A Better Future for Everybody
I sound like crap because I'm still freaking sick.
Yeah, I'm currently nursing a throat lozenge or whatever they call a cough drop.
It's pronounced lozenge.
Ah, right.
And bazelle.
Yep.
That was a reference, John, to you, actually.
Anyway.
culturally significant that one time i mispronounced the word it was culturally significant anyway uh i have a question for you too how in the name of zeus's butthole also a reference do you get healthy when you have a child that is waking up in the middle of the night more than occasionally because he's like in a wonder week or teething or sick or whatever um how do you ever get healthy if you can't sleep waking up in the middle of the night implies that the rest of the night the baby is sleeping so really you don't have anything to plan about
It's just this time in the night when the baby wakes up.
If that is significant, then that tells you that the rest of the night, you have an expectation that the baby will be asleep.
So really, you have a really good sleeping baby and you can't complain that much.
How do you get better?
You will eventually.
It'll happen.
You'll see.
All right.
Well, to continue with the housekeeping, all kidding aside, for the two of your benefit, for your two's benefit and for the live listeners, if I suddenly go silent in the middle of saying something, just give me five to ten seconds and assume I'm hacking up a lung and I'm just muted and just carry on.
Well, I guess don't carry on.
Just give me a moment.
And if I really have disappeared, assume that I've poured more stuff on Aaron's Mac and it's just all over at this point.
Now, don't pour cough syrup on there for many reasons.
First of all, there's no way it would survive that.
Second of all, cough syrup doesn't actually work.
That's probably true.
It really, like nothing.
Like, believe me, I'm an expert in coughing.
Like, cough suppressants just don't work.
Like, the only effective ones are like the narcotic ones that just knock you out.
yeah that's that suppresses your cough because it puts you to sleep right like it's not that's not really fixing the right problem it's like yeah shooting you in the head but also stop your cough you know not maybe not a good idea but you know that would that would do it so yeah it cough nothing that's a cough suppressant actually works the only thing that works is either fixing the root problem which isn't always possible
Or, if you're lucky, just, like, chain-sucking... Please don't make that a title.
Chain-sucking those Ricola cough drops with the menthol.
They're, like, traditional default flavor, whatever it is.
Not, like, the weird fruit ones.
The regular, like, the brown ones that taste like menthol.
That helps as long as it's in your mouth.
Like...
As soon as it's gone, it stops working.
See, that's why you have to have, like, if you buy those, just go right for the big bag.
The one that has, like, 40 instead of 10.
Go right for the big bag.
Want to do some follow-up?
Cool.
Sounds great.
John, Serge K wrote in and quoted you in saying that you said the drive just see blocks.
It doesn't know about file systems.
Serge wanted to tell us that firmware of modern drives reaches one million lines of code and they do recognize common file systems.
Obviously, encryption breaks this, but that's not common, especially in data centers.
This allows the drive to reorder or delay commit some metadata updates that are recoverable by checking disk in case of failure.
You had put this in the show notes, so tell us a little more about this, please.
I'm actually surprised by this because this implies some sort of synergy in the market between the people who sell these drives and the machines they're expected to go in and the file systems they're going to use.
How can the firmware on a drive know about a file system?
How does it know what file system it's even being initialized with?
how does that communication happen across the various layers of the storage system to say like can you just buy one of these mechanisms stick it in a thing and format it as ext4 or whatever and then it knows that it's formatted by ext4 and does clever things this is actually very interesting um and it's the type of thing that uh capital o capital a tm only apple can do but hey wait this has nothing to do with apple i thought only apple could have this kind of connection between hardware and software well apparently it can also happen in the wild and woolly world of
What I imagine are Linux servers and random storage hardware.
So I'm always interested in cases where the supposedly rigid layers of the storage hierarchy are, quote unquote, violated as the claim was about ZFS back in the day.
It was a rampant layering violation, combining the file system and logical volume management and a bunch of other things and RAID all into one thing.
Like, you know, we have this nice layered approach where each thing is responsible for each layer and I can mix and match my logical volume manager with my file system, with my RAID thing.
And ZFS combined them all to, I think, great effect.
by saying if we don't have that mix and match thing, kind of like the way Apple, you know, Macs are not mix and match, where you get to pick your own CPU and pick your own this and pick your own that and build your own Mac, that Apple picks the components in the same way.
ZFS, by picking all those different layers and combining them, did some really interesting and cool things.
This sounds like an interesting and cool thing.
This is the first I've ever heard of this, that an SSD, I'm assuming it just says drives here, that an SSD...
uh knows about the file system and i would love to learn more about how that actually happens um but there you have it at least one report that this this is now a thing all right uh we also had uh someone write in ryan wrote in apparently ryan is the one honda fit driver that listens to the show and he or she was not uh was wanted to correct us about cameras on the fit and as our resident honda expert john would you like to tell us a little more
I think I was making a joke last time about like toasters, how, you know, you can make a decent toaster for 50 bucks.
Like you just concentrate on the important things in the same way that you don't expect a Honda Fit to have the fancy cameras that Marco's BMW has.
You don't expect a fancy toaster to have all the bells and whistles.
You just want the basics right.
Like I was saying that the knobs on a Honda Fit and the controls on a Honda Fit still feel like they're quality components, even though it's a cheap car.
apparently i don't know if this is an optional or standard equipment the honda fit does have cameras on the all sides on all sides of it i don't know if it does that synergy thing uh maybe ryan didn't understand the feature that on marco's car where yes it has cameras on all the corners it also combines the cameras to show you as if there's like a virtual camera floating above your car looking down on it so you can see what's on all sides of your car in real time yes the bird's eye view yeah uh so i think this is just uh
a bunch of cameras on the corners to show you like your blind spots and stuff which is cool and everything and it just shows how this this tech is slowly creeping down uh and you know that once you have the cameras in place the the extra bit of you know smarts to combine them into an image isn't that complicated so it seems like it will eventually trickle down to even the cheapest cars but
that shows show that either uh as standard equipment or possibly optional on the honda fit you have a bunch of cameras that show you things i even even on my honda accord i have a backup camera so you know they're cameras they're coming to cars near you yes and please please don't write in telling us about regulations and things that are going to require backup cameras to be there we know about those thank you
also um unrelated to any of the other follow-up unknown has told us that there's lots of classical music in the itunes music store and on apple music i'm not sure why that's significant but it's in the show notes and we have now covered it yeah i don't know who who said that but a bunch of people that's not a quote it was like say oh that you know there's tons of classical music and then the very next thing from frank hertz is for unknown reasons apple itunes apple music spotify anything are awful at classical music vast archives of studio recordings remain unavailable online
So there are two opinions on classical music.
One person saying that one person whose name I did not record saying there's tons of classical music and another person saying that there's not.
So I don't know what to think, but obviously at least one person is not satisfied with the selection available.
You don't say.
Yeah.
And then Chris wrote in to say that another thing that's not on iTunes is hip hop mixtapes.
Even mainstream ones are almost never on streaming services or stores due to copyright for all the samples they include, which I guess kind of falls under the same category as mashups.
All right.
This is my favorite piece of follow up for this week.
We had somewhat comically, somewhat flippantly told underscore David Smith in the last episode or had assumed that underscore David Smith would figure out the origin of the phrase on an infinite time scale.
This was referenced about 43 minutes into the last episode.
Underscore has reported in, which is totally unsurprising and yet kind of surprising.
And he has said that the first usage of the exact phrase infinite timescale was by Marco on ATP 83 at about an hour and 14 minutes.
However, the concept was introduced in ATP 53 at about an hour and 16 minutes.
But, and now I'm quoting, John never used the now canonical phrasing himself.
I loved underscore David Smith.
I don't know how he figured this out.
I don't know what he did, but he figured it out.
Well, he is the official show historian.
That is true.
He is the official show historian.
And the reason he looked this up is that my contention is that this infinite timescale thing is not the canonical phrasing of anything, that it is what Marco made up to make fun of my argument that I made to him and probably in episode three.
And it was the concept.
The concept, once again, was that if you agree with me that something will happen eventually but can never actually agree on any actual finite time, like, well, you know, and then that's the Marco.
Well, on an infinite timescale, the idea is that you're not saying, you know, yeah.
it will happen when time equals infinity you're saying we all agree that at some point in the future this thing will happen but it won't happen this year or next year or the year after that or the year after that or the year after that and so you try to try to get to pin the person down you say uh well is it ever going to happen or is it never and as well it's going to happen eventually of course we agree but then it's like all right five years 10 years 15 years 100 years and so infinite time scale infinity was is conceptually in there but i don't think i use that particular phrase again i'm not entirely sure because
Who can remember what you say?
So I had... I would love for people to find definitively the sources.
Someone else wrote in and said they thought it was on debug.
I think it was Guy English was saying, like, maybe you said it on debug.
Because I've made similar arguments with stubborn people who refuse to acknowledge the inevitability of the future.
I believe, by the way, the argument with Marco was about... No, the argument maybe with Guy and Marco was both about how Objective-C needed to be replaced.
Yep, that's right.
And I had to resort to, like...
uh we all agree it's going to happen eventually right guys you're like yeah we'll find and eventually turn out to be like next year or something yeah it was like six months away yeah right but that's something like you never sometimes it's farther than you think and whenever it's like a new technology is going to be able in five to ten years especially if it has to do with medicine uh it's always five to ten years away and it just seems like it takes so you know so long to get there but in tech you can be caught by surprise because
lots of things in tech are feasible right now but we know there's a bunch of other things that are stopping them from happening and so it could happen tomorrow but probably not and it didn't happen last year and didn't happen the year before like we were with objective c for so long and you know even me with my whole thing of like copeland 2010 2010 came and went still objective c right uh so that's that's the fun of the industry we're in that uh
Unlike medicine and other fields where things are very often and pure science, things are very often much farther out than you think they are in technology.
There are lots of things that we know are possible today, but that sort of market forces or momentum or, you know, just stubbornness of the people in charge of these companies causes not to happen when we want them to.
But then like you could just wake up one day and boom, all of a sudden it's there.
Boom, Apple has a new file system.
Where did that come from?
Oh, God.
Someday it'll happen, right?
Someday.
It'll happen next year.
It could.
It could literally happen.
It could have happened this year.
It could literally happen next year.
There's nothing stopping it other than, you know, taking a really long time to do something that should have been done years ago.
I enjoy this, what has become a routine segment of, in every show, John has to explain one of the arguments he's made in the past that everybody keeps slightly misunderstanding.
Yeah.
Well, the idea that infinite timescale, the infinite timescale argument, that that is the short version of this thing, it's a terrible short name because it's misleading.
So that's why I'm trying to figure out, is this my fault?
Did I actually say this?
Or is this Marco's fault?
And so far, it's looking like it's Marco's fault.
Most likely, yeah.
But I am really good at naming things, even if the names aren't entirely accurate.
