A 3,000-Word Digression
John:
You guys are failing.
Casey:
I see something about transporter in the FU.
Casey:
Do we want to talk about that or do we not care?
John:
That's a worthy follow-up.
John:
Okay.
John:
Because it's quick.
John:
I forget we were talking about transporter.
John:
Maybe it was during an ad on a past show mentioning the lights.
John:
And I think it was Marco was saying that lights, the blue LED lights are annoying on devices.
John:
This has a big blue light.
John:
Well, you can apparently turn the lights off on a transporter.
John:
So if you are one of those people who doesn't like lights on your electronics,
John:
and you get a transporter, apparently you can dim and turn off the lights.
John:
I don't think the lights are that bad, but then again, mine is also in the basement, so there you go.
Marco:
Speaking of retina, man, John, that thing in your review, we were supposed to talk about your review, how you found that the default wallpaper is exactly 2x the current 27-inch cinema display's resolution.
Marco:
Yeah, quite a coincidence.
Marco:
That's painful, man.
Marco:
That's so painful, because now you look like...
Marco:
all the pieces are in place i was treating like this like all the pieces are in place to have a retina desktop display except having the display like the computer is now supported thunderbolt 2 is fast enough the gpus are insanely fast and all these new models uh
Marco:
And there's clearly a differentiation here, whereas assuming it would need to be Thunderbolt 2, the new MacBook Air still can't do it.
Marco:
They don't have Thunderbolt 2, right?
Marco:
That's right, isn't it?
John:
I think so.
Marco:
The only computers Apple has announced with Thunderbolt 2 are the new Retina MacBook Pro and the Mac Pro.
Marco:
So it would be interesting.
Marco:
I've decided now, looking at what's being released, unless the benchmarks show some kind of massive gains in an application I actually use on the new Mac Pros, I think I'm going to wait and not buy a new Mac Pro until there is a Retina Desktop Display.
Marco:
Because I'm just not going to see enough of a gain from just the CPU side alone, just the storage side alone.
Marco:
I already have a good CPU, a good SSD, but what I really want is that display.
Marco:
And until it exists, I think I'm just going to hold off.
Casey:
That's going to be great claim chowder.
Casey:
I'm looking forward to that.
John:
We'll see how well his resolve holds, especially when I get mine and talk about how awesome it is.
Marco:
The thing is, what's it really going to get me if I get it before then?
John:
It makes sense.
John:
We're just questioning your ability to act rationally.
Marco:
Yeah, I might not.
Marco:
I mean, that's certainly a valid question.
Marco:
And you might be right.
Marco:
And this might be being played back at some point later and laughing at me.
Marco:
But I just... I think if you already have a 2010 Mac Pro...
Marco:
There's not a major reason to upgrade for just the CPU performance.
Marco:
We'll have to see how quickly applications take advantage of those GPUs.
Marco:
That could really make a big difference.
Marco:
I don't expect that most of the apps that I use will really do much with that, but we'll see.
Marco:
I could be wrong about that.
John:
Your Mac Pro might probably actually be better for games than the new expensive one that I'm going to buy because I could take out the video card that you have in and buy an aftermarket card.
John:
And, you know, so it's got fine CPU, fast SSD, and then I would put in the fastest gaming card available.
John:
And that might have better gaming performance than this obscenely expensive Mac Pro.
John:
But it wouldn't be black and cylinder shaped and have one fan.
John:
So, you know.
Marco:
And do you see that red one that's in the charity auction for product red?
John:
It's kind of neat, but I don't know if I like that color too much.
John:
I'd rather have a black one.
John:
See, I like it a lot.
Marco:
My reason for hesitating on bidding on that auction is that I don't know what the specs of the Mac Pro are.
Casey:
Wait, wait, wait.
Casey:
The thing starts at, what, $40,000, and the reason you're not bidding is because you're not clear what the insides are?
Marco:
I think that it says estimated range $40,000 to $60,000.
Marco:
Does that mean that the first bid has to be $40,000, or does that mean that's just what they expect it to go for?
Casey:
I've never been that serious about an auction of this capacity to even know the answer to that question.
Marco:
I don't know either, but if I can put in a bid for like $3,000, yeah, maybe I'll do it.
John:
Yeah, it's not entirely crazy because items like this, one-of-a-kind, blah, blah, blah, would probably retain their resale value.
John:
So even if you spend an obscene amount of money on this, you could, in theory, get that money back even after the computer is obsolete, simply selling it as a one-of-a-kind price.
John:
Mac Pro, blah, blah, blah, officially sanctioned.
John:
It's not like an aftermarket mod or something, so it should retain some value.
Marco:
That's the other thing.
Marco:
Right after the Mac Pro comes out, is Colorware or one of these companies going to start an anodizing service that just lets anybody do this for like $1,000?
Marco:
Yeah, probably.
Marco:
But the big problem with this is they don't tell you the specs of the Mac Pro.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
If I would actually win this thing for a reasonable price, I would at least want to know, what CPU does it have?
Marco:
Because that's something you can't change, right?
Marco:
GPUs I care less about, but does it have the base model CPU?
Marco:
If so, that's kind of crappy for that price.
Marco:
But if it has the 12-core, that's actually worse for single-threaded tasks than the 8-core.
Marco:
So I wouldn't really want that either.
Marco:
So, I don't know.
Marco:
This is all probably a ridiculously moot discussion because I don't think I can get it for $3,000.
Casey:
Goodness.
Casey:
Do you want to talk about this review?
Casey:
We don't have any other FU, do we?
Casey:
Oh, what about 703 and John's Motion Sickness?
John:
Yeah.
John:
We should have talked about this last week, but...
John:
I installed the 703 update.
John:
I knew what it was going to bring.
John:
And for people who don't know, the 703 update changes it so that if you go into the accessibility preferences and turn on reduce motion, it doesn't just remove the parallax effect on the home screen and the parallax effect on pop-up dialog boxes.
John:
It also removes the zooming animation when you launch applications and when you go back to Springboard.
John:
And it replaces that animation with a crossfade.
John:
Uh, and I always had to reduce motion on from the second I installed iOS 7.
John:
Cause I can't stand the parallax thing.
John:
The worst thing about the parallax thing is my chosen lock screen image, a picture of my dog, uh, my ex dog.
John:
He's still a dog anyway.
John:
He died several years ago, but yeah, that's my lock screen image because it's like a tiebreaker between like, you know, my two kids and my wife and everything.
John:
So let's go with the dog.
John:
Um,
John:
When you have parallax on, it has to zoom the image, zoom in, you know, like so we can do the parallax thing, but there's not enough background.
John:
It's a very tight closeup of my dog's face.
John:
There's not enough background around it.
John:
And when turn parallax on, it zooms the image too much and like chops off his little doggy nose on the side of the screen.
John:
So that's no good.
John:
So I can't have that.
John:
So I definitely don't.
John:
And I don't like the parallax at all.
John:
I don't like the effect.
John:
I don't like the little dialogue jiggling around when I move my thing.
John:
And so I got this thing.
John:
I'm like, all right, well, whatever.
John:
I just, you know, 703 update.
John:
I'll get it.
John:
And I knew it was going to eliminate the zooming thing with the crossfade.
John:
I'm like, oh, maybe it'll make my thing feel faster, right?
John:
Now, the first thing is, I'm not even sure that the duration of the animation is any shorter.
John:
I haven't actually timed it, but feeling-wise, there's still an animation, there's still a crossfade.
John:
Is it less time than the Zoom animation?
John:
Maybe it's the same amount of time.
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
People keep asking me about that.
Marco:
I see them asking you about it, too.
Marco:
I haven't tested it.
Marco:
I really don't want to test it.
Marco:
Somebody with two iPhone 5Ss, point one at the other one, take a slow-mo video and test it both ways.
Marco:
I'm curious to know the answer, but not so curious that I would actually do that.
John:
Yes, but the point is it doesn't feel instantaneous.
John:
But the second thing is I found that I missed the zooming.
John:
Because the zooming, for all of its slight motion sickness-inducing feeling, and by the way, I had that very early on until I just learned where to look.
John:
It was only because it was unexpected, and now I knew how it was going to work.
John:
That zooming animation was like the thing that made iOS 7 feel like iOS 7 to me.
John:
And it was fun, and it was interesting, and it made me feel like, hey, I'm using iOS 7.
John:
That's what I associated with the experience.
John:
That and the weird icons, I guess, whatever.
John:
And the new dialogues and stuff.
John:
And when it was gone, I missed it.
John:
And in its place, I didn't get, okay, well, I missed the animation, but it's so much faster.
John:
I got kind of boring, maybe slightly faster, but I can't even tell.
John:
I don't like the crossfade.
John:
And so now I wish there was a way to turn the zooming back on, but keep the parallax off.
John:
And this is like, you know, this way lies madness, where it's like, okay, well, we had an option to reduce motion, but now some people want this part of the motion is okay, but this part of the motion... Like, this is kind of an unapply kind of thing to do, where you release something, like, this is our statement, this is our product, but then you have to put in some option to turn some stuff off, because there are some legitimate issues with it, and then you start tweaking that option, and it's just like...
John:
It would be better if you could come up with one interface that everybody liked and nobody has a problem with, kind of like the original iOS, where there weren't these motion sickness problems.
John:
There weren't options to turn off zooming or whatever the effects were when you go back and forth to springboard.
John:
They nailed it better with that, whereas iOS 7 seems to have more rough edges, and they're like...
John:
trying to figure out the balance of, okay, well, we'll have a switch to turn it off and we'll have this thing to adjust that.
John:
And I'm not in favor of them adding 8,000 options to like pick which parts of the motion you like.
John:
I like the parallax, but I don't like it on dialogue boxes.
John:
I just like it on the lock screen or I want to disable it on the lock screen or I want that.
John:
You can't do that, right?
John:
They have to just go with one thing.
John:
So...
John:
In the end, the messing with my wallpaper and the stupid jiggly parallax annoys me more than I miss the zooming.
John:
But I really, really do miss the zooming.
John:
In fact, if I could pick myself, I would say keep the zooming and make it twice to three times as fast.
John:
And that would make me happy.
John:
When I say twice to three times as fast, I just mean reduce the duration.
John:
It doesn't mean I need a higher performance phone to do that.
Marco:
Would it really make you happy?
John:
Well, you know, happier.
John:
So that surprised me about 703.
John:
How did you guys feel about it?
John:
Did you upgrade to 703?
John:
Mm-hmm.
John:
And do you have reduced motion on, either one of you?
Marco:
No, I'm not an animal.
Yeah.
Marco:
I did have it on in 702 and earlier.
Marco:
I had it on just because I just didn't care about the parallax.
Marco:
And there was a weird bug with the parallax where if you launched an app in a certain orientation and then you tilted the phone back a bit, closed the app, goes back to Springboard.
Marco:
For a split second, it would show the old position of the parallax and then update to the new one.
Marco:
So you'd see one wrong frame and then it would jump to the next one.
Marco:
That's just a stupid implementation bug.
John:
I'd see that as well.
John:
And, like, I don't like seeing graphics move that I don't, you know, think should be moving.
John:
Like, the dialog boxes and stuff, it's not a convincing... The 3D effect is not convincing because the background and forward, like, there's no actual parallax.
John:
It's trying to fake it with, you know, shifting the background around.
John:
But to me, it just looks like they're shifting the background because that is what they're doing.
John:
Like, it looks flat to me.
John:
You know, in the videos that they show, like...
John:
hey, it looks kind of like the icons are floating above the screen, but the illusion is not maintained for me.
John:
So all it is is basically making graphics, like untethering them from the pixel grid where I think they should be pinned down for no great effect versus the zooming animation, which I think really does provide kind of like a sense of space of where you are and sort of, you know, going with the different layers and stuff more so than any of the other layering things.
John:
I think the zooming in and out from applications totally works to provide you with a three-dimensional sense of space of where things are on the phone.
John:
And I miss it when it's gone.
John:
I have intentionally not upgraded my iPad because of that.
John:
It's the last bastion of zooming.
Casey:
Well, I did see somebody, I don't remember who it was, with 703 and the crossfade enabled.
Casey:
And the very first time I saw that person return to the home screen from an app, I thought, oh, God, that's terrible.
Casey:
And I completely agree with you that that zoom does give you a sense of place.
Casey:
And I think it's kind of important to the whole layered approach to iOS 7.
Casey:
And I should say we had some real time follow up from a very reliable source that says the speed, the animation speed duration, as you were saying, is no different for the crossfader and no different in 703.
Marco:
and the zoom was the zoom was fun i did hear from a few people that uh that it is different on the iphone 4 and 4s that because the slower devices some a lot of people who had those devices told me on twitter when i asked if it was faster that it's faster on those um but i i can't really that sounds like maybe a coincidence or maybe maybe placebo and uh but i don't know i mean and i i'm with john i i
Marco:
I had reduced motion turn on just to avoid the parallax, which I think will go down as iOS 7's pinstripes.
Marco:
And as soon as the crossfade became a thing, I turned parallax back on because I can't stand the crossfades.
Marco:
They're so bad.
Marco:
These are two very extreme positions.
Marco:
It's as if on Mac OS X, as if you minimize the window.
Marco:
Every time you minimized or hit an application, it would do the big slow genie effect.
