ATP

00:00:00 ◼   ► There's brief moments of time when I listen to the two of you go back and forth and for

00:00:04 ◼   ► a minute I'm like, man, I'm not even here anymore.

00:00:08 ◼   ► And I feel ever so slightly sad.

00:00:10 ◼   ► But then I continue to listen to you two going back and forth and I just don't even care

00:00:14 ◼   ► anymore because I'm entertained as hell.

00:00:17 ◼   ► We had recently received an email as recently as about two hours ago about how we say to

00:00:24 ◼   ► to each other, or say actually to you, the listener,

00:00:27 ◼   ► please email anyone other than us,

00:00:30 ◼   ► or please don't send us email, et cetera.

00:00:32 ◼   ► Would you like to talk a little more about this email?

00:00:34 ◼   ► - All right, so the first sentence is,

00:00:36 ◼   ► I'm a little surprised about your whole email topic.

00:00:39 ◼   ► Now, this is already kind of like spreading the topic wider

00:00:43 ◼   ► because this started with Marco getting specific feedback

00:00:47 ◼   ► and bug reports about Overcast, right?

00:00:49 ◼   ► But then this sort of expanded into like the entire topic

00:00:52 ◼   ► of us getting email.

00:00:53 ◼   ► And so this feedback is not about Marco and his bug reports, really.

00:00:57 ◼   ► It's really about when we say on the show, please don't email us about whatever.

00:01:02 ◼   ► Right. So I already think this is kind of off topic and it's just like it's

00:01:05 ◼   ► related to the discussion, but whatever we want this.

00:01:08 ◼   ► It's not interested in really discussing how Marco handle his feedback.

00:01:12 ◼   ► He's more interested in discussing the joke that we do when we say, please don't

00:01:15 ◼   ► send us email.

00:01:16 ◼   ► And he says it makes him feel like that we don't appreciate the listeners that,

00:01:20 ◼   ► you know, I find a good sentence here.

00:01:22 ◼   ► He says he loves us, loves the show.

00:01:23 ◼   ► It doesn't make me feel entitled to anything.

00:01:25 ◼   ► I know that obviously, and I know that it's impossible to get back to everybody.

00:01:29 ◼   ► But what is impossible is to appreciate your position,

00:01:31 ◼   ► to appreciate the fact that people devote their time to actually tell you what they think,

00:01:35 ◼   ► to appreciate that people are the ones that are attracting sponsors, etc.,

00:01:39 ◼   ► to appreciate that a podcast by nitpickers is going to attract nitpickers,

00:01:42 ◼   ► to appreciate that so many people really care.

00:01:44 ◼   ► And I know you do appreciate your listeners, but the whole email joke,

00:01:46 ◼   ► the whole annoyance is neither funny nor respectful.

00:01:48 ◼   ► It's strange, off-putting, very arrogant and makes me kind of angry.

00:01:51 ◼   ► "It makes my engagement feel pathetic and needy.

00:01:54 ◼   ► "It's really not that hard just to say

00:01:55 ◼   ► "a few nice words, you know?"

00:01:57 ◼   ► To this I would say that we don't have a,

00:02:01 ◼   ► ignoring the fact that most of the time we're just joking,

00:02:03 ◼   ► right, because jokes can be hurtful too, right?

00:02:05 ◼   ► We don't have a blanket ban on email.

00:02:09 ◼   ► We don't say, it's like a prohibition.

00:02:11 ◼   ► In fact, we encourage, tacitly encourage email

00:02:14 ◼   ► by responding to email on the show.

00:02:16 ◼   ► And a lot of the followup is about things

00:02:18 ◼   ► that people send us, either corrections for things

00:02:21 ◼   ► expansions on topics, we take real-time feedback and real-time follow-up from the chat room

00:02:25 ◼   ► from people saying the same thing, right? So it's clear that we're not like, nobody

00:02:28 ◼   ► ever emails us anything, you know, for whatever reason. We don't say that.

00:02:32 ◼   ► I mean, there's a feedback form on our site that I made when we made the site. Like, we

00:02:37 ◼   ► have this form on the site that says "send feedback". If we wanted to not actually receive

00:02:42 ◼   ► any feedback, we would just take the form down.

00:02:44 ◼   ► Like Marco, like Marco and his app doesn't want to imply that he's providing support,

00:02:48 ◼   ► just fries the feedback bank.

00:02:49 ◼   ► So first of all, I would say the premise of the idea that we just are saying we don't

00:02:52 ◼   ► want any feedback.

00:02:53 ◼   ► That's not our message at all.

00:02:55 ◼   ► We do very frequently though say, "Please don't email us about whatever topic."

00:03:00 ◼   ► And that is specifically focused on whatever it was we were talking about.

00:03:04 ◼   ► So if it's like, "I'm going to tell you about this toaster oven I got.

00:03:10 ◼   ► Please don't send me email about slot toasters."

00:03:13 ◼   ► And then I follow up by saying, "I know about slot toasters.

00:03:16 ◼   ► I know slot toasters exist.

00:03:17 ◼   ► I know that they are different than toaster ovens.

00:03:19 ◼   ► I am reviewing toaster ovens, right?

00:03:21 ◼   ► - And they're worse.

00:03:22 ◼   ► - Right, you know, like, right?

00:03:24 ◼   ► And part of that is like, the please don't email thing

00:03:27 ◼   ► is a long running gag from any podcast

00:03:29 ◼   ► that we've listened to and been on in the past.

00:03:30 ◼   ► So if you don't have that context,

00:03:31 ◼   ► maybe that doesn't make much sense.

00:03:32 ◼   ► It's also kind of a joke like,

00:03:34 ◼   ► oh, I don't wanna hear from those people

00:03:35 ◼   ► who are just gonna tell me about the slot toasters, right?

00:03:37 ◼   ► But it's very specifically focused on this one thing.

00:03:39 ◼   ► It is not saying please don't email me ever about anything.

00:03:42 ◼   ► If you know something cool

00:03:44 ◼   ► about a new DisplayPort specification,

00:03:47 ◼   ► Yes, send us the email about it.

00:03:48 ◼   ► If you say I've been an Apple genius for X number of years

00:03:51 ◼   ► and this is my experience, yes, send us email about it.

00:03:53 ◼   ► Like, of course we want that email.

00:03:54 ◼   ► Like we read it on the show, we appreciate it.

00:03:56 ◼   ► We appreciate our listeners.

00:03:57 ◼   ► So I don't want people listening to think,

00:03:59 ◼   ► and I don't think most people do,

00:04:00 ◼   ► but this person does apparently,

00:04:01 ◼   ► that we don't want feedback from anybody.

00:04:05 ◼   ► It's 50% of the time a joke

00:04:07 ◼   ► and the other 50% of the time very focused

00:04:09 ◼   ► kind of exasperation at a particular type of feedback

00:04:13 ◼   ► that we expect to get because we said something

00:04:15 ◼   ► that we know leaves us open to a particular kind of correction and we're trying to say,

00:04:19 ◼   ► you don't need to send us that correction because we are fully aware that we have either

00:04:22 ◼   ► intentionally ignored this thing or whatever.

00:04:25 ◼   ► Right, it's a way, I use it as a way to preempt getting a whole bunch of emails that begin

00:04:33 ◼   ► with "well, you know..." and some big argument about something that like, I know the thing

00:04:37 ◼   ► I just said is contentious, or I know there is something that other people are going to

00:04:42 ◼   ► want to tell me about what I just said, and I'm just like, I don't want to engage that

00:04:45 ◼   ► entire discussion right now.

00:04:47 ◼   ► It's a way for me to basically try to preempt

00:04:50 ◼   ► getting a whole bunch of duplicate emails

00:04:53 ◼   ► telling me something I already know.

00:04:54 ◼   ► And that saves everybody time.

00:04:56 ◼   ► - And it's not to say it's not annoying.

00:04:57 ◼   ► If you're annoyed by it,

00:04:58 ◼   ► it's totally your right to be annoyed by it.

00:04:59 ◼   ► It can be annoying, I fully admit that.

00:05:02 ◼   ► But we are human and we get exasperated sometimes too,

00:05:04 ◼   ► and we express that on the show.

00:05:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, so this email was from Pell D.

00:05:09 ◼   ► I feel like we should attribute, I'm assuming him.

00:05:13 ◼   ► And what I had replied to him or her, I'm thinking him,

00:05:17 ◼   ► and saying, and what I said was,

00:05:19 ◼   ► we don't, or we say don't email us,

00:05:22 ◼   ► either because we really don't care about the minutiae,

00:05:24 ◼   ► minutiae, minutiae, all the nuance of the topic at hand.

00:05:29 ◼   ► - You're gonna get on me about Bezel,

00:05:31 ◼   ► but you're gonna go minutiae, okay.

00:05:33 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:05:35 ◼   ► Minutiae, Kit Tacy, like, touche.

00:05:37 ◼   ► - I was pretty sure it was minutiae,

00:05:39 ◼   ► and then I was envisioning all the emails of it,

00:05:41 ◼   ► saying to me, "No, it's not minutiae, it's minutiae."

00:05:43 ◼   ► So should people not email you about the correct pronunciation of minutiae?

00:05:46 ◼   ► So please do not email me.

00:05:49 ◼   ► See?

00:05:50 ◼   ► That's a perfect use.

00:05:51 ◼   ► It's a perfect use of it.

00:05:53 ◼   ► Anyway, let me try this again.

00:05:56 ◼   ► So we say please don't email us either because we really don't care about the minutiae of

00:06:01 ◼   ► the topic at hand or because we know we won't be able to respond to everyone.

00:06:05 ◼   ► And actually that reminded me as we were talking of another piece of follow-up, which is I

00:06:10 ◼   ► I saw a handful of people, generally speaking from Europe, who seemed confused about the

00:06:16 ◼   ► whole toaster oven thing.

00:06:18 ◼   ► Yeah, someone asked me, "Isn't that just a grill?"

00:06:20 ◼   ► And then I realized we had a language barrier between English speakers.

00:06:25 ◼   ► I think it was someone from the UK or some other thing that Marco can tell us the correct

00:06:29 ◼   ► name of.

00:06:30 ◼   ► Can we maybe just put a "U" somewhere in it?

00:06:32 ◼   ► Would that make them know what we're talking about?

00:06:33 ◼   ► A "touster oven"?

00:06:34 ◼   ► Yeah, no, it was great.

00:06:36 ◼   ► It was great because someone said, "Isn't that just a grill?"

00:06:38 ◼   ► And I replied, "No," because I didn't look up where they were from or something, but

00:06:42 ◼   ► I was confused by it.

00:06:43 ◼   ► And then another person who obviously speaks the variant of English that that person was

00:06:47 ◼   ► speaking, tweeted back to them and said, "I think that what you mean by grill isn't what

00:06:51 ◼   ► they mean by..."

00:06:52 ◼   ► Seriously, it's like an actual language barrier.

00:06:54 ◼   ► We don't know the words for things.

00:06:56 ◼   ► But we put links in the show notes, right?

00:06:58 ◼   ► You can click on them and see what it is.

00:06:59 ◼   ► It's a thing.

00:07:00 ◼   ► Toaster ovens are a thing in America anyway.

00:07:02 ◼   ► And so if you live in one of these barbaric countries that doesn't really have a toaster,

00:07:07 ◼   ► Doesn't have toaster ovens basically. It's like a little tiny oven that can serve either as a toaster or an oven hence

00:07:14 ◼   ► Toaster oven and they're extremely convenient if you'd like to reheat something especially something bready

00:07:20 ◼   ► pizza being the most obvious example

00:07:23 ◼   ► French fries anything like that if you want to reheat something bready

00:07:28 ◼   ► But you don't want to do so in the microwave because then it'll end up all gummy

00:07:31 ◼   ► Toast oven is a great way to do it now. Yes, you could use a traditional oven

00:07:35 ◼   ► but why in the world would you start up what is probably

00:07:38 ◼   ► multiple square feet worth of space

00:07:41 ◼   ► to heat one slice of pizza or two slices of pizza?

00:07:44 ◼   ► And so a toaster oven is the best of both worlds

00:07:46 ◼   ► because it's a little tiny oven,

00:07:47 ◼   ► big enough for usually a slice of pizza or two,

00:07:50 ◼   ► or it's a toaster, big enough for maybe a couple of bagels

00:07:53 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:07:54 ◼   ► - Right, and it tends to heat up just about as quickly

00:07:57 ◼   ► as doing it in the microwave for me.

00:07:58 ◼   ► Like if you're gonna, I mean, it's not 30 seconds,

00:08:01 ◼   ► but if you're gonna reheat a slice of pizza,

00:08:03 ◼   ► A toaster oven has it done in like two or three minutes at most.

00:08:06 ◼   ► And so it's way faster than using a full-size oven.

00:08:09 ◼   ► Nobody should ever put a pizza in a microwave, I just want to say that.

00:08:13 ◼   ► Oh, completely agreed.

00:08:14 ◼   ► But anyway, so if you don't know what a toaster oven is, well perhaps it's time to move to

00:08:19 ◼   ► a different country.

00:08:22 ◼   ► But nevertheless, maybe you could import it or something like that.

00:08:25 ◼   ► So you need nationalized healthcare or toaster ovens?

00:08:27 ◼   ► I'm going toaster ovens.

00:08:28 ◼   ► I think I might too.

00:08:29 ◼   ► The brand of my toaster oven Breville apparently that's a proprietary eponym.

00:08:34 ◼   ► See I did remember that from the past episode.

00:08:36 ◼   ► It's pronounced Brazil.

00:08:38 ◼   ► That is a proprietary eponym in the UK like Kleenex or whatever and so someone in the

00:08:42 ◼   ► chat room says a Breville refers to something we would call a grill in the UK for sandwiches

00:08:47 ◼   ► so they've taken that entire brand and turned it into you know that it's a signifier for

00:08:51 ◼   ► the entire category of things like a panini grill type of thing or whatever but anyway

00:08:56 ◼   ► that's definitely not what I'm talking about.

00:08:57 ◼   ► and follow the links in the show notes.

00:08:59 ◼   ► I'll show you exactly what we were talking about

00:09:01 ◼   ► last week's show notes, not this week's show notes.

00:09:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, we're not gonna put in this week's show notes

00:09:04 ◼   ► because it was already there.

00:09:05 ◼   ► You should have clicked the links, kids.

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00:11:01 ◼   ► Thanks a lot to a glue for sponsoring our show. Once again, they've been a longtime sponsor a friend of our show

00:11:05 ◼   ► Yeah, very much. Thank you a glue

00:11:08 ◼   ► We should talk about the photos app that we all thought may have kind of gone away

00:11:15 ◼   ► Hang on real-time follow up on the Breville. It's not a panini. It's not a panini press look at the thing

00:11:20 ◼   ► I just put in the show notes. It's the thing like

00:11:23 ◼   ► It's like a a clamshell thing that closes and it has two little compartments for

00:11:28 ◼   ► Bread like if you cut a piece of bread on diagonal and it kind of like heats them from both sides

00:11:33 ◼   ► Different than a panini breast which is you know the flat surfaces with the little ridges on them

00:11:37 ◼   ► This is a common thing like that's what they prefer. I've seen them in the US

00:11:41 ◼   ► I just I don't think many people have them, but that's what they call it

00:11:43 ◼   ► That's what they call a Breville and if you read the history of the thing, that's that's really peculiar

00:11:47 ◼   ► I mean well, I've seen them before but it looking at the chat room

00:11:51 ◼   ► It seems like in the UK and Australia everyone has one of these and I cannot think of any one of my friends or family

00:11:56 ◼   ► That has one so it's labeled there as a durable stainless steel jaffle maker. So are those jaffles?

00:12:02 ◼   ► Is that like that's what we call this thing. I want to try to pronounce that word. I don't think maybe it's jaffa le

00:12:07 ◼   ► Jaffle like waffle

00:12:11 ◼   ► So quick aside I was at work

00:12:14 ◼   ► this is a year ago now and somebody was one of my

00:12:19 ◼   ► Co-workers was talking about doing something in JavaScript and at one point he said something about just song and I was like what oh my god

00:12:26 ◼   ► I think he was saying it. I you know

00:12:31 ◼   ► Comically and or ironically or whatever, but what I heard just saw I was like wait what and sure enough

00:12:38 ◼   ► He meant just saw Jason. God. I just did it again accidentally my boss used to say H over

00:12:42 ◼   ► What H over that's when you put your H over an item

00:12:46 ◼   ► - Yep. - And the H-over style

00:12:49 ◼   ► and the links.

