583: I’ve Spent a Lot of Time in the Address Bar

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35:03All right, moving on. We can talk about a first look at Europe's alternative app stores. This actually posted, I think, before we recorded last week. We didn't have the time to get to it. This is on The Verge. Another potential roadblock to widespread third-party marketplace adoption is just how fiddly it is, with each store taking around a dozen screen interactions to install. It goes like this. you begin by checking a clicking excuse me a browser based link to load the alternative store from there you receive a pop-up informing you that your installation settings don't allow marketplaces from that developer then you head to settings to enable the marketplace then you return to your browser and click the download link again then you receive another prompt asking you to confirm the installation finally you can open the store and browse the available apps that is uh not exactly delightful not surprised at all yeah this is something this happens in the mac too and it's an annoying pattern but the annoyance is serves a function so you can't really get rid of it um the mac experience is you try to run some mac app and it's like you need to give me permit full disk access or screen recording permission or some other thing that it needs to do its job right but you can't give it that permission from within the app because if you could people would just throw up a dialogue that would people would go yeah yeah okay okay okay yeah yeah if you could approve it from within the app by clicking a button apps would trick you into doing it so there's always has to be a process that's like that they'll tell you go to system preferences slash system settings and go to the screen and do this and do that and some apps on the mac went so far as to sort of automate that process they would like lead you through it wizard style and they would bring up system settings and they would make their own windows lined up alongside the window with like arrows pointing to the things you had to get like that was short-lived i think because uh system settings system preferences changed into system settings and apple moved everything around and i feel bad for the people who made these you know wizards to do that but it's because the user has to it's like when when someone calls you and you don't trust them or whatever hang up and like go to the the website that belongs to that company and find the number and call them back yourself right so you know you're actually talking to the person you think you're talking to don't trust that the number they called you from is not spoofed or whatever so you as the user have to go and do a thing and all the app or alternative app store whatever can do is say uh you know or in this case the OS saying oh you haven't allowed that developer to install third-party marketplaces you need to do that and users like how do I do that I don't know how to do that go to system settings where in system settings can't you just do it for me can't you just send me a button that says okay approve yes and the answer is no they can't do that because if they did that if it was possible to do that at all every app would throw a thing in your face that says do you like puppies click yes and then you just approve yeah you know like and oh don't worry app review will catch that yeah right we know how many things get past app review so it is annoying and fiddly and i'm sure apple didn't really care about streamlining it's this much because this is this is still more than one or two back and forths but some part of that fiddliness is essentially unavoidable to actually implement the security that isn't trivially exploitable i think it's too much on the mac i think you know jason snell's talked about this a lot when he had to set up his new mac and he just went into a rage about how many times he had to approve things i think there should be a way to sort of do mass approvals or a better interface to approvals instead of the current way of digging in to find stuff and scrolling like this this process can be approved but you can never get rid of the part that is essentially the equivalent of the user hanging up and saying whatever you say i'm going to call now the number that i think is for visa credit card like the number on the back of my credit card right i'm going to call that myself and if you've hacked me so bad that that goes to the wrong place then you win right oh goodness yeah so we'll see what happens with this we talked about it mike and i on not the upgrade that just dropped uh this week but last week when i guessed it on upgrade and uh i just i really feel like this is a non-starter unless something really really weird happens and i think some dorks will like us will enjoy doing emulators which we'll get to actually in a second or something along those lines but for most people i just don't expect that most people will bother unless facebook like pulls their app from the traditional op you know app store in the eu and says oh you have to go to facebook's app store now in which case that's different but assuming it's just you know alternative app stores you know like what it says on the tin i just i just don't see people going through it well i mean this is surmountable like if you think the the number of steps here isn't too hard there's nothing in it that doesn't involve just you're just tapping things on your screen you just people just need to be adequately motivated and things that can actually motivate them are like you mentioned you know some some must-have app like facebook or whatever doing this that would do it right but even stuff like you know someone does a tick tock about some app that they saw and then someone else does a tick tock that's like oh if you want this cool app you do these six steps uh like never underestimate how influential a fast tutorial video plus the fomo of some cool app that someone found an alternative app store doesn't take much for that to happen right uh it's you know it's you need something like that you need something to make people do it they're not going to casually do it on their own but the things that could lead someone to install a third-party app store can be much smaller and more trivial than oh you have to go there to get facebook now which i don't think is going to happen oh yeah i mean like so many people installed things like configuration profile just to get like different app icons on their phone and that's way scarier and it takes more steps and more fiddly than this is basically just going back and forth to return a web browser and settings yeah by the way guess what the app store cares about none of that yeah those are app store apps that doesn't matter yeah install a configuration profile to change the icons for your instagram and stuff yeah go ahead what could possibly go wrong to apple's credit they did provide apis for doing that eventually not on vision os yeah well you know maybe you'll be able to rearrange the icon someday yeah as an app developer i can't allow a user yeah you can't change your icon yeah hey on the mac there's api to change your icon but no apis for other mac apps to get what the hell you change the icon to the doc can show your icon but nobody else not that that would be bothersome to somebody writing a window management app.

41:23There's a feedback filed against it. No, but for the App Store stuff, I think people will go through this when there's an app they want to use. That's it. It's not going to stop them. Going back to what John was saying earlier about the Mac with its security dialogues of the app can tell you or the system can tell you, go to system settings and do this, but it won't give you an easy way. I'm not sure I accept without comment that that's good for security. It seems like a modern Apple security practice is to make something a real pain in the butt and make it really suck and hope that people will just not want to do it or will do it carefully because it sucks.

42:07I have to say, though, the sucking part of the Apple side of it is not necessary for the security. The necessary part is that you have to go do something. The app doesn't have an opportunity to dark pattern you into doing it like the app can't put up a dog. Like that's the necessary part for security. The fact that when you go to do it, it sucks because system settings is Byzantine and it's a pain to do. That's on Apple. And that's not a necessary part of the security. That's just the way Apple did it. System settings is not easy to navigate. The big scrolling list doesn't like sort by most recently requested.

42:38Like there are ways that Apple could do this better and they don't. But that's not part of the security. The security part is the app does not have an opportunity to trick you. And that's the essential part that you essentially have to, you know, what is it? the DeVry Tech. Remember, I can't call you. You have to make the first call. You have to go make the move. So I would say Apple could fix a lot of the suckiness by not being so bad at making system settings. Yeah, I actually I agree with that. Yeah, you're right. Because like, I don't mind like, okay, there's one place you have to go do this.

