575: Walk a Little Faster

36:49It's just so weird to me that your experience does not match mine on what is effectively identical hardware. And it's just a funny quirk of this brave new world we're entering into. It turns out our eyes and brains are not identical hardware. Maybe that's the problem. Those can all be solved by screens that are four times as big with eight times the resolution. No problem. I'm sure we'll be right there. Hey, you know, we got retina Mac monitors eventually. It's just got to be patient. I think there's always going to be certain tradeoffs. you know there are for example like certain principles of optics that are going to make some of this stuff more difficult but certainly the higher resolution they can get those screens you can paper over a lot of those problems or you can you can dramatically minimize them kind of like on the iphone screens where you know on i think most modern iphone screens essentially they use the pentile sub pixel pattern where you don't even get an r a g and a b sub pixel for every quote-unquote pixel on the screen right like if you zoom in on the screens that they use this pattern where like i forget which one is but one of the sub pixels is shared with neighboring pixels you're like how can that look good what a garbage screen they couldn't even give every pixel an rgb that must look terrible the answer is no you can't tell they're so small like no nobody notices nobody cares right because they're so small yeah i mean even like i mean please designers out there cover your ears for just this moment um when i like draw icons and and think about like font weights and icon stroke widths for my app you used to have to think about like all right you got to make everything like exactly you know like 1.5 points or three points or whatever it was so it would perfectly line up on pixel boundaries integer multiples yeah like and so it would look good on retina screens and non-retina screens it would perfectly align with everything and these days i don't think about that anymore like once we went to 3x density ios screens which i believe happened at the same time i believe that was all with the iphone 10 and forward i have yet to find any stroke width that I choose to use that looks blurry or bad compared to other ones.

38:43So now I just do them semantically. I'm like, all right, I want this icon to be semi-bold. I want this one to be medium. You know, I just do that and kind of let the system do what it wants with thicknesses. And they are not always perfect integer multiples. And it turns out it's totally fine because we have such incredibly high density on those screens now. So I think with Vision Pro, I think you're right. Once way down the road, I don't think this is coming soon, but way down the road, maybe maybe 10 years from now, when they can double the resolution of the screens or more, I think a lot of these problems will get a lot less noticeable.

39:15But until then, there's just going to be trade-offs that we live with, and that's just the reality of the technology we have so far. Tony DiTaranto writes, adding to the categories of ATP listeners with jobs in every profession, I am a professional choral conductor and long-time listener to the show. This is my favorite corner. It really is. I had a funny thought while listening to John describe window management in VisionOS in episode 574, specifically about how our eyes normally function as input devices and not output devices. In the course of my work and in my professional training at music school, I've learned an important thing that most people who aren't conductors don't think about.

39:49When giving cues and conveying information, it's important what you do with your arms and hands, but it's arguably more important what you do with your eyes. Eye contact and directing your gaze is an even stronger form of communication and control than arm and hand gestures. From when I first started conducting technique in college, when I first studied, excuse me, conducting technique in college, I had to train my gaze as much, if not more than my gesture to achieve the desired result from the group. I just wanted to provide this as an example of how, although I'm no Superman, I feel like I use my eyes as an output device for my work.

40:21Oh, those conductors, they just see all the people in the chorus or the orchestra as tiny instruments to be controlled by their eyes. well there was a line for the movie wasn't it uh you know i they they play the music i play the orchestra or something like that no spoilers for steve jobs come on all right atp.fm slash join uh david schaub writes what frustrated me is that dropping oh this is with regard to fitz law i'm sorry whoever put this in not enough context john well you know you got to read ahead of sometimes anyway uh david job writes with regard to fitz law uh what frustrated me is that dropping files on the macOS dock breaks Fitz's law.

40:57If you drag a file to the dock, you can drag it past the icons, which according to David Chobb is ridiculous. It is ridiculous. It's a long-standing thing. It's kind of like when you put a folder alias in the dock, you can't drag things into it. It's one of those things that could be fixed in numerous ways. For example, you could just disallow dragging folder aliases into the dock if you're not going to support it. But it hasn't been because apparently nobody cares. But yeah, dragging things to the dock. We get away with it because in the grand scheme of things, the dock is pretty big on most people's monitor.

41:24I bet Most people don't have their docs smaller than the menu bar. But yeah, try it. Take something. If you have a folder in the doc, take a file and try to drag it into the folder and go past the folder. Go all the way to the screen edge and you'll notice the folder is like, nope, nothing's on top of me anymore. It's crappy. I might have even filed a feedback on it years ago. Maybe I'll file one again. I'm sure other people have, but I don't think Apple cares. But it's sad. They should. Apple, this is wildly unrelated. Apple extends their modem licensing deal with Qualcomm through March of 2027.

41:55So to recap, Apple bought, what was it, Intel's modem business a few years back? Intel's cell modem business, yeah. Right. And they said without saying, oh, we're going to make our own modem so we don't have to continue to pay Qualcomm. And then they realized, oh, this is harder than we thought. And they continued to pay Qualcomm. And now they've apparently realized, no, it's still harder than we thought. And so they are extending their deal even further. They're reading from Mac rumors. Apple has extended its modem chip licensing agreement with Qualcomm through March 2027. Qualcomm said today during its first earnings call of 2024, Apple's existing agreement has now been extended for two years, so we can expect to see Qualcomm modems in the next several iPhone generations.

42:33Yeah, not great for Apple. I still think they really should make that modem and maybe think about integrating it into the SoC or near the SoC, but first they got to make one that works. Good luck. I keep in mind also like, you know, just because they have a license deal with Qualcomm through 2027 doesn't necessarily mean that Apple is not going to ship its own modems before then. It probably means that, but this could be like Apple is going to need Qualcomm's chips through March 2027 for some parts of their lineup. That's true. It's possible that next year, one of the iPhones gets it, or some variant of it, whether it's the iPhone SE.

43:11Yeah, but they're going to want to start this slow, I think. it's not going to debut in the pro phone probably i think they're probably going to be wary and like you know put it out in the se first or something like just i don't know what they're going to do but like given how hard it's been i don't think this is a bet your flagship product on i don't think they can make enough of them at that all i guess the tsmc would do it for them or whatever but yeah i think with given how this has gone a gradual gradual rollout of apple's modems is a good idea remember last time they use intel modems in their phones and what was it you could either get the Intel modem or the Qualcomm one, and nobody wanted the Intel one because it wasn't great.

43:47And that was kind of on their flagship phone. Yep. I had the Intel one. That was the AT &T iPhone 7. Yeah. So it's tough. It's tough. So I hope Apple does take this slow. Keep extending that deal, lock in whatever deal you have to get with Qualcomm. I know these two companies hate each other, but you kind of need cell modems for cell phones. Indeed. Going back many episodes now, probably five or ten episodes, we were talking a lot about patents, and an anonymous person wrote in to say, Apple employees are heavily incentivized to file patents. It's one of the few ways to make additional income at Apple outside of your normal job responsibilities.

44:21Apple has an entire department and online portal to streamline the process. I can't find the exact numbers right now, but I believe employees receive at least$1 ,000 if a patent is accepted and approved. The caveat, of course, is that Apple owns all of the intellectual rights to the invention. i don't mean to sneeze at a thousand dollars a thousand dollars is a lot of money but like that seems chintzy right oh yeah yeah for for apple for it's like that does seem like a little it seems lower than i would have guessed well that's apple's mo their whole the whole rep is that they don't pay as much as their competitors because everyone should just be happy to be working there because apple but yeah thousand dollars is like why bother give me one share of stock we are sponsored this episode by celtrios this is a shmup a shoot-em-up game they actually sponsored us a while ago and they're back with even more updates so here's the idea it's a shoot-em-up so tiny ship big weapons waves of foes and power-ups and obstacles and all of this is brought to you with no ads no in-app purchases no subscription and nothing is locked you can play celtrios over and over again as long as you want with lots of customization options to keep it fresh and celtrios is available exclusively for apple platforms mac iphone ipad and apple tv So Seltrios has 13 different stages.

45:36You can start from whichever one you want. You can also, of course, resume play later if you quit the app. You have a million different possibilities when you're configuring your ship. Dozens of abilities. And then, of course, randomizing options, full screen options. Huge amount of ways to play both mechanically and then also just how your ship is configured. It's great. Seltrios also has a huge, high-quality soundtrack with over 45 minutes of music. And Seltrios keeps expanding. There have been over 75 free updates to it so far, and the entire thing was made by an independent developer. So, of course, this is right in my heart, you know?

