My Stupid Thumb
John:
It's much easier when everything was monochrome.
Casey:
Those were the days, right, John?
John:
Those were the days.
John:
You kids these days in your multi-bit displays.
John:
Pixels could be on or they could be off.
John:
What more did you need?
Casey:
So I'm sick.
Casey:
You know, I should actually save that for right before follow-up, because if you don't leave in that I'm sick, then everyone's going to bitch at you about how the sound's all wrong for me.
John:
Marco would never edit something out of a podcast that causes a stream of feedback for an entire week, even though we discussed it on the show.
Marco:
Normally I try to remove things that we say kind of like, I wonder if it's this way that we find out two seconds later are wrong.
Marco:
Because if I don't do that, then we will get tons of email from people who pause at that point before we realize that we are wrong and write it and tell us that we were wrong.
Marco:
So normally I will edit out the first half of something like that just because it doesn't do anybody any good to hear us speculate being wrong that we're going to learn is wrong shortly after.
Casey:
but sometimes i get it wrong so with that in mind um before anyone writes in i am a little sick i actually feel fine but i get i don't know maybe my sinuses are all clocked up because i sound weird you sound like hell but i know i but i really do feel okay like i haven't been snotting that much i mean everything seems okay but i can feel it coming
Marco:
Can we hear more detail about your nasal situation?
Marco:
I would love to.
Casey:
I would love to.
Casey:
Actually, it's funny because I... How's your butt?
Casey:
Let's hear more.
Casey:
God, I wish I remembered that Scrubs song about... I think it all comes down to poo, something like that.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
That's live.
Casey:
But yeah, I listened to Dubai Friday, which I resisted listening to for a while for no particular reason.
Casey:
I guess just because I don't feel like I have a lot of availability in my...
Casey:
in my schedule for new podcasts.
Casey:
Don't do that.
Casey:
Well, and as it turns out, I'm glad I folded because Dubai Friday is excellent.
Casey:
And on Dubai Friday, they were talking about some sort of like sinus cleansing device that I think came from Walgreens.
John:
Don't do that either.
Casey:
It was a neti pot, right?
Casey:
Well, yeah, neti pot or something along those lines.
Casey:
I forget the details.
John:
Brain amoebas.
Casey:
Yeah, well, that's the thing.
Casey:
And so on the one side, I feel like
Casey:
I think my sinuses are clogged as hell, and one of these neti pot-like things would theoretically clear it.
Casey:
But that being said, I really do not want a brain amoeba, and so I will just pass and sound like a moron for the rest of the episode and not die from a brain amoeba, and I'll be okay with that.
Marco:
Now, in fairness for the Dubai Friday brain squirting device, that one did have a microfilter of some kind that purported to block the brain amoebas from entering your brain.
John:
And if there's anybody you want to trust with keeping microbes out of your body but through use of a paper-thin filter, it's CVS.
John:
It's a $14 thing at Walgreens.
John:
Walgreens, sorry, not CVS.
John:
Sorry.
John:
That's a whole different story.
Casey:
Yeah, if it's Walgreens, then you're okay.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
Casey:
So, yeah, so don't yell at Marco.
Casey:
His levels aren't wrong.
Casey:
My levels aren't wrong.
Casey:
I just sound weird.
Casey:
So, yeah, apologies for that.
Casey:
We should start with some follow up.
Casey:
We are aware that you can use Control Center to switch to AirPods on iOS devices.
Casey:
The whole of the Internet wrote in to tell us this.
Casey:
And this was very confusing for John and I because we spoke about this on the show and I didn't understand why nobody spent the time to figure that out.
Casey:
And as it turns out, we later discovered that this was one of those instances where Marco got a little aggressive with the edits, which, truth be told, happens extremely rarely.
Casey:
But every great once in a while, something slips through the cracks.
Casey:
And this was one of those instances where John and I discussed this, and it was in the midst of other things that should have been cut, and apparently the slicing and dicing was not quite surgical enough.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
We are aware that you can use Control Center to switch to AirPods on iOS devices.
Casey:
So thank you, the entirety of the Internet, for writing in.
John:
But more importantly, for the people who listen to the show, the vast, vast majority of people, that information was cut and they didn't get the benefit of knowing that.
John:
Yes, obviously, the people who wrote in to tell us that we can use Control Center.
John:
You know, like I was surprised by them writing in because I said, oh, like Marco said, sometimes people pause the show to send feedback and then they resume playing it.
John:
And there's some standard amount of feedback you get of someone saying something that you know will be addressed maybe 20 or 30 seconds later in the show.
John:
And that's fine.
John:
That happens all the time.
John:
I do it myself.
John:
Everybody does it right.
John:
I usually expect to see.
John:
one or two pieces of feedback after that saying oh haha i should have waited 20 seconds and you mentioned it but i didn't see any of those i was like this is weird large volume of people apparently pausing the podcast to get feedback but nobody's saying oh sorry i should have kept listening um
John:
So that was my clue that this was going on.
John:
But anyway, the important piece of information denied to all the other listeners who didn't know.
John:
Or didn't listen live.
John:
Yeah, that you can do this.
John:
If you have AirPods and multiple iOS devices, you don't have to go to settings and Bluetooth and switch it.
John:
You can do it in control center and it is more convenient.
John:
So try it.
Casey:
Yeah, and to be clear, just in case it wasn't obvious, there are two panes in Control Center, and it is the rightmost pane.
Casey:
There's a kind of a drop-down list-ish thing on the bottom where you can select your output device, and that's what you want.
John:
And actually, speaking of Control Center, one of the reasons that...
John:
It is not actually as convenient for me to use Control Center is because as of right now, I have Control Center disabled on my iPad every place except for Springboard.
John:
You know, there's that setting whether you want to be able to swipe up and get Control Center either just in Springboard or in all apps.
John:
I forget how it's phrased.
John:
But anyway, I had to disable Control Center.
John:
uh in during in applications on my ipad which is the main device i would be switching to because of stagehand which is an excellent game that you should try but it involves a lot of swiping rapidly upward from the bottom of your ipad and i really don't want control center to appear i don't even want the little tabby thing to appear because you know it makes you do it twice just to show that you really mean it that little tabby things appears and i'm instantly dead so uh that's a great game everyone should buy it and try it uh and you should disable control center first
Marco:
I love the style of that game.
Marco:
I love the music of that game.
Marco:
I love the idea of that game, but my brain just can't do it.
Marco:
I know there's some kind of learning curve, maybe, and I tried playing it for a good 15 minutes.
Marco:
I could not get my brain to do it right.
John:
It's not a learning curve.
John:
It's a two-state machine.
John:
There is, I don't get the game, and then you will cross a humongous gap somehow magically, and then all of a sudden you get the game.
John:
That was my experiences.
John:
I was in the beta for that game,
John:
I played it a lot during the beta, right?
John:
And my high score was like 1 or 200 for several weeks.
John:
And then as the beta went on, I got close to 400.
John:
And I was asking Nevin, like, what do normal people get for high scores?
John:
Like, I know it's just the beta testers, but like...
John:
Am I just terrible at this game or am I like average?
John:
And he was saying there's a lot of variability and so on and so forth.
John:
It's trying to make me feel better about my terrible high score.
John:
But once the game got closer to release, I think it was actually around the time of release, my brain figured it out.
John:
like figured out how to play the game and instantly went up into the thousands and, you know, and have him look back.
John:
So I wouldn't, you know, it's a fun game.
John:
It's a cute little trifle.
John:
You can play with it.
John:
But unfortunately, unlike Alto's Adventure, unfortunately slash fortunately,
John:
once you figure the game out it becomes surprisingly time consuming as you spend your days plunking away at this thing but there is there is a big leap so if you don't you know if you don't want to ever make that leap that's fine i still think it's worth the three bucks or whatever the game costs just to play with it because it is a really novel interesting idea very well executed
John:
But there is another game on the other side of it once you cross the hurdle, once your brain gets the game, and then you can, like me, spend most of your time being incredibly frustrated that you made some tiny minute mistake after playing for literally 20 minutes and just missed your high score.
Casey:
This sounds vaguely like the Smarter Every Day video with the backwards bike.
Casey:
Have you seen this?
Casey:
It's, you know, with where they had like a gear or something like that, such that when you turned the handlebars right, the bike went left.
Casey:
And if you watch the video, spoiler alert, basically, eventually you just flip this switch or your brain just flips the switch where it understands and then you can actually ride the bike.
Casey:
Also, real-time follow-up, this is an example of us saying something that we don't realize is wrong.
Casey:
People will have already paused the show and written in, and now I will correct it.
Casey:
For the three of you that actually use HomeKit, HomeKit is the rightmost pain on Control Center.
Casey:
It is not the audio stuff, but there's only three of you that use HomeKit, so I appreciate all three of you writing in.
Casey:
Marco will cut that out, don't worry.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm sure.
Casey:
Do you think they're also the Opera users?
Casey:
Ah, you know, that's an interesting point.
Casey:
Very well could be.
Casey:
Hmm.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
So write in if you know, actually, not really.
Casey:
There are long waits when you use the chat feature for most customer support tools.
Casey:
This is when you use the online web chat, because like me, you hate the telephone and don't want to spend any time on the telephone if you can avoid it.
Casey:
Tom W. writes in to point out, web chat works on the premise that one person speaks to a few people at once, many up to 10.
Casey:
And perhaps that's why the latency is so atrociously bad when you're having these online chat experiences.
John:
Yeah, a lot of people wrote in with that feedback, and that makes perfect sense, and it should have occurred to me but didn't.
John:
I was using it because the phone lines were closed, but it just falls out of like, okay, so the phone lines are closed.
John:
Why is the text chat open?
John:
Because in text chat, you can get a 10 to 1 multiplier on your people.
John:
Yeah.
John:
that's why i gotta wait 10 minutes for reply because someone is replying to 10 other people and that's actually kind of an amazing slash terrible job because who wants to have you ever tried to conduct 10 simultaneous text conversations that are productive in any way with anybody you can't even joke around with with three friends at once i feel like i'm frazzled doing that it's like all right i mean you can have i can have multiple things going
John:
with a not in a non-timer critical nature like just you know whatever like someone says something funny and then you say something funny backward like that's fine and multiple slack channels all that stuff but 10 customer service conversations where the person on the other end is potentially angry and wants to just complete a transaction now i feel really bad for these people
Marco:
I'm guessing that there's software assistants here that they're probably using special tools that have a checklist script that they're going through with each person.
Marco:
I'm sure there's a script or a checklist that each one can probably keep a state of, here's what I've done with this customer so far.
Marco:
There's probably some kind of special software design to help them out here.
John:
I mean, this is a perfect application for everyone's favorite 80s AI technology, expert systems, where you can't make a general purpose AI because it's really hard.
John:
But what you can do is make a text-only chat thing that knows how to handle customer service, you know, the top five customer service concerns and punts to a user if it can't figure it out.
John:
And those can work fine, too.
John:
And I think I would probably be mostly okay with those if they just, you know...
John:
I would type in something and it would repeat back to me its understanding of the thing, asking for confirmation.
John:
And that can get frustrating if you go around in circles.
John:
But if it just punts you to a person, I can imagine it would probably be good for, you know, covering at least half of the cases of I have a product.
John:
There's a problem.
John:
I want to return.
John:
And it would ask me for the order number and give me the RMA.
John:
And but like machine can do that.
John:
Not that I'm trying to put more people out of work with AIs, but, you know, efficiencies.
Casey:
All right, so let's get to the John Syracuse portion of follow-up, as if all of follow-up isn't John's already.
Casey:
Why don't you tell us about APFS?
John:
somebody on the internet named tyler lock or loke successfully booted mac os sierra from an apfs file system as we all know apfs was introduced in sierra as a developer preview and presumably sometime this year will be the official supported bootable file system for what i suppose is the next major version of mac west but who knows they could do it in a point release too whatever it's already coming to ios in 10.3 and that's not even the next major release
John:
um and uh up till now you haven't been able to boot from it but many many parts of it are getting more and more mature and obviously if it's going to be the it's going to convert all your ios devices to apfs in 10.3 i bet the file system is pretty much ready for prime time the only reason it's not on the mac is because the mac is obviously a lower priority
John:
um and he tweeted about this we'll put some links in the show notes to these tweets just so you can get in touch with him and tell him to write a blog post about it if he hasn't already um he did it by taking a 10.12.4 drive cloning it running the apfs hfs convert command line utility which exists to convert it in place just like it does in the ios devices right that's you know why that utility exists um
John:
And then manually edited the global partition table UUID to some big hex string that apparently is the right one.
John:
And then did some other stuff that I can't understand because he tried to compress it all into a tweet and changed some kernel flags and rebooted.
John:
And he was booted into APFS.
John:
And the other thing to note is his little screenshot showing, hey, look, I'm booted into APFS.
John:
uh showed as the volume type uh apfs and in parentheses case insensitive so in case you're one i don't know if this is just a choice you made or if it's going to be the official one but uh apfs case insensitive is certainly a thing so maybe if you're having problems with case sensitive hfs plus um you won't have to worry about that with apfs because you won't be forced to make your mac case sensitive if this screenshot is any indication
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you very much to Indochino for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
So big week for Marco, as they say.
Casey:
You have released Overcast 3, so congratulations.
Marco:
Thank you.
Marco:
There's only one massive bug.
Marco:
What's the massive bug?
Marco:
Well, there were 15 minor bugs that I fixed in a point release yesterday, but created one less minor bug where now you just can't create playlists anymore.
Casey:
Oh, that's no big deal.
Marco:
I've heard from surprisingly few people about it because creating a playlist is not a very common action.
Marco:
You get the all-episodes list for free, and if you queue things, that's created automatically, so that's fine.
Marco:
I have the fix ready.
Marco:
iTunes Connect has been undergoing maintenance stuff all day, so I haven't actually been able to submit it.
Marco:
But that should be fixed in a couple days, probably by the time this podcast goes live.
John:
You found this bug, the playlist bug, after you uploaded 301?
Marco:
301 caused the bug.
John:
oh there you go there you go that's now that's a point release because i was so it was it was a rapid turnaround like you had 3.0.1 which had like a bunch of little minor fixes and it got approved really quickly and it went up on the store it's like wow everything's working as designed but then you added a bug yeah well because 3.0 had had a pretty serious bug where
Marco:
The gesture for dismissing the now playing sheet, it would interfere with the speed slider's little thumb if you would set the speed to the very bottom setting, the minus, which is like 0.7x or 0.8x, something like that.
Marco:
So basically, if you set the speed all the way down, you could never change it.
