618: Type System Says No

37:58I do have an incentive for everyone in the audience to buy these. The current developer ecosystem of plugins to display things, it's very friendly. You can very easily make your own plugin, but there just aren't that many yet for different services. So I would love for more people to buy these so that way maybe more people would develop plugins for more stuff I might be able to do with it. But I'm very happy with this because it's finally like it's taking all of this amazing like this amazing cheap tech that we have now like hardware is so cheap now especially if you don't need like top of the line cutting edge stuff and so i'm i'm excited to see products like this you know even if this one particular thing isn't you know exactly what what you need out there there's so much amazing cheap hardware now that's that just makes it so much more accessible you can use it in so many more places more people can buy it more people can afford it more people can afford to replace it if it breaks if you have a need for some kind of ambient display in your house, check out Terminal.

38:56I think it's a really cool idea. Their heads are in the right place. It isn't some kind of weird, creepy startup trying to VC you up the rear end or anything. It's just a nice seeming, it's just like a nice effort to a nice product. So far, it passed muster as something that can live in our house, and that's pretty impressive. So the three things you're showing on it, is that just built-in stuff? Does it, I forget what you said, weather? Is it like a built-in weather thing, and then countdown? you just put a date in and it shows your countdown yeah i haven't yet made any custom things um frankly i just haven't had time i do intend to um because this this it's so it's so nice and good looking and useful that i think if i were ever to want to make like some dashboards for my business metrics say this would be great to have like you know two or three of these in my office uh you know just you know on it next to my desk or something like that um but right now i'm just using the like there is just in their existing like library of plugins that they they already have um i'm using like yeah the weather the date countdown and the office quotes those are all built in i think i mentioned uh a while back of the my brother had the need for the same type of thing to show like the family calendar it wasn't e-ink but it was like i don't know maybe it was color ink or maybe it's just a really bad looking lcd but it looked it looked very similar to this uh similar size similar proportions even you know similar like the little bezel was similar as well although i do kind of wish this thing didn't have the terminal logo on the front and the bezel was equal or on all sides but whatever it's cheap um but yeah like uh having e-ink one of the good roles of e-ink is to basically be configurable paper with all the advantages and disadvantages of paper you can't see paper if it's dark and you don't have light shining on it but if there is light shining on it it looks real good and doesn't take a lot of power and yada yada um so yeah i i'm not sure if i would use this but like well another question does it come with bundled support for like google calendar or other calendar things if you want to show your calendar and not just a calendar?

40:48It doesn't have any kind of iCloud support yet. So that's kind of what I want people to make. Otherwise, I'll be forced to make it for myself, and I don't want to. But I believe it does have Google Calendar support already. It does. If you go to slash integrations, useterminal.com slash integrations, you can see what they're currently advertising, for lack of a better word. And yes, Google Calendar's on there. But I also am an Apple Calendar person. So, yeah, I like the idea of this quite a bit. And on my personal to-do list of projects that I'll never get to and probably talk about a lot, the top of that list is still fiber.

41:24But somewhere not too far below that is writing my own dashboard-y thing, like Marco said, probably with Raspberry Pi. Because, hey, what else can I solve with Raspberry Pi? But I feel like it's a lot of work, especially if I want to make it look good, which is not my strongest suit. and I would have to get a bunch of integrations or find third-party code that does these integrations. It just seems like way too much effort. I love the idea of this, but the particular integrations I want doesn't seem like they exist. I still use Anylist, which is, I think it might've been a sponsor years and years and years ago, but I use that for our shopping lists and I use Apple Calendar.

42:04So this does not fit my needs today, but I concur with Marco's implied point that it could fit my needs tomorrow. Yeah, and also, if you are so inclined to write your own plugins, you pay an extra, I think, 20 bucks for access to the developer keys and everything, and you can do basically whatever you want with it then. And it seems like it's pretty easy, because it's all just web page rendering, basically. It's like rendering HTML and CSS to an image. So it seems like, I haven't delved into that yet, but it seems like it's pretty easy to make your own plugins. i'm still using panic status board an app that was discontinued many years ago but somehow still is running on my ipad um yeah that's that is very limited but casey if you're thinking of doing this you might want to try doing it on ios or ipad os because there's that cool swift charting library that exists it depends on what you want to do with it like what what this thing sounds like is doing like rendering html to an image is way more flexible i kind of wish status board did that but it doesn't but anyway uh yeah this is cool i'll definitely keep in mind if i have a need for something else i already said last time that i didn't think i had any need for a uh um a digital picture frame and apparently i do so maybe this will find a place as well like i'm thinking because you know we do use google calendar maybe having this well so the thing is we have a paper calendar on our fridge but the reason we do that is because just to see the pictures essentially i don't think anyone we should just take the paper calendar just like fold it over so all you see is the picture on the top page and not the calendar no actually i do look at it i looked at i look here's when i look at the calendar that's hanging on the fridge i see the pictures and i like seeing i make the calendar out of my own pictures you know one picture for each month um the main time i look at it and i did it today was when i'm taking the milk out of the fridge and i see the expiration date i glance at the calendar that's on the fridge door to see what they say is this expired how close is this to being expired so yeah maybe uh i don't know maybe there's a role for this somewhere um i'll think about it interesting i'm looking at the api documentation which we'll also link in the show notes and they have a bring your own device section and they say look the components are probably going to cost more than what we have put together.

44:07We share this not to dissuade or pitch you, but rather as a friendly FYI. Making your own terminal from scratch is not an economically rational decision, but a labor of love. I mean, John, you could make a custom plugin that would, you know, just you enter, every time you buy new milk, you enter expiration dates in your API somewhere. And then it just counts down the days on the terminal on the fridge to, you know, the milk has three days left. There's more than one thing of milk in the fridge, but yeah it's just easier to pull it out and glance at the calendar as you close the door it's the the system works fine but that's what that's when i use it that's when i actually look at the calendar portion the rest of the time i'm just looking at the image part well i like the idea of this quite a lot i really really do um and it's honestly it's the first one that doesn't look like somebody's diy project like it actually it's actually like a legitimate product like it isn't like you know if somebody's you know flimsy 3d printed 3d printed yeah it's not like and it isn't like you know held together by like tapes and screws like it's just it's actually just like a nice feeling and looking product.

45:04We are sponsored this episode by Masterclass. For a gift that's always on time and lasts a lifetime, you can't do better than Masterclass. Your loved ones can learn from the best to become their best. This can be a gift for unlimited learning. You can learn from any Masterclass instructor anywhere, on a smartphone, computer, smart TV, even audio only in audio mode. So this can do all sorts of wonderful things for you or as a gift for your loved ones. You can prioritize like a boss with multimedia icon Elaine Welteroth. You can learn how to invest in the stock market with Ray Dalio and some of Wall Street's best.

45:39You can build a billion dollar company with self-made billionaire Mark Cuban. And these classes really make a difference. 88 % of members feel that Masterclass made a positive impact on their lives. So this is a great way to just get yourself into new things this year, develop skills, try new things. This is the time you have both the holidays with gifting season and you have the new year and this is a great time to kind of take some you know evaluate what you want to be doing with your life and say you know maybe i do want to get better at this hobby i've always wanted to do but never quite felt right or maybe i do want to get better at work or develop my skill in these areas masterclass is great for that masterclass always has great offers during the holidays sometimes up to as much as 50 off head over to masterclass.com slash ATP to see their current offer.

46:30That's up to 50 % off at masterclass.com slash ATP. Masterclass.com slash ATP. Thank you so much to Masterclass for sponsoring our show.

46:45Last week, there was, I think it was last week, there is a new episode of Apple's Immersive Video Wildlife show. the previous episodes were I think rhinos first and then elephants second and now there's a new episode about sharks and it's pretty good it's like I don't know less than 10 minutes and you should check it out if you're one of the dummies like me that bought a vision pro so check it out if you haven't I just wanted to call it to people's attention because I feel like because not that many people seem to have vision pros when new things like this drop I often am unaware until I put my face computer on my face again and just go spelunking through the Apple TV app.

47:24So this is the service I provide to you listeners for all six of you that have one of these. You're welcome. And you also provide a personalized recommendation service to me because you say, hey, there's a new thing out in the chat before we record. So I also, I watched the Sharks. Oh, what did you think? It was delightful. Again, this is what I want to see more of. So I'm happy to see that it's happening very slowly, but it's happening. We are getting more immersive video it still feels like demos of content not content like it still feels like these are little snacks and little previews of what could be done if somebody gave us like full length content like you know because i think i think the sharks thing was maybe like what seven or eight minutes long like something like that yeah like these aren't long these are these aren't even as long as sitcom episodes like they're they're just they're like you know seven to 15 minute chunks of example content and it's good example content but it still feels like example content and so i that that being said um there was also news i think yesterday um there was that black magic camera announced you see that oh yes yes so because i think this is i'd actually like to talk about this for a second um so basically black magic released a or announced rather a camera that's shipping in i think a couple of months it's a dedicated hardware camera specifically for recording Apple immersive video video.

48:51It looks basically like, you know, two giant lenses, like two eyes on the front of what otherwise looks like a fairly common Blackmagic camera back. It's two, you know, 180 degree kind of fisheye style lenses, each one having an 8K image sensor behind it. So it records 8K per eye at I think 90 frames a second up to. And then of course, all the different video specs of color depth and everything else. Before this, I'm not sure what people have been using to record the immersive video to date. I know Canon has that, like we talked about it when they announced it. Canon released like a dual fisheye lens that you could attach to some of their more recent cameras.

49:35The Canon setup is about$5 ,000 all in. If you look at the reviews of people who actually try to use it, first of all, it is not as good as the Blackmagic thing in specs in that the Canon lens is using two eyepiece lenses to project an image onto one single 8K sensor, so it kind of just divides the sensor in half, projects the left eye onto half the sensor, right onto the other half of the sensor. So the Canon one is lower resolution, and I believe only up to 60 frames a second. So the Blackmagic camera is higher spec'd. It is dedicated for this purpose, designed right from the start for this purpose, and instead of costing$5 ,000, it costs$30 ,000.

