Tim Said, Man
Marco:
global branding strategies did you just whip together a show bot in 20 minutes yeah the only thing is i can't get ajax to work um yeah i saw that you used forms for the buttons yeah i i did if i had like 10 more minutes i could get ajax working but i don't so here we are but did you find irc code somewhere or did you actually write that too
Marco:
oh, there's no bot.
Marco:
There's no bot.
Marco:
It's literally just a form.
Marco:
I have no idea how to make an IRC bot.
Marco:
And that was probably not going to fit in my 20-minute budget to build this thing.
Casey:
I was really starting to doubt my own self-worth when you said, oh my, I had to whip this together in 20 minutes.
Casey:
I'm thinking, how the hell did he get an IRC bot in 20 minutes?
Casey:
Node is like the king or queen or what have you of having packages to do everything under the sun.
Casey:
And I doubt I could whip together an IRC bot and Node in 20 minutes.
John:
You could.
John:
I could just download the IRC bot library and you just instantiate it, give it a channel and a nickname and then tell it what to look for.
John:
Like it's the library does everything for you.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
It's just a question of finding that library.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And try to find it for PHP.
Casey:
You know, the show bot code is open sourced.
Casey:
I think you could have just.
Casey:
So why don't you use that?
Marco:
I was racing people in the chat, seeing who could finish first, me rewriting it, or them trying to get this installed because it's a Ruby thing and it's full of dependencies and all this other crap.
Marco:
And I don't know how to host Ruby, so I figured I could rewrite it faster in my hosted framework than the time it would take to figure out Ruby.
Casey:
I want to make fun of you so badly, but I don't know crap about Ruby.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I mean, could you have set it up in 20 minutes on a server?
Marco:
Probably not.
Casey:
Oh, goodness.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, apologies in advance if I'm cranky tonight.
Casey:
I'm a little stressed out.
Casey:
A lot of things going on in the List household, trying to keep it all under control.
Casey:
Not really succeeding.
Casey:
So to make me feel better, let's start by making fun of PHP.
Casey:
John.
John:
What?
John:
You would know if you looked at the notes.
Marco:
Anyway, I was a little busy.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Just a disclaimer up front.
John:
This is not my normal voice.
John:
This is my I'm sick voice.
John:
I've done many podcasts with my I'm sick voice, including, I think, like at least four of the six hours of Star Wars podcasts in the incomparable I did with this voice.
John:
But anyway, we'll get through this, which is kind of a shame because next week we're not recording an episode and presumably I'll be better by then.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
And speaking of, we're recording on – what is today?
Casey:
Thursday the 22nd.
Casey:
So just like we talked about last episode, if we say something extraordinarily stupid, it's because of time shift issues, not because we're actually unintelligent.
John:
All right.
John:
So quick follow-up, a bunch of corrections follow-up.
John:
First one is that I didn't notice this when we were recording the podcast, but when I listened back to it, I noticed that –
John:
Marco made some bold claims about PHP being faster than JavaScript that much people wrote in to tell us that this is not the case.
John:
If I had been paying better attention, I would have tried to call him on it, but apparently I wasn't.
John:
I was kind of surprised that you didn't at the time.
John:
I didn't even remember hearing it.
Marco:
As soon as I said it, I realized, yeah, this is probably wrong.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So Gingy sent us a bunch of links to benchmarks.
John:
We'll put this one in the show notes showing how incredibly slow PHP is compared to JavaScript.
John:
And again, it has nothing to do specifically with the languages.
John:
It's what we were talking about on that show.
John:
JavaScript has had so much engineering resources put towards making it fast.
John:
PHP, less so.
Marco:
Yeah, the core PHP runtime seems like it's been held together by sticks and duct tape for its entire lifetime.
Marco:
And that's why Facebook was able to come in and make such a massive upgrade with HHVM performance.
Marco:
My point was not that PHP is the fastest language.
Marco:
I didn't mean to say that.
Marco:
That was kind of me stumbling around with my words.
Marco:
Trying to say my actual point, my intended point, which was that PHP, like no one's ever really complained that PHP is slow.
Marco:
It's not like the PHP being slow has never really been a problem for most people unless you're operating at Facebook scale.
Marco:
It's fast enough and it's not like performance has never really been PHP's problem.
John:
The thing with all these quote-unquote language performance benchmarks is they always end up doing stuff like they end up doing like integer and floating point math, right?
John:
And arrays of integers and floats and calculating fractals and playing the game of life and
John:
doing things that no one will ever ask one of these dynamic languages to do because if you try to do anything math related or anything with like densely packed structures of course the language that uses like native ints and can use like the add operation on your cpu is going to destroy the thing that where every single variable is this crazy ass struct with a million different things in it you know best case scenario is a big struct worst case is something even worse of course you're going to get slaughtered by someone doing you know
John:
native operations versus that but these languages are used mostly to manipulate strings and if you do string manipulation stuff like who can run regular expressions with you know unicode handling against huge strings and intelligently replace things and then suddenly these dynamic languages even the slow ones that don't have a lot of attention paid to them start looking a lot better so I don't pay too much attention to these benchmarks because every dynamic language gets slaughtered when you know calculating fractals and who cares because that's not what they're being asked to do
Marco:
What matters most when you're using one of these languages, what matters most is how much can it handle on servers in real-life applications?
Marco:
How many concurrent connections?
Marco:
How much can you fit per server, per CPU unit of performance, or per dyno if you're on some virtualized thing?
Marco:
How much can it handle?
Marco:
And that's related to lots of things besides low-level math performance.
Marco:
And it's in those areas that...
Marco:
Almost all modern languages and frameworks do pretty well at that.
Marco:
And, you know, platforms and web servers and everything like that.
Marco:
Modern standards are pretty high for that.
Marco:
And, you know, you can go like Apache versus Nginx versus built-in servers and stuff like that.
Marco:
And you can get into a lot of nitty gritty there.
Marco:
But the fact is they're all pretty fast these days because they're all pretty well designed.
Marco:
And pretty much any language you use on a reasonably hosted stack can handle a lot.
John:
That's why Node is such an interesting hack because it's like, well, there's this language that we're all forced to use that tons of people have worked really hard to make fast.
John:
Why don't we just use that on the server?
John:
Because then we can, you know, it's the V8 JavaScript engine that Google wrote that's super fast.
John:
We'll just do that on the server.
John:
It sounds crazy, but it's like, hey, someone already did the work.
John:
So here's a vaguely dynamic language that someone has already made fast for us.
John:
And then we can concentrate and do interesting things on top of that engine.
Casey:
Let me interrupt you real quick.
Casey:
What you were saying about performance on dynos and whatnot reminds me that I had somebody from Heroku reach out to me and say, hey, we heard you talking about how I had thought that I'd hit some internal dashboard because of the traffic I got via Marco about the post about Aaron being pregnant.
Casey:
Well, firstly, I think I misread the URL, and I do not think that that was an internal app, and people from Heroku have since confirmed that anyway.
Casey:
But secondly, somebody from Roku wrote me and I don't have his name handy and I apologize, but wrote me and said in so many words, your dyno was well under control and not really getting taxed that badly at all.
Casey:
And that was when Google Analytics was reporting roughly 500 concurrent users in the real time tab.
Casey:
And I think I got somewhere around 10 or 15,000 hits over the course of that day that I posted that.
Casey:
So yeah.
Casey:
To your point, in the right situation, it's really not that bad.
Casey:
Node is not that bad on the server side.
Casey:
So I'm sorry.
Casey:
Speaking of Node...
John:
Yeah, we were talking about JavaScript modularization and the different systems for use, and I said that I thought Node.js uses AMD.
John:
It doesn't.
John:
It uses CommonJS, which is another one of those standards.
John:
And there's also, someone pointed out to me, the ECMAScript 6 modules thing.
John:
The ECMA, ECMA is the, I don't know what it stands for, but it's the standard for JavaScript.
John:
And
John:
they've been marching on making new standards for the language well ahead of what browsers are implementing but if you look at the later ones there's a lot of interesting things in there including a formal language supported way to do modules uh with uh i have another link in here in the notes to this uh es6 module transpiler that will write your lets you write your javascript using the the es6 module syntax and then compile it into either amd or common js modules and
John:
All these things are trying to accomplish the same task, you know, sort of provide, you know, keep things out of each other's namespace and provide a formal interface for defining what a module is, what it's named, what it exports and all that other stuff.
John:
So, yeah, it's a great thing about standards.
John:
So many to choose from.
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So additionally, you had mentioned, I don't remember if it was the regular show or the quote unquote after show, but we had talked about iPhone earbuds and you were devout in your fairly devout in your belief that the iPhones do not come with earbuds.
Casey:
Marco and I explained that you were wrong.
Casey:
And then you had intended to go on a treasure hunt for some of Tina's earbuds.
Casey:
What was the result of that?
John:
I did find them.
John:
I asked her where the box was, and she didn't tell me.
John:
Maybe she didn't want to tell me.
John:
But on my own, I found the box.
John:
And in the box, lo and behold, completely still in the little plastic shrink-wrappy whatever stuff were the earphones with a clicker.
John:
I found the iPhone 5S box.
John:
I bet the ones in the 4S box...
John:
are still there as well because again i have never seen one in this house so i think we've just never unpacked them so i unpacked the 5s clicker and i was wearing it tonight when i was doing dishes and stuff uh i don't know if it's going to solve my problem because it already has two issues i see with the uh the little clicker thing well that's three one issue which is not really the fault of of the phone iphones i think is the the headphones i think is that
John:
i get a little bit of like static like when i twist if i if i just twist the little connector i get a little bit of crinkly static and maybe i have some dirt or something inside my ipod touches headphone connector that only shows up with like the you know that like the little plug is little extra segments for the clicker the contacts that contact might be a little bit screwed up so that's kind of annoying you should it shouldn't be audible because i believe it just uses the microphone contact for that
John:
yeah i don't know what it is about these but like if i put in my regular headphones i don't hear any clicking and you know this is just in my pocket i wasn't intentionally doing it i took it out and i said what the hell is that and if i just twist it i can hear crinkle crinkle so who knows it's probably just dirt or something inside my connector what can you do could also be that earbuds are pieces of crap
Casey:
Oh, would you stop it with that?
Casey:
Earbuds are not bad or not good.
John:
I'm just listening to podcasts.
John:
Who cares?
John:
The second thing is, and I understand why this did this, because there's a microphone in it.
John:
I really wish that the clicker was lower down on the thing because I don't want to reach up that high to to click.
John:
I'd rather click lower down.
John:
But obviously, if they're going to make it a mic, they have to make it up higher.
John:
So I kind of understand why they did that.
John:
And the third thing is also related to where it is.
John:
It means that one of the earphones has different weighting and different sort of, you know, when I turn my head around and everything, one of the things is going to fly out and pull out more because it has an extra weight on it there.
John:
And it makes my right ear, the earbud in my right ear, start to work the way loose faster and more aggressively than the one in my left ear does.
John:
And I find that a little annoying.
John:
Wow.
Casey:
It is of no surprise to me that you have immediate complaints.
Casey:
Also, I should note that you're, if I'm correct, using ear pods.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
Is that what they call the new earbuds?
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
The weird ones that don't have a rubber gasket around them and they kind of like go into your ear.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Whereas the 4S, I believe, came with the old earbuds, which didn't have a formal name to my recollection.
John:
Yeah, I like the ear pods that they fit my ears reasonably well.
John:
And I like the idea that there's not anything that's going to wear off on them.
Marco:
Well, that's not true at all.
Marco:
It just might take a little bit longer.
John:
Well, what's going to come off, though?
John:
There's no there's no like it's just a solid piece of two solid pieces of plastic.
John:
I suppose the two pieces of plastic could come apart, but that seems much less likely than that stupid rubber thing coming off.
Marco:
The way most headphones die is internal fraying of the cable where it meets the headphone.
Marco:
Or occasionally where it meets the jack end.
Marco:
But usually it's the headphone end.
Marco:
Almost always.
Marco:
Because it's one of those strain boot points.
Marco:
And the strain boots never really do that much.
Marco:
And that's it.
John:
I've never had a pair of AirPods.
John:
And I didn't have the original iPod.
John:
I believe the first one I got was the terrible one with the four touch buttons on it.
John:
I guess that was the...
John:
third generation or something anyway i've never had a pair of apple earbuds go bad like they all still work uh so i think i'm really gentle on them and speaking of being gentle on them one of the things people were suggesting with it to solve the problem of like uh you know when someone walks up to you got to fish the ipod out of your pocket and turn it off if you don't have the clicker or whatever said i'll just yank the headphone uh jack out because that'll stop playback yeah it will but you'll destroy your headphones doing that you'll probably destroy the jack too but you'll definitely destroy the headphones they're it's not designed to be yanked out repeatedly so
John:
That is not a viable option for me.
Marco:
One thing I actually looked into as a potential feature for Overcast is to allow you to just tap the phone really hard with your finger while it's in your pocket and allow that to mimic the clicker controls.
John:
I thought of that and I was going to suggest that to you, but then I thought about it a little longer and I said, this is a terrible idea.
Marco:
Well, yeah, that's pretty much what happened.
Marco:
I mean, I tried like reading some of the accelerometer data to see if I could reliably detect that versus any other kind of motion.
Marco:
And it was just really hard.
Marco:
I don't think it would ever be good enough to like reliable enough to detect that without having a bunch of false positives.
John:
And you don't want to encourage people to be whacking their iOS devices, even if it's just a fingertip.
John:
Because once you open that door, you know how human nature, you'll tap, you'll tap harder, and you'll tap it again.
John:
Right.
John:
I'm going to make a Raymond Williams reference, but you've never even heard of that movie.
Casey:
Nope.
John:
Nope.
John:
That's all right.
John:
Finger go right through the iPhone.
John:
Boom.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Okay.
John:
I'll get a show notes link for it.
Marco:
Go ahead.
Marco:
We were sponsored this week, once again, by our friends at Dash.
Marco:
Go to thedash.com.
Marco:
T-H-E-Dash.com.
Marco:
Not an actual Dash.
Marco:
This is like that McSweeney's hard-to-pronounce email addresses.
Marco:
T-H-E-D-A-S-H.com.
Marco:
So it's not like a hyphen or anything.
Marco:
Anyway, go to thedash.com slash ATP.
Marco:
And this is really cool.
Marco:
They basically allow you to build your own custom dashboard.
Marco:
And it can be public or private.
Marco:
And you can fill it up with all sorts of widgets.
Marco:
And you can customize it.
Marco:
You can make your own widgets.
Marco:
You can do widgets for things like your site traffic or recent tweets or your recent GitHub commits if you're a developer.
Marco:
All sorts of things, social activity, traffic activity, all sorts of things.
Marco:
If you can picture a graph or a status widget for it, they probably have it or can or will add it.
Marco:
It's really great.
Marco:
So they have a bunch of pre-built widgets for you to use.
Marco:
They're adding more all the time.
Marco:
vanity searches all sorts of stuff you can put up there you know a lot of it like like we compared it last week to panic's excellent status board app for ipad it's kind of like that for the web and in my opinion pretty pretty uh well expanded from that they do a lot more a lot more comes with it um
Marco:
Really great.