43:07That's okay. But it just really sucks. And Apple doesn't always follow this themselves. Like, how often do you get a pop up on your phone saying like, you got to go into your password and system settings and you tap that and it brings you to a screen where you need to enter your password uh that's terrible for security but but that's you know that's doing the same thing with your apple id password um there's there's all sorts of you know kind of paper cuts around this area i what what i hope is that apple is motivated to improve that user experience side on the mac because you're right the mac definitely gets like the the worst of it um but i i just we don't see any evidence that they care it's it seems like as jason snell wrote in that article it seems like the the mac security team always wins over any kind of remote usability concern uh and that the mac team in general seems to not really have the resources behind it to make bigger changes to make all this stuff suck less yeah and especially like the in the mass case on the mac of like you just set up a new mac to do the things that would make that easier actually require the security people to do a bunch of stuff so for example having a thing where like look i already gave this app permission and i've set up a new mac and i want that permission to essentially transfer over doing that in a secure way is difficult and complicated the ui team can't do that on their own that's the security team would have to say you have to say like hey security team You have to come up with a trusted, secure way to transfer permissions from one Mac to another based on, oh, you allowed it on this Mac.

44:42And on this Mac, I say, hey, do you want this Mac? Do you want all the apps on this new Mac to have the same permissions as they did on the old Mac? And the user just says yes. And then security happens and that happens in some way. And so that's part of the problem is to get the better user experience, you also need buy-in from the security people and they have to do a bunch of work. and then on top of that is even if with no help from the security team the ui team could surely make this a hell of a lot better like i said how about just a different way to sort the app so i have to scroll through that giant list how about default sorting them by the app that most recently asked for something like imagine that so i'm just constantly scrolling through a list which i i convince myself as alphabetical until i scroll and it's like the alphabet has started over again and it's like is this asciabetical and the capital letters come first what the hell yep it's amazing all right so definitely not because of any uh legal issues or regulations or anything like that absolutely had nothing to do with the fact that apple is now allowing the app store the app store to offer retro game emulators definitely had nothing to do with any pressure from anywhere i love this i love this so much this is it's so okay here's here's how this goes.

45:50Apple is now all of a sudden forced in the EU to offer sideloading. What's a popular reason that people often sideload in a way that wouldn't really matter at all if they allowed it in the app store? Game emulators. So isn't it interesting that right as they need to force open their, you know, sideloading thing in a pretty big market in the world, they suddenly have a change of heart on allowing game emulators on the App Store everywhere, which, hmm, somebody might think that might deflate a lot of the demand for sideloading and therefore retain control for the App Store. What a surprise. Imagine that.

46:35Maybe there's a larger lesson here. Maybe allowing things in the App Store that are otherwise harmless is better for Apple's continued long-term control of the platform whoa whoa let's not get let's not get you know completely out of bounds i think apple apple doesn't think it's harmless like the reason one of the reasons they stopped this was like hey how we there's no in-app purchase in those games we don't get paid for those games we don't get to approve those games like as far as they're concerned is like look you want to put space invaders on the iphone we better get our cut right and then that's that's uh if you ask them i think that it would tell you that's why we don't want to have essentially app stores within app stores we don't want apps that run other apps like that was their main objection to this now i agree with you that's not actually a problem apple is being stupid about it but that's what they think and so yeah they're being forced to this and this is even more hilarious because um what's his name riley tested um yep so he is the alt store guy alt store is a thing that existed for a while to let you install uh non-apple approved apps on your iphone but it was complicated and used what did he use to use a test flight system or something like that i forget i forget the details too but anyway it was it was it was technically complicated and weird but anyway alt store is a name that you might have heard it is you know for all the time before this whole eu thing you're like is there another way you can get apps onto the app instead of the app store you might have heard of city and you might have heard alt store and these are all kind of like you know skirting apple's rules and technically complicated or whatever all right uh but riley's got his start uh by making an emulator a retro game emulator for ios that then was not a lot on the app store and then you know got on the alt store was just his thing uh and is funded through patreon and so now he's making alt store a third-party app store using the apple dma third-party app store thing or whatever and his the reason he's doing this so he can put his retro game emulator on his alt store using apple's official thing so like this uh apple opening the store to retro game emulators is lightning focused on the one dude who ran alt star and is now going to put alt star in the eu you know alternative marketplace thing right yeah for his one emulator it's not like they said well here's all the world of things that could possibly be in a third party store and we better compete with them it's like i know this one guy and alt star by the way has been in waiting for approval i think for like a month or something i forget what his complaint was but there's it's been a slow roll for them to get a thing like they know he's doing this so this is this rule is targeted on one person's all-star to say we're going to preempt you which is ridiculous and i mean i feel like he should be honored that they feel like he's such a threat to putting a emulator maybe they're just like come on back come on back to the app store you don't have to have that third party story even though he made you jump through all these hoops and do all this stuff never mind you can have it on the app store it'll be fine which is not because you can't he wants his thing is funded through patreon and you still can't do the app store so he's still doing all-star but whatever it's it's i don't i don't know that it's aimed at this one person but it is strangely coincidental yeah i don't know if it's aimed at that one person although honestly that is exactly the kind of pettiness that app store leadership would actually do uh but no i i think it's more strategic i think it's like it's literally just like this is a reason why a lot of people might side load let's deflate the air in that balloon because it turns out like this is some low-hanging fruit there really is not any good reason why apple couldn't have emulators on the app store it really doesn't harm them at all it doesn't really as long as they keep it within the parameters they're keeping it which is retro systems and kind of bring your own roms and you assert they're okay like as long as they do all that then they're not really in legal in legal trouble with it um and so but yet there is all this demand for it so this is a clear instance where they can just allow these because there really wasn't that good a reason to disallow them in the first place.

50:30So they're just allowing them now because it is high benefit to the App Store and to Apple strategically and very, very low risk and cost compared to other ways they could open up to deflate demand for sideloading. I think other ways would have larger downsides in costs. It wouldn't be as clear cut. So, for instance, if for some reason big crypto apps that don't fit what they currently allow in the app store become big in some kind of sideloading thing, which, I mean, is anybody still doing crypto? But if they are, maybe that would be a thing. But there's bigger downsides there. If they would start allowing porn apps, they've never allowed porn apps in the app store.

