Take Your Co-Host To Work Day
Casey:
I'll stall by saying the showbot is back.
Casey:
For how long?
Casey:
Yeah, probably not much longer.
Casey:
There have been a few pull requests from a couple of different people who, as usual, I don't have their names in front of me because I'm a jerk.
Casey:
But we can all laugh together when this goes down momentarily.
Casey:
Well, we're laughing with you, not at you.
Casey:
I think it's both, but I don't blame you.
Marco:
Laughing at your show bot with you.
Marco:
There's no known vulnerabilities left, right?
Casey:
Uh, known, no, but I'm sure that they exist nevertheless.
John:
So you reach Zara Boogs, you know, Zara Boogs?
John:
Nope.
John:
That's all right.
John:
We can count that as the pop culture reference for the show if you'd like, because it's kind of pop culture kind of programery.
John:
I'll put it in the show notes and then you guys will know what it means.
John:
Probably still won't.
John:
Follow-up.
John:
Last week, I think it was last week, we talked about Google's Material UI that they demoed at the Google I.O.
John:
keynote.
John:
And I mentioned that one of the things they showed in the keynote that I thought was neat was that
John:
They want this UI to be the same on the web and on their phones.
John:
And so they had a web version of it.
John:
And this is a website.
John:
I don't even know if it's an official Google website, but it's a website.
John:
And you can go to it and view the web version of a lot of the controls that Google showed in their presentation.
John:
Did you guys check the site out, preferably in Chrome, I suppose?
Casey:
I have it in Chrome right now, but I have not looked previously.
John:
Well, click around in it and see what you think.
John:
I mean, it looks like the stuff you saw up on the screen.
John:
immediately on this was another thing spawned from Twitter today because Don Lodzky sent me this on Twitter and then I retweeted it and a bunch of other people responded.
John:
And of course all the people who follow me true to form jumped on the fact that you can't click on the labels to activate the checkboxes, which is quite egregious.
John:
But in the web world, it could just be that it didn't do the label, you know, four equals ID of the checkbox thing, or these could be entirely custom controls.
John:
I haven't even looked at the source to see if these, if there's actually any HTML, uh,
John:
So anyway, I don't blame them for that.
John:
Mostly what I'm looking at is, does this UI feel, for lack of a better word, snappy?
John:
And I think it does.
John:
I think the animations are smooth.
Casey:
Yeah, but they take too long.
John:
Well, yeah, but that's not a performance issue.
John:
That's like a decision.
John:
That's kind of like an iOS 7 where I have the transition things turned off, even though they don't take any shorter.
Marco:
uh i have that for the zooming effect or whatever but anyway that's like they're deciding how long these things go it's not like they're taking too long because they're slow well and remember ios 7.0 things did take too long in 7.1 they fixed it they well they improved it they they tightened everything up and they said we made everything faster which they did by you know tweaking two values but you know apple didn't really get this perfect either uh on step one and there's still a few areas where there's like unnecessarily long animations in os 10 and in ios
John:
Well, there's like, you know, like I mentioned with turning off the reduced motion or whatever, where it doesn't reportedly does not change the duration at all, but it feels faster because it's a crossfade instead of a zoom or whatever.
John:
There's lots of things you can do perception wise to handle that.
John:
But this interface also shows off the...
John:
big honking like ripple effect thing so you can tell where you clicked or the buttons having a ripple go across them i'm still not a fan having clicked around in it but i am reasonably impressed with the performance i wouldn't complain if i was clicking around on this like it doesn't look like a native control
John:
It doesn't feel like a native control, but it doesn't feel slow or clunky either.
John:
So it reduces all my complaints not to technological ones, but to design complaints, which I think is a reasonable achievement.
John:
Like if what they're looking for is this should be exactly the same on the web and native.
John:
I haven't tried the native one, but I can't imagine it being any more or less responsive than this.
John:
So then you're just switch over to complaining about the actual design decisions.
John:
But it looks to me like they've achieved reasonable parity of performance between the platforms.
Casey:
You know, I don't like if you look at the buttons, and I'm looking at the raised button, the colored raised button, where the kind of ripple effect is most obvious, or at least as far as I can tell.
Casey:
I don't like that it doesn't look like you're depressing the button.
Casey:
Like, if you're going to have a raised button, it should get pressed when you tap it or click it.
Marco:
Right, if anything, because the shadow gets larger as you tap it, so it looks like
Marco:
the button is being raised up off of the page for a moment, but the, but it's not moving.
Marco:
So it just kind of looks spatially wrong.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The Z index thing is weird.
John:
Like if I understand what Casey's saying about the depressed thing, but wouldn't that be like, wouldn't that change the Z value?
John:
And then like momentarily it would be putting, I don't, I don't know.
John:
I'm trying to figure out their frigging metaphor, but yeah, it is.
John:
This is what they've chosen to do.
John:
Like you're not pressing the button down.
John:
You're merely adding,
John:
activating the button and so a shimmer goes across the button but the button does not move it's kind of like those touch sensitive buttons uh you guys are probably don't remember this but way back when on televisions my grandfather had one of these they had buttons on them that did not move in and out when you press them they were like touch sensitive buttons it was like a metal ring with a metal contact in the middle and you just touch them with your finger and it would activate to change the channel but it would they would not actually push down and these were both on the television and on the remote and it was amazing technology in whatever year it was 1986 but uh
John:
did not catch on for obvious reasons because people want buttons that press down like the home button on your iOS device.
Marco:
Yeah, I think we're like, this is the kind of thing it's, it's hard to tell in a demo here, you know, in this, in this artificially created demo on a webpage, which is not the intended use of this.
Marco:
I mean, I know it's, it's a way you can use these things, but it's obviously this is made for touch devices first.
Marco:
And,
Marco:
This is the kind of thing where we're just not going to be able to really know how good it is because none of us use Android full time.
Marco:
But we got a few people complaining about the way that we talked about Google last week.
Marco:
And I think it's worth pointing out and kind of telling ourselves as well.
Marco:
Look, the world of tech is really big.
Marco:
And no individual person or even small groups like this, it's hard to get adequate coverage of everything in detail.
Marco:
We like to talk about things in great detail.
Marco:
We are all extremely focused, well, for the most part, but we are extreme nerds at least.
Marco:
And so we will go into depth on crazy topics to crazy levels of detail.
Marco:
And that has to necessarily be at the exclusion of others.
Marco:
It's like nobody can be an expert in all programming because programming is massive.
Marco:
Maybe in the 70s, you might have been able to become an expert in almost everything that was out there.
Marco:
Now, that industry is simply too large.
Marco:
You can't be an expert in all programming because there's more out there than you have time to even look at or learn.
Marco:
You have to, at some point, reject certain things implicitly just because you're choosing to focus your attention on something in particular.
Marco:
I don't think we should feel like we're barred from talking about things that we aren't experts in.
Marco:
Anything that sounded like we were doing that last week was our mistake.
Marco:
I don't...
Marco:
i i think i was i was doing a uh a pretty reasonable job of of disclaimers and being humble and giving the benefit of the doubt but that's been a very unpopular opinion of me recently apparently i don't i'm not doing that very well uh in in almost everything i do uh and and so i you know i don't know if it's my problem everyone else's problem it's probably some of both honestly but
Marco:
We can't be expected to be experts on everything, and we don't need to give everything equal time.
Marco:
And I think that's very important for all of us, both us and the audience, to understand and to be on the same page and to be in the same parking lot about.
Marco:
Am I using that right?
Marco:
No, that's okay.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
And maybe, you know, get one of those little tickets that you pay on the way out.
Casey:
We need to have take your co-host to work day with you and me to see how long you'll last.
Marco:
How long until your co-host gets fired from the job you didn't even have.
John:
I think it's simpler than Marco.
John:
I think you're looking too deeply within yourself to figure this one out.
John:
I think it probably comes down to talking negatively about something that it's clear that you don't know a lot about.
John:
And that's the easy attack for people who are sort of on that team is that I don't like you saying bad things about the thing that I like.
John:
And by the way, you also don't know as much as I do about the thing that I like.
John:
Therefore, you're stupid for saying that you don't like the thing that I like.
John:
which may be true.
John:
Maybe if you knew it better, you would like it better.
John:
But just as easily, it could be that you know enough about it to know that you don't like it.
John:
And that's just an easy avenue of an attack.
John:
So when you dismiss Android or I call Android phones crappy or whatever, if you're on the Android team and you care whether other people like Android, which is some other thing in and of itself, then you're going to say, well, if you just knew it better, that's the nice way to say it.
John:
And the unkind way to say it is you guys know nothing about Android.
John:
You should not talk about Android because if you, you know,
John:
You say bad things about it, but it's clear that you guys don't even have Android phones, so stop talking about it.
John:
But that stuff doesn't bother me because the people who are on teams, like the partisans, the people who care whether other people like Android stuff or Apple stuff or anything like that, there's a million of those.
John:
You're not going to change those people.
John:
What you do want to be is fair to the stuff, like...
John:
And not because anyone's on any particular team, but you don't want to misrepresent anything.
John:
And I think the criticism that we got that I think was not fair, but it was coming from a good place was that we didn't, for instance, mention that Android has more market share than Apple.
John:
We didn't mention that because we assume everybody already knows that not because we don't know it and not because we're trying to deny it.
John:
But I can understand if you're coming at it, not having that background and sort of, you know, if you don't share those assumptions with us, then you could say they're misrepresenting Android, making it seem like it is the inferior or lower selling.
John:
phone platform in reality which we never said i know exactly but but it's like we all know what we know and a lot of our regular listeners know what we know but if you're a new listener you may be thinking these guys are making it seem like android is the loser when really android has the biggest market share i try not to get too bogged down in those things anyway most most people were just yelling at marco so i just go on to the next email at that point
Marco:
Well, I think it's a topic worth addressing because it's going to keep coming up here and there where somebody gets upset that we didn't cover X, Y, or Z or that we didn't consider their team when discussing topic X because we covered somebody else's team and they perceive that as a slight to them.
Marco:
And it's worth a disclaimer that when we talk about Android, none of us use it.
Marco:
But I don't think that removes our ability to talk about it intelligently.
Marco:
I think it's something we have to consider when we're talking about it intelligently.
Marco:
But I think we usually have.
Marco:
We shouldn't be afraid to talk about it or, you know, banned by our audience from talking about it.
Marco:
As long as we keep that in mind, as long as we keep in mind, you know, none of us use it.
Marco:
So we can't really say in great detail about these things.
Marco:
But it is a major force in our market.
Marco:
And it would be it would almost be stupid and negligent of us not to ever talk about it.
John:
So this discussion has given me time to right-click on that little demo page, and I do not see an input HTML element anywhere in sight on that checkbox.
John:
It's all div, canvas style, which is fine.
John:
I was just wondering if they had tried to use the actual HTML elements and then enhance them.
John:
Maybe they have, because I didn't inspect element.
John:
I don't know what was in the source code before the JavaScript got a hold of the DOM.
John:
But when the JavaScript was done with it, all I'm left with is div soup and some canvas elements and some inline styles.
Yeah.
Casey:
That's some crazy stuff.
Casey:
I like the slider.
Casey:
I like the 3D when you grab the little, what do you call that?
Casey:
Not a nubbin, but the thing or handle, whatever.
Casey:
Thumb.
Casey:
Thumb.
Casey:
That's what I was looking for.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
Anyway, when you grab the thumb, I think it's a little too much zoom.
Casey:
I think it comes at you a little bit too much, but I like it.
John:
It's not coming at you.
John:
It's getting bigger.
John:
If it came at you, the shadow would increase.
John:
Go to the Z index thing at the bottom, like shadow thing.
John:
It shows distance, you know, the Z index.
John:
So that's the thumb is actually getting bigger.
Casey:
OK, well, either way.
Casey:
And I also like that it becomes colorless at the left edge, although I do think if you're going to do that game, it should be more of a gradient as you.
Casey:
come across the slider.
Casey:
But no, there are definitely some good ideas here.
Casey:
It feels a little unnatural because it looks different than a lot of things.
Casey:
I think mostly like this layout where you've got that page card thing that kind of goes over the header that feels weird and different and uncomfortable.
Casey:
But I think it's just because it's different, not because it's bad.
