A Mac on Fire
Casey:
I have not looked at the show notes, by the way, so whatever we're talking about is going to be a surprise to me.
John:
New job, you trying to use an iPad full-time.
Marco:
So it's basically all you today, so good luck with that.
Marco:
All right, we're going to go live.
Marco:
Boy, we sure got a lot of feedback about last week's episode.
Marco:
Like, a lot.
Marco:
And this, you know, so last week's episode, we were especially unusually critical of Apple, and in particular, their UI design recently, especially things like the Apple TV and the Photos app.
Marco:
We have so many responses from that, and they are split right down the middle.
Marco:
It was a very polarizing episode.
Marco:
About half of the comments said, I can't believe you're so negative about Apple.
Marco:
I'm getting so tired of this.
Marco:
I just can't listen anymore.
Marco:
I just can't take it anymore.
Marco:
I can't take the negativity.
Marco:
And then the other half was, I am so happy you guys are finally saying all this stuff or that you are drawing attention to this problem that I also agree with or have or thank goodness I'm so happy you covered this.
Marco:
Including people in Apple who said they were very happy that we covered it.
John:
So I don't know what to think about that.
John:
Did you actually count them?
John:
I meant to count them as well because I felt like it was definitely – it was not lopsided one way or the other.
John:
But I'm like, you know how your perception of the feedback is different?
John:
Like maybe I'm thinking, am I weighing the ones that agree with me too much or am I weighing the ones that disagree because they feel bad too much?
John:
So I said, you know, I should just count them.
John:
But, of course, I never got around to it.
John:
But I should go back and do that to see.
John:
My impression just based on feel was that –
John:
It was slightly more supporters than detractors.
John:
But, you know, I could be wrong on that.
John:
But anyway, it was definitely not a landslide in one direction or the other.
John:
And, like, it wasn't so much the volume of the feedback as each piece of feedback was very emphatic about whatever their point was.
John:
Either they really, really loved it and are like, thank God, or that was a great episode or the best episode ever or whatever, or the exact opposite.
John:
That was the worst ever.
John:
I hate you all.
John:
Goodbye.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, it's funny.
Casey:
I didn't count either.
Casey:
But my conclusion was nearly identical.
Casey:
My conclusion was it was split really close to 50-50.
Casey:
I would actually say it was slightly more, you guys need to stop whining, and slightly less, oh, thank goodness somebody's saying it.
Casey:
But it was near as makes no difference to 50-50.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I was, I don't know, it was a little bit sad to see so many people upset about it.
Casey:
But by and large, I felt like the feedback was certainly polarizing, like Marco had said.
John:
Yeah, I felt better about even the people who didn't like it.
John:
I mean, if you don't like it, you don't like it.
John:
Like this, you know, everyone's entitled to their opinion, right?
John:
But I really felt like, you know, as we've been talking about these various issues related to Apple...
John:
that that of all the episodes that we've had that have touched on these topics i thought it was fairly constructive like that it wasn't just complaining for the sake of complaining that we were trying to figure out like what is you know describe the problem in detail just like i mean not like i don't like apple tv it's bad like we had reasons right and then and then trying to dig in why are those reasons there what couldn't they do differently like specific and constructive and
John:
Right.
John:
And without any sort of therefore Apple is doomed stuff.
John:
And like and, you know, so I guess for some people, making it specific and constructive doesn't matter as much as like, you know, just taking too long or whatever.
John:
Anyway, I'm not trying to change anyone's minds about what they do or don't want to hear in a podcast.
John:
But for my part, at least, that's what I'm always aiming for is.
John:
If you're going to be talking about problems that you're having, try to do it in a constructive way.
John:
Try not to be mean-spirited, not to get carried away, but to really get to the heart of the matter and try to figure it out.
John:
Imagine that it was your problem to solve.
John:
How would you solve it?
John:
What is the way to fix this?
John:
That's what I'm always thinking.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
So hopefully we'll have some happier shows over the next few.
Casey:
But knowing us, we'll see how that works out.
Casey:
But but speaking of happy things, do we have any follow up?
John:
A couple items here.
John:
This in the last episode, as part of critiquing the photos UI and the general trend on the Mac of simplifying Mac applications.
John:
Um, one of the quotes I threw out that I thought was, uh, I still don't remember the designer's name.
John:
I thought it was the guy, not the banging Olsen guy, maybe Dieter Ram, maybe him.
Casey:
That's who I think you thought it was.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I thought it was some designer and many people pointed out to me after the show that the quote I was quoting about, uh, as simple as possible, but no simpler.
John:
Um,
John:
um was not a designer apparently it's attributed to albert einstein and uh look this up on wikipedia or not wikipedia wiki quote sorry sorry and the actual quote as is often in the case the actual supposed quote that led to the thing i was quoting is much more complicated and much more albert einsteinian i guess here it is
John:
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
John:
That does not roll off the tongue, like as simple as possible and no simpler, right?
John:
This was from On the Method of Theoretical Physics, the Herbert Spencer lecture delivered at Oxford.
John:
june 10th 1933 all right so that is a real thing that he said that was recorded that sounds a lot you know if you if you simplify the sentence it is much like what i said and the quote investigator.com story talks about how the quote attribute to dinestein may have arisen from that um
John:
And the variant is everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler and so on and so forth.
John:
So we'll put all these links in, like all these kind of quotes that you've heard attributed to a particular person.
John:
It's hard to know where they actually came from.
John:
But the sentiment rings true with enough people that this quote and this idea survives, despite its cloudy origins.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So tell me about a photos crop and aspect behavior theories.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So a lot of my complaints were focusing on the photos application, which I use a lot and which I still do like, but the frustrations with the, the Apple product design in with using photos as an example.
John:
And one of, one of my major complaints was about dealing with the cropping photos and constraining their aspect ratio and stuff.
John:
And a couple of people had some suggestions to make that easier inside the application.
John:
Um,
John:
one of them is the keyboard shortcut which if you hold down the shift key you can constrain the proportion to the original proportions the tricky bit with that is you have to hold down the shift key before you begin the drag unlike a lot of other operations and like graphic applications or uh you know that you may be familiar with where you start say dragging a selection outline in photoshop and then if you hit the various modifiers to constrain it
John:
you can switch those modifiers in the middle of the drag.
John:
With this, you have to be holding down shift before you begin the drag.
John:
If you begin the drag, then nothing you do with shift makes any difference.
John:
So that's convenient to know.
John:
And there was a theory that nobody offered in the feedback that I totally expected to get and literally nobody sent.
John:
A lot of people send various keyboard shortcuts, but nobody sent this idea.
John:
And it is a reason to try to explain why photos, every time you go to edit an image and hit the crop thing, you have to hit the aspect menu and select original, even though it's what I want every single time.
John:
and you know setting aside the keyboard shortcuts or whatever why does it not remember that every time i go to crop i want the aspect to be the original right why does it just not remember like the last thing i used or have a preference or something you know you don't even need a preference setting just basically like when i change that pop-up menu leave it that way until i change it again and my theory if i had to have someone explain that default aside from them possibly just saying oh we never got around to making that sticky would be
John:
that if you remember the last setting used in an application that's trying to be as simple as photos is someone would go in there and for you know have to make a square photo for something so they would you know figure find the little aspect thing select square and resize their photo and crop it and be done and then three days later come back and go to crop a photo and just try dragging the little outline and have it all of a sudden snap to a square and they wouldn't understand why is it why does it keep snapping to a square i don't i don't want it to be a square or
John:
Or whatever thing.
John:
I want to do freeform cropping here.
John:
And they won't remember, like the settings did.
John:
They'll think it's broken.
John:
Or someone different will come to the program and not realize that it is remembering the last thing.
John:
So resetting from zero every single time gives what they think is the sensible default for everybody, which is unconstrained.
John:
Which I don't even know if that's sensible default.
John:
But in theory, you could argue that by remembering the last thing you picked, it's making the application appear broken to future people who may not know about the aspect menu or even someone who picked it from the item last time didn't do it.
John:
I don't think that's a good reason to do it in an application like Photos because I think that is...
John:
uh not as common as like i think you would be uh gearing the application to novices too much and that you should be realized that everyone starts off as a novice but if you use photos for year after year after year eventually you will learn a thing or two and become if not an expert then at least a proficient user and that constant annoyance of having to pick that or having to hold on the shift here having to do whatever
John:
uh overwhelms it so my opinion is still the same but if i had to make the counter argument against my opinion or try to explain the behavior of photos as it exists that's one explanation and the other explanation a lot of people gave which i think is not an explanation at all and i think is obvious but we should have pointed out in the past show is that uh part of the simplification of these various uh mac applications
John:
is to make them look and work more like their ios counterparts ios counterparts obviously have to be more simple necessarily because they have to work on a phone screen in many cases so obviously you can't have giant toolbars or buttons you just don't have room for anything you have to simplify right um
John:
But on the Mac, the whole point of that discussion was that on the Mac, those same constraints don't hold.
John:
So for the sake of uniformity, trying to say, if we just make it look and work the same in both things, then you're just not treating the Mac the way it should be treated.
John:
It should be the advantages of the Mac platform should be realized in the applications that run in them.
John:
They should it shouldn't be constrained to the lowest common denominator as defined by phone or whatever.
Marco:
Well, and also, just in the same way that it was the best thing for the phone and for the iPad to not just have Mac OS shoved onto them and just ported onto them straight.
Marco:
In that same way, having iOS things just shoved straight onto the Mac is not appropriate for the Mac.
Marco:
And we can look at the last five years of OS X releases, basically since Lion, and
Marco:
as they have attempted to to shove ios things onto the mac and most of the time it really flops or it's just bad or at best mediocre there's a whole bunch of like the iosification of mac that has been attempted and it just it just lands flat it just doesn't doesn't feel right on the mac just in the same way that the mac ui wouldn't feel right on the phone
John:
i think the worst one is where they they decide they have to have down like maybe not down to the pixel but basically the same glyphs the same icons the same sort of menus like when i see a mac application with like basically an ios 7 style button that is really just plain text like that language doesn't doesn't fit in on the mac because the rest of the mac isn't like that most mac apps are not like that on the mac buttons have little outlines and stuff they look like little capsules blah blah you know
John:
There is a design language for the controls and experience on the Mac, and it is different from the phone.
John:
And so when an Apple application lands on the Mac, setting aside the functionality and how many things are hidden away or if it's designed for a phone screen, they'll just change the surface part of it to look and act weird.
John:
And it just doesn't fit in.
John:
And so the photo suffers from all of that.
John:
It's massively simplified.
John:
Lots of stuff is hidden.
John:
Many things are constrained, like the little pop-up thing with the sharing thing that we talked about.
John:
That's just way too small for no reason.
John:
The icons are sometimes identical to the ones on the phone.
John:
And I think they're trying to make a family resemblance, but...
John:
There has never been an iOS 7-style revolution in the Mac UI.
John:
Yosemite was as close as they came, which flattened stuff out and took away a lot of the gloss and everything, but it is by no means like iOS 7 was on the phone and the iPad where it radically changed the look and feel and the way you design applications.
John:
So anyway, before we get off photos, one last item is a lot of people suggested keyboard shortcuts.
John:
I know a lot of these.
John:
I've looked them up in the help, so on and so forth.
John:
One of the issues that I've complained about in the past that I should have emphasized last time as well is that photos likes to ignore my keystrokes.
John:
Not all of them.
John:
Most of the time, the keystrokes land.
John:
But if I had a penny for every time I hit the spacebar and nothing happened in photos, I would be able to buy a nice meal.
