A Box and a Strap
John:
Do you have a yellow highlight?
John:
I like a yellow highlight.
Marco:
That's the intro.
Marco:
Transparent yellow highlight.
Casey:
Speaking of pronunciations, who's going to pronounce the fashion label CEO?
Casey:
Yeah, I'll take the fall on that if and when we get there.
John:
I don't even know what his name is.
John:
I read the thing, but I didn't retain the name.
John:
Is it hard to pronounce?
Marco:
I think his regular name is somewhat normal, but the place he came from, I think, is substantially not American sounding.
Casey:
Yeah, I was talking about the company, not the gentleman.
Casey:
So you want to talk about that?
Casey:
So I guess we could talk about that.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So Apple in the last, what, 24 hours, maybe 48 hours, well, at the time of recording, has announced that they've hired the former CEO of Yves Saint Laurent.
Casey:
No, no, not Darn, not T. Close.
Casey:
Yves Saint Laurent.
Casey:
I think it's Yves, isn't it?
Casey:
Yves.
Casey:
I did this research like three hours ago, so now I've already lost it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Anyway, you can email Marco about that because his last name is French, so he should be the one that took the fall for us.
Casey:
Anyway, so what is this for?
Casey:
Apparently, he's been hired as a senior vice president, is that right, to report directly to Tim.
Marco:
Yes, he's basically a senior vice president of nothing in particular, working on special projects.
John:
As opposed to all those other projects that are totally not special at all.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
Isn't that great?
Marco:
I mean, that could be... I mean, the speculation from everybody and this... There were also rumors about Apple apparently filing for trademarks for the word iWatch in a whole bunch of countries in the last couple days.
Marco:
And so everyone's saying, oh, this is about wearable computing because this is somebody from the fashion world.
Marco:
Right?
Marco:
It's the fashion world?
Casey:
Yes, it is.
Casey:
But he was the CEO.
Marco:
What sport does that team play?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So, yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Well, that's one thing.
Marco:
I mean, obviously...
Marco:
Obviously, a CEO is possibly not going to be the best designer.
Marco:
But at the same time, if you want to know about the computer market, you'd probably ask Tim Cook if you could.
Marco:
Anyway, so all the speculation is about this being about wearables and specifically about a watch in all likelihood.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean…
Marco:
We talked a little bit about a possible iWatch.
Marco:
It's a terrible name.
Marco:
It just sounds like some kind of illegal observation.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It just sounds dirty.
Marco:
But, I mean, would you wear an iWatch, and do you think it would really take over the world?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
See, on the one side, I am a reformed watch wearer, and I think I might have mentioned this in another episode, but I liked wearing a watch, but I am too cheap to buy the kind of watches I want, which is like several hundred dollar watches, not the multi-thousand dollar watches that some people have.
Casey:
And I think it would be cool to have a watch that's functional.
Casey:
I was one of those morons that had the Timex Microsoft watch.
Casey:
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Casey:
Yeah, with soap.
Casey:
You would hold the watch.
Casey:
What?
Yeah.
Marco:
Didn't it broadcast soap all over the place?
Casey:
Oh, maybe.
Casey:
And you had to go rinse it off?
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
I think we're talking about something else.
Marco:
I think we're not, but go ahead.
Casey:
Well, anyway, so whatever it was, it was like a data link or smart link.
Casey:
Where's the chat?
Marco:
Well, the thing that communicated via the IR on your computer monitor?
Casey:
Well, I don't know if it was IR or not, but yeah, it would flash random lines across the computer monitor.
Casey:
Oh, right, right.
Casey:
You're right.
Casey:
And then you would hold the watch up to the monitor, and that's how you would get phone numbers in it and all that.
Casey:
And it was really cool at the time, but in retrospect, it was terrible.
Casey:
But anyway, so the point is I have already, even as like a 13-year-old loser nerd, was already all in on the smartwatch idea.
Casey:
But I don't know, like I haven't bought a Pebble.
Casey:
And even though I listened to a bunch of Geek Fridays with Faith and Jason talking about it, and it did sound pretty appealing, and a friend of mine, Phil, has one.
Casey:
It seems a bit early, but then again, if Apple were to do one, one would hope they would do it better.
Casey:
So I guess that's a very long and rambling way of saying, I'd probably consider it if not do it, but we'll see what happens.
Casey:
What do you think, John?
John:
It seems highly unlikely that I would ever wear an Apple watch because I don't wear a watch at all.
John:
At least on the cell phone front, I carry a cell phone.
John:
It's not an iPhone, but at least I have it.
John:
But I don't have a watch.
John:
I don't think I've owned a watch since, I think, a sports watch maybe 10 years ago, and I have it sitting in my drawer if someone hasn't stolen it from me.
John:
But I never wear it.
John:
I guess if I was going to go running and needed something to keep time, I would take it out and put it on.
John:
But
John:
It's hard for me to imagine having something like that and deciding, even though I haven't worn a watch for basically my entire adult life, now I'm going to start wearing one.
John:
The only scenario I can see that happening is if I eventually get an iPhone and there's some sort of integration where this is like a more convenient way to get information without taking out your phone or something.
John:
But even that's a stretch, especially considering I don't even have an iPhone yet.
Marco:
I mean, I think it's also worth considering.
Marco:
I know that's one of my catchphrases, but it's also worth considering that, you know, if you would have asked people in late 2006...
Marco:
If Apple released a phone with no buttons and no removable battery and no keyboard, would you buy it?
Marco:
A lot of people would say no.
Marco:
A lot of people did say that when it was first announced.
Marco:
But now we're all using either that or something very similar to it from somebody else.
Marco:
Except for me.
Marco:
Except for you.
Marco:
But everybody else on this podcast and many other people in the world who have the means to get a smartphone go with an option very similar to that.
Marco:
And so I have to wonder what could they do in the watch or watch-like area.
Marco:
And chances are – I mean whenever people try to predict Apple products, like new categories before they're – not just, oh, this is going to get a faster CPU next week.
Marco:
Well, who cares?
Marco:
Whenever people try to predict Apple products –
Marco:
they almost always can only predict it in the context of what we know today.
Marco:
For instance, if you look back only like a month ago, look back at the predictions or the mock-ups for what a flat iOS redesign would look like.
Marco:
And so many designers made these because the rumors were that Apple is redesigning iOS and it's going to look all flat, which was not that far from the truth.
Marco:
But what everybody came up with was basically iOS 6 minus the gradients.
Marco:
And it was even the same color palette, all the same fonts, all the same layouts, all the same everything except they just removed the gradients basically.
Marco:
And it was not nearly imaginative enough.
Marco:
And Apple, of course, had radically different plans in mind for iOS 7, which now we know about.
Marco:
And by the way, a lot of it goes beyond just removing gradients and all the colors and most of the font weight.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I have to wonder in the watch world, or in the wearable world even, what are they going to do that no one's really going to predict?
Marco:
And obviously, by definition, we're going to have trouble predicting this.
Marco:
But I wouldn't write off the idea just yet of, oh, are they going to do a watch?
Marco:
Am I going to wear it or not?
Marco:
Because they really are more likely to do something that we hadn't really considered.
Casey:
Yeah, well, the thing that I'm asking myself as I'm listening to you is what is Apple solving by having a watch that's smarter than your average watch?
Casey:
And the obvious answer is, well, it's another way.
Casey:
It's a second screen for the device that's already called a second screen.
Casey:
But it's a second screen so you don't have to pull your phone out of your pocket, which is a total first-world problem.
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, I feel like they would do more than that.
Casey:
That's not enough.
Casey:
And I keep thinking in my head, well, I think Tim Cook mentioned that he wears a fuel band, like you had said a moment ago, if I'm not mistaken.
Casey:
He said he wears a fuel band.
Casey:
I know that a lot of people have Fitbits.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
I know that, like Erin, my wife, for example, has a Fitbit and she likes it, but it's not terribly accurate.
Casey:
And so my thought is, well, maybe this watch will have some sort of much more accurate sensor that will have some sort of really nice integration, kind of like Nike Plus, but better.
Casey:
But then again, I can't envision how you can make a better sensor than what we've already got.
Casey:
So I don't know what problem Apple is solving with this phantom watch, but I got to imagine it's going to be something that we didn't expect, just like you were saying, Marco.
John:
Well, you know, despite the fact that I don't have an iPhone and probably not going to wear a watch, I've been on board with the idea of Apple producing something that attaches to your wrist or some other part, you know, some small thing, small device like that, because it makes a lot of sense from Apple's perspective for a lot of reasons.
John:
I think we went through these on Twitter or maybe someone blogged about it a while back.
John:
But like back when the iWatch rumors first came out, people were just listing reasons to make sense.
John:
Uh, it's, it's a consumer electronic device.