50:15Oh, how cheap. A bit of a jump. Now, this sounds ridiculous, right? I know how this sounds. A$30 ,000 camera to shoot Apple immersive video. But again, if you look at the Canon reviews, people trying to use the Canon double lens to do this, the main challenges seem to be on the software end, like whatever data format the camera is generating, it's like a special format that you need their special software to transform into anything else. And apparently not only does that require a subscription that nobody wants to pay, but apparently it also is not easily compatible with Apple Vision Pro or Apple Immersive Video and is also not as good of quality because it's not having 8K per eye or more than 60 frames per second.

50:58So I am actually excited to see this Blackmagic camera release. And I wonder, I don't think we know what Apple has used to shoot the existing Apple immersive video. Maybe they were just using like a preview beta version of this camera. It's possible. That wouldn't surprise me at all. Like maybe they worked with Blackmagic to develop it. And part of that process was they were able to use pre-production versions to shoot all this other content. That was all shot on iPhone. Yeah, okay. Because you can buy a$30 ,000 camera or you can just use your iPhone. yeah right yeah what's the difference um but the reason i'm excited about a thirty thousand dollar camera is not because i'm going to buy it not only is that obviously thirty thousand dollars but also it's like a black magic professional camera i have no idea what the process is to shoot with that camera and then whatever data format it makes to take that onto whatever computer however it's edited i have no clue i was gonna say you probably need a pc and adobe premiere or something no well the canon one you do actually but but uh no i the black man i think i think it goes into davinci resolve uh but i've you know i've heard of that as a name i don't know what that means i've never seen the app but you know you're you're practically an expert so the point is like right now like whatever this camera is going to be when it comes out in a couple of months it's going to be 30 grand it's going to require who knows what else in the ecosystem around it to get that video from shooting it to you know actually being able to play on a vision pro who knows what app plays those how do you get the data into the vision pro or do you have to put it in the apple tv marketplace however that works does apple photos support it can you put it in your photo library like who knows like those are all going to be worked out over time but what's exciting about this is that the existence of this camera being publicly released and probably being significantly better than the canon solution because the canon solution was just kind of you know bolting on an existing lens onto cameras that weren't designed for this.

52:53This is designed from the start for this. I'm not going to buy a$30 ,000 camera to do all my video projects that I do. I'll do a row of them. But other people will be able to who know what they're doing. Video production companies will be able to buy or rent these and shoot a concert, shoot a play, a nature documentary, whatever it is. Getting these cameras out there will be a huge boost to getting more immersive video content made. you know whether it's the high profile content snacks that apple keeps giving us or i think more interestingly get these into the hands of like youtubers and smaller production houses like because again you'll like they'll be able to rent these so if you're doing a shoot i'm sure you can rent one for a few a few thousand bucks or something like that and and that makes it more accessible to smaller productions so this i think is an important milestone i think this is more important than just breathing through the news for an hour like i think this is actually going to be a much more important deal than that.

53:52And yes, this is$30 ,000 today. The Canon solution is, you know, quote, only$5 ,000. And that's giving much of the functionality of this. Granted, you know, the reviews say it's not very good in different ways, but those are mostly workflow problems and software and support problems. It's only a matter of time. Maybe, you know, maybe one or two other options that are substantially in the ballpark of that Black Magic camera capability, but maybe a little bit more consumer and price friendly. Maybe in four or five years, maybe we'll be able to get something like that for$2 ,000 or$3 ,000 in the prosumer market.

54:37And that becomes something that maybe nerdy people like us start to buy and experiment with, or we start to rent it from camera rental companies for important family events. I would love the ability to buy or rent something like that and capture like basic, you know, when my kid has a band concert. I mean, obviously, that would be a little disruptive to the audience members behind me. So maybe maybe I work with the school on that one. But like, you know, or, you know, a family event Christmas Day, like when Apple immersive video capture becomes accessible to prosumers and consumers. I think that's going to be a big deal if the Vision Pro still exists by that point because I hope it does because yeah it's great to be able to have a shark video here and there but what I want is to capture the people I love and the moments in my life in that format because it really does feel like you're transported right there again and that's so much better than little postage stamp dream blobs you get from the iPhone immersive video and I'm glad to have those dream blobs It's better than not having anything at all that's spatial.

55:45Like, I'm glad we have that option. But the immersive video with the 8K per eye is so much better. It's like it's an order of magnitude different in, you know, in so many ways and in quality, obviously in frame rate, in just how much of the scene you're capturing and how it feels to watch it. And you really feel like you are in it. That's a very different thing. And so when that becomes accessible to regular people in some way, even if it's in a few thousand dollar camera, like photo enthusiasts have been buying a few thousand dollar cameras for many years. Like it's not – that is something that like everyone will be able to afford.

56:23But it is something that gets it into the prosumer market in a much better way than a$30 ,000 custom pro everything camera. So this I think is a very important step. Like this camera being released that shoots directly to immersive video apparently or at least can be easily processed into it. That's a really big deal because that signifies that we are on that path and that maybe in a few more years – and that now people – production companies now will be able to rent that and shoot a concert or whatever and that's going to be huge. But then it's going to be even better when we can shoot our own memories with that.

56:58Yeah, and I just want to reiterate, I know you just went over this, but I harp on this regularly because it's very hard. It seems like a distinction without a difference, the different kind of modes that you can get in in the Vision Pro for video. And I just want to reiterate, there's 3D movies where you have a rectangle, but a rectangle that has depth to it, right? So it's just a rectangle, but you can see into the rectangle. It's just like a 3D movie. then there's these dream blobs i think you called it a minute ago which is a very accurate description which is where you have a very small often square if not rectangle um that has that's the way they represent it and render it they the the edges kind of like are a little like wispy if you will and kind of fade out sort of kinda and that is when you've recorded something on one of your devices like an iphone or whatever and it also has depth but unlike a 3d movie where the the canvas if you will, is multiple feet wide and multiple feet tall by default.

57:57You know, the canvas or the viewport, for lack of a better way of describing it, is very, very small by comparison. And with both of these, with 3D video or the, excuse me, the 3D movies and with spatial video, you don't get to control where the camera's pointing. You are along for the ride. There's depth, but you're along for the ride. And what we're talking about, the key that makes this so impressive is that immersive video, and I'll continue to harp on this for a long time now, immersive video, as you move your head and as you look around, you're changing the perspective of the camera. You're effectively moving the camera.

58:32You're looking at different things. And the jump from a 3D movie or a spatial video to immersive is just night and day. It is wildly different, wildly, wildly different. And even if you can reason through what that difference would feel like, I assure you actually living it is very different than what you think. And in the end of the day, I couldn't agree with you more, Marco, that being able to capture full-on immersive video would be such a game changer. And I'm not going to spend$30 ,000 to do it. I don't think I'm even going to spend$1 ,000 to do it. Like Underscore had tooted, I'll probably forget to put the link in the show notes, but he had tooted, you know, hey, I can imagine being able to rent this for a thousand bucks and just goof off and try some things.

59:16And I agree with Underscore. Or for me,$1 ,000 is still a bit rich for my blood, but the point is still fair. And I absolutely concur with you, Marco, that how cool would it be if you could set this up, and I don't know what the mechanics of this would look like, but set this up when everyone's opening Christmas presents or a Christmas dinner or something like that. Yeah, or like your wedding. Or at your wedding, God, yes. And you can look around and you can see, let's take your wedding as an example. You can watch yourself exchange vows with your partner, but you can also turn your head and you can look and see how your parents are reacting.

59:54And you're not losing anything because it's not the camera. It's not the recording that has moved. It's your viewport into the recording. So you could turn your head right back and look at your partner, and then you can look at their parents. You know what I mean? And so it is so incredibly powerful. And I cannot wait until that is in the hands of someone like a prosumer, like you've been saying. But it's important to understand if you've seen a 3D movie and you think, oh, that's it. This is not that great. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. This is more like a 3D IMAX than it is anything else. Yeah.

1:00:29Like this more than any other format, this makes you feel like you are there. You are in that room with the people. So if, you know, like I could just imagine, like I think back to, you know, videos I've taken of relatives who have since passed away. Like I'm so happy I have those videos. This you feel like you are in that room. So imagine the emotional weight of if I had the video of my grandma with my kid, if I had that video in this format, I mean obviously I probably would not have hauled a$30 ,000 giant camera into the assisted living facility for that video. But like – so it's obviously very important for the phones to keep getting better at capturing that stuff because they're always with you.

1:01:14But we don't know what media will be important to either us in the future or our future generations. you know like when we look back at our own childhood you know there's almost no videos of us generally there's you know we're lucky to have like you know a few photos here and there uh and then when you go to like our parents or our grandparents there are usually like there's maybe one picture of them when they're young maybe it's their wedding picture and that's it like you know like as we move forward you know it becomes more commonplace to have more media captured of people and in more rich formats whether you know moving first to first from photos into like color photos and then better photos and then more photos and videos and more videos i think it will be i think we will if you if you start capturing this kind of video somehow when it becomes available to you capture important moments here and there you know while it's still expensive and hard to do maybe it's only things like weddings or whatever but like over time that will become more common and you'll be so happy you have those videos and so that i i'm looking forward to that because like right like i thought back before the vision pro was out i thought that the version of immersive video that the phones were shooting now and the vision pro itself as a capture as a vision pro itself can capture video like spatial video but the quality is not great and the immersion therefore is somewhat limited um you know as case is that you're only capturing like a rectangle in front of you and the resolution and frame rates are pretty rough they're they're pretty bad honestly so this is the next this is like a leap above that this is a huge above that and so yes it's nice to have you know some some spatial video of people here and there it's it would be a heck of a lot nicer to have this so i i look forward to this being more available over time.

