623: It’s About Human Connection

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40:15john take us through some hyperspace updates if you don't mind i can prompt some of this i had some questions it looked like you wanted to keep my question for the end which is fine but tell me what's going on yeah so uh uh last episode uh i announced the test flight it went out to all the atp members uh people who were interested dutifully started installing it and using it and sending me feedbacks through all the various channels um and it occurred to me about halfway through the week that I had included my own little brown M &M in the test flight release notes. Are you too familiar with the brown M &M thing?

40:50Is this like a sex thing? No, no, no. I think it's where you ask for like all green M &Ms or something like that on your rider just to see if people are paying attention to you. Kind of. The story is that the band Van Halen used to have this very long contract they would have with the venues that they would play their concerts in. And one of the things they would ask for is, and in our dressing room, we want to have a bowl of M &Ms. but there should be no brown ones in the bowl. Right. And it was the story went around in the eighties and it was like, Oh, Van Halen, can you believe these like rock divas?

41:18And they got to have, you know, they're so, uh, they're so full of themselves. They want every little thing. They're just mad with power and just abusing the people who, uh, you know, who run the concert halls that they run in. But, uh, then the, the, sort of later day sort of internet era turns out story about that as well. Actually, uh, they put that in there. There was a real thing and it wasn't their contracts. And they put that in there because if they went into the dressing room and they saw either no bowl of m &ms or a bowl of m &ms but the brown ones were not removed they know that the concert venue did not really carefully read or take seriously their instructions and that was important because a lot of their instructions had to do with safety about you know we're going to have this light rig that's going to weigh this much and the stage is going to put this much pressure on these positions and we have like to we have to have these kind of electrical outlets and so on and so forth for it to be a safe show i mean it wasn't that big but but they had explosions going off and you know uh pyro flames things and all that stuff uh they wanted the venue to actually read it and not just be like yeah yeah yeah rock band will set your stuff up you'll be fine and so that was the supposed utility of the brown m &m clause that it was just an easy way to tell uh are they paying attention to our contract or they did they just not even read that closely and don't even care about the details right uh i have nothing i didn't intend to put a brown m &m in my release notes but i did uh at the top of the release notes in all caps letters is the thing that says it doesn't actually reclaim disk space because that was the most important thing that people needed to know because i didn't want to have a week of telling me that there were people running my program but they weren't getting disk space back so that's all caps it's line number one i think pretty much everybody read that so good job everybody um line number two of the release notes was a link it was a url uh and that's where everything fall apart because i don't think people followed that link or read anything else they said read the all caps line they said yep got it good doesn't reclaim disk space which is fine um but the reason i know is because if you follow that link it goes to a bullet pointed list it's got like five bullet points on the page here uh and the very bottom of the five bullet points it says the following the icon is a placeholder the final final icon is still in the works so every single person and there are a lot of you who sent me very long critiques about the icon i didn't think it was appropriate and i should really think of something else you didn't read the part about the brown m &ms you read the all caps part about how it won't actually reclaim disk space so i thank you for that uh but that brown m &m is in there so i just wanted to tell everybody if you're listening to this podcast the icon is temporary i actually think it's pretty good to be honest with you but that's neither here nor there yeah i just wanted people know it's temporary uh because so maybe week two will have a different thing all right um next item test flight purchases this was probably the biggest purchase related piece of feedback i got and as usual with anything related to in-app purchase i have no idea what's up this is the first time i'm doing this here's the deal people who are outside the u.s would tell me hey i tried to do your test flight purchase i dutifully read the release notes and i know it's not going to charge me any real money so i clicked the purchase button in test flight uh and it didn't work it said oh this is not in the whatever the german store or it's in the u.s store you have do you want to change stores and it would pop up a dialogue with a change store button and i would click the change store button and it would change it would have me sign in i would change to the german store and then it would say cannot reach app store and i just want to uh clarify two things one all those dialogues the whole thing about you can't do it in the store or change store bubble that's all apple stuff i i'm not producing those dialogues that's all apple right uh i don't know how they're supposed to work all i know is that people are telling me they don't work uh all the things that i was able to check seem fine my app is in theory available in every single country that that apple allows it to be available in all the in-app purchases are available in every single country like i just double triple quadruple checked like yes nothing is restricted everything is everywhere but uh having never done this before i'm a little bit uh concerned about the fact that if you go to the app availability section in app store connect it says for all the giant list of countries a thing that says available on app release so you know angola available on app release argentina available on app release and as we know my app has not yet been released so it could be that non-us people cannot make purchases in the test light version because this app has literally never been released and all those regions will be available on app release which hasn't happened yet so if that is the case i apologize for all the people trying to make purchases outside the u.s and having it not work i don't think there's anything i can do about that short of releasing my app which i'm not ready to do yet um but yeah that's my guess about the deal do either of you two have any clarification on this no and i don't remember this being a problem for me and i definitely had users in other countries it tests like beta testers in other countries so maybe this is a mac os thing i'm not sure it wouldn't surprise me because a lot of stuff on mac os is way jankier so here is a little tidbit because a couple people did say i'm outside the u.s and it worked fine for me so then i'm like well i don't know what the heck to make of that right uh one person did say this they said earlier today i reported an issue with the purchase flow due to an incorrect country setting although i've never encountered this problem with other test flight apps i managed to resolve it here i clicked on restore purchases which prompted a login window i logged in using my normal swiss account and while there was no feedback and no changes were apparent the purchasing of the app now worked so if you're out there trying to purchase and it's not working you can try clicking the restore purchases thing and see if that solved the problem.

47:02I don't know if it will. I'm maybe 50 % confident that when I release the app, all these issues will go away and it will be fine. But I guess we'll find out. I've asked around. I've tried to do research on this. I've tried to look at Apple's documentation. Ha ha ha. Yeah, good luck with it. So I don't know what the deal is, but I will tell everybody if you're outside the US, you may not be able to purchase it. You can try the restore purchases thing, right? Second thing on purchases, many, many people, maybe people who are new to test flight since a lot of we've got a lot of test flight testers here wrote in to tell me that they thought that uh my app should not prompt them for their apple id password and instead should use touch id and by the way the dialogue that appears asking for their apple id password is super janky and scary look i agree guess who makes that dialogue box apple everything you see in the purchase flow all those dialogue boxes that's not me i'm using the standard Apple thing, which is like, okay, go do purchase.

47:59And then Apple throws up a bunch of UI. And yes, for whatever insane reason, as far as I know, this has always been the case, both on iOS and on macOS. When you try to make a test flight purchase, does it let you use touch ID? Does it do password autofill? No, it makes you type in your Apple ID password. Why does it do that? I don't know. But it does. And it makes you type it into a terrible text box that looks like it's totally fake. And Apple is producing that it's one of the reasons why I like I end up uninstalling test flights, like I'll go back and forth between the call sheet test flight and the call sheet real one because test flight purchases like expire on an accelerated rate.

48:37I just never want to have to tell the test flight is you have to repurchase the test flight. I got to type in my Apple ID path is just it's so painful. I there's no way around it. Like, that's just the way that's why it is it's part of the pain of being a beta tester and there is pain there's there is pain in being a beta i know because i've got so many paid apps on my phone it's it's annoying i acknowledge it's annoying how many years has it been like this since the existence of the mac app store i think it's always has it always been like this on ios too uh it's it's always been rough i feel like test flight actually in a lot of ways was better when it was an independent entity but you're asking me to remember 10 15 years ago and we not make you enter your password like in text when you try to do an app purchase in a test flight no no not that i can think of yeah so but mac os is the same way and and everything does look worse on mac os but in both cases it's just like nothing else in the system ever asked you like if you have like face id or touch id or whatever like nothing else ever asks you to type in your password and then all of a sudden here's this beta thing doing and it looks so janky and i agree it's janky i wish apple would fix it but just to let everybody know welcome to test flight it's not the same as real apps and it's bad all right what else uh so the other major thing that i spent the week uh fighting with is uh my review window uh when i was first making this app i was like okay you know they pick where you want to scan your files you scan them uh and then you know you want to reclaim space from them but in between there it'd be nice if you saw well you just did the scan and you told me you found a bunch of files can i just see what those files are because maybe i don't want you to do all of them like or even i just want to see it like just for visibility like i want to review what have you found before we continue to the part where you reclaim space or pretend to in the case of my test flight app um so thus was born the review window uh it just you know here's all the stuff i found uh and you can remove things and you know like that's the point of the window is like for you to take a look at what i found and for you to maybe decide you do or don't want to include certain things i i didn't think too much about it i just kind of made that on a whim it's like oh it seems like a nice thing to have but pretty quickly even before the test flight i realized okay well if you scan like a big directory like your documents directory your whole home directory or something or people are scanning their whole drives uh it might find a lot of duplicates like a lot a lot not like 10 not like 100 but like thousands many many thousands of duplicates first of all is it possible to quote unquote review thousands of things is someone going to look at a thousand things or are they just going to be like oh no i don't know this looks fine like you can't at a certain point you can't manually review it anymore this came up and uh my old jobby job when we were talking about um reviewing dependencies for like license and security and stuff like that like you know any new project you make we want to make sure that anything any third-party software you're depending on we should review it there should be a human review process to make sure that like you're not using some software that you're not allowed to use because of its license or that has some security problems or whatever so we should have a process of human review for all software dependencies which sounds totally sane and like a thing that a company would do as a policy but i know a lot of you right now are already thinking the same thing that i am and maybe casey's thinking as well node modules guess how many third-party dependencies any kind of non-trivial Node.js application has.