John:
Apple's good at making them.
John:
They have a lot of deals with companies and, you know, manufacturing.
John:
So it's right in their wheelhouse.
John:
It's not like they're making, you know, windmills or something.
John:
Uh, they're going to be cheap, right?
John:
You presume that like you can't make anything that's that, that's small, that expensive.
John:
It's not going to be made out of diamonds, right?
John:
So it's inexpensive.
John:
Inexpensive means you can sell a lot of them because a lot of people can afford them.
John:
You don't have to have someone who can afford a $200, $300 phone plus a two-year contract or something like that, or even, you know,
John:
uh something as cheap as a mac it's going to be presumably very cheap uh and that means they can sell a lot of them and a lot of people are eligible to buy this thing especially if they don't tie it to any of their more expensive devices it's cheap and who who can't buy one you don't need to be a mac user a pc user you don't need to be computer savvy you don't need to hook it up to your television and have a cable subscription or anything else it's just kind of like a small reasonably inexpensive thing that presumably they can get good margins on because it will really be cheap for them to make and they'll sell it for you know
John:
40 50 margin on it is not uh crazy to think of and so you're like okay this seems like a pretty good product it has characteristics that fit with something that apple could sell a ton of at a good margin and that it's not outside its realm of things that it normally makes and then you're the only question you're left with is all right well why would anyone ever buy this thing all these characteristics sound great what are you going to sell them a lump of plastic for 50 bucks and it costs you 25 to make you know and you're make millions of dollars uh and i think it's
John:
probably not that complicated like you uh casey was saying all right so it's a little it's presumably this thing has a screen uh and presumably i can do stuff with it that i would normally have to take my phone out of my pocket for but that's not an important enough reason because who cares if i get my phone out of their pocket uh if everything comes together in the right way
John:
And Apple does a good job with this product.
John:
I think that those advantages that we scoff at now are exactly the thing that will make this a big seller and addictive device.
John:
Again, if they do a good job.
John:
It's not de facto if they make something that's a smartwatch, it will fulfill this.
John:
uh what i'm thinking of is i wrote something about this on my blog a while back the technological conservatism article where anything you describe that doesn't exist now that removes some tiny minor annoyance from your life sounds ridiculous like oh such a big deal i get my phone out of my pocket it's so hard to dig into my pocket and then i have to grip the phone take my hand out of my pocket bring my arm up to my face turn my eyes to look at the thing that's so much harder than having to turn my wrist you know like it's not that much harder and you can make fun of people for having this thing but
John:
If you get used to doing the ever so slightly easier thing, it becomes annoying to go back to the old thing.
John:
And, you know, these things build up in a series of them.
John:
That's what I did in my article explaining, like, look at any past invention.
John:
You could have poo-pooed it with the same exact thing.
John:
And yet if you go back 17 of these inventions, no one would want to live in a world without, you know, 20 or 30 or 40 of these things.
John:
But they all build on each other.
John:
So if they can make this even just a little bit less annoying than something that we do now...
John:
Even if you were to describe it and it sounds ridiculous, I think that that's enough.
John:
If it's a good product and people like it and it makes our lives a little bit better and it's not that expensive, it does maybe one or two things to get people in the door to get that critical mass.
John:
Once you get used to having it and it provides some benefit to you, even if the benefit sounds incredibly lame and makes you sound like a terrible person and all first world problem and who needs this thing and you get made fun of on the news and everything, people will keep doing it.
John:
Just think of all the things in our life that are like, I know, right down to the smartphone itself.
John:
uh it i think that's enough if they do a good job with the product so i'm looking forward to what they uh produced again not that i think i'll get one uh but who knows i gotta always throw that in yeah well you know because like the thing thing is i think a lot of people listening and people who send feedback get tied up with the idea of like what we like and use and what we think will be successful and is a good idea and they're not the same thing necessarily like you
John:
We're all, I think, very aware of what our wants and needs are not the same as everyone else's.
John:
And there's no reason that a product that we choose not to buy is necessarily a bad product or vice versa.
Marco:
I think a lot of people in the chat are trying to figure out what kind of hardware the watch will have and what else about that.
Marco:
And I think, and you mentioned a little bit about this too, whether it would be kind of a standalone thing, like its own device, whether it would have its own storage or be able to run its own apps, what kind of sensors it would have.
Marco:
My guess, if they actually go through with this and if this watch is a real thing, and there sure is a lot of smoke around that.
Marco:
There's probably something there.
Marco:
All the technology is there.
Marco:
Obviously, when you look at things like the Pebble and that other one, whose name I forget, but Lex Friedman likes it.
Marco:
If you look at things like that, obviously technology is there to do a smartwatch.
Marco:
But I think it's always going to be viewed as an accessory to another iOS device.
Marco:
And not quite a second screen necessarily.
Marco:
People use that term a lot.
Marco:
I think that's most of the way there.
Marco:
But I really see it as like, for instance, you've got to figure out the power envelope here.
Marco:
This thing is not going to have its own GPS chip.
Marco:
It's probably not going to have many sensors.
Marco:
It can have things like a pedometer and an accelerometer.
Marco:
I guess it probably is the same thing.
Marco:
It can have things like that, but it's probably not going to have a lot of its own power.
Marco:
It's probably going to be almost like a Bluetooth headset level of processing.
Marco:
Just its own Bluetooth thing using all the low power stuff and 4.0, whatever that is.
Marco:
And it would use your other iOS device.
Marco:
And it might not have to be an iPhone.
Marco:
Maybe it can use an iPod Touch.
Marco:
Maybe it can use an iPad.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
It can use your other iOS device nearby over Bluetooth to do any kind of heavy lifting.
Marco:
Or even the iOS device controls it.
John:
Or, God forbid, a web application.
John:
No, forget it.
John:
That's crazy.
Marco:
Well, and figure also, you know, look at things like, remember when Panic tore apart the HDMI Thunderbolt adapter, or no, the HDMI Lightning adapter, and found this tiny little ARM processor in there, and figured out that, you know, it's basically like a little tiny ARM chip running a little tiny embedded version of AirPlay?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
That's a perfect size thing to go in a watch.
Marco:
Figure, shove something like that in a watch with almost all of the rest of the space being taken up by a big battery and a very, very thin screen on top.
Marco:
Would the screen even need to be a touch screen?
Marco:
You can't really – because doesn't the current iPod Nano – that's a touchscreen, right?
Casey:
It is, and I want to talk about that a little bit more in a minute.
John:
I see this little thing as basically an iPod replacement because I use the iPod Shuffle a lot, and this is the only thing I think could make me have it.
John:
It's like a lot of people are looking for an iPod that's as small as possible, especially like runners or something like that.
John:
There's no reason this thing couldn't play audio with an incredible battery life except for the niggling detail of how does that audio get into my ears because you're not going to have a cord running from your wrist up to your ears.
John:
But if it has Bluetooth and they make Bluetooth earbuds or something like that, that is a solution that would be attractive to all the current people who buy the iPod Shuffle.
John:
And again, the iPod Shuffle must cost them at this point $15 to make and they sell it for like $39, $49 a millimeter.
Marco:
but i don't i don't see this thing having a lot of storage though because i mean i really i really see this thing as like for this to be good it can't be very bulky it can't be very big and so you're talking a very very tight amount of space in there and all the spaces there must be dedicated to a battery because it's going to be really challenging to get how big do you think the battery is in the shuffle because the shuffle is tiny and most of the room is taken up by humongous buttons
John:
and switches that will not be needed to be on this thing the battery must be minuscule in the shuffle and it plays audio for hours and hours and i i think especially it's not doing wireless well but i think especially if they do like all this prototype stuff of like you know curved glass or whatever basically spreading the mass out in a curved shape around your wrist gives you a lot more volume than making like the terrible pebble thing where it's like a
John:
a matchbox sitting on top of your wrist and then there's a strap.
John:
I imagine this device spreading the volume of the stuff inside it across a much larger area than just having a box and a strap.
John:
Plus, a box and a strap would not be Apple-style.
John:
So I think they have room for enough storage to, say, contain a bunch of podcasts and a low-power Bluetooth thing.
John:
Maybe version 1 isn't that great or whatever.
John:
I don't think we expect to see this until next year, but I think they could pull it off.
John:
Basically...
John:
An iPod shuffle plus a pedometer plus some kind of, you know, screen to give you information from somewhere.
John:
And that's it.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, I have a couple of thoughts about this.
Casey:
Firstly, a lot of times, and I've been wracking my brain trying to think of an example and I can't, but a lot of times when Apple has new technologies, you can kind of smell or see the smoke or smell the fire from a distance.
Casey:
And I don't keep up with the low-level technologies and what's new, but I'm asking myself, well, are there any new Bluetooth profiles like Bluetooth Low Energy or something like that that's even newer devices?