1:03:06I think the realities of dealing with dual 8K video streams with 180 degree fields of view, there's always going to be some difficulty in shooting that. That's always going to be a little bit of a skilled operation to do it well. And I think for a foreseeable future, that's going to be somewhat expensive to do also. But$30 ,000, it sounds ridiculous now, but trust me, to a production house, that's not that ridiculous. And again, there's the rental option and it's only going to come down from here. So I look forward to this. I think this is a big deal. I am tempted to buy one. I'm not going to, but...

1:03:40So you say. I'm not going to, but I might, but like what Underscore was saying, I might rent one someday. I mean, obviously I think it'll be a while before they're even available for rental, like from the rental sites and they will probably cost, you know, three to$5 ,000 for a few days with them. So even that's probably going to be more than I want to spend on my curiosities here, but I can see the future coming. I can see the first... The sun is rising in this area. I can see the little glimmer of light. I think this is going to be really cool in not that much time from now. On the price of these things, like you said, I know$30 ,000 sounds like a lot, but just the regular digital cameras they shoot movies with get into those prices and they have multiple ones of those cameras.

1:04:22This is in line with prices of fancy cameras that professionals use to shoot movies although professionals use iphones to shoot movies too but anyway it's not i know it sounds ridiculous it's just not a consumer device it's a pro device just go look at how much the equipment costs to shoot your average like marvel movie or whatever they're expensive uh another thing is i you know so as you said like there's the professional cameras and then we've got our iphones with what they're doing and obviously it's not great because the cameras are dinky and small low resolution and they're like five millimeters from each other but i am looking at the picture of this camera and i'm looking at my phone and i am wondering that if the iphone 20 had cameras on the far ends of the phone and you were to line those cameras up with like basically the interpupillary distance of this camera would it match because i think those camera things they look kind of like they're about the same distance as your eyeballs like that's what they're going for right big lenses but like the centers of them are like human eye distance from each other well an iphone held sideways the corners of that are also within human eye interpupillary distance from each other and if you put a 180 degree fisheye camera on either end of your iphone and if they were 8k on the iphone 25 or something obviously it's not going to be as good as a 30 000 camera but you're getting closer to what we're looking for which is instead of the little tiny rectangle field of view that is you know the blob or the postage stamp that you you turn your head and what you see is not the thing you recorded because it's not there because the field of view is so narrow right yep and the field of view being narrow is mostly due to the lenses they simply can't capture image that are to on the side of you right i mean if you look at these lenses you'll see they look like spheres poking out of it like your iphone can't capture that the light coming from the side just hits the side of the camera lens like they're they're flat it's not going to work right um and the the depth perception being slightly off on your phone is because the cameras are just so darn close the left and right image aren't that different from each other we want the when we're looking through our eyeballs the left and right image to be different from each other based on how far our eyeballs are apart and everyone's eyeballs are a little bit different distance but that's basically what we want out of it and this camera achieves that and another thing that i have a question about i don't maybe someone who knows about these cameras can write in so i'm thinking of looking at this camera and i'm thinking about like you know professional movie cameras that you see of the ari alexa or the red cameras all the modern all the companies that like did well in the modern digital camera space um and they sell you know they sell the camera bodies which cost as much as a car and they're just like a cube with and then you buy their incredibly expensive twenty thousand dollar lenses that you stick onto that cube and then you buy their fifty thousand dollar sd card that is really just a 10 cent thing from a drugstore but they charge you a thousand dollars for it although did you did you see what they charge for an eight terabyte ssd no is it less than apple or more it's like half what apple charges oh lovely that's the red i think the red cameras had uh back in the early days the red cameras had flash storage that was more expensive than apples like again it's the same storage but it's like well no this is the special red stuff and we guarantee it and but it's it's quite a racket i mean they're they're you know they're selling these to hollywood studios with multi-million dollar budgets so it is what it is right but my question about these cameras with like the regular ones like i said you buy the body but then you buy the lenses and the lenses tend to cost as much or more than the body because you can buy 17 different lenses depending on what you need for your shot are lenses a thing on this camera or can you not use lenses at all because like what's the point like you need to get you need to get 180 degree field of view that's the like so if you put two lenses on there and they also got 180 degree field of view like is being like i don't understand how lenses work with that wide of a field maybe just works the same maybe it's like you're looking through binoculars and it's like you're sitting and you know if you put this at a concert and you had like a lens that was magnified it would be like you were sitting five rows up from where the camera is placed because it's magnified but you'd still get a 180 and that can't possibly be true right because the things from the side like you can't ever with a regular lens with a narrow field of view you can essentially zoom in and it seems like you're closer to the concert but with a 180 degree field of view the thing that would be directly to your left if you were in the front row is never going to be directly to your left if you're in the back row.

1:08:38Like you'll never be able to see that person's ear dead on because they're in the front row and you're in the back row. You know what I mean? So I think like I'm looking at this camera, I'm like, that doesn't look like there's any place where you could put a lens on this thing. I mean, maybe. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. I don't know enough about this to know, but I'm pretty sure like if you're shooting this 180 degree field of view, I think it kind of has to be a certain focal length. Like it has to be like whatever that focal length is, like that ultra-wide focal length to capture 180 degrees, I think it just has to be that.

1:09:10Because what you're trying to do ultimately is you're trying to match the visual perspective of what our eyes see. Well, our eyes don't see 180. Our perfect vision is garbage. But you're trying to make it so that when Casey turns his head, there's something there that he can see. Yeah, and I mean, by the way, the resolution on the edges of immersive video is also garbage. Like, we say we can turn our heads around to look at the sides, and we can. But it's very blurry and low res when you get to the edges. It's better than our peripheral vision, I'll tell you that. Yes, but for the most part, you want to focus straight ahead.

1:09:46But what you get in the field of view is useful for just additional immersion and context. So yes, you can look over to the sides and the top and the bottom and everything. But you generally don't spend much time doing that. Also, they're out of focus. I mean, you don't have to look 90 degrees. You can just look off center a little bit. But I mean, they obviously have the 360 cameras as well. 360 cameras that like erase the tripod that they're on which is just you know the sort of the end game of this of like i capture video in every direction and like you know cleverly remove the the monopod that my camera is sitting on there you know the resolution is lower on those they're even more limited but i think with things like this like i don't think it seems to me that lenses different lenses for this camera are not useful or a thing both based on my reasoning about it and also by looking at the physical item i don't see how lenses would attach to it like the two lenses that are there are too close together so that's an interesting if that's true someone write in and tell me am i do they have lenses for them do they not would it would lenses just massively narrow the field of view and maybe that's a useful thing to do or not but i don't even think it can physically attach but anyway someone who knows write in and tell me but either way that's like if it's the case that you that lenses are not as important on this that's quite a change from decades and decades of of of you know movie cameras where it was all about which lens do you choose for this scene and how do you do this and that was just like when you reach the end game of like 360 degree camera in all directions uh there is there's no more like lenses are not a thing it's just like light we put the camera in a position and light comes from everywhere towards it right i mean yeah and maybe it's not really the end game because casey's saying like you know you can turn your head and stuff like that but one thing you can't do unfortunately with these cameras and any of the immersive video we've seen here with the exception of i think the immersive environments that apple puts you in um is if you stand up in your concert seat your perspective on the people on stage does not change because guess what the camera didn't stand up the camera was the same height the whole time so if you wanted to see the top of that person's head to see if there was a piece of confetti that landed on their head and you can't see it when you're sitting and you stand up you still can't see it because you're not you can't change your perspective in that way all you can do is look at different parts of the frame that was captured right with the apple immersive environments where the i don't know what they do like 3d modeling part or whatever you basically need to be like essentially in a game engine where oh if you're in a game engine when you stand up you can look on top of the dresser that previously you couldn't see the top of because it's all 3d rendered in real time and it's changed it's literally changing your essentially the quote-unquote camera's position in space so the immersive video to work well and it does work well you stay in the same position you stay seated you you can look up look down look left look right but what you can't do is stand up or step 10 feet to the left because that will not change your perspective on the video yeah but you know i think like you know the question about like whether we need lenses on this or whether you can i think that's immersive video like immersive 180 degree stereo video i would i would almost treat it as a different medium than cinema or a cinematic video what's important is your perspective but what's more more important like what what your environment has in it like you're not doing like There's less camera work that can be done because, first of all, if you move the camera too much, it makes people motion sick.

1:13:01And that's still a problem that I had a little bit with some of the Shark video, but it's less so. I think they're getting better at that the more they make. It's almost like asking, like, what kind of lens do you use for concert goers to see a concert? That's kind of an invalid question. That's missing what this medium is. People who stage a theater play don't need to care what kind of lens people might be using in the audience. Like it's not about that. This medium, there's actually less camera trickery potential to do because what you're mostly doing is just capturing a scene in a way that the viewer is in more control over it than you are.

1:13:40So what you want to do is like capture as much as you can because you're going to get the 180 degree field of view no matter what. So capture whatever you can, capture it, and give people the freedom to look at whatever they want in the frame and guide them by putting the important stuff in the middle. But for the most part, they're going to be looking around a little bit more than you might expect. And I think it's just going to take a little while before people really get that, who are producing it. But this is getting better. I just – like all these Apple videos, as I kind of – I said earlier that they're like snacks of content or previews of content.

1:14:10I kept wanting to just like sit on a shot for a while. like the shark video is in the Bahamas and there's one shot where they're doing like a quick helicopter flyover of one of the islands in the Bahamas I've never been to the Bahamas I was looking around I'm like oh is this what the Bahamas look like and I'm like looking around and before I know it it's gone to another shot because it's like oh well there's three seconds of what it's like to be in the Bahamas like I want more they would have like you know they're feeding some sharks under some water and you can look up and you can see the boat like above you like on the surface of the water Then it explodes.

