Siracusa Waited Impatiently For This
Casey:
And you're going to hear all the coughs and sniffles and everything else that normally we have time to take out.
Casey:
It has nothing to do with our studio, which is excellent.
Casey:
And I'm very enthusiastic about this, but has everything to do with the fact that we want to get this out immediately.
Casey:
Meanwhile, I'm watching John and Tiff take pictures.
John:
Put your camera down.
John:
I'm trying to get every time I do a picture.
Casey:
Okay, so this is our special WWDC episode.
Casey:
We are recording at the day of the keynote, and it is right after the keynote, or I'm sorry, right after the afternoon session.
Casey:
We are at the Macworld Studios.
Casey:
So thank you very much to Jason Snell for letting us crash his studio and use his equipment in order to get this podcast to you lickety-split and not sound like garbage.
Casey:
So thank you very much, Jason Snell.
Casey:
Everyone tweet him a big thank you just so his inbox explodes.
Marco:
At JSnell.
Marco:
Or you can listen to his podcast, The Incomparable, on 5x5.
Marco:
Email Marco!
Casey:
So some stuff happened today.
Casey:
Today was a busy day.
Casey:
And John, do you have any thoughts about today by chance?
John:
We should have talked about a plan of attack for this podcast because there is much there is way too much that happened today for us to discuss on one episode of the podcast.
John:
No doubt we will be talking about these things for many episodes to come.
John:
And it probably would have been a good idea for us to have a plan of like, OK, today we're just going to talk about like iOS 8 or we're just going to talk about Swift.
John:
We're just going to talk about like but we don't have a plan because we are disorganized.
Marco:
Are you suggesting that you did not do your homework?
John:
Oh, we didn't know what was going to be next until today, so how could we, you know.
John:
But anyway, I think that we, what do you want to do?
John:
Do you want to focus on a particular area or do you just want to give broad, sweeping stuff?
John:
Because if we want to do everything, we need to have a list of bullet points and say, okay, we've got to talk about this, that, that, that, and get through them all.
John:
Otherwise, we're going to dive into one of these topics and spend the whole show on it, which I'm also fine with, but...
Casey:
Well, let's just start going down the list.
Casey:
And if we end up going off on a tangent that lasts 12 hours, then so be it.
Casey:
So what did we see today?
Casey:
Well, firstly, on the way in, we got celebrated by the line people, which was weird.
Casey:
I've never seen that before.
Casey:
So as you're on your way in, so you wrap around the block a couple times and then at something like 7, 7, 3rd, well...
Casey:
Something around 730, they let you into Moscone and you end up going to the second level of Moscone.
Casey:
And so you go up these escalators and we hear cheering.
Casey:
We hear cheering going on.
Casey:
And I'm thinking to myself, what is happening?
Casey:
And sure enough, they had, I guess they're Apple employees, but they had all these Apple employees lined up saying like, all right, yeah, be excited.
Casey:
It's like 730 in the morning.
Casey:
We're all exhausted and jet lagged and they're trying to pump us all up.
Casey:
And I'd never seen that before.
Casey:
And it was,
John:
That's what they do with Apple Store openings, right?
John:
They have Apple Store retail employees come out and applaud for everybody.
John:
I mean, at least at that point, people know what they're excited about.
John:
But on the way into the keynote, we don't know what we're going to be excited about.
John:
And there was plenty in the keynote worth applauding.
John:
Had we known what we were going to see, we would have been jazzed as well probably, but we didn't.
John:
So it was just a bunch of tired people.
Casey:
Yeah, it was different to say the least.
Casey:
Then they tried to get a WWDC chant going, which was extremely, I don't know.
Casey:
It was odd.
Casey:
But then we made it into the keynote room.
Casey:
That worked out well.
Casey:
And the keynote started fairly slow, I thought.
Casey:
I didn't think it had that much speed to it.
Casey:
And everyone seemed really confident and really relaxed.
Casey:
And I didn't know what to make of it.
Casey:
So what was some of the first stuff they covered?
Casey:
I didn't start taking notes until about halfway through.
Casey:
So I don't know if you guys.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
This is an accidental podcast.
Marco:
I mean, one of the things I noticed first was just the mood of everyone.
Marco:
Tim comes out, and Tim is relaxed and laid back.
Marco:
And this is a side of Tim we haven't seen a lot of, if any, really.
Marco:
And he was kind of fiery.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
in jabs at Google and Windows and stuff, and it was the kind of thing, you know, we've seen that from jobs in the past, but Tim has always shown a more reserved approach to those usually, and he'll put in jabs here and there that are more subtle in the past, but I think this was the first time we saw him really, like, feel free to just dig in, and he seemed, and I think what we saw play out is that the reason he was so confident and laid back
Marco:
Because the same reason that all the presenters were so confident and laid back is because they knew they had a kick-ass lineup that they were announcing.
Marco:
And they were very proud and confident in what they were about to show us.
Marco:
And we didn't know yet.
Marco:
So at the time, we were just like, wow, they seem like they're really relaxed today.
Marco:
And it flowed very well.
Marco:
It was much more put together, much more seamless than I would say any Apple event in the last three years.
John:
I would say that he seemed less rehearsed.
John:
We know they rehearsed like crazy, right?
John:
But in Tim Cook's first several keynotes, you could tell that he was well rehearsed.
John:
And he would come out there and say what he was going to say.
John:
And it was like, oh, I can see that he is saying something that he has pre-scripted.
John:
I mean, now it was the same exact thing this time, but he sounded less rehearsed.
John:
So again, because he was relaxed.
John:
As for the rest of the keynote, there was so much stuff in this keynote that
John:
whole important technologies got like a slide in five seconds.
John:
And it was like, wait, what was that?
John:
And then they're on to the next thing.
John:
Because there just wasn't enough time.
John:
And I mean, it's obvious they're trying to keep it to a two-hour keynote.
John:
They're trying not to go three hours, four hours.
John:
Whereas other companies, I mean, Google's done that.
John:
Microsoft's gone really long.
John:
Sony, if you want to go to the gaming space.
John:
There have been press conferences where when people have a lot to announce, they say, well, we've got a lot to announce and everybody will love it.
John:
And they just go.
John:
And Apple was like, we have a lot to announce.
John:
but we're going to hold it to two hours because we've got a schedule to keep.
John:
So there was so much in this keynote that there were things that got one slide that are more significant than things that got like 10 minutes in previous years.
Marco:
Yeah, it was... You could tell, like, you know, that we were... What I love about this is that so much of it was a surprise.
Marco:
You know, there were very few spoilers of any value here.
Marco:
Even, like, you know, one of the biggest spoilers, HealthBook, was kind of wrong in, you know, how... And it was like...