51:12That's probably obviously going to be a big thing in sideloading contexts, I'm sure. There's obviously bigger downsides to that. if they want to keep things a certain way in the app store, keep certain standards, stay out of certain legal problems there. But with emulators, there really was not much reason not to allow them. So I think there might be some element of spite, of personal spite there, but I think that's probably a small component, if any. The much bigger thing is, this is just pure strategy. Right as they're forced to offer sideloading, remove a big reason why anybody would need to do that.

51:46So that would be, hey, come back to the app store, back inside the walled garden. Look, it's nice here. Here's an emulator. Go nuts, kid. And you described that as a couple times as like deflating the need to go to a third-party app store. The other word for that is competition. Hey, our competitors are doing the thing that customers want. If we want to get those customers back, let's do the thing that customers want too. Imagine that, competition. When there was no competition, they could just say, nope, not allowed, and you can't get apps from any place else, so no problem. And now suddenly you can get apps from somewhere else, and it's like, oh, what do those other people have that we don't have that we can add to your point like they're probably not going to add porn and stuff but like i guess we'll add retro games someone says no don't allow that we can't get in at purchases from space invaders and like but we have to do it because competition and so i like this development we should but let's let's read uh the the details of this because the devil is in the details as always apple is loosening its app store restrictions and opening the marketplace up to retro game emulators in an update on friday apple announced that game emulators can come to the App Store globally and offer downloadable games.

52:47Apple says those games must comply with quote all applicable laws quote though an indication it will ban apps that provide pirated titles. The app review guidelines read as follows. Apple or excuse me apps may offer certain software that is not embedded in the binary specifically HTML5 mini apps and mini games streaming games chatbots and plugins. Additionally retro game console emulator apps can offer to download games. And now, of course, James Thompson, friend of the show, immediately quipped, well, I'm looking forward to an official Apple definition of the word retro. This is where the devil starts in the details.

53:24Because remember, this is the App Store. And your apps go through App Review. And App Review is capricious. All right. What is a retro game console emulator app? What does it mean to, quote, comply with all applicable laws? App Review will tell you. You'll find out, I guess. All right. And that was the question when this story first came out. people like but like what does this mean can i put up a nintendo emulator or will apple like so what i immediately thought of was casey's trying to send screenshots for call sheet and apple's like hey before we approve this app can you tell us that you have the rights to use this movie poster and it's like all right well so is apple if you send a nintendo emulator is apple gonna go hey before we post your nintendo emulator can you tell me that you have the rights to ship a nintendo emulator because we've heard of nintendo the same way that they're asking casey if he has the rights to these known hollywood movies like this is the thing with app review you can send up uh an app sometimes called like uh like you know i think someone did like a mario app or something like that sail through app review and they're like hey app review doesn't deal with copyright we just wait for someone to complain but if you know it's not our job to vet all your copyrighted material but apparently with casey's app that reviewer was like you know what it's my job to vet copyrighted material right so how is it going to work when they send a game emulator they're going to say the disclaimer is apple are basically saying hey you just have to follow all the laws someone complains to us we're gonna say hey we told them they have to follow the laws don't look at us just to directly sue the developer don't sue us we said they have to comply with all laws and they didn't do it so they violated the agreement or whatever but when your app goes to app review is the app reviewer we're going to say hey everything in your app are you allowed to do all that stuff are you allowed to have a nintendo emulator are you allowed to like i see you have like an icon that looks like an n64 are you allowed to have that icon do you have the rights to this like or are they just going to be like fine go on through i don't care and we didn't know the answer to that question i think we continue to not know the answer to that question because we just have one or two data points but even just in the guidelines retro game console emulator apps that's multiple words in there it's not just retro games retro pc games that's not a console so i think if you're doing pc games you can't do this and what does retro mean last generation the generation before that is it a number of years is the switch retro because it's so damn old who knows you'll find out submit your app and find out i mean i i think it's it's probably fairly clear like i i think so for first of all yes they will absolutely uh make you assert that you own things or prove that you own things that are shown in your screenshots and that come with the app well will they but look at look at the igba emulator that we're gonna get to in a second i don't think they did that in that app at all i'm sure scrutiny will change and be inconsistently applied like all other apps like who knows because we just have the one data point igba which is a game boy advance emulator if you look at it it's filled with like nintendo proprietary looking stuff right down to like you know the the ui it looks like the the game boy advance or whatever did someone have to assert that they own all that stuff or did the rear would just be like, yeah, it's fine.

56:32Yeah, there wasn't my reviewers, so it's cool. Yeah. No, I think, you know, if I was making an emulator for the App Store, I would assume that I can't use trademarks. So, you know, stay away from, like, especially stay away from the word Nintendo. Like, just stay away from it. Or the word Game Boy. What about GBA? Yeah, I think acronyms might be easier to get away with. But, you know, certainly I would stay away from as many trademark names as possible. I would obviously not include any ROMs with it. Or I would include only open source enthusiast ROMs, which probably exist for most of these systems.

57:06For almost all these old systems, there are enthusiast communities who make new ROMs that were never actually made on cartridges. So you could ship this with only freely available ROMs. They exist. So you could do that or ship it empty and have people bring their own. If you ship it empty and you get that one reviewer who's like your app does nothing rejected, then you've got a problem. because you know those reviewers exist right like if your app doesn't do anything you know when you launch it you're like oh well people have to supply their own roms like sorry rejected your app does nothing yeah anyway so i i think the path is fairly clear there like when they first made this rule we all thought they're not going to allow arbitrary roms to be loaded into apps they would they would you know allow something somebody like nintendo themselves to make an app that includes their own emulated old games.

57:58But it turns out, like, they've given a couple of press comments here and there, including there was one in MacRumors today, I believe, that basically where Apple has given statements basically saying, like, it will be okay for you to, like, bring ROMs to it from the web. So that's allowed. Yeah, we've got that quote down in the notes. Here's what MacRumors said. Apple confirmed to us that emulators on the App Store are permitted to load ROMs downloaded from the web so long as the app is emulating retro console games only. Again, what is a retro console game? Let your heart guide you. So I think ultimately this is, we're going to hear about occasional pain in the butt stories about AppReview where somebody's going to have to say no I don't own Mario so I can't show it in the screenshots, fine.

