You Had Your Moment
Casey:
Oh, how was the Six Flags the other day?
Casey:
Hot.
Casey:
Was it water or not water?
Casey:
I guess not water.
John:
We went to the water part, but I didn't go in the water part.
John:
I was the pack mule for the day.
John:
I was carrying the backpack with everyone's like, you're not allowed to bring food in, but like, you know, the water bottles that we sold in the park and all the possible bathing suits and towels for the water things, which is fine.
John:
Like, I was willing to be the pack mule, but like, I'm too old to be spending seven hours just
John:
walking around on hot black asphalt it wasn't like it was in the 90s but it wasn't like super hot or super humid but it doesn't matter it just wears you down like I was I was hunting for shade I was like there's a dumpster there must be shade on one side of that dumpster let me crouch in the shade while my kids wait on this you know two hour line to go on a roller coaster
Casey:
Now, are you a... Oh, no, you're not a rollercoaster person because you get motion sick.
Casey:
Never mind.
John:
No, rollercoaster is... I'm not a teacup person.
John:
Teacups are the worst ride in the entire amusement park because that is repeated motion.
John:
Puke your brains out, right?
John:
Rollercoaster is over 90 seconds.
John:
It doesn't matter what you can do to you in 90 seconds, you're fine.
John:
So the shorter... Oh, so you do like rollercoasters?
John:
I don't like them in general because I feel like I've gone on.
John:
I've experienced everything there is to experience on a roller coaster from a thrill perspective.
John:
And now the risk reward ratio is way off because I don't want to go on these rides run by teenagers with a risk of death.
John:
And what is my reward?
John:
To have an experience that I've already had before.
John:
Like it's not anything new.
Casey:
That is the most John answer I've ever heard.
Casey:
I feel like you need to slide that in the show somehow.
John:
I don't like my family going on them because, like, it's teenagers running these things.
John:
They're not well-maintained.
John:
Six Flags is not Disney.
John:
And, you know, accidents happen all the time.
John:
And it's like, that's a tiny risk.
John:
But then for the reward, it's like, why am I doing this?
John:
Like, it's not, you know.
John:
So anyway, my kids go on them.
John:
They can have all the experiences that you have.
John:
I feel like I've already done all that.
John:
Is there anything at an amusement park that you are amused by?
Marco:
No.
John:
i like the roller coasters i enjoy the ride on a good roller coaster but i just always think about like all i can do is like look at the machinery and i look at the 12 year olds running the thing like it's not you'll see i mean just wait until adam's old enough to go on these things you'll be like he's gonna be like oh i want to go on the roller coaster you'll be like
John:
you really want to go on it?
John:
Have you seen the machinery?
John:
Have you seen the people running it?
John:
There's no adult supervision, and the maintenance on these things is not great.
John:
It's not really... Oh, that's fantastic.
John:
I'm sure I'll feel the same when my kids start driving, but at least...
John:
you know if something goes wrong in a roller coaster there's nothing there to save you yeah except the like quadruply redundant systems that are keeping you on the track oh they're that's what they tell you no these are just ancient ricky the best thing was that uh my kids wanted to go on like they have a roller coaster they're called the cyclone which is the name that they reuse because they're six flags and it's a wooden coaster and it was closing july 20th so i was there what like four or five days ago or whatever
John:
So that's when they were closing the ride.
John:
It's like, well, be the last one to ride it.
John:
And it looked like it was a roller coaster.
John:
Paint is peeling, and I'm watching the roller coaster go around and seeing the thing sway and bend.
John:
They're like, oh, it's supposed to sway and bend.
John:
That's what wooden coasters do.
John:
It's like, yeah, no thanks.
Marco:
Yeah, we're going to ride it right before everyone decides it's no longer worth maintaining for safety reasons.
Marco:
Exactly.
John:
And I was like, well, today it's fine, but tomorrow it will be closed.
John:
Like, what's the difference between today and tomorrow exactly?
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, we all survived.
John:
And, you know, I was so tired from that experience.
Casey:
Do we want to talk about Overcast for a little bit?
Marco:
Do we have to?
Marco:
Oh, I had this one that I wanted to answer.
Marco:
I mean, I'm happy to answer other questions if you want, but I don't want to totally make everyone sick of this.
Marco:
No, you had your moment.
Marco:
You're done.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
You made me have my moment.
Marco:
I was going to give it like 10 minutes on the show.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I'm just giving you a hard time.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So there was one thing a listener named John wrote in to say...
Marco:
Kind of curious if you could talk about how weird it is that you have to do so much server-side work to do a podcast client.
Marco:
The Reader Guide doesn't have to deal with this stuff.
Marco:
There's a whole group of web-based RSS processors that people can use for syncing.
Marco:
It seems wasteful that each indie podcast developer has to reinvent the wheel when what they're differentiating themselves on usually has nothing to do with the server-side work but the client features.
Marco:
um so what he's asking about is things like how we have you know we used to have google reader as a big sync service um before that everyone just crawled their own feeds from their rss readers after google readers death we now have things like feed wrangler and feedly and stuff like that um other you know sync services and so you don't have to if you just want to write a feed reader you don't have to write the whole server side yourself uh in fact you probably shouldn't write any server side code you should probably just use these sync services
Marco:
and uh so you know basically why isn't there one of those for podcasts and i think there's a few reasons for that first of all there's i mean i'm sure you could go to underscore david smith and say hey i want to make one of these based on a feed wrangler and i'm pretty sure either that's possible or he would let you do it like either it's already there or you could just ask him and he'd be like okay sure like i'm pretty sure most of these sync services if they don't already support that wouldn't have a problem with you doing that um
Marco:
i think i think the the bigger question though is i think there's two big questions here why do it yourself and why use a server-side model at all um and i think both of those are very good questions i mean why do it yourself is applicable to lots of things and you know the number one answer to that is because i'm me and i don't trust anyone and i don't like third-party dependencies much to a fault um
Marco:
The simple fact is, when I make things, I make things with the intention of them lasting a long time.
Marco:
Whether they do or not, it's another story, but I want them to last for a long time.
Marco:
And I look at when I first started Instapaper in 2008.
Marco:
What was the common wisdom at the time?
Marco:
If I wanted to base on some other service, what service would that have been in 2008?
Marco:
because instantly we're still running today and if i would have like you know based the whole thing on the original like facebook app platform which i think was coming out around that time where would that be today you know stuff like that like the whole you know basing yourself on someone else's entire service what if your entire business was making twitter clients this is a very real thing that's happened to a lot of people in our industry and um you know so you know you you can say oh why not just build it on x and
Marco:
But over time, X will go away or change in a way that makes it impossible for you to keep doing that.
Marco:
And the question is, do you plan to still be around at that time?
Marco:
And something you make now might be around longer than you think.
Marco:
When I was starting Instapaper in 2008, I don't think I thought it would still be around in 2014.
Marco:
I probably hoped it would, but I'm sure that was not in my mindset at the time of, I better make decisions now that will last at least seven years or whatever, you know, six years.
Marco:
I can't do math when I'm podcasting.
Marco:
But so, you know, you have to realize like the ground shifts constantly in this business.
Marco:
And if you can find some stable ground to stand on, you probably should.
Marco:
And so that means building mostly your own stuff on...
Marco:
on very stable, long-standing, boring things that don't shift around.
Marco:
Things like Linux and your own servers.
Marco:
Things like old languages like PHP and Perl and Ruby and Python.
Marco:
These are all well-established languages.
Marco:
It's a pretty safe bet to write something in Python and host it on Linux and have the database be Postgres or MySQL these days.
Marco:
That's a pretty safe bet.
Marco:
So anyway, that's one reason to do it yourself.
Marco:
And then the second question is, why do a server-side based infrastructure at all?
Marco:
And...
Marco:
there it isn't a clear win with that um it's a design decision basically and and but like a technical design decision uh there's a lot of advantages to it there's a lot of disadvantages to it i chose to do it because i was okay with the disadvantages the disadvantages of course being you have to write the whole thing first of all um and you also have to support servers and
Marco:
And there's a whole class of problems that you then have to deal with whenever you support a service, a website service.
Marco:
And that's even if you run it on something like Azure, you still have to support all of that in some way.
Marco:
Maybe you don't have to support the servers going down if it's on one of these abstract platforms, but you still have to support like, oh, well, they made a change and all of a sudden they're requiring this.
Marco:
Or all of Azure is down for the next 20 minutes and you can't do anything about it.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
I'm not saying that, you know, not to pick on them.
Marco:
I mean, like that happens to S3 all the time.
Marco:
That happens to EC2 all the time.
Marco:
Like this, that happens to these big cloud services where the entire service has a problem or like a quarter of it will just go down.
Marco:
An Amazon data center will just be unreachable for 20 minutes.
Marco:
And there's nothing you can do about that.
Marco:
But it's your problem.
Marco:
It isn't your fault, but it's your problem.
Marco:
And so, anyway, this is a diversion.
Marco:
But any kind of service that you have, if you don't build a service, you might rely on something like iCloud to do your syncing.
Marco:
Well, that's the service.
Marco:
It's just not yours.
Marco:
You still have all those problems to deal with.
Marco:
You just can't do anything about them.
Marco:
Anyway...
Marco:
Doing it.
Marco:
So all those problems I'm willing to accept.
Marco:
I've done it a lot before.
Marco:
I know what it's involved in hosting servers.
Marco:
It only gets easier with time.
Marco:
So, you know, I was fine doing it eight years ago.
Marco:
I'm even more fine doing it now.
Marco:
It's even easier and cheaper than ever.
Marco:
So that's all fine.
Marco:
And then the advantages of what this allows me to do is not only things like have a web player, you know, the obvious stuff, but things like fix crawling errors without shipping an app update.
Marco:
Like, if there were certain feeds I wasn't parsing correctly because they used crazy mime types, one of them used an XML header that left out the M. So it's just an Excel document, and I'm supposed to figure that out.
Marco:
Like, there's all sorts of, like, crazy, stupid stuff people do in feeds.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
I've been crawling podcast feeds for almost a year.
Marco:
But there's still like once I had real users, they added way more feeds than what I had.
Marco:
And so there's still like new problems I've run into.
Marco:
And I didn't have to ship an app update to fix them.
Casey:
So how do you handle the one-off feed exceptions, for lack of a better word?
Casey:
And I don't mean like, you know, a code exception.
Casey:
What I mean is, well, the people at ATP, they don't know how to make an XML file, so I need to handle specifically the feed at this URL differently.
