618: Type System Says No
19 Dec 2024A new toy Marco bought, a new toy Marco swears he won’t buy, many names John won’t use for his app, and a snack of sharks.
Episode Description:
- New member-exclusive ATP Insider: Making The Show
- Follow-up:
- John’s [hopefully] (?) forthcoming app
- A funny conspiracy theory shared by Thomas Alvarez
- Christian Kent’s correct/joke
- More app name ideas…
- Experts have weighed in on John’s idea
- Alternative space-saving idea from Timm Schoof
- Using self-service parts for upgrade is not really possible because ✨software✨
- John’s [hopefully] (?) forthcoming app
- Pinstripes are back, baby!
- Is Siri… emotional… now?
- Marco’s new e-ink toy
- Integrations
- API
- Note that it’s backordered for a bit
- New Wildlife immersive video episode
- Blackmagic announces immersive video camera
- Apple Vision Pro 🤝 PlayStation VR2 Controllers
- PlayStation VR2
- Steve Jobs quoting Alan Kay
People who are really serious about software should make their own hardware.
- Post-show: John’s app progress
- Members-only ATP Overtime: The Mac monitor situation
- 5K is 5120 × 2880
- Marc Edwards’ chart
- Samsung ViewFinity S9 5K
- At the time of recording, on sale for $720
- Jason’s review
- ASUS ProArt Display 5K PA27JCV Professional Monitor
- BenQ PD2730S
- ASUS PorArt Display 6K PA32QCV
- Apple’s plans
Sponsored by:
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Chapters
- Member special: Making the Show
- Laundry follow-up
- Storacusa follow-up 🖼️
- Sponsor: Aura Frames (code ATP)
- Migrating Photos to JPEG XL?
- Upgrades via self-service parts
- Pinstripes are back! 🖼️
- Siri gains gusto
- TRMNL 🖼️
- Sponsor: MasterClass
- New AVP content: Sharks 🖼️
- Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive 🖼️
- Sponsor: Squarespace
- PSVR controllers for AVP?
- Ending theme
- Storacusa progress
Member special: Making the Show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We also didn’t mention this yet, but we did a new member special. Oh, that should have
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey on me too. It was
⏹️ ▶️ John released like an hour before we started recording. See? See, Casey, I need to be on top of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I know. Usually I add that one. No, that’s not true. No, usually you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John do too. All right. Here we
⏹️ ▶️ John are, you know, an hour and a half into the show. Go ahead, DeMarco.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s about how we make the show. All the organizational techniques we use to prepare
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well in advance for making our show.
⏹️ ▶️ John Except for when the new special episode drops an hour before we’re recording. I was in the shower.
Laundry follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, let’s do some follow-up. We had a lot of feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about laundry, mostly, oh my God, I can’t believe that I listened to laundry stuff and had opinions, but nevertheless,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think our favorite piece of laundry follow-up and feedback was from Thomas Alvarez, who writes,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I told my wife, these guys are talking about washing shirts with the printing right side out, to which she said, they want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to sell you more ATP shirts by telling you to ruin the printing faster. I love this. I wish I could tell you it was some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big conspiracy that we had plotted, but no, that had nothing to do with it, but this is hilarious to me. So this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very well done.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, this is the theory that with the printing facing out, it will rub against other clothes more than it would with the printing facing
⏹️ ▶️ John in. I’m not even sure that theory holds out because, you know, although the clothes are all smushing around there,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have it inside out, the printing is still touching another piece of fabric. It just happens to be the
⏹️ ▶️ John other side of its own shirt. It doesn’t know that it’s its own shirt versus another shirt, but who knows? People have
⏹️ ▶️ John ideas about laundry, but yeah, it was not a conspiracy to get you to buy more shirts. gonna come off those shirts
⏹️ ▶️ John eventually no matter what if you keep watching.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Of course, John had feedback about a joke, but here we are.
Storacusa follow-up
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Christian Kent, speaking of jokes, has a correction. And according to someone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who put this in the show notes, who I’m sure his name is John Syracuse, Christian Kent apparently had the best
⏹️ ▶️ Casey joke about John’s app.
⏹️ ▶️ John So- So the correction, the correction is this. I was, when I was talking, talking about names for the app, which we’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ John to in a second, I was mentioning, I think I said Space Doubler or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that. Cause there was a series of utilities for a classic Mac OS called RAM Doubler or Disk Doubler.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, Disk Doubler is what Space Doubler was called. That’s the correction. Sorry, but it was ram doubler and speed doubler believe
⏹️ ▶️ John it or not They have they sold a software product called speed doubler. I did make your computer faster
⏹️ ▶️ John perceptively faster in a few interesting ways But anyway, the space-saving one was not space doubler. It was disk
⏹️ ▶️ John doubler And Christian made an image of like the old I presume This is the old disk doubler a
⏹️ ▶️ John floppy disk that it came on with like the little styled label or whatever but he changed the word disk and
⏹️ ▶️ John disk doubler to be a a potentially appropriate name
⏹️ ▶️ John for the app that I’m working on, which is Risk Doubler.
⏹️ ▶️ John A little bit pessimistic, but you know, I laughed. I thought it was funny. Risk Doubler,
⏹️ ▶️ John Disc Doubler, it’s right there in front of you. Good job, Christian. I like that one. And speaking of names.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, we have so many names were suggested for John’s app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco made myself kind of a top list. Have you made one or do you wanna hear mine?
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, let’s, are yours ones that have been suggested by other people or are they new? By other people. Oh, okay,
⏹️ ▶️ John well, now let me, so I have a list here in front of me. Now, I wanna say that this
⏹️ ▶️ John list is not exhaustive. There were just so many suggestions I could not click them all. So I’m sorry
⏹️ ▶️ John if you don’t hear your suggestion on this list. This list is not ordered in any way.
⏹️ ▶️ John on, you gotta order it, man.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You gotta pick your favorites.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll get to that in a little bit. I mean, there are favorites mixed in, but it’s mostly kind of like the order that I got
⏹️ ▶️ John to putting them into this document together.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s no theatrics in that. You gotta have like a countdown from
⏹️ ▶️ John worst to best. So as I go down this list though, what it will actually be
⏹️ ▶️ John is an exercise in me trying to pronounce people’s names. Like it’s not about, I just realized this
⏹️ ▶️ John has nothing to do with the name of my app and has entirely to do with the fact that I decided to put the people’s name who suggested
⏹️ ▶️ John it in here. And now you’re gonna hear, this is like payback for Casey. Now you’re gonna hear me try to read 50 people’s
⏹️ ▶️ John names. Anyway, I’ll try to do this quickly, here we go. Ben McCarthy suggested
⏹️ ▶️ John deduplicity. Todd Hoff suggested free disk space because it has a double meaning. It’s like you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John freeing it as a verb and you’re also talking about it as a noun. Alexander Morris Terry said spacey list. I
⏹️ ▶️ John Ben O’Maddick said final frontier. Mark Edwards said double down and clone cut. Gabrielle or
⏹️ ▶️ John Gabriel said deduplo. F10 said dupe de dupe, which I thought was fun.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s very good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yvonne Caveiro Balunday said, dupe nukem,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey which is good. Mm-hmm.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, a little bit of a copyright trade address, whatever. Graham Kay said,
⏹️ ▶️ John store accusa. El Neal said, ding. John Muir said,
⏹️ ▶️ John safe space and bigger Mac. I’m sure the McDonald’s would love bigger Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ John Thomas Hall said, saving spaces, bit biter, and bite impotent. Bite impotent?
⏹️ ▶️ John bite in front of idempotent. That’s a little too obscure. Um Jack Wellborn said fire marshal
⏹️ ▶️ John like yes like fire marshal
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco file marshal.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, file marshal. It said, let me show you something. Um file minion copy optimizer
⏹️ ▶️ John and copy miser. Michael Horns, uh Michael on or a I’m gonna say said space cowboy which
⏹️ ▶️ John I like because it’s a cowboy bebop reference. Uh Ted Duffield said obiterate
⏹️ ▶️ John uh team O’Groon said duper blooper duper trooper and mirror space. Dan
⏹️ ▶️ John an angler said Archivides in honor of his one of history’s great minds famous
⏹️ ▶️ John for messing with volumes because he was figuring out like how to tell the volume of like spheres or something. I remember and he lived
⏹️ ▶️ John in the city of Syracuse said Duple race or Dupre
⏹️ ▶️ John race. Matt Johnson said Clone War. Obviously, there’s lots of clone things that are gonna run afoul of Star Wars here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Kelly said Clone Zone. Mustafa Hamoumi said Conjure as in creating something out of nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John like free storage. Stephen Bernard said dis get with like this get with a G.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jack you. You Yana said dupli killer. These are getting kind of violent here. Squoson said Optimus
⏹️ ▶️ John Marina Appleman said Space Forger. Claude Zin said repeat defender or repeat offender.
⏹️ ▶️ John A duplicate double down duper scooper. Renee Bannis said storage sweep.
⏹️ ▶️ John Jonathan Augusto said storage consolidator, dis consolidator, consolidate
⏹️ ▶️ John stories. Sounds like a dinosaur. Um storage liberator, disc liberator, bite liberator,
⏹️ ▶️ John freedom biter, Schumstra said space rescue and space machine. And Nathan Galt said cow
⏹️ ▶️ John candidate because cow is cop stands for copy on right, which is how the cloning stuff works under the covers. Uh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Mike Corillico said doppelganger and Jose Vasquez says space scout one file
⏹️ ▶️ John stack file bed bunk and Mac half empty. Those are all the ones that I have in my document that is not all
⏹️ ▶️ John the ones that suggested, but that gives you a feel of what the names are going. Now, Marco, So you have a favorite list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do from least favorite to most, but I think these are all excellent. That’s why they made the list.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jonathan, the core copyright, like two words copy and then like right as in the opposite of left
⏹️ ▶️ Marco copy right. Jonathan Augusto’s storage liberator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Ben Curtin. That’s a reference, which is amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s a like an extremely inside joke for an app that you’re trying to sell to people. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but that’s a reference is a great name. Tom English suggested Space Finder, which I think is pretty pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco straight. I did like Graham Kay’s Storicusa, that’s excellent. Jack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Wellborn’s File Marshall is also excellent. I also wrote down Ivanka Arbel-Gunde’s Dupe Nukem.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But my favorite, which I don’t think you said, was via email by Sean Flynn, Forage
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, there was lots of foragers. I didn’t have all the forage ones on because so many will be like Space Forager, lots of foraging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Space Forager I thought was decent, but I think Forage Space is even better. I think that
⏹️ ▶️ John what is that? What’s the pun there? Like storage
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco storage space forage space.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Come on. That’s a great name. If you’re not going to go with store accuser, I think or dupe
⏹️ ▶️ John dupe Newcomb bigger Mac is what is one of the I like I do like dupe Newcomb
⏹️ ▶️ John and bigger all the ones that you can’t possibly use because like McDonald’s and Apple and whatever. Those are funny
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco jokes. Yeah, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t use most of those, but you can use store accuser or forage space. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna use store. I know there was no way you were ever going to use
⏹️ ▶️ John bites of Syracuse County.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Casey, do you have any
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think Duke Nukem was my favorite, which obviously has problems. I think you could get away with it, but it definitely has problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. Other than that, there were a bunch of really good ones. Nothing specific is leaping out at me
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the rightest answer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And again, I apologize if I didn’t read yours. There were just so many of these, and I’m sure lots of fell through.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, that’s true. Forge Space is excellent. That’s Probably of the ones that you can actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use, that’s probably my favorite.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the reason I’m not giving you top lists here is because I have indeed chosen a name for
⏹️ ▶️ John my app since last we recorded. Oh no. And I’m not going to reveal what it is and I’m not even going to tell you whether
⏹️ ▶️ John it was one of the ones on this list or not. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Will you tell us privately at another time?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco has to be an on-show
⏹️ ▶️ John reveal. Here’s the thing about the name and maybe Casey, you can relate. It’s a name,
⏹️ ▶️ John I chose this name And I just know that everyone else is not going to like it. Oh, Ben there.
⏹️ ▶️ John Only I have to like it, and that’s all that matters. So yeah, eventually I will reveal the name. I’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ John reveal the name once I have an icon, which I’m nowhere near having, or whatever. You know, anyway. And on that
⏹️ ▶️ John front, I’ll just give a brief update on my progress on the app. When we recorded last week’s episode,
⏹️ ▶️ John I had created the Xcode project a couple of days before that. So if you’re expecting that app to be released,
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, The last one we recorded, I had a working app and it would do what it’s supposed to do when you click the button, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it takes longer than a week to make an app just FYI. And it takes me personally way longer because I am so
⏹️ ▶️ John slow as a Mac developer because there’s just so much I don’t know. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s frustrating when you’re a fast developer in other contexts and other languages. At this point, I’m faster on PHP
⏹️ ▶️ John than I am in doing what I do. There’s just so many things I gotta do. And there’s only one way to do a lot of things
⏹️ ▶️ John because you got to use the APIs to do them. Anyway, you know, it’s going to be a little while. This app will
⏹️ ▶️ John not be out in 2024 for sure. Who knows when in 2025 will be out? What am I doing with all this time?
⏹️ ▶️ John If you already have an app that quote unquote works, well, I got to put a UI on it. That takes a surprising amount of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John I got to do all the store in that purchase stuff. It takes a surprising amount of time for someone who has never done it before.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll complain about Apple’s documentation maybe next episode. Oh, yes, please. And and
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, basically, I’m trying to figure out and implement all of the appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ John guardrails to make this not be a risk doubler, right? That’s the hard part. When you just make something for yourself,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, well, you know, I know what I’m doing, and it’s fine or whatever. But to make something you’re going to give to other people to use, you really
⏹️ ▶️ John have to nail the sucker down. And that is taking a lot of time because I’m trying to think of what are the best mitigations?
⏹️ ▶️ John Which one should I allow to be disabled? Which one should I not allow to be disabled? How locked down should it be because you lock
⏹️ ▶️ John it down too much, it’s not going to find any duplicates because it’s not allowed to look anywhere where the duplicates are, you know. So
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll I’ll give updates as I go along here, but it’s going to be a while, so don’t hold your breath.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We also got some feedback some experts have weighed in. Friend of the show, Dave Nanian, has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey some thoughts. Dave writes SuperDuper, which is what I use every other day in order to do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a full backup of my computer. Dave writes, the big problem with Space Saver, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess is the name that he has chosen, we’ll see if that’s what John has chosen, is that it’s going to be run by people low
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on space, not just the curious. side effects, more data on the drive than capacity, will cause post-run
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pain for the user, it’ll cause confusion, and more. Think migration, moving to new Macs, etc.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even though we know how to do this, obviously it’s a brute force thing, we don’t on backups
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for performance or sense reasons on smart update, which is a feature within
⏹️ ▶️ Casey SuperDuper. Erase replicates to preserve these relationships,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even for data only on version 3.10. So this is more about again, super duper,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s not going to be so much your support, which may occur may not, but downstream support effects that you’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fully or at all anticipating at some level, of course, it’s not your problem. But it’s a significant issue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s certainly prevented me from doing something similar. I don’t want to lead users down a primrose path.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so this I mean, obviously, maybe I’m making Dave’s life miserable. So even though I’m not calling
⏹️ ▶️ John it super duper, he’s still gonna have problems. What he’s talking about is, if you have have lots of clones on
⏹️ ▶️ John your drive, clone files on your drive, and then you try to
⏹️ ▶️ John use SuperDuper to clone that drive periodically to like another drive that is the same
⏹️ ▶️ John size, you may be surprised to find when it says, oh not enough disk space. And you’ll be like, what do you mean
⏹️ ▶️ John not enough disk space? I have one 4 terabyte drive that I’m trying to clone to another 4 terabyte drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John How can it not fit? Clearly it fits. I’m looking at it right here. Well, the drive you’re looking at that has a whole
⏹️ ▶️ John bunch of clones on it that are only taking up one amount of the space even if there’s five copies
⏹️ ▶️ John of the file. But when you copy it to another disk, if you don’t faithfully reproduce those clones,
⏹️ ▶️ John you will take five times the space for those five files instead of just the one times the space that it’s taking on your drive.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what he’s talking about about drives growing or whatever, like migrating to a new Mac, for instance. If you have tons
⏹️ ▶️ John of clones in your drive, you migrate to a new Mac and it doesn’t reproduce the clones, your stuff might not all fit on the thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, my response to this, I had a couple of responses. First of all, obviously Dave’s perspective is he is doing
⏹️ ▶️ John support and writing an app that does discloning. So yeah, it’s gonna be probably more an issue
⏹️ ▶️ John for him than it is for me. But second of all, ever since Apple introduced this feature, the Finder does
⏹️ ▶️ John it every time you copy a file onto the same volume anywhere, which is why people have clones all over the place. People have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John how many clones they have. They’re just blindly and instantaneously copying giant files
⏹️ ▶️ John around and putting them in different folders and organizing things and not realizing they already had a copy of that somewhere over here or over there.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’m not the only thing creating clones. People are doing it themselves every time they duplicate
⏹️ ▶️ John a file in the Finder or copy it somewhere, right? Again, on the same volume only, right? Still, I’m obviously making
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem worse, which is kind of a bummer, but like this feature exists for a reason, not
⏹️ ▶️ John just to make copies instantaneous, but to save space. Like I said, I leverage it myself because
⏹️ ▶️ John one of the big things in my home directory is the giant folders full of all my audio recordings. Every time I record
⏹️ ▶️ John a podcast, it’s a couple hundred megabytes and I copy it to a bunch of different places to organize it. And I don’t worry
⏹️ ▶️ John about those copies because they’re all clones They don’t take up any more space because I’m copying them in the finder, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s one of the reasons when I duplicate my drive with super duper sometimes I run out of space Now what he was saying is
⏹️ ▶️ John when you do the initial copy with super duper it faithfully replicates the clones No problem when you do subsequent
⏹️ ▶️ John incremental copies It does not faithfully reproduce the clones because it would take too long or whatever I told him if you
⏹️ ▶️ John added the option for smart update to Reproduce the clones I would take that option because I want I want that
⏹️ ▶️ John to be leveraged It’s leveraged on the initial copy, but not on follow copies But anyway, I’m still making the app.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll see how it turns out. It may be disastrous for me, it may be disastrous for Dave, it may be disastrous for users,
⏹️ ▶️ John But right now, I’m still a go.