John:
Well, it's in a web page like imagine it on a phone imagine that you're using this on a phone and one app was a web app because the whole thing with Google's with their new OS is they're trying to you know tabs are mixed in with apps in your task switcher and everything in a way that's supposed to blur the line between what is a mobile website and what is an app and so if you were using
John:
a google app that used this ui that happened to be a web app and using a google app that happened to be native they want them to look and feel the same and i mean if the whole rest of the os looks like this you'll get used to it and then if you happen to use a little mobile web app like this it won't be as shocking as it is for us to load this up you know on our macs in a little demo thing inside a chrome window
Marco:
Well, or it'll be like an Uncanny Valley problem where it'll get, you know, it's like when all those sites, I mean, obviously we're way more advanced on this these days, but when all those blog templates and everything started making, when the iPhone first came, I started making like mobile layouts that looked like an iPhone navigation controller.
Marco:
And so it would have like, you know, the big gradient bar, which of course eggs really well.
Yeah.
John:
But they did not perform like it.
John:
They had to do the simulated JavaScript scrolling way back when because they couldn't even do the real GPU-accelerated scrolling.
John:
But yeah, even when they did a navigation where you'd hit an element, they would try to do a slide, it was all stuttery.
John:
That was not fooling anybody.
John:
I would like to see actually...
John:
in a blind test between you tell me is this a web page or is this a native app i guess you'd start with something simple as just like this like a control gallery so someone makes a native app and on google's new operating system with these controls and then someone makes the web equivalent and doesn't tell you which is which and you have to fill around with them and guess uh like two devices which one is the web one which is that would be interesting that's the true test i suppose that's the pepsi challenge abx testing
Casey:
You have to take it serious.
Marco:
Anything else on this?
Marco:
I share everyone else's opinion for the most part that it looks on first glance to have way too much animation.
Marco:
But again, we'll have to see how that plays out.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do we want to go through this biomedical follow-up stuff?
John:
Yeah, I think we should before Apple comes out with an iWatch and then becomes less relevant.
John:
Plus, we just got to clear all the space out of our document.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So we got feedback a while back when we were talking about wearables probably before WWDC.
John:
The first bit is from a biomedical engineer named Bed Griffel, and the second bit is from a doctor named... Oh, God, I'm not even going to do this one.
John:
Why don't you sacrifice yourself?
John:
Not it.
John:
He actually put it in his email.
John:
Try and pronounce that.
John:
So he's just like taunting us.
John:
And we do not live up to his challenge.
John:
His first name is P-E-R.
John:
I'm going to go with Per.
John:
And his last name has a capital O with two dots on top of it.
John:
And then it just goes on from there.
John:
I'm going to say Per Ostergren.
Casey:
I think that sounds reasonable.
John:
That's accurate enough.
John:
It's probably not that far off.
John:
So the biomedical engineer was responding to our questions, uh, several shows ago about like, what, what do you need to get vitals from people?
John:
What kind of hardware do you need?
John:
Uh, and he says, uh, getting a good heart rate requires at least two sensor attachments to the body.
John:
And I actually saw someone running with one of those.
John:
You ever see one of those bands that goes around your chest?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like forgetting your heart rate.
John:
I assume that's a similar thing where it has two sensors.
John:
Otherwise, why would it wrap around your whole body?
John:
Um,
John:
So having it having just the wrist thing might not be great for that and Oxygen saturation he says it's feasible with current tech But like the other person whose name I'm not going to pronounce again His main issue is what do you do with this information assuming you even can collect it and the doctor's opinion is that
John:
when dealing with any of this data you're faced with a couple problems one is that most people's vitals are stay within a reasonable range assuming they're healthy so it's not that interesting data if you were to chart it it's not like you're going to see big fluctuations because if you do you should probably be in the hospital because it's not you know certain things like blood oxygenation should not be radically uh out of bounds uh he says that your your uh pulse at oxygen level and blood pressure should only vary within a few percent so this is a boring graph so i assume you could zoom in on the axes and exaggerate the differences
John:
uh but he says when dealing with data points in my work context is everything is that pulse rate normal or not depends on the context same goes with fever blood pressure etc taken out of context there is nothing to analyze and the whole idea is that the most important thing that doctors do is get a context for these readings and the numbers in isolation without a trained doctor to look at them are meaningless certainly meaningless to like an untrained person just looking at these numbers and trying to know uh what this information is uh
John:
So I mostly agree with all of this, and a lot of people in the medical field are nervous about this stuff ever being used for anything remotely approaching medical purposes.
John:
Like, I'm sure these things will have to come with these glamours.
John:
Like, this is not for you to self-diagnose.
John:
This is not telling you whether you're sick or healthy.
John:
This is not telling you whether you should or shouldn't go to the doctor or the hospital.
John:
i don't know for entertainment purposes only like fitbit you know like fitbit is safe because it's you know steps and not even really steps just how many times the fitbit has wiggled in a step-like manner uh and and that's kind of like gamified but once you start getting into things that start looking like things that you might measure in a hospital i guess apple or any other company that does this stuff has to be careful in saying this information is not diagnosing you with anything it is not a doctor consult your doctor before blah blah blah blah blah i think all that is true uh
John:
I also think there is a reasonable entertainment only gamified version of this that could come into being.
John:
And long term for people who do have chronic illnesses and stuff, you would imagine like that.
John:
We show this in the demos from the 80s and 90s.
John:
And I'm sure they're doing it today with a million devices that people email us about.
John:
But like if you have a chronic condition that requires monitoring, having technology to have a device that does monitor this information and relays it to your actual doctor so that you can have sort of.
John:
not 24 7 care but like redundant monitoring by health professionals of your actual vitals because as part of some condition like you can imagine imagine if there was a way to constantly get your blood sugar level for people with diabetes without pricking your finger you just put on this wrist strap and then like your doctor would automatically have uh or like an entire medical staff somewhere would automatically have your blood sugar and could
John:
notify you when you're overdoing it and remind you to uh you know take your insulin shot before you go off to bed or whatever that's like the future world technology they always show with for remote medicine and i suppose these silly entertainment stuff like fitbit is like a little miniature step along the way to that but anyway it was it was mostly a uh pessimistic view of this stuff that from from the medical professionals uh they think it's not as useful as uh the fantasy scenarios make it out to be and i'm inclined to agree with them
Casey:
Well, maybe this would provide context to a doctor.
Casey:
I think you're right in that it could never be used for serious medicine.
Casey:
But, you know, maybe you could say maybe this app or the health kit or whatever could say, well, your heart rate generally falls between this and that.
Casey:
And right now it's at two beats per minute.
Casey:
So you might be dead.
John:
you know so and so maybe that maybe it'll provide that context that you wouldn't have otherwise had because you don't normally walk around with a heart rate monitor strapped to your body oh yeah this last bit that i wanted to get to and anyone who has spent any time in the hospital recently or ever uh recognizes that like talking about the existing automated devices in hospitals for tracking vitals uh
John:
and how many of them have warnings or alarms that go off and how often those warnings or alarms mean anything on tv shows they always mean something with a little buzzy beepy thing goes off doctors run around and it's something serious and the dramatic music starts playing in actual hospitals the stupid buzzy warning things go off all the time and the staff there knows whether it's serious or not and there's tons of false positives and the thing that differentiates a false positive from time for doctors to run around with their heads
John:
you know, on fire is the trained medical professionals who know what can be disregarded and what can, and what's an equipment malfunction and what's the sensor that just slipped off and what's a serious situation.
John:
You know, like I said, I don't spend a lot of time in hospitals, but I've spent enough time to know that, uh,
John:
BP things going off in the beginning start freaking you out until you realize that BP things go off all the time.
John:
And only some small percentage of the time does it mean anything.
John:
And when it does mean something, hopefully, you know, the doctors and nurses are on it.
John:
But the rest of the time, the doctors and nurses are resetting the thing, turning the thing off, recalibrating the thing, reattaching something.
John:
And that just goes to show how much of humans are a factor in this stuff and how little automated devices, even hospital grade automated devices can do on their own.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by our returning friends, Igloo, the intranet that you will actually like.
Marco:
Now, I know, Casey, you work in the world of intranets frequently.
Marco:
Is that correct?
Marco:
Is there a market for somebody coming along to make an intranet that's good?
Marco:
Because, you know, it kind of implies that other intranets are terrible.
Marco:
Would you generally say that's the case?
Casey:
Would you say there's a market for an iPod, a phone, and an internet communicator all in one?
Marco:
Well, I mean, a PC guy is not going to just come in here and take the market.
Marco:
They're not going to just walk in.
Casey:
Right, naturally.
Casey:
But if you were Igloo, you could just walk in and take the market.
Marco:
It turns out most intranets are terrible, and Igloo is awesome.
Marco:
And that's actually a really good business model.
Marco:
You know, go find something terrible and make an awesome version.
Marco:
Anyway, Igloo has a super exciting release coming this summer called Unicorn.
Marco:
Now, we've talked about this before.
Marco:
A couple months ago, or a month ago, we told you about Unicorn a little bit.
Marco:
So just to recap, Unicorn has a ton of new features, but the best is integrated task management that will change how you stay on track with work.
Marco:
igloo tasks can be assigned in different ways depending on the work you're doing one of the coolest ways to use tasks is creating them directly on your content why do you need this so for instance when requesting updates on a graphic or a text correction excuse me a text correction on a word document you can create these tasks right on your content so you and your team stay up to date with what has to be done next
Marco:
When you're viewing content, even if it's a blog, event, or forum topic inside your Igloo, these tasks are right there, informing everyone if all tasks have been completed or if it needs additional work.
Marco:
You can assign these tasks to yourself or a teammate, comment on the tasks, and keep all of your changes in one place.
Marco:
And when you're the one who's been assigned a task, all your tasks show up in a unified dashboard within your Igloo, with due dates clearly marked, making it super simple to manage your day-to-day work and clarify your priorities.
Marco:
Man, I want to throw a parking lot joke in here.
Marco:
Unicorn is a free update for all Igloo customers coming this summer.
Marco:
So learn more at igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Once again, that's igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Igloo for sponsoring our show once again.
Marco:
Good people over there.
Casey:
Yeah, they're very good people over there.
Casey:
Up there, I guess I should say.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Marco:
They're up in the great wide north, right?
Marco:
Indeed.
Casey:
Aperture and iPhoto are dead and being replaced by iCloud Photos.
Casey:
Any thoughts on this from somebody who actually pays attention to photography, which I am not that person.
Marco:
What do you guys use?
Marco:
Let's start with that.
Casey:
I used in the past iPhoto occasionally, but...
Casey:
I felt like even for my photo collection pre-children, although it goes back to like 2002 or something like that, it was really slow, like really, really slow.
Casey:
And so I tried to buy into using that as my photo management application.
Casey:
And then it took me all of a couple of weeks to revert back to using the file system.
John:
That system is not going to scale once your child gets here, let me just tell you, using the file system.
John:
I've used iPhoto and Aperture, and I think I had a demo of Lightroom installed for a while.
John:
And I always kept going back to iPhoto, despite the fact that it has gotten worse and worse over the years and drives me insane for two reasons.
John:
One, I have invested a lot of time in adding metadata to my photos in iPhoto.
John:
And yeah, I know Aperture shares library and all that other good stuff.
John:
But two, the features that I use most frequently either aren't in Aperture now or weren't in Aperture years ago when I continued on this path.
John:
Like face recognition came first, iPhoto, is that even in Aperture yet?
John:
I believe they brought over all that stuff in a .1 update.
John:
The photo books, the slideshows, all the silly consumer-grade things they put in iPhoto, we use them.
John:
Not frequently, but every once in a while, it's nice to have them there.
John:
And again, with the library sharing, it's probably not that big of a deal, but basically...
John:
I've just sunk so many hours and so much time into iPhoto.
John:
All my photos are in iPhoto.
John:
They're organized in there.
John:
They're rated, mostly keyworded, all sorts of other stuff.
John:
And I just don't do any adjustments of them.
John:
I have no idea what I'm doing in Aperture or Lightroom.
John:
My photos aren't that good quality anyway because I don't really have a real camera.
John:
So, yeah, I've been to iPhoto forever, and that's where all my pictures are.
Marco:
So I've actually used all of these things before and spend it like it beyond just like using it for like a day or two.
Marco:
I started out with all iPhoto.
Marco:
Then I tried Aperture for I was all iPhoto through my first SLR phase for three or four years.
Marco:
Then I switched over to Lightroom.
Marco:
I mean, to Aperture first for about a year and a half or two years.
Marco:
then Lightroom, then back to Aperture, then back to Lightroom.
Marco:
And each one with a six-month interval there at the end.
Marco:
And now I've been at Lightroom for a couple of years.
Marco:
And they've all driven me crazy in different ways.
Marco:
None of them are great solutions.
Marco:
And the iOS situation is not great either.
Marco:
The iOS situation pre-8 with the Photos app on iOS being just kind of this browser that could do very little...
