mergeconflict399
===

[00:00:00] James: Welcome back everyone to Merge Conflict and congratulations to the one and only Frank Krueger shipping his very first Vision OS Pro app, making tons of money. It happened. You're in the App Store. You're featured. The Apple's like, Oh my goodness, I could have never imagined 

[00:00:17] Frank: that this is the most amazing app in the entire world.

[00:00:22] James: Gosh. And he would have thought he's writing Swift code in Xcode. He 

[00:00:25] Frank: loves it so much. And oh my goodness. Swift. Woo. C A layers of goodness. And 

[00:00:32] James: congratulations, Frank, you did it. You did it. You did it. It only took a few weeks, but boom from prototype to shipping to the app store, that's what happened, right?

[00:00:44] Frank: Yeah, I wish. Was that your Jon Stewart? Because I think you just nailed Jon Stewart. Well, now that Jon Stewart's back, I think you were just, you were doing full Jon 

[00:00:52] James: Stewart. I love, listen, I love the entire Daily Show crew. Uh, I love them all in general, but it's, it's, it's got me back, it got me back into it.

I actually really liked when they were doing the rotating. Anchors back. I just watched some YouTube clips, but now it's good to have Jon Stewart back. Um, even if it's just Mondays, that's totally fine. Cause I love all the anchors. They're all great. Um, um, 

[00:01:16] Frank: yeah, so that, that was a great, uh, impression. It's completely wrong.

Uh, fake news.

[00:01:24] James: You create an entire X account. You have an entire marketing website. You have, you paid for the most craziest domain. I mean, you made a marketing video, uh, that went viral thousands upon thousands of people saw your house. You created an app icon, I hope using Dolly. And then, um, you, you got so excited about it, that you tweeted it to the world.

And I just imagine you're rolling in bank and you've retired at this point. It's been four days since your tweet, two or three days since your tweet. You're retired because just the vision pro money is just pouring. You're just bathing in vision pro money. 

[00:02:10] Frank: It's that problem where you just don't know what to do with all the cash.

It's just like a physical problem. You can't spend it 

[00:02:19] James: fast enough. It's not even worth your time picking up a 5 bill on the corner. Cause it's, you got that Bill Gates money, 

[00:02:27] Frank: you got that Steve Ball money. It's easier. You're 

[00:02:30] James: buying sports teams. What's next? 

[00:02:36] Frank: Um, I, I don't think it was Balmer. It might've been Steve Jobs that said something along the lines of never pre announce your product until it's about to be released.

And oh boy, have I learned that lesson? Because James, I am going through what we like. in the biz to call AppReview hell. Absolutely stuck there at the moment. But, um, look, look, uh, just because I made the classic mistake of pre announcing my thing before it was reviewed, because of course I just assumed the review would go just fine and fast and everything.

Of course, of course, every review does. I'm still going to pat myself on the back for actually uploading an app. It's always, we talk about it all the time, but it's always hard to do that last 20%, which is actually 80 percent of the app, which is build the icon, add the app description, make a promo video.

We did a whole, 

[00:03:31] James: we did a whole podcast on it, people. We did a whole podcast. If you're interested, go find it. I think it was called like, we're the worst marketers in the world. So yes. 

[00:03:41] Frank: Yeah, so I went through all that effort because, um, yeah, so I wrote my first app and we'll see if it gets approved or not.

Maybe it'll never make it out into the world, but it's a little, um, it's, it's a fun little app for the Vision Pro. It's a night vision app where it uses all the sensors on. The device to recreate a mesh of the world that it can reprojects into your face, thus creating an artificial environment that you can walk around in, in low light environments.

Not, not pitch black, 

[00:04:11] James: low light. I like it. It's called night, it's called night goggles. Um, and you have an entire, a night vision goggles and the app name. Made exact sense, exactly my expectations. My expectations were met with the video that described the thing and it was accurate. And I was like, cool, I'm going to go download this app because I just got my new Vision Pro.

