667: Wisdom and Treachery

38:05It's thermoregulating, it's odor resistant, it's durable. So honestly, I find it great for packing for travel. Like if you want something on the airplane, it's a great one for that. Each pack of hoodie is handcrafted in Peru by artisans who stitch their name into the tag, their personal signature of quality and care. And it's made sustainably and ethically from traceable alpaca fiber, which supports the communities and artisans in Peru who bring it to life. over a hundred thousand people have already picked up the pack a hoodie so honestly it's it's pretty great you should check it out if you've been thinking about leveling up your hoodie game do it now check it out today right now during packa's black friday slash cyber monday sale you can get 30 off with the purchase of three items or more go to go.packaapparel.com slash ATP.

38:52That's go.pakaapparel.com slash ATP. go.pakaapparel.com slash ATP. That'll get you 30 % off with the purchase of three items or more. Thank you so much to Paka for sponsoring our show.

39:11Let's do some topics. Apparently Apple Fitness Plus is under review. I put this in here because the Mac Pro, you got all this fun about my Mac Pro potentially going bye-bye. Well, now it's your turn, Casey. Oh, my God. Gurman writes, Fitness Plus, the company's app-based Peloton Rival, remains one of its weakest digital offerings. The$10 a month service suffers from high churn and offers little revenue upside. Still, Fitness Plus has enough loyalty for its small fan base, hi, that Apple can't simply shut it down without a backlash. And given how inexpensive it is to operate, there's little incentive for a nearly$4 trillion company to pull the plug, especially if such move would generate negative headlines.

39:47That said, the future of Fitness Plus is under review. The division is getting new management with Apple Health head stumbled aside, adding Fitness Plus to her portfolio. But both she and the group that now reports the service is cheap at EQ, both she and that group will now report the service is cheap at EQ. With that new arrangement in place, the service will be under fresh pressure to improve results. Better do more workouts, Casey. You want to keep that service around? Yeah, you know, I haven't used Fitness Plus in a while, which is kind of damning given the support. But I do really, really enjoy it.

40:14I really honestly do. And typically, as I've said many times in the past, there's a service called Beachbody. Now it's called Body. It's terrible. Yeah, I know. It was basically an MLM, which they've largely abandoned that as far as I'm aware. And you don't have to get involved in the MLM part. You can just get the fitness videos and the shoe, the supplements and the pre-workout and all that other junk that was really gross. And that's what Aaron and I always did. And they're workout videos I really enjoy. And typically, Aaron and I will go back and forth going through several programs that they have.

40:49And I really like Body. Again, nay, Beachbody. And usually, after I finish like an eight-week program on that, I'll do a couple of weeks of Fitness Plus to kind of like have a palate cleanser. And I really enjoy Fitness Plus. I think it's really, really, really good. But I will be sad, if not surprised, if it goes away. And it wouldn't surprise me if it goes away. There's also some news that CNN was pulling out of News Plus because they've got their own pay offering for news stuff. um i did see that fly by like yeah news plus is fitness plus makes perfect sense to me like it's sad that maybe not enough people are using it or whatever but it seems like uh a very apple style fitness offering with no real bad parts about it if you like what they're offering like it's you know it's it's part of a bundle i'm not sure is it can you buy it separately anyway yeah yeah it's 10 bucks a month yeah well anyway it it seems fine uh news plus on the other hand has always seem weird and un-Apple-like because it's filled with terrible ads and the app isn't very good and it's that it it's in that you know thing we talked about last week of uh Apple not really being known as a web-first company so News Plus is an app that lets you read things that are also available on the web but you're not really reading them on the web but there are Apple News URLs so you can read them on the web but it will launch the app and it's just what are you Apple and then the terrible ads like what what are you doing and then losing cnn like i still appreciate news plus for the purposes of this show because i've subscribed to the apple one bundle otherwise i wouldn't get news plus but it lets me read like the wall street journal without subscribing to the wall street journal because they get the wall street journal articles but even that is such a weird dance of like you know find the wall street journal article it's behind a paywall and then use the share sheet to open an apple news which isn't available and i think it's not available in the in-app browser but it's available in safari anyway it's confusing and annoying uh but it does let me read things that otherwise would have to pay separately for so i appreciate that but every time i look at apple news plus i'm like i can't believe people would open this uh this would be like their main news source because it's filled with all the the worst ads that you see on the web and that's not apple like um but fitness plus is apple like it's just i don't know someone pointing that out in the chat room fitness services surely have a lot of churn because you know people uh are dedicated for to working out and then you know fall out of the habit and then go back and forth you know so but it's uh i mean it's the type of thing this is the thing that always annoys me about apple or the current apple anyway like let's say you know i they don't put numbers behind this or whatever but you might think oh well as long as it's as long as the money that it brings in exceeds the money that it costs to run it they'll keep doing it but that's not the way a company apple size seems to think which is it's not worth our time unless it's going to make us this amount of profit merely being profitable is not sufficient to stay alive which you know again i think certain things you should do because you're you think they're an important part of your product before they're not getting to the mac pro but just like apple fitness press seems like an offering that fits in with their online service offering and it is very apple like and clean and doesn't have anything gross in it and is a good version of the thing that it's trying to be.

44:01So as long as it's, even if it was losing a little bit of money or breaking email, I would still keep doing it. But I will also be disappointed it goes away. Despite the fact that I've never done Apple Fitness Plus and it doesn't appeal to me at all. I just think it's a good example of what it's trying to be. Yeah. And just very, very, very quickly, what I like about it is, first of all, the trainers are, you know, the bubbly, happy Apple trainers you would expect. Like they're, they're men and women, they're all different shapes and sizes, and they're really, really enjoyable and they're not all American.

44:32There's a bunch of Brits. I'm pretty sure there's other nationalities as well that I'm not thinking of. But they're really, really good at what they do. Additionally, one of the things I like about it is the integration. So if you have an Apple watch, then your rings will show, assuming you're doing a workout on your Apple TV, your rings will show right there on the TV and update live as you're doing your workout. So you can watch your green and your red rings close, which is really nice. Additionally, if you pause the workout on your watch, it will pause playback on the TV, which is really neat.

45:03Is this earth shattering? Absolutely not, but it's neat and I like it. And again, the workouts you can do like a five minute core up to, I think they might have a 40 minute something or other, but they have up to like 30 minute hit and strength workouts. Um, and I really like them. I haven't done, like I said, I haven't done them in a few months now, but I really do like them. And I really think they're really, really well done. They're very pretty to look at. They're, they're nicely executed. they're they're they're uh accomplishable by people of varying fitness levels and they always have one person that's like not remedial but you know not working quite as strenuously uh i really do think it's a really well executed and i would be sad if it went away i don't know how strong of a position apple's services are in besides the the taxes and fees like are people absolutely running to the other ones, maybe.

45:57It seems like Apple TV Plus, now it's called Apple TV. It seems like TV is seemingly, I think, doing pretty well. Yeah, I don't know if TV makes money, but it does make headlines. They won Oscar, they win Emmys. It buffs the brand, whether or not it makes money. Yeah, and the other services, the other kind of content services, News Plus, Arcade, and then Fitness, I don't think they do that much. We almost never hear about them. That doesn't necessarily mean anything, but we don't hear that much about them. But I think it's important for Apple, if they're trying to sell their bundle and their subscription, what they're trying to say is, hey, everybody, come sign up for Apple One and you get all this cool stuff.