Casey:
That's come out recently that maybe would enable this sort of thing.
Casey:
And that's kind of a rhetorical question.
Casey:
I don't know that we have an answer to that right now.
Casey:
And the other thing I wanted to mention was my friend and I think our friend Chris Harris, he posted something very brief on his blog a couple of days ago, which I'll paste in the chat.
Casey:
And what he was saying is everyone is complaining and moaning about the icons in iOS 7.
Casey:
But if you envision those same icons on a much smaller device like the current iPod Nano, suddenly that Safari icon we all hate actually kind of looks right.
Casey:
And I just wanted to pose that as a little thought exercise.
Casey:
And I don't know if you guys have any input on that.
Casey:
If not, you can tell me about something awesome.
Marco:
Well, and we did get a big hint.
Marco:
Somebody in one of the press briefings or something, somebody got someone at Apple to comment that iOS 7 was designed with future devices in mind.
Marco:
And obviously that could just be, oh, well, we're going to make a bigger iPhone with auto layout that stretches everything.
Marco:
But it could also be things like this.
Marco:
It could also be, well, iOS 7's new aesthetic would look a lot better than iOS 6.
Marco:
It would look a lot better on iOS
Marco:
a really tiny, low-resolution screen, possibly.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
I think there's something to that.
Marco:
Because on a tiny screen, you don't have a lot of space for ornamentation, and you can't really discern fine textures and things like that.
Marco:
You need everything to be very simple, although I guess having a bunch of text labels won't really work either.
John:
I think we all agree that this thing is not going to run iOS anyway.
John:
No, but it might look like iOS.
John:
At least in the first eight years of its life, it's not going to run iOS.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
I think you're right, John.
Marco:
This is the continuation of the iPod line, basically.
Marco:
They have all the parts they need in the iPod line.
Marco:
already.
Marco:
They have that nice embedded OS.
Marco:
They have all this stuff running on top of it.
Marco:
They have a lot of miniaturization and they figured out tiny screen navigation.
Marco:
So I do think there sure is a lot of smoke here.
John:
Because they've been like the iPod line has been diverging.
John:
Like it's been the iPod touch, which is basically like an iPod in name only.
John:
And that's on one side of it and the classic kind of lurking there.
John:
And then every other iPod has just been trying to disappear, like slowly getting smaller and smaller until it almost disappeared.
John:
Like the shuffle almost disappeared when they had the buttonless one.
John:
And they said, no, we can't we can't do that.
John:
We can't make it actually disappear.
John:
We need something.
John:
And then it's like, all right, well, it gets bigger again.
John:
No, no, can we make it smaller and bigger and smaller and bigger?
John:
And it's just they want that thing to go away, and they can't figure out what you do with it.
John:
I guess you clip it on your clothes.
John:
You can't carry it when it's small of a certain size.
John:
Maybe a touchscreen will help us hide the buttons.
John:
But then how do you hold this thing and try to use the touchscreen at the same size?
John:
Like they want it to go away.
John:
And so if you could strap it to your wrist and relabel it a watch, that solves a lot of the problems.
John:
Sort of the design challenges of the Shuffle and Nano line as they've been trying to shrink away into nothing.
Marco:
Speaking of nothing that we were just talking about.
John:
Good transition.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm really good at this.
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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Casey:
It is really good.
Casey:
I've been playing it for the last week.
Casey:
And the pacing is perfect.
Casey:
It's very simple up front.
Casey:
The tutorial, I completely echo what you just said.
Casey:
The tutorial is excellent.
Casey:
But it gets harder very gradually in the way you want it to.
Casey:
So there were a couple of times I got stuck after I don't remember how many levels.
Casey:
And I would kind of put it away, think for a little bit, come back.
Casey:
And then I was able to get through that level.
Casey:
And that's the right kind of difficulty to me.
Casey:
Enough that it makes you kind of sit back and think, but not so much that you're like, oh, God, I hate this, and I want to break this iPad over my knee.
Casey:
So it is really, really good.
Casey:
Go check it out.
John:
There's a level editor, too, right?
Casey:
Pardon me?
John:
There's a level editor, too, right?
Casey:
I don't recall, actually.
Casey:
I was just playing through the campaign, and that's been keeping me busy.
John:
I was just looking at their demo video, and it shows someone making a level and then uploading it.
Casey:
Oh, I guess so then.
Casey:
Look at that.
Marco:
Oh, look at this.
Marco:
Yeah, hold on.
Marco:
That's buried in here.
Marco:
There's over a thousand levels uploaded by players and sorted by rating and a level editor.
Marco:
And it's totally free.
Marco:
And it unlocks when you've beaten enough levels.
Marco:
That's pretty cool.
John:
It's kind of like the PlayStation Xbox One thing where the fact that you can pay money for a game and then play it is now a really massive selling point of a game, as in it's not going to pay you for money.
John:
My son is currently playing one of those free-to-play games on the iPad, and I warned him about it, and I talked to him about it, and he understands intellectually what's going on, but he still says...
John:
But can I just get this thing?
John:
And for these coins, it's like, don't you realize it's, you know, at this point, it's taken like $15 from him already of his own money that he's paid for just junk in this game.
John:
It's just so refreshing to go back to the good old days when you could pay money in exchange for a product and then enjoy it.
Marco:
And the phrase free-to-play, that's... Anytime you have to add words to free, that's bad news.
Marco:
It's always going to be some kind of scam.
John:
It's like the USA Patriot Act.
John:
Free-to-play means not free-to-play.
John:
Exactly.
Marco:
No child left behind.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Let's not get me started on that.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
So, Marco, I noticed a flurry of what looked like productive activity over the last week, and you were apparently in iTunes Connect.
Casey:
What's going on, man?
Marco:
Well, I was trying to be in iTunes Connect.
Marco:
Well, touche.
Marco:
So what's up?
Marco:
I decided – I mean I don't really have that much to say yet, but I decided a little less than a week ago –
Marco:
that I wanted another app to exist, not the one I've been working on, but I wanted something else to exist and something that I would use every day.
Marco:
And so my other app, I've actually only been working on the web component so far, and I'm just about to start the iOS stuff.
Marco:
But I decided to have...
Marco:
a second app that i was making just for just because it's a really really simple thing i i'm sorry this is going to tease everybody in a really cruel way it isn't that exciting it's a very very simple you know very low functionality app um but just something i wanted so i decided to whip it up and i'm going to put it up for sale for like a dollar um
Marco:
probably by next week.
Marco:
I'm sorting out a tax ID issue with iTunes Connect.
Marco:
But once I get through all that, I'll put it up for sale and you'll all see what it is.
Marco:
And it's really simple and really stupid, but I want it to exist and I'm going to use it a lot.
Marco:
So we'll see.
Marco:
One of the biggest reasons I wanted to do it
Marco:
Not only because I want it to exist, but because, first of all, it got me back into iOS development.
Marco:
I mean, keep in mind, because of various timing of Instapaper and the magazine sales, I haven't actually written iOS code in probably six months.
Marco:
off the top of my head.
Marco:
It's been a while.
Marco:
Maybe five months.
Marco:
Either way, it's been a long time since I've written iOS code.
Marco:
And it's been even longer than that since I've written substantial iOS code.
Marco:
And so this was kind of a way to warm me back up to it, get me back into it, and just practice before I tackle my next big project's iOS code base, which is probably going to be non-trivial in scale.
Marco:
And I hope it's going to last a long time.
Marco:
So it was nice to have kind of this warm-up round first to do a very, very simple app.
Marco:
And
Marco:
I will see if I can get away with this with Apple.
Marco:
But I made the app look like an iOS 7 app, even though it's written for iOS 6.
Marco:
We can be in the store now.
Marco:
So I think it was kind of interesting making an iOS 7 design and getting into that and faking all this stuff for iOS 6.
John:
Is this your first Arc app?
Marco:
No, the magazine was.
Marco:
Instapaper never made it to Arc, but the magazine did.
Marco:
At first, I was like, well, I don't really need this because I'm perfectly fine doing manual retain release and auto release, and I never really had major bugs with that, so I really didn't need Arc for that, but it is nice.
Marco:
It's a nice convenience to have.
Marco:
So I switched to it with the magazine during some point release, and yeah, it's fine.
Marco:
I still don't really...
Marco:
I think I have much use for things like storyboards.
Marco:
But, yeah, Arc is good.
John:
Are you using Xcode 5 or no?
Marco:
Well, no, you can't because you can't build App Store versions with that yet.
John:
Oh, that's right, yeah.
Marco:
So this is all using the old tools and the old SDK but writing an app in the new style.
Marco:
And then, I mean, it runs on iOS 7.
Marco:
It runs great because my testing iPhone was iOS 7.
