617: An Incredibly Dangerous App

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36:58all right john so uh potentially in preparation for you getting a mac studio you've been doing some house cleaning what's going on yeah so we talked on the show you're so pained by this yeah i know seriously i'm scared i can't remember we i think we were talking about like maybe we were talking about our photos workflows or something on the member special but anyway um to refresh everyone's memory uh we have i have a shared iCloud photo library thing i love it uh my wife and i are both in the same shared library essentially all of our photos are in the shared library i think pretty much all of her photos are in there i keep some photos out of the shared library they're mostly screenshots of videos about destiny stuff my wife doesn't need to see that so it's like uh yeah so those are my but i have a very small and also the pictures of the backs of appliances and stuff like that those are in my personal library but for basically everything else is in a massive 200 000 plus photo shared library right um and because apple hasn't really finished the fight in halo parlance on the shared photo library some things are still not shared like albums and people and so i still need to switch to my wife's account on my mac sometimes to do photo stuff because if i were to do them in my account it wouldn't have any effect because they're not shared in the shared photo library.

38:18So anyway, she has an account on my Mac. I switched to it. Her account is set to download originals. So our full photo library is on my Mac through her account because it's set to download originals. It gets backed up with the whole rest of my Mac, right? But also on my account is my photo library. And when I launch photos, I'm essentially looking at the same photo library that she's looking at, the shared library, right? She's set to download originals. My account is set to the optimized storage thing. But practically speaking, there's 200 ,000 photos. And when you go to her account, you can see those 200 ,000 photos.

