Tangled in Version Numbers
Casey:
I want to see you discipline your kids, John.
John:
No, you don't.
John:
You'll see how ineffectual I am when we meet in person with my kids sometime in the future.
Casey:
Do you use the I'm really disappointed in you approach?
Casey:
Kids don't care.
John:
Kids don't care what you say.
John:
You'll learn.
John:
You are the least impressive, intimidating.
John:
They get used to you is what happens.
John:
In so many respects, they look up to you and the things that you do have such profound effects on them.
John:
But in so many other ways, strangers are much better able to control and discipline them.
John:
Until they get used to the strangers, then they're screwed, too.
John:
Happens every school year.
John:
I mean, just ask Aaron.
John:
At the beginning of the year, they're intimidated by you.
John:
You're an authoritarian.
John:
At the end of the year, the badly behaved kids are just like, I know that person.
John:
And they just start goofing off.
Casey:
Okay, so let's do some follow-up.
Casey:
So let's talk about iTunes on Windows.
Casey:
And this was something that I did not know.
Casey:
So, John, you got an interesting tweet in the last week or so.
John:
Yeah, obviously none of us know anything about iTunes on Windows because how many of us – I think the last time I even saw iTunes on Windows was probably like in my Windows XP boot camp partition.
John:
It probably made me install it at some point, and I probably accidentally launched it once.
John:
But anyway –
John:
Chucker tweeted that Windows has a bunch of cocoa crap in it.
John:
Apparently there's an objc.dll and a corevideo.dll.
John:
I don't think corevideo is necessarily... Does anyone remember if corevideo is an Objective-C API or a C-API?
John:
Marco?
Marco:
I've never even heard of it.
Marco:
I mean, there's QuickTimeKit.
Marco:
No, I mean, what you're talking about... And actually, beyond just iTunes for Windows, when they made Safari for Windows, there was also a bunch of this stuff.
Marco:
They ported it over the whole text system.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Which is which is why Safari rendered fonts on Windows the way Macs render fonts.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So anyway, iTunes for Windows has been progressing and obviously it's not stuck in the bad old days when it was.
John:
I mean, it was originally based off those like libraries that they had ported for a quick time for Windows, but it has obviously expanded since then.
John:
from what we've heard from various people who still use itunes on windows despite its uh foundations being uh you know based partially on coco and objective c stop it is still not a good app on windows so but it's an excellent app on the mac uh people do not say that either i mean obviously i see all the feedback that agrees with me but what have you guys been seeing of like twitter feedback and email feedback about itunes
Casey:
I'd say I saw probably two-thirds in favor of you and one-third in our camp, roughly.
Casey:
Would you say the same, Marco?
Marco:
I didn't really see much about this, although my Twitter stream has been filled with other things recently.
Marco:
But I think another point to bring up here, which isn't directly related but I think is relevant, the way Apple's software works on Windows, first with QuickTime Player back in the early days, and then with iTunes, then with Safari.
Marco:
It angers so many Windows people.
Marco:
I know because I used to be one.
Marco:
Because it doesn't work the way Windows software works.
Marco:
It is not a good platform citizen.
Marco:
It is not native.
Marco:
It is like an Apple app was dropped poorly onto Windows.
Marco:
It's always like this giant pile of hacks.
Marco:
And Windows people hate them.
Marco:
They absolutely hate them.
Marco:
Geeks hate them.
Marco:
And I think that actually contributes a lot to...
Marco:
pc users uh hatred of apple sometimes because like you know the geeks have seen quicktime player for years and and all the crap it did and all the weird stuff it installed and the system tray thing and all this you know that's all the extensions it took and it was it was a really bad citizen yeah safari for windows didn't catch on for many reasons but that is one of the many reasons that it didn't catch on because it totally looked like a weird gross version of safari for the mac somehow made to lurch to life on windows and
John:
They finally came the thing was a couple of years back.
John:
They got they stopped developing that.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it was about two years ago.
John:
Yeah, I mean, which is a shame because WebKit on Windows is definitely a viable thing to do.
John:
I mean, Chrome is popular on Windows and Chrome is not particularly Windows like it is more Windows like in Safari was.
John:
But it just goes to show that Apple could have had a viable browser on Windows if they weren't so married.
John:
To making it look and act as close as possible as the Mac version, right down to the crazy text rendering that Windows people hated because it wouldn't use clear type.
John:
It would use the Mac font rendering, which looked wrong to everybody who uses Windows.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Lightning cables.
Casey:
Apparently, this is becoming the follow up that never ends.
Casey:
We have some warranty clarification and damage causes and other things to talk about.
John:
Yeah, we didn't talk about warranties last time, and I said, you know, if you have a lightning cable that's dead or something, bring it to the Apple store, maybe they'll give you a new one, maybe they won't.
John:
What I didn't say, and what I hoped was clear, but apparently it wasn't, if you have something with one of your Apple devices that goes wrong and it's still under warranty, you can get a warranty replacement.
John:
Now, in the case of cables, there's still a gray area where if you bring in something that was clearly chewed by a cat,
John:
You're at the mercy of the Apple genius if they want to be nice.
John:
Because I think like damaged caused by intentional misuse or something like you drop your iPhone in the water unless you have that special AppleCare Plus that gives you replacements.
John:
Anyway, there are nuances to this.
John:
But in general, if you're within the warranty period, yes, by all means, bring it in.
John:
You'll almost certainly get something new.
John:
What I was talking about is if you're not in the warranty period.
John:
And you still have a broken cable and you feel like, boy, this shouldn't have broken after, you know, a year and a half.
John:
You can bring that in and they may give you a new one.
John:
And we got some feedback here from Jim, who said that the the genius of the bar said the genius at the Apple bar, you know what I mean?
John:
The standard rule is that you should bring it in before it fully splits, like before the casing splits open because they're reluctant to replace it once it's split.
John:
So it's better to take it in early.
John:
So take it in if it looks like it's wearing out or whatever.
John:
But then that's just what one person said.
John:
Lots of other people said, hey, I brought it in.
John:
It was totally mangled and they gave me a new one.
John:
I brought something in.
John:
It was like five years old.
John:
No problem.
John:
Gave me no, you know, lots of people saying they got new ones and it's not a big deal.
John:
I don't think anyone wrote in to say they took in a cable that was damaged and got turned away.
John:
And you would think you would hear a couple of those stories.
John:
But anyway, it seems like if you have a damaged cable, if you go to the Apple store, if you're under warranty or if you're nice or both, you'll probably get a new one.
John:
Uh, and for the damage cause stuff, a whole bunch of people speculated about, uh, what might be causing it.
John:
Like ours aren't broken.
John:
Everyone else's are.
John:
And we talked about pulling it out by the cable.
John:
Another common thing cited by, uh, a lot of people responding to us who a lot of people attributed this advice to Apple geniuses as well is don't use your iOS device while it's plugged in, you know, to the charger or whatever, because obviously that puts extra strain on the thing.
John:
And I think one person, I wish I had saved their tweet, but I didn't.
John:
One person said they, uh, had taken to using their iPad.
John:
with the lightning cable plugged in the bottom with the ipad resting on the lightning cable so like in you know in portrait orientation resting on the lightning cable that is not a good you know that's exactly what people like uh us are thinking like what are these people doing to their cables you know are they resting on the lightning cable while they read their book don't do that that's not it's terrible for the cable uh yeah yeah just turn it upside down you get better wi-fi reception that way too
John:
Yeah, not everyone knows you can do that.
John:
And not every app supports that, right?
John:
Because that's an orientation mode that apps have to actually explicitly support.
John:
and how about uh sandeep shetty sheedy yeah good job i'm glad you tried to pronounce that one uh he i'm assuming said you're right about cable shape being quote johnny ive situation well sort of tell me about this yeah that was a couple weeks ago i was saying you know it could be i was mostly joking but i'm saying it could be one of those situations where strain relief looks nicer when it doesn't look like the traditional strain relief with like the little uh
John:
you know, concentric rings or ridges or whatever.
John:
Instead, the Apple's cables just have a smooth, slightly thicker sleeve over the connector.
John:
And we got a link to a Reddit thread where someone who used to work for Apple claims that that is exactly the case.
John:
But the basis of this claims, if it's he making these claims, I can't tell, is not particularly solid.
John:
He's basically saying industrial design runs everything at Apple, and he finds it totally plausible that
John:
He says the industrial design department hates how much strain relief looks like a power adapter.
John:
They would much prefer to have nice clean transition between the cable and the plug.
John:
But it's not, you know, and then he says, I'm sure the engineering division gave every reason the robot strain relief should look like the little rings.
John:
And I'm sure they got overridden.
John:
So it's kind of like hearsay and speculation.
John:
Slightly more support because this person used to work at Apple, and he's claiming to know that the industrial design department hates that little ring pattern type thing.
John:
I don't know.
John:
When I was reading this thing, I was looking down at my headphones that are in my head now, and they just happened to have a strain relief thing of the cable going into the headphone part, and it looks like Apple's.
John:
Is it because Sony's engineers hate the little rings too?
John:
I think that thicker sleeve type thing is a vaguely plausible technique for strain relief.
John:
It's just not as sturdy as the ring thing because the rings, you know, like they when you bend it, the rings knock into each other and make sort of a smooth curve.
John:
But anyway, I'm sure Apple knows what they're doing here.
John:
This is not new information to them.
John:
They know how many lightning cables wear out.
John:
They know how many replacements they have to hand out.
John:
If it's a problem, they will, you know, address it by either continuing to give out free cables or maybe the next version will be a little bit stronger.
John:
We'll see.
Marco:
Yeah, for whatever it's worth, I have a large quantity of headphones within eyesight right now.
Marco:
And I just took a look around as you were describing that.
Marco:
And none of them have the little like gap ridge pattern.
Marco:
All of them just have little cuffs at best, similar to the Apple lightning cable.
John:
And maybe it's like an expectation of like how much, you know, people don't expect to be yanking on the cable that goes into your headphones, right?
John:
You know, even if you're dancing around with your headphone cables, I mean, I don't know.
John:
It's an expectation of, you know, what does a typical usage look like?
John:
And I think Apple appears to have misjudged the stress and strain of typical usage of lightning cables, if our feedback is to be believed.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
Now, kind of sort of speaking of lightning cables, Frank Enderly wrote in to you to say that you were slightly incorrect about an assertion you made regarding the cables.
Casey:
Tell me more about this.
John:
My information was correct.
John:
It was incomplete.
John:
I said...
John:
The secret to knowing how to orient an Apple USB connector is to look for the logo.
John:
The logo faces up if it's a horizontal connector on an Apple device.
John:
That is true.
John:
That is also true for non-Apple USB devices.
John:
The logo facing up thing is a part of the USB standard.
John:
So, of course, that doesn't mean that everybody does it because there are plenty of...
