Animated Kale
Still booting.
This is the most interesting podcast ever.
Well, it's not a podcast yet.
Well, unless you keep this in the show, which you better not do.
I might put that in somewhere.
Please, dear God, no.
First of all, I want to start this show with a story about the theme song.
Our theme song by Jonathan Mann, spelled the same way as Merlin Mann, but with Jonathan in front instead of Merlin.
Our theme song—so here's what happened.
When we started this show, I went to Merlin Mann because he made the theme song to his Back to Work podcast, and
And I went to Merlin and I said, look, I'm looking for, for this show that we're doing, I'm looking for something that is kind of punchy, the way those opening chords are, to back to work.
Hello.
Did you mention bleeps and boops to him?
I did not.
Just to irritate you.
So anyway, so I went to Merlin and I said, could you whip something up in GarageBand or something?
Because he likes doing that kind of stuff and he's really good at it.
So I said, can you whip something up in GarageBand or something just to be a quick opener and a quick closer to the show?
And he said, yeah, okay, I'll work on it.
And then like a week later, Jonathan Mann does this song and releases it on YouTube during his song-a-day thing, which we will link to in the show notes.
Jonathan Mann did this awesome theme song that we've been using in almost every episode since then, if not every episode.
Except John.
But the rest of us love it.
And so...
So eventually I went to Merlin, and I'm like, you know, I think we're just going to have to keep this because it's so good.
And he was like, yeah, I agree.
You should definitely keep that.
It's really good.
Well, when you gave Merlin the assignment for the song, did you make sure it had a budget, a deadline, and resources attached to it?
I didn't.
Therefore, I guess it wasn't a priority.
No, it wasn't a priority, I think.
It didn't have a level 10 priority.
It might have only had a level 8 priority, but there's 19 other level 8 priorities.
Something like that.
I think I'm getting this right.
Right, Merlin?
I think that was a Merlin impression.
Not that good of one.
I don't have any cards to flap.
It could also be Lemongrab.
Well, no, that's more stressful.
I can't do it because I don't even know what show that is.
I've heard Merlin do it enough times that I know what you're talking about.
Anyway, so I went to Jonathan Mann and I said, hey, can we just keep using this?
Can we give you something for it?
Can we keep using it because people love it?
And he said...
All he wants is for us to mention his site and his business, because what his business is... So this guy, you've probably heard his songs before, at least one of them.
One of the biggest ones is when Apple did the AntennaGate press conference back in 2010, was it?
Late 2010, whenever that was...
They opened the press conference with the song about the Antenna Gate issue.
And that song was Jonathan Mann's songs.
I think it was just his song of the day for one of those days or something that he had released it right before then.
And Steve Jobs came out and said, Good morning.
Thanks for joining us here.
We saw that on YouTube this morning and couldn't help but want to share it.
They opened the conference with that.
So Steve Jobs likes his songs.
His song gets stuck in your head.
And he has a business where he can write a song for your company if you want him to.
And so go to his site.
It's jonathanman.net.
And we'll put that in the show notes also.
And you can also just follow his YouTube channel because he posts all these songs every day and they're really catchy.
He did a hypercritical song a few months back when that was still going and that was really catchy.
And so he's just really good at writing songs that got stuck in your head
And so if you have a podcast or a company or anything like that, you kind of want that because that's really good for you.
One of the reasons I wanted to keep this song for us is because it gets stuck in your head.
That's good for the show.
That's like promotion for the show.
And it gives you a good feeling when you hear us every week.
So thanks a lot to Jonathan Mann for letting us use this song.
And check out his site.
I'm willing to, in the show notes, JonathanMannWithTwoNs.net.
Yeah, I feel compelled to point out that when you say they're catchy, that's like the good kind of catchy, not like the modern pop music annoying catchy, where it's like this thing burrowing into your brain.
It's the happy catchy, the one that you kind of giggle about every time you hear somebody humming it or...
singing it as tiff and all of us did for most of the germany trip so it's the good kind of catchy yeah it's not like you know pop music that you want to you want to drill your brain out right with a spoon because you just cannot get it out of your head i mean this is like yeah you're right it's the good kind and and this guy obviously you know jonathan has real talent here because he's he's made lots of songs that are that catchy like it's not like he had one that was really catchy and that was it he was done he seems to be really really good at specifically creating good catchy songs
He makes a song every day, doesn't he?
He's still doing that, right?
Yeah, and I believe his reasoning for that was to keep himself sharp and develop these skills, and he really, I mean, you could tell this guy, he's really good at it.
Anyway, so thank you to Jonathan Mann.
That was freaking great to have this theme song, and I love it.
Well, most of the hosts on this show absolutely love it.
Two-thirds of the hosts of ATP.
I like both versions of the song.
This one is catchy.
I like it.
I'm partial to bleeps and boops.
and i i agree with the people who said that the bleeps and boops the weakness of the bleeps and boops song is that it sounds like there should be more song and there isn't whereas the uh the other one it kind of is a complete thing you know oh i should point it also i even adjusted the uh the eq in in the way i edit things i adjusted the eq for starting in last week's episode just to make the song sound better
Like it needed any help.
I was killing its audio quality because I was applying the voice EQ to the global track to all of us, including the song track.
So now the song track is untouched, and so you get to hear it in its full glory.
At 64 kilobits.
Now that we have two consecutive podcasts about podcasts, a really quick bit of follow-up that I just wanted to mention.
A lot of people have come out of the woodwork and recommended a million different list apps to me after my complaining about the way that list apps work and how I want something super simple.
And one of the things I heard a lot of is, dude, why don't you just use the Reminders app?
which at first I didn't even realize that you could share lists in that, but apparently you can do it, I think, on the website and definitely on OS X, but not on iOS.
It's close to what I want.
It's not really what I want.
It's not worth discussing what I want because it's really boring and not that exciting, but I just wanted to thank everyone for pointing these things out, but also say I've heard every recommendation under the sun at this point, and if you really want to engage me on Twitter to argue about this kind of minutiae, then you know where to find me.
Just listen to the song.
It's right in there.
I was talking about ListApps yesterday because I was going grocery shopping and a lot of people brought this up to me also.
My problem is I like the Clear app.
I actually like using that in the store.
It's because it has such a minimal interface and everything is a big touch target and you can swipe everything.
It's really easy to use while shopping, and I like that as you cross things off, they fall off the list, and so the view that you're looking at gets smaller.
It's really, really very nice when walking around a store.
You don't have to look that closely at the phone.
You don't have to be that precise with your gestures.
Everything is big and friendly to one-handed use while shopping.
And I was lamenting problems I was having with it syncing to the Mac client and not being able to multi-line paste.
Although apparently if you do a shake gesture or something, there was some kind of crazy gesture that I would never have guessed to attempt to multi-line paste something.
I don't know.
I didn't try it since then, but...
Anyway, so I was expressing my disdain for shopping list apps, and just like Casey, I got a billion recommendations from everybody about their favorite shopping list app, or in many cases, the shopping list app that they make themselves.
It's so funny how so many of these apps only did a third of what I asked for.
What I asked for is fairly simple.
I didn't even have the share requirement that Casey had.
All I want is to have a sync between the Mac and iOS.
For the iOS client to be as easy to use as Clear when I'm actually shopping...
And if sync for some reason doesn't work very well, let me at least type the list in the Mac, email it to myself, and then copy and paste into the list in a multi-line to multi-item action.
And so many recommendations couldn't fit my fairly minimum requirements.
So anyway, the problem that I have when people give me all these recommendations is that it takes time to try these things out.
And, you know, if I have something that works like 90% of the way or 80% of the way, the chances that I'm going to take an hour one day and try 14 different other list apps, that's just never going to happen.
The pain of using the one I'm already using is never going to be great enough to make it worth even looking at the other ones.
Here's something else about recommendations, because I get them a lot, too.
People do recommendations kind of like they're participating in personal computer gamesmanship on the Internet in 1992, like they do with feature checkboxes.
Well, this has X, Y, and Z, and Q. Well, this is X, Y, Z, Q, and P. Oh, well, then it wins, right?
And especially for iOS apps, I find that a lot of the time, the application that I use...
I like for reasons that have nothing to do with the features.
I acknowledge that this lacks features and has an annoying bug that drives me insane, but I like how it looks better.
Or I like the three buttons that I press most frequently.
I like where they are because of the way I hold it with my thumb.
Crap like that.
That determines which app I pick.
