Necessary But Not Sufficient
Marco:
I'm drinking tea tonight.
Marco:
I feel like Dignation.
John:
What?
John:
I know it's not actually the 90s, but that's like the 90s equivalent of Internet World.
John:
Dignation?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Casey, you really honestly don't know what Dignation is or was?
Casey:
I've heard of it, but I never paid attention to it.
Marco:
Did you use a computer in 2006?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Have we not already completely established that both of us, myself especially, have no knowledge of anything that either of you considers worthwhile?
Marco:
Yeah, I guess.
Marco:
But I mean, you're at least a nice guy.
John:
I thought we established it was like me and then you two in another camp over there.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Dignation was a podcast.
Casey:
So anyway, let's talk about Facebook paper.
John:
Yeah, I talked about it last week, the startup movie and the crash and all those bad things, and we talked more about the app itself.
John:
But I hadn't really used it for more than a couple seconds.
John:
So after the podcast or sometime in the past week, I tried to use it some more, and I'm flipping around and doing stuff.
John:
And it keeps interrupting me with like video and audio instructions to tell me what I should do on any given screen.
John:
Like it's bad enough when you get the coach marks, you know, like the like the iPhoto style thing or whatever, or sometimes on startup and sometimes at the hit of a button where they'll show sort of like magic marker.
John:
Kind of drawings with arrows.
John:
Like someone wrote on your screen like it's a whiteboard.
John:
And Comic Sans text telling you like click over here and tap over there.
John:
This is worse because it's audio.
John:
It's like you're sitting there trying to use your thing.
John:
And someone starts talking to you.
John:
And this little animation comes on the screen.
John:
Swipe to the right to get to the next thing.
John:
It's like...
John:
okay all right whatever and you know you don't know what to do to make it go away because there's no x or maybe there is i didn't see it it's like do i have to do what it's telling me but eventually it goes away i'm like okay yeah i'll start using this i go to the next screen it says you can move this up for like no stop talking to me stop it's i know it's trying to be helpful but now i think it's over the line of like maybe someone would find a startup animation or movie interesting or charming for the very first time you launch the app and never see it again but
John:
If it's like there's like a pause, it's like now you get to use the app and you start using it.
John:
And then it says, by the way, I'm still here, this disembodied voice in these animations.
John:
And then it goes away again and you keep using the app and then you're on another new screen and the thing pops up.
John:
That really, really bothered me.
John:
And I think that is it's trying to be helpful, but it's failing.
John:
It's.
John:
Like the worst kind of help.
John:
If I had asked for that, if I asked for a guided tour, sure.
John:
But if I'm just, you know, if I think I've, I've passed through the front door, the splash screen, and now I'm really using the app and it keeps interrupting me.
John:
No good.
John:
So I give that a big thumbs down.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Marco:
It seems like these, I mean, you know, we're in this era now of these very, you know, highly progressive experimental gesture-based interfaces on so many apps.
Marco:
Really mostly on iOS, let's be honest.
Marco:
But, you know, so many iOS apps.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I kind of feel like gestural interfaces are really appealing to designers because they can look amazing.
Marco:
They can be really cool.
Marco:
Users who get used to them can love them.
Marco:
But it's really, really hard to have any kind of affordances that also look good and that are discoverable.
Marco:
And so you end up needing things like this.
Marco:
Universally, I've heard people love paper.
Marco:
Well, this paper.
Marco:
They love the other one, kind of, and the last one they'd never heard of.
Marco:
But they love this one, the Facebook one.
Marco:
And
Marco:
A lot of that is because it has this new experimental, progressive gestural interface.
Marco:
But if you have to tell people how to use it with these things, to me, that's just so annoying.
Marco:
It's such a failure of design, really.
Marco:
And I wonder...
Marco:
There are periods in software fashion where you can point to really tacky things that were iconic of that era, like the Flash intro page on websites, or Clippy in Microsoft Office.
Marco:
And I wonder if this is that thing for our current era, is like the stupid overlay that you have to show or little tutorial videos and little intro that you have to show on gesture-based iOS apps because nobody could figure out if they're looking at them what to do.
Marco:
And I wonder if we're ever going to move past that.
Marco:
I mean, this is a big problem in all gesture-based interfaces because... And it's just like keyboard shortcuts.
Marco:
Gestures are just as discoverable as keyboard shortcuts for the most part.
Marco:
Although, actually, in some ways, they're a little bit less because there's no list.
Marco:
At least keyboard shortcuts, you can open the menus and you can... Eventually, some people figure out that those little things next to the commands tell you the keyboard shortcuts.
Marco:
Anyway, so I wonder...
Marco:
I wonder if we're going to move past this, really.
Marco:
And how long will it be until we look at an app like this that is so, like, you know, too cleverly designed for its own good, almost?
Marco:
It's so different from what we've had before that it has to have all these overlays and these help dialogues, which we've seen, you know, paper's not the first thing to do this.
Marco:
We've seen this a lot in the last few years, but it just seems like a really bad hack.
Marco:
It seems like a really terrible design flaw to have to require these things.
John:
I think Paper's the first one to interrupt me.
John:
I'm used to either having it be something you go through on initial launch or having it be something you ask for on demand.
John:
I'm not used to thinking I'm through with that part of the first launch experience, proceeding to use the app and then having it come back unprompted and say, I've got to tell you something else now.
John:
and then having it go away again, and then having it come back.
John:
It's not even so much the audio and the video that is grading.
John:
It's the idea that you are never free of it.
John:
I don't know how long it goes on.
John:
Does it keep reminding you?
John:
When does it decide that I know that you swipe up to do this thing or swipe left and right to do that thing?
John:
That's terrible.
John:
But for the gestural UIs, I think one of the problems, and I don't think paper really solves this, is you really need to have some kind of
John:
It doesn't necessarily have to be physical model, but it has to be a model that matches up with most of your users mentally, where the motions mean something or can have some sort of connection.
John:
And it's really difficult to do that.
John:
I mean, you can see it in your Flipboard or in paper or any of the other apps.
John:
So paper, like, left and right is how you go through things.
John:
And that's like, all right, so they're lined up left to right, and you go from side to side.
John:
That in itself is already a little weird because most of us are used to vertical scrolling, but okay, I can kind of handle that.
John:
But then they have the thing where it, like, folds over itself when you push upwards to see, like, if you want to see more on this flippo, like, this little panel folds down.
John:
And there's no sort of analog in real life, certainly not in the physical world, and not in any computer UIs that would indicate to you that that is a memorable motion for, like, oh, push up, push down with my thumb, that does that.
John:
uh you really need to have some kind of connection to hang on to the only way you the only way you can get away with not doing that is if it's not people use obsessively and constantly and they'll just learn them because you use it all the time and maybe facebook has that going for that people are going to use it all the time and eventually those motions will just become second nature kind of like in your favorite twitter app everybody knows is which way slide to see the conversation is and which way slide to reply is and it's different in different twitter apps and whichever one you use all the time you eventually just get used to it but
John:
It really helps to have a physical model, kind of like the webOS cards metaphor or the iOS 7 task switcher, where you can kind of envision them as individual entities that you can throw off the screen or something like that.
John:
Some kind of thing to hang your hat on, because otherwise, imagine if every app was like paper.
John:
I think eventually you'd get confused and your thumb would be like, oh, I thought it was slide left, but it's slide right.
John:
And really, you don't want to have to think about it on a conscious level.
John:
And you're like, what is slide up in this app?
John:
Is that show more detail or is that get rid of this item?
John:
And how do I get back to where I was?
John:
Is that slide to the left or do I pull down?
John:
And you only have a few axes to work with.
John:
and especially these whole screen or kind of grab the whole thing gestures is there's really, you know, it's everybody fighting over up, left, right, and down.
John:
No one has had the guts to really do 45 degree angles or not 45 because it's a rectangle.
John:
But anyway, no one has had the guts to do specific angles.
John:
But I mean, eventually maybe that's going to come and it's going to be a revolutionary new thing.
John:
Not only can you fold it up and make some new panel come out and fold it down and make it flip over and fold it left and right to make it twist and slide.
John:
But at 45s, it folds up into a little swan and flies away.
John:
And, you know, I don't know.
John:
It's really difficult.
John:
And I will confess that since I use enough different Twitter apps and app.net apps and everything, that occasionally I do flick the wrong direction.
John:
Oh, I wanted to reply, but I got show conversation because it's different in different apps.
John:
And there's nothing particularly right or lefty about show conversation and reply, physically speaking.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
What's this root metrics thing that one of you added?
Casey:
I glanced at this earlier, and it actually looked very interesting.
John:
Do you remember on the last show, I think I mentioned about Google, a project Google could do with all its Android phones is it could measure the...
John:
the signal strength and the data throughput of various isps and they report that back to google so you'd have an idea of like if i live in this exact spot in this house and i work in this building right here what service has the best throughput and the best reliability and you know like that type of information that's the only only information you can get if you have tons and tons of people all over the country in various locations because you can't just have like one person in each city you really want to know
John:
specific data and after mentioning that show someone whose name i lost sorry sent me the url this place called root metrics and this is apparently a company and that's what they do they send people around to test the connectivity at various different isps from different places all over the united states and i guess also the uk and they said they've driven over 132 000 miles and done 3.5 million tests you can look at their website it's uh
John:
rootmetrics.com they're not a sponsor uh i read through their methodology and their claims and it seems like they're doing it right like they're not affiliated with any network as far as i can tell or if they are they're hiding it very well and they they try to be objective and make sure they have enough samples to be statistically sound uh so this apparently is a good idea and someone's already doing it so if you want to find out uh i guess you go to this website and i didn't even explore the website enough to know is this an app i download is this a service i sign up for whatever it is it seems like uh
Casey:
They have an app.
Casey:
So it says that they have driven actually 540,000 miles.
Casey:
They've tested in 137 markets.
Casey:
Well, I'm assuming that means they have done that.
Casey:
But additionally, you can download their app and do a test.
Casey:
And I'm assuming that's how they aggregate all of
Casey:
all of the consumer information like you were describing, is that the idea is I'll download this app, I'll test, I'll report in that I'm on AT&T, and they will add that to their database OINFO.
John:
And they point out in their thing they don't do user surveys.
John:
They're not asking people how they think the connectivity is because that would be terrible.
John:
And they emphasize that they have people looking at the statistics and making sure that they've achieved the proper level of significance and all that good stuff.
John:
So from the five minutes I spent on the website, it looked interesting.
John:
And I'm glad someone is doing that.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Next up, I had this iPad Pro thing.
Marco:
Listener Mike Z wrote in asking, you know, we were talking about the iPad Pro and moving towards the needs of regular people and everything always has to get better.
Marco:
And Mike Z said, are we sure that usability is infinitely improvable?
Marco:
What if computers, including mobile platforms, just aren't for everyone?
Marco:
And I thought this was worth considering because we kind of faced a similar issue with programming languages and programming in general, where for a while, especially like, you know, late 90s, even before that, really.
Marco:
But for a while, there were these efforts to bring programming to every computer user.
Marco:
You know, everyone can be a programmer.
Marco:
And there were these efforts to make simpler and simpler languages that did more and more stuff for you or, you know, had experimental types of syntaxes and commands and stuff.
Marco:
And we're very simple and really made for, quote, everyone.
Marco:
And the reason why everyone isn't a programmer today is not because the languages aren't simple enough.
Marco:
It's because programming, just conceptually, programming is complicated.
Marco:
And even if you don't have to...
Marco:
do that much to tell the computer what you are trying to do.
Marco:
You still have to deal with the realities of things like the computer is not going to be able to really reliably guess if you don't tell it very well or if you're ambiguous.
Marco:
It doesn't really deal with that very well or if you don't really necessarily know what you want or you tell it what you want but that's actually not what you want because you didn't tell it correctly.
Marco:
It's all these problems that make programming hard even for those of us who know how to do it.
Marco:
And so I think the reality that the conclusion of those kinds of efforts is that you can make programming easier up to a point, but after a certain point, just the inherent nature of programming, the inherent complexity of doing a programming type task does keep a lot of people out of it because they just can't think that way.
John:
I like how you think this was a 90s phenomenon.
John:
You should go to the 4GL Wikipedia page and do some reading.
John:
Because back from when I was first reading about programming, I guess it goes in cycles like anything else.
John:
But yeah, 4GLs were the new big thing, and they were going to make it so you didn't have to do all the nasty programming.
