Thrustmaster Joystick
Casey:
Are we sure we have John?
Marco:
I almost forgot how to do this.
Marco:
It's been so long since we recorded last.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Although this last time was John's fault.
Marco:
You're all recording, right?
Marco:
We're remembering that?
Casey:
Yes, yes.
Marco:
You forgot once for like 10 minutes and you're never going to live it down.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
That's why we have redundant systems, my friend.
Casey:
That's why we have redundant systems.
Marco:
I'm looking forward to editing this episode.
Marco:
This is going to be the first one that I get to use my automatic drift corrector and aligner for triple ender recordings.
Marco:
I'm going to release this thing at some point.
Marco:
I have it to a handful of beta testers right now just to make sure it works on more than just my computer and more than just our tracks from the three of us for this one show.
Casey:
Now when you say release it, do you mean release it like the FaceTime spec or do you mean actually release it like Second Crack?
Marco:
That's a good question.
Marco:
Backing up a second, what this tool is.
Marco:
I guess this is going to become a quick topic, so I'll try to make it quick because it isn't that interesting.
Marco:
When you record a podcast like this, typically people talk to each other over Skype and then...
Marco:
the way you can record it is you can either have everybody record their own microphone's input that records just them, and then they all send the files to somebody who edits them together and lines them all up and everything.
Marco:
Or you can have one person just record everybody through Skype.
Marco:
And the problem with that is, like, I'm sure everyone's heard on other shows where if somebody's Skype connection gets a little bit slow for a few minutes, then they start either breaking up or their voice gets noticeably worse quality or problems like that.
Marco:
Now...
Marco:
The other way of doing it where everyone records their own thing and sends the files to somebody to line up, one problem is that lining them up kind of sucks.
Marco:
It's not a time-consuming thing.
Marco:
You might take five or ten minutes to line them up.
Marco:
It's annoying and it's tedious, but it's not that time-consuming.
Marco:
The bigger problem that a lot of people face is drift, and that's that when you have somebody's microphone recording at 44,100 hertz, very, very slight inaccuracies or differences in how that's measured between different hardware, different sound cards and computers and such –
Marco:
Very, very slight inaccuracies will, over time, add up so that over the course of a 90-minute recording, one person might be aligned perfectly at the beginning, but at the end, be off by a second and a half.
Marco:
And that starts making the conversation sound weird and just not...
Marco:
So you can either not correct it, which has kind of bad output, or you can try to periodically go through and every 10, 20 minutes or whatever, go through and realign the tracks.
Marco:
Cut them at a convenient point and then shift somebody over to correct for their drift.
Marco:
It's not great.
Marco:
And most people, in fact, Dan Benjamin very famously avoids this kind of workflow for the 5x5 shows because he does so many shows, he has to get them out quickly.
Marco:
He can't afford for him or an editor to take an extra 45 minutes editing each show for what ends up being a difference that a lot of people don't care about.
Marco:
But I do care about that difference.
Marco:
And so we've always done our shows, both neutral and this, with the triple ender method, which is everybody records their end and sends me the files and lines them up.
Marco:
And Drift isn't too bad because we all have good computers, but it's still like – Casey has the worst, actually.
Marco:
Sorry, Casey.
Casey:
Well, that's right.
Casey:
I'm not on a fancy-pants Mac Pro like you two.
Marco:
Maybe that's why you buy the Mac Pro.
John:
You're not on a computer from 2008.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
So anyway, I made a little command line tool basically to solve this problem for myself.
Marco:
And it just analyzes the sound and not only automatically lines the tracks up, but also corrects the drift in a nice even way throughout the course of the whole file.
Marco:
So it's pretty much exactly perfect output of what you want.
Marco:
In theory, of course.
Marco:
Obviously, I'm sure it doesn't work every time, but we'll see.
John:
How is it fixing the drift?
John:
Is it stretching out the sound or is it doing like a cut at places where there's silence and sliding them?
Marco:
It is adjusting for silence.
Marco:
So it's like, you know, it detects silence and then it adds or removes samples as necessary to get back on track.
Marco:
So anyway, so this tool, it's extremely useful to a very small number of people.
Marco:
And so when thinking about like, okay, I do want to release it.
Marco:
Obviously, I'm not going to keep this for myself and have ATP be the only podcast that sounds this good.
Marco:
And it doesn't get out of sync.
Marco:
That obviously is not that productive of a thing to try to do and try to be.
Marco:
And so I could also...
Marco:
give it away for free, which then I don't really see much of an upside, or I can charge money for it.
Marco:
And the problem with that is if you charge money for this,
Marco:
I'm sure I could sell this for like 50 bucks, maybe even a hundred bucks to like 40 people.
Marco:
And that's about it.
Marco:
Like at most, uh, there aren't that many people who edit shows in this way.
Marco:
And of all the ones that do there, there, you know, what percentage of them would actually ever hear about this and then be willing to buy it.
Marco:
So, you know, it, the audience for this is probably really small.
Marco:
Um, so, um,
Marco:
I thought about it and I'm also thinking, okay, so let's say I sell it for X and I make X dollars at most from it in theory.
Marco:
What's my possible upside here?
Marco:
And it turned out to be I might make a few thousand dollars ever for the course of the life of this app.
Marco:
And I'm like, you know, if I'm having people pay me a good amount of money for this, they're going to expect some level of support on that.
Marco:
And do I really want to get in the business of supporting this little tiny app for 50 people for not that much money in the grand scheme of things for the next two years that they're going to expect to be able to use it at least?
Marco:
Sounds like crap.
Marco:
It doesn't sound like a very good idea.
Marco:
So I decided instead, when it's ready to be released, I'm going to release it for free.
Marco:
I don't think I'm going to open source it quite yet.
Marco:
I'll think about that.
Marco:
That's a whole other discussion.
Marco:
I'm probably going to release it for free, but with the condition that if you use it,
Marco:
and you have any shows that you edit with it that have sponsorships at all, I would like a quick little thanks mention.
Marco:
And I'm going to release it when I release my next product.
Marco:
And so the thanks mention will be for that.
Marco:
So I'll kind of – this is all my working theory.
Marco:
I haven't fully decided on this yet, but I think that's the best idea because it's free.
Marco:
So it keeps the expectations on me low and the commitment to my time low.
Marco:
But I still see some upside and potentially a more valuable upside than I would if I tried to charge $50 for the thing and sell it to 40 people.
John:
Sounds like a completely unenforceable system.
Marco:
Well, yeah.
Marco:
It wouldn't be like – I'm not going to go threaten to sue people who don't give me a plug in their podcast.
John:
You'll never know.
John:
You'll never know unless you're watermarking their files.
Marco:
No, and again, this is all down the rabbit hole of detecting piracy and everything.
Marco:
It's so not worth it.
Marco:
It's so, so not worth it.
Marco:
So anyway, I believe that's pretty much all I have to say about that topic.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Is there anything more to say about it?
Casey:
Only that it seems like you're doing an excellent job of procrastinating from doing what is arguably your actual job, which is your next big app.
Casey:
Between Bugshot and ATP and this, you're doing a very good job of not doing your job.
John:
Well, the next app is that he just has to write before he can get back to what he was doing.
Marco:
No, now I'm back to the big app.
Marco:
I've been on it for a nice solid week and a half or so, and it's been great.
Marco:
I don't know how much you want to make this the Marco show again, but basically the quick version is...
Marco:
I got discouraged working on the big app for a while.
Marco:
And part of it was just because I was tired and lazy and burnt out from big coding jobs.
Marco:
Part of it was that I just wasn't really applying myself very well.
Marco:
My discipline was pretty weak for a lot of the summer.
Marco:
And part of it was that the name I had chosen for the new big app...
Marco:
ended up having a trademark problem.
Marco:
And I could either figure out licensing of that and use the trademark and spend a lot of money doing that maybe, or pick a different name.
Marco:
And so I looked at all my options.
Marco:
I had to call a bunch of lawyers and figure out what to do.
Marco:
And
Marco:
It was very discouraging to have to be dealing with this.
Marco:
I mentioned this on Twitter, and a lot of people chimed in saying they feel the same way.
Marco:
If I don't have a good name for something, I generally have a hard time working on it.
Marco:
To me, it gives it a personality, or it helps motivate me to see the end goal of the name of product, name of thing, out there.
Marco:
This is an app that has a web component, so I had to do things like get SSL certificates for the domain name.
Marco:
I already had the domain name that I wanted and everything.
Marco:
So it was like I had all this kind of work and hopes invested in this name and then for the possibility of not being able to use it.
Marco:
And then I brainstormed new names and came up with a bunch of crap.
John:
What's the name of the audio aligner?
Marco:
Sidetrack.
Marco:
Why?
John:
You didn't focus group that one, huh?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
I like it.
Marco:
Again, it's going to be used by like 40 people.
Marco:
Who cares?
John:
Well, I'm saying like if you didn't have a name for that one, the same type deal, would you have not felt motivated to complete it, just left it as like a single purpose tool for yourself?
John:
Once it has a name, then it can be a thing.
Marco:
Well, for most of its development, it was called Audio Align, but I thought that was a stupid name, and so kind of at the last minute, I changed it.
Marco:
For that, it was less important to have a great name up front, because it's really like a utility.
Marco:
It's like, you know, like, I don't have great names.
Marco:
I have a shell script that imports the files off of my AVCHD camcorder, because AVCHD files are stupid, and nothing supports them.
Marco:
So I wrote a shell script forever ago that imports them and converts them into something useful, and
Marco:
That is called Import Videos from Sony Camcorder Dutch.
Casey:
So it's not the best name.
Casey:
Well, you're scratching your own itch or you're solving a problem.
Casey:
And when you're solving a concrete problem, especially a smaller one, and you're not intending to make money off of it, I don't see that as being the same as writing this new big app, which is perhaps solving a problem for yourself.
Casey:
But it's also solving a problem, hopefully, for many, many, many other people, which totally changes your motivations.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
And so that's why, you know, I wanted and I had such a great name and I was working on it.
Marco:
Like I looked up I the first classes I wrote for this new big app.
Marco:
I wrote last October.
Marco:
Like I've been thinking about this for a long time before I sold Instapaper, shortly after I started the magazine.
Marco:
I've been thinking about doing this for a while.
Marco:
And I made some prototypes of some of the functionality way back then.
Marco:
I mean, I've been doing this for a long time.
Marco:
And I had this name in mind for most of that time.
Marco:
And so, you know, to not be able to use it or to potentially have a big problem with using it suddenly, like after months of loving it, was very discouraging.
Marco:
Anyway, so I know it's a terrible excuse for not working on it very much for like two months.
Marco:
It's a horrible excuse.
Marco:
But it really did demotivate me.
Marco:
And I was certainly distracted by Bugshot and by Sidetrack.
Marco:
I had other distractions, but the main thing was a combination of me being very lazy this summer and just having a hard time getting going on things and the discouragement from the naming issue.
Marco:
But the good thing is I now have two names.
Marco:
I have the original name, and I have a new one I can use if I need to.
Marco:
And I'm still negotiating the trademark to get the original one that I want.
