The Transitive Property of Nerdiness
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Linode, Linode, I hate Linus, Linux, Linus, there's so many problems.
Marco:
Are we allowed to do follow-up?
Marco:
Why not?
Marco:
Sure, why not?
Marco:
John, have you licensed the term to us?
John:
Yeah, you haven't been getting my bills?
John:
My rates are very reasonable.
Casey:
Funny, I've been getting them.
John:
Yeah.
John:
All right, so this first bit is just somebody posted something on app.net whose username is J-A-S-T-E, but I don't know if that's the real name or handle.
Marco:
I believe it's Franz Jaste.
John:
You think so, but who knows?
John:
This is an iWatch follow-up, and he thinks that the iWatch will be Apple's foray into identity.
John:
And this is an aspect of the watch that we didn't talk about in the last show, and I think it's worth talking about, and the identity problem in general.
John:
Like the concept is that the thing that you wear on your wrist will somehow identify you to all the other things that you come in contact with to your television set.
John:
I guess to your phone, if you want to pay for something at Starbucks, you wave your wrist by it or something like that.
John:
Uh,
John:
I don't think there's anything special about the watch that makes it more possible to be your source of identity than, say, the phone.
John:
We all have phones now, and if we were going to have some sort of device be your source of identity, it would have been the phones by now.
John:
And lots of people have tried to do that in various ways.
John:
So this idea is that maybe the phone is too big or too expensive or the battery doesn't last long enough or you have to dig it out of your pocket or something else.
John:
So this would be slightly more accessible than to give us another crack at making this magical identity thing where,
John:
Our identification is securely carried around with us by this little physical dongle.
John:
And when you sit down at your computer, it detects that you are you because you're the one wearing the watch, and it automatically unlocks your screen and logs you in.
John:
And when you walk into a room, it plays the music that you like, and it puts things on your tab when you swipe it when you buy things at stores.
John:
This is the fantasy scenario.
John:
And I think the...
John:
barriers to that are, you know, not technological, they're business related, where this payment processors camped out at every possible place that want to give you money and
John:
maybe standards related where if you want the same little dongle to do all these different functions throughout your house everything you own has to be created by the same company and purchased recently because even if apple rolled this out it wouldn't work with all past apple hardware probably you'd have to get new stuff or at the very least you'd need to update software so i think this scenario will continue to be a fantasy but while nothing is actually announced this is the time to indulge in that fantasy i suppose
Casey:
So this person basically just wants to enable the pictures on the wall from the movie Antitrust.
Casey:
Did you ever see that abomination?
Casey:
I did not.
Casey:
Oh, you should.
Casey:
It's Ryan Filipe, Filipe, or whatever, and Tim Robbins.
Casey:
Tim Robbins basically plays Bill Gates, and Ryan Filipe, Filipe, whatever, is a crack programmer.
Casey:
And so they go...
Casey:
into quote-unquote Bill Gates' house.
Casey:
And as he goes in between rooms, like the lights dim to a certain level and the pictures on the wall, which are all like LCD displays, show different pictures.
Casey:
And I think this was based on something that Jobs supposedly had in his mansion, or excuse me, not Jobs, Gates had in his mansion.
Casey:
But the theory being that this watch could kind of enable that.
Casey:
In other words, it's always on you.
Casey:
And just like you said, it's always personalized to you.
John:
And it would be like lower power than a phone, so I guess it wouldn't run out of charge as easily.
John:
Right.
Marco:
I don't really see this happening in that way with watches.
Marco:
I mean, rather, I don't see watches changing anything.
Marco:
I think, first of all, one big problem with this is that I think there's going to be a lot more phones than watches out there.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
My theory from the last episode was that the watch would really just be a phone accessory.
Marco:
I don't know if I outright said it, but my theory here is that it wouldn't be anything by itself.
Marco:
It would be like a Bluetooth headset with no device.
Marco:
It would just be communicating over Bluetooth, low energy, and it would just be a peripheral to your iPhone or maybe iPad and maybe iPod Touch, which would be interesting.
Marco:
For all the reasons why we don't yet have this magical automatic identity thing with these devices, I think all those same reasons are going to continue to make it impossible for us to have that with watches also, or rather impractical for us to have that with watches.
Marco:
All the same reasons apply.
Marco:
You have weird privacy and security issues.
Marco:
You have a big boil-the-ocean problem.
Marco:
You have a lot of just weird incompatibilities in reality.
Marco:
In reality, it wouldn't be one company making all these things that all work together.
Marco:
Look what you have now.
Marco:
You have Apple doing pretty well with the iPhone, but then you still have Android.
Marco:
You still have Windows Phone.
Marco:
You still have all these other things.
Marco:
You have...
Marco:
Of all the people who have iPhones, a small portion of them have Macs, but a lot more of them have Windows PCs.
Marco:
And some of them have iPads and some of them don't.
Marco:
And people who have Macs sometimes have Android devices.
Marco:
People who have iPads sometimes have an Android phone.
Marco:
There's this giant, diverse environment that things would have to work in these days.
Marco:
And for something like identity to work that well and to be that ubiquitous,
Marco:
I think you'd have to have one company so dominant in the field that it could make everything for almost everybody.
Marco:
And I don't think we're going to have that for at least the next decade and hopefully longer because we're better off not having that.
Casey:
You know, this segues somewhat well, something you said a moment ago, segues somewhat well to a post that my friend Eric Wielander wrote.
Casey:
The post, which I'm pasting in the chat, let me kind of take you on a little mental journey.
Casey:
So we talked last episode about, you know, what is the thing that this iWatch is solving and also
Casey:
You know, what's the challenge of it?
Casey:
And the challenge is that there's really not a lot of input that can go into this and also not a lot of output that you can get from it.
Casey:
And so, you know, what already fixes that?
Casey:
And Eric pointed out, well, Siri could be a good answer for that.
Casey:
And I think part of the reason I'm bringing this up is because I'm so excited today.
Casey:
At the thought of a Dick Tracy watch, which I joked about at the end of the last episode.
Casey:
But the thought being, hey, you know, Siri could solve a lot of these problems about an input output for an iWatch.
Casey:
And the other thing that occurred to me that Eric didn't bring up was Eddie Q during the keynote at about an hour and 42 minutes.
Casey:
said something about how, hey, Siri's going to have a little more control over the things the phone can do.
Casey:
And the example he used, I think, were things like brightness and one or two other things, maybe even Bluetooth, which maybe wouldn't be relevant in terms of an iWatch.
Casey:
But I thought it was an interesting idea that perhaps some sort of really Siri-based integration could work well with a watch.
Casey:
Now, on the other side of the coin, to argue with myself and with Eric,
Casey:
I don't know if a Dick Tracy watch as much as I joke and say I want it would be a really socially acceptable thing.
Casey:
I think that would be a little awkward if we all walked around talking to our to our wrists.
Casey:
But then again, we all walk around staring down at our crotches.
Casey:
So I guess it can only be but so bad.
Marco:
I guess my problem with so much of this is basically why don't we have this now?
Marco:
What's stopping us from doing this with phones already?
Marco:
Because really, when it comes to things like capturing input and having sensors and everything, the phone already covers pretty much all of this area.
Marco:
There's not a whole lot of ground that a phone in your pocket or bag or jacket doesn't really cover anything.
Marco:
And there are – certainly there's some things.
Marco:
There's things like biometric information, pedometer-style things.
Marco:
Those are things that the phone either doesn't reliably have or just can't get practically.
Marco:
But unless you press against your naked leg all the time or something, that would be kind of – I'm sure somebody does.
Marco:
There's a lot of people with iPhones.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
For most of these things that we think of as, oh, will the watch allow us to do X, Y, and Z, almost all of them you could do with a phone.
Marco:
And we aren't doing with phones.
Marco:
And I think it's worth asking why and looking at it with some healthy skepticism of, well, if this isn't working with phones or if we're not doing this yet with phones, there's probably a really good reason for that.
Marco:
And it's probably not going to change if we have a microphone or some sensors or an e-ink screen or anything else stuck to our wrist instead of in our pockets.
John:
The Siri thing is weird, though, because I don't see how it could ever provide an experience that's even as good as it is on the phone, because it would have to communicate with the phone to do the Siri thing.
John:
So it would be like using Siri on your phone, which already is not snappy, only delayed by one more hop, because it's not like the phone is going to talk to the Siri service itself.
John:
It's not going to have, you know, 3G wireless is going to be talking to the phone.
John:
The phone is going to be talking to the Siri service and then, you know, playing this little game of relay back and forth.
John:
And it has all the same problems as Siri.
John:
Say something, hopefully wait as you stare at it and wait to see how it interpreted or misinterpreted what you said and wait for an answer.
John:
It is not a...
John:
a snappy experience that's even ignoring like the whole how do you feel about talking to yourself type of thing i do not see people you know people use siri as a game when you're conversing with it and then use it for very focused tasks uh rarely and i don't see them maybe they feel like they need to do it in private but people tell me oh i use it to set reminders or i use it to answer text messages when i'm in the car or whatever those are all times when they're not with somebody all your friends are secretly using siri when you aren't around
John:
Well, yeah, I mean, yeah, because they, you know, people feel more comfortable talking to their thing and using speech recognition when no one is in the room.
John:
Even when I do speech recognition to like write my articles for a dictation, it's more comfortable to do that when no one is in the room hearing you say fragments of sentences and issue voice commands, you know.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I would definitely say also that whenever I have to use Siri in public, I will usually try to use it as quietly as possible.
Marco:
And often I will do the thing where I pick up the phone and put it to my ear because most people don't know that also triggers Siri with the proximity sensor.
Marco:
And you can then just talk into it.
Marco:
So it looks almost like you're talking to somebody on the phone.
John:
Like you're giving a command to your secretary.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
In a very stern voice.
John:
We are by restaurants.
Casey:
Remind me to tell my wife I love her when I get home.
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Anyway.
Marco:
Goodness.
Um,
Marco:
Anyway, is there anything really new that we think about the watch now?
Marco:
We got an interesting article also by response.
Marco:
I've got to put this in the notes because I lost it.
Marco:
Somebody basically outlined what Bluetooth Low Energy does and what it makes possible and why it's so much better in response to our episode last week in the context of the iWatch.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I hope it's not called that.
Marco:
The name is already starting to sound stupid in my head.
Marco:
Yeah, I agree.
Marco:
All those trademark applications, I thought iPad was stupid too.
Marco:
And MacBook, terrible name.