Marco:
unless you had an iPad or something that you could sync it back from.
Marco:
And so that was a pretty serious bug.
Marco:
So I had to get 301 out quickly.
Marco:
And there were a couple of other minor things.
Marco:
I was like, you know, let me throw in whatever I could do quickly that's not going to require lots of testing to validate and everything.
Marco:
Let me just do that quickly.
Marco:
And I slipped up when fixing a playlist reordering bug.
Marco:
Basically, I pulled the playlist editor out of the card environment because for various implementation details that are too boring to get into here,
Marco:
uh ui table view reorder controls break if they're in a card that isn't my now playing card um so i had to reach i had to revert the playlist editor back to the regular environment which is not in a card because it's a regular full screen sheet and in doing that i mistakenly forgot to re-add the done button back to it so now you can cancel your creation of the playlist but you cannot finish it i'm surprising that your comprehensive suite of automated tests didn't catch this
Casey:
I was waiting for it.
Casey:
Thank you, John Syracuse.
Casey:
I love you so much.
John:
I wanted to save your voice.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So you've gone on a justifiable media blitz.
Casey:
I listened to Under the Radar already moments before we started recording.
Casey:
It turns out, as per tradition, you are on the talk show.
Casey:
What do you want to talk about here, either that you've touched on previously or that you'd like to elaborate upon?
Casey:
I mean, this is your show.
Casey:
So now's the time to really... Well, not that Under the Radar is.
Casey:
I mean, you know what I mean.
Casey:
now's the time to really go deep on any of this stuff or do what I expect you to do and say, hey, whatever.
Marco:
Well, I don't... I mean, what do you guys want to know?
Marco:
I mean, what do you think would be interesting?
Marco:
Because, like, you know, so I'll tell you, you know, on Under the Radar, I talked about kind of the idea of basically, like, 3.0 was a big...
Marco:
release in terms of like how much stuff changed but it was actually not a big release in terms of like here's a list of features that are new like there are very few new features and it's kind of an interesting thing to do of like
Marco:
here's a new version of this app.
Marco:
There's been tons of work to it.
Marco:
It's a lot better, but I can't tell you everything new in it because it's not that kind of better.
Marco:
Like I basically, most of the work was in revamping the UI and it doesn't even look incredibly different than how it did before.
Marco:
It just works differently in certain places.
Marco:
Um, so like, you know, the whole card UI with the now playing screen, uh, the, the two stage episode selection now with the action row on the bottom of it.
Marco:
Uh, those are the big things.
Marco:
And then, you know, the queuing system that goes around that whole thing and, and kind of like moving all the actions into visible places, but.
Marco:
In a similar way that it's hard for me to come up with like a feature change list of like, here's the big new headlining features.
Marco:
It's also hard for me to come up with like, what should I talk about?
Marco:
Like, what do you want to know?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Chat room, what do you want?
Marco:
I mean, what do you think I should be covering here?
John:
Chat room wants to know why swipe to delete is gone.
John:
And having been on the overcast 3 beta for how many months, I thought I'll eventually get used to it and it will go away.
John:
I'm still swiping them to delete.
John:
So just FYI.
John:
I mean, not that I don't mind it because I don't delete them that often.
John:
Like they go away when I still have the setting that deletes them when you finish listening.
John:
So it's not a thing that comes up often, but I've done it in the past week.
Marco:
The short version of why this is the way it is, and then you can yell at me for an hour, is the old way of, you know, you have your list of episodes, you could swipe one of the cells and it would reveal the iOS standard table view delete button along with a couple other actions.
Marco:
Like there was a star for recommending and there was a download button there if it wasn't downloaded.
Marco:
This has always been the way to delete episodes in Overcast.
Marco:
You could also just listen to them all the way through and the default setting was to delete after listening.
Marco:
I got so many emails and tweets over the last two and a half years since 1.0 with people asking, how can I delete episodes?
Marco:
Or how do I delete episodes without listening to them all the way through?
Marco:
Which is kind of funny if you think about it.
Marco:
That means people were actually trying to play episodes all the way through just to delete them.
Marco:
And the reason why is because I thought when I was designing this app that, you know, of course, everyone using an iPhone knows that you swipe table views to delete.
Marco:
You know, that's obvious.
Marco:
Everyone knows that, right?
Marco:
Or you tap the edit button in the corner and it shows the delete controls and then you delete from there.
Marco:
People don't know this.
Marco:
A lot of people don't know this.
Marco:
And you can kind of understand why.
Marco:
Because if you just get an iPhone...
Marco:
and you just start using it, at no point do you really need that.
Marco:
In the rest of the iPhone interface, there's always also a delete button somewhere, or it's in some context messages where it doesn't really matter, where you don't often delete entire conversations.
Marco:
A lot of people who use iPhones don't know the quote standards for some of the standard controls for things like swiping table cells to show a delete control, or hitting the edit button to show other controls or whatever else.
John:
Does Apple Mail have a way to delete?
Marco:
Yeah, there's delete buttons right on the toolbar.
Marco:
A huge design goal of Overcast 3, and I wrote this in my post, but a huge design goal of Overcast 3 was basically to... Because every feature that I had that was hidden behind some kind of gesture, people wouldn't find.
Marco:
And they would write in confused or mad that I didn't have this feature or disappointed.
Marco:
And so my main goal with Overcast 3 was to take...
Marco:
all of the things I've learned with two and a half years of basically feedback and user testing and try to address as many design flaws as possible.
Marco:
I mean, there's so many features, so much functionality that I've had since 1.0 that a good portion of my users either can't find or just assume I don't have or they misunderstand.
Marco:
So it was very much like a clarifying release, like to clarify how things work and et cetera.
Marco:
And I knew going into it, I knew that the now playing being this card that's coming from the bottom instead of a navigation pane that slides from the right, I knew that would be a minor thing people get used to quickly.
Marco:
But I also knew, and I even said on the post, that the new two-stage where now you tap the cell, and rather than immediately playing the episode...
Marco:
it shows a little action menu, kind of like when you select a tweet in TweetBot, and there's buttons, and the middle button there is play.
Marco:
And the one to the far right is delete.
Marco:
I'm a little curious from people like you guys and the entire chat room and many people on Twitter.
Marco:
By the way, I should say before I make jokes like that, the response to this update has been massively positive.
Marco:
I am very, very happy with the response.
Marco:
It has been...
Marco:
very very positive and for something that changes so many things that's a it's a more positive reaction than i would have guessed um so anyway that that aside for the people who are not so positive about it because of this new like now it takes two taps to delete something thing it always took two taps to delete something but before it was swipe tap now it's tap tap
Marco:
So I'm kind of curious, like, why?
Marco:
I mean, it's different, but is it actually worse?
John:
You know why.
John:
Casey and I shouldn't – don't give him the answer.
John:
Chat room, don't tell him.
John:
Marco will now explain to us why there is feedback about the swipe.
Marco:
I understand the people who don't like that there's two taps to play something.
Marco:
I understand that because it was one tap before and now it's two, even though it's much less error-prone now and the interface is way clearer for everybody.
Marco:
But why is it worse to have delete be two taps instead of a swipe and then a tap?
John:
And now the other part of Marco's brain will answer that question.
John:
Go ahead.
John:
No, I honestly, like, I... Oh, I know you can do it, Casey, and I know you can do it.
Marco:
It's just different.
Marco:
But is it worse?
John:
Nice.
Marco:
It's actually easier to do.
Marco:
It's more precise because that's one of the reasons I did this was that the swipe to delete, I would often accidentally start playing the episode.
Casey:
So, well, let me give you my answer, which I think is the same as John's, but who knows?
Casey:
My answer is you should never, ever, ever deviate from what is the norm on the platform.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
The norm on the platform is if you want to do some sort of destructive change like that in a quick, like gestural way, you swipe from right to left and there will be some sort of destructive action that you can take right then and there.
Casey:
And like you said previously, Marco, that's on pretty much every table view in the system that allows you to remove a table view row.
Casey:
And I don't think this is exclusively a power user thing, although it certainly, in my mind, skews towards power users.
Casey:
But you should never fight the frameworks, which you've done with this table view, actually, in many ways.
Casey:
And you should never fight the HIG, the Human Interface Guidelines.
Casey:
And I feel like you're fighting the HIG.
Casey:
Now, I haven't beaten you up about this too bad previously because I understand where your head's at.
Casey:
And it makes sense to me that...
Casey:
For the overwhelming majority of users, I bet you anything this was a positive change.
Casey:
But for someone like me and thinking completely myopically, you are behaving differently than the rest of the platform.
Casey:
And that feels gross in the same way that you get that grossed out feeling when you look at a material design Google app on an iPhone.
Casey:
I don't use any Google apps on my phone.
Casey:
Well, you know what I mean, though?
Casey:
That's a bit of an unfair comparison and a bit slanderous, to be fair, because you are nowhere near that out of left field.
Casey:
But it's a similar scenario, right, where you have something that doesn't quite feel right.
Casey:
But it doesn't quite feel right to a power user or even a moderate power user.
Casey:
I think to most people, I think you made the right change, even though it drives me batty.
John:
Well, let me just boil that down to a simpler, more visceral answer.
John:
Everything you said is right, but the result of that is that, bottom line, I keep swiping things.
John:
That's the bottom line.
John:
After many, many weeks, I keep swiping.
John:
And it's not a big deal.
John:
And the discoverability is 100%.
John:
Even though it is nonstandard in the same way that TweetBot is nonstandard,
John:
i like it like it is good because you have a complicated application and i think this is better and discoverability there's no arguing against that you were getting tons of feedback about discoverability people will find the trash can icon when they couldn't 100 on that but why why do people complain it's not about speed it's not about efficiency why why do i keep swiping it's like casey said because i swipe everywhere else i can't convince my stupid thumbs not to swipe um
John:
And everything you said about why you added the bar and the discoverability, all that's 100% true, but exactly in the same way that underscore convinced you to make a sideways swipe inexplicably do a thing that you should totally not do just because that's the way the old one worked.
John:
You keep the same controls exactly where they are, but if my finger stupidly swipes for the umpteenth time, just let it delete.
John:
but that's all i'm asking for like keep exactly the same stuff that's in there now make a discoverable so on and so forth but for the admittedly very small handful of people and that's why this is not a big deal that's why 3.0 is a net win no matter what even if you never had this feature back but for the small handful of people who are either on this podcast with you or in the chat room
John:
whose stupid thumbs keep swiping this is another case to do one of those uh features just like the the one i was referring to the underscore talked you into which was the old gesture was to get rid of now playing you could swipe to the side even though the new one comes up from the bottom you still made swipe to the side work because it's no skin off anyone else's back
John:
No one else is going to discover it except for people who have muscle memory from the old overcast.
John:
Guess what?
John:
I can make that work for you, too.
John:
Now, it may be a pain in the butt to make swipe to delete work in the context of whatever unholy things that you've done to this table view to make it so super custom.
John:
And by the way, I love the fact that you can reorder now with the little grippy tabs everywhere.
John:
So, you know, again, it's totally a net win.
John:
But for this tiny little minor feature.
John:
uh you know it would be neat if the old muscle memory still worked um and i guess i'll probably eventually get used to it but i thought i would have gotten used to it by now and i think it's exactly what casey said if the whole rest of the system is training me again and again to swipe to delete it's very difficult to sort of contextually untrain myself from that gesture on something that looks for all the world like a table view
Casey:
As a general rule, use standard gestures.
Casey:
People are familiar with the standard gestures and don't appreciate being forced to learn different ways to do the same thing.
Casey:
In games and other immersive apps, custom gestures can be a fun part of the experience.
Casey:
In other apps, it's best to use the standard gestures so extra effort isn't needed to discover or remember them.
Casey:
Straight out of the HIG.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So you guys make good points.
Marco:
I don't I don't disagree with a lot of what you're saying.
Marco:
I actually the idea of doing both of adding the swipes back actually never occurred to me until this moment.
Marco:
There is probably something I'm doing to that table view that would make that probably not work well.
Marco:
you don't like drawing glitches come on that's all that's all part of the fun i will try it because i i admit like if i can do that with with no horrible side effects uh then it is kind of a no-brainer to offer that affordance to have both i like to see the little orange bar appear as the thing above it swipes sideways and the orange bar starts to get clipped and filled it would be so awesome
John:
Oh, you have no idea what I've done to poor UI table view.
John:
I mean, whatever TweetBot did, same type of thing.
John:
And to be fair, I don't know if TweetBot was the originator of this thing, but a lot of applications do this where they want to have more stuff for you to do in a table view.
John:
they can't all fit under a magic edit button where you go into a mode right and so they do this thing where it reveals more controls when you tap the thing i think that itself even though it's not in the hig or whatever is kind of standard and tried and true but since you can't delete a tweet the tweet bot never had to deal with well i guess you can speaking with you can delete a tweet what the hell does tweet bot do when you swipe i guess i don't delete tweets as often as i swipe i think is view conversation yeah there's two different directions one of them is the conversation the other one i think is favorite oh that's right they use both directions for the for the yeah yeah
Marco:
No, I mean, so... Okay, so there's a number of things to respond to here.
Marco:
One of them is when you're thinking about, like, how this app should be or how this thing should be, actually, like, you know, work through the entire thing in your head to see, like, you know, maybe think, like, maybe there's a reason why it isn't that way, right?
Marco:
Or maybe that would present more challenges.
Marco:
And we often do this, like, with trying to, like...
Marco:
as our armchair people trying to tell Apple what to do.
Marco:
What if they did that?
Marco:
What are the other ramifications of that?
Marco:
If I didn't do the button bar thing, if I kept the delete in there, how else could I make it actually discoverable to people?
Marco:
And so the way that the Apple apps do it, that you're reading from the HIG as if this is a gospel, well, I'll get to that next.
Marco:
But the way they do it is on the resulting screen.
Marco:
So look at Mail.
Marco:
Mail is always a good example of standard UI kit stuff.
Marco:
It's always a good inspiration and reference point for that.
Marco:
So look at Mail.
Marco:
With Mail, you open the message.
Marco:
If you assume that you don't know how to swipe on table cells to delete things, which most people don't,
Marco:
If you open the message, in the message window, there's a delete button.
Marco:
So if you don't know how to swipe on the table view, you're still seeing delete buttons all the time.
Marco:
So if I were to go down this path with Overcast, to have single tap to open the message, and to have a swipe offer the delete, or single tap to begin play the way I had it before...
Marco:
How else could I make delete more discoverable?
Marco:
So one way to do it would be if I put delete in the info pane, which I could do.
