529: The Cycles of Marco

35:21Some of which have USB ports. Some of us just have SD card slots. I believe the ones of those that use the lightning port, I think do already work on the iPhone, but I'm not positive about that. I don't have one here to test and I wasn't going to buy one a few months before the USB-C iPhone comes out. So I could be wrong on that. But anyway, that's an option maybe to go directly to a phone. I know it at least works on iPads and definitely works on Macs. So that's the way to go if you want to transfer photos to your cool Apple hardware is just dump them onto the computer directly with the card or the cable also got a wonderful uh tip my my complaint about the x100v was i was having trouble getting the autofocus to really nail the focus like especially on eyes it would sometimes like you know focus on the like the tip of the eyelashes instead of the actual you know eye surface stuff like that like it was kind of like slightly missing focus a lot um and i was having trouble getting sharp shots um so anonymous wrote in to say that the x100v ships with the release slash focus priority setting on shutter meaning it will prioritize taking a picture over actually getting the right focus changing it to focus improve my hit rate noticeably and seems to have little impact on shutter lag in most situations so to explain this basically almost every modern camera um in at least in default mode usually if you if you push the shutter button but the lens has not focused yet usually it will wait until it locks on focus and then take the picture.

36:48So that's shutter lag. And sometimes it's really frustrating if you're maybe in the dark and the camera's having trouble focusing and you're like, just push it, just take it. And the camera's going, going back and forth and can't really focus on something. So oftentimes this feature, you know, in more pro modes or more pro models will be set to shutter priority, which means as soon as you hit the shutter button all the way down, just take the picture, regardless of whether the autofocus engine thinks it has focus or not. So the X100V ships in that mode by default, where it just takes the picture, even if it's not focused all the way.

37:20So I changed this, the way Anonymous said, to change it to focus priority, so the former where it waits for focus, even if it introduces some lag, before it actually takes the picture. And I agree, it seems to have improved the hit rate, and it does not seem to introduce noticeable lag in any situation I've encountered so far. Are you not a fan of back button focusing, which would also solve this problem for you like the af on button on cannons and stuff like that like we're like you hit the you hit the button there without because normally i just half press the shutter and then go all right so so most people phones uh phones cameras uh big cameras ship uh so that if you press the shutter button halfway down it will start focusing and then if you press the rest of the way down it will take the picture and at that point everything you just described takes place it says should i really take the picture or should i wait for the focusing motor to finish getting to where i know it's supposed to focus and so on and so forth right the other technique is often called back button focusing which means you assign some button on the back of your uh camera to be the please do autofocus now button and then the shutter button is and you turn off the feature that makes the the camera try to focus when you push the shutter button halfway down so you separate the two functions so you do your decide when you want your camera to do autofocusing with the back button and then once you're happy with the focus you can press the shutter button you can do both of them at the same time and then you would still have the same situation where should i wait for the motor or whatever but you can also do your focus and then once you're happy yes you've got the focus to my satisfaction and you know the the thing isn't moving the person isn't moving or whatever then when you press the shutter button it's going to take it immediately because no part of pressing the shutter button tells it to do focus again focusing is separated from shutter i am not a big fan of this but i see i see the situations where it could be advantageous and some people this is the only way that you the camera and they consider it broken to use the other way but i feel like it's just kind of a muscle memory type thing a lot of the times but you see the advantage is like if you get it focused on somebody and they're not moving very often with cameras with modern cameras being so good at focusing on stuff like someone in the background will move and turn their head towards the camera and the camera be like oh a pair of eyes i'm totally gonna focus on that it's like no no focus on the ear of the person i just focused on like you know if you get the focus the way you want and the person you focus on turns their head away so now they're just ear is facing you but you're happy with that focal plane you don't want it to jump to the person in the background whose two eyes just faced that you want it to stay where you left it and so in that situation you do back button focusing to get the focus you want so you get perfect eye focus on that person and even if they turn their head slightly you don't want it to pick some other subjects so then use the shutter button for it so if you got used to that technique of focusing i think that will that would essentially do the same thing as you saying shutter priority because you know in that case the shutter never activates autofocus it just fires the shutter yeah i never shot that style but you know it's a lot of people do so there's there's probably some i probably should be using that style i think i it's it's more cumbersome a lot of the time but and especially if you forget that you've you've you previously selected this focal plane and i'm never going to change it unless you hit the back button again and you think oh i you know because you get used to just using the half the other way to to solve this problem with lag or maybe the focus is to get a sony camera or some other camera that has insanely good really really fast uh really smart focus selection that's just been getting better and better over time and to be fair all camera manufacturers have been getting in better and better sony used to have a huge lead and now it just has a smaller lead but sony still is a really good focusing system where it will like the reason you don't notice it on sony's is it's so fast first of all sony lenses are very fast to physically focus and second the sony like image detection system is really good at finding the thing you want to focus on and tracking it and not getting distracted when something moves.

41:05So that's one of the advantages of the Sony cameras, but other ones have been catching up. And these type of settings are a good way to sort of shore up the minor inefficiencies as compared to the best of the best. Yeah. And in all fairness, as much as I love the Fuji color processing, they are not close to class leading with like autofocus sophistication. That is one area where they are, I think, behind the competitors and i think all the reviews agree with that um so i have noticed that it is not as smart as sony's autofocus but it's smart enough for me and i've i'm i'm loving the pictures that it's getting it's like if i was a sports photographer i would definitely not use fuji but i would uh but you know for taking pictures that i like a lot uh in other situations it's it's proving to be fantastic one thing i noticed as i was you know taking pictures with these cameras for the first time like you know since using an iphone i missed the iphone hdr photography and i don't mean the um so so cameras have caught up in a number of ways so since i since i you know the previous last camera i bought was the um sony a7r3 which is at this point probably something like five years old in that ballpark and what cameras have gotten really good at eating away some of the iPhone's advantages in the meantime.

42:24Not all of them. And they never will get all of them, but some of them. And one of the things is, you know, the iPhones have always been really, not always, but modern iPhones have always been really good at dealing with high dynamic range scenes. Scenes where you have something very bright, like maybe something, you know, water reflecting the sun or the actual sun or the moon or something, you know, in your shot. Something very bright, but you still want to have detail in the darker shadow areas. So, you know, you have to have a lot of dynamic range in the image. And modern camera sensors in big cameras can capture that dynamic range very well.

42:57Modern camera sensors have incredible dynamic range, but usually where they lacked is in processing down that dynamic range to a useful photo that you would actually want and look good without losing all the details in the highlights or the shadows. And usually you had to shoot raw to really make the most of that. And I am so done shooting raw. The pictures are so huge, and they break in everything and i i'm just not and that's that's for a more editing focused workflow than what i ever want yeah you might be back to raw eventually but but i i think i think uh so this is relevant to a link that we'll put in the show notes from uh petapixel that is uh actually from today no two days ago uh where the headline is gen z discovers modern digital cameras are better than iphones and it shows a bunch of pictures on like tiktok where they're like look uh you know this person was sitting on the beach and we want to take a picture of them here's what it looks like on the iphone here's what looks like on a real camera and there's situations in which the iphone sensor is too small to gather enough light and the real camera like is able to gather enough light to correctly expose the person right but a lot of these pictures like you know look how look how dark everything is in the iphone i think they're terrible examples because what you just said is so true what the where the iphone excels it's not being like good low light photography and that gathers lots of light on the sensor and can sort of see in the dark no that's not why the iphone photos come out well they come out well because it does the high dynamic like HDR photos, meaning, and we're setting aside what you're going to get to eventually, right, with just the EDR stuff.

44:22But like when the iPhone does high dynamic range, it does it in the same way that big cameras can do it, but it does it without involving the user at all. You just press the shutter button on the iPhone. And what the iPhone does, it's not like, oh, it processes its dynamic range better. It takes multiple exposures, right? It takes one underexposed. It takes one overexposed. I don't know how many exposures it takes. It takes at least two, maybe more. and it combines them so it's not a single photo because a single photo has crap dynamic range on a on a sensor that's like the size of the the end of an eraser on a pencil right it's going through this tiny little lens with this tiny little it's just there's not a lot of light there so why do the iphone cameras actually look better where is the real camera because it takes multiple exposures and combines them if you take a single exposure with a full-frame camera in a very challenging lighting situation like a person with a bright sunset behind them you can choose to expose so the sunset is not blown out and then the person is all dark you can choose to expose the person so their skin tone looks good and then the sky behind them is blown out with any single exposure you can try to get as much you know big camera sensors have a lot of dynamic range you can try to get a compromise between them but in very challenging situation where there's a really bright light behind somebody you can't have both but big cameras can also take multiple exposures and try to combine them.

45:43They just, there's so much worse at it than phones, right? Because first of all, there's the contract when you're using a big camera, which is you press the shutter button, we do a single exposure. Oh, do you want to do exposure bracketing? Well, that's a setting and you get to do it. And maybe you want to use electronic shutter or maybe we're going to take multiple ones and I hope you don't shake the camera because our software is not very good at aligning the pictures and combining them. The iPhone totally wins there. So I feel like this Petapixel article is showing a bunch of photos where I'm like, the iPhone probably would do better here unless you're in a situation that is within the realm of the dynamic range of a real camera that you don't need if you have a big sensor and a real camera you don't need to do multiple exposures whereas the iphone does need to do multiple exposures and it ends up looking worse and i guess that's what their examples are here but i think you know you've said in the past mark with like uh you know iphones are better at low light and then we get all this feedback saying are you crazy iphones aren't better at low light they have a tiny sensor they can't gather any light or whatever and it's like no they're not better physically speaking in terms of photons but they're better because they take you know one they take two or more exposures i honestly don't know how many they take and they find a way to combine them even if your hand is shaking even if you know like they the processing of the multiple exposures that they take exposing for the sky exposing for the person's face exposing for this and then they do all this processing and they mush it up into this thing that they call a photo which is a combination of multiple photos that's what they're better at and big cameras can do that but it's a setting you have to know how to use it and they're still not as good in doing the combination of those exposures as Apple is, let alone doing them seamlessly when you just press a single shutter button.