Yeah, you should have just called it the argument.
Yeah, exactly.
All right.
And our final piece of follow-up, which I didn't even think to include until I noticed it in the show notes, so somebody else had said it, I guess Marco.
This is a very good idea.
In the show notes, it reads as follows.
Marco would like to explain the state of U.S.
radio to non-Americans.
So, Marco...
Yeah, I put this in here last minute because I kept thinking, we kept getting feedback from people because last time we talked a lot about Beats 1 and about how terrible modern radio is, like broadcast FM radio.
And I will include Sirius XM in there as well.
I've been an XM customer for a long time.
Then when Howard Stern went over, I became a Sirius customer.
And I've been a satellite radio customer since about 2003.
Yeah, about 2003, 2002.
So I've been there for a long time.
And before that, radio was my whole youth.
Radio was everything to me.
Music was everything.
I grew up with radio, as I think we all did, being a very big deal.
And the state of radio, from what I've heard from people, the state of radio in other countries, especially what sounds like people love BBC One and BBC Radio, which I have no familiarity with at all.
I don't even know if that's the right station.
I don't know.
But it sounds like radio in other places is potentially good sometimes.
And in the U.S., that is just not the case.
Like, radio in the U.S.
was gutted by Clear Channel, which is now iHeartRadio.
It was gutted by Clear Channel over the last couple decades.
And, you know, you can't just blame one company and say they ruined everything.
The fact is, like, the difficult economics of radio ruined everything, really.
But...
It just became cheaper and crappier and more and more automated and fake.
And it just became horrible to the point where now most FM stations in America are not, there's very little human involvement there.
It's not like a DJ sitting at a console playing records all day.
You know, everything's like recorded ahead of time or just recording.
Yeah.
and so radio in america is just terrible it's full of the worst commercials in the world the same like 20 songs in a loop on a playlist and sirius xm is in most ways no better it is as much as i i've been a customer of this company for so many years um it's a horrible company it like it's horribly run they have pretty questionable ethics when it comes to their marketing and billing practices um
The audio quality is just awful over the air and their website is terrible.
Their app is terrible.
It's always been terrible.
The only reason this company exists and succeeds first was because it had eclectic music channels and nothing else had.
And at a time in the early 2000s when nobody had unlimited data plans on their cell phones in their pockets that could play streaming services.
um and then and of course after that then howard stern came on and that made a huge difference and now there's there's some some exclusive talk shows that have big audiences as well but for the most part i see no future for satellite radio i think satellite radio is dead um i think it'll be interesting to see what happens to sirius when howard leave to see how much of an impact he has because one of the problems with satellite radio is that they can't tell who's listening to what so they can't tell like
How many of their customers are listening to Howard Stern over the air versus other shows?
Who knows?
But anyway, it'll be interesting to see what happens when his contract is up this fall and he has to decide to stay or go somewhere else in it.
Sure, sounds like from his comments he's not going to stay, so we'll see what happens.
I've heard a few people suggest that maybe Apple would hire him to do like a Beats 2 and it's all talk.
I don't see that happening at all, just because I don't see Apple wanting his, basically his profanity and dirtiness.
And I don't see him wanting to do a show without it.
Apple won't even let any porn in the App Store.
I think they end up with Howard Stern on their radio station.
So going back to the original point, radio is horrible in America.
Sirius XM is horrible.
And so Beats 1 being like DJs that are talented at being DJs, playing good music,
That is actually novel again, because we haven't had that for a very long time in America.
So that's why it was such a big deal to us last year, or last week, rather.
And if the rest of the world, you know, if you have great radio stations on just broadcast, that's great.
Congratulations.
Enjoy them while you can.
Enjoy them while they're there.
We haven't had them in a very long time.
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All right.
So we had kind of teased this last week, and we should probably talk about it this week.
John, is Safari the new IE?
Ugh.
Somebody says it is or sort of says it is.
And then sort of retracted it.
But it's all right.
He seems like a good guy.
So I don't know.
I sympathize with somebody writing a rant and then it being spread way more than you think it should or that you expected.
And then you have to deal with all the like, oh, wait a minute.
Maybe I didn't actually mean that as severely as I said or people are taking the wrong idea from it.
Yeah, I sympathize with that a little bit.
Really?
So this is Nolan Lawson, the person we're talking about here.
He wrote a thing called Safari is the New IE.
It was republished or whatever by Ars Technica, but he's got it on his own site as well.
It was syndicated, John.
Is that what it was?
I don't understand.
I first read it on Ars, but yeah, somehow it appeared in multiple places.
Yeah, I like ours, but I refuse to link to a syndicated version of the post.
We're going to link to the original one.
But the whole thing was there, though.
So I'm assuming they asked him, hey, can we... Yeah, yeah.
It was with permission.
Every time I write an article that spreads anywhere, I get a handful of big sites saying, hey, we'd love to syndicate your article to our audience.
And I've agreed a couple times in the past.
You know what it got me?
Nothing.
Nothing.
Every time I did it, it got me nothing.
All it did was dilute the value of my original article, compete for it in search results, and make my site look worse to Google because now I have duplicate content.
It looks like I stole it from Ars Technica.
Nice.
It wasn't actually ours that I've done in the past.
I won't blame them specifically, but it just never worked out well for me as the author.
It helps the site that syndicates it because they get content for free.
It doesn't really help you, the author, in a meaningful way.
Anyway, so the gist of this article is Nolan Lawson is a web developer, and he said himself that he is an Android user and an enthusiastic web developer, and he contributes to a bunch of web standard stuff.
And he's very upset and frustrated with Apple for, in general...
two major things one of kind of lagging behind implementing new web standards as they come out and especially some of the more advanced recent stuff involving things like local databases local storage and like device access stuff like that and secondly he's frustrated with them for not being visible active participants in the web development community and the conferences and stuff that he goes to as as a developer and he thinks they need to be
So I don't know.
I mean, we are all current or past web developers.
What do you guys think of this?
I felt like it was reasonable for him to be embittered that Apple wasn't really participating in this conference.
I'm going on the assumption, not knowing any better, that this conference was important and it wasn't like the Richmond, Virginia Web Developers Conference.
I don't even recall what it was, but I'm going on faith that the conference was one that it would be appropriate for Apple to appear at.
I understand that Apple doesn't usually like to show its hand.
I understand that this is not usually Apple style.
I don't think it's unreasonable for someone who is into the quote-unquote open web to say, hey, it's kind of BS that Apple wasn't there.
I don't take any issue with that.
I do think he got a little bit aggressive saying Safari's the new IE.
And the way I read the original article was that he was bitter that his favorite new features of the web or his favorite, I don't know, new technologies, Apple doesn't seem to be supporting.
And he seemed like he was pretty grumpy about that.
I don't think that was really necessary.
But like you said, Marco, sometimes you're just fired up about stuff and you get a little aggressive and you really kind of regret it afterwards.
Yeah.
And it's important that, you know, he did write this follow up piece and he addresses many of the common criticisms head on and elaborates a little bit more and does kind of retract some of the severity of his original post.
And he's and, you know, he talks about the title like, you know, Safari is the new IE is a really catchy title.
It's, you know, some people accused him of being link baity.
It sounds like that wasn't really his intent, but, you know, it doesn't matter.
I think we can move past that analogy because that is irrelevant because it's really not accurate.
And, you know, we were all around developing for the old IEs that were really bad.
I mean, the new IEs are glorious compared to the old ones.
And they're still not quite right, but they're much closer now than they used to be.
uh and it is it is impossible to to understate how much of a pain it was to develop any kind of advanced web layout even or even any kind of simple web layout honestly any kind of web layout in like 2006 when you when you when there was all this great stuff moving forward and you had to still support these terrible versions of ie that broke everything in such big ways like
it was so much worse back then believe me so this is not yeah that was not a fair analogy but i think we can move past that as you know that's not really the point well i think there is something to that the reason why he picked that title part of it could be as you said like looking at this picture here maybe he's young enough that he didn't live through the dark times and doesn't understand exactly exactly how grim situation was when you like i remember not being able to set the font with css and i like it was like seriously like i can't style text
Like, forget about layout.
Forget about the frigging box model.
Forget about anything.
It's like, I just want to style text.
And back in the bad old days, like IE5 could do it on the Mac, but no other version of IE could do it.
So, yeah, so there's obviously not in terms of severity, but why would he pick this title?
The frustration he's feeling as a web developer, and by the way, it's still true of current IEs, even though they're so much better, it's still...
i still think ie is the new ie like and what i mean by that is you want to do something on the web and when you do anything on the web uh it's like it's not like android fragmentation where you have to make 10 different versions sometimes it's just certain things you can't do because you know x percentage of your users are using a particular browser and if x is big if x is even just like high single digit percentages like well we can't do that because you know what are you going to say
Screw you to that five percent of our users.
If you've got a lot of users, five percent is a lot of people like no one is going to agree to that, you know.
And so, oh, I wish I could use this thing.
But five percent of my users are still in IE8 and IE8 has a limit on the number of selectors in CSS.
And we either split up our CSS files into multiple files or we don't use like whatever.
Like there's always some stupid limitation for some technology you want to use.
and there's always one browser that is like that is the one like when you say hey i wish we could do this and then you try it in all the browsers and this is the one it's like oh it's supported everywhere but at this one and again i think ie is still that browser mostly in terms of not not so much features but performance these days like a lot of times things that are reasonably fast and all the webkit-based browsers are still not as fast and again ie is getting much better really fast so it is not the bad ie that used to but it's still catching up
But the text that Nolan was talking about are new things like Shadow DOM and web components and service workers and like things that give new capabilities.
A lot of them are sort of app related.
A lot of the focus on this article has been like, oh, he wants to write.
He wants to write things that are like native apps.
by using web technologies.
But I think that's actually besides the point.
I think it's really, there's a bunch of new web technologies and it's like, okay, well, what browsers can I, what modern browsers can I use this tech with?
And he points to the site, caniuse.com, which gives you nice grids of like what browser support, which thing.
And for a surprising number of these new things, Safari is the one
That's lagging behind.
Lagging behind Chrome even, which used to be WebKit Brace and now is based on Blink.
And even IE has implemented some of these things more than Safari has.
And so if you are a web developer and every time you want to do something cool, you are stopped because either mobile Safari or desktop Safari, probably mobile Safari because probably few people care about desktop Safari.
But anyway, if every time you go through this exercise...
You start seeing Safari as the one stopping you, and Safari has this historical reputation as a good standards-compliant browser.
You know, WebKit is great.
Everyone loves WebKit.
Like, it's the good web rendering engine, right?
You start to feel like Safari is the one stopping you from doing what you want to do on the web.
And I think it is separate from, do you want to make apps or whatever?
Like you want to use an XDB and local storage and all this stuff.
Like even stuff like Shadow DOM has almost nothing to do with apps.