Didn't get it. Just kidding. Yeah. Thanks. But I was like, well, man, tease me. But I was like, what if, what if, what if I did? Um, so you, you went out into the world and you, you. You uploaded it and you, you hit submit, I assume, and then tweeted it to the world. Or you're just like, Hey, I'm, I'm about to submit it maybe tomorrow.

But you actually submitted it. And then, and then it happened. 

[00:05:04] Frank: Let's put both of us into my mindset because that's a good place to be. Like 

[00:05:10] James: Apple wants every single app humanly possible. Why would they, they're not even going to look at it. They don't even have review units. Like, how are they even going to test it?

They can't even test it. 

[00:05:20] Frank: That might have been. 10 percent of it. Yes, just a little, a little gambling. I'm a little bit of a gambler. I'm like, they want apps. I think they announced that they're up to a thousand native apps for the Vision Pro. That's not including the 1 billion iOS apps that run on the Vision Pro just fine.

And 

[00:05:39] James: you are a respectable, responsible, existing app creator, developer with hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue. So why would they, why would they even flinch? Oh, Frank Krueger? Click approved. Duh. Hello. Look at this repertoire of things. Amazing. Oh, my battery is running low on my computer. That's not good.

Oh, that's, 

[00:06:06] Frank: you should plug that puppy in. Okay. Look, that's funny, but you do wonder sometimes, like, do they ever look that I have been on the app store for 16 years? Hopefully that would help. But no, I have to be honest and I hope James can actually hear me here. But, um, I have to be honest and say that normally the test flight reviews.

I've been going so slow compared to the App Store reviews. I don't know if you noticed this. We might have even talked about it on the podcast at one point, but it was almost feeling at some point that TestFlight reviews were taking longer than App Store reviews. And I had submitted a couple of Vision apps to TestFlight, and they were pretty rigorous.

I've had to defend app ideas on there, where I've literally gotten the question, Who would want this app? And I'm like, I had to defend the existence of my app to the, oh no, app review team . Like, that's one of the worst rejections to get. I have to tell you, like, if they tell you you, you're like doing something wrong.

According to the guidelines, you're like, Ooh, my bad. I actually should have read the manual. But if they're like, what is this and why would anyone want this? You're just like, Ooh, ouch. Burn . 

[00:07:26] James: Yeah. Ouch. Yeah. Ooh. Just like ego hit geez. 

[00:07:30] Frank: Yeah. Uh, maybe I do need an onboarding screen. Um, uh, so I, I had gone through my, my last few test flight review processes have been actually pretty rough.

You know, they've been really thorough checking through my apps and everything. That's for test flight. Uh, whereas this app, I think it went through the test flight review and like. Five seconds. It was like, I clicked the button and they're like, here's your app. And I'm like, great. Yeah. No one, no one questioned the app's existence.

That's kind of nice. Um, and so honestly, I was not expecting the full app review process to go this slowly because my experience has just been the reverse, honestly, uh, for the past couple of years, that long, actually. 

[00:08:19] James: Yeah, no, I think that is the same. I remember going through. With my cadence was like the last actual app app that are released.

And even the Google, uh, Google play stuff was like super slow. And I was like, what's going on just for internal testing. And I was like, this is inappropriate. I'm like, I just want to test my app. This is like time sensitive. I'm like, you know, if I'm a business, I am losing my daily salary. Like let's get this moving.

And people, especially if it's like, Oh, it's just testing. It's like, come on. You know what I mean? Um, you know, just come on. You know. So they held it up. Now, this app though, I assume we're going to, and we're going to Tarantino this because we've started at the end, the end, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to Tarantino it to the beginning here.

So Nolan, isn't, doesn't 

[00:09:05] Frank: Nolan do it now too? 

[00:09:07] James: Oh, does Christopher Nolan? Um, did he do it 

[00:09:11] Frank: in Oppenheimer? I didn't see Oppenheimer. I didn't watch Oppenheimer. Okay. Our reason is good. Anyway, moving on. So what's the current, current 

[00:09:21] James: state is it's waiting or it has been reviewed or what's the, 

[00:09:25] Frank: the. Hi everyone.

