Dave (00:36.984) Yes, yes. So here we are. And just before we started hitting record, we were making silly 1930s or 40s radio voices at each other. I'm not sure if I'm quite getting there. It was more nasal and up there, but here is David and Daniel. I sound more like a commentator coming around the inside lane. There's Daniel ready to start. Daniel (01:04.302) fantastic, he has the soft tires on. the lightweight aero package. It's what I have. I do have a pretty strong aero package this week. I don't know, like I ever since the piercing, like. Dave (01:20.088) I'm not talking about your aero package, Daniel. Let's move on. Daniel (01:25.23) Spoiler alert! Daniel (01:29.198) Yeah, no, but what I mean is my hair, you know, I haven't gone to the barbers for ages, but I dare not because of that piercing is still so fresh and I don't want the guy to, I don't know, touch the ear or something accidentally. Dave (01:42.136) Yeah, yeah, yeah, I understand that. I've solved the problem for listeners of the show. I'm wearing a beanie hat. In fact, shout out to Tony, who I think sometimes watches or listens to the show because he refers to me as Ali G whenever he sees me wearing this beanie. And it is a little. Daniel (02:00.302) I can very much see it. So, hey, yeah, go on. Dave (02:05.688) and fun fact. Fun fact, about 20 years ago now, I was living in stains for a very brief period of time in my life, just like the character, Allie G, who was supposed to live in stains upon Thames. So, yeah. Daniel (02:22.35) And Ali G is someone who is like played by the same guy as Borat. Yeah. So millennial, millennial humor. Anyway, so listener Tony. Hey, Tony, just for you basically. Welcome to Waiting for Review. A show about the majestic indie developer lifestyle. Join your scintillating hosts, Dave and Daniel, that's me. Dave (02:26.872) That's right. That's right. And I am showing my age referencing LEG. So let's move on. Yep. Daniel (02:49.966) And let's hear about a tiny slice of their thrilling lives. Join us everyone while waiting for a view. Dave (02:58.392) Hey, we've started the intro before we're fully into the show. How you doing, Daniel? Daniel (03:03.374) Yeah. We've lost the transatlantic accents, have the intro done, so we're good. I'm good. I am incredibly work -focused this week, and I'm actually being very enthusiastic about it. So that's pretty cool. And also, the last few weeks were really hard for me, work -wise, but also just like, I don't know, that's a huge amount going on and whatever. And... Dave (03:22.84) Hey. Daniel (03:36.206) I'm just slowly getting my energy back and it really feels really, really good. You know, it's like, it's like, I feel energized and in a really good way. Dave (03:42.968) Nice. Dave (03:47.224) And is it coming into sort of spring, almost summertime, where you are as well? Or you come out of that curve into like, hey, it's nice and sunny and all those things? Daniel (03:59.246) Maybe, yeah, that's probably also a reason. Dave (04:03.192) Yeah, I say because another reason for the hat is that it is freezing here in New Zealand today because we're at the other end of the year. Daniel (04:04.174) Daniel (04:09.486) Yeah, and the other end of the earth, the planet. That's pretty cool actually. You think about it. Dave (04:14.68) Hmm. Yes. it's very cool in terms of, yes, I was frozen this morning. Daniel (04:23.342) Okay, I'm sorry. That's not as nice, even if it is cool. What is cool though is listener feedback. So we heard from listener Tony already. We also have a message from Holger Krupp. Thanks to Daniel and Dave for the discussion about time limits for apps on iOS. I'm trying this new, this now. Dave (04:35.416) Dave (04:40.44) Mm -hmm. Daniel (04:50.862) He's setting a maximum of 45 minutes per day for this app. I assume from the message he's setting it for YouTube. And he says, Dave (04:57.304) Mm -hmm. Dave (05:01.624) No, Instagram, Instagram in the screenshot, Daniel. Daniel (05:05.454) What does it say? you've reached a limit on Instagram. And then the message he says, unfortunately, there's no way to restrict YouTube shorts, but not long videos, which I didn't even think about because my YouTube is just long videos. For shorts, I use the TikToks. Dave (05:09.016) Yeah. Yep. Dave (05:22.136) Mm -hmm. Daniel (05:23.662) But yeah, it's really cool that people are doing this. Dave (05:26.968) Definitely people are giving that a try. I'm still not But Yeah being able to fine -grain your time limits, unfortunately, you need the apps really to To give some other option, I guess there but that's not something YouTube's ever gonna give you right? Daniel (05:34.414) You Daniel (05:48.91) Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I mean, that's the thing, like the apps, they kind of want to be your sole focus. So you're kind of at odds with them. So they're probably not going to play ball. So if you are, if you're really into like YouTube shorts or whatever, you're just going to have to ban the whole app and then instead read a good book, maybe go outside, touch the grass. Dave (06:01.304) Yeah. Dave (06:09.88) Yeah, maybe so. To be fair, Daniel, I know a lot of people, to be fair, yeah. I know a lot of folks watch a lot of YouTube, as people would have watched TV a few decades back, but for me, I get fed up with the ads. And one thing I've done is I've installed this application called Vinegar. which runs a Safari extension which helps you watch things without the ads. It's basically its own little ad removal thing. But of course it doesn't work with the YouTube app. And I'm like, well actually I'm okay with that because for as little as I watch YouTube, like I watch stuff when people link it to me or if I'm searching for a particular thing, but I don't just go there for entertainment. I've found that it works well for me. Daniel (06:47.214) That's pretty cool. Daniel (06:55.982) Mm -hmm. Dave (07:06.008) at that point, right? I don't see the ads or anything. Yeah. It also means I