Just has to do with like having a sane way to plop in some content on another page and not have to fight the, uh, the cascade of CSS, you know, like web components and Shadow DOM stuff.
Like these are, these are good technologies that are just beneficial to the web period, having nothing to do with making a web things like app, like apps.
And yeah,
and safari is behind on a lot of these uh and the other part of it that casey was mentioning is like well are they really behind or had they just not announced the support like is the next major version of safari going to come out and have support for all these things because when new versions of safari come out tons of stuff is in it and you don't hear about the stuff until it comes out which is different than the model that the other browser makers do so
in these web conferences when all the other browser makers are showing off their cool things Apple's not there because Apple doesn't go to any conferences Apple goes to WWDC right they don't they tend not to show up at other places or at least not in a public way and so it feels like they're not participating in the community so that combined with the fact that Safari is behind on a lot of these things
makes you feel like the thing the browser that's stopping you from doing what you want to do is safari just like the browser that used to stop you from doing what you didn't want to do with ie and in terms of degree it's you know world's different because again people don't realize how bad it was during the time when ie a sucked and b was not getting any better safari does not suck and is getting better it's just possibly getting better slightly slower in these specific areas that web developers care about in terms of
This browser has support for this thing.
This browser has support.
Oh, Safari doesn't.
Never mind.
And then that also spirals into like, why can't I have other web rendering engines on iOS and all sorts of other things?
But I think the kernel of truth behind the title is that this web developer feels like every time he wants to use a new technology, Safari is the browser that's stopping him because Safari is on the list of browsers that he cares about and has to support, but doesn't have this new tech.
well i think it's even it's even more specific than that i think it's that he's trying to make like and he elaborates a lot more on the follow-up like he believes and this is not just him this is a very widespread belief that app development like native app development is you know one thing and it's kind of a bad thing it's kind of inefficient and that
The way forward for mobile is to just write really advanced web apps and to have one web app that you write that runs on all mobile platforms.
And that way you don't have to write native apps.
That is seemingly his main goal or position here is like that is the end goal.
That is the ideal.
And so what he's really talking about is iOS is holding him back.
It's 1,000% about iOS Safari and not about desktop, really.
It's about iOS Safari and iOS Safari being the only built-in thing that you can use on iOS devices, which are kind of popular.
And he wants to write an app that can run on Android and iOS by making it a web app.
And he wants that app to have basically all the same abilities and quality and performance and everything as native apps.
And that is extremely common among a pretty large segment of web developers to have that goal and that position and those priorities in mind.
But I really don't think those are Apple's priorities.
And...
I mean, I have a whole lot to say about standards and standards people, but maybe I'll save that.
But just because that is what all these people are pushing for does not mean that either that's what users care about.
Or that's what Apple wants to enable.
There's lots of downsides to that.
Like, one of the things he cites in his blog post, in the second post, he's talking about, he said, you know, just one of many examples.
He says, there's a problem using this local database interface, which, forgive me, I have not followed this stuff.
So I don't know what is possible, what is not, and what the limits are.
But there is, he mentions how this local database thing he's using, local storage in iOS for websites, web apps is capped at 50 megs, and then it'll ask the user to confirm that they want to go past 5 megs, once they pass 5 megs.
And
He's saying this is really a problem for making native apps, which makes sense.
If you're trying to store a whole bunch of data natively in a web app, and you're limited to 5 megs without asking, and then 50 megs total even after asking, that is quite limiting for that purpose.
But from Apple's point of view...
they already offer a way to make apps.
It's called native apps, and they don't have those storage limitations.
And I can see why, and I don't know if this is why this limit's in place or whether they just haven't gotten around to it yet, but I can see why they would look at this request to basically let web pages store arbitrary amounts of data or whatever they want.
And you can see why that could be a problem.
Because one part of app review that occasionally causes controversial issues
is they actually have storage rules on how you use storage.
And you have to mark your files as backup versus not backup properly.
You can't just like download excessive amounts of data or store excessive amounts of data without a good reason.
And storage management on iOS is all about per app control.
So you can go to the general usage thing, which still isn't great, but you can go there and you can see, oh, I'm out of space.
What apps are you using the most?
And Apple gives you these controls to say, all right, well, you can, you know, here's your list of apps.
Here's the storage they're using.
You can, you know, delete or make choices based on that.
So there's all this baggage that comes along with the ability to use lots of storage space on a device.
And when you're enabling web technology and web capabilities, you have to be much more conservative and much more limiting for many good reasons.
Performance, battery life, but also security and usability.
And many of these features, like modern web standards, are going way beyond what, quote, web standards meant 10 years ago.
10 years ago, it was really talking about, like, how a page should be laid out and different capabilities you'd have with CSS and a little bit of JavaScript.
Like, that's really what web standards were about.
So back then, the idea was, let's, you know, fix all the garbage we did in the past, make things better for layout.
and enable a few small things in javascript and let's make it so that we only have to make one set of markup and blah blah so like back then that made perfect sense back then it was very defensible and it wasn't by the way it wasn't some like perfectly clean thing that just happened all of a sudden everyone was on board like that took years to hammer out and and took years before that stuff was remotely usable uh but you know back then it it was a much simpler thing it was all about like how does the page render and
Now, what many of these standards are demanding or creating or requesting is much harder things to make performant and secure and good for users.
So things like spawning background processes, having any kind of native hardware access or compiled code access, any kind of interaction where you can break out of the browser.
So things like notifications, access to the hardware, sensors, vibrations, stuff like that...
Now, so many of these new standards are breaking out of the page that is rendered and doing way more advanced stuff.
Stuff that is usually only the realm of native apps, at least in the past, has only been the realm of native apps.
So, especially on iOS, where Apple's very careful about these things for very good reasons...
I can totally see why they would not only move slowly, but also say no to some things.
Because if they actually let every web app create 500 meg gigabyte large databases that are not under app review and can do basically whatever they want and it's hard for people to find and delete that storage, that's a problem.
You have to...
With any capability that Apple adds to WebKit and the web engine in mobile Safari, they have to assume the worst.
Assume what is the worst possible people... What are the worst possible people going to do with this on some ad network that's embedded on every single web page or something?
There are so many ramifications.
There's privacy.
There's battery.
There's usability.
There's speed.
I mean, so many considerations there that it is totally...
completely reasonable that apple would both move slowly and say no to some things i don't know i think that that limiting web technologies to only things that show pages and not allowing app-like things is short-sighted because there's a lot of a lot of things that web applications are doing today that are crappier because of lack of progress and standards i mean even just
like sort of the modern way of writing web applications where a lot of it happens client side where they're essentially JavaScript applications, uh, that execute on the client, which is better than them executing the server.
Fewer round trips and the client has faster CPU dedicated just to you and all this other stuff.
Uh,
But still served up by loading a page that gives you this gigantic wad of JavaScript that may be minified and obfuscated and then gzipped.
And then you bring it back to the browser.
And of course, the browser has to compile it every time, even if it has a cached version, doesn't cache the compiled copy.
And then that takes time.
Sometimes just you burn milliseconds just parsing and lexing and compiling the JavaScript before you even start executing it.
And that's the type of crap that makes just plain old web pages feel slower.
It's adds latency to everything.
That's kind of like the web assembly and, you know, stuff is going on now.
That's why I always kind of been rooting for something like dark, but better, or like Swift in the browser or something like that.
Like that people are doing things with current technologies that are, that are making, making the web experience worse for users.
Uh, and yeah,
there are advances in those areas that are sort of separate from the, like you were talking about, like, oh, well, you just give web developers free reign of your hardware and let them store tons of data or whatever.
Just, you know, like I said, just Shadow DOM and web components.
That's not...
There's nothing nasty anyone can do with that.
And in fact, that enables technologies that allow you to have sort of reusable components that are more isolated from each other that don't have access to other parts of the pages that are separate that that make web development easier just to kind of like do the things we're doing now, but technologies to do them better.
It's not as if Apple isn't pursuing these.
If you talk about the web standard stuff, Apple is and has been for many years an active participant at W3C.
They have an opinion on what you should use for serving up retina images, for example.
Apple is a heavy participant in that thing.
The Canvas tag basically comes from Apple.
They do care about web standards, and they have that position, and they push their things, and so does Microsoft and all the other participants in the web standards process.
It's just that
in the grand scheme of things if you had to rank the browser vendors about how aggressive they are pursuing standards for the most part the other browsers are more aggressive than apple and partly because they kind of have to be because what would firefox's claim to fame be if it was both less popular and uh and less you know technologically advanced than safari and
Kind of the same thing for IE, which is trying to refurbish its reputation as the browser that doesn't implement anything, so they're gung-ho to jump on top of whatever they can.
And Google, of course, which is everything it does is a web app, so I'll put a link in the show notes to my Code Harder Go Home thing, which was talking about why it was kind of natural for Google to go its own way with WebKit, because they were driving the development to a large extent, and they wanted things, and they wanted things now, and they didn't want to be held back by sort of Apple's
more cautious uh release schedule um so i think the frustration uh that all web developers feel about whatever the browser is it's not letting them do the thing they want to do is real but i don't know what the solution is because it's not as if uh you know all this this frustration can be real and this position can be justified from the point of view of a web developer
But I don't think any of it is compelling in any way for Apple to change what it's doing, because then you just flip around and say, well, what is Apple's perspective?
What do they care about?
What what role do they see the web browser taking?
What things are important to them?
And a couple of people like sort of countering this article, saying basically Safari is not that bad.
Take a look at this.
There was one showing that CSS for selector support with WebKit nightly has like 53 percent support.
And the closest one is the Chrome Canary at 32 percent.
And everything tails off from there.
uh apple has always cared a lot about css there was someone showing like a css spinner just showing like a little shape spinning around with css looking at the cpu usage if you just let the thing spin uh safari cpu usage is zero firefox is 23 chrome is 20 this is on os 10 not an ios uh apple has always cared about power efficiency so they want to do as many things as possible uh in an efficient manner uh they they emphasize a lot of the past couple wwcs of
What should Safari or WebKit be doing when a page is just open in the browser but you're not looking at it?
Or how is Safari not killing your CPU and waking it up every few milliseconds to animate some stupid JavaScript thing?
How is it maintaining responsiveness but not killing your CPU?
Those are the things that Apple is concentrating on.
They're spending a lot of engineering effort on things that are important for
to apple for its uh platform and i don't think web developers complaining that they can't use particular technologies are going to convince apple to add those technologies any faster because there's no sort of meeting of the minds here there's no sort of like let me tell you why this would be better for you apple that's why you should do it all it is is saying it would be better for me and apple's like well it would be better for us if you're native apps and so they just stand there with their arms folded and say well i'm not gonna write native apps and apple's like well i'm not gonna add that thing we're adding the things that are like
The Safari team at Apple adds stuff all the time.
I'm always amazed when the new version of Safari comes out how much stuff is in it.
It's just not necessarily the things that you would want if your goal is to be a web developer.
