00:00:09 ◼ ► So, let's start with some follow-up. Stephen Fry was the narrator for the migration video. One of us had said it was, um, oh god, what was his name?
00:00:24 ◼ ► Jen Simmons, who is a designer advocate at Mozilla, had contrary thoughts about the migration video.
00:00:30 ◼ ► So this is the video, the same one we were just speaking of at the very beginning, which I loved.
00:00:34 ◼ ► I thought it was hilarious about how, you know, developers basically never come out to the sunshine, and they never travel, they never talk to people, et cetera, et cetera.
00:00:40 ◼ ► So Jen said, "I can't get past the opening video with the long quote-unquote joke about how developers are not regular people.
00:00:51 ◼ ► I simply am so utterly done with this myth that only people who act male, act white, act nerdy, dress badly, eat junk food, have poor social skills, are qualified to be developers.
00:01:01 ◼ ► There's a special insiders club which most people can't join. Or that there's a special insiders club that most people can't join.
00:01:07 ◼ ► I'm utterly sick of that idea, simply saying, quote, "Oh, girls can join now. People of color can join now.
00:01:11 ◼ ► You just have to act like this, dress like this, eat like this, talk like this, think like this, here's your hoodie, join the cult/club," quote.
00:01:19 ◼ ► I can't disagree with this. That is not the read I got from it, but hey, I'm a white nerdy guy, so what do you expect?
00:01:26 ◼ ► But I thought the video was funny, and I think it's because I am, I don't know if we've met, I kind of like to make fun of myself.
00:01:36 ◼ ► Yeah, I know, exactly. I thought it was very funny, but I think this is a very good point, and I'm glad one of you, I'm guessing, Jon, put this in the show notes?
00:01:44 ◼ ► Yeah, I brought up a similar point on our live episode, that some aspects of the video rubbed me the wrong way, and I put it in here again to talk about it, just to get a perspective from someone who doesn't fit exactly into the stereotype that they were giving there.
00:02:01 ◼ ► So, on the last show I talked about how if you want to get the audience on your side and reflect them back in the video and say this is the thing about you, down to literally putting developer friends of ours in the video.
00:02:14 ◼ ► So you want to foster the idea that the people who are at WWDC, that there is something that unites them, and their common interest in Apple and developing for the Apple platform.
00:02:26 ◼ ► That is the thing that should unite them, so you'd want to have the most benign version of the in-group, out-group.
00:02:41 ◼ ► And then the out-group, not in a mean way, but just trying to say you have this shared interest, right?
00:02:56 ◼ ► But, whenever you have, and I'm sure that was part of the motivation of making this video, whenever you do something like that though, you have to be very careful that your, the sort of the outline of the in-group and out-group is what you think it is, right?
00:03:11 ◼ ► Because there is, the thing that unites people at WWDC, I think is just what I described, right?
00:03:16 ◼ ► And pretty much nothing else. What unites the people at WWDC is not that they're all dudes, is not that they're all white, is not that they're all rich, is not that they're all from the US, is not, you know, what any other thing that is unrelated to developing for Apple platforms is really outside the realm of the things that should be uniting the people who are there.
00:03:38 ◼ ► But it's very easy to, the stereotypes include much more stuff. So you get the people dressing, you know, dressing in the hoodies or excluding the guy in the suit or the plain fact that like the vast majority of people shown in the video were men.
00:03:52 ◼ ► It's very easy to fall into those because you think, your motivations are pure. I want people to feel like they belong and they belong to this tribe of WWDC, this tribe of Apple developers.
00:04:01 ◼ ► And that is a good instinct and that's what they're going for and that's what everyone is responding to, right? We want to feel like we are part of that group, we have this esoteric interest, but now suddenly we're in a group with all those people with similar interests.
00:04:11 ◼ ► But the other stuff that comes along with it can make certain people feel like, oh, this, what this video is telling me is that I'm not actually a member of the tribe because I don't see myself reflected up there or because what some of the aspects of the stuff they're putting up there don't apply to me.
00:04:27 ◼ ► So for example, when they're talking about like source code as a strange language, I would give a thumbs up on that because if you're a developer to people who aren't developers, writing computer code looks strange to them and that is the thing that everybody knows and has learned and can unite them.
00:04:41 ◼ ► But anything having to do with how you dress or how socially awkward you may be or just representation thing of like who you see up on that screen is, you know, is a thing that could potentially make other people excluded.
00:04:53 ◼ ► So I think I've said this on past shows or whatever, but it's the general rule for life that we judge ourselves by our motivations, but other people by their actions, right?
00:05:02 ◼ ► And in some respects, that's a good way to think about that to help you deal with other people.
00:05:07 ◼ ► But in this case, like I think we can all agree that Apple's motivations are pure, but as a large corporation with a, you know, a big voice up on a stage and, you know, in front of thousands of people and thousands more remote,
00:05:21 ◼ ► we have to at some point also judge them by their actions. So we may recognize the great motivations and though we may think this video was, you know, made us feel good and, you know, like we appreciate the motivation, we appreciate some of the feelings that engendered,
00:05:39 ◼ ► You know, Anita Sarkeesian's refrain at the beginning of every one of her videos that people conveniently ignore is that it's, I'm paraphrasing, it's okay to criticize things that you like.
00:05:49 ◼ ► Like, it doesn't mean you hate them forever. It doesn't mean it's the worst thing in the world. It just means that everything, you know, things that you like, I think I had a podcast about this, there's usually something that's worth criticizing about them.
00:06:00 ◼ ► And you don't have to go from, I hate every aspect of this and now I need to boycott Apple or say, I love every aspect of it and it's perfect.
00:06:06 ◼ ► Got it. I should have looked up her quote because it's a little, you know, stick that she does at the beginning and it's very apt.
00:06:14 ◼ ► All right. Can you tell me what its road trip, oh, that's right. It's road trip. Right as I was reading that, it occurred to me what that was. Did we not talk about this on the show?
00:06:25 ◼ ► We didn't. I think we missed it. It was in the notes and I, you know, the specifics are probably not that interesting, although just to refresh everyone's memory, there was a past keynote where some Apple folks were giving a demo, I forget of what application,
00:06:36 ◼ ► and they were trying to write Utah road trip and autocorrect changed Utah into its right. And the guy giving the demo hit return or whatever, or like, you know, accepted the text before he had realized autocorrect is snuck behind his back and changed its Utah to its.
00:06:54 ◼ ► And he has this great expression on the video where he's like, oh, like you see his face drop and his eyes roll on his head, you know, and, and so they had this project that was running that they fixed it.
00:07:04 ◼ ► I think they fixed it in post, like in the non-live version, they changed it to Utah. Right. So it looks okay. But we were all making that joke about its road trip after that keynote. So in this keynote, there was where the heck was it? Maybe in like, oh, it's one of the labels in the finder, I think.
00:07:20 ◼ ► Okay. Like, you know, they showed a finder window with a bunch of labels. And one of the labels was its road trip. And I thought that was neat because whatever they're making a joke. But the thing is, it was Apple making the joke. But Apple was, this is sort of like, it's a low, it's a low bar, but it's one of the things that I've seen Apple do recently. It makes, you know, it's an admission of engagement with the community, because Apple didn't intentionally make its road trip a thing. It was an accident and the community latched on to it.
00:07:47 ◼ ► And by doing this, Apple is acknowledging, hey, community, we see you, we know you're out there, we know we made a goof and we know it was funny and we know you made it funny. And we are reflecting that back to you, which is a rare thing for them because normal Apple would be like, all right, have your fun, but we're never going to reference our mistake again. Why would we reference our own mistake?
00:08:07 ◼ ► Why would we acknowledge that it's a meme that was invented in the outside community? We'll just move on and pretend it never happened, just like we did in the video where we corrected it. So I thought that was a nice glimmer of hope that Apple sees and recognizes the community and is willing to do frivolous things to reflect ourselves back.
00:08:24 ◼ ► My buddy Sam Gross tweeted sometime in the last week, hey, messages in macOS Mojave, Mojave, Mojave, Mojave, I always second guess it. Mojave, long e. Okay. Messages in macOS Mojave supports iMessage and nothing else. Rest in peace, Yahoo Messenger, AIM, Google Chat via Jabber, ICQ, et cetera.
00:08:44 ◼ ► Now most of these are actually dead anyway. Yeah, exactly. Didn't AIM shut down? Let's see, Yahoo Messenger is dying soon. They announced that it's dying, right? Yeah, ICQ I think died like 50 years ago. I think AIM shut down last year.
00:08:56 ◼ ► I thought ICQ was still a thing. Seriously. No, I think AIM is, I think, yeah, I think ICQ is gone and so is AIM. You can download it right now. New ICQ from macOS 10. Hmm. Fake news. I could swear it's still a thing. I could swear it's still a thing. Google Chat is definitely still a thing. Is it, though?
00:09:12 ◼ ► Yeah, it's in the lower left corner of my stupid Gmail window all the time and I have to learn how to hide it in every new version they release. I mean, Google Plus was there for a while, too, and that wasn't really ever a thing.
00:09:21 ◼ ► They got rid of, yeah, Google Buzz, yeah. I assure you, for those, for the parts of my company that are not on Slack, which is basically everything that's not engineering, Google Chat is still a thing.
00:09:31 ◼ ► I'm so sorry. So anyway, one nice heuristic to help you remember how to say Mojave correctly is that Mojave sounds fancy. Mojave sounds like casual and it's California, so it's always going to be casual.
00:09:46 ◼ ► Yeah, so this, them eliminating all the third-party things makes sense. I mean, iMessage is ascendant. Many people have talked frequently about how iMessage is the one vaguely social thing Apple has ever done right.
00:10:01 ◼ ► And it's very popular and it's a very commonly used application and it's better than SMS and we're all happy we have it, so on and so forth.
00:10:08 ◼ ► And the other ones are all dying and it's just like Apple to say, "Why are we even supporting these anymore? Everyone has an iPhone that wants to use iMessage anyway. Just ditch them. It'll make the app simpler."
00:10:19 ◼ ► And I'm pretty much on board with that, even though I have accounts on all these services.
00:10:23 ◼ ► It also might be like, you know, from a basic software development standpoint, one of the big issues that Apple had between iOS and the Mac is that the Mac version of Messages supports a very small subset of what the iOS version supports.
00:10:36 ◼ ► So if they were going to do something like try to improve that, it would probably be a lot easier in a Messages app that only supported iMessage instead of having a special case the entire UI for all these other services while they are also working heavily on it.
00:10:49 ◼ ► We'll talk about that topic either later in the show or in the next show because I have more to say on that specific topic.
00:10:58 ◼ ► I always forget that's a thing and then somebody will send me something like, "Oh, yeah." Renaud Leinart writes, "I just realized that Xcode 10's Device Simulator clones, which make parallel testing possible, probably rely on APFS fast snapshotting capabilities in order to instantly copy the master simulator's 'template.' Thus, the APFS transition is starting to bear its fruits."
00:11:32 ◼ ► So I saw the demo of like, "Look, we can run a bunch of simulators in parallel and run multiple test suites and it's all cool and everything." And it makes sense to me that this would be an efficient way to implement that, but I have no idea if that's how they actually implement it.
00:11:44 ◼ ► I hope it is because I agree that APFS has many abilities that can lead to advances like this, things that you couldn't even conceive of doing. Let's say these templates are like 300 megabytes and you want to make 12 copies.
00:11:59 ◼ ► Making 12 copies of a 300 megabyte file in HFS+ would take you forever and in APFS you can do it instantly and they can slowly diverge from each other with copy-on-write semantics.
00:12:09 ◼ ► So that would be super cool and I really hope that's how they're doing it. If they're actually copying 300 megabyte files 12 times or if the file is only 4 megabytes and it just copies real fast because SSDs, I'll be sad.