John:
asterisk on the presentation it was like oh yeah we got this health thing yeah well i mean it was like it was like we said the possibility of like them them introducing apis for integration with third-party things and then maybe something of their own in the future and so that apple was not going anywhere near anything wearable or anything today it's like we have a bunch of apis and third-party applications can use it and i think that'll be great guys right okay moving on i mean it was one in this in the scope of this keynote it was a minor announcement
Casey:
Yeah, it was really wild.
Casey:
And I got to say to back up just a smidge that I loved snarky Tim Cook.
Casey:
Oh, I thought it was great.
Casey:
I really, really did.
Casey:
And I think that the corny jokes that Apple made like during last WWDC, and I can't think of them off the top of my head.
Casey:
Maybe it was...
Casey:
With Eddie Q and I work and he did like the band poster or whatever it was.
Casey:
And I just felt like that was so corny and contrived.
Casey:
And this year, with the exception of the hair thing, which I think we've taken a little too far, I thought everything else was well done.
Casey:
I thought it was the right amount of snark, the right amount of humor.
Casey:
which is not something I'm used to seeing from Apple.
Casey:
I mean, Jobs had his own schticks here and there.
Casey:
But generally speaking, they've been fairly by the book.
Casey:
And I loved this slightly more casual Apple.
Casey:
The titles in the WWDC sessions where it was like, well, wouldn't you like to know?
Casey:
And we wish we could tell you.
Casey:
I love this new Apple.
Casey:
I don't know, John, as the old man of the three of us in terms of Apple lineage, what do you think about this more casual setup?
John:
Well, the thing about the humor and the jokes is like there's two parts that one is how relaxed, relaxed the people are making things.
John:
And we already said, like, the people seem relaxed because they were confident because they had a lot of good stuff to show and because their experience, like when they brought out the newer people who hadn't presented as many times, they were shakier, kind of like, you know, Craig was in the beginning, but now he's more experienced.
John:
But the second thing is that the jokes were just as silly and corny as they've always been.
John:
But when you're announcing things that get the audience excited, the audience is predisposed to forgive your mistakes because they're so jazzed about what you just showed before.
John:
And so that is the effect.
John:
Basically, if you have great things to show, if you have announcements that the audience is going to love, they will also be in the mood to laugh at your stupid jokes.
John:
And if you're showing stuff that's boring and you make a stupid joke, you're like, not only are you not entertaining me and releasing things that I want, but you're making a stupid joke and wasting my time.
John:
So it's all about audience atmosphere.
John:
And we were, you know, as the announcements rolled on,
John:
We were all very receptive to anything.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
And I think that the pace in general seemed not that brisk in the beginning.
Casey:
But by the end, my goodness, it was a fire hose just getting leveled at all these developers in the best possible way.
Casey:
But things got fast.
Casey:
And this comes back to what you were saying earlier about, oh, yeah, well, we've got this health thing.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, and we've got these new dev tools.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, and we've got this new language.
Casey:
And it was unbelievable how quick it was.
Casey:
There was a lot happening today.
Marco:
There was also just a level of refinement that we haven't seen in a while.
Marco:
And even with Jobs, this isn't really a Steve Jobs thing, because even with Jobs, there were some weird and sloppy moments in the events.
Marco:
For the last couple of years, Apple's events have seemed stuffy, almost sterile, kind of uptight.
Marco:
And I was even worried, because when we saw Eddie Q and Jimmy Iovine last week, I think Eddie Q did not come off that well either.
Marco:
I think he came off a little uptight there.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I was kind of worried, you know, that's kind of the Apple we've seen recently.
Marco:
And like last year, like some of the jokes were kind of overplayed or stale.
Marco:
They ran too many videos last year.
Marco:
Yeah, that's another good point.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And then they kept running the same video for like three events in a row.
Marco:
Like it was this year they ironed out all those bugs in their presentation and it was just a smooth presentation from start to finish.
Marco:
There were no remote control cars.
Marco:
It was it was just very, very well done.
Marco:
And I mean, what they announced, I don't even know where to begin.
John:
It was just a lot.
John:
I think we can begin with OS X because I think despite people thinking that this is going to be, and us also saying this was going to be a big OS X release, and it is visually, I guess, from the user perspective, I think it was the smallest of the things that they announced today because they put up the big slide.
John:
It's going to be OS X, iOS 8, and then dev, developer tools.
John:
And all of those three things, they led with the smallest one like they always do.
John:
You save the best for last.
John:
So I think we can dispense with OS X pretty quickly if you want to cover that in the beginning.
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, so your review is going to be short as well then?
John:
It might be.
John:
Like, I don't know.
John:
I mean, the thing about it is I mentioned to you guys before that, like, a lot of the things they put in the iOS section or in the dev developer tools section of the keynote also apply to OS X. It's just that we don't think of them that way because, you know, anything that's shared between OS X and iOS is going to go into the iOS session because that's what everyone cares about because the Mac is a smaller platform.
John:
But that stuff applies to OS X as well.
John:
So I'm not entirely sure.
John:
But...
John:
I think we can start with OS X. What we thought was going to happen was a big visual refresh.
John:
What we got was a big visual refresh.
Casey:
It wasn't that big a visual refresh, though.
Casey:
I mean, it's pretty big.
Marco:
I was actually surprised how radical it wasn't.
Marco:
Yeah, that's exactly my point.
Marco:
What did you expect that you didn't see?
Marco:
Well, I expected everything to be all white and thin and wispy, and it wasn't.
Marco:
It still looks like Mac OS X. I agree.
Marco:
It's not a jarring change.
Marco:
It is an evolutionary change, and it's exactly, I think, the kind of change that was warranted.
Marco:
They didn't need to totally throw away everything.
Marco:
Remember, and we'll probably talk about this on Gruber's show, but remember Gruber was even saying, what are they going to do about shadows, about layering windows?
Marco:
And it turns out
Marco:
They didn't do anything different.
Marco:
We still have window shadows because windows still are windows.
Marco:
They still look like windows.
Marco:
They're still layered.
Marco:
It wasn't as radical of a change as I think a lot of people were assuming or fearing that it would be.
Marco:
And there are a few weird issues with it that I'm not thrilled with.
Marco:
I think the...
Marco:
The translucency difference between the sidebar is translucent to the desktop and the title bar is translucent to the view under it within its own window.
Marco:
There's these weird layering things that are conceptually a little odd, but I think overall it looks great and it looks like a nice modernization of what they already had rather than throwing it all away and making something totally, radically different.
John:
Here's the thing about that new look.
John:
It's not the type of thing where you're going to install this new OS and all your apps are going to look like the apps that they showed in the keynote.