Marco:
I really do hope that if this exists...
Marco:
It's either a very small-scale thing at first, like the Apple TV now, which is like, you know, everyone was so excited Apple can release something for TV, and then they release the Apple TV as we know it today, which is like, okay, it's nice, but it's a pretty small-scale problem solver.
Marco:
And so, you know, if they make a watch, it could be that, right?
Marco:
It could just be...
Marco:
doing things that are very similar to what the pebble and the other things like that do now which is basically showing notifications on the watch and uh and maybe having some minor sensors like a like a fitbit or fuel band equivalent but not doing a whole lot else not having a microphone for siri you know maybe maybe they add those things later on but just starting out with a nice simple problem set they can do really well with all the existing hardware and
Marco:
and have a great battery life and not be this giant bulky thing on your wrist, not look ugly, not look like a nerd convention happening on your wrist, and just do that really well.
Marco:
I hope that's what they do.
Marco:
Because looking at everything else, all the things they could possibly do that would be all these crazy transformative ideas, it seems like for a lot of them they have extremely fatal practical or technological restrictions that would really prevent them from being good.
Casey:
Yeah, and the more I think about the iWatch, the more I keep coming back to, I feel like the only way it's going to be really interesting is if it aggregates sensors in a new and clever way.
Casey:
Let me give you a couple examples.
Casey:
So in the original iPhone, as opposed to having to hit a button to rotate the screen from portrait to landscape, it added an accelerometer and
Casey:
In order to do that automatically, in order to prevent cheek dialing somebody or cheek hanging up on someone, it had a proximity sensor in order to turn off the display and turn off the touch input when the thing is up against your head.
Casey:
And maybe that's not aggregation in the strictest sense, but I feel like taking sensors that we have today, like a Fitbit or something like it, and taking either new sensors or the existing sensors and putting that data together in a new and interesting way, that's what I feel like an iWatch would do that would differentiate it.
Casey:
But how specifically, I don't have the faintest idea.
John:
You know what Samsung would do with the iWatch?
John:
Copy it?
John:
Copy everything?
John:
They would make it so that when you use the Samsung iPad equivalent, whatever that is, you could wave your hand in front of it without actually contacting the screen to do gestures because it would have the accelerometer on your wrist.
John:
They already do things sort of like that with a single device, but once you have two of them, you have to sort of start thinking like Nintendo.
John:
Okay, well, I've got a sensor on my wrist, and there's a screen over here, and if I wave my hand, the sensor can recognize my gestures without me physically interacting with the other device and use it, you know, that type of thing.
John:
I assume Apple would pass on most things like that because non-contact UIs are not particularly...
John:
Nice feeling, but guaranteed Samsung would do it just because it's possible.
John:
They seem to try everything that's technically possible.
John:
Try it out.
John:
Ship it on a device.
John:
See if people like it.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
What was the most recent one?
Marco:
The S3?
John:
S4.
Marco:
Okay, so whatever the most recent one was.
Marco:
And it had the hover feature.
Marco:
It had the tilt scrolling and all these crazy things.
John:
The eyeball tracking to see when you're looking at the video.
Marco:
If we can sort of do it, ship it.
Marco:
We heard a lot about those when it was launched.
Marco:
I haven't heard a thing about them or that phone since then.
John:
They have to be awful.
John:
Because if any of them had passed the threshold into being...
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, let's go to things that are reliable.
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:
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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:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Casey, you've had one of these things.
Marco:
Indeed.
Casey:
And it is really nice.
Casey:
It really is.
Casey:
It's pretty much exactly like Dropbox, but just like you said, rather than being in the cloud, it's in my possession.
Casey:
So if for some reason I ever wanted this stuff not to be on the internet, well, not to say that it's on the internet, but so to speak, if I ever wanted it to be...
Casey:
inaccessible from the internet even by myself i remove the ethernet jack and suddenly there's nothing anyone can do to get to it now granted the nsa has already read all of it anyway but in principle no they can't well now i'm saying at before this point the nsa has read everything but once i remove the ethernet jack there's nothing they can do to read it shy of coming to my house please don't come to my house
Marco:
They're already in your house, Casey.
Marco:
Come on.
Marco:
They probably are.
Casey:
It really is nice.
Marco:
It's a great concept.
Marco:
It's a great device.
Marco:
I'm a big fan of, as I've written about a lot recently, I'm a big fan of owning your own stuff online, of being in control of everything.
Marco:
Sure, there's a place for Dropbox, but...
Marco:
there's a lot of situations where you feel a lot better having your own stuff.
Marco:
Plus, I mean, heck, what would two terabytes on Dropbox cost you?
Marco:
You know, there's a cost advantage here, too.
Marco:
And, you know, Transporter, they have software that integrates with macOS that it provides a lot of the same conveniences as the Dropbox software.
Marco:
You have the folder integration, the finder integration, the share links, everything like that.
Marco:
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It's a great idea for a product, and I'm very, very happy that they made it.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So moving along.
Marco:
Thanks, Transporter.
Marco:
John, you mentioned last week in the after show strange ways that real people use iOS.
Marco:
I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit.
John:
Sure.
John:
This is based on my recent vacation to see family and
John:
And since the last time I visited, it seems like all of them got iPhones, usually like 4Ss, the less expensive iPhones.
John:
I didn't see any iPhone 5s.
John:
And I noticed a little bit of this at WADC, strange ways that other developers use iPhones, but seeing how regular people use them because they don't have any circle of people to give them sort of the social norms of how you use an iPhone.
John:
And here are the things that I noticed earlier.
John:
right away the first thing and this is the one i noticed wwc as well is i didn't see anybody who filled their screens with icons the springboard screens and up until very recently everyone i saw filled their screens because your first screen you'd fill it with icons and when you ran out of room you go to your second screen and fill it from top to bottom with icons and so on and so forth right and that is sort of the
John:
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that's more or less the social norm of how you configure your iPhone.
John:
Go ahead, Gacy.
Casey:
I was going to say that's the norm, although I will use myself as an example of an odd way that people use their iPhone.
Casey:
For whatever reason, and I read this somewhere, and I've been trying to figure out where I read this, but I copied from someone on the internet that on their first home screen, only their first home screen, was it one of you?
Casey:
It was me.
Casey:
Was it you?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
Okay, so on Marco's first home screen, he leaves the row above the dock blank.
Casey:
And I don't know why that rang true with me, but I was like, you know what, that's a really good idea.
Casey:
So on my first and only first home screen, I have the bottom row blank, but on every other screen, of which there are generally a total of three, I use up every single space.
John:
Yeah, and that's the thing I started to see, people intentionally leaving blank rows not on the last page, and even having it on the first page.
John:
And my question, I guess, for both of you, since you're doing this, is why do you have a blank row above your doc on the first page?
Marco:
Well, I have another whole complexity of my system also, which iOS 7 makes awesome, actually.
Marco:
But the main reason why I have always done that was that the very first iPhone with version 1.0 before apps had, I believe...
Marco:
one icon in the bottom row or none i'll have to look this up but um so it was just kind of always what i was used to um provides like a nice like kind of neutral swipe area to swipe between the two screens where you can swipe anywhere you can but like it's like it's like a reliable area like you know you can swipe there and not accidentally launch something you will never accidentally launch something by swiping
John:
It will not happen.
Marco:
I bet it has happened.
Marco:
Anyway, so there was that kind of legacy reason.
Marco:
I also think it looks better.
Marco:
It looks a lot less crowded.
Marco:
The bottom row is always where my app in progress, which is usually Instapaper, would go.
Marco:
Because at first, in the early versions of the SDK...
Marco:
I think every time you installed the app on the phone, it would move it to the default next application or something like that, which was always right there, something like that.
Marco:
Anyway, there was some reason with development why I would always have Instapaper and back when it existed Instapaper free in that bottom row by themselves so that the second half of it was clear.
Marco:
The other thing I do that's weird that I recommend to anybody who wants to try this...
Marco:
Back when the App Store first came out, I would have all these different pages of apps, and it just sucked.
Marco:
Once folders came out, I decided to do a different system.
Marco:
Generally, I don't like folders.
Marco:
I think they're very clumsy to enter and leave.
Marco:
Actually, on iOS 7, I like them even less, because they hold less per screen.
Marco:
You at least do have paged folders now, so folders have way more total capacity.
Marco:
But it moved from showing, what was it before, 12 pages?
Marco:
It would show three rows or four rows.
Casey:
Let me look.
Casey:
I think you're right.
Marco:
So in iOS 6, I believe it showed either 12 or 16 icons in a folder.
Marco:
It is 12.
Marco:
But you have the short phone, though.
Marco:
The big, fat, heavy one.
Marco:
Why do you have to be a jerk like that?
John:
Anyway.
John:
Shut up, you guys.
John:
You get 16 on the file.
Marco:
Right, okay.
Marco:
Is that true?
Marco:
Is that really true?
Marco:
Yeah, you get an extra row.
Casey:
God, you're so spoiled.
Marco:
Isn't that great?
Marco:
But on iOS 7, let me double-check here just to make sure I get this right.
Marco:
I believe you only get nine.
Marco:
This is not against the NDA, of course.
Marco:
Yes, on iOS 7, you only get nine per folder screen.
Marco:
And you can have multiple screens, as I said, but it ends up that getting into the folder is already an extra tap.
Marco:
And so to have to page through a folder only seeing nine at a time is kind of clumsy.
John:
And you have no neutral swipe area inside folders.
Marco:
What do you do?
Marco:
That's a great question.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I just launch apps accidentally all the time.
Marco:
But what I do is my very first page, I keep configured mostly the way the original iPhone always was configured, with everything in roughly the same spots.
Marco:
If I have a really awesome preferred...
Marco:
replacement app i'll put it in the same spot the apple app used to go so like for example i use silver instead of calculator and so silver is the second row right most spot for me because that's where the calculator was i believe in the original iphone anyway on and so on the first page there's no folders on the second page that's where all the folders go and it can have it can have individual icons also but the second page is where all folders go and i only have those two pages which is really honestly great i love
Marco:
having switched to a two-page only standard because you always know where you are.
Marco:
You're either on your first page or you're not.
Marco:
It's very, very, very easy.
Marco:
And all the things that you want to bury for occasional use can go in one of those folders on the second page.
Marco:
And with iOS 7 now, now that folders can hold so much more in total, you can at least say, like, you know, I used to have, like, games, new games, new games to test.
Marco:
Like, three different folders for games because they wouldn't all fit in one.