Sponsor: Aura Frames (code ATP)
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This week we are sponsored by Aura Frames. Imagine you wanted to give
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the gift of happiness. Unfortunately, you can’t literally do that, but thanks to Aura, you can effectively do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. How? Because you give people the ability to get their photos out of their devices,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out of their memory banks, if you will, and put them on display in the middle of your home. Aura
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was kind enough to send a couple of these photo frames to me, and I kept one and put it on my living room wall, and I sent one to my mom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and dad. I could pre-set it up before it even left the box by scanning a little bit spooky
⏹️ ▶️ Casey QR code, give it their house’s wifi password so that when they plug it in, magic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey happens. It’s incredible. That’s a great example of how well AuraFrames thinks about everything. They’re just so well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey designed from top to bottom. There’s no chintzy looking branding on the front or anything like that. In fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m not even sure there’s branding anywhere on these things, but if there is, it’s gotta be on the back because I never see it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey These are so well done. And the thing of it is, is that every time I walk in my living room, I see a picture of the kids or Aaron
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or Penny or what have you, and I get to be happy. I get that little dopamine hit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of a happy memory that I shared with my family. And my parents, oh Nelly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they love putting pictures of their grandkids and their kids and their friends and whatever. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’ve set this frame in the focal point of their living room. It is like the side table that you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see from the front door. That’s how important it is to them. These things really genuinely are great. They’re super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey easy to upload photos to. I can upload photos from my phone directly to my parents frame or my own or both
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Migrating Photos to JPEG XL?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tim Schoof writes, do you think that an APFS style switch from JPEG to JPEG XL
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the Apple Photos library is planned, imminent, or for some reason unlikely? I’d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey certainly like a 50% smaller photo library. Are there third-party tools to achieve this and would you trust them?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t think this is likely anytime soon, although to Tim’s point, you know, they’ve shown that they can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey change the wings while the plane is flying, so anything’s possible. I don’t, I don’t know. I would,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would want to keep my photos kind of as they are, even though there’s really no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like academic reason why this wouldn’t be a good idea. I don’t think I would do it though.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I remember correctly, isn’t one of the benefits of JPEG XL that it can actually store existing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco JPEGs at smaller size and then losslessly go back to them if it needs
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I believe that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So that’s, that’s what he’s getting at. The, the idea that, um, the specific feature JPEG XL he’s talking about is take
⏹️ ▶️ John an existing JPEG that’s not an Excel JPEG and make it smaller with no loss in quality It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John re-compressing it at all. It’s just found a cleverer way to store the exact same JPEG So it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John improve the quality of the photo, but it also doesn’t make it any worse It is not re-compressing it. JPEG XL has a way to
⏹️ ▶️ John just take your existing JPEGs and Make them smaller without changing the quality of the display
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing about them. It’s essentially a lossless conversion just saving space
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple could do that to all of our JPEGs if they wanted to.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think probably the reason it is not imminent is because development
⏹️ ▶️ John in the photos world is slow. Sometimes for good reasons, because it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ John very important thing to get right. How long did it take for us to get iCloud shared photo libraries? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John a decade, right? But I’d rather have them get it right than ship it and destroy all my photos,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? So I think this is not imminent, but it definitely would be cool. As for would I,
⏹️ ▶️ John are there third-party tools and would you trust them? I would absolutely not trust them because
⏹️ ▶️ John converting, because when you do this thing, you are converting it from a JPEG file to a JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ John XL file. It would have probably a different file name extension, it would be a different format, apps have to read it. You can’t do that
⏹️ ▶️ John behind the back of the Photos app. Like Photos app expects JPEGs to be JPEGs, not JPEG XLs.
⏹️ ▶️ John I would absolutely not trust a third-party tool to do this because that’s not what the photo library is expecting.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even if you just think of it as simple as like, the metadata in the SQLite database in your photo library will no longer
⏹️ ▶️ John match. Like the file and disk will be a different size, right? It’ll just, no. If you see a third party
⏹️ ▶️ John tool that says it will do this, don’t do it. Like I’m talking about changing your photo library in place. Now, if you wanna like
⏹️ ▶️ John export originals from your photo library, put them in a third party tool, change them to JPEG, XL and re-import
⏹️ ▶️ John them, by all means, but you’re gonna lose all your metadata for the photos if you do that, so. Anyway, it would be cool if
⏹️ ▶️ John they did it, but as we saw with iOS, They didn’t even go whole hog on JPEG XL on the phones. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John a thing they use for RAWs, but they didn’t even switch. The regular voters are still HEEC, so baby steps in the JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, when you think about it, though, nobody has a higher incentive to shrink photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco JPEGs than Apple, because Apple probably stores more photo JPEGs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their own servers than anybody else in the world, if I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to guess. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John charge you for it. Yes, well, that’s fair. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they have that much incentive. Well, but still, I think they would benefit substantially from just the resource savings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on their end alone. And I mean, who knows how many people really pay that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much for iCloud who wouldn’t still pay.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s the question of like, are people simply not paying and by making it smaller,
⏹️ ▶️ John making it, well, they’re never gonna fit in between the amount, they give you five gigs for free, which doesn’t matter how much compression they do, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not gonna help anybody, right? So, I see what you’re saying, but right now,
⏹️ ▶️ John anybody who does, Anybody who pays for any iCloud storage gives Apple the
⏹️ ▶️ John market rates for it. I think last time I reviewed it, they were charging about the same amount as Google. So they’re not ridiculous, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it is ridiculous that the amount you get for free is basically useless.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I could totally see, because keep in mind, occasionally what Apple will do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is in order to justify still selling iPhones and Macs that have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much too small a base storage for the era in which they are sold, They will sometimes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do fancy compression tricks to save space in order to make them not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suck for a little while longer as much so they can keep selling their 256 or their 8 gig or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We see all the work they did to try to fit modern LLMs to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco try to shrink those models to fit onto the small amounts of RAM that are in iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A lot of that’s because it’s just more efficient. A lot of it is because the iPhone RAM has been too small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a little while, and so people, like they kinda had to make it work. In this case, maybe, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, maybe they’d be motivated to do one of these like in-place migrations
⏹️ ▶️ Marco over time for everyone’s photo libraries, you know, as JPEG XL support improves over time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe they’d be motivated to do it simply to, you know, keep selling 256 gig Macs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a little bit longer, you know. Like there’s, there are other cynical reasons than to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Remember last episode, they said we’re gonna get the one terabit NANDs. We’re gonna be off 256 next year. That person
⏹️ ▶️ John promised. I hope. Yeah, and by the way, just to be clear, JPEG XL,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, they should change, not that, to get the benefit of JPEG XL, you should
⏹️ ▶️ John be saving your photos in JPEG XL. This thing we’re talking about where you can take your existing JPEGs and save them without loss
⏹️ ▶️ John of quality in a smaller size, that’s like an off to the side nice to have. The advantage of JPEG XL, we talked about before,
⏹️ ▶️ John is like, it will make you better quality pictures in the same size or, you know, like it’s, you
⏹️ ▶️ John should just be, the camera should be producing those if you wanna get the real benefit from it. So I would imagine they wouldn’t do the
⏹️ ▶️ John recompression until or unless they decided, oh, we’re switching from Heek to JPEG XL. And
⏹️ ▶️ John like the, you know, the space savings is like, well, since we’re in there and since every, because if they did this, like every
⏹️ ▶️ John part of the Apple ecosystem would have to fully support it, which I think it mostly does as already. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think we had a follow-up item about that where most Apple things can currently read JPEG
⏹️ ▶️ John XL, but Apple’s cameras don’t shoot them and I’m not sure it’s entirely universal. So
⏹️ ▶️ John we’ll see, I’m rooting for it. I love saving space. I don’t know if you’ve heard.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I was aware of that as it turns out.
Upgrades via self-service parts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Unrelated to this, we got in a little bit of anonymous Apple Genius feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with regard to self-service. So this anonymous genius writes, Regarding buying upgrade parts
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from Apple’s self-service store, you can’t simply insert the main logic board of one configuration of MacBook Pro into
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a different configuration of MacBook Pro, nor can you do this for the storage modules in Mac Studio, because Apple requires
⏹️ ▶️ Casey their configuration tests to be run for self-service repair and for Apple Store and mail-in repairs.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This configuration diagnostics will fail unless the specs match what’s already assigned and configured
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to your serial number. Apple locks storage memory configuration to your serial number, preventing you from using a different logic
⏹️ ▶️ Casey board configuration to increase storage memory, which is why you enter your serial number on the self-repair
⏹️ ▶️ Casey website. Womp womp.
Pinstripes are back!
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, apparently you’re still trying to make pinstripes and happen. What’s going on
⏹️ ▶️ John Not me. I just was using my computer one day and I looked down at the finder and it was looking a little under
⏹️ ▶️ John the weather. Maybe like I had a rough weekend and just woke up too early.
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess we’ll put a picture in the show notes or maybe it’ll be chapter art or something because it’s hard to describe what it
⏹️ ▶️ John is, but it’s clearly a mistake, like a rendering problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t look like it was done stylistically. It’s like the finder icon in the dock on the left side of the dock.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s got kind of vertical stripes where there’s like a dim area and the lighter dim area and lighter, like
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, I don’t know, 10, 15 stripes, vertical stripes across the thing. But as it gets towards the edge,
⏹️ ▶️ John like the stripe breaks up and it’s like melting the colors behind it and it just looks awful.
⏹️ ▶️ John I posted about it on a mess and I said, you feeling okay this morning, little guy?
⏹️ ▶️ John And I thought it was just me who knows whatever. I have exotic hardware sometimes weird stuff happens,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then Jeff Johnson posted that he saw this on reddit as well Someone who had the exact same problem only on their
⏹️ ▶️ John computer It was Safari and the finder you can see in my screenshot the finder is messed up But Safari
⏹️ ▶️ John right next to it is fine, and then in this reddit screenshot Safari and the finder are messed
⏹️ ▶️ John up, but the but the icon between them which is like launch center or whatever is fine
⏹️ ▶️ John So anyway, this is a 15.2 thing as far as I can tell because it started after we all updated to 15.2 I
⏹️ ▶️ John think this is an Apple bug just FYI if the icons in your docs doctors look wonky it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John probably 15.2 and hopefully Apple will fix it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was quick and easy.
Siri gains gusto
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of quick and easy, I have a question for you. So I don’t drive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey around town very much. And when I do, it’s usually 10 or 15 minutes, but it seems like some way, somehow
⏹️ ▶️ Casey every time I get in my car, that is the moment that any of my friends decide
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they would like to talk to me via text message. And so because of that, I am often reading
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you will, and responding to text messages via Siri on CarPlay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In 18.2, I swear that Siri has gotten more emotional.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What does that mean? So, like, as an example, when I said something, gosh, I wish I remember
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what specifically it was, but I said something like, I said to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dingus, I’m dictating a text message, right? And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I said to the dingus, all caps no, all caps freaking, all caps way, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the dingus and Kurt interprets as, you know, no freaking way written all in capital letters,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? You hope and normally, normally what would happen is it would read it back to me because it’s car play and it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, okay, sending to Aaron, no freaking way. And that’s all I would get.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But ever since 18 to I swear to you, what I get instead is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sending to Aaron, no freaking way. Would you like to send it? And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I feel like Siri is actually expressing some amount of inferred,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I guess, I mean, that’s what I think that’s what I’m looking for, inferred emotion based on what you’re sending.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s the most obvious example that I can think of is when I said something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like that, that was surprising. And I feel like I keep saying the S word, the ding
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has kept, like read it to me and it read it back to me in a surprising way. Um, I said something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey angry, um, I think similar to what I just described. and it read it back
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in like an angry way. You know, maybe it was the same words, maybe it was different, but it was like, no freaking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way, you know, I’m exaggerating some, but you get the idea. It is surprising to me that it’s showing a bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of emotion. And I don’t remember this being a thing before. I don’t remember reading anything about this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey anywhere, but I swear to you it’s happening. So if you guys don’t have anything to say about it, that’s fine, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey listeners reach out on like Mastodon or something, you don’t need to email us or anything like that, but reach out to me on Mastodon. If you’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a similar experience, had a similar experience, or if there’s been coverage about this that I missed, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey love to get an email about that because I totally miss this if this was stated and I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just didn’t realize it.