Marco:
Dashboards from Dash look great on a TV if you want.
Marco:
You can connect it via Apple TV or via a Chromecast.
Marco:
The pricing model is really quite simple.
Marco:
It's a lot like GitHub.
Marco:
So you can always create unlimited public dashboards for free.
Marco:
And if you sign up, you can create one private dashboard for free.
Marco:
And then if you want, you can just pay $10 a month.
Marco:
to have unlimited private dashboards.
Marco:
So you can have internal stuff kept private for your company or whatever.
Marco:
Uh, but if you want to go there, play with it, create a public dashboard, go right ahead.
Marco:
That's free.
Marco:
You can even get one private dashboard for free.
Marco:
Um, really great thing.
Marco:
Go to the dash.com slash ATP run by great people.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
I met one of them last year and really nice guy and big fan of us.
Marco:
And so if you go to the dash.com slash ATP, you can even see the dashboards that he made for me, John and Casey.
Marco:
And they're actually pretty funny.
Marco:
So definitely check that out.
Marco:
Really cool.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to dash.
Marco:
Once again, the dash.com slash ATP for sponsoring our show.
John:
A couple of people are asking on Twitter about different widgets because you mentioned, you know, widgets to interface different services and stuff.
John:
And if you go to support.thedash.com, you can vote on basically the next widgets that they'll introduce.
John:
So this is ideas from the community for widgets they want, and you can vote up the ones that you want to see.
John:
So it's obviously an expandable platform, and they're adding widgets as they're demanded.
Casey:
So tell us about your Accord.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So last week I said that I couldn't figure out how to get or I thought it didn't see my iPod touch at all.
John:
But many people who have an accord of the same vintage and iPod touches of the same vintage said, no, it'll it'll find it.
John:
And so I took another run at it.
John:
And sure enough, it's just because the interface is terrible.
John:
Like it's got this thing that says connect new device.
John:
And then it says search for devices.
John:
And it says searching.
John:
And then this voice comes over and tells you if your device is incompatible, go to blah, blah, blah.
John:
And just searching, searching, searching, searching.
John:
And then it says no device is found.
John:
And I thought that was it looking for devices, but apparently there's a whole other feature where you have to say, like, I don't know what the difference between searching for a device and adding a new devices, but they're different functions.
John:
And I don't even remember how I found that.
John:
Eventually, I found my way to a different menu, which is not searching for device, but adding a new device, which is somehow a different thing.
John:
And it did find my iPod touch.
John:
So the next time I commute to work, I will do so in Bluetooth glory.
Marco:
you're gonna see you're gonna become a convert it's really really convenient like that this is what i was saying last episode i think i think this was edited out but being able to get in the car and just have it start playing is just so much better and more convenient than having to plug in for any reason like it's it's worth not having your phone charge during your car ride um just for that convenience and you know anything that cars do that requires me to plug in
Marco:
I'm going to have a really hard time convincing myself that's worth doing now because it's just so nice to just get in.
Marco:
It starts playing.
Marco:
When you turn the car off, it pauses.
Marco:
Done.
John:
I still got to plug in my headphones for the for the walk from the parking garage to the office.
John:
So there's still a little a little bit.
John:
I had to do that anyway with the iPod shuffle.
John:
But yeah, now I've got the clicker for that, too, so.
Casey:
Is that long enough to justify rocking headphones?
John:
Oh, yeah, definitely.
John:
Down six flights of stairs, up three flights of stairs.
John:
I mean, it's and walk from the garage to the building.
John:
We don't all live in rural Virginia where your parking spot is right in front of your ground level office building.
Casey:
i'm going to choose not to engage so we should probably talk about wwdc predictions because by the time this episode comes out it will be mere days before the big event and i wanted to start with hardware and this is a little bit of a tangent but um
Casey:
There's been a lot of talk about larger iPhones, and it certainly does not stand to history or recent history that we'll see any new iPhones during WWDC.
Casey:
But that being said, let's suppose, even if it doesn't happen during WWDC, let's suppose that there are, what are the two sizes?
Casey:
4.7 and 5.5.
Casey:
5.5?
Marco:
Which is pretty big.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So I wanted to ask Marco specifically, because you seemed most enthusiastic about these bigger sizes.
Casey:
Let's assume, just for the sake of conversation, that both 4.7 and 5.5 are real and they exist.
Marco:
Oh, so much anxiety.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
But let's also assume that the effective resolution is no different.
Casey:
So I don't recall exactly what resolution the iPhones are today, but
Casey:
Whatever the size is that they blow it up to, they blow it up.
Casey:
There's no more effective real estate.
Casey:
Would you still want one?
Casey:
Or are you really excited for them strictly based on the thought that you could shove more things onto the screen?
Marco:
Now, you know, there was a rumor a couple of weeks back that iOS 8, I think this was on 9to5Mac, that iOS 8 was going to include some kind of new resolution scaling feature, possibly based on the way Mac OS X does it on the Retina MacBook Pros.
Marco:
If that actually happens, if there is some kind of feature where you can actually simulate higher resolutions or somehow adjust the size of things on screen to make everything small.
Marco:
I mean, there's universal text sizing, but it isn't that well supported yet.
Marco:
But if this feature exists and you can actually dynamically scale things, then I would probably be tempted to go with the big one.
Marco:
Or if the big one actually does have a higher resolution, I'd be pretty tempted to go for it.
Marco:
I'm not sure I would keep it.
Marco:
Like, you know, the year after, I might go back to the, quote, small 4.7 inch size.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm curious to try it.
Marco:
I've never had a large screen phone.
Marco:
And I know a lot of people say they're too big, but a lot of people love them.
Marco:
And, you know, for how I use it,
Marco:
Especially since I don't really use an iPad very often.
Marco:
I use my phone for everything when I'm not at my computer.
Marco:
So I'd be really curious to try the big phone.
Marco:
That being said, if it's only a pure scale up in the resolution and there's not more pixels and it doesn't put in more capability to see more on screen with the same resolution...
Marco:
I'd have a really hard time justifying the bigger one because it's like, well, what am I really getting for that?
Marco:
I mean, and you are getting something like you could theoretically set the universal text size smaller and fit more on screen with text, but it wouldn't quite have the same effect.
Casey:
Having also never had a larger phone, I don't see myself carrying a larger phone in my pocket.
Casey:
Anything over five inches for sure.
Casey:
And I'm not overly enthusiastic about a 4.7-inch phone.
Casey:
But as with all things that I claim I either don't understand or don't like...
Casey:
like Macs and iPhones and BMWs and many other things I'm not thinking of.
Casey:
I'm sure I will probably come around on this, but I don't know.
Casey:
I don't have an overabundance of pocket space as it is, and I don't even fancy skinny jeans or anything like that.
Casey:
So I just I can't imagine having like a five inch plus phone sitting in my pocket all the time.
Casey:
That does not sound enjoyable to me.
John:
i think a lot of people a lot of uh you know apple enthusiasts would end up getting it just like margo said just to see what it's like because presumably these people have only ever had iphones like they're you know they've only been buying iphones haven't tried any other kind of phone you're gonna try it just i mean i guess you won't be able to tell from holding in the story but like well i don't know like you'll want to just buy it own it you know you're gonna get a new phone next year or the year after anyway
John:
Give it a try.
John:
And then you'll find out probably within the first couple of weeks or couple of months if this is for you or not.
John:
But since it's a novelty in the Apple iOS device space, I think a lot of people are going to buy it just to see what it's like.
John:
So Apple kind of gets an out in that regard.
John:
And regular people who aren't listening to this podcast and aren't Apple enthusiasts, they're already buying big phones.
John:
So it's not a big deal to them.
John:
It's only a big deal to people like us.
Marco:
Also, the screen might not be the only difference.
Marco:
Obviously, a larger phone can fit a larger battery, and some of that battery power is going to be spent lighting that larger screen, but probably not all of it.
Marco:
Assuming they have the same logic board, motherboard inside, and it's just that same board plus larger battery on the bigger phone versus smaller battery on the smaller phone, you'd probably get better battery life on the bigger one.
Marco:
And it might not be by a whole lot, but I bet it would be noticeable.
Marco:
Secondly, if they do different thicknesses, and I talked about this on the talk show, which we'll get back to in a minute.
Marco:
I talked about this on the talk show a while back, talking about a big phone, but if they do different thicknesses, they might...
Marco:
have different camera sensors.
Marco:
And camera sensors on phones, thickness tends to be the limiting factor in how good they can be.
Marco:
And that's why you see Android phones having these big blobby things where the camera is in the back so they can make that thicker and put a nice sensor in there and nice optics.
Marco:
Because optics, you just get to physical limits where you just need depth to make larger sensors, larger optics, things like that to make better image quality.
Marco:
And the rumors are that there's going to be this iPhone Air.
Marco:
It's the biggest one and it's super thin.
Marco:
if the big one is thinner and has a worse camera as a result, then that's going to be a pretty big downside for me, and I would almost certainly not get it.
Marco:
I would say if the cameras are different at all between the two sizes, and obviously this is assuming a lot.
Marco:
It's a disclaimer up front.
Marco:
This is assuming that there even are two iPhones.
Marco:
And by the way, we probably won't hear about them next week.
Marco:
We'll probably hear about them in the fall.
Marco:
But assuming...
Casey:
assuming that that there are two phones if there's any difference in the camera at all between them i will almost certainly pick the one with the better camera no matter what size it is you you you pre-derailed us casey you put in stuff about a phone which we all think is going to be released in september and in the section about wwdc predictions well yes i'm sorry i just i really wanted to ask marco about this because sitting here now like i said i have no enthusiasm about a bigger phone although clearly the rest of the planet quite literally does so i don't know i just wanted to ask real fast
Marco:
Before we move on, and before we forget, speaking of the talk show, so Gruber announced on the talk show today that he's doing a live show at WBDC on, what is it, Tuesday?
Marco:
Mm-hmm.
Marco:
And we will be the guests on that live show.
Marco:
So, we decided not to do our own live show because it's just a lot of work and...
Marco:
you know, he's doing one and we'll just invade his.
Marco:
So, uh, so if you want to hear us invade the talk show, um, live at WWDC next week, uh, tickets are not available right now as we record, but by the time we post this, they will be.
Marco:
So we'll, we'll put a link in the show notes.
Marco:
Uh, so let me, uh, so keep, you know, look at the show notes basically and see tickets are probably going to go pretty quickly.
Marco:
So, um, go quickly if you want to come and hopefully we will see you there.
Marco:
And where would people find those show notes?
Marco:
Listen to the song.
Marco:
I don't know.
Uh,
John:
Yeah, see, but the song has to fit every episode.
John:
It says you can find the show notes at ATP.FM, but in the back-to-work tradition, you have to give the full URL.
John:
And now that you've made the nice short URLs, you can do that, can't you?
Marco:
Well, they're not that short.
Marco:
It's ATP.FM slash episodes slash 67, right?
Marco:
Is this number 67?
Marco:
Dan?
Marco:
Dan?
Marco:
Yes, it is.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
And also, you are lying.
Casey:
ATP.FM slash 67 should work.
Casey:
That does work.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
So, yeah.
Casey:
So, ATP.fm slash 67.
Marco:
Once again, WWDC, Tuesday evening.
Marco:
I don't know what time.
Marco:
Either 6 or 7.
Casey:
6 to 9 at Mezzanine, which is a really nice venue.
Casey:
Yeah, it's going to be a good show.
Casey:
So, check it out.
John:
Yes, we will all be there.
John:
I will be there in person.
John:
I'm flying out to do a live podcast.
John:
You're welcome.
Marco:
We actually convinced him to do this.
John:
Because I do not want to do a live podcast, and yet I am.
John:
So if you wanted to see me... He doesn't want to do a live podcast.
Marco:
He doesn't want to fly.
John:
No, I don't want to do this at all.
John:
But, you know, I'll survive.
John:
So anyway, all three of us will be there in the flesh.
Casey:
So, okay, WWDC stuff.
Casey:
Let's start with the rest of the hardware, the stuff that they actually may announce at WWDC.
Casey:
Do we see a Retina MacBook Air happening?
John:
When they lowered the price on the current ones, you know, when they revised them and took off $100, at first I thought that was a clear sign that they were making room for the one and only 12-inch Retina Air model.
John:
But then I thought maybe it's just their preemptive move because they don't have that ready and they just want to make these more attractive until they do have it ready.
John:
And now I can't decide.
Marco:
Well, I think you're right because Intel's having some issues getting the next CPU.
Marco:
I believe it's Broadwell.
Marco:
Intel's having some issues with that, getting that on time.
Marco:
And so it's basically been pretty widely rumored and speculated and maybe even said by Intel that...
Marco:
They're basically not going to have new CPU models out until December at the earliest.
Marco:
And there's different times for the different releases.
Marco:
So the MacBook Air super low power CPU might come out at a different time than the ones the iMac uses and stuff like that.
Marco:
But basically, it's looking unlikely that Apple is going to have a compelling reason to update the current line of anything anytime soon.
Marco:
that doesn't mean they can't launch a new one like if they wanted to do a retina macbook air or any you know any new size of a laptop they could just ship it with the existing cpu family it's it wouldn't be that big of a deal i don't know about that because i always assume that retina would be rating for broadwell just for power concerns because the extra power needed by the screen is broadwell a die shrink or a process shrink
Marco:
I think it is, but I'm not sure.
John:
Oh, yeah, it is.
John:
It's 14 nanometers, isn't it?
John:
So that does matter.
John:
I would imagine that Apple's roadmap was based on the assumption that they would have Broadwell in time for a mid-year Retina MacBook Air.
John:
With the price drop and the revisions before WWDC, like I said, that could go both ways.
John:
It could be like, well...
John:
You would want to keep those in the lineup because they're still good computers, but they revised them.
John:
Did you see the Macworld speed test on them?
John:
They're actually slower than the models they replaced in a couple of measures.
Marco:
Was that just because of the SSD?
Marco:
There was a thing that came out that first said, oh my god, the SSDs are actually slower.
Marco:
And then a couple days later, it came out that, oh, well, actually, there's always been variance in which SSD manufacturer you get when you buy your MacBook Air.
Marco:
There's always been variances in them, and the current variances are nothing new.
John:
Yeah, that could be true.
John:
But you would think that Macworld would get the models with the fast ones.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
But anyway, the point is they're not the revisions of the existing models are not like, oh, these are so much faster than last year's.
John:
You know, it's just it's a price drop and performance is the same, maybe a little bit better, maybe a little bit worse, depending on what your previous one and what your current one is.
John:
Screens, not a big change there or anything.
John:
So it's like that they're being pushed down market and kept on life support to make room for something.
John:
And I can't decide whether doing that before WWDC means they're making room for an announcement at WWDC or doing it before WWDC means this is not, and we don't have anything nice to say, so we won't say anything at all at WWDC and you'll just all wait, Mac Pro style, for us to come out with the real replacement machines.
Marco:
I'm guessing it's the latter just because, you know, we know we know that Intel is having these issues with with the new generation of CPUs.
Marco:
So we know that this current generation of MacBook Airs has to last longer than expected.