46:13So, Seltrios supports one or two players at a time. On the Mac, you can do various input methods with iOS. The second player needs a game controller, but hey, it works. So, it's just a great shoot-em-up or shmup kind of game. I love this genre of game. It's so fun. You know, it's like the old arcade games taken to the extreme with all the modern capabilities. It's wonderful. So get Seltrios if you love traditional shmups or you just want a quality game that's fun to play again and again with none of those usual annoyances of other modern games. Mac only Seltrios is available on Steam with a free demo or head over to the Apple App Store to get Seltrios for iOS and tvOS.

46:47Thank you so much to Seltrios for sponsoring our show once again.

46:54harvey simon writes in regards to the magnetically attached uh apple watch bands that are rumors magnets screw with compasses apple watches have compasses ergo apple is unlikely to add magnetic attachments for apple watch bands so i mean i'm not an expert in magnets but that makes sense to me so if you're if you're waiting for extremely powerful magnets to be connecting your apple watch band maybe that won't work well with the compass feature of the watch time will tell i think working around magnetic strength limitations is not that hard because again i'm not a scientist but i'm pretty sure magnetic strength falls off dramatically with distance it does and if you have fixed magnets inside the apple watch that are always in the same position i would expect it would not be super hard to just calibrate that out uh from the sensor third-party watch bands might throw a monkey wrench into that well it depends like where are the magnets are the magnets in the body or are they in the band i would imagine they have to be in both places kind of like the mag safe cases you know like the ones that work well the cases also have magnets in them and third-party ones tend to be stronger than apples in my experience maybe but like i i think if they're if they're in the watch body which i mean actually does the charging uh disc on the bottom are there any magnets in on the watch side of that there probably are i would imagine there's electricity so there's also magnetism it's complicated yeah yeah anyway so i i think i think they could design around this i don't think it would be that big of a deal oh we'll see we'll see this is still just a rumor we i haven't seen any con anything concrete on the watch strap thing since we talked about it except for vague notions of watch strap magnets okay well so give me give me a drawing give me something we don't have anything yet fair enough all right and then And finally, for follow up this week, more on the line or letter of credit from Brian Coffey.

48:44As someone who also works in commercial banking, specifically problem commercial loans, I need to clarify the comments on the requirements to get a letter of credit. Drawing a letter of credit. Yes, Apple could draw on the letter of credit, but in the agreement, they must have a good and valid reason. The typical use for a letter of credit is for international shipping, where you ship the goods before getting paid. The letter of credit ensures the overseas recipient won't stiff you. The shipper who got stiffed must go to their bank to work with a shippee's bank to claim that the shipper never got paid.

49:10And with regard to getting a letter of credit, a letter of credit is a credit product of the bank. Once a letter of credit is drawn upon, it instantly becomes a loan. A company can get an unsecured letter of credit if they're producing enough cash flow to show they're quote-unquote good for the money if the letter of credit ever gets drawn upon. If a potential borrower doesn't have strong enough cash flows to support this, there are alternatives. Smallish businesses could put up their homes or retirement accounts as collateral. You could also be 50 % secured or really any percent secured depending on the strength of your cash flows.

49:38All this is to say you don't absolutely have to put a million in cash in the bank, but you do have to show a bank that you could reasonably come up with a million if you had to and prove it. So it's not exactly handing the bank a million bucks or a million euros, but it's not that far away either. Yeah, I mean, like any bank thing, if you can convince some bank to do something for you, then fine. but yeah i feel like the bank basically wants to know uh you have something that we can get a million dollars from even if we need to like repossess your home or you know whatever so uh it's it's not as bad as you must have a million dollars in cash but i feel like you still kind of have to have some way to get a million dollars for a bank to agree to this because that's kind of the whole deal unless you have a really friendly bank and it's like we like your face we we think it's fine yeah we'll front you a million bucks because we like your face that sounds reasonable yeah oh yeah yeah all right let's uh move on to some topics and of course we have a little bit more vision pro to talk about and john you seem to be very enthusiastic enthusiastic to talk about personas baby so what you got it was kind of like when we talked about eyesight last week um the reason this feature exists is obvious and i think is not really going to go away so personas are the the little fake computer people that you use to represent yourself when you're on a facetime call and the reason for them is obvious uh being on a video call in a zoom meeting for your work in a facetime or whatever it's so common today it's a very common part of using computers but if you've got weird ski goggles strapped to your face how do you get yourself into a video call do you let your max web webcam show your weird ski goggly face i think people would find that off-putting even with the creepy eyesight things on it so apple's solution is hey we'll make a little computer version of you and when you're in your facetime call or your zoom meeting the little computer puppet of you will talk and that problem is not going to go away until we're actually wearing you know glasses that you know that just look like regular glasses which is many many many years in the future if it ever comes in any form um so you're gonna need some way to show your face in these meetings i guess the other solution is oh uh you know we're having a zoom beating well why why isn't your video turned on oh i'm wearing a headset so you can't see me um i'm not sure that's necessarily going to fly and you wouldn't want it to because there's a lot of bandwidth uh you know a lot of communication that happens from your facial expressions so apple's solution to this is these weird creepy uh computer uh models and uh as weird as they are i think uh they're gonna apple's gonna keep plugging away at this as you know they've taken a lot of flack for this during the rollout because they do look kind of creepy and scary uh i don't think that apple is going to be scared away nor should they because i think you know video conferencing is not going away uh and it's going to be a long time before these things on our face don't look like sea goggles and kind of hide everything about our most things about our face so i think they just need to keep plugging away at it as embarrassing it is as now and as for how embarrassing it is like we like last episode i think we when we tooted about it we showed uh casey's persona and like the the graphic for that episode they look silly but only if you you have a more i think you have a more appreciation for them if you have any experience with this type of thing before and most of my experience with this type of thing comes from video games and similar tech where they would you know put your face in the game make a skin for your player character or whatever and the things that have been built into games have been so much worse than what apple did they really are one of the best instances i've ever seen of this particular technology and we'll put a link in the show notes to someone demonstrating this the thing i think that's most impressive about apple stuff well two things one that they're able to make something that looks as good as it does i know you you're hearing that you're like what do you mean they look terrible look like a death mask it could be so much worse go look at a video game let's do this it could be so much worse right and yes they all blur the edges to hide their sins or whatever but they do an amazing job with just a with a face scan that you can do not a professional scan like go look at things where they have like a famous hollywood actor in a video game and they have that person go into a full motion capture studio and have them stand there with like balls on their shoulders and and lasers shooting them for a million angers like incredibly controlled environment where they spend the entire day getting their face scan and they put them in the game they look awful and this is oh just hold the ski goggles in front of your face for two seconds turn to the side and apple's doing a better job so yeah that's impressive but the second thing is it's demoed in this video how well it tracks the expressions you're making with your face so you're wearing ski goggles and you're raising your eyebrows and you're blinking and you're twisting your mouth and you're sticking out your tongue and you're smiling and you're frowning and you're furrowing your brow and somehow Apple's able to detect all those things.

54:31Some of those things are happening inside the headset. Some of those things are happening outside the headset. It is phenomenal what they do. Now, does the little puppet look like you when it's doing that? You know, it's got fake, everyone's got the same perfect fake teeth and everyone's got the same weird artificial tongue. And it's not, you know, if you can make the W shape with your tongue, the avatar is not going to, right? But like it does a really good, I think it does a good enough job, kind of like a really well articulated puppet would do of letting the people who are on the zoom call with you or whatever know what expression you're making are you you know are you happy about that are you skeptical are you angry are you not paying attention like i feel like they do an amazing job of matching the the movements of the various parts of your face and reflecting those no it's not perfect it's not capturing all the subtleties of your acting performance it might not even really look like you but kind of like i was you know talking about the cartoon eyes sometimes just sort of a not a cartoon eyes but like a uh a decomposed less granular version of you captures a lot of it it's the reason animation can look so good animation doesn't look photorealistic but the right lines in the right places can be very expressive in animation and i feel like that's what apple's going for this isn't exactly you but if they catch enough if they put the right lines in the right places they can convey most of the information your face is expressing and again i'm really impressed that some of that expression is underneath these the the the goggles and some of it is outside and they put it back together into a cohesive whole so um i'm not i don't relish seeing these personas talking to me but i think this is just one of those hard problems that apple and anybody who wants to do what apple is doing has to be resigned to tackling over the next several decades because it's not going to go away again until we just get plain old glasses.