Marco:
The camera app being kind of half-integrated into it, and then the separate iPhoto app, which I don't know anybody who uses iPhoto and iOS.
Marco:
I tried it briefly, and it was so clunky and terrible to me that I couldn't stand it.
Marco:
But on the desktop, these programs have all had issues.
Marco:
They've all driven me nuts.
Marco:
iPhoto was by far the least aggravating for the longest time in that...
Marco:
If you want to do pretty passive management of your photos, like, you know what?
Marco:
I don't want to create albums and sets and tags and keywords.
Marco:
I just want to import everything and be able to browse it quickly.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
I know this is not maybe as common as other people think.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I've never used metadata features at all.
Marco:
I tagged all the faces in iPhoto when that came out, and then I never looked at them again, so that was a waste of time.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
iPhoto has always been the simplest because it didn't require much organization and you could browse quickly and performance was critical.
Marco:
Aperture has always had by far the worst performance of any of these things.
Marco:
Even on a Mac Pro, even with an SSD, Aperture performance has always been much slower for me than Lightroom or iPhoto.
Marco:
And even like in a fairly recent update, I think like two years ago, which for Aperture is recent because no one ever works on it.
Marco:
But in a fairly recent update to Aperture, they even did the thing where you could merge the library where Aperture and iPhoto could share the same library, which is an interesting move.
Marco:
Even that didn't make Aperture fast.
Marco:
It's always been very, very slow just browsing through collections and stuff.
Marco:
And it's also been very buggy.
Marco:
And I tried a lot of different versions of Aperture because whenever a new one would come out, all the Aperture fans would say, oh, they finally made it better.
Marco:
So I'd go back and try again.
Marco:
And it was never really that much better.
Marco:
It's like desktop Linux.
Marco:
Everyone always says, it's better now.
Marco:
Go try it again.
Marco:
And it never really is.
Marco:
Or at least not meaningfully enough to people who don't use it every day to really see that, oh, no, this is still annoying the crap out of me and having these weird bugs and weird performance issues.
Marco:
So Lightroom has by far the best performance and the best stability compared to the other apps.
Marco:
But Lightroom's interface is clunky.
Marco:
And although, honestly, I found Aperture's interface clunky as well.
Marco:
Even iPhoto, like, I totally agree with John that while I was still trying it, and I still go back to it occasionally...
Marco:
It does seem like every release is worse than the last one.
Marco:
There's something about the things they do to try to make it easier usually end up making it clunkier, which you wouldn't expect, but that's been the case.
Marco:
And so I've tried all these apps.
Marco:
None of them are great.
Marco:
And only the Apple apps have the integration with the iOS devices.
Marco:
So if you're an iOS device user and you want nice sync between all these things...
Marco:
Only Aperture and iPhoto have that.
Marco:
And Lightroom has, they recently launched their own sync platform.
Marco:
Adobe's had a weird history with this.
Marco:
First, they launched Adobe Revel about two years ago, I think.
Marco:
And it was a good idea.
Marco:
In fact, a lot of the stuff that the new Photos Cloud thing is doing, Revel did it two years ago.
Marco:
But it was a weird combo with weird limitations that was never very well marketed.
Marco:
It was very clear that it was not a top priority for Adobe.
Marco:
So then Lightroom Cloud was, are they calling it Lightroom Cloud, Lightroom Mobile, whatever?
Marco:
Lightroom released a sync product like two months ago or something like that.
Marco:
And you had to manually drag over things that were synced.
Marco:
It would not sync your whole library.
Marco:
It wouldn't even let you sync a smart album.
Marco:
So you couldn't do a trick where you say, all right, we'll just sync everything from the last six years.
Marco:
Couldn't even do that.
Marco:
You have to manually select what got synced, which kind of ruins the way I wanted to use it.
Marco:
and what i want is what apple is giving us now i am sad that aperture is going away in the sense that there's going to be less competition for lightroom but there wasn't that much to begin with because aperture was so badly maintained by apple it hardly ever got new releases it rarely got new features um does it even i know i know this is probably some people consider this minor but does it even have lens profiles yet for cameras like lightroom added that a couple years ago and it's
Marco:
Oh, it's such an incredibly good feature because you don't realize how distorted your camera is until you click on that checkbox that applies the lens profile in Lightroom and you see, whoop, oh.
Marco:
All right, people in the chat say no, didn't get lens profiles.
John:
I feel like it's kind of a shame that like, not that Aperture defined the category, but that Aperture essentially popularized...
John:
a a category of application that previously was only used by professional photographers it sort of made it prosumer because it's like when we were talking about aperture on twitter and everything and everyone was chiming in with the names of these applications that i've never heard of probably because they're used by pro photographers and aperture was like prosumer oh here's an application like the ones the pros use
John:
probably nicer because it's made by apple and doesn't have any weird you know it's not made by some weird company that sells a small number of companies this is apple it's going to be friendly it's going to be prosumer but it fulfills the same role and then lightroom said that's great in all apple but here's how you actually do that app and not make it suck
Marco:
Right, and Aperture was just relentless in its updates, and new cameras would come out with crazy new RAW formats.
Marco:
Lightroom, you mean?
Marco:
Yeah, yeah, obviously.
Marco:
New cameras would come out with crazy new RAW formats, and Lightroom would beat Aperture to supporting almost every single one, and often by weeks or months, it was often a pretty big difference.
Marco:
And just the processing engine...
Marco:
I always liked... And I was torn.
Marco:
One of the reasons I kept switching back and forth.
Marco:
I always liked the results I got from Aperture, from editing in Aperture.
Marco:
I edited some of my favorite pictures in it.
Marco:
But Lightroom's editing controls are better.
Marco:
I was really very, very impressed with the output of Aperture, but I hated every part of getting there.
Marco:
Whereas with Lightroom...
Marco:
But it's now like the tools are much more advanced and they've slowly like made it a little bit more artsy rather than like, you know, analytical and everything.
Marco:
And so they're improving on that front.
Marco:
But the biggest problem with these apps, that's always been the case with Aperture and Lightroom.
Marco:
And I know there's other apps out there.
Marco:
Like my wife uses Bridge.
Marco:
In fact, Casey, for the same reason, she likes the file system approach.
Marco:
We have a kid.
Marco:
We have many pictures of the kid and she uses the file system, John.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Because Bridge, it comes with Photoshop, and it's basically Lightroom's editing controls.
Marco:
Or rather, Lightroom is really Bridge's editing controls.
Marco:
But regardless, it's Lightroom's editing controls, all the same tools, even with the same names, just with a different skin, in a way that operates directly on the file system.
Marco:
So it's more of like a fancy image browser that just browses your folders on your disk, but can do these operations to them.
Marco:
Anyway, the problem with these apps is that...
Marco:
you have like the professional workflow stuff like if you're doing shoots for clients these are not your personal photos you don't want to keep one giant library of every photo you've ever shot for a client merged in with the photos of your dog that's you know that doesn't really make sense doesn't really work doesn't really scale
Marco:
And so Photoshop and, I mean, Lightroom and Aperture were both built to address this market of professionals who do shoots with these big, you know, these collections, these big sets that you have to like bring in and out of your library and manage and manage your storage in different crazy ways and everything.
Marco:
That's what they're for.
Marco:
There's also this entire community of people like us, people who might buy an SLR or a fancy camera and want really advanced editing controls for making our photos look good after we take them or, you know, fancy raw controls or, you know, things like that or raw handling rather.
Marco:
And then, you know, lossless editing controls.
Marco:
There's people like us who want that power, the power of those editing tools, who don't need or necessarily even want that crazy pro photographer workflow and storage and collection management that these apps bring and kind of force you to use.
Marco:
iPhoto actually has a very it has always had a very small amount of raw options the way it used to work and please check correct me if I'm wrong with new version but the way it used to work the first time you edit a raw photo you would actually have lossless raw controls there and you could make make great adjustments it wouldn't really indicate that except for like a little raw badge in the corner but you were doing like it wasn't like importing a JPEG and operating on that you were actually working on the raw first
Marco:
But as soon as you exited that first edit, it would write the changes, it would bake them into the JPEG preview, and then you'd never have lossless editing on that file after that unless you totally reverted it back to original and then reprocessed it.
Marco:
And so iPhoto had these like half-assed raw editing controls.
Marco:
It looks to almost all the hints we got, almost all the info we got.
Marco:
And if you look at the articles that reported the apertures being discontinued, they all came with this additional screenshot of the Photos app that we haven't seen before that wasn't in the keynote that shows controls and things that weren't in the keynote.
Marco:
And it looks a lot like Aperture and Lightroom.
Marco:
It looks like it has a ton of editing controls in the right-hand column.
Marco:
Really advanced stuff beyond what you normally get in iPhoto and looks like the same kind of stuff you get in Aperture and Lightroom.
Marco:
It sure looks like what they've really done here is now we will have the simplified management of iPhoto and all the convenience of the files being synced and being part of our official photo library on our Macs and our iPhones and our iPads.
Marco:
And it looks like they've finally given iPhoto, or the new Photos app rather, but they finally brought those pro-level editing tools into the consumer-level photo management app.
Marco:
which is something we've never had before.
Marco:
You know, as I said, iPhoto used to have kind of this half-assed version, but it sure looks like they're giving us exactly what people like us want.
Marco:
This is not what pro photographers really need, but it certainly is what people like me and you guys need, you know, where it's still a consumer app.
Marco:
It's going to have simple management, I'm sure.
Marco:
probably very similar to the iOS photos app, but it has all these advanced controls.
Marco:
And that, to me, I'm very excited about this.
Marco:
I don't think I'm going to stop using Lightroom, but I might.
Marco:
It looks like it's good enough that it might be good enough for me to drop Lightroom entirely.
John:
Well, their editing controls, the big thing they were showing in the keynote was, you know, not just prosumer, but going down to consumer level.
John:
When consumers are faced with the actual controls available in Aperture Lightroom, they have no idea what to do.
John:
I don't know what to do.
John:
Like, it's just it's too complicated.
John:
There's too much involved.
John:
You're never going to get anything right.
John:
So that's why iPhoto just has a big red button called Enhance that tries to do something reasonable.
John:
And then it's got a few tweaks for, you know, a few other minor controls.
John:
The photos app is trying to take it farther.
John:
It's like we are going to sort of kind of expose all the crazy controls you see but we're also going to give you a big friendly slider slider that says Please make picture better now in along some axes and that slider won't adjust any one thing that slider will adjust 17 factors and not even in a constant ratio just trying to do like a smart adjustment and
John:
Because they know that most people don't know enough to correctly adjust the little sliders to get everything right.
John:
And they know that the big red enhance button is also the other end of the spectrum.
John:
It's not good enough.
John:
They want to give you some control.
John:
You can tell, oh, this picture is a little bit too dark.
John:
This picture looks like it's a little bit underexposed.
John:
Like, if you can get a few basic concepts and then grab ahold of one of those sliders,
John:
They will do sophisticated stuff behind the covers that involves adjusting 100 sliders to try to get you something nice.
John:
And this is moving farther and farther away from professionals and towards the realm of consumers, but trying to make it useful.
John:
You're like, if we give this picture to a pro, they could make it look better than you ever will.
John:
But how close can we get you without teaching you really anything but some basic concepts about photography?
John:
Um, and did you see the larger screenshot that someone put in the chat room?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It confirms, I think pretty much everything.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it does actually, it's hard to see in this picture, but it actually almost looks kind of light roomy in terms of like the UI, you know, less like aperture with this strange squinty pro interface and all that stuff.
John:
But so I made, I made a list of pros and cons for the photos app.
John:
That's going to be replacing this from my perspective, because despite all the editing stuff that you just talked about,
John:
I think most people don't edit their photos.
John:
I bet most people don't even hit the big red enhance button.
John:
I bet most people don't even crop their photos.
John:
I think they just collect them and then want to have some way to go through them.
John:
So organization is a more important thing.
John:
But so from my perspective, what I do with things in iPhoto is the reason I add all this metadata is for organizational purposes.
John:
So that I can do things like, I just have too many damn pictures.
John:
So I can do things like three plus stars featuring my daughter from Long Island in 2010.
John:
And that will give me like seven photos if I wanted to make a calendar page for printing out a family calendar of cute pictures of my daughter on the beach in that time.
John:
And
John:
How do I get to do that out of my thousands and thousands and thousands of photos?
John:
Because I rate every single one of them, because I keyword them, because I make sure the face recognition works so that I can do smart searches and smart albums that very quickly give me the seven or eight good pictures out of the hundreds or thousands that I took.