One that recently came up was people yelling at me on App.net about why I should use other App.net clients because I'm constantly complaining about NetBots annoying bugs.
bugs with not marking replies as read and silly things like that and you know i have i've bought like every app.net client that exists right so i already have all these apps and they're like this one hasn't this has had that feature forever and like i know i have all them but when i like i there's something about how netbot looks or like it looks like app.net to me or i like where the buttons are you know the intangibles and that could be why you end up using an application over another app it doesn't always it's not it
doesn't always have to be feature checkboxes and it's crazy to me that people who are like in the mac community and you know sort of in our circle that part of their brain shuts off when when like comparing applications oh you should use this application because it has the feature you want well if it's ugly i'm not going to use it well why is it ugly it's not really ugly it's just not to my taste like i'm not not impugning other people's applications that somehow they do a bad job laying it out but sometimes you like how one looks better than the other you like where a button is or what's a button and what's a slide and what's not a slide and
people don't like to hear that like that's what whenever people ask me about app recommendations i always have to do this whole song and dance about like this is the application that i like but it's not necessarily the best one for you because maybe you like different things than i do you know oh that's exactly that's exactly what i ran ran into with the recommendations to me because everyone said oh you want something super simple you want it to be shared what's wrong with you why not use reminders and
there's a there's several reasons why i don't really want to use reminders none of which matter and it's really not worth going into but i i tried to tell people this and they're like but that should work for you and i'm thinking to myself well i just told you it doesn't well now that now that you're a famous person like that's the thing is that you want the famous person to use your app because it's like oh you know well this is used by you know this person who has this uh this voice to the world or whatever but
It's nothing against a lot of these apps.
Some of them I acknowledge are better applications than the one I'm choosing to use.
But if one is green and one is red and I really like red, I'm going to use the red one even if the green one is technically a better app.
And that's how people actually are.
And I don't think we should be...
excluded from being allowed to be just like people are and just picking the green one because you like green.
As long as we're clear when people ask about recommendations, it's like, this is the app that I like, but there are plenty of other really great apps too.
Try the ones and see which ones.
Do what I didn't.
Buy every single one of them and then pick the one that you like best.
Oh, yeah.
And what you said a minute ago, you said, like, you know, you like this button being red and the other app, it's blue.
Like, back when I worked... I've told the story a few times on Build and Analyze, so I'll be quick.
Back when I worked at Vivissimo in Pittsburgh and we made the Clusty search engine, among other things...
We would get support emails from Klusty saying, I use you over Google because I like the color scheme on the site or I like your logo.
You would think, oh, Google in 2006 or 2005 when we were doing this, they were on top of their game.
They were dominating the search market.
Bing wasn't around yet.
DuckDuckGo wasn't around yet.
Everything was Google back then.
And you would think an alternative search engine, there'd be no market for it.
But there was.
There wasn't another market for a Google-sized company to have their own search engine.
But when you had a little one, like we did, run by only a handful of people, you can pay them with the revenue.
You can be sustainable with a small company having a small product with a small market share because the market is just so damn big that if you can get...
half of 1% of it to prefer your product over the other one, you can support a company on that as long as it's not that big of a company.
That applies to so many things.
That applies to the App Store.
That applies to so many things where you think there's no more room in the market for your product, but there is.
There might not be a whole lot of room for your product.
You might not be able to have a ton of users and make a ton of money, but there's enough space for sustainable living
to be made by one or a handful of people in a lot more markets than you think.
Cool.
Thanks.
You can always rely on me to break that awkward silence.
It's hard not to think of this position by Marco as a foreshadowing of his future endeavors.
It's going to be a to-do app, isn't it?
You can just admit it.
It's okay.
Yes, that's it.
I already posted a screenshot.
I posted my preview of the to-do app with filters.
Did you?
I missed that.
Did you post on your site or Twitter?
On Twitter.
Yeah, because now I'm thinking there aren't enough apps in the App Store that let you take a photo and apply a filter to it.
I saw it.
That was on your shopping list, yes.
Yes.
And so that market, I think, is underserved.
There just aren't enough photo filter apps.
And as we just discussed...
There are many to-do apps, but there aren't really any that we all love.
So I'm going to combine the two and maybe throw in a flashlight as well because those are pretty bad too.
And I was thinking maybe a weather feature as well because all of those things are dramatically underserved.
And so it would be a flashlight weather shopping list with filters.
For your shopping list, I have two words for you.
Animated kale.
Done.
Million dollar idea.
What?
And you should call it... Should that be the name of the app?
No, it should have animated kale on it.
When you write down kale on a list, I want to see kale leaves.
I know they want them to be animated.
Like as if you're shaking the water off of them from the fruit sprayers?
No, not at all.
Are you getting it?
No, they should blow in proportion to the wind velocity where you're standing.
You can use the accelerometer and the gyroscope, you know.
Run with it, Marco.
You can figure it out.
I can figure that out.
Call it InstaList.
Well, I was saying, too, I don't plan to ever reuse the prefix Insta anymore because ever since Instagram came out and became insanely popular, that prefix has been so overused now that...
If I use it again, I will look like I'm copying the trend and not just copying my own previous product that predated most of the Instacraze.
There's nothing I can really do about that.
You just got to accept that phrase has been ruined and move on.
Anyway, do you want to talk about Google I.O.?
That happened today.
Do we care?
I think we probably should care.
I think it's relevant.
Yeah, there were some interesting bits.
I'm just trying to be... I didn't see any of it because I was working and then I had dinner and a school concert.
So I saw the tweets about it, but I really know nothing.
So hopefully you guys know more about it than I do, and then you can explain it to me who doesn't know...
any of the stuff and that will serve to also explain it to the listeners who could not endure three and a half hours of that keynote or maybe they have jobs well to that end I did not watch the three and a half hour keynote and after after I got home I lazy twittered for for like a brief recap in my my good friend Larry King definitely called me out and asking basically all of Twitter to do my show prep on my behalf so thank you Twitter
But then Panzer did it for you, so there you go.
Yeah, but Panzer did it for me because who doesn't like Panzer?
I mean, he's the man.
So anyway.
He has very tall hair.
He has extremely tall hair.
Don't be jealous.
I can't hide it.
I am jealous.
My hair cannot get that tall.
and and he he can pull it off just like like jeff rock always jeff rock is is a cool enough guy that he can pull off any facial hair any like mutton chops full beard partial beard goatee anything he can pull off any facial hair combination and i'm i'm very jealous of that because i can't pull off anything except clean shaven which i don't do very well like i'm sorry guys i did not shave for the podcast
I thought something felt just a little bit wrong tonight.
Yeah, I'm a little sharp.
Anyway, so Google I.O., go on.
Oh, you watched it, didn't you?
No, I didn't actually.
Oh, I thought you did.
Instead of watching Google I.O., I took a new allergy medicine this morning because my allergies have been crazy and slept all afternoon.
So I was able to tweet a few things in response to some of the live blogs that I was reading before and after the giant nap.
Amazingly, I woke up from the giant nap and it was still going on.
Yeah, so apparently, so I'm going to recap.
So let me try that again from the top.
I know almost nothing, but apparently of the three of us, I know the most.
So based on Panzer's excellent punch list, which I'll try to find while one of you start talking and put in the chat so we can put it in the show notes, there were a few different things that I kind of
grouped everything into.
And so the general themes that I saw were general stuff about Google's business and Android and Android's business.
Then there was a bit about DevTools, of course, a bunch about cloud services, and then finally some hardware.
In terms of IOs and Google's business,
They did note that they have 900 million Android activations, which is quite a bit, and 48 billion apps downloaded, which given that Apple just rolled over 50 billion, I thought that was kind of interesting and unsurprising that they had a Me Too moment about that.
Oh, definitely.
So I don't know if you guys have anything else to add on that before I continue.
It doesn't sound like it.
Okay, so DevTools, they mentioned a few different things.
Firstly, apparently there's a mechanism by which you can ask for app translation to happen, or maybe not ask for as though it's free, but you can request app translation to happen within the Google equivalent of iTunes Connect, I guess.
Yeah, I wasn't clear on that.
Was that human-powered?
Yeah.
I don't know.
My impression was you have to, somebody is doing it somehow.
So yes, it's human powered and I don't think it's free, but again, I'm not a hundred percent sure.
It's still very good, though, because I've always rallied in favor of good voiceover support in apps to the point where I think Apple should be testing apps with voiceover on during app review and rejecting the ones that are unusable or otherwise terrible for voiceover users.
And my reasoning for that would be to get more apps to do this fairly trivial thing to support accessibility better.
And I think it would be interesting if somebody were to do the same thing with basic localization.
Now that Google has this infrastructure in place where you can very easily localize your app or at least do the basics right within their developer portal, what if Apple did that and made it a basic requirement of app review that you have to localize all important strings in your app for strings that are important to use it?
That was a question I had about the localization thing, because although I didn't watch it, I saw the tweets going by about it.
Is this a service they provide?