38:51When you go to my account, you can see those 200 ,000 photos. And somebody wrote in a while back, and I think we talked about it on SKTP or something, asking, does macOS do or does photos do anything smart with the fact that it's the same shared library and two accounts on the same Mac? Or if I set my account to download originals, would it download two complete copies of my library? and I told this person I think it will download two complete copies of your library and it's incredibly wasteful that it does that but you know that's a pretty tricky scenario right anyway we had that discussion a while back but it had been sticking in my mind going you know I wonder especially as my disk fills and I get close to my storage limit and I'm always like fighting against that how much space am I wasting on my Mac by having the same photo libraries hers downloading originals and mine not but like how much stuff is it downloaded so you know I've got pearl i can find the answer to this question oh my word of course you turn to pearl why would you why wouldn't you just use finder but no pearl exists i'll use pearl well i can't use finder because it's in her account why not use php i mean you now know that gouge my eyes out using php for extended amount has made me hate it more if that's even possible to imagine but it's true but it has happened anyway um so i i wrote a little pearl script uh and it ran it as root what could possibly go wrong right i've been running pearl as root since before uh you were out of high school anyway uh right ran my script uh and it crawled over her photo library my photo library and found all the files that are identical uh and i was actually well first here's the file count any guesses oh if you include like are you are we including like all the different all the previews that generates i'm not excluding any files oh it's just like it's there's there's like a directory called like whatever dot photo library like that photo library is the extension but it's a directory and in there is a bunch of stuff that photos uses to keep track of your files so obviously the originals are in there in my wife's account but also all the other crap of like the thumbnails and pre-use and stuff like that i'm gonna say two million no identical identical files not oh not files total oh okay oh let's let's see i think hundreds of thousands yeah i mean i'll say like 200k 73 000 files were identical okay fewer than i thought all right but now keep in mind my photo library is how big is it maybe like two and a half terabytes three terabytes 200 000 photos that's how big it is so it's like oh i gotta see some major savings here turns out there's only 8.6 gigs duplicated now i don't know if that's because i kind of stay away from my photo library don't like scroll back in time and like load the full resolution images and stuff or whatever i mostly just look at the pictures that have just come in you know i'm not really going back in time and doing stuff but only 8.6 gigs but i was like you know what i want those 8.6 gigs back oh here we go you couldn't just leave well enough alone no because that's the whole point of this the person was asking like uh does the os do something smart about this like does it share them and only have one copy or whatever and i was like i can get those 8.6 gigs back can i guess how but we you should know how because we talked about it on the show before but yeah go ahead uh are you going to use the special cp copy command that does the apfs uh deduplication thing for the same file yeah i'm not gonna use a cp command like an animal but yeah um apfs the file system that mac os and phone and ios and all the other devices uses apple's file system uh has a feature that lets you make a quote clone of a file where you get a complete independent copy of that file essentially for free because it shares the storage with the other file and not like a hard link or a sim link or an alias not like that not like where when you edit one file the other one gets edited they are two completely distinct files they do not affect each other in any way but while they are identical they share the same storage if you duplicate a file in the finder go to your finder now find a 10 gig file and make a thousand duplicates you will not take up any more space except for the space required to store the file names of those files that's why duplicates in the finder are instant go to find a 300 gig file hit duplicate and be like why was there no progress well bar you know why because it's just cloning the file it's saying those blocks on disk now there's another way to get at them and again it doesn't tie them together like a sim link or an alias or a hard link they're not linked in a way when you edit one file it will edit all the other copies they're completely independent they will diverge as you edit them it's the magic of copy on write it's one of the advantages of having a modern file system and most people don't even think about it but the cp command from the command line will do this although there is a flag to tell it to do it if you don't even pass the flag it does it all the time anyway the finder will do when you duplicate that's why your file copies are instant i do it all the time for podcast recordings when i report it record a podcast whatever folder ended up in audio hijack for this show or whatever i copied into a like separate folder which is just like all the shows i've recorded like from going back in time that doesn't take up any more space i just copy it i also copy it into dropbox i'm not sure how dropbox handles that but it gets to leave that dropbox pretty soon but anyway i can get the space back take those 73 000 files and every one of them that i find that where there's identical identical content in my photo library clone the one from her photo library into my photo library and throw out the one that was in my photo library because they have identical content and you got to do it carefully because just because they have identical content they're still different files they have different creation dates different modification dates different owners different permissions different finder labels different comments different access control lists distance different extended attributes tons of stuff about these files is different but not the data different resource forks maybe but but not the data i love that you're going through all of this on a computer this is this isn't on her computer right this on your computer yep why you could put another freaking hard drive in your machine why are you going through all this pain well it's i mean it's not pain that the first pearl script to find out how many files were the same real quick like you know 10 10 minutes right i mean i think it's overkill but i'm behind it in principle but doing this like you know swapping in place within the photos library mega mega air quotes database oh no so that's that's one of the things is like okay well how can i do this in a way where i feel like i'm not hosing myself right aside from just being a good careful programmer with experience with pearl uh one of the ways i decided to tackle this was i will choose her library as the source and mine is the target so i will only read from hers and only write to mine because hers is like the canonical good one where it's downloaded originals blah blah blah and mine is not worst case scenario i just delete my photo library and re iCloud it because there's so little is actually in my photo library proper it's all in the shared library right so that's what i did i use hers as a source mine is a destination to copy the files um i did it in a couple different steps one is i needed to be able to find out if the files were already clones of each other i forgot to mention this but i did that as part of the pearl script i couldn't find a good way to do that except someone eventually i eventually found someone in github who had a tool that did a best effort at it and as far as i could tell it worked they did a bunch of test cases it always got the right answer uh it essentially walks the entire extents tree for each of the files and sees if they're identical which is it's not great but it's the only way that you can do it there's a bunch of little flags and stuff about there's even one called like may share content or may share blocks like may well that's not really helpful to me i need to no they do share box right so you basically just have to walk the whole extent tree so i use that was written in c i have my thing written in pearl there's a command on the mac called ditto that will copy a file with all of its metadata and stuff and then i wrote uh in swift a thing to do the extended attributes creation dates blah blah blah some things you can't restore because i think there's a thing called like an access uh access time or attribute modification time that you can't actually update like it gets updated by the file system and you have no way there's no apis for updating it but i don't think anything really uses that so anyway i was comfortable that it would be say if i did a test on one or two files i looked at before and after as i examined them with every tool i had and said the before and the after file really do look identical in every way that i can determine that i care about and so i just ran it i got 8.6 gigs back i'm still happy for you and then i thought you know free disk space oh no oh no oh no free disk space oh no john john john i did my my computer has not lost anything obviously there's there are fewer redundant copies of bits on the ssd but i'm not relying on the redundancy of the bits on my ssd to save those things that's what backups are for oh god raid is not a backup neither is having multiple guys but anyway free disk space this is this is like that's like free opium what could possibly go wrong free real estate i'm not doing free opium free real estate free disk real estate um i thought to myself most people don't know about this apfs cloning thing it's too nerdy uh but everyone likes free disk space right like literally free and if you go to the mac app store you'll find tons of like file deduplicators that will find duplicate files but it wants you to delete the other ones like they all offer like i know we'll delete them i'll save the newest one we'll save this you know but like no cloning doesn't make you make that choice you don't lose any files all the files stay exactly the way they were john are you about to launch an app don't do this don't do this to yourself the support burden will be terrible you can have all sorts of like you know creepy marketing about it like you can free get free resources from your computer just give me 40 but like but it's a technical it's a technical ability that people aren't leveraging on their own because it's too onerous to do it like you can't i wouldn't find 73 000 files by myself so anyway i thought this would be a good idea for a mac app oh no john so i wrote it oh my god are you launching it like right now no well here so i i because i i've written the pearl scripts i'm like this couldn't be that hard to make as a mac app don't use the pearl scripts in the app for god's sake the whole point of making is an app is no more pearl scripts no you know like real real honest to goodness app uh i made i you know because i like doing mac development and my apps are essentially feature complete although i do have a couple ideas for one of them but anyway uh it was exciting to start a new app i made a swift ui life cycle app uh you know started from scratch uh wrote it up i did the the programmers ui that you're all familiar with which is a giant window with a bunch of text and buttons on it no ui and no styling just text buttons and rapidly changing numbers right nice love it love the programmer ui and yeah no it worked uh and while i'm at while i was doing this i was like you know i probably someone already wrote this program uh and i should just like stop what i'm doing and use theirs eventually i remembered someone did write the program we talked about it on the show i feel like casey now we talked about it on the show i already had it installed in my applications folder i literally it is a pay app that i bought years ago it already exists so i we'll put a link in the show notes uh it's called uh disk the dupe by frank schroeder uh i'm not sure how many years old it is uh but it is uh it does exactly what my app is trying to do it's not the most polished app in the world but it's been developed for a little while it's on like version 1.3 or something uh it's available on the mac app store you can get it right now if you feel like it uh but i'm still making my app uh other people made uh podcast players too but mark doesn't stop marco yeah that's true made overcast uh and the reason i'm also i'm making the app just because i like doing uh mac development it's fun and i think there is a place in the market for a slightly more polished version of this uh but i'm doing it for a couple other reasons as well one is after i got like uh you know a thousand lines into this app and it was basically working but with an ugly ui i thought you know let me not make the same mistake that everyone else always makes uh i should turn on swift 6 language mode because i hadn't at that point and so that you know burned a day but still you do it when there's a thousand lines it's better than doing it when there's a hundred thousand right there and there's a lot i don't know about concurrency but i figured it out all right uh the other thing i'm concerned about is this is an incredibly dangerous app like if i'm not careful right it it uh essentially deletes and then reincarnates arbitrary files that it knows nothing about right possibly because that's what it does like it doesn't it doesn't if you point it at a directory it doesn't know what those files are it just knows these two files have the same content and i'm gonna magically do some magic with cloning and when i'm done you won't notice anything that's changed but while i'm doing it i hope no one's looking at those files unfortunately mac os being a unix derivative does not have a really great way to tell if someone else is messing with a file you want to run lsof on every file it will take a year and a day and the kernel will get angry at you um and even that is not going to tell you anything because there's a million race conditions that you only have advisory locking you don't have mandatory locking like on windows yada yada yada the point is it's a dangerous potentially dangerous app but then on the other hand that's why a polished version of this that is very cautious and careful maybe has a place in the market because no people are never going to do this on their own they're not going to run a pearl script like i they're not going to run a pearl script as root like i did that calls out to a swift program that they wrote in a c program that they downloaded from github like no one's going to do that they just want a polished single mac app that does all the stuff so anyway uh i am going to eventually make that app uh it it is essentially working now it just has half a ui i'm noodling with the oi to try to make it not heinously ugly um but i'm having fun and the other thing i'm going to do with it is so the existing app that does this is a paid up front app i'm going to make mine free but within that purchase because it's so ideal like you get the app for free you try it it tells you how much space you can save if you can't save any space you don't find whatever but if it turns out you can save 10 gigs then you get the in-app purchase and that gives me an opportunity to play with in-app purchase which i've literally never written in any app before so i want to do in-app purchase and a mac app this time to see what that experience is like because it could be fun yeah i mean here's where you're telling me a store kit testing is never fun i understand but you know god it's not it's gotten better but it's real rough it's store kit too casey it's not just regular no no that's what i'm using and it's still trash it's still trash like it's gotten a lot better but it's still my end up purchase will be fairly simple but anyway yeah say that so the final thing to say here is i have a casey level naming dilemma going on oh yeah good luck good because here's the thing with naming i uh i have uh very particular opinions about app naming everything on the mac but when you make a new project in xcode they make you pick a name for the project and if you don't know what your app is going to be named you gotta call something this is how casey ends up with his stuff i imagine as well right yep it is exactly right that is one of the reasons why i typically cannot start a new project until i have the name yeah like i i just i i can't make myself do it with a placeholder name yeah i'll say here's the other thing about names uh depending on which naming theme i'm going with i very often have spaces between words but if you put spaces between words in your xcode project it puts underscores and files and it's just like oh yeah it messes it all up and then if you go okay we'll put underscores and file i'll just remove those underscores but then your whole project is screwed up because you haven't found every reference to that file and it's just like you gotta so obviously i made a project and i gave it a name it's not going to be the name of the app is it flisk space it's not as bad as a casey name but it might as well be my thinking on the name i talked about this briefly with merlin on the rectives that will come out in a little bit um i my other apps are a little bit more fanciful in names but this one i actually want people to to find when they're searching for something that does what it does yeah this is like an seo name i can't just call it like lemonade or something that's just like you know right just nothing that has anything to do with anything even though it might be good branding to come up with like a very unique interesting no one will ever find it i don't know i don't trust the the app store search and my keywords and my description or whatever so i want the name to at least give you a hint that it might have something to do with discs or storage or duplicate files or something like that and that really puts you in squarely into the namespaces of the million other apps to delete duplicate files that are on the mac app store so i'm not quite sure what it's going to be called uh as soon as i know i will let you know but the app's not quite done yet so like can you think about like words that are like about like finding free finding resources out in the world like you know mining minor stuff like that or you can't do mining yeah that's like a bitcoin thing anywhere like that i would want to put like disk it but disk people don't have disks anymore they don't even think of it as disks it's certainly not hard drive yeah i would use it i would call it if you're going to refer to the medium i would call it storage um or space or something like that but i ideally you shouldn't have to but i don't know yeah that's that's a that's a tough one any guesses that what my uh what my working title is my what the name of the xcode project is oh no i don't want to guess but i think it's got to have been overdone a trillion times but the obvious answer for this is highlander because there can be only one yeah there already is an app called highlander obviously um one of the names i came up with uh obviously it's not a real name that i would use for reasons uh that you'll understand in a second uh super de duper wow that's pretty good actually because dave nanion would come to my house and beat me up yes but it's still pretty good though that's called trade dress if i try to name my app after a well-known beloved multi-decade old like yeah which is also about storage yeah Yeah, which is also a SuperDuper, I guess people don't know, is the Mac cloning app that I, in fact, use to clone my hard drive.