46:45Look at all this cool stuff you get. And I think in that context, having a fitness service is actually more important than how many people actually end up using the fitness service. So even if not that many people are using it, I hope Apple can see in the bigger picture, it's nice, first of all, that's a very aspirational thing. A lot of people - It's like a gym membership. Yeah, exactly. And not to use it, just got to pay for it. Exactly. And a lot of people will pay for it because they're like, yeah, you know what? If I spend the extra six bucks a month to get this whole bundle compared to the pieces I was going to buy separately, I'll get these few other things.

47:22and yeah, maybe I will start using fitness. Yeah, that sounds good. I mean, not this week, but next week maybe. All right, sometime. But that still helps the bundle overall, and it helps Apple show, like, here's a broad selection of different services. And when you look at, like, what does it cost them to keep it going? They've already built out the studios. They've already set everything up. They've already built the software. They've already built it all. The actual cost of them to keep it going is trivial, especially for Apple. like it's it's trivial so i i hope that they can see in the big picture like having the service even if it doesn't get amazing numbers of direct usage it does provide a net benefit that might be bigger than that and it's costing very little to keep it going so i'd say keep it going but hard agree that's why i don't work at apples who knows and they are cheap if they're anything they are yes they're very very cheap you don't usually get that rich without being that cheap yep All right.

48:22There was a very interesting video that went around a couple of weeks ago, I think. Fast charging and battery degradation. So HTX Studio tried to answer the question, is fast charging killing the battery a two-year test on 40 phones? And so Julie Clover and MacRumors summarized it. using six iPhone 12 models, the channel set up a system to drain batteries from 5 % and charge them to 100 % over and over again. Three were fast charged and three were slow charged. Another set of iPhones underwent the same test, but with charging initiated at 30%, stopped at 80%. So the iPhones were always in that range.

48:55This was done, I forget the specific hardware they used, but they had a combination of hardware and software that would work together to have the phone tell the hardware I need to be charged now or stop charging me. It was very, very very clever how this was done anyway going back to julie the results suggest there's minimal additional battery drain from fast charging but keeping an iphone between 30 and 80 charge could be minimally beneficial there's such a weird way to test this you know because it's kind of like uh i guess you would describe it as like integration testing or a system testing because they're you know they're charging phones as you noted like automating the charging of phones but like the battery manufacturers know how the batteries perform like they you know this lithium-ion battery manufacturers are well aware of the uh you know limits of their batteries and how they behave under various scenarios and whether fast charging and slow charging and yada yada like that's their job done but that's just a battery in isolation so they're testing the whole system well you don't care how the battery performs you care how your phone performs and the phone is the battery and the thing that converts the voltage and the charging system and the software and the operating system and the case and the heat dissipation and like a million other variables So they're trying to test that at the system level.

50:02But even there, it's like, okay, well, where were these phones while they were being charged? Were they in your pocket? Were they in your jacket pocket? Were they on your nightstand? Like, how cold was the weather? Like, it's all sorts of other variables that affect your phone when you're charging it. Is it in a sunbeam while it's charging because you put it on your kitchen countertop? Like, there's so much. But, like, they're just sort of rediscovering the same things that the battery manufacturer could have told them, which is that fast charging is not as good as slow charging, but the difference isn't that big.

50:31And the battery manufacturers, I'm sure, pride themselves on narrowing that gap further and further because they want to sell a battery to phone makers that can tolerate fast charging without hurting the battery. Like they want to be able to charge fast. They want to be able to discharge fast. They want to be able to do a lot of cycles without losing capacity. That's how battery manufacturers compete with each other. And this is just sort of proving that out with modern phones of saying, yep, fast charging hurts the battery more, but the gap isn't that big. and you know the conclusion of the video is what we always say about this which is like unless unless you really need to pinch those pennies on resale and you think your battery life is going to just use your phone just use your phone how are you going to use your phone how you use your phone is how your battery is going to turn out if you constantly use it you know you charge it in your pocket you do mag safe charging instead of a wire like you fast charge all the time then that's how you have to use your phone and that means your phone's battery is going to be in worse condition after two years than it wouldn't have been otherwise but like what's the alternative to change your entire life around babying the battery just use your phone how you're going to use your phone you can be aware you know if you're a tech nerd you can be aware of the things that batteries like and don't like but i don't think it's worth changing your life to satisfy the battery that the phone's job is to be a tool for you not the other way around we were sponsored this episode by zapier you know these days i'm using ai all over my work, but it's hard to integrate it in.

51:55I'm using it by like using the AI tools in the browser and then, you know, maybe copying and pasting and stuff like that. That doesn't really help you as much be more efficient at work as you could be. For that, you need the right tools. You need Zapier. Zapier is how you break the hype cycle and stop all the copying and pasting and put AI to work across your company for real. So Zapier is being used by all sorts of companies to do all sorts of things. They can do things like streamline their rev ops, streamline their marketing, integrate with sales, help HR and IT issues, and so much more. And that's what I'd be most excited about using it for.

52:31Like if I was trying to integrate this into my company, that's where I would start with those kinds of tools. Marketing, brainstorming, that kind of stuff, reviewing reports, like it's great for that. Zapier is how you actually deliver on your AI strategy, not just talk about it. With Zapier's AI orchestration platform, you can bring the power of AI to any workflow. So you can do more of what matters. You connect top AI models like ChatGPT and Claude to the tools that your team already uses. So you can add AI exactly where you need it. And then one thing I love about that is that it lets you pick the model.

53:03So like if I'm a really big fan of one of these models, I can just use that one. And Zapier helps me integrate that into my tools. So you can have AI powered workflows, agents, chatbots, or whatever else you can orchestrate it all with Zapier. And whether you're technical or not, you don't have to be. It's super easy for everyone to use. Teams have already automated over 300 million AI tasks using Zapier. Join the millions of businesses transforming how they work with Zapier and AI. Get started for free by visiting zapier.com slash ATP. That's Z-A-P-I-E-R dot com slash ATP. Thanks to Zapier for sponsoring our show.

53:46Okay, we haven't done Ask ATP in like 34 years, so we're going to do some Ask ATP. And we're going to start with Max Velasco-Knot, who writes, Marco, now that you run a restaurant and have a staff, has that affected your tipping culture or tipping preferences, etc., when you dine at other restaurants? No, because I was already tipping pretty well. So here's the thing. The way tips work in restaurants. In America. In America, yes. Good qualification. Workers in restaurants usually are paid below minimum wage as their base salary because they're expected to make more in tips. And then that should push them well above the minimum wage in a good restaurant and hopefully at least above it in kind of a slow, inexpensive one maybe.

54:31But anyway, these people are on their feet constantly. When you are a server at a restaurant, you generally don't stop moving during your shift. You are constantly moving. It is a hard job, and if you're a good person, you kind of have also the burden that you have to bring up the average from the bad people. So this includes both people who don't tip very well, which there are a lot of them, and people who are just kind of jerks. so my goal in a service situation like this is not to necessarily be super noticed just i want to make sure that i'm doing what i can to make this person's day a little bit better because there are a lot of people doing the opposite you know my goal is always you know what i'm gonna be an easy customer also keep in mind too like the kinds of things servers get blamed for or praised for oftentimes are not the fault in either direction.

55:35Because the server is like the face of the restaurant to the customer for the most part. The server is usually the only employee that most customers are interacting with or maybe a host up front for a minute and the server is the rest of it. And so the server gets the blame or the praise for everything. Now the praise, great, you know, good for them. But they also will get the blame for things like if the food is slow to come out, which is not their fault, usually. Usually it's like, you know, things get really busy. Maybe the kitchen's backed up a little bit. Or, you know, if the food tastes good, that's also not the server's fault either direction, you know.