52:12Thousands. A trillion. Thousands, literally thousands, right? There's no way to avoid it. Like, and so now are you going to have human review of thousands of dependencies? And also each time all those dependencies are updated? At a certain point, human review breaks down. But nevertheless, I still wanted to have a review window was like look if you want to look at them they're there put a search field in the review window so if you're looking for something if you're like i want to make sure it's not doing anything with my whatever files type this in some search query narrow it down find that thing you know uncheck the checkbox next to it and say i don't want to do these things or whatever and yes i'll probably add an excludes feature at some point but probably not in 1.0 anyway um so i made a review window i put a search field in it uh and then i ran into you know the the brick wall that is uh swift ui performance because like everything like everything else in my app this was a swift ui window and i was asking swift ui to show potentially thousands of things at the very least it's going to be thousands of check boxes or some other control that says yes do this or don't do this right and also it's going to be thousands of file names and probably file paths to say what am i checking or unchecking where is this file and maybe you want other stuff besides just the file name in a checkbox maybe you want to know what size it is or how many duplicates there are or what the total savings is like pretty quickly you're it's not that complicated but it's like okay well it's like for each item it's a checkbox and a string and maybe another string for the path and then maybe a couple numbers all right but it shouldn't be that bad right well you get the review window you put a uh you know a naive swift ui implementation and it just falls over on its face after a shockingly small number of items uh you can pull up the page usually with a small number of items but even scrolling through 100 or two of them painfully slow right so then you're like all right so what can i do for swift ui performance how can i enhance this you know uh what if i use the lazy version of everything so it doesn't have to load the thing up front because if you use the non-lazy one it's just you get a beach ball like trying to load a few hundred things whatever so you use lazy version it loads fast scrolling performance is still not great still you're moving the scroll thumb up and down you're like oh i can see them like lazily loading and it's all jerky and it's just like can i just can i show less stuff what can i do to make this better and so i spent a while fighting with that uh one of the ideas i had was uh maybe i'll just like maybe i'll just show like maybe i'll do like lazy loading on top of lazy loading so i'll show you the first hundred and then when you get to the bottom of the hundred list i'll have like a little load more button and it will load more right but of course if i just let you keep loading more uh it'll just get long again so i have to pull off ones from the top so if you hit load more two times it'll pull off 100 from the top you know that didn't really help i implemented that and i was like no it's still like even just with the 100 window it's the scrolling is not smooth like it's just not good okay well maybe i shouldn't use like lazy vstack maybe i should use list because list is supposed to be for big lists of stuff so i re-implanted the window in list instead of using lazy vstack this is all tech terms or whatever and just suffice it to say i'm rewriting this this window in multiple different implementations i try a list that has a different set of trade-offs it's supposedly also lazy uh but it doesn't it doesn't seem any smoother than than lazy vstack in fact in some ways it's worse you have less control over the items that are in it maybe it's better on ios i don't know but on mac os it wasn't that great all this time i've been resisting the you know the give up and use app kit approach uh but i also decided okay well let me see what an app kit approach to this would look like just using app kit for the scaffolding and still having each individual item be a swift ui view so i did that uh didn't really help it was a little bit better but because every individual view was a swift ui view you're still in the end loading you know n swift ui views or n items even though they're contained in an app kit collection view or whatever the thing you have which is also lazy loading it is more efficient than the swift ui things but uh you know not quite the same and i think uh you know marco was marco's first advice when i first mentioned i saw this screen was slow he's like you should just do this in app kit i'm like oh it's gonna be a lot of work to do in an app kit but like here i am on implementation number four right i've done it i've done it with well you know vstack lazy vstack list uh uh collection app kit collection view with uh swift ui views inside of it uh and you know where i ended up i ended up well let's write it in app kit which i was resisting because this is literally the most complicated screen in my entire app the stupid review window it is i mean not that my app is that complicated but of all the screens in my app this is the most complicated and now i'm rewriting it for a fifth time uh wrote it in just straight app kit nstable view you know the old ways still in swift obviously but yeah um and the performance was better a lot better i still kept a swift ui view for the detail pane that's one of the things i one of the changes i made halfway through is like look i gotta get less stuff on the screen for multiple reasons but not the least of which is that it kills scrolling performance so what if i have like sort of a uh a list of the individual file groups and then a detail view that when you select one you see more information about it so you only ever need to have one detail view and then you have the big scrolly list which is supposedly simple and that's the design i've stuck with i re-implemented all in app kit except for the detail view that i left in swift ui i bashed my head against that for a while uh and the performance is much improved as they say uh that's like you know a glimpse into a week of development uh on uh and a on a pure swift ui mac os app i don't think what i was asking you to do was that big a deal although some people like the testers out there they're trying hard i had one person who uh had a review window with 150 000 items in it oh my uh and and that person tried i think most of the different versions of this screen that i made and would tell me when it was not cutting right and so i think the new one can handle that and it's okay but some point during this whole week of me banging my head against this screen.

58:28A thought occurred to me, and it's going to spawn a slight side discussion here. I want you guys to go to this URL. This is web-based. Oh, no. Can you scroll that web page for me, please? Yeah, it scrolls pretty fast. Are you going to write it in WebKit? Is it smooth for you? Does it seem smooth? Oh, no. Can you load that on your phone? I presume I could. Oh, my God. Are you asking me to do that? Can you see how? Yeah. see how this works on your phone maybe oh my god hold on

59:03you're gonna do this with web tech aren't you wow it's really fast okay does it seem smooth did it load fast sure did oh my god you're gonna do this with web tech aren't you this is i'm having them load a web page because i'm i'm banging my head against uh you know swift ui app kit ns collection view nstable view lazy v stack list the performance is crap i'm on a mac pro with 192 megs of ram i'm like why can you not scroll a list i don't care if it has 10 000 items in it is like it should why can you not scroll this list what's the problem it's just text it's text and it's check boxes and i'm like i could and it's just i could do this in two seconds in the web tech now granted it's web developer for 25 years so i have a little bit of more of skill in that area but like i could do this i know this would work fine in a web page like this i'm not asking too much right so i made a web page i made one with 100 items 500 items 1 000 items 10 000 items and like i load it and it's just and it's girl like today right now this scrolls faster than the app kit the native swift pure app kit ns table view on mac os 15.2 on a mac pro with 192 megs of ram this web page loads instantly and scrolls perfectly smoothly with an equivalent number of items right now we're talking about like oh web web apps always feel worse you can always tell it's a web app because it's not as good and it's not as smooth and snappy and this and that and the other thing no web tech has had so much effort put into it that right now HTML and CSS are an amazingly performant engine for quickly and easily creating user interfaces that scroll like butter.