Like you give them some money or something, and then people localize your app?
Or is this just a way for you to localize your own app?
My impression...
My impression was that it was a service, and somebody in the chat is saying that, yes, it's human-powered and you pay per word.
And if your name was pronounceable in the chat, I would pronounce it, but it's a series of consonants.
And so I guess your name is G-G-G.
But anyway, so they were saying that it's human-powered and pay-per-word.
And I agree with you, Marco, that voiceover support is so unbelievably trivial in iOS.
It's really just saying, hey, for this UI element, this is what you should read to a vision-impaired user.
And when you got on a kick about this, geez, I don't know, it was like two years ago now, I did that with my really crummy and really simple app in the App Store, and it took me about an hour.
And I expected it to take forever.
So that's not translation.
That's a little bit different.
But...
I completely agree that not having voiceover support is inexcusable, and shame on you if you don't.
This translation thing reminds me of highlights, if it is as you described, how is the difference between Apple and Google?
Because I can never imagine Apple...
offering a service like that because what apple would want you to do is to get your own translators and work closely with them to make sure it's exactly the way you want it because it's not it's not that it's automated translation or machine translation it's just that this pool generic pool of translators aren't going to know your particular application to the same degree that you know someone that you hired personally and worked with would know
And it seems like what you'd end up with is more applications that are translated, but the ones that are translated would not be very good translations.
And it seems like Apple would be like, look, just don't even bother translating if you're not going to sweat the details over the exact precise word in this other language is going to be the right word for your application.
And you're going to go back and forth with your guy 50 times about it, you know.
One thing, too, one of the reasons why I never localized Instapaper, which honestly was probably very bad for business, but the reason I didn't localize the app is because Instapaper is much more than just the app, and there's the entire website that would go along with it.
And the Instapaper app and website and the way they interact, the bookmarklet, installation, procedure, all that stuff –
It's very text-intensive, very language-intensive, and the language is very nuanced in a lot of cases.
And also, there's the question of, shouldn't you also, if you're selling an app in a language, giving the impression that you support that language, do you also need to provide support in that language?
That's another question.
So there were all these...
The task of localizing Instant Paper would have been so large to do it well that I never got around to it.
As my limited time and resources permitted, I just never got around to doing it because I knew that it wasn't just localizing a few button labels in the app.
It was much, much more than that.
And...
And localization, even when it is just localizing button labels in an app, that alone is not trivial.
There's a lot of problems with, again, with nuance, not the company, with nuance, the noun, of just when you say accept or okay, or if you say read later, what does that mean in another language?
If you directly translate that,
Is there a better alternative than what you come up with, or is it confusing if you directly translate it?
There's all these little exceptions that, as you said, John, it's not as easy as, here, just blindly take the strings file and give me the output.
And then there's other issues like, do the new strings fit on the buttons?
Do they overflow the boundaries of the labels?
Hence German and their expensive spaces.
Right, or like Japanese, where you should be using larger font sizes slightly, or different fonts.
There's all sorts of differences that you need to consider, and edge cases all over the place, to the point where they're not even really edge cases.
It's just regular cases.
Localization is not a trivial thing, and just translating the strings is step one, and there's a lot more to it than that.
But at the same time, you could possibly argue,
Is a badly translated app better than an app that is not translated at all?
Yeah, I'm not making a value judgment about it.
I'm just saying that Apple's system of priorities is such that they would prefer that you do a super awesome job or not do it.
Whereas Google...
Their philosophy is definitely it's better to have make make translation as easy as possible, even if the translations aren't going to be that great, because we think it's more important to just have, you know, 10,000 OK translated apps out there instead of 100 ones with great translations.
Yeah.
But yeah, but the same thing with the layouts.
And forget about, you know, when you were doing Instabator testing, having your 17 Kindles, your 800 iOS devices, now multiply that by the number of languages.
And make sure you check every screen in every language, because you never know when that label's going to poke out of the button or get truncated.
It's just a nightmare.
Oh, yeah.
I remember when we, back in Tumblr, before I even left to do Instapaper, when Tumblr started localizing, it was just a massive amount of work.
And fortunately, I didn't have to do it.
But it took a dedicated staff of, I think, two people, one being... And it's hard enough to find a good translator, for one thing, because you have to find somebody... Generally speaking, it's better to find somebody...
who is a native speaker of the destination language that you're translating to.
So if you want to translate to Japanese, you should probably find a Japanese person who has grown up in Japan, who knows enough English to be able to understand your app and translate it well to Japanese.
But then it isn't just enough to find somebody who speaks the language and knows it well.
You have to also find somebody who's good at writing interface text.
Think about how hard it is to find people in your own language to do that.
That's not an easy job.
And that really can make a very, very big difference in how people perceive and use your product.
And so you can't just find anybody.
But here's the worst part.
You can't really judge the quality of somebody for a language you don't know very well.
You can't judge how good they are at that.
It's very, very difficult.
So there's the issue of how do you find good people to do this even?
Yeah, Google's automated, like the tools are actually a problem because I've done, I've worked in companies where we extensively localized everything and the tools to give to the people who are doing the localization, that is actually an issue because we would hire the best people to do localization as we could, but they weren't necessarily tech savvy.
So you wanted to give them a really simple way for them to be able to update things quickly that integrated with the rest of your process.
So this tool that Google is providing is,
It provides that piece of the puzzle, and I can also imagine a way for them to help with the problem that you were just describing, Marco, where you're like, I hope this guy's doing a good job with these translations because I can't read them.
You could have a system whereby people rate the quality of the translations of those applications in the store, and I know it's crazy for us in the iOS ecosystem to talk about adding features to the store or the back end to it, but for Google...
That's, you know, they'd be like, oh, yeah, we should do that.
So then the people who participated in this human powered translation process could be rated by the customers of the applications to say, was this is this application localized in your language very well?
Or did it read like, you know, when we read those manuals and how to assemble something that are clearly barely translated from, you know.
korean or chinese or something and you can tell right and eventually you would probably start you know narrowing the pool of your human power translators or at least marking this guy as like five star for like all the things you can do with the internet and the web could be brought to bear on these aspects of the translation problem the difficulty of finding tools finding people who are going to use the tools and making sure those people like having some sort of feedback mechanism whereby
the people get better, or at least you can see how good they are during the translation.
I think that that also brings up an interesting side effect of this, or a side discussion related to this, which is, I think, seeing all the stuff that Google was adding to their developer portal today really makes iTunes Connect look terrible in comparison.
I mean, iTunes Connect, which is what iOS developers use to manage their apps and upload them and everything, it's always been pretty terrible.
It has gotten better over the years, but I would still not call it anywhere near good.
There's lots and lots of old cruft there.
It's very clearly made for the music industry to upload their stuff to iTunes back forever ago, and they just kind of tackled the stuff onto this ancient infrastructure to support apps.
iTunes Connect is just a website, right?
Yeah.
They never upload an iOS app.
It's amazing to me that if you think of how far...
The tools that Apple's developers use have come since, like, Project Builder when it was... Well, was it still called Project Builder in Mac OS X 10.0?
I don't remember.
I wasn't there for that.
Way back when, like, Xcode did not look like it does now.
And it was in as many complaints as people have about Xcode 4.
Like, it has a... It's...
Leaps and bounds of where it was when things started.
So it's clear that Apple has invested very heavily, with some bumps in the road, fine, in its native IDE, right?
But then if you look at any part of the development process that's not in a native application, like Radar Web, or apparently iTunes Connect, which I haven't used, or even just like the ADC site, which has kind of limped along, those have not made the kind of progress that Xcode has over the same period of time.
And it's frustrating for everyone involved.
And it doesn't make sense to me because in this particular case, it's not like they don't prioritize the developer experience.
I mean, look at what they're doing with Xcode.
Like they made their own compiler for crying out loud or, you know, acquired slash commandeered their own compiler.
Like they're not afraid to do the hard things when it comes to trying to make great tools for developers.
But somehow the web doesn't count.
And it's like, oh, we'll just suffer through this website.
And I don't understand that.
Well, and we're going to get to that if we get this far, since I'm on point one of Google I.O.
and we've already run for a few minutes.
But we'll get to that later in that Google announced a lot of cloud services, and that really made me think about the comparison to Apple.
But yeah, iTunes Connect definitely stinks.
And in my, what is it, three or four years that I've been piddling with iOS as a developer, it has always been awful.
And I couldn't agree with you more, Marco, that
It's unsurprising to me that Google, who is so strong in web services and cloud computing sort of things, it's not surprising to me that they're doing so much better or appear to be doing so much better than Apple is at these sorts of bits.
So along the line with DevTools, another thing that they announced is
native beta testing.
And to be honest, I don't know specifically what that means.