I do worry a little bit about...
Apple kind of falling behind the other browser vendors to the point where it really is the next IE in terms of standard support when, you know, when like everybody else has had support for, you know, say IndexDB catches on and it becomes like a big awesome thing and everyone has it.
And everyone has had it for five years and Apple still doesn't have support for it.
At a certain point, kind of the web community sort of votes with their implementations.
It's just what happened with IE.
It's like, well, I can't do that because IE doesn't have it.
Eventually, the web community was like, you know what?
I'm using CSS.
The standard was released in 1996.
I'm going to use it.
The only way I'm going to style text on my site is CSS.
Screw IE.
The web community voted.
They said, even though the version of IE that some huge percentage of my users are using...
does not support this feature i'm still going to write my website in it and when an i user complains i'm going to say you know what screw you like that that can eventually happen you don't want apple to ever get in the situation where they are the only ones refusing to implement some particular standard because it doesn't fit with their strategy and that the community the wider community of web developers votes with their keyboards and says
Well, fine, Apple, don't support it.
We're writing web apps with it.
Everyone who comes in here on mobile safari is going to see a big thing that says, sorry, get yourself a modern browser.
Like that's the doomsday scenario.
That is, we are far from that today.
Very far from it because most of these standards they're talking about are barely implemented in the other browsers and are super buggy everywhere.
No one would write any app with it, right?
But, you know, I do worry about that happening simply because Apple's priorities seem so different than the priorities of pretty much every other company that makes a web browser, even Microsoft at this point, which maybe we'll talk about their their their difficulties with their own native platforms.
and how the web may become more important to them as they go forward in the same way that the web was kind of the savior of apple max became uh saved from or saved from being completely irrelevant because well everybody can use the web and once the max could use the web that that gave them a you know an extension on their lifeline and it gave apple time to sort of come back from the brink right that could be the situation that microsoft's going into now so even though yes this article is sensational and uh
It is stating one position, but it is not particularly compelling Apple to change what it's doing.
I do worry about the sort of kernel of truth underlying this dissatisfaction.
And that's certainly fair.
But I think if this does continue to get worse to the point where it's a big problem that Apple doesn't support things other people do,
the market will sort that out.
As you said, if somebody puts up the doomsday page and says, well, sorry, this cool app that everyone wants to use just doesn't work on Safari, then Apple will... If that truly succeeds, then Apple will be forced to respond or to lose all of our business or to lose our browser.
And that's fine, but...
I think one of the problems with this is what you said earlier.
What's Apple's motivation here?
The goal of having web apps replace native apps.
That is something that web developers are clamoring for.
But are users clamoring for it?
Are native app developers clamoring for it?
It seems like this is the kind of thing that web developers are all saying.
In order for us to keep doing things the way we like best, we need these things to make us relevant in this world that right now we kind of aren't first class citizens in.
But that world and the people who use it don't have that problem.
Like me as a native app developer and as a user of native apps on my phone, I don't have the problem of my web apps can't do enough.
Like, that is not a problem I have.
But, you know, you do have that.
Like, web developers obviously have the problem.
Users have it, too.
Because why users have that problem is that developers have to, you know, companies that have a software product or service have to make multiple different native apps.
Why?
Because you can't make just one web app that works for everybody.
Or if you can, it's crappy.
Right?
And that is worse for you as a user because it's them spreading their efforts over several proprietary platforms.
Like, the open web is good for users.
Right?
So it's bad for users, I think, that you can't use the open web to make an app that's as good as a native app experience or close enough to be good enough.
That's bad for users.
That's also bad for developers because they spend more time fighting with individual proprietary platforms instead of the open web.
The open web is good for pretty much everybody except for big companies, right?
And so there is this constant effort to try to make the open web better.
Native platforms are getting better all the time.
platforms companies are highly motivated to make native platforms better they're also motivated to make their web browsers better they're always working hard to make safari run faster pages load faster which is why i think apple could actually do well to be more aggressive on the things that just simply let you you know get your javascript loaded and cached and pre-compiled faster than we're currently doing and stuff like that but
But yeah, I think the open web is a benefit to both developers and users.
And it's only a detriment to companies with proprietary platforms.
And so we're kind of in this catch-22.
It's like, well, it's actually not really good for users because if they could make a web app everywhere, it would suck.
And then the web developers are like, yeah, but we want it not to suck.
And so what happens first?
Do you make it not suck first?
Or do you implement it, but then it still sucks, but then everybody does it and native apps are still better?
Yeah.
It's a difficult situation for everybody involved, but I think it's wrong to say that there's no benefit for users.
It's the same thing you've talked about many times before about proprietary systems owned and controlled by one company like Twitter versus an open alternative.
The open web is an important thing to preserve and continue to enhance.
There's always going to be a gap, but there's currently a gap.
And I would like that gap to be narrower, and I think narrowing that gap between native and the open web would be good for everybody except the possible exception of companies like Apple and Microsoft.
I mean, in general, I agree, but I do want to clarify that my position is not that there is no user benefit.
My position is that there's too little user demand.
Well, that's it.
It's the Catch-22.
Why would they demand a crappier app?
They don't know.
It's not like they're demanding a web app because they're like, oh, when I use the web app, I'm going to use the native one.
The native one is better, right?
So it's something that they would benefit from, the users would benefit from, but they don't know enough to ask for it in the same way that users wouldn't know enough to ask for a language like Swift.
They don't know
like what causes bugs and if there was a better different programming language that would cause fewer of those bugs and help develop it like that's not a user concern but they reap the benefits of it like users don't know what technologies developers need to have to make their lives better um and they're not going to even connect back the fact that like it takes twice as long to get something especially if you're on like a lesser platform like if you're on a platform that isn't if you have a windows phone maybe you feel this more acutely and
hey there's a version of this app for ios and they said they're making an android version but they don't even mention the words windows phone so uh but at least i can use this web page that we can all use right like again mac users have been in that position where there were windows versions of everything they wanted and a mac version maybe was mentioned once or maybe never mentioned we didn't even get half-life for crying out loud we still don't have a half-life
And that's part of the problem here is the argument for web developers making web apps being the way forward for all mobile platforms would be a much stronger argument if there were more than two that mattered.
But there aren't.
And most companies and startups and everything that have an app...
You can get away just fine making either just iOS or iOS and Android.
Well, that's a symptom, though, isn't it?
Like, why are there only two?
Well, because native apps are so powerful and because it's so hard to make a native app platform.
Like, if the open web was as powerful, it would be harder for two platforms to sort of dominate the entire market because it would be like, well...
We can have a diversity like Palm would have survived if they didn't have to have their own native SDK and have people write native apps as the only viable way to... If web apps were the only apps, again, the same way that the Mac survived.
Why did the Mac even continue to be relevant at all?
It's because the web became so big and it's like, well...
yeah, I can't have all these Windows applications, but increasingly, as long as I can go to Yahoo.com and order books from Amazon, a Mac is still a viable computer to own, right?
So it's, you know, it's... I don't know if Catch-22 is the right term or chicken egg or whatever, but each thing is blocking the other.
Like, well, it doesn't really matter because there's only two platforms, but there are only two platforms because the only way to write apps is native and how many native platforms can we support?
Like, you can't have seven... Even game consoles, it's only ever been like...
three with maybe a fourth like there's just you can't have 17 native app platforms so you can have 17 different uh web browsers and different devices that all can view web pages that is totally possible then you can get into like well web rendering engines how many of those are there
similar number right but web rendering engines because they're defined by standards for the most part because we've all kind of agreed that you can't just make up the marquee tag and just be like like that's not that's not a winning strategy to just make up your entire proprietary thing like active x or whatever even job applets didn't catch on we want it to be open we want the open web to be not controlled by a single company but if we let it languish that all that will be left is proprietary native platforms
Oh, sure.
And also, I think it would be remiss of us not to also mention that this is not the only solution to this problem.
So if you have this environment of multiple mobile platforms, although let's be honest, it's really one to two that matter right now.
um and and you want to have one thing that works on all of them there's already lots of things that let you make native apps using some kind of shared higher level language that then gets compiled down to the native code uh to the other platforms those things exist and they as far as i know they do pretty well in the consulting business especially
And so, like, there are other solutions to this problem.
Maybe, like, you know, the web or the internet is fine.
You know, all this communication between these apps and to servers, it's all going over HTTPS and it's using the internet, but it is not displaying the front end in a web browser necessarily or something that resembles a web browser.
And so, you know, the...
The problem of making one front-end app that displays your stuff for all platforms could be solved with web stuff.
With another proprietary company offering you a solution that's on top of two other proprietary companies' things?
Like, that's three things that can go wrong to, you know, because... Yeah, but nothing ever goes wrong with web browser support for things?
Yeah, but I'm saying, like, what, you know...
A new version of a web browser is not going to come out in the next year that is going to break the bold tag, right?
Whereas if you're writing something that targets a particular API that produces Objective-C code for iOS and produces the Java code for Android and everything, there are so many things that both those platforms can do unintentionally to make it so that your thing that targets both platforms breaks.
uh whereas the web comparatively is much more stable because it has to be because there's tons of web browsers and tons of markup and they can't there's no there's no sort of single controlling body in the way that there is apple where apple can just say well you know that api is gone or we changed our abi or we just changed from x86 to arm or whatever and you're like oh god this thing i have that's supposed to be targeting multiple platforms with a single code base is now like
I don't even know with a year of work, if I can get it to, you know, I don't know if it's ever going to work again, or they've changed the security rule.
So I can't even do what I was doing before, or they've changed the app submission rules.
Like with, with the, you know, the snap of their fingers, they can totally invalidate your entire strategy for deploying stuff.
Whereas the web does evolve, but it evolves way more slowly.
And there's no single point.
There's no single company that can say, you know what, that thing that you were making that makes a web app that runs on mobile and desktop browsers, like,
Next week, it's not going to work at all.
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Okay.
I can't believe you're arguing the proprietary side of this, Marco.
You're supposed to be the person who loves freedom and hates Google for copying all your data into the cloud.
Well, part of it is like I look at web standards and standards people and I see, you know what, this is all the same old bull...
You put the word standard on it, it's like standard markdown.
You put the word standard on it and it sounds like something that is this great purpose with this great intention, this noble effort.
And the reality is it's just companies having power struggles for themselves.
That's all it is.
But consensus is always ugly.
That's the whole point.
It's not owned and controlled by one company.
So you get a bunch of people arguing.
And they're going to come up with something that's not going to be as as sort of pure as if one company decided.
But the end result is, hey, guess what?
No one company decided this.
No one company has enough pull of the W3C to dictate what happens.
And, you know, the strengths of that and weaknesses and the weaknesses are well known.
Takes them forever doing anything.
Sometimes they come up with a stupid solution.
That's a dumb compromise.
Doing things by committee is dumb.
The whole HTML5 mess with the what WG like.