Marco:
And I would say that puts you in a severe minority.
Marco:
I mean, I would bet you're totally right.
Marco:
Most people don't even edit their photos, don't even crop them.
Marco:
But I would also bet almost, you know, comparably nobody.
John:
actually edits metadata right well i'm not saying that's the that's the right solution i'm saying that's what i've done but like what i think actually before i get to my pros and cons but i think the correct solution for the photos app is dump all the photos into one big thing and give people like the the ability to like not obviously you can't use facebook's like but i think that's something people can do people can take a bunch of photos people can go because maybe all the photos that someone takes the person who took the pictures goes through them at least once like they want to look at the pictures they took i'm not i'm not even sure that's a safe assumption but good
John:
I think they take the photos, they go through them once, they say, oh, that's a good one.
John:
And if they had a little button that would, you know, do like or star or whatever, then at the end of their vacation, 1% of their photos or 2% or depending how kind they are to themselves, have little stars in them.
John:
And then in the future, when they want to see, show me all the good pictures from that vacation, they don't want to go through a thousand pictures.
John:
Just show me the ones that I said were good.
John:
That kind of binary good, bad type thing where you don't say bad, you just say good.
John:
Maybe there's a bad option to, I guess, put in the trash or whatever.
John:
Is there a parking lot?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, no, but the thing is, so let me use myself as a quote-unquote normal insofar as I take pictures only with my iPhone.
Casey:
We have no point-and-shoot other than that.
Casey:
We have no SLR.
Casey:
I know that we'll all probably change when Sprout's here, but nevertheless...
Casey:
As it is today, we only have our iPhones.
Casey:
And what inevitably happens is I'll take a picture because the occasion strikes my fancy and I think that I might want to capture that moment.
Casey:
And it goes into my photo stream roll thing, whatever, on the phone.
Casey:
And then every couple of months, I remember that, oh, I should probably take this off my phone.
Casey:
I hook up image capture.
Casey:
I hook it up to the Mac, run image capture, dump everything into one folder and never look at it again.
Casey:
And these these photos are extremely important to me.
Casey:
Yet I never, ever look at them.
John:
But no one wants to see pictures of you and your wife.
John:
People are going to want to see pictures of your child.
John:
And so you're going to be faced with the problem of send me three good pictures.
John:
And or you're going to be making cute little kid things like I mentioned the calendars or little books or some like, you know, baby's first year type things like stuff like that comes up.
John:
and you want to distribute them so you will be faced with some kind of sorting problem because a you'll have way more pictures than you have of yourself and your wife because you'll take a million pictures of your kid and b people will want them but people won't want a million of them they just want the one or two good ones right so you you will be faced with that task eventually of of having vastly increased volume but also having the task before you to come up with two or three good ones and you're going to want to because you're going to want to show your kid being the cutest possible
Casey:
And I understand that.
Casey:
But I think if it's again, sitting here now, very ignorant because I don't know what it's like to be a parent yet.
Casey:
I think I would just think to myself, hmm, when did Sprout have or whatever we're going to name him or her?
Casey:
When did Sprout look cute?
Casey:
When do I remember taking a good picture?
Casey:
What day was that?
John:
He thinks his memory is going to work after the child gets here.
Marco:
That's so cute.
Marco:
Honestly, I think that's what most people do.
Marco:
I think most people, they just browse on a timeline.
Marco:
That's all I do.
John:
Yeah, the timeline gets big.
John:
I mean, like I said, I'm not saying people need to be rating each individual one and cropping it.
John:
I'm saying even like when people put stuff on Facebook, people like other people's photos on Facebook.
John:
People say, yes, that is a good picture.
John:
No, that is not a good one.
John:
Just the binary, that little binary thing.
John:
Because...
John:
Every picture on Facebook gets one or two likes, but individual people don't like every single photo they see.
John:
So, so too with your own pictures.
John:
If you look at them at all, ever, it's not too much to ask, oh, that's a cute one.
John:
And just click a little thing.
John:
Like people fave tweets for crying out loud.
John:
It's the same thing.
John:
You know, do people read all their Twitter stream?
John:
No, but sometimes they see one and they fave it.
John:
I think that is the appropriate level of granularity for sorting.
John:
But
Casey:
And I'm with you.
Casey:
And the funny thing is, I actually believe in having the metadata, which is what I did in that two months that I spent or whatever it was with iPhoto.
Casey:
And I tried to create and generate all that metadata so I could do exactly what you're describing.
Casey:
And the thought of being able to say, oh, the picture of Aaron that I liked when we were at some friend's wedding and getting there instantly, that sounds extremely appealing to me.
Casey:
It really does.
Casey:
But all the work I would have to go through to get to that point, I have no interest in whatsoever.
John:
Well, I mean, face detection is an example.
John:
I was using keywording before face detection existed to keyword each of the people.
John:
But if you have face detection, the computer can do that part for you.
John:
You don't have to find keyword things as having Aaron in them.
John:
Face detection will narrow that down for you.
John:
It's not going to be 100% effective.
John:
But look at all the work it's saved.
John:
You didn't have to categorize pictures as having Aaron in them or not.
John:
The program did it for you.
John:
Program probably could get to the point where it can fave things for you in terms of framing and composition and whether it's in focus or not.
John:
You know, that's where they're trying to get there.
John:
What Apple is trying to do is make it so that normal people can have the photo experience that I have through diligent work that I put into my photo library.
Marco:
I don't think that's it.
Marco:
I think they're trying to adapt from a world of people hoping to use it like you and usually not and failing.
Marco:
They're trying to adapt from that world to the way people actually use their photo libraries today.
John:
I know, but they want them to have the advantages that I have without the work.
John:
That's what I'm getting at.
John:
Same thing with the editing.
John:
They want them to be able to edit photos kind of sort of like a pro without knowing anything that the pros know.
John:
They want them to be able to find their photos quickly, the ones they like, without having to put any work into organizing them and saying which ones are good and putting them into little albums and doing all that stuff.
John:
That's what all their things are towards.
John:
They want you to have powerful features without putting in a lot of work.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So what are your pros and cons?
John:
All right.
John:
So this is from my perspective, obviously, as an iPhoto user.
John:
So we already touched on a lot of these pros, but just to go down the list here.
John:
So full cloud backup of everything, assuming you pay enough money.
John:
We've talked about this forever.
John:
What they seem to be saying is...
John:
All your photos will be everywhere.
John:
We'll take care of it.
John:
They'll all be in the cloud.
John:
They'll be full resolution, assuming you pay us enough money.
John:
But I mean, fine, whatever.
John:
Like if they come through on that and the pricing is not outside my price range, I would call that a pro because right now,
John:
I have to roll my own solution for that.
John:
Whereas in this system, I wouldn't need to.
John:
No one device has to hold all your photos.
John:
So if my Mac isn't big enough to hold my photo library, if my phone isn't big enough to hold my photo library, if my iPad isn't big enough, doesn't matter.
John:
They don't all need to be in any one device.
John:
They're all in the cloud.
John:
Some subset of them is on your devices.
John:
You don't have to worry about it.
John:
But all photos are browsable, are available to you on all devices.
John:
So just because all your pictures can't fit on your phone, if you scroll back to 1996,
John:
You should still be able to browse through there, even though those aren't, you know, so dynamically taking care of like what's on the device, what's not like.
John:
That's that's the whole promise of this system getting us out of individual applications and stuff like that.
John:
Presumably edits show up everywhere.
John:
So if you crop a photo on your phone, if you crop it on your Mac, if you crop it on your iPad, wherever you do that work to it, that edit would show up everywhere.
John:
You don't, oh, I cropped that on my phone, but the version on my iPhone library isn't cropped.
John:
Or the one in PhotoStream is cropped, but the one in my library isn't.
John:
All these weird things like that presumably would show up everywhere.
John:
And also, presumably, organizational changes would show up everywhere.
John:
If they have a concept of an album, and if you happen to make an album,
John:
I would hope that that album shows up everywhere that your pictures are.
John:
So if you make the album on your Mac, the album would show up on your phone.
John:
If you make the album on your phone, it shows up on your iPad.
John:
That's the dream of this arrangement of being divorced from a program that lives in one place that has a library that's in a folder or in some big bundle thing or whatever.
John:
now on the con side the one i immediately think of is how do i make a backup of this how do i make a local backup because if all my photos aren't on my mac and all my photos aren't on my ipod and all my photos aren't on on my you know ipad what if i want to have a hard drive in my house or even just do like an on my own online backup to backblaze or whatever
John:
How do I do that?
John:
How do I make a backup of this?
John:
Or am I out of the picture on that?
John:
No, I'm sorry, you're not allowed to have a backup of it.
John:
And that leads me to the second con, which is, what's my recourse if some of my pictures disappear?
John:
Say I buy into the system, upload all my stuff, all my pictures are in the cloud, some subset of them is all my devices.
John:
Then I try to go back to some pictures from 2004 that I know we took a beach vacation with.
John:
And I can't find them or they're there and they're all blank white or they're all scrambled or whatever What is my recourse?
John:
I don't have a local backup remember and now they're all screwed up Or what if they all spawn duplicates and have three of every picture and I have to go through manually delete them What is my reset?
John:
How do I start over if I don't have a local backup?
John:
um
John:
this is like reliability basically saying do i trust apple to be the cloud storage for all my photos and i clearly i don't uh how severely will the organizational tools that i happen to use be curtailed i presume they will curtail the organizational tools because you know like marco said most people don't use half of these tools why would they include them in the photos app ratings keywords albums faces events like all these things all these concepts that exist in iPhoto i imagine almost all of them would be gone in photos uh
John:
And that's fine for most people, but it's not good for me because I put a lot of time and effort into those.
John:
And what happens to that data when, you know, how will I import my existing iPhoto library into the system?
John:
Will there be a way for me to do that?
John:
Even just saying stuff like crops, like I spend a lot of time cropping pictures that I like, like, that's not a big, complicated edit.
John:
is that something i'm going to lose all my crops going to be gone will there be a migration path for my photo into this thing that maintains as much of my metadata as possible or will it just be like nope sorry we'll just read your original jpegs off disk again and upload them and you'll have to do a re-edit them and everything so
John:
in these pros and cons i'm kind of excited about the pros but if some of these cons can't be addressed i don't know what i'm going to do because i i mean particularly about the backup thing i want to have an out if this thing gets flaky or screws up my pictures in some way i need to have a local backup and if i can't figure out how to do that i'm just going to have to like i don't know keep using iphone until it doesn't run anymore or try to maintain two copies of everything one in my photo library and one in this cloud thing i'm i'm very nervous about this
Casey:
Well, why can't you just do image capture like I do and put that somewhere that gets backed up everywhere?
John:
But then they wouldn't be in the cloud thing.
John:
If I want to buy into this photos thing, I like the idea of having access to my one photo library everywhere without having to have literally 500 gigabytes of photos attached to every Mac in my house.
John:
And I can't fit it on any of my iOS devices.
John:
I want to see my photos from everywhere.
John:
I want to have one big shared library that everyone can see, or at least...
John:
The same Apple ID and every system can see this gets into the family sharing thing that drives me nuts.
Casey:
But no, I'm with you.
Casey:
I'm saying maybe even just leave the pictures on your iPhone, if you will, or I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know what you would do with an SLR.
Casey:
But in addition to whatever the normal procedure is for the new way to handle photos, also take all the pictures, dump them on your Synology, for example, in some drive somewhere that you're also backing up offsite.
John:
yeah i mean that doesn't i presumably when i bring the photos in i do mess with them a little bit at the very least i crop them and find the ones that are good uh and that work is not preserved uh by having a backup of a folder full of pictures whereas now what i'm backing up is essentially my iphone library which has all the original jpegs yes but also has all the associated metadata with all the stuff so
John:
if my house burns down and i restore from a backup what i get back is not just my original photos i get back all my crops from them all my metadata from whatever metadata there is to preserve i get back whereas if i'm just backing up the individual files but then you know investing my time and continuing my metadata regimes as much as i'm allowed to at the very least with simple things like albums and if not ratings and some kind of you know star type system uh
John:
I'm not backing that up anywhere.
John:
That goes away.
John:
And it's not like I think my house is going to burn.
John:
I think it's going to go away because the early versions of this are going to be buggy and it's going to screw up in some way and I'm going to want to reset or I'm going to want to restore from backup or whatever and I'm not going to be able to.
Marco:
Well, I think this is really, though, a very uncommon case.
Marco:
I mean, first of all,
Marco:
I think this is going to work like almost all these other iCloud type services and for Android, whatever their thing is, for Amazon, for their new thing.
