A Plague With Very Minor Effects
John:
What does your application have going for it brand-wise?
John:
It has a hideous icon that happens to include feet.
John:
And so following that brand, like you're going through a rebranding effort, all you've got going for you is the fact that your icon had feet.
John:
And so getting a non-hideous icon that has feet, it's like you're owning it.
John:
You're owning the feet.
Casey:
So, but what if I don't really need to worry about brand recognition because only like three or 400 people have ever bought the damn thing in the first place?
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
It's not like people are going there looking for the feet.
John:
That's what you got is feet.
John:
And, you know, I think being whimsical, like that was your instinct.
John:
That's what you brought to the application.
John:
You drew feet on that terrible icon.
John:
You brought that.
John:
That came from you.
John:
That is your own personal creative input into the branding of this application.
John:
If you got some other creative input, put it in.
John:
But don't like, I wouldn't just throw that away.
John:
You wanted feet, you got feet.
Marco:
Hey, your app is basically UIKit plus feet.
John:
Here's one from John Dark, spelled with an E at the end of Dark.
John:
That's a pretty awesome name, although he should really have an H in his first name.
John:
But anyway, he brought up an interesting point that I didn't think of when we were talking about the Apple Lightning connector and the upcoming USB connector that we don't know anything about other than it's not going to suck and it will be bidirectional.
John:
Wait, we don't know it's not going to suck.
John:
It still very much can suck.
John:
Yeah, I guess, I suppose.
John:
But they're saying all the right things about it.
John:
And when we talked about that, I was saying it's hard to think of that connector being anything except for something like the lightning connector.
John:
Not exactly, but reverse with the contacts on the outside and a solid metal thing instead of being like micro USB and mini USB where it's like a little bent piece of metal with crap on the inside because...
John:
That is very delicate and annoying and crappy.
John:
And it seems crazy to me that they would make a new connector and make it like it's like micro USB only now it's reversible.
John:
That's not really great or that wouldn't be a very big improvement.
John:
But Marco's right.
John:
I suppose they could still do that.
John:
But anyway, this blog post says, okay, so say my speculation ends up being close to right and they produce a connector that is in the style of the lightning connector, but isn't obviously not a lightning connector.
John:
and say that apple eventually adopts that because it's a better connector than the current full-size usb and they put it in all their products and all that stuff you would end up with a cable like the one that's drawn in this blog post did you open the link yet uh yeah i read i actually read this post earlier that cable would be kind of a nightmare don't you agree because it looks like lightning on one end and a made-up usb connector on the other that looks kind of like lightning but not really like it's a little bit thinner and the contacts are longer and
John:
And you lose all the advantages of the reversible cable of the new USB thing and everything.
John:
And you know, consumers would have trouble figuring out which end is which because they look so similar and you know, regular nerd would be able to know every time but maybe even we would mess it up if we're bleary eyed in the morning trying to plug something in.
John:
So that's kind of like the curse of being first, where Apple came up with a lightning connector while all the USB guys kept screwing up their connectors and making their crappy things.
John:
And, you know, for a while now, we're like, you see, Apple's got these great connectors on their devices.
John:
And, of course, the big, fat, ugly other end that connects to your computer is you'd never get that confused with a lightning connector, right?
John:
But if the new USB connector looks something like lightning, Apple could find itself in a strange or uncomfortable situation.
John:
And I don't think they can go USB on both ends because of all this, you know,
John:
planning they have for the lightning connector and how it works with all their devices and how it lets them change the insides while keeping the connector the same and all that good stuff well first of all i'm guessing that the usb reversible so this guy's calling it usb type c is that do we have is that an official name the type c plug yeah i think that's what they call it in the the thing that he links from the
Marco:
All right, good.
Marco:
So we can call that.
Marco:
So if this Type-C thing ends up coming out, being reversible, and resembling lightning in its general design, I would guess almost certainly it would be wider by a substantial amount to accommodate all the pins necessary to do USB 3 at a reasonable cost.
Marco:
Because the lightning connector has very, very tiny little contact pads, and then the port is required to have these little tiny pins.
Marco:
All that super miniaturization, I'm guessing, might run afoul of USB's desire to be super cheap and...
Marco:
And to have pretty broad tolerances so that any idiot can make one of these connectors or ports and it'll work.
Marco:
I'm guessing the connector would not be nearly as small as Lightning.
Marco:
And that alone would be a pretty big switch.
Marco:
Also, let's think about realistically speaking here.
Marco:
How likely is it?
Marco:
that the usb people are going to make a spec that's as good as lightning to be actually easily confused with it like i'm guessing it's going to be in some way clunkier and i'd love to be proven wrong on that i hope i am proven wrong on that but i'm guessing you know looking at their history of how they how they do things and what they prioritize i don't think what they make is going to end up being confusingly similar to lightning
John:
The Apple's easy out would be that no matter what the connector looks like, make the plastic grommet-y end thingy on the lightning connector just massive so that it's like the same size as the current USB connector on a lightning cable, except maybe it has a little dinky thing.
John:
So even if they made the connector exactly the same size, Apple, since it more or less controls the lightning connector market or the people who want to use lightning connectors, could dictate that the end that's not lightning has to be this big, fat, chunky thing.
Marco:
I think also I'm pretty sure we can safely rule out the latter two possibilities in John's blog post about either Apple basically killing lightning and adopting USB or Apple working together with the USB forum people to make one better standard together.
Marco:
I think we can pretty safely rule those things out.
Marco:
It's very, very unlikely.
John:
Yeah, I don't know what Apple's motivation would be to standardize since they love having their very own connector with their own particular attributes that they can license to accessory manufacturers and do all that good stuff.
Marco:
Exactly, because they do make a lot of money off those licensing fees.
Marco:
And I think more than the money, I think the money is a secondary concern for them.
Marco:
I think the bigger reason they do it is control.
Marco:
They love having control over what their devices can and can't do.
Marco:
They love having control over what accessories can and can't do, how they interact with the device.
Marco:
And then I think they also like that if you make a lightning port device, it's not going to work on somebody's Android phone.
Marco:
All these things really benefit Apple, and there's really no motivation to change that.
John:
The best thing about it is finally Apple has found a market and a position in that market where this lack of compatibility with the other guys does not hurt them.
John:
Because back in the day, it was like, well, real keyboards and mice use insert connector here, but Apple uses this crazy thing called ADB.
John:
And so you have to buy a special Apple keyboard.
John:
You can't just buy a regular keyboard, right?
John:
And Apple eventually adopted USB and now more or less you can take a USB keyboard and connect it to either computer.
John:
So during the whole Mac PC era, the Mac was dinged on every single area where it didn't conform to the rest of the industry.
John:
Now in the portable device space and the iPod space, Apple so dominated the portable music player space that 30-pin became sort of the de facto standard.
John:
And now in the phone market, people might not buy an iPhone because it doesn't have a big enough screen or other things like that.
John:
But I don't think people are saying, well, I was going to get an iPhone, but it doesn't use USB.
John:
It uses this lightning connector type thing.
John:
People may still gripe about lightning connector and the cost of it, but it doesn't hurt them as much as I think all their...
John:
special apple specific weirdness used to hurt and this apple always wanted to have its own weird thing but it was the the negatives were not overwhelming but kind of must have annoyed apple and now finally they have a you know in the portable device market a place where they can do their proprietary stuff and only take a minimal hit in the market for it almost non-existent you know people will just grin and bear it
Casey:
You say that though, but Gruber made a post about this, I don't know, maybe a week or two ago about how the lightning cable, I think he was talking about the lightning cable, is the epitome of the difference in perspective between Apple users and Android users.
Casey:
And I actually pointed this out.
Casey:
I sent this article to a bunch of my Android loving friends and they were like, yeah, that's stupid.
Casey:
Why would you want a proprietary cable?
Casey:
And, man, it's just – to me, that makes no sense.
Casey:
Like I don't need to have a really clunky cable that I have 300 of.
Casey:
I'd rather have one cable that works very well all the time.
Casey:
And I don't know.
Casey:
It just – it struck me as so weird that that was the thing.
John:
That post was right about the difference between the users.
John:
But those are users who have already made their choice or who have some sort of like some allegiance to one side or the other.
John:
Regular people who have no allegiance to one side or the other don't care or know anything that's different about them.
John:
You know, and like, they expect when you get a new thing, there will be new accessories that have to come with it.
John:
I don't know people I don't know if people are like, well, if I can't reuse my charging cables, then forget it.
John:
Because across Android phones, maybe you can't reuse the same cables or the same charger.
John:
So they don't work as well.
John:
It's, it's not a it's not that big a deal.
John:
Besides, they come with, you know, one or two cables or whatever the iPhones come with these days.
John:
I think the experience of using lightning cable, like you said, Casey, for regular people is more important than the theoretical advantage of being able to reuse cables across phones that you buy.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We also got a lot of feedback about dual input displays because during the, I believe it was the last show, we talked.
John:
Wait, was it a lot or was it one tweet?
John:
Well, I saw one tweet.
John:
People kept tweeting and saying, isn't it possible if they just hooked up two cables?
John:
Right.
John:
Two cables from your Mac Pro to your monitor, then doesn't that solve the resolution problem?
John:
Or, you know, do you think Apple could do this?
John:
Do you think Apple will do this?
John:
Every variation.
John:
So there were a lot of tweets about that.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
But John, you have put one specific tweet into the show notes.
Casey:
Do you care to expound upon that?
John:
Yeah, it's a slide from Apple's most recent presentation about the Mac Pro that's showing the back of the machine.
John:
And it says next generation video up to three 4K displays, single and dual input displays.
John:
And I don't even know what that means.
John:
I remember that being on the slide.
John:
But I guess I just forgot about entirely.
John:
I'm not even sure what they're getting at.
John:
Either one of you want to venture a guess?
Marco:
Well, in last episode, we talked about how it was going to be pretty impossible for them to ship a 5120 pixel wide monitor, which would be a perfect 2x of the current 27 inch.
Marco:
That it would be impossible because it would use more bandwidth than a Thunderbolt 2.0 cable will support.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
Now, back in the forever ago days, when the 30-inch cinema display first came out, it was one of the first monitors in the market to require dual-link DVI.
Marco:
And what dual-link DVI basically is, is a whole bunch more... It's basically like two...
Marco:
regular DVI channels in one cable that has just a ton of pins.
Marco:
And it required special video cards that would support this, and everything was very expensive and everything.
Marco:
That was pretty much the same idea, which is you have this standard... And forgive me if I'm getting this wrong.
Marco:
Please email us, actually, if I'm getting this wrong.
Marco:
I'm curious.
Marco:
But the standard is not fast enough to support all this resolution.
Marco:
So they basically, as far as I know, they basically divided the display in half logically...
Marco:
in the controllers and just had each channel render one half of it.
Marco:
So by doing something similar, if you could link together, say, two Thunderbolt cables into one monitor that was made to handle this, and the video cards were made to handle this as well, you could theoretically then have enough bandwidth to drive a 5120 pixel wide display.
Marco:
off of the new Mac Pro.
Marco:
And doesn't... The new... Actually, yeah, the old one too.
Marco:
The new Retina MacBook Pro that also has Thunderbolt 2.
Marco:
So far, it's the only Thunderbolt 2 computer that's shipping from Apple.
Marco:
That has two ports on it as well.
Marco:
And I don't know if it has this capability.
Marco:
It might not.
Marco:
I don't think they've advertised it, but it's worth noting that that does have two ports.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
This would be a way now.
Marco:
So last episode we were saying it's impossible for them to offer this monitor.
Marco:
Now, with the proof from this slide, from Vegard Nielsen, thank you, with the proof from this slide, it actually shows that if a dual-input display exists and that works the way you think it would, which is being able to combine the bandwidth of both cables into one display, like dual-link DVI, although that was one cable, but regardless, if this works the same way as that,
Marco:
That theoretical display now is possible again for the new Mac Pro.
John:
But is that what it means on the slide when it says dual input displays?
John:
I'm not sure that what it means is a display that has two inputs and you need both inputs to drive the display at its native resolution.
John:
It could just as easily mean...
John:
a display that has two different inputs so that you can switch between them.
John:
So two different Macs could share the same monitor.
John:
I don't, I don't know what dual input display means.