00:12:19 ◼ ► iOS 12 pre-release reports. Okay, so I need an intervention. I'm traveling sometime soon and I really don't want to be traveling on beta software. It just seems like a poor choice.
00:12:41 ◼ ► Oh, don't tell it. But you're supposed to be. You see, this is why I can't go to you Marco because you're the best worst influence I've ever met in my entire life.
00:12:47 ◼ ► What I really want to do is install iOS 12 on my carry phone, but I don't want to. My brain is saying no, but my future Memoji is saying, "Oh, hells yes."
00:12:57 ◼ ► So I don't know what to do. And the reason this is an issue, this is a real issue, is because everything I've heard is that iOS 12 is without comparison far and away.
00:13:09 ◼ ► The first beta is far and away the best first beta ever. The customer sat on the beta is blow away.
00:13:27 ◼ ► Yeah, I felt like, I'm like, "Oh, I kind of feel charming." I'm like, "Oh, I miss Scott Forstall."
00:13:31 ◼ ► Because we haven't heard Apple say blow away since Scott was fired. Is that true? I don't think.
00:13:37 ◼ ► I don't know about that. I think it's kind of creepy though. It's like when the ET, as they call themselves, executive team, talk amongst themselves and a word like that spreads.
00:13:47 ◼ ► Like in a single group of friends, right? And then years later they're still saying blow away, but I'm assuming no one else in the world is except for a senior leadership at Apple.
00:13:57 ◼ ► I mean, it's natural. It happens all the time. I see it happen at work, but it's a little bit weird to see that one come slingshotting about and go, "Whoa, blow away." Blow away is an adjective.
00:14:12 ◼ ► Someone needs to track that down. We need an etymologist to find the cultural origin of blow away as an adjective at Apple. Maybe it's like all of Silicon Valley. I don't know where it came from.
00:14:23 ◼ ► Oh, man, that's tremendous. Anyway, what was I trying to say? I don't even know anymore.
00:14:31 ◼ ► IOS 12, not even like the first public beta, but what they release at WWDC, like, "Hey, get out of your seats, go down to the labs, download from little epoxied on Ethernet connectors and get IOS 12 for WCD developers."
00:14:43 ◼ ► Everybody says, not only does it not crash and mostly functions, but that, like they said in the keynote, it's fast. It's fast on your old phone. It's fast on your new phone.
00:14:53 ◼ ► Everybody's raving about it, and I'm in a similar situation to Casey. I'm not considering putting it on my phone because I'm not, you know, that deluded, but I have strongly considered putting it on my iPad.
00:15:02 ◼ ► I'm holding out and saying, "Just wait for the first public beta," because everyone says it's great, and I don't think I've ever heard this about an IOS beta before.
00:15:10 ◼ ► I mean, you have to put it on your main phone so you could do Memoji if you have an iPhone 10.
00:15:20 ◼ ► I have it. I'm using my iPhone 7 right now, and it is already installed on there, but I don't even know why I did this in retrospect because the one thing I actually really want to try is the stupid Memoji that I know I'm going to be obsessed with.
00:15:43 ◼ ► But it's still being Memoji because they're about—it's like, just imagine a Nintendo M-I-I Memoji.
00:15:49 ◼ ► Well, anyway, the point I'm driving at, though, is I need someone whose name is not Marco Orman because you're the best worst influence ever to tell me that this is a terrible idea, and Beta 2 might be just a dumpster fire, and not to do it, even though I really want to.
00:16:05 ◼ ► The other thing that's easy to say—so Marco is sending me a message of his Memoji smiling at me right now.
00:16:27 ◼ ► I haven't tried it myself, obviously, but in the ones that people have posted, I haven't seen much variation.
00:16:31 ◼ ► Maybe everyone just always picks the ideal—not the ideal, but the most Emoji-looking face.
00:16:39 ◼ ► If you're making it for yourself, it's hard to even know, like, what shape is my face exactly?
00:17:37 ◼ ► I am on board with this because if we've learned anything from my me on the Nintendo Wii and/or Switch,
00:17:44 ◼ ► I have learned that John Siracusa is quite the me critic and he will not fancy my Memoji.
00:18:02 ◼ ► Yeah, I guess you could just, like, you know, use it as a reference when building your own.
00:18:26 ◼ ► Can you flip your hair direction the other way so it can start looking more like an Emoji?
00:18:49 ◼ ► We're just trying to nip it in the bud before you start saying Memoji for the rest of your life.
00:19:01 ◼ ► All right, so Marco, all kidding aside, you're running the beta, and you're sending me the Memojis.
00:19:25 ◼ ► Everyone's phone is uniquely different and everything, but I will say that it's been totally fine for me.
00:19:34 ◼ ► At least the GM versions, you can be sure that they've been pretty extensively tested on a lot of people's devices,
00:19:47 ◼ ► But with the beta, this beta might be fine today and yesterday and the day before that,
00:20:10 ◼ ► So in the last couple of years, the betas have actually been pretty reasonable to run on your main phone.
00:20:20 ◼ ► If you don't need to be running the beta for any reason, yeah, you probably shouldn't be running it.
00:21:16 ◼ ► And because I knew it was going to be hot, and because I wanted to hear the world around me,
00:21:20 ◼ ► the headphones I picked to listen to podcasts on while I was going for my big walk today,
00:21:42 ◼ ► and they send tiny little vibrations through your cheekbones so that your inner ear picks them up,
00:22:02 ◼ ► So I'm able to listen to a podcast on my dog walks and also still hear, say, if a car is coming.
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00:22:41 ◼ ► I highly suggest you check out the Aftershokz Trekz Air wireless bone conduction headphones.
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00:22:57 ◼ ► Check it out today at ATP.aftershokz.com, and use code ATP30 to get $30 off the weightless wireless Trekz Air.
00:23:18 ◼ ► So I believe I mentioned two weeks ago that I had acquired, with the release of iOS 11.4 and AirPlay 2 and stereo pairing,
00:23:55 ◼ ► Plus, a few people had said that they've had weird, out-of-sync sounding bugs with stereo pairs, with Overcast in particular.
00:24:02 ◼ ► So I thought, okay, let me test this. I gotta actually see if this is the case or not, and if I can do anything about it.
00:24:10 ◼ ► So I had the chance to finally test not only one HomePod, but two HomePods, and to see how they sounded in stereo.
00:24:15 ◼ ► Now, having just the one before, and I had it in the kitchen first, and then I brought it to the office,
00:24:20 ◼ ► I was pretty impressed with the sound quality. It wasn't life-changing or anything, but it was very impressive.
00:24:28 ◼ ► It also isn't a very good value, necessarily, like $350, you can get a lot of good speakers.
00:24:34 ◼ ► But it was a very good sounding speaker, but it still ultimately sounded like a fancy version of an Echo.
00:24:47 ◼ ► So the stereo pair takes what was a, you know, it sounds good in a mono non-pair, I guess.
00:25:02 ◼ ► And it's not just because of certain instruments coming from one side or the other, it's because it fills a space better.
00:25:09 ◼ ► We are accustomed to hearing, like if we have a room that's bigger than a bathroom that you want to fill with sound,
00:25:27 ◼ ► Even if they were playing the exact same signal, if they were just both playing a mono signal,
00:25:32 ◼ ► it would still sound better because it would fill the room better, and it would come from multiple points,
00:25:36 ◼ ► it would have wider sound stage and everything else, but because they're also doing a stereo signal now,
00:25:41 ◼ ► it basically lets them shine as not having to rely so much on trying to reflect sound across walls and everything
00:25:49 ◼ ► to try to fake a wider sound projection, but to actually just have one in the first place,
00:25:56 ◼ ► That way they can, it seems like they're maybe turning down the weird processing when they're in stereo mode,
00:26:14 ◼ ► And I have it on my desk now, I have them like Jeff Foxworthy style, they are on top of my other speakers.
00:26:20 ◼ ► Which actually is really nice because it puts them right at ear level, which is exactly where you want them,
00:26:38 ◼ ► besides that they're $700 for the pair, that's a bigger flaw, but there's one flaw even bigger that money can't solve,
00:26:45 ◼ ► and that is that you currently can't use them as computer speakers, or many kinds of speakers really,
00:27:12 ◼ ► So you can send from your iPhone, you can have iPhone as your sound source, but not iTunes.
00:27:24 ◼ ► I think maybe you could trick AirPlay into helping you out there, but it would be awfully clunky.
00:27:35 ◼ ► So that's really unfortunate, because if there were a way to conveniently make these my computer speakers,
00:27:47 ◼ ► Unfortunately they're limited by their lack of input variety and lack of input options really.
00:27:59 ◼ ► I have my little Paradigm Adam speakers, which are, I think it was about $300 for the pair.
00:28:04 ◼ ► Plus I had to get a little tiny amp to power them on my desk, that was another 200 maybe,
00:28:13 ◼ ► I've never found a pair of regular bookshelf speakers that sounds better for the price than Paradigm Adams.
00:28:18 ◼ ► But because they are traditional speakers, not only do you need an amp, and they have a powered version,
00:28:26 ◼ ► Anyway, so they sound great, but they also have a clear sweet spot, because they're just regular speaker drivers,
00:28:35 ◼ ► So actually using them on a desk is kind of, it's a little too short distance for them,
00:28:46 ◼ ► The HomePod doesn't have a clear sweet spot, because it broadcasts from a bunch of different tweeters,
00:29:27 ◼ ► Beats headphones, if you put too much bass in headphones, what you tend to get is boominess,
00:29:50 ◼ ► I've never heard anything like that from something this size that sits on top of a desk.
00:30:05 ◼ ► if my Mac could output sound to them, that's all I would need, but it can't, and that's unfortunate.
00:30:13 ◼ ► There's also a few other minor niggles about stereo pairing mode, if anybody was curious about trying it.
00:30:19 ◼ ► It seems to be working kind of like AirPods, where most of the time it gives the illusion that it is a stereo pair acting as one.
00:30:31 ◼ ► So for instance, when they've been off for a while and you tell it to play, first of all,
00:30:41 ◼ ► When they've been off for a while and it starts to play, that one that responds to Siri,
00:30:47 ◼ ► that will start playing for like a half second first before the right one wakes up and realizes,
00:30:57 ◼ ► So you hear the sound first out of one channel, and then the second channel warms up and gets there after a second or so.
00:31:03 ◼ ► And I have had occasional once or twice split second moments where it did seem like they were out of sync also.
00:31:16 ◼ ► these are two separate devices that are most of the time working together as a perfect stereo pair,
00:31:23 ◼ ► Other than that though, they are really great, and I just hope that Apple broadens this product's versatility
00:31:38 ◼ ► But if you are primarily using it for music, this could be a really great product if it was easier to get your music into it.
00:32:03 ◼ ► and in this particular screenshot it says Office HomePod, but there's a picture of two of them.
00:32:09 ◼ ► So even though it says singular Office HomePod, there's a picture of two HomePods there,
00:32:46 ◼ ► I'm looking at this menu and I'm like, I have no freaking clue where on this menu I need to click,
00:32:57 ◼ ► Like, if the Mac could just output your system audio as an audio output device to a pair of HomePods,
00:33:11 ◼ ► Second of all, a lot of other desktop systems that are high-end are similarly expensive,
00:33:40 ◼ ► that was saying that the HomePod, which we had heard had been in development for a long time,
00:33:45 ◼ ► and just now emerged, was originally not designed to be like a person in a tube cylinder thing,
00:34:04 ◼ ► And I think about that one, and we all know the Apple Television set rumors from ages ago,
00:34:19 ◼ ► Like, if it was off to the side, it would always kind of sound like the sound is coming from the side.
00:34:30 ◼ ► And then, if they were going to have two of them, are they going to add $700 MSRP to the television set?
00:34:41 ◼ ► I mean, maybe that's the reason they didn't make it, because they realized this is a dumb idea for a TV speaker.
00:34:46 ◼ ► But apparently, if you get two of them for the low, low price of $700, you get some good stereo speakers.