John:
I would still be excited for Apple to announce the machine, show it and say it's not shipping until like October.
John:
And then in October, have it slipped to December like that.
John:
I would basically I want to see what the new machine looks like, even if I can't have it until the end of the year.
Marco:
So basically exactly what they did with the Mac Pro last year.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
You know, it's like not that people are dying for new errors, but by pushing the existing ones down, it's like now the air feels like kind of a loser machine.
John:
It's like we know there's a replacement coming and it's not here yet.
John:
So they haven't been waiting years like the Mac Pro people, but still...
John:
I mean, we'll get to any other hardware we think might be announced, but we all agree probably no phones because they're in September these days.
John:
The iPads have just been updated.
John:
If they're not going to show a red in the air, do they have any hardware to announce at WWC?
Marco:
Well, there's always room for a new category.
Casey:
I was just thinking that and just put it in the show notes to talk about.
Casey:
We may do the wearables thing.
Casey:
I want so badly to have a clever idea as to what that would be, but I cannot come up with anything.
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Casey:
So what about Apple TV at WWDC, either software or hardware?
John:
The hardware is kind of like the iPod Touch hardware at this point.
John:
It's like Apple updates it, but it's in no real hurry.
John:
They're a single core A5 in the current Apple TV, right?
Marco:
Yeah, the shrunk version.
John:
At a certain point, it becomes like USB 1.0, where it's more expensive to put on a computer than 2.0, because everybody's making 2.0 chips.
John:
I mean, it's different because only Apple's making the A5.
John:
But still, at this point, you feel like Apple must have worked through their inventory of A5s with a bum core.
Marco:
No, these are now custom chips.
Marco:
Remember, and I think it was in Antec, did the teardown, where as of a year and a half ago, they're actually making custom chips that right now are only in the Apple TV.
Marco:
They only have one core to begin with.
John:
Apple TV, it's not slow per se, but it's certainly not a speed demon.
John:
And the interface is clunky.
John:
And no one's really talking about an Apple television set anymore.
John:
We're just assuming they're going to update the puck.
John:
But we all think the puck software and experience needs to be updated.
John:
And I think part of that updated experience, if they ever bring it, would have to be a faster CPU and maybe some more memory to support what we hope is a better UI than just a massive grid of rounded rectangles that you can't.
John:
navigate between and that appear randomly on your thing so there are an awful lot of sessions on the wwc schedule that are like to be announced and those all can't be like oh here's the new x code or whatever like there's got to be something i should have done the count did anyone do the count of how many are like to be announced this year versus last year
Marco:
Well, I remember last year there were a lot that were to be announced that weren't about any kind of special secret thing.
Marco:
Basically, what they tend to do is anything that includes in its name or description the name of any unreleased thing or unannounced thing does not get put in the app until keynote day, until after the keynote.
Marco:
And so it's like, you know, it might even be like the title, like a session might be, you know, one of those to be announced titles now.
Marco:
And it might just be like, what's new in networking on iOS 8?
Marco:
You know, and that's just because iOS 8 hasn't been announced yet.
Marco:
So they mark it as secret.
Marco:
So you can't really tell by that.
John:
I suppose, but like...
John:
i was trying to look at the categories because the secret ones do have categories applied to them so you can see one's dev tools like like you look at the day and the time and the fact that it's dev tools like that's the xcode 6 uh you know session and like there's a couple ones like media like in a prominent slot what would they have to do about medias like some new av foundation stuff and like oh god i hope not
John:
I'm trying to figure out that if they did a big Apple TV revision, say, allowing apps of some kind or making an SDK for it or something like that, are there enough slots in prominent positions to do that?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, I didn't put the iPod Touchdown here, too, but God knows when they're going to update that.
John:
But I would like to see a revision of the Apple TV version.
John:
Even if they just do a hardware bump and like a reasonable software revision, like I said, we've given up for the Apple TV set.
John:
You've given up for them fixing TV because, you know, all the rumors are that any TV stuff they have is not this year.
John:
Probably.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm again, I'm trying to think of like, so what hardware do we get?
John:
No hardware in the WDC announcement.
Marco:
Which do you think will be updated first?
Marco:
The iPod Classic, the iPod Touch, or the Mac Mini?
John:
I'm going to go with Mac Mini there, I think.
Casey:
I think it'll be the iPod Touch.
John:
That's a tough race, though.
John:
They're both pretty in the glass.
John:
It's not going to be the iPod Classic, I'll tell you that.
John:
I don't think they'll change that until they can't get the parts anymore.
Marco:
Discontinuing it would count as an update.
Marco:
In that case, maybe.
Yeah.
John:
I really am having a hard time thinking of hard.
John:
I get someone put a Retina MacBook Pros and those are they're not due for an update, but they could be.
John:
But then what would you do to them besides reducing the price and maybe offering more RAM or bigger, faster SSDs?
John:
Like if Broadway is not ready, you're not going to change the CPUs.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
That's the problem.
Marco:
That's why I don't think we're going to see any new Macs unless they are a new form factor using the old CPUs.
Marco:
because there's just there's nothing new to put in them apple does not do make your updates to products uh without a new intel chipset to put in them they just don't they you know they'll do minor stuff and that won't even you know bother with an announcement or they'll do a whole new line that doesn't need a new cpu because they can use something that was already available in a new way uh but they're not going to release like you know because you're right yeah what would they do it's like
Marco:
like i know they're not going to announce a new mac pro already because there's no new zeon yet and you can always tell when they're going to announce new mac pros well usually uh you you were able to always tell before they went three years without doing anything to it by just looking at the zeon roadmap say all right well when are there new zeons coming out that are that are the series that the mac pro uses and as soon as there's new zeons within a month or two there's new mac pros uh
Marco:
Same thing with the laptops.
Marco:
You can see Intel's roadmap and Intel releases new CPUs about every year and this year's are delayed.
Marco:
And so therefore, I suspect it's a pretty safe bet that all new Mac launches are going to be delayed until the winter or the spring.
John:
See, this is the perfect time for them to rev the iPod Touch at WWDC.
John:
Because, like, it's so far behind that it's easy to, like, you put an A6 in it.
John:
You know, I'm not even asking for an A7.
John:
I'll put an A7 in it.
John:
Who cares?
John:
Wait, it's still A5?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
I think it is.
John:
I can't even keep track.
John:
It's so old.
John:
I don't even remember how old it is.
Marco:
No, it has the tall screen, right?
Marco:
Like the iPhone 5.
John:
So it probably has an A6 in it.
John:
Oh, I don't know.
John:
Someone look it up.
John:
It's super slow compared to the iPhone 5S.
John:
I'll tell you that.
John:
Yeah, the chat room says A5 still.
John:
Oh, that's terrible.
John:
And not that I think they're going to do this, but like it's the one product that they have that they could easily provide an update to if they cared, but they don't.
John:
So whatever.
Marco:
And they hardly sell any of them.
John:
Yeah, that's what I'm saying.
John:
It's not going to happen.
John:
But if they were desperate for some hardware, that would be a gimme.
Marco:
You're keeping the entire line afloat.
Marco:
You're the only one buying it.
John:
No, lots of children.
John:
I just bought another one.
John:
I couldn't believe I did this because it's against my religion to buy an Apple device this old.
John:
I bought one for my son because he wanted one for his birthday.
John:
And so now he's got one.
John:
He's like, it's the worst time to buy this thing.
John:
But kids like them.
John:
My daughter's upset that she doesn't have one.
John:
So now she wants one.
John:
So I'm trying to resist buying a second one or a third one.
John:
I don't know how many.
John:
We've got a lot of iPod touches in this house.
Marco:
Just get the new iPhone this fall and give her your current one.
John:
Done.
John:
Yeah, we'll see about that.
John:
We'll see what the new iPhone looks like.
John:
If it's a big, giant 5.5 inch thing, I don't know.
Marco:
It's going to look like an iPhone.
John:
What do you mean?
John:
It's going to look like an iPad mini if the rumors are to be believed.
John:
yeah and maybe the big one does you know maybe the quote iphone air that the the big 5.5 inch one um yeah we'll see i don't know all right so hardware it seems like we don't know what the heck is going on here with hardware we can't none of us can think of anything that we think is a slam dunk for hardware wwdc
Marco:
If they're going to do another MacBook Air, I bet they will do it here.
Marco:
If they're going to do a 12-inch something, this would be a good time to do it because they have no other good existing product updates.
Marco:
But really, I think the most obvious answer is if they're going to announce any hardware at all, which is not a given, but if they're going to announce any hardware at all,
Marco:
It's probably going to be some new category.
Marco:
And, you know, not just Retina Mac, but, you know, something like watch sensor, earbud, pinky ring, whatever, you know, some kind of new thing.
Marco:
Because this is a really good time to do that.
Marco:
If they're announcing, and it could even just be...
Marco:
apple tv you know 10.0 or whatever where apple tv is now a full-fledged platform that you can write apps for or something like that you know that could be the big thing this year and some of those sessions that we don't know anything about that have to do with media could be apple tv development that's true
John:
I haven't been following the rumors that closely, but hasn't the consensus been that Apple wearable sensor support and stuff would come in iOS 6, but Apple supporting hardware would only come later in the year?
John:
I haven't been keeping up.
Marco:
you mean eight but yeah i mean i think it's tough i mean they it wouldn't be unprecedented for them to have wwdc not mention anything and then announce new hardware in the fall that has some new feature and then like spring on developers with like a 0.1 update or the very last beta sdk or something like that like that they have done that before um in fact they did it with the m7 uh the m7 chip and the f15s uh they did that that whole thing
Marco:
but something that's that's actually like a big a big deal like a new sensor a whole new sensor type i mean that would be tough and and if they're going to show off health book you know maybe they might pre-announce something involving that because it's kind of you know health book as we know it right now with the sensors that we that we know about now is pretty much just pedometer plus plus um but if you if they're going to do new sensors and they become more valuable so i don't know
Marco:
I'm guessing that we see some new category be announced at WWDC, and I don't know what that category will be, whether it's Apple TV major update that's now developable or whether it's a wristband watch thing.
Marco:
Who knows?
Marco:
I bet it's going to be something like that.
Marco:
There's something that we have not been able to develop for or use before that we can now develop for or use.
Casey:
I suppose.
Casey:
Do you think it's about time for the Apple TV to get a visual refresh?
Casey:
The software, not the hardware.
John:
Yeah, that's what I was talking about.
John:
Stop being a stupid grid of rounded rectangles and start having a richer interface.
Casey:
I'm thinking it's so dark now and iOS 7 is so bright.
Casey:
I almost wonder if just making it brighter and more iOS 7-like would be an improvement.
Casey:
And additionally, isn't it running not a fork, but kind of a fork of iOS?
Casey:
Isn't that right?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, it definitely does not.
Marco:
It looks dated.
Marco:
No question.
Marco:
It looks dated.
Marco:
I don't think the interface is scaling very well.
Marco:
Like as they keep adding more and more of these channels and the rounded oval keeps getting, you know, the list of those keeps getting longer and longer and longer.
Marco:
It definitely is not scaling well.
John:
I mean, if you just look at like, look at Roku and Amazon's TV, Fire TV thing, like for where Apple TV, like what its competition is currently doing.
John:
And Apple is still pretty far behind that.
John:
Although as a Plasma TV owner, I hope Apple does not go the iOS 7 route and make it all white.
John:
And anyone who owns a Plasma TV knows why.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Marco:
Wait, hold on.
Marco:
Why?
Marco:
Is that because it makes it hotter?
John:
Yeah, white screens use more power.
John:
More power draw causes the Transformer buzz to be louder.
John:
And yes, all the lovely sacrifices that I make, including having fans in my television to get superior picture quality.
John:
One of them is if you make the screen all white, you get a more audible Transformer buzz.
John:
So having a black background is preferable to me.
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Casey:
I'm going to choose to believe that they deliberately put that branding stuff in the ad read because they knew that you would be the one reading it.
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Casey:
Oh, right.
Casey:
Anyway, anything else on wearables?
John:
Yeah, we've had it in the show notes for a while.
John:
We linked to Craig Hockenberry's thing about Apple wearables.
John:
And I've been thinking about it as well.
John:
And my thinking on wearables has changed over time.
John:
Over time of Apple doing nothing.
John:
And the more I think about wearables...
John:
Everyone keeps seeing in their head something that goes around your wrist that has this amazing futurist-looking screen on it that does something or that you interact with by swiping.
John:
You see these mock-ups and they look really cool, but it's like, well, then how would you use it?
John:
And everything we're seeing from actual rumors from Apple are like the health book stuff.
John:
And that's all about having an application on your phone that integrates information from other sensors.
John:
So when I think of Apple wearables now, I keep thinking of things that either don't have screens or have things that are like barely screens.
John:
I mean, like the Fitbits have their various little displays with the LEDs and stuff, because screens are a problem.
John:
Like,
John:
You can't have a screen on all that.
John:
There's a reason that these Fitbit and things like that don't have big LCD screens in them.
John:
You can't have a screen on all the time.
John:
The battery will run out.
John:
I mean, you don't have your phone screen on all the time.
John:
You just take it out.
John:
You look at the screen.
John:
You put it away.
John:
You turn the screen off.
John:
But if the screen's not on all the time, it can't really function as a watch because you got to, you know, think of all the smart watches that make you do the little jiggle shake to turn on or tap it to turn on or, you know.
John:
And I'm thinking, like, what does Apple want out of this?
John:
They want...
John:
more sensors and more information integrated into your phone, does that require a screen that's always on or a screen at all?
John:
Not that I'm saying that Apple wearable won't have a screen, but I think there is a place in our current conception with the known information of what Apple's trying to do with sensors and integration for a thing that you attach to your person or clothing somewhere that doesn't need to have a screen.
John:
And it could be that they also have a device that has a screen,
John:
Everything I'm seeing out of Apple makes me think some little turdy thing that will look nice but doesn't need to have screens.
John:
Does that mean it's a ring like Hockenberry's thing?
John:
No, I think that's still a fantasy.
John:
I can't imagine them pulling that off.
John:
Although, feel free to prove me wrong, Apple.
John:
Does it mean it couldn't be around your wrist?
John:
Maybe it could.
John:
Maybe they're going to use some breakthrough screen technology that can be on all the time.
John:
Or maybe they're going to use color e-ink.
John:
There's all sorts of crazy things you can come up with.
John:
And certainly a lot of the rumors from years ago were like Apple's investigating curved, flexible screen technology for things that will go around your wrist and you can still touch them and stuff like that.
John:
But I just wanted to throw that out there that the vibe I've been getting from the information available is that there is a place in Apple's grand conception of health monitoring and health book and stuff like that for something that doesn't necessarily have to have something that we would recognize as a screen.
Casey:
Yeah, I completely agree.
Casey:
I think if Apple does do some sort of wearable thing, I am pretty convinced it will not have a screen.
Casey:
And additionally, I think it will have some sort of sensor, almost certainly health related, that the iPhone either can't or doesn't or perhaps won't have.
Casey:
I don't know what that would be.
Casey:
Pulse would be a great example if you could do it comfortably, but I can't imagine how that would work unless you could grab whatever latent electricity you have in your wrist or finger or whatever.