Marco:
Most people are not going to have their own backup.
Marco:
Most people are going to be totally at the whims of the system and it'll work fine for most of them.
John:
um i really think that uh it's just not going to be an issue for most people well i said these were my pros and cons but like even for things like contacts contacts the entirety of people's contacts is probably the size of one photo from one photo from an slr and yet people have trouble with contacts duplicate contacts contacts being lost edits to one contact not showing up in another place if apple can't get that right with such an incredibly low data volume and if that continues to be as i think it is from dealing with my relatives at least
John:
Managing contacts continues to be a problem, keeping them in sync, even if you're 100% on the Apple system, keeping them in sync, making sure all your edits are available in all places.
John:
Contacts are less precious than photos.
John:
And I'm not sure Apple has proven that it's up to the task to even doing, forget about metadata, forget about anything else, just the concept of I've taken a photo, it exists or doesn't exist, and it is accessible everywhere.
John:
Simply that.
John:
It may be below the bar of things that Apple is able to pull off or as thus far proven that it's able to pull off because I can't think of a single system that involves data goes in one place and is available everywhere that works flawlessly and has reasonable debugging recourse in Apple's environment.
John:
Whether it's photos or we just talked about messages last time, which is just simple text.
John:
My confidence is low.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think that's fair.
Marco:
I think what's going to happen is it'll work great for most people.
Marco:
And by the way, I think most people, once the photos thing is clouded, I guess.
Casey:
Wow.
Marco:
Yeah, sorry.
Marco:
Most people might lose most of the need for their own backups because you figure like what most people do with their computers is pretty basic by geek standards.
Marco:
It's the internet stuff, which is kind of always inherently backed up because you can just log into stuff.
Marco:
And then, you know, photos, maybe some documents here and there.
Marco:
Well, documents are now being moved to iCloud in a lot of cases, or at least people are using Dropbox or things like Dropbox.
Marco:
With the new iCloud Drive thing, even more people will be using something like that.
Marco:
So that's kind of all covered, especially if iCloud Drive becomes like the default place to save files by the system, which it almost certainly would be.
Marco:
That's backed up.
Marco:
You have all the contact calendars, all that data backed up.
Marco:
You have everything on your phone, your music collection, your media collection.
Marco:
That's all backed up through iTunes Match if you have that.
Marco:
If you bought it through iTunes, it's backed up anyway.
Marco:
And then now we're going to have all your photos backed up.
Marco:
I think this is going to really remove the need for a lot of people to have backups.
Marco:
And furthermore, for people who don't have backups, which is unfortunately most people...
Marco:
having their photos be one of the things that is always inherently backed up when they do have catastrophic data lost it'll be much less of an issue it'll be much less devastating because they will have all their photos again that and that's something that people almost always like that's their number one regret when they have data loss they lost their photos from you know x time interval or this entire kids existence or something like that so i think the benefit here is impossible to to overstate yeah
John:
We talked about this many times.
John:
We all want this.
John:
We all want we all want it to be to someone to take care of our photos.
John:
What I'm saying now is not that I think it's a bad idea for our photos to be in the cloud is that I want someone to take care of my photos.
John:
And I'm not sure that Apple is the one that I trust.
John:
And even like even the Everpix scenario, the reason Everpix was exciting was because Everpix would promise to take care of all your photos.
John:
But I was not entrusting my photos to Everpix because I still had my iPhoto library.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
I was still backing up.
John:
It was one more thing.
John:
It's the scariness of saying not only is Apple volunteering to take care of your photos and not only do you hope Apple is going to do this right, but
John:
your photos won't be anyplace else like you know you you have like all your eggs are in one basket and you just better watch that basket right uh and if it works like that's exactly what we want apple please take care of the photo problem for us and like you said like the amount of local data like why don't we just all buy chromebooks at this point because if we won't you know everything's in dropbox or in icloud and your photos are all backed up and uh your i messages are all back to what what local data is like you're you know your email's all on a server somewhere using imap like
John:
your the stuff that's local to your device it becomes just like a local cache which is again what we're all looking for is like tiered storage with a grid fast local cache but uh none of your data needs to be there so you could smash your computer with a hammer get a new one sign in with your apple id download dropbox install it wait a day and a half for for your caches to warm up and then you're back in business like
John:
that's where we want to all get it's just that i'm not sure apple is the one has proven that it's the one to take us there like you know cloud kit which apparently this is all based on is way better technologically speaking from a understandability standpoint than their previous one so science point in the right direction as does the idea that they're even doing this at all that they're having the guts to say they're putting all their eggs on basics too aperture gone iphoto gone photos is the way it's cloud backup for everything and then they say trust us and wink
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And I think I totally agree with you that it is very important, like how they implement the Mac client.
Marco:
Things like how does it store its files?
Marco:
Is there an option somewhere to say, always store my entire library on this computer?
Marco:
So you can do things like maintain your own backups.
Marco:
Because, you know, look, I think that's important too.
Marco:
As much as I put a lot of faith in the Apple ecosystem,
Marco:
I'm also not an idiot.
Marco:
And I will always maintain my own backups as well.
Marco:
And I wouldn't use a photo system that didn't give me that option to easily and reasonably do that and automatically do that.
Marco:
It is very important.
Marco:
And I hope Apple knows that when they're implementing this.
Marco:
And this might be one of those things where it might get worse before it gets better.
Marco:
Maybe version one might not have much of that visibility or might not have the right limits or the right options, rather.
John:
Well, like you said, like the people who care about that, that's not who this is designed for.
John:
And I wouldn't blame Apple for never having that feature in there.
John:
It's just that they just they need to get it right.
John:
Like the rest of it, like they're the big thing is there needs to be some recourse.
John:
Say something goes weird and all your pictures are black like mine were in PhotoStream for a while.
John:
Or like you just get a bunch of black squares that are the right aspect ratios and the right sizes, but they're all black What do what do I do in that case?
John:
Do I just stare at it and hope do I do I'd like delete the photo stream and reinstall it?
John:
Do I delete all my local photos and resync them like this?
John:
I have very and I tried all those things and they kept coming back black What do I do at that point?
John:
And if that was the only place my photos are I'd be freaking out right and so
John:
I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying they need a way to debug this.
John:
They just need to either get it right all the time or give people some kind of tool to fix it when it's not.
John:
Getting it right all the time is preferable, but maybe asking too much.
Marco:
As we move to this world of cloud stuff and cloud-hosted things...
Marco:
We do lose a lot of that flexibility and a lot of those fail safes of like if I want to, for example, if I want to move my entire iTunes library to a new computer, the the way I would always do it would be to actually just move the entire directory over and.
Marco:
um and it worked like because everything all the data it read was there um and it was all you know baked into this one folder and you can quit the app move this folder restart the app bing all of a sudden there's all your stuff whereas something like this it's more opaque or something that's cloud-based
John:
You can't do that.
John:
I mean, they designed it in, but then it kind of hit the feature.
John:
That's why you had applications like iPhoto Library Manager or just hold down the option key when you launch iPhoto, if you don't know about that, to like pick a different library.
John:
So we have multiple iPhoto libraries where we've split things off various times, but that is not, it's even less commonly used feature, I think.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so are we done with this photos thing?
Marco:
We're never done with the photos thing, but we can be done tonight.
John:
oh that's what i meant i mean we're we're turning into the prompt at this point we're probably gonna get a mountain of feedback on this too the next exciting step in the photos thing will be like after uh you know the release versions of all these different os has come out and i assuming there is any upgrade path i try taking my iphone library and saying here you go photos what do you make of this and then we wait i suppose and see what happens
John:
Does it do I end in a functional final situation?
John:
Does it you know how long does it take to get the photos there?
John:
You know, does it do I require double the amount of storage space to get to the final destination?
John:
I don't know.
John:
That will be an exciting day.
John:
Certainly I will do lots of backups first.
Marco:
one thing though i mean this this is a really really promising thing for people who have smaller devices like this is i think this is going to dramatically reduce the amount of space a lot of people need on their ios devices which is funny because like the you know the rumors are this might be this might finally be the year where they start at 32 by the year they finally do a storage bump yeah that
John:
i i keep hoping that for itunes match because i like itunes match except when it totally destroys my installation of itunes causing it to absorb gigabytes of memory every time i launch it but other than that when it works besides i like it and i like uh the idea that you know i enable it on my ios devices because the whole idea is that if i start to run out of space the os is supposed to say oh well let me just start ditching some of these uh
John:
you know, some of these audio files, because I know they're on iTunes match.
John:
And if the person listens to them, I'll just stream them down later.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
It's supposed to be like cash space.
John:
It's expendable.
John:
I don't need to sync a particular playlist onto my iPod.
John:
I can have my entire music collection available and just the songs that I play can be there.
John:
And there's a little cloud button.
John:
You can say, download this whole playlist and stuff like that.
John:
And I hope that doesn't mean that it's now going to, going to refuse to, uh,
John:
uh expunge from memory the ones i forcibly downloaded but every time i start to fill up on disk space i'm like why don't you just pull things some stuff off itunes match that's the kind of the point of it so photos i'm hoping for the same thing that i'll have access to all my photos but that at any one time i don't guarantee that any of them are actually on the device because you know they wouldn't all fit
Marco:
yeah i think that's how it was advertised to work uh we'll have to go we'll have to see what happens but i'm pretty sure that was the whole idea was that all your photos will be backed up as long as you subscribe to one of these planned things or and what do you get for free you get a pretty good amount too wasn't it like 20 gigs or something
Marco:
Whatever it is, it's pointless for me.
John:
But yeah, for regular people, it's a good starter thing to get you suckered into eventually having to pay.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But yeah, I think the whole idea was like, this is a big part of, I think, their solution to iOS storage management, which is just start removing some of the biggest things that fill up everyone's space.
John:
yeah and make it so they're removable make it so they can be purged basically if space starts to get tight because you can't really purge apps i mean they haven't gotten to that point they'll the apps are gonna stay so if you download some big giant game well they do run the cleaning things yeah the cleaning pass that that kills all the apps temporary things and deletes all your newsstand issues in theory they could delete like oh we're gonna get rid of infinity blade because it's gigantic and the next time you play it we'll download after you tap
John:
It will still keep the icon there, but when you tap it, it'll be like, oh, actually, we removed that from your system earlier.
John:
I'll see if there's room now and download it.
John:
You can't get blood from a stone.
John:
They don't have magical, transparent-tiered storage ending in the cloud quite yet, but this is all along the path there.
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Casey:
John, you want to tell me what you think about the Airport Extreme?
John:
I didn't think much about it at all because I don't have one, other than I didn't like it because it has a fan.
John:
But we've discussed that in the past.
John:
But today, I saw something retweeted from Jim Ray on Twitter.
John:
I forget who retweeted it.
John:
And it was about the new airport, you know, the big tower thing.
John:
The thing that's...
John:
Looks like a tissue box stood on its end and it's designed to hold a hard drive, but only the time capsule version holds a hard drive.
John:
But both the time capsule and the hard drive less airport use the same case.
John:
Anyway, this was not about the fans or the hard drive.
John:
This was about ports on the back.
John:
Do you guys load the pictures that I put in there?
John:
I did.
John:
I saw that and he's totally right.
John:
All right.
John:
So here's the tweet from Jim Ray.
John:
It says, design is how it works in quotes.
John:
Hey, Johnny, which is spelled wrong, but that's OK.
John:
Maybe turn the ports 90 degrees so we can actually unplug the goddamn things.
John:
And what he's talking about is the Ethernet jacks on the back of this vertical tower airport.
John:
base station uh the ethernet ports are done so the little clicky whatever you call it release thing on the rj45 things is on the top but the ports are stacked on top of each other so to release the middle one you have to wedge your finger between the middle one the top one and get your fingernail onto that little thing and then try to disengage it and he's saying rotate them 90 degrees so that all of the little
John:
whatever they are, release thingies, would all be accessible.
John:
They'd all be on the left side or on the right side instead of having to shove your fingers between the two little ports.
John:
The picture explains it better.
John:
We'll put the picture in the show notes so you can take a look at it.
John:
And I retweeted this because I thought this was a very good point, and it reminded me of a sore spot that I have.