Casey:
Like, do you have a series of if-else's switch statement, or do you do something a lot more clever than that?
Casey:
I would assume the latter.
Marco:
You assume wrong.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So far, I'm doing very little about this.
Marco:
So the XL feed I have not fixed yet because that's like, again, it's faced with this problem of what do you do?
Marco:
Do you special case it?
Marco:
Do you just have a list of conditions and you just do a streaming place of question mark XL version equals 1.0, change that to the right thing?
Marco:
Like, you know, what do you do?
Marco:
So far, I haven't quite figured that out yet.
Marco:
What I have instead, most of the problems were people using crazy wrong content types for the enclosures.
Marco:
Because one thing I do, I don't support video.
Marco:
And so I have a whitelist of these are the content types that I support.
Marco:
And then I map them all to whether this is generally MP3 or MP4 format.
Marco:
And certain people mark their enclosures as text HTML.
Marco:
which they're not.
Marco:
They're like MP3s, but they say content type text HTML, and they expect that to work.
Marco:
So I have to do crap like that.
Marco:
But for that, I just have a list of content types that I accept anyway that I know aren't videos and stuff like that.
Marco:
Anyway, that doesn't matter.
Marco:
So server-side lets me do stuff like that.
Marco:
It also lets me do things like keep the app code very simple.
Marco:
And there's all sorts of benefits for things like
Marco:
Having to pull a whole bunch of feeds all the time and then that uses a bunch of data and battery life on your device, stuff like that.
Marco:
Fast updates.
Marco:
You pull a bunch of feeds at once.
Marco:
For me, one of the biggest benefits is my app does not have to know XML and does not have to parse feeds.
Marco:
The server can just crawl everything in all of its crappy condition.
Marco:
normalize it all, strip out the stuff the app doesn't even need, and then send the app small, normalized JSON blobs that it can decode very easily.
Marco:
So it lets me do more work on the server side, which means more work in a higher-level language that allows you to do things like string processing,
Marco:
much more easily and has all sorts of built-in normalization.
Marco:
Like, I have the whole power of iConv, and so I can convert even character sets and solve those kind of problems server-side very easily.
Marco:
So it's more of a division of labor.
Marco:
It's not that the app wouldn't need all this stuff.
Marco:
It's still, like, you have to put all that logic somewhere.
Marco:
And I've chosen to put much of it on the server where it's easier to update and in some cases easier to write.
Marco:
And then the app can focus more on the UI and not have to deal with some crazy new feed that's a one-off exception.
Casey:
Yeah, that totally makes sense to me.
Casey:
I just didn't know if you were going into like...
Casey:
some crazy design pattern whose name escapes me where basically each of these one-offs is perhaps encapsulated in a class and you just run through a series of classes to say, oh, does this little one-off care about this particular feed?
Casey:
And you could go totally crazy down that road or you could have like the if-else chain from hell.
Casey:
And that's a different way of approaching it.
Casey:
And I was thinking about this earlier today.
Casey:
I was curious how you handled that sort of thing.
Casey:
It's the same sort of problem I'm sure you had at Instapaper with really weird DOM parsing trying to find the bits that you cared about, which that you used XPath, didn't you?
Marco:
Yeah, for Instapaper, I went through a few things.
Marco:
The very first text parser was actually an XSL document.
Marco:
And because my previous job in Pittsburgh, we did crazy things with XSL and I knew it extremely well.
Marco:
And for the purpose of like parsing through a DOM and outputting something as a result, it's really good because it's a specially suited language for that task.
Casey:
Yeah, I've used it in the past.
Casey:
It is very good.
Marco:
Yeah, like, it does things that if you just have, like, a DOM interface and a programming language, like, there are certain entire classes of problems for which XSL is just way, way easier to use.
Marco:
And in many cases, really fast.
Marco:
Anyway, so...
Marco:
yeah instapaper then i did a dom thing then i did xpath and and i ended up with like a big dom crawling parser that would like it would like step through the dom and tag everything with scores and then it would have xpaths to do things with special rules and so i had a thing where you could like you could say okay for this site this is the xpath for the title this is the xpath for the body strip anything matching this xpath stuff like that um obviously with feeds that's a lot easier
Marco:
I do run through the show notes that are in podcast feeds.
Marco:
I run those through a bunch of parsing, actually, to try to normalize them.
Marco:
So to do things like if there isn't a P tag around the text, put one around it.
Marco:
You know, some things just have one little quick line of text as their show notes.
Marco:
I put a P tag around it.
Marco:
So that way it renders the same way that things that use P tags do on the client side.
Marco:
I also strip out inline style tags and certain like inline JavaScript things and, you know, things that just would mess up or are possible security holes on the client side.
Marco:
I strip all that out and normalize stuff, remove empty paragraphs, remove like the one pixel GIFs and then the paragraph around them because it's now empty, stuff like that.
John:
anyway what were we talking about if you find yourself writing else if chains to handles variations in input uh and you're not writing a parser uh you're probably doing something wrong so it's like the solution is always write your own xml parser no no i mean like i'm saying like if you're doing a parser and you're switching based on the token or something that's fine but if you're but in this case like if you should never like don't even get to the point where you're writing the code if it's this feed do this if it's that feed do that like especially when you know
John:
What you're going to be doing is parsing feeds, and the world of feeds is large, and the number of special cases is large.
John:
I would probably just do a series associated with each feed.
John:
You have a default parser, and then you have a series of...
John:
things that you run in order before you get to the default parser.
John:
And so then you could reuse, like if the text HTML thing is a common problem, one of your things is, one of your rules is fix broken MIME types.
John:
And another rule is add the M back in XML, right?
John:
And so you just apply those rules to each podcast.
John:
So then that way, when, if 700 feeds have the bad MIME type, you can use that one rule to fix all of them.
John:
If one feed has the missing M in XML, you just do one more rule to that.
John:
But anyway, yeah, not an LSEF chain.
John:
Oh, yeah, of course.
John:
That's not Casey, because he was offering that as like, in case anyone's listening, don't do that, please.
Casey:
Oh, no, I wasn't being serious about that, for God's sakes.
Casey:
I would definitely do something probably very similar to what you described, John.
Casey:
But I was curious because Marco tends to kind of do the down and dirty approach occasionally.
Casey:
And I was curious what you chose, especially early on.
John:
I was thinking of the other day, I was thinking about the handling weird feeds and stuff.
John:
And if you have access to, I don't know if you do, if you could get access to the iTunes catalog, I suppose you could with like screen scraping iTunes or doing whatever.
John:
But a good exercise for your feed parser would have been, I'm going to...
John:
parse and normalize every single podcast feed available on iTunes, and then make sure the results conform to something reasonable.
John:
And then you would have found many, many exceptions.
John:
I just don't know if you have access to that corpus of data.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by a new sponsor.
Marco:
It's Cotton Bureau.
Marco:
And when we were making t-shirts for this show, after we made our t-shirts, we had tons of people recommend that we should have gone with Cotton Bureau.
Marco:
And I took a look, and honestly, it looks pretty good to me.
Marco:
uh cotton bureau is a t-shirt printer it's the kind of thing where you upload a design um and then and and people can then pre-order it kind of like kickstarter you know you can pre-order your shirt and then if they get enough pre-orders they ship them and they print them and they ship them which is great because nobody wants to deal with t-shirt sales in other ways like having to like get a bunch of t-shirts printed with your own money up front get boxes of a thousand shirts shipped to your house and then have people like
Marco:
then have to be doing order fulfillment for them for yourself.
Marco:
You know, if you just have like a podcast and you want to sell t-shirts, that's a pain in the butt.
Marco:
Nobody wants to do that.
Marco:
Cotton Bureau is, in their words, of the internet.
Marco:
They came out of a group called United Pixel Workers.
Marco:
I have a few of their t-shirts, actually.
Marco:
And the desire to help their designers and partners make and sell t-shirts.
Marco:
In the past, they've worked with Dribble with three Bs, so it must be good.
Marco:
Rudeo, Rudeo.
Marco:
Is it Rudeo?
Marco:
Stephen Hackett probably tells us.
Marco:
He used to have a show about streaming music services.
Marco:
I'm guessing it's Rudeo.
Marco:
Lauren Brichter, Jeff Atwood, and more.
Marco:
Cotton Bureau shirts are soft, tagless, and the highest possible quality.
Marco:
Cotton Bureau is a rejection of the contests and gimmicks that some sites use to create demand.
Marco:
They require only 12 pre-orders, which is the minimum necessary to cover their costs to print a shirt.
Marco:
They're brutally honest about what they're doing and why, as you can see on their blog.
Marco:
cotton bureau's previous work includes uh tap bots the incomparable real mac pacific helm nevin mergon buzz anderson and more great designers than you can shake a stick at all selling t-shirts featuring everything from coffee and bacon to sports pop culture and goofy animals and honestly i took a look through their stuff and earlier today and it's really nice like they you can tell this is like this is the site that that designers like it's very clear from that uh with good reason too
Marco:
many great shirts are currently on cotton bureau collecting orders including the future friendly tea which donates all proceeds to archive.org and even by the time this is published later this week they will even have a Kennebalt t-shirt and coming soon to cotton bureau they have upcoming teas from the incomparable maybe even a bionic tea possibly because Matt Alexander from need blazed the trail of ATP being a fashion sponsor which I still find kind of funny
Marco:
And they might maybe, hint, hint, possibly have a Roderick on the Line shirt coming in the future, but I cannot confirm or deny that.
Marco:
Go to CottonBureau.com.
Marco:
I honestly, Bureau was one of those words I never know how to spell.
Marco:
I always misspell it, so I'm going to spell it for you.
Marco:
Cotton, you know how to spell Cotton.
Marco:
Bureau is B-U-R-E-A-U.com.
Marco:
CottonBureau.com.
Marco:
Check out the Wall of Fame there.
Marco:
If you see a previously made shirt that you like,
Marco:
you can actually sign up and kind of vote for it to be brought back.
Marco:
And if they have enough votes, they will bring it back and do a second printing for you.
Marco:
Cotton Bureau just celebrated their first birthday in June.
Marco:
They plan on being around and staying proudly independent for a long time to come.
Marco:
They add amazing new shirts every day.
Marco:
So check it out.
Marco:
Go to CottonBureau.com.
Marco:
Browse around.
Marco:
See if you like anything.
Marco:
Buy it.
Marco:
If you want to upload one and make your own shirt, go for it.
Marco:
Very high quality shirts.
Marco:
You can get 15% off any order in July when you use the code ATP15 at checkout.
Marco:
Once again, CottonBureau.com.