John:
That's what I'm, what I'm getting at.
Marco:
And I, but what value would, and I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, I've never bought like, you know, like maybe this, maybe there's something about pro displays, but this is a common feature.
Marco:
What value would there be in Apple advertising their ability to plug into a switched monitor that has two different inputs for two different sources?
John:
I know.
John:
That's what I'm getting at.
John:
I think there's some context we're missing from video pros or something that might use this.
John:
I'm sure we will get email from the people explaining to us.
John:
Because they put it on a slide with the expectation that everyone knows what it means.
John:
And I hadn't heard anything about it, meaning the equivalent of, oh, if you don't have bandwidth to run the resolution, you can run two of them on it.
John:
So for all the people asking, is it possible that they could do this?
John:
It seems technically plausible, vaguely plausible, because dueling DVI wasn't a standard that Apple made, I don't think.
John:
It was part of the, you know, whatever the DVI consortium is or whatever.
Marco:
No, I think they were just some of the first ones to use it.
John:
Right.
John:
This sounds a little bit weirder, you know, especially since it would be two actual cables and they like bundle them together or something.
John:
i don't know but it's within the realm of possibility will apple do this i think the cost probably the cost of a display at that resolution is puts it outside the realm of things that apple will do even if they could technically do it but i think the wild card is what did apple mean by dual input displays and it seems like none of us know for sure so if anyone out there knows for sure exactly what apple meant by dual input displays let us know
Marco:
The other thing we should point out right now is that we're recording this on Monday, December 16th at night.
Marco:
It is very, very likely that the Mac Pros are coming out tomorrow.
Marco:
So it's very likely that by the time most people hear this, the new Mac Pros will already be out.
Marco:
And if Apple is going to make any kind of display announcement at that time, that might have already happened as well.
Marco:
And other people might have already gotten these and tested them.
Marco:
And we're saying all this before the new Mac Pro is actually out.
Marco:
So this all could be irrelevant in 12 hours.
Casey:
Why do you say that tomorrow would be the day, which would be Tuesday the 17th?
Marco:
Because today they rushed out on a 10.9.1 update that supports the new Mac Pro.
Marco:
And they like to do the releases on Tuesdays.
Marco:
And this is one of the last potential weeks for them to release something and still be in December because half of Apple shuts down next week.
John:
And this was the rumored date as of a couple of weeks ago anyway, right?
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Right, yeah.
Marco:
So I would say the 10.9.1 release today all but confirms it.
Marco:
I would say it's almost certain that they're being released in 12 hours.
John:
Hasn't Apple released hardware in the recent past where if you buy the new hardware, you get a newer build of the OS than you could get on an existing Mac?
John:
I don't know if they've ever done it where you can get 10.9.1, but only if you buy a Mac Pro, and then a week later it comes out for everybody else.
John:
But they have definitely done things where if you want to buy this new hardware, you get a newer build of OS X than anybody else can get, and you've got to wait until the next update.
Marco:
Yeah, they definitely have done that.
Marco:
So with its release imminent, John, are you buying one tomorrow?
John:
No, I'm definitely not buying one tomorrow.
John:
No, I have to wait.
John:
Even if everything was just right, I want to wait until people test it.
John:
I want to see gaming benchmarks, you know?
Marco:
As far as I know, I don't think I'm going to buy one tomorrow.
Marco:
As I said, unless they actually announce some kind of rent in the display, in which case I would buy both immediately.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Besides that, I think I'm also going to wait and see.
Marco:
I'm really curious to see from reports from people about how it compares to the 2010 Mac Pro in practice.
Marco:
It has all sorts of, besides the CPU improvements, which are there, but it's not really what you'd expect from three years of CPU progress.
Marco:
So besides the CPU improvements, which are, say, moderate,
Marco:
I want to know, is this whole new version of the system architecture, this all-PCI Express everywhere, maximized for throughput, and then these GPUs being super high power?
Marco:
I want to know, how big of an upgrade is that in practice, in regular use, using not just 3D rendering apps that will use the GPUs, but using just general apps, development apps, photo, audio, production stuff, that kind of stuff.
Marco:
I would love to know...
Marco:
how much of an upgrade is this really if you already have a 2010 Mac Pro?
John:
With a gigantic PCI Express SSD in it already.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
Well, my SSD is mediocre.
John:
That's another thing.
John:
The disk throughput, the quote-unquote disk throughput of the solid-state drives in this thing, I'm interested in that as well because I think that will have more of an impact on my daily life than the speed of the CPUs.
John:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
In theory, the way this is architected, there's a lot of stuff missing from it.
Marco:
Various card slots and a few old interfaces like Firewire.
Marco:
One of the reasons they did all that was so they could basically devote all of the PCI Express lanes available in the chipset and from the CPU, devote all of that to just maximum throughput for the core components.
Marco:
I want to know, can you feel that?
Marco:
Is that noticeable?
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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John:
And everybody should have an offsite backup of some kind.
John:
And online is the easiest and probably also the cheapest offsite backup you can get.
Casey:
Yeah, we just received, at least John and I received a tweet from someone I don't have it handy saying, oh my goodness, I should have listened to John about backing up because I just lost 12 months worth of work because I didn't have a backup.
John:
He could have just installed a piece of software in five minutes and paid $5 a month, which is not that much in the grand scheme of things.
John:
Just don't go out to lunch one time a month and you're fine.
John:
And he would have had all his stuff and some peace of mind.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
Yeah, it's really great.
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And it's also, you know, this is a great thing too.
Marco:
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Marco:
She loves it.
Marco:
She puts everything on there.
Marco:
But I know she's never going to manage time machine.
Marco:
It's a laptop.
Marco:
It's all over the house.
Marco:
Time capsules are unreliable.
Marco:
I don't even want to mess with that.
Marco:
I just want to know that she has online backup and I can check in.
Marco:
I can go online and I can make sure her computer has been backed up recently.
Marco:
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Marco:
Nice peace of mind.
Marco:
Fantastic for yourself and for setting up things for your relatives who you don't want to lose data.
John:
Yeah, you should make it as a Christmas gift idea when you do the annual visiting the relatives and fixing all their computer stuff.
John:
Just install Backblaze on them for it.
John:
Because for casual users who are not downloading multi-gigabyte things all the time and everything, you say, well, their internet connection is not fast enough to use online backup.
John:
The initial backup is probably going to take a long time on their terrible DSL connection or whatever crazy thing they're using.
John:
But once they get through that initial backup, casual computer users don't produce data in that high volume.
John:
I mean, Backblaze will automatically...
John:
you know not back up stuff that doesn't have to right so you don't have to worry about oh what about all their cache files from safari when they do web browsing it's not going to back up that stuff it's just going to back up the data they their own data and casual users don't produce that much data so it will have no problem keeping their update their backup up to date uh you know in practically in real time every day once it gets caught up and it won't take that long so
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, my mom's entire backup set is 30 gigs.
John:
And how much does it grow a day?
John:
Like, you know, the daily churn in that is probably like a megabyte or two.
John:
No problem uploading that.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And, you know, I can tell you, too, like, I mean, I have on my computer, I have about 800 gigs in Backblaze.
Marco:
My wife has about one and a half terabytes in Backblaze.
Marco:
And I said, we've used this for years and we've never had a problem even with that much data.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We have a little bit more follow up specifically around TV related things.
Casey:
John, you went on an absolutely fantastic rant last episode about your new TV.
Casey:
And one thing in particular that that in the the dual link display idea, we got a lot of feedback about.
Casey:
So would you care to talk about how to calibrate your TV?
John:
Yeah, I talked a little bit about calibration last episode, how there's lots of settings, and I was playing with all of them, trying to get it dialed in.
John:
And then I got a bunch of tweets from people asking about this topic, including some tweets from Daniel Jalco, who just recently bought a Panasonic Blaster television.
John:
And I was talking to him about it.
John:
It was making me realize how few people know anything about it.
John:
I mean, even you guys are like, calibrate my TV.
John:
What are you even talking about?
John:
Uh, so I figured I would go over just a couple of basic things you can do to make your television look better.
John:
I'm almost anybody.
John:
You don't need to have a fancy TV.
John:
It doesn't even need to be a plasma TV.
John:
Uh, but you know, you can make your TV a lot better.
John:
And basically what it comes down to is that your TV looks bad now and you probably don't even know it.
John:
Uh, so the first thing that lots of people tweeted about was a calibration app.
John:
It's on the app store from the THX company.
John:
Well, I guess Lucasfilm or whoever owns them now.
Marco:
I believe it's pronounced thicks.
John:
I don't think so.
John:
Oh, God.
Casey:
John, I thought you were better than that.
John:
No.
John:
And it works if you have an iOS device and either an Apple TV so you can AirPlay to your TV or some way to connect the iOS device to your TV with HDMI cable.
John:
I used AirPlay to my Apple TV.
John:
I think it had options for HDMI, but I don't know what the options are there in terms of cable.
John:
So anyway, it's like $2.
John:
Don't buy the application if you can't do one of those two things.
John:
You can read the description to see if you can.
John:
I bought it just out of curiosity because I already have a THX calibration thing that came with my TiVo that is basically the same test.
John:
The iOS one has a little bit of integration with your camera, which is only so-so, but it's really simple, really basic.
John:
But even without that, you can probably find somewhere where you can download some test patterns or something to adjust your television.
John:
The THX app just happens to make it easy to do this stuff.
John:
The tricky part is...
John:
you need to get a picture on your television and you don't want it to go through anything that screws with the picture.
John:
So if you like got an image on your computer and try to use like airplane mirroring onto your TV, I would worry that that would not be a good simulation of the image.
John:
And, or if you wanted to adjust your Blu-ray player,
John:
Really, you probably need something on a Blu-ray to go out the Blu-ray player and onto your television.
John:
That's not to say that you need to calibrate every single input of your television separately, but it is possible that some devices you have connected to your computer could output different kinds of signals than other devices, so be careful about that.
John:
But anyway, here's my quick tips for calibration.
John:
The first one is make sure the devices that are connected to your television are outputting what you think they're outputting to your television set.
John:
So for example, if you get a cable or a satellite TV or whatever, something like that, it's sending you your television shows
John:
In a particular format.
John:
And say you have Comcast and the television comes over as 1080i.
John:
Make sure that it's going into the back of your television as a 1080i signal.
John:
You'd be surprised at how many people have things configured where their television shows are 1080i, but...
John:
through the series of boxes or devices or inputs they're going through it's being converted to 720p to be shown on their television or vice versa you have a 720p signal and your tv could show 720p but it's set up to show it as 1080i most televisions and the boxes and receivers and things in between will convert between 1080i and 720p and uh you know and even 1080p they will up sample down sample do whatever it takes you want it to go through
John:
sort of natively, whatever the native is.
John:
If the native is 720, have your TV show at 720.
John:
If the native is 1080 IRP, have it show that way.
John:
That's not even a calibration step.
John:
It's just, you know, look at all the settings and all the devices in your chain and make sure you're not messing up the signal.
John:
That sometimes is easier said than done.
John:
Like old TiVos used to have a whole bunch of different settings where you could, you put out like the cable goes into your TiVo, like the television signal.
John:
And then HDMI comes out of your TiVo and the TiVo used to say, okay, I can take the signal coming in and I can convert it to any format you want and send it to your television.
John:
Or I could not touch it at all and just pass it through.
John:
And that's always the one you want.
John:
They used to call it native or whatever.
John:
Nowadays with the modern TiVos, I don't think they even have that option.
John:
You just have to know what the input signal is and match it up for the output signal.
John:
And the second thing for Tivos in particular is if you hit the up arrow button on the five way selector, it will change the format.
John:
And if you have children in your house, they will accidentally hit that up arrow selector many, many times.
John:
And so you will have everything configured.
John:
Then one day sit down to your television and wonder why things look a little weird.
John:
It's probably because one of your kids hit the up arrow while they're watching television and change the format.
John:
So check for that.
John:
The second thing is about the size of the image on the screen.
John:
And this is another thing I'm surprised that not a lot of people know about.
John:
If you buy a television, you're like, oh, 1080p, it's got full HD 1080 resolution, right?
John:
And if you know about the resolution, I think it's 1920 by 1080 if you were to do it in pixels.