1:00:50this wasn't true in 2007 when the iPhone came out right WebKit views were not as fast as native views right this is not recycling as far to my knowledge it is not recycling cells in this table right it's it's just rendering them all putting them into the giant image and just scrolling with the gp like just shake the thing up and down it's unbelievably performant right I don't think there is a way with any of apple's native ui toolkits to make a scrolling list of items with some text in them that is smooth as just doing it in stupid html i believe this is an html table i've already forgotten it's just you slap this together and it takes two seconds right and you can change that 500 number in there to larger numbers to see different versions but here's the thing i was i was real close middle of the week i'm like screw it i'm doing this in webkit like i'm i'm sick of i'm sick of native development i know i can do this in in in html and css why am i banging my head again it's so much harder to like app kit like doing the nst table view it's such like ancient technology like the number of classes you have to implement the number of methods you have to override the number of things you have to do in them it's like what is going on here how many lines of code is this and it's like an html it's just it's like a page of html and css like in two seconds it's just straightforward and obvious and like the swift ui one is also pretty straightforward and obvious but then the performance is terrible so who cares that it's straightforward and obvious right it's great if you have 10 items 100 items right but if you have 150 000 they just these things just throw up their hands uh but i didn't implement it in webkit because i think if you change that 500 number to 10 000 in your url and then load that page oh it drops out yeah it kind of gives up after a certain point and you just get blankness now i can tell you that that will eventually load all of it and once it does load it'll it'll be smooth and even while it's blank it'll be what we're saying is you if you scroll this list all of a sudden the list disappears and then there's no more list like there's just then you're just scrolling it's fine on my desk you guys got to get better computers oh by the way chrome does it way better than uh than uh safari so if you load that page in chrome much better job than safari but safari on both the mac and on ios when you load the page with 10 000 or more items it just stops drawing it very quickly now like i said eventually it will all load in and god knows how much memory is thick uh this is the consequence of it not being lazy but this made it a non-starter for me because as slow and janky as it is in swift ui or an app kit for 150 000 items it does actually load you can actually scroll it is just jerky and slow right webkit at a certain point says nope check please not gonna do it and then like i said if you wait if you wait like wow mine just mine just came in finally now if you wait eventually especially have 192 megs of ram or gigs of ram eventually it will load in right and eventually you can scroll your list of 10 000 items and it will you know it's a little bit blinky and stuttery but it's still pretty smooth john have you tried this on tina's computer i'm not trolling you right now because this the performance problems you're describing on your computer i'm not having on mine i tried it on my you can see the same thing on the phone too try it okay you didn't see the blank you didn't see the blanking like it it blanks for variable amount of time it blanks for like a split second like a blink of an eye no on my phone i'll send you i had a long enough time to screenshot on my phone it is blank for a long enough time for me to stare at and take a screenshot right and my phone was my measurement of like look this is you know this is a good baseline right and like i said chrome does way better than webkit but obviously if i'm doing it uh well actually i could use i could embed like the blink engine in my app but i'm not gonna do that so anyway i didn't choose to use webkit for it but had i chosen to use webkit for it this one aspect of it how quickly it can draw this and how smooth it can scroll it would be better what would not be better i think is say sortable column headers because if i did that naively in html uh in javascript the performance would be horrendous what i would have to do is essentially re-implement nstable view in javascript which many people have done like where it's like okay well i'm not actually gonna redraw everything i'm just gonna have a fixed number of cells i'm gonna recycle them and i'm gonna refill them with content and when you tell me to sort i'm going to sort the data store behind the scenes and then redisplay the window of them that you're looking at like all the stuff that nstableview and lazy vstack are doing behind the scenes you can also do that in html but either i would have to implement it all myself in html in javascript or i have to find a third-party framework that does that of which there are a thousand which is part of the problem because i have to find one of those thousand to embed in my app and then finally i would be communicating a fairly large amount of app state in and out of a webkit view through the the slurping straw of javascript uh and i did not relish that even doing it the way i did it where i have appkit and swift ui views communicating and both trying to manipulate a fairly high volume of data uh in real time up to sync everywhere that was difficult enough to do between swift ui and appkit throwing webkit into the mix would be even more difficult But I just, this is a good, interesting thing to note that the conventional wisdom about quote unquote native apps and how much better they are and how much better the performance is and how you can always tell when something is janky in WebKit.

1:06:30Now, you know, with the caveats, I said, I am an expert web developer. I am not an expert macOS or iOS developer. So maybe someone who is a better macOS developer than me could do a better job. I think I did an okay job on the AppKit table view. If you two have the latest test flight version of the thing, you can run it against something and get a big review window and scroll it. It's all right. You know, it's fine. But it's not as smooth as that WebKit view, is it? It's not as smooth as that web page. And that is disappointing. So for whatever it's worth, native devs should be faster. Now, the most common trick that Apple's frameworks use, and I presume other platform frameworks probably do similar things, it shouldn't matter really how many items are in a scrolling list for the list performance.

1:07:21with the trick they usually do is they you know if if the list you know suppose on screen you can fit 10 cells well as you scroll through a list of of 100 000 items it only keeps like 12 cells alive in memory it just recycles their content and so it has like you know the 10 cells that fit in the screen and it has like one above and one below so that as you partially scroll that's already loaded. And then as you scroll the list, all it's doing is swapping in the content of those same 12 cells. So it isn't like allocating everything. It isn't rendering the entire list. It's just rendering the part that you are looking at.

1:07:58So theoretically, it should be fairly linear, like the performance of the list should be about the same no matter how many items it has. Now, there are a few things that can break that assumption and require the frameworks to like load all the items or to render all the cells. That can be things like if they are variable heights and you want an accurate scroll indicator of where you are in the list position, then the framework has to render every cell to know, well, how tall are all the cells? So I know how tall is the total view so I know where to put the scroll indicator. And there's also things like, well, where the cell, like cell content, does one cell's content depend on another cell's content?

1:08:40or does something depend on the content of all the cells in order to render it? And so there are little pitfalls you can fall into that will require the framework to load or render everything rather than loading and rendering only what is on screen and kind of paging in the data dynamically. And it can be very, very easy to accidentally fall into one of those pitfalls. And this was true of both UIKit and SwiftUI. AppKit I never really used, so I don't really know, but definitely UIKit and SwiftUI both had the potential for a UI table view or a list respectively or a lazy V grade or whatever. They all had the potential to make some small decision or some small mistake or not flag something correctly in the code and it would have to render the entire list every time.

1:09:29So I'm guessing that now and on iOS I can tell you I don't have this problem like using Swift UI list on iOS. Like I tested my playlist screen with 100 ,000 items and it scrolls just as well and just as smoothly as it does with 20 items. So I'm pretty sure I don't have this problem with Overcast and that's just, let's say SwiftUI list. I don't think you would ever have a Overcast playlist that's 150 ,000 items either. So it's not really something you need to worry about too much. Well, you'd be surprised what people try to do. But that's why I have a test account that has 100 ,000 podcasts in it.

1:10:03Like, trust me, people do some interesting stuff. Anyway, so I can tell you that SwiftUI, like this is not an inherent problem to SwiftUI in general as a concept. It has that same optimization that UI TableView has of only loading certain cells on screen and buffering in, like, you know, changing their content. Like, it does that same thing, or at least it can do that same thing on iOS where I've used it. Now, the problem is, again, there are all these different pitfalls. You could be inadvertently triggering it to do a full render with some detail of how you've implemented it. Or it's also possible that that optimization doesn't work or doesn't work correctly on macOS.

1:10:42Because SwiftUI on macOS is a little bit of... It's not nearly as tested and mature as it is on iOS. So I can tell you this is probably not a problem with SwiftUI overall, but it might be a problem with swift ui the way you are using it or it might be a problem with swift ui on the mac oh i can tell you i know all those things that you just said and uh i'm pretty sure that is not what i'm running into because you can very easily trigger it so that you know for example use list use vstack instead of lazy vstack if you want to see what it looks like when it loads all of them up front use just plain vstack without the lazy and the difference is stark you will just get a blank screen and a beach ball for minutes it's not subtle right the the and you know even like on the nstable view thing like all these obviously they're all the same height they're all fixed they're all not doing computation like it's just you know all the optimizations i know about from app kit stuff applying them to swift ui like it's so clear that what the problem is is not that it's not doing the thing because it is you can you can literally see it doing it like you can see lazy vstack recycling those cells and like you know it's doing it the reason you know it is because you load a thousand, 10 ,000, a hundred thousand, they perform exactly the same.

1:11:54Like there's no difference in the performance. The problem is the thousand performance is not good enough. Like the hundred performance is not good enough. The 150 ,000 performance is exactly the same as a thousand performance. They're both not good enough. Like it's so clear that it is, it's doing the thing you described just like NS table view is right. There's nothing that's happening that is like subverting that optimization. Now there may be other things that are happening that are making it like slower but like the basic optimization of just show some a small number of cells and recycle the content is absolutely happening and like you know i did i did the thing i didn't describe as part of the debugging process but when this was first happening with my 50 ui view i said all right start over a new test app uh list all it is a list with the word hello in it 100 times right strip it down to nothing how fast can it be and then like build up from there a constant string in 100 000 you know a thousand hundred thousand or whatever just empty app nothing in it like just let's see what the performance is like and i can tell you having built up from zero from like the simplest thing you can possibly have right building up slowly to be something approaching a ui the performance gets crappy so fast like it's it doesn't you know it's not like it becomes like unusable but like the smoothness like oh this is with the word hello it seems pretty smooth this is great right and then you add like oh can i have another word in there hmm i'm starting to get a little bit like there's still constant can i have a third one maybe you write justified oh no it's all over like it it's not like it's terrible but it doesn't feel like it should it doesn't feel like that web page it doesn't feel totally smooth and like that was the thing i was doing of like is there something that was like is there something i can do with the content is the problem the content is a problem like the data model or where it's coming from or like let me just eliminate there's you know there's no data model it's literally constant strings right you know can i get acceptable performance in like the best case scenario and as i slowly added things besides the word hello it just immediately started to feel not that smooth even just the word hello by the way if you compare just the word hello to an nstable view with the word hello and a table you stomps all over on the mac right it's still it's a it's a it's a table that is recycling cells with the word hello in every cell that's all it is right It's a fresh new app.