I have had an app in review for five days now. That means a human 

[00:09:31] James: being, they've been, they've been, they've been in your app for five days straight. Wow. 

[00:09:38] Frank: I'm a little bit afraid they like wanted to demo it in a forest. They went out to the PlayerWitch forest and they met a witch. I know something happened.

[00:09:47] James: They've set up a meeting with, they've set up a meeting with Tim. Like Tim, you gotta see this app. You're not going to believe this. This is, this is a revolution. This is the bit. We talk about risk taking. We talk about, you know, being bold. This is it. Mm-Hmm. . This is the thing. 

[00:10:05] Frank: We thought we turned off every sensor on this device.

No. He found one sensor that was active. And look at what you're able to do with this puppy . No, I, I wish the app was that grand. But I mean, it's, it's a fun app. I, I kind of love it 'cause it makes my house look clean. You know when, when you remove all the clutter from your house and you just navigate in beautiful grid world with beautiful pastel colors?

I, I love moving around about the world in that way, but it's a very simple app. It's either following the rules or it's not. And I don't know what rules it would be breaking. So like, I am curious, like, did they drop it? Did they forget that they were reviewing my app? Is there one Vision Pro device per thousand app reviewers?

You're 

[00:10:47] James: in a state where, this is the state that I like to call, which is. Do I just reject my app and resubmit it? I have like, do I do? Cause cause after like a few days, just like, well, how long do I wait? Cause like, do I need to get out of the queue and read back into the queue is like something stuck. Do I need to, do I need to call Apple on Tim Apple, Tim?

Yeah. What's going on with my app review. I like, listen, I saw the Uber show documentary on HBO. I got to call you up, Tim. Dev was gone. Yeah, Dev. Um. 

[00:11:16] Frank: Well, we've all heard the horror stories, and I don't know if it's been recent or not, but we've definitely heard of the people in AppReview for like four weeks or anything.

But you know how it normally goes. Normally, you're waiting for review for a few days, and you're like, gosh, I wish Apple would hurry it up. And then you're in review for two hours. During those two hours, you drink as much alcohol as you can because you're stressing out. That's how I deal with it. And, uh, I just gotta tell you, five days of hard drinking has really hurt.

I'm not sure I can do this anymore, Apple. You really need to make a decision. Like, every time I hit refresh and the little icon is still yellow, I'm like, it could be red. At this point, just make it red. Just, just end my misery as I pour another drink. Tell me what I 

[00:12:01] James: did wrong, Tim, please. I don't have insurance.

[00:12:07] Frank: I'm an independent developer. Come on, Tim. Do you know how much insurance costs? I 

[00:12:14] James: I sold my other liver, let's imagine you have two livers, I sold my other liver for the Apple Pro, that's 

[00:12:20] Frank: enough. No for the M3 processor that I need to develop Vision Pro X. That's true. 

[00:12:27] James: That's true. Um. Okay. 

[00:12:29] Frank: It's a little bit funny.

So yeah, I mean your joke about rejecting it and resubmitting it, I hate the idea that I'll probably never do that. But it has made me think, like, okay, what if they reject this app? On what grounds could they reject it? Uh, this is a immersive app, so it takes over your field of view. So it is kind of a VR app, because it's presenting an augmented view of the world, not the world itself.

And so there might be funny rules that they didn't really explain in detail, how much you are and are not allowed to cover the world, and things like that. But None of the guidelines I had read said you couldn't 

[00:13:06] James: do that. So the other question I have to ask you, cause we're still at the end of the story, which is fascinating, um, but are you in the state now where it's been five days in which you've already fixed about 25 bugs?

So you're like, I don't know, I got version 1. 1. I'm just saying like, this is lingering. You know what I mean? Like, cause like, it's, it's at the state where like, if it gets approved, you're like immediately submitting a new build, you know, out to the app store. Is that the state of it? Or did you walk away and you're like, listen.

Tim, I'm away. I am not touching any more Xcode. I refuse to become part of your two day MAUI. 