John:
And so you figure if you're watching a television show and that television show put up a test pattern image that showed a one pixel wide rectangle that was 1920 by 1080 pixels, you would expect to see like around the edge of your screen, that one pixel wide border, you know, say it's like a white, a white rectangle on a black background.
John:
In reality, on any television you buy, pretty much, you will see nothing because they will cut off the edges of the screen.
John:
That's called the overscan or lots of other different names for it.
John:
It's from the CRT days where the images at the edges of a CRT were really low quality and they would cover them on television sets with like a plastic part of the bezel and everything.
John:
And...
John:
And someone was giving me more historical context on why they did that.
John:
But the bottom line was that there was a safe area where you can show an image where you were sure it would show up on everybody's television set.
John:
And there was the unsafe area, which on most people's television set would be covered by some other plastic trim piece.
John:
There are no plastic trim pieces covering the edges of your televisions.
John:
If you have an HD television and it has 1080p resolution...
John:
You can see all those pixels.
John:
But all those televisions will take your television signal and zoom it so it's bigger than your television, so you can only see sort of like the inner, you know, it'll cut off a frame of the thing.
John:
So that does two things.
John:
One, it makes you misinformation, things that are outside of that area you won't see at all.
John:
And the second thing is it takes all those nice native, if you're lucky, 1080p or 1080i pixels, and it will stretch it.
John:
It's like taking a picture, taking a desktop background picture that exactly fits your monitor and then making the size bigger by 5%.
John:
You're missing part of the picture and the part you see is blurry.
John:
So almost all televisions, not just the fancy ones, have a setting somewhere in them where you can tell it, don't do that.
John:
Don't turn off overscan.
John:
Sometimes they have what size should it be?
John:
Size one, size two.
John:
Look in the manual for your television.
John:
This is another tip.
John:
If you can't find the manual for your television, just Google for your television's model name, manual PDF.
John:
You'll find the manual PDFs online somewhere.
John:
And find that setting.
John:
Because if you paid for a 1080p television or a 720p television or whatever...
John:
You should see all those pixels at their native resolution, to think of it in television parlance.
John:
These two steps, input resolution and the size of the picture, are two things that anybody can do.
John:
You don't need an application to do it, and there are pretty much no downsides to it.
John:
Some people were saying that if you do that, you might see booms in the shot, like microphone booms, because people expect every television to be overscanning that.
John:
In my experience, running a television at the proper size for four years now, since I got my first HDTV,
John:
That has not been a problem.
John:
I have not seen a bunch of, you know, boom mics coming down from the top of the screen or things from the side.
John:
But even if I did, I would say that's the problem of the show is not mine.
John:
I don't want all my television to all the images on my television to be zoomed in and a little bit blurry with stuff cut off around the edge.
John:
The third item I would say that everyone should adjust, and here's where you need a calibration thing, is brightness and contrast.
John:
The two calibration things that you'll look at in either this THX app or any other type of thing are one shows you a bunch of gray boxes going from white down to black, and you will adjust your brightness until a certain number of boxes are visible.
John:
like they'll usually have it so you're not supposed to see all the boxes like you shouldn't see the last box or the second to last box or whatever adjusting that level is important because it lets you see some shadow detail but you know not too much like the test images often say you should see a person in front of a background and if that background looks entirely black to you your thing is is not dialed in correctly and if it looks if you see too much stuff on it then it's it's it's too bright so you should adjust it until you get just the right boxes uh visible it's
John:
pretty easy test to do you don't need any special equipment you just need your eyeball they'll say something like make it as dark as you can so you can still see box seven that's something anybody can do just by looking at it maybe you want to do it in a light room or a dark room depending on how you watch television and contrast similarly they'll show you something like a series of four white boxes and i said if this just looks like a big white rectangle your contrast is too high
John:
Turn the contrast down until you see actual four distinct white boxes of varying levels of gray.
John:
There should be lines between the white boxes.
John:
If you're losing the line between the last two white boxes and they're starting to blend together, you need to dye your contrast.
John:
Those two settings, plus the size, plus the input resolution, will improve the picture on your television set.
John:
Not just making it more accurate to what it's supposed to look like, but generally making things look nicer.
John:
Not look washed out, not look too dark, not look too bright.
John:
And then I haven't even touched anything having to do with color in terms of exactly dialing in the red, the green, and the blue and all this other stuff.
John:
But just brightness, contrast, size, and input resolution will go a long way.
John:
And the final thing, I talked about this in the last show, was turn off all the crazy effects.
John:
If your television has crazy effects, and it probably does, you just need to turn them all off.
John:
LCDs you might want to leave motion interpolation on if motion looks weird to you without it.
John:
But other than that, all the things about vivid color and extra brightness and the title of the last episode, Brilliance Enhancer, you just need to turn that off.
John:
And I actually pasted it into the show notes because I wanted to know these actual names.
John:
I didn't have them in front of me last time.
John:
Here are the actual names of the settings from my fancy new television set.
John:
These are not made up.
John:
And these are not, like, gathered from several different models.
John:
These are all on one television set.
John:
Caption smoother, MPEG remaster, motion smoother, resolution remaster, video NR, CATS, acronym with periods between the letters, photo enhancement, vivid color, color remaster, black extension, and automatic gamma control.
John:
And all those things have explanations in the manual trying to explain what they do.
John:
The bottom line is, just turn them all off.
John:
Every single one of them, turn them off.
John:
What if I like cats?
Yeah.
John:
Do you know what cats is?
John:
Nobody knows.
John:
They have terrible names, too.
John:
You can look up what they do.
John:
Basically, what all of them do is mess with the picture in a way they think might be helpful, but generally is not helpful, especially on a plasma television that doesn't have the problems that need to be compensated for by effects like this.
John:
uh the motion smoother is the one that really galls me on plasmas on an lcd television you will have similar settings if you turn them all off and it looks like crap figure out which one or two you need to turn on to make it not look like crap to you but do not leave them all on especially things like vivid color or color remaster things that you're going to screw with your colors those just make everybody look like clowns and make things look totally wrong
John:
So you don't need to hire someone to come into your house to do a professional calibration to improve the picture of your television.
John:
Those four things, just turn off the effects, check your input resolution, check your size, and check your brightness and contrast.
John:
It'll make a big difference in your life.
Marco:
I actually hate cats.
John:
What about CATS, though?
John:
You might like them.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I haven't read the manual.
Marco:
We are also sponsored this week by Hover.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They're part of 2COWS, which is a company that's been around basically forever, and they're one of the largest domain registrars in the world.
Marco:
They offer tons of TLDs.
Marco:
They've got .net, .co, .com, of course, .tv, all sorts of country codes, and many more domain names.
Marco:
And they're always adding more.
Marco:
You can get .just about anything.
Marco:
So Hover does not believe in heavy-handed cross-selling or really aggressive upselling.
Marco:
They don't believe in hiding functionality or requiring extra payment for things that really should be included for free with domain names, such as who is privacy, subdomains, and URL forwarding.
Marco:
They also have their own email service.
Marco:
However, email makes it easy and affordable to create a memorable email address without having to use one of the impersonal, forgettable webmail addresses that you can get for free elsewhere.
Marco:
They also offer Google Apps for Business on any domain, new or old.
Marco:
And one of the best things about Hover is that they have amazing customer support.
Marco:
So not only do they have excellent online help with all sorts of documentation and tutorials, but...
Marco:
They also have this awesome no-hold, no-wait, and no-transfer telephone support policy.
Marco:
So you can call this 866 number Monday through Friday, 8 a.m.
Marco:
to 8 p.m.
Marco:
Eastern, and a real live person, probably in Canada because they're in Canada.
Marco:
That means they're going to be really nice, of course, and a little bit cold maybe, but really nice.
Marco:
You're going to be speaking to a live person picking up the phone almost immediately.
Marco:
Second ring maybe.
Marco:
You might have to wait until the second ring, but almost immediately.
Marco:
And the person who picks the phone will actually be able to help you.
Marco:
They will have the power to help you.
Marco:
You want it to be transferred to 10 different people.
Marco:
No, you call them up anytime during their business hours, 8 a.m.
Marco:
to 8 p.m.
Marco:
Monday through Friday, and you are speaking to a person.
Marco:
And that is incredibly unusual in pretty much any business these days, let alone something that takes place mostly on the internet, like domain name registration.
Marco:
So go to hover.com slash ATP for high-quality, no-hassle domain name registration.
Marco:
And don't forget to use promo code ATP for 10% off any purchase you make at Hover.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Hover for sponsoring our show again.
John:
Got a couple more things on calibration.
Marco:
You?
John:
Yeah, one is the frequent suggestion by many people who either have the same television me or have other similar television, they say, they go into a forum seen it has forums like this, there's AVS forums, there's tons of websites about high definition television televisions on the web, where people buy televisions, calibrate them either professionally or sort of by hand by themselves.
John:
And then they post to the forum group what their settings are.
John:
So there's a million different settings for brightness, contrast, color, tint, gamma, like,
John:
tons of things you can adjust, and they will adjust it to their liking or have it professionally calibrated and post those numbers to the forum.
John:
And CNET, the people who review televisions on CNET, will also post their settings and say, we calibrated this television before we did our testing for a review.
John:
Here are the settings we used.
John:
I tend not to just take those settings and use them on my television because particularly with plasmas, each individual example of a particular model varies enough that you're not going to... I don't think you're going to get...
John:
I mean, these are like 10-point, 15-point white balance adjustments of tiny, minute degrees.
John:
I don't think those settings that they use for their television set are going to work for mine, even if we have the exact same make, model, and year, just because of variations within individual televisions.
John:
Uh, and, and then on top of that, there's aging where the televisions look different as you use them or again, particularly the plasmus.
John:
So I wouldn't blindly take any of those settings and apply them to your television and expect you are seeing what they're seeing, but I've been looking at them to give myself sort of a ballpark idea of what are people doing?
John:
And particularly look at the gamma settings to see.
John:
you know, what, what gamma values are they using?
John:
And there's lots of weird stuff, especially with Panasonic televisions where they'll have a bunch of presets and then a custom setting.
John:
And the, if you pick one gamma level and the custom, it's not the same as if you did it on a preset.
John:
So you have to look at all the details.
John:
Like they started with the setting, they tweak these things.
John:
So they started with that and they tweak those.
John:
And there's also the super-duper professional mode where you can expose all the settings in the television through some crazy interface by, you know, typing in weird codes on your remote to get even more settings and screw with those.
John:
And at that level, I mean, once you're doing that, I would say don't do that.
John:
Hire a professional to do that.
John:
But if you want to look at these forums to get an idea of what things people are setting, for example, if you did it visually, like you did those tests with the black levels and the contrast and you got some numbers dialed in,
John:
and then you go to a forum post and you see seven different forum posts on different websites, and everybody has their contrast set at like 63 or 62, and you have yours at 12, you probably did something wrong.
John:
It's just like a sanity check.
John:
So I wouldn't say copy those numbers, but a lot of people have talked about that and asked me if I had used those settings.
John:
No, I don't use them directly, but I do use them to just check that I'm not entirely crazy.
John:
Good thing that can be verified.
John:
Well, you know, it's supporting evidence for or against...
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So everyone has been talking about rating things.
Casey:
So I think now's as good a time as any to say, rate our show on iTunes.
Casey:
Now, do you want to do that now, later, or not at all?
Marco:
No, no, no.
Marco:
Do you want to rate our show well now, or do you want to email us your negative thoughts?
Casey:
Right.
Marco:
Or do you want to be reminded to rate us well in two weeks?
Casey:
Or how about with every episode of the podcast, we'll just ask you again during the show, do you want to rate us?
Casey:
That actually is what a lot of podcasts do.
Casey:
Yeah, I realized about halfway through that that I was sticking my foot right down my throat.
Casey:
So let me move on and say, Marco, do you happen to have any thoughts about rating apps and asking and soliciting users to rate apps?
Marco:
Yeah, don't.
Casey:
Moving on.
Marco:
Fastest topic ever.
Casey:
We figured it out.
Marco:
This was discussed at length in last week's episode of John Gruber's The Talk Show with Daniel Jalkut.
Marco:
And it was a really good discussion, so I don't think we need to rehash most of it.
Marco:
The gist of my position is really... So we're talking about those... In case you couldn't tell.