Marco:
But I had to, like, dig out, like, my TIFF's phone and my old iPad are my iOS 6 test devices.
Marco:
It was nice.
Marco:
I really do appreciate the value of practice.
Marco:
When you just work on one app for a while, you don't really get a lot of opportunities to practice with a clean slate.
Marco:
It was an app that uses APIs and techniques that I've never used before, so that was fun too.
Marco:
And yeah, it's just a fun little thing.
Marco:
Chances are no one's going to buy it except 10 people or so, but I don't really care.
Marco:
Even if no one buys it, it serves its purpose already.
Casey:
So is it using auto layout?
Casey:
No.
Marco:
Yeah, right.
Marco:
I haven't gotten that far.
Casey:
You seem bold.
Marco:
Well, to be fair, it only has two screens, and they're both very, very simple.
Marco:
I don't even use Interface Builder for this app.
Marco:
I will use it when it's warranted, when you're laying out something relatively complex, but for this app, it was really not necessary.
John:
So can we all guess now what it is?
Marco:
If you want.
Marco:
I mean, I'm not going to tell you anything.
Marco:
It's not going to be very exciting.
Marco:
Maybe next week when it's available, if it's available next week.
John:
Here are my guesses.
John:
Okay.
John:
My first and only categorical guess is that it has to have something to do with coffee.
John:
And then within that realm, I have to think of the things that you do every day that you would want a simple application to help you manage.
John:
And the only things I can think of, not knowing much about coffee or anything, except for what I've heard you talk about, is one of them...
John:
is timing how long the various steps in the process to make coffee take, and the other one is keeping track of your coffee supplies in terms of the age of the beans and when they were ground and stuff like that.
John:
Those are my only guesses.
John:
We'll see how, and I have no inside information on this, so we'll see how close I am next week.
Marco:
Casey, do you want to make a guess, or should I just tell John about his guesses?
John:
Don't tell me about them.
John:
Just don't tell me now how wrong I am.
John:
We'll find out next week.
Casey:
So what was it?
Casey:
Was it Nursing Clock was the other app?
John:
Yes, it was.
John:
I'm biased against clocks.
Casey:
Can we start by saying that this is not in any way related to that?
Marco:
Biased against clocks?
Casey:
I don't even know where to go from there.
Casey:
I'm upset because if this is a coffee clock, then you would have had the alliteration.
Casey:
But now all your apps will have to have the word clock like they supposedly had to have the word instant.
John:
Only the ones that don't sell any copies have clock in the name.
Marco:
No, there is no clock.
Marco:
And it also does not even have any kind of network connectivity.
Marco:
It's a very simple app.
Marco:
But first of all, John is totally wrong.
Marco:
I'll just tell you that now.
Marco:
You couldn't give me a week to think I was right.
Marco:
I think this is an interesting topic, though.
Marco:
The reason why you're so wrong is because I wouldn't use those apps.
Marco:
Basically, people always – I feel so bad.
Marco:
People work so hard on coffee apps, and people send me coffee app promo codes all the time and ask me to try them out.
Marco:
I don't need an app to make coffee.
Marco:
I really don't.
Marco:
I don't need an app to keep track of my coffee roasting supplies.
Marco:
I just know how to make coffee and I know how old my beans are.
Marco:
My beans are never more than... The roasted ones are never more than two weeks old.
Marco:
So – because I go through them faster than that.
Marco:
So I always know – I have some idea how old they are.
Marco:
And the unroasted beans – you know, they – unroasted beans keep for like a year or more even.
Marco:
And I never have them for that long.
Marco:
I go through them too.
Marco:
So I don't really need to keep track of that.
Marco:
But – and like people making coffee like –
Marco:
Okay, so coffee, I just know how to time it because I do it every single day and it's fine.
Marco:
Tea, I always have to manually time because it takes longer and it's more sensitive, especially like green tea, which is my favorite kind.
Marco:
That's like a two-minute brew usually at most.
Marco:
And so you've got to be pretty precise with that.
Marco:
And I don't have a good intuitive sense of how long two minutes is just to try to wing it.
Marco:
So I just use the built-in clock app with its timer mode.
Marco:
I mean, like, I'm not... A lot of people are huge fans of having, like, very specialized apps for all the things they do in their life.
Marco:
And I just... I'm not that kind of person.
Marco:
I don't see the need for a coffee timer when I can just use the system timer.
Marco:
I don't see the need for a very specialized data tracking app when I can just use a text file or a paper notepad, you know?
Marco:
Like, I...
Marco:
And it's just like a difference of philosophy or opinion.
Marco:
A lot of people just love super specialization like that.
Marco:
I'm just I just I'm not into it at all.
Marco:
Do you guys use stuff like that?
Casey:
I can't say that I do.
Casey:
I'm trying to think of an example.
Casey:
When I go for a run, I use RunMonster.
Casey:
A lot of people use RunKeeper.
Casey:
I don't know if you classify that as hyper-specific.
Casey:
I like using an app called Glimpse when I'm traveling to someone's house.
Casey:
And we're going to see that again this weekend, Marco and I. But I like using that as a way.
Casey:
I call it reverse or inverse stalking.
Casey:
Basically, Glimpse just beams your location to one or more people for a short window of time.
Casey:
And it's a really nice way if you're traveling for more than, like, ten minutes for whoever's at your destination to know where you are.
Marco:
Yeah, it's actually really cool.
Marco:
Like, when you first sent me that, I thought, this is stupid.
Marco:
I'm not going to complete this link even.
Marco:
What the hell could this possibly be?
Marco:
And...
Marco:
And then I saw it and like when you guys were coming to our house once and we were like trying to get things done in time and trying to know, oh, do we have time to go walk the dog or whatever?
Marco:
And it's nice to know when you're expecting somebody to know, oh, okay, they're 45 minutes away and they're right here.
Marco:
Or, oh, look, they're stuck in traffic.
Marco:
They're going to be a little bit longer.
Marco:
It's okay if they're a little bit late.
Marco:
It's really nice to know that stuff in advance and as you go.
Marco:
So that's actually really cool.
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, and to answer from the chat, no, it's not really what Find My Friends is for.
Casey:
This is more of a short-term but rapid updating thing, whereas Find My Friends is more of a long-term, infrequent updates thing.
Marco:
And it also gives you an ETA, which is nice.
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
I wanted to, if we're mostly done with this topic, I wanted to go back to something you said a minute ago, Marco, which is it gave you practice.
Casey:
And one thing that I think is important as a developer, which all three of us are, is to get a lot of practice.
Casey:
And one thing that I've found, and I think I might have talked about this briefly in the past, but one thing I've found is...
Casey:
getting practice in things that you're not used to is always, always, always, always helpful.
Casey:
And so you had said you were using frameworks that you're not used to in iOS.
Casey:
So you're getting the practice in the stuff you're used to, which is iOS in general, but you're also expanding a bit and getting practice in frameworks that you're not used to.
Casey:
My day-to-day is .NET.
Casey:
And so whenever it is, I sit down and write a little Objective-C and
Casey:
That scratches a different itch in my brain, which in turn, I think, positively affects the way I think about my .NET code.
Casey:
And so one of the ways that I stay fit as a developer is by trying to learn new things always.
Casey:
And man, do I get grumpy if I'm not learning.
Casey:
I mean, I've left jobs because I've been pigeonholed and not learned stuff.
Casey:
And it drives me nuts.
Casey:
And I was just curious, do you two have anything you'd like to add in terms of what keeps you sharp as a developer?
Marco:
Coffee.
Casey:
Fine.
Casey:
I should have seen that coming.
Marco:
John?
John:
Yeah, I got an email.
John:
I don't know if you guys were CCNR, but someone asked me last week, I think I was mentioning how...
John:
Once you know the basic concepts, you can pick up any programming language because all they're doing is you just look for what the equivalence of this concept is in that language or whatever.
John:
You just need some critical mass of concepts.
John:
So if you've never used a language that's object-oriented and you try to learn one that is, you have a hurdle to overcome before you figure out the language.
John:
First, understand what object orientation is and the various parts of it.
John:
And second, how does this language do those things, right?
John:
And once you have this collection of concepts, you can pick up anything.
John:
And someone asked, what are those concepts like?
John:
What are what's the laundry list of concepts?
John:
So it's that critical mass.
John:
And what I told this person was basically like when I thought of let me see what they are.
John:
Let me start listing them.
John:
It actually ends up being a pretty darn long list, especially when you get into specifics like concepts that are specific to GUI programming or, you know,
John:
event loops and delegation and event bubbling and things that are related to any sort of user interface-type toolkit.
John:
There's laundry lists for each one of those things, and server-side programming or whatever.
John:
So I think just...
John:
I thought making a list was not useful because the list really actually is pretty long.
