547: Own Your Pricing

36:42All right, anything going on this week? I released a new app. Oh, wait, that was you. No, no, that was me, wasn't it? Let me check my notes for a second. No, that was me. That was me that did that. I did that. That was me. Yeah, so now is the time. If you were, are an ATP member and were, are on the Call Sheet test flight, well, be gone with you. You need to go to the App Store. This is Casey's way of saying thank you. No, actually, I genuinely do have to talk about that in a minute because there's a lot to be said about that. But anyway, but Call Sheet is out. It came out Monday, asterisk, and it's been out.

37:19What is Call Sheet, Casey? Call Sheet is. Thank you. You know, usually I'm the one prompting you knuckleheads to do this. This could be the first episode someone listens to. They're like, what the hell is Call Sheet? No, you're right. No, no, no. I agree with you. I'm just saying usually I'm good about this, and when it's me, I forget. Anyways, Call Sheet is an app for iPhone and iPad that lets you look up movies, cast members, crew members, TV shows, and trivia and information about them. And it does it in a super fast, super user-friendly way. It is free to try. Then you have to subscribe after 20 searches.

37:54You get a one-week free trial on your subscription. The cost is$1 per month in the U.S. or$9 per year. And you can optionally pay more if you so choose. I'll describe that in a minute. But But anyways, it's what I've been working on for the last six months. And I'm really proud of it. I think it's pretty darn good. And I'm excited to finally have it out and in the wild. So that is what it is. And yeah, so I actually hit the go button on this very, very, very quietly on Saturday because I was finally back from our Pennsylvania vacation. And I wanted to make sure that at least one person, that would be me, tried the in-app purchase and it ensured that it worked and didn't just bomb miserably because on Saturday, you know, I might still have the time to do an expedited review on Sunday, potentially, or just say to the people who I knew were going to talk about it in the press, oh my gosh, just kidding.

38:50But thankfully, the in-app purchase code seemed to work, knock on wood. And so on Monday at 9 a.m., I let everyone know that it was out. It was very funny, actually because you know i said on mastodon oh it's coming tomorrow i said on sunday and a lot of people would did exactly what i expected and went and searched for it anyway and found it and started using it which was fine there's nothing wrong with that but i think everyone kind of freaked out a little bit on my behalf thinking that was an accident and it wasn't i knew exactly what was going on but i mean and for the most part like people who haven't released an app on the app store there's no other way to do it like there is no way to say it's going to be out at nine and and click a button and everyone sees it at nine that's not possible due to cash propagation and store propagation so you have to do everything every app you've ever seen released on the app store has done this where it launches and it doesn't show up in search for a while and it doesn't show up in australia for a while like it just propagates across the world but they haven't announced it yet and then at some date like on a monday or a tuesday at 9 a.m it quote unquote launches right but it's been on the store for a while you're just waiting for it to spread to everywhere so that on monday at nine if anybody anywhere in the world searches for call sheet hopefully fingers crossed they'll find it although i have to say two days to get into app store search app store search may not be sufficient in some cases because that search is so bad and so slow it takes so long for things to get into it yeah that's exactly it and there is a mechanism you know before everyone writes in there is a mechanism that you can tell the app store i would like it to be live at such and such a time in such and such a place but the problem with that is you have to decide that at submission time or i believe that to be true i might be i might be lying to you accidentally but i believe that's true you can you can hold for developer you know that is no like hold for developer release is what i did if you hold for developer release and you hit and you hit go i think the going is a little bit faster but the problem is with the app store is that it's you well one of the problems the app store it's usually pretty timely for almost everyone but that's a lot of work for the search if it's a brand new app though that's what i'd be worried about.

40:51And that's the thing. There's a lot of squishiness in that. There's a lot of usually's and a lot of probably's. And so if you want to launch an app and make a big splash and you've timed press and stuff like that, you don't want to take those risks. So it is better usually to hit the button the night before. And then if people find it early, good. Good for them. That's great. But it doesn't really matter. And it's much better to have when you're going to announce it and if there's going to be any press or any yelling about it on social media or anything, it's better that every single person who goes to find it will find it so you don't want to take any risks with it's not yet showing up in new zealand or it's not yet showing up in search like you don't want to do you don't want to take any of those risks you want any any press any buzz you generate you want someone who's searching for it to find it no matter what so you usually you don't need to put it that far ahead of time but the smart people all do yeah and also like for a brand new app that has never been on the store that's the worst case scenario for the search index if you're launching a version 2.0 and you haven't renamed your app you're probably good like everything will probably work out but for an app that has never been on the store and has never appeared in search you really want to get that out there because we have no visibility into or control over when things appear in search which you would think it doesn't appear in search as soon as it's on the store no absolutely not you can you can get the url to the app and if you click the URL, you'll see the app, but then you'll search for call sheet, zero hits or not zero hits.

42:15You'll get a bunch of other garbage that's not call sheet. Right, right. Exactly. And that's the thing. And oftentimes, you know, if you wait for, if I were to have hit go when I really wanted it to be available, then sometimes, you know, maybe Americans can search for it, but people in the UK can't or vice versa. It's just a mess. So, so yeah, so I probably, I had actually intended on doing all this on Sunday, but I had gotten home from our trip on Saturday and I was champing at the bit to like, just make sure this is all functional, good, it works, et cetera. So I'd done it on Saturday quietly.

42:46And then, like I said, you know, a bunch of people found it and that was fine. They reported it into me, which was lovely. And I appreciate that, but I, I didn't want to, I replied to as many as I could, but I didn't want to like publicly say, don't worry, it's there, but don't tell anyone. Cause obviously then everyone will go looking for it. And I wanted the big press push, blah, blah, blah. So anyway, so I appreciate all of you who are looking out for me, but it was deliberate, I promise. So yeah, so the press was far and away the best press response I've gotten from anything I've done. I am extremely, extremely thankful for all the press I've gotten.

43:17It has been extremely kind. I was bracing for impact from a couple of spots, particularly on Mac Stories, because I know how much John and Federico love their iPads, and I was bracing for impact on the iPad support and call sheet, admittedly being pretty bad. i was going to ask about that because i don't think i've actually even tried it on the ipad what is it like neither have i no just kidding uh barely wait it runs on the ipad yeah it turns out the reason i bring this up is because i've wanted the app on my mac several times i'm like i should just run the ipad version of it which then i have two things a i can't do that because i have an intel mac and b i was like did casey even allow it to be run on the mac well we should talk about that i will probably forget so try to keep me honest but we should talk about that later But no, it is on the iPad, but I have no iPad-specific affordances.

44:03I have done nothing to it specific for the iPad, and it's not particularly great. Is it set to allow it to be run on Mac? It was on TestFlight. It is not in the App Store. Boo. Well, so here's the thinking on that, and I'm being convinced that my thinking is wrong. I mean, you could write a Mac app if you want, but I'm just saying, checkbox is easier. Well, that's the thing. So on TestFlight, I was like, who cares? It's TestFlight. Everyone knows it's garbage. But when it was in the App Store, I thought, well, I don't think, given that the iPad experience is pretty subpar, to put it mildly, I didn't think I wanted to also introduce a subpar Mac app because it just seemed like it was too much subpar stuff.

44:47and I've literally never run it on the Mac. I know it can be done. I have heard people that were doing it on TestFlight, but I didn't desire to, or I didn't have the time really before I wanted to launch to do any testing for iPad or for the Mac. And so my thought was the iPad was bad enough, but I think it's required. I'll let it go on iPad. But on the Mac, it just seemed like that was not wise. And enough people have written to basically say, dude, I'll take it, I don't care, that I think for the next release, I will probably turn on the Mac version, but I'm interested if either of you have opinions or feedback one way or the other.

45:22I mean, I would work on the iPad version a little bit. Oh, definitely. Before worrying about turning on the Mac. The reason I think you didn't see a lot of pushback about this in reviews is because it's clearly like the phone is where everyone's going to use it. Like you're on the couch. You've got your phone. You don't have your Mac with you probably. You probably don't have your iPad. Like the phone is the right platform for this. Like so I don't I don't think the lack of an iPad version is that or not the lack of an iPad. I don't think a subpar iPad version really matters that much at all, especially for 1.0.

45:48But I would say, you know, eventually when you get around to it, shore up the iPad version. And then once the iPad version is not crappy, you know, decide what you want. The reason people don't put it on the Mac is because they're like, oh, but if we put it on the Mac, what if someday we want to make money for them by making a Mac version? If you know you're not going to do that, just put it on the Mac. No, that I don't think I care about. Remind me of this, but I don't think I care about. So for whatever it's worth, my podcast app, which is not really something that many people want on their iPads or their Macs.

46:13Oh, I use it on the Mac all the time. All right. For whatever it's worth, right now, my Mac use and my iPad use are roughly tied. The iPad is slightly ahead, but not by much. They're about the same in terms of percentage of use across all overcasts right now. So that says something. um i will say supporting the mac in in that way in the ipad compatibility mode it comes with a few little weird caveats for you know apps that have certain features like audio apps for instance airplay doesn't work i don't know why it just it just says it's unavailable all the time you know yeah there's occasionally some weird bugs um where like some like on the mac version it will crash if you use this one api and there's no way to know that until you do it or something like that Is Casey's video player not going to work?

47:05I should look. I should definitely look into that. But for the most part, I think what your app is doing, it's pretty much showing information and lists and images and stuff like that. That should be fine. I can't off the top of my head come up with any major problem you'd run into. But once you go onto a platform, even if it's just leaving that thing on on the Mac, you will start getting reviews from people who are using it that way. so you got to think about like am i running a big risk here you know you can't and then once you do it you can't really take it away without a bunch of people so you know be go into it carefully like i thought when i was going into it i thought this is great i don't have to do anything this will cost me nothing there will be no downside it just runs and it's fine and that's almost the case but not quite uh there people do have expectations they have feature requests they you know they whenever there is a bug or a shortcoming, they will either email me about it or leave a mediocre review saying, why does an AirPlay work on the Mac or whatever?

48:06So you will run into occasional downsides of it, but overall, I would say it is worth doing. Once you have your iPad app situated, just check the box and let it run on the Mac too. Yeah, fair enough. But anyway, so yeah, press has been incredible. It was covered at Mac Stories. I did an interview I keep forgetting to look up when it was but it was a month or two ago I did an interview with D. Griffin Jones at Cult of Mac which I really enjoyed we talked for like 90 minutes or something like that and then it was cut down in a good way to about 30 minutes and that's a video interview so if you want to see me talking at my normal podcasting desk with my normal podcasting setup if memory serves however you can actually watch me talk and gesture and articulate with my arms and so on and so forth Is it your normal podcasting setup?

48:54Is the closet door open or closed? No, that's true. In this one, I believe the closet door was closed, but it is currently open. It would have had terrible audio. Marco's eagle ears, or whatever, not eagle ears. You know what I'm saying. Marco's bat ears would detect it. Marco's tiny holes in the side of his head look like the ears of an eagle. Something like that. Anyways, he would have noticed if I had closed the closet door. But yeah, so there's a video interview there. Chance Miller at 95Mac, our friend Stephen Hackett at 512Pixels. And then, much to my surprise, Sarah Perez at TechCrunch reached out.

49:25So I was on TechCrunch, which is extremely cool. And then our mutual friend, John Gruber, Daring Fireball wrote it up, which I was very, very flattered to see his link post about it. Our friend Jason Snell. And then somebody pointed out to me that Florian Innocente at iGeneration, which is a French blog, apparently, that wrote it up this morning. So I got a lot of good press on it, and I'm really, really pleased with that. The response seems to be pretty, pretty good. a lot of people seem really happy with it there were some curmudgeons that were yelling at me about how I'm offering software for rent which is exactly what I expected and was frustrating but you know here we are if only there were some podcast episodes they could listen to where you talked about this if only I mean that's the thing about you know so I know everyone you're always you know you're going to get those things because first of all if your app is not free flat out for everyone forever there's always going to be complaints but especially with subscriptions because you've got people who are tired of them they don't want to keep paying for something on a regular basis and they're going to complain and that's fine but in this case in the case of this app i think most of the complainers you if you were to explain to them the reasoning which is like look i'm building this on a third-party api and though that api is free right now that could change and if it changes i could be on the hook for a lot of money see these recent examples in the press that you may have seen like it's not just a hypothetical theory even though it was hypothetical it's just smart and defensive you know business but it's not so hypothetical these days so i feel like if you explain that they'd be like oh i didn't realize your app using api or i didn't realize your app using api and it was free but it may charge in the future of course there will still be some people say well it's free now so you should make it free you know like you know you're not going to get everything no the reality is like you've you've already spent too many words on these people like yeah yeah just ignore them and move on i'm not saying that you don't need to answer every single one of these people but like there is if you if you were to no you have to answer effectively none because look the reality is anything you put out there that people want that is not free you'll get some complaints and there are a lot look every time we talk about this we will hear from a handful of people who are like i don't like subscription apps because of super strongly held belief xyz and look that's you can you can hold those positions and that's fine the reality is this is where software has gone not even is going like has gone like it's over the transition is over we are here in a subscription-priced world for almost everything.