58:42And the whole thing's going to be very like wink wink nudge nudge, yes of course you're going to load it up with Mario games. That's what we're going to do in practice and it will be fine. But it will be just like any other app, like CallSheet, like Overcast, like Instapaper. It'll be like any other app that has the ability to show third-party content, some of which somebody might have rights over and some of which somebody might not care. It's going to have that same kind of trade-off of risk versus reward and possible occasional app store snags mostly involving metadata and screenshots. And I think it'll be fine.

59:16So, you know, speaking of app review problems, our friend ben mccarthy they're about to release a pokedex app you know like a pokemon database sort of thing and i don't think there's any marketing site for this uh but i'll put something in the show notes that you can look at at least briefly nevertheless i bet you anything that when we look at the app store screenshots for ketchup which is the name of this app i think it'll end up being little to no Pokemon in the app, or it'll be like, I don't know, outlines or something like that. Because if you get too close to the actual Pokemon, then you'll end up running afoul of app review.

59:56And I bet you any amounts of money that Ben has had to do some really heavy lifting to try to show this app in the app store without using any of Nintendo's copyrightable assets. And I'm sure it's going to be a real pain. So we've had one example of emulators first, and it's been an unfortunate one. So this is the Verge story. The first approved Apple emulators for the iPhone have arrived, and one of them was the aforementioned IGBA, which is a Game Boy Advance emulator. Unfortunately, it was essentially a clone of Riley Tested's first retro game emulator, which was open source, and it was essentially forked.

1:00:32And someone forked it and made an iOS game out of it and uploaded it to the App Store and apparently didn't follow the open source license. And shortly after that story was posted, the thing arrived. There was another story that says, here's why Apple removed the first Game Boy emulator from the App Store. And according to 9to5Mac, Apple said that it removed IGBA from the App Store for violating two App Store guidelines, copyright section 5.2 and spam section 4.3. IGBA's functionality was originally approved in compliance with the App Store's guidelines. The app was then removed, however, when apple learned that it was a clone of gba for ios a violation of copyright and spam app store guidelines so this explanation is we proved it first when i realized we made a mistake and the mistake was not that this retro game thing is not allowed but two things one there's the copyright thing and i think that's just like failure to comply with an open source license uh and two is that it was a clone of a previously existing but rejected app gba for ios and i don't i guess the spam guidelines are like hey you can't just like if we reject an app you can't just upload another version of it or something so i don't actually understand this rejection at all but the bottom line is uh retro game emulator appeared and then was quickly pulled down and uh for what it's worth riley said that uh and attitude uh he said i just want to reiterate that i'm not mad at the developer everyone makes mistakes and they even reached out to me via email to personally apologize for the mess so no hard feelings so it's not a big deal that the person uploaded a thing that was a clone and not compliant or whatever but the fact is it appeared and disappeared and it was using nintendo's copyrighted material or loading romps from the web or and that for other app store guideline related reasons and as i said before nintendo says you are allowed to download romps from the web on this topic though there are other parties that are able to stop uh the retro dream from happening on all our phones and ipads and so on and so forth i guess just phones no ipads too because it's global for the app store um nintendo recently uh nuked from orbit the yuzu switch emulator uh and that's something that hadn't been happening too often like it was like a game console developers were like uh you know turned a blind eye to emulators of their old platforms which always seemed weird to me because in the olden days like well fine they don't care they just care about their latest console they don't care that you're emulating an nes and some open source thing that nobody cares about but over the past decade or so all the big console makers have been making money off their own old games often using emulators and hiring emulator developers into their own companies so that you can play pay for and play nes games on your switch or whatever right so it's not like these companies no longer care about retro consoles they do care every person who downloads for free an nes emulator and downloads in the legal nes rom of mario and plays it is a customer that is less likely to pay whatever it costs to get that in nintendo's own official store where you can buy old nes games but this nintendo thing with yuzu apparently i was asking before if the switch was retro the switch is a really old console hasn't been updated in a while the oled one came out people thought that might have been a revised switch but it was just a better screen anyway it's been out for a long time and it was slow when it came out from hardware perspective it is retro but from nintendo's perspective it is their current console and nintendo didn't like many things about the yuzu emulator one of which obviously that runs switch games that people illegally download but the second one is i think supposedly the people involved with the yuzu emulator might have somehow been involved with like leaking the uh tears of the kingdom game before it was actually officially released so people were playing it on their steam decks before it was even out on the switch and nintendo was just like enough and so lawyers descended and as you can imagine nintendo has a pretty slam dunk case against an emulator whose entire purpose and community and website and tutorials and everything is so clearly aimed at letting you figure out how to essentially play your illegally acquired roms uh and they had a court case and i believe the court case was settled and the settlement was yuzu loses everything nintendo gets everything bye bye yuzu and yuzu had to pay 2.4 million dollars and you know shuttered its entire company and nintendo continues to wander the web finding people and things who are doing things it doesn't like like it's getting a bunch of discord server shut down because yuzu's open source there's like forks of yuzu and nintendo's getting their discords shut down so they no longer have a place to uh hang out with each other and work on their emulators so nintendo is awake and angry and i'm not i'm kind of not surprised like i said because nintendo like many other uh console makers is making money off quote-unquote retro game consoles so yes apple may allow your retro uh thing up on the app store but if apple sees that not apple nintendo sees that that thing is essentially being used for piracy uh i can imagine nintendo will ask apple hey uh we think this app violates our intellectual property yada yada yada and then apple will take it down or apple will direct them to you and you'll take it down yourself because you don't have a bazillion dollars to pay for lawyers to fight nintendo so and the same is true by the way of alternative app stores if you have an emulator you put it up on alternative app store and nintendo comes a knocking either at the alternative app store or comes knocking on your door guess what you're going to fold like a house of cards just like yuzu did and you're not going to have 2.4 million dollars to pay them to settle a lawsuit so it's a dangerous world out there for console emulation especially since like in the case of the switch it's so retro that the switch emulations like in yuzu play switch games better than the switch because any reasonably powerful pc or probably even ipad or whatever can play switch games at a higher frame rate and higher resolution than the switch itself can because the switch hardware is so anemic and old uh and so not only is it not retro or you know the switch is their current console, but it's so retro that you can play it faster in emulation than you can on the actual Switch.