56:20Until then, people are going to want to be in meetings and people are going to want to see their faces and they're going to want to be able to use their faces, again, talk about our choral conductor, as an output device because that's part of the way we communicate with other people. We want to be able to scowl at someone meaningfully and have that have an effect on them in the meeting. Yeah, no, I want to build on what you were saying earlier. Like, as a technical achievement, it is stunning how good these are at expressing what your face is expressing. Because remember, you've got cameras on the inside that are figuring out when you're blinking because the persona reflects that, that figure out when you're raising your eyebrows because the persona reflects that.

56:59I don't recall if it reflects where your eyes are looking, but I think it does. Yeah, it does. Pretty sure. And it's certainly, you can turn your face left and right and up and down. and then your smile like that's happening outside the device and granted there are cameras you know pretty much everywhere on this thing but still there's you know it's it's outside the device that you're smiling or sticking your tongue out like you had said and whether or not like leaving aside the creepiness factor or the uncanny valley which again just like i was saying in the beginning of the show like that's a big thing to just push under the carpet but leaving that aside the technical achievement is really just phenomenal and stunning how good how good it is and you know i had a i do a monthly facetime call with james thompson we had one this morning and because we're both idiots we jumped on the call unbeknownst to either of us but we i think we both kind of assumed it you know we jumped on the call you know started off the calls and in in our vision pros with our personas and so on and so forth and had a good laugh about it and you know chuckled about how ridiculous we both look.

57:59And then we hung up and, you know, got on the computer like we usually do. But I mean, I think if we had stuck with the personas, it would have been awkward for a few minutes. And this is a very common refrain from people who've done it. You know, it would have been awkward for a few minutes, then it would have felt pretty normal all in all. And I think that's how it typically ends up. Like, I'm not saying it's not weird. I'm not even necessarily saying it's not creepy. But I don't know. You settle into it. And again, as a technical exercise, it is beyond compare did you look at the charlie chapman video by the way the one that i was referring to did you have a chance to look at it i think i skimmed through it super quickly if memory serves some some of the things he does for example are like puffing air uh underneath his like uh into his uh behind his lips and into his cheeks and also talking out of like the side of his mouth like that's what i'm talking about where it's not just like a puppet where it's like i can tell when you're opening your mouth and you said a t sound so i'll make it look like you're making a t sound with your tongue like you can do weird stuff with your face that is not normal like like you know puffing your lips up and and you know talking weird like and it's i mean is it tracking it exactly no but they're accounting for the fact that you might do that and they're mapping it to whatever their little puppet model is of your face going far beyond just simply making it so that your mouth moves when you talk please everyone should definitely look at this video i mean you know and again ignore the fact that his whole head is all fuzzed out and he looks like a weird death massive himself i mean but i think you are correct at how incredibly impressive this accomplishment is but it's still not good enough and i think this is kind of this is largely the story of vision pro in general right now most products like most new groundbreaking products you tend to have mostly like routine you know stuff that has been done before plus like one or two big new challenges That's not the Vision Pro.

59:53The Vision Pro is a very small number of things that have been done before. Like, here's an M2-based, you know, iPad-based OS in a computing environment with Windows and stuff. And then they tackled 10 different massive challenges, at least. And they have achieved remarkable things. They're way ahead of the industry in so many ways with the Vision Pro. but the problem is they're not selling the Vision Pro and pitching the Vision Pro to people in the VR industry. They're not selling and pitching the use of personas to only gamers. They've tackled these massive problems and they've done very respectable jobs in their solutions to them but the problem is they're still not where most people want them to be and they probably have some kind of resentment whenever people criticize it on some level.

1:00:47I bet there's people in Apple who are like, how can you criticize the personas because look at how amazing they are compared to the state of the art. And that's true, but when you're presenting them as an alternative to people, then people are going to hold them to a much higher standard. That's why they made the studio display camera so cruddy. Yeah. The Vision Pro, in many ways, it's pitching itself as like an alternative to various aspects of reality that people are very good at noticing the differences between the real stuff and the fake stuff and they have achieved remarkable stuff and yet it is still not good enough for what most people expect as like the basics oh you're going to show a virtual version of me okay it needs to look like me like it needs to be a stand-in replacement and it's it's sort of you know it's in the ballpark for a lot of people but it's not a standard replacement.

1:01:42In many cases, it looks creepy and weird, and still, even with 1.1. And so, I think this is going to be just part of the Vision Pro's uphill battle over the coming years. even though they have achieved remarkable things, they still need to push it even further than what they've already done to match what most people's expectations are who are not vr industry pros yeah i think they picked mostly like the right challenges because there are so many different challenges they could have chosen and you might look at this i think a lot of people look at the outside like why did apple even try to do this and the answer is because this is one of the problems they eventually need to solve and if you don't start working at it now don't expect you're just gonna snap your fingers sometime 10 years from out it'll be perfect you got to make the janky version first right so they're doing like but they can't ignore this problem like they can't ignore it unless they see a time horizon of just wearing like clear glasses instead of these goggle things otherwise this is just going to be out there as an issue and so they better start plugging away at it and i bet this was like a big time sink and a big you know like a lot of technology went into this and to your point marco a lot of technology and time went into it into a feature that we know regular people are gonna look at and go i look at it go but but it's like you just got it like this is a problem that has to be solved if you want to make this product there are a small number of problems you basically just have to solve and you're not going to be able to do a great job on them even if you better than anyone else has ever done before but you better start cracking on it because next year you make a better version next year like they can't ignore this one they can't like even more so than eyesight or eyesight where you can say okay we'll make the cheaper one without eyesight or we'll use cartoon eyes or whatever like you could maybe sweep that one of the covers but people are on video calls all the time and i don't think it's acceptable to them to say either you just can't show your face or your face is going to have these giant ski goggles on it and all of those are less acceptable than even this janky thing so they just have to be like okay we're gonna we're gonna put ourselves out there i'm gonna say we gave it our best shot because we recognize this is a problem that we need to solve and next year we hope we'll do better and you know it's gonna be a while but like i said it is it is impressive from a technical perspective what they've achieved and i think they struck a reasonable balance in the beginning people were like why didn't you just use memojis i think memojis would be worse like i know they have memojis i know this whole this whole scene kit versus reality kit political internal api thing that they have going on there but setting that aside memojis are not as expressive as personas are again watch the video we'll link in the show notes of charlie chapman showing his different facial expressions memojis are cartoons that are not what i was using before the example of animation where you draw just the right line to be expressive emojis are not that emojis are are bad or rigid headed chucky cheese pizza time band whatever things not to no you know slack and the emoji team what they did is amazing too emojis had to walk so personas could walk a little faster but but personas are are better able to communicate you across a computer while you're wearing that goggles than emojis would be and and what people want is personas but not bad right and so you got i guess you have to start you know you could either just never ship uh or you could ship what you have which is personas which are you know better than emojis but still not good enough so i give apple an e for effort here and if they have to choose where to add the resources to pursue better things i would say put more resources into personas than eyesight for going forward.

1:05:11Yeah, I don't know. I stand by eyesight as well, and we don't need to belabor this, but I get why people are turned off by both personas and eyesight. But I genuinely think this would be a far worse product without both of those components. We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform. for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything, from your products to your content to your time, all in one place and all on your terms.

1:05:49Let me tell you how great it is building a website with Squarespace. So I've told you over the years how whenever I or someone in my life needed a new website for something, especially businesses, I would always point people to Squarespace first. Every time, they would try it and they would realize, oh this is i'm done this is all i need this just happened again friend of mine runs a runs a small business and she had some very very high quote for some custom work and i said hey why don't you try it on squarespace first and she didn't know about this and next time i saw her she's like oh my god you just saved me thousands of dollars because she was able to go and she's not technical but she was able to go to squarespace and build her own site without me telling her how to do it as the nerd, like you literally just point people to Squarespace and it's so easy.