47:12Maybe they'll get there someday, but I do kind of feel like there is that implied contract with the real camera, which is you press that shutter button once, we do one exposure. And if you want something different, you have to ask for it explicitly. Well, and there actually, there is an HDR mode on the X-T5. I gotta see if the X100V has it. But you're talking about multiple exposures or you're talking about, oh, the thing where we add a brightness channel that shows the bright stuff brighter. so there's multiple options so there is the multiple exposure thing you flip a knob over to hdr it's right right at your thumb you hit the shutter and it goes and it takes three pictures and it merges them and you get a jpeg out and it's done um that's and that's you know using using the exposure bracketing you know one dark one light one medium different settings for like you know how much range you want to cover there how much you want to you know crush into the final picture um but then modern cameras also have usually some form of extended dynamic range shooting mode so what this and and the various details of how they do this are you know they vary by manufacturer and everything um some of them will have like dynamic range priority modes but the idea basically is they use a larger range like they capture a larger range than they normally would and then map that to like you know the zero to one color space you know for the jpeg so what ends up happening is it looks you know if you've seen hdr pictures uh online like they can look a little bit odd it like in terms of like the contrast is maybe too low and everything kind of looks almost like a painting like not texture wise but like color wise are you thinking again i feel like we need to distinguish you're talking about hdr with multiple exposures no one exposure all right so then what you're talking about is if you take a photo with your iphone for example of a sunset you may notice that when you view that on your iphone with an hdr screen that the sun looks brighter that's different so this there's three different things all right so i'm talking about like extended dynamic range modes on big cameras uh where they they kind of they use the range they have differently they like they map it differently to capture more range at the expense of usually contrast um and and possibly noise because it's kind of like they kind of like shoot at a higher iso than they would need to and then kind of capture the i don't know the details of how it works but speaking of details i should find this show notes in a future show i actually had it in the notes i learned something recently we're watching a video about sony cameras iso in particular you probably already knew this and maybe we even mentioned on a past show but i if we did i totally forgot it that sony's sensors on their cameras have two different capture modes essentially depending on what iso level they're at there's like a low sensitivity one and a high sensitivity one and when you cross an iso threshold which differs from camera to camera it kicks into the other mode which i had no idea about but it explains so much if you look at the test results you can say i can see and on this camera and i saw 400 it switches to the other thing which is you know it's a trade-off between dynamic range and noise and stuff like that but that's it's something that uh they don't sony doesn't really mention because they don't consider it to be a feature that you can count on uh i forget what the the term of art is but their their video cameras do it explicitly and and they only talk about it there because the video cameras are able to be equally good in both of the ranges but it explains a lot if you if you have a sony camera of like why when i was cranking up the iso everything kept looking worse and worse until i crossed the threshold and all of a sudden it got better and then started on a whole new curve it's because these sensors have two different modes it makes sense when you see the underlying stuff i'll try to find it for a future episode or maybe even for this one but it was fascinating and that's that's the type of technical detail that is buried in inside your cameras that is good to know because on a real camera you have control over that stuff on the iphone even if you're using a third-party camera app and tweaking all the settings not quite as much control yeah um and so rounding out the dynamic range topic one of the things i missed also was what john said a minute ago when you take a picture with a modern iphone of a you know a high dynamic range environment like there's a sunset or something you notice when you view it it cranks the brightness up way past normal like you know pure white brightness levels for those parts of the photo that are super bright like the tips of the waves the sun you know the the light in the background the you know the moon whatever it is those get higher higher brightness levels same thing happens in any kind of modern mac with with do they call them edr or hdr for the screens they call them xdr it's called edr i think is what they call the technology of hey we're going to show your screen the way we normally did but if you show one of those photos that is was taken how you describe we will also show that on the same screen without changing your display mode or anything like that that's the edr is like the ability to combine regular dynamic range your windows and you know web pages and stuff like that but oh here this little square of it is high dynamic range just that little square we've talked about before with like the aerial screensaver when when you show a preview of it in like system settings or whatever that it's like this little tiny window that's suddenly hdr but the whole rest of your screen is normal i was wondering well if i'm using a camera that can capture all this dynamic range how can i get my pictures to render in that mode on my pro display xdr on MacBook Pro.

52:14It's obviously just some kind of metadata somewhere. Like, how do I set that? So I was looking for an app that can do this, that can be like, all right, take this photo from my camera, turn on EDR display mode for it, and then let me map in the image, like, all right, what levels correspond to what? So, you know, because what EDR, the way EDR works, basically, if your regular screen brightness is like 0.0 to 1.0, EDR would be like, all right, in this photo, we have some areas that are 1.5 bright so you know map map what the photo has from you know zero to one map it really to zero to 1.5 and show that that way on the screen so there's a way you can you know map the the the brightness levels and tone levels from the picture onto a different range for display on the screen did you look up did you look up how the iphone does this no i didn't have recollection is that the way apple decided to do exactly what you're describing they wanted to do it in a way so that when you share that photo with somebody who doesn't have an hdr screen like they just have a regular they have a macbook air or they have an imac 24 inch or something like that and doesn't they don't have an hdr screen that it still looks normal to them like that nothing goes wonky so i my vague recollection is that what apple did is it's you know the jpeg or whatever the heek image is just the regular dynamic range and then there's a separate sort of a separate channel that's like the brightness enhancing channel oh yeah and uh non-hdr screens that will just ignore that channel and just show it normal but if you have an hdr screen it takes like the brightness channel and smushes it together with the picture and then produces the output what you're describing sounds more like you've got the image data and then you're just like telling it to reinterpret it but i'm i do wonder if the the fuji thing is doing the you know separating the brightness channel from the regular image for backup compatibility reasons or if it's really just like baking it into the photo and then just reinterpreting it according to some flag that says, hey, when you look at this thing, interpret it this way.

54:08Well, so as far as I can tell, I don't think any modern standalone cameras shoot that way with that. Whatever that metadata is that makes Apple display them super bright. I don't think any modern cameras do that. So I was wondering, how can I apply that in editing? Is there some app that can toggle that flag and generate that brightness data for my pictures? And I looked around. So I have Pixelmator. so pixelmator on the mac can do it if you go to the color adjustment section hit customize you can add an edr toggle the problem is this only works for raw files as far as i can tell and it seems like the xt5 raw files are supported by nothing right now including not pixelmator not mac photos like nothing seems to support the xt5 raw files even though this camera came out like last fall i think it's not super new but anyway pixel made on the mac can do it only for raw files pixel made our photo is their ios app this can do it for all files if you go to the adjustment sliders hit hit the ellipsis menu um and then there's an option that says turn on edr um so that's what this it's called edr in pixel made and so that's what you want to turn on if you want to play with this i separately found an app called radiance plus i'll link to it uh it's three bucks a month or 30 bucks lifetime.

55:29And I converted two photos with it and instantly paid the 30 buck lifetime fee. It's a very, very simple app. It just has like two sliders. It's like, you know, brightness and strength or something like that. I converted these two pictures I had taken with the, um, with the Fuji X100V. They look awesome. And these pictures were awesome by themselves, like before I did this, but they're even more awesome. When I added this flag, it much better captures the actual range that the scene actually looked like and i'm very very happy that i can i can basically take awesome camera input and make them look as nice as the iphone photos do in this particular way uh and then and then that's six you know i added them to my library like it works in your photo library and so now those show up on all my devices in that cool edr mode and it looks great so i will link to these apps in the show notes uh if you want to do it i strongly recommend giving these apps a try we are brought to you this week by squarespace the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online you can stand out with a beautiful website engage with your audience and sell anything your products content you create even your time squarespace makes it super easy to do all of that and so much more so it's a great way with squarespace to make any kind of website and they've really been adding a whole bunch of really great business features recently.

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58:22While I was doing all this, I was in camera mode. And so one of the most common times that we use big cameras in our household is we can occasionally see some wildlife from our deck of our house and so i wanted something that had a big zoom and and i and i gave tiff as a gift a couple years ago i gave her a super zoom lens for our sony uh the 200 to 600 millimeter sony zoom with a 2x teleconverter so that it reaches to 1200 millimeters. It's a very far reach. We've tried to shoot with this a lot. We haven't had great success with it, in part because it's just not a very sharp lens. And so we've gotten some pictures that just were very soft and very low contrast.

59:13And I thought at first, maybe that's just the teleconverter. So I took the teleconverter off, less reach, faster, et cetera. And it just still was not very good. And some of it is just distance. If we're taking a picture of something that's like you know very very far away uh you know the atmospheric haze the water vapor in the air like it just it makes it hard to capture anything very sharp at a very great distance because that's just how air works and you can't really get around that uh you can like you know put a uv filter on and everything that doesn't really do much it's it's not really you know you're dealing with the atmosphere so that's there's only so much you can do but i was curious Now that I was in the Fuji system, Fuji has a similar reach lens.

59:57I also know that there's this whole category of super zoom cameras. And I had never tried one before. I know John has occasionally tried things like this, right? Yeah, before I got interchangeable lens cameras, I went from like little handheld, like, you know, point and shoot type things, which are my first digital cameras, to super zoom, which I used for many years because what you get with a super zoom, I remember I was taking pictures of my kids playing in the waves in the water, is you get a really good quality incredibly long zoom lens for the price of never being able to take it off your camera because it's not an interchangeable lens camera it is a camera it comes with this built in and it is what it is and i was able to get i think my last one that i got was like it was like uh you know uh 2.8 aperture through the entire zoom range which is absolutely unheard of unless you're willing to spend like thousands of dollars on a like interchangeable lens zoom thing because normally that you're lucky if the lowest end of the zoom range is is you know f 2.8 usually it starts off much worse than that and gets worse as you zoom but i was able to get for a very low price a tiny sensor in a not very you know good camera but it comes built in with a extremely long zoom that's f 2.8 through the whole aperture range like there's no if i had to try to get that in a quote-unquote real camera equivalent it would have cost like thousands of dollars more um so that's i endorse that type of camera and they're really cool but But of course, that's all you're getting.