1:06:39So it actually gives you a superior game experience, superior fidelity than an actual Switch. And partially Nintendo is to blame for that, but really, Nintendo is not angry, and they are awake, and I think it's going to really put a damper on everyone's fun with this whole retro game thing. Indeed. Yeah, we'll see what happens. I mean, I'm sure something will show up, and I'm glad that Apple's finally doing... I was going to say what's right. I think that's a bit dramatic. I think it's good that they're finally embracing things that aren't cut and dry, perfect fits for Apple. And again, I think it's competition that's caused it.

1:07:14And I'm here for it. Like, I want more of this. So I don't want specifically, but I just want more of this. So please and thank you. Yeah, and this is an example, just to reiterate, where there was the EU DMA thing that's forcing Apple to do a thing. And Apple's response was to change the rules for the whole world in the App Store. So we actually benefit from it in this case. We don't get the alternative app stores like the EU folks do, but we do like the retro game rule is not just for the EU. So I think that is what Apple should be doing. I, you know, you would think that it annoys Apple to have a fragmented ecosystem where the rules are different in the EU in significant ways that like impact the OS and the user experience.

1:07:52And I'm sure Apple doesn't like that. but in every case where Apple can bring itself to make a decision for the whole world, they should because it's just, you don't want to fragment it even further. And I'm glad they managed to convince themselves that this would not be the end of the world to allow retro game console emulators, but not retro PC emulators. We are brought to you this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website building 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.

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1:10:15let's do some ask atp and yan wetekind writes how does john manage where new tabs spawn in safari with so many open browser windows it draws me bananas and that it always opens in the last active window and it's cumbersome having to manually move them around any tips well it is cumbersome um two ways i manage this one is the not great way but practically speaking this happens sometimes you click on a link it opens you know where it's going to open safari has a bunch of rules about where it's going to open new windows and new tabs based on your settings based on what the front most window was yada yada whatever safari picks it's not that big a deal that if it picked the wrong place just yank out that tab put it where you want it put it in the window you want it put it in its own separate window that's the thing you can do the second thing which i do a surprising amount is don't click links right click them copy link location switch to safari make new window paste in the url you can do most of this from the keyboard um and then you can decide where it goes you can put the tab where you want it to appear and put paste the url into the location bar and hit return and i know this probably sounds cumbersome but like as a career web developer i've spent a lot of time in the address bar let's say uh and other people never other people never even touch it in fact apple i think correctly de-emphasized it many many years ago to the point where they don't even show the full url anymore i think people just think of that as the google search box and ignore it when it has any other text in it yeah but as a web developer i spend a lot of time in there and so copying and pasting things into the address bar browsers is like how i spent half of my day and that's a weird way to work for most people practically speaking that is one way that i essentially determine where things are going to open it's because i'm inverting the process i am not clicking in url now in the os to dispatch and the app to choose or whatever i'm grabbing a url as a text string and i'm that i'm going to the browser that i want to go in because remember i'm running two of them all the time and finding the window or tab where I want it to be or making a new window or whatever and pasting the URL and hitting return.

1:12:06So that is the very unsatisfying answer, but that's how I do it. Pedro Fernandez writes, what's your take on using case sensitive file system formatting for macOS? I had a bug that was driving me crazy because it was working perfectly in macOS, but failing in Linux. A folder was named Dataset with capital D, capital S. What is that, Pascal case? I always get it wrong. That's Pascal, right? Sure. Sure. And I was accessing it with the string Dataset with capital d in lowercase s it worked on mac os but not on linux i once i recall once formatting mac os using case sensitive and having many problems i honestly don't even remember what i do i feel like i do case sensitive where where can one thing okay i guess i don't yeah because the case sensitive is not the default um and and yeah and before we let john tell us the right answer i will butt in and say case sensitive is wrong in most cases like it that is that is a poor choice in most cases.

1:12:58I mean, obviously, there's a lot of complexity once you get into various other types of Unicode normalization and things like that. There's a lot of complexity there. And I think it creates better outcomes for users, and it avoids more problems and potential bugs and even sometimes security problems if the file system normalizes names as much as possible when doing duplicate detection. So let you enter whatever case you want and then display whatever you entered back to the user, but prevent the creation of another file in the same folder with a name that matches it in any kind of normalized form.