Marco:
It's like that.
Marco:
Like if that was the only option, either that or no animations at all.
Marco:
And, you know, the reality is the best thing is something in the middle here.
Marco:
And it's just going to take Apple, you know, maybe a release or two before they kind of tone down the new cool thing that they learn how to do.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And I should say, John, that even though I do quite like, well, I shouldn't say I quite like the parallax, but I don't mind the parallax except that my lock screen image, because I don't have children, is Aaron, is my wife.
Casey:
And I took that photo.
Casey:
It was actually the very first photo I took with my 3GS.
Casey:
And thus it is way too small to be parallaxified or whatever you want to call it.
Casey:
And I always constantly see like a black bar at the top of the screen, which drives me up a wall.
John:
No, no, you can't have that.
John:
You've got to get rid of that.
Casey:
Oh, it's terrible.
Casey:
It is terrible.
Casey:
And I haven't had a chance to find a picture that works better as a lock screen image.
Casey:
But that does drive me bonkers.
Marco:
You know she lives with you.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I know.
John:
Take another picture.
John:
I'm so close to doing, like, you know, content-aware fill to extend the background of this picture of my dog so that I don't have that problem.
John:
Like, I have Photoshop.
John:
I can make it happen here.
John:
Because I tried recropping it several different ways and realized just, you know, you can't.
John:
It's just not going to work.
John:
You can't stretch it out.
John:
There's just not enough background.
John:
And, of course, I use a black background on Springboard, so there's no parallax for me on Springboard, but the dialog boxes all have it, and I hate seeing those dialog boxes shift a couple of pixels if I move my hand.
John:
Stay still.
John:
trying to tap you was the dog photo taken any location that you can get back to oh no it was a a rental house in southampton from uh many years ago uh taking a picture of us putting his little head down on the on the uh gray wood deck so content aware phil could have a shot on uh stretching it out i might try that but we'll see
Casey:
Anything else on 703?
Marco:
Was there anything else about 703?
Marco:
No, that was it.
Marco:
Just the crossfades.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Just want to make sure.
Marco:
They're pretty bad.
Casey:
So speaking of Farhamptons, that's Long Island.
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
Yes, Casey.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Just want to make sure.
Casey:
There's a point to that question.
Casey:
What is the significance of Levittown to you particularly?
John:
Oh, that's where my parents grew up, both of them.
Casey:
OK, because I'm I don't have the link handy or I don't have the page number handy.
Casey:
I don't think I'm looking through my notes.
Casey:
But I noticed in the map screenshot you had Levittown and you had something else.
Casey:
I don't recall what the other thing was.
Casey:
And I was wondering because I feel like all these screenshots had like little tidbits and windows into the life of John Syracuse.
Casey:
And so was that address the address where either mom or dad grew up or both of them?
John:
Yeah, that was the address of my mother's parents.
John:
They don't live there anymore.
John:
So, like, none of the information in the review is useful to you.
John:
In fact, when my grandparents moved out of that house, a developer bought it and within weeks just totally ripped it to shreds and made a new house out of it.
John:
Because that house, it was an original Levitt house.
John:
You can look up the history of Levittown.
John:
You want to...
John:
Maybe read David Halberstam's The 50s, which is a nice book for learning about the stuff.
John:
Very light, not like the power broker.
John:
Anyway, it was an original Levitt house that my grandfather extended, but for the most part, my grandparents lived there their whole lives.
John:
It hadn't changed.
John:
Like, it looked like a grandmother's house and a grandfather's house.
John:
Like, they had changed it, but they changed it when they had kids, right?
John:
And so I guess it's just, you know, unsaleable.
John:
So when they moved out and the house was sold, you can't sell somebody, I guess, a grandmother's house or a grandfather's house, and they just ripped it to shreds.
John:
And so I'm glad my brother and I took a bazillion pictures of the inside and outside of it before that happened.
John:
So, yeah, if you were to go to that address in my review, what you would see is a house that looks absolutely nothing like the house my mother grew up in.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
And then what's MacArthur Lane and Smith something?
John:
That's the house that I grew up in for the most part.
John:
I mean, there was a couple, I lived in three houses.
John:
I was born in one and spent many years in another house and then moved to that one.
John:
And that's where I was in high school and everything.
John:
And again, we sold that house, you know, or my parents sold the house a while ago.
John:
I haven't lived there for many years.
John:
The people who bought the house cut down all of the trees in the yard, which is terrible.
John:
And I think actually against the law, but apparently they were not prosecuted.
John:
And so now the house looks gross.
John:
and all the trees are cut down and i have no idea what they did to the inside but i'm sure that's gross too now is there enough information in this review uh to steal your identity or or get a credit card under your name or maybe get an apple id password reset i don't think so because like i said uh these these two houses in this map thing no one related to me has lived in for many many many years and they don't look anything like they did when i lived there so it's useless useless to you
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
There were a couple other tidbits throughout the review, like an IM that you had presumably sent yourself or had Tina send to you, which I wanted to ask about the contents of that IM, which I have written down here somewhere.
Casey:
I'm assuming it's some book or popular media reference I didn't get.
Casey:
Where was that?
Casey:
Oh, something about Iceman.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
That was something else.
Casey:
Oh, something about a raccoon being released safely or something along those lines.
John:
That's what happens when people don't read their entire Twitter timelines.
John:
That's from my actual life.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
I read every one of your tweets, John.
Casey:
I have no recollection of this.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
You don't remember what I tweeted when I found the raccoon sleeping in the bottom of my garbage can?
Casey:
No, but I heard someone else tell that exact same story just today, actually, at work, which is kind of funny.
John:
Yeah, you know, in the bottom of one of our garbage cans, it looked like a young raccoon had gone in there and, I guess, couldn't get out.
John:
And, of course, they're nocturnal, so you went to sleep.
John:
So we went to put the garbage in the garbage can, and then, you know, you put in the bag, and you see a little raccoon sleeping down there.
John:
So I had to take the raccoon in the garbage can to the woods, wake him up, and release him into the woods.
Casey:
That's very kind of you.
John:
What else am I going to do?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Have him get dumped into the garbage truck if you're a terrible human being.
Casey:
Yeah, that's terrible.
Marco:
I might have done that.
Marco:
I really don't like raccoons.
Casey:
I used to love them when I was a kid.
Casey:
Now I realize they're just disease-filled, disgusting animals.
Casey:
But don't email me.
Casey:
So the last thing that I spied on your screenshots was...
Casey:
uh ice man wants to use your passwords which is what i was stumbling over a moment ago is that supposed to be some other reference that i didn't catch or is that just you trying to be fun all right marco save save casey here and redeem yourself what ice man i'm looking hold on what i'm on page five the icloud keychain page approximately halfway down the page
Casey:
man you're you're there's no way i'm gonna get this well and i mean i my first thought which i'm i'm grabbing from the chat my first thought was top gun but i i that's not right right it's ice men not ice man there was only one ice man you guys are failing that's see that's why i didn't think that was the case so what is what is it and will i even understand what it is this is a reference to you will okay so make me feel stupid
John:
The best one I have is in the AirPlay menu option thingy.
John:
You can see that that's the name of the volume because you can see the hard drive in the upper right corner of the screen.
John:
What's the name of the OS, Casey?
Casey:
Mavericks.
Casey:
Oh.
Casey:
So I get it.
Casey:
It's a plural of Iceman.
Casey:
I get it.
Casey:
That actually is kind of funny and I'm kind of annoyed now.
Casey:
Oh, man.
John:
If you make a Top Gun joke in the review, it's too obvious.
John:
And I also made an explicit Top Gun joke
John:
two releases ago you know so i can't can't go there again but yeah it's mavericks and the character in the movie is maverick and there's more than one of them so if you had iceman you know more than one of them like you don't want to be on the nose you want to get a little something for people's brains to be tickled or just confuse you yeah exactly apparently i fall in the confused category this is like six feet behind the nose and around the corner
John:
A lot of people got it.
John:
Let me tell you guys, not to make you feel bad or anything, but a lot of this is like the most obvious thing people write in like, you know, hey, like the whatever about your review.
John:
This is the one that was most recognized by people reading the review.
Casey:
Oh my God.
Casey:
He says in the chat, this is a fun game.
Casey:
Listen to Marco and Casey tortuously try to decipher John's references.
Casey:
That's the last I had everyone.
Casey:
So I'll stop putting us through this awkward pain.
Marco:
Well, this week is sponsored in part by a wonderful return sponsor who would actually get all these inside jokes, which I didn't get Casey.
Marco:
You barely got, uh, I don't even know if John gets them.
Marco:
It's Igloo software.
Yeah.
Marco:
igloo is an intranet you'll actually like go to igloo software.com slash atp so that igloo knows that we sent you and of course that will mean they will keep buying sponsorships which is always good for us now most people don't really like their intranets because most intranets are terrible i know you guys do you both have experience with sharepoint i know casey does yes everyone has to use sharepoint and it's not good
Marco:
I've never heard a single good thing about SharePoint.
Marco:
Have you?
Marco:
Is there a single good thing to say about it other than Microsoft something?
Casey:
There is, but I don't want to go there.
Casey:
I mean, it can be used well.
Casey:
It just never, ever, ever is.
Casey:
And in fact, the last project I did with SharePoint was an instance of it being used well, but that's the only one I've ever, ever, ever seen.
Marco:
That's saying a lot, because it's pretty widely used, and it's almost always hated by everyone who uses it.
Marco:
So with Igloo, you can make an intranet that your company and your employees and you will actually like using.
Marco:
You can share content quickly with built-in apps.
Marco:
They have blogs, calendars, file sharing, forums, Twitter-like microblogs, wikis, and more.
Marco:
Everything on Igloo is social.
Marco:
You can comment on any type of content.
Marco:
You can at mention your coworkers.
Marco:
You can follow any content for updates.
Marco:
And you can use tags to group things around the way you work.
Marco:
You can add on also subrooms like mini-Igloos for each of your teams to work in.
Marco:
It's very easy to use.
Marco:
The whole thing is drag and drop.
Marco:
It features responsive design and uses beautiful fonts from Typekit.
Marco:
You know, most intranets, if I can go off script here for a second, most intranets are designed 15 years earlier by a programmer, and it shows.
Marco:
And, you know, there's nothing modern about them.
Marco:
They might even require, like, IE5 to work properly or God knows what.
Marco:
Igloo is all modern, beautiful, well-designed, and tech-friendly.
Marco:
It's free to use up to 10 people.
Marco:
And when you grow, it's only $12 a person per month.
Marco:
And this will pass almost any enterprise checklist.
Marco:
It has enterprise-grade security.
Marco:
Everything is private, secure, and made for businesses.
Marco:
And you can start using it right away.
Marco:
If nothing else, just go to the website.
Marco:
See their genuinely funny videos about the service.
Marco:
And it's really great.
Marco:
So go to igloosoftware.com slash ATP to start building your igloo.
Marco:
Free to use up to 10 people.
Marco:
That's pretty great.
Casey:
uh igloosoftware.com slash atp thank you very much yeah now marco do you have did you do your homework let's start there you did read the review if i'm not mistaken i did i'm very proud of you this might be the first time that you've ever done your homework so it is definitely do you have do would you like to start with any questions i have i have a handful of questions that are kind of all spastic and all over the place but if you had any you would like to ask would can we start there
Marco:
I actually don't, and here's why, and I mean this as a compliment.
Marco:
The review, when I got done with it, it was like I had just finished a big meal.
Marco:
And it's like, all right, I'm satisfied.
Marco:
If you just ate a big meal at a restaurant and it was pretty good, and the chef comes over afterwards and is like, do you have any questions about what you just ate?
Marco:
Actually, no.
Marco:
No, I don't.
Marco:
I'm quite happy, thank you.
Marco:
So that's how I feel about this review.
Marco:
It was really good.
Marco:
I liked reading it, and I'm satisfied.
Casey:
You know, I actually feel mostly the same way.
Casey:
And I feverishly reread the review this afternoon or this evening right before we recorded in part so I could generate some questions and maybe in one or two instances fabricate some questions.
Casey:
Because the first time I read it, I felt the same way.
Casey:
I was like, I'm good.
Casey:
Everything was excellent, just as I expected, and I will be sure to tip the waiter.
Casey:
But yeah, it ended up really well.
Casey:
So John, any observations before I start noodling you with random questions?
John:
You should start noodling me, and then I will riff as needed.
Casey:
Is that supposed to be needling?
Casey:
Whatever.
Marco:
Noodling sounds funnier.
Casey:
Well, we were talking about food, so now you've got food on my brain.
Marco:
The mental image of noodling is definitely funnier.
Marco:
It's like some limp floppy noodles.
Marco:
This is going nowhere good, gentlemen.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Let me start with a really simple question, actually, which is less about the review and more about Mavericks.
Casey:
Do either of you guys find yourself using Finder tabs?
John:
Wait, you've installed Mavericks?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, no, I'm running at work too.
Marco:
Oh, you're crazy.
John:
No, it's fine.
John:
I mean, I said the only reason I don't do it at home is because of the stupid VPN that I'm forced to use that is not yet compatible with Mavericks.
Marco:
I was going to actually install it today, but I wanted to wait until after this show was recorded just in case something went horribly wrong.