[00:13:42] Frank: If I was a good developer and I had a, let's say, a boss, someone tell me, Frank, today you should work. Today is a work day. Therefore, you should work. Instead of, Frank, stop refreshing the browser and drinking alcohol.

You, you can't stare at that yellow dot any longer. It's just not healthy. Uh, if I had a boss to tell me these things, what I would do is in the pipeline, I actually have like three apps, three smaller, my plan is I'm going to do like three smallish apps for the Vision Pro and then one bigger app just to really get to know the platform before I start devoting a lot of time to like a bigger app.

So what I should be doing, I had, I have these other apps that are all at 80 percent and I should be doing the last. 80 percent of them to get them up to this state and perhaps submitting them. But it's really hard to concentrate when you're in review because you want to know what you're, obviously, I have an assumption here that's wrong.

So either they forgot about my review, which I guess valid. Or I did something a little bit naughty and they're deciding on it. And I want to know what that naughty thing is, because maybe that'll affect how I code my other apps and things like that. I can't imagine what I did, but that's, that's why I need an answer.

And so me being myself, I'm just not very good at multitasking, um, letting one sit in that. So I work on completely different projects, like actually non vision. Projects. So I guess it is kind of what you said. I said, Tim, approve this one or I'm not working on it anymore. That's not true. If this is the only app you get, Tim.

Yeah, and that won't be true. So instead of like rejecting it and resubmitting it, I thought about other things I could do with the technology I developed for the app. Because there's always like, the code you write to pull in the data that you need to do the visualization that you want. But that data can be visualized in different ways.

It could do this. It could do that. It could flip upside down. I don't know. It can do all these things. Yeah. And, uh, so I, I already thought of spin off apps. Like, what if I just copy paste this app, rename it to something else, change the feature set, change the visualization. Therefore, if they reject it, if they just Flat reject the app concept, like, we do not want these kinds of apps on the app store.

Um, then I could still recoup at least some of the time and effort I put into refining the code and adding error messages everywhere and making sure the authorization process goes through smoothly. Because, you know, it's a, it's all that stupid code, that annoying code that really, like, make the UI nice and good responsive and all that kind of stuff.

All that code is good and is. Almost app independent. You know, it doesn't matter exactly what that app's doing. So I've already thought about spin off ideas from this idea, but I really hope to not go there because I like this app. It's a good app. Yeah. 

[00:16:40] James: No, that makes sense. Uh, I think that's a good, good approach.

It's, it's hard. It's like you're in a tough spot. Um, that's for sure. And you're right. I think it's usually the waiting for review that is the long time that used to be the pipeline. Something is clearly going on, uh, and, you know, I, I've seen this before, um, internally, you know, um, I've, I've, uh, I've had some, we, we've, uh, developed some apps together, uh, that, uh, we, we won't, we won't talk about the specific name or the specific product, but let's just say, you know, It, um, it was out and then it went through a lot of, uh, hemming 

[00:17:21] Frank: and hawing.

[00:17:22] James: Yeah, it was, uh, my dear Sir , wait a second. What is happening? Um, those are fun times, 

[00:17:33] Frank: but yeah. Well, yeah. Okay. Uh, so that's why I have these fears because I have had three app ideas rejected in whole. After I've developed the app through the app store. So this is not new to me. I have thrown away months and months of time and energy because Apple on whatever guideline they wish to quote has just said, no apps of this type.

are not allowed on the store. And I might be hitting one of those walls again. It's, it's me. I like to push the edge and sometimes the edge pushes back. Well, 

[00:18:10] James: and I know that you, you know, have had issues even with continuous, right? Which was an app that was approved and getting that through and updates through and just like the, the policy on it.

You know, You know, for all that we praise Apple and the app store and Google play and the Google play store, like there are these, uh, walls that you can run into from time to time and often those walls, you don't hit until you're at the last mile, you know what I mean? And that last mile delivery, that logistic part of it, uh, it can make a break, you know, you can spend a lot of time developing, getting the marketing in place and then submitting and.