1:13:40So, for instance, capital A versus lowercase a in the name. Don't allow that to exist in the same directory. But even other things, like there's this whole mechanism in place for character normalization of letters that are beyond just the English Roman alphabet. So, for instance, like an E with an accent over it. Should a word with an accent at E be unique from a file system perspective from that same word with the English E with no accent? they're both E's but they have different forms sort of like or you know certain letters normalize in different ways there's that big that big capital B looking symbol in German that kind of translates to like SS I think so there's all sorts of like different in different alphabets in different languages there's different characters that kind of can normalize down to other characters and there's a question of like how should file systems handle that should they treat those as two separate spellings and therefore allow two files to exist with you know one each of those variants or not and i think in general it is better to coalesce those down for duplicate detection so that no like similarly translating characters are allowed to coexist as two different file names all right john what's the right answer so uh if you are listening to this and you don't recall what you picked uh you took the defaults and the default is not case sensitive so that's the answer to what most people are doing um there's a long history behind this a long mostly sad history uh in the hfs plus slash hfs days maybe this was just hfs plus but anyway in the classic mac os days um what the file system would do was it would perform unicode normalization so you'd you'd give it a file name and it would be like that's great and all but i'm going to normalize that and unicode normalization is essentially picking there's a bunch of different normalized forms you can look up in the wikipedia page well in case you can find a link for it um but to give an example like uh i was just the word cafe uh with the e with little accent over it right that little e with the accent can be written at least two different ways one of them is there's a unicode code point for e with little accent over but another way is you can write the unicode code point for e and then the one for little accent combining character and they both make an e with an accent over it one of them is a single thing one of them is e plus accent they combine right there's these combining characters in unicode so they look exactly the same they are the same comparison size but the bytes on disk are different for both of those things so if you did a blind byte comparison you know they're both utf-8 like they're not different encodings they're both utf-8 but if you went bite by bite and you compared cafe to cafe they look the same they are the same character they like they're the same but bite by bite like nope these are different right and uh what hfs plus did i believe it did one of the normalized forms why it normalized everything so whatever you fed it it would do maybe it's like normal form d or something i forget what the names are um and that you know and setting aside the case sensitivity that unicode normalization made some computer nerds angry like linus starvold the creator of linux he was very angry about the fact that hfs plus did that because he's like how dare the file system change the bytes that i gave it for the file name because it violated what he thought was the contract which is hey file system here's a bunch of bytes that is the file name and then later the code would go look for that file in the file system based on those bytes and it wouldn't find it because the file system had changed the byte sequence to do whatever normalized form like one normalized form is combine everything the other normalized form is like uh have everything decomposed and you wouldn't get back the same bytes that you put in he's like this is a violation of the contract when i read the file name back from that directory i better see the bytes that i put in there otherwise it's insanity and he was super angry about that you can find his email on the internet where he was angry about that so when apfs came along apfs made a different choice maybe not because linus was angry about it but whatever uh apfs the original version of apfs said you give me some bytes i'll store some bytes whatever i'll just whatever bytes you give me i'm going to store that's that and when you read the directory and you look at the list of file names i'm giving you back the bytes that you gave me and as soon as apfs came out in fact before it was released at least on the mac anyway i filed a bug against apple that said hey i can make two files named cafe in the same directory in the finder one of them is the e with the accent as one little thing and one of them is the e with the combining accent character but in the file system they literally look the same and here they are side by side with each other in the same directory to marco's point this there's not a capitalization difference or whatever they literally look the same and it's because the file system was totally hands-off and it was like i am not you give me bytes i store bytes i'm not involved in this at all i just i just put the bytes in and when you read the directory i give you the bytes back out kind of like what linus wanted but of course from using your interface perspective that's not great eventually future versions of apfs apfs changed to do i think this is current someone will correct me if i'm wrong but i think the current strategy is this apfs still takes the bytes that you gave it and gives them back to you just the way you gave it to it but the thing that looks in the directory to see if a file by that name already exists that mechanism normalizes everything so the comparison is normalized they normalize before they do the comparison of both sides but it will always give you the bytes out that you put in so if you try to make a second file called cafe with a different normalization it won't let you because it'll say sorry file exists right it will clash that seems like the best approach yeah well it is it's certainly better than the previous two that we said but this i believe this is what everything currently does and that in case sensitivity i assume i don't know how case sensitivity implemented but i assume it's in the same type of thing where the the case insensitivity comes in the checking whether that file already exists or not.

1:19:23But when you put the file in the file system, the case is there. So it is case preserving. It is encoding preserving, but it is not encoding sensitive. And if you choose case insensitive, it is not case sensitive. Here's my take on this. I think that the file system should be case sensitive on comparisons. And I think that higher levels of the OS should implement case insensitivity for places where it matters. But it doesn't matter what I think because we have decades of mac os history where the file system by default has not been case sensitive and the plain fact is that the mac apps sometimes will misbehave on a case sensitive file system shouldn't be that way people shouldn't be careless in their right their programs but reality is what it is i would say the answer this long-winded answer to this is do not format your file system as case sensitive uh especially your boot disk on the on mac os and expect to have a problem-free experience don't do it it's it's not it's the legacy of software for the mac that is going to thwart you and as much as you may want to have a case sensitive file system for your own purposes don't do it now if you want one make an external disk with an external file system make a disk image i have this on all i've has on every mac for my entire existence i've had a case sensitive file system disk image that i would launch and you know mount and cd into to do stuff and why well you may uh be angered slash surprised to learn that one of the file name extensions for c++ source files in unix the file name extension is capital c how do you feel about that oh what no lowercase c is a c file capital c is a c++ file and you think that's not true it's cpp it's c with two plus characters i will tell you that as an old school unix person one of the extensions for z plus us files was in the past capital c and why might that come up well you download some open source thing and you untar it and you try to build it and it doesn't work you're like why the hell doesn't work and it's because when it untarred either a foo dot capital c overrode a foo dot lowercase c or vice versa and now you're missing one of the files that's why you need a case sensitive you know so the the unix the culture of unix and all unix software is to have case sensitive file systems by default but the culture of mac os is not so there's tons of mac software out there were in the source code someone copy and pasted like a folder name or a file name that's part of their application uh that has the wrong case and it's been working for 30 years because mac file systems are case insensitive by default so the sad fact is we are essentially all stuck with case insensitive file systems which i agree that that should be the policy i just kind of wish the file system at the lowest level was case sensitive and then just the higher levels implemented that but that's not the world we live in so pedro case insensitive uh keep around a second disc or disc image that is case sensitive for when you need it matt mccurdy writes in the style of throw money at the problem for the best product i'm curious to know what brand of ceiling fan marco landed on where does one shop for fans i'm trying to avoid the big box store generic brands for fear of a low quality and noisy product and then i can only seem to find styles that are stuck in the 70s or hyper modern like they belong in space so what'd you do marco um i get space fans uh so the the short version of this is it doesn't matter i've in my experience that much in terms of like quality um i've had good fans i've had crap fans i've had fans that i picked out myself and put in new i've had fans that came with a place that i was renting or an old house that i bought or whatever it's not that different because fans aren't that hard to make it turns out so buy fans that you like the look and other specs of you know fans that fit your rooms that fit your style for the most part it's probably better off fashion wise for you not to notice your fan very much because they're not that attractive even the nice ones so all that being said I suggest get whatever you know fits the ones I get are I think the nice ones I get I get had some that like got loose and rattled and it had to be tightened just like any other brand most of them have been fine for years just like any other brand um the only weird thing that i don't like about their fans is that they seem to mostly or all now come with those dumb like custom remotes to control them yep instead of just having like three wires now they can be adapted and converted to the three wire system um but that requires you to have three wire wiring that goes from the switch to the fan.

1:23:58And so in some ways, it's better that they have an option to not do that. Like if you use their little smart remotes, you can just have regular two-wire wiring that was never planning for a fan on a certain circuit or switch and you can make it work and it'll be fine. But so I currently, in the new house, we got a bunch of Fanimation fans and they all have these dumb little remotes. So I got to deal with that now. Is fan-imation the name of an anime animation? Oh, that's fun-imation, sorry. I just feel like there's a possible trade bar conflict. Can you explain the three-wire thing? I don't quite understand what you're getting at there.