00:34:51 ◼ ► No, I mean, ultimately, like, if you're setting these up to fill a moderately sized room with sound,
00:35:06 ◼ ► If you want it to be what most of us have used Amazon Echo's for, which is, like, a thing in the kitchen,
00:35:13 ◼ ► you know, or, like, in, like, the middle section of a house to be, like, kind of a personal assistant,
00:35:17 ◼ ► to answer voice requests and not so much music, or if there's not room for two of them,
00:35:24 ◼ ► But it sounds so vastly better with two that for anybody out there who doesn't have one yet might be thinking about it,
00:35:51 ◼ ► Molekule introduces a breakthrough science that's finally capable of destroying air pollutants at a molecular level.
00:36:00 ◼ ► This goes beyond HEPA filtration to not just capture but completely destroy the full spectrum of indoor air pollutants,
00:36:07 ◼ ► including things that are a thousand times smaller than what a HEPA filter can trap, so things like VOCs.
00:36:16 ◼ ► They did a study of 49 allergy sufferers presented at the American College of Asthma, Allergy and Immunology,
00:36:21 ◼ ► and Molekule's technology provided dramatic statistically significant sustained symptom reduction within a week of use.
00:36:55 ◼ ► And it's been personally effective and verified by science, but also tested by real people.
00:36:59 ◼ ► It's already helped asthma and allergy sufferers around the country better cope with their conditions and significantly reduce their symptoms.
00:37:23 ◼ ► Once again, Molekule with a K.com and code ATP at checkout for $75 off your first order.
00:37:42 ◼ ► They Sherlocked, what is it, MeasureKit, which I always thought was an odd name for an app, but it's a great app.
00:37:46 ◼ ► They Sherlocked MeasureKit, which is an app wherein you can use AR today to measure things.
00:37:54 ◼ ► They Sherlocked all the other AR-based measurement apps that are out there in the store.
00:38:04 ◼ ► Yeah, I want to talk about this just because, you know, I think it's interesting which applications Apple decides to make.
00:38:12 ◼ ► Obviously it makes sense for them to make an app with AR, another app with AR, to highlight their work on AR.
00:38:20 ◼ ► It got me thinking about, people don't get as worked up as they used to about Sherlocking.
00:38:28 ◼ ► People can look that up. I don't want to delve into it now, but there was a program called Watson and then there was a program called Sherlock, and it was pretty obvious and pretty rude.
00:38:41 ◼ ► So the downsides are obvious. Before I was selling a measurement app and now everyone can get one free with their phone.
00:38:51 ◼ ► Anyway, the point is Apple can afford to make this for free and maybe you can't if it was the app that you were selling and it was super popular, so that's bad.
00:38:58 ◼ ► But the upside is that Apple tends not to, like they tend to make applications like this and sort of, you know, call it good after it has basic functionality.
00:39:10 ◼ ► Like they're not relentlessly year after year improving their measurement application that they offer for free, right?
00:39:16 ◼ ► And so by offering this application, it could be that Apple makes a larger portion of the population aware that measurement apps are a thing and that it leads more people to your application, which is like the pro version of a measurement app that does more fancy things that Apple is never going to implement.
00:39:33 ◼ ► And all of a sudden you have a bunch of new customers who previously didn't even know you or measurement apps existed at all, but find themselves hungry for a better one once they reach the limits of the Apple one.
00:39:42 ◼ ► I don't know what is, which one of those is the case for measurement applications, but I thought it was interesting that I didn't hear pretty much any outcry from Apple deciding to offer a free application that does things that a bunch of store apps already do.
00:39:59 ◼ ► And I think it may be because people are, you know, recognize the potential upside more than they used to now. We'll wait two years and see if those measurement applications that were previously selling for 99 cents are all dead or have gone to free with in-app gambling or something.
00:40:13 ◼ ► Measure is included on the phone. I'm using my iPhone 7 right now. And I don't know how well this is really working, but that's okay. It's a dark room.
00:40:22 ◼ ► I've tried it a couple times and it has failed pretty significantly. Like they said last year when they introduced ARKit, they said that measurements would be roughly within 5% accuracy.
00:40:33 ◼ ► The ones I've taken so far with the measure app have been like 30% off. So maybe I'm doing it wrong or something, but I would take any measurement with it as a novelty and not as an actual useful bit of information.
00:40:46 ◼ ► That's pretty cool. So I'm measuring my Magic Keyboard and it snaps with haptics when you're hitting what it thinks is a corner. That's very neat.
00:41:06 ◼ ► Even though it isn't the perfect Casey hair, but I think it's the closest of what we have.
00:41:10 ◼ ► Jelly's critique of yours, which he probably didn't want me to share with you, but hey, whatever, is that my hair is too light and my eyes are too round, according to Jelly.
00:41:19 ◼ ► I did lighten your hair from the default. Because I'm basing it mostly on your avatar picture because that's what I'm staring at right now and it's easier to look at that than to remember what you look like.
00:41:41 ◼ ► You know what's funny? In the, whatever we do in this, like five years of this show, I don't think I've ever turned on my camera while recording this show.
00:41:54 ◼ ► I am wearing my best white t-shirt, as you said. Look at us. We're looking at each other. This is a whole new world.
00:42:24 ◼ ► My own customer's sat on my own mispronunciation is Blowaway, I gotta tell you. Now beating that joke to death.
00:42:30 ◼ ► Anyway, multiple faces in iOS 12 face ID. There is an alternative appearance option for face ID and iOS 12.
00:42:41 ◼ ► I have not yet tried this myself. I have heard reports that other people have been able to set this up for a spouse or something like that.
00:42:51 ◼ ► Oh man, I don't want to get this wrong, and I don't recall the head covering. What's the name of the head covering?
00:43:00 ◼ ► For people that have... well, I shouldn't say have to, that choose to use Hijab's... I hope I pronounced that right, I'm so sorry.
00:43:23 ◼ ► But you bet that as soon as I get this, I'm going to try to set this up for Erin and vice versa, because I have no particular reason why I wouldn't want her to be able to unlock my phone.
00:43:33 ◼ ► I know not everyone is like that, and that's fine. But for me, I don't think she even really cares.
00:43:38 ◼ ► For me, it's easier if I'm driving or something, I just hand her my phone and say, "Hey, can you send a text to Marco or John about blah, blah, blah."
00:43:56 ◼ ► First of all, it's interesting to me that the option in the settings says, "Set up an alternative appearance."
00:44:06 ◼ ► Yeah, sometimes I have an alternative appearance. As far as face ID is concerned, I look different enough that it's confused, and I want to set up an alternative appearance for myself.
00:44:14 ◼ ► But when they phrased it that way, I was like, "Are they trying to discourage the idea of letting your spouse open it?"
00:44:31 ◼ ► They're like, "Oh, I want my spouse to be able to do it. I don't want to set up an alternative appearance for myself."
00:44:45 ◼ ► It works just fine. Now, here's the thing about it. Once you set it up, the only way that we were able to determine in the brief two seconds that we were looking at this to,
00:44:55 ◼ ► "We should delete my face off your phone so I can't open up your phone and steal all TechCrunch's secrets," or whatever, is to reset face ID.
00:45:04 ◼ ► It's not like touch ID where you see the individual fingers and you can delete the individual fingers.
00:45:08 ◼ ► The option after that is to reset face ID. And I was wondering when the iPhone X first came out, can they not support more than one face?
00:45:19 ◼ ► Obviously, it wasn't a storage issue because they didn't add more storage to the phone by putting iOS 12 on it.
00:45:27 ◼ ► But it does feel kind of limiting that if you add that second face and want to ditch it, you've got to start completely over with face ID,
00:45:32 ◼ ► especially since that might remove all its learning that it's done about your various appearances.
00:45:40 ◼ ► But anyway, I'm excited to be able to unlock my wife's phone with my face because typing in her very long passcode is tiresome.
00:45:48 ◼ ► Yeah, that's the problem I have. Aaron knows my passcode, but it's something like 10, 15, 20 characters. I don't remember exactly how many.
00:45:57 ◼ ► And that's why it's so nice to have face or touch ID, and that's why it's such a pain with face ID that she can't unlock my phone without typing this obnoxiously long password.
00:46:10 ◼ ► Well, there's another thing that I think we didn't talk about at all on our live show, but it was a major selling feature.
00:46:18 ◼ ► I guess we didn't talk about it because we weren't really surprised by it and didn't feel like there was much to say.
00:46:22 ◼ ► After that live show, I went to the Mojave Dark Mode WWDC sessions, and I just went to them because I just wanted to see cool screenshots and stuff, and I thought, "Well, whatever, this will be a fluff session."
00:46:40 ◼ ► And I love these sessions. They're rare, but there are WWDC sessions where they're not just like, "Here's the APIs. Here's how you use them."
00:46:46 ◼ ► But it's where Apple explains their thinking. Why did we do it the way we did it, right?
00:46:51 ◼ ► That really doesn't have, in most cases, much of a developer impact, but it's like explaining our thinking.
00:46:58 ◼ ► This doesn't influence how you do things, developers, but we want you to understand why we did our things the way we did them.
00:47:04 ◼ ► And sometimes there's a lesson, like user's lesson in your application, but sometimes it's just like we want to explain ourselves.
00:47:09 ◼ ► The people behind it want to explain themselves. They want to show how thoughtful they were.
00:47:12 ◼ ► And the Dark Mode sessions are a good example of that, at least the first one. Maybe the second one is more about how to change your app.
00:47:18 ◼ ► So what did they do that you might not have thought of if you just saw the keynote presentation?
00:47:26 ◼ ► Well, I think as we discussed a couple of times previously, a naive implementation of Dark Mode is a problem,
00:47:37 ◼ ► And if all your windows are black, for instance, how do you do the drop shadow? Does the shadow become light?
00:47:48 ◼ ► How do you deal with having sufficient contrast or showing colors against black versus white?
00:47:55 ◼ ► Having text, you just make the text white, light, and the background dark, but what about colors?
00:48:00 ◼ ► How well do they show up on black? What about transparency, colors with transparency? How do you make that work?
00:48:10 ◼ ► And so, we'll put the link to the session in the show notes. I encourage everyone to watch it.
00:48:15 ◼ ► It's not that long, and it's definitely not particularly technical, but there is a surprising amount of detail that they go into,
00:48:22 ◼ ► and exactly how they made this work. One aspect of it made me think about, and we didn't talk about this much either,
00:48:33 ◼ ► And we were talking about it in terms of OLED, like, oh, if you have black and OLED, it looks great,
00:48:38 ◼ ► because it turns off the pixels and it's true black, right? But Dark Mode on the Mac does not use true black almost anywhere.
00:48:45 ◼ ► So, that advantage of wouldn't Dark Mode look great on an OLED phone because we get true blacks is not really an advantage,
00:48:53 ◼ ► because almost nothing in Dark Mode, at least on the Mac, is true black, for the reasons I stated before,
00:48:58 ◼ ► like that you lose the ability to do any kind of contrast. Now, there's not overlapping windows on iOS,
00:49:02 ◼ ► so maybe it's less of a problem there, maybe they'll still do it, but certainly on the Mac,
00:49:06 ◼ ► you know, although until we get our 8K OLED screen with our Mac Pro next year, the OLED thing is not an issue.
00:49:13 ◼ ► The things that tickled me about how they dealt with this is, as they took pains to point out,
00:49:20 ◼ ► although I think it's a little bit ridiculous people would think this, it's not just an inversion of light mode,
00:49:24 ◼ ► I mean, if anyone has ever used the accessibility feature to literally invert the colors on the Mac screen,
00:49:33 ◼ ► but it's not really like, let's make it look cool, like it looks like a film negative for people who are old enough to remember what that is.
