Fleece the Whales
Casey:
How do we always have this much to talk about, even when we have nothing to talk about?
John:
Blabbermouths, that's why.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
John:
That's why you should get more out of your system on your new podcast, then you won't have as much to say here.
Casey:
Oh, because I'm definitely the one bogarting the mic of the three of us.
Casey:
John, any follow-up?
Casey:
Why is follow-up always my job?
Casey:
Because you invented follow-up.
Casey:
Is that really that big of a surprise?
John:
I mean, really.
John:
I put all this follow-up.
John:
You guys can put follow-up in too, you know.
Casey:
Yeah, but we don't believe in following up on things.
Casey:
Because we're just always right.
John:
It has nothing to do with being right.
John:
It has to do with adding additional information.
John:
People ask on the earning calls, can I get some more color on that?
John:
We provide more color.
John:
All right.
John:
First item is that new reversible USB connector that we talked about many, many, many shows ago.
John:
They have reportedly finalized the spec and released a bunch of images of what the connector is supposed to look like.
John:
If you look in the show notes, you can see it.
John:
We had like mockups before.
John:
We already knew.
John:
That it wasn't going to be like lightning, it wasn't going to be a solid metal thing with contacts on the top and bottom, but rather it was going to be more like an existing USB connectors where it's some kind of shape metal shell and then inside the little metal shell is...
John:
what's inside there there's a better picture of the inner is like a little hole and then in the thing you plug it into there's a little uh board with uh contacts on top and bottom and anyway it's difficult to explain we'll put pictures in the show notes you can see what it looks like it's not very exciting to look at i guess i mean it's got uh it's basically like a a rectangle with round end caps on the right and left side
John:
I guess there's not much more to say about it, except there's one comment on the Ars Technica story, which we'll link, from Peter Bright, who is known for being wrong about everything all the time.
Wow.
John:
Yeah, that's kind of his reputation.
Marco:
Way to put it gently.
Marco:
Yeah, how do you really feel?
John:
But in a pleasant way.
John:
He's well informed that he knows lots of things, but whenever there's a choice to make one decision or another based on subjective criteria, he chooses wrong.
Casey:
Is this like the John Syracuse equivalent of bless his heart?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, he wrote in the comments...
John:
The big question is, where are the sprung parts?
John:
USB traditionally did this right, putting them in the cable, which is cheap and easy to replace.
John:
Apple did it wrong, putting them in the port, which is expensive and difficult to replace.
John:
And what he's talking about is when you have a connector where two contacts press up against each other, one or both of them have to have some give to them.
John:
Otherwise, if they were both completely rigid, you would have to have it perfectly aligned, and you'd have to have these little metal things touching each other exactly.
John:
One of them you want to be kind of like a spring.
John:
So if there's a little bit of wiggling...
John:
you know, then they move back and forth, the spring will account for that motion by staying in contact with the thing.
John:
And traditionally, there's like one rigid part and one springy part of it.
John:
I suppose you could do two springy parts.
John:
It would work the same.
John:
In lightning connector, the little thing that you plug in is stiff.
John:
You can look at it.
John:
It's a little metal, solid metal thing with contacts on top and bottom.
John:
But inside the connector are these little kind of springy finger things that are...
John:
When no connector is in it, they are closer together than the width of the connector.
John:
When you shove the connector in, it presses those springy things apart so that when it's inserted in there, the connectors are pressing against the contact area.
John:
So if the lightning connector wiggles a little bit, the things stay in contact with each other.
John:
and peter is saying that in usb the little springy things are inside the connectors so if they get unspringy or they start to get looser whatever fine you throw it out the cable you get a new one and in lightning the little springy things are inside the connector itself so the cable doesn't matter if those little springy things get loose you need to replace the thing that the cable connects into
John:
Which makes some sense, but the question always is, what is the expected lifetime of the little springy things?
John:
If the expected lifetime of the little springy things exceeds the expected lifetime of the device, then you're fine.
John:
If it doesn't, then you have problems.
John:
Presumably, Apple took this into account.
John:
I like the idea, as I talked about on the past shows, that...
John:
The lightning connector is, you know, is very physically robust.
John:
It is a solid little ingot of metal.
John:
It does have very fine connect contacts on it, which I guess is just the price of being small and having, you know, you need like, what is it?
John:
You need at least four connectors there.
John:
I forget how many are on lightning.
John:
I guess I can stare at this thing and look, what is it, eight?
John:
I think it's eight on each side, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, that's a lot of connectors in a small place.
John:
But the connector itself, it's like there's nothing to snag on anything.
John:
You can bang it around and it will probably be OK.
John:
It seems more robust to me than a similarly sized connector.
John:
The USB 3 USB type C connector is bigger than lightning, but not that much.
John:
I think we went over the exact size of millimeters on the previous episode.
John:
But it's hollow, so it's got this really skinny shell.
John:
And inside that little shell is a little gap where this thing plugs into it.
John:
And I'm not sure how durable that will be compared to this.
John:
Now, he's right that it's like, well, if you have to replace something, wouldn't you rather replace the cheap cable than replace the other thing?
John:
So if you have if you had something fragile into your cable, like if your connectors were fragile and you accidentally stepped on them or they got dropped and bent or whatever, well, so what?
John:
You buy a new cable.
John:
So it's not so bad for the connectors to be fragile, but the springy parts is a good point that I'm not quite sure how that's going to work out in practice.
John:
I don't think Lightning has been in the market long enough for anyone to have a Lightning connector device where the little springy things become unspringy or get permanently bent up or lose their spring.
Marco:
Well, what's interesting is that this actually might be a good design on Apple's part because...
Marco:
It certainly seems, from the sound of people complaining when lightning came out, that the cables might outlast people's use of the devices.
John:
Well, they still have the little, you know, the little strain relief sleeves on the edge.
John:
Sure, yeah.
John:
Like, so those things always wear out.
Marco:
But I'm saying, like, I bet the average person who has more than one iPhone in their life, they probably keep cables around.
Marco:
Because, like, I know I do.
Marco:
Like, it was really annoying to me when I bought lightning cables when the iPhone 5 came out because I had accumulated so many dock cables over the years that I wanted to, like, you know, at least partially match my collection so I could have all the convenience of having these things everywhere.
Marco:
I bet...
Marco:
That had to have crossed somebody's mind at some point at Apple when designing this connector that actually, you know, most people replace their iPhone every one to two years, whereas these cables might hang around for five years or more.
John:
Well, the thing about the cables, I do also have a lot of old cables hanging around, but I would imagine the part that fails on the cables, like I said, is not the connector part on Lightning or even on the dock connector, which is this crazy wide thing with very weird, you know, tiny contacts in there.
Marco:
I'm still amazed the dock connector ever worked.
John:
Yeah, yes, it's I mean, I'm still using it.
John:
My iPad still uses it.
John:
But but instead, it's the it's the the wire itself, especially the stream release parts for people who are not delicate with their devices and just yank it out.
John:
Eventually, the part where the wire goes into the connector starts to fray.
John:
And once that goes, it doesn't matter that your connector is still fine.
John:
The whole wire is dead.
John:
You could be right, though, especially for phones on like a two year replacement cycle with contracts in the US that the cable might outlive the thing.
John:
The thing about I mean, I said lightning hasn't been around for a while for long enough for us to know if the little springy things are a problem.
John:
We do know that in all connectors.
John:
dock port lightning anything with any portable device that you carry around in pockets and stuff lint is an issue like if there's a hole in device and you're carrying around in your pocket or in your purse lint will get in there and i've known many people who have had either had to go to the apple store or sort of done surgery on their own with like
John:
I don't know, toothpicks and dental tools or something to remove big wads of lint from because like if you eventually if you pack in enough lint in your thing and you try to put the lightning connector and it won't go all the way in, it'll basically be prevented from from seeding.
John:
And, you know, there's two little dents on the side of lightning connector that these other these other two little springy things grab onto.
John:
And then, you know, it's probably seeded.
John:
That's why you get that little click.
John:
If you get enough crap inside that you can't even get it seeded.
John:
I mean, that's there's not much I think the connector can do about that.
John:
Except maybe not having it open at all and being more like MagSafe, but that has its own set of problems.
John:
But anyway, I'm glad USB is getting reversible.
John:
I think the connector looks okay.
John:
I would have preferred if it looked and worked like lightning, but there is an open question about durability for both of them because neither one has existed long enough for us to know.
Marco:
Hey, I'm just proud of them for finally making possibly, maybe, just maybe, a micro USB connector that isn't totally infuriating to insert and remove.
Casey:
Let's not go too far.
Casey:
It's still early.
John:
It will join the eight bazillion other kinds of USB connectors that are out there.
John:
In this thread on Arstechnica, in the comment thread, about this connector, about a million people posted the XKCD comic about, you know,
John:
uh competing standards and how there's you know too many standards i know i'll make one standard that everyone can use and now you've just created one more standard that's the history of usb like they just kept creating connector after connector there are so many of them in so many different shapes and sizes plus the weird proprietary ones that occasionally people would come out with that are only appear on one or two devices
John:
Uh, hopefully this new reversible one will sweep away all the old ones.
John:
Uh, at the very least, I hope it replaces everything on PC laptops and desktops.
John:
I don't really care so much about like cameras and stuff like that because I think they're always just going to do their own thing.
John:
But, uh, anyway, uh, I, I welcome my new USB connector overlords.
Casey:
That's the Simpsons, isn't it?
Marco:
it is good job all right we are uh sponsored tonight first by a return sponsor it's automatic automatic is your smart driving assistant on your smartphone go to automatic.com slash atp so automatic is this little thing you plug into your odb oh man is it okay which one's the wrapper which one's the port every time i'm gonna ask this question
Casey:
On-board diagnostics.
Marco:
OBD.
Marco:
You plug it into your OBD2 port, which is available on pretty much almost every car made since I think 96 was when they started standardizing this.
Marco:
You can look at their site to see.
Marco:
So check their site to make sure, but chances are very, very good that your car is supported.
Marco:
Automatic is a little thing you plug into this port.
Marco:
And it uses Bluetooth and it talks to you with smartphone app.
Marco:
It monitors how you drive.
Marco:
So that way you can monitor your fuel economy.
Marco:
It can read check engine type error code.
Marco:
So like rather than just having one check engine land on the dashboard, it'll tell you like your oxygen sensor is broken.
Marco:
You should probably get that looked at.
Marco:
You know, it'll tell you more specifics.
Marco:
um it could also if you're in a crash and the port detects that which most of them do um it can signal for help if you're in a major crash um and there's like a little thing on the app you can tell it not to when that happens if you want to within like 30 seconds something like that but chances are you probably want it to if you're in a serious crash
Marco:
and the best part about this though and you should look at the app it's pretty cool the best part about automatic it intelligently monitors how you drive and so it tells you how to optimize your fuel economy and other factors you want to optimize for so it gives you all the data you need to track your fuel cost it even checks like costs around you and your fuel efficiency every week and it can give you tips on small changes you can make to save a lot of money in the long run it can even make subtle audio cues when you drive inefficiently if you like you know
Marco:
slam on the accelerator too often or slam on the brakes too hard, it'll kind of remind you subtly to help guide you towards better habits to reach the goals that you've set.