Marco:
I forget whether I did it or not, but I could do that.
Marco:
You know, have delete be one of the buttons in the info pane.
Marco:
But in typical playback, you're not using the info pane.
Marco:
In typical playback, you're hitting the episode and then it begins playing in the screen if it's this way.
Marco:
And so it would have to be in the now playing screen.
Marco:
So now look at the now playing screen and where would I put it?
John:
No, no one's arguing that you should get rid of the bar.
John:
Well, at least I certainly wasn't.
John:
I totally... Oh, people are.
John:
You have to.
John:
It's an improvement.
John:
I'm saying like adding swipe to delete as a shortcut for the people who happen to know it, which is definitely a tiny detail, nice to have thing that is not essential for 3.0.
John:
That's why I said the bar is obviously an improvement, like just, you know, 100%.
John:
And in fact, I think you can... It's not obvious to a lot of people on Twitter.
John:
Well...
John:
I think the other thing the bar gives you looking at it is, I don't know how much metrics you're collecting in terms of usage, but you have a lot of room.
John:
Not a lot.
John:
And I don't know how common the add to playlist, the plus hamburger thing and the star thing are, or even the share.
John:
You have enough room to actually use that bar as a place to highlight new features.
John:
in 4.0 or whatever as they come and i think it's important to have an element like that and burying it under info or putting it on the now playing screen are all much worse this was merely a question of and i don't understand how this is spun out into this giant big thing because this is such a minor thing like this is not a problem with the application at all it's just like it's a problem with my thumb still doing a thing and i'm just exploring why it might do that is to continue to provide affordances for the tiny amount of people
John:
who uh who are used to or their thumbs are used to doing a certain thing in a way that doesn't detract at all from the increased discoverability provided by the little bar if people are arguing against the bar entirely to go back to the old way i think they probably just haven't been using the app long enough because when i first started using with the little bar too it feels weird you're used to using overcast for at this point like years right used to tapping to play a thing and you tap to play a thing and the podcast doesn't start playing um
John:
that's something i got used to and it's not as if the first tap doesn't do anything the first tap reveals the bar so it's not like with swiping where the swiping just literally does nothing does not give you any progress towards your delete action that you were trying to perform tapping reveals the bar you have a visual cue that there's something else that you have to do and usually i'm doing playlists anyway so it's just playing one after the other so it's not a big deal
Marco:
Yeah, I again, I until this podcast did not even consider the idea of leaving the swipe buttons in and also leaving the bar in.
Marco:
So I actually am going to see if I can do that easily or without massive horrible side effects because of my table view abuse.
John:
Did you have in the old one?
John:
I don't even know if you had this.
John:
Did you have the male style super duper swipe?
John:
Yeah, where there's like three buttons over there.
John:
Yeah, I had that.
Marco:
But like where you go all the way to the end, it just deletes it.
Marco:
Oh, no, that was never made available.
Marco:
Mail always, whatever TableView Mail uses, always gets cool features like that before they're available in the public API.
Marco:
So like they had the first action buttons there for I think an entire iOS version before it was easy to do that with other ways.
Marco:
And then they later, once they gave us the API to make those action buttons, then mail got the ability to have the full drag all the way across for delete.
Marco:
And I don't think they ever made that available to anybody.
John:
That's a cool feature.
John:
I hope that does come to table views because it's definitely like they were getting into the realm of like...
John:
Not expert features, but features that hopefully never bother anybody if you don't know they exist.
John:
But once you know they exist, it becomes addictive to be able to go and just knock out things.
Marco:
The only thing I don't like about that feature is that if you swipe mail messages left, there's an unread option on the side, which does the same thing.
Marco:
You swipe it hard enough and it just marks it unread, and that's cool.
Marco:
If you swipe it right, you have that super mode where if you swipe it far enough, it just deletes it and the far most button is trash.
Marco:
But the other two buttons that offers are more and flag.
Marco:
And so if you're opening that menu in order to flag the message, that's kind of the opposite of putting it in the trash.
Marco:
But if you drag just very slightly too far when you open that message up, it deletes it.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's a fine line with the swiping.
Marco:
Well, it's a bad decision.
Marco:
Like to me, I think that everything that's not trash should be on the other direction swipe menu if they're going to do that, if you're going to have this all the way swipe gesture, because it's too easy to do this destructive action when you're trying to do flag or more.
John:
i have the opposite problem where i i guess i'm too lazy with the swipe and i wanted to delete it but it didn't quite go far enough and i have to give a second attempt on it but i can see the opposite being true to it definitely with anything gestural that's the problem that's the good thing about the bad thing about gestures they feel so good when they're right but you get it's like controlling a video game you get it a little bit wrong and because it's not a precise thing because it is inherently a fuzzy thing it's really difficult to get sort of the you know the control scheme just right for everybody and everybody's a
John:
as opposed to the much more analytical world of pointers and mouse control and how big targets have to be that you can it's it's easier to measure that and it's generally a more precise thing although you know you mean you did the basics here for the little bar trash is far away from the play button play is not all on the left and trash is not all around the right because the middle is easier to hit than the edges of the screen like it's you know everything you've just described about
Marco:
the ergonomics of where items are in relation to each other and how easy this to accidentally is revealed in the bar the only thing you can maybe argue about is whether the center is appropriate for play but i think it is yeah oh yeah i that i don't i don't think i would hear any other arguments about that again it's like it's like if you think about where where else would you put these things like it you you come to pretty similar conclusions i think with a lot of this stuff anyway
Marco:
So yeah, I'll look into the double gesture thing, because that does make some sense.
Marco:
I do want to address, though, the whole HIG, adherence to standards, everything else as gospel.
Marco:
Apple, and for those of you who don't know, HIG is the Human Interface Guidelines.
Marco:
It's been a document Apple has published forever, and they revised it over time with new OSs and new knowledge.
Marco:
But basically, it's like...
Marco:
It's like the standards for how your interface should look and work and be laid out for Apple's platforms.
Marco:
Over the years, there's always been tons of debate over the HIG and whether it's okay to violate it, when it's okay to violate it.
Marco:
And I think it's similar to rules of grammar for poetry, right?
Marco:
I think it's like you're allowed to violate the HIG if you know what you're doing and you have good reason, basically.
Marco:
It's not like this set in stone thing.
Marco:
And Apple violates the HIG all the time with their own apps.
Marco:
They blatantly violate it and they don't care because they think they know better.
Marco:
And in many cases, that's true.
Marco:
I am a developer.
Marco:
For years, I said I am not a designer.
Marco:
And when it became clear to me that I was doing the vast majority of the design in my apps, I stopped saying that.
Marco:
I think now, no matter what anyone else says, I think of myself as an app developer and app designer, combo in one.
Marco:
Even though I'm not as good at the design part as I am at the development part, I now do both of those roles.
Marco:
I think that I now have a good enough design sense that I can judge or I can kind of have some leeway in deciding when to break a standard of rule.
Marco:
And it doesn't always work.
Marco:
Sometimes I have to roll it back.
Marco:
I have lots of crazy ideas and many of them are awful.
Marco:
But I think I now have earned myself the right to break rules sometimes because the fact is, in order to do good design and especially in order to move things forward, you have to break the rules.
Marco:
The rules were never written to be gospel.
Marco:
They were never written to be adhered to 100%.
Marco:
as soon as any version of the hig is published apple already has apps out there that violate it all over the place because the hig is it's kind of like using stock ui kit controls with stock themes on them it's like you can do that for most people that's a reasonable default that's a good starting place if you aren't confident whether you can break the rules you should just do that like that's that's fine
Marco:
But it's also nice to have apps that don't follow all the rules.
Marco:
They push things forward or they do things differently.
Marco:
And that is how progress gets made.
Marco:
And that often is necessary to result in an overall better designed or more usable app.
Casey:
Yeah, you know, the thing of it is, is that to me, the best user interface is one you don't have to think about, right?
Casey:
And it just feels frictionless that things are where you expect them to be.
Casey:
As an example, as an unrelated example, in my car...
Casey:
I feel like everything is where I expect it to be.
Casey:
Even within iDrive, which a lot of people hate, it makes sense to my brain.
Casey:
Maybe it doesn't to yours or to whomevers, but it makes sense to me.
Casey:
And so the best, like I said, the best user interface is one you don't have to think about.
Casey:
And the moment I have to think about that user interface, about how I accomplish a task, then I'm experiencing friction and I'm taken out of the moment of what I'm trying to do.
Casey:
And we were beating up a lot about this, you know, swipe to delete thing, because I think I speak for John in saying my natural gut reaction is to just immediately swipe.
Casey:
And then I have to think, wait, no, no, this is that place that doesn't work.
Casey:
Oh, what do I do?
Casey:
Oh, yeah, I tap and then I tap again.
Casey:
Well, that's fine.
Casey:
It's just, oh, why can't it work the way I expect it to?
Casey:
And that doesn't really negate anything you said about how the HIG isn't.
Casey:
It's not laws, it's guidelines.
Casey:
What was that stupid movie?
Casey:
Parts of the Caribbean style.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It takes someone who is very confident and with a lot of skill, like you had said, to violate it in ways that make sense.
Casey:
Like somebody in the chat room, I already lost who it was, noted that pull to refresh wasn't in the HIG.
Casey:
And that's a perfect example of something that wasn't in the human interface guidelines, but just made freaking sense.
Casey:
And that was a great...
Casey:
choice but other times i think you have to be very confident and very very sure you're right in order to get away with violating it i think that the hig has changed over the years it's time for me to do a more old man stuff here um when you guys talk about the hig you're talking about
John:
Like the umpteenth iteration in the modern era.
John:
I know you guys started with Apple before iOS, but not much before, like three years before or something, right?
John:
The human interface guidelines used to be very, very different than they are now.
John:
One thing that they shared is the thing that you were talking about, Casey.
John:
In the beginning...
John:
part of what was revolutionary about both the Mac and the human interface guidelines that came along with it is the selling point of the Mac and the selling point of the graphical user interface was there would be a standard set of controls and a standard guideline for how to use them so that if you learned how to use one program on a Mac, you could go to another program and reuse a lot of those skills because it would also have a menu bar with pull-down menus.
John:
It would also use the same command keys for things.
John:
It would also have windows with
John:
The confirmation button on the right and the cancel button on the left and all, you know, the whole nine yards.
John:
Interface consistency, which was a revolutionary and novel thing in an age when on DOS you use WordStar and it had absolutely nothing in its interface in common with WordPerfect or whatever, some other contemporary.
John:
Even though they were both word processors, they didn't copy and paste text the same way.
John:
They didn't format it the same way.
John:
They didn't have the same menu structure.
John:
They didn't use the same keys.
John:
It was like, oh, I know WordStar.
John:
can I transfer those skills over to it?
John:
You could transfer your basic skills of knowing where the keys are on the keyboard.
John:
And maybe if you're lucky, they shared something about how their interface work, but they rapidly diverge.
John:
Whereas if you use Microsoft word or Mac, right.
John:
You know, some of the menus were the same.
John:
There was a font menu.
John:
There was the font sizing.
John:
The fact that there was a menu bar at all like that.
John:
And just in general, using anything on the Mac, you were able to take the skills that you learned and build on them to more rapidly get up to speed in another application.
John:
That's the whole point of the interface guidelines and the way the document was different.
John:
is that especially in the beginning, it did way, way less of explaining to you how things should look or what you should do, and way, way more of explaining the reasoning behind it.
John:
Do this with your whatevers, because... And then explain the philosophy behind it.
John:
And very often that philosophy had more of a foundation on...
John:
you know user testing and stuff if i look at the hig today even even just the first like aqua hig for uh for mac os 10 so much of it is about how big the borders should be between items like i mean this isn't even talking about like size minimum size of touch targets but just like this is how you should lay out your dialogues this is how far away buttons uh labels should be from their fields and buttons should be from their whatever and this is how tall this should be and this is how much padding there should be on the things it's like that's all great and you should totally have that an interface builder should do it for you automatically which they added you know like
John:
That's all fine.
John:
But that does not tell me why.
John:
And that is how things should look, which is related to how they work very often in terms of the size of touch targets and readability and why labels that are aligned this way are easier to scan and all that other stuff.
John:
But...
John:
there's less of the less of the philosophy less of like look let me just complain explain to you the concepts and here are some guidelines um but now you see these guidelines you see here's the concepts that that they flow out of and when you're provided with the concepts and actually i feel like given more free reign in the old days to say follow these these concepts in your custom interfaces and yours will feel like ours rather than saying just use our controls because that's the only way you could possibly do this
John:
The new ones feel more like make your applications look like ours down to the pixel.
John:
Use our standard controls.
John:
And we won't really explain to you the reasons.
John:
Why is this alignment or the spacing beneficial?
John:
Why should you phrase words in...
John:
the dialogue in this manner whether it's imperative why should you use verbs for buttons or why should you you know like the whole night why should you not use differently styled text and you know they used to have reasons for it they would say when our testing we found out if you put a bunch of bold words and dialogues that's all people read so don't make bold words make everything in the same because this isn't fine i'm just making this up this is not a real thing but like to explain the reasoning behind things um and that i feel like has been lacking and because that's lacking i'm
John:
I feel like the Human Interface Guidelines for iOS and even for the Mac are way less authoritative now in terms of how developers should take them.
John:
Like, just because it's in the Hague, that's just one other person's or a couple other people's ideas.
John:
And it's important for you to know what they expect from you for the sake of consistency with the other applications.
John:
But if they're not going to explain their reasoning and you suspect that you might have a better way, I think you are much more likely today to actually have a better way than you are back in the old days where, A, nobody knew anything.
John:
And B, Apple knew so much more than everybody else because developers were coming upon us the first time and Apple at least had put many, many years into it.
John:
And they were, you know, the world's leading experts on making consumer facing personal computer GUIs for a very long time.
John:
And they would they would show their work.
John:
They would say, here's why.
John:
Here's why we're doing all this stuff.
John:
And you'd read it and you go, oh, that makes sense.
John:
And if they said they did a bunch of user testing, you don't have a user experience lab for you to test this stuff.
John:
I have you.
John:
Part of the transition from the from the jobs era was seemed like he was much less of a fan of, you know, the scientific method and user testing and much more of a fan of using his gut.
John:
and his gut was pretty good but sometimes you got like you know stitched leather and stuff so yeah anyway uh all this is to say that i i have you know i i put much less stake in the in apple's human interface guidelines now than i did many decades ago um
John:
But the guideline that, you know, the guiding principle, I think every developer uses who's making their applications is to try to make it fit in with what the user expects.