00:49:40 ◼ ► But they made things dark, and everything is kind of a shade of gray, and to make the windows distinguishable,
00:49:47 ◼ ► they made the shadows much darker than they are before, and the dark shadows have a fighting chance to show up against the not-so-dark dark windows,
00:49:54 ◼ ► but they also had to add a little, like, single hairline pixel glow around the perimeter of all the Dark Mode windows,
00:50:01 ◼ ► so you could pick out the edges of the windows against the shadow, not just that shadow against the windows behind it.
00:50:10 ◼ ► If you want your application to be Dark Mode savvy, there is a surprising amount of stuff that you have to do to it.
00:50:15 ◼ ► It's not just flipping a flag and making sure your colors are right, you have to change a lot of things about your app if you really want to make it right.
00:50:20 ◼ ► They even go so far as to say, say you've got a black and white icon in a toolbar, and in Dark Mode,
00:50:25 ◼ ► instead of drawing black text, instead of drawing a black outline of a house, I'll draw a white outline of the house.
00:50:30 ◼ ► And they were like, but you just changed your house that used to be a white house into a black house.
00:50:35 ◼ ► It should still be a white house, so don't just invert it, fill in the field with white in the inverted version,
00:50:41 ◼ ► so it's still a white house on a black background. You can go pretty far down the rabbit hole trying to make your applications look good in Dark Mode.
00:50:51 ◼ ► They've pulled off a pretty amazing feat, which I'm not sure that most app developers would be able to pull off,
00:50:58 ◼ ► of trying to make something look like it's colored but transparent but on top of black.
00:51:04 ◼ ► And we've seen it in the screenshots, but really look at it. Say you had to do that on your own.
00:51:12 ◼ ► Some people are doing a painting or whatever and they think, well, the mountains are gray, and the sky is blue and the trees are green,
00:51:19 ◼ ► so I'm going to mix up some green paint for the trees, and I'll mix up some gray paint for the mountains, and mix up some blue for the sky.
00:51:26 ◼ ► And you just paint everything as its intrinsic color. But that's not what the world looks like.
00:51:32 ◼ ► The trees are actually mostly gray in the distance. They're slightly green, but they're mostly gray,
00:51:37 ◼ ► and the ones in the foreground are a little bit more green. And the mountain isn't actually gray, it's actually blue on one side,
00:51:52 ◼ ► "Oh, I have a black window? I'm going to take red and put it over there. That looks like nothing.
00:51:57 ◼ ► How do I make the red transparent so that the black shows through the red? Do I just make the red darker?"
00:52:03 ◼ ► It's actually a very tricky problem. So take the eyedropper, take a digital color meter, and put it over a highlighted region,
00:52:10 ◼ ► and see what color that actually is, and just marvel at how it looks like a piece of transparent red plastic from a Transformers box in the 80s,
00:52:27 ◼ ► it's really hard to design UIs where a prominent background color that's used often is pure 100% black.
00:52:42 ◼ ► And that's why, if you look at iOS apps that succeed with their true black designs on the iPhone X,
00:52:49 ◼ ► it's typically apps that don't have a lot of depth to their UIs, don't have a lot of layering, where it's single, flat screens.
00:53:07 ◼ ► You think of today's app aesthetic as being still very flat and everything, but it's not.
00:53:18 ◼ ► And so shadows are very commonly used to denote layering, even if it's just as simple as a slide-over sheet, or a popover, or a dialogue box.
00:53:27 ◼ ► There's shadows everywhere, even to do things like to help separate artwork from its background, stuff like that.
00:53:45 ◼ ► They won't work, so it's really hard to find alternatives to those conventions that are understandable and that look good.
00:53:56 ◼ ► I also forgot to mention accent color, which is one of the most fun things that Apple has added since the classic Mac OS days, really.
00:54:09 ◼ ► Because accent colors apply in both. So if you never want to use dark mode, you still get to use accent colors.
00:54:14 ◼ ► And it basically changes the solid color. It's solid blue in High Sierra and many versions before.
00:54:25 ◼ ► You can change that blue to a bunch of different color choices. Purple, pink, orange, even gray.
00:54:31 ◼ ► And that influences everything. The color radio buttons, check boxes, the little arrow thingy that's on the side of pop-up menus, and whole nine yards.
00:54:43 ◼ ► No reason other than just aesthetics. What do you like? What mood are you in? What best matches your desktop background?
00:55:00 ◼ ► And this is one of the few sessions where I was watching it and I got that sort of pang of like, man, if I was doing Mac OS reviews, I would spend...
00:55:08 ◼ ► It would be difficult to constrain myself to one quote-unquote page. One section for this.
00:55:14 ◼ ► I would be doing screenshot after screenshot zoomed in at like the pixel level on every minute detail of how they do it.
00:55:20 ◼ ► So Stephen's got screenshots in his thing as well, but I wish I could click on them and zoom in because I don't see the details of these tiny sizes, Stephen.
00:55:29 ◼ ► I need to zoom in. I need to have lossless pings at native resolution. Anyway, check it out.
00:55:35 ◼ ► So it would be theoretically possible to write a mini review-like post just on this one topic.
00:55:44 ◼ ► I mean, maybe you could write it on some kind of, I don't know, what would you call something like that? Maybe like a web blog or something like that?
00:55:53 ◼ ► If only there was some place, some way that you could publish text and images to the world, but without having to write a 25,000 word review.
00:56:03 ◼ ► That's not what I want to do. Stephen already wrote a blog post about it. Yes, I would have done it slightly differently, but he covered the basis. Plus, this is the WWDC session.
00:56:11 ◼ ► Plus, I have this big ramble, so I figure like I've gotten out of my system, but it would have been fun.
00:56:16 ◼ ► Although, like, I also did think about how would you write a full review of Mojave? Because yes, dark mode is fun and you'd have a big section about it.
00:56:23 ◼ ► And I'd spend a lot of time talking about, you know, Mars Pan stuff eventually, but there's not much there.
00:56:28 ◼ ► But is there enough? You know, my full-fledged OS reviews kind of had a certain number of sections that you expected them to have, and recent Mac OS releases have been not as evenly distributed across the feature surface of the OS, let's say.
00:56:43 ◼ ► Yeah, but you know, that's just self-imposed. If you wanted to write a blog post about just one thing, you could. You're allowed to.
00:57:16 ◼ ► It seems like you're capable of writing, you know, quote only a blog post if it's about something you consider trivial, like bagels or pasta.
00:57:25 ◼ ► I had a blog at Ars Technica, and I ported all those blog things with permission to my Hypercritical.co website.
00:57:32 ◼ ► So if you look, there's a Fatbit section, and you can see many blog posts about Mac OS.
00:57:50 ◼ ► Tell me about Notarized Apps. I mean, the name makes sense, but I don't know. It seems like a very peculiar name to me.
00:57:55 ◼ ► But I guess that there's a different stage of security and secureness to apps in Mac OS Mojave, so tell me about this, John.
00:58:21 ◼ ► The next mode is, I've got to open up this preference so I don't blow this, Security and Privacy.
00:58:34 ◼ ► So Mac App Store is like, you all run applications for the Mac App Store. We know what those are.
00:58:38 ◼ ► And then the And Identified Developers is what Marco's talking about, which is Developer ID, which is you register with Apple, and you get an identity, and you sign your application, but your application is not in the Mac App Store.
00:58:49 ◼ ► And the final setting is Mac App Store Only. The only things that this Mac will run are things from the Mac App Store.
00:58:54 ◼ ► The default setting is the middle one, and there's always a bypass where you can right-click and do open and click through a dialog and get it to open up.
00:59:00 ◼ ► So people have been scared about this for years because they worried that Apple would make a Mac that can only run software that Apple approves.
00:59:07 ◼ ► I mean, nobody wants that because we all want to be able to run whatever the heck software we want on our Macs, but we also appreciate the additional safety of these settings.
00:59:16 ◼ ► In particular, I never change it to the old style anything goes thing because it's so easy to bypass on a case-by-case basis if you leave it on the middle setting.
00:59:24 ◼ ► The middle setting gives you advantages, which is that if there is a malicious developer out there, Apple can revoke that developer's identity, and your Mac will refuse to launch their application.
00:59:34 ◼ ► So if there's some malware that goes out there and Apple detects it, they can revoke this developer's identity, and then everyone else who has that software is protected after that.
00:59:42 ◼ ► So Notarize applications is not really a change to this model. It's just an enhancement.
00:59:55 ◼ ► If they revoke the developer's ID, every application that belongs to that developer is nuke.
00:59:59 ◼ ► So say like some hacker got into a third-party developer's thing and poisoned one of their applications, but all their other applications were fine.
01:00:12 ◼ ► But with Notarized apps, they can kill the one specific application that has the malware inserted into it.
01:00:19 ◼ ► And the way it does this is by communicating with Apple's Notary service on launch and saying, "Hey, I'm application XYZ. Am I allowed to launch?"
01:00:28 ◼ ► Rather than saying, "Hey, I'm an application signed by developer XYZ. Is developer XYZ in good standing, and I'm allowed to launch their applications?"
01:00:36 ◼ ► So this seems like a good change, a good enhancement. I can imagine eventually Notarized applications replacing developer ID applications.
01:00:45 ◼ ► It's basically just an enhancement of developer ID. In both situations, you need to register with Apple.
01:00:50 ◼ ► In both situations, Apple servers are involved in it somehow, if only sending definitions to your computer about what it isn't allowed to run.
01:01:07 ◼ ► Well, you're saying you have to contact Apple service to do the signing, too? Like, is there the Notary on it?
01:01:14 ◼ ► Whereas developer ID, you can just sign it locally without a network connection? Is that a difference?
01:01:17 ◼ ► Yes, but it's a little bit more complex than that. If I'm understanding this correctly, so developer ID, it happens entirely locally.
01:01:26 ◼ ► Once you get your certificate from Apple that you register with, the entire signing process from your version of Xcode to your customer's Macs can happen on your computer.
01:01:36 ◼ ► You can generate the final build and put it on your server or send it to people, and it works and it's verified as you, because it's just a signature and a certificate.
01:01:45 ◼ ► The new one, the Notarized thing, requires the app binaries to be uploaded to Apple servers and requires them to go through something that sounds a lot like the processing step with iTunes Connect, now App Store Connect.
01:02:01 ◼ ► And as iOS developers know, that is not just a simple reading of the file, it's also not very fast.
01:02:09 ◼ ► So there's a couple of problems with this. Number one is that processing step on the iOS, iTunes Connect infrastructure, at least, can take half hour, maybe, on a good day, sometimes longer, sometimes a little bit shorter, but minimum is usually 20 minutes.
01:02:24 ◼ ► And so, it seems to be like you're stuck behind a big queue, so that just slows down development and complicates things. It becomes an asynchronous thing that you have to submit to Apple and then wait, and then download the file from them.
01:02:39 ◼ ► So you can't just have a script that signs a build, publishes it, and you're done. It adds complexity, because you have to wait until this processing step is done that happens sometime, and occasionally gets stuck.
01:02:50 ◼ ► That's just for release builds, though, right? Yes, it is for release builds. But still, that's still an extra step, and it makes something less automatable, it makes something more complicated, and it increases the chances that your release that you want to do might have to be delayed by a couple hours if it gets stuck and you have to make a support ticket, because that actually does happen with the iTunes Connect stuff.
01:03:11 ◼ ► And so, that's one problem. The other problem is, Apple hasn't, I don't think, been incredibly clear on what kind of verification they're going to do. So, for instance, on the iOS one, during that processing step, they're doing all sorts of automated checks on that app binary.
01:03:27 ◼ ► Now, we know the whole purpose of this is to scan for malware. That makes sense, sure, I'm sure they're going to do that, but one thing the iOS one does is also scans for things like private API usage, and will automatically, with no human decision involved, will automatically every time reject an app that uses any private API symbols.
01:03:47 ◼ ► Are they going to do that on the Mac too? For this non-app store distribution method that will soon probably be the only distribution method that works without changing massive defaults? Will they, at some point in the future, require all apps to do this unless you do something crazy like disable SIP?