56:10Servers get a lot of people who, you know, blame them a lot or are rude to them, treat them like subservient humans. Like there's a lot of people who are rude or worse to restaurant staff. I like to go the opposite direction. So I've always been nice and polite, even when I had no money, I've always been nice and polite and easy customer. Again, even back like in high school, I would still tip reasonably. You know, I wouldn't, even when I had not that much, if I couldn't afford the tip, I wouldn't go to the restaurant. That's kind of been my philosophy all the time. Now, as I've gotten older and I've gotten more money, I've been able to tip better.

56:48Even before we own the restaurant. It's kind of like in a very, very small form of altruism. I consider that life has been very good to me. And I like to leave a nice tip because it seems like paying it forward. It's like, hey, you know what? Life's been very good to me. I kind of got lucky. I'm going to try to give this person some of that luck, make their day a little bit better. So I will leave a ridiculous tip if I can. And that's usually the case. And so I'll go 50 % maybe for a restaurant I like a lot or unless it's like$1 ,000. That might be a little crazy. But I'll tip well. And I'm lucky that I can do that.

57:33For those of you out there who can tip well, I suggest you do. Because chances are, if you have that kind of resources yourself, chances are giving that money to the server, they'll make better use of it than you will. It'll mean more to them than it means to you. And you're making the world a little bit better place. And you're making up a lot for all the people who don't do that. Because it's a tough job. They really work their butts off. And I think it's the right thing to do if you can do it. Yep. Couldn't agree more. John, any thoughts to add? No. I mean, I don't go out to restaurants that much, but I tend to tip pragmatically for delivery free food uh i tip with the the urgency of me wanting these places to stay in business i guess maybe this started during like you know the covid lockdown it's like my tipping became much more generous uh yeah i was tipping fine before but like now you know like marco level tips because it's like i don't want you to go out of business because you're close by to my you just opened you're close by to my house you deliver to my address you're prompt your food is good i don't know how many other people are going there so hopefully this will keep you going the tip is not going to the restaurant in that case you know that right well no this these are places that deliver themselves they're not using like doordash or whatever like oh okay some places actually have their own delivery it's hard to believe but i in the place that i live some places have their own we just had some of it tonight their actual own delivery where people probably the kids of the people in the restaurant uh deliver whatever but it's takeout like there's like what are you what are you tipping for there's a delivery fee like they they do charge a delivery fee but there's also a place for a tip and i tip like i was at a sit-down restaurant and i tip you know basically saying please stay around this one sandwich place i keep trying to do that but they're never open when i want a sandwich i'm like i can't buy things from you if you're not open i don't i don't know how long that place is for this world but i like their sandwiches so uh yeah that's the only thing i think covid lockdown has probably changed my tipping culture to be uh extremely generous tipping for people i'd never see in person on top of the delivery fee for delivery food Eric Jacobson writes, what do you think about using third party packages in your apps?

59:39I know Marco tries to use packages rarely, if at all, a stance that I find admirable, but not exactly pragmatic. CallSheet doesn't strike me as something that would need many, but we've all worked on enough apps to know that unexpected needs are the rule. Hyperspace, on the other hand, I'm sure could benefit from all sorts of outside work. I'm not entirely sure how Eric jumped to those conclusions. I'll start by saying CallSheet has, shoot, I should have had the project open, I don't know, so I'll go off the top of my head. CallSheet has a couple of third-party projects. there's a socket project that I use for talking to Plex and then I just this week adopted Swift it's a first party project but it's one that you have to bring in using Swift Package Manager it's not async algorithms which is kind of like combine meets async await but there's another one that Apple does wherein they have different data structures and I needed an orderable dictionary for something that's coming out fairly soon.

1:00:40And so I pulled that in recently. But that's, I think, it. I don't think I'm using anything else. Marco, you have some pretty strong stances about this. Oh, let me, I'm sorry. Before I pitched you, Marco, let me interrupt myself. Only you would apologize for interrupting yourself. Well, I told you you were up, and then I said I was a liar. So anyway, I don't really have anything against third-party code, but generally speaking, I've come to land on Marco's side of things, which is I avoid it if reasonably possible. Not because I think my code is necessarily better or anything like that, but I feel like having 100 % ownership over everything that happens in the app is something to aspire to, to the degree that you can using SwiftUI and UIKit and so on and so forth.

1:01:28and so generally speaking if I can just write whatever I need to write and especially if I have any interest in writing the thing I want to write generally speaking I'll just do that now I could have written a orderable dictionary but I didn't have any interest in it and it wouldn't have really served any useful purpose and since it was a first party project I thought I'll just suck that in but generally speaking I'm not I'm not an absolute an absolutist about it but I do generally try to avoid it now. Now, Marco, for real this time, what are your thoughts? Obviously, as discussed before, I do try to avoid using third-party code in my app.

1:02:07It comes from experience of third-party code having bitten me in the butt much of the time that I have used it. Not all the time, and I'm not 100 % against it, but the barrier is high. It has to be really worth it, and not using it has to be really bad. So for instance, I will discuss in a few minutes I'm going to be talking about how I had to switch an S3 compatible provider to a different S3 compatible provider on Overcast backend. And I write my own S3 PHP accessing class. I wrote it a few years back. I believe I even posted it to GitHub as a gist or something. But I wrote it a few years back because I just needed some kind of like S3 compatible basic IO library.

1:03:00And everything out there for PHP that I could find was these like, you know, usually the official Amazon one or some third party one that just like this absolutely massive, giant library with hundreds of files, all this complexity that I didn't really need. And I know like, you know, for me to do this myself, I know it's not that much code. I think doing it myself was something like 200 lines of code. Like it was not a lot of code. And just literally a few, like two weeks ago, I had to look at that code and be like, all right, I have to modify it slightly to be compatible with this other service.

1:03:36Is this worth it to me? And you know what? It really was unpleasant for about two hours. And then I found what I was doing slightly wrong that one service tolerated and the other service didn't. And I fixed it. Now it's fine. And now I won't have to touch that code again for years. And meanwhile, that code, because it's so small and I've written it entirely myself, number one, it is just lighter on the servers. It will literally directly save me money over time. Number two, I know it. So if any part of it has to change or if I have to debug a problem, I know all the code. And it's small enough that even if I have to look at it again, you know, three years from now, when I've definitely, you know, it has definitely fallen out of my L3 cache by then in my mind.

1:04:21But I'll be able to look at it and figure it out really fast because it's small. So that's the kind of benefit that I tend to go for when I have a library that I could use someone else's or I can write my own. Now, sometimes the complexity is not worth it. So the main third-party library I use on the servers is the Stripe API. Because dealing with Stripe stuff, I know I don't offer Stripe descriptions for the app, but I do use Stripe to sell my ads on the website. and so and dealing with stripe for that like it's super easy to use their api and for me to for me to use their sdk rather and for me to not use their their php sdk would be a decent amount of work with the feature set that i use now i could do it but it's i don't need to it's fine and that's something that's like stripe has proven over time that their sdk is very trustworthy and very low needs.

1:05:17I don't like one thing I would not enjoy is if the copy of it that I had needed to be updated frequently. So far, I forget when I built my Stripe ad system. I think it was something like eight years ago, maybe nine years ago, seven years ago, something like that. I think I've had to update the code once in that entire time. And so again, this is like, It's a low needs library. It's a high cost to do it myself. And I've never had any problems with it. So I'm okay doing that. But that has not been the case for things like S3 libraries or things like, you know, a lot of the iOS side stuff. And frankly, on the iOS side, I really don't frequently have a need for third party code.