I'm assuming it's a test flight sort of setup, which is interesting because last I heard test flight was just becoming available on Android, but that is available now.
And the other thing that I thought was very interesting is staged rollouts.
So you can say, Hey, for this new feature, perhaps for this new binary, I'm not, again, I'm not totally clear on how it works.
You can target or say only 10% of my users can, can see this new feature or new binary or whatever the case may be.
And that strikes me as really useful and relevant for things like, what was the trendy mail app?
Was it Mailbox?
Is that right?
It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter.
You got it right.
So yeah, so Mailbox, who famously had or infamously had a queue system, and I think a couple other apps have done that since.
Instead, they have this native mechanism wherein you can do a staged rollout, which I thought was really cool and interesting.
But speaking of support problems, I can only imagine the support snafu that that would cause.
So I don't know if this would do more harm than good.
And I'm curious, Marco, to hear your two cents about this.
But it certainly, on the surface, it sounds excellent.
But as soon as I dig deeper mentally into what this would mean, it strikes me as maybe not the best idea in the world.
Well, I think it's necessary in the Android ecosystem more so than it is in the App Store or iOS ecosystem because the Android ecosystem is kind of this wild west where you can upload a binary at any time.
There's no app review.
You do what you want whenever you want to.
And so having something like a staged rollout actually makes some sense because you don't have that, first of all, that long delay between when you ship some code and when people can actually get it.
And there's also not that big step of app review happening in the middle where there's someone else trying your app in an isolated environment and catching most really obvious major bugs.
And therefore preventing you from submitting that to your customers.
So I think with iOS, if you had a stage rollout, how would that really benefit you if you can't send a new binary up there for another week anyway?
The benefit there is less so than in the Google case where you can just upload things whenever you want and it's pretty much immediate.
But that presupposes that an issue is with your binary and not with the backing web service that in this phantom app presumably is under your control and presumably you could fix whenever you want.
Yeah.
Did that make sense?
Yeah, it did.
I guess if you're rolling out something that's going to put a lot of strain on your servers or you don't know how it's going to be at scale and you might have to re-index some databases or optimize some things, then I could see some value there.
But...
I think the overhead of having such a system probably is not worth it in most cases.
I don't even know how much it's worth it to Android, really.
I think what we're seeing here, though, is that Google has to make all their tools awesome.
They have to make all of these things for Android developers great, because they have to attract developers.
Google needs developers to really start taking Android more seriously.
And they are, slowly.
It is slowly happening, but...
Google needs to be attracting developers as hard as they can.
Apple doesn't need to do that because all the developers already go to Apple.
So Apple, they don't need them as badly.
And so that's why Apple can sit there with iTunes Connect being as mediocre as it is.
And they can not support all of these cool new things that Google is doing.
And they can have app review and things like that.
They can do all that because...
we go to them already.
We're like knocking down the door.
We are desperate to get into the Apple App Store because that's where the people and the money and the influence all are.
And the Android App Stores have been kind of this mixed game of usually not simultaneous release with iOS.
Things usually debut on iOS first if they're going to be cross-platform at all.
Certainly, they almost never debut on Android first and then go to iOS.
And most of the buzz of new apps happening is still happening on iOS.
So Google really needs people to go to them first.
So they need to be doing all this stuff, whereas Apple really doesn't.
Yeah, I would agree with that.
And the other thing that I forgot to mention in terms of developer tools on an iTunes Connect sort of scenario is I heard some rumblings of, I guess there's some sort of lead tracking or referral information, like analytics-ish kind of.
Analytics is a poor choice of words, but some sort of referral information so you can see why somebody downloaded your app.
And again, I don't know any of the details beyond that, but I heard some rumblings about it.
And I know
That would be really exciting if you take your presence in the App Store seriously, which I do not, but I know, Marco, you certainly did.
And still do.
And so I can only imagine how awesome that would be if Apple provided even a rudimentary amount of information about where you've gotten downloads from.
Oh, yeah.
I mean, I've been yelling about that for years.
And yeah, I think what they said was later this summer they're tying it in with Google Analytics and something like that.
And so you can have app analytics and the website and track where they came from and all that stuff.
Basically everything that iOS people want.
Yeah.
As an iOS developer, it's very hard to know why people are buying your app.
You can look at your rank, and you can see how well you're doing relative to other apps and everything like that.
You can see your sales every day.
You can see how many you're selling.
And you can attempt to correlate.
Like, okay, well, I just did a big ad buy, and then the next day my sales were up.
So that might have been because of the ad buy.
Or it might have been because a lot of people just bought new iPhones that day.
Or it could have been featured somewhere in the app store and not even known about it because they don't tell you when you're featured.
There's all these conditions.
And you don't know even, did somebody search for your app by name?
Or did they browse an App Store section?
And if they were browsing an App Store section and it popped up, what kind of section were they browsing?
Was it a feature?
Was it a top list?
Was it a category list?
It would be great to know where these people are coming from, why they bought your app, how they got there.
If you run a web campaign, there are things like Tapstream that will try to track people between things.
But...
Even those, they can't work all the time because Apple doesn't have any kind of hooks into their stuff.
And so it would be great to know, oh, my app was downloaded from browsing the top list here.
And therefore, I might want to consider staying in the top list and maybe adjusting my price as a result.
Or it'd be nice to know, well, most people downloaded my app by searching for it by name.
Therefore, I don't need to rely as much on the top list, and I can concentrate more on advertising my name and branding and all that stuff.
It would be great to know that stuff, and you just have no insight into any of that with Apple today.
You can attempt to get some of it through various hacks and services that attempt to tie IPs to purchases and things like that, but it would be so much better if Apple integrated that somehow, and they just ignored that completely.
which is kind of their MO, which is unfortunate, but it's certainly true.
So what if iTunes Connect and all this stuff having to do with sales tracking and uploading new versions of your application and everything was written as a native application instead of a web app?
Does that solve the problem for us?
Is that the only way we can make this happen?
Because, I mean, maybe it would start out as kind of like, you know, the first version of Xcode 4 would be kind of a disaster, and it would be like, oh, this is so much worse, at least the website worked.
But
Maybe over time they would iterate on that native application, whatever it might be called.
Hopefully it would not be called iTunes.
Well, they already have a native app and Xcode integration doing part of the job.
It used to be that you would prepare your binary with the special... You'd have to export it with the...
the distribution, signing profile, and all this crazy certificate and profile stuff, and then make sure you upload that version of it into the file upload form.
And now, first they had this application loader, I think, or I think that was the one that did it.
First they had this app that you would do everything in iTunes Connect to prepare for the upload.
You'd enter all the metadata, the screenshots, everything else, and then it would say, ready for upload, and then you'd launch this app, and that would do it.
And now that's built into Xcode.
So Xcode itself can do that.
People were super excited.
I think this was the last year's WWDC when I think someone was discussing this feature of the integration.
And they were like, oh, do they integrate iTunes Connect into Xcode?
And everyone was excited about that.
I think mostly because they figured if we can hook on to the train that actually has iterative improvements year after year, that will be a good thing.
And then everyone was disappointed.
Yeah.
An hour or two days later, we realize, oh, they didn't integrate it entirely.
It's just slightly more stuff happens in Xcode, but still you're going to be going to that website.
Right.
And the stuff they integrated does work well, and it is better and faster and way less error-prone than the old way of doing it.
But it's still not – it's not the full experience.
But I don't even know –
If integration would really solve the problems of iTunes Connect, because it's not that web apps are always terrible.
There's lots of great web apps.
I don't think this needs to be a native app to do the stuff that iTunes Connect mostly does.
I think it just needs to be a better web app, and there's plenty of room for that.
are apple's web maps always terrible i don't think they are like some some of the iCloud apps like the little fake mail application they have they suffer from trying to look too much like native applications yeah but but other than that like there's competence there to to do it like competence that is not reflected in for example radar web right oh yeah radar web is way worse than itunes connect
Right, because they had, like, you know, I think Apple helped fund slash hired a bunch of the guys from Sproutcore, and they had PastryKit, their internal thing that was doing, you know, emulated UI kit stuff in JavaScript.
Like, there's little fits and starts of web stuff that goes on, and then, of course, there's the web object guys toiling away, doing whatever it is that they do.
But clearly, like Google, the entire company is focused on web development.
And their web apps just – you may not like them aesthetically and you may not like Google and the things they collect or whatever.
But they know how to make a web app, let me tell you.
Oh, yeah.
They work great.
And they are – even if the visual design is often questionable – in fact, I think it has always been questionable – functionally, they work extremely well.
And I think the visuals have gotten better, like leaps and bounds.
When they did that, they redesigned everything to be that kind of more widely spaced, sharp-cornered Google colors, gray and red and blue.