John:
Again, like if you made a Mac application and you didn't have a menu bar or you're like the file and edit menus were in the opposite order.
John:
Even if you think you have a really good reason for that, it's probably not a good idea.
John:
But if you want to put different items in your file menu, as long as quit is at the bottom, if you're really old, that's where it used to be, everybody.
John:
As long as quit is at the bottom, people are okay with you shoving in a few other items.
John:
And third-party applications...
John:
like marco said push the interface forward because apple can't cover all your possible scenarios so if photoshop starts doing something and photoshop does it for 25 years eventually whether that's in the human interface guidelines or not if you're making a graphics application it would be a good idea for you to perhaps take a few conventions from photoshop because it's so important in its field and i think that's the same way a lot of twitter clients can get away with the side swipes which i don't know who invented that but it's all over the place in twitter clients
John:
uh because if you use a lot of twitter clients eventually that's what you get used to and in the realm of podcast apps i feel like if you use a lot of podcast apps i don't use a lot of them but i imagine there's some conventions for controlling things that they would have some commonality between them that you would begin to read read the landscape and get used to using now that you want every genre of application to be different uh but
John:
where you start falling back to the bedrock of expectation is that for things like muscle memory and you know the fact that you're using a table view at all and the fact that you know the transitions between things are sort of mental and spatial model of how the application flows from left to right and coming up from the bottom also judgment calls to make there but in general you try to keep it uh consistent and you
John:
you know if you miss one little tiny corner where now delete works a little bit differently it's probably not a big deal especially since delete is probably not a common operation it's not but it's if it's a place where you can if it's a place where you can return uh that uh where you can fulfill that expectation in a way that lets you retain all the other benefits it's a pretty clean win i mean i i would question even more the feature you did have there which i mentioned before it was like
John:
being able to dismiss a thing that comes up from the bottom by swiping sideways makes not much sense, spatially speaking, and is probably a misfeature.
John:
The only reason it's there is to honor the muscle memory of users of your specific application, because if you didn't ever use the previous version of Overcast, you would never expect that to work, and you would never even try it, right?
John:
But you're just doing that to just give a little help to those people, and I think this is the same category of things.
John:
In fact, I would trade these in terms of
John:
What is more beneficial in the long run?
John:
I would say if I had to sacrifice one, which you don't, you should just keep both of them.
John:
But if I had to sacrifice one, I would say the side swipe people will get used to the card coming from the bottom pretty quick.
John:
And it's just a gesture in a different direction.
John:
Whereas the swipe to deleters are still being trained by the whole rest of their entire iOS device to keep doing that.
Marco:
We're sponsored tonight by Warby Parker.
Marco:
To start your free home try-ons today, go to warbyparker.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Warby Parker believes that eyeglasses should not cost as much as a phone.
Marco:
They have prescription eyeglasses starting at just $95, including prescription lenses.
Marco:
And they make buying glasses online easy and risk-free.
Marco:
Which sounds kind of crazy, but here's how they do it.
Marco:
They have this home try-on program.
Marco:
This allows you to order up to five pairs of eyeglasses, and they ship them to you for free, and you get to try them on for five days with no obligation to buy.
Marco:
When you're done, you ship them back in the free prepaid return label.
Marco:
You're out no money for this whole process.
Marco:
And again, no obligation to buy.
Marco:
If you want to buy, of course, they make it very, very easy.
Marco:
They have a Warwick Parker app from the App Store also.
Marco:
It has a home try and companion feature, which allows you to quickly take photos wearing all the frames that you're trying on.
Marco:
You can stitch it into a video.
Marco:
You can share it with friends and family to help you pick a winner, get feedback from everybody.
Marco:
Buying glasses through them is, in my opinion, probably easier than buying them from anybody else.
Marco:
And of course, they do good in the world too.
Marco:
For every pair of eyeglasses you buy, a pair is attributed to someone in need through various vision charities around the world.
Marco:
you've got to check it out.
Marco:
The Warby Parker glasses are great.
Marco:
My wife has a couple of pairs.
Marco:
She loves them.
Marco:
I don't wear glasses, but I do have sunglasses from them because they also have sunglasses, including polarized lenses, starting at just $95 for non-prescription and with prescription starting at just $175.
Marco:
Just like their eyeglasses, you can also get sunglasses through the Home Try-On program.
Marco:
These are premium polarized lenses that are scratch resistant and 100% UV protection.
Marco:
you've got to check out Warby Parker.
Marco:
Their glasses are so good, they're fashionable, and it's so easy to buy from them.
Marco:
Glasses start at just $95, including prescription lenses.
Marco:
Lenses include anti-glare and anti-scratch coatings.
Marco:
Check it out, warbyparker.com slash ATP for your home try-on kit today.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Warby Parker for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Before we move on from Overcast, I did want to briefly ask you about this new ad model.
Casey:
And I'm not entirely sure I understand the nuances of it.
Casey:
And so I'm going to defer my chief summarizer-in-chief role to you, Marco, if you could summarize what this new setup is and kind of how it works in broad strokes.
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
So basically, before, you know, I have, as John likes to remind me, I change my business model on Overcast roughly every, you know, nine to 18 months.
Marco:
I've gone through many of them now.
Marco:
The one I've settled on since this past September, which was just kind of a tweak to the one before it, is basically ads as like the main source of income and then paid subscriptions to remove the ads if you want to.
Marco:
And the way this has worked out over time is actually not that way.
Marco:
The way it has worked out since September when I added these Google AdMob ads... And by the way, just as a quick clarification, I know there are other ad networks, but they're all worse in some major way.
Marco:
Like either they have...
Marco:
creepier code or they require more SDK integration.
Marco:
They're kind of like meta networks where they have to add lots of SDKs to your app for all these different companies.
Marco:
Or they just don't sell enough inventory.
Marco:
You end up getting very little money from your ads and a lot of unsold inventory that you have to just show nothing for or show your own splash thing for or whatever else.
Marco:
So I think if you're going to do third-party ads, I think AdMob is the way to do it.
Marco:
But what I found with AdMob ultimately is that
Marco:
The ads were of lower quality than I wanted, and they made very little money.
Marco:
And as I kept going through and going in their control panel and turning off various categories of crappy ads that I didn't want to see, things like casino stuff and weird sexy dating services, I would find those and I'd turn them off, and that'd make even less money because it turns out all the crap ads make a lot of money, which is why they run them.
Marco:
So basically, it was making very little money.
Marco:
It ended up like I thought I was going to make most money from the ads and then some money from subscriptions.
Marco:
And it ended up that I was making 90% of the money from subscriptions.
Marco:
Totally flipped.
Marco:
And that's actually fine.
Marco:
I like it that way.
Marco:
I'd rather have people paying me than have to deal with ads.
Marco:
And the ads – the presence of the ads increased subscriptions dramatically from the previous system, which is basically pay if you feel like it.
Marco:
Like patronage, you know, just pay if you like me.
Marco:
And that worked a little bit, but it was not – it wasn't working enough.
Marco:
So it succeeded as a business model, but not because of the ads.
Marco:
It succeeded because there were ads there, but the ads could be anything –
Marco:
Honestly, I'm sure I might actually see a slightly lower subscription rate because the ads are no longer crappy.
Marco:
But they're also now on the now playing screen, so you see them more.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
That'll probably balance itself out.
Marco:
Anyway, so I decided that I was no longer interested in running Google AdMob ads for lots of different reasons.
Marco:
Quality of the ads, low revenue, those are major factors.
Marco:
But also, as I talked about in the blog post and a little bit here, I think...
Marco:
I'm no longer very comfortable embedding closed source ad libraries into my app from ad companies.
Marco:
I think as a developer, you have to be conscious of that.
Marco:
There has to be a really good reason for you to embed someone else's closed source code in your app because that can do anything and it's on you.
Marco:
That can access all of your user data.
Marco:
Whatever users are doing with the app, whatever they are entering into the app, that code has complete access to it.
Marco:
That code can get you in trouble with Apple.
Marco:
That code can do things that are prohibited.
Marco:
That code can require you to have all these advertising disclaimers that your users see or that AppReview sees.
Marco:
They can get you in trouble with AppReview.
Marco:
There's all sorts of baggage that you sign up for when you're adding someone else's closed source code to your app.
Marco:
And so I thought there had to be a really, really good reason for that to be in there.
Marco:
And I no longer had a good reason.
Marco:
The only reason I did it in September was I thought it was the only option.
Marco:
The option between that and going out of business, basically.
Marco:
And so I took that option.
Marco:
But then the business model changed and the environment changed.
Marco:
You know, that all happened in September.
Marco:
Then November happened.
Marco:
Then January happened.
Marco:
It's a different world now.
Marco:
And so now I basically went to this saying, like, all right, well, now let me see, you know, what can I do myself?
Marco:
And because the Google ads made so little money...
Marco:
for me.
Marco:
Other people have more success with Google Ads than I have.
Marco:
I don't want to say that they don't work for anybody because they obviously work for lots of people.
Marco:
But my tap-through rate was awful.
Marco:
Basically, how much money you make depends extremely heavily on your tap-through rate.
Marco:
And there's lots of reasons for that, none of which I was willing to fix.
Marco:
For example, if you want a
Marco:
a, if you want to make more money, you should put the ad somewhere where people are more likely to accidentally tap them.
Marco:
I'm not going to do that.
Marco:
Uh, you should have the ads on every screen of your app or more screens of your app, but I wasn't doing that.
Marco:
I had them only in the list screens before because they were too big to fit on now playing.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
You should enable things like animated banners.
Marco:
I didn't want to do that because those pay better.
Marco:
There's all sorts of things that you can do to make ads work better that I was unwilling to do.
Marco:
So it's not entirely AdMob's fault that I had such a bad experience.
Marco:
It was just my app and my strict requirements for it, just what I could stomach and what I was willing to do.
Marco:
Anyway, I decided since AdMob ads were making so little for me, I could replace them with...
Marco:
pretty much anything.
Marco:
And it probably wouldn't negatively affect my business.
Marco:
Because the main risk with running my own ads is what if no one buys them?
Marco:
What if it turns out they're really hard to sell?
Marco:
Which they might be.
Marco:
These aren't podcast ads.
Marco:
They're display ads.
Marco:
And display ads are hard to sell right now.
Marco:
I only have very, very limited data right now with these trial partners that I have now in there.
Marco:
But
Marco:
I have no idea even what kind of views or tap-through rates or subscription rates that they're going to get in three months.
Marco:
Right now, everyone's looking at them and poking them and seeing what they're like.
Marco:
So the data right now is nice, but it's not really representative, probably.
Marco:
So I have no idea how they're going to perform.
Marco:
But the fact is, I am way happier with them.
Marco:
They are totally under my control.
Marco:
There is no weird closed-source code going to the world's biggest advertising company.
Marco:
It is just completely my app doing my thing, the way I designed it, under my control.
Marco:
The privacy of them is great because I don't collect anything because I don't want any of your data.
Marco:
I want the least data I can possibly get from you to make my app work.
Marco:
um if you if you ever are curious what i call it read the privacy policy in overcast it's very short human readable i wrote it all it's you know it's very very clear um and so i'm much happier with this setup now and so what the setup is is my own ads they show in the now playing screen and in the ad podcast screen and
Marco:
The ad unit can show either ads for websites, apps in the app store, or podcasts in Overcast.
Marco:
And so you can actually advertise for a podcast in the podcast app.
Marco:
And when you tap these ads, it brings up the sheet that is just the Overcast ad podcast screen, the standard screen.
Marco:
And so it has all the episodes in it.
Marco:
They all have all the buttons that Casey and John hate with, you know, you can add to queue, you can subscribe there, you can download whatever else.
Marco:
And so it's all this standard native interface.
Marco:
I don't know how many podcasters are going to be willing to pay for ads long term.
Marco:
I can tell you I have an inbox full of emails from podcasters who are interested right now that I am having a very hard time answering all at once.
Marco:
However, there's tons of interest right now.
Marco:
But once you get into the nitty gritty of getting people to actually commit and to pay, everything changes.
Marco:
So I have no idea what it's going to be like long term.
Marco:
But the fact is, I don't need to sell very many ads to make more than I was making before.
Marco:
And even if I make less than what I was making before, as long as people keep subscribing, I'm still fine.
Marco:
So I think I made the right move.
Marco:
Also, by the same logic and for all the same reasons, I also, in this update, removed the Fabric analytics from the app.
Marco:
So there's no more third-party analytics services either.
Marco:
All I do now is...
Marco:
I have a very, very basic analytics class that I wrote myself that just logs some very basic information.
Marco:
And it can be used to do things like what you were describing earlier, John, about measuring how many people use the delete button or whatever you were asking about.
Marco:
I can do stuff like that.
Marco:
Right now, I'm measuring almost nothing in the app.
Marco:
I talked a little bit about this under the radar this week.
Marco:
The short version there is I've done analytics for a while now with fabric and I found some actionable things from it, but most of the data I was collecting was neither useful nor actionable.
Marco:
I find analytics are great to like when you have a specific question you're trying to answer.
Marco:
So like when I was developing, I was curious a while back, maybe a year ago now,
Marco:
So I added analytics for what type of output device people were listening on.
Marco:
And I learned from that, that a lot of people use the built-in speaker way more than I thought.
Marco:
And so that's why I did the voice boost optimized speaker profile for the iPhone speaker.
Marco:
Because I realized, wow, a lot of people do this.
Marco:
This is worth focusing attention on.
Marco:
I also learned during times like that, I measured parts of the Watch app.
Marco:
Does anybody even use the Watch app?
Marco:
What features of the Watch app do they use?
Marco:
Do they actually go to the force touch menu?
Marco:
By the way, no.
Marco:
Do they actually ever use the buttons on it?
Marco:
Or are they mostly using it to read information as a glance?
Marco:
Answer, yes.
Marco:
So I learned stuff like that.
Marco:
But I can do that myself with very basic analytics.
Marco:
I don't need everything that a full-blown analytics package offers today, like various conversion tracking, different things and funnels all over the place and all these retention.
Marco:
That's the kind of stuff that venture-funded companies need.
Marco:
I don't need that.
Marco:
I don't have anybody asking for that information.
Marco:
I don't care about that information, so I don't need to collect it.
Marco:
So basically...
Marco:
I'm getting away now with incredibly simple analytics of just my own, you know, hand-rolled thing.
Marco:
Oh, God, I'm a hipster.
Marco:
My own artisanal analytics.
Marco:
And now it's just a lot simpler and lower tech.
Marco:
But now I can tell things like, you know...
Marco:
How many people are using different devices?