Marco:
So I'll see how those negotiations go.
Marco:
But if that falls apart, I have another name that I can use.
Marco:
I'd rather not, but I can.
John:
I've forgotten what the original name was.
John:
I am it to me, so you can remind me.
Casey:
I prefer the original over the second one.
Casey:
I did not care for the second one at all.
Casey:
We should really not be talking about this.
Casey:
This is painful.
Casey:
We're trolling.
Marco:
This is like constant inside jokes.
Marco:
Oh, man.
Marco:
Anyway, so I had to make sure I typed it into the correct chat room.
Casey:
That would have been funny.
Marco:
Yeah, basically.
Marco:
So, yeah, that's what I've been doing.
Marco:
And recently, I don't know if this really matters.
Marco:
I did a couple of days ago decide to delete my desktop Twitter client and app.net client.
Marco:
And because I realized, have I mentioned Rescue Time here yet?
Marco:
I mentioned it somewhere recently.
Casey:
I don't think so.
Marco:
One of my many podcasts.
Marco:
No, I don't know.
Marco:
I've been using Rescue Time.
Marco:
It's one of the great things I picked up from one of Merlin's many tools discussions from the last few years in which she has discussed every single productivity tool ever released or that could be released or that might be released for the Mac.
Marco:
And I picked up Rescue Time about six months ago.
Marco:
And so what it does, it sits, I think it's a kernel level thing.
Marco:
It's some kind of creepy, deeply integrated thing on your computer.
Marco:
And it also sends all the stuff to a web service, which makes it even more creepy.
Marco:
And I wish it was just a local app, but it's not.
Marco:
So what it does is it records how much time you spend in every app.
Marco:
And if you give it permission, it will also record what domain names you're browsing in web browsers.
Marco:
And so it basically gives you, every week, it sends you an email saying, here is how you spent your time.
Marco:
Here's how many hours you've had on the computer.
Marco:
And here's how many hours you spent and what percentage of the time that is on things that are work, things that aren't work.
Marco:
And you can customize what that means.
Marco:
But it has pretty good defaults for, you know, Xcode is work for most people.
Marco:
Whereas, you know, Tweetbot is not work for most people and stuff like that.
Marco:
And they can break down by website, like, you know, maybe the New York Times might be work, Facebook probably isn't, you know, stuff like that.
Marco:
So it showed me over the last few months that, you know, I was, the reason I installed this was I was feeling like I wasn't getting enough work time in every week.
Marco:
And I didn't know why.
Marco:
It turns out that I was getting enough work time most of the time.
Marco:
There were some weeks where it was busy, family stuff.
Marco:
But for the most part, I was getting enough work time.
Marco:
And the biggest problem was that I was just not spending the time well.
Marco:
And I was spending something like four hours a week out of my 36 to 50 work hours a week.
Marco:
I was spending about four of those in TweetBot.
Marco:
And that was scary.
Marco:
I mean, do you guys use desktop Twitter clients?
John:
That's just efficient multitasking, though, isn't it?
John:
Whenever you're in IO wait because something is compiling or tests are running or whatever, then you want to not leave the CPU cores idle so you can glance and read three tweets, and then you come back and your tests are finished or your code is compiled or you finally hit that stupid breakpoint.
John:
That's how I use Twitter all day.
Casey:
Yeah, same here.
John:
I don't think the total amount would bother me.
John:
Maybe if I saw a graph and it's all like continuous periods of time where I'm just using Twitter, but I think it would be little tiny slices.
Marco:
Well, the problem was that...
Marco:
Months ago, I kind of gave up on reading my whole timeline.
Marco:
I used to be a completionist in how I read both my Twitter timeline and my Tumblr dashboard back when I used Tumblr more.
Marco:
And I would read everything.
Marco:
I would have to, like, quote, catch up.
Marco:
And I still do that with mentions, but I no longer do that for the main timeline.
Marco:
And I haven't done that for the main timeline in months.
Marco:
I gave up months ago.
John:
You should just unfollow people.
Marco:
Well, yeah, there's a lot of people I have to follow for political reasons, stuff like that.
John:
Political?
John:
They're going to assassinate you if you don't follow them?
Marco:
You know that whole deal.
Marco:
You can unfollow anyone.
Marco:
Well, anyway, so I haven't even been following the main timeline reliably, and yet I was still spending the same amount of time on it.
Marco:
I was still spending like four hours.
Marco:
I'm like, what am I doing?
Marco:
And
Marco:
I think what I was doing was just clicking around.
Marco:
With the streaming API, you can get one at reply and something lights up somewhere.
Marco:
There's something new to read.
Marco:
I have a good amount of followers now, so there's something new to read almost all the time.
Marco:
I can click around.
Marco:
It was a very, very large number of context switches, basically.
Marco:
I realized that when I was not running TweetBot, I was getting way more done.
Marco:
And so I also realized that if I deleted it, because I tried just quitting it.
Marco:
I don't have the self-control to keep it quit because it's like automatic.
Marco:
I just launch it and it's like passive.
Marco:
I don't even realize I'm doing it.
John:
Does that bother you that you had to delete it instead of just choosing not to launch it?
Marco:
Oh, yeah, of course.
Marco:
I would love to have the kind of self-control where I can just say, you know what, I can't do it.
Marco:
But the reason I deleted it was because I had like six accounts configured in there.
Marco:
If I ever want to reinstall it, it's a giant pain in the butt.
Marco:
And so I'm probably not going to do it.
Marco:
And so I still have it on my laptop.
Marco:
I figured, you know, if I need a desktop Twitter experience, like I did when I was announcing that this show was recording live, it's a big thing where I publish it on both app.net and Twitter, and then I retweet it into my main accounts from those services to get more people.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
So it helps to have a desktop client for that.
Marco:
So I figure I'll keep it on the laptop, and if I ever really need to do it a lot, I'll just keep the laptop open on my desk as the second computer.
Marco:
But my main computer does not have that on it, and so most of the time, not only is the temptation gone, but the ability to even read it is gone, which helps me because I don't have any self-control.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
I have found in the last few days it really has been a dramatic improvement.
Marco:
I don't know if it's – it could just be temporary.
Marco:
Like when you lose three pounds on the very first day of a diet and you think every day is going to be like that.
Marco:
It could just be temporary, but it's a massive difference so far.
Marco:
And I've gotten so much done in the last few days on the main big app because I'm not using TweetBot on the desktop.
Marco:
And this is the first time since I've started using Twitter at all that I haven't had a desktop Twitter client open on a regular basis.
Casey:
Now, do you have any audible alerts or push notifications on your phone?
Marco:
No, no, of course not.
Marco:
I never have.
Marco:
I've never gotten into that.
Marco:
Because I used to run servers, and so I would reserve audible alerts for things that were really potentially important.
Marco:
So I don't have anything send me push notifications for any reason.
Marco:
And so I would sleep, back when I ran servers, I would sleep with my phone
Marco:
very close to my head with the speaker turned all the way up so that if something beeped in the middle of the night, I would hear it and wake up and go deal with it.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
I just asked because I didn't know if perhaps you would hear your phone chirping in the background and find yourself reaching over for your phone to figure out what was being talked about.
Casey:
I guess that's not really possible for either of you guys because you have a gazillion followers, although I just crossed 3,000.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
Who's awesome now?
Casey:
No, not really.
Casey:
But anyway, I guess for you guys, it would be hard to have those sorts of things turned on.
Casey:
I have the push notifications on for TweetBot on my phone, but I do not have sounds on.
Casey:
Because I was finding that I am barely popular enough that I get enough audible notifications that it's distracting.
Casey:
But I had visions of you perhaps having these audible notifications on and then reaching over for your phone every five minutes, then negating the point of not having TweetBot on your Mac at all.
Marco:
I don't like using it on my phone, honestly.
Marco:
I would rather take out my laptop and I'm on the couch or lying in bed before going to sleep, which I know is horrible for other reasons.
Marco:
But I think I'd rather catch up on Twitter then.
Marco:
I'd rather catch up on Twitter occasionally on a laptop than all day on a phone.
Casey:
You want to talk about something that's awesome?
Marco:
Let's do that.
Marco:
Our first sponsor this week is a return sponsor.
Marco:
It's 23andMe, again, because they are that awesome.
Marco:
So they give you the tools to better understand how your genes may impact your health.
Marco:
So this could help you or your doctor find health areas to keep an eye on, or just tell you some really cool stuff about genealogy and your genetics.
Marco:
So they have over 240 personalized health trait and ancestry reports.
Marco:
So what they do is...
Marco:
They send you a DNA kit.
Marco:
It's only $99.
Marco:
You sign up, you get a DNA kit.
Marco:
You give them a saliva sample so you don't have to cut a hole in your finger.
Marco:
It's just saliva.
Marco:
You give them a saliva sample, send it back to them, and they give you a full report on lots of interesting things about your DNA as they profile it.
Marco:
They have over a quarter million members who
Marco:
which makes them the largest ancestry service in the world for DNA.
Marco:
And so they give you genetic information.
Marco:
Here's the cool thing.
Marco:
You can figure out if you're related to any celebrities, it'll tell you that.
Marco:
If you have that gene that we talked about last time that makes you have smelly asparagus pee, they can tell you that.
Marco:
Or whether you like cilantro or not, they can tell you that.
Marco:
All sorts of fun stuff you can learn from your DNA.
Marco:
Plus, it can give you...
Marco:
Things like how closely are you related to Neanderthals?
Marco:
And how quickly do you metabolize coffee?
Marco:
There's all sorts of things they can tell you.
Marco:
And it's a fantastic service.
Marco:
Once again, 23andMe, $99.
Marco:
They give you this full DNA analysis of...
Marco:
Interesting characteristics you have, interesting ancestors you might have.
Marco:
It's really, really cool.
Marco:
So go to 23andme.com slash ATP for our show.
Marco:
That's 23andme.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to them for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
So you want to hear a little bit about Fast Text?
Marco:
Yeah, so yeah, go on, yeah.
Casey:
So last episode, which was number 24, I believe, we talked a little bit about my app Fast Text, which was never designed to be a money-making enterprise.
Casey:
It was just kind of one of those things where I did it to prove to myself that I could.
Casey:
And I think because it was an app that nobody had heard of, and then we mentioned it, or actually more than just mentioned it, talked about it on ATP, which is a reasonably well-listened-to podcast podcast,
Casey:
It was it has accidentally become an interesting study in what publicity does or does not do.
Casey:
So I did a little bit of homework for the Accidental Tech podcast before the podcast.
Casey:
And according to what is it, App Annie?
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
I always forget the name of the thing.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
According to App Annie, which apparently I enabled on October 24th of 2011, I had 206 downloads between then and July 23rd.
Casey:
And on July 23rd, which I'm guessing is around the time that we recorded that episode, I had 11 downloads.
Casey:
And then I had not many, you know, 2, 3, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 1, which is about an average week and a half or whatever that is, week of fast text downloads.
Casey:
Then on the day of the release of ATP, which was either August 1st or August 2nd, somewhere around there, I had 30 downloads, 69 downloads, 31 downloads, 1515, and yesterday was six.