It's definitely uglier, right?
But the end result, no matter how crappy it may be, is still not owned and controlled by a single company.
And that is its one shining true benefit.
And you have to say that, you know, for all the bumps and the crappiness over the long term, where we were with HTML for quote unquote strict mode and where we are today was
We have made progress.
It has definitely not been a straight line, but web technologies and the things you can do with web apps of all kinds, just from plain old web pages up to things that act more like applications, is way better now than it was a couple of decades ago.
Oh, sure.
But I think we're making progress.
And all along that progress, at no point, with the exception of Microsoft trying for it, has all this web crap been under the thumb of a single company.
So that's fair, but there's downsides to this.
And one of the downsides is if you're a company like Apple and you have strong opinions about how things should be done, which let's face it, everyone else does too, but everyone else is more like a we can all agree on cheese situation where they make it sound like what they want is the standard for everybody, but really it's for them.
But Apple is not going to be pushed around here.
And if you're Apple, this could look as though like...
Why should I let this consortium of my competitors, basically, dictate my roadmap to me and dictate my features to me and dictate how I do things?
It cuts both ways.
It is nice to have some kind of industry correlation and some kind of ad hoc standards form, and sometimes you do need a dictated standard, but...
There's also so many downsides to that, and it can go so wrong.
And you have this situation where if you let the standards bodies, which are just a bunch of dysfunctional people, just like any other committee, if you let these committees dictate everything you're going to do...
they're going to make you do some bad stuff too and they're going to make and they're going to make you do some things that are against your interests and and possibly not good ideas even for your users and so you have to be a little bit picky you and you have to push back sometimes and you have to just declare your own standards sometimes and hope people catch up which apple has done many times well that's been apple's kind of mo in the w3c like when they come and they when they come and they arrive with the canvas tag like you know what would be really cool idea guys if we have this tag called canvas and
Which, by the way, you've already implemented in the API.
It looks like core graphics.
But don't mind that.
Like, this would be really cool if we had this, guys.
And if they say yes, it's great for Apple.
Because they're like, yay, they said yes.
And guess what?
We already implemented it.
Like, we're not just hypothetically telling you about something we think would be cool.
We're telling you about something we already implemented.
And that's great for Apple.
And other companies are always doing the same thing.
Hey, you know, I don't know if they've already implemented it.
But everybody is bringing to the table, like, here's how I think we should do retina images.
And by the way, we've already implemented this in our web browser.
And everyone wants you to pick your thing for whatever the thing is, because A, that puts you ahead, and B, you're the one who got to design it.
And the committees may take it and say, well, we like your proposal, but we want to adjust this, that, and the other thing.
And then you're like, okay, great, we'll go back and adjust our implementation.
That's how...
essentially web standards works at this point all the companies are coming with the thing that's exactly the way they want to do it the thing that's important to them or their priorities and sometimes what happens is the thing that apple wants they more or less get in the way they wanted it and the thing that microsoft wants they more or less get i think the google like each company has things the most important to them and sort of all the things get defined as standards and everyone kind of agrees like oh yeah no that's totally a standard but then who implements the canvas tag well apple certainly has it they they're the ones made it up it's there first who else is going to implement the canvas tag
the other ones like grumble, grumble, maybe I'll do it or whatever.
And like, same thing with index DB and shadow dom, like whoever is the strongest driving force behind those standards is the one that wants it the most.
And even if it gets sort of agreed upon by the committee and written up on W3C and say, this is going to be a standard, like that takes years and years for it to get to that stage.
Yeah.
then you're still left with all right who implements these standards just you know just because it's written down in w3c org website like you said marco doesn't mean apple has to make it they get to pick and choose which web standards they're going to make it's bad it's a bad look for apple if the committee you know the w3c agrees on how we're going to handle retina images and apple is
uh implements his own way to do it despite the fact that it wasn't the accepted standard and refuses to implement the accepted standard like that is sort of not playing the game the right way and apple wouldn't do that because eventually five years down the line everybody else would have implemented this way to do retina images and apple would have the other way and people would be like well i got to do conditional markup because now for everybody else i can use this element but for safari i would have to do this no apple would never do that they're going to just go with the standard eventually anyway for things for these other things that are implemented yet
It's just because Apple, they're not high on Apple's priority list.
Like, either they're not going to catch on, in which case Apple will have been smart to not waste time implementing it.
Or if they do catch on, eventually Apple will implement it when it becomes important.
It's all about prioritization.
It's just that it seems like every other browser vendor is more motivated at this point.
To implement the standards faster, because almost all the important platforms see the web at this point as their weapon against whatever other proprietary platform is beating them in whatever other market.
Because they're like, well, you may be beating me in this market, but like Windows Thrones or anything.
well Android and iOS may be beating me in the native app market but if I hurry up and implement web standards really well maybe I'll have really cool web apps at the very least and web developers will like our platform like it's the only thing available to them right whereas Apple's priorities are different and you know Google's priorities are a little bit weird because they have Android but they also have
all of google's web apps so google is highly motivated to make the web awesome but also motivated to make a native platform that competes with ios so i get i mean in this game apple is the only one who is highly motivated to work on native apps and slightly less motivated to work on web stuff so it kind of makes sense that they are choosing different web technologies to concentrate on
And that so many of the things that they're concentrating on with their web stuff, like with all this power saving things and GPU acceleration, are actually things that make their overall platform better.
It's better when mobile Safari doesn't kill your battery.
It's better for selling iPhones, right?
And so they're doing that.
It's not really a native app thing.
It's like, that's our platform.
Our platform is this entire product, not just the software it runs on.
And so Apple has been doing things to make...
their web browser like every other part of the system more power efficient and i don't think anyone else is as motivated to do that maybe android a little bit but you know it's it's a strange mix of prioritization there and i think the what we're seeing is the result of different companies with different
different goals and different priorities uh i just i just do worry uh that as these companies drift off in the directions that is natural for them to drift in that uh things will start separating too much it's why i wrote that code hard to go home thing like it was kind of disappointing to me to see that apple and google couldn't stick together and put all their effort behind making great web browsing engine that apple and google's directions and pace was so different that they had to split and i worry about apple being left behind really simply because
Their web rendering engine priorities are so much different than Google's and different than web developers and perhaps not in the best interest of users in the long term.
Yeah, the thing of it is that, as you both have said, everyone is acting in their own interests.
And in and of itself, I don't think that's unreasonable or bad.
It's just, like you just said, John, I would hope that all of these different companies' interests eventually kind of come back together over time.
And I think it was John that said a moment ago, a few minutes ago, you know, if it comes to be that the new foo tag is just the coolest thing in the world, and Apple hasn't done it, and everyone else has, and it's freaking awesome, you bet your butt that Apple's going to implement it.
It may not be as quick as you want, but it'll happen.
I don't see them just completely, you know, sitting on their hands and going, la, la, la, la, la, we don't care.
So...
I understand everyone's perspective here, but I don't see it as near as big a deal as Nolan apparently did.
Well, and I just keep going back to motivations here, perspectives.
So much of this is the perspective of web developers who see this world taking off of native apps and who want to stick with what they know, what they're invested in, what they believe is right, which is the web app.
And they don't want to come make native apps, especially for the platform they don't use.
So just like me, I use iOS.
I'm an iOS developer.
I just can't address Android in a way that is good because I don't see it.
I don't use it.
I choose not to...
have it be a part of my my devices in my life and so i just can't serve android and they're you know the web development world is not used to that the web development world is used to being able to serve everybody with only writing one version of the site especially now that modern browsers are so good with with css and stuff like you can really just write one version of the site and have it work pretty much everywhere without a whole lot of effort and without a whole lot of hacks and which is way better than it used to be
thanks to web standards, John.
But, you know, you have to look at this as like, you know, web developers really just... Of course they want to stick with what they know.
Of course they want to use all the knowledge and the tools and the code that they already have.
But...
The fact is, this is a world of native apps now.
And there is nothing from users saying, we want web apps to come back and get better so we can stop using these native apps.
That's just not the world we live in.
And so many of these standards are about pushing web apps into becoming native app replacements.
Maybe that's not the right goal.
Maybe just yelling at native apps...
and saying we're coming after you with our old stuff just wait till it catches up just you'll see it'll be there just like desktop linux it'll be there next year uh you know maybe that is actually a path towards faster relevance i don't know uh i i've i've said things in the past that are very skeptical of the future of of the web browser being the front end for apps um like you know and you look at so many new things that matter a lot like instagram when it came up
And it didn't even have any website whatsoever.
I mean, heck, it didn't even have an Android app for a while.
But look at things like that.
And Instagram rose up and was bought for a billion dollars before it even had a website at all that did anything useful.
It was crazy.
And I think the website still doesn't do that much.
And you can look at examples like that.
That was granted a long time ago.
But these examples just keep happening now.
And you can say, maybe I've hitched my train to this web standards thing, this web app thing, and that's what I'm going to invest all my professional life and career in.
Maybe the ride there is coming to an end.
I don't know how many more metaphors I can shove in here.
That might not be the best thing, both career-wise, financially, or for your users, or for your company.
These new platforms come up, and right now, we went through this period where web apps, it was the glory days of web apps.
From 2005 to 2013, 2014, it was the glory days of web apps.
That was the place to be to succeed, to make a big startup, to make a successful app, or whatever.
That was the place to be.
Now, that's very clearly not the place to do those things.
Now, apps are the place to do those things.
And you can look at the way web developers talk about the things they need, the things they want, the future they see, and look at other industries that have been made less relevant or less successful by technological change.
Look at statements made by publishers of magazines and magazine-like websites.
Look at statements made by record industries about music and the music business.
And you can see, you know, it isn't that bad, but you can kind of see some parallels there.
I really do think web developers would be best served by...
Sure, if this is what you care about, keep pushing on it.
Keep doing what you want.
But keep an open mind to the idea that maybe in 10 years, web development won't reach this point that you want it to reach.
Maybe native apps will keep the hold they have on them.
Technology moves in these eras.
It is not always...
As open or standards-based as idealists want it to be.
Sometimes you have a span of like 10 years like Microsoft in the 90s.
Sometimes you have a span of like 10 years where one company does control a lot and you just have to deal with it.
You have to work within that.
You have to find ways to succeed and get your business done in that environment.
And, you know, what John has said about, you know, open being better for everybody is true in theory and it has a lot of benefits.
But in practice, it doesn't always work out that way.
It doesn't always happen.
You don't always have those chances.
And so you have to work within whatever era your career is happening in at this moment and where it's going to go next.
You have to work within that just pragmatically.
Ideally, yes, ideally things are different.
Pragmatically, this is how the real world works.
You're making it sound like you can't get a job as a web developer.
The web will be around longer than Windows Phone.
I mean, don't worry about it.
Well, that's not saying much.
The web will be fine.
It's just a question of relative rates of development.