John:
And the best thing for you to really do is to not try to go out and, okay, now I'm going to learn about the concept of obviously orientation.
John:
Now I'm going to learn about the concepts and functional program.
John:
Now I'm going to learn about the concepts of, you know, closures and currying stuff.
John:
Like you will not be successful by doing that.
John:
The best thing to do is,
John:
find a language that you're interested in using for a project that has one of these concepts you want to learn and do the project and then find a different language that happens to have some other concept that you might want to learn and do a project in that language like you can't learn the concepts by like academically trying to learn them what you have to do
John:
is a series of projects, each one of which touches on one of these new concepts.
John:
And that's why I was saying, like, once you've been, especially in web development, where you're using umpteen languages and frameworks and APIs, like, and they keep changing all the time.
John:
Once you've been a programmer for a long period of time, you pick these things up.
John:
And I don't know if there's any shortcut.
John:
I don't think you can, like, get the book with all the concepts, learn the concepts, and then say, now, even though I know zero or one languages, I'm ready for any language.
John:
You have to have done real projects with real APIs, with real products,
John:
And once you get enough of them and they're different enough, that builds up sort of like this base of knowledge.
John:
And then you're free to, you know, pick up anything much more quickly.
John:
So my advice is to basically do real projects with real languages and real APIs and make sure each new one that you do doesn't overlap 100% with the last one you did.
Casey:
Yeah, I absolutely think that's the right approach.
Casey:
When I was first a professional developer, I was writing C++ on a Whatcom compiler for DOS, which was kind of weird.
Casey:
And then I taught myself C Sharp just by writing an app, actually comically enough, to track my time during the day because I started doing a consulting gig.
Casey:
And so I needed to make sure I tracked my time.
Casey:
And so I wrote a C Sharp app in order to
Casey:
helped me track my time.
Casey:
And that's how I learned C sharp.
Casey:
And then I ended up doing C sharp professionally and still am my really, really basic app that's in the app store.
Casey:
I did that just to teach myself objective C and I couldn't, I couldn't echo what you just said enough that the best way to do it is to dive in, but to do something specific and productive.
Casey:
And so I think that that's the best way, not only to stay sharp, but also to learn something new.
Casey:
And again, I can't stress enough that in my experiences, when I learn a different language or a new framework or whatever the case may be, it makes me think about the stuff I feel like I know cold differently.
Casey:
I mean, I know C Sharp pretty darn well.
Casey:
And when I learn different languages or different frameworks or whatever the case may be, that changes how I write my code in C Sharp, again, usually for the better.
Casey:
So forgive me for actually doing something nerdy on this podcast.
John:
It's like when someone comes back from France and they start using French words or eating French foods.
John:
Put on the fake accent?
John:
Yeah, well, that happens.
John:
I've read, especially early in my career, lots of Java books, even though the only Java program I ever did was in school.
John:
I never did it professionally.
John:
But a lot of the early books about object-oriented design principles and stuff used Java as their language, or were specifically about how to write a better application in this environment.
John:
One of the umpteen GUI APIs that Java supported in its history.
John:
And I read a lot of those Java books and I brought with me a lot of the concepts and practices from Java into my daily work in JavaScript, Perl, you know, C++, whatever I was doing at the time.
John:
And you could see like, oh, this person has just read some book on this, some Java book, or maybe you just read the patterns book, which did a lot, you know, the Gang of Four patterns book, which does a lot of examples in C++, if I recall correctly.
John:
And for a little while, you'll have that carryover effect.
John:
And I think that that's weird initially, but it's good because it'll settle down eventually.
John:
You'll learn some new idea and you'll just want to use that new idea in this totally different language because you're excited about it.
John:
And maybe it's not quite a good fit and maybe you'll be too enthusiastic and you'll paint yourself into a corner, but you'll learn something and sort of that will settle down.
John:
You say, okay, I learned about this concept and I found out this other language also has this concept.
John:
Now I'm going to use it everywhere.
John:
Okay, that's too much.
John:
It's not a good fit, but now it's in my tool belt and now I have it available to me to know when I have this kind of problem, use this approach.
John:
And when I have that kind of problem, use that approach.
John:
Um,
John:
Like K.J.
John:
Healy, the ever-helpful chatroom person, said, as a friend of mine likes to say, there's an easy way and a hard way to learn programming language, and the easy way doesn't work.
John:
And that's not the answer most people want to hear, but that's the only wisdom I have to offer from my experience is that there is actually no substitute for experience, and you just have to do lots of things.
John:
And I don't know a shorter way to end up at the end point without going through all those intermediate points.
Marco:
And one, I think there is a slight, not necessarily a shortcut, but at least makes it a little bit easier.
Marco:
It doesn't save you any time, but it does help a little bit.
Marco:
To slow down the pace of what you're being barraged with that's new and to reduce the chances that you'll get totally frustrated and just give up and stop.
Marco:
I find it very helpful to take half steps.
Marco:
So for instance, when you first dive into programming for the very first time of any language, you can't make a half step.
Marco:
But once you know a language, then maybe the next step you take isn't learning a whole new language from scratch.
Marco:
But if you know Java from school, then maybe try writing a web app in Java because you probably didn't do that in school.
Marco:
If you know...
Marco:
A little bit of cocoa in Objective-C because you made an iOS app at some point.
Marco:
Try making a radically different iOS app using very different frameworks but using the same language.
Marco:
That way you don't have to relearn the language at that time.
Marco:
Or if you make web apps in PHP, then you already know things like HTML and HTTP requests and protocols and stuff like that.
Marco:
So if you already know how to make web apps in one language, then maybe learn another language that makes web apps.
Marco:
So you're only taking a half step in some of those instances.
Marco:
So it's a little bit easier and you won't just give up.
John:
That tends to happen naturally during the course of a career because the next job you get will probably build on something you already know.
John:
And so you will end up like, okay, well, I did web apps and language X and now I need to get a new job.
John:
And so I have experience building web apps, but this company uses a different language.
John:
You will find yourself writing web apps in a different language.
John:
And now you've taken that half step.
John:
All the things we're talking about, yes, you can do them on your own sort of as a hobby or whatever.
John:
But if it's your career, you will probably not find yourself doing completely, totally unrelated things from job to job because that's not a good way to build your career.
John:
Your salary and stature will not be increasing with each job change.
John:
You will want to build on what you know before, but you will also necessarily have to do things that you're unfamiliar with because you're not going to find a job that's exactly like your old job probably.
Marco:
So that just happens over the course of an actual programming career.
Marco:
and hover is so good believe me when i tell you i have moved every domain that i have that they can host i have moved there um like there's some of the weird international tlds they don't have registration rights for yet but everything else that they can host i have moved there um hover believes that everyone should be able to take control of their and of their online identity with their own domain name and then they make it easy to do so
Marco:
They offer .net, .co, .com, .tv, many of the country code TLDs.
Marco:
Getting a decent .com is difficult, but there's still tons of .nets available.
Marco:
There's tons of options for you.
Marco:
They take all the friction and hassle out of owning and managing domain names.
Marco:
They don't believe in heavy-handed upselling or aggressive cross-selling.
Marco:
Sometimes if you go to a domain site, there's like a million checkboxes that you have to uncheck during checkout to say, no, I don't want all this other stuff, and I don't even know what that is.
Marco:
And there's a checkbox here that says you won't set fire to my house for $10 a month.
Marco:
It gets so bizarre at other places.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Hover is just clean, honest, easy.
Marco:
It is a great place to register domains.
Marco:
They have great support.
Marco:
You call them and a human being answers.
Marco:
Really, really great technical support if you need it.
Marco:
Great pricing.
Marco:
They have email hosting.
Marco:
They have forwarding.
Marco:
Everything you'd expect from a great domain registrar.
Marco:
And more importantly, nothing that you would expect not to be there.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
And they're also part of 2COWS, which has been around forever, in internet terms at least.
Marco:
So officially they were founded in 1994.
Marco:
It used to stand for the ultimate collection of Windows shareware, right?
Marco:
Did I get that right, guys?
Marco:
I asked last time and I forgot.
Casey:
I think that's right.
Marco:
Anyway, they've been around forever.
Marco:
High-quality people, high-quality company.
Marco:
You can trust them.
Marco:
They're not going to scam you.
Marco:
They're not going to upsell you.
Marco:
Really great, no-hassle domain name registration.
Marco:
Anyway, go to hover.com slash ATP.
Marco:
For high-quality, no-hassle registration, use our promo code ATP, and you'll get 10% off.
Marco:
Again, that's hover.com slash ATP, and you'll actually automatically get it.
Marco:
Or just use promo code ATP at checkout for 10% off.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Hover.
Marco:
for being an awesome domain registrar, and for sponsoring our show.
John:
I keep forgetting to use our own... I always forget to use our own codes.
