What to Do When You Get Sherlocked by Apple
blog.astropad.com
blog.astropad.com
I spent months writing a very capable MIDI driver. In those days, writing a MIDI driver was a truly non-trivial exercise, as you had to have a MIDI adapter that fed back a 1MHz clock, which you would then program their UART to clock down.
That UART was also a pretty hairy bit of hardware. You had to program it with ASM, and the chip was set up so that a 16-bit address range corresponded to various control states. Setting control states for the chip meant a LOT of homework.
MIDI drivers basically were about as difficult as you could get, as you needed to step down an external clock, and set up things like ring buffers that were large enough to not trip over their own feet during an intense session.
Anyhoo, after a couple of months of working on the driver (and buying a DX-7 as a test bed), I was just about to announce it, when Apple came up with a package of OS utilities that included...a MIDI driver.
I don't think that theirs was as good as mine, but that was beside the point.
I open-sourced the driver, but the OS community wasn't particularly well-established back then, and I believe that it's lost in the sands of time.
Is this what happened with your MIDI driver?
For me, the novelty quickly wore off. Amazing how long Apple took to replicate THIS VERY OBVIOUS FEATURE.
Answer 2: Not especially, but those of us that have been programming Apple since the 1980s (I've been at it for a loooong time) have learned a rather cynical outlook.
Apple has a long, long history of stepping on its developers; often accidentally (but we still got stepped on).
I've taken OpenDoc and QuickDraw GX courses, because they were the future.
Anyone remember Copeland, and the enormous push behind it?
I still love programming Apple devices. I'm writing an open-source Bluetooth driver, right now.
I think your attitude is healthy btw.
Link?
https://github.com/RiftValleySoftware/RVS_GTDriver
I expect to have it to the same level as the original version in the next few days.
After that, I will be working on a BT Classic transport adapter.
I learned the hard way that it's a royal pain to try sniffing BLE.
Do you have a client who requires an interface to these devices? Or is it of general interest to you?
BearTooth uses Bluetooth Classic; not BLE. In the latest OS revisions, Apple claims to have integrated Classic into CoreBluetooth, but the documentation is terrible, so I’m not sure how seriously to take it.
You need multiple devices of the same type. When you buy them, they come in sets of two. You can have a whole network of them. goTenna markets a “pro” line, aimed at First Responders. You can buy sets of devices that go for like $20,000.
They have a military use case, but I doubt it’s battlefield, as these could easily be “shoot me” beacons.
I like that these are aimed at disaster response. I’ve been writing software to support NGO/NPO assistance for decades.
No client yet. I’m doing this because I want to learn Bluetooth programming, and I want to create much more lightweight and flexible SDKs than the ones that currently exist.
Their use case is that the devices establish a mesh network in RF, with devices acting as repeaters, and are controlled individually via Bluetooth. The current limitations on that seem to be software, as a function of their SDKs.
I’d like to improve On their SDKs. For example, I’d like to be able to control goTenna devices directly from a Watch. You can’t do that, with their established SDK.
I’m fairly good at SDKs. I’ve been writing them for decades. Most of the “closed” work I’ve done (what I was paid for) was SDK work.
The driver is really just the lower-level part of an SDK, designed to provide transport abstraction. There will be another layer over that, providing application implementation support.
I love coding. I'm a really good manager, but I don't love it.
Since I need to hang a coding shingle, I need to have a serious portfolio. These types of projects give me that.
I've made some technical switches (Java -> Embedded -> iOS) and found those to be hard; like you said, you need to have a serious portfolio before someone bothers interviewing you for either a job or a freelance project.
It was fairly gnarly.
In the aggregate, it all worked out for the best. That was my first open-source project, and most of what I've written since, has been open-source.
The idea to connect the iPad to use as a second display isn't that unique, there's Duet Display (founded by an ex Apple engineer), Astropad, and I think I've seen a couple of more apps. Watson was a pretty unique product; that's why people recognized Sherlock as a copy of Watson... but this feels like a company that developed a Voice Memo app for macOS complaining that macOS Mojave 'sherlocked' them by including Voice Memo by default.