Marco:
Like how many iPhone 7s versus 7 pluses do I have?
Marco:
And that helps me decide things like what should I optimize this interface for?
Marco:
Should I optimize it for 5.5 inch screens or for 4.7 or for 4.0?
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
That's stuff I need to know.
Marco:
I don't need to know the level of detail that all these commercial analytics packages provide and especially at the cost of having their own closed source code in my app and exposing all my user data to them.
John:
The thing I like best about these new ads is the fact that they are podcast ads and a podcast player.
John:
Right.
John:
So they have built-in relevance.
John:
And if you ever run out of inventory, which you wouldn't because you could just lower the price and get any inventory you wanted, but if you ever did run out, I would be happy to see that slot spilled but just pulled from your own most recommended section because you have ready-made inventory of...
John:
you know i don't know how relevant but like hey here are some popular uh here are some podcasts with some episodes that are being recommended a lot in insert time window and then just throw them in the most recommended thing you tap them and you go right to the episode it's it's like a no-brainer uh i also i
John:
I also echo your fear that they will not be offensive enough to make people pay because they're pleasant.
John:
They're podcast ads, and it's not to be like mesothelioma or whatever.
Marco:
By the way, I do want to clarify.
Marco:
They're not all podcast ads.
Marco:
There's an ad for Hover.
Marco:
There's an ad for Linode.
John:
There are a couple of website ads in there.
John:
Now that you mention that, when I saw the Hover ad, I was like,
John:
because i see hover and i think oh that's a podcast ad too because obviously they advertise on a lot of podcasts that i listen to um imagine if it was like synchronized like when the hover ad is playing on the show that the hover ad got the hover banner got to display down in the thing and included the people's codes there's all sorts of crazy business ideas that you could do here or competitive advertising where people could buy podcast advertisements against that would run against other podcasts in the same genre this is all getting way too complicated and i agree that if you know
John:
If this is simply a way to replace that 10% of money with a more pleasant experience, then it's a win no matter what.
John:
But I think that kind of like the – what was this?
John:
I think it was on Rectifs.
John:
I was talking about the fantasy Google ad that it's far fewer ads but far more valuable because they're better targeted by some magic AI thing.
John:
I think even just basic better targeting of the fact that, hey, I know you're interested in podcasts because you're listening to one.
John:
You are a great audience for me to advertise other podcasts to because you are a proven podcast listener and you're using a podcast client.
John:
And guess what?
John:
Here's another podcast.
John:
And that's why you can charge more money for that than you can for an ad or even for something like Hover or something because...
John:
uh although they advertise in lots of podcasts however it's not technically podcast related but another podcast is and then a podcast can spend money advertising to each other and it can do just like the app store ads yeah cool because like that's why that's one of the reasons i made this for podcast i was like and i've had all sorts of crazy ideas on on
Marco:
how to possibly sell these things and things like that.
Marco:
But ultimately it came down to like, of course, this is the perfect place for an ad for a podcast.
Marco:
The only question is, you know, the only doubt in my mind is, you know, whether enough podcasters will be willing and able to pay for an ad for their shows because most podcasters don't make a lot of money from sponsorships.
Marco:
Most podcasts don't even have sponsorships.
Marco:
Most podcasts don't have audiences big enough to get sponsors.
Marco:
So how many podcasts are going to be willing to pay for ads?
Marco:
I have no idea.
Marco:
It doesn't take a lot to make this work.
Marco:
It doesn't take...
Marco:
You don't need thousands of advertisers.
Marco:
You need tens of advertisers to make this work really well.
Marco:
So I think it will probably be okay.
Marco:
I think one of the big challenges is going to be... I don't think podcasters have ever even thought about buying ads.
Marco:
Because there's never really been a place where you could buy an ad for a podcast that made sense.
Marco:
Because as you were just saying...
Marco:
You can't just buy a Google search ad or a Facebook ad for your podcast and get anybody to click through to it because you start losing targeting really fast there.
Marco:
The chances that they are a podcast listener and who want to listen to your show, that combination gets multiplied and that's going to be a pretty low number.
Marco:
That was too much.
John:
friction if you like in other venues of like doing it on the web if you're not already in a podcast player getting successfully described subscribe to a podcast in your player of choice is difficult because i encounter that when i'm on the web and i find a podcast that i like and i'm disappointed when i don't see like either a link to the overcast url where i can do save an overcast like if they just give me an itunes link or something like that that's not no good to me i don't use that player right because you don't the
John:
The website can't know what player I use.
John:
But if I'm already in the player that I use and there's a one-tap way to get an episode, that's way less friction.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
So I am really curious to see how this plays out and to see who buys these ads.
Marco:
Once people can actually start seeing my prices publicly, like a few emails, once people have data of what a month worth of clicks and new subscriptions look like,
Marco:
And for how much money, that could change things.
Marco:
Because right now, none of us, me, the advertisers, none of us know whether these are going to be a good deal or not.
Marco:
Because we don't have enough data yet.
Marco:
So we're going to find out.
Marco:
And it might be an incredibly good deal.
Marco:
It might end up being by far the best way to get new listeners to a podcast.
Marco:
Or it might be that there's just too few people for it to make any financial sense.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
We're going to find out.
Marco:
And if that's the case, then I'll just fill it up with hover ads.
Marco:
I don't care.
Casey:
So a few quick hits regarding that.
Casey:
Do you want to disclose even an order of magnitude of pricing?
Casey:
Like are we talking tens of dollars or ten thousands of dollars or...
Casey:
So can you narrow it down?
Casey:
Because I assume that you're going to get a thousand emails about, you know, I don't even know how much this costs.
Casey:
Can I afford this?
Casey:
So is there like a rough order of magnitude you can say for pricing as we record tonight, which obviously could change?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Ask me in a few weeks.
Marco:
That's when I will have a much better idea of what these things will actually be charged for, you know, long term.
John:
Marco is currently trying to talk himself off the ledge of making this an auction system.
John:
So let's all root for him in this endeavor.
Marco:
One system that I thought was – there should be some way to kind of automatically scale with demand.
Marco:
And so one thing I thought was just like just sell them for 30 days.
Marco:
and just say, you know, like, here's how many ads there are in the system right now, and keep the price fixed.
Marco:
And just, you know, the market kind of works that out, right?
Marco:
Because, like, if the price is really low, then a bunch of people will buy it, and then every ad will just get fewer impressions.
Marco:
So it kind of is self-regulating, I think.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm throwing around all these different ideas in my head of how this should be billed, how this should be sold, and there's a reason why there are so few initial partners on board, because...
Marco:
Everyone who's advertising it right now, I've worked out, I've gone to them in advance and said like, hey, here's what's going on.
Marco:
I don't know what this is going to be yet.
Marco:
And so we're going to go into this in this kind of like trial mode and we're going to share data.
Marco:
I'm going to tell you what this gets you and you're going to tell me if you get click-throughs on your website and everything else and we're going to figure out how this actually works.
Marco:
Because right now I have no idea.
Marco:
So it's way too early.
Marco:
I mean, this has been in the store for like a day and a half.
Marco:
So it's just way too early for me to have useful data yet.
Casey:
So what is the appropriate mechanism by which you could be contacted if somebody wants to buy an ad?
Marco:
If you go to the site, go to the contact page, and it says there, it says, you know, for ad inquiries, email here.
Marco:
So do that.
Marco:
But it might be... What site is that?
John:
Overcast.fm?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And it might be a week or two before I can actually get back to you with something useful.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally, and this is more out of my own curiosity, how are you or are you providing?
Casey:
I mean, you just hinted at it a second ago.
Casey:
Are you providing any sort of like analytics?
Casey:
And is there like a portal for that?
Casey:
Or is this just you ripping off emails when the time comes?
Casey:
Like, what's your intention with that?
Marco:
My intention is that people who buy the ads will be able to log into a portal and see the performance of the ads they bought.
Marco:
I haven't actually built that yet.
Marco:
I just have one giant dashboard that I can see in my admin panel.
Marco:
I can see how they're doing.
Marco:
I say all this in the privacy policy.
Marco:
The only thing I'm tracking is three things.
Marco:
Clicks, views, and subscriptions if they're podcast ads.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
For websites, it's just clicks and views.
Marco:
And they can be targeted by podcast category.
Marco:
So you can say, show this to everybody.
Marco:
Or you can say, show this to people who listen to shows that are in the iTunes technology category.
Marco:
I have targeting by top-level podcast category in the directory optionally.
Marco:
And so that helps a little bit.
Marco:
But that's it.
Marco:
So, you know, it's a very, very simple system.
Marco:
It's very low on data because, A, I find too much data in that situation kind of gross, and, B, I don't believe it's necessary for this.
Marco:
So we'll find out.
Marco:
We're sponsored this week by Hover.
Marco:
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Marco:
Did you know over 100 million .com domains are already registered and a new one is registered every second?
Marco:
When you think of an idea, you need to find it a great domain name before someone else snatches it up.
Marco:
And Hover makes it incredibly easy to quickly register your own .com domain.
Marco:
Instead of making you opt out of page after page of add-ons that you don't want or need, Hover only offers domains and email, the two core services.
Marco:
You can quickly secure your domain and then get back to working on your great idea.
Marco:
Hover is also known for their no wait, no hold, no transfer phone service.
Marco:
So this is kind of amazing.
Marco:
When you call them up,
Marco:
A real live human being picks up the phone.
Marco:
There's no holds.
Marco:
There's no waits.
Marco:
And the person who picks up the phone can help you.
Marco:
There's no transfers.
Marco:
There's no phone tree to go through.
Marco:
A real live human being picks up the phone if you call them for help.
Marco:
Plus, if you don't want to call, they also have great online stuff, email and live chat support as well.
Marco:
So you can find a great .com name for your idea at Hover.
Marco:
Go to Hover.com and use promo code ATP10 at checkout.
Marco:
That's ATP10 at checkout to save 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Hover for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So I feel like we should spend a few minutes talking about how much of a cesspool Uber is because what a disaster.
Casey:
I mean, what a freaking disaster.
Marco:
And this latest horrible thing they did, it's like it's just the latest in a string of horrible things they have done over the relatively short time they've been in existence.
Marco:
Like they're a horrible company run by horrible people.
Casey:
So if you're not aware, a woman who goes by Susan J. Fowler has written, reflecting on one very, very strange year at Uber.
Casey:
It is not a terribly long post, but it's long enough that you're going to want to leave yourself a few minutes to read it.
Casey:
And you absolutely should read it, and it is worth reading in its entirety.
Casey:
Don't skip around.
Casey:
It's worth it because it is flabbergasting how unbelievable it was, the behavior of Susan's superiors and, in some cases, peers, and the HR department at Uber.
Casey:
Suffice to say, I don't know if I should really pull a summarizer-in-chief on this one because there's so much to this post.
Casey:
The short version, and again, please read it.
Casey:
Please, please read it.
Casey:
But the short version is she was sexually harassed in various ways and in various magnitude pretty much from the moment she got there until the moment she left.
Casey:
And to me, the most despicable thing that I found about this whole story was that she was told when she bubbled up these complaints to HR at Uber that she was the only one complaining about this one particular individual.
Marco:
Yeah, it was a first-time offense.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
That's an important distinction.
Casey:
That's absolutely correct.
Casey:
It was a first-time offense.
Casey:
We'll call this person Bob.
Casey:
Bob has never done this before.
Casey:
It's Bob's first time being a complete turd.
Casey:
It's first time, yeah, I'm sure he didn't mean it.
Casey:
Don't worry about it.
Casey:
Which...
Casey:
is such a terrible way to approach this kind of a situation like i i don't understand like why why is the first offense even considered free like even if it was true like which it wasn't but like what why is that even an okay response even if it was true yeah i mean in atp tipster in the chat is phrasing it well in this is all caps but my voice is shot so i'm not going to scream is this first grade why the f is sexual harassment a strike-based system like truth exactly
Casey:
Why is this the way this works?
Marco:
You don't get free strikes on that.
Marco:
No, immediately fired, maybe arrested.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Casey:
So anyway, so Susan ends up talking to some of her peers, and her peers are like, oh, that's weird.
Casey:
I was talking to HR about Bob, and they told me that it was a first-time offense.
Casey:
And we are not the same person.
Casey:
We are not reporting the same incident.
Casey:
looks to us like HR is full of crap.
Casey:
And so, you know, there's always a chance that this is all fabricated.
Casey:
But man, I don't believe that for a second.
Casey:
Like, this is not one of those rage quit kind of posts where...
Casey:
Oh, you know, I didn't fit in well, and I'm just going to make up stuff about it.
Casey:
No, that's not how this reads at all.
Casey:
And this reads like an intelligent, mature person just stating the facts of what they went through.
Casey:
And God, is it terrible.
Casey:
And there was another report that came out.
Casey:
I don't have a link handy, but we'll find it for the show notes about how, and I'm butchering the details, but it was something like, if you don't make men...
Casey:
use their real names or anything like that, about 5% of them think that they have any room to grow with regard to relations to women or other minority groups.
Casey:
And guess what?
Casey:
All of us are a problem.
Casey:
I like to think of myself as relatively woke in this department, and I'm a damn problem.
Casey:
I don't get this right all the time.
Casey:
And oh, God, the utter...
Casey:
overwhelming self-confidence that these Uber employees have shown.
Casey:
Not the women, the men in HR.
Casey:
It's just preposterous.
Casey:
Like, oh my God.
Casey:
I just, I can't believe that this is a thing and that it's continued going on.
Casey:
Now, since this blog post, Travis Kalanick, is that his name?
Casey:
The CEO, whoever he is, has, to his credit, I guess...
Casey:
Take it a pretty strong stance on this in that he's taking it as true.
Casey:
He's taking it as evidence that there is a real problem.
Casey:
But I don't know, man, it's pretty late.
Casey:
Like everyone has known that Uber is really freaking slimy in a lot of freaking ways.
Casey:
And now is when you're finally jumping on board and being like, oh, you know, maybe we have something to change.
Casey:
It's just this whole situation is just so freaking gross.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I mean, that's like the CEOs in these situations always act so surprised.
Marco:
I had no idea this was going on.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Like that's either a complete BS or you were really doing a bad job at looking at your own company for very, for things that should be really common sense.
Marco:
Like something, something is seriously wrong here.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
it's it's not like the evil hr department is the cause of this no like the hr department is in service to the company the hr department like it's not anybody's friend it's not like a third party you know judge system hr their main role is to prevent the company from getting sued and to mitigate risks that might cause that
John:
This HR department isn't even doing that job well, by the way.
John:
That's true.