1:14:09There's no data model, right? And NSTableView is just faster, right? So that shows immediately that SwiftUI on macOS has a long way to go to catch up in the naive case to the responsiveness of AppKit. But both of those things seem to have a real far way to go to catch up with the stupid brute force implementation of HTML and CSS with no recycling of cells, no clever anything. Just render it all. Just render it all immediately now and scroll it as smooth as glass on your phone or on any computer. Like web technology is amazing, right? like i said not in every aspect because again once i start sorting column view headers it's like guess what you're implementing you're re-implementing ns table view you're re-implementing ui table view like there's a reason those optimizations exist there's a reason they've been re-implemented in the web and things start to tumble downhill pretty quickly once you're doing everything in javascript versus doing it in objective c or swift like i'm not saying web technology is better than native and it's not the case i'm saying that on the mac specifically this is definitely a functional gap where i would have been very disappointed by the performance and like again i'm not experienced on the platform so obviously this may be some things that i'm doing wrong but i asked a lot of more experienced people every single thing they told me to check out it's like already doing that already doing that already doing that like i was able to eke out some more performance you know it was already acceptable in ns table view right and i was able to make it a little bit better it's fine like it's okay it just bothers me that any amount of effort should be required on the mac with any of apple's native uh platforms to try to match the performance of a naive html page that someone could slap together on geocities you know it wasn't it wasn't fast back in the geocities days but anyone can learn html and type those tags and they can be lower case they can be capital you don't even have to close them right the thing will just scroll like butter so anyway that was my journey this week on that screen i re-implanted at least five times ended up at nstable view performance is now acceptable uh that's probably why i'm gonna ship in 1.0 uh may be revisited in future versions if i can get the webkit thing to work but probably not wow that was a journey john that was a journey journey for me man yeah you want to write rewrite the most complicated screen you're out five times in a week don't recommend nope do not recommend i do not the last two times quick one i'm working on voiceover stuff i am lousy at it if you two have any voiceover tips please send it to me i find it so hard to figure out where and how to put the right like uh modifiers on the right elements to get it to say same things when i use voiceover because like if i put it on like the parent element it stops saying things about the child elements but i wanted to say that the parent element is this larger thing and anyway i'm no voiceover expert but i'm trying so that is another thing i'm struggling with this week.

1:17:08Well, so very, very quickly, very quickly, if you think about call sheet in the right hand side of like a person or a movie or something like that, there'll be like a title and then below that a runtime. And there are modifiers you can use to tell voiceover, treat these two things as one thing. So instead of saying, and I forget exactly how it works, it'll say something like, you know, release date, title, October 24th, 2024. Well, now it says like Like you can have it say, you know, released on October 24th, 2024 or something like that. And you can do that pretty easily. So if that's what you're talking about, you and I can talk after the show and I can show you how I did that.

1:17:47Yes, please tell me. A lot of my problem is like I have a lot of things like laid out like grid views and stuff. And so the label and the value are separated. So I can't even put one modifier on both of them. So it's a little true. Anyway, I know it's not going to be – the voiceover support is not going to be great, but I want it to be okay. and so i'm trying to get to the level of like i could use it in my eyes closed and sell what the things are i wanted to say reasonable things for every item and just figuring out where i can get it to say the right things it's a little bit tricky oh and you'll be shocked to learn the controlling focus in swift ui and mac is terrible no it's terrible on ios too i was fighting that earlier today worse on the mac i believe it's so bad yeah there's the new is this the focus state stuff exists on mac yet yeah it is yeah that's it's it is it's a little limited it's the way it interacts in the hierarchy is bananas like doing things on the on the parent view overrides things in the child viewing like but i don't want like the whole point is if i override it on the child like why is the parent taking over like it just makes certain things like very difficult so i'm struggling uh final item uh analytics i said in the last show i didn't want to deal with it at all uh having all the feedback from the tesla light testers on it by the way i want to thank all the atp members casey was totally right uh you are all great testers i have so much feedback so much of it great just appreciate all of it it also quickly led me to learn that i need analytics because trying to get a sense of what's going on i was not able to do that by yeah and i'll tell you i'm reading everybody's feedback i cannot respond to all of it if i responded a lot of your feedback all i would do all week is just respond to feedback so i thank you for all your test flight feedback but i can't actually respond to you all it doesn't mean i'm reading it i am but anyway i need analytics unfortunately um a uh company that is apparently a friend of the show offered me a free account for their analytics service which i gladly accepted i probably wouldn't have done this if they had not given me a free account so thank you to them uh and i am trying it out and collecting analytics and seeing what it can tell me i'm fighting a little bit with the analytics back end but at the very least the front end uh is doing stuff um what what am I collecting?

1:19:56Just numbers. How many items did you scan? How many files? How many folders? How many errors did you encounter? How many bytes did you scan? How many bytes did you reclaim? How many bytes could you have reclaimed? How many times did you launch the app? I think I just listed everything I'm collecting. It is completely anonymous. There is no, you know, no personally identifying information whatsoever. It's just a bunch of numbers. And yeah, that's it. And so it's given me some insight, at least into the testers. And I was glad I liked this. I don't package because incorporating to the app took like two seconds it was straightforward to do i am not enjoying the back end where i get to analyze this data because it is beating me up with a query language that i do not like uh but you know it is what it is so i will probably ship with that analytics in there so um what i i'm sure he won't mind me sharing this um one of the most ingenious things i ever heard from underscore uh is that for one One of his apps for analytics, he was just having the app just make a URL request to his server and encode a bunch of stuff in the URL.

1:21:04Now, this URL was actually not a real page on his server. It would just 404, which would be logged to the error log, which he could then parse. I've done the exact same thing my whole career in web dev. That is a common thing. so it actually is like a like a reasonably easy absolutely because you because if you're at a big company you already have some system that is ingesting your logs and like you can use it to analyze them just make an http request put data in in the url and then take your law your thing you already paid for that's analyzing your logs and it can extract stuff from the query string and you can you know decode it and deparse it and decrypt it and you know slice it and dice it yep It is the world's jankiest analytics system.

1:21:51Yeah, and if you think about what you need for privacy protection is basically don't associate anything with people's IP addresses. At this context, that's basically all you need to do is don't have any kind of persistent customer identifier in those requests and don't associate IP addresses with them. You can make a custom HTTP log that has just these query strings for things of this format and logs it to a log that does not that does not log ip addresses with a fairly straightforward nginx or whatever configuration yeah and that's all i want to know is like i just wanted to say like what is the average number of files scan per scan so i just every every entry is a number i just add them all up and divide by the number of numbers there's my answer right that's it like i'm just i'm literally just uh log numbers but yeah trying to trying to sort of get a feel for that from people's screenshots was surprisingly difficult because not everyone sent one and just getting a sense of them like what happens is like i think like the outliers stand out like that person with 150 000 files is kind of an outlier 150 000 duplicates not 150 000 files 150 000 duplicate files i don't even forget how many millions of files were scanned to get that result but uh but yeah uh the number having the actual numbers is going to be coming in so i will probably ship with that uh like i said i'm pretty happy with the um the sdk side of it seems pretty lightweight and uh the performance is good because obviously when you tell it to log something doesn't actually do it it just puts in a queue and then flushes it later it's all swift six compliant you know so it's it was a very uh simple and straightforward uh thing to put in there so yeah analytics uh they are a thing and we'll see how it goes oh and the other the only other thing i put in there is i did put analytics for like how many people click the help buttons like did someone click a help button and i'll just count up you know the app was launched 10 times and the help button was clicked zero times stuff like that you know oh yeah and uh test flight testers don't forget to pretend reclaim i now that i know from analytics a lot of you are not pretend reclaiming you're doing the scan and you get to see the numbers and you're like done and done don't forget to click the reclaim button even though it doesn't actually get you disk space back it does everything else it does a whole bunch of work and then just throws the work away right but i want i want you to make it do that work because in the course of doing that work it will encounter errors and then you'll send me those errors and i'll fix them or try to fix them or whatever so please the ratio of the ratio of people scanning to hitting the reclaim button is very low please do the fake reclaiming i know it will not actually reclaim space it seems like a waste of time but it really helps me because you could do that reclaim and then tell me it crashed the app it did this like that's beta testing you know it broke my computer hopefully it won't break your computer but you know beta testing if you don't want to use a beta don't sign up for a test flight Like, guess what?

