The Unexpected Hard Part
John:
Today is a vocabulary day.
Marco:
You'll be quizzed on these at the end of the year.
Casey:
We got a lot of follow-up today, Joe Figure.
Marco:
I'm shocked and awed that we have so much follow-up.
Marco:
And dismayed as well.
Marco:
Let me take a wild guess and say that we're going to spend the first 90 minutes of the show talking about follow-up.
John:
No, it's not that long.
John:
It's not even a page.
John:
You'll see.
John:
It'll be fast.
John:
You guys don't know how to measure follow-up.
John:
You just see more than a screen full of text.
John:
Oh, lots of follow-up.
John:
These are all two-second items.
Casey:
all right well we should probably start with the most important piece of follow-up that we have which is most of the internet coming to the defense of the load bearing finger that's not even in the notes it is it's not at the top of the follow-up anyway go ahead no it's not it's way at the bottom but it's really important to me so i thought i'd bring it to the top
Marco:
Because you and I were proven right and John was proven wrong.
Marco:
Right about what exactly?
Marco:
Well, you were outvoted at least.
Marco:
You were outvoted.
John:
Outvoted about what exactly?
Casey:
About whether you should or should not use the load-bearing finger.
John:
I think the results from people telling us that they use their pinky are inconclusive as to whether people should or should not use their pinky.
John:
All we have shown is that many people who emailed us do use their pinky.
John:
And that doesn't prove anything.
John:
Because for all we know, there are many, many more people who don't use their pinky who didn't email us.
John:
But anyway, the people who do use their pinky wanted to tell us that they did.
John:
And so they did.
John:
None of which has anything to do with whether you should use your pinky or not.
John:
Or what the values inherent in using your pinky are.
John:
What is it good for?
John:
What is it bad for?
Casey:
All I know is I saw a lot of email feedback, of Twitter feedback, a lot of it.
Casey:
And it was almost universally in support of the Armand slash LIS load-bearing finger method.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
You can put yourself first.
Marco:
You're so nice.
Marco:
You talked about it.
Marco:
It was your subject.
Marco:
It's alphabetical.
John:
Anyway, yes, a lot of people do use their pinkies, but I don't think that's material to our discussion, which was about why you should or shouldn't use your pinky.
Casey:
Well, here's the thing.
Casey:
The reason you should use your pinky is because even when I reach to the way far corner of the screen, which when I'm holding the phone in my right hand is the upper left-hand corner, you know, the most important corner in iOS because that's the back button.
Marco:
See, I would say ever since the back gesture in iOS 7 or 6, whatever that was added, 7, ever since the back gesture became commonplace and default behavior with any kind of navigation controller, I would say that is now a lot less important than it used to be.
John:
That's true.
John:
Yeah, but it better be with the 6+, because forget it, no one's reaching that with the 6+, with the one A. That's true.
Casey:
But anyway, so the point is, when I reach for that, I have to...
Casey:
pull my fingers from the... Again, I'm holding the phone in my right hand.
Casey:
I have to pull my fingers from the left-hand edge of the phone to behind the phone in order to give me the reach to go to the upper left, but the load-bearing pinky still holds strong.
Casey:
With your six, you mean?
Casey:
Yes, that's correct.
Casey:
With my six.
John:
um the load bearing peaky holds strong though and keeps me secure it's not much it's not much of a load bearing you keep calling it that as if the entire weight of the phone is is uh no it's just because it sounds funny yeah well anyway yeah now i've done i've done more research with uh well a lot of people are sending like videos and pictures of them doing stuff or whatever and i i hadn't noticed this but many people sent in the video of the uh
John:
What was it?
John:
The old five or five S ad where Apple was trying to defend the fact that they didn't have really big screen phones back when they didn't have really big screen phones.
John:
And it was that ad where they showed that the thumb of this male model and the ad can reach all four corners of the screen.
John:
And they say something about, oh, it's just common sense.
John:
See, that's why we have whatever.
John:
What is the four inch screen on the five?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, this was their excuse out of why we don't have a big phone.
John:
But everyone who was asking me, I can't understand how you're saying to hold the phone.
John:
I tried to hold that way.
John:
I can't reach anything.
John:
I just sent them the link to the video because that ad and most of Apple's video literature shows...
John:
hands male adult male model hands uh holding the phone the way i was describing more or less and and again and last year i was talking about why casey was holding the phone wrong not why you are holding the phone wrong because if your hand is too small you can't hold it my way like bottom line right but casey's hands are similar size to mine that's why it was relevant so a couple people
John:
They're like, oh, my hands are too small.
John:
If your hands are too small, you just can't do it.
John:
But anyway, that ad shows essentially how I hold my phone.
John:
And I do have one additional piece of information on the phone holding thing.
John:
After watching myself use the phone in both my right and left hands, what I realized is that I use the pinky to move the phone up into typing position.