Marco:
We're talking about those rate this app dialogues that pop up in many iOS apps, big and small.
Marco:
Hey, rate this app.
Marco:
You want to go...
Marco:
Leave a great rating now or remind me later or never do it again.
Marco:
They've kind of become this plague on iOS devices, a plague with very minor effects that it's slightly annoying everybody.
Marco:
Gruber started out about a week ago now saying, I've often thought about starting a campaign online to just make everybody rate one star when they see one of those, which is his nice way of kind of seeding the idea without saying, I'm telling you all to do this right now.
Marco:
It's a masterful phrasing.
Marco:
We've had a lot of discussion here and there between various smart people in the community about the pros and cons of these Rate This App dialogues and the pros and cons of what would happen if you started retaliating and rating everything one star or rating everything only three stars instead of five or whatever the case may be.
Marco:
My position is not that you should necessarily take any particular action towards the apps that do this.
Marco:
My position is really just telling developers you should not have this in your app.
Marco:
And I think Grouper had a really good point in the talk show about why this is so irritating.
Marco:
is that a modal dialog box that pops up in your face when you're trying to do something with an app, like that's... A modal dialog box should be reserved for basically exceptions, like in programming parlance, like something that is not supposed to be the common case.
Marco:
You know, like...
Marco:
there was some kind of weird server error and we can't do what you asked.
Marco:
Or you just tried to authenticate and you couldn't log in because it refused your password.
Marco:
Or you're trying to do something right now and we can't do it because you turned off cellular data or location services or something like that.
Marco:
That's the kind of conditions in which a modal dialog box is appropriate.
Marco:
Interrupting people...
Marco:
to serve the developer.
Marco:
Rating an app doesn't do crap for the people who are doing it.
Marco:
It doesn't serve them at all.
Marco:
It only serves the developer.
Marco:
You're asking people to promote you or to make you feel good about yourself.
Marco:
Either way, you, the developer, are asking people to do something for you.
Marco:
And you're asking them that by interrupting them in the middle of them trying to use your app and probably trying to get something done.
Marco:
You're interrupting them to say, hey, help me out here by reviewing me and pimping me in the store.
Marco:
And that seems like a very inappropriate use of an interruption to your user like that.
Casey:
You know, I almost wonder if now is a decent time to expose Marco to corporate culture.
Casey:
And what I mean by that is I wonder if now is a good time for the five whys.
Casey:
So Marco, put on your not so awesome developer hat.
Casey:
And you're thinking right now about putting this into your app.
Casey:
Or actually, let's say you just did put this into Overcast for the sake of conversation.
Casey:
I know you never would.
Casey:
Just try hard.
Marco:
And for me, let me just say while we're on the Overcast topic, I said right in my post, I am putting a thing in the settings screen.
Marco:
Like a button to say, leave a review for this app in the store.
Marco:
Just a button there.
Marco:
That is different.
Marco:
If you want to make it easy for people who do want to leave a review for you, if you want to give them a shortcut or suggest they might want to do that in a passive way, like a button in an about screen, that's very different than interrupting them with a message box in normal use of the app.
Marco:
I don't have any problem with a button in an about screen.
Marco:
You can put whatever you want there.
Marco:
I don't care.
Marco:
That doesn't interrupt me.
Marco:
And if I'm browsing in settings or about...
Marco:
I might actually consider doing that because I'm like, hey, I'm playing with stuff or I'm exploring this app.
Marco:
But when you're actually trying to do something and you get interrupted by a modal dialog box, that's the problem.
Marco:
So I want to draw the distinction.
Marco:
It's not that asking for reviews at all is bad or providing a shortcut at all is bad.
Marco:
It's the way you're asking by interrupting people in a modal way like this.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So you're writing Overcast and you had a brain fart.
Casey:
I don't know, maybe you had too much shimay one night and you've put this into your app.
Casey:
Why did you put a... I love the idea of a drunk feature edition.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
That's when the best work is done.
Casey:
Why would you put a solicitation to rate your app into Overcast?
Casey:
If you were the kind of developer that would do that sort of thing.
Marco:
The main reason why people do this, and the reason why hypothetical drunk me would do this on Overcast if I somehow... I don't know.
Marco:
When I have a lot of Chimay, I don't get bad taste.
Marco:
In fact, I would argue if you're getting drunk on Chimay, I think you have pretty good taste.
Marco:
But, you know, in all seriousness, to borrow one of your phrases, I think the reason people do this is very clear.
Marco:
It works.
Marco:
In the definition of works where it does get you more reviews.
Casey:
Now, why would you want more reviews?
Marco:
The theory is, I've heard different things.
Marco:
Obviously, we know from just like a customer perspective, we know that when we are browsing for apps, usually we do read the reviews.
Marco:
Or at least we'll glance at them or glance at the star rating, the average star rating.
Marco:
And there is a distinction between ratings and reviews.
Marco:
You don't have to write a written review to leave a star rating.
Marco:
But I don't think for the purpose of this discussion, I don't think it really matters.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So there's one argument to say that when customers find it, they will read the reviews.
Marco:
And if you don't have a lot of reviews or if you have a couple of bad reviews and no positive ones to offset them, then that'll make them less likely to buy your app.
Marco:
That I can't argue with.
Marco:
That is true.
Marco:
However, I've heard a lot of people also say that reviews are correlated with rank.
Marco:
And I don't think we have any evidence to confirm that.
Marco:
And a couple people said that it specifically doesn't do that.
Marco:
So that's all over the map.
Marco:
I would love to hear from anybody who has actual evidence to support whether that's true or false or not.
Marco:
As far as I know, rank is all about sales volume.
Marco:
It's like sales volume per time interval.
Marco:
I don't think it has anything to do with reviews, but it could change.
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
Why do you want a higher rank?
Casey:
To get rich in the App Store.
Casey:
Well, why would that make you rich in the App Store?
Marco:
Because nobody pays for apps anymore.
Casey:
All kidding aside, the line of questioning I'm trying to lead you down is that – and I believe that to some degree Underscore David Smith talked about this in his really good blog post today.
Casey:
But I feel like the end of the five whys of this conversation is that discovery is broken.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And if not discovery, then finding a way to pitch your app so that I don't need to double check your work.
Casey:
What I mean by that is if I throw up a bunch of really awesome screenshots and I throw up a really nice description, you're going to want to double check from real people that I'm not full of it, that I'm not lying.
Casey:
And I think it's a combination of discovery and representation of the app that makes this sort of gross behavior necessary.
Casey:
Because if discovery was really good, then I would be able to find apps very easily.
Casey:
And then once I found the app that I think I might want...
Casey:
if if the selling of it if the marketing of it within the app store was really good then say if we had a video for example or maybe if you had a trial and i'm not trying to go down that road i'm just saying hypothetically if you had like a one-day trial or whatever then it wouldn't matter what the reviews or certainly wouldn't matter as much what the reviews say and it wouldn't matter as much what the ratings are but because developers have almost no levers to pull
Casey:
in order to improve their performance, to find performance however you want, in the App Store, this is one of the only levers they've got.
Casey:
So darn it, they're going to pull on it.
Casey:
And that was the five whys exercise I was trying to bring you down.
John:
I think the reason this comes up at all, like the reason it ends up on Daring Fireball or whatever, is not so much because apps do annoying things.
John:
Because I think the app store has always been, you know, like the two Americas thing from whoever that guy was who tried to run for president.
John:
There's the two app stores.
John:
There's the one that's full of crap.
John:
that we just ignore, we being the Mac nerd, blogger, whatever people.
John:
And there's the good app store with the apps that we like and we use.
John:
And the reason this Rate Me thing comes up is because it's not limited to the crap app store.
John:
apps that we all like and use every day do this instagram like our favorite twitter client uh you know our favorite note-taking application everybody does it the super high class well designed well regarded we love the application couldn't live without it everything about it is awesome responsive developer releases bug fixes has reasonable prices great application all around
John:
Even they have stupid rate me dialogue boxes on them.
John:
Not all of them, but it's an infection of annoyance that has crossed over into our world.
John:
And that's why you get someone like John Gruber saying, well, this has got to stop.
John:
I mean, I love these applications that I use every day, but they got to get out of my face.
John:
Uh, if, because there are tons of terrible things that happen only in the crap app store, like blinking ad banners in your face and, you know, just all sorts of ugly UIs and, and, uh, things that are modal when they shouldn't be.
John:
And just, you know, there's tons of crap applications.
John:
We don't care what happens over there.
John:
It doesn't affect us because we, you know, we feel like we're discerning and we talk to each other and say what the good applications are and make recommendations.
John:
And then when we get one of these good applications that we use every single day and it throws up one of those rating dialogues boxes, it's like a betrayal.
John:
It's like, that's not supposed to happen here.
John:
This is the good app store where I all talk to my friends and get all my stuff.
John:
And that gets back to the discovery thing Casey was talking about where...
John:
If we had a way to look at an application and it said something like, and I know this is getting all Facebooky, it's going to scare everybody.
John:
It's going to be like, oh, six of your friends use this application and they like it.
John:
It means so much more than wading through 100 possibly paid for five-star reviews from Amazon Mechanical Turk or whatever these developers do to get their scam reviews.
John:
And especially when you're going into an area that you're not that familiar with on the App Store.
John:
These sort of social proof that people who you know and trust have decided this application is good.
John:
That's all you need is to see like from three other people saying this is good or this is bad that you happen to know.
John:
That would make so much more difference to you than just these random reviews.
John:
But there's no way to put that in there.
John:
There's no way to, you know, I guess we have the reputation of the developer, which maybe we know, maybe we don't.
John:
And then we just have a whole bunch of reviews that we can't even tie back to individual people.
John:
Even if we see a name that we think we recognize, unless we know that's the name under which some friend of ours leaves reviews on the iTunes store, we have no idea.
John:
So the reaction to this in terms of putting up a thing that says, I've been thinking about asking people to one star rate this as a weird way to suggest one star rating of it.
John:
It's in effect, that's not the way to go about it.
John:
The actual campaign suggestion of a way to campaign to go about it.
John:
But what we want to happen and what I think is going to happen is not that kind of one star campaign, but a socialization of the idea that putting up rating dialog boxes is unacceptable in the quote unquote good app store.
John:
And that's what we're all looking for.
John:
you know, get that stuff out of the applications that we like the high quality, well-designed applications from good developers that we use every day that are really popular that we like.
John:
We've already got this whole thing of like when an application goes bad, like people used to like Tweety and then Twitter bought them and it was still okay.
John:
And then they changed it and now it's crap.
John:
And now nobody uses the official Twitter client for iOS if they can help it at all.
John:
That's an application going bad.
John:
It was good.
John:
It did conform to sort of our, you know,
John:
taste and social norm guidelines in at least in the you know the mac nerd or ios nerd community and then it didn't anymore and we kicked it out right but all these other applications are still doing this we need to socialize all of the you know software reviewers developers consumers of it with people who think they have a good taste and everything socialize the idea that you can't put up these rate me dialogue boxes otherwise we will look down on you in some way
John:
That's all you need.
John:
You don't need to do one star ratings.
John:
You don't need to attack people or to punish their applications.
John:
If you socialize, everybody involved in this good half of the ecosystem that putting up rating dialogs boxes is unacceptable.
John:
The problem will take care of itself because no one wants to be that app that puts up the rating dialog boxes.
John:
And the problem is that somehow we got to a point where that was deemed acceptable by almost everybody involved.
John:
And I think this exercise is going to turn that around if we keep at it without any stupid campaigns to rate things one star or retaliate or send people email.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean that was kind of the main argument of my post is like, yeah, you can do this and it, quote, works, but at what cost to quality and to your reputation, to your brand?
Marco:
There's lots of things that work.
Marco:
Telemarketing and spam work.
Marco:
But most reasonable people hate those things.
Marco:
And the telemarketers would argue, well, we're just calling you up and it's once a week maybe for two seconds and you hang up if you don't like it.
Marco:
It's always good when you attack a portion of your own audience.
Marco:
That's when you get the biggest feedback.
Yeah.
Marco:
But I've gotten so much feedback since I published my post about this from developers saying it's no big deal.
Marco:
If you don't like those, you just hit dismiss and you don't see it for a little while or something.
Marco:
But that is a big deal.