Marco:
And now I just have one.
Marco:
And, you know, I would have a folder called, like, Rare and Utility, and now I just have, like, Rare.
Marco:
You know, so there's...
Marco:
Anyway, I highly recommend doing a two-screen-only setup and using as many folders as you need to on the second screen to do that.
Marco:
It really is awesome.
Marco:
And on the iPad, I even just do a one-page setup, which is even better.
Marco:
There's not enough room on the iPhone to do it.
John:
You don't have to swipe anywhere.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And now they... Thank God they moved Spotlight.
Marco:
I love that change in iOS 7.
Marco:
They moved Spotlight so that you have to pull it down from the top.
Marco:
It's no longer like a springboard page to the far left.
Marco:
I think one of the stupidest things in old iOS was when you were on the home screen, if you tap the home button, that would be a shortcut to go over to the Spotlight screen.
Marco:
And that...
Marco:
So many times I accidentally did that, and I've seen other people do it even more.
Marco:
In fact, John, you can probably tell me from your regular people experience, how many times do they accidentally go to spotlight by hitting the home button too many times?
John:
I see that a lot, but I also think it's kind of like people hit the home button when they want to go back to the beginning and they understand that concept.
John:
And if they're already at the beginning and they hit it again, it probably means that they want to go backer to the more beginninger.
John:
And basically, they can't find what they're looking for.
John:
They're like, no, just bring me back to the beginning beginning.
John:
And throwing the search field in their face is like, oh.
John:
All right, well, I guess I can type here because I kind of know what the name of the thing is that I'm looking for.
John:
So it's kind of like, look, this is the last resort.
John:
You press this button because obviously you're not finding what you think you're supposed to be finding, but we've already brought you to the place that this button press takes you.
John:
So by pressing it again, you're saying, no, I'm still not satisfied.
John:
Here's the last resort.
John:
Go to search.
John:
But, you know, for me personally, it's just frustrating when I accidentally hit it because I don't notice I'm on the first screen or something.
John:
But for other people, I have to wonder if it's not...
John:
an okay thing and i kind of like the fact that it was to the left of the home screen i especially like the uh what they did with the little icons at the bottom maybe this is too subtle for most people but the little dot icons right and when you're on the first page there is one more dot to your left but it's not a dot it's a tiny tiny magnifying glass which is adorable so i kind of like that
John:
Go look at your iOS 6 device now.
Marco:
No, you're right.
Marco:
And that was a nice touch, but I have personally and I've witnessed so many accidentally invocations of Spotlight by that double home button tap thing that I have to imagine that's not worth it.
Marco:
And so I'm very glad they got rid of that in 7.
John:
For experienced users, it's not a good experience, yeah.
John:
So what I saw for people using the iPhones was not just leaving a row blank,
John:
But wiping out every single icon except for one row of four on the top.
John:
And what I even saw on one person's phone was one row of four on the top on the first home screen page, all folders.
John:
And everything else basically deleted and wiped out.
John:
But some people had like multiple pages where you go to the next page, one row of four at the top.
John:
Maybe not all folders, maybe all folders.
John:
And, you know, only a couple pages, maybe three or four pages, but only one row of icons at the top.
John:
And, of course, the dock on the bottom because I don't know if they knew how to get things out of there or whatever.
John:
And, you know, before I spoke to these people, I just saw their devices or saw them using them or whatever.
John:
I'm like, what's going on there?
John:
Why would you ever do that?
John:
It doesn't make any sense.
John:
Like, unless they're following the Marco philosophy, I just need a massive safe region to swipe.
John:
But that wasn't it because these people weren't looking for safe.
John:
So after speaking to them, the reason they're doing this, can you guys guess before I reveal it?
John:
Do they think it saves battery life or otherwise it's performance related?
John:
Too sophisticated.
John:
Casey, nothing?
Casey:
I don't even have the fan... Oh, because they want to make sure they have the space for the expanded folder?
John:
No.
Casey:
That's a good one, though.
John:
That's close, yeah.
John:
It's because they put a picture on their wallpaper, and they want to see the picture of their kids or family or whatever...
John:
And the picture is like the top part of the picture is just background like trees or whatever.
John:
But the faces are in the bottom part.
John:
And people with pictures, people had pictures that were purposely like biased to the lower part.
John:
So the people's faces were lower down so they could get two rows of icons because they want to see they want to see the people's pictures.
John:
And that is something that like, you know, adding, what did they add that in iOS four or five, they added the ability to have, you know, wallpapers instead of just a black background that, you know, that's an unforeseen side effect of giving people the ability to put a picture in the background is that they're going to want to see it.
John:
And they're going to clear out because they don't want some icons sitting on top of their kid's head.
John:
They're just going to move those things out of the way.
John:
And what they're left with is a screen with nothing on it.
John:
And that's,
John:
The four folders at the top is like, well, when you only have one row of icons, you still want some minimum amount of stuff to be on page one, so then just shove it all into folders.
John:
It's incredibly inefficient.
John:
It makes no sense to me, but this is how they choose to use their phones.
John:
It just goes to show that features have unforeseen side effects, and the way you think people will use your device is very different from the way they'll use it in real life because they have...
John:
very different concerns so i was fascinated to see this common pattern across all people's and and the other thing of this i could have guessed is that the people who delete everything off the phone they could possibly delete because they don't know what it is like this is this is why it's actually good that you can't delete like the phone app and stuff because if you could they would and then wonder why they can't send you know what i mean we're all annoyed that you can't delete calculator and stuff like that and maybe it would be okay to let those go but people are just like nope i know how to use four things on this phone i want to get everything else out of there
John:
So their solution is just to move them off the other screen.
John:
And that I would have predicted and have seen before.
Marco:
Don't tell them about parental controls.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
No, that's too deep.
John:
I don't know if they knew what the settings app was.
Marco:
They deleted settings.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And these are the same people.
John:
One person really was annoyed about the weather channel on their new television service.
John:
And I said, well, you have an iPhone.
John:
There's eight gazillion weather apps.
John:
Find one that you like.
John:
But there's no good one.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You'll have the weather forecast right there.
John:
Even something like Dark Sky or whatever, saying if your whole obsession is when it's going to rain, there's apps with real-time radar.
John:
We have the technology that's better than watching the Weather Channel and wading through commercials and weather reports for areas where you don't live or whatever, having to go into the TV room, turn on the TV.
John:
And I said, no, I prefer to see it on TV.
John:
I want someone talking to me.
John:
Even though it involves watching commercials and watching weather for towns that are not your town.
John:
And, like, that's crazy to me.
John:
But, you know, old habits die hard, I guess.
Marco:
I will say Dark Sky is still one of those things that can blow the mind of any normal person.
John:
Yeah, no, I try to show them, but it's, like, not impressive.
John:
I want a weather person on TV telling me the weather.
Casey:
I want that human touch.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
All right, do you want to talk about this Dropbox thing?
Casey:
Well, is John Donne?
John:
Yeah, I mean, that's... I'll think of more later, but the two big ones were...
John:
Yeah, the home screen so you can see the picture and getting all the applications of the home screen and then the totally being unimpressed by applications, not just the weather, but any kind of applications, like things that we all know that you can do with your phone that you know you can do X, Y, Z with your phone.
John:
Nah, that doesn't seem appealing.
Casey:
Now, did you see a lot of people force quitting apps for no good reason?
Casey:
Because I still see that constantly.
John:
None of these people know how to do that.
Marco:
Well, the really scary part is in 7, I don't know how much this was public.
Marco:
I'll tread lightly.
Marco:
In iOS 7, there's actually a really good reason to remove apps from the multitasking switcher.
John:
No, they have it in the movies, yeah, because you want to get them out of there so they're not in your way, so you don't, you know... No, that's not it.
Marco:
There's... Well, that's... I mean, maybe that's part of it for some people, but in Seven... I know what you're thinking of.
Marco:
The new backgrounding stuff, I don't...
Marco:
I don't know if this is public or not.
Marco:
Well, let's see if anybody cares.
Marco:
The new backgrounding stuff in 7, where your app can be woken up periodically in the background, if your app has been removed from the switcher, it does not do that.
Marco:
So you can't get background updates, which is a change since iOS 6, because with 6, even the newsstand content available things would go through no matter what.
Marco:
But
Marco:
In 7, if your app's been removed from the switcher, you don't get any background wake-up types.
Marco:
You can still get push notifications that alert the user, but your app will not run in the background at all if you've been removed.
Marco:
So there actually is a pretty substantial reason to manage or not manage the things in that switcher now.
Casey:
So come to think of it, that means that all these ill-informed people who are constantly clearing out what is now their multitasking tray are actually kind of shooting themselves in the foot because now all of their apps that are not running in the background won't get up while running in the background, so to speak, aren't getting updates.
Casey:
And they're actually demonstrably.
Casey:
penalizing their own experience.
Casey:
But now it's even worse.
Casey:
There's even more reason not to do that.
Casey:
Or to do it.
John:
This is all just a sliver of... There's the people who are tech nerds who know all the details.
John:
Then there's the aspirational tech nerds who know enough to force quit.
John:
And then there's the vast, vast majority of people who have no idea about holding down your finger to get the little red thing, and who will continue to have no idea about swiping up to get rid of those icons.
John:
Because it's not... There's nothing there that indicates that that's possible...
John:
Just like there's nothing in there that indicates that you can press and hold on the multitasking switcher.
John:
And I have to think that the vast majority of people will never use either one of those features and the phone will just manage it for them.
John:
So it's just this fringe of the people who know enough to be dangerous that are problematic.
Marco:
Right, the power users.
Marco:
Power users are like the most dangerous users to support or like for anybody, for IT departments, for developers, for themselves.
Marco:
They're just always like the worst type of user to support because power users, they know enough to cause trouble.
Marco:
or to cause headaches for themselves or others, but usually not enough to really fix things if they break them or have a really great environment.
Marco:
And they're usually the ones that are most susceptible to superstition and myths and crazy stuff like that.
Casey:
When I heard a lot of reports that geniuses, quote unquote geniuses, were telling people to force quit everything under the sun because that makes your iPhone run faster, which is just patently wrong.
Casey:
Even in iOS 6, that's just wrong.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Well, and again, geniuses, many of them are this type of person, the power user who like, you know, they know enough to have that job.
Marco:
That doesn't necessarily mean that they know the intricate details of how iOS works and why that's a bad idea or why that does or doesn't do something.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And, I mean, almost any IT person that you're likely to run into in any kind of work IT department or anything like that, almost all of them are this type of user.