John:
When I was on my past podcasts, I would hear other people's promo codes.
John:
All these ways I could be saving money.
John:
I believe I have never used a promo code for Hover and I have spent too much money there.
John:
I should use my own... Maybe I can remember ATP now.
John:
Is it ATP or is there a number?
Marco:
It's just ATP.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
10% off.
Marco:
They do codes for a long time.
Marco:
For a while, I was using Dan sent me.
Marco:
Now I can just use ATP.
Marco:
It's great.
John:
I'm just paying full price all the time.
John:
It's not that expensive.
John:
Domains are cheap.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
I think especially listeners of this show are probably very familiar with having a lot of domains and having too many of them.
Casey:
All right, so what else are we talking about?
Casey:
I've been bossy this episode.
Marco:
Do you want to talk about any RSS crap, or is that just kind of over?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't really have much to add.
Casey:
A lot of people have asked what we're using.
Casey:
I don't know if we wanted to do a quick roundtable.
Casey:
I have thrown my weight in $19, whatever it is.
Casey:
behind a friend of the show underscore david smith speed wrangler uh i've liked it since the moment i paid for it and started using it it's gotten even better now that reader for iphone is supporting it uh and that's basically all i have to say about that david smith is a good guy so you should you should give him some cash he deserves it
Marco:
Yeah, I'm also using... I also agree that he's a good guy.
Marco:
I also agree that he's a friend of the show.
Marco:
And I'm also using Feed Wrangler.
Marco:
I guess we'll have to link to that in the show notes as well.
Marco:
I wonder if he can give us a coupon code.
Marco:
Actually, probably not.
Marco:
Not within that purchase, at least.
Marco:
But I believe he also supports Stripe on the site.
Marco:
Yeah, I like it.
Marco:
I wasn't crazy about giving up Reader back when I first tried it, but now I don't have to do that.
Marco:
So I went back to Reader.
Marco:
I like Reader a lot on iPhone.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
So yeah, I like it a lot.
Marco:
It works.
Marco:
It's fast.
Marco:
It's solid.
Marco:
Even in the last couple of days when he's had a massive influx of new users, it's held up really well.
Marco:
And I've never really hit any problems with it so far.
Marco:
And even among the paid options, I think it's one of the cheapest.
Marco:
It's very well priced.
Marco:
I know Lex Friedman, our friend and ad salesman, he wrote a big article on Macworld.
Marco:
Maybe we'll link to that.
Marco:
He recommended Feedbin, was it?
Marco:
The one that's not free.
Marco:
Feedly is free, right?
Casey:
I think so.
Marco:
Yeah, so he likes Feedbin, the other one.
Marco:
But it's $24 a year, so David Smith is actually cheaper.
Marco:
And I haven't tried Feedbin.
Marco:
I don't know if it's better in any particular way, but for me, Feed Wrangler, it works.
Marco:
It's a sync service.
Marco:
I would rather not use his first-party apps because I already have apps I like.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
So as long as you're using someone else's apps, it doesn't really matter which sync service you sync with.
Marco:
All that matters is cost and whether it works, right?
Marco:
So yeah, I like Feed Wrangler a lot.
Marco:
John?
John:
I've just been ignoring this entire thing because I assumed, well, eventually everyone will have everything sorted out.
John:
And three days before the shutoff date, I will simply look online and there will be some consensus for some slot in replacement that I can use that will let me continue to use the apps that I like using to read news.
John:
That turned out not to be true, much to my disappointment.
John:
I mean, I really thought it would happen.
John:
My habits aren't that esoteric, but...
John:
I thought someone would just support the API and I could just do some Etsy host thing to just get it to magically work.
John:
I don't know what I expected, but I thought people would get everything to go together.
John:
It didn't work out for me.
John:
So I mostly do my reading on the iPad and Reader, which is different than the iPhone version.
John:
It's not a universal app.
John:
I have both of them, but I never use the iPhone version.
John:
So...
John:
I have nothing that I can read on now on the iPad.
John:
Like I bought Mr. Reader or something like that, which kind of works, but I miss my good old Reader with two Es.
John:
So I'm just going to wait for Reader to start working with some service that I like or use.
John:
And I use NetNewsWire on the Mac, and it just turned off sync.
Right.
John:
I'm going to do it the old-fashioned way, and I don't think it'll be that big of a deal.
John:
Believe it or not, I know which things I've read.
John:
I don't understand which part of my brain is dedicated to keeping track of the last unread point in hundreds of feeds, but I don't know.
John:
i don't have to do it but i just i just know the last thing that i've read uh so i'm using feed bin because i figured i should pay for one of them but feed bin only is only supported on reader on the iphone presumably will be supported in reader on the ipad and then i guess i'll be kind of all set except for the cross device singing i don't know it's kind of yeah the desktop is little i didn't like google reader uh i
John:
You know, I'm glad that it went away.
John:
It's just that we're now in a transition period that's kind of uncomfortable.
John:
And a lot of the new readers that I try to have downloaded and purchased a lot of the new reader apps that didn't really exist before the Google Reader apocalypse happened.
John:
And I still like Reader better.
John:
So I'm hoping my old apps will come to support it.
John:
And NetNewsWire 4, I don't like the UI that I've seen so far of that.
John:
So maybe I'll just keep using NetNewsWire 3 until it dies.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm with you on the Newswire 4.
Marco:
I was a big fan of 3 for a couple of years now, and 4, I just don't really like the direction they've gone.
Marco:
They removed a lot of what I like, and they haven't added a lot that I like in their efforts to remove the other things.
John:
Awesome.
John:
But it's not done yet, so I'm going to wait and see.
John:
That's true.
John:
It's not done yet.
John:
I think there's a possibility that they will eventually come to support all the things that I like.
John:
By the time 3 stops working entirely, maybe 4 will be something nice for me to use.
John:
I'll be disappointed if it's not, because what's the alternative on the Mac?
John:
I don't want to use a web app, right?
Marco:
I use ReadKit now because I think it's the only Mac app that natively supports anything right now that's not Google Reader.
Marco:
If it's not the only one, it's certainly one of very, very few.
Marco:
I'd love to know if there's any others, but I don't think there are.
Marco:
It's decent, but the problem with ReadKit is that it started out as an Instapaper pocket readability app.
Marco:
And so it's really designed for that.
Marco:
It's designed to be like a read later service client.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
They added feeds.
Marco:
The developer added feeds.
Marco:
And the developer is very responsive on Twitter and everything.
Marco:
He or she, I forget, added feeds, feed support to it recently.
Marco:
So it can now do all these things.
Marco:
And I assume it's under pretty rapid development right now.
Marco:
So this all could change soon.
Marco:
But right now it just does not...
Marco:
it doesn't flow as gracefully as NetNewsWire.
Marco:
It doesn't have a lot of the keyboard navigation.
Marco:
There's a whole lot of missing details about NetNewsWire that... When you build something into your workflow, which your RSS client, your Twitter client, these are all important parts of anyone's workflow who uses them.
Marco:
And once you get into a habit of using the keyboard a certain way or expecting things to disappear when you've read them or any kind of minor detail like that, it really gets ingrained so much that when you have to switch, the differences or the absence of any of those things really grinds on you or grates on you, I guess.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
So ReadKit is kind of like that with me right now.
Marco:
Every time I use it, I want to set it on fire, but I'm glad it's there, and I like it a lot better than any web app I've seen so far.
Marco:
So I'm assuming it's going to get a lot better quickly because it really does seem like the developer is being pretty active with it.
Marco:
So I'm going to hope that turns out well.
John:
There should be money flowing into the ecosystem now because everyone was using Google.
John:
We were free and, you know, a reasonable portion of the replacement services and apps charge money.
John:
And so hopefully now this influx of money will result in whoever gets the most of it, you know, rapidly increasing the quality of their application.
Marco:
Oh, sure.
Marco:
I mean, look, if BlackPixel just took NetNewsWire 3's code base and somehow made it work with any other service, they could release it for $100 and people would buy it.
Marco:
You know?
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, there's a good question in the chat, a few lines up.
Marco:
Somebody who I now lost because it was too long ago asked how blog traffic is being affected now that Google Reader is shut down.
Marco:
I posted my stats the other day, and first of all, if you run a feed-crawling service, please, please, for webmasters,
Marco:
add the number of subscribers in the user agent string when you fetch the feed.
Marco:
Because Google Reader did this, a few others do it.
Marco:
It's very, very important for web people to know, if you look at their stats at least, it's very important to know how many subscribers there are to the feeds.
Marco:
And if you are running a service that proxies the crawling of the feed and caches it so that
Marco:
It's not one-to-one anymore on our side.
Marco:
Please report your subscriber counts.
Marco:
Anyway, so Google Reader, for me, I have like 54,000 RSS subscribers or 53,000 most of the time.