Marco:
Yeah, so this is not a new thing, really.
Marco:
But it seems like it's kind of died down in recent years, as everyone's kind of realized that, yeah, sure, our programming languages are not perfect these days, and there's always going to be room to improve programming languages, but...
Marco:
you know, inherently programming is complicated.
Marco:
And there are these concepts and realities involved with it that no matter how easy you make the language, it still has this built-in degree of complexity that you can never fully get rid of.
Marco:
So, you know, back to Mike Z's question, you know, does usability fall into this category?
Marco:
You know, as he asks, what if computers just aren't for everyone?
Marco:
And I think that's a really interesting point because we see – I've been banging this drum for a while now on the show.
Marco:
We see issues that Apple's run into with iOS where the realities of being a computing device get in the way of their pretty abstractions.
Marco:
Things like we talked about storage space being an issue and managing photos and backups and stuff like that and how –
Marco:
you kind of slam into walls with that with iOS because they try to make it simpler and better for everyone, but then reality kicks in at some point and has a problem with that.
Marco:
And computers inherently...
Marco:
they are kind of complex.
Marco:
And it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
Even the Chromebook, which uses just web services for everything, even that has complexity because you're talking about complexity of data and having data, having accounts that you log into or...
Marco:
data that you manage, the concept of documents and files and where do you put them, where are they when you want to look for them, how do you copy stuff, move stuff, how do you manage things, where is the stuff backed up, if it's backed up.
Marco:
All of these things...
Marco:
I think are just inherent complexities of computers.
Marco:
And even if you have fantastic backup services, cloud services, cloud interfaces, great interface design, I think the reality is you're still dealing with this is a computer.
Marco:
It does exactly what you tell it to and no more for the most part.
Marco:
And if you tell it, save this thing I just typed, name it this...
Marco:
it'll have that.
Marco:
And if you can't remember anything in it or the name, you're going to have a hard time finding it unless you browse.
Marco:
But there might be a million things to browse through because you've been doing this every single day for the last 10 years.
Marco:
There's just inherent complexity in just having data in a computing system and managing it in some way, no matter how good that system is.
Marco:
So I think while there is tons of room for improvement, I think there is a ceiling.
Marco:
And we are hitting that already.
Marco:
And I think we can kind of get...
Marco:
you know, logarithmically closer to it, but I think we're never going, or asymptotically closer, whatever, you know, the asymptotes in math.
Marco:
We're going to get closer to it, but I don't think we're ever going to really be able to break through the ceiling of, you know, there's just this inherent complexity with these things.
John:
I think this is a bogus question, though, because he starts off, are we sure that usability is infinitely improvable?
John:
Did any of us ever say it was infinitely improvable?
John:
I don't think anyone said or implied that.
John:
I mean, that's a crazy thing.
John:
If it was infinitely improvable, it would result in the technological destruction of the world because every single person on the planet would be able to do everything that every computer is capable of without, you know, without any real effort.
John:
You know, if they could think they could make it happen, and even just given current technology, that would just destroy the Earth because they would, you know...
John:
immediately hack into nuclear missile silos because they know that it's something that they want to do and computers are infinitely usable no it's not infinitely usable whatever the heck that means obviously uh but i don't and and if there's some sort of you know that some sort of inherent complexity with current technology like given the hardware that we have and the limitations of that hardware how usable can you make it i i believe yes there is a limit there as well i don't think we're anywhere near near that limit for even for the given hardware and hardware is uh
John:
you know getting better over time so i think that we will always be chasing that and we can always make them more usable but more to the point of the ipad pro thing we already seen that like maybe computers aren't for everyone computers are totally for everyone if we not learn that computers are everyone even before smartphones pc has proved that computers are pretty much for everyone in the same way that anything can be for everyone yes you have to live in a first world country where you can afford to have a computer and all that stuff but
John:
We've basically proven that, you know, given the resources, if you give a computer to everybody, they can find something useful to do with them.
John:
Yes, they're crappy and annoying and they have problems, but so do cars, so do houses, so do clothing, so does everything else that regular people can have.
John:
And smartphones, forget it.
John:
They are computers.
John:
They are for everyone.
John:
So, yes, computing is definitely for everyone.
John:
Computers can get easier on the current hardware.
John:
And on the iPad Pro thing, are iOS devices more usable than personal computers?
John:
I think they are.
John:
So I kind of see what he's getting at here, but I think it's kind of a straw man and doesn't really shed any light on the question we were asking, because I think we do all agree that iOS devices are easier than personal computers.
John:
How much easier or whatever.
John:
And I think we also all agree that computers are for everyone, even if they may be annoying.
John:
It's proven by the existence of, you know, everyone has one now.
John:
Almost everyone has one.
John:
So I didn't find this question as enlightening as Marco did.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do you want to tell us about something that's pretty cool, Marco?
Marco:
I would love to.
Marco:
Our friends at Transporter are back.
Marco:
Now, we've had Transporter on the show before, and here's a quick rundown.
Marco:
Transporter is by Connected Data, this company that was spun off.
Marco:
It was created by some ex-Drobo people, and it got so good, Drobo bought them.
Marco:
So that's how good this thing is.
Marco:
The Transporter is like...
Marco:
It's an external hard drive that you buy and then you own it outright.
Marco:
There's no monthly fees.
Marco:
It's just a hard drive that you buy and it sits on your network.
Marco:
But then it has software and a web service that allows you to access it from anywhere, from any of your computers, over the internet, and also sync things between multiple transporters and multiple computers.
Marco:
And all this happens with the files only being stored on your transporter or on any number of transporters that you choose to sync it with.
Marco:
They don't store your files in their cloud service or anything.
Marco:
So you have the data.
Marco:
You own and control the drive it's sitting on.
Marco:
And it's fantastic for privacy.
Marco:
Everything's encrypted end-to-end when it's being transmitted.
Marco:
So you've got a lot of privacy stuff covered here, regulatory concerns if you can't use something like Dropbox.
Marco:
But they know that, realistically, Dropbox is the competitor here.
Marco:
The Dropbox is the alternative in what you're going to think of.
Marco:
Well, I could just use Dropbox.
Marco:
And they address that head-on.
Marco:
They don't try to hide that, don't mention the competitor.
Marco:
No, no, no.
Marco:
There's lots of advantages here, and they're very happy to tell you about them.
Marco:
So one of the biggest, in my opinion at least, one of the biggest is just the economics at stake here when you have big data needs.
Marco:
So the transporter sync for just $100, that's the one with the USB port, you plug in your own hard drive, and it has a network port on the other side, and it turns any drive you already have into a transporter.
Marco:
They also have...
Marco:
500 gigs for just $200, 1 terabyte for just $249, and 2 terabytes for just $349 if you don't already have a drive to use with it.
Marco:
So these things are very affordable, and they made a special coupon code this week.
Marco:
If you want to buy the little one, the Transporter Sync where you plug in your own drive, you buy the little one, use coupon code ATPSHARE for the whole month of February.
Marco:
You can use this code.
Marco:
ATPSHARE, and you get it for just $75.
Marco:
Really fantastic deal.
Marco:
And so anyway, back to why you want this thing.
Marco:
I'm kind of all over the place with this one.
Marco:
Because there's so much to talk about with Transporter.
Marco:
They can do so many things.
Marco:
You really should check this thing out.
Marco:
So when you compare this pricing, and there's no monthly fees.
Marco:
You just buy it up front.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
You compare this pricing to if you wanted to store stuff on Dropbox or any of the cloud services.
Marco:
It's nowhere near this cheap.
Marco:
And, you know, there's privacy concerns with a lot of stuff, too.
Marco:
And Transporter has all these new features.
Marco:
So they're actually having... They're in the advanced beta here for their desktop software, their little client that accesses this stuff and helps you with sync and everything like that.
Marco:
They're in an advanced beta.
Marco:
It should be out probably by the end of the month, but you can... The beta's public.
Marco:
You can go download it now if you want to.
Marco:
And it will sync...
Marco:
your desktop, your documents folder, downloads folder, movies, music, and pictures, optionally, they're all optional, you can have it automatically sync those folders with your transporter and then with any other Macs that you want to log in with.
Marco:
And so you can kind of have your Mac special folders, desktop, photos, all that stuff, you can have those things synced
Marco:
automatically without having to explicitly store them on your transporter yourself.
Marco:
So it's even better than Dropbox in a way because you don't have to change your habit of, oh, I want to start storing these files in the Dropbox folder rather than just keeping them on the desktop or keeping them in the photos folder or whatever.
Marco:
They automatically sync all those things with this new beta software due out by the end of the month and I believe available now for anyone who wants to try it.
Marco:
They also have this great iOS app where you can access through the little Cloud Reflector service.
Marco:
You can access your files right from the iOS app.
Marco:
Anything stored on the Transporter, you can access right there from anywhere.
Marco:
So really great service here.
Marco:
So check out File Transporter.
Marco:
There's so much to say here.
Marco:
I've been talking for a while now.
Marco:
There's just so many possibilities.
Marco:
You can sync folders.
Marco:
You can collaborate with multiple people.
Marco:
You can have a transporter at home and a transporter at work and have them sync, do an automatic off-site backup.
Marco:
So many great options here.
Marco:
Go to filetransporterstore.com.
Marco:
And then that's where you can find out more about the transporter.
Marco:
You can find out about the great prices they have for us.
Marco:
And if you use code ATPSHARE before the end of February, you can get the transporter sync for just $75.
Marco:
Otherwise, for any other transporter model, you can save 10% by using the coupon code ATP.
Marco:
So once again, go to filetransporterstore.com and check these things out.
Marco:
Use coupon code ATPShare.
Marco:
You can even give these things.
Marco:
Oh, that's, once again, the purpose of the share.
Marco:
You can give one of these as a gift.
Marco:
You can say, hey, happy Valentine's Day, my special someone.
Marco:
I got you a Transporter Sync.
Marco:
They're really pushing this.
Marco:
They want you to share these things with everybody.
Marco:
Just $75, you can't go wrong.
Marco:
So once again, thank you to Transporter for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
Thanks, guys.
Casey:
Okay, so somebody has added Flappy Bird Saga question mark to the show notes.
Casey:
Which one of you is noncommittal about talking about Flappy Bird?
Marco:
Oh, I added it.
Marco:
I'm committal.
Marco:
The question mark was just to allow you guys to reject the topic.
Casey:
I don't know that there's much to say, which means take a look at the timestamp now and we'll come back and say, well, that was good in an hour.
Casey:
But I mean, it seems to me like a guy, a kid.
Casey:
Do we know how old the developer is?
Casey:
28 or 29, one of those.
Casey:
Well, I'm barely older, so I can say kid.
Casey:
So with a kid that wrote this, tried to do something that people say may or may not be good, but certainly was popular and didn't like the aftermath, which to some degree, to a very small degree, I think the three of us can sympathize with.
Casey:
Well, not John because everyone loves John, but you and I can sympathize with that, Marco.
Casey:
And John doesn't have anything in the App Store either.
Casey:
Also true.
Casey:
Um, so yeah, so he put something in the app store.
Casey:
Everyone, you know, went berserk about it, both good and bad.
Casey:
And then he pulled it because he wanted to go back to an easy and normal world.
Casey:
And everyone got mad about that.
Casey:
Like, I feel bad for the guy, I guess is what I'm trying to say.
Casey:
It just seems like a really crummy situation that didn't have to be.
Marco:
Yeah, that's kind of why it's a topic.
Marco:
I mean, the game itself was basically a meme.
Marco:
No one actually really loved it as like, oh my god, this is the most amazing game ever.
Marco:
But it is a funny, addictive game.
Marco:
And I think it wasn't really...
Marco:
I'm sure when this guy made this game, I'm sure he did not expect to be number one in the app store.
Marco:
And I checked.
Marco:
I made a little post about this earlier, and I checked using our friends at AppFigures, because I have an account there.
Marco:
You can look up the rankings for any app in the store.
Marco:
So I checked to make sure, and it was still number one.
Marco:
It was number one for many days straight beforehand, and it was number one at the moment he took it off the store.
Marco:
I mean, has this ever happened before where...
Marco:
Somebody who had this extremely high-profile iOS app in the middle of its massive wave of popularity pulls it off the store for, you know, it wasn't a legal reason as far as we know.
Marco:
It wasn't, you know, it wasn't like any compelling reason except that he just couldn't take the barrage of hate and flames that he was getting and the attention he was getting as a result of being in that top position.