Marco:
I actually found like, so my car, sorry if this is ridiculous, my car has one of those lane change warning things where little cameras look at the road and detect where the lines are when you're going above a certain speed.
Marco:
And if you start drifting towards the lines on either side and you're not signaling, the steering wheel vibrates slightly.
Marco:
And when I first got the car, I was hitting that all the time, and I realized it was mostly because of my own bad habits.
Marco:
Like, I would start drifting a little bit to the left on the highway before I would turn the turn signal on to change lanes.
Marco:
And having that subtle feedback actually fixed me.
Marco:
Like, within a few weeks of having this car...
Marco:
i've i improved my habits i improved my technique um just subtly with that slight reminder and so automatic can do that for you with these audio cues if you you know to reach the goals you have for fuel economy or whatever else it can do that pretty cool stuff it can help you save hundreds of dollars on gas um and really get you help in a serious crash diagnose engine lights all this fun stuff there's even a parking locator that ties in with the app so it can it can tell you where you parked your car
Marco:
They have apps for iPhone and Android.
Marco:
You can order one for just $100.
Marco:
There's no subscription fees.
Marco:
It's $100 up front one time and that's it.
Marco:
You own it.
Marco:
The service comes with that price.
Marco:
There is no monthly subscription for all this cool stuff.
Marco:
free shipping ships in two business days and they have a 45 day return policy so it's kind of you know no pressure just try it see if you like it now best thing is for you guys because you're special and we're special and you know everyone who listens to the podcast is by definition special um you don't have you don't have to pay 100 bucks for this even though that's a great value we have a special price 20 off so it's just 80 bucks
Marco:
Go to automatic.com slash ATP.
Marco:
This is spelled the normal way, not the WordPress way.
Marco:
Automatic.com slash ATP to get that special deal to get this thing for just 80 bucks.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Automatic for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Pretty cool product.
Casey:
You know someone serious when they give you a 20% discount.
Casey:
Yeah, that's big.
Casey:
10% is, you know, hey, that's pretty cool.
Casey:
I appreciate that.
Casey:
But 20%, that's some serious stuff.
Casey:
What else is in follow up, John?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Oh, man.
John:
You want to do this next one?
John:
I just pasted it in there, but I have no particular tie to it more than anyone else does.
Casey:
Well, I don't know which parts in particular you wanted to talk about, but this is from Gavin regarding Arm Max.
Casey:
And again, there's like 300 words here.
Casey:
I don't know which particular words you felt were important.
John:
You're failing as a summary service, Casey.
John:
You know the thing?
John:
Is it still an OS X where you can select a bunch of text and ask it to summarize it for you?
Casey:
Back in the day, that was a service.
Casey:
Isn't that what that kid had created that did the news article?
John:
Summly.
John:
Yeah.
John:
All right.
John:
Anyway, this is from Gavin, and he asked a question about ARM Macs.
John:
His idea is, what about... Instead of an ARM Mac, what about a...
John:
traditional Mac form factor device, but with an ARM CPU running iOS and not OS X. I think that's essentially what he's asking about here.
Casey:
What would that accomplish that one of those silly Logitech keyboard covers doesn't, other than the fact that it would be less silly?
John:
Well, I think the idea is that iOS is the newer OS.
John:
iOS has less annoying stuff in it.
John:
It's easier for people to use.
John:
Why should laptops be stuck with the more complicated OS?
John:
Why can't we make a laptop form factor but have it run iOS?
John:
I think the obvious answer to that is
John:
is that, you know, what do you do?
John:
Do you touch the screen or not?
John:
Because that's the question, the first question you have to ask.
John:
All right, so it's running iOS.
John:
iOS doesn't work with a mouse pointer.
John:
It's a touching thing.
John:
So am I going to be touching the screen of my laptop?
Casey:
No, you'll use the same mouse and keyboard combinations that the iOS simulator uses because those are super fun.
Marco:
And there's still no shortcut to adjust dynamic text size.
Marco:
It drives me nuts.
John:
See, like, the exact text is, what about a laptop WIMP version of iOS?
John:
You know, so he's saying it's going to have Windows... What is WIMP?
John:
Windows something?
John:
No, I don't know.
Marco:
MySQL PHP?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Mouse pointer, whatever.
John:
I think he's saying it's going to have... He compared it to a Chromebook, basically.
John:
So the idea is instead of, you know, having iOS go down market, something like that.
John:
And the other part of his email was...
John:
What if you had something that was like an Intel computer in the house, which he calls the truck, but each individual person has their own iOS device that either docks with or connects with that, and you only replace the big Intel computer every few years, but you replace the iOS things more frequently.
John:
And when I read this part, I thought it seems like, well, I don't know what the replacement cycle is, but it seems like the replacement cycle for iPads in particular is not particularly frequent.
John:
Like they are hanging around way longer.
John:
I don't know if they're hanging around longer than Macs are, but they're certainly hanging around for a long time because they're not tied to a contract.
John:
There's nothing artificial making you upgrade it.
John:
So I know so, so many people who still have iPad ones being used in the house.
John:
Granted, usually by kids, but like you cannot kill these things.
John:
Like if you don't physically break it,
John:
And it still runs the same five apps than it was running before.
John:
I guess at a certain point, maybe like if you can't view YouTube on it anymore or if the browser becomes so old that you can't use most websites, that will kill it.
Casey:
Well, we have an answer to this question, kind of.
Casey:
A friend of the show, underscore David Smith, just updated his version stats page to include the average device age, which for an iPad is 883 days.
Casey:
And by comparison, an iPhone is 804 days.
Casey:
So a difference of, what is that, 80 days?
Casey:
Something like 30?
Casey:
Yeah, about 80 days.
John:
Yeah, I saw those stats, and I was surprised that they were so similar.
John:
You would think the upgrade cycle on phones would make them last longer.
John:
But anyway, I mean, the problem with all of underscore stats is...
John:
I don't know if he has a broad enough cross section of the user base.
John:
I think a lot of the people who use his apps or know about them might be in the nerd circle, and then that could be skewing things a bit.
Casey:
Well, this is all from audiobooks alone, I thought, which is a little bit more mainstream.
John:
Yeah, I suppose.
John:
And, you know, now that I think about it, like in the same way that iPads get handed down, I do know a lot of cousins, for example, who have old versions of their parents' phones.
John:
So I don't know.
Casey:
And also not everyone is on a two year cycle.
Casey:
You know, that that from what I gather is maybe not a uniquely American thing, but a particularly American thing.
John:
Yeah, so I'm not sure about Gavin's theory here.
John:
I think we'd have to work out a lot of issues in terms of the input for the iOS-powered Chromebook type thing.
John:
I like the idea of trying to get rid of the legacy concerns of the Mac, but we're not anywhere close to having replacement for all the functionality that a Mac provides, and I don't think you can just make everyone go iOS and solve all these problems.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't think any sort of doc-like thing would make much sense.
Casey:
I understand what he's driving out with a Chromebook.
Casey:
And I don't know, the Chromebook, to me on paper, I don't understand why it's appealing.
Casey:
But I know Ben Thompson of Stratechery, because it used to be Stratechery, now it's Stratechery.
Casey:
I know he swears by his, and I've heard from others, so I can't remember who, that they love theirs.
Casey:
but having never used one, I don't get it.
Casey:
But then again, I said the same thing about an iPad and I love my iPad.
Casey:
So I don't know.
John:
You said on paper, you don't get it on paper is exactly where I get it.
John:
Like conceptually, conceptually.
John:
And in theory, all the things that they're doing, I think are great.
John:
It's just in practice, the actual devices I have not,
John:
found appealing although maybe i just need to use them the whole idea is like throw it in a river who cares all your stuff is somewhere else you just sign in everything syncs nothing is local everything local is just a cache everything's in the cloud all your applications are web applications or similar like that concept you know don't worry about backups don't worry about local device management don't worry about anything it's just like you know
John:
it's not a dumb terminal it's a smart terminal you know like it's got you have you have local disk local cache memory gpu all that good stuff that you want what you don't have is local state but you what you've eliminated are all the stupid concerns that make us have difficult tech support calls with relatives about how to deal with computing and it would be just you know take away all those concerns but in practice what are the applications how do you use it how is the experience how is the hardware what is the pricing and performance like and those things aren't quite yet worked out so
Casey:
Oh, sure.
Casey:
It'll all be iCloud.
Casey:
It'll be perfect.
John:
Well, Google does a better job than Apple with iCloud.
John:
But yeah, we're not there yet.
John:
But like if anyone's going to get there first, it's going to be Google.
John:
So I keep my eye on the Chromebook space to see how it's going.
John:
But so far, it's not has not impressed me.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So we also have some follow-up.
Casey:
This was sent specifically to us.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
From Jared Sinclair?
John:
Yes.
John:
Don't you read your email?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I just wanted to make sure.
Casey:
That makes one of us.
Casey:
So he says in an email to the three of us,
Casey:
not even to Apple.
Casey:
The main purpose of my article was not to assign blame, but simply to make my failure a matter of public record.
Casey:
Here's why.
Casey:
In response to Brent Simmons' recent post about who are the indie iOS developers, numerous people on Twitter responded mentioning my name.
Casey:
With the high-profile reviews of Unread and several App Store features, I could see why an outside observer might assume that Unread was earning me a sustainable living.
Casey:
I don't want someone to take my silence as a tacit approval of that notion.
Casey:
More importantly, I don't want someone to consider, scare quotes, going indie, to make that career change without hearing about how easy it is to fail in the App Store.
Casey:
The scale of the App Store with over 100 million credit cards can make it seem like any given niche is big enough for a solo developer to earn a small but sustainable living.
Casey:
The idea out there is that great design and great reviews will be enough to carry you.
Casey:
Reality often contradicts that wishful thinking as I learn the hard way.
Casey:
Maybe someone out there can learn from my mistakes and not repeat them.
Casey:
So I thought that was pretty interesting and well phrased.
Casey:
And similar and kind of relatedly, sometime in the last week or so, Jared actually took a full-time position with...
Casey:
With someone, I say as I stall.
Casey:
But it doesn't really matter.
Casey:
With someone.
Marco:
He talked about it, actually, on... There's a good podcast called Release Notes that you should all listen to if you're a developer, especially.
Marco:
If you listen to this show, that will be relevant to you.
Marco:
It's a very good show.
Marco:
And they had him on last week, and then this week he talked more about it.
Marco:
And, yeah, it's good.
Marco:
I mean, hell, we could talk about this for episodes and episodes.
Marco:
We probably shouldn't.
Marco:
We probably will.
Casey:
And really quickly, a real time follow up.
Casey:
It's blog loving that he is joining.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So, I mean, I don't know.
Marco:
There's so many angles to this whole thing.
Marco:
First of all, I don't think it's worth anybody trying to figure out what indie should mean.
Marco:
The definition of the word indie doesn't really matter for the purposes of this argument.
Marco:
I don't think that's really a discussion that needs to happen.
Marco:
I don't think we need to care about how many people are there making their living solely on this.
Marco:
And again, what does that mean?
Marco:
I think you can just look around to see that it's hard.
Marco:
There's a lot of people out there doing iOS app development with the hopes of making money from it.
Marco:
And very few of them make a meaningful amount of money from it.