1:24:35Test flight apps, they have bugs. So to release apps, don't tell anybody. But anyway, test flight apps definitely do. So if you are a brave tester and you want to be a brave tester, click that reclaim space button and then cross your fingers and let me know what bad things happen. By the way, I think for pricing, like we got a few, we got a bunch of feedback on how you should price. I've got a ton of that through test flight as well. Yes. Yeah. What I have come around to being the best price is a consumable IAP price per reclaim. Isn't that what I said? Yes, I think it is. Come on, man. I know.

1:25:11I'm just saying, upon further thought and upon replaying Casey's argument in my head over and over again, definitely that's how I was convinced. um you know upon further thought i do think like given all the trade-offs given your desire for ongoing revenue given how you want to be able to fund future things and and uh you know make the app better to be able to reclaim more space and everything and because of the nature of it being like most people are going to have most of the value be like this one-time upfront thing you I think about a kind of similar but not quite market is those SD card data recovery tools, where those are almost always...

1:25:55You don't get a free trial for your SD card data recovery tool, because chances are if you have a need for that kind of app, you need it right now, probably once, and then you'll never use it again. or maybe you'll use it again like five years from now where you will you will again like desperately need it right now so those apps are priced and and are structured such that like you know all their value is up front so they don't like give you a week free or anything you just have to pay for it if you want to recover the data maybe you can see the data before paying but then to actually get the data you have to pay i think this app has you know a similar like customer value timing dynamic where like you know as mentioned last time for most people the the most value they will get out of this app will be captured the first time they run it so i think having it be you pay me you know whatever it is 10 bucks like whatever it is you pay me 10 bucks to do the the reclaim step like you know i'll scan it i'll show you how much you can reclaim for free and if you want to actually reclaim this space you pay me 10 15 20 bucks whatever it is I think that's the right move and then if you want to reclaim if you want to run it again in two years and get another 50 gigs 100 gigs back it's another 10 bucks I think that's best you could even then if that is your model you could even then also have tiered pricing by how much data is being saved so like if someone's only going to save 20 gigs maybe they're going to have that for like you know two bucks or five bucks if someone's going to save like in my case when I scanned my NAS drive and I could save 750 gigs.

1:27:41It's a good thing I didn't have the analytics on that because you were literally thrown off the average. Yeah, right. Maybe that's 20 bucks. I think you can see that scaling. Maybe 100 gigs is 10 bucks. Maybe up to 100 gigs to 500. You could tier it like that. And then if I run it there, And that gets me that reclaim perfect. But if I have two computers, I think it kind of makes sense to pay for two different reclaims since what you're paying for is literally I am paying to get that amount of space back. So I really do think that that is probably, you know, there are ways in which it's not perfect, but I think that is probably the best price structure.

1:28:27And I think that will give you the most bang for your buck, so to speak. Like I think that'll give you the best income. And I think it will be easier to do things like dynamic pricing to help align the value that the app delivers to the customers with how much they are then willing to pay for it. I think that the word best in the sentence of the best pricing structure for your app is doing a lot of work there. The least terrible pricing structure for your app. It depends on what you value. I have to say that the test flight feedback has not been as enthusiastic about this approach as you are. but again test flight is not necessarily representative either because they're all like atp members and you know they're technical people or whatever but then again they're also the people who are going to buy the app and anyway uh you know i'm not really worrying too much about pricing at this point except for dealing with bugs related to pricing which i'm still trying to make sure i can make sure everything works the way it's supposed to uh you know before i ship i can obviously change my mind about monetization stuff but for now i'm just working on the app.

1:29:27I obviously agree with Marco, who's in turn agreeing with me that I really think consumables, this is one of the very, very few places other than a game that I think consumable does make sense. And I think it's worth considering. And you likely will not end up going that route, which I understand, but I really think you should think about it. We are sponsored this episode by Delete Me. You ever wonder how much your personal data is out there on the internet for anyone to see and easily find with a quick web search, it's so much more than you think. Your name, your contact info, your phone number, social security number getting a little creepy, your home address getting pretty creepy, even that same information about your family members, which to me is extra creepy.

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1:31:37All right, let's do some Ask ATP and we start with Jeremy Kelleher who wrote probably three years ago knowing us, but I think it was actually fairly recently. Wondering about your suggestions for a nerd who will be shopping for their first home soon. While I'm touring homes, are there tech-related questions I should ask? I'm thinking, is there an Ethernet running throughout the house? Or is there power in the garage I can use for an EV charger? I think those questions are great. You're also hitting me at a bad time, or really a great time, depending on how you look at it. Because as we'll probably be talking about in the post-show, I'm turning into one of those.

1:32:12It's not CrossFit. No, it's the nerd equivalent. It's home assistant. And so I think it is worth it. Not quite as healthy. Not nearly as healthy and probably quite a bit more expensive. It's worth thinking about if you want to do any sort of home automation, be that, you know, home kit, be it a home assistant, be it whatever. What is the situation for the switches in the house? Are there smart switches? And if so, will they convey? You know, will the owner leave them? Are you talking about light switches? Yes. I'm sorry. Yes. Just to clarify, people don't think of the Ethernet switches. But yeah, light switches.

1:32:47Let's say you see a bunch of Lutron Caseta stuff in the house. Are they going to take those with them? Because honestly, I probably would. You're going to rip out the light switches when you move out of your house? Oh, hell yeah. And I'd put in the regular dumb switches. I absolutely would. Oh, my God. It's taking the fans off the ceiling. I wouldn't go that far. So in this scenario, a Lutron Caseta switch is about$60. So in this scenario, you're going to rip out a switch that is probably by that time like a decade old and you know you should probably have an electrician do some of this types of things too so it's like that's never gonna be worth it actually that is true I'd probably use it as an excuse to upgrade so maybe I take it all back okay Casey's never gonna move so it'll be fine that's also true if you buy someone's house who was a smart home enthusiast chances are what you're gonna find in if they do have like wall switches it's all X10 yeah it's gonna be like an old like you know broken like old thing from you know some standard from 15, 10, 5 years ago.

1:33:45X10. Well, right. Fair. Yeah. But it's going to be like Belkin WeMo switches that no longer pair to the anything. It's going to be like old, broken, crappy Home Gear. You're not going to find somebody with a house full of Caseta switches. You're not that lucky. That's not what you're going to find. You're going to find somebody with a bunch of cheapo Amazon knock-offs. Yeah. But leaving that aside, like I think it's worth identifying, you know, whatever smart home stuff is there and figuring out what's going to happen with it. But on the assumption that nothing is there, depending on the age of the house, you might want to, maybe during inspection or perhaps even before, figure out, you know, what is it?

1:34:26The wire that I'm thinking of? The common? Is that what I'm thinking of? The wire that... For the thermostats? Well, for thermostats and for smart switches as well. Oh, a neutral. Neutral. Maybe that's what I'm thinking of. How did you forget that word? on this podcast. Right, seriously. I think I was conflating the two, but yes, a common wire for, as Marco said, a thermostat or a neutral wire for light switches. Basically, if the house is old enough, the switch may not have power unless it's switched on, and that's bad for a smart switch, right? You want the smart switch to always have power, and then the device that it's switching may or may not have power, depending on whether the switch is on or not.

1:35:02So you might want to ask about that. Another thing that I think is very important, and I mean this genuinely, is what are your ISP options where you're living? You know, all three of us now have been spoiled by Fios for 10 plus years. I genuinely think that if I had the choice between a darned near perfect house in Comcast territory and a house that wasn't quite as good, but in Fios territory, I'm buying the Fios house every day of the week and twice on Sunday because it truly makes my life as a nerd that much better. And just the other day, I was somewhere, I want to say it was a library or something, And the internet was a little spotty there.