1:06:04Usually the kind of code I'm writing on the iOS side is custom code that only I could write. because it's like it's integrating stuff in within my app to other stuff within my app i don't have a lot of these like orthogonal problems that i can have one library import to totally solve a problem for me i guess i don't have a lot of that um and if i for some reason need something smaller like you know give me a function to calculate the tangent between you know these two triangle points i'll just ask chat gpt and i'll look at the 10 lines of code that it wrote. I'll adapt them so they fit and work.

1:06:36And then it's a 10-line function. So I don't have a lot of needs for things that are larger than that, that a third-party library might even exist for. John? I come from the web development world and ever since the web had any libraries at all to speak of, they have constituted the vast majority of the code. Even if you think back in the jQuery days, you'd load jQuery and then write a paragraph of code. Well, jQuery is way more than a paragraph of code. always has been i don't know they try to minify themselves and make them small but the fact is that you know client-side web libraries have grown server-side web libraries i've written tons of web frameworks in pearl in my career even when i'm using a framework that i wrote myself still the vast majority of the code is third-party code because of cpan the comprehensive pearl archive network of one of the one of the original package management open source things uh you know i would build my web frameworks on top of libraries on top of cband modules because that's just the way things were done so both client side and server side in the web libraries made up the vast majority of code that's not that different from the the world on apple platforms they're just we we think of it differently because it's like well there's the operating system and there's all the frameworks that lead up to the pinnacle framework which is ui kit or app kit or whatever but underneath that is frameworks on top of frameworks on top of frameworks on top of libraries on top of the operating system none of that is your code but it's first party code it's not third party but anyway the vast majority of the code that makes up quote unquote your app is almost certainly not your code it's you know the the operating system and the frameworks even though it's all first party so i'm very used to the idea that what i'm doing is writing on top of a mountain of someone else's code i did enjoy my career as a web developer having the source code to all that code that i'm writing on top of which is not true on apple platforms you have some of the source code but not all of it which is disappointing um but all that is to say i am not allergic to using libraries um that said but part of the reason we like apple's platforms is the first party stuff and frameworks provides you a lot of stuff so you're like it's not like it is in you know pearl or you know to make the extreme case like a node.js where doing almost anything requires importing a jillion libraries right um you can just start a project and use ui kit or app kit or swift ui or whatever uh just use that first party top level framework and do a lot of stuff without ever having to go anywhere to a third party thing that said my apps do have third party stuff again i'm not quite sure why hyperspace got the call out for a thing that's going to need third party libraries the only third party libraries are you and it's in hyperspace one library is for i don't know if you've looked at the ui but i do like a a thing that imitates like the path bar in the finder kind of where it shows like the i had to represent a folder hierarchy without i didn't want to use a path with slashes because that's not user-friendly if you're not unix so like how does mac os do it in the finder it shows like you know a folder icon a folder name and then like a little you know arrow or whatever like i don't know what do you call it is it called the path bar there's i don't know what it's called in the finder but they they show you a path without making it a unix path so i wanted to make a thing that did that and that requires you know making a little image and some text and doing truncation and doing wrapping of the images and the text with truncation and i wanted to do a thing where if you moused over the truncated ones it would expand them so you could see the full name on them and has to flow correctly and overflow if it gets too big and that's a fairly complicated thing and i implemented that all myself and it wasn't fun in SwiftUI to do that.

1:10:11And then after I implemented myself, I think, I forget if it was after 1.0, but I think it was, I found a third-party library that did exactly that. I'm like, oh, thank God. Because it wasn't, I'm not a SwiftUI expert. And yeah, I got it to work and it was fine, but I'm more than happy to use a third-party, you know, Swift Package Manager package that does reflowable, like, collections. And honestly, Apple really needs to up their SwiftUI game to sort of reach parity with like UIKit and AppKit with like their collection views, you know? SwiftUI does not have very robust collection views. That would make my life a lot easier if they did it.

1:10:47But anyway, there's a library called Flow that's on GitHub that I used and I ripped. That was glorious. It deleted all my code, all my stupid custom view layout thing or whatever and just imported that package and uses it. That's a UI thing. The other main library I use in hyperspace is a library to implement the Easter egg. there's a hyperspace themed easter eggs does some fun graphics uh and i didn't want to write myself and there's a third-party library from a well-known uh swift uh developer uh teacher in the swift community who did like a fun library to do fun graphics i will gladly use that library instead of rolling that by myself that's it all of the stuff that touches files that's all my code on top of apple's frameworks unix apis all that other stuff so no frameworks for any of the actual functionality just a framework for ui layout and a framework for an easter egg and then in swift glass switch glass actually in all of these i'd use well not not in um hyperspace because hyperspace does an app purchase because it's free download but switch glass is paid up front and this always annoyed me once i discovered this mac development if you do a paid up front mac app uh and you just write it naively your app does nothing to make sure that someone actually paid for it you have to write some code i thought this you got this for free as part of the mac app nope nope nope um you have to write some code that says oh and by the way when you're running make sure someone didn't just copy this to another machine like make sure it actually is downloaded from the mac app store and does apple provide code for you to do that not really no not in a good way and so there are third-party libraries that will check to see that you have the mac app store receipt and that it's valid and signed and so on and so forth and those third-party libraries have to keep pace with all whatever apple does oh we're changing the algorithm we use a different hash or whatever i don't want to have to deal with that so i just use a library again it's an open source library that does receipt validation on mac os and i use that to make it so that my app cannot be naively copied to another mac and run in my paid up front app obviously with hyperspace where it's in-app purchase the whole in-app purchase system handles that uh but yeah apple should definitely do a better job there but i use um that uh package in switch class and then it in turn uses other packages uh that are also open source like swift crypto and stuff like that anyway uh so that's that's what i use in my in my apple apps but i'm i'm not allowed to third party code i think of it very much like marco does where it's like do i want to deal with this is this going to change often and you know the reason i gave the uh the layout example is like even if i've already written all the code for it is that code like the core competency of my app no it's just something it's just a layout that i it's a layout that i want to have that i don't even have to have i could pick a different layout i just wanted to have that one but i'm not the the value of my app doesn't rely on wow look at this great layout code he wrote no i will gladly use a library for that and then i will be praying for the day when apple sort of sherlocks that library and says oh you don't need that library anymore because we built it into swift ui and then i'll be able to delete that dependency and just use Apple's first-party implementation.

1:13:54All right. Nathan writes, I've been thinking about the subfolders in the applications folder, and I'm curious about your thoughts. I know it might seem a bit unconventional, but I've noticed some apps acting strangely, others refusing to launch, and some just refuse to budge from the root of the applications folder. I use Spotlight and Alfred, but I've always felt like my applications folder could be more organized and user-friendly. It's like a cluttered mess that I'm constantly wishing to tidy up. Have you ever tried organizing your applications folder and subfolders? What have you found to be the benefits and drawbacks.