56:22So SuperDuper. There's also Carbon Copy Cloner. But anyway, SuperDuper would be a great name if we were at the same company, but we're not. How about Canonical? It's a terrible name, but it's kind of... Isn't that a whole software company? Yeah, people aren't going to guess that that's a disk. I might have to give up on the people can guess that it's a disk thing. Yeah, I don't know. That's tough. I mean, naming anything these days, you know, anything in tech is a very crowded market these days. and naming something that solves a common problem that has existed for a very long time, like freeing up disk space on your computer, that's going to be extra difficult because there's going to be so many.

56:55Space Doubler. Oh, wait. You guys don't remember Space Doubler, but it was the name of a classic Mac OS utility. Didn't do this, but it was another thing. I think it was like a compression, on-the-fly compression thing. Stacker is one of those, too. And the funny thing is that name actually kind of makes sense here. Yeah. Real-time follow-up. I knew I recognized Canonical from somewhere. They're the people who do Ubuntu. i can't believe i didn't realize that immediately okay well that's that's why i knew it anyway a few more things like now that i have this program up and running it's obviously a two-phase thing one where you scan where it tells you how many duplicates is found and two is where you consolidate them and so i've been doing a lot of scanning uh especially when developing the app uh i pointed it at my documents folder believe it or not uh only 14 000 documents but 12 gigs more duplicates in my own just in my documents folder my own documents folder only than there was when i was cross comparing the two photo libraries that ostensibly are both looking at the share of 12 gigs in my documents library dropbox i'm probably just going to literally forbid in my app you ever pointing it at google drive dropbox or anything because i have no freaking idea what dropbox will do when i yank the file out from under it and replace it with a clone yep i'm just going to be like nope not anything that's anything that's running on a file provider type api thing like google drive onedrive my app is just gonna flat out refuse to do just for safety reasons probably but anyway i got a gig 626 files in dropbox uh my home slash library folder which i will also forbid for what i hope are obvious reasons stuff that's in your library is like stuff that other apps are using that you have no idea when they're touching it right things that are being touched by the cfprefs demon uh containers sandbox containers whatever 15 gigs in my library folder.

58:4015 games of duplications. So that's the type of situation where you shouldn't run it, but I might run my Perl script on it. John, I am in full support of you doing this for yourself. I am at best half-hearted support in you selling this as a product because I feel like the support burden would just be awful. It will be ruinous. And then you're going to not do a bunch of work for ATP that I've been happy for you to have been doing recently. that's the whole point of this program is like the uh the the one i said the disc the thing or whatever um that has been on the mac app store it doesn't really have any guardrails it will just do what you tell it to do for the most part right and i don't think it's a very popular program and i don't really hear about it despite the fact that i apparently bought it years ago even i didn't use it that often i want to make something that's more polished that has enough guardrails that it will prevent you from really hosing yourself right like really cautious in what it does just totally refusing to do anything that's that it knows is potentially dangerous um you know and in terms of support burden like we'll see it could be like this is one of the things that was preventing me from doing is like oh this you're just making an app for people to hose themselves and now they're going to be angry and you're not going to get one star reviews or whatever but yep but this app is already on the mac app store it's got great reviews it has no guardrails people love it So maybe those apps find their audience.

1:00:03So we'll see. I mean, look, I am an expert in bad ideas. And I don't think this is not jumping out at me as a bad idea. So I think you might be onto something here. This might be a good thing for you to do. It is a risk. I think, you know, like any new app, it will be way more time consuming than you think it will. The support burden will be larger than you expect and predict. and it will be difficult to market it even though you have one of the best marketing channels in the indie Apple scene by your existing presence in the internet and on this podcast, on your blog and everything else. But I think...

1:00:48you could do it and i think you could do a good job of it and some people would buy it i don't know how the heck you're going to price it i don't know anything about this market but i think you i think you can make it happen here's the thing any like competent experienced mac developer could bang this out in between the time this podcast is released and like like you could anyone who's good at mac development could do this so much faster than i will part of the reason i'm doing it is because i enjoy mac development which is the thing i discovered from my other two apps i just enjoyed doing it period uh and i'll learn a lot during i want you know one of the things i enjoy is learning stuff but like i am by no means an experienced mac developer i am stumbling my way through this so it's going to take me a long time anybody good like one of the one of the many good mac developers that are out there that make these things like gee rambo probably made this app already while we've been discussing you know what i mean and they'll do a better job than me too but maybe they're not interested in that market maybe they know that it's this is a dangerous tool for it to be i just don't understand why more people haven't made this is probably not the only one the one i found that there's probably other apps that also do this when we discussed it on the show i think i probably said someone should totally make an app like that and then someone said here's this app and then i bought it and right like so this is not a new idea i just think this is an idea that more people should be implementing and if people aren't going to do it then i will do it and again even if they do do it i'm still going to do it anyway because i'm having fun and if it turns up a disaster i just pull the app from the store to be absolutely clear as your friend i'm nervous for you and i don't love it as your co-host oh hell yes because we will get so much good stuff out of you say that until i want both of you to run it for the show okay maybe not i'll give you the source code you can look at it you can step through the debugger to see that it's not really doing anything terrible oh my gosh i'm certainly stepping through in the debugger i mean I think there is, honestly, like there is a lot to be said for taking something that, yeah, anybody, any programmer can write a script to do this in a couple hours at most.

1:02:52And, you know, there is something to be said for wrapping that idea and functionality in a really nice app. And there is a market for that. And honestly, there's a lot – when you look at iOS, because it is so big, the entire world is iOS. And as a result, it is hyper-competitive. Every dollar is squeezed out of everything. You can't get an iota of attention on iOS without paying for it. and you're going to be competing with everyone else who's paying for it with all the money they're making from their scam subscriptions and all that other crap that goes on in ios like it's a brutal market on ios big but brutal and you can't do apps like this on ios at all anyway true but but just like just kind of like you know the dynamics of the market on ios are just cutthroat and brutal and it's hard to to do something like nice there as an indie it honestly it really is hard on the Mac, though, I think part of the beauty of the Mac software ecosystem that I think really peaked a lot in the mid-2000s and maybe 2010s, and we've kind of been going down since then, is people who were really just making nice versions of simple tasks.

1:04:15Like apps that did something that, yeah, anybody could write something to do that, but here's a really nice version of it and it's 20 bucks or whatever 40 bucks like that was a huge part of the mac indie software scene and that's what what that's part of what drew a lot of us to the mac in that time span and a lot of that has been has either faded or has been lost since then and so i love the idea of you going into this and doing something like this even though like if you look at like okay what how should you spend your money or how should you spend your time to maximize the amount of money you can make with apple platform software this probably is not the answer but that's not your goal your goal is to make something nice on the mac and i think that we need more of that and i really miss the era of that being like the thing we were all really paying attention to and doing and using so this could be great and you know selfishly it's easy for me to say this because i don't have to handle the support load that you do but um i think this could be this could be a very good idea or it could just fizzle out and do nothing and make you another you know 10 bucks but it's a i i think i think odds are if you finish this and release it and let me pick your price i think you'll make more money from this than your other two apps combined yeah this definitely has more potential customers but also it's much more potentially dangerous like the thing about being an indie developer oh price it per gig saved i'm not gonna be that you're thinking of ios this is the mac we don't do that yeah it's a terrible idea don't do that yeah um you can compete with apple storage prices right right that's that's kind of what led me to this i still have a discussion of storage but like when you're when you're running a when you're running like a company you can think about like what kind of products should our company make in terms of product market fit and total addressable market and so on and so forth but when you're an indie developer you're in the situation where essentially you can't pick what you're interested in building like and if you're lucky you're interested in building an app that has wide appeal but if you're unlucky like me every app you want to make does not have wide appeal but that's what you want to make right like even when i was thinking of doing a mastodon client which is a much more difficult task and i started it and turned out i didn't like ios development that much right because i like doing mac development the apps that I want the apps that I'm interested in making are weird right and so it's like I mean let's just right out of my alley I love file system stuff I love like this actually surprisingly large overlap between this app and the stuff I did in my web dev career because I did a lot of you know high scale back end things one of the biggest things I made was like an s3 like service that had to deal with all sorts of file system things in addition to being a web service type thing right so I do actually have relevant experience here and you just don't get to pick what you're interested in when you're an indie you're interested in what you're interested in so you end up making what you want to make and if you're lucky you get something that overlaps with a lot of customers but if you're unlucky you like you can't force yourself to be like i should make a to-do app i don't want to make a to-do app right never mind that market is saturated anyway but whatever like anything with wide appeal right so or if you know if you're a very skilled developer you can just you know do the underscore method and you have so many interests in so many apps and you can churn them out so quickly that you make lots of bets and eventually some of them pay off.