1:35:39And it was beyond infuriating. I don't have patience at 40, almost 43 years old. I don't have patience for crappy internet. I cannot tell you how amazing Fios has been for me. And I think I speak for all three of us. So I think I would look into that. And on the ISP front, by the way, I feel this pain, not personally, because I, like Casey, intentionally bought a house that could get Fios. my relatives unfortunately live in places where their isp options are very limited and have been terrible so every time we do facetime calls with people they look like potatoes because their upload their upload is terrible also they have terrible lighting in their house but other than that their upload is terrible and they we look clear to them because it's like you know some crappy comcast package where their download is perfectly adequate but their upload is like nothing right and so a very exciting development my sister recently said hey there's this company in the neighborhood they're they're say they're offering me you know internet service for x amount y z or whatever and i was like do it take it do it like you need to get home from compcast right it was i don't know remember the name of the company is but it's one of those like you know like i don't know if it's municipal fiber but some kind of like one of those upstart fiber companies that's like but i've never heard of this company and like it's like do it names that sound like skynet but are not skynet no it's just like something i'd never heard of i'm like whatever it is do it how many years have you been suffering under the yoke of comcast xfinity whatever the hell it's called now do it and guess what she did it uh and her upload speed went from like 0.5 megabits per second to 600 that's amazing you have and the other thing is she called me and she was like uh there's something you know i can't i'm not getting i did a speed test and it's showing these numbers and they're not you know the speed test up here on the the third floor is not as good as it is in the basement or whatever and it's like um well first of all that number is like you know 200 at that point and it used to be like 0.5 megabits so like congratulations that's way better than it was but second of all i debugged the situation and what they did they had installed uh the isp router like where where her old uh you know xfinity router was like and it's like next to the tv and like the sort of downstairs like split level like entertainment room or whatever uh but she had an euro system that i'd given her one of my old eros i i gave her and installed at her house to try to like mesh network the wi-fi from what is essentially the basement up to like the third floor or like loft area where she's got her iMac on wi-fi essentially and she said that euro system for ages and so she's like i i hooked up the euro to try to get better signal to the mac upstairs but it's not working i looked at the way everything was configured and it was she had two wi-fi networks both somehow with the same ssid but they were like fighting with each other uh in the end the solution was unplug all the arrows put them into a ziploc bag find someone else who wants them and use the one router that this weird janky fly-by-night company that gives you fiber gave her that's in the basement and now she's at 400 megabits per second up and down symmetrical from a wireless iMac on the third floor like welcome to civilization isps make such a big difference you think oh you're such a prima don you need to have your fast speed for your torrents no no it's it's about human connection do you do facetime calls with your family or like google video like this is how we see whenever this is how we see our relatives people who aren't flying around from place to place right we see the other people in our family and talk to them through two-way video.

1:39:12And if people have poor upload, you can't see them. It's not a thing that you can control yourself, but you know, so this is the gift you give to everyone else. Get a good ISP with good upload speed. Do not ignore the Xfinity thing that say, look at this big number you're going to get down. Who cares about down? You want symmetrical and cable tend not tends not to be symmetrical for a lot of historical and technical reasons. and fiber tends to be so yeah look for a house that has a choice of fiber isps not just verizon but there's all sorts of other ones that are around uh and they some of the again i don't remember the name of this company anything is better than massively asymmetrical and expensive cable yeah and and you know there's a number of you know shortcomings for nerds that houses might have that you could fix you know if you want to either yourself or maybe by applying small or maybe large amounts of money usually your availability of isps cannot be fixed with any amount of money sometimes you can like pay somebody to run a cable to your house but that's rare you're gonna pay them huge amounts of money like enough to buy five more houses right yeah like for the most part like whatever isps are available for your address you're stuck with that and it's very hard to ever change it so my sister has been in the same town for i don't know 15 20 years finally she has one isp choice it's not like rcn or xfinity or whatever yeah and so like you know when you're thinking about like you know going back to jeremy's question here like is there power in the garage you can use for an ev charger well if there's not usually the circuit breaker box is in the garage so it's pretty easy for an electrician to come out and add that without too much cost or hassle because you're adding something in a garage next to the circuit breaker like that's fine that's one of the but i already actually answered jeremy's email from who knows how long ago it was i didn't want to leave them hanging about this but that was the main piece of advice i had is when purchasing a home and when you're looking at a home um and i was giving advice from the perspective of somebody who is who did the one amount of home shopping he has ever done in a very hot real estate market where the idea of uh picking a house based on what it has is laughable let alone like demanding that you have things it's just like trying to find a house that will accept your bid and you know waiving the inspection and just accepting that a family of rats lives there or whatever because that's what it's like in a hot real estate market and you don't forget to ask to offer 20 over asking anyway um the the way i'm framing it is questions is like finding out what you're going to have to do to the house when you buy it to factor that into your equations not like you should look for a house that has this margo's right the isp thing is the one thing you have to do that because you can't fix this but almost everything else especially if you're in a hot real estate market is like i'm giving you advice so you know what you're in for not so that will influence your choice you should not forego a house that doesn't have what i'm about to describe but just be aware that the house you're buying doesn't have this because you're going to have to pay for it yourself i think the one thing i suggested was find out how many amps are supplied by the the circuit breaker the panel like how many amps of power are available in this house i forget what they come in like 100 150 200 or whatever you kind of have to know how much power is already in the electrical system in the house and how close to the limit of that power the house is.

1:42:24Very small house might not need that much. Very big house might need more. Does it have air conditioners? How many air conditioning units does it have? What is the heating and cooling like? And then you have to add to that the loads that you think you're going to add with your nerd stuff. Do you have an EV? Do you have a bunch of computers? Do you have a big TV and entertainment center? Do you have a big stereo? That's going to add up. You should do some kind of back of the envelope math and figure out, hey, this is a 3 ,000 square foot house with 100 amp service. Nope. I'm going to have to upgrade that.

1:42:52That's why I'm telling you, look at the panel. Like, especially old houses are way under provision for modern standards. Yes, despite the fact they had incandescent lights, they didn't have EVs, right? So be aware that when you're looking at a house, again, don't not buy it, but go to an electrician and say, hey, if I want to upgrade this service, they just run another line from the street or connect the line that's already running from the street. It's not like you can't do it. But you have to pay an electrician to do it because you will die. Okay. Pay an electrician to do this, please. Right?

1:43:22And it's going to cost you a lot of money because it is dangerous work that only an electrician can do. You want to know that number. So that was my number one piece of advice. For any tech nerd buying a house, find out how much power is going to it. And if you have to, on day zero, before you move in, upgrade the service to your house and pay an electrician to do that. Yeah. Well, and also that typically involves the electric company as well. You have to get approval from them to upgrade the service. And you will then have to replace probably your entire breaker box. Like it's so it is it's quite a job, but it can be done.

1:43:54But it's, you know, it's probably like a few thousand bucks. And sometimes it has to be done. Yes. Like if you want to live a sane life with like lots of electronic equipment and definitely an EV. Yeah. And you can do stuff like, you know, smart breaker panel boxes that'll make better use of limited service. but usually upgrading your service is actually pretty much the same price as a as a smart breaker box so you might as well just upgrade the service but uh sometimes if you don't have that option the smart breaker box is terrifying me it's just like yeah we're just going to take power from this part to deliver it over there it's like i just i need like let me do that i'll turn lights off and stuff i just need i need it to be possible to cook in the oven or in the microwave at the same time i need to be able to do that like without the lights going out so yes please check your service Yeah, and I think a corollary to that is how many open slots do you have in your box?

1:44:41I mean, it very well may be that you're going to replace it anyway. But if you're bursting at the seams, maybe you have 500 amp service. I'm being facetious. But you have 500 amp service, but you have one little itty-bitty slot for a new circuit breaker. Well, guess what? The whole kitchen's on one circuit breaker. That's the thing you want to know. That's the other thing. Yeah, right. That's the other thing. But if you only have one slot available, then you're either going to need to have a daughter box or what have you, or you're probably going to need to replace the whole damn thing and rejigger it all.

1:45:08So that's also worth looking at. But in terms of nerd stuff, I mean, yeah, is there Ethernet running throughout the house? I think that's a fair question. If not Ethernet, is coax running throughout the house? I have had extremely good luck with, as I've talked about many times in the past, Mocha Bridges, which are basically things that go from Ethernet to coax and then back again. So my house is sort of kind of wired for Ethernet. Nerds, just let it go. It's fine. My house is sort of kind of wired for Ethernet because I have these boxes in a couple of places and I just ride on the coax and it's surprisingly fast.