John:
Why was he getting the hate and flames?
Marco:
So people were looking.
Marco:
He was getting hundreds and hundreds or possibly thousands of Twitter messages because once people figured out his Twitter username, he was getting tons of messages saying, damn you for getting me addicted to this game.
Marco:
I've lost my life because of this game.
Marco:
I've lost hours to this.
John:
But those are supposed to be funny.
John:
Those aren't real.
Marco:
Well, but you know a lot of people online are...
John:
not funny in their criticism i saw when he said he was gonna pull it then he started to get the actual crazy threats because oh yeah it got worse and that's only because people don't understand what pulling from the app store means i had i have to imagine that they don't understand because obviously if they care at all about flyby birds they've already got it and him pulling it from the store doesn't take it away from them but people don't understand that but
John:
i it's it's a shame that people are so terrible but they are uh and anytime you are high profile in any way uh you get more exposure to the good and the bad and like he this is just some guy presumably and he didn't like it and wasn't prepared for it and he pulled out of it i don't think it's
John:
I mean, it's terrible, but we all see terrible stuff like that all the time.
John:
It doesn't make it better or anything, but I think the story is the phenomenon of the game, and the person's reaction to it is kind of like the reaction lots of people have.
John:
Lots of people will do something online that gets a little tiny bit of notoriety, and they get lots of negative feedback about it.
John:
And how they react to it depends on are they used to that?
John:
Are they used to getting lots of negative feedback from strangers?
John:
Do they have the ability to not look at it and not worry about it?
John:
We talked about this before, about how you deal with negative feedback from people.
John:
And there's a scale to all of this.
John:
Obviously, his scale was massively bigger than someone who just writes a blog post that a few people read and complain about.
John:
But everyone has different tolerances.
John:
So the individual personal story of how he handled crazy Internet criticism was
John:
I'm not as interested in that as I am in the story of how a random game rocketed to the top of the charts on the App Store and why that happened.
John:
Truthfully, as a gamer, I'm interested in debating the merits of the game itself.
John:
It seems like the human interest story is dominating the news these days.
John:
Like when you put down the floppy bird saga, I think people understand that phrase to mean that, you know, let's talk about this guy's feelings and the terrible things that have been said to him over the Internet versus let's talk about the game, because I think people are over the game part.
Marco:
Well, I think there's two stories here.
Marco:
There's an article on Forbes where they interviewed him, and they claim, apparently in the article he said that he took it down because it was an addictive product, and that's a problem, so it's best to get rid of it.
Marco:
And I've read a few things.
Marco:
I didn't have a whole lot of time.
Marco:
I read a few things today talking about the differences in cultures here.
Marco:
This is a guy in Vietnam, and the...
Marco:
The culture over there around video game addiction is very different than it is here, apparently because video game addiction is actually a pretty serious problem for a lot of Asian countries.
Marco:
And so it's looked upon almost the way alcohol addiction is here.
Marco:
Video game addiction is serious.
Marco:
And so to make something where everyone is telling you they're addicted to it is a more serious thing.
Marco:
Here it's just a fun, lighthearted thing.
Marco:
There it's more serious, so that's kind of bad.
Marco:
I think one story here is the story of basically harassing this guy.
Marco:
It wasn't just people saying it was addictive.
Marco:
It was all sorts of stories going up on major websites saying this is the worst game ever made and it's popular.
Marco:
Just trashing the game.
Marco:
I have it on my phone.
Marco:
I actually downloaded it after he said he was going to pull it.
Marco:
I'm like, well, I might as well get it so I at least know what I'm talking about.
Marco:
So one problem is the flames that went into forcing this guy to take this down, basically.
Marco:
And that's a pretty serious cultural problem, but I don't think it's one we can really deal with easily, unfortunately.
Marco:
The other interesting story about this...
Marco:
is why did this game get so popular and the reactions that other iOS developers and other game developers have had as a result.
Marco:
And I think that's potentially even more interesting because to me, I wrote this in my post today, to me, it's very obvious why it got popular.
Marco:
It's because it was, like, cute and charming and kind of crappy.
Marco:
In fact, really crappy.
Marco:
But it was exactly what succeeds in the App Store.
Marco:
It was quick.
Marco:
It was simple.
Marco:
There was no learning curve.
Marco:
You could play it for six seconds and be done, or you could play it longer than that if you want to.
Marco:
Like, it was... And you just launch it, and for the most part, you just launch it and it goes.
Marco:
There's not a million different splash screens.
Marco:
There's not a huge menu system like console games, stupid things.
Marco:
There's not...
Marco:
There's no in-app purchases, and it's free.
Marco:
It just has an iAd at the top.
Marco:
It's hardly ever even populated because iAd has apparently a terrible fill rate at this scale.
Marco:
It was exactly what succeeds in the App Store.
Marco:
It was kind of retro, kind of new.
Marco:
I mean, it was...
Marco:
Of course it succeeded.
Marco:
And the game developers are all so upset because they put so much more time and money into their games that most of them don't do this well.
Marco:
But I think what this really is is kind of a wake-up call to the game industry saying, like, look...
Marco:
This is the kind of thing that does well.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing people actually play and download on the App Store.
Marco:
And so all you guys out there trying to make really, really high-budget productions and these really deep games, trying to sell into this particular market, or people who are trying to gum everything up with an app purchases and try to psychologically screw people that way...
John:
you're like that you're trying to do all that in a market where this is really the kind of thing that succeeds and that's very frustrating to hear i imagine don't you think there's tens of thousands of other games that have all those criteria like i would say well there are now no no before that like i'm saying that may be necessary for massive app store success but it is not sufficient for
John:
Far from it.
John:
And the interesting question that I think is, why did this particular terrible addictive application that has nothing to it succeed when the tons of other pre-existing applications that fulfill all those same criteria didn't?
John:
There's so many thousands and thousands of apps.
John:
Something made this particular one successful.
John:
snowball right and it may be just you know happenstance like it was some random fluctuation of things that causes to to snowball out of control but like i don't think it's anything about the application itself other than having you know having those qualities you describe which i do not think are uncommon i think there are tons of terrible short simple fast to play free ad supported uh games with addictive mechanics on the app store
John:
But this particular one happened to snowball.
John:
I mean, and I'm not talking about the clones that came after.
John:
I'm talking about for years before, like the app store has so many apps, tons of apps to fill these criteria.
John:
And so the devious story is like, oh, there's some sort of, you know, conspiracy going on here or he hacked the app store or he paid reviews or whatever.
John:
And the more banal story is we don't know exactly why it snowballed like this.
John:
It could have been any other app, but it happened to be this one.
John:
If someone could track that down to show like,
John:
The download tree of the individual people and how did this spiral up to be this thing?
John:
But it's, you know, I think I think you got it right.
John:
First, when you said, this is a meme, how do memes become popular?
John:
There are tons of funny things written on the internet all the time, but every once in a while, a few of them catch hold.
John:
Are they funnier or more culturally relevant?
John:
Or do they have qualities about them that other memes don't?
John:
Usually not.
John:
Usually they're pretty much all one big giant meme stew.
John:
And any of them, if you look at them in isolation, you could say, are equally dumb, equally funny, appeal to the same sort of base instincts of people.
John:
Why is one massively popular and the other one not?
John:
And it's just...
John:
It's like chaos theory.
John:
It's like some butterfly flaps its wings somewhere, and this guy's game in Vietnam goes... And that's why it's kind of a tragedy that he gets all this negative feedback, because it really... I don't think he did... I haven't seen any evidence that he did anything nefarious to get his rankings.
John:
So he's like a victim of a tornado or a lightning strike in a bad way, in that...
John:
He could not have had any expectation that his game would go like this because if he had looked on the App Store before publishing this game, he would have found tons of games with all the same qualities that went nowhere, and yet his game didn't go nowhere.
John:
It went all the way to the top.
John:
I would like to understand that phenomenon, but I think that I'm more in favor of the butterfly flapping its wings theory of how this became successful.
Marco:
See, I would actually say that it's very obvious when you sit down and look
Marco:
This game, with the exception of the iAd occasionally interfering the top part of your view, which doesn't even mess with the game at all, and I don't know how he's making that much money on ads because I don't know how anybody would ever tap on that ad.
Marco:
But with the exception of iAd, the game...
Marco:
was actually impeccably implemented.
Marco:
Oh, I disagree.
Marco:
Wait, wait, wait.
Marco:
It was impeccably implemented to the essence of what makes App Store games addictive and what people actually want.
Marco:
And I think that's what is driving everyone crazy.
Marco:
I totally disagree.
Marco:
What's driving everyone crazy is that they don't want to believe that this is what the market is, but this is what the market is.
John:
This game is not... I understand what you're getting at, but you could tap into those same bad instincts in people more efficiently than this game with a better game.
John:
It's not a terrible game.
John:
It's not like a piece of garbage game.
John:
He doesn't deserve to have people telling him he made a bad game or anything like that.
John:
It's just that, obviously, it's that it's so successful people want to tear it down.
John:
But where I draw the line is people trying to say that this game succeeded because it was good.
John:
Because implementation-wise in this game, there are many complaints you could have on it from a game design perspective.
John:
And even from a let's plug into the worst instincts in people and exploit them, I would say that terrible rip-off, you know, clone things like Candy Crush...
John:
are more efficient and better at plugging those buttons because, oh, Candy Crush is too complicated.
John:
This was so simple or whatever.
John:
Again, I think you could go to the App Store and find many games with similar mechanics that are very similar.
John:
Maybe you're not going through pipes or whatever.
John:
Maybe you're trying to jump over something, but kind of,
John:
Not very well implemented.
John:
Difficult for bad reasons.
John:
Very quick.
John:
The reason this game became popular is because everyone was playing it.
John:
Now that's, you know, no one goes there anymore.
John:
It's too crowded.
John:
That type of statement makes no sense.
John:
But seriously, the phenomenon here is that it snowballed.
John:
That it becomes relevant as larger groups of people did it.
John:
If you were the only person on the planet and you had access to the entire app store...
John:
and you downloaded this game, you would throw it away and not play it a lot.
John:
It's only interesting because you know this is the game that everybody's talking about and because you can compare your score with everybody else.
John:
And comparing your score with everybody else only happens because everyone else is playing it.
John:
People aren't playing it because it's awesome.
John:
It's a self-fulfilling prophecy.
John:
So the quality of this game is not what caused it to be the phenomenon.
John:
Again, necessary, but not sufficient.
John:
So it had barely the necessary qualities to be a mega hit, but that is not sufficient to be a mega hit.
John:
And if you look at this individual game, and if you go back in time and substitute Flappy Birds with any of the other games, perhaps some of the better games that fulfill all those same criteria, we'd be having the same conversation about them.
John:
I don't think it has anything to do with game quality.
John:
And that's why I would advise people not to copy the attributes of this game in terms of the implementation.
John:
For example, people like, oh, the collision detection, it's brutal but fair.
John:
It may be fair, technically speaking, but to give just one game design tip that anyone would pick, when you die from hitting something, good games will show you where you hit.
John:
Did you hit too high?
John:
Did you hit too low?
John:
They'll sort of pause the animation long enough for you to realize the error of your ways.
John:
This one doesn't even do that.
John:
And that doesn't add to the game.
John:
That makes the game worse.
John:
But, you know, like, that's not enough to derail it because everyone's playing this game.
John:
No one's going to say, well, I was playing Flappy Birds, but I played the Flappy Birds clone that does a competent job of showing you where you hit something.
John:
No, no one cares about that.
John:
It's just an unimportant detail.
John:
But that does not make this a good game.
John:
I really think that you're wrong.
Marco:
I think you're right that what carried it and what gave it this massive later boost and what pushed it into number one was the social effect.
Marco:
You're totally right about that.
Marco:
I completely agree.
Marco:
And also, you know, the fact that it had social game center leaderboards.
Marco:
And because it was so hard, it's like you can try to beat your friend's high score of six.
Yeah.
John:
You know, it's so... Well, if you want to talk about hard games, have you played Super Hexagon?
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Well, hold on.
Marco:
But before we go to that, all of that worked with this game.
Marco:
It was incredibly sticky with people.
Marco:
It got people engaged into this stupid game.
Marco:
See, this is where I think that you're not giving it enough credit.
Marco:
You're totally right.
Marco:
The social aspect carried it and boosted it up to number one and kept it there.
Marco:
But what got it the initial traction at all...