Casey:
Or maybe it was the day before yesterday.
Casey:
So all told, between October 24th of 2011 and July 23rd of this year, I had, according to App Annie, 206 downloads.
Casey:
And between July 23rd and tonight, which is August 7th, I've had 185.
Casey:
So I've almost doubled the amount of downloads that I've had in the entirety of Fast Text's existence.
Casey:
And I believe I initially put it on the App Store.
Casey:
It was whenever iOS 4 came out, which I think was like late-ish 2011.
Casey:
Um, so that said, what was really interesting to me about this was that it, once I get my next check from Apple, if I crunch this math properly, fast text will actually be in the green, which is really exciting.
Casey:
So even if you consider the three times $99 that I've paid for the Apple developer account, if you consider the $40 I paid for opacity express, which is a great app that enabled
Casey:
a completely non-artistic person to make an icon that's terrible, but a lot better than it otherwise would have been.
Casey:
All that told, a fast text should be in the black soon.
Casey:
So that's very exciting.
Casey:
So thank you to everyone who bought it.
Casey:
And thank you to the people who have sent unsolicited icon updates.
Casey:
There have been only a handful.
Casey:
There's one that I actually really, really liked, and I apologize because I don't have the gentleman's name in front of me that did it.
Casey:
So I might end up using that for whenever I do an update for iOS 7.
Casey:
But...
Casey:
The point I'm driving at is, you know, we're a podcast that has tens of thousands of listeners.
Casey:
And even despite that, having a whole segment about my app.
Casey:
quote unquote, only led to 200 downloads.
Casey:
And don't take that as a complaint.
Casey:
That's not a bad thing at all.
Casey:
I'm extremely thankful for almost 200 of them.
Casey:
But the point I'm driving at is, even that much exposure, which, not to be self-righteous, but I think that that was a pretty decent set of exposure, it was pretty high exposure, it didn't lead to an overwhelming amount of sales.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I don't know if it's because the app is kind of silly.
Casey:
I mean, for whatever the reason, it didn't lead to a lot.
Casey:
And I just found that to be interesting.
Casey:
So I don't know if you guys have any thoughts on that.
Casey:
And if not, we can talk about Minecraft.
Casey:
But just a little F you.
John:
It has to be a product that people want to buy.
John:
A lot of the stuff for the fast texting, if people weren't in the market for a way to send texts very quickly, they may have bought it just to make you feel better.
John:
Because that was the gist of the whole conversation, right?
John:
And FastTax actually has a reasonable purpose, but you could go even narrower.
John:
Actually, even for text.
John:
But at this point, people probably have a system of how they send texts or whatever.
John:
So maybe in the early days of the iPhone, it would have caught on.
John:
But if you have some application that has a very narrow possible audience of people who want to do this thing, no amount of publicity is going to make it.
John:
5% of the people who have iPhones buy it.
John:
It's never going to happen.
John:
Awareness is one thing.
John:
If you have an application that lets you take pictures and put filters on it, that's a pretty crowded market, but a lot of people could potentially do that.
John:
If they've never heard of you, but they've heard of Instagram, they're going to get Instagram.
John:
If they'd never, you know, if hip somatic, no one had ever heard of it, no one would ever buy it, even though it's a great application, you know, so you have to get the word out somewhere.
John:
So if you have an application with broad appeal, I think publicity is good.
John:
It's like, look, the only reason people aren't buying this is because they don't even know it exists.
John:
They don't know to search for it.
John:
We have a weird name.
John:
How can they distinguish it from all the other crap apps in the store that claim to do the same thing?
John:
Ours is actually good.
John:
You got to get the word out about it.
John:
But if you have an obscure app or an app that's only of a limited appeal, getting the word out is not going to expand your base much.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And I think that Optia, which was a sponsor of ours a couple of weeks back, maybe a month ago now, was a great example of how advertising does work.
Casey:
Because here was a game that, as we famously pointed out and was talked about briefly on the last talk show, it didn't have any in-app purchase, which makes it unique and different.
Casey:
And it's a genuinely good game anyway.
Casey:
So I've not heard direct feedback from the developer, but I've seen some general feedback from him that he's gotten a whole lot of sales from the ad reads that we've done and that others have done.
Casey:
And so I think you're right, John, that something that may have a little more universal appeal could arguably benefit greatly from being a sponsor or being talked about, even if they're not a sponsor.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But for me, it was certainly a tremendous increase.
Casey:
And I'm extremely grateful for every one of those purchases, even if it was just to make my self-esteem a little bit better, as somebody has joked in the chat room.
Casey:
But either way, it wasn't like I'm about to retire on fast tech sales, unless I go ahead and sell it to Marco.
John:
Well, you got to work on a version 2.0, right?
John:
Which better be for better be a free upgrade, because I don't want this application again, Casey.
John:
99 cents is all I budgeted for you for the year.
Casey:
Oh, that's too bad.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know if there's anything else there.
Casey:
But I thought it was just an interesting, a little interesting case study.
Marco:
And this actually lines up very well with my bug shot sales.
Marco:
I made the post last week or whenever about how people assume that because I have an audience in some places that any app I release is going to be some kind of giant hit.
Marco:
And that really isn't the case.
Marco:
I have an advantage, certainly, by having an established audience.
Marco:
I have an advantage mostly up front where I'm guaranteed a pretty good launch.
Marco:
But then after that,
Marco:
I'm in the same boat as everyone else.
Marco:
And like, so, so bug shot, I posted my sales graph from the beginning until whenever that was.
Marco:
And I made that post like a week ago and, uh,
Marco:
And right now, when I made that post, my peak day, the launch day, I hit like $3,000 or something in that range.
Marco:
And then it dropped off significantly after that, of course, because it already reached a lot of people.
Marco:
And on that day, I got tons of press from bloggers, from the tech press.
Marco:
I mean, I got more press than most people could really hope for, including myself, for an app that I only spent a week or two making.
Marco:
And so it was the perfect launch.
Marco:
But the fact is, yeah, it peaked and it was great.
Marco:
But then it fell down.
Marco:
And at the time I wrote this post, the average was $47 per day for the last five days.
Marco:
Well, the last two days, it's been under $20.
Marco:
it's been i think yesterday was uh 16 day before that was 19 uh so obviously you know this is a long tail effect dropping off very very very quickly and yeah 20 bucks a day is good uh it's especially for no continued effort that's good but it isn't even staying there it's going to keep going down and down and down and you know the fact is
Marco:
John, what you said is correct, that no matter what kind of audience you get, the app store is very, very crowded.
Marco:
And it's hard to make good money there.
Marco:
It's not impossible, but it's hard because you're competing with so many other developers.
Marco:
And
Marco:
Casey, your app, Fast Text, which we're going to plug like crazy because I want the sales to go up.
Marco:
But your app already has, as John said, it's a specialty audience.
Marco:
It's like if you have this need to quickly send pre-written text messages, that's the app for you.
Marco:
That's already some small segment of the user base.
Marco:
And then within that, you have to remove anybody who either decided that they didn't want to solve that problem after all, or doesn't know about your app, or knows about your app but decided not to buy it, whether they bought someone else's or what, or just bought nothing.
Marco:
So just getting a bunch of people to even look at it isn't necessarily going to guarantee success.
Marco:
So it's just... I don't know the answer to this, but I don't know how much Apple can really do about it.
Marco:
People complain to Apple that they're making less money in the App Store, but I just don't... We talked about this last episode.
Marco:
I don't really know what Apple's supposed to do about that exactly.
Marco:
Besides, they can make a few minor changes here and there, but...
Marco:
I don't think anything's going to fix the problem that there's hundreds of thousands of developers all trying to make the same thousand different kinds of apps with varying levels of success.
John:
Marketing is not Apple's problem.
John:
Apple has huge power in marketing, but technically speaking, it's really on the individual developers.
John:
It's very difficult to start an app store business and say, okay, now we just got to wait for Apple to feature us.
John:
That is not really a viable strategy.
John:
Even though Apple featuring you is probably going to give you tons of money, you can't count on that.
John:
You can't control that.
John:
You have to just do your own marketing.
John:
And if Apple features you, that's great.
John:
But if not, you better have a plan for how you're going to market your application.
Marco:
Also, Apple very rarely features things that are not free and not games.
John:
You never know.
John:
The Mac App Store is better.
John:
The Mac App Store, they will frequently feature big, expensive applications.
John:
Well, they have to because there's nothing else.
Marco:
There's cheap things.
John:
There's lots of cheap things in the Mac App Store.
John:
Lots of $3 and $5 silly utility apps that are not great.
John:
But then there's the big apps that are worth it.
John:
It's like anything else.
John:
You've got to write a great app first.
John:
Is Fast Text a great app?
John:
I don't know.
John:
The icon's not great.
John:
That probably cut your sales in half right there.
John:
That's true.
John:
Do not doubt the power of that icon.
John:
If you had an awesome looking icon, your sales would be double guaranteed.
Casey:
You know, and with that said, who was the end of it?
Casey:
Let me dig this up.
Casey:
Let me stall for a second.
Casey:
It was Jacob Swyadek.
Casey:
I hope I pronounced that right.
Casey:
I'm so sorry, Jacob, if I didn't, who sent the one that I liked the most of the three or four or five that I've gotten.
Casey:
And if I end up working out something with him that maybe I can use that for iOS 7, for the iOS 7 version of Fast Text, then maybe we'll see.
Casey:
And maybe...
Casey:
Maybe it will get a whole lot better.
Casey:
And here again, we can use me as a kind of a case study for somebody who wrote an app that, I mean, I put a lot of effort into it in terms of qualitatively, but quantitatively, I wouldn't say it was that terribly much.
Casey:
Most of the effort I put into it was because I was learning Objective-C and Cocoa Touch at the time.
Casey:
If I were to write that app again today...
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It'd probably take me a week at most, if not just a few days.
John:
What's on the inside doesn't matter, Casey.
John:
What's on the outside?
John:
This app just needs a makeover.
John:
When iOS 7 comes out, imagine this app comes out from the back with iOS 7 and a totally new icon.
John:
All the code underneath is exactly the same, but it just looks different on the outside.
John:
Everyone's going to woo and ah, and then you'll see the real sales numbers, maybe $300.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
No, I mean, all kidding aside, I know you're right.
Casey:
And again, I mean, the advantage of iOS 7 is that using raw UI kit, well, from what I know today, using raw UI kit will actually be a good thing because I'll look new and modern and I'll fit right in.
Casey:
Totally.
Casey:
And maybe I'll go wild and use like tint colors or something.
Casey:
Ooh.
Casey:
But, you know, just a new icon and getting some of the iOS 7 stuff for free is
Casey:
I think will make a difference.
Casey:
And so we'll see what happens.
Casey:
And once iOS 7 comes out, we'll follow up, and maybe I'll have two sales a day instead of just one, which would have doubled my sales.
Casey:
So we'll see what happens.
Marco:
First of all, I do think...
Marco:
I'm curious to see how this shakes out with iOS 7 and how cool it looks and fashion-wise with apps.
Marco:
Because you're right.