1:45:41It's not as good as real Ethernet, but it's close. It's certainly not as good as fiber, am I right? But anyways, I would look at what is the in-wall situation for Ethernet, for coax, for anything really and see what's available. But I think for me, that's most everything. Marco, I feel like you haven't had a chance to offer any unique suggestions. You've certainly had commentary about ours. Anything you can add? Yeah, mainly that like, so yeah, Ethernet running through the walls would be amazing. You're not that lucky. It's not going to happen. You're not going to find that. I don't think I've ever seen a house that had Ethernet already in the walls.

1:46:13Or if you did, it's not going to be like Cat 6 or Cat 7, so it won't do one gigabit or whatever. Yeah. So for me, the question there is not, is there Ethernet in the walls and is there an EV charger? Because there won't be either of those things. But although you're more likely to find an EV charger these days than Ethernet. But the question is, how hard is it to add it? And that depends on the house. Like what would really help a lot is if the house has a basement or a crawl space under it and an attic above it. Then you can much more easily like run wires, you know, in and out. Or like if there's an attached garage, you can kind of go from the garage and go in and out of stuff.

1:46:50Like, basically, does your house have, like, utility spaces above, below, next to, or throughout? Any kind of utility clauses, anything like that, where you could run wires through and access the interior walls of some of the other rooms, like, by going in from above or below. So you don't have to, like, tear up big sections of wall. So the question is not, like, will you find a house with Ethernet? No, you won't. But the question is, how involved and disruptive and expensive will it be to add Ethernet to this house? and you don't necessarily if you're going to have to do that to a house you don't need an Ethernet in every single room if you can get it in most rooms that's great but if you're trying to retrofit it to an existing house and don't want to tear up every room or don't want to spend quite that much money to do it you can just kind of have the greatest hits have Ethernet go from the garage, wherever your computer will be, wherever your TVs will be and wherever you think you might need a wireless access point now if you want to go even you know even further you could you know run ethernet to anywhere you might want a power over ethernet device like a camera um but that's that's more kind of advanced mode uh but yeah most houses could be well wired for nerd's sake for ethernet with between like two and four ports like if they're well placed throughout the house yeah i agree that's all i've got the only things that are connected to ethernet and i wired them myself through my large basement is my computer room so every single computer that is not a laptop is connected to ethernet uh and the tv entertainment center so all my streaming boxes and everything like that and my playstation is in here in the computer room so every device that i care about is on ethernet but there's literally only two rooms in the house that have ethernet and my security cameras those have power going to them through like a little usbc thing that plugs into a plug that's you know in the garage or whatever like but they just use wi-fi because with a good mesh network you don't need that many access points to cover my not so big house so yeah if you're thinking like i gotta have ethernet in every room you don't unless you live in some like 50 000 square foot giant mansion right like just ethernet in strategic places plus good mesh wi-fi will get you covered the only other thing i think about related to networking stuff is i don't know if this is a thing you can really check because the people you're buying the house from are never going to tell you this or whatever but like do your walls have lead in them is it one of those old houses where for some reason wi-fi cannot penetrate from room a to room b you know you're only going to kind of find that out when you're there but like the the things we're talking about here this is another reason why if at all possible again don't not buy a house because of these things but just be aware of them and factor it into both your budget and considering like can we afford this house given that we have to upgrade disservice given we have to do x given we have to do y and also the time of like before you move in is the time to have somebody ripping apart walls and fishing things through attics and basements before there's furniture before you live there i know it's a luxury sometimes you don't always have but like before you settle in do the information you know obviously the you know refinish the floor it's like before you move your stuff in right but even just fishing things through walls uh or you know, trying to get something into a difficult place, it's a lot easier to have to either do that yourself or have someone else do it when there's nothing else in your house.

1:50:14And, you know, in worst case scenario, if you want Ethernet throughout your house, but it's difficult, you know, to get it through the walls or anything like a lower tech solution might be fine, depending on how much jank you can tolerate. Like when we were when we first bought this house and I my Ethernet wiring wasn't wasn't installed yet i ran the cable out the window and threw into the garage like i because ethernet is very tolerant of running long distances through lots of different conditions and we know margo's kink so origin story yeah so like i just i bought like 140 ethernet cable and plugged into my computer and ran it out the window and closed the window on top of it so it wouldn't move and just ran you know through the bushes across the across like the front of the house you know It's like running Christmas light wire.

1:51:06You just kind of tuck it in different places and then, you know, under the garage door, like into the garage. And I ran it that way for like a couple of months and it was fine. Similarly, like, you know, if you – like you don't need necessarily to have Ethernet jacks in the wall. If you need to, you can just like – I mean depending on, again, where you can kind of hide or get away with this. You could just like drill a hole in the floor and run a cable from your basement up into the – like there's lots of different ways. you can do it it's pretty tolerant and it doesn't have to be perfect that's how my internet gets to my rooms yeah right like because it works like like a lot of times if you especially if you have an old house like it can be pretty difficult to to run like professional wiring in in the walls into jacks in the walls like that could be very disruptive unless you're willing to rip open the entire walls that's a much bigger project right exactly it can be like you could do it the way every college nerd did it when we were in college.

1:52:02Just like run the cable down the stairs and tape it to the wall. There's lots of options. But anyway, good luck with the house hunt, Jeremy, if you're still in it or if you are in it to begin with. There are a lot of options, but the thing with most houses, it's not, will it have this already? Because it won't. And if it does, it'll be some ancient or bad version that you won't want to use. It's more how easily can this be added and how much will it cost me? pick your house based on the location that's stupid you know saying location location it's it's stupid but it's true pick it based on the location all right your people's commutes to you to your jobs uh proximity to public transportation to uh you know grocery stored all that is going to make have such a bigger effect on your life the only reason all these things we're talking about come in is because you have to factor them into your time and money budget and so that's how you're selecting you're not you know like i said do not reject the house if it's in the right location if it doesn't have all these things if you if it fits within your budget to fix all of them the only one you can't fix is the isp yeah it's all about location and fiber isp access all right thank you to our members who support us we can thank you to our sponsors squarespace and delete me one of the perks of membership is our weekly overtime our bonus topic every week this week in overtime we're gonna be talking about the nintendo switch 2 that was announced we don't know much about it yet but we know enough to talk about it so this week overtime Nintendo Switch 2 announcement you can join us at atp.fm slash join if you want to listen to that overtime and all the other member exclusive content that we do including overtime every week and a bunch of different specials etc so thank you very much for everybody for listening and we'll talk to you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin cause 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 So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arman, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.

1:54:35It's accidental. Accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Accidental. Tech Podcast. So long. So I alluded to a little bit of home automation talk earlier. Oh, I can't wait. I can't wait. There's been a monumental occurrence in this household, which literally nobody in the household is even aware of other than me. But this is how it goes. So to recap, we talked, and I believe it was on episode 376, which we'll put a link in the show notes. We talked a couple of years ago, one of my pandemic projects, as especially nerds were want to do, was to make the most cockamamie and ridiculous Rube Goldberg scenario for alerting myself if the garage door was open.

1:55:25We have a smart garage door opener, like the physical machine that opens and closes the garage door, but it doesn't work with HomeKit. It will never work with HomeKit. And I could get the MyQ thing, but I had one and it was all right. And then it got better for a while. Then they took away HomeKit access or something like that. I forget the details. It doesn't really matter. But I needed a project anyway. And so what I had done was I got a couple of Raspberry Pi Zeros, which at the time were the cheapest and most underpowered Raspberry Pis that existed. I think they have things that are closer to an Arduino now, but either way, at the time in like 2020, they were the cheapest I could get.

1:56:09They were like 10 or 15 bucks, I think, each. I got zero WHs, which is to say zeros that had Wi-Fi capability. There's the W and the H meant that they had the GPIO, basically the I.O. pin soldered on, because by default, a Raspberry Pi Zero doesn't have any of the pins to connect to other stuff. And I had one literally sitting on top of the garage door opener. with a contact switch running up to the top of the garage, and it would use that contact switch hooked to one of these aforementioned GPIO pins to figure out whether or not the garage door was open. And when it was opened or closed, either way, it would periodically broadcast a UDP packet on the network saying to anyone who wanted to listen, the garage is open, the garage is open, the garage is open, or whatever the case may be.

1:56:55And then I had another Pi Zero WH up in the bedroom hooked up to an LED, and when it received one of those UDP packets saying, the garage is open, then it would illuminate the LED. And although in the two or three years, I forget when we recorded that episode, God, it might've been five years at this point. Time is something else. Anyways, in the several years since this, since I started this whole project, it's been mostly bulletproof and there have been five or 10 times in five years that I have had the garage door closed because I noticed the red illuminated LED by my bed. So mission accomplished.

