00:00:00 ◼ ► Marco skipped ATP last night, which is to say we all skipped ATP last night, because he wanted to watch/listen to the first Fish concert, as you just mentioned, that had been performed in God knows how long.
00:00:15 ◼ ► And I wanted to make fun of him real bad, but truth be told I would feel similarly if I were Marco. And then Marco and I were chatting earlier today, and I had explained to you that I had just, as you had sent me an iMessage, I had just finished splitting up a three hour MP3 that I had recorded using Audio Hijack off of Chrome playing the SiriusXM website on Friday night when Dave Matthews performed.
00:00:44 ◼ ► Dave Matthews performed their first concert in God knows how long, a year and a half I suppose. And then I was using Fishn, this is I guess a defacto ad read for Rogue Amoeba, but anyway I was using Fishn to split all these tracks up.
00:00:56 ◼ ► And I was doing all this because that's the best thing I can do to get as close as I can to a soundboard recording of Dave Matthews' band. Marco, what did you do to get a soundboard recording of Fish?
00:01:07 ◼ ► Well I just bought the Season Pass on LiveFish.com, their officially sanctioned live recording vendor. A couple hours after the concert was over I could download my MP3s right from the native app that runs, well I think it's a Java app, but it's an app that runs on my Mac that's like the bulk downloader or you can download it right from the website if you want to.
00:01:27 ◼ ► I get all these recordings for something like I think it's about $9 a show when you buy the Season Pass like I do. And I also, through the same website, watch the show live in 4K, professionally produced.
00:01:44 ◼ ► The live stream I think that cost about $20 I think and something like that. And it was great because I could, as I mentioned previously on the show, I thought it would be really quite a cultural moment to see as a Fish fan, to see the very first show back since COVID shut everything down for almost two years for them.
00:02:03 ◼ ► And it really was, I was very happy to see it. And I didn't want to go as far as to actually go to Arkansas in almost August, but to actually go see it in person. But I'm very very glad that I watched the live stream.
00:02:19 ◼ ► And it's funny, of all the things that our Wednesday night recordings have gone up against, that we have decided to just have the show anyway, it's things like presidential debates, the World Series, all sorts of major events that we're like, we're going to have the show anyway.
00:02:36 ◼ ► But dammit when the first Fish concert after two years is about to start, that's where I draw the line.
00:02:43 ◼ ► So I sat on my couch alone and watched this Fish concert streamed in glorious 4K with soundboard and everything. They have a hell of a team behind the band. They really produce things at very high quality live.
00:02:59 ◼ ► And so you get an amazing experience of very multi-camera setup and the highest quality visual and audio stuff. It's fantastic. To be a fan of this band is so much better than I think to be a fan of any other band, simply just in how well they serve the fans.
00:03:18 ◼ ► Well, maybe not so much better in terms of storage space. I do wonder if the band is some kind of deal with storage makers.
00:03:26 ◼ ► Well, as I mentioned before, for all the recordings of the shows, I just download the MP3s. They offer a FLAC, they offer 24.96 FLAC. I don't download those. I just download the MP3s.
00:03:39 ◼ ► It's just a never-ending series of downloads. You buy the season pass and there's however many shows there are per year. Even an MP3, it's just megs and megs of constant data on your hard drive. Unless you just pick and choose shows, I'm like, "Oh, this wasn't that good a show." You just download them all. You're paying for them all.
00:03:58 ◼ ► Well, I'm saying this never ends. I suppose the expansion of storage outpaces their output. You'll probably be fine because if you're happy with MP3s, the files shouldn't really get any bigger from this point on, I guess.
00:04:11 ◼ ► To give you a data point here, all of 2019, they played 41 shows. It was a pretty busy year for them. That was a little under 15 gigs. That's really not bad.
00:04:28 ◼ ► 15 gigs a year dedicated to your favorite band. It still seems hefty, but as time goes on, that will be less and less. The storage will get bigger, I guess.
00:04:38 ◼ ► Oh, come on. If you two play that many shows, you'd be there. I don't know. You have quite a tolerance.
00:04:51 ◼ ► But anyway, that being said, Dave Matthews does have some forward thinking, for lack of a better term, policies. They let you record concerts using microphones in the audience. They have since forever.
00:05:06 ◼ ► Yeah, tapers, exactly. Very early on, they would actually let you hook into the soundboard and then very quickly they said, "Eh, that's not such a great idea anymore."
00:05:13 ◼ ► And then there was a brief window of time when people realized that they could grab one of the band members' IEMs, their in-ear monitors, and so they would start recording that.
00:05:21 ◼ ► And that would be a very odd mix because it would be super heavy on the drums because it was Carter the drummer's IEM feed or whatever.
00:05:29 ◼ ► But then the band put the kibosh on that, so now we're back to just microphones in the audience.
00:05:33 ◼ ► And you'd be surprised the fidelity of a microphone on a taper tower that's 30 feet up in the middle of the audience.
00:05:40 ◼ ► It is way better than you would expect, but it is still straight trash compared to what you're listening to.
00:05:45 ◼ ► And it's just so frustrating because I feel like the bands, I know you're going to be offended by this Marco, I'm sorry, but I don't feel like the bands are that different in spirit.
00:05:52 ◼ ► Yes, I know the fans are very different and so on and so forth, but I feel like the spirit of the band is not that different.
00:05:58 ◼ ► But nevertheless, I feel like Fish gets this so very right in the Dave Matthews band. I don't know if I would go so far as to say it gets it wrong, but certainly does not get it right.
00:06:07 ◼ ► And I am very jealous. And I would be buying all of the shows if I were able to, just like you do.
00:06:13 ◼ ► Because Fish went through a similar thing with allowing tapers, first allowing soundboard tap-ins, and then eventually they caused problems so he stopped doing that.
00:06:21 ◼ ► But it's a great example of where there is demand, try to address it. If people are telling you over and over again in big ways, "We want live recordings of your shows of the highest quality we can get,"
00:06:32 ◼ ► then if you can find a way to sell that to them with terms that everyone is happy with, that's great. Take advantage, address the demand rather than just trying to either ignore it or pretend like it's not there or try to stamp it out just unaddressed.
00:06:47 ◼ ► If you can address that demand, that's usually a good idea. And in this case, Fish does a fantastic job with doing that.
00:07:00 ◼ ► But you won't download them because that might use like 3 gigs of your hard drive space on your very, very small hard drives.
00:07:20 ◼ ► That's exactly right. Actually, I'm surprised you and I agree on this, but yes, I completely agree.
00:07:25 ◼ ► I mean, is this hard to agree on? I don't think there's anyone who's ever suggested that you do a jam band.
00:07:30 ◼ ► Well, no, I'm more talking about our long-standing different definitions of jam band, wherein I think for Mark, I would say flavor of music, whereas for me, it's about improvisation.
00:07:41 ◼ ► The reason I started talking to Casey this morning about the show is that, so I'm watching the livestream, so excited, I made this whole event out of this, right as the band walks onto the stage for the first time, the camera pans out, and flanking the left and right of the stage are two giant digital billboard screens.
00:08:02 ◼ ► And during the performance, they turn those off. So you're not seeing a giant Miller Lite ad on the side at the Walmart amphitheater here in Arkansas.
00:08:12 ◼ ► But as the band walked out on stage, everyone starts cheering, camera pans out, and they hadn't turned the billboards off yet.
00:08:18 ◼ ► And what were they showing? An ad for an upcoming performance there of Dave Matthews Band.
00:08:31 ◼ ► So flanking the stage of this amazing moment for me, this Phish fan is two giant ads for Dave Matthews Band.
00:08:43 ◼ ► No, that's the thing. They don't. You don't, but. Yeah, some do, but probably not the common case.
00:08:49 ◼ ► Speaking of ordering things online, did you guys get anything or order anything shiny and yellow today?
00:08:57 ◼ ► Sure did. I'm right there. One o'clock today. I was there ordering two play dates for my family.
00:09:05 ◼ ► But there's three people. Yeah, well, two was the most you can order at once. I didn't want to try to abuse the system.
00:09:10 ◼ ► And I know from experience that two is generally the right number for a portable system in our house.
00:09:15 ◼ ► Actually, the reason I know that is, you know, look, this is a game system. I am not much of a gamer, but the other two members of my family are.
00:09:23 ◼ ► Occasionally I will take a risk on something gaming related that is fun. Not because it's like the best system with all the specs.
00:09:31 ◼ ► Like I have no interest whatsoever in the PS5 or the Xbox X series, whatever. No interest in those things at all.
00:09:39 ◼ ► Because those are like, you know, the high end systems or shooting people in high definition. I cannot possibly be less interested in that.
00:09:46 ◼ ► But like little fun experiments here and there or like fun systems that are kind of more, you know, casual audiences or, you know, going in a different direction.
00:09:56 ◼ ► Things like the Nintendo Wii. Those I tend to have fun with. At least for a brief time before the fad wears off.
00:10:04 ◼ ► And the last time I took a risk on buying a portable system that I wasn't sure how much I would like, but I thought it might have a chance of being something fun.
00:10:14 ◼ ► Was actually when the Nintendo Switch came out. A friend of the show, Colin Donnell, who actually, you should follow Colin if you are a programmer or whatever.
00:10:24 ◼ ► Because he does a lot of really good stuff. He makes a lot of really good commentary. He always is starting some kind of new interesting project.
00:10:30 ◼ ► He's doing like some developer assistance projects right now. But he also is really good about talking on Twitter about mental health issues as a developer.
00:10:41 ◼ ► Facing mental health challenges, the challenges he's faced, helpful things if you're facing mental health challenges, especially as a programmer.
00:10:49 ◼ ► So Colin Donnell is a good follow. But the reason I bring him up is that the last risk I took right in the middle of Switch mania.
00:10:56 ◼ ► Colin had placed a couple of preorders and had gotten one more than he needed. So he offered to sell the Switch to me at cost.
00:11:03 ◼ ► Which was very generous at that time because they were selling for well above cost on the third party market.
00:11:08 ◼ ► And so I took a risk and bought the Switch from him. I had no idea whether it would be good, whether the family would love it.
00:11:15 ◼ ► And it was like the greatest hit in the family that we've ever had. Everyone loved it. It was amazing. So much fun.
00:11:22 ◼ ► I mean you guys remember the early Switch days. So much fun. It's still one of the most played things in our house.
00:11:28 ◼ ► So I decided with the play date, let me take a similar risk. It's not that much money. It's like $180.
00:11:35 ◼ ► So it's not a huge risk. And I'm pretty sure it's going to be a lot of fun. Knowing Panic, seeing the developers they have on board,
00:11:44 ◼ ► seeing some of the preview articles from the press that got hands on time with it, with some of the prerelease games.
00:11:50 ◼ ► It looks really cool. I trust them to make it really fun. And at that price I decided to take the risk.
00:11:56 ◼ ► And sometimes those risks pan out for me and little fun game stuff for my family. And I'm pretty sure this is going to be one of those times.
00:12:06 ◼ ► So I had a reminder set up on my phone to go off to remind me to do it. The reminder went off. I took my phone to make the preorder.
00:12:12 ◼ ► I already had the page loaded in Mobile Safari and I had no bars because I was out of my house. And that was kind of a shame.
00:12:20 ◼ ► And I was too far away from any place where I could get signal. So yeah, I mean I ordered it. I preordered just one.
00:12:28 ◼ ► It was kind of disappointing. I mean I kind of knew there might be a signal quality issue. I was like well it might be hard but I'll be there the second the thing opens.
00:12:37 ◼ ► So surely I'll get through. Turns out no, didn't get through. The place I live, I don't entirely understand it. I usually just blame it on rich people not wanting cell towers in their area.
00:12:46 ◼ ► I would pay so much money to put a cell tower in my backyard right now. Please just plant it in my backyard. I don't care if it's an eyesore.
00:12:54 ◼ ► I just want cell signal. But anyway everywhere around where I am, like a whole neighborhood, whole, cell signal is so bad.
00:13:00 ◼ ► I think I've talked about this before. The thing that frustrates the most is both of my kids' schools are essentially cell signal dead zones.
00:13:05 ◼ ► Which is extremely frustrating because one of the major tools parents and children use these days and especially in COVID times and all that stuff.
00:13:12 ◼ ► To communicate about meeting up to pick up and drop off because you can't like drive up to the school and pick up your kid because every other person is doing that because none of the kids are driving the bus.