01:04:06 ◼ ► If you look at how this is today, right now today, as we know it, which I don't think the system's actually running yet, but as you know it today, we know the iOS version just adds delays and makes things asynchronous and makes things occasionally just stop for hours at a time for no reason.
01:04:23 ◼ ► But in the future, this could be used badly. It could be used to actually prevent Mac apps that exist today from being able to use the system at all, which could in the future prevent them from being run either easily or at all.
01:04:40 ◼ ► So for instance, if your app uses a private API, is this system going to automatically reject it, and therefore in a future version of Gatekeeper, your app will just be unsignable? That's kind of crappy, and that's not good for the platform, I would argue.
01:04:56 ◼ ► So there are some red flags here for that, that I hope they don't do it badly like that, but this kind of system now gives them the ability to, and not only as some kind of crazy theoretical thing, but just if it works the way the iOS processing step always has, then it will do this. And I don't love that.
01:05:17 ◼ ► So that's the slippery slope argument that everyone was worried about when Gatekeeper came out. It could just be that the slope is slippery, but everything about macOS development is slow, and it's taking a long time to slip down the slope.
01:05:29 ◼ ► So this is like a decade-long locking down of the Mac. But thus far, they haven't made any moves in that direction. And I think the one that people are really wary of is not so much about how annoying it is to have a signed application, but the ability to run on-signed ones, period.
01:05:45 ◼ ► By making that either extremely difficult or impossible for regular people, that would really change the character of the Mac.
01:05:52 ◼ ► Things like SIP for third-party applications make me think that they don't have a change in philosophy.
01:05:57 ◼ ► Well, first of all, they took great pains to say there are no new guidelines for App Review, which is kind of a non-secret, because we're not talking about App Review, we're talking about developer ID. The rules for the Mac App Store do not change, but this is kind of outside that.
01:06:09 ◼ ► And second, SIP for third-party applications is the reverse. It lets third-party applications use the tools of the OS to lock themselves down in a way that was previously only open to the OS.
01:06:21 ◼ ► So it's third-party applications keeping users out of their business. And I know it's mostly an unrelated feature to this, but it makes me think that they realize that on the Mac, that it would be a bad idea to reject Mac applications that use private APIs.
01:06:39 ◼ ► It's been part of the culture forever, unlike on iOS. And the whole point of this is that they already have something that rejects you for using private APIs. It's called the Mac App Store. This is not that.
01:06:52 ◼ ► I can imagine them changing the default to Mac App Store only if and when they're able to make the Mac App Store get up to snuff again and getting Office and Adobe in there as a step in that direction.
01:07:02 ◼ ► So maybe their goal could be, you know, in three years, let's change the default. But I really hope they never do get rid of the ability to run apps from anywhere.
01:07:12 ◼ ► And I really hope they don't take any of the Mac App Store guidelines and port them down to Notarize, because then what's the point? Then instead of having three options, you really just have two.
01:07:20 ◼ ► And the only difference is in one case, Apple takes 30% of your money and hosts your file for you. I want to clarify before we leave this topic, Apple did actually say explicitly a future version of Mac OS will require developer ID apps to be notarized.
01:07:32 ◼ ► So notarized apps will replace dev ID. In the future, which future OS? Next year? The year after? Who knows? They didn't say, but we'll see.
01:07:42 ◼ ► Oh, it's next year for sure. Let's be realistic here. We're just lucky they didn't do it this year.
01:07:47 ◼ ► Moving on, Safari got some cool stuff. It got tracking prevention. And so tell me about this Facebook example dialogue.
01:07:56 ◼ ► I just thought it was funny, like when they're talking about Safari, all these sorts of security features to show how they prevent websites from dragging you.
01:08:03 ◼ ► They used Facebook as the example of the thing they're stopping from tracking you, which is a little on the nose, but it's good that they're not pulling punches, especially considering how Apple used to in the past.
01:08:15 ◼ ► I think it's all gone now. Have direct integration with Facebook for things like contacts and have like, I think they still let you. Do they still let you have a Facebook account in your like accounts thing?
01:08:25 ◼ ► No, they pulled that all out last year. Yeah. So anyway, Apple has spent a few years with sort of most favored nation status given to like Facebook and Twitter and a bunch of services that we're not familiar with because they exist in China.
01:08:41 ◼ ► And they seem to be moving away from that and saying, you know what, get out of our messages service, Yahoo, AIM, iZQ, get out of our system dialog box, Facebook.
01:08:51 ◼ ► You're not allowed to use our contact data. Just, you know, going back on all that stuff and now really taking a very aggressive stance with Safari at doing whatever they possibly can to thwart websites tracking you.
01:09:06 ◼ ► Right. So one avenue of doing this, they already did this in what the, in High Sierra's version of Safari, where they try to detect when a cookie is being used to track you across websites and periodically delete it to try to prevent you from being tracked across websites.
01:09:26 ◼ ► Like they basically make their web browser broken. It's supposed to say, hey, store this cookie in on my expiration time. And Safari tries to say that cookie doesn't look legit. Like it's not a cookie.
01:09:36 ◼ ► The domain for that cookie seems too broad or I see it being read by web, by multiple websites or it's being read by a little bug on a page. And I don't like that.
01:09:46 ◼ ► So I let you have the cookie and I let you set it. But every once in a while, I'm going to delete it just just to fuzz things up to make it harder to track these people.
01:09:53 ◼ ► Now they're taking it even farther and looking at all the things that the websites do that don't use, you know, the most obvious thing, which is just cookies or other local storage to track you.
01:10:03 ◼ ► Lots of websites do stuff where even if you run kind of an incognito mode or constantly clear cookies or whatever, they use JavaScript to access attributes of you, of your web browser.
01:10:15 ◼ ► Things like what fonts do you have installed, what configuration do you have installed, what's the resolution of your screen, you know, all sorts of stuff that you wouldn't think has anything to do with you.
01:10:25 ◼ ► But just like but if they combine seven or eight of those things, they can come up with what they call fingerprinting, like a fingerprint of you.
01:10:31 ◼ ► You know, how many people have this exact combination of attributes at this time with this user agent on this device with this thing?
01:10:39 ◼ ► And they can use that fingerprint to track you across websites. And so now Safari is going to lie to websites about exactly all that stuff.
01:10:47 ◼ ► It's going to lie about what fonts you have installed. It's going to lie about what plugins you have installed. It's going to lie about your configuration.
01:10:52 ◼ ► It's going to make you seem generic and make all Safari's users look like they have the same fonts installed, the same plugins, the same configuration, the same screen size, stuff like that.
01:11:02 ◼ ► Which is, you know, if you got back in time 20 years and said, you know, soon web browsers will have the ability to tell what, you know, all these attributes of your system, like, wow, I could do such interesting things with that and say, yeah, but browsers are going to lie and tell you fake information because if they don't, people will track you and show you the same ad across a million different websites.
01:11:23 ◼ ► They're also getting rid of all the legacy plugins that could do all sorts of nasty things to your browser. They've, you know, they've been deprecating those for years now. Finally, they're going to go away.
01:11:32 ◼ ► Unfortunately, they also got rid of their own legacy plugins. Safari extensions they introduced many years ago.
01:11:38 ◼ ► They're not going away entirely, but the only way, the only ones you're allowed to use are the ones from Apple's App Store, which means that my beloved reload button, the most sophisticated Safari extension ever created, which reloads your web page,
01:11:50 ◼ ► is breaking in Mojave because I can't put it on the Apple's App Store for extensions. I used to be on their little App Store for extensions, like when the extensions first came out.
01:12:03 ◼ ► And then later they changed it around and you had to sign a certificate, which I did. And then later they had like a separate store for it. And they said, if you want your extension to keep showing up, submit it.
01:12:12 ◼ ► And I submitted it to them and they said, this extension has insufficient functionality, which I can't really blame them because it's kind of true. So my reload button is dead, which is sad.
01:12:21 ◼ ► But more importantly, a bunch of other extensions that I used to use are also dead and I'm kind of annoyed by that. So I'm trying to encourage those developers to get into the Safari extension App Store thingy so I can continue to use our extensions.
01:12:31 ◼ ► If you want to work around this, by the way, I discovered this on Twitter today, you can use Safari Extension Builder to load the extensions and run them. And you just have to type in your admin password, which is kind of scary, but you have to type in your admin password and that will get them to run.
01:12:45 ◼ ► The problem is every time you quit Safari and relaunch it, all your extensions are gone again. So not great, but there's a workaround.
01:12:54 ◼ ► And my final point on this topic is Apple went through all this stuff and it's crowd-pleasing. People are like, I don't want to be tracked by Facebook. I love how you're doing these clever things to thwart people trying to fingerprint me.
01:13:11 ◼ ► But in the end, as people are applauding, I was thinking as a, you know, long-time web developer, Apple somehow got an entire audience full of technical people to applaud for potentially breaking websites.
01:13:22 ◼ ► And not that I'm saying Apple shouldn't do this stuff, but every time Apple does stuff like this, some website somewhere that you're going to use is going to break in some weird way and you're not going to understand.
01:13:31 ◼ ► And it's going to be because either Safari's "intelligent tracking prevention and fingerprinting" are going awry or because they're working exactly the way they're supposed to and this website literally stops functioning when they can't track you.
01:13:44 ◼ ► And both of those things are prone to happen. It's one of the, you know, one of the downsides of running a content blocker or an ad blocker or any of those things that I think we all run in some form or another is that you have to be careful because we all don't want to be tracked, but we're also super annoyed if some website we're using doesn't work.
01:14:00 ◼ ► Especially if it doesn't work in subtle ways that you think might just be a bug with the website and then it takes you like 20 minutes to an hour to realize, oh, it's my content blockers.
01:14:08 ◼ ► And if I reload this page without content bloggers, suddenly it works, which by the way, you can do on iOS by holding the reload button down. I think you can do a Mac OS with a similar thing.
01:14:15 ◼ ► So it's not that hard to do, but it's for me at least it's hard to remember that maybe what's going wrong here and it might not just be that like my cell connection is bad and that's why I'm tapping this button, nothing's happening.
01:14:30 ◼ ► So anyway, good moves by Apple, but I'll miss my reload button and I'm a little bit wary about websites breaking.
01:14:37 ◼ ► Honestly, I'm not that concerned about that. With the intelligent tracking prevention that they did last year, the first version of the system as you described, as far as I could tell, nothing seemed to break from that.
01:14:48 ◼ ► There was never a time in this whole year so far where I've thought, well, better disable that or better switch to Chrome because that must be breaking what I'm doing right now.
01:14:56 ◼ ► So that was a pretty conservative approach, I think. Obviously this year, what they're doing with this is a little more aggressive and honestly, I think that's a good thing.
01:15:05 ◼ ► Ultimately, if you look at the browser landscape, Google, the advertising company that does a lot of this tracking stuff themselves and has zero respect for people's desires not to be tracked, they're not going to do crap for Chrome.
01:15:21 ◼ ► Like Chrome is not going to lead the way on this and the only two browsers that have enough market share to do things like this without having a lot of people just get mad and switch away are probably Safari and Chrome.
01:15:33 ◼ ► And so Apple, I think, is the only major browser vendor that both has the market position to do things like this without the whole web just saying, well, F off.
01:15:45 ◼ ► Fine, our site will break in your browser and it'll work in everyone else's. Apple has the clout to try this and they actually have the motivation to do things like this.
01:15:54 ◼ ► Whereas Google has motivation to do this as well. Oh, no way. Yeah, yeah, listen. I think they've probably already done stuff like this. I just haven't been keeping up with it.
01:16:04 ◼ ► Google's motivation is to kill everybody's tracking except their own. So because they build a web browser, they can build, they can literally build in any Google specific tracking they want like into the web browser.
