218: MagSafe Cups of Water

App Challenges

The transition to APFS has introduced unexpected challenges for developers, as highlighted by Marco Arment and John Siracusa. Marco shares his experience with Overcast, where he had to temporarily remove support for AAC chapters due to crashes caused by Apple's metadata parser. He explains the complexity of the AAC format, noting its proprietary nature and the difficulties in parsing metadata without crashing the app 1.

The AAC chapters format is completely undocumented and proprietary to Apple. I've tried to figure it out on numerous times in numerous occasions in the past, and I've gotten most of it, but it's really, really tricky.

--- Marco Arment

John suggests exploring alternatives like switching from symlinks to hard links, but Marco emphasizes the need for a long-term solution, such as writing his own parser 2.

   

Storage Insights

The introduction of APFS has also led to peculiarities in partition and storage management. Casey Liss discusses a user's experience of unexpectedly gaining free space after upgrading to iOS 10.3, highlighting the changes in partition sizing 3.

If you have a 64 gig phone, it does what we were saying in the example last show with like, if you had a one gig disk and you put two one gig partitions, they have a 64 gig disk essentially in this phone.

--- John Siracusa

John elaborates on how APFS simplifies partition management by allowing both OS and user partitions to utilize the full disk capacity, which can lead to discrepancies in reported free space 3. Additionally, he speculates on Nvidia's potential return to Macs, noting job postings that suggest a renewed partnership with Apple, which could impact future Mac hardware 4.