Marco:
That's like if you're annoying somebody slightly, you're still annoying them.
Marco:
And that builds up over time.
Marco:
You get the image in people's minds, the brand image of kind of being mediocre on quality or on standards.
Marco:
That matters.
Marco:
It all adds up.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm torn on this.
Marco:
It's hard for me to talk about this because anything I say, people jump down my throat immediately saying, well, you didn't have to do all that because you were popular or something.
Marco:
Forgetting that the way I got popular was because of Instapaper.
Marco:
I wasn't popular before launching that.
Marco:
So it's hard for me to say anything and for anybody to take it seriously in this regard because they just pulled the that's fine for Merlin argument against me.
Marco:
But I can't say enough how much those little quality decisions matter and they add up.
Marco:
And that's how you get popular.
Marco:
That's how you get respected is by caring so much about quality that you won't annoy your users for a split second every two weeks.
Marco:
That really matters.
Marco:
And I don't know how else to tell people that without sounding like I'm attacking them.
Marco:
But it is annoying.
Marco:
And it does matter.
Marco:
Let me take a quick break right now before I get to my next bigger point and tell you about our final sponsor this week.
Marco:
It is Audible.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Audible's offering ATP listeners a free audiobook along with a 30-day trial.
Marco:
Go to audiblepodcast.com slash ATP to take advantage of this special offer.
Marco:
Now, Casey, I've heard through the grapevine that you have recently listened to a book or read a book.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
I recently read – and this was actually recommended by someone on Twitter a few months ago when I was going to the beach and I wanted to have some books to read.
Casey:
And so I solicited recommendations on Twitter.
Casey:
And somebody recommended Machine Man by Max Barry, B-A-R-R-Y.
Casey:
I just finished reading it.
Casey:
I did not read it on Audible, but I read the book book.
Casey:
It was extremely weird, and I don't know if I liked it or not, but it was very different.
Casey:
And for that alone— Strong recommendation.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
For that alone, though, it may be worth checking out.
Casey:
And the TLDR version is—I'm sorry, the summary, John—is that there's a guy who's a PhD, and he accidentally chops off one of his legs working in his lab because he works with, like, this big equipment—
Casey:
And so he gets a prosthetic leg and then realizes, well, you know, I could build a better one.
Casey:
And so he builds himself a better prosthetic leg and then realizes, you know what, this would be better as a pair instead of just one.
Casey:
And I'll let you...
Casey:
read the book to fill I'll let you read the book to fill in kind of where this goes but it was very very very different and so I double checked and it of course is available on audible and audible has been kind enough to sponsor ATP a handful of times and every time I think of a book recommendation even if it's slightly esoteric I go to audible to see before I recommend it hey is this available on audible and every single time the answer has been yes
Marco:
So feel free to go to Audible and get Casey's weird book recommendation.
Marco:
What was it called again?
Marco:
The Machine Man?
Casey:
It's called Machine Man by Max Barry, B-A-R-R-Y.
John:
Did he win Pulitzer Prize for that or no?
Casey:
I don't think so, but it's a lot shorter than your recommendation.
Yeah.
John:
Just asking.
John:
This is just questions.
Casey:
It's less than 60 hours.
Casey:
I think it was 600, wasn't it?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
The length is 9 hours and 27 minutes on Audible.
Casey:
Awesome.
Marco:
So thanks a lot to Audible once again for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Go to audiblepodcast.com slash ATP.
Casey:
And really quickly to build on not the book but Audible, we're going on a car trip to go to my family's soon.
Casey:
And the best way in the entire world to kill time on a car trip other than listening to this show is…
Casey:
is to get a book on quote-unquote tape, so to get something from Audible.
Casey:
And right now, I mean, they're offering you a free audiobook to fill, in the case of this particular selection, a 10-hour car ride.
Casey:
How can you say no to that?
Casey:
There's no reason not to go check it out.
Marco:
Or you can get John's pick, which is the power broker, and fill your next three years of car rides.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So the point I wanted to start before I took that break, because I knew this might be a little bit long.
Marco:
So back to Apple and discoverability and searchability.
Marco:
I would take the position, and I know this might not be popular, but I think it's realistic, that it's no longer Apple's responsibility, and it might never have been, but it's no longer Apple's responsibility to promote your app.
Marco:
The App Store is just huge.
Marco:
Back in the early days of the web, Yahoo had this directory where they were trying to make a directory of every website, basically.
Marco:
And it worked in 1995 because the web was a really small place.
Marco:
Eventually, though, that was abandoned, I think.
Marco:
It might still be running.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
But I think it was abandoned because the web just got too big.
Marco:
And a directory paradigm was – there was too much data, too much out there on the web.
Marco:
It just didn't fit.
Marco:
That was pretty much abandoned in favor of search.
Marco:
And search has all sorts of challenges.
Marco:
It has ranking.
Marco:
It has spam issues.
Marco:
But the directory paradigm did not scale.
Marco:
And on the web...
Marco:
you're on your own to get attention for your site.
Marco:
You're on your own to get traffic.
Marco:
Some of it will be merit-based if you can get good people to link to you, but in general, you're on your own.
Marco:
And making something good enough is still on you anyway to get people to link to you.
Marco:
So I think the App Store has reached that point very clearly where...
Marco:
Discoverability is a word thrown around a lot with this.
Marco:
I don't think it's Apple's problem.
Marco:
I really don't.
Marco:
I think they can have their editorial picks, which will cover some discoverability.
Marco:
But relative to the whole store, chances are you're not going to get featured that often to matter.
Marco:
You might get featured once or twice if you have a good app.
Marco:
Chances are you're not going to be featured every two weeks or anything.
Marco:
So discoverability through Apple's official editorial channels is going to help you occasionally, if ever.
Marco:
Everyday discoverability is not Apple's problem.
Marco:
It's your problem.
Marco:
It's you as a developer.
Marco:
You have to get your own attention.
Marco:
You have to get your own traffic.
Marco:
And whether you have to buy that traffic or whether you have to earn it or whether you have to look into it, if some, you know, influential person happens to use your app and, you know, link to it or talk about it or something that, you know, you might get that, but you have to do your own marketing.
John:
that's the right attitude from a developer's perspective because you want to be motivated to do the right things right i think that's the correct way for a developer to think about it but in the grand scheme of things it is apple's problem in that if they have a customer who buys an ios device and they say i would really like an application to keep track of my shopping list and they search for shopping list on the app store because they don't know what else to do like they shop they the google for shopping list app
John:
or they find the app store, luckily, and type shopping list into there, and they get search results.
John:
And if those search results are filled with tons and tons of crap that the person looking at those screens has no way to determine whether they're being lied to, whether these are all automated reviews, it just feels lost.
John:
That's a bad experience for the customer.
John:
And they're like, I just want a shopping list, and there's too many of them, and I can't tell which is which.
John:
And I think that's, that's a problem for Apple because they want people to get their thing and be able to have a cool shopping list app.
John:
And surely there are many cool shopping list app, but the chances of them being anywhere near the top of the results for shopping lists in the app store are slim.
John:
Like so many people are talking about, you know, we all know the handful of really great Twitter client apps out there.
John:
If you search for Twitter or Twitter app or something like that in the app store, all the apps that we know and love that we think should be at least on the first page of results or somewhere near the top are very often are buried.
John:
And so,
John:
you know, is that a problem for it's like, the app developer can't say, Oh, Apple, it's your fault.
John:
I'm not selling my stuff because I'm buried.
John:
You're right, the app developer has to do their own marketing and everything.
John:
But from Apple's perspective, they want everyone who buys an iOS device, who types in Twitter app to end up with a good one, like one that Apple agrees is good one that everyone agrees is good and not have to sort through tons and tons of crap.
John:
And I think that's a bad experience for Apple's customers, not on any individual base, a developer deserves to be at the top or whatever.
John:
But just in terms of
John:
how satisfied is the user with that experience of typing in shopping lists and finding a good shopping list, especially with no trials?
John:
And even if they had trials, there would just be another form of torture because you'd be like, download, trial, delete, download, trial, delete, download, trial, delete.
John:
We want some way to, like Casey was saying, to look at an application and to be able to tell, is this going to be good?
John:
Am I being scammed?
John:
Am I being fooled by reviews?
John:
Or can I not trust these people in these reviews?
John:
Right.
Marco:
And, you know, that's why I think,
Marco:
It's very important to draw a distinction here that, you know, in air quotes, discoverability, that word alone, that's not Apple's problem.
Marco:
Search is Apple's problem.
Marco:
And search ranking.
Marco:
And, you know, so making it so that if you search for shopping list in the app store and, you know, making it so that mostly good slash popular apps show up on top,
Marco:
That's important, and their search engine sucks.
Marco:
I mean, there's no better way to say it.
Marco:
App Store search has always sucked.
Marco:
So, you know, they have tons of room for improvement, and they really should be working on that.
Marco:
However, you're still mostly on your own.
Marco:
You know, assume they make good search.
Marco:
You know, let's say they fix their search, which, honestly, is probably not happening anytime soon.
Marco:
Let's be realistic here.
Marco:
But assume they actually did make really good search.
Marco:
And so it would be kind of Google-like, which is like the most popular, generally, you know, the most like validly popular things would generally rank on top for any given terms.
John:
Well, they can't use Google's thing because Google is all based on when other people link to them.
John:
But the App Store is this closed ecosystem.
John:
And the problem with a closed ecosystem of the App Store in terms of search is what is your signal for determining what's good or not?
John:
You can't use user activity as a signal because users are not...
John:
They're not like independent entities, like, because if you keyword spam, you will get boosted.
John:
If you spam people's rating dialogue boxes, you will get boosted up in terms of, well, we don't know how that ranks, but there's lots of scummy things that you can do.
John:
And that's the only thing that affects the signals is user activity.
John:
So if you can convince tons of users to download your application
John:
And they all give it one star reviews, but you pay for five times more five star reviews from just random people around the world.
John:
You'll be high ranked, have all the signals that the app store says good, which is why their search algorithm puts this crap near the top, because those people have, you know, sort of game the system to get near the top.
John:
And if that's the only input signal,
John:
then like, you know, Apple is at the mercy of its own rule set.
John:
And every time it changes the rules, people, the scummy people game it again, which is why the top results for almost any category of app is filled with crap applications.
John:
And like one solution is to open up that ecosystem like the web where, you know,
John:
You have to do all the, what do you call it, the SEO battling stuff that Google does where they figure out when people make link farms and they combat that.
John:
It's just a constant stream of battling, but within a very narrowly defined app store with no other signal coming into this, you know, like, for example, a social networking type signal of I'm friends with this person, therefore their opinions and ratings mean more to me than these random other people who I don't know, or some other source of signal.
John:
It's difficult for Apple to ever make a search that doesn't suck, not because they don't know what they're doing, but...
John:
Because any criteria that you choose to rank on will be gamed inside this little bubble.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, that was always a problem.
Marco:
Like, my first job was enterprise search, and that was a big problem in enterprise search, even, is, like, if your job as a search engine is to search through this company's intranet and there are, like, tens of thousands or millions of documents they have on, like, file stores and stuff, there's no page rank information there.
Marco:
Like, there's no helpful way to rank results of any kind of importance or popularity there.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And if you do the sort of incompetent but not evil thing and you just say, well, I'll just track activity.
John:
And you can say, well, people searched for vacation schedule or people search for the word vacation on the Internet.
John:
And, you know, 80% of the people who search for vacation and clicked on this link, it must be really good.
John:
Well, all it means is that link probably came up near the top for whatever reason.
John:
And everybody clicks on it because it's near the top and everyone goes to it and is disappointed by it because it's like three years ago's vacation schedule.
John:
And as more people do that, it gets higher and higher in the rankings and just gets cemented as the number one match.
John:
And everybody who clicks on it says, no, this is two years ago's vacation schedule.
John:
Like, that's an example where you don't have any other input signal.
John:
So any errors that you have in your algorithm just become magnified by things that you didn't intend.
John:
And I totally see that in the App Store.
John:
Oh, the top lists work exactly like that.
John:
Yeah, because if you, you know, what is it?
John:
There's some expression that I can't remember that someone in the chat room will... The Rick's Get Richter?
John:
That's not it, but it's like that.
John:
Anyway, that's good.