01:16:17 ◼ ► That's true. And block everything from everybody else. Now they're not going to do that, but by owning the web browser and because they are an advertising company, they can do exactly what Apple's doing and become super aggressive about blocking stuff.
01:16:28 ◼ ► But instead switch all of Google's tracking entirely like literally within the browser's code itself. Like you just have like some tag on the page that says Google Chrome, do your thing.
01:16:39 ◼ ► And Google Chrome totally internally based on the do your things tag will have its own internal tracking that they can update with their auto update mechanism or whatever.
01:16:46 ◼ ► So I kind of think Google is motivated to block every other tracking system except for theirs because they make money in advertising and the degree to which other people's advertising systems are crappier than theirs is good for them.
01:16:58 ◼ ► That's true. Yeah. And honestly, you say they wouldn't do that. I think they totally would do that. The only reason they probably haven't done that yet is maybe antitrust concerns. Although honestly, in this day and age, no one's enforcing that.
01:17:10 ◼ ► And it would break the web. Like if they were super aggressive and it totally broke everybody else's stuff, it would break more than just like it's because they're all using the same tools to do it.
01:17:18 ◼ ► They're using cookies, so you can't totally break cookies. They're using JavaScript. You can't turn off JavaScript. So it's actually very tricky to do, which is why it's hard work.
01:17:25 ◼ ► That's why Apple, you know, again, they did the cautious thing with the tracking prevention. They're ramping it up. It's very easy to accidentally break the web by doing this stuff.
01:17:32 ◼ ► So you actually have to, when they say intelligent tracking prevention, remember there actually is a, not a machine learning, but an intelligence aspect to this where you have to do it very carefully and test a lot.
01:17:42 ◼ ► And you can't just blanket block anything because you will break the web. Ultimately though, I wonder like is quote breaking the web that bad of a thing these days?
01:17:51 ◼ ► You know, we've had a lot, we've had years and years and years, over a decade of browser extensions being commonplace that can do things like block JavaScript on certain pages or block all JavaScript or things like that.
01:18:03 ◼ ► Like we've had like people routinely quote breaking the web for themselves voluntarily for a long time now. I would also argue that today there's more reason than ever to break your web.
01:18:15 ◼ ► Like the web tracking and web ads are so abusive and so just immoral and creepy and sleazy and just bargain basement garbage, shameless, like they're so bad that as time goes on, I feel like the reason to break your web voluntarily for yourself with things like this, not only does the reason go up,
01:18:44 ◼ ► but also I think the downside gets reduced because over time the web has less usage and more alternatives. You know what happens?
01:18:54 ◼ ► Like so, you know, I run a content blocker in Safari. You know what happens if I go to a site that breaks it? I close the tab and I go do something else.
01:19:02 ◼ ► I go read someone else's site that it doesn't break in or I go do something else that isn't browsing the web. Like we have so many options and things to do.
01:19:10 ◼ ► This is why the web is struggling in a lot of ways, but like there's so much competition for everything on the web these days that if the way I like to run things for my own safety, security, and speed breaks your site, my reaction isn't I'm going to disable my blocker.
01:19:30 ◼ ► I think that's the reaction of us on this program and most people listening to it, but people who are not into technology just want their websites to work. And if you try to like, if you install a blocker on their thing and it breaks Facebook in even the most minor way, they will immediately uninstall the blocker.
01:19:46 ◼ ► They won't even, oh, you can whitelist Facebook. Nope, nope, just uninstall. You broke the web for me. Like people just want, they just want their stories.
01:19:52 ◼ ► They just want the two websites they ever go to, Facebook and probably something else, to work all the time, 100% of the time. And if this thing causes any sort of problem, they will immediately delete it.
01:20:02 ◼ ► So I think it's important for us tech nerds to be on the forefront of this because we are the ones who are trying to push this forward. We're the ones who are willing to not go to a website to break stuff to deal with the brokenness.
01:20:13 ◼ ► And that I think is pushing the web and pushing, you know, Apple. Apple is part of that, pushing everything in the right direction. Most normal people, they are not an agent of change. They are merely victims of these things.
01:20:23 ◼ ► So building it into Safari, I think, is a big step because it's not a thing that people can turn off as far as I know. So Apple has to be really careful with it. But it does, it like raises the bar for everybody.
01:20:33 ◼ ► And to be real, it's a cat and mouse game. Apple does this, the advertisers do that, so on and so forth. Same thing with Google. Someone said in the chat that Google Chrome actually does have some blocking already built in for the most annoying kinds of ads.
01:20:45 ◼ ► And for years they've all had pop-up blocking. You guys remember the web when pop-ups were not blocked by web browsers and you had pop-unders and all that other stuff, right?
01:20:53 ◼ ► So every time browser vendors have taken that next step, that has really pushed the web forward. And we have influence by, you know, recommending to everybody, "No, you shouldn't use IE6, you should use Chrome." Right?
01:21:06 ◼ ► What made Chrome become as popular as it is on Windows? Part of it is tech nerds who had heard of Chrome and no one else had forcibly installing it on all their friends' computers and saying, "Use this, don't use IE, it's better." Right?
01:21:19 ◼ ► And I think, you know, we can't forcibly install Safari on people's Windows machines anymore, but I think being enthusiastic about browsers and blockers and stuff like that and evangelizing them to regular people who otherwise wouldn't look at them is help moving this forward as well.
01:21:37 ◼ ► Not sure if we're winning this war, but I'm glad that there are at least combatants on both sides instead of so many other situations in the tech and especially government worlds having combatants only on one side and just victims on the other.
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01:23:30 ◼ ► Let's do some Ask ATP. It starts with Rodrigo Palau who writes, "I love hearing you guys talk about the cutting edge stuff. What do you think are the essential Mac apps for the super novice user?"
01:23:38 ◼ ► I'm not sure how to answer this. I have a lot of things that I consider important for me, but I wouldn't necessarily say that any of them is important for your novice user. The only thing that can come to mind is Alfred, which is my particular launcher of choice.
01:23:57 ◼ ► I think one or both of you guys use Quicksilver. Launch Bar is another popular one. That's on the Mac, right? Or am I making that up?
01:24:05 ◼ ► Other than a launcher, Alfred just does the same stuff that Spotlight does, but in a way that agrees with my head a little better. Other than that, I can't really think of anything. Do you guys, let's start with Marco. Do you have any apps that you would recommend?
01:24:17 ◼ ► I would honestly say that I don't think a launcher is necessary for most people. I would just use Spotlight because by default, I think it even has the command space key that is the standard launcher key.
01:24:27 ◼ ► For me, the best thing for most novices to do on a Mac is to use as many of the built-in apps as possible because Apple is pretty good at making novice apps for common tasks. The built-in calendar is fine. It's not great, but it's fine. Built-in Apple Notes is really good, actually.
01:24:46 ◼ ► There's a couple of rough edges here and there, but for the most part, it's really good. The built-in Reminders is okay. I would say Things is significantly better to be your to-do app if you want a to-do app, but Reminders is okay in the meantime.
01:25:01 ◼ ► All the built-ins, Mail is good, Safari is good, as you were just saying. Just use a bunch of the built-in stuff, I would say. Maybe add things to it, although I think it's probably a little bit expensive for most novices, if I had to guess. Otherwise, yeah, just use Apple's stuff. Use Photos. Use Notes.
01:25:17 ◼ ► It's all really good. Use iCloud to sync and backup your contacts and everything like that. I use most of the stuff myself. It's great. There's a good suggestion from Espressly in the chat to use 1Password. I really like 1Password a lot, and I was kind of late to that game, but I'm very glad I joined that game.
01:25:35 ◼ ► But that being said, I think it's still a little clunky and complicated for novices. I don't know that I would recommend it for novices.
01:25:43 ◼ ► Yeah, I would agree with everything you just said about 1Password. I'll also put in the show notes, I have a link to an article I wrote probably two or three years ago now, 2016, there you go, where I put in basically, it was for myself more than anyone else, but I put in a checklist of all the things that I tend to install.
01:25:59 ◼ ► To be clear, most of this is super nerdy, super duper nerdy, but there may be something on here that you might think is useful. So, as a silly example, like trip mode, which I'd learned about from Jason Snell, if you're on a laptop where you can restrict what has access to the internet connection, say if you're tethering or something like that.
01:26:16 ◼ ► Also fiddly, but also something that may have appeal beyond just the super nerds. So, again, you can take a look through that.
01:26:23 ◼ ► I gotta say, the trip mode, like a lot of weird stuff breaks with trip mode in non-obvious ways because if an app uses some kind of command line thing behind the scenes and that thing isn't whitelisted, then it'll get blocked and random things just won't work. It's kind of weird. For a novice, I'm not sure I would recommend that.
01:26:40 ◼ ► Yeah, it's just something to look at, if nothing else, and you can see a lot of these on this post. John, what do you think?
01:26:46 ◼ ► So, this is asking for not just novice users, but super novice users, and I think my advice to them would be, like, there's probably one sort of main thing you're doing with your Mac, especially if it's a work-related thing.
01:27:01 ◼ ► As far as my work is mostly writing. It's writing or drawing or like, you know, what are you doing with Mac spreadsheets, whatever.
01:27:07 ◼ ► I would say that if you are a super novice user, like Marco said, just stick with the stuff that's built in there. There's a lot of stuff built in that covers most of the bases, but whatever it is that you're doing, there is probably one or two or three popular, powerful Mac applications for doing whatever it is you're doing better than whatever is built in.
01:27:26 ◼ ► So if you're a writer, you could probably use TextEdit and get by with the fine, but depending on the kind of writer you are, if you're like a fiction writer, maybe look at Scrivener or Ulysses, or if you're a coder, you know, look at BB-Edit or some other kind of it, right?
01:27:37 ◼ ► There's some application, if you're an artist, there's some built-in applications for doing some kinds of art, but obviously you look at Photoshop or, you know, Acorn or whatever.
01:27:49 ◼ ► Like in every one of those realms, especially if the realms of the Macs are popular, you have to do a little bit of research. If you're a super novice user, maybe you've never even heard of Acorn, you know, or maybe you've never heard of Scrivener, right?
01:28:00 ◼ ► You know, like you've heard of Microsoft Word. It's like, is that what I can get? Oh, Word, Word is for the Mac. I should just get that. Word may not be the best application for you.
01:28:07 ◼ ► The Mac, what makes the Mac great is there are applications like Ulysses and Scrivener that are not Microsoft Word and are, you know, I would say simpler and more elegant and dedicated to specific use cases.
01:28:20 ◼ ► You should find those applications for the one important thing you're doing with your Mac and everything else, use the standard tools.
01:28:26 ◼ ► And then I would say I was going to offer a launcher as like, and finally, if you ever graduate out of super novice user, maybe the first sort of quote unquote power user thing you might want to look into is find a launcher.
01:28:37 ◼ ► And there's lots of cool ones to choose from, and they're a very simple application that does a few simple things, a little bit better than Spotlight, and it's a good sort of entree into the world of Mac customization and more sophisticated use.
01:28:51 ◼ ► Moving on, Jack Johnson writes, "Do you think Apple could make an Android version of iMessage for cross-platform compatibility? Set aside the question of whether or not they would make it, even if they could, for reasons like platform tie-in and et cetera."
01:29:03 ◼ ► There were rumors a while back that this was already in progress, and I would be surprised if they hadn't at least, you know, kicked the can on this one or kicked the tires, I guess I should say, on this one.
01:29:13 ◼ ► I don't think they're interested in it, because I do think there is tremendous lock-in, but I don't personally see any reason why they wouldn't be able to.
01:29:23 ◼ ► I mean, you could look at the way they treat iMessage on the Mac, and you can kind of like, well, if they could even maintain this on like two OSs, let alone adding another one.
01:29:35 ◼ ► I mean, that being said, obviously Android I think would have probably more of an upside for them if they wanted the most people possible using iMessage, but I think the lock-in thing is really the key here.