00:13:20 ◼ ► Is texting and what happens when you can't text or call, it makes life more difficult. Anyway, all this to say is I ordered but my order is not coming until 2022 apparently.
00:13:30 ◼ ► Which is a shame. But on the bright side, don't cry for me too much. I already used a playdate in person two years ago at WWDC with the panic folks.
00:13:39 ◼ ► So I'm glad I've already got to touch one and try it and even play a little bit of one of the games and stuff like that.
00:13:46 ◼ ► I feel like I've already got a leg up but I'll be waiting a little bit longer for mine.
00:13:51 ◼ ► Honestly, I don't really play handheld systems for RSI issues but I just bought this just because it's so cute and so interesting.
00:14:00 ◼ ► I actually am very interested in the games that they're developing just because of the constraints the game developers are under. I just want to see what they produce.
00:14:06 ◼ ► In terms of RSI, I'm assuming most of the games won't be the type of games that you have to sink 500 hours into unless you want to.
00:14:12 ◼ ► So I'm hoping I can play them and get a flavor for it and then I suppose hand it off to my kids. I'm kind of afraid they're going to destroy it.
00:14:21 ◼ ► Anyway, I'll buy a second one for preservation purposes once they come out with the cool pencil holder thing that goes with it.
00:14:31 ◼ ► I just want to have that on my desk. I have the issue of Edge magazine that they were on the cover of and everything.
00:14:38 ◼ ► I feel a vicarious sense of pride because I know the people who made it. It's really cool.
00:15:03 ◼ ► I'm curious to see because they have what looks to be a fairly compelling developer story ramping up there.
00:15:10 ◼ ► I'm not saying I'm putting an overcast there or anything. I probably wouldn't do that just for time reasons.
00:15:22 ◼ ► I'm curious to watch it because I too handled one at WDC a couple of years ago for a brief time.
00:15:29 ◼ ► It looked and felt delightful as you would expect. I expect that it's going to be a pretty fun platform.
00:15:58 ◼ ► That's a pretty good indicator that there's going to be a pretty well sized community for this device out there.
00:16:04 ◼ ► That I think suggests, especially considering it's a pretty well sized community of a lot of nerdy people too.
00:16:12 ◼ ► That suggests there might be some fun hobbyist stuff on here as well. I'm looking forward to this.
00:16:16 ◼ ► Yeah, people who don't know, every play date is what they call in the console world a dev console.
00:16:25 ◼ ► There you go. Thank you. There's a dev kit. There's no special version of this hardware you need to develop games for.
00:16:30 ◼ ► Every single one that you get, you can develop for. The idea to develop for it is free.
00:16:35 ◼ ► If you buy a play date, you might not care about it and don't want to do any development on it.
00:16:46 ◼ ► If you're interested in making a game with a very simple game API, it's kind of like going back in time.
00:16:52 ◼ ► You can make a game with far fewer resources than would be required even to make a PC game.
00:17:02 ◼ ► but you have to impose the limits on yourself and decide that you're not going to do everything in full color, 3D, so on and so forth.
00:17:13 ◼ ► So you will be within the constraints of the hardware and you'll get to experiment with gaming.
00:17:16 ◼ ► It's actually, I would imagine, a pretty good platform to learn about what it means to write a game
00:17:22 ◼ ► because you won't get lost in the weeds of like, "Oh, I need to do this. I need to learn this shader language to make this cool shiny chrome sphere."
00:17:29 ◼ ► It's like, no, you're just, let's move some pixels around on the screen and make a fun game.
00:17:54 ◼ ► It absolutely did. I, because I am a professional, will have mine in this year because I am not a poor planner like Jon.
00:18:15 ◼ ► Multiple alarms set, different intervals before it, so I would make sure that if I was out, I could get home to be ready for it.
00:18:23 ◼ ► I woke my phone up on my desk so the screen would be on so that the Apple Pay checkout, I wouldn't have to wait for the screen to unlock to first show me that.
00:18:37 ◼ ► Anyway, I did order one. I have no idea if I'll like it or not, but it looks super cool.
00:18:45 ◼ ► There was a three-week window of time when I was in middle school or high school that I was obsessed with Tamagotchi.
00:18:51 ◼ ► And it lasted like three weeks, but man, did I enjoy that thing at the time until it died.
00:19:04 ◼ ► Are you kidding me? I would rather sell my car to like a family member or a friend than sell a Playdate to you, Jon.
00:19:12 ◼ ► There's no chance. If I breathe on that thing, it will be considered good condition at best.
00:19:17 ◼ ► You just put it in your back pocket when you wash your car and jump to clean the roof or something.
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00:21:27 ◼ ► Once again, sanity.io/atp for that free trial. Thank you so much to Sanity.io for sponsoring our show.
00:21:35 ◼ ► We should probably start the actual show. I just wanted to make a brief plea and reminder that if you are in the United States of America and you are over 12 years old, please, please, please, please go get your vaccination if you can.
00:21:54 ◼ ► It would be really, really helpful. The Delta variant is starting to really take over here if not having already taken over and it's super duper contagious and I think that none of that should be controversial.
00:22:06 ◼ ► And whether or not it's a panacea, whether or not it's a silver bullet, I can tell you that every bit of science that I've read says that the vaccines help and they certainly don't hurt.
00:22:15 ◼ ► So if you can, on behalf of those of us who have children younger than 12, on behalf of those of us who are immunocompromised or can't take or can't get the vaccine, please, if at all possible, now's a great time to get vaccinated if you're an American.
00:22:31 ◼ ► For those of you who are not American or don't have access to these, genuinely my heart goes out to you. No snark.
00:22:37 ◼ ► It's a really tough place to be and I hope that you have the ability to get your vaccination sooner rather than later.
00:22:45 ◼ ► But one way or another, for those of us who are American and who are lucky enough to have an ample supply of vaccines available to us, please do your part. Do your part for other people.
00:22:53 ◼ ► Even if you don't want to do it for yourself, do it for your friends. Do it for your friends' kids. Do it for relatives. Go get your shot. Get vaccinated if at all possible.
00:23:04 ◼ ► And as a reminder for people in the U.S., the vaccine is free, which is so rare in healthcare in this country.
00:23:10 ◼ ► I know some places will ask you for insurance information. You don't have to give it. The vaccine is free. No one will take any money from you for it. You can get it.
00:23:17 ◼ ► Yeah, please do. We as Americans of our generation are so fortunate that we've never really been called to serve our country in a really big way in a way that was mandatory.
00:23:31 ◼ ► For those of us who serve in the armed forces, that's a different story and we respect them very much.
00:23:37 ◼ ► But fortunately, most of us of our generation have not ever been drafted or been forced to serve our country in some way. We are lucky to be in that position.
00:23:53 ◼ ► As Casey said, not everybody can. People who are immunocompromised or have other conditions that prevent them from getting the vaccine, they can't get it in a lot of cases.
00:24:01 ◼ ► So every one of us who is able to get it, please serve your duty to society. This is what we have to do.
00:24:09 ◼ ► We all have to work together to get this done to finally beat this virus because we're not out of the woods yet at all.
00:24:15 ◼ ► In fact, it looks like we're going to gear up for another winter where we're going to have some problems.
00:24:20 ◼ ► We're not out of the woods yet. We need everybody. We need as many people as we can possibly get to please step up and serve society by getting this done.
00:24:31 ◼ ► Anybody in your life who refuses to get it, I know that's a really hard thing. I have people like that in my life as well.
00:24:37 ◼ ► It's a really hard thing to try to convince them. We have problems with a lot of rhetoric in our society right now.
00:24:44 ◼ ► But whatever you can do to get yourself and anyone else who's able to be vaccinated, to get them vaccinated, please do it.
00:24:51 ◼ ► Serve the world by doing this. It's very, very important. It will literally save lives. Please do it.
00:24:57 ◼ ► Moving on to far less important things, I just can't be bothered by these Safari changes yet.
00:25:04 ◼ ► I'll be bothered about it when the final GM lands. But everyone else seems to be really intrigued by the day-to-day machinations of Safari updates.
00:25:14 ◼ ► You, especially Jon. So I am passing the chief summarizer and chief baton to you for at least this segment.
00:25:22 ◼ ► Apple keeps changing it, like we said in the last show. They're not done with the changes.
00:25:26 ◼ ► And if you look at the build date on the betas that we're looking at now, even these took place a while ago.
00:25:39 ◼ ► In Mac OS Monterey, the latest beta, the reload button is gone from the choices in customized toolbar.
00:25:47 ◼ ► Remember, at first it wasn't there. Then it was there and it was backwards. Then it was there and it was forwards. Now it's gone again.
00:25:57 ◼ ► I want there to be one and I want it to be facing the right direction. Why did it disappear now? Who knows? But it's gone. Just FYI.
00:26:04 ◼ ► Someone on Twitter pointed out that they added darker outlines around the window widgets, the little red, yellow, and green circles.
00:26:11 ◼ ► All the window widgets, even in current Mac OS, have a little bit of an outline, but they made the outlines darker.
00:26:16 ◼ ► The theory is that it lets the window widgets stand out better from a similarly covered background, because remember the background can color that toolbar in Safari.
00:26:24 ◼ ► They added an outline around the address bar, whereas before it was just kind of a solid thing.
00:26:30 ◼ ► They continued to tweak. I didn't dig too much into the Mac one because I'm just like "yeah, yeah, yeah, let's see."
00:26:36 ◼ ► The most important thing is that they didn't change, because you can still choose to have the tabs below the address bar.
00:26:44 ◼ ► The tabs still don't look like tabs, which as we mentioned in the last show, doesn't really make any sense.
00:26:49 ◼ ► The whole reason they look the way they do is because they had to be those "tabs" that transform into the address bar, and the address bar has a rounded rectangle with text in it, so it made sense.
00:26:59 ◼ ► But now that they're in a separate line, I don't know why they just don't go back to looking like tabs. Fingers crossed on that one.
00:27:11 ◼ ► Apple more or less said they were going to do this, so it now looks much more like the Mac one.
00:27:15 ◼ ► Again, it's inexplicable why these things that are supposed to be tabs look exactly like the address bar, unless you know that, hey, they used to be up next to the address bar and they would transform into the address bar when you clicked on them.
00:27:24 ◼ ► But if you don't know that, this design doesn't make any sense. So there's iPad. It is now caught up to the previous mess from the last beta.
00:27:31 ◼ ► Gruber had some things to say about what they've done to iOS Safari. I still haven't installed iOS 15 on any of my devices, so I'm just looking at this from the screenshot, so I'm kind of glad.
00:27:43 ◼ ► There are nine tap targets in the new toolbar in Beta 4. That's nine tappable buttons or effective buttons on a single phone-width toolbar.
00:27:53 ◼ ► Apple's own example in the human interface guidelines of a toolbar that's too crowded has nine buttons.
00:27:59 ◼ ► Like literally there's a screenshot from the human interface guidelines that shows a toolbar in an iOS app and says, you know, provide ample touch targets for interactive elements.
00:28:06 ◼ ► Try to maintain a minimum tappable error of 44 by 44 points for all controls. And they show green check, yes, look, three buttons in the toolbar, plenty of room to tap them.
00:28:14 ◼ ► Red X, no, nine buttons in the toolbar. Apple literally has nine buttons. Now you'd be forgiven for thinking there aren't actually nine buttons, but Gruber provides a handy diagram with arrows showing.
00:28:24 ◼ ► If you tap over here, it's the previous tab. Then there's the back forward navigation. Then there's the address bar. Then there's a reload button.
00:28:30 ◼ ► Then there is another thing that you can tap for previous tab, I guess. Oh, no, wait, I forget what that other one is. I can't tell what that region does.
00:28:39 ◼ ► There's a share button. There's a tabs button. And then there's the next tab thing. This is all, everything I just described is from the left to the right edge of your phone.
00:28:47 ◼ ► So like it seems like they heard the complaint that it was too minimal and there weren't enough functionality and they just jammed everything they could into that.
00:28:53 ◼ ► It's still floating logins. It's still up above the top. You know, they haven't, you know, anyway, we'll see what they do next version just to let you know things continue to happen.
00:29:02 ◼ ► Yeah, I just, I, the iPhone version is still killing me. It's just this, this bar, this like floating capsule thing. Like we've seen a number of mockups now from designers who are more talented than I am to toolbar tall mockups.