Marco:
iOS 7 right now, just the default... If you just use default UIKit stuff and don't modify it at all, you look cool and modern.
Marco:
Because iOS 7 looks cool and modern.
Marco:
iOS 1 looked cool and modern too at the time.
Marco:
And eventually that became stale and didn't look cool anymore.
Marco:
I wonder...
Marco:
how long it's going to take for ios 7 to for for its default look to start looking like cheap or or outdated and i wonder also uh how many apps are going to come out with you know quote ios 7 redesigns this fall that are all going to look exactly the same because they're always going to look like ios 7 stocks default stuff like i really wonder because that's
Marco:
It's going to be interesting to watch.
Marco:
I don't really know what to say about it in advance except it's going to be interesting to watch because a bunch of people are going to be making these big gambles and some of them are going to pay off and some of them really aren't because it's like prisoners of dilemma.
Marco:
If everyone makes their apps look just like iOS 7's default stuff, then they're all going to look terrible and bland.
Marco:
But if only a few people do it, their apps are going to look really cool and modern and everyone else's will look old.
John:
There's going to be that backlash kind of effect where if you are one of the few people who has an application that already looks really good and doesn't look particularly iOS 6-y, like it doesn't have that kind of heavyweight kind of...
John:
play it out look if you just keep your app the same and everyone else either converts to iOS 7 or copies iOS 7 look suddenly your branding is even stronger because previously you had some kind of think of like the bot applications tweet bot calc bot I don't know if they fall into this category but they have a branding across all their applications it's very heavy but it's not exactly like iOS 6 I think they may be too close to it for it to work but think of another application that has like a completely custom UI it looks nothing like the OS at all it's not a game it's an application but it did a really nice custom UI how about Vesper?
John:
I think it's too close to iOS 7 as well.
John:
I was thinking like if you were just the other end of the spectrum, but also still don't look like iOS 6, you may be able to get away with not changing and like carrying your brand and making your brand even stronger as everyone else just goes all white and everything.
John:
It's a difficult line to walk.
John:
I wouldn't count on this as a plan.
John:
I would say you should really convert your stuff to look like iOS 7 if you can.
John:
But there are going to be survivors who are like, we didn't change our UI to look like iOS 7.
John:
We either stuck to our guns or we came out with an all-new look that also doesn't look like iOS 7.
John:
Because there is a strength in branding and not looking like all the other applications.
John:
And since the iOS 6 UI and 5 and 4 looks kind of played out if you go with like the default buttons and everything, so many iOS applications that are successful have custom UIs now, which is why everyone's scrambling with the iOS 7 thing, right?
Yeah.
John:
Some of those custom UIs could survive.
John:
The trick is knowing, am I one of those ones that can survive?
John:
Or if I stick to this, am I just going to look terrible?
John:
And I think a lot of them are just going to, because it's like native iOS 456 UI, plus a couple of custom controls, and that's going to be a mess.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, I think the closer you look to iOS 6, the more old you'll look if you don't change it.
John:
Things like Vesper and Twitterific are already iOS 70, maybe not enough, maybe Twitterific.
John:
They just changed their app to become even more iOS 70.
John:
They made minor tweaks.
John:
They were already there.
John:
Vesper, I think, has its own look that's a little bit like iOS 7, but I'm sure they're going to revise to sort of
John:
tap it over and realign a little bit not making it look like ios 7 but just sort of like recognizing that it's living on an ios 7 system we'll see how much they they revise that but uh those apps are the lucky few that were already more or less positioned well and don't have a lot to do probably right exactly
Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
That's right.
Marco:
Yeah, it's 8, wow.
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Marco:
You know how they used to have that default mobile style that every WordPress blog, by default, I think, maybe it was a theme or what, but by default it had the same... It was like an iOS 3 mimicking appearance.
Casey:
It looked terrible.
Marco:
Squarespace doesn't do that.
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Marco:
Yahoo, they're changing their logo, but they're keeping the exclamation point, right?
Marco:
I have no idea.
John:
We don't know because the last logo will only be like 30 days from now.
John:
And maybe that one has no exclamation point.
Marco:
Oh, okay.
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Casey:
All right, so do we want to talk about Minecraft?
Casey:
Because I hear, John, that you really love Minecraft and you particularly like installing Minecraft mods.
Marco:
I didn't do my homework.
Marco:
I didn't either.
John:
You guys are slackers.
John:
I put a second topic in there too that's actually more tech related.
Casey:
Oh, I missed that.
Casey:
I do have it open.
John:
The Google Chrome password.
Casey:
Oh, yes.
Casey:
Yes.
Marco:
What was that?
Marco:
Was that just the iOS stuff or was that more?
Marco:
No, it's a desktop Chrome.
Marco:
I didn't read this yet, man.
John:
I'm back.
John:
I'll give you the summary because it's really quick, and I want to do that.
John:
I think we'll get through this password one faster and leave the Minecraft one until the end.
John:
So the Chrome thing, I didn't actually read the original story.
John:
I just read the Hacker News thread, which is sufficient usually.
John:
if if you have desktop chrome and you go to preferences hit click advanced and click like manage passwords and click on a password uh it shows the little dots for the password and there's a little button right next to it that says show you click the show button it shows you the password in plain text oh and people don't like that and this hacker news thread that i've also linked in the little documents you can put in the show notes is one of the some some google chrome engineer uh explaining the reasoning behind that decision and
John:
Like any hacker news thread, which Marco is very familiar with, there's a lot of nerd-on-nerd violence going on in these hacker news threads.
John:
It's kind of the worst.
John:
The hacker news brings out the worst in nerds.
John:
There's the dark side of being a nerd, and if you get a bunch of them together, the worst part comes out along with the good part sometimes.
John:
And the reasoning, the explanation for why...
John:
that the chrome team decided to do this is definitely a nerd explanation explanation is look even if we didn't do that we're not increasing security at all because once you have access to your computer and you're logged in like you know security is pointless game over uh
John:
And people are like, why don't you have a master password like Firefox?
John:
And the nerd explanation is, look, that doesn't actually protect you.
John:
If you're sitting there in front of the computer and you're logged in, you can get all this information.
John:
It's not possible to hide information from yourself because you are going to use the information to log into websites.
John:
It's like DRM where they want to give you the content but somehow prevent you from getting the content.
John:
They cross purposes.
John:
And so the reasoning is if we didn't
John:
By removing that button that shows you your plain text password, we would be effectively lying to the user, making them think that it's more secure than it really is.
John:
And an obvious user might somehow think, oh, no one can get my password because it's just a bunch of dots.
John:
There's no way they can get that, right?
John:
And that is definitely a very nerdy explanation because they're like, let me just think about it in the abstract.
John:
It's not actually any more or less secure.
John:
Effectively, the security is the same.
John:
So I want to be technically honest and we're just going to leave the button in.
John:
And, you know, they get yelled at in the hacker news thread by some people who don't understand the security issues, some of them.
John:
Some people say you just do what Firefox does and don't understand that doesn't help either.
John:
But also a lot of people who understand that argument and just think it's a terrible one.
John:
And I fall into that camp.
John:
And it's explained very well by the good nerds showing the good parts of being a nerd.
John:
And, of course, they're good because I agree with them.
John:
In the thread of basically saying...
John:
There's a difference.
John:
I think the best analogy was safe.
John:
No safe is uncrackable.
John:
The job of the safe is to make it time-consuming, inconvenient, noisy, difficult to get in.
John:
You can always get into a safe.
John:
The safe is there to delay you sufficiently long that other issues come in.
John:
And I think having...
John:
plain text passwords visible to anyone who grabs your mouse for five seconds is without a lot of knowledge uh is it's too easy it's just too easy like the the previous easiest way to do it would be go to a website that you want their password for let it autofill right click inspect change the text field to password like that requires much more technical knowledge and takes longer than you know
John:
Command, comma, click, click, click, click, click.
John:
I've seen your password.
John:
It's just too darn easy, too fast.
John:
And that is, you know, that's what you're trying to do is draw a line there.
John:
No, you can always get to it.
John:
You're not actually preventing anyone to get it.
John:
You're just trying to make the time limit long enough that it's not, if I turn my back for one second and someone grabs my mouse, they can see my plaintext password.
John:
Because that's literally how it is.
John:
Someone who's faster than a mouse
John:
You could, like, turn your head, talk to someone, say five words, and they could have seen your plaintext password.
John:
No other way to get that password is that fast without, like, you know, malware or some other, you know, actual nerd hack type thing of getting into your computer.
John:
So I think this is a fairly terrible decision.
John:
And it just goes to show that security is not a black and white type thing.
John:
Like, by removing that show button, technically speaking, you're not making it any more secure.
John:
But practically speaking, there's a big, big difference between...
John:
just letting someone click through preferences to see your plain text password in three seconds and requiring them to at least know how to use the web inspector or type something or put in, you know, do something that's beyond the realm of just going to settings.
Marco:
Yeah, this is a weird... I was reading about this now.
Marco:
It's just a weird attitude to have towards security that this engineer is displaying here.
Marco:
And I assume that the engineer did not have permission to write this, because if they did, their boss should be fired.
John:
You don't need permission at Google.
John:
It's all one big, happy family of engineers working.
John:
But it's definitely a nerdy type position, because it's like...
John:
you know, I'm not actually increasing security by removing that button.
John:
Therefore I won't do it because it's like, it's intellectually dishonest to remove that button.
John:
And then not understanding the practical issues, but they're like, I know that that's, you know, it's like, it's like mathematical or black and white.
John:
And they, you know, he's not like, I guess they said they would consider these nuances, but didn't deem them important.
John:
There was some sort of, we felt like we were being dishonest or misleading to the user by doing this, but it does just does not hold together.
John:
Like practically speaking, that button is a problem.
Marco:
where it is and how easy it is to get to yeah it's it's kind of like an immature attitude to say like well this isn't really going to help security although actually your points are that it kind of does but the you know their attitude is we don't think this is really going to help security so we're just not going to do it period like it's
Marco:
And the attitude they're having here, it kind of sounds like they messed up and they're having a hard time accepting that or admitting that.
John:
They said they've, like, we've debated it and discussed it for years.
John:
And if they debated and discussed it for years, like, maybe the people who are on the side of sanity are just tired of arguing with the people who are not or the wrong person is in control.
John:
But, like, you know...
John:
It just boggles my mind that it's not so clear to everybody that this is the wrong decision to make for practical reasons.
John:
Like, and just, you know, you should be able to put things into their right comps.
John:
No, you're not actually making it more secure.
John:
But, like, security is more than just, like, is it hackable?
John:
Yes, no.
John:
It's a continuum.
John:
And, you know, there's a certain threshold beyond which it's just too darn easy to see people explain text passwords.
John:
And many people were giving examples of, like, you know,
John:
why people might do these malicious type things and like there's a there's a threshold like if if there was one button you could press on your keyboard that would put all your plain text passwords up on the screen you would never enable that button but the google attitude that's expressed here is like well they can get all those passwords anyway if they have access to your keyboard so there's no harm in leaving a single button that shows them all instantly
John:
That's the obviously extreme thing, but time required matters.