John:
It was an amazingly smooth install because normally I have to futz with all my installed stuff.
John:
I didn't have to touch anything in user local as far as I can tell it all worked.
John:
The only bump I had was that my subversion repositories, they bumped subversion up to 1.7 and so I had to upgrade those.
John:
That's one command that it tells you when it finds out that it upgraded and so far that's it.
Casey:
No, I'm surprised.
Marco:
Actually, I have it on my laptop, and I was doing some work on my laptop earlier today for a while, and it was perfectly fine.
Marco:
I had Homebrew and CocoaPods doing stuff and PHP on the command line doing stuff, and yeah, it all works just fine.
Casey:
Wait, we might have talked about this, but you've embraced CocoaPods now?
Marco:
I have, yeah.
Marco:
When I open-sourced FC Model, whenever that was, like a month and a half, two months ago, whenever that was, a bunch of people requested it in pod form.
Marco:
And so I decided to install and start learning how to use CocoaPods.
Marco:
And yeah, turns out it's good.
Marco:
Who knew?
Casey:
No, when I wrote an iPad app early this year at work and we had another guy come in and help us out and he told me, oh, you have to use CocoaPods.
Casey:
It's the best thing ever.
Casey:
And I was kind of like, and as it turns out, it really is that good.
Casey:
So I digress.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because the thing is, programmers always – like every week, there's a new tool that programmers are telling other programmers, oh, you've got to use this.
Marco:
This is so great.
Marco:
And they usually fizzle out and die because they aren't that useful or necessary or mature.
Marco:
And CocoaPods, I wouldn't necessarily call it mature, but it's close enough.
Marco:
It works very well, and it serves a very good purpose that nothing else really serves this well, if at all.
Marco:
So –
Marco:
it works fine for me it is pretty poorly documented um and for a while the xc workspaces it would generate were not that great and had different warnings and stuff but if you update to the newest coco pods which there is no update command you have to like just run the gem install thing again uh then that fixes those things so i'm i'm happy with it now
Casey:
um there was definitely a learning curve to just getting it installed and set up properly but their site is is okay at telling you how to do that and once you get it set up it's pretty awesome good deal um so we got we got sidetracked so marco you've barely used mavericks whatever uh we've you've barely used mavericks john are you using finder tabs
John:
No, I mean, I don't use the browser mode finder very rarely to use it occasionally use it when I'm like, I'm when I'm literally browsing like I'm trying to find something in some Samba share somewhere.
John:
And I just make one new browser window use it and discard it all my other windows don't have the sidebar.
John:
I mean, occasionally when I do browsing type activities, maybe it will come up.
John:
But like for the most part, I don't do browsing type activities.
John:
I have like the five windows that have my stuff in them open, usually in list view and with little the little folders turned down that I access frequently.
John:
And that's it.
John:
I don't spend a lot of time.
John:
you know, browsing the file system with a browser.
John:
And it's most of it is because if I do anything with the browser, I am potentially screwing up what little spatial state that the finder deigns to actually remember for me.
John:
And I don't want to take that risk, you know, and it doesn't matter, you know, even me avoiding it, mixing that stuff together and screwing up all my state information, it still just forgets every, you know, two or three days, like I'll, like my applications window, which I never opened because they use Quicksilver, but occasionally I open it up to like, look around in there or,
John:
you know, maybe to drag something in or to, to zip up something before I saw a new version, you know, and I have it, you know, it's, it's, that's one of the few windows that I have viewed by icon with pretty big icons cause they're nice looking.
John:
And I have it all arranged by name and at least once a month, it will forget entirely about that.
John:
And we'll use a different view.
John:
We'll change the sort order.
John:
It'll have a sidebar when it shouldn't, it'll be in the wrong position on the screen.
John:
It'll be the wrong size.
John:
Um,
John:
And I'll have to hit Command J. And I will see the little checkbox that says, oh, we show an icon mode is checked, even though it has totally changed all my view options.
John:
And I'll set it back to the right thing.
John:
I mean, maybe it's a bad installer overwriting the DS store file or whatever.
John:
You know, it's just it has no respect for the work I put into it.
John:
So I try to avoid the finder.
John:
I try to avoid the finder as much as possible, because what's the point?
John:
Like, this is a section of the review that I didn't write, that I started writing.
John:
And I said, you know what?
John:
Stop.
John:
Stop writing this.
John:
It's not, you know, because I could just write about this forever.
John:
I was going to write in the finer section, you know, go on a big digression about about this whole topic, trying to give an analogy to the people who, you know, because people don't understand this whole thing.
John:
And they think it's stupid, but it's not.
John:
And I put in that one little sentence to that effect in the review.
John:
And that's all the remains of the what could have been a, you know, 3000 word digression that everyone would have been pissed about.
John:
How would you feel if once a month you picked up your phone and all the icons and springboard were all over the place?
John:
Like, would you go back and rearrange them to the way you wanted them again?
John:
After that happens three times, two times, or maybe even just once, wouldn't you just give up and go, oh, well, forget it.
John:
I guess I'll just do search for everything.
John:
Or I'll just try to have them sort alphabetically and hope that they stay that way.
John:
Like...
John:
And then you just accept that.
John:
And if someone said, no, no, the little springboard icons, they should remember where they are so you could arrange it.
John:
Like, who's going to arrange all their little icons?
John:
This is stupid.
John:
There's too many applications anyway.
John:
You know, no one is going to arrange all their stuff like that.
John:
Just accept that you use search or they're alphabetical, right?
John:
And that's the state of the Finder, that, you know, it doesn't respect...
John:
Any work you do to get things arranged the way you want them, to have this window off to the left and this view and this size and this scroll position and this selection state and to have that window over there and to do this, no one's going to do that because you know any of the work that you put in, it may help you for this session right here, but tomorrow or next week or whatever, it'll be changed and you open that window and it'll be in the wrong spot and it'll have a sidebar and it won't respect the view options that you picked or the solid order that you picked or whatever.
John:
And so people give up and they're just like, oh, I guess I can't do that.
John:
And you hear all the same arguments like,
John:
Well, there's too many files.
John:
That works when you have five files, but it doesn't work when you have a thousand.
John:
That's like saying, well, I have too many applications.
John:
Even people with a bazillion applications with screens full of folders, and we've all seen those people, right?
John:
The people who used to hit the 11-page limit on Springboard.
John:
Even those people...
John:
screen one at the very least or even like you know they'll arrange screen one and then after that it's just you know folder land and it's just a big mess right but even they will arrange screen one and even if you don't arrange screen one i'll go ahead no it's all just a i'll see a folder i always do a search even those people i feel like would carefully pick the four items that are in their little dock that you know the fix thing or whatever like there's always something in your life that benefits from you putting it the way you want it knowing where everything is
John:
using you know spatial recognition of what size is it what color is it what position is it on the screen when i put it there it stays there i know where it is i can orient myself to it and those are the few common things you do and no matter how many files we get no matter how many applications we get no matter how big hard drives get there's always going to be some working set of things that you would benefit from if you could arrange them just so and have them where you want them and that i continue to
John:
uh rail against and i wish people at apple understood that clearly someone does because springboard is just relentlessly spatial in terms of arranging things and if you've ever had this happen and i have with an ios bug where springboard does go nuts and everything gets all scrambled it is crazy making everybody hates that uh that's how i feel about the finder half the time when using the finder in os 10 so yeah not really in tabs
John:
Wow.
Casey:
That was all that for, no, not really.
Casey:
I don't use Finder tabs.
Casey:
John, this is why we love you.
John:
And it's not because I don't like tabs.
John:
I love tabs.
John:
I use them in my browser like crazy.
John:
It's because I know if I mess with any of that browser stuff, I'm going to be screwing my own tiny little toehold that I have on the spatial state in the Finder.
John:
It's not because I hate the browser stuff.
John:
If I could just have separate browser windows and non-browser windows, I would use the browser way more.
John:
And I would love that there are tabs there.
Marco:
Do you think it's a little bit less of a priority of making that stuff that reliable on Mac rather than iOS?
Marco:
Because on iOS, Springboard is the only way to launch apps and is by far the most common way for power users and the programmers who work on iOS to launch their apps.
Marco:
Spotlight exists, but on iOS, it's certainly a little bit clumsy to use over just swiping too over to find the page and tapping an icon.
Marco:
Whereas on the Mac,
Marco:
I suspect that most programmers who work on OS X and most power users who would be most irritated by this kind of stuff probably don't open finder windows very frequently to navigate to their applications or to the files they want.
Marco:
They probably are using things like LaunchBar, Quicksilver, or at least Spotlight to do quick keyboard-based launching and finding of things much more often.
Marco:
So you think maybe it's just not as much of a pain point?
John:
Well, I mean, it's not that it's not much of a pain point.
John:
It's just that the design of the OS X Finder precludes them doing this.
John:
It's not like it's like, oh, if they just fix the bugs, it would be fine.
John:
It's just designed not to work that way because it's not clear when you're rearranging something.
John:
what effect what you're rearranging has.
John:
Because if you have a browser window and you browse through stuff and you make changes as you go, what are you making changes to?
John:
It's the difference between window as a device that you peer through to see the contents of your file system and window as the spatial manifestation of a particular directory on disk.
John:
And you can't combine those.
John:
Once you can change a window from one to the other, what happens when you transform?
John:
Does suddenly the spatial state of the window suddenly apply itself to the folder when you transform it to get rid of the sidebar and reverse?
John:
Like there's no sensible way to do it.
John:
So there's nothing they can do short of actually separating those two views.
John:
And the non-user friendliness of the Finder is tied to the non-user friendliness of the file system.
John:
So this also doesn't solve that problem.
John:
Like the fact that there's a bazillion files and they're all over the place and people don't know what to do with them.
John:
Like it's the reason iOS is so successful because it gets rid of that.
John:
It's like,
John:
You know, people can't handle the faucet system.
John:
They can't even handle open save dialog boxes.
John:
They just simply cannot handle it.
John:
So we need to get that away from them.
John:
And Springboard is a great, you know, a great solution to that problem, especially in the context of handheld devices.
John:
Maybe it doesn't apply entirely to the Mac, although they did add Launchpad and everything like that.
John:
But...
John:
the the problems the problems of the file system are not going to go away if you suddenly you know make the finder spatial now because the finder was spatial for years and people still couldn't handle it but for the you know the average person but for the few people who could it really did let you manage your stuff in a nicer manner uh and we've got many more interesting advanced technologies you know like you said spotlight quicksilver
John:
all that good stuff, plus tons of really good in-application management of stuff, like the sidebars and the source lists and the various applications that give you a view of your stuff without showing you a view of your disk.
John:
That's all good stuff.
John:
It's all thumbs up, but the Finder is not what it could be, and I don't think it's because of...
John:
that it's not a priority.
John:
It's just that, well, I guess it is kind of, it's not a priority because they're like, well, it doesn't work that well.
John:
And we don't have a real strong philosophy for it.
John:
And we're trying to satisfy everybody and end up satisfying it.
John:
But really in the grand scheme of things, the finder is way less important than it used to be.
John:
And that is true.
John:
So, you know, let's just add tabs.
Casey:
Why not?
Casey:
Well, the funny thing is, the reason I brought this up two hours ago was because I was just wondering, I was just wondering after having reread your review, why it was I was still opening like two or three finder windows in order to drag things between folders, directories, whatever, when I'd completely forgotten that tabs were even a thing in Mavericks.
John:
Well, you want to see the source and the destination at the same time.
Casey:
Yeah, and that's a very fair point.
Casey:
But to be honest, I would probably do just as well by getting one tab with the source, the other tab with the destination, and that would be sufficient.
Casey:
And that's why I actually really like – this is a completely unsponsored plug.
Casey:
I really like the app Dragon Drop, which is like the animal dragon drop, but it's a pun for drag and drop.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
Did you know there's a really funny joke in his review about Iceman?
Casey:
Uh, anyway, so the point is this little app, you jiggle your mouse and a little, uh, like a tool tip sort of, and it's not a tool tip.
Casey:
It's like a little, I don't know what you call it, but it's a little thing, a little window that pops up and you can drop something that you had.
Casey:
that you were dragging onto this little window that is on top of all other windows.
Casey:
And then you can go about your business, do whatever you need to do, and then drag away from the drag and drop window onto whatever you want to put it on.
Casey:
So the use case being, you have one finder window, you find the file you want, you pick it up, you jiggle your mouse, you drop it on the drag and drop window, go to that same original finder window, and go to wherever you want this file to be, and then bring the file from the drag and drop window
Casey:
back into that original finder window which is now pointing to the new destination.
Casey:
That was a terrible way of describing it, but the point I'm driving at is there are other options other than just tabs that I use constantly, but yet just today I found myself somehow deciding to open two or three Finder windows to do this when I really should have just embraced Finder tabs.
John:
Yeah, so that drag-and-drop thing is the shelf from Next Step.
John:
So everything old is new again.
John:
Having that intermediary place to keep things.
John:
It's a reasonable idea, but at a certain point you can't have every...
John:
They ditched it because they were trying to simplify the interface.
John:
The next dock was more complicated than the original Apple dock, and the shelf goes away.
John:
But yeah, there's lots of replacement-type things to say, to let you split up an operation into two pieces.