Marco:
15% off any order in July by using the code ATP15.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Cotton Bureau for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Really good company.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Anything else about Overcast?
Casey:
There are a couple other bullets here that I didn't write.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
Well, I figure Marco should go through the UI changes he made or is making if he wants to.
John:
You talked about them on Twitter already, so you might as well talk about your reasoning in more than 140 characters.
Marco:
All right, so basically, I'm trying to make this stuff useful to more people besides just me and people who want to hear about everything overcast.
Marco:
So please forgive me as I try to stumble through and generalize this to be more applicable to possibly the work that you, the listener, are doing.
Marco:
Anyway, so one of the first things I did was I got a few notes, and this came up in the beta a little bit, but I didn't pay enough attention to it.
Marco:
I got a few notes from people saying the font is too small.
Marco:
And I run everything through an appearance manager class where I set all my defaults of, okay, this is the main font name.
Marco:
This is the secondary font name.
Marco:
And I have all these methods for things like the preferred font.
Marco:
Because you know how iOS 7 has all this dynamic text stuff?
Marco:
So it has things like preferred font descriptor for style.
Marco:
And you can say UI font text style body, headline, caption one, caption two.
Marco:
I have an appearance class that accepts those same arguments, looks at the system dynamic text setting to get an idea for how big the system thinks this text should be, and then returns to the caller my fonts based on the system font settings and based on those styles.
Marco:
And so I can do things like specify, okay, when you fetch font style caption 2, always return the small caps font.
Marco:
And the default color for that font should be this.
Marco:
Here's the size for it based on the system size, etc.
Marco:
And that's one of the reasons why Overcast so easily supports dynamic text.
Marco:
Because I wrote all this crap with iOS 7 in mind and everything else.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
Um, I also had a master font adjustment and I had set that to negative one so that any font, you know, checked through the system mechanism.
Marco:
Um, and if the app requested a 14 point font, I would actually return a 13 point font because I was testing out various fonts a year ago last summer trying to figure out what my font would be.
Marco:
And I was trying to normalize the sizes between them because certain fonts like they kind of look bigger and I'm sure there's official terms for this and, you know, things like the X height and stuff like that.
Marco:
But I'm not an expert on that kind of stuff.
Marco:
But I can tell you certain fonts look better or bigger than others.
Marco:
And so it's hard to make direct comparisons.
Marco:
So I like normalize them all.
Marco:
And so for this font, I settled on negative one being its fair comparison size.
Marco:
And then designed the whole app that way, shipped the whole app that way.
Marco:
Everyone's saying, hey, you know what?
Marco:
This is kind of... It's a little bit too small.
Marco:
Let me fix this.
Marco:
So I increased the font size by one pixel by changing that negative one to a zero.
Marco:
Now everything looks better.
Marco:
And so that's fine.
Marco:
I realized, yeah, it sucks to lose the extra one to two characters on each line of title, but...
Marco:
I realized that the fonts were a little too small before, and it does look better now.
Marco:
And it is a little more accessible now.
Marco:
Anyway, secondarily, I replaced the skip back and skip forward button icons with the standard Apple...
Marco:
uh number in the circle with the little back forward symbol kind of on the tail of the circle if you if you listen to any podcast app ever uh no actually that's not true if you listen to apple's podcast app uh you look and look in control center or even do they even have those on the icons on the buttons i don't even know
Marco:
anyway i don't know either it doesn't no one no one uses that app i'm just kidding it's the biggest podcast app in the world by far i think they do as because i recognize the icons and where else would i have seen them right exactly so anyway uh their apple has established a standard icon for skip back and skip forward by x number of seconds that is different from the double triangles slash double triangles with the bar at the end kind of thing that tape players and cd players uh did and
Marco:
I had been using the double triangle icons on Overcast Now Playing screen, and I decided to change that because a lot of people were confused as to what those did.
Marco:
A lot of people were writing in asking me to add the 30-second skip button to the app, even though the app already had that feature.
Marco:
They just had never tapped that button.
Marco:
I got tweeted that.
John:
I was doing tech support for Overcast for people tweeting.
John:
They don't even have to.
John:
As I'm doing that reply, I'm like, you know, this came up during the beta, too.
John:
And you said, yeah, but the arrows look better.
John:
And then nobody pursued it further.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And the arrows do look better.
John:
You're right.
John:
They do.
John:
But, I mean, it's always the but, right?
Marco:
Exactly.
John:
In the beta, five people say, hey, I can't tell how far back or forward...
John:
thing is going to go or I forget or I don't know that features there and you answer those five ten people done and done wipe your hands of it but luckily when you release to the app to everybody it becomes clear very quickly that there's more than five people you have to explain this to and so like I said I had to explain it to some people so that's that's where I draw the line
Marco:
yeah i mean i had multiple people tell me that they they had just never touched those buttons on the now playing screen because they assumed they would like you know fast forward or skip to the next track which no one ever wants in a podcast app like overcast actually has no control that means skip to the next track or skip to the previous track or the horrible annoying behavior of the previous track button in podcast apps usually
Marco:
Which normally in most podcast apps, including Apple's, I think, I think that's still the case.
Marco:
If you push the previous track button, it does what CD players do when you push the previous track button, which is before it goes to the previous track on the first press, it just goes to the beginning of the current track, which loses your position in a podcast.
Marco:
which is horrible and i decided there was no place for that control in a podcast app and so i just don't have those controls anything like if you have a car with like fast forward fast rewind buttons any kind of integration the headphone clicker anything that normally triggers a previous track next track action in overcast does those second skip buttons instead
Casey:
Yeah, I noticed that today.
Casey:
I was driving around and listening to the tail end of this six-hour debug epic with the dude from Apple that was on the iOS apps team whose name escapes me.
Casey:
Well, anyways.
Casey:
Yeah, Neaton Ganatro.
Casey:
Yes, thank you.
Casey:
And they're all incredible.
Casey:
Like, when I saw that there were six hours of this, I thought to myself, oh, this is going to be...
Casey:
painful and I'm probably not going to listen to any of it.
Casey:
And my goodness, they're incredible.
Casey:
They're definitely worth listening to.
Casey:
Anyway, the point is I hit the little button on my steering wheel to either fast forward or rewind.
Casey:
I forget which one.
Casey:
And sure enough, as I'm doing that, I'm like, I hope this does what I think it does.
Casey:
And then it did.
Casey:
And it was wonderful.
Casey:
So I don't know if that was a deliberate move on your part.
Casey:
I assume so.
Casey:
But it was a great, great, great call.
Marco:
Yeah, like I told you, there literally is no code in Overcast that can respond to a button click with backtrack or forward track.
Marco:
That doesn't exist because I hate that behavior.
Marco:
You can make an argument for skip to the next track.
Marco:
I can see the argument there.
Marco:
But the previous track feature, I think, is awful.
Marco:
And the skip to the next track thing...
Marco:
I was talking to someone about this.
Marco:
I'm not sure if he wants me to use his name, so I will default to no.
Marco:
And he was trying to argue for a next track button.
Marco:
And I can see an argument for that.
Marco:
Like a show comes on and you're in your car, you're jogging or something like that, and you can't easily play with the controls.
Marco:
A show comes on, it's not what you want to hear at that moment, so you want to skip to the next one.
Marco:
I get that.
Marco:
But the question is, if I add something like that, where does it go?
Marco:
I'm not even talking about on the screen.
Marco:
The screen I can figure out.
Marco:
I'm talking about if you have a headphone clicker or a car control or control center buttons.
Marco:
When you only have the seek back, seek forward spots or rolls in a control, where does a next track button go?
Marco:
And, you know, because I wouldn't want to replace the skip forward 30 seconds button.
Marco:
It's very frequently used.
Marco:
So, again, where does it go?
Marco:
I don't think there's a good answer to that.
Marco:
And so for now, I'm not going to do it.
Marco:
But we'll see.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then finally, Priority Podcasts, again, was written in the show notes document.
Casey:
I assume that's John.
John:
Yeah.
John:
On last show, uh, we're talking about priority podcasts and how I thought that I, that didn't need to be a thing, a separate place where it says select priority podcast, then go to a different place after you've done that to order the podcast that you have selected as priority podcasts.
John:
Uh, and
John:
I always want them all to be priority podcasts.
John:
Lots of people don't know what that means as they've been tweeting at me.
John:
It doesn't mean that all podcasts are the same priority.
John:
It's not the same thing as not selecting any.
John:
This is why it's confusing.
John:
Selecting something as a priority podcast merely means that now this podcast can be ordered.
John:
Now you can say this is my number one, this is my number two.
John:
For a podcast to participate at all in that ordering, you must say it is a priority podcast.
John:
I'm making quotes with my fingers.
John:
uh thank you and so i always want all of them to be priority podcasts because i want to set an order for all of them some people uh don't want all of them to be priority they just want one two or three to be priority podcasts and the rest of them too i'm assuming they sort by whatever you pick the order like whichever has the newest or oldest episode or whatever
John:
Uh, whereas your, you know, your number one podcast will always be your number one podcast, regardless of what new episodes come out in your non-priority podcast.
John:
I wanted to revisit it because, uh, last show we were just talking about the whole concept and who would want to have priority, non-priority.
John:
It turns out a lot of people.
John:
Now I just want to get back to the root of the problem, which is why do I have to go to the separate place to elect things to participate in the priority podcast?
John:
And I was trying to think of a UI.
John:
What I want is we want is to select the podcasts that are part of a playlist and right on that scene where I'm screen where I'm selecting the podcast.
John:
be able to sort them.
John:
And if I don't sort them, they stay in sort of the unsorted bin at the bottom.
John:
And if I do sort them, they stay in the sorted section.
John:
And there's not really a good analog that I could think of.
John:
It's kind of like the Netflix queue, which is kind of like, you know, in Netflix DVD queue, they're all priority podcasts.
John:
But then there's like a dividing line with the non-priority ones.
John:
It's difficult to come up with a UI for it, but I think that would be
John:
clearer to people like this concepts that we've talked about and the people tweeted back and forth about i i'm not sure how many people uh understand all the nuances of how i mean i certainly didn't and people tweeting me questions certainly didn't all the nuances of how priority and non-priority podcasts interact with each other if you just had one screen that showed when you were making a playlist here's all the podcasts that could participate in this playlist and some of them are sorted by priority and some of them are not and here they are and you could drag between those two regions in a big list or something
Marco:
uh i think that would make more sense and would save me a trip into the separate region for electing before i go back to the other region for sorting yeah i mean that's that's a fair idea there's a big question mark there it's too like okay you know how do you do this as you said i mean it's it's a hard problem to solve i'm not sure it's a net win like if if the current the current problem is a combination of
Marco:
If you know what you're doing already, if you already understand these features, then, yeah, it's kind of annoying to have to go to two different places to do this thing.