00:12:50 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:12:51 ◼   ► He was just avoiding trying to pronounce that word

00:12:53 ◼   ► because he knew it was such a problem.

00:12:55 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:12:56 ◼   ► - That's true because you never know when that'll go wrong.

00:13:00 ◼   ► But for the record, it's hover.

00:13:01 ◼   ► - We'll talk about them in 20 minutes.

00:13:03 ◼   ► All right, sorry for the derail, photos, back to photos.

00:13:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, so let's talk about photos.

00:13:08 ◼   ► We had all, not genuinely, but kind of wondered,

00:13:10 ◼   ► hey, what happened to photos?

00:13:12 ◼   ► Because somebody had pointed out to us

00:13:14 ◼   ► that it disappeared from Apple's website.

00:13:16 ◼   ► Well, apparently it's back.

00:13:18 ◼   ► It's back in a big way,

00:13:19 ◼   ► because it's actually in the latest Yosemite beta.

00:13:23 ◼   ► Now, have either of you guys tried this?

00:13:25 ◼   ► - What, are you crazy?

00:13:26 ◼   ► I was actually gonna try it,

00:13:27 ◼   ► like not on my computer with my actual photos,

00:13:29 ◼   ► but just to load the program

00:13:31 ◼   ► and throw some sample photos at it or whatever.

00:13:33 ◼   ► But then I realized,

00:13:34 ◼   ► and I'm pretty sure this is still the case,

00:13:35 ◼   ► that you have to upgrade to the 1010.3 beta,

00:13:40 ◼   ► and I wasn't willing to do that,

00:13:41 ◼   ► just to try the Photos app, so I'll just wait.

00:13:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's the reason I'm not using it,

00:13:45 ◼   ► because I'm not going to run a beta OS on my main computer, so that's not going to happen.

00:13:50 ◼   ► Yeah, I've already put in a lot of time doing stuff like that. I deserve a break.

00:13:56 ◼   ► I also feel like this is a good opportunity that I really should take to go back and clean out some

00:14:02 ◼   ► of my photo library, because there's so many times—I'm sure this happens for a lot of people—I'll go on

00:14:08 ◼   ► a trip or something, or we'll do a shoot with the kid or the dog or both or whatever, and we'll just

00:14:13 ◼   ► dump all the photos into the photo library

00:14:15 ◼   ► and then just never really pick through them.

00:14:17 ◼   ► So I have these giant 30 gig folders

00:14:21 ◼   ► full of some shoot or something like that

00:14:22 ◼   ► and it's like, if I just took an hour to go through this,

00:14:25 ◼   ► I would probably delete 95% of those pictures

00:14:28 ◼   ► and just keep the 5% of the best ones

00:14:31 ◼   ► that I actually want to see again.

00:14:32 ◼   ► And basically I need to apply that process

00:14:35 ◼   ► to five years of photos.

00:14:38 ◼   ► It's like spring cleaning, I keep meaning to do this

00:14:39 ◼   ► and maybe this is my motivation to do it finally.

00:14:43 ◼   ► Do you guys have that problem?

00:14:45 ◼   ► - I used to use iPhoto,

00:14:47 ◼   ► this was, I don't know, three, four years ago now,

00:14:50 ◼   ► and I felt it was nothing but a burden.

00:14:53 ◼   ► And there's probably a million and seven ways

00:14:56 ◼   ► that you can blame that on me,

00:14:57 ◼   ► and probably a million and six of them are correct.

00:15:00 ◼   ► But for whatever reason,

00:15:01 ◼   ► I just didn't have a workflow

00:15:02 ◼   ► that really worked well for me.

00:15:04 ◼   ► And what I've ended up doing since then is just eschewing,

00:15:06 ◼   ► that's how you pronounce that word, right?

00:15:08 ◼   ► Eschewing iPhoto altogether.

00:15:10 ◼   ► This is the Accidental Pronunciation Podcast.

00:15:12 ◼   ► And now what I'm doing is,

00:15:15 ◼   ► and I think it was Bradley Chambers,

00:15:17 ◼   ► learning to love photo management

00:15:19 ◼   ► in combination with some scripts from Dr. Drang.

00:15:23 ◼   ► And so basically what I do is I have all of my pictures

00:15:27 ◼   ► renamed consistently and stored consistently

00:15:30 ◼   ► in my file system.

00:15:30 ◼   ► And that's as close as I get to any sort of organization.

00:15:33 ◼   ► And I wish I had a better organization system

00:15:36 ◼   ► in so far as something where maybe I've tagged pictures

00:15:40 ◼   ► that I think are really good

00:15:41 ◼   ► or I've grouped them into events or what have you,

00:15:43 ◼   ► the sorts of things that I suspect

00:15:45 ◼   ► Photos app will be great for.

00:15:47 ◼   ► But for whatever reason,

00:15:48 ◼   ► it just felt like such a pain in the butt with iPhoto

00:15:50 ◼   ► that I never really did it.

00:15:52 ◼   ► - I think I've described my system before.

00:15:54 ◼   ► I put them all in iPhoto and then I star rate them.

00:15:56 ◼   ► And the only cleaning I really do,

00:15:59 ◼   ► I tend to be like not want to get rid of pictures

00:16:03 ◼   ► of my kids, even if like they're not framed correctly,

00:16:05 ◼   ► or even if they're a little out of focus,

00:16:07 ◼   ► 'cause sometimes they're still cute.

00:16:08 ◼   ► But what I do is I do rate them all.

00:16:10 ◼   ► And when I feel like doing a little cleaning,

00:16:13 ◼   ► I just show all the one stars,

00:16:14 ◼   ► and the one stars are basically like,

00:16:15 ◼   ► you should really delete these,

00:16:16 ◼   ► 'cause the lighting is really bad,

00:16:18 ◼   ► or it's blurry, or whatever.

00:16:19 ◼   ► And I will delete,

00:16:20 ◼   ► I'll look at every picture when I load them into iPhoto,

00:16:23 ◼   ► I'll delete the ones, obviously,

00:16:24 ◼   ► they're like, excellent, I took a picture of my foot,

00:16:25 ◼   ► or like something, you know, they're totally bad.

00:16:28 ◼   ► But all one star ones, and then when I wanna clean,

00:16:30 ◼   ► it's really easy for me to just show a smart album

00:16:32 ◼   ► that shows one star, and then just go through

00:16:34 ◼   ► and just delete whole swaths of them.

00:16:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, but see, then you can't see the ones around them

00:16:37 ◼   ► that were better, so you can really know,

00:16:39 ◼   ► Like which of these do I need to keep?

00:16:41 ◼   ► - One star means, I mean I can look at the pictures.

00:16:43 ◼   ► Like it's like these are so blurry.

00:16:45 ◼   ► Like they're not, I'm not one starring.

00:16:46 ◼   ► If it's in focus and people are in the,

00:16:48 ◼   ► like those never get one star.

00:16:50 ◼   ► One star basically means you should really delete this.

00:16:52 ◼   ► One star is the thing that most people

00:16:53 ◼   ► would delete immediately.

00:16:54 ◼   ► I just let them stew and then if I feel like cleaning house,

00:16:57 ◼   ► I delete all, I think I deleted every one star

00:17:00 ◼   ► from my collection a couple years ago

00:17:01 ◼   ► and it was a lot of photos.

00:17:02 ◼   ► But now I just kind of let them build up.

00:17:04 ◼   ► - Maybe you're just letting them develop like a Polaroid.

00:17:06 ◼   ► Like figuring maybe it'll get better

00:17:07 ◼   ► I just leave it here for a little few more hours.

00:17:10 ◼   ► And also, a picture that is actually out of focus, sometimes we do family calendars where

00:17:17 ◼   ► you make the calendar for the year with pictures and everything and they have these little

00:17:20 ◼   ► collages where you can put the pictures.

00:17:21 ◼   ► Sometimes there's little spots on the calendar for small photos.

00:17:24 ◼   ► And even a picture that's blurry, like it's not in focus, when you shrink it down to be

00:17:28 ◼   ► like one of the small thumbnails at an angle in the corner of a calendar thing, it doesn't

00:17:32 ◼   ► actually even look that bad.

00:17:33 ◼   ► So occasionally that's why I'm kind of keeping the one stars around.

00:17:36 ◼   ► Or if it's like me trying to see a picture of like,

00:17:40 ◼   ► what do I have on this shelf in this year?

00:17:44 ◼   ► Where was that thing or whatever?

00:17:46 ◼   ► - Oh my God.

00:17:47 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:17:48 ◼   ► I wish this system was more intelligent about finding things.

00:17:51 ◼   ► For example, I do keyword them,

00:17:53 ◼   ► but my keywords are limited to like,

00:17:55 ◼   ► I have a keyword for each of my children

00:17:56 ◼   ► and then one keyword for me and my wife,

00:17:59 ◼   ► 'cause I'm not gonna do us individually.

00:18:01 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:18:02 ◼   ► And that's about it.

00:18:03 ◼   ► And you just think like, why do you need to do that?

00:18:05 ◼   ► doesn't the faces feature find all the people that you want for you?

00:18:08 ◼   ► Well, I started doing this before the faces feature existed, long before, first of all.

00:18:12 ◼   ► But second of all, no, it's not reliable enough.

00:18:15 ◼   ► Like me manually keywording them is much more reliable than faces.

00:18:18 ◼   ► I wish I could turn faces off because it's always grinding away, making the fans spin

00:18:22 ◼   ► up on the MacBook Air to try to detect people's faces.

00:18:25 ◼   ► But that's the same thing I do with iTunes.

00:18:28 ◼   ► Starring them and basically using the star as a threshold system easily lets me sort

00:18:32 ◼   ► get what people are trying to get by cleaning things out, which is just like, "Just show

00:18:36 ◼   ► me three stars or better." Those are the good pictures. There's very few of them. Suddenly

00:18:39 ◼   ► my collection becomes small and manageable. And if I want to share photos on PhotoStream

00:18:44 ◼   ► or send them to relatives, I just show the three stars. It's super manageable. People

00:18:48 ◼   ► want their collections to actually be like that. I can't bring myself to throw out the

00:18:51 ◼   ► two-star ones, but the one-star ones I do delete.

00:18:53 ◼   ► Now, going back to the Photo app for a second, I think, so one thing that we were skeptical

00:18:59 ◼   ► of or hesitant or whatever the right word here is.

00:19:02 ◼   ► We are disasters.

00:19:04 ◼   ► Yeah, right. I'm still sick. I have a good reason. We were wondering like, you know,

00:19:10 ◼   ► one of the issues with cloud service backed things and iCloud stuff in particular is that

00:19:15 ◼   ► there's pretty much no visibility into the storage and no recourse if it does something

00:19:21 ◼   ► crazy like delete half your contacts. Like it's pretty hard to recover from that in a

00:19:25 ◼   ► lot of cases for a lot of these services.

00:19:28 ◼   ► And if you have this on your Mac and it has all these files sitting there locally, you

00:19:32 ◼   ► can back up these files and then hopefully have some way to reimport them if you had

00:19:37 ◼   ► to nuke your whole iCloud account and start clean or restore a bunch of stuff that was

00:19:41 ◼   ► deleted.

00:19:42 ◼   ► And it seems from earlier reports that the storage layout of it, you can import things

00:19:48 ◼   ► off disk and it can just leave them where they are and not copy them in.

00:19:51 ◼   ► But by default it seems to maintain a very iPhoto-like library structure so that these

00:19:56 ◼   ► files are just sitting there as files on your disk.

00:19:59 ◼   ► All of your photos are there by default.

00:20:01 ◼   ► It will only be smart and try to delete some of the originals or cache things online only

00:20:06 ◼   ► if you enable the special low space mode.

00:20:09 ◼   ► So you can just have one computer that has the whole library on it and has all those

00:20:13 ◼   ► originals sitting there as files and you can always reimport them later.

00:20:16 ◼   ► So it does seem like it is durable enough in that way to be used as your main photo

00:20:21 ◼   ► app, at least once they work out any glaring bugs.

00:20:24 ◼   ► It's actually even better than that.

00:20:25 ◼   ► We should explain what the experience of this is.

00:20:27 ◼   ► So iPhoto was an app and Aperture was an app that Apple had both discontinued, both being

00:20:31 ◼   ► replaced by this app.

00:20:32 ◼   ► Both mediocre.

00:20:33 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:20:34 ◼   ► Functionality-wise, Photos does not include all the functionality of Aperture.

00:20:37 ◼   ► It includes most of the functionality of iPhoto.

00:20:39 ◼   ► So this application is coming into people's lives with the expectation that you've already

00:20:44 ◼   ► got all your photos in one of these other applications or in a folder of crap somewhere.

00:20:49 ◼   ► And it handles all those situations.

00:20:51 ◼   ► So like if you have an iPhoto library, when you start it up it will import that iPhoto

00:20:55 ◼   ► library and it won't actually make duplicates of the files, it'll just make hard links to

00:20:58 ◼   ► them.

00:20:59 ◼   ► We'll put a link in the show notes explaining the hard links.

00:21:01 ◼   ► Basically it doesn't take up any more room on your disk, but it makes a separate parallel

00:21:04 ◼   ► structure of its own.

00:21:07 ◼   ► At that point your libraries are divorced from each other and if you make changes to

00:21:10 ◼   ► either one of them, the changes are no longer visible.

00:21:12 ◼   ► So it's a one-time kind of import process that doesn't actually take up much more disk

00:21:17 ◼   ► space, but at that point they're diverged, like they're not kept in sync with each other.

00:21:21 ◼   ► If you have a file full of pictures that just like you've organized yourself, you can just

00:21:25 ◼   ► start photos up, make a new empty library, and import those pictures.

00:21:29 ◼   ► I believe it will copy them, no it won't copy them in that case.

00:21:32 ◼   ► You can tell it to leave the pictures where they are.

00:21:33 ◼   ► There's a preference, kind of like the iTunes preference of copy media into the library.

00:21:37 ◼   ► You can tell it, "Don't move my stuff, I have it arranged in folders."

00:21:40 ◼   ► Just reference them from where they are, and it will do that.

00:21:42 ◼   ► It will leave them in your nice organized folder structure.

00:21:44 ◼   ► It will put a little thing in the app that shows you like,

00:21:46 ◼   ► oh, by the way, this picture isn't in a library.

00:21:48 ◼   ► It's referenced from another location.

00:21:50 ◼   ► And if you want to work that way,

00:21:51 ◼   ► which I would totally recommend not doing

00:21:53 ◼   ► because it's crazy and you're a crazy person,

00:21:56 ◼   ► the application will do that for you.

00:21:57 ◼   ► You can organize your photos into little folders by date

00:22:01 ◼   ► and name them whatever the heck you want,

00:22:02 ◼   ► and then just reference them from the Photos app

00:22:04 ◼   ► and continue that crazy workflow

00:22:06 ◼   ► where you act as a little person

00:22:08 ◼   ► putting things into folders

00:22:09 ◼   ► and then reference them from the application.

00:22:11 ◼   ► And just like iPhoto, you can hold on the option key

00:22:14 ◼   ► on launch and switch among different libraries.

00:22:16 ◼   ► The only limitation you have is,

00:22:18 ◼   ► and this is all just like totally local,

00:22:20 ◼   ► forget about network connection.

00:22:21 ◼   ► This just all works totally locally,

00:22:22 ◼   ► no cloud stuff involved at all, right?

00:22:24 ◼   ► If you wanna do some cloud stuff,

00:22:26 ◼   ► then you can designate one library as like,

00:22:29 ◼   ► the what, the system library, whatever,

00:22:31 ◼   ► like the iPhoto, the iCloud library.

00:22:33 ◼   ► One library on your system can be cloud backed up.

00:22:36 ◼   ► And then you have the choice of,

00:22:38 ◼   ► do I want to keep all the originals on my Mac

00:22:40 ◼   ► and then also put them in the cloud,

00:22:42 ◼   ► or they want to use whatever it calls

00:22:43 ◼   ► like smart or advanced storage

00:22:45 ◼   ► or whatever some other preference that says,

00:22:47 ◼   ► I don't care if they're all on my Mac,

00:22:48 ◼   ► you can actually take some of them off my Mac

00:22:50 ◼   ► as long as they're in the cloud,

00:22:51 ◼   ► and that's the second option.