I don't know what Nolan's motivation is because he lists himself as an Android developer and a web developer.
Obviously, he wants to make more appy type things, but I've seen similar complaints from other people, and I don't think it's all personally motivated.
In fact, I think most of it is kind of like altruistic, hippy-dippy, like...
We don't we don't want a future controlled by a small number of companies.
We want a future controlled by nobody in the you know, in the in the Brent Simmons RSS, you know, Matt and Reese micro blogging, get your own domain, Marco Arment, host your own email sense of the world word of independence that our future isn't dictated by a small number of people who run some very large and very powerful companies.
Right.
The web is is a hedge against that.
Uh, and if we give up on the web and say, well, I, maybe I should just learn to write native apps.
Like every, every person who does that every time a company moves in that direction is it's kind of seeding control, uh, giving up on the dreams that, that, uh, you know, all three of the people I listed, you, Brent, Manton, and me for that matter, have expressed about a future, uh, defined in their own terms where we sort of own our own information.
Right.
Right.
um and where where we don't have to do where companies don't have the power to end our careers with a flick of the switch or change the rules on us like that's that's what the open web is about and so i don't think it's so much about i'm worried about my personal career so i'm going to write this thing about safari is the new ie to try to make apple do the thing that i want them to do so i can do the thing like
You're right that there's adjustments, especially in startups.
Startups are all about the web.
Now startups are all about apps.
Who knows what the heck startups will be about in the next couple of decades?
Maybe it'll be about biotech.
I have no idea.
But I think that's separate from the overarching discussion of...
what is going to define the future of technology and like we define it by you know by sort of the the anyone who participates in the development community defines it like even you know seen a lot of tweets from lauren brichter discussing this uh who has has very strong and strange feelings about uh programming and development these days but when he did ios development he wrote his own gui and open gl and he's currently having fantasies of
writing a web application entirely with webgl and the canvas tag right is that still a web application as we define it why would he be doing that why wouldn't he just write a native app he's certainly a really good native app developer he's not doing it because he's afraid that he won't he already knows how to write native
apps right it's because he doesn't want to be under the thumb of apple or microsoft or android or anyone else and that was what i think is the underlying motivation of at least some of the people who are sort of behind the hey let's make the web a better place to write applications thing it's not so much about trying to defend their small domain of knowledge because if they can't write web applications they can't do any other job
I mean, Lauren Brichter is a great example.
He can obviously write native applications, right?
That's not why he's doing that.
That's not why people like Jeffrey Zeldman are gung-ho on the web, right?
It's sort of trying to ensure a better future for everybody.
And I like to think that that is the majority of the thing that motivates everyone on the Safari team, everybody on the Blink team at Google, everybody doing anything with web technologies, that they're motivated...
in large part by the idea that even if they work at Google or Microsoft or Apple, that the web isn't owned by anybody.
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Okay, so was it earlier today, I believe, Microsoft announced big layoffs.
And someone was kind enough to put some snippets in the show notes, and I will capitalize on their hard work and claim it as my own.
Microsoft Corp today announced plans to restructure the company's phone hardware business to better focus and align resources, which typically is business speak for we screwed up.
Microsoft also announced a reduction of up to 7,800 positions primarily in the phone business.
As a result, the company will record an impairment charge of approximately $7.6 billion related to assets associated with the acquisition of the Nokia devices and services business in addition to a restructuring charge of approximately $750 million to $850 million.
Yikes.
And just for reference, they're basically saying the entire price we paid for Nokia is a write-off.
Isn't that basically what they paid for?
Yeah.
Since they bought Nokia, they said they basically lost $10 billion on it.
So not a great acquisition.
And I always wonder...
Obviously, I don't understand enough about a big business to know like someone is highly motivated to make these things happen.
Right.
Someone is highly motivated to marry two large companies together.
At least it's going to be a big payday for them.
Right.
But anybody from the outside and probably most people from the inside know that the joining of these two giant companies, despite all the talk of synergy, is going to be a terrible idea.
Nothing good is going to come from this multi-billion dollar acquisition.
The chances are really, really, really high that instead what's going to happen is more losses, more layoffs, just like bad things will happen.
I mean, it's possible to have good acquisitions.
Apple buying Next was perhaps the best acquisition in the history of the world, value-wise, like $400 million for Next or whatever it was.
If you look at what they got out of that deal, tremendous, right?
It all sorts of like, oh, I bought a small company and that was a great idea because it helped me make this product that, you know, like whatever, buying the companies that do like touch ID sensor or strategic investments in other small companies.
But when it's like a company that's in trouble buying some other company for a really, really big amount of money.
It just always seems like to me from the outside that it's like, seriously, someone thinks this is a good idea.
Like, this is not going to save them.
This is going to be a disaster.
And most of the time you're right.
But somebody in all these companies must be both incentivized to do it and in the position where they can make it happen.
And those people are, I guess, laughing all the way to the bank or retiring to their private islands or whatever it is they're doing.
But Microsoft as a company, if you care about Microsoft as a company, them buying Nokia or for that matter, Google buying Motorola all seem like really bad ideas in retrospect and also really bad ideas at the time.
Like maybe there was nothing else they could do.
And this was the best of a bunch of bad options.
But boy, this is very disappointing.
I mean, don't you think, though, that... I do agree with you, but don't you think in a situation where Microsoft was arguably a little bit on the ropes, what was it, a year or two ago when they bought Nokia?
Nokia, I always pronounce it wrong, I'm sorry.
If they have a lot of money in the bank, and they're kind of on the ropes...
Why not give it a shot?
I agree that intellectually, it never seemed like it was going to work.
It just seemed like a bad idea.
But if you're in a bad position, but you have a pretty big war chest, what else are you really supposed to do?
Quadruple down on R&D and hope you fart out something good?
It kind of seemed like at the point that they bought Nokia, their whole strategy about like, are we going to make our own phones or are we going to make Windows phones and have other people make phones?
Like trying to waffle between the Apple strategy and the Microsoft Windows strategy where do we just make the software and then we make other people make the hardware?
Or have we decided that that doesn't work anymore and we need to make our own hardware?
Because you can't do both very well.
It's the same thing with Google and Android.
They make Nexus phones, but they want everyone else to use Android, but they let people do whatever they want with Android, but not really.
Actually, they want to have more tightly controlled.
You can say what you want about Apple's strategy, but for the most part, it has been straightforward.
And Microsoft has been in between strategies for a while.
The Windows strategy was clear.
We make the software.
You make the hardware.
You guys kill each other until your margins are zero and you all go out of business.
We make money hand over fist.
right that was a very clear strategy they tried to do the same thing with mobile and it just never worked out and so they doing this slow motion transition into kind of like the apple strategy like once they bought nokia it was like so are you all in on the apple strategy i know you basically bought a phone company you're gonna make windows phones running windows that you make like that seems like what you're doing but you're also still licensing windows phone like what do you guys even do it was just it was
It's like they didn't want to do what Steve Jobs did when he came back at Apple, was immediately make the super hard choices.
Are we doing phones or are we not doing them?
And it seems like they spent $10 billion to delay a few years in saying, we're not doing them, at least not this way.
this way where we make our own phones and like and i don't even understand like the next quote i put in the show notes here is uh sati nadella saying we're moving from a strategy to grow a standalone phone business to a strategy to grow and create a vibrant windows ecosystem including our own first party family what the hell does that even mean you're not going to have a standalone phone business you want to have a
including our own first party device family wasn't that what you were just trying to do like walk this middle road of like uh we want to have a vibrant ecosystem but we're also going to make our own phones like he also wants to uh focus his phone business on making every kind of phone for everybody
Yeah, like either just say, we lost in mobile.
We were too late.
We moved too slowly.
We made too many mistakes.
We're gone.
Or pick one thing, strategy, and focus on it laser-like.
And their current waffling, it just seems like you're just dragging things out and not really making things better.
I think you're right, Casey.
Yeah.
the nokia acquisition is like well the one thing we don't have a lot of time but we do have a lot of money so let's just go for it maybe it will help maybe it won't maybe you could say well of course the naysayers are gonna say it's too late you're never gonna get traction but who knows they could have maybe something could have happened they could have had a particular feature in a new windows phone that caught the public imagination and suddenly you know i don't know like it was it's conceivable but it just it has always seemed that like
they're not quite ready these layoffs are actually kind of a good thing but they're not quite ready to do the crazy brutal immediate cuts that apple is because apple is going to go bankrupt microsoft is not right so apple was better motivated to do the cuts that it did microsoft probably needs to do the same kind of cutting it just is you know because they're not in such dire straits they're not quite ready to do that and like
The Satya Nadella company that, like, concentrates on Azure and mobile services and, like, server-side backends, kind of like a better, friendlier, less creepy Google where they have a bunch of server services that they vend to you.
And, of course, they still own the desktop and all this stuff.
Like...
that company doesn't seem to include mobile as an essential component to me that strategy they want to have that strategy they want to say we sell to the enterprise we own the desktop pc space we also have windows you know mobile services type things for for vendors of all platforms including other mobile platforms and by the way we also want to have our own phone platform and our own phones and have our phone operating system and other people's phones like i don't know if microsoft of today is the microsoft that can keep doing that so
God, it's weird that I'm rooting for Microsoft to get its crap together, and I thought they really were, but I mean, I guess I'm just in retrospect yelling at them some more for acquiring Nokia.
I guess this is the right move to cut your losses to move on, but it's tough for all the people who are getting laid off, and I still don't understand these quotes in this press release about their strategy moving forward.
It still seems like they're still crossing their fingers and hoping somehow that Windows Phone will be viable in some form.
Honest question.
Why do you say it's weird for you to be rooting for Microsoft?
Why is that weird?
Because I hate Microsoft.
I'm a longtime Microsoft hater, remember?
Well, but I mean, what have they done to you lately?
I'm not going to make the analogy I always make again because it's terrible and people should yell at me much more than they do about making it.
So I'm not going to make it again.
But yeah, I've explained this in nicer terms many times before.
When I was growing up, it was so clear to me that Apple had the better operating system and technology and everything that
Yeah.
and they ruined it all by by winning on on the basis of merits that i did not consider important or the most important one so i hold a grudge against them which is silly and immature in reality i'm actually rooting for them so on and so forth but that's but i'm basically explaining to you why do i ever have any kind of resistance to microsoft that's why
Well, I understand what you're saying, and it is big of you, and I'm not patronizing you.
It's big of you to say that you're holding a grudge and being a baby about it.
But, not to turn this into accidental analog, but don't you think that Apple needed the...
the domination of Microsoft and their utter demise or near demise to rise from the ashes and become the powerhouse they are today?
It makes a more dramatic story, but they didn't need it to do what they did.
If Apple had become the dominant force in desktop computing, I would have had a happier childhood.