Casey:
Personally, I see it as whatever their wearable is as a mechanism to...
Casey:
sell more phones because, hey, look at all this wonderful health or perhaps other kind of data you can get into the phone if you have the Apple iRing.
Casey:
And I'm not sure it's going to be a ring, obviously, but just for the sake of conversation.
Casey:
So I agree with you, John.
Casey:
I'm pretty convinced it will not have a screen and will be all about sensors.
John:
Yeah, and the sensor stuff, I don't know a lot about medical sensors, but talking about being able to track O2 levels, don't those things use some kind of light they shine through your fingertips and stuff and see how red things are?
John:
I have no idea how these things work.
John:
But like...
John:
when i think of stuff like that i think of like well the iphone 6 could have you know the touch id sensor or someplace that you put your hand but you're not gonna have something clipped to your fingertip when you go through the day and you can't clip something to your you know the end of your shirt or your bra or something and have that measuring your o2 level so like i don't i don't even understand which parts of the body you need to clip things to to get this information or if it's going to be like a once or twice a day put your finger on the special spot on your iphone 6 type thing so uh
Marco:
you know i mean apple has been hiring these people for visualizations of medical information and remember those hires back then of like uh like there's there's so much smoke there and i just don't understand what what form the fire is going to take maybe you're right maybe it is the home button because that's something that you like if you think about all the different places you could have a wearable you have like you know wristbands but that could be on the outside of a shirt like if you have like a long sleeve shirt the wristband could be on the outside of it and you know maybe not always but it might be you can't really count on that
Marco:
you know rings I think you're right I think we're probably not there technically yet to be able to fit everything in something as small as a ring and yeah but the home button you're always pushing with your finger throughout the day and so that actually makes a lot of sense
John:
The wrist thing, even stuff like pulse, you would never want a wrist thing that was tight enough on your wrist to measure your pulse.
John:
People don't like things ripping them that tightly, you know what I mean?
John:
It's not like you'd be in a blood pressure cuff all day, but even just to pick up your pulse, I feel like you'd have to have something that is slightly uncomfortable.
John:
There's a reason that people don't walk around with these sensors on them all day.
John:
We go into the doctor's office and they hook these things up to you and you want to get them off, you know?
John:
So, I mean...
John:
i don't know like and the thing about wearables is like we're so much focused on health because that's the little nugget of information that we have from like vague screenshot rumor site type things of health book and it's like well what good what good you brought what good is health book how is that any different than phenomena plus plus unless you have some other information and if you where's that information coming from and that's why we get into like the well that's a third-party opportunity apple will basically make these apis and
John:
Fitbit and whoever can make new devices that will feed into this API.
John:
But then where is Apple in this?
John:
Where is the new category?
John:
That's the question we continue asking.
John:
And I guess we'll keep asking.
John:
If this year ends and there's nothing that you can wear from Apple and they haven't done anything to Apple TV, something is wrong because...
Marco:
you know tim said man new category this year i think you're right also that you know going back a step you know with the whole screen no screen thing like whatever this thing is i've said it before and i'll keep saying it every episode i would never bet against the smartphone at least not for a long time um in the current era that we are in the smartphone is king smartphones are awesome and it is so unwise to bet against them you
Marco:
As a tangent to that, if you're thinking about having something that you're also going to be carrying around, it makes so much more sense for it to be a smartphone accessory than its own standalone thing of some sort.
Marco:
And the smartphone has all the power.
Marco:
It has all the connectivity.
Marco:
It has way more battery power than you can fit in a, quote, wearable, unless the wearable is a backpack.
Marco:
uh and so it is unwise to try to cram a whole bunch of power sucking stuff into a wearable including a screen and yeah you could do like e-ink so it's it only takes power to change the content of the screen you could do that but e-ink looks like crap and uh i can't see apple doing that you can't touch that like you can't touch this well no you could but it just takes takes more power
John:
It wouldn't respond to your touch in real time.
John:
Like that's the whole point of touch is like that you feel like you're directly manipulating something.
John:
And all the mock-ups are like some big curved glass screen that looks like you're wearing like the bracelet equivalent of Cinderella's glass slippers, right?
John:
Let me just make something that's like solid glass, put it on my wrist so I can bang my wrist on the table and have shards of glass drive.
John:
Anyway, you know, that's what the fan, and then, but what would you do with that?
John:
Can you imagine trying to swipe a smooth glass?
John:
Half the time, you'd end up rotating it around your wrist.
John:
Where are you swiping anyway?
John:
Are you swiping longitudinally or across it?
John:
How could you use an interface?
John:
If you've tried to use any of the recent iPod nanos where they have touchscreens in a tiny little space, there's not much that you can do reasonably with a screen that size.
Marco:
And if you look at smartwatches that exist today from other people, in order to have any kind of interactivity on a smartwatch, it has to be pretty big and bulky.
Marco:
And that's not cool.
Marco:
It's not sexy.
Marco:
It is not appealing.
Marco:
It is a wearable, certainly, but it's a wearable that nobody wants to wear.
Marco:
And these things that are catching on big time, things like fuel bands and Fitbits...
Marco:
They're smaller.
Marco:
They're subtle.
Marco:
You don't have to take them out constantly.
Marco:
You can leave them tucked under your sleeve or clipped to your bra or in your pants pocket or something.
Marco:
You can leave them hidden away because wearing electronics is just not cool.
John:
What they start looking like is... I guess they start with Lance Armstrong, maybe breast cancer.
John:
All those things that people would wear as...
John:
showing their support for some cause or you know like those little color like the fuel bands look so much like the whatever you know lance armstrong bracelet things or the the breast cancer awareness pink things like and we've just sort of accepted that you'll have a regular outfit and then there'll be this other thing that you wear that doesn't call attention to itself and that you don't spend much time interacting with and those were totally non-functional they were just pieces of rubber that you that had words stamped into them they increased awareness john
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
And now now we have one that at least has stuff inside it that at the end of the day, I get to count my steps or whatever.
John:
And, you know, I just again, we should get someone here with a medical sensing expert to say this.
John:
They could probably tell us exactly.
John:
Look, if you want, you know, pulse, this is the only place you can get it.
John:
And this is how if you want, you know, blood oxygenation, this is the only places you can get it.
John:
And this is how because these answers are all out there.
John:
We just don't happen to know them.
Casey:
All right, so let's talk about OS 10, 10.10, 10.
John:
La OSS, Ferrari LaFerrari.
Casey:
Yeah, I feel like Super Troopers with the Meow game.
Casey:
Anyway, so...
Casey:
I think we can round up our show with iOS 8, but let's start with OS 10.
Casey:
God, I'm already stumbling.
Casey:
OS 10, 10.10.
Casey:
What do we expect?
Casey:
To me, I expect some sort of visual refresh.
Casey:
I don't think it'll be full bore iOS 7, but I think it'll be somewhere in that direction.
Marco:
I expect it's going to have another name of a place I haven't heard of that's awkwardly pluralized.
Casey:
I don't think it'll be awkwardly pluralized, but I do think that it will have... Maybe it will end with like ED or ING.
Casey:
I'm going to go on record and say it will be a place that we recognize, even as non-Californians, in a place where we aren't on vacation all the time.
John:
As much as I was rooting for the cat names to end, now that they have, I realize that with their new theme, it's basically impossible to try to guess.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like, there's a certain number of big cats, and they started to work their way through them, so it became a fun game to guess what the next one would be.
John:
But there's a lot of cities in California, so forget about that.
John:
A lot of places in California.
John:
And yeah, there are the prominent ones we can all think of, you know, Yosemite, San Francisco, whatever.
John:
But, like, considering they started with Mavericks, it seems like they're going obscure.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
The other thing, this is very minor, but I really, really want, and I believe this is a combination of iOS 8 and OS 10.
Casey:
I really want airdrop between my devices and my computer.
Casey:
Can we have that please?
Marco:
Yeah, I'm still emailing pictures to myself because it's faster than everything else.
Casey:
Yeah, it's so, so ridiculous.
Marco:
I still email so much crap to myself.
Marco:
It's really embarrassing.
Casey:
Yeah, I'd really like that, and I'd like a mail app that works properly.
Casey:
Although I like airmail quite a bit, but I'd like the standard out-of-the-box mail app to work again.
John:
Yeah, thinking about 10.10, besides the visual refresh, which I think is enough to, you know, that will obviously be like the headliner feature of this release.
John:
It's like now we finally have time to revise how things look and we'll all either love it or complain about it or depending on what they do.
John:
But that's a big change, and it could affect applications in profound ways.
John:
But in terms of the underpinnings, I don't think they're doing anything to underpinnings to enable this new look or anything.
John:
So what is this OS about?
John:
Is it just a visual refresh?
John:
What needs to be done to the core OS, and what could be done?
John:
Will they continue to just...
John:
uh i i mean i'm sure they'll make things better in little little bits but like last year the big theme was power saving and they had lots of technology to support that this year the big theme will be visual refresh but there's no technology to support that really i mean obviously new file system is evergreen and they can bring that out anytime they want but i have no expectations uh
John:
Everything else about the OS, like you can point to individual parts of the OS that can be tightened up and made better.
John:
But Mavericks, with the exception of the applications, because a lot of if you use the Apple Mail, you know, I feel sorry for you.
John:
But even before I haven't been a fan of that for a long time, but.
John:
That makes you think Mavericks was a terrible release.
John:
But in terms of the core OS, very, very few problems.
John:
I upgraded Mavericks everywhere really early.
John:
And there just have not been a lot of weird things, not even like weird application compatibility things.
John:
And we're only on 0.3.
John:
We went 1, 2, and 3 since last year.
Marco:
Yeah, I would say overall, with the exception of my clock always being fast, which I think 10.9.3 might have fixed, it's really solid.
Marco:
I've always wondered, well not always, I've wondered recently if it will ever be worth it for them to modernize AppKit.
Marco:
And maybe not replace it with UIKit, but bring a lot of the UIKit lessons back into AppKit.
Marco:
Because right now, if you want to write a GUI app for iOS and Mac, there's very little GUI code you can share because AppKit just works very, very differently than UIKit.
Marco:
It has a lot of legacy baggage, and I don't know enough about it to really talk that much more about it besides this very high-level overview, but...
Marco:
I've often wished... I know how to develop for iOS pretty well.
Marco:
Now I know UIKit really well.
Marco:
I don't know anything about AppKit.
Marco:
I just know it's very different.
Marco:
There's a lot of things that don't work the same way and aren't as nice or aren't as simple.
Marco:
And so it would be... I would love it if they would bring a lot of UIKit.
Marco:
The parts that make sense.
Marco:
Obviously, certain things aren't going to make sense outside of the full-screen touch environment.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Bring over the parts that make sense with things like how views are dealt with, you know, all the layer back stuff that you like.
Marco:
You can do all that in AppKit, but it's, you know, oftentimes it's like it's not the default or it's hard or it's different or it's somehow tricky.
Marco:
If they would bring some of that development framework and when you're doing a major visual refresh, that would be a pretty good time to do it, I think.
Marco:
That would go a long way.
Marco:
Unfortunately, I think that's very unrealistic because it just seems like they're stretched so thin and the Mac is not that high of a priority.
Marco:
That would justify all those development resources if they're also having to work on iOS 8, iPad version of it, which is still terrible.
Marco:
Plus, whatever else engineering resources are being devoted to for things like new categories, whether it's Apple TV or something.
Marco:
We know from hints and bits and pieces here and there, we know that a lot of people at Apple are working on something secret that is relatively new or relatively recent.
Marco:
But we still don't know what that is.
Marco:
So there's something else draining engineering resources at Apple.
John:
yeah i hate that phenomenon like that as far as we can tell from the outside that this this happens inside apple that something big new and important comes and that team like you know harvest the best engineers from other teams leaving them sort of with i guess the lesser people or the people who didn't want to move and those people go off and disappear for a while and work on some new thing it's like
John:
that's fun and makes for good articles after the fact, but it's kind of like, what if I like the products that those guys used to be working on?
John:
Now they're just going to get fewer resources.
John:
But I mean, I think, I think you're right about like the main thing preventing, like the reason we don't have parody, like Microsoft's been leaning on this recently, like, Hey, you can write a GUI app and you can run it in windows eight and you can run it on tablets and you can run it on phones.
John:
And it's like the same app with, you know, minor changes or whatever.
John:
But,
John:
And Apple doesn't have that.
John:
And I think it's mostly just because the Mac is not that big a platform compared to iOS.
John:
That's always going to be the thing when you're trying to prioritize resources.
John:
Well, how many iPhones did we sell last year and how many Macs?
John:
And they are modernizing AppKit.
John:
Didn't they make a new table system that doesn't use NSCell a couple of years back?
John:
it's not the same as like so here you go here's UIKit on the Mac but the worst warts get covered over but like it's just the people who are left there working on AppKit who are doing that and they don't have resources the iOS 18 is obviously much bigger I mean you're right as part of the visual refresh if the visual refresh includes like especially if it looks a lot like iOS 7 or the visual refresh relies more on layer back controls maybe it's a time to revise a few more APIs here and there but
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm having trouble thinking of core OS features unless you're thinking of something.
John:
I mean, not that I think it doesn't need them.
John:
I'm trying to think of features that that Apple would put the resources towards like the kernel and the core OS, like they could do lots of interesting things there.
John:
But what's their motivation for that?
John:
Right.
John:
I guess their motivation would be we want to do this because it will benefit, you know, the core OS stuff benefits iOS and OS 10.
John:
So if they change the kernel, you know, the Mac would just reap that benefit as, you know, as a side effect of doing that.
John:
But
Marco:
Right, like kernel stuff and core OS and shared frameworks, you know, things like, you know, from things like core animation all the way down to newer stuff, like, you know, Grand Central Dispatch and auto layout, like all these major advances that come to both platforms because they're lower level, that, you know, that will continue.
Marco:
You know, that'll be fine.
Marco:
But it's the high-level UI stuff that is so radically different between the two platforms that,
Marco:
And obviously, as I said, to some degree it should be because they're two different interaction paradigms, but there's a lot of stuff that could be shared that isn't, only because of legacy concerns, it seems.
Marco:
But I think you're right.
Marco:
I think it will never be worth it to Apple...
Marco:
to invest their engineering resources, which are very limited and strained, which I think is a big problem, but to invest their limited and strained engineering resources into this platform that is such a small part of their business these days, which is, again, I think it's a shame, and I think that's wrong.
Marco:
I think that's bad prioritization, but that's probably what they're going to do, because we see that
Marco:
as much as we want Apple to have more resources, for whatever reason, they just keep not having them.
Marco:
And they just seem to have a very small pool of engineering ability that they selectively choose.
Marco:
That's why some of the applications, the people in the chat were talking about how long it's been since Aperture's been updated.
Marco:
Aperture has always been dysfunctional in this regard, but it just seems like...
Marco:
Things that are not the new hotness at Apple just get ignored for years with nothing being done to them for years because there's nobody working on them.
Marco:
Or there's one person responsible for maintaining it while the rest of the team was sent off to do something newer and more exciting that's some new product or that's going to get them in the news again.