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC was so long ago that we’ve all forgotten about what was advertised for iOS 18 because it’s been rolling
⏹️ ▶️ John out over the course of this whole year, but I’m pretty sure this was one of the features that was advertised
⏹️ ▶️ John back at WWDC that was coming in iOS 18. And we all forgot about it because at this point, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not even gonna blame Casey this has just been so long. This year they have just been, it’s been a slow
⏹️ ▶️ John roll. These features are not coming fast and furious. It’s like when they get around to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Someone in the chat room is saying it’s all of 18, not just 18.2, but yeah, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John sure this was in fact an advertised feature of the new Siri. I think when I first upgraded
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 18, I noted that it did that as well, and I did not like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wanted it to go back to being on an even keel. I don’t need it to add to play act, the things that I’m saying. but
⏹️ ▶️ John yeah, I think it’s not just you, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey As long as it gets it right, which so far it has, I like it, but I don’t feel like I noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it before 18.2, but it very, very well could be that it was 18.0 and I just didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, that’s another thing with the 18 release. I’m just going by what some people said in the chat room, but it’s like, which 18
⏹️ ▶️ John release had which thing in it and which things are still to come on which platforms? This year, man,
⏹️ ▶️ John like there’s, we didn’t put it in the notes here, but there’s been some stories about like, The people who at Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John who are supposed to be working on iOS 19 are delayed because so many people are still working on 18 because 18
⏹️ ▶️ John is not done. Like we’re getting into this type of thing where it’s like, they will announce at WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ John basically all the features that they’re gonna release over the course of the next year. And only by next
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC will they all actually be out. Which is a strange way to do things because then the next WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John comes along, do you have another year’s worth of features to announce at that point? Are you just gonna start announcing
⏹️ ▶️ John things before anyone has begun working on them and just assume you’ll get them done within a year. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John the AI thing sort of catching Apple, not by surprise, but
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of like, they had other priorities and they shifted priorities quickly. Like, I think that has been an issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John Hopefully they’ll get back on track, but this definitely has been like the longest release
⏹️ ▶️ John I can remember and for on all their platforms of just like, it’s not gonna be done
⏹️ ▶️ John until, certainly not done within the calendar year that the WWDC was. So they’ll still
⏹️ ▶️ John be releasing features into 2025. Whereas in past releases, by the time the year
⏹️ ▶️ John turned around, it was just bug fixes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, if it was 18.0 and I didn’t realize it, that’s my bad, but it is weird. I think I like it, like I said,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I think it’s probably for the best that Siri tries to accurately reflect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the emotion that we are choosing or people who send stuff to us are choosing to use capitalization,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco punctuation, style. Like we’re choosing to use this stuff. Maybe now, I believe we now have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support for some basic bold italics kind of formatting. Hopefully Siri could take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco advantage of that when reading things aloud. I think that’s all good. It just has to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be done well. And so once we get used to it, the shock of it being different will wear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco away. That being said, there are still certain things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Siri reads, like if I get a message while I’m walking my dog and it comes in through my AirPods and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Siri dictates the message to me over my AirPods. I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure what part of the computational chain there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is choosing how to read those out, but wow, it’s really dumb in certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ways. I’ve had it do things like read out tracking numbers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco individually, like one, Z, two, five, six, and boy, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re walking your dog and it’s cold and it’s winter and your hands are all bundled up in your pockets and you have a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hat on and all this stuff, like there is no good way to tell it, stop for the love of God, like please
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, there is, there is. If you enable the head shaky stuff, you can shake
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your head left to right, which is, you know, the standard no head shake in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey English speaking languages anyway, or English speaking cultures. You shake your head laterally left to right and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you hear do do do do do do, and it’ll stop talking.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, really? Even once it has already started? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ll have to try that. You can also say, hey, dingus, stop when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, but usually by the time you get that out and by the time it recognizes it, and like it’s kind
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, it’s a slow process.
⏹️ ▶️ John decides to do, you know, so-and-so wrote a long message, do you want me to read it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but so far, like I assume it’s waiting for me to do the head tracking. I turned off the head tracking, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes-no tracking because I thought it would be annoying, but I will actually say out loud, yes or no.
⏹️ ▶️ John Turn on the head tracking. Like I said, I hear the little rattles a lot, but I’ve never accidentally triggered it yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right, yeah, because so far, just by vocally saying yes or no, I’ve never had it once do the right thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve never had it recognize it.
TRMNL
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you have a new toy you wanted to tell us about. Can you tell us about it? I do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah. So this is something that breezed by our friend Charlie Chapman. I saw him buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one and I’m like, oh, that looks kind of interesting. He posted on Amazon about it and I immediately ordered my own.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is, it’s the Terminal with no vowels, T-R-M-N-L.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s basically a little kind of iPad mini sized E Ink screen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you use to just display data. It’s like a little E Ink dashboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a little over a hundred bucks and I got one and you know when I was buying this I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like alright. My family could use some basic ambient display
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of information in the kitchen. Like on the kitchen counter next to the home pot I want to be able to show like the weather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know some countdowns to important dates and stuff like that and this does that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excellently but I thought for sure like all right I’m gonna put this up sometime when Tiff is not home
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and just hope that it can last as long as possible before she sees it because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think it’s a huge risk to put this up and have it be approved.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I played a family favorite I had it do like a three pane layout one big pane was weather one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small pane was a date countdown to important to the next important date and the other small pane show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Office, because I’m like, my family loves The Office, so I’m like, alright,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m like, you know, playing with the crowd here, maybe that can win people over. I put it up there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a day went by, I’m like, there’s no way I got away with this, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I change anything in the house, like, you could move an entire room in my house to a different spot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it would take me a week to notice, but if I change anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco house, Tiff and Adam both notice immediately, like, they can sense any disturbance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything being rearranged, anything missing, anything being new or removed, they know
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re like dogs. You ever take your dog for a walk and the neighbor has like a new, like a tiny flag
⏹️ ▶️ John on their lawn and the dog freaks out about it because something has changed in their environment? Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, so about a day into this, I’m like, there is no way I’m getting away with this. How am I? And then eventually,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, somehow a conversation, somebody’s asking something and Tiff is like, oh, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what that new thing on the wall is doing. And like, oh, you saw that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, yeah, I like it. It’s fine.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Like, whoa, look at that. The magic
⏹️ ▶️ John of E-ink because it’s not emissive. It’s not a quote unquote stream. I’m assuming it doesn’t have like any kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John front light like the Kindles. Not at all. Yeah. So that that’s how it sails through because now it is just like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Like so what I like about this thing. So I, I just love E-ink. I’ve always loved E-ink. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hardly ever read books. And so I don’t really have a chance to use I also like, you know, when you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at stuff like the remarkable tablets, those are great. I also never take notes like with pencils or pens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I don’t have much of a reason to use E-Ink in most of my day-to-day life,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though I just love it as a display technology. And it’s, I mean, it’s very limited. It’s very weird,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s really cool. And so I’m like, all right, for this kind of purpose of like an ambient display, it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfect, I think. Let’s try it. And what I like about the Terminal product is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’ve been able for years, you’ve been able to go buy like a basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco E-ink screen that’s like, you know, two to eight inches wide
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for almost no money if you get it in like a raw state that you can plug into a Raspberry Pi
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. Those are great. A lot of people have done some fun stuff with those, but that would never pass
⏹️ ▶️ Marco muster as a thing that looks nice enough to put in my house. Like that would be the kind of thing that would be,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, constrained to my office. And even then, like, I wouldn’t even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to look at that my own office but what I like about the terminal is that they’ve basically taken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that type of hardware like inexpensive mid-sized e-ink screen it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco super high-resolution it’s like I think it’s like 160 pixels so it’s not super high-res but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you know for viewing it at a distance which is what you’re mostly doing it’s totally fine for that and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve put it in a nice-looking small minimal white
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enclosure they have a battery in it that lasts like a couple of months so it has a USB charge by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco USB C but I just I took some velcro command strips and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuck it on the wall and I charge it up and stuck on the wall and you know throttle back some other refresh settings so it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lasts even longer and so yeah every three months I’ll take it down with those velcro things and charge it for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few minutes and put it back up so far this is great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am it is not an ad but I strongly suggest I think people in our audience would enjoy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playing with this thing. I do have an incentive for everyone in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audience to buy these. The current developer ecosystem of like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco plugins to display things, it’s very friendly, like you can very easily make your own plugin, but there just aren’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for different services. So I would love for more people to buy these, so that way maybe more people would develop plugins
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for more stuff I might be able to do with it. But I’m very happy with this because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s finally like it’s taking all of this amazing like this amazing cheap tech that we had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like hardware is so cheap now especially if you don’t need like top of the line cutting edge stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’m excited to see products like this you know even if this one particular thing isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know exactly what what you need out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much amazing cheap hardware now that’s that just makes it so much more accessible you can use it in so many more places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more people can buy it more people can afford it, more people can afford to replace it if it breaks. If you have a need for some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of ambient display in your house, check out Terminal. I think it’s a really cool idea. Their heads are in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the right place. It isn’t some kind of weird, creepy startup trying to VC you up the rear end or anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just a nice seeming, it’s just a nice effort to a nice product. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far, it passed muster as something that can live in our house, and that’s pretty impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ John So the three things you’re showing on it, Is that just like built-in stuff? Like does it, I forget what you said, weather? Is it
⏹️ ▶️ John like a built-in weather thing and then countdown, you just put a date in and it shows your countdown?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I haven’t yet made any custom things. Frankly, I just haven’t had time. I do intend to. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s so nice and good looking and useful that I think if I were ever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to want to make like some dashboards for my business metrics, say, this would be great to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, you know, two or three of these in my office, you know, just next to my desk or something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But right now I’m just using the, like there is just in their existing like library of plugins that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they already have. I’m using like, yeah, the weather, the date countdown and the office quotes, those are all built
⏹️ ▶️ John I think I mentioned a while back of the, that my brother had the need for the same type of thing to show like the family calendar.
⏹️ ▶️ John It wasn’t e-ink, but it was like, I don’t know, maybe it was color e-ink or maybe it was just a really bad looking LCD.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it looked very similar to this. Similar size, similar proportions, even, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John similar, like the little bezel was similar as well. I do kind of wish this thing didn’t have the terminal logo on the front end and had
⏹️ ▶️ John the bezel was equal or on all sides, but whatever, it’s cheap. But yeah, like
⏹️ ▶️ John having, one of the good roles of E-ink is to basically be configurable paper
⏹️ ▶️ John with all the advantages and disadvantages of paper. You can’t see paper if it’s dark and you don’t have light shining on it.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if there is light shining on it, it looks real good and doesn’t take a lot of power and yada yada.
⏹️ ▶️ John So yeah, I’m not sure if I would use this, but like, well, another question, does it come with bundled support
⏹️ ▶️ John for like Google Calendar or other calendar things, if you want to show your calendar, not just a calendar?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t have any kind of iCloud support yet. So that’s kind of what I want people to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make, otherwise I’ll be forced to make it for myself and I don’t want to. But it does have, I believe it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the Google Calendar support already.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If you go to slash integrations, useterminal.com slash integrations, you can see what
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re currently advertising, for lack of a better word, and yes, Google Calendar’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on there. But I also am a Apple Calendar person, So yeah, I like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the idea of this quite a bit. And on my personal to-do list of projects that I’ll never get to and probably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about a lot, the top of that list is still Fiber, but somewhere not too far below that is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey writing my own dashboardy thing, like Marco said, probably with Raspberry Pi, because hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what else can I solve with Raspberry Pi? But I feel like it’s a lot of work,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially if I wanna make it look good, which is not my strongest suit, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would have to get a bunch of integrations or find third-party code that does these integrations. It just seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way too much effort. I love the idea of this, but the particular integrations I want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doesn’t seem like they exist. I still use Anylist, which is, I think they might’ve been a sponsor years and years and years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey ago, but I use that for our shopping lists and I use Apple Calendar.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this does not fit my needs today, but I concur with Marco’s implied point that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it could fit my needs tomorrow.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and also, if you are so inclined to write your own plugins, you pay an extra, I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco $20 for access to the developer keys and everything, and you can do basically whatever you want with it then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it seems like it’s pretty easy, because it’s all just web page rendering, basically.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like rendering HTML and CSS to an image. So it’s actually, it seems like, I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delved into that yet, but it seems like it’s pretty easy to make your own plugins.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still using Panic Status Board, an app that was discontinued many years ago, but somehow still is
⏹️ ▶️ John running on my iPad. Yeah, that is very limited. But Casey, if you’re thinking of doing this,
⏹️ ▶️ John you might wanna try doing it on iOS or iPadOS because there’s that cool Swift charting library
⏹️ ▶️ John that exists. It depends on what you wanna do with it. Like what this thing sounds like it’s doing, like rendering HTML to an image is way
⏹️ ▶️ John more flexible. I kind of wish status board did that, but it doesn’t. But anyway, yeah, this is cool. I’ll definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John keep in mind if I have a need for something. I already said last time that I didn’t think I had any need for
⏹️ ▶️ John a digital picture frame. and apparently I do, so maybe this will find a place as well. Like I’m thinking, because
⏹️ ▶️ John we do use Google Calendar, maybe having this, well, so the thing is, we have a paper calendar on our
⏹️ ▶️ John fridge, but the reason we do that is because, just to see the pictures, essentially, I don’t think anyone, we should just take the paper calendar and just
⏹️ ▶️ John like fold it over so all you see is the picture on the top page and not the calendar. No, actually, I do look at it. I looked at,
⏹️ ▶️ John here’s when I look at the calendar that’s hanging on the fridge. I see the pictures and I like seeing, I make the calendar out of my own
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures, you know, one picture for each month. the main time I look at it, and I did it today,
⏹️ ▶️ John was when I’m taking the milk out of the fridge and I see the expiration date, I glance at the calendar that’s on the fridge door to see what
⏹️ ▶️ John they say. Is this expired? How close is this to being expired? So yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, I don’t know, maybe there’s a role for this somewhere. I’ll think about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Interesting, I’m looking at the API documentation, which we’ll also link in the show notes, and they have a bring your own device
⏹️ ▶️ Casey section. And they say, look, the components are probably gonna cost more than what we have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put together. we share this not to dissuade or pitch you, but rather as a friendly FYI,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey making your own terminal from scratch is not an economically rational decision, but a labor of love.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I mean, John, you could make a custom plugin that would, you know, just you enter every time you buy new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco milk, you enter expiration dates in your API somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And then it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco counts down the days on the terminal on the fridge to, you know, the milk has three days left.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s more than one thing of milk in the fridge, but it’s just easier to pull it out and glance at the calendar as you close the door.
⏹️ ▶️ John The system works fine. But that’s when I use it. That’s when I actually look at the calendar portion. The rest of the time, I’m just looking at the image part.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I like the idea of this quite a lot. I really, really do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s honestly, it’s the first one that doesn’t look like somebody’s DIY project. Like it’s actually like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a legitimate product. Like it isn’t like, you know, if somebody’s, you know, flimsy 3D
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John printed. It’s not 3D printed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s not like, and it isn’t like, you know, held together by like tapes and screws. Like it’s just, it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just like a nice feeling looking product.
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New AVP content: Sharks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Last week, there was, I think it was last week, there is a new episode of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple’s immersive video wildlife show. The previous episodes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were, I think rhinos first and then elephants second. And now there’s a new episode about sharks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and it’s pretty good. It’s like, I don’t know, less than 10 minutes and you should check it out if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one of the dummies like me that bought a vision pro. So check it out if you haven’t. I just wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to call to people’s attention because I feel like because not that many people seem to have vision pros, when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey new things like this drop, I often am unaware until I put my face computer on my face again and just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey go, you know, spelunking through the Apple TV app. So this is the service I provide to you listeners for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all six of you that have one of these.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re welcome. And you also provide a personalized recommendation service to me because you say,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hey, there’s a new thing out in the chat like before we record. So I also, I watched the sharks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, what did you think? It was delightful. Again, this is what I want to see more of. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m happy to see that it’s happening, very slowly, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening. We are getting more immersive video. It still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feels like demos of content, not content. It still feels like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these are little snacks and little previews of what could be done if somebody gave us
⏹️ ▶️ Marco full-length content. Because I think the sharks thing was maybe, what, seven or eight minutes long.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey like that. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like these aren’t long, these aren’t even as long as sitcom episodes. They’re just, they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, seven to fifteen minute chunks of example content. And it’s good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco example content, but it still feels like example content. And so that
Blackmagic URSA Cine Immersive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There was also news, I think yesterday, there was that Blackmagic camera announced.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You see that? Oh, yes. Yes. So because I think this is I’d actually like to talk about this for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So basically Blackmagic released a or announced rather a camera that’s shipping
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in, I think, a couple of months. It’s a dedicated hardware camera specifically for recording
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple immersive video video. It looks basically like, you know, two giant lenses,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like two eyes on the front of of what otherwise looks like a fairly common Blackmagic camera back.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s two, you know, 180 degree kind of fish eye style lenses, each
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one having an 8K image sensor behind it. So it records
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 8K per eye at I think 90 frames a second up to, and then of course, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the different, you know, video specs of color depth and everything else. Before this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not sure what people have been using to record the immersive video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to date. I know Canon has that, like we talked about it when they announced it, Canon released
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a dual fisheye lens that you could attach to some of their more recent cameras. The Canon setup is about $5,000 all in.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you look at the reviews of people who actually try to use it, first of all, it is not as good as the Blackmagic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thing in specs in that the Canon lens is using two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco eyepiece lenses piece lenses to project an image onto one single
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 8K sensor, or kind of just divides the sensor in half, but it projects the left eye onto half the sensor, right on either half the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sensor. So the Canon one is lower resolution, and I believe only up to 60 frames a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the Blackmagic camera is higher spec’d. It is dedicated for this purpose,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco designed right from the start for this purpose. And instead of costing $5,000, it costs $30,000. Oh, how cheap. A bit of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a jump. Now, this sounds ridiculous, right? I know how this sounds, a $30,000 camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to shoot Apple immersive video. But again, if you look at the Canon
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reviews, people trying to use the Canon double lens to do this, the main challenges seem to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the software end, like whatever data format the camera is generating, it’s like a special
⏹️ ▶️ Marco format that you need, their special software to transform into anything else. And apparently not only does that require
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a subscription that nobody wants to pay, but apparently it also is not easily compatible with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Vision Pro or Apple Immersive Video, and is also not as good of quality
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because it’s not having 8K per eye, or more than 60 frames per second. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I am actually excited to see this Blackmagic camera release, and I wonder, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think we know what Apple has used to shoot the existing Apple Immersive Video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe they were just using a preview beta version of this camera, it’s possible. that wouldn’t surprise me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. Like maybe they worked with Blackmagic to develop it and part of that process was they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to use pre-production versions to shoot all this other content.