I resorted to joining Zoom meetings twice and sharing the screen with my ipad session as host and drawing in the Notes App
I use it mainly for audio streaming from my phone to my MacMini / Stereo, and sometimes to play Alto's Adventure on a projector.
Or, if your Mac is compatible, just try Sidecar. There's a hack to make it work on older Macs, but I think officially it's tied to the ones that have hardware HEVC/h.265 support. http://osxdaily.com/2019/10/11/sidecar-compatible-mac-ipad-l...
It was for extending my desktop to a chromecast. Not mirroring but extending and acting a second monitor. It broke at OSX 10.13 and I gave them 6 months and stopped trying
Yes, multiple Zoom sessions from my same user account. I'd mostly do this to convey a diagram live with other people, that I would draw out. So They'd join once, I would join on one device and my ipad, with the first device being so they could see me sitting normally during the whole session.
[0] https://apps.apple.com/pl/app/screen-mirroring-app/id1463795...
HMMMMM well worth considering if other options don’t pan out
https://www.imore.com/luna-display
Love my Luna - even with sidecar I still see me using Luna. Hope they survive :(
Apple pencil latency on ipad OS is crazy low and I hear it was already lower than a typical wacom tablet, so this is quite compelling. Sad for Astropad that Apple are taking their business away, but it is a logical step really... :/
Astropad does this, yes. https://astropad.com
Astropad is mostly sour grapes. Sure I feel sympathy that their market dried up but the feature (Airplay, Chromecast) has been just a compile away from being available. Yea I know they support input too but you can make similar arguments for imput. How far of is the standalone bluetooth touchpad code from just running the same or slightly tweaked software on an iPad to use as a touchpad, etc... Heck, I wrote a touchscreen driver for the Amiga. I'm sure it didn't take more than 2-3 days. It's not like the device doesn't have that feature already built in and transfering that data over to the mac is not a some crazy impossible never been done before process.
People make these arugments before. Networking drivers were not part of the OS in the earily 90s. Companies selling network cards complained when Microsoft added networking to Windows. TCP/IP stacks were not part of Windows pre 1993. There's an long list of features that got added as standard features to most OSes. Thumbnails for images in Finder/Explorer (use to need 3rd party software). Memory management. Anyone remember buying QEMM? Browsers started out separate from the OS. They are separate now but I can't imagine desktop OS shipping without one.
Astropad deserves credit for shipping a feature years ahead of Apple adding it. That in itself is worth a lot. At the same time, the functionality is very obvious. The real lesson here should be something about expecting to be copied from day 1. Anyone that’s been around for a while knows that is just reality. You don’t get special credit for having an idea first or producing a working product long before someone else. There are patents and trademarks but those only go so far. The more obvious what you are doing, the more likely other people are working on it even if you don’t know it. History is littered with that sort of thing.
The “feature” was being done a month after the iPad was introduced in 2010.
https://gizmodo.com/review-idisplay-turns-your-ipad-into-a-s...
Holy crap they got (HBO) Silicon Valley "Brain Raped."[0] What sickens me is that Apple wouldnt just outright buy them out instead. If you are designing something like this... Make sure you patent as much as possible. That would of guaranteed a buyout. Course not sure how patentable that idea would of been by now if they had other competitors.
Unless they divulged some really clever low-latency video compression optimizations during these meetings (I bet making the mouse cursor move with low latency was the #1 priority - everything else is boring plumbing)... I'm filing this under the "CEO's slightly dramatically exaggerated regrets", maybe for the benefits of his investors.
But part of the problem is probably the drawing software too, because even native drawing has different latency between drawing apps:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNbvYaO0ZZ0
It's not an easy problem because even 1 ms latency is noticeable in drawing as Microsoft research showed:
While its certainly plausible that Apple engaged in some kind of two-faced corporate espionage here, another plausible explanation is that Apple is an enormous company, and the part of it that was working on Sidecar had little or no connection at all with the part that was talking to Astropad.
It probably isn't even that. The "Left hand" could be engineers who are only thinking about technical and product design aspects and really want the thing to go off and succeed. And then, just when it's about to happen, a legal team does the final check and someone higher in the hierarchy has to approve it and they say "wait, can we just build this in house much cheaper". The Right Hand just learned what the Left Hand was up to, and decided that it isn't perfectly in company's interest, so they adjust it a bit.