1:14:43Yeah, and I'm like, I'm looking up at the boat, and then it's gone because the shot changes. Like, I want longer shots. I want more – I basically want more immersive content in the sense that I want to just know what certain environments are like just to sit in. Like, let me just sit in one of these for – give me a 10-minute long fixed shot of something that's not that interesting but just like an environment to be in. Give me 10 minutes of sitting on a beach in the Bahamas. Give me 10 minutes of like, you know, a boat ride or something like, you know, like that kind of thing for a nature documentary.

1:15:15How about just stick a camera in a nature preserve where there's some animals off in the distance and just give me a 10 minute shot of that so I can just sit there and like look at the animals and just enjoy it. That's why they got to do a full 3D engine of it so you can actually get up and walk around. And that's what the environments are. If they can feel you, if they can fool you into thinking it is. Although, of course, you could also do the I don't know if you remember this back from the the weird old days. This is before your time in the Apple world. but one of the things they would do it do you remember quick time vr of course you don't that was way before your time but um i remember it being a thing i don't and i remember using it i remember that i have used it i should say i don't remember what the actual use of it felt like for lack of a better way of describing it was that where you could like drag or like point and click and hold and drag the viewport around basically with your mouse is that right it was just like it was a 360 degree field of view extremely low resolution photograph right Right.

1:16:03And so once you have a 360 degree photograph, minus the tripod, which they didn't really know how to erase. So it was kind of down there. Right. Then you could look all around the photograph at your different places. And one of the things people did with QuickTime VR is, you know, they did it for real estate, but they did it for other things, too. They would take the QuickTime VR camera, the 360 camera, and put it in 17 different spots within an area and then allow you to move between individual, essentially individual spheres of 2D imagery. with like faded cross fading between kind of like google maps when you know and you click forward like on google maps and you go to the next part in the street right it was exactly like that do you never look at uh houses on zillow just for grins and giggles what is it no but this is like quick time vr is like it was like the 90s like it was a long time ago yeah um but i was thinking it from the from marco's bahamas thing if you had um 360 degree 8k 2i video you could shoot it forward backward up down left right and then move two feet forward backward up down like the data would be massive it would be better just do it in a 3d engine but like you could brute force this into providing some semblance of essential like 3d google maps street view where you could move around in the space and within each space you could look anywhere you could even do the thing where when you stand up on the couch your perspective does change because they also shot from a foot higher and they could fade between them it's probably just easier to do it in 3d but i was just thinking about the quick time vr thing or like you said the current real current real estate things are essentially that quick time vr thing but like it's so cheap to do now you buy a 10 cent 360 camera on amazon and you just stick it in a bunch of rooms and you you jump between the spots but i click down i don't think that's the case like matterport i think is the company that does this and i i think it's more involved than you're giving it credit for you could do the fancy version too but like the tech is cheap enough now that you can do the janky version real easy right fair but yeah i mean it is good for real estate like it is does give you a perspective on things but like that's as close as we can get to having like okay but what if i wanted to have a different perspective well we had six spots in this room so you can jump between those six spots and look from those six spots yeah but i mean yeah but i mean it is like it is very important though like that's that's getting almost ubiquitous now in new real estate listings i've even seen like on certain like hotel room bookings like here's what this type of room looks like like that that kind of stuff is actually very useful and i'm looking forward to seeing more of that yeah it is but it's not it's not video and it only has six spots in the room so for your bahamas thing if you wanted to like be in the bahamas with enough room to maybe walk around in a 10-foot circle or something as opposed to being confined and not being able to change it like the apple's immersive environments which i'm assuming like they use 3d plus photo stuff or whatever and you can actually move around a little tiny bit and moving around i believe even if you move a little tiny bit does actually change your perspective on the things that are in there yeah because those are those are just rendered 3d environments like those are not videos yeah i think there's probably some photographic things used for textures and backgrounds and those as well but like yeah that's kind of like what you're going for is like the stuff in the uh what is it called um the the ilm thing where they did the mandalorian the big lcd screens oh yeah i know what you mean like the big like 360 degree yeah if you can think about that all happening inside because the way that works is uh they have cameras shooting actors and on a stage in front of a screen and the things and the screen is just a wraparound screen but the things that are projected on that screen only look sane from the perspective of the camera if you're just on the side of the camera looking at what's on the screens it just looks like garbage because they're what they're doing is as the camera moves all the imagery moves behind the camera to you know a 3d engine like unreal i don't think they use unreal anymore but whatever 3d engine they're using it's basically a game engine with the camera being a real physical camera in the real world and real like actors and sets in front of it it's very clever the way they do it you can imagine doing that in vr only in vr you are the physical your head is the physical camera that's in that thing what is it called the uh someone in the chat room tell me it's really annoying me now it's not the sphere because that's the las vegas thing that's something else yeah the volume thank you dr calhoun uh if they can do that in a way that is good enough to fool marco into thinking he's seeing the real bahamas you know you've you've accomplished the goal i mean that's and that's what i want like you know part of part of what i have been kind of begging apple for since this came out is like more environments please because the the environments that are 3d you know game engine rendered kind of things um but no but like with this with this black magic camera and like with you know more immersive video cameras hopefully down down the road that are more available to people like when you look at what kind of videos people watch on youtube say it's everything it's every it's stuff you would never even think people watch that do you want a 24l you log video and immersive three that's the thing like you can think like oh yeah you can make like nature documentaries on youtube yeah you can but there's also people who just like stick a camera on something as here's here is eight hours straight of this thing that people find relaxing that's what i want more of like i want i want to get these cameras into the hands of everybody possible who might make video because the reason they were able to make videos like that on youtube is because video cameras got cheap and widely available so that everybody could you know take got the phone they already had and stick it in front of a fire for eight hours and record that video and put it on YouTube for free.

1:21:14And somebody would find that and be like, oh, this actually is what I'm looking for right now. Thank you. The more we can get immersive video cameras out there into the world, the closer we will get to the world in which it is worth somebody's time to stick one in a vacation destination or a relaxing mountaintop or whatever and give us those, you know eight-hour YouTube videos of just that you want a dual dual perspective 180 degree immersive 8k smr videos basically I mean I'm not an ASMR person so I can't say for sure but like I think that's what I want yeah the 3d audio is real important for that too yeah but like and again it's all like this is all super easy stuff to to capture all at once when you have the right equipment which they do because like what's interesting is like this does not require them to set up a whole studio or a whole set or have a bunch of actors or staff somebody could take one of these cameras and literally just like bring it to an attractive environment in nature and just capture a day there and you know figure out what to do with it afterwards like i mean well they'd probably fill up all those eight terabyte storage modules pretty fast because this video is huge but let us stream it live your grandchildren they're the cheap uh bird feeder camera that they buy online will have this in it yeah right but and and you know there there are challenges too again with with just the size of this video right now that's very challenging but you know when 4k came out hell when hd came out you know those were very large for the computers and networks and discs of the time now you can stream 4k live and it's fine like every it just works in so many places now and it's not that big of a deal anymore so it's only a matter of time before this you know dual 8k format is a little more uh wieldy is that is i know unwieldy is wieldy a word making up words yeah like like i always say we are um you know we only need probably a few more doublings to do what we've already done with audio which is max out human perception like for this particular format of like can't change your perspective immersive video shot from a single point uh we're not there yet but we're you know one or two or three more doublings away from like there's no point in making this higher resolution because human eyes can't distinguish it just like we were with audio where there's no point in making this higher resolution because humans can't hear a difference right and we got there with audio because it's easier because there's less data and even when we get there with still video then it'll be like okay but what about the camera that takes 8 000 different perspectives from all over the place and what about the 3d engines and yada yada so there's still a ways to go but you can see it now you can see that like all right if you could give me four times eight times the resolution there's no need for more at that point and then it's just about dynamic range and other issues but not resolution which and resolution is mostly what's giving you the uh the data size issues so and even within resolution like poor casey sports are still in 1080 most of the time which is sad yep sports uh and yeah in terms of streaming we can mostly do it except the internet is not made for broadcast the way radio waves and cable television was.

1:24:14So when everyone tries to watch Mike Tyson, there are problems. Yeah, I mean, I know I've said it a hundred times, I'll say it again, that I think the holy grail for this would be, you know, live streaming sports. It would be just unreal, just truly incredible. But getting that much data, you know, quickly in real time down to a Vision Pro, I imagine is a large engineering hurdle, to say the least. I think it would be upsetting to be have a 180 degree immersive. I know they have those wire cameras flying over the football fields and everything, but like a lot of sports, especially football, you do want to have that narrow field of view perspective so you can see the whole field sometimes.

1:24:54And in fact, maybe most of the time, because the view like from like, you know, the quarterback's perspective when the when he's about to get sacked, like that's exciting, but also kind of upsetting and doesn't really give you a view of the entire game. it's kind of like your f1 thing that you're talking about casey where it's like it would be it's cool to see the driver's perspective but what's really cool is to see 17 other perspectives not to say oh the whole race is going to be from the perspective of one driver because that would be incredibly fatiguing and you wouldn't have any sense of what's going on and so sports really needs a hybrid approach but again vision pro is there for that because it's oh you want five screens i can put them wherever you want i can put them any size you want i could put them have whatever i want on them i can have an immersive screen that when you stare at it and pinch your fingers you jump into that screen and now it's immersive and you're seeing from that driver's perspective, like so many things are possible.

1:25:40Yeah. I mean, again, I've said it before, but I'll quickly recap when you're watching F1 race and you have like the main feed directly in front of your face in the equivalent of like a 70, 70 inch TV, but you have two or three accessory feeds on either side of that. So you have like the in-car feeds from a couple of drivers. And then on the bottom, you have a 3d representation of what the racetrack looks like and where every driver is on the track. It is mind-blowingly cool. And that is another great way. You make a great point that I hadn't considered. That's another great way to get quote unquote immersive sports.