John:
We'll go with that.
John:
But yeah, you get on the top of the top list and everyone sees you on the top list and they buy you, which makes you higher in the top list.
John:
And when you talk about discoverability, I think what you're talking about is like, say I'm not on the top list.
John:
I'm unknown.
John:
I didn't scan my way to the top.
John:
I don't have a popular application.
John:
How do I break through?
John:
How do I get people to know that I exist?
John:
I believe I have a good application.
John:
That's this quote unquote discoverability.
John:
And that's where marketing, you have to do your own marketing.
John:
You can't expect Apple to help you
John:
get in get in the face of you know get on the top list how do i break into those top results well you could do all that scummy stuff that apple is hopefully battling or you have to do something else it's not apple's problem to figure out how do i go from zero into the top list but it is apple's problem to say look at the ecosystem of apps within any search term or any category there's a handful of applications that we think are great and we can't editorially handpick you know every single category of app we should have some kind of algorithm that will put up
John:
The applications that if you talk to anyone on the street would agree are good, you know, are popular or high quality or not pieces of crap.
Marco:
And that's also worth a bit of exploration too.
Marco:
And this is hard for a lot of people to even recognize as a possibility or to judge or accept.
Marco:
But it's also possible that your app either isn't that good or isn't that compelling.
Marco:
What if no one's buying your app because they don't really want it or they don't really need it enough to justify the price to them?
Marco:
Nursing clock.
Marco:
yeah nursing clock i mean like you know like i have bug shot in the store now for a dollar and it makes about two to four dollars a day uh sometimes one but usually two to four um i don't do any promotion of it in fact mentioning it here is the first time i've even thought about it besides using it in months and uh you know that's that's a a good example of like an everyday app you know it's it's paid it's only a dollar though but so it's it's paid but really cheap and
Marco:
And there's no external promotion of it except a link on my – a relatively buried link on my site that nobody ever clicks on.
Marco:
And it does poorly.
Casey:
FastX is the same way.
Casey:
I get excited if I have one sale in a day.
Casey:
And I would say every two or three days I do get a sale, and I've actually had a really good run of like three whole days where I've had one sale.
Casey:
But if I see more than one sale in a day, that's like, baby, let's go to dinner because daddy's rich.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All kidding aside, it's very much the same for me.
Marco:
That's a symptom of a lot of different conditions.
Marco:
One of which, especially in my case, and probably your case too, there's tons of competition.
Marco:
There's tons of other apps, many of them free, that do roughly the same thing.
Marco:
And this is an area like Apple could do very well to improve how we're able to communicate what our app does.
Marco:
Like there was a rumor a couple of weeks ago, they enabled a video in one app's description.
Marco:
And people were thinking, oh, what if they enabled video for all apps in the future?
Marco:
And I wrote a post that comes with pluses and minuses.
Marco:
The pluses are you could show off more of your app, and it'd be easier to sell a paid app up front if people could watch a video about it right there in the App Store, and you can kind of show off how good it is, assuming it's good.
Marco:
But then the downside is you'd be expected to make a video, which is time-consuming and potentially expensive.
Marco:
So there's all sorts of pluses and minuses there.
Marco:
But the fact is the app store is a very crowded place.
Marco:
And if your app is selling very badly, especially if it's paid up front, I mean, Instapaper was not selling very well in its last year before I sold it.
Marco:
I mean, it didn't sell that well because it was a paid app in a crowded app store.
Marco:
People think I'm immune to all these effects, but I'm not.
Marco:
And again, look at Bugshot.
Marco:
It's out there for a buck and no one buys it because I'm not immune to this.
Marco:
Like, popularity on the internet, it only takes you so far.
Marco:
And so the bigger problem here is not that...
Marco:
that Apple has to improve discoverability, you know, in quotes.
Marco:
It's that the app store is really crowded and maybe your app just isn't taking off in sales because it isn't that compelling for that many people.
Marco:
Or there is the need for that kind of app, but someone else is doing it for free or is, you know, spending more on advertising or is, you know, sending promo codes to all the people who run all the Mac blogs or something like that.
Marco:
And those are things you have to do to get noticed.
Marco:
And if your app is really great, even if you just do a little bit of promotion, if your app is really great, it will get noticed and it will spread.
John:
Yeah, people will find it.
John:
All these apps that I'm saying, we all know what the good Twitter apps are.
John:
We could probably name all of them, even if we don't use them ourselves.
John:
And the reason we know is because people who write about applications, who review iOS applications, who use a lot of iOS applications, who have popular technology blogs,
John:
talk about their applications if they're in an interview sometimes they ask what's your favorite mail application what's your favorite to do like people talk about things and you know just through word of mouth and old-fashioned this is the you know sort of organic marketing in addition to the regular marketing people doing advertising on podcasts buying ads and magazines giving promotion codes to everybody getting reviewed if you actually make a good application that most people who review it give it you know four or five stars or a thumbs up or generally positive review
John:
you will eventually start to gain traction.
John:
And the tragedy of that situation is, I made an awesome app.
John:
It's in a crowded market, but like mine is a popular one.
John:
People think it's interesting.
John:
People think it's got a new take on this genre, or it's a great example of the form.
John:
It has lots of features and it's high quality application.
John:
Everybody likes it.
John:
And people go to the app store and search for that with a generic term because they can't remember your name.
John:
Even if they remember your name, they can't find it.
John:
And they just end up with tons of results of crap.
John:
And that's where you're just being handicapped by the app store where you're like, unless I have a direct link to my product with the exact iTunes URL, if people search for me, they're very likely to find a clone application.
John:
An unrelated application or just generally be distracted by crappy other applications that are not what they're looking for, even if I get them to go there to try to find my application.
John:
That is terrible.
John:
That's where you feel like Apple is actively impairing what would otherwise be a.
John:
A success for you.
John:
I have a great application.
John:
It's the new version of TweetBot.
John:
Go find it.
John:
And people can't remember what it was, but they just search for Twitter, and TweetBot is on page 17, and no one ever finds it.
John:
Right.
Marco:
Obviously, there's a lot Apple can do there, but if your app is barely selling, it is not because you don't have enough reviews.
Marco:
That's not the reason.
Marco:
And let's say you get a bunch of reviews by putting in one of these stupid dialogues, and then your sales go up 10% the next week or something.
Marco:
How long is it going to last?
Marco:
And what else are you willing to do to keep that going?
Marco:
And is that really worth it?
Marco:
The fact is, if your app is selling very badly, chances are it's because it's not that necessary or not that compelling or not priced right or something like that.
Marco:
And you need to change something.
Marco:
It's not about juicing the sales you have.
Marco:
It's about either...
Marco:
dropping your price figuring out some other way to make to make money you know make make a free you know do an app purchase or or you know drop it to a buck and see if that helps something like that because that's what the market demands or find find your audience because like say you're trying to sell nursing clock and you've just been advertising on mac tech websites
John:
you know you got to find like where where are new mothers hanging out maybe you know find in the old days you'd go to the usenet group and you'd post it there and you get more sales from one usenet group posting then here i'm crossing the streams here the usenet existing is a active thing at the same time as the app store anyway you have to find where your audience lives and advertise in that context what podcasts they listen to what websites do they visit maybe that's the problem maybe it's not that your app sucks maybe you just haven't found the audience or maybe there's an audience for people who want really complicated nursing clocks
John:
And yours is a simple one.
John:
Find the people who want simple nursing clock.
John:
It's the same product marketing thing as any other product.
John:
Getting the right features at the right price and getting that message in front of the right people.
John:
But yeah, rating applications are not the way to do that.
John:
Especially since, as Marco said, if there really is no hard and fast evidence that getting more ratings by bugging people is going to help move you up the rank in any significant way.
Marco:
Well, people say it works.
Marco:
I have no evidence to support this.
Marco:
I tweeted the other day that there was this one version of Instapaper that due to an App Store publishing bug... This was when everything was being published with broken signatures and they couldn't launch.
Marco:
It would crash on launch for a day, two years ago, whenever that was...
Marco:
that version of Instapaper, once it was fixed and republished, was not reviewable.
Marco:
And it was in the store with no reviews for however long that was the latest version.
Marco:
I forget how long.
Marco:
I think it was at least a few weeks, maybe even longer, maybe even a couple of months.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
It seemed to make no difference in what my average daily sales were, like none at all.
Marco:
And yeah, sure, not every app is going to be just like this.
Marco:
There are obviously different conditions around everything, but that was just one data point.
Marco:
A lot of people have given other data points saying like, oh, well, one release I had no reviews and then I didn't sell that many.
Marco:
And then the next release I had a bunch of reviews and I sold a lot more.
Marco:
That could also be due to different factors.
Marco:
It's hard to run controlled experiments in the App Store.
Marco:
So it's hard to really say whether it works definitively or not.
Marco:
Chances are it works a little bit.
Marco:
The question is whether it works enough to make it worth it to you to have that quality reduction.
Marco:
And that depends on where your priorities lie.
John:
I think the reason that the good app developers are resorting to their rating dialogue boxes is as a way to combat the...
John:
the crappy developers, like if you go to some crappy application, it will have, and you look at the little histogram, it will have a huge number of five-star readings that they scammed their way into somehow, right?
John:
And then there'll be a bunch of like one-star, it'll be like U-shaped or whatever.
John:
If you make a really popular application that everybody loves...
John:
especially if it mostly plays to an audience that doesn't spend its time writing reviews or rating applications, what you'll see is a bunch of angry people who rate it one star because of backlash, because they read about it on seven different websites and they tried it and they didn't like it.
John:
So like, I read about it on these websites and everyone said it was great, but I don't think it's great.
John:
One star, one star, one star.
John:
And all the people who love your application are not going to rate it.
John:
And you're like, geez, this is not a one star application or a two star application.
John:
I really think this is a four star.
John:
And every place that's reviewed it and every person that's used it has said it's great.
John:
Why am I rating so bad?
John:
And if someone does a search with their crappy search system,
John:
and sees well this thing has an average of 4.8 and this one has an average of 3.2 they're like oh that 3.2 one must suck must suck in reality the 4.8 one that guy scammed all his reviews by paying people to rate it five stars or whatever and no one rated it one star because no there are no legitimate users of that application because no one would ever willingly download it or pay for it and the application that is actually good just has the backslash negative backs back uh
John:
Am I saying it right?
John:
Backlash.
John:
Backlash.
John:
There you go.
John:
That's the word.
John:
Backlash, negative reviews, and not enough positive ones.
John:
Maybe it has some positive ones, but not enough.
John:
And that will bring this developer to feel justified in saying, look, I worked hard on this application.
John:
It gets great reviews.
John:
Every magazine and website reviews it.
John:
It says it's good.
John:
I know I have a lot of users whose people are buying it.
John:
please can you go and rate my application i think this is what leads good applications to go bad good applications to throw in your face a dialog box that says please rate my application because they're fighting against that crap and that's another case where i think if apple did something about the crap in the app store these developers would feel less pressure and they would feel less justified in saying well
John:
I'm just asking my happy users of my application that's popular to rate things because if I don't ask them and all the crap applications do ask them to or pay people to, my application looks worse and people buy it less.
John:
And again, that's the role that Apple plays in this is to get rid of the bad stuff.
Casey:
Something you said earlier, John, kind of got me to thinking a little bit.
Casey:
And I was wondering, you know, you had said something about like the Facebookification, if that's even a word, which it isn't.
Casey:
It is now.
Casey:
It is now, of the App Store.
Casey:
And, you know, hey, 12 of your friends are using this app or whatever.
Casey:
It got me to thinking that, firstly...
Casey:
Imagine if on the App Store you could see that X number of your Facebook contacts or Twitter followers or the people you're following on Twitter would probably be an even better metric.
Casey:
X number of those people have downloaded this app.
Casey:
And then separately, Y number of that same group.
Casey:
actually have this app on their device.
Casey:
And that would be really cool.
Casey:
And that would be a tremendous amount of data.
Casey:
And yes, it's a little bit creepy, but if it was all anonymous, you could never find out who those people were, maybe it would be okay.
John:
When I said the Facebookification or whatever, I was saying in a negative sense, because that's a privacy thing where Facebook does that, but I would not want the App Store to, by default, show even just counts.
John:
Because if you see an application like...