John:
vaguely compliant USB devices out there on the market as we all know sometimes they don't even fit in the plugs or they fit too loosely or whatever but anyway that's a USB standard not an Apple standard in fact I wonder if Apple is actually in violation of the standard because it doesn't emboss the little USB logo it just sort of prints it on there I don't know I didn't actually read the thing in the standard to see if it demands that it be embossed versus a printed thing but there you go it's not just Apple that will work for you everywhere
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
Man, we're cruising through this follow-up.
Casey:
All right, so just a little bit more.
Casey:
There is a Mac that is sold with an optical drive.
Casey:
A lot of listeners came out of the woodwork to tell us that the 13-inch MacBook Pro, non-retina, just the 13-inch MacBook Pro, is still a thing.
Casey:
It still has a platter hard drive and it still has a onboard super drive.
Casey:
And actually, I just noticed it's labeled in the specifications page as an 8x super drive, which just made me remember.
Casey:
Do you remember back in the days when there were just CD burners and there were like 52x CD readers and they were like 8x burners?
Casey:
And oh, man, you thought you were so cool when you had like a 52X reader and you could, you know, load whatever, you know, Wing Commander 3.
Casey:
Well, that's too old, but you know what I'm driving at.
Casey:
You know, one of these old CD-based games in no time and the loading times were instant.
Casey:
Well, John doesn't remember this, but you remember this, Marco, I assume.
Casey:
And oh, God, those were the days.
Marco:
Well, the loading times weren't instant because first you'd hear the CD spin up and then spin up further.
Marco:
It'd be like...
Marco:
Yeah, just like step through all the speeds.
Marco:
So everything would just freeze on your computer while this happened.
Marco:
Because I think this was before more advanced buses.
Marco:
I think at that time, the type of IDE bus they plugged into, one device would monopolize the whole bus still, which was later alleviated, I think.
Marco:
But at that time, it wouldn't.
Marco:
And so they would just...
Marco:
As you'd sit there hearing that whirlwind spin up and spin up and spin up, everything would just lock on your computer while that happened.
Marco:
Yeah, it was a great time for computers.
Marco:
There was also the Kenwood 100X drive, which used, if I remember correctly, seven lasers in parallel and an actual spinning speed of something like 12X.
John:
and uh and and i actually had one of these and it was a really nice drive because it was it was way quieter than all the other ones um but for whatever reason i never caught on probably just the complexity of it well you know the x's and like the you know from 2x 5x 52x is time isn't it times the normal data rate for the 1x cd rom which was super it's like yeah which is it's 150 kilobytes a second per x
John:
right it's ridiculous so that's why an 8x dvd is putting out way more data than a 100x cd because dvd data rate just you know from the how much you get from a 1x spinning dvd is yeah they reset the rates yeah dvd i believe it's some dvd is something like nine times the cd speed something like that man i never thought i'd need to know these again
Casey:
Yeah, and I remember just having this 52X drive and thinking I was so awesome.
Casey:
And especially since my first CD-ROM drive was way early on, and it was actually, what was the term?
Casey:
Was it a caddy where you put the CD in a plastic thing with a lid on it, and then you stuck the plastic thing with the lid on it that had the CD inside of it?
Casey:
into the cd-rom drive and it was slower than dirt and i remember playing like where in the world is carmen san diego on this and oh god it was so cool i think this was the 386 machine that we had and then we made it smoking fast by putting a math coprocessor on it nice oh man those were the days
John:
This is a good time for us to appreciate Apple's URL rot on their website because that link for the 13-inch MacBook Pro with an optical drive, look at the URL.
John:
It's www.apple.com slash MacBook hyphen pro slash specs.
John:
That's the whole URL.
John:
I checked it like three times.
John:
Like, did I put the wrong link in there?
John:
MacBook Pro slash specs is the link to the one with the optical drive.
John:
The ones to the current MacBook Pro is MacBook Pro hyphen specs hyphen retina.
John:
weird so like they're not i mean normally they do replacement like so the new macbook pros you know like the os 10 page like there's a main os 10 page and then like slash preview os 10 for the new version and when the new version is released you know yosemite will just be at plain old slash os 10 or whatever the url is but somehow retina got stuck in the url and they didn't do full replacement on it and they didn't manage their redirects well so anyway they need to they need to work on that at least there's no uh at the end of it
Marco:
Which do you think will be the last Apple product to include a spinning disc?
Marco:
And your choices are probably that MacBook Pro, the Mac Mini, the iPod Classic, or the iMac.
John:
Does the Mac Mini come with an optical as an option anymore?
Marco:
No, a spinning disc, like a hard drive.
John:
Oh, I'm going to say the iMac.
Marco:
normally i would say the imax i think you're right i think well see the chat's all saying mini i would actually vote for the ipod classic because this thing is just it's an undead zombie product it will never be killed oh yeah if they just if they just never get rid of it right you're right it will win it will win it will win by never ever changing but always being for sale yeah
Marco:
Because I could totally see them like, you know, designing the next iMac because three and a half inch drives are pretty large, like physically.
Marco:
And I can totally see them designing, you know, one or two generations from now, an iMac that is much thinner across the whole thing, not without that big like pyramid in the back, much thinner and all solid state, just like a MacBook Pro.
Marco:
They're right in a MacBook Pro.
John:
I mean, that's why that's why I think the mini will go, because its whole thing is it's small and, you know, it's you don't expect it to have tons of internal storage.
John:
So it'll go full SSD.
John:
But like, did you see the recent announcements?
John:
Like, see, it has like an eight terabyte drive, three and a half inch, eight terabyte drive.
John:
Yeah, but Apple's Apple's already not like, do they even offer a four terabyte in the iMac?
John:
I don't think they do.
John:
I think they talked about a three, right?
John:
I know they're always lagging behind.
John:
But like, if there's going to be one machine left, they can actually have that actually has enough room.
John:
For a three and a half inch drive, it's going to be the iMac because it's gated by the size of the screen.
John:
I guess maybe they'll get sick of that bulge being so big and it'll just keep shrinking.
John:
Do they have 2.5 inch drives in the current iMac?
John:
I don't even know if they still have three and a half.
John:
That's exactly what I was going to ask.
John:
They say the chat room says it's 2.5 in the current iMac.
John:
I don't think that's true.
John:
I thought it was, but...
John:
Three people in the chat room said it, and three people in the chat room are never wrong.
John:
Do three terabyte hard disks at 2.5 inches exist?
John:
I don't think they do.
John:
All right.
John:
Now there's dissension in the chat room.
John:
If only we could look this up somewhere.
John:
I'm on iFixit.
John:
I can only go so quickly.
John:
All right.
John:
Anyway, we'll move on, and Marco can cut that out.
Marco:
No, because if I'm right, I'm going to leave it in.
Marco:
Of course you are.
Marco:
That sure looks like a teardown that has a three and a half inch drive to me.
Casey:
Oh, did somebody already post it?
Marco:
If this is the most recent one, yeah, TyTy in the chat posted this link that clearly shows a three and a half inch drive.
Casey:
I was with you.
Casey:
I was about to call you out and say, no, I'm pretty sure.
Marco:
Dan Stutters in the chat says two and a half in the 21 inch iMac and three and a half in the 27.
Marco:
Oh, interesting.
John:
You have failed me for the last time, chat room.
Casey:
I'm sure that's a pop culture reference I'm missing.
Casey:
But anyway... Oh, Lord, Casey.
John:
All right, yes, let's move on.
Casey:
So speaking of follow-up that never ends, John Casey, no relation, pointed out to me via email that quote-unquote speed match is coming to Verizon Fios, quote, in the coming months.
Casey:
And so if you recall, I was...
Casey:
I had sold my soul and Sprout in order to get symmetrical internet.
Casey:
And this John Casey said that, well, if you were just a patient person, you would have been okay.
Casey:
And it will be in the coming months.
Casey:
But let me tell you, my 7575 internet is magnificent.
John:
I didn't get one of those emails.
John:
Is it regional?
Casey:
I don't know, but I would assume so.
John:
All right.
John:
I'll just wait patiently.
Casey:
Let me repent publicly that apparently that quote was from Star Wars, and now the internet hates me even more than perhaps they might have.
Casey:
So my mistake.
Casey:
I'm sorry, internet.
Marco:
You know who doesn't hate you?
Marco:
Fracture.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
I have a bunch of Fracture prints in my house.
Marco:
Right now I can see five within eyeshot.
Marco:
What is the word for?
Marco:
I guess within view.
Casey:
I think within eyeshot.
Marco:
Within eyeshot, I have five fractures, two big ones, three small ones.
Marco:
I love these things because for a few reasons.
Marco:
So first of all, and one of the points they tell me to say is they put everything you need to get your photo on the wall or on your desk right in the box.
Marco:
So if you get a desk mount, it comes with it.
Marco:
If you get a wall mount, it even comes with the anchor that goes in the wall if you need to use a drywall anchor.
Marco:
Everything is included.
Marco:
The packaging is fantastic.
Marco:
It is certainly a good question to ask how they ship around big pieces of glass in relatively efficient boxes without them breaking.
Marco:
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Marco:
Their packaging is awesome.
Marco:
And I've never had one arrive broken.
Marco:
They even have the little arrows on here.
Marco:
Pull here.
Marco:
It's very nicely designed.
Marco:
Anyway, every fracture is handmade and checked for quality by their small team in Gainesville, Florida.
Marco:
Definitely one of the best things in Florida.
Marco:
And prices start at just $12 for a 5x5 inch print.
Marco:
And so what I use the 5x5 inch size for, it's this nice little square.
Marco:
I use it for my app icon.
Marco:
So whenever I make a new app, which happens all the time, whenever I make a new app, I get an icon printed on
Marco:
of it and i hang on the wall so now i have this little like trophy row of the apps i've made on the wall and it looks great i'll link to it in the show notes and i've been doing this for a while and now i'm seeing uh every time we do one of these spots and i mentioned this a couple days later we'll get a tweet from somebody else saying they did it and they'll show a picture of theirs and everyone loves doing this so if you're a developer you have apps even if you're a podcaster you have podcasts podcast artists square too uh they also have non-square sizes if you want to do something that's rectangular they have that as well uh really
Marco:
fantastic service i love their prints they look they look great and you don't need to frame them or anything like you just the print is effectively the frame um so it's really an incredibly good value like if your other option is either buying a frame or having something custom framed it's a fantastic value and the print quality is great i love it um i'll keep buying them so go to fracture me.com to see more and you can get 15 off with coupon code atp
Marco:
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Marco:
That will let you know they came from the show as well.
Marco:
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Marco:
Thank you very much to FractureMe.com.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Fracture for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
Okay, so we had a request from dear friend of the show, Merlin Mann, and he had asked, I will quote him, I'd love to hear John's thoughts on the TiVo Romeo OTA, who it's good for and why, and is it worth it given the fee?
Casey:
Now, I know nothing about TiVo.
Casey:
So, John, can you start by explaining to me what makes the TiVo Romeo OTA different than other TiVos?