1:07:32But you have to be, A, a really good experienced developer to do that. And B, I think Underscore actually is legitimately interested in every app that he makes. He's got a wide-ranging interest. My interests are narrower and more obscure. And this is one of them, unfortunately for me and potentially, unfortunately for the world. Well, again, I am in full support of this as a co-host. I am sort of in support of it as a friend. The support burden is what worries me so deeply. Like everything else about it, I think, heck yeah. But I am deeply concerned about the support burden. But if you say you're comfortable with shouldering that, then power to you.

1:08:11Let's do it. You're definitely going to want the LLC protection on this one. It's not a very complicated app in terms of, you know, there's not a lot of complicated UI that people are going to have trouble with. it's just only going to be a question of oh you you broke my computer and deleted all my files but it's pretty not it's easy but like you if you're super cautious in your app you can severely limit the damage i mean my my evidence is the the disk the duper app that's on the mac app store now is not bombarded with terrible reviews yeah people like it people like getting free disk space back and the operation it's performing is not complicated it's officially supported it's you can put it in the mac app store it's not using private apis it's pretty straightforward you know do you think will um full disk access be an annoying limitation uh turns out you don't need it uh because it's very confusing on mac os one of the things i discovered is it does not work the way you think it does what i was in one of the mac development channels discussing like how does full disk access interact with sandboxing interact with user expressed intent through the open save dialog box i don't need full disk access for this app that's bananas i can't believe that yeah i think you and me both i couldn't believe it either but i i literally don't need it because everything that it does is user initiated like and once you get a user initiated uh permission through the open save dialog box i essentially have full access to the thing that they chose to open in the app so would you just like have them open like the root of the drive basically and then you can no they just they just pick whatever they're going to pick whatever folder they want to do so they pick their documents folder and that's it but what if they want to do everything their whole system uh they shouldn't do that my app will probably stop them because that's bad now one of the things i'm also looking into for a future version of this goes well is a privileged helper tool where you ask for admin permissions you can do cross account yada yada yada but just version one is just files that you own in your home directory there's i mean there's space to be saved there.

1:10:14Of all the things I thought we were talking about tonight, this was not on the list. No, saving space. Saving space, yeah. I mean, literally the show notes, our internal show notes read, John is saving space, photos, iCloud, shared library, multiple accounts on the same Mac. That's all we had. That's all we had to go on. When I wrote that in the show notes, I hadn't done anything except for Muse about it. In between the time I wrote that, and now I wrote a Perl script and wrote a Mac app. very good stuff this is why we love you all right well i am looking forward to this corner of the podcast going forward this is very exciting just send in your names we are sponsored this week by tailscale tailscale is legitimately one of my favorite discoveries if not my favorite discovery of 2024 now they've been around a lot longer than than just this year but i only really truly embraced tail scale earlier this year and really truly genuinely it has made my computing life that much better they can't pay me to say that but it is absolutely true so what is tail scale imagine if you didn't have to care what network each of your devices was on your home network a work network perhaps at linode or digital ocean or something like that you just wanted to make sure that you could always talk to all your other devices irrespective of what network they're on irrespective of what firewalls are between you and your other devices.

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1:12:48All right. We have semi-breaking news. I think it was yesterday afternoon, iOS 18.2, macOS 15.2, VisionOS 2.2 all launched, and I was not on the beta train on anything for the.2 releases. And I have been very excited to try the.2 releases, the 15.2 and VisionOS 2.2 releases, is mac os 15.2 and vision os 2.2 because this gives us the new fancy mac virtual display so if you are not caught up the way it worked up until literally yesterday as we record this is that um if you wanted to kind of suck your mac into the the vision os world you could use either the vision os uh control center or if you have a laptop you can just look at your laptop and a little button will appear over it.

1:13:42This is when you have your Vision Pro on. A little button will appear over your laptop that says connect. And then it'll, whatever, you know, laptop or even desktop, if you go in through Vision OS's control center, whatever computer you're bringing into Vision OS, you get a 4K display in Vision OS. And you can resize that display insofar as you can make it, you know, the equivalent of 10 feet in front of your face, but it's still only ever 4K. And I've used this a handful of times. I used it kind of a lot when traveling, but I don't travel that often. So I've only used it a little bit here and there.

1:14:16And I've used it on the train and on the plane. And it's very, very cool and really nice that not only do you have a large display in a train or in a plane, but nobody can see what's happening on your Mac. It's not like, you know, screen sharing where a lot of times your Mac will be displaying what's on screen and then some other computers also displaying it. When you do this Mac virtual display thing, the Mac screen or screens go dark. And so no passerby or bystander or whatever, looky-loo, can see what's going on. And I always thought this was good. It wasn't perfect, it wasn't stellar, but it was good.

1:14:47And I typically do this with the developer strap on my Vision Pro. If you recall, you can replace the right-hand side audio pod, I think they call it, which in the strap that it's a part of. and you can get one that has a little USB-C dongle on it, then you can plug USB-C from the Vision Pro into your computer and it will actually do Mac virtual display over that rather than like local Wi-Fi or whatever. And I always thought it was good, maybe even great. I don't know, somewhere between good and great. Marco, up until yesterday, if I recall correctly, you found the Mac virtual display to be a little bit blurry and you didn't really care for it very much.

1:15:28Is that accurate? I would say that's an understatement, but yeah. Okay, fair enough. So yeah, so yesterday we got the new Mac virtual display, which does a few things. I believe the standard display is now 5k instead of 4k. Additionally, you have two other modes that you can optionally choose between. You can choose between, what do they call it? Wide and ultra wide. Thank you. Wide and ultra wide. Now I should also note that up until yesterday, even the standard display was well there was that was the only option you had and it was flat whereas now all of the displays are curved a little bit which generally is not something i particularly care for but in this context i think does make a fair bit of sense um god help me if i end up buying like one of these 40 inch curved computer displays in my desk in all fairness i would say like based on the virtualized size of them the wide and ultra wide i think basically have to be curved especially the ultra-wide, it takes up like, I mean, I'm just estimating here, maybe like 90 degrees of your field of view.

1:16:32So if that was just a big flat pane window in the view, the left and right edges would be substantially further away from your eyes than the center would be. It would be a little weird. Yeah. So, yeah. So they added wide and ultra-wide. And wide is, let's see. So the standard, I think, I forget the resolutions. Oh, here we go. So when I was in ultra-wide mode, it offered 5120 by 1440, which is the default, and up to 10240 by 2880, which is bananas. But suffice it to say, I have tried this out. Holy freaking crap, this is amazing. I am so in love with this. Now, if you recall, I'm the kind of lunatic, and this is partially Marco's fault for having sent me one, but I'm the kind of lunatic that runs three 5K displays at home.

1:17:23I have my studio display directly in front of my face. Then I have at, you know, like a 45 degree angle to either side. I have, uh, I have, uh, LG ultra fine five Ks. So I'm used to having an overabundance of real estate and I'm used to having to move my head in order to use my computer. I don't mind that. I, I, I think the, the juice is worth the squeeze for me personally. The ultra wide is so freaking big in the pro that I actually think it might even be too much. And I am so happy that that is the problem I have, that this might be too much. It is unreal. I have many more thoughts about this, but I'd like to pause myself and hear Marco.