John:
If, you know, if you friend like two people, right, and you see the number on like your guide to getting a divorce application go up by one.
John:
You know that's one of your two friends and you know which one is most like totally.
John:
It can't be the default.
John:
It has to be totally opt in.
John:
It can't be like Facebook.
John:
But that's the reason Facebook and all the other things do it by default is because they can harvest.
John:
lots of good signal from these relationships and these activities and i don't think apple should do that but there is a there is a there is a place between what apple is doing and what facebook does even if you just look at something like more like what amazon does where amazon still has it's basically like the app store in their reviews where it's just a bunch of anonymous people most of whom are angry writing things that may or may not be true all what does amazon add one tiny extra thing that amazon adds is
John:
the ability of other people to respond to reviews.
John:
So someone will write a big angry review and say, I got this thing home and it didn't work as advertised and it was supposed to do this and it said it did that and blah, blah, blah.
John:
Just be able to have one person respond and say, oh, well, you didn't see the whatever switch or you have to know that you have to hook it up to the whatever and then it will do the thing that you wanted or if you had read the manual, you would have realized that you have to do this, that, and the other thing.
John:
That's it.
John:
All they've added is just another level of sort of anonymous, random garbage.
John:
Even that is better than the App Store, where it's just one big, long, linear list, and if you're lucky, you can scroll through 20 pages and find some person correcting somebody who said something totally bogus and bad.
John:
That's one tiny step towards the direction of, I see that seven of my trusted friends have installed this and have launched it in the last day, which is totally creepy Facebook-y type stuff.
Casey:
It is creepy, but nevertheless, I feel like there's a way in which it could be only slightly creepy, but very, very useful.
Casey:
And the actual point I was trying to drive at is, what if this is what Topsy was for?
Casey:
Because Topsy, my limited understanding of Topsy, is that it was built for handling massive amounts of data.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
to me the only really massive amounts of data that apple probably cares about if not twitter itself is their retail stores and the app store and and i'm not saying that topsy necessarily is going to do this weird thing that i just concocted about who many how many of your friends have this and how many of your friends have this on their devices but i could easily see it see topsy being used for either one of these things and the other
Casey:
popular thing that a few listeners have written in about and I think makes sense is if iBeacons are sprinkled throughout Apple retail stores, perhaps aggregating that data and seeing, speaking of being creepy, where are people walking within an Apple store?
Casey:
Because at that point, with enough iBeacons, and if you have the app installed on your phone, presumably you would be able to maybe even know that much information.
John:
That's more like usage data.
John:
That's getting the Google creepy of like, you know, what if Apple just tracks every time you launch an application?
John:
And I think someone was suggesting to Marco or that you respond to on your blog, what if they tracked how long you use an application, which almost any metric you think up can be gained, as I think Marco pointed out with the how long you use it, that's punishing applications to get you in and out quickly, like the application that's efficient that you don't need to spend a long time in that application gets punished.
John:
versus the one that like keeps you inside the application because it's cumbersome to use.
John:
Like any metric you pick is going to have some downsides, but there are tons and tons of venues to get some other signal in here.
John:
Uh, and you just have to be careful on how you pick them.
John:
But I think you need some more input than what you have, because if it's a closed ecosystem,
John:
it's much easier to game than if you have lots of different kinds of input that are more difficult to control.
John:
Like the app store reviewer, you know, the scummy people can pay people to leave five star reviews and stuff.
John:
They will have a much harder time.
John:
They can't, what they can't do is pay every single website that reviews iOS applications to give them a good review.
John:
That's much harder than just paying a bunch of people to give one star reviews.
John:
So that signal, that external signal,
John:
is harder to control than the internal one anything that just exists inside the app store is going to be a lot easier to game than anything that involves all of us and the trick is to find some way to get useful signal from us in a way that's not creepy that doesn't track every single thing that we do that doesn't you know violate our privacy by showing everybody which applications we're downloading and using and when but just get that signal somehow i suppose topsy couldn't be involved in looking at that but it's like anytime apple buys any company that uh
John:
They're not going to tell us what they're going to do, and we just have to guess.
John:
And it's like, yeah, Topsy could do that.
John:
I guess that PrimeSense company, they could do that.
John:
They could have a sensor for their TV or for their next iPad or for their next iPhone or for their watch or for a ring they're going to design or for their glasses.
John:
We don't know.
John:
We'll see.
John:
The only one that was easy was when they bought, what was that called?
John:
The Chomp Company or whatever.
John:
They redid the store.
John:
They bought that company, but they're going to use them to redo the store.
John:
And as far as I know, yeah, they did use them to redo the store.
John:
And nobody likes it.
John:
But at least people guessed right about what they were going to be doing with that company when they bought them.
Marco:
You know, I wouldn't have high hopes for Apple doing meaningful things here.
Marco:
I mean, look at how they've improved the App Store since its introduction.
Marco:
This is where I would paste in the crickets sound effect.
John:
Well, they kind of shove things in in one direction, and then it pops out someplace else, and they shove it in over there, and then a new thing pops out.
John:
And so they're kind of doing stuff, but it's all just like...
John:
You know, they shift in one direction, shift back in the other.
John:
There's never any like big clean push into a whole new realm of wind.
John:
It's always address whatever the most egregious problem is, but accidentally cause another one and then address that one and cause another one and kind of staying in the middle.
John:
I mean, the big problem with the app store during this whole time is during the time that they've been working on trying to tweak it and make sure it doesn't get too far out of line, the volume has gone up like crazy and it's really difficult to do anything useful unless you get it exactly right when the volume is going up so fast because new kinds of problems are cropping up all the time in a solution that would have been perfectly viable when it was small.
John:
is now useless, and you need to come up with a new solution.
John:
And you get that implemented, and then your volumes go up again.
John:
And like Marco said, if eventually you reach web scale, then this whole idea of having a directory, what are they going to do?
John:
They're reproducing the web?
John:
I guess Amazon does the same thing.
John:
Amazon, I assume, will always have more products than the App Store does, and they manage to do better searching and recommendations.
John:
Very rarely do I type something into Amazon
John:
and not find the thing i want i can misspell it i can misremember what it's called as long as i'm misremembering in the same way that a bunch of other people are misremembering amazon seems to have do a good job of keeping track like just like google keeping track of uh not the the first bad result that people click on but the first result that actually leads to like a sale or lingering on a page or whatever they're doing over there at amazon there's another company apple should just acquire or merge with you know someone please help them amazon i
John:
Well, I mean, who sells lots of things and makes them discoverable and has a reasonable system for buying stuff that people tend to like?
John:
Amazon, right?
Casey:
Well, hold on, though.
Casey:
But yeah, you're right about that.
Casey:
But you're also talking about physical goods and audio and things like that.
Casey:
What I was just wondering is, how is Amazon's app store for discovery and things of that nature?
John:
I think the problem is they don't have a lot of apps.
Casey:
No one uses it.
Casey:
And nobody uses it.
Casey:
But, I mean, even amongst the 12 people that use it, is it any better?
Casey:
It may not be.
Marco:
We've had a number of comments in the chat room during the show that apparently the Google Play Store is really good about reviews and rankings.
Marco:
And that makes sense.
Marco:
If it's true, that makes sense because...
Marco:
Google is really good at search and ranking.
Marco:
They know how to do that well, and they prioritize that.
John:
They are probably totally not above keeping track of when every application is launched on an Android phone and how long people spend in it and all those stats that they get to track anonymously or however, and they're not trying to do it.
John:
Because that's what they do on the web.
John:
They gather every ounce of signal they can on the web and try to block out every source of noise and gaming of the system they can for the entire web, and that's what the whole company was founded on.
John:
So, of course, they're going to focus those same tools on their web store.
John:
And, of course, they're going to do better.
John:
That reminds me of the funny replies to talking about that tweet I talked about last week about someone saying, why isn't anybody talking about this feature that didn't ship in whatever?
John:
I was mostly talking about the why isn't anybody talking about an angle.
John:
But a lot of people were like, I thought it did ship.
John:
I just thought it didn't work.
Yeah.
John:
And like some people are doing that as a joke, but some people were kind of like half serious.
John:
And I have to admit to myself, like a lots of features that Apple ship, you just mentioned back to my Mac, back to my Mac feature, which also has worked sporadically for me.
John:
If Apple ships a feature that has anything to do with the net and,
John:
It's very difficult to tell whether the feature is missing entirely or just isn't working right yet because they hide all of like the nuts and bolts from you.
John:
So when back to my Mac isn't working, if we had told you that Apple removed back to my Mac from OS 10 two years ago versus, oh, no, it's always been in there.
John:
It just doesn't work.
John:
As far as you're concerned, the experience is the same.
John:
It doesn't seem to do what it's supposed to do.
John:
And maybe there's still a checkbox for it.
John:
But, you know.
Marco:
That's how far Apple's reputation... If a tree falls in the woods and it never works for anybody.
John:
Yeah, that's how far Apple's reputation has fallen so far that if any feature has anything to do with online, people just assume it's shit, but it didn't work.
Marco:
I think App Store Search, because search is such a hard problem, and you look at the difference between apparently Google does it very well, which is not a surprise, and Apple does it poorly, which is also not a surprise...
Marco:
I think this is the kind of problem that Apple would probably just never do that well.
Marco:
Like, it's just not in their DNA to really do search and management of this large dataset and, you know, management of spam and gaming and everything else.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
It's just not what they do well.
Marco:
And they've never, ever shown an ability to do that kind of thing well, nor really a priority to really put a lot of resources into it.
Marco:
And so I don't... I would not expect the situation to change from their end.
John:
Before we leave this topic, there's one more thing I wanted to briefly touch on, which is the reason I held these links in here.
John:
They're linking to your blog post about rating this app, and then that other response is to saying that Apple...
John:
You said that they can't ban the Rate This App dialog boxes, and someone responded, and then you responded back to them.
John:
This is basically the idea that one solution to this problem with rating dialog boxes is that Apple could just say you're not allowed to put up a dialog box that asks someone to rate your application.
John:
And you were saying you could make that rule, but you can't enforce it, and you were arguing back and forth.
John:
Do you have anything more to add to that other than what you put in the blog post there?
Marco:
Not really.
Marco:
I mean, a lot of people have suggested ways they could add a report button or something, but it wouldn't actually work in practice.
Marco:
If they added a report as of use or inappropriate or whatever button to every UI alert view, that obviously is very costly in other factors, and then people would just stop using UI alert views.
Marco:
It's not that hard to write your own popover view that looks and works like a dialog box and just attach it as a subview of the window.
Marco:
And what are they going to do at a button in every UI view?
Marco:
Obviously, they can't do that.
Marco:
So there's really no...
Marco:
Any kind of like minor offense that lots of apps will do that will appear after app review time, such as spam push notifications, which are also against the rules, but they're very prevalent anyway.
John:
I was going to say that that's the perfect example because those already are against the rules.
John:
You're not allowed to send people push notifications with advertisements in it.
John:
And yet many of us see push notifications with things in them that look a lot like advertisements.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
All the time.
Marco:
They're never going to catch it, really.
Marco:
And once it's already in the wild, after the fact, these are such relatively minor rule violations.
Marco:
It'd be different.
Marco:
If your app passes app review, and then you have it hard-coded so that two weeks later, it becomes malware somehow, that would get noticed, and that would get shut down.
Marco:
Because that's really bad.
Marco:
You'd be kicked out of the developer program or whatever else.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
For something like this, like a minor offense, like a push notification or rate this app dialogue, those are not major enough PR problems, major enough offenses in the App Store that if it happened after review time, Apple would make a big effort to crack down on that and eliminate that.
Marco:
It's just not important enough relative to everything else they have to do.
Marco:
So realistically speaking...
Marco:
It's very unlikely that Apple would ever ban these dialogues.
Marco:
And if they did, it's very unlikely it would be enforced.
John:
So my position on this is that I mostly agree with the difficulty of enforcing this, although I also agree with the, you know, like, just because it's difficult doesn't mean it can't be done.
John:
But I think that if...
John:
If this agreement within Apple that this is an experience they don't want people to have, that they're using their application and a dialog box pops up and asks you to rate applications, they should absolutely add it to the guidelines, just like the thing that says you're not supposed to get ads and push notifications, because Apple's decided that getting advertisements to push notifications is not the experience they want on their phones.