John:
because like and so the same thing for like rotating or you know hitting enter to edit or you know command keys usually have a higher percentage like command r to rotate but c to crop and stuff like that but i don't know where those keystrokes go i don't know if there's a responder chain thing falling down
John:
uh and it's not like it's just like mightily delayed and i get impatient and hit it again sometimes i will just say you know what i'm not gonna hit it again maybe it did register and i'll just wait and you know after 10 seconds you're like nope that space bar just went into the ether um so yeah uh keyboard shortcuts are not first of all they're not a solution for most people using the application because most people never are going to memorize those keyboard shortcuts but even for me who knows some of them
John:
the keyboard shortcuts become unreliable as well every time i do you know edit crop aspect original with the mouse cursor it works every time it's just tedious so that's why i end up doing it repeatedly rather than attempting to do the keystrokes because if i do the keystrokes and i wait for a three count and nothing happens then i end up going to the mouse anyway
Casey:
All right, somebody sent to us, and I apologize because I don't know who sent this in, but somebody sent us a Bluetooth headphone dongle concept, which was done by Sean Nelson.
Casey:
This is on PartlySean.com.
Casey:
And I'm glad that one of you put this in the show notes because I meant to and I completely forgot.
Casey:
This is actually a really interesting idea.
Casey:
So the general premise here is, hey, if the iPhone 7 really does give up the headphone jack,
Casey:
then what would Apple do to kind of bridge the gap between the phone not having a headphone jack and all of us having these headphones that are probably not Bluetooth?
Casey:
And so this Sean Nelson person did a prototype, a concept of, hey, here's how Apple could fix this.
Casey:
And what it is is a circular puck that has a headphone port like you would find on the iPhone 6S.
Casey:
On one side, a lightning port on the other for charging, and it will convert any headphones into Bluetooth headphones.
Casey:
It doesn't appear to have any buttons as far as I can tell.
Casey:
It does have a little clip on it so you can clip it to your clothes.
Casey:
This is a really, really clever idea, and I really think that this is a pretty good way to bridge that gap.
Casey:
But what did you guys think about it?
Marco:
So it's interesting that it takes the approach of putting it on the phone end of the cable.
Marco:
And basically, you plug your headphones into this, and they still have their full cables.
Marco:
As we discussed, as I brought up a couple weeks ago, you can't really put it on the headphone end of the cable because there really is no standard size or shape cable that would fit a large number of headphones that would go on that end because they all have just these different shaped plastic surrounds and everything.
Marco:
So anyway...
Marco:
um it is smart to put it on that into the cable i will also say that these devices already exist you can you can go on amazon you can get things like this not that would be small unattractive and would have apple logos on it um or would charge by lightning those those would all be new here but you can get these things already uh like you know you can go on amazon get them for probably like 30 bucks uh you can you can get devices that adapt and
Marco:
any end of any audio setup to and from bluetooth uh they're very common and some of them even work uh so it it's not it is you know we can we can try this today we can see already what this is like today as long as we don't need it charged by lightning
Marco:
It is a good idea for the most part.
Marco:
However, first of all, having a cable that dangles into your clothing but then doesn't plug into your phone, it kind of seems like... I don't know.
Marco:
Is it really worth having that cable?
Marco:
It seems kind of clunky.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I suppose it's better than having to buy all new headphones.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
It seems like...
Marco:
A lot of complexity to solve this problem.
Marco:
If you're going to have a wire that goes down into your clothing and comes out of your headphones, why not just have a wired adapter that can then plug directly into the alleged lightning port that is headphone compatible of the alleged new headphone jackless iPhone 7?
John:
You covered all the points I was going to make, which is that these things exist already and that it's weird to have a wire.
John:
Where do you put the wire?
John:
Like, especially if you have your phone in your pocket and then this wire with a dongle is also in your pocket.
John:
They're like, right.
John:
You have this wire to nothing.
John:
Right.
John:
You have to put it somewhere.
John:
You know, you're going to have it hanging from your ear, swinging back and forth as you walk.
John:
So you'll probably stick it in the pocket.
John:
But the reason I can think of why Apple might find this solution attractive is.
John:
is that the wired adapter we keep thinking of one way one way is that if the passive lightning to headphone adapter that we've been surmising might be possible is not possible then this is probably better than trying to make an adapter with a chip in it like try to make an active adapter it's more apple like than trying to make an active adapter probably
John:
Um, but even if the passive thing does work, the passive thing, I don't know if you can sell the passive thing for 30 bucks.
John:
Maybe Apple can, but point is Apple can sell this for more money that this little battery Bluetooth container thing.
John:
It's what Apple is good at making very small, simple things that don't really have like an on off switch or any complicated, you know, but inside are very, very precise.
John:
And it uses all of their expertise in terms of making very small chips and batteries.
John:
Um,
John:
and all that good stuff and they can sell it to you for more money um and it does seem like a little bit more elegant solution because then your your phone could be in one pocket and this could be the other and they're not connected to each other um i can see them selling it as a more advanced version of a wired adapter
John:
uh so and this design looks neat like every time you see like a prototype of it looks like the little watch adapter basically like a little circular thing with an apple logo on it although i don't think they'll put a giant apple logo like that on it but who knows um it looks like an apple product looks like an apple product they could sell and as ridiculous as it may be especially if you like put a clip on the back of it like this guy's got a clip to his pants waistband or something that is not a good look
John:
well i don't know i think it i mean is it any worse than clipping an ipod shuffle anyway yes it looks plausible to me as an apple product and i think they can sell it for more money so especially if they can't do a passive adapter i i think this is a reasonable option that apple might want to consider and as you pointed out
John:
if apple doesn't do it there's a million third-party ones that are already making it they're going to be excited by an iphone with no headphone jack to say now we have a new audience to advertise to hey you just get one of those new phones buy our little square dongle that we've been selling for five years yet another thing you gotta charge and spend 30 bucks on now charges through charges through lightning
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It seems like this is too clunky of a solution.
Marco:
I feel like Apple's solutions are going to be either buy new headphones or use this passive wire adapter.
John:
And you're sure that the passive wire adapter is going to be possible?
Marco:
No, I mean, but if that rumor site was true that they were going to have this thing, I mean, it's already possible today if you put some smarts in the adapter.
Marco:
You can do it on today's lightning ports with some circuitry and some smarts there.
Marco:
So we already know such a thing as possible.
Marco:
It would just be better if it could be passive and if the phone could sense it through a new revision of the port.
John:
I agree, but I'm just, I'm not sure.
John:
I'm not sure how Apple would prioritize that.
John:
Like, is it really important to make sure we can have passive adapters or just going to say, you know, just deal with it and get new headphones.
John:
Everybody get new headphones in three years.
John:
You won't care anymore.
Casey:
Yeah, so when we go in Tailgate, which we've spoken about on the show in the past, I have a TDK Boombox, which is actually the model for this speaker thing.
Casey:
And it doesn't have any Bluetooth support on it.
Casey:
And so years ago, I got this absolutely terrible $13 AGP Tech Bluetooth adapter.
Casey:
I'll put a link in the show notes, even though I don't think it's available anymore.
Casey:
It is a total piece of crap, but it works perfectly.
Casey:
And so like the build quality is terrible.
Casey:
It's very chintzy looking.
Casey:
So think of like a USB key that has a headphone jack on the outside of it and plugs in via USB on the other side.
Casey:
So what I do is I plug this into a USB port that is on this speaker, on this TDK boombox, and this receives Bluetooth.
Casey:
And then I plug this little headphone cable from this Bluetooth to RCA converter, basically.
Casey:
So the headphone cable goes from there to the boombox, and suddenly this boombox that has no Bluetooth support
Casey:
has Bluetooth supports.
Casey:
This is the other direction than what we're talking about.
Casey:
But to your point earlier, Marco, you know, you can go either way with this.
Casey:
And it was $13.
Casey:
And I mean, it is a piece of crap, but it's been working perfectly for three years.
Casey:
So I guess, is it really that crappy after all?
Casey:
But yeah, it works well.
Casey:
And so you'd be surprised what you can do for not a lot of money.
John:
it's like you know those invisible fences for your pets only this is invisible wire someone in the camera was asking like like we were saying what like what's the point of having a little wire with a dongle that you stick in your pocket or clip on your pants that's like three inches away from where your phone is like there are still some advantages for that absurd scenario mostly is that like when you want to take out your phone and do something there's not a wire attached to it i mean i guess probably people are you know who are used to listening on wired headphones are good at
John:
taking out their phone to send a quick text or see something or whatever without wrangling the wire but it is i think i keep thinking of it as a as a luxurious feature like the the fact that the two aren't connected anymore they are now connected with an invisible wire even though there's a stupid real wire still in play because again you're using your old headphones and they don't support this new phone it is still a slightly more luxurious
John:
experience to be able to take out your phone without a wire attached to it.
John:
Um, invisible wires are better than wires in general.
John:
Um, and if you can't get rid of the wires entirely, which I'm Apple will surely sell you Bluetooth headphones to do that.
John:
Um, but if you can't, because you want to use your old headphones for whatever reason, um,
John:
A dongle like this, as ridiculous as it seems, I think does actually offer some material advantages to the point where I'm thinking like maybe I would do because my big problem is like when I'm walking from the parking garage to work, very often my headphone cord gets caught on like a door handle going through like the garage doors or up in the stairwells at work or whatever and ends up yanking the headphones either out of my ears or out of my phone or both.
John:
uh i would like it if i could i mean obviously my solution is just use bluetooth headphones right yeah just use bluetooth headphones yeah i i use earbuds i don't want to look like ohuro with the big thing coming out of my ear with it anyway they have smaller things look get the sennheiser mm400x it is really basic it's like something like 150 bucks
John:
Is it earbuds?
John:
It's not earbuds.
Marco:
No, it's the new version I use for any kind of walking and often even travel purposes.
Marco:
I bring the predecessor to it, which is the Sennheiser PX210BT, which is long since discontinued.
Marco:
The MM400X is seemingly the exact same thing, but with a microphone added so you can make phone calls on it.
Marco:
And these sound like complete garbage for music purposes.
Marco:
But for podcasts, they're great because they have actual hardware buttons on the side.
Marco:
So they're small.
Marco:
They fold up.
Marco:
They can fit in any large jacket pocket and any bag very, very easily.
Marco:
Not a pants pocket.
Marco:
They're too big for that.
Marco:
But otherwise, they're great.
Marco:
Battery life is great.
Marco:
They charge via micro USB.
Marco:
You can get new batteries for them if you want to, like separate batteries.
Marco:
and they have these amazingly useful buttons actual buttons like not just like a capacitive touchpad which is infuriating not some little tiny switches you can operate them with gloves on in the winter because the buttons are nice and big and they make sense where they are it's i listen to i listen to these exclusively when i'm when i'm walking with my iphone because i'm always listening to podcasts so the sound quality doesn't matter and they are so much better than anything else i've ever tried for for portable podcast listening
John:
i like my earbuds with my little clicker on the wire that's another thing where would the clicker go if i didn't have a wire like it goes to the ear cup i'm used no i like the clicker down where it is anyway whole point is i think i would actually find this thing vaguely useful if it existed so much so that maybe i should just buy one of those ones that's already on amazon and give it a try but maybe i'll just hold out to see if apple there's one for 20 bucks it will have apple have bluetooth earbuds and maybe that will solve my problems
Casey:
If you'd like to not spend $200 on a set of Bluetooth headphones, my beloved Arctic P311s that I've had for like four years are still going strong.
Casey:
I use them for music.
Casey:
I use them for podcasts.
Casey:
They will not make Marco happy.
Casey:
I'm sure from an audiophile's perspective, they are terrible.
Casey:
But if you don't have hyper intense requirements, if you're not Marco Armand, they're like 30 bucks and mine have been going strong for years.
