be the best of everything. Problem is they’re super
⏹️ ▶️ Marco expensive. Like the, the, uh, the most of the GFX cameras are in the like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, $5,000 and up range. Oh my word. the lenses are also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, very expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John And don’t forget the cameras are usually pretty big.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes. Well, it turned out in the holiday
⏹️ ▶️ Marco season this past winter, there were two factors that led to a substantial discount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on one of the cameras. One was it was the holiday season and everybody was doing sales
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and BS like that. Another was that Fuji was about to, was about to release a new model,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the GFX 100 2 I believe and that pushed down in the lineup and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in price the GFX 100 s that’s the one I got because it was on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super sale and I knew it was about to be replaced but the GFX 100 2 that the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one that came out was adding things that I really don’t need or care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about and was at a price point I would never have gone for but it what it did was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco push the GFX 100 s down to surprisingly affordable, relatively speaking,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco price points. And because I’m not a professional photographer, I don’t need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of giant expensive lenses. I got the smallest lens in the system, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco its version of a 40-ish millimeter pancake. It’s quite large,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it is the GFX version of that. It’s the 50 millimeter F3.5.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’ve been playing with this. I’ve been shooting with this for the last two months whatever it’s been since
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve gotten it. It is amazing and it is kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like like many things in technology it is a massive set of trade-offs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The camera as John said a minute ago is very large. Now it is very large in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terms of like if you look at today’s mirrorless cameras they are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very compact compared to what like good SLRs used to be. If you actually compare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the GFX 100S with this lens to the previous era’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco DSLRs that were of similar professional use cases. Like for instance the Canon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5D line. This camera is almost exactly the same size class as that. It’s very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very similarly sized and weighted to a Canon 5D with like a you know a medium
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aperture lens on it. So it’s big by today’s camera standards
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you go back even just 10 years ago it was considered it was like it’s a normal sized camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that time range for professionals to handle. And I am incredibly happy with it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in most ways. It is an incredibly slow camera, like just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it, I should, I should say it takes a hundred megapixel images. Oh
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re probably the same thing, right? Android phone that takes a hundred megapixel images. Why did you bother getting this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And like, and the size of the sensor, like when, when I, when I had to, you know, open the camera up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mount the lens and I get to see that sensor. It is ridiculous how big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is. It’s so massive. But the result is you get not only incredible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resolution but just as going from a crop sensor to full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frame comes with a substantial increase in light sensitivity and so you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get like much lower noise and higher resolution and better color even in low-light.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have that same jump again going above full frame into this medium format
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensor. So full frame is already great compared to the small sensors, and this is even that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco additional step above that, and so it is amazing. I can shoot ridiculous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things handheld, I can crank the ISO up to like ISO 24,000 and it still looks amazing. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just, I’m very happy with this. But I thought, hey, what if I look at some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these pictures in the Vision Pro and that took me a while to finally hook up and figure out, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco panoramas, there is no metadata that says this photo is a panorama.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But if you crop any photo down to be very wide, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you give it a very wide aspect ratio, I think a little bit wider than 16 by nine at the minimum,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it will display it in the panoramas section and it will enable a panorama-like view mode in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro. Not exactly the same though. It basically gives you, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t give you like the full 180 view, it kind of just gives you like a larger
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in front of you view. But it was enough for me to see the effect. There were two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco key takeaways for me with this camera and with trying to use a professional camera to shoot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision Pro content. Number one, the resolution does matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot. The content of those pictures looked way better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than any panorama my phones have ever shot. It wasn’t even close.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Now, that is not surprising. It’s not a fair comparison. These are massive sensors with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco amazing optics in front of them. So of course you would expect that. So I’m not saying that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPhone camera is crap, like it’s just a totally different beast what I’m talking about here. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s unexpected and that’s fine. However, what I also learned is that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The lens I have for the camera, being a roughly 40-ish millimeter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equivalent focal length, is totally wrong for this kind of use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because it’s just not nearly wide enough. The panoramic display in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision Pro assumes that you have a very wide field of view. Again, it wasn’t even showing it in the full