1:18:03You were assigned yet more homework. And listeners, I have to tell you, Marco's been a very good sport about all the homework I've assigned. And you have done more homework. And I appreciate you. And I appreciate that. Rain on my parade. And then I'll go back to telling you about how amazing it is. honestly, if you try it and you like it, more power to you. Where I am with the Vision Pro is I have my feelings about it. I can tell you how well it works for me, but a lot of other people, it works better for them. And so, if it works better for you, who cares if it doesn't work very well for me? That's my loss and your gain.

1:18:40So, anyway, I did try this. It is substantially better than the original version in terms of screen space and therefore like the usability of that screen space um i i found the ultra wide the biggest setting to actually be way too much space i had to be do so much head turning i'm like this is ridiculous um so i actually stuck with the middle setting the wide it was a lot of screen space plenty of screen space on the middle setting for me without too much head turning so that that part was fine you know the the scale you know the the ability to use the space that was all very good um the the main problems i had with the original version were number one i could notice the foveated rendering which is bad like because that's like you you see kind of out of the corner of your eyes like which parts of the screen are blurry um that you're not quite looking at and maybe it was a little slow to update when you when you would move your eye to it um that i did not notice that this time so i don't know if they've actually improved that or if i've stopped noticing i think they might have actually improved it so you don't notice the foveated rendering blurriness on the stuff you're not looking at anymore at least i didn't i did still notice the two other major problems i had with the first time which are a lack of sharpness uh and latency one of the first things i tried when i when i first got the Vision Pro, I tried editing a podcast in it with Logic.

1:20:12The screen space was delightful, but the problem was there's a little bit of latency. And when you're like, if you're just typing in a document, you won't see it. But when you start moving stuff around, you do see it. You do feel that latency and it feels really bad and really wrong. And it makes certain types of work very difficult to do in that environment without like driving yourself nuts. So latency is still there, I still notice it. And that alone would be enough for me to not really want to use this very, very often, if ever. Now, quick interruption. Are you using this via Wi-Fi or are you plugging in via the developer strap?

1:20:48The laptop it was connected to was connected to Ethernet, but the Vision Pro was on Wi-Fi. Gotcha. Okay. That being said, you know, the Wi-Fi router is like 10 feet away. And nothing else ever says this is a bad Wi-Fi connection right here in my seat at my desk. Anyway, and I would argue that's the way to actually judge it anyway, is when using it on Wi-Fi because that's how it's really made. Because the developer strap gives you a second cable down the other side of the Vision Pro. By the way, I actually did solve my Vision Pro standby issues. Quick aside here, I've decided when I'm not using the Vision Pro, I just disconnect the battery cable from it.

1:21:29It's like unplugging a desktop. It powers off immediately and it does not do a clean shutdown, but I don't care. And when I disconnect the battery cable for storage, I did that last time I put it away. That was probably, what, two weeks ago? I got it out this time. Perfect charge. It booted up just fine. The battery still showed green. Like everything was totally fine. So if you actually unplug it from its battery, it does last substantially longer than standby mode. Anyway, so going back to the screen, the Mac virtual display update. The latency is still a problem for me. The sharpness is still really poor.

1:22:05When you look directly at something and you kind of stabilize yourself, I'll get to that in a second, you can see what it is. It's not like the pixels are so blurred that you can't read lettering or you can't see lines. It's not that bad, but it is blurred. And when you look at the optical pipeline of what is being shown on a Vision Pro, it has to be blurred. We are nowhere near the optical resolution or screen resolution required to actually replicate the pixel density of a computer monitor at a regular distance inside the Vision Pro. We're nowhere near it. We are many generations away from that being realistically possible if it ever comes.

1:22:50So it is substantially blurrier than looking at a real monitor. It has substantial latency. And then one of the big killers for me is the Vision Pro has significant motion blur when you move your head or eyes very much. When you look at the design of Vision Pro native apps, everything is huge. The windows are huge. The buttons are huge. The text is pretty big. Everything about Vision Pro or Vision native apps, everything is big. And it's simulated to be somewhat far away from you too. and so everything like you don't notice the motion blur as much and then the best thing to do in my opinion with the vision pro is watch 3d video content or immersive content and with that you don't really see it at all because of you know the the type of viewing you're doing in there the small amount of motion blur when you move your head is is kind of just blurred away and compensated for with everything else you're seeing but when you're looking at a computer screen which has a very high pixel density trying to make all these nice sharp windows and nice sharp text in this window, the motion blur of the Vision Pro, just moving your own head, just even very slight movements as you operate your computer, you notice it constantly, at least I did.

1:24:04And so I found it very unpleasant to use. If you have already been using the Vision Pro virtual display mode, like before this update, and it was fine for you, then this is even better for you. So enjoy it. If you had the problems with it that I had of latency, blurriness, and motion blur, those are not improved. And I don't think it's possible to meaningfully improve them with the current hardware. So basically, if you already have a Vision Pro, this is a useful thing to try, and this might get you to use it more. If you don't already have a Vision Pro, this probably is not a good enough reason to go out and buy one.

1:24:44I was with all of your summary until that very last line. So let me reiterate that for me, and maybe it's because my eyes are not great. And I know I've said this a thousand times, but just one more time to set the stage. I have a weird eye disease called keratoconus. That means I wear hard contact lenses. It's actually been said on Apple's documentation that you shouldn't wear hard contact lenses with Vision Pro. It probably won't work. I've never had a problem with that. Well, don't tell them. My Vision is actually pretty good with my contact lenses in. And I'm like 20, 30 or something like that.

1:25:17I forget what I am. But it's actually not bad. But without my contacts, I'm even more blind than John. And that's saying something. So I think it is possible, it is certainly possible, if not probable, that maybe some visual wonkiness that is really a shortcoming of the Vision Pro is actually my own eyes. I don't know. This is the only eyes I've got. So I can't tell you one way or the other. But whatever the case may be, be it because of the Vision Pro, be it because of my eyes or whatever, I don't find it to be that off-putting. I don't really get the motion blur. Occasionally, I find it's a little difficult to focus, but it usually goes away very, very quickly.

1:25:54That might have to do with maybe my eyes settling down and the foveated rendering calming down, I'm not sure. But generally speaking, I find this works really well. And so this morning, I had the occasion to go to a local library, and I needed to be there to return something. and I figured, well, I'll just chill and work for a little bit. And so I am enough of that guy to use the Vision Pro at the library, but I'm not enough of that guy to do it in the middle of like all the other people working at the library. So I, I don't want to say rented, I reserved a study room at one of the local libraries and I sent this picture to Marco and I forget exactly what you said, but you said something along the lines of, holy crap, could you not have found a bigger place to work because it is effectively a closet.

1:26:37And that's true. But I sat myself in this little study room and I put on my Vision Pro and I looked like a damned fool. But thankfully, I wasn't in the middle of everyone. And I was using the Vision Pro and I was using Mac virtual display. And I agree that the ultra wide, while incredibly novel, is generally speaking just too much, especially since like the menu bar runs the entire width of the display. You know, if you think about the way it is on my desktop, on my desktop at home or my laptop desktop at home, I have three different displays. So they each get a menu bar and I can use the dock on any of them.

1:27:16Right. And it'll be centered. The dock will be centered at the bottom of each individual display. And the menu bar is repeated across or, well, effectively repeated across each of these three displays. On the ultra wide, it's just one freaking huge display that, like you said earlier, something like 90 or 120 degrees of your vision. so if you need to find the menu bar you got to crane your turn your head all the way to the left to go find it and i don't mean to imply that it's a burden but it's it's striking right um i think the ultra wide is a bit too much but the wide is incredible and i got a lot of work done with this on now granted the the comfort i think i i've actually while i was sitting there i ordered one of the uh 50 belkin head strap things that i should have ordered a while ago and apparently my local store doesn't have in stock, which was a bummer.