Marco:
Do we know that it's not pronounced OTA?
Marco:
We do not.
Marco:
I'm going to go with that.
John:
So it's not out yet.
John:
I read a preview on CNET of it, and that's the only information I have about this thing.
John:
It is a... Romeo is their branding for the current line of TiVo DVR.
John:
It's got a little hard drive in it.
John:
It's got a CPU...
John:
It will record television that comes into your house.
John:
The TV will run with your OTA, like the name says, gets, God, I don't even know what OTA, over the air.
John:
It's a capital T has thrown me.
John:
Anyway, yes, it gets over the air broadcast.
John:
It doesn't take in cable through either a cable card or anything like that.
John:
It gets high-definition television from an antenna over the air.
John:
And that's all it does.
John:
And it's interesting because I think this is the first TiVo since way back when, since, you know, maybe the first version.
John:
I don't remember.
John:
The first TiVo I got was Series 2, and I've always had it hooked up to cable.
John:
So I don't remember what the old over-the-air analog stuff was like.
John:
But...
John:
This one does not take cable input, and it's only $50 for the box.
John:
And it's this little tiny box.
John:
It has a small hard drive for $50 you wouldn't expect much.
John:
It's a 500-gigabyte hard drive, which doesn't actually hold that much high-def video.
John:
It has four tuners, which is nice because it used to be four tuners was the top of the line, so they're making some progress there and making that technology go down market.
John:
And it costs $15 a month.
John:
And I think from looking at the CNET article, I don't think there's a lifetime thing.
John:
Like other TiVos, if you don't want to pay a monthly fee for the TiVo service, you can just pay a lump sum up front.
John:
And if you plan on keeping it and using it for more the next number of years, you can do the math and figure out what makes more sense for you.
John:
I always buy the lifetime stuff with my TiVos because I use them until they die and they haven't actually died yet.
John:
So...
John:
I use them until I buy a new TiVo.
John:
I use them until I have gotten my money's worth out of the lifetime service frequently, but I don't think there's any lifetime service for this $50 thing.
John:
So yes, it's super cheap, but then you have to pay $15 a month.
John:
So who is it good for and why?
John:
I think maybe it's good for TiVo, the company, because it's a way to $50 will trip people into buying because it's like, oh, it's so cheap.
John:
You know, like I'm a cord cutter.
John:
I don't have cable service or whatever, but I like to watch my local sports or whatever.
John:
Something else that I can't get in a convenient way.
John:
If I just get this $50 box, I hook it up to my TV.
John:
I'll be able to record the local sports games.
John:
They get to use the same TiVo interfaces on their big fancy boxes, which, as we noted in the last show, doesn't use flash anymore.
John:
It isn't horrendously slow, which is nice.
John:
And, you know, and they don't either don't think too much about or figure they'll just, you know, stomach the $15 a month for a couple months to see if they like it.
John:
And the reason I think this is good for TiVo is because once you get used to that experience, like especially with cord cutters, you're used to, you know, firing up the Apple TV or watching something on their iPad, you're
John:
TiVo is super convenient.
John:
Once you hook it up to your television, you stop using your television the way you used to.
John:
And you get used to the convenience of having a built-in DVR right there.
John:
It's the screen you go to when you want to watch television, and there's all your stuff.
John:
And you say, well, I do the same thing with my Apple TV.
John:
Or I do the same thing with HBO Go.
John:
I guess you'd have to have a cable description of that or a shared password or whatever.
John:
But in my experience, having used all of these different kinds of ways to get video, TiVo is the most like old TV where you sit down in front of your television, you turn it on and there and you, you know, point the remote at the TV and there's your stuff.
John:
and there's no booting, and there's no launching, and there's no waiting for it to wake from sleep, and there's no doing any of this other stuff, even if it's not our fastest interface in the world, it is a convincing sort of replacement for your television that changes the way you watch TV.
John:
And the reason I say this is good for TiVo and not for people buying this thing is because...
John:
Once you get used to this, you're going to want to watch all your TV this way.
John:
Any television that you watch on a television set, I really feel like once people get used to watching a television like that, they're going to turn it on, look for the show they want to watch, and remember, oh, yeah, I have to watch that one on Apple TV.
John:
And they've got to switch inputs and then go over to the thing and then wait for the Apple TV to wake from sleep and then move the little thing around and hold on the menu button to get back to the top-level thing and go into the app they want and then get an iTunes error.
John:
And it's just...
John:
It is, you know, it's not as nice as an experience as TiVo.
John:
And a tiny hard drive is not going to hold that much stuff.
John:
And $15 a month is just brutal.
John:
So I can't imagine someone, I would not recommend this box to anybody.
John:
If someone wants to record television that comes into their house in real time, you know, time shift it for later, I would recommend they get, they either use their cables company DVR if they want to get something super cheap and terrible.
John:
Although many people tell me they like their cable company DVRs.
John:
But anyway, it can be inexpensive or they get a good TiVo.
John:
I think this is like the thin edge of a wedge for TiVo just trying to say, you know, we think that if we can just get our interface in front of people, they will realize that it's a nicer way to watch television than almost any of the other alternatives.
John:
And I agree with them.
John:
It is better.
John:
I watch most of my television on TiVo if I can help it.
John:
It is nicer than all the other ways I have to watch television.
John:
um it's a shame this doesn't include the streaming stuff i don't know why i mean they're cheaping out or whatever but like the fancy tivos have you can watch stuff you can transfer stuff to your ipad and then take your ipad like on a plane and watch something you pulled off your tivo you can watch it by streaming it over the network from your tivo to yourself although the bandwidth required to do that with hd video is pretty terrible i've done it a couple times but it doesn't look great um
John:
But they don't have those features built into this $50 box.
John:
You can buy this other much more expensive box.
John:
It's like a TiVo stream or something that adds this capability.
John:
All these are reasons not to get this $50 box.
John:
Don't recommend it for anybody.
John:
But I do recommend if you have any interest in DVRs, maybe here's what I recommend this for.
John:
If you want to spend $80, so two months for the $15 a month service plus $50 for the thing, you just want to try it out.
John:
If you like it, I recommend getting a good TiVo.
John:
If you don't like it, no, you're out at 80 bucks, so what?
John:
Not a big deal.
John:
That's basically all I have to say about this.
Marco:
When I first saw this announcement, whenever it was yesterday, whatever it was, at first I was like, wow, this is really interesting.
Marco:
I thought about it, and I...
Marco:
Then I realized, first of all, yeah, the $15 a month is, while that may at one time have seemed fine, and also compared to an entire cable subscription that people are paying, compared to what some cable companies charge to rent their stuff, that might seem reasonable, but compared to what cord cutters are used to, that's a lot of money.
Marco:
like so i'm a quote cable cutter i i canceled my cable service in like 2006 uh realizing that i wasn't just not using it enough and i would rather spend that you know 80 bucks a month or whatever was the difference uh elsewhere and now that i've gone this long without traditional tv and and you know so i get most of my shows either through netflix or buy them on itunes i have to pirate stuff occasionally that i can't get it any other way but it's very rare now it's almost always itunes and netflix and
Marco:
Um, none of these methods have commercials and none of these methods have like, you know, the broadcast stream, the cross promotion crap, the, the, you know, starting a minute off all this, all this crazy stuff that you deal with, with TV sometimes or all the time.
Marco:
And so when I watch regular TV, like, you know, at family houses or something like that, when I watch regular TV, it's it is terrible.
Marco:
Like, it's I know I recognize this is a massive first world problem.
Marco:
That disclaimer aside, like, it is a terrible experience.
Marco:
And it's I look at that and I'm like, it's like going back to using Windows.
Marco:
Like, I can't believe I ever thought that was normal.
Marco:
And so I look at something like this.
Marco:
And if you're the kind of person who is not a cord cutter, but you're thinking about cutting a cord, and you were looking at this as possibly a way to do it, great.
Marco:
That sounds like a reasonable idea.
Marco:
If you've already been a cord cutter, though...
Marco:
I think this will be a lot like going back to visit your high school after you graduate.
Marco:
You're going to feel like this is not a good idea.
John:
No, because it's not like watching regular TV.
John:
You don't have to see the commercials and everything.
Marco:
You still have to skip them.
John:
I know, but it's not as bad.
John:
The reason you would ever even consider this is because there's something you're missing, and I have to think that it's local sports is basically what this is for, right?
John:
Because everything else...
John:
you can get or everything else requires cable because you're like, Oh, I want to like, no one watch it.
John:
Do people watch network TV?
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe you get this for someone who only watches network TV, but the reasons to have a DVR because you want to watch shows right now.
John:
You don't want to wait for, even if it's 24 hours, you just don't want to wait for them to appear on Hulu or Apple TV or whatever, wherever they're going to appear.
John:
Or, you know, even HBO Go, you don't want to be locked out of Game of Thrones because everyone slams HBO Go because they try to broadcast it simultaneously and it doesn't work.
John:
Right.
John:
I never have that problem.
John:
I watch Game of Thrones exactly when it airs.
John:
It's important enough to me that I pay for HBO.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's either because you want to watch it now because you're super impatient and have a lot of disposable income or because there's something you literally can't get anyplace else like local sports because there's a local TV blackout and all sorts of other crap like that.
John:
And so that's the market for this thing.
John:
I just think even those people are going to be like, geez, is it really worth – I mean, you bring up cable again.
John:
Maybe these days you can't get – maybe this is still cheaper.
John:
Like if you desperately want to see local sports where you can't be there for them, you don't want to miss a single second of your favorite team, right?
John:
Maybe this is the cheapest option.
John:
What else?
John:
Because the cheapest you can get a cable, like if you say, give me the most basic of all basic cable, you know, because like I mentioned a cable company's DVR, but then I realized if you get a cable company's DVR, you have to pay for cable.
John:
And how cheaply can you pay for cable?
John:
Probably more expensive than this.
Marco:
Yeah, well, basic cable is usually about $15 a month, but usually by the time you can add all the fees and everything, and it's pretty hard to get those kind of plans these days.
John:
$15?
John:
I would guess it was like you couldn't get any cable television with any signal over your house with less than like $40 a month.
Marco:
That's standard cable.
Marco:
I'm talking about basic.
Marco:
There is almost always a level below standard.
Marco:
They don't really advertise very much, but you can ask for it.
Marco:
This is the level I had growing up, which basically has the networks plus WGN and a couple other, not a great selection.
Marco:
The problem I see with this is that
Marco:
It is, you know, compared to what cord cutters pay for things, this is not expensive, but it's mid-priced, I would say, you know, compared to everything else.
Marco:
It's also, though, substantially worse than a real standard cable package.
Marco:
And if you have an ATSC antenna and you get enough reception, like, you can get...