00:22:52 ◼   ► So this is an extremely flexible application

00:22:54 ◼   ► that does things in pretty much the smartest way possible

00:22:57 ◼   ► given the current file system technology we have,

00:22:59 ◼   ► that leaves every person able to do whatever it is

00:23:02 ◼   ► that they want with their photos.

00:23:04 ◼   ► The only bad thing about it transition-wise

00:23:06 ◼   ► is if this app is completely buggy and like erases stuff

00:23:09 ◼   ► and destroys your photos and they get lost in the cloud

00:23:10 ◼   ► and everything, any changes you made after that initial

00:23:14 ◼   ► kind of one-time import process will be lost

00:23:17 ◼   ► because once you do that import,

00:23:19 ◼   ► you are now leaving iPhoto behind.

00:23:21 ◼   ► I suppose you could import your photos into both of them

00:23:23 ◼   ► in parallel, but then you will actually be duplicating

00:23:25 ◼   ► because the one-time import with the hard linking stuff,

00:23:28 ◼   ► it doesn't take up much more space,

00:23:30 ◼   ► that's not an ongoing thing.

00:23:32 ◼   ► So there is a transition point.

00:23:34 ◼   ► And so I suspect if I try out this program,

00:23:36 ◼   ► I will try it out and then, I don't know,

00:23:40 ◼   ► maybe just like bail out after importing

00:23:42 ◼   ► a couple of pictures into it

00:23:43 ◼   ► and then reimport those same things into my photo library.

00:23:46 ◼   ► Like I still don't have a good transition pan,

00:23:47 ◼   ► but spec wise, the photos application

00:23:51 ◼   ► seems like it does all the right things

00:23:53 ◼   ► to make everybody except for aperture users who are screwed.

00:23:57 ◼   ► It will import your aperture library,

00:23:58 ◼   ► everybody happy except for the people who use the aperture

00:24:01 ◼   ► and will miss all the features that aperture have

00:24:03 ◼   ► that this doesn't have in terms of advanced photo editing.

00:24:06 ◼   ► Well, the editing controls are actually not that far off.

00:24:09 ◼   ► This is one of the reasons I'm very excited about this app,

00:24:11 ◼   ► that the actual editing process

00:24:14 ◼   ► and the controls you have for editing are very advanced

00:24:17 ◼   ► and really are pro-level editing tools

00:24:19 ◼   ► compared to Aperture and Lightroom.

00:24:22 ◼   ► Lightroom is probably slightly more advanced

00:24:24 ◼   ► in certain areas.

00:24:25 ◼   ► Aperture, I'm not sure I haven't used it in a couple years,

00:24:26 ◼   ► but it's probably very closely matched

00:24:30 ◼   ► to those editing tools.

00:24:31 ◼   ► Where it falls short is in the organizational tools

00:24:34 ◼   ► things like Aperture and Lightroom, and especially if you're coming from Aperture, I think it's

00:24:38 ◼   ► going to be, if you were really heavily using those organizational systems of vaults and

00:24:44 ◼   ► all these things, most of that is not going to transfer over gracefully. So that's really

00:24:50 ◼   ► where Aperture users are going to be very rightfully upset. But besides that, it looks,

00:24:55 ◼   ► again, I haven't used it yet, but it sure looks like the editing and processing of the

00:25:01 ◼   ► photos is just as good as Aperture was.

00:25:03 ◼   ► But they don't have the interface of doing the pics.

00:25:06 ◼   ► A lot of Aperture was about professional photographers

00:25:09 ◼   ► taking lots of photos and then designating

00:25:12 ◼   ► the ones they think are good in an efficient manner.

00:25:15 ◼   ► There's no workflow like that, as far as I can tell,

00:25:17 ◼   ► built into photos.

00:25:18 ◼   ► Whereas Aperture, so much of Aperture

00:25:20 ◼   ► was focused on the editing tools, which is one thing,

00:25:23 ◼   ► and then this whole, like you said,

00:25:25 ◼   ► the vaults and the management, and then the picking process.

00:25:28 ◼   ► I forget what they call it.

00:25:28 ◼   ► Is that the word they use?

00:25:29 ◼   ► I think so.

00:25:30 ◼   ► It might be.

00:25:30 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:25:31 ◼   ► Again, it's been a couple of years since I've used Aperture.

00:25:33 ◼   ► But yeah, I mean Aperture and Lightroom are both gonna be way better for what pros actually do.

00:25:38 ◼   ► Like my wife, Tiff, is not gonna use this photo app. I can already tell you that. She's not gonna use it.

00:25:42 ◼   ► She has, even Aperture and Lightroom are too heavy-handed for her.

00:25:46 ◼   ► She just uses Bridge and a bunch of directories because like the one she does client shoots,

00:25:50 ◼   ► she doesn't want to bring it into some giant library

00:25:52 ◼   ► program and have it organize things for her. Like she does it all in the file system with Bridge and does all the picking that

00:25:58 ◼   ► way and it works great for her.

00:25:59 ◼   ► Most pros are going to have a system like that where they're going to use one of these pro apps

00:26:03 ◼   ► To do all that organizational and stuff and managing the shoots and managing the picking and all that stuff

00:26:08 ◼   ► They're not going to use this app, but that's fine. This isn't made for them

00:26:11 ◼   ► this is made for the people like me who and and of course everybody else but like

00:26:17 ◼   ► People like me who were using

00:26:19 ◼   ► Aperture and or lightroom for its advanced editing controls primarily and then secondarily we would occasionally touch some of these library functions

00:26:27 ◼   ► but we were mainly there for the editing controls.

00:26:30 ◼   ► That's definitely the case for me.

00:26:31 ◼   ► I know it's the case for a lot of people

00:26:34 ◼   ► who bought SLRs in the last eight years

00:26:38 ◼   ► and got into photography as a nice hobby.

00:26:40 ◼   ► Just having these nice editing controls

00:26:43 ◼   ► built into the main photos library mechanism

00:26:47 ◼   ► on iOS devices and Macs is going to be awesome.

00:26:49 ◼   ► Because for all these years, we've

00:26:51 ◼   ► had to decide between something that's fully integrated

00:26:55 ◼   ► into Apple's ecosystem and syncs everywhere

00:26:57 ◼   ► and is all in all the photo pickers and all that stuff,

00:26:59 ◼   ► or has great editing controls and pro stuff,

00:27:03 ◼   ► and there were always these things you'd have to give up

00:27:05 ◼   ► one way or the other,

00:27:07 ◼   ► and this looks like it's perfect for people like me.

00:27:10 ◼   ► Any prosumer who's really into SLR photography,

00:27:13 ◼   ► but is not doing pro photo shoots actually for clients

00:27:17 ◼   ► every day or on the weekends or whatever,

00:27:19 ◼   ► this is for us, and I'm very much looking forward to that.

00:27:22 ◼   ► - I think the editing controls,

00:27:23 ◼   ► like the adding intelligence to the editing controls

00:27:25 ◼   ► is really important because they default for most photo apps, including Apple's, with the

00:27:30 ◼   ► exception of the little magic wand enhance button.

00:27:33 ◼   ► They give you one button, it's like, "You don't understand all these crazy controls.

00:27:36 ◼   ► Press the magic wand and maybe it will make your photo look better or maybe it won't."

00:27:39 ◼   ► And if you press that button and didn't like it, you're like, "Whatever."

00:27:41 ◼   ► And then you're faced with, "Okay, well, so the magic wand didn't work?

00:27:44 ◼   ► Here's 8,000 sliders.

00:27:45 ◼   ► Good luck."

00:27:46 ◼   ► And if you don't know how to use those sliders, it's daunting to figure out how to just, you

00:27:51 ◼   ► know, there's a million different combinations and you're trying like, "I don't know, do

00:27:53 ◼   ► I move this and that or whatever?"

00:27:55 ◼   ► Well, so Photos has this sort of intelligent thing

00:27:57 ◼   ► where they give you sliders that are sort of meta sliders

00:28:00 ◼   ► that cause the other sliders to move

00:28:01 ◼   ► in what it hopes are pleasing ways.

00:28:03 ◼   ► And you're like, oh, well, that's bad.

00:28:04 ◼   ► I don't want it to be smart

00:28:05 ◼   ► and move those other sliders around.

00:28:06 ◼   ► I wanna move the actual sliders.

00:28:07 ◼   ► Well, the great thing is you can use these meta controls

00:28:10 ◼   ► that influence the other sliders to try to,

00:28:12 ◼   ► like most people can do that and say,

00:28:14 ◼   ► oh, I would never have thought

00:28:15 ◼   ► to put those other sliders in this position,

00:28:17 ◼   ► but when I slide this top slider,

00:28:18 ◼   ► all these other things move around.

00:28:19 ◼   ► But you still have the ability to edit

00:28:21 ◼   ► every single one of the detail sliders manually as well.

00:28:24 ◼   ► So if you want to use the sliders by hand, you can.

00:28:26 ◼   ► But most people have no idea how to get good results

00:28:28 ◼   ► with that so they can use those other meta sliders.

00:28:30 ◼   ► So it's a big step up from either Magic Wand

00:28:33 ◼   ► or you're on your own.

00:28:34 ◼   ► - And all these edits are fully synced,

00:28:37 ◼   ► not just like burning it into a JPEG and syncing that.

00:28:40 ◼   ► The actual edit states are synced so that you can go

00:28:43 ◼   ► on your phone or your iPad and make adjustments

00:28:46 ◼   ► and that syncs back.

00:28:47 ◼   ► - Well, in theory, I mean, let's be serious.

00:28:50 ◼   ► - Well, I mean, this is all based on CloudKit.

00:28:52 ◼   ► So far, our CloudKit stuff has been solid.

00:28:54 ◼   ► - Why didn't my contacts sync, Marco?

00:28:56 ◼   ► Contacts, it's like a tiny set of data, why?

00:28:59 ◼   ► - That's a good question, I have no idea.

00:29:01 ◼   ► - My faith is like, yeah, I'm ready to be impressed.

00:29:04 ◼   ► - It seems like, you know, I've heard rumblings,

00:29:08 ◼   ► I'm sure everyone's heard these rumblings,

00:29:09 ◼   ► that like, Eddy Cue's team took over iCloud,

00:29:13 ◼   ► something something, and was really like,

00:29:15 ◼   ► revolutionizing and fixing stuff like a year ago.

00:29:17 ◼   ► Like that's when all this stuff started, allegedly.

00:29:20 ◼   ► and it seems like CloudKit and the Cloud Photo Library stuff

00:29:25 ◼   ► and all the stuff that came out of that

00:29:26 ◼   ► that's all based on CloudKit,

00:29:28 ◼   ► seems like that is most likely to be

00:29:31 ◼   ► the result of that rumor.

00:29:33 ◼   ► And that we're seeing now,

00:29:34 ◼   ► they're doing good things with the cloud stuff now.

00:29:38 ◼   ► Rather than the initial iCloud services stuff,

00:29:40 ◼   ► which was the document stuff,

00:29:42 ◼   ► which is a fairly simple problem set,

00:29:45 ◼   ► but it was done kinda oddly, but mostly worked.

00:29:49 ◼   ► Key value store, which works all right,

00:29:50 ◼   ► and then core data sync, which was a disaster,

00:29:53 ◼   ► 'cause they tried to tackle this incredibly complex problem

00:29:56 ◼   ► that really can't be done well

00:29:57 ◼   ► in the way they attempted to do it,

00:30:00 ◼   ► and of course, so it sucked.

00:30:02 ◼   ► CloudKit was like, we talked about this

00:30:04 ◼   ► when they announced it back in the summer,

00:30:05 ◼   ► like CloudKit is Apple kind of saying,

00:30:08 ◼   ► okay, we're gonna do a cloud service

00:30:09 ◼   ► that actually is much easier to do well,

00:30:13 ◼   ► and so far, it seems like they did.

00:30:16 ◼   ► So I'm pretty confident in this service probably being good.

00:30:21 ◼   ► I mean, we'll see what happens in practice

00:30:24 ◼   ► once it's launched full scale and everything,

00:30:25 ◼   ► and we've all been using it for a few months.

00:30:27 ◼   ► But I think all the pieces seem to be in place

00:30:30 ◼   ► for this to actually be good and work pretty well

00:30:33 ◼   ► most of the time or all the time.

00:30:35 ◼   ► - Well, just the fact that they're dogfooding it so heavily,

00:30:37 ◼   ► I think is a pretty big change from, say, iCloud

00:30:41 ◼   ► with Core Data or Core Data with iCloud

00:30:42 ◼   ► or whatever the terminology was.

00:30:45 ◼   ► The impression I had was that nobody was dogfooding that,

00:30:48 ◼   ► but just like you said, Marco,

00:30:50 ◼   ► it sounds like Apple's heavily dogfooding CloudKit,

00:30:55 ◼   ► and that's definitely a good thing for all of us,

00:30:58 ◼   ► because I think Apple is fairly tolerant

00:31:01 ◼   ► of third-party developers having to jump through hoops,

00:31:04 ◼   ► and fairly intolerant of their own people

00:31:07 ◼   ► having to jump through hoops.

00:31:09 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, that's fair, and as far as I know,

00:31:10 ◼   ► I don't think any Apple app ever used Core Data Sync.

00:31:15 ◼   ► I'm pretty sure we never found one.

00:31:16 ◼   ► I know some people were trying to like,

00:31:18 ◼   ► they were asking around on Twitter like, you know,

00:31:20 ◼   ► a year ago or whenever, like,

00:31:20 ◼   ► "Does any Apple app actually use this?"

00:31:21 ◼   ► I don't think we ever found one.

00:31:23 ◼   ► But anyway, I'm confident.

00:31:25 ◼   ► And also, you know, I wouldn't necessarily like

00:31:27 ◼   ► be all nostalgic for Aperture,

00:31:29 ◼   ► because Apple has been a terrible steward of Aperture

00:31:31 ◼   ► since the beginning.

00:31:32 ◼   ► Like, it always had delays, issues,

00:31:35 ◼   ► it was always pretty buggy,

00:31:37 ◼   ► it always had terrible performance.

00:31:39 ◼   ► Most of all, it would just go years

00:31:42 ◼   ► without any major updates,

00:31:44 ◼   ► and everything was always just too little, too late.

00:31:46 ◼   ► It was always getting better soon

00:31:48 ◼   ► and never actually great.

00:31:50 ◼   ► That's why Lightroom does so well,

00:31:52 ◼   ► because Apple basically said,

00:31:55 ◼   ► "Hey, we're gonna eat at Apple."

00:31:56 ◼   ► I think they basically invented the category

00:31:58 ◼   ► of apps that work like this, basically.

00:32:01 ◼   ► I think, I'm not sure about that.

00:32:02 ◼   ► Please email Casey.

00:32:04 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:32:05 ◼   ► And then Adobe came in with Lightroom

00:32:08 ◼   ► and just ate their lunch,

00:32:09 ◼   ► because they just iterated so much faster

00:32:11 ◼   ► and it was so much better.

00:32:13 ◼   ► Apple really, you know,

00:32:14 ◼   ► Aperture was always pretty badly neglected.

00:32:16 ◼   ► So, you know, rose colored glasses and everything,

00:32:19 ◼   ► I don't think we're gonna see people looking back

00:32:21 ◼   ► in six months saying, "Oh, I really miss Aperture."

00:32:23 ◼   ► Like, I don't think so.

00:32:24 ◼   ► And for the few who do say that,

00:32:26 ◼   ► I think they're probably gonna be misremembering

00:32:29 ◼   ► how good it actually was.

00:32:31 ◼   ► - I thought I saw somewhere,

00:32:33 ◼   ► and it might have been in Jason Snell's review,

00:32:35 ◼   ► but I thought I saw somebody had loaded

00:32:37 ◼   ► just a crud load of images, of pictures,

00:32:40 ◼   ► into the new Photos app,

00:32:42 ◼   ► and they said you could scroll that thing

00:32:44 ◼   ► at a solid 60 frames per second like it was nothing.

00:32:46 ◼   ► - I will be excited to see that if that's true.

00:32:48 ◼   ► That's why I wanted to try it.

00:32:49 ◼   ► I'm like, I've gotta see this

00:32:50 ◼   ► 'cause it is so terrible in iPhoto.

00:32:52 ◼   ► I have maybe 30, 40, maybe I have more than that.

00:32:55 ◼   ► 40,000 photos, 50, and maybe it's up to 60.