1:06:33Even non-tech people have no problem figuring it out and then doing it themselves. So you're actually not only are you saving yourself as the nerd, you're saving yourself work and, you know, time that you could be, you know, that you might think they would need your help, but then you're empowering them to build their own site and every feature. She kept, she was, she was asking me like, oh, can you change this? Yes. Can you change, you know, the template, put in your own stuff? Yes. Does it support buying things scheduling things yes all of those does it support image galleries yes of course like so much on squarespace is built right in and it's so easy anybody can do it i strongly suggest you check out squarespace and if people in your life need websites point them to squarespace too go to squarespace.com to start a free trial when you're ready to launch go to squarespace.com slash atp and you will save 10 off your first purchase of a website or domain so once again squarespace.com free trial.

1:07:21When you're ready to launch, use squarespace.com slash ATP for 10 % off your first purchase. Thank you so much to Squarespace for sponsoring our show.

1:07:34There's news today that Apple is already defending iMessage against tomorrow's quantum computing attacks. I'm sorry, what? So Apple and security professionals that have probably known about this for a long time, but I don't often have to think about this. But one of the things that security professionals are thinking about is, hey, there will one day be a quantum computer. And what happens if you somehow, probably nefariously, capture a bunch of encrypted traffic today? But what if you save it off for years and years and years? And eventually, you finally get your hands or build that quantum computer.

1:08:13And you can go back to all of that years and years and years of data that you captured with our comparatively weak encryption that we use here in 2024, well, suddenly your quantum computer can just decrypt all of that, right? That's how it's going to work. And nobody really knows if that's true or not. It certainly stands to reason that it's true. And Apple is already starting the process of defending iMessage against tomorrow's quantum computing attacks. So they had a blog post about this, which I'll link in the show notes, and The Verge covered it, and I will read from The Verge a little bit.

1:08:48Apple's security team claims to have achieved a breakthrough that, quote, advances the state of the art of end-to-end messaging, quote. With the upcoming release of iOS 17.4 and macOS 14.4 and the equivalent iPad watchOS, the company is bringing a new cryptographic protocol called PQ3 to iMessage that purports to offer even more robust encryption and defenses against sophisticated quantum computing attacks. So now from Apple's blog post, today we are announcing the most significant cryptographic security upgrade in iMessage history with the induction of PQ3, a groundbreaking post-quantum cryptographic protocol that advances the state of the art of end-to-end secure messaging.

1:09:23PQ3 is the first messaging protocol to reach what we like to call level three security, which I'll explain in a second, providing protocol protections that surpass those in all the other widely deployed messaging apps. To our knowledge, PQ3 is the strongest security properties of any at-scale messaging protocol in the world. PQ3 employs a hybrid design that combines elliptic curve cryptography with post-quantum encryption, both during the initial key establishment and during rekeying. Thus, the new cryptography is purely additive, and defeating PQ3 security requires defeating both the existing classical ECC cryptography and the new post-quantum primitives.

1:09:59I thought that bit was interesting because basically they're covering their butts to say, look, what if we screwed this up? What if we came up with this new post-quantum encryption, but we have a bug in the implementation. We're just rolling this out and oops, we got something wrong and there's some kind of bug or buffer overflow or whatever. Making this additive to the existing encryption hopefully makes it so that if they really screwed this up and oh, it's trivially easy to crack this post-quantum encryption because of a bug in Apple software. Well, once you crack it, what you're left with is the stuff that was encrypted the way it's currently encrypted now.

1:10:34like that's that it's it's layered on top of it is my understanding which i think is really smart thing to do to sort of you know we all kind of wish we could do this like you kind of want to have the old way there as a fallback even if you totally screw up the new way i'm not entirely sure if that's that's true but my reading this paragraph makes me think that it might be and it's a clever idea which is like belt and suspenders uh we're not getting rid of the old encryption we're just encrypting it one more time even better yep yep and so apple as mentioned has come up with its own four plus stage, I guess five plus stage level system.

1:11:10They've defined classical cryptography, which is not quantum secure. There's level zero, which is no end-to-end encryption by default. And by the way, you can kind of tell, it's kind of weird that Apple's marketing department really doesn't ever really like to name competitors at all, ever. Even though we know who they're talking about when they allude to something. But whoever's doing the security blog has no problem naming names. So you undertake the level zero thing, level zero, no end to end encryption. They just name names, Skype, Telegram, WeChat, whatever that QQ is. Yep. Level one, end to end encryption by default, which includes Line, Viber, WhatsApp, Signal previously, and iMessage previously.

1:11:47Level two, now we're in the post-quantum cryptography or PQC. This is, and also has end to end encryption by default. So level two is PQC, key establishment only, which is Signal with PQXDH, whatever the heck that means. And then level three, which is PQC key establishment and ongoing PQC rekeying, which is the new iMessage with PQ3. And then in the future, not given a level, but I guess it would be level four, PQC establishment plus ongoing PQC rekeying plus PQC authentication. And then there's potentially even more after that. So this is really cool. I'm happy that Apple was working on this, even though I don't think anyone gives a crap about what I say in iMessage, But I do think that that's really cool that this is something that they're actively working on, hopefully and presumably so long before it's ever going to be necessary.

1:12:35It's interesting in the fact that they have like the level four written there. If you read the big document to the blog post, they explain like that they essentially chose not to do the thing that makes this level four because it's just like level three, except they add the PQC authentication. And they explain why they chose not to do that. they said like look we don't um we don't want to do that right now and we don't think it's necessary right now because it happens it happens in the moment so it's not one of those things the authentication is like you know establishing authenticity of who you're communicating with before you start communicating and that has to happen each time and so what they say is like this is not like you could save this for later and then decrypt it later because you're not there's no useful information exchanged yet so saving that saving that uh you know that exchange is useless to you because that exchange has already happened so even if you crack the encryption out with your quantum computer 10 years from now it's pointless there's no data there and that that conversation happened long ago and those keys are all useless right and so they said well until someone can get a quantum computer that can intercept your traffic and then in real time crack it we don't have to worry about that so that's why they pushed it off to the future and the other thing they talk about in implementation trade-offs is um the post-quantum cryptography stuff the data is bigger like the keys are bigger and whatever whatever other info they have to exchange is significantly bigger than their old encryption scheme and their old encryption screen scheme sends new keys like every single message but to like basically tamp down on the bandwidth use of you know if you're going to tack something onto every i message that's sent that adds up real fast because a lot of i messages are sent per hour per day per minute per second right um so they say with the uh the post-quantum stuff they only are going to do like the rekeying periodically and they do it based on an algorithm of them of like if you're on a crappy connection we won't try to shove these new keys down as fast as we normally do if you're on a faster connection we'll send them more frequently and what they basically said is we're trying to narrow the window that an attacker could do something so if an attacker someday cracks this the only thing that they'll be able to see is the the brief period before we rekeyed uh they cracked just that little segment so i don't know how big that is they didn't actually say whether it's like two lines of text or five minutes or whatever but uh that's another a trade-off they made and that's that's another fun thing of like seeing security people write something instead of marketing people uh because they'll tell you here were the engineering trade offs and here's why we made them uh instead of just saying this is the best and no one else anything has anything like this and it's super secure they'll let engineers write it and they'll tell you about the trade-offs so i thought this was super interesting i highly recommend everybody read the blog post we link because it is it might seem like it's kind of got a little bit of technical jargon but they do a really good job of explaining it well enough for you to follow what they're saying and it's pretty cool stuff all right it's been a little while so let's do some ask atp and let's start tonight with ian malchazewski who writes what is your advice on how to best communicate to non-tech people the value and benefits of native mac ass mac apps i work at a small under 10 people company where everyone works on a mac but some are new to the platform and most of their software experiences using electron apps and other apps that are best that are at best so-so citizens of the platform we're contemplating hiring a developer to make an app to help us with an internal project, I want to be able to make the case to hire someone who knows how to make good Mac software.

1:15:51If I put an app like Fantastical next to Outlook, most of my teammates just see two calendar apps with cosmetic differences and shrug off the idea that there's anything notably different between them. I'd love any advice on how to make the case to non-technical people that Mac-ass Mac apps have a real user-facing benefits beyond just feeling better. Hot take, I don't know that you really want a Mac-ass Mac app in this context. If you're just writing stuff for your own team of 10 people, I wouldn't spend the time personally. And I know that's probably going to make everyone shudder and hate me, but there are bigger problems and more important problems to solve than making a Mac-ass Mac app.