Marco:
is because it is a really fun, cute game, even though it's terrible.
Marco:
It has the little 8-bit Mario-like graphics.
Marco:
It has the cute name Flappy Bird.
Marco:
And it is executed for what it is.
Marco:
It's very similar to the old helicopter flash game that everyone's seen a million times.
Marco:
And the helicopter flash game was also a terrible game.
Marco:
But we all played it.
Marco:
What this is, he nailed the formula exactly.
Marco:
Whether he knew he was doing it, and he probably didn't realize he was doing it, whether he knew or not, he nailed what people like on iOS and current trends.
Marco:
with the 8-bit graphics and the name and everything.
John:
He didn't nail them, though.
John:
He barely crossed the bar for them.
John:
That's what he did.
John:
He did not nail them.
John:
He barely limped across the bar of the few criteria that matter.
John:
Necessary, but not sufficient.
John:
How many times do I have to say that?
John:
And you're still not getting it.
John:
You're like, yeah, but he met all his criteria.
John:
Yes, he did.
John:
But meeting those criteria is not sufficient for you
John:
to be the game it's everything else that makes it the game and he just barely made it it's like it's barely competent right it you know it has no progression it the collision detection and the animations are are barely sufficient to get the job done when the game center banner comes down over the screen it does stutter on my ipod touch so it's not like he's even smooth 60 frames per second performance the whole time no one's using ipod touch though
John:
it's just it is it is barely sufficient super hexagon is my best example of like uh a very difficult game that is a good game but did not cross the bars the sufficient bars for it to be massively popular because it is too complicated and too abstract and does not have a cute name right yeah it's it's not cute it's not like it doesn't draw people in
Marco:
No, it's too complicated.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, like, that's... What I'm saying here is not that he did everything perfectly, but that all of the elements to having a hit, he got them all.
Marco:
Like, yeah, there's thousands of other games in the store that have many of these, but very few... No, they have all of them!
John:
They have all of them!
Marco:
Very few have all.
Marco:
And that's what he got here.
John:
No, they have all of them, and they do them better.
Marco:
I strongly disagree.
Marco:
I've downloaded so many games.
John:
The title of this episode needs to be necessary but not sufficient.
Marco:
Holy cow.
Marco:
So many games have most of these elements, and then they really blow one.
Marco:
They give it a terrible name, or a terrible icon, or a terrible art style, or it's just a little bit too much friction to get into it, or it's a little too long, or a little too... So many games...
John:
are like 90% there and then they blow the last 10% in some way and that keeps them from becoming a mega hit and I really think that he had all the elements here he nailed it if you had a time machine I would send you back in time before Flappy Birds was created I would give you a week to make this exact game and then I would laugh as nobody downloaded it I couldn't make it
John:
I mean, now I could, now that I have something to copy.
John:
You could make that.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
Go back in time.
John:
Make a clone of Flappy Birds before Flappy Bird exists.
John:
I'll give you a month to develop it.
John:
You'll put it out.
John:
You'll probably do a better job with the animations than this did.
John:
And no one will download it and it will not become a phenomenon because that's not what made it successful.
John:
It would sit there languishing with the rest of the crappy free games that have similar qualities to them.
Marco:
I still disagree, but I think we should move on.
Casey:
Well, what would you like to talk about?
Casey:
Should we talk more about games?
Marco:
Hold on.
Marco:
Before we do, we have more sponsors that I want to get through before we're three hours into talking about Flappy Birds.
Marco:
This was going to be a quick topic.
Casey:
I told you.
Casey:
We could keep going.
Casey:
I told you.
Casey:
How about you tell me about something cool?
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
This episode is also brought to you by our friends at Squarespace, the all-in-one platform that makes it fast and easy.
Marco:
Hear that, everyone?
Marco:
Fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio.
Marco:
For a free trial and 10% off, not even up to 10%, they give you the full 10%.
Marco:
Go to squarespace.com and use offer code Casey.
Marco:
That is offer code C-A-S-E-Y.
Marco:
Not one of the many misspellings of Casey's name that we get via email.
Marco:
It's C-A-S-E-Y.
Marco:
And if you forget how to spell it, listen to the ending song for the show, which you have not heard a million times yet.
Marco:
Squarespace is always improving their platform with new features, new designs, and better support.
Marco:
They have beautiful designs to start with and all the style options you need to create a unique website for you or your business.
Marco:
They have over 20 highly customizable templates for you to choose from.
Marco:
And you can start with these templates and you can customize the settings directly or you can inject your own code, JavaScript or CSS.
Marco:
In fact, like on my blog, I posted yesterday...
Marco:
how I add download links to Squarespace for podcast episodes.
Marco:
And I do this because I can inject random code into the page.
Marco:
So I wrote my own script tag with my own JavaScript code inside of it that manipulates the code on the page.
Marco:
And that's how I added these links.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
There's lots of ways to do stuff like that, but you can also, of course, do all the built-in settings that are way easier.
Marco:
Anyway, they have fantastic support if you need any help.
Marco:
Over 70 employees working full-time right here in New York City.
Marco:
All this, you get responsive designs with your site so that your site looks the same on any device.
Marco:
It looks like your site.
Marco:
It doesn't look like some generic template.
Marco:
It looks like your site with your theme and your style, whether you're viewing it on a computer, a phone, or anything in between.
Marco:
So all this starts at just $8 a month, and this includes a free domain name if you sign up for a whole year.
Marco:
Also, recently, they have this whole Squarespace commerce system where you can make a whole online store for physical or digital goods right within Squarespace.
Marco:
They have this great advanced system to do this.
Marco:
It tracks everything for you, very advanced coupon codes, every feature you can imagine.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Now, every Squarespace site includes Squarespace Commerce.
Marco:
Every plan, excuse me.
Marco:
Every Squarespace plan now includes Squarespace Commerce at no additional charge.
Marco:
So go to squarespace.com and use offer code Casey.
Marco:
Start at just $8 a month.
Marco:
And you can even, before you buy, start a free trial.
Marco:
There's no credit card required.
Marco:
It's a real, genuine free trial.
Marco:
So go to Squarespace.com, start your free trial today.
Marco:
When you do finally decide to buy, use coupon code Casey for 10% off.
Marco:
And thanks a lot to Squarespace for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
Speaking of games, I had seen via a friend of the show, Ben Thompson, a really interesting post about how in-app purchases – did you know they're ruining the game industry?
Casey:
I was not aware of this.
Casey:
And by not aware of this, I mean I've been witnessing it.
Casey:
So anyway, there's this post where they have two links to two videos.
Casey:
One of them is a review of the original Dungeon Keeper from 1997, although I guess it's been updated slightly to run on modern hardware.
Casey:
Well, anyways, it's this video review of Dungeon Keeper, and it's quite long, but you get the idea after about five or ten minutes about what the game is about.
Casey:
And then further down on the same post, you see a review from the same individual of Dungeon Keeper for iPad and Android from this year.
Casey:
And that review is about eight minutes and is filled with profanity, which immediately I enjoyed it because of that.
Casey:
But it shows how unbelievably woefully bad...
Casey:
the company that put this game out ruined the game.
Casey:
And in short, you kind of dig out stuff.
Casey:
I've never played it, but I guess you dig things out in a dungeon, go figure.
Casey:
And in the original game, the game cost, you know, five or 10 bucks or something like that.
Casey:
And you could just play it.
Casey:
Well, in the modern version of the game, it costs, I don't remember if it costs money or not, but anyway, whether or not it costs money to even get the game,
Casey:
When you dig things out, which is the whole point of the game, it's on an artificial time lag.
Casey:
So you have to wait a day or whatever it is in order to dig out another square of dungeon.
Casey:
And guess what?
Casey:
You can pay to make this quicker.
Casey:
And even as someone who doesn't play very many games, with the exception of threes, which I'm addicted to, even as someone who doesn't play very many games, be it console or computer or iOS...
Casey:
Even I could tell that this was unbelievable.
Casey:
And to me, the most egregious example of just ruining a game for the purpose of in-app purchases.
Casey:
So I don't know.
Casey:
Did either of you guys see this?
Casey:
Oh, yeah, of course.
Casey:
It was everywhere.
Marco:
John, what do you think about this?
John:
Yeah, this I think you and I will actually agree on more, Marco.
John:
And the analogy I was thinking of... Well, before I get to the analogy, I think the explanation for this is the same as the analogy I'm going to make, is that the App Store and all that stuff has reduced the barrier to entry for people making games.
John:
And I know we all like to think of, like, oh, the big bad App Store, Apple is the gatekeeper, and we can't sideload apps, and they decide what comes on and everything.
John:
But compared to what it used to be like to make games, Apple's gate is way more open than other gates were.
John:
For the most part, Apple doesn't control for quality, as we see.
John:
Just look at any app on the App Store and do a search.
John:
I mean, they control for malware and a few things like porn and stuff like that.
John:
But for the most part, if your game compiles and complies with their rules, even if it is the worst thing ever, they'll put it on the store.
John:
And the analogy that always comes to mind is network television.
John:
It used to be there was this limit to access to television.
John:
It was limited because there was no cable, so it was limited to the spectrum, and the spectrum was not particularly wide for old television technology.
John:
So you had a sort of – not an artificial limit, but a sort of a hard limit due to technology on how many television networks there could be in the United States.
John:
And the power –
John:
to broadcast things in television was in the hands of relatively few people who controlled like the major networks only a couple channels and some very powerful people who controlled all of that
John:
And those few people, however we may think of them, relatively speaking, they were some high-minded individuals in some respects, in that because there was only four or five or six of them, old, bald, white men somewhere deciding what gets to go on television, they could afford to have...
John:
principles about things that uh that they all sort of agreed on uh so network tv news was sort of a not a loss leader but like they felt it was important to inform the public and it was probably actually might have been part of some fcc mandate and stuff like that where they would they would make news programming
John:
That by modern standards is boring, but they would tell us the things that we thought we needed to know kind of a paternalistic.
John:
We know best.
John:
We control access to the airwaves.
John:
We have high minded ideals about what's important for you to know and what is rubbish and you shouldn't see.
John:
And yeah, we'll run soap operas during the day and all that.
John:
And I love Lucy and all the other stuff.
John:
But the network news is where we're going to really concentrate on this.
John:
Compare that to today where there's tons of channels.
John:
Cable has eliminated the fight for spectrum and opened it up to many more networks, starting with like CNN doing news and all the other things.
John:
And now there's this 24 hour news just made it.
John:
There's so much more room for news and increased competition, lower barrier to entry.
John:
more news to be made has caused them to compete with each other to figure out what it is that people want.
John:
And what they want to see is OJ riding around in a white Bronco and coverage of celebrities and all those other things that we all say are just terrible that we shouldn't be watching.
Uh,
John:
But letting more news and television flow out has caused this to happen.
John:
It is freeing us from the totalitarian, well, it's not the totalitarian, but the rule of those few bald white men controlling what we have on.
John:
And you can no longer afford to have these high-minded ideals because if you want ratings, you have to show the stuff that people want.
John:
And it's not like, oh, I blame those people for making the content or I blame the people who want the content for wanting it.
John:
It's simply the reduction in friction.
John:
And the App Store has so massively reduced friction in the market of gaming compared to how hard it was to get a game on a console or how hard it was to get a computer game published or whatever.
John:
The friction is so low now that inevitably you see the exact same thing even worse, more accelerated, just figuring out what it is that people want.
John:
What's the equivalent of...
John:
you know, the trashy 24-hour news channels that just show things like Nancy Grace and stuff like that, as opposed to, like, you know, the nightly use with Ted Koppel, you could afford to be, you know, more sophisticated.
John:
And so the question is, is free ruining the game industry?
John:
Free is ruining the game industry in the same way that cable has ruined news, in the same way that to pick an industry that the technological barriers went away sooner, like McDonald's has ruined the food industry.
John:
When you remove all the friction and you let everybody compete, you will necessarily get a redistribution of quality.
John:
Whereas if you artificially limit it and put some people in charge of it, they have the power to make it the average better, but the number much smaller.
John:
When you reduce the friction, the number becomes massive.
John:
The average goes way down, but I still think there is more good stuff.
John:
So overall, I think free has not ruined the game industry.
John:
I think net-net there are more good games now than there were before.
John:
It's just that there are so many more games and so many more games that appeal to the worst in us that that's what we see.
John:
Because most people are going to be playing the crappy games that appeal to the worst of them.
John:
It's just a law of numbers.