00:32:57 ◼   ► Anyway, it doesn't seem like that big a number,

00:32:59 ◼   ► but I wanna see that scroll nicely.

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00:36:13 ◼   ► - Okay, so there was a little bit of a surprise

00:36:17 ◼   ► within the Photos app, and some people went spelunking.

00:36:20 ◼   ► I'm assuming it was Steve Troutonsmith.

00:36:23 ◼   ► Is that right, Steven Troutonsmith?

00:36:24 ◼   ► I'm sorry, but that guy.

00:36:27 ◼   ► and we have, he, they, someone has discovered UXKit.

00:36:32 ◼   ► So UXKit appears to be sorta kinda UIKit for the Mac.

00:36:37 ◼   ► Marco, do you wanna talk about this a little bit?

00:36:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, so it's a private framework that is used

00:36:43 ◼   ► only by the Photos app at the moment

00:36:45 ◼   ► that Apple shipped with the Photos app beta.

00:36:47 ◼   ► And it appears, you know, you can't,

00:36:49 ◼   ► no one's like disassembling it, I don't think,

00:36:51 ◼   ► but you can class dump it and you can kinda see

00:36:53 ◼   ► just like what classes and methods are contained within it

00:36:56 ◼   ► from the Objective-C runtime.

00:36:58 ◼   ► - It's not just photos, by the way.

00:37:00 ◼   ► People say that Xcode 6.3 beta also uses UXKit.

00:37:03 ◼   ► - That's interesting if that's true.

00:37:05 ◼   ► I do not know that.

00:37:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, there's a tweet from Don Mowry saying that.

00:37:08 ◼   ► I suppose it's easy enough to confirm,

00:37:10 ◼   ► but I put a tweet in the show notes.

00:37:12 ◼   ► - That is interesting.

00:37:13 ◼   ► Well, anyway, so, and what it appears to be

00:37:16 ◼   ► is a subset of UIKit ported to the Mac,

00:37:19 ◼   ► and so there are things, and just like, you know,

00:37:22 ◼   ► with the UI prefix replaced with UX,

00:37:25 ◼   ► And so there's things like, I think there's a UX navigation

00:37:28 ◼   ► controller and stuff like that.

00:37:29 ◼   ► And there's UX color or UX-- all this.

00:37:33 ◼   ► Because normally, between UIKit on the iPhone

00:37:35 ◼   ► and AppKit on the Mac, there are a lot of big differences,

00:37:39 ◼   ► but a lot of also just little superficial differences.

00:37:42 ◼   ► The prefix for UIKit is just UI.

00:37:45 ◼   ► The prefix for AppKit is NS.

00:37:47 ◼   ► And so you have some classes like UI color versus NS color,

00:37:51 ◼   ► and UI image versus NS image.

00:37:53 ◼   ► And many of these classes that have these superficial name differences aren't that

00:37:58 ◼   ► different, or the Mac version supports some ancient stuff that no one really uses anymore,

00:38:03 ◼   ► so you might as well just unify them.

00:38:06 ◼   ► So there's a lot of overlap that seems trivial, and many people have written C macros or utility

00:38:14 ◼   ► classes to have a unified codebase that shares some of this code between iOS and Mac more

00:38:19 ◼   ► easily.

00:38:20 ◼   ► So this appears to be Apple's version of this on this one app in this one team, where this

00:38:27 ◼   ► is their translation layer to have the same code, probably, to have the same code running

00:38:32 ◼   ► on iOS and Mac.

00:38:35 ◼   ► So the question is, is it just this one team?

00:38:38 ◼   ► Is it just this one app?

00:38:39 ◼   ► Or is this going to be a more widespread thing?

00:38:41 ◼   ► Is it going to become public?

00:38:43 ◼   ► And is this going to be the new unified UI framework so that you can share a lot more

00:38:47 ◼   ► code between iOS and Mac?

00:38:49 ◼   ► That's all, basically nobody knows anything about that yet, everyone's just speculating,

00:38:54 ◼   ► but that's why this is interesting. What do you guys think?

00:38:58 ◼   ► Guy English had a good point, and it's the analogy that came to mind when I thought it

00:39:02 ◼   ► was well. So, setting aside that Xcode 6.3 also appears to use it according to this tweet,

00:39:09 ◼   ► Guy pointed out ProKit.framework, remember that?

00:39:11 ◼   ► Yeah, all the pro apps, Logic and everything, Aperture.

00:39:15 ◼   ► What are the other apps that used it?

00:39:19 ◼   ► Maybe Shake when that was out.

00:39:21 ◼   ► Not Final Cut.

00:39:22 ◼   ► Well, maybe Final Cut.

00:39:23 ◼   ► Anyway, a whole bunch of Apple's apps that look different, like the window chrome was

00:39:26 ◼   ► different, it was darker and sometimes it was smaller and they had their own little

00:39:30 ◼   ► weird set of controls and everything.

00:39:31 ◼   ► They used ProKit framework, which was a framework shared among Apple applications that gave

00:39:39 ◼   ► a different UI.

00:39:40 ◼   ► I mean, I assume it wasn't just look and feel.

00:39:42 ◼   ► I assume it had other features as well.

00:39:43 ◼   ► But the point is that it was a framework that was not for public consumption

00:39:47 ◼   ► That Apple used on multiple applications that never became the future of AppKit, right?

00:39:53 ◼   ► So the idea that UXKit could just be a thing that Apple uses internally to make its applications

00:39:58 ◼   ► This is a completely viable idea. It's not crazy to think

00:40:02 ◼   ► Oh, well now once they UXKit like because Apple also does the opposite they they take

00:40:07 ◼   ► Frameworks they use them privately for a release or two and then make them public, right?

00:40:12 ◼   ► So now we can't tell whether this is going to be one of those things that's used privately

00:40:16 ◼   ► and becomes public, or is it just another ProKit that Apple will use internally to make

00:40:20 ◼   ► its life easier when it makes its applications, but it is not the future of making UIs on

00:40:25 ◼   ► the Mac.

00:40:26 ◼   ► There is some debate around this from smart programmers who are saying, "Look, you really

00:40:30 ◼   ► don't want to have the unified framework because the Mac and iOS UI-wise are different."

00:40:37 ◼   ► And the very low-level stuff, the foundation classes, that's like the data structures,

00:40:41 ◼   ► the networking, stuff like that, that all is unified already.

00:40:45 ◼   ► And what's mainly not is UI stuff.

00:40:49 ◼   ► And there is a great argument to be made there that many people have made that that should

00:40:53 ◼   ► be separate because just porting an iOS app directly to Mac and using a lot of the iOS

00:41:00 ◼   ► interface paradigms like navigation controllers and things like that, it doesn't really work

00:41:04 ◼   ► well on the Mac.

00:41:05 ◼   ► It's really not like that's kind of a waste of what the Mac is good at and it just kind

00:41:09 ◼   ► and it feels like you're clicking an iPad app basically.

00:41:11 ◼   ► - But what about things like collection views,

00:41:13 ◼   ► like the fancy iOS collection views

00:41:14 ◼   ► that sort of reflow themselves,

00:41:17 ◼   ► or even just something like a better table view.

00:41:19 ◼   ► I mean, I know they've improved table view

00:41:20 ◼   ► getting rid of NSL and everything.

00:41:22 ◼   ► Those type of things kind of span the range.

00:41:24 ◼   ► I mean, they might still have weird APIs

00:41:26 ◼   ► like touches begin inside cell,

00:41:28 ◼   ► and it's like, what do you mean touches?

00:41:30 ◼   ► There's no, you know what I mean?

00:41:31 ◼   ► What you have to think is, look, this framework exists,

00:41:34 ◼   ► and the class names make you think it's very UI,

00:41:37 ◼   ► Like why would Apple bother making this?

00:41:39 ◼   ► And for the Photos app, the obvious answer to me is,

00:41:42 ◼   ► the photos for the Mac app looks like photos for iOS,

00:41:46 ◼   ► right down to zooming out and seeing that giant grid

00:41:48 ◼   ► of like photos for this month or week or year.

00:41:50 ◼   ► Like it is very clearly a Mac-ification

00:41:54 ◼   ► of the iOS Photos app.

00:41:56 ◼   ► So UI wise, you know, ignoring like the backend

00:41:58 ◼   ► and how it stores photos and the iCloud

00:42:00 ◼   ► and everything like that.

00:42:02 ◼   ► So much, it looks much more like,

00:42:04 ◼   ► hey, someone ported iOS photos to the Mac

00:42:05 ◼   ► in anything like, "Hey, someone made a new version of iPhoto."

00:42:09 ◼   ► So if you have the existing Photos app, which presumably uses UIKit, and you wanted to make

00:42:15 ◼   ► a Mac version of that, being able to reuse, if not that code directly, then that code

00:42:23 ◼   ► indirectly or the structure of the program, it would be really convenient to have something

00:42:27 ◼   ► like UXKit where you can get the benefit of all that UIKit code and get some semblance

00:42:33 ◼   ► of a Mac version up and running faster.

00:42:35 ◼   ► That doesn't answer the question of why it would be used in Xcode, but historically Xcode

00:42:39 ◼   ► has been used to dogfood all sorts of weird stuff like garbage collection and, uh, what

00:42:43 ◼   ► was the other one, it was dogfood-arc, I think?

00:42:45 ◼   ► Did it dogfood-arc first?

00:42:47 ◼   ► Anyway, that could also just be Xcode dogfooding things, because if you're gonna experiment

00:42:51 ◼   ► with weird technologies you should definitely do it on the application that developers use

00:42:54 ◼   ► to write programs.

00:42:56 ◼   ► The argument of "you should keep them separate" is weakened once you start looking at, like,

00:43:02 ◼   ► What things in iOS would you not have on the Mac, and vice versa?

00:43:07 ◼   ► And I think that list is actually a lot smaller than you might expect if you're starting to

00:43:12 ◼   ► make this argument.

00:43:13 ◼   ► And if you look, like, as you said, Collection View, that's applicable to both.

00:43:19 ◼   ► So many little components.

00:43:20 ◼   ► UI Control, UI Image, UI Image View, UI Label, Table View, Text View, so many of these things

00:43:27 ◼   ► actually, like, there's not a great argument that they shouldn't be the same on both.

00:43:32 ◼   ► It's really just the very high level structures, the very high level navigation concepts, navigation

00:43:38 ◼   ► layouts, that kind of stuff should be different on both.

00:43:41 ◼   ► But that's really a very small part of UIKit in the grand scheme of things.

00:43:44 ◼   ► And you don't even know, like you say "Oh, navigation controller, we don't really push

00:43:47 ◼   ► new things on it."

00:43:48 ◼   ► But there's no reason you couldn't make a Mac app that in one of its windows does a

00:43:52 ◼   ► sort of UI navigation controller thing of pushing a new view on and popping it off.

00:43:57 ◼   ► It might be weird, but arguably a lot of the existing OS X apps do a lot of iOS-y type

00:44:04 ◼   ► things.

00:44:05 ◼   ► Hell, I think in Messages it has buttons that aren't buttons but are just colored text.

00:44:09 ◼   ► I think I pointed that out in my Yosemite review if I meant to.

00:44:12 ◼   ► There's a details button or something in Messages that is not a button, it is just blue text.

00:44:15 ◼   ► It's like, "This is not iOS, what do you think you're doing here?"

00:44:17 ◼   ► But people accept it.

00:44:19 ◼   ► It's like, "Alright, whatever, I know when I click that I get details."

00:44:23 ◼   ► serving certain interests, as an iOS programmer who doesn't know much about the Mac, it

00:44:29 ◼   ► would make me way more likely to start tackling a Mac app if this stuff was more consistent.

00:44:34 ◼   ► And I know, like, if I just dive into the Mac and really am committed to it, I could

00:44:38 ◼   ► work through AppKit pretty well, I could figure it out, you know, that's not the only reason

00:44:44 ◼   ► I'm not making a Mac app, but it would definitely make me a lot more likely to make a Mac app

00:44:48 ◼   ► sooner and it would make it a smaller undertaking if a lot of this stuff is unified, instead

00:44:53 ◼   ► of having all these little superficial differences, some big, some small.

00:44:58 ◼   ► That has to play in somewhat to any decision they make to this.

00:45:02 ◼   ► If Apple wants to encourage more Mac apps, if they want to populate the desolate, awful

00:45:08 ◼   ► landscape of the Mac App Store, which is really sad in a lot of places, if they want to help

00:45:13 ◼   ► populate that with more, better apps, if they want to get more people making Mac apps, more

00:45:18 ◼   ► people using the Mac for a lot of this stuff. They have to make it easier for developers.

00:45:22 ◼   ► Right now, all the people who are saying this shouldn't be unified are all long-time Mac

00:45:30 ◼   ► programmers. Long-time iOS programmers, I think, are very excited about this idea. We

00:45:37 ◼   ► look at the Mac as like, "Well, we could go here fairly easily, but all this stuff

00:45:41 ◼   ► is needlessly different."

00:45:43 ◼   ► Yeah, and like even if you made the core of your app like oh it's all written in

00:45:48 ◼   ► sort of completely platform agnostic manner and it doesn't really matter or

00:45:51 ◼   ► I'm using some framework that's on both places like core data or something, the

00:45:55 ◼   ► UI part is like you see like oh and just we'll just put a different UI on top of

00:46:00 ◼   ► it. I'm not gonna say it's the hard part but it's a surprising amount of work and

00:46:03 ◼   ► if you have to repeat it and keep them in sync and every time you want to add a

00:46:06 ◼   ► feature you have to add it in both places of a totally different code

00:46:08 ◼   ► using different APIs it's just it's a lot of extra work. I'm not sure UXKit

00:46:13 ◼   ► it makes it, you know, lowers the barrier enough to really move the needle on the Mac

00:46:19 ◼   ► App Store because it has other problems, you know, and it's just there's so few Mac users,

00:46:25 ◼   ► like I think you'd have to really make it a low barrier for someone's, "Hmm, I can address

00:46:28 ◼   ► the market of like hundreds of millions of iOS devices or like a couple of Mac people

00:46:33 ◼   ► like there's like a million or two or five or whatever."

00:46:36 ◼   ► So the iPhone is just such a monster and that's just one iOS device compared to the Mac, right?

00:46:41 ◼   ► But if this was their goal, like their long-term goal, like we're going to dog food this, we're

00:46:46 ◼   ► going to see if it's possible, because we as Apple have a bunch of iOS apps that we've

00:46:50 ◼   ► decided this is the right way to do photos with the stupid view where you zoom out and

00:46:53 ◼   ► see everything as a big thing and you put your finger or your cursor over it and see,

00:46:57 ◼   ► you know, that's the future of photos.

00:46:59 ◼   ► We already wrote that app.

00:47:01 ◼   ► Can't we just get that to run on the Mac?

00:47:02 ◼   ► Well, no, because X, Y, and Z.

00:47:03 ◼   ► It's like, well, okay, so we have a job to do.

00:47:05 ◼   ► We can use this UX Git framework to be the first people to try to do that.

00:47:09 ◼   ► But Apple has way more resources to throw towards the successor to iPhoto than the average

00:47:15 ◼   ► developer with an iOS app who might be thinking about making a Mac app.

00:47:18 ◼   ► So if Apple runs this experiment and decides, "Boy, this really makes porting much easier,"

00:47:23 ◼   ► then what do they do about it?

00:47:24 ◼   ► Do they just say...

00:47:26 ◼   ► How would they...

00:47:27 ◼   ► Assume that this is a successful experiment inside Apple and assume that the goal of it

00:47:30 ◼   ► was to see if this is something that developers might want for the reasons that Marco stated.

00:47:34 ◼   ► How does Apple then at WWDC announce this as a thing?

00:47:38 ◼   ► And tell, like, what is the messaging?

00:47:41 ◼   ► It's like, so you're thinking of writing a Mac app.

00:47:43 ◼   ► If you have an iOS version, then look at UXKit,

00:47:47 ◼   ► 'cause you could reuse a lot of that same code,

00:47:48 ◼   ► changing all the capital I's to capital X's or something.

00:47:51 ◼   ► But otherwise use AppKit, or is the message like,

00:47:54 ◼   ► this is the future of writing Mac applications.

00:47:57 ◼   ► It just happens to look like the iOS one.

00:47:59 ◼   ► But even if you never write an iOS Mac,

00:48:00 ◼   ► we're telling you you should use UXKit

00:48:02 ◼   ► to write your Mac apps.