⏹️ ▶️ John I was all shot on iPhone. Yeah, okay. Because you can buy a $30,000 camera or you can just use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, right. Yeah, what’s the difference? But the reason I’m excited about a $30,000 camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not because I’m going to buy it. Not only is that obviously $30,000, but also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like a Blackmagic professional camera. I have no idea what the process is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to shoot with that camera and then whatever data format it makes to take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that onto whatever computer. However, it’s edited. I have no clue. I
⏹️ ▶️ John you probably need a PC and Adobe Premiere or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, well, the Canon one you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do actually, but but no, I the black magic. I think I think it goes into DaVinci resolve,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’ve you know, I’ve heard of that as a name. I don’t know what that means. I’ve never seen the Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know. Well, you’re practically an expert. So the point is like right now, like whatever this camera is gonna be when it comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out in a couple of months, it’s gonna be 30 grand. It’s gonna require who knows what else in the ecosystem around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it to get that video from shooting it to, you know, actually being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to play on a Vision Pro. Who knows what app plays those? How do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get the data into the Vision Pro? Or do you have to put it in the Apple TV marketplace, however that works?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Does Apple Photos support it? Can you put it in your photo library? Like, who knows? Like, those are all gonna be worked
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out over time. But what’s exciting about this is that the existence of this camera being publicly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco released and probably being significantly better than the Canon solution, because the Canon solution was just kind of, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bolting on an existing lens onto cameras that weren’t designed for this. This is designed from the start for this. I’m not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy a $30,000 camera to do all my video projects that I do. I’ll zero them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But other people will be able to, who know what they’re doing. Video production companies will be able to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or rent these and shoot a concert, shoot a play, a nature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco documentary, whatever it is. Getting these cameras out there will be a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge boost to getting more immersive video content made. Whether
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s the high profile content snacks that Apple keeps giving us, or I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more interestingly, get these into the hands of YouTubers and smaller production houses.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because again, they’ll be able to rent these. So if you’re doing a shoot, I’m sure you can rent one for a few thousand bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something like that. And, and that makes it more accessible to smaller productions. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this I think is an important milestone. I think this is more important than just breezing through the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco news for an hour. Like I think this is actually going to be a much more important deal than that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes, this is $30,000 today. The Canon solution is, you know, quote
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only $5,000 and that’s giving much of the functionality of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Granted, you know, the reviews say it’s not very good in different ways, but those are mostly Workflow problems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and software and support problems. It’s only a matter of time Maybe you know, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’ll be two to four years When there will be maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one or two other options that are that are substantially, you know in the ballpark of that Blackmagic camera and capability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But maybe a little bit more consumer and price friendly Maybe in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four or five years, maybe we’ll be able to get something like that for two or $3,000 in the prosumer market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that becomes something that maybe nerdy people like us start to buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and experiment with, or we start to rent it from camera rental companies for important family events.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would love the ability to buy or rent something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and capture basic, when my kid has a band concert, I mean, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would be a little disruptive to the audience members behind me. So maybe I work at the school on that one, but like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, or, you know, a family event, Christmas day, like when Apple immersive video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capture becomes accessible to prosumers and consumers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that’s going to be a big deal if the Vision Pro still exists by that point. Because I hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does, because yeah, it’s great to be able to have a shark video here and there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what I want is to capture the people I love and the moments of my life in that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco format. Cause it really does feel like you’re transported right there again. And that’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much better than little postage stamp dream blobs you get from the iPhone immersive video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I’m glad to have those dream blobs. It’s better than not having anything at all. That’s spatial, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m glad we have that option. But the immersive video with the 8K per eye is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so much better. It’s like, it’s an order of magnitude different in,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, in so many ways, in quality, obviously in frame rate, in just how much of the scene you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capturing and how it feels to watch it. And you really feel like you are in it. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very different thing. And so when that becomes accessible to regular people in some way,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it’s, you know, in a few thousand dollar camera, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco photo enthusiasts have been buying few thousand dollar cameras for many years. Like it’s not, that isn’t something that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like everyone we’ll be able to afford, but it is something that gets it into the prosumer market in a much better way than a $30,000 custom pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything camera. So this I think is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a very important step. Like this camera being released that shoots directly to immersive video, apparently or at least can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be easily processed into it. That’s a really big deal because that signifies that we are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that path. And that maybe in a few more years, and that now people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, production companies now will be able to rent that and shoot a concert or whatever, and that’s going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco huge. But then it’s going to be even better when we can shoot our own memories with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. And I just want to reiterate, I know you just went over this, but I harp on this regularly because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very hard. It seems like a distinction without a difference, the different kind of modes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you can get in, in the vision pro for video. And I just want to reiterate there’s 3d movies where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have a rectangle, but a rectangle that has depth to it. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, it’s just a rectangle, but you can see into the rectangle. It’s just like a 3D movie.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then there’s these dream blobs, I think you called it a minute ago, which is a very accurate description, which is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you have a very small, often square if not rectangle,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the way they represent it and render it, the edges kind of like are a little like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wispy, if you will, and kind of fade out, sort of, kind of. And that is when you’ve recorded something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on one of your devices, like an iPhone or whatever. has depth but unlike a 3d
⏹️ ▶️ Casey movie where the the canvas if you will is multiple feet wide multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feet tall by default you know that the canvas or the the viewport for lack of better way of describing it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very very small by comparison and with both of these with 3d video or this excuse
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me the 3d movies and with spatial video you don’t get to control where the camera is pointing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you are along for the ride there’s depth but you’re along for the ride. And what we’re talking about, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the key that makes us so impressive is that immersive video, and I’ll continue to harp on this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a long time now, immersive video, as you move your head, and as you look around,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re changing the perspective of the camera, you’re effectively moving the camera, you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at different things. And the jump from a 3d movie or a spatial
⏹️ ▶️ Casey video to immersive is just night day. It is wildly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different, wildly, wildly different. And even if you can reason through what that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey difference would feel like, I assure you actually living it is very different than what you think.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And in the end of the day, I couldn’t agree with you more, Marco, that being, being able to capture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey full-on immersive video would be such a game changer. And I’m not going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to spend $30,000 to do it. I don’t think I’m even going to spend $1,000 to do it. Like underscore to it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ll probably forget to put the link in the show notes, but he had tooted, you know, Hey, I can imagine being able to rent this for a thousand bucks
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and just goof off and try some things. And I agree with underscore for me, a thousand dollars is still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bit rich for my blood, but the point is still fair. And I absolutely concur
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with you, Marco, that how cool would it be if you could like set this up?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know what the mechanics of this would look like, but set this up when everyone’s opening Christmas presents or a Christmas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey dinner or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco that, or Or like your wedding. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can look around. Or at your wedding, God yes. And you can look around and you can see, let’s take your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wedding as an example. You can watch yourself exchange
⏹️ ▶️ Casey vows with your partner, but you can also turn your head
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and you can look and see how your parents are reacting. And you’re not losing anything because it’s not the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey camera, it’s not the recording that has moved, it’s your viewport
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into the recording. So you could turn your head right back and look at your partner
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then you can look at their parents, you know what I mean? And so it is so incredibly powerful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I cannot wait until that is in the hands of someone like a prosumer like you’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey saying. But it’s important to understand if you’ve seen a 3D movie and you think, oh, that’s it, this is not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that great. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is more like a 3D IMAX than it is anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, like it this more than any other format this makes you feel like you are there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you are in that room Yeah with the people so if you know like I could just imagine like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think back to you know videos I’ve taken of relatives who have since passed away like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m so happy I have those videos This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you feel like you are in that room so like imagine the emotional weight of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of, you know, if I had like the video of my grandma with my kid, like if I had that video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in this format, I mean, obviously I probably would not have hauled a $30,000 giant camera
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into, you know, the assisted living facility for that video. But like, you know, so it’s obviously very important for the phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep getting better at capturing that stuff because they’re always with you. But we don’t know what media
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be important to either us in the future or our future generations. You know, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when we look back at our own childhood, there’s almost no videos of us generally.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco We’re lucky to have a few photos here and there. And then when you go to our parents or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our grandparents, there are usually like, there’s maybe one picture of them when they’re young, maybe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their wedding picture and that’s it. As we move forward,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it becomes more commonplace to have more media captured of people and in more rich formats,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether moving first from photos Into like color photos and then better photos
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then more photos and videos and more videos I think it will be I think we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will if you if you start capturing This kind of video somehow when it becomes available
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to you Capture important moments here and there you know, but while it’s still expensive and hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do Maybe it’s only things like weddings or whatever but like Over time that will become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more common, and you’ll be so happy you have those videos And so that I I’m looking forward to that because like right
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like I thought back before the Vision Pro was out I thought that the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco version of the immersive video that the phones were shooting now and the Vision Pro itself as a capture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a can as a Vision Pro itself can capture video like spatial video but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the quality is not great and the immersion therefore is somewhat limited you know as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey said you’re only capturing like a rectangle in front of you and the resolution and frame rates
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are pretty rough they’re pretty bad honestly so So this is the next, this is like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco leap above that. This is a huge leap above that. And so yes, it’s nice to have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, some spatial video of people here and there. It would be a heck of a lot nicer to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have this. So I look forward to this being more available over time. I think the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realities of dealing with, you know, dual 8K video streams with 180
⏹️ ▶️ Marco degree fields of view, that there’s always gonna be some difficulty in shooting that, like that’s always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gonna be bit of a skilled operation to do it well. And I think, you know, for a foreseeable future,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s going to be somewhat expensive to do also. But $30,000, it sounds ridiculous now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but trust me, to a production house, that’s not that ridiculous. And again, there’s the rental option. And it’s only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to come down from here. So I look forward to this. I think this is a big deal. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am tempted to buy one. I’m not going to, but… Steven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Levy So you say?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Paul Matz But I might, but like, what underscore we’re saying I might rent one someday.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, obviously, I think it’ll be a while before they’re even available for rental, like from the rental sites, and they will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably cost, you know, three to five thousand dollars for a few days with them. So even that’s probably going to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more than I want to spend on on my curiosities here. But I can see the future
⏹️ ▶️ Marco coming. Like I can see the first, you know, like the sun is rising in this area. I can see the little glimmer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of light. Like I think this is going to be really cool in not that much time from now.
⏹️ ▶️ John On the price of these things, like you said, I know $30,000 sounds like a lot, but just the regular
⏹️ ▶️ John digital cameras they shoot movies with get into those prices and they have multiple ones of those cameras. So this is in line
⏹️ ▶️ John with prices of fancy cameras that professionals use to shoot movies. Although, professionals
⏹️ ▶️ John use iPhones to shoot movies too. But anyway, I know it sounds ridiculous, it’s just not a consumer device. It’s a pro
⏹️ ▶️ John device. Just go look at how much the equipment costs to shoot your average Marvel movie or whatever. They’re expensive.