John:
But I think there are more better games now than there were before.
John:
So I don't think free is ruining the game industry.
John:
It just seems that way.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
I don't even know how to review that.
John:
I agree.
John:
Hey, Grace, there you go.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, moving on.
Casey:
So apparently business happens after hours or gets quietly leaked after hours.
Casey:
Late breaking, Marco shared something with us moments ago.
Casey:
Apparently Comcast is buying Time Warner.
Casey:
Because that sounds wonderful.
John:
Doesn't everyone hate Time Warner?
John:
Doesn't everyone hate Comcast?
John:
Well, I think people hate Time Warner more.
Marco:
Not possible.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think people hate Comcast.
Marco:
See, I've never lived in a Comcast area.
Marco:
I have lived in two Time Warner areas, and they've been fine.
Marco:
Not great, but fine.
John:
It's a great merger when we're debating which company is more hated.
Yeah.
John:
Again, well, these are American ISPs.
John:
They're all awful.
John:
Well, we don't hate... I think those of us who are Fios customers, we may not like Verizon Wireless for various reasons, but I think we're all more or less happy with... We're all glad that we have Fios because the pricing is kind of around the same as what we hear from cable companies, and we're happy with the service in terms of reliability and speeds.
John:
The only one I hear better things about is...
John:
and i don't know if this is just because this is one of the few places i visit every year but uh the the what used to be cable vision on long island optima online always comes out really high in the rankings of bandwidth and people seem to like it i don't like it that much for like the house that we rent there that has it it looks kind of crappy to me but that gets highly rated but i i hear comcast yes lots of people hate because it's why but i hear lots of complaints from the people i know in the new york city area about time warner
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
And I've had Cablevision slash Optimal Online because they serve Westchester.
Marco:
So I had that in two different places, and it was fine.
Marco:
It was great.
Marco:
It was actually better.
Marco:
Time Warner I had in Brooklyn, and it was very clearly oversold where I was.
Marco:
And Time Warner in Manhattan, I've had it in the Tumblr office.
Marco:
We had that briefly, and it was pretty bad.
Marco:
Because Manhattan has a problem where...
Marco:
Pretty much anything that's not like a thousands of dollars a month dedicated leased line to your office, like anything less than that where you're just getting like files or business cable, they're all terrible because it's for the same reason everything else in Manhattan.
Marco:
It's traffic.
Marco:
It's like you have way too many people crammed into way too small of an area, and there's even traffic on the internet.
Marco:
Like, there's too much traffic, even for that, so that everyone's backhauled and pipes and everything gets overloaded in Manhattan, too.
Marco:
And the buildings are all old, so a lot of times you only have, like, one choice of what the buildings even would permit in or already have hookups for.
Marco:
It's a bad scene there, but...
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
What scares me about this deal, assuming that it's real, and I would assume that this is subject to regulatory approval, although the way things have gone in the US with the FCC and regulatory approval for things like giant internet companies merging, I don't imagine they're going to have problems with that.
Marco:
I think they should, but they won't.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
I just think it's sad.
Marco:
I mean, the last thing that we need in the US is less broadband competition.
John:
Yeah.
John:
All the people in other countries have been telling us since last week or whenever we talked about net neutrality that I don't even remember which country is there, but some places apparently have laws that if you own the wires, you can't run an ISP.
John:
And that would be an easy way to – one thing is like the common carrier things where it's like, well, if you own the wires, you have to rent access.
John:
You're required by law to rent them out to other people.
John:
And then you're like, grumble, grumble.
John:
All right, fine.
John:
We'll rent them out, but we'll do a crappy job of it.
John:
The law where it has to be split, where one company can't own both of them, seems much better to me because then the interests are aligned.
John:
Like the company that owns the wires is in the business of renting them out.
John:
And it's not like you have the company that owns the wire and an ISP also is forced by the government to rent them out, but always does a crappy job and rents out the crappy quality of service to other people.
John:
Many systems are better than what we have now.
John:
And I think preventing the merger, I agree that they probably shouldn't be allowed to go forward.
John:
But the bottom line is Time Warner will probably get better as a result of this, and it will give Comcast more power to raise prices and screw everybody.
John:
So it's like...
John:
Not allowing this merger doesn't really make things better.
John:
It just stops things from getting worse in one respect and possibly better in another.
John:
So, yeah, we need sane laws on tech, and we won't get it because we're in America.
Marco:
Well, there is one thing to point out that the chat and Twitter are both very happily pointing out right now, that competition in this instance is weird because the way U.S.
Marco:
cable companies work...
Marco:
I've never heard of a place where you could choose between two different cable companies for your house or office.
John:
Massachusetts, we had three up here.
John:
Really?
John:
Comcast, Fios, and RCN.
John:
I think that's still the case.
John:
I had Comcast and Fios in the same place, and RCN cables were running to my house when I can.
John:
They all did internet.
John:
They all did internet, phone, television.
Marco:
everything oh sure yeah well but yeah like usually you'll have one phone company and one cable company and you can you can get things through both you know and if the phone company is Fios for is Verizon Fios then you can get TV through that too or even AT&T's U-verse isn't that anyway I don't I don't know what these things are
John:
But yes, I'm a rarity, but I have three choices.
John:
I could have picked any three of those and fulfilled all my needs.
John:
I could have picked all three of them and picked internet from one, phone from the other, and television from the other if I wanted to.
John:
Obviously, they make that economically unfeasible, but that is a rarity.
John:
Mostly from what I hear, it's like all I can get at my house is Comcast or something like that.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Usually you can choose one phone company with DSL or, if you're lucky, Fiber and one cable company, and that's it.
Marco:
And so Time Warner and Comcast are not so direct competitors where they have to really compete on price because they're usually not competing for the same customers.
Marco:
Where I think this is bad...
Marco:
is in consolidation of, you know, now we're going to have even fewer major national ISPs.
Marco:
And Comcast, which is already, I think it was the biggest ISP in the country already.
Marco:
Comcast, which already has way too much power over things like net neutrality in the US.
Marco:
You know, like if net neutrality starts going badly for us, Comcast is going to be the first company to start screwing people over.
Marco:
Like they're going to jump right on that.
And
Marco:
And they have a terrible track record with this.
Marco:
So they are just horrible people in that company.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It isn't necessarily the problem of you'd have less competition for pricing in your area for cable.
Marco:
It's the problem of now one company is going to be in charge of even more of the U.S.
Marco:
's connected broadband.
Marco:
Like the number of companies that are representing the entire connected U.S.
Marco:
is shrinking.
Marco:
And these are like two of the biggest ones that are now going to become one.
Marco:
And that's pretty bad.
Casey:
Well, it would be just terrible of me not to say that I have had Comcast on at least a couple of occasions.
Casey:
And it is, without a shadow of a doubt, I believe my most hated company other than perhaps airlines.
Casey:
It was terrible.
Casey:
It was my only reasonable option, and I hated it.
Casey:
I hated it at least 100 times more than the Mac Pro discussion.
Casey:
I hated Comcast.
Casey:
The customer service was awful.
Casey:
I would wait for an hour to talk to someone who had no idea what they were doing, and no matter what fancy thing I said to them to indicate that I'm not an idiot, I would still have to unplug my router, and then I would have to do this.
Casey:
And then I would have to do that.
Casey:
And it was just a freaking nightmare.
Casey:
The service was never terribly good.
Casey:
Rates went up constantly without any, any notice and without any real reason.
Casey:
Whenever I went to the local office to like return a piece of broken equipment or exchange something, whatever the case may be, it was a 50, 50 shot that that would actually show up on my bill.
Casey:
And then I would have to call the customer service to see, oh, okay, well I returned this in person and
Casey:
to your office, I didn't even put it through the mail, two weeks ago, and yet you're still charging me for this thing that I haven't had for two weeks.
Casey:
I cannot even begin to tell you how terrible Comcast is.
Casey:
Whereas by comparison, and I know I've talked about how wonderful Fios is, and I know no one wants to hear it, but just a few weeks ago when I had an issue with... I forget which piece that was in the house, but it wasn't the router.
Casey:
It was something upstream from the router, but it was something in the house.
Casey:
It was like the ONT or something like that.
Casey:
Well, anyways...
Casey:
I said to the person on the phone, well, you know, I've looked at the router, but I've got this and this and this problem.
Casey:
And I'm looking at the ONT and it's got this, this and the other thing going on.
Casey:
And that completely bypassed me through all the stupid drivel.
Casey:
And I think the guy even said, oh, you know what you're talking about.
Casey:
All right, let's try this just to be safe.
Casey:
And I think I talked about this on the show.
Casey:
Like he had me unplug something, replug something.
Casey:
Just to confirm that the outlet itself wasn't an issue, which was a perfectly reasonable course of action.
Casey:
And then the next day, that morning, they said, what went from an all day, you know, you have to be home all day because we're not going to tell you when we're coming.
Casey:
It ended up that I actually almost got woken up by their phone call to say, hey, we'd like to fix your problem as soon as possible.
Casey:
Whereas Comcast was, I believe they missed an installation appointment or two at one point.
Casey:
I'll stop because I could go on forever, but I cannot tell you how bad Comcast is.
Casey:
And the fact that they're buying another major cable corporation petrifies me because who's a competitor anymore?
Casey:
Fios is the Apple TV of the Verizon conglomerate.
Casey:
U-verse is the Apple TV of the AT&T conglomerate.
Casey:
My parents have it.
Casey:
It's very good.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's like a pet project as far as I'm concerned.
Casey:
My parents used to have charter communications.
Casey:
I don't know if that's even still a thing anymore.
Casey:
I mean, what are the big companies other than Comcast?
Casey:
I think you're right, Marco, that it's basically Comcast and then a bunch of little guys.
Casey:
And that's scary.
Casey:
That's not good for anyone.
Marco:
And Verizon and Comcast entered this shady agreement a few years ago that basically Verizon agreed to stop expanding Fios.
John:
Right.
John:
That can't be legal.
John:
The good thing about the little guys, though, I don't know who owns Cablevision or Optima Online or whoever.
John:
Maybe they're already owned by Comcast.
John:
But the little guys have some reasonable chance of... They're not going to be swallowed up by the other ones unless they buy them.
John:
Because they own...
John:
they own their regional areas and comcast is not going to come and pay to string new wires there and if those companies don't have to rent their wires out to them they're not going to what comcast will do instead i guess is buy them if it's worthwhile to them which is what they're doing with time warner uh and hopefully eventually even our crappy laws will step in and say you know when comcast tries to buy verizon or vice versa they'll say okay you can't do that but uh no it's not it's not a great situation and i i would i think we would all be happier if
John:
the service itself would improve.
John:
Instead of just, oh, your profits are improving or you're merging and doing stuff like this, would you care how bad the customer service was if you just got good speeds all the time?
John:
I've had Fios for, I don't know, for as long as I could possibly have had it, many, many years now.
John:
i've never called their customer service it could be terrible as far as i know but it just always works it doesn't go down i never have to call them it doesn't break all the equipment is still going eventually i assume it will break or i'll need to get it upgraded or something but so far so good so if comcast put as much energy into improving its service as it does into like buying up other companies and trying to figure out how to make money maybe you'd be like well the customer service is terrible but boy the speeds are great and i bet fios you know i bet your verizon if you had a bad customer service experience it would annoy you but you'd be like well i still enjoy the speeds and the connection
John:
And for the most part, it's been reliable.
Casey:
But what's compelling them to do that?
John:
Yeah, nothing.
John:
Yeah, that's why they're not doing it.
John:
Nothing.
Casey:
And that's the problem.
Casey:
And the competition is what makes everyone get better.
Casey:
It's the same reason why, although I don't prefer Android, I want Android to be incredible because that makes iOS that much better.
Casey:
And I just seen a tweet or an article or something like that a day or two ago saying that,
Casey:
Suddenly, Comcast had just ratcheted up their speeds in the areas around Google Fiber.
Casey:
Or maybe it was in Chattanooga where I know that they have municipal or their power company or something like that.
Casey:
They have some weirdo setup that I've talked with Bradley Chambers about wherein they get just absurd speeds from a source that you wouldn't expect, either the municipality or like the power company or something.
Casey:
Well, anyways, in those areas, Comcast will actually be okay, from what I gather, because they're compelled to, because otherwise no one will subscribe to them.
Casey:
And I don't know, I guess for regular human beings, Fios isn't compelling enough.
Casey:
But I agree, John.