John:
Time and skills.
John:
Going to the settings menu and clicking four times is not a very high time or skill barrier.
John:
It's just too easy.
Casey:
Well, you know, what's interesting is, you know, everyone's perception of Google, and mine to some degree included, is that it's a collection of unbelievably bright people that are all working together.
Casey:
And this strikes me as the argument made by a bright person, like an academically bright person, but not a realist.
Casey:
And just like you were saying, it still is a big security hole, but
Casey:
But the PhD, air quote, PhD argues correctly that, well, it's no different than what we're already doing.
Casey:
That's just, it's a very short-sighted, you're hanging your hat on academia when reality is very different.
Casey:
And it just seems silly.
Casey:
And it fits well with my very uninformed perception of what Google is.
Marco:
Oh, definitely.
Marco:
Honestly, and maybe this is just me being a little bit tinfoil-hattie, but to me, I treat Chrome as though it is Google and that everything I do in it, Google knows or can easily get or is collecting.
Marco:
uh even though i know that that what they do collect is more limited than that and i know there's things like chromium like the open source thing that has less of their stuff in it but uh i still generally treat chrome as though it is a giant google application you know it is a giant google ad basically and every it's just recording everything i do even though i know that's not the case but
Marco:
that's not entirely untrue.
Marco:
There's some traces of truth to that here and there and various things it does.
Marco:
So, to me, Chrome is my Google and Facebook kind of silo, quarantine, where I use Safari for my main browsing and I use Chrome for things that I know I'm being spot on, even though I know those companies are matching my IP and figuring out that I'm really the same person, even in Safari.
Marco:
But I try.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I've noticed that Chrome also – because I have this kind of pessimistic attitude towards Chrome and this defensive attitude, I also – generally when Chrome asks me for keychain access, I say no.
Marco:
um and every time you visit any website at all that has a password in it chrome will prompt up a box uh on mac saying hey this google chrome wants access to your keychain always allow you know and and uh and i click no every time and it'll keep asking it'll ask like six times for a page load to like twitter.com or or you know facebook or google or whatever you know so like it'll ask a lot obviously chrome for macs
Marco:
is clearly misusing the keychain API.
Marco:
Clearly, I don't think it's that they don't understand it.
Marco:
I think it's they don't respect it.
Marco:
I think Google has this culture of engineering arrogance, which is often earned, but sometimes not.
Marco:
And Macs have this awesome keychain system that is pretty secure and certainly better than a lot of these methods.
Marco:
And Chrome...
Marco:
Chrome basically tries to take it, like take it over, take all the value out of it, but yet still have its own little system that, you know, does its own thing on the side because they think they're better.
John:
Well, you know, they want to be cross-platform.
John:
They don't want to be tied to, you know, I don't blame Chrome for not having deeper OS X integration because, like, that's the value in Chrome.
John:
Well, then why access the keychain at all?
John:
Well, you know, like they have their own way to store these things and they want to integrate a little bit, but they're certainly not going to say, oh, on the Mac, all we do is use Keychain because that's not going to be the case.
John:
Like the value I see in Chrome is that I know that if I go somewhere else, my Chrome environment is there too because Chrome is not tied to any OS.
John:
Like if I installed Chrome on Windows and signed in with my Google account and synced everything, I'd have all my preferences, all my extensions, all my tabs, all my history, all my passwords, all that stuff.
John:
on windows like that's the value in chrome that would not be the case in safari it wasn't even the case when there was safari for windows right uh so i think you're torturing yourself by you know not letting chrome do this either use it or don't use it but if you're going to use it just let it do what it's going to do like it's no i don't i don't see anything worse about it in terms of being tracked or anything like that and i really like chrome uh as a web browser especially since uh webkit 2 was introduced since safari started to be flaky safari is still my default browser
John:
but uh chrome is much more solid for me and i spend a lot of time in it and i don't fight it i let it do what i want and i'm happy when i go to another machine sync everything up in chrome and like my whole chrome environment is there i wish every part of my computing experience was like that so when you say your whole chrome environment i i treat chrome the same way marco does but but what do you what is synced that that makes your experience that much better
John:
I use extensions, Chrome extensions, and I'm annoyed.
John:
I can't use default Chrome at this point.
John:
I'm too addicted to the handful of extensions that I use.
John:
I like my preferences of what's displayed and not.
John:
I like my bookmarks bar, my bookmark menu.
John:
All those little things, like when you go to a new machine, you've got to go wait, especially because Chrome's preferences are terrible.
John:
Chrome's UI is not nice.
John:
It's not Mac-like, and it's also not nice, so it's double...
John:
whammy against it and i would not want to go into that ui every time i was on a new machine and configure stuff like i don't want to go in there ever so it's great when i could just sign in with my google id and get everything synced up like that's the experience i want to have with all my applications with icloud like that's the dream of icloud and all the apple stuff is just
John:
Go anywhere, sign in with your Apple ID, all your stuff and awareness of who you are and everything you've ever purchased and all your preferences and everything are all just there with you.
John:
And that is still not the case on OS X. If I set up a new Mac, it sets up some things for me and they're getting better about it.
John:
But it is not like, you know, my Chromebook fell in the ocean.
John:
Give me another Chromebook, sign in with my Google ID and it looks just like my previous Chromebook.
John:
Which is, granted, easier when all your thing is a giant web browser, but that's what Apple is working towards.
Marco:
And Casey and I don't go near the ocean, so it isn't a problem for us.
John:
If you drop it into the lake, it's just as dead.
John:
And it's muddy.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
John:
And filled with broken glass that cuts your feet because there's no waves to wear down.
Casey:
Oh, come now.
Casey:
Although I will say.
John:
What lake have you been to?
John:
Lakes are filled with sharp broken glass.
John:
Everyone knows that.
Casey:
No, they're not.
John:
Oh, yes, they are from beer bottles from lake yokels.
John:
There's no waves to agitate them enough to turn into sea glass.
John:
There are waves.
Casey:
There are waves from boats and stuff.
John:
There are waves from boats.
John:
Yeah, it takes much longer.
John:
That's why you think it cuts.
Casey:
Although I tell you what, I'm stealing a line from Kevin James right now, but I have never screamed louder like more of a little girl than when a piece of seaweed from the bottom of the lake touches my feet.
Casey:
Oh, my goodness.
John:
It's not seaweed if it's in a lake.
John:
Well, whatever.
Casey:
Lakeweed.
Casey:
Whatever it is.
Casey:
That stuff freaks me out so hard.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Are we in After Dark already?
Casey:
I didn't even think we ended the show.
Casey:
It's all downhill from here.
John:
I could talk about Minecraft mods to finish it up.
Casey:
Well, I have a feeling that's going to last a while.
Casey:
Do we want to end it here and then do Minecraft for the next episode?
Marco:
It's up to you guys.
Marco:
I have no preference.
Marco:
It could just become the topic that we always push off to the next episode.
Marco:
I'm okay with that.
Casey:
That can be a thing.
Casey:
I'm okay with that.
Marco:
Is there something that Casey and I can do to make it a better topic for us to discuss?
John:
Like I said, you guys should adopt a neighborhood kid and have them request that you install Minecraft Botch.
Casey:
Because like we discussed, that's not at all creepy.
John:
So just go install Minecraft.
John:
You might have to pay for it, but now that Casey's selling all these copies of FastX, he can afford it.
John:
And pick a mod.
John:
I can send you the name of a mod because that's all you get from a kid.
John:
Kids discover these mods by watching YouTube videos.
John:
YouTube videos show someone playing.
John:
Hey, look at this cool new mod.
John:
You can do this.
John:
You can do that.
John:
Kids watch these videos and say, I want to do that.
John:
And all you've got to go on is the YouTube video.
John:
And usually they just mention the name of the mod.
John:
It's like, that's like video, you know, it's like video podcast and everything, but on YouTube, YouTube channel where every week they'll say, okay, I hear these new mods we're checking out and do some stuff with it.
John:
And it's a show.
John:
So not all of them have like show notes links to say, if you're interested in this mod link to it.
John:
In fact, most of them don't.
John:
So you just have a name, like I want the whatever mod.
John:
And given those two pieces of information that Minecraft exists, that there's a YouTube video that shows someone using this mod and a kid wants that mod, go and see how long it takes you.
John:
to successfully get that mod into Minecraft.
Marco:
Is this why there's, like, infinite Minecraft-related spam on the App Store?
John:
I don't know why.
John:
I can't quite understand what has happened to... It could be, like, a broken Windows-type thing, where Minecraft was very popular and it's been around for a long time, and at a certain point, people stopped fixing the Windows, and so now just, like, all of them have been knocked out by stones.
Marco:
Yeah, maybe.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I mean... Look, we're already talking about this.
Marco:
Might as well get into it now.
John:
All right.
John:
Yeah, I've got time.
John:
I've got to go to another podcast in half an hour.
John:
Busy man.
John:
You're so popular.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So, Minecraft mods.
John:
The problem with Minecraft mods, I complained about it on Twitter a little bit, and I hesitated to complain about it on Twitter, because I didn't actually want anyone to help.
John:
And the other thing I didn't want was people to think that it was a technical issue.
John:
It is totally not...
John:
a technology-based issue.
John:
It is a social community-based issue.
John:
That's the problem with Minecraft mods.
John:
And that is the essential thing to understand about them, that it's not difficulty in doing something with computers or software that's buggy or anything like that.
John:
It is completely evidence of what happens when either there is just chaos and anarchy in the community, like the broken windows thing where no one is repairing anything and everything's just in shambles.
John:
And it also looks a lot like Lord of the Flies, where it's just a bunch of kids on an island and you just leave for like two months and then you come back and it's just, you know, it's Lord of the Flies.
John:
Like the entire community has been... is run by young children.
John:
I don't think it really is run by young children.
John:
I think Minecraft is played by the same kind of demographic that plays all games, which is probably like the average of like a 30-year-old person or something.
John:
But it seems like it's run by kids.
John:
So here's the problem.
John:
If you...
John:
Got Minecraft.
John:
Like, you can go to the Minecraft store, you know, mojang.com or whatever it is, buy Minecraft, download it, play it.
Casey:
Hold on, hold on, hold on.
Casey:
Can you explain for those of us who don't know what Minecraft is, what Minecraft is?
Casey:
We're asking for a friend.
Casey:
I'm asking for a friend, whose name might also be Casey.
John:
It's actually not important what Minecraft is, but briefly, it's like...
John:
I can't explain it without doing jargon.
John:
I was going to say it's a voxel-based game.
John:
What?
John:
You don't know what voxels are.
John:
Wait, like Tiberian Sun?
John:
Remember Comanche on the PC, Marco?
John:
No.
John:
Back in the day?
John:
Voxels!
John:
Anyway, you can Google it later.
John:
You make a bunch of cubes, and the cubes come in different materials.
John:
And...
John:
The materials have properties and they start you off with like a procedurally generated world with grass and water and mountains and stuff like that.
John:
And you can hit little cubes to make them disappear or, you know, use cubes to make more cubes appear.
John:
So it's like Legos, but all the Legos are cubes and they're made of different materials and they interact with each other.