Marco:
that to some degree has always been the case like our friend underscore david smith um did an episode of developing perspective which you should also be listening to uh during the very first week this was being discussed a few weeks back and where he basically said uh it's always been hard and he's right i mean i've i've been in the app store since day one and i was i was lucky that instapaper on well i was actually like day two or three technically but
Marco:
uh because there was a huge backlog of submissions and even though i submitted by the deadline that where they said you'd be there on day one i wasn't no i'm not i'm not bitter about that i've been there since roughly day two or three and yeah the fact is it's always been hard i was lucky that my app was very popular from the start relatively speaking but even that was not that easy to sustain and
Marco:
And I've had other efforts since then that were not that successful.
Marco:
And I saw the other side of it too.
Marco:
At some point, I want to do a big blog post about app marketing and what that actually means, which is funny coming from me.
Marco:
And it would probably include me talking about brands because it's actually relevant.
Marco:
You have to think about marketing from the start.
Marco:
like when i when i made overcast when i decided to start making it the very first thing i did after deciding okay i'm going to take this little prototype audio engine i have and make it into an actual app the very first thing i did was download all the other podcast apps that i could find and make a folder on my phone so i could keep tabs on them and see what they added and see what they did and see what they were good at and see what they weren't good at and i took screenshots of all of them i did like a little tour of each app and
Marco:
and took a screenshot to say, you know, here's how this app looks.
Marco:
And I made folders saying, you know, this is Downcast, this is Instacast, this is Pocketcast, like all the apps.
Marco:
Here's how they look.
Marco:
Here's their setting screen.
Marco:
Here's their playback screen.
Marco:
Here's their list screen.
Marco:
Here's the options, you know, that they have and whatever.
Marco:
I did all this so that I could have this portfolio of info.
Marco:
And then I made a list saying, here's what I plan to do with my app.
Marco:
How will it be better than or worse than these apps?
Marco:
In what regards will I be better than this?
Marco:
And for each app, I had an entry in a big text file saying, here's the pros of Overcast versus this app, and here's the cons of Overcast versus this app.
Marco:
And I did all this, not because I'm good at doing research or homework, because that's not even close to being true.
Marco:
I did all this because I wanted to make sure that I had a chance and not a chance of being, you know, being like a minor success for a week or two.
Marco:
I wanted this app to be successful enough that I could develop it for years because that's what I want to do.
Marco:
I want to keep working on this.
Marco:
Now it's out.
Marco:
There was an update, which I'll get to, I guess, later.
Marco:
I've already fixed many of the known bugs.
Marco:
If I wanted to just abandon this app and move on, I could probably abandon it in about another two months.
Marco:
But I don't want to do that.
Marco:
I want to keep working on it.
Marco:
So far, I will be able to.
Marco:
It's selling well enough that so far, I can do that.
Marco:
But I did all this research up front and all this planning to really know what am I really going to be adding to this market.
Marco:
And Jared points out, there's this idea that great design and great reviews will be enough to carry you.
Marco:
And he points out, rightly, that's wishful thinking.
Marco:
That doesn't fit reality.
Marco:
Because the fact is, you can have the best launch in the world and be all over Daring Fireball and MacStories and iMore and all the great sites that review this stuff.
Marco:
But what you have to look at is an App Store buyer who is just browsing the App Store, who has searched for the kind of app that you have.
Marco:
They typed in podcast into the App Store.
Marco:
They get a list of the podcast apps, and they're going to look at the first few and make a decision.
Marco:
You have to ask yourself before you even start any work at all, you have to ask yourself, will people meaningfully, in meaningful numbers, will people buy my app in that situation?
Marco:
They're not going to go to Mac Stories.
Marco:
They're not going to go to Daring Fireball.
Marco:
They're going to go to the App Store and look down the list.
Marco:
And they're going to make a few comparisons.
Marco:
Probably first they're going to look at price.
Marco:
And they're probably first going to look to see if there's a free one that fits their needs.
Marco:
And if there is, great.
Marco:
They're going to stop there and that's it.
Marco:
And then they judge it based on the icon, the title, the screenshots if you're lucky.
Marco:
And no one ever, ever, ever reads the description text.
Casey:
I read some of it.
Marco:
You're the only person who reads it.
Marco:
Yeah, I read it too, but you know.
Casey:
Well, I also read emails, so.
John:
There's like three words visible in those Griffin texts most of the time.
John:
It's like two or three words, a period, a new line, new line, one word, new line, dot, dot, dot, tap for more.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
And no one ever, and Apple there is designing for what people actually do.
Marco:
Like it used to be more text visible and over time they've shrunk it because presumably because nobody reads it and they can use that space for other things.
Marco:
So, you know, people have to you have to plan from the start.
Marco:
This is this is marketing.
Marco:
This is part of marketing is figuring out where you fit in the market and making sure you're going to fit somewhere that there actually is a market for.
Marco:
It's marketing from the very beginning.
Marco:
It's thinking about this stuff from the very beginning.
Marco:
You have to be able to think, you know, you have to be able to make a good case for your app based on no reviews having been read, no research having been done, usually not even people trying trials of different apps.
Marco:
They're usually going to stick with whatever they use first.
Marco:
So in that list, when they do the app store search, they're browsing a list.
Marco:
is your app going to be compelling enough?
Marco:
And the fact is, because there are so many apps in the store, it's hard to be compelling.
Marco:
And especially the model of paid up front.
Marco:
The reason it's so hard is because that's how people browse.
Marco:
The reason the race to the bottom happened is because of that.
Marco:
That's because most people are buying apps not from their desktop, reading reviews, and clicking a link to go to iTunes and have the app sync over.
Marco:
Most people are buying apps right from the phone in the App Store app, period.
Marco:
And they're doing that probably after doing a search.
Marco:
We don't know that for sure yet, but I bet once we have better analytics, we'll find that out pretty quickly.
Marco:
That is probably through browsing top lists first and searching for terms a distant second.
Marco:
And most people aren't going to be on the top list.
Marco:
So your hope is searching for terms.
Marco:
When they browse the list and they see that one of the apps is free or that like three or four of them are free and there's your app sitting there at four bucks, you don't stand a chance.
Marco:
You just don't.
Marco:
If people hear about your app in some other way and if a friend tells them if they read a review and your app is four bucks, that's fine.
Marco:
You have a decent chance there.
Marco:
But the average person browsing, and I know there are specialty app types for which this is not true.
Marco:
That's fine.
Marco:
But for general audience apps, general purpose apps that are not being used in some kind of specialty business role or anything like that, general audience apps, this is how people browse.
Marco:
They look for what they want.
Marco:
They find one.
Marco:
Hopefully, that's free.
Marco:
They download it, and they stop looking.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
And so paid upfront apps just, as I said, they don't really stand a chance in this model.
Marco:
This is why Overcast is not paid upfront.
Marco:
Instapaper was paid upfront the whole time.
Marco:
I saw the challenges.
Marco:
It worked for a long time.
Marco:
Then it stopped working very well.
Marco:
And it's
Marco:
hard for developers to accept this because paid up front is easy it's really easy to just make an app where everything's always enabled and you don't have to worry about trying to manage purchases or anything like that you just make a great app and you put a price tag on it and you're done and you don't have to deal with refunds or anything like that because apple deals with it for you and you don't have to deal with limiting things and trials and demos and working with an apple limitations and rules for that and all that stuff you just put it up there and you're done
Marco:
It's a great story.
Marco:
It worked for a long time.
Marco:
It stopped working.
Marco:
It doesn't work now.
Marco:
Now you've got to put a little more work into it.
Marco:
Now you have to actually figure out, well, how can I wedge a free trial type thing into this system?
Marco:
What can I get paid for in this app, if anything?
Marco:
And then you have to implement that.
Marco:
You have to say, all right, well, you have to, like, in Overcast, I made these little demo modes where you can demo the effects for five minutes before you buy them.
Marco:
That's all additional work.
Marco:
I had to have an interface for buying things.
Marco:
I had to have a screen explaining what you get when you buy things.
Marco:
You have to have all these different states that exist in the app.
Marco:
You have to, with iOS 8, you have to deal with delayed purchases, all this stuff.
Marco:
This is just the reality of the market now.
Marco:
You have to think this way.
Marco:
You have to do more work.
Marco:
If you want a general audience app, you probably have to do a free within-app purchase to make any money.
Marco:
And that's just the reality of it.
Marco:
What Jared was doing with Unread was appealing to us, appealing to people like you and me.
Marco:
But that's not the market.
Marco:
That's a very small part of the market.
Marco:
And he got that part of the market, but it just wasn't enough.
Casey:
Do you think you would have had, maybe the bravery is the best way to phrase it, to release Overcast had you not already proven your success in the App Store with Instapaper?
Casey:
I'm not saying like to other people.
Casey:
Do you think internally you would have had
Casey:
The bravery, again, for lack of a better word, to jump into the App Store in today's App Store, had you not already lived through 2008's App Store?
Marco:
I probably would have been stupid enough to do it.
Marco:
I don't want to discourage people from doing it.
Marco:
Just have reasonable expectations.
Marco:
And the fact is, in 2008, you could put anything up there.
Marco:
God forbid, if you actually see screenshots of Instant Paper 1.0, it's a disaster.
Marco:
And I actually didn't have a paid app on day one.
Marco:
My first app was free.
Marco:
And then I made newspaper pro about two months in.
Marco:
That was the paid app.
Marco:
So about two months in, I started getting paid revenue.
Marco:
And even that version, I mean, you look at the screenshots.
Marco:
It's just a disaster.
Marco:
It's awful looking.
Marco:
And I charged $10 for it.
Marco:
And it sold well.
Marco:
It's crazy.
Marco:
And the fact is standards were just much lower back then.
Marco:
There was a lot less in the store.
Marco:
These days, every category already has 10 apps in it at least.
Marco:
Especially, I mean, God, some categories have thousands.
Marco:
You're competing against a massive, massive market now.
Marco:
It's not the same game anymore.
Marco:
And you have to adapt to the new reality of it.
Marco:
And you can't really depend, you know, and Jared's right, you know, to not...
Marco:
to not really ascribe blame to Apple in this.
Marco:
Um, because, you know, I wrote this post a couple of weeks ago called app rot and, and this post was a failure of mine as a writer.
Marco:
Um, I had about three different ideas I wanted to express.
Marco:
They should have been three different posts.
Marco:
Um, I was lazy one night and made it one post cause I've been sitting on these ideas for months and I just couldn't get them out.
Marco:
I didn't have the motivation.
Marco:
Um, and people misinterpreted it to me in a lot of different things because I, because I tried to conflate these different things that should have been different posts into one post.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
Apple is not really at fault at all here for this part of the market failure.
Marco:
They have other things they could do to make the market better, but this is not Apple's fault.
Marco:
This is not because we don't have trials or anything like that or paid upgrades.
Marco:
This is simply the result of the market having a ton of people in it.
Marco:
A ton of developers do this.
Marco:
As we talked about last week.
Marco:
So, you know, there's not much Apple can do to fix this problem.
Marco:
There's some things they can do to fix other problems.
Marco:
Like I mentioned getting rid of the top lists.
Marco:
That won't fix this problem.
Marco:
It will fix other problems or reduce them.
Marco:
But this problem is here to stay because the market is just this big.