1:01:16Like there's no, you can't put a prime lens on it. You know, it's not, the sensors tend not to be very big. And if you do get one with a big sensor or whatever, then those also cost thousands of dollars. But it is a very inexpensive way to get a really good quality, really long zoom, as long as you're okay with that being the only thing this camera can do. Yeah. And usually, you know, there's other compromises. It might not have the best optical quality. usually the sensor is substantially smaller uh than than you would get in like a big camera resolution usually not as good it doesn't have as many pro features like you know there's there's other downsides to it uh but overall it's uh yeah super zooms can be pretty good and so i was curious and also the super zooms are almost always way way way smaller than an equivalent focal length range would be on like a full frame camera or something like smaller lighter like some of them are comical you put this picture up some of the biggest super zooms do get comical but they're still smaller they're still smaller than if you were to get that same focal length smaller lighter if you get that same focal length in an interchangeable lens so it is i love that category because it's like we're going to make compromises in it for the sake of having really good zoom and not being so big that you need like an extra person to hold the front of the lens up for you yeah so here i just pitched this link i'll put this i'll make this the image of the chapter art this is all the different cameras and so i don't own most of these i went to lens rentals and i rented a whole bunch of stuff from them because i'm like i want to try out modern super zooms to see how good are they how how do they compare to the sony super zoom that we have and do i want to maybe you know sell the sony thing and buy something else and by the way you're calling it something a super zoom i think super zoom only applies to the cameras that don't have interchangeable lenses and a really long zoom no i know i'm the only person i'm just talking yeah i'm just talking about a giant telephoto lens yes exactly but i i consider the the combined unit of the camera and the giant telephoto lens i will call that a super zoom i know it's technically not there's other things in here that also aren't super zooms but i'll explain why in a minute but anyway so i decided to rent all this stuff to see like how do i like modern you know long reach camera options how do they compare to my giant sony full frame you know 600 millimeter telephoto like how does all this stuff compare and and maybe it's something else fit my needs better maybe i could you know trade the sony for it you know with bnh or something like that so anyway i rent all the stuff from lens rentals they were great as usual um i also wanted to try with all so i i rented what seemed to be according to dp review which is i i've been on that site so much recently and i'm still so sad it's going away i i went to their reviews and ratings and everything and did some research and found it seemed like the two generally best regarded super zooms right now are the um sony rx10 mark 4 and the nikon cool pics p1000 the nikon is about a thousand bucks the sony rx10 is almost 2 000 so it's a pretty big price difference um the sony only quote only goes to an equivalent of 600 millimeters.

1:04:24So it's not a massive reach, but that is still pretty far, especially for something that is as small as it is. And if you look at this picture of the overview of all these cameras, the Sony RX10 is the one in the bottom left corner. And you can see it is way smaller than the telephoto cameras, than the full frame telephotos. And it's even significantly smaller than the next one to its right. that's the that other black camera is the nikon p1000 but the p1000 doesn't just go to 600 millimeters it goes to 3 000 millimeters goodness i also want to point out if you're looking at this photo which you should be it'll be the chapter art and it'll probably also be in the show notes that when marco says the one in the lower left corner it goes to 600 millimeters that's how far at least one of the white ones on the right yes the one on the far right is the same.

1:05:15The far right lens has the same zoom distance as the far left camera. So when we say you save size and weight by going with the super zoom, this is what we mean. Yeah. Oh, and in all fairness, I did have the lens hoods attached to the two to everything. But you should there's a lens hood on the one left, too. Yes. And you really should for, you know, when you're trying to minimize, you know, any kind of thing that could cause haziness and try to maximize contrast. You want the lens hoods on. I think the lens hood on the camera on the right is bigger than the entire camera on the left i think you're right and i also you'll you'll note right above the nikon p1000 is a little tiny black camera that is the sony rx100 mark 7 the this is not a super zoom uh but the reason i rented the rx100 first of all it's very inexpensive to rent i'm like i'm already renting all this other stuff let me throw this in too i've wanted to try it um the rx 100 series i first got one i first rented it from lens rentals actually uh back in 2013 i rented the very first one and now they're on mark 7 unfortunately mark 7 seems to be this might be the last one like they they released this this mark 7 in 2019 and there's been like nothing on that front since but what's interesting about it is that it's kind of pocketable.

1:06:35Not really. You know, you wouldn't want this in your pocket. A jacket pocket you could do. Definitely not like a pants or, you know, other clothing pocket. You could easily put it in pretty much any size bag and larger jackets. I was interested in the ARS-100, the new one, because I had heard it had gotten a lot better since the one I had tried in 2013. And the one in 2013 was pretty underwhelming in terms of image quality. it is the r100 series is a is you know very small and it has a zoom range of 24 to 200 equivalent so i thought that's really interesting to be in that size how good could the optics possibly be in that and i saw sample pictures on dpreview.com and i was like that seems impossible like that they look pretty good for a camera that's that size has like a little i think it's like a one inch sensor like a little little you know still bigger than a phone by a mile still a small sensor for a standalone camera.

1:07:30And these little tiny optics that go to 200 millimeter, how good could that possibly be? But the reviews were stellar. So I thought, let me rent this thing. You know, I think it was like 60 bucks to rent. Like, fine, let me rent it. I want to try this. Where big cameras can still very much shine is areas that the iPhone really cannot compete in. And one of those areas is long reach. Now we will see, I know this fall, there's the rumors of the, you know, the Pro Max phone having the periscope arrangement of its optics, which would almost certainly result in a much better zoom reach but i i would be surprised if it was competitive with anything else here frankly um so anyway so that's i decided let me see something that is approximately you know pocketable ish almost size class let me see its reach as a competitor to a phone i was thinking if i really love this little tiny sony camera maybe i would buy one and just kind of keep it in my backpack wherever i go and occasionally use it because that can cover rolls that the iPhone really can't cover.

1:08:30And sometimes I want that. So anyway, rented all this stuff and I tried it all out and I made a little sample gallery. I will link to that in the show notes as well. Found out a couple of, I think, useful comparison points. I'll try to be quick. I know it's not super entertaining listening to a podcast about photos, but I'll try to be quick what surprised me the most so i i took i went outside and i tried to take the same approximate set of pictures with all of these cameras at you know when possible at the same focal lengths uh and and just kind of compare to see how are they in handling what kind of quality am i getting what kind of you know sharp sharpness and stabilization can i get at the long reaches and how do the pictures end up looking and number one thing i noticed was wow the iphone really sucks.

1:09:21I've thought for a while, wow, the iPhone is an amazing camera, but it's not an amazing camera when you want reach. The 3X lens on the iPhone 14 Pro that I was using for these comparisons sucks. I have noticed so far this year of using this phone, the amount of over-processing and over-sharpening is kind of irritating to me a lot of the time. Not every time. I still get a lot of good photos with it, and it's still going to be the camera that I use by far the most because it's always in my pocket but the amount of of processing that it does is is a little off-putting and so i i might try to experiment with apps like halide you know to see maybe if i if i do more manual control maybe i can get get a better balance that i like more but i am not super thrilled with the iphone 14 pros camera system in the sense that i have tried to make it replace a big camera and at first I thought it really could and now I see it really can't.

1:10:20It does really well for what it is but at the end of the day it is still a tiny little sensor with tiny little optics that have to cost probably like 40 or 50 bucks and so there's going to be a lot of limitations there for physics, for components, for quality. There's so much that's limiting it and it makes up for a lot of that with its smarts and its various processing and intelligence and what it does with that sensor and how it dumps data off and how it deals with everything. there's a lot of intelligence there and it really is incredible for what it is but there's a lot more out there and and so what this experiment has taught me is there's still a place in my life for other cameras so anyway i took pictures of far away objects with all these cameras including the iphone and the rx100 and the iphone i showed the regular 3x resolution the regular 3x perspective and I zoomed it all the way in with its digital zoom just so you could see what that looks like.

1:11:19It's not good. I would not recommend using the digital zoom for anything, but it's there so you can compare. And what I was... So first of all, I was very, very impressed with the little Sony RX100. If you look at the pictures it got, it blows away the iPhone for reach. And it's really not bad. It's not great. and and i think i've decided for the moment not to buy one um and it also doesn't have usbc because it's so old but anyway it's not an amazing optical quality but for its size it's fantastic and i could very easily see at some point me justifying the plan of just keeping one in my backpack all the time because it really is an incredibly versatile camera it even has my favorite part about the rx 100 is it has this cute little pop-up viewfinder you hit this little tab on on its side and this little tiny cube goes pop and it pops up this little it's the cutest little viewfinder and it works i was using you know i use it outside because it's so bright it works like it was great um anyway it's an adorable camera it is it is not something i want to ever put in a pocket it is something i would occasionally carry in a jacket and i would very much carry in a backpack if i had more frequent needs like that because they really just cover a lot that the iphone doesn't cover and for what it is and for its size i'm extremely impressed by the rx107 all right moving on um in rough order of price uh the nikon coolpix 1000 this is the one that can go to 3000 millimeter equivalent it does that by using a much smaller sensor you'll even notice its pictures are four by three not three by two the way most cameras are because it's basically a phone sensor as far as i can tell like as far as the review is going to say that i'm like that's interesting and then i i noticed like it shoots natively in four by three so it's like maybe there's something to that um but anyway 3000 millimeter equivalent is kind of hilarious it is also kind of like the iphone digital zoom not especially useful because the problem is when you get to 3000 millimeters, when you're like, you know, in that kind of range, stabilization becomes extremely difficult.