01:29:45 ◼ ► iMessage is a great lock-in for iPhones. This has been, I think surveys and business research and things have actually shown this to be the case.
01:29:53 ◼ ► One of the major reasons people stick with iPhones, who might otherwise be a little curious to try Android or something, is because they know they'd become a green bubble friend, and they don't want to be a green bubble friend.
01:30:04 ◼ ► That's a real thing. That's a real major effect. So I can't see Apple being willing to give that up for what benefit.
01:30:14 ◼ ► Basically, I think the answer shouldn't be like, if they could do an Android version. I think the answer is, what would they gain from doing an Android version?
01:30:22 ◼ ► They're not making money on iMessage directly. What would they gain from that? I don't see any answer to that question that would make it worth giving up the massive amount of lock-in that it gives them.
01:30:35 ◼ ► This ties into something I mentioned earlier about messages being Apple's most successful quote-unquote social network, which is, again, not a high bar because they're not particularly good at this.
01:30:46 ◼ ► The question is, could they? Yes, absolutely they could. They've made Windows versions of all sorts of stuff. They have an Android version of Apple Music.
01:30:54 ◼ ► In fact, when I read this question, I was like, wait, do they have an Android version of iMessage? And I realized I was thinking of Apple Music. I think, right? They have Apple Music on Android?
01:31:01 ◼ ► Yeah, because there was Beats Music when they bought it. And unlike many other products where Apple usually cans the Windows versions, they didn't for that, so there is Apple Music for Android.
01:31:11 ◼ ► Anyway, if there ever comes a time where it is in Apple's strategic interest to have a foothold in the social networking space, like say Facebook is on the wane and it is slowly destroyed by our cumulative hatred for it.
01:31:26 ◼ ► Our meaning on this podcast, three people we're going to take down Facebook with our mind. And there's a power vacuum, right?
01:31:35 ◼ ► Apple is like, well, you know, there's WhatsApp and Line and all those other things. And Apple will be like, we're a player there, right? Like maybe we're not as big as WhatsApp or Line, but why aren't we as big?
01:31:46 ◼ ► Like we're, you know, it's been historically, as Marco said, a lock-in is such a harsh word, a differentiating factor for the iPhone, you know, a network effect kind of thing, right?
01:31:56 ◼ ► But at some point the math could switch and say, actually, we have a shot at the brass ring here, there's a gold iPhone, I don't know if we have a shot at the ring, I think it's brass.
01:32:07 ◼ ► Yeah. If we just open this up, we can take iMessage, you know, we can triple the size of it overnight maybe because, you know, like carry the wave of that network effect and say, now suddenly why would Android people sign up for this?
01:32:20 ◼ ► Oh, because they want to be Blue Bubble friends too, like the last gasp of that, the exclusivity, even though you've just eliminated exclusivity, they're still the people who wish they had Blue Bubbles briefly and then, you know, overwhelm the competitors and become the most important text messaging subsystem.
01:32:39 ◼ ► But Apple Pay is an app in there and Apple Pay is the thing they do make money off of, presumably.
01:32:47 ◼ ► So there may come a time in the future where Apple is in Apple's strategic interest to try to like put strap rockets to their one successful social network and see if that can take them to the next level, to make them a player in a space where historically they have not been a player.
01:33:10 ◼ ► It seems that everyone is suddenly talking about streaming console quality games to thin clients.
01:33:21 ◼ ► And you're basically doing like a glorified VNC or something like that where it's just beaming the fully rendered display to your console or your computer or what have you.
01:33:32 ◼ ► And you're interacting with something that is very, very stupid and not very powerful, but it has a very, very good connection to the internet.
01:33:41 ◼ ► So we've gone from plastic disks in cardboard boxes and trucks that you drive your car or whatever to the store and get and bring back home and load.
01:33:53 ◼ ► Actually, before that, we went to plastic disks that you buy and bring home and stick in your console.
01:33:57 ◼ ► And then it copies every single bit of data off of the plastic disk onto your hard drive.
01:34:01 ◼ ► And then it plays off the hard drive, but you have to have the disk in for stupid copy protection reasons.
01:34:19 ◼ ► Just download enough bits for you to start playing the game, like the PlayStation 4 fast start thing.
01:34:25 ◼ ► So it's still not streaming the game. It's still running locally, but it's sending you just enough bits to start the game.
01:34:33 ◼ ► And then the final stage of that, which we've had with OnLive and the various, that company that Sony bought that emulates PS3 games and runs PS3 games remotely.
01:34:47 ◼ ► Run it in a data center somewhere on a much more powerful device and beam it over to you.
01:35:02 ◼ ► Not all, but certain categories of games, the latency imposed by the physical distance and the speed of light.
01:35:07 ◼ ► And, you know, in the US, the crappiness of our internet connections means that certain genres or games are not going to become streaming anytime soon.
01:35:21 ◼ ► Like you would need direct fiber optic connections to a fairly close data center for it to make sense for those genres.
01:35:28 ◼ ► But for every other genre of game, and there are many of them that don't require those kind of, you know, reflexes, it's just an economic question.
01:35:37 ◼ ► Yeah, it's great to be able to sell someone a cheap box that doesn't have a lot of electronics in it.
01:36:00 ◼ ► And depending on how that math works out and how much data center power costs and all that other stuff, it could make sense to do that.
01:36:13 ◼ ► Does it make sense for people who can't afford big gaming PCs and we can get them to rent games?
01:36:22 ◼ ► So I think in the next one or two or three generations, we are still going to be downloading bits and running things locally.
01:36:29 ◼ ► But five generations from now, it seems conceivable to me, especially for like TV connected pucks or TVs themselves.
01:36:52 ◼ ► But I think for the rest of all of our lives listening to this, running games on a local device will still be a thing at the high end anyway.
01:37:42 ◼ ► E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T-Marco-Armin S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-S-C-R-A-Q-S-A-It's accidental
01:38:19 ◼ ► Yeah, so we couldn't talk about it last week because it was kind of a big event, but now
01:38:33 ◼ ► it. So you had this big, long analog episode about it, which was excellent, so obviously
01:38:50 ◼ ► badgering you about it. What made you decide, like, it seemed like in the early part of
01:38:57 ◼ ► this year, right before Michaela was born, it seemed like you were kind of on the fence,
01:39:02 ◼ ► and you were kind of into it during your leave of absence, and then at the end of the leave
01:39:06 ◼ ► of absence, you seemed like you decided, you know what, actually, I don't want to go independent.
01:39:13 ◼ ► Right, and so obviously sometime between that, which was what, like late March or something
01:39:24 ◼ ► Yeah, and I mean, I'm perfectly happy to give the abridged version of analog. I think the
01:39:30 ◼ ► canonical version of this conversation, just like you said, is on analog episode 134, "Running
01:39:34 ◼ ► Toward a Better Future." And I put a blog post up about this, which is kind of the super
01:39:39 ◼ ► succinct version of it, but to answer your question more directly, a few different things
01:39:48 ◼ ► Broke a shoelace. That's a deep cut. I'm proud of you, Jon. I broke a shoelace, and that's
01:39:51 ◼ ► where it all happened. Now, what actually happened was I started arguing with my insurance,
01:39:55 ◼ ► and that was kind of sort of my broken shoelace moment, because it occurred to me—well,
01:40:01 ◼ ► it was two things. I argued with my insurance, and I actually looked at how much we pay for
01:40:11 ◼ ► but not always, your employer will effectively subsidize your health insurance. So they'll
01:40:17 ◼ ► pay a large portion of the cost. And so at around the time that I started thinking, "How
01:40:24 ◼ ► much am I really paying in insurance?" was when we were starting to really get the bills
01:40:28 ◼ ► from Michaela's birth, and the insurance is not very good. In fact, it's pretty bad, and
01:40:44 ◼ ► ways, the thing that I was hanging my hat on for going back to work was, "I need insurance.
01:40:51 ◼ ► I don't want to pay for my own insurance. I don't know if I can pay for my own insurance.
01:40:57 ◼ ► Well, then when you realize that—a few things all at once. You realize, A, your insurance
01:41:19 ◼ ► out there, but it really wasn't that much—but I was able to kind of separate myself from
01:41:23 ◼ ► family, from work, from everything, and just kind of think. It occurred to me like, "You
01:41:28 ◼ ► know that thing that Marco and Aaron and Mike and everyone has been saying? You know, you
01:41:33 ◼ ► could always get another job? You know what? Son of a gun, I could always get another job.
01:42:03 ◼ ► that as just a number and don't think about where that money comes from, it occurred to
01:42:21 ◼ ► me, but it feels not real because it doesn't feel like podcasting can be a real job. And
01:42:28 ◼ ► I don't want to lose sight of the fact that I am—well, all three of us, but me especially—I
01:42:33 ◼ ► am deeply, deeply, deeply lucky and unbelievably privileged to be in the position where the
01:42:41 ◼ ► three of us earn enough money from this podcast and with our extracurriculars that me leaving
01:42:47 ◼ ► a full-time job is something that's even possible, let alone—that I could even consider
01:42:54 ◼ ► it, let alone actually do it. But it occurred to me, and I know this is a hilarious thought
01:42:59 ◼ ► exercise, but this is the thought technologies I needed. If FastText had earned the exact
01:43:06 ◼ ► dollar amount that this and my other extracurriculars have earned over the last couple of years,
01:43:20 ◼ ► it's real. But podcasting, man, that doesn't count, that's not real. But when I realized,
01:43:24 ◼ ► okay, I can always get another job, my insurance today sucks, this is enough money that I should
01:43:30 ◼ ► be able to survive, and then I started doing like the world's biggest number—well, that's
01:43:37 ◼ ► try to figure out, okay, no, really, you know, looking at, you know, the money that we've
01:43:41 ◼ ► earned, is this really something that's possible? It occurred to me, like, this is a thing that
01:43:52 ◼ ► I think I talked on analog, you know, we tend to go out to eat a lot. Now, not so expensive
01:43:55 ◼ ► places to like, places that most of you would be disgusted by, but there are places that
01:44:03 ◼ ► for lunch on the weekends. And that adds up over time, man, you know, like 10, $20 worth
01:44:11 ◼ ► sake of conversation, you know, 20 bucks for lunch every Saturday, that adds up real quick.
01:44:15 ◼ ► So silly things like that, actually, Mean Mean is mentioning cookout in the chat, that's
01:44:38 ◼ ► is that, you know, there may have to be some lifestyle changes. And I'm not talking dramatic
01:44:41 ◼ ► lifestyle changes, but some lifestyle changes because, you know, we've been lucky enough
01:44:45 ◼ ► that we haven't had to nickel and dime ourselves. And to be fair, you know, we don't spend
01:44:59 ◼ ► so I don't have one. Our TV, the biggest TV in our house is 40 inches, 1080p. And I have
01:45:04 ◼ ► no desire to upgrade it. Oh, that's not it. And I get a, okay, infinite money, sure, I'd
01:45:08 ◼ ► upgrade it. But sitting here now, it's fine. I'm okay with it. I'm only potentially buying
01:45:18 ◼ ► you know, you put all this together and, you know, we've been treating the extracurricular
01:45:22 ◼ ► money as, you know, money that's been mostly funneled directly into savings. So we have
01:45:27 ◼ ► enough in the bank that we can survive for a while if everything just disappeared tomorrow.
01:45:39 ◼ ► want? In talking with Aaron especially about it, it occurred to me, and again, like I had
01:45:51 ◼ ► from the kids in Austin for Mike's bachelor party. It occurred to me that, you know, Declan
01:45:59 ◼ ► is three and a half and because of when his birthday is, he's probably gonna go to kindergarten
01:46:17 ◼ ► of ways, you could make a very good argument, especially John, I suspect because, you know,
01:46:30 ◼ ► know, they're barely humans for a long time, you know. I wouldn't make that argument. Okay,
01:46:34 ◼ ► fair. But, you know, I'm saying, you know, you could make it, one could make an argument
01:46:39 ◼ ► that this is a silly time to be home. But the way I look at it is, you know, from starting
01:46:43 ◼ ► from five or six years old until they're gone, they're gonna be in school all day. You know,
01:46:50 ◼ ► So now seems to be the time. It seems to be the time financially. It seems to be the time
01:46:56 ◼ ► familial. Why wouldn't I try this? And more than anything else, if I don't try this, I'm
01:47:07 ◼ ► never gonna know. And if I never know, I will regret it. I might regret this later. Maybe.