John:
i'm calling it johnny ive design which is not fair because he's just a head of a large design team he's not designing all these things himself he's not even like telling people how they should be designed he has a team of people designing them presumably he approves them or disapproves or gives advice but it's not all his fault but can you imagine johnny ive sitting around like for like 90 days working on this brand new revolutionary design for a wireless router
John:
well but the thing is like people think that he's there and he designs everything so if they come out you know it was his idea to make the the mac a trash can it was his idea to design the iMac and like and certain things are his ideas like he he has he has certain things that are his designs but so many other things aren't he's got an entire team but he's the figurehead and so uh i'm blaming it all on him because you know the buck's got to stop somewhere
John:
uh when i look at this i know exactly why the ports are that way on this thing at least so i tell myself and you know because i just go into the mind of johnny ive or the mind of his organization that he runs and i've looked at all the products they've made over the years and and it seems clear to me that they're like they are that way because it looks better that way
John:
And this is the tension, aesthetics versus usability.
John:
And the whole design is how it works thing makes it sound like that the balance is way over.
John:
Oh, usability is the most important thing, and aesthetics are secondary.
John:
But if you look at any device that came out of the Johnny Ive Apple, even in the pre-Steve Jobs era, that he had a hand in designing or was ahead of the design studio when it was made,
John:
aesthetics is a huge part of how it's designed and far be it for me to say that aesthetic shouldn't be a factor because then everything would look like oxo good grips right oh i bet even then there's some aesthetics creeping in there uh but there's a balance between make it usable but also make it look nice but hopefully don't compromise on the usability too much for the sake of aesthetics and
John:
I think the Johnny Ive Apple, if we're going to call it that, has crossed the line many, many times and is stubborn about it and will not go back.
John:
And this the back of the airport looks like a situation where they cross the line.
John:
Not a big deal because all the people on Twitter replied said, oh,
John:
how often do you plug and unplug things who really cares uh it's not too hard to wedge your fingers in there uh if they rotated them nine degrees it would have been more expensive and all sorts of other things like that uh and i mostly didn't pursue these avenues except for the most expensive more expensive one so i looked at i immediately went to the ifixit tear down to see what the heck was going on inside there uh and that's in another link in the notes and it turns out
John:
that the ports, which should not be surprising to anybody who has seen one of these towers or the new Mac Pro, the ports are already at 45 degree angles coming off of the printed circuit board.
John:
So obviously expense is not, this is not like, what's the cheapest way we can make these Ethernet ports pop out of this board?
John:
Just solder them on.
John:
They're already coming out at a 45 degree angle and they're coming out at a 45 degree angle
John:
With the contacts running, I don't know how to explain this, the distance from each contact to the printed circuit board is different.
John:
So the contact closest to you when you're looking at the printed circuit board flat is much longer than the contact closest to the board because it's in an angle that way.
John:
If they were rotated 90 degrees, as suggested, it seems to me that if anything, it would either be the same price or cheaper to mount them that way because then all the contacts from the Ethernet connectors would have equal distances to the board.
John:
but who knows maybe it's the same price but the point is this this device was not designed with uh cost concerns if you look at how it was constructed it's kind of like the mac pro and like a with the hard drive on an angle in the middle with with fins and sort of a chimney type effect and it is it's a very fancy design it is not made to be the cheapest possible thing to manufacture uh inside it it looks uh fairly expensive so i'm not gonna buy cost there uh
John:
You get back to it, right?
John:
So if it's not, if a cost isn't a concern, why are these things vertical?
John:
And I really do think it looks better when they're vertical.
John:
It's symmetrical.
John:
If you were to divide the device in half vertically, if you were to draw a straight line down the middle of these ports and split it in half, it's symmetrical on the right and left side.
John:
Whereas if the ports were sideways, the rest of the device would be vertically symmetrical, but then the ports would not be.
John:
One half would have the little flanges, one half wouldn't have it.
John:
Uh, and this is not that big a deal, but, uh, it's emblematic of the line that I think, uh, the modern Apple crosses, uh, many other times that I put a couple of examples, other examples in the show notes that I've complained about previously on the show, the MacBook keyboards, uh,
John:
this is a little bit economics too so you can throw tim cook under the bus for this one as well why does the 15 inch and why did back in the day the 17 inch one have the exact same keyboard as the smaller model makes no sense there's no reason that the current 15 inch macbook air can't have full-size arrow keys oh there's a reason because they want to use the same exact keyboard they do on all the other macbooks and on the airs for that matter um there's an economy of scale there but it's also making the larger product worse
John:
Most charitably to save money and least charitably because if you put full-size arrow keys then the keyboard wouldn't be symmetrical anymore And it looks ugly So that's why it doesn't have full-size arrow keys because the little inverted T would be on one side But not on the other or any sort of key type arrangement to try to get a reasonable inverted T in there would necessarily Bump out somewhere or push some other keys around or otherwise be awkward
John:
uh ports in the back of the imac it's great being able to plug things into the front of my old style tower mac pro even if i have to bend down a little bit for it uh having ports accessible to you when you want to plug something in quickly is great uh the imac has all the ports in the back because it's prettier every time you want to plug and unplug something you got to dig around back there it is not comfortable it's not a good experience
Marco:
That's actually one of the frequent annoyances with the new Mac Pro is that I don't have two front USB ports anymore.
Marco:
And I use those all the time on my old Mac Pro.
Marco:
And the new one, if I want a USB port, I need to turn the thing around and go to the back and get fingerprints all over it.
Marco:
And it's not nearly as useful as having them right there on the front.
Marco:
But I recognize that it would not look as good if it had USB ports on the front side of it.
John:
That's a little bit of a size constraint, too, because that machine got so much smaller that so many things become, oh, the answer is now have a breakout box.
John:
And so you could have a little breakout USB hub and stick that on your desk somewhere.
John:
Like that's always the answer for that tiny little Mac Pro is, oh, you can't fit it inside and you can't fit it on, but you can connect the cable to and then have a peripheral.
John:
I give it a little bit of an out for the size thing, but it's similar in.
John:
You're mentioning how weird it is to try to plug things into the back of it.
John:
Like, are the ports aligned along a line that goes through the center of the Mac?
John:
Or are they... I don't even know the answer to this.
John:
You can tell me.
John:
Are the ports parallel to each other in the two rows?
John:
Or are they all perpendicular?
John:
Is the horizontal surface of the ports perpendicular to a tangent of the circle?
Marco:
I don't think I know what you mean.
Marco:
However, the surface that the ports are on is curved with the case.
John:
Right, but what are the ports like?
John:
Are the two USB ports parallel to each other?
John:
If you were to extend lines out along the USB ports, would they be parallel to each other or would the lines intersect?
John:
They would diverge.
John:
Yeah, because basically the two USB ports are pointed in different directions.
John:
Yeah, because they follow the curvature.
John:
Right.
John:
So you could make the two USB ports both exactly like flat and going forward.
John:
Instead, they both go towards the center.
John:
And so you have to sort of calculate the angle when you're plugging in back there.
John:
So your cables jut out of it at angles instead of judging out stream.
Marco:
And all the ports feel the same too.
Marco:
So you have like, you have to turn it around and look because all the ports are almost the same size and all feel the same.
Marco:
Like you have the four USBs and then the six Thunderbolts right next to each other.
Marco:
Everything's very close to each other.
Marco:
And so, yeah, it's not made to be done blindly.
John:
someone in the chat room is saying the usb ports are parallel we're all using the wrong terms here i'm visualizing the right thing in my head but anyway what we're saying is that if if you took that usb port and pushed it really really hard and just tunneled through the device in exactly the direction of the port it would hit the center of the mac pro and that's true for both of the ports and they would intersect that's correct yeah and if you plug in if you plugged in two cables to them that were not flexible at all were just straight rods they would form diverging lines right and so what we're saying for parallel was the other option that could have gone with is that the usb ports were exactly parallel and
John:
And if you were to extend cables out from them forever perfectly stiff, they would never hit each other.
John:
That's what we're talking about.
John:
Anyway, I don't know if that's a compromise for aesthetics, but, you know, the ports in the back of the iMac stand out because the iMac is such a massive machine, and it's supposed to be a home machine.
John:
It's the type of thing that people might plug and unplug things in, but they had to be hidden there.
John:
I was going to pick the Mac Q, but that's kind of a low blow, where the ports were not only on the back, but underneath on the back, and it was super hard to get at those because it looked better.
John:
And the final line I put in there was...
John:
iOS 7 buttons.
John:
I mean, they got rid of the button outline because it looked nicer, but then it wasn't always clear whether something was a button or not.
John:
And I'm not saying these are like fatal flaws or that they're always over this line.
John:
I'm saying there is a line and you have to decide where in that line you fall.
John:
And I feel like my opinion of good design is
John:
is closer to usability at the usability side of the spectrum in that in the challenge in the uh tension between aesthetics and usability and i appreciate the aesthetics i like that they are pretty but
John:
I'm not just designing them in a lab and looking at plans and looking at the beautiful, polished, fingerprint-free thing on a pedestal and saying, yeah, my work is done.
John:
I'm using the things every day.
John:
And that's where the aesthetics start to fade.
John:
And, you know, not so much because I don't want some ugly PC tower.
John:
Like, I like the aesthetics.
John:
I like having beautiful things on my desk.
John:
They make me feel better to have nice things.
John:
Like, I mean, Mark, you talked about looking at your little Mac Pro.
John:
It makes you happy to have that thing there.
John:
But...
John:
there's a there's a line between that and usability it depends on how much do you value that niceness over difficulty of getting into the ports and you know uh the other one i wanted to mention is the uh the edges of the macbooks where they used to be super sharp when they were unibody things and you're not supposed to rest your wrist please everybody if you're resting your wrist on something when you type do not rest your wrist but the bottom line is people do occasionally rest their wrists and it was way too sharp and why because it looked really nice it really did it looked very elegant but
John:
There's a line there and it's like, I mean, they took the edge off in later models where they said, okay, let's not quite make it that sharp.
John:
I still think it's a little bit over the line in terms of, it looks like a beautiful piece of sculpture, but it's not quite as pleasing to handle as it would be if it was a little bit more rounded over.
John:
But anyway, these are just a couple of examples.
John:
I'm sure people can come up with their own.
John:
I just feel like this balance, that we have a difference of opinion.
John:
If I ever got to interview Johnny Ive, this is all I would talk to him about is how do you manage the tension between aesthetics and usability and why are you so wrong in all these cases?
John:
it would be a great interviewer he would love it i i think everyone else would love it at least no one ever talks to him about design that's a shame like when they get interviews with them they just talk to him in a way that he can speak in generalities no one ever i mean that's not an interview that's why i'm a terrible interviewer like an interview is you let the interviewer talk about things you don't have an axe to grind with them but anyway yours is an interrogation yeah mine would be more of an interrogation style less than yeah this is why i don't interview people but anyway uh i think i would enjoy it at least
Marco:
I think, honestly, most people would enjoy listening to an interrogation, but most people would not enjoy being interrogated.
John:
I think it would be a fruitful discussion because I'm sure he has reasons behind all these things.
John:
And it's not like one is totally wrong and one is totally right.
John:
It's just where do we draw that line and why?
John:
And, I mean, maybe I'm alone in thinking that...
John:
that I have is a little bit farther on the aesthetics towards the aesthetic spectrum than I think most people are like, we all love aesthetics.
John:
We all love beautiful Macs.
John:
We all love our beautiful iOS devices.
John:
We obviously value aesthetics probably way more than the average person.
John:
We're willing to pay all this money for it.
John:
Like in just the hardware, the software, everything like,
John:
we place value on this it's just that there is sometimes it just seems to go a little bit too far in one little tiny area and you feel like i would give up that little aesthetic flourish i would give up perfectly symmetrical ports to just turn them 90 degrees even if i don't unplug and plug these things that the three times a year when i have to reach back there to unplug something it drives me nuts and i said oh johnny if you just could have rotated them 90 degrees i never look at the back of this thing anyway it would make life so much easier and and he would be tasked with defending
John:
The beauty of the symmetrical arrangement of something that people don't look at and doesn't give them as much joy as, say, a super shiny Mac Pro does.
Marco:
Well, also like, oh, Johnny, could you maybe add more than three Ethernet ports?
Marco:
Like, really, on a top-of-the-line wireless router?
Marco:
I don't think he's picking that.
Marco:
I'm not going to blame him for the number of ports, but...
Marco:
Well, but it's like, you know, like you have to, and this is part of design, you have to consider design in practice, in real life, what people actually do, applied design, right?
Marco:
And the reality is, if you only have three Ethernet ports, a lot of people are going to ruin your awesome design by putting a big, fat, ugly switch right next to it.
Marco:
Similar thing with the Mac Pro.
Marco:
If you don't build in enough stuff people use or enough storage capacity or enough things, enough capabilities, you're going to have this beautiful metal cylinder sitting next to the crappiest blue LED-filled USB hub and 10,000 Thunderbolt enclosures and drive enclosures and all this crap.