Marco:
Of that, like 9,000 or so was other aggregators as of a few days ago.
Marco:
And the other, you know, 46 or whatever it is, or 40, 43 or 44, that was all Google Reader.
Marco:
So it was a massive chunk of the subscriber base.
Marco:
And it's always been that way, you know, except for the last few days when everyone switched over.
Marco:
And especially, you know, sites like mine and Daring Fireball and a bunch of others, we sell sponsorships based on feed subscriber numbers.
Marco:
At least we have so far.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So it's interesting.
Marco:
I mean, last night at like 2 a.m., I published a major article, so my traffic today has been very high.
Marco:
So today's kind of an outlier.
Marco:
But yesterday was the first full day, I believe, without Google Reader being operational.
Marco:
And so I looked at my traffic for yesterday, and...
Marco:
it was actually slightly up from previous days.
Marco:
But overall, it was a pretty average day.
Marco:
I didn't see some kind of massive dip down.
Marco:
And I wonder, I mean, over time, it's probably too early for anybody to say, but I wonder for people who didn't do anything special yesterday or today on their sites, did you find any kind of massive drop in traffic or referrals by the lack of Google Reader?
Marco:
And so far, I haven't seen it on my site.
John:
My site gets so little traffic that I'm really getting a distorted picture, but I saw the shift away from Google Reader for my subscription numbers happening like weeks in advance, and it shifted dramatically.
John:
I should graph it.
John:
It used to be like 90% Google Reader and then just a bunch of other stuff, and it shifted to like 50-50 weeks before the transition.
John:
I haven't looked at the numbers post-transition, but I assume it's gone in the other direction now, and now it's...
John:
I'm assuming my numbers might have actually stayed steady because they're so low.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
I was just trying to pull it up while you were talking to see if I could look at the logs.
John:
I'm using the same.
John:
I'm using a conversion of your terrible shell script, but basically the exact same algorithm.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The exact same algorithm of how to figure things out, parsing out of the user agents or whatever.
Yeah.
John:
And yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that went.
John:
But yeah, I was surprised at how quickly the Google Reader bailout happened before it shut down.
John:
Because the few people who are reading my site are like the super nerds.
John:
They know it's coming and they're trying out different services and stuff.
Marco:
Yeah, I think...
Marco:
To answer the immediate question of what do you do with sponsorships, I think the biggest thing really is I'm just going to keep selling them the way I've been selling them.
Marco:
Because I assume that even if I have a big drop temporarily or permanently in RSS readership, I assume that dedicated people who are reading the site and who put any kind of thought into reading the site and care at all about it –
Marco:
they're probably still going to find some way to read it, and so there's not really going to be an interruption for them.
Marco:
And all the other people who had it in Google Reader but hadn't logged into Google Reader in like a year, people who just aren't that engaged, engaged, they probably, I'm guessing, were not really responding to the sponsorships that much anyway, or even seeing them if they weren't really even checking it.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I'm going to check in with my advertisers and just see if they're getting the right kind of response from what they expect and from what previous things have gotten them, then I don't think it's that big of a problem.
Marco:
I think your most engaged fans...
Marco:
are still going to read you.
Marco:
They're going to find out how to read you if they are surprised by Google Reader shutdown.
Marco:
They're going to find out how to read your site for the most part, and that's going to be it.
Marco:
What's really going to hurt, I think, is all the really small sites that don't sell feed subscription because they're just too small or their owners don't care enough to do that.
Marco:
Small, infrequently updated sites where if you ask some of their readers to list the sites they read, they probably wouldn't think of them.
Marco:
Because they don't update enough or they're not that important to them.
Marco:
But then in an RSS reader, when they would make their one post a month, all those people would see it.
Marco:
And now anyone they've lost might not come back because they might forget about it.
Marco:
So that's going to be the bigger issue, I think, is for smaller, infrequently updated sites.
Marco:
They might see a bigger change than the bigger.
Marco:
I think Gruber is going to be fine.
Marco:
I think Daring Fireball is going to be fine.
Marco:
But I think a much smaller site might have some trouble.
Marco:
But we'll see.
Casey:
Man, I'm screwed.
John:
I just ran the thing on today's stats.
John:
Why am I still seeing Google Reader numbers on the third?
Marco:
Their crawler is still running.
Marco:
somebody said that their API is actually still running until the 15th I don't know where that is sourced from so that could be crap I don't know but apparently it's still running so I would assume because the API is still running I would assume the crawler will also run until the 15th at least so we will see
John:
Yeah, I'm over 50% non-Google reader as of the beginning of January, so the people all shifted out.
John:
In fact, 75% and the first 75% non-Google reader, so...
John:
Yeah, I don't even know how many people read.
John:
Just because you have a Google Reader subscriber, it was always difficult to tell.
John:
Just because the thing is checking your site and reporting that subscriber number, how many of those subscribers are looking at your feeds?
Marco:
Exactly.
John:
Especially if you provide a full-text feed and there's no reason for someone to go to your site.
John:
Traffic numbers to the site...
John:
you know that that's people actually coming to your site and you can do the normal unique ips per day whatever dance on that and get a more reasonable number then the like the the reader subscribers i guess we're a good proxy because when it was when it was just google reader even if the numbers were crazy they were we were all using the same numbers so advertisers could compare relatively right you know even if the number was totally made up well you've got a seven you've got a three i don't know what those numbers mean but seven is more than three and you know they're both provided by google reader so there you go
Marco:
I think we'll be able to tell also just by repeat buys.
Marco:
Obviously, that doesn't help initial sponsors very much as we figure all this out, but if we see that our sponsors are still buying repeat buys, then I think we're fine.
Marco:
The exact same thing applies to podcasts.
Marco:
Podcast measurements, first of all,
Marco:
How you measure podcast downloads is itself very much up for debate because it's not simple.
Marco:
Because some clients will start multiple downloads.
Marco:
There are places like Stitcher that work like Google Reader where they cache a copy for everybody.
Marco:
And so you don't see any of that traffic unless you become their partner and sell your soul to the devil or something.
Marco:
And I don't like Stitcher.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
And with podcasts, it's always difficult when selling it to a sponsor because if we say we have this many downloads per episode, a good sponsor probably should, although usually doesn't, but probably should ask, how are you measuring that?
Marco:
Because that could be the difference of four times more or four times fewer hits.
Marco:
It's that big of a difference of how you measure it.
Marco:
And then there's the other problem, as Dashihi points out in the chat, that a lot of podcast clients, the biggest one is desktop iTunes, will keep downloading podcasts for a while even if you aren't listening to any of the episodes.
Marco:
And so a download doesn't necessarily equal a listen.
Marco:
Just like for Google Reader, a subscriber doesn't necessarily equal somebody seeing that.
Marco:
So yeah, it's a mess.
Casey:
Is that it?
Marco:
Anyway, I think that's it.
Marco:
Unless you guys have anything else to add on that topic.
Casey:
I think we're good.
Casey:
John?
John:
Do two minutes on free Mavericks.
Casey:
I couldn't resist.
John:
Couldn't resist.
John:
It's a quickie, though.
Marco:
That's some kind of like it prevents cancer, free Mavericks.
John:
That's free Radicals.
Marco:
Oh.
Marco:
Sorry.
John:
They're full of blueberries.
John:
Yeah, Mavericks are different than Radicals.
John:
The question someone asked me on Twitter or whatever, will Mavericks be free, as in not cost you any money to download from the App Store?
Casey:
I thought it couldn't be because of some strange accounting stuff.
Casey:
I don't remember exactly.
Marco:
Well, that used to be the case.
Marco:
I know we are not qualified to talk about this.
Marco:
I believe they changed the way they accounted for iPhones like four years ago to prevent that from being a problem with iOS updates and for iPod Touches as well.
Casey:
Right, right, right.
Marco:
But I think the Mac might still be accounted for the old way.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
It wouldn't surprise me if they still have to charge for it.
Casey:
I'm guessing, John, you're about to lay the truth on us.
John:
I mean, I don't know.
John:
The only thing I think of is when they were showing, again, the WCD keynote, when they were showing the adoption numbers and the adoption of iOS was massive and the adoption for the new versions of macOS was not massive.
John:
massive uh that's interesting yeah because one of those what can they do to move that needle well you know people free gets much better traction than 30 bucks right uh free also gets massively better traction than 99 cents uh which is counterintuitive but you know changing your price from zero to one cent
John:
totally destroys how many copies you can distribute uh you wouldn't think so like if it's changing it from two cents to one cent doesn't have the same effect as changing from one cent to zero free is magical right uh so if they want to move the needle on on os 10 penetration and i think they do but i think they're kind of annoyed about all the people who are still running like snow leopard lion and lion out there especially snow leopard i bet apple wants to just you know federally wants to go to all his houses and upgrade those people's computers like stop
John:
running snow leopard that's the last good version you put out you know whatever they they want they want to get those people on and so how can you do that lower the price or make it free if they can't make it free for some accounting thing though i'm worried that like well if you can't make it free because of some crazy legal reason it's is it even worth it to try lowering the price like it has been getting lower what did it used to be i can't remember the price i think it was went from 30 to 20 right
John:
Yeah, I don't remember.