John:
Like so many parts of this company, this HR department is terrible even at its ostensible job, not even at its theoretical job in the ideal world.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But the point, the HR department's job is to protect the company from its employees.
Marco:
That is literally their job.
Marco:
If the HR department is being directed or being incentivized to do horrible things by the people who run the company, they're going to do horrible things.
Marco:
And it should come as no surprise, and I'm pretty sure it's BS that it did come as a surprise.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure this was no surprise.
Marco:
It should come as no surprise to the CEO of a company that...
Marco:
Horrible stuff goes on in HR when he himself seems to be a pretty horrible person from the little bit that I know, and the company does lots of horrible things and has a complete culture of being horrible and toxic and disrespectful of everyone, especially women.
Marco:
This is not the first time they've had problems with women in particular.
Marco:
Like, this is not their first one, not by a long shot.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
His whole thing about, I'm shocked, I'm going to investigate this immediately, that's BS.
Marco:
That's complete BS.
Marco:
So I don't believe that for a second.
Marco:
None of this should be forgiven and none of it should be isolated to a couple bad apples in the HR department because it's not that.
Marco:
It's a deep-rooted cultural problem.
Casey:
It's a systemic failure.
Casey:
It is absolutely a systemic failure.
Casey:
And it comes right from the top.
Casey:
It comes right from the top.
John:
That's why this is such a great example of very often people who are not
John:
steeped in these issues don't spend all the time you know we're reading about them whatever here here the phrase institutional underscore institutional sexism institutional bias or whatever and it seems like a buzzwordy thing that doesn't make any sense but a reasonable working definition is based on examples like this where you find yourself in a situation where they're
John:
there is some kind of institution or authority.
John:
That structure could be the government, but it could also be the company that you work for, which even though it is not the government, it is an organizational structure with authority over your life that you work within for as long as you decide you want to work there.
John:
And in this case, as in so many other cases in many other companies, you know, forever and ever, the institution has certain...
John:
attitudes towards whatever you want to be whether it be minorities or older people or women or whatever and those those policies and and biases and views come through in the rules that govern everybody else so you have an hr department that if it was functioning well in its role as marco described it to protect the company from its people uh you know part of it is like hr like any other part of the company is supposed to
John:
make the company more successful so if there is a problematic employee hr has to deal with that if that employee is doing things that could get the company sued it is in the company and hr's best interest to solve that problem and the most reasonable way to solve it is to try to make the company a place where people will want to work and that usually means taking the toxic person and you know disciplining them or getting rid of them right and
John:
it becomes much more difficult when that person is high up in the organization, or as they say in this thing, was a high performer.
John:
Yeah, when that person's valuable to the company.
John:
Right, right, right.
John:
But, you know, there is the larger value to the company.
John:
But anyway, these institutions have control over many of these employees' lives for as long as they work at the company.
John:
And yes, it is always obvious that just get another job someplace else.
John:
But the thing about institutional sexism or any other sort of institutional bias is,
John:
it's not always clear and it very often is not the case and it's very difficult to tell that if i were to leave this tech job and go to a different tech job will that company have better attitudes towards uh you know whatever my thing is whether it's minorities or women maybe maybe not like that's that's a selling point of a company but if you're in this control it's a it's not that easy to change jobs and b if you're within this control structure these
John:
these policies and attitudes and the things that will happen to you uh seem like an injustice because they are an injustice um because you view the the authority of the company as the arbiter of the you know the rules of play within the company it's not as if people are getting murdered right so it's not it's not for the most part it's usually not a criminal type of thing it is
John:
Here are the rules as set out.
John:
And if there are any violation of the rules or violation of what I think should be the norms, there is an authority that I appeal to, whether it be my manager, my manager's manager, the HR department, whatever it may be.
John:
For example, if you found an error in your payroll, like, you know, you got paid the wrong amount, you go to the payroll department and in a functioning company, the payroll department's job is to make sure that everybody gets paid the amount they're supposed to be paid.
John:
And if there's an error and you brought it to the payroll department,
John:
If the institution is functioning correctly, they would correct the error or tell you that it's not an error because they did some weird thing with taxes that they would then explain to you.
John:
That's the function of the payroll department.
John:
I don't think anybody would argue with like, you know, like it would seem like an injustice if you found you're missing 100 bucks on your paycheck and you brought it to the payroll department of the institution that you are in.
John:
and they didn't correct that error or tried to tell you that you did your math wrong or said well it's only a it's the first time we made this mistake so don't worry about it like that would feel like an injustice even though you know it's just a payroll department of the company you work at and if you don't like it get another job right that's the whole attitude you hear but it is an injustice because that's what the thing is supposed to do so if the company says oh we're an inclusive employer and we love everybody and you know we certainly don't contone sexual harassment which any company will take it will say if you ask them
John:
hey company x do you condone sexual harassment they'll all say they don't right so it's their stated policy not to so if this happens to you in a company in any company that in this day and age is going to say that and you take this thing to the authority of the institution that you are working within and you say hey hr department we're supposed to be a company in which people don't get sexually harassed it's my first day of my job and my boss is propositioning me for sex
John:
Here you go.
John:
It's on a silver platter.
John:
Now, HR, do your job as stated.
John:
And again, it's not as if like, oh, I'm expecting HR to protect me.
John:
They should be protecting the company by having someone like this in it because it's against their stated policy and it's bad for business, period.
John:
The only reason you wouldn't do that is if there is institutional bias and sexism from the highest levels to say, actually, the strategy we want to take here is to sweep that under the carpet, to shuffle the victim off someplace else, to put the blame on them, to...
John:
to give them an option like well you can either stay under this manager but he's going to give you a bad performance review because we're going to totally tell him that you reported him and if he does give you a bad performance review you really only have yourself to blame for report like i'm not making this up read the thing this is what's happening in the company you really only have yourself to blame and because we did give you the option to transfer someplace else and the employee was like but but this is the department i want to be in this is where my skill set lies and if i transfer i'll have to learn a new thing like well we gave you a choice
John:
or you could just quit your job like they don't mention that but it's always an option like you'd always just quit your job but she had skills that were a perfect fit for the job that she was in she enjoyed doing it technically she liked some of the people she was working with there's just this one niggling problem right about being sexually harassed at work so she ended up transferring to a different department which was painful and did well like it's just it's such a terrible story of
John:
And then she had problems there as well and other issues and she would bring them to HR and they would do the same thing and finding about all the other people.
John:
This is institutional sexism where the institution is working against her.
John:
She has a reasonable expectation, according to the state of policies of the company, that the people whose job it is to be the referees for this area, just like the payroll department is the referee for how much you get paid.
John:
are failing to act and that is like the definition of injustice and when it's an institution it's the definition of institutional sexism and you can expand that out to any institution you want whether it be your family unit at the smallest institution where maybe everyone in your family thinks all the wives should stay at home with their kids all the way up to the government with policies that are you know biased in in one direction or another against uh people who are minorities or people who are women which is the
John:
And so that that's what's maddening to the reason, you know, the whole social justice movement and the pejorative SJW that's used.
John:
The reason they have the word justice in them is because all of them derive from a recognition that every large grouping or organizational structure has.
John:
you know has a behavior as an overall organism that is that emerges from the attitudes of the people running it and despite what people may say uh it's pretty easy to find out if you're in a situation where the institution is working against you and where the supposed places you go to resolve are
John:
whatever issue you have, whether it's a discrepancy in your paycheck or someone violating what you think is an HR policy, if those institutions fail to act or actively work against you, that feels like and is an injustice.
John:
And that's what people are fighting against.
John:
And I think that the payroll analogy is the one that probably works because most people think that's a no-brainer.
John:
They understand the role of the payroll department.
John:
And if they don't get paid the money they were promised, that is an injustice.
John:
But you apply the exact same thing to other things like,
John:
well, he's a really nice guy and he's really important in the company.
John:
And can't you just change to a different place?
John:
Because it boggles my mind that any modern company, that these things would ever happen.
John:
It almost sounds fantastical.
John:
But then you'll hear the same story from tons.
John:
Talk to women that you know who have worked in large companies for any part of their career.
John:
you'll hear these same stories everywhere.
John:
And that's another clue to you that this is an institutional thing.
John:
It's not just Uber that Uber is a bad company.
John:
Oh, Uber is the one bad apple.
John:
Everybody else is fine.
John:
It is everywhere.
John:
It is systemic.
John:
It is societal.
John:
It is cultural.
John:
It is institutional.
John:
That's the definition.
John:
And that's why the stories like this are depressing because no matter what Uber does...
John:
A, it's probably not going to change Uber because if they haven't changed by now, they probably never will.
John:
And B, it's not going to solve the problem in all the other places.
John:
The only way you can fix it systemically is with systemic solutions and cultural change and all the other stuff.
John:
And that takes a really long time and is very difficult to do.
John:
And that's why stories like this are very depressing.
Casey:
And since this original blog post was written, and in just the last few hours as we record, somebody's tweeted, we'll put a link to it, that 118 people have resigned or given their notice since yesterday, which I guess is Tuesday.
Casey:
It was in the last couple of days is really what it amounts to.
Casey:
And that was only in San Francisco.
Casey:
This is at Uber in San Francisco.
Casey:
Like, that's a lot of people, 120 people.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
And, you know, I power to you, man, if you are willing to to stand up for this and and and say, I cannot be a part of this anymore.
Casey:
Like here again, like I like to think of myself as reasonably woke.
Casey:
But if I mean, I don't know if I would have the gumption to just walk away from my job that's putting food on my table like.
Casey:
That's awesome.
Casey:
And men or women, it doesn't matter.
Casey:
Whoever these 118 people are, good for you.
Casey:
That's tremendous that you have put your money where your mouth is.
Casey:
And yeah, I can't emphasize enough.
Casey:
I see it from time to time at my work and...
Casey:
And I – and I'm not even necessarily like – I don't have my antennae up, if you will, to like search for it.
Casey:
I just see it from time to time, and I try to do my best to correct it when it happens.
Casey:
But this stuff happens everywhere.
Casey:
It's not unique to San Francisco.
Casey:
It's not unique to Uber, although Uber seems to be excelling in this department.
Casey:
It's everywhere.
Casey:
And –
Casey:
And it's up to everyone, but particularly those of us who are not oppressed like the three of us, to give credence to the stories of those who are, to pay attention to the stories of those who are.
Casey:
And to try to fix or speak for, or really even better, give the microphone to, which is comical since I'm talking into a mic right now and not doing this.
Casey:
But anyway, give the microphone to someone who is oppressed and who allow them to speak for themselves.
John:
The other thing I like about this post is I think it does a good job of explaining why someone might stay in a job where this happens.
John:
Because that's always the reaction.
John:
It's like, well, just quit.
John:
If you don't like it, just quit.
John:
Right?
Right.
John:
There are mitigating factors, one of which may be you really like the work you're doing, and it's technically interesting, and you are growing your skills, and maybe you even like the people you work with.
John:
It's very possible to be in a company whose institutions are failing you.
John:
But nevertheless, you enjoy your peers and employees, and maybe you enjoy your direct manager, but you know that it only takes one bad person and then one non-functioning institution to fail to, you know, to fail to do its job to...
John:
protect the company from toxic employees like this to you know like you know retention as part of the job of hr when 100 people quit because of something like this that's hr not doing its job right but it's like why why did she stay in this job i think this this article uh has a good description of why someone why it's not just like oh well someone you know uh said something uh you know lewd to me and therefore i gotta quit the next day and if you don't quit the next day it's your own fault right that's a ridiculous thing like
John:
people are more complicated than just they're not you know it's not just one thing right and so that's why this thing is like reflecting on a very strange year like it is very even-handed and i think when you read it you can see the excitement of working for a company with a lot of vc money doing interesting technical stuff with people that you enjoy and expanding your skills and generally having a career a thing that most people get to have like and that is that is the tension do you want to have a career or is your entire career going to be
John:
uh sending reports to hr every time someone does something bad to you it's like i shouldn't have to choose between those two things like can't i have a career and not be sexually harassed is that is that even an option on the table um and so it makes people have these ridiculous choices like well
John:
it's not really that bad, is it?
John:
And I guess I'll just tolerate it.
John:
And if I just keep reporting it to HR, maybe I'll do something eventually.
John:
And it's just, it's not a healthy situation, but like the expectation that everything is your fault.
John:
If you don't immediately storm out and quit at the first time someone does something you don't like.
John:
Otherwise, like as the HR department, well, it's really your own fault at that point.
John:
He's going to give you a negative performance review, but you can't really blame the guy.
John:
Right.
John:
And I mean, like,
John:
So that might have been over a lot of people's lines.
John:
But it really depends on what state you are in your career and how much you know of the world and, you know, what capacity you have to leave your job at that moment and how excited you are to be able to work in this thing.
John:
It's like, well, it's just that one bad person.
John:
And if I work in a different department, I want to deal with them because there's always people at work you don't have to deal with.
John:
And if you've lived your entire life as a woman in virtually any culture in the entire history of the universe, you are sadly very used to dealing with people crapping on you and treating you badly.
John:
And so have probably internalized some notion that this is a thing that you have to tolerate to get ahead in the world.
John:
And sadly, you're also probably kind of right about it.
John:
So that's like, I think will give people, reading this, I think will give people a...
John:
a better idea of what of what it might be like to be in the situation and why you might not do all the things that i'm assuming people down in the comments are screaming that this person was supposed to do which is you know run out with your hair on fire at the first sign of anything going wrong which honestly might have actually been the better choice in the case of uber but um is not a realistic thing to demand of people otherwise they somehow lose their right to justice and somehow lose their lose their expectation of being in a functioning institution that doesn't hate them
Casey:
yeah it's just ridiculous it's and again I know I said it before but truly it is worth your time to read this entire post it is extremely well thought out and extremely mature and it just spells out the facts the way Susan saw them and I believe every word of it and
Casey:
I mean, even hypothetically, if this was laced with BS, which, again, I truly do not believe, this to me sounds like something that absolutely could have happened.
Casey:
And maybe if it didn't happen, it may not have been at Uber.
Casey:
This this is stuff that happens every day and I don't see it.
Casey:
And I want to I want to I'm trying to in part by talking to the three of you and anyone else that's listening or two of you.
Casey:
God, I can count.
Casey:
It's late.
Casey:
We I'm trying to to open my eyes wider to these sorts of things and be more aware of them and try to figure out how I can react appropriately in these situations.
Casey:
But.
Casey:
golly, this is just bananas.