00:29:19 ◼ ► So there's like, you know, like a two row toolbar on the bottom that slides up and then collapses into the, into like the collapse state like we have now.
00:29:25 ◼ ► And that is so much better than what they have now. Like I think that the main, the cardinal sin of the iOS version is this floating blob state because not only does it block a whole bunch of content and it wastes a ton of space that if it was a double high status bar, you would waste about the same or less space.
00:29:46 ◼ ► And still have more room for more controls and be more usable. But also the way that it messes with web content continues to be a big problem.
00:29:56 ◼ ► Web content assumes a rectangle viewport and they assume to be able to pin stuff to the edges of that viewport controls, content, things like that.
00:30:07 ◼ ► And so so many web pages are still broken by this. And so I feel like any design that relies on Apple overlaying critical browser controls over parts of the web page that like can't be moved out of the way, you know, easily or like, or that just try to automatically adjust the web content and have it flow around it.
00:30:27 ◼ ► And that of course keeps breaking and breaks a bunch of different things. Those attempts are going to fail. They're not going to be usable. They're going to break too many pages. And the web is not going to adopt to them uniformly and perfectly.
00:30:40 ◼ ► Safari as a web browser needs to accommodate the web as it is. And the web as it is really expects a rectangle viewport. And there's nothing they can do to fix every single web page in the world.
00:30:55 ◼ ► So give us back a rectangular viewport. It's hard enough having the bar shrink and hide in the previous in like I was 14 and before having the bar like shrink and show and have the content at the bottom occasionally collide with the tap target to expand the bar or whatever.
00:31:10 ◼ ► That's bad enough. This makes it even worse because it tries to then render the background content behind the bar. And so it's it's this whole thing that is never going to work.
00:31:19 ◼ ► In addition to I think looking hideous and being really cluttered and unreadable because like any part of the page that's covered up by this floating bar or its giant drop shadow. It might as well not be visible.
00:31:30 ◼ ► Like there's no there's no utility to showing me a significantly occluded part of the page. I don't need to see the left few words of the paragraph that's below that or like part of the sentence that's covered by a giant drop shadow.
00:31:44 ◼ ► But I can't see the sentence that goes between the top of the bar and the bottom so I can't actually read it. Like I'm getting no benefit by rendering more of the page behind these controls.
00:31:53 ◼ ► In the same way that we get no benefit by rendering additional background color or border color up in the notch area. Like there's no benefit to that.
00:32:03 ◼ ► We do that because the notch is a hardware thing that you know kind of has to be there for their current goals. And so I guess we'll work around it and try to put something up there so it doesn't look like an Android phone.
00:32:12 ◼ ► But the bottom is not like that. The bottom we can render however we like and web pages are significantly more frequently assuming the bottom is a straight line compared to the top.
00:32:24 ◼ ► So this behavior of this floating bar going above the content with this giant drop shadow is always going to cause problems and doesn't look very good and is a usability failure.
00:32:35 ◼ ► So I hope, you know it seems like Apple is just digging and digging and digging deeper with this design. Like it seems like they're committed.
00:32:44 ◼ ► Oh we're going to keep this. This isn't a bad design. We just need to add a few things here and there. Oh add one more thing here.
00:32:50 ◼ ► They're just jumping through hoops trying to make this design work. It's not going to work. The sooner they realize that the sooner they can make something better.
00:33:00 ◼ ► But until then they're just digging and digging and digging and they're just it seems like they got their heels in the dirt just saying no we're going to stick with this.
00:33:09 ◼ ► This is not a bad design. Damn it. This is going to work. We're going to make it work. And it's just not going to work.
00:33:14 ◼ ► Yeah I like that this is still back in time so who knows what they have actually changed. As we mentioned the very first time we talked about this the spec that allows web pages to accommodate for this isn't some Apple specific thing.
00:33:24 ◼ ► It's part of the CSS spec where you can find like the safe area insets essentially of a web page right. The trouble is that most websites don't implement this and certainly don't implement it towards the bottom because if they implement at the top it's because of previous iPhones which as Mark pointed out had the notch that is you know that essentially did force web pages to do something different to accommodate Apple's hardware in this case.
00:33:45 ◼ ► It's a little bit more excusable it's like well face ID is awesome and we all love it and if there's going to be a notch it's what they've chosen to do. Seems like they're making the same choice here but the difference is when you explain like oh here's a bunch of stuff you web page authors have to do to accommodate our new phone with face ID.
00:34:01 ◼ ► You can say you know Apple you could have not had the notch. We have this discussion on the show many times. You could have not had the notch and just made it straight across it would have made everyone's lives easier.
00:34:09 ◼ ► But I do see the benefit of face ID and in this case saying you know Apple you could have just had a regular toolbar on the bottom and web doers wouldn't have accommodate this but there's no but it's like but I see the benefit of a lozenge with the drop shadow.
00:34:22 ◼ ► No I see more problems with that I don't like the lozenge with the drop shadow there's there's no benefit like there's no benefit on the other side of this thing.
00:34:29 ◼ ► We know web page authors you're going to have to change your stuff but there's a benefit on the other side of it because if you just did something that simpler like a toolbar on the bottom web page developers wouldn't have to accommodate this and I mean I personally agree with Marco that I don't like how this looks and I don't see any benefit to for being a floating lozenge and it really does read like you know again what we're seeing is weeks back in time from Apple soon as well it's like now but really does read like someone really wants this floating lozenge and they're just going to do whatever it takes to somehow get this floating lozenge to ship and they just keep throwing more stuff at you.
00:34:58 ◼ ► And it's like hey think about not making a floating lozenge like we're all we all like the idea of things in the bottom we all like swiping to get other tabs like that's all good we like that that's the benefit we want the floating lozenge is nothing there's no part of this that requires a floating lozenge and the drop shadow right and that is the root of the problem and I feel like eventually hopefully this already happened at Apple someone say look let's list the benefits of the design and let's list the downsides and let's just say is there is there a way we can change design where we keep literally all the things that we want to change.
00:35:27 ◼ ► Keep literally all of the benefits and eliminate the things that are bad and also make it so web page authors don't have to do safe area into this.
00:35:36 ◼ ► Now you can be argued that like well this is a forcing function really every web browser should already do safe area insets for everything.
00:35:42 ◼ ► That's a nice view of the world but if you've been a web developer for a decade or two you can know that any argument that says what the web writ large quote unquote should do is probably not a winning argument and change happens slowly.
00:35:53 ◼ ► So I don't think Apple can force the entire world to use safe area insets in their CSS any more than they forced everybody to accommodate the notch.
00:36:00 ◼ ► You know Apple centric web developers accommodated the notch but most didn't if you go to websites and look at how they handle the notch so fingers crossed for the next beta which will you know which already got baked I guess two weeks ago or whatever.
00:36:15 ◼ ► Moving right along live text which is the thing where you can select text out of like an image or things that aren't that the computer doesn't know is text that is coming to Intel Max as of Mac OS Monterey beta 4 which is really exciting.
00:36:30 ◼ ► Friend of the show Jason Snell wrote live text uses the neural engine on Apple design processors to convert text and images into text you can select and copy.
00:36:37 ◼ ► But in the just released fourth beta of Mac OS Monterey live text has also been enabled on Intel Max which is very exciting I'm very happy about that because I at the rate we're going I'm not going to have an M1 Mac for quite a long time.
00:36:47 ◼ ► Yep Snell says that they're using GPU based processing because of course the Intel Max don't have a neural engine in them and we talked about this earlier the features that were not an Intel Max maybe because they weren't written for it you know if this feature was written for the neural engine and there isn't one oh well.
00:37:00 ◼ ► But if there's enough demand of course Apple can write a version that works without the neural engine and apparently they did because I think there was demand this is a great feature of all of Apple's upcoming operating systems and I'm glad to see on an Intel Max.
00:37:12 ◼ ► I tried it and it's got a little bit of the characteristics the case will probably describe later in the show of Apple features where like hey there's nothing to do it just works.
00:37:24 ◼ ► And so I was on my Intel Mac running Monterey beta 4 and I just said OK so so how do I I want to try this image text thing is to have to do something special or and so I just went to a web page and there was an image on it with text and like so do I don't I don't see it can I select the text like nothing was happening I'm like OK maybe I need to save the image and I opened it in preview.
00:37:47 ◼ ► I was like no still it's like I just get the regular cursor when I when I drag my cursor and click on the image like just drag the image and like it's not it's not selecting any text so I was like how is this feature supposed to and then all of a sudden my cursor turned into an IBM.
00:38:02 ◼ ► I was like oh there it goes like there's no indication that you need to do anything at any point but it does actually take a second I mean obviously I'm being an impatient person and I use the computer very quickly I know this.
00:38:15 ◼ ► It's probably like less than a second but like I'm just like let me try it no I can't select text.
00:38:21 ◼ ► I used to do this when I was my relatives would come over and they would watch me use the Mac and they could not keep track of what I was doing because you know on the old I've talked about this before on the old like 68 K Max drawing to the screen was so slow that if you use them a lot you can anticipate where like the OK button would eventually draw itself and click before the entire dialogue or even as even entirely drawn itself.
00:38:41 ◼ ► So it's very difficult to track what I was doing so I tend to move very quickly on the computer.
00:38:46 ◼ ► All this is to say is that I think it probably takes fractions of a second on any image anywhere in the OS for you to be able to select text but it's not actually immediate.
00:38:55 ◼ ► But what but it really does as far as I can tell work everywhere anywhere there's an image like I went back to the web page where I couldn't select text and then I could select it there too and it's like everywhere like you know in preview and web browsers in any graphics but it's just I don't know how it works.
00:39:13 ◼ ► I don't actually know but anyway it works and it works really well and it's super cool.
00:39:17 ◼ ► I kind of in some in some ways I don't prefer the text sniper technique but I think I will continue to have text sniper installed I think just because sometimes first of all I think text sniper sometimes does a little bit better job.
00:39:30 ◼ ► I gave us some challenging things by like googling parking signs you know with the blurry you know sign text telling you all the times you can and can't park text sniper sometimes does a little bit better and also sometimes I actually want to just sort of drag select a region and say do what you can to get this text out versus selecting the text or rather waiting around for the IBM cursor to appear.
00:39:53 ◼ ► And that of course is the weakness of all these type of Apple features which is like is it going to work eventually or is it not going to work eventually because I'm assuming there's some parts of the OS where it's not going to ever actually work and the only way you have to know that is wait a long enough period of time where you just assume OK but it hasn't happened by now it's not going to happen.
00:40:10 ◼ ► So that's a bit of a bummer but anyway it's cool and I'm glad it exists and I'm glad it exists on Intel Max.
00:40:20 ◼ ► I mentioned in the last show I was talking about the little dark marks that you get on the tiny little contacts on lighting tables sometimes and I said whether they're scorch marks or corrosion or whatever they are I think we're all familiar with them so someone named Mr.
00:40:31 ◼ ► Glass wrote in to say this I don't know I don't have a good way to gauge the reliability of information but I thought it was interesting and worth considering and presumably there is a way we could test it.
00:40:42 ◼ ► So here we go. The discoloration on lightning cables is actually metallic plating slash corrosion due to five volt power being continuously applied to the pin when the phone is not connected.
00:40:52 ◼ ► To avoid this happening you can unplug the cable from power whenever you're not charging your phone.
00:40:58 ◼ ► This problem has actually been silently fixed in current official Apple lightning cables as they do get revised.
00:41:04 ◼ ► The latest USB A cables will pulse a smaller voltage of about 1.5 volts at a very low duty cycle less than 1% with a piece of custom silicon specifically designed to address this issue.
00:41:14 ◼ ► So in theory if you buy a brand new USB A to lightning cable from Apple and you use it in some context next to an older one you should not see the corrosion on the newer one because it's not continuously applying voltage.
00:41:28 ◼ ► This is the first I heard of an actual concrete cause and effect explanation for this and with the added information that Apple has apparently known about this and fixed it.
00:41:38 ◼ ► If this is true I would love for Apple to say this somewhere even if it's buried in a tech note or something to let us know hey if you're sick of getting these little scorch marks maybe you should get a new...
00:41:48 ◼ ► Hey well will Apple sell more of its expensive accessories? Maybe you should get a new cable.
00:41:52 ◼ ► Having said that last show like I said I've had these scorch marks on cables for the entire time lightning has existed and they've never actually caused a problem.
00:42:01 ◼ ► The only problem they cause is mild anxiety and me worrying that they're going to cause a problem but for me personally they never have actually caused a problem.