John:
now that i think about it bluetooth earbuds wouldn't help you because again where would the clicker be i really got news i think the ipod shuffle killed me in that but the ipod your ear cup no the ipod shuffle didn't there's no ear cup in your buds obviously yeah use mine with the buttons are right there it's it's even it's easier and more reliable than using the clicker headphones it's too much i can't i don't i can't pull that off but it's too much to have big giant headphones on as big as you think
Casey:
Try the P311s.
Casey:
They also have the buttons.
Casey:
And they're only 30 bucks.
Casey:
Just saying.
John:
Anyway, point is, this concept, I think, is not entirely ridiculous.
John:
And if Apple doesn't make one, maybe I'll buy one and give it a try.
John:
We should talk about bagels.
Marco:
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Casey:
So I've had a big week so far.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So tell us about this.
Marco:
What exactly happened in your own words, Casey?
Casey:
Describe for the audience what happened.
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So this past Monday, I started a new job.
Casey:
I took last week almost entirely off.
Casey:
I had a week of self-directed fun employment.
Casey:
I went into my old job on Monday for a few hours and
Casey:
Spent the remainder of last week just kind of relaxing and taking a break.
Casey:
And then on Monday, I started a new job as an iOS developer, which is completely scary and completely awesome.
Casey:
To recap, in case you weren't familiar with my professional...
Casey:
exploits.
Casey:
I had been working at a consulting firm doing .NET stuff for between three and a half years and four years.
Casey:
And I did like it, but my heart wasn't really in .NET anymore.
Casey:
I really do love C Sharp, a hand on heart.
Casey:
I love C Sharp.
Casey:
I think C Sharp is great.
Casey:
I really do love Visual Studio.
Casey:
I
Casey:
But everything around that, I just couldn't care less.
Casey:
It just didn't do anything for me.
Casey:
And when I was hired at this job, I was told, hey, you're going to be our iOS guy.
Casey:
And I was the iOS guy, which was good.
Casey:
But the problem was we only ever landed one bit of iOS work.
Casey:
And when it's a consulting firm, you don't typically have the luxury of working on what you want to work on.
Casey:
You work on what you're told to work on.
Casey:
And that means a client will tell the company, we will give you money to work on this thing.
Casey:
And then the company tells the consultants, my company tells us.
Casey:
Okay, it's time to work on this thing.
Casey:
And it just so happened that the only time I ever did an iOS app was several years ago when I did an iPad app.
Casey:
And it was for all the wrong reasons.
Casey:
An executive decided, oh, we should be in the app store, even though we don't really have anything useful to offer.
Casey:
And so we built an app to put in the app store.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
So I hadn't been unhappy necessarily, but I hadn't been terribly happy, and I just was trying to figure out, you know, what do I do?
Casey:
And it's hard, especially when you're a consultant, but it's hard in general.
Casey:
I mean, I kind of know how to write code for iOS.
Casey:
You know, I know Objective-C reasonably well for someone who doesn't do it professionally, but
Casey:
I sort of kind of ish know Swift.
Casey:
So it's a hard thing to sell any employer on teaching you how to do this stuff on the job unless the employer is for some reason incentivized for you to learn this on the job.
Casey:
So, for example, if.
Casey:
If my consulting firm had gotten a contract to do iOS work, then suddenly my employer, the consultancy, will be hugely incentivized for me to learn on the job.
Casey:
But it's pretty hard for them to sell me as a supposed expert when I'm not really an expert.
Casey:
And typically when you're going to a consulting firm, you're looking for experts.
Casey:
So it was clear to me that it wasn't really going to work out if I really, really, really wanted to pivot to iOS.
Casey:
It wasn't going to work at the consulting firm.
Casey:
And so a friend of mine, a mutual friend between Marco and I, a friend named Jamie, he had just gone to a local company here in town that their bread and butter is not iOS, but they have their own iOS app that is part of their product offering.
Casey:
And he had been saying, hey, you should come join me.
Casey:
You should come join me.
Casey:
You should come join me.
Casey:
And finally, I was like, you know what?
Casey:
I should come join you.
Casey:
And so I interviewed and I got the job.
Casey:
I was very plain about what I do and do not know about iOS.
Casey:
But what was great about my new gig is they recognized, hey, you seem like you're a pretty darn good engineer.
Casey:
One of our engineers is saying you're a pretty good engineer.
Casey:
Sorry, Dr. Drang.
Casey:
And so we have faith that whatever you don't know, you can pick up.
Casey:
So let's do this.
Casey:
And I started this past Monday and I haven't really gotten into too much code yet, but, uh, so far so good.
Casey:
And it is blowing my mind that the things that we talk about here and the things that I've been pumping into my ears by way of, of Marco's other show, um,
Casey:
And by way of Corn Tuition and by way of Mobile Couch and so many of these other shows, suddenly this stuff that I've just longed to do, I'm now doing.
Casey:
And it's really, really exciting.
Casey:
And I'm petrified because I'm used to... I was a pretty darn good .NET developer.
Casey:
Not the best, but pretty darn good.
Casey:
And I...
Casey:
wasn't often scared by the things I was asked to do in my day-to-day job.
Casey:
And now I am not a pretty darn good iOS developer.
Casey:
I'm at worst a rookie and at best an intermediate level iOS developer.
Casey:
And so I'm reaching on this and that's really, really scary.
Casey:
But I found that that's the best way to force myself to learn is to go straight into the deep end and just learn how to swim.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I'm excited.
Casey:
I'm excited just selfishly because this is what I've been wanting to do for a long time.
Casey:
I'm excited for the show because I think even though we don't get that deep into developer topics that often, it'll be nice to have someone else who does this sort of thing for a living other than Marco.
Casey:
And I'm just excited to learn something new because I've been doing the same stuff for a long time.
Casey:
And the last really new thing I learned, if you don't count some React that I was dabbling with maybe a year ago, was when I taught myself Node for my blog.
Casey:
And that was in 2014.
Casey:
So it's about time for me to get scared and learn something new.
Casey:
So I don't know if you guys have any questions about that.
Casey:
If not, we can just put it in the parking lot.
Casey:
Oh, that was my first question.
Marco:
Do they have a parking lot?
Casey:
I have not seen one yet.
Casey:
I have not seen one yet, but I'm sure it's there.
Casey:
But anyway, but if you have any questions, I'm happy to field them.
Casey:
Otherwise, we can just move it right along.
John:
So you talked about the tech differences of like C sharp versus subjective C and, you know, the different IDE and all that other stuff or whatever, but setting that aside, like getting back to the doing consulting work versus doing a product.
John:
Um, I think you covered this in your blog post, but like the idea of the consulting work is, uh,
John:
uh sometimes you get a crappy job but the job ends and sometimes when you get a good job that job ends too but with product work i imagine you know without getting into details of what kind of product you're making or what kind of company you're working for it's conceivable that you could get to be an ios developer
John:
dedicated to working on a product that does nothing for you like the product is like i'm an ios developer and i'm working on a product but i don't care about this product at all like i don't have any passion for this product i don't you know and the customers who use this product are not really into the product and no matter how good i do my job they're never going to really appreciate it because it's like you know an industrial machine control thing or something where it's just not you know what i mean and in that case you would be using the new technology you'd be learning things you'd technically be an ios developer but i'm thinking it's like
John:
imagine if like your worst consulting gig just never end never ended so is is part of your decision to go to this specific company the idea that like what do you care what the product is really like is it just better that it is a product that you can like work on and incrementally make better year over year over year even if it's a boring product or do you also kind of need it to be a product that interests you more than like your least interesting consulting gig
Casey:
Yeah, no, it's a very fair question.
Casey:
I think I have to reach back just a half step and explain that I've been doing some flavor of consulting since roughly 2006.
Casey:
So it's been about a decade now.
Casey:
The first couple of years from 06 to 08, I was doing government contracting, which is not exactly consulting.
Casey:
I was working for a company that had a product, but literally the only people that bought that product was the U.S.
Casey:
government.
Casey:
So, really what ended up happening was the government said, hey, we want this new feature, and we said, okay, we'll do that.
Casey:
And so it was basically consulting.
Casey:
After that, it was just regular, you know, no asterisks, honest-to-goodness consulting from 08 on.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I found that there have definitely been some projects where the client was awesome and the project was a lot of fun.
Casey:
And eventually what ends up happening is, as you described, John, the client either can stand on their own two feet, so to speak, or they feel like that product is complete enough for now.
Casey:
And then they say, all right, thanks for your time.
Casey:
We'll see you later.
Casey:
And that's a total bummer because here's something that you really invested in.
Casey:
The kind of consulting I was doing, I should also note, is typically project-based.
Casey:
So it was myself and a bunch of my coworkers at the consulting firm would swoop in, do a project, and then swoop out.
Casey:
And of course, we would be working alongside the client, but the overwhelming majority of the work was done by the people at my consulting firm.
Casey:
Um, it's not like your individual consultant who is just an individual contributor.
Casey:
It's, and this is where the staff aug thing came in, um, a couple of months back.
Casey:
And so typically with project-based consulting, you know, you build this project with your, with your friends at work and then it's like, okay, thanks.
Casey:
And then you leave.
Casey:
And that's a total bummer.
Casey:
And even though it's nice to know that you have, uh, that, that each project is in some, to some degree, a ticking time bomb because eventually it will go away, both the good and the bad.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
It's nice to think about.
Casey:
I really wanted to try walking on the grass on the other side of the fence.
Casey:
And I wanted to see, is a product company really what I wanted and really what I want?
Casey:
And let me give you a really weird but concrete example of why I wanted this.
Casey:
So I believe it was my first day at the new job.
Casey:
And we actually had this all-hands meeting off-site, which was just purely coincidental.
Casey:
And so we were in a different portion of Richmond at this all-hands, and then we needed to come back to the office afterwards.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
We were traveling from the all hands.
Casey:
I was at a hotel to the office and I got stopped at this light that typically will take two or three cycles for me to get through at this particular time of day.
Casey:
It was around lunchtime and this is right by a bunch of other right by a bunch of businesses and a bunch of eateries.
Casey:
So everyone's going to are coming back from lunch.
Casey:
And as I'm sitting at this light, I'm thinking to myself, oh my God, this is taking so long.
Casey:
Oh my God, this is taking so long.
Casey:
I'm going to have to make up this time because, oh God, I'm sitting here for like 10 minutes.
Casey:
And it's one thing if you sit at a light for like a minute, you could just kind of flub that and whatever.
Casey:
A client isn't going to care if you bill them for one minute where you weren't actually doing work.
Casey:
But this is like 10 minutes and I'm really, I can't build a client for this 10 minutes.
Casey:
And so now I'm going to have to stay at work 10 minutes later than I plant.
Casey:
Oh, wait.
Casey:
Wait, I don't have a timesheet anymore.
Casey:
I'm not working for a client anymore.
Casey:
Oh my God.
Casey:
I don't have to give a shit.
Casey:
This takes an hour because I don't have to answer to anyone anymore.
Casey:
Well, not literally, of course, but you know what I mean.
Casey:
This is magnificent.
Casey:
And it's just stupid stuff like that.
Casey:
I'm just kind of...
Casey:
I was ready to take a break from consulting.
Casey:
And who knows, maybe in a year or two, maybe I'll 1099 and I'll just go.
Casey:
And if you're not an American, basically I'll be an independent consultant and maybe I'll go back to a consulting firm.
Casey:
Who knows?
Casey:
But for right now, oh my God, it was magical not to have to stress about sitting in a stupid light for 10 minutes.
Casey:
And to come back around to John's question a little more concretely, I'm really, really amped to work on a product, period.
Casey:
But I agree with you, John, that if the product was some industrial control system, it was not likely to keep my attention very long.
Casey:
Now, with that said, I don't intend to share who my employer is nor what I'm working on.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'd prefer to keep that world separate.