Marco:
There are some really good ones that know a lot more, but most of the people you'll run into in this kind of context are like the knows-not-to-be-dangerous power user.
Marco:
And that's one of the reasons why all these crazy myths like defragging long after that mattered.
Marco:
All these crazy myths get propagated and live on because it's all these power users saying, oh, well, you need to do this and this and this every day to keep your phone clean or whatever.
Marco:
And nothing bad ever happens if you do that, so you just keep propagating it.
John:
You know, your platform has arrived when you get one of those because the Mac had a long sequence of them.
John:
I think it'd probably be the first one I can think of.
John:
It's like rebuilding the desktop, but you had zapping the PRAM.
John:
You had all those things.
John:
And then, like, the Mac OS X got repairing permissions.
John:
And then iOS, I guess, is the first one that iOS got was the forced quitting apps.
John:
That's the only one I know of.
John:
I believe so.
Marco:
Because that was like one of the first things you could do as kind of like an amateur system administrator for your phone.
Marco:
It was like there's not much else you can do.
Marco:
There is no iOS defect.
Marco:
Although there are – there have been like crazy scam apps in the App Store that are like maximize your battery life and stuff like that.
Marco:
And I always wonder how they get approved because then you read the description and you find out like, oh, well, it's actually just like –
Marco:
It's a joke app officially, or it's educational only, or it just has like lists of tips and tricks that you're supposed to do.
Marco:
But there's a lot of apps, even like if you look in the top lists, there's a lot of apps that are selling really well that are basically scams preying on this kind of mythology of like, oh, that an app can compress your memory on iOS or can speed your phone up or save your battery life.
Casey:
Yeah, and somebody in the chat, I shouldn't share this person's name just to be safe.
Casey:
Again, from working in the Apple store or at the Apple store, the company would send out numerous memos reminding us that force quitting everything under the sun was wrong.
Casey:
But tons of my colleagues would spread that lie and practice it themselves, which is kind of sad, but...
John:
That's the nature of superstition.
John:
You can't be convinced by a presentation of evidence, the whole point of superstition.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And it's, you know, those things that spread so easily are the things like, well, if you do them, nothing bad really happens.
Marco:
And you can't really tell if anything good happens because it's too small of a difference if it, quote, works.
John:
You don't need the feather.
John:
You just need to believe.
John:
I think that's a Dumbo reference.
John:
I haven't seen the movie in years.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Yeah, neither have I. So...
Marco:
This episode is also sponsored by another return sponsor.
Marco:
It's Audible.
Marco:
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Marco:
If you want to listen to it, Audible has it.
Marco:
You can listen to audiobooks anytime, anywhere.
Marco:
iPhones, iPads, computers, Kindles, even iPods.
Marco:
They're offering ATP listeners a free audiobook with a 30-day trial.
Marco:
Go to audiblepodcast.com slash ATP to take advantage of this special offer.
Marco:
So once again, it's audiblepodcast.com slash ATP to get free audiobook with a 30-day free trial.
Marco:
Guys, do you have any audiobooks to recommend?
Casey:
You know, I haven't looked, to be honest, to confirm that this is on Audible, but I bet you it is.
Casey:
I was asked recently what my favorite movie is, and if you bear with me for a second, my favorite movie, if I had to pick just one, is probably The Hunt for Red October, and you can judge me on that, and I won't be offended.
Casey:
But it's actually based on a Tom Clancy book, also, curiously enough, called The Hunt for October.
Casey:
And the book, as with almost every book that's ever been written that was eventually turned into a movie, is actually considerably better than the movie.
Casey:
So I would recommend The Hunt for October if you're into political thrillers based in the early to mid-1980s when we still hated Russia and Russia still hated us.
Marco:
Awesome.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Well, thanks a lot to Audible for sponsoring the show.
Marco:
Remember, go to audiblepodcast.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot.
John:
You're not even going to ask me if I have a pick?
Marco:
Do you have a pick?
John:
Well, maybe we should save it for the next Audible sponsorship.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Save it.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Be that guy.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So moving along.
Marco:
Is there anything we should talk about with this Dropbox thing?
Casey:
Actually, I don't know if you're being sarcastic or not, but I thought there was.
Marco:
You know, I'm so tired of platforms.
Marco:
Really?
Marco:
I mean, do we really need another platform?
John:
Well, I mean, it's an existing platform, though.
John:
Well, as Steve Jobs would say, it's not a platform, it's a feature.
John:
But anyway, Dropbox exists and is popular.
John:
And the reason we're interested in their data store, or at least I'm interested in the data store, is because it's from Dropbox.
John:
People already have Dropbox accounts.
John:
Many people already pay for Dropbox accounts.
John:
many iOS applications already integrate with Dropbox using an existing API for file storage.
John:
So that's an advantage that many, many other things that are supposedly going to store your crap do not have.
John:
Even Google, mighty Google, come up with an API, but it's like, well, all right.
John:
And how many applications are already integrated with Google data storage?
John:
It's a bigger hurdle to overcome with Dropbox.
John:
You're already there.
John:
Your apps are already talking to it.
John:
This is basically the equivalent of...
John:
Instead of just documents in the cloud, iCloud storage, it's like their equivalents, kind of, sort of, not really, of Core Data Sync, where you're... I hope not.
John:
Well, you know what I mean.
John:
You're not just storing files.
John:
You're storing something that's not just a linear stream of bytes in a single named entity, right?
John:
That's basically where the similarity ends, because Core Data is this whole other sort of persistent object store thing.
John:
And this is much simpler.
John:
This is...
John:
you know, basically schemeless fields with in basically tables.
John:
So you have table and has records, the records have an ID, they have name value pairs in them, and you can do one small level of nesting underneath that.
John:
And that's it.
John:
I look at these things, because I think it's interesting to see how what kind of API are they going to offer?
John:
Like,
John:
They're definitely not going the core data route where they say, just use your objects in memory and we'll magically synchronize them with the persistence across all these applications.
John:
And you can just, the rest of your application just behaves as if it's using objects in memory and we make everything work.
John:
It's not quite doing.
John:
You can just, you know, sort of speak to a database over a wire and we'll do updates where it's like a server resident database.
John:
It's kind of in between.
John:
They want you to be able to
John:
Store records in this thing and get notified when there are changes to these records, but they don't want you to have to implement your own conflict resolution.
John:
This is where the rubber meets the road.
John:
It's like, what if I do two different things on two different devices?
John:
They're both offline.
John:
They come back online and synchronize the changes.
John:
What do I do to sort these things out?
John:
And looking at their documentation briefly, it seems like your choices are minimal.
John:
All the conflict resolution seems to be automatic.
John:
And your choices are like biggest value wins, smallest value wins, sum of value wins.
John:
And that's about it.
John:
And it's like, well, that doesn't help me if I'm trying to synchronize an address book.
John:
None of those policies seem like they would be helpful.
John:
local wins versus remote wins.
John:
Like there didn't even seem to be any date stamping type things in there where you could tell which one happened at a different time and synchronize based on that and resolve conflicts based on that.
John:
So I'm not sure what the target audience for this thing is, but like any kind of service, the real proof is going to be, is it reliable?
John:
Is it fast?
John:
And is it easy to program for in a way that doesn't block my application when, when, uh, you know, the trainers don't come in.
John:
And in that respect, it looks like it has, uh,
John:
Some advantages over iCloud core data the way it existed in that you don't need to be online.
John:
Your changes can take effect locally and remote changes can come in whenever they want.
John:
So in theory, you shouldn't be blocking as long as you can write to your local disk and as long as you can read from your local disk.
John:
So that's good.
Casey:
I also looked at the API and the documentation, and there were a couple of things that piqued my interest.
Casey:
Firstly, and this is outside of the documentation, quite obviously Dropbox is cross-platform.
Casey:
And let's suppose for the sake of argument that even core data in iCloud worked flawlessly, which is a pretty funny thought just to begin with.
Casey:
Well, it's still Apple-centric.
Casey:
And even though I speak for all three of us in saying we're all in on Apple platforms, not everyone is like that.
Casey:
We talked about that earlier in this very episode.
Casey:
And so Dropbox is cross-platform, which is really nice.
Casey:
So if I was psychotic enough to want to write not only an iOS app but also an Android app, I could presumably use this Dropbox datastore API in order to get data between them.
Casey:
Additionally, like you mentioned, John, it's not straight SQL.
Casey:
And while core data you'll get smacked on the wrist if you call it database, it isn't a database.
Casey:
Just like you said, it's an object persistence or object graph persistence mechanism.
Casey:
Generally speaking, behind the scenes, it's SQLite or SQLite or whatever crap it's supposed to be pronounced as.
Casey:
Whereas this, like you said, John, is a little more flexible than that, which is nice.
Casey:
Obviously, there's caveats to that, and that could be bad.
Casey:
But generally speaking, it's nice.
Casey:
But the other thing that was really interesting is they have a datastore web inspector.
Casey:
And I glanced at it very, very quickly.
Casey:
And it appears that even regular people, not even necessarily developers, can go in and inspect the data stores associated with their Dropbox account.
Casey:
And I think that's both very good and arguably maybe not so good because it allows developers to go in and see exactly what tables and records and things are stored in their own Dropbox.
Casey:
But that also gives some amount of visibility for a user.
Casey:
Now, it is read-only through this web interface, but it's still more visibility than you may want.
Casey:
Now, to argue with myself briefly, maybe that's a good thing, after all, in the sense that if somebody's storing a bunch of data that I don't want them to store, I could go see that and then remove that app.
Casey:
But, I don't know, it just freaks me out for the idea of users seeing exactly how I'm persisting data.
John:
Well, that's good because then you could shame people who store plain text passwords and stuff.
John:
Regular users can go and see it and so they can see, hey, you're storing my whole address book or hey, there's my plain text password for whatever service.
John:
It's interesting.
John:
The reason I put that link in the show notes is that
John:
It's interesting that they launch with that.
John:
Like, of course, of course, it's going to be a web interface to see what's on the server side.
John:
How can you develop an application if you don't have visibility into what we're doing in the data store?
John:
And their data store is so much simpler.
John:
Like, it is just very simple and primitive compared to the amazing thing that Core Data is supposed to be doing for you.
John:
Like, it's up to you to figure it out.
John:
No schema, name value pairs, lists, you know, you're going to get a notification that something changed, we'll give you a list of record ideas, you figure it out, I don't know, whatever.