John:
Because this stuff doesn't get enabled by default.
John:
You have to opt into it.
John:
And so Apple's apps are going to look like that.
John:
Apple's apps are going to have title bars with the window widgets right in line with them, like they do already in some apps, like the App Store app is like that, I think, and a couple other ones.
John:
And Apple's apps are going to have a translucent sidebar.
John:
And Apple's apps are going to have a translucent title bar.
John:
It's not going to transform all your apps into this crazy translucent thing.
John:
So for the most part, what most people's Macs are going to look like is their existing apps with different title bars, different fonts in the menus, and a different doc, but everything else looking more or less the same.
John:
And I don't know if Apple will be able to get everybody on board the, hey, everybody, make all your sideboards translucent, make all your title balls translucent, and tuck the content underneath it.
John:
I don't know if they're going to go in that direction.
John:
So I'm trying to think about what real Macs will look like running Yosemite, not what we saw in the keynote.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
The other thing that struck me about the visual refresh was when I saw Windows 7 for the first time, and this is when I'd already had a Mac at this point.
Casey:
I was already all in on OS X. I felt like, what do they call the Windows 7 visual refresh?
Casey:
I can't remember now.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
But anyway, but where everything got... It's not Metro, right?
Casey:
It's something else.
Casey:
No, it was pre-Metro.
Casey:
But anyway, the point is it was all very translucent and similar ideas.
Casey:
And I actually thought from the very first time I saw it that the Windows 7 stuff looked pretty good.
Casey:
I agree with Marco, especially with this odd amount of translucence where I'm translucent to one thing here, but I'm translucent to this other thing there.
Marco:
It's Arrow, by the way.
Marco:
Feedback from the chat.
Marco:
Sorry.
Casey:
It's what?
Casey:
Oh, Arrow.
Casey:
Yes, thank you.
Casey:
So Arrow, I thought, looked great from the beginning, and I don't even know if Microsoft is backpedaled on that or not, but this new OS X setup, I look good, but I have my reservations.
John:
That's what I'm saying.
John:
I don't think your screen is going to look like that.
John:
I think it's going to look like what it looks like now, and then Safari might look different, and it may look different.
John:
Most of your apps will look the same.
John:
That's a fair point.
John:
The whole thing with the translucency is...
John:
To what end?
John:
To what end?
John:
Why are these things translucent?
John:
That is always the question.
John:
And it's Apple's job, I think, to justify why some of them would want to do this to their application.
John:
Because there are downsides in terms of readability, in terms of variability.
John:
Is this something that people want?
John:
Does it look really awesome on people?
John:
Like Brush Metal, the justification was basically people think it looks cool.
John:
And so everybody made their apps Brush Metal.
John:
Whether it was or not, if you were to ask Apple, why should people do this?
John:
They'd be like, well, people think it's cool.
John:
And they did think it was cool, and they used brush metal everywhere.
John:
Well, I don't know if people think this translucence is all that cool.
John:
I mean, iOS 7 has it as well.
John:
Granted, the APIs are not as open, so everyone couldn't go hog wild with it.
John:
It will really depend on whether people think it's worth adopting these things, because if they don't, it's just OS X, but everything, you know, candy colored in iOS 7ified.
Casey:
Yeah, but didn't they say during the keynote that the idea was to give you some context within your document, which I don't really buy.
John:
Yeah, but like, what does that mean?
John:
What does the context mean?
John:
Previously, I wasn't aware that my document continued off the top of this page, but now that I can.
John:
see the green image showing through my title bar, I'm aware that it goes off.
John:
How does that provide you any more context than simply clipping the image at that point, or God forbid, always showing a scroll bar so you could see the scroll position?
John:
I forget which word they were using.
John:
I don't think it was context, but they did have a talking point of how translucency provides you.
John:
One thing was you can pick your desktop background, and that will influence how your apps look to let the personality of your desktop background show through your apps.
John:
Is that something that people want?
John:
Do they want the personality of their desktop background showing through in their apps?
John:
Do they just want to use their apps to, like, read their mail and stuff?
John:
They don't want to see the desktop image behind it.
John:
It looks like a big model of mess.
John:
But, again, these are all opt-in things.
John:
Your apps aren't just going to all of a sudden become translucent.
John:
Apple is obviously opting into them, and they will be a good test bed, and it will be interesting to see if this is something people want, whether developers think it looks cool and they just ship it to people and then people complain or developers never even ship it and it just ends up being a different-looking macOS.
Yeah.
Casey:
So anything else on the visual refresh?
Casey:
Because, I mean, I think that's pretty much all I had to say about it.
John:
I like the idea of them redoing the – trying to constrain the icons into the different, you know, arrangements of having circle icons and square icons and having all of the little slanty – they showed them – people were taking pictures of the IMAX screen up, but I'm sure there's more up.
John:
Showing all the little slanted rectangle icons all looking identical, identically slanted and everything.
John:
That's a reasonable unification.
John:
It's a nice middle ground between people thinking, oh, OS X is going to use round racks for all its icons.
John:
It's not.
John:
There are still distinct shapes.
John:
And again, I think third parties might just ignore this and say, well, that's good for you, Apple.
John:
You can do whatever the hell you want with your icons, but we're still making our icons look like we want.
John:
So I think there will be a continued tension between what Apple is doing with Yosemite and what third-party developers do with it.
John:
And it might be a little weird, kind of like iOS 7 is, where some apps just don't come all the way on the iOS 7 train.
John:
So you've got these apps that...
John:
Their icons haven't changed since iOS 6, and their interfaces may be different, but they don't look like iOS 7.
John:
They still don't have the iPhone 5 screen size support?
Marco:
Not that bad, but yeah.
Marco:
All right, we are sponsored this week first by our friends at Igloo.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you so much.
Marco:
Go to igloosoftware.com slash ATP to check out Igloo, the internet you'll actually like, and all the cool stuff they're working on these days.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our friends at Igloo for sponsoring our show once again.
John:
Speaking of Igloo and other web-type applications, you know all the web apps that started to change their look to look like iOS 7 after iOS 7 came out?
Marco:
Hey, I'm just glad that websites aren't still trying to look like iOS old because that looked terrible on websites.
John:
But a lot of people who have either web components to their products or have web apps took the hint from, yeah, Windows 8 as well, but also iOS 7, especially in the Mac world, to make their websites look like that.
John:
And with the change in look of OS X now, that turns out to be a good move.
John:
I mean, even Apple is doing it.
John:
Like, they showed what the App Store looks like.
John:
That's what they were showing, right?
John:
The new App Store app on the Mac looks all different.