I'm not that big a fan of that design, but applying that coat of paint at least is finally giving them some kind of unified appearance across their product lines.
And each new one that comes out, when they redid Google Images, it got a little bit better.
And the new Google Maps looks like a little bit more modern, a little bit better.
Gmail is still weird looking.
Google Plus, even in its short life, Google Plus has stepped up.
So it's the old thing we've seen said a million different times about a million different companies.
But in this case, it's Google and Apple.
Google is becoming better at being like Apple faster than Apple is becoming better at being like Google or however you want to phrase it.
google becoming apple apple becoming google but like it seems like that google is upping its game in all the areas where apple is traditionally strong and apple is not really upping its game i mean i guess kind of like do it pulling off maps at all was was kind of a leg up like now apple proving that it can kind of do this stuff but that didn't come out great you know
Yeah, let's come back to that in a minute.
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I've been to Event Apart and I highly recommend it.
Especially if you're like a programmer developer type nerd and you've never been to a non-developer conference.
Event Apart is a developer conference, but it's not like hardcore programming.
They're going to talk about HTML, CSS, and they're going to talk a lot about design issues.
It's great to go to a conference like that, especially a good one outside of your core area of competency.
Because maybe you're not a designer, maybe you're just...
JavaScript programmer, but just to go to a conference where more than half the sessions are about things outside the realm of your little world of programming really helps expand your mind to the fact that your product is more than how nicely factored your classes are.
Oh, yeah.
And I went to one as well.
I learned a lot there.
And it really is a very good balance of code and design and style.
And it really is focused a lot on websites.
Like, yeah, highly recommended if you're a web developer or web designer.
And the quality of their speakers tends to be perhaps a notch above, in terms of public speaking skill, the average speaker you'd get at like a Python conference or something.
Not that I'm impugning programmers, but these people understand that it's part of their job to be entertaining and engaging, and they are.
So highly recommend it.
So back to what you said a second ago.
I do want to talk a little bit about this, how it does seem like Google is advancing rapidly.
And Apple seems to be going at a relatively stable pace that is noticeably slower than Google in a lot of these areas.
And we had on our previous shows, we discussed what happened with the WebKit project and how Google just threw a ridiculous amount of engineering talent at WebKit and just totally blew past Apple's contributions pretty quickly.
See, I don't know if it's so much as them throwing people at it because that makes it seem like they have taken resources and directed it a certain thing.
I just think they have more bandwidth.
They're a wider machine.
They just have more bandwidth for these types of things.
How many people does Apple have to put towards making any kind of web application better versus how many people does Google have to put towards that?
Pick any other thing.
How many people does Apple have to put towards their compiler versus how many people does Google have?
I'd love to see the real headcounts here, but it just seems to me like Google has more bandwidth.
They have more people.
They have more smart people.
And they seem to, through what is often a failure of Google, which is their relatively hands-off management through most of their history, that always results in them having a million different half-finished, half-assed products and services, and they go into betas, and they get shut down, and then they get ignored.
They've always been kind of all over the place, but as a result of this lack of strict management for so long...
You're right, they do have a lot of bandwidth.
They can just get tons of stuff done because it isn't all flowing through a narrow funnel at the top, or at least it hasn't been so far.
And at Apple, it's always been the opposite.
At Apple, it's always been like everything goes through the top, everything is directed from the top, and so things that the top doesn't care about or doesn't have time to care about generally get neglected or get on very, very slow development cycles, like iTunes Connect.
And so I think – or the Mac Pro.
And so I think Apple has always operated much like a small company, and that has really given them a lot of benefits in a lot of their products and a lot of their output.
But I think in the case of things like web services, that just doesn't work.
You just need more throughput.
There's more to do.
There's more that needs to be able to be done without the CEO having to approve everything or the chief director of whatever having to approve everything or be in all the meetings.
And you're right that Google is just so capable of throwing tons and tons of bandwidth, as you say, at this problem.
And Apple just has not seemingly done that.
I mean, it's hard to know with Apple because so few people really talk about what happens inside there.
They're not really allowed to.
But it just seems from the outside like Apple has just never cared that much about things like web services, enough to get them as right as Google does.
I have to say something about this every show, so this will be my time this show.
Google seems so much more dedicated to caring about infrastructure, solving a general purpose problem that will benefit the entire company in a general purpose way rather than having, oh, the group that's working on this little thing will do whatever it takes to make a great whatever they're working on.
So the Gmail team would like, oh, we really need infrastructure.
to make storage work great for gmail so we're going to do a storage project and like great good job we love gmail came out great we have people with good taste like the apple model people with good taste deciding what's in and what's out and we really make a great product uh but what did you do for the rest of the company great so you made a great product did you help the rest of the company in any way when you made that maybe some other projects in the company need some way to store stuff in a similar way that gmail needs to store stuff
And I get the impression at Apple, especially before they went cross-functional, that it was like the team working on iOS does all sorts of crazy things to make the first version of iOS awesome with minimal...
with a minimal eye towards what are we doing that will help the rest of the company, not just today, but 10 years from now.
And with all their concentration on, we just need to make this the best operating system it could possibly be.
And there are pluses and minuses to both of those strategies.
Because if you spend all your time trying to make infrastructure, you'll have an awesome infrastructure and crappy products.
And you can apply that slam to Google in many past scenarios and present scenarios, right?
Because infrastructure is something that nerds love, but infrastructure
Great products are something that customers love, right?
But there's a balance.
And it seems like Google is starting to get better at concentrating on making great product, not having a million different products, while retaining its religion about we need to make infrastructure, we need to make things better for everyone at the same time.
Whereas Apple just seems to be doubling down on the we need to make the most awesome product.
But at a certain point, you can't make your products any more awesome if you just don't have...
the tools in place for your company to make great web services, to make great cloud computing things, you know, all that stuff.
Like, and they can't make, it seems like almost like they can't figure out why, why aren't our maps as good as Google's?
Why isn't our, you know, iCloud services as good as the equivalent one?
And soon they'll be asking themselves why Game Center isn't as good as this cross-platform web, you know, like...
And maybe it doesn't matter because iOS will still have better games than Google, more games, games that make people more money.
And in the end, that's all that really matters.
But I worry about the infrastructure thing, and that's something that has historically been Google's strength.
And they're playing strongly to it, like you were saying.
So the other section or grouping of things that we learned at Google I.O.
that I saw was just kind of cloud services.
So you mentioned Google Play Games.
I think that's what it's called.
I don't even know.
They also have a cloud messaging thing, which my understanding is it's not as much iMessage as it is
a more centralized version of push notifications and so the understanding that i got was that if you're using some application that uses this uh this service say it's a website within chrome well if you get a notification within chrome it will only go to that chrome session but the minute you leave that chrome session and i don't know by what mechanism it determines that you've left
Then you'll start getting these notifications on your phone instead.
And so this is the thing that all Apple users beg for specifically around iMessage, but would be awesome in general.
So if you say use TweetBot, you would only get TweetBot notifications on whatever thing you're actively using.
And again, that would be really awesome for iMessage.
And the interesting thing that I caught myself thinking was, you know, I bet that'll work really well.
Whereas if Apple announced the exact same thing at WWDC in a month, or not even a month, I think my first thought will be, hmm, I hope that works.
They can't even get iMessage to show up in the right order within a single application on a single device.
Like, it's so far in terms of the confidence level of getting this stuff right.
You know, speaking of Google Hangouts, which someone mentioned in the chat room and featured in various ways in this thing, it was integrated with the messaging stuff.
Remember when they showed Google Hangouts, like, Google Plus came out, and, like, and there's also this Hangout thing, and you're, like, some sort of, like, video thing, and I have to install, like, a...
Yeah.
And that is the way that we can successfully video conference.
And they share their screens with each other and have different speakers doing things.
And we do like all the things that you would see in those 80s futuristic, like in the future, you'll be able to do this.
We do it and we're doing it all in a web browser in Google Hangouts.
Now, does that require Google Plus, or is that its own thing now?
I don't know what people are doing to do it.
I think it might require Google Plus, but the point is, all you need is a web browser.
No one has to install any software, works on a Mac, works on a PC.
I don't even know if everyone's using Chrome.
Maybe they all are, but it's the one thing that actually works.
And it's amazing to me to see these people who have not been evangelized, as far as I know, by anyone from Google, and
You know, like just a bunch of managers coordinating their like non-technical people coordinating their own, you know, five person multimedia presentation in three different locations.
And it just works in a web browser.
And it's amazing to me that if you said, you know, maybe Apple will be the one to bring us because, you know, I chat video chat was the first video chat that actually worked and people could do it as long as everybody had a Mac and FaceTime works great, too.