To your knowledge, you're like, Hey, I've done everything I've can to adhere. This is an app, you know, that I, I think it, here's all the guidelines and then bam, you hit the wall and, uh, you're there. So when I pray for you and your app review that come tomorrow morning, or by the time this podcast comes out, which would be day seven, by the way, for people who are Saturday.

We'll give an update next week and then we'll, that'll be like a Tuesday. So we'll see if it'd be a week. That would be day nine. Um, 21 days later, 

[00:19:23] Frank: my liver, my liver, Tim, think of my liver. 

[00:19:26] James: Um, okay. So you develop some apps. Let's get back to the beginning of the story here. We now have the idea of the app.

Um, you know, I've watched the fireship, uh, video of, uh, fireship guy, uh, doing and making his vision pro app where he, uh, played a GIF. And made red balls, um, appear on the screen. That's cool. Uh, that was a nine minute video. You can make balls, uh, red balls fly into the air. That's cool. Geometry. I love geometry.

Listen, the first thing I ever made, I would be better if it was teacups. It was not a teacup. I was really playing with geometry. Let's just be honest. Um, Cornell box. 

[00:20:04] Frank: There you go. The boxes and spheres inside 

[00:20:07] James: of it. Um, so you, you played with software and how, how did the app development experience, the swiftenation, uh, of, uh, swiftifying your UI?

Uh, new, is it new? Is all new stuff, reality kit stuff, uh, all this new hotness? 

[00:20:26] Frank: Yeah, yeah. Uh, well, we're in the fun stage where we actually have hardware now, so you can, it's so easy to have ideas and then attempt to put them on the simulator, but they're just not quite the same. Like, you need the device on to really get a feel for what is fun in here.

What do I actually want to do in this little virtual world and everything? And I think that's why, um, Apple announced that they're at like a thousand apps. It's a low number for good reason, because we just haven't had the hardware. Like, we didn't know what was going to be good on this device. Right now, every developer, just like myself, is like, Okay, I've, I've had a couple weeks now to play with this thing.

I know what I want. I know the missing holes. I know what features Apple left off. We can start filling in the blanks. Where is my 3D mail app? Why is my mail app still 2D? The mail should pile up on the floor like it does in real life. 

[00:21:21] James: A bird flies through three dimensions and it lands in your inbox. 

[00:21:26] Frank: This is what I was promised by Jurassic Park.

I want my 3D Unix browser. You know, there's just missing features 

[00:21:34] James: in this. Here's what I want, right? It is like an email app where like, there's the inbox, the outbox, and then like the ascent and like what, a draft. The stones, e. g. Yeah, like what's the, what's the representation of them? And like. When I send an email, does it go in?

Because it goes into a pending state, right? And then does a birdie come and fly, and then it flies away? Like, picks up a piece of paper and says, Oh, let's do this. A carrier 

[00:21:57] Frank: pigeon. A little bird has to come up, you gotta put it into this little collar, and then he flies off. Because 

[00:22:03] James: in Gmail, right, you can have that little delay where it delays 30 seconds, which is basically just a task delay.

Um, And then you hit the undo button. But imagine, yeah, you, you, you're the natural, the only way to send an email is you have to, with your hands, take the draft and then put it into the carrier pigeon, and then you have, you have to hold it, then you have to let it free. That's the 

[00:22:26] Frank: send button. Because you, you want to think about, do I actually want to send this email?

I guess so. 

[00:22:34] James: Oh, I'm just saying there, the opportunities. We 

[00:22:37] Frank: don't know. We have to remind ourselves, Apple did not invent, um, pull to refresh. An app developer did. An app developer with an iPhone is like, I like the bounciness. I like the upy downy smoothiness. Let's add more upy downy smoothiness and let's use pull to refresh.

And then Apple's like, this is the greatest thing ever and baked it into every app in the OS. And so we're still in that phase right now with the Vision Pro. We don't know what pull to refresh is just yet. Hopefully it's Pigeons that you release into the wild or something. I hope the physical metaphors don't go quite that far, but it would be fun to have 

[00:23:12] James: some physical metaphors at play.

When we talk about skeuomorphism, where this is like just morphism. It's just, it just is. 