John:
And I am... There's also an opportunity for people at their jobs to... I mean, I know at my job it has sparked this discussion that I think, you know, whatever venue you have to have this discussion, if you work for a company, like, people might be talking about this story, especially if you're in the tech industry.
John:
It's time to ask around.
John:
Hey, has... I mean, a good HR department should be doing this.
John:
Hey...
John:
Does anyone in our company feel like they can't go to HR or has gone to HR and has felt like HR has failed them in some way?
John:
Things like this happen all the time.
John:
I mean, you know, people are people and there's always communication gaps, but...
John:
it's like a teachable moment type thing where what a good company will do with a good hr department is use this to say if this is happening here we don't want it to and let us know and employees should talk amongst themselves like sometimes people don't talk about you know like they'll report some of the hr but maybe you don't tell like your peers that you did that you know because you don't want to because you fear retribution which is itself a very bad sign right off the bat but
John:
Sometimes it takes something like this.
John:
It's the same reason the women in this company didn't get together immediately.
John:
They had to eventually figure out, wait, but I reported that same guy and they told me it was the first time.
John:
These conversations need to happen and a healthy company should have happened.
John:
As this story went around, people at my job, people started talking about it and talking about their experiences with HR at our company and how it compares to this story.
John:
if you don't hear about these stories and you don't think it's happening in your company maybe it's totally not but maybe it is and you're just not hearing about it because it hasn't happened to you and the people who has happened to you haven't felt like they could tell you for you know and like the worse it is probably the more hesitant people will be to share these stories because if it really is bad and you really are punished for reporting it and this and you know
John:
HR justifies retaliation against you based on it and everything.
John:
You're not going to tell your coworkers that it's happening.
John:
You're going to keep your mouth shut and you're not going to report another one because you need this job.
John:
Like, that's the case where everyone clams up.
John:
Whereas if there really is an expectation and a functioning HR department and someone has a bad interaction and they should feel...
John:
free to tell everyone all their co-workers and their boss about it because they'd have an expectation like this is not functioning correctly and you know i was told something that does not seem to comport with the supposed policies of this company um and that's the only way these things get worked out because if people are just quiet and go about their business and try not to rock the boat like that's not a good culture for anything but you know it period in a company but certainly not a good culture for making sure you have
John:
Making sure you have a company that is able to retain employees, good employees, because this person seems like a good employee.
John:
I mean, she wrote an O'Reilly book on a topic and speaks at conferences.
John:
It's not like she's just this random cog in the machine, right?
John:
Oh, just throw her away.
John:
We don't need to have that.
John:
It's more important to protect the high-performing sexual harasser.
John:
It's ridiculous.
John:
But anyway, a good HR department will try to make a company that is attractive to employees.
John:
People want to work there, and then once they do work there, they want to stay there.
John:
That is, you know, again, it is not a...
John:
a role that is in service of the employee, but it's a virtuous cycle if the HR department realizes that by making it a better company to work at, they will be protecting the company and they will be making the company more successful, even if their main goal is to, main loyalty is to the company and not to the employee.
Casey:
Was it Thursday of last week, the day after we recorded, that we got a very weird announcement out of Apple?
Casey:
Was it Thursday?
Casey:
It was sometime after we recorded and not too long after we recorded.
Casey:
Ten minutes after we recorded.
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
That's what it felt like for sure.
Casey:
I think Apple's trolling us because clearly they care about our recording schedule.
Casey:
WWDC 2017 has been announced.
Casey:
It is a week before I thought it would be.
Casey:
It is the 5th through 9th of June.
Casey:
I had guessed, and I was pretty confident it would be the following week.
Casey:
I am wrong.
Casey:
I had also guessed it would be in San Francisco, and that's not right either.
Casey:
So it's going to San Jose, which apparently is the most boring big city in all of America, from what I'm told.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
that's a thing people who say that have never been to any other cities in america yeah that's true and and i mean i've never been to san jose um i've heard it's nice but i don't really know anything about it um but one way or another they have announced wbdc they've announced the dates this is way sooner than they've done it in many years usually it's like april or even may when they announce that that oh in a couple of days you can buy tickets so uh
Casey:
Get ready.
Casey:
And this is convenient if you're somebody like us that's probably going to go regardless of whether or not you have a ticket.
Casey:
It's also convenient if you're someone that doesn't live in the United States and needs to work out, you know, the entry procedure.
Casey:
And I'm just going to dance around this whole topic.
Casey:
It's nice to know way in advance.
Casey:
And I think part of, if not most of the reason that it was announced this far out is because it's not in San Francisco and that changes things.
Casey:
And nobody really knows how it changes things, although I bet you weren't going to talk about it for a while, but it certainly changes things.
Casey:
And
Casey:
And I'm curious to see how this turns out, because it certainly gave me pause for a minute, because everything I've understood about San Jose is that it is a really sleepy town after all the local businesses go to sleep, if you will, after business hours.
Casey:
And a lot of the reason that I go to WWDC each year is so I can hang out with you guys and all my other friends and mutual friends and socialize and have fun and continue to build existing relationships and build new relationships.
Casey:
And I don't know how conducive San Jose is to that.
Casey:
For all I know, it could be great.
Casey:
I mean, I really honestly don't know.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
But it's certainly different.
Casey:
And how are we going to go to the House of Prime Rib if it's an hour away?
Casey:
That's not going to work.
Casey:
What do you do?
Casey:
This is terrible.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
John, what do you think about all this?
John:
Well, I don't like traveling and I don't like change.
John:
I don't like change to travel.
John:
So Apple must have detected that I had gotten used to the flight to San Francisco and the arrangements there and was familiar with enough of the city to start to feel comfortable, you know?
John:
Um, and so they said, we need to change things up.
John:
Um,
John:
As many people pointed out, the obvious reason they would change this is because it's marketing for Apple because it's closer to their headquarters.
John:
It's got to be cheaper than doing anything in San Francisco.
John:
In theory, it was supposed to be cheaper for attendees.
John:
In practice, I don't know if that will be the case because obviously...
John:
all the traditional wwdc attendees plus the people who go without a ticket or some fraction of them anyway are going to drive our prices but um i did get uh hotel reservations provisional hotel reservations for less money than i could have gotten them in san francisco for the same week uh not much less but a little bit less and certainly a nicer location so mine's a thousand dollars less
Casey:
Yeah, same here.
Casey:
But I have not independently confirmed this, but I had people that I saw on Twitter saying that within a couple hours of this announcement, all those prices went up to effectively equivalent to San Francisco prices.
Casey:
So last couple of years, it has been, and I'm sure we've talked about this on the show, but it has been for a middle of the road hotel for the area.
Casey:
And admittedly, it's not the greatest area for sightseeing.
Casey:
And there's a bunch of problems with the area in which
Casey:
uh, WWDC used to happen in San Francisco.
Casey:
But the point of the matter is for a unremarkable hotel, but not slummy, it was like $400 a night.
Casey:
I think I spent like 2,500 or $3,000 for a week or five nights in San Francisco.
Casey:
And somebody said to me at some point, I wish I could remember who it was, but somebody pointed out,
Casey:
Last couple of years in San Francisco, you were basically buying an Apple Watch every single night you were there and then throwing it away.
Casey:
That's how expensive the hotels were.
Casey:
Was it you, John?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Last year's WWDC.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So that's barbaric.
Casey:
That's just – San Francisco, or at least that part of San Francisco –
Casey:
Is not a nice enough city to justify that kind of price.
Casey:
Like, it's just not.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
And so here it is for a fleeting moment.
Casey:
San Jose seemed like it would be a whole lot better.
Casey:
But from what I understand, all of the excess inventory that was low priced has been snapped up.
Casey:
Now, that very well could be because Apple has also bought a bunch of hotel rooms for attendees, which they've done.
John:
in years past that is very very likely apple almost certainly has blocked out discounted rooms for attendees so that basically if you plan to to try to get a ticket don't book a non-refundable hotel room yet right exactly yeah the strategy been doing the strategy at san francisco for a few years always as soon as you find out the dates you book a refundable ticket and then what i would do is wait to see that if i do get a ticket which i have
John:
in years past look at the rates that apple offers for like hey we reserved a block of room for you some years the apple reserve room rate is cheaper than the one i provisionally booked sometimes it's actually more expensive so it really depends on how quick people are on the draw and how quickly the hotels figure out what's going on but in this case but by the time you're listening to this if you haven't already booked something
John:
probably apple's reserve block of room rate is going to be better than anything you get right now and there are it seems like there are more hotels at formerly reasonable prices closer to whatever the convention center is in san jose because moscone has some super expensive hotels fairly close to it and some cheaper ones like 15 minute walk away and then it goes down from there whereas the san jose one right around it within like the same block there's a couple of big hotels which don't seem as nice and we're going for
John:
uh you know a hundred and something a night if you were really quick on the draw of course now they're all up to four or five hundred but you know what yeah mine is like i got mine for like 189 or something i mean i haven't paid a rate that low in san francisco in a few years yeah i haven't seen anything with the one in front of it in many years yeah exactly so true oh my goodness so true
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So on the one side, so I guess at first that seems like an improvement because it seems like it's more accessible financially until you have to fly there because there seem to be considerably fewer options to get into San Jose than there are San Francisco, which makes sense.
Casey:
San Francisco is a much bigger airport from everything I've gathered today.
Casey:
I am more than a little bitter that no matter where I fly out of, I'm going to have to change planes.
Casey:
In the past, I've driven two hours northbound to Dulles, everyone's favorite airport, and gotten a direct flight on Virgin America, which is non-sarcastically my favorite airline in the States.
Casey:
And typically, Underscore and I have flown on the same flights out and back, and it's been wonderful.
Casey:
And now I'm going to have to change planes like an animal.
Casey:
which I'm perfectly capable of doing, but I don't care for doing.
Casey:
And that's a bummer.
Casey:
Alternatively, we could fly into San Francisco and take like an hour long drive or Caltrain or something along those lines, which is a bummer.
Casey:
So getting there is a little bit tougher and probably more expensive, which stinks.
Casey:
But in the grand scheme of things, I think this has a lot of potential upside.
Casey:
It does make a lot of things different and at first glance potentially worse, but I think it could make a lot of things better.
Casey:
Also announced today, which we're not going to talk about very much, the Apple Campus 2 has been officially named Apple Park, and it will start to receive employees that will be moving in in April and WWDC is in June.
Casey:
So it's
Casey:
It is certainly possible that there will be one or more WWDC events at Apple Park, which would be kind of neat, I guess.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
There's been a lot of, like, theorizing and scheming about where things like the beer bash will happen.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Where will the keynote happen?
Casey:
And we know the name of the conference center or event center or whatever it is that WWDC is happening.
Casey:
I've already forgotten what it is.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter.
Casey:
But there's a lot of questions about this.
Casey:
And additionally, somewhere on the website, or maybe it was in the announcement, they made passing reference to...
Casey:
how Apple's working with San Jose to kind of have stuff to do after hours.
Casey:
What does that mean?
Casey:
Does that mean that they work with people like layers and alt conf to get something going on, but that's not really after hours that's during the show.
Casey:
So is it, is it that they're working with the relay folks to get something going?
Casey:
Probably not, but you never know.
Casey:
You know, there's a million questions here.
Casey:
Very few answers.
Casey:
However,
Casey:
At least we know when it is, and at least we know where it is.
Casey:
And we'd know that before what feels like 10 seconds in advance, which is good.
Casey:
So I'm tentatively optimistic, but we'll see how it works out.
John:
I'm going to miss the convention center.
John:
Like, I don't even know what the San Jose one is like, but Moss County was cool looking.
John:
right yeah i like that i like that space i mean obviously the rooms themselves are like you know boring partitions that they move around and stuff but i think apple always did a good job of making it feel so the that familiarity will be will be a little bit weird the potential upsides of san jose is that nerds will be able to more thoroughly dominate the place because in san francisco yeah there's a lot of nerds and when you're around moscone you see a lot of little black wwc jackets but san francisco is a big busy city full of people going about their business and as you move outward you
John:
Nerds don't dominate the city, like the people who live in the city and work there.
John:
I mean, it's other nerds, the people going to work at Twitter and stuff, right?
John:
But it's a different set of nerds.
John:
In San Jose, because the population is lower and it's just less of a big city than San Francisco, I would imagine that we will...
John:
dominate more um i'm worried a little bit about facilities as people have pointed out i'm not so much interested in bars but even just as simple as like hey where do you want to go for dinner tonight if there's any remotely good restaurants they may be overwhelmed by the additional volume of people but then again it is a convention theater so maybe they're used to it i don't know it's hard it's hard to gauge that but again san francisco has a much larger capacity to absorb
John:
uh people's activities just because they're used to you know it's a big city there's many more options more places to go places that are more used to large volumes of people on an ongoing basis whereas this surge for wwc could be uh large as far as san jose is concerned or it could not be because i think maybe their convention center regularly houses conventions that are seven times the size of wwc in which case you know not a big deal and also
John:
Maybe people who previously went to San Francisco for WWDC without a ticket to just, you know, enjoy the company will think twice of it, either because there's not a direct flight or because they think there won't be stuff to do.
John:
You know, it won't be as much stuff to do or whatever.
John:
I think the idea of people going into San Francisco from San Jose is crazy because that's a ridiculous trip and it's long distance even without traffic.
John:
You're not going to want to make that trip back when your meal ends at 2 a.m.
John:
or whatever.
John:
Certainly, I would never do that, but I think most people wouldn't do that.
Marco:
Can you imagine getting back in an Uber to go ride for an hour at 2 in the morning to go back to the Park 55?
Marco:
No.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Hard pass.
Casey:
No, thank you.
John:
Yeah, and maybe the weather will be nicer.
John:
Maybe it won't be freezing cold.
Casey:
My understanding is that's accurate, that it will be considerably warmer.
Marco:
Yeah, it seems that San Jose is actually in California.
John:
Right.
John:
And for me, because I hate flying and I hate traveling, I'm going to take a direct flight to SFO.
John:
I can't do the change.
John:
Like one six-hour flight, I can't do two four-hour flights with an hour in between or whatever the hell it would be if I went through Texas or whatever my options are.
Marco:
I'm curious, how are you going to get down to there from there?
Marco:
How does that work?
Marco:
I'll get someone to drive me.
Marco:
It'll be fine.
Casey:
Yeah, I've debated doing the same thing, especially inbound where the schedule is a little less intense.
Casey:
And I haven't booked plane travel yet.
Casey:
Yeah, neither have I. But I think what I'll likely do is just fly into San Jose and deal with the fact that I have to put on my big boy pants and change planes at some point.