1:14:22Has this ever been a thing on the Mac? Or should I just give up and pretend it's not there? This is something I have never once thought about, do not think about, will not think about, do not care about. Just stop worrying about it, Nathan. You have many other things to worry about. Stop worrying about this. You can answer the question. Has this ever been a thing on a Mac? Yes! It absolutely has. Cue the line that I cannot remember from the intro from the Fellowship of the Ring movie. Something, something, things were lost because none now live who remember them i'm still alive i remember i used to arrange all my applications into beautifully arranged subfolders with their own custom icons in classic mac os because in classic mac os the computer belonged to the user as did the file names you could name things whenever you wanted you could put them mostly wherever you wanted with exceptions of certain things having to do with the operating system uh that freedom was lost in the transition to mac os 10 apple tried to do the best they could do applications have to be in applications the applications folder well no obvious apple itself ships the utilities folder inside the applications folder is a folder called utilities and inside there are applications also you can make an applications folder in your home directory which is so well supported that it will get a little application folder badge because apple knows that it's going to be there against this holdover from the next days when you could have local applications user applications network applications so on and so forth so there are a bunch of designated okay spots for applications and apple itself has subfolders in the application folders that they put applications and there's also things in system library core services there's applications in lots of different places but as casey was expressing in his casey way the culture on mac os 10 is that applications go in the applications folder and apple encouraged you to do this in various ways in the ui if you ever tried to run an application from like a disc image or run it from the downloads folder sometimes the applications themselves will say hey i noticed you're running me from not in the applications folder do you want movie there and i think there's an os feature that will like translocate them there and say hey i'm not running an application do you want me to move me there should it make a difference where they are not really but i mean running them from disc image is bad because disc image is a read-only but these days applications shouldn't be writing things to their own bundles but who knows what happens but anyway what has happened is that the culture on mac os of applications just expecting to be in the applications folder has produced a brood of applications many of which don't behave correctly when they're not in the applications folder i think that is antisocial and bad i think applications should behave just fine when they're on the applications folder and if they have to be in there for some good explicable reason they should notice when they're not running there and offer to move themselves there but that should be a very rare edge case otherwise they should like most of apple's applications run from anywhere again system library core services like it's not a special application special folder they should run from anywhere so i think it's it's bad that they can't but some of them do get cranky when they run outside there now if you want to subdivide I do have some subfolders like I have a games subfolder in my applications folder and there are a bunch of games they're all fine they all run fine from there again like I sometimes I have subfolders within subfolders like most applications will be fine but if you're nervous at all or you have any application that looks like it's misbehaving put it into the top level applications folder I've never had anything misbehave in my home directories applications folder so take that for what you will maybe because that's more of a blessed location but yeah um it's bad uh it used to be better.

1:18:03There used to be more flexibility, but most people don't care where their applications are and don't want to organize them. And so if you're having any problems, just stick it in applications. Marco, do you also organize your applications folder? Of course not. I don't even open my applications folder. Yeah, same. I almost never do. It's all from search. Omri Arbiv writes, I recall an old hypercritical episode in which John said he will always be better than his children in video games. Now that John's children are in college, is there any video game that either of them plays better than and John have Marco or Casey's kids surpass their video game skill.

1:18:36Let's start with me and Marco and end with John on this one. Cause I think John will have the most to say for me, I can no longer consistently beat Declan and Mario cart. That's the only thing that we play semi regularly together. We haven't played in a while though, to be honest more often than not, I can beat him, but there's a handful of tracks that he's better than me on. I forget which one's off the top of my head, but generally speaking, I can still whip his butt. uh marco how's it going with adam in that department there are some games that i am better than him at typically games that rely on old platform game mechanics in the 2d world that we grew up in adam and i play a game called ultimate chicken horse uh that is basically like it's like a new party and well new to me it's probably like 15 years old but like it's like it's a modern kind of like 2D side-scrolling party game where you like jump through like difficult scenarios that you make up in a 2D platform kind of world I play that with a Super Nintendo style controller and I'm really good at it and I can beat him much of the time in that game not all the time but much of the time in that game that's it in all other games he's way better than me like not even in the same league so far ahead of me.

1:19:56But in that kind of game that relies on old platforming mechanics, I'm actually good at that. So that I can do. But anything else, anything involving certainly combat, I mean forget it. I don't stand a chance. In general, in life, he's just much faster than me. His brain works a lot faster than mine. And he is so tuned in to video games and how to play video games. and like he will spend hours getting good at them and building the skills and getting the muscle memory. And like so he's he is starting from a from a better place already because he's not only younger than me, but he's mentally faster and physically faster than me.

1:20:35But then also he has so much practice with the games and he'll go and do the research and he'll watch the YouTube videos and he'll dive into all the stuff. And so like any game that we play, he will know everything about it before I've even seen it. So I don't stand a chance in most games. Now, we do play games together anyway. way like like we generally like playing games that are um you know maybe more co-op style um or games that are so simple like ultimate chicken horse that it doesn't really matter um but we can do things like you know we've played like the the bloons td games together where just as co-op we're both playing like the same team just trying to beat the big mobs of whatever coming into the tower the tower defense arena um but yeah if we're actually playing against each other he's better than me in every possible way all right john what's the situation i don't remember if i said this on the hypercritical episode but i hope i did which is i was gonna say it sounds like you yeah and and no not that this particular thing i'm about to say i did definitely say that i was gonna always be better than my kids but i don't remember if i i explained the something that would have helped you too which is that um as you get older and you're you know your kids get older of course your kids are going to have better reflexes than you they're going to be faster they will have the advantage of youth.

1:21:51And the reason I said that I will always be better than them is because what I will have is wisdom and treachery. And also the psychological barrier of being their dad. You must play to your strengths. Your strengths are no longer your reflexes. You can't lean on that. You have to use what you have, which is life experience and the ability to ruthlessly betray and be sneaky. and and you know you use your wisdom and experience now how is the how is me always being better than my kids working out i hope i also said this which is i maybe i didn't maybe i didn't foresee this which is like that we would be interested in different games so there are games that my son plays that i have never played and have no interest in and presumably he's better than me in them but i still think that if i did play those games and was interested in them that i would still beat him um for the games that we both play equally i must rely on my wisdom and treasuring to to defeat him and so he's pretty close in a lot of this especially first person shooters i think i'm mostly better just because i make better decisions which is most of what being good at first person shooters actually is it's not actually reflexes most of the time but because his reflexes are so much better than mine i really have to outthink him to sort of level that playing field but it but it can't happen um you mentioned like uh adam watching all the youtube videos involved i i'm doing that i subscribe to so many gaming youtube channels all i do is like half of my youtube watching is learning things about like destiny videos i subscribe to so many destiny channels now that i'm playing arc raiders i'm just constantly watching arc raiders videos to learn things so that is part of sort of being into the games and i don't expect him to be better than me in the games that i'm playing and he's not for example so that's sort of the the you know the calculus there the the caveat should have been always better than my kids in video games if we both play the game but if one of us plays it the other one doesn't obviously it's unfair and on that note recently uh it was over a friend of mine's house and he uh suggested that we play uh um it's an apple arcade game uh which luckily we're all apple arcade uh subscribers but basically uh you know network name that tune um what is it called uh it's not actually a very nice application so i'm a little bit annoyed at it i think it's called i'm so surprised to hear that it's called song pop party song pop as uh all one word capital s capital p and then a space and then the word party it's network name that tune and their ui is inscrutable like they have never seen like the information architecture is foreign to them they have no idea what a hierarchy is it's just like how do i get from here to there and shoot you just want to like i just want to pick a playlist and play it the game with these songs and it's it's maddening anyway it's available on a phone and ipad and you can play it on apple tv and it's just named that tune it's multiple choice name that tune so everyone gets the app on their phone or whatever you should play it on the phone because using the apple t remote is a massive disadvantage because it sucks and it's multiple choice you all hear the song start playing immediately and you have four buttons on the screen and you have to press the button that's the right answer sometimes the button that's the right answer is the title of the song sometimes it's the artist that's basically the whole game it's apple arcade so there's no in-app purchase but you do have to unlock things by earning keys it's like come on apple arcade i already pay for you there's no in-app purchase you're not making any money why are you time getting these things behind xp it's so stupid anyway well that's that's just because like you know in the same way that like when we were growing up arcade games were a thing and then a lot of times they would be ported to the home consoles but they still acted like arcade games like where you'd have to you know like insert credits or whatever like at like they still had like arcade game remnants this is like all the apple arcade games that that were like you know ports from regular app store games they all have like remnants of the in-app purchase grinding garbage mechanics that all these games have now those remnants are still there sometimes i'm not sure if this is an apple arcade game that existed outside of it right i think it might be is you might get paid based on play time oh like an apple arcade and so there if you're incentivized to keep people playing your game then you're going to lock all the stuff behind like you know anyway i'm not sure the details that's annoying but if you consider this a game this is an interesting one to play with your kids it's not great it's not really a video game it's it's named that tune but like it works exactly how you would expect if i pick like the 80s tv show playlist i'll crush everybody right but if my kids pick like current music i have no idea what these people large it's you really it's really struggle to find a playlist for like a round of the game that is remotely fair because our cultural differences are so huge you can also by the way play with strangers when you play with strangers you get to sort of pick like i'd like this to be the playlist and it just randomly every person picks what playlist they wish it was and then it randomly picks amongst them and like you know i'll pick like billy joel you can do artist based ones i crush pretty much everybody in billy joel because the odds of you getting another big I'm guessing there's not a fish live performance one.