[00:23:22] Frank: I want my Latin's not good enough. I'm trying to figure 

[00:23:25] James: out what I want is like that carrier pigeon. And then here's, what's really cool. It's like the carrier pigeon then knows what server it needs to go talk to. So you watch the carrier pigeon fly across a glow of digit.

You see your email. Fly. And then here's what's cool about it knows your contacts. Maybe your contacts have an address in them. So now it isn't like it's hitting a server, but then it's like, it's the carer pages go into their house, like on Google earth, it's like, whoa. And then Frank Gotten. It's like, wow, it just got delivered to the island.

Crazy. Wow. 

[00:23:57] Frank: I like it. I like it. I think in our five year plan though, we're going to have to turn it into an MMORPG. Uh, people will be able to shoot down your pigeon. You can shoot down their pigeons. We're going to have to make this a little bit more competitive to keep that hook in people's eyes. You know, so many pigeons.

Yeah. I like it. Terrible idea. I love it. We're going with it though. Best idea. 

[00:24:18] James: Best idea. I'm in. 

[00:24:21] Frank: Okay. So, uh, the develop experience, it's not bad. Um, Swift isn't my favorite programming language in the world, but it's a good language. I like to make fun of it. I think my original, uh, how I summarized it was it's a cute little subset of F sharp.

It kind of is. It still is. But it's a cute little subset of F sharp, therefore I can handle it. It's okay. Uh, the debugger is atrocious. Uh, worst debugger I've ever used in my life. How could the Turbo Pascal debugger be better than the Swift debugger? Decades, millennia to improve these things. Anyway, I blame LLDB for that.

We'll, we'll move aside. I think the development experience though is pretty good. I was talking about it on the show because you can have your virtual Mac monitor in front of you and then your app running off to the side and things like that. And so you're in kind of a coherent environment where your development environment and your.

Even though it's not, it's a trick, but your development environment and your app are kind of running in the same place. And it's kind of great. One of the best things Vision Pro is best at, that's poorly phrased, I apologize, is it's multitasking. It's really good at multitasking, running multiple apps at the same time.

I got 10 apps over here. I got my Mac monitors here. I got my six demo apps that I'm working on over there. It's a really good multitasking area. So it's actually kind of fun to do development in there. All that said, can I make the. One most important complaint, Tim, please, for the love of God, one, one critique in that beautiful development environment I'm in.

Every time you start your app, it appears directly in front of you. Now, let's say you're programming Xcode and you're like, okay, the person hit start the app. You have a choice. Do I put the app where it was before, or do I put it directly in their field of view at no matter what they're looking at, their app appears directly in front of them.

It doesn't matter if the app is 10 meters wide or one meter wide. We're going to put it directly in front of them and block everything in their field of view. It is the most annoying thing ever. Every time you start your app, I've trained myself to do this. I hit the, I hit the start play button, the debug button, and I immediately whip pan.

And I hold my gaze to the right until my app starts in my field of view. The worst. I am going to like sprain my neck one of these times, whipping my head around so that my app doesn't start in my. And in front of the IDE, please, please, please, Tim, change that. So the app will just resume where it was before.

I know you can do that because that's how apps normally behave. 

[00:27:12] James: It is. Yeah. Because it's like, normally you just put your iOS simulator wherever you want it to be. You kind of do want that, like, here's the zone for my app. Uh, that's funny. Yeah, I like that. I like that. 

[00:27:23] Frank: It's such a jerk reaction to you're like, Oh no, it's going to start in front of me.

It's like slo mo. You can see your life happening in front of your eyes are new whip your head around. I'm like, I'm really going to twist my neck off one of these times. Oh my gosh. So aside from that, it's actually, it's not too bad. Um, the worst debugger. Yeah. It's, it's, it's a prank. Like, it's just gotta be a prank.

Like, they, someone wrote this debugger as a prank on someone, and we're all living through it. That's all I can possibly determine. But the language itself is okay. Xcode desperately needs Copilot. A lot of little things like that. SwiftUI continues to be Obtuse, Beyond Reality, Poorly Documented, um, but I just stay as far away from 2D UIs.