Marco:
And it's a shame because there's a lot of Apple stuff that really could use some attention and some love.
Marco:
And, you know, like what happened with iWork having gone so long with no update and then what feels like a pretty rushed update that happened kind of, you know, last fall that kind of messed everything up.
Marco:
This happens all over Apple's entire product line, both hardware and software, but especially in software.
Marco:
And you can just tell there's so much stuff in software where it just seems like no one's working on it.
Marco:
And that's probably the case because Apple's teams are kept pretty small.
John:
Yeah, on the file system front, the only hope I have is the file system is the type of thing.
John:
I mean, they could have been working on it for years without me hearing about it, I suppose.
John:
But
John:
A file system is something I don't think you can develop between two major releases.
John:
Like it's a multi-year project.
John:
You have to be super careful.
John:
You have to maintain all your semantics and presumably you're adding value.
John:
So there'd be new features to deal with as well.
John:
And yes, Apple desperately needs a new file system, but they don't seem to be working on one as far as I'm aware.
John:
But they do have core storage.
John:
And as I pointed out in my past OS X reviews, a lot of the things that core storage already does on Macs today are very similar to the things that a file system would need to do.
John:
So it's possible that what they've done for core storage can slowly continue to evolve its way towards a system whereby the disk appears to be HFS+, but most of the actual management of blocks on disk and APIs and everything, it ends up being core storage with a thin veneer of HFS-plus over it.
John:
Which is kind of... I mean, if you use core storage now, that's not...
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't know how they can manage the layering between those things because, like I said, core storage keeps track of where things are in disk and manages blocks and does all these interesting things and is actually one of the more interesting modern file system type things that Apple has done in recent years to enable things like the new FileVault, which is so much better than the old one.
John:
But, you know, this HFS Plus is still sitting there, still having crappy features, still corrupting itself, still, you know, still being its own, still being single-threaded, still being its own cranky self.
John:
And so HFS Plus is on iOS devices too.
John:
I'm always talking about this in the context of the Mac, but all your iPhones are running HFS Plus as well.
John:
I think they actually... Just restore your phone and quit all your apps.
John:
Do they run the case-sensitive version of it?
John:
I forget if they still did that or if they ever did that.
John:
But anyway,
John:
A new file system or a lack of a file system or like a native core storage against NAND or something, that would benefit iOS devices.
John:
And so I think that's got to happen eventually because that's Apple's bread and butter, right?
John:
It's not like, oh, this is just a Mac thing.
John:
It's never going to happen.
John:
No, it's an entire Apple platform thing.
John:
Everything uses HFS Plus.
John:
And...
John:
You know, there's performance to be had, there are features to be added, and there's reliability to be improved.
John:
Every axis along, you know, Apple can improve in this regard.
John:
And none of them, I guess Apple doesn't think any of them are critical.
John:
Well, it could be more reliable if it's reliable enough.
John:
Well, it could have better performance, but the performance is good enough.
John:
You know, well, we could have more features, but the features we have are good enough.
John:
They can keep saying that, but eventually it's going to not be true.
John:
And I hope they don't.
John:
You know, this is not like a new language API thing where they have to start 20 years ahead of time.
John:
But this is like a three year project.
John:
Easy.
Casey:
I mean, we'll see what happens.
Casey:
There's going to have to be a time where the file system changes.
Casey:
And I'm a little scared that if the file system does change, that you'll just quit this podcast because you'll have no reason to complain about it anymore.
Casey:
That seems unlikely.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Anything else on the new Mavericks that won't be called Mavericks?
Marco:
I'm really curious to just see what they do with it.
Marco:
I mean, like, you know, besides Visual Refresh, OS X is... It's pretty mature at this point.
Marco:
You know, the releases add less and less generally over time.
Marco:
If only there was somebody we could ask to verify that.
Marco:
But it just seems like, obviously, it's a mature product.
Marco:
The gains to be had are smaller and smaller in each release, especially by speeding up to releases happening every year as opposed to before where it was like every 18 to 24 months.
John:
Well, they still keep doing... That's the thing, though, with the yearly releases.
John:
They still keep doing stuff to the internals that I think I would never want to risk in a yearly release.
John:
That's why I'm so surprised that Mavericks has done so well.
John:
If you look at what they did with the power saving stuff and the new APIs, they're always monkeying with...
John:
you know even if it's just like screwing with launch d again or like you know they're adding minor features and doing minor tweaks and minor improvements but they're to parts of the system that if you screw up in any way nothing works you know and so even though they're not big changes every year they do that and like they did it in snow leopard too like oh you know no new features but they screw with everything in there i mean it's good like i think the core s team does a great job with that they're like you know what
John:
Bunchy's there and it works, but it could be better.
John:
And let's add these features and tighten this up and make it use less memory and do this.
John:
And it's like... Those features, all the way down to the kernel, if you mess up even the littlest bit of that, it destroys the stability and reliability of the entire OS.
John:
And Mavericks, I think, did a good job.
John:
They didn't do that.
John:
They screwed up the applications.
John:
Like, Mail and Gmail got all screwed up.
John:
But that's like...
John:
I think end users are more concerned about that.
John:
They're like, oh, Maverick sucks because my mail broke.
John:
And I understand that perspective.
John:
But from my perspective, I think of the OS as the core OS.
John:
And they continue to bravely make changes to the core OS on a yearly schedule in areas that are super risky and manage to not screw it up.
Casey:
Yeah, that's true.
Marco:
Yeah, I was actually surprised with all the Mavericks kernel changes, like changing kernel timings of things.
Marco:
That sounds like a pretty risky thing to do, but they did it, and it seemed like it was flawless.
Marco:
I mean, it seemed like it caused no noticeable problems.
John:
It was really quite solid.
John:
Or even your bad clock, like they screwed with NTPD, like they screwed with how they do time or whatever.
John:
Yeah.
John:
that's the type of thing we're like why did they change it was it broken before well no but someone said they could do it again a lot of us in terms of energy saving well you know let's let's do it so we can you know if we're doing things repeatedly we have they had all this new instrumentation to see what's who's waking up the cpu and stuff and like oh this stupid thing's waking up the cpu and like so they they change it and that's an example of where they they screwed it up and you know had bugs in it or whatever but everything's up for grads every if you run ps and see those bazillion processes
John:
Those are all things that they continue to improve.
John:
And one of the good ones is I haven't seen the stupid blurry icon bug that has been haunting OS X for years and years.
John:
Did you guys get this one where all of a sudden your dock icons will look like they're half res and be all pixelated and zoomed up?
Casey:
I've never seen that.
Marco:
I would occasionally get that with just one app would be half-res, and the next time I'd launch it, it would update it and be correct.
John:
Yeah, but it would spread like a virus.
John:
You'd open a window, and some of them would be messed up, and some of them would be good.
John:
That bug was in the OS for so long.
John:
And from people I talked to with Apple, they're like, oh, Mavericks will actually fix that.
John:
And fingers crossed, since upgrading to Mavericks, I have not seen that bug yet.
John:
And so that makes me happy because someone, you know, the icon services thing, or, you know, it's like when they update the font daemon or whatever.
John:
There's tons of processes there, and they keep improving them.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I like that.
John:
I just get a little bit nervous about it on a yearly schedule.
Casey:
One thing that struck me as a little weird is we haven't heard very much chatter about OS 10.10.
Casey:
There's been a lot of talk about HealthBook, about all the other things that may be coming in iOS.
Casey:
And I know that iOS is the darling of everyone's eye at the moment, but there's been very little talk that I've heard about 10.10.
Casey:
And that's a little scary if there's not much happening, but...
Casey:
Kind of awesome if they really finally did double down on secrecy.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see.
John:
Well, all the things we listed would be big.
John:
Visual refresh is going to be big.
John:
That's what everyone's going to write about, right?
John:
UIKit coming to the Mac would be big.
John:
That would be a headliner feature.
John:
Hey, all you iOS developers, now suddenly you have an easy way to make a Mac app, and we want to encourage you to do that because, you know, the halo effect to get the Mac more popular, right?
John:
new file system, core storage stuff would be big among nerds.
John:
There's plenty of areas that they could put on there that they could put those bullet points on the website and everyone would be like, wow, Mac OS X Sausalito was great.
John:
Is that a city in California?
Casey:
I don't even know.
Casey:
I believe it is.
Casey:
So to that end, before we start the iOS 8 talk, while you guys are going back and forth for a few minutes, and John, you were making a couple of really brilliant points before I had the chance to make them, and so I could have sounded brilliant, damn it.
Casey:
But I was looking at the schedule for WWDC, and I was digging through it and looking at the –
Casey:
the categories that each of these sessions are a part of.
Casey:
Because if you look at the schedule, even the ones that are TBA to be announced, they still have the category listed.
Casey:
So I looked, and by quick count, as I'm still trying to pay attention to what you guys are saying, there are 35 frameworks sessions, 17 media sessions, and 19 tool sessions.
And
Casey:
Additionally, I thought, well, let me look at what's in Presidio, which, if you don't know, is the biggest room within Moscone the way Apple sets it up.
Casey:
And so really important things that are going to be really, really popular for everyone to hear tend to be in Presidio.
Casey:
For example, the keynote.
Casey:
So I recounted, and among the things that are not yet announced, so the things that are still to be announced, there are six framework sessions in Presidio and eight media sessions in Presidio.
Casey:
And I didn't look at tools, crap.
Casey:
But I think there are eight tool sessions in Presidio.
Casey:
I did not look to see if any of them were to be announced.
Casey:
But that's actually, it looks like at least half of them are to be announced.
Casey:
Almost all of them, all the tools ones.
Casey:
That's a lot of tools and a lot of media and a lot of framework stuff all to be announced and all in Presidio.
Casey:
And it makes me wonder, is something big going on that we just don't realize more than just a visual refresh?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
What is the media category?
John:
Look at the announced ones in the media category.
John:
What the hell is the media category?
Marco:
Probably too long to do live, but we could look at last year's where there's nothing to be announced.
Marco:
We know everything last year.
Marco:
Because a lot of the sessions get repeated, or at least something similar will get repeated.
Marco:
Every year there's going to be stuff about UI, networking, accessibility, working with media, working with Safari and web technologies.
Marco:
There's certain sessions that just get repeated every year.
Marco:
And so we can kind of look at that to maybe eliminate some stuff.
Marco:
But I...
Marco:
It certainly does sound like media is being emphasized here.
Casey:
Oh, hold on, hold on.
Casey:
I got that backwards.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
There are eight tool sessions that are unannounced in Presidio.
Casey:
I got my wires a little crossed.
Casey:
So there are definitely some media ones as well, but it was tools that I should have said instead of media.
Casey:
I apologize.
Casey:
So there are six new framework sessions in Presidio.
Casey:
Presidio, and I believe there are eight new media sessions in Presidio, something along those lines.
Casey:
So no matter how you, God darn it, I said media again, tools sessions.
Casey:
I'll get this right one day.
Casey:
So now that I've just completely confused everyone, including myself, suffice to say there's a lot of tools and a lot of frameworks action going on.
Casey:
And to me, that's indicative of something major and something big and something we're not thinking of.
John:
Then it also could be like Marco said that every one of those descriptions says find out how to use the new blah with iOS 8 and OS 10 or Vine.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I wouldn't read too much into anything regarding the sessions at the conference because it's so arbitrary.
Marco:
The categories are so large.
Marco:
It isn't like the category is like OpenGL.
Marco:
It isn't that specific.
Marco:
It's media technologies or something.
Marco:
There's
Marco:
They're so broad, and we're not dealing with a massive data set here.
Marco:
We're dealing with how many sessions are there, like 60 or something, or 100?
Marco:
There aren't that many.
Marco:
It isn't that big of a set, and there's not that much signal to the noise here.
John:
Yeah, the only thing I can think of is that when you do a visual refresh, like I did with iOS 7, think of all the sessions that were about, like, how to make your app not look like ass in iOS 7.
John:
Like, it was, you know, how to get your views out from under the status bar, Casey.
John:
You can go to that session this year.
John:
How to use the tint color and all that.
John:
Like, there was tons of sessions because it's like, from the outside, it's...
John:
you know, it's like, oh, everything looks different.
John:
But from a developer, it's like, oh, how am I going to, you know, if I have custom controls, how are we going to make them look nice?
John:
Is there a new way to do these controls?
John:
How do I deal with text size changing?
John:
Like any kind of visual refresh has tons of sessions for the nitty gritty of like developers to figure out how to make their apps look and work right.
John:
So if OS X is getting a big visual refresh, I would wager that, well, I don't know these days, actually, but I was going to say that, uh, does OS X have more custom controls than iOS?
John:
Uh,
John:
maybe i don't know like it has a lot more controls total for the whole set like built-in controls like people where they're drawing their own things where you know i don't know i mean some some people aren't even using native controls at all like they're drawing their own their own ui entirely themselves so that's not a big deal but like i can imagine a lot of the the bulk it was you know we basically know that os 10 visual refresh is coming a lot of the sessions are about how to make your app look right and this new look
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And, you know, and Apple's design principles in this new look.
Marco:
It isn't just going to be, you know, here's a new skin.
Marco:
It's like last year.
Marco:
It's like, all right, well, here's here's a new look.
Marco:
But we also want you to think about this, this and this.
Marco:
And, you know, it's actually like a rethinking and a redesign rather than just a reskin.
John:
Although there's still that baffling session from last year.
John:
iOS 7 was introduced and there's a whole session about how to make your icons.
John:
And all the example icons were like super skeuomorphic, like things look like they're made out of yarn with grass growing on it.
Marco:
Yeah, it was weird.
Marco:
They actually even said at the beginning, like, keep making your icons the old way.
Marco:
Don't use the new style that we're using, which was really weird.
Marco:
I remember I was in there and I remember thinking that was a very strange thing to say.
John:
And that's what I think of, like, the icon factory.
John:
Craig was putting up, like, samples of the Xscope, like, you know, experimentations and, you know, speculative sort of experimentations of how might the Xscope icon look like in a flatter OS X world.
John:
And they did two little samples and they look really good, but...
John:
what what is the message going to be from apple is it going to be are all the os 10 icons going to be redesigned to be ios 7 style or whatever the new look but then they're going to tell us to make our icons the same i don't know uh anyway visual changes cause lots of churn and lots of things that developers have to deal with so that covers at least a lot of the os 10 side of things uh we should get to ios 8 though because ios 8 will probably not be a visual overhaul and yet i'm sure there's lots of sessions about ios 8
Casey:
All right, so what's coming in iOS 8?
Casey:
So I really want, and I'm not going to get it, but I really want some sort of inter-app communication.
Casey:
Because as I think John said last episode, if you fix inter-app communication, then you don't need panes of apps running simultaneously on the iPad.
Casey:
So much gets fixed with better inter-app communication, but I'm not hopeful that it's going to happen.
John:
Well, aren't they going to do the remote view controller stuff that's private?
Casey:
One would think.
John:
They have that.
John:
We don't know if they're going to do anything with it.
John:
Right.
John:
Well, they make it public.
John:
That's the usual MO.
John:
It's like it's private for a while.
John:
Then they get the kinks worked out and they make it public.