00:48:04 ◼   ► - Well, honestly, I think if they actually unified it,

00:48:07 ◼   ► it would just be called UIKit Everywhere.

00:48:09 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:48:09 ◼   ► - Like that's the direction they would go.

00:48:11 ◼   ► They would work from iOS back to the Mac,

00:48:14 ◼   ► and they would just bring over everything named UIKit

00:48:17 ◼   ► that makes sense to have on the Mac.

00:48:19 ◼   ► And also, one advantage they would have here is right now,

00:48:22 ◼   ► they're maintaining two different frameworks.

00:48:24 ◼   ► They're maintaining two different UI libraries,

00:48:26 ◼   ► and AppKit is very, very old,

00:48:30 ◼   ► and there's a lot of cruft in there from the olden days.

00:48:33 ◼   ► UIKit was kind of like a rewrite of AppKit for the iPhone,

00:48:38 ◼   ► and to be more modern and to be more efficient

00:48:42 ◼   ► and have all these new capabilities

00:48:44 ◼   ► and be simpler in a lot of ways.

00:48:46 ◼   ► UIKit is like, it is the rethink of AppKit,

00:48:49 ◼   ► it is the rewrite of AppKit.

00:48:51 ◼   ► They just didn't replace AppKit with it quite yet.

00:48:53 ◼   ► - If they were gonna call it UIKit everywhere though,

00:48:55 ◼   ► doesn't that count?

00:48:56 ◼   ► Because the code is not the same.

00:48:58 ◼   ► Like UXKit, I'm led to believe,

00:49:00 ◼   ► is more or less just a wrap around the existing App Kit

00:49:03 ◼   ► APIs to begin with.

00:49:04 ◼   ► And maybe they would gut that out later.

00:49:06 ◼   ► But I don't think you can pull that out

00:49:07 ◼   ► because you have to maintain support for App Kit

00:49:09 ◼   ► for a long, long time into the future.

00:49:11 ◼   ► So linking against the--

00:49:13 ◼   ► if they called it UI Kit, you couldn't link against

00:49:18 ◼   ► that framework if one set of code

00:49:21 ◼   ► is the native code for the iOS devices, and another set of code

00:49:24 ◼   ► is the wrap around App Kit.

00:49:26 ◼   ► I don't know how you could do that with the same name.

00:49:29 ◼   ► I think the reason the X is there,

00:49:32 ◼   ► it just doesn't make sense to me.

00:49:34 ◼   ► It's not going to be a single unified code base.

00:49:36 ◼   ► It's going to be two separate code bases.

00:49:38 ◼   ► And having two separate code bases in a framework

00:49:40 ◼   ► with the same name on two--

00:49:41 ◼   ► I mean, I suppose you could pull it off,

00:49:42 ◼   ► because the SDKs are in different folders.

00:49:44 ◼   ► This is the iOS SDK, and this is the Mac SDK.

00:49:46 ◼   ► But it just looks like--

00:49:47 ◼   ► I mean, think about looking up documentation for it.

00:49:49 ◼   ► Surely there would be differences.

00:49:50 ◼   ► So I don't know.

00:49:51 ◼   ► Messaging-wise, though, that's--

00:49:54 ◼   ► we'll get to those after the next sponsor.

00:49:55 ◼   ► but that is a weird message that like AppKit,

00:50:00 ◼   ► we've been evolving and improving for a long time,

00:50:02 ◼   ► but now, you know, it's like,

00:50:05 ◼   ► I always wonder that when they bought Next,

00:50:07 ◼   ► like how, I wonder how long the NS prefix will keep,

00:50:09 ◼   ► I wondered initially,

00:50:10 ◼   ► would they keep the NS prefix and everything?

00:50:11 ◼   ► 'Cause it's kind of weird, you know, NS next step,

00:50:13 ◼   ► like why do all these KOHO classes have NS prefix?

00:50:16 ◼   ► I bet there's tons of people just starting out programming

00:50:18 ◼   ► for the Mac and wondering what the hell

00:50:19 ◼   ► this NS crap is about, right?

00:50:21 ◼   ► But it's held on for a surprisingly long time, right?

00:50:25 ◼   ► And if they get out from under it and say,

00:50:28 ◼   ► all right, this is the new thing, and we call it UXKit,

00:50:32 ◼   ► and maybe in the future it'll be unified,

00:50:34 ◼   ► but for now we have UIKit and UXKit.

00:50:36 ◼   ► And I still think they would be stuck

00:50:39 ◼   ► maintaining three things--

00:50:41 ◼   ► AppKit, UXKit, which is on top of AppKit, and UIKit.

00:50:45 ◼   ► So it wouldn't be-- maybe long, long term it's a unification.

00:50:48 ◼   ► But I don't know, the messaging just-- it seems weird to me.

00:50:51 ◼   ► Yeah, I mean, that's fair about maintenance.

00:50:53 ◼   ► The messaging I don't think would matter.

00:50:55 ◼   ► I mean, look, they have two languages now.

00:50:57 ◼   ► - Well, but one of them is clearly a successor to the other.

00:51:01 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think it's gonna be long-term.

00:51:02 ◼   ► And by the way, a lot of people are speculating

00:51:04 ◼   ► that UXKit might be Swift-only or Swift-native.

00:51:08 ◼   ► I think we can already tell it's not

00:51:10 ◼   ► just by inspecting the file and everything,

00:51:13 ◼   ► but if you look at the timing of this,

00:51:18 ◼   ► the Photos app was introduced at the same time

00:51:20 ◼   ► as Swift Beta 1.

00:51:21 ◼   ► When Swift Beta 1 was announced at WWDC last year, very few people inside Apple had even

00:51:27 ◼   ► used it yet.

00:51:28 ◼   ► So I think it's extremely unlikely that there's any Swift code in the Photos app.

00:51:32 ◼   ► Well, there's probably some Swift code.

00:51:35 ◼   ► That's the way they would, you know, but I don't think it's written from the ground up

00:51:38 ◼   ► in Swift, and I think you're right that this is an Objective-C framework.

00:51:41 ◼   ► The whole point of Swift is you can call through to the Objective-C frameworks, and half of

00:51:45 ◼   ► the stuff they did in Swift 1.2, which we didn't even talk about, was making it less

00:51:49 ◼   ► painful and less awkward to interoperate between Swift and Objective-C stuff by adding a whole

00:51:54 ◼   ► bunch of annotations that you can mark up an Apple. I'm assuming it's marking up its

00:51:57 ◼   ► own Objective-C APIs with all these annotations that mean nothing to Objective-C but totally

00:52:01 ◼   ► let Swift know how it needs to write the adapter classes to be less annoying.

00:52:05 ◼   ► Exactly, and I think that's the biggest sign as anything that Objective-C is not going

00:52:10 ◼   ► to go away two years from now. This is going to be a very long-term replacement. Right

00:52:17 ◼   ► now, look at how many Apple classes are still using C++, as there are so many APIs that

00:52:23 ◼   ► are still in C++ that I don't think we have to worry anytime soon that Objective-C is

00:52:28 ◼   ► going to be just ended.

00:52:29 ◼   ► Well, I mean, it could be ended in the sense that they tell you when you're writing your

00:52:33 ◼   ► application the only code you will ever write is Swift.

00:52:35 ◼   ► You could get away with that, but it's like, "I'm not limited.

00:52:38 ◼   ► I can call all the existing frameworks and APIs.

00:52:40 ◼   ► I can call them all from Swift, right?

00:52:43 ◼   ► I can do weird C-style stuff too."

00:52:45 ◼   ► So you could say, third-party developers, if you were starting a fresh new application

00:52:49 ◼   ► and opening a new project in Xcode, write all your code in Swift, and you'll be fine.

00:52:54 ◼   ► They're not at that point yet, but that's where they want to get.

00:52:56 ◼   ► And that point could come way before all the Objective-C code is gone, because that's going

00:53:00 ◼   ► to take forever.

00:53:02 ◼   ► People at Apple are going to be writing Objective-C for a long time, but they could be telling

00:53:04 ◼   ► all third-party developers, "We would like it if you just wrote all your code in Swift,

00:53:10 ◼   ► and you won't be limited in which APIs you call."

00:53:13 ◼   ► The idea of a Swift-only or a Swift-native API, what's the selling point of that other

00:53:18 ◼   ► than ideological purity at this point and in the near future?

00:53:24 ◼   ► Surely that day will come, but unless there's some big advantage in terms of speed or interface,

00:53:31 ◼   ► it's going to be difficult to justify it because then you'd be cutting off all the people with

00:53:34 ◼   ► existing Objective-C apps and there's a lot of them.

00:53:38 ◼   ► I would not expect a Swift exclusive API

00:53:41 ◼   ► for anything important to be available in the next,

00:53:45 ◼   ► I don't know, two years at least.

00:53:46 ◼   ► I mean, I think it's gonna be a while.

00:53:49 ◼   ► - Apple likes to move fast.

00:53:50 ◼   ► They like to like, "Oh, it's sooner than I expected.

00:53:52 ◼   ► "I didn't think," you know, and in fact,

00:53:54 ◼   ► they will probably do it with something important

00:53:56 ◼   ► when they decide to do it,

00:53:57 ◼   ► but it seems like it's just way too soon now.

00:53:59 ◼   ► So that probably means that whatever your estimate

00:54:01 ◼   ► was two years, like maybe cut that in half.

00:54:03 ◼   ► 'Cause don't they always surprise us where it's like,

00:54:06 ◼   ► You know, the way they herd everybody into whatever new thing they want to do is like

00:54:11 ◼   ► the new hotness is only available with X and...

00:54:13 ◼   ► Yeah, but not necessarily... first of all, not necessarily on this level of like the

00:54:18 ◼   ► language level of what you're doing with the API level, not necessarily on that level,

00:54:21 ◼   ► and also I think the last time they did that, like with, what was it, with Carmen, like

00:54:26 ◼   ► when was the last time they did that?

00:54:27 ◼   ► Oh no, the best example I think is how you can't build applications for older versions

00:54:31 ◼   ► of OSs with the newest version of Xcode.

00:54:34 ◼   ► They want to push everybody to the newest version of Xcode.

00:54:37 ◼   ► And that's why people have to keep seven versions

00:54:38 ◼   ► of Xcode running on old machines.

00:54:40 ◼   ► Like they're like, you can't even target, you know,

00:54:43 ◼   ► Snow Leopard anymore with this thing.

00:54:44 ◼   ► And like they are pushing people up their OS support chain

00:54:48 ◼   ► forcibly by saying, look, you're gonna have to have

00:54:50 ◼   ► this version of Xcode, 'cause it's the only way

00:54:51 ◼   ► you can develop for the iPhone 5,

00:54:53 ◼   ► but you can't develop for Snow Leopard with it.

00:54:55 ◼   ► So, you know, all these people keeping these VMs alive

00:54:58 ◼   ► with ancient versions of Xcode and the old SDKs,

00:55:00 ◼   ► that is Apple aggressively pushing people way too fast.

00:55:03 ◼   ► Like as soon as people are running VMs

00:55:05 ◼   ► with old versions of your IDE,

00:55:06 ◼   ► you know you're going too fast.

00:55:07 ◼   ► And that is a very common thing that people do.

00:55:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, actually a lot of Mac developers need to do that.

00:55:13 ◼   ► - I think it'll be sooner.

00:55:14 ◼   ► I tend to come down on this closer

00:55:16 ◼   ► to Jon's point of view than Marco's.

00:55:18 ◼   ► I think the push to Swift is going to be more aggressive

00:55:21 ◼   ► and sooner than any of us expect.

00:55:24 ◼   ► I think I'm on the edge.

00:55:27 ◼   ► I almost want to say something will be Swift specific

00:55:31 ◼   ► or this year, maybe at the end of the year,

00:55:35 ◼   ► I think perhaps it's more reasonable

00:55:37 ◼   ► to say sometime in 2016, but I think it'll be soon.

00:55:39 ◼   ► I think it'll be really soon.

00:55:41 ◼   ► And certainly Swift is making

00:55:43 ◼   ► some really significant steps in doing so very quickly.

00:55:48 ◼   ► What I keep thinking is, you know,

00:55:51 ◼   ► Swift is supposed to make a lot of the dangers

00:55:54 ◼   ► of Objective-C go away.

00:55:55 ◼   ► And that's of course causing a lot of,

00:56:00 ◼   ► I don't know about drama, but maybe doubt in the community, especially amongst those

00:56:05 ◼   ► who have worked with Objective-C for a long time.

00:56:08 ◼   ► But I think that if Swift prevents really silly programming errors, and if it's a little

00:56:16 ◼   ► more stable eventually, and it runs faster eventually, it's in Apple's best interest

00:56:21 ◼   ► to push everyone that direction.

00:56:23 ◼   ► And I think they will, and I think they'll do so really aggressively.

00:56:25 ◼   ► Yeah, but I mean, honestly, I think most of the drama is already really fizzling out,

00:56:33 ◼   ► and I think it's only a matter--it's only a couple more Swift revisions.

00:56:37 ◼   ► I mean, look at how much they did in 1.2.

00:56:39 ◼   ► It was a pretty substantial upgrade in a lot of ways, and I don't even use it yet, but

00:56:44 ◼   ► I can tell just by looking at what they changed and other people's reactions to it, it's a

00:56:47 ◼   ► pretty substantial upgrade.

00:56:49 ◼   ► I read a bunch of these blog posts of like, "We switched our big project to Swift," or

00:56:53 ◼   ► rebuilt a big project in Swift and here's how it went."

00:56:56 ◼   ► And overall it seems to be, people are mostly okay with the language itself, with a few

00:57:04 ◼   ► minor differences here and there, but mostly okay with the language itself, but they just

00:57:09 ◼   ► complain that the tools are immature still.

00:57:11 ◼   ► That's working itself out pretty quickly, really.

00:57:13 ◼   ► They just added the incremental compilation, which was probably the biggest complaint in

00:57:18 ◼   ► its absence before.

00:57:20 ◼   ► In less than a year, Apple has eliminated most major complaints about the language.

00:57:28 ◼   ► There's still some minor complaints, and there's still some people who really object to certain

00:57:32 ◼   ► things about it that will probably never change, but for the most part, they've already addressed

00:57:37 ◼   ► many, many good complaints about it in less than a year.

00:57:42 ◼   ► And they're moving really fast.

00:57:43 ◼   ► They're making big, big breaking changes, almost so much like it's frustrating reading

00:57:48 ◼   ► the documentation for the language and trying to learn the language just to the point you

00:57:51 ◼   ► think you're actually learning things, they change it all.

00:57:53 ◼   ► And you're like, "But I just learned how it worked before, now it's totally different

00:57:56 ◼   ► again."

00:57:57 ◼   ► And they don't do it in minor ways.

00:57:58 ◼   ► Like, "Oh, we tweaked this little syntax here, but there's big fundamentals."

00:58:02 ◼   ► Just wait until they add exceptions and regular expressions, people's brains are going to

00:58:05 ◼   ► explode, right?

00:58:06 ◼   ► This is why I haven't learned it yet.

00:58:07 ◼   ► This language is moving fast.

00:58:10 ◼   ► And it's like, "Wow, at one point it was a big change.

00:58:13 ◼   ► I feel like, well, my program got five times faster and I didn't change anything.

00:58:17 ◼   ► might compile times are lower.

00:58:19 ◼   ► It's still super young,

00:58:21 ◼   ► and I think it's probably still super buggy,

00:58:22 ◼   ► and they've got a long way to go.

00:58:23 ◼   ► But I think the inclination is to think,

00:58:26 ◼   ► well, it's young now, and there's these big changes,

00:58:29 ◼   ► but the rate of change will slow down.

00:58:30 ◼   ► And I expect it to not slow down,

00:58:33 ◼   ► to make people uncomfortable with the amount

00:58:35 ◼   ► that it doesn't slow down for the next couple of years.

00:58:38 ◼   ► At a certain point, it's gonna be kinda like

00:58:40 ◼   ► the change fatigue with the OS.

00:58:41 ◼   ► Go like, all right already.

00:58:43 ◼   ► My annoyances with whatever features in Swift

00:58:46 ◼   ► are now dwarfed by my annoyance that you keep changing

00:58:49 ◼   ► the language every three months.

00:58:51 ◼   ► We understand you're addressing all of our problems

00:58:53 ◼   ► and trying to make things better,

00:58:54 ◼   ► but now I just want it to be stable so I can write some code

00:58:56 ◼   ► and feel like I actually know the language.