Marco:
To add a new show to a podcast that wasn't there and make it a priority and put it in order with the other priorities.
Marco:
I get that.
Marco:
Then the other problem is, for people who don't already understand this feature, this seems like it might even add more complexity to it.
John:
I think the current division makes it harder to understand what the app is capable of.
John:
That's what I'm getting at.
John:
Like, the feedback that I've gotten on Twitter for people is that they're not... The people won't discover... I think, as I said last show, I think the playlist creation stuff is the most important feature of the application to me.
John:
And I think it is not as discoverable as it could be because people don't understand that process.
John:
Go over here, select these things.
John:
Now they're eligible.
John:
Go over to this other place and order them and what that all means and the resulting...
John:
the resulting sort of workflow of like when podcasts come in, where do they, where do they fall on my list of things that I'm playing?
John:
And the fact that they can essentially set up almost any reasonable ordering that they want by a combination of priority, non-priority podcasts and playlists.
John:
That is powerful.
John:
It's the question is how do we,
John:
How do you show people that that's possible without some crazy tutorial or some other thing like that?
John:
And right now, I think a lot of people don't know that they can do that with this app that they already have because it's not clear from the naming and from the interface.
John:
Because I can't think of any other analogous interface with this elective process.
John:
Then you go back to a different region and the things you elected are now able to be manipulated in a new way in this other place.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, and the whole concept of Playlist and Overcast is a challenge for me to sell people on because I hear from so many people who all say, I've never used Playlist before in my podcast app.
Marco:
I don't see the point.
Marco:
I don't see why I need to use this.
Marco:
And it's hard to, and in some cases, people on the beta said that.
Marco:
And I told them, hey, you know what?
Marco:
Here's how I use them.
Marco:
Why don't you try it?
Marco:
You know, see if you like it.
Marco:
And every time the person has come back saying, oh, my God, I love this.
Marco:
Like, now I use playlists.
Marco:
Now I get it.
Marco:
You know, now there's a reason to use it.
Marco:
And it's hard for people to realize that that's one of the reasons why as soon as you subscribe to at least two shows, I create your first playlist for you.
Marco:
As soon as you subscribe to enough shows where it would matter, I create the all episodes playlist for you server-side.
Marco:
And that gets synced to your account.
Marco:
And you can edit it, you can delete it, you can do whatever you want.
Marco:
But the first time you do that, I create that for you to kind of force you to maybe just maybe click on that one time to see, hey, all episodes, that sounds convenient.
Marco:
And, you know, I use the word playlist because that's what everyone else uses because that's what iTunes uses.
Marco:
And people are used to the idea of playlists.
Marco:
I would love if a different word would solve this problem.
Marco:
I just don't think a different word would solve this problem.
John:
A playlist is a problem because people think, like, why would I want to manually arrange... It sounds like what I used to do with my iPod Shuffle.
John:
And the whole idea is, like, this is a hybrid smart playlist, regular playlist.
John:
It's the best of both worlds combined.
John:
And then within the realm of these playlists, how do I define it?
John:
Like, I use the all-episodes playlist.
John:
Like, I have modified it because it's... I mean, it's very close to what I want, minus all the prioritization and the exclusions and stuff that I do, and the manual reordering.
John:
It's just a question of...
John:
And once they understand that playlists are good, they say, well, why?
John:
What can I do with them?
John:
And they get into that setting screen, which is probably one of the more intimidating setting screens in the app.
John:
And then, you know, understanding how can I get the result that I want?
John:
Because I think like I again, I don't know if people say they only have one or two or three priority podcasts.
John:
If we force them to order all of them.
John:
would they have trouble or would they, you know, are there, is there a second class citizen type of show where they never want to bubble up?
John:
I feel like if you told anybody to say rank these, all of your podcasts in order of how much you like them.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Maybe when you get down to the bottom, it's weird, but, uh,
John:
I feel like people could do a ranking.
John:
I don't even know if you need the two regions, but again, people have disagreed on that.
John:
I just think that if you forced everyone to sort everything, they would have a very similar experience to the current one where they sort one or two or three and then have everything else in a bucket.
John:
But either way, an interface that makes it clear that you can do one or both of those things or makes it clearer that you can do one or both of those things would help a lot of people because like you said,
John:
I think a lot of people think that playlist means more work for them when it's the exact opposite.
John:
It means less.
John:
It means almost no work.
John:
It means that let the thing do the work for you.
John:
And all you have to do is launch the app and hit play.
John:
And it will just go through the podcast in exactly the order that you want to hear them.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I mean, it's like I thought of like the word filter or something like that, like some other kind of word.
Marco:
But again, it's overall like I still think playlist is the best word for this feature.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And the fact that even after people know playlists, they still often are reluctant to use them because they never have used them in a podcast before.
Marco:
I think it's just the kind of thing where I'm going to have to do my best.
Marco:
You're right that the playlist editor screen is definitely not intuitive.
Marco:
I definitely have some things I can improve there.
Marco:
No question.
Marco:
I completely agree with you there.
Marco:
But I also, I recognize the inherent complexity in this concept and these capabilities.
Marco:
And I don't know that there is a way to make it easy enough to win over some of these people.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
And I'll certainly play with it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So why don't you tell me about something that's cool?
Marco:
We are also sponsored this week by Backblaze, our friends at Backblaze.
Marco:
Backblaze is so simple.
Marco:
It's $5 a month for unlimited, unthrottled, uncomplicated online backup.
Marco:
Your files that are available anywhere on your iOS devices.
Marco:
If you have Android, I don't think they have Android app, but who cares?
Marco:
You probably have an iOS device.
Marco:
I mean, let's be honest.
Marco:
And if you disagree with that, please email Casey.
Marco:
no so anyway backblaze online backup uh really five bucks a month per computer and uh so for most of you that's five bucks a month what makes us more interesting uh so online backup man there's there are so many reasons you should be doing online backup i've used backblaze myself for years long before they were a sponsor i'm very glad they are a sponsor now because it makes it easier for me to talk about them because i actually use them um they're fantastic they're my favorite online backup service i've tried other ones they are by far my favorite um
Marco:
and it just works like you your uploads are unthrottled which is great like i had a throttling issue with another service where i can upload with this awesome files connection at 65 megabits a second which is awesome um but this other one wouldn't take they would take it at like you know 200 kilobits a second or something and backblaze will upload it'll accept the files as quickly as you're willing to send them so you know and you can devote certain percentage your bandwidth but usually the client's smart enough and you can just leave it running and it'll do the right thing
Marco:
Online backup is really important because, you know, you never know what could happen.
Marco:
You should always have local backups too because it's easy and fast to recover from them.
Marco:
But, you know, worst case scenario, you always know that you have this online backup ready if you need it.
Marco:
And you never know.
Marco:
Like, what if there's like a fire or a flood?
Marco:
Or, you know, like if you're in an apartment, what if the apartment above you, like they have a water leak and then it leaks all over your computer and destroys everything on your desk, including your time machine drive?
Marco:
That happens.
Marco:
You know, ask people.
Marco:
That happens all the time.
Marco:
and so it's always good to have off-site backups um to protect against things that happen to your dwelling and therefore all the stuff that's plugged into your computer but off-site you know usually everyone's like oh yeah i'm gonna put something at my parents house and i'll cycle it out every few months and then you forget to do it and that's out of date and you can maybe restore from a backup you made one six years ago and that's no good so back plays you can just have it all in the cloud it's great
Marco:
They also have things like email notifications.
Marco:
They can notify you if they haven't heard from your computer in a while, so that way you aren't caught off guard.
Marco:
It's a great service.
Marco:
Go to backblaze.com.
Marco:
That's backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
And you can get a 15-day free trial with no credit card required.
Marco:
All you got to do is enter an email, a password, and begin.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
There's no add-ons, no gimmicks, no additional charges.
Marco:
Five bucks per computer per month.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
Unlimited, unthrottled backup.
Marco:
I got like three terabytes up there.
Marco:
Simplest backup.
Marco:
Go to backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Backblaze for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
So we should probably briefly touch on the Sapphire iPhone 6 screen that may not be Sapphire at all.
Casey:
Is this show going to be all follow-up?
Casey:
I think it might be.
Casey:
It's possible.
Casey:
So we talked an episode or two ago about a video that somebody that we weren't familiar with, whose name I've forgotten again...
John:
That's why I put the link in there, so we can give him credit this time.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
It is Marcus Brownlee.
Casey:
Is that how you pronounce his first name?
Casey:
No idea.
John:
M-A-R-Q-U-E-S.
Casey:
I'm going with Marcus.
Casey:
Hopefully I'm right.
Casey:
He put up a second video, which was actually... I liked the first video, but I thought the second one was even better.
Casey:
And basically, he used a little bit of science to explain why the screen is not actually made of pure sapphire.
Casey:
And I don't know if...
Casey:
You guys have any commentary on that?
Casey:
We'll link it in the show notes, but it's worth checking out.
Casey:
It's a few minutes long.
John:
It was really good.
Casey:
Yeah, it was really, really good.
John:
I think a little bit of science is the correct modifier for that description, however.
Marco:
Well, so what he did was basically, so in the last video, he had this leaked part that was purported to be an iPhone 6 display cover glass.
Marco:
and it was and he he showed in the first video all these crazy stress tests of like taking a knife to it bending it so it was almost like a u shape all this crazy stuff and it would not scratch or crack or shatter um it was just it was just perfect even after like bending it into u it still would not shatter and he and you know the knife test and everything would not scratch and
Marco:
So the problem is, as I've learned, and as I think most people have learned if they look into it at all, pure sapphire crystal is extremely strong, but it is not flexible.
Marco:
Is that right?
Marco:
Does that match what you guys have found?
Casey:
Yeah, that's what my understanding is.
Marco:
Yeah, so based on the incredible flexibility of this panel that was being shown in the video, it made it pretty unlikely that it was pure sapphire.
Marco:
There's also some concerns people have brought up who are more familiar with manufacturing and stuff like that, that an all sapphire panel of that size would also be pretty expensive.
Marco:
And so it makes it less likely, not totally ruled out, but it makes it less likely that Apple would use an all sapphire panel.
Marco:
But, so what this guy did, Marcus, I hope I'm pronouncing that name right.