Casey:
I've had to call customer service twice, maybe, and it was because of random one-off things that are kind of expected to happen over the course of several years.
Casey:
And otherwise, I've never, ever, ever, ever had an issue with it, ever.
Casey:
And I use the Action Tech router, not for Wi-Fi, but I use it as a router.
Casey:
And I know that's Marco's favorite thing in the world.
Casey:
And I've actually not even had problems with that.
Casey:
So I can't stress enough how wonderful Fios is and how god-awful terrible Comcast is.
Marco:
Thank God that we are sponsored by somebody better than Comcast.
Marco:
Our third sponsor this week, our friends at Hover.
Marco:
Hover is high quality, no hassle, domain name registration.
Marco:
And you can use promo code, you ready for this?
Marco:
Promo code, who the hell is Casey?
Ha!
Marco:
For 10% off.
Casey:
I am serious.
Casey:
That is fantastic.
Marco:
Hover.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Use promo code, who the hell is Casey?
Marco:
All one word.
Marco:
This is an all Casey promo code episode.
Marco:
I love it.
Marco:
For 10% off.
Marco:
So what is Hover?
Marco:
In my words, not theirs, Hover is a domain registrar that doesn't suck.
Marco:
And if you've used domain registrars before to register domain names, you know that not sucking is pretty rare.
Marco:
And not only do they not suck, but they're pretty good, actually.
Marco:
They have amazing support.
Marco:
They have a beautiful design.
Marco:
I love Hover and their sister company, Ting, part of the Two Cows family of companies.
Marco:
They have this awesome support thing where...
Marco:
They have phone support.
Marco:
You can do online stuff too, but if you want, you can call them anytime during the business day and a person picks up the phone.
Marco:
It's a no hold, no transfer, no wait policy.
Marco:
You call them during the business day and a real person picks up the phone.
Marco:
There's no long hold times and the person who picks up is actually able to help you.
Marco:
They don't have to transfer you 17 times to have you explain everything, all this crazy stuff.
Marco:
It's fantastic phone support.
Marco:
So in addition to all that, see, Hubbard's really focused on, they want people who have ideas, who want to start a new website, buy a new domain for your email address, whatever the case may be,
Marco:
They want people who have ideas to be able to just find a great name, get it set up, and then get back to making your idea work.
Marco:
They know that domain registration is not like the place you go to hang out all day.
Marco:
They know that this is something that you need to do something else.
Marco:
So they want to make it as easy as possible for you to get in, get out, and just get what you need.
Marco:
They can have that.
Marco:
To pull it down.
Marco:
So, and they have, I mean, you guys have probably heard all these crazy new TLDs that are being released.
Marco:
You can get like Dot Laundry or something.
Marco:
They have so many...
Marco:
So many really stupid ones being released, honestly.
Marco:
Like, I don't know what... You know, it seems like... Is it ICANN that makes the final decisions on these?
Marco:
Or the IANA on Reddit?
Casey:
I know what you're saying.
Casey:
I never can keep them straight.
Marco:
Seems like the creation of new TLDs... Whoever makes those decisions is just comically misguided about how things are named on the internet.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
The TLD is not usually used for important purposes.
Marco:
Usually it's like you pick the one that either completes the spelling of a domain hack for you.
Marco:
So you can get thing.gs.
Marco:
So it says things and stuff like that.
Marco:
Or...
Marco:
You get one that's kind of accidentally related.
Marco:
We have ATP.fm, even though we are not in the federated islands of Micronesia.
Marco:
It just happens that that's kind of sound related.
Marco:
And just like TV, is it Tuvalu or Tuvalu?
Marco:
No one who has a .tv domain name is actually in Tuvalu.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
you know, people use it.
Marco:
Hey, it's .tv.
Marco:
It's just like .me, I think, is another country, too.
Marco:
And it's like, you know, that just happens to mean something in English, you know?
Marco:
So that got popular.
Marco:
.co is Columbia, but it's close enough to .com that everyone's like, oh, well, that'll work.
Marco:
We'll just start using that.
Marco:
So that all works.
Marco:
And then the new domains are all these crazy things like .lighting and, like, .photography.
Marco:
And, like, you know,
Marco:
this is not AOL keywords.
Marco:
I know this is, I know this is a sponsor read, but I'm going, I'm going, I'm making this a topic temporarily.
Marco:
This like, I'm, I'm so annoyed by the list of these new domains because they're so useless.
Marco:
Like they're so cheesy.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
Who is going to name their business, like, supplies.photography?
John:
Well, see, what they did was sort of how macOS 10 made movie computers real.
John:
Because it used to be before macOS 10, movie computers did these crazy animations that didn't exist on real computers.
John:
And things would go bloop, blooping.
John:
And you're like, oh, that's not what real computers are like.
John:
It's so stupid.
John:
And then Mac OS X came out, and it's like, oh, that's a real computer.
John:
It does the genie thing.
John:
It's actually a real thing.
John:
Well, this makes what your parents would say for domain names or what late-night comics would say, I need to go to, you know, doggy.woofwoof.
John:
And we'd be like, .woofwoof isn't a real TLD, don't you know?
John:
Like, they wouldn't know that it was like com.org.net or whatever.
John:
They would just say, like, you know, paperbags.lunchtime, right?
John:
And they'd say backslash after that, right?
John:
But now those things are real TLTs, and it's like, no, you're making all the worst bad things about people who didn't know technology come true.
John:
Exactly.
Casey:
By the way, why do all movie and TV computers make noises every time you click or touch anything?
John:
Text appearing on the screen.
John:
I can't stand it.
John:
A window appears.
John:
Everything makes noise.
John:
Drives me nuts.
John:
All right, different topic.
John:
Finish the ad.
Okay.
Marco:
Anyway, so if you want to get a sensible TLD, like the ones we've had forever, you can get pretty much all of them at Hover.
Marco:
They keep adding new ones all the time, and they have almost every one I've ever looked for.
Marco:
However, if you want to get one of the new stupid ones, you can now do that as well.
Marco:
So you can get... They now have today, or yeah, today, a new batch became available, including .equipment, .camera, .estate,
Marco:
.gallery, and .lighting.
Marco:
So now you can have your new ATP.lighting in case we wanted to start a lighting-related company.
Marco:
I'm sure there's enough of those to justify an entire top-level domain on the internet.
Marco:
So they have all sorts of these new crazy domains, and there's this two-year-long schedule where they're going to roll out a whole bunch of them at ICANN level.
Marco:
All the regular stars are joining in, at least all the good ones.
Marco:
But if I was going to register any of these, I'd do it at Hover because they have their panels nice and easy to use.
Marco:
They have great support.
Marco:
They have this old but awesome service called Valley Transfer where if you want to transfer some names to Hover and you don't want to have to deal with the process...
Marco:
they will do the transfer for you.
Marco:
If you just give them the credentials to log into your old registrar, they will transfer everything over for you.
Marco:
It's really great.
Marco:
So they have all sorts of stuff.
Marco:
They have email, Google apps for your domain.
Marco:
They support that.
Marco:
And their attitude is very honest.
Marco:
They don't try to aggressively upsell you or cross-sell you to crazy stuff.
Marco:
They didn't tell me to say this, but we all know that the implication here, or rather the alternative here, is if you ever did a checkout at GoDaddy, oh my God.
Marco:
It's like...
Marco:
It's worse than the app store.
Marco:
It's like the amount of crap they present to you is so – it's unbelievable.
Marco:
And it's like they use – there's like all these shady things like, oh, well, do you not want us to not give your disclosed information to people who are possibly affiliated with us?
Marco:
And you can pay an extra $12 a month to have privacy so that we won't spam you.
Marco:
It's like it's so weird with other registrars.
Marco:
Hover has sensible defaults.
Marco:
They don't badger you.
Marco:
Things like domain privacy, they give you for no additional cost.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
So let me get back to reality here.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Hover for sponsoring the show.
Marco:
Fantastic radio talk.
Marco:
Go to hover.com slash ATP for high quality, no hassle domain registration.
Marco:
And use the promo code, who the hell is Casey, for 10% off.
Marco:
Who the hell is Casey?
Casey:
We should know that the promo code is only for new customers, though.
Casey:
Yes, that's right.
Casey:
I also should point out that moon.lighting is already taken, and I'm very sad about that.
Casey:
Oh, that's too bad.
Casey:
Not surprising, but unfortunate nevertheless.
Casey:
These TLDs are really the worst.
Marco:
We've had stupid TLDs in addition to these for a while, like .museum.
Marco:
When was the last time you saw it?
Marco:
Even museums don't use .museum.
Marco:
If they don't use it, who else is going to use it?
Casey:
Yeah, I don't get it.
Casey:
It makes no sense to me.
Casey:
But whatever.
Casey:
Let me do something brief about iBeacon, some Bluetooth LE, and then we can maybe talk about Copeland 2010 for six hours.
John:
Oh, not on this show.
John:
Put a line in the notes.
John:
Next show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, let me talk briefly about iBeacons, and then maybe we can wrap.
Casey:
So I've had a little bit of time between projects at work over the last week and a half, and I've been fiddling with iBeacons and Bluetooth Low Energy.
Casey:
And in case you live on— Translation, I've been slacking off at work.
Casey:
No, no, no, no, no.
Casey:
I've been between projects.
Casey:
It's true.
Marco:
Sure, yeah.
Marco:
You know, don't be a jerk.
Marco:
I have my share of slacking off at work.
Marco:
Don't worry.
Casey:
No, they're slacking off at work, and then there's doing things that are professional development when you're in between client projects.
Casey:
Right.
Marco:
It's your 90% time.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I'm going to try to be serious here, darn it.
Casey:
So I was piddling with iBegins and Bluetooth Low Energy.
Casey:
And so in case you don't know what that is, in iOS 7, Apple came up with a standard that they said they would make a standard, which just like FaceTime, they haven't, wherein you can have over Bluetooth Low Energy...
Casey:
a small data packet that's broadcast that includes a GUID or UUID or GUID, depending on how you want to pronounce it.
Marco:
Did you say GUID?
Marco:
Like squid?
Marco:
Yeah.
Casey:
That's awesome.
Casey:
That's how I've always pronounced it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Anyway, so it's strictly speaking, it's a UUID in the Apple platforms.
Casey:
But you can broadcast a UUID, a major integer, a minor integer, and I believe a little bit of text as well.
Casey:
I forget off the top of my head.
Casey:
And the idea is you can set up a...
Casey:
iPad, for example, like let's say a cash register iPad, and you can set it up to beam over Bluetooth low energy this, hi, I'm here, and I'm waiting for someone to talk to me.
Casey:
And on an iPhone, if you have, let's say this is the Apple Store, because the Apple Store is doing this, if you have the Apple Store app on your iPhone, not the App Store, mind you, but the retail store app, as you walk into an Apple retail store, it will actually say...
Casey:
We see you're at the Apple store.
Casey:
Is there anything we can do for you?
Casey:
And they took this even further at WWDC, and they said, hey, you know, if you think about it, you could use the major and minor integers to do something like specify the major integer is what store number you're in, and the minor integer is...
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so on and so forth.
Casey:
And it's both extremely cool and it could be extremely creepy.
Casey:
You could think of less creepy uses like at a museum.
Casey:
We were talking about dot museum earlier, where as you go between exhibits, there could be eye beacons all over the place saying, hey, we think you're at such and such exhibit.
Casey:
Let me show you a screen about that rather than you having to go and search for information about that exhibit.
Casey:
Well, anyway, so I've been playing with this over the last week and a half.
Casey:
And really, the whole point of me bringing this up was to say that Bluetooth low energy apparently has a hell of a lot more energy in it than I thought it did.
Casey:
And I say that because I had my RetinaPad Mini sitting on my desk at work.
Casey:
And then I walked across the office, which I know doesn't mean anything to anyone.
Casey:
But suffice to say, it was a solid, I don't know, 10 to 20 meters.
Casey:
Or 10 yards if you're an American.
Casey:
So polite.
Casey:
And it was through a few walls.
Casey:
And I could still, very faintly of course, but I could still pick up from my iPhone 5S my RetinaPad mini's beacon being transmitted through.
Casey:
via Bluetooth low energy, a solid like 10 or 20 meters away, which I just thought was remarkable because the way it was pitched, it sounded to me like it was going to work in the span of, you know, a couple of meters at most.
Casey:
And that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
Casey:
And I just thought it was very interesting.