John:
Or you still think it's going to stay private.
Marco:
Well, I think it will stay an implementation detail of the system they actually make public if they do something like this.
Marco:
Because you can't, like, what are you going to do?
Marco:
You can't launch your own process on iOS.
Marco:
You can't do that.
Marco:
So I would love to see them fix, not necessarily what a lot of people consider inter-app communication.
Marco:
I mean, inter-app communication is kind of a broad topic.
Marco:
There's a lot involved there.
Marco:
They can address a nice chunk of it.
Marco:
By doing something like the Windows 8 contracts or the Android Intents or whether I have that backwards, I don't know.
Casey:
No, you had that right.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Something like that.
Marco:
One of those systems where apps can register and say, I can provide photos to anything that offers a photo picker.
Marco:
Or somebody else can say, I'm a search provider.
Marco:
I can search for things.
Marco:
Or I accept photos.
Marco:
Or I accept URLs.
Marco:
And then be integrated into any kind of share sheet that comes up in other apps.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So that's the kind of thing I want, because that doesn't require like there was some something I think I think it was on Gruber site, something in the last couple of days where somebody was saying, you know, the problem is if you add something like the like the side by side thing that was that was rumored last week, if you add something like that, you're also adding complexity.
Marco:
And if you do something like the contract and intent systems, you're adding a lot of power without adding a whole lot of user complexity.
Marco:
And there are certainly challenges to those systems, things that you'll have to control and possible problems that could come up.
Marco:
There's a lot of weird things with fraud and confusion that Apple would have to look for at AppReview.
Marco:
But they can do that.
Marco:
They have all the tools in place to do that already.
Marco:
They're set up for that.
Marco:
So I don't think that's necessarily going to be a big problem.
Marco:
I would just love to see them address that.
Marco:
Even if all they do is rip off what Windows Phone or Android does or take bits and pieces from both, that would be amazing.
Marco:
That would be so much better than we have now.
Marco:
And that would enable so many third-party app capabilities that either weren't possible before or were really clunky and rare before.
Marco:
Like right now in Overcast, I have a thing where if you tap a URL, what do you do with it?
Marco:
and i have an open in safari activity i have an open in chrome activity only because i wrote an open in chrome activity um you know what if it would be better if chrome could just say i can accept urls from anything that shares urls and then i bring up the sheet and i give it a url and it shows me a chrome button they already have most of the pieces in place to do that already like that's all that's been there since ios 6 with the whole ui activity system like that's
Marco:
It's almost all there already.
Marco:
And the impression I got when poking around back when iOS 6 was released two years ago, the impression I got, hint hint from people, is that that kind of system was discussed or in progress and was canceled or was delayed.
Marco:
Um, and so obviously, and you can look at the UI activity system and you can see like, okay, this is obviously intended for something like this and the support for things like remote view controllers, like the pieces are all there.
Marco:
Uh, it's just a matter of, you know, doing a little bit more to expose it as an API and, uh, and certainly there's challenges.
Marco:
There's like, you know, there's, there's a pretty big, uh, tools challenge and, and, uh, code design structure challenge with like, all right, well, if I offer remote view controller, um,
Marco:
how do you present that to the user do you launch my entire app in the background and then have me bring up a certain view controller like how does that work you know how does that work with memory and the api level and background doing like there are certainly some things to consider but it seems like they've already done most of the work for that um and that you know it's it is certainly a limited form of inter-app communication but it's a massive step forward from what we have now and it would really be very beneficial
John:
Yeah, I've seen iOS 8 as kind of the Mavericks of iOS in that from a user's perspective, it's going to seem like iOS 7.5.
John:
It's not going to look all that different.
John:
And a lot of the new features are going to be internal.
John:
So while Mavericks is vaguely visually distinguishable from Mountain Lion, from a user's perspective, it wasn't that big a deal.
John:
But there were a lot of changes under the hood.
John:
And iOS 8, I would imagine, is going to be the same thing.
John:
Refinement of the look, features that probably aren't in the user's face, but that will slowly appear as applications become iOS 8 savvy, to use the old term.
John:
And what you're talking about, having the activity viewer type thing and having it list URLs and having some sort of system for you to configure like, oh, I don't want... Probably one of the reasons that might have been canned is the whole idea of like,
John:
on the mac applications that would say that they can handle you know star i handle any application so the open with you'd always see this application for every single file like sort of spamming the thing like what can open a url and you see a list of 9 000 applications so you need some way to manage that as well and that's another complication in the ui and that's the type of thing that could make you say we're not quite ready to do that and the same thing with like sandboxing do we just load your do we do we load like a loadable bundle or a framework but run it in the sandbox of your application so that
John:
You have access to your document container and everything, but you're on the screen at the same time as somebody else.
John:
And again, if they're doing side-by-side apps on the iPad anyway, they've already got to do probably two sandboxed applications that each have access to their own containers, both on screen at the same time, which is not a big deal.
John:
They're called Windows back in the old world.
John:
So if they're doing that anyway, there's a place for that.
John:
But yeah, it seems like...
John:
A Maverick style release where there's lots of new APIs for developers to adopt a couple of new things on the settings screen, some new applications, you know, the health book stuff and everything like that.
John:
But, you know, not it's not going to be like iOS 7, that's for sure.
Marco:
Yeah, and I don't think it really needs to be.
Marco:
I mean, iOS 7 was really a remarkable release in that they crammed in not only a massive visual overhaul and lots of rewriting of the built-in apps to accommodate that, but a lot of cool frameworks, like major stuff, things like TextKit and all the background refresh stuff and the URL session stuff, major, major changes to frameworks.
Marco:
And they fit all that into one release.
Marco:
I mean...
Marco:
What I would like to see from 8 is, you know, besides the internet communication stuff, which is a big deal, you know, just take all those frameworks they added last year and just do some tweaks here and there.
Marco:
Like, there's certain limitations and URL sessions that I'd like to see lifted, but it's mostly minor stuff.
Marco:
It...
Marco:
The frameworks are getting really good, even simple things.
Marco:
I was complaining two episodes ago or last week, I was complaining how the keychain API is ridiculous to use because it's still one of the old C-based APIs and they haven't made a nice Objective-C wrapper around it.
Marco:
If they just did more of that, just wrap a bunch of the stuff that's hard to use, like the contacts API and the keychain, stuff like that, stuff that still uses old C APIs.
Marco:
Just wrap some of that in new classes so it's easier for people to use.
Marco:
I would love just a release like that, just doing a bunch of small tweaks and improvements to the existing frameworks and then having one or two major new features and capabilities like the inter-app sharing things.
Casey:
Yeah, we'll see.
John:
And then there's like the idea of, you know, any new category or whatever is probably going to have a bunch of new frameworks and stuff that you're not going to care about if you don't have any interaction with whatever the hell is new.
John:
If you're not writing Apple TV apps, then you don't care about whatever new things added there.
John:
If you're not going to integrate with some Apple wearable, then you don't care about those frameworks.
John:
But those are always, you know,
John:
the extras that they add on top, sort of like the, you know, the, the controller, the hardware controller interface.
John:
If you're not writing support, a game that has to have a support for hardware control, you're never going to look at that new API, but Hey, it's new in iOS seven, right?
John:
So there's always that bushel of things that can be new on iOS eight.
And,
John:
But with health books supposedly in there that we all seem to believe is coming, there's got to be a bunch of new APIs to do with that.
John:
But maybe you're just not going to look at them because especially if an Apple wearable doesn't come out, you're like, well, fine, this is going to be so long before a third party wearable takes advantage of this anyway.
John:
And I'm not interested in it for my podcast app.
John:
So I'll just ignore that.
Casey:
Do you think that there'll be any sort of new Springboard functionality?
Casey:
Like everyone keeps calling for widgets in either Notification Center or Springboard.
Casey:
I'm extremely unconvinced that would ever happen.
Casey:
But is there anything that you can think of that would make Springboard better?
John:
Yeah, have the little icons not slide.
John:
Someone tweeted that, and I thought it was a reasonably good idea.
John:
Have you be able to delete icons without all the other ones rearranging themselves?
John:
I mean, just trying to deal with rearranging icons on the device is just torture.
John:
It's a terrible game that we all do to ourselves.
John:
People just don't rearrange them because it's so hard.
John:
There's certain positions, like the lower right corner is torture.
Marco:
It's really hard to get there because it'll scroll over to the next pane or something.
John:
Yeah, or...
John:
Or like as you're going through pages, especially on my super slow A5, as I'm going, like I'm holding it against the edge and the things are scrolling by.
John:
Sometimes I guess the animation takes too long and it start, it will end up shoving icons off.
John:
Like I'm not landing on this page.
John:
I'm saying go to the last page.
John:
I'm going to take this icon from the first page into the last.
John:
And as part of that process, I will bump icons off all the intermediary pages.
John:
So by the time I get to the last page, two new icons are there.
John:
and I've shifted everything over.
John:
It's just maddening.
John:
If when I moved one, the other ones wouldn't slide into its place, that would help me rearrange things with a slight extra little bit of sanity.
John:
They're never going to do that, but it drives me insane.
Marco:
yeah there's not really a lot of springboard changes that i would really care that much about with the exception of for god's sakes fix newsstand or give apps a way to get out of it or give users a way to take apps out of it because it is so annoying for everybody now for publishers and for users like like i read stuff that's in newsstand and it's like on the ipad i think it's this way on the phone i only do on the pad but you know you have the app you exit the app
Marco:
And you have to separately then exit newsstand with another tap on the home button.
Marco:
You have to wait for the animations to complete staring at a folder.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
It's so it's so bad.
Marco:
And it's like just I read these same apps like all like one of them's a New York Times app.
Marco:
I read that every night.
Marco:
Watch.
Marco:
Can I just move it out of there, please?
Marco:
Just let me put it on the home screen, please.
Marco:
So I can get rid of the stupid newsstand crap.
Marco:
It's so, so bad.
John:
I mean hell let it let them all appear in newsstand fine but also let them be outside like no one will ever go into newsstand like if there's some person or just let me drag them in and out we need to group them all months back what case you mentioned though about like the the widgets or like in windows problems live tiles or something like that that is a complication that I see Apple not wanting to add but it may be inevitable that like I mean like you know the today view that they have that shows you all the collection of information which is kind of configurable but not really yeah it's not that good
John:
and we just have a bunch of icons and there's no real widgets like opening the door to that complexity is something they definitely don't want to do but at a certain point when everybody else's phone has some way to sort of customize what you see on either your home screen or on your lock screen in ways that are beyond what Apple allows you to customize I think Apple is wise to not do that stuff as much as everyone else is but I think they're far enough behind now that
John:
they could make another baby step in that direction with iOS 8 and no one would freak out.
Casey:
If remote view controllers are a thing that are being used for inter-app communication, could that also be used for a widget, like in the home screen or in Notification Center?
Marco:
I mean, in theory, yes.
Marco:
In theory, they could use the background refresh system and their remote view controller system together to just have an app periodically update something.
Marco:
and you know you'd be woken up every you know you it wouldn't be frequent you wouldn't be able to like run like you know a news ticker constantly scrolling across or you know you know constantly changing things maybe but maybe they would be maybe they'd wake you up every you know 20 minutes or something to let you put an update there can you even change your icon like the calendar app is that even public
John:
no that's never that's never been allowed and same thing with your default like whatever is the default ping like the thing that comes up before your app is launched yeah you can't change that either newsstand can change its icon uh but but other apps can't do either so like we're talking about widgets and they haven't even allowed you to change either your icon or your your default image your default launch image and but you know apple apple's allowed to change it because they're allowed to have a functional calendar application but no one else is uh you know so forget about live tiles you can't even update your freaking icon so like i said they're
John:
they should make some more moves in that direction they don't have to go whole hog like hey you can have a view that you control that gets updated every end minutes that's on the home screen that's the size of five icons put together like the live tile thing like that's that's too far but they're way back in the prehistoric era with the limitations and a lot of stuff was like oh we don't want people burning cpu and stuff like that but that you know they've come so far in terms of background refresh and everything and
John:
with you know the the hardware that we have now the restrictions on no you can't change your calendar icon to be today's date that would take too much battery that's ridiculous it's just you know that stuff should be opened up a little bit more remember for a while their calendar icon didn't update it wasn't until like os3 or 4 like it was it was just it would just always be showing the wrong date well it would be showing the wrong date most days of the month
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And one thing I wonder, do you guys think they would ever, and I think my answer is no, but do you think they would ever give the ability to set default apps to third-party apps for things like your default mail app, your default web browser?
John:
God.
Marco:
uh geez it seems highly unlikely doesn't it right because i mean they have that on os 10 but you know that's that's different so i do you think i mean because that would go a long way with with the url or with the data sharing system like the contract intense thing that would go a long way towards um not only enabling a bunch of third-party apps to be better but enabling what a lot of users want anyway like it's
Marco:
it's not just like oh google wants to invade with chrome and maps it's like a whole bunch of people are choosing to use chrome and google maps anyway and it just sucks that they don't have full system integration you know if you tap a mail link in something it doesn't just open chrome or the mail is the worst one though because i can imagine that apple be like well we have to keep you on safari because the web is such an important thing and only we get to use the good javascript engine and blah blah blah we don't want people changing this
John:
uh but mail man like there are so many good interesting mail applications and i bet mail is the application that most people are likely to use a third-party one because how many people use chrome probably not a lot but i think the gmail app is probably very popular yeah i bet you're right well chrome was very popular but i think it's kind of fading now but your gmail app is very very popular no question
John:
And then you have to like I'm setting up these iOS devices for my kids.
John:
You have to set up an email account in the mail app because every application that sends email is going to throw you into that stupid mail app.
John:
And if you don't have an account configured, you just can't use that feature of those applications.
John:
So you need some sort of little sentinel mail application configured in Apple Mail just to support emailing from all the other applications that you're going to use.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
What about services?
Casey:
Are we going to see any improvement there?
Casey:
Like web services?
Casey:
Well, like iCloud, for example.
Marco:
Oh, lol.
Marco:
No.
John:
I mean, they keep making things better with the iCloud core storage and the key value store.
John:
I'm sure there'll be improvements there and blah, blah, blah.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
Any new iCloud APIs?
Casey:
Or even just it actually working?
John:
Well, I mean, they've been making steady progress in that area, but it's like fundamentally it's like an architecture type thing where you're not expecting an API that you just want it to work within the bounds of its original design.
John:
But if the original design precludes it ever being having a certain level of performance or ever having a certain level of reliability, you're just like, well, just do as well as you can within that.
John:
And that's why I mentioned a new API like
John:
a new API that does a new thing architected differently.
John:
Like you talked about the push API thing.
John:
You can imagine that the backend for the, you know, the push notification system is substantially different than the backend for the iCloud core data.
John:
And those choices, those different choices they made influence how the API is designed and how it performs and how well it does what it's being asked to do.
John:
And so I think new iCloud APIs would be your opportunity to make something much, much better.
John:
Whereas the alternative thing is just take the existing APIs with the existing design parameters and make them better and
John:
remove the bugs and add the features.
John:
And they did a lot of that with, with iCloud, with core data, iCloud stuff in Mavericks.