1:26:49Well, that might be tricky. I didn't see fish in there, but you have to unlock the things. I unlocked Billy Joel and you two. And like, I think the police or something. And I unlocked a bunch of 80s things, including like movie soundtracks and TV show themes. Although sometimes the TV show themes, they'll play a portion that didn't play at the beginning of the TV show, which I think is bad and wrong. Like you should. I know the songs are longer, often longer than they were at the beginning of the show, but you can only play the part that played in front of the tv show i thought actually a good engagement mechanic might be that the fish playlist starts out unlocked and you have to rank up to lock it well no the fishing won't be hard because i don't i'm not sure if humans choose the excerpt you know what i mean it's like if they don't if you randomly choose an excerpt from a fish song i think even you would be challenged yeah i mean there's a lot of them that you know once they kind of go off in the wilderness for a while you're like i don't know what the heck this was yeah maybe it would be fitting for instead of it being like five second snippets the fish ones they play three minutes the song yeah and and still no one knows what the heck it is i think this was a carini at 20 minutes ago it's multiple choice the most fun part is like when especially when you're playing with like strangers online they'll play one and it's clear nobody in the in the game in the lobby or whatever has any idea but then they'll sing the lyric that is the title and everyone picks it you can see it happening that makes me think that it's not that that is not human curated because you should never pick a snippet that has the title in like where they say the title of the song with the you know leonardo dicaprio gif right so anyway um a network name that tune is a fun game idea just like draw something a network pictionary is also a fun game idea this is a poor implementation of it but if you have apple arcade you get it for free and it's an interesting quote-unquote video game to play with your kids because there is very often not that much overlap between the world of your cultural references and the world of theirs yeah i like to show the the variance in gaming selection um the game that adam is currently um very heavily playing is called ultra kill and what he is doing in it is basically like trying to beat his best times through the level in like a speed running kind of method now when i as a you know as an old person see this game and i see the way he is speed running it he i it's you know it looks like kind of a regular shooter but he's basically flying through it because he's like doing these like crazy speed run jumps and jumping and soaring and flying and like whoa how did you get all the way over there in three seconds oh i shaved off 0.1 seconds off my best time it's like oh my god like there's so much going on this game is retro and adam probably doesn't even know it it looks very much like uh quake one or quake two but much faster obviously but like the graphics are like intentionally retro but for a time that wasn't retro to me when i was living through it oh yeah well my favorite thing is like the the the font used throughout the entire ui is that like vcr bitmap font and it's it's and i love it like i i saw it i was delighted by it i'm like even though this at no point did anything with that font look like this like those are two not overlapping time spans but it was delightful but like when you look at this game you're like i have no idea what's going on here and it's just so much of it like this is and like you know besides this he'll play he'll play those kind of like grinding economy games or just like you know some like roblox pile of hacks that'll be like well that now you know i i just traded in the the mega sword for the ultra sword but to get the diamond sword i have to get five million of these bags of rice and it's like oh my god like that sounds i mean honestly to me it sounds super unfun but he has fun with it so you know whatever and i see games like this but i'm just like he's in he's doing things that are like impossible in this game like i can't believe what's going on in this game you should try universal paperclips one of the i think that was what it was called one of the original web-based ones oh i did sort of like economy games yeah i actually did play that for you know a few days has adam played it i don't know he also there's like there's all these like clickers now that are basically that same kind of game um he was just telling me about one the other day like one of the one of the many oh it was cookie clicker that was the one that's that's what the kids are playing now or recently and that's like it just it sounds exactly like all of those games but it's like i just need five million more of these things and i'll have it in 35 days like oh my god he likes ultra kill he might like the the recent uh entries in the doom franchise i don't know if you two know but they they keep making doom games and they are very much like ultra kill but with a little bit better graphics huh i didn't know that i knew that they were putting well not they but people were putting doom on all sorts of hilarious pieces of hardware but i did not know that new doom was many many doom games since the original doom and they keep making them and they keep making you them faster very much like ultra kill where you move real fast you go real fast there's lots of bullets it's you know not attempting to be realistic in any way i don't there's it's not quite as speed runny as it seems to be but uh he might enjoy it all right I thank you to our sponsors this week, Aura Frames, Zapier, and Paka.

1:32:00And thanks to our members who support us directly. You can join us at atp.fm slash join. One of the many perks of membership is ATP Overtime, our weekly bonus topic. This week on Overtime, we're going to be talking about, should we ever be forced to put away our phones to have phone-free experiences? Things like events and things that require your phone to be away and how they do that. Interesting topic, I think. So we're going to talk about that in Overtime. You can join if you want to listen to that and everything else we do for members exclusively, atb.fm slash join. Thank you, everybody, and we'll talk to you next week.

1:32:54Accidental. 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 Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long. So I just did an Overcast update a few days back that adds the number one customer requested feature for probably the last year by far. Episode images. tell me more about what that means okay so podcasts have always had like the main podcast image that is like the artwork that shows to represent a podcast a very very long time ago there's there's been support basically since the beginning of podcasting for images to be embedded in the mp3 files because mp3s themselves support images being embedded in the id3 tags and they have for a thousand years so you could so you you had your podcast image it was specified in the feed as a URL, just an image URL on the feed.

1:34:22And you've been able to embed images in the MP3s themselves. And in many podcast players, if you would play a podcast with an embedded image, that image would show on the now playing screen instead of the main artwork if one was present. Now, a long time ago, that actually caused me a problem with Overcast early, early on on the development because the wonderful now, I believe now, totally over podcast Core Intuition by our friends Daniel Jockett and Manton Reese. Core Intuition was one of my test shows a thousand years ago. And they used to embed a lower resolution version of their main image as their embedded image in every file.