51:48Anything you're going to use is going to have some form of this, whether it is making money from you constantly via ads and tracking BS or making money from you constantly via a subscription plan. But in some form, everything has gone this direction. And so, look, you are now, like, by having a subscription-priced app, you are now in the mainstream. This is not a fringe thing. This is not a risk you were taking. This is the mainstream. And everyone who is on the other side who is yelling, their numbers are dwindling. And frankly, they're not going to be your customers anyway. So you're better off serving the people who are going to be your customers as best as you can.

52:22And those people can find apps that are pay once or whatever. I think the Affinity apps have made a big deal about not requiring a subscription like Photoshop does. And I think that's worked for them. They're sort of in the old model where you buy new versions and they cost you a certain amount. And I have a bunch of the Affinity apps and part of that is what attracted me to it. So for the people who don't want to pay subscriptions, there are still places you can go. But in the same way that Casey's choices don't dictate the choices of everybody else's, your preferences as a consumer also don't dictate the choices of every software developer.

52:57So you can say you're not going to buy it and then don't buy it. Done and done. There are still some things you can buy without a subscription. But the people who are willing to pay a subscription have different choices than you do. Some people might not want to pay hundreds of dollars up front, but they just want to rent Illustrator for one month for 20 bucks or something. I don't even know if you can still do that because Adobe is weird. But, yeah, it's a complicated world of software pricing and it has changed a lot. So if people are in the mindset that this is like Marco is getting alluding to, that this is an aberration and a new bad thing that will eventually go away.

53:27It's it's not really like, you know, Microsoft Office is subscription. Photoshop is subscription. Tons of iOS apps are subscription. subscription uh the only things that aren't are either things that are sort of intentionally reactions to that so affinity not being subscription is sort of a competitive differentiator against one of the main competitors which is photoshop and what other other adobe apps there are or there are apps like mine that are you know dinky little things that aren't a big deal you pay five dollars for my apps once and apparently you get free upgrades forever and ever so uh and until i decide to start trying to get a subscription so buy yours now indeed yeah and a handful of people were like, well, what about a one-time purchase, even if it's way, way, way expensive?

54:05And, you know, the handful of people that I did answer who were the ones that were not jerks and clearly seemed to be willing to have at least a modicum of a conversation about it. I totally understand their point. Like, I'm not, as a user, I'm not in love with subscriptions either. Like, I'm kind of tired of them too, but I had to take off the user hat and put on the business hat. And I don't think that there's any way I could offer this app other than subscriptions, see the two or three episodes of this very program where we discussed it. And, you know, people would say, well, what about like a really really expensive one-time purchase and you know as soon as i said to them look i i don't want to end up in a twitter or reddit scenario pretty much everyone was oh okay yep okay i get it and not everyone bought it but you know at least at least now i have prior art to point to you know you could also give a time stamp link to the episodes where we talked about it although speaking of software costs when i was looking up the uh the differences in mac paint 1.0 and 2.0 and everything uh i had occasion to because i was looking at the pages with the version history had occasion to see the price again uh and in 2023 dollars the combination you get mac paint and mac write in a single box that was 553 dollars for those two programs oh and so here's the thing it's like yeah but you only had to pay that once i would pay it once to get the best word processor for the mac and the best paint program like the only word processor and paint program because it was the mac was just out in 1984 if you paid that 553 dollars in 1984 guess what 2.0 came out in 1988, four years later.

55:27And it cost even more just for Mac Paint. So it's like, you know, I'll pay that money and I'll never need to pay it again. The old model was they would charge you huge amounts for software. You could use it as long as you wanted and you quote unquote never needed to upgrade. But practically speaking, you'd eventually get a new Mac and eventually the operating system would be upgraded. And eventually the old version of Mac Paint that you got wouldn't even run on the new Mac on the new version of Mac operating system that you had. And then you'd quote unquote have to buy mac paint 2.0 because mac paint 1.0 1.5 like stop running and mac paint's a bad example because it ran for a really long time although i did find out that mac paint 1.0 broke really fast because i'm using like a you know what is it called infinite mac.org uh those various websites to run emulators and plus mini vmac on my local mac to double check all this stuff um and mac paint 1.0 does not like to run on operating systems and simulated macs that are much newer than like the 128 or the 512 right very quickly one point version 1.5 came out in 1985 and that one had more legs so anyway the old model had its problems too but you know people like what they like and so seek out software that offers the pricing model that you prefer uh but know that the landscape is changing and you may be hopping from island to island as the water rises around you indeed i would say also casey like when you when you talk about the price this is both you know i i saw a little bit of this like in your blog post um or you know even in the app ui you you are very kind of apologetic about the price so you're very careful to introduce people to it and and maybe that's a better approach than than my approach but the way you approach the price when you're talking about it is along the lines of here's the app you can use it for free for a little while but after that you have to pay when you like that that kind of that that but there that shift in attitude suggests that this is a downside and i would suggest just reframe it you you can use it for free and then you then you know you have to pay like you know change the but to an and no it's a fair point it's a fair point well i mean i would flip it around entirely and say uh the app is x dollars for y and y dollars for x but it also includes a week free trial plus 20 free searches that's even yeah that's even better make the but be like the you know here's the app here's as much it costs oh and if you don't want to pay that don't worry there's a way for you and by the way i know we talked so much about pricing and i hadn't kept track of what you had decided i like this set of things i like one dollar a month it's really simple i like nine dollars a year and i like uh one week free trial obviously so i think that yeah i think eventually through all this hemming and hawing we came up with what i think is a pretty good pricing structure that has all like it has everything that people want the 20 free searches you don't have to start a trial to use them you don't have to like you don't have to make any decision you just get them right and you're trying to be friendly with the searches and then having the trial if you decide to do it with enough time decided whether you want this app and then the pricing i think is totally fair especially especially if you have used the imdb app to try to do this task and if you have if you have you know a dollar a month lying around for this task if this is worth a dollar a month to you you will throw that money in case in a second to not have to use the imdb app like when i was trying to like uh you know post i was gonna say tweet but whatever post about it on the various social media networks on launch day i launched the imdb app again just to remind myself what it was like and took a bunch of screenshot of the various interest interstitials that it threw in my face i'm like does it want me to sign up for a streaming service because it threw like netflix logos in my face i'm like what the hell is this and i went back and looked at the screenshot and it's like it's not that evil what it was trying to say is hey uh you can tell the imdb app which streaming services you subscribe to so it knows like just like you can and just watch which is integrated with casey's app so it knows which ones to recommend to you i'm like okay that's a good feature imdb app what's not good is when i launch the app when i want to look something up to throw a full screen thing in my face telling me that feature exists that i don't like because i'm at that point i'm so angry i just want to get to the search box so i can type something that i dismiss it without reading it anyway yeah so yeah so anyway just own your pricing as like here's the app and this is what it costs like that's it like look that's what apple does apple when apple introduces a new billion dollar thing they come out and say here's here's this good thing and here's what it costs that's it well they say well apple gets to say starts at oh you can say that too casey you can say it starts at one dollar a month that's true no it starts at whatever no it starts at like you know 80 cents a month or whatever right whatever when you divide out oh yeah yeah yeah that's what everyone else does well whatever you can do the start side you can say if you want the blacked out logo though it's another$1 ,500.

1:00:06It's Porsche option pricing. Yeah, that's Porsche for sure. But yeah, it's funny you bring up all this pricing stuff too, because one of the, there were a handful of misses, I think on my part, none of them so far seem to be too dramatic or catastrophic. But one of the misses on my part is when I was setting up the pricing for the four different IAPs, I said to Apple, you know, here's the price I want, compute the equivalent across the planet. And they said, sure, we're happy to do that. And there were four countries that I've become aware of so far that I'm aware of so far. I'm trying to figure out if I can find them real quick, maybe not.

1:00:41But there were four countries. Sweden was one of them. I want to say Japan was another where apparently the yearly cost was either the exact same or more than the monthly cost. It was Sweden, Japan, Vietnam and Canada. surprisingly. I need to look into this, but I don't know how this happened. Like it was not deliberate. That's weird. Right? And maybe it was user error. Darned if I know how, but it could have been. So I think it makes sense to me because here's the thing. I don't know exactly how this works, but I do know that pricing is abstracted where you pick like, what is it called? Tiers or something?

1:01:14A tier, yeah. But you can customize for subscriptions. You can customize it per region or per country. Right. So you can, but most people don't because they don't want to have to do exchange rates in their head. And if you pick a tier, Apple adjusts them for you as the currency fluctuates at some interval i don't know what they do occasionally they send an email that tells me they're adjusting things and like whatever but the thing is the tier for your yearly like that's a different number you're picking the u.s dollars number and that maps to all sorts of weird numbers across the the the world and i think that big number maps maps differently than the smaller monthly number like it's not a linear thing like because they want to hit i don't know how they do it but i think they like sort of bin them into these little buckets and i think your small monthly number ends up in like a bucket that's that's less than the us bucket but then your big number ends up in a bucket that's greater and then you end up the math doesn't end up working like that's that's difficult to do but like marco said you can't actually go in there and just fix it manually but yeah which i plan to do i just haven't had the chance yet that's someone in the chat room said foreign exchange headwinds going back to our analyst discussion earlier yeah right that's exactly right using this you can make money but yeah no i've been really really pleased with the response.

1:02:22Sales, it's pretty early to tell, especially since everyone who has bought is in a one-week free trial. Oh, no, you won't know for a week. Right, exactly. I'm looking at App Store Connect. I've never done a subscription app before. And looking at App Store Connect, sales seem okay. They don't seem stellar. You get to see that they started the trial, though, right? It seems that way, yes. Again, I've never looked at App Store Connect for subscription stuff. But it seems that I am getting a vague notion for how many people have started the trial. And, you know, I'm not displeased with the numbers I'm seeing, but especially given that the press was really complimentary, and I was very thankful for it.

1:03:01It is not as good as I would have hoped. So we'll see. Well, keep in mind, many of the people haven't hit their free limit yet. Yeah, that's true. Like, you know, a lot of people will download this app, and then, you know, they might not have any questions about people in movie and TV shows right that second. You've got to wait for a couch incident. Yeah, exactly. I think it's going to be kind of a slow burn here. Because you have to first wait for people to have couch incidents where they all have to say, oh, I can look it up in this new app I downloaded the other day. And they have to remember that they got the new app.

1:03:31Right, and remember what it's called, and find it on their phone. And so what you're going to do here, you're going to build patterns of usage. And so I think it's going to have a surprisingly gradual build. But the good thing is once somebody is in the habit of going to call sheet for this information, not IMDb, not the web, once you build that habit, that habit is very unlikely to change over time. So it is going to, I think, be a slow buildup to get people in. But then I think they're going to stick around for a long time. So I think you're going to be in a good spot, but it might not be visible like this week.

1:04:07But maybe, you know, maybe like in a month after people have had more time to, you know, have catch incidents and actually use it and then surpass their free try or their free limits. Then maybe you'll start to see like, oh, now it's actually, you know, this is decent numbers. Yeah. And Mike and I talked about this on Analog. We recorded yesterday, but in as I think Mike called it the ATP time warp or something like that, which is accurate. But that episode won't be out until Sunday. We'll put a link in the show notes with a note that it's, you know, going to 404 for a while. But anyways, we talked about this a bit.