John:
Here's the thing that I found, and then hang out over here.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, it makes sense.
John:
I mean, I know a lot of people who would always have, the way they use the OS X finder is they would have, all they were to have ever have is two browser windows.
John:
One on top or one on bottom, one on left, one on right, and they would just sort of arrange them.
John:
And I bet they got pissed every time those windows rearrange themselves or resize themselves.
John:
Anyway, and they use it kind of like transmit, like panic FTP app.
John:
The left side would be source and the right side would be destination.
John:
And that's how they move files.
John:
They would navigate with the browser thing in one place, navigate with the other thing, and then move the files crosswise like that.
John:
And that's one way to operate, albeit inefficient, because the finder was not helping.
John:
Because what they really wanted was basically transmit with a big arrow in between.
John:
And so they could navigate, navigate, arrow one direction or the other.
John:
You know, select and then do arrows.
John:
Right, right.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So anything else on finder tabs?
Casey:
I feel like we've already been on this for a while.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Let's see.
Casey:
What else did I, Oh, one, I wanted to make an observation perhaps more than, than have a question, which is there were a couple of spots where you threw in these just extremely passionate, like one liners.
Casey:
And the, the, you made mention of one earlier, which was,
Casey:
I guess it was about Finder where you said some people don't care about this distinction between browser and whatever the other kind of Finder window is.
John:
Or think it's academic and not important.
Casey:
Well, right.
Casey:
And while they think it's academic and not important, next sentence, they are wrong.
Casey:
And there was another instance.
Casey:
What was it about?
Casey:
I wrote down eternal vigilance.
Casey:
Oh, it was Notification Center about how whether you want people around you to be able to see who's IMing you or who's tweeting at you or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And so you could choose to have, in the case of email or IM, you could have kind of the details hidden on Notification Center, but that is less useful if you're the only one looking at the computer.
Casey:
And so he made this one-off about how the penalty for this is you have to be eternally vigilant as to who is within eyeshot of your machine.
Casey:
And again, I don't think there's much of a question here, but I just loved those little one-liners where it was...
John:
completely clear exactly what you felt and if any of us disagree well we are just completely wrong and that's the end of the damn meeting the academic thing is like that's part of a broader point where people fall into the trap uh where if if they don't understand or can't see the benefit of something uh therefore there is no benefit and in anything where you're you know someone is a creator and someone is consuming it
John:
the assumption is that the creator has more knowledge about the domain.
John:
Like you're not, you don't have to understand what makes a good song to appreciate a good song.
John:
Right.
John:
But you also, you know, can't say if someone describes like some musical concept, you'd be like,
John:
I don't understand.
John:
That's not important to a good song.
John:
You don't know what makes a good song.
John:
It's not your job.
John:
You don't have to know what makes a good song.
John:
All you have to know is how to enjoy a song.
John:
Do I like the song?
John:
Do I not like it?
John:
And you leave it to the people creating it to figure out what is it that makes a good song.
John:
All that music theory stuff.
John:
You may not understand music theory at all.
John:
You may not understand how anything about music works.
John:
But someone has to.
John:
And it's their job to understand this stuff.
John:
So all this academic stuff, you don't have to understand it.
John:
You don't have to even buy that it works.
Right.
John:
Tons of things that people love about Apple products have a foundation in complicated things that users don't understand, but the user sure as heck feel the result of it.
John:
And so that's what I hate the argument about, like, you know, this, this space, like you try to explain the concepts behind things that make for, you know, usable, pleasing, efficient user interfaces, and the people's eyes glaze over like, and they say, Well, that is obviously not not an important part of user experience.
John:
it's not you know just because you don't understand doesn't mean it's not part of it and the thing is they shouldn't have to understand it so my like my goal i'm kind of talking to apple always with these things like i guess i want to tell people about you know the the philosophies underlying these things that that i think would be a good idea or whatever but it shouldn't be their job to understand it and it's not i don't i don't nothing hinges on convincing them so that's at this point i'm not like i'm done trying to convince the end users that
John:
that this would make a good interface.
John:
And the best bet I have is to try to convince someone who has the power to make an interface.
John:
And the thing is, a lot of software developers have read what I've talked about on this topic and tried to incorporate some of those things into their designs with very little success, I might add.
John:
And I would say Apple itself
John:
uh is one of the few companies that has incorporated against springboard and the whole ios user interface is like the the the comfort and the stability and you know the the sort of approachableness that people feel with that little grid of icons that you can move around and swipe from one screen to the other that is like the ultimate victory of all of these concepts that everyone thought were stupid and their eyes go there so yeah that that got a one-off because like i said that is the big honking section of the review that every time i read a review i stop myself from writing more or less because i feel like i've covered it but
John:
it's still totally there and i wasn't interested in engaging on it and the other one the eternal vigilance thing like that's that's again even more true of ios because you know what it's like in ios like you know people who are nerds listening to this podcast how often do we go into preferences and like go on patrol and the notifications thing and the location settings you know what i mean like you're allowed notification you're you're you're allowed to have banners
John:
you're allowed to make sounds you're not allowed you install an application and you go in there and adjust this thing you're not allowed to push notifications like all these things are great but if you want to have a nice experience and not just be like overwhelmed by beeping things and things popping in your face the price is you have to spend some time in like in the notification minds throwing the toggle switches left and right and just deciding what you want and os 10 has exactly the same thing notification center which i love it also means that if i don't pay attention and i install five new applications
John:
I need, you know, they'll be throwing stuff up and they'll be filling my notification center sidebar and they'll be doing all this stuff.
John:
And I got to go in there and say, oh yeah, nope, not you, no banners, no sounds, no this, you know, all that stuff.
John:
And if you don't do that, you will eventually be overwhelmed and you'll be like, iOS sucks.
John:
Everything's always beeping in my face.
John:
Like, well, they give all the application developers these things and they give the users control in a way that Apple usually doesn't.
John:
Like Apple, it usually isn't in the business of giving you a gigantic wall of toggle switches.
John:
But in the case of notifications, they do.
John:
And I think it's,
John:
probably the only way you can do it because only the user can decide what's important enough to them to, you know, beep in their face and how annoying is a dialogue box versus a sound versus a banner versus something appearing in a sidebar.
John:
So that was the point of that one.
Casey:
Yeah, and I really do love them.
Casey:
And I think part of the reason I enjoy them so much is because I tend to waffle.
Casey:
I don't know if – or in hedge.
Casey:
I don't know if anyone happens to have noticed this.
Casey:
And I love when you just come out and it's just that's the way it is, like it or not.
Casey:
And I just really enjoy it.
Casey:
Marco, do you want to tell us about something else that's awesome?
Marco:
I would love to.
Marco:
Now, we know what you're thinking, but let us assure you that Oxygen is not yet another attempt at a write-once, run-badly-everywhere solution to app development.
Marco:
And we've seen a lot of those.
Marco:
Oxygen lets you create fully native apps on each platform, and it gives you full unrestricted access to the APIs native to each platform.
Marco:
So whether it's the Cocoa APIs on Mac and iOS, the .NET framework on Windows, Casey, or the Java and Android libraries...
Marco:
With Oxygen, you can still write apps specifically for each platform, but you can do so using the same modern language in IDE, removing the need for you or your developers to learn different languages and switch between different environments all the time for the different platforms.
Casey:
oxygen is based on object pascal do you guys know pascal i never learned it i spent like a week or two learning it at some point actually it might have been in computer camp and we can do a whole deep dive into the psychosis behind that but but i believe it was in computer camp that i learned very very briefly learned pascal i went to band camp and and i thought that was the nerdiest thing ever but i i think you just beat me
John:
No, I never use Pascal.
John:
Actually, I think I may have written a couple pages of Pascal back when you programmed the Mac in Pascal.
John:
That's a long time ago, but didn't do anything useful with it.
Marco:
Maybe chess camp is worse.
Marco:
Anyway, Oxygen is based on Object Pascal, which is revamped and revitalized for the 21st century.
Marco:
It's a fully object-oriented language that's easy to learn and produces easy to maintain code.
Marco:
And it has many sophisticated language enhancements, from features that make it easier to write asynchronous and parallelized code to things like class contracts that make your code more robust and easier to test.
Marco:
Oxygen comes with the Visual Studio IDE, where the tool chains for all platforms come together.
Marco:
For example, you can build, deploy, and debug against your iOS and Android device right from the IDE.
Marco:
You can find out more by visiting ramobjects.com slash oxygen, remember there's an E on the end of that, and downloading a full free trial.
Marco:
That's ramobjects.com slash oxygen, O-X-Y-G-E-N-E.
Marco:
And by the way, if you use discount code ATP13 for the ATP, the year of 2013,
Marco:
That's 20% off all RemObjects products, Oxygen or otherwise.
Marco:
So thanks a lot to RemObjects and Oxygen for sponsoring the show.
Casey:
So that's actually a somewhat prescient segue into what I was going to ask next, which is a lot of the review, John, I would say is relatively high level and approachable for just about anyone, even non-developers.
Casey:
And then the next thing I know, I'm looking at hex dumps of file, extended file attributes or whatever they're called.
Casey:
And my question to you is, at what point do you decide you're going too deep into the nerdery and pull yourself back out?
Casey:
Is there any sort of decision making process or decision tree or is it just you do enough to get your point across and that's that?
John:
Well, so there are so many things in any release that I could write about.
John:
This is the eternal struggle with any of these reviews, and this is why I continue to resist the description of comprehensive.
John:
Because, you know, if you've gone to WWDC, like, there are so many topics that I could go into.
John:
Topics that I'm interested in.
John:
I mean, in dev tools alone, I could spend a million years just on Xcode and Clang and LLVM and, like, all the things they do to the language every year.
John:
And some years I have done that.
John:
I did that when they did GCD, and, you know...
John:
like but then i didn't do it when they were you know doing properties and dot syntax right so there's just too much to cover right and i have to decide you know which one of these things it really makes a difference and sometimes i sneak stuff into os reviews that really has nothing to do with the os but i think is important for the platform like it's this is more of a state of the platform type review and using the release of an os as a
John:
as a point to talk about it but even within the os i just have to leave stuff out right and i try to pick some features that i think are either important or you know could be important to users or highlight something about apple's design philosophy or you know and so a lot of things get dropped in the cutting room floor and but tags you know tags fits all the criteria it's a feature that apple touted you know all the time it's it's a feature um
John:
that builds on technologies that they added over many, many years and that I've been following closely.
John:
So this is like, this is like a, you know, a breadcrumb trail of like, how did we get where we are today?
John:
And you go all the way back to, you know, the metadata stuff and file name extensions, and then finally getting extended attributes and then spotlight leveraging that.
John:
And then like, now finally we're at a point where we can do tag.
John:
And there's been so many third party applications that leverage this exact same infrastructure to do similar things with, with the tags.
Yeah.
John:
And now it's a built in feature of the OS.
John:
And the reason I went deep on it is because I, you know, I'm, I talk, I'm talking about the implementation and I don't have to re-explain the implementation first principles, because if you've been following along, you know, and I could link back to, you know, remember when we talked about extended attributes, remember when we talked about spotlight, like, you know, it builds on, it's, it's like any kind of, you know, school course where you, you build on the information that you learned in the previous semester to learn the new things.
John:
You don't have to go back over it again.
John:
And in particular, when it comes to tags,
John:
Like, you know, it's scary to see, like, hex dumps and stuff like that, but I explained it to a level that I thought anybody reading could understand.
John:
Like, you know, I had to, like, you know, explain exactly, like, okay, well, this number in hex is this, and therefore that number and blah, blah, blah.
John:
And it has a, you know, understanding the history of tags and the particular implementation explains why it works the way it does.
John:
Why are there only seven colors?
John:
Why can I have repeat colors with different names?
John:
Like, and all these weird behaviors that if you were to just test them, like, it works in a strange way.
John:
Sometimes,
John:
This file had this name and this machine when I brought the tag over here, the color was different, but the tag name was the same.
John:
And when I did a search, you know, all these things that would be inexplicable.
John:
Once you understand the implementation, it's not that complicated.
John:
Once you understand the implementation like Oh, now I know why they only have seven colors.
John:
and now i know why that you know the names change like that and now i know why it's sort of backward compatible with labels because i know how labels work so now i understand why you know they can't have all the labels because labels only have this one bit field and so it has to pick and they chose to pick like the last tag that you apply but you can still have the other tags as they're over here and why are they in a big xml blob because they do property lists which is a big thing in mac os 10 and they put it in one big blob so spot like an index it is a symbol you know like
John:
it all comes together like that the details of that implementation help you understand why the features work the way it does and i tried to get into like the trade-offs of like what if they had done it this way that would be more pure then they would have this drawback well they did it this way what happens if you change the name of a tag and you've got 10 000 files uh and you're just like that well you're going to see a progress dialogue well it's kind of gross and you could have different tags with different names and different machines and if that disk isn't online when you change the name when you bring it back online things aren't going to match and
John:
you know it in some sense it's revealing the ugliness of the implementation but i think i think it explains how the feature works better than trying to like truth table it out and saying when you click here and do this and do that this happens when you click here this is that like you know because i think tags do have enough weird edge cases that if people just started clicking around they wouldn't understand why they work the way they do and this is the type of section that i'm going to be linking people back to for years to come and already getting you know people like
John:
tags did this strange thing i don't understand why uh just link to the section like once you read through it you say okay well now i know what happened when i did that and now i completely understand why it behaved in this particular way
Casey:
And you feel like going all the way down to hex is a reasonable amount of depth for a normal human being to understand.