1:35:06And Overcast's initial logic was, if there is an embedded image, display that. and if not display the main artwork now the result of this was when playing core intuition back then it would quickly pop in a worse version of the main image because that was the embedded image because it had to be kind of you know smaller to fit into limits and stuff and so i originally episode artwork meant that and even that i had to like develop basically i did something where I resized both images down to 16 by 16 pixels and measured the differences and how different these two images are. And if the embedded image was deemed to be basically the same image as the main feed image, I would just show the main feed one and just ignore the embedded one.

1:35:56You're probably ruining a lot of people's subtle jokes where they change one letter in the title of their name as a joke artwork, but you replaced it with the real artwork because it's shrunk down there the same. Well, the good news is the embedded artwork feature of the mp3 spec and of podcast apps has hardly ever been used now the world has moved on since then and overcast still supports that and it has the entire time um but and we use it all the time in this show right or no we use chapter images yes see we stopped we did use it in this show um and chapter images we did anyway we moved on the world has moved on no one ever really used those in great numbers and just to be clear that the distinction we're making is chapter images are a different thing where images are embedded in the mp3 file which is separate from episode images where there is a artwork image embedded in the mp3 file saying for this episode this is the artwork.

1:36:44Right, exactly. So, over the last few years it's become fairly common especially for larger podcasts who have like production staffs and designers on staff and stuff. Larger podcasts will often have individual images made for each episode and what they do is Apple Podcasts added support I think a couple of years ago at least, for images to be specified in the feed per episode. So it's just in the feed, it's just another URL, and the feed has to download it, or the client has to download it and show it. And then this takes it out of the file, and the advantage of this is that you can show them before the episodes have been downloaded.

1:37:24So if you're presenting a list of episodes that have not yet been downloaded, all those images that are present, they can be shown on that list. So it's helpful and it's kind of nicer for like the rich display of podcasts now with big budgets and all these assets and design things that they can have now. So for a long time now, my number one feature request has been support for these episode images. Of course, I try to go implement them and I run into so many little problems. So first of all, the scope and the scale that you're dealing with now is Overcast is hosting metadata for and crawling millions of podcasts.

1:38:09Now, every podcast has one main image. You're going now from the potential of a podcast having one main image to 2000 episode images, maybe. so you're dealing with like potentially orders of magnitude more images that need to be dealt with now the most obvious way to do this is just ignore them on the server side and just have the client download them directly from publishers at full size then the servers don't have to know anything about them except this is the image url go go nuts uh the problem with that there's a number of problems with that so i'll get i'll get to that in a minute but first that is what i prototyped first now the very first thing i had to do was build an all new downloader for overcast because what this means in in the before support times of this overcast had to download one file for every episode so the downloader was kind of tightly bound to one-to-one relationship between episodes and files that can be downloaded for those episodes so i first had to refactor the downloader and in fact i ended up writing a whole new one for other reasons um but refactor the downloader and design it such that a podcast can have more than one file associated with its down with downloading for it and there's all sorts of tricks to that like okay well what happens if one of them gets deleted what happens if one of them is downloaded but the other ones aren't uh what happens if the file is being streamed uh during playback and not downloaded what should What should happen if it's in your list but it is not downloaded?

1:39:47What should show there? There's all sorts of these considerations. There's also a privacy angle because keep in mind, the world of podcasts is all about ad tech in all of its forms now. Fortunately, it can't do quite as much as it can on the web because of the limitation of the medium. But any little bit of information you give these big ad networks that are now serving podcasts, they'll use it against you. Like, so it's like talking to the police, like give them as little as possible. Making a second request from the same IP. Well, when do you make that request? Do you download every image, even if you haven't downloaded the file?

1:40:28But then you're making a request two different times. And maybe they can like bind two different IPs to your data profile if they're keeping on you. And then they can figure, oh, you this is your home IP and this is your work IP. There's also there's all sorts of stuff that you got to think about with that kind of stuff. you know what if they specify a quote pixel uh and then you have to think about like are they going to change the url over and over again to you know to make sure that you keep downloading it so they can keep tracking you as you go throughout your life and as you move to different ips in different locations uh the answer is yes of course the people are going to try to do that if they're not doing it yet they're going to so you have to design any kind of feature like this with privacy like significantly in mind and then the second problem is like okay you're downloading images now.

1:41:10What happens if the image changes after you've downloaded it? How often are you checking? What happens if the URL changes? What happens if the URL doesn't change, but somebody replaces the image on their server? Do you keep the cached version forever? Do you have to pull potentially thousands of image URLs client-side every single time? When you think about what actually has to happen here to do this well, it's not a small amount of work so i refactor my downloader to download the images directly and from from the publisher so that way my servers wouldn't have to deal with millions more images and whatever that might that might mean okay i try it out i've run it i run it on you know in the ios simulator on a test account that has a handful of podcasts in it and it was 500 megs of images on a test account with a handful of podcasts like what the heck is going on and so at first i look and i see there's one image that i have about a hundred copies of it's the artwork for hypercritical so it turns out that um one thing that that you know five by five feed now has is they specify images per episode even if there never were images per episode for like a very old podcast they just specify the same url for every image like oh no duplicates and you you can't count on podcast feeds doing anything in a in a regular logical way they're going to do whatever they're going to do so then i have to all right now re re-index things with the consideration that maybe you shouldn't count an image as being an episode image if it's been used before in the same feed.

1:42:55If it's the main artwork episode or if they're using it for a bunch of other episodes. So I had to de-dupe all those URLs, ignore any URL that appeared more than once. But then in a later test, I learned that that breaks dithering. Because dithering uses different URLs, but it uses each image for like a month. So you'll have like eight episodes of dithering in a row that have the same image URL, but then it'll change. You need content addressable storage. what it'd be storing them based on their content not based on their name or anything so then you can say when you download one you can say oh i can discard this because i've already got this file but then you're still downloading it a million times it's true but you're not keeping it a million times so it wouldn't take a 500 megs yeah but then i then i'm basically building like a file system at that point then i'm like all right well this this thing references this block or you know then you can delete this one no the content or like s3 has things that will kind of do this for but anyway yeah go on like you'll get there yeah so my my deduplication thing you know had to like be revised a lot uh it still didn't still didn't get there but whatever all right then i'm like okay now now comes the other problem all right so i try it out and it's like it's the images are way too big and they're still not available without downloading the full size images from the publishers so as you are scrolling a list of episodes that you don't have downloaded yet those who are having to download these huge images, popping them in.

1:44:25And if you make the iPhone download an image from a publisher, you have to be very, very careful not to do anything with that image that might load it into memory and blow up the phone before you know for sure that it's safe. And I don't necessarily mean safe in terms of security vulnerabilities. I mean safe that it won't exceed the memory limits of the phone or cause a huge amount of processing time. so like there was there used to be back in the day i remember jason and mike were joking about this that like at some point i think one of them accidentally published the upgrade artwork as a jpeg 2000 file oh i remember this it was served and it was fine and because apple's image part processing frameworks can read it overcast was dutifully reading it maybe it was just a chapter or whatever it was, it was reading it, but it was incredibly slow to read.

1:45:20And while that, I think, yeah, it was while that chapter was playing, the interface would lag like crazy because it was like trying to parse this giant JPEG as an image. And so you have to be very careful with like, you know, kind of untrusted input. And so I have all these things in place that like use certain image IO functions on the client side to like first read the dimensions of the image. And if it's above a certain dimension, don't even try to decode it. And then also check the format of the image. And if it's not like, you know, JPEG ping, you know, if it's not one of like the simple well-known ones, don't even bother.