don't really end up down the rabbit hole of the shorts because I'm not in the YouTube app. It's not nudging me that way, you know? Yeah, but that's not for everybody. Daniel (07:07.15) That's pretty cool. Daniel (07:20.91) I'm actually a heavy YouTube user, but also not a shorts user. So what I do is when I sit down in front of the TV in the evening, most of the time I will actually turn on YouTube on the Apple TV. And I watch a lot of like, I want to say documentaries or like sci -fi stuff and stuff like that. Like this, this one, it's called Real Engineering about like, I don't know how they build planes and stuff. I kind of like that. and lots of space stuff and whatever. And so actually, a while ago, a few years ago, I decided I'm just going to pay for YouTube premium, I watched enough that the ads are really annoying. And it's about the same as Netflix or any other streaming service. And just the amount of time I spent there, it's just money well spent, even though you're giving it directly to Google, of course, but whatever. Dave (08:06.424) Mm -hmm. Fat play. But you're also using the product. So that means of course you're a customer at that point. Daniel (08:14.702) Yeah. And yeah, I'd rather pay for it than be the product basically. And yeah, it works very well for me. It's nice. I also get YouTube music, which I never use. But that's another story. Yeah, I just watch a lot of YouTube content. Dave (08:22.52) Yep. Dave (08:30.104) Yep. Dave (08:39.448) That's fair. That's fair. I'm finding it's interesting, right? Because I was very much on a social media, like diet in the last couple of years of like, yeah, I'm not doing anything with meta, not doing anything with Twitter, et cetera, et cetera. And because I've been using Instagram for the VJ app to publish bits about it there, it does suck me in, you know, that black hole of media. And now it knows what I'm interested in, right? So it's serving me all these really, really interesting visuals based videos. I get it. I get how difficult it is for anybody to leave, leave their, their comfy spot with it as well, because it is entertaining and it is good. It's like, I'm finding all these, all these shorts about these little, video projection ideas and things. and it, it draws me in and. Daniel (09:11.182) Yeah. Yeah. Dave (09:38.584) That's exactly what it's meant to do. so I think this comes full circle back around to the topic we had last week, which was about setting sensible time limits and that sort of stuff. Right. It's like, if I accept that this is something I do actually enjoy within these parameters and I'm getting value out of it. Well, that's okay. I hate Zuckerberg. I hate meta. I don't hate the people posting the content I'm watching though. And I find it very, conflicting. in a lot of ways because of that. But I think time limits, you know, to try and protect time for doing stuff is a sensible thing. Daniel (10:09.006) Yeah. Daniel (10:19.534) or time for actual rest, you know. Dave (10:22.072) Yeah, and I should definitely instigate some. So maybe I'm going to take an action rather than talking about it and saying how it's a positive and give people could or should. Here's my commitment, Daniel. I'm going to put a time limit on these things and then check back in over the next week and see how I'm doing with that. Daniel (10:40.782) Awesome, yeah. I'd like that. Dave (10:43.032) But shout out to Holger for his comment. I'm sorry we can't help in any way with the dichotomy of shorts and long form on YouTube and configure how you want it. But yeah, definitely keen to hear how anybody listening to the show is getting on with their own time limits. Daniel (11:03.31) Yeah, totally. That'd be super interesting. What have you been doing these days? Like, have you been doing the marketing or have you been writing code? What's your occupation right now? I know that Govj3 isn't out yet, so are you stuck? Are you happy where you are? Dave (11:22.264) And well, I'm actually happy where I am. I'm not stuck, but I'm certainly not as far along as I wish I was with it all. I'm looking at my notes in our topics and I wrote about Ko -Vee -Jay that I'm on finalfinal .underscore .draftv3. You know, feels a bit like that, like I'm drawing it out, but. What I've done, Daniel, in the last week is I've, I've, I've gone on a bug hunt and a bug fixing mission just to polish everything over. So I'm still in the code there. Meanwhile, on the marketing side, yeah, I'm building up to it. I hate it. I really do. But, on that side, what I have done is I've been speaking with a few people on Instagram actually, and getting more people hooked up with the current beta. get some feedback and that's not specifically release marketing but what's going on there is I have realized there's this whole other sub scene that is VJ adjacent right liquid light shows Daniel (12:33.678) Which is... Daniel (12:38.03) What's that? What's that? What's that, brother? Dave (12:40.536) Wow, yeah, exactly. This is what happened. This is exactly this is my reaction and I feel really, really ignorant now. I was ignorant before this. These these people are making light shows with inks and oils underlit by by by by bright lights. Yeah. And the modern it used to be people used overhead overhead projectors and like a couple of Pyrex. Daniel (12:58.37) yeah, I've seen that. Dave (13:10.168) bowls, clear, clear kind of plates or bowls, squidge the oil over the light to project that fancy, like, you know, the psychedelic sixties, seventies sort of swirling patterns. Yeah. Daniel (13:19.566) Right, right, right. Yeah, I can totally, I can, I think I've seen that somewhere. Dave (13:25.784) Yeah, I posted a video I found to mustard on about this actually, and I'll link it in the show notes because it's a fantastic history of the light shows from the 50s, 60s, 70s and how that tied through to effectively right the way into projected visuals and VJing the sort of stuff that I did in the early 2000s through to today. So there is a lineage there that actually I should have known about a bit deeper, which is those light shows. sort of walked so that visuals with apps like mine could run. Right? They're directly related. Long story short, these people are on Instagram. There's a whole scene where people are rediscovering that art form. And then they're using cameras and applications like mine to then feed that into things. Yeah, with effects. Yeah. Daniel (14:21.71) nice. Dave (14:24.056) So I've been speaking with a few of the movers and shakers of the liquid light scene on Instagram. And honestly, I think there's a whole group there that would benefit from an app like mine. Yeah, so not quite marketing, but I do know like some of how I'm going to pitch it effectively. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Daniel (14:28.974) Mm -hmm. Daniel (14:36.334) Yeah, I can see that. Daniel (14:46.67) networking maybe. That's awesome. Yeah, I like that. I thought you were gonna say lasers because I sent you a laser video the other day. And I was like, lasers are cool, you know. Dave (14:57.956) Yes. Lices are cool. Yeah. Daniel (15:04.718) But the liquid like thing sounds actually really cool. Dave (15:07.672) No lasers for me. For listeners of the show, we were trying to trigger lasers on our respective iPhone cameras and then I. Daniel (15:15.63) I was gonna let it uncommented, you know. Just a little tiny treat. Dave (15:19.768) Yeah, yeah. Dave (15:24.056) but, but yes, no, not lasers, liquid light. And, it's so that's me very much telling you I've not done any marketing really. I've been doing networking by speaking to people on Instagram, but, the bugs are nearly clear. The app is in a much better stage. That list is down to like one last thing. So that will get ticked off this weekend. Daniel (15:44.078) It's also good. Dave (15:51.672) And then yes, absolutely into marketing mode. I've got my screenshots ready. I need to update the website with all of the new screenshots and everything. As we spoke about before, Daniel, I'm going to repurpose the landing page that you helped me with a few months back for Govj Pro. I'm going to repurpose that for regular Govj. Put these screenshots in. And again, try and move as quickly as I can to actually get this thing out the door. So, yeah. Daniel (16:24.91) Fantastic. Good to know. I like that. Dave (16:29.208) But that's me desperately trying to pull myself out of the code, getting into marketing mode. Daniel (16:37.294) I'm in marketing mode. I don't really like it, but actually, I kind of like it. The thing that I'm doing, I like that. What I'm doing is I have this consultant, I guess now, who has a lot of ideas and knowledge about landing pages and website marketing and stuff like that. So I'm redesigning the website. And one thing that he says is have different landing pages for different types of industries and stuff like that. And... Dave (16:40.28) Yeah. Dave (16:47.736) Mm -hmm. Dave (17:05.88) Mm -hmm. Daniel (17:06.702) So one thing that I've been doing is creating in the kind of in our CMS, in our CMS system, sorry, creating the different building blocks that I need for this to work. And so the first few like glimpses that are online, but they're not really linked basically. Hang on, I can actually show you like, I'm gonna describe everything, but if you are on video, you can't do it. I can show you a few nice visuals if I can actually manage to resize my window, which I can somehow. Here we go. So what I did so far was I started on creating these new layouts, basically, that are more clear and have a good, you know, call to action and a nice headline and stuff like that and are a bit more focused. So for example, I actually created, so what we want to do is we want to have like learning pages for different industries. And one of the industries will be startups. Another one will be indie developers. And then maybe like medium -sized companies, app development agencies, medtech. That's going to be the first few, I think, medtech, yeah. And so now that I have the landing page that is just like directed only at startups, I can like bring forward the arguments basically that people who are startup founders need to hear the most. Like for example, for the startup page, it says it's very hassle free and it doesn't bring any like legal and technical complexities. also says that the setup is very quick and that we provide a lot of pre -made dashboards and stuff like that. And what I did was actually I built these components to be very flexible where I can just have the screen separated into two columns. And then in the one column, I can set it to right or left depending so I can alternate them. Daniel (19:28.398) On the one column, I can just have text and a call to action button or something like that, and then maybe a list of features. And on the other column, I can have something like a bunch of testimonials that I've been collecting testimonials for ages. And now I can just link to them. It's so nice. I can have live charts, because I want to illustrate a telemetry deck feature. I can also have. screenshots or images. And it is, of course, I want to say mobile optimized and whatever. And also, because I'm linking to these, because I'm including these features, I'm also creating a library of features, kind of, where. Dave (20:00.408) Beautiful. Daniel (20:22.318) where I am. Here we go. Where I'm just like, for every feature that I'm linking, I kind of link that to a separate page. And then I can write a few paragraphs about how the feature works, basically. And the features, then, they have kind of the same feature pages. They have kind of the same functionality where you can have different content. You can have images and live charts and whatever. And yeah, and also. that's the more I know is actually, and that's super fun because it is so flexible, but at the same time, it gives a very direct framework, basically, how these pages should be looking. I think what's missing is, I don't