1:13:40Like I was standing on a deck and even if I put it on a tripod, the vibrations of the deck from wind, from like a slight breeze were making it jiggle visibly. And so even to get these pictures, I had to, I had to have the shutter speed way up, like 2 ,500th of a second, like way, way up, super fast shutter on, on, you know, right in the middle of the day, just so I could get some kind of, you know, sharpness in these pictures. Most of the pictures I shot at those far reaches were totally blurry and unusable. These that I got in my sample gallery were the best ones that I, that I shot. And I did everything I could to make that happen.

1:14:20I shot it also at 600 millimeters. And just so you kind of see like, you know, how does that look compared to the other ones and it's fine when you're zoomed out like when if you're not like looking too closely at the pixels if you look too closely at the pixels it's it's a mess even at 600 millimeters and it gets way worse at 3000 like when you zoom in it's a mess like it is not good so the p1000 i think it's a fun novelty but ultimately it's very hard to get good pictures out of it when even when you do the it's just not a very sophisticated sensor in there and I found the stabilization, even the stabilization at 600 millimeters was not as good as the other cameras and lenses at that same length.

1:15:04So it's not a very good stabilizer. And it's a very like plasticky, like kind of light, cheap kind of feeling camera. It's a fun novelty to rent, but I was not impressed by it, honestly. And this looks big. This is not the bottom left, but the one directly to the right of it, correct? Correct, yeah. I mean, it goes to, when you turn, so those cameras that's in their off position when you turn them on and when you zoom in the lens sticks out like a pringles can at the front like it extends outward it looks really hilarious like it looks ridiculous um but it was you know it anyway this is not their this is not their fully uh activated state um so anyway the reason i the reason i bring that up is only because it's not like you can shrug this off as well the pictures aren't the greatest but the camera is tiny like the camera is pretty big until you start comparing to the you know lenses uh and so i i this doesn't seem like it has very many redeeming qualities at all from what i'm hearing no but i mean but it is half the price of the next one which is the sony rx10 which is the one on the in the bottom left corner so sony rx10 it is a you know almost double the price of the p1000 The RX10 IV really impressed me for what it is, for how big it is, or rather isn't, for how heavy it isn't, and how easily it handled.

1:16:24I was very impressed with the RX10 Mark IV. It took pretty good pictures. It only goes to 600 millimeters, which is pretty great. Again, the only reason I say, quote, only 600 millimeters is that relative to some of the other ones, that's not the furthest. But it's pretty great. And it achieves pretty good detail relative to its price and size and tradeoffs. So I was pretty impressed by the RX10 4. And I think if I was in the market to buy an integrated super zoom camera, that's the one I would buy. It isn't worth trading in my giant full frame, my giant gear for that, just because the bigger gear surprise is better.

1:17:06But it's not, you know, the bigger gear is like three times the total cost or two times the total cost. and probably three times the total size and weight. And I wouldn't say it's three times better. So anyway, that's the RX10 IV, a very solid contender. There's a reason why that camera is so well rated. Next, I have my new Fuji X-T5 and I rented the Fuji 150-600mm giant telephoto lens with that. As usual, it, I think, had the most pleasing colors. I would say the Fuji 150-600 is a substantially sharper and nicer lens than the Sony 200-600, even though it is not as optically fast. What's interesting is that because the Fuji is made for its crop sensor cameras, it's made for APS-C size sensors, its 600 millimeters is an equivalent of 900 millimeters.

1:18:04so i shot all these at you know and you can see like it's it is more zoomed in um and you get pretty sharp results um it is a little tricky to focus in certain lighting again that's i think mostly due to fuji's focus system not the lens um but it is surprisingly good and surprisingly detailed overall very impressed by the fuji and then finally i have my trusty old sony a7r3 with its 200-600mm lens. I did two sets, one with the teleconverter to get it to 1200mm and one without the teleconverter. It did fantastically in terms of detail. The text on the sign on the right set, the text I think is the best on the Sony series, but the lens overall is just not a very sharp lens.

1:18:53You say that, but I was definitely looking at the text in the same thing. I have to say, the Sony, the very bottom one either with or without the teleconverter has sharper text than any of the other ones like so i so you say oh the lens isn't as sharp well that text is sharp like that's why i was looking for text as we know what text can look like in particular if you look at uh ripcurrents.noaa.gov the g the descender in the g in.gov is right on top of a rivet yeah that rivet reads way better on either one of the sony pictures than it does on the fuji one that's interesting yeah if you pixel peep that and go in that like it's just it's just it's just sharper it's sharper it's not as fuzzy it's not i can't even tell that it's a river than the other ones i definitely looking at all these pictures i was surprised to see that even with the teleconverter which usually hurts your you know sharpness and light gathering or whatever that the the sony is comes out on top as far as i'm concerned i mean and it's close like it's not like the fuji with that giant lens is much worse than the sony with the giant lens but i would i would definitely say that the the sony is sharper now i i think if you had not that you need to spend more money but like you know the a7r is up to the a7r5 now and that is not the most recent uh big giant ridiculous expensive white uh zoom lens from sony so if you you know refreshed all that with modern sony stuff to compete against your modern fuji stuff i think it would probably widen the gap even more it's possible i mean certainly you know it would have more resolution and everything but but yeah i i was surprised you know just owning the sony ones i've been surprised like how little i like the pictures that i ever get out of it um and i don't know what maybe that's just and i have to say i've heard this from other people as well and i so you're not you know this is this is you but i either i like what the sony's do or whatever difference you're seeing i don't see or don't care about okay like the way they call the color science or whatever i see the differences from camera to camera but like i would never choose a camera based on it like because i always just feel like i can you know i guess it's because what it comes down to is like you said i'm editing these things yeah any picture picture i care about i'm editing so like if there's something i dislike about you know the jpeg that came out i'll go to the raw and change it to the way i want it i really don't care how the jpegs look especially when you're talking about one of these gigantic camera rigs where you're like i'm done shooting in raw right but if you got that gigantic camera that's the you know longer than your arm and it weighs a ton and you're setting it all up or whatever spend the five minutes to edit it like you know but i need the jpegs to come out exactly how I want them, but I'm willing to lug around a camera that's bigger than my child to take the photo.

1:21:20I don't quite understand that right off. For the pocketable one, sure. But for the white-colored camera lens that is gigantic and costs a bazillion dollars, edit those photos. Sometimes I find with the Sonys that no matter what I do with the edit, I can't get the colors to look what I want them to look like. But I do wonder what you're looking for. I think the Sonys look okay. like i don't have that you know i maybe it's a little bit like the fujis i've always felt look a little bit it's kind of like when people you know like the sony's always to me look mostly neutral whereas the fujis remind me more of film just setting aside the ones where it's trying to look like film like you were talking about and i don't want the film look whether intentionally trying to look like film or just kind of like accidentally looking like film i want it to be i wouldn't call the sony more neutral but that's how i think of it as like the sony is just showing me the colors that were there without trying to massage them, which I know isn't true.

1:22:14The Sony has its own bent about how it handles reds and stuff like that. Like I can see that, but I definitely wouldn't choose a camera based on it. It's strange to hear that it is such a factor in your decision-making about which cameras you want, even when we're talking about giant zoom lens on a giant big camera. I've lived in Sony land for a while now. We used to be a Canon family. tiff still has her old canon gear because she never ended up liking the sony pictures very much she has the same same complaints i have of like just can't get them to look the way you want sony excels in extreme technical skill at the expense of being really boring actually is kind of my greatest strength and weaknesses as well as a person but like you know sony there's not a lot of of pizzazz or or excitement in the way sony renders things it doesn't make you go wow but it's technically very much very very high and it's it beats everyone else on technical specs most of the time and so there are lots of situations where that's okay or that's what you want like if you're going to be heavily editing the pictures afterwards that makes a lot of sense i know myself well enough to know that i'm not going to edit like a long time ago um i at some point for a christmas one year we rented this crazy high price Leica camera, also from Lens Rentals.

1:23:39We've done a lot of stuff with them over the years. It was this, whatever Leica was their digital rangefinder at the time. I think I even made a blog post about it. My impression of it when we had it was, first of all, being a rangefinder was such a giant pain in the butt to use. If you've never used a rangefinder, consider yourself lucky. If you have, I'm sorry, you probably hate me right now. But such a massive pain in the butt to shoot things with a rangefinder. at the end of the day i i was disappointed by the camera's high iso performance you know it sucked in low light being a ring finder it didn't have autofocus at all the technical side of it i was very disappointed by but over the over the following years i would always look back on those photos and be like man i love these pictures i love the way they look and it's not because of its technical perfection because it didn't have that it wasn't because it did great in low light because it didn't it wasn't because it had the highest resolution because it didn't i just like the way they rendered colors between leica's optics and and whatever they're doing in the camera to process those those colors i just like the pictures a lot better than what i than the other ones i was getting at the time i i just i liked it's indescribable but you know you like what you like right and so anyway that we didn't go that we didn't go to leica direction for many reasons um but although honestly i i considered renting a q2 during this run but it would have doubled the price of my entire rental.

1:25:03I'm like, I don't want to do that. But anyway, for a while, we left Canon Land, or I did at least, to go to Sony World because Sony World had just the amazing technical chops. So good in low light. The Sony full frame sensors, back with the first Sony A series cameras, were just kicking Canon's butt. They were so much better back in that time. And so that got me over to Sony Land. But while I've taken a lot of decent pictures with the Sony, I'm not loving the pictures I get out of my Sony cameras as much as I used to love some of the Canon stuff I was getting, as much as I love those rented Leica pictures, and as much as I love the handful of pictures I've shot so far with the Fuji gear.

1:25:47It just doesn't fit me, and I've tried. I've edited them, and I've tried processing them and doing different things, and I just can't get out of the Sony what I want in terms of niceness, something I love. It's not about technical specs. You know, I'm not sure this is a good analogy, but when I listen to you say this, it makes me think of the somewhat similar situation in the audio world of people who we've talked about in the past. People who like the smile curve because it makes movies exciting where you boost the bass and you boost the treble and you dip the mids. And people who want a more neutral sound.