John:
Yeah.
John:
That look, that kind of like flat candy colored look, if you did that everywhere across your website on your iOS device and now the Mac has switched over to it, that was a good planning because people like that look.
John:
It's simple.
John:
It's clean.
John:
And now it is across the entire Apple platform.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So this keynote was, to some degree, wonderful and terrible for me.
Casey:
And it was wonderful because they announced that we're getting airdrop between devices, between OSs, I guess I should say, between Yosemite and between iOS 8, which is great.
Casey:
But the downside was that we also learned later on that there's this handoff thing that where if you're, say, working on an email or something like that, and then you want to finish that email, you're working on it on your phone, you want to finish it on your computer, and then all of a sudden you can just pitch this email through.
Casey:
through the ether, through the air, onto the computer.
Casey:
And that sounds awesome, and I'm really enthusiastic about it.
Casey:
However, I think, and they never confirmed or denied, that that's probably using Bluetooth low energy, and none of my Macs have Bluetooth low energy on them.
John:
You could be using AirDrop, because if AirDrop works between them, and it's supposed to be, the whole idea is it's proximity-based.
John:
So it's not like they mentioned, oh, you won't have things from your home showing up on your work computer or vice versa.
John:
So it could be Bluetooth.
John:
It could also be AirDrop, which uses that ad hoc Wi-Fi networking thing, I think.
John:
But all of it requires developer support.
John:
This is not magic.
John:
So Apple's Mail, if you use Apple Mail on your Mac and you use Apple Mail on your iOS device,
John:
then yeah, you can do that.
John:
But what if you use something else on either one of those places?
John:
Or what if the things you use, the developer hasn't added support for this?
John:
It still seems like a thing that you have to do, and it could kind of be fidgety enough that it demos really well, but I don't know.
John:
I understand the frustration they're getting at because I know when I'm doing something on one device and I want to just transition to it over there.
John:
It would be nice if everything picked up, but this requires so many parties to cooperate and everything to work for that handoff to work.
John:
Getting the handoff to work could end up feeling like, from the user's perspective, more trouble than it's worth.
John:
Maybe it's just better to just save it as a draft and then go over and then pull up the draft over there, like the old things that we used to be.
John:
It demos well, and I think it's a good idea for this product, but I'm skeptical about how seamless it will really be in real life.
John:
So I think we'll have to see.
Marco:
I think it's going to be one of those things like notification syncing between devices and how – we were talking last week how there seems to be this grace period in current infrastructure that we have now where if you get an iMessage and you're at your computer, if the window's focused, then your phone won't buzz in your pocket.
Marco:
But if you don't attend to it within a few seconds, your phone will buzz.
Marco:
It's that kind of thing, and they have worked on that over time, and it has gotten –
Marco:
better over time.
Marco:
It's still not perfect, but it's gotten better.
Marco:
This is probably going to be the same kind of thing where it's going to start out probably a little wonky and then get better over time because it's probably built on that exact same system.
Casey:
I'm hopeful that it is the peer-to-peer Wi-Fi thing.
Casey:
I'm skeptical, but I'm hopeful, and we'll see what happens.
Casey:
But what else did we learn OS X-wise?
Marco:
Well, I mean, one thing that's very interesting, I think, and I don't know if we're going to talk about this today, is the iCloud Dropbox, basically.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I mean, we talked about whether they would backpedal.
John:
Would they just decide to show the file system or would they try to figure out something else?
John:
And this is kind of like an interesting compromise.
John:
But what it seems to me is that they wanted to have their cake and eat it, too, which is they wanted to have the existing iCloud experience, which is just like there's no file system.
John:
You don't have to worry about that.
John:
Every app owns its own files.
John:
Everything's in iCloud.
John:
Everything is ubiquitous and available everywhere.
John:
they wanted to keep that because I think that's good, right?
John:
But they also wanted to add the ability for people who knew what they were doing to have something that was more like Dropbox.
John:
And they didn't want to destroy one with the other.
John:
So they want to make it so, like, if you're using the system the way you've been using it for the past several years, it will look the same to you.
John:
But if you know what to do, then suddenly you get the equivalent of an open save dialog box that's showing you, like, you know, the iCloud sidebar suddenly shows you documents.
John:
And what I think will happen is once you put iCloud in the sidebar of the finder,
John:
People are going to click on it.
John:
People are going to learn they can make new folders there, and people are going to use it.
John:
And they'll end up using it like Dropbox.
John:
And I think Dropbox has proven that if you constrain... It doesn't make any sense, but if you constrain the world of the file system to a single place that they can hang their hat on, like, it's in my Dropbox, or it's on my desktop.
John:
People are fine with that.
John:
It doesn't matter that the number of levels of hierarchy they create under that are the same as they could make anyplace else.
John:
It just gives them a starting point, and it makes them feel comfortable.
John:
So now...
John:
With iCloud in the sidebar, for people who – imagine someone who gets a computer like, oh, you should install Dropbox.
John:
And you know they can't install Dropbox.
John:
You know that that phrase, you should install Dropbox, is like Greek to them.
John:
Like, well, I don't know what you mean.
John:
I don't know how to install software.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Is there a website?
John:
Do I do something?
John:
Do I download a disk image?
John:
Do I get it?
John:
Like, nobody knows.
John:
And it's just like, look.
John:
Go to your Finder, and the sidebar is a thing called iCloud.
John:
Anything you put there when you're, you know, you can put stuff there and you'll see it everywhere.
John:
And that is like Dropbox.
John:
It's a folder that syncs.
John:
And now iCloud, it's a cloud that syncs, we hope.
John:
I mean, all this, we'll have to see how reliable it is.
John:
But it's a reasonable compromise.
John:
I like that it acknowledges the fact that Apple has failed to come up with something so much better that eliminates all the evil of the file system.
John:
And I think they've taken less of Dropboxes like...
John:
The file system is big and confusing, but if you constrain it to this one place, whether it makes sense or not, a larger group of people are suddenly able to deal with it.
John:
Not everybody, but a larger group.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think this has a huge value in PR for Apple.
Marco:
We've been talking before, iCloud is this umbrella term that refers to lots of different things, most of which are behind the scenes.
Marco:
In fact, Eddie Q talked about this in the Jimmy Iovine thing last week.
Marco:
This is now a very public-facing version of iCloud, and it works the way people expect modern, quote, cloud things to work.
Marco:
It's a cloud sync service for this folder full of files.
Marco:
That's exactly what people want from a cloud service today, for the most part.
Marco:
There's things to be built on top of that, but this is what people want.
Marco:
And this is going to be this big thing in everyone's face to use as a Mac saying, look, it's iCloud.