Yeah.
slightly i don't know that it really could have ended up this way like i mean there's no i i there's no way for us to know right but i'm not entirely sure that the situation like the situation we end up and makes a really good story because a company that almost goes out of business then becomes the biggest business company in the world is a great story right and the return of a leader ousted like it's all it's all a great narrative but um the current place we're in with the current apple i don't know if this is the best of all possible apple worlds at this point right
Anyway, like I said, I'm rooting for Microsoft to get its act together.
I would like to see it concentrated on the things that it is actually good at.
I still have a taste issue with Microsoft, to use the old Steve Jobs slam on them, in that a lot of the things they do, I find...
uh technically and aesthetically displeasing for for reasons that are also probably petty and silly but just i mean even for down to the use of backslashes and all capital letters and things like you're like why does that matter like stuff like that matters to me it's stupid whatever it does i feel like my my sensibilities do not match up with my sensibilities are much greater match to
90s era apple sensibilities and unix sensibilities and combine them two then you have modern apple sensibilities which i'm still pretty much you know on the same wavelength wavelength with i've not been on the same wavelength with uh microsoft about most things and you know the most the the major manifestation of my grudge is i have to admit in in the gaming world where i still won't have an xbox if i can possibly help it
And they bought Bungie.
Did I mention that?
Anyway, there's a lot of bitterness for many years.
You don't say.
So when I was in high school and middle school, I was picked on like crazy.
There were so many people who picked on me.
And some of it I wasn't helping, but a lot of it I was just getting picked on.
So I had a rough time.
And so in college, I was home for one of the summers, and I had a job.
I had a good internship at Nationwide Insurance.
And one morning, I stopped off at the coffee shop in the neighborhood I grew up in, and the guy behind the counter who served me was one of the biggest bullies to me in school.
And so here I was like going to my nice job and being served by this guy who used to really be a bully to me.
And he was so burnt out and so out of it.
He looked like he'd been hit by a train.
Like he clearly had gone through some really rough times and was not having the life that anybody would have said, I want that life.
He clearly, you know, he needed to get his stuff together and clearly just wasn't.
And here he was serving me after making fun of me for years.
And I felt bad for him.
I didn't look at him and say, oh, here's this guy I hated in high school.
I just looked at him and I'm like, man, that is so sad.
He was so burnt out.
I don't think he even recognized me.
I hadn't seen him in three years.
I don't think he even knew who I was.
That, to me...
hating Microsoft today... I don't hate them.
It's like you said.
I feel bad for them.
I wish they would do better.
But I still have... But P.S.
I hate them.
No, no.
Here's the thing.
Like I said, current day, I still have aesthetic differences with their tastes.
The technologies that they make and the GUIs they make, even down to the hardware design, it doesn't quite match up with my taste.
Metro was maybe a little bit closer, but still...
uh not quite a match and i do give them full credit for sort of leading the charge in that new design but i like apple's interpretation of it better right so i'm not i don't spend my time worrying about them uh but like even here's the thing they still dominate on the desktop and that still annoys me
The idea that someone who most people who own personal computers do not own Apple personal computers or Linux on the desktop or whatever the heck.
They mostly own Windows.
And I don't like Windows.
I don't like PCs.
I don't like PC hardware.
I don't like Windows operating system.
I don't like any of it.
And that's still the default.
PCs still exist.
And that annoys me.
It's like, well, Apple is the biggest company in the world.
And I guess it doesn't matter anymore because who cares because mobile is the future and blah, blah, blah.
But that's still a real thing that is happening now.
Microsoft Exchange is still a real thing, and I don't like it.
It doesn't work right.
I don't like Microsoft Office on the Mac, and I have to use it at work because Microsoft dominates with Exchange, and SharePoint is a real thing.
These things still annoy me from day to day.
So there are actual real sources of complaints.
I would like to see Microsoft the company get its act together because I think it's filled with smart people who can do great things.
I would like them to do those great things instead of trying to pretend they're still the old Microsoft and they can dominate everywhere.
And the gaming thing is kind of a side show because Microsoft is a little bit of a usurper there.
It's like, well, can't you just leave gaming alone?
That was, again, back from the days when Microsoft needed to own everything.
It's like, oh, of course we're going to have a gaming console.
Yeah, but we're going to come and ruin every industry.
And, you know, that's mostly just silliness because Xbox is a really good platform and they've done a really good job in that market.
In fact, the Xbox should be the model for every other business they're screwing up in because...
They stuck with Xbox even through many screw-ups, including crappy first-generation hardware and the red rig of death.
They kept sticking to it.
They learned from their mistakes.
If they had done what they'd done with the Xbox and all their other businesses, they'd be in a way better position than they are now.
uh that said i'm still not betting getting one if i can at all help it and also i would say for this generation i think the ps4 has the better hardware uh i like the i like the trade-offs and compromises that sony made with this generation's hardware better uh last generation microsoft probably had the better hardware than the ps3 but i was last generation i was intrigued by the ps3's crazy ass cpu how could you not be intrigued by it if you're a cpu design nerd so um
Anyway, this is not... I don't spend my days thinking about Microsoft.
Are you sure you don't?
Yeah, I know.
But you guys brought it up.
And in the context of these layoffs and everything, I'm frustrated with Microsoft, like, not... I don't know.
I would like to see Microsoft rise from the ashes as a company I can love.
That hasn't happened yet.
But what could they do to turn into a company that you would love?
Well, I mean, the Xbox is a good start.
The one that you just said you would never, ever, ever buy.
Right.
But what they did with that product, like how they behaved, how did they enter a new market?
What did they do?
How did the company stand behind it?
As opposed to like, you know, oh, forget about the Ken and we screwed it up.
Oh, we're not going to do the Courier.
You know, like all the times Windows CE, Windows Mobile, like...
they never had the courage of their convictions and so many other things where they screwed up whereas the xbox they stuck with it through thick and thin and there was a hell of a lot of thin and they gotten better and better with every generation and even the connect which they kind of tried to stick with which is not really working out for them that was it that was a bold daring interesting move right um so take those type of things and apply that to pick your market and maybe they're kind of also doing that in in web services backends i don't you know
There's not this.
There's them.
There's Amazon and EC2 and S3 and all the other services they do.
And then there's Google stuff.
So there's not everyone in that market is a little bit weird.
It's kind of hard to.
And it's also a very young market.
So it's hard to know what they're doing there.
But certainly what they've done in mobile is the opposite of what they had at Xbox.
Really, you know, not standing behind what they're doing, being really confused about what they're trying to do, not doing anything particularly bold or daring, not learning from their mistakes, like deciding whether we're going to make the software and everyone else makes the hardware or we're going to do the Apple strategy.
uh being really late to the game you could argue they were late to the game and consoles but on the other hand like console console generations are kind of a reset point in a way that mobile is not like every year there's a new set of phones but it doesn't give you well it's a new chance to see who's going to be on top this year like uh the the market share sort of builds from year to year so
yeah i i have some i have let's say i have history with microsoft let's leave it at that it's complicated i have history well it comes down to like and and who is microsoft it's not a person bill gates is gone like i don't have any ill will against the individual people there but you can conceptualize the collective actions of many people under a single corporate banner as a thing and i have history with that thing i mean whatever man whatever makes you happy i have history with apple too
Yeah, but they can do no wrong.
No, there's a different history with them.
Very different history with them.
Yeah, let's talk some time about the performer series of Max.
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Hover, Backblaze, and Fracture.
And we will see you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Because it was accidental.
Accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
Accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
It was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.fm.
And if you're into Twitter.
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S So that's Casey Liss M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T Marco Arment S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse It's accidental They didn't mean to Accidental Tech Podcast So long
Have you guys ever used a Windows 8 computer?
Actually, my first time was within the last week or two.
I use it in a VM.
Does that count in VMware?
I have Windows 8 in VMware since it's been released.
So I was, as most of you know, I was a Windows user from the dawn of time that I had a computer up through 2004 and then kind of faded away into the Mac full time by about 05 or 06.
And so I totally missed... I never even used Windows Vista.
I was on XP until I quit.
Never used 7, never used 8, and haven't even seen 10, really.
Except, you know, occasional VMs for browser testing, but nothing beyond that.
Well, this past weekend, I was at my kid's preschool, and they knew I knew computers, so they asked if I could take a look.
One of the computers was having trouble.
It couldn't see the printer, basically.
The printer kept saying it was offline.
It was running Windows 8, and the only reason I know that is that it kept getting kicked to the squares screen, getting kicked between that and the desktop environment.
And even having been a previous Windows professional, I would be paid by people to fix their Windows computers.
I was pretty good at it.
But all my knowledge for Windows is 10 years old.
Even having that background and now being pretty good at Macs, this system was completely inscrutable to me.
It was so ridiculously confusing trying to figure out how to do things like turn the Wi-Fi off and turn it back on.
Or where is the printer control panel?
Where is the print queue so I can delete this document that I sent four times out of it?
It was baffling.
And I would, like, you know, right-click on something.
And, of course, it doesn't help that PC hardware is awful.
So, like, you know, I kept, like, right-clicking or left-clicking when I meant to right-click and everything because the trackpad was terrible.
And it was just unbelievable, like, how incredibly confusing and horrible...
Windows 8 really was to do something you know that's beyond test something in IE on Windows 8 like you know beyond that of like okay here's a computer that's having what is really a very minor problem how do you fix it and like and the problem ended up being the computer was offline completely like it just had it had no internet connection through the Wi-Fi.
And so bouncing between IE to test the connection, it's like go to IE, type in Google.com or whatever, going back and forth between that, and then the Wi-Fi control panel, which is really in the desktop environment because it's some Wi-Fi thing there, and then bouncing between that and different control panels.
Oh, my God.
I know Windows fans generally hated Windows 8 for that reason, but I had no idea how bad it was.
I'm shocked that they shipped that.
Oh, it's ridiculous.
So my entire... Well, my parents are all on Macs and iOS.
My brothers are on iOS.
But I believe they're both running PCs.
I read somewhere years ago... I can't remember specifically where it was.
But somebody basically said that they told their family... It might have been you, Marco, for all I know.
But somebody said they told their family, listen...
I am going to only field tech support questions about Macs.
Yeah, that was me.
Okay, it was you.
It worked.
They all use Macs now.
Right?
So I have taken that same hard line.
That worked well with my family, Aaron's family.
My brother-in-law does the same sort of thing that I do.
And he is the eldest child and he can do no wrong.
And so he continually recommends Dells and they continually constantly recommend or buy Dells.
Granted, they constantly be and moan about how they never work, but they still go and buy Dells.
Anyway, my sister-in-law, who has a Dell, said, oh, something isn't working.
I forget specifically what it was now.
And she wanted help with it.
And I went to use it.
And this is the first time I'd use Windows 8 for more than four seconds without a co-worker telling me, click here, click here, click here, click here.
Yeah.
I genuinely... I went to do Windows Key R, which in general, in XP and Windows 7... That's run, right?
Right.