Casey:
But I will say that the particular thing that I'm working on, although it is not for me, it is for a general audience.
Casey:
And depending on what lens you use to look at it, I genuinely think it's helping people.
Casey:
And I think that's pretty cool, being able to help people and make a difference in people's lives.
Casey:
A small difference, but a difference nonetheless.
Casey:
And so because of that, and granted, I'm still in the honeymoon period, but I'm very hopeful that I'm really, really going to enjoy working on this.
Casey:
And additionally, the particular company I'm working for and the particular iOS app that I'll be working on,
Casey:
It isn't great.
Casey:
It's okay, but it isn't great.
Casey:
But the important thing is the company knows that it isn't great and they're looking to fix it.
Casey:
And so I'm getting in kind of on the ground floor and being able to influence some of those changes insofar as I can help make architectural decisions, you know, not as much like, oh, we should use CocoaPods versus, God, what's the other one?
Casey:
I'm drawing a blank.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
Who cares?
Casey:
It does.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
CocoaPods versus Carthage, I believe it is.
Marco:
I'm going to be in charge of all the most boring decisions on the software project.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
This is going to be our file naming convention.
Casey:
Woo!
Casey:
But you know what I mean.
Casey:
Architectural decisions, I can work with my friend Jamie, who is pretty much the lead architect.
Casey:
I can work with him, and we have a good rapport because we've worked together in the past, and say, hey, I really like this.
Casey:
We should go that direction.
Casey:
Or, you know, this just doesn't feel right.
Casey:
And in some ways, being a little bit ignorant as to how iOS development works is kind of an advantage for these sorts of discussions because I don't have...
Casey:
that background knowledge to influence or perhaps taint what I think about these decisions.
Casey:
And so I'm really, really amped to work on something and work on something for a long time, which is not what I've been doing for the last nearly decade.
Casey:
Does that answer your question or did I completely flub that?
Yeah.
John:
I hadn't even thought about the whole timesheet thing because it shows how much consulting I've done.
John:
But yeah, that's got to be a big upgrade in lifestyle.
John:
I've done product work in some fashion or another for my entire career.
John:
um for the most part it is better even i could say even working on a product that you're not actually interested in the the aforementioned and off maligned uh industrial control software that can be interesting too like everything can be interesting um i think the dark side of product work is like like the both the best and the worst thing that could ever happen to a product you're working on is it become very popular and very important to the company and a huge money maker you're like isn't that all upside
John:
No, because that means the product will live for a long time and will have a lot of customers and any change to it is consequential.
John:
And if you work there for five years, you will, you know, if you come five years after that happened, you will be inheriting a giant, possibly disgusting looking code base that nevertheless has to be treated as the golden, you know.
John:
yep child and can't be messed with and if you were there from the beginning you will have created five years worth of painting yourself into a corner and making dumb decisions that you come to regret and now have this giant you know jenga style tower that's uh that's teetering but nevertheless the entire company is built on and you are both responsible for having made it this way
John:
Back when you were younger and less experienced, you know, past you was always the worst enemy of every programmer.
John:
And you don't have the option to say, well, you know, unless you go change a different company, I want to do a different project now.
John:
Let's go to different products.
John:
Like, no, this product is the company.
John:
But that is what the joys and the sorrows of product work.
John:
But you are far from that now, especially if you are if they have an app now and they know it's bad.
John:
So you're kind of getting to go in there and clean up.
John:
Just try to keep five years from now, Casey, in mind when you're doing your work.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, that's the idea.
Casey:
And we're, like I said, we're re-architecting everything, and we're trying to make intelligent decisions as to how to do this so that it's sustainable, so that it's testable, which I know is Marco's favorite thing, you know, unit testing.
Marco:
I love unit testing.
Marco:
I test everything, yeah.
Marco:
Totally.
Marco:
Cover all my builders.
Marco:
Oh, God.
Marco:
Just stop.
Yeah.
John:
but anyway someday he's gonna get testing religion it's gonna be awesome is he gonna be like you know what testing is actually a useful way to do so like i don't know what's gonna happen but it could happen conceivably oh i i would love if i already had testing no no as a way as a way to do development like you know rather than you know like you write lines of code and you want to see those lines of code do the thing you wanted them to do like not entirely test driven development just getting enough of it into you go it doesn't matter if no one else like it doesn't it doesn't even matter it's just this is the way i write code from now on it is
John:
I think everyone can benefit from testing, and I feel like you will turn that corner eventually.
John:
They're just waiting for it to happen.
John:
Given infinite time, everyone could benefit from testing.
Casey:
Oh, here we go.
Marco:
No, you'll just be dead.
Marco:
That's what happens with that.
Marco:
But it's conceivable, I can say, that it could happen.
Marco:
I think testing is a great idea that I don't do.
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's probably a fair summary.
Casey:
Anything else on the new job?
Casey:
Any other questions?
John:
Oh, yes.
John:
The other thing that you should point out, because there was confusion about it, and I wanted to bring it up as another point, is that a lot of people think like, hey, I left my job or I had to work in this big corporation like a Dilbert or whatever.
John:
And now I'm going Indie.
John:
But you're not.
John:
No.
John:
You don't quite know what Indie means.
John:
But Indie, Marco knows what Indies means because he's basically been that for a very long time now.
Marco:
But Indie just means like you kind of stop working.
John:
Well, it depends.
John:
It's kind of like Indie Rock.
Casey:
It's a synonym for retired.
John:
Indie Rock or independent movies.
John:
That term, especially independent movies, started to warp as like...
John:
small independent movies would nevertheless be bankrolled by big studios under i don't know you know but anyway the definition of indie for software is basically that you write software for a company that you own um it's been muddied a little bit by the fact that if all your paychecks come with a signature that says apple incorporated at the bottom of it are you really indie
John:
you're still kind of indie.
John:
The definition, we still say, yeah, even if every one of your paychecks is signed by Apple, you're still indie because you get to decide everything about the product.
John:
You own the product.
John:
You just are sort of outsourcing your distribution and your entire relationship with your customer and many other things to Apple, but you're still indie.
John:
But the bottom line is that...
John:
And also what comes with it is you run the show, you make the decisions, and you're not running a 100-person company.
John:
Are the heads of the Omni Group indie?
John:
No, not really.
John:
They've got a company.
John:
They've got a Mac software company, an iOS software company that a lot of people work for.
John:
can you be indie with two people probably two or three maybe you're pushing it but the idea is that essentially you are your own boss or something very close to it and so in that case if you worked on a product for a long time and uh you kind of got sick of it even if it was selling well because you're indie you could say you know i'm gonna do something else now as long as the next thing you do also sells well
John:
And as long as you have some sort of transition plan for supporting the other one, or maybe you sell it to somebody like Marco loves to do, um, that's fine.
John:
You can do that.
John:
Whereas if you were in a company, especially if you're in like a public company with shareholders and everything is scaled up and people care a lot, you can be like, well, I'm going to try a different product.
John:
Now this one is perfectly fine and it's profitable, but I'm kind of bored of it.
John:
That doesn't happen in that world.
John:
So, uh, this is something that the group were called the narc a long time ago, the life capital T capital L. I think it was in reference to Brent Simmons stopping that newswire development.
John:
Uh,
John:
And probably sort of in the post-Internet age, sort of in the time when Apple was on an upswing, there was a resurgence in the old idea.
John:
The idea does exist for a long time, but there was a resurgence and a popularization of the idea, thanks to the Internet and blogs, that...
John:
if you are a computer programmer who liked Apple stuff, you could make a pretty good living for yourself by writing programs that other people who use Apple stuff would buy from you and they would give you money and you would give them software.
John:
And if you can get enough of them to do that through the magic of software, like it's not any harder work for you to sell an application to a hundred people versus a thousand versus potentially a million because bits are bits and you copy them and you don't have to manufacture them and there's no incremental costs.
John:
And you know, all the wonderful things about software that, you know,
John:
You can do a certain amount of work, and the amount of work that you have to do does not scale with the number of customers.
John:
You do the work, and then if 10 people buy it, you do the same amount of work as if 20 or 30 or 100.
John:
So people can make really good livings selling software.
John:
They were their own boss.
John:
They got to do something that they wanted to do.
John:
They got immense satisfaction out of it.
John:
And that's the life he was referring to.
John:
iOS...
John:
gave a different view of that but at this point i think everyone who's involved in this ecosystem would agree that it is slightly harder to live the life it is slightly harder to be an independent software developer who makes their living doing that if only because the market is so much more crowded i think we talked about this on maybe this podcast maybe the ones in the way distant past of like
John:
If you're doing something that is really fun and a lot of other people want to do it because it's fun, that's going to drive down the value of the thing you're doing.
John:
If a bunch of students want to make an iOS application for fun and give it away for free or close to free,
John:
And you say, well, but I've got to feed my family.
John:
I can't afford to give away, you know, like like the value of what you're doing is being driven down because there are more people in the market.
John:
And so it makes it harder for a regular person who wants a family and health care and everything to be able to make a living as an independent software developer.
John:
It's not getting to the point where it's like being a professional athlete where a small amount can do it, but it's getting more to the point where it's like a regular job where.
John:
It's not like if you're a decent programmer and you find a market need that's not being met and you sell an application, you're good to go for 20 years.
John:
You can just keep selling and revising that application for 20 years and you'll have a healthy lifestyle.
John:
Those days are past because the market is just too crowded.
John:
But my question for Casey about his new job is...
John:
Maybe you didn't think about that now because you're like, I don't know enough about iOS development.
John:
But my question is, does that still appeal to you as sort of the real polar opposite?
John:
Grass is greener on the other side of the fence from from the consulting world, consulting world where you have to go where they tell you, you have to track your hours, your different clients or your masters at various times.
John:
And the far opposite side is Marco's life where you call the shots, you decide what you're going to make.
John:
and you build it your way on your schedule and your time and find a way to make that a viable living.
John:
Does that still appeal to you?
Marco:
Well, I try to find a way to make it a viable living.
Marco:
It doesn't always work.
Marco:
I make things my way.
Marco:
I call the shots, but then the market decides whether to pay me or not.
John:
Yeah, but like you have, you know, for the most part, you've been successful doing that.
John:
Like I said, it's not an easy thing to do.
John:
Like, it's not like you can, you know, how many people do you know who are still living the indie life?
Marco:
But my question for Casey is, does that... Honestly, I'm not even sure I am anymore, but that's fine.
Marco:
I know what you mean, but I think App Store economics are such that it is very, very hard to do that anymore.
Marco:
And I think the number of people doing that is probably shrinking for sure.
Marco:
Overcast is not making as much as Instapaper did.
Marco:
And the trend lines for these things are...
Marco:
generally downward i mean overcast is making you know the the number overcast numbers are going up very slowly now with patronage um but it's making still making less than what it did before the patronage model which that was less than what instapaper made so you know overall this whole market is getting harder
Casey:
Yeah, I think, John, I understand what you're driving at.
Casey:
There's a couple of things to unpack here.
Casey:
First of all, it was easy for me to tell who did and did not read my entire blog post because those who did read the blog post, it was abundantly obvious that
Casey:
I am still working for the man.
Casey:
It's just a different man, figuratively speaking, of course.
Casey:
But those who didn't read the blog post or perhaps only read above the fold were like, oh, you went indie.
Casey:
Congratulations.
Casey:
So that was kind of funny.
Casey:
But to directly answer your question, I certainly have thought quite a bit about going completely independent.
Casey:
And to me, that means one of two things.
Casey:
It either means what you described, John, and what Marco is trying to and or succeeding at doing.
Casey:
I'll let you be the judge of that.
Casey:
Or it means I am consulting, but not as part of a consulting firm, but instead as an independent consultant.