John:
You can put water on lava and different things happen, stuff like that.
John:
Okay, so how do you win?
John:
The appeal of the game, it's like a sandbox game, like literally.
John:
There's a survival mode where you can go and you have health and there's enemies that come out at night and you have to defend against them and fight them by clicking on them or whatever.
John:
And then there's other modes where you're just like, you don't have any health or life, you're just there playing in a big bin of Legos.
John:
And what do you want to do?
John:
You want to build things.
John:
You want to build structures, big architecture.
John:
You can dig into the ground and mine for minerals and jewels and make structures underground and do all sorts of very interesting things.
John:
It's totally a sandbox game.
Casey:
So you like it because it's a combination of Legos and GameCube?
John:
I don't play it.
John:
I'm not into Minecraft.
John:
I played it enough to know that it's not really for me.
John:
But kids like it, and my son really, really likes it.
John:
So that's the game.
John:
And the mods alter the behavior of the game.
John:
Like...
John:
there's a certain amount of like things you can put on your person, like different kinds of armor.
John:
And there's a, there's a mod that gives you different, you know, armor with special abilities, like armor lets you glide or fly or jump higher.
John:
And there's, you know, mods that give you larger explosives, you know, they have TNT in the game, but what if you want something that makes it even bigger explosion or mods that give you new enemies instead of just the regular zombies and creepers that are going around, you can get different kinds of, and so that's what the mods do what mods do.
John:
Right.
Casey:
Now, are these mods accepted or like an extension or is it the sort of thing where you would get like some, hypothetically, if you were young and couldn't afford things, you would get a patch so that you wouldn't have to register a game and pay for it?
John:
Well, so here's the thing about the game.
John:
Like, just like I was saying before, just getting the game itself.
John:
Like, no mods, no nothing.
John:
I just want to buy this game and play it on my Mac.
John:
Even that was not a great experience until recently.
John:
And even now, it's not great.
John:
Like, when I first bought the game, you get an icon.
John:
It's in your application folder.
John:
You double click it.
John:
It doesn't work.
John:
Like, that's not a good experience.
John:
Like, just like the game does not launch.
John:
And it's like all this permission errors.
John:
And if you had the older version, you had to go in and chmod something or, you know, it turned out being faster for me to just like run the jar file from the command line using the Java command line thing to get the game started because their wrapper thing didn't work right.
John:
So right off the bat, it's not a great experience just for the game itself.
John:
Because seriously, if I buy a game, I downloaded it.
John:
I put a little app icon.
John:
I double click it.
John:
The game doesn't launch.
John:
You know, game over.
John:
And this is not, again, it's not like version one of a game.
John:
Minecraft had been out for years by the time I installed it for the first time, and it just didn't work.
Casey:
So how did you allow your son to play this if the experience was that bad already?
Casey:
I would have expected you would have said, son, I'm sorry, but this just doesn't cut the mustard.
John:
You know, for gaming, you put up with a lot.
John:
I put up with Windows to play some games.
John:
Eventually, you just want the games to play.
John:
And I didn't, you know, this was years ago.
John:
It was like years after the game had come out, but years before now.
John:
And I played around and it wasn't that, I think I fired it up again so I could see like the 5x5 Minecraft server where they did a giant version of my head floating in the sky.
John:
So I went and flew around in there for a while.
John:
Look at that.
John:
Uh, and that was fun, but I don't actually play it.
John:
But so my son's friends are into it and you know, Oh, you gotta, can, can I play Minecraft?
John:
I'm like, okay, well I already paid for it.
John:
I have it.
John:
So here you go.
John:
You can play Minecraft.
John:
And then he starts watching the YouTube videos about mods and says, can I have like the, you know, the armor movement mod, which gives you some armor stuff that lets you, you know, fly and move and stuff like that.
John:
Uh, and I was like, okay, what are you talking about?
John:
And he says this and shows me YouTube video.
John:
And this one actually did have a links.
John:
It was like, uh,
John:
you know, armor movement mod, blah, blah, blah.
John:
You scroll down in the little, you know, the text underneath the video and it has links like, uh, download the mod here.
John:
Uh, you need to have this installed first and it gives a link to it and you're like this, you know, all right, so no problem.
John:
So you click on the links and they take you to forums and that's, that's a bad sign.
John:
Number one, if you click on a link or something and you end up in a forum, that's, that's a bad sign.
John:
And so I, I quickly learned that mods are not a feature of the game.
John:
Like a lot of games are built, uh,
John:
with the intention that you're going to modify it.
John:
Like, they support it.
John:
They say, okay, if you want a mod, here's the API you can do, here's the folder you put it in, put your stuff in there, and it will run it.
John:
Minecraft is not like that.
John:
Which, first of all, that alone boggles my mind.
John:
Because it is so clear that mods are something that the community wants to do with this game, that if...
John:
You would imagine that any other game developer would love the fact that people are modding the game and stuff like that.
John:
Support it as an officially supported feature of the game, because clearly that's what people want to do.
John:
But nope, nope, they're not going to support that.
John:
So your very first problem is that you're trying to mod a game that doesn't want to be modded, and that is always going to be gross and ugly.
John:
And like I said, it's a Java game.
John:
So the process of modding is usually like this is the technical part of it.
John:
And it's not difficult, although you would think it's the, you know, the end of the world if you Google around for it.
John:
Jar files are just zip files.
John:
So if you just unzip them, you get a bunch of, you know, class files and stuff, other Java crap in there.
John:
To mod it, you take some other jar file and open it up, take its contents, throw it inside the Minecraft jar and zip the thing back up and rename it .jar.
John:
That is the technical process of modding Minecraft.
John:
And usually what you want to do is install mod loader.
John:
It's like you do one mod that you shove into the Minecraft jar file that lets you load other mods that you don't have to shove in there anymore or something like that.
John:
And so if you Google around for how to install the whatever mod, there's a million YouTube videos.
John:
These are mostly kids, like, talking to their built-in mic, showing you a screencast of them in Windows XP, like, opening up zip files and dragging files from one place to the other.
John:
And there's a bunch of people doing it on Macs, too, showing you how to right-click and open, you know, and drag things around and stuff like that.
John:
One of the videos of some kid doing it on a Mac, I think it was on Tiger or something, really ancient version of OS X. Yeah.
John:
Uh, he, he's, this is the best part of this video.
John:
And it's, there's another thing about how real people interact with technology.
John:
He was dragging like from, you know, one calm view window into another.
John:
Uh, and, uh, a lot of these mods like replace files that come with Minecraft.
John:
And so you get the dialogue that says, you know, a file by this name already exists.
John:
Do you want to replace or whatever?
John:
Uh,
John:
I forget what the options are, but there's a checkbox in the corner that says, you know, answer this for the rest of the prompt so you don't have to keep clicking the button.
John:
He says in the video, you can click this checkbox, but I like to click it individually for each one just in case.
John:
That whole idea that the checkbox is not trustworthy, that it is...
John:
you are taking matters into your own hands and resting control from the evil, mysterious computer by clicking the button manually each time versus hitting that checkbox and hitting the button once.
John:
Because in one case, like, it's desperation for control to feel like you are in control of the system.
John:
If I click the button 100 times for these 100 files, I am in control.
John:
If I hit that checkbox and click the button, I have no idea what it's going to do with those 100 files.
John:
Maybe it will forget to do it for one of them.
John:
That's how real people relate to computers.
John:
Like, I've seen that phenomenon before, and this was an amazing instance.
John:
I would guarantee it was a kid, but I don't think it's confined to just kids.
John:
Anyway, that is the technical process.
John:
That is the part that I had the least problem with.
John:
Because, you know, whatever, I could do that 800 different ways.
John:
The difficult part was everything else.
John:
Finding where to download this thing from.
John:
Successfully downloading the thing.
John:
Those two steps are very difficult.
John:
Finding where to download, you go to a forum post, and maybe it's a sticky post, and is the post at the top constantly updated, or is the most recent version at the bottom?
John:
Having to read through the whole thread to figure all that stuff out.
John:
Then, when you get there...
John:
To download it, you click on a link that takes you to one of those, like, you know, scam download sites that's like, you know, click 800 download buttons, free download, download now.
John:
And you got to figure out which one is the real download button.
John:
Sometimes it's like seven layers deep.
Marco:
You only thought a survey and three captchas.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
For some credit cards.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
I would say the majority of those do not eventually lead to an actual download.
John:
No.
John:
Right.
John:
So now you're just angry, right?
John:
And what I'm thinking during this process is Minecraft is an insanely popular game.
John:
This is obviously a very popular mod.
John:
How is there not like a .org site?
John:
How is there not a damn Squarespace site as the official home for the armor movement mod for Minecraft?
John:
an official website that would say here it is don't you know because if you google for it you'll find a million hits like you know keyword spamming and like the keywords like you know download minecraft armor movement mod like people are camped out in that like crazy with things that have nothing to do with it but like you know the google results are useless and they're like you come to realize there is no official site for these mods there is no like the people who make these can't be bothered to put up a single website that has like here is the mod here are the here here is the download link here are the versions like
John:
That just doesn't exist for the most part.
John:
And you would think, okay, well, are there sites that compile these mods together, like a mod management site?
John:
Kind of, sort of, but those suck too.
John:
And the next problem is, say you successfully download something, what you really need to know is not just like this download link, what are the prerequisites?
John:
What do I need to make this mod work?
John:
Does it only work with a certain version of Minecraft?
John:
Do I need something else to be installed first?
John:
What version that needs to be installed?
John:
All these details do not exist because every single person doing these mods is apparently a goldfish who forgets things after seven seconds and says, like, this is what I had to do to get this work on this day.
John:
I uploaded a video about it and forget it.
John:
And you can sort of read the tea leaves and say, when this was posted...
John:
according to wikipedia the most recent version of minecraft version was therefore and then you have to guess did this guy have the installed the most recent version or did he not because if you take those files and jam them into the minecraft jar that's the wrong version they just won't work and the thing will crash on startup or whatever uh and they will not tell you this they will not tell you what you need and most of them say you need to install mod loader or forge you know requires mod loader or forge mod loader or forge are never linked to anything
John:
I just assume that everybody reading this knows what mod loader or forge are, already have them installed, have no problem finding the link.
John:
Go ahead and Google for Minecraft mod loader, Minecraft forge.
John:
You'll find a million hits, a million fake downloads.
John:
And again, you don't know which one of those work.
John:
And then you're like, okay, this one says I found something.
John:
This one says it only works with Minecraft version 1.5.1.
John:
where can I get Minecraft version 1.5.1?
John:
You think you could go to the main Minecraft site and get it.
John:
And you can kind of sort of do that, but not really, because they really hide the old versions down there.
John:
And then you're like, okay, well, this has got to be up on the web somewhere.
John:
I should be able to find a Minecraft 1.5.1 or 2 or 3 or whatever download somewhere.
John:
And so you're hunting around justifying the original Minecraft jar.
John:
And there are a million files out there that claim to be this that are not this.
John:
I mean, you download them, they're just a bunch of exes or mislabeled where you find out the jar file is actually 1.6.2, not 1.5.2.