If everyone has an iOS device, FaceTime just works.
So kudos for Apple on that.
But things like Hangout that seem stupid and silly to begin with, just Google keeps hammering on them.
And even just adding the ability to screen share, integrating instant messages and having file attachments, they'll just keep integrating that until Hangout becomes this be-all, end-all, multi-person communication thing.
And it started out as this weird chat roulette type thing attached to a social network that nobody wanted to join.
Well, and apparently, according to Marco's car in the chat room, it still does require a Google Plus account, which I think I have one, but God knows I haven't looked at it in like two years.
But what's interesting about the way you describe it, John, and I think you're right, is that it's been iteratively improved upon, which is a very Apple-like approach, and it seems to be working really well for Google.
Yeah.
And I know that I've heard regular people talk about, oh, let's just do a Google Hangout real quick.
And I look at them like, wait, what?
Really?
So obviously I'm the one that's crazy because you're getting the same thing.
But people can do it.
They are successful at doing it.
Whereas think about any other way that you would do that.
Let's all get on Skype video chat.
Oh, forget it.
Skype is a train wreck and try to get everyone to have it.
I don't have Skype installed or install it or it doesn't see your camera and this and the other thing.
FaceTime.
FaceTime is pretty good.
FaceTime works.
The only problem with FaceTime is finding the other person.
Like, what name do I put in?
What Apple ID are you signed into?
And that gets back to what you were talking about before, that insanity.
And it rings in your iPad and not your computer.
Right.
And then eventually, when it finally works, you have to get your parents to turn the thing sideways.
So true.
So true.
Someone at Apple, if you're listening, can you have some sort of mode that just, like, you can do that for vertical video shooting on the iPhone.
Just force people to put it sideways.
Because if you just put the image on the screen sideways, they will turn it sideways so the image is right side up and we will all thank you for it.
So quick, let me channel neutral for a second.
When we were going around the Nürburgring and I was driving, I looked over briefly and saw Erin recording what was going on with her phone in portrait.
And I very, very sternly explained to her that that was just not going to cut it for a video of me driving around the Nürburgring.
Yes, we actually had that discussion while Casey was driving the Nürburgring.
We were discussing why you don't want to shoot video in portrait.
It's called multitasking.
Anyway, it's weird because I think FaceTime does work extremely well, but the problem with FaceTime is it's one-to-one.
And just like you were saying, John, if you want a multi-person thing, that very quickly eliminates FaceTime, unless I'm missing something.
And that's, like, even iChat video thing used to be able to, like, share a document kind of off to the side in this weird thing.
Like, it still wouldn't work for business because in business you want to put the big spreadsheet up so people can see it or you want to share your web browser screen so you can demonstrate a web application while they can still hear your audio.
Like, it's not – we're not asking for the moon, but –
Apple's conception of this in iChat video chat was like that little thing where the people would have the little reflections like they were on this big virtual infinite black mirror finished plane.
And then when you shared a document, that would come in and another one of those little things.
But they weren't expecting you to share a picture of your baby you could all look at, right?
It wasn't like made for business where you wanted to fill the screen with stuff.
It's just...
Google Hangout has lots of features and they're complicated and picky or whatever, but people can figure them out.
Like they're not elegant and beautiful or whatever.
And at some point, just having those features means something.
Why doesn't that FaceTime have multi-person chat by now?
Like, was that team, oh, okay, we're done with FaceTime.
It works fine.
Now go off and work on the next great thing, but we're not going to improve FaceTime anymore.
We're not going to add multi-person FaceTime, or maybe it doesn't work over 3G.
Who knows?
But it's kind of depressing.
It is.
It is.
And there are a few other things that Google announced.
What else do they do?
Well, they have the Google Play games, and then they also have Google Play Music All Access, which my friend Brad Lautenbach had tweeted that they really need a brand manager helper.
I forget how he phrased it.
He phrased it much better than I'm giving him credit for.
But they need a way to come up with better names.
But there's Google Play Music All Access, which is basically Spotify by Google.
That's a terrible name.
Oh, it's atrocious.
It's just like we were talking about last week, how Microsoft puts Windows in front of everything, and they used to put Windows Live, blah, blah, blah.
And now Google has put Google Play in front of all these different product names, and it just sounds ridiculous.
Google Play itself is just no good.
No, it isn't.
Whatever they came up with, like Google Play is going to be our flagship brand for the way we sell you things.
That should not have.
Because you can't go anywhere from there.
There's nothing you can put after Play that's going to improve it.
bad yeah yeah so i don't um to me a spotify like clone by google really i i don't think i care i care because i mean i don't actually don't care because i don't use streaming music but if i did use streaming music i would be more comfortable uh in investing in in the in google to like they'll stream me music they'll let me upload all my stuff or whatever because i would have more faith that google is going to be around long term than spotify like
Not that Spotify is a fly-by-night company or whatever, but if something is going to involve mass uploading or mass downloading, I like it to involve a big company that it would take a lot to kill.
Well, but even somebody as fickle as Google who always kills things?
That's the wild card, but for something where there's a business model that makes sense, like where they charge you money for it on a monthly basis, yeah, maybe the thing could just go away, right?
So that's a risk with anything.
Should I start buying iTunes music the day the iTunes store is open?
You try it and you find out, but it's not like Google Reader where it's a free service that costs a tremendous amount of money to run that you can't figure out how to make money.
They charge you every month, and presumably they charge you enough money to cover their costs.
Yeah.
It's, you know, it's the same as with Spotify.
Like, but I, I just, this is one of the, this is one of Google's strengths and Amazon's too, for that matter, like Amazon's streaming service or whatever, they're always selling you things.
They like to sell you digital things.
That's not going away.
Amazon's probably not going away.
I feel more comfortable with that than I do with just, you know, some company, random company like Spotify.
And maybe Spotify becomes as big as Google in 10 years and I'll trust them as much too.
But I think there is something to be said for that type of thing.
I don't know, but there's also something to be said for Spotify.
That's their whole business.
Whereas Google, this is kind of like this side business.
It's brand new, and Google often tries things that don't work, and then they shut them down.
And Google doesn't really need this to succeed.
They have other things they could be doing.
Spotify, this is their entire business.
So if you're going to try to figure out one company of those two that you want to invest your time and effort into, I'd still pick Spotify.
Well, I mean, it also has to do with integration, too.
Like, the reason we like the Apple thing is if you buy all Apple devices, you're sure that you'll be able to watch, you'll listen to your iTunes music if you do iTunes Match on all your iTunes devices and your Apple TV, and, you know, you're all set, right?
Well, Spotify has to do that as well, but they don't own any platform.
So they're coming from the outside, whereas at least Google can put it on Android, and you know they're going to have an awesome version on the web, and then they're okay about making an iOS app, so they've got something covered there.
But Spotify doesn't have any sort of native platform.
Well, by that rationale, you shouldn't use Netflix.
I was just about to say the same thing.
That's the thing.
If Apple had come up with a Netflix-like service, I would probably be using that instead of Netflix, but they didn't.
There's no reason Apple couldn't have done exactly what Netflix did around the same time Netflix did it.
But they didn't.
Netflix was out there alone making it happen.
So that's why we're all doing it.
And Dropbox is another example.
Why aren't we all using Google Drive?
Because Dropbox got there first, earned our trust, and Google Drive came out, and then Google Drive looks like the Me Too.
And you're like, well, you know what?
Even though Google might be around longer than Dropbox, Dropbox has proven itself to me, and it's stable and everything.
I also don't like the Spotify app.
I've tried it a few times, and it's a little bit offensive to me.
Oh, it's gotten better too.
That's the sad thing.
I agree with you.
It's rough.
It's not intuitive at all, or at least not for the way my brain ticks, but it's actually gotten a lot better since the early versions.
So I think that's the majority of the cloud services.
The only thing we haven't really talked about, which looks reasonably exciting, and I do not say that sarcastically, is the new version of Maps, which seems to be a kind of quasi mashup of
Google Maps of today with Google Earth with just generally improved visuals and everything just gets better.
I can't believe I just thought about saying this, but I was going to say they kind of plus one to everything and now I need to shower.
But no, I saw a very brief video that Google made of the new Google Maps, and it looks really darn good.
It really, really, really does.
They have really great representation of all the different directions you can take between places, and if you're lucky enough to live with somewhere that has public transport, they'll show that, they'll show car, they'll show bike, they'll show walking.
It really, really looked good.
It apparently uses, what is it, WebGL?
Yeah.
The 3D...
API, if you will, for web browsers.
So you can – presumably it runs really, really quickly.
Everything about it just looks like Google Maps, which almost everyone I know really likes, myself very much included, but better.