Is there utility in such a distinction?
e.g. if malice, then sharing ideas is more dangerous; if byzantine organization dynamics, then it's less dangerous.
The business reality is that almost any software can be easily replicated by BigTechCo for a max of a couple million dollars, far less than any founder is hoping to get acquired for.
In an acquisition, buyers are not buying the software despite whatever PR-friendly face gets put on it. They're buying something they can't just easily generate by locking a few of their already-employed engineers in a closet, which means either a) intellectual property via patents; or b) an audience/userbase that the acquiring company can't already easily access.
No entrepreneur should go into it without internalizing and understanding that. Code is cheap. If you want to be acquired, you have to bring something to the table.
(also note: for Google and Apple, "a lot of mobile users" isn't really part of that equation)
In the 1990s, 2000s, or heck even early 2010s this would have been an open source utility that someone had spent a few months building as a passion project. And then 5-10 people from around the world would have pitched in a work week here and there to make it work really well and lots of people using it would be really happy from using it.
Now, because everything that possibly can be monetized needs to be monetized.. it has to be monetized. And everything needs to be made into a company, with programmers, product management, marketing, HR, legal etc etc.
I hate to defend Apple here, because I think they are beginning to halt progress rather than bring it forward, but.. meh. It's just a goddamn feature. You can't call dibs on obvious features. (And in terms of obviousness, I think this one is a lot more obvious than Sherlock.)
What I will say is that I think - despite the harm to the specific developer of the competing product - that adding new features to the OS for free is a net positive for consumers. It's one less thing they have to pay for out of their own pockets, and enhances the overall value of the product and its ecosystem.
Step 2: Allow Macs to use AirPlay to create a separate display from a Mac.
Step 3: “We have this nice beatific light display call the iPad and we already have the capability of low latency AirPlay”.....
Is that not obviously the next step?
iPad -> AirPlay -> 5KPlayerr -> Windows
Mac -> AirPlay -> AppleTV -> TV
Mac -> iDisplay (2010) -> iPad (https://gizmodo.com/review-idisplay-turns-your-ipad-into-a-s...)
Seeing that every combination between iPad/Windows/Mac/Airplay has been done for between 6-8 years. Why isn’t this obvious?
There was also a way you could hack around with VNC to do it early on.
And the author isn't calling "dibs" at all; her company's product hit the market first, but she isn't claiming any right to that market.
Not calling dibs: fair enough.
Edit: Just noticed the pronoun you used and was confused. I vaguely remember these people (the creators of this product) from when they launched the product as, well, male.
Turns out they still are: Here's their separate blog post btw:
https://blog.astropad.com/a-message-from-astropads-founders/
Did it? I remember hearing about Duet Display first, but maybe I just missed it.
That does not obviate their point, of course. Getting Sherlocked by your platform sucks.
Basically it's the fault of the bizarre SV venture capital funding model.
And in fact YC CEO Michael Seibel has said on many, many occasions that the number one reason YC companies fail is because they hire too many people, too quickly.
VC companies push you to grow efficiently not just grow at any cost (unless of course you have unique unit economics).
I wish that was the case. Unfortunately, patents exist and they enable exactly that sort of thing.
TBH, I'm actually surprised this didn't happen sooner -- it's the obvious solution to a lagging Adobe Photoshop and pro tools that immediately give the iPad strong value and staying power.
It’s a surprise though that Apple is making some moves that appear to cater to pro users, since the overwhelming sentiment seems to be that Apple has completely abandoned the pro market. I loved my mac laptop, but it’s becoming very clear I can’t stay on the platform. I work with a lot of CG film companies and everyone I know feels the same way, that Apple no longer has any interest in customers doing high end design. I suddenly don’t know anybody who’s not migrating away from macOS.
Only need higher performance ARM cores. And this isn't in the "impossible" or "silly pie-in-the-sky" bucket either.
But in the current environment we are in, I am seriously considering using cross-platform software like Ableton Live and DaVinci Resolve. This is due to the fear of being locked-in hardware wise.