John:
It's kind of the same way it was with like the just companies in general with the dot com thing.
John:
Right.
John:
Where, you know, it started out if you were an Internet company and you had a website, you had a reasonable shot.
John:
But then all the websites got better.
John:
And very quickly, what evolved was the business model where you get as much venture capital as you can.
John:
You try to get as many users as you can by giving away everything you can for free and then figure out how to monetize it later.
John:
in the app store we're not really in the figure out how to monetize it later but we are in the part where like the goal is get every single human being with an ios device to download this application and have within this application a way to get money from them it's already there like you know people don't have to use it whether it's like buying magic coins or paying for energy to play your game or whatever the hell it is like the monetization thing is already in there so in that respect it's better than the dot com where they're just like ah we'll figure it out later we just want to get as many people but
John:
That strategy evolved quickly of like growth over everything.
John:
Get as many users as possible.
John:
That is the number one goal.
John:
I don't care how many people, I don't care if our conversion rate is 0.001%.
John:
If we get just millions and millions and millions of users, that's still serious money.
John:
Uh,
John:
And when that happened in the dot-com world, and it continues to happen, you know, arguably with, like, what the hell was that?
John:
$19 billion acquisition?
John:
Was it WhatsApp or whatever?
John:
Oh, yeah, the messaging app?
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
Yeah, there's still a viable strategy.
John:
Like, no one is buying WhatsApp.
John:
WhatsApp pursued the strategy of just, you know, get as many users as possible, become super valuable.
John:
Instagram, for that matter, too.
Marco:
To be fair, it's a really, really good business model to freak out Facebook.
Marco:
That is the best possible business model in this entire industry, in the entire tech industry.
Marco:
Just freak out Facebook and you'll get billions.
John:
Well, see, the old strategy before there were big companies like Facebook to buy you for too much money.
John:
I mean, there were always companies to buy you for too much money, but not like it is today where there's a few vacuuming everything.
John:
But the old one was...
John:
we'll just get a bazillion users our growth curve will look like a hockey stick and we'll ipo and everyone who has a stake in the company will get rich off the ipo and then the company will go down the tubes you know like in other words no one would buy us we never will figure out how to make money but everyone invests in the company made out like abandoned on the ipo so who the hell cares and it eventually goes down and somebody buys the scraps or something you know the new strategy is get as many users as possible yeah like said freak out facebook or become so big like this is the next big thing get someone to buy you and that's how you get your big payday not from the ipo but from a big acquisition
John:
And then, you know, whatever.
John:
After that, nobody cares, right?
John:
Well, so in the App Store, same strategy, get big really, really fast.
John:
But just like in business today, even though that is still a viable strategy and it happens a lot, the other strategies evolve along with it.
John:
Not every company that has, you know, not every sort of online-focused company decides that its strategy is going to be get as many people as possible as fast as possible.
John:
I'm not sure what the breakdown is.
John:
Like, are there more sort of, you know, technology-based startups trying to get as many users as possible as fast as possible than there are trying to, like, sell a product?
John:
I mean, obviously, when you get into physical goods, it gets different.
John:
Like, the strategy of the Nest company was not to get as many users as possible as fast as possible.
John:
I don't know how many...
John:
thermostats and smoke detectors they sold but it was not like you know whatsapp type numbers uh but they made a quality product they charged people for it and it was enough to get them acquired by somebody who wanted the talents they had and i you know that worked out for them but they didn't pursue that strategy and it was still successful so you mentioned before applications where oh if it's a specialty app or whatever it doesn't apply to you but if you want to get the mass market uh i think there is a spectrum where i think of an application like capo where it's
John:
It's not like a super specialty app, like something for, you know, someone in a very specific field to use.
John:
There's tons of musicians.
John:
Musicians is a big market, but it's not mass market.
John:
Not everyone is a musician.
John:
Certainly not everyone is looking for an application to help them with their music creation process.
John:
But it's much broader than, you know, like last week's dental office software.
John:
But musicians are willing to pay for things that help them make music better.
John:
Like, especially if your application in these types of cases replaces lots of other much more expensive equipment.
John:
Suddenly your $10 app seems like a bargain compared to the $200 worth of equipment it's replacing.
John:
uh that is a very viable thing to do or even like a drawing application not everyone needs an application like acorn or something right but the people who do are actually willing to pay money for it and is that mass market well it's not as mass market as as an instant messaging app or even a podcast app i think uh but it's much more mass market than some very narrowly defined app that could maybe command a hundred dollars or whatever so
John:
What we really want to see is like the breakdown.
John:
How many are doing that crazy?
John:
Get as many people as possible and then fleece the whales for some percentage or whatever.
John:
To us, it seems like that's big.
John:
Like it seems like, oh, that's the entire store because that's all we see.
John:
They dominate the topless.
John:
It pisses us off because we think that's not like a sort of a constructive and honorable way to make money.
John:
And so to us, it seems like that's bigger than it is.
John:
But I wonder how it compares to that middle ground of people selling applications like, you know,
John:
that charge money up front to not the mass market, but also not to like just a couple hundred people and that it works out for them.
John:
I mean, I think our impression of the market is correct, that it's mostly those people, you know, doing tons of stuff because, you know,
John:
The numbers don't lie.
John:
They do dominate the top lists with their stupid free applications within app purchases and everything.
John:
But I hope that over time, just like in the dot com things, I hope over time that that crazy frenzy getting many people a possible thing will sort of not run its course, but simmer down a little bit and we will get a healthier kind of middle part of the market from people making applications and selling them to people who actually want to pay money for software.
John:
Because in the end,
John:
That's what, you know, this is a business of people paying money for software, right?
John:
And we all continue to think that that is a thing that people are going to do because software provides value.
John:
Speak for yourself.
John:
No, like even the free applications, like people are paying for software, they're just paying for, you know,
John:
virtual currency within software like they're paying they're not getting anything for like they're not getting any physical goods they're putting money in and what they're getting out is an experience so it's like buying a ticket to a movie buying a level for a game or paying money to be able to tap the screen sooner than you could previously tap the screen like they're paying money for essentially nothing and even the big scary gross top end of the market shows that people are willing to do that
John:
It should be not outside the realm of possibility to get people to pay money for things that give them value in ways other than entertainment.
John:
It's just going to be a smaller market.
John:
So I don't know what the equilibrium is.
John:
But I think we're not what I'm saying is I think we're not there yet.
John:
I think we are now tilted still way over into the candy crushes of the world.
John:
And there still needs to be a little bit more rocking back towards the middle.
Marco:
We are also sponsored this week by our friends at Hover.
Marco:
Hover is the best way to buy and manage domain names.
Marco:
You know, I had a few people on Twitter bothering me in the last few weeks about how I pronounce hover.
Marco:
How are you supposed to pronounce it?
John:
You're saying it right.
John:
I don't know what they were saying.
John:
Am I supposed to say hover?
John:
No, you're not.
John:
It's hover.
John:
Maybe it's because you emphasize the U sound.
John:
Hover?
John:
Just keep saying hover.
John:
It's fine.
Casey:
Yeah, you pronounce some things weird like query instead of query, but hover you get right.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't, I'm wondering what, please, listeners who criticize my pronunciation of hover, please record an audio file of yourself saying it properly and send it to me because I honestly don't know how I'm supposed to be saying it differently than this.
Marco:
Hover is a domain registrar that's awesome, basically.
Marco:
I don't need to explain to you guys what domain names are.
Marco:
I can just tell you what Hover is really good at.
Marco:
So, first of all, their interface is awesome.
Marco:
It's nice.
Marco:
It's clean.
Marco:
It's quick to do things.
Marco:
I've used many other registrars' control panels before, and Hover's is...
Marco:
um i think yeah i can safely say it's the best one i've used it's because i've used a lot and they're almost always universally awful um and hovers is good that's i mean that's that alone is a reason you should you should go with them but there's more reasons too so first of all they have amazing customer support you can call them on the phone if you want to and a human being picks up the phone and can help you there's no hold no wait no transfer phone support
Marco:
You can also, of course, email and do online stuff if you want to, but that option is always there for you.
Marco:
You can just call them.
Marco:
They also have great prices.
Marco:
In fact, so there's all these new domain names, like all these crazy new things, like .plumbing and all this crazy stuff.
Marco:
Most of these new domain names are on sale, big sales in the month of August.
Marco:
So if you listen to this in time, you should be able to catch this sale.
Marco:
If you want any of these new domains, check out Hover.
Marco:
They're on sale for often up to 50% off.
Marco:
They're deeply discounted.
Marco:
maybe even more than that on some of them check it out if you want like you know you can get dot ninja dot guru there's all sorts of horrible ones and a few good ones that you can get so check that out too hover includes things for free that other people make you pay for for example you get who is privacy on every domain for free you can you know there's all sorts of stuff you can do with hover and it's
Marco:
They have email hosting.
Marco:
They have Google Apps for your domain hosting.
Marco:
They also have this really cool service, which I talked a little bit about last time, called Valet Transfers, where if you want to transfer a domain name into Hover from another registrar, you can do it the normal way if you want to, but there's a very good chance when you transfer domain names that you're going to mess something up.
Marco:
Usually it's DNS settings, stuff like that.
Marco:
If you want to, optionally, Hover will at no additional charge.
Marco:
log into your old registrar you you just give them your credentials they will log into your old registrar and do the transfer for you and you can often do this with a very large number of domain names like don't think you'll have too many because they'll still do it it's pretty impressive so that's and i don't know if any of the registrars has that service so give hover a try um we have a new coupon code this week uh the coupon code this week is vinyl sounds better
Marco:
oh that's fantastic if you go to hover.com and use coupon code vinyl sounds better all one word you i assume you can spell vinyl sounds better uh you will get 10 off your first purchase at hover and uh really again i can't recommend them enough they're a domain record store that's awesome basically that's that's all i need to tell you guys you guys are geeks you know what this is about
Marco:
You can get so many domains these days.
Marco:
You can get them for humor.
Marco:
You can get them for business.
Marco:
You can get them for your own personal site or email address.
Marco:
If your blog is like something.wordpress.com, that doesn't look very good.
Marco:
Just get your own domain.
Marco:
Manage it.
Marco:
Manage your identity.
Marco:
There's tons of reasons to buy domain names these days.
Marco:
If you're drunk and have a funny idea for a domain name or an app, just buy the name.
Marco:
Great.
Marco:
Go to Hover.
Marco:
Tons of reasons to buy domain names.
Marco:
And if you're going to buy it ever...
Marco:
you should buy it at Hover.
Marco:
So thanks a lot to Hover for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Once again, don't forget to use coupon code VINYLSOUNDSBETTER for 10% off.
Casey:
I love that they basically forced you to admit that vinyl does indeed sound better.
Casey:
Also, I'd like to add, before anyone jumps on me, that earlier today I noticed that .BMW is a top-level domain now, and I did not at mention or anything Hover in that tweet, and they replied to my tweet saying,
Casey:
With the following, it says, at CaseyList.BMW is being operated as a closed TLD, so not available to the public.
Casey:
No white.BMW for you.
Casey:
And then they had a link to the actual registrar page, which I thought was hysterical.
Casey:
So even when they're kind of sort of trolling, they're super nice people.