know, like a huge call to action at the bottom or something, but other than that, it's been really fun to build this and then also have, Dave (20:51.192) Love it. Daniel (21:20.686) and a CMS have like all these fields because then you don't have the, how is it called, the empty page syndrome basically, where you're like, okay, I have a huge empty page, what should I do? But now I know basically I have, I wanna have like three of these elements on the page with alternating like right and left layout. And what I also want is, and these elements then they have like all these fields that I cannot. can fill out, like I have a title for the element and some body text or whatever. And then I'm like, yeah, there's a feature list field. So I can add links to features there, stuff like that. And so that actually makes it easier to work with that. Dave (22:07.16) really very cool. I love that. What, I've got to ask, I'm curious, what headless CMS are you using to drive it? Daniel (22:14.062) Ha ha. Sanity. Dave (22:17.272) Cool, what sanity. Daniel (22:18.734) It's a headless CMS, sanity .io. To explain what a headless CMS is, it is a CMS system. I love saying CMS system because it's just wrong. CMS is for quantum management system. So I love saying CMS system, just like I love saying ATM machine and pin number. yeah, that's also a good one. Dave (22:38.048) Yeah. And pin number. Daniel (22:44.238) A headless CMS is a content management system that does not have a presentation layer. For example, think of WordPress as a CMS. But WordPress is the CMS in the back end where you edit your posts, but also the front end that renders your post as a blog. Whereas a headless CMS is something that is just the back end. You edit your post or whatever, and you can tell it, my thing has posts and it has features. Dave (23:02.136) Yes. Daniel (23:11.694) And it has landing pages, and it has regular pages, and it has FAQ items, for example. And then you can define the fields that these have. And then with another software, you can just connect to the API and be like, hey, give me all the FAQ items. Give me all the landing pages. And use that data to build your website as I do. I kind of rebuild the whole website as static HTML. Every time something changes, what you could also do is just like, grab the data live as the user navigates. It has different trade -offs, basically. I think the most well -known headless CMS is Contentful or Contentful. Dave (23:53.72) Yeah, I was looking at another one called Wagtail. Wagtail was another one. Yeah. Daniel (23:54.702) There's also Strapi, yeah, Wagtail. At the beginning, I kind of looked at a lot of these. And there are more better headless CMSs than Sanity compared to Sanity. But they were way more expensive, especially Contentful, which some of us have worked with. Not me, but Lisa, for example. Looks really cool, but it's like, Dave (24:18.748) Yeah. Daniel (24:22.19) you get into the hundreds and thousands of bucks really quickly because they are kind of targeting larger, richer companies than us. And so us operating on a shoestring budget was not that correct. It didn't work out that way. And then I discovered Sanity, which worked very well with Eleventy. Dave (24:37.848) Mm -hmm. That makes sense. Daniel (24:47.726) which is the software I used to create my front -end headless, my static HTML files. And also, it works very similar than, like compared to, I wanna say Django admin, which is something that I used to do a lot of backend CMSs in when I was working with Python and Django. Fun fact, by the way, yeah? Fun fact, about... Dave (25:11.32) So with cycle. Daniel (25:16.782) I want to say 10 to 12 years ago -ish. I worked as the CTO of an app development agency. And we had a customer who was a large car manufacturer. And they wanted to have an app that was kind of like a sales catalog with lots of images and then the different layouts and then different texts and whatever. And what they really wanted to do was they wanted to change the content of the app without having to re -upload to the app store. And we kind of built something like that for them. And then I was like, this is actually cool. This is a CMS, but without the front end. I had no idea what to call it. And so I was like, can we make this into a product? And we, like, especially like I kind of pushed an initiative so that we would work more on that. And we kind of sold it to a few more customers, but it never really like, Dave (25:57.912) Mm -hmm. Daniel (26:16.366) Like in hindsight, I should have really pushed to make this like into a public facing product because that's exactly what how Contentful came to be. For example, like I could be the CTO of Contentful for all I know in another universe. But it was still fun. Like I forgot what it was called. There was like some car engine related name for it because I don't know, like you know me. Dave (26:23.48) Mm -hmm. Dave (26:27.32) Yeah. Dave (26:31.328) Yep. Daniel (26:45.966) either space or cars. Dave (26:48.152) Yes. that's interesting because that's like the two roads kind of thing. You could have been deep in CMS and maybe still working with Django today in one way or another. Daniel (27:03.726) Maybe, yeah. Daniel (27:07.854) I mean, I took a while longer, but now I am a successful asterisk startup founder. Dave (27:16.28) I always read down to the bottom what's the asterisk? Daniel (27:19.118) The company is not very like it's not profitable right now and I'm not rich, but on the other hand, we haven't folded. We're good. We are growing. Our customers are mostly happy except about the few little bugs in the front end. So yeah. Dave (27:31.736) Yeah, yeah. Dave (27:43.288) You're punching above your weight, I think is the phrase for that. Daniel (27:46.542) Like someone said recently that we as a society often measure success only as forever success. Like, I don't know, relationships that end are not successful and companies that fold are not successful. But I mean, yeah. So it's