Marco:
Anyway, what he did was he took the panel again after reading these people saying, hey, that might not be sapphire.
Marco:
And sapphire has a very high hardness on that diamond hardness scale.
Marco:
And so he took sandpapers of materials that should be able to scratch or not scratch sapphire and showed it and actually scratched up...
Marco:
I feel bad for the iPhone 5S he used.
Marco:
He had an iPhone 5S that he actually... Yeah, oh my goodness.
Marco:
He took sandpaper through a 5S, because the 5S we know has a non-Sapphire glass cover on the screen, but a sapphire home button cover over the Touch ID home button.
Marco:
That's pure sapphire.
Marco:
And so he took these sandpapers to it and showed that they would scratch the glass, but they would not scratch the Sapphire Touch ID cover.
Marco:
And then that same thing would scratch this new leaked part, but not quite as much as it scratched the iPhone 5S.
Marco:
So it appears as though this part that he has is not pure Sapphire because it scratched more easily than the Touch ID home button.
Marco:
but it is much more strong against resisting scratches than the glass that's currently on the iPhone.
John:
Yeah, so the reason I said he was using a little bit of science in this test are a couple of reasons.
John:
First, the sandpaper he was using...
John:
I'm not entirely sure that 100% of the particles glued onto that piece of paper are of the material advertised on the sandpaper.
John:
I have no idea what the quality control is on sandpaper things.
John:
I know that kids who are allergic to nuts can't eat food that is manufactured in the same factory as nuts, which makes me believe that there's a large possibility that there could be particles other than the ones advertised on those pieces of sandpaper.
John:
So right away, it's not a particularly controlled test for hardness, scientifically speaking.
John:
Second...
John:
The idea that the Touch ID sensor is somehow pure sapphire or solid sapphire, or that is the only material that it's made out of, I'm not sure where that's coming from and the way he tested it by kind of digging his finger into the little thing with the sandpaper and trying to scratch it in the other little region.
John:
It's better than not testing it at all, but it's not quite the same thing as being able to rub the sandpaper on the giant surface of the 5S because it's kind of down in a little divot and you don't really have enough room to scratch back and forth.
John:
And it was hard to tell if he was making any dent at all in that thing there.
John:
the most clear test obviously was same piece of sandpaper, 5S versus this new thing, new thing better.
John:
That's what we were missing in the first video because all these impressive things he did with it in the first video, the question was always, all right, fine, so how would an existing iPhone screen fare on those exact same tests?
John:
Maybe it's exactly as sturdy.
John:
And what he was basically saying when he talked about the hardness scale is,
John:
uh yeah probably the regular iphone screen probably would have fared just as well because he was using soft metals that weren't going to scratch uh even glass uh no matter what uh so this was a much better test still doesn't tell us you know what we want to know is is this really the the uh iphone 6 thing uh in terms of the the pureness or real or full sapphire or whatever as i said on past shows it seemed obvious that if they're going to make something this big it was always going to have to either be a laminate or use some deposition process uh and
John:
We can't tell which one of those things they did, but like Marco said, the idea of it being solid 100% sapphire all the way through would mean it would be much too brittle.
John:
This thing was obviously not brittle.
John:
So it's just a question of how thick is that top layer of sapphire?
John:
Is it just atomized and heated and then deposited on there through some process, like sort of coated with it?
John:
Is it a separate thin layer of sapphire that's bonded to it in some way?
John:
Are there multiple sapphire?
John:
We have no idea what the manufacturing is, I'm sure.
John:
If Apple wants to brag about it, they'll show us a cool slide and maybe some robots building something and some layer sandwich things or who knows what they'll say.
John:
But this video was more informative than the last.
John:
And I was kind of disappointed to see, I mean, if we thought about it for a while, kind of disappointed to see how easily sandpaper scratches even the new one because he wasn't even rubbing that hard.
John:
And it's like, well, at one point in the video, he said, unless you have high quality sandpaper in your pocket, you don't have to worry about this.
John:
Well, you know one thing that does go in pockets?
John:
If you go to the beach, you have sand in your pocket.
John:
And so if the idea is like, this iPhone is indestructible, I don't have to worry about anything unless there happens to be, you know, maybe it's because I'm from Long Island and I just expect to have sand in all my clothing pockets, but I still would not put a naked iPhone in my pocket with sand because you don't know what's mixed in with that.
John:
Anyway, I look forward to the day someday of being able to get a caseless iPhone.
John:
that is basically impervious to scratches in any normal condition.
John:
This one looks much more sturdy than the 5S by a long shot, but I was kind of depressed to see how easily he could scratch even the new one.
John:
step one should be you should get an iphone at all and then you can worry about it scratching us baby steps we're getting there we'll see what the iphone 6 looks like if it if i could get one it's conceivable in fact i wish i had one right now for yosemite handoff testing so i didn't have to take my wife's 5s and upgrade it to ios 8 which i've still still have not done yet do you want do you want to take a bet right now on whether you will get one because i'm gonna bet no i think it's like 50 50
Marco:
Do you want to take that bet?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm not going to bet it.
John:
First of all, why would anyone take a bet with me when I control the outcome?
Marco:
Because you don't control the outcome.
Marco:
Your neurosis does.
Marco:
No, that's not accurate.
Marco:
The amount of money you bet controls the outcome.
Marco:
I will bet you, for nothing, just betting to be right, I will bet that you won't get it.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I haven't decided yet.
John:
We'll see.
John:
Casey, do you think I'm going to get one?
Casey:
I'm going to abstain.
John:
Well, then now it's just, all right, but we'll find out.
John:
I mean, we also don't know what the product looks like at this point.
John:
You don't even know whether you're getting the big giant one or the regular one.
John:
So we have to just wait to see what's what.
Marco:
I also, going back to the video just for a second, I still maintain that we don't actually know whether any Sapphire is involved with this thing at all.
Marco:
This could just be another type of material, you know, maybe something new from Corning, you know, the maker of Gorilla Glass.
Marco:
Maybe it's like you don't know like this.
John:
Well, I said they could have used some sort of mass spectrometer or something to actually tell you what elements are on the thing.
John:
Like if you want to go full Dr. Drang on this, like we have the technology.
John:
We can actually find out what exactly what the screen is made out of if we cared.
John:
But, you know, it's just people doing bending stuff on YouTube.
Marco:
The only thing that we know that – the only thing that people are basing this on is that Apple has built this giant sapphire plant in Arizona, right?
Marco:
Or they're invested in it.
Marco:
Whatever they've done, they're involved in a big sapphire plant.
Marco:
But that might not be for this.
Marco:
That might be for more Touch ID sensors.
Marco:
That might be for a potential iWatch cover or something like that.
Marco:
It could be for so many other things besides the iPhone cover glass, right?
Marco:
And so I really don't think that we can assume yet.
Marco:
I don't think there's enough information to assume that Sapphire is being involved with the screen at all.
Casey:
Yeah, it is a bit early.
Marco:
We are also sponsored by our friends at Squarespace.
Marco:
Squarespace is the all-in-one platform that makes it both fast and easy to create your own professional website, portfolio, and or online store.
Marco:
For a free trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com and enter offer code ATP at checkout.
Marco:
A better web starts with your website.
Marco:
They have responsive design, so all your designs look great on any size device, and they all look like your site.
Marco:
They don't look like just some canned design once you shrink down to iPhone size or anything like that.
Marco:
They have 24-7 support through live chat and email with representatives located in New York City and Dublin, Ireland.
Marco:
The plans start at just $8 a month, and that includes a free domain if you sign up for a whole year up front.
Marco:
Squarespace also features commerce.
Marco:
On all of their plans, if you want to, you can add a store to your site.
Marco:
You can sell digital or physical goods.
Marco:
They have things like shipping, tracking, and everything else all built in, shopping carts, all that stuff that you'd expect.
Marco:
Really great stuff with Squarespace Commerce, and that comes at no additional charge with all of their plans if you want to use it.
Marco:
You can start a trial with Squarespace today with no credit card required.
Marco:
A real free trial, no credit card.
Marco:
All you got to do is start building your website.
Marco:
When you decide to sign up, you can make sure to use offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for our show.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Squarespace for your support.
Marco:
Once again, they support lots of our shows, lots of other people's shows, and we really appreciate that quite a lot from them.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Squarespace.
Marco:
A better web starts with your website.
Casey:
So last week, when Marco was so selfish about the show and refused to move along from Overcast, there was some actually legitimate news about Apple and IBM.
Casey:
And we didn't get a chance to talk about that last week.
Casey:
We should probably talk about it now.
Casey:
And so what happened was Apple and IBM announced a partnership with
Casey:
I guess, so IBM is going to kind of sell and push Apple stuff in the enterprise.
Casey:
What's a better summary of this?
John:
I think you got it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
A lot of people were scratching their heads on this one.
Casey:
And for me, it was particularly interesting because my dad just retired from IBM after a long, long time, just a few weeks ago.
Casey:
And unfortunately, even after pushing, he either didn't have any insider information he could share or refused to if he did have it.
Casey:
But this is certainly an interesting partnership and an interesting...
Casey:
I don't know, reacquaintance of a couple of companies that have been kind of flirting with each other on and off for forever.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
John, what did you think about this?
John:
So in past shows and past podcasts, I've talked a lot about enterprise entanglements and how, you know, even on this podcast, we defined enterprise software as software where the person who buys it is not the person who uses it.
John:
So the people who make it are motivated to satisfy the buyer rather than user.
John:
And that's why the software is crappy.
John:
Um,
John:
And enterprise entanglements is when a company starts deriving a lot of its profits or revenues are both from serving the enterprise, and then it becomes beholden to the small number of people who determine whether software is satisfactory to the enterprise, rather than the large number of consumers who might buy a product, you know, so
John:
It is worse to be beholden to a small number of companies and to a small number of powerful people in those companies.
John:
It makes your products worse.
John:
And then you get tied to them.
John:
It's like golden handcuffs.
John:
That's where you get most of your money from.
John:
This happened to Microsoft a lot.
John:
Some companies immediately just go completely off the deep end on this, like SAP and Oracle.
John:
And that's all they do is they don't sign a contract for less than five figures and want them to be six, seven or eight figures most of the time.
John:
And they have a huge sales force that goes out there.
John:
to sell these contracts and the software they make is terrible and everyone hates it, but they stay in bed.
John:
Like, that's the worst case scenario, right?
John:
So Apple is at the far other end of the spectrum.
John:
They don't want anything to do with these stupid enterprises.
John:
They don't want to deal with companies like that.