And that's never a bad thing in my eyes.
So did you guys see this?
I think they didn't plus one it.
I think they like plused 100 it.
That's true.
that depressing thing that Apple used to do and still kind of does is particularly on hardware where Apple comes out with an amazing hardware device.
And then for a year, the rest of the industry bends over backwards to try to come out with something that's even remotely as good.
And as soon as they start getting close, Apple like just leapfrogs itself.
And they're like, Oh God, we just barely caught up with whatever the previous iPod model was.
And now they have this thing.
Like the iPhone was one of those things.
Like we were just finally trying to get our digital music players to be half.
And now they have this phone thing and you know, everyone is screwed at,
Apple has not yet caught up with plain old, before this announcement, Google Maps.
And, you know, Apple's working hard to make them better and so on and so forth.
And now they do this.
And it's like, what?
You guys, if you just stay still for a minute, we can catch up with you.
But they won't.
Like, they're driving forward, you know, every aspect of this map thing.
It's not like we just have new data or we added new features.
Like, all new UI, all new look, all new vocabulary, all new set of things you can do, all new technology to run the thing.
By the way, WebGL still freaks me out a little bit.
I'm always afraid that I'm going to accidentally root my phone.
Yeah, security on that is tricky.
I don't know.
Yeah, that bothers me a little bit.
But you can't say that Google is just adding tiny incremental improvements to maps.
They're not resting on their laurel.
Some team had been working on these maps to vastly improve it.
And they already had the best map data.
And it's just going to get better from there.
I don't see Apple catching up to that, honestly.
I see Google Maps always being way better than Apple Maps.
Apple has never shown an ability to catch up with things of this nature at all, to even survive at all, let alone to be able to surpass Google.
Google is so good at services and big data type stuff, and Apple is so bad at that.
And leveraging the crowd, like the OpenStreetMap initiative.
If I was counseling Apple on what their only chance to be competitive in the map space is, you have to go community-based, collaborative, find an open project, get the entire world behind it.
Because then it can be you and the entire world versus Google.
And I'm sure Google is doing the same thing with trying to... They'll do it on their own.
They'll integrate feedback from all the people.
That whole mechanism of...
if someone sees something that's in the wrong place correcting it daniel jackett was talking about this on twitter the past week about how he wishes if like a store was in the wrong place he could correct it on his phone and he would at least see that change immediately even if everyone else didn't and then by doing that it would eventually filter upstream but it's like why torture himself with his own phone if he
knows the pin is in the wrong spot let him drag it to the right spot and let that change stick local to his phone and then everyone on twitter told him how that wouldn't work because what if you share the map with somebody else and people could put in bad information and blah blah those are they're all correct those are all the hard problems solving those hard problems on a massive scale is how you get better map data
You can't just do it on your own.
You can't hire 10 people to improve your maps or sort through the backlog of 8 billion requests.
You really have to just let the whole world participate.
In fact, I wish the entire world, as I've said many times in the past, were all working together to provide the best map.
This is only one planet.
There's only one Earth.
There's only one set of roads, only one set of buildings.
There's no reason, other than good old capitalism and competition, that we couldn't all be collaborating to provide the single most accurate unified set of information
that individual companies could sort of average out and smooth off the edges and decide how they want to pull from that to make their maps better.
But alas, that kind of cooperation between, particularly between Apple and Google, seems to be in the past.
Well, it worked well with WebKit.
For a little while.
I was being sarcastic, actually.
So a couple of really quick thoughts, and then we can move on to something different.
Firstly, in contrast to all the things that we said about how hideous Google properties tend to be, I actually think that the new Maps looks really, really pretty, and I was very impressed by that.
And the other thing on a more global scale in terms of Google I.O.
is that a bunch of people joke every year that...
This year's, whatever this year may be, this year's Google I.O.
is last year's WWDC.
And to some degree, I think that's true, especially let's look at the Game Center knockoff, whatever you call it, thing.
But this year, there were a lot of things that as even an amateur Apple developer, I looked at that and said, hey, man, that would be really nice.
Or, wow, I kind of wish Apple would do that.
And I just think it's interesting that this year, and this comes back to what you guys were saying about how quickly Google is moving in this space.
It's interesting to me that rather than being like, oh, look at these copycats, now we're saying, man, Apple, you should copy some of that because that's really good.
And I don't know, maybe I'm the only one who thinks that way, but I thought it was very different than it was in the past.
Oh, definitely.
All right, moving on.
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That's pretty big, John.
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I thought that was half off.
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And thanks a lot to those guys for sponsoring also.
I feel like this is like... We have two sponsors on this show that are both conferences.
And they don't really overlap that much at all.
An event apart is...
really web apps and design of the web apps.
And CocoaConf is iPhone, iPad, and Mac native Cocoa development.
And so really, I think most people listening can identify very well with one of these conferences.
You can't really go wrong with either of them.
All right, so next up, I wanted to talk about Apple's new Objective-C JavaScript bridge, which actually John, you had tweeted about earlier today, and that was the first I had heard of it.
Wait, are we talking about bridges with John Syracusa?
We are, and the chat was guessing that we might go here, and I'm already getting pestered about the potential for a Syracusa County title, and I should probably tell you that I'd find it unlikely we'll go there, but...
I find it unlikely that John would let us go there.
Even if we wanted to, and I'm not sure I do.
But I should point out to begin this conversation that there is a picture of two Golden Gate Bridges beside each other in this article, which I'll put the URL in the chat.
And the caption on this article of the picture of two Golden Gate Bridges right next to each other is, and I quote, Syracusa County is on the left.
Don't you recognize that picture, Casey?
I don't, actually.
It's from WWDC, isn't it, Marco?
I don't remember.
One of their teases, it was either for WWDC or a presser.
It's from Apple's, like, you know, they send out, like, a picture, you know, come to whatever.
Someone in the chat room, please tell me.
I forget what it was.
Maybe it's a metaphor for the forking of a web kit.
But anyway, no, no.
It was from a past.
A. Pike in the chat room says it's from the WWDC 2008 invitation.
Oh, that was before my time, so I wouldn't know.
Me too.
Anyway, they didn't make it up.
That's what it was.
Well, clearly they did not make up the fact that Syracuse County is on the left.
I mean, that is geographically and factually fact.
Factually fact.
It is.
There's a title if I've ever heard one.
So anyway, so John, since you brought this up by way of tweeting it earlier, would you like to give the executive summary and get your first comments in?
Yeah, well, because I've been busy today, I Instapapered this article and I skimmed it, but I have not actually read it.
I tweeted it, I skimmed it, and I Instapapered it.
That's what I do with all links that I run across now.
But looking at it, first of all, this is a feature of WebKit.
And I've already seen some people say that this is not new, that something similar to this has existed in the past.
So I don't even know how much this is an improvement of an existing feature or an expansion of an existing feature.
It's certainly not a bridge in the sense that the Cocoa JavaScript bridge was, where you're now writing your native applications in a language other than Objective-C.
That's not what this is either.
And since it's specifically related to WebKit, well, the JavaScript core part of WebKit,
It's not a general purpose thing, but they've got the plumbing there where you can write JavaScript code that manipulates Objective-C objects and vice versa.
And so just having skimmed this article, people ask me what I think it means.
I think what it mostly means is all the developers I've seen complaining over the years about how little...
how little control you have over WebKit views in your native application.
And I would like it if I could intercept whenever this happened and make this happen in my Objective-C application.
And I would like it if my Objective-C application could cause this to happen and manipulate the web view in this way.
This seems like a way where you could sort of arbitrarily connect JavaScript code running in a web view
with the state of your application and its objects and its methods in memory.
And that strikes me as a much more powerful way to let people use WebKit views to do things.
Now, could that same mechanism be used to let people write code as part of their native application in JavaScript for the hell of it?
Perhaps, but the API you have now where you make a JS context and you just pass it strings and stuff, like that's not the same thing as...
writing your application in javascript or whatever so i don't even know if you would call i mean i guess it is kind of technically a bridge because you're calling objectivity from javascript and the other way around but it's not it's not what people think of when they read the title like oh now i'm going to write all my uh you know coco and ui kit applications but i'm going to use javascript instead because now i don't have to worry about pointers anymore that's not this
Well, and there already are a lot of cross-platform frameworks that work on that principle of you write things in JavaScript and on both iOS and on Android, they have these shell apps that interpret that for you.
So you already can write apps in JavaScript on the mobile platforms.
And there's certainly nothing stopping you from doing it on the desktop as well if you want to.
But I think what's interesting about this, there's two big points I think worth thinking about.
One is this might not necessarily be how they want to move forward to say all apps will be JavaScript coming soon.