Marco:
It works.
Marco:
We get it.
Marco:
We're in the cloud.
Marco:
We are doing web services.
Marco:
And they mostly work most of the time.
John:
And it comes with your Mac.
John:
It uses the iCloud account that they make you set up when you install the OS or when you set up the device.
John:
Like, you don't have to go to a third party.
John:
All the advantages of being part of the platform.
John:
Like, you know, all those barriers that prevented people from getting Dropbox installed.
John:
And in fact, I think...
John:
There are new APIs in OS X and in iOS.
John:
And I guess we'll probably talk about the whole extensions.
John:
Is that what they call it?
John:
Extensions?
John:
I believe that's right.
John:
That was in the iOS section.
John:
But extensions apply to OS X as well.
John:
And so there are extensions in OS X that will let, for example, Dropbox make their application better.
John:
So Apple is not just saying, oh, iCloud is built in and we'll be able to do Dropbox-y-like things.
John:
But in fact, we're helping Dropbox out here too.
John:
Yeah.
John:
helping ourselves out as well.
John:
For example, in not having Dropbox in-memory hack the finder to put those little badges on all your icons to show the green, they've got an official API for that through extensions, which is their safe mechanism for extending functionality.
John:
And I think the notification widget things are similar, aren't there?
John:
Aren't those under the umbrella of extensions?
Casey:
I think that's right, yeah.
Casey:
The iCloud Drive thing struck me as so interesting for a couple of reasons.
Casey:
Firstly, it was the tangible manifestation of Dropbox as a feature, not a product.
Casey:
And I thought that was kind of interesting.
Casey:
And then secondly...
Casey:
This was, I believe, the first thing we saw of a series of different features and enhancements and products and whatnot that are all heavily relying on iCloud.
Casey:
And maybe I'm amongst a group of people that are giving iCloud a bad rep for no really good reason anymore.
Casey:
No, they're good reasons.
Casey:
Okay, so either way.
Casey:
But if they doubled down on secrecy, which it appears they have, they've quadrupled down on iCloud being the bus for their entire ecosystem.
Casey:
And in principle, that's wonderful, but that's a lot of pressure to put on a system that I'm not so sure can handle.
John:
Yeah, they were saying a lot of the right things.
John:
Like, for example, I forget, maybe this was in the State of the Union, we're not supposed to talk about it or whatever, but one of the services they were talking about, they...
John:
They mentioned push notifications in connection with it.
John:
And as we've said on past shows, push notifications is one of the things that's under the iCloud umbrella that seems to work pretty well.
John:
And we're all hoping more like that, less like iCloud Core Data.
John:
And this presentation was, I mean, maybe it's just an optimistic thing, but when they showed these things, I'm like, I have...
John:
I'm optimistic that these new things will be more like push notifications and less like the things that haven't gone well.
John:
Although iMessage is, I mean, they added tons of stuff to iMessage as well, and that still continues to be a little bit weird and creepy.
John:
So, yeah, you're right.
John:
They really put a lot of eggs in this iCloud basket.
Yeah.
John:
Basically what Apple is doing is, I'm assuming, forcing themselves to get better at this crap.
John:
Because it will be disastrous if they continue to fumble and keep putting more and more important things into the iCloud basket.
Marco:
I'm actually pretty confident in what they're doing because it seems like, you know, Casey, you said like...
Marco:
They're building a lot of this stuff on what appears to be the push notification slash iMessage part of iCloud.
Marco:
And that seems to be the part that is operating at probably the biggest scale and is probably the most reliable.
Marco:
I know people have had iMessage problems here and there, but we don't know how much that is related to the client-side software.
Marco:
It seems like the server-side end of that, the push notification, the whole push system...
Marco:
has been really rock solid for the vast majority of its existence and certainly recently.
Marco:
So I'm actually pretty confident that the iCloud part of this is probably not going to be a problem.
Marco:
Other parts of it, you know, like the client side code might be.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But it seems like the iCloud services end of what they're doing, you know, and people, you know, iCloud core data sync was a disaster, but that was also probably mostly a client side and design issue of the design of that capability.
John:
I mean,
John:
Or even documents in the cloud, or a lot of those things kind of work, but had weird things about them.
John:
Or they started off as synchronous, and then they made them asynchronous, and there's not a lot of visibility.
John:
And when it doesn't work, even today, if you launch Apple's Notes app, and you know there are notes that you put on your iOS device, the Notes app just sits there for a while, and then eventually your notes show up, you hope.
John:
But if they don't, you have no recourse.
John:
There's no visibility.
John:
And that's why moving to iCloud in the sidebar and putting stuff there for documents
John:
I mean, at least that gives you some visibility into what's going on.
John:
But the other APIs, I mean, that's still a problem with their cloud system.
John:
They're making it better from a developer's perspective so developers can tell what the hell's going on.
John:
But from a user perspective, man, this stuff better work because you have nowhere to go if it doesn't.
John:
You just stare at your app.
John:
It's not even a busy indicator.
John:
You're just like, is my stuff there?
John:
Is it going to come?
Casey:
It's so true.
Casey:
But they did mention, and I think this was in the NDA session, so I'll be very vague, but I believe they mentioned that they're dogfooding a lot of the stuff they're providing to developers.
Casey:
So a lot of the stuff that they're giving developers, they're using those APIs for their own new features and applications.
John:
Yeah, that was heartening, although it's like...
John:
It's helpful.
John:
What that means is that if they did a bad job, Apple will know about it.
John:
That is the best thing about it is that at least they'll know they did a bad job.
John:
It doesn't necessarily mean they did a good job, and it's kind of bad if they didn't because now they're screwing up their own services.
John:
Their own headline features are screwed up by their own bad APIs.
John:
But presumably because they are dogfooding it, they'll find out that it's bad and it won't just be this, like, we won't have to wait for, like, developer backlash.
John:
Like, Apple's own engineers would be like, your server-side crap is broken and I can't ship my app because it's broken.
Yeah.
Casey:
So is there anything else that's fun and exciting to talk about?
John:
Before we get off OS X, I just want one more thing.
Casey:
Oh, no, we're not done with OS X yet.
John:
The notification center sidebar on the widgets there, and everyone's like, what does that mean for dashboard?
John:
Where is dashboard?
John:
And they didn't say anything about it.
John:
I'm pretty sure Dashboard's still there in Yosemite.
John:
Jason can nod his head because, yep, he nods his head.
Marco:
Well, they didn't say... The implication is that you should probably not get too attached to Dashboard.
John:
Right, but anyway, this is a grace period, it seems like.
John:
Apple said nothing about the future of Dashboard, but anyone who knows anything about Apple will know that the future of Dashboard is not bright.