John:
Like, it's really primitive.
John:
And primitive things are kind of annoying to, you know, you have to write all your own logic to deal with these, you know,
John:
the updates and stuff, but it's easy for developers to understand and time and again, that's proved to be much more important than the amazing framework, especially if it doesn't work right, the amazing framework does awesome things to you versus the simple one that doesn't do as much for you.
John:
But what it does do is easily understandable by any developer.
John:
And that gives even like a novice or mediocre developer a fighting chance of using your API to do useful work, because maybe they use it inefficiently, and maybe they have to write a ton of code themselves.
John:
But
John:
conceptually the way it works is like, you know, it's simple enough that they can wrap their head around it.
John:
So they never get themselves into a situation where they have no idea what's going on.
John:
They just perhaps make an efficient code.
John:
So this, you know, again, we'll have to look at their performance and how reliable their services and stuff like that.
John:
But I think they have a big leg up on everyone else simply because we already all have Dropbox accounts.
John:
And I think like the first five megabytes per application that you use does not count towards your Dropbox quota.
John:
So if you just want to use this to store like preferences or,
John:
Small amounts of state information or, you know, five megabytes is actually a lot, you know, as long as you're using it as your main data storage.
John:
That doesn't count towards your Dropbox quota.
John:
And of course, once you go over that, then you just start using the person's Dropbox quota, which is great for Dropbox, because then eventually if you're a free user, you hit your limit because you use some application and you end up being a paid customer.
John:
And it's all a virtuous cycle.
John:
So I'm cautiously optimistic about this.
Casey:
Now, what are the implications for Apple?
Casey:
Because one could argue that this is core data iCloud, but not done by Apple and hopefully actually functional.
Casey:
So does this light a fire under Apple's keister and make them make core data and iCloud actually work, or do you think they don't care?
Marco:
Oh, they don't care.
Marco:
I mean, there are people there who do care, obviously.
Marco:
The people who are on that team obviously do care quite a bit and are working their butts off, I assume.
Marco:
However, you can simply look at what Apple does.
Marco:
Look at the results.
Marco:
You can tell that iCloud is really seen as an accessory in the company.
Marco:
And especially...
Marco:
the iCloud developer APIs, the sync APIs and stuff that Apple themselves barely uses for their own apps.
Marco:
You can look at that stuff and you can very much see this is not a very high priority for the company.
Marco:
Again, I'm sure it's a very high priority for people working on it, but you can tell that it's not getting the resources it needs, it's not getting the priority it needs, because look at the last year, not much has really changed.
John:
This was in the WWC keynote, though.
John:
Didn't they have a section of the keynote that we can actually talk about where they said what their policy about iCloud core data was going forward that was not in the keynote?
John:
Maybe it was in the State of the Union.
John:
I don't remember.
Marco:
Well, they mentioned it in the State of the Union, which we can't talk about.
Marco:
But I believe it's safe to say that they basically said, like, give us another shot in as many words.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I just don't see it.
Marco:
We see this with almost all of Apple's online services, especially the ones that Apple themselves doesn't really rely on very much.
Marco:
We see that they just don't really put that much effort into them.
John:
Well, even ones that are ostensibly flagship features, like messages, that's Apple's application.
John:
It's an important Apple application.
John:
It obviously got attention because it was massively redesigned, yet it still doesn't perform its basic functions in a reliable manner.
John:
So even when Apple is totally using, not that I'm saying it uses iCloud Core Data, I don't know what it uses, but the point is it uses an online service that Apple implements, and it is a flagship application, and it still doesn't work.
John:
Right.
John:
So them using it is not a guarantee that their online services will work correctly, but it certainly helps.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But it just seems like Apple still has a lot of that tunnel vision that they are infamous for where something gets a whole lot of attention, but then everything outside of the immediately obvious first interesting thing that they're working on gets pretty neglected for a while.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's still a sign of Apple being a smaller company than their success and their money and their sales and their presence would indicate.
Marco:
They still are a very small company with very small teams relative to all the stuff they do.
Marco:
And so how they prioritize their resources –
Marco:
it still is very much a, uh, a, a, a zero sum game with them.
Marco:
Like they, they don't just add a brand new team to address brand new things they're doing.
Marco:
They like move people around and deprioritize other things to prioritize certain things.
Marco:
Like they, they don't just like buy more people out of nowhere and, and they have this giant department all of a sudden.
Marco:
And, uh,
Marco:
We've talked in the past about how Google is so good at just applying way more brute force engineering to problems than Apple usually does, especially in the services area.
Marco:
I just don't see any evidence of Apple changing that anytime soon.
Marco:
So anything like this that is basically a major online service that's really tricky to get right and has lots of substantial design tricks, technical challenges, and service challenges and big data challenges, I don't see Apple ever doing well.
John:
Well, see, Apple's making their life harder here by... Not Google.
John:
Dropbox has chosen to make a simpler API.
John:
Like, it does less stuff for you.
John:
It is just simpler, right?
John:
Much simpler than iCloud Cordana.
John:
Far, far simpler, right?
John:
So that gives them a fighting chance of...
John:
getting it to work correctly, having a small API that developers can pick up.
John:
And that's like a philosophical difference between the team that's responsible for doing these kind of services for Apple philosophically.
John:
I mean, as part of it's philosophical and part of it's like, look, they already had core data.
John:
People already have core data applications.
John:
What are you going to say to those people?
John:
Hey, we want your applications to work with iCloud.
John:
But Core Data doesn't work with iCloud.
John:
So rewrite your thing to use something more like the Dropbox Sync API.
John:
Like that would have been a tough sell back when, you know, iCloud Core Data was introduced, which is why everyone's so excited.
John:
Oh, but I have a Core Data application.
John:
And they tell me, well, we're going to iCloud.
John:
Yeah, I don't have to rewrite it because...
John:
think if you told them okay well you just have to throw out core data and use this new api that is totally unlike core data much simpler you have to do a lot more coding to get it to work uh but trust us that's that's how online will work and that's like kind of like online companies no your apis have to be small simple and semantically you know easy to understand uh
John:
because that's that's the way to do it you if you try to make something big and complicated your api is going to be big and complicated on the client side and the server is going to be really hard to implement in an efficient manner and scale and all those other things so don't do that but apple is so far sticking to their guns and saying where you know they do have key value store and like they could enhance key value store over the course of a year to basically make it match this dropbox api and remove all their storage limits because key value store is really just for tiny data uh
John:
And they would have the equivalent of this.
John:
And by all accounts, KeyValueStore doesn't work better because it's simpler.
John:
It has to do less stuff, right?
John:
But they're saying, no, we want to make core data work magically over the internet.
John:
And it's a big, complicated API with lots of corner cases, both on the client and the server.
John:
And if anything goes wrong, bad things happen, and we need more debugging tools, and it's a really hard problem.
John:
And the size of the team that's doing the Dropbox Data API is probably like...
John:
one tenth of the people who are trying to do the core data thing and yet they'll probably be more successful because they chose to do something simpler
Casey:
Now, the only thing that I wonder, and I didn't see specifically noted in the API documentation, is what about sharing?
Casey:
So I keep coming back to my example of sharing a grocery list with my wife, and it seems like this Dropbox data store API would be perfect for it, except that I didn't see any mention of sharing, but maybe I missed it.
Casey:
John, did you happen to notice anything?
John:
I don't think it's any share.
John:
I think it's kind of like it's just a data store for your application.
John:
Right.
John:
It's shared from that user on multiple devices, but not like there's no like server.
Marco:
Well, there is one important part, though.
Marco:
There is a JavaScript API as well.
Marco:
And I haven't verified this yet, but I would assume that you could use that maybe from Node or the other server-side JavaScript interpreters.
Marco:
So you could probably run this server-side with their JavaScript API.
John:
Well, yeah, but then you still need to authenticate as you to get access to your data store.
John:
So if I authenticate as me, I'm not going to see any Casey's data stores.
John:
I guess you could copy it onto some other service.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
If you ran your own web service that used this, I would imagine you could whip that up.
Marco:
You could just have a few pages that...
Marco:
that do that, you know, that bounce through authentication for you and you authenticate your own people, who's going to see what.
Marco:
Although if you're going to go through all that, you might as well just have your own sync service on your server.
John:
Yeah, I mean, that's what it boils down to.
John:
But since they have sharing for their file API, I mean, this is like their version one, right?
John:
So maybe the next version they add, you know, obviously they know about sharing.
John:
They have some means for you to take the same file and share it amongst many people and revoke sharing and all that other stuff.
John:
It seems like that would have to come for these data stores because they have it chunked out into like you have a data store, data store have tables, tables have records.
John:
They could do the sharing at probably the data store or table level and it wouldn't be crazy.
John:
But maybe not for version one, right?
Casey:
Yeah, I doubt it.
Casey:
But all in all, I give this two thumbs up.
Casey:
I think this is definitely, well, a tentative two thumbs up.
Casey:
I think this is definitely a good start.
Casey:
If it actually works, I think it's a very simple, yet at the same time, like you were saying, John, kind of robust way of syncing data.
Casey:
That's a very low cost of entry, both financially and in terms of effort.
Casey:
And so I think this is really cool.
Casey:
And although I'm not sure I disagree with you guys in that Apple won't care about this,
Casey:
It also makes me wonder, especially if adoption is really high.
Casey:
Marco said that, not me.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Well, but I hope and I wonder that if adoption of this Dropbox Datastore API is really high, if Apple will start to pay attention and really do something about iCloud and core data.
Casey:
I should also say that I know that there was a session or two about iCloud and core data at WWDC, but I've not yet watched them.
Casey:
So I don't know if that was just Apple groveling.
Casey:
I don't know if perhaps in iOS 7 there's going to be massive improvements.
Casey:
I truly honestly don't know.
Casey:
But those of you who do have a developer account should go check it out, and I should take my own advice on that issue.
John:
I've seen those sessions, and there is news to be had there.
Casey:
Interesting.
John:
One thing we didn't mention to tie it back to topics from last week's show is what if a newsreader decided to use Dropbox Datastore as its sync service?
John:
Obviously, you can't use it to get your feeds for you and give you your content, but just keeping track of which things you read and haven't read seems like a fairly ideal...
John:
You know, so you don't want to make someone sign up for your own service.
John:
You want them to use the account that they already have that they pay for.
John:
You don't have to run the servers.
John:
You just have to store some state information about last read state and what articles have marked red and favorited or whatever random metadata you want to keep.
John:
Like it's basically, you know, you make up the data story that you want.