1:26:13All of these are 2D rectangles, like the most basic version of video that you can get on a vision pro, but because the whole of them end up being immersive and they're in an immersive space, it's a different way of kind of sort of reaching the same goal. Now you can't turn your head and, and, you know, change the way the camera's looking, but you can choose which one of your screens you're looking at. It's like, you know, the prototypical man cave sports dungeon-y thing where there's, you know, 14 TVs in the wall. Well, you can do that with 14 TVs in front of your face and strapped to your face in a way, and that's really, really cool.

1:26:49And I would love it. I would absolutely love it. I love it when F1 is live and I have the opportunity to use the Vision Pro to watch it, but that is another way of accomplishing the same thing. So I don't know. I'm happy that, as Marco said, that we're moving forward. The sun is rising. Progress is being made. And that's nothing but a good thing. We are sponsored this episode by Squarespace, the all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything from your products to your content to your time, all in one place and all on your terms.

1:27:29Squarespace makes it just so great to run your business. They have an amazing design system. They've evolved this over the years, and they're constantly making it better. This is design intelligence now from Squarespace, combining their two decades of industry-leading design expertise with cutting-edge AI to unlock your strongest creative potential. This empowers anyone to build a beautiful, more personalized website tailored to your unique needs and craft a bespoke digital identity that you can use across your entire online presence, all built in to Squarespace. And of course, when you're selling your products on Squarespace, this can be anything.

1:28:03This can be physical goods with inventory management and all these different integrations. My wife uses that to run her own site. She has a store site on Squarespace. I've seen this for myself. I've seen how it runs. And it's so easy. She never has to come to me. She's not a programmer, but she never has to come to me for help. She runs it all herself, all in Squarespace. And all the payment support is easy. They support every kind of way people might want to pay. Popular methods now being added like Klarna, ACX Direct Debit, Apple Pay, Afterpay, ClearPay. And as these get added in the industry, Squarespace is always right there adding them also.

1:28:35So this is just a great way to run your business, whether it's physical goods, digital goods, memberships. Maybe you're a consultant and you can book time slots, or maybe you're a trainer. There's all sorts of businesses you can run on Squarespace, and they make it all super easy, and it looks fantastic in the process. Go to squarespace.com to see for yourself with a free trial. And when you're ready to launch, you go to squarespace.com slash ATP, and you'll get 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain. Once again, squarespace.com slash ATP for 10 % off your first purchase of a website or domain.

1:29:06Thank you so much to Squarespace for really just being awesome and for sponsoring our show.

1:29:14speaking of vr apple is allegedly working with sony to bring playstation vr 2 controller support to the vision pro reading from i believe it was mark ermin at bloomberg apple is now working on a major effort to support third-party hand controllers in the device's vision os software and has teamed up with sony group corp to make it happen apple approached sony earlier this year and the duo agreed to work together on launching support for the playstation vr 2's hand controllers on the Vision Pro. Inside Sony, the work has been a months-long undertaking, I'm told, and Apple has discussed the plan with third-party developers, asking them if they'd integrate support into their games.

1:29:48Apple doesn't have any imminent plans to launch its own controller, but the company's design team spent a few years prototyping what is essentially a wand for the Vision Pro. This would be more of an Apple Pencil-like tool for precise control rather than gaming. As for supporting the PlayStation VR 2 controllers, Apple and Sony originally aimed to announce this capability weeks ago, but the rollout has been postponed. One hiccup is that Sony doesn't currently sell VR hand controllers as a standalone accessory. The company would need to decouple the equipment from its own headset and kick off operations to produce and ship the accessory on its own.

1:30:18As part of the arrangement, Sony would sell the controllers at Apple's online retail stores, which already offer PS5 controllers. The move is meant primarily for games on the Vision Pro, but the company's also created support for navigating the device's operating system. The controller's thumbstick and directional pad could be used for scrolling, while the trigger button could replace a finger pinch when clicking on an item. so on the one hand you can see the arguments surely people are making inside apple which is why should we bother trying to make a controller these gaming companies have been making controllers for decades they're really good at it they're making them anyway they're going to make them with or without us why don't we just make sure our macs our ipads our phones are compatible with xbox controllers playstation controllers so on hell we'll sell the playstation controllers in the apple store done and done what a clever good business thing we did we we didn't try to make a controller because we're probably bad at it they're already making them we support it people already have these controllers because they already own a playstation or an xbox problem solved and this is just one more example of how apple's approach to gaming is inadequate let's say wrong-headed uh misguided because the reason all those people make controllers is if you want to be remotely serious about gaming you have to make and ship your own controller you can't just say oh it's a third-party opportunity apple just does this forever third-party controllers for your phone for your ipad for your mac like just other people make them we support them isn't that good enough and the answer is no if you bought a a console and it didn't come with controllers and they said all just buy them from a third party other people make them they'd be like what the hell is this a gaming console or is this not a gaming console it was bad enough when they used to come with one controller which is criminal but like they still do uh like apple you need to make control so anyway vision pro no hand controllers people like apple doesn't believe in hand controllers it's all gonna be with your hands you pinch your fingers together you do gestures you don't need controllers they're they're cumbersome no one's gonna it's bad enough that you're putting a thing on your head you have to be able to use it without them and i agree with that but also from day zero of the vision pro we were like okay but what kind of games do people like to play in vr already before apple introduced this product and how would those games work on the vision pro with no hang controllers and the answer is poorly it doesn't mean there can't be good games without hang controllers but then we know that there's a whole bunch of games that people already like that require hang controllers and apple's like oh you can find them somewhere i mean and they're doing the same thing here like oh well you know we'll team up with sony we'll make support for their controllers they already did all this work it's fine it'll be it's so frustrating it's like the whatever the alan k quote or whatever people who are serious about software have to make their own hardware i forget i may be reversing that to someone please google that and get but anyway it's like if you're serious about gaming you have to make your own controllers and i agree apple will be terrible at it there's a story probably we'll get to the next episode about apple working on human input referrals and how that has not been their strength for a long time but like you gotta to try apple you can't sell the apple tv with the stupid diving board remote and say here's your game controller no that's not a game controller like it's never gonna work until it's just killing me i can't take it anymore they're doing all that they're putting amazing gpus in they have the game porting toolkits they're doing all these things and they're just like but we're not gonna make a controller because i don't know how do you guys feel about this well i think if you look back at the history of how this has gone.

1:33:56The Apple TV, great example of this. The Apple TV has all of the hardware needed to be a fun game console, but it really hasn't stuck. Why didn't the Apple TV ever become a fun game console? All the computing hardware, you mean. Yes. And the problem, the reason it never became a game console, there's multiple factors for sure. But one of the biggest reasons, and there were different changes over time that affected this, but like you couldn't require a game controller for a long time by policy. But how many people who have Apple TVs bought extra game controllers for them? I did because I'm a fool, but no one else did.

1:34:37So if you're making a game for the Apple TV, you cannot assume that almost any of your players will have a controller. So you have to design for the crap little diving board thing that it came with, which is very limited for what games could do with it. and that's it. It wasn't enough that it was possible for people to buy controllers. Since every Apple TV didn't come with a controller, effectively zero of Apple TV's market would have one. That's what's going to happen here. The Vision Pro, I mean, look, there's so many ways that it's not a game platform. The one thing they have going for them is they haven't sold that many yet.

1:35:14Yeah, but like, suppose this goes through and all of a sudden you can buy Sony PSVR controllers separately that will work with the Vision Pro. How many people are going to do that? Like 10? And I'm not exaggerating? Like actually 10? We're talking about a fraction of a fraction of an already small market. No developer is going to port a game to the Vision Pro that requires controllers. The Vision Pro is already a tiny market and then you're saying we're going to only target people or have a game that mostly pretty much only works or only works well with these add-ons. After you've spent four grand, you're going to also now spend another, whatever it would be, a hundred bucks to get some VR controllers and then be able to play a game.

1:36:01That's going to be almost no addressable market. It's going to actually do that. For a platform to have games that run on game controllers, the platform's hardware has to come with the controllers. If Apple TV started shipping with a game controller in the box, which they will never do, But if for some reason they would do that, then you would start having a lot more games on Apple TV that were designed for the controller and could therefore accommodate more game types pretty well. You look at iOS. iOS is as big of an addressable market as you can find. There are lots of third-party game controllers that work with iOS.

1:36:39And yet, no major iOS game requires a controller. Why? because effectively almost no one has them, even though it's a huge market. And by raw numbers, that's going to be way more people who have iOS devices plus game controllers than Apple TVs or Vision Pros. But because the iOS devices don't come with an official controller with everyone sold, game developers cannot count on there being a very large market that has that. So they have to design for touch mainly, and maybe you can also work with an external controller. So that's what we're going to see with Vision Pro. Like if anyone is making games for it, which they're not and they shouldn't, but if anyone's making games for it, really, what you're going to keep seeing is, well, maybe you can use a controller once the support is there, but you're not going to get anything shipping on the Vision Pro that is only good with a controller because it makes no sense for anyone to develop that.

1:37:35I mostly agree with that. I do find this idea to team up with Sony to be less frustrating than I think the two of you do. If you look at the situation, you know, based on rumors, Apple hasn't sold a lot of Vision Pros. It doesn't seem like, by and large, it's catching on as a productivity device, with the possible exception of Mac Virtual Display, which we talked about, I don't know, last week, the week before. what is the purpose of the Vision Pro other than to sit there and let movies wash over you? And I think the obvious answer could be to play games, but it's obvious as well that doing that with hand tracking just isn't cutting it.

1:38:17And if you're Apple and you want to solve this problem yesterday, then you team up with Sony and make a pairing out of it and make it work, Make the Vision Pro work with this PSVR 2 controller. I think that makes perfect sense. Now, that doesn't mean that John is wrong by any means. I think in a perfect world, Apple would have already come out with their own controllers. And even if it was optional, it would have been a launch device with the Vision Pro. Similarly to the head strap that Belkin just came out with that probably should have launched with the Vision Pro. Probably should have even been in the box with the Vision Pro.