1:16:24But that's my opinion, wrong as it may be. Marco, correct me. I don't think I'm going to disagree with you on this. So it depends so much on the nature of the app that you're going to build. So Ian said this is an internal app. I think it will be challenging for the higher-ups to justify what it would take to make a really good, you know, quote, Mac-assed Mac app. And what that means is, you know, basically native Mac code, native Mac controls, you know, kind of the standard Mac UI design paradigm, things like that, as opposed to things like Electron. and i think for for most software i mean let alone most internal use software it's very difficult to justify that kind of investment on the mac because first of all you know you mentioned wanting to hire someone who could do that that's difficult there's not a lot of programmers out there who are qualified to make the this style of like high quality native you know kind of traditional style Mac app.

1:17:30It's a very small talent pool. Including inside Apple. Yeah, Apple can't even make them anymore. Sorry, but it's true. It is. So that's, you know, problem number one is, could you even find someone to do this? Problem number two is, would you be able to pay them what they are probably worth? And then problem number three is, can you convince the higher-ups in your company that that's worth doing? And I think the only way that is really easily done is if the higher-ups in your company are Mac nerds and also not good business people because what you're what you're ultimately looking and by the way and i'm both of those things so if it was you know my internal app i would absolutely do this but the problem is when you're when you're talking about having that style of app with the realities of today and the markets and the tech needs around it today it's more of an indulgence than something that you can make a good business case for.

1:18:27So if you're able to convince them, hey, indulge me in having this thing that we're going to build be very nice in these ways that you don't care about, but I do, then good for you. That's great. I think you're in for an uphill battle. And then also, even if you can get someone to build it and you can get the higher-ups to agree to indulge you in this, what happens down the road when you have to change it or update it? how hard is it going to be to get someone in to do that down the road? Because it's already hard enough now. So I think it's, I think it's going to be a tough sell. These two just don't have enough experience dealing with a giant corporate bureaucracies.

1:19:09Let me tell you how to do this. Okay. So the first thing you need to do, first thing you need to do is establish things that are not in this question that aren't the answer to. For example, this seems to imply that you're going to hire a developer to make an app for an internal project. and that you only need a Mac app, if that's really true, confirm that and say, just so we're clear, we're not like planning on making a Windows version of this app later. Like, well, it's an internal app. Like, are we ever going to need a Windows version? Do we need a Linux version? And if you can get past that hurdle of clarifying the requirements and they say, no, no, no, we're never going to make a Windows version.

1:19:44Never going to need a web version. This is going to be a Mac app. It's an internal thing, which is only ever going to run on Mac. So there's never going to be any other version. Then you're set. Because then what you can do is not say what Marco just said because that will discourage them. What you have to say then is, okay, if it's going to be a Mac app, the reason we want to hire an experienced Mac developer is because the straightest path to make a Mac app is to use Apple's frameworks in a straightforward way. No weird custom stuff. No, I've come up with a framework of my own for doing GUIs.

1:20:20just use and you'll have to like hash a style whatever they want you to use swift ui do they want you to use app kit whatever it is they pick whatever path you go down don't pick swift ui on the mac yeah hot find someone who will do that in the most straightforward way possible and the pitch is when this person disappears i want anybody to be able to look at this and say oh this is a straightforward swift ui app straightforward app kit app that doesn't do any weird custom stuff that has no custom controls that apple's documentation explains how to do it that you know it's really easy to find example code documentation you know anything like that it is straightforward and they're going to be done faster this was the old pitch with like the next stuff when it was you know next and object to see and everything you can make a highly functional app with fewer lines of code and in less time because the frameworks do so much for you that's the pitch you make to your goal is i want a good to get an experienced mac developer in and the pitch is we need someone who we can't you can't someone who's like i don't even know what apis max offer i'm just going to use like the you know quartz 2d drawing api and draw my own gui because i don't know what this whole app kit thing is it's confusing to me but i i'm a good programmer so i'm going to make my own ui framework like lauren brichter out of open gl or whatever you know i mean like that is not what you want and so that's how i would pitch it i would say and you're never to get sort of like to know the culture and the idioms but at the very least you should get someone in there for example you decide it's going to be app kit get someone who knows app kit i know it sounds dumb but like i've seen corporate hiring it's like i could figure it out it'll be fine right and you know if someone comes in you oh i've made a mac app and they show you an electron app and it's like did you make an app mac app though are you really a web developer are you using like react native and electron and all these other things like that's not what we're looking for and that I feel like will be harder to wrangle because if you're making some kind of internal tool app and someone uses Electron and it takes 500 megs of RAM when you just launched the thing, like that's another case against it, right?

1:22:18Just find a Mac developer who can make a straightforward, simple thing that will be done quickly, have lots of functionality and be easy for any future Mac developer to understand. I'm not saying it's a slam dunk case, but that's your best shot. All right, sorted. Julian Gamble writes, if you could ask Apple for one new API to help your apps this year, what would it be? Julian's guesses are, Marco for Overcast, watchOS, an API to make syncing files like podcast files work on demand and reliably on schedule and in general much easier. We can stop there. I don't even write a watch app and I'm in.

1:22:50I'm ready. I think what that's, I don't think an API can change physics in the size of the watch's battery. And I know Marco says they should loosen up a little bit, but in the end, an API that did that would burn your battery pretty badly. Okay. First of all, this would not be my guess or this would not be my pick for this question but just for the sake of argument what i would want in this area would be if a user has initiated a download while the app is in the foreground let me start a backgroundable download that begins immediately and uses wi-fi if it has to because right now it will you know wait for a while and maybe do it later when i saw the charger or it'll use the Bluetooth connection of the phone because it's lower power.

1:23:33And if a user, while using the app in the foreground, initiates a download, that signifies pretty clear user intent. I want this to happen, like kind of now. I make a pretty strong argument for that, but honestly, that is not my biggest problem on watchOS. My biggest problem on watchOS is every few days when I get an email from a customer saying, why don't I support the double tap gesture on the Series 9 and Ultra 2 yet? And the answer is there is no API to do that. Apple released the double tap feature in the fall and they said, hey, third party apps, you can just let this do the default response on notifications.

1:24:12And that's it. So literally there is no API to response double tap. And it's such a glaring omission that my customers assume that I'm the one being negligent, not Apple. So that would be my number one request on watchOS. But that isn't even my number one request overall. My number one request at this moment is for SwiftUI's list to have feature parity with UI TableView. Now, that is not a small thing. No, it is not. However, that would be a huge improvement to the most coding that I'm doing this year. Julian said this year. That's what would help me is make SwiftUI list have more capabilities.

1:25:00For instance, one that I ran into most recently is the kind of drag to reorder mechanic in it does not support multiple items. In UI Table View, you can pick up multiple items as you drag your finger around with a second finger and then drop them all in one spot. The equivalent in SwiftUI does not support that. The API appears to be written to support it because when it tells you drop here, it passes you a set of indexes to drop there. So the API seems to be built to support multiple things being dropped. But there is no physical implementation of that. It's just one case of many where I keep running into areas where SwiftUI list is oddly limited in ways that UI table view is not.

1:25:51And UI table view is a super important API for iOS. Almost every app uses table views in some way. And UI table view has been added to over time like crazy because it's such a huge part of interaction on iOS. There's tons of features that UI table view supports. SwiftUI list kind of started from scratch and kind of did the basics and has been very slowly and carefully adding little bits and pieces. Oh, you want to customize this inset? Okay, here's one way to do that. You want to customize whether this border shows up over here? Okay, fine, we'll give you another small way to do that. But there's some big areas like the multi-select drag and drop that it just has not enough feature parity.

1:26:32and that is making my life difficult as I'm trying to work on the SwiftUI rewrite for the biggest part of my user base, like the iOS app and the table views within it. Those are major areas and I just keep hitting walls that just aren't there yet in SwiftUI. It rocked my world when I want to say it was like four or five years ago. It was maybe more than that. But somebody described all of professional iOS development as turning JSON into table views. And I was like, mother of God. That is exactly right. So if that doesn't mean anything to you. So JSON is a plain text way of transmitting data. Typically when you get something from a web server, not as a person, but as an app, you're going to get data back in JSON format, JSON.