not, we're not on the safe side where it's like totally, totally think about that. We will survive the next 30, 40, 50 years, but I mean, we've built something really cool. Dave (27:55.768) Yes. Daniel (28:16.078) and it works right now and it works very well for me. Dave (28:22.072) And it is working well, I love it. I really, I know we talk about telemetry deck every show, cause it's your product, but I enjoy hearing, hearing all about it. Enjoy hearing more about what's going on. Daniel (28:23.758) Yeah. And then. So. Daniel (28:32.654) Yeah. And let's hope that these new landing pages will actually bring in even more people. You know what I mean? Just make it more well known, because that's important for growth and stuff like that. And what isn't in this landing page right now is, you know how if you go to a website for a SaaS product and it says, hey, Dave (28:41.944) Mm -hmm. Daniel (29:00.302) Like if you go to the menu and it says like something like solutions or whatever and you hover over it and it's like this huge, incredibly large drop down. I hate those, but apparently I'm going to build one of those. So the thing is, I, the reason why I hate those is I never understood what they actually mean. Like, why should I, why can't you just tell me what the thing does, you know? And like whatever, like why should I like check out some detail? Dave (29:09.208) Yep. I do too. hang on. Daniel (29:28.846) about the thing when I want to get an idea for an overview, basically. And so what Andreas, our website consultant, told me was that these are supposed to, what you are supposed to do and what apparently many neurotypical people, many people are doing is they hover over the thing and then they find their description. Like, I don't know, either by industry where they say like, they are like in a startup or by role. Like they have like these things like CTO or whatever, or even, I don't know, by another dimension. And then they just click the thing that most closely matches them. And then they get a landing page that is kind of tailored to them, which makes a lot of sense, but it never did to me because like, I don't know, like I want the main landing page to just tell me what the thing is and what it does. Dave (30:26.584) Yeah. Yep. Daniel (30:26.67) and how to use it. But apparently people don't want that or like most people or whatever, like a large amount of people. What they want is what is the feeling that I will get? What is the, what are the direct benefits? Which I don't know. It doesn't work for me directly, but apparently that is what I think that mostly works. So I'm going to try it out. Dave (30:42.104) Mm hmm. Dave (30:50.456) That's quite interesting. I think there's something quite insightful there because I'm in your camp in that sense, right? In that just tell me what it does. Just tell me, you know, like, so you can start with like why you've made the product or why you think this thing exists. You can tell me how you do it. All of that kind of flow on. Tell me what it does. That's fine. I will then figure out how it fits what I want to do, right? Like I'm not... I'm not looking for it to tell me how it will fit what I want to do because I know that information. Yeah. But that's fine. If a lot of people are looking for the if a lot of people are looking to see something that represents themselves quite directly and you can achieve that in this way and that helps them, then that's actually pretty awesome. And obviously, you know, simultaneously, if it helps them, they can use your product that helps you. Daniel (31:23.854) Yeah. Dave (31:48.088) It all feeds together, but that's the thing, right? You want people to find that side of it. You want people to understand how it's going to work for them and then use it and then get that benefit. So yeah, I guess I see it. I see how this comes together. I also think that your different landing pages, I wonder if that's going to help you with any sort of SEO and that side of stuff as well, like whether it sort of hangs together with that. Daniel (32:20.174) Probably. I mean, that's also why I kind of really wanted the features to have their own pages that can link to from different landing pages, you know. Let's see, let's see what the charts are going to say. And also like you talked about this last time, I think, or two episodes ago where you said you really should like be less, like more about like benefit first language, I think, something like that. Dave (32:48.696) Mm -hmm. Daniel (32:49.358) And so I try to do that where, especially in the titles and the subtitles, I try to be more about, hey, this is like, you will enjoy this benefit and then explain the features that lead to the benefit later. Dave (32:52.792) Yeah. Dave (33:07.96) Nice. And yeah, I think that again, like you put that view together with what Andreas has been telling you, nudging you towards with all of this. Yeah, that's, that's cool. Daniel (33:19.438) But yeah. Like, for example, like my original headline was something like, hey, because we are anonymizing our data's authority that we are not even like fall under GDPR and other privacy regulations, you are not obligated to bring up cookie banners. And I kind of reworked that to forget consent management. All of the data, none of the asking. There's no need for cookie consent banners or in -app permissions. Enjoy uninterrupted insights on all user behavior because our algorithms are designed to prospect privacy from the ground up. Dave (34:02.52) Yeah, that's better. Daniel (34:03.95) I still, I don't know, I feel icky, but whatever. One thing that really helped me is I'm now paying for like GPT -4 and usually I write something, then I copy it in there and I tell it rewrite this like an Apple ad. And then you have to do some editing. Like it doesn't work perfectly, but like you can actually pick up like almost whole sentences out of that, rework them a little bit. Dave (34:20.312) Dave (34:31.64) Yes. Daniel (34:33.134) And like, it works. It