John:
most of the value of this for free you're just not getting the DVR part oh yeah you're not getting the commercials all you're paying for is yeah commercials and times shifting but that's like that's worthwhile speaking of you know that's the worst watching live TV when you can't skip commercials like that is the real bottom because then like the best you can do is mute during commercials like that is really going back to Windows to use your analogy that's going back to DOS
John:
having to skip commercials it's not so bad um and depending like i think it's the the amc shows don't even have that many commercial breaks but anyway that's cable um yeah i don't know i like i think if you like the experience of you know being able to time shift and being able to see the shows when you want to see them without having to wait another day or whatever and and frankly the reliability of you know of
John:
Knowing that you're not going to get locked out of HBO Go and you're not going to have streaming problems or whatever, or you're not going to be subject to stupid ISPs, you know, throttling your Netflix bandwidth and all sorts of other terrible things that are going on.
John:
DVRs like this are still the most reliable way
John:
to get tivo when you to get tv when you want it uh but i just think this is not a very good tivo because it's so expensive monthly and if you like this like save save more money i mean you can literally save more like the cnet did the math and said if you keep this thing for three years it's like the most expensive device tivo sells because it's so much cheaper to just get one of the more expensive tivos and just buy a lifetime subscription and then keep it for more than three years you know what i don't understand is if you're a cord cutter
Casey:
Oftentimes, I would imagine it's because you don't want to spend the money on something that you may not either enjoy that much or use that much or what have you.
Casey:
And so if you're in that mindset where you're either –
Casey:
I don't mean frugal dismissively, but I can't think of a better word.
Casey:
So frugal or whatever the reason is, you're cost sensitive.
Casey:
And then TiVo is saying, well, actually, now that you've saved money by cutting the cord, why don't you pay us $15 a month for something that really doesn't have that much benefit anymore?
Casey:
Other than maybe skipping commercials and maybe doing a little bit of time shifting.
Casey:
But to me, if I'm in that mindset of I'm trying to save money and that's my priority, then I'll just sit through the damn commercials.
Casey:
It's really not that big a deal.
John:
No, you can't go back to sitting through commercials.
John:
You just can't.
Casey:
Bull.
Casey:
I do it.
Casey:
I have a DVR.
John:
I do it all the time.
John:
I can't do it.
John:
Anyway, the other advantage this gives you is the four tuners.
John:
If you just watch network TV, say you're a bunch of old people, you give this to your grandparents or something, and all they watch is network TV, and they have a couple of favorite shows, but there's a time conflict.
John:
This solves the problem, right?
Marco:
Yeah, and you can tune to all four of the OTA channels you can actually receive.
John:
And record them all at the same time.
Marco:
You can see all of your TV at the same time.
Marco:
That's the problem.
Marco:
It's applying a great feature set to what most people would consider woefully inadequate input.
Marco:
Even people who watch network TV shows regularly, they probably also watch cable network shows.
Marco:
Yeah, at least one.
Marco:
There's also other things they want to see.
Marco:
That's why I'm thinking this won't appeal to people who like TV too much to cancel cable.
Marco:
It won't appeal to them.
Marco:
And it won't appeal to cord cutters because it is both too expensive and not good enough.
John:
But the expensiveness is hidden.
John:
The only reason that I think this is an interesting product at all is because they chose to price it at $50.
John:
That's the only reason that it's even worth discussing because I think that will get people to try it.
John:
And I think TiVo is just hoping that they'll try it.
John:
We'll get a little bit of money out of them.
John:
They've probably calculated that the $15 a month will make up the purpose.
John:
This thing costs more than $50 to make, I'm sure, right?
John:
So we'll get the money out of them from our outrageous monthly fee.
John:
Maybe a couple of those people we will convert to.
John:
This is terrible, but I would get cable again if my interface to it was this instead of whatever it was before.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let's talk about something else.
Casey:
Let's talk about version numbering.
Casey:
And today we had a little bit of news insofar as there's a new release from our friends at Liquability, and we're probably going to talk about that in just a few minutes.
Casey:
But Brian Capps from Liquability wrote a very interesting and relatively brief post on version numbering.
Casey:
And I thought it was a really good post because in summary, what Brian had said was, you know, version numbering, especially for major versions, you really don't need a decimal or even multiple decimals.
Casey:
When you're on version three of an app, just hypothetically, it doesn't need to be 3.0.
Casey:
It doesn't need to be 3.0.
Casey:
It can be just plain three.
Casey:
And I just thought I never really thought about version numbering this way until I read this post.
Casey:
And I thought it was a really interesting take on things.
Casey:
And I would definitely love to hear, Marco, what your two cents is about this.
Casey:
And how do you handle these sorts of things for Overcast?
Marco:
that's a good question so i i stressed a lot about version numbers for instapaper and i i would like you know hold features like oh i have a big 2.0 coming out soon i better hold back this good feature um even with overcast like there's a great feature that i that i uh finally figured out how to do recently and i thought you know should i should i save this for 2.0 like some at some mystery point in the future and
Marco:
you know maybe you know get people to pay again for something or something and i thought about it and then i i realized you know that that was a bad idea but but for various reasons but um i think version numbers need to exist for technical reasons you know there has to be some kind of identifier for the version for the programmers but what you expose to users and to your marketing efforts is of course up to you um
Marco:
I think it's very important to consider version numbers that you're going to be publicizing as marketing.
Marco:
It's part of your marketing message.
Marco:
And it probably matters less than you think most of the time.
Marco:
Like, so I submitted an overcast version 103.
Marco:
That has semantic meaning to programmers.
Marco:
It means that the base version is 1.0.
Marco:
It is not a major update because it isn't 1.1.
Marco:
It's 1.0.3.
Marco:
So it's a minor update, probably mostly bug fixes, not a lot of new features, if any.
Marco:
So that means something to nerds like us.
Marco:
It doesn't mean crap to regular people.
Marco:
If you see the version numbers for Facebook or Chrome, like the Facebook app on iOS or Chrome, they're comical.
Marco:
They're just meaningless numbers.
Marco:
And geeks make fun of them.
Marco:
And Facebook would be like, version 12.0, changelog, bug fixes.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
And then Chrome is like at version, you know, 273,000 something.
Marco:
And it's like, you know, Chrome just increments the base number every time.
Marco:
And, you know, the fact is they don't really matter to almost anybody.
Marco:
The very, very few people.
Marco:
Oh, sorry.
Marco:
I was corrected in the chat room.
Marco:
The current version of Chrome is 38.0.2125.24 dev 64 bit.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
Not great for marketing.
Marco:
Not a very human-readable version.
Marco:
But it doesn't matter.
Marco:
If you're going to make a major update, yeah, it makes sense to do a new version.
Marco:
That carries meaning to people.
Marco:
And that is how you can base your marketing around it.
Marco:
It's easier for marketing if you cluster together big releases or big changes into these big whole-number releases.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I think there's also a good argument to be made, which I believe Casey posted to the show.
Marco:
Somebody's posted in the show notes.
Marco:
I'm going to guess John, because I don't think Casey reads Coding Horror that much.
Casey:
No, I don't.
Marco:
Yes, I got it right.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So John must have put The Infinite Version, one of Jeff Atwood's posts on Coding Horror.
Marco:
We'll put this in the show notes.
Marco:
I haven't read this post, but I have a feeling I can figure out what it's about from the title, which is, does it really matter what version you're ever on?
Marco:
Just keep adding features whenever you can and...
John:
That's not quite what it's about.
John:
It's actually a pretty old post, but I've linked to it like a thousand times because it's one of those trends that I think some people have seen coming.
John:
I mean, this is like 2011.
John:
I've been in favor.
John:
I've been seen coming for a long time, but other people are either blind to or are against because it's different, right?
John:
The App Store in some ways is kind of holding us back from this because in the App Store...
John:
If you want to charge money like Marco was just alluding to before, if you decide you want to charge money for Tweety, you have to you have to market it differently.
John:
Like you have to say it's Tweety 2 and I suppose 2 might not necessarily be a version number.
John:
It could be like a Roman numeral, like a sequel, like a movie sequel.
John:
But you are forced to do something marketing wise to differentiate the new version from the old one because you want to charge money for it again because there's no upgrade pricing.
John:
So that is possibly keeping versioning alive.
John:
That and the fact that apps don't auto-update.
John:
I think this is true, right?
John:
In iOS, they still don't auto-update by default.
John:
I know it prompts you and it wants you to tell them to auto-update, but I don't think it does it by default.
John:
Is that correct?
John:
Anyone know?
Casey:
No, I thought it was by default.
John:
Well, if it does, I can never keep track.
John:
I think the Mac doesn't do it.
John:
Maybe iOS does.
John:
But anyway.
Casey:
I think that's right.
John:
What the Coding Horror Post is about is what Chrome did is you have no choice.
John:
If you run Chrome and you ever quit Chrome and relaunch it, it will update itself.
John:
It had been quietly downloading an update to itself.
John:
The next time you launch it, it will install that update.
John:
It doesn't really bother you too much about it.
John:
It used to be a little bit more intrusive and give you more options to defer it or maybe say no or whatever.
John:
But Chrome is going to update itself.
John:
And this, I think, is exactly the right strategy for web browsers today.
John:
Uh, because you just want to, you don't want to get into an IE situation where it's just old versions of IE that you just can't get people off.
John:
Even if you drop support for XP, people still use it and, or re-extend support for XP or it's just, it's terrible.
John:
Like you need browsers to be up to date.
John:
And so Google's approach is if you run Chrome, we will shove the current version down your throat.
John:
Just deal with it.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's the infinite version.
John:
It's like, yeah,
John:
Do you have Chrome?
John:
It's not what Chrome do you have?
John:
Yes, I have Chrome.
John:
What is Chrome?
John:
Chrome is whatever Google says it is now.
John:
And it will change over time.
John:
And Google has no problem.
John:
We'll totally change the UI.
John:
We'll move menu commands around and drive some people nuts.
John:
It drives me nuts sometimes.
John:
I'm trying to get that stupid bell out of the menu bar for the millionth time.
John:
but that is the correct approach not to the ui obviously but for the rendering engines like that's the correct approach for the web i wish every browser updated itself like chrome as a web developer because they wouldn't have to deal with ie8 anymore because everyone would be infinitely updated to chrome 37 which i think is latest stable 38 is like the canary thing and maybe 37 is beta and 36 is main i don't know anyway
John:
The point is, I don't want to know.
John:
I just want to know you've got Chrome, then you have the latest Chrome.
John:
And there are, you know, there's different channels to get, you know, more bleeding edge Chrome.
John:
But in general, that is a much nicer place to be.
John:
Now, is that the appropriate versioning technique for every single application?
John:
Maybe not today, but I think in the future.
John:
That is a much more viable approach from a user's perspective because users hate upgrades.
John:
They don't want to do them.
John:
And it's kind of like autosave where people are like, but what if I wanted to keep the old version?
John:
I don't want you shoving the new version down my throat and blah, blah, blah.
John:
It's exactly the same thing people would say about autosave.