The new Mac Pro caters almost exclusively to pro users. Normal people (at this time) have little use for a computer and monitor that cost 5 figures with the specs on offer. The “pros” I know that benefit from this level of power are chomping at the bit to get the new Mac Pros and the monitors. Just the capabilities of Logic and Final Cut with the Mac Pro are astounding.
OTOH, she uses the touchscreen all the time. Even when something would be easier with the keyboard, like filling in a form field and just hitting Enter, she finishes typing and reaches up to touch the button on the screen. If anything can be done by touching the screen, that's how she does it.
It seems a bit strange to me, but she loves the touchscreen!
But different folks, different strokes. I have a ChromeBook with a touch screen that I never use. But I have a friend who, if I hand over the ChromeBook to look at something, their natural reaction is to swipe the screen to scroll, which is something I almost never do.
I’m in the ‘get your fingers off my screen’ camp but there are undeniable benefits.
IMO, there needs to be a detachable keyboard with trackpad that really locks to a tablet so the screen doesn't need to be propped up in some manner. Some things out there get close but not quite.
Also pretty heavy and pricey.
Buying the company? If so, what about the competing companies that offer this functionality? Apple obviously felt it would be easier/cheaper to build than buy.
This said, single-platform feature apps like this are always at risk from this sort of thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
Note that nearly all of these occurred after Steve Jobs’ return and continued apace after his death.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
This makes me believe that if Apple is building their own rather than buying, perhaps there’s not a whole lot of innovation that the app developer created that wasn’t trivially replaceable.
Especially since all of the Apple senior leadership team were still there making the same decisions as when Jobs was CEO.
No it isn't.
That is capitalism and cut-throat business. These guys were foolish for getting so close to Apple when Apple could literally destroy their entire business by adding a single feature.
Protip: If your business is defined by a single feature, your strategy sucks.
I don't have a lot to add except to say that the blog entry was substantially more insightful, honest, introspective, and valuable to the reader than I would have expected given the circumstances. The author and the company deserve a lot of credit for dealing with setbacks so graciously. Meanwhile, Apple deserves another helping of skepticism.
I look forward to seeing what kinds of creative display tricks Astropad comes up with in their multi-platform adventures on Rust.
(Again, this applies to every large tech company, not just apple)
Legal operations software, for example, is about a 1 billion market[0].
Your startup can compete in this space but it's too small to be worth pursing for Microsoft.
[0] https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2019/07/05/187891...
And they will only do so in a market that is core to them.
The advice is useful because if I’m building a feature I will either be purchased by a product or eventually be added into a product.
I think the risk is thinking you are a product company when actually a feature company and then not diversifying.
Spending $10M worth of resources on a project within Apple is not even notable, meanwhile that's a healthy series A for a startup.
There are only handful of companies (Google and FB come to mind) that make products for Apple's platform that Apple can't easily replicate itself.
My company was Sherlocked in 2017 when Apple released ARKit and our flagship product, an AR SDK with SLAM was made obsolete overnight. We knew it was coming, but didn't know when, so we diversified into mobile-web computer vision products before it happened.
Didn't matter though, the third party mobile AR tool landscape isn't robust enough to sustain more than a handful of content companies. All the hard tech in AR is being done by FB, Goog and Apple so we were dead in the long run anyway.
We were lucky though that a niche market for our mobile web product was desirable enough for an acquisition and we found that offramp. I don't think most companies can survive a sherlocking.
I have an older Mac as my daily driver and was bummed to learn it was excluded from the Sidecar functionality. As a daily Wacom user, I’ve really wanted this feature.
So, I went and looked at Astropad and learned that their pricing is based around a ludicrous subscription model and they lock basic functionality behind it (like shortcuts). They obviously don’t understand their market because Adobe is near reviled by digital artists nowadays for these kind of tactics.
If they had at all been reasonable in their to pricing, they would have been fine. Most artists I know hold onto their hardware for a long time and would’ve payed (reasonably) for support/their feature set. But because they got greedy, people will just wait and upgrade to the built-in support on newer devices.
Rather enthusiastically I was advocating, and filing bugs to allow me to ship a side project I had been working on for quite a while: A way to network MIDI devices on OSX. Multicast, very low latency, auto-discovery etc. I basically entirely trusted them with all the ideas, thinking it wasn't something they would need, or care, to ship in OSX at any time in the future because it was so niche.