1:28:03I was literally going to drive home by the Apple store to grab one of them, but it was not in stock. So leaving the comfort behind or aside for a minute, it was so incredible to be able to have all of this real estate. And it's all right there. I'm in this little closet of a room, and I have effectively a Pro Display XDR, maybe not literally, but effectively a Pro Display XDR right in front of me. It was phenomenal. And not only that, but I could put music, the music app, like above the display. So I'm using the native Vision OS music app that's in 3D space above my ultra wide display, excuse me, my wide display or whatever.

1:28:45It was so amazing. So over the last few years, what I've really wanted to do, and this started especially during COVID, is I want to be able to work wherever I want to work, right? And leave aside the Vision Pro for a second, just just in general, I want to work wherever I want to work. And when I entered the pandemic, when we all entered the pandemic in 2020, if I'm not mistaken, I still had an iMac Pro and a very serviceable 13-inch MacBook Pro. And over time, I feel like we are answering more and more, or Apple is answering more and more questions. So I was thinking about this, The first question is, can I take my computer with me?

1:29:25And that's a solved problem, right? If you want to take your computer with you, you can just get a laptop. That is not up for grabs. We've solved this problem for 30, 40 years now or something like that. Not a big deal. The second problem is, can I power it? And that isn't much of a problem, generally speaking, if you go to a library or something like that. Typically, you can plug into power. But even if you can't, you can always bring like a USB-C battery or something like that to give you another hour or two. There's plenty of ways that you can solve this problem. So neither of these are really new problems or really that terribly interesting.

1:30:02But where things got interesting, I think, was starting in around 2020 with Apple Silicon, And when Apple answered the question, can I get my work done on it? And that started in 2020 with Apple Silicon, because now the computer that is portable, that I can pick up and walk away with, is just as powerful, if not more powerful than that iMac Pro that was sitting on my desk. and part of the reason why i returned to the full-time laptop lifestyle was because my macbook pro my m1 max macbook pro at the time was considerably quicker than my imac pro and my m3 max macbook pro is considerably quicker than a lot of apple desktops and and i don't have to really make any compromises like it was such an incredibly freeing feeling if you're still on intel it is such an incredibly freeing feeling to know that you can take this incredibly powerful computer and just walk away with it.

1:30:57You can just buy a laptop and walk away with it. And you don't need a MacBook Pro to do that. Like, as we've said many times, the MacBook Airs are also incredibly powerful computers that you can easily walk away with. It's unreal. And then, so can I get my work done on it? Hell yeah, I can, because they are so darn powerful. And then the other thing, and this is where the Vision Pro comes in, is do I have the space to get my work done on it? And I mean, screen real estate. A 13-inch laptop is not a fun way to get work done unless you're doing very, very basic stuff. But typically, in the last couple of years, and I've talked about this on the show, I bought a 2K portable display, a bus-powered portable display.

1:31:41It is a piece of trash, but I love it because that gives me a second display that I can set next to my MacBook Pro. It's super thin, super light. It doesn't need a power supply. Like I said, it's bus-powered. It's great. And that would get me enough that I could do development work in a pinch on the go. It wasn't fun, but I could do it. With the Vision Pro, I can legitimately do my development work, and it might be a little less convenient than having my full array of three 5K displays, but not that much. The compromise, even with that spare physical 2K display, the compromise was still quite large.

1:32:19But now, if you can leave aside the fact that you look like a frigging idiot, the compromise is really not that much at all. And in fact, for most people that don't have 15Ks sitting in front of them, it's actually arguably better in the ultra-wide display. Now, I agree with Marco. I think ultra-wide is actually too much, but that's neither here nor there. My point is just that I am now able to set up an entire workstation by way of a MacBook Pro and a Vision Pro. And I just think that is so incredibly cool. That is so cool that one of the things I can do, which I haven't done yet, but one of the things I could do is during the workday, if I feel like I'm just a little uncomfortable in my desk chair or what have you, I can go down to my couch and I can sit on my couch with my nerd goggles on my head and I can be doing work on my couch.

1:33:15there's nothing wrong with it. It's almost as good as on my desk. And I just think that is such an incredibly powerful, cool thing. And again, there's so many things I could say to poo-poo this. I'm talking about what,$9 ,000 worth of hardware or something like that. It is an absolutely asinine amount of money that I'm talking about. I said earlier, the laptop was like five grand. The Vision Pro is$3 ,500 plus the$400 developer strap went out like nine grand. That is bananas. but it is so incredibly cool to have that future i was gonna say in my hands but also on my face today and i think that that's so incredibly powerful but here's where i'm gonna drag marco back in oh no you know what you know what else is missing you know what the thing is that would really make this truly and incredibly and just it perfectly portable i have i can figure out power I can figure out my display.

1:34:09But Marco, what do I not have yet? What is not internal to my MacBook Pro? Internet. Internet. I cannot imagine how cool it will be when Apple finally one day, when I'm 95 years old, decides to put a cellular modem in this MacBook Pro. Because then, then, this literally could be used anywhere. Anywhere there's civilization. I'm sure there's an asterisk there, but you know what I'm saying. I could go to my beloved park bench slash picnic table. I could go wherever the hell. I could be in the car in the passenger seat. I could be wherever, and I can have my MacBook Pro and my Vision Pro, and I can get work done damn near as well as I can do it on my desk.

1:34:53And whether or not you think that's a wise use of my money, whether or not you think it's a smart idea to put this nerd goggles on your face, it is so powerful. I would say empowering, but I think that might be a little dramatic, but it's powerful that I can get my work done in the same fidelity, for lack of a better word, as my desk. And I can do that almost anywhere. I can do it anywhere that I have internet. And that to me is so cool. And I still mostly agree with Marco that, well, I 100 % agree with Marco, that if this is something that didn't work for you before, like the Mac virtual display thing didn't work for you before, you're probably not going to like it now.

1:35:34I concur. It is better, as Marco had said, but it's not night and day better. But if you're like me, and this is something that worked before, but now you want to see what it's like now, let me tell you, it's so good. It's so good. And this is the sort of thing that if you have the money to spend on this sort of thing and the desire to be able to work wherever in maybe it's only that you travel a lot you want to be able to work really efficiently in a hotel room or whatever the case may be suddenly this is becoming and money many other people have said this over the last few days this is starting to become a killer feature for me and i think that this will gen i genuinely think that this will make me want to use my vision pro more not in the house necessarily i still think all the problems we've talked about many times about not being enough content is still true in the house but it's going to make me use it out of the house especially on the occasions that i travel much much more and i cannot say enough good things about it if apple really cared about this use case with the you know the m5 powered successor to the vision pro or whatever they should just let you plug a thunderbolt cable from the headset into your mac to get rid of the latency thing that marco was complaining about like just fully embrace the idea of it as an external monitor and yeah it'll start to do all the 3d and the tracking and the blah blah blah but the latency should be gone thanks to whatever clever thing they do over thunderbolt to you know essentially rendering into a virtual display somewhere inside the vision pro that it then puts into 3d space in front of you without having to do any wi-fi or compression shenanigans or stuff like that but i don't i'm not sure apple cares that much about this use case i know casey you love this use case but i think apple probably thinks the appropriate level of technological and cost technological innovation and cost is what they're doing now pretty good pretty uh pretty good resolution very big display wireless convenient no cables you don't have to put all the extra hardware and memory inside the vision pro to support it and stuff like that but but yeah you can see how if the vision pro was emphasizing this use case much more and de-emphasizing many other ones you first of all would have to make the vision probably even more expensive just for the memory stuff but you could do that and if you want to go really expensive you know the vision pro with an m5 in it you know what that could do they could just freaking run mac os in addition to vision os you know i mean like with virtualization but like you could just run your mac like why do you need to have this laptop that you bring with what is the what is the purpose of the laptop it's just sitting there over in the corner right again it would make it even more expensive heavier hotter you'd have to have an external compute thing the battery would have to be bigger but like that's not the use case that apple is going for so i don't think they're going to do any of that but technologically speaking because apple like taco bell is using all the same different ingredients to make lots of different things slightly different results yeah but you look at the vision pro and you're like you do you know all the pieces are there like if you want if you could if you could arrange these lego pieces to make vision pro like the casey's dream like on the go mac development thing all the pieces are there except for apple cell modem that's going to put cellular into mac someday which we'll have a story on in a future episode if we remember to do it but yeah We're still waiting for that day.