John:
They'd be like, but what if I don't?
John:
I just want to speculatively make changes.
John:
I don't want it to automatically save.
John:
I want to manually hit the save button.
John:
But nobody says that about iOS.
John:
Nobody says, I need a save button in Notepad.
John:
Sometimes I just speculatively type things into my notes app.
John:
I would need a button to save it.
John:
Don't auto-save.
John:
No, it's just something that people don't get used to.
John:
All of us will die.
John:
Future people will think it's crazy that we ever had to push a button to manually update our software, and it will just be accepted as the way things are.
John:
And at that point, yeah, the version number can just be a random string of letters.
John:
It doesn't matter.
John:
It's just the unique... They could be, you know, use UUIDs for version numbers.
John:
Who cares?
John:
Like, it's totally pointless.
John:
uh so that's where i think we're going and uh hemming and hawing over whether it's 3.0 or 3 is kind of pointless i think the only thing that matters about versioning now and on the app store is like marco said for marketing purposes and then developers can pick whatever they want because believe me nobody but us ever looks at that number that's in light gray text next to facebook they don't even read the release notes they just you know if it's auto updated by default they just notice it has a blue dot next to it and they don't know what that means and they tap on it it goes away does it even get the blue dot if it's auto updated i don't think it does
John:
maybe not but well and you know like what what brian's point was in this article was was not that version numbers should go away but that you we should care about the version numbers and present them nicely to people when it's when it's significant yeah and i think that's not i don't think that's that's a that's that important like i think you don't present a version number to people you present a product name to people and tweety too is a product name and is that to a version number who knows who who cares
John:
right exactly and furthermore like is tweety 2 still the product name a month after it's out or did you know is it just tweety then it's tweety 2 1.0 it's the first version of tweety 2 oh i don't know about that you're like getting getting tangled up in version numbers is something that really only we like i guarantee if you asked a random person if they know the version number of any apps on their phone or you know they have no idea in fact the only reason the only app that marco probably knows the version number is his own apps
John:
Yeah, pretty much.
John:
And we look at the release note.
John:
I do manual updates.
John:
I turn down the little disclosure thing to see what they change so I can see their one-sentence thing that says bug fixes or whatever they're going to say.
John:
I actually read that, and I don't know the version numbers.
Casey:
It's interesting to me that over the last few years, it's gotten to be
Casey:
important to consider URLs.
Casey:
We were just talking about this with Apple earlier.
Casey:
And having clean and easy to understand URLs has gotten pretty important.
John:
What do you say gotten pretty important?
John:
What do you mean by that?
John:
You think this is a recent development?
Casey:
In the last few years, maybe I'm looking at this through a very Microsoft developer lens.
Casey:
But, you know, in years past, especially in the Microsoft community, having these godawful URLs with .aspx on the end of it all over the place.
Casey:
Yeah, it's just the way it was.
Casey:
No big deal.
John:
But yeah, that's always been gross over there.
John:
Believe me, the clean URLs have been important from day one on the web.
John:
It's just I agree with you.
John:
Microsoft has historically not considered that to be the case, but we've all been laughing at them.
Casey:
Well, okay.
Casey:
And I think it's more than just Microsoft.
Casey:
Do you remember when, what was it, the exclamation hash that Twitter was doing?
Casey:
Did I get that right?
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
That was because they thought their browsers didn't support history push state, and so they used this crazy thing.
Marco:
Yeah, there was like six months where every major website started doing the bang hash thing when they picked up JavaScript as an everything all-encompassing framework for their site.
Marco:
It was a very dark time.
Marco:
That was worse than 52X CD-ROM drives.
John:
but now websites just say you know what screw you you better be using a browser that supports history but i think i think even i8 supports that you know that's you don't do that kind of hack anymore that's why everybody should be using chrome because we could have all been updated to that uh sooner the one i always think of is the hilarious uh city desk urls that joel still has yep with all the zeros zero patty like that's the type of thing you know i don't want to pick on fog creek and those guys over there but like
John:
there are windows that people founded by someone who spent a lot of his formative years in microsoft and i don't know if it's a cause and effect or just a correlation but can you imagine anybody who's sort of in the apple nerd apple enthusiast camp ever like choosing that as a url structure even if like forget about your personal website where you're gonna like hand to and everything if you're making a product for other people to use you would still be like
John:
I don't want people to use my product and have their URLs look like this, but Joel was like, good, good to go, thumbs up.
John:
I think he got shamed into changing the URLs in that software so they're not quite as ugly.
Marco:
And I can't even imagine that was an easy change to make.
Marco:
Like, whatever reason it was that way, which I assume the reason it was that way at first, was so that file names would sort in order, because this was before any OS did natural number sorting in its file browsers.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
Didn't they use a database backend?
John:
I assume it's just so they could have a big zero-padded number that he would increment, because he's a Windows user.
John:
He just wanted to do, like, an sprintf present 052s or whatever, or d. Anyway, the point I'm driving at is, looking at this from a Windows developer's point of view, you know, REST...
Casey:
REST-style URLs got popular, I don't know, four or five years ago, maybe a little more than that now.
Casey:
And all of a sudden, all the Windows developers, Windows web developers were like, oh, holy crap, we should kind of take URLs seriously.
Casey:
And so over the last few years, or again, from my point of view, over the last few years, it got to be really important to have really clean URLs.
Casey:
And it's interesting to me that that same care put into URLs and sweating of the details got
Casey:
those of us who do native applications just didn't really have a similar amount of care for version numbering.
Casey:
And I think that Brian's point was just, hey, we should care about this.
Casey:
And this is marketing.
Casey:
It can be important to some users and you should give a crap.
Casey:
And I think that was mostly his point.
John:
Most people cared about version numbers.
John:
As someone in the chat room pointed out, the Mac has had a longstanding tradition of the three-section version numbers for major, minor, and patch version, or major, minor, and update, or whatever, like down to the old vers resources that enforce that and that the Finder would render by reading that resource.
John:
and parsing them but uh there's always been it's always kind of a convention like back in the apple days there was uh version numbers with letters in them so you could you could have d releases which was before alpha which had a little a in the name and then b would have a b so 1.0 you know b3 or 1.0 d5 and then sometimes you get an rc or an fc thrown in there these are all like little idioms and conventions among developers and
John:
that most users don't have any interaction with.
John:
But I still think there was care.
John:
It's not like there was a file name extension.
John:
It wasn't like 1.0.5.aspx.
John:
That was the worst things.
John:
The worst of the URLs in the web was where you would expose the implementation of your web application
John:
through an extension in the URL as if that had any meaning to anything except for your crappy server software, right?
John:
Like, do the people on the other end of it care that it's like .asp or .pl or .cgi?
John:
Like, they don't care.
John:
They don't care what technology used to implement this.
Casey:
That's not entirely true because a lot of people would see slash pages slash something.aspx and they would immediately say, oh, that's SharePoint.
Casey:
This is going to suck.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah, there's some of that.
John:
And there was the thing like early proxy servers would be like, well, I won't cache anything that has .cgi in the URL and all sorts of stupid crap like that.
John:
It's the same exact thing as file name extensions anyplace else.
John:
You are overloading, you're inlining information into another location because you feel like there's no other place to put it.
John:
Only in HTTP, there is totally another place to put it.
John:
And this piece of information doesn't need to put it anywhere because it doesn't matter to anybody except for the server.
John:
So it's just stupid and people should not manage their URL space
John:
uh as if it's as if it's invisible now there's the open question of whether that should be visible at all and we'll talk more about that after yosemite is released i suppose but we talked about it once when chrome tried to do that thing to replace the address bar with the the thing that doesn't show the address anymore
Marco:
Oh, it was the awesome bar or something, right?
Marco:
Or no, that was Firefox.
John:
No, it was like a URL.
John:
They called it the URL chip.
John:
It was in Chrome Canary for a while.
John:
It might still be there.
John:
I turned it off.
Casey:
It was awesome.
Casey:
So speaking of lickability, Marco, is there anything else you'd like to tell us about these guys?
Marco:
As a matter of fact, yes.
Marco:
So we had a last minute sponsor dropout because of a miscommunication this week.
Marco:
And like literally about an hour before we recorded the show, we went to Twitter and said, hey, anybody want this spot?
Marco:
And our friends at Liquability jumped at it.
Marco:
They were the very first ones to respond and say, we want it.
Marco:
We will take it.
Marco:
And the reason they took it is because they're awesome people.
Marco:
Lickability is three guys.
Marco:
It's Matthew Bischoff, Brian Capps, who we just mentioned about the article, and Andrew Harrison.
Marco:
I've definitely hung out with Matthew and Brian a lot.
Marco:
I think Andrew Harrison, I saw his Twitter picture on the site.
Marco:
He looks familiar.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure I've met him, possibly at New York Times when I went to visit the other two.
Marco:
Anyway.
Marco:
Matthew Bischoff used to be at the New York Times.
Marco:
He's now at Tumblr.
Marco:
Brian Capps, I believe, still is at the New York Times.
Marco:
Please correct me if I'm wrong.
Marco:
And Andrew Harrison.
Marco:
Yeah, I've seen him somewhere.
Marco:
So probably at the New York Times.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
These are really great guys.
Marco:
And if you follow what they do online, you can see that yourself.
Marco:
If you see their work, you can see it even more.
Marco:
I mean, these are the people who actually wrote the New York Times app.
Marco:
And Matthew now works on the Tumblr app.
Marco:
These are really high-quality, high-skilled people.
Marco:
I even talked about on Debug how if I was going to hire another programmer, I would try very hard to hire Matthew Bischoff, although I probably couldn't get him.
Marco:
But this is how good these people are.
Marco:
And what they've chosen to do in their free time is this company called Lickability.
Marco:
and lickability has this app called quote book and quote book version three there's no dot in that there's no zero there's no large number there's no meaningless number quote book version three was released today in the app store so just by coincidence they make they release a giant new version it's been eight months in the making it's a complete redesign and rewrite from the ground up uh and just by coincidence they released that today right as we record and that's why they decided to buy the spot so
Marco:
Quotebook 3 is a universal app for iPhone and iPad that lets you collect quotes that matter to you and share them anywhere.
Marco:
You can collect lines from movies, lines from books, song lyrics, crazy stuff you hear in real life from your friends and family, even quips from Twitter.
Marco:
You can save tweets directly into it.
Marco:
All these things are perfect things you can use Quotebook for.
Marco:
All of your quotes are synced via iCloud between all of your devices.
Marco:
And I trust these guys to do iCloud right because I know they care a lot and they test it a lot.
Marco:
I was in the beta too.
Marco:
You should see the things they sweat about, like the details they worry about are stunning.
Marco:
Like they really have...
Marco:
They have the attention to detail that we wish Apple actually had, that we sometimes think Apple always has, but a lot of times Apple doesn't.
Marco:
They have that attention to detail with their stuff.