I was wrong, next major OSX version, they had it -- in a more primitive way than my product -- but they had it.
I that point I had been a mac developer, one of the old school, since 1985 or so. And I literally dropped tools and decided to do something else entirely.
Now I still use a Hackintosh mostly for a few programs I still cary on using, but my work has entirely shifted away from Apple.
And so if it's a great idea that is going to benefit consumers not sure why Apple wouldn't add it.
Interesting comment by a company whose apps replicate what has been available for almost a decade. I remember using software to turn my 1st generation iPad into a second screen, back in 2010. Have been through at least three variants of the same app since.
I'm not happy with platform owners eating more and more of their own market, and think some of the anti-competitive clauses of app stores should be illegal, but there is no high horse to stand on here.
It made reading this article a bit off-putting because they seem to imagine they were the sole bearers of such a product; they were not and never have been.
https://www.extremetech.com/computing/138762-how-to-use-your...
You’ve also been able to hack stuff like this together using VNC.
Hear: Make your product better and more feature rich, focusing on a narrow segment of the mass market Apple is trying to serve.
I felt quite bad for Spotify and Flux when Apple Music and Night shift came out, but I guess this is a risk when you use any type of platform to reach customers.
Diversification is a good idea, I’m impressed was impressed with the response in the article.
This poisons the well for an entire genre of productivity apps.
Trader Joe's does this, and some googling will tell you who really makes some of their products. Costco is known for rebranding some impressively good single malt scotches and selling them cheap.
1) Have your work patented. 2) Be acquired by a larger firm that can enforce your patents.
If you don't have a patent, then anyone can copy anything you create, and economies of scale are going to catch up to you and force you out of business.
I personally don't believe in patents, but it's the only way to operate today.
You mean like Apple? What other firm is going to acquire a startup with products like this, which are so tightly tied into MacOS/iOS?
Duh, quite obvious, diversification is what all companies desire, but most just try and milk the golden goose for as long as possible. Until it is too late.
It does astonish me though when every year I walk through the booths at AWS Summit (poor man's Re:Invent) and see all these companies that are a feature-announcement-in-one-tiny-paragraph-in-an-AWS-blog-post away from going out of business. But I guess it pays the mortgage bills for a lot of people until those blog posts.
As an oldie, who remembers the kinds of money that was being made in the late 80s early 90s in software development tools? Cool languages. Powerful compilers. CASE tools. Libraries. Innovative IDEs. I worked in that space (Smalltalk VisualWorks). Businesses paid good money to fund those efforts, to try and have competitive advantage to develop better solutions than the competition. But in a similar vein, the OS vendors (as well as free open source) moved into this space, and then there was very little money to be made in 3rd party software development tools.
So I feel these guys pain. But the expansion transcends the particular type of add in they're making money in.
(1) Take a deep breath, don't pretend nothing happened
(2) Don't just compete, look at how you can provide additional value to those customers that will also use the incumbent's offering
(3) Get on with your roadmap on improving value for and delighting all your customers
When Microsoft announced Teams [1], we thought our own team collaboration product [2] would be severely impacted. Not that we were surprised that Microsoft came out with this product after having lauded ours in the past. Team collaboration was always on their radar, and had been declared strategic for years. But I will not deny that it still makes you feel as if the ground beneath your feet is rumbling.
We knew from past experiences, and our contacts, that Microsoft would push this product hard into their ecosystem. So we had to keep in mind that most of our customers would be aware of it if not already, soon, and at least there would be questions of whether they should consider going with Microsoft or not.
But we also had been competing successfully for years as a 'small indie' shop against outfits that were swimming in VC money, so stiff competition was not a 'new' experience. However, Microsoft being the gorilla in the room stapling in their offering into O365 might be a different beast altogether.
So what to do?
First we acknowledged that going forward many of our customers would also have Teams, by choice or by company policy. So we looked at how our customers might benefit from having both. I think this is a key question you should ask. Not just 'how is my offer better than theirs', but how are both together better than just the competing offer from the behemoth?
In our case this meant two things
- making sure that you play nice with the new app, in a way that the experience of using both is seamless.