Casey:
And this is, if you're in the United States, often referred to as 1099ing.
Casey:
There's many other ways you can refer to it.
Casey:
But that means as a single person, I am going and helping with something that
Casey:
And I am my own boss.
Casey:
I am my own salesperson.
Casey:
I am my own employee.
Casey:
I am everything soup to nuts.
Casey:
And so what may happen, if I were to make a guess, I think one of a couple things will happen.
Casey:
Either I'll stay at my current job for quite a long time.
Casey:
Or I will be here for a while until I really get to know iOS.
Casey:
And then maybe I'll try to split my time between a handful of clients.
Casey:
And those clients might be, say, Marco and Underscore or maybe somebody else entirely.
Casey:
Or maybe I'll come up with that brilliant idea to make that impossibly great update to Fast Text or whatever comes after Fast Text.
Casey:
I don't think today I'm in a position that I would be comfortable being completely independent.
Casey:
As much as I think it would be fun and as much as I'd love to try it, I don't think I'm comfortable doing it today.
Casey:
I'm the only breadwinner for the family.
Casey:
And granted, I'm diversified a bit insofar as I have podcast income as well as regular income.
Casey:
I really want to continue to have health insurance that my employer helps me pay for.
Casey:
And the thing that I really want to do...
Casey:
Like I said earlier, I kind of know how to do, but I don't really know how to do.
Casey:
And the best way to learn how to really do it is to just freaking do it.
Casey:
And it's much easier, as I discussed earlier, to be a part of a product company who knows what they're getting into when they hired you and knows what you are or not capable of.
Casey:
It's easier to learn on that job than it is.
Casey:
to to try to position yourself as a expert consultant but not really be an expert in it so for now i'm really happy with the move again i'm in the honeymoon period um you know there's certainly bad parts to this company like there are any company but so far all the bad parts seem super manageable and all the good parts seem awesome so i'm really enthusiastic
John:
Are you talking about considering, you know, the whole 1099 independent consulting only because it is a thing that, you know, I'm assuming you're talking about C sharp type consulting or am I?
Casey:
No, no, no, no.
John:
I meant, I meant, well, I mean, it could be C sharp, but I was, I'm saying like, if you were to do it now, you like, it would be very difficult for you to be an iOS consultant because you don't have a lot of relevant experience, but you could consult on the same exact stuff that you were doing at the previous company.
John:
and to me that's like the worst of both worlds where you're doing you have to be consultant you have to work in a tech that maybe you don't like or is not as interesting to you as as ios and you have to do everything yourself and it's like it's like all the all the uh downsides of being independent with none of the upsides of getting to
John:
decide what you want to make.
John:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Oh, I completely agree with you.
Casey:
And plus, I don't think I'm a very good salesperson.
Casey:
So I don't think I would be good at like, you know, pounding the pavement or whatever term phrase you want to use and trying to drum up work for myself.
Casey:
I mean, I feel like
Casey:
You know, I could shill for myself on the podcast, be like, hey, guys, if you want a C-sharp person, just let me know.
Casey:
But I'd rather not do that.
Casey:
And it's just it's not those sorts of things that you just described are not things that I'm interested in and not things that I think I'm good at.
Casey:
And just like you said, I don't the things that I'm good at, like C-sharp and that sort of thing, I don't necessarily want to keep doing.
Casey:
So you're exactly right to go completely independent today.
Casey:
I would probably be backed into the corner of doing all the things I don't really want to do.
Casey:
And so I'd much rather have the steady and reliable paycheck and the help on health insurance that comes from working for, quote-unquote, the man.
Casey:
And then we'll reevaluate in a couple of years and see where things stand then.
Casey:
But like you, I think I can speak for you, John.
Casey:
I am extremely risk-adverse.
Casey:
Is that the word?
Casey:
Averse?
Casey:
Averse.
Casey:
Yeah, I always get it wrong.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
I'm extremely risk-adverse.
Casey:
And I'd rather have some of that risk consumed by my employer than have to shoulder it myself.
Casey:
Now, yes, this is where all of the Internet and perhaps Marco is saying, well, your employer could fire you at any second.
Casey:
They could fold tomorrow.
Casey:
You never really, really know.
Casey:
And yes, that's true.
Casey:
But the way I perceive it, you know, better, worse or indifferent, is that this is less risky than going completely independent today.
Marco:
You're at least outsourcing many of the jobs.
Marco:
You're outsourcing many of the risks and much of the work by working for somebody else.
Marco:
And I wouldn't say – you're totally right in predicting what I would say that any job you could lose at any moment, you just kind of lose control when you're working for somebody else.
Marco:
But the fact is, if you go to work for an already established company that already has multiple employees and your salary is not where 100% of their budget is going, then certainly it makes it less likely that they would fail on the market in a way that would affect you or things like that, compared to just you going on your own and trying to make one app and trying to see that one app succeed.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because the company that you're going to work for has already released that one app, and it's already doing well enough for them to hire people and to keep paying the bills, hopefully.
Marco:
So certainly you do reduce and outsource some of those risks by working for somebody else.
Casey:
And additionally, I didn't leave my old job with my middle fingers in the air.
Casey:
I left my old job in such a way that...
Casey:
If things fell through with this one, I'm pretty sure I could go back without having to put my tail too far between my legs.
Casey:
And I'm pretty sure every job I've left, I could say the same for.
Casey:
And plus, as time goes on, you know...
Casey:
Some of the people I worked with two or three jobs ago are now at other jobs where I've never worked.
Casey:
And so I could go work with old friends again at the new places they're now working at, which actually, if you think about it, is exactly what happened here.
Casey:
Jamie and I worked together a couple of jobs ago.
Casey:
We still kept in touch for a long time.
Casey:
And it ended up that this all came circling back around.
Casey:
I kind of hate myself.
Casey:
We circled back to each other.
Casey:
And now we're working together.
Marco:
Yeah, ping me later all over the parking lot.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
So, you know, for those who are not independent, which I think is the overwhelming majority of us, if you leave a job not like a jerk, you also have that option.
Casey:
So even if this all fizzled tomorrow, I would still have the option of going back to the old job or working with some of my old co-workers from years ago.
Marco:
Yeah, there's always new bridges to burn.
Yeah.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
I'm still disappointed that you didn't take us up on the offer to have me, John, and underscore go into your old job and quit for you.
Casey:
That would have been hysterical, but I don't think that would have been a wise choice.
Marco:
Probably not, but it would have been really fun for us at least.
Marco:
I think you made the right choice for yourself, though.
Casey:
Yes, but it would have been enjoyable, and man, that would have been a really great YouTube video, if nothing else.
Marco:
We are happy to burn anyone's bridges that they need burned.
Marco:
We're happy to do that.
Casey:
Yeah, and that's the thing.
Casey:
I mean, I certainly had a list of grievances that I could have shared with my employer on the way out the door.
Casey:
And I think...
Casey:
They knew some of the things that made me unhappy, like the fact that I wasn't doing iOS.
Casey:
And so when I told them I was leaving, they were a little surprised and a little bummed.
Casey:
But when I said I was leaving to do iOS work, they were like, oh, okay, yeah, that makes sense.
Yeah.
Casey:
So so I feel like, you know, there's no good come or in my perspective anyway, no good comes of, you know, hey, I quit.
Casey:
And by the way, let me tell you all the reasons why you guys are a bunch of jerks.
Casey:
You know, there's no good comes to that because everyone is a jerk in their own way and I'm a jerk in my own way.
Casey:
And so, you know, we can all be jerks together and that's OK.
Marco:
Well, plus, suppose you do go back to your old company, say, in two years.
Marco:
You are now a two-year experienced iOS developer that they didn't have to pay you for training in the meantime, and now they can charge way more for your time.
Casey:
Yeah, that's actually extremely true.
Casey:
So we'll see how it goes.
Casey:
I'm really excited.
Casey:
I'm really scared, but I'm really excited.
Casey:
And I'm really anxious to see what it's like.
Casey:
It's going to be interesting being client-side, and it's going to be interesting because most of the C Sharp stuff I was writing, it was all server-side.
Casey:
I had written some client-side C Sharp way, way, way, way, way back when, when I first started writing in C Sharp.
Casey:
But I haven't done that in a long time.
Casey:
The closest thing I've come to client-side programming is JavaScript.
Casey:
And I'm not going to get into that holy war.
Casey:
But suffice to say, I haven't done real honest-to-goodness client-side development in a long time.
Casey:
And additionally, I'm really looking forward to some of the engineering challenges of working on a mobile device that I haven't had to worry about in a long time.
Casey:
You know, like...
Casey:
The processors are getting faster and faster and stronger and stronger, but cycles are not free.
Casey:
And more importantly, network traffic is not free.
Casey:
And even after having been there only a couple days, there's a couple of choices that have been made in the app for understandable reasons that I'm thinking to myself, ooh, that probably shouldn't be the way we do things.
Casey:
And I'm not the first one to this conclusion there.
Casey:
It's a known issue, but...
Casey:
It's some of those engineering challenges that you don't have to think about that often anymore, even though you probably should, but you don't have to, that I'm really anxious to start worrying about again, even though it's going to be a complete pain in the tuchus.
Casey:
So we'll see.
John:
Just let me know when you get far enough into your Swift stuff that we can talk about member-wise initializer proposals on the podcast and bore Marco with it.
John:
All right.
John:
That sounds great.
Casey:
Is that the thing that Erica Sadens, forgive me, I don't know how to pronounce her last name, but she had just read a blog post about that like a week ago, maybe a few days ago.
John:
Maybe.
John:
She's on the list.
John:
She blog posts about it.
John:
Swift evolution.
John:
Learn about the future of the language you're just learning.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
So you can tell what you're learning now will be obsolete in T minus three months when this proposal goes through.
Marco:
This is great, though.
Marco:
As long as Casey keeps learning Swift, I don't have to, really.
Marco:
We'll just use you, right?
Marco:
I don't think that's how that works.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure that's not how it works.
Casey:
Somebody, I think it was Curtis, had said it's about time that you guys got a Swift programmer on the show, which I thought was pretty funny.
Casey:
But anyway, so yeah, we'll see how it goes.
Casey:
But I'm really anxious.
Casey:
A lot of the existing code is, of course, in Objective-C, but all the new stuff is in Swift.
Casey:
And I was looking at the Swift book over the Fun Employment Week.
Casey:
And I was trying to teach myself some of it.
Casey:
And a lot of Swift really does.
Casey:
And to be completely fair, this is all academic because I was working in a playground and just reading the book.
Casey:
But a lot of it looks really, really good.
Casey:
And it may be that once I start really developing with it, I will hate everything.
Casey:
But so far, I'm really enjoying it.
Casey:
It's looking really good to me.
John:
So am I still in second place for amount of Swift written if you count the lines of code in my OS X reviews?
John:
Yes.
John:
All right.
John:
Just let me know, Marco, when you do more than 10 lines or whatever my line count is for the section where I put code samples of Swift.
Marco:
Well, I will start learning Swift when desktop Linux takes over.
Marco:
It's always like a year and a half out.
Casey:
Mm hmm.
Casey:
And I really appreciate all of it.
Casey:
I didn't think that many people gave a crap about where I spent my time during the day.
Casey:
And I don't mean that in a nasty way.
Casey:
It's very flattering that people have been so enthusiastic.
Casey:
And so I really, really appreciate it.
Marco:
We just couldn't wait to pull you out of the parking lot.
Marco:
That was really it.
Marco:
We never talked that much about your work just because it wasn't something you wanted to talk about on the show and we don't see each other privately that often.
Marco:
But it certainly did seem to me that some of the overhead of being in a big corporate... Not big corporate, but being in a big company and doing the consulting work and having to track your time and everything...