1:38:44It's a race between a worthy Mac Pro chip and cellular and Macs, and it looks like Casey might win this one. You never know. I'm glad, actually, you brought up the plugging it in via Thunderbolt thing because I should say that my experience, I believe I've only exclusively used it with the developer strap with the thing plugged in. So that's another reason why Marco's experience might have been slightly worse than mine. And it does appear that, by default, it will try to hop on Wi-Fi between the computer and the Vision Pro. And I think it negotiates this via Bluetooth. But I definitely noticed once I plugged it in, and I think I actually killed Bluetooth on my Mac if I recall correctly, it clearly renegotiated the connection over the cord, over the cable.

1:39:28And then I pulled it out because I realized like a ding dong, I had taken the cable that's coming out my right ear and connected it to the left side of my computer. I don't know what I was thinking. So I unplugged it and moved it to the right side of my computer. and the screen immediately went black. And once I plugged it back in, it took a few seconds before it renegotiated, but it did come back on its own. But I think that that certainly helped like latency and stuff like that. Some of the legitimate complaints that Marco had. But yeah, either way, it is so cool. And there's no easy way for Apple to demo this when they do like the Vision Pro demos or whatever, because it all is relying on like your Apple ID or whatever it's Apple account now.

1:40:07and it would be a lot to get this to work. But, oh man, if you have a friend where you could just strap their face computer on your face for a minute, it's worth trying because it is so freaking cool. All right, thank you to our sponsors this week, Tailscale, Delete Me, and Aura Frames. And thank you to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of ATP membership is ATP Overtime. This is our bonus topic every week. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about the story about there's a Mac emulator called Mini VMac that was being rejected by Apple's notarization even from third-party app stores in the EU, which is quite a story.

1:40:54So we're going to be talking about the Mini VMac notarization rejection from the EU app stores. Interesting story. Anyway, you can hear our coverage of that in overtime this week by joining ATBJ.FM slash join. Thank you, everybody, for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

1:41:31It was accidental. And 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-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. Before we get to Casey's thing on the after show, can I do a quick, this is not an ad, discussion of one of our sponsors this week. Yeah. Yeah. Go for it. This is not legit, not an ad. If you're listening to the non-member version, you by now probably have already heard the ad for our frames.

1:42:30This is not the ad. This is just me talking about our frames, which they did send us one of them for free. So take that with a grain of salt. I got mine for free. I have never bought a digital picture frame. Honestly, I thought they were like, why would anyone want that? It's just like a really low quality screen in your house. i have plenty of actual pictures up on the wall or whatever so i you know whatever they sent it to me it's free i guess i'll set it up to see what it's like love the thing i don't understand why like again they're they're inexpensive it's not like it's not like it's not a pro display xdr right it's not like because you know it can't be it's not thousands of dollars right they're inexpensive it's an inexpensive small color screen kind of like casey's like 2k monitor thing that he loves even though like it's not super high quality i didn't like who would care that you have like i see my pictures they're on my phone they're on my mac like why do i want to have a frame in my house that rotates through those pictures turns out i do want to have that i can't like it's so much enjoyment of looking at which picture it's showing right now i pointed it at my favorites library which has like 30 000 photos and something it was like no problem i love the thing like oh what was that picture you just swipe on the top to go back to the freeze i know this sounds like an ad honestly like i and probably this is like you know a gift like i would not have bought this for myself i would not have ever bought a digital frame as evidenced by the fact that i've literally never bought one i never bought one for someone else i always thought they were dumb having been gifted this one essentially as part of a sponsorship made me realize i like digital picture frames that's it it's not an ad uh that i just wanted to say that i've discovered that i like digital picture frames yeah the aura stuff is legitimately really really good and you will hear me or some of you have heard me do the sponsor read, but for real, and I'm now kind of regurgitating the sponsor read, but if you've had one of these in the past, this is not like that because the ones in the past, you have to put an SD card in and it's just trash.

1:44:23And I'm not going to repeat the ad, but suffice to say this is all that, but done right. It's really quite good. I took like, you know, two minutes to set it up ages ago and have not touched it since. Yep. No, it's genuinely good stuff. All right. So I have a conundrum. And I'm probably making a mountain out of nothing because, hi, have we met? But I am, I think at the point that I'm ready to release the briefly previously mentioned, or I guess not so briefly, actually previously mentioned update for call sheet where you can have multiple lists of pins. So effectively, multiple batches of favorites, if you will.

1:45:00So I think I'm ready to release. But then it occurred to me, you know what? Apple has said to developers a handful of times recently, you know, you can tell us when you're going to be doing a new app or a new feature or whatever, and maybe you'll get a feature on the App Store. Maybe you'll get an editorial on the App Store. It'll be great. And I know full well that the likelihood of my little dinky app getting a feature on the App Store is not great. But I thought, what's it going to hurt to do what they ask you to do and report in and say, yeah, I've got this big new feature. It's the thing that almost all my users have asked for at some point or another.

1:45:37Why wouldn't I just tell them? And so I went down the path of telling Apple, hey, I'm going to be doing this probably in the next week or two. And completely fairly, especially given the time of year, very early on in Little Wizard, they have you go through to get the information that they want. They say, hey, we really prefer for you to give us three weeks before your launch, which in and of itself is fine, but that means I'm not hitting my self-imposed deadline of before the end of the year. And my question to the two of you, and I think I'd like to start with Marco if that's okay, is knowing that there's no real urgency to get this out other than a completely self-imposed deadline of wanting to be done with it before the end of the year.

1:46:21Should I hold on till like the first full week of January? So like two or three weeks from where, I guess three-ish weeks from where we are now and give Apple the chance to feature me, even though I intellectually know that there's almost no chance of it happening. Like what's it gonna hurt to delay and try? Or should I just get this out the door now? What do you think? I have a question for you, Casey. Oh, sorry, yes. Before we get opinions. Do you know if Apple, not insists, but if Apple won't feature you if you launch without them? Is the featuring contingent on you launching coordinated in time with their feature?

1:46:57Or are those two separate things? That is an excellent question. And I don't know the answer, but I thought that I think they want you to release as they feature. I do not know if that's accurate, though. If only there's someone on the show who has experience with iOS. Okay, so this is why I came to the show. So tell me, what am I doing? What should I be doing? What am I doing wrong? What should I be doing? Help me. Okay, so first of all, I'll answer the second question first. They want you to coordinate your other marketing with them. They don't want to be the only place promoting an app. Other marketing?

1:47:33They want to jump on a bandwagon. and they want you to be doing a big push and they want to be a part of the big push. That's not always the case. That's not the only way they'll promote something, but that's why they want to coordinate with your release. Casey, you should email ATP and tell them you have a new app that you're launching. Maybe you should offer the CEO of your company to be a guest on our show. Yes, I should do that. Oh, God. That's such an inside joke, but yes. Anyway, yeah, we get a lot of PR email. Anyway, that being said, when you are trying to coordinate something like that by submitting it to them in advance with the number of weeks of notice and everything, that's kind of what you're going for.

1:48:10That is not guaranteed to actually happen. What also happens is if they see another app that like, hey, the blogs are posting about this app, like, hey, this thing got reviewed on Mac Stories, 9 to 5 and everything. If they see that, the Apps Re editorial team, they have people who look for that kind of stuff. If they see that, they will come to you and send you a message in App Store Connect saying there's a promotional opportunity if you just submit artwork of these specs by this date. And what that means is we might feature you in the App Store somewhere. So that's the other part of this. If you actually succeed in being featured, that's what they will go to you with.