John:
And this is not... I'm saying next year it's gone.
John:
Yeah, and this is... Jason just pulled up Dashboard in Yosemite.
John:
I'm staring at it.
John:
Anyway, it's still there.
John:
But this is not news.
John:
Dashboard has been kind of stagnant and just...
John:
sitting there doing nothing for many, many years.
John:
It is a pretty old feature.
John:
Was it coming at 10.4 or something like that?
John:
Yeah, something like that.
John:
It's been around for a long time.
John:
I use it every day.
John:
I still think it's great, but it's clear that it's not just like this year that Apple decided to kill it.
John:
It died of natural causes, essentially.
John:
So Dashboard is still there.
John:
You can continue to use it in Yosemite.
John:
I don't know how much longer it will be around, and I bet most people won't mourn it, even though I will, because I think it's kind of cool.
John:
And you can't, I mean, it's not a direct replacement.
John:
Like, the notification center is a skinny little sidebar, whereas Dashboard took up your whole screen.
John:
But third-party opportunity, people.
Marco:
We are also sponsored this week, once again, by our friends at Warby Parker.
Marco:
Go to warbyparker.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Warby Parker is a new concept in eyewear, although it's only new to you if you haven't listened to our show ever.
Marco:
Warby Parker, it was a collaboration between four friends.
Marco:
And here's the thing.
Marco:
They believe that eyewear should not cost a fortune.
Marco:
It should be available and affordable to everyone.
Marco:
Eyeglasses should not cost as much as an iPhone.
Marco:
That's ridiculous.
Marco:
So, they have prescription eyeglasses, very high quality, and they start at just $95, including the prescription lenses.
Marco:
They even have a titanium collection starting at just $145, including prescription lenses, that includes premium Japanese titanium, French non-rocking screws, and all sorts of other niceties.
Marco:
All their glasses include anti-reflective and anti-glare coatings at no additional cost.
Marco:
All of their glasses come with a hard case, which is awesome, and a cleaning cloth.
Marco:
There's no additional items you need to purchase.
Marco:
They're not trying to nickel and dime you.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
They make buying glasses online easy and risk-free.
Marco:
Now, you're probably afraid, if you think about buying glasses online and you've never done it before, you're probably afraid, like, how will I know how they will look on my face?
Marco:
They have a couple of ways to address this.
Marco:
They have these awesome online tools.
Marco:
You can use your webcam.
Marco:
They can even use the webcam to help you measure in case your eye doctor won't give you the prescription details about your sizing, which some of them are weird about.
Marco:
They can even help you measure, and it's very good, very accurate.
Marco:
So you can preview everything there, and that's cool.
Marco:
But the best thing about Warby Parker, I think, is that they have this home try-on program.
Marco:
So you can go online.
Marco:
You can pick out up to five styles of glasses that you think might look good on you or look good in the preview thing.
Marco:
and they will send them to you, and you can try them on in your home, risk-free.
Marco:
They send them to you for free.
Marco:
They come to the prepaid return label.
Marco:
You send them back for free.
Marco:
You can try them on in your home, and you can see how they look on you in person.
Marco:
And then if you want to buy them, you can.
Marco:
If you don't want to buy them, no problem.
Marco:
And not only that, if these people aren't nice enough already, for every pair of glasses that they sell, they distribute a pair of glasses to someone in need through Recognize Vision Charities.
Marco:
And this is great because...
Marco:
There are so many people who lack access to eyeglasses.
Marco:
And if you need glasses, you need them to live.
Marco:
You need them to work.
Marco:
If you're a kid in school, you need them to learn, to see what's on the board.
Marco:
It's so important to people.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
So Warby Parker donates a pair of glasses for every pair they sell to people in need.
Marco:
So it's really fantastic.
Marco:
Anyway, go to warbyparker.com slash ATP to learn more and to check out their awesome glasses.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
So thanks a lot to Warby Parker for sponsoring the show once again.
Casey:
Yeah, I've told the story a hundred times and I'll make it really quick.
Casey:
But when I got a set of Warby Parker sunglasses, I put in like four pairs, maybe three pairs of sunglasses that were my stereotypical, like this is Casey's style.
Casey:
And then I put in a pair or two that were just completely not the sort of sunglasses I would normally buy.
Casey:
And sure enough, the ones that I ended up choosing were one of the ones that I didn't expect to like.
Casey:
So it actually ends up working out pretty well.
Casey:
So really quickly, real time follow up with regard to dashboard.
Casey:
I believe the quote, as I was informed by Jason, was we suggest you quickly adopt this new technology with regard to with regard to the notification center, which is basically Apple code for this is going to die.
Casey:
Prepare yourselves.
John:
Yeah, and dashboard was like a weird one-off thing with these HTML kind of widgets or whatever, whereas their replacement is part of a larger system that spans both iOS and iOS 10, this extension system.
John:
And, I mean, maybe that's just an umbrella term and there's no real relation technologically.
John:
We haven't learned the details yet.
John:
But they're using that term to say you can write extensions, which is, I mean, people in that audience don't know, but extensions, we already used that term once on the Mac.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it has bad connotations.
John:
These are different.
John:
And in iOS, it has a totally different thing, which we'll get to when we talk about iOS 8.
John:
But these new widget things in the sidebar are part of that system.
John:
It's a way to extend the system.
John:
And I look forward to new ways to extend the system.
John:
Because what this means is Apple has basically come up with a way for both iOS and the Mac for people to write system extensions.
John:
to extend the functionality of the system.
John:
And that whole idea has been like, all right, we'll let you put an icon in the menu bar, but you should really make it black and white.
John:
And we won't let you move yours around.
John:
We can only do that with ours.
John:
Yours just go in a random order.
John:
Tough luck.
John:
Download Bartender.
John:
So I'm hoping this is the dawning, certainly on iOS, it's the dawning of a new age of extending this.
John:
I'm hoping on the Mac as well that it's a sort of a renaissance of extending the Mac in interesting and safe ways and Apple approved ways versus the old way, which is just like third parties figuring out how to get it done.
Casey:
You know, the keynote as a whole, and perhaps this relates more to iOS than the Mac, but I felt like the keynote as a whole was an exercise in Apple doing all the things that we never thought they'd do.
Casey:
They gave us a whole bunch of photo—well, sort of—gave us a whole bunch of photo storage.
Casey:
They are allowing extensions, like you were saying, both on OS X, which is to be expected, but also on iOS, including stuff as wild as replacing the system keyboard.
Casey:
And there were a couple other things.
Casey:
Now I'm drawing a blank.
Casey:
But there were—oh, well, Swift—
Casey:
The entire extension thing.