1:24:35Many fans have built-in lights, and so the idea is if you have a switch on the wall for the fan, if you only have one set of wires that runs from the switch to the fan... Has the fan and the light on at the same time? Yeah, if it has the fan and the light. So you have multiple options there. sometimes um the light switch is kind of like the main switch but then the fan will have two pull chains one for the light one for the fan speed that's one option to do it or the nicer fans you can control them without pulling chains uh but then you need like you need basically a third wire one that goes from the switch to the fan and one that goes from the switch to the fan's light and that way you can control them separately do you have lights on your fans i do only because most good fans come with lights.

1:25:18I find the actual light on the fan usually to be really harsh and terrible. They also usually now these days are custom LED fixtures, as in you cannot replace the bulb. And they say, oh, they'll last forever, and they don't. And so eventually the LED in it will start going bad and will start flickering or will just outright die, and then you just don't have a light in your fan anymore unless you go through the hassle of replacing the custom LED thing in there um so for the most part no is the answer you know as a non-fan person i would think that what i would want is a fan without a light because it would be lower profile and sleek but that's just me thinking about headroom i guess in practice the like the led lights only add like one inch of height it's because because they're not bulbs and they're the stupid custom things right that's why there's all yeah like if you you're right like if you want to minimize uh you know the the protrusion from the ceiling yeah don't get one with a light but yeah with with With these modern, terrible, custom LED things, the difference is pretty small.

1:26:16As a final note, and I think I've told this story before, I don't recall the specifics. Please, please, please, please, please talk to an electrician or do your own research. But we bought space-looking fans. I couldn't tell you what brand they were for the screened-in porch. And they came with the RF boxes, just like you described. But certain kinds of fans, I want to say it's AC fans, and then there's others that have a conversion into DC. Again, double-check my math on this. I'm probably getting this all wrong. But certain kinds of fans, you can will work with, say, the former sponsor, but one of my favorite things in the world, Lutron Caseta fan switches.

1:26:51And so what we did was or what the electricians did was they wired it up to the RF receiver, whatever. And then I took one of them and was like, well, let me see what happens. And sure enough, it's been this way for two, three years now. We can use them with the Caseta things and it's working just fine. And I vastly prefer that, even though the Caseta, especially the early Caseta stuff wasn't the most beautiful stuff in the world, but it's extraordinarily reliable, as Marco and I have talked about many times. And it's so much better looking than the RF boxes that were mammoth and stuck out of the wall and so on and so forth.

1:27:22So do your own research, but it is possible in certain circumstances, especially if you have a fan that does not have a light in it like those are, you might be able to use Caseta Switch in a pretty straightforward way. thank you to our sponsors this week squarespace and fastmail and thank you to our members who support us directly you can join us atv.fm slash join members got a bunch of perks including atp overtime a bonus segment every week this week on overtime we're catching up with some old friends we are talking about the reviews of the humane ai pin and also uh that automatic has acquired beeper.

1:28:01So this will be interesting. Thank you so much to everyone for listening, and we will talk to you next week.

1:28:30And you can find the show notes at atp.fm And if you're into Mastodon, 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-U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. So, Casey, you just brought up the Lutron Caseta and the switches. in the new house I've had the electricians put in Lutron's new Diva smart switches. Oh those are the ones that are way prettier right? Oh my god they're great. So okay huge caveat first of all yes they were a former sponsor I don't know if they're gonna sponsor again.

1:29:28Second of all I've had them in my house for like two weeks but oh my god they look so nice. So the one of the challenges of Lutron's dimmers before is that it was kind of like BMW's controls. They were fine once you learned them, but when you had a guest over, like, how do I turn on the lights? Like, it was, the Lutron switch controls in the past were a little bit unintuitive. The Diva switch looks just like a big Decora style, like the big square paddle switch, you know, the up and down. And then it happens to have one of the little slidey dimming things on the side. But it looks, but the up and down is not stateful.

1:30:09So it's always rocked in the middle. And you tap it up and it rocks for a second. You tap it, but then you release your hand and it just goes back to the center. So they can be smart controlled but still have the look and feel of regular light switches. And then other huge benefit of that, I know nerds out there, I bet many of you, like me, when you have a three-way switch in your house, there is a certain alignment that you consider correct. Correct. Preach, brother. My life. This is my life in my house. Yep. Oh, my gosh. Preach. And this is going to cause a marital issue between Aaron and me.

1:30:48Oh, gosh. Welcome to New England where every switch is three-way. Yes. This is the problem because our main kitchen light has a switch at the entryway from the garage and a switch where the telephone would have been when the house was built. You know, like the main area of the kitchen, like halfway through the kitchen, or well, like on the other end of the kitchen really but right next to the main hallway downstairs and aaron loves to use the switch by the garage door and i prefer to use the switch that's on the other side and we basically just fight each other constantly cannot stand oh it drives me bananas you need to have like a a summit a switch summit where you can come to some kind of a joint resolution yep yep no and i would actually listeners i'm so sorry i railroaded you marco but this is triggered me um but it listeners if you have it does not have to be a smart switch i does not have to be a smart switch if you have a paddle style or whatever this is called i think decor is what you had said earlier marco i think that's the right name for it is the large shape like where it's like a big rectangular cutout instead of like a little tiny stick in the middle it's a seesaw it's a big seesaw it's an 80 seesaw yeah a big big big seesaw yeah if you have a state-free decorous switch and i might i don't need this to be a smart switch but based on what you just told me about the the uh decor or excuse me the uh the what is the thank you the diva i might be spending a lot of money because these are not cheap i might be spending money on these just so i never have to see these stupid rockers upside down ever again so but if you know of a dumb equivalent you know a non home kit just a freaking switch please please find a way write me tweet me send me a letter shoot a carrier pigeon my way do something and let me know because i would i would love to have one of these well and i think it has to be somewhat smart to make this work yeah if it's not smart you're just you're just making yourself angry like the switches won't appear to be wrong but you'll never know whether you need to hit up or down to make the light go on or off that's fair yeah whereas like the way so the way that the the smart divas work is they have they sell a right like a smart regular switch and then they sell accessory switches that if you put them on a three-way circuit with it you can just tap either one of them up or down and it will turn the light on or off exactly the way it should be so both switches are visually always centered and whichever one you're near you can tap it up to turn it on and tap it down and turn it off so there is no wrong configuration of a three-way circuit it is glory is life-changing like that's how much like because i've always hated that with any with all three could not agree more i'm i'm pretty good about forcing things to be the the correct way in our house but like you know so let me say i we've been living in this house for over 20 years now 23 24 we've been living in this house a long time okay and still like when my parents come to visit or something they find like a switch that i didn't even i forgot existed and they will flip that one it will reverse all the switches in the kitchen right because that was the three woman that we never touch it's like what the hell happened in here and i have to go and fix them all like you'll know you're i think we should let me just explain this briefly so people know what we're talking about a three-way switch is let's just give a simple example there's one light in the middle of the room and the room has two switches on the wall right i know this is sounds silly because they're in the same room but maybe there's two entrances to the room yeah two entrances to the room and each entrance has a switch on the wall right and a three-way switch means that if you want that light uh one of the lights one of the switches is going to be when you push the switch up the light goes on push the switch goes down down light goes on the other switch is going to be reversed when the switch is down the light is on and when the switch is up the light is off right and what we're saying is if you live in a house for a while you come to decide look the switch by this door is the one that's going to work as you expect by the The switch by this door means when you push it up, the light goes on and push it down, the light goes off.