00:42:08 ◼ ► So maybe Apple's silence on this issue is we have actually improved it but it's not important enough for us to tell you about so just keep buying Apple stuff and eventually you won't have scorch marks.
00:42:17 ◼ ► Hooray! And then I'll take another opportunity to pitch the thing that I discovered only what a couple of years ago.
00:42:24 ◼ ► The magic of electrical contact cleaner. I don't know what's in it but it is a purpose built product and on my old phone that I had taken to the beach many many times the shutter button was getting a little bit wonky and my speakers that I have connected to my PlayStation 5 and my old PlayStation 4 have a flaw in them where the little potentiometers get wonky.
00:42:46 ◼ ► And they start making staticky noises when you turn them. Electrical contact cleaner. It's probably some terrible toxic substance but it does what it says.
00:42:53 ◼ ► If you have something that makes electrical contact then you want to clean it put this stuff on it and it will clean it right up.
00:42:58 ◼ ► I haven't actually tried it on lightning cables because again I haven't actually had any problems with the scorch marks but I imagine it would work great.
00:43:03 ◼ ► Can you remind me the context of the MagSafe soap dish? I do not remember what we were talking about with this.
00:43:09 ◼ ► This is Marco trying to get his phone aligned on his bedside and sometimes having a little bit of trouble with his little suction cup MagSafe thinks he's got a line of two circles and I mentioned having a soap dish like thing and maybe there was third party ones like that.
00:43:31 ◼ ► He says I wanted to make something like this for a while but I never had a name for it. Can I call it soap dish and sell it on Etsy? Are you going to want royalties or what?
00:43:38 ◼ ► No royalties. Feel free to make this and sell it on Etsy. I think it might be a tough sell because it looks kind of nerdy.
00:43:44 ◼ ► And a lot of people actually wrote in when I was talking about that issue with aligning my phone and the MagSafe thing because as I mentioned my MagSafe is adhered to my nightstand with that micro suction tape.
00:43:56 ◼ ► So it's great in the sense that it doesn't move so you can pick the phone up with one hand which is why I did that because I really wanted that.
00:44:02 ◼ ► But a lot of people wrote in to say that if you just leave the MagSafe puck floating loose just resting on the stand and don't adhere it to the stand so that it can move, you can just kind of wave your phone over it by an inch or a half inch or whatever.
00:44:16 ◼ ► And the MagSafe puck will lift itself up off the table with magnetic force and perfectly align to the back of the phone. So that's another option.
00:44:27 ◼ ► This is why you're not getting my playdate. This is why. This moment right here. This is why.
00:44:31 ◼ ► This is the thing. Even if you have a case you'll see the little circle from people who use MagSafe all the time.
00:44:39 ◼ ► Glass is probably more resistant than cases but in both cases just like dirt can build.
00:44:43 ◼ ► Yeah I was going to say I do see a couple of minor scratches on my back glass but none of them are in the MagSafe area. They're all around the edges and stuff. There's nothing in the MagSafe area.
00:44:56 ◼ ► Alright and then finally from a couple episodes ago this has been floating around in follow up. We were talking about I think Marco had said you wanted to potentially try to do like an elective AppleCare+ repair and then people had said no you can't do that.
00:45:08 ◼ ► Well a self-professed genius wrote in to tell me scratches were added as a part of our troubleshooting classification. Yes scratches are part of our updated VMI. I don't know what that means.
00:45:19 ◼ ► It wasn't advertised to us that it was a new option. So if you go to a store and they say no just ask them to type in scratches and it'll pop up. This genius says I only discovered it by chance a few months ago. It really was a quiet update.
00:45:32 ◼ ► We used to have a lot of upset customers that wanted to get stuff fixed for cosmetic damage and would call AppleCare once we denied a repair. AppleCare would turn around and give them a customer satisfaction code, a CS code, and get the repair done for free for their quote unquote bad store experience. I'm sure Apple got tired of that.
00:45:47 ◼ ► So in other words mom says no go ask dad. Yeah basically yeah that's pretty true. I'm sure you'll sound great talking to the person the Apple store and saying just type scratches. They'll hate you so much. They will. They absolutely will.
00:46:00 ◼ ► People love when you tell them how to do their job. Right. Type this into your computer especially because you'll hear this on a podcast and then do this in real life for years now when everything has changed.
00:46:11 ◼ ► That's very true. You can ask nicely and say you can say I heard on Accidental Tech podcast a great show that everyone should listen to and you should preload on all your iPhones that there's a possibility that you might be able to get scratches repaired.
00:46:23 ◼ ► We say it in a nice way maybe it'll work. And also if you include an ad for the show that might also work. Yeah something like that.
00:46:29 ◼ ► Then I have a request for solution please. So we're going to talk in just a moment about me and iCloud photos but simultaneously with me switching to iCloud photos. Guess who's Google storage is exploding at the seams. This guy.
00:46:44 ◼ ► So I thought to myself well screw it I'll just. Why is your Google storage exploding? Because I only have a terabyte I'm using it all in Google Photos.
00:46:52 ◼ ► Wait Google? But that's not related to your iCloud photo stuff right? Well no so all right let me back up and try this again.
00:47:01 ◼ ► I missed something. How did Google get involved in your iCloud storage library? OK. No no no. So I have moved all of my stuff to iCloud photos.
00:47:09 ◼ ► Thus Google Photos is redundant. And it's not I know John it's not literally redundant but I would prefer to only pay for one of these things. And since I'm not uploading most of my photos to Google anymore because their desktop uploader just has absolutely stank since like three years ago.
00:47:26 ◼ ► It seemed as good a time as any to get rid of Google Photos. Right. Are we with me so far. All right. Sure. Yeah. OK.
00:47:33 ◼ ► So simultaneously with this there's an urgency behind it because I have a terabyte of storage and with Google Drive or what have you I don't even know the vernacular and I am basically out of storage which is fine in and of itself except that also affects my email which is on a legacy Google apps for your domain thing.
00:47:50 ◼ ► So because I don't have any storage I am probably days away from never receiving email which is probably.
00:47:56 ◼ ► You would have been days away from never receiving email even if you didn't do the iCloud photo storage. You were just getting close to the edge of Google and just happened to be simultaneous.
00:48:04 ◼ ► Correct. Correct. So my request for solution my RFS which is something that does not exist but I'm trying to make a thing. By the way it's super fetch.
00:48:12 ◼ ► So my request for solution is how in the name of Zeus's hindquarters do I clear out my Google storage because I have literally gone into Google apps like the admin interface and I've told it nobody on my domain can use Google Photos because I'm the only person my domain.
00:48:29 ◼ ► So I turn that off and then all this stuff seems to be still lingering in Google Drive and I've deleted everything from Google Drive and even a couple of days later it appears that it is all still lingering still taking up all of my space and I don't know how to get rid of it and it is so inscrutable to me what I'm supposed to do.
00:48:47 ◼ ► I don't know what I'm supposed to do so please help me. Do you still see it in your Google Drive like when you go to like I did not anymore.
00:48:54 ◼ ► So when I did this I think I talked about it in the show when I did this I had to delete a bunch of stuff because I was messing with my Google storage like this was back in a time and I'm not sure if this is still true when like I was using the terrible Google backup thing and it would put things into basically a folder in Google Drive.
00:49:10 ◼ ► It was a huge folder that had all the photos in it and I like deleted that folder in Google Drive but then it went to the Google Drive trash essentially.
00:49:21 ◼ ► I've tried emptying the trash. Right and do you remember you probably don't you never remember these shows but anyway it was a long time ago remember I couldn't empty the trash like I had thousands and thousands of photos in the trash and I would try to empty trash and it would just give an error and so if I selected like a hundred photos from the trash and I hit empty those hundred it would delete permanently delete those hundred but there was thousands of photos so I was faced with like do I sit here and select in batches of 50 or 100 and delete and I contacted Google about it and I was like I'm not sure what I'm supposed to do.
00:49:45 ◼ ► I was faced with like do I sit here and select in batches of 50 or 100 and delete and I contacted Google about it and they said oh yeah sometimes when you got a lot of stuff in the trash it takes a long time for them to get cleared out but don't worry about the error you're getting because when I hit the like just empty everything from the trash button it says don't worry even though it gives you an error we will eventually delete all the stuff from the trash and sure enough it was like a week later and eventually it disappeared from the trash and I got my space back.
00:50:08 ◼ ► That said I know Google has changed how they deal with photos and storage recently so all this could be completely outdated information but I would actually suggest trying to contact like Google support and tell them your situation and you may get a crappy answer like I did which is like oh yeah that's a bummer but maybe it will eventually work check back in a week but at least that's better than you know not having any option or at least you get some kind of explanation.
00:50:32 ◼ ► And the other caveat as you well know Casey is that what I heard from everybody who pays for the Google my domain whatever the hell it is is that it's worse than the free stuff like we're supported as more bugs.
00:50:48 ◼ ► No no no I'm sorry I'm paying for extra Google Drive storage on top of a free Google apps from my domain that was you know grandfathered from 84 years ago.
00:50:56 ◼ ► Well I didn't know there was still free but anyway I still hear that the Google for my domain is much worse than the you know if you're just a plain old public version just because that's the one that gets all the bug fixes and everything and you people get nothing.
00:51:10 ◼ ► All right so yeah please tweet me or if you have to write an email and explain to me what to do because I can't figure it out.
00:51:15 ◼ ► Or just someone going someone who works for Google just go in and empty Casey's trash right now.
00:51:20 ◼ ► I mean an alternative solution well there are some aspects on this one but you could just post three videos to YouTube with copyrighted music in them.
00:51:32 ◼ ► Speaking of the Google backup thing by the way I realized I hadn't I don't know how long ago I did this probably months but I realized I had disabled the Google photo uploader because it just kept grinding and grinding and never actually making any progress.
00:51:44 ◼ ► And I didn't notice remember that I disabled I said huh the updaters not running I should launch it.
00:51:50 ◼ ► Then I launched it and watched it grind the computer for like 17 hours without doing anything and I said oh this is why I disabled it.
00:51:56 ◼ ► So I'm kind of stuck with Google photos uploading in that I don't think I can upload my photos to Google anymore because these software that they give me to do that never like gets to the point where it updates anything because it just says oh you want me to upload my photos.
00:52:13 ◼ ► Because it just says oh you want me to upload your photo library well I'm going to look through it and I'm like yep I've got this file yep I've got this one and like it never actually gets to the point where it decides to upload new stuff and at this point it's months behind.
00:52:23 ◼ ► And I let it run for like a week straight and all it did was cause the fans on my computer to or on my wife's computer which is even worse to run constantly and just thousands of Python processes to be running and it never actually got to the point where it was doing useful work.
00:52:38 ◼ ► I may be in the same situation as you soon Casey by the side well if you can't upload anymore maybe I should delete what I have or knowing me I'll probably just leave the you know whatever half a terabyte that I have there and just say well at least this is a you know septuple backup of my library as of six months ago.
00:52:54 ◼ ► Yep I hear you and you know all things being equal I would have just left it but because I'm now exploding through storage and I don't and I'd like to I'd like to just get rid of that monthly you know fee because I don't have that much email I don't think.
00:53:08 ◼ ► So I'd rather not pay for extra storage and that means I need to get rid of all this but I just can't figure out how so if you have an answer or if you work at Google please feel free just just clear that out for me.
00:53:19 ◼ ► And actually speaking of that a quick very very brief topic that we don't have the show notes which is John's favorite moment in the show.
00:53:27 ◼ ► I have been playing with Apple Music recently because I think I had mentioned on the show last week or two that I'm now a paying Apple One customer.
00:53:35 ◼ ► And so I've been trying out all these services that I hadn't tried before including Apple Arcade and I'd been using Fitness Plus and now I've been trying to use Apple Music for the first time since it debuted you know two years ago whatever it was.
00:53:48 ◼ ► It kind of sucks. I don't know like I really really don't want to this is what cute me off on this topic I don't want to continue to pay for Spotify since I'm going to be de facto playing paying for Apple Music but it like sucks.
00:54:04 ◼ ► I'm going to have to listen to Overcast I mean I have no choice but no yeah I would never listen to Spotify I mean come on but here's the thing I go to play a song on Apple Music and like one time out of three I get some message about how I don't have rights to it.