John:
You still might need the service to fetch all your feeds and do all that other stuff.
John:
But this other part of it for synchronizing which things are read and even just having the applications themselves fetch the feeds.
John:
I know that's torturous, but in the old days, that's what things used to do.
John:
And hell, that's how I'm using that newswire now.
Casey:
uh it's possible this is this could be a piece of people's uh you know reading api well and even and even more than that what if you mix that with this new backgrounding stuff where it could be a nice combination i agree with what i think you're about to say marco in that i don't know if that's really sustainable but it's a very interesting approach
Marco:
My big thing with it is that if you're going to be having feed syncing and stuff like that, there's a lot of advantages to running your own service to do that.
Marco:
There's not only things you can do in the background when the app isn't running, but you can also...
Marco:
One of the biggest things with feeds in particular is parsing them and running into people's weird malformed feeds.
Marco:
If you can adjust your parsers on the server side immediately and have that apply to everything for everyone immediately instead of having to bundle them into an app update and ship the app update or have some kind of weird system where you have server side definitions of what the app will interpret and then you have to add new things it can do to accommodate some crazy new feed condition...
Marco:
There certainly are a lot of reasons with readers in particular to still have a service.
Marco:
Plus, now we have like 15,000 reader services.
John:
Well, that's what I was thinking of is that say you make a reader, right?
John:
And you want to let people pick from the umpteen other reader services that are going to do the feed parsing for you and stuff like that, right?
John:
But you also want to add value in your application and you also want – say you have awesome ideas for features –
John:
But three out of the four feed things that you support for your, you know, aggregation and everything don't support those features.
John:
You need some layer on top of that to add your own, you know, enhancements.
John:
So like maybe one of them, you know, three out of the four don't support like favoriting or something like that.
John:
Well, you can store information about your favorites.
John:
Where do you want to run a whole service?
John:
Yeah, you could.
John:
But if it's simple enough, you could just use Dropbox as your back end.
John:
You know, Dropbox and iCloud are two possible options for like key value storage or whatever, depending on how much data you have.
John:
to enhance the backend features because otherwise you're forced to do the lowest common denominator of all your services.
John:
So if one of them doesn't support like folders or something, you're like, well, I guess I can't support folders because where would I keep tracking my folders?
John:
Well, I keep tracking them locally, but then it doesn't synchronize or it just synchronizes on iOS.
John:
If I use iCloud, but if I want to have a web version, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Well, there's the Dropbox data store.
John:
That's what I'm thinking like as an, as an enhancement layer so that your application can be better than the umpteen services that it supports.
Marco:
Maybe.
Marco:
But then it also has the problem – I wrote about this with NetNewsWire in particular.
Marco:
There's the problem then of like you only get that benefit if you use that application on all your devices that you browse feeds from.
Marco:
And so if you only get – like if NetNewsWire adds features that only work in NetNewsWire, then you have to use NetNewsWire on Mac and iPhone and iPad if you read feeds on all those places to get those benefits.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But if you use Feedbin as your backend, then you can use any iOS reader that supports Feedbin.
John:
And yeah, you won't have those fancy features, but maybe you like a different reader better on the other platforms.
John:
And presumably you like it better, you know, for whatever reasons, but you're not tied.
John:
You're not like, you know, we're saying in that news article, you're not actually tied to use the same reader everywhere because...
John:
The basics, the lowest common denominator syncs everywhere because everything uses Feedly or Feedbin or whatever your third-party services think the basics are.
John:
But on particular platforms, you have enhancements.
John:
And if they do a good enough job with their clients, maybe you'll want to use those enhancements on other platforms.
John:
Basically...
John:
You're saying, okay, if I want to use different readers in different platforms, that means that either the reader isn't available for all the platforms I want, or maybe I have different feature desires from one platform to the other.
John:
But if you have different feature desires, then you don't care that those enhancements that you use on your Mac don't work elsewhere.
John:
But if you do care about these awesome features in the Mac client, what you'll want to use is the iOS version of that same client.
John:
So, you know, nothing is going to give you...
John:
you know, everything you want, which is don't give me lowest common denominator features.
John:
Give me my choice of readers and every single platform and synchronize everything between them.
John:
Like that's never going to happen because it's just not, it's like, it's, it's not a solvable problem.
John:
So you have to pick and choose.
John:
And I think this, this type of solution where you use a common backend for lowest common denominator functionality, and then individual applications are free to enhance in the front end using some other service.
John:
That's, that's pretty close to, to ideal, you know,
Marco:
Yeah, I guess.
Marco:
It causes weird issues in other ways, though.
Marco:
For instance, let's say BlackPixel ships NetNewsWire, and it uses Feedbin or FeedWrangler or any of these other services, or it can use them, and then it does what you're saying, where it uses some other backend, whether it's their own or Dropbox or whatever, to add bigger things to it.
Marco:
And then, let's say Feedbin and Feedwrangler add to their own services that capability, and then other clients add it.
Marco:
Does NetNewsWire then adopt that?
Marco:
Because then they're removing a competitive advantage they have over other feed readers by doing that.
Marco:
It'll cause weird situations like that if people really do this.
John:
Once we get real numbers, though, they'll be like, look, okay, I added support for these five backends, but in reality, 90% of my users use these two backends.
John:
So right away, I can eliminate those other backends from having to support them because it's kind of a pain to support lots of different backends.
John:
And of the two remaining features, actually, some of the stuff I was implementing myself is available in both of them.
John:
I think all developers would be happy to say, oh, great.
John:
Well, the two remaining ones that I support have this feature so I can shift it off onto them.
John:
But there's always that tension between how much of the value of my application is reliant on the value of a third-party service that I don't control.
John:
And it's great that you can have different clients in the same third party service, but you are just, you know, in some respects at the, at the mercy of that third party service.
John:
Like if they take away a feature that you were relying on, so it's good to have some place to, you know, either if they take away a feature, you can shift it to your backend.
John:
And if they add a feature, you can take it out of your backend.
John:
If it is now part of the new lowest common denominator that you decided to support, this is just an uncomfortable period now because people are just supporting as much as they possibly can.
John:
And they don't know how things are going to shake out, but I have to think there's going to be,
John:
Instead of seven of them, there's going to be like two or three popular ones left standing after a year, right?
Marco:
Well, I think we're actually already seeing that shakeout happening now.
Marco:
I mean, I published my numbers earlier today from what I could get.
Marco:
It seems like Feedly is by far the most popular alternative, mostly because it's free.
Marco:
And I believe it's one of the only ones that's free.
Marco:
News Blur is second.
Marco:
I think News Blur is free, but then has premium features that you can optionally buy.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And Newsblower's been around forever.
Marco:
It's been around way longer.
Marco:
I believe it was four years.
Marco:
It's been around way longer than these other services have.
Marco:
And then FeedWrangler and FeedBin are basically neck and neck.
Marco:
They're very similar in that they're both paid services run by very small teams.
Marco:
I believe they're both run by single people.
Marco:
Or FeedBin might have two.
Marco:
Anyway, very small teams.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
And then there's pretty much after that, there's a pretty big drop-off.
Marco:
Besides that handful, literally my list is Feedly, NewsBlur, NetNewsWire, clients not even using a service, FeedWrangler, and FeedBin.
Marco:
And then everything else is less than half of those.
Marco:
And it drops off pretty quickly.
Marco:
And so I think we're already seeing that very few services are showing up.
Marco:
Now, that being said, I don't yet have numbers for DigReader or AOL.
Marco:
And those are pretty – I've heard a lot of people mentioning those.
Marco:
I don't know how big they are, but we will see.
John:
There's probably room for new entrants in this next year as well.
Marco:
Oh, sure.
John:
Because these are all – People who haven't come – these are the guys who scrambled to get something ready because the new Google Reader was going away.
John:
And in general, they tend to be small people.
John:
But if there's some bigger, slower-moving entity entering this field, who knows when they could land something that does this.
John:
I mean Amazon could do it for all we know.
John:
They do crazy things all the time.
Marco:
And I would say Feedly is not likely – Feedly is likely to burn out, I think, because they have a very large staff.
Marco:
And they're free.
Marco:
And I assume they're venture funded as a result of all these things.
Marco:
And generally companies that are on that trajectory don't stay in it for the long haul.
Marco:
Chances are Feedly is going to either shut down or way more likely get bought by somebody and possibly dramatically change the service as a result a year or two later or even immediately.
John:
They have to monetize it at some point and any monetization is bound to be annoying.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So I'm guessing Feedly is going to explode quickly and then burn out.
Marco:
And then News Blur, Feed Wrangler, and Feed Bin, I think, are all in it for the long haul.
Marco:
And we'll see what happens with them.
Marco:
And I'm sure it's always going to be a free option from somebody that gets popular, whether that's Feedly or AOL or Dig.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know what it's going to be like in a year.
Marco:
But I bet the smaller services that are run by individuals and have sustainable business models will...
Casey:
will last a long time especially news blur has already been around for like four years so obviously like that's a stable product right so we'll see i was pleased to see though that that your subscriber numbers didn't plummet by virtue of google reader going away and and i think we all kind of figured that would be the case especially for for a site like marco.org i didn't figure well i i
Casey:
I think that there was hope at the very least.
Casey:
And for Marco.org, which caters to nerds, I think you perhaps are seeing a kind of outside of the normal case situation wherein you'll get a lot of subscribers moving to other platforms because we're all nerds.
Casey:
I'm curious to hear for something more mainstream, say like a CNN or something like that, how things change.
Casey:
Because that's not catering to nerds.
Casey:
That's catering to normal humans who may or may not care about this.
John:
But only nerds use RSS.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
Well, I mean, that's not really true.
Casey:
Like my wife uses RSS in a very odd and in a very different way.
John:
She's nerdy by a transitive property of nerdiness.
Casey:
She is.
Casey:
But I mean, I know regular people that use it.
Casey:
But to your point, it's very, very frequently a nerd that even has any idea what RSS is.
Casey:
And it's not very regular to hear a regular person talk about it.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, these numbers sure are big.
Marco:
I feel like RSS is one of those things that I'm sure it's much more talked about and maybe more actively used by nerds.
Marco:
And certainly, of course, there's a whole class of applications that are powered by RSS that use it in some other way, like Flipboard.
Marco:
And those tend to do way better than anything that just uses RSS kind of raw the way we use it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
even if it's just nerds, there's a lot of nerds.
Marco:
I learned this with my apps.