⏹️ ▶️ John Another thing is, you know, so as you said, like there’s the professional cameras and then we’ve got our iPhones
⏹️ ▶️ John with what they’re doing. And obviously it’s not great because the cameras are dinky and small, low resolution and they’re like
⏹️ ▶️ John five millimeters from each other. But I am looking at the picture of this camera and I’m looking at my phone and I am wondering
⏹️ ▶️ John that if the iPhone 20 had cameras on the far ends of the phone and you were to line those
⏹️ ▶️ John cameras up with like basically the interpupillary distance of this camera, would it match?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because I think those camera things, They look kind of like they’re about the same distance as your eyeballs, like that’s what they’re going for, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Big lenses, but like the centers of them are like human eye distance from each other.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, an iPhone held sideways, the corners of that are also within
⏹️ ▶️ John human eye interpupillary distance from each other. And if you put a 180
⏹️ ▶️ John degree fisheye camera on either end of your iPhone, and if they were 8K on the iPhone 25 or something, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not gonna be as good as a $30,000 camera, but you’re getting closer to what we’re looking for,
⏹️ ▶️ John which is instead of the little tiny rectangle field of view that is, you know, the blob
⏹️ ▶️ John or the postage stamp that you turn your head and what you see is not the thing you recorded because it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John there. Because the field of view is so narrow, right? And the field of view being narrow is
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly due to the lenses. They simply can’t capture image that are on the
⏹️ ▶️ John side of you, right? I mean, if you look at these lenses, you’ll see they look like spheres poking out of it. Like your iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t capture that. light coming from the side just hits the side of the camera lens, like they’re flat, that’s not gonna work, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And the depth perception being slightly off on your phone is because the cameras are just so darn close, the left and
⏹️ ▶️ John right image aren’t that different from each other. We want the, when we’re looking through our eyeballs,
⏹️ ▶️ John the left and right image to be different from each other based on how far our eyeballs are apart and everyone’s eyeballs are a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ John different distance, but that’s basically what we want out of it. And this camera achieves that. And another thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I have a question about, I don’t, maybe someone who knows about these cameras can write in. So I’m thinking of looking at this camera
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m thinking about looking at professional movie cameras that you see of the Arri Alexa or
⏹️ ▶️ John the RED cameras all of all the modern all the companies that like did well in the modern digital camera
⏹️ ▶️ John space and they sell you know they sell the camera bodies which cost as much as a car
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re just like a cube with and then you buy their incredibly expensive $20,000
⏹️ ▶️ John lenses that you stick on to that cube and then you buy their $50,000 SD card that is really just a 10 cent
⏹️ ▶️ John thing from a drugstore, but they charge you $1,000 for it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although, did you see what they charge for an eight terabyte SSD? No.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is it less than Apple or more? It’s like half what Apple charges.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the RED cameras had, back in the early days, the RED cameras had flash storage that was
⏹️ ▶️ John more expensive than Apple’s. Like again, it’s the same storage, but it’s like, well, this is the special RED stuff and we guarantee it.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s quite a racket. I mean, they’re selling these to Hollywood studios with multimillion dollar budgets, so it is
⏹️ ▶️ John what it is. But my question about these cameras, with like the regular ones, like I said, you buy the body,
⏹️ ▶️ John but then you buy the lenses and the lenses tend to cost as much or more than the body because you can buy 17 different lenses depending
⏹️ ▶️ John on what you need for your shot. Are lenses a thing on this camera or
⏹️ ▶️ John can you not use lenses at all? Because like, what’s the point? Like you need to
⏹️ ▶️ John get 180 degree field of view. That’s the like, so if you put two lenses on there and they also got 180
⏹️ ▶️ John degree field of view, like is being like, I don’t understand how lenses work with that
⏹️ ▶️ John wide of a field. Maybe it just works the same. Maybe it’s like you’re looking through binoculars and it’s like you’re sitting,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know, if you put this at a concert and you had like a lens that was magnified, it would be like
⏹️ ▶️ John you were sitting five rows up from where the camera is placed because it’s magnified, but you’d still get a 180. That can’t possibly be true,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Because the things from the side, like you can’t ever, with a regular lens, with
⏹️ ▶️ John a narrow field of view, you can essentially zoom in and it seems like you’re closer to the concert. But with a 180
⏹️ ▶️ John degree field of view, the thing that would be directly to your left if you were in the front row
⏹️ ▶️ John is never going to be directly to your left if you’re in the back row. Like you’ll never have,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll never be able to see that person’s ear dead on because they’re in the front row and you’re in the back row. You know what I mean? So I think,
⏹️ ▶️ John like I’m looking at this camera, I’m like, doesn’t look like there’s any place where you could put a lens on this thing. I mean, maybe,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I don’t know, I don’t know enough about this to know, but I’m pretty sure like if you’re shooting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this 180 degree field of view, I think it kind of has to be a certain
⏹️ ▶️ Marco focal length. Like it has to, like whatever that focal length is, like that ultra wide focal length to capture 180 degrees.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it just has to be that. Because what you’re trying to do ultimately is you’re trying to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco match the visual perspective of what our eyes see.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, our eyes don’t see 180, our perception is garbage, but you’re trying to make it so that when Casey turns his head, there’s something there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I mean, by the way, the resolution on the edges of immersive video is also garbage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like we say we can turn our heads around to look at the sides and we can, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s very blurry and low res when you get
⏹️ ▶️ John edges. It’s better than our peripheral vision, I’ll tell you that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, but for the most part, you want to focus straight ahead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but what you get in the field of view is useful for like just additional immersion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and context. So yes, you can look over to the sides and the top and the bottom and everything, but you generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t spend much time doing that. Also, they’re out of focus.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you don’t have to look 90 degrees. You can just look off center a little bit, but I mean, they obviously have the 360 cameras as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John 360 cameras that like erase the tripod that they’re on, which is just, you know, the sort of the end game of this, of like I capture
⏹️ ▶️ John video in every direction and like, you know, cleverly remove the monopod that my camera
⏹️ ▶️ John is sitting on. They’re, you know, the resolution is lower on those. They’re even more limited. But I think
⏹️ ▶️ John with things like this, like I don’t think, it seems to me that lenses, different lenses for this camera
⏹️ ▶️ John are not useful or a thing, both based on my reasoning about it and also by looking at the physical
⏹️ ▶️ John item, I don’t see how lenses would attach to it. Like the two lenses that are there are too close together. So that’s an interesting,
⏹️ ▶️ John if that’s true, someone write in and tell me, do they have lenses for them, do they not? Would lenses
⏹️ ▶️ John just massively narrow the field of view and maybe that’s a useful thing to do or not, but I don’t even think it can physically attach. But
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, someone who knows, write in and tell me. But either way, that’s like, if it’s the case that lenses
⏹️ ▶️ John are not as important on this, That’s quite a change from decades and decades
⏹️ ▶️ John of movie cameras, where it was all about which lens do you choose for this scene and how do you
⏹️ ▶️ John do this? And then it was just like, when you reach the end game of like 360 degree camera
⏹️ ▶️ John in all directions, there’s no more like lenses are not a
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. It’s just like light, we put the camera in a position and light comes from everywhere towards it, right? I mean, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John And maybe it’s not really the end game because Casey’s saying like, you know, you can turn your head and stuff like that. But one thing you can’t do,
⏹️ ▶️ John unfortunately, with these cameras and any of the immersive video we’ve seen here, with the exception of, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think, the immersive environments that Apple puts you in, is if you stand up in your concert seat,
⏹️ ▶️ John your perspective on the people on stage does not change. Because guess what? The camera didn’t stand up. The camera was the same
⏹️ ▶️ John height the whole time. So if you wanted to see the top of that person’s head to see if there was a piece of confetti that landed on their head and you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John see it when you’re sitting and you stand up, you still can’t see it. Because you’re not, you can’t change your perspective
⏹️ ▶️ John in that way. all you can do is look at different parts of the frame that was captured, right? With
⏹️ ▶️ John the Apple immersive environments, where the, I don’t know what they do, but like 3D modeling part or whatever, you basically need to be like essentially in a
⏹️ ▶️ John game engine where, oh, if you’re in a game engine, when you stand up, you can look on top of the
⏹️ ▶️ John dresser that previously you couldn’t see the top of because it’s all 3D rendered in real time and it’s literally changing your,
⏹️ ▶️ John essentially the quote unquote camera’s position in space. So for immersive video to work well, and it does work
⏹️ ▶️ John well, you stay in the same position. You stay seated, you can look up, look down, look
⏹️ ▶️ John left, look right, but what you can’t do is stand up or step 10 feet to the left because that will not change
⏹️ ▶️ John your perspective on the video.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I think the question about whether we need lenses on this or whether you can, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s, immersive video, immersive 180 degree stereo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco video, I would almost treat it as a different medium than
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cinema or cinematic video. What’s important is your perspective,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But what’s more important is like what your environment has in it. Like you’re not doing…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like there’s less camera work that can be done because… first of all, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you move the camera too much, it makes people motion sick. And that’s still a problem that I had a little bit with some of the shark video,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but it’s less so. I think they’re getting better at that the more they make. It’s almost like, you know, asking like what kind of lens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do you use for concert goers to see a concert? That’s kind of an invalid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco question. Like that’s missing what this medium is. People who stage a theater play don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco need to care what kind of lens people might be using in the audience. Like, it’s not about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This medium, there’s actually, you know, less camera trickery potential
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do, because what you’re mostly doing is just capturing a scene
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a way that the viewer is in more control over it than you are. So what you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want to do is, like, you know, capture as much as you can, because, you know, you’re going to get the 180-degree field of view no matter what. So capture
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever you can, capture it, and give people the freedom to look at whatever they want in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco frame, and guide them by putting the important stuff in the middle, but for the most part, they’re gonna be looking around a little bit more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than you might expect. And I think it’s just gonna take a little while before people really get that who are producing it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is getting better. All these Apple videos, as I said earlier, they’re like snacks of content or previews
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of content. I kept wanting to just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sit on a shot for a while. the shark video is in the Bahamas and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one shot where they’re doing like a quick helicopter flyover of the But of like one of the islands in the Bahamas. I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never been to the Bahamas. I was looking around I’m like, oh is this what the Bahamas look like? I’m like looking around and before I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it it’s gone to another shot Because it’s like oh there well There’s three seconds of what it’s like to be in the Bahamas like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I want more they would be they would have like, you know They’re they’re feeding some sharks under some water and you can look up and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can see the boat in the like above you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John on the surface of the water.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Then it explodes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I’m like, I’m looking up at the boat and then it’s gone, because the shot changes. Like, I want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco longer shots, I want more, I basically want more immersive content in the sense
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I wanna just know what certain environments are like, just to sit in. Like, let me just sit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in one of these for, you know, give me a 10 minute long fixed shot of something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not that interesting, but just like an environment to be in. Give me 10 minutes of sitting on a beach in the Bahamas.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give me 10 minutes of like, you know, a boat ride or something like, you know, like that kind of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For a nature documentary, how about just stick a camera in a nature preserve where there’s some animals off in the distance and just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give me a 10 minute shot of that so I can just sit there and like look at the animals and just enjoy it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s why they gotta do a full 3D engine of it so you can actually get up and walk around.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, and that’s what the environments are.
⏹️ ▶️ John If they can feel you, if they can fool you into thinking it is, although of course you can also do the, I don’t know if you remember this back from
⏹️ ▶️ John the, the weird old days, this is before your time in the Apple world, but one of the things they would do,
⏹️ ▶️ John Do you remember QuickTime VR? Of course you don’t. That was way before your time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember it being a thing. I don’t, and I remember using it. I remember that I have used it. I should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, I don’t remember what the actual use of it felt like for lack of a better way of describing it. Was that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you could like drag or like point and click and hold and drag the viewport around basically with your mouse?
⏹️ ▶️ John It was just like, it was a 360 degree field of view, extremely low resolution photograph, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John And so once you have a 360 degree photograph minus the tripod, which they didn’t really know auto erase, so
⏹️ ▶️ John it was kind of down there, right? Then you could look all around the photograph at your different places. And one of
⏹️ ▶️ John the things people did with QuickTime VR is, you know, they did it for real estate,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they did it for other things too. They would take the QuickTime VR camera, the 360 camera, and put
⏹️ ▶️ John it in 17 different spots within an area, and then allow you to move between individual, essentially
⏹️ ▶️ John individual spheres of 2D imagery, with like cross fading between, kind of like Google Maps, when you know, and you click forward,
⏹️ ▶️ John like on Google Maps, and you go to the next part in the street, right? It was exactly like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that. Do you never look at houses on Zillow just for grins and giggles?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John What is it? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John no, but this is like, QuickTime VR is like, what is it, like the 90s? Like it was
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey a long time ago. Yeah, it was so long ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I was thinking it from the, for Marco’s Bahamas thing. If you had 360 degree, 8K,
⏹️ ▶️ John two-eye video, you could shoot it
⏹️ ▶️ John forward, backward, up, down, left, right, and then move two feet forward, backward, up, down. Like the data would
⏹️ ▶️ John be massive. It would be better just to do it in a 3D engine, Like you could brute force this into providing
⏹️ ▶️ John some semblance of essential like 3D Google Maps street view where you could move around in
⏹️ ▶️ John the space and within each space you could look anywhere. You could even do the thing where when
⏹️ ▶️ John you stand up on the couch, your perspective does change because they also shot from a foot higher and they could fade between
⏹️ ▶️ John them. It’s probably just easier to do it in 3D, but I was just thinking about the QuickTime VR thing. Or like you said, the current real
⏹️ ▶️ John estate things are essentially that QuickTime VR thing, but like it’s so cheap to do now. you buy a 10 cent 360 camera on Amazon
⏹️ ▶️ John and you just stick it in a bunch of rooms and you jump between the spots by quick time.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that’s the case. Like Matterport, I think is the company that does this. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it’s more involved than you’re giving it credit for.
⏹️ ▶️ John can do the fancy version too, but like the tech is cheap enough now that you can do the janky version real easy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, fair. But yeah, I mean, it is good for real estate. Like it does give you a perspective on things, but like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John as close as we can get to having like, okay, but what if I wanted to have a different perspective? well, we had six spots in this room.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you can jump between those six spots and look from those six spots.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, but I mean, it is like, as you were saying, it is very important though. That’s getting almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ubiquitous now in new real estate listings. I’ve even seen it on certain hotel room bookings. Like, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this type of room looks like. That kind of stuff is actually very useful and I’m looking forward to seeing more of that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it is, but it’s not video and it only has six spots in the room. So for your Bahamas thing, if you wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John to be in the Bahamas with enough room to maybe walk around in a 10 foot circle or something as opposed
⏹️ ▶️ John to being confined and not being able to change it. But like Apple’s immersive environments, which I’m assuming, like they
⏹️ ▶️ John use 3D plus photo stuff or whatever, and you can actually move around a little tiny bit
⏹️ ▶️ John and moving around, I believe even if you move a little tiny bit does actually change your perspective on the things
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause those are just rendered 3D environments. Like those are not videos.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I think there’s probably some photographic things used for textures and backgrounds in those as well. But like, yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s kind of like what you’re going for is like the stuff in the, what is it called?
⏹️ ▶️ John The ILM thing where they did the Mandalorian, the big LCD screens
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco that are like.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I know what you mean, like the big 360 degree.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, if you could think about that all happening inside, because the way that works is, they have cameras
⏹️ ▶️ John shooting actors on a stage in front of a screen, and the screen is just a wraparound
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, but the things that are projected on that screen only look sane from the perspective of the camera.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re just on the side of the camera looking at what’s on the screens, it just looks like garbage, because what they’re doing is as the
⏹️ ▶️ John camera moves, all the imagery moves behind the camera to, you know, a 3D engine like Unreal,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they use Unreal anymore, but whatever 3D engine they’re using, it’s basically a game engine with the camera being a
⏹️ ▶️ John real physical camera in the real world and real like actors and sets in front of it. It’s very clever the way they do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can imagine doing that in VR, only in VR, you are the physical, your head is the physical camera
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s in that thing. What is it called? The, someone in the chat room will tell me, it’s really annoying me now. It’s not the sphere, because
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the Las Vegas
⏹️ ▶️ John something else. Yeah. The volume. Thank you, Dr. Calhoun. If they can do that in a way
⏹️ ▶️ John that is good enough to fool Marco into thinking he’s seeing the real Bahamas, you know, you’ve you’ve accomplished the goal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, that’s and that’s what I want. Like, you know, part of part of what I have been kind of begging Apple for since this came
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out is like more environments, please, because the the environments that are 3D, you know, game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco engine rendered kind of things. But no, like with this with this Blackmagic camera and like with, you know, more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco immersive video cameras, hopefully done down the road that are more available of people. Like when you look at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of videos people watch on YouTube, say, it’s everything. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff you would never even think people watch that.
⏹️ ▶️ John They want a 24-hour U-log video in immersive 3D.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s the thing. Like you can think like, oh yeah, you can make like nature documentaries on YouTube. Yeah, you can. But there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also people who just like stick a camera on something and say, here’s eight hours straight of this thing that people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco find relaxing. That’s what I want more of like I want I want to get these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cameras into the hands of everybody possible who might make video because the reason they were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco able to make videos like that on YouTube is because video cameras got cheap and widely available so that everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could you know take out the phone they already had and stick it in front of a fire for eight hours and record
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that video and put it on YouTube for free and somebody would find that and be like oh this actually is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what I’m looking for right now thank you the more we can get immersive video cameras out there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the world, the closer we will get to the world in which it is worth somebody’s time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to stick one in a vacation destination or a relaxing mountaintop or whatever and give
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us those eight-hour YouTube videos of just that.
⏹️ ▶️ John You want dual perspective, 180-degree immersive 8K ASMR videos.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Basically, I mean, I’m not an ASMR person so I can’t say for sure, but I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I want. Yeah, the 3D audio is real important for that too. Yeah, but like and again, it’s all like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is all super easy stuff to to capture all at once when you have the right equipment Which they do because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like what’s interesting is like this does not require them to set up a whole Studio or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a whole set or have a bunch of actors or staff somebody could take one of these cameras
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and Literally just like bring it to an attractive environment in nature and just capture a day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there and you know figure out what to do With it afterwards like I mean, well, they’d probably fill up all those eight terabytes storage much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was pretty fast because this video is huge.
⏹️ ▶️ John But let us stream it live your grandchildren there the cheap bird feeder camera that
⏹️ ▶️ John they buy online will have this in it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah right but and and you know there there are challenges to again with with just the size of this video
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right now that’s very challenging but you know when 4k came out hell when HD came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know those were very large for the computers and networks and discs of the time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now you can stream 4k live and it’s fine. Like every it just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works in so many places now and it’s not that big of a deal anymore. So it’s only a matter
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of time before this you know dual 8k format is a little more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wieldy. Is that is I know unwieldy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John is wieldy a word? Like I
⏹️ ▶️ John always say we are you know we only need probably a few more doublings
⏹️ ▶️ John to do what we’ve already done with audio which is max out human perception. Like for this particular format of
⏹️ ▶️ John like can’t change your perspective immersive video shot from a single point. We’re not there yet, but
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re, you know, one or two or three more doublings away from like, there’s no point in making this higher resolution because human
⏹️ ▶️ John eyes can’t distinguish it. Just like we were with audio, where there’s no point in making this higher resolution because humans
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t hear a difference, right? And we got there with audio because it’s easier because there’s less data. And even when we get there with
⏹️ ▶️ John still video, then it’ll be like, okay, but what about the camera that takes 8,000 different perspectives from all over the
⏹️ ▶️ John place? And what about the 3D engines and yada, yada, yada? So there’s still a ways to go, but you can see it now. You can see
⏹️ ▶️ John that, like, all right, if you could give me four times, eight times the resolution,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no need for more at that point. And then it’s just about dynamic range and other issues, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John resolution, which, and resolution is mostly what’s giving you the data size issues. And
⏹️ ▶️ John even within resolution, like, poor Casey’s sports are still in 1080 most of the time, which is sad for sports.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yeah, in terms of streaming, we can mostly do it except that the internet is not made for
⏹️ ▶️ John broadcast the way radio waves and cable television was, so when everyone tries to watch Mike Tyson, there are problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, I know I’ve said it a hundred times, I’ll say it again, that I think the holy grail for this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would be live streaming sports. It would be just unreal, just truly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey incredible. But getting that much data quickly in real time
⏹️ ▶️ Casey down to a Vision Pro, I imagine is a large engineering hurdle to say the
⏹️ ▶️ John think it would be upsetting to be, have a 180 degree immersive. I know they have those wire cameras flying over the football
⏹️ ▶️ John fields and everything, but like a lot of sports, especially football, you do wanna have that narrow
⏹️ ▶️ John field of view perspective so you can see the whole field sometimes. And in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe most of the time, because the view like from like, you know, the quarterback’s perspective when
⏹️ ▶️ John he’s about to get sacked, like that’s exciting, but also kind of upsetting and doesn’t really give you a view of the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire game. It’s kind of like your F1 thing that you’re talking about, Casey, where it’s like, it’s cool to see the driver’s
⏹️ ▶️ John perspective, but what’s really cool is to see 17 other perspectives, not to say, oh, the whole race is gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John be from the perspective of one driver because that would be incredibly fatiguing and you wouldn’t have any sense of what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John on. And so sports really needs a hybrid approach. But again, Vision Pro is there for that because it’s like, oh, you want five
⏹️ ▶️ John screens? I can put them wherever you want. I can put them any size you want. I can put them, have whatever we want on them.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can have an immersive screen that when you stare at it and pinch your fingers, you jump into that screen. And now it’s immersive and
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re seeing from that driver’s perspective, like so many things are possible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I mean, again, I’ve said it before, but I’ll quickly recap. When you’re watching F1 race and you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have like the main feed directly in front of your face in the equivalent of like a 70 inch TV,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you have two or three accessory feeds on either side of that. So you have like the in-car
⏹️ ▶️ Casey feeds from a couple of drivers. And then on the bottom, you have a 3D representation of what the racetrack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks like and where every driver is on the track. It is mind-blowingly cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that is another great way, you make a great point that I hadn’t considered. That’s another great way to get quote unquote, immersive
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sports. All of these are 2D rectangles, like the most basic version of video that you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on a Vision Pro. But because the whole of them end up being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immersive and they’re in an immersive space, it’s a different way of kind of sort of reaching
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same goal. Now you can’t turn your head and, you know, change the way the camera’s looking, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey can choose which one of your screens you’re looking at. It’s like, you know, the prototypical man
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cave sports dungeon-y thing where there’s, you know, 14 TVs in the wall. Well, you can do that with 14
⏹️ ▶️ Casey TVs in front of your face and strapped to your face in a way. And that’s really, really cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I would love it. I would absolutely love it. I love it when F1 is live and I have the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey opportunity to use the Vision Pro to watch it. But that is another way of accomplishing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the same thing. I don’t know. I’m happy that, as Marco said, that we’re moving forward.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The sun is rising, progress is being made, and that’s nothing but a good thing.