1:04:38And I think something that occurred to me when I was talking to Mike, if memory serves, is that I've been programmed for all my other apps and for years of following people like Marco, you know, pre-subscription time. I've been programmed that the way the App Store works is you make all your money in the first, you know, three days or week or what have you. And then you make nothing after that. And so I think part of my kind of more morose or forlorn point of view right now is because I'm still like that's so internalized and I'm trying to break my brain away from that. And I think you're right, Marco.

1:05:09I think there's a lot to be said for this being a much slower burn. It's certainly compared to my other apps and maybe just in general because of the nature of this app. But it's hard for me to remember that. And so if this is a slow burn, then I'm actually sitting pretty good right now. But if I'm judging it by, you know, the immense cliff in the good way and then the cliff in the bad way, then it's okay. It's not bad, but it's not great either. But it's certainly done better than the prior two apps, which is good. And not a terribly high bar, but good nonetheless. And, you know, all told, I think I did a bad job of verbalizing this on analog.

1:05:45And Mike very justifiably called me out on it. But I am really proud of this. I don't think the app is perfect, but I think it's a pretty damn good app. And there's plenty of places that I'd like to improve it. My issues, geez, how many GitHub issues do I have right now? I have 45 GitHub issues, almost all of which are enhancements. There are some bugs for sure, but almost all of those are enhancements I'm planning. And so I have plenty of work that I'd like to do on this app. And I really think that it's a good app that I think is well-considered. I think it's in a pretty good spot. Again, not perfect, but it's a pretty damn good spot.

1:06:25And I'm really proud of it. And I really think that if you, a listener, give it a shot, you will probably like it too. You know, I've had a lot of people write on Mastodon in various amounts of rudeness to say, oh, I wanted nothing to do with this app. It was a total waste of my time. And then I tried it and it turns out it's great. And I totally just subscribed. It's like, well, thank you. thanks but you know thank you for that backhanded compliment but um but no i genuinely think that it's it's a really good app that will serve more people than you would expect you know i think if you're kind of sitting on the fence or just you know snubbing your nose at this and saying oh this isn't for me give it a shot it doesn't hurt you don't have to even sign up you don't there's no subscription required um until after your first 20 searches and in fact one of my favorite pieces of feedback that I got were a handful of people saying, oh my God, I installed the app and then it ran.

1:07:22There were no prompts. There's no permissions. There's no nothing. It's just, here's the app. You know, there's no, what about Bluetooth? What about local network? Right, right. What about this? What about location services? What about this? What about that? Well, let's do a 17-step onboarding. Why not? Turn on notifications, please. I'm amazed at the number of apps that beg me to turn on notifications. Like, what will you ever want to notify me about? Oh, God. And quick aside on this, by the way, so just a very obscure follow-up. Fuji has a new, Fujifilm has a new app for their cameras. They redid the whole app, and it's compatible with the ones I got.

1:07:54So I downloaded the app and set it up. The Fujifilm app will not let you progress and use the app's core functionality. And it's stuff like pulling pictures off the camera, using a remote shutter to remotely display the camera's display, so you can use the phone as a shutter, like basic camera app stuff. It will not let you do those things until you allow full-time, including background, always location access to it. What? No. And it says, oh, you have to, you know, we need this so we can geotag your photos automatically. But it will, like the, like, you know, Ubi screen, the out-of-box experience, like in Microsoft terms, like the setup screen process going through there.

1:08:36you cannot access the app until you grant it full always background location access how that got through app review i have no idea because they were distracted by disney and pixar they were too busy looking at your screenshots anyway but like that's you know again when you look around the app ecosystem that's every app every single app i mean it's not usually that that egregious and again apple for the love of god reject that app like that's your job at the app store like why do they have to give full-time background location access always for an app that is supposed to be about getting pictures off your camera and showing a live shutter um that's ridiculous and that is a failure of app review at the highest level like that that's so egregious um but anyway sorry but that you know the thing is like that's when when customers are complimenting your app for like not having all that bs it's because the rest of the app ecosystem is that bad now there is so much garbage there is so much harassment of users for constant permissions to creepy private stuff that the app really doesn't need or at least really shouldn't be asking for yet um you know that that is such a thing now it's so just ubiquitous uh that your app really does stand out if you just respect people and don't barrage them with permission dialogues and first launch.

1:09:59Like that does make you stand out. And that's a very good thing. But yeah, honestly, you know, I think, number one, I think this is absolutely the best app you've made yet. Number two, I think it is by far the most likely to succeed long term because it has the broadest market. Definitely. You know, your previous apps have been like a little more specialized for, you know, so if you have this particular need, you know, this app, a lot of people need this app. and a lot of people could benefit from it so i think if if you keep the marketing up and by the way you really you know the press that you got is great that first of all that's wonderful um but the biggest marketing channel you have is this show and you know in terms of not in terms of raw audience you know the the combined audiences of all those press outlets is larger than our show's audience but the the the rate of conversion that you get from a press article about your app to downloads of your app is not nearly as high as you would think like i've i've been doing this a long time and that it's it's wonderful getting press there's a lot of benefits to it besides immediate downloads but the immediate download number is never that great it's never what you think it'll be from press even from big press um it's that's just the reality of the market um but you're building here you're building long term you're building like word of mouth advertising you're building you know over the shoulder kind of advertising experiential average like that's what you're going to build over time with this app because people are going to download it maybe remember to use it maybe then actually use it and they're going to be like oh that's fast that was nice right and then like next time they have a couching student where they need to know who that guy is they're going to go back to that app maybe and over time you're going to build that habit with them and that that's going to be how this app succeeds and i really do think i mean look, I don't know what your expectations are, but I really do think this is going to succeed.

1:11:50Unless you have totally unreasonable expectations, I think this will do well over time. It just might take a little bit to get there. Well, and it's funny you bring that up. I actually just today did something I've never done before. Spoiler alert. I have purchased some podcast advertisements. So I know a guy who knows a lady. And so I was able to purchase a couple of spots on the Incomparable. I don't know exactly when they're running. And a couple of spots on Downstream because my thought process is downstream is, you know, industry people and people who really care about streaming media and stuff like that.

1:12:29And the Incomparable is, you know, pop culture. And so although I think that The Incomparable probably has a fair bit of crossover with this audience, I thought it doesn't have, you know, 100 % crossover. And I'm willing to throw a little bit of money at it. And then downstream, I think, probably has considerably less crossover with our audience and is more likely to have an audience outside of my own. You know what I mean? That was very clunky the way I described that, but hopefully that makes sense. And so there's going to be a couple of spots, I believe, this month on both shows. and we're going to see how that goes.

1:13:02And I have no idea if it's going to work. I've never advertised any of my apps before. And so I'm going to give it a shot. And, you know, I also reached out to the Maximum Fun people to see if it's as hilariously unaffordable as I expect to sponsor the Flophouse. They have not gotten back to me yet, but I suspect it will be a gazillion dollars or maybe seven gazillion dollars, which I will not spend, but it can't hurt to ask the question. So I'm trying new avenues. And, you know, something that occurred to me as we were recording Analog, which, Marco, you just said the exact same thing, the addressable market for this app is arguably anyone who watches television or movies.

1:13:41Yeah. Which is basically everybody. I mean, like, it's hard to capture that market. Oh, absolutely. But you can be reasonably sure that, like, whatever marketing and reputation you build, that part of the funnel is not going to be your limiting factor. Like, you can love my app. Someone can go around their whole family and say, oh my god, you've got to try Overcast. And most of their family is going to be like, what are you talking about? I use the podcast app, or what's a podcast? So it's a much narrower appeal. Your app, you know, CallSheet has significantly more appeal in that area. Like, any random person around someone who's using it, if they like it enough to mention it, or if the person oversees it, or if, you know, whoever says, oh, who's that guy?

1:14:27it's oh it's that one guy and they look it up like you know they're they're probably in a conversation with someone else or the someone else on the couch next to them so that's why i i think you're gonna do well you know over time it's just it's gonna take a while to get there i would also suggest um you know in terms of like maximizing your ad spend um app store search ads are probably better than podcast ads for what you're looking at yeah i i actually need to talk to you about that Yeah. So first of all, when you go sign up for App Store search ads, do the advanced. Don't do the basic. Because the problem is the advanced is the kind that used to be the only kind.

1:15:04I very briefly tried to use basic. And when I saw what it took away, like what kind of controls it took away, I backed right out. because I have enough experience with Advanced to see, like with Advanced, you can see every single keyword and phrase and stuff that it thinks your app is relevant to that it'll match it to. And you kind of have to babysit it because like, you know, for my LLC, which we'll get to in a little while actually, my LLC name for Overcast is Overcast Radio LLC. This was stupid. The reason why is that New York already had an Overcast LLC when I went to register. So I had to like add some other word to it.

1:15:40and I when I was when I was in that stage of the app development which was very very very early on I briefly had the idea what if I you know what if one of the features of the app would be like it could play podcasts like radio and of course everyone else has done this since then and it doesn't work and nobody actually wants that but you know it's like oh what if you could just play you know put on a station it would just play it so I briefly thought how about I call it overcast radio to make it like forward looking like it isn't just about podcasts it's going to replace radio so my company name is overcast radio llc i don't know how the hell to change it um so the what i really should do is call it overcast podcast app llc because that's how app store search works um and i keep meaning to change it to that and i just haven't yet for whatever reason i don't even know if apple will let me change it as far as i know they won't but i think maybe if you email them who knows anyway because my name is overcast radio llc even though my app does not mention radio anywhere in the text anywhere in the title anywhere in the keywords It doesn't mention radio anywhere else.

1:16:40But because that keyword is in the company name, Overcast gets matched by search ads to radio type searches, radio ads. Oh, goodness. And it's police radio scanners. This is way off what I'm going for. So the problem is when you do the App Store basic search ads, you lose a lot of the controls that allow you to tell them not that, not that, not that, not that. Because their search is really dumb and their matching algorithms are really rudimentary and really very stupid. So to maximize your effectiveness of your dollars of search ads, you have to tell it what not to match you to. And you have to go in there periodically and say, oh, I spent 45 cents matching to free police scanner.

1:17:31Like, okay, let me X that out so I don't get more of those in the future. I'm not going to spend my money there. so that's why I recommend doing the advanced so that you actually get those controls because you will need them if you really want to maximize how your money is spent but the good thing about App Store Search ads is that you can see then how much you're actually spending to acquire people it actually tells you that so that helps you make first of all it helps you know how much to spend on ads but then that also helps you it helps you see your return and then it helps you kind of figure out if you need to make a future pricing decision or future product decisions, you can figure out what does it cost me to acquire a user and to keep that user over time.

1:18:18So that's why I recommend App Store Search Ads. With podcast ads, and I say this as somebody who makes a lot of my living from podcast ads, although decreasingly so, but rapidly decreasingly so, but anyway, please, adf.fm slash join. Or slash sponsor. Either one is fine. Yeah, right. Let's be honest. Slash join is better at this point, I think. But anyway, but you know, podcast ads, when you have a smaller budget, it's much harder to have the impact that you want because a lot of, you know, spoken ads like this, like most forms of advertising, depends on repetition for it to really like stick in people's minds.

1:18:56So if you only have the budget to buy one podcast ad, don't buy a podcast ad. like you might get some return but it's not maybe nearly as much as if you bought like four podcast ads like you know every week for four weeks like that's it that's a much more effective marketing plan uh than just buying one and have it be one off and that's it because people won't remember it nearly as well uh but you know so so i would and also with podcast ads because again because of things that are actually very good about the podcast medium it's really hard to know the direct response rate of those ads for an app you know the reason why podcast ads say hey go to whatever slash atp use coupon code atp for 10 off your first purchase is so that way the sponsor knows how many people heard the ad and how many new customers they got through that ad it's direct response advertising that's why this has been so popular with podcasts over time because they can then attribute they can say well it turns out you know the atp does really well for something like squarespace so they're willing to spend more money with us oh and they still have to do the guesswork of all the people who went and didn't use the link or didn't type in the code or forgot there was a code or didn't go to the landing page so it's not you know the it's not the the perfect knowledge that you know search app store search ads have right yeah but it's at least closer it's very hard to do that for an app like you can you can make a custom link and have it add a tag like but no one does that no one remembers those links it's yeah it's not that that's that's going to be above your pay grade for this app um so really what what you should do here is the most money that you spend acquiring people should probably be with app store search ads or at least the first money you spend well i mean you know whatever you've whatever you've already committed to fine i'm not saying i'm not saying back out but i am saying yeah yeah definitely start buying search ads now because that you know you'll have you'll have data in a day of how much you're spending and and what you're being matched to um what keywords you're being matched to and you'll be able to see you know you'll be and you'll be to adjust very quickly like all right well this bid i got you know i got to raise this bid to 50 cents or whatever for this keyword or or oh i'm not getting shown enough when i when i when you know when i'm buying imdb i'm not being shown enough there so i need to either increase my bid or bid on something else you know you can start getting those getting that data very quickly in a pretty tight feedback loop then you can finally see like you know if it turns out that you end up making you know like whatever whatever percentage of your downloads result in that, you know, five or$10 value somebody might have for you, you know, as long as they stay subscribed, which could be actually much higher than that over time.