Marco:
So anyway, quotes that are saved in Quotebook 3 can have an author, a source, a rating, and tags...
Marco:
So you can do all sorts of great organizational and search options on these.
Marco:
So, for example, you can say, show all quotes about Apple, show all quotes from John Syracuse.
Marco:
That's just one tap in the interface to do stuff like that.
Marco:
The app is localized into four languages.
Marco:
It's fully accessible via voiceover and other accessibility options.
Marco:
All the good stuff you expect from high-quality app developers.
Marco:
So new in version 3.
Marco:
Also, you can now add images and descriptions to authors and sources.
Marco:
You can probably have a little John Syracuse ahead on his name there.
Marco:
It can even pull information and pictures for your authors and sources automatically from Wikipedia if you'd like.
Marco:
It's pretty cool.
Marco:
Come on.
Marco:
This kind of feature is...
Marco:
That's just awesome.
Marco:
This is what happens when you take people who are extremely talented at what they do, and you give them what is, in theory, a relatively simple database app, and this is how they do it.
Marco:
It's pretty crazy.
Marco:
All the polish they put into this, all the awesome features they put into this, they have really, as I said, they sweat the details like crazy.
Marco:
more things you can autocomplete authors sources and tags uh from within the app your contacts and your music library so it scans all these data sources on the phone for autocomplete information so that as you're typing autocomplete so it's not doing anything creepy or anything like sending it to anybody it's just a local app that syncs with iCloud so these people these are good people doing good stuff here
Marco:
um let me see what else they can import quotes from your tumblr posts and your facebook profile so you can have something to start with you can start organizing things you've already posted uh really great stuff here good onboarding experience we could talk about those for a whole episode as well um you can then share your quotes after you save them or look them up later you can share them to facebook uh twitter tumblr and day one um and
Marco:
Now, auto-detection even works, so it will detect a quote on your clipboard from iBooks, and it will even extract and parse the relevant book and author automatically.
Marco:
So if you select something in iBooks, hit quote, switch over to quote book, and it will recognize all that stuff for you.
Marco:
Anyway, this is really great.
Marco:
Go to quotebookapp.com.
Marco:
Once again, that is quotebookapp.com.
Marco:
Download the app or just search for quotebook, one word in the app store.
Marco:
It's five bucks and I can tell you this is worth every penny.
Marco:
I was going to say, I wish these guys would do even more apps.
Marco:
But the amount of polish they put into this one, it's just... Oh, man.
Marco:
I just want them to keep doing this.
Marco:
Again, it's a concept... The idea of an app to save quotes in sounds simple, but there are so many ways that it could have been done with mediocrity and...
Marco:
They did such an incredibly awesome job with it, and they have such great values and such great talent, and it really shows through.
Marco:
So anyway, thank you very much to Lickability for sponsoring our show for Quotebook.
Marco:
Go to Quotebookapp.com or look up Quotebook in the App Store.
Casey:
Yeah, we really appreciate them jumping into the last minute like that.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
We got a question from a listener regarding the podcast patent troll.
Casey:
And the question was basically, why the crap aren't you three talking about this?
Casey:
I can't verbalize my feelings about it, other than I think it's crummy, but I don't know, John or Marco, whoever, whichever one of you added this to the show notes, would you care to explain why you didn't want to talk about it?
John:
I put it in there, and I think, well, first, to recap what it is, there's some patent troll out there that... Personal audio.
John:
Yeah, that thinks they have a patent on, like, podcasting, basically.
John:
If you were doing anything that looks like a podcast, we have the patent on that, and you would have never thought to do it without our hard work, and we deserve to be paid, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh, and they've gone after lots of different podcasters.
John:
One of the ones they went after was Adam Carolla, who has a very popular podcast.
John:
Is it the world's most popular podcast is very popular anyway.
John:
And they did a big lawsuit and he raised a bunch of money, uh, along with the EFF helped me fight off this patent troll.
John:
He raised like half a million dollars.
John:
He was going to lawsuit with them.
John:
They decided to drop the suit, uh, for whatever reason, like they might've thought that like, he didn't have as much money as the, he thought they dropped it in a way that they can file it again.
John:
Uh,
John:
For a little while, it looked like he was going to try to continue the fight anyway, but basically they both bailed out.
John:
They both reserved the right to go back at it again in the future.
John:
EFF is still trying to get their patent invalidated, which if this is a sane world should be easy because their patent is dumb and there's tons of prior arts.
John:
Hopefully that will go well.
John:
The question for the listener is why haven't we talked about this?
John:
And I think the reason is that
John:
Well, on on hypercritical, I talked about patents a ton and basically I am not in favor of any patents on anything.
John:
So anything that has to do with patents is kind of like I'm not going to argue about this.
John:
You know, it solves the entire what's your position on this.
John:
I think patents shouldn't exist.
John:
Next question.
John:
Right.
John:
So that's all I have to say about that.
John:
uh marco has a similar anti-patent stance maybe not as as uh severe as mine no it's the same yeah and so like so that's we're not going to get into the nuances of this type of thing and yeah so we all think this patent troll is terrible we think patents is terrible casey what do you how do you feel about patents
Casey:
I don't think I have nearly as strong an opinion about it.
Casey:
Certainly, I don't think software patents should be a thing.
Casey:
I think that's kind of insane.
Casey:
Regular patents, I haven't really put enough thought into it to come to any particular conclusion, but I don't know.
John:
That's a very good non-answer, I suppose.
John:
The real reason we haven't talked about it, though, is because the patent system is so absurd and ridiculous is that there's nothing to talk about.
John:
Like if they decide to come after us, we're screwed.
John:
Right.
John:
And that's true of anybody, because the patents to litigate a patent case costs way more than half a million dollars.
John:
If Adam Carolla wanted to actually go through with this case, like if they hadn't dropped it.
John:
he would have needed to raise millions of more dollars, even when you're in the right.
John:
And usually you don't get your legal fees back because they all have these things take place in some East Texas, Texas court.
John:
That's incredibly favorable to patent trolls.
John:
And it's just, it's a terrible rig system that's, that punishes everybody.
John:
And you know, there's, there's no point in discussing it.
John:
Like it's, you know, it's like, why don't we discuss whether we get struck by lightning?
John:
If we get struck by lightning, we're dead.
John:
You know, there's nothing you can do about it.
John:
Right.
John:
We can't even put little lightning rods on.
John:
So yeah,
John:
The patent system is terrible.
John:
Hopefully we are small enough that no one will ever come after us.
John:
If they do, we're screwed.
John:
We all hate patents to the end.
Marco:
The interesting thing about this case, one of the interesting things about this case, is it really what appears to have happened.
Marco:
The patent is not from somebody familiar with podcasting.
Marco:
The patent, if I remember correctly, from a write-up on ours forever ago, I believe it was something like some guy was sending cassette tapes through the mail.
John:
what yeah it's even it's bogusly within the realm of bogus patents even if you believe totally in patents you would look at this and you'd be like what they want money from everybody who does podcasts now it's it was updated i think to not be tapes in the mail and all like whatever it doesn't even like that's why it doesn't matter as i argue about the nuances of this if if you believe patents as a concept shouldn't exist who cares about the nuances like that's why i don't really have any interest in like
John:
well, is it about tapes or about this?
John:
It's just bogus.
John:
Even if he had exactly come out with the entire concept of podcasting, it's stupid because I've never heard of him until he started suing people, so obviously I didn't get the idea for podcasting from him.
John:
Oh, you got it from the person who got it from the person who got it from him?
John:
I don't care.
John:
They don't think they deserve any money.
John:
That's not how I wish the world worked.
John:
But it is the way our legal system works, so we just basically shut up and hide, right, more or less.
Marco:
Pretty much.
Marco:
I mean, because you're right, like, it is pretty much a crapshoot with, you know, patent lawsuit threats from patent trolls, or even, you know, the term patent troll is thrown around here.
Marco:
And there's a lot of, you know, scapegoating that, oh, well, patent trolls are the problem.
Marco:
No, not really.
Marco:
Patents are the problem.
Marco:
And it doesn't really matter who owns them.
Marco:
Patents themselves are the problem.
Marco:
And even when used entirely in the way that people's storybook version of what they think patents are for, protecting some small inventor, even when used in that exact, quote, intended way by people who are really making things, supposedly, and really need protection...
Marco:
Even then, they don't work.
Marco:
Even then, they're a net loss on society.
Marco:
And that story is so rarely even the case.
Marco:
And all the other times they're used are way worse than that.
Marco:
The problem is not trolls.
Marco:
The problem is patents.
Marco:
And because of the way our civil legal system is set up in the U.S., you know, John was right.
Marco:
Like, if you're attacked by somebody with an actual filed lawsuit or the threat of filing a lawsuit,
Marco:
there's pretty much nothing you can do except comply with whatever settlement offer they make you and give them money.
Marco:
It's really quite a racket.
Marco:
But there's nothing more anybody can really intelligently do because what are you going to do?
Marco:
Fight it and lose hundreds of thousands, if not more?
John:
Millions.
John:
It will cost you millions of dollars to win a patent.
Marco:
Yeah, if it actually goes to trial, then you're really screwed.
Marco:
But even just to begin...
Marco:
to fight, even just to begin a lawsuit.
Marco:
You will lose all of your money.
Marco:
You will lose tons of time.
Marco:
You will lose all motivation to work and to do anything.
Marco:
And for what?
Marco:
It's a terrible system.
Marco:
It is...
Marco:
If anything in this country is a tax on innovation more than the lack of government healthcare, it's the patent system.
Marco:
It is so incredibly destructive to innovation and it's so destructive to small companies and large companies, actually, but small companies just feel it more, I think.
Marco:
And so this is a horrible thing.
Marco:
However, this particular case, I don't think I'm that qualified to talk about because I don't know that much about it.
Marco:
And I agree with John.
Marco:
It's not really any different than any other case.
Marco:
I think it would have been great if Adam Carolla and his people...
Marco:
succeeded in invalidating this patent?
Marco:
Because I believe that's what they were going for.
John:
They wanted to fight it in court and just to win the suit and invalidate as part of the court.
John:
I mean, I don't blame them for settling.
John:
Some people are like, oh, we gave you half a million dollars and you just sell.
John:
They spent all that money getting to the point now where they can get out of it.
John:
The suit was dropped...
John:
Uh, the, the company reserves the right to file suit again, but it seems like the company has decided that there's just not enough money to be had there or whatever.
John:
But the EFF as an organization, I believe is still going forward with the patent office itself and saying, you can, you can like go to the patent office and say, we think this patent is invalid and go through this crazy business process to try to get it invalidated.
John:
And I think EFF is still doing that independent of Attica role entirely.
John:
So.
John:
We can only hope that like this patent troll, the patent troll probably has 50 more patents that they can throw out.
John:
But we can only hope that this patent troll by raising its head above and like picking on somebody with a microphone and some publicity has caused the FF to decide to go after them.