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PSVR controllers for AVP?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Speaking of VR, Apple is allegedly working with Sony to bring PlayStation VR 2 controller
⏹️ ▶️ Casey support to the Vision Pro. Reading from Mark Ehrman at Bloomberg,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple is now working on a major effort to support third-party hand controllers in the device’s Vision OS software and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has teamed up with Sony Group Corp to make it happen. Apple approached Sony earlier this year and the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey duo agreed to work together on launching support for the PlayStation VR 2’s hand controllers on the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Inside Sony, the work has been a months-long undertaking, I’m told, and Apple has discussed the plan with third-party
⏹️ ▶️ Casey developers, asking them if they’d integrate support into their games. Apple doesn’t have any imminent plans to launch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey its own controller, but the company’s design team spent a few years prototyping what is essentially a wand for the Vision Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This would be more of an Apple pencil-like tool for precise control, rather than gaming. As for supporting the PlayStation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey VR2 controllers, Apple and Sony originally aimed to announce this capability weeks ago,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the rollout has been postponed. One hiccup is that Sony doesn’t currently sell VR hand controllers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as a standalone accessory. The company would need to decouple the equipment from its own headset and kick off operations
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to produce and ship the accessory on its own. As part of the arrangement, Sony would sell the controllers at Apple’s online retail stores,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which already offer PS5 controllers. The move is meant primarily for games on the Vision Pro, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the company’s also created support for navigating the device’s operating system. The controller’s thumbstick and directional pad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could be used for scrolling, while the trigger button could replace a finger pinch when clicking on an item.
⏹️ ▶️ John So on the one hand, you can see the arguments surely people are making
⏹️ ▶️ John inside Apple, which is why should we bother trying to make a controller? These gaming companies
⏹️ ▶️ John have been making controllers for decades. They’re really good at it. They’re making them anyway. They’re going to make them with
⏹️ ▶️ John or without us. Why don’t we just make sure our Macs, our iPads, our phones
⏹️ ▶️ John are compatible with Xbox controllers, PlayStation controllers, so on. Hell, we’ll sell the PlayStation controllers
⏹️ ▶️ John in the Apple store. Done and done. What a clever, good business thing we did.
⏹️ ▶️ John We didn’t try to make a controller because we’re probably bad at it. They’re already making them. We support it. People already have
⏹️ ▶️ John these controllers because they already own a PlayStation or an Xbox. Problem solved.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is just one more example of how Apple’s approach
⏹️ ▶️ John to gaming is inadequate, let’s say. long-headed,
⏹️ ▶️ John misguided, because the reason all those people make controllers is
⏹️ ▶️ John if you want to be remotely serious about gaming, you have to make and ship
⏹️ ▶️ John your own controller. You can’t just say, oh, it’s a third-party opportunity. Apple just
⏹️ ▶️ John does this forever. Third-party controllers for your phone, for your iPad, for your Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ John like just other people make them, we support them. Isn’t that good enough? And the answer is no. If you
⏹️ ▶️ John bought a console and it didn’t come with controllers and they said, oh, I’ll just buy them from a third party. Other people make
⏹️ ▶️ John them. They’d be like, what the hell? Is this a gaming console or is this not a gaming console? It was bad enough when they used to come with
⏹️ ▶️ John one controller which is criminal, but like they still do. Like Apple,
⏹️ ▶️ John you need to make controls. So anyway, Vision Pro, no hand controllers. People are like, Apple doesn’t believe in hand controllers.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s all gonna be with your hands. You pinch your fingers together, you do gestures. You don’t need controllers. They’re cumbersome. No one’s gonna,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s bad enough that you’re putting a thing on your head. You have to be able to use it without them. And I agree with that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John also from day zero of the Vision Pro, we were like, okay, but what kind of games
⏹️ ▶️ John do people like to play in VR already before Apple introduced this product? And how would those games
⏹️ ▶️ John work on the Vision Pro with no hand controllers? And the answer is poorly. It doesn’t mean there
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t be good games without hand controllers, but that we know that there’s a whole bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John games that people already like that require hand controllers. And Apple’s like, oh, you can find them somewhere. I mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re doing the same thing here. like, oh, well, you know, we’ll team up with Sony, we’ll make support for their controllers. They already
⏹️ ▶️ John did all this work, it’s fine. It’s so frustrating. It’s like the, whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John the Alan Kay quote or whatever. People who are serious about software have to make their own hardware. I forget,
⏹️ ▶️ John I may be reversing that. Someone please Google that and get, but anyway, it’s like, if you’re serious about
⏹️ ▶️ John gaming, you have to make your own controllers. And I agree, Apple will be terrible at it. There’s a story
⏹️ ▶️ John probably we’ll get to the next episode about Apple working on human input referrals and how that has not been their strength
⏹️ ▶️ John for a long time. But like, you gotta try Apple. You can’t sell the Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ John with the stupid diving board remote and say, here’s your game controller. No, that’s not a
⏹️ ▶️ John game controller. Like, it’s never gonna work. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just killing me. I can’t take it anymore. They’re doing all that. They’re putting amazing GPUs in. They have the game
⏹️ ▶️ John porting toolkits. They’re doing all these things and they’re just like, but we’re not gonna make a controller because,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. How do you guys feel about this?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think if you look back at the history of how this has gone The Apple TV
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great example of this the Apple TV has all of the hardware needed to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a fun game console But it really hasn’t stuck
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Why didn’t the Apple TV ever become a fun game console the computing hardware you mean yes?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And and the problem you know the reason it never became a game console There’s there’s multiple factors for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure but one of the biggest reasons And there were different changes over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that affected this but like you couldn’t require a game controller for a long time by policy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But how many people who have Apple TVs? Bought extra game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controllers for them I digs I’m a fool, but no one else did like so if you’re making a game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the Apple TV You cannot assume that almost any of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your players will have a controller So you have to design for the crap little you know diving board thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that it came with which is very limited for what? Games could do with it, and that’s it It wasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enough that it was possible for people to buy controllers since every Apple TV didn’t come
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with a controller Effectively zero of Apple TV’s market would have one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s what’s gonna happen here the vision pro. I mean look there’s so many ways that it’s not a game
⏹️ ▶️ John the one thing they have going for them is they haven’t sold that many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like suppose this goes through and all of a sudden you can buy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sony PSVR controllers separately that will work with the Vision Pro. How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many people are going to do that? Like 10? And I’m not exaggerating,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like actually 10? We’re talking about a fraction of a fraction of an already small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco market. No developer is going to port a game to the Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that requires controllers. The Vision Pro is already a tiny market. And then you’re saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’re going to. Only target people or have a game that mostly pretty much only works or only works well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with these add-ons. Like after you’ve spent four grand, you’re going to also now spend another, whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be a hundred bucks to get some VR controllers and then. Be able to play a game. Like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be almost no addressable market. That’s going to actually do that for, for a platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have games that run on game controllers. The platform’s hardware has to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco come with the controllers. If Apple TV started shipping with a game
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controller in the box, which they will never do, but if for some reason they would do that, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would start having a lot more games on Apple TV that were designed for the controller and could therefore, you know, accommodate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more game types pretty well. You look at iOS. iOS is as big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of an addressable market as you can find. There are lots of third-party game controllers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that work with iOS, And yet, no major
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS game requires a controller. Why? Because,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effectively, almost no one has them. Even though it’s a huge market, and, you know, by raw numbers, that’s going to be way more people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who have iOS devices plus game controllers than Apple TVs or Vision Pros. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because the iOS devices don’t come with an official controller with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone sold, game developers cannot count on there being a very large market that has that. So they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have to design for like touch mainly, and maybe you can also work with an external controller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So that’s what we’re gonna see with Vision Pro. Like if anyone is making games for it, which they’re not and they shouldn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if anyone’s making games for it really, what you’re gonna keep seeing is, well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe you can use a controller once the support is there, but you’re not gonna get anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shipping on the Vision Pro that is only good with a controller, because it makes no sense for anyone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mostly agree with that. I do find this idea to team
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up with Sony to be less frustrating than I think the two of you do. If you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey look at the situation, you know, based on rumors, Apple hasn’t sold a lot of Vision Pros.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It doesn’t seem like by and large, it’s catching on as a productivity device with the possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exception of Mac virtual display, which we talked about, I don’t know, last week or the week before.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What is the purpose of the Vision Pro other than to sit there and let movies wash over you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I think the obvious answer could be to play games, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s obvious as well that doing that with hand tracking just isn’t cutting it. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you’re Apple and you wanna solve this problem yesterday, then you team up with Sony
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and make a pairing out of it and make it work, make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the Vision Pro work with this PSVR2 controller. I think that makes perfect
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense. Now that doesn’t mean that John is wrong by any means. I think in a perfect world, Apple would have already come out with their own controllers
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and even if it was optional, it would have been a launch device with the Vision Pro. Similarly to the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey head strap that Belkin just came out with that probably should have launched with the Vision Pro,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably should have even been in the box with the Vision Pro, but that’s neither here nor there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So in the end of the day, I’m not put off by this partnership and I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it does make a lot of sense, probably for both companies, But I also concurrently agree
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with John that really Apple should be solving this problem themselves.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they should have first party controllers and also support third party ones. Like in that scenario where they ship a
⏹️ ▶️ John first party one, it’s getting to Marko’s point, at least the software developers know everybody has
⏹️ ▶️ John a controller. And those people can choose not to use it because they don’t like it, they wanna use it. I mean, there’s third party controllers
⏹️ ▶️ John available for every system. You know, consoles, you can use third party controllers. PC, you can use third party controllers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And these days, most PCs support all the controllers that work with consoles as well. Like, that’s great, that’s a great
⏹️ ▶️ John ecosystem, but you gotta come with one. It’s like, I was gonna say, it’s like a computer not coming with a keyboard and mouse, but the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John Mini does that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John game consoles come with a controller. The PSVR comes with controllers. Like, sometimes it’s optional. I think some
⏹️ ▶️ John of the motion things have said like, well, you get it with this kind of controller, but not with that kind. But, you know, look at, in the VR headsets,
⏹️ ▶️ John the MetaQuest, I believe, Marco can correct me, that comes with controllers, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, of course it does. Because here’s the thing, the way you design a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco game console, or a hardware meant to play games as its primary
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or one of its main functions, it has to come with the controllers that it needs.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Of course the Quest comes with controllers, they all have. For like, the whole Quest is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco only, I think the entry level one is like 300 bucks now? Including the controllers? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the single Xbox Elite 2 controller I have costs close to that much. Yeah, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not a headset, it’s just a controller.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Trying to make the Vision Pro have gaming as one of its significant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uses, I think is never going to work because the Vision Pro is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a good game console, even if it came with actual game controllers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the box, which if they want to be serious about it, it needs to come in the box. But even if it did,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Vision Pro is, first of all, way too expensive to be a game console.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s also way too heavy. You gotta get rid of the dangling battery. Because what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco games are popular in VR? Most of them are motion games, where you’re moving.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have things like the rhythm games like Beat Saber and whatever the version of it is for, you know, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have rhythm games, you have kind of, you know, virtual, like, shooting games where you’re turning around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco constantly. You have stuff like Guerrilla Tag, which is massively popular on Quest, where you’re like, you’re being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco physical, you’re physically moving around in the headset. You have the wonderful ping pong game, 11 table tennis,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you’re like physically playing ping pong. You have games where you’re moving a lot. The Vision Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so not made for motion in so many levels. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terribly physically designed for it. The screens have too much motion blur and have too much latency
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for that. Like I mean, pass-through latency. Like there’s so much about the Vision Pro but is clearly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not designed for the kind of games that people enjoy on the Quest series right now.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So this whole idea of trying to make game controllers compatible with it is not gonna
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go anywhere. I’m very optimistic if they get good content
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out there, like video and sports and experiential content, the Vision Pro is designed for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of thing. It is not designed for motion and games.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you know Apple will, you know, hinder itself even further because even like
⏹️ ▶️ John a kind of like a grassroots kind of behind the scenes thing where some developer make a really compelling
⏹️ ▶️ John game, they’re like, oh, this is really good game for Vision Pro. And now the $1,500 one is out. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I know Apple doesn’t ship controllers, but you can use this third party controller. And like, it’s just so popular that it gains momentum
⏹️ ▶️ John all on its own. And despite Apple, it makes, it starts to make the Vision Pro into a gaming platform, but that will never
⏹️ ▶️ John happen. You know why? Because Apple, which controls all software that ships on the Vision Pro will say, oh, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t ship this game that requires a controller. Sorry, rejected from the app store. It will never, they will never even allow
⏹️ ▶️ John someone to like, to help them, like help me help you. And Apple’s like, no, you cannot help us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your game has to support the Apple TV remote. Right, I know they backed, they went back on that one, but it was too late. But like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you just know, they would never allow a game on the Vision Pro that requires a controller, because
⏹️ ▶️ John they’d be like, oh, that’s not, that’s not the way we think about our platform. It’s like, well, then we can’t help you. You’re never gonna be,
⏹️ ▶️ John you won’t ship your own controllers. You won’t let people shoot games that require them. It’s just, they cannot get out of their own
⏹️ ▶️ John way. And is it, because if it was like, if there was side loading or if there was third party stuff or if the EU
⏹️ ▶️ John decided that the Vision Pro was too dominant in the market of Vision S
⏹️ ▶️ John and you had to allow third party, like, because if people can do whatever they want on it, you can get that kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like grassroots phenomenon, surprise viral hit that makes people go
⏹️ ▶️ John out and buy the controller. But with Apple being the gatekeeper for these platforms, That’s, it’ll never happen
⏹️ ▶️ John on the Apple TV. It’ll probably never happen on the Vision Pro because there’s no room for a third party
⏹️ ▶️ John to do a thing that definitely will be janky and low interest at first that might
⏹️ ▶️ John catch on because Apple would just be like, no, that’s not how we like our platform to behave.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Aura Frames, and Masterclass.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash join.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the perks of membership is ATP Overtime, a bonus topic every week. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time in Overtime, we’re talking about the Mac monitor situation. There’s been a number of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco recent hardware releases from other companies for Mac-appropriate monitors, and we’re gonna talk about that in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Overtime. You can join to listen, http.fm slash join. Thanks for listening, everybody, I’m gonna talk to you
Ending theme
⏹️ ▶️ John Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco begin Cause it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ John do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause it was accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey oh it was accidental And you can find the show
⏹️ ▶️ John notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Mastodon, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that’s Casey Liss,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ John S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental, check podcast so
Storacusa progress
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, John, you want to update us a little more specifically about your app?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, so, you know, I’m here plugging away. I guess the main thing I probably want
⏹️ ▶️ John to talk about today is, I mean, something near and dear to Casey’s heart. We were always complaining
⏹️ ▶️ John about poor documentation with Apple stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yes, baby, I’m here. So here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John like, poor documentation, you know, the lack of documentation, it doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John seem to be a lot of it. Some things have like a one or two sentence description. That is
⏹️ ▶️ John frustrating, but like, you really don’t feel the full force of the
⏹️ ▶️ John pain until you are in an area that you have no knowledge or experience of.