1:26:19And then there are people who think a neutral sound is super boring. And it sounds to me like you like the like a smile curve and neutral photos seem like poison to you. and also that you're unable to reproduce the smile curve when you try to manually edit it. And I would have to think the inability to reproduce the thing you want from a neutral photo mostly comes down to not knowing what it is that you need to do with your neutral photo to make it look like those Leica photos, right? Because it's an indescribable thing that you know you like it, you see it, you know you like it, but if you don't know, all right, how do I go from neutral to that, you're never going to be able to do it just by randomly poking at curves and stuff to try to make it happen yeah and that and yeah and part of that is because it's really complicated and you know it's like when you try to correct yeah it's not as simple as just pull push this dial up on the equalizer and you're done right right yeah it's it's like trying to correct something you like about headphones with eq it's like you can sometimes do that a little bit but the whole frequency response and distortion characteristics and reflection characteristics of a headphone are are so much more complicated than just you know the basic eq controls you have and that's how I feel with photos like I can use something like Lightroom or the built-in photos app and you know use the editing controls I've done that before I've done I did that for years and sometimes I sometimes it worked out for me usually not because and it's partly because it's more complicated than that it's also largely because I'm not very good at it and I'm never going to be very good at it so you'd have to start from raw to have a fighting chance because if you start from the jpeg you're just you know you're screwed exactly so I've decided that my camera journey is i'm just gonna i'm gonna abandon technical excellent or technical um class leadership i think and just go with what i love go with what gives me the pictures i love and right now that is fuji and i never tried fuji before because i because they weren't leading in the technical stuff they were they never had like the best you know high iso noise performance they they usually didn't have the best you know megapixel resolution um i didn't really know anything about their lens situation.

1:28:25They didn't have anything full frame. It's funny. They don't have full frame. They have APS-C, and they went right to medium format. And they have nothing in between. But anyway, I thought for a long time that what I wanted was technical perfection, but I now know what I want is pictures I love. And some of those are going to come from iPhones. Some of those are going to come from Fujis. Some of those are going to come from random rented Sonys here and there. But I'm getting a lot more of them from Fujis, and my hit rate is quite good. I will give your Sony gear a good home. I will probably be sending some of it to you.

1:28:59First, I'm going to trade some of it back probably to B &H to buy this Fuji lens and then we'll talk. Yeah. All right. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Green Chef, Trade Coffee, and Squarespace. And thanks to our members. Once again, big, big thank you for the members. We've had wonderful membership numbers recently and we've got tons of great feedback on our member exclusive episodes we've done recently. Lots of great feedback on the Toda episode. Lots of great feedback on the food one before that. We're on a roll here. So thank you so much to members. You can join at atp.fm slash join. We will talk to you next week.

1:29:37Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Cause it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes At ATP.FM And if you're into Twitter You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's K-C-L-I-S-S M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T Marco Armin S-I-R-A-C USA Syracuse, it's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. I'm going to do my dear friend Mike Dirty and talk about something that we spoke about a little bit on Analog this week, but isn't out yet.

1:30:46This is the pain that comes from analog recording on a Tuesday, but not typically being released until Sunday. So I'm sort of taking away Mike's exclusive. And I'm sorry, Mike. I'm sorry. It wasn't my intention. We were here first. Well, he was there first. It's just nobody heard it but the two of us. Marco's rapid production cycle wins again. You got a ship. Real artist ship, you know? Oh, brutal. Poor Mike. I'm sorry, Mike. So anyway, so what we talked about, Mike and myself, and I will put a link to the, as we record this forthcoming episode of Analog, but we'll soon, by Sunday, will be the released episode of Analog.

1:31:26Mike and I talked about my forthcoming app, and I am pretty, pretty sure this one's actually going to see the light of day. It is not ready yet. It is getting pretty close. But I thought I would try something different and talk about it a bit. And I'm not really sure why I wanted to try something different other than it's different. But I figured we could talk about it, the three of us and the listeners kind of by proxy and see what we think. So what am I up to? As usual, I don't have a good name. If you recall, in the past, I didn't come up with, well, actually, I think it was my friend Steve that came up with Masquerade, if memory serves, but that didn't happen until pretty late in the development cycle.

1:32:08I don't have a good name for it, and I have an even worse icon for it for those who are on the test flight, which is basically just friends at this point. Can you, do you want to share the terrible name? Just so you can tell me how you came up with this terrible name. Okay, so the code name. Oh, wait, no, I think I figured it out. go ahead and see if i'm right so the code name is is well i don't want to pronounce it because no no so the code name is is the word look up with an f in front of it which is supposed to be a portmanteau of of film look up to become flook up right well i said this to aaron or i showed aaron the name i did not verbalize it to her and she says fluke up what the hell is fluk up it does look like fluk up now that i see like i i instantly read in my head fluk up when i saw first but but i can see why you get fluk up yep i read fluk up and then i tried to fluk up and i was like no they're both bad well they're both bad i mean full stop they're both bad fluk up p fast look up feet yeah it's uh no feet on this one not yet anyway see i need a name i'm still working on that and i need an icon the icon i like fluk up i think it's a it's a funny name but i think it works no do not listen to marco it's a terrible name i always like your initial terrible names well uh it's probably better than face splash but that's neither here in any case so we're we're getting we're getting we're getting off off track already uh so what what what the heck is it uh the the thesis statement if you will is imagine imdb but but written by someone who has self-respect.

1:33:44And so what this is born from is I often, when I'm watching a television show or a movie or some such, I would want to know, oh, who is this person? Or where do I know this person from? Or what have you. And for years and years and years and years, I would use the IMDb app or the website. The website is still mostly okay. Disagree. Disagree. It's not great. So bad. It's unusable. It's so much. I hate it. Well, I can use the website and I can do it without actively vomiting on myself. Without scrolling up and down the page seven times. It's got to be here, right? That is fair. That is totally fair.

1:34:24That is totally fair. That is the experience of IMDb. I hate it so much. However, I will say that the IMDb app, in my personal opinion, is unusable and has been for like two or three years now. So the reasons I don't like the IMDb app, not to belabor it, it's constantly like playing videos or trying to play videos. or show you images at like three quarters the size of the screen. I don't want to log in. I don't want to log in. Stop asking. I don't f***ing want to log in. Just stop. So that in and of itself is enough to drive me nuts. And it's very gross now. It's clear that Amazon owns it. It's clear they want you to either watch their shows or buy things from them.

1:35:06And it's just frustrating. And so I started wondering, well, could I fix this problem? And there's a pretty great website called The Movie Database. And we'll put a link to The Movie Database in the show notes. It is a kind of, I don't want to say knockoff, that's kind of disrespectful, but it's an alternative to IMDB. I'll be the first to tell you the data is not quite as good as IMDB's, but it's pretty close. And for any of the major stuff, it'll be there. And so I started digging and looking and, well, wow, they have an API. And wow, this API seems to make sense. It's not completely bananas.

1:35:48And if all you're doing is reading stuff, you don't need to log into anything. And so that's how Flickup was born or whatever I ended up calling it. And the idea is what if it's IMDB by someone who actually cares? and it lets you look up TV, movies, episodes of TV shows, seasons of TV shows, and people as well. And I started, the first commit, I should have this handy, I'm sorry, but the first commit on this was something like January 25th or thereabouts. And I think I am in a position that barring the name and icon, I could send this to AppReview in the next few days, I think. So I am pretty darn proud of how fast it's come together.

1:36:36It's 100 % SwiftUI. I'm literally not using UIKit for anything as far as I can recall. It's using Async Await, which has gone really, really well. And I'm just really enjoying writing it. And I'm having a lot of fun with it, which is cool. The most interesting thing at the moment is how do you monetize it? But actually, I should interrupt and say, do you two have anything you want to talk about, add, or ask before I start talking about monetization? Yeah. First of all, I will nitpick. When you sent me the very first version, I nitpicked a few things. I did one of my trademark video tour. I've been holding back until things calmed down a little bit to send my final design nitpicks.

1:37:19But this is coming together really well. This might be your best app yet. I mean, it's really good and it's very useful I think this is going to be useful to a lot of people this could be it and I'm happy to hear that you've quote only worked on it for about 3 or 4 months now because that's how to become a successful iOS developer is like try stuff you gotta put stuff out there, you gotta try it and see what's going to work and what's going to stick, what's going to find an audience, what's not. That's what you've got to do. And if you're spending a whole year on an app and you put it out there and it's actually a pretty specialized thing that doesn't have a huge audience, that's not a great use of your time.

1:38:07And if you want this to become a bigger part of what you do, this is how to do that. You get an app like this where it's like you identified a pretty substantially sized market. It's a big market. you built something that doesn't seem to have major costs to you like you're not running the servers you're not running any kind of back-end service for this you know you're you're not paying for the api it seems right so that there's the whole story there we'll get back to that but suffice to say so far that is correct right so there's that um and you and you made something that looks and feels pretty good without taking a ton of time to do it that's a great story and the result is really good like it's it's very useful it is something that you know i i've used a couple of times so far i the only reason i haven't used it more is that i don't watch a lot of movies but when i do i have the same need and you know i'll do the same thing during tv shows oh it's that guy what's he from again you know and i'll you know go look it up or whatever um and i think this is great i i really do i i think this shows that this shows your your growth as an independent iOS developer.

1:39:12You are getting better, and your ideas are getting more mainstream, and this is, I think, a pretty good opportunity. And, you know, I will nitpick things, you know, obviously, but... That's why you're here. But I have less to nitpick here than any of your previous apps when I've first seen them. Like, way less. Yeah, and it's come a long way. It's come a long way, and I think some of that is me, some of that is our mutual friend Ben McCarthy, who makes obscura among other things i'll put a link to obscura in the show notes it's a uh like an alternative uh camera app uh ben had some really phenomenal ui ideas that that they shared with me and that i think made a tremendous tremendous difference anything looks good is either them or me and anything looks bad is 100 percent.