Marco:
I can't even imagine the kind of stress that you have to internalize to have things like your traffic light incident of thinking about how am I going to bill a client for the time I accidentally spent a little bit too much at this traffic light.
Marco:
It seems like that is something that certainly working for any company has its stresses.
Marco:
Working for no company has its stresses, even though nobody else sees them except me.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But I feel like you're making a move here that, at least by the way it sounds and by what you are describing so far, it sounds like you're moving towards less stress and towards something that is significantly more aligned with what you want to be doing and where you want to take your skills with things like iOS and moving towards client-side stuff, moving towards Swift.
Marco:
So it sounds like for what you want today, this is a way better fit for you.
Marco:
And so I'm really happy for you.
Marco:
I am so happy to hear this.
Marco:
And I think anyone who's been following your work for the last couple years or whatever, anyone who's been following your work recently has probably noticed the same things.
Marco:
That what you were doing was not very well aligned with what you wanted to be doing anymore.
Marco:
And now this new job sounds like it is.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, I couldn't agree more, and I appreciate it.
Casey:
I'm really looking forward to it.
Casey:
And the funny thing about all of this is that I've been able and lucky enough to go to WWDC in 2011, 12, 13, 14, and 15.
Casey:
And every single time, I've felt almost guilty that I've taken a ticket from a quote-unquote real iOS developer because there was certainly a potential every single year that I could be doing something
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Speaking of making corporate things better, we are sponsored this week by Igloo.
Marco:
Igloo is the corporate intranet that you will actually like.
Marco:
Now, if you ever worked in a corporate environment with parking lots, you know how painful intranets usually are.
Marco:
The content is so often stale.
Marco:
The interface is really ugly.
Marco:
You can't access it on your phone or get any meaningful work done outside the office.
Marco:
Igloo is a modern intranet designed by human beings for other human beings that you will actually like.
Marco:
It's an easy-to-use collaboration tool that can help you do your best work.
Marco:
You can share files and updates with your team, coordinate calendars, manage department projects, and more.
Marco:
Whether you're a large enterprise stuck using SharePoint, I'm so glad I've never seen SharePoint.
Marco:
I don't even know what it is.
Marco:
I just know it's Microsoft and everyone hates it.
Casey:
Trigger warning, trigger warning, trigger warning.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Please stop.
Marco:
Does the new job use SharePoint?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Thank God.
Casey:
Or if they do, I haven't seen it, and I want to keep it that way.
Marco:
Good, because nobody likes SharePoint.
Marco:
If you're stuck with that, or if you're a fast-growing business overwhelmed by file sharing, calendar apps, you can create a corporate intranet that matches your brand's look and feel, simplifies how you work, and is accessible on any device, mobile, laptop, desktop, anything.
Marco:
all today at igloosoftware.com.
Marco:
So go to igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Marco:
What is not to like here?
Marco:
Check it out today, igloosoftware.com slash ATP, the internet that you will actually like.
Marco:
Start a free trial today to check it out.
Marco:
And if you're under 10 people, you can even use it for free forever.
Marco:
So that's pretty cool.
Marco:
Check out igloosoftware today, igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So just to keep this the all Casey all the time show, I wanted to tell you about my last day at my last job.
Casey:
And this sounds like it's going to be boring, but bear with me here.
Casey:
I decided because I wanted to be a model employee and I don't need to hear emails about why this maybe was a bad idea.
Casey:
I'm sticking with it being a good idea.
Casey:
I decided to be a model employee and try to remove all of my stuff off my work computer for the last job.
Casey:
All my stuff off of it, just reload OS X, leave it in a position where it starts up, and the first thing it's going to do is finish the installation.
Casey:
So I did that over the weekend right before this past Monday.
Casey:
So when I went in Monday, I effectively had no computer.
Casey:
I mean, I physically had one, but it was ready to get set up anew.
Casey:
I had taken a Mr. Clean magic eraser and cleaned the exterior of it.
Casey:
Everything was good.
Casey:
I put it back in the box because for whatever reason, when they gave me the computer, they gave me the box.
Casey:
Everything was great.
Casey:
I really wanted to, however, scan a few tax-related documents at our scanner in the office.
Casey:
And the way the scanner works is, you know, it's a scanner slash printer slash copying machine.
Casey:
You can save something to a USB key.
Casey:
You can save something to or you can send something via email.
Casey:
Well, I didn't know how long my email address was going to last because, you know, it's maybe I could have keyed in my personal email address.
Casey:
But.
Casey:
It was certainly intended to be used only for your work email addresses.
Casey:
And I'm literally there for like two or three hours to do an exit interview or two and then get on my way.
Casey:
So I didn't even know if I would have an email address on this past Monday.
Casey:
It turns out I did.
Casey:
But I brought my iPad mini with me.
Casey:
And what I wanted to do was I wanted to scan these documents and confirm that they scanned properly and save them to Dropbox if at all possible.
Casey:
So how do you do that?
Casey:
Well, I brought a USB key, but the problem with that is I have no way to confirm whether or not it works.
Casey:
We don't have any public terminals sitting around in the office.
Casey:
I'm sure I could have asked somebody awkwardly, hey, do you mind if I use your computer to see if my scanned W-2 looks right?
Casey:
P.S., don't look over my shoulder, please, because it shows you exactly how much I made last year, and that's a little awkward.
Casey:
So I needed to do everything via my iPad.
Casey:
And what I ended up doing was I had sent the scans to my work email, which was still working, sat down on my iPad, looked at these scans, and then put them in Dropbox.
Casey:
That sounds like it was a pretty easy thing to do, but man, did it take forever compared to using a Mac.
Casey:
I had to go to mail.
Casey:
I had to wait for the message to download, get angry when occasionally mail showed me that there was a new message but refused to download it, force quit mail, go back into mail.
Casey:
Finally, the message is there.
Casey:
Now I need to open the PDF.
Casey:
Then I need to open, do the little share sheet thing, go to open in and then go to Dropbox.
Casey:
And then now I'm opening it in Dropbox.
Casey:
Now I need to tap, tap, tap, tap, tap to figure out what folder to go in.
Casey:
And I need to rename the file, by the way.
Casey:
And then I can finally save it.
Casey:
Sometimes there was a share button.
Casey:
Sometimes there wasn't.
Casey:
And I needed to tap and hold.
Casey:
What a freaking nightmare.
Casey:
It took forever to do something that on a Mac would have taken like four and a half seconds.
Casey:
So it was both a wonderful experience in that I was able to accomplish this at all on the iPad, which I think even not long ago, I wouldn't have been able to or it would have been even more taps to make this work.
Casey:
But all I wanted in the world was to have a Mac in front of me so I could make this go so much faster.
Casey:
Additionally, I needed to fill out another tax form, which included a signature.
Casey:
on os 10 you can sign using your finger on the trackpad in preview or you can sign a piece of paper hold it up to the um camera that's on your mac and it will quote unquote scan really take a picture of your signature and um
Casey:
And filter out all the background noise, if you will, and let you put your signature on PDFs.
Casey:
Easy peasy, simple to do.
Casey:
With the stuff that comes on iOS, I couldn't do that.
Casey:
I am sure there are like 300 different apps, like for example, PDF pen that would have let me do that.
Casey:
But I didn't have anything out of the box to do it, and that's frustrating.
Casey:
And I don't want to have to search the App Store, which, as we discussed earlier, is a dumpster fire full of options to figure out the one that I wanted.
Casey:
Additionally, similarly, some of the PDFs that I scanned, I really wanted to rotate.
Casey:
On Preview, that's Command-R.
Casey:
Easy peasy.
Casey:
How do you do that on an iPad without a third-party app?
Casey:
What I'm coming around to and bringing all this up is I really enjoyed the fact that I could sit on one of the couches at work at the old job where we had some couches.
Casey:
And actually, there's some at the new job as well.
Casey:
I really enjoyed being able to sit on the couches at work and use a computing device that wasn't a laptop.
Casey:
But all I wanted in the world was to have a damn laptop.
Casey:
And I understand...
Casey:
Why Mike and Federico and CGP Grey and Jason Snell and others might enjoy that?
Casey:
Because it was kind of cool being able to put puzzle pieces together to get most of this stuff done.
Casey:
But maybe I'm just old.
Casey:
I don't know why, but it just felt...
Casey:
awful to have to jump through so many damn hoops to get what are comparatively super simple operations done on the ipad and i don't know if you guys have any thoughts about this if you if many yeah well and i didn't know if this is if we're beating this horse to death but i don't get why this would be fun for people i just don't see why it would be fun
John:
i think i understand why it felt bad like oh one reason i mean you kind of touched on it why why might it feel bad to have this experience and why was it so difficult part of it has to be just simply uh a gap in knowledge that for example vatici could tell you exactly how you should be doing the thing that you're doing because he has experience you know how to do it on the mac because you've done it before on the mac like you know which programs and
John:
How to get things between them.
John:
And the comparison I always think is like so many things that seem effortless to me and my Mac are not effortless to other people with less experience with Macs.
John:
We don't even think about these tools we have at our disposal.
John:
And you always know, you know, drag from this application to that one, but that one you can't drag directly into there.
John:
You can drag it onto the app icon for this application, but this other one you got to go to the desktop intermediary.
John:
and who knows that you could drag anything out of there and how do you know that sometimes you got to hold down before the drag is active and you can't just start dragging as soon as you click the mouse button like these are things we internalize details that are just byzantine and don't really make any sense and aren't consistent and we don't have to go to the app store and look for the applications we want because we already have them installed and we already know you know all that like that we know what to do on the mac and so you go to someplace where you don't know what to do and you feel less competent it feels like i know i could do this in two seconds
John:
in realm x where i am an expert and now i'm in realm y and it's frustrating to you know to get to to feel like a novice um and that i think explains a large part of the dissatisfaction and the fact that you could do it at all probably means that there is like 900 better ways to do it that you just don't know yet because you don't have the apps installed um
John:
But on the other side of this is what we've talked about a lot is that in the end, some things still just are easier to do on the Mac, no matter what arrangement or things, because sometimes some of the things that we teach you might explain about his crazy world of living.
John:
And, you know, on the iPad only you think about and you're like, all right, well, that's impressive that you could do it at all.
John:
But really, it's a Rube Goldberg machine.
John:
And that's really this can't be the true path forward.
John:
Like, really, this is just like you're doing this to suffice for now.
John:
But I have to believe that maybe some of the things that you were doing actually would be just as easy, if not easier, on the iPad if you just knew how to do them.
Casey:
Yeah, you very well could be right.
Casey:
I guess the thing that frustrated me was that out of the box on OS X,
Casey:
all the puzzle pieces I need are there and are arranged pretty closely together.
Casey:
So you just kind of have to, you know, shove them a little bit nearer to each other and they all fit.
Casey:
And I think you made a great point that a lot of that comes from experience.
Casey:
Whereas out of the box on iOS, those puzzle pieces may exist.
Casey:
And hell, they may even fit together more nicely than they do on OS X, although I'm skeptical.
Casey:
But the problem is you have to seek them out.
Casey:
And I personally...
Casey:
don't have that patience that Mike and Federico and so many others do.
Casey:
Now, Marco, what were you going to say about all this?
Marco:
I was actually going to say something very similar to what John said, which is, like, in the iPad's defense, you were not familiar with it.
Marco:
You know, you are an expert on the Mac.
Marco:
You are not an expert in doing this kind of thing on the iPad.
Marco:
And so, yeah, there are ways to do these kinds of things that, yeah, you just didn't know.
Marco:
It'd be similar, like, if you tried to use Linux.
Marco:
And Linux might have tons of tools to do these things, and you just don't know about them.