works surprisingly well. Dave (34:39.256) well, speaking of Apple ads, there's been a bit of ad controversy in the last couple of days. Not quite controversy, but yeah. Yeah. And I think so, but I'll preface this with, I think you might have to start saying like an Apple ad before 2024. For your GPT hack. Daniel (34:49.582) yeah, the iPad thing. Do you want to talk about it? Dave (35:08.248) But yeah, the new iPads. I hadn't actually seen this right up until I saw a parody of it just before we started recording the show. So I've seen a few people posting about, yeah, OK, that ad says it all about how Apple's such a big, bad tech company these days. So for anybody who hasn't seen this ad, the context here is that we had new iPads. announced what two days ago now. If not a little bit before. They showed this ad adverts on the events and the ads gone out and it has all of these musical instruments and equipment in the middle of this this room. And there's this big metal slab representing the iPad Pro coming down and crushing it. which I know from Apple's point of view, they're probably going for the iPad Pro is so powerful. You don't need all of these things anymore. And hey, look, it's crushing it. Isn't that good? And the backlash has been, yeah, that just represents how big tech is killing everything that's good about the world. Daniel (36:22.318) Yeah, it looks very horrible. Like there's like a grand piano and there's like various like string instruments and they're just shattering. And there's also like a few computers, an old style arcade machine, like lots of things that people really love. And they're just destroying it. And then the message is like, yeah, but the iPad Pro is so thin, which I'm sure it is. But yeah, it is, it is, it is a absolute misstep. Dave (36:26.008) Mm. Dave (36:31.032) Yep. Yes. Dave (36:39.768) Yes. Dave (36:44.376) Mm -hmm. Daniel (36:50.062) like a rare mystery for a company like Apple that is usually very good with their ads and their outside communication. I have an article that I'm going to link to in the show notes that says, Apple apologizes for controversial iPad Pro ad and scraps plans for a TV campaign on nine to five Macs. So apparently, just a few days after its debut, the... Dave (36:52.824) Yeah. Dave (36:57.528) Yeah. Dave (37:06.968) It hurts. Daniel (37:14.766) They have issued a public apology to AdAge saying it missed the mark with the video. Dave (37:22.552) It's funny. So I'm on, obviously I see it saw some of the backlash from social media, from my mustard on feed, from other iOS and indie devs to be fair. And, and, and then just general people in the, that I follow. but also I'm now in a few Facebook groups for what I do with the VJ app. I'm in like an iPad musicians group. and some of those sorts of things. And it was interesting there because a lot of folks were like, yeah, this iPad, these iPads, I mean, they're great, but like Apple's kind of jumping the shark with how much they're pushing what it can do, what it's got, the rest of it. Cause for their needs, right? Since the M1 and M1 iPad Pro, like that is more than powerful enough for a lot of what they do. Daniel (38:14.958) Mm -hmm. Dave (38:18.008) And it's just quite interesting to me seeing the discussion there because these are arguably people who are all in on the ecosystem, right? They're iPad based musicians. But they're not all in, in the way that Apple assume in that ad, right? It's like an iPad is part of their workflow and they love it for that. But that doesn't mean that they would get rid of all of their instruments or anything like that. Like it's, it's. It fits in as another part of the piece rather than dominating the whole thing in the way that the advert implies. So yeah, they really did miss the mark. And I think they missed the mark with quite a lot of people who would otherwise have, you know, or otherwise very much advocates for what Apple does with the iPad. A rare misstep, but potentially a big one in the, in some ways. So yeah, good they've reversed it. Daniel (39:11.054) Yeah, totally. Dave (39:16.568) That's a... I don't know. Today's apple is an interesting beast at times. Daniel (39:22.83) I mean, yeah. Hang on. I have a thing that I want to talk about. And this iPad topic really leads into that, which is I want to rant a bit more about Vision Pro. So I think now after the launch, people are getting a bit more realistic about the device and what it can do and what kinds of content does it have and what kinds of apps. And. Dave (39:28.152) Go on. Go for it. Dave (39:37.56) Go on. Daniel (39:53.07) At least in this telemetry data set, usage is like steadily going down. Because people are, that's my interpretation, people are just like playing with it and it's like, yeah, this is cool. But then the novelty kind of wears off and it feels like, I can't really do the things that I really want to do with it because it's just very restricted. And I know that I've talked about this before, but I just feel very vindicated that this is what I said. And now it is kind of coming true, which is that the iPad is just a big iPad. The Vision Pro is just a big iPad. It is a wraparound iPad with an infinity size screen, basically. But it's still just a big iPad with all the problems that the iPad has, which is, except multitasking. The multitasking user interface on the Vision Pro is like, Dave (40:42.136) Mm -hmm. Daniel (40:52.206) Fantastic. Because you just drop your windows everywhere that you want, right? But apart from that, the Vision Pro, or Vision Pro without that there, has all the problems that the iPad has, which is a software ecosystem that doesn't have enough applications. And also, these applications are incredibly limited in the way they talk to each other and in the way they interact with the system, which is totally fine for a phone because... Dave (41:20.408) Yes. Daniel (41:21.454) A, everybody has a phone, so people are just willing to put in the work to create the apps, but also