1:40:00me so that's what we can agree i'm taking credit for my you know pg13 are like the styling of the terrible right but i understood like it was clear to me and to be clear you sent this app to us like it you didn't explain anything about it and i saw the icon and i didn't understand what the heck it was and it was terrible but then i launched it like oh i get it imd but not sucking all right so thumbs up on the on the concept um i have to say for me personally and this does not affect your market because your market is much more mass market but for me personally your biggest competition which is currently way way ahead of you because they've been out for years and years and years is letterboxd right and i know they don't do tv and i know it's not really the point of that site but they have had so many years to polish their experience of finding movies and who's in them and what other things they might be in and stuff like that and their site and their app which is just really just their website is not junked up like imdb so i feel like within the realm of people who even know what that letterboxd is it is very strong competition because it is not i mean i think it's way better than the movie database site it's certainly better than imdb it is the same ethos as you is hey guess what a thing that people might want to use to find information that is nicely organized and laid out and they this site was not created in the last three months right so they have a big lead on you your advantage is nobody who's not a giant film nerd knows about letterboxd and honestly it's overkill for the simple use cases i'm on the couch i want to find out what this person's in i go to it because i use letterboxd all the time and i do movie stuff or whatever but marco is not the target audience for letterboxd and he would use your app so and this is also to say if you want some good ideas about how to lay things out and how to do you do ui and stuff like go to letterboxd at their website and again their their quote-unquote app i think is just a web view onto their their mobile version of their site which is a testament to how good the mobile version of their site is but i would say uh check that out for some good ideas oh i i should do that yeah i it's funny because a lot of the people that I've sent the beta to seem to, the cross section between my friends and letterboxed users seems to be quite strong.

1:42:32I am not a letterboxed user. It's not something I think I need or want in my life, but I can totally understand why one would want it. Like I use Goodreads fairly religiously to track the things that I've read. And it's a very similar idea. I want to congratulate you for your ability to pronounce the name of that site differently than me in the same conversation and not giving in like the the gif jif people do when you're conversing about somebody with it and you can't help but just start uh copying the other person's pronunciation like whoever said it first but no you're holding strong and to be clear casey is pronouncing it the right way and i'm pronouncing it the john way we'll see we'll see how well i do but uh in any case uh so yeah so i think if if this continues to be a thing and if it's not just a flop then And one thing that I've gotten some very clear interest in, at least because of the small test group I've sent it to, is having letterboxed integration and, you know, marking.

1:43:24I don't even know what that would mean, to be honest, because, again, I don't really use letterbox. But I would investigate that and see what makes sense to be in both places. But that's, you know, that's another version way down the road. So with regard to monetization. So, yes, Marco touched on this earlier. it's a little bit of a squishy thing because the movie database seems to not want my money so they have like a couple of different this is just for the listeners not even just the members but for the listeners because this is kind of putting me in a little bit of an awkward spot so I could belabor this story quite a bit but suffice to say I've asked several times to get a commercial key like API key from the movie database database.

1:44:10I've asked in this one place over here and another place over there. And so far, they refuse to give one to me. They keep ghosting me when I ask them. And I'm like, hey, you know, I'm currently using a developer key. That's fine. But this will be sold at some point. Can I have a commercial key? Crickets. So I've backchanneled a little bit with some people that are using the Movie Database API in other uses. And I don't think they're ever going to want my money. But that's not like it's in writing or anything, right? So like, I need to account for the fact that this is an API that I don't own, and I don't control.

1:44:49And it is perfectly within their rights to say, you got to pony up, big guy. So since this is something that hopefully people would use a lot, and hopefully a lot of people would use, I need to have some sort of recurring revenue. I don't want to be put in a situation where suddenly my weather API, so to speak, not in a literal sense, you know, the weather app with the weather API that goes from free to not free to, oh, my gosh, expensive. So I think what I'm going to do is make this a subscription app. And I did not start down that path, but I think it was Underscore in a conversation we were having said to me, look, you got to go subscription because you never know what the future will bring.

1:45:26I hope I'm not putting words in Underscore's mouth. I'm pretty sure it was him that started this in my head. But that makes me think, okay, I should do a subscription. But that, in turn, I don't think it's the right use to begs the question, but begs the question. Raises the question. There it is. Thank you. How much does one charge for this? And honestly, I don't have a great answer. Because, you know, I was looking at, you know, what can I think of as something that has a clear and obvious cost, recurring cost to the company, and even an end user would understand that. And how much does that cost?

1:46:04Well, there's an app called Overcast that has a clear and recurring cost to the person or persons that run Overcast. And I should look at how much that is. No, you shouldn't. If I'm not mistaken, Overcast is$10 a year. So to me, that sets a high threshold that I don't think I should be even that particularly close to$10 a year. But then where should I be? And honestly, I don't know. I'm not sure. See, I get what you're saying. It was like, oh, I have a comparable, as they say in the real estate industry. But it's not comparable. comparable setting aside whether marco's pricing is right it's not right but but like here's here's the deal like no one who is interested in buying your app has knows or cares what overcast it goes for they're not they're not competitors they might not even know overcast exists right it's the question not that this makes it easier but i'm just saying the question is how much are people willing to pay for an app that does what your app does when there's a very very clear free alternative and that has almost no connection to how much are they willing to pay for a podcast app that does what overcast does sure and and then the second question is oh is overcast charging the right amount it's not so and i'm assuming marco you think you should be charging more yeah definitely i agree when i you know when i launched overcast premium god knows how many years ago subscriptions for you know non-content apps like you know subscriptions for like you know newsstand apps were common you know stuff like that but like subscriptions for like regular app functionality that was not that common still back then and ten dollars a year felt like a bit of a reach but like a doable reach so i did it now i mean look i just told you you know five hours ago when we began this episode i just told you that there was this app that made the edr photos for me that that's it's a like one feature app that i'm going to use here and there occasionally it's$3 a month or$30 lifetime and I jump right for the$30 lifetime purchase.

1:48:12But if I didn't, it was$3 a month. And I'm charging$10 a year for an app people use typically multiple hours a day. So the comparison, as John said, is not super direct between what many different apps do. But if I was launching today, I would not charge$10 a year. I would probably, I mean, look, even my competitors. Like if you look at other podcast apps that charge money for anything at all, I'm cheaper than all of them for like the premium feature set. I think I think all of us are like free up front now, but the premium feature set, I'm by far the cheapest, I think, like by like I think by half or more.

1:48:51And so, you know, if I were doing this today, I would probably go to 20 a year, maybe. Or maybe I would maybe I'd have some kind of monthly. I don't know. maybe I'd have to do like a free trial which I still have not done so I don't know necessarily what I would do but it wouldn't be$10 a year it would be substantially more in some way that being said Overcast is not$10 a year Overcast is free with ads or$10 a year you can put ads in this and that's what most people would do and it would be you know you would crap up the experience and be exactly what you are trying to not do but you know you would make some money from ads like that's that's the thing and you could have you know most people would leave them and you'd make you know a few pennies here and there from those people and then people like me who are who are you know jerks about ads you know not not wanting to see ads in my ass if i don't have to we would pay for whatever the unlock would be and that would be it and and you know you get some purchases for the no ads purchase and you get some purchases for the ads or some money from the ads and that that would be it that is probably the best way to do it um whether you'd want to do or not it's a different story but that's like if you want to maximize your money that's what you should do is put ads in it and you know and tolerate some crappiness um but again that's not that's not the way to make the best app necessarily that's the way to make the most money so you complete the trifecta of not taking any pricing advice from your podcast co-hosts uh the tiny number of people who use my two apps run them 24 hours a day seven days a week so i should be charging tons of money instead it's a one-time price that never repeats so don't don't price like my apps and apparently don't price like marco's apps well i guess he's saying yes price like his app but don't price just like the premium portion of his app for don't forget there's the free part with ads yeah and and by the way um you know what you said a minute ago about you don't know what the future holds but in terms of your api access to the service that your app depends on and is useless without um to me that's a giant red flag for a subscription purchase because you know what just happened with the twitter apps you know like that that were cut off and had to refund and i would say even if that api is free forever even if you know they never charge you any money for it and i would say that any app and setting aside what marco was just saying i said look every app charges subscriptions no matter what they do now but any any app that accesses a third party api that you don't control should charge a subscription doesn't have to be expensive subscription but it should charge a subscription it could be one dollar a year but whatever it is because that app is guaranteed to require some kind of ongoing maintenance above and beyond the just keeping up with the latest version of ios because apis change unless they're dead i mean if the api is dead then you have separate problems right because apis change and that means you'll have to update your app or you'll want to update your app like there is you know you are essentially writing on top of a thing that you don't control we're all writing on top of the apple platform and we have to keep up with those changes we have no choice but i think once you go the extra step of saying oh and by the way my app is essentially a front end for an api that has nothing to do with me you will have to you know ride that bear in the steve balmer sense you will have to continue to chase that api wherever that api goes you don't have control over it and wherever it goes you have to follow it or your app doesn't work or breaks or is worse and so that argues for unless you're just going to give up on the app after a year or something that argues for some tiny little subscription fee or a one-time purchase that's enough to fund your ongoing maintenance and development for what you think the life of the app is going to be yeah and that's what makes it tough is if i knew for sure that it was free forever i would probably just charge like i always do, like a one-time fee and call it a day.

1:52:34But even considering the Twitter debacle from a month or two back, I still feel like it makes sense to account for the possibility of, oh, they've decided to charge me. That money's got to come from somewhere. Otherwise, I am utterly doomed. And so it seems to me like a subscription is the right answer. Now, I echo what you're saying, Marco, that if I was really going for a money grab without question, advertisements and then, you know, an unlock or, you know, remove ads, unlock or whatever, that would make way more sense and surely be way more lucrative. But I just don't want to do that, I don't think.