00:54:21 ◼ ► What? Like this is Apple Music I pay for it I have an account what? Two times out of three it takes like an obscenely long time for playback to start like stunningly long with Spotify it's almost instant and with Apple Music it's like one to two seconds I'm not playing over airplay or anything like that like just on my phone to play a song.
00:54:41 ◼ ► It takes there's a noticeable latency like in Spotify it's freaking instant. I mean the thing I was expecting to hate about Apple Music is not having my Discover Weekly well actually Discover Weekly that playlist has been utterly ruined because it's nothing but like kids music now.
00:55:00 ◼ ► But in the before times both in a figurative and literal sense before you know my kids started requesting you know Disney Music all the time that was a really good playlist that would just say hey based on what you've already listened to here's other things you would like and and perhaps I'm wrong and I would love to be wrong but as far as I know there's no like direct equivalent to that in Apple Music or even that much of a spiritual equivalent.
00:55:19 ◼ ► And then release radar which thankfully has not yet been ruined by my children that's you know new stuff that that is based on the things you've already played so it's the Discover Weekly could be older than dirt but release radar is all new things.
00:55:33 ◼ ► And I don't think there's any equivalence to that in Apple Music if there are please send me a tweet genuinely I would love to see it but I figured I would miss that from Spotify.
00:55:43 ◼ ► But what I miss is an app that frickin works and is understandable like I don't know I guess it's just because I have so much momentum with Spotify, but I feel like the music app is okay like it's pretty, but functionally it's okay sometimes it's got like this full screen like playback queue which I almost never want to see, and it takes me a second to realize I gotta swipe that down to go back to like the regular interface that I was expecting to look at.
00:56:08 ◼ ► And the latency and you know you don't have rights thing is really driving me bananas like I don't I don't dig it. And so here it is like we're talking about $10 a month for Spotify which is in and of itself not that much money but you know it over time it starts to add up and I would like to get rid of it if I can but golly Apple Music is the service may be okay but the interface man the app is just not great.
00:56:34 ◼ ► You guys don't really use Apple Music do you? Well I do. Okay so tell me I'm wrong. So the way I use it though is like an old man. That's what I thought I was doing though.
00:56:48 ◼ ► So for some context here I while I have Spotify I hardly ever use it. I have it basically you know for you know research purposes and occasionally like I'll be referring to a song maybe on top four or something and I want to get like Spotify links so I'll open it up there and copy the link and make a playlist or whatever so I use Spotify but only rarely.
00:57:08 ◼ ► It's not my regular listening. Apple Music first of all some of the problems that you're seeing with like just weird load times and stuff I see those not all the time but regularly and it seems like it almost feels like Apple Music is hosted by Siri like whatever is hosting Siri.
00:57:30 ◼ ► That's true. In the sense that when people will hear this you're going to hear two completely different sets of responses. You're going to hear a lot of people saying what are you talking about? It's fast and works every time for me.
00:57:45 ◼ ► And you're also going to hear a lot of people who say the same thing I'm saying which is like yeah it breaks me in all those same ways all the time too. It seems like there might be regional differences maybe based on certain CDN nodes or like different data centers that you're hitting or just different internet weather affecting different people at different times.
00:58:01 ◼ ► But the same inconsistent performance problems that I see with Siri I also see with Apple Music and with Apple TV hosted stuff. So it does seem like there's some kind of and this is not recent this has been for years. This is like for the last decade and in two different houses on two different internet connections.
00:58:20 ◼ ► So I know that it's not like my router or something like it's not something weird like that. It's whatever infrastructure is running a lot of these services has some consistency problems just in certain areas or at certain times and it just doesn't work the same way for everybody.
00:58:35 ◼ ► And so maybe the people at Apple actually think like maybe it works great at ADQ's house. Maybe they don't see these problems but certainly many of us do. So that's part of it that you just have bad luck with whatever servers are serving this to you whatever infrastructure and you're just out of luck on that and that sucks.
00:58:54 ◼ ► Well yeah and I'm on a symmetric gigabit connection as are you I thought or certainly fast enough. So I mean if anyone is supposed to be having these problems theoretically it's not the two of us right because we have super fast connections to the internet.
00:59:07 ◼ ► Yeah that's right it doesn't feel like our local setup it feels like a like a regional CDN node or something like that being wonky here and there. Now as for the actual apps Spotify feels confusing and weird to me because I'm not I'm not accustomed to it because I hardly ever use it.
00:59:22 ◼ ► But that being said when I use it there's a lot of stuff about that I notice instantly. Number one I notice how incredibly fast everything loads.
00:59:32 ◼ ► It's like instant like it still feels like a garbage web app and so does you know Apple Music app is also a garbage web app it's just it's just in a differently built but it's still a garbage web app but you know in typical Apple web services style the the Apple version of the garbage web app is really inconsistent and relatively slow.
00:59:53 ◼ ► Whereas the Spotify garbage web app is fast and relatively consistent so I do find it is it is refreshing whenever I use Spotify's app that I just see how fast it is to just navigate around to search for stuff to find stuff.
01:00:08 ◼ ► It is full of garbage as well I mean there's there's they have their own problems but the speed and the responsiveness of everything is just so much better night and day difference.
01:00:18 ◼ ► See also I mean look this is exactly the same difference between Siri and Alexa for me it's exactly the same thing.
01:00:24 ◼ ► As much as I don't like the Alexa ecosystem and I'm almost totally out of it now when I do occasionally use it it's just remarkable how fast it is.
01:00:32 ◼ ► I just wish I could get that kind of speed from Siri and I just never do but my my main complaint here with these services is that music listening used to be a much more diverse ecosystem.
01:00:47 ◼ ► It used to be first it was like a hardware and physical media based ecosystem where everybody had different record players and tape players and CD players and you and there are all sorts of ways to do that.
01:00:59 ◼ ► So then in the computer age you could rip everything to mp3s or you could buy mp3s legally or get them off of Napster or whatever so everyone had these common files most of which were DRM free and so you could open them up and whatever music app you wanted and play them however you wanted.
01:01:13 ◼ ► We ship whatever interface you wanted and there was this wonderful dynamic ecosystem of everything.
01:01:18 ◼ ► Now in the era of streaming you have this very small number basically two services that that have enough scale to matter and to last and so everything is being defined by the really crappy apps from these two services.
01:01:35 ◼ ► And the way everyone experiences music or practically everyone experiences music these days is through one of two crappy sets of apps and that to me is kind of a weird and sad and dangerous place to be.
01:01:51 ◼ ► I wish there was more diversity in these client apps now that being said both of these services offer apis to various degrees.
01:01:58 ◼ ► I could write an app for iOS that plays from Apple Music and there are people who do that there are lots of apps out there I've never found anything particularly compelling but they're out there.
01:02:08 ◼ ► So maybe that's an area where this can be improved over time but I don't know it doesn't seem like there's much of a market for it.
01:02:15 ◼ ► It seems like most of the market just tolerates either Apple Music or Spotify or occasionally both which I'll get to in a moment. The result is that the apps we use to listen to music have gone from all the different hardware in the world down to all the different software in the world now down to two crappy apps.
01:02:34 ◼ ► And I don't like where that has left us and I hope that doesn't have horrible effects over time.
01:02:40 ◼ ► So going back to your services question of do you keep subscribing to both now yes in the grand scheme of things we're very fortunate you know you can lose a 10 bucks a month and I wouldn't be the worst thing in the world but I do get how on principle you don't want to be having redundant services that seem wasteful.
01:02:56 ◼ ► The way I look at this first of all you're not paying for Apple Music you're paying for Apple One for other reasons so Apple Music is something that you're getting you know quote for free or at least you know for no additional charge it's already part of something you're paying for that doesn't mean that you now have no reason to ever have another music service.
01:03:12 ◼ ► I pay for Amazon Prime because of the shipping. I also pay for Netflix because I don't care about Prime Video very much there's much more stuff I want to watch on other services and I know it's not a perfect analogy because there's catalog differences there whereas between the streaming services there really aren't meaningful catalog differences.
01:03:32 ◼ ► So you know you could say Spotify is giving you quote the same thing as Apple Music and then be largely correct but although for Prime Video I just noticed this last night there are sometimes pricing differences surprising price we wanted to watch a movie I went to just watch to find out where it is I subscribed to all the services and it was available for rent and purchase in many many different places.
01:03:52 ◼ ► And the rental price for Apple was $3.99 for the movie the purchase price on Amazon was $4.50. Ooh Apple's purchase price was $14. So you know it's I don't think it applies to Casey but if you pay for a service in the case of Apple Music if you pay for a service and you have it and you never use it fine you don't need like I agree with Marco like use the one that you like and pay for the one that you like and don't worry about the one but just knowing that you have it is occasionally handy because I would never change it.
01:04:21 ◼ ► It is occasionally handy because I would never choose to watch a movie on Amazon but when I'm in that situation where it's like oh we want to watch a movie tonight but it's probably not a movie we actually want to own should I just rent it should I buy it at $4.50 versus $4 for renting yeah I'll buy it so we did so yeah don't don't forget that you actually do quote unquote pay for Apple Music because like say you're looking for a song like Marco was saying with catalog difference say you're looking for a song and you don't find that on Spotify remember that you have Apple Music and say hey maybe it's there and check it out.
01:04:49 ◼ ► Yeah so I think psychologically you can think of it as like you know you're paying for you know one service by itself with that Spotify Apple Music you're kind of paying for it but you know very indirectly and kind of not really and so it's not super redundant but you could also say you know what you're paying for Spotify because that's what you like you bought Apple One for other reasons so you don't even have to make this decision like Apple One is worth it to you even without Apple Music.
01:05:17 ◼ ► So you don't have to rationalize it this way now I also consider the purchase of Apple Music through whatever means whether it's through Apple One or by itself I consider it kind of I know I know this is going to sound bad I don't mean it quite this battle it's not that far off it's kind of like paying the mob to stop harassing you.
01:05:35 ◼ ► Wait no that's why I got on that cloud photo library so you jackass this would leave me alone.
01:05:49 ◼ ► So I think that's the reason why Apple is degrading the user experience for people who don't buy all their services for people who don't use Apple Music using Apple's devices is increasingly sucking and that's only going to keep being the case Apple's only going to keep tightening those screws to further and further drive services revenue.
01:06:07 ◼ ► They will happily throw every bit of integrity of the user experience out the window to increase services revenue they already are doing that and they will continue to do that to an ever increasing degree over time so it's becoming kind of hard and annoying to use Apple's built in music app especially without being an Apple Music subscriber they're going to keep harassing you they're going to keep putting up full screen interstitial ads it's they're going to just keep being jerks about it.
01:06:33 ◼ ► And as much as it sucks to just pay them off and to have that be the solution that is a solution so you can largely look at like Apple Music membership is something that as a user of Apple devices who if you want to use their music app at all for anything or use Siri to play music or anything.
01:06:51 ◼ ► Your life is going to be made easier if you're an Apple Music subscriber. This is not a good reason why you should be an Apple Music subscriber but it is a reason and it is a real effect that you can you can consider like okay I'm going to pay their extortion money so they stop bothering me so much.
01:07:05 ◼ ► Again, this is I don't love how this makes me feel to say this, but that is a value that they're giving you so you can you can justify having Apple Music, even if you're not actually using it to listen to music most of the time, there is still value it is providing to you in that terrible way but that is legitimately away.
01:07:24 ◼ ► Yeah, I think you're right and what I plan to do is continue to mess with it and try it because it may be that it's as simple as me having you know, gosh, it must be like 10 years of momentum with Spotify and basically once I really embraced Spotify which was very early on when it was available here in the States, which was several years after it was available elsewhere.
01:07:42 ◼ ► Once I really embraced Spotify, I rarely used at the time iTunes and then eventually Apple Music anywhere like I was all Spotify all the time occasionally I would bust out you know Apple Music or iTunes at the time if I wanted to listen to like some Dave Matthews recording I had or some other esoteric recording I had that wasn't on any of these services, but I've basically been all in on Spotify for easily a decade plus I would imagine at this point and so I do have a lot of momentum and maybe maybe I just need to give it a more time to sink in but
01:08:11 ◼ ► I don't think that any amount of time with me using it is going to change the fact that I find it slow it's not going to change the fact that search kind of sucks there's you know who's surprised that an Apple's product doesn't have great search no way and we're going to talk about that more in just a minute with Apple photos.