1:21:29But, you know, suppose, suppose you're like, all right, well, you know, 5 % of downloads result in a purchase. I don't know what your number is going to be there. I don't know if that's high or low. I have no idea because that varies a lot per app and, you know, what the offering is. But then you can go and say, all right, well, if it only costs me 50 cents or 5 cents or 1 cent to acquire a user, okay, now I have numbers I can work with. You can start doing the math and figuring out what works for you. So buy App Store Search Ads. Yeah, it's on the to-do list. I was clicking around as you were talking, and I went and landed on searchads.apple.com.

1:22:08And I'm not reading because I'm trying to listen you but i found a start now button i clicked it and then the pie hole said no you can't do that because it was an advertising domain it's filled with ads it is yes that's where all the ads live i'm gonna need to approve that domain which i thought was there's still no search ads in the mac app store right uh i don't think there are i mean when's the last time i've looked at the mac yeah i was gonna say the problem is there's no users in the mac app store yeah i know i i know we talked about when apple came out with this like you could buy search ads against your competitors apps and stuff like that and it would show you at the bottom remember that whole thing i i don't think like i don't think there's search ads on the mac app store but there i know this from searching for my own apps when i search for my own apps on the mac app store other people other competing apps come up so they must be putting my app name in their keywords oh totally i don't think you're supposed to do but i don't actually know when when the app store first launched like for the in the early days uh you were not officially you were not allowed to put other apps names in your keywords field because the keywords field in app store connect is not shown to the public yeah apple uses it in search indexing and i think they've used it less over time as people have spammed the crap out of it but again apple search algorithms are really dumb and really rudimentary so they do still use that kind of stuff as far as i can tell and everyone started putting their competitors names in in their keywords field everyone did that and you could complain you could say look they're not supposed to be doing this or it's my trademark or whatever you could do all that and mostly your complaints would be ignored because the app store is not policed nearly as much as we often want it to be uh in the ways we want it to be and this is one of those ways any anything that's considered like app store optimization uh you can kind of it's kind of the wild west and and you you can kind of do whatever you want and apple mostly won't have a problem with it uh because everyone else is doing it too and and worse including apple itself in many cases um so you know you you might have to do some of that stuff you know depending on on you know what what you're being matched with and everything or you know what you're how you're ranking you might have to start doing some of those things that are a little bit icky sounding to a pure mind um but the app store does that to you over time i mean look i even converted to like the screenshots that like show different shaped iphones in them and like rather than just being screenshots i even converted to that recently like it's there's just there are certain things that like you don't want to do and then eventually like you know the title of my app was overcast colon podcast player for a long time you know until they added that subtitle field which no one uses and they still make their app called something whatever colon keyword spam um yeah that's that's just the app store you gotta go full full amazon product name for your app yeah exactly overcast podcast player audio sound like i don't i can't even it's hard to come up with those titles because you think you can come up with them it's free free podcast not police radio like it i will say i don't put my competitors names in my keywords field um it's my keywords field is like you know podcast podcatcher free podcast free download is like that that kind of stuff um i do however bid on their names in apps in app store search ads uh because a there's nothing wrong with that b they do it to me um and c it's that's expressly allowed by apple like phil shiller expressly said we want people we want to be we want people to do this um and i think when you are buying yours you should absolutely bid on imdb as your top bid like and it'll it tells you when you when you type in a keyword into the app store uh in the search ads buying thing it'll tell you like these little like colored bars that kind of indicate roughly how popular that is and then roughly like how strong your bid will be against other people's bids um and my bids are almost all in the red it's like your bids are weak don't even bother but i put them in anyway and then i get i get downloads you know it's so someone's bit someone's clicking on them and i'm winning some of those auctions um but but it and that's and that's not because i'm super cheap it's because it's literally like to to get it in the green for some of my keywords it would be like five dollars per tap like absurd amounts of money that i could never justify.

1:26:11But anyway, buy search ads and be aggressive with what you bid on, the keywords you bid on, you know, all that stuff like be be aggressive, be totally like blatant, you know, bid right against your competitors and see how you see how it does. Yeah, that is the plan. I again, I've never done any advertising, much less, you know, app store search ads or anything like that. But it is absolutely the plan. And I will probably be needling you with questions about this over the next few days. But to go back quite a bit, I keep dancing around this, but I wanted to make this point, which I think I talked about on Analog as well.

1:26:46But when I had the idea of tying access to the test flight to membership, to be completely forthright, the only goal I had in doing that was juicing our member numbers. Like I really thought it was a win-win, right? I'm giving the members something that they wouldn't have otherwise, and they're giving me money I wouldn't have otherwise. And so I thought everyone's happy, right? And that was really the only purpose in having the members have access to the test flight. Well, as it turns out, having a test flight that had quite a few more people on it than would otherwise have been there was really great.

1:27:28And I really owe the members that use the test flight a debt of gratitude dude, because I really think the app is better for having been used by way more people than would otherwise have used it. Because I think you can have different groups of people in App Store Connect, and my friends and family group is something to the order of 50 to 100 people. I forget exactly how many are in there right now. But the members test light was quite a bit more than that. And that really, really helped make this app better. And one of the very obvious ways is there were international people. And granted, I had a handful of people from other countries in my friends and family list, but there were way more in way more countries on the member's test flight.

1:28:14And they came up with legitimate problems or tweaks or things that I should change. And I do think the app is far, far better for it. So if you are a member, whether or not you joined for the test flight, I really appreciate you using the app via test flight. and I appreciate those of you who did report feedback. I appreciate those who maybe reported feedback and never heard anything back from me because there was a lot of it, but it did make the app better. And I read all of it. And I'm really, really thankful for all of you members that took the time to do any of these things because I genuinely think the app is better for it.

1:28:50With that said, I think it was a build or two ago, I did expire all the old builds and test flights. So I think I might've left the most recent one. I don't recall, but I expired either all of them or all but the most recent one for the members test flight. Now, to the best of my knowledge, that means you cannot install it again. But if it's already installed, you're you're clear to use it for up to 90 days from when the build was posted. And so I'm thinking to myself, oh, God, here we are again with slow burn. You know, I had a week delay from free trials. Now I've got three months delay from all of the test flight people, many of whom I'm assuming will wait until they can't use the app anymore in order to switch over to the paid one.

1:29:35But it turns out, and Marco is the king of this, I am but the court jester by comparison, but it turns out procrastination wins the day. And let me tell you why. it turns out that when i was working on it i on the test flight builds i really really wanted to add some sort of detection like that oh if you're in test flight you know you get the whole thing for free or oh that you know for a while there i had a way in which you could go into settings and like insta buy the app you didn't have to go through the whole flow um and the reason i wanted to do all these things is because the way test flight works is it deliberately shortens the the real world time that a subscription takes.

1:30:13So if you have a year subscription, it takes a day or a month or a week. I forget exactly how long it is. It doesn't really matter. But what I got from from Tesla users was constant questions. And I don't blame them because I would ask the same thing. Dude, why do I have to buy it every single day? And you can't face ID. You have to enter your damn password. It's such a pain in the hindquarters. Why do I have to do this every day? This sucks. Well, yeah, it does. But I've got other bigger fish to fry. I'm genuinely sorry that it's a pain in the butt, but I got other things to worry about right now.

1:30:42I'm sorry, I can't do anything about it. Well, I had a bunch of people write to me and say, oh, thank God, I don't have to do the stupid nag every single day. So my negligence and my procrastination has saved the day. And so a lot of TestFlight users have been kind enough to purchase the full bore version of the app, just so they don't have to repurchase it every day. So thank you to all of you. And I'm sorry for you being nagged, except I'm not sorry. So sorry, not sorry. Does anybody know why you can't do face ID? I'm very familiar with this phenomenon, but I assumed it's one of those things.

1:31:13I assume someone else has reported this, right? Because it's ridiculous. Like I don't, what's the, is there any kind of reasoning there? Or is it just like, oh, it's always been that way. Sorry about it. It's probably, so the whole way that like the sandbox purchasing environment works over time has always been really hacky. And it used to be a lot worse. Like it used to be that sometimes you would get into a state where your sandbox environment purchase on your phone would not be able to complete a purchase, and it would put up the box, the random system modal alert every so often, saying, you know, you've got to enter your password to complete this purchase or whatever, and it would say environment sandbox in brackets, and it would pop that up.

1:31:52It would ruin a phone. You would have to reformat and restore your phone to get to have this stop. It was awful. so the current system is is a lot less bad but it's still very bad it's still based on a pile of hacks i think that's kind of how it feels so what i usually recommend is don't do any test flight purchase testing like i usually recommend for test flight builds disable all purchasing because it is just no it's not worth the many many hassles about it like do all your purchase testing internally uh and then when you give it a tester just have a flag that just like makes everything free or blocks out the purchase screen or whatever.

1:32:31Yeah. And like I said, for a long time, when I wasn't actively testing my very late in my build process rejiggered purchase flow, I just had a button in settings that you could go into and instantly buy the app. It wouldn't ask you for the, you know, it would fake it on my end. You know what I mean? And I will probably put that back for the handful of people who are listening that do have the test flight still. But for ATP members, you know, you're going to have to buy the app. Sorry. but yeah so it was a royal pain in the butt for test flight users and now that has that pain in the butt is now the the stick or maybe it's the carrot depending on how you look at it that is compelling people to go ahead and buy the paid version which is pretty great but genuinely i wanted to thank all the atp members one more time it really did make the app better and thank you for that yeah and congrats on the launch this is this is a really big deal you put a lot of work into it it shows and and it looks like it's going to be successful i i think it's going to be very successful hey everyone out there go buy the app make me right yeah yes please yeah yeah i think it's going to work i really do i i sure hope so and i appreciate it and also i want to say that the the uh i don't know what your original plan was or whatever but i'm glad that you took the time you did to pick this set of features for 1.0 because you could have launched before this like there are features that are in this that didn't necessarily need to be there but i think the set that you landed on as the the 1.0 set is it's generous like it is it didn't have to have this many features but because it does it's really it's really a fleshed out 1.0 it's not like a 1.0 it's not like a skateboard as they would say or an mvp or whatever it is skateboard people say that what yeah you'd be glad you don't know about the business knowledge it's talking about like uh minimum viable product is not like a pile of wheels or whatever it's a it's not a car either it's a skateboard because it rolls it's got four wheels it's got a thing you can stand on anyway just it's crappy business but the point is that this i think this 1.0 has a good kind of like the pricing it has a good set of features not every feature you could possibly imagine but you could have launched with less than it would have been quote-unquote okay uh and you could have waited you know another six more months and be way more full feature but the set of features in here now definitely covers like most of the common needs that people want with with a couple extra things thrown in there so i'm glad that you waited as long as you did because it seemed like you were kind of anxious to launch this like months ago and i was like i was you probably probably need some more features but i think you did the right thing took your time added those features in as it turns out as you were implementing them they didn't take that long to add and they add so much value to the app like being able to look it up on just watch you know or even a little thing we were talking about before of showing uh the popover of what time the movie would end which maybe shouldn't be a popover but still like stuff like that that's in your 1.0 that's in your very first version, right?

1:35:15And so you have, and you already have that big list of things that you want to add. So I think you picked a good feature set for 1.0. Yeah, I appreciate that. And you know, as I do this more and more, I'm no underscore, but I am getting better at it. And I feel like I'm getting better at it, which is great. You know, you never want to be bored in your job, and you never want to feel like you're not improving. And I feel like I'm improving. I got a long way to go, but I feel like I'm improving. You only got what, like 63 more apps to catch up on the underscore? Something like that. Yeah, I'm sure it'll be any day now.