1:38:53But that's neither here nor there. so in the end of the day i'm not put off by this partnership and i think it does make a lot of sense probably for both companies but i also concurrently agree with john that really apple should be solving this problem themselves yeah they should have first-party controllers and also support third-party ones like in that scenario where they ship a first-party one it's getting to marco's point at least then you could the software developers know everybody has a controller and those people can choose not to use it because they don't like it they want to use it i mean this third-party controllers available for every system you know consoles you can use third-party controllers pc you can use third-party controllers and these days most pcs support all the controllers that work with consoles as well like that's great that's a great ecosystem but you gotta come with one it's like i was gonna say it's like a computer not coming with a keyboard and mouse but the mac mini does that but anyway game game consoles come with a controller the psvr comes with the controllers like it sometimes is optional i think some of the motion things have said like well you get it with this kind of controller but not with that kind but you know look at for in the vr headsets the meta quest I believe that comes with controllers right?

1:39:56Yes of course it does the way you design a game console or a hardware meant to play games as it's primary or one of it's main functions it has to come with the controllers that it needs of course the quest comes with controllers they all have the whole quest is only I think the entry level one is like 300 bucks now including the controllers like of course it does i think about the single xbox elite 2 controller i have cost close to that much yeah probably it's not a headset it's just a controller trying to make the vision pro have gaming as one of its you know significant uses i think is is never going to work because division pro is not a good game console even if it came with you know actual game controllers in the box which if they want to be serious about it it needs to come in the box but even if it did the vision pro is first of all way too expensive to be a game console it's also way too heavy you got to get rid of the dangling battery because what look what games are popular in vr most of them are motion games where you're moving you know you got you have things like the rhythm games like beat saber and whatever the version of it is for version os like you you have rhythm games you have kind of you know virtual like shooting games where you're turning around constantly.

1:41:18You have stuff like Gorilla Tag, which is massively popular on Quest, where you're being physical. You're physically moving around in the headset. You have the wonderful ping pong game, Eleven Table Tennis, where you're physically playing ping pong. You have games where you're moving a lot. The Vision Pro is so not made for motion on so many levels. It's terribly physically designed for it. The screens have too much motion blur and have too much latency for that like i mean pass-through latency like there's so much about division pro that is clearly not designed for the kind of games that people enjoy on the quest series right now so this whole idea of trying to make game controllers compatible with it is is not gonna go anywhere i i'm very optimistic if they get good content out there like video and sports and experiential content division pro is designed for that kind of thing it is not designed for motion in games and you know apple will you know hinder itself even further because even like a kind of like a grassroots kind of behind the scenes thing where some developer make a really compelling game they're like oh this is really good game for vision pro and now the 1500 one is out and i know apple doesn't ship controllers but you can use this third-party controller and like it's just so popular that it gains momentum all on its own and despite apple it makes it starts to make the vision pro into a gaming platform but that will never happen you know why because apple which controls all software that ships on the vision pro will say oh you can't ship this game that requires a controller sorry rejected from the app store it will never they will never even allow someone to like to help them like help me help you and apple's like no you cannot help us your game has to support the apple tv remote right i know they back they went back on that one but it was too late but like you just know they would never allow a game on the vision pro that requires a controller because they'd be like oh that's not that's not the way we think about our platform it's like well then we can't help you you're never going to be you won't ship your own controllers you won't let people ship games that require them it's just they cannot get out of their own way and is it because if it was like if there was side loading or if there was third party stuff or if the eu decided that the the vision pro was too dominant in the market of vision and you had to allow third party like because if people can do whatever they want on it you can get that kind of like grassroots phenomenon surprise viral hit that makes people go out and buy the controller But with Apple being the gatekeeper for these platforms, it'll never happen on the Apple TV.

1:43:42It'll probably never happen on the Vision Pro because there's no room for a third party to do a thing that definitely will be janky and low interest at first that might catch on. Because Apple will just be like, no, that's not how we like our platform to behave. Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Aura Frames, and Masterclass. And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atv.fm slash join. one of the perks of membership is ATP overtime a bonus topic every week this time in overtime we're talking about the Mac monitor situation there's been a number of recent hardware releases from other companies for Mac appropriate monitors and we're going to talk about that in overtime you can join and listen atp.fm join thanks for listening everybody and we'll talk to you next week

1:44:36Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it 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 that's casey list m-a-r-c-o-a-r-m-i-n-g-marco-r-m-s-i-r-a-c-u-s-a-circusa it's accidental they didn't mean to Accidental Accidental Tech Podcast So long All right, John, do you want to update us a little more specifically about your app? Yeah, so, you know, I'm here plugging away. I guess the main thing I probably want to talk about today is, I mean, something near and dear to Casey's heart.

1:45:45We were always complaining about poor documentation with Apple stuff. Oh, yes! Yes, baby, I'm here! So here's the thing. like it's poor documentation you know the lack of documentation it doesn't seem to be a lot of it some things have like a one or two sentence description that is frustrating but like you really don't feel the full force of the pain until you are in an area that you have no knowledge or experience of so if you're in some area that you know about like say i'm doing app kit stuff which i know a little bit about from my other two apps right i know a whole bunch of app kit stuff and there's some stuff i don't know but like i i needed to like fill in the blanks or fill in you know it's like the fog of war on the you know rts maps fill in the areas that i have you know so i know a bunch of surrounding stuff but i don't know and then you go and you find some credit documentation but because you know all a bunch a whole bunch of surrounding stuff you can like oh i see what they're probably getting at here and i see how this is related to that thing and you can put the pieces together but for what i'm doing in this app what i've spending been spending some time doing uh you know in-app purchase type stuff i've never done that on any apple platform ever ever before so i have zero knowledge other than watching wwc videos about it and i've watched a lot of wwc videos but there's nothing like actually programming it which is actually part of the problem here so in that situation when you're just you just got nothing you're starting from zero and you land on one of those documentation pages that doesn't have anything except for like a single sentence that uses like five proper nouns that you don't know the definitions of and there's nothing else you're just like what i don't you know and so here i'm in this situation and i you know i have watched just so many hours wwc videos about apis that i have never used right i have a lot of this knowledge in my head but they're wwdc videos for all however as wonderful as they are they really are kind of like math class in school where if you have kids or if you've been a kid and remember math class if you like don't understand a concept and you never learn it that's going to be a big problem because next year they're going to talk to you as if you already know elementary algebra they're not going to reteach you algebra they're going to assume everyone here is no as algebra or like multiplication tables they're going to assume you know your multiplication tables you know how to do addition subtraction multiplication division you like they're not going to reteach that if you miss one or two things when you watch or when you when you attend like the you know the junior year high school class and they started teaching you calculus if you don't know like pretty much everything that came before it you have a serious problem they like to say that math is cumulative you really need you can't like forget the old stuff they build on what you knew before many wwdc videos are like that not all of them but many of them well they'll say what's new in star kit 2 they assume you already know what was old in star kit 2 and they're just going to tell you about the new stuff it's an incremental update and so you're like okay but that's not all the videos what you should do is go and find the wwc 2021 or whatever video it's introducing star kit 2 here's the problem with this approach and you know this is you know apple spends a lot of money in wwc the production values are great the people will present them as great i think the presentations are great but you go uh introducing store kit 2 and you watch that video if there's a conceptual part about like big picture what is store kit about hopefully that's still relevant but with the current rate of development and transition to swift ui almost all the code in in that presentation is not what you want to be doing today because it's not you know they in in future years there'll be a session called what's new in StarKit 2 and SwiftUI or something.