⏹️ ▶️ John So if you’re in some area that you know about, like say I’m doing AppKit stuff, which I know a little bit about from my other two
⏹️ ▶️ John apps, right, I know a whole bunch of AppKit stuff. And there’s some stuff I don’t know, but like
⏹️ ▶️ John I needed to like fill in the blanks or fill in, you know, it’s like the fog of war on the RTS maps,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco fill in the areas that
⏹️ ▶️ John have, so I know a bunch of surrounding stuff, but I don’t know, and then you go and you find some credit documentation, but because you
⏹️ ▶️ John know a whole bunch of surrounding stuff, you’re gonna like, oh, I see what they’re probably getting at here,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I see how this is related to that thing, and you can put the pieces together. But for what
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m doing in this app, what I’ve been spending some time doing, in-app purchase type stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve never done that on any Apple platform ever, ever before. So I have zero
⏹️ ▶️ John knowledge other than watching WWDC videos about it. And I’ve watched a lot of WWDC videos, but there’s nothing like actually
⏹️ ▶️ John programming it, which is actually part of the problem here. So in that situation,
⏹️ ▶️ John when you’re just, you just got nothing, you’re starting from zero and you land on one of those documentation pages that doesn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John anything except for like a single sentence that uses like five proper nouns that you don’t know the definitions of and there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing else. You’re just like, what? I don’t, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John and so here I’m in this situation And I have watched just so many hours of WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John videos about APIs that I have never used, right? I have a lot of this knowledge in my head, but
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC videos, for as wonderful as they are, they really are kind of like
⏹️ ▶️ John math class in school, where if you have kids or if you’ve been a kid and remember
⏹️ ▶️ John math class, if you don’t understand a concept
⏹️ ▶️ John and you never learn it, that’s gonna be a big problem, because next year, they’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John talk to you is if you already know elementary algebra. They’re not gonna reteach you algebra. They’re gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John assume everyone here knows algebra, or like multiplication tables. They’re gonna assume you know your multiplication tables, you know how to do addition,
⏹️ ▶️ John subtraction, multiplication, division. Like, they’re not gonna reteach that.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you miss one or two things, when you watch, when you attend like the, you know, the
⏹️ ▶️ John junior year high school class, and they’re starting teaching you calculus, if you don’t know like
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much everything that came before it, you have a serious problem. Like they like to say that math is
⏹️ ▶️ John cumulative. You really need, you can’t like forget the old stuff. They build on what you knew before.
⏹️ ▶️ John Many WWDC videos are like that. Not all of them, but many of them. Well, they’ll say,
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s new in Star Kit 2? They assume you already know what was old in Star Kit 2
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco gonna tell you about the new stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s an incremental update. And so you’re like, okay, but that’s not all the videos. What you should
⏹️ ▶️ John do is go and find the WWDC 2021 or whatever video, it’s introducing StorKit 2.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the problem with this approach. And you know, this is, you know, Apple spends a lot of money on WDC. The production
⏹️ ▶️ John values are great, the people who present them is great. I think the presentations are great, but you go introducing StorKit 2,
⏹️ ▶️ John and you watch that video. If there’s a conceptual part about like,
⏹️ ▶️ John big picture what is StorKit about, hopefully that’s still relevant. But with the current
⏹️ ▶️ John rate of development and transition to SwiftUI, almost all the code in that presentation
⏹️ ▶️ John is not what you wanna be doing today. Because it’s not, you know, they,
⏹️ ▶️ John in future years there’ll be a session called what’s new in StarKit 2 and SwiftUI or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John And those are the APIs you wanna be using. Cause those are the new ones that work really well with
⏹️ ▶️ John SwiftUI. The old ones you could get it done, but the, so the intro course is telling
⏹️ ▶️ John you a way to do it that you don’t wanna do it. And the new course expects
⏹️ ▶️ John you to already have experience with the old API, but you have neither. And I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John through this and I’m thinking, as I stumble my way in the dark through this, just making mistake
⏹️ ▶️ John after mistake, as I stumble my way through this, I start fantasizing about writing documentation.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like I’ve already written it in my head based on what is surely my current misunderstandings.
⏹️ ▶️ John I could explain this to somebody who has zero knowledge. Granted, my information is probably
⏹️ ▶️ John wrong at this point, but I could explain my wrong information and say, look, here’s the problem you’re facing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here’s the things you’re going to run into. Like, here’s how you have to think about it. Here’s a way to arrange
⏹️ ▶️ John it, stuff like that. Right. And as far as I’ve been able to determine that kind of documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John almost doesn’t exist at all, anywhere in the Apple ecosystem, like first party.
⏹️ ▶️ John It provides a third party opportunity for people to do that. But even the third party ones, because things are changing
⏹️ ▶️ John so rapidly in particular, because so many API’s, like predate SwiftUI, and
⏹️ ▶️ John then work with SwiftUI, but just barely, and then there’s a new ones that are like made in an age where SwiftUI
⏹️ ▶️ John is the expected default, and they don’t work anywhere else. Like, if you make that tutorial two years ago,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe it’s out of date now. It’s extremely frustrating. And so that one of the things that Apple usually is
⏹️ ▶️ John okay about is providing the sample code, although they do this weird thing where the sample code
⏹️ ▶️ John from year to year, they’ll keep enhancing the same app like the food truck app or the backyard birds app or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John and the download links to the sample code will be like download the food truck app. But when you download
⏹️ ▶️ John it, I think they only have like one copy of the food truck app and it’s the current version. So
⏹️ ▶️ John if you download it from like a video four years ago, you don’t get the four years ago food truck, you get the current one, which in some ways is
⏹️ ▶️ John good because it’s more updated. But in some ways it’s bad because the the app doesn’t match the video that you’re watching.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, that my final complaint on this is, you know, again about WWC videos, which I feel
⏹️ ▶️ John like WC videos are they’re not like movie trailers, but they’re like, do you want to they’re great for
⏹️ ▶️ John me before I was programming with these API’s. Do you just want to get an overview of what Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing with the API’s and what they’re capable of? These are the videos for you. But if you’re actually have to
⏹️ ▶️ John implement an app, man, these videos like they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ John going to give you what you need to give just one example that drives me batty anytime in a
⏹️ ▶️ John WWDC video, and I think and I understand why they do this anytime in a WC video, they say, You know, we’re going to do X,
⏹️ ▶️ John Y, and Z. And they say they’ve omitted error checking for brevity? That is useless to me!
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Error checking is the
⏹️ ▶️ John most important part of the programming! I’ve omitted error checking?
⏹️ ▶️ John Are you freaking kidding me? All I want to know is where can this go wrong? What do I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to check for and where so I tell that the transaction is valid? Do I have to do it? Do I not have to do it?
⏹️ ▶️ John What are the possible error scenarios? Where do I, like, I’ve omitted error checking for brevity? I know
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to fit it on a slide, but that is just throw it out the window. Like it’s useless. It’s only useful to
⏹️ ▶️ John me as a casual dilettante viewer of like, I’m not writing an app, but I just want to learn about APIs. Isn’t this great?
⏹️ ▶️ John But when it’s time to write an app, the code is all error checking. There’s one line that does something in 75 lines
⏹️ ▶️ John of error checking. Like, especially
⏹️ ▶️ John something like in-app purchase. Like, I just wish like, and this made me think like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what labs are for. Like, if I’m still doing this, W3C, I should go to a lab and say,
⏹️ ▶️ John I should just come with a W3C session and say, Explain this stupid app to me. Explain Backyard
⏹️ ▶️ John Birds. Why are you doing this? What does this API do? What in the world?
⏹️ ▶️ John It took me like a full day to figure out they were calling map.map on something and
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t, you know, the array.map? It wasn’t that map, it was a different map. It does basically the same
⏹️ ▶️ John thing, but it was literally like a different signature, a different fricking function, because
⏹️ ▶️ John it wasn’t an array. You can’t tell that by looking at it because it’s not Perl with an at sign in front of it. Like, oh, relax.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m like, and then so the documentation for that map function was a single sentence that I can’t make heads or tails of.
⏹️ ▶️ John Single sentence. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it’s in their sample app
⏹️ ▶️ John and they gloss over it. Man, I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey just, it’s been just,
⏹️ ▶️ John and surprisingly, the thing that I thought would be tripping me up so far, I mean, I’ll get to it, but so far hasn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John been, which is, oh, how do you test transactions and like pretending to purchase things
⏹️ ▶️ John and blah, blah, blah. That actually, because I spent, because I waited, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John eight years or nine years or whatever to do my first in-app purchase, that’s actually pretty good. And I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John say this, that’s better than I thought it would be and I haven’t had problems yet. Partially because I’m still
⏹️ ▶️ John just doing it locally, which is a feature they introduced two or three years ago, the local store kit configuration thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Love it, pretty easy, mostly works. You can’t, it doesn’t really work. You can’t really, I haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John money, you can do tech support from now. Is there a way to cancel a subscription in the local Xcode thing? Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s a special bespoke window for it in Xcode. Hold on, I gotta
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John open it up. I found that
⏹️ ▶️ John window. How do you cancel? Right clicking doesn’t do nothing. They do have a thing where you can click and it says show options, and then
⏹️ ▶️ John it has buy, like the transaction list.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, in the transaction list. I thought there was a way to do it, but now I’m having second thoughts about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John cancellation.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I go to the options list, and when you click options on it, it brings up a thing that says like, there is a cancel
⏹️ ▶️ John option, but those are like transactions that already happened. And when I cancel, my app doesn’t see that. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t hit one of the update handlers or whatever. So anyway, when I
⏹️ ▶️ John try it with Sandbox, I’m sure it’ll be easier, because I’m assuming when I do cancel it in App Store Connect, because basically what I’m trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John do is to simulate a user canceling it. They go to their subscriptions in their iCloud, whatever, blah, blah, blah, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they hit cancel. That’s what I want to simulate from Xcode and haven’t figured out how to do it yet. But that’s a minor complaint.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I thought that would be the big problem, but they have actually a pretty good options for like renew
⏹️ ▶️ John every 30 seconds. Each 30 seconds is one month, or you can easily delete the transactions to reset
⏹️ ▶️ John the world, having no problem with that. Having massive problems being like, where
⏹️ ▶️ John do I put the stuff in my app to make sure I’m doing all the things that I need to do
⏹️ ▶️ John for all these fricking transactions? And oh, the types, when the type signature makes
⏹️ ▶️ John the line go over 100 characters just by, it’s like, you know, what is it? The entitlement
⏹️ ▶️ John result, the verification result with angle brackets around it all, plus the type that you put, but that one inside
⏹️ ▶️ John has a question mark, And it’s just, and you have to like massage that value through 17 different
⏹️ ▶️ John things to figure out if it’s verified and extract the real value with an if case led. And then it’s just like, oh my God, who
⏹️ ▶️ John made this API? Who made it? Like it’s so good in so many ways. And then just when you get down to where the rubber
⏹️ ▶️ John meets the road where you have to figure out do they actually own this? It’s like, guess what? Angle brackets for days,
⏹️ ▶️ John no documentation. Good luck. Oh, and by the way, there’s like, there’s the subscription
⏹️ ▶️ John update task thing to monitor for updates to subscriptions. Is there an equivalent of things that aren’t subscriptions?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, that one takes a single product ID because screw you.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wasted at least 15 minutes trying to figure out how to programmatically apply multiple
⏹️ ▶️ John of the same view modifier with different arguments. And the type system did
⏹️ ▶️ John not like what I was doing and I gave up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I gave up. I felt like I was so close. Like I can smell it. I can use reduce. I can make it happen.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like, nope, type system says no. Type system says no. And I was like, nope, this is beyond my Swift skills.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I just bailed out. Anyway, StorKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and so the funny thing is, you’re doing StorKit 2. StorKit 2 is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey light years better than StorKit 1.
⏹️ ▶️ John know, I saw the old with the SK, the SK APIs. I’m like, boy, I’m glad I’m not doing that because that was working
⏹️ ▶️ John that with SwiftUI. First of all, that will never work with Swift 6, never. Like, it would be so angry at you about everything you’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I don’t think there is a way to cancel, by the way, within this little transactions dialogue.
⏹️ ▶️ John The thing you can do to cancel that makes the transaction disappear, but the point is it doesn’t have the effect that a user
⏹️ ▶️ John canceling their subscription would in iCloud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. But with regard to documentation, I mean, I could go on and on and on about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me start by saying it actually has gotten a lot better over the last few years. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey doubt I had anything to do with that, but I certainly, it was late 2020 that I wrote
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my blog post about this, which I stand by, Pretty much. I mean, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think it has gotten better, but it is still not great. And you know, the name of this blog post was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on Apple’s piss poor documentation, which yeah, pretty much. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think the thing there, there’s two things that really chapped my bottom about Apple’s documentation these days.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey First of all, when you have either, what is it? No overview, uh, something, something,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no overview found or something like that. I figured no overview available. That’s what it is. Um, you see that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey less these days, which is great, but a lot of times what you’ll see is just like a regurgitation
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of what the function signature is. And very, very few other words. And this is like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you were describing John with like, here’s a single sentence with a bunch of proper nouns that I’m not familiar with
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also not helpful. And that really is frustrating. Really, really frustrating.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or I love seeing like enumerations where each of the cases is just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey restatement of the case, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey no, maybe. Like the comments that add one to I. Right. It’s just bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Um, but the other thing that really, I find deeply frustrating and Apple has a, an affordance
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for this and their documentation, but a lot of times there’s not a really great
⏹️ ▶️ Casey overview of here’s this system, here’s how it works. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey secondarily, here’s the overview, which sometimes does exist, but here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how you actually execute. So take StorKit for example. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a pretty great overview of here’s all the things you need to consider, and here’s what this does and that does, and subscriptions
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and non-subscriptions, and this, that, and the other thing. But they don’t do a particularly good job at all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of really explaining why the API is as kooky as it is. Because StorKit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 2’s API is actually really good. It’s actually not that kooky. But when you want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to figure out, Is this app purchased? Yes or no. In order to figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that out, Apple’s basically like, you got to look at like 300 different arrays of information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I don’t know, piece it together yourself. Have fun. And I understand why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that is, but first of all, it would be nice if Apple kind of solved this for us.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But second of all, there’s like maybe a couple of sentences that explain why
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is the way this is and that’s it. And what I really want is a deep dive about, OK, here’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the reason this is the way it is. You might have family sharing, or you might not. You might be entitled via family
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sharing, or you might not. You might be entitled via family sharing and your own entitlement, or you might not. You might
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be entitled via family sharing something else and your own entitlement, or you might not. Or the family sharing has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey expired, but your own entitlement hasn’t, or vice versa. And so suddenly you realize, oh, no, I really do need to do the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work of traversing all of these arrays of subscriptions and information and whatnot. But you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey come upon that oftentimes by users reporting into you, your app doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say it’s purchased, but here’s a receipt showing I purchased it. That’s not frigging helpful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple, that’s too late. It’s too late at that point. That just drives me bananas.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Another great example of this is I’ve started adding widget in intense support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to call sheet, hasn’t shipped yet. But one of the things you can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do is with widgets, I’m pretty sure it’s widgets. You can communicate
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between the widget and the main app. There’s not really a good overview page of your different techniques
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of doing this. I piece together that, oh, you can do
⏹️ ▶️ Casey URL schemes, but it has to be a secure URL. It can’t be like an X callback style URL.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I forget there was one other, oh, you can put things in user defaults, but even Apple seems to think like, I wouldn’t recommend that if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re going to avoid it. I thought that’s all there was. And come to find out, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey actually, you can flip a switch. There’s a Boolean somewhere
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in your widget where you can say, no, I need you to open the app when the widget is interacted with. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at that point, you’re effectively in the app’s runtime and you can do kind of whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you want. But there’s no good overview of, okay, here are all of the available options
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and here’s why you would choose each one. It’s not useless, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost useless. And in some ways it’s worse than useless because they give you just a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little nugget of information and then basically say, have fun. You’ll figure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it out. You’re smart,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And then when you search like for third party stuff, you’ll find lots of like really good posts that do the kind of documentation
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m fantasizing about. Like, let’s start from the beginning. Let me tell you the problem. Let me tell you the solutions. Let me tell you the different approaches.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you said, when you would use them or whatever, but the problem is that blog posts were written four years ago and now it’s all out of date and it doesn’t talk
⏹️ ▶️ John about the APIs you want and maybe it’s wrong, right? And I just, I want to give credit here. or like the Storky people
⏹️ ▶️ John are listening, Storky 2 is so much better. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, I can see that. I’ve seen all the WWDC sessions, especially for using SwiftUI.