3D for life, carrier pigeons for email. 

[00:28:18] James: Gotta have them. You gotta collect them all. You gotta collect them all. Oh, that's cool. That's good. It's a good, you know, cause like, you know, we you've I know that you've, you've dabbled in, in this, in the Swift here and there, and now it's like, you know, you're developing the thing fully in it, right?

And really taking it on. That's a different experience than just dabbling because you start to, as you get further in a production application, start to really get into the depths of, uh, that development process. So those debuggers and profilers and those things, all those little Yeah. Yeah. Things that you take for granted, uh, are really important at the end of the day.

Uh, and you know, I guess I'm just spoiled in the world of Visual Studio and the debugger and the experience there is just so good. So, uh, 

[00:28:58] Frank: never give it up. Just hold that debugger. Just anytime someone says, I work in the de Bugging department, buy them something. Doesn't matter what, whatever's near you.

Buy that for that person. Be like, You are the most wonderful person on the planet. Your debugger is beautiful. And it actually tells me information as I'm trying to debug my app. I'm 

[00:29:17] James: going to go ask Mads, uh, K and I'm going to say, Hey, Mads, like. What's the, the, the VS debugger team like I think they have their own Twitter account, but I'm going to ask them, like, hey, like, who is it?

I'll buy them all Starbucks gift cards on teams. Yeah, it's very true because you know, when I started at Seton a long time ago, after I moved there from Canons in the in between Xamarin times. Um, I was doing a lot of Java development, uh, early Android days, which is Eclipse. And so this is before Android Studio.

So, you know, I'm old if I'm developing Android apps. And it Eclipse. And, uh, the debugger was just, it was, I don't even think there was a debugger. That, that's, that's what it felt like. Oh, is that right? I mean, there was. You know, cause I. There was. But it felt like it wasn't. That's bad. Um. See, 

[00:30:08] Frank: I, I've never, uh, used the Java debugger, so I, I actually wasn't sure what the state of the art was there.

I was slightly under the impression that, um, the managed memory languages tend to be easier to debug because it was easier for them to freeze the world, interrogate the heap. They have all the meta information that they need to display good debug information. It's always been my understanding that in native code compilation, just.

A little bit too much type information is usually lost. They can't chase pointers as easily as we can chase pointers and manage memory. Uh, so I was just under, I guess, the impression that Java debugging was probably on par with NET debugging there for a while. And maybe it's, it's, I'm sure it's all advanced and all that, but.

[00:30:56] James: I have to imagine the Java debugger is much better, just in general. Uh, this has been dec this has been a decade at this point. So, and that was Eclipse, right? And, you know, we've moved on to the, and to the Android studios and the, the IntelliJs of the world. So probably much, much, much, much better. So, uh, in there, but yes.

Uh, but you know, I think in terms. 

[00:31:17] Frank: Yeah, sorry, I was just going to say in terms of the other tooling and Xcode, I've always used instruments. I've always loved Xcode's instruments for profiling code and things like that. So I'm still pretty comfortable in there. And truth be told, I was an Objective C programmer before I was a Xamarin developer.

So I've always known my way around Xcode. Uh, should I need to, and I would say the editor has actually come a long way. Um, it's much more usable than back in those Objective C times. They have pretty decent IntelliSense for Swift these days. They have really good built in documentation support. Those are all pluses.

So I don't want to just come off complaining. I, the Xcode is getting a lot of hate on Twitter lately. And as much as, I mean, Twitter's there so we can hate things. I mean, that's its purpose. But, um, there are actually a lot of good aspects of Xcode. So I don't want to throw it under the bridge completely.

All it needs is a brand new debugger and it would do a lot 

[00:32:16] James: better. No, it's definitely fun to watch, you know, every year watch WWDC and it's always fun to see like how Xcode is evolving and years, years back. I know a lot of work went into the editor because it is so important. And I know they've come a long way and just the smoothness because it's built, you know, for Mac devices and they can really leverage a lot of the things.