John:
uh that's another incredibly problematic phenomena people keyword spamming for like armor movement mod for minecraft 1.6.2 which is a total lie because the thing downloadable from there will not work with 1.6.2 as evidence if you can dig through like the youtube comments people saying doesn't work with 1.6 change the comment this really works with 1.5 like
John:
it is a terrible maze of lies and bad downloads and no help from anyone and there is no safe haven there's no clean well-lit place where to explain what these things are and you would think for like a game as popular as minecraft that at this point you would launch minecraft and there'd be like it like an app store in the freaking game it would only show you the mods that you can load you would click on them and they would automatically install like you would think at this point that's how it would have gotten but
John:
But years and years of development have just led to this.
John:
It's like just giant chaotic mess of crap.
John:
And it has not gotten better.
John:
Maybe there was like a golden age before like the world fell and everything crumbled to dust.
John:
But I didn't experience the time.
John:
And now it is just a big giant mess.
John:
And really, everybody involved with this did what they required to get their thing to work on the day they posted it three years ago.
John:
And that's all they care about.
John:
And everything else is lost in the sands of time.
John:
So I spend most of my time trying to guess.
John:
Where can I get the file to work?
John:
First of all, what version of Minecraft does this mod work with?
John:
Second of all, can I get that version of Minecraft?
John:
Third, putting that version of that mod into that version of Minecraft and running it and seeing if it worked.
John:
And of course, there's no real indication for a lot of these things, especially when I was trying to get Modloader or Forge installed.
John:
It would seem to work.
John:
It wouldn't crash, but I couldn't tell if it worked successfully.
John:
And like Mod Loader and Forge, it's like, okay, I think I successfully installed these things.
John:
How do I install a mod?
John:
The Mod Loader and Forge people won't tell you.
John:
You can find instructions like, oh, just after you've installed them, just throw the mods inside your Minecraft jar.
John:
But other ones are like, oh, there's a mods folder.
John:
Put your mods in there.
John:
All the instructions reference outdated structures of Minecraft.
John:
There's a whole other menagerie of Minecraft launchers, of ways to launch the Minecraft program that are also third-party applications, because apparently the main launcher doesn't work, and they change how the launchers work between 1.5 and 1.6.
John:
And there are many, many mods that only work with 1.4 or even earlier versions.
John:
It's a problem of community and society and organization.
John:
It shows how terrible... It makes Linux package management look like paradise.
John:
That's probably what I can say about this.
John:
It makes RPMs look like the promised land.
John:
Because it is unbelievably terrible, and it boggles my mind that it has not gotten better.
John:
So this is like a cautionary tale for anyone who wants to have any kind of community involving a game.
John:
Do not let your game community... Do not let whatever happened to the Minecraft community happen to your game community.
John:
Because it is... I've got to think of a good analogy for it, but it's like a terrible plague or virus has destroyed that community.
John:
And it's just filled with this sadness and angry children and frustrated parents.
Casey:
So, John, I have to ask you, do you enjoy installing a new Minecraft mod or do you find it to be a little bit frustrating?
John:
At this point, you build up a certain level of expertise and you kind of know where all the bodies are buried and stuff like that.
John:
At this point, I know what all the problems are.
John:
My son asked me, I want the Explosives Plus mod.
John:
I couldn't even find the mod he was talking about because the video didn't have any links.
John:
I found lots of mods with the word explosive in them.
John:
I picked one that looked like it had a reasonable download link that went through one of those scammy ad sites where I know the seven places you have to click to actually get the download.
John:
And I did that for two mods.
John:
One of them just caused it to crash on launch.
John:
I'm not sure if I had the wrong version.
John:
Again, I had the version that it said that I needed.
John:
But the fact that it said that I needed a version doesn't mean anything because like, you know, it said needs one point.
John:
What do you mean it?
John:
Is it the official website for this mod?
John:
No, of course not.
John:
It's some random scam Google keyword page.
John:
A human probably didn't even write that.
John:
There is no canonical source for information about any of these things.
John:
So it's just all trial and error.
John:
So one of them totally didn't work at all and caused the thing to crash.
John:
Another one only worked when I uninstalled another mod.
John:
Again, cross-mod compatibility.
John:
Forget about that.
John:
That's not even a glimmer in the Minecraft community's eye.
John:
they have no conflict resolution whatsoever so i uninstalled a bunch of other mods i have this this thing that lets you make re-instance minecraft to say here's an entirely new instance of minecraft of a particular version and then you can screw with that one so they have tools that are trying to manage this chaos but the wrong way like they're just we will duplicate your entire world so you can start off with it in a known state and screw it up and then throw that away and do another one so i eventually got one of the explosion mods installed my son played with it today
Casey:
You know, I have two thoughts on this.
Casey:
Firstly, I am genuinely, and all kidding aside, I'm genuinely stunned that you're so willing to take code from random places and drop it on your computer and run it and just go on faith that it's not going to screw things up.
Casey:
Like, how does that not freak you out?
Casey:
It's just Java.
Marco:
Doesn't it have local file system access?
John:
It could be totally rooting me.
John:
It could be stealing every one of my files and my passwords.
John:
Seriously, the competence level of the Minecraft community is such that malware could not successfully propagate.
John:
It would be thwarted by the Byzantine maze of crappy download pages and everything.
John:
I'm assuming I'm not being hacked.
John:
Also, I'm installing this on my wife's computer.
John:
There's that.
John:
There's that.
Marco:
Then the truth comes out.
Marco:
Also, it would only have access to your passwords in Chrome.
John:
It would have access to everything.
John:
It's running as me.
John:
It could recursively delete my wife's home directory if it wanted to.
John:
You're right.
John:
But that's true of anything.
John:
If I download any game in the pre-app storage and even in the post-app storage, any application you download, you think, oh, it's Shareware or whatever.
John:
from some random place and you run it, it could destroy your disk.
John:
But in practice, that is extremely rare and has not happened, and that's what backups are for.
John:
And sandboxing.
John:
Sandboxing is not helping in this case.
Casey:
You know what this reminds me of?
Casey:
And perhaps this isn't the best comparison in the world.
Casey:
And, John, you won't understand this at all, I don't believe, because this is a PC thing.
Casey:
But, Marco, I don't know if you remember Kali, K-A-L-I, from way back in the day.
Marco:
I never had it, though, but I do remember it.
John:
I just pulled out Comanche, and now you're questioning my Windows cred, but go on.
Casey:
Sorry.
Casey:
So anyway, so Kali was this thing that it would take the internet and it would make the internet be emulated as an IPX whatever-whatever network.
Casey:
I'm a little light on the details because my memory is crummy.
Casey:
But the idea was all of these old DOS games or perhaps early Windows games were designed to be multiplayer based on IPX networks, which was some style of local network.
Casey:
And what Kali would do was it would...
Casey:
fake the internet as an IPX network.
Casey:
So basically what this means is games that were not designed to be played on the internet and descent one was a great example of this.
Casey:
You could then play over the internet and Cali not only would create this kind of tunnel for lack of a better word, but on top of that, it would also let you manage, it would let you view servers.
Casey:
It would let you join games.
Casey:
So take, um, I don't remember if Quake one supported internet play or not, but I believe it did not.
John:
It did.
John:
We're talking about it.
Casey:
It did?
Casey:
Okay, well.
John:
Quake World.
Casey:
That was a quick one.
Casey:
Well, fair enough.
Casey:
Well, maybe it was just early Quake or maybe it wasn't Quake at all.
Casey:
Maybe it was Doom 2.
John:
I don't remember.
John:
I remember playing Doom 2 over fake IPX because the Mac version of Doom 2 was compatible with the PC version.
John:
Like it was a Byzantine, you know, they would have to use the IPX and they would have to use Kali and then the Mac version would do whatever hell of crazy stuff it's doing and we both dialed them through modems and it was not a good experience.
John:
But it worked.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So the point I'm driving at, though, is that here's a situation where Kali was a standalone app that was, to the best of my knowledge, not at all supported by any of the many, many, many, many games that it supported.
Casey:
So Kali was a complete third-party hack, but it was really well done.
Casey:
And you could find servers, you could find games, you could find rooms, if you will.
Casey:
And it was really awesome.
Casey:
And I remember losing so much of my time playing Descent 1 against people on the internet over like crummy 56K X2 connections, or maybe it was even before that.
Casey:
Whatever it was, it was terrible.
Casey:
I had a Thrustmaster joystick that I'll never forget used.
Casey:
What it did was...
Casey:
You would plug your keyboard into the Thrustmaster, which by the way, had to be the big fat keyboard connection, not the small PS2 connection.
Casey:
Then you would plug the Thrustmaster into your computer and you could run this app in DOS that would let you configure the 950 buttons on the Thrustmaster to emulate keyboard keys.
Casey:
So I thought I was hot crap because I could play Descent basically all on the joystick without having to hit 350 keyboard keys.
Casey:
Anyway, the point I'm driving at is it was really well done and really well orchestrated for something that was not at all supported.
Casey:
And so it's surprising to me that Minecraft isn't – especially in this day and age where self-management is so much easier –
Casey:
So it's surprising to me that the Minecraft world is such a wild, wild west.
John:
Minecraft would be better if it was a DOS game, because in the DOS days, like you said, one guy would make some sort of mod loader thing, and it would kind of filter through the community through like BBSs and floppy disk trading, right?
John:
And there wouldn't be a million of them, and...
John:
you know, they'd have to be careful because it's not like you can update people.
John:
So the version that you got would probably work and there'd be like three possible versions in circulation and that would be the one that everybody uses and there'd be like five or six mods on the BBSs and they would all work and all be used.
John:
You wouldn't have this problem.
John:
Like, the problem is that it's like the complete irresponsibility of children combined with the...
John:
complete lawlessness and huge, you know, reach of the internet.
John:
So it's just spam, explosion, crappy download sites, kids' YouTube videos, no official sites for anything, which just boggles my mind.
John:
Like, the official page of a lot of these mods seems to be like a forum post where the guy just continually updates the top post in a sticky thread of, like, with his latest versions and stuff.
John:
It's just...
John:
it is really amazing.
John:
And especially in the modern age where any real game has like a, you know, a real supported built-in system for mods or the worst case, a folder where you throw a bunch of things and then it just loads them and just opening up jar files and putting stuff in and complete version and compatibility and no system for sorting that out and no conflict resolution.
John:
And it's really, really terrible, shockingly terrible.
Casey:
So what you're saying is you really like it.
John:
Not at all.
Marco:
I think what you're saying is this is your next app idea.
Marco:
You were saying last episode you didn't have any app ideas, and now this is clearly a major problem that no one's adequately solving to your standards, although I would bet most problems aren't solving your standards.
John:
It's unsolvable to my standards because of the way things are set up, and there's a million applications to try to help you with it, and each of those applications has exactly the same problems that they're trying to solve because you don't know which version of Minecraft it works with and which mods it works with and, you know...
John:
where to get it from and what you're supposed to do once you get it.
John:
And just a million repetitions of instructions of how to zip and unzip files.
John:
It's like, that's not the problem.