John:
Enforceability, I think...
John:
should be not entirely separate but mostly separate from making the rules i think the rule against advertising push notification is a good rule it's kind of like the you know the the school zone speed limits which are usually set like super low it's so that if if they wanted to they can give every single person in the school zone a ticket right it gives you it makes it so that like everybody is breaking the law and then you can you know you can pull anybody over
John:
But in this case, I think it's a reasonable speed limit.
John:
If you just put in a rule that says you can't put up a RateMe dialog box, you're right.
John:
It's not like it's going to turn to malware.
John:
How are you going to know that this thing really put up the dialog box?
John:
And who was it that had that blog post explaining like a big system of sort of a social engineered system where different people could report violations?
John:
And then if their accuracy of their reporting gives their reports a higher ranking.
John:
And, you know, there's lots of systems that are possible.
Marco:
Yeah, that was the Chuck one.
John:
Yeah, I wouldn't get too bogged down in the details of that.
John:
I would just say, if this is an experience that Apple thinks you shouldn't have, put it in the guidelines.
John:
And maybe it's incredibly sporadically enforced, almost never enforced.
John:
The fact that it's there, and I think it's probably easier to enforce than the push notification one, because the push notification comes from, like, elsewhere.
John:
The RateMe thing, I guess it could be triggered by an external server-based thing, but the code to put up that dialog has to be in your application somewhere.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's the type of thing where once it becomes a guideline, that alone could push it off into the crappy section of the app store that I was talking about before.
John:
And all of the good developers of the well-known applications that we all know and love and use all the time would comply with the guideline because those people aren't willingly sending out push notifications for ads either because it's against the guidelines.
John:
And so even just putting in that guideline, even though it can't stop all the other crap apps from doing it,
John:
just putting it there at all would give a position that the quote unquote good guys in the app store, uh, would follow along with, I think for the most part.
Marco:
Well, but there's already like, I think everyone for the most part knows that it's kind of not okay.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
But most developers who have implemented it are probably implementing it because they've weighed that trade off in their head and they've been like, well, I know it's kind of annoying to some people and it's kind of not okay, but everyone else is doing it and I need all the help I can get because my sales suck.
Marco:
And that same rationale, I think, would still be there.
John:
No, but that cost-benefit is going to be way different if it's against the rules.
John:
You would never knowingly put something up on the store that violated a guideline, especially if it was a high-profile guideline that came into being under circumstances like this, where now Apple releases new guideline, not allowed to put up a rate meet.
John:
You would never put up an application that knowingly violates.
John:
It's not even subtle.
John:
If a dialogue pops up and says, please rate this application, you're in violation.
John:
none of the good developers would willingly violate because suddenly the cost benefit is like well i'm being kind of annoying but blah blah blah versus my app is going to be rejected or there's a chance my app is going to be rejected or as soon as somebody sees this i'm going to have all those backlash users saying you need to get this off the store it violates europe as i read about on this website like
John:
I think all the good guys would follow it.
John:
You certainly would, right?
John:
And you don't even put it up now.
John:
But think of a guideline that Apple could come up with that you would willingly flout because you think it gave you some minor increase in sales.
John:
You wouldn't.
John:
You would just say, well, Apple has changed the rules and made my application unviable and you'd go do something else.
John:
You would not violate the rules.
John:
And I think that's the function that the rules would serve.
John:
Not to eliminate the practice, but merely to further marginalize it and make it socially unacceptable.
John:
Not just socially unacceptable, but like...
John:
The smart developers who have a clue who don't plan on registering new Apple IDs for the Apple developer program every two weeks to keep their business in business would say, I can't, you know, I can't willingly violate this.
Casey:
Something I was thinking, and I know we probably shouldn't get into the details of how to implement that kind of rating, or to enforce, I should say, that kind of rating.
Casey:
But what's stopping Apple from, as part of the scan that they do for private APIs, what's stopping them from looking for rate an app as something that's passed into a UI alert view?
Casey:
Or just doing a string search within the compiled code for...
Casey:
you know, rate an app only a couple words away from each other.
Casey:
And maybe they don't unilaterally reject upon finding that.
Casey:
But maybe that, you know, raises a warning to the reviewer saying, you should probably take a look at this.
John:
Yeah, that's the kind of that's the kind of heuristics they could pull off.
John:
And again, that's totally not going to stop anybody who wants to do it, because you could have the text fed from a server, you can obfuscate it, you know, whatever.
John:
But
John:
But, yeah, more so than push notifications because those come from entirely elsewhere.
John:
I think you'd have a fighting chance at an automated tool that might bring up a flag on this.
John:
And even if the reaction to that was just that the reviewer would contact the developer and say, this thing doesn't have a dialog box that would pop up to say rate notification, does it?
John:
And then they have to lie to you to get through.
John:
They have to say, oh, no, it doesn't have anything like that.
John:
And now you've got them on records telling them a lie.
John:
I think it would be helpful.
Marco:
All right, I think we're good.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Backblaze, Hover, and Audible, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
They did it.
Casey:
I'm so upset I missed the joke.
Marco:
Somebody in the chat pointed out the much better joke of it's pronounced TH10.
Marco:
Yeah, that would have been a better joke.
Marco:
That's much better.
Marco:
I wish I would have said that instead.
Marco:
But you didn't.
Marco:
There was one other additional thing I wanted to tack on to the rate this app thing.
Marco:
Might as well put it here.
Marco:
The way these dialogues work to kick you over to the App Store to review it is they call special URLs that launch the App Store app to particular pages.
Marco:
And in iOS 6 and earlier, it was possible to link directly to the review form for an app.
Marco:
And in 7, that was no longer possible.
Marco:
In 7...
Marco:
the best you can do is link to the apps page in the app store.
Marco:
One thing Apple could do to combat this in a way that would actually be more effective than a policy is to make it stop working.
Marco:
Now, they can't make links to the App Store or apps stop working.
Marco:
But one thing somebody suggested on Twitter somewhere, sorry, I forget who it was, is that what if they make it so that if the App Store is invoked by a URL from another app, don't allow the input of a reviewer rating?
Casey:
That's an interesting point.
John:
I think that could be frustrating from a user's perspective because they're like, I can't read the application.
John:
And then it's like, well, did you get that window there from a link from another?
John:
And then they don't remember or know what that means.
John:
And it's just, it looks like their website is broken.
John:
I don't know if we could, that's like, you know, the people who try to punish their dog for pooping and they don't connect you yelling at the dog with the poop he made five minutes ago.
Marco:
One other thing they could do that I thought of also is – so they have – I believe this was added on iOS 6.
Marco:
It's at least here in 7 where they have this ability to show like a modal sheet for the app store, like for an app within your app without kicking you over to the app store app.
Marco:
And so what if they remove the review input method just for those modal sheets and then made it a policy that if you were going to link to an app, whether it's yours or someone else's, if you're going to link to an app from your app, you have to do it through one of those modal sheets and you are not allowed to kick over to the iTunes app.
Marco:
That would be an easier policy to enforce.
Marco:
You could even check for those URLs or even make those URLs stop working.
John:
It would be like institutionalizing the idea of something that is triggered from an application that lets you rate the application.
John:
I don't know if that... I almost think that if that's the... It should be on a springboard level type thing, but no one would ever do that.
John:
In an application, you can't have anything that's coming up.
John:
That's why a lot of people were talking about the idea of
John:
making a new website you know sort of gamifying a website where people could rate applications outside of the app store and outside of anything else but all you're doing is kind of recreating a crowdsourced review website and there are tons of websites that review ios apps it's some of it i bet apple people thinking about this have the same thought as i do sometimes it's like what if apple just got entirely rid of ratings and reviews and everything and all they were was a directory of things that you could download and
John:
And they had release notes, and that was it.
John:
And they used signal that they didn't show you to rank the applications that was probably equally mysterious to whatever they do now, but would actually work.
John:
And when I search for Twitter, I would see the 10 best Twitter clients on the first page of results, and I wouldn't care about the sort order.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
But then people want reviews, and people want all the other things, and Apple has signed up to do that, and now they're kind of stuck with it.
John:
Say they had never had reviews but left it entirely to...
John:
websites to review their stuff uh that would be a different story and maybe that would be an acceptable thing to do but we would probably just be asking for them to do reviews so i don't know they're kind of stuck it's like once you start censoring stuff now you're on the hook for anything that comes through once you start accepting ratings and reviews now you're on the hook for making them not suck and apple has not done that yet well and they love they and they want the control i don't think they'd like that the official source of whether an app is good or bad is not controlled by them
John:
Well, you know, there's this thing we didn't even talk about that every like everyone except for Apple agrees that it should be possible for the developer of application to leave a response to a review.
John:
And for both parties involved in that process to update the thing, because nothing is more frustrating as developer having someone say, I got your to do application, but doesn't let me defeat delete items one star.
John:
let the reviewer write actually does let you delete items you have to swipe or something like that.
John:
Right.
John:
It doesn't mean that the developer is going to be correct or is official in any capacity, but just simple matter of like, cause then, then, you know, you can edit your review and you know, like the, the,
John:
people who leave that non casey review all the time are constantly editing it right you can edit your review so they could respond and say actually you can't swipe and like you don't want to turn into like arguing back and forth but if they just get they both just have their one things there's one one uh review and one response from the developer and the two of them could fight continually updating their response and review if they want although i think it's counterproductive but a smart developer would leave an authoritative response to the problems that were you know raised there uh and that would be that and
John:
And I guess the fear there is you would have every single review having a contradictory response from the developer, and that would be annoying to read like a big giant argument.
John:
But they've got to do something like that.
John:
They have to have some way to have other people be able to upvote and downvote them.
John:
All roads lead back to Apple having to learn how to do social stuff, which they don't know how to do, as evidenced by Ping.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's a bad situation for everybody.
Marco:
I think what this boils down to is the need for reviews is to give more inputs when someone's browsing and they stumble upon your app to give more signal as to whether the app is good and works the way it should.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
If there are more ways that Apple could communicate that, and a trial would certainly help for paid apps, but I don't think we're going to get trials.
Marco:
If there were other ways, as I said earlier, videos.
Marco:
Let people upload videos.
Marco:
developer responds to comments or to reviews, that is another way for developers to communicate their quality level.
Marco:
Like if a developer responds to every negative review in a really good way, like in a helpful way to say like, even if the person reviews something negative and they're right, and the developer is like,
Marco:
Sorry, we're working on that for the next update.
Marco:
And then you can diffuse all the invalid ones, too.
Marco:
Say, oh, actually, this feature exists here.
Marco:
Or the buggy reporting is fixed in this version that's up now.
Marco:
That's still another venue for you to communicate more signal to browsers to tell them, like, this is an app that's worth checking out or that's worth buying.
John:
As long as the developer doesn't lie in every single one of their responses, because then it becomes incumbent upon additional reviewers to say, don't believe any of the developer responses.
John:
They are entirely fabrications.
John:
What I'm thinking of now is a formalized structured system for doing the equivalent of blurbs in the back of a book.
John:
thrilling adventure says the new york times or whatever and uh if you had a formalized structured system for that where you had to link back to the actual source that's another way to pull an external signal mac you know macworld gives it five mice right new york times quote from the new york times review of this application says blah blah blah
John:
link back to that article link back to the mac world thing so that people can read it see this is a well-reviewed application in fact i can follow these links to confirm that they didn't make up these blurbs and i can actually read the reviews and again it's the whole thing oh how are you going to police that and what if the link goes away and blah blah but these are all things that have worked in other contexts to give people signal that the thing they're looking at is this book popular do lots of people like this book
John:
And some of it is like, oh, I hear about it on the news all the time, or this is a very popular book, or I hear it on monologues on a late night show or whatever.
John:
How do we all know that The Hunger Games is an exciting thing?
John:
Oh, they're making a movie of it.
John:
All those other ways The Signal get in, unfortunately.
John:
iowa's applications have not reached quite that level i guess angry birds kind of maybe words with friends made it to that level but that's how people hear about these things oh that must be the application i like but even in that case you're like oh well words with friends used to be good but then zynga screwed it all up and now it's annoying to use and how do you learn about that later uh it's not an easy problem and yeah people are people are inscrutable little things and i think apple wishes they they weren't