01:08:25 ◼ ► But search sucks. I apparently there may be some sort of automated automated playlist. I'm getting tips from the chat from Eric WVGG has pointed out that there's a playlist. It already flew off the screen but there's some sort of playlist that a new music mix there we go that seems like it might be similar to one of my Spotify playlists although that being said I have hand curated a handful Spotify playlists, and I'm sure that they're like third party services that will let me integrate those into Apple Music and if there's a good one, please let me know.
01:08:54 ◼ ► on Twitter, but why doesn't Apple Music do that? Like let me give Apple my Spotify credentials, which is the sort of thing I would never normally do for any service ever but I trust Apple in this regard. Give let me give them my Spotify credentials let them just suck in all my playlists like why is that not a thing? So I don't know Apple Music so far.
01:09:12 ◼ ► I might end up just sticking with Spotify and double dipping so to speak in terms of payment. You know, I might pay Spotify and and implicitly pay for Apple Music, but I think you're right that I should probably give it a fair shake and then if just stick with what I like more.
01:09:26 ◼ ► No, that's I mean, don't even give it a fair shake. Just stick with what you like and don't worry about it. Because honestly, like, you know, I consider Spotify like, when I when I look at like alternatives, you know, I'm pretty heavily in most parts of the Apple ecosystem and Spotify is one of the only areas where I kind of feel like maybe I made the wrong choice.
01:09:46 ◼ ► Unfortunately, because of various, you know, details of my music listening and and equipment setup and everything. I'm pretty much bound to Apple Music like, you know, our our smart speakers around the house are all home pods now except for one.
01:09:59 ◼ ► And so, and, again, this is all very like, you know, Apple anti competitive stuff, but Spotify still sucks trying to use it from a home pod. So, you know, we're going to use app music for that. Also, just in a legitimate feature difference that is not based on anti antitrust stuff, or Apple's bad things. It's actually a very good thing.
01:10:19 ◼ ► As I mentioned before, Apple treats my own files that I upload and manage way better than anybody else's. I know Spotify has a feature where you can do that. But from all accounts, it sucks. I tried it a while ago, it sucked then having my own files, like the aforementioned 41 fish concerts per year.
01:10:35 ◼ ► That's a huge part of what I listened to. And that stuff is not available in streaming catalogs, at least most of it isn't. So I need a way to listen to that, like for my preferences. And there's just not a good way to do that with anything but Apple Music and but by using iTunes match with Apple Music, I can I have that available on all my devices, like last night's fish show, I imported it this morning on my onto my computer.
01:10:58 ◼ ► And it's already on my phone. Like I haven't checked it, but I know it's there. As I walk in the dog, I know I can play that show. It's gonna be right there in my like recently added list and Apple Music, because it just it'll sync over. And I bought these files on my own, downloaded them, imported them into what used to be called iTunes and have music and it just worked.
01:11:16 ◼ ► That's great. And that's not an experience that anybody else offers, at least not in a good way, or even a remotely usable way. So I'm kind of stuck in Apple's ecosystem. But I kind of am jealous of Spotify people like most most alternatives. I really, you know, I use Windows here and there for gaming stuff.
01:11:37 ◼ ► It's, I'm not tempted at all by Windows. I really never use Android. And I'm not tempted at all by that, like most alternatives to Apple stuff. I'm not tempted at all by I'm not jealous at all of and I and I couldn't be less interested in Spotify is one exception where I am envious of how much people love Spotify, how good it is certain things, and how it's not part of my life.
01:12:00 ◼ ► And I don't know anything about it. I'm not used to it. And I'm not built into it and everything. But for me to get into Spotify would require not only for me to just not listen to all of my fish shows there. So I'd have to maintain still two different apps and everything. But also I have to figure out the smart speaker situation in my house. And also, I would have to get used to their app on the desktop, because I do a lot of my music listening on the desktop. And I think their Mac app is just utter garbage, better than Apple Music in the US.
01:12:29 ◼ ► I think they're just like streaming part, but in just the library playback part, I think it's pretty garbage. But I don't know.
01:12:36 ◼ ► Yeah, see, that's the thing. I can't speak for library playback. And I was gonna say, you know, before you get well, actually, you know, last I looked, I haven't looked in a while, you can at least on the desktop, you can have the Spotify client, you know, suck in all of your local media. I think you're correct. Either if there is an option to do it such that you could listen on your phone as well to like your fish concerts, for example.
01:12:58 ◼ ► I don't expect it would work very well at all. I've not tried it, but I would expect it would be garbage. But you know, their desktop app, it's like Slack, which is not a compliment. Like it does work. It works. It's fine. I wouldn't say it's good. I personally wouldn't say it's straight garbage. It's fine.
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01:15:23 ◼ ► Anyway, we should move along. Let's talk about iCloud Photos. So if you recall, I think last we left our hero, I was still uploading everything on my iMac. And that took, I don't remember how long, but I want to say it was about a week to upload about a terabyte worth of stuff.
01:15:42 ◼ ► And there was a nice little progress bar right on the bottom that showed me, you know, approximately where it was and how it was going, which was great. On my laptop, it just said updating. So I get, you want a progress bar? Too bad. Want to know if it's actually working or not? Tough noogies. Just updating. Just come back.
01:15:59 ◼ ► I mean, that is more than you usually get from Apple sync services. That is true. That is true. Now, in the defense of Apple, I did have my laptop with me at the beach and the connection there was not stupendous. And that was only part of the time that it was updated, that the laptop was updating.
01:16:14 ◼ ► But certainly some portion, last like two or three days, I think, that it was downloading or doing whatever magic it was doing in the background. That was part of that time while I was at the beach. But nevertheless, any sort of indication that it was going to take more than a day would have been nice.
01:16:30 ◼ ► Like I, as a nerd, I can expect that, oh yeah, it's got a terabyte of data to churn through or download or God knows what. Of course, it's going to take a while. But I honestly expected it would be a day or two, particularly when I'm at home on this symmetric gigabit connection.
01:16:44 ◼ ► And in fact, I had left the laptop wired via Ethernet for a lot of that time just to try to speed things up. But I had no indication whatsoever. And it didn't say it should this take a week, a month, a year? It just said updating. That's super annoying. Super, super crummy first run experience.
01:16:59 ◼ ► Yes, I understand that most of you came to this with like four photos and then built them up over time. But some of us come with 70,000 photos. OK? And I don't think that's that out of the ordinary.
01:17:10 ◼ ► So I really think that Apple should look at their user experience and provide some sort of idea as to whether or not this is working. Thank God for iStab Menus, right Marco? So I could see what kind of bandwidth is being used by Photos app. Just saying.
01:17:23 ◼ ► Moving right along. Having your photos everywhere and basically available instantly. I mean, maybe not instantly, but pretty quick. You know, in the same way that I was lamenting that Apple Music is very, very slow.
01:17:36 ◼ ► I haven't, for the most part, had that experience with iCloud Photos. And having your photos basically everywhere, basically instantly. Hey, turns out that's pretty cool. Who knew? That's actually real nice.
01:17:46 ◼ ► I'm glad you're enjoying it. So in that sense, that's really good. It isn't always as reliable. Reliable is too strong a word. Not the word I'm looking for. There are times that I'll take a picture on my phone and then like immediately look over at my iPad and it's not there yet, which is a little bit frustrating.
01:18:02 ◼ ► But I think that part of that is me having unfair expectations. And if I wait like a minute or two, typically it does show up. But still, even that said, as you know, I'm doing all of these things, including in a couple of cases where I would like shrink down a video or, you know, and cut off, you know, the beginning or the end or what have you.
01:18:20 ◼ ► Having all of that available, including your edits, pretty much everywhere, turns out it's pretty nice. So I wish you guys had said something. I really would have jumped on this panel.
01:18:32 ◼ ► I mean, I've used PhotoStream, you know, the thing where the most recent thousand pictures or whatever is duplicated across all your devices, but I hadn't been using, you know, a proper, you know, iCloud photo library. All right. So here's the thing. Here's where everything takes a turn. And it's actually a turn for the better, which I did not expect to say.
01:18:51 ◼ ► I started glancing at their different, I don't know what the term is for them, but they're, you know, like auto-generated albums, right? So, you know, here's Day at the Beach or what have you, things like that, right?
01:19:02 ◼ ► And one of the first ones I noticed was Mom's 62nd birthday. I thought, wow, that's really cool. Because sure enough, we had seen my mom on what I believe was the day of her 62nd birthday.
01:19:14 ◼ ► And, you know, there's pictures of my mom, which I think I had identified as, you know, my mom's name. And so it, and I think in my contact card for my mom, it says, you know, this is my mother, et cetera, et cetera. So like, I can understand how this happened.
01:19:26 ◼ ► Well, but hold on, hold on. We're getting there. So it's, you know, in my contact card, because I'm me, you know, I have my mom's exact birthday, they could cross reference the day these photos were taken with the date and look at the contact card because it's, you know, it's my mom and, and I could see how they could put together.
01:19:46 ◼ ► Well, this is indeed, you know, her 62nd birthday. Very cool stuff. I'm not trying to like say that this is not extremely cool and very well executed, but I can trace as someone who kind of wonders if he's an idiot developer, I can trace how you could make this happen, right?
01:20:02 ◼ ► So far, so good. A couple of days later, Go Team! University of Virginia. Whoa. This was an automated album of us at a University of Virginia football game.
01:20:14 ◼ ► Now, the only way I can imagine they were able to put this together was by like OCRing some of the text, like recognizing that we were in a football stadium and OCRing some of the text in that stadium and somehow or another being able to decide with reasonable confidence that we were at a UVA game.
01:20:32 ◼ ► Oh, no, you're right. I'm sorry. I did not consider that. You're right. GeoT- see, this is why you geotag things, Jon. You're exactly right. The geotag, the geotag was in there.
01:20:41 ◼ ► But still, even, so this is slightly less impressive now that I thought about that, but I still think it's cool. I still think it's cool that it put together, this is a football game, you know, we're at a football stadium, etc.
01:20:51 ◼ ► The two that really, really blew my mind, and I don't think this is geotags, but maybe it is, or maybe I'm just not thinking outside the box enough. There was one, I should have shared this with you, Marco. Dave Matthews Band, 15 December 2018. How? How do they know that?
01:21:12 ◼ ► Like, yes, it's geotagged. I think that was the John Paul Jones Arena at UVA. It was geotagged, but how did they know? Maybe, I didn't look close enough, so maybe there was a video that had a little bit of audio that maybe they ran through Shazam.
01:21:27 ◼ ► But not only that, not only that, the backing music was not one of my favorite, but a Dave Matthews song. It was the space between. Now, granted, if you've ascertained that it's a Dave Matthews concert, like, yeah, of course they would go to Apple Music and put in a Dave Matthews song.
01:21:40 ◼ ► But, like, that kind of integration is super cool. I still, for the life of me, don't know how they concluded that it was a Dave Matthews concert. Maybe there's something obvious that I'm not realizing, like geotags, for example, but for the life of me, I don't know how they picked that out. And I think that is crazy super cool.
01:21:59 ◼ ► So, then it gets even better. There was a different concert. I went to what was, up until they broke up, my favorite band, Mute Math. There was a concert we went to wherein we had, like, paid for early access and we got to watch, like, the soundcheck and so on and so forth.
01:22:13 ◼ ► I don't have any idea how they figured out that it was a Mute Math concert. Like, none. Zero zilch. How the f*** is that possible? How is that possible?
01:22:25 ◼ ► Like, this blows my mind. I want someone to explain to me how this works. And the nice thing about it being Apple is that I, with, it has never occurred to me that they've done something nefarious with my data or anything like that.
01:22:39 ◼ ► There's no doubt in my mind that they are somehow, some way, deducing via what they're seeing in these photos and geotags and metadata and so on, figuring out what these concerts are.
01:22:51 ◼ ► The best answer I can come up with, and again, maybe this is the case, I didn't look to see if there were videos there. Maybe they recorded, I recorded a song, which at a concert, if anyone has been to a concert recently, you know, when you record even with an iPhone, even with a brand new iPhone, the audio fidelity is straight garbage. It's terrible.
01:23:08 ◼ ► So, to be able to take a live performance of a song and run it through Shazam, which is usually not good at altered versions of songs it does know, maybe that's how they did it? I don't know. But this is blowing my mind and I find this extremely freaking cool.