John:
Everyone knows how to do that.
John:
I found a couple of people on Twitter did send me helpful links for like, here's a thing that I used to manage it.
John:
And most of them were terrible or I'd already tried, but one of them actually did work for one mod that I was doing.
John:
And another one worked for a different mod.
John:
I have like 17 versions of Minecraft all in various states of disrepair, just so I have a chance to put like, okay, well this mod, I'll try to shove into that one.
John:
And this one I'll use this, this thing.
John:
And this one I'll use this launcher application and this one I'll use my clean 1.6 with.
John:
And yeah.
Yeah.
John:
It is probably the worst gaming experience I've ever had, and that is including updating any in-bat files and making special boot floppy disks on my friend's PC.
Marco:
I love that for the last 26 minutes, Casey and I have said almost nothing.
Marco:
And this is like one saved, bottled up rant that you've been waiting to let this out for months.
John:
I've calmed way down about this.
John:
I was livid.
John:
It's been weeks since this first happened and we just saved it.
John:
And I've mellowed out significantly.
Yeah.
John:
I would have loved to be there that night.
John:
Especially if you'd gotten me to the point where I had yet to be successful, because I spent several nights with nothing to show for it.
John:
It was just like a series of broken Minecraft jars.
John:
You know, that's all I had.
John:
And, you know, anyone who's, like, technically, you're just so pissed that, like...
John:
Because the problem is not like, look, I know how to zip files.
John:
You can't give me a damn download link.
John:
You can't tell me what I need.
John:
How can I tell whether it's working?
John:
What do I need to do for this?
John:
What version does it work with?
John:
All that stuff.
John:
That's after you fight through the download pages to get downloads that aren't like EXE files.
John:
This is the Mellow version.
Casey:
I would love to see the full-bore version.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
John:
And then you're trying to remain calm like Marco when he gets older.
John:
You're trying to remain calm for your kid, right?
John:
You don't want him to see the first.
John:
It's not his fault that you can't install this mod, right?
John:
But he's also saying, you didn't install the mod yet.
John:
When do you get the mod installed?
John:
It's just the worst in the entire world.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
I think we should probably wrap it up.
Casey:
Yeah, I think we're done.
Casey:
Well, John, would you like to add anything else?
Casey:
I'm sitting here waiting.
Casey:
I'm here for you, John.
Casey:
If there's anything else you'd like to add, is there anything else you'd like to complain about?
John:
Not today.
John:
I've got another podcast in five minutes.
John:
You've got to save it up.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
All right, thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, 23andMe and Squarespace, and we'll see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S
Casey:
Oh, no after show because we have no time for it today.
Casey:
Oh, come on.
John:
That's five minutes.
John:
You have five minutes.
John:
And now you've already had two things you have to beep.
Casey:
Hey, really quickly.
Casey:
How's your review?
Casey:
That good?
Casey:
That's a great soundbite right there.
John:
It's like I want it to be done, but there's more.
John:
Today was the first build of Mavericks that Apple even released that had one of the major applications that they advertised in the keynote.
John:
Oh, wow.
John:
So that's the pace we're at here.
John:
And they didn't even get the release number right in the release notes.
John:
They said, keep in mind that in Maverick's developer preview 4, blah, blah, blah won't work.
John:
It's like, oh, that's great.
John:
This is the developer 5 preview notes.
John:
I guess you just copied and pasted that from 4.
John:
When you're copying and pasted the known issues from the previous notes, you're not making progress.
John:
So I don't know when this thing will be released, but it makes review writing slow going.
Marco:
Do you think, given the developer preview state, do you think its release is imminent?
Marco:
No.
No.
I do not.
John:
Besides, they said fall.
John:
Fall starts on September 22nd.
John:
They reiterated fall in the earnings call.
John:
I listened to the earnings call, waiting to hear what they said.
John:
They said fall again.
Marco:
I'm guessing all of the pending computer updates are waiting for this.
Marco:
I'm guessing the Mac Pro and the new Retina MacBook Pros and maybe other MacBook Pros, maybe even a Mac Mini, probably eventually an iMac.
Marco:
I bet these are all being held up.
Marco:
by Mavericks.
John:
Eh, it could be held up by the Haswell things or screens.
John:
Who knows what the limiting factor is, but, like, progress is slow.
John:
Like, I just tried... I just got to... I was gonna write the dictation section today.
John:
Okay, now let me try this dictation thing.
John:
Didn't work.
John:
At all?
John:
No.
John:
Did not put my words that I said into the document.
John:
Period.
John:
Did it put other words into the document?
Marco:
Nope.
John:
Just no words?
John:
Just nothing at all.
John:
The UI worked.
John:
You see the little microphones, see the levels going up and down.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So...
John:
All right.
John:
It makes it slow to write, like, I want to make progress, and yet how can I write anything when things are broken?
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, why don't we hang up on you?
Casey:
Because friend of the show, Jason Snell is actually in the chat room being extremely patient, but let's hang up on John.
Casey:
And then Marco, I don't know if you have anything to add, but I don't mind hanging on for a few, if you'd like.
Casey:
We can just talk.
Casey:
We can talk about John while he's gone.
John:
You can pick a title.
Casey:
Oh yeah.
John:
We do have to.
Marco:
All right.
John:
That's how we win.
John:
That is how you win.
Marco:
We just wait him out.
Marco:
So he has to give up and yield to us.
John:
Otherwise I dictate the titles.
John:
You pick the titles anyway.
Yeah.
Casey:
Don't ruin it for everyone.
Casey:
All right.
John:
Now Jason is calling me.
John:
All right.
John:
There you go.
John:
That's not subtle.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Bye, John.
Casey:
Bye, guys.
Casey:
All right.
Marco:
By the way, I love – so for the secret live listeners that are under NDA, Casey sent me the screenshot of fast text under iOS 7.
Marco:
Now, I'm not going to share it with them because that would be a violation of trust.
Marco:
However –
Marco:
because you know i don't i don't want to give away secrets of the much anticipated fast ios 7 update but i love this is so you unintentionally that you are running it in the 3.5 inch iphone simulator yourself is it an it you know i almost pasted it in the chat but i didn't know if it was like breaking nda by even showing that and so i i don't think i mean technically it probably is but nobody cares
Casey:
All right, here's what we're going to do.
Casey:
So I'm going to put in the chat, and chat room, you're not going to share it anywhere else, right?
Casey:
We all agree, chat room?
Marco:
This is going to go right on to CaseyRumors.com.
Casey:
Right on to CaseyRumors.com.
Casey:
All right, nobody on the chat room is agreeing with me, so maybe I won't do anything.
Marco:
Well, they're on like a five-second delay.
Casey:
Whatever, whatever.
Marco:
Everyone agrees, that's it.
Casey:
Oh, there we go.
Marco:
That's like four people, that's enough.
Casey:
All right, that's a quorum.
Casey:
All right, everyone lie to me and tell me how beautiful it is.
Casey:
Anyway, so yeah, that's what I've been saying is that it actually looks pretty good.
Casey:
It does, yeah.
Casey:
Because it's all raw UI kit.
Casey:
So I'm thinking maybe I'll throw a tint color on it like a badass and call it a day.
Marco:
So I'm doing this stage of my app development now where I'm building the basics of the UI.
Marco:
I'm way behind development.
Marco:
I've been doing the data layer, the sync layer.
Marco:
Now I'm doing the basics of the UI.
Marco:
Very, very beginnings.
Marco:
I wrote my first view controller yesterday for this project.
Marco:
That's how far along I am.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
But looking at all this iOS 7 stuff, I'm like, I don't really want to do anything different here because this all looks really good.
Casey:
I just want it to look like this.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And so on the one side, I'm like, man, I feel like any time you use raw UI kit, you're copping out.
Casey:
But on the other side, I mean, not to toot my own horn because I really didn't have much to do with this, but I don't think it looks bad.
Casey:
It really does look pretty good.
Marco:
yeah really and you know like i you know i'm sure in a year or two anything that looks like this will probably have to have some more design work put into it but i think i'd rather like run this for a year exactly exactly and really you know like and plus like customizing stuff gets easier with every release because like you know first we had the ui appearance stuff and then like i think it came in five and then it got better in six and it's even better by a little bit in seven and now seven is all this cool new ui kit stuff and
Marco:
Customizing the appearance is getting easier with every OS release.
Marco:
I think we can fly with this easily for a year and be awesome.
Casey:
I agree.
Marco:
Not every app is going to be updated immediately.
Marco:
I completely agree.
Marco:
I would say we're in for a pretty uncomfortably ugly and awkward phase similar to browsing the web on a Retina MacBook Pro.
Marco:
I mean, I don't know what that's like.
Casey:
I don't know what that's like, Marco, because I'm using a pedestrian high-res anti-glare MacBook Pro, you big jerk.
Marco:
Yeah, and a 3.5-inch iPhone.
Casey:
Your phone is so heavy and thick.
Casey:
Oh, f*** off.
Casey:
So AF Waller in the chat said, add in a bunch of UIKit dynamics.
Casey:
I don't know, if you've used fast text, when you send a text, a little green box pops up that says, hey, you've gone ahead and sent it successfully.
Casey:
Well, just for grins and giggles on the way back from WWDC, I definitely changed that from going from like one by one pixel in the center of the screen to something to the order of 100 by 100.
Casey:
So it zooms in, if you will.
Casey:
What I did on the way home was from WWDC is I changed it to be full size drop in.
Casey:
What did I do?
Casey:
It drops in from the top and, like, bounces on the bottom, you know, using UIKit Dynamics Gravity, and then eventually falls off the bottom.
Casey:
And it was really fun to do, and it looks like crap, and it takes way too long.
Casey:
But it was a lot of fun to write that.
Marco:
Oh, we're going to be in for a rough time, I think, with apps playing a little bit too much with that kind of stuff.
Casey:
Oh, I had no reason to do it.
Casey:
But I was like, oh, this sounds fun.
Casey:
Let me try some of that.
Casey:
And it was terrible.
Casey:
But it was fun.
Casey:
Ay, ay, ay.
Casey:
uh what else we got to talk about anything i feel like we should be totally making fun of john or saying terrible things about john since he's not here to defend himself but but he's a nice guy we can't really say i know i know it's terrible did we so what are we concluding with titles are we going with thrustmaster joystick it's really good a thrustmaster yeah i mean was that not the most ridiculous name for a company in the world
Marco:
That's why Thrustmaster Joystick has to be our title.
Marco:
It really does.
Marco:
I mean, come on.
Casey:
Oh, man.
Casey:
So on a completely unrelated note, I know that I have made it in the world.
Casey:
And this link I'm about to post in the chat confirms it.
Casey:
I now have a parody account.
Casey:
Nice!
Casey:
My work here is done.
Casey:
This is my last episode of ATP.
Casey:
I've accomplished all that there is to accomplish.
Casey:
I'm done.
Casey:
And I would drop my Rode Podcaster if it wasn't so damn expensive.
Casey:
And mount it on a humongous mount.
Marco:
Yeah, and stuck to something.
Casey:
And stuck to something.
Casey:
Oh, man.