1:49:30And those are the APIs you want to be using because those are the new ones that work really well with SwiftUI. The old ones, you could get it done. So the intro course is telling you a way to do it that you don't want to do it. And the new course expects you to already have experience with the old API, but you have neither. And like, I'm going through this and I'm thinking as I stumble my way in the dark through this, just making mistake after mistake as i stumble my way through this i start fantasizing about writing documentation like i'm already i've already like written it in my head based on my like current what is surely my current misunderstanding it's like i could explain this to somebody who has zero you know knowledge i'm granted my information is probably wrong at this point but i could explain my wrong information and say look here's the problem you're facing here's the things you're going to run into like here's how you have to think about it here's a way to arrange it stuff like that right and as far as i've been able to determine that kind of documentation almost doesn't exist at all anywhere in the apple ecosystem like first party it provides a third-party opportunity for people to do that but even the third-party ones because things are changing so rapidly in particular because so many apis like predate swift ui and then work with swift ui but just barely and then there's the new ones that are like made in an age where swift ui is the expected default and they don't work anywhere else like if you make that tutorial two years ago maybe it's out of date now it's extremely frustrating and so that one of the things that apple usually is okay about is providing the sample code although they do this weird thing where the sample code from year to year they'll keep enhancing the same app like the food truck app or the backyard birds app or whatever and the download links to the sample code will be like download the food truck app but when you download it i think they only have like one copy of the food truck app and it's the current version so if you download it from like a video four years ago you don't get the four years ago food truck you get the current one which in some ways is good because it's more updated but in some ways it's bad because the the app doesn't match the video that you're watching but anyway that my final complaint on this is you know again about wwc videos which i feel like wwc videos are they're not like movie trailers but they're like do you want they're great for me before i was programming with these apis do you just want to get an overview of what apple's doing with the abis and what they're capable of these are the videos for you but if you actually have to implement an app man these videos like they're not going to give you what you need to give just one example that drives me batty anytime in a wwdc video and again i understand why they do this anytime in a wwdc video where they say you know we're going to do x y and z and they say they've omitted error checking for brevity that is useless to me error checking is the most important part of the programming i've omitted error checking are you freaking kidding me all i want to know is where can this go wrong what do i have to check for and where so i tell that the transaction is valid do i have to do it do i not have to do what are the possible error scenarios where do i like i've omitted error checking for brevity i know you have to fit it on a slide but that is just throw it out the window like it's useless it's only useful to me as a casual dilettante viewer of like i'm not writing an app but i just want to learn about apis isn't this great but when it's time to write an app the code is all error checking there's one line that does something in 75 lines of error checking like especially something like in-app purchase like i just wish like this is and this made me think like this is what labs are for like if i'm still doing this wdc i should go to a lab and say i should just come with a wdc session and say explain this stupid app to me explain backyard birds why are you doing this what does this api do what in the world it took me like a full day to figure out they were calling map dot map on something and it wasn't you know the array dot map yeah it wasn't that map it was a different map it does basically the same thing but it was literally like a different signature a different freaking function because it wasn't an array you can't tell that by looking at it because it's not pearl with an at sign in front of it like oh relax i'm like and then so the documentation for that map function was a single sentence that i can't make heads or tails of single sentence and it's in their sample app and they gloss over it madness i just it's it's lucency incredible and surprisingly the thing that i thought would be tripping me up so far i mean i'll get to it but so far hasn't been which is oh how do you test transactions and like pretending to purchase things and blah blah blah that actually because i spent you know because i waited you know eight years or nine years or whatever to do my first in-app purchase that's actually pretty good and compare i'll say this that's better than i thought it would be and i haven't had problems yet partially because i'm still just doing it locally which is a feature they introduced two or three years ago the local store kit configuration thing love it pretty easy mostly works you can't it doesn't really work you can't really i haven't money you can do tech support for me now is there a way to cancel subscription in the local xcode thing yeah there's a special bespoke window for it in xcode hold on i got i found that window how do you cancel right clicking doesn't do nothing they do have a thing where you can click and show it says show options and then it has by like the transaction list yeah in the transaction list i thought there was a way to do it but now i'm having second thoughts about cancellation also but i go to the options list and in the and when you click options on it it brings up a thing this is like there is a cancel option but those are like transactions that already happened and when i cancel uh my app doesn't see that like it doesn't you know hit one of the the update handlers or whatever so anyway when i try it with sandbox i'm sure it'll be easier because i'm assuming when i cancel at an app store connect because basically what i'm doing trying to do is to simulate a user canceling it they go to their subscriptions in their iCloud whatever blah blah and they hit cancel that's what i want to simulate from xcode and haven't figured out how to do it yet but anyway that's a minor complaint so i thought that would be the big problem but they have actually have pretty good options for like you know renew every 30 seconds each 30 seconds is one month or you can easily delete the transactions to reset the world having no problem with that having massive problems being like you where do i put the stuff in my app to make sure i'm doing all the things that i need to do for all these freaking transactions and all the types that just when the type signature makes the line go over a hundred characters just by this it's like you know what is it a entitlement result verification result with angle brackets around it all plus the type that you put but that one inside has a question mark and it's just and you have to like massage that value through 17 different things to figure out if it's verified and extract the real value with an if case led and then it's just like oh my god who made this api who made it like it's so good in so many ways and then just when you get down to where the rubber meets the road where you have to figure out do they actually own this it's like guess what angle brackets for days no documentation good luck oh and by the way there's like there's the subscription update task thing to to monitor for updates to subscriptions is there an equivalent things that aren't subscriptions no that one takes a single product id because screw you i spent i i wasted at least 15 minutes trying to figure out how to programmatically apply multiple of the same uh view modifier with different arguments and the type system did not like what i was doing and i gave up no no no no no i i gave up i like i felt like i was so close like i can smell it i can i can use reduce i can make it happen it's like nope type system says no type system says no and i was like nope this is beyond my swift skills and i just bailed out anyway store kit yeah and so the funny thing is you're doing store kit too store kit 2 is light years better than store kit 1 i know i saw the older with the sk the sk apis like boy i'm glad i'm not doing that because that was working that with swifi first of all that would never work with swish 6 never like it would be so angry at you about everything you're doing yeah it's it i don't think there is a way to cancel by the way within this little uh transaction dialogue i i i apologize you can't like the thing you can do the cancel that makes the transaction disappear but the point is it doesn't have the effect that a user canceling their subscription would in, you know, iCloud.

1:57:33Yeah. But with regard to documentation, I mean, I could go on and on and on about this. Let me start by saying it actually has gotten a lot better over the last few years. I doubt I had anything to do with that, but I certainly, it was late 2020 that I wrote my blog post about this, which I stand by pretty much. I mean, I think it has gotten better, but it is still not great. And, you know, the name of this blog post was on Apple's piss poor documentation, which, yeah, pretty much. And I think the thing, there's two things that really chapped my bottom about Apple's documentation these days. First of all, when you have either, what is it, no overview, something, something, no overview found or something like that.

1:58:16I forgot. No overview available. That's what it is. You see that less these days, which is great. But a lot of times what you'll see is just like a regurgitation of what the function signature is and very few other words. And this is like what you were describing, John, with like, here's a single sentence with a bunch of proper nouns that I'm not familiar with. Also, not helpful. And that really is frustrating. Really, really frustrating. Or I love seeing like enumerations where each of the cases is just a restatement of the case. Like, yes, no, maybe. Like the comments that add one to I. Right, it's just bananas.

1:58:54But the other thing that really I find deeply frustrating, And Apple has an affordance for this in their documentation. But a lot of times there's not a really great overview of here's this system, here's how it works. Or secondarily, here's the overview, which sometimes does exist, but here's how you actually execute, right? So take Storkit, for example. They have a pretty great overview of here's all the things you need to consider and here's what this does and that does and subscriptions and non-subscriptions and this, that, and the other thing. But they don't do a particularly good job at all of really explaining why the API is as kooky as it is.

1:59:36Because Storkit 2's API is actually really good. It's actually not that kooky. But when you want to figure out, is this app purchased? Yes or no. In order to figure that out, Apple's basically like, you got to look at like 300 different arrays of information and, I don't know, piece it together yourself, have fun. And I understand why that is. But first of all, it would be nice if Apple kind of solved this for us. But second of all, there's like maybe a couple of sentences that explain why this is the way this is. And that's it. And what I really want is a deep dive about, okay, here's the reason this is the way it is.

2:00:14You might have family sharing or you might not. You might be entitled via family sharing or you might not. You might be entitled via family sharing and your own entitlement or you might not. You might be entitled via family sharing something else and your own entitlement or you might not. Or the family sharing has expired, but your own entitlement hasn't or vice versa. And so suddenly you realize, oh no, I really do need to do the work of traversing all of these arrays of subscriptions and information and whatnot. But you come upon that oftentimes by users reporting into you, your app doesn't say it's purchased, but here's a receipt showing I purchased it.

2:00:47And that's not frigging helpful, Apple. That's too late. It's too late at that point. And that just drives me bananas. Another great example of this is I started adding widget and intent support to call sheet hasn't shipped yet. But one of the things you can do is with widgets, I'm pretty sure it's widgets, you can communicate between the widget and the main app. And there's not really a good overview page of your different techniques of doing this. And I pieced together that, oh, you can do like URL schemes, but it has to be a secure URL. It can't be like an ex-callback style URL. And I forget there was one other, oh, you can put things in user defaults, but even Apple seems to think like, I wouldn't recommend that if you're going to avoid it.

2:01:33And that's, I thought that's all there was. And come to find out, there's actually, you can flip a switch. There's a Boolean somewhere in your widget where you can say, no, I need you to open the app when the widget is interacted with. And at that point, you're effectively in the app's runtime and you can do kind of whatever you want. But there's no good overview of, okay, here are all of the available options and here's why you would choose each one. It's not useless, but it's almost useless. And in some ways it's worse than useless because they give you just a little nugget of information and then basically say, have fun.

2:02:12You'll figure it out you're smart right and then when you search like for third party stuff you'll find lots of like really good posts that do the kind of documentation i'm fantasizing about like let's start from the beginning let me tell you the problem let me tell you the solutions let me tell you the different approaches like you said when you would use them or whatever but the problem is that blog post was written four years ago and now it's all out of date and it doesn't talk about the apis you want yep and maybe it's wrong right and and i just i want to give credit here like the store kit people are listening store kit 2 is so much better oh god like i can see that i've seen all the wwc sessions especially for using the swift ui it like it does really does a huge amount of work current entitlements does a lot of the work for you like a huge amount the fact that entitlements are you know products are separate from subscriptions is still a little janky even though they're both represented by products like there's weirdnesses there i get it but it has come such a long way and that's why it's all the more frustrating that like i'm sure there's a correct way to use these tools the tools they seem powerful they seem way more powerful than the things they're replacing they they do a lot of stuff in a small amount of space but there's one or two things that i'm missing that i don't understand and especially like swift six that really hasn't been much of a problem but it's a little bit of a problem in that smuggling data between the various islands uh especially when you're stuck in some kind of non-async swift ui thing where you can't even await something from an actor you end up smuggling a lot of stuff through environment apple's example smuggles stuff through the environment so i'm like is this just the way because like what's the best practice they're like yeah we're totally going to smuggle like do we have an actor doing a bunch of store stuff and it's uh that actor is like invoked asynchronously from a view modifier and that mute view modifier shoves things into the environment and then other views see it because you shoved it into the environment and they have the ad environment it's like all right i mean is that it like am i because i have a a lot of data that i want to move around and now i have like six environment variables and i'm like maybe i'm doing it wrong and it's just anyway i'll put a link in the show notes i just put it in the document case you have the link section for the map method uh the documentation for this map method says uh the method is map open friends underscore colon close friends uh and it says uh returns a new state mapping the entitlement value if successful thanks that's helpful it it maps a new value oh mapping the entitlement value that's great uh it uh it returns an entitlement task state angle brackets new value so the value is like i kind of see how they're using it in their sample app i'm using it in my app i kind of understand what it's doing but when it came time for me to do something similar not in subscriptions but with the like for the entitlement part for trying out like non-subscription purchase type things i just was baffled and i was like i'm just not gonna like Like, is this just a convenience method?