Marco:
You know, things like that.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Something to think about with iOS stuff and with people who are going to do most of their work on iOS or all their work on iOS.
Marco:
I think there's a bit of a parallel to draw here between this kind of dilemma and the reason why so many people still buy laptops with DVD drives in them.
Marco:
And all of us geeks can look at this and say, why would anybody want a laptop with a DVD drive?
Marco:
What year is this?
Marco:
It is very common people still buy laptops with DVD drives because they say, well, what if I need it?
Marco:
I need this every so often.
Marco:
It's very similar to how people justify buying SUVs a lot of times.
Casey:
Or pickups.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
A lot of times people who buy SUVs, they choose them over a different kind of vehicle that they might be happier and more comfortable driving more of the time or that might work better for them in other ways, might be easier to park or more efficient or whatever.
Marco:
They choose SUVs over those vehicles sometimes because they think they might occasionally need to use some of the features on the SUV.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And even though 99% of the time they never use them and during the entire time they own that SUV, the need for its benefits over a regular vehicle might only come up like three or four times.
Marco:
And if they didn't have the SUV those three or four times, they probably could have found some way around, you know, we could rent a truck for this afternoon or whatever, you know.
Marco:
But people still choose those because of these occasional needs.
Marco:
And that's a very powerful force in decision-making of when people are choosing these kinds of things that they're buying or using or owning because they think, you know, as much as I could get away with...
Marco:
what I need 90% of the time with this simpler, smaller option, whether that's iOS or a motorcycle, as much as I can get away with that most of the time, that last 1% or 5% or 10% of the time that what I'm doing can't be done on this thing at all or can't easily be done on this thing, I'm going to be really upset if I don't just get the bigger, more capable thing to begin with.
Marco:
And sometimes that actually isn't a rational decision.
Marco:
Sometimes they could have been fine with the smaller thing, and the bigger thing, they're actually less happy with it overall.
Marco:
But it's very hard to persuade people of that up front, and a lot of times the times where the smaller tool isn't sufficient, they stick out in the person's mind, and that affects their decision-making forever.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
There have been so many times in my past travels, during which I've owned a MacBook Air or a 13-inch MacBook of some kind, and I have regretted not having the 15-inch.
Marco:
Now I have a 15-inch, and I'm looking at it, I'm like, you know, I hardly ever need this to be this big.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
I really hardly ever... But it does occasionally happen.
Marco:
And so I'm tempted to go smaller for my next one, but it's in the back of my mind like, yeah, but man, I do really like it sometimes.
Marco:
So I think looking at the iPad, we have a kind of similar problem here where if you're super devoted to doing as much as you can on it, you can get quite a lot done on it.
Marco:
But people look at that concept and they think, yeah, but...
Marco:
But what if I want to do this one fairly trivial thing that just by the design of the iPad or by its hardware restriction or something, it just can't do?
Marco:
Or by iOS's restrictions, it's very clumsy to do.
Marco:
And you only need one of those things.
Marco:
for the idea of an iPad being your primary work machine to be dismissed in your mind or to seem impossible.
Marco:
And so many people will have one of those things, at least.
Marco:
And I have tons of those things, so that's one of the reasons I don't do it.
Marco:
But I think in this case, it's a very hard problem to solve because that's the kind of thing that just takes...
Marco:
years and years of software maturity and a blossoming third-party ecosystem and advancement in the OS and the interface and everything.
Marco:
And right now, if you are accustomed to the Mac, it's really easy to just get a bunch of stuff done.
Marco:
And honestly, the Mac has taken a beating in enthusiast communities recently because everyone...
Marco:
it seems like everybody wants to flee from the mac and there it seems like whenever the ipad or iphones get better we hear from people who are just like seemingly like can't wait to drop their mac like it's like on fire like oh my god i i i'm rushing these other things because i just hated my mac so much thank god i can i can run to the ipad
Marco:
And I don't feel that at all.
Marco:
I love the Mac.
Marco:
I think the Mac is great.
Marco:
And my only concern is when Apple messes with the Mac in ways that I don't agree with or that I think make it worse.
Marco:
But even those are few and far between, relatively speaking.
Marco:
And the Mac is awesome.
Marco:
And to me, the Mac is my work machine and my main machine.
Marco:
And I am not looking to constantly flee the things I'm using if they're working fine.
Marco:
But I totally get the driving force that makes people think that way.
Marco:
But I do think when somebody like you goes to try the iPad as a work device, even for this one task you tried to do on it, when you run into one of those walls of things it can't do, it just seems like, oh my God, this thing is worthless.
Marco:
Why would anybody ever do this?
Marco:
And there's basically, to summarize this very long rant, there's reasons on both sides.
Marco:
And it depends.
Marco:
Just like everything else that can always be summarized that way.
John:
This whole issue of Casey's iPad use and trying it out on for size reminded me of an older discussion.
John:
I forget what podcast.
John:
I have one of the ones with Mike.
John:
He's on a million podcasts.
Marco:
That's Mike with a Y. That does not narrow it down at all.
John:
We were discussing his use of the iPad and how he remembered how it was just like...
John:
accessory thing but now there are so many things that he prefers to do he was talking about uh sitting in front of his mac with his ipad using his ipad like he's literally sitting in front of his mac but instead of using the mac that's in front of him he's instead got his ipad propped up in front of him he's using it um to do things like sorting through email or whatever certain classes of tasks that he by his own admission were less efficient on the ipad
John:
But the thing that made him want to use it was that he found them more enjoyable to do on the iPad.
John:
And this is not necessarily the factor that is making people try to drop their Macs like they're hot, but different expression.
Yeah.
John:
but it is like the idea that certain things and i've experienced this too i think we all have with the ipad maybe even marco once in a while certain things feel more comfortable to do on the ipad not even ergonomically speaking but just like mentally like somehow that our brain goes into a different state or maybe we're sitting in a different chair i mean with with mike's example he was actually literally sitting in the same chair that he's in front of but he also talked about doing it in bed or whatever
John:
Or just, I don't know, like just that it feels different to sort of like your body relaxes and you're just kind of like swiping things around on the screen to, you know, flick this message over there, scroll down over there, look at that.
John:
I find that a lot of browsing stuff, like if I want to read through Twitter, like if I'm behind and I want to catch up on Twitter or something.
John:
i find it much more comfortable to catch up on twitter on an ios device than on my mac even though i know that it's more efficient to do on my mac because i can open a link in a web browser faster because my mac is so much more powerful and bigger than when i click on the link browser window opens there it is it's very fast i don't have to switch apps you know like i i know intellectually that if you were to put a stopwatch on it or make any kind of objective measure of efficiency
John:
you would find that doing that task on the Mac is better, but it feels better to do it on an iOS device.
John:
And, uh, someone in the chat room said the lean back experience, maybe that's part of it.
John:
Like the, that it's more relaxing.
John:
Maybe it's just the context switch that we all spend so much time, or at least I do sitting in front of a computer all day, uh, that, you know, sitting down on a couch also in front of a computer, but the computer is really flat and you touch it somehow that like it's a mode switch and it feels more relaxing.
John:
Um,
John:
But I think that is that's part of this.
John:
And it factors into Casey's discussion of feeling like this is just, you know, what he was feeling was the other side, the inefficiency that like, I know how to do this in this other realm and I have to do it on here.
John:
And it's like a puzzle for me to solve.
John:
And it's annoying.
John:
And it's the worst kind of inefficiency because, you know, you'd already be done by now if you just did it on the Mac.
John:
Right.
John:
Yep.
John:
But the flip side of that is when you acknowledge the inefficiency and then it just it just feels better.
John:
um and i'm not like i said i'm not entirely sure what all the different sources of that feeling are i know a few of them but i think it's an interesting phenomenon and i think i think everyone who's used an ios device has spelled that to some degree even if you're just feeling it on your phone like i think that's a better example for marco who doesn't really use ipads that much some things just
John:
feel better to do on your phone i think gruber has talked about how he his preferred device for reading twitter is his phone because it just that just feels like the natural place to do a particular activity and it's got to be less efficient like you have you can put fewer things on the screen if you want to tap a link it's much more of a pain and you got to go back and all this other stuff but it just feels better
Casey:
Yeah, you know, to provide a counterpoint to my earlier lamentations, when I was on my way back from the Armands, actually, at the at the beginning of the year when we all congregated at Marco's house, I was sitting in the back of Aaron's car with Declan trying to keep him occupied and happy and whatnot.
Casey:
And when he wasn't in actively in need of, you know, entertainment or whatever, I was sitting back there with the same iPad mini and
Casey:
And I was watching us.
Casey:
I was using iPad multitasking, and I had typically Waze and like a third of the screen on the right-hand side in the little multitasking area.
Casey:
And then the main window was either Slack or Twitter.
Casey:
Or occasionally, if we were in a stretch like, say, the Jersey Turnpike, where we didn't really need to worry about directions or anything, I would have Twitter as two-thirds of the screen and Slack as a third of the screen, or maybe even half and half.
Casey:
And I have never taken a car trip that felt easier because I was entertained the entire way.
Casey:
And granted, you know, I'm talking to Aaron and stuff and I'm helping Aaron and whatnot or helping Declan and whatnot.
Casey:
But when I was just sitting there kind of doing my thing, I could not have enjoyed using the iPad more in that in that moment because all the things that used to suck about using an iPad, just constantly double pressing the home button or using the multitasking gestures to go back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
Casey:
All of that went away when I could even use just two apps simultaneously.
Casey:
So in that case, it was magnificent being able to use the iPad.
Casey:
And I think using a laptop would have been considerably worse in the backseat of a car as you're hurtling down the road.
Casey:
Because for among many other reasons, a laptop doesn't have a cellular connection.
Casey:
Yes, I could have tethered to my phone.
Casey:
But still, it was just it would have been a lot more uncomfortable.
Casey:
And so there are definitely times and places.
Casey:
And I'm not trying to say that there's consumption versus creation.
Casey:
I'm not trying to get into that argument.
Casey:
It just so happened that it worked really well in this case for the sorts of things you would want to do in the back of a car.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks a lot.
John:
I reconfigured my email recently and accidentally got MailRoute misconfigured from my hypercritical domain.
John:
and i could not get a turn back on fast enough this is what it's like because you don't even you don't even see all the crap that comes to it because i don't really use that email address but but it is publicly visible and so like the web scrapers have long since found it boy what a nightmare so i have talked way too much this episode people love you man this is great yeah people are all mad at me and john for being negative about apple last week so we needed you to rescue us this week and get all the listeners back that's it uh john you played any good games lately
John:
there's one game i wanted to talk about not review because maybe we'll talk about it on like some other podcast where we spoil the game everything but i just wanted to uh encourage people to take a look at the game because i have played it and i enjoyed it and i don't want to spoil it for you but i do want to explain to you why you might want to play this game the game is firewatch it's by campo santo i don't know how to pronounce the name of that
John:
I've never actually said it out loud until now.
Marco:
That seems like a reasonable guess.
John:
Yeah.
John:
In cooperation with our friends at Panic, makers of Transmit and Coda and many other fine products and other fun things.
John:
And they started development in this game.
John:
This is a weird thing for Panic to even be involved in at all because they are a Mac and iOS software company, not a game maker.
John:
But there are a lot of gamers on the staff there, and this is something I wanted to try.
John:
um and so they helped get this project underway and it's a bunch of game veterans actually making the game so this is not a bunch of newbies making this thing um it's my type of game if you heard me talk about games on other podcasts i like artsy fartsy games which is a way of saying like not games that are uh phil not the equivalent of blockbuster hollywood blockbuster movies that are just like filled with space marines and huge budgets and millions and millions of people buy them this is more like uh
John:
independent art house movies that have a limited appeal, but the people who like them really love them.