Marco:
With the magazine, I tried to be less nerdy.
Marco:
I tried to broaden past nerds.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Not only was it harder than I expected, but I think that was actually a fatal mistake.
Marco:
I think it would have done a lot better if I would have just really nailed the nerd market.
Marco:
Nerds are a massive market.
Marco:
And sure, we are the worst customers in the world.
Marco:
because we're picky and we're needy and we are entitled and we're generally smart and we think we're really smart.
Marco:
And so we will tell you how stupid you are for your app doing a certain thing or not having a certain thing or breaking in a certain way.
Marco:
I mean, nerds are really a terrible market to serve.
Marco:
However, if you are already in it by being a nerd and you are familiar with it and you can appease the nerd market in some small way,
Marco:
There sure are a lot of them.
Marco:
And I've always been served very well by serving the nerd market.
Marco:
And whenever I've tried to break out of it, that's when I've had trouble.
Marco:
And I've done it.
Marco:
Instapaper was not used by all nerds.
Marco:
I mean, there were a lot, as my support email would show, there were a lot of regular non-nerd type people using Instapaper.
Marco:
And there probably still are.
Marco:
Actually, I know there still are.
Marco:
But you certainly can't go wrong.
Marco:
If you think something will only appeal to nerds, there's still a lot of those.
Marco:
And you're probably wrong.
Marco:
One thing that nerds do, which is kind of condescending, and I do it too, I've been guilty of this as well, is that we underestimate regular people's skills or desires or abilities.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Certainly, there's reasons to sometimes do that.
Marco:
When you're designing an interface or when you're writing the text of a dialogue box, you want to write it so that it will work no matter how smart or not smart or engaged or not engaged the user is.
Marco:
And you want to really be inclusive there and assume nothing about the user's skills.
Marco:
But outside of contexts like that,
Marco:
we've got to give people credit.
Marco:
And a lot of times, I'm very pleasantly surprised by what non-nerds are able to do, especially with some of the crazy crap that nerds build for themselves, and we think no one else is going to use it, and then people do use it, and they figure it out.
Marco:
I'm always very surprised by that.
Marco:
And so I think we should be careful to not say, oh, this is just for nerds, because a lot of times it isn't.
John:
Go ahead, John.
John:
I was going to say, on RSS, it's not so much that there's anything inherently about RSS or what it does that is nerd-focused, but I think as Marco probably pointed out in one of his things that he wrote about, like...
John:
It's because it's an open standard not owned and controlled by a single company that, like, that these other companies flee from it because Google wants to use Google+, and Facebook wants to use Facebook.
John:
And, like, all these companies are like, all right, so the web is great, and RSS is great, and all these protocols that no one owns is great, but...
John:
What if we could do something similar, but in a proprietary manner on servers that we control that locks people into our platform and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
They all just want to do all these same things.
John:
And so you've seen just everything flee from RSS.
John:
And it's not because people don't want the services provided by the technology, nor do they even need to know what RSS exists.
John:
If all companies all embrace this the same way they've essentially been forced to embrace web browsers, and every single device you owned came with a first-party, built-by-the-vendor, essential, gotta-be-awesome newsreading application,
John:
people would love it.
John:
People would love to use it.
John:
It's not like they don't like to read news, but it's because we didn't get past that critical threshold like we did with the web.
John:
We're like, look, if you buy devices, better have a web browser and it better be a good web browser.
John:
And I don't care that you don't control the web because customers demand it.
John:
We never got there with RSS.
John:
We seemed like we were close when Apple was adding RSS to all of its things.
John:
But if we had gotten there, people would just spend all day in newsreaders because it's a great way to consume content on the web.
John:
It's not that the news reading itself is nerdy.
John:
It's that the protocol didn't break through that barrier.
John:
And now we're kind of, you know, they successfully marginalized it and are trying to bring us all to their stupid proprietary platforms to do all the similar things.
Casey:
And the thing I was going to say, also going back a step, is that the interesting thing about nerds is that once you hit about age 25 or so, more often than not, nerds are willing to spend some money.
Casey:
And they're willing to spend some money on things that make them happy.
Casey:
Or at least that's the nerds that I interact with, which, granted, are all typically Apple users and Apple.
Casey:
You know, stereotypes are true for a reason or stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.
Casey:
And most of my friends and family members have come to realize that, you know, a three, four or five dollar app is the cost of one of Marco's beloved Starbucks coffees.
Casey:
And so and they last a lot longer.
Casey:
So Marco catering to nerds is is a lucrative or often a lucrative thing because nerds are willing to spend some money on stuff that makes them happy.
Casey:
And that's a good thing.
John:
They're likely to be gainfully employed as well, because presumably their nerdiness translates into some kind of marketable skill.
Casey:
Right, exactly.
Casey:
And Sam the Geek in the chat is offended that I said it's only the over 25 nerds, but that's just a ballpark.
Casey:
Some of the younger nerds can also pay for things too.
John:
The younger nerds jailbreak and pirate everything.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
That's what I thought.
John:
That is very true.
Casey:
And on that bombshell.
Marco:
Do you want to wrap it up?
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, Audible and Transporter.
Marco:
And I'll see you guys next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause 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:
Oh, 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.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C, USA Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental, they didn't mean to.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Check.
Casey:
Podcast.
Casey:
So long.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
All right, so what are we doing about titles?
Marco:
Oh, I haven't even looked yet.
Marco:
I was saving it.
Marco:
It's like podcast dessert.
John:
I didn't get a chance to add my two cents on the nailing the nerd market.
John:
The other big factor, which I think you probably talked about at some point and back to work.
John:
Building analysts that...
John:
the reason you're going to have an easier time being successful in the nerd market is because it's so much easier to make an application used by people who are like you, right?
John:
Oh, definitely.
John:
So, you know, because you are a nerd and because, you know, presumably software developers have nerdy tendencies, yes, it's much easier, you know, to hit the nerd market with nerd applications written by a nerd who understands what nerds like and is a one-man shop and you know what I mean?
John:
So that's also a big factor in there.
Marco:
Oh, absolutely.
Marco:
But, you know, a lot of times too, like, you know, nerds,
Marco:
Nerds think of solutions to problems that most people don't even think they have, but a lot of times they do have that problem, and they appreciate the solution once they see it.
Casey:
Well, that's engineering.
Casey:
It's solving a problem you didn't know you had in a way that you don't understand.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so I do think there's some value.
Marco:
And that's one of the reasons why a lot of nerd stuff does jump the gap into regular people.
Marco:
Because, you know, I mean, some of the stuff, like, you know, if you're making some kind of web sync service to synchronize your Twitter posts onto the newest social network.
Marco:
So, you know, you cross post between Twitter and app.net.
Marco:
That is a problem that normal people don't have and are unlikely to ever have.
Marco:
And so that is going to be limited really only to nerds.
Marco:
Look at something like If This Then That, IFTTT.
Marco:
Great site, great idea.
Marco:
Almost definitely going to stay with nerds.
Marco:
Because it solves a whole class of problems and desires that mostly only nerds have.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But things like Twitter itself, that was something that started out pretty nerdy.
Marco:
But it solved a problem that a lot of people had.
Marco:
Just it first was only known about by nerds.
Marco:
And that's the kind of thing that can break out.
John:
That's another thing you can do with that Dropbox API.
John:
Synchronize my direct message red state so I don't have to use the Twitter official client, which now I added that feature.
John:
But only, as my understanding, for the official Twitter client, which I don't want to use.
Marco:
Yeah, if you want to understand, they didn't actually make an API for it.
Marco:
They used to add it themselves.
John:
Yeah, they just added it to that.
John:
Right.
John:
So then it's like, well, fine.
John:
You know, if I use Twitterific on both platforms, if they both talk to the Dropbox thing, like they could also use iCloud key value storage, but that's not cross-platform.
John:
It has size limitations.
John:
So just, you know, use this.
John:
It's really easy to do with the Dropbox data storage.
John:
You're just, you know, you have an identifier for the message.
John:
You just store a big list of them.
John:
If it's fast and efficient, you know, go to town.
Casey:
So with regard to titles, I don't think I care, but I would recommend something that relates to Dropbox and not something that relates to iWatch.
Casey:
So I don't know what that would be, but whatever.
Marco:
I'm pretty bored of iWatch already, even though we don't know about it yet.
Marco:
Even if it's real or anything about it.
Marco:
I'm bored of everyone, including us, speculating about it just because we have nothing to work on.
Marco:
And it could be something really cool, but that's really unlikely.
Marco:
And the most likely thing it's going to be is really boring.
Marco:
I'm so burnt out from people talking about it.
Marco:
And again, that includes us and me even.
Marco:
I say this with full self-realization that we just talked about it for like 25 minutes earlier.
Marco:
But it's just so – I don't know.
Marco:
We have nothing to work on.
John:
You'll be reinvigorated when it's not a watch but it's actually a necklace or perhaps an earring.
John:
Then we'll have something to talk about.
Casey:
I cannot wait to hear the story of Marco getting his ear pierced in order to wear the eye earring.
John:
The apple tongue stud.
Casey:
Oh, God, that'd be terrible.
John:
Think of the sensors they could get in there.
Casey:
Holy crap.
Casey:
I'm uncomfortable.
Casey:
oh man hey uh so in random other news since marco came and marco and his family came to visit this weekend i've seen his new app and it is glorious yeah new one or the like practice new one the practice new the practice new one yeah to be honest i'm just trolling the chat room right now because they were begging for information about it i'm not gonna give them any well you know underscore david smith saw it too
Marco:
Are you releasing it or what?
Marco:
It's awaiting approval.
Marco:
It is officially shipped to Apple, but it's awaiting approval.
Marco:
It's been about eight days, so it's not totally unreasonable.
Marco:
I can tell from my Tapstream analytics.
Marco:
I'm trying Tapstream for the first time here.
Marco:
Previous sponsor of my site, Disclosure.
Marco:
I can tell from their analytics that there have not been any new launches of the app since I submitted it.
Marco:
So as far as I can tell...
Marco:
It's not like hitting some wall that somebody has to ask someone about.
Marco:
It's just waiting in the queue.
Marco:
So we will see.
Marco:
That's interesting.
John:
You should write a Mac app because I keep hearing people getting their Mac apps through in like one day.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
It's crazy.
Marco:
Well, I mean, but that's such a roller coaster.
Marco:
Like last year, it was like 45 days or something.
Marco:
It was ridiculous.
Marco:
So yeah, at least iOS is fairly consistent.