00:58:58 ◼   ► That's gonna happen in like eight months

00:59:00 ◼   ► if they keep up this pace.

00:59:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, hopefully.

00:59:02 ◼   ► I mean, I said last year I was gonna wait about a year

00:59:05 ◼   ► before I even looked at it,

00:59:07 ◼   ► and so far that's working out very well.

00:59:09 ◼   ► I can see in passing, oh, they're making

00:59:11 ◼   ► all these big changes, but I have no investment in it.

00:59:14 ◼   ► I haven't even read the Apple Swift book yet,

00:59:17 ◼   ► the thing they release on iBooks for free,

00:59:18 ◼   ► I haven't even read that yet.

00:59:19 ◼   ► - That's good because every page of it has changed by now.

00:59:22 ◼   ► - I know.

00:59:23 ◼   ► And so I'd rather just wait until it settles down,

00:59:26 ◼   ► at least most of the way.

00:59:28 ◼   ► I would expect within the,

00:59:30 ◼   ► you said within the next couple years,

00:59:31 ◼   ► I think it will be pretty stable even in a year from now.

00:59:35 ◼   ► - But I think the reason I don't think

00:59:37 ◼   ► it'll ever really stay is just like,

00:59:39 ◼   ► built into this language is the idea

00:59:41 ◼   ► that it is a versioned language,

00:59:42 ◼   ► and there's no backward syntax compatibility,

00:59:46 ◼   ► their entire path forward, and we'll see how this works,

00:59:48 ◼   ► is that the IDE is going to update your source code.

00:59:51 ◼   ► They're not going to support Swift 1.0, 1.1,

00:59:54 ◼   ► for the source.

00:59:56 ◼   ► It's not like I wrote this in Swift 1.0,

00:59:58 ◼   ► and I'm gonna be able to compile it in Xcode 9

01:00:00 ◼   ► many years from now.

01:00:01 ◼   ► No, you won't, no, you can't even compile that now probably.

01:00:04 ◼   ► Their whole strategy is source compatibility, forget.

01:00:06 ◼   ► I mean, maybe they'll change their policy.

01:00:08 ◼   ► When it comes to the maturing point,

01:00:10 ◼   ► they're gonna say, okay, now the new policy is

01:00:11 ◼   ► we will actually respect the sanctity of your source code

01:00:13 ◼   ► and not require you to like, you know,

01:00:15 ◼   ► use our refactoring tools to upgrade the syntax.

01:00:18 ◼   ► But they're not in that phase yet.

01:00:19 ◼   ► They're in the phase that says,

01:00:21 ◼   ► "We told you we're gonna break syntax compatibility.

01:00:23 ◼   ► "We are going to.

01:00:24 ◼   ► "We're never gonna compile your Swift 1.0,

01:00:26 ◼   ► "1.1 stuff anymore.

01:00:27 ◼   ► "So just get used to it and you better upgrade to Swift 1.2.

01:00:30 ◼   ► "And by the way, 1.3 will do the same thing to you."

01:00:33 ◼   ► - Our final sponsor this week is Automattic,

01:00:35 ◼   ► your smart driving assistant on your smartphone.

01:00:38 ◼   ► go to automatic.com/ATP.

01:00:41 ◼   ► So, automatic is this little dongle

01:00:43 ◼   ► that plugs into your car's OBD2 port.

01:00:46 ◼   ► It's the same port they use at the mechanics

01:00:48 ◼   ► or the dealers where they check it for error codes.

01:00:50 ◼   ► It's usually in the driver footwell.

01:00:52 ◼   ► Automatic plugs into that, and so all the information

01:00:54 ◼   ► that the dealers can get and the mechanics can get

01:00:56 ◼   ► out of your car, automatic can get,

01:00:58 ◼   ► and it has a smartphone app that integrates with this

01:01:00 ◼   ► and does cool stuff.

01:01:01 ◼   ► So, one thing it does, so by the way,

01:01:03 ◼   ► this works on iPhones and Android phones,

01:01:06 ◼   ► which is pretty great.

01:01:07 ◼   ► And it can show you by combining the smarts in your car

01:01:10 ◼   ► with the smarts in your phone, it shows you things like where

01:01:14 ◼   ► you've driven and how efficiently you drive.

01:01:16 ◼   ► It gives you feedback on your driving in real time that can

01:01:19 ◼   ► save hundreds of dollars a year on gas.

01:01:22 ◼   ► They can even call emergency services for free in a serious

01:01:26 ◼   ► crash, so if your car crashes and your phone is at all

01:01:30 ◼   ► workable, it can use your phone to call emergency

01:01:33 ◼   ► services for you.

01:01:34 ◼   ► This could really seriously be a benefit here.

01:01:37 ◼   ► Automatic also can diagnose any check engine light code.

01:01:41 ◼   ► So because it's in that port that all the mechanics use,

01:01:44 ◼   ► if there's any kind of error code

01:01:45 ◼   ► that causes the check engine light to come on,

01:01:47 ◼   ► the car has a lower level error code than that.

01:01:50 ◼   ► It's just not showing you

01:01:51 ◼   ► 'cause it usually just lacks the display for that.

01:01:53 ◼   ► That's why it just says check engine.

01:01:55 ◼   ► But usually there's some lower level code.

01:01:57 ◼   ► And a lot of those codes are really obvious things

01:01:59 ◼   ► that you can fix.

01:02:00 ◼   ► Things like the gas cap isn't sealed all the way.

01:02:03 ◼   ► stuff like that you can just fix that yourself or you know minor parts swaps

01:02:06 ◼   ► you can do you know you can go to a mechanic instead of going all the way to

01:02:09 ◼   ► the dealer and paying all this money so it can save you lots of money with check

01:02:12 ◼   ► engine light codes it can give you lots of money savings on gas it can call the

01:02:16 ◼   ► emergency services for free in a crash and it even has little useful things

01:02:20 ◼   ► like parking reminders again it's combining your car with your phone so it

01:02:24 ◼   ► knows where you parked and you can use the automatic app on your phone you just

01:02:28 ◼   ► go find your car again they even have integration with a few different things

01:02:32 ◼   ► So they integrate with the Nest learning thermostat.

01:02:35 ◼   ► So for example, if you're headed home,

01:02:37 ◼   ► and Nest has you in away mode, so your house is cold

01:02:40 ◼   ► in the winter, Automattic knows you're

01:02:42 ◼   ► getting close to your home, so it will tell the Nest

01:02:45 ◼   ► to turn the heat on.

01:02:46 ◼   ► And so then by the time you get home,

01:02:47 ◼   ► your house is nice and warm for your arrival.

01:02:50 ◼   ► And even if you don't have a Nest,

01:02:52 ◼   ► they have integration with IFTTT, if this, then that.

01:02:55 ◼   ► So with that integration, you can integrate

01:02:57 ◼   ► countless other online services with your Automattic device.

01:03:00 ◼   ► So it's really great.

01:03:01 ◼   ► There's also an API.

01:03:02 ◼   ► You can download your driving data.

01:03:04 ◼   ► You can subscribe to events, like when you start and stop

01:03:06 ◼   ► the car, when your check engine light comes on, et cetera.

01:03:08 ◼   ► There's a whole API for use for whatever you want.

01:03:11 ◼   ► And if you have an Android phone,

01:03:12 ◼   ► they even have a feature called Do Not Disturb mode,

01:03:15 ◼   ► so that if you want, you can have it automatically mute

01:03:17 ◼   ► your phone buzzing or beeping while you're driving,

01:03:20 ◼   ► so you don't get distracted by those notifications.

01:03:22 ◼   ► So great stuff here.

01:03:23 ◼   ► automatic.com/atp.

01:03:26 ◼   ► And this is normally about $100.

01:03:28 ◼   ► There's no subscription fees.

01:03:30 ◼   ► This is one time up front, just $100.

01:03:33 ◼   ► There is no monthly fee.

01:03:35 ◼   ► You can buy the device, that's it.

01:03:37 ◼   ► Now there's a special offer for the podcast listeners, 20% off.

01:03:40 ◼   ► So for you guys, by going to automatic.com/atp, it's just $80.

01:03:45 ◼   ► 20% off.

01:03:47 ◼   ► So just $80.

01:03:48 ◼   ► Free shipping in just two business days, and they have a 45 day return policy.

01:03:54 ◼   ► This is really risk free.

01:03:55 ◼   ► Fantastic deal.

01:03:57 ◼   ► $80.

01:03:58 ◼   ► free shipping in two days and a 45 day return policy.

01:04:01 ◼   ► Automatic.com/ATP.

01:04:03 ◼   ► Thanks a lot.

01:04:05 ◼   ► - And speaking of different ways

01:04:08 ◼   ► of writing your user interfaces,

01:04:11 ◼   ► a couple of things have happened over the last weeks

01:04:13 ◼   ► or months that a few listeners have asked us to talk about.

01:04:17 ◼   ► And the first, actually might have even been a year ago now,

01:04:20 ◼   ► is Async Display Kit.

01:04:22 ◼   ► Do you wanna tell us about that, John?

01:04:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, all this talk about UX Kit has,

01:04:26 ◼   ► Like the idea, oh, UXKit is a successor to AppKit,

01:04:29 ◼   ► and AppKit has this corrupted UIKit,

01:04:31 ◼   ► you know, learned from AppKit and did things better,

01:04:34 ◼   ► which is why it seems nicer to do a lot of things in UIKit

01:04:37 ◼   ► than it is in AppKit and everything.

01:04:38 ◼   ► And AsyncDisplayKit and the other topic we'll go after

01:04:43 ◼   ► about React, or React Native, rather,

01:04:47 ◼   ► point to sort of a larger leap above both the AppKit

01:04:52 ◼   ► and the UIKit paradigm, particularly having to do

01:04:55 ◼   ► with the requirements that certain things only be done on the main thread, laying out

01:05:00 ◼   ► the UI drawing, and there's some exceptions to that, where you can try to do some of those

01:05:04 ◼   ► things off the main thread, but generally that leads to sadness, unless you're super

01:05:07 ◼   ► careful and know what you're doing.

01:05:10 ◼   ► And that's a limitation kind of built into the framework, a framework that if you trace

01:05:15 ◼   ► its lineage through, you know, OpenStep and NextStep, AppKit going way back in time, made

01:05:20 ◼   ► sense when you didn't have a multi-core CPU in your little handheld crazy phone.

01:05:24 ◼   ► Symmetric multiprocessing was barely a glimmer in people's eyes back then.

01:05:29 ◼   ► Forget about these 12-core CPUs and everything like that.

01:05:34 ◼   ► But the reality is that now we do have multicore in everything, and even if you just offload

01:05:40 ◼   ► some of that work to another core, it can be a big benefit.

01:05:43 ◼   ► So AsyncDisplayKit is a thing, I think it's a thing that Facebook made for its native

01:05:47 ◼   ► applications, the paper application, where they wanted to do layout calculations.

01:05:52 ◼   ► basically math of saying how wide is this,

01:05:53 ◼   ► how much room is it going to take up, blah, blah, blah.

01:05:56 ◼   ► And they wanted to do it in parallel,

01:05:57 ◼   ► not on the main thread,

01:05:59 ◼   ► because they didn't want to block the main thread.

01:06:00 ◼   ► They wanted the main thread to be available

01:06:01 ◼   ► to pick up events and process them

01:06:03 ◼   ► and make the UI, you know, reactive,

01:06:06 ◼   ► not to use that word, the next thing.

01:06:08 ◼   ► And so they made AsyncDisplayKit,

01:06:11 ◼   ► which is a thing on top of AppKit

01:06:14 ◼   ► that lets you do UI type calculations

01:06:17 ◼   ► in asynchronously and possibly in parallel

01:06:21 ◼   ► and other threads and then do it in a nice way

01:06:24 ◼   ► so that the actual layout gets done on the main thread

01:06:26 ◼   ► as it has to to work with the thing,

01:06:28 ◼   ► but you can actually do the calculations elsewhere.

01:06:30 ◼   ► And that's what makes me look at UXKit and think like,

01:06:34 ◼   ► this can't really be the future of anything.

01:06:36 ◼   ► It seems just like an interim step

01:06:38 ◼   ► because I would wanna see a leap,

01:06:40 ◼   ► like UIKit was a nice step up from AppKit,

01:06:42 ◼   ► but it was kind of like more like a cleaned up AppKit,

01:06:45 ◼   ► but it didn't revisit some fundamental assumptions

01:06:48 ◼   ► in light of the hardware realities that we have today.

01:06:52 ◼   ► And I think something like,

01:06:54 ◼   ► something that incorporated something like Async Display Kit

01:06:57 ◼   ► into the fabric of the framework would be much better

01:06:59 ◼   ► than someone taking AppKit or UIKit

01:07:01 ◼   ► and layering another framework on top of it

01:07:03 ◼   ► to offload stuff to other threads and stuff like that.

01:07:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, so Async Display Kit was most,

01:07:10 ◼   ► gained most of its fame, I guess, from paper,

01:07:14 ◼   ► which was, is an app that Facebook wrote

01:07:17 ◼   ► as a kind of alternative to their traditional Facebook app.

01:07:21 ◼   ► And it's actually the app that I use on my phone

01:07:23 ◼   ► because it freaking supports sending messages,

01:07:26 ◼   ► which is nice.

01:07:27 ◼   ► You don't have to have a separate app for that.

01:07:28 ◼   ► But anyway, it's very pretty

01:07:29 ◼   ► and the animations are very cool and it's very nice.

01:07:34 ◼   ► And that and Async Display Kit powers it.

01:07:36 ◼   ► Now lately, Facebook has taken a different approach

01:07:40 ◼   ► 'cause React Native is Facebook, right?

01:07:41 ◼   ► I'm not making that up, am I?

01:07:43 ◼   ► - I think you're right.

01:07:45 ◼   ► - All right, well, we'll just assume I'm right, why not?

01:07:47 ◼   ► email me and tell me if I'm wrong.

01:07:49 ◼   ► Anyway, so React Native is also by Facebook

01:07:53 ◼   ► and React originated as, or at least to my knowledge,

01:07:58 ◼   ► as a JavaScript front-end framework,

01:08:01 ◼   ► kind of, sort of, but not really at all like Angular.

01:08:04 ◼   ► And then somebody at Facebook said,

01:08:06 ◼   ► "Well, you know what?

01:08:07 ◼   ► We could do something on the Native side with this."

01:08:12 ◼   ► And so there's an unbelievably good video

01:08:16 ◼   ► that I had seen by way of Andy Matuszak,

01:08:20 ◼   ► who has been coming up a lot lately, actually, on the show.

01:08:23 ◼   ► And it's an overview by one of the developers

01:08:27 ◼   ► of React Native at Facebook,

01:08:29 ◼   ► talking about how it works and kind of what it does.

01:08:32 ◼   ► And I haven't watched it for a week or two

01:08:35 ◼   ► since whenever it came out.

01:08:36 ◼   ► And so I can't really get into the specifics

01:08:39 ◼   ► 'cause I'll steer us into a black hole of incorrectness.

01:08:42 ◼   ► But some of the stuff that it does was just unreal,

01:08:46 ◼   ► including being able to mess about with your UI

01:08:49 ◼   ► without doing another build.

01:08:52 ◼   ► And so you can have your app running in the simulator,

01:08:57 ◼   ► fart around with some stuff in Xcode,

01:08:59 ◼   ► and it will refresh itself in the simulator

01:09:02 ◼   ► without recompiling.

01:09:03 ◼   ► And additionally, you could actually connect Chrome

01:09:07 ◼   ► to the app, the running app,

01:09:09 ◼   ► kind of like we talked about, I think, last episode

01:09:11 ◼   ► with web views, but this isn't a web view.

01:09:14 ◼   ► This is all real honest to goodness native stuff.

01:09:17 ◼   ► And so you can connect Chrome,

01:09:19 ◼   ► they have some sort of interpreter connector, whatever,

01:09:21 ◼   ► and you can connect Chrome to your native app

01:09:24 ◼   ► running React Native and go inspecting it.

01:09:27 ◼   ► Kind of like, what was the third party thing

01:09:29 ◼   ► that got Sherlock this year?

01:09:31 ◼   ► Do you know what I'm thinking of?

01:09:32 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, the thing that exploded all the views.

01:09:34 ◼   ► - But yeah, so it's kind of similar to that.