John:
But it's going down.
John:
The trend, I did a little graph of it at one point.
John:
So they can keep going down.
John:
It could be $5, $2.99, $0.99.
John:
It would be great if it could be free, though.
John:
And if you think about why can't it be free, like Apple doesn't need that money.
John:
If you multiply $20 times, assume every single person who owns a Mac upgrades and see how much money that is, it's like five minutes of launch day iPhone revenue.
John:
Not that they're going to, you know, oh, we don't need the money or whatever, but I think version penetration is more important to them.
John:
than uh the money they make from this so i think if they can make it free they should i'm not ready to say whether they will or not but presumably we'll find out at some point at some point before i have to publish my review that talks about what the pricing is because it would really be bad if the day before they release it they say and finally here's the pricing
John:
That would be bad.
Marco:
Honestly, I don't really think that the pricing of Mavericks really matters at all.
Marco:
I think the reason why OS X adoption is not matching iOS adoption is because computers are generally in use longer than phones because of the pricing models and subsidization and things like that.
Marco:
There's a whole lot of computers that can't run Mountain Lion that Apple has sold four years ago or whatever.
Marco:
and uh and they're still in use you know apple computers have a pretty long useful life um you know as you as you know if you've ever tried to buy a cheap one because you can't afford the full priced ones and you you you find out that used ones still sell for quite a bit of money and and uh or if you've sold one after you've used it you realize wow i got a lot more money for that than i expected
Marco:
Macs are in use for a pretty long time after they're sold.
Marco:
And so, whereas iPhones, like, you know, if Apple cuts off a two-year-old iPhone model from compatibility, that's not that big of a problem since so many iPhones are discarded after, you know, two years or sold for bargain basement, nothing to some kind of trade-in program.
Marco:
You know, it's, I mean, this doesn't apply everywhere in the world, of course, but it certainly applies to
Marco:
to a lot of smartphone buyers.
Marco:
And so for Apple to keep moving that bar up for hardware, I think with OS X, it restricts that a lot more on the Mac side than on the iPhone side.
John:
Plus, computers are a pain to upgrade.
Casey:
I was just about to say the same thing.
John:
That's true.
Casey:
And plus, they store a lot more critical data.
Casey:
I mean, yes, you have photos on your iPhone, and if you're a regular person, that's the only place they exist, except maybe iCloud.
Casey:
But even beyond that, you have tax documents, you have financial documents, you have office documents that you can't get rid of if you're a normal person.
Casey:
And so the thought of that going wrong, I would expect, would prevent a normal person from
Casey:
from being very enthusiastic about upgrading.
Casey:
Even though OS upgrades on Macs seem to go really well most of the time, it's still scary, much scarier than on an iOS device.
John:
It's not an appliance.
John:
It's the same reason that people feel totally comfortable adding and removing apps on their phone but don't feel totally comfortable adding and removing apps on their Mac.
John:
And the Mac App Store has helped a lot with that except for the removing part.
John:
But it's still a different world.
John:
It's the little appliance.
John:
People upgrade iOS, and they just expect it to work.
John:
If you think about it, we know that it's not actually much less complicated on the iPhone because it is basically an OS X-based operating system, and it's doing all fancy stuff.
John:
The sandboxing, the restrictions really help the upgrade process work on something that's in a known state if you're having jailbroken or something like that.
John:
But it's still pretty complicated, and those guys must be sweating.
John:
People just expect...
John:
oh upgrade to ios 6 all right tap this button and their phone will be unusable for a while and they'll come back and it will work and if it didn't people would be livid it's like this thing broke my phone whereas with a computer people accept some amount of like oh this is going to be a big deal and i have to set aside a whole day to do it and upgrades gonna i mean even even we do i mean i certainly do because i know i mean granted i'm a special case but like
John:
I know that I'm going to have to like rebuild all my stuff in user local probably or I'll want to rebuild it because it would be a good time to upgrade stuff and things that link to shared libraries that aren't there or incompatible, you know, weird esoteric stuff.
John:
But even just making sure like all my apps are updated before I upgrade and doing all that, looking for any apps that are going to not work with the new version and stuff like that, like that's a pain.
John:
And I know when I do OS upgrades, I don't do them.
John:
Like I publish my review and then I don't upgrade my main machine for sometimes weeks or months after just because...
John:
I don't want to think about having to do that.
John:
And I'd rather just wait for the applications to get updated.
John:
So that is a big barrier too, but I think the $29 just doesn't help.
John:
Uh, but like I said, I'm not sure, uh, if going lower is worth doing if you can't go all the way free.
John:
Uh, Rob matters in the chat room.
John:
Uh,
John:
looked it up and said $29 for snow leopard, 19 snow leopard in line and 19 for mountain lion.
John:
So, uh, if you're going to follow the pattern, it would be one more $19 release and then down to $9, but who knows?
John:
They don't, they don't follow any patterns.
John:
We learned that from cat modifier cat.
Yeah.
Casey:
And we're done.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our two sponsors, Optia and Hover.
Marco:
And we will see you guys next week.
Casey:
Now the show is over.
Casey:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Casey:
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.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, 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-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
John:
I haven't lost a letterpress game in like 30 games, so I need some new opponents.
Casey:
You're not going to get somebody like that from me.
John:
Did you give up, Casey?
Casey:
I'll play you again.
Casey:
No, I just haven't played Letterpress in a while.
Casey:
Not because I don't like it.
Casey:
I just haven't thought about it.
John:
Casey is glad that the Letterpress application does not keep records.
Casey:
Oh, God, you have no idea.
Casey:
I would be like one in 394.
John:
You've never won against me, Casey.
Casey:
I don't doubt it, but I did not know that.
John:
I'm keeping track because I'm always rooting for you now.
John:
I'm like, this is going to be the game, Casey.
John:
You're going to make it happen.
John:
Months ago, you came close.
John:
I'm like, oh, this is it.
John:
This is the game.
John:
He's going to do it.
John:
And then you choked, and then you haven't come close since, and it's just been depressing.
Casey:
I was so mad.
Casey:
I'm so mad.
Casey:
I remember that game.
Casey:
I was on cloud nine, and then right back to Earth.
Casey:
I hope you guys are still recording.
Casey:
I am.
John:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Now I'm getting nervous shakes.
John:
I've got to add a topic to the notes that we didn't get to this week I learned from my vacation.
John:
Strange ways that real people use iPhones.
Casey:
Oh, I'm already interested.
Casey:
Don't get started because we'll go for another two hours, but I'm already interested.
Casey:
What do we think about titles?
Marco:
A box and a strap.
Marco:
What was that about?
John:
Like the pebble.
John:
The stupid pebble thing.
John:
Oh, okay.
John:
Have you seen a lot of those in person?
John:
I find them so terrible looking.
Marco:
I've seen one in person, and I could not believe how nerdy and how large it was.
John:
It's huge.
John:
It's from the 80s.
John:
It's like rubber gaskets on it, like that yellow Walkman.
John:
I feel like... Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
I feel like... You're right.
Marco:
The era of most watches has so passed us by.
Marco:
It would have been awesome if we could have a smartwatch in 1991.
Marco:
But now... Yeah.
Marco:
But now, like, who... I don't know.
Marco:
Who's wearing watches?
Marco:
I mean...
John:
I thought the people who got the pebble would stop wearing it, and I see them, and they're still wearing it.
John:
So I believe that it is performing some useful function for them.
John:
And that function is probably not telling them the time because you've got to jiggle the stupid thing to make the backlight go on so you can read the damn screen.
Casey:
All I know is I just want a Dick Tracy watch.
Casey:
Even though it would be terrible in every way, I just want a Dick Tracy watch.
Casey:
Is that so much to ask?
John:
Here's the problem with the Dick Tracy watch.
John:
When you see Dick Tracy using it, what you see is what he sees on the watch, which is some attractive person in a head-on shot.
John:
What they see is the inside of his nose.
John:
You don't realize that actually using a Dick Tracy watch would just be like nose hair vision.
Casey:
I didn't think it had video.
Casey:
I thought it was just audio.
John:
Maybe it is just audio, but I'm saying like the view of the person, that person is like in a studio standing right in front of the thing.
John:
It's going head on right into them.
John:
They're making eye contact with Dick Tracy somehow, and Dick Tracy is showing them the underside of his chin and nose.