John:
And, you know, hopefully they get punished for being publicly terrible instead of privately terrible like Lodzis, for example.
Marco:
Oh, you mean like Nathan Mirrold in Intellectual Ventures?
John:
Yeah, all those guys.
Marco:
Let's call it right out there.
John:
Yes.
John:
We all hate patents.
Casey:
Yeah, I forget how much I really hate this stuff until we bring it up again.
Casey:
Maybe I should listen to that episode of Hypercritical or episodes of Hypercritical one more time to get myself all fired up.
Marco:
Oh, well, we have one more sponsor this week, which is way better than patents.
Marco:
It is our friends at Squarespace.
Marco:
Squarespace is the all in one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website, portfolio and online store.
Marco:
For a free trial and 10% off, visit squarespace.com and enter offer code ATP at checkout.
Marco:
A better web starts with your website.
Marco:
Now, I'm going to skip the rest of the read for now.
Marco:
I have a cool Squarespace story this week.
Marco:
So there's a small organization that my kid's involved in.
Marco:
And I volunteered to be on the computer website committee.
Marco:
They contacted me when I said I want to be in this committee and they said, oh, good, we're going to redo the website this year.
Marco:
We have a budget of $3,000 that we're going to, we need to pick a new web developer to have them redo our website for $3,000.
Marco:
And we're also going to, you know, we're going to go to WordPress and we're going to buy a theme and we're going to have this designer design us a new theme and everything, a new template to use for a site.
Marco:
And I'm like, hold on.
Marco:
Give me an hour.
Marco:
And I literally, in the span of about an hour, went to Squarespace, took everything off of their old site, which is one of those 10-page info sites with a couple of forms here or there.
Marco:
It's fairly simple.
Marco:
A little gallery, a calendar, stuff like that.
Marco:
I took their entire existing site, imported it into Squarespace, gave it a whole custom theme, took pictures, put a header image and everything.
Marco:
I did all of this in an hour.
Marco:
And I went back to them and I said, okay...
Marco:
Rather than spending that $3,000 and having some developer involved that's going to be custom work, it's going to take forever, I just did all this for us.
Marco:
And we can use that $3,000 for any other purpose and just spend $10 a month on this.
Marco:
And needless to say, I won that bid.
Marco:
my my option one and and you know that this isn't this is something that i can set up once or they could set it up i could set it up and then just hand it over to them and they can edit things without messing anything up they can change you know if they want to change the colors they can change the colors it's no big deal and the best thing is if they want support squarespace has support so i don't have to support it they can just go to squarespace and they have 24 7 support
Marco:
So I think this is all honest to God, true story.
Marco:
This is what happened.
Marco:
I'm actually meeting tomorrow to show them the final site, which took me literally an hour to make and saved a good cause $3,000 by not having to go do something more complicated than this.
Marco:
So if you also want to do that, or for any other reason, go to squarespace.com and use offer code ATP at checkout.
Marco:
You can start a trial with no credit card required, which is what I did.
Marco:
I started a trial and I showed them the trial account URL here.
Marco:
I didn't pay a thing yet.
Marco:
And then when they say, okay, they're going to put in their credit card and I'm going to put in our promo code.
Marco:
And of course...
Marco:
Anyway, when you do decide to sign up for Squarespace, you should also put in our promo code if you heard it most recently.
Marco:
Otherwise, put in whichever one you heard most recently in your favorite podcast.
Marco:
But use our promo code ATP.
Marco:
It'll get you 10% off anything at Squarespace in your first purchase, and it'll show your support for our show.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Squarespace for supporting our show.
Marco:
Once again, a better web starts with your website.
John:
Should always use our promo code because it's three letters long.
John:
It is the ultimate promo code ATP type it in every single box.
John:
That's true.
John:
And check out who knows it might work.
Casey:
So Marco, you recently posted a large headphone review.
Casey:
Is there anything to add about that?
Casey:
Or is that pretty much self contained?
Marco:
That's pretty much self-contained.
Marco:
I did face a little bit of a problem with this review, which was... Oh, you're going to talk about how you're being ridiculous about in-ear monitors?
Marco:
No, actually.
Marco:
The problem I had with this, which is really boring, I'm not going to spend too much time on it, is where do you put it on the site?
Marco:
Because what I've done in the past, like, I've mostly just, you know, made blog posts here and there with, you know, here's what I think of this pair of headphones or here's my current recommendations.
Marco:
This one, I just... I decided that I'm going to make it its own, like, page that I can update continuously because, you know, blogs always have...
Marco:
uh a problem with like accessing old content how do you make old content useful how do you how do you deal with old content that's out of date you know do you go back and edit and put little headers on all of it saying this is now out of date go here for an updated version you know like there's all sorts of challenges there um i decided rather than doing all that i'm just going to have like one continuously updated page and uh that was even more boring than i expected so that's pretty much it that's all i got it's funny you bring it up because when i looked at marco.org i noticed that your very long headphone post was
Casey:
Very, very short, but it was a link post.
Casey:
And so I thought to myself, well, weird, I guess he added some sort of like read more functionality to his to second crack because to my knowledge that didn't exist at the time.
Casey:
And then I clicked.
Casey:
the link post to your own post and realized, oh, you just had this as a singular file or a singular URL just sitting off the root.
Casey:
And I did notice that.
Casey:
And it did take me by surprise that that's how you handled it.
Casey:
And then once I saw what you had done, it made perfect sense why you had done it that way.
John:
I don't think it made perfect sense.
John:
I saw that, too, and I said, oh, that's not the way I would have done that.
John:
Of course.
John:
I understand the reason you did it, but what I would have done is made the new post just as a regular long post and then gone back into all my old headphone posts and put as the very first line, this is old, you should go look at the new one here, something nice to that.
John:
Because I don't like the idea of...
John:
updating an old article to say, well, these, you know, 10 years ago, these were, this was the headphone.
John:
This is what I thought of all the headphones that are available.
John:
But, and this has a lot of Google juice because a lot of people have linked to it over the years.
John:
So if you landed here from Google, you know, I don't want you to see that.
John:
I want you to see my new review.
John:
I'd rather leave what I wrote as a sort of historical document at that URL and then just have a constantly updated redirect, like not a redirect, constantly updated, like header at the top says, hey, you're about to start reading.
John:
in case you didn't because people totally don't notice the date and this drives me insane i feel like the new trend should be on people's blogs instead of all the other design trends that we've had of making really big text and uh you know centering everything and all that stuff the new trend should be making the date just bigger and bigger until all you see in the entire screen is 2004 so because people read things i tried your instructions on how to you know set up mysql full text searching and it didn't work in like 2004 dude like look at the
John:
People do not see dates.
John:
But anyway, they will read the first sentence of the review, you hope.
John:
And the first sentence should be, this is old.
John:
The most recent one is here.
John:
And yeah, it's a pain to have to keep going back through those and re-updating the links or whatever.
John:
But you can automate that if you really feel like it.
John:
But that's the way I would have done it.
John:
But I understand why you did it the way you did.
John:
It just seems weird.
Marco:
Sorry.
John:
You can do it better next time.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Fracture, Quotebook 3 from Liquability, and Squarespace.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
John didn't do any research.
Casey:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M
Casey:
So how's the review coming?
John:
I made progress this weekend, but like every time I make progress, I like try to reassess percentage wise.
John:
Oh, what percent done do you think you are now?
John:
And I keep coming up with the same number.
John:
Like it's like it's been like 70 percent for the past three weekends.
John:
Like, oh, I feel like I'm about 70 percent done.
John:
I wrote like 7000 words this weekend.
John:
I feel like I'm 70 percent done.
John:
And I just found out that I've been taking my screenshots in the wrong size or some of them in the wrong size.
John:
Not that I've taken many of them anyway, but I have so much stuff to do.
John:
Like, I don't know.
John:
Just rooting for a late October release date, and then everything should be fine.
Casey:
So what are you going to do if they release early?
Casey:
Would you, like, rage quit the review even if you were half cooked on it or 70% cooked?
John:
No, I would rush to get it done even sooner than possible.
John:
I would probably miss the release, and people would just have to wait, and it would be terrible.
John:
And, you know, what can you do?
John:
Like...
John:
Takes the time that it takes.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I don't know about this TiVo thing.
Casey:
And everyone's saying, oh, it's for sports.
Casey:
It's for sports.
Casey:
Well, not everyone.
Casey:
People saying it's for sports.
Casey:
That doesn't make sense to me.
Marco:
I figure if you're that under sports, you probably have cable, right?
Marco:
Right.
John:
They're trying to, like, it's cord cutters who still want sports.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Like I said, $50.
John:
That's the whole point of this thing exists.
John:
$50.
John:
If they had made it free, it would be even more of an interesting product.
John:
But just if you want a TiVo, get a real TiVo.
Casey:
Do you want to talk about this Twitch thing or is that going to go on for two hours?
John:
It won't go on for long.
John:
We can talk about it because I don't think I have much to say about it.
John:
Do you guys both know what Twitch is?
Marco:
Have any of the three of us actually like seen Twitch?
John:
I have, yes.
Casey:
I watched like 10 seconds of it once when, what was it?
Casey:
Something about playing Pokemon, like some chat room or something was playing Pokemon.
John:
So like old people, have any of you guys seen the YouTube?
John:
Have you seen the YouTube?
John:
I've seen the YouTube.
John:
like as if youtube is one thing as if twitch is like oh yeah i've seen twitch have you seen twitch yes i've gone to the website have you seen google yeah well at least google is kind of one thing twitch is you know you're you're right to call me out so i've seen a video game being played live on twitch i believe it was one of the pokemon is it pokemon or pokemons i guess pokemon games it's pokemon
Casey:
Anyway, point being, it was something that went around like a couple months back where it was like an entire chat room was trying to collaborate and play one of the Pokemens.
Casey:
Don't actually say that, Casey, please.
Casey:
I was kidding.
Casey:
I was kidding.
Casey:
So it was the chat room or something.
Casey:
Was it a chat room?
Casey:
Shoot.
Casey:
I don't know what it was.
Casey:
But anyway.
John:
They had fish playing it.
John:
They have chat rooms playing it.
John:
Many, many different things have played these various Pokemon games.
Casey:
Yeah, and so I watched like 10 seconds of that and was impossibly bored after those 10 seconds and never looked back.
John:
So I think we had in our show us way back when, and since I just recently caught up on Isometric, I heard them talking about it.
John:
There was some rumor a while ago that Google was going to buy Twitch.
John:
Do you remember that?
John:
Maybe we had it in our show notes briefly, but we never talked about it because Google never did buy Twitch.
John:
It was like, oh, it's a done deal.
John:
Google's going to buy Twitch.
John:
It was months ago, right?
John:
And they didn't.
John:
And then people thought they might because it made sense.
John:
And now I don't even know.
John:
Is the Amazon actually a done deal?
Casey:
I think.
Casey:
I mean, I don't know.