⏹️ ▶️ Marco width. It was kind of cropping it in and giving me just like a bigger regular window. I’m not sure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that might require some kind of phone-only metadata to give it like the full 180 view?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think if you just made it really, really narrow, it might do it. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like, oh, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the key thing to know about the iPhone panorama is this is not just one capture. You have to like rotate your phone or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so it’s many, many captures, which makes it a way wider field of view in the horizontal
⏹️ ▶️ John axis or whichever direction you’re moving. I mean, you follow the little arrow or whatever. So it’s kind of a shame that Fuji doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John or doesn’t have Fuji have a panorama mode where essentially you take your giant medium format camera and you slide
⏹️ ▶️ John it around the horizon, just like you would do with your phone, and it does multiple 100 megapixel captures and stitches
⏹️ ▶️ John them all together, just like a phone, because that’s what you want for. I mean, I know you’re saying, Oh, if I just got like a, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, a five millimeter lens or some really wide angle thing that it might, you know, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John do the equivalent, but I don’t think I think you’d get the best results if you literally did like a panorama by stitching
⏹️ ▶️ John together multiple exposures from your big medium format into an actual panorama, and that would have
⏹️ ▶️ John even more megapixels in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I think That’s the way to go. And I think ultimately, this is probably the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing that would be done in software. I would assume Lightroom or something probably has
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a feature like this where you can create, where you can stitch together multiple exposures into one big panorama.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sometimes they’ll do it. Some cameras will do it in the camera. Some cameras, I think Sony would force you to use some janky
⏹️ ▶️ John third-party Sony app to do it. And some of them will let you export the exposures and do it
⏹️ ▶️ John in your own app. But it’s per camera brand. It’s another area where if Apple did it, it would be much, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, Apple did do it and it’s way simpler. What do you do? You just move the phone and it just does it. But lots of camera
⏹️ ▶️ John companies do have some way to do this. I’m just not familiar with Fuji solution.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would assume that it would definitely not involve the camera because the camera-
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Has nothing in it, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I mean, the camera has a lot in it, but like it’s already very sluggish to capture and process
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these giant images off this giant sensor. Like there is no way it has the power.
⏹️ ▶️ John Compared to the iPhone in terms of how much computing in there versus how much computing is an iPhone.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, but even, I mean, geez, just imagine how much memory it must take to stitch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco together photos from that sensor. I mean, because the raw, I think, I don’t have the number off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hand, but I think the raws are like 200 megs each. There’s a lot of data being used,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being generated by the sensor. It’s ridiculous how many pixels you have to process.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I would expect this to be no small feat for software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hardware to stitch those together. But I think it’s interesting. But ultimately,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even with the amazing hardware of that camera, it is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suitable to do that job of stitching together for panoramas for the Vision Pro. What you ultimately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want for the Vision Pro panoramas is just better iPhone cameras and better iPhone processing, that’s it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because the iPhone is doing the capture in ways that no camera will ever do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in terms of being able to stitch things together so perfectly, so easily, maybe with imperfect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input, maybe in varying light levels across the frame. Like if you happen to sweep across the sun,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like how do you deal with that? With the camera you can fix the parameters, but then you gotta kind of expose
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the sun and make everything else darker. Like it’s just this whole thing. The iPhone takes care
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of so much of that for us and makes it so easy. And then once you’re in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Vision Pro looking at it, you don’t have to worry about, did I properly match the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perspective with how I process this photo so it will display correctly in the Vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Pro? Doesn’t matter. When you do it with an iPhone, it’s always properly matched. It always handles that for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So ultimately, I think we’re still gonna just be limited by, in practice, by what the iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can do for the sharpness and resolution and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco possibly depth of what we’re looking at in the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John Surprised you didn’t get one of those white monoliths in Alicia Keys studio, that might’ve been cheaper than that
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco thing. Whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John like dual camera system they used to capture that, obviously it’s not still images, but like that’s, when I think
⏹️ ▶️ John about Contra for Vision Pro, I remember I said in my demo, I was much less impressed by the panoramas because
⏹️ ▶️ John they weren’t 3D. Like the right and the left eye didn’t see different perspectives on the same
⏹️ ▶️ John objects. They were a flat 2D billboard wrapped around me, which is cool and would be better if the resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John if there was more pixels, so it didn’t look kind of, you know, kind of fuzzy. But what was
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more compelling to me were the video that was captured with two different
⏹️ ▶️ John perspectives from two different cameras. And I don’t know how expensive the things in Alicia Keys studio
⏹️ ▶️ John were, but they seem smallish. I know when they’re doing the major league soccer,
⏹️ ▶️ John apparently Apple recorded a bunch of those matches with some fancy cameras. Those are probably
⏹️ ▶️ John bigger and scarier than the discreet little white pillars with two little black
⏹️ ▶️ John dots on them. and maybe they’re more like the cameras we were talking about