01:23:23 ◼ ► I was just looking through the memories. I usually don't look too much into them, but every once in a while I'll see them in a widget or something. I just put in our Slack, one of the ones that often comes up for me, or variations on this. Because if you have Apple Hosts for a long time, you start to see themes or trends. You see it in the Slack channel.
01:23:40 ◼ ► Four Legged Friends and it's pictures of my dog. It's like, yeah, you're right, Apple. I do take a lot of pictures of my dog. So if you're going to do that, I mean, it's mostly for one legged friend. But I get this stuff like this a lot too. Check out the next one.
01:23:53 ◼ ► Oh, that's magnificent. Okay, so let me paint a word picture for you. So this is memories and there's a lovely rectangular photo of _DavidSmith and then the text written on this memory. So the title of this memory is in all caps, _subtitle over the years.
01:24:13 ◼ ► I guess it's because I have _ written in his nickname and his contact card and I do have pictures of him over the years. And the thing is, I don't think I have more pictures of _ than other people. Certainly I don't have more pictures of him than people in my family. But this is what it chooses to make me.
01:24:38 ◼ ► A lot of people find those things impressive. And it's nice when like, just to see a little thing. It's kind of like the photo widget. Like it's very similar to the photo widget. The photo widget, the reason a lot of people like the photo widget is it will pull photos out based on whatever, you know, sort of simple machine learning algorithm that says there's a bunch of people who you have lots of pictures of who are facing the camera and smiling. Right.
01:24:59 ◼ ► You can do things like that. Like this looks like a good picture. Right. As opposed to a blurry one or somewhere where you can't see any people or whatever. And it just pulls them out of your giant library of pictures. You say, oh, I haven't seen that picture in years or I haven't thought about that thing in years. And it gives you a good feeling. And that's why people like the photo widget.
01:25:16 ◼ ► Because we have a lot of photos and most people don't do what I do and meticulously go through and arrange them and do it. Like people don't have time for that or they're not interested in it. And so they can do that for you. And the memories are the same thing, but instead of just finding one picture and throwing it up there, it'll do like Casey's saying, it'll make a little slideshow. It'll come up with a fun name, four legged friends, you know, fluffy pets. Or I was going through this bunch of ones, Disney World, obviously, you know, it doesn't take much to identify Disney World.
01:25:43 ◼ ► Like, especially things where lots of people have been or if there's a geotag and they know you're in Disney World or whatever, they can make albums in a way that is convenient. It's not the same as what a human would do because you would look through some of the pictures like, oh, I wouldn't have picked this one. And, you know, this is not the way I would have done it. But you're getting this essentially for free. And like Casey said, you have the confidence that it's like they're doing it on device. And it's not like they're not transmitting it back to Walt Disney Company or selling access to Walt Disney to let them know how many people have been there.
01:26:12 ◼ ► And they know how many people have been at Walt Disney World. Like it's just that's not Apple's business model, right? So you have some confidence that that's not happening. And you get to experience these fun little things. I don't spend too much time looking at them. But I do look at them just because it's fun to see what the computer came up with, you know, fun to see and sometimes critique the selection of backing music and the pictures and the animations and sometimes it'll incorporate video into them.
01:26:37 ◼ ► Or, you know, like in Casey's case, they figure out Dave Matthews Band and what song do they expect to put behind it. It's pretty neat. And I can imagine this just getting better and better because I think it's it's not just a thing that we have technology for. I think it's a thing that people respond to like that that they find appealing. Like I also think it's one of those features that you often see in a keynote. It's hard to tell whether it's going to be like digital touch where it's a feature that Apple is super excited about, but no one cares about. But they present these type of features the same way of like, oh, isn't this great? And sometimes it really is.
01:27:06 ◼ ► Like I said, the photo widget, a rounded rectangle that shows you pictures selected by a computer from your collection does not sound like a killer feature, but people love it.
01:27:15 ◼ ► Yeah, that I've never I would never have imagined how much I love the photo widget. That's the kind of feature that would be like installed by default. And the first thing I would do when I updated that version of the OS is to delete that. But for some reason, I like didn't delete it. I guess I was lazy that day. And like, it just started to get a little bit more complicated.
01:27:35 ◼ ► Like it just starts picking this amazing stuff. I'm like, oh, OK, well, I'll delete that some other day. And then, you know, days go by and it keeps picking amazing stuff. Oh, that's wow. That's this is working pretty well. I'll delete it next week. And then eventually I'm just like, no, this is actually I'm going to admit to myself this is actually a really good feature. And I'm not going to delete it. I'm just I'm just going to have my photo widget on my screen. And it's it's fantastic.
01:27:54 ◼ ► I put one more in the slack. Yeah, fluffy friends. I've seen the fluffy friends, but I put more on this. Like, obviously, I have a pretty boring life. So the memories thing is really trying hard to call for something based based on my location and things I take pictures of.
01:28:21 ◼ ► Meals at Home. That's that's almost like sad. It's like lonely meals at home. I didn't eat that alone. It was a family thing. Yeah. And that's and I have to say that's a good looking Thanksgiving plate.
01:28:33 ◼ ► If I do say so myself, that's exactly what I want on Thanksgiving. It's all featured on that plate. It is pretty good.
01:28:38 ◼ ► And I also am paging through now. I see one for Erin and I's 10th anniversary, which sure enough was on our 10th anniversary. And that one, like things like that are they're still impressive, but they're less impressive because in knowing me, I probably have my anniversary in my contact card, even though I do remember it offhand.
01:28:53 ◼ ► But but, you know, it looks at the card, it looks at the date the picture was taken. So, oh, OK, sure enough. That's the 10th anniversary. That one, like, I still think it's cool, but it doesn't it doesn't blow my mind.
01:29:03 ◼ ► But freaking figuring out Mute Math and Dave Matthews Band. I don't understand how that happened. And I kind of wish I did. The only thing that does kind of stink about this is I forget what it was I was trying to send.
01:29:15 ◼ ► But I think it put together like a montage, a video montage from our beach trip. I was trying to send it, I think, to Erin. And it had some sort of completely arbitrary, but reasonably catchy music associated with it.
01:29:26 ◼ ► And then I went to share it and it said something to the effect of, well, you can't share with that music. Pick different music.
01:29:32 ◼ ► Wait, was this before you were an Apple Music subscriber? No, this is literally earlier today. Oh, OK. So I guess because it's baking the audio into the video, it does.
01:29:41 ◼ ► I guess they didn't have rights for that particular song. But if that's the case, then, like, don't frickin use that song. Yeah, right.
01:29:48 ◼ ► So that was a little bit of a letdown. But well, but it makes sense. Like if if the most common case is that you simply enjoy this on your phone yourself.
01:29:55 ◼ ► You know, but no, all in all, like I, I really shouldn't say this publicly because I'm ashamed by everyone.
01:30:02 ◼ ► But I am glad that I listen to literally the entire Internet and have finally joined iCloud Photo Library. This so far has been going really well.
01:30:11 ◼ ► The search is not nearly as good as Google Photos, which is a bummer. I forget exactly what I was looking for, but I think I was looking for.
01:30:18 ◼ ► Oh, it was a picture of me, which you spoke about on the show many years ago, I think a picture of me when I was a kid at that Lamborghini dealer.
01:30:25 ◼ ► And I think I searched for like Lamborghini. It didn't work. I think I searched for like exotic car or something like that.
01:30:30 ◼ ► And I came up with I shouldn't say didn't work. I came up with Lamborghinis. If I remember correctly, I came up with exotic cars, but I didn't come up with the specific picture I wanted.
01:30:38 ◼ ► And then I went into Google Photos, search for Lamborghinis and scrolled all the way back to, you know, you know, the beginning of time. And sure enough, there was that photo immediately.
01:30:44 ◼ ► So in that sense, it was a little bit of a bummer. Like, I wish their search was better, but I am still overall extremely pleased with this experience.
01:30:52 ◼ ► Updating, notwithstanding. And now I'm like riveted by their for you galleries or montages or whatever you call them. They're super cool.
01:31:03 ◼ ► I had a search experience with photos just earlier today. I was when we mentioned in one of the slacks that we're all in. What were we talking about? It was how I mentioned a celebrity local celebrity sighting.
01:31:14 ◼ ► I was at my wife had a celebrity sighting a couple of years ago, and she also got to sit next to Bill Murray on a plane flight. And I was like, oh, I have a picture of that, too. I should go find that picture.
01:31:22 ◼ ► So I go to my photo library, my wife's photo library, because she's does apples understand families. I'm like, where is that picture of my wife sitting on a plane next to Bill Murray?
01:31:33 ◼ ► I can't search for my wife because there's a lot of pictures of her and that's not going to narrow it down. And so I go to the search and I'm like, all right, I guess I airplane, I guess.
01:31:44 ◼ ► Like, is it just going to show me pictures of the outside of airplanes? And no Apple search does. Okay. It shows me lots of pictures of like out the window of an airplane or interior space of airplanes, but not the picture I want.
01:31:56 ◼ ► Like, is it a favorite? Let me search for favorites. Doesn't like, you know, I have a lot of favorites. I scroll for a while. And unlike Casey, I can't remember when the hell anything happened. I can't even get the year right because I'm old.
01:32:08 ◼ ► I don't, I don't know what happened. All right. And so I like, maybe it's got to be an iPhone picture, right? Because no one's going to, it must have been, it was just my wife and traveling by herself.
01:32:17 ◼ ► And so for business, and so probably she just gave someone her iPhone to take a picture of the two of them together. Right. So it's got to be an iPhone picture.
01:32:24 ◼ ► So I search for, I make a smart album for all photos by iPhones. But let me tell you, that's a lot of pictures to scrolling and scrolling. And I guess they don't go past 2007, but still I'm not coming up with anything.
01:32:36 ◼ ► And so now I'm like, now I'm like in, you know, in desperation programmer mode. I'm like, okay, I go to Google images. I search for pictures of Bill Murray. I add them to the photo library. I identify the faces, Bill Murray, I had Bill Murray to my people. And I say, find other faces like this. Right.
01:32:50 ◼ ► And I'm like, first I'm like, it's like the, the text selection. I just talked about finding texts in the photos. I put pictures of Bill Murray in, I import three pictures of Bill Murray looking roughly the age that I think he was right at the time.
01:33:01 ◼ ► And then I'm waiting for Apple photos to do the thing where it identifies a face where it puts, I don't know if Casey's experiences yet, but it puts little circles around. If you slightly puts little circles around it and then you can type underneath the circles.
01:33:14 ◼ ► This is whatever part, like that's how you do it. And I'm waiting and it never does that. I'm like, okay, if I quit the app and relaunch, if I, if I go edit the picture, there is a way you can do the info panel and do add face where you can place that circle yourself.
01:33:27 ◼ ► So eventually I just give up waiting for photos to identify, and these are all head on headshot high resolution pictures of Bill Murray. These are not challenging. Like I can't find a face in this picture, right? It's right there. Right.
01:33:37 ◼ ► But it never does it. And of course, there's no way in photos for you to press a button that says, Hey, photos right now, use CPU and memory to find faces in this one picture that I'm looking at. Because of course that would be too convenient.
01:33:48 ◼ ► And they have to, it just does what you mean. You don't have to ever do that. It'll do it automatically. Eventually, maybe who knows? Good luck. Anyway, so I made the little circles. I said, add face to this photo.
01:33:58 ◼ ► I tried to place the circle over his face, which is weird because it like repositions itself. And I'm like, are you finding the face? If you could do that, why don't you just do that all the time? Anyway, I make the pictures, I type in Bill Murray, and then I go to the Bill Murray people thing.
01:34:10 ◼ ► I say, so find more pictures of Bill Murray. And it shows a spinner at least for once and says, searching for pictures of Bill Murray, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Sorry. Couldn't find any other pictures of Bill Murray.
01:34:20 ◼ ► So at that point, that one I'm defeated. And I have to fall back to the ultimate technique, which is to ask my wife.
01:34:25 ◼ ► When she wasn't home at the time, to be fair. But as soon as she came home, I said, Hey, when were you on that flight with Bill Murray? And she narrowed it down to the month and year. And I found the picture and guess what?
01:34:34 ◼ ► It was a PNG image. It had no metadata about what it was. I don't know where it came from. Had no metadata about screenshot. Maybe, maybe I don't know where the hell it came from, but it was, it didn't have any metadata about anything.
01:34:46 ◼ ► It wasn't taken on an iPhone. There was no lens information. There was nothing. And it wasn't a favorite. So anyway, I made it a favorite. I changed the title of the image to Bill Murray.