1:27:21And like Marco said, table views run the majority of all iOS apps. So you could summarize iOS development as turning JSON into table views for money. web development too these days not table views i guess but same yeah exactly you get a json api you get the result you lay it out on an html page yep exactly so anyway so yeah that that rocked my world even though it was five years ago i still think it's hilarious and accurate uh john uh continuing with julian uh john for front and center uh for mac os an api to enable preserving icon arrangement in folders as per classic mac os you know pre mac os 10 that's julian's guess that's misunderstanding what would be required to get that it's not an api that's missing it's the the mac finder application would have to be behaved differently there's no api they could roll out that would make that work unfortunately back to what marco was saying about lists i was telling him before uh when we were talking about this in slack uh they should count as blessings because a list was so uh under featured and buggy for me in swift ui and mac os that i can't even use list in my thing that has a list of things that are reorderable and i had to basically roll my own list it's like having to roll your own ui table view because table view was too janky for you so it could be worse but yeah it could definitely be better um what i actually want for an api to make my help make my app better this year i actually filed feedbacks on this uh in the fall of last year a whole bunch of them um i'll just read off the titles of them because i tried to separate it into like i don't know why i bother but like i try to separate it into things that i hope would be like if if i put them all in one feedback they'd say oh we're not doing all this crap i tried to break it down like maybe they'll pick one of them so the first is add a modern window list API, an API in macOS that lets me list all the windows on the system.

1:29:02There are existing APIs that do that, but they're super old. Most of them are deprecated and they're just terrible. Well, on your computer, they would just crash. And just like, I just, and when I say list the windows, I don't mean get the Windows contents like screen capture kit. I don't mean control them like accessibility APIs, which are also kind of old and cruddy. I mean, just literally list them. List them, which apps own them, what are their sizes, what are their positions. Sounds so simple. you can do it with existing apis but apple really doesn't want you to and there are a bunch of caveats and a bunch of stuff is deprecated um second one was add a system-wide window layering and visibility api so you can give it you can list all those windows and you know where they are and how big they are and which app owns them wouldn't it be great if you could tell them to come forward go to the back go behind some other window again still i have no idea these apis have no idea what's in the windows they can't see the window contents at all they don't want the window contents they're just a bunch of anonymous rectangles that are owned by processes right an api where you could tell them what to do and the mac window layer apis are extremely limited people are shocked to hear that you can't do something as simple as take one window and change its layering because those windows belong to other applications and my application has a very limited ability to screw with windows in other applications again module the accessibility apis which are a whole other can of worms that i've found other bugs with um and let's see um i the ones i get even more ambitious just add support for window manipulation extensions.

1:30:25So the idea, this is more of kind of more ambitious, but like the idea that when you're doing operations with the window server, like moving windows around or clicking on them to bring them to the front or whatever, that there would be a plugin system where you could affect that interaction. Once again, still having no idea what's in any of these windows. All you know is, hey, a window is being moved. It's owned by this application. It's in this size and it's in this position. I'm about to move it to here. Is there anything you'd like to do to modify that operation like say snapping to a grid or giving you a chance to draw a bunch of guides like you're in a graphics application you know like you could do so many cool things with this apple is currently not doing them third-party applications try to do them but it's so hard because mac os fights you at every step so anyway my answer this is basically like a modern you know swift savvy like not not something that's in core foundation not something that's an ancient carbon API, but like a modern API that lets you participate in the window management system in macOS, changing window layers, knowing where they all are, and being able to do things as they're moved around.

1:31:32That would be a dream, not just for me and for my apps. But I think if Apple provided those APIs, all those apps that are out there now that try to do this with like the accessibility APIs and the janky ones that we have now would become so much better, so much more a full feature and i've said this in past programs stage manager if if apple did my wish list of apis here stage manager should have been something that a third party could have implemented like because if you have all the apis and a third party had the idea of like i think it would be cool if windows work like this a third party should have been able to implement stage manager as we know third party could absolutely not implement stage manager only apple could do it and now only apple can ever make it better and only apple we have to wait for the next idea that apple has in five years third parties are out there with lots of cool ideas about window management on the mac they can't implement them because apple does not provide robust enough apis and like i said you can do pretty much all of these with zero access to the contents of any of these windows so it is privacy preserving but it is you know annoying for apple to implement because they may think this is not important but i'm like apple your heart doesn't seem into this window management thing every once in a while some team manages to squeak something out and it gets added to the giant pile of mac window management stuff.

1:32:42Let third parties do it. We'll figure out what works. Just copy whatever the most popular app is in five years. That's what I want. Fair enough. Julian continues. Casey, this is a tough one. It has to be Apple and not another company. For VisionOS, an API and Apple TV for call sheet to pull out the current movie or show name and be able to prompt with the movie show info required. Yeah, kind of. But really, the one thing I would kill for right now is I want to have a way to ask any of the Apple TVs on the same network, what are you playing right now? And I get why that isn't a thing, because somebody like Facebook would use it for nefarious purposes.

1:33:20But maybe you could have, I mean, there's so many other freaking user prompts, like, you know, Windows Vista style. Why not prompt some security prompt that says, hey, is it cool if CallSheet looks at what you're watching? And I would love that. And it'll never happen, but that would be what I would want. Please and thank you. Why don't you just do what everybody else does, which is just have microphones or visual system. Yeah, right. Exactly. Detect what's playing and look it up Shazam style to figure it out. Yeah, that's what I should do. Winnie Lewis writes, could Marco please best first favorite Phish concerts?

1:33:54I wasn't aware Phish had a lore and I'm curious where to start. Do you need me to explain best first favorite, Marco? We should explain it to the listener anyway. Yeah, please. So best first favorite is a thing from one of my other podcasts, Reconcilable Differences. My co-host Merlin came up with it. it is the idea that when you're trying to discuss a thing like the band fish or a television show or you know a set of movies or whatever you are challenged to come up with which one of these things you think is the best the best beatles album for example which one you think a someone who is new to the beatles should listen to first so what beatles album should i start with and what is your favorite beatles album and they may all be the same thing or they may all be different so the best first favorite Fish concert is what's the best Fish concert, what's your favorite Fish concert, and if someone is new to Fish and you had to tell them this is the concert you should start with, which one is it?

1:34:43And I don't really have a good answer. So the reason Whitney Lewis asked this question is it was shortly after New Year's this year, because Fish did a really fan service amazing thing for their New Year's Eve concert, that if you've been a Fish fan for a very long time, this was an especially big one that played upon a whole bunch of stuff in fish lore from forever ago that fans really enjoyed. And I don't really know how to tell you to get started in fish in a way that you would appreciate that. Because that's kind of like saying, oh, here we have a podcast with over 500 episodes. How do I go about getting all of the old references?

1:35:23You could go listen to all 500 episodes of our show. And by that point, you will understand all the references. that's a bit of a commitment and i wouldn't necessarily recommend that most people do it just because that's that's quite a lot to tackle but that new year's one could be your favorite though still or it could be the best fish has 40 years they've been playing together so no one is going like you're not going to go into a band with a 40 year history and get all the context to understand all the different lore i don't even know a lot of it and i've i've been a very diehard fan of the band since like 2007-ish, 2008-ish.

1:36:04Much of the old fish lore goes over my head even because I wasn't there in the 90s when all the fandom was really building up. So I'm actually not even qualified to answer this question. And I have purchased the live download of every show they've done since 2009. You can answer favorite for sure. Answer favorite. I can't do that either. I don't frequently listen to old shows. I'll pull one up occasionally. And in fact, one of the reasons why I want to make a jam band listening app, as I discussed in previous episodes at some point, the app that will have an audience of four people. And so I should never make this app.

1:36:44But one of the features that I want out of this app is kind of a way to like deep mine my collection of old fish concerts for like gems of shows. And I have a couple of ideas on how that could be made more interesting and things like that. But the reality is what I usually am listening to is the last few months worth of live shows. So, of course, that's a rolling window. They're literally doing a show right now. I cannot wait until tomorrow morning. I can download it and listen to it. usually that's what I'm doing is I'm listening to whatever the you know the last few months of shows are I'll kind of go through and as I'm going through a show I will give star ratings in you know the the Mac music app formerly called iTunes anything that that I like rate a certain level I kind of go back and revisit more often and then I have a playlist in iTunes slash music called best of fish any real standout songs not shows I will add to that list it's not a huge list but then whenever i'm somewhere if i want to oh shuffle my best of fish playlist like then i know i'm going to get some real you know rocking you know standouts but i don't even i am not qualified to tell you which entire performance is best or my favorite and i would say for first you're you're best off for first fish concert just finding any of them good like if you go so the service that they that they released them through is called live fish you can buy a whole show worth of mp3s there for for i think it's 10 bucks for a whole night you can also try they have their own um streaming service that spotlights certain shows you can stream the whole catalog from it they have a free trial on that streaming service so you can even just try like sign up for the streaming service for a month and just play some shows it's i think it's you know 12 bucks or whatever like it's not we're not talking a ton of money here that's what i would suggest like get into it that way because that's the way most fans get into fish is maybe you'll hear one of their studio albums or two like you know you can go to whatever music streaming service you already have and listen to some of their studio albums but what what the band really is about is live shows so getting any live show exposure will give you an idea of what this band actually is some of them are available on youtube for free some of them you can get on certain streaming services for free most of them you're gonna have to go to live fish to get because most of them are not released through the official streaming service channels.