It might just be right now people do tons of hacks and
with like passing urls back and forth between the web view and the and the coco code you know passing urls and evaluating javascript string literals and stuff like that it's a it's just a pile of hacks right now having a web view that you communicate with with your app and going back and forth so they might just be trying to improve that certainly it would improve performance and it would it would make things a lot cleaner and a lot less bug prone and error prone and everything else
This is also, like you said, it's so hacky the way you had to do it before.
This is still kind of hacky where you're like applying the protocol to built-in classes so they can have visibility to the JavaScript world.
Believe me, it's less hacky.
It is.
It's less like you're not sipping through a straw anymore.
You're not making up, you know, like I only have three ways to communicate with this web view, so everything must funnel through them.
Now you have a new way, and you can really hook up arbitrary stuff, but it's still like...
not it's still kind of creepy and weird you know yeah but it's not it's not like it's not even as good as like the various other you know bridges they've had like the ruby what is the what is the popular ruby one where like it really is like a fairly transparent bridge uh
where things just work and you don't have to worry about the plumbing.
This, the plumbing, is visible.
You're manually creating the plumbing.
You're hooking things up.
But as you said, the ability to do it at all is what I've heard many developers ask for over many years because it's just so frustrating to have a web view and have just so little control over it.
And that...
That seems to be solved, assuming this ships and is made a public API for developers and recommended to everyone at WWDC.
Right.
Because the other interesting thing about this is that in WebKit, first of all, it was committed on New Year's Eve so that nobody would notice.
And a lot of this stuff is wrapped in compiler macros to not compile it if it's not on 10.9.
So it certainly looks like this is set to be a feature only of 10.9.
So whether they will do anything more with it outside of the WebKit tree, if they'll expose this API on a broader level or make a bigger deal out of it, we don't know that yet.
But I think that's really interesting that they seem to make some effort to do this quietly.
Yeah.
Well, the fact that it's in WebKit is the only reason we've seen it at all, because WebKit is open source.
And I guess they could have still held it back if they wanted to, like they do a lot with a lot of their big WebKit changes.
They just hold them and hold them and then push them out.
But yeah, the question of, will this even be a public API to WebKit?
Because if it's not, it doesn't matter if you're writing a Mac app, but if you're a Mac App Store app, it matters.
And if you're certainly writing an iOS app, I know.
I know the UI is there, I can see the headers, but Apple says they're private, so I can't use it.
So you'd still be stuck, if you're selling things through Apple, any of Apple's app stores, you'd still be stuck using the crazy hacks you had before.
But when I see stuff like this, it seems like the kind of thing that Apple would not do for the hell of it, and it also seems like the kind of thing that is not particularly useful to anyone outside Apple, because who else uses Objective-C and WebKit at the same time?
So it strikes me that it's probably...
there to help one or more apple applications maybe they're finally making the app store apps better i don't know what is the company they bought to redo their store with the with the worst appearance and ui it doesn't matter yeah it was like start with a ch again chat room can help me out it's not even worth disparaging them because they did just make everything worse
Yeah, but maybe if they could do everything with a web view.
I remember the iTunes store was done with these crazy XML descriptions of the data, and then they had the iTunes app itself interpret the XML.
And then I heard they had slowly transitioned to using WebKit views, but then they suffer from the thing of like, well, you've got a nice WebKit view, but it has to hook into this application, and the hooks are very bad, and we're tired of doing these crazy hacks to do hooks.
And here is now a slightly better system for integrating web views and stuff.
So I would expect that the reason this API exists is because one or more applications on either iOS or the Mac are going to use this API to better integrate web views with the native application that surrounds them.
That's very possible.
Yeah, it might just be for Apple for their own apps to use.
And maybe if you're a Mac developer, you'll be able to use it.
But maybe they won't bring it to iOS because there's less of a reason or who knows.
Chomp is the name of the company, says the chat room.
I was hoping we'd do without it.
Everyone was so excited when they bought Trump.
They were like, oh, this is finally going to make everything better, and it made everything worse.
I don't know if you blame Trump.
Yeah, it might not be them.
The technology that enables the store may be better than the technology they had before, but it's just the choice of the UI that is not nice.
So the passage of this article that I thought, John, you would be most fired up about and where the bridges of Syracuse County come in is, and I quote, the most interesting possibility would be that this is the start of Apple's evolution away from Objective-C, which, by the way, they're linking to Copeland 2010 Revisited.
into promoting a higher-level language for their platform.
It's too early to say at this point, but if JavaScript core is going to one day displace the Objective-C runtime, this would be a reasonable starting point.
And I guess I see their point, but I feel like that's a really big leap.
And to your earlier point, John, this isn't a bridge in the sense that you're making JavaScript a first-class citizen of the OS X or iOS API platform.
Yeah, that's a big thing.
Yeah, but you like Perl.
Yeah, I know.
I like Perl much better than JavaScript.
The funny thing about JavaScript is that nobody likes JavaScript, but it's everywhere, so everyone just kind of learns it eventually.
Some people, I think, do like it.
If you work with low-level languages for a long time and JavaScript is the first and maybe the only and the primary high-level languages, you're like, oh my god, high-level languages.
It's amazing.
I can concatenate strings with E's and run substitutions and just
It's just so amazing to not have to worry about all these details of a strongly typed, low-level language like C or C++.
It's like, wow, JavaScript.
It's amazing.
I feel so productive.
But if you've used any other high-level language, you're like, oh, JavaScript.
It has weird warts, and it's kind of like PHP, but not as bad in that it was not designed by an expert language designer.
It just kind of came to be to scratch someone's itch under tight deadlines and...
You know, progressed from there.
Of course, PHP sort of metastasized, but JavaScript was pinned down by the fact that it was implemented in web browsers and it couldn't advance that fast.
But it's a similar type of thing.
It's not, oh, we've got the world's best language designers together and they come up with a language.
In fact, most languages...
that end up being successful or not that way c might be an exception because that's made by some really smart people who really thought about it uh and that worked out pretty well but javascript was like one guy right at netscape originally yeah under a tight deadline came up with this thing that and you know it has crazy warts that are still there today because you know that's the way it was and you can't break backward compatibility very easily when it's in a million web browsers
So are you thumbs up or thumbs down to this, John?
I think it's good for integrating WebViews better with your native application.
I think that's a worthy advancement.
I don't think it indicates anything one way or the other about Apple's plans for anything.
We've discussed this on past shows.
The path Apple has chosen and continues to walk along is enhancing Objective-C, and it seems like they'll continue along that path.
Last year, WWCA was saying that, oh, you guys got to have type inference next year.
While we're approaching, we'll see if they have anything like type inference or maybe just C++'s auto keyword brought into Objective-C.
I think you can already use an Objective-C++.
But yeah, advancing Objective-C by taking the reins of the compiler and adding features to the language, it seems like that will continue.
All right.
And with that, I think it's a good time to wrap up the show.
What do you think?
Sounds good.
Good.
All right.
Thank you very much to our two sponsors of this episode, An Event Apart.
Go to aneventapart.com slash ATPFM.
It's the design conference for people who make websites.
And our second sponsor was CocoConf.
CocoConf is a two-day multitrack conference for iPhone, iPad, and Mac developers.
Go to CocoConf.com.
Use coupon code ATP for 20% off.
Thank you very much, guys.
Thank you.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research.
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Cause it was accidental.
Oh, 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-E-N-G, Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental, accidental.
They didn't mean to.
Accidental, accidental.
No, yeah, I've actually considered teaching myself to type the right way, but it seems like work.
Why mess with what works?
Plus, you have RSI anyway, or whatever.
Yeah, exactly, and I should just talk on my code.
Open curly base, return.
tab tab dollar sign foo space equal space no please put that in the show if that actually worked do you think that would be fast
no definitely not oh god I don't know because like a lot of the programming keys you have to hold down shift for and maybe I could speak it faster especially if you could abbreviate like you'd say curly or pick some other word that's like one syllable long for curlies the Ruby people would love it and a lot faster to say that than to type it
That's our show ending right there.
Yeah, it is.
You don't have to put that crap in.
Oh, do it.
Do it.
Please do it.
Yeah, people love that.
I love the post roll.
All the people say, I love this song, blah, blah.
It's already two episodes after the song is done.
I can't take the song anymore.
It's so long.
I have to fast forward to see if there's any post roll.
It's like 30 seconds long.
It's not even.
I think the full version is like 45.
It's really a short song.
And you don't have to hear the stupid gag at the end.
You can just stop listening.
But you know as well as I do, nobody thinks that way.
I don't know.
People can't please anybody.
Except for if you put in bleeps and boops, which everyone loves.
It is one minute and three seconds.
Oh my goodness.
You are such a baby.
It cracks me up.
It says pot about kettle.