Casey:
And I will also say that
Casey:
It was actually fairly straightforward to get it to work, and the code really isn't that bad.
Casey:
And I also ordered from, what is it, RedBear, which is some company out of, I believe, Hong Kong.
Casey:
I ordered a Beacon B1.
Casey:
Actually, I ordered three of them for the company, which are basically these standalone iBeacons.
Casey:
And so what you can do is you can connect to them using an app that they have.
Casey:
And program them with your GUID slash UUID and program them with what major and minor number you want.
Casey:
And you can use them as a physical iBeacon.
Casey:
And the reason you can do that is because the quote-unquote standard that Apple came up with for iBeacons really isn't that complex.
Casey:
And so people reverse engineered it pretty quickly, and they've come out with physical hardware devices that you can use in order to be an iBeacon.
Casey:
And I just thought this was all fascinating.
Casey:
I don't really know where this is going in the future.
Casey:
But the thought of having what is basically geolocation within a building where GPS isn't probably going to work very well and additionally isn't accurate enough, I just think that whole thing is fascinating.
Casey:
But maybe that's me.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Do you guys have anything to say about that?
John:
It's like the fantasy of every business person told about computers for the past 50, 70 years has been hammering on the, and when they're right near the cafe, we'll tell them we're having a sale on coffee.
John:
People are obsessed with giving you just-in-time advertising information.
John:
Both utopian and dystopian sci-fi movie would have some scene where the character not used to the future wanders by some sign that notices he's there.
John:
And tells them that something is available for his purchase that's related to his interests or changes to talk to him or whatever.
John:
And mostly for me, that's kind of dystopian.
John:
But I like the idea of using the similar type of technology where it's like, it's not...
John:
it's longer range than near field.
John:
It's not as long range as wifi, but it's, but it's almost as low power as, you know, it's not going to be as low power as near field, obviously, but, but it's much lower power, like making it more feasible to do something like, like,
John:
Pipe in GPS, for example, like to do the equivalent of positioning within a building without having to use GPS, but have it be similarly accurate by using all the in all the in store beacons as sort of a proxy for an actual GPS beacon that's somewhere else.
John:
And because the beacons know where they are, I don't know how this would work, but position within a building is good because.
John:
Even if it's just for, like, you're in the mall and you want to find out where the heck the, you know, children's, the Gymboree is because you want to buy clothes and you haven't been in this mall before.
John:
It would be nice and the mall would consider it a feature if you could just look on your phone and, like, type in G-Y-M and tap on the first thing and it would tell you how to get to the Gymboree.
John:
Like, wayfinding within buildings to find, you know.
John:
If that was so common that it was boring, you wouldn't have that thing that we have now.
John:
Like, it used to be when you wanted to go on a long car trip, you'd, like...
John:
look up the maps in your little atlas thing or get one of those triple a booklets that tells you all the different turns and stuff like that now we just take for granted that if you want to go somewhere and you know the address you can just hop right in your car type in the address and drive there but we still do the thing when you get into a building where you got to go to the front desk and find out what floor this place is on and what number it is and you look up on the little the sign and by the elevators to show where you have to go or
John:
That's the equivalent of bringing the Hagstrom into your car and looking stuff up or getting a little AAA manual.
John:
So if this stuff does become pervasive, there's boring, very benign uses of it that would eliminate yet another one of those things that we can tell our kids that we used to have to look things up.
John:
It would be like telling people you had to go through Rolodex to find someone's phone number, if they still know what phone numbers are by the time we're telling them these stories.
John:
So I mostly give this tech a thumbs up, but I think people will try the dystopian things first, and I think those won't fly as well.
John:
as something more utilitarian and boring.
Casey:
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Casey:
I should also mention that the iBeacon API within core location on the iPhone and iPad, actually, it does tell you a basic idea of whether or not you're close to any of the beacons you can see.
Casey:
So it gives you a vague proximity of basically you're on top of it, you're near it, you're far away from it, or I can barely tell.
Casey:
And the other very interesting thing about iBeacon specifically is that
Casey:
you can actually have iOS start or provide a notification that you are within that region even if your app isn't running.
Casey:
And so for the nerds, CLBeaconRegion is the class in question, and there's a property, NotifyEntryStateOnDisplay, and it says, when set to yes, the location manager sends beacon notifications when the user turns on the display and the device is already inside the region.
Casey:
These notifications are sent even if your app is not running.
Casey:
In that situation, the system launches your app into the background so it can handle the notifications, which is actually extremely interesting to me because I can't think of a way in which I guess you could with push notifications.
Casey:
But are there any other ways, Marco, that you could just have your app started arbitrarily in the background?
Marco:
background refresh and stuff, but for a particular... When you stumble into a spot, I guess you can do geofence tricks.
Marco:
You can do all the various location-based APIs that exist now, like the major updates and regular updates and geofences and stuff like that.
Marco:
Otherwise, I don't think any of them are really reliable enough.
Marco:
If you wanted to simulate this behavior with anything else, you couldn't really do it very well.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And that's the thing.
Casey:
And I just thought this was all very interesting and something a little bit different that, to my knowledge, not a lot of people have really been exploring.
Casey:
And I don't know how to explore that in a non-retail sense because you need these physical devices.
Casey:
Beaming these Bluetooth packets in order to do anything with iBeacons.
Casey:
But I could see it being just really cool and really interesting things coming from it.
Casey:
And I agree, John, that there's a dystopian version, which is, hey, ties are on sale.
Casey:
Hey, unmentionables are on sale.
Casey:
Hey, pots and pans are on sale.
Casey:
Or there's the cool version of, hey…
Casey:
Let me tell you where, you know, we see that you're in such and such a location in the museum.
Casey:
If you'd like to look at the gallery of M cars in the BMW Welt, well, you need to go upstairs and to the left or whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And I just think that would be really cool.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I think with a lot of this stuff, reality kind of gets in the way for me.
Marco:
I tend to adopt this stuff very slowly and very late compared to everyone else.
Marco:
I still use paperboarding passes at the airport.
Marco:
I still don't use the thing on your phone, the passbooks thing.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
Usually there's some level of complexity and fumbling and delay with technology that if there's a quick paper way to do something, I'll usually do it that way.
Marco:
Or if there's some simple way, I'd be much more likely to look around the floor of the museum I'm at for a directory or for a map.
Marco:
than I am to take out my phone and try that.
Marco:
Because so often this stuff doesn't work right, or it's not worth the effort to take your phone out of your pocket, unlock it, find the app, find the thing, and wait for it to connect, drain your battery.
Marco:
There's all these little tiny costs that add up to make it kind of clunky in so many cases.
Marco:
I'm usually very skeptical of stuff like this, and usually I avoid it.
John:
for years after everyone else tries it and usually it dies out and it's not a problem and i i save myself the time of ever having tried it the museum thing i have a friend who works in a museum and he had been for years taking a bunch of old school like ipods i think even the ones with wheels and stuff and charging a bunch of them up and filling them with audio programs that people would you know go use the little click wheel to scroll through like they were manually making their own tour is as a sort of
John:
manually guided audio tour to, you'd go to a certain section of the museum, rotate the little wheel and hear a little story about something.
John:
And, and if people weren't willing to tolerate that, especially museum patrons, which are like, you know, senior citizens and rich people.
John:
And I don't know who goes to museums, but like I, I,
John:
This would be a vast improvement if you could use these beacons and give a bunch of people iPod touches because the whole problem was trying to make something that was guided so that people didn't have to manipulate the device.
John:
And if you just walk up to something and the little thing in your hand starts playing it, that's an improvement.
John:
So I think there's definitely...
John:
small areas where this will become influential it only it only becomes really something that regular people encounter if those beacons are everywhere like that's where the big value like beacons in a few places and beacons in a few stores has some value but if you just assume that when you went into a mall the thing would be filled with beacons then now you've got sort of a platform on which people can do both more interesting and more terrible things
Marco:
And now you can launch that platform at .domains or .holdings or .systems.
Marco:
Is that one?
Marco:
I don't think it is.
Marco:
.academy.
Marco:
Oh, I got it.
Marco:
beacon.plumbing.
Marco:
That's your new site right there.
Casey:
And we're done.
Marco:
Museum.solutions.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Squarespace, Transporter, and Hover.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
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, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They did enough.
John:
I was going to say that a new life awaited you in the off-world colonies, but I realized neither one of you would get that, so never mind.
Nope.
Marco:
You got to listen to the Bionic a couple episodes ago where they were going through these domains.
Marco:
It's freaking hilarious.
Marco:
I was just thinking the same thing.
Marco:
I was listening to that episode when I was walking my dog, and so I couldn't go check out the list myself immediately.
Marco:
And I kept listening through it.
Marco:
I'm like, this can't be real.
Marco:
Half of these have to be made up.
Marco:
This has to be a joke.
Marco:
And then I get home and I look, and they're all real.
Marco:
Like, every one of these stupid domains, they're all real.
Casey:
Do we ever find out if Mike got Mike.Sexy?
Casey:
Is .Sexy available?
Marco:
No, I don't think it's available yet.
Marco:
I think it's in... It's in the hopper?
Marco:
Is it just me, or is the whole TLD thing, you think, a scam by ICANN to get whatever little percentage of the registrations that they get from all the trademark owners who've got to go register all their trademarks and all these different TLDs?
John:
I'm interested to see how it goes, because the...
John:
The cachet and the technological advantages of .com back in the days when address bars used to, I mean, I guess maybe there's only a Mac platform, but remember when address bars used to stick on .com for you instead of doing a search if you just typed in a word by itself?
John:
Yep.
John:
That right away was a huge advantage.
John:
You didn't want the .net or the .org because you knew if they typed foo and hit return in the address bar, which people used to do back in the day, use the address bar, they would go to foo.com and then it would try www.foo.com and do all those heuristics.
John:
And now that's gone, but I still think there's a cachet to having the .com for most people.
John:
And I wonder if there'll be a stigma associated with having clownpenis.fart, as the joke goes, or any other...
John:
tld that looks like you're kind of like fly by night or couldn't you get the dot com like the social aspect of tlds not the technical aspect and not whether there's a tld that's perfectly suited for you that that you know kind of like we were here first and we got the dot com and everyone else has dot com and you look weird because you have this other thing the only place i can see where this would work out well and i don't know if they allowed triple x or whatever but all the porn sites i assume will rush to get triple x dot sex or whatever because people are probably typing those
Marco:
Into their browsers they're typing.
Marco:
But they haven't.
Marco:
We've had .xxx for, I think, a couple years now.
Marco:
Have we?
Marco:
I thought they didn't want to... Do we have .sex?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm sure that's one of the proposed ones.
Marco:
I mean, the thing is, these are released under... And by the way, before we leave this topic, we've had .biz and .info for a long time now, and no one uses them.
John:
Yeah, and .name.
John:
We've had .name.
John:
I've got a .name.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, and that name is not too abused, but biz and info, those are just spam.
Marco:
The only things on there are spam.
Marco:
That's all.
Marco:
It's 100% spam.
John:
It's affiliate marketing spam and just crap.
John:
This colloquy.info is the only .info site that I know of that I would visit legitimately.
John:
Right.
John:
And I guess they couldn't get the .com.
John:
That's my first assumption.
John:
Why would you get colloquy.info?
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
But all these domains...
Marco:
like if they it's like the people who made the yellow pages design this domain name system it's like like they they think that anyone is going to want to have like oh like for instance there's a dot diamonds and if you're like do you think major diamond companies are going to move their sites or create new sites as like you know company name dot diamonds or is that going to be really cheesy looking immediately it's a bonanza for domain squatters like i think that it
John:
If you're going to think, who is this going to hurt the most?
John:
It seems like it's going to hurt the domain squatters the most because you know they're just going to have like parking pages and, well, maybe not hurt them, but like all those accidental results you get on Google that are just someone squatting to redirect you, you know they're going to be all over Dot Diamond because God forbid someone accidentally types something that looks like that or get a Google result that goes that.
John:
So many new places that look legitimate to someone at a glance that they can drive you through to probably take you to a porn site or something.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And I just think the tax this is going to place on trademark holders to try to, okay, well, to what degree do you have to buy them?
John:
I don't think so.
John:
Is Coca-Cola going to get Coca-Cola.plumbing?
John:
I don't think they are.