1:53:22And that's fair. That's a totally valid answer. And the advantage of having ATP and analog and the apps that I have is that in terms of finances, I don't need to do that, or at least not today. Ask me again in a week. But sitting here now, I don't need to do that. I don't need this thing to go gangbusters in order to put food on the table. And so I'd rather do something that I'm, well, this is going to sound a little flippant and I'm sorry, but I'd rather do something I'm extremely proud of than junk the app up with ads that I don't control. I think Overcast is a bit of a weird exception because that's your own ads and that's a very different beast.

1:54:03But that's not something I could do. And also the major selling proposition of your app is it's like that other thing you're familiar with, but not junked up and ads are part of that. Right. And so you'd have to have like an asterisk like, oh, unless you have the free version, which is what most people. less junked up right there's fewer there's fewer pieces of junk but there's still it's like when twitter tried to uh you know like a twitter blue they said pay for twitter blue and you'll get fewer ads yeah right not no ads just fewer ads what does that mean it's like my new york times subscription i pay to have the worst reading experience in their app um anyway hooray no but and but you know keep in mind though this is a double-edged sword people's alternative is to just go to imdb or whatever and get this get this information for free covered in ads so if you are offering something covered in ads too you know that's gonna that's gonna hurt you a little bit but also if you're putting up a paywall too soon that's also gonna hurt you a lot because people are gonna they're gonna try this app like oh this is kind of nice it's it's like imdb but nice then they're gonna slam into a paywall and most of them are gonna be like all right bye yeah exactly so it is gonna like if your paywall is too you know too aggressive you're people are gonna bounce right out and then word of mouth isn't going to happen ranking isn't going to happen and no one's going to use it if you have the paywall be you know too generous and give too much away for free you'll make no money because nobody will go past the paywall so it is it's a hard thing to do it this i mean look developers have debates and arguments and and you know anguish about this all the time because this is a very hard problem to solve and i mean look it took me a long time to get it right and overcast took me like three or four years before i came up with the system i have now that fortunately does work for me, but it took a while to get there.

1:55:46It took a lot of attempts, a lot of different systems to do it. So I can't necessarily say anything's going to work. I think ads, the ad-based business model with the option to pay to remove them is the cleanest conceptually, and it is the best in terms of maximizing the number of people you will get to install the app, the number of people who keep it installed and who will keep using it, and the number of people who, and the amount of money you make. Like all of that will be maximized if you have ads and an option to remove the ads for some, you know, X per year or X one time or whatever. That will make you the most money and get you the most users.

1:56:22But if that's not the app you want to make, then don't do it. That's not, you know, no one's forcing you to do this. So you should make the app that you want to make. And so I totally get that. So the question is then, what do you do? Subscription does concern me from the point of view of the API thing. Like, you know, that's part of why the ad option makes that really clean. As long as the app works, you are seeing ads and we are making money. As soon as the app stops working, you'll stop using it and everything stops and that's clean, you know? Anything you do involving taking people's money is going to be less clean than that and could bite you in the butt if things go badly down the road with the provider.

1:57:05I wouldn't worry about that, especially if you stick to monthly and don't even do an annual or something but like whatever like you know the whole thing where apple's gonna refund everybody for the twitter apps because they shut it down or whatever that's an extreme scenario and i feel like the odds of that happening again are low and if they happen yeah you just eat that and if you're not expecting again if you're not expecting this to be like your main source of income that's gonna bankrupt you if that happens then you would just be like oh that'll be a bummer if it happens but honestly the odds of it are so low like is is the movie database run by a giant jerk like probably not or at least not an Elon Musk caliber jerk.

1:57:37So I wouldn't spend too much time fretting about that. I mean, so many apps on the App Store have subscriptions, and many of them have a thing that if it was run by a jerk like Elon who cut the thing off and nobody noticed, they'd be in the same situation. It just doesn't happen that often. That's why it was so shocking when he did it, that it is not a common thing, and I don't expect it to be a common thing. So I wouldn't lose too much sleep over that. Well, and furthermore, I think the difference is that even if that were to happen, it is unlikely, not impossible but unlikely it would be flick of a switch like it basically was for the twitter apps i think in all that's what i'm saying they'd phase it out and you can set the app and you know whatever yeah so the other thing to consider is you know when when we you know fancy ios people you know when we like you know apple enthusiasts and and podcasters in this space like when we think about value of an app we are thinking of it from our perspective from what we think is valuable from what we think is a reasonable price and from the quality level that we set for ourselves as kind of a community.

1:58:39If you look at the App Store, it's not that. It's very far from that. Pretty much everything else in the App Store, it's a ton of garbage with massive quantities of ads, tricky upsell things that try to shove you into a subscription deceptively, and then every app wants like$2 a week from you. oh you want to be able to crop photos five dollars a week that's the app store that's the market you're in most people's phones are filled with garbage apps to crop photos and stuff that are you know these thinly veiled subscription scams that are full of ads and are charging them six bucks a week and just like extracting as much as possible that's most of the app store so first of all it doesn't take much to be better than that second of all that's the price expectation or ad expectation that people have of apps because that's what most apps are most apps are not the boutique apps from people who we know on on you know formerly twitter and now mastodon that's not most apps most apps that most people are using are big corporate apps like facebook stuff that are just their own form of specially abusive of garbage.

1:59:55And then the huge long tail of all the garbage photo cropping apps that are full of these massive weekly subscriptions and stuff like that. So that's the market you're playing into here. So it's tricky. It can be tricky to figure out what's right for you. I think if you really don't want to do ads, which sounds like you don't, and that's fine. Again, if you really don't want to do ads, then do a subscription. But keep in mind with the pricing of it that a lot of people are going to bounce right off. I mean, there is kind of an argument to be made for a one-time purchase because I think people are so burned by subscriptions recently.

2:00:35I think a one-time purchase is seen as refreshing to a lot of people. And since you don't have ongoing server costs for this now, and you probably will... Well, and then maybe you could change your mind down the road, but since you don't have ongoing costs now, there is something to be said for that But I think ultimately I would probably agree with underscore. Like, you know, you should probably have recurring revenue. But that will turn more people off at the door. So you kind of have to price it accordingly. And you can with App Store subscriptions. They recently did add the option, which I think I might at some point use, that you can raise the price of a subscription without losing all your old subscribers.

2:01:15You couldn't do that before. You couldn't do that before about, I think, a year or two ago. They added it for Disney Plus and they made it available for everybody. so or was it HBO one of those anyway one thing you could do like you know because my worry with with subscriptions would have been like you know if you're charging people you know a buck or two a month and then you get you all of a sudden have to pay for your API access and it's more than that that could be a problem for you but you don't have to worry about that so what I would say is start people on a subscription plan but make it a really cheap one if you have to raise prices down the road because some api cost happens so be it if not or until then you will just keep making lots of lots of sales that you wouldn't have made otherwise if it was too expensive one of one of the consideration if you want to minimize your like refund liability down the road if things go really bad uh monthly would be better than annual but that being said if you want it to seem really cheap, annual's the way to go.

2:02:21Right. Yep. Exactly. And that's what I'm struggling against is I know that anyone who is likely to already have had an interest in the sorts of thing that Flookup or whatever I end up calling it does, probably already has the IMDB app installed on their phone. So I have to overcome free and already working. And that's tough. So my current thought, which I have no idea if it's wise or not, is$6 a year because it's like 50 cents a month. That's not that much. And it doesn't seem too aggressive. Even$1 or two a month seems like kind of a lot to me. And so$6 a year, it's more than nothing, but it's like...

2:03:09It's a coffee at Starbucks or something like that. You know, it's do eight. What makes you say that? $7.99 is a nice looking price. It still is under$10. People think it's cheap, but it doesn't seem that much more expensive than$5.99. And you'll get more money. And I think it's the same perceived price class. I think also you're talking about like, oh, the one-time cost. People are tired of subscriptions and so on and so forth. It depends on how you're looking at the app because if you start with a subscription, even if you price it high that it scares a lot of people away, if the app has any kind of success at all and you decide yes this is worth me working on you can make the app grow into your price whereas if you started the app with a fixed price you will grow out of a fixed price you will get the app the app is a good for a good for a good for the app.

2:04:17popular guess what it's a subscription now whereas if you started out at that subscription that was kind of expensive and the app grows into it the original customers are satisfied because like i bought it and when it wasn't when it was a 1.0 and now it's so much better and i'm paying the same subscription and then when you grow into the price people look at the price and aren't as scared away because it's a better app now like it just seems like i i feel like i've seen that happen too often where someone underprices it initially because the app's not that good and everyone's app's not that good in the first release right but you have to think about if this app works if it works in the market at all, what will the app be like?

2:04:48And I always feel like it's better to price it like that because that produces the least amount of regret among your customers, right? Because the people who are willing to buy it early when it was a 1.0 and it seemed kind of expensive, they'll be happy when your app improves and grows into it. And the people who weren't, they'll only arrive after your app goes into its price. But in both of those scenarios, everyone more or less is satisfied with and understands the deal. Whereas I hate seeing apps that's like, oh, it's just a 1.0 and it's not that good. So it's a$3 one-time purchase. And then like two years into development, the app is amazing and the developer is not making any money because the development costs and the maintenance overhead is high, but they feel like they can't increase the price, let alone go to subscription because you know what happens when you go from a fixed price to subscription, everyone hates it.