John:
They don't want their softwares to get worse.
John:
They don't want their agenda, their products, their feature sets, anything they do to be dictated to a small number of people anywhere, except for inside the company, obviously.
John:
Uh, and so for all this time, when we talk about Apple doing this thing with the iPods and the iPhones and their personal computers all this time, it's like, well, Apple doesn't want to get into that business where you sell like exchange servers.
John:
And there was a brief dealings with the X serve and OS 10 server that has mail servers and stuff like that.
John:
But their heart was never in it.
John:
They were never willing to do what enterprises want.
John:
They want service contracts.
John:
Is Apple going to have value added resellers?
John:
They've had that as well.
John:
But then they have their own official channels and they have their business liaisons.
John:
Like,
John:
you could tell that Apple was just never willing to do what it takes to serve the enterprise.
John:
And if you've talked to anybody who does it in a big company, it's like my, you know, my customers, my users, essentially the employees of the company want Apple hardware, but it's such a pain in the ass to support and Apple's tools.
John:
Aren't that great.
John:
And getting anything from Apple is a pain.
John:
And,
John:
Depending on which reseller you go through, if you go through Apple directly or, you know... I mean, Apple does what it has to do for the enterprise.
John:
It did all that stuff in, like, iOS 3 or whatever it was to integrate with Exchange servers and to be better with the enterprise.
John:
And they have enterprise app deployment for their app stores.
John:
Like, they do...
John:
It's not like they do nothing.
John:
It's not like they're willfully hostile to it.
John:
But in general, their reputation in the enterprise is not good that other companies do more for the enterprise than Apple.
John:
And it's always been this thing.
John:
Well, tough luck, guys.
John:
Apple doesn't want doesn't want its company to be reshaped.
John:
by contact with the enterprise because direct contact with the enterprise will reshape your company.
John:
And so we're just kind of at this impasse.
John:
Apple doesn't want to take this business.
John:
Microsoft currently has the business, but it's not an interesting business to be in.
John:
Even Google is kind of like half-hearted.
John:
Well, there's Google Apps for business.
John:
You could use that instead of Office and Exchange.
John:
But it's like nobody wants that business.
John:
It's a crappy business, except for Oracle and SAP and Salesforce and Microsoft.
John:
And Apple wasn't willing to take it.
John:
And so we've been languishing in this place, this weird place where nobody wants Blackberries anymore.
John:
Everyone hates Exchange and SharePoint.
John:
But that's what we all use because no one is saying, oh, I want to take that business from Microsoft.
John:
I want to pervert my company to the needs of enterprise IT.
John:
It's just it's poisonous.
John:
If you like if you like companies like Apple and don't like companies like Oracle, as every right thinking person should.
John:
So.
John:
This deal is basically Apple finally.
John:
The important thing here is Apple is finally saying, all right, we'll take that business.
John:
Like, but we don't want to touch it directly.
John:
Like it's now it's too big.
John:
It's like, you know, calculus must be.
John:
We shouldn't just let Microsoft have this business by default.
John:
It shouldn't just go to Oracle and IBM and say, like, why do they just get it by default?
John:
It's a big business.
John:
The people who work at these companies want to use our products.
John:
We're not willing to do what it takes directly to change our company to be an enterprise company.
John:
But now we are saying we're raising your hand and saying, all right, we're going to go after that business.
John:
So no longer do all of the companies get it by default because Apple is just no good at this.
John:
And they've tapped IBM as their lucky partner to say, we're not going to touch it directly.
John:
You touch it directly, but we're going to sick you on them and say, go get them.
John:
Go make every single company, you know, make them happy to use our products, right?
John:
You sell them.
John:
You have that Salesforce out there doing all that thing.
John:
You do all those icky enterprise deals.
John:
They complain to you, not us.
John:
Right.
John:
You make the special applications so they can integrate iPads with their business and do all this other stuff or whatever.
John:
We don't want to deal with that.
John:
And so when the customers complain to IBM that, you know, that was the typical relationship between IT and vendor.
John:
But IBM will be like, well, you know, we don't control what Apple does with their OS.
John:
Like, oh, we'll tell them.
John:
We'll tell them you don't like it when they upgrade too fast and screw over your users.
John:
We'll tell them that you want them to keep making the iPad 2 forever.
John:
Like, whatever.
John:
You know, but like, well, what can we do?
John:
They're not, you know, it's not us.
John:
They're Apple.
John:
Right?
John:
And so IBM is the go-between there.
John:
And IBM, of course, gets, you know...
John:
gets the money off the top of that.
John:
They, in theory, get more business because now they are... I think this is an exclusive relationship.
John:
They are the exclusive gateway into the enterprise for all of Apple's stuff.
John:
I'm not quite sure how this deal works in terms of the existing value-added resellers of Apple's stuff and the existing retail chain and business relationships or whatever, but...
John:
So theoretically, at the time of like the press release announcement, it looks very much like Apple is now finally saying that it wants in on the enterprise business and the way it has found to do it without ruining its own, you know, ruining the company, ruining everything that's good about the company is having a go between do all the dirty work for them.
Casey:
Well, you do realize that there is a Apple Salesforce directly targeting enterprise, right?
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
No, yeah.
John:
You can – like, I mean, it's better than it was before.
John:
Like, they will sell – you know, they'll do your volume discounts.
John:
Like, there's the whole enterprise app score things.
John:
They'll do the service so you don't have to bring your stuff into – it used to be you had to bring your stuff to the Apple Store to get a VIX.
John:
Now they have – you know, they're – but –
John:
The more you get into a business, like they're sort of dipping their toe in all these things.
John:
It's like, well, Apple has that.
John:
Apple kind of has that.
John:
But they're not really good at it.
John:
They're not really engaged in it in the way these other companies are.
John:
And so your choices were become engaged in it.
John:
Make this a big part of your business.
John:
Get serious about the enterprise or don't do that.
John:
Have someone else do it for you.
John:
And that sort of lets Apple continue to be Apple and be sort of.
John:
Wild and fancy free and run with flowers in its hair through the fields.
John:
Well, IBM has to be IBM has to be there signing these contracts and doing the support stuff and writing the custom applications for the big companies.
John:
And that's what IBM is doing anyway.
John:
Right.
John:
So IBM is more than happy to take this business.
John:
If it works, it is a very clever solution to get some of that money that has been going to these companies with quote-unquote worse products for just decades and without it changing what Apple is, without changing all the things that are good about Apple for consumers and stuff.
John:
So I don't know if that can work.
John:
Does adding a buffer make it okay and now it will work out?
John:
Or is there more to it than that?
John:
Is it that Apple will always be defeated by the companies that are actually willing to do
John:
to do what enterprises want directly.
John:
And maybe IBM will not be able to convince people or not be able to do enough on its own to make Apple more palatable to the enterprise.
John:
Like the past strategy was, we'll just make our stuff so good that IT companies want to choke down whatever we do.
John:
And we'll do a little bit to support them, but we're never going to do what those other companies do.
Casey:
What I don't understand is I don't see how this can really make a big difference until the support strategy changes pretty dramatically.
Casey:
And I'm looking at the press release and it says, and I'm quoting, mobile service and support.
Casey:
AppleCare for Enterprise will provide IT departments and end users with 24-7 assistance from Apple's award-winning customer support group with on-site service delivered by IBM.
Casey:
And I can tell you that I work in pretty small firms.
Casey:
And most of the reason that I've ever heard for us to buy Dells, which all the companies I've ever worked for almost exclusively, generally favored Dells over anything else.
Casey:
And the reason was – or the primary reason was –
Casey:
Either that they were very cheap or if something breaks the next business day, there is a Dell repair service person, operative, whatever, in the office replacing what's broken or just handing us a new computer.
Casey:
And without that kind of just immediate service, I don't know if this will ever really take off.
John:
Well, isn't that what you just read that IBM is supposed to provide?
John:
IBM provides on-site service?
John:
Because that's exactly the type of thing that Apple as a company is not equipped to do, to provide that for all of enterprise that is not built that way.
John:
But IBM is built that way.
John:
They'll send a guy.
John:
What IBM has is guys to send.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And that's what I'm kind of asking.
Casey:
And we don't know the answer.
Casey:
It was a semi-rhetorical question.
Casey:
But until this AppleCare for Enterprise gets more concretely defined, I don't know if I really see this making a big difference unless it really is doing all the things that these Dell, you know, Tiger team people come in and do.
John:
Well, yeah, I mean, again, we're at the press release stage, so we have nothing concrete to go in here, right?
John:
But at the press release stage, IBM is not unfamiliar with doing all those things you just described that Dell did.
John:
IBM is exactly that kind of company for this type of stuff, and it's just...
John:
I would have to assume that the whole point is IBM is going to do all those things, that all the things that Apple either wouldn't do or wouldn't do as enthusiastically or wouldn't give the same guarantees about.
John:
And IBM will make the, you know, the contracts that you sign that specify exactly what this stuff is and lets you pay through the nose so that you can get a laptop repaired or replaced.
John:
Uh, with one business day's notice, if that's part of your service contract or whatever, like all these enterprise things that, I mean, cause it takes so much to do that.
John:
So much handholding, so much salesmanship, so much relationship, dealing with the relationship for these big companies.
John:
That's just not Apple's forte.
John:
That's not what the company's built around it.
John:
And, uh,
John:
Having someone else do it for you goes a long way towards making it possible.
John:
You're still left with the problem of, okay, well, what about service and support and OS upgrades and compatibility and all this other stuff that Apple, generally Apple's too busy running forward.
John:
We can't look back.
John:
I don't care what we're breaking.
John:
We're just running forward as fast as we can because that's how we win the race in the consumer space.
John:
That's ultimately where we win everything.
John:
So this is probably not going to slow Apple down from that race, but at least someone's left holding the bag, and that's IBM having to apologize for Apple, explain things, and IBM perhaps to bend over backwards and make things better for the people who are having problems.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
What else is going on?
Casey:
Marco, you don't have any thoughts about the enterprise?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
Not at all.
Marco:
I figured this would be a good time for me to give everyone a break from me.
Marco:
Fair enough.
Casey:
Is there anything else going on?
Casey:
Or are we done?
John:
There was some real-time follow-up on sand.
Marco:
Oh, okay.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Cotton Bureau, Backblaze, and Squarespace.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M
Casey:
I forgot what the real-time follow-up on sand was.
John:
I lost it.