John:
We'll say we're hearing from you because your connection got canceled or got missed.
John:
How excited you are to miss registration.
Casey:
No, true.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
And that's why, like, sure, I am being a little bit of a baby saying, I don't want to change planes.
Casey:
But truly, like, that's why I drive two hours, because driving two hours to a larger airport is...
Casey:
is something I can control.
Casey:
When I get stranded in Dallas or Charlotte or Chicago or something like that, I'm screwed.
Casey:
There's nothing I can do about that at that point.
Casey:
So I'm with you, John.
Casey:
I completely understand.
John:
Yeah, that's one of the many reasons to try to go direct.
John:
And then for me personally, there's a potential that I won't be able to go at all because my wife might have work travel during that time and then I wouldn't have anybody to watch the kids.
John:
So potentially I'm not going at all.
John:
And of course, always the option of me not getting a ticket and if I don't get one,
John:
As always, I will have to reconsider because I'm not really going there for super duper nightlife and drinking.
John:
I'm going to sit in boring nerd sessions and learn things.
John:
But you're the life of the party.
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
I'm sure I'll be terribly missed.
John:
You will.
John:
you would be certainly by the two of us marco would be so excited to be able to figure out a new recording rig where he's got two people live one person remote oh god please don't make me do that that would be awful yeah anyway i will be entering the lottery uh uh anyway and hopefully i'll be able to either work out something with child care or my wife's work travel will change because it's not set in stone at this point and i totally i love the fact that we case already mentioned that we found out so much earlier
John:
like even before like we can't even put our you know name into the hat for the lottery until the end of march so they gave us so much notice which is great it's like so much more relaxing although the mad rush is still there because as soon as everyone i felt like i found out like an hour after everybody else did despite the fact that through many venues if i had just opened my eyes i would have known much sooner and then i'm scrambling to try to get a number with a one in front of it as my hotel room rate which i think i barely did
Casey:
But, I mean, all in all, I'm tentatively excited, like I said.
Casey:
I think this could be a bunch of awesome changes.
Casey:
Now, it certainly could be garbage, and it could work out really poorly, and there'll be nowhere to go after hours, nothing to do.
Casey:
So I'm excited.
Casey:
I think it could be a lot of fun, and I'm really looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.
John:
So getting just a little more on the venue stuff, do we all agree that the keynote will not be in the Steve Jobs Theater in Apple Park?
John:
It's too small.
John:
It's not big enough.
Marco:
Yeah, it's not even close.
John:
I always wondered about that theater, why they made it.
John:
I mean, I guess for press events, 1,000 is probably plenty, but Apple has had a lot of press events in bigger venues.
John:
Like, even the Watch event held, like, 5,000 or something.
John:
So I kind of wonder why they made it so small.
Marco:
Well, I mean, I'm sure the rationale was basically, like, you know, we can have some events on campus, which we do, and, like, the smaller events that aren't, like, 5,000 people in a room, they just have on their campus.
Marco:
And the rationale is probably, like...
Marco:
To make it meaningfully bigger, it's like, do we want to put a 5,000-person theater in our campus?
Marco:
And that's a lot of people to shove into one room.
Marco:
It's a really big room.
Marco:
That's probably a massive undertaking for relatively little benefit.
Marco:
They can just go book a place in San Francisco for that or book the San Jose Conference Center for that, and it's probably fine.
John:
That whole Steve Jobs theater is just a facade for the 800 levels of sub-basements where they do the car development, right?
Yeah.
John:
Something like that.
John:
In the underground test track facility that's a complete recreation of the Nurburgring.
John:
Yeah, that's it.
John:
With artificial sunlight over the whole thing.
Marco:
I would not assume that there's going to be any involvement between Apple's new campus and WWDC.
Marco:
I don't think there's going to be anything there.
Marco:
They don't really need to, and it would be a pretty big ordeal.
Marco:
5,000 people is a lot.
Marco:
To do anything with 5,000 people...
Marco:
Like, that is a large logistical challenge.
Marco:
And when the people can just walk to different buildings that are all within the same downtown area, that's way easier.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
We'll see what happens.
Casey:
Well, good luck, you two, getting tickets.
Marco:
I'm not trying for a ticket.
Marco:
Oh, you're not?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
I decided last year, you know, I'm always so, like, double and triple booked for things I want to do during that week, during every time of every day.
Marco:
Humblebrack.
Marco:
That, like, there is just...
Marco:
A ticket on me at this point, I would feel better with somebody else getting it.
Marco:
I feel like it's wasted on me now because there's so much else I want to do during those daytime slots.
Marco:
And last year, I didn't go to that many sessions, and I felt really bad about that.
Marco:
So this year, I'm just going to be like, you know, I'm just going to let someone else get my ticket this time because I think I don't need it anymore.
Casey:
I'm giving you a hard time, but I actually...
Casey:
felt very similarly.
Casey:
Now, I did have Layers that I went to almost the entirety of last year.
Casey:
And quick aside, if you, for some reason, want to be in that area and you don't get a ticket or perhaps you want something a little less developer-centric, Layers is a great conference.
Casey:
And I think I could have sworn I saw that they were at least contemplating going to San Jose, but I might be lying about that, so double-check me.
Casey:
But
Casey:
But yeah, if Layers is a thing again, be it in San Francisco or San Jose, it is definitely worth checking out.
Casey:
But anyways, last year, you know, I had a lot more availability because I didn't have a conference ticket to WWDC.
Casey:
I had one to Layers and I still felt a bit overwhelmed and triple booked.
Casey:
And I'm giving you a hard time about humble bragging about how busy you were.
Casey:
But truth be told, I totally understand.
Casey:
And I am in the exact same boat.
Casey:
I will be trying for a ticket for sure because I think I still have a lot to get from it in a way that I don't know that you necessarily do, Marco.
Casey:
I agree with what you just said.
Casey:
But we'll see what happens.
Casey:
John obviously will be putting his hat in the ring, and we'll see how it goes.
Casey:
But I'm looking forward to it one way or the other.
John:
Yeah, I forgot about Layers.
John:
That's an option.
John:
That would be an excuse for me to go.
John:
It's like, well, I didn't get a ticket, but oh, well, I'll buy a ticket to Layers instead.
Casey:
Yeah, and I feel guilty because I feel the same way.
Casey:
But truth be told, Layers really is a great conference.
Casey:
I shouldn't be positioning it as an also-ran because it really is really, really good.
Casey:
Now, full disclosure, one of the women that runs Layers, Jessie Char, she also does our ad sales, and so we're inclined to like her anyway.
Casey:
But the truth of the matter is she's awesome.
Casey:
It went the other direction.
Marco:
She does our ad sales because we liked her so much.
Casey:
That's true, actually, yeah.
Casey:
And Layers is just – it's such an unbelievably good conference and a very diverse conference in a way that WWDC is not, which is super refreshing and really, really awesome.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
That is one of the biggest things that I want to do instead of going to WWDC this year.
Marco:
I hope Layers happens.
Marco:
If it does happen, I'm there.
Marco:
No question.
Casey:
It shouldn't be positioned as an also-ran.
Casey:
It is a peer to WWDC.
Casey:
It is truly a tremendous show.
Casey:
We'll see what happens, but I'm looking forward to it one way or another.
Casey:
I really, really hope that
Casey:
that all three of us make it out there.
Casey:
So I will put in a good word with Tina to temporarily quit her job or something if need be.
Casey:
Small price to pay, am I right?
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Hover, Warby Parker, and Indochino, and we will see you next week.
Casey:
Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them.
Marco:
At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Casey:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T.
Casey:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
John:
It's accidental.
John:
Accidental.
John:
They didn't mean.
Marco:
I have had... I've been gaming again on the Apple TV with Adam, my son.
Marco:
And a while back, like right after I finished playing through all the emulator stuff with Providence on the Apple TV, I was playing them all with the SteelSeries, is it?
Marco:
The Nimbus controller?
Marco:
Whatever the Nimbus is, I think it's a SteelSeries.
Marco:
And it's one of the many $50 Apple TV gamepad controller things.
Marco:
And it's fine.
Marco:
It's not great, but it's fine.
Marco:
And right after I finished playing all of these old platformers with that controller, somebody recommended that I check out the HoriPad Ultimate.
Marco:
This is a company... I was not familiar with it, but apparently they're well-respected.
Marco:
The Hori company, I guess.
Marco:
They're well-respected for making gamepads.
Marco:
And there's a model called the Hori Pad Ultimate that is, as far as I can tell, only sold at Apple stores and through Apple's online site.
Marco:
And I've been playing with that the last couple days, and...
Marco:
night and day better it is so good it is so much better than the nimbus for for for like the actual d-pad and playing old games with the d-pad the analog sticks and everything i couldn't care less about because i'm not i'm not that picky about analog sticks
Marco:
But the D-pad and the buttons and the responsiveness of it is just so much better than the Nimbus.
Marco:
And it's more practical.
Marco:
It's easier to turn on and off and everything.
Marco:
And there's the actual power switch on it and stuff like that.
Marco:
It also charges via lightning.
Marco:
So it's very nice, very convenient.
Marco:
Highly recommended the Hori Pad Ultimate Apple TV game controller.
Marco:
Apparently, it also works with iPads and iPhones, but I have not yet tried it with those.
Casey:
So what have you been playing that isn't emulated?
Casey:
Or is that basically it?
Marco:
Well, there's kind of an asterisk on that.
Marco:
So I have not actually loaded up Providence yet, because at some point in the last few months since I last touched it, all of my games got deleted out of it, which is probably some kind of Apple TV storage purge thing.
Marco:
And so I probably have to reload them all on, but I will have lost all my progress, and I'm not looking forward to that.
Marco:
But I instead have been playing the official...
Marco:
Sega authorized ports to the Apple TV of the Sonic the Hedgehog series, Sonic 1, 2, and CD.
Marco:
They were done... Oh, God, I forget the guy's name already.
Marco:
They were done by a really good person.
Marco:
And they actually have remastered the Sonic games, these three Genesis Sonic games,
Marco:
to be natively widescreen to have built-in like saves uh christian whitehead is the guy thank you chloe de guzman in the chat christian whitehead is the is the person or company i guess i think it's a person who ported the game and it's a very these are very well done ports actually like nice widescreen versions of these old sonic games
Marco:
and they actually don't break in widescreen.
Marco:
Things aren't worse or weird in some way.
Marco:
They had to make a couple of tweaks to the games to make it not break.
Marco:
Like in Sonic 1, the boss of Spring Yard Zone kind of depends on the field of the game being a certain width.
Marco:
And so in this remaster that's widescreen, they just put up these two big walls on two sides to force it back into the right width.
Marco:
Stuff like that.
Marco:
So anyway, really good ports of all three of these games, of Sonic 1, Sonic 2, and Sonic CD.
Marco:
They're awesome.
Marco:
We've been having a lot of fun playing them.
Marco:
uh and apparently uh he has been hired to do something called sonic mania which is like a basically a new sonic game in the style of the old ones because there have been a million garbage sonic games like since genesis like all the stuff they've done afterwards and it has largely gone nowhere uh really and it has not been that memorable uh but there's a new one now being made uh i don't know when it's coming out but oh it's for the nintendo switch i should mention i'm getting a nintendo switch
Marco:
What?
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I feel like it's going to be fun.
John:
How are you getting Nintendo Switch?
John:
Because I want to get one, and I missed the one-hour pre-order window.
Marco:
So did I, but a friend of the show who I would name, but I'm not going to in case he would get bombarded with requests.
Marco:
A friend of the show basically had an extra pre-order and offered it, and I grabbed it.
Marco:
I'm going to have to figure out what games to get for it, but I think it's going to be fun.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
I can't get my fancy version of the Zelda game either.
John:
I missed the pre-order window on that.
John:
I have notifications on Amazon for all these things, like email me when they're available.
John:
How did you miss that?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I was working, and I missed the day when you could put in the pre-orders.
John:
I missed it for like an hour.
John:
And by the time I went there, it was like, oh, too late.
John:
I already sold out.
John:
So I'm sure I'll get the console.
John:
I have no problem with that.
John:
I just would like the fancy version of the Zelda game because that's what I want.
John:
I want the console, and I want the Zelda game and the Pro Controller.
John:
And that's what I'm going to do with it, and I don't really care about any other games for it for a while.
Marco:
Actually, I'm hoping... Do we still know nothing about the virtual console for it?
Marco:
I'm sure we know something.
Marco:
I haven't been keeping up with it, but... Okay.
Marco:
Well, anyway, I'm hoping the virtual console becomes...
Marco:
like, you know, what it has to be for, like, a pretty good thing, pretty good resource, because I would love to play, like, basically some of, like, the Mario and Mario Kart games that I have missed in the last 20 years.
John:
Just get Mario Kart 8, the Mario Kart 8 Deluxe.
John:
It has so many freaking tracks from past games.
John:
Oh, yeah, I ordered that.
John:
And they're adding 16 more, I think, on top of that, so... I'm going to order that.
Marco:
It's in my Amazon Kart to pre-order that, but...
Marco:
But, yeah, so basically that's obvious.
Marco:
But, like, is there anything else?
Marco:
Like, it seems like Mario games themselves are kind of absent for a while until the big one comes out, like, in a year or something, right?
Marco:
Something like that?
John:
They're spacing it out, I think, by, like, by the end of this year.
John:
Like, I think a lot of the games are basically done and they're just spacing it out to give, like, every two months there'll be a major new game.
Marco:
Yeah, so far my launch list of things I want at launch are basically like Bomberman, Puyo Tetris, and Mario Kart, which isn't actually at launch, but is close to launch, I guess.
Marco:
But I don't really know what else to get.
Marco:
I'm not really that in Zelda, so I probably won't get that unless Tiff wants to play, which she might, but I don't know what else to get.
John:
I don't know what this new Zelda is going to be like.
John:
It might be within Tiff's window of tolerance, but I recall her not being a big fan of the 3D Zeldas.
Marco:
Yeah, she was a fan of some of the very first one for N64, but not even the second one or whatever.
John:
Yeah, this one's supposed to be very different and more open-worldy, so that could be worse or better, but we'll see.
Marco:
Which one's the one where you drive around the dragon boat and play all the flute songs?
John:
Wind Waker.
Marco:
Yeah, she played that one, I think, but I think that was it.
Marco:
Play all the flute songs.
John:
Whatever.
John:
No flute.
John:
No flute!
John:
What?
John:
What is it?
John:
It's a recorder?
John:
It's a wand.
John:
It's called the Wind Waker.
John:
It wakes the wind.
John:
You don't blow into it, you wave it around.