1:39:05And then the second thing is, if you're into this, go to a concert. Many people, if you don't get into Phish through listening to the albums first, you usually get into Phish because someone brought you to a concert and you enjoyed it. So that's what I would suggest for first. Go to the streaming services and listen to whatever you can. Live generally is preferred to studio albums. And go to a show if if that's you know that's your jam so to speak um and that's it unfortunately i don't have a good answer to like what are my things because my things are always shifting around i don't have one show i go back to all the time i'm constantly just listening to whatever is recent whatever i can get this is a very on brand for fish uh for the band and for you in particular to essentially not be able to name best first or favorite because it's all just music man that's not what i said But that is the result.

1:39:56Thank you to our sponsors this week, Seltrios and Squarespace. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. And we will talk to you next week. Now the show is over. They didn't even mean to begin. Because it was accidental. Accidental. Oh, it was accidental. Accidental. John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental It was accidental And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM And if you're into Twitter You can follow them At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M And T-Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.

1:40:57It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast. So long. So I went on a small adventure. I mentioned a while ago, and a couple of listeners have called me out on it recently, I mentioned that I may or may not have recently bought a higher resolution camera in preparation for Vision Pro content. I was tempted for a while to go with a higher resolution camera system, and I did. And what pushed me over the edge happened around the time that Casey visited me in New York in the fall. There was a reason Casey came to New York in the fall. We got pizza together and did a couple other things.

1:41:47that was the only reason was the pizza for some reason during that trip i was inspired that maybe i should start capturing higher resolution photos especially in like panoramas and you know was it because that really janky jpeg that your phone took of you on the beach and the at night trying to get your car unstuck no we talked about on the show just how terrible that thing was like man you know what i need i need a higher resolution camera no so anyway so there there was there was an event that casey and i attended in november uh and anyway so i decided i needed to capture more high resolution content um coincidentally not at all related to that i got a vision pro recently and i was able to view my panoramas and my other photo and video content in the vision pro and was disappointed in the resolution of them when viewed at that scale.

1:42:43Because, of course, you're looking at phone-captured panoramas from old iPhones from five, six, seven years ago being displayed in this virtual 100-foot-tall view I'm seeing inside the Vision Pro. So I decided, let me see what I can do with higher-resolution stuff. And I wanted for a while to get into the Fuji GFX line. Last year, I mentioned how I had fallen in love with cameras again because I had discovered Fuji cameras. And I just love the way Fugees render color, especially just the out-of-camera JPEGs. that I was able finally to take pictures that I loved without having to mess with them in Lightroom and everything first.

1:43:34I was just super thrilled with just the out the straight out of the camera performance of Fujifilm's cameras. And this was this kind of was inspired because Tiff wanted the X100V for her birthday last year. Yes, I know they just released the sequel to that like yesterday. I'm very much aware of that. Thank you very much. So I got Tiff an X100V for her birthday last year. I got to try it a few times, fell in love with it, got myself an X-T5. The X-T5 is an amazing camera in so many ways. It is by far my favorite handling and controls I've ever had on a camera, like the way it just has, it has just a whole bunch of knobs, but for all the main stuff to adjust, you don't have to go into menus.

1:44:15You don't have to like hold buttons and turn a wheel and hope something changes. No, it's just knobs. It's wonderful. And I love the X-T5. The only thing with the xt5 that's a little bit of a downer is that uh well there's two things number one fuji's autofocus system is not as good as sony's we talked about this i don't i don't want to go too far into this the autofocus is not as good as sony's and also because they are apsc sized crop sensors they don't have the very high resolution or the very low light abilities of full frame sensors well it turns out fuji makes a larger sensor camera system they jumped right over full frame have never made one as far as i can tell instead they make medium format digital cameras and yes there's some asterisks on what that means but generally this is what is accepted as digital for what medium format means so this is basically the next step up beyond full frame in sensor size so you have you know the little you know crop sensors that many of the small mirrorless cameras use then you have full frame which is what the really nice cameras use and then above that you have medium format the sensor is just giant and i've been eyeing this for a while because i'm like man if i could get amazing resolution and low light performance with fuji's colors that would be the best of everything um problem is they're super expensive like they the uh the most of the gfx cameras are in the like you know five thousand dollar and up range oh my word and the lenses are also you know very expensive and don't forget the cameras are usually pretty big yes well um it turned out in uh the holiday season this past winter there were two factors that led to a substantial discount on one of the cameras uh one was it was the holiday season and everybody was doing sales and bs like that another was that fuji was about to was about to release a new model uh the gfx 102 i believe and that pushed down in the lineup and in price the gfx 100s that's the one i got because it was on super sale and i knew it was about to be replaced but the gfx 102 that the new one that came out was adding things that i really don't need or care about and was at a price point i would never have gone for but it what it did was push the gfx 100s down to surprisingly affordable relatively speaking uh price points and because i'm not a professional photographer i don't need a bunch of giant expensive lenses i got the smallest lens in the system which is its version of a you know 40-ish millimeter pancake it's quite large but it is it is the gfx version of that it's it's the 50 millimeter f3.5 so i've been playing with this i've been been since I've gotten it it is amazing and it is kind of like like many things in in technology it is a massive set of trade-offs the camera as John said a minute ago is very large now it is very large in terms of like if you look at today's mirrorless cameras they are very compact compared to what like good SLRs used to be if you actually compare the GFX 100S with this lens to the previous era's DSLRs that were of similar professional use cases.

1:47:41Like, for instance, the Canon 5D line. This camera is almost exactly the same size class as that. It's very, very similarly sized and weighted to a Canon 5D with a medium aperture lens on it. So it's big by today's camera standards. But if you go back even just 10 years ago it was considered it was it's a normal sized camera for that time range for professionals to handle and i am incredibly happy with it in most ways it is an incredibly slow camera like just it so it i should i should say it takes 100 megapixel images oh my grief so do android phones marco they're probably the same thing right totally yeah android phone that takes 100 megapixel images why did you bother getting this thing and like and the size of the sensor like when when i when i had to you know take open the camera up and mount the lens and i got to see that sensor it is ridiculous how big it is it's so massive but the result is you get not only incredible resolution but just as going from a crop sensor to full frame comes with a substantial increase in light sensitivity and so you get like much lower noise and higher resolution and better color even in low light you have that same jump again going above full frame into this medium format sensor so full frame is already great compared to the small sensors and this is even that that additional step above that and so it is amazing i can shoot ridiculous things handheld i can crank the ISO up to like you know ISO 24 ,000 and it still looks amazing like it's just it's I'm very happy with this but I thought like hey what if I look at some of these pictures in the vision pro and that that took me a while to finally hook up and you know figure out oh panoramas there is no like metadata that says this photo is a panorama but if you crop any photo down to be very wide if you give it a very wide aspect ratio I think a little bit wider than 16 by nine at the minimum it will display it in the panoramas section and it will enable a panorama like view mode in the vision pro not exactly the same though it basically gives you it doesn't give you like the full 180 view it kind of just gives you like a larger in front of you view but it was enough for me to see the effect there were two key takeaways for me with this camera and with trying to use a professional camera to shoot Vision Pro content.

1:50:17Number one, the resolution does matter a lot. The content of those pictures looked way better than any panorama my phones have ever shot. It wasn't even close. Now, that is not surprising. It's not a fair comparison. These are massive sensors with amazing optics in front of them. So, of course, you would expect that. So, I'm not saying that the iPhone camera is crap. It's just a totally different beast what I'm talking about here. That's unexpected and that's fine. However, what I also learned is that the lens I have for the camera being a roughly 40-ish millimeter equivalent focal length is totally wrong for this kind of use because it's just not nearly wide enough.