people want their phones mostly for single, quick interactions, and so that works really well with the security model that the App Store and Sandbox and everything does. But everyone is still using Macs or computers because they are more powerful. Even the Vision Pro fans, they use the Vision Pro to interact with their Macs, which, come on. Dave (41:44.504) Mm -hmm. Dave (41:49.464) Yes. Which at the point in time you're talking about twice as much as a monitor, like twice as much as the studio monitor, isn't it? Like, you know, you can look at that and go, well, I could have a, a Mac studio and a monitor for equal money, if not a little less, depending on what you can pick up. And, you know, it's, Daniel (41:50.83) and Daniel (42:01.07) Yeah, something like that. Dave (42:19.928) The vision pro is, is a hard sell, I think for anybody looking at it, through without the sort of, you know, rose tinted glasses, if you like. There we go. Kind of funny. the rose tinted goggles. no, I, I, this is, this is conflicting for me because I really, really wanted and still want AR to work. Daniel (42:30.382) You Dave (42:46.744) in a meaningful way. Like I think there's something to it. I think there's definitely something there. We've spoken before about the fact I would like it for, you know, video calling with family who are all the way around the other side of the world and having better presence in those sort of conversations. You know, I want to sit with my cup of coffee on my sofa and see my mother virtually sat next to me in the same space or something like that. I think there's power to those sort of things and all the variations of that. there's power to an infinite canvas where you can, you know, if things worked in the way that I would like them to work, you could have, you could start to replace certain physical interfaces with virtual ones that are used in a, in a space. I'm thinking of node based things where you're virtually connecting wires between stuff, right? And you're, you're able to do that. There's all these things that could be quite powerful, but the vision pro is it is right now. And what I see with it. You're right. It's too restrictive. It's got all these edges to it. And I can see why the novelty has faded off for a whole bunch of people using it. Or if the novelty hasn't worn off, they're certainly not using it as much as they did a while ago. You're seeing that in your stats. Yeah. Daniel (44:01.486) Yeah, the thing is, I think what somehow doesn't matter for the iPhone, but what does matter for the iPad and for Vision Pro is that most of the apps that we use these days, or most of the programs, I want to say, actually are designed in a way to interact with their peers, with the other apps. Like, Dave (44:26.296) Yes. Daniel (44:27.918) Of course, like when you think of an app, you think of like one thing that you open or whatever, but our computers are built basically by lots of little command line apps, by lots of the libraries that kind of interact with each other and kind of build on top of each other. And that's how we kind of got here where we have on our PCs, on our Macs, have like really capable applications because they kind of like lots of different parties, either like open source or not or close or whatever, like provided. Dave (44:37.848) Yeah. Dave (44:48.088) Mm -hmm. Daniel (44:57.87) a building block, basically a puzzle piece. And then that kind of built up and then suddenly someone like suddenly like the combination works and then someone else has like decides because they see this works to re implement the thing as a whole. But because that doesn't happen on iPad and vision pro, it kind of just stagnates like and you can't do that these building blocks like it would be really cool to have like an app that is very powerful, but no one is going to Dave (45:00.792) Mm -hmm. Dave (45:12.984) Yes. Daniel (45:26.798) make that because it is just too much work for a very unsure return on investment. But if you could just combine various smaller apps with individual features in a way that is easy and quick and very helpful, like with drag and drop or copy and paste on the Mac. And I know you can do drag and drop on the iPad, but somehow it doesn't work as easily. Right? Dave (45:46.84) Mm -hmm. Daniel (45:53.518) or maybe that's not the right paradigm. What I'm saying is like, if you could just like combine the different apps property in a way that you could like get some kind of workflow going, then like the value of the platform would rise so much. And I think, yeah, maybe that's the missing link, you know? You don't have to like open, like you don't have to allow us, like, I mean, you do have to allow, you don't have to disable sandboxing or anything, like, but just give us APIs to like... Dave (46:09.112) Yeah. Daniel (46:22.35) communicate between apps better or like I don't know like make this this pipeline work better. Dave (46:25.88) You're, you're, you're dangerously close to something that I'm going to go off on a bit of a thing here. Daniel, you're setting me off here because, okay. So I have this app, it mixes video, right? And one of the things that I can't do with it that I could do if it was audio is I can't connect other video apps to it. Daniel (46:32.11) You Dave (46:55.384) very easily. I can now I've got the NDI support in terms of sending stuff from one device to another that basically encodes the video frame into a transmission format. So it's like H264 or 65 encoding it and then sending it over the network. And NDI is more complicated than that, but that doesn't matter. It's encoding it and sending it out. And I could technically use that to send stuff between apps on the same device as well, right? Locally through the network layer over on the Mac. That same thing can work without any of that because I can use, there's a third party library created out of the VJM Visual Scene actually by a couple of very talented developers that lets you share frames, video frames between