01:09:36 ◼   ► And I haven't played with it yet,

01:09:38 ◼   ► But just watching this half an hour video,

01:09:41 ◼   ► my mind exploded probably 15 times.

01:09:44 ◼   ► Reveal, thank you for the chat room.

01:09:46 ◼   ► It was revealed that I was thinking--

01:09:47 ◼   ► - You're not gonna try and pronounce that?

01:09:49 ◼   ► - No, thank you person in the chat room.

01:09:51 ◼   ► Marius Sirachi, that's totally wrong.

01:09:54 ◼   ► Anyway, this video is really, really incredible.

01:09:59 ◼   ► And Marco especially, I'd be,

01:10:02 ◼   ► well, you haven't seen this, have you?

01:10:04 ◼   ► - No, of course not.

01:10:04 ◼   ► - Okay, nevermind.

01:10:05 ◼   ► So you're useless.

01:10:06 ◼   ► - Hey, in my defense, I did spend all day today

01:10:08 ◼   ► making another Go program.

01:10:10 ◼   ► So I was in this century.

01:10:12 ◼   ► - Okay, well that's good.

01:10:14 ◼   ► I would like to hear about that if we have time.

01:10:15 ◼   ► But John, what are your thoughts on this React Native thing?

01:10:18 ◼   ► Have you done React, the JavaScript framework at all?

01:10:21 ◼   ► - I retweeted a thing from like,

01:10:23 ◼   ► someone was making a joke, like a sign of the W3C

01:10:25 ◼   ► and it was one of those signs of the library.

01:10:27 ◼   ► I said, there have been blank days

01:10:31 ◼   ► since a new JavaScript framework

01:10:32 ◼   ► and it had zero whiteboard.

01:10:35 ◼   ► Like, I'm pretty sure I know what React is

01:10:38 ◼   ► and have seen it, like the JavaScript version

01:10:40 ◼   ► for web applications.

01:10:41 ◼   ► You can correct me if I'm wrong, Casey,

01:10:43 ◼   ► 'cause you've watched the thing,

01:10:44 ◼   ► 'cause I haven't watched it yet.

01:10:45 ◼   ► But React is the one where they do,

01:10:47 ◼   ► where they have all,

01:10:49 ◼   ► is it the one where they have like the DOM

01:10:51 ◼   ► sort of as a structure not actually connected to the DOM

01:10:54 ◼   ► and they do diffing against it

01:10:55 ◼   ► to figure out what actually needs to be updated

01:10:57 ◼   ► and that ends up being faster?

01:10:58 ◼   ► It's like, it's one of those crazy solutions

01:11:00 ◼   ► that has to do with,

01:11:01 ◼   ► it's not Shadow DOM, Crystal, TD, and the thing,

01:11:03 ◼   ► although that's a separate thing.

01:11:04 ◼   ► and web components are related to this,

01:11:06 ◼   ► but it's like, you would think it would be so much slower

01:11:09 ◼   ► to build these parallel structures in memory

01:11:13 ◼   ► that aren't the DOM,

01:11:14 ◼   ► and then figure out what the changes are

01:11:16 ◼   ► by diffing it against something else.

01:11:17 ◼   ► And then only at the end,

01:11:19 ◼   ► after you've done this crazy diffing thing

01:11:21 ◼   ► and it's just these abstract memory structures

01:11:22 ◼   ► that have no connection to the browser that you say,

01:11:24 ◼   ► now, finally, I know what I have to update in the DOM,

01:11:26 ◼   ► and you do the minimal update to the DOM,

01:11:28 ◼   ► but updating the DOM is so damn slow

01:11:30 ◼   ► that doing that diffing ends up being way faster

01:11:32 ◼   ► than doing it like the quote unquote direct way.

01:11:36 ◼   ► - It's worth pointing out also the Flipboard thing

01:11:38 ◼   ► on this topic, where Flipboard came out,

01:11:40 ◼   ► I think it was yesterday or the day before,

01:11:42 ◼   ► it was very recent, and they launched a web version,

01:11:45 ◼   ► and then their engineering department posted

01:11:47 ◼   ► this whole thing, how they're basically doing

01:11:49 ◼   ► a React-like diffing system in the middle

01:11:54 ◼   ► of this whole system where they're basically,

01:11:55 ◼   ► they basically rewrote part of WebKit

01:11:58 ◼   ► that just runs on a canvas.

01:12:00 ◼   ► And it's a very small part, but still.

01:12:02 ◼   ► Yeah, they call it a web version.

01:12:04 ◼   ► I put scare quotes around a web, because once

01:12:06 ◼   ► your entire application is just a big Canvas tag

01:12:08 ◼   ► that you draw stuff in with your own framework,

01:12:10 ◼   ► yeah, I guess that's the web.

01:12:11 ◼   ► But you've just reinvented ActiveX controls.

01:12:14 ◼   ► Like you're--

01:12:15 ◼   ► Oh, no, that's terrible.

01:12:17 ◼   ► That's really insulting.

01:12:17 ◼   ► Come on.

01:12:18 ◼   ► You know what I mean.

01:12:19 ◼   ► But you are not-- it's a difference.

01:12:20 ◼   ► We used to talk about this with Flash.

01:12:22 ◼   ► The web is-- we know what the web is.

01:12:24 ◼   ► And anything that is a rectangle in a web page in which

01:12:27 ◼   ► some other program runs is not the web.

01:12:29 ◼   ► And Canvas is like the borderline of that.

01:12:31 ◼   ► It's like, well, is that the web?

01:12:33 ◼   ► Or is it like you've written, you know, yes,

01:12:36 ◼   ► that you have a nice display layer

01:12:38 ◼   ► and you could in theory do everything yourself.

01:12:40 ◼   ► And they're not doing everything themselves,

01:12:42 ◼   ► but it's like, as many people pointed out

01:12:44 ◼   ► in terms of like accessibility

01:12:46 ◼   ► of a Canvas native application,

01:12:48 ◼   ► like unless you're signing up to re-implement,

01:12:51 ◼   ► you know, UI kit or app kit

01:12:52 ◼   ► with all the accessibility things

01:12:54 ◼   ► that are inherent there and support for all the tools,

01:12:57 ◼   ► it strikes me a lot as a big rectangle on a webpage

01:13:00 ◼   ► where other things happen,

01:13:01 ◼   ► which may be fine for Flipboard, but I don't think it's--

01:13:03 ◼   ► - That's fine for Flipboard.

01:13:04 ◼   ► - Yeah, right, but React is more like,

01:13:07 ◼   ► we're going to take the web as it exists

01:13:09 ◼   ► and we're just going to find out a nicer way

01:13:11 ◼   ► for you to write applications

01:13:13 ◼   ► or what they think is a nicer way.

01:13:15 ◼   ► React has some weird stuff going on.

01:13:17 ◼   ► They violate, they sort of sacrifice a lot of sacred cows.

01:13:21 ◼   ► They're the big things, I think,

01:13:22 ◼   ► also where they like mix JavaScript handlers in line with these fake things that look like

01:13:28 ◼   ► tags but really aren't and freaks people out because it looks like you're doing like the

01:13:31 ◼   ► old style on mouse over equals whatever but you're not really because that's not actually

01:13:35 ◼   ► DOM markup that's just a way to communicate with the like there's a lot of weird things

01:13:40 ◼   ► about React but I think that's all besides the point because I think the important part

01:13:43 ◼   ► of it is that it is a different model and it's a very different model from AppKit and

01:13:47 ◼   ► UIKit of how to make GUI applications and it's like well that's for the web the web

01:13:52 ◼   ► is so different than native, it has to be different.

01:13:54 ◼   ► And React Native is like, what if we take that same model

01:13:57 ◼   ► and apply it to native things?

01:14:00 ◼   ► Does that work?

01:14:01 ◼   ► Is it actually better than using UIKit or AppKit?

01:14:03 ◼   ► And some people apparently think it is.

01:14:04 ◼   ► I think the jury's still out on whether this new paradigm

01:14:08 ◼   ► is the way to go, but I think this combined

01:14:10 ◼   ► with AsyncDisplayKit show two different

01:14:13 ◼   ► potentially complementary approaches

01:14:16 ◼   ► that show, that are so different from AppKit and UIKit

01:14:21 ◼   ► and UXKit that it's like, it makes UIKit and UXKit

01:14:25 ◼   ► and AppKit look like Objective-C 2.0,

01:14:28 ◼   ► and it makes these things look like potentially Swift

01:14:30 ◼   ► or something like, I just feel like there's a bigger leap

01:14:32 ◼   ► to be had and it's like, I would recommend that Apple

01:14:36 ◼   ► not invest some huge amount of time pushing some unified

01:14:41 ◼   ► UIKit, UXKit type of thing for the future

01:14:43 ◼   ► because that transition will take a long time

01:14:44 ◼   ► and when you're done with the transition,

01:14:45 ◼   ► what you've got is basically,

01:14:46 ◼   ► now everything's as good as UIKit.

01:14:48 ◼   ► And UIKit may be nicer than AppKit in important ways,

01:14:50 ◼   ► but it is not sort of a large,

01:14:55 ◼   ► it's not as big a leap, potentially as big a leap

01:14:57 ◼   ► as Swift potentially is over Objective-C.

01:15:00 ◼   ► Like I'm looking for the next big step.

01:15:01 ◼   ► And I would say refine what you have now,

01:15:03 ◼   ► make AppKit better as you've been doing,

01:15:05 ◼   ► make UIKit better as you've been doing,

01:15:07 ◼   ► and get busy working on whatever the next big thing is.

01:15:10 ◼   ► And if it's something like React Native, fine.

01:15:11 ◼   ► If it's something that incorporates the ideas

01:15:13 ◼   ► of Async Display Kit, fine.

01:15:14 ◼   ► If you think you can retrofit those to both UIKit

01:15:17 ◼   ► and AppKit and let people do more things

01:15:18 ◼   ► off the main thread, maybe try that too.

01:15:20 ◼   ► but I'm not going to say this is my next Copeland 2010 type of thing, but I do look at these

01:15:27 ◼   ► other frameworks and I'm not convinced that they're the future, but they look different

01:15:31 ◼   ► enough from the present that I'm interested in potential ideas for the future.

01:15:35 ◼   ► Yeah, I agree. I think you're totally right that if you're going to make everyone do a

01:15:40 ◼   ► big transition, if there is this other thing that has come up in computer science-y type

01:15:46 ◼   ► circles and everyone thinks this is a really great idea and it turns out in practice to

01:15:49 ◼   ► to really be a really great idea,

01:15:51 ◼   ► it is definitely worth considering.

01:15:53 ◼   ► Is it worth, if you're gonna force people

01:15:55 ◼   ► to go through a transition,

01:15:56 ◼   ► to make a bigger leap, like Swift?

01:15:58 ◼   ► - It's not even like computer science-y,

01:16:00 ◼   ► just recognizing the hardware.

01:16:01 ◼   ► The hardware is so different now.

01:16:03 ◼   ► The frameworks we have are not a good match

01:16:05 ◼   ► for everything being multi-core

01:16:06 ◼   ► because of the main thread constraints.

01:16:08 ◼   ► And GCD helps that a lot.

01:16:10 ◼   ► GCD does help, but for UI code, it doesn't help

01:16:13 ◼   ► because it's like certain things you have to do

01:16:15 ◼   ► on the main thread or bad things happen.

01:16:17 ◼   ► And so that's like the Async Display Kit.

01:16:18 ◼   ► is like we're going to hack around that limitation

01:16:21 ◼   ► of Apple's frameworks and say,

01:16:22 ◼   ► you just sit there framework, don't worry,

01:16:24 ◼   ► we'll actually do the UI updates on the main thread,

01:16:26 ◼   ► but we're gonna do a whole bunch of other math over here

01:16:28 ◼   ► in our sort of play world.

01:16:30 ◼   ► And same thing with React, our sort of play world of,

01:16:33 ◼   ► this is not the UI,

01:16:34 ◼   ► but this is our little fake model of the UI

01:16:37 ◼   ► so we can actually take advantage of parallel processing.

01:16:39 ◼   ► And then we'll get back to you with like,

01:16:40 ◼   ► okay, now that your actual UI,

01:16:42 ◼   ► or now your actual DOM, please do this change.

01:16:44 ◼   ► And that is hacky and clever,

01:16:46 ◼   ► but it shows that the current frameworks

01:16:49 ◼   ► are just not a good fit for current hardware.

01:16:51 ◼   ► - Well, I think the multi-core hardware rendering

01:16:54 ◼   ► on main thread thing is kind of red herring.

01:16:57 ◼   ► In practice, the reason why a lot of UI code now

01:17:02 ◼   ► is tricky to write is not because drawing calls

01:17:06 ◼   ► have to happen on the main thread.

01:17:07 ◼   ► It's because, jeez, is it declarative versus procedural?

01:17:12 ◼   ► Whatever the, it's a different paradigm,

01:17:15 ◼   ► is what I'm saying.

01:17:16 ◼   ► It's not that it's tricky to write.

01:17:17 ◼   ► It's just that if you have performance concerns,

01:17:20 ◼   ► like you want to treat it more like a game engine, where

01:17:23 ◼   ► it's like, if you're going to do anything,

01:17:26 ◼   ► you have to be done, because I have to pull the next event off

01:17:28 ◼   ► the queue.

01:17:29 ◼   ► You need to leave the main thread alone.

01:17:31 ◼   ► Do not-- that's the whole thing of GCD.

01:17:32 ◼   ► Stop blocking the main thread, for crying out loud.

01:17:34 ◼   ► I don't care what you have to do.

01:17:36 ◼   ► Get in, get out.

01:17:37 ◼   ► I need to get the next event, because if it's

01:17:39 ◼   ► stuttery when it's scrolling, it's super bad.

01:17:41 ◼   ► And that's why AsyncDisplayKit has this cool--

01:17:44 ◼   ► one of the classes they have is like,

01:17:45 ◼   ► Say you're gonna show a big giant grid of images

01:17:47 ◼   ► and they're coming from the internet.

01:17:48 ◼   ► You can't wait to get all those downloaded

01:17:50 ◼   ► to figure out what sizes they are so you can lay it out.

01:17:52 ◼   ► It'll take forever.

01:17:53 ◼   ► So there's like this procedural thing

01:17:55 ◼   ► where like we'll download super low res versions of those

01:17:59 ◼   ► and asynchronously bring in the higher res versions

01:18:01 ◼   ► but just so you can get a scrollable correctly laid out

01:18:04 ◼   ► thing as soon as possible so you can start scrolling it.

01:18:07 ◼   ► That's the type of thing that's very difficult to do

01:18:09 ◼   ► with the existing framework

01:18:10 ◼   ► which it's like they don't expect sort of asynchronous

01:18:12 ◼   ► updates to all these features.

01:18:16 ◼   ► It should be easier than it is.

01:18:17 ◼   ► And it's not because of, like you said,

01:18:20 ◼   ► declarative versus procedural, that's part of it.

01:18:22 ◼   ► And you could say, oh, it's easier if I could describe

01:18:24 ◼   ► my UI in this way instead of writing a bunch of code

01:18:25 ◼   ► to make my UI in this way.

01:18:27 ◼   ► But it's like for large grids with lots of things on them,

01:18:32 ◼   ► I don't want to block the main thread with the amount,

01:18:34 ◼   ► I don't want my main thread to be blocked

01:18:37 ◼   ► if N is really large for something that's performance

01:18:41 ◼   ► is dependent on the number of items.

01:18:43 ◼   ► - Yeah, but I think it's more, you know,

01:18:45 ◼   ► like you said, like with GCD,

01:18:46 ◼   ► we can already step off the main thread, come back later.

01:18:49 ◼   ► Like, it's more of a paradigm shift.

01:18:52 ◼   ► It's not that like the APIs have to happen

01:18:55 ◼   ► on this main thread, it's that like,

01:18:56 ◼   ► the paradigm for how you update the UI,

01:18:59 ◼   ► like, 'cause the way React does it,

01:19:01 ◼   ► like if you look, like I don't know React,

01:19:03 ◼   ► so whenever I see snippets of React code,

01:19:05 ◼   ► it just breaks my mind.

01:19:07 ◼   ► Like, I'm looking at it and I'm like,

01:19:08 ◼   ► oh my god, this is totally backwards, inside out,

01:19:12 ◼   ► upside down, and in French.

01:19:14 ◼   ► Like it's so, it looks so foreign to me

01:19:17 ◼   ► 'cause it's so different from what I'm used to.