1:57:32Putting all that aside, recently, over the last several months, I've started to dabble again with Home Assistant. I had been running HomeBridge, which was my preferred home automation thing of choice. and HomeBridge is pretty darn good at taking things that don't have native HomeKit support and putting them into HomeKit. And that's done mostly via JavaScript, like add-ons and things like that, because hey, why wouldn't you? JavaScript's everywhere. And I did like it and use it for a long time, but let me tell you, the Home Assistant people, you think John's flying monkeys are bad? Oh, let me tell you, the Home Assistant flying monkeys are worse.

1:58:14they will not stop talking about Home Assistant. Everything relates to Home Assistant. There's no problem that cannot be solved by Home Assistant. And it is the only software you should care about, period. And I always found that so incredibly off-putting. And I did try Home Assistant around the time I had trialed HomeBridge, and I just couldn't wrap my head around it. It was wildly different than what I wanted, and I didn't understand how it worked. Well, I am here to tell you I now understand how it works. I am now one of the flying monkeys and everything relates to home bridge or excuse me, home assistant.

1:58:48Now there is no problem gentlemen that I cannot solve with home assistant. But in my home assistant journey, I became aware of something that I should have known about. It's existed for like 20 years or something like that, but I'd never heard of before. And this is MQTT. It's an acronym who's, I already forgotten what it stands for. It doesn't really matter. But what it basically is, there you go, MQ telemetry transport. That totally explains what it is, or at least that's what it originally was called. I think it has a different definition now. What this basically is, and the nerds will come after me for this description, but what it basically is, is like a data bus.

1:59:28So it's a PubSub sort of thing where you can say, I would like to know when such and such happens, or hey, such and such happened. And so I'm running this, as you would expect, as a Docker image, as I am Home Assistant on my Synology. It is extremely lightweight and extremely fast. And I have realized now that what I can do is I can put things into an MQTT message, if you will, somewhere, and then I can read them somewhere else. Now, what that means is since Home Assistant has even more support for different devices than HomeBridge did, and HomeBridge had a lot, Home Assistant actually has support for my cockamamie garage door opener.

2:00:17So it has native support for it, which is great. And what I can do is I can have Home Assistant, when it sees there's been a change in the state of the garage door, it can publish a message on MQTT that says, hey, the garage door is open. Then I can have the Raspberry Pi that's upstairs in the bedroom listen for those messages, and it can turn the LED on or off, which means that now I don't need my garage Raspberry Pi. And so it has been officially decommissioned as of earlier today. And at this point, Marco, if you would like to insert taps, please feel free. Wow. I am down to only one Raspberry Pi and two Docker images.

2:01:01You might want to run the Docker containers on the Raspberry Pi because maybe it has a better CPU and memory than your Synology. Like you're running so much on the Synology. Not the Raspberry Pi Ws. excuse me zero w's those are very weak i'm sure i bet they could do it especially for mosquito which is the particular i'm just saying like running i always get nervous about you running all this stuff in your synology that like does actual computation stuff you say it's lightweight but like i'm you know what does your synology have and is that like an atom processor or something i think it does i i understand the question i forget what it is it's a 1621 plus so it was it's not the original one that we had all gotten years ago i'd gotten this a couple of years ago now, maybe a year and a half ago.

2:01:40So it's, you know, 1 800th as fast as an Apple TV. I don't know if I would go that far, but your point is fair. But I'm running, let's see, right now I am running, where is it? There are 22 Docker containers that are on MycenaLogy, of which 20 are running at the moment. And it's fine. It really is fine. It's fine. But in any case, I have now, thanks to MQTT and I'm using Mosquito, which is the particular implementation of MQTT, I have decommissioned one of my Rube Goldberg Raspberry Pis. Sounds kind of like you've replaced it with another Rube Goldberg machine. You just think it's cooler because it has an acronym.

2:02:20Yeah, pretty much. And it's not relying on UDP, which I think is an improvement as well. What's wrong with UDP? I mean, nothing. It just seems so old and janky by comparison. Old and janky? It's not any older than TCP IP. They're the same age roughly. It just feels jankier to me. and you want you want to do anyone want to do the joke you want to do the joke i don't know what joke you're talking about so no i don't want to do the joke i know a joke about udp but you might not get it oh there it is well done well done wow yeah well and mqtt does run on tcp um in any case uh what this is now created though other than probably more problems and certainly a complete time suck is now i want to do something different and i know you two are going to make fun of me and I don't care, but I need help.

2:03:06And I was talking to my good friend, Eric Wielander, who has a phenomenal YouTube channel about smart home stuff, especially HomeKit, but not exclusively HomeKit. And I was talking to him and he came up with a couple of pretty good options, but I haven't come up with a perfect option. What I think I want to do is I want to have a very low tech in-home status board. So what I want is like three LEDs. Now, I think the terminal that Marco has, the little e-ink thing, I think it could serve this purpose. I could write my own custom thing for it. And to be honest, I might end up going that route because I don't know if we spoke about it on the show, but Terminal was kind enough to offer John and I freebies basically because of Marco's hard work.

2:03:52So thanks, guys. My hard work in buying one and talking about it? Well, still. And I believe, and to be fair, I believe they are sponsoring a future episode of the show. But one way or another, I could do this on the terminal, I think. I'm pretty sure I could. But what I kind of want to do is I want to take the space that a light switch would take up. And I want to have three LEDs there. This is such a 1970s slash 80s solution. It is. Forget about a screen with information. Can I get three lights? Yeah. No, I know. And stick them in a switch plate? I know. So that only I will know. It's like looking at the lights on your cable router in 1994.

2:04:3194. It's like, I know what those lights mean. Why stop at lights? Why not go for like Nixie tubes, those like flip board things? Yeah, exactly. Maybe I should go that route. No, I mean, again, I know you're making fun of me and truth be told, if I was on the receiving end of this conversation, I would make fun of you as well. But I think it would be neat to have like two or three LEDs that will show like the state of things that I really, really care about. If you know how to read them. If you know how to read them. One of them is whether or not whether or not Aaron's car is actively charging, whether or not the garage door is open, and whether or not the mail has been delivered.

2:05:07Because I think we talked about in a past show, yeah, we did talk about with my ridiculous setup out in my mailbox. You know, I've got, I've also gone deep into the Yolink world. And so now that's been integrated into Home Assistant, et cetera, et cetera. But I think those three LEDs, and I, what I want to do is like John described, I'm not literally replacing a light switch, but in the same kind of setup, you know, I can envision in my mind three of these LEDs in the spot where a light switch could be, and they will illuminate based on presumably like an Arduino, or maybe if I had the physical space to fit the Pi Zero in there, which I probably wouldn't.

2:05:42But I don't know. I can't figure out a graceful way to do this, because presumably if I were to literally replace a light switch, which I don't plan to do, but for the sake of conversation, if I were to replace a light switch, I would have power there but not in the way I would want you know that's not like an AC outlet is in a you know junction box behind a light switch there's you know 120 volts back there or whatever 110 volts back there in the spirit of your mailbox contraption you can get one of those switch plates that has USB ports on it USB A or C ports and then you plug a cable into the port and fish that cable back behind the switch plate and that'll match your mailbox it would match my mailbox perfectly But what I'm driving at is, is there some sort of, you know, LED, a controllable LED, preferably from either Home Assistant or like an Arduino or something like that, wherein I could turn, you know, one to three LEDs on or off as I see fit.

2:06:38And I don't think I want a single one because multiple things could be happening at the same time. I'm pretty sure an Arduino can handle turning on LEDs. In fact, that may be the main thing people do with them when they first get them. Or you can just get yourself a breadboard. That's also fair. But the problem is, like, how do I power the Arduino? Where do I physically put it? And so I think there's probably a more graceful solution to this, which probably is the terminal. But a more graceful solution to this that I'm not thinking of. So Eric gave me a couple ideas. Like, he had suggested, I think it's called Nanoleaf, the, like, tiles you can stick on the wall, which he knew isn't exactly what I wanted.

2:07:15But it's in the vicinity of what I want. But I presume there's some other options that I'm not thinking of. So if you have something like that that you've done or that you're thinking of, please reach out to me on either email or Maston. Let me know because I would love to have some suggestions. The next person who buys this house someday is going to be like, why are there LEDs in the wall? This must have been done in the 60s. Like, nope, 2025. No, it's so true. It's so true. Do they not have computer screens? No, they have them. This old fogey just didn't want to use them. That's what it boiled down to.

2:07:49No, I just think it would be – it's one of those things. It's just a fun project. and so far I'm failing miserably but nevertheless I'd love to have some feedback if you have any so please feel free to reach out