John:
And I'm sure they're continuing that, but that's not, that's not the type of thing that's going to wow someone in a session.
Casey:
You know, I feel like we are being even more noncommittal and hand wavy than usual.
Casey:
Like last year, we knew that it was going to be a visual refresh and we were pretty confident about that.
Casey:
And that's about all we knew, but it's a lot more than I feel like we know now.
Casey:
We know about health book.
Casey:
What else do we really know with any sort of certainty?
Casey:
Anything?
John:
The scheduling is really throwing things off because we have we have these teas from starting from late last year of new category, but it's too vague.
John:
So we don't know what it is.
John:
We just have to pick from like the, you know, vague, wearable, vague TV, you know, unknown, whatever that tells us nothing.
John:
And, you know, the gimme is to be like, oh, Mac hardware revisions.
John:
Well, the CPUs are delayed.
John:
So it's like everything's up in the air.
John:
You know, we feel like if you had to predict what was Apple was going to introduce this year, I think we would have we would be more confident.
John:
But it's like, what will they have ready in time for June?
Marco:
Yeah, that's a really tough call.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
I mean, there's no guarantee that they're going to have anything mind-blowing ready for June.
Marco:
It could just be like, all right, here's a visual refresh for Mac OS X. Here's a less significant improvement in iOS 8.
Marco:
And go for it.
Marco:
Here you go.
Marco:
And here's my sessions on how to use the new stuff in iOS 8 and Mac OS 10.10.10.10.
Marco:
There's nothing stopping them from that just being it.
Marco:
There might be no hardware announcements, no new category announcements, nothing exciting at all except the new software, which in a developer conference, that is technically adequate.
Marco:
It also is not unprecedented.
Marco:
They've done that before.
John:
then you'd be reading the tea leaves to see like are they really they're really emphasizing being able to draw your app at different sizes and then you'd be like is that for the bigger iphone 6 is that for side by side on the ipad air like you can read those tea leaves and then there's the hidden stuff like you know m7 where you don't find out about until you know the september iphone announcement oh then here's these new apis and they were kind of in ios 7 all along but you know like they could do that uh i
John:
I think I think that would be sufficient for a conference to say we've got we're revising all our OS's and here's a bunch of hints for new APIs.
John:
But it would be quite a letdown after the past couple of fun years, even just stuff like the Mac Pro where you're like, I think that was an exciting announcement, even if it didn't have much impact on people's lives in general.
John:
It adds it definitely adds to the keynote experience.
Marco:
I mean, as a user of all this stuff and as a developer using all this stuff, I would actually be really happy with just software improvements because Apple has a lot of potential software improvements, especially if they're tackling a major refresh in 10.10.10.
Marco:
they there's there's room for this like they they could do a lot here i would love if they weren't distracted on all sorts of new projects and could focus their engineering resources on the things that that need it i just don't believe that's the case i believe they are working on big stuff it is pulling resources away from everything else and it is going to be new but it might not be ready yet or
Marco:
maybe we'll all be proven wrong i mean honestly it's kind of fun not knowing so much ahead of time because when there's all when there's a whole bunch of leaks it kind of ruins the fun and the anticipation of the keynote this will sound great next week when all the leaks have come out listen to the show yeah we're recording this almost a week before we're going to publish it so yeah you're right because you're right like there's all the good leaks that come out next week and
Marco:
Well, we'll find out.
John:
I put two questions in the show notes here.
John:
One was, what are you most looking forward to at WWDC?
John:
And then the other one is just kind of the same question, rephrased, but a little bit different angles.
John:
If you had to choose one realistic thing that you want, your wishlist thing that you want to see announced at WWDC, like you don't have to be predicting that it's going to happen, but it has to be, you know, within the realm of possibility.
John:
What would that be?
Casey:
Definitely inter-app communication.
Casey:
And I think it's possible.
Casey:
I don't know how, but I think it could be done.
John:
That's definitely realistic.
John:
And if they say something about that in the keynote, you'll be the most excited about that.
Casey:
I don't know if I'll be Mike Hurley at Marco's XOXO talk excited, but I'll be... That was awesome.
Casey:
But I'll be really excited.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We'll see.
Marco:
Marco?
Marco:
So you're asking what I think is the most likely or what I would want the most?
John:
No, this is like your most wished for thing, but it has to be realistic.
John:
Okay.
John:
To be announced at the keynote.
John:
It doesn't have to be like you're predicting it, but like, man, it's possible for Apple to do this and I would be really excited if they did.
Marco:
yeah i think i'm gonna have to go with spheric in the chat room um with a thunderbolt retina display but if they if if that's not realistic which i think it is i think they could very much do 4k thunderbolt retina display yep that's that is definitely realistic i mean otherwise i would say casey's thing of internet communication other and if i can't do that because it's already taken then i would say um new ui kit like framework for os 10
John:
Realistic is the wrong word, but what we're saying is feasible.
John:
Because Apple would never announce a monitor.
John:
It doesn't seem like the monitor would ever rate enough to get in a thing, but it's a thing they could make.
John:
It didn't seem like the Mac Pro would ever rate enough to get in the thing.
John:
Oh, sure.
John:
Well, the Mac Pro is interesting and new.
John:
But anyway, Apple could make that right now if they wanted.
John:
Why are they not doing it?
John:
Because they hate us.
John:
But that's realistic.
John:
My thing, I think it's actually kind of surprising me is the reason I put this question in is...
John:
uh retina macbook air a new form factor of a macbook air with a non-crappy screen that's you know that's also better viewing angles retina and a more interesting maybe it's not tapered as much maybe it's just like like a super thin 13 inch you know thing i that's
John:
Like I said, I think they could show it.
John:
I think they probably have it all designed up and ready.
John:
They just can't ship it because there's no CPUs for it.
John:
But hey, I'll wait six months for a computer I'm not going to buy anyway.
Casey:
I've done that before.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
I like seeing new laptops introduced.
John:
I was excited when the Retina MacBook Pros were introduced.
John:
And I'll be excited again to see what the next evolution of the Air is.
John:
So I'm really hoping that they show that even though it's not ready.
Marco:
I wonder, do you think the need for a Retina 12-inch MacBook Air is that strong?
Marco:
Because the 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro is so good.
Marco:
It's such a great all-arounder for so many people.
Marco:
It is not that expensive.
Marco:
It has the nice Retina screen.
Marco:
It is very small.
Marco:
It is almost Air-sized.
Marco:
But it's big enough still to have a nice-sized battery and a nice CPU in there.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
Do you think the 13 inch Retina MacBook Pro reduces a lot of the need for the MacBook Air?
John:
No, because I think I think they'll have to separate from each other a little bit.
John:
But basically what I'm looking for is the air, the air internals.
John:
So forget about a discrete GPU ever.
John:
I don't think the 13 doesn't have a discrete anyway, but like it's but it's it's possible they could in that size form factor.
John:
and like i said maybe it won't be tapered as much as the old ones because they got to fit more battery for the retina display but it should still be if you put one on one hand one on the other be clear this is not a 13 inch pro this is the 12 inch air and it may end up pushing the 13 inch up mark maybe the 13 suddenly starts sprouting uh more powerful gpus if not a discreet one whereas the the air is always going to have whatever the super ultra everything on one chip uh
John:
CPU that Intel offers, and the 13-inch Pro is going to have, okay, well, this isn't the super low-power one.
John:
It's a little bit more powerful than that.
John:
So I think there's room in the lineup for it, and I'm excited to see.
John:
I'm kind of bored of the form factor of the MacBook Pros now that we've sort of evolved to what we think is the final form here, and they just keep getting thinner.
John:
But the Airs, I still think there's room for something that looks a little different than the current wedge type things.
John:
And I'm so sick of those screens on the current Airs.
John:
I really want them to make a nicer screen on an Air-sized device.
John:
Someone in the chat room asked about iPad Pro.
John:
The iPads were just revised.
John:
Like, I don't even think that's within the realm of feasibility.
John:
I don't think they're...
Marco:
Well, not in June.
Marco:
Yeah, this fall, they'll probably announce new iPads.
John:
And I don't think it's the type of thing, you know, because the MacBook Airs are coming.
John:
You know, there's going to be MacBook Airs based on Broadway, and it could conceivably happen this calendar year.
John:
iPad Pro, I think, is outside the realm of possibilities because iPad Air is not that old yet.
John:
Uh, but who knows with iOS eight side by side, I guess they could throw it there, but I w I would be more excited actually for, to see what the new, uh, red in the air looks like, hoping that it's a different shape than, than just another increasingly thin slate type thing.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know if it counts as realistic or not, but the thing I'm most looking forward to is, is there going to be a new product category?
Casey:
And if so, what, what the crap is it?
Casey:
And I would love, I would love for it to be something that's surprising.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
And we'll see.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I can't even conjecture what it would be.
John:
See, that's not my most look forward to thing because I can't pin it down.
John:
It's just an amorphous cloud of whatever.
John:
And honestly, I'm not interested probably in anything wearable.
John:
And a TV thing, I have so little faith that anything they'll do will be interesting to me.
John:
And a revised Apple TV, I'm not sure I would.
John:
Maybe I would get it because it's 99 bucks.
John:
Who cares?
John:
Whatever.
John:
But like it's.
John:
it's too i don't know what it is yet i can't i can't say that i'm most looking forward to that because i don't just want the novelty like i just want apple to do something different no i have to see what it is if it's something awesome i'll love it but if it's something i'm not interested in yeah it's great they did a new thing but i'm never going to get it so whatever random question are they going to transition the macbook pros to be black aluminum in the style of the mac pro
Marco:
Yeah, I would love it.
Marco:
Because to tell you what, the Mac Pro is a nice-looking machine.
Marco:
The color is basically a glossy version of the iPhone 5S slate color.
Marco:
And the iPhone 5S slate color is really nice, too.
Marco:
And they could definitely use that, because glossy would not work on a MacBook, obviously.
Marco:
It would look terrible.
Marco:
It would have...
Marco:
well they did it before but glossy metal i think would show a lot more fingerprints um than the old plastic macbooks did so i don't see that i would love it if the uh if a retina thunderbolt display matched the new mac pro uh in color and finish might be a little reflective but if it's just on the bezel and or the bezel as john would say then then they'll offer it in black but it's 150 extra oh
John:
Wow, old reference.
John:
Remember when they did that?
John:
Yep.
John:
The black books.
John:
Nice.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
That was around the time I bought my first Mac.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I feel like it could be a really neat differentiator to keep aluminum for the quote-unquote consumer-grade stuff and make everything black for the professional-grade stuff.
Casey:
So a black...
Casey:
a Thunderbolt display, a black Mac pro black MacBook pros, perhaps even a black, um, what do you call the magic mouse?
Casey:
It isn't a magic mouse, the magic touchpad trackpad thing.
Casey:
Um, which then begs the question, would you have a black magic mouse?
Casey:
Do they, do they sunset the magic mouse brand and make me very sad?
John:
I would love for them to kill that stupid mouse and make it, make a decent mouse.
John:
It seems unlikely, but I like it.
Casey:
I like it too.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, a mouse is, you know, something like that.
Uh,
John:
something that you hold is going to have this broad spectrum of do you like a high mouse or a low mouse a wide mouse or a skinny mouse a mouse that's contoured or a mouse that's not you know and so it's not going to say this is a bad mouse I'm just going to say I don't like a mouse that's that low I don't like a mouse that's that heavy I don't like a mouse that's that low and so if that's the only mouse that Apple makes Apple doesn't make a mouse for me and
John:
historically not all of apple's mice have been that heavy and that low this is a new kind of design direction uh i'm ready to see what the next design direction is for mice but i don't think they care enough to change it and so i'll just continue to i've been using a third-party mouse since god since the one that was a semicircle on the on the bottom that came with like the power max 6100 that's the last apple mouse that i used i think
Casey:
See, I use the Magic Mouse because I am a really heavy user of, what is it, screens that they used to call it, the virtual desktops.
Casey:
And to use a third-party mouse that doesn't have multi-touch to swipe between my virtual desktops is terrible, or at least in any mouse I've ever tried.
Casey:
I have to bring the violin music back.
Casey:
Yeah, you do need to bring the violin music back.
John:
It's true, though.
John:
The touch surface on the Magic Mouse is so much better than the touch surface on other touch surface type mice that I've used.
John:
It's true of Apple's trackpads compared to everyone else's trackpads.
John:
Everyone else just uses whatever the cheapest sensor they can put in the device, and Apple doesn't.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so I would love to see a more bulbous magic mouse.
Casey:
I don't think it'll happen, but I can't, I don't care for the track pad very much.
Casey:
I can use it, but I don't care for it.
Casey:
I grew up on the track point on IBM ThinkPad.
Casey:
So I still miss having one of those.
Casey:
And when I'm, when I'm at my desk for more than a few minutes, I tend to like to use a proper mouse.
Casey:
And because of my obsession with virtual desktops, it has to be a magic mouse.
Marco:
yeah the magic mouse is a beautiful piece of sculpture i love how it looks i just don't like holding it in my hand i just love the inertial scrolling with it because i used to before this i used the logitech mx revolution that had uh had this awesome like heavy weighted flywheel scroll thing that you if you flicked it hard enough and you had their software installed it would unlock and spin freely for a while until you like slowed it down or stopped with your finger then it would lock and become notchy again
Marco:
it was a fantastic mouse that was plagued with terrible software and terrible support by like alternative mouse drivers, uh, on OS 10.
Marco:
And then they stopped making it.
Marco:
And so it was like, it was awesome when it worked and it just, it worked so rarely.
Marco:
Now you can't buy a new one.
Marco:
And so the magic mouse with its touch inertial scrolling kind of replaced that for me.
Marco:
Cause like once you get used to the inertia scrolling, uh,
Marco:
Having an old notchy type scroll wheel where you're scrolling by a non-accelerating rate is barbaric.
Marco:
Like an animal.
Casey:
And on that bombshell.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Linza.com, Dash, and NatureBox.
John:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
John:
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.
Casey:
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.
Casey:
It's accidental, they didn't mean.
John:
I was going to say we're really scraping the bottom of the barrel if we're talking about mouse revisions to the mouse.
John:
Do you think they're going to do it?
John:
No, it's just like, what possible hardware does Apple has that needs to be revised?
John:
Well, the Magic Trackbread's pretty old.
John:
The mouse hasn't been changed in a while.
John:
Apple doesn't seem to want to make monitors anymore.
Marco:
I would like to see if they do end up doing some kind of cosmetic update with a lot of the stuff like the aluminum keyboard and stuff like that.
Marco:
They've used that bare brushed aluminum look for so long that it might help to just do a little refresh on that.
Marco:
That's what I'm saying.
Marco:
Do something like the space gray color or the Mac Pro's glossy space gray looking color.
Marco:
Just do a cosmetic refresh with not that much different under the hood for all their little peripherals and stuff that all just have brushed aluminum now.
John:
That's what I was saying.
John:
The MacBook Pro is in their final form because they went to aluminum and they slowly revised, revised, revised, removed doors, sealed everything in, soldered everything to the board, and now it's like, okay, this is the logical conclusion of...