Marco:
I mean, that's a huge thing right there.
Casey:
So there are all these things that I think the three of us, everyone really have been saying, oh, they've got to do this, but they're never going to do it because they're Apple, they're stubborn, they're belligerent.
John:
But I don't think it's like a stubbornness or like a philosophical objection.
John:
I mean, a lot of us say like, oh, previously there was a philosophical objection and now that has changed.
John:
But with a lot of these things, it's like Apple always wanted to do them, but it had to wait for certain things.
John:
And on iOS, which I guess we'll transition to soon anyway, but like it was,
John:
And iOS was like, we don't have the CPU to do that.
John:
We don't have the memory to do that.
John:
We don't have the whatever, like background and all that stuff.
John:
And because they just had priorities and didn't fit into them.
John:
And, you know, for the sandbox and stuff like that, we don't have a safe way to do that.
John:
And so all of it was like, when we have the CPU, when we have the memory, when we've come up with a safe way for you to do it, we will let you do it.
John:
But not before then.
John:
Not like, oh, just add it.
John:
I know how you can get this to work.
John:
Look, if I go to the jailbreak stores, I can get something that does this right now that lets me put widgets on the lock screen.
John:
It's like Apple wanted to come up with everything had to be in place.
John:
And the final thing that had to be in place is we have to have a safe way for you to do things so you're not compromising the stability of the system, so you're not allowing malware, so you're not doing all, you know.
Casey:
Or your own privacy as well, because they talked about how extensions – very briefly, they spoke about how extensions are going to be sandboxed.
Casey:
And this might be in the NDA session, so I should probably shut up.
Casey:
But suffice it to say, they took not only security of the system, but also your information security.
John:
very seriously.
John:
That's the safety.
John:
Like all the things they prioritize for, you know, you are safe using iOS in these ways and we are not going to let you do all the things that you guys all want to do until we have safe ways to do it within the current envelope of hardware.
John:
And then, of course, it's a lot of work for them to make those APIs.
John:
And this is the year.
John:
This is the year where finally they have crossed the threshold for all these things.
John:
And there probably is a philosophical aspect of it as well in that there's been so much shakeup at the high levels of Apple management that you can't discount that as one of the possible reasons.
John:
But...
John:
You have to just look at the way they're giving us all of this stuff, and all of it is not the same way that the jailbreak stores gave it to us.
John:
It is an official supported API that works with their existing sandboxing and prioritization stuff on the Mac as well as on iOS.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So as a way to transition from Mac to iOS, I wanted to briefly talk about – I forget what they called it, what their marketing term for it was, but when you can –
John:
send traditional sms messages via the mac but it's at the the your iphone does the sending you can actually even take oh i believe it's called blue phone elite yeah eight years ago it is very much in the demo you might be mistaken for thinking it's like oh i've been able to do that in google voice for years but it's paired with your phone no iphone none of this stuff works so but
John:
Yeah, but it's the same type of third-party products that would basically say, you've got a phone, but you want to do stuff that your phone could only do on your Mac screen.
John:
And it just connects the dots.
John:
And it looks really nice, and it's very seamless, and it's something that was like, yeah, that should work that way.
John:
Why do I have to go and pick up the phone or having the caller ID show up as a notification, having you be able to answer that call from your Mac?
Yeah.
John:
It's using your phone, but they're all in the same house, even if it's another room.
John:
They're all connected on the same network.
John:
Why shouldn't this work?
John:
And Apple made it work.
Casey:
I hope it works well.
Casey:
And here again, I hope it doesn't rely on Bluetooth low energy.
Casey:
I presume in the case of phone calls, it certainly wouldn't.
Casey:
But nevertheless, I just think it's a really impressive...
Casey:
It's a really impressive way to leverage the platform and really do what you would hope and expect these things to do.
Casey:
And I'm really excited about that.
Casey:
So with that in mind, let's kind of shift gears to iOS.
Casey:
There's so much to talk about.
Casey:
I don't even know where to begin with.
John:
I remember when I said that iOS 8 was going to be like the Mavericks of iOS was just, you know, not a lot on the outside and, you know, and some stuff on the inside.
John:
But this is way bigger than a Mavericks release.
John:
It's true that it didn't change the appearance that much.
John:
Like very little visually has been changed, but all the number of things are changing in every other part of iOS is just huge.
Casey:
Yeah, it's really surprising.
Casey:
There were a couple of things that jumped out at me really quickly because they're things that have really bothered me over the years.
Casey:
They didn't talk a lot about it in the keynote, but it seems like for iMessages and SMSs and things like that, it seems like all media is ephemeral by default.
Casey:
If you look closely at the keynote after an image or after one of these audio clips that's, I believe, new,
Casey:
Or after a video clip, after each of these, it says keep.
Casey:
And so the implication, I think they made a very quick mention of it, but the implication was if you don't hit the keep button in the next three days or whatever the number may be, then that's just going to go away.
Casey:
And I especially have lamented numerous times about how I had gigs upon gigs of, well, probably animated GIFs, but one way or the other.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
gigs upon gigs of photos in my messages app on my phone that I didn't really need and I didn't really want.
Casey:
I wanted them to go away and I wanted them to do that easily and quickly.
Casey:
And this seems like it's probably going to be the answer for that.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, they did so... And this leads very closely to the photos discussion, I think.
Marco:
Yep, absolutely.
Marco:
So to recap, basically, they announced this new... A few new things around photos that's basically...
Marco:
like, you know, it's basically what people wanted, which is, like, you know, PhotoStream as, like, a standalone thing is kind of going away as what it was before.
Marco:
You know, you still have, like, the shared PhotoStream.
Marco:
That's more of a, you know, feature.
Marco:
But as a storage mechanism, PhotoStream has been massively upgraded, and now you just have all of your photos are just in iCloud.
Marco:
And they use your iCloud storage, which now has a couple of bigger, cheaper plans.
Marco:
And it's, you know, it's not...
Marco:
we're not talking about like revolutionary pricing.
Marco:
What was it like?
Marco:
It was 200 gigs for four bucks a month.
John:
And yeah, whatever it was, I think it was like 20 gigs for four bucks or there was cheap plans.
John:
I mean, it's much cheaper than it was.
John:
Right.
John:
But like, but it's still not like, you know, Google level pricing.
John:
We don't have enough information yet to see what this is really to be like, but they said the right thing is when, you know, one of the things they said that I'm glad about was they said, we keep your full rise pictures, which is,
John:
And videos.
John:
Yeah, and videos, which is opposed to what Marco was saying in the past shows that, like, if Apple needs to, they should just do a lower-res stuff if they can't handle it.