John:
Scrolled back in the... My own sand story that I think I told before is when I brought my aluminum PowerBook G4
John:
to an apple store to the genius bar and the guy slid it like two inches across the genius bar to himself and there was one grain of sand oh underneath that laptop and it went someone was talking about uh sand is mostly made of softer materials like it doesn't take much it takes one one grain of sand in the wrong place rubbing the wrong way
John:
to make a nice little scratch.
John:
Nobody cares about that.
John:
That's the worst thing that can happen.
John:
My Apple Thunderbolt display has been back to the Apple Store three times to fix various problems.
John:
It is now fully functional, but those three trips to and from the Apple Store have left scars on it.
John:
The people in the Apple store are super careful compared to the people at, like, Best Buy, right?
John:
But they're not as careful as I would be.
John:
No one would be as careful as I would be.
John:
And even I would accidentally damage it eventually.
John:
It's just, you know, big heavy things being manipulated.
John:
uh aluminum is not as hard as sapphire let's just say uh yeah things scratch it's tough uh and a scratch like that no one will take you seriously if you explain that that you're upset that it has a stress oh you can barely see it but i mean maybe maybe mac users don't understand do you do you care that your laptops get stretched
Marco:
Oh, absolutely.
Marco:
I used to care a lot more.
Marco:
I mean, like, my first Mac was a PowerBook G4 aluminum.
Marco:
And I sold it after about three years of using it.
Marco:
And it looked brand new.
Marco:
Like, it didn't have the keyboard marks on the screen like so many of them did.
Marco:
Because I read early on that if you put it, like, in a backpack facing out versus facing in, then it wouldn't get the marks because the screen wasn't being squeezed in that way.
Marco:
And even, like, I didn't have a dedicated laptop bag.
Marco:
I just had like a backpack that was just like a general purpose backpack.
Marco:
And so I kind of fashioned this big felt pocket that I like I inserted this be like felt sleeve into one of the pockets and made that a dedicated laptop pocket.
Marco:
And it only ever had this big thick black felt in it with it.
Marco:
And so this thing was pristine.
Marco:
And even when I was using it, it was usually connected to a keyboard and mouse and monitor.
Marco:
So the keyboard wasn't even worn away or all greased up.
Marco:
Like, it looked brand new when I sold it.
Marco:
Since then, though, I've only used laptops for, like, travel and stuff, which is happening more now as I'm, you know, an adult and keep doing family stuff.
Marco:
So now my machines don't stay that pristine and it kind of makes me upset.
Marco:
They're still very good.
Marco:
I would say they're still far and away like, you know, the top one percentile of condition for for age.
Marco:
But that doesn't mean much these days because people I see some that are ridiculously bad.
John:
yeah so that's like that's what's worst about like a thing like a monitor it's supposed to just be sitting on a desk in theory it comes to your house you unpack it it's perfect at that point you hope you put it on your desk and then you never touch it again it's a monitor maybe you touch it to adjust the angle every once in a while but in general it's like a desktop monitor it's not going anywhere and so to have that that big heavy thing make three trips to and from the back of an apple store it's inevitably going to come out with little nicks and scratches that you won't see no no one will see them no one will know they're there you're just looking at the picture on the screen right but i know they're there
John:
I know where they are.
John:
You just try to forget it.
John:
I mean, it could be worse.
John:
It could be like the bad old days of the Apple 22-inch cinema display with the big, clear two little feet and dead pixels.
John:
And then, you know, that's just like, yeah.
John:
I still remember where the dead pixels were.
John:
I could point to them right now on my screen.
John:
I had one there and I had one there.
Marco:
Well, and it's also, it's not great, too.
Marco:
Like, with the current Mac, the iMacs, and I think the cinema displays are the same thing, where the construction is such that, like, with yours, they were probably working on, like, the logic board that has, like, the little peripherals and stuff plugged into it.
Marco:
They weren't, like, working on the panel.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
exactly right while making not only no scratches but leaving no dust anywhere and like no dust getting between the layers and getting in there like there's the chances of that going perfectly are are pretty remote i think apple stores have special rigs just solely for that purpose to vacuum out blow out any dust because i've been again three trips and every single time this glass has come off every single time they've separated the glass from that like you have to to get at the insides right they weren't touching that part but
John:
You know, there could have been dust every single time, and every time I got it back, I would dread looking at it and seeing some piece of dust trapped over there.
John:
They have not done that, but the little nicks on the aluminum thing, like, I mean, these are really tiny nicks that, again, people would think you're crazy for saying you even noticed, but...
John:
You know, if you're if you're that type of person, you just have to put it on your mind like that pixels.
John:
Like, what are you going to do about it?
John:
There's nothing you can do about it.
John:
You're not going to complain and say, I want a new thing because you put this microscopic nick on it.
John:
Right.
John:
It kind of reminds me of like the worst experience I had.
John:
Like this is when I was a kid and I had my Mac SE30, which was my favorite Mac ever.
John:
But when I first got it, the power supply had a wine, like a high pitch wine.
John:
You know, I don't know if it was a transformer or whatever it was that was causing the noise.
John:
uh but and i remember i was coming off a uh a mac plus at that point which has no fans in it that was a great machine uh yeah the 128 512 and the plus didn't have fans in them uh the se30 uh i'm pretty sure had a fan but also the power supply one was the the dominant noise i don't know if it had a fan i have to look that up anyway uh
John:
and it was loud enough that i complained about it and we brought it back to not an apple store because they didn't exist to to our apple retail store and said hey uh this thing makes a high pitch whining noise and everyone at the apple store claimed they could not hear it and the thing is i believe them because when you get older you lose like the high frequencies right yep and so they probably couldn't hear it but here i am like whining to my parents and the people like
John:
This thing, trust me, I know you can't hear it, but I can because I'm 12 years old and it's really annoying.
John:
And it just could you just replace the power supply and just they never did anything about it.
John:
We took it to a different place, which is I guess you could still go with Apple stores, take it to a different Apple store.
John:
They did replace the power supply and it was silent and I was happy.
John:
uh but for a while i was like i thought i was being gaslighted like i thought i was going insane like no one else can hear this noise but you can hear it my computer is haunted well i feel the same way about these nicks like no one else can even see these nicks but you insist that they're there and further you insist that this is a problem uh well that's one of the benefits of getting a used car
Casey:
because the BMW I bought used, and it had a couple of very, very, very minor nicks, for lack of a better word.
Casey:
And that has some amount of freedom associated with it because the car has already been, mega air quotes, tainted.
Casey:
And so if something appears, it's, well, okay, it's already been nicked here and nicked there, and it's not the end of the earth.
Casey:
And that's actually been, to some degree, a little bit...
Casey:
A little bit of a nicer experience.
Casey:
Now, with that said, I still park in the furthest most corner of the parking lot like a jerk, but at least I do it in only one spot.
John:
Oh, wait until you have kids.
John:
Then you'll get chocolate ground into your seats like I just found when I cleaned my car this weekend.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
And when we got my new car, like I was also kind of putting off getting a new car until after the kids were out of like big car backseat destroying car seats.
John:
Right.
John:
They just don't like, you know, like the little booster seats that, you know, that just raise you up.
John:
So the what do you call it?
John:
The shoulder harness doesn't go across your neck.
John:
Right.
John:
And those don't strap in.
John:
And it's like, oh, there should be no problem here.
John:
But.
John:
Food and other crap finds its way between the little booster and your actual seat, and then it gets ground into the fabric.
John:
So I'm there trying to get that stuff out this weekend.
John:
And then, of course, them putting their muddy, dirty feet all over the back of the front seats of your car.
John:
Kids destroy cars.
John:
There's no way around it.
John:
So you have that to look forward to.
Yeah.
Casey:
I'm looking forward to it.
Marco:
I mean, the good news is, you know, like, I mean, my kid is like 2.25 ish right now.
Marco:
And, you know, he still is not old enough to destroy the car.
John:
He can't reach the back of your seats yet.
John:
He's not kicking you in the back while you're driving yet.
Marco:
Right.
John:
He's still, he's still rear facing, but we're, he could be getting to the point where he's kicking the seat back.
John:
not your seat back but the other one he yeah he he's able to do that but we don't notice and and i have like this this like cover over it so you know it's no big deal yeah those covers those covers are expensive and i i almost got them several times but i was like it was like 15 bucks well like the big fancy ones like if you buy like the the branded ones like the bmw branded or the honda branded full well you don't get
John:
those full full back seat cover well they're good my brother has one like they the full you know because they're fitted to your car they're super thick but i'm just always worried about something getting caught between the cover and the seat and then that's just like you know a recipe for disaster you guys two giant things are rubbing it's again the grind to get into the actual fabric it's the bra problem yep without the tan lines all you probably get tan lines from that too depending on how much uv gets into the the cabin of the car
Marco:
anyway titles oh sorting by vote it's not optional it's mandatory but that's fine because that's the only way i probably want to sort it anyway well see i actually like to have both like i like to be able to sort by most recent so i can troll through the most recent ones yeah and and vote them up as like as the show goes on otherwise now we have like a rich get richer problem
John:
I can make a Safari extension or Chrome extension that just throws the jQuery data tables at this table and gives some sorting.
Casey:
You're done.
John:
It's one library.
John:
You just point it at the element.
John:
It'll make everything sortable.
Casey:
You're the worst.
John:
I like the arrows, though.
Casey:
I thought you might like the arrows.
John:
They still don't look like buttons.
John:
Can you put them in a circle or a little rounded brick?
John:
I'm going to aim for a skinny little button.
John:
My cursor doesn't even... What's the click area on this thing?
John:
Let's see.
John:
It's like... Oh, it's moving too much.
John:
I can't see.
Casey:
I'm going to make these damn arrows like 72 points wide.
John:
The click area is not bad.
John:
The click area is not the width of the arrow.
John:
It's a little bit wider.
John:
But if you highlighted the click area when the little cursor went over it, anyway.
John:
And the arrows don't line up.
John:
Because the numbers are left aligned instead of right aligned.
John:
So like the 1 and 13 is right above the 8 and 8.
John:
Whereas the 8 should be underneath the 3.
John:
always something to complain about i posted into the chat room in the beginning when i first loaded the page and there was no titles on it the the headings votes title author time it said it was like titles vote title author time like it was a sentence because they were all squished together nothing in it and there was no min with them anyway ui is hard
Casey:
I'm fine.
Casey:
I must have some sort of client side issue because occasionally the two tables kind of decide to mate with each other.
Marco:
Right now I have, I have links in the titles table that kind of, I don't know why that keeps happening.
Casey:
I'm gonna have to play with that.