- find specific scenarios where the users of the incumbent app benefit from having yours as well
We developed an integration with Teams[3] that covered these points. We also doubled down on our roadmap, making sure that both standalone and dual app users receive increased value over time. Dual might be a bit of a misnomer since nearly 100% of our customer base even before Teams touched collaboration across different applications and services, Outlook and SharePoint being the most prominent.
I'm not saying this is a recipe that will lead to guaranteed success in every case. It worked for us and we kept growing both our customer base and revenue all through the advent of Teams and thereafter. Of course I can not compare this to a world where Teams was never introduced. I remain however convinced that where possible, the strategy of not just competing but also adding value to those customers that chose or were forced onto the platform provider's own offer is far preferable to one were you just go head-to-head.
Always offer the best product, but also offer the better-together experience.
[1] https://products.office.com/en-us/microsoft-teams
[2] https://tasksinabox.com/apps
[3] https://tasksinabox.com/integrations/microsoft-teams-integra...
Assume their next iteration will be better. Then what? By all means, believe in your team to be competitive head-to-head. But also assume Microsoft/Apple/google/... will be present and eventually if not already will/might be pretty decent.
Or they might just be part of the package. For many of our product champions in corporate environments, SharePoint was not something they chose, but it still was part of their daily reality and not something they could ignore or stop using.
I hope I'm not downplaying just how hard it can be when your core revenue generating product is just being completely commoditized by a 'ham sandwich'[1]. I'm just trying to relate an experience where we could absorb and even grow through the impact in the hope it might keep others from being discouraged in difficult times
[1] Steve Ballmer, famously said the company could bundle a ham sandwich into Windows if it wanted to
I also considered how easy it is to have your iPhone screen show up as an video source in QuickTime Player, just by plugging in a lightning cable...
I'm deleting basically all of them (possibly excepting VNC, which has a few different use cases) and switching to Sidecar.
Can’t you do that with SideCar as well?
I was thinking doing this instead of buying a new Apple Tv. Like having an iPad driving a Mac Mini via SideCar but also connected to a regular tv.
Then fb partnered w some big name to do another app that copied the functionality very poorly, but fb promoted it far and above the other all, effectively killing it.
Lesson #6: Lean into your competitive advantages by showing off what differentiates you from Apple.
This is exactly why I continue to pay for an Alfred license over just using basic spotlight search.
I use a Mac for work - and most of user that I know don't slavishly follow the glorified press conference that Apple holds. I dare say most users don't know about most of the new features in the utility laptop they buy or are forced to use at work.
Astropad lets you use your iPad as a second display for your Mac, with an emphasis on functioning as a tool for artists. It used to support multiple iPad styluses but moved to only supporting the Apple Pencil.
Sidecar lets you use your iOS13 iPad as a second display for your Catalina Mac, with an emphasis on functioning as a tool for artists. I have not used it but I am pretty sure it only supports the Apple Pencil.
Both of these are sort of functioning as an alternative to buying an external monitor with pressure-sensitive stylus support, which is generally going to be more expensive than a tablet - Wacom's Cintiq line, for instance, runs from $700 for a 13-inch screen to $3300 for a 32-inch screen.
They are also in competition with the growing power of tablet apps; there's a lot of former Photoshop painters who have switched to Procreate or the tablet version of Manga Studio to get their work done.
It works fine with touch. The Pencil just allows for more precision and easier secondary actions.
The web on the other hand is open and no single company can just change it in a whim.
Always believe in the web.
For example, their graphical editor could perhaps be a web app instead of relying on big bad Apple.
The web is good for displaying information, but it’s not a 1-1 replacement for native.
But I honestly think all your examples are soon to be quite possible with WebGL and WebAssembly. Most apps I use today are web apps so you can do a lot more than just display CRUD. That is simply BS from your part.
Some examples, I stream all my movies that I rent via youtube, I talk to people in real time via Discord, I download files with WebTorrent and I do all my coding in Visual Studio Code.
All of those are web apps and none of those would I consider only to be CRUD apps. Downvote all you want, it is still true that you can do a lot more than simply CRUD on the web.
There is even image editors coming up, sure they are a bit basic still but I think that is about to change: https://pixlr.com/x/
But I do think that companies should start thinking of cross-platform compatibility now.