John:
Yeah, because I feel like I walk through it a step at a time.
John:
Like, here's the contents of the thing, and here's what it looks like.
John:
And linking back, if you don't know what a property list is, I link you to the documentation that says that Apple's –
John:
property, you know, property lists are what we use in Mac OS X to store this type of data.
John:
And this is what I think anyone could understand property lists.
John:
It's not, you know, you don't have to know the intimate details of it, but you've read the documentation like, oh, this is a nice way to store like semi-structured, simple data with like strings and numbers and stuff.
John:
And, you know, Apple uses it a lot and there are different structures.
John:
So it makes sense that they would use that to store it.
John:
Then you come back to the review and continue reading, you know, and extended attributes, go read about what the heck those are and come back here.
John:
Oh, they just made a new extended attribute and they gave it a name and here it is.
John:
Like,
John:
It may take somebody who doesn't know anything about it a while to go back through the other stuff, but anybody who has been following along should breeze through it.
Marco:
Yeah, actually, part of the reason why it took me longer this year to read it than last year is because I followed some of those links and got lost on things like the Wikipedia page about Unix demons and things like that.
John:
Yeah, well, that's mostly there.
John:
I'll just use the word demon with the A before the E and just assume everybody knows what it means.
John:
I don't want to explain what that is.
John:
But if you don't, the Wikipedia page explains what they are.
John:
And you could come back fairly quickly unless you're like, oh, well, this is interesting.
John:
But, I mean, you already knew what they were, I'm assuming, and just went there...
John:
out of academic curiosity and then got lost.
John:
But I'm trying to just bring everybody along.
Marco:
Even if I already know what a demon is, I will follow that link just to see, you know, I bet there's something about this that I don't know.
Marco:
And sure enough, there was lots there I didn't know.
Marco:
So it was definitely worth it.
John:
Yeah, I mean, sometimes you don't need to know everything about it.
John:
Like, in that particular link, I'm just trying to make sure everyone is following along instead of not to explain what a demon is, because that's cumbersome.
John:
Like, I want to assume that there's some common shared knowledge here, but if I can help someone out by going, oh, I didn't know that was the word for that and why it's spelled funny like that, but now when I read this Wikipedia page, it explains, you know, what these things are and why they have a funny name, and now I can come back and continue.
Yeah.
John:
But in other cases, I'm trying to add additional color through what I link, where I'll link to it, and it's not the obvious link.
John:
It's a link that makes a statement about the word or phrase that adds.
John:
Usually, it's just adding a little bit of extra opinion about how I feel about something or whatever.
John:
And you don't have to follow that link if you already know what the thing is, but you will get more information, even if you just mouse over the links.
John:
Because you're like, oh, I think I know where that leads.
John:
You mouse over, and you go, yep, a link's there.
John:
Because you kind of know what my opinion on it is going to be, but maybe you don't know when you click through it.
John:
So...
John:
Yeah, it is.
John:
I guess back to the linking thing.
John:
Some people find it tiring to do that and just want to read.
John:
So you could read straight through if you understand every term.
John:
You don't need to.
John:
But links do add stuff.
John:
Maybe it's like a replay value in a game.
John:
You can get repeat reading value out of going back to sections and following the links.
Marco:
Going back a sec to the tags implementation details, one reason I actually really enjoyed that section is because when I see a feature like tags, I rely a lot on the file system for organization.
Marco:
And I know that might seem like an obvious statement, but I rely more than most people do in that I tend to not use things like Everything Bucket apps or apps that maintain their own organizational database, like Aperture, and then the file system is kind of haphazard or hidden from you.
Marco:
I avoid that kind of thing, and I really just use the file system as a major organizational point.
Marco:
Much like our friend Dr. Drang, I really believe in doing things that way.
Marco:
And one of the reasons is because...
Marco:
it is very resilient to both data problems and software problems.
Marco:
For example, failed disks.
Marco:
You can pull a directory tree off a backup and it doesn't matter if the backup was from some service or medium or software that didn't support certain Mac extended attribute implementations or anything like that.
Marco:
It also ages very well in that if I change software I use, if I change my text editor, I don't have to change
Marco:
the directory structure with which I store text files.
Marco:
Everything is more independent from each other and so on.
Marco:
And so I find that the more I can do just file system management of things, the generally happier and easier and more resilient my setup is.
Marco:
And so when I see a new feature added like tags, before I think about using it, I have to ask myself, okay...
Marco:
How is this going to fit into long-term organization on the disk?
Marco:
Because if there was just some central system database file that maintained all the tag relationships, or if it was baked into some kind of allocation table in the file system, something like that where it's not just in the file or next to the file, that would be a lot less resilient.
Marco:
Because then if you copy a directory to a backup drive,
Marco:
or if your backup software doesn't know where that thing is to find that data, then if you restore from that, or if you copy that into a new machine, or you're moving it to your laptop to work on it for a trip or something, that stuff doesn't come with it, and that sucks.
Marco:
And so it was really good to know with your file system stuff.
Marco:
that it is implemented in such a way that it will be fairly resilient and it will be fairly portable and fairly aging-friendly, at least.
Marco:
Not aging-proof, but aging-friendly, as long as the tools in question support extended attributes.
John:
Yeah, we've had like six years or seven years.
John:
How long has it been since 10.4?
John:
For all the tools to get up to speed on, hey, you know, extended attributes are a thing.
John:
And Apple implements so many things through extended attributes.
John:
Like all of Time Machine relies on them just to work at all, right?
John:
They're used for access control lists, which is a pretty deeply woven part of the provision system, the operating system.
John:
And like I said in the review, for years and years, they've taken things that aren't even in extended attributes and exposed them through extended attributes.
John:
So applications have kind of a unified interface to data that's not really the same.
John:
So any application does anything, especially a backup application.
John:
I mean, they don't have to be like, oh, I got to be updated for tags.
John:
It's like, no, you've had seven years just to get on the page of like extended attributes are a thing.
John:
Copy them when you copy stuff.
John:
And anything Apple implements on top of extended attributes, which is why, you know, I was always in favor of, you know, arbitrarily extensible, arbitrarily extensible metadata, because there are so many things you can do with it.
John:
All your tools need to do is understand that those things exist and just copy them all.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh,
John:
and and that's all you need to do and still there are tools that don't do it that way but you can rest assured that any tool that works with extended attributes in any form will also work with tags because that's all they are and the implementation is like and not only that everything's in there about them the stupid number for the color from you know 1988 with the labels and the string with the name so there's not even a central registry for that like
John:
If you copy the file and you copy the extended attributes with it, like any good, even the command line CP does that at this point on OS 10, you will have your tags.
John:
Uh, so yeah, that is that it's re as reassuring as any other thing that's implemented on top of extended attributes in OS 10.
Casey:
And, you know, I have to say that if I were to pick a favorite section of the review, this one might have been it.
Casey:
Not because I'm particularly enamored with tags, but because I loved that you could trace today's situation all the way back almost 30 years to 1988 and see that decisions made then –
Casey:
have and have a demonstrable uh effect on the decisions that were made today and maybe that's the nerdy side of me coming out but i just thought it was so cool to be able to trace what happens in 2013 all the way back to 1988 and i do think you handled it well i'm grilling you not because i disagreed but because i thought it was a very interesting point to talk about
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
What else did I have here?
Casey:
Well, actually, I think one of the things we do need to talk about, and I'm just going to go ahead and kick back while you talk about this, is how was publishing all the different e-books?
John:
That's pretty smooth this year compared to last year.
John:
I was really nervous about doing iBooks because this is the first time I've ever published anything on iBooks.
John:
Last year and the year before that, I had generated an EPUB version, and that EPUB was, I always try to say, an iBooks-compatible EPUB because people don't know what EPUB is.
John:
I'm making a file that you can load in the iBooks application, and I've done that for years.
John:
So it's not like the creation of the file was a problem any more than it always is trying to deal with these eBook readers that don't.
John:
render things nicely uh so i had the file it was just a question of going through the submission process and i had heard that the submission process could be like days or weeks you know to get to the ibook store and that's not going to work for me when i don't even know the release date i need a quick turnaround so you know i have friends who hooked me up with people uh at the ibooks store who said they could expedite you know my submission kind of like the expedited review you can get a one-time type thing i don't know if it's a one-time type thing but i only publish one thing every year anyway so
John:
It was fine.
John:
And they were all lined up like, oh, yeah, we'll get it up in 12 to 24 hours.
John:
So that was all set to go.
John:
And dealing with the tools we talked about in the last show, it wasn't the greatest experience.
John:
The tools are kind of creaky.
John:
Not a lot of hand-holding in terms of if this is the first time you're doing it, are you sure everything's all set?
John:
Are you sure when you click this button it's going to do what you think?
John:
Are you sure after you click this button you will have the ability to modify X, Y, and Z without screwing stuff up?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Just learn those through experience.
John:
I've updated all the eBooks so many times at this point.
John:
Like if you're listening to this and you have, you bought either the Kindle book or the iBooks book, both of them have been updated.
John:
I don't know how the hell to get updates from the Amazon store.
John:
I think they have to send you an email to tell you it's been updated.
John:
You have to do some crazy thing.
John:
I have no idea.
John:
So, but rest assured that the book has been updated.
John:
And if you can figure out how to get the updated version from Amazon onto your Kindle device, good on you.
John:
You'll get a nicer version with typos fix and everything.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure you have to actually just delete the current one off your device, lose any highlights and notes you've made in it, and just re-download it.
Marco:
And I think that will get you the newest version.
John:
In past years, that wouldn't even work.
John:
In past years, when you deleted it and re-downloaded it, they would give you whatever version you purchased.
John:
And the only way to do it was to wait for an email with some magic link or something.
John:
It may have gotten better.
John:
But iBooks, like any other store thing, like within iBooks is a little updates tab.
John:
Like, hey, this book has been updated.
John:
You tap the update button, and you get the new version.
John:
And I think it preserves everything for you.
John:
I didn't try it if it preserves your notes and highlights.
Marco:
Do iBooks updates have release notes?
John:
They do.
John:
I discovered that 17 updates in when I saw, hey, these have updates, and they got to write something.
John:
And then I found the little tiny...
John:
The places they let you type these things into the iTunes producer thing, it's like a box that's literally the size of two postage stamps, like two actual postage stamps.
John:
And that proportion, like more like a square than a rectangle.
John:
And it's like, paste your tiny text in here.
John:
Like seriously, in this gigantic window, I get two postage stamps in a tiny little font.
John:
It's too small.
John:
It shouldn't even be anti-Yellis.
John:
It's like, you know, eight point text or something.
John:
yeah without spelling correction i think because that doesn't do the little red squiggles it's uh it's crazy maybe it does do the red squiggles and i just didn't catch it but i i put spelling errors in those boxes many times luckily i type everything in bb edit and uh caught it before i paste it in but anyway uh getting the book up there it was so fast so the first submission
John:
Uh, you know, I was talking to my contact at Apple and they're like, okay, I've submitted it.
John:
And he wanted me to give him some information about it.
John:
I gave him some information and then I saw the book on the store.
John:
I'm like, all right, this is awesome.
John:
It's, you know, it's up, boom, it's there.
John:
It was, you know, it was there so quickly.
John:
Uh, and then he sent an email back and said, actually, I wanted this other piece of information, not the one that you sent me.
John:
So he didn't even expedite it.
John:
It just went up that fast just because like, because I don't know, it's a lull and not a lot of people were submitting iBooks or whatever.
John:
So maybe I just got lucky.
John:
And the same thing with the updates, I would update the book and
John:
And it would get updated within hours.
John:
And I'm like, is this normal?
John:
Is this automated?
John:
Or is a person doing this?
John:
And they're like, it usually takes a few hours.
John:
So I'm very happy with how responsive, you know, even apparently without the special treatment that I was trying to get, that putting stuff up in the iBook store was, you know, it's faster than the Amazon store.
John:
And there were humans involved.
John:
So if it ever did go slow, I had a human being I could talk to and say, hey, it's going slow.
John:
Can I get it faster?
John:
But after the first, after getting the first book up, it was, you know,
John:
It wasn't a problem.
John:
I didn't care if it took a day for the typo correction versions to go up or whatever.
John:
The iBooks Reader and the Kindle Reader, but the iBooks Reader more so continue to frustrate me because they have to paginate stuff, right?
John:
And it's fine if it's just text, but when you have big images, the iBooks Reader tries to obviously not have images spanning pages where you see the top of an image and then you flip to the next page and you see the bottom of the image.
John:
That's bad.
John:
But the only possible way to do that is to move images around because
John:
depending on what your screen size is and what your text size is, which can be adjusted by the user, so you can't even control that, you know, where the images land changes.
John:
So the iBooks application kind of sort of has to move stuff around.
John:
And when it moves stuff around, like it makes things that are ugly.
John:
It moves images away from the text that refers to them.
John:
It, you know, floating images are the worst because it has to decide, is there enough room to even float this?
John:
Sometimes it thinks...