Marco:
Yeah, and they're fans of ours, too.
Marco:
So, you know, they're good people.
Marco:
How bad could they be if they like this show?
Casey:
Let's move on to TiVo.
Casey:
Apparently, there's been an update.
Casey:
They're still in business?
Casey:
Who knew?
John:
I've been waiting for this update for a while since I read about it, but they do like sort of a staged rollout, I think.
John:
I don't know how they determine the stages, but anyway.
John:
I finally got it on my TiVo.
John:
So the thing with TiVo, I've been complaining for many years that the user interface is not as responsive as it should be, especially after they went to high definition.
John:
At first, they didn't have their menuing interface wasn't high definition, even though the video was.
John:
Then they added a high definition menuing interface.
John:
written in Flash, and it was super duper slow and terrible, and it just made me sad.
John:
And that was the case until my current TiVo, which is the TiVo Romeo, which has a much more responsive user interface, much more responsive than the previous ones.
John:
There's still some standard def menus in there, which is shameful in this late stage.
John:
But anyway, at least they made the main interface that you use faster.
John:
Well, so this update supposedly was going to make the older TiVos have the same interface as the most recent models.
John:
It would look the same and it was supposedly much, much faster.
John:
And I wish I could find this for the show notes.
John:
I actually spent a while looking for it a couple of days ago.
John:
Maybe someone in the chat room will know.
John:
uh they stopped using flash for their interface so good on them uh whether that was why it was slow or just a side effect or something else bottom line is the flash interface on the old evo's terribly slow this new interface uses something to replace flash and i can't for the life of me remember what the hell the name of the technology is it's not something you've heard of it's like a weird name it's not swift obviously that's popping into my head because the language things maybe started with an s or something if anyone in the chat room knows what they're using instead of flash because there was this big presentation from the tivo people that said uh
John:
Here's how we evaluated this new technology.
John:
And here's how we sort of ported our existing infrastructure over to it and figured out what the issues were in terms of, you know, CPU performance and memory usage and all this other stuff.
John:
It was an interesting presentation that I, of course, read and just completely lost track of.
John:
And it's nowhere in any of my browser histories that I wouldn't know what to search for anyway.
John:
Anyway, bottom line, this update came.
John:
I got it on my TiVo Premiere that I moved upstairs when I got the new TiVo Romeo downstairs.
John:
It does look like the new interface, and it is way, way faster.
John:
It is not as fast as it is on the Romeos, I feel like, but it is much faster.
John:
So if you have an old TiVo Premiere,
John:
It is no longer embarrassingly, disgustingly slow if you have the latest version of the software, which is a free update to everybody.
John:
So that's kind of good news.
John:
If you happened to buy one and didn't know how slow it was, or if you were holding off buying a used one because they're all slow and gross, they've actually made their hardware faster with software, and I give them a big thumbs up.
Casey:
Nice.
Casey:
Really quickly before we move on to topics, because we haven't gone on long enough with follow-up.
Casey:
This is still follow-up?
Casey:
Yeah, sort of.
Casey:
How's the review, John?
John:
You can ask me this every week.
John:
It's like torture.
Casey:
This is me encouraging you to accomplish the review as quickly as possible.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So this weekend, my wife was nice enough to take the kids out to do various activities.
John:
And I got a lot of stuff done, which only serves to remind me how much more I have to do.
John:
I feel all accomplished.
John:
And I wrote an entire section and a half.
John:
I'm like, oh, great.
John:
Only like nine more to go.
John:
Just do that nine more times.
John:
And then you look at the calendar and you think about the possibility of that.
John:
And yeah, it's bad.
Casey:
Okay, on that happy note.
Casey:
Marco, do you want to quickly talk about the Overcast update that is pending?
Casey:
Is that correct?
Marco:
Well, first, let me tell you about our last sponsor because we're running long here.
Marco:
Our last sponsor is lynda.com, L-Y-N-D-A.com.
Marco:
lynda.com is an easy and affordable way to help individuals and organizations learn.
Marco:
You can instantly stream thousands of online video courses created by experts on software, web development, graphic design, and more.
Marco:
Linda.com works directly with industry experts and software companies.
Marco:
To provide timely training, often the same day new versions or releases hit the market, so you're always up to speed with new stuff.
Marco:
So, for example, if Adobe makes a new Creative Suite version, they have videos usually on day one to help you learn all the new stuff.
Marco:
All these video courses on Linda are produced at the highest quality.
Marco:
This is not like the homemade videos you see on YouTube.
Marco:
These courses are broken into bite-sized pieces.
Marco:
You can learn at your own pace and learn from the start to finish or just find a quick answer by skimming through and going in the middle somewhere.
Marco:
They have tools on these, including searchable transcripts, playlists, and they even have the thing, if you use LinkedIn, I'm sorry.
Marco:
But if you still use LinkedIn, you they have little certificates that somehow you a certificate of course completion.
Marco:
So when you watch something on if you watch like a whole course in Linda, you can have that published into your LinkedIn profile to advertise to other unfortunate souls who are using LinkedIn that you completed a course.
Marco:
And this could help your job prospects because if you're in a kind of environment where people look at LinkedIn, they probably care about stuff like what you know, your qualifications, all this stuff.
Marco:
So that's another fun thing they've added.
Marco:
Now, lynda.com courses cover beginner to advanced, all experience levels.
Marco:
They also have these cool mobile apps.
Marco:
iPhone, iPad, and Android are all supported.
Marco:
Now, you get...
Marco:
One low monthly price of $25 gets you unlimited access to the entire lynda.com library.
Marco:
They have over 100,000 videos and they're always adding more.
Marco:
$25 a month gets you unlimited access to that.
Marco:
And if you upgrade to one of their premium plans, you can also download the videos for offline storage on your iPhone, iPad, or Android device and watch them offline.
Marco:
Premium plan members can also download project files and practice along with the instructor if you want to.
Marco:
So fun stuff there.
Marco:
Even if you just do the $25 a month basic plan, you get tons of value out of that.
Marco:
They gave me a trial of it and I kept going with it.
Marco:
It's fantastic.
Marco:
They have all sorts of topics in their courses.
Marco:
HTML, PHP, MySQL, iOS 7, even things like iPad tips and tricks if you want something like that or if you know someone in your life who needs something like that.
Marco:
Very useful.
Marco:
How to create web apps.
Marco:
How to use like Perl 6.
Marco:
Is that a thing yet, John?
John:
Sort of a thing.
Marco:
That's one of those things that does not have a short answer.
Marco:
All sorts of great things, from technical stuff to apps like Logic and Final Cut Pro, the Creative Suite apps, down to things like software, web design, web page making, all this cool stuff.
Marco:
OpenGL, they even have a course here that's called Microsoft Intelligence Business Stack Fundamentals.
Marco:
I'm guessing somebody out there knows what that means, but it's definitely not me.
Marco:
But they have it.
Marco:
And so I can watch that and I can learn it if I want to.
Marco:
They also have more important things like managing your mobile photos, which, as we know, is not a simple topic.
Marco:
They have videos to help you out with that.
Marco:
So go to lynda.com slash ATP and you will get a free seven-day trial.
Marco:
It's a great offer.
Marco:
And if you want to continue after that, again, just $25 a month for unlimited access to all the videos in their entire library.
Marco:
Go to lynda.com slash ATP to try it free for seven days.
Marco:
Once again, that's lynda.com slash ATP.
Casey:
All right, so tell us about this Overcast update.
Marco:
I've been preparing the 102 update for a few weeks now.
Marco:
It's been a little while.
Marco:
And it's mostly bug fixes and minor improvements.
Marco:
And then a few days ago, I got a notice in the App Store Rejection Center.
Marco:
What is it called?
Marco:
The Resolution Center.
Marco:
Yes, where they post rejection messages now.
Marco:
So I got a notice in the Rejection Center saying, upon reevaluation, I hadn't even submitted an update at this point.
Marco:
They're just out of the blue.
Marco:
So upon re-evaluation, we've decided that you're in violation of this rule 17.2, which is the rule that basically says you can't require account-based logins with personal information for things that basically shouldn't require a login.
Marco:
So I responded, first of all, saying, well, there really aren't any features in my app that don't need the account.
Marco:
The entire app is account-based.
Marco:
Oh, and they said, you need to submit a build that fixes this within two weeks, or we'll pull you off the store, basically.
Marco:
They said it nicer, but that's the gist of it.
Marco:
I first responded with my thing saying, well, basically trying to explain my way out of it.
Marco:
The reason why... I didn't explain all this.
Marco:
The reason why I didn't have an account-free option at the beginning... And I explained this a little bit before, I think.
Marco:
But the main reason why is that you think of the situation where...
Marco:
Suppose somebody has an anonymous sync account, which is kind of what I call them in the back end.
Marco:
So these anonymous sync accounts, then they, at some point, they launch their iPad or whatever.
Marco:
They launch the app on a different device.
Marco:
And they see a login screen and they assume mistakenly that they've created an account.
Marco:
So they type in a username and password.
Marco:
They ignore the text in the box that says, this account doesn't exist.
Marco:
Do you want to create it?
Marco:
And they just click yes, because that's what most people do.
Marco:
Then they're presented with this newly created account that is blank.
Marco:
And then they email me saying, I can't believe you deleted all my stuff.
Marco:
It's all gone.
Marco:
Oh my God, you suck.
Marco:
One star refund.
Marco:
Everything's horrible.
Marco:
You've ruined my life.
Marco:
I saw this happen so many times with Instapaper.
Marco:
This is how people actually behave.
Marco:
Trust me.
Marco:
It's like this will happen.
Marco:
And because people, you know, people don't read text on screens and they don't remember, understandably, because there's so many things out there.
Marco:
They don't remember what they've made accounts for and what they haven't.
Marco:
um they often will do it with two different email addresses but not much i can do about that so i wanted to avoid this this support issue of what do you do with you know with it with this kind of situation it's not good if those people write in i can i can explain to them oh well you know you have this other account here if i can find it if i can figure out who it is which i probably can't with anonymous stuff but anyway
Marco:
uh you know you could try with support but the problem is most of the time those people won't even email in support they'll just assume that i'm a terrible person and an incompetent programmer i lost everything of theirs and they will just be angry and never buy my stuff again they'll tell their friends how much it sucks or they'll post a review or they get a refund from apple all of which suck for me
Marco:
So I really did not want to go down that route.
Marco:
So that's why I said, let me just require it at the beginning.
Marco:
It'll just be email account, no usernames.
Marco:
I even answered that part in the fact because I'm like, no usernames necessary for this because...
Marco:
You know, I had it with its paper first, where it was at first you could enter anything for your username, email or not.
Marco:
Just any string of characters would work.
Marco:
And I had the problem, again, if people would log into a new device, type in an email address when they had used username before or vice versa, and create a new account by mistake and think everything was gone.
Marco:
So all that stuff sucks.
Marco:
I wanted to avoid it.
Marco:
So that's why I did it the way I did it at launch here.
Marco:
And I mentioned earlier, when I launched, I believe on the launch show here, when we were talking about this, I believe I said something like half of all people who downloaded it were actually creating accounts.
Marco:
If I ever wanted to raise that rate, I would have to add an option like this.
Marco:
I was considering it, but I wanted to avoid the support issues.