2:05:01I'm just going to like, anyway, I would, I long for a first party thing that like just explains from start to finish because you can't do it in a WC session. It's not long enough. That's not what it's for. Like, I'm not saying WC sessions should be different. I'm saying there needs to be something to augment it. And I do appreciate all the third party stuff out there, hacking the Swift for like basic Swift stuff and some Swift UI stuff. Those things are great. There's tons of people writing blog posts about it. The Swift forums. like you can find stuff but the problem with the internet is just you're just going to find so much out-of-date stuff um i have been using like chat gpt to try that but like chat gpt doesn't know about swifts it thinks it knows about swift 6 but it does not it absolutely does not so i'll just give you this code that's just not going to run i've been trying a clod to see what it can make they they will give you just they'll give you code that doesn't work for just days right just that will never work that apis that do not exist like they can be helpful sometimes but a they're just chronically out of date because they have to be because it takes so long to make these models that by the time you get them they they don't have wwc 2024 info in there it's just and then b yeah they'll just make up something and it's a shame like i use it because it's like look you're gonna try to run the code anyway as i said before it's one of the ideal cases for this i do i if i had to you know pick the the best program best new programming tool 2024 it's it's these ai things but they are in their own way extremely frustrating and they absolutely do not help for things like i need a human being to conceptually explain to me all the moving parts and because like there's not 8 000 different ways to do this i would imagine the people who made store kit have an idea say you have an app that wants to use every single feature that store could have you have you know consumables subscriptions not really like that's what their bird you know backyard birds app is trying to say everything that store kit can do this does all of them and if you're going to do all of them this is how you should arrange your junk uh but like i don't blame the backyard bird sample app it does do all those things but it is so kind of like strange and idiosyncratic and it doesn't do every single possible thing you can do in some ways it's limited and there's some weird choices made by like the programmer who just really likes using enums to smuggle information around where there's like an enum where there's like seven of the cases are product ids and one of the cases is the group id like i guess i mean you just avoid the group id and because you know that one's called group and it's not a product id and it's like well it's convenient when we throw and also one of the states is not subscribed and we're going to do it's just what are you doing like you know every program has got their own quirks right and it's like it's fine to be quirky but when you're making like the the canonical sample code for how to use store kit maybe like rein in those quirks and just be like i'm not going to do anything or make any weird decisions it's just going to be like here's how you use the apis it should be incredibly well commented which it is not uh and it should have all the error checking like all of it because there's so many theories you go on you google for it and it's like i think you should do this and i think you should do that and you have to check for this but you don't have to check for that but no it's just you have to check this and check the revocation date but if it gets through here it's already verified but you have to verify yourself oh store kit 2 does the verification and the old store kit didn't but now you still need to verify it's just exhausting so anyway and this the the frustrating thing obviously is that this has nothing to do with the functionality of my app.

2:08:18It's all just about the monetization. And it's not the only thing I'm doing. Really, I'm spending more time on UI than I am on this. But UI is, you know, this is UI just is what it is. It's a slog because you don't quite know what you're the best way to make it and stuff like that. And yes, I'm also working on the engine. Like I'm doing all the parts, but I just I just wanted to rant out store kit in particular because it was what I was working on today. It's it's brutal. And I can't stress enough. It is light years better than store kit one. I know I've said it two or three times. I want to say it two or three more times.

2:08:47It is so much better than store kit one, but it is still a lot in some of that. Maybe even most of that is the, is the domain that they're trying to cover because there's so many gotchas and what ifs and this and that and the other thing. But again, it would be so much better if there was better documentation that walked you through. Okay. Here's the plain vanilla version where, you know, you have a single in-app purchase that's unlocking your app. Okay. Now, what if you had a single subscription that unlocks your app? Okay. Now, what if you had multiple different in-app purchases that could unlock your app in multiple different subscriptions?

2:09:22Well, okay. Now let's introduce consumables, you know, and build a step-by-step over, over all of these different, you know, problem domains, if you will. But there's just not that. And I just, from what I can tell, there does not seem to be an institutional value in, in documentation from what I've gathered internally or externally. That documentation just does not matter the way I think it should. And it's really unfortunate because Apple, at its finest, really wants to and empowers us, the developers, to make world-class apps. And this is flying directly in the face of that, right? Like, if they want Marco and John and me to make the best apps we possibly can, then they need to document their APIs in the best way they know how.

2:10:08and I don't think that's the way it is today. Yeah, I feel like that's one of the goals of Storkit 2 is they basically said, people are using Storkit 1 wrong, probably because we didn't explain it well enough and there's not good docs. So in Storkit 2, we're going to do a lot of the work for them because we know how the API is supposed to work. So we're going to take away a lot of, that's one of the things that's great about it. They're like, inside this API, it's doing a bunch of stuff that basically, from Apple's perspective, you third-party developers proved you can't do this right. Like on average, you can't do it right.

2:10:36So we're going to do it for you. And then we'll just give you a response. But still, the response they give you, it's like, oh, and by the way, the things we give you, you have to implement a bunch of business logic here. And it's super important you do it exactly right. Otherwise, you're going to screw things up. But we'll only kind of vaguely explain it. And again, the like the Backyard Birds app, they go through all the things you said, Casey, but it is still in the end, just one app. And if you watch that session, you cannot come away from that session and say, now I'm ready to implement my app.

2:11:02You're not. You're absolutely not. like even if you memorized every line of code either you copy and pasted the code samples they have them in the transcripts the code like that's not sufficient for you to i know i just did it like it that information i have the backyard birds app open an xcode next to me that is not sufficient for you to do even the most basic thing like what like just a single thing that unlocks your app there are still so many more things that you have to know and think about to actually make that work because the code snippets they give you and like the backyard birds app itself is so weird and differently structured than your app would be that you can't just use it as a one-to-one thing and the wwc session just glosses over so much stuff like it gives you an outline of what's possible but when it comes time for you to type stuff in you're just like it took me so long to figure out just banging my head against it and just randomly googling to to find all the other people who have hit the same roadblocks and you know discovered things like you know non-renewing subscriptions apple doesn't track anything having to do with those so that's all you all right i know they do it for all the other ones but those ones just yeah like okay it would have been nice if that was in the documentation in big red letters which is like hey if you do this everything's on you unlike subscriptions where we keep track of it all but you know that's that's development for you right and you know it sounds like i'm being fresh and i'm actually enjoying the fun parts of it like the parts that actually make my app work and i do enjoy the ui stuff a little bit although i have a separate rant about that for another time But yeah, working on the app.

2:12:36So this is probably not a good time to suggest this. But I was thinking, if you are making an app that's going to crawl people's files on their disks and everything and take advantage of the knowledge that you have and the things you care about, why not make an app that scans your files and keeps hashes in a database and periodically can rescan to detect bit rot people have already made that program what is it? there's a whole bunch of ones that will do that they'll put little checksum files in your directories what I've gathered from the discussions I've had about that thing is that people who have carbon copy cloner does it actually instead of using super duper they have an option to put checksum files in there and every time you do a copy, it will re-check some of them and everything.

2:13:29Like, you can do it manually, but what people have told me who do this type of thing is that they're super diligent about it, they do it, they have a program that does it, they have a third-party program that does whatever, and they say it just never finds any errors. And I don't know if that means those programs aren't working right or if it means the modern storage stack with SSDs is so good that you're very unlikely to find those type of things, and if you just keep the data moving from one fresh SSD to another, it won't be a problem. but yeah that's you know it's it's something i have considered but one of the things that bothers me is you know the the map is not the territory you can put the checksum files in every directories but then you're putting turds all over the disk and there's all sorts of issues with that you can keep a central database but then your central database diverges instantaneously from the disk that it is databasing and you're constantly like chasing it around to try to keep the database up to date with the state of the disk it's not it's a type of thing that this is where like my you know my principles and tastes say this should be implemented in the it has to be implemented in the file system many file systems do implement it apfs does not and so i just sit around here with my arms folded say well you should eventually do this in the file system right because it's it's like wrong it's like it's wrong to do it not on that you can but it's just wrong put it in the file system zfs showed you how this is the thing that exists just do it well but it wouldn't even if it was in the file system wouldn't the file system not know until it tries to read the file Yeah, but you don't know until you try to scan the file.

2:14:54It's the same thing. You can't get around the fact that to tell whether the bits are right, you have to read them. Sure, but... There's no getting around that. But wouldn't that still then leave an opportunity for something that would scan periodically and alert you? Yeah, but the thing that scans has to read all the bits to find out if they're still right. Yes. That's a tremendously heavyweight opportunity. The thing that ZFS did is you had optionally, you could store data redundantly, right and so when the thing was scanning in the background just crawling your entire disk from like painting the golden gate bridge from start to finish and as soon as it got done it just starts over again with a low priority thread is it would fix the things that it found because you have redundant copies of the data and it would repair them and it would alert you if there were a problem you know this i just feel like it's a file system thing maybe i'll maybe i'll add to my list if this goes disastrously bad maybe i won't but if not you know again there's already apps that do this but like i don't i don't like either of the approaches i don't like the turds in the directory approach.

2:15:51And I don't like the central database approach because both of them are just like, so. I mean, honestly, I think the central database approach is the right one for that. But like, I don't know, I'm kind of thinking this could be like your thing. You could become like Storacusa suite of apps that like, like imagine, honestly, imagine if like, what if you had one app that would kind of just care for your disk and it would have a few of these functions built in. You got a tech tool pro, norton disc doctor yeah no it's storicus and or forge space but you know but like from a sandbox app none of that stuff is possible let me tell you who has more credibility or passion about the file system than you just because i'm interested in the fossil doesn't mean i'm good at it i've already explained what a terrible mac developer i am you don't want me hearing too much stuff leave it to the experts honestly i think people would love to see the the storicus suite of functionality a few annoyances or shortcomings of APFS or data storage on the Mac that you could help out a little bit with and we'll see one app at a time