John:
I have enough room to float this image to the right, and it's got like three characters worth of space on the left side.
John:
So a three-letter word fits there, followed by a two-letter word, and then there's a huge vertical swath of space, and then the five-letter word is underneath the image.
John:
And that is terribly ugly, and it's like, why don't you fix the formatting of your book?
John:
Like, it totally doesn't look like that in any other version, and it would be nice if iBooks decided there's not enough room for me to float this image.
John:
I should just center it and not allow any text on either side of it.
John:
And so I'm constantly like, you know, doing that little dance that you do, you know, Marco's familiar with the dance where you have, I have a stack of Kindles and iOS devices on my desk, maybe not as big as Marco's stack, but big enough to be annoying.
John:
And you load the book and every million one of these things and you page through it.
John:
And believe me, it takes forever to page through this thing on even an iOS device, let alone an e-ink Kindle.
John:
It just takes
John:
forever to page through and you're just painting through to making sure does it look sane does it look readable can people read the text because at a certain point you have to give up on like well on this device in this font size it does this weird formatting thing but you know what can you do uh but for the most part everything went smoothly the ipad bug and amazon didn't happen as soon as as soon as it went up on the amazon store people were able to put it on their ipad uh did i mention this in the past show the surprising thing to me has been
John:
Almost all the sales have shifted over to iBooks.
John:
The total number of sales is similar to what it was last year, roundabout for the eBooks.
John:
But last year, there was no iBooks version.
John:
And of course, everything was on Amazon.
John:
This year, almost everybody bought the iBooks version.
John:
And a tiny pool of people bought the Kindle version.
John:
So I guess that kind of makes sense because it's built into the OS.
John:
And Apple nerds are going to be the people reading this.
John:
And they might like iBooks or whatever.
John:
But I always buy all of them.
John:
And the iBooks version...
John:
is nicer than the kindle version because i was able to use uncompressed pings there but i couldn't in the amazon version because there's stupid delivery fee thing so you know as i explained in my you know post but like how many of the people who bought the ebook read my blog post about it like i mean i i don't know i i was i was surprised at how massively dominant ibooks was in terms of the sales and you know thumbs up you know i i'm perfectly happy with that if people were happy with what they got
Marco:
Yeah, that's actually really interesting because it'd be one thing if you were never that popular on Kindles.
Marco:
We could try to explain that away.
Marco:
But to have a big difference between last year and this year, that's something interesting, I think.
John:
Like I said, I can kind of understand it, but don't you get the impression?
John:
I know I buy most of my e-books on the Kindle store.
John:
When I buy a book, the default is I will buy the Kindle book from Amazon.
John:
That's how I read anything that's not maybe like a technical book that has lots of charts or something.
John:
I wouldn't do that.
John:
Or like a comic book, I might buy a paper version or read in Comixology or something.
John:
But yeah, I always thought, oh, Kindle is the dominant thing, and then Apple's over there with the iBook store.
John:
But I guess if you're writing a review of the Apple operating system, people are all ready to buy that in iBooks form.
Marco:
I guess.
Marco:
And maybe part of it is because Kindle... The good Kindles are the grayscale e-ink ones.
Marco:
And the tablet Kindles are kind of crappy.
Marco:
That's an understatement, I think.
Marco:
And so if something like this where...
Marco:
It's full of nice color images and links and things.
Marco:
You're going to want to have this on a full-featured reading device.
Marco:
The e-ink Kindles are not going to be good for the color images.
Marco:
They're not going to be good for following those links because even though they have browsers, they're terrible and slow.
Marco:
And so the best device to read this on is a computer or a tablet.
Marco:
And so it makes sense that most of the people who are interested in reading this kind of thing...
Marco:
if they have to pick a color tablet device to read this on, are way more likely to pick an iPad than, say, a Kindle Fire, which is a total piece of garbage.
John:
Yeah, and like I said, I still like the web version better, but for the e-book versions, despite the fact that the Kindle version has compressed JPEGs, massively compressed JPEGs, as opposed to uncompressed pings that are in the iBooks one, the Kindle reader app has a built-in browser, and the iBooks app doesn't.
John:
So I think it's nicer if you're visiting a lot of links to do the Kindle one, because then at least you don't have to keep leaving the app and coming back, because when you tap a link, it'll open in the in-app browser, you know, like Instapaper or any other app with an in-app browser.
John:
uh that that is is better you know so like i mean there were enough options for everybody everyone could get what they want and the option that i'm surprised more people don't pick i guess they're afraid of subscriptions is that you know the ars premiere subscription which costs exactly the same amount as buying the book but you get all the versions of the book you get the the web version with no ads on a single page if you wanted uh you get the multi-page web version if that's what you want you get the the ebook and the kindle version and also a pdf version which is not nice and i don't make but anyway people some people like pdfs for their libraries or whatever
John:
And I guess it's all because people don't want to have to remember to unsubscribe or to cancel their subscription immediately or whatever it is you have to do.
John:
It's just a simpler transaction for them to just hit buy inside iBooks.
John:
So we provide the options.
John:
People pick what they want.
Marco:
first of all i am an arch premier subscriber because i subscribed like three years ago for your review then and i have just forgotten to unsubscribe every year you also get to read the our site all year with no ads on it so usually i'm not logged in because i forget that i even have it and then when it renews i'm like oh i gotta go cancel that sometime and i feel bad because i like ours and then yeah and yeah
John:
Because it remembers your login really well, unlike many other sites.
John:
I can't remember the last time I logged into ours.
John:
I don't think there's any kind of timeout.
John:
So on all my browsers and all my machines, ours has no ads on.
Marco:
One more point to make on this before we leave the e-reader topic.
Marco:
I have, over the years with both Instapaper and with the magazine...
Marco:
I have spent a lot of time and effort trying to make things work really well on Kindles, trying to make things look as well as they can, trying to get the layouts and fonts exactly right and the markup exactly right and everything, the navigation with the periodical navigation, all that stuff, trying to get all that stuff exactly right for E and Kindles.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I think almost none of it was worth it.
Marco:
For whatever reason, I don't really have a great theory on this.
Marco:
There are a lot of people who use Kindles, but any kind of difference in quality of the Kindle experience just never seemed appreciated by almost anybody, let alone enough people to make it worth the pretty incredible amount of effort that it was over the years.
Marco:
And
Marco:
And maybe that's just because so many things about reading on a Kindle, content-wise, are mediocre.
Marco:
So many e-books are half-assed and have one weird font set for the whole thing.
Marco:
Even though your e-ink Kindle will be set with the regular Cecilia font, one book will be totally set in the sans-serif font in a weird size and justified somehow.
Marco:
And there's no way for you to change that.
Marco:
Or books will have OCR errors from when they were scanned from paper and nobody ever fixes them because nobody's looking and nobody cares.
Marco:
So because there are so many – and don't even get me started on periodicals on the Kindle, which are just really, really half-assed –
Marco:
And so many content experiences on these devices are like 60% quality or so that maybe people who use Kindles just don't expect any better and maybe don't even notice when it is better because the whole experience as a whole is so mediocre, full of things like bad formatting and weird little shortcomings and errors.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And that might also have something to do with the whole thing about market share and browser share being so different between iOS and Android, where Android devices, a lot of those are these purpose-made tablets that are sold as video-playing devices or reading devices, something that's not intended to be a general-purpose computing device.
Marco:
And so maybe people who own those...
Marco:
don't go looking for things like this to read on them or don't go looking for web magazines or web save for later services.
Marco:
They're getting these things to just read books and they don't even consider doing stuff like this with them.
Marco:
So one of those is probably the case.
John:
Yeah, they do notice a little bit.
John:
Like I said, what I'm trying to do when I look at on the yin candles is make sure it's okay.
John:
I know it's never going to be great.
John:
I just want to make sure it's okay.
John:
And last year, I think, was the year where when it's not okay, I did find out because that was the year everyone was buying on a Kindle because there was no iBooks version.
John:
And it didn't look right on what was then new, the Kindle Touch, the one with the stupid well where your finger goes down to intersect the IR beams or whatever the hell that thing was.
John:
And I don't have one of those, and no one should have one of those.
John:
But anyway, some people have one of those.
John:
And they said, hey, when I bring your book up on it, the text is like crazy small, and it's all messed up, and it's like unreadable.
John:
And no matter what I do to adjust the size, even if I adjust the size to max, it looks too small.
John:
And I had screwed something up with the fonts.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But when I opened it in the simulator and said set device to Kindle Touch, it looked fine.
John:
But in the actual hardware device, it didn't.
John:
So if you screw it up bad enough, you hear from it.
John:
And remember, in that case, I had to make my best guess as to what I had screwed up with the fonts.
John:
Because again, like...
John:
if you look at the markup of this book it's disgusting like all sorts of hacks in there that some of them probably aren't even necessary anymore like i think i have like p style equals text indent none you know like an inline style in every single paragraph i think you still need that for like the kindle 3 and maybe even the kindle 4 right and like so these like crap like that if anyone looked at like what are you crazy you don't know how to make markup it's like i'm not putting that there for my health that was because like three years ago i had to do that to get a look right on like the kindle 2
John:
Right.
John:
And, and I just, I just leave all that crap in there.
John:
So now it's just a pile of hacks on top of pile of hacks.
John:
And the, the particular arrangement of pile of hacks screwed up the font on that, you know, that Kindle touch.
John:
So I had to like, guess what the solution was.
John:
bundle up a book you know email out to scott mcnulty who has every kindle in the universe and say uh can you load this on your kindle and take a picture of it to show me what it looks like it varies font sizes so i can say okay like there i i approved that i think that's good and then ship it up actually you know what before we before i forget uh i now that i no longer have instapaper or the magazine and my next app is a podcast app um
Marco:
I've actually been looking to get rid of my collection of all the Kindles.
Marco:
Do you want it?
Marco:
I'll just send it to you for free.
Marco:
Because you can actually use it.
John:
My wife will not like you sending more electronics to the house.
Marco:
You can make a Kindle museum.
Marco:
A museum of mediocre reading devices.
Marco:
I'm sending it to you.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
You can refuse it if you want, but I'm mailing it to you.
John:
Well, you know, I was thinking, like, we did give our son one of our old Kindles because, you know, having Kindles for kids is actually kind of good because, you know, I like buying e-books.
John:
I think it's more convenient than paper books, and they have so many paper books.
John:
So, like, buying my son books and giving him his own Kindle to, like, to read on is pretty good.
John:
So, you know, if you want to send me some of your old ones, like, I'll just give them to my kids and let them read on them.
John:
But you should save some.
John:
Well, you know, by the time Adam is old enough, we'll have hollow Kindles, and you won't want these crappy things back.
Marco:
The only one I want to save is the Paperwhite, because that's the only one that we actually use.
John:
Yeah, that's the actual good one, yeah.
John:
But yeah, if you have crappy Kindles you want to get rid of.
Marco:
I have all the old ones, everything before the Paperwhite.
Marco:
I have one of each model, and you're going to have them soon.
Marco:
Well, don't send me the Kindle one, because nobody wants that.
Marco:
It's so funny how bad the Kindle one is.
John:
Actually, it is.
John:
It's kind of like that.
John:
I'll put that next to my QCAT up in the attic.
John:
Wow.
John:
You actually have and kept a cute cat?
John:
It came free with Wired Magazine.
John:
And I'm like, oh, this is so... It's shaped like a freaking cat.
John:
Of course I'm going to keep it.
John:
That is... Of course, I can't find it.
John:
I'm sure it's up there somewhere.
John:
Oh, that's great.
John:
Yeah, but I have it.
Oh, my God.
John:
All right, so before we move on from this topic and end the show, I want to get in... I asked you guys two questions.
John:
Well, actually, one, I'll talk about appearance.
John:
Maybe I'll do that next week.
John:
But since we're short on time,
John:
I mentioned last week where I didn't really talk about the review that there was some overriding theme that I was trying to weave throughout the review and that whether or not you got the pop culture references that I was using to build it, the theme should have worked on its own.
John:
Did I succeed?
John:
Did you see a theme running through this?
John:
And if so, what do you think it was?
John:
Power saving.
John:
Well, I mean, that's true in terms of the features, but I'm thinking more like, again, touchy-feely.
John:
What kind of OS is this?
John:
Where does it fall in the hierarchy of OS releases?
John:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
I think so.
Marco:
I mean, you explicitly state that you kind of give an idea of the theme that you want me to say that you weaved.
Marco:
I think it depends a lot on your opinion of Mavericks.
Marco:
As a user, once you're using it, it depends on what you think of the things they changed, whether it makes a big difference for your hardware and for your usage, and what you think of the direction they're going.
Marco:
And so I think that your theme is spot on of...
Marco:
This shows some interesting things for the direction they're going with some of this stuff.
Marco:
And it wasn't necessarily the obvious direction they were going a year ago or two years ago.
Marco:
And so that you did very well.
Marco:
I'm not sure I picked up on the specifics of a ton of places where you think they are going.
Marco:
Besides some big things like shifting towards...
Marco:
One thing that I think is very obvious for me with this is Mavericks is really a laptop OS that happens to run on desktops if you want it to.
Marco:
It is getting more iOS-like.
Marco:
but not in the interface.
Marco:
Stuff like Launchpad, I think, is half-assed and kind of stupid.