01:34:56 ◼ ► So I'm hoping like, you know, instead of like image one, two, three, four, five, I changed that to Bill Murray. I didn't add a Bill Murray keyword because I felt like it would be going too far. But I did identify Bill Murray.
01:35:07 ◼ ► I did identify Bill Murray's face. So the picture is called Bill Murray. Bill Murray's face is identified and it's a fave. And so next time I want to find that Bill Murray picture, I damn well better be able to type Bill Murray into the search field and photos and find it out.
01:35:19 ◼ ► I didn't actually test that. I should have actually, I would test it right now, but I'd have to switch to my wife's account because again, Apple families. But yeah, that some, I agree.
01:35:34 ◼ ► And then, oh, yeah. One more, one more Apple memories for you album. I just put in the slack. Christmas Eve 2020. Can you guess what pictures is chosen to put on that album?
01:35:46 ◼ ► Those are garlic knots. I mean, I guess. Sure. Like, yeah, we did have garlic knots on Christmas Eve 2020. We always have pizza.
01:35:56 ◼ ► We always have a pizza on Christmas Eve. I don't know when this started, but we've done it for years and years. We'd always have pizza. Usually have friends over and have pizza. And I guess this is one of the years that we decided to also add garlic knots to it. So yeah, Christmas Eve 2020. As you know, Christmas means garlic knots.
01:36:16 ◼ ► I want it. All right. So anything else on photos? All in all, I'm really impressed. Like, it's not flawless, but in the same way that I'm like, in the same way I feel like Apple Music is, eh, I guess it's okay.
01:36:29 ◼ ► You know, I'm like a step away from it's no good. With Google, with, I almost said Google Photos, with iCloud Photo Library, I'm a step away from this is amazing. Like, if search was better, I think I would be a million percent in on iCloud Photos.
01:36:44 ◼ ► Yeah, we will talk more about this in the future because I think it's time to start having you do things with your photo library. I know it's nice that Apple is doing things with your photo library for you, which is cool, but there are things that you can do. So we'll get into that in future.
01:36:57 ◼ ► Yeah, there's things that you could do too, Jon. You could geotag your photos. That's something you could do.
01:37:01 ◼ ► Most of them are geo. I think, I think my geotag thing is actually working. Like my Bluetooth pairing with my new camera. I'm pretty sure it's actually working. I should go check, but I think all my photos are now geotagged.
01:37:10 ◼ ► Look at you. Alright, we are running long, so we'll try to make this brief. Let's talk MagSafe battery pack. My two jerk co-hosts didn't volunteer to spend $100 on the MagSafe battery pack, so somehow...
01:37:28 ◼ ► I'm not going anywhere. Like most of the time I'm spending, I mean, my battery life is not great because I spend a lot of time like playing podcasts through the phone speaker and everything, so my battery life is certainly not good. But most of the time I'm in my house enough of the day that, you know, if the afternoon has come and I see my phone's down to like 60%, I'll just plug it in on my desk as I'm working. Like it's not a big deal.
01:37:51 ◼ ► So if I was traveling, that would be a different story. Traveling, no question, I would bring a battery pack. And in fact, the other day I was running some errands on the mainland and I brought just, you know, a little USB battery, like a regular standalone battery for that.
01:38:06 ◼ ► And I was thinking like, it would be kind of nice to have the MagSafe battery pack right now, but not so nice that I'm going to like drive to an Apple store right now in the middle of this errand trip and buy one for $100 because this little like $15 battery in my backpack is working fine for the once I've used it.
01:38:20 ◼ ► I was going to tell you since your wife is not here that we don't say on the mainland. Please don't do that.
01:38:32 ◼ ► They give me that authority. I'm not sure who or where. It's like the key to the city. They just pass it to me and say, "You, John, speak for every person on Long Island." I'm just saying, please, please don't say on the mainland.
01:38:41 ◼ ► I mean, actually, the more common phrase is off island. Like I'm going off island. But it seems weird to say I'm going off island to go onto a different island.
01:38:48 ◼ ► I know, but so you decided to make up your own phrase like you live in Hawaii and you're going back to California, but that's not what it's like.
01:38:53 ◼ ► No, they also call it. I mean, you hear people call it the mainland also. But can we go back to John's cranberry sauce for a moment on this meals at home picture?
01:39:15 ◼ ► The problem is, I think the meat you're misapprehending how much meat there is there. There's a lot of stacking involved.
01:39:35 ◼ ► Yuck. All right, so let's talk MagSafe Battery Pack again. I have never had MagSafe anything before.
01:39:47 ◼ ► The long version is... Let me ask you, is it impossibly easy to twist a MagSafe connected thing?
01:39:59 ◼ ► Because I'm looking at this magnifying glass looking top of the MagSafe Battery Pack where you've got the circle that seems to be the area that the Qi charger is within.
01:40:08 ◼ ► And then you've got that little stump coming off of it. And I don't know what the situation is, but that stump is nowhere near strong enough.
01:40:22 ◼ ► Pretty much any time I pick up the phone off the desk... I didn't that time, so maybe I'm exaggerating a little bit.
01:40:27 ◼ ► But many times when I pick the phone up off the desk or wherever it may be sitting, I will twist the MagSafe Battery Pack.
01:40:33 ◼ ► Now it's not so egregious that it stops it from charging, but it's enough that it's off kilter and it's really frickin' frustrating.
01:40:41 ◼ ► Is this a thing that you guys experience? Jon, you don't have any MagSafe stuff, right?
01:40:49 ◼ ► I think the key is this is a battery pack where you're expecting to pick up the both of them at the same time, and that's where you're getting the twisting.
01:40:57 ◼ ► Because neither one of us have accessory that we expect to pick up with the phone on it, right?
01:41:05 ◼ ► Now if you notice, the MagSafe cases and full-size MagSafe things have not only the circle of magnets, but they have the little line of magnets below it.
01:41:14 ◼ ► Yeah, the point of that line is to help stuff, to prevent stuff from twisting, basically.
01:41:18 ◼ ► So it's possible, maybe it's just not super strong. It is only a relatively small number of magnets compared to the entire circle, well, most of the circle that forms the ring part of it.
01:41:29 ◼ ► So it could just be that there's not enough magnets there to counteract the massive amount of force that you are somehow unknowingly twisting the battery pack with.
01:41:43 ◼ ► Speaking of that, Quinn Nelson posted a video of a similar situation where he's got the phone and the MagSafe.
01:41:51 ◼ ► He's demonstrating a problem here. Obviously this is not a real scenario, but saying he's got the phone with the battery pack on his hand.
01:41:57 ◼ ► He's saying if you do this and you don't think about it and you go to press, like let's say you press the power button twice to do Apple Pay or whatever.
01:42:07 ◼ ► If you press the power button on the right side of the phone and your fingers that are curled under the phone are merely gripping the battery case, you will succeed in just pushing the phone right off the battery case.
01:42:18 ◼ ► Because you're not counteracting. Normally when you press the side button, your fingers are on the other side of the phone, which allows you to press the side button while bracing the other side of the phone.
01:42:31 ◼ ► Now I don't think that's a big problem because maybe you do that once and break your phone and learn, "Oh, hey, when I press the side button, I have to make sure my hand grips all the way around the battery pack and the other side of the phone."
01:42:41 ◼ ► But it's another demonstration of what Casey was saying. It's not too hard to twist these suckers off of there. There's probably not much they can do about that besides cranking up the magnet strength, which has its own problems.
01:42:53 ◼ ► Both in terms of weight and also in terms of the number of things they can screw up with these very strong, tiny little rare earth magnets inside there.
01:42:59 ◼ ► Because the underside of the battery thing, in case you can tell me if it is as it looks, seems to be like grippy rubber. So they're trying to do as much as they can with the sandwich closing force and make a friction surface so it doesn't slide. But how tacky is that surface, Casey?
01:43:14 ◼ ► Not that tacky. It's considerably less tacky than the, what is it, the official Apple plastic-y iPhone cases? You know what I'm talking about? What's the term?
01:43:24 ◼ ► Yes, thank you. Those are way tackier than this. It feels vaguely similar but not nearly as tacky. And then the exterior portion is even less tacky still.
01:43:34 ◼ ► Yeah, so that's a little frustrating. Coincidentally, when I first got it, I had not done the compulsory update to my iPhone. And so when I plugged it, or I shouldn't say plugged it in, when I stuck it to the back of my iPhone, it did show up as like a second thing in the battery, or whatever, an additional thing in the battery widget.
01:43:53 ◼ ► But comically, it didn't show up as the MagSafe battery pack. The iconography was a lightning connector. And I was like, wow, that's really weird. I thought it showed MagSafe there. And then I did the software update on my phone and sure enough, it worked as expected. But I found that very funny that that was what it fell back to.
01:44:09 ◼ ► In terms of like in the pocket, it's fine. I mean, I have dude pockets. So it's, you know, they're much more spacious than your average women's cut clothing. I don't have a big problem with the weight. Like it's not insignificant, but it's not terrible.
01:44:25 ◼ ► I think I had it on my phone for day to day use for the last few days just to kind of get used to it and have something to talk about tonight. I don't see myself using this really very often at all if I'm not traveling. I haven't yet tried using this as a bedside, like Qi charger, which is something that I use.
01:44:43 ◼ ► I use a standard Qi charger at home, not MagSafe, but a standard Qi charger on my bedside table at home. But when I travel, I use one of those. I think it's an Anker, like, you know, five USB port dinguses where, you know, I have a bunch of lightning and an Apple Watch cables hanging off of it.
01:45:01 ◼ ► And I don't love that. And so if I connected this to my Anker dingus and then just set my phone on there to charge overnight, I might like that. However, and I haven't had the chance to confirm how the behavior is when it's plugged in.
01:45:16 ◼ ► But when the phone, excuse me, when the MagSafe charger is just free ball and it's not plugged into the wall, it says that it will not charge the phone past 80 percent or excuse me, 90 percent. And I'm curious if I use this as like a de facto bedside charger, would it go to the full 100 percent or would it still cap itself at 90?
01:45:39 ◼ ► And I'll have to follow up next week on that. But assuming it will charge to 100 percent, you know, when it's plugged into the wall and so on and so forth, then I guess it's being really useful for travel for sure.
01:45:49 ◼ ► It definitely depletes, you know, the MagSafe battery depletes faster than I would have expected. But all in all, I do like it. I don't know that I would generally have spent one hundred dollars on this thing.
01:46:01 ◼ ► But in the future world, maybe one day eventually, when we can travel again, have I mentioned get your vaccine, please and thank you. When we can all travel again, I can see this being super nice. But until that point, it's fine.
01:46:14 ◼ ► Thank you to our sponsors this week, Fastmail and Sanity.io. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can support us by going to ATP.FM/join. Thanks, everybody. We will talk to you next week.
01:46:28 ◼ ► Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
01:46:50 ◼ ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S. So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M.
01:47:09 ◼ ► N-T-M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-C-U-S-A. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long.
01:47:31 ◼ ► Speaking of batteries and only charging to 80%, I read an interesting article in Car and Driver about GM's new battery tech. The pitch is that they found a way to make batteries cheap enough so they can try to make electric vehicles profitable at lower prices.
01:47:44 ◼ ► You know, you have a typical GM approach. Like, they're not going for the Tesla model of making premium vehicles. They want something cheaper. And the battery pack that they come up with, you can see how it would be cheaper to build because it uses fewer cells that are bigger and all this other stuff.
01:47:56 ◼ ► But one thing they say about it is that they're, unlike pretty much every other car maker, they're not going to recommend that you avoid charging it to 100%. Like, most cars, and most Macs now, do the battery optimization thing where they say it's better if you don't charge your battery to full capacity and it's also better if you don't discharge it all the way to zero. Try to stay in that middle band for better battery life.
01:48:20 ◼ ► And GM says, "We don't have that problem with our batteries. You can charge them to 100% all the time and it will be fine." And, you know, it'll go 250,000 miles or something like that.
01:48:30 ◼ ► This could be bluster. These things don't exist in the real world yet. I think the first vehicle they're out is the new giant, like, 5 bajillion pound electric hummer that they're coming out with.
01:48:39 ◼ ► But it certainly is interesting. I would love for that to be on my laptop because now that I have laptops in the house that do that, I leave it turned on because, you know, like, well, this will extend battery life, but I feel kind of bad about it.