John:
going to let that one go you know like they just i mean they don't care i wouldn't you know it would be an easy way to get money out of them but i think they're gonna they're gonna look at that list and say if the list was five more every corporation would buy the extra five but the list is too long now they're gonna be like okay well now you've pushed me to this and i'm going to say no i'm not going to get coca-cola that all of these
John:
I'm just going to keep, like, who knows if Coca-Cola even has Coca-Cola.info or Coca-Cola.biz.
John:
I bet they don't even have them.
John:
So I think they're going to stick with the .com, and I don't know what's going to happen with all these top-level domains.
John:
.florist?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's just, I mean, infinite numbers of podcast episodes could be recorded about these domains.
John:
I know the technical reasons why.
John:
Like, why do we have the top of all domains at all?
John:
Like, I understand how DNS works and everything.
John:
But if you were to remove the technical limitations and just say, what if the entire name was up for grabs?
John:
And when you got a domain, you just picked the name and you just got Coca-Cola and there was no .com, right?
Yeah.
John:
And then you could put dots in your names if you wanted, and people can make up any sort of something, dot something, dot something if they wanted to.
John:
In some ways, it would be cleaner in that you're just fighting over ASCII characters that make or the Unicode with that crazy escaping system they have and domain names.
John:
just a bunch of characters and it's just this weird artifact that there's a certain last segment of it because of the way dns works and the top level domain holders that that's limited but everything in front of that you can get you know i don't even know if there's length restrictions anymore there probably is somewhere out in the distance but you can just put any crazy garbage you want to try to fish people or whatever and it just has to end in one of these other crazy things and the list of crazy things is getting bigger so i'm kind of okay with that like that's moving us more towards
John:
You just register a name, and here's some length limits, and here's the character encoding it has to be, and you just pick the name and we map it to your IP address somehow.
John:
So maybe that's the endgame.
John:
Top-level domains.
John:
It's not a fixed list.
John:
You just pick what you want, the last part of your thing to be.
Marco:
Wasn't that a proposal like a year and a half or two years ago?
Marco:
Didn't ICANN propose that they'll just allow .anything and allow people to register any TLD they wanted?
Marco:
But I think that didn't go anywhere, which might be for the best.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
The value of a domain is so much smaller now because everyone just searches.
Marco:
Google ranking is so much more important.
Marco:
Now, one thing that might be relevant here is how much weight is Google going to put on these keywords, these new TLDs?
Marco:
Is this going to count favorably towards your rank on Google for these searches?
John:
No.
John:
I think Google has long since learned to disregard – if anything, it's going to be a negative like it probably is for .info because their weighting is not based on philosophy.
John:
It's based on practical results.
John:
So their battle with spam or whatever is like practically speaking –
John:
If more.biz domains are crappy and have spam, they're going to get downranked.
John:
There's not someone saying, well, that seems more specific because it says .museum.
John:
I don't think that's anywhere in their algorithm.
Casey:
All I want to know is, are you going to get overcast.weather?
Marco:
Is .weather one of them?
Marco:
I don't even know.
Marco:
They probably have .podcast.
Marco:
They might have .podcast client.
Marco:
That's the funny thing.
Marco:
They don't.
Marco:
And there is one proposed .app, which I would love to get overcast.app, and that's one that would be interesting.
John:
Oh, .app would just drive people crazy.
John:
Can you imagine trying to discuss... Well, it would drive Mac heads crazy.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, like what is the website for your app?
John:
It's whatever.app, and I use terminal.app to use mail.app to go to that.
John:
I mean, someone would get terminal.app and mail.app and make something out of it.
John:
File name extensions, they ruin everything.
Marco:
And that's what these are, really.
Marco:
They're like keyword spam domain extensions.
Marco:
It's just so tacky.
Marco:
Seriously, who are these people who come up with this and say, that's a good idea?
John:
People submitted them, wasn't it?
John:
Like a semi-pseudo-democratic process.
John:
And I bet the people submitting them were all the people who make those parked, spammy phishing sites.
Yeah.
Marco:
It seems like they're trying to make one for every major industry, basically.
Marco:
And a bunch of weirdly minor ones.
Marco:
It's just an odd list.
Marco:
Everything about this is designed by committee.
Marco:
It's obvious that there is no guiding authority here whatsoever.
Marco:
It's just all like, well, I guess we'll invite all these different stakeholders to the table and we'll come up with something with this task force that everyone can agree on.
Marco:
There's no authority here saying, yeah, but this is all kind of a bad idea.
Marco:
Anyway.
Casey:
Anything else going on?
Casey:
No.
Marco:
I had to get up early, so... Do you want to talk about this Patreon thing?
Marco:
What?
Marco:
So Patreon is this site that basically it lets you, you as a creative person, get money from your fans every time you release something.
Marco:
So you can say, like, you know, every podcast episode I release or every...
Marco:
Every three blog posts I make or every five songs I write, you, the audience, can pledge $10 or $5 or whatever for every X that I do.
Casey:
Oh, is this what Jonathan Mann is doing?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
So the idea of it is pretty good.
Marco:
There's good people behind it.
Marco:
Anyway, they emailed us inviting us to put our podcast on there.
Marco:
And I don't...
Marco:
I don't feel good about that because, like, you know, it's different.
Marco:
Like, with Jonathan Mann, like, he doesn't, like, fill his stuff up with ads and he doesn't really, like...
Marco:
If you don't have a lot of great options to make money with your stuff directly, then that's fine.
Marco:
But we make money through ads.
Marco:
And we make good money through ads.
Marco:
And we make, I think, more through ads than we would ever make through direct payments.
John:
Yeah, I think if this is your only way – if you decide the way you're making money is people are going to buy the thing, the consumers of the thing are going to buy it, then something like Patreon is great.
John:
But if you're ad-supported, it almost feels like all you're trying to do is to get a little bit extra by soaking your –
John:
200 best your 200 best fans for money and i would much rather see if you're gonna soak your 200 best fans for money i would much rather see them get something out of it like a t-shirt or something yeah exactly because then they're getting something like then then they have something that expresses their super fandom like whereas the patreon like they would have got the shows anyway and
John:
I would rather sell somebody swag than do this.
John:
But if you're trying to do a non-ed supported podcast, I would totally do something like this because you're looking for some way to efficiently get money from people who want to give it to you for the thing that you make.
Casey:
I agree on all counts.
John:
But we should do t-shirts or something.
Casey:
Yeah, definitely.
Casey:
But we need a better logo before we do t-shirts.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Preferably something without the f***ing Mac Pro on it.
John:
I still don't have mine yet.
Casey:
Don't care.
John:
Terrible.
John:
You should take the new off of it.
John:
Well, I guess it says ATP now.
John:
You should put soon or delayed.
Casey:
That is kind of funny.
Marco:
Put 2013 in quotes?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, people are getting them now, but now I think shipping estimates have slipped to April.
John:
Yeah, Rich Siegel still doesn't have his.
John:
Slipping to April, I would love to know if that's...
John:
Is there a problem or is that demand?
John:
It's almost hard to believe that it could be demand.
John:
You're like, seriously?
John:
That many people on Mac Pro?
John:
Okay, I can imagine some delay because they weren't ready to start manufacturing and couldn't build up an inventory.
John:
But surely by this point, it's almost like there's some part shortage or some other thing that's preventing... Well, I think, as far as I can tell, the bottleneck might be Intel.
Marco:
Because if you try to buy these CPUs, not all of them, but if you try to buy, especially the 8-core...
Marco:
You can't buy one.
Marco:
Like, everywhere they're out of stock.
John:
They should swap in some i7s.
John:
Keep the price the same.
John:
Don't tell anybody, hey, this has better single-threaded performance.
John:
I don't know what's going on.
John:
I guess they can't do that because of the PCI Express.
Marco:
Yeah, they definitely can't do that.
Marco:
I know, I know.
Marco:
But yeah, so I think the problem might be Intel.
Marco:
But it also might just be like, you know, this is a brand new factory in a brand new place with a brand new staff making a brand new product that they probably didn't think was going to sell in massive volumes.
John:
But it's a metal tube.
John:
Is it more complicated to manufacture than an iPhone?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
No, but it's inexperienced.
Marco:
This is like a new thing.
Marco:
It's this new plant in Austin doing this – or is it in Austin?
Marco:
Somewhere.
Marco:
It's this new plant doing this crazy thing and with all these – Just say it.
John:
It's lazy Americans.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know if it's lazy, but it is Americans as opposed to these places in Asia who have been manufacturing things like this for a long, long time and at massive volumes, whereas here we have a lot less of the infrastructure set up for that here.
John:
I like the part shortage theory and secondarily, a distant second, the demand theory.
John:
But presumably, if it's demand, we'll hear about it and either Apple will tout it and say, wow, we sold, put the new Mac Pro on sale and the sales were way more than we thought they would be and they'll announce some number.
John:
But I doubt they'll never mention the number.
John:
And the other way to tell would be like on the earnings call, like margins on Macs went up.
John:
If Horus or somebody can calculate that and say like, well, what could possibly be driving margins up in the Mac market?
John:
Maybe the new bajillion dollar Mac Pro is selling in huge numbers, but part shortage sure sounds like the most likely culprit.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
If I had to take my best guess, I would say that I'd say it's Intel.
Marco:
Yeah, the more I think about this and look at what's coming and my current setup, the more I think that I should use this Mac Pro whenever it comes in.
Marco:
And honestly, if it doesn't come in in the next month, I might just even cancel it.
Marco:
I mean, just wait until the next one at this point.
Yeah.
Marco:
Don't cancel it.
Marco:
You have to get it.
Marco:
I already got the AppleCare.
Marco:
They've already invoiced me.
John:
You're the thing where it starts.
Marco:
Now I'm going to have to call and make them move the date up.
Marco:
I got the AppleCare delivered like a month ago.
Marco:
But yeah, so now I'm definitely thinking with this one, like this is... Whenever the next Mac Pro comes out with the Haswell EP chips, that will be like 10%, 15% faster single-threaded stuff.
Marco:
I'll probably upgrade to that for myself and then give this one to Tiff for her upgrade.
John:
Yeah, there you go.
John:
This is the hand-me-down thing.
Marco:
Which will make my office much quieter.
John:
People in the chat room just cannot accept that I don't want a gaming PC.
John:
Somehow it's...
John:
It's like a form of arrogance that I don't want a gaming... I just don't want one.
John:
I want different things than you.
John:
You can have a gaming PC.
John:
I don't want one.
John:
It's not... I don't think it's a...
John:
I don't think it's anything to get upset about.
John:
What is it?
John:
Just make a damn gaming rig and get over yourself.
John:
I'm not getting over it.
John:
I don't think I'm too good for a game.
John:
I just don't want one.
John:
There's a thing I don't want.
John:
You can want it and you can get it, but I don't want it.
John:
And it doesn't make either one of us a better person than the other person.
John:
If I had a house where I could have a second computer set up, then I would be much more interested in a gaming PC.
John:
Because I would say, well, I could have the gaming PC over there and my Mac over here.
John:
And I would decide which place I wanted to put which one.
John:
But I don't have that.
John:
And I don't want a KVM.
John:
Why don't you want to get a KVM?
John:
Get over yourself.
John:
I don't want it.
John:
I just don't.
John:
I don't want an extra complexity.
John:
I want one computer that does everything.
Marco:
I love that we just trolled Casey into another Mac Pro discussion.
Marco:
He's trying to go to bed.
John:
Just wait until yours arrives.
John:
Then his day of reckoning will come.
Marco:
He just hung up.
John:
He just lopped it.
John:
Did you see that picture from Underscore where he had his Backblaze mug on the top of his Mac Pro?
John:
I'm assuming that was his Mac Pro.
John:
No, that was actually a Backblaze blog post.
John:
Oh, well.
John:
I was like, I didn't know Underscore had a Mac Pro.
John:
But anyway, you could find out if that warms your coffee.
John:
and then accidentally spill it into your $7,000 computer.
Marco:
Mine was not that.
Marco:
It would have been $7,000 if I kept the original configuration, but I felt too bad about that, and I'm like, no, I can't do this.
John:
Yeah, well, here, that's the one advantage, that the Mac Pro probably doesn't have those little water detector things inside it.
John:
That's true, actually.
John:
You're like, what coffee?
John:
Why does it smell like coffee in there?
John:
I don't know.
John:
You must be crazy.
John:
For some reason, it smells like really good coffee inside this computer.
John:
Does it smell Kenyan?
John:
Because I only have Kenyan.
John:
No, it doesn't smell Kenyan at all.