Marco:
That ruins the design.
Marco:
To me, that's actually a design flaw if you're making a design that doesn't account for real life and then in real life it will simply become worse.
John:
And see, when I think of these designers' desks, and I think this was even mentioned in one of the Johnny Ives book, maybe about his desk or someone else, but when I think of their desk, I think of them arranging their beautifully designed products in the number, like, they would buy special white Ethernet cables to exactly fit this.
John:
They would arrange just on their desk, they would just have their MacBook, and they would...
John:
probably not even have a cable to a big display and maybe like these two beautiful little speakers like what they would do is say if this doesn't have enough ports and this doesn't have any items then i don't want it because having that item would destroy the aesthetic purity of this or the aesthetic value not purity but like just that that this is a beautiful arrangement and i would really like it if i could have an extra hard drive or more usb ports but i do not want that feature enough to take an ugly usb hub and shove it on here you know i that's that's where they're drawing the line they say
John:
Maybe it would be nice to have more USB ports.
John:
But I'm willing to forego the USB ports to have a nicer desk arrangement.
John:
And I make a different value judgment for my desk.
John:
I'm going to say, I would rather have the USB port, despite the fact that I can't stand how ugly it is, like you just said.
John:
And at that point, then you revisit.
John:
And why does this have so few USB ports?
John:
Or why does it have so few euthanasia ports?
John:
Maybe that's a cost thing.
John:
Maybe that's a feature thing or whatever.
John:
But those are the trade-offs.
John:
Even the sides of a lot of the MacBooks, you're like...
John:
Hmm, this 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro probably had room for one more USB port on the side, and it would really make my life easier.
John:
Again, you can't tell if that's cost concern or space constraints inside there or whatever, but some issues are more cut and dry, and I think the keyboard on the 15 inches is probably my biggest issue.
John:
Economics aside, this is an expensive piece of hardware.
John:
Give me full-size arrow keys.
John:
Give me a different keyboard.
John:
well although i i can also see that see the benefit there of as a user that all the keyboards and all the apple products are all the same keyboard like that or they're close enough rather but i'm rotating through my my fleet of apple devices how many laptops do people have you know i i'm willing to say when i'm on when i'm on the 13 inch one i will use the compact keyboard when i'm on the 15 inch i want the expansive keyboard like i mean at that point why not just have all of your macs have whatever the smallest screen any of them have because then your screen arrangement will always be the same it's
John:
Oh, boy.
John:
All right.
Marco:
We should probably end the show.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Igloo, Hover, and Lynda.com.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Margo and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
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.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
They did it.
Casey:
Hey guys.
Casey:
Oh yeah, you're here.
Casey:
You're still here.
Casey:
Hi.
Casey:
Showbot's still up.
John:
That's amazing.
John:
I thought they said it died.
John:
I saw a message in the chat room like an hour ago that said it was down.
John:
They're crazy.
John:
Does it have any data in it or is it just like they're empty?
Casey:
No, it's real.
Casey:
It's there, man.
Casey:
You don't give me any respect.
John:
All right, I'm loading the page now, but I'm going to see the word connecting in a really big font.
Casey:
You will no matter what.
John:
Actually, I'm just going to see the loading animation in Safari.
John:
Safari does this to me occasionally, where I will try to load a page
John:
And it makes me think that it thinks the OS is out of file descriptors.
John:
But I'm like, why is it waiting?
John:
This site should be fast.
John:
Why is it not opening?
John:
And I know the system is not out of file descriptors that would manifest in a different way.
John:
But I've actually run into situations where the system has been out of file descriptors because I run local databases.
John:
And that happens sometimes if you don't adjust your kernel parameters.
John:
And it'll just be sitting there.
John:
And in the time that I'm waiting for the Safari page to load, I will copy the URL out of the address bar, go over to Chrome, make a new tab, paste it in, load the web page.
John:
Loads instantly.
John:
I go back to Safari, and it'll still be waiting.
John:
Anyway, now it says List is More.
John:
The blue gradient in the Safari address bar is about a little bit less than halfway.
John:
I still see nothing underneath the little nav bar.
John:
I'm still waiting for it to load.
John:
You should restore your phone.
Casey:
I agree.
John:
I'm going to do it right now.
John:
I'm going to take this text.
John:
I'm going to go over to Chrome.
John:
Paste in the URL.
John:
Load it.
John:
It says connecting.
John:
Titles have loaded.
John:
Boom.
John:
Done.
John:
Let me go back to Safari and see how it's doing.
John:
Oh, it's finally loaded.
John:
Wow.
John:
People wonder why I run both Safari and Chrome all day.
John:
This is why.
Casey:
so now that it has survived an entire show because even if it craps out now i'm counting it um is there a sort by votes no and that's exactly what i was about to say is i think the next step is sort by votes what do you mean there's no sort but what's the point of the show bot if there's no sort by votes because i wanted to make sure the show bot could live john i wanted life to find a way can i complain about the layout again
Casey:
Yeah, you can because I don't remember.
Casey:
I took notes on a couple of them and I did change it.
John:
I like that they're not centered line anymore, but you have a number, then sometimes you have a blue plus or minus thing that I can't tell if it's a control or something.
John:
Then you have a title, then you have author and time.
John:
So the time, fine, whatever.
John:
Author seems to work.
John:
The titles are okay, a little bit close to votes, but I have no idea what's in the votes column.
John:
I see a number in the blue.
John:
What is the blue plus one sometimes there for?
John:
It's to vote.
John:
So this is the Johnny Ive again.
John:
I could not tell these were controls, but because you made the text blue, I'm supposed to surmise that this is a button.
John:
I suppose I can mouse over and see the hand cursor as well, but that is not obvious to me as a control at all.
John:
So you'd rather see like an up arrow or something?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Something that looks like a control.
John:
I mean, that's the challenge.
John:
Like it used to be the way you made something look like a control is you drew a little puffy fake 3D mound.
John:
you know, like you drew something that was raised or beveled or shaded or seemed to be raised, you know, like you drew something that looked like you could press it in.
John:
And then the iOS 7 thing is, no, just change the text color.
John:
No border needed.
John:
Doesn't need to be raised.
John:
Doesn't need to be anything.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
It looks like, based on my list, and I've not yet looked at Brad Choate's list, Laughing at Your Showbot With You has the most votes.
John:
Showbot Lives is number one.
Casey:
No, it's not sorted.
John:
Oh, God damn it.
John:
Can we go over to the Working Showbot and sort these titles somehow?
John:
Oh, man.
John:
You gotta have sorting.
John:
What good is it if it's no sorting?
John:
The first thing you do is sort by votes.
John:
No, the first thing you do is keep them... Keep them...
John:
yeah it's like a speed and correctness and you went for speed no i went for the thing that doesn't self-destruct that's what i went for also your program can be really fast if it's not correct and your show bot can be up all the time but if it doesn't have sort by titles the first the thing that we want to use a show bot for it doesn't help anyway congratulations on it staying up like i said all zara boogs i gotta go find that for you for the show notes oh oh no it just died oh no
Casey:
Really?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Connecting.
Casey:
Oh, that's it.
Casey:
It threw an error again.
Casey:
We're so close.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
Well, no, it still counts.
Marco:
Well, it didn't make it through the whole show.
Marco:
We're not actually able to use the data.
Casey:
All right, just stall while I'm doing this.
Casey:
I don't know what happened.
Casey:
Basically, I tried to do something on a socket that apparently was not open.
Casey:
Hold on.
Marco:
Oh my god, I've had a hell of a week.
Marco:
Oh, what's going on?
Marco:
I'm almost ready to ship.
Marco:
I was going to say, sold to Overcast.
Casey:
Wait, did you say you're almost ready to what now?
Casey:
Ship.
Casey:
Ah, okay.
John:
Yeah, ship or get off the pot, Marco.
John:
Exactly.
John:
Have you started potty trading yet?
John:
Not you personally, but... No, I'm afraid of that.
John:
Speaking of, yeah, well, it's one of those things that has to happen.
Marco:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
It's out there.
John:
Schedule it for his 18th birthday.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Just hope he figures it out on his own.
John:
That tends not to work, in my experience.
Casey:
You know, I think what happened is, I think it was a race condition where, and actually Jeremy Banks has just put in a pull request.
Casey:
God, I love open source.
Casey:
Anyway, looking at it, not having seen what he said in his pull request, it looks like there was a race condition where perhaps a socket disconnected, but it hadn't been removed from my internal list O sockets.
Marco:
looking at the show but that works again take your co-host to work day is probably is the number one that actually would be usable i think and not it isn't about the show being up at the beginning of the show um that system is not going to scale i like that a lot what was that in reference to you said it to casey in reference to his his photo non-management technique
John:
yeah but we'll see when i mean i guess if you never look at your photos any system scales put them in the trash i mean if you never look at them even one time after you took them why bother even putting them into date organized photos yeah i like the idea that you think you're going to remember like the year let alone the month or week that some memorable event happened and then you're going to go to the you're going to go right to that folder and find the picture that you want that is a fantasy scenario of a young person
John:
I bet there's a lot of people who never look back at their photos.
John:
They have an easy photo management scheme for them.
John:
Right.
John:
Beautifully rendered trash can in your dock.
Marco:
Well, that's my strategy.
Marco:
So I have one of these Fujitsu ScanSnap scanners that everybody bought five years ago.
Marco:
Well, I did too.
Marco:
And so any paperwork I get in the mail, I scan it.
Marco:
And then I deal with it, I scan it, and then I shred it.
Marco:
So I was usually trying to make this folder system where I'd organize, all right, the electric bills all go in this folder, and the gas bill all goes in this folder, and everything else.
Marco:
And I gave up on that within a couple of weeks.
Marco:
And since a few weeks after I got this thing, my system has been...
Marco:
I just scan everything into one giant folder, and the file names are just timestamp-based, you know, just data.
John:
But it does OCR, though.
John:
Like, isn't the whole point that it OCRs them?
John:
So you can just type the name of your gas or electric company in Spotlight and find them?
John:
It doesn't OCR them?
Marco:
It doesn't by default, and mine is the S510M.
Marco:
It's a pretty old one.
Marco:
I think I got it in, like, 2007 or something.
Marco:
It's pretty old, and the software it came with was very, very slow to OCR and was this whole separate app that would launch and that would quit.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
So it added too many steps to the process.
Marco:
So I stopped doing that, too.
Marco:
Now I just have the images.
Marco:
And my strategy is they all just get scanned into this one giant folder sorted by date.
Marco:
If I ever have to find something, I just go and flip through and I flip the flip with the up arrow key using quick look.
John:
I mean, presumably the volume is lower there.
John:
Like the number of photos you take in a year is lower than the number of bills you get in a year.
John:
And that is where you're looking for years, because when the IRS comes in order to you and you want your stuff from 2013, you want date-organized, everything from 2013.
John:
Here you go.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
But I'm saying, like, it's a similar kind of thing where, like, it's mostly a write-only system.
Marco:
It's write most of the time, read very occasionally, and so writes need to be quick and simple, and reads don't need to be that.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
It's a similar kind of thing.
Marco:
That's how most people, I think, treat their photo library, where you have to be able to just add to it without any effort whatsoever, even if that comes at the expense of if you want to find some particular one, it might take you a few extra minutes because you haven't spent hours over the last few years building up this giant system of metadata and sorting and organizing.
John:
Well, someone said that actually the iOS 8 has a little heart.
John:
on every picture that you can just tap kind of Instagram style to fave, right?
John:
And I think the next step in that would be, it could be that like, not that I'm saying they have the wrong defaults, but kind of in the messages where like in iOS 8, you have to say that you want to keep them.
John:
What if it decided that if you didn't pay for iCloud storage, it would slowly delete the ones that you didn't heart?
John:
You know, like your pictures.
John:
I mean, I don't think that's the right thing to do, but like because so few pictures come out well or ever need to be looked at again.
John:
I bet most people's photo collections could be reduced by like 80 percent without any sentimental loss because of just the huge volume of garbage pictures that people have in their collections.
John:
And it's like what they really care about is.
John:
one or two or three good pictures of their kid at every age that they were or a particularly memorable event but not the hundreds of pictures that people end up taking you know just seven shots of the of the same person within a sec especially with like burst mode stuff on like real cameras i mean real i mean real photographers you know have to discard that stuff because they can't keep all of it forever and they just pick the one or two good ones a lot of the aperture workflow was was about they used to advertise like oh here's how you can pick
John:
your seven good shots out of the 800 you took, right?
John:
Regular people are not that severe, but that whole idea that you're going to take a lot of pictures, most of them are going to be crap, put the little hearts in the ones that you like, and that's your tool later for if you want to thin out your set of photos.