2:05:31Yeah, yeah. And that's the other thing I'm looking at is I don't ever want to have to renege and go into subscription. It's another thing if I choose to, I'm making this up, But if I choose to do like a forever unlock for$100 or something like that, again, I'm making this up. I feel like that's different. But to go from a one-time only IAP to, oh, just kidding. I'll need your money periodically now. That's just really, really hard. That's just really hard. Buy my apps to the forever unlock price of$5. Oh, God. I'm still regretting. I sold for, I think, one year, Overcast's first year in 2014. i sold a five dollar unlock how did i not buy that is because i was on the beta probably or maybe you might have bought it but it so i have a special case in the app so if you have that five dollar unlock you don't get the premium feature of the uploads because that's a monthly s3 cost i'd have to pay and those that wasn't there back then like that came later but you do have no ads shown if you have that original unlock because there were no ads in the original app and i have thought for a long time i actually track my analytics like how many of those people are still using the app and it's a lot of people like it's it's a substantial portion of my user base and i've thought for a while like i should really end that ad exclusion from them because i've these people paid five dollars nine years ago and i've i'm now like literally just you know four days ago five days ago my web host just raised prices 20 for no reason um so it's like now my cost just went up by 20 awesome like and i've been paying all these server costs for nine years to support these people and yet those people will be they'll be so mad when it happens too because if you explain to them you paid five dollars nine years ago and they'll say and kind of rightly yeah but nine years ago you said this is a forever unlock for five dollars and you're bad right oh yeah that's why i haven't done it because i know it'll result in a million one-star reviews and the reality is customers hold that they one-star review system it basically holds us hostage just after developers like we can't do anything about that those like that's why i haven't done like i i'm i'm losing money every single time those people use my app but it's not worth the the hostage situation of of you know having all these people one-star review me and and kill my business so i can't really do it i just have to support them forever so casey don't do that maybe maybe i think but at least you know but again like you don't have server costs yet at least to worry about so that that's a huge difference but but you do have that api to chase like i mean you're like oh they'll be free forever does that mean it won't change forever right they could change the api or they can add things to the api or they can break the api and like oops they put it rolled out a new release and it broke your app and now you're scrambling to fix that like they didn't do that to screw you it's just a thing that happens because you don't control them they don't probably don't even know you exist considering they won't answer your emails, right?

2:08:29Which means that things they do can affect your app immediately with no notice. And that is the type of thing that you have to be willing to wrangle. So either the app works, and you're on board to wrangle that, in which case, you kind of need some minimum amount of money to keep doing that, whether it's from acquiring new customers or subscription, or the app doesn't work, and then you just sunset it or whatever. Right, exactly. And so that's why I'm leaning towards subscription. And for what it's worth, I was always planning on having like a one week free trial, but you still, it's still tough because I still need to have some amount of functionality that is there to give you a taste so that when I present the paywall, you're not like, no.

2:09:12no. And so in a Slack that we're all a part of, I've been going back and forth with a few mutual friends where initially I was told, and I think justifiably, well, my paywall was too aggressive too soon, et cetera. And my thinking at the time was, well, that's what the one-week free trial is for. But I can see how that would appear to be exploitative and that it would appear that I'm just hoping and praying that people forget to cancel that free trial. And so - I wouldn't characterize it that way for the record, but go ahead. Well, and so I'm happy to be convinced that I'm wrong about this as well.

2:09:44But so I moved the paywall back a little bit. But then some mutual friends were saying, well, you've moved it back so far that now I probably would never bother paying for the app at all. And that's also not good. So I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out where is the appropriate line and where do I say, tough noogies, you're going to have to sign up now. I haven't been in that conversation too much. I've seen a little bit of it, but has the idea come up, which used to be very common in shareware type things, of allowing the full functionality a limited number of times and saying, you know, if someone actually wants to buy the app, they'll use it more than that number of times.

2:10:20And so they get to experience the full breadth of the functionality. But then after they use it the fifth time, it's like, okay, well, you've used up your, you know, four free uses for the day or whatever, like that type of thing where you're not choosing, not simply choosing functionality that is in front of or behind the paywall, but instead like following usage patterns and saying you can use the app this amount over this period of time for free but once you exceed that you have to pay presuming that someone who gets enough utility of it will use it more than that number of times and hit the paywall but they will hit it after having experienced the full functionality of your app you know what i mean yeah and that actually was recommended earlier today and i'm probably going to go that route i gotta see if how ugly it would be to implement but you're just moving the problem to a different place, which is like, okay, but what is the right number of users over what period of time, right?

2:11:07Because what if someone watches like one movie a week, they're never going to hit it, right? That's exactly right. And I think it would be a fairly small number. Like it would be enough for what I would consider to be a day or two of, you know, average use. And then again, I would stick with the free trial, I think. And if people really only use the app for a week and a day or something like that and then that's it okay then maybe it's not for them like i don't want to take your money unless you want to i want i want you to give me your money i don't want to take your money you know what i mean and marco was saying about what the app store is actually like what the app store is actually like is you launch the app and you can't do a single damn thing until you absolutely positively agree to start a free trial right now which is closer to the way this was that's how the app store works like there's so few apps you can't even see what the ui looks like until you agree to to pay for the in-app purchase which which has a seven-day free trial which is nice and you can cancel and pay nothing but we're hoping you forget yeah and keep in mind also casey i you know i i never make a stink about this because i always forget to with with my people who give me test flights but subscriptions on test flights are horrible they suck so bad it makes me type my password casey make it stop well and then they only last like a day you know and then they reset and you have to type your password again and my password is long and complicated and it's hard and it's just I can't do it.

2:12:30Yeah, like anybody out there who's trying to send a test flight out to your friends to test a net purchase or Apple fix this. Don't bother. Like, yeah, like just don't even bother because a test flight paywall sucks. It's impossible. It drives people crazy. You will lose everybody. Everyone will jump off your beta. It's hard enough to get people to keep beta testing your app. Like, a paywall instantly makes all your friends say, ah, forget it and they quit and they move on. But of course, you want to test the IAP so you actually do want people to test it but they don't want to do that because they make it's not like the real experience the real experience you can pay by like double tapping the home button and using your face but not in test flight because reasons that apple you know like so it's just such a this is just a beta tester thing but it's not you know regular customers have to deal with this but i've seen what i've seen a couple different purchases one uh to make the restore purchases thing just always say yes totally you're fine right so you leave all the pay balls in there but then you present people with like or restore purchases and anybody who taps your store purchases says oh you totally paid and then so you would avoid the whole authentication problem but then you're not exercising your iap flow really so right exactly it's a pain yeah there's no good answer the good answer is for apple to make test flight iap work like the real one does yeah exactly i'll have to add some sort of hack i hadn't considered that but you're exactly right but honestly i mean the whole idea of like you know having it be basically you have to subscribe to do almost anything but it's a free trial that's fine i i don't think that's that bad of a solution uh i and there's a reason why so many apps do that because it works it's effective and people like free trials like people like that like that's that's not a bad idea honestly and so many apps like so many apps in the app store that's how they work that are that are way crappier than yours that have way less value to people.

2:14:18You don't have to put it like literally the first thing that they see. Like you can give them one or two searches for free and then make it a third thing they see. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the thing is so like at first my thought was, oh, I forget exactly where I put the line, but basically you can search, but you can't drill into anything. Like it'll show you search results, but then you don't get to see. So let's say I did a search for Ryan Reynolds. You could see that, oh, Ryan Reynolds is right there at the top. That's what I expect. But the moment you try to drill into Ryan Reynolds and see like the details about Ryan Reynolds, then then it would throw up the paywall, which is, I think, probably a little too aggressive.

2:14:54So now, you know, what I was thinking is in the way it currently is, which is probably too lenient is, oh, you can see the results like you can go from search to details. But anything that's linked from there. So like if you're looking at Ryan Reynolds, you couldn't drill into Deadpool or any of the other any of the other roles that he's had. at that point when you try to drill into one of ryan reynolds's roles then it would throw up the paywall but then that means worst case you just go back up and search for deadpool and then you get to see deadpool you know and so i think that's a little too permissive and i'm not i'm not sure what the right answer is but i mean certainly in a slack that we're all a part of a part of there was a visceral reaction that i was that if that a free trial alone and putting up the paywall that quickly was absolutely the wrong answer and and i'm a fool for even thinking it was it was okay so I don't know I gotta figure out what the right answer is and obviously I don't know.

2:15:46Keep in mind also like once you've decided alright I'm gonna go subscription with a free trial of this duration with this annual price then you can tweak the rest of it afterwards like you can ship that way and alright this is the business model period but then the detail of like well how much do you get for free when do I show the paywall that can change over time you can play with that yeah that's exactly right so I don't know we'll see but I'm excited for it I think it was Marco but one of you said this earlier this I think has an even bigger space or potential market than anything I've done so far like well vignette was different but that was short lived and that got sunset real quick but if you look at peak of you you know well it's parents or people who hand their phones to other people a lot and then masquerade well it's people who actually care about privacy which these days is almost no one and I'm not saying that everyone in the world is looking for an IMDB replacement, but I think it's probably more people than are looking potentially for either of my other apps.

2:16:44And so here again, ignorance is bliss slash list. Don't. No. No list puns. We're not doing that. So sitting here now, I'm hopeful. And again, I'm proud of the work. Whether or not it's interesting to anyone, I'm proud of the work. And even if it ends up being a complete flop, I do think I'm getting better at my craft, which is what you were saying earlier, Marco, and I appreciate you having said that. I think I'm getting better at my craft, and I am proud of that. It is not a perfect app. It is not flawless. It probably has bugs somewhere, although it's been reasonably bug-free so far, which I'm pretty proud of.

2:17:21But it's the best I think I've got going so far, and it's a little bit better, if not a lot better than Masquerade, which was, I think, a little to a lot better than Peakaview. And so I'm making progress, and I'm pretty happy about that. And even in a worst-case scenario, you know, this doesn't take off, ATP suddenly goes away, analog goes away, and I need to find a big-boy job again. Then I have something to show for what I've been doing for the last several years, right? Well, in this case, the last couple of months, but more broadly, the last several years. And I think that's a positive thing as well.

2:17:51And I'm learning how to use new stuff. And all of these things, I think, are nothing but good. So even if the app flops, certainly I hope it doesn't, but even if it flopped, I still feel pretty good about what I've learned and how I've grown during the process.