01:47:14 ◼ ► I doubt it, but maybe. But at least I'll know that I tried. At least I'll know that I did
01:47:25 ◼ ► and lit it on fire and said, you know what, I'm good, thanks. But I did it because I wanted
01:47:29 ◼ ► to be with my family. And I didn't know that I had the gumption, for lack of a better word,
01:47:35 ◼ ► to do that. But the Monday before, I'm sorry, the Tuesday before WWDC, because what was the
01:47:41 ◼ ► holiday that Monday? It doesn't really matter. There's a holiday that Monday. Yeah, thank
01:47:45 ◼ ► you Memorial Day. So I didn't do it Monday. I did it Tuesday. But I said to my boss, look,
01:47:57 ◼ ► Monday in July, which is the second, is going to be my last day. So after that, I'm gonna
01:48:04 ◼ ► be done. He took that as well as can reasonably be hoped. But he was not particularly overjoyed
01:48:25 ◼ ► a independent worker for hopefully as hopefully as little as two and a half, three, I guess
01:48:32 ◼ ► two and a half years until Declan's in kindergarten. That's like my goal. The six or so years or
01:48:37 ◼ ► five and a half years, whatever until Michaela's in kindergarten. That's my stretch goal. And
01:48:40 ◼ ► my holy cow of one the lottery goal is just I never have a boss again. Well, that's awesome.
01:48:54 ◼ ► your house? Did Casper sponsor this episode? No, they didn't. But if you have any extra
01:48:58 ◼ ► bedrooms in your house, how many years do you have in your family? Let me tell you about
01:49:00 ◼ ► aftershocks. They all need a pair of aftershocks. You should check them out. But no, the plan
01:49:22 ◼ ► Swift. And you know, if 1099 work that I find is interesting and is not 40 hours a week
01:49:28 ◼ ► comes my way, 1099 being independent consulting if you're not American. If 1099 work comes
01:49:33 ◼ ► my way that I find interesting and does not take up an entire week, then sweet. But Aaron
01:49:47 ◼ ► hours a week. Because if I'm going to be elsewhere for 40 hours a week, I might as well just
01:49:50 ◼ ► keep a regular job and get the free, well, not free, but you know what I mean, free healthcare.
01:49:54 ◼ ► And so the idea is to be around the family at least, you know, roughly half of the work
01:50:03 ◼ ► these things that I've been, you know, kind of playing with but haven't been able to really
01:50:12 ◼ ► I've been very proud of them, but I haven't been able to work on them as much as I want
01:50:19 ◼ ► or as quickly as I want or with the dedication that I want, because I have a job and I have
01:50:27 ◼ ► has a negative connotation, but we've negotiated that I'll work, you know, roughly half a work
01:50:36 ◼ ► things for ATP I'd like to do, which I haven't talked to you guys about, which I should have
01:50:38 ◼ ► last week. Nothing bad, you know, some helpful things for ATP I'd like to do. I can start
01:50:49 ◼ ► Well, and so, so one thing I want to place in your head, because occasionally that works,
01:50:55 ◼ ► is I don't mean it to be insulting. I like, I'm not saying you're dumb, I'm saying like,
01:51:08 ◼ ► Oh, it's so good. The problem with Inception is, the sidebar, the problem with Inception
01:51:17 ◼ ► two after it came out and I was like, oh God, this is going to be such a chore because everyone,
01:51:23 ◼ ► Who said Avatar was amazing? I agree with you about people overhyping Inception. I don't
01:51:27 ◼ ► think Avatar was overhyped. I think everyone kind of sneered at Avatar because it was Dances
01:51:39 ◼ ► the damn hype. I loved that movie. I freaking loved that movie. But anyway, so you're trying
01:51:46 ◼ ► So what I'm going to incept you with, I think, if I understand the reference correctly,
01:51:50 ◼ ► which I don't, is one thing that is hard to fight against in American culture especially,
01:52:06 ◼ ► going to be weighing on your mind. So you mentioned a few minutes ago that leaving your
01:52:11 ◼ ► job unnecessarily feels like setting a bag of future money on fire. Like I'm just going
01:52:20 ◼ ► Tumblr, even though my side hustle was doing well enough that I could leave, I thought,
01:52:27 ◼ ► why would I give up a job? That's just giving up money. And part of that is because many
01:52:34 ◼ ► of us, myself included, come from modest backgrounds where why the heck would you give up money?
01:52:40 ◼ ► We didn't come from a place that was privileged enough that giving up money would be something
01:52:52 ◼ ► culture too, of why would you turn down money? Another big part of it is this kind of guilt
01:53:06 ◼ ► ever not work a full work week? That is slacking off or something or makes you less of a person.
01:53:21 ◼ ► to look at a different concept or a different mindset on this, which is, do you have enough?
01:53:31 ◼ ► Oh no, we are not. This is real hard for us. A lot of other cultures have a much more healthy
01:53:37 ◼ ► relationship with the idea of having enough. We are all in an amazing position that this
01:53:44 ◼ ► show makes enough money that it provides all of us with enough. We could just do this show.
01:54:19 ◼ ► really enjoy consulting work very much. I don't think you would enjoy hourly, 1099 basis.
01:54:26 ◼ ► And the way you're talking about it, it sounds like you want to jump into that because you
01:54:36 ◼ ► I would actually say, honestly, if you don't need to, which I know you don't, don't. Why
01:54:47 ◼ ► you, as a programmer, had the itch to program a lot and didn't have your own projects to
01:54:57 ◼ ► projects that you want to do, that you are doing. So I don't think you need to do that.
01:55:03 ◼ ► We are in incredibly fortunate positions here by having this income from this show with
01:55:09 ◼ ► relatively low hourly weekly loads, workloads for it, that you should just enjoy this. Because
01:55:17 ◼ ► you don't need to do anything else. You don't need to fill your week with 20 hours of consulting
01:55:22 ◼ ► work just because you feel obligated to fill that time. You have enough with this right
01:55:28 ◼ ► here. Literally everything else you do could just be a fun hobby or a future, kind of betting
01:55:35 ◼ ► on a possible future but that has no direct income right now. Everything else you do could
01:55:54 ◼ ► And that's fine. Literally everything else you do could be that and you'd still be fine
01:56:01 ◼ ► Yeah. We're actually saying the same thing. I brought up the consulting earlier. I feel
01:56:06 ◼ ► like you're mostly right. I don't think that I would take consulting work if it was offered
01:56:13 ◼ ► unless it was something that I genuinely thought was interesting and novel. And even if I took
01:56:17 ◼ ► it, it would only be for like a day or two a week because if you think about it, I want
01:56:29 ◼ ► is 16 hours. Suddenly I have four hours. Not to say this is not fungible but you know what
01:56:33 ◼ ► I mean? If I stick with my "budget", if I do two days of consulting a week, I've already
01:56:38 ◼ ► blown through my budget of hours that Aaron and I have agreed upon. And so what you said
01:56:47 ◼ ► going to do? A) I could just do ATP and nothing else. B) I don't think I have the disposition
01:56:52 ◼ ► to do it though. And C) I really, even though sitting here today, knock on my glass desk
01:56:58 ◼ ► because I have no wood nearby, I see no particular end point for the three of us and for this
01:57:07 ◼ ► just like you said. So what I'm, what this, these hours that I want to spend doing other
01:57:18 ◼ ► sticks so that if one of us decides tomorrow, "You know what? I'm done." Then I have something
01:57:30 ◼ ► I don't know if any of these things will stick. Like you look at YouTube today and to make
01:57:33 ◼ ► money on YouTube is damn near impossible. So is Casey on Cars going to stick? Eh, probably
01:57:37 ◼ ► not. But does it make me happy and do I find it fun? Abso-frickin'-lutely. So I'm going
01:57:55 ◼ ► if Casey on Cars doesn't stick, it might lead you into something that does. So it's still
01:58:05 ◼ ► exactly right. And we're saying the same thing. And so the idea is to enjoy the time that
01:58:12 ◼ ► I and the three of us and Mike and the other extracurriculars I have, enjoy the time that
01:58:24 ◼ ► complacent and try to get myself positioned such that I can continue on even if this went
01:58:31 ◼ ► away or analog went away. Or what if advertising just dries up in the podcast world tomorrow?
01:58:42 ◼ ► other plan. The other plan would be we would ask everybody to give us like 10 bucks a month
01:58:50 ◼ ► to be able to, I want to diversify basically and I don't want to have all my chips in this
01:58:54 ◼ ► basket. And so that's the plan. And candidly, the ideas I have, the Casey on Cars is almost
01:59:12 ◼ ► doing something with regard to RX Swift. And that's a stretch. Like it's possible. I think
01:59:17 ◼ ► I can see a future in which that makes money, but it's a stretch. And so I figure I'll try
01:59:21 ◼ ► all three of these. And if I come up with a different idea, I'll try that idea and we'll
01:59:46 ◼ ► by using this time wisely, then that's what I want to do. Now, John, you've been quiet.
01:59:55 ◼ ► This is the short version of the analog. That was like, that was like an hour, hour and
02:00:10 ◼ ► a good summary of analog. Sorry. Sorry, dad. Chief repeater and chief repeater. Well, in
02:00:18 ◼ ► my defense, I recorded that before WWDC. Like a lot has happened since then. I couldn't
02:00:35 ◼ ► are you going to do a Patreon or are you going to do, you know, some sort of like membership
02:00:39 ◼ ► to your website sitting here now? No, I don't plan on that. I'm not saying that is my forever
02:00:56 ◼ ► for now, just put it aside for me, I guess, or buy, buy yourself some aftershocks, start
02:01:02 ◼ ► a savings account, special Casey savings account that your bank knows about them. Just exactly.
02:01:40 ◼ ► all of us have shows on relay. So if you want to give us more money individually or as a
02:01:52 ◼ ► this podcast that you're listening to now and buy things from them with our code. That's
02:01:56 ◼ ► how you support all of us. That's what I said. And ultimately, you know, if the time comes
02:02:01 ◼ ► when sponsorship no longer makes financial sense for whatever market forces or whatever
02:02:11 ◼ ► of money per month, I forget what our calculation was like to match, you know, enough to make
02:02:17 ◼ ► Casey, you know, not go out of business as himself. I think we'd have to have like, was
02:02:24 ◼ ► it five percent of people paying five dollars a month was added or was it was that half?
02:02:28 ◼ ► It was worse than that. You've done the math wrong. It was even more grim. Yeah, it was
02:02:35 ◼ ► enough that it's like, oh, that's, that's rougher and less likely. But if the time comes
02:02:40 ◼ ► when, you know, that we would need to do something like that, you know, apply the money then.
02:02:45 ◼ ► If you haven't given it to all of our sponsors yet. Exactly, exactly. But yeah, but I mean,
02:02:50 ◼ ► and I said this on analog and I will briefly repeat myself, sorry, John, and say it here.
02:02:54 ◼ ► You know, it is an unbelievable privilege to record this show with you guys and to record
02:03:08 ◼ ► best by being home with them for this window of time. And it is, and if it would not be
02:03:17 ◼ ► the words I'm saying right now. So to every listener that has ever bought a t-shirt, that
02:03:30 ◼ ► very much. And from the bottom of my heart, and I think I speak for the other guys, but
02:03:33 ◼ ► from the bottom of my heart, I deeply, deeply appreciate it because it literally is paying