Marco:
But the interface is actually getting mostly back to being Mac-like again.
Marco:
Maybe that's until they try a radical redesign.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
But a lot of the...
Marco:
and Lion started this too, but a lot of the power saving stuff, a lot of the app nap, the sandboxing, and just putting more restrictions on apps in order to achieve better stuff for the user, whether it's security, whether it's power-related, or managing unsaved data, stuff like that.
Marco:
I think we're going to see a lot more of that, and a lot more stuff aimed at laptops specifically.
Marco:
But just a lot more restrictions that...
Marco:
Won't necessarily hinder power users for the most part, but will keep making life harder for developers temporarily to get long-term better situations going on this platform that they didn't have the luxury of starting from scratch like they did with iOS.
John:
You basically got it.
John:
I spell it out in the conclusion.
John:
Like I said, it's the intro and the conclusion is where I'm going.
John:
And then the last paragraph, more or less.
John:
And, you know, the very last line.
John:
Like I said in the last episode, this is a weird time in the life of the Mac.
John:
Because the direction it was going in has been sort of like a big stop sign up there.
John:
Stop with that.
John:
Don't don't do that anymore.
John:
And, you know, they scraped out a lot of that stuff, but left a lot of the other things kind of, you know, it's in limbo.
John:
Like it's it's an OS that is not it's unsure of itself.
John:
right it's not it is not bold confident even to the degree that lion was lion was more bold and confident like yeah we're gonna have everything wooden and felt and it's gonna look like ios and like i don't care what you're doing with address book it's a book now it's got a bookmark deal with it you know it was i mean you could say it was misguided or going in the wrong direction but it was certainly more more confident and bold about what it was doing and mavericks is like
John:
i don't know you know maybe i'm not so sure about what we're doing here i guess you know i mean like the power saving stuff is like yeah they're definitely they're going to emphasize power saving do that stuff and that's fine but like when i think like what what is the mac platform becoming like which what is the direction for the mac and aside from the obvious stuff of like get more efficient get faster you know better battery life
John:
What does it mean to be a Mac?
John:
What is the future of this platform?
John:
And Mavericks is not a bold statement in any particular direction other than that direction we were going in before.
John:
We're not doing that anymore.
John:
But we don't have time to undo all that stuff either.
John:
So some of it's still going to be there.
John:
But, I mean, you know...
John:
We put this stuff in.
John:
We don't want to do that.
John:
We just didn't have time to clean up.
John:
But don't look over there.
John:
It's kind of a gross... I mean, Game Center is still frigging felt.
John:
Like, you know, it's still... The stuff is still there, right?
John:
I mean, I guess on iOS, there's a little tiny bit of that of, like, iBooks still being the wooden shelves.
John:
But for the most part, iOS was like iOS 7.
John:
You know, boom, here it is.
John:
It's iOS 7.
John:
This is where we're going.
John:
Everyone clear.
John:
Everyone get in line.
John:
You know, all aboard the iOS 7 train.
John:
And Mavericks is not like that at all.
John:
And the energy-saving stuff, I think I should have emphasized this more.
John:
I think I did...
John:
I mean, I spelled it out.
John:
I think I might have used italics, maybe not.
John:
Like, Apple said this themselves, and it's really important.
John:
I think it bears out in the usage of it.
John:
You said it's like, you know, it's like a laptop OS, which is true in the sense that they're, you know, focusing on power saving, which only really matters when you have a battery.
John:
You know, but...
John:
It's not just energy saving.
John:
It's increased energy efficiency and increased responsiveness.
John:
They go hand-in-hand.
John:
Responsiveness means stop your Mac from doing crap that is not responding to you, the user, right now, which usually means stop your Mac from doing all sorts of stuff that it was doing before.
John:
If you spend any time running D-Trace or the old SC usage, I think it's still in there, D-Trust or FS usage or all these tools on the Mac that you can use to see what the hell your system is doing...
John:
It's doing tons of stuff all the time.
John:
The Mac is doing so many things.
John:
This is why it's so amazing that iOS even works, because iOS is not doing these things.
John:
It would destroy your battery.
John:
And so they're trying to bring it into, like, stop Macs.
John:
I know you have all this.
John:
They just have too much memory, too much computing power, too much hard disk space.
John:
And they were doing tons of stuff in the background that's trying to rein it in.
John:
And even if you don't have a laptop, like I don't use laptops, right?
John:
Maybe this is psychological, this happens after every OS update, but I feel like I more or less should have this gauged after going through so many OS updates.
John:
People say, oh, it feels snappier because you just did a fresh install and all your caches are clean or maybe things are defragmented or things haven't started to slow down.
John:
All these psychological effects of making you think the new OS is faster...
John:
But, you know, even accounting for that effect, I truly believe that my desktop Mac Pro at work feels snappier after an upgrade to Mavericks.
John:
More so than it always feels snappier after you do an OS upgrade.
John:
Like, in a lasting way.
John:
Yeah, you eventually get used to it and you don't notice it anymore, but...
John:
It's because the thing, my machine is doing less crap.
John:
And even if it just comes down to like, my machine is not being destroyed by spotlight and time machine to such a degree, you know, like totally, this is the way to kill a Mac.
John:
Like just swamp it with IO because I mean, again, only, only one frigging process can have a lock on the catalog file at a time because of stupid HFS plus.
John:
So those 12 cores are not doing you any good.
John:
You know, contention for IO can make your Mac feel slow, almost more so than anything else.
John:
Although low memory eventually becomes swamp with IO because of swapping and everything.
John:
But,
John:
The memory compression combined with the lower priority of everything else combined with just less crap going on in the background and more things that'll be like, oh, I was going to run, but let me hold off.
John:
Let me wait until an idle period.
John:
That goes a long way, even on a desktop Mac.
John:
And so...
John:
I would encourage people who are like, well, I don't have laptops.
John:
I don't care about Mavericks.
John:
You should care, not because of energy saving, but because of the responsiveness angle that goes hand in hand.
John:
And I think this is just the tip of the iceberg.
John:
It's not like it's magically all super-duper responsive now.
John:
But they're finally going in that direction to say, to make a better experience, we have to do like what iOS did and say, we really need to respond to the user.
John:
We've got all this power, too much power, and we've...
John:
gotten lazy and just said oh well we got so much power we can have you know because they just added things one after the other like first spotlight was like oh now this thing is going to run and then we're going to have time machine that's another thing is going to run in the background and we have all these other things and if you just look at like the cpu usage of some stupid thing pulling in your menu bar like so many things are so wasteful adobe
John:
Just torturing your machine.
John:
This is something I missed in my review that I added an updated version.
John:
Even the stupid time machine, like the little turny clock icon, doesn't turn anymore.
John:
It's not worth giving CPU cycles, waking up the CPU 30 times a second to spin that stupid thing when it's spinning.
John:
Because time machine backups can take a long time.
John:
Just this relentless desire to say...
John:
stop the computer from doing crap that does not help the user uh and so that that is a good new direction and i think this is like the first toe dip in that direction uh but overall the os is definitely in a in a transitional period and you know the last line of the review you met me at a very strange time in my life i think this is a strange time in the life of the mac because think of what's going on i mean it has been strange for the past few years but like this is even more strange like it seemed like
John:
Oh, the Mac is irrelevant.
John:
iOS is awesome.
John:
And then it was like, oh no, the Mac's relevant.
John:
Back to the Mac.
John:
And then the Mac became, Mac's going to become relevant by looking just like iOS.
John:
And we're going to do the same thing there.
John:
And then we were like, no, that's not great or whatever.
John:
And then it's kind of like, yeah, you're right.
John:
Like that's not great.
John:
And now it's just kind of like, all right, here I am.
John:
I stripped off a lot of that wood stuff.
John:
We're going to do some efficiency stuff, but I'm not quite sure what's going on there.
John:
Again, compared to iOS 7, we're just so bold and fresh and confident in what it was doing.
John:
That's the theme I was trying to weave throughout the review.
John:
I think people feel that.
John:
Even if they just feel it as a vague disinterest in the Mac platform, it's because Mavericks doesn't come out of the gate with some... A lot of it comes down to aesthetics.
John:
It doesn't come out of the gate with some bold new look and some new ideas about...
John:
how you interact with the Mac.
John:
Like, you know, what if the dock is gone and all windows are full screen, or we have a tiling window manager, all sorts of crazy things you can imagine.
John:
No more menu bar.
John:
You know, like, not I'm saying any of these things are good ideas, but if it did any of those things, people would set up and take notice.
John:
It does not.
John:
Like, this is not macOS 11.
John:
It's macOS 10, and it's like macOS 10, you know, tepid edition in terms of what it's willing to throw in the user's face.
John:
But underneath it all are, you know, some good ideas,
John:
about efficiency and responsiveness that hint at what a new direction for the Mac could be, but we're not there yet.
John:
And again, probably because of time constraints.
John:
So we'll circle back here next year around a similar time, I assume, and see if the next release is that bold new direction that builds on what Mavericks is kind of hinting at, only hinting at.
Marco:
One other thing, too, is that I really think that some of this transition notion is... Because Apple has always had... And this is true of both Mac OS and iOS.
Marco:
But especially on Mac OS, they've always had this weird dichotomy of trying to appeal to power users.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
They are power users, and they respect us, and they have a lot of power user fans.
Marco:
Trying to appeal to power users and be like the pro OS, the pro platform, while also having all these opinions and being so strongly controlling about ease of user experience and simplicity and hiding implementation details from people.
Marco:
And we've seen Apple go a little too far in the ease direction sometimes, and then they pull it back.
Marco:
And you look at some of the big headlining features of Mavericks, some of the fine air enhancements, stuff like that, they really are for power users.
Marco:
The multi-monitor stuff, that's all... Do you think anyone would have predicted they would have been improving multi-monitor stuff as much as they did just last year or the year before, like with Lime, when Lime brought in full screen and everyone's like, oh, well, now we have Linen.
Marco:
We're just stuck with Linen on our second screen forever.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
No one would have predicted at that time that the same company just two years later would dramatically improve multi-monitor and make it so much better.
Marco:
And was it Mountain Lion that introduced Mission Control or whatever that new thing was?
Marco:
Anyway, Apple's always had this weird dichotomy between...
Marco:
power users and hiding things for ease of use.
Marco:
And part of the transition that I think you're getting at is just them fighting that battle that they've been fighting for a long time.
Marco:
And they just keep moving forward and making it more locked down for ease of use, but also better for power users.
Marco:
And it's like they're one-upping themselves in that battle as time goes on.
Marco:
And I don't know if they can ever win that battle.
Marco:
It's just a hard problem.
John:
This is kind of like a do-over, because they're going to head off, I think, in the same direction, but Lion and Mountain Lion are sort of an embodiment of misunderstanding what's good about iOS.
John:
They kind of understood at a broad level, iOS is good and popular because it's simple, and it gets crap out of your way that you don't want to deal with.
John:
Crap that...
John:
and I talked a lot about this in the Mountain Lion Review, especially in the Lion Review, things that we all take for granted, that if you think about it, it's like, well, why should I even have to bother with that at all?
John:
And iOS is the perfect example of, look how easy it is to buy and install an app.
John:
Why isn't it that easy on the Mac?
John:
Well, because of X, Y, and Z, and blah, blah.
John:
But does it have to be?
John:
Well, I've been a computer user so long.
John:
It's kind of like, power users do want power, and they'll get addicted to Stockholm Syndrome.
John:
They'll get addicted to things that are terrible.
John:
If you had asked a Mac user way back before any of your time,
John:
You used to be able to choose how much RAM an application would allocate to itself.
John:
You can get info on the finder.
John:
There was a little box, and it said, like, two little boxes where you could put in, like, a recommended at a maximum size or whatever.
Marco:
What a support nightmare that must have been for programmers.
John:
Support used to be like, oh, you have to give it more memory if you're going to open files this big or whatever.
John:
You know, you would sort of decide how much RAM it could use.
John:
And obviously, that's such a, you know, from a modern perspective, you're like, why would I ever have to do that?
John:
It's like, you know, having to go out and crank your car to start it or something, right?
Yeah.
John:
But if you would ask the power users, like, oh, I need to have that control because I need to tell exactly how much this application needs to have.
John:
And, you know, like they love the knobs and, you know, they get addicted to that stuff.
John:
And it takes a while to get away from that.
John:
Sometimes it takes a clean blinker like iOS and say all that crap that you thought was essential.
John:
Actually, it's not.
John:
And see how much more pleasant it is to use this thing.
John:
But what Lion to Mountain Lion were like, OK, iOS, like people like that.
John:
That's good.
John:
That's simple.
John:
What we need to do is make the Mac like iOS.
John:
And they made it like iOS in the wrong ways, right?
John:
What they should have been doing is more of what Mavericks is doing.
John:
All that sandboxing stuff and all the simplifications of getting rid of... Wouldn't it be nice if...
John:
You knew where all the files were and the system could manage them.
John:
And, you know, the sandbox containers for things.
John:
And you didn't have all these applications just doing random crap to your system and patching things and running in the background and eating CPU cycles.
John:
And, you know, that it wasn't the Wild West anymore.
John:
Like, that's one aspect of it.
John:
And the other one was like, well, interface simplification.
John:
A address book should be like a book and it's familiar and it's just one simple screen, you know.