1:45:51Don't try to read it. It's like there's all these different checks I have to do. This is just to illustrate kind of the complexity of having the client process images. So then I get to the problem of like not being able to see them in scrolling lists without downloading all of these giant images from publishers. And I'm like, oh my God, I have to thumbnail them server side and put them behind a CDN. That's like, that's the real answer here. i really just had like and that's what i do for main podcast artwork also the client is not downloading podcast artwork from the publisher it's downloading it from my cdn and my cdn is doing like my servers are doing the resizing and sticking them on the s3 compatible storage thing and being served through cloudflare so it's free um and that's that's the whole the whole process but then i'm like okay now now i gotta be careful because now i'm gonna start are thumbnailing millions of images again on the thumbnailing front i just ran across this because i was looking at some some code for an app that you'll never guess because it has nothing to do with thumbnails but it was like someone posting uh fast core graphics thumbnailing code that i think its pitch was it never has to have the full big image in memory like essentially you can if you've got the full size image somewhere accessible like on the file system that you could make a thumbnail without ever without ever reading and putting into without ever expanding sort of like on you know uncompressing the entire jpeg 2000 that somehow would make you a thumbnail while iteratively reading the thing in chunks or something and that i mean i know you're probably doing it server side using whatever you know server side library you have but i'm i'm wondering if you ran across that in your travels in terms of can i make thumbnails without loading the whole image i've seen a bunch of those articles like because you know every every few years either some new api will come out or somebody will find some new you know method or they'll run like some little benchmark and make a blog post about it saying this method changes images this much faster or whatever.

1:47:43But yeah, it's all happening server side now. It's all using like image magic server side. In PHP? From PHP. But image magic is doing the actual image magic. Exactly. Well done. Anyway, so I'm like, now I got to build this stuff. Then I go and build that. And that takes weeks to start like filling the back catalog, doing all the thumbnailing, and then I'm about to launch the feature. And one morning I start seeing that all my S3 put commands are returning 403s. What is going on? Now, the object service I was using to store it, because it was way cheaper than S3 and it was local to my servers, was Linode Object Storage.

1:48:30Their S3 compatible block storage, almost every web hosting thing has their own S3 compatible block storage kind of thing. and so I was putting it there because it was it was very inexpensive and I put Cloudflare in front of it to serve it really fast so that part didn't really matter well it turns out I created my little object storage bucket on their like legacy version of it and now they have buckets that have high limits but the one I hit had a limit of like 50 million objects or something like that of five with a lot of zeros at the end. I think it was 50 million. Just an artificial limit, that many objects, and once you hit it, they don't email you or warn you in advance or anything.

1:49:15You can start getting four or three hours whenever you try to write any new images to it. So that was fun to figure out. And I opened a support ticket. I'm like, hey, can I get a higher limit? And they're like, nope. You got to move to a whole different data center to do that. I'm like, oh my God. So this is now a bucket that has 50 million things in it. And I have to, and I was literally like about to release that bill to the app store like oh god now I have to delay this again because I hit Leonard object storage's old limit for the number of items in a bucket which I didn't even know was a thing like so then I took another you know week to slowly migrate all of those 50 million things to Cloudflare R2, which is Cloudflare's S3 clone for their block storage.

1:50:05Change all the code and overcast to point to that and to make sure that all the stuff works to actually read and write to that properly. Do all that. All the image URLs change. Everything. Did you look up what the limits are for the new object storage? No, because I know Cloudflare wouldn't have stupid limits like that. I would look them up. I would still look them up even though I agree with you. Just write them down somewhere. And then finally, I was able to launch the feature last week. The number one customer request now. Can I have a setting to turn that off? Cool. Thanks, everybody. Yeah, because sometimes episode artwork is gross.

1:50:47I mean, I have a problem with main show artwork. Some podcasts I listen to have changed their, like their main, you know, the, the artwork, the main artwork for the entire show to be hideous. And I just, I wish I could just like, like custom artwork, kind of like custom icons in the finder. I don't like the, the icon, this app changed and I changed it. Yeah. Yeah. I'm surprised you don't have some like Pearl script. That's just putting a facade in front of the official RSS, but inserting your own preferred artwork. I could do that if I really cared that much, but I mean, there's, there's, there's enough problems to dealing with podcasts.

1:51:20RSS feeds, I don't want to add another layer there so I can just blame Marco for everything. Oh, that works for me. Everyone else does. Right. Well, so it's shipped and other than people saying I hate this because different everyone is happy by and large. Yeah, I mean for the most part, well and there's also, by the way, there's the massive like UI question of where and when the images get displayed during playback or not during playback. So there's a number of schools of thought here. So where I'm displaying them now is if you are viewing an individual podcast's screen and you're seeing its list of episodes, they will show there and they will show during playback in the now playing screen and anywhere the now playing image would show.

1:52:03So things like CarPlay, the lock screen, control center, you know. But if you have a playlist or a widget, a context where you're seeing episodes from different podcasts possibly being blended together, they are not showing there. I'm showing the regular podcast artwork there, like the main show artwork there. Because my rationale there is like in a context where you need to distinguish podcasts from each other, the main artwork is how you visually identify that podcast. But again, what I think is not necessarily what everyone thinks. And so that many people are, you know, thinking like that's not what they want.

1:52:41So it's a very tricky problem to solve. um i even i played with briefly i played with like having in in a mixed podcast contest like a playlist having the regular podcast artwork show with the individual episode artwork in some form like maybe like i tried having the regular podcast album art as a little tiny inset thing like on the lower right corner of the main but it was it just looked cluttered and confusing and then you're obstructing the artwork like it was there were so many problems with everything else I tried. So that's why I went with this. But even that, like, it's a really tough feature to get right.

1:53:17And it's, it sounds so simple. Episode images. Yeah. And then every single one of these details was like, was harder and more cumbersome and time consuming than I thought it would be, which I guess a software development. But this was, this I thought was an especially long saga for something that seems so simple. It's funny you say that. I don't want to go too deep into this for a bunch of different reasons, or at least not now anyway, but one of my most frequent requests was the Discover screen on CallSheet, the main screen you land on. Those things like popular movies, popular TV shows, new movies, new TV shows, a lot of times the entries there that TMDB provides are kind of inexplicable.

1:53:59And a lot of people have been asking, can I turn some of these off? Can I rearrange them? Can I do both, et cetera? And so just finished rolling out in the last 24 or 48 hours, uh, is the ability to turn on or off each of those sections, um, which a lot of people have been asking for, for a long time. And then I am mostly done with implementing the ability to rearrange those sections, which is not currently possible. Um, and it's funny because both of these things I knew people wanted for months and months and months and months. And I kept kicking the can, kicking the can, kicking the can, kicking the can, because I felt like it was going to be really, really difficult to implement.

1:54:36And then when I finally told myself, stop being a baby and do it, it actually wasn't that bad. It was not without peril, for sure. But it was one of those things, unlike what you're describing, where it's so far been mostly straightforward, and I'm kind of mad at myself for kicking the can. But there have definitely been times that I kick the can for a long time, go to finally implement it and go, oh, oh, this was a mess. Like the multiple list of pins is a great example of that. like I got there but it was way messier than I thought it would be and I already thought it was going to be messy as hell so I've been on both sides of this sometimes you just got to buckle down and give it a shot and see what happens and I'm sorry for your sake that this one was not an easy one but I'm glad you got it across the line and it's got to be a big weight off your shoulders yeah it really is and now it's a big weight onto Cloudflare's shoulders but hey that's not my problem nice