John:
Apple's basically saying, no, actually, we can handle it.
John:
Not only can we handle all your floor-res pictures, we'll handle your video, too, which seems crazy, but, like, hey, go for it, right?
John:
And then the pricing, it's like all that announcement means nothing unless they adjust the pricing, and they did adjust the pricing.
John:
Have they adjusted it enough?
John:
We'll see, but the previous pricing was crazy and punitive and...
Casey:
Well, I'm not in love with this pricing because it was at five gigs for free, which I just think is a little low.
Casey:
That is ridiculous.
Casey:
And then I think it was 20 gigs.
Casey:
Is that what you're saying?
Casey:
20 gigs was something.
Marco:
20 and 200.
Marco:
They have plans up to a terabyte, but they didn't say how much those cost.
Marco:
But I mean, either way, we're talking – it's not dirt cheap, but it's not that expensive.
Marco:
You're not paying like S3 rates for this.
John:
Yeah, we would hope – what we would hope is that –
John:
Say you're starting off as an Apple customer now, and you're just becoming an adult and taking pictures or whatever.
John:
We would hope that as you accumulate pictures that Apple's pricing keeps pace and comes down.
John:
But for people with existing large collections, we're going to have to look at that and do the math and say, is this worthwhile for me to do this?
John:
And they didn't mention anything about iPhoto, and I have no idea what the fate of iPhoto is.
John:
And they showed this Photos app, which is like the iOS photos app.
John:
No, because the iOS Photos app doesn't do anything close.
John:
There's iPhoto on iOS, too.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
The Photos app is on iOS, and there's also iPhoto on iOS.
Marco:
I think iPhoto is going with Dashboard.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Earlier, even.
John:
You can't use them for the same thing.
John:
The whole idea that, you know, can you take your photo collection and just put it all up into the cloud and deal with your photos that way?
John:
I don't know what the answer to that is yet.
John:
I don't think that the keynote gave us enough information to know that.
Marco:
Well, I think the implication is very clear.
Marco:
iPhoto has always had this problem where iPhoto was originally conceived in a world before the iPhone and sync, and it never had multi-device sync and everything else.
Marco:
And PhotoStream kind of like half-assed it in there, but it wasn't a very good solution and certainly was very confusing.
Marco:
And then the iPhone comes out and the iPad comes out and they have this Photos app, which is not iPhoto, distinctly not iPhoto, and it has its own way to do things and store things and manage things.
Marco:
And then they bring iPhoto to iOS, which is weird because they didn't replace photos with it.
Marco:
They just brought this other photo management program, which iPhoto on iOS, in my opinion, has never been good.
Marco:
But maybe that's just me.
Marco:
But it certainly, I don't think, has gotten widespread adoption.
John:
How could iPhoto be any good on iOS if all your photos are in the Photoshop?
John:
Exactly.
John:
But it seems like what they've done is brought that same dichotomy to the Mac.
John:
And I don't understand why iPhoto can't be the same app it is today, but all the photo storage done the iCloud way.
Marco:
Oh, I think the new Photos app on the Mac they showed off that's coming out, was it next spring or this fall?
John:
Yeah, they said next year, and so basically it means it's not tied to an OS release, and it got pushed, basically.
John:
It didn't make it into Yosemite, right?
Marco:
I'm pretty sure the implication there, though, is that the new Photos app for Mac that's coming next year is the replacement for iPhoto.
John:
Yeah, but what they showed was not.
John:
What they showed was the iOS Photos app inside a window with a dinky little toolbar.
John:
It doesn't come close to doing keywords and maps and slideshows and all the stuff that...
Marco:
I bet it will.
Marco:
Because Photos app on iOS already has much.
Marco:
It doesn't have the management stuff, but it has the maps and the albums.
Marco:
It's getting a lot of that already.
Marco:
I think the implication of where they're going is very clear.
Marco:
Like, iPhoto's going away.
Marco:
This is the replacement.
Marco:
We're just not done with it.
John:
I mean, the good thing is that from the photos in the cloud, like it's what we're talking about with messages.
John:
What they're basically saying is some of these photos will be on your local device, but you have access to more photos.
John:
Like, I mean, Everpix did it.
John:
You didn't have every single photo in your photo library on your phone just because you uploaded to Everpix, but you could scroll through all of them and you can show any one of them.
John:
And Apple is doing that now.
John:
Apple is saying, yeah, we're going to do that too.
John:
All your photos can't be on your iOS device.
John:
We'll store all your photos, but you can get to all of them from your iOS device and you can get to them all from your Mac sometime next year.
John:
And that's what we're looking for.
John:
Unified photos.
John:
Right.
John:
protected in the cloud, hopefully locally cached on your Mac when the hard drive is big enough and some of them on your phone.
Marco:
Yeah, and if the Mac version is good enough and able to and willing to also import SLR pictures, pictures from standalone cameras, then that will be amazing.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
I think it's very, very clear where they're going.
Marco:
I agree.
Marco:
Do you think Aperture continues?
John:
I think it probably does, but... Yeah, the pro stuff will lag, but the whole idea... It's what we want.
John:
We want to have local, fast access to our photos, but we want not to worry that if our computers die, that we lose our photos.
John:
So we want Apple to store them and back them in the cloud, have it be synced everywhere, but have fast, local copies.
John:
And Aperture, as the pro app, may be like, well...
John:
The pro people don't want their stuff in the cloud, and it's too big anyway, so they'll just have it on local hard drives.
John:
But, like, you know, you can't... This is going to come.
John:
Like, the whole idea of sort of a transparent storage hierarchy where the canonical version is stored in a data center somewhere really safely for you, hopefully not on HFS+, and all of your... Ding!
John:
And all of your local...
John:
Your local versions are like just caches of it, and everything is synchronized, and everything is fast because of local caching, and it's all seamless.
John:
That's where all storage is going.
John:
And for giant bins of data that we have, and our giant bins are basically photos and video for regular people, that's what we want, a storage hierarchy that ends in the cloud and that is transparent to us.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And I feel like the the photos set up that that Apple's building, I'm still grumbly about the price.
Casey:
But if that's the most of my complaints, then we're still doing a pretty good job.
Casey:
And I'm really looking forward to it.
Casey:
I'm really looking forward to trying it.
Casey:
The only thing I wonder, though, is how are we going to get the years upon years upon years of photos that we've already taken into.
John:
Well, that's what I was thinking.
John:
Like, if they came up with a new version of iPhoto or if the Photos app is the new version of iPhoto, they would import them.
John:
Or it would say, okay, now we're just going to transparently make your iPhoto library in the cloud.
John:
And it would take forever.
John:
But, you know.
John:
Yeah.