1:51:05The panoramic display in the Vision Pro assumes that you have a very wide field of view. again it wasn't even showing it in the full width it was it was kind of cropping it in and give me just like a bigger regular window i'm not sure that might require some kind of phone only metadata to give it like the full 180 view i think if you just made it really really narrow it might do it but like oh maybe the key thing to know about the iphone panorama is it's not just one capture you have to like rotate your phone or whatever and so it's many many captures which makes it a way wider filter view in the horizontal axis or whichever direction you're moving i mean you follow the little arrow or whatever so it's kind of a shame that uh fuji doesn't or doesn't have fuji have a panorama mode where essentially you take your giant medium format camera and you slide it around the horizon just like you would do with your phone and it does multiple 100 megapixel captures and stitches them all together just like a phone because that's what you want for i mean i know you're saying if i just got like a you know a five millimeter lens or some really wide angle thing that it might you know kind of do the equivalent but i don't think i think you'd get the best results if you literally did like a panorama by stitching together multiple exposures from your big medium format into an actual panorama and that would have even more megapixels in it yeah i think that's the way to go like and i think ultimately this is probably the kind of thing that would be done in software i i would assume like lightroom or something probably has a feature like this where you can create where you can stitch together like multiple exposures into one big panorama sometimes they'll do some cameras will do it in the camera some cameras i think sony would like force you use some janky third-party sony app to do it uh and some of them will let you export the exposures and do it in your own app but it's it's per camera brand it's another area where if apple did it it would be much you know apple didn't do it and it's way simpler what do you do you just move the phone and it just does it but uh lots of camera companies do have some way to do this i'm just not familiar with fuji solution i would assume that it would definitely not involve the camera because the camera has nothing in it yeah well i mean the camera has a lot in it but like it's already very sluggish to capture and process these giant images off this giant sensor like there is no way it has the power compared to the iphone in terms of how much computing is in there versus how much computing is an iphone oh yeah but even i mean just imagine like how much memory it must take to stitch together photos from that sensor like i mean because the raw i think i don't have the number of hand but i think the raws are like 200 megs each like there's just there's a lot of data being used by you know being generated by the sensor um it's it's ridiculous like how much how many pixels you have to process so i would expect this to be you know no no small feat for software and hardware to stitch those together but i think it's interesting um but but ultimately even with that the amazing you know hardware of that camera it is not suitable to do that job of stitching together for panoramas for the vision pro what you ultimately want for the vision pro panoramas is just better iphone cameras and better iphone processing that's it like because the iphone is doing the capture in ways that no camera will ever do in terms of like you know being able to stitch things together so perfectly it's so easily you know maybe with imperfect input maybe in in you know varying light levels across the frame like if you happen to sweep across the sun like how do you deal with that with the camera you can fix the parameters, but then you've got to kind of expose for the sun and make everything else darker.

1:54:25It's just this whole thing. The iPhone takes care of so much of that for us and makes it so easy. And then once you're in the Vision Pro looking at it, you don't have to worry about, did I properly match the perspective with how I process this photo so it will display correctly in the Vision Pro? It doesn't matter. When you do it with an iPhone, it's always properly matched. It always handles that for you. so ultimately i think we're still going to just be limited by in practice by what the iphone can do for the for the sharpness and resolution and possibly depth of what we're looking at in the vision pro surprised you didn't get one of those uh white monoliths in the alicia q studio that might have been cheaper than that thing whatever like dual camera system they use to capture that obviously it's not still images but like that's when i think about contrast for vision pro i remember i said in my demo i was much less impressed by the panoramas because they're they weren't 3d like they the right and the left eye didn't see different perspectives on the same objects they were a flat 2d billboard wrapped around me which is cool and would be better if the resolution if there was more pixels so it didn't look kind of you know kind of fuzzy but what was so much more compelling to me were the you know the video that was captured in with two different perspectives from two different cameras and i don't know how expensive the things in alicia a key studio were but they seem smallish i know when they're doing the uh the major league soccer apparently apple recorded a bunch of those matches uh with some fancy cameras those are probably bigger and scarier than the uh discrete little white pillars with two little black dots on them um and maybe they're maybe they're more like the uh the cameras we were talking about when we talked about uh 3d movies on the last episode where it's two gigantic expensive film cameras arranged in a really weird way through a prism or a beam splitter so that they can both get the perspective they need uh you know because the cameras are so big they can't get that close to each other but either way i find that content much more compelling than i would even an infinite resolution panorama because the panorama still just looks to me like a giant painting that i'm looking at as opposed to actually being in the mountains you know oh yeah totally like the panorama panorama is in the vision pro to me yeah it looks like i'm in a planetarium like okay there's there's a big static image okay i got planetariums really better than that but like you know what i mean like it looks like you're in a dome and it's painted on like that's that's great for certain things like but it's nothing like a 3d environment so canon just released um so they kind of released this like double-eyed lens intended for capturing vr 180 format which is what the like the high rope thing and um was it the shark that was that's vr 180 rhinoceros yes anyway so canon just released a lens for that and they have a special mode with one of their highest end new mirrorless cameras um i believe it's the r5c that can do it with the special lens and the special like subscription software that you need from canon to stitch the images together um but wait what is it doing for you panoramas you mean no i mean i mean 3d video i'm sorry i switched gears but from a single camera with a single sensor or from two cameras yes single camera single sensor they just released a lens that has two eyes on it and i guess it and they split up the sensor like one gets the right half one gets the left half yeah but somehow they're doing 8k video per eye at 60 frames a second but i haven't had a chance to look too much into that yet but anyway so if i was if i was going to actually start creating like 3d content i would probably look at that but what i learned from this is like i love this camera for lots of other reasons but it is not it's not what I need if I want to create 3D content.

1:58:04That's kind of a separate beast. yeah i do wonder if you could get away with just way worse cameras but two of them like the 3d effect will hide a lot of sins because you're just so wowed that it looks 3d as long as long as long as you don't move your head to 3d way to 3d way. they looked way smaller than you would think. Like there are two lenses and presumably two cameras inside these little pillars that just kind of look like posts. And I thought those looked pretty good, but maybe I was just fooled by the fact that they were 3d and I didn't notice how pixelated everything was. No, the 3d stuff I think was pretty good, both, you know, the immersive and just regular 3d.

1:58:57I thought all of it was very, very well done. And I want more of it. I have somebody, I was just listening to somebody talk about this. I can't remember who it was, but, me, no, no, No, I mean, I thought it was somebody else that was just saying, or maybe it was dithering. I don't remember. But, you know, the 3D, the immersive stuff, I shouldn't say 3D, the immersive stuff was so, so good. Or I say was as though it's past tense. I mean, it's still there. It's just I've experienced it once. It's just the same videos you've seen a million times. Exactly. But the immersive stuff is so incredibly, incredibly, incredibly cool.

1:59:29And I just want more of it. I want all of my stuff to be immersive. And I know that's never going to happen, but I want it. And I hope Apple really does just hammer on the gas in order to, you know, get more of this. And we heard about the MLS stuff and we are hearing rumors about the slam dunk contest. But I want all the immersive video. I want all of it. Please and thank you. Yeah, they need to commission like someone to do like nature documentaries, you know, kind of like they did when 4K first came out. that you saw a lot of planet earth type things like oh do you have a new 4k tv watch this 4k count but the problem is they sold way more 4k televisions uh much quicker than apple is going to sell these headsets so it might be a lot and apple's apple has the ability to bootstrap this because they do have the rights to some sports franchises so they're doing the major league soccer thing and they do have a studio that makes television shows and movies and it's not going to be economical and they're going to lose money on it but if you want to solve the chicken egg problem and you can't convince anyone else to make content for your you know 200 000 of your closest friends with their headsets apple you just pay to make yourself and the good thing is if you make evergreen content like a planet earth style nature thing that's not going to age that badly in five years when more people have these headsets they'll still want to watch that planet earth thing hopefully planet earth won't have changed that much by then uh it's evergreen and sports aren't evergreen unfortunately but hey if you catch a particular dramatic game or something that might make some evergreen content and if not you know there's always more sports so apple needs to practice recording it in a format that looks good in their headsets and just keep doing that going forward