Marco:
So anyway, back to modern day.
Marco:
Apple tells me a few days ago, you have to do this within two weeks.
Marco:
And I explained my way out of it, maybe.
Marco:
But Apple doesn't respond quickly to those things.
Marco:
I offered in the thing, I said, you know what, if you want, you can call me and we can talk about it on the phone.
Marco:
Like two days later, or two or three days later, they tell me, we will schedule a call within three days.
Marco:
now i have a two-week deadline and i'm sitting on this bug fix update that i really need to get out there because there's 102 fix some pretty important bugs and i'm thinking you know what this is too long i can fight this now i might not win if i don't win i'll be down a whole week uh at least probably longer so then i'll have to really rush out a fix furthermore if i do win this argument i
Marco:
If I'm living on the edge of a rule, I tell people this all the time.
Marco:
Don't rely on living on the edge of a rule in the App Store guidelines.
Marco:
If I win this argument now and convince them it's okay for me to require accounts now, there is nothing guaranteeing them from...
Marco:
There's nothing guaranteeing that I will always be exempt from this rule.
Marco:
And so I could, at some point in the future, submit a really important update to fix some really important bug and have it be held up in review because they're going to get me in this rule again.
Marco:
It's a terrible situation to try to always assume I'll be able to get around this rule.
Marco:
So I decided even before I heard back from them, and I still haven't heard back from them, I decided, you know what, I'll just do it.
Marco:
I was on the fence about doing this at all to begin with.
Marco:
It wasn't like I was always totally against doing this.
Marco:
I just wanted to minimize those issues.
Marco:
But I'm like, you know, let me just do this.
Marco:
I'll probably get more users and it'll be all right.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
So I did it and I submitted, I tested it for a few, I did the whole thing over about four days implementation to submission.
Marco:
I submitted it today at noon.
Marco:
It was approved today at 8 p.m.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
This is remarkable.
Marco:
I assume that if you have one of these open issues on your app, which, you know, it's marked on iTunes Connect and everything, I assume that any update you submit gets bumped to the front of the queue because it's to fix that.
Casey:
You know, it's funny you say that because a friend of the show, Daniel Jowkett, was saying that earlier today to somebody on Twitter.
Casey:
I think it might have been Brianna Wu from Giant Space Cat.
Casey:
But yeah, that corroborates his theory as well.
Marco:
And the funny thing was, I was very upset when I first got this because I was like, I was literally about to submit 102 then.
Marco:
And I was like a day away from submitting.
Marco:
I was just in final beta testing.
Marco:
And I was so mad.
Marco:
I'm like, now I'm going to be delayed.
Marco:
All these bug figures are going to be delayed because I have to now do this and test this and everything.
Marco:
Turns out that was about a week ago.
Yeah.
Marco:
and review times recently have been about a week so i think it was kind of a blessing in disguise that you know i had to do this yes and that it's a better product for it for the most part there are going to be support issues i'm i'm going to be annoyed to deal with them people are going to be upset um but it is overall i think probably a gain we'll see and
Marco:
And it is nice that, you know, because of that jumping the queue thing, this was released today, which was probably going to be roughly when 102 would have been released if I submitted it at the normal time anyway.
Marco:
So, it's been a busy week.
Marco:
It's been a little bit of a stressful evening because I...
Marco:
I didn't have enough time to test this compared to what I usually do.
Marco:
And I assumed that I'd be able to test it during the app review process a little bit more.
Marco:
And you can only reject the binary if it's broken.
Marco:
And you shouldn't make a habit of doing that all the time, but it's nice to have that extra week of testing just in case.
Marco:
I had eight hours of extra testing this time, so we'll see.
Marco:
But yeah, that's what's going on.
Marco:
Anyway, that's about it.
Marco:
What else is new?
John:
Someone in the chat room did find what technology TiVo is using instead of Flash.
John:
It is called H-A-X-E, which I'm going to say is either Hacks or Hakes.
Marco:
That's pronounced Hover.
John:
We'll put a link to it in the show notes, but it's like a cross-platform toolkit slash cross-compiler.
John:
I think you can write code in their language, their high level language and generate code for all sorts of other platforms.
John:
It's an open source thing.
John:
Anyway, bottom line is it's way faster than Flash, way faster than TiVo's Flash implementation.
John:
And there's an article also put in the show notes from Slash Gear talking about how ditching Flash
John:
Could mean that you could put the TiVo interface on other devices like Xbox and Fire TV, and I don't see how that wouldn't have been possible also with their gross flash interface.
John:
I would also say, by the way, that TiVo's interface, like...
John:
they would probably kill to have like UI kit dropped upon them and say, here, why don't you just make your user interface in this?
John:
Like a sort of, uh, you know, a mature IDE, well-established API that when done correctly, it makes extremely perform because like, what is TiVo?
John:
It's, it's a bunch of text lists.
John:
Like the video part is the video part, but when you're going through menus, it's just like big, long scrolling lists of texts with various options that you can do to each selected item and menus.
John:
Like it's not rocket science.
Uh,
John:
And, you know, they would probably need a more powerful CPU to run UIKit in there.
John:
But anyway, I don't think hakes or hacks is the be all end all of interface things.
John:
I just am glad that my TiVo got faster.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
This has been remarkably positive from you on TiVo tonight, John.
Marco:
Are you okay?
John:
I always want them.
John:
I think they should sponsor the show.
John:
I don't understand why.
John:
I mean, I know I complain about them all the time, but I continue to buy them.
John:
And when I buy them, I buy whatever the most expensive one is that they sell.
John:
And I keep doing that year after year because I still think it's the best.
John:
And so if that's not an endorsement, I don't know what is.
John:
Yeah, I have complaints, but I have complaints about everything.
John:
They should sponsor the show.
Marco:
The strong Syracuse endorsement.
Marco:
I buy this even though I hate it.
Marco:
Well, thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Automatic, Lynda.com, and Hover.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
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, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
Don't overthink the hover thing.
John:
I actually looked it up in the dictionary just to make sure we're not all crazy.
John:
We're not.
John:
It's the same little upside-down E as to the beginning of the word other.
John:
Hover other.
Marco:
Honestly, I want people to record an audio file and send it to me of how they think I should be saying it.
John:
By people, you mean the three people who are crazy about this.
Casey:
Is it all like Australians or something?
Casey:
Because they have a tendency to pronounce things just completely wrong.
Casey:
Like cash instead of cash, for example.
John:
We're confining ourselves to American English and then we're going to go to like...
John:
Debate of what is unaccented American English?
John:
Is there such a thing or is there not?
Marco:
That's a good question.
Marco:
Well, there's like the newscaster accent, right?
Marco:
It's kind of Midwestern and kind of averaged.
John:
But that's just defined by the newscasters who were famous in those roles for a long time.
John:
So Dan Rather has an accent.
John:
Because he was famous for a long time.
John:
We we say, oh, that's that's the news or Walter Cronkite or whoever, like a few individual people from actual places in the country with actual accents hiding under their newscasteriness.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, it's hover.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
What else is going on?
Marco:
I can't.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Somebody in the chat just pointed out, was this all follow up?
John:
Yes, it was.
John:
But like, I mean, it's fine to have that because like talking about Overcast, it's always is it always going to be follow up?
John:
Because we've talked about Overcast before.
John:
Therefore, every time you talk about Overcast again, it is follow up, you know.
Marco:
We need to follow up on last week's Apple News with this week's Apple News.
John:
And the Jared Sinclair thing, I didn't emphasize that.
John:
I think this was sent because not a lot of people, so like one or two emails or tweets that thought we were trying to say that Jared's post was blaming Apple.
John:
And I listened back to the show, but didn't actually say that.
John:
But the word Jared and the phrase someone to blame were in close enough proximity to each other that people could have made that statement.
John:
uh mistaken assumption but it like it was and plus we all ramble and don't talk in complete sentences or maybe it's just me anyway uh lots of posts about this whole app store stuff and a lot of them are looking for someone or something to blame and then there was jared's post we're not necessarily saying that jared was trying to add something so that's why he wrote in to clarify and i'm glad he did because this explanation and this is the this is the magic writing technique uh that i try to use on myself and my children you write on your children
John:
No, I try to use this trick on my children.
John:
So you write something and you think you've said what you want to say, but then people who read it like misinterpreted or whatever.
John:
And then you, you know, the next task is explain to someone who is misunderstanding what you wrote, explain what you actually meant.
John:
Right.
John:
And when you do that, then you say, why don't you just write that in the first place?
John:
I mean, obviously that's, you know, a little glib, but this little introductory thing of saying, well,
John:
here's why i'm here's why i wrote this it was you know brent said this a lot of people looked at me and i wanted people to know actually i'm not a good example of that because here's why uh and he i mean that's in the post it's in there but like when you find yourself having to explain to somebody who read what you wrote and still didn't understand you have to explain it again like more clearly and you know emphasizing the parts that they're getting wrong that makes for stronger writing so in the same way as like you know having to explain something to somebody makes you understand it better um
John:
doing this exercise and doing it all before you actually publish anything is useful.
John:
Like, you know, when someone's having trouble writing something, whether it's my children or someone else, you just say, well, don't write anything.
John:
Just explain to me what you want to say.
John:
And a lot of people can do that.
John:
They're like, well, what I want to say is blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
And if you just write down everything they say during that part and put it in front of them, you say, here, type this.
John:
Just write.
Casey:
That's funny.
Casey:
So on a random note, tell me that I shouldn't sell my privacy slash soul to get symmetric file service.
Casey:
So what are they asking you to do exactly?
Casey:
I'm not clear what you have to give up.
John:
They know you have a child on the way, so...
Casey:
That's probably true.
Casey:
I've been spending so much damn time on BabiesRUs.com.
John:
No, no.
John:
They know you have a child in the way, so that's what they want.
John:
You're first born.
Casey:
Oh, that's all?
John:
Yeah, that's it.
Casey:
Worth it.
John:
Rise in HL, baby.
John:
Wow.
Casey:
What is that actually from?
John:
You never saw that movie?
John:
I can't get the title off the top of my head.
John:
Chat room, help me with the title of that movie.
John:
See how fast you can get it.
Casey:
All right, well, they're doing that.
Casey:
I saw, I think it was Zach Burr talking about this earlier.
Casey:
I forget who it was, but I'm looking at, so there's a link that I put in the chat that's a public link where it doesn't really say anything about
Casey:
getting increased speeds but behind my private page you know like my account information my rewards plus sharing online just got faster great news you're eligible for an upload speed to equal your current download speed at no additional cost to you simply click here and enroll in our my rewards plus program it's easy and free just our way of thanking you for being a loyal verizon customer faster upload speeds means better sharing experiences that's powerful
Casey:
And I guess they like snoop your stuff and you get 75.
Casey:
I would have 75-75 instead of 75-35.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm trying to figure out what exactly this is.
Casey:
That's the thing.
Casey:
It's unclear to me what exactly they're doing.
Marco:
doing because they can already snoop your stuff right but is this just is this just like they're gonna start sending you like gift card crap promos and stuff like that i mean i think because i mean i already get spam from verizon in the mail almost every day trying to upgrade me to a higher plan that includes like tv and stuff because i just had the internet and phone and and i called them like there's no way to opt out of this there's no way to get them to stop bugging me
Marco:
I would imagine they're probably already doing creepy things like selling my information to Starbucks and everything else.