Marco:
iOS is pretty much always six to eight days.
Marco:
It's very rarely outside of those bounds.
Marco:
And when it is, not by much.
Marco:
So we will see.
Marco:
But yeah, I'm just waiting for that to be approved.
Marco:
And then I actually just today restarted work on the other big app that will be out this fall, I hope.
Marco:
It's funny.
Marco:
I've decided that I'm going to require iOS 7 for the new one, but...
Marco:
The question is, when do you release that?
Marco:
Obviously, it's great to get it out there early, but the earlier you get it out there, the fewer people can actually use it.
Marco:
And the more you're competing for press attention and Apple features, if you're trying to get out there the week of iOS 7's launch.
John:
I think you want to be out on launch.
John:
You definitely want to be out on launch.
John:
I know all the downsides, but the downsides all have nothing to do with the number of sales you're getting.
John:
I think...
John:
As soon as people get iOS 7 device, they're going to want to put applications on it that show off iOS 7 and that are sort of iOS 7 savvy, to use the old System 7 term.
John:
And you want yours to be one of those things.
John:
Because I think that's a big foot in the door.
John:
If you think about all the people who were like that on day one on the iPad or day one on the iPhone app store, I think that's a huge advantage.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
That might work.
Marco:
Yeah, I'll have to see.
John:
I mean, it's a nightmare scramble to do that.
John:
Right.
John:
And you end up shipping something that is not in the state and perhaps that you would want to ship it.
John:
But I still think like, I mean, you're going to work on the application.
John:
It's going to improve even if that first version is new.
John:
People are just going to go through like, I just want to buy it.
John:
Like in the iPad launch, I've got a new iPad.
John:
Which applications are iPad savvy?
John:
Put them on here.
Marco:
I really do wonder also, though, how many people are going to hold off upgrading on 7 because it is so different.
Marco:
And certainly, there's going to be a lot of backlash when it launches from people who want things back the old way.
Marco:
And so I wonder, I don't think it's going to be a big delay for people, but I bet there will be something.
Marco:
I bet we'll hear it.
Marco:
Every time there's a new iPhone or iOS release, but especially a new iPhone release, every time there's some kind of stupid Consumer Reports scandal about some part of it that everyone doesn't like,
Marco:
And I think it's going to be iOS 7 this fall.
Marco:
I think that's going to be the big Apple scandal.
Marco:
It's like, oh my god, nobody likes iOS 7 and no one can figure out how to use it, even though it takes a minute to get used to.
John:
Yeah, but all the 5 million people who buy the iPhone 5S or whatever the hell in the holiday season, those people are going to have to be stuck with iOS 7, and they'll buy your application.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
We'll have to probably save this for next show, but I am curious to talk about Apple's fall lineup.
Marco:
Yeah, let's save that for next show.
John:
All right.
Marco:
Because it looks like there's a lot coming, and possibly all in the same month.
Marco:
If I were you, John, I would maybe get your review done for September.
John:
Yeah, no.
John:
I know all about it.
John:
I know all about it.
John:
I'm so angry.
John:
It's so slow going, so freaking slow.
John:
I just look at it, and I'm in the phase where I'm like, this is never going to be finished.
John:
It was literally never.
Casey:
You know, maybe if you gave up on all your other podcasts and actually worked on this review instead.
John:
It's not the podcast.
John:
It's the 9-to-5 job.
John:
It really takes time away.
Casey:
I'm just giving you a hard time.
Casey:
So to continue darting around between topics, Icevix, from a 16-year-old perspective, says, from a 16-year-old perspective, most kids seem to like it except for the UI change, the main change, and there are very few that don't like it.
Casey:
So what is there that one would like?
John:
that isn't the ui change because no normal 16 year old has any idea what the hell but 16 year olds don't write articles it's grumpy old men who write articles in the stupid magazines that are like right phone change and everything's all white i can't read the text because it's too thin and there'll be legitimate complaints mixed in with the fear of change mixed in with the blah blah blah but i don't know if the back i think hopefully we're getting through all the backlash now uh and by the time it ships they'll be like well we're used to it it's all right
Marco:
Do you want to pick a title?
Marco:
Oh, you know, one thing I do like, which John mentioned very quickly in passing, The Transitive Property of Nerdiness.
Marco:
Is that too long?
Marco:
I like it.
Casey:
I do like that as well.
John:
You should Google that to make sure I use the right word.
John:
I guess back to my tweet about Googling embarrassing questions.
John:
Much better to Google the answers than to not.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure that's correct.
John:
Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's correct, too, but this is exactly the type of thing.
John:
Yeah, I'm almost 100% certain it's correct, and yet the internet is sitting there saying, why don't you just ask me?
John:
I'll have the actual answer.
Ha ha!
John:
like why not why not double check that's why writing this freaking review takes forever because every single thing i write in there i'm like you know what let me check that you know what let me check have you ever you know let me check that you find out you're you're on a five minute diversion to check some fact that you were like 99.9 sure is correct but you have to prove it before you can go on with the sentence anyway have you ever been wrong about anything ever
John:
That's what kills me.
John:
All I see is the one fact that I didn't check that I got wrong.
John:
The name of this machine, the release date of this thing, or the price is off by a dollar because I didn't check it because I was just going by memory and it just kills me.
Marco:
Here's the problem, John.
Marco:
Here's the problem you have.
Marco:
That Retina MacBook Pro that showed up in Geekbench a few days ago was running Mavericks.
Marco:
Do you see why that's a problem?
Yeah.
John:
I know... When they say fall, I try to be ready by the first day of fall.
John:
I'm no dummy.
John:
I know how this thing goes.
John:
I don't assume it's going to be the middle or end of fall.
John:
I assume it's going to be on the first day of fall, and that's what I'm still shooting for.
Marco:
I'm thinking we have...
Marco:
Two big events.
Marco:
We have an iOS event and we have a Mac event.
Marco:
I'm thinking those are separate events.
Marco:
The iOS event happens later, more likely November, because iOS 7 needs a lot of time.
Marco:
iOS 7 is nowhere near done.
Marco:
However, I'm thinking that the Mac event might happen as early as September and that Mavericks comes out then along with the Mac Pro, new Retina MacBook Pros, and maybe an iMac refresh.
John:
I think they'll delay the Mac Pro because like, well, the retina screens aren't ready.
John:
So, you know, the Mac Pro will have more to say about that later in the year because back to the old, they can't resist.
John:
It's like, you know what?
John:
Screw those Mac Pro.
John:
We'll get out in the fall, December 19th.
John:
We'll, you know, because like they're holding the Mac Pro.
John:
We all hope they're holding it with some monitors too.
John:
So even if they're not, they'll just be like, you know what?
John:
Screw the Mac Pro.
John:
That one's going to wait.
John:
We've got to hire all those Americans to build it or something.
Marco:
Well, the Mac Pro right now, they can't release it now because Intel hasn't released those CPUs yet, presumably in volume.
Marco:
The official delivery date of those CPUs is September.
Marco:
And it's the same delivery date for many of the Haslet parts in volume, I believe.
Marco:
I'm not sure on that part, but obviously they're holding back the Retina MacBook Pro for some reason.
John:
Right there.
John:
The Mac Pro also has to wait for Mavericks.
John:
All these new Macs have to wait for Mavericks.
John:
They're not going to bother getting them to work correctly with Mountain Lion because there's no big rush in the Mac Pro.
John:
People have waited so long already.
John:
What's the big deal?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Same thing with the Retinas.
Marco:
But that also means we're probably not talking November here.
Marco:
We're probably talking September.
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
I'm planning on it.
John:
I'm trying to get it done.
Casey:
Well, October is after September last I checked.
John:
I know, but you never know because the wild card is maybe it's such a mad scramble for iOS 7, which is do or die, that they pull everybody off everything and it's like, everyone just get iOS 7 done and then go back to what you were doing and then Mavericks get delayed just due to sheer neglect.
John:
Because everyone was pulled off to work on iOS 7 because that is far from done and they have to get that done.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Well, honestly, I think they're just going to ship whatever the hell they have in mid-November or whatever it is.
Marco:
They're just going to ship it, period.
Marco:
Whatever they have at that point, that's what 7.0 is.
John:
You can do that with iOS 6 and 5 where they just cut off features, but they can't have a disaster where everyone gets their phones on Christmas morning and there's some fatal bug.
John:
They just can't have that.
John:
It's a problem.
John:
So they have to
John:
they have to ship what they have but they also have to make sure that what they have is stable like does not have any fatal flaws and that's really hard to do when you're making a mad scramble like well they're already almost to that point though like like between betas two i didn't use beta one much but between beta two and three um there's already a significant reduction in reboots and reduction in reboots is not
Marco:
Well, with three, I haven't seen one.
Marco:
With two, I would see about one a day.
Marco:
With three, I haven't seen any yet.
Marco:
I mean, I've only had it for a few days so far.
John:
It's not burning your battery.
John:
It's not failing to sync something.
John:
Like so many things, yeah.
Marco:
It's so much easier when you're doing it.
Marco:
Most of the bugs that remain in iOS 7 right now are just like minor UI problems.
Marco:
Like, oh, this label disappears, or the status bar appears rotated in the wrong way on the screen.
Marco:
It's minor UI quirks that, yeah, they suck, and they're definitely bugs, but if they ship with that, it wouldn't be the end of the world.
John:
Yeah, no data loss, no crashes, no phone reboots, and no failure to do some essential function like convey text messages or synchronize something or get mail or skipping mail messages.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
No, I mean, I have no doubts that they'll be able to get something out there that is stable and doesn't have major bugs like that by November.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I suspect that 7.0 is going to have still some weird little edge case UI bugs, just because there are so many new UIs, and so many of them are not quite baked yet.
Marco:
But the kernel is fine.
Marco:
I'm sure Springboard will be pretty much fine.
Marco:
All the really important stuff, the common stuff, the underlying stuff, that'll, I think, be fine by November, because it's already almost fine now.
Casey:
Well, and plus, I mean, everything I've read on Twitter says that Mavericks is good to go immediately.
Casey:
You know, they're ready.
Casey:
So even if there's a grant, well, which means, John, you're fine.
John:
I wouldn't say that.
John:
When I come back to my Mavericks laptop, it is after night.
John:
I put it to sleep.
John:
I put the Mac laptop to sleep, and then I go to bed and come back down in the morning, and the thing is usually awake, fans on, but totally hard hung.
John:
So maybe it's not ready yet.
Casey:
Fair enough.