John:
I always wait.
John:
I want to see a press release on the company's websites.
John:
That's what I want to see.
John:
That's when it's confirmed.
John:
But this is like, you know, sources say that whatever.
John:
Anyway, the story about this is Amazon buying Twitch.
John:
I think the big story is, from my perspective, why hasn't someone bought Twitch already?
John:
Because Twitch does tremendous traffic in an area that is...
John:
underserved essentially like you know these uh for people who don't know twitch allows you is a website where people put videos of them playing video games and you can stream to it live and you can a lot of the consoles have a button you can press that will stream what you're playing up to twitch uh you can do pre-recorded stuff
John:
um and it's like why why would you not want to buy this because millions of people watch i think that like some uh esports championship championship thing had like 41 million viewers or 70 million viewers or something like that huge uh viewership on this and
John:
the question is like, well, why, why isn't this all just happening on YouTube?
John:
Well, YouTube is a different kind of environment.
John:
YouTube is for people making like their own little shows and channels and stuff, but YouTube is really harsh at cracking down on copyrighted material.
John:
Uh, and I, you know, the,
John:
twitch is specifically tailored to gamers as integration with the consoles and everything like that now in recent uh weeks or months or however long it's been twitch has been starting to clamp down on the copyrighted stuff as well like if it hears if it does that you know content detection if it detects copyrighted music it will just mute the audio track and what's happening is like people are getting their entire videos muted because there's copyrighted music like in the game the game people paid for and like just all these problems of having machines try to enforce copyright so
John:
I don't understand why that's going on, but the biggest thing I don't understand is why didn't Google buy Twitch?
John:
They are a hot commodity.
John:
They are a place where lots of people are going to look at things that isn't well served by any existing properties, but is in that same vein.
John:
This is not like YouTube.
John:
You could say, oh, it's kind of like TV.
John:
But instead of TV shows, you watch YouTube.
John:
And people who have kids of a certain age know that kids do watch YouTube just the way they watch TV.
John:
Well, Twitch is like that for people who are into games, only there never really was a TV analog because there was never any real TV channel you could go to where you just watch, you know, hundreds of channels of people playing video games live or recorded.
John:
And that's what Twitch is.
John:
uh so i'm not quite sure that amazon buying them is good for anybody including amazon i think google was a better fit because i feel like what's happening on twitch should be happening on youtube and if youtube is not doing something to make that happen and they need it to be in a separate branded site then fine google should have bought twitch and made it like as an offshoot of youtube or tried to roll it into one or whatever
John:
But I think what Twitch does is only going to go away or fade if it gets screwed up by like stupid copyright stuff or whatever.
John:
I just think it's inevitable.
John:
It's obviously something that people want to do all over the world.
John:
It's going to happen with or without Twitch.
John:
People should be interested in those people.
John:
Those people buy games, are worth advertising to.
John:
They're in a demographic that people want to advertise to.
John:
Why did Amazon buy them?
John:
Google reportedly bid for them and didn't get them.
John:
And then Amazon did.
John:
Did Google say too rich for my blood and just bail out?
John:
Did Amazon outbid them?
John:
These days, I don't feel particularly good about Amazon buying things anymore.
John:
I used to feel good about Google buying things and then not so much.
John:
You know, now Amazon, I used to feel OK about them buying companies and now maybe not so much with like the comiXology and stuff.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
I mean, I guess maybe this is better than Facebook buying them.
John:
I just think it's a shame for everybody who's into Twitch.
John:
It's kind of a shame for Twitch.
John:
Although presumably the people involved get a big payday.
John:
Twitch is not something that I watch regularly.
John:
Twitch is not something that you guys watch at all.
John:
So it's a very younger demographic.
John:
But that's why I think like it's the future, man.
John:
Doing what Twitch does has a future.
John:
And I just hope Amazon doesn't screw it up.
Casey:
I have nothing to add to that.
John:
This is one of those things that you should feel old, Casey.
John:
This is one of those things that is really popular.
John:
It's not like soccer, where you understand that it's really popular and always has been.
John:
It's just not your thing.
John:
But this is worldwide really popular, and you just have no interaction with it at all.
John:
At least Facebook.
John:
We may not use Facebook, but we know Facebook exists.
John:
We know what it's like or whatever.
John:
So if you don't want to get out of touch with the kids, you should spend some time on Twitch.
Casey:
I've genuinely been dreading the thought of Minecraft still being a thing in 10 years.
John:
You can't kill it.
John:
It's going to be like it's one of those games that just gets ported everywhere, you know, because it was like it had dated graphics the day it was made.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's not as if it's going to get old and people won't like it.
John:
Nope.
John:
It'll it will never die.
John:
They'll probably open source it at some point and then you're really screwed.
Casey:
So is World of Warcraft or Minecraft dying first?
John:
World of Warcraft, definitely.
John:
That requires humans to maintain and run, and presumably, eventually, that will become unfeasible.
John:
Whatever Blizzard's next big project is will eventually, I assume, supply.
John:
They keep revving it and releasing it.
John:
I guess they have enough people addicted to it, but...
John:
That requires way more maintenance.
John:
Minecraft, you can just let it into the wild like a virus.
John:
You don't need any human intervention.
John:
Blizzard needs to pay people millions of dollars a year just to keep World of Warcraft, keep them in new content every year and keep the servers up and running and maintained.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
In wildly unrelated news, I was somewhat stunned that it only took the internet a week to find Marco.coffee.
John:
Yeah, I didn't even know about that until this morning.
John:
I thought Marco had registered that site ages ago.
John:
I didn't know it was yours.
John:
So did I!
John:
trying i'm trying not trying to say nice things about your websites marco but i think i'm not marco casey but i think everyone has already yelled at you oh yeah oh yeah formatting of that site oh god it's terrible but i threw it together in like 20 minutes so i didn't care it probably is not worth a whole lot of effort exactly oh i knew it was horrible it's worth it's worth just enough effort to make the one page that is on that site look reasonable that's
Casey:
I really don't even care.
Casey:
The point was to give a few people like 10 seconds worth of laughs or giggles or what have you.
Casey:
And I think I succeeded in that.
Casey:
It's funny, people are complaining and moaning about the fact that it's frames because I was too lazy to figure out how to get GitHub pages to accept.
Casey:
It's frames?
Casey:
Yeah, it is.
Casey:
Well, it's framed because it's a hover redirect, and so I had it cloak the URL.
John:
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Casey:
So it's just a big iframe, I guess.
Casey:
And getting the layout the way I wanted was a pain in the butt without using tables, which I don't think I ended up doing.
Casey:
So, yeah, because I suck at CSS.
Casey:
I'm freaking terrible at CSS.
John:
This is one of those differences.
John:
Like, you would have been the person to make those CityDesk URLs because you'd have been like, eh, it's good enough.
John:
I don't care that much.
John:
It's just a URL.
John:
Yeah.
John:
I'm not saying there's something wrong with you.
John:
You are in the majority, believe me.
John:
I know if I was putting up a single page site that just had text in it, I would be there making sure that text was exactly where I wanted it to be in the font that I wanted it to be.
Casey:
Well, that's because you're extraordinarily critical.
Marco:
Well, I mean, the joke still works if it's marco.coffee slash pages slash troll.aspx, right?
Casey:
And the funny thing is, I think it was TJ Luoma.
Casey:
I'm probably getting that pronunciation wrong, and I'm sorry about that.
Casey:
But I believe he was the first person to point out to me, in retrospect, I should have just had to redirect to Starbucks, and I really had a missed opportunity there.
Marco:
Well, that's what I did with bad.coffee.
Marco:
So I own bad.coffee redirects to Starbucks' Wikipedia page.
Marco:
And then I also have overcast.coffee and podcast.coffee.
Casey:
How did you not register marco.coffee?
Marco:
Yeah, I did.
Marco:
That for some reason didn't cross my mind when I was entering all these in.
Casey:
Oh, man, that's funny.
Casey:
Anyway, I noticed this the other day.
Casey:
This was a week to the day.
Casey:
It was last Wednesday, and I noticed that Marco.coffee was available, and I thought, what could I do with this?
Casey:
Well, actually, my first thought was, hey, did you know that Marco.coffee – to say to you, hey, Marco.coffee is available.
Casey:
And then I was like, wait a second.
Casey:
There's an opportunity here.
Casey:
And so, yeah, so I figured trolling you for a year is worth $25 of my money.
Casey:
So I will go ahead and register this and throw up the world's crappiest single-serving site.
Casey:
And you did.
Casey:
And I did.
Casey:
That's good.
Casey:
It's funny.
Casey:
I'm proud of you for even doing this joke.
Casey:
It originally was coffee is stupid, and then I felt like that didn't have the same ring to it as coffee is silly.
Casey:
You're so polite, even in your trolling.
Casey:
Something like that.
John:
I had a domain registered for the Flophouse for a couple of years, but I just let it expire in protest because no one would accurately represent the joke I was making on that website.
Casey:
Of course.
Casey:
Of course.
John:
It was frustrating.
John:
But anyway, you're talking about like paying $25 for a year.
John:
I think I paid for three years, maybe even four years of that domain.
John:
And it was nothing but a redirect.
John:
Like it was the whole point of the domain is like, oh, if you type this, you'll get those redirects aren't as much fun.
John:
Back in the days when if you were in the circle of Mac users, all the popular Mac browsers would first append, I forget which are they, the first appended.com and then www.com or the reverse appended
John:
But if you typed any word, that's what they did.
John:
Before the age of the various awesome bars and integrated search address bar, if you just typed a word by itself into your address bar, it would try the .com and or the www.com.
John:
And that was a cool way to navigate, but that time has passed.
John:
So half the time people just type stuff and they end up with a Google search anyway.
John:
So you are getting a domain.
John:
It's not as much fun as it used to be.
Casey:
Do you want to do titles real fast before Snell steals you from us?
Casey:
Three people are never wrong.
Casey:
Oh, that was about the chat room.
Casey:
You failed me last time, chat room.
Casey:
When in Star Wars was that?
Casey:
I'm going to really, really get everyone to hate me.
John:
There's no mention of the chat room in Star Wars.
John:
Don't look for it.
Casey:
What?
What?
John:
I said there's no mention of the chat room in Star Wars.
John:
Don't look for a mention of the chat room in Star Wars.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
You failed me for the last time.
John:
Admiral.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, that does ring a vague bell.
Casey:
I haven't seen Star Wars movies in years.
Casey:
It's not the same line.
John:
That was a line in a similar scene.
Casey:
Don't you remember in Empire Strikes Back?
Casey:
I couldn't even tell you the plot of Empire Strikes Back.
John:
Darth Vader is mad at people.
John:
Darth Vader is mad at people because they're doing things wrong and he kills them.
John:
And why does he kill them?
John:
Because you've failed him for the last time.
John:
Because he'll be dead now, you see, so he can't fail him anymore.
John:
It's very complicated.