1:35:43Very quickly, a couple of other notes. First of all, if you are looking to purchase the app, or subscribe, I should say, one of the things I did, which I didn't know if Apple was going to complain about it, but surprisingly, they said, not a peep. If you are going through the purchase flow, the first screen you see says, oh, you can do it monthly or you can do it yearly. And under the two options, you can choose between, there's text that says, more purchase options. If you like the work that I do, if you like me, if you think I'm a kind of okay guy, you can hit more purchase options. And in there is a quasi tip jar sort of thing, but it's a subscription tip jar.

1:36:18So what that means is for instead of paying$9 a year, you can pay$20 a year or your local equivalent or$50 a year. You get no perks other than my undying love, but that is it. That is all you get. I am not expecting anyone to do that. Some people seem to have done that and I am extremely thankful for all of you that have, but you can elect to do that. And I'm pretty sure you can go in and manage your subscription and change to it during your free trial if you fancy doing that. So something to look for. Very quickly, since this is a nerd podcast, I put this at the bottom of my blog post, but a few things that I think are kind of funny.

1:36:52Total commits in GitHub, 727. The first commit was the 30th of January, 2023. The build for the App Store was done on the 27th of July, which is 178 days or about six months between the two. according to clock on the command line 14 ,232 lines of swift 673 lines of text or xml or markdown for a total of just shy of 15 ,000 lines of code 102 beta builds and the first screenshot which we will link to in the show notes is hilariously basic and that i took on the 3rd of february and you can see it has come a long way baby because it is not at all is a is a good uh advertisement for swift ui because uh one of my mac apps switch glass has almost the same number of lines of swift code as yours and substantially fewer features and less ui and where is all that code it's not in the swift ui view although my swift ui view is fairly girthy as the kids would say i don't like the slang it's the kids anyway it's all the stupid app kit code because when you do anything with app kit and ui you know you're making all these outlets and actions and it's so barbaric like you know not declarative right so the fact that you have that many screens and that many features and like networking code and all sorts of other stuff that my app doesn't have and we're within a couple thousand like i think i'm like 12 or 13 000 lines of swift and you're at 14 uh you're a great advertisement for swift ui indeed uh so yeah i think that's all i have for now i appreciate you talking to me about it if you want to check it out you know there will be links in the show notes.

1:38:25Don't you worry, but you can go to www.caseless.com slash call sheet. And that is my blog post. And if you click the title of that blog post, it will push you over to the app store. I'd love for you to check it out. Even if you don't think it's for you, like I was saying earlier, even if you don't think it's for you, that's okay. Check it out. What's going to hurt? It's free. You don't have to subscribe. There's no harm done. Go ahead and check it out. I think you'll like it. You didn't get a.app domain? Oh, actually, it's funny you bring that up. Maybe we can talk about this in the after show, but I did get callsheetapp.com.

1:38:54And there was all sorts of agita earlier today trying to figure out how to do redirects with that, which is uninteresting. That's not a.app domain. No, it's not. Because I have callsheets.app, but callsheet.app is not available. Oh, really? That's a bummer. Yeah. So what are you going to do? The reality is the domain name for your app really does not matter at all. I know, but it's just a fun thing to do when you make an app. Like, it could literally be like, you know, callsheet.butt and it would be fine. Like, you still, it wouldn't matter at all. Get Dropbox.com. We are sponsored this week by Green Chef, a CCOF certified meal kit company.

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1:41:16All right, let's do some Ask ATP. JP, Nate Silva writes, Casey, congratulations on publishing Call Sheet and the well-deserved great reviews you're getting. Thank you so much. I've noticed that Call Sheet is published by Limitless LLC. Is there a reason you chose to use an LLC? Is it something you would recommend for other developers? So I'm going to take a stab at this. I am not a lawyer. I have only been doing this for a handful of years, not nearly as long as Marco. Marco is probably the right person to listen to, but I've got the floor, so here we go. An LLC here in America is a limited liability corporation, I believe, and basically what that means.

1:41:47Something like that. Basically what that means is for the purposes of legal liability, I, Casey Liss, have some amount of protection. And as long as I keep my finances separate, the company finances separate from my finances, the worst thing that can happen, I am not a lawyer, I am not a lawyer, I am not a lawyer. The worst thing that can happen is the company's finances could be drained, but I personally will not lose all of my money if something bad happens because of the work that I do. And so, yes, it is something I recommend. In Virginia, it was extremely easy to set up an LLC. It was extremely cheap and extremely straightforward.

1:42:21I was able to do it all by myself. I definitely recommend it. Marco, can you add the color commentary and or clarifications to that, please? Yeah, that's the gist of my understanding as well. Again, none of us are lawyers or accountants. So take this with a grain of salt. And, you know, definitely it's worth consulting with a lawyer and an accountant when making this decision. However, at least in the U.S. and most states and possibly all states, it is a state construct. So check with your state with specifics of it. But at least in New York, having an LLC is fairly easy and inexpensive. So what it takes to have one is you got to register it and you got to fill out a form every couple of years to basically renew its registration.

1:43:07every couple of years i was going to ask you what what is it for both of your states what is the uh what is the the burden and for massachusetts it's annual and substantial i think it's like 25 every two years in new york it's not much what i gotta move to i gotta move to new york it's right no you really the taxes will kill you don't worry but massachusetts doesn't have a lot of taxes yeah they get it in other ways don't worry about that uh but but yeah um it's yeah Yeah, so it depends on the state, but it is something like$25 every two years. It's something like that in New York. What about you, Casey?

1:43:40Yeah, for me, I am almost sure it is$50 every single year. What? What do you pay? More. Why is this a state secret? Just to have an LLC? Yes. Are you going through one of those scam services that does it for you? I am going through a scam service, but even accounting for the 500 % markup, it's more. Oh, God. But anyway, all you have to do here is you have to register. You have to have like, you know, it's good to have like either a lawyer or an accountant file the paperwork for you the first time just so you don't mess anything up. But in most states, this is a fairly simple thing. And then you go to your bank.

1:44:18Once you have the forms from the state, you go to your bank and say, I need a bank account for this, please. And then you just have every transaction that is for the company go through that bank account. and then when you want to take money out to pay yourself you take it out of that bank account and put it in your personal bank account and that's just that's about all you really have to do but never never cross the beams the streams the beams yes oh definitely not like you never purchase anything with for personal use from that account like you know that account has its own its own debit card or credit card you buy things on that that are for the business only buy things for the business on that like you know keep everything nice and separate and then by doing that what case you said you know you have a a pretty large amount of like limited liability that's what that's what the ll stands for um in the sense that like yeah if somebody wants to sue overcast there they don't get to take my house you know they they can take overcast assets you know in the worst case but they wouldn't get to take all of my personal assets um so it's a way to like cover your butt in a fairly easy way um and as long as you follow the the relatively simple rules of of operating it separately from your other stuff um it's it's it isn't hard to operate an llc uh or expensive if you're not in massachusetts uh and so it is it's worth looking like anything that's going to be like an app that's going to be possibly making real money um i would suggest having an llc and then the second thing is if you think your app might someday be sold to somebody else it is much better to have it be on a separate apple id than your personal apple id because apple has since devised some weird like app transfer wizard things um some of them they've had limitations like i believe i don't know if this is still the case but previously if your app had ever used icloud or any icloud based service it could not be transferred using using this mechanism but anyway it's it's awkward and it's a lot easier if someone's going to buy your app is a lot easier to say you you you're buying the llc and it's and its assets and here here's the apple id for that llc it's a whole different developer account a whole different apple id totally separate from your other stuff again it's just it's part of that the reason you make these separations if you're going to make an app that that might make real money and that might be sold someday or whatever it's to make those outcomes easier and to limit the risk to your personal stuff of the business stuff seeping in too much.

1:46:46And LLC is generally the first step of that, and it makes all that stuff a lot easier. Goodness, these fees in Massachusetts, which John has put in the chat, they're kind of a lot. They're very high. And the burden, it's onerous. To fill out the paperwork yourself is annoying, and you'd be afraid you screwed up, which is why you pay for these companies. There are companies that will do it for you, right, for some fee on top of this. So I pay even more on top to not to deal with it. Look at the fee structure. There's stuff you have to do every year, and everything costs hundreds of dollars. $500 to register an LLC?

1:47:15Is that right? And forget about the one-time cost. The recurring annual cost just to maintain the LLC, a basic LLC, is just very... Anyway, there's a reason the nickname for my state for those people who don't live in the U.S. is Taxachusetts. That's... Wow. That's ridiculous. This is ridiculous. Holy jamoles. Should have incorporated in Delaware, I guess. Right? Goodness. Anyway, in the grand scheme of things, it's a drop in the bucket. And I just, you know, consider it a cost of doing business and, you know. there it goes but anyway just to chime in for the lc yes i do have an lc um and i i don't understand all the things that is supposedly doing for me but my understanding is just like the two of you said is like if if someone uses my application switcher and it burns down their house and they sue me for millions of dollars even if they win all they can get is all the assets of hypercritical lc and those assets let me tell you are not substantial so so they cannot take my house They cannot take all the money from all my savings accounts and the money that my kids are going to use to go to college or anything like that.

1:48:15They can only take the very meager assets of my LLC, which is not worth suing me over. So don't bother. Yeah. And from what I understand, it's basically like however much is in the checking account of that LLC. You know, it's like it's not they can't take like, you know, all past earnings that it ever had. Like, you know, it's just it's whatever you keep in the, you know, whatever money you keep in the business, which is usually not a ton of money for most people. that's one thing i did save money on so i got a separate bank account for the business and a separate you know debit card for the business and a separate credit card for the business and it's all registered to the business you know it's like oh it's a business and i found one that's a bank that's local to me that has no fees for anything it's like as long as you have under like you know 500 transactions a month i'm like don't worry you know i i get a transaction from apple what do they pay like monthly right or i forget yeah once a month from apple one big deposit i got one from apple and then like you know that's basically it right and so i i have i have checks but everything is no fees like i just have a minimum balance that i have to keep which is very low and i pay zero dollars for this account in exchange for having a credit card that i use for business expenses and a debit card and checks that i never use although occasionally i have had to do like voided checks or whatever for things um but you know that's that's the easiest stuff to get but the trick is to get all that and not have it have your name on it or not to be right you have to have a legal entity that it can be in the name of, and mine is hypercritical LLC.

1:49:42Yep. And then the final note, at least here in America, for tax purposes, it's different depending on the flavor of your LLC, but mine, oh shoot, I forget what it's called, but mine basically - It's a pass-through. Yes, thank you. Mine does not exist for tax purposes. It's only for legal liability purposes. So my taxes, anything that Limitless LLC makes is effectively Casey List money from a tax perspective. It's only from the legal liability perspective that this is a thing. And we can do that because we don't have any employees. We're not going to say we're not real businesses because we are, but we're intentionally like it's a pass through for tax purposes.

1:50:15It makes doing our taxes easier, you know, even though both Casey and I have accountants do our taxes. If you have a company and you want to have multiple partners and employees and salary and, you know, and having to deal with like health care for your employees, like a, you know, quote unquote real business, accounting and taxes get way, way more complicated. Whereas if you know you have basically a single employee company that's just you, the LLC will give you legal protection while not overcomplicating your accounting or your taxes. And obviously that stops working if you want to have a company with multiple employees and everything or whatever.

1:50:49But if you're still in this sort of easy mode where you're not planning on doing that, having a pass through simplifies things greatly. Yep. Yeah. jan ohen yemi ohen yemi i'm so sorry uh writes with all that empty space on the mac pro would it be feasible for apple to just slap a huge heat sink on the processor and overclock it by 30 or 40 percent over the standard ultra that way there would be a performance difference between the studio and the pro call it the ultra turbo you put a turbo button on the french you just press it and computer goes faster um oh those were the days so i'm assuming the person who wrote this doesn't have a lot of experience overclocking pcs but overclocking in general uh it's not as simple as like, well, if you turn up the clock speed, it'll produce more heat and then you just have to get rid of that heat.