It basically brings up the start run in Windows that have a start button.
So I could type... I think I was trying to get to the command prompt or whatever.
And I tried to do that, and I couldn't because if...
If memory serves, Command or Windows key R didn't do anything.
Because why?
Because there is no start button anymore.
I was completely, completely crippled.
I didn't know what to do with myself.
And I basically looked at it, shook my head and said, you're going to have to ask your brother because I got nothing.
And I don't understand why they keep going back to these machines because all they do is have problems.
And all they do is come to me and say, can you fix this?
And for everyone, I typically say, nope, buy a Mac.
My sister-in-law is a little younger.
She's in her first or second year of college.
I felt bad for her.
I was like, all right, well, let me at least take a look.
And nope, even if I wanted to, I couldn't freaking figure it out.
Now, let me remind you that day to day, I live in Windows.
That is what my regular J-O-B job does.
I could not figure out what to do with Windows 8.
Now, in the defense of Windows, Windows 7 is actually excellent.
It really is very, very good.
And I've heard that Windows 10 writes a lot of the wrongs that Windows 8 made, much in the same way that 7 righted a lot of the wrongs that Vista made.
But by God, I could not agree with you more, Marco.
8 is so, so, so bad.
Windows 8 has the problem that everyone who is familiar with the previous version of Windows, like you two, is cranky when you change where things are.
So Windows 8 tried to be like, well, we know people are going to be cranky.
That's me.
So can we have a bunch of new stuff?
Nope.
But also try to keep the old stuff?
And so they don't get everybody miserable.
It was like they moved too much stuff for people that didn't want things to move.
And they didn't do like a clean sheet kind of Mac OS 9 to OS 10 transition where it's like just everything's gone.
Forget about classic Mac OS's backward compatibility for a little while, but it's going away.
They didn't do that either.
And so in Windows 10, they're backsliding.
They're like, well, we were too timid to make the big transition.
So let's just roll back.
most of the annoying things and try to make it slightly more familiar for people who liked Windows 7 and no one liked Vista and XP and whatever.
They have not, as I said, had the courage of their convictions when it came to their desktop operating system either.
And so Windows 8 and Windows 10, these were, at various times, the recommended thing that Microsoft would sell you
you know, for the dominant personal computing platform on the planet.
And that should be upsetting to everybody involved.
No, but I mean, it isn't... Windows 8 is not just bad because it was different.
Like, the new interface, even if you lived entirely in, like, the new Squares interface... Well, you couldn't live entirely in it because there were certain things you had to go to the other one to do.
But, like, I would even go as far as to say that was actually bad.
Like, it wasn't just that it was different or that it was mixed.
i would even say like the squares interface is itself bad is that what it's called yes sure well it's not called metro anymore god knows what it's called so like it like but but you're talking about like the screen with the tiles like not not just the the interface of the apps when they're running but that screen where you like have a bunch of tiles on a ribbon that you slide along and
right i'm talking about like like the tile interface to launch and see what is happening there and the apps that run natively within it like like the ie i kept switching into was natively in that in that environment well as part of their unified strategy of like this works on tablets this works on your phones this works on the desktop to try to make one sort of os type of one os paradigm if not one specific ui that spans one os that works nowhere
yeah well i mean i think that interface worked a lot better on phones on tablets maybe had a little bit too much of edge slidey crap um but on phones there you know it kind of is on phones what you do you can basically just swipe around and stuff and so like and the tiles idea of like having active tiles where you can relay information instead of just icons like there were a lot of good ideas buried in there but it was
They bit off a lot, maybe not more than they could chew, but they bit off a lot.
And then they just decided that they had to, for just practical reasons, hedge their bets on the desktop and still kind of have the old windows lurking underneath everything.
And that's just didn't make anybody happy.
let me tell you another long boring story about my past um when i was developing overcast the very first version of the podcast list screen like basically the root screen uh the first version of that i i designed and wrote as a collection view with a column with like a tile view of podcasts and you can see some other apps do this too like it's this is not a new thing
So I assumed you'd have the tile view of just squares of artwork.
It was a nice squares-based interface, and it looked really nice.
It looked better than the long list.
Visually, you look at that, oh, that's so much cooler.
But I found as I was using it, it would annoy me.
I couldn't browse it as easily as I could browse one single list.
You have to kind of zigzag your eyes back and forth into columns and everything.
I decided even though it looks nicer, it doesn't work as well.
It is not as good, in my opinion, as a list.
So that, like, I think Windows Phone, everyone said when Windows Phone came out with this brand new interface of the Metro Squares, everyone said, oh, my God, this is really interesting.
It's a cool new design.
And even I said, it's a cool-looking new design.
But even, like, you know, like when I've occasionally tried to use the Tile interface, like, in Microsoft stores in the past, and...
It is cool looking, but that doesn't mean it's a good interface.
And Apple is guilty of that offense very often.
But in general, I don't think they did it as badly as Microsoft did in anything.
But like, you know, Windows 8, if Windows Phone, you know, you said, oh, Windows Phone did it well, people liked it.
If Windows Phone really did it that well, more people would have bought Windows Phone.
It worked better there than it did on the tablet or PC is what I was saying.
Because the screen is so small, you can't have this massive fleet of tiles.
You could basically have just one or two columns of things.
And so it was more manageable, even within the interfaces when you're scrolling through contacts.
They would have one per row.
It wasn't a table view, but it also wasn't this giant fleet of little tiles that you had to scramble through.
They were basically forced by the narrowness of the device to have interfaces that were...
more more like if you were to wireframe them it was really more like a traditional scrolling view with a list rather than a giant grid even like the sort of home screen thing maybe had two things side by side or three and it and it ended up being not too much unlike swiping from one home screen to the next as you saw the next set of things that would fit on the little skinny screen
I don't know, but whenever I heard from people who actually used it as their phones full-time, either for a brief span or for a long time, everyone always said the same thing, which is like, this interface looks cool, but this design has a lot of flaws, and it isn't as easy to use as you would think, conceptually.
And, again, everyone agreed.
It's, you know, same thing like with the Palm Free and WebOS.
Everyone said the same thing about that.
Like, this is really cool.
It's interesting.
Well, but they did have good ideas.
Like, the tile interface is basically the current iOS multitasking thing.
Like, they did actually have good, I think, interface ideas.
Like, how to do multitasking, how to deal with different things, to scroll along them, to flick them up, to, you know, pull things down from the top.
I think they had much more good ideas.
Yeah, but still nobody bought them.
But yeah, I know, but there's lots of reasons people want to do that.
But the Metro interface suffered mostly, I think, from having too much influence from visual, the visual design department, like a lot of it was like a consistent visual theme across the whole platforms.
when it couldn't have benefited from, like, you know, a little bit more influence from the sort of mechanical usability side of things.
And you can kind of see a little bit of that in recent Apple, too, where, you know, even iOS 7, like, obviously, huge amount of visual influence in the design, and the visual part had a usability aspect to it, but...
It seemed clear that the original iOS, you can wireframe that with a bunch of boxes and say, this is going to be our interface, and then let loose the graphic designers on it to give it spit and polish, and it just enhances the interface.
Whereas the iOS 7 thing...
the visual like you the wireframe is useless to you like the buttons don't even have borders on them like you have to the whole look has to be complete to say oh this is what it's going to look like you can't wireframe it because what do you draw for the button like it either is the finish pixels or not the finish pixels right so metro looked like it was entirely designed as like if you're doing a magazine and you wanted to have the pamphlet the magazine and the coffee table book and have a consistent theme throughout them
Metro perfect fit.
But once it starts being interface that you have to use those, those people who come with that, and maybe it's the same people aspects of the same people come more with the, uh, you know, the, the information architecture, user interface, usability perspective, uh,
that is hand in hand with the look and feel of it but there's a balance between them you want it to look nice you want to have a consistent visual theme but you also want it to be usable and i think metro just went a little bit too far into the well but this just looks so good across all of our platforms it must be usable and it wasn't as usable as they hoped
It's funny because just yesterday I was talking with a co-worker and we have a handful of co-workers that go to Build every year, which is in Moscone.
It's only three days, but it's basically Microsoft's WWDC.
And unlike WWDC, the door prizes at Build are not jackets.
They're like last year they got an Xbone and a Nokia phone.
This year they got some sort of convertible PC, which I guess is kind of a piece of crap, but it's still a whole freaking computer.
Well, anyways, one of my coworkers is still rocking this Nokia phone from a year, a little over a year ago.
And obviously it's a Windows phone.
And I was talking to him about it just yesterday.
And I asked him, you know, if you were to buy a new phone tomorrow, because I think he was complaining about something.
I don't recall specifically what.
And I asked him, if you were going to buy a new phone tomorrow, what would you buy?
You know, would you get like a, what is it, the Galaxy S6 or whatever that new hotness Android phone is that I've genuinely, genuinely heard very, very good things about.
So I asked him, you know, would you get the Galaxy S6 or what would you get?
And he said, actually, no, I'd get an iPhone 6.
Or to be honest, I'd probably try to wait until the 6S and then I'd get that.
And this is a guy who loves his Surface, who eschewed getting a new MacBook Pro to replace his existing MacBook Pro, and instead got this just behemoth of a Dell, what do they call them, like portable desktops or whatever?
So it's a laptop in theory, but it weighs 904 pounds.
The power supply weighs about twice what my laptop does.
Yeah.
And he got that because he's a pragmatic guy, and we do Windows work at work.
And so he thought, you know what, I'm just going to get a Windows machine.
I'm going to get this Dell.
And I asked him about the Dell as well.
Are you happy with that?
And he said, well, the trackpad is unusable.
The keyboard sucks.
It weighs a million pounds, and the power supply is worse.
But, you know, when it's sitting at a desk connected to external monitors, an external keyboard, an external mouse, it's a great machine.
I love it.
I can put seven hard drives in it, three optical drives, you know, 42 gigs of RAM, and a partridge in a pair.
But anyway, I bring all this up to say that he is he is a guy that really does love Microsoft stuff.
And he was telling me I am definitely switching away from Windows phone as soon as the opportunity arises.
After today's announcement, even before today's announcement, it's easy to lose faith in the future of a platform.
And, you know, like, is this is there a bright future?
in Windows phones?
Does it seem like the applications that I want that aren't there today are going to be there tomorrow?
Are there going to be great new Windows phone hardware?
We can go talk about it on app.net.
Same thing that happened to Apple.
When people lose faith in a platform, it's really difficult to ever get it back.
Even people who I think
would love it if there was a new windows phone that was like the current windows phones but better in all ways and had better software and a new version of the operating system and all the you know that they would keep buying those especially if they thought that they would be able to go to the the windows phone app store and get all the apps that they want uh but at this point it seems clear that even if that's what you like it's kind of like me with the ipod touches like you know that's not that's not a there's not a bright future in that maybe seek your phone satisfaction elsewhere