Casey:
Um, if you refresh the page, it'll straighten itself out, but I will definitely have to look at that.
Marco:
I'm afraid it'll crash if I refresh the page.
Marco:
Oh, stop it.
Casey:
Stop it.
Casey:
Uh, you had your moment.
Casey:
You're done.
Casey:
That was kind of funny, but I don't think that's good.
Casey:
I don't think that's a good title.
John:
If you do that one, you can use a semicolon of the title.
Marco:
I don't like semicolons.
John:
Well, you can't use a comma.
John:
It'd be a comma splice.
Marco:
These titles are all moving around as they sort, which makes it hard to... Well, what do you want, people?
Casey:
You only get to pick one.
John:
No, you can have both.
John:
You can have sorting and you just have manual refresh.
Casey:
Oh, that's terrible.
John:
You need to use WebSockets.
John:
Now it's no longer a feature.
Casey:
Now you've eliminated the whole point in using WebSockets in the first place.
Casey:
That's what I'm saying.
Casey:
I hate you, John Syracuse.
Marco:
You should just add a setting, add a preference.
Marco:
That's what everyone tells me to do.
Marco:
Just add a setting for everything.
Marco:
Maybe a pause button to pause updates and then resume them later.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
You got to figure out which of those things you want.
Marco:
I like It's Always the Butt.
Casey:
That is pretty good.
Casey:
Actually, I do like that one.
Casey:
I don't remember that.
Casey:
What was that?
Casey:
I thought you said it.
Marco:
You did say it.
John:
I don't remember a lot of what I say.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It's all right.
Marco:
We do.
Marco:
The chat room records it for us, so we don't have to remember.
Marco:
my email account for the listeners paying attention to what i say on different podcasts is currently 1923 unread but i answered about 200 of them today uh so i had crossed 2000 there's a couple of people on twitter who are like tracking the order in which i've recorded the various podcasts i've been on because i i keep saying like oh i have 300 unread messages and then oh i have 900 unread messages and the number keeps going up as time goes on they assume you're never answering answering any of them i guess
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, the fact is they're coming in faster than answering them.
Marco:
Like, my strategy was rather than spend like three days just answering email, I would instead read many of them, read all of Twitter, and fix as many problems as I possibly could by shipping an update.
Marco:
Like, so actually writing the update, testing the update, and shipping the update to Apple.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And then start tackling the email inbox so I can then tell people rather than I'm working on this, I can actually tell people I fixed this, you know, and actually give them useful news.
Marco:
And, you know, the update isn't out yet, but I can at least say I fixed this in the update that's submitted to Apple and should be out soon.
Marco:
Like some people I'm able to say that.
Marco:
So I have a whole bunch of text expander shortcuts and I'm going through the email now and some people get text expanded.
Marco:
Some people get a custom thing.
John:
Are you going to get a support person to do that?
Marco:
Yeah, I'm bringing on a support person, but I wanted to get through the initial batch myself.
John:
Just have Adam do it.
John:
Time for him to start earning his keep.
John:
Just bang on the keyboard with his hands.
John:
Every once in a while, you hit send.
John:
Problem solved.
Marco:
Oh, that would be fantastic.
John:
Adam's free ride is over.
Casey:
Have you been watching Halt and Catch Fire, whatever the hell that thing is called?
Casey:
No.
John:
Do you know what I'm talking about?
John:
I know what you're talking about.
John:
That show looked terrible to me.
Casey:
I've heard it's amazing.
Casey:
I've not seen a single frame of it in any capacity, and I've heard it's great.
John:
I've seen all the ads, and it was like, I know what the show is about.
John:
I know a lot of this history from reading it in books, and they make it sound like it's like, well, the actual story is not enough.
John:
And they're probably right.
John:
The actual story isn't enough unless you're a nerd.
John:
So we got to jazz it up.
John:
And it's just like, no, that is not what computer work is like.
John:
That's not what engineering is like.
John:
That's not what's exciting about it.
John:
Terrible.
Marco:
What is this the story of?
John:
Compaq, clean room, cloning the IBM PC.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, okay.
Marco:
What is it, a TV show, a movie?
John:
Yeah, it's like a series or miniseries.
John:
It's supposed to be like in the Mad Men vein of like, oh, it's a period piece because it's the 80s, right?
John:
And the reverse engineering thing that's so dramatic.
John:
I mean, it was dramatic and technically interesting and it changed the industry, but not in a way that regular people would be interested in.
John:
So they have to make it all exciting and the nerds are super good looking and exciting and it's dramatic and everything's happening in the dark instead of just like these pudgy...
John:
pale losers with acne pouring over technical manuals and programming.
John:
No one wants to see that, but that's how it actually gets done.
John:
No one wants to know how the sausage is actually made.
John:
Silicon Valley is actually pretty good.
John:
No, it is not.
John:
I finally watched it.
John:
I really enjoyed it.
John:
First of all, we can all agree that it is not representative of anything related to technology.
Marco:
Second... No, but I think it's funny in a Mike George kind of way.
Marco:
The way it makes fun of Silicon Valley I think is really good and smart.
John:
Yeah, but it's making fun of a caricature of Silicon Valley.
John:
It doesn't exist when there's plenty of legitimate things you can make fun of from the real Silicon Valley.
John:
I think Beavis and Butthead was funnier.
John:
I think King of the Hill was funnier to pick two more Mike Judge properties.
John:
This is probably funnier than Idiocracy, but Idiocracy was more incisive.
Marco:
I would say this is between Idiocracy and A King of the Hill.
Marco:
It is a social commentary on this part of our culture, no question.
Marco:
And a pretty good one at that.
Marco:
Yes, it is exaggerated and ridiculous, but it is a pretty good social commentary.
Marco:
And it's also pretty funny.
John:
I don't know if the total exclusion of human females is supposed to be a commentary or just accidental.
John:
I believe that's intentional.
John:
It's hard to tell.
John:
Because occasionally they just throw in a woman for two seconds.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure that's intentional.
Marco:
As a commentary.
Marco:
I think it's pretty clear.
John:
I'm just disappointed.
John:
Because you could have had a show that was a lot smarter and a lot funnier that actually...
John:
actually made fun of the way things really are because like they started with a character and they say isn't this caricature funny let's make fun of the caricature it's like well you're it's like it's like a straw man you're making something nothing this ridiculous ever existed so of course it's easy to make fun of something that ridiculous the reality has plenty of things that are ridiculous about it as well but in i guess in nuanced ways that people wouldn't understand or care about i don't know
Marco:
Or, you know, like, you probably can't base a lot of this stuff on real people for various legal reasons.
John:
And I also think that Mike Judge doesn't really know anything about computers, which is a problem.
John:
Like, he knows a lot about... Well, he used to be a programmer.
John:
I know, but, like, it's not... He's not...
John:
This is not his thing.
John:
He's been a media person for ages.
John:
He knows a lot about being a jerky, you know, teenage boy.
John:
So Beavis and Butthead was good.
John:
He apparently knows a lot about people in Texas.
John:
Yeah, because he's from Texas.
John:
Right, so that worked out.
John:
And he may have worked as a programmer for a little while, but his adult life has essentially been making television programs.
Marco:
So I think he does not have... Right, but like office spaces is actually based a lot on himself and the job he used to have.
John:
Office space was...
John:
I mean, I think office space was good.
John:
It didn't go too far over the top.
John:
Like I guess Lumberg was a little bit over the top, but everything else about it, just like the office environment, like it wasn't made.
John:
It didn't, you know, so they have like the holographic tube and the crazy headquarters and everything.
John:
That is more over the top.
John:
Office space was an actual cubicle office building.
John:
Right.
John:
And there's enough ridiculous about an actual cubicle office building.
John:
You can get humor out of you don't need to make it more oppressive than it actually is.
John:
should be an incomparable talk about silicon valley nobody else likes it you could be the lone voice of dissent but some people still i think jason snell's still watching it and i i've been letting them pile up on the tivo occasionally i'll watch a couple minutes it's only eight episodes and like 20 minutes long i know but like i'll watch them every once in a while i'm not engaged in the story so to speak so if i just want some a couple of gags here and there they have some funny gags
Marco:
It's just like Mike Judge's other shows, where it's not the best show in the world, but it's a good show, and it's funny.
Marco:
If you take everything with a grain of salt, and if you just look at it not as something that's trying to be accurate, but something that's trying to be funny... That's difficult for me with tech shows, though.
John:
Halt and Catch Fire, again, it's also getting bad reviews, but if I knew something about the advertising business, maybe Mad Men would bother me a lot more than it does, but I don't, so...
John:
it doesn't bother me as much whatever whatever liberties they're taking with the advertising business i'm willing to accept whereas anytime you touch any topic that anytime you touch tech basically it's like there's not a good history there in terms of interesting or accurate representations and especially it's like the walter isaac especially that i do find tech industry and i think a show that did tech right would be interesting but only to me obviously
John:
Nice.
John:
What should you be watching instead of talking about Veep?
John:
Veep is funnier than Silicon Valley and shorter and more interesting and doesn't involve technology.
Marco:
Shorter than eight 20-minute episodes?
John:
I guess at the same length.
John:
Something really seems longer.
John:
I take like three viewings to get through one episode of it.
John:
But anyway, I think Veep is on what?
John:
Is it Showtime or HBO?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
all right then bedtime yeah all right kids so i'll uh i'll talk to you thursday yeah um editing schedule um tomorrow i'm going to the lake so oh that's your tough yeah your constant work schedule i know what it's like this is like the third time you instagram from the lake yeah actually tomorrow i'm going to the lake because i my backup royally and our friend up there is a massage therapist and uh is gonna help me fix it oh yeah it's rough i'm
John:
Jesus Christ, Marco.
John:
That's exactly like my schedule.
John:
I, too, am going to a lake to get a massage tomorrow.
John:
What about you, Casey?
Casey:
Did you know the lake is actually coming to me and that I'm getting the massage?
John:
Are you going to have a corn dog?
John:
I'm thinking of having a corn dog.
John:
It would never look more like an Ohio boy than sitting there with a corn dog on your dirt beach in front of your mud lake.
John:
i can't breathe oh my god this is why i follow people on instagram now i don't actually participate in instagram but it's a it's just for the shaming a nicer window into people's lives oh god that was awesome wow we're all just casey you and i are just bitter and jealous people yeah that's what it boils down to that's exactly what it boils down to
John:
We need to be true to ourselves and admit that.
Casey:
We're bitter jealous and getting older every day.
John:
Yeah, but I have the secret glee of knowing what you're in for when this baby comes.