1:51:30Although that alone is much harder than you would think because it's not like, oh, we can get rid of as much heat as we want. We'll just put a bigger heat sink on there. The problem, especially with modern CPUs, is that heat is concentrated in a tiny little area. So no matter how big a heat sink you put on it, all the heat is emanating from this tiny little rectangle and it has to spread from that rectangle quickly elsewhere to get the hell out of there before it can get to your big giant heat sink or fan or whatever evaporative cooler whatever right so in all fairness the ultra is a pretty large rectangle well i mean compared to the size of like a heat sink that's like eight inches on the side or something right or some kind of evaporative cooler or even a water cooler like getting the heat out of that little tiny area is the difficult part but but anyway heat is not your big problem here because you we do have things that can get that heat out pretty quickly your real problem is how fast can the chip go before it stops working and 30 to 40 percent overclocking is ambitious.

1:52:28Because the faster you make it go, you have a bunch of problems. One is how fast can your transistors actually switch? Because transistors don't instantly change from one state to another. They have some sort of transition time. And you have to make sure all of your transistors involved in your CPU or GPU or whatever can switch as fast as you want them to switch successfully getting from one state to the other. The second thing is you need signals to be able to propagate from point A on the chip to point B on the chip. And yes, it's a very small area like postage stamp size or whatever. But at the speeds we're talking about, multiple gigahertz, there is actually transit time for signals to travel.

1:53:04And if you clock it too high, by the time the next clock comes, the signal hasn't propagated from where it needed to, from where it started to where it needs to get to by the next clock cycle. And then your CPU doesn't work. there's there's all sorts of things that will literally stop the thing from functioning correctly if you clock it too high and that percentage is not 30 to 40 percent most of the time you can get lucky because some people if you get this is why overclockers are looking like you know cpus that are quote-unquote good for overclocking where they're manufactured in such a way that the defect rate is low and that you know there's actually a lot of headroom that's the way they do things like you know cool it with liquid nitrogen because they're like in this case cooling really is our limiting factor so we'll cool the thing with liquid nitrogen which is you know a silly stunt or whatever and then see how fast it will go and even being cool with liquid nitrogen you can't make it go like 800 faster or whatever because eventually it just stops working but what you're looking for is a chip where let's say you're either not on the bleeding edge which apple usually is especially with the upcoming three nanometer stuff or whatever and it's a design that has sort of all the bugs worked out of it because all takes is one dark corner of your chip chip to be a little bit iffy and if that part of the chip can't you know the transistors there are a little bit wonky because the masking was all kind of screwed up and it works fine but it only works at the at the bin to clock speed plus like two percent the rest of the chip has you know five or ten percent headroom but because that part of the chip doesn't your whole thing doesn't work so uh it would be cool they could probably overclock it a little bit and extract some extra heat but 30 to 40 percent is probably not realistic especially when we moved three animator and apple is the very first customer in the world to be using these chips from tsmc also like when you think about the market of the mac pro um and by that i mean the mac studio pci breakout box um it seems like you know if you could actually you know whatever the whatever the number would be that they could actually achieve reliably for the overclock would probably be maybe more on the order of like 10 or 15 percent and i don't think the buyers of this machine would be willing to buy something that might be like a little bit very slightly less reliable than the regular version of the chip you know because overclocking the problem is like it's kind of a risk game you roll the dice like you see oh can i push it a little bit higher and then you run you know some like massive stress test thing to see like put as much stress unless you see if you were possible like does it crash does it does it keep running like let's see and can you push a little bit higher and maybe maybe you got to raise the voltage a little bit and you know and what you what you typically end up with is having to have rapidly rising power and heat to get relatively decreasing gains uh after that point and so that's that's another good point by the way the uh as you increase clock speed the heat output does not increase linearly it's like a square it's like the square of the so you know if you increase the clock speed by i can't do the math in my head but like you know if you double the clock speed you are way more than doubling the heat generated yeah it's you need way more cooling not just a little bit you know you don't just need 10 more cooling you need all like three times the code and if you see like that what is that what is the what does the parabola look like the you know the parabola graph you must have done in school with like you know an exponent of two uh the slope goes up real real fast so it doesn't take long before you're saying i am now producing infinite heat right exactly it becomes unfeasible way faster than you think which is why people use you know liquid nitrogen you're like they're using liquid nitrogen that must be overclocked by 8 000 no it's like 150 and like and typically you know like john was saying like you know what kind of what chips people look for when overclocking usually you're looking for you know some some kind of you know intel or amd whatever where they sell a pretty wide range of of chips you know in of speeds of clock speeds within a certain you know family of chips and maybe you buy one of the lower clocked ones assuming you could probably push it higher you know um and that's not how apple sells the the you know apple silicon cpus there are no clock speed options it's just one it's like here we made this one we've designed the entire chip to work at this one ideal speed range and that's the one everyone gets that you know you can't pay more to get the next to get like the faster one it's just you have this one chip and so i would imagine there actually might not be as much headroom as you think in the sense that like they've they've they've set these parameters for for good reasons they if they could push a bunch of them higher they probably would um but they're not and and there's probably good reasons for that also these are massive chips you know the when you're looking at the you know the ultra or even just the m1 max but especially the ultra this is such a large chip I haven't overclocked in a very long time so all my knowledge could be super outdated and not relevant to modern chips but I would expect with that much chip with that much surface area with that many transistors I would expect that as you push things past their spec the likelihood of you having a problem I think would be higher than the old days where you were overclocking this little tiny Celeron thing I would guess that these massive you know multi-core you know all-on-one giant die kind of chips that apple's making here i would guess you actually don't have the headroom that you think you do yeah i think the overclocking is a little bit trickier because keep in mind with modern chips but especially modern soc system on chip like we have now there's multiple clock speeds going on it the gpu is not running at the same clock as the cpu and all of them are on some kind of uh clock speed curve in response to heat so heat is a factor and having better cooling can let you stay at higher clock speeds for longer but different parts of the chips are running at different clock speeds anyway and unlike the situation where you don't have an soc like a thing common in pc overclocking or whatever is to choose like your memory speed independently from your cpu speed when you're overclocking i don't think you have that kind of flexibility with an soc because the ram is right there on the package and i'm not sure if you could overclock the gpu but underclock the cpu but increase the speed of the ram i don't i don't actually know the mechanisms you'd have to use to overclock this but to your point about apple picking the speed like whenever they bin these whenever they say these chips will run at this speed and these chips have a broken gpu core so the cheaper ones wherever they do all this binning apple could choose to say we're going to put only the ones that can run 10 faster in the mac pro but it would be even more expensive because every time they do that they say okay only the very best ones go in the mac pro guess how many of the very best ones there are way way fewer it's not like the and the mac pro already costs so much money so you think okay we would just cost 10 percent more to get 10 percent more clock speed no again because like your yields like how many of this you build them all and you think they have to pick some number it's like okay 80 percent past the bar for mac studio use how many past the bar for 10 percent more than that okay one percent and now figure out how much you have to charge for that one it's like okay 80 percent of our chips are suitable in the mac studio one percent of our chips are suitable for the mac pro granted it's good that the macro doesn't sell many so So maybe they could still make it work.

2:00:12But like the more you bin it, the more you say, I will reject any SOC unless it can run at X gigahertz. And you find out, OK, that's like one in 10 ,000. Now it becomes way more expensive to put that in something because you have to mend your extra 10 ,000 of those chips just to get one of those. So, yeah, overclocking is a fun thing to do as a hobby on PCs. And I think Apple probably has a little bit of thermal headroom to push it on the Mac Pro and still stay within a reliability envelope. but they've chosen not to mostly because like it's just one more one more thing to make the mac pro expensive like it's not that big of a benefit it would be single digit percentage if that and now you're making an already expensive machine even more expensive and rare even if you could qualify it and say it passes all of our reliability things we've tested it the same way to everything else and this one can go five percent faster it's probably not worth it what you want from the mac pro as we've said before is twice as many cores that is way more valuable than the same number of cores, but 5 % faster.

2:01:11Even, I was just thinking too, another big reason for them not to offer that kind of thing is it would also then kind of dilute the Mac Studio, which they probably sell a whole lot more of. And if you think like, right now they have these great, well, they have these names. They have these compact names for these chips. M1 Pro, M1 Max, M1 Ultra, M2. They have these nice, short, compact names. they're very simple they're they're reasonably easy for people to understand if they start adding variants like oh this is this is the m2 max turbo like the iphone pro max it's just confusing but yeah i know right it's not a perfect you know system that we have now but you know the more variations they add it'll start to seem first of all it'll be more confusing and people won't necessarily know what they're buying or why they should buy it but also then like imagine if like might that actually hurt the Mac Studio in the sense that the Mac Studio would then have the reputation of like, well, yeah, it says it has the M2 Ultra, but it's not like the really good M2 Ultra.

2:02:15It's intentionally underclocked so you can fit in that case. And it kind of is, but not by the way you think. Like, it's not, like the cooling in the Ultra can absolutely handle that SoC in the M2 generation. But yeah, you could get a couple more percentage if you put a bigger cooler on it, but that's like, It's just not that kind of distinction. They would never get another name like the M2 Turbo for 5%. Like the Ultra is not a 5 % difference from the Max. It's a big difference. It's literally two Maxes in there. So I don't think you get a new name for 5%. Edward Corcoran writes, what text editor are all three of you using these days?

2:02:53have used textmate for around a decade based on marco's recommendation a few mac os's ago textmate started loading really slowly due to some checks on unsigned code macromates can't fix the issue so i'm looking to switch to a new editor i also started using textmate forever ago i think because of marco and also noticed it takes a freaking eternity to start i have no idea if this unsigned code thing is true or not i have no idea if macromates can or can't fix it but that at least explains potentially explains why this thing has become just intolerably painful to use so yeah by By the way, thank you, Edward, for pointing this out.

2:03:24I didn't know why TextMate launches so ungodly slowly. I just assumed, you know, I have, you know, I usually have a bunch of windows and it saves all those and restores them. So I just figured like, oh, I guess for some reason this is taking a very long time. I will say it hasn't been a problem for me because TextMate is always running. Like I will hide it, you know, the command H, I'll hide it if I'm not actively using it, but it's always running. So the only time I ever actually launch it is in the relatively infrequent case where I reboot my computer. Then when it comes back up, I'll have to launch it at some point.

2:03:56And I do notice, God, it's taking forever to launch. But then it's launched and the problem is gone. So I don't really have a problem that I need to move away from it very suddenly based on that. But it is nice to know at least one possible reason why it's doing this. Indeed. John, what is the correct answer? Wait, so Casey, what are you using? I still just use TextMate. Well, the thing is, I only use TextMate for like ephemeral, like quick things because I'm using Visual Studio Code for web development to the small degree I do any, and I'm using Xcode for everything else. So it's very unusual I'm in anything else to begin with.

2:04:31Usually I just need a place to drop something briefly, but I use TextMate. I just wait an eternity for it to open, which is not the rightest answer, and I could use Visual Studio Code, but I perceive Visual Studio Code more like an IDE and less like a quick and dirty text editor, and what I think I would like is some new or replacement quick and dirty text editor. Yeah, and so I'm also, I'm all TextMate still, although, I mean, I write most of my code in Xcode. Most of my code writing is not web development. I very rarely need to do anything to my web code, and thank God for that because I hate it.

2:05:10But that's not TextMate's fault. I just hate web programming these days and server work and stuff. So I try to spend as much time as possible in Xcode. things that are not you know things that are more like note based I will usually just keep in Apple Notes so that's that you know takes that load off of my text editor and then you know sometimes things that I'm like kind of working on an idea oh how you know what if I do this this or this a lot of times that's happening in Solver because if there's numbers involved so a lot of other apps have kind of taken chunks out of my text editor role that being said my general purpose text editor is still text mate because again once it's launched the performance is fine um and and i i guess i can tolerate that a long time ago i i did a brief experiment i think this might even been during the build and analyze days i did an experiment where i tried out whatever like the the two new ish text editors at the time were uh that everybody was using they were i spent a few time a few you know a little while with each one you know a few days with each one or whatever to you know getting to know them and i came out of it thinking yeah these are fine if i if i had to switch away from textmate this would be fine and then i went back to textmate and i liked it better and it fit me better it's not perfect it has a lot of problems it is very very old and seems pretty unmaintained at this point uh but it i still like it and and what i came to after that experiment was once textmate stops working for me for whatever reason there's plenty of great options out there that I will gladly look at and try out and I'll switch to one of them.