⏹️ ▶️ John when we talked about 3D movies on the last episode where it’s two gigantic,
⏹️ ▶️ John expensive film cameras arranged in a really weird way through a prism or a beam splitter
⏹️ ▶️ John so that they can both get the perspective they need because the cameras are so big, they
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t get that close to each other. But either way, I find that content much more compelling than I would even
⏹️ ▶️ John an infinite resolution panorama because the panorama still just looks to me like a giant painting that I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John looking at, as opposed to actually being in the mountains, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, totally. Like the panorama, panorama is in the Vision Pro to me, yeah, it looks like I’m in a planetarium.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like okay, there’s a big static image,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got it, planetarium’s usually better than that, but like, you know what I mean. Like, it looks like you’re in a dome and it’s painted on. Like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s great for certain things, but it’s nothing like a 3D environment.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Canon just released, so they kind of released this like double-eyed lens intended
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for capturing VR 180 format, which is what the high rope thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and was it the shark that’s VR 180? The rhinoceros. Yes, anyway, so Canon just released a lens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that, and they have a special mode with one of their highest end new mirrorless cameras,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe it’s the R5C, that can do it with the special lens and the special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco subscription software that you need from Canon to stitch the images together. But- Wait, what is it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing for you, panoramas you mean? No, I mean 3D video. I’m sorry, I switched
⏹️ ▶️ John gears. But from a single camera with a single sensor or from two cameras?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, single camera, single sensor. They just released a lens that has two eyes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on it and I guess it- And they split up the
⏹️ ▶️ John sensor, like one gets the right half, one gets the left half?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but somehow they’re doing 8K video per eye at 60 frames a second. But I haven’t had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a chance to look too much into that yet. But anyway, so if I was gonna actually start creating like 3D content,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would probably look at that. But what I learned from this is like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love this camera for lots of other reasons, but it is not, it’s not what I need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I want to create 3D content. That’s kind of a separate beast.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I do wonder if you could get away with just way worse cameras, but two of them. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John the 3D effect will hide a lot of sins because you’re just so wowed that it looks 3D as long as you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John move your head too much, right? But, yeah, because like I keep thinking of those,
⏹️ ▶️ John those camera stands in the studio, they didn’t look that big. There’s no way they looked close
⏹️ ▶️ John enough to even house a single one of the 8K cameras that Apple’s recording the
⏹️ ▶️ John Major League Soccer games with. So they just, not that they look like webcams, but they looked way smaller
⏹️ ▶️ John than you would think. Like there are two lenses and presumably two cameras inside these little pillars that
⏹️ ▶️ John just kind of look like posts. And I thought those looked pretty good, but maybe I was just fooled by
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that they were 3D and I didn’t notice how pixelated everything was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey No, the 3D stuff, I think was pretty good. Both, you know, the immersive and just regular 3D, I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all of it was very, very well done. And I want more of it. I have somebody, I was just listening to somebody talk about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this. I can’t remember who it was, but um, no, no, I mean, I thought it was somebody else
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that was just saying, or maybe it was dithering. I don’t remember, but you know, the, the three D the immersive stuff, I shouldn’t say three,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the immersive stuff was so, so good. Or I say was as though it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey past tense. I mean, it’s still there. It’s just I’ve experienced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John just the same videos you’ve seen. Exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, But the immersive stuff is so incredibly, incredibly, incredibly cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I just want more of it. I want all of them. I want all of my stuff to be immersive and I know that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey never going to happen, but I want it. And I hope Apple really does just hammer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the gas in order to, you know, get, get more of this. And we heard about the M
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the MLS stuff and we are hearing rumors about the, uh, slam dunk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey contest, but I, I want. All the immersive video. I want all of it, please and thank you.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they need to commission someone to do nature documentaries, you know, kind of like they did when
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K first came out, where you saw a lot of planet Earth type things like, oh, do you have a new 4K TV? Watch this
⏹️ ▶️ John 4K count. But the problem is, they sold way more 4K televisions much quicker than Apple is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John sell these headsets. So it might be a lot. And Apple has the ability
⏹️ ▶️ John to bootstrap this because they do have the rights to some sports franchises. So they’re doing the major
⏹️ ▶️ John league soccer thing. And they do have a studio that makes television shows and movies, and it’s not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to be economical and they’re going to lose money on it. But if you want to solve the chicken egg problem and you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John convince anyone else to make content for your, you know, 200,000 of your closest friends with their
⏹️ ▶️ John headsets, Apple, you just pay to make it yourself. And the good thing is if you make evergreen content like a planet earth style
⏹️ ▶️ John nature thing, that’s not going to age that badly. In five years when more people have these headsets, they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John still want to watch that planet earth thing. Hopefully planet earth won’t have changed that much by then.
⏹️ ▶️ John evergreen and sports aren’t evergreen unfortunately but hey if you catch a particular dramatic game or something
⏹️ ▶️ John that might make some evergreen content and if not you know there’s always more sports so Apple needs to practice
⏹️ ▶️ John recording it in a format that looks good in their headsets and just keep doing that going forward.