So the butter smooth scrolling and all this stuff. So, um, yeah, it's good to see there, but yeah, you know, debuggers, debuggers are hard, man. So 

[00:32:42] Frank: they'll get there. Well, and you know, and then like the classic things like. Package managers are terrible in every language, it turns out. You know, I love to complain about NuGet, but in general with NuGet, you can right click on a package and say upgrade, and the upgrade, I'm going to say 95 percent of the time works just fine, everything goes smoothly.

Xcode, I have not had one Yep, one. Upgrade work correctly. I always have to go chase around derived data, delete Xcodes caches, and get the package to update. There's still lots of little things like that that can definitely be frustrating, especially when you haven't used the tool a lot and you run into it for the first time.

You're like, no, everyone knows you gotta go delete your derived data if you want to update your packages. Everyone knows that. Well, you didn't know that and you have to go learn those lessons the hard way again. 

[00:33:30] James: Yeah, it's a death by a thousand paper cuts, right? Especially if it's, you know, getting around to it.

So no, that's cool. I'm, I'm glad it's going good. I really pray for the, this app review to actually happen. Maybe, maybe like you said, like someone's been assigned, they're just waiting for the device. That's, that's the best case scenario. 

[00:33:49] Frank: Worst case. Blair Witch. They're lost in a forest testing out my app.

And if so, I apologize. Come home. I'll, I'll change it. So you don't get Blair 

[00:34:00] James: Witched. Come on, Tim. Let Frank know what is up. We can do this. I want next week or the week after, or at least eight months from now, this app approved. Let's get it happen. Frank will soon not be able to be coherent on this podcast.

If you don't approve this app. Tim, let's get it. All righty. 

[00:34:22] Frank: Well, yeah, I, I, I just, I want to keep pushing the edges. So again, I'm, I'm happy. I'm happy if they deny it. That's not at all true. I'm going to be heartbroken, but I'll get over it. Deny the app and I will move on with my life. The first 

[00:34:36] James: submission, you're almost expecting a denial anyway.

So you're just like, all right, what did I mess up? Uh, put up, put that in, add a URL. 

[00:34:46] Frank: Can't use the color red in your icon. I did miss that line in the class. 

[00:34:52] James: All right. Well, that's going to do it for this week's Emerge Conflict. Good. Like Frank, we are going to hope and pray and, and do all the things for you.

And I'm going to finish my gin and tonic and we'll be good to go. That's going to do it for this week's Emerge Conflict. If you want more goodies, uh, from Frank and I, you got to check out our Patreon feed, patreon. com forward slash Emerge Conflict FM this week, we talk about. Starting a fire and how I can't seem to start fire.

So if you want that quality content, check us out. Uh, you can, there's a free trial. You didn't have to pay that you just get it for free, free trial. Just download it all. There's millions, there's billions and by billions, I mean, at least 10 exclusive behind the scenes episodes you can get right now. You can just do that.

Frank and I don't have sponsors this year. We've, and even people have reached out to sponsor the podcast. And I said, listen. I will just do it for free because we don't have sponsors. We have partners and those partners, I just want to give away your stuff. I don't even, we didn't even, Frank doesn't make so much money on this app.

We, we decided, we decided that Frank is going to be a vision pro app billionaire, that way we do not need sponsors. So no sponsors, only patron support. And, um, that can be really useful because when. Uh, Frank does become a billionaire. That means I am not an ad billionaire and Frank will leave me. So your important Patreon contributions will keep me going and pay our server fees.

Um, so thanks everyone for tuning in. Uh, check out the show notes for the links to Frank's tweet, where he announced the app that will maybe never get approved and, um, become a Patreon support. We super appreciate it. That's going to do for this week's podcast. So until next time, when it's episode. 400, please write in and give us comments.

I think, or is this 400? Crap. I don't even know. Uh, we'll find out till next. We'll find out if this one's 400 next week. Tune back in to the behind the scenes exclusive, uh, Merge Conflict. Uh, thanks everyone for watching. I'm James 

[00:36:47] Frank: Montemagno. And I'm Frank Krueger. Thank you for watching and listening.

Peace.