2:06:45But that time hasn't come yet. So as long as you're willing to tolerate the long launch time with TextMate, if that's if that's still your favorite one, then there's not a lot of reason to move away from it right this second. But, you know, if you if you like something more modern, you know, better than great, then switch by all means. You know, we have lots of good options these days. John. So, I mean, the reason I put this question in Ask ATP is one of those ones we answer every few years just to check in and i think checking in we're finding out that none of us have changed myself included uh i started using bb editor during its first public release i'm still using it i've written basically everything in my entire life in this app all my mac os 10 articles all my development and work that i've done in my entire career as a web developer uh the exceptions are i i use xcodes editor for doing my mac apps mostly because xcodes editor it's integrated with the ide so the debugger is integrated with it it knows about all the symbols and all the swift ui things it's got autocomplete it looks up the help you know like that that's why i use the xcode editor um i do still occasionally copy and paste either the entire contents of files or sections of text into bbedit when i become when my fingers become frustrated by something that i would like to do that my fingers know how to do in bbedit uh but i don't know how to do an xcode or it's awkward or weird or whatever i'm like i don't want to bother clicking around that stupid finder replace interface for something complicated when i know i could get a sun in two seconds in bb edit and so i will occasionally pull text out put it into bb edit do a thing to it bring it back um i use bb edit for tons of stuff like i i realized this when i install bb edit like on on my wife's account or on my son's laptop or whatever and i launch it on their account and i realized i kind of like an emacs user and i'll get to that in a second i realized i can't use bb edit in its default mode anymore because i've spent literal decades customizing it and i don't even know what like i'm like wait that's not a default keystroke like i can't tell anyone i'll do this in bb edit because for all i know i'm telling them to do a key combination that is not the default so i don't even know how to use default bb edit i'm like it looks weird it behaves weird my fingers do things and weird dialogues pop up i'm like what the hell i rebound that when did i rebind that in 1996 like just anyway uh but i do have lots of customizations in bb edit and my fingers just know them the other the only other text editor i've ever really used in my life is emacs which i started using on unix systems in the 90s uh and it used to be the mac os 10 ship with emacs i think they stopped shipping it and i install it uh because i don't want to use vi i'll use vi if i have to but i don't like it so So why would I ever use Emacs?

2:09:30I'm just used to using it to edit my dot files, I guess, like from ages ago. I could open my dot files in bbedit. I've got the bbedit command line. In fact, it's alias to BB, right? So I just say BB space whatever. But I also have weird aliases that I made in 1993, like emal to edit my dot alias file. I know it's weird, but it's four characters long. My fingers type it before I can even think about it. So Emacs is really the only other editor that I actually use, but BBEdit, write everything in there. Any important email I'm going to write, I write in BBEdit, like writing just, you know, scratch pad, writing metadata for my apps in the Mac app store, writing HTML, writing all my weird Perl scripts.

2:10:12Just everything is in BBEdit with the exception of Mac development and a couple of weird command line things. And BBEdit is still maintained and launches fast and gets new features and new versions all the time. Highly recommend it. yeah i think if first of all um i think vi is way better than emacs fight me and and it's it's actually sad the the author of vi just passed away vim the author of vim passed away not the author of vi that's okay that's true but what everyone calls vi is really vim um so that's that's what everyone's thinking of when they say vi does the mac even have vim installed i don't even know i believe it comes with it yeah i've never i've never had to install it i mean i always just type i always just type vi and get in and out as fast as i can so i don't really want to hang around in there yeah anyway um but yeah i think if i were to be forced to move today i think i would i would look at two two alternatives right away for number one i would absolutely look at bb edit um because it is by far like first of all i think it's the only other like really mac native great modern text editor that exists besides text mate which again is aging anyway uh so it is it is like you know the most mac text editor i think out there um and then i would also check out visual studio code because everyone says like it's amazing for working with you know stuff like because the most common thing i'm doing in my non xcode non apple notes text editor it's usually php that's usually what i'm writing uh or at least a shell script but you know usually php and so something that could actually have some kind of like code you know reading integration autocomplete that kind of stuff i should probably be looking at that in reality um but i've never used i've never used um vs code at all and i've only used bb edit very briefly so um i don't i can't really say for sure but that would be where i would look vs code is very full feature but it definitely does not feel like a mac app yeah i'm looking at screenshots it looks horrendous like for what i'm looking for it's it does not it's not as it's not bad but it's different yeah that's the thing it's different it is electron but it's the only electron app i can think of that isn't a pile of garbage um and i i would never know it's electron except for the fact i mean i don't know if i'd want to throw like a you know a 500 megabyte log file on it like i routinely do to bb edit uh but yeah i would expect it to crumble like bb edit you can put any you can throw anything at bb edit and it will it will read i know that so that's why i would go for that yeah and bb edit does it does have things where i can kind of make it cry when i try to soft wrap a log file that's you know seven million lines long like literally seven million it'll do it but it'll think for a second maybe your mac pro is too slow yeah kind of like marco was saying i leave bb edit running all the time it is just always running uh and knowing me i end up having a lot of windows open in it and because i just leave them open because bb edit is another great thing that bb does is if you quit bb edit it doesn't nag you about anything it doesn't say oh but wait you've got unsaved changes and this is an untitled document if you never saved it It just says, you want to quit?

2:13:08Fine, I'll quit. Yeah, peace out. When you launch, everything is back exactly where it was, including all your untitled windows, all your edits. It's just, so like, why would I? I never quit it. But even when I reboot and I relaunch it, everything is back, including all my untitled windows and all my unsaved changes. So it's just constantly running. If I need to dash off some text, it's there. And this is a thing you can't transfer to other people. It's kind of like weird Emacs people. It's like, your experience with BB-Ed is not going to be like mine. Because mine is just, I have literal decades of finger muscle memory for these weird things that i do like i do data processing in bb edit i'll take a big file full of things rattle off a bunch of regular expressions with my weird keystrokes which honestly i couldn't even tell you what they are but my fingers know what they are which is like uh copy matching line sub-expressions into new document sort lines in new document unique lines copy matching lines into new document it's kind of like using remember you don't remember this but channel operations in photoshop i know i've mentioned it several times in the show before photoshop had layers and in protoshop before version 3 uh they didn't have layers so if you wanted to do anything you would do an operation and the result of that operation would be a modified basically a new window you can tell i loved it a new window containing a modified version of the thing so if you're like i want to combine this uh image with this image using the multiply command you could do that as a layer option now right instead you would get a new window that has the multiplied version and you just proliferate these windows well in bb edit i do data processing by selecting the contents of windows and running regular expressions about them and and bb has a feature that says i'll do the thing that you asked and i'll either put the matching lines in the new window matching sub expressions things that don't match the thing in a new window like and so you get a series of windows where you're sort of winnowing down and processing the data and then of course you can run scripts against them you can write a pearl script and run it with the menu command and i do i wrote pearl scripts to intelligently quote aware smart wrap things in the way that i want you just select a region hit a key combo that my fingers know but my mind doesn't that will do the thing that i want that's not going to be your experience by using bb edit that took me decades to build up and that's why i can't use bb edit in its default state anymore but it's worth it to me to not move from bb edit because if i moved elsewhere i would have to recreate all that stuff it would be like recreating my dot emacs file elsewhere although i'm not i don't have a giant emacs file it's reasonable size but my bb set up is just too byzantine and most text editors have most of the features but not all of them and what you really need is an escape hatch which is like look if the editor doesn't have this can i just write something in pearl in python in shell script in swift in language of my choice and have it take text as input and replace the contents with his output, most text editors have a way to do that.

2:15:50I have to re-implement all my things to work with the new text editor. So, someday, someday, sorry Rich, but someday Rich Siegel is going to die, hopefully before me because he's older than me. He's at least going to retire at some point. He could retire, but I think death is the only thing that's going to stop him from developing his application because he's very dedicated. He's very dedicated. And I thank him for But someday the BB edit train will come to an end. And like Marco, I'll have to pick a new text editor. And at that day, I'll probably be so old that I won't be able to recreate all of my old setup.

2:16:24And I'll just become, I don't know what I'll become. I'll just become like less capable on the computer. It was like, I remember when I could do this in BB edit, but BB edit's gone now. So all I could do is write a Perl script. So I'm looking up the links for the show notes. And I look up, you know, the textmate link, which is macromates.com. and I went and I thought, you know, what does their blog have to say about any of this? Is this really abandoned? You know, because I feel like I haven't seen TextMate Update in years. The most recent blog post dated 22 of May, 2020 begins as follows. In episode 379 of ATP, both Marco Arman and John Syracuse described noticeable delays and stalls after upgrading to Mac OS 1015.

2:17:03I've been struggling with this issue myself and I found several system operations that can cause delays, which I will detail below. And then the author does. so imagine my surprise as John is talking and I look to see the most recent blog post on this website and sure enough it literally begins in episode 379 of ATV I remember this now I had forgotten about this but I did see this when the author wrote it when Alan Gaw wrote it I did see this back then but yeah I had forgotten today about this I have no recollection of this I don't either 379 was May 21 of 2020 and in the after show we talked about life at home status updates because covid i will say that like you know like text me it really has not gotten a lot of love in in many many many years but it does still work like like whenever rick siegel hopefully retires um you know bb edit is not going to instantly stop working like in all likelihood it will continue to work for years until some os change breaks it you know on apple side it'll work for two more major versions until some sandboxing thing breaks it i mean and he's not he's not the sole developer to be clear but he is you know it's it's his baby and i do think that when he uh when he finally gives it up i hope he finds it a new home but boy talk about a legacy code base this is a code base that i mean it's been substantially written many times over but uh here be dragons no i mean i would imagine like you know i can't imagine anybody besides him you know taking on taking on that crown um and and And that's not really a reason not to use something.

2:18:38Like, I feel like if you look at, like, I think the safest option would probably be VS Code because that seems to be... I don't know. I think BBEdit can download. BBEdit's been around for 30 years. That's the thing. All the editors have come and gone. It's competitive. Oh, Alpha is better. You can extend it using Tickle. And people are like, what the hell is Alpha? What's Tickle? There have been so many competitors. Atom, the more recent... I was thinking of what you're using, VS Code, Atom, TextMate. Like those editors come, they flare out people's interests, they leave. BB edit is still there.

2:19:10It's, it is the rock. And eventually everything comes to an end, but come on. It's, I mean, might as well be VI. I mean, although I think VI is a lot easier for other people to take on the mantle of, frankly, compared to something like BB edit. But, but still like, I think the, um, you know, you can, you can look at this, like the way I look at it as I don't want to invest my, like such a, such a key part of my work habits. I don't want to invest that into something that might not have a long life. So you have to pick something that is likely to stick around for a long time. And I think BBEdit is one of those top picks.

2:19:44I think that will stick around as long as Rick Siegel wants to be a programmer or is able to be a programmer. I think it will stick around as long as possible. And then for a few years, even after that. But again, TextMate really has not been worked on much in recent years. And it's still fine as well. So I think these things have longer lives. I don't know if it's fine. I definitely got some Casey vibes with both of you saying, yeah, it takes forever to launch. Once it gets running, it's okay. Yeah, it's just you. And the thing is, when you look at something that's made by a big company, that can go both ways.

2:20:17If it's made by a big company and it's successful and it's core to their business interests in some way, then it's probably going to stick around for a while. I don't think Microsoft is going to discontinue Excel and PowerPoint for quite a while. You know, I think those are pretty safe investments for your time. Whereas, you know, VS Code, like, it seems like that's serving them pretty well. I think that's probably the most likely to be long-lived out of all these options that I see, you know, in the market today. But, you know, you're still at the whims of a company in whatever directions it might take.

2:20:52You know, if they have a leadership change or if they start having a bunch of bad quarters and they got to, you know, start making cuts or whatever. like you know there's always risks of that in big companies too so uh you know we'll see what happens with all this stuff but i i think i think either bb edit or vs code are both pretty safe options for a long time hopefully wow it looks like alpha made it to mac os 10 i didn't even realize that someone did alpha coco as a project to rewrite alpha for mac os 10 based on the coco framework i don't know how old this page is but uh yeah no one remembers alpha except for really old school bb edit users the funny thing too is like the the ones that i tried when i was looking for a textmate replacement i first of all i can't remember either the names one of them was brown and one of them it's got to be adam adam had to be one of them a tom no it wasn't out yet um it was before that one of them i think it began with an s and it was really popular at the time and all of its configuration no i tried that that was that's way earlier um and all of its configuration was in one giant text file that opened up in the editor and it was a big pain in the butt yeah i I think I know the editor talking about it.