1:34:24And that means you never touch ever the switch by the other door. And often people employ something like a piece of tape over that switch to indicate this switch is not a switch. Never touch it. Because by preserving the state of this switch, like tape it into the up or down position or whatever it needs to be, that makes the one true switch work in a sane manner. And that's what we're all trying to preserve in our house. that's actually slightly different than my situation. With the kitchen switch, it is... I forget the terminology. I did all the switches in the house during COVID. It was one of my COVID projects, and I've lost all the terminology.

1:34:59But with the kitchen switch, I'm pretty sure there's only two physical switches. I think it is still considered a three-way switch in terms of the wiring and all that. If there is more than one physical switch, it's like a plus one situation. That's what I was saying. It's two wall switches, one line. Yeah, if there's three switches, it's a four-way. But the thing of it is, is if maybe I somehow screwed up the wiring, but it's worked in our favor because you can have it such that both of them are off and the light is off. Then you turn either one of them on and the light goes on. But the problem is if one of them is on and you want to turn the light off from the other switch, that's when it gets all backwards.

1:35:36But my point is there is a good state when only one is up and the light is on like that. That is the standard state. The problem comes where Aaron will turn on the one that i don't want her to turn on and i want to turn on the one that she doesn't want to turn on yeah you but you don't want them to be in essentially what you consider to be invalid states like it basically comes down to the point of like you say if i could just erase one of these switches and simplify it i would but instead i just prefer you not to use everyone else in the house not to use in our weird new england house it's convenient because a lot of those switches that i don't know exist like they're behind appliances or like they're just never used by anyone who lives here until someone visits and somehow is looking for a light switch and they find it behind the toaster and they flip it and then like every light is reversed and it's it's madness yeah and and modern electrical codes there's you know not even not even that recently um the i find three-way switches are much much much more common than they used to be because the the intent of modern electrical codes is basically like you should be able to find a light switch when you're entering a dark room yeah so okay what if you have a big hallway There's certain conventions, or some of them might even be coded rules, of like within a certain amount of distance of a bedroom door, you want to be able to come out your bedroom door and hit a switch to turn on the hall light.

1:36:50Well, if it's a long hallway, you might have multiple bedroom doors that need their own switches near them somewhere. So you might have two, maybe even three switches down this long hallway. Or four on two different floors. Because our upstairs is like a big L. I'm a little oversimplifying slightly, but our upstairs is a big L. There's one bedroom that's the office where I'm sitting right now that's kind of off by its lonesome. And there's a hall switch by that bedroom. Then there's a hall switch outside Declan's bedroom, which is on one extreme end of the vertical bar, if you will. There's one outside of our bedroom.

1:37:24And then at the bottom of the stairs, there's number four, baby. And oh my gosh, if anyone even breathes on any of these switches, the whole thing is ruined. Everything is upside down. Yeah, because again, because you want switches on the outside of every bedroom for the hallway. You want switches on top and bottom of staircases. Yep. Any kind of common room, like a living room or kitchen, you want a switch at every entrance. So if it's like a long room with like a door on each side to go to other rooms, you got to have one on both sides. So modern construction has tons of multi-way switches. And yeah, let me just tell you, the Lutron Diva smart switch with the accessory switch, life changing.

1:38:00That is good to know. One of the benefits of living in New England is my house is so old that it predates all these things. I've said that my dining room has one power outlet in it, not one double socket power outlet, literally one power outlet in the entire room. And the actual modern code is like you need to have a power outlet every like four and a half feet or whatever, right? One. One power outlet. And it's a single. So one pig nose. That's it. Yeah. And I believe it was not grounded until I fixed it. Oh, of course not. Oh, my great. Googly moogly. Oh, my word. But like, yeah, so I don't have this problem.

1:38:32And you got the New England thing of people who have been in New England house where like the switches are on the outside of a room. So someone goes in a bathroom, closes the door and realize they're in darkness and they can't find the switch. Guess what? It's not in there. It's outside the bathroom. Yeah. That's the worst. But so the good thing is we didn't have all these codes, but the one place that apparently in the 20s, whenever my house was made or whatever, that they did decide to do is what Mark just said, top and bottom of the stairs. We have top and the bottom of the stairs lights, which is someone, maybe it was done later in the 80s.

1:38:58but either way we have top and bottom three-way switch for this stairs light which you know makes sense from a safety perspective all right but and that is the only one that my family uses consistently and i don't know if they realize this but i fix it every single day because i was the last one to come upstairs last one i put it to the known good position at the end of every single day it does eventually get messed up but i essentially throughout the day try to preserve the one true position which in case you're wondering the switch on the bottom is the real one when the switch on the bottom is up the light should be on on the switch on the bottom of the stairs is down light should be off no one else in my family respects that and it is the one switch that i must fight with but every other switch in the house there is peace and there is one good configuration top and bottom of the stairs there's nothing i can do i don't even mention it to anyone in my family because i know they're not going to do it i just fix it every day that's the service i provide Beep beep beep.