01:19:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, so let me jump in here.

01:19:21 ◼   ► So one of the links is,

01:19:23 ◼   ► that we're gonna put in the show notes,

01:19:24 ◼   ► Why React Native Matters, and this is by Joshua,

01:19:28 ◼   ► I'm guessing that's Josh Haber.

01:19:30 ◼   ► Anyway, he says, right now we write UIs by poking at them,

01:19:34 ◼   ► manually mutating their properties when something changes,

01:19:37 ◼   ► adding and removing views, et cetera.

01:19:39 ◼   ► This is fragile and error prone.

01:19:40 ◼   ► Some tools exist to lessen the pain,

01:19:43 ◼   ► but they can only go so far.

01:19:45 ◼   ► UIs are big, messy, mutable, stateful bags of sadness.

01:19:48 ◼   ► React lets us describe our UIs for a given state,

01:19:51 ◼   ► and then it does the hard work of figuring out

01:19:54 ◼   ► what needs to change.

01:19:55 ◼   ► It abstracts all the fragile error prone code

01:19:58 ◼   ► out away from us.

01:19:58 ◼   ► We describe what we want,

01:19:59 ◼   ► React figures out how to accomplish it.

01:20:01 ◼   ► UIs become composable, immutable, stateless value types.

01:20:04 ◼   ► React Native is fantastic news.

01:20:06 ◼   ► And that's building, oh, it's Josh Abernathy, I'm sorry.

01:20:09 ◼   ► That's building on what you were saying, Marco,

01:20:11 ◼   ► where this is just a whole different model

01:20:14 ◼   ► of how you interact with user interfaces.

01:20:17 ◼   ► And it makes a lot of sense.

01:20:20 ◼   ► Maybe the particulars are a little bit wonky

01:20:22 ◼   ► and I'll concede that.

01:20:23 ◼   ► But the premise of really this is just moving

01:20:27 ◼   ► from one concrete state to another

01:20:29 ◼   ► and it should just be a finite state machine,

01:20:31 ◼   ► hopefully in theory.

01:20:33 ◼   ► That is a really cool premise.

01:20:34 ◼   ► And building on that, going back to Andy Matuszak,

01:20:38 ◼   ► he tweeted a few days ago,

01:20:39 ◼   ► put a link in the show notes,

01:20:40 ◼   ► "I say with confidence as a former UI kit author,

01:20:43 ◼   ► "React's model for the UI layer

01:20:44 ◼   ► "is vastly better than UI kits.

01:20:46 ◼   ► "React Native is a huge deal."

01:20:49 ◼   ► In another tweet, "They've just got to figure out

01:20:50 ◼   ► "the interaction and animation pieces."

01:20:53 ◼   ► And so he goes on just briefly,

01:20:54 ◼   ► "To all asking me what's React, filter bubble danger,

01:20:57 ◼   ► "you must watch the broader development landscape

01:20:59 ◼   ► "don't get trapped in one platform."

01:21:00 ◼   ► And I think that's a really good call.

01:21:02 ◼   ► And this is something very interesting

01:21:04 ◼   ► that's influenced from a web framework coming into native

01:21:09 ◼   ► and it's making some really interesting moves.

01:21:13 ◼   ► And I wouldn't be surprised if something along these lines

01:21:17 ◼   ► gets adopted by Apple in the same way

01:21:19 ◼   ► something along the lines of Reveal,

01:21:20 ◼   ► which isn't an apples to apples comparison,

01:21:22 ◼   ► but, you know, Reveal was kind of Sherlocked.

01:21:24 ◼   ► It wouldn't surprise me if they took a very similar

01:21:27 ◼   ► spiritual, spiritually similar approach

01:21:29 ◼   ► to whatever replaces UIKit and AppKit

01:21:32 ◼   ► eventually one day maybe. Oh yeah, because you know React, I mean it's making big waves,

01:21:37 ◼   ► and it's making waves with a lot of the people who matter with such decisions. People like Andy Matuszak,

01:21:42 ◼   ► and like people who are developing these frameworks, people who are in important positions, or were, or know people, you know like, or those

01:21:50 ◼   ► you know the new people in those positions. These are, it's making big waves. I've heard so much about React.

01:21:55 ◼   ► Every JavaScript framework out there besides React that's come out in the last decade, I hear nothing about because I don't care.

01:22:02 ◼   ► React makes big enough waves that I keep hearing about it.

01:22:05 ◼   ► Like, I don't know anything about Angular.

01:22:07 ◼   ► Is that the one that has like a million different levels

01:22:09 ◼   ► of factories?

01:22:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, Ember and Angular, yeah.

01:22:11 ◼   ► Like, you don't, those are confined to the client side.

01:22:14 ◼   ► React is coming over to the native side.

01:22:16 ◼   ► Like, I think to tie this together with AsyncDisplayKit

01:22:19 ◼   ► was like, you know, we were talking in two different things.

01:22:21 ◼   ► Like, I was mostly talking about AsyncDisplayKit

01:22:23 ◼   ► with the performance concerns,

01:22:24 ◼   ► and you were talking about React as the paradigm thing.

01:22:25 ◼   ► They're connected though, because React's functional thing,

01:22:29 ◼   ► where like, you know, you operate on state

01:22:30 ◼   ► and it's a value type thing, that sort of, you know,

01:22:34 ◼   ► lack of side effects where you just operate

01:22:36 ◼   ► on your arguments and return a value

01:22:37 ◼   ► and everything is sort of, you know,

01:22:39 ◼   ► like just a value type and all that stuff,

01:22:41 ◼   ► that you see a lot of that in Swift as well,

01:22:43 ◼   ► that allows you to parallelize that stuff.

01:22:45 ◼   ► Because if you don't have side effects,

01:22:46 ◼   ► if you're not, if it's not just one giant big ball

01:22:48 ◼   ► of mutable state, then you can only update

01:22:50 ◼   ► one thread at a time, otherwise you get crazy conflicts.

01:22:52 ◼   ► That's what, one of the many things that ties AppKit

01:22:54 ◼   ► to its current paradigm.

01:22:56 ◼   ► React, so, you know, React and AsyncDisplayKit

01:22:58 ◼   ► are connected because if you use the React model,

01:23:00 ◼   ► It doesn't matter what thread you do these mutations are,

01:23:02 ◼   ► it doesn't matter, you can do them all in parallel,

01:23:04 ◼   ► the same, like, they're side effect free,

01:23:06 ◼   ► they're pure functional, and so it lends itself

01:23:09 ◼   ► to that type of UI model, as opposed to the current model,

01:23:13 ◼   ► which is, we have this one thing, it is the state of the UI,

01:23:16 ◼   ► be super careful with it.

01:23:18 ◼   ► - And going back a sec to what Casey just said,

01:23:20 ◼   ► like, it is not past Apple to steal good ideas,

01:23:24 ◼   ► they do it all the time.

01:23:26 ◼   ► And if something is making this big of a wave,

01:23:29 ◼   ► and Apple's engineers and top people,

01:23:32 ◼   ► if Apple thinks it's a good idea, they will do it,

01:23:36 ◼   ► or they will do something similar to it.

01:23:38 ◼   ► And something like this, this is a pretty big deal,

01:23:41 ◼   ► like to change your entire UI API paradigm,

01:23:44 ◼   ► or to add a new one is a major deal.

01:23:47 ◼   ► And this is not something that can happen in a year.

01:23:50 ◼   ► This would be a big undertaking.

01:23:53 ◼   ► - It would have to be a Skunkworks,

01:23:54 ◼   ► but I think that the exciting thing about Swift is it showed

01:23:56 ◼   ► us, yeah, it was a Skunkworks,

01:23:58 ◼   ► But it was essentially one guy, one very powerful guy,

01:24:02 ◼   ► who had proven himself with many other things

01:24:03 ◼   ► that he had done in the company.

01:24:05 ◼   ► It's not just some random employee

01:24:06 ◼   ► off in the corner somewhere.

01:24:07 ◼   ► But for a long time, it was just one person.

01:24:10 ◼   ► And I'm sure there's lots of those one person type projects

01:24:12 ◼   ► that may or may not go anywhere.

01:24:13 ◼   ► But it just goes to show that you don't need buy-in

01:24:16 ◼   ► at the VP level to get the ball rolling

01:24:18 ◼   ► or something like this.

01:24:19 ◼   ► And maybe the ball starts rolling and then stops rolling,

01:24:21 ◼   ► like has happened with ZFS or whatever, other things.

01:24:24 ◼   ► It's not guaranteed that it's going to happen,

01:24:26 ◼   ► but it seems like Apple is currently an organization

01:24:28 ◼   ► in which something like this could start happening

01:24:31 ◼   ► and get killed before we ever see it

01:24:33 ◼   ► and something else comes along

01:24:34 ◼   ► and maybe React is just the hotness today

01:24:36 ◼   ► and then two years it's something else.

01:24:37 ◼   ► But it's not outside of the realm of possibility

01:24:40 ◼   ► that Apple can innovate in this way

01:24:42 ◼   ► on any subject other than file systems

01:24:43 ◼   ► which they seem insatially incapable of ever changing.

01:24:47 ◼   ► Not that I'm bitter.

01:24:48 ◼   ► - And tying it back, even though I really wanna end on that,

01:24:52 ◼   ► but tying it back, if they're gonna do something

01:24:55 ◼   ► like a React-style UI framework, that would be a really good thing to start with Swift

01:25:01 ◼   ► and to make Swift only. One of the things that makes React code look so weird is that

01:25:07 ◼   ► it fits in very weirdly with existing languages, which is like the syntax of declaring it and

01:25:12 ◼   ► using it.

01:25:13 ◼   ► The fact that it's using JavaScript, like this is...

01:25:16 ◼   ► Yeah, it's really badly bolted on. I mean, not by its own fault, but by the fault of

01:25:20 ◼   ► the language really, but Swift is still squishy and generally more pokeable.

01:25:27 ◼   ► But Swift is a much better fit.

01:25:28 ◼   ► The whole idea of so many things being value types in Swift, not that that is a direct

01:25:32 ◼   ► parallel to the idea of the UI state being a value type and everything, but it just shows

01:25:36 ◼   ► that the headspace, like where is Swift at in terms of immutable data, well it is much

01:25:41 ◼   ► more on the React side of things than Objective-C is, because Objective-C is all about everything

01:25:45 ◼   ► and be mutating and, "Hey, just declare this type ID.

01:25:48 ◼   ► "Whatever, guys, it's all right."

01:25:50 ◼   ► Whereas Swift is like, "No, we're gonna pin things down."

01:25:53 ◼   ► Lots of things that were reference types

01:25:55 ◼   ► are becoming value types just because we've learned

01:25:57 ◼   ► that making NSString reference type

01:25:59 ◼   ► just leaves no more headaches

01:26:00 ◼   ► and people forget to copy them.

01:26:02 ◼   ► It's like that is the mindset of Swift.

01:26:05 ◼   ► And so something using the good ideas

01:26:09 ◼   ► in React and Async Display Kit,

01:26:11 ◼   ► written natively in Swift,

01:26:12 ◼   ► would be a very interesting successor

01:26:14 ◼   ► to both UIKit and AppKit from Apple,

01:26:16 ◼   ► so someone should start writing that now

01:26:18 ◼   ► and in four years get back to me.

01:26:20 ◼   ► - And it'll give me a reason to learn Swift.

01:26:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, that'll be eight years later.

01:26:24 ◼   ► - Yeah. (laughing)

01:26:26 ◼   ► All right, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week,

01:26:28 ◼   ► Igloo, Hover, and Automattic,

01:26:30 ◼   ► and we will see you next week.

01:26:31 ◼   ► (upbeat music)

01:26:34 ◼   ► ♪ Now the show is over ♪

01:26:36 ◼   ► ♪ They didn't even mean to begin ♪

01:26:39 ◼   ► ♪ 'Cause it was accidental ♪

01:26:41 ◼   ► ♪ Accidental ♪

01:26:42 ◼   ► ♪ Oh, it was accidental ♪

01:26:43 ◼   ► John didn't do any research, Margo and Casey wouldn't let him

01:26:49 ◼   ► 'Cause it was accidental, it was accidental

01:26:54 ◼   ► And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm

01:26:59 ◼   ► And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them

01:27:04 ◼   ► [music]

01:27:34 ◼   ► What are we talking about?

01:27:35 ◼   ► Oh, your Go thing.

01:27:37 ◼   ► What is this about?

01:27:38 ◼   ► You're really getting into this Go thing.

01:27:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, I'm getting faster with it now.

01:27:42 ◼   ► And today was the first time,

01:27:44 ◼   ► my previous, the polar, the feed polar,

01:27:47 ◼   ► that's just one giant file.

01:27:49 ◼   ► 'Cause I didn't want to figure out

01:27:52 ◼   ► how do I break up things into different files

01:27:54 ◼   ► and manage that in Go,

01:27:56 ◼   ► because it fit, it's a pretty long file,

01:27:58 ◼   ► and I should break it up now,

01:28:00 ◼   ► 'cause it got longer once I finalized

01:28:03 ◼   ► all the stuff I actually needed to be in the system fully.

01:28:08 ◼   ► So tonight I was working on something else.

01:28:11 ◼   ► So I have these two servers at high velocity that I bought, or that I started leasing per

01:28:19 ◼   ► month about a month ago, and I haven't done anything with them yet.

01:28:22 ◼   ► I bought them because they were having an insane sale.

01:28:25 ◼   ► That was just ridiculous for what you get for both hardware and bandwidth, where now

01:28:31 ◼   ► a few hundred dollars a month, I now have an unmetered gigabit of transfer. A gigabit

01:28:37 ◼   ► per second unmetered of transfer.

01:28:39 ◼   ► What?

01:28:40 ◼   ► And I asked them, before I bought it, I'm like, "Alright, so what's your actual policy

01:28:44 ◼   ► here? If I actually use all this, what if I was hosting big podcast files? If I made

01:28:49 ◼   ► a podcast file host for us or whoever else, if we actually used all this bandwidth, would

01:28:56 ◼   ► you cut it off." And they're like, "Nope, you can use it, that's the point." It's a

01:29:05 ◼   ► pair of machines that are each 500 megabit, and they're each roughly as good as a 6-core

01:29:13 ◼   ► Mac Pro. They have dual SSDs with RAID 1, 64 gigs of RAM. I mean, these are insane machines!

01:29:21 ◼   ► 6-core Xeon 1660v3s, which are actually faster than the current Mac Pro CPUs because the

01:29:26 ◼   ► Mac Pro seemed to have skipped generation, which they sometimes do, so I'm not surprised.

01:29:32 ◼   ► There is a newer version of the Xeon chips that the Mac Pro uses that is out right now

01:29:36 ◼   ► that Apple has not updated to and seems like they're probably just not going to at this

01:29:39 ◼   ► point.

01:29:40 ◼   ► Anyway, so I have these servers that I bought because one thing I want to do, and the reason

01:29:47 ◼   ► why I was so interested in having tons and tons of bandwidth available is I want to be

01:29:53 ◼   ► able to launch a Twitter card for overcast player pages so that people who are browsing

01:29:59 ◼   ► the Twitter app can play the podcast right there in Twitter cards. Twitter cards require

01:30:03 ◼   ► that all assets that are loaded within them, including media files, are served over HTTPS.

01:30:10 ◼   ► Some podcast hosts support HTTPS for their files, but most don't. So the first thing

01:30:17 ◼   ► wanted to write was an HTTPS proxy. And there are a few of these that exist. There's one,

01:30:23 ◼   ► I forget what it's called now, there's one that GitHub wrote in Node. Oh man, I'm sorry

01:30:29 ◼   ► I forgot the name. Anyway, so there's that one, that's fine. I looked at it briefly.

01:30:34 ◼   ► It's mostly made for images, but fine, it would work the same way. I decided to try

01:30:40 ◼   ► to write that in Go, a basic SSL proxy. And it's so, it's nothing, it's like a hundred

01:30:45 ◼   ► I mean, it's almost nothing, it's great.

01:30:48 ◼   ► And I also have a few other things I wanted to try.

01:30:52 ◼   ► I mentioned last week that I was using Imageix for my thumbnailing, but it was costing me

01:30:56 ◼   ► a fortune, so I'm moving my artwork thumbnailer to these boxes as well.

01:31:03 ◼   ► So I wrote just one Go program that contains those two functions, the SSL proxy and the

01:31:09 ◼   ► artwork thumbnailer.