John:
making a MacBook Pro out of a solid brick of aluminum, hollowing it out and shoving the insides in.
John:
And now it's like, all right, can you change the color?
John:
Can you change the texture?
John:
Can you change the shape?
John:
Because they're not going to go away from aluminum, that's for sure.
Casey:
Well, that's why I think if they were to hypothetically make a black Pro line, that would be the perfect moment, like Marco was saying, to do this light visual refresh.
Casey:
So it's more than just painting black on top of aluminum.
Marco:
Come on, Retina Thunderbolt.
Marco:
Come on, you can do it.
Marco:
Yeah, we didn't even talk about Sapphire.
Marco:
There's all these rumors about where Sapphire is going to go.
Marco:
I think it's pretty clear that they're going to keep using it for Touch ID, of course.
Marco:
And they need a lot of it to do that because Touch ID is in...
Marco:
every iPhone 5S, and you would expect that this fall when there's new iPhones and iPads, it's now going to be in the new iPhone and the last year's model if they keep the 5S around.
Marco:
So there's going to be even more for iPhone demand.
Marco:
Hopefully they would add it to iPads because it's really weird once you get used to it on the phone to not have it on your iPad.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
you're looking at a lot of sapphire demands right there versus some of the rumors that say like if you're going to use it for the whole iphone screen that's a lot more like that it's such a massive quantity more i don't think they could make enough of it even in their new plant in arizona or whatever like that's that would require so much more sapphire than just what they have now i just think the volume is is impractical that would be like an iphone 7
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So maybe, you know, if they have if they are doing something that has like a watch face, you could see plausibly, OK, maybe, you know, maybe that's where it would be going.
Marco:
You know, something where you have some kind of wearable with, you know, a medium or small, medium sized screen.
Marco:
You need to be very, very resilient.
Marco:
It could go there.
Marco:
But this could be one of those things where, you know, there's just not much of a story here.
Marco:
It's for iPhone home buttons to just make more of them.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I'm getting more and more excited the more I realize that we don't know crap about what's going on.
Marco:
Yeah, it definitely is more exciting this way.
Marco:
There's been so many recent keynotes in the last few years where almost everything has been ruined ahead of time, and it just isn't fun.
Marco:
We still go, and we still pretend to be excited, but it's so much better when we're actually genuinely surprised.
John:
It's always exciting for me because I always have the terror of when they're going to announce the release date for OS X. Right.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
You've won the lottery for the most part so far.
John:
Yeah, they could say edit shipping in three weeks and then I'm screwed.
Casey:
Do we want to do titles?
John:
Are there any?
John:
Let's check this crazy show bot.
Marco:
Yeah, my crazy hack together show bot from 20 minutes before the show started.
Marco:
By the way, I apologize in advance for how crappy this is.
Marco:
Where are you saving the data?
Marco:
In MySQL.
Marco:
What do you mean?
Marco:
A little overkill.
Marco:
What would you do?
Marco:
If you had 20 minutes to rewrite this, where would you store it?
Marco:
Memory.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I guess they've got the database there already.
John:
If you're... You're supposed to be an iOS developer.
John:
You should be storing this in a plist.
John:
Duh.
Marco:
No, this is actually... It was a fun exercise because I've very rarely coded like mad under time pressure.
Marco:
I certainly haven't done it recently.
Marco:
So it was kind of fun.
Marco:
It was like a fun hackathon for 20 minutes with myself.
Marco:
Sounds terrible.
Marco:
But no, it was...
Marco:
It was fun.
Marco:
And, you know, obviously there's tons of stuff I can do to make it better.
Marco:
It probably won't be worth that.
Marco:
But now I have something where, like, if I end up open sourcing this framework that I've been wanting to open source forever, this could be like the test app that I open source with it.
Marco:
So here's an example of how to use it.
John:
Is this not sorted by vote?
John:
I have to click to sort by vote.
Marco:
They also know Ajax voting, which is much worse than the sorting problems.
Marco:
But I ran out of time.
Marco:
Come on, give me a break.
Marco:
Form submissions.
John:
The old ways are best.
Casey:
Oh, John, only you can bitch and moan about something that was whipped together in 20 minutes out of the blue and not and not sound like a world class jerk doing it.
John:
I think it sounds like it should take less time and be less effort.
John:
Form submission is the hard way to do it.
John:
You make an entire form with a little field and a button.
Marco:
How hard do you think it is to make a form?
John:
It just seems more heavyweight.
John:
And then the whole page has to reload and you lose your place.
John:
It's like you're sacrificing functionality for it.
John:
I guess if you don't know the APIs already, but if you have jQuery loaded, you just attach handlers and do the submission.
John:
It's super easy.
Marco:
The final form, that's interesting.
Marco:
I like that.
Marco:
Oh, I've now lost my place because I voted for it.
Casey:
Wearing electronics is just not cool.
Marco:
It's true.
Marco:
No, it's like these modern smartwatches, they're like calculator watches in the 80s.
Marco:
They're worse.
John:
The calculator watches were sleek and elegant in comparison to like a pebble.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't think so.
John:
Oh, they were, yes.
John:
Don't you remember them?
John:
They were terrible.
John:
Yeah, they were way thinner than a Pebble, way smaller than a Pebble.
Marco:
No, Pebble's way nicer.
John:
Pebble's not nicer than a calculator watch.
John:
It is.
John:
It's not by a lot, but it is.
John:
Oh, the Pebble looks like you're wearing, like, a lunchbox on your wrist.
John:
An ugly lunchbox with, like, grommets and, like, it's terrible.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I don't think it's that bad, but it's it's not great, obviously.
John:
But yeah, it's just my my grandfather had a metal calculator watch like I was like a grown up, you know, it was a Casio, I think.
John:
But it was like the fancy, you know, gentleman's one where instead of just being plastic with a bunch of little plastic nubs, it was all metal and smooth with flush keys.
John:
It was awesome.
Casey:
What else going on?
Marco:
Oh, I didn't do my homework, but I did play Flappy Golf.
Marco:
Does that count as a game?
Marco:
No.
Marco:
Sure, why not?
Marco:
I play Flappy Golf, too.
Marco:
It isn't that good of a game.
Marco:
I mean, it's literally just like Super Stickman Golf 2 with the Flappy Bird thing as the mechanic instead of balls, but...
John:
I know, but that's a clever remix slash commentary on Flappy Bird.
John:
It is.
John:
It's a good way to reuse resources they already had.
John:
And I think if you had never seen Super Stickman Golf, it works in a world where Flappy Bird exists.
John:
I think it was clever.
John:
I just don't enjoy playing it that much.
Marco:
Yeah, I kind of wish they had made original courses for it, because some of the ones that come with it just don't make sense, and it's kind of obvious.
Marco:
But otherwise, yeah, it's a fun diversion.
Marco:
It's a little too easy, and there's zero replay value, but it's funny.
Marco:
So anyway, I did play that, and I was greatly annoyed by the Game Center pop-ups in it.
Marco:
You were totally right.
Marco:
Game Center ruins everything.
Marco:
And I eventually logged into Game Center just to make it stop bothering me to log into Game Center.
John:
And the thing is, like, it used to be that a green felt thing would come down and spoil their application.
John:
And now a bubbulous white thing comes down to spoil it.
Marco:
And you have to sit there watching it animate in.
Marco:
You have to sit there for like seven or eight seconds watching this thing show itself to you.
John:
And it will never match anything that it goes on top of because no one is ever going to make an app that looks like either the old Game Center or the new Game Center.
John:
So it's like worried all about this visual stuff.
John:
Let me take a window from another application that doesn't match yours and shove it on top of your UI.
John:
Like it's never going to work ever.
Marco:
So you love it.
Marco:
Do you think Game Center will get any updates on iOS 8?
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm guessing zero.
Marco:
I'm guessing like literally no changes at all to Game Center.
John:
I would love to be in the meeting where they decided, or we're getting rid of the felt.
John:
What says game to you?
John:
And someone said, oh, I know.
John:
Puddles of colored goo.
John:
Puddles of colored goo.
John:
I mean, it's not even... Maybe they were smoking something.
John:
I don't understand.
Marco:
This is why I'm like, I'm just so... You know, as I said last week with, you know, like the getting some new blood in the executive team.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, it's... I think it's...
John:
it's designed by people who don't play games but i don't know if it's they could be young people too like i think everyone who works on game setter should be forced to get an xbox live account to get you know a playstation account to get steam and just like not that those are great examples of interface but just see what everyone else is doing in the realm of things to keep track of like your friends and what games that you play and like this is not new territory tons of other companies do this and they all do it in a way that is more successful visually and technologically frankly than what apple does so
John:
I get the feeling that the people who are doing game center either have never used those things or they've used them, but their bosses say, make it like this.
John:
And they just do what their bosses say.
Marco:
Oh yeah.
Marco:
I'm talking about the bosses being, being, you know, the potential problem here.
Marco:
Like, like, you know, the settings icon in iOS seven, where it has all these, you know, these inner lined gears or these concentric gears.
Marco:
Like, do you think this is like how a bunch of 50 year old men work?
Marco:
view gears like oh well how about on a bike that's where we've seen gears before that's what setting should mean it just it seems like i don't know it just seems so out of touch those aren't bike gears they're watch gears they have to be oh even better old men with watches yeah how about a high-end watch which like how many 25 year olds have ever even seen a high-end watch that has the exposed gears visible through the transparent glass like you know how many people have ever seen that that are you know of this generation at all i mean it's
John:
You know, I'm kind of excited to see the OS X new look introduction video, because I think that was the best part of the iOS 7 announcement, was that little video they put together.
John:
It was like the first time we were seeing iOS 7, and it was crazy looking, and they had all those animation.
John:
You know that video?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
And that was actually, that was a major moment in last year's keynote because it was so shocking.
Marco:
And, you know, I was down on them before for leaning too much on videos in the recent keynotes where, like, you know, I don't think it's a very good keynote if we have to sit there and watch, like, 20 minutes of canned video clips that are basically commercials.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
I know the whole keynote is a commercial in a way, but at least give us the dignity of a human presentation as much as you can and just use videos sparingly.
Marco:
And I thought last year they went over the line and used too much video.
Marco:
That being said, that was a really good video and that was a good use of it.
John:
Yeah, and the difference is that in the olden days, back when Jobs would do Macworld keynotes and everything, the first time you saw the UI was either on a slide, like they would show you elements of it on a slide, or like some sort of theme image, and then they would go to a computer screen where he would be using it and you'd see the screen.
John:
Right.
John:
Whereas this was a produced sort of like...
John:
What you're seeing is super high res images of their sort of design document animating together showing, you know, and that's, I think that is a much more interesting way to be introduced to a UI than seeing screenshots or seeing closeups of theme things.
John:
And so I hope OS X rates getting a similar video.
Marco:
Yeah, when it's that dramatic of a redesign, I agree.
Marco:
If it's like, you know, here's a new version of iWork, I don't think that matters as much.
Marco:
But yeah, I agree with the major redesign.
John:
It's about a new design language.
John:
Everything's Helvetica and whiter.
John:
Really, really thin.
John:
No more overlapping windows.
John:
Yeah, well, that's so last decade.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Last four decades.
John:
Did Johnny Avgo on screen explain why overlapping windows are so passe?
Marco:
Well, they aren't true to the object self.
Marco:
You know, you don't really have overlapping monitors.
Marco:
They're not true to the materials that you're using.
Marco:
They're unapologetically tiled.
John:
If only they did that, and then Federighi would come in from the side and push Johnny off his stool and say, no, seriously, we didn't do that.
John:
It's still a functioning OS.
Casey:
On a random note, about five or 10 minutes ago, I started looking into a node IRC package.
Casey:
And I now have a show bot that's at least listening for suggestions that is doing zero with them, but it's listening for them.
John:
The bot's the easy part.
John:
Once you have the library, you can make it join the channel.
John:
You make it watch everything.
John:
When something matches exclamation point S and a bunch of stuff, you build a URL and you hit it.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
Problem solved.
Casey:
Maybe I'll fiddle with this and see if I can get it up.
John:
That was my, that was my first CPAN module was a bot, a library for making bots.
John:
You couldn't just make the bot.
John:
You had to make the bot factory factory.
John:
It's the same thing.
John:
Well, it was, it was for, do you guys remember?
John:
You don't remember this as you weren't into max, but there was an application called hotline.
John:
Do you remember that?
John:
Maybe?
John:
Nope.
John:
No.
John:
Well, anyway, it was, it's just like IRC, but it's like, it was, it was an application, a client server application written by like a 16 year old.
John:
Uh, so right away, you know, it's going to be awesome.
John:
Uh,
John:
and it was for the mac only and it was used basically to trade illegal software you know like some people would set up servers in their house and you could join it as a user and you'd get an account and they had files and it was all it was basically like had to design your own local irc thing but anyway it was a the protocol was all binary because all the person was doing i think was just shoving like native c structures out onto the wire i don't even think he was doing like a
John:
H to N or all things that changed into network byte order and all that stuff.
John:
It was just like native spewing out C structs onto the wire.
John:
And it was not documented, so I had to reverse engineer it by watching hex dumps of the network traffic and figuring out the packet formats.
John:
And once I had done that, then I could write a library that knew how to read and write those packets.
John:
And once I'd written the library, then you can write a bot.
John:
That's what I did.
John:
My bot was cool.
John:
Well, your bot factory was cool.
John:
Someone else made the cool bot.
John:
No, I made the bot.
John:
I made the framework to make the bot, and then I made the bot with the framework.
John:
You had icons and stuff.
John:
The bot would change its icon based on what people said, and you could send and receive files to people, and you could have private conversations with the bot.
John:
It would log things.
John:
All the things that IRC bots do, but not in IRC and with a few extra capabilities that don't exist in IRC.
John:
But yeah, Hotline was terrible.
John:
That code is terrible.
John:
The module is terrible.
John:
But very first CPAN module.
John:
And so Casey didn't have to do that.
John:
He just downloaded a node module.
John:
He was up and running.
Casey:
Yeah, you two keep blabbing.
Casey:
I might actually have it posted to Marco's thing here in a few minutes.
Casey:
Why don't we just have Casey rewrite the whole thing in Node?
Casey:
That's what I should do.
Marco:
I mean, if I could do this in 20 minutes in PHP, can't you do it in like 30 seconds?
Marco:
You just type in like, you know, it's one line in Node plus 150,000 lines of dependencies.
Marco:
Pretty much.
Marco:
Yeah, just do that.
Marco:
Why would I write this in PHP if you can do that?
Marco:
because the one thing i really don't want to have to try to figure out irc stuff with php that that's i know i'd have to use some kind of third-party code and it would probably be awful and i'd rather not do that so yeah just figure it out that's your next project that's your new homework rather than play a game this week do this you can probably write this whole thing in less time than it takes to beat monument valley
Casey:
I already did my homework, though.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
I'm giving you my homework to do.
Casey:
Yeah, you can't assign homework when you haven't even done your own homework.
Marco:
I was busy playing Flappy Golf and could not play Monument Valley.
John:
Monument Valley is a better game than Flappy Golf.
Marco:
I hope so.
John:
Low bar, but just saying.