John:
That was the wrong direction.
John:
Like the simplifications are not in the visual and interface.
John:
The simplifications are in think of the parts of the system that are like busy work that you don't need to be doing or that are like are inefficient or that cause chaos, like the Wild West nature of the internals of like.
John:
all these things running rampant all over your system and making like a fragile system, get rid of that, but still give the features that, that make the Mac, the Mac.
John:
And so I think this is a reset of like, they went off in, they went off in pursuit of the aesthetic look and feel and simplification in terms of the visual.
John:
And they're resetting now and saying actually true, you know, true luxury simplicity, whatever from the terrible advertisements that they had that, you know, the true, true simplicity is getting rid of ugly details and,
John:
but not getting rid of features as much as they're still doing a little bit of that with Witness the iWork applications and stuff.
John:
But try to provide the same functionality, but make it so there are fewer moving parts and fewer crap that you don't care about that you have to deal with.
John:
And they're far from that goal now.
John:
It's kind of like a rewind and reset.
John:
And I hope when they move in a new direction towards simplicity, it will not be towards just...
John:
playing iOS dress-up, like I said in the review a few times, and more towards appreciating what it is that iOS has fewer hassles.
John:
So get rid of the hassles in macOS.
John:
Don't just try to make it like iOS, because iOS and macOS have different sets of hassles.
John:
There are hassles on the Mac.
John:
Get rid of those hassles.
John:
Add new features without their own set of hassles behind them.
John:
And go forward in that direction.
John:
So I hope that's where they're going.
John:
I mean, like I said, the last show, I almost hesitate to call this transitional because you're like, well, I know what it's transitioning from, but we don't quite know what it's transitioning to.
John:
So it's more it's kind of like a, you know, a pause, reset, regroup kind of thing.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Well, let's wrap it up this week because we are running long on time and we want to preserve everyone's ability to download this episode over cellular.
Marco:
So thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, Igloo Software and Oxygen by RemObjects, and we will 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:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-G, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They did it immediately.
Casey:
you know what is the name of that rule that whatever you search for it will eventually degenerate into porn
John:
That's not the rule.
John:
You're trying to think of rule 34.
John:
And the rule 34, I believe, is if it exists, there's porn for it.
John:
Slightly different than what you're saying.
Casey:
That's what I'm thinking of.
Casey:
Well, I feel like there's a rule for anything that you participate in, particularly podcasts, which is if you talk long enough, it will eventually end up with you bitching about HFS+.
John:
You know, just got to fix the things that annoy me, and then I move on to the next thing that annoys me.
John:
Like, I don't complain about cooperative multitasking or protected memory anymore.
John:
They got those.
John:
They nailed those.
John:
Yeah.
John:
You know, there's always something else.
John:
Did you guys find any Easter eggs?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
There were Easter eggs?
John:
Marco said he was clicking all the links.
Casey:
Not all of them.
Casey:
No, I didn't.
Casey:
I was not very diligent about clicking links.
John:
I always have Easter eggs in there.
John:
I mean, they're not hard to find.
John:
It's a web page, you know.
John:
But I was surprised by the number.
John:
I keep making them less obvious.
John:
And sometimes I think, like, no one will find these.
John:
But, you know, if you put the review up and then 50 people email you and say the Easter eggs they found.
Marco:
What are we talking, like hyperlink periods and stuff like that?
John:
Yeah, that's the level of thing.
John:
You're along the right track.
John:
Crap like that.
John:
But, I mean, just references.
John:
A lot of them are right in your face, like the image stuff.
John:
Iceman is one of them.
John:
One of the most obvious, like I said.
John:
Right in your face.
John:
Seriously, I use it like nine times.
John:
It was the name of my volume.
John:
I've got to think of what to call these things.
John:
And so you could just glance over that and like, oh, I guess he calls his hard drives Iceman or whatever.
John:
But if you think about it for a second, if you've seen Top Gun, you're like, oh, I get it, whatever.
John:
That's the most obvious one.
John:
Everything has something like that.
John:
A lot of people, like in the context screenshot, a lot of people are sending me stuff about that.
John:
They're the same contacts from last year and I think from the year before.
John:
And the reason is because iCloud, in my test account, every year I don't have to make new fake contacts because I made them one year and they're in iCloud now.
John:
So every time I install a new OS and load up one of my test accounts, they're all my contacts.
John:
So it's the same joke over and over again.
John:
But...
John:
it's convenient it's new to some people they're like oh you know that context thing how many people caught that reference and nobody i mean go look at the context screenshot you have no idea what that crap is right uh but for the seven people who know what it is it's entertaining and six of those people are seeing it for the first time because they didn't read my review last year and the year before that and they get a little like oh that's cute although i screwed up the joke this year they did it better last year but
John:
i don't think i got the joke yeah it's a reference to a movie you haven't seen so you know whatever but like you don't need to know you see that's what that's what context looks like that's what you need to get out of that screenshot oh the caption and you get none of you guys know what the caption is either do i think uh what do you call merlin posted the caption to his blog so i think he understood the reference see the caption under the contacts thing cucumbers with cottage cheese nothing on that one nope yeah you've seen that show maybe you don't remember that episode
Casey:
Which show?
Casey:
I got nothing.
John:
I can't reveal them all to you.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
Dudax in the chat room wants to know what's better than HFS+.
Casey:
And I'll see you guys later.
John:
CFS, BTRFS, NTFS.
John:
Basically any file system created in the last 20 years.
John:
Fat 16.
John:
Not created in the last 20 years.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Aye, aye, aye.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else going on?
John:
One more thing on the e-books production.
John:
I wimped out, and I have some copyrighted material, and I think it's fair use, but I have some copyrighted material linked in this review, and I wimped out of putting that into either of the e-books because I just dreaded getting rejected from the iBook store because it contains copyrighted material.
John:
I'm not going to have a nuanced conversation about fair use when I need to get my book up.
John:
So I did not include that in e-book versions, only in the web version because I was afraid.
Casey:
I have nothing constructive to add about that.
Marco:
Neither do I. Except that I agree that basically if you ever reach a point where you are trying to argue fair use with somebody and you've already lost.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's just like so much easier to just remove it.
John:
And if it's on the web, if anyone says, like, it's because of the delay.
John:
I won't get complaints on the web because no one cares.
John:
But if I did get complaints on the web, two seconds later, I can remove it.
John:
Boom.
John:
Fixed.
John:
But with the books, it's like, no.
John:
So I kind of disappointed because I would want, you know, like, oh, if you buy the e-book, you get the full experience.
John:
But this is like another one of those things that no one's going to find this anyway.
John:
I think everyone, you know.
John:
Obviously, everyone who found it was finding it on the web.
Casey:
Oh, I do have one question I should have asked during the show.
Casey:
It's very simple.
Casey:
Are you going to do this again next year?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I didn't think I was going to do it this year, but I ended up doing it.
John:
Every year, you've got something terrible about it.
John:
This one was the long, drawn-out.
John:
You think, oh, great fall.
John:
I was so happy at WWDC.
John:
I'd have all this time to write.
John:
But then at a certain point, it's like, all right, I'm ready.
John:
It's always something.
John:
Announce the date.
John:
I was so long done, and then I was just updating it.
John:
It's nothing more joyless than having to revisit a review that I finished writing on September 1st.
John:
Repeatedly revisit it to revise, change, revise, change.
John:
That is so terrible.
John:
writing it for the first time can be kind of fun you know work you know hard work but kind of fun but revising it's just not fun at all so i don't know like the the thing that the thing that makes me keep doing these things is i think about well if i don't do it they're gonna have someone else do it and i don't want someone else to go like no you're not doing it right
John:
If I did it, I would have done this.
John:
I don't want to be sitting there armchair quarterbacking whoever does the reviews of saying, well, if I did a review, and especially if they're going to do some crazy-ass iOS 7-style thing, how can I resist?
John:
In some ways, the 10th major release is a nice round stopping point, kind of like episode 100 of Hypercritical, even though it was only on 98 of them because of the numbers.
John:
The 10th major release is a nice thing, but on the other hand, 1010 is also a round thing.
John:
If they ever did 11, I don't know.
John:
I'm going to have to stop at some point.
John:
Maybe they'll just get worse and worse until no one reads them anymore.
John:
Is that a good strategy?
Marco:
Yeah, because imagine who the hell would want this job of trying to fill these shoes?
Marco:
That is true.
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
You don't have to fill the shoes.
John:
That's the whole thing about it.
John:
People think that these reviews get so widely read because they're so good, but at this point they get so widely read because they're on Ars Technica.
John:
I don't think that's true.
Casey:
I don't either.
John:
The publication has a reputation.
John:
At this point, people don't even look at the byline, and they have no idea who I am.
Marco:
I bet that's not even close to true.
Marco:
I bet that you bring a lot of people to Ars Technica for this review that are coming to it because it's your review.
John:
I brought a lot of people to Ars Technica.
John:
A lot of the people who work for Ars Technica now said, oh, I first came reading some OS X review years ago.
John:
But I think at this point, the Ars Technica, the publication, has a good enough reputation on its own that people trust it and will read it.
John:
The reason these reviews get so much traffic...
John:
is because the site's traffic has grown so much.
John:
Like back in the day, we got- That's completely wrong.
John:
Yeah, you are so wrong.
Marco:
You know, last year when I did my parody review of your review, I told you that was by far the number one page view article on my site for all of last year.
Marco:
And I had a lot of big hits last year and that beat them all.
John:
But I know the actual traffic numbers for ours, which I'm not going to say on the air.
John:
But I know the actual traffic numbers.
John:
So I can compare apples to apples.
John:
And ours as a site, its traffic has grown tremendously over the past several years.
John:
And it's to the credit of all the people who write for the publication.
John:
And I've just been kind of along for the ride.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like –
John:
I make a very long review, too.
John:
I think I said in the line review, it was the most popular article in ours for the year.
John:
But I think it was also the longest, so it's hard to tell.
John:
This year, less traffic than last year.
John:
I don't know if it's just because of the month it came out in or whatever, but...
John:
i mean maybe maybe that's what will happen maybe it'll just fade away and people won't care enough about the mac platform to be reading these reviews or maybe there won't be that interesting stuff i mean this review was shorter than last year and i think it's because there's less stuff to talk about uh so like i'm thinking of end game kind of like uh cable's talk at uh xoxo which i finally watch like how does this end what is what does the end look like uh i don't know i mean he had the things like you know fade away sell out i have nothing to sell so i can't sell out uh and
John:
Or just stop.
John:
That's my other thing.
John:
So I'll stop eventually.
John:
But the worst time to ask me is after I've just finished one.
John:
Because after I finish, I totally feel like I'm never doing that again.
Casey:
Did I tell you the conversation I had with my really good friend Brian the day that your review came out?
Casey:
Maybe I told Marco.
Casey:
I told one of you.
Casey:
But for the live listeners, so my very good friend Brian, who's a pretty big nerd, although he doesn't do this sort of thing professionally, he sends me an IM the day the review comes out.
Casey:
And he says, wait, wait, wait.
Casey:
Is one of the dudes on your podcast John Syracuse?
Casey:
He's like, yeah Oh, well he is all over the internet today I never realized he was the review guy
John:
See, that's what I said.
John:
People don't know that, you know, they don't look at the bylines.
John:
It's just the Ars Technica review.
Casey:
Well, okay, well, hold on.
Casey:
But they may not look at the byline, but when a new Mavericks, when a new OS X comes out, they know to go to Ars Technica and find your review.
John:
People used to be really into when new iPods came out too, but you see how that ends up.
Casey:
Well, okay, yes.
Casey:
Everything eventually does die, John.
Casey:
But I think you're being way too humble.
Marco:
Are you saying that you are like the iPod classic?
John:
What happens is that the thing that I have to offer that's actually of distinct value becomes of less and less interest.
John:
Because as time goes on, there are plenty of people... Like at this point, when I was first writing them, nobody even knew what the hell OS X was.
John:
So I was the winner because I was the only one writing about it.
John:
So I was the best writer about it.
John:
But now...
John:
You know, Apple and the Mac gets so much covered by so many actual professional people that, you know, I can't offer what they offer in terms of, you know, a general purpose review of the operations.
John:
All I've got left of value is...
John:
I'm the guy who's been there all along.
John:
I started with the Mac in 1984.
John:
I know all these details.
John:
I have all the historical context.
John:
I've been deep into every single release.
John:
This is not the first time I'm reviewing an operating system.
John:
I can give you historical context with maybe knowing which areas to go into technical depth.
John:
Because there's plenty of people who go into the same depth that I do.
John:
Plenty of people who can find more features than I do and have opinions about them or whatever.
John:
All I've got to offer is...
John:
Old people eventually don't have looks or strength or vigor.
John:
They just have wisdom.
John:
And eventually people are like, yeah, wisdom is great and all, but I'm going to go look at these young people frolicking on the beach because it's much more interesting.
John:
Wow.
John:
As time goes on, I will have my wisdom, I will continue to offer it, and that will, you know, may not be enough to sustain interest in these types of things.
John:
So maybe, you know, like I do with hypercritical, you know, try to bail before things go downhill, before I jump the shark, or just, you know, continue to do it until no one pays attention anymore.
John:
I don't know.