Casey:
I think that's actually exactly what they're doing because it's talking about all these particular vendors like Target and ExxonMobil and Amazon and Dunkin' Donuts and Starbucks and Panera Bread and Visa prepaid card and blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
but see so they're saying apparently there's a system where you gather points to do something and the way you can gather points is to like them on facebook to go to their website to refer a friend celebrate your birthday well i celebrate my birthday every year am i are they tracking that somehow rent or buy on demand movie i mean so what what is this
John:
You know, you can usually I don't know the specifics of this deal, but you can usually take whatever service they want and then use it in such a way that you don't have any interaction with them.
John:
I'm really close to not having any interaction with Verizon at all because I don't have any of their boxes.
John:
I don't use their router.
John:
I don't have video on demand, like all these services they want to sell me and everything.
John:
I don't see.
John:
The only one they've still got me on is their stupid DNS, because if you use Google DNS or something, you don't get good geo IP routing.
John:
Even though Google says you're supposed to practice has shown me that if I use Google's IP or open Google's DNS or open DNS or something like that, I get worse speeds from like downloading, you know, Apple software where I should be pulling it from Akamai across the river.
John:
And I'm not because it thinks I'm someplace else.
John:
So I can't entirely like and Verizon, what does Verizon do with DNS?
John:
Give them an inch like, you know, you type in the wrong URL and you get some big, stupid advertising park page and Verizon DNS is super slow and crappy and I don't like it.
John:
So but I'm really close to getting rid.
John:
So it seems like if you opted into this thing and you did a similar scenario where you got rid of everything, didn't have any boxes, didn't use their router, didn't use their DNS, didn't use anything like that, didn't have video on demand.
John:
I guess like what's left like like Marco said, they're already believe me, they're already selling every ounce of your information to somebody like
Marco:
They're a horrible company.
Marco:
Everything about Verizon as a company is just horrible.
John:
But everybody sells all your information.
John:
Any information you give them, of course they're selling it to everybody.
John:
There's no more giving away of your information that they could be doing.
John:
They're already doing it as hard as they can.
John:
Unless they can make you interact, like, oh, here, take the survey to tell me what you thought of these detergent brands.
John:
Unless they have some way to get you, like...
John:
You'll be using your computer and all of a sudden you go to a site.
John:
Instead of going to the site, you see the stupid survey that comes up that wants you to rank the movies you've seen recently or some crazy thing like that.
John:
Like that seems like the only way they can get you.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
I guess I wouldn't want to be the one to experiment with this and find it out because downgrading from it or getting rid of it is probably a super pain too.
Marco:
My Rewards Plus Points are easy to get.
Marco:
The only hard part will be deciding which rewards you want.
Marco:
This includes options such as use the MyFios Registered Trademark app, connect to us through Facebook, like us on Facebook, order new equipment,
Marco:
Try Verizon's in-home agent?
Marco:
Rent or buy a FiOS trademark on-demand movie?
Marco:
Oh my god!
Marco:
I cannot decide which of these things to start with.
Marco:
These all sound so appealing.
John:
So you don't have to do any of those.
John:
That's kind of like the free antivirus software I get as part of my thing.
John:
Free online backup stuff.
John:
I just never do those.
John:
I never look at those.
John:
So if you never do any of those things, you never like them on Facebook, you never download their app, you never download their free antivirus software, like, they will email me and say, hey, I've noticed you've had this service for seven years and have never downloaded our free online backup software.
John:
It's like, it's good that you noticed that.
John:
It's not like, whatever.
John:
Like,
John:
They're always going to spam you.
John:
They're always going to send you stupid cards in the mail that you put right into the recycle bin.
John:
But I don't think they can make you do anything unless they start getting intrusive.
John:
Like the DNS thing is literally intrusive.
John:
Like you mistype a URL and you're looking at a bunch of Verizon crap.
John:
That is intrusive, which is why I wish I could get rid of it.
John:
But everything else you can just simply not use, I suppose.
Casey:
I mean, it seems to me like they're already snooping everything anyway.
Casey:
I'm already getting spammed anyway.
Casey:
Why not just get 75-75?
Casey:
You guys are supposed to convince me not to do this.
Casey:
You're not supposed to convince me to do this.
Marco:
Well, when they announced these plans a few weeks ago, they said they would be rolled out automatically for free.
Marco:
That's not true now.
Marco:
See, if they're actually requiring this, then that was BS.
Marco:
And it wouldn't surprise me if that was BS because they're a giant ISP and they're a horrible company like all giant ISPs.
Marco:
So that wouldn't surprise me.
Marco:
However, if this is indeed what's required to get this, that is complete BS.
John:
By the way, the movie was A Cry in the Dark, 1988, starring Meryl Streep.
Casey:
And that isn't originally like a dingo ate my baby or something like that.
John:
Yes, that's yes.
John:
People know it from Seinfeld, but yes.
Casey:
So what I'm hearing is I should be the guinea pig and do this.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
You always move.
Casey:
Yes, because that's totally an easy solution to this problem.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And then the post office sells your information to everyone else when you move.
Marco:
And so then everyone tracks you anyway.
Marco:
Fun stuff.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
What else is going on?
Casey:
Want to do titles?
Marco:
The Sprung Parts is pretty good.
John:
That's not what the show is about.
Marco:
Fleece the Whales.
John:
Fleece the Whales was more what the show was about than the Sprung Parts.
Casey:
Well, I'm biased, but I did like Fleece the Whales.
Casey:
That is pretty good.
John:
We've said that many times before.
John:
It's not like something we're making up.
Marco:
I used to think it's a funny concept to somehow combine whales and fleece.
John:
Yeah, well, I never liked the term whales anyway, but it's... I don't know where I got it started.
John:
I first heard it in, like... Is it Casino?
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Casinos.
Marco:
Yeah, I think I first heard it in Boiler Room.
Yeah.
Marco:
it's it's definitely like you know it got it started in businesses that don't respect people for sure speaking of verizon it's yeah it's it's definitely not a respectful term which is why zynga uses it and all these stupid free-to-play games that try to abuse people's psychology to pay them more money uh yeah it's not it's not a great term it's like eyeballs
John:
Well, it's not that it's disrespectful.
John:
If anything, it's disrespectful for the people who aren't whales because it's like none of our customers matter except for these five people.
John:
And so, I mean, for casinos, these five high rollers get everything, right?
John:
And everyone else, you don't matter because the bottom line is we make most of our money from these high rollers.
John:
It's not five people, but whatever it is, like such a small and everyone else is just there kind of like to fill seats, right?
John:
It's all about the whales.
Marco:
It also kind of insults whales.
John:
Well, I mean, they're they're treated well.
John:
They are considered important.
John:
It does.
John:
I mean, you wouldn't talk to them and tell them that they're whales because then they would feel like, wait a second.
John:
You know what this means is that my money is leaving my pocket and going into your pocket.
John:
But I mean, especially with gambling, it's like, you know, maybe that's like they understand that.
John:
Like they know when they go to Las Vegas with two million dollars and come back with zero dollars.
John:
They had a good time.
John:
That's worth two million dollars to them.
John:
Whatever.
John:
I don't understand.
John:
what they're thinking but anyway the zynga whales probably worse because it's like i feel like playing these games or buying in app purchases there is no opportunity to win like even in the casino the house is going to win almost certainly but at least there's some slim possibility that you could get lucky once like it's you're never going to become a millionaire playing candy crush so it's like a zero percent versus point oh one percent
John:
the point oh one feels better you get some excitement even if you don't win you feel like during that period of time when i lost there was a chance i could have won and that was exciting and i paid for that i don't i don't gamble goodness i really never would have guessed i i am so surprised by that statement yeah although if i did gamble i would do uh you guys aren't watching leftovers never mind i can't
John:
nope i would do that that style of gives there was a silly gambling sequence where someone goes to a roulette wheel and bets on red three times in a row and those type of odds i can figure out with like pencil and paper and fractions and i could say all right well i can calculate these odds uh well wait a minute wait hold on did he say it will land on red three times in a row yeah i understand and make that the bet yeah no it was there were pigeons involved and premonitions and yeah it was
Casey:
It's a television show, not a real one.
John:
But the whole point is like, you know, so he doubles his money.
John:
And, you know, the next time it comes around, if you put all your money back on for another 50 50 shot, you know, and just do that several times, you can, you know, through the magic of doubling, if you keep winning, but then the odds of it being anyway, whatever.
John:
That's what I would do.
John:
So it means I would immediately lose most of the time or immediately win.
John:
And then you don't have to sit there and do anything that's skill-based or complicated or takes a long time.
Marco:
So your goal with this activity that most people do for entertainment value would be to get it over with as quickly as possible and just leave.
John:
Well, so the whole thing is, like, people go to Vegas and, like, I'm going to Vegas with, like, $500.
John:
And, like, I don't care if I come home with zero.
John:
$500 is my entertainment budget, which is the way you should do it if you're not addicted to gambling, right?
John:
You just go there.
John:
You say, this amount of money I'm going to spend.
John:
And I fully recognize that I can come home with zero of it, but that's fine.
John:
I'm willing to pay $500 for a fun weekend with the excitement and the possibility of winning or whatever.
John:
But if you don't like actually playing the games, if you don't like blackjack or poker or any of these games, like,
John:
you don't enjoy the actual playing of the game.
John:
You just get that part over really fast.
John:
Just put $500 on black spin and then you win or you're lost.
John:
If you won, you leave.
John:
If you lost, you didn't.
John:
You're done in like five minutes.
John:
Then you can just, I don't know, get on the plane and leave again.
John:
Can you tell I've never been to Vegas?
John:
i just i love that you're optimizing for let's end the fun as quickly as possible but it's not fun like i'm saying this if there's no fun to be had if you don't like playing blackjack you don't like sitting at a bar if you don't like playing poker if you don't like any of those things that's not the fun part the only fun part is that brief moment when you might win or you know when you might gain money or lose money you can get that over with really quickly like well i won yeah i'm happy well i lost no i didn't and you did have that brief moment of excitement and that was it why not just do it online and save yourself the flight
John:
That's true.
John:
Although online gambling is legal in the U.S., so you'd have to do one of those offshore things, and it's really pain to get money in and out of those things.
Casey:
How do you know that?
Casey:
I was about to say, not that you would know.
John:
I work for an online gaming company many years ago.
John:
We didn't take U.S.
John:
play because it's illegal.
Casey:
But you were based in the U.S.?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, I mean, the actual servers were an Indian reservation in Canada, as they have to be, blah, blah, blah.
Marco:
They weren't in Sealand?
John:
But yeah, no, we were crushed by competitors who took U.S.
John:
play because they were based in the Bahamas and didn't have any U.S.
John:
resident employees.
John:
Because people in the United States, surprise, want to gamble online.
John:
And if you don't take their business, someone else will, and that someone else will get much bigger faster than you.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
So I didn't realize you worked in the gaming market as well because my first job out of college was Indian casinos in Oklahoma or Native American casinos, whatever the correct term is.
John:
Yeah, the slot machine things, right?
Casey:
Well, it was bingo, but we had reels on the machine.