1:48:52They'll go to you with a promo art request. and so they'll say all right the link link to some document somewhere on on apple site that says we're currently looking for this type of promote and it'll say in the request like a you know home screen header or whatever there's different names for the different positions in the app store different formats and everything and they'll send you there's a link to like a photoshop template and it's like you know you have to have design your artwork within these safe guides and have it feature these things but not these things and don't include screenshots, don't include words, it'll go through all these requirements with you.

1:49:29So then that's then placed on you and they'll say give us the promo artwork by so and so date. Usually give you like a week or something if you're lucky. Sometimes it's like 48 hours. Anyway as developers we are given that chance and we say okay well we can either rush to put this promo artwork together ourselves if we even can and if it will look any good or we can hire a designer or you know tell like because they they basically assume you have a designer ready to go like they assume you either are a designer or have one on staff because they assume everyone's a big company um so anyway so as an indie though then you're stuck with like all right i have to like find a designer and pay them to do this for me and then you have to start weighing like what is this going to be worth it or should i try to do it myself, like do my own custom promo artwork, but I'm a programmer, not a designer, and it'll look like crap.

1:50:24And the worse it looks, the less likely they are to actually use it and actually feature your app. Because when you submit that promo artwork to them, they basically say, thanks, we might feature you. That's it. So you're kind of throwing it into a black hole and hoping someday they maybe use it. They won't tell you where they're featuring you. They won't tell you when they're featuring you. They won't tell you if they choose to or not to you just kind of have to watch for it um although i think they've recently added a notification that if they do feature you now it finally tells you i mean that was very that was like two weeks ago very recent anyway the process of being featured in the app store requires something of you it requires you to you know if you're going to go through the what you were asking about about notifying them ahead of time that's one level if it's going to be like you know you having to make promo artwork which is usually required that's a different level there is a certain amount of work and cost that is going to be put on you.

1:51:20And so the question of whether all this is worth it or not is worth asking. Sometimes it is. I think usually for indies who already have marketing channels, usually I think it's not worth it to bend over backwards. Now, if you can address what they're asking for without too much spread off your back, without too much work, without too much cost, then sure, do it. You might as well do it if it's going to be easy. But if what they're asking for is going to cost you thousands of dollars in designer time or heck, even hundreds, it probably won't be worth it. Because the thing is an app store feature used to be worth a lot more than it's worth now because not a lot of people, it seems, are just casually browsing the app store, looking around for new apps to install.

1:52:15But it used to be that way. When iOS was younger and less mature and less established, when people were actually getting their first iOS devices still, there was a lot of just browsing around that happened. I remember back in my Instapaper days, Christmas Day used to be a huge sales day for me. It was one of my biggest sales days of the year because so many people, Instapaper had pretty good business on the iPad, and so many people would get iPads for Christmas, and that was often their first iOS device or at least their first iPad. And so they would then immediately go browsing around, hey, what can I do on this?

1:52:55Let me install a bunch of apps. Now, most people with iOS devices, this is not their first iOS device. So how many new apps they need to browse around and install goes down over time. And now there's so much out there, there's so many apps that I don't think a lot of people are just kind of browsing the editorial sections of the iOS app store. So I occasionally do get featured, which is very nice, I'm very thankful for it. But I see, like, when you look at the sales that happen as a result of that, it's hard to see a bump anymore. I'm sure it helps. I'm sure any bit helps. And if you don't already have a ton of exposure in any other way, you got to take whatever you can get.

1:53:37But the effect that it has has gone down over time to the point where now I think it's more of a vanity and honor thing than an actual thing that translates to sales. And so you should account for that in deciding how much to either spend accommodating their plans and or how much to change your plans in response to that. So my advice after all of that elaboration would be don't change your plans. Release it when you want to release it. And if they want to feature it, they'll come to you. Yeah. And I guess what I'm wrestling with is what's it going to hurt to wait and see? Like, what's it going to hurt to throw this over the wall, give myself the remainder of the year to breathe and perhaps, you know, just make sure everything is good to go.

1:54:23And yeah, I have, I guess, failed in that I haven't released the thing that I've been working on, but it's done. Like it's ready. It's released in test flight. And the only person that's really going to be disappointed in it not being out is me. And I don't feel like that's enough of a reason to rush it right and especially if you know god forbid the rollout ends up being a disaster well that's what i was gonna say like what does it hurt i would want to get it out and make sure it actually works before i get featured the worst thing you want to have happen is get featured just as you launch and there's some fatal bug that causes problems with your app and now you've like drawn lots of attention to your mistake like that's why i want to get it out and from the wisdom of releasing it just before the holidays aside i would want to have my be sure the app that was going to be featured was stable and working which is fair but if i'm also coordinating the big release with apple i can't i can't have both right unless i'm missing well that's why i was asking do they care if you coordinate the release or do they just want to feature you because if they don't care if you coordinate the release i would want to have my new version out for three weeks you know maybe get a one or two bug fix updates out and then get featured if they don't insist that you not release your app until Marco's thing about they want to be coordinating with your marketing push.

1:55:43If you don't have a marketing push, I wonder how they'll feel about that. You are the marketing push, Apple. Right, right. Yeah, I don't know. I got a noodle on it and certainly if App Store Editorial wants to quietly whisper in my ear, not necessarily whether or not I'd be featured, but just, you know, what is the expectation? You'll never hear that. They'll never tell you that. I know. Trust me. Ask any iOS developer, you know, Ask underscore, ask Ben McCarthy, ask everyone you know who has apps in the store. They're all going to tell you the same thing. I even submitted PR artwork for some of my apps at one point.

1:56:15And they did actually, if not write about them, then at least list them somewhere at some point in the past. But no, they did not tell me when they were doing this. I found out because other people told me, hey, I saw your app on this thing. I'm like, oh, okay. Yeah, they did recently launch notifications for when you're feature-aware. And you can also, like I've been notified through AppFigures. They have a thing. If you use app figures, they'll tell you. But it is mostly just like you kind of just rely on people telling you on social networks, hey, congrats, I saw your app and this thing. And again, it's nice, but it's really hard to see much of a bump from those anymore just because, again, I think the number of people who are just casually browsing, looking for new apps to install, I think that number is very small these days.

1:56:55The reality is because, as I was saying earlier, because the iOS market is so full and so cutthroat and so dramatically over-served with just huge amounts of apps, you usually have to pay to get people to install your app. You have to buy search ads. You have to buy Facebook ads or whatever. And paying for app installs is not cheap because there's so much competition from everyone else trying to get people to install their apps. So the bids all get bid up. So it's really hard to get installs of your app because no one is going out there and just looking organically unless they hear about it from your other marketing channels, from your podcast, from your blog.

1:57:35That's where to promote your app. And just talking about it on here is worth way more than most types of App Store features that any of us would be likely to actually get. Now, if you happen to be like the app of the day on the front page of the App Store, then you're talking about different numbers. That is more substantial. And that is worth it. Of course, if you can get it, but this kind of smaller feature is like, oh, top apps to be cozy this winter or whatever, like that kind of stuff. You don't you're not going to see much from that. It is a nice honor. Again, like it's it's an honor to be featured and it's it's nice to have your work recognized by Apple and it feels good.

1:58:13But in terms of translating to actual like really meaningful sales and downloads, it's not much. Your plans are more important. So launch your app when you want to launch your app. And you can tell them afterwards, like once it's launched and once it's settled, you can email that address and say, hey, I got this new update out and it's being well received. And here's, you know, positive reviews or whatever. You can tell them afterwards. But don't change your plans for them because, first of all, they wouldn't do it for you. And second of all, you're better off serving your customers directly in the best way you see fit, not bending over backwards, trying to accommodate something that you might get from Apple that probably wouldn't have a ton of value.

1:58:51yeah well i appreciate the conversation i'll noodle on it and see what i decide to do um i don't know i don't know i gotta think on it but this is very helpful and i appreciate it