John:
I love games like that.
John:
This is one of those games.
John:
And the reason I want to encourage people to do this is back to something I talked about in hypercritical.
John:
And I always dwell on the skill barrier to enjoyment of video games.
John:
I really enjoy video games.
John:
I like other people to enjoy them, but I know there's some inherent amount of experience with video games that you need to have before you can enjoy one.
John:
much more so than other media like movies where maybe you need to have some knowledge of like the history of film but in general a really good movie can be enjoyed by anybody who sort of uh lives in the same society as you at the very least like but video games really there really are a lot of skills that need to be acquired before you don't have to think about those skills and can instead enjoy the game for what it is so firewatch is one of those games that requires very little of you in terms of
John:
knowledge of how video games work skill with a controller or whatever there's not a lot of complicated mechanics it's not a lot of rules or systems it doesn't demand lightning fast reflexes or anything like that it does require you to know how to orient yourself in 3d space and sort of a first person type thing but it is very slow and you won't be for the most part rushed there is some limited amount of being able to use either a controller or a mouse and a keyboard required of you like it's not you know it's a game you do have to play it but
John:
It is very gentle.
John:
And I think it's an interesting game that gives me an opportunity to recommend it to people who I wouldn't recommend, say, you know, Destiny or some other game that I like that I just know is not going to be appealing to people who aren't into video games because it's just so complicated and so in-depth.
John:
So in my ongoing effort to get more people to like video games, I would encourage everybody who either has a PlayStation 4 or a Mac or a PC to check out this game.
John:
It does require a somewhat substantial Mac or PC.
John:
I forget what the actual requirements are, but some people have said on Twitter that it helps if you have a discrete GPU on the Mac.
John:
I don't know if that's a hard and fast requirement.
John:
I played it on the PlayStation 4.
John:
It's nice to have a PlayStation 4, but you're like, look, if it runs on the PlayStation 4, I have one of those.
John:
I'm fine.
John:
I think it runs better on a beefy gaming PC or a Mac with a big video card, but
John:
uh you know from all the people responding on twitter like you learn nobody has a mac with a good video card anymore they all have the you know integrated graphics people don't even have the discrete graphics in their uh you know in the laptops because who gets discrete graphics but anyway um check the your requirements before you buy it's available on steam they do have a better refund policy than the apps the app store so you uh you might be in luck there it's fairly inexpensive it's like 20 bucks or something
John:
it's not a long game which you might think oh that's i'm not getting value for my money but i think that is a good aspect of a game like this the reason i'm recommending it is you don't have to sink like 100 hours into this thing it you can be finished with the game in between three and four hours my my first run through the game was like three and a half hours you could take much longer if you go slower or whatever but the point is you're not investing your whole life in this game it's more like watching a really long movie or maybe two really long movies
John:
so think of the length as a as a benefit to people i think of it like as a as a benefit to people who don't play games that much because you don't want to send them in the game that you know really after the first 25 hours it really starts to get interesting that's not that's a non-starter for people um i haven't said anything about what the game is about um it's called fire watch it's the idea is there's like a big house in the middle of the woods that you look around in to spot fires in the woods and report them if you're like a forest ranger uh
John:
that doesn't really tell you anything about the game so what do i do do i just go to this place and look out the window it is a narrative type game where they're mostly you're in it for the characters and the stories again it is not based on mechanics you're not going to be you know uh you know traversing a tech tree or finding resources or leveling up your character or doing any of the other things you typically do in a more traditional game this is much more of a
John:
all these things that i've said about the game may make people who are into games the so-called hardcore gamers who love games like starcraft and destiny and you know uh battlefront and all these other things like people who love those type of games you know gamey games you know the the quote-unquote self-described gamers may think this is not the game for them and maybe it isn't because i like this kind of games i like artsy fartsy games but if you demand the challenge of a bloodborne or something you are not going to find it here so
John:
But I feel like gamers already know about this game.
John:
They know all the review sites.
John:
They've read reviews of it.
John:
They know if this is the type of game that they're going to like.
John:
I'm mostly talking to the people who would think, video games, that's not for me.
John:
They're too complicated.
John:
Consider giving this a try.
John:
It could be, like I said, people on Twitter have been asking, I always ask them, have you played a first-person game before?
John:
Do you have any sort of like...
John:
medium level competence of like oh i know which direction i'm pointed in in a 3d world and i can walk around and look at things that's really all that's required of you and some minor button pressing if you pass that hurdle uh give it a try um and marco and casey should definitely play it because it's short and they never play any games and they can both play it just fine
John:
Whether they'll enjoy it or not, who knows?
John:
Because I don't think either one of them likes artsy-farty movies as far as that goes.
John:
But for everyone else, check it out.
John:
It's really cool.
John:
At minimum, the game looks beautiful.
John:
Even if you just launch it and look at the title screen and go, damn, those guys are good at what they do.
Casey:
Now, serious question.
Casey:
Can we pull a Merlin on this and do it half and half, or do you really need to dedicate three or four hours to it?
John:
I don't think you need to do it in one sitting.
John:
I did it in one sitting accidentally.
John:
I was saving this for the weekend, because I've had the game for a little while.
John:
It's been out for a little while, and I was like, oh, I don't want to rush it on a work night or be up late or whatever.
John:
I'll just save it for the weekend.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Last night, my wife wanted to do something else instead of watch a TV show with me.
John:
She wanted to watch one of the shows that she watches.
John:
I'm like, oh, I'll find something to do myself.
John:
I said, you know, I've got Firewatch and people are talking about it on the internet.
John:
Maybe I should just, I don't know, I'll just start it.
John:
Maybe I'll just launch it and see what it's like or whatever.
John:
And then I started playing it, and of course I couldn't stop.
John:
And I just ran through the whole game in one sitting.
John:
You do not need to play this entire game in one sitting, but I would encourage you to play the game in a small number of sittings.
John:
Don't play for five minutes and then leave for the next day and five minutes and leave for the next day.
John:
Because it is a narrative and because it is all about mood and character, you need to have some amount of through line.
John:
You wouldn't watch...
John:
uh you know say you're watching like a four-hour movie you wouldn't watch in five minute increments but if you want to do it in two sittings that's probably okay actually that's really not okay because i have different rules for movies but this game i'm gonna say uh if you want to do it in multiple sittings that's fine if you do it all in one it's great and i think it's even more powerful that way but asking someone to sit in front of their tv for three to four hours is uh asking probably a bit too much of someone who's not into games
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
I'd like to try it.
Casey:
I wanted to try it even before you were talking about it, but we'll see when I have the time.
Casey:
Knowing me, it'll be, I don't know, a year and a half from now, something like that.
John:
Yeah, as long as you don't read any spoilers for it, you'll be fine.
John:
That's also part of the reason I was afraid I was going to get spoiled.
John:
I'm like, I better get going on this sooner rather than later.
Casey:
Yeah, hopefully I'll find the time to try it soon.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Igloo, and MailRoute, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
John:
And if you're into Twitter.
Marco:
You can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean it.
Marco:
so here's a question so i i am interested in playing firewatch i have uh i have this iMac i also have a ps4 i generally prefer using a computer for first person games but i don't want to install steam
John:
Why not?
John:
Steam is fine.
John:
Steam is least of your concerns.
John:
Steam is nice, actually.
John:
Like, I mean, this is a lot of Mac users' first experience with Steam, and it looks atrocious, and it's filled with, like... I always wonder how companies don't get sued for this.
John:
Like, you remember the old gumball window widgets, the red, yellow, and green?
John:
You know, when they used to look like... They used to look like glowy spheres.
John:
Well, so Steam is entirely...
John:
steam is not a native mac application i don't know what it's made out of but they basically took steam and dressed it up in the skin of a mac application and you know with their own graphics so they basically copied and pasted the old glowy balls from like 10.6 or whatever and put them in the corner of their windows and then just left them there and as the os has evolved 10 7 10 8 10 9 10 10 it
John:
the little glowy balls are still up there and you realize that really isn't like nothing on the screen is a native control is it and it's like nope they're just it is a you know a wolf in sheep's clothing um so it doesn't it looks weird it doesn't look anything like a mac app or whatever but here's what i like about steam it also doesn't work and it installs all the startup items everywhere it's like no no startup well yeah it does want to run on launch but you can you can turn that off
Marco:
Yeah, it constantly runs.
Marco:
It puts itself everywhere, and it's a terrible app, and it's like, ugh.
John:
Well, here's what's good about Steam.
John:
It lets you download games and play them, which sounds like, so what?
John:
So what?
John:
But in the days before Steam, when you had to download some kind of installer to your Windows PC and get the installer to run on the same PC that other games are also installed on, and they would fight each other, and you'd have to fight over graphics card settings, there's a reason Steam is so popular, because it took...
John:
the terrible world of gaming on the PC, not necessarily the Mac, because there was very little gaming there at all, gaming on the PC, and made it way less terrible.
John:
Is it still not as good as it should be?
John:
Maybe, but I love Steam, and I even love Steam on the Mac, even though it has a weird update, or even though it wants to launch on login items like...
John:
It does silly things.
John:
You can stop it from doing them.
John:
It doesn't come with malware.
John:
It has better, for the most part, it has better refund policy and sales and trials and all the other things that you can do and early access and stuff better than the app store.
John:
Not that that's a high bar, but better than the app store for buying games.
John:
probably better than the App Store for selling games as well.
John:
The cable was tweeting today how exciting it was that on the day they launched Firewatch and Steam, they had already issued two bug fix updates.
John:
Because on Steam, once your game is accepted to the Steam store, you do updates without any interference at all.
John:
You post them and they go up immediately.
Marco:
Yeah, I wouldn't mind Apple taking some of their inspiration for the App Store from Steam.
Marco:
If they want to know where things should be improved, don't look at the Apple.
Marco:
The App Store apps are garbage, but don't look at the Steam app because the Steam app kind of... To me, the Steam app feels like... Hmm, how do I put this gently?
Marco:
It feels like not only a Windows app that is running on your Mac, not only that, which is bad enough.
Marco:
But it also feels like it is a Windows web app designed to run in Internet Explorer 3.0, which they have embedded in the app and is running in virtual PC emulation through Rosetta emulation on your Mac.
Marco:
That's how it feels.
Marco:
I think it's better than the Mac App Store app.
John:
Don't you think it's better than the Mac App Store app?
John:
Just in terms of the sheer number of features, the ways you can view your data.
Marco:
It is not as good as the iOS App Store app, which again is not saying much, but it is way better than the Mac App Store app because the Mac App Store app actually works worse than Steam.
Marco:
And that is saying a lot because the Steam app just does not work doing so many stupid little things.
Marco:
But wow, the Mac App Store app is even worse.
John:
But anyway, I would heartily endorse Steam as a way for Mac users to get and play games, even though the place that you buy stuff through is a little bit weird and looks strange.
John:
Just because you will be successful.
John:
You will be able to purchase a game.
John:
It will download it for you.
John:
When you want to launch it, you go to Steam and you can double click it and you'll be able to play the game.
Marco:
And you will never be able to get rid of Steam again.
John:
You can uninstall it.
John:
Fine.
John:
And that's the best thing about Steam.
John:
It's like, you know, all the great things about the App Store before the App Store.
John:
Say you're done playing a game and you want to free up some hard drive space.
John:
Uninstall it.
John:
Wait, is the game gone?
John:
Did I lose everything?
John:
Well-behaved modern Steam games.
John:
Save all your save stuff and stayed in the cloud and everything so you can uninstall the game to free up disk space.
John:
Know that you can reinstall the game later.
John:
and get all your stuff back.
John:
Again, well-behaved Steam games.
John:
I have some older Steam games that don't do that, and it really annoys me.
John:
But the good ones do everything right.