2:21:53I'm not sure you have the name right, but I know it. Yeah, it was cross-platform, but I think this was even pre-Electron, though. But yeah, I tried that one, and there was like a Sublime? Sublime, yeah, that was it. Yeah, that's it, yeah. And there was a brown one that came out around the same time. It was a Zoom text editor. I can't remember what it was. I mean, this was probably around like 2010. And yeah, I tried both of those, and they were fine. But now, like, I never hear of anyone using those anymore. so like the ones I tried like you know 10 or 15 years ago VS Code is kind of blotted out the sun for those type of editors because once you have like Microsoft funding you it's tough to compete with that as a small dev team and like I never would have guessed at the time that like these new ones I was trying out to replace TextMate I never would have guessed TextMate would outlive them or out zombie them anyway well right wasn't the original VS Code I thought that was a fork of Adam actually if i'm not mistaken yeah i think i think vs code is derived from that lineage in some way either yeah either atom or sublime or something like that all those editors are kind of the same but you know vs code has definitely gone its own way and is now you know incredibly full featured probably maybe a little bit too full featured yeah to a fault anyway yeah hopefully uh i'm i'm i'm gonna be it's driving me nuts what the name of the brown one was i got you'll figure it out you'll have to remember something more than the color I'm going to be lying in bed tonight oh Espresso or whatever something like that Espresso is an editor, it was a web editor I forget where it was derived from but it was native CSS edit become Espresso I think maybe it's blocking my mind here CSS edit was amazing back in the day I really got to figure out I got to go back to my history if it was built and analyzed find whatever episode it was so I can find the links.

2:23:45Yeah, it'll be in the show notes. Yeah. All right, anyway. I thought build and analyze fell off the internet, didn't it? I thought it did. Marco, like a diligent person like me, has a backup web archives of all his pages, right? Yeah, I do have a local, yeah, 5x5. Yeah, Dan's taken a whole bunch of his stuff offline. But yeah, I have a backup of everything. That's right. Well, and plus we can all agree as we close that Emacs is indeed better than BI. Bye, everybody! I do not agree to that. Thank you very much. V.I. kicks butt. Anyway, thank you so much to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Collide, and Green Chef.

2:24:24And thank you to our members very much for supporting us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash join. And we will talk to you next week.

2:24:44Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him. Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. 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 Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O, A-R-M, N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. I got to find this. You're going to have to let it go. Search your archives. Search for Sublime, because wherever you find Sublime, you'll find the other one.

2:25:46I doubt that word is common in show notes other than when you're talking about the editor. So while Marco's looking for that, so we were traveling last week, as I had mentioned a couple of times on the show. And we were traveling just a couple of weeks before that, actually, when John and I were concurrently on separate beach vacations. Separate, but at the same time. and when we were at our beach house something happened that i that i was absolutely disgusted by and then forgot about it and then it happened again when we were at a airbnb in northeastern pennsylvania and what had happened was i had because i'm me brought a travel router as we talked about last episode i believe or maybe the episode before i had brought a travel apple tv because I'm that kind of jerk.

2:26:32I mean, a dork. And I had plugged the travel router into the, um, you know, into the router that was at the place, both at the beach and at the Airbnb. And I was, you know, I plugged the travel Apple TV into the TV, et cetera, et cetera. And so on both of these TVs, which I forget what brand the TVs were, I want to say it was like TCL or something, speaking of Tickle, but they were both Roku-powered TVs. So they use all the Roku software to do all their stuff. I have no control over these TVs. I didn't set them up. I believe that they were both designed to be on the internet because the idea is if you're a guest in these Airbnbs or whatever, then you could watch Prime Video or what have you on the TV.

2:27:19They're quote-unquote smart TVs, etc. Chocolat! I am so happy for you Marco I am so happy for you breaking news I did a vlog post about it I would never come up with that it does make sense that it's brown yes and the website's totally gone I guess it's dead probably long dead sorry text made is over August 10th 2012 Marco Arment declares yeah no I remember I remember it now that I see the spelling yeah that's a bummer All right, so I'm watching TV. No, no, it's fine. I'm genuinely glad that you figured it out. So I am watching TV using the Apple TV on these TCL or whatever Roku-powered TVs. And as I'm watching, and I don't remember if I was watching something I'd seen before or something new, but one way or the other, a little banner comes up in the bottom like 10th or maybe 5th of the screen.

2:28:17and I wish I had taken a picture of it or a screenshot or what have you. I didn't think of it at the time, but it said something like, watch this episode from alternate providers. What? What? What? As you're watching it already? I am watching something on an Apple TV that I provided, but these TVs are creeping on the video I'm watching, scanning the video I'm watching, doing some sort of like shazam for video or something like that and figuring out what i'm watching and then are advertising to me oh you can watch this other places how gross is that that is so gross not only is that so gross but that's not even a very good sales proposition you're already watching it like why would you need to watch it somewhere else when you're already watching exactly it's so true anyway i want you to go elsewhere so i know you love to talk about tv this is a a big thing in the television industry has been for many many years and it is a trend that is only increasing and that trend is television companies realizing that they can't make money selling televisions they need to make money some other way uh and so some of these sort of pioneer brands that you've mentioned like vizio tcl roku uh a lot of these brands used to make televisions but now don't anymore like visio uh doesn't make television hardware they used to oh is that true i didn't know that yeah now that someone else makes the hardware for them and they resell it but what is visio actually selling they're selling a software platform and what does a software platform do it watches what you're watching and sells that information to other people uh and that business turns out to be way more lucrative than selling television sets and the number of companies that are still willing to manufacture television sets has been shrinking and it's sort of a race to the bottom where the less premium let's say companies that make cheaper televisions that you would see at lower priced retailers they're still out there cranking them out but there's a very dwindling number of companies that do that with names that you might not even recognize if you're not into the television space and they're resold often under other brand names but those companies that are reselling them are just adding the i'm gonna say the spyware to the television sets and you'll be like oh that's bad i want to stay out of this market i'm gonna buy a good tv well the the latest developments are that even the quote-unquote good television makers are like i don't know if there's money in making better screens anymore lg have you heard of lg they make fancy oled televisions they're very popular they they're very highly regarded lg even is like i don't know about this whole trying to make the picture quality better thing it seems like a loser business can we stop making panels and instead do what vizio does and just spy on everybody and and sell software and sell the information that does that and like sony and there's other high-end companies that want to sell thousand dollar televisions all of them are looking at vizio and saying like like lg lg display i think has lost money for the past year like has not not just not made enough profit but literally been losing money and vizio their profits are going up because they don't make those stinky televisions anymore they just make the spyware and that's a great business so you know did you also see the company that will give you a free television set as long as you agree to have underneath the television a long skinny display that shows ads like an ad banner the size thing that shows that so you get the tv for free but it you have to basically see an ad banner it's underneath it in a separate screen and if you cover that screen the television turns off or whatever this is where televisions are going where it's like the lucrative business is spying on what everybody's watching and selling it and only losers make screens and it's like but somebody's got to make the screens and there's like a bunch of you know uh you know bargain based manufacturers like yeah yeah we we turn out the cheapest television sets we can using whatever the most economically feasible technology is which would be like a a cheap lcd with terrible viewing angles and black levels yeah we'll make a million of those we'll make them in really big sizes we'll sell them to you at super bowl sunday for$250 and will spy on everything you watch for the rest of your entire life.

2:32:23And Sony's over here trying to make$4 ,000 television sets with Samsung displays in them. And they're not making any money. And Vizio is like, ha ha, you losers. We just spy on everybody. It's really got me worried because like having that be a market, fine. But having that market become the only market, the only way you can buy, kind of like how you can't buy a dumb TV now. You can only buy smart ones. Soon, I fear will be you can only buy a television with a crappy screen that spies on you and that's literally your only choice so i'm like sony hold strong and we may have lost lg lg may be deciding yeah we're not going to try to make better screens anymore that business sucks and that will mean no more you know no more advancement in oled technology from lg and it'll leave basically only samsung in the entire world trying to make screens that have better picture year over year and selling those screens to Sony in itself, it's depressing.

2:33:14So yeah, you have seen a glimpse of the future with that Roku. I don't want it. You know, that's not a new thing. These things have always been spying on everything that you watch. They're just now being more blatant about it. Yeah, exactly. And actually, I have a corollary, like ethical question for you. So this Airbnb that I was staying in for a couple of nights last week, it was a little teeny tiny cottage off of Lake Wampalpak. It was probably 600, 900 square feet or something like that. It was, you know, two beds, one bath, a little teeny tiny kitchen and a little teeny tiny living area. Well, in a closet was there like cable modem or what have you and an Eero, which I was like, oh, that's that's cool.

2:33:53I'm happy to see that. And for a fleeting moment, I thought rather than plug my travel router into the Eero, which is what I ended up doing. And so I, you know, I'm double natting, but that doesn't matter because nothing is inbound. it's no big deal, but you know, that's not as direct as I would want it to be. What I did was, or what I considered unplugging the Eero and replacing it temporarily with my travel router. And the reason I didn't was because I noticed that they had a camera mounted on the external portion of the house to see the front door. And I also noticed that they're like mini split system, you know, the thing that John should be doing to his house, their mini split system had what appeared to be a Wi-Fi icon on it.

2:34:38So it appeared that there is some sort of remote control or at least monitoring for the mini split. And I had a feeling that if I unplug their router, you know, obviously the Wi-Fi network information is going to change and all of these things will die and the Airbnb actual owners will probably poop themselves. And so I didn't do it. Is that, did I make the ethically correct choice or is it YOLO, you know, who cares, unplug it if you want to? You made the practically correct choice because you know sometimes when you unplug the router that is actually connected to the ISP, the ISP is like, oh, I don't know what the hell this new router is.

2:35:11Call our customer support line. I know it's not like that in most places, but I would never risk that because then you're without internet access and you have to admit to the people who you were renting the house from that you screwed it up. They're breaking their cameras. I don't want to A, be without internet, and B, have to explain that I was messing around stuff. That is totally fair. But leaving that aside, let's assume, which I wouldn't be, But let's assume I could guarantee that the internet would come back. Is it still ethically questionable choice? Yeah, as long as you can successfully put it back the way it was.

2:35:40If you screw up your own internet when you're there, that's your own problem. The problem arises because A, you'll be without internet. And B, you will refuse to be without internet. So then you will have to go crawling to the owner and say, I screwed up your internet. Yeah, fair. That's why people lock these things in the shed outdoors. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Marco, what's your ruling on this? I would say in any kind of rental situation you're better off not messing with it that's not for you to mess with do you feel like it was inappropriate for me to hang my travel router off of the Eero or is that acceptable in your mind that I think is fine but I think as soon as you start attaching things to their network or modifying their network in such a way that you're running the risk of causing problems at that point you become a thousand percent liable for anything that happens as a result um and i think i i wouldn't probably mess with it uh myself just because you would you would mess with it if it didn't work though that's the thing it's like it's like okay this wi-fi is so bad it might as well not even exist and then suddenly you're very willing to mess with it like it's already broken i can't possibly make it work it already doesn't do the thing it's supposed to do so that's when you get in there and start trying to find where the router is and you find it locked in a shed and then you cry it would have to be so bad that i also couldn't use the built-in just you know lte 5g connections on my phone like so like i would rather i would rather just use my phone and tether to it with the laptop then deal with someone's bad wi-fi if my phone works well at all now if you're somewhere where you don't have reception you know of course of course we would we'd all just use love to use the phone but then of course your vacation house is in a place with no signal so that's not an option either yeah that that becomes a problem then so yeah and that mean look you got to do what you got to do like internet connectivity is a is a basic need it's like it's like well if the toilet's broken you know you're not going to just not flush the toilet all weekend like you'll make it work similarly yeah like if there is no internet connectivity you're going to do what you got to do as a nerd to make it work for you and your family but including finding neighbors with unprotected wi-fi which i remember way back in the day when we were we were going uh to my long island vacations the houses didn't even have wi-fi but some of the neighbors did and some of them didn't have passwords so we would sit like in the room closest to them or go in the backyard against the fence to get signal.

2:37:52Yeah, you gotta do what you gotta do.