Casey:
So you thought you were playing a slot machine, but really you were playing bingo.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, right.
Marco:
You explained on Pragmatic, right?
Casey:
It was either that or debug, one or the other.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
But like, yeah, I think it was debug.
Marco:
You're right.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like some technicality of like this type of gaming was allowed and this type of gaming wasn't allowed.
Marco:
So you did something that was technically allowed, even though it looked like a slot machine.
Marco:
Right.
Casey:
Correct.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
It wasn't a skill game.
Casey:
And so poker, blackjack, et cetera, were considered skill games.
Casey:
I don't know why a straight up slot machine wasn't allowed.
Casey:
I think because it had to be multiplayer.
Casey:
And so the bingo was, strictly speaking, multiplayer.
Casey:
So all these DOS machines had some sort of TCP networking that were going to, I think, a Windows server that would issue the bingo cards and pull the same numbers for everyone on the floor.
Casey:
It was weird.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
So are we going with fleece whales?
Casey:
Yeah, we have to.
Casey:
It's too good.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
What else is going on?
Casey:
Anything?
John:
You want to try to squeeze in this Wii U thing in 30 seconds?
Casey:
Not really.
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
Damn it.
John:
Why don't you describe the tweet sequence, Marko?
Marco:
Alright, so Patrick Thornton, PW Thornton on Twitter, said, Also, you guys need to talk about how the Wii U quietly became the next-gen system with by far the best games.
Marco:
I replied, saying, Could be a good topic.
Marco:
The Wii U is the only next-generation system I've been tempted to try because of its games.
Marco:
uh and that's true basically you know i mostly with everyone raving about how good mario kart is uh the wii u is the only next gen system that i that i intended to try um however i still haven't bought one because i keep reminding myself that i will probably never actually play it in practice because i'm not a very good gamer
John:
Yeah, Patrick's tweet is just an accurate description of the current situation and not a revelation about a reality that people don't realize.
John:
Yes, the Wii U does have some games that are reviewed well that people like, but doesn't change how many Wii U's are in the market, does not change the size of the Wii U game catalog, does not change the pipeline of upcoming Wii U games, does not change the fact that...
John:
pretty much every anticipated or currently popular AAA title is available for PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 4 and not the Wii U because it can't run them and it has a small installed base.
John:
Like, all these things, they all continue to be true.
John:
Uh...
John:
Nintendo's got its work cut out for it.
John:
That's why I thought this was a tweet.
John:
People are surprised to learn that the third place game console that nobody wants has some good games.
John:
Of course it does.
John:
People think people don't buy the Wii U because it stinks.
John:
No, it's like when the new Zelda comes out for the Wii U, I fully expect that it will be highly satisfying to rabid Zelda fans like myself.
John:
That doesn't make the system more successful.
John:
That doesn't make...
John:
It's like, oh, you should totally buy a Wii U now because it's got these three good, really awesome games.
John:
And people point out, oh, there's nothing I really want to play on the PlayStation 4.
John:
I don't have a PlayStation 4 yet either because there's nothing I really want to play on it.
John:
But I know that the game's pipeline, the upcoming game's pipeline for the PlayStation 4 is crazily big and good and has exciting things in it, including a game that I've been waiting for for seven years, which may never be released.
John:
The Wii U game pipeline looks like a desert and it's sad and it makes me sad.
John:
So I do have a Wii U. I don't have a PlayStation 4.
John:
But over the long haul in this generation, unless it's intended as something drastic to turn it around, they're going to continue to not get the popular AAA games.
John:
And every year or two, they're going to come out with one or two gems because they're really good at making games.
John:
But that's not going to be enough to make a difference.
John:
It doesn't seem like.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I kind of felt like the reason why the Wii U seemed interesting to me is not because it's a great game system.
Marco:
It's because I kept hearing about these good games for it.
Marco:
And, you know, if I wanted to academically buy the best game system, I'd probably buy the PS4.
Marco:
I don't think it would be much of a decision.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
I don't care much about games.
Marco:
And so all the games that are coming out that are big blockbusters that are not going to be available on the Wii U are very likely to be games I'm not going to play anyway and not care about anyway.
Marco:
The problem is, because I'm so nonchalant and not involved with gaming, I'm probably not even involved enough to own a Wii U.
Marco:
I'd probably play Mario Kart for a few days and play Mario Super 3D World whatever for another few days and then never look at them again.
Marco:
So that's why I'm not going to get it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
you don't hear anybody talking about the great games on the PS4 or the Xbox one.
John:
Well, you do if you read gaming sites, because I mean, everyone's talking about destiny and there be, that's, that's a cross platform game everywhere except for the Wii U, of course.
John:
Uh, but that is a really highly anticipated, sure to be almost certainly going to be popular game.
John:
Uh,
John:
if you don't read about people being excited about that, or it's because you're not reading gaming sites because you're not a console gamer, but like early in any console's life, the launch games are usually crap.
John:
And then it takes a while for things to get up to speed.
John:
And then one or two gems come in.
John:
This is actually the nicest generation in that the indie game is very quickly.
John:
Like you got indie ports of, of games that already knew were good that you were available that are now available on the consoles because they all have online stores.
John:
Uh, and yeah,
John:
A couple of the post-launch games haven't been that bad, but like a console generation, they're in it for the long haul.
John:
And the catalog and the upcoming game releases all look good, all highly anticipated by people who like PlayStation 4s.
John:
And Sony just announced their sales numbers at some gaming... What the hell is it?
John:
Press conference at some gaming convention in Europe.
John:
They said their install base is 10 million now.
John:
which is pretty good that seems pretty good right it's been out for nine months 10 million roughly a million a month that's it's it's growing uh it's selling faster than the ps3 did which is not that much of a feat because the ps3 was like 600 bucks and had a slow start uh but you know they're doing well and nintendo is not selling a million we use a month
Casey:
Yeah, I want to try Mario Kart Wii U, whatever it's called.
John:
It's just Mario Kart.
John:
Double Dash is still better.
John:
I never even played that one.
Casey:
Yeah, I've never played Double Dash, and I've never seen a Wii U in the wild outside of like a Target store in your house.
John:
Yeah, me too.
John:
It is interesting, technically.
John:
I think if both of you got Nintendo Land and played through all the things, you would have gaming experiences that you had never had before, but they're all... What's Nintendo Land?
John:
It's the thing that like has a bunch of mini games that show different mechanics with the controllers.
John:
It's a good demo of like, here's all the things you can do with this crazy, stupid tablet game pad thing that we gave you.
John:
And you can do lots of interesting things, things that you have not done in iOS or on a Mac or like they are interesting.
John:
And some of them have do have sustainable value.
John:
Like I said, my, my,
John:
uh son's friends come over they still play the metroid blast minigame which i think does not have that much depth in it but they love it they love the you know the asymmetrical play where one person gets to be the ship and the other people are get to be the people and they can you know that the ship sees a different perspective and they're all on us you know it's it's not these are all slight games you know they're all mini games but it's a good demonstration of all the different things you can do with it
John:
But if you're not interested in an academic sense of like, oh, new gaming experiences, like, you know, kind of like a VR helmet, like, wouldn't you want to try that?
John:
Wouldn't you want to try the Oculus Rift just just to see what it's like?
John:
Yeah, you'd get that out of the way you do.
John:
But that's not something like, OK, well, now that I've seen what's possible, do I want to keep and you guys just aren't gamers.
John:
I just have to once Tiff goes through my sort of back catalog of must play games that she can already play, maybe I'll recommend a Wii U game.
John:
And then you'll have to buy one because you'll need to play something on it.
John:
But right now, I mean, Mario Kart looks great.
John:
It's extremely well done game.
John:
I have some complaints about it.
John:
I think they were driving a double dash was still better.
John:
But.
John:
You know, if you play Mario Kart, you play Mario Kart, it's Mario Kart.
Marco:
Last one I played was 64.
Marco:
Has it gotten much different since then, or is it basically the same game?
Marco:
Wii was pretty good.
Casey:
I mean, it was basically the same, though.
John:
The driving feels very different than it did in the N64 version, and the graphics are just, like, obviously phenomenally better because that was a million years ago.
John:
If you saw it, you'd be impressed, but in the end, you're driving around on carts, getting little presents, shooting shells at people, and doing all sorts of stuff.
Marco:
So, yeah, basically the same game.
John:
It's a racing game.
John:
How much can it possibly change?
John:
You go around courses and the person who gets there first wins.
Casey:
How much could Zelda possibly change?
John:
Oh, a lot.
John:
I know.
Casey:
I'm messing with you.
Casey:
But still, I mean, it's a pretty similar concept every time, is it not?
John:
Zelda is a is a more broad concept because like it's racing.
John:
It's just, you know, you go around a circuit and the person who gets their first wins and Zelda, you're playing through a narrative more or less.
John:
And the narratives like they all have a similar structure, just, you know, a bad guy, a good guy battle against evil.
John:
But there's different characters involved, different events take place.
John:
And in each Zelda, they try to come up with some new gameplay and mechanic.
John:
that uses the controller, whether it's swinging the little Wiimote around to use your sword or riding on a horse or traveling by boat or different combat systems.
John:
And so in the overall, yeah, you're playing through some story of some fight against evil.
John:
In the end, you win.
John:
Uh, but in that range is much more that you can do.
John:
Yeah, it makes sense.
John:
Playing when playing Wind Waker compared compared to playing Twilight Princess, even though you could graph them all out.
John:
And so they all have the same thing.
John:
They all have dungeons.
John:
You get a weapon, use the weapon to defeat the boss at the end of the dungeon.
John:
You get more power.
John:
Like they all do exactly the same things.
John:
But the experience of playing those two games feels very different.
John:
They look entirely different.
John:
They feel different.
John:
Uh,
John:
Whereas Mario Kart, it's like in every game you go around, of course, Mario is more or less looks the same.
John:
It's not like in one, you know, they can add motorcycles and other type of things, but it's like wheeled vehicles.
John:
You know, they can make it look like a wipeout.
John:
It would still be Mario Kart.
John:
Like you're still it's still a racing game.
John:
So there's much more freedom.
John:
uh and then this upcoming zelda game supposedly is going to finally throw away a lot of the conventions that they've been leaning on since socarina of time to actually change the gameplay so that if you did graph it out on a whiteboard it would look different like that it's not a linear progression of dungeons and it's not a dungeon weapon you can go to anything anytime you want which is more like the old version of uh zelda where you can uh
John:
If you discover it, you can go do it, even if you're not ready for it, and then you just get killed.
John:
Anyway, we're not entirely sure what the new Zelda is going to be like, but they have said they're going to break some conventions.
Casey:
Roughly, when is that out?
John:
I don't know, like 2015, 2016, something like that.
Marco:
They can just make it require like a $60 add-on controller to help their financial problems a little bit.
John:
yeah that i mean let's talk about uh you know what if you just sell to a small number of people who are willing to play money uh i wonder about like how much money could nintendo make if they just oh yeah just sell the new zelda game for 300 yeah i mean i would buy it so that's one sale right uh there are a lot of rabid zelda fans but i think that the uh whatever the economic term is for the uh the market for zelda games it's not
John:
It's either not that elastic or not that inelastic, but I've never took an economics course, so I don't know which one of those things is the correct term.