applications with zero latency because they are sharing the same reference to the same texture on the graphics card. The subsystem for that is IO surface that exists on iOS and iPadOS and Vizion OS. The subsystem for transmitting this as a server, this as a client and doing all of that, that this library uses is kind of based on something to do with how app processes can communicate with each other. So for example, the XPC sort of subsystem inside of things. represents that these days. I could almost do this zero latency transmission between apps on an iPad or even on an iPhone. The ish kind of gets a bit weird because background adapts don't render in the same way. Exactly. And you could chain them together or somebody else independent of me could make something that I could put together into my apps. Right. And I can almost do this today. Daniel (48:38.382) And then that other app could totally add more filters and stuff like that. Dave (48:54.36) you can transmit the data between processes between apps using the same thing on iOS, except that it is locked to your sandbox. So it works, but you have to have apps in the same app group to talk to each other. And then it doesn't work because the IOS surface, I believe, is locked in a way that it doesn't transmit outside of the sandbox process as well. So it All the pieces are there, but it is deliberately hobbled because of the sandboxing and yeah. Daniel (49:26.702) Yeah, like, and I mean, don't even get me started on App Store policies, you know. Dave (49:33.368) Yeah, yeah, yeah. But that's a literal worked example from my world of where this stuff prevents me from producing apps that would interoperate and be part of a wider ecosystem that would be incredibly powerful for me and other video independent developers and really, really useful for users, for customers. But because of Apple's policies, that's impossible. And it bugs the living heck out of me, to be honest with you. Daniel (50:07.694) Yeah. And add to that the fact that if you like, don't get me wrong, like Vision Pro is a fantastically impressive device. Like they're just putting it on and it's like, wow, this is like technologies, like feels like ultra advanced and it's really cool. But that doesn't change the fact that putting on any VR headset is a bit of work, you know, you kind of, you kind of commuting into VR. Dave (50:19.192) Mm -hmm. Daniel (50:37.39) Like it's not like sitting down in front of a computer or grabbing a phone or iPad, where you just like grab the thing and interact with it. You kind of get it, got to set it up. You're going to put it on and then you're in a different world, like literally actually, where you are like, you need to like play by different rules. So kind of disconnected, even if you have the weird little eye things on the display, you're kind of disconnected from the rest of like, from the world around you in a way. And. Dave (50:37.432) Yes. Dave (50:54.84) Mm -hmm. Daniel (51:06.894) So yeah, and that is a. Dave (51:06.904) Yeah. And the, I think the, the, the, the eyes on the outside don't really connect to you with other people. Right. As being the thing I've seen, like people just don't really like it. It's sort of a bit weird. I think there, there is a world in which Apple like releases the next vision device and it takes a whole bunch of this stuff into account. Like I could imagine. a slightly lower cost device, you get rid of the screen on the front of it that costs some costs. There's a whole bunch of other bits they could probably trim here and there. There's a point where they could make the battery situation a bit a bit better, maybe. I don't know. Like you've got the wire plugged in to it and all of that. That's a bit odd. But. Daniel (51:58.798) It's a bit odd, but it's not something that, I don't know, like you forget it after a few minutes. But it needs to be able to do anything, something that a Mac can't do. Dave (52:02.68) It doesn't really prevent anything. Yeah. but I don't know. Dave (52:12.376) Yes, or it needs to be able to do the things a Mac can do to some degree in a sensible way and provide all of the other bits. It does really well on top. And I think that actually applies to the iPad as well, to be honest with you. but yeah, I don't know. We've got to wrap the show and kind of wind up, but I just kind of wanted to say like, there's been a couple of rumors about, about potentially Mac OS coming to the iPad. in some form. Daniel (52:43.406) Yeah, every now and then there's a rumor like that. Dave (52:47.416) Yeah, and I gotta say I wouldn't hate it as an idea, as an option. Yeah. But honestly, I really wish they would just open things up a bit more and give us all these, all the nice things. Daniel (52:50.542) Yeah, I can see that. Daniel (52:58.542) can wrap it up like Mimi also wants to say hi. Dave (53:04.216) we have a cat on the mic. Awesome. Well, Daniel. Daniel (53:07.502) Yeah. Yes. Let's wrap it up. Dave, people should really find you on the internet and you and Govj. So where should they go to do that? Dave (53:12.92) Dave (53:22.008) Well, you can find out about Govj over on lightbeamapps .com. And certainly once version three is updated, there'll be an updated website linked off of there. But watch this space. We all know I'm dragging my feet on that. And over on the socials, you can find me on mastodon at dave at social .lightbeamapps .com. How about yourself, Daniel? Daniel (53:46.158) Find me at daniel at social dot telemetry dot com oops and also go to telemetry deck dot com and in the next few days there should be like one of those weird little new menus So tell me if you like it or not also Thanks everyone for listening. Please rate us on iTunes and give us a thumbs up on the YouTube's Send us emails at contact at waiting for review calm Dave (54:00.824) Mm -hmm. Daniel (54:15.534) and have a great rest of the week, Dave. Dave (54:16.28) Yep. You too mate, and yeah, catch you later, Daniel. Daniel (54:23.086) Bye! Dave (54:25.592) Bye.