⏹️ ▶️ John It really does a huge amount of work. Current entitlements does a lot of the work for you. Like a huge
⏹️ ▶️ John amount. The fact that entitlements are, you know, products are separate from subscriptions is still a little janky,
⏹️ ▶️ John even though they’re both represented by products. Like there’s weirdnesses there, I get it, but it has come such
⏹️ ▶️ John a long way. And that’s why it’s all the more frustrating that like, I’m sure there’s a correct
⏹️ ▶️ John way to use these tools. The tool, they seem powerful. They seem way more powerful than the things they’re replacing. They
⏹️ ▶️ John do a lot of stuff in a small amount of space, but there’s one or two things that I’m missing
⏹️ ▶️ John that I don’t understand. And especially like Swift 6 really hasn’t been much of a problem, but it’s a little bit of a problem
⏹️ ▶️ John in that smuggling data between the various islands,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially when you’re stuck in some kind of non-async Swift UI thing where you can’t even await something from
⏹️ ▶️ John an actor, you end up smuggling a lot of stuff through environment. Apple’s example smuggles stuff through the
⏹️ ▶️ John environment. So I’m like, is this just the way? Because like, what’s the best practice? And they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, yeah, we’re totally gonna smuggle. Like, we have an actor doing a bunch of store stuff and
⏹️ ▶️ John that actor is like invoked asynchronously from a view modifier and that
⏹️ ▶️ John view modifier shoves things into the environment and then other views see it because you shoved it into the environment and they
⏹️ ▶️ John have the ad environment. And it’s like, all right, I mean, is that it? Like, am I,
⏹️ ▶️ John because I have a lot of data that I want to move around, and now I have like six environment variables, and I’m like, maybe I’m doing
⏹️ ▶️ John it wrong, and it’s just, anyway, I’ll put a link in the show notes. I just put it in the document case,
⏹️ ▶️ John see at the link section for the map method. The documentation for this map method says, the method
⏹️ ▶️ John is map open parens underscore colon close parens, and it says, returns
⏹️ ▶️ John a new state, mapping the entitlement value if successful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thanks. That’s helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ John It maps a new value. Oh, mapping the entitlement value. That’s great. It returns
⏹️ ▶️ John an entitlement task state angle brackets new value. So the value is like, I kind of see how they’re using it in their
⏹️ ▶️ John sample app. I’m using it in my app. I kind of understand what it’s doing. But when
⏹️ ▶️ John it came time for me to do something similar, not in subscriptions, but with the like for the
⏹️ ▶️ John entitlement part for trying out like non subscription purchase type things. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John was baffled and I was like, I’m just not gonna, like, is this just a convenience method? I’m just gonna like,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyway, I long for a first party thing that like just
⏹️ ▶️ John explains from start to finish, because you can’t do it in a W3C session. It’s not long enough. That’s not what it’s for. Like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John not saying W3C sessions should be different. I’m saying there needs to be something to augment it. And I do appreciate
⏹️ ▶️ John all the third party stuff out there, hacking with Swift for like basic Swift stuff and some Swift UI stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those things are great. There’s tons of people writing blog posts about it, the Swift forums, like you can find stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem with the internet is just, you’re just gonna find so much out of date stuff. I have been using like
⏹️ ▶️ John chat GPT to try that, but like chat GPT doesn’t know about Swift. It thinks it knows about Swift 6, but
⏹️ ▶️ John it does not. It absolutely does not. So it’ll just give you this code, that’s just not gonna run. I’ve been trying
⏹️ ▶️ John a Claude to see what it can make. They will give you just, they’ll give you code that doesn’t work for just
⏹️ ▶️ John days. All right, just that will never work. that APIs that do not exist, like
⏹️ ▶️ John they can be helpful sometimes, but A, they’re just chronically out of date because they have to be, it
⏹️ ▶️ John takes so long to make these models that by the time you get them, they don’t have WWC 2024 info in there, it’s just,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then B, yeah, they’ll just make up something and it’s a shame. Like I use it because it’s like, look, you’re gonna try to run
⏹️ ▶️ John the code anyway, as I said before, it’s one of the ideal cases for this. I do, if I had to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John pick the best new programming tool 2024, it’s these AI things,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they are in their own way extremely frustrating and they absolutely do not help for things like, I
⏹️ ▶️ John need a human being to conceptually explain to me all the moving parts. Because like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not 8,000 different ways to do this, I would imagine. The people who made StorKit have an idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John Say you have an app that wants to use every single feature that StorKit have. You have, you know, consumables,
⏹️ ▶️ John subscriptions, not really like that’s what their bird, you know, backyard birds app is trying to say. Everything that
⏹️ ▶️ John StorKit can do, this does all of them. And if you’re gonna do all of them, This is how you should arrange your junk.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I don’t blame the Backyard Birds sample app. It does do all those things,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it is so kind of like strange and idiosyncratic and it doesn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John every single possible thing you can do. In some ways it’s limited and there’s some weird choices made by like the programmer
⏹️ ▶️ John who just really likes using enums to smuggle information around. Where there’s like an enum where
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s like seven of the cases are product IDs and one of the cases is the group ID. Like I guess, I
⏹️ ▶️ John you just avoid the group ID because you know that one’s called group and it’s not a product ID. And it’s like, well, it’s convenient
⏹️ ▶️ John when we, and also one of the states is not subscribed and we’re gonna do, it’s just, what are you doing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, you know, every program has their own quirks, right? And it’s like, it’s fine to be quirky, but when you’re making like
⏹️ ▶️ John the canonical sample code for how to use Storkit, maybe like rein in those quirks and just
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, I’m not going to do anything or make any weird decisions. It’s just gonna be like, here’s how you use the APIs.
⏹️ ▶️ John It should be incredibly well commented, which it is not. And it should have all the error
⏹️ ▶️ John checking, like all of it. Because there’s so many theories you Google for it and it’s like, I think you should do this. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you should do that. And you have to check for this but you don’t have to check for that. But now it’s just, you have to check this and you check the revocation
⏹️ ▶️ John date. But if it gets through here, it’s already verified but you have to verify it yourself. Oh, Storkit 2 does the verification and the old Storkit didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John but now you still need to verify. It’s just exhausting. So anyway, and
⏹️ ▶️ John the frustrating thing obviously is that this has nothing to do with the functionality my app, it’s all just about the monetization.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not the only thing I’m doing. Really. I’m spending more time on UI than I am on this, but UI is, you know, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John UI just is what it is. It’s a slog because you don’t quite know what you’re, you know, the best way to make it and stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And yes, I’m also working on the engine. Like I’m doing all the parts, but I just, I just wanted to rant out store kit in particular, because it
⏹️ ▶️ John was what I was working on today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s it’s brutal. And I can’t stress enough. It is light years
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than store kit one. I know I’ve said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John it two or three times. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey want to say it two or three more times. It is so much better than StoreKit 1, but it is still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot. Some of that, maybe even most of that, is the domain that they’re trying to cover
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because there’s so many gotchas and what ifs, and this and that, and the other thing. But again, it would be so much better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if there was better documentation that walked you through. Okay, here’s the plain vanilla version where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you have a single in-app purchase that’s unlocking your app. Okay, now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what if you had a single subscription that unlocks your app? Okay, now what if you had multiple
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different in-app purchases that could unlock your app in multiple different subscriptions? Well, okay, now let’s introduce consumables,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, and build step-by-step over all of these different
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem domains, if you will. But there’s just not that. And I just, from what I can tell, there does
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not seem to be an institutional value in documentation from what I’ve gathered
⏹️ ▶️ Casey internally or externally, that documentation just does not matter the way I think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it should. And it’s really unfortunate because Apple, at its finest,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really wants to and empowers us, the developers, to make
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world-class apps. And this is flying directly in the face of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? Like, if they want Marco and John and me to make the best apps we possibly can, then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they need to document their APIs in the best way they know how. And I don’t think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way it is today.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I feel like that’s what one of the goals of Storkit 2 is they basically said, people are using Storkit 1 wrong,
⏹️ ▶️ John probably because we didn’t explain it well enough, and there’s not good docs. So in Storkit 2, we’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ John do a lot of the work for them, because we know how the API is supposed to work. So we’re going to take away a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s one of the things that’s great about that, like, inside this API, it’s doing a bunch of stuff that basically,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re from Apple’s perspective, you third party developers proved you can’t do this, right? Like on average, you
⏹️ ▶️ John can’t do it, right? So we’re gonna do it for you. And then we’ll just give you a response. But still the response
⏹️ ▶️ John they give you, it’s like, Oh, and by the way, the things we give you, you have to implement a bunch of business logic.
⏹️ ▶️ John Here it’s and it’s super important you do it exactly right. Otherwise, you’re gonna screw things up. But we’ll only kind of vaguely explain
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And again, the like the backyard birds app, they go through all the things you said, Casey, but it is still in the end just
⏹️ ▶️ John one app. And if you watch that session, you cannot come away from that session and say, Now I’m ready to implement my app.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not you’re absolutely not. Like even if you memorized every line of code, even if you copy and pasted the code samples,
⏹️ ▶️ John they have them in the transcripts, the code, like that’s not sufficient for you to, I know I just did it, like
⏹️ ▶️ John that information, I have the Backyard Birds app open in Xcode next to me. That is not sufficient
⏹️ ▶️ John for you to do even the most basic thing, like just a single thing that unlocks
⏹️ ▶️ John your app. There are still so many more things that you have to know and think about to actually make
⏹️ ▶️ John that work because the code snippets they give you, and like the Backyard Birds app itself is so weird and
⏹️ ▶️ John differently structured than your app would be, but you can’t just use it as a one-to-one thing. And the WWDC session
⏹️ ▶️ John just glosses over so much stuff. Like it gives you an outline of what’s possible, but when it comes time for you to
⏹️ ▶️ John type stuff in, you’re just like, uh, it took me so long to figure out, just
⏹️ ▶️ John banging my head against it and just randomly Googling to find all the other people who have hit the same roadblocks and
⏹️ ▶️ John discovered things like, you know, non-renewing subscriptions, Apple doesn’t track anything
⏹️ ▶️ John having to do with those, So that’s all you, right? I know they do it for all the other ones,
⏹️ ▶️ John but those ones just, yeah, like, okay. It would have
⏹️ ▶️ John been nice if that was in the documentation in big red letters, which is like, hey, if you do this, everything’s on you,
⏹️ ▶️ John unlike subscriptions where we keep track of it all. But you know, that’s development
⏹️ ▶️ John for you, right? And you know, it sounds like I’m being fresh and I’m actually enjoying the fun parts of it, like the
⏹️ ▶️ John parts that actually make my app work. And I do enjoy the UI stuff a little bit, Although I have a separate rant about that for another time.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yeah, working on the app.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I actually… This is probably not a good time to suggest this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I was thinking, if you are making an app that’s going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco crawl people’s files on their disks and everything and take advantage of the knowledge that you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the things you care about, why not make an app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that is scans your files and keeps hashes in a database and periodically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco can rescan to detect bit rot.
⏹️ ▶️ John have already made that program. What is it? There’s a whole bunch of ones that will do that. Yeah, they’ll put little checksum files in your
⏹️ ▶️ John directories. Like what I’ve gathered from the discussions I’ve had about that thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is that people who have, like Carbon Copy Cloner does it actually. If you, instead of using SuperDuper, if you
⏹️ ▶️ John use Carbon Copy Cloner, they have an option to put checksum files in there and every time you do a copy, it will re-checksum on there and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like you can do it manually, but what people have told me who do this type of thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is that they’re super diligent about it, they do it, they have a program that does it, they have a third party program that does whatever, and they say it just
⏹️ ▶️ John never finds any errors. And I don’t know if that means those programs aren’t working right, or if it means the
⏹️ ▶️ John modern storage stack with SSDs is so good that you’re very unlikely to find those
⏹️ ▶️ John type of things, and if you just keep the data moving from one fresh SSD to another, it won’t be a problem, but yeah, that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it’s something I have considered, but one of the things that bothers me is,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, the map is not the territory. You can put the checksum files in every directories, but then you’re putting turds all over the disk and
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s all sorts of issues with that. You can keep a central database, but then your central database diverges
⏹️ ▶️ John instantaneously from the disk that it is databasing, and you’re constantly like chasing it around to try to keep the database
⏹️ ▶️ John up to date with the state of the disk. It’s not, it’s a type of thing that, this is
⏹️ ▶️ John where like my, you know, my principles and tastes say this should be implemented in, it has to be implemented in the file system.
⏹️ ▶️ John Many file systems do implement it. APFS does not. And so I just sit around here with an arm’s
⏹️ ▶️ John full and say, well, you should eventually do this in the file system, right? Because it’s like wrong. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John like wrong to do it not on the, you can, but it’s just wrong. Put it in the file system. ZFS showed
⏹️ ▶️ John you how. This is a thing that exists. Just do it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t, even if it was in the file system, wouldn’t the file system not know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco until it tries to read the file?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but like, you don’t know until you try to scan the file. It’s the same thing. Like you have to, you can’t get around
⏹️ ▶️ John the fact that to tell whether the bits are right, you have to read them.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Sure, but- There’s no getting around that. But like, wouldn’t that still then leave an opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for something that would like scan periodically and alert you? Because like-
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but the thing that scans has to read all the bits to find out if they’re still right. Yes. Like that’s a tremendously
⏹️ ▶️ John heavyweight opportunity. Like the thing that ZFS did was it would, you had optionally, optionally you could
⏹️ ▶️ John store data redundantly, right? And so when the thing was scanning in the background,
⏹️ ▶️ John just crawling your entire disk from, like painting the Golden Gate Bridge from start to finish, and as soon as it got done, it just starts
⏹️ ▶️ John over again with low priority thread, is it would fix the things that it found. Because you have redundant copies of the data,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it would repair them, and it would alert you if there were a problem. I just feel like it’s a false assumed thing. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll add to my list, if this goes disastrously bad, maybe I won’t, but if not, you know, again, there’s already apps that
⏹️ ▶️ John do this. But like, I don’t like either of the approaches. I don’t like the turds in the directory approach,
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t like the central database approach because both of them are just like, ugh. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, honestly, I think the central database approach is the right one for that. But I don’t know, I’m kind of thinking this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could be your thing. You could become like Storacusa, suite of apps. That
⏹️ ▶️ Marco imagine, honestly, imagine if, what if you had one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app that would kind of just care for your disk and it would have a few of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these functions built
⏹️ ▶️ John a tech tool pro, a Norton disc doctor, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s StorAcusa and or ForgeBase, you know, but like.
⏹️ ▶️ John From a sandbox app, none of that stuff is possible, let me tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Who has more credibility or passion about the file system than you?
⏹️ ▶️ John Just because I’m interested in the file system doesn’t mean I’m good at it. I’ve already explained what a terrible Mac developer I am. You don’t want me hearing too much
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. Leave it to the experts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Honestly, I think people would love to see the StorAcusa suite of functionality.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco A few annoyances or shortcomings of APFS or of data storage
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the Mac that you could help out a little bit with. and we’ll save one app at