John:
Ditch the ones with no hearts.
Marco:
oh yeah I mean just anecdotally like the few times I'll occasionally be in the mood to clean out my photo library and I'll go back and like I'll go back like to whatever pictures from like a year ago and I'll find this tremendous folder and I'm like why why did I keep like 80% of these and I'll go through and you know it takes like hours to go through like a year worth of photos and
Marco:
delete all the the crap the the blurry ones the the alternate takes that i ended up using a different one or that you know i i took three different photos of the same thing and i picked the best one to use but i forgot to delete the other two and i can i can cut down a year of photos down by 80 or 90 percent without really losing anything of value just by doing that but even that most people don't even do that i hardly even do that you know and i just talked about it like it most people never do that
John:
A great cross-site scripting attack just popped up on Casey's show bot.
Casey:
Which is funny because I literally just pushed the fix to my website like two seconds ago.
John:
A little alert just popped up that says, page at www.caseylist.com says, you should follow me on Twitter at Jeremy Banks.
John:
I post rarely, so it won't hurt your stream much.
John:
Okay.
John:
Good job, Jeremy Banks.
John:
I'm not going to follow you, though, because your name wasn't clickable, and it would take too much effort to copy and paste it out of the dialogue.
John:
Also, you just hacked Casey's poor show bot.
John:
You're kicking a bot when it's down.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
He gets a buy because... I don't think he hacked it.
Casey:
Well, it was an issue, and it wasn't really a hack, but he gets a buy because he's been actively trying to fix these vulnerabilities rather than just find them and, you know... I'm assuming he just pasted JavaScript into the titles, and then your page dutifully rendered the JavaScript into the DOM, and we...
John:
Off we go.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
Escaping?
John:
What's that?
Casey:
So we got slightly sidetracked.
Casey:
So Overcast, you're pretty much ready.
Casey:
What's the holdup?
Marco:
The holdup was, well, you know what the holdup was because you're on the beta, but I basically had a pretty sizable feature that I really decided that I wanted to add last minute.
Marco:
And so I probably... I had something that was almost 1.0 a few days ago.
Marco:
And then I realized, oh, you know what?
Marco:
This feature I was going to delay until sometime later, I actually really want to have it in 1.0.
Marco:
So I bumped it up and I did that in a few days.
Marco:
And so I basically only have...
Marco:
i i have probably two more betas to ship i have the next beta which is going to be like the feature complete one um and then after that is going to be like the release candidate in old windows parlance i don't does anyone else still use like rc1 rc2 or is that only an old windows thing it's still a windows thing as far as i knew although i don't really keep up with that very much anymore
Marco:
Anyway, yeah, so that's where I am.
Marco:
I'm like the build before release candidate probably going out in the next couple days.
Marco:
Release candidate probably going out later this week.
Marco:
And then I'll probably submit next weekend or early the week after that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I'm very, very close.
John:
Did you ever find that bug that someone reported about the UI showing up gray, like tint color all gone?
Marco:
No.
John:
Because I've been experiencing it lately.
Marco:
Yeah, I should spend more time trying to find workarounds.
Marco:
Yeah, there's a bug.
Marco:
If you've ever used an iOS 7 device, you've probably run into this at least once, maybe in mail or some other standard app that uses a tint color, where...
Marco:
the tint color gets stuck as gray.
Marco:
Because what happens is when there's an alert box popped up or something like an alert box, any kind of system modal view like that, UIKit usefully changes the tint color on the background window to gray.
Marco:
So that way all the controls that have this bright color for their tint color
Marco:
uh, fade into gray in the background.
Marco:
So they don't, so they aren't loud and obnoxious while you're looking at this alert box that's in front of them.
Marco:
And then when you, when you cancel the, uh, when you cancel that box out, then it goes and puts the color back.
Marco:
The problem is it doesn't always put the color back.
Marco:
And, and under certain conditions that I haven't quite figured out, um, your tint color will get stuck at gray and not all controls will, uh, will update or it's, it's a mess.
Marco:
Um,
John:
and it happens occasionally in overcast and it drives me nuts and it doesn't recover like if it loses if it misses that chance to do it like you can just hang out and use a gray ui for a while like it's not gonna unless you like mine it's always you know waking it up from sleep so the only way to get to get have a second chance of doing that is put it to sleep again go to another app switch back to it see if it's you know switch back to orange yeah this it's driving me nuts and i can't i can't figure out what to do about it i mean because because i want that behavior i want the behavior of did you file a radar
Marco:
No, actually.
Marco:
I don't think so.
Marco:
I don't think so.
Marco:
The ghost of Jerry will haunt you now.
Marco:
It definitely seems like it's a UI kit bug, and I could try to work around it, but I'm not willing to do too much of a crazy hack to do that.
Marco:
That's one thing I decided early on with Overcast, and so far I've stuck to it for the most part.
Marco:
With Instapaper, I would try to use crazy, crazy hacks to work around limitations or bugs in UIKit.
Marco:
Usually limitations, usually not actual bugs.
Marco:
But it was so hard to maintain, and it wasn't really worth it.
Marco:
I would work around it to achieve a certain transition or animation or feature that you weren't supposed to be able to do in the API, or to try to mimic built-in Apple behavior in a way that wasn't publicly exposed.
Marco:
and it just was never worth it even even some of the big stuff like pagination oh my god pagination was such a pile of hacks because until ios 7 there was no api to paginate a web view so you had to do it manually and i did it a few different ways they all were horrible hacks they all worked but they were all horrible hacks it really it dramatically complicated the code and it took tons and tons of time to write and maintain all that
Marco:
and at the end of the day, it wasn't that big of a deal.
Marco:
It wasn't that major of a feature.
Marco:
I thought it would be, and it really wasn't.
Marco:
So with Overcast, early on, I decided I'm just going to avoid most of those things.
Marco:
I'm using a lot of stock UI kit with appearance customization, but still, I'm not rewriting my own navigation controller.
Marco:
I'm using the built-in stuff.
Marco:
I'm hardly even doing custom transitions anywhere.
Marco:
In fact, I don't know if I have any custom transitions anywhere.
Marco:
uh it's it's mostly ui kit stuff because first of all it's 1.0 and i didn't want to get too bogged down all that stuff because it turns out turns out uh podcast apps have a lot of screens and stuff like it's it's a lot more than i expected like there's this is a this is a much larger app than instapaper um that's one of the reasons it's taken me so long is there's just so many screens and so much functionality that needs to be built in considered to get what i think most people would consider like the bare minimum
Marco:
necessary function set of a modern podcast app and so it's just tons and tons of of code and interfaces and screens and designs and strings and localization potential and and so i didn't want to also have this big pile of hacks that would uh that would make all that more complicated and it would take time that i needed to to do all this stuff in a reasonable amount of time
John:
People are asking if I ruined the surprise of your color scheme.
John:
You showed the gigantic icon at XOXO like a year ago.
Marco:
Yeah, and it's also on the Twitter bio and on the web page.
Marco:
The web page even has the font.
Marco:
I mean, yeah, it's pretty obvious by looking at the preview page I have for it on the website, roughly what the app looks like.
Marco:
No big deal.
Marco:
uh anyway so that's where i am i'm very close and i i recognize by the way that this is completely ridiculous to rush to ship an app now as opposed to waiting for ios 8 and i've thought about this a lot because i'm going to require ios 8 as soon as i possibly can pretty much as soon as as soon as it's out i'm gonna require it
Marco:
the reality is that's still a few months away probably you know we don't we don't know exactly it might be september it might be october that's still a few months out and i really want to ship before then i you know i i'm i'm already embarrassed that it took this long i would have liked to ship months ago but oh well i didn't now i have i'm i'm now at a shippable point
Marco:
so i don't see much of a reason to wait you know i am going to require eight immediately which means that there's going to be the awkward phase of i'm going to support the iphone 4 and the old ipod touches for like two months and then i'm going to cut off support for these people and that that sucks but i i don't think there's a better way to do that while also taking full advantage of what ios 8 offers so does that make sense i
Marco:
you've got that you you just you explained in the uh in the beta thing how you're handling that to not disappoint users correct i don't want to reveal too much but yeah i mean and i'm gonna i'm gonna anger people anyway i mean like there's no question like people are going to be annoyed that uh that i i have this app that supports these devices and then like two months later i stopped supporting those devices you know that is going to annoy people but uh
Marco:
I'd rather get it out there sooner.
Marco:
Because right now, I haven't even started iOS 8 stuff yet on it.
Marco:
I haven't written a single line of iOS 8 code for it.
Marco:
I'm not even using the iOS 8 SDK to build it.
Marco:
I have the 8 SDK installed on my laptop secondarily, but on my desktop, I'm doing my main development.
Marco:
I don't even have it installed yet.
Marco:
I haven't written any Swift yet.
Marco:
I haven't done anything with 8's new APIs.
Marco:
I haven't done anything with rotation or the size class stuff, or the stuff that replaces rotation.
Marco:
I'm delaying all of that until I ship the iOS 7 version.
Marco:
And then after the 7 version ships and is reasonably stable, then I will start doing the 8 version and try to prepare it in time for 8 launch, which I know it's cutting it close and I might not make it quite on time, but...
John:
You'll be spending all your time making all the UI handle different size classes for the bigger iPhone.
Marco:
I don't intend to actually have an extension or anything on day one of eight.
Marco:
Mostly because I'm not really sure what an extension would be immediately.
Marco:
Obviously I could do an add to overcast kind of thing but I want to do that right and so I'm probably not going to have that on day one.
Marco:
I'm going to ship it soon is the very short version of this very long story that goes nowhere.
Casey:
Now, whenever you submit and you can choose not to answer this question, but whenever you submit, are you going to hold release for some big marketing push or just like a day or two to get your stuff squared away and then let it rip?
Marco:
I'm going to set it on hold release, but once it is releasable, I don't think I would really hold it back for much of anything unless, like, if Apple is going to feature it, they might ask me to hold it back until Thursday or whatever.
Marco:
But I don't know if that's going to happen or not.
Marco:
I would guess off the top of my head, probably not, obviously, because most apps don't get featured on launch.
Marco:
Chances are I'm going to have to release it when I'm ready to.
Marco:
So...
John:
like i want to do something a little more on the website i want to have like a marketing page and the site so i'm gonna have to like while it's submitted i'm gonna have to write that and you know if that's not done i might wait until it's done but i'm not gonna wait more than a few days do you need help thinking of three things to put in the standard bootstrap powered layout of a product marketing page because you know you gotta have the icon and you gotta have three boxes and it's like powerful simple orange that's my suggestion yeah
Marco:
That's fantastic.
Marco:
Yeah, no, I've actually I've considered marketing from the very beginning and I have in my giant task paper document that I that's kind of my my to do list and forecast for this app.
Marco:
I've been considering marketing the whole time.
Marco:
And so I like I've even I've even considered like what features go into 1.0 or don't go into 1.0.
Marco:
based on how they support my overall like strong marketing points and you know and i know i know talking about marketing for developers is weird and sometimes even taboo but it shouldn't be because it's it's kind of stupid not to consider these things and if you can consider these things and if you can play to your strengths why not do it and so i have i've been considering that very strongly from the very beginning and i'm pretty sure what i'm going to put in these it's just a
Marco:
I'm not sure if I'm going to do that same front page everyone else does, but it's probably going to have boxes with features in them.
Casey:
And how's the review?
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
So much.
John:
I mean, like, I think now finally I have the outline.
John:
Like, I have it all in my head of what needs to be written.
John:
It's just I need to write, you know.
John:
Actually, not true.
John:
This...
John:
The Swift section, I'm still trying to decide how I'm going to make it not be ridiculous.
John:
I'm trying to focus on a few things.
John:
I have one of the things, sort of an idea of what I'm going to write there, and the second one I'm just putting off for now.
John:
But the rest of the stuff, I more or less know what I'm going to write now.
John:
I'm just thinking about, like, should I bother taking screenshots?
John:
Should I just wait?
John:
Of course, I can't do a lot of the testing with the handoff stuff, or if they're going to support the dark UI, like they said they were going to.
John:
I just need to write.
John:
I need to plow forward bravely.
John:
I got through the introduction, though, so that's good.
Marco:
Hey, that's something.
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
Casey, how about that fast text update for iOS 7?
Casey:
I was really hoping you weren't going to ask me that.
Marco:
I'm really going to beat you to shipping.
John:
Yeah, you are.
John:
He's putting all his time into the show bot, Marco.
John:
Don't distract him.
John:
Yep.