John:
Because typing, you know, I can type with that grip.
John:
Some people are like, I can't type with the grip.
John:
How do you do it?
John:
Well, you can look in the Apple ad.
John:
I can do it.
John:
The person in the Apple ad can do it.
John:
Maybe other people can't, depending on how their thumb bends or whatever.
John:
That's fine.
John:
But when I want to do serious one-handed typing, I will hoist the phone up so it's higher, so I'm coming more from the bottom.
John:
And that hoisting operation, depending on how I'm doing it, frequently involves me using my pinky to push the phone upward.
John:
So I am also in the load-bearing pinky group for brief moments of time when repositioning the phone.
John:
I guess that makes sense.
Casey:
The funny thing about it is I feel like I've gotten, and I think Marco as well, we've gotten a lot of feedback over the course of ATP, almost two years now.
Casey:
It's a year and a half now.
Casey:
A lot of feedback about, oh, you're wrong because John says so, or, oh, you're wrong because you don't agree with John.
Casey:
And finally, my crowning moment when the internet comes to my defense was about how I hold my freaking iPhone.
John:
Well, I don't think that people say that wrong because I say it.
John:
They may find my argument more convincing than the other.
John:
Anyway, that would be a lousy reason to say that.
John:
So I still contend that all the things I said about the different hold techniques hold true for Casey, whose hands are similar size to mine, and that it is more secure not to hold the thing like it's sheet music in a music stand.
John:
And what most people didn't understand is the whole thing with my grip is...
John:
If suddenly, you know, I got jostled or knocked over or whatever, and I immediately gripped with my hand to say, whoa, I'm just about to get knocked over.
John:
I better hold on to my phone.
John:
What would happen is I would be pressing on the far long edge of the phone and pressing the corner into my palm.
John:
That's essentially the grip, even if you're moving your fingers around.
John:
And that's different from the grip where if suddenly you were pressed, what you would end up doing is pinching the phone like you're pinching like a Hershey's bar or something.
John:
That's what you get with your fingers around the back.
John:
Or if you're doing the pinky thing, it's just fewer number of fingers on the back.
John:
But, you know, you got to do what you got to do, depending on the size of your hand.
John:
The I was trying to come up with a universal theorem of phone gripping this for like for explaining why for why people hold it in different ways.
John:
And what I started with was from the extreme of like, if you just put the phone on the table and then, you know, you can't put any fingers around it at all and you just take your thumb, then you can reach anywhere on the screen because your thumb is just it's free form.
John:
You know, you're not you're not holding it anywhere.
John:
uh that's what you would have to do if you had little tiny minuscule hands like if you were if you're trying to use a 25 inch ipad you would you would just put it flat on the table and if you're going to use it with one hand and you want to use your thumb to do stuff you just move around like that uh as the size of your hand and the size of the phone
John:
Get closer together like as the phone gets smaller and the size of your hand gets bigger or whichever direction you start to be able to put more portions of your four fingers Behind or under the phone if your hand is just barely big enough Maybe you can put like four fingers or two fingers behind the phone But the whole rest of your hand needs to be out so you can reach the upper left hand corner, right?
John:
As your hand gets bigger and bigger and bigger, you can slide more and more of those four fingers behind the phone and still be able to reach things comfortably.
John:
When your hand reaches a certain size, you can fit all of your four fingers and a lot of your hand behind the phone and nestle the corner of it into your palm.
John:
And that's essentially the hand size I am.
John:
And if you keep going up in the Chalkenberry, Craig Hockenberry size...
John:
uh then maybe i don't know how maybe he can fit like the entire and maybe he can fit all four of his fingers in front of the phone and still be able to reach all the corners with his thumb i don't know how big his hands are but that's essentially the continuum that we could probably do some sort of 3d animation to show the the different various grips that are possible but i i still strongly endorse nestling the corner of the phone into your palm so that you can grip it and press it in that direction with all four of your fingers if you can reach all the corners of your phone with your thumb that way and if you can type comfortably
John:
I can type comfortably that way.
John:
I can hit the home button, but like I said, when I want to do more serious long typing, I will hoist the thing up with my pinky.
John:
Pinky goes back, and then I type in that position.
Casey:
I guess that's fair.
Casey:
To sort of make a subject change, I should note that another week on with having the six...
Casey:
I definitely like it, and I like having a screen that big, but I'm picking up one of our five S's, and it feels, to me anyway, so much more comfortable in my hand.
Casey:
I like the feel of it so much more, although I will tell you that this screen looks comically small.
Casey:
Furthermore, I think I tweeted about this, but we use a 3GS to run a playlist for when we're at a tailgate before a football game, and that thing is like,
Casey:
positively microscopic compared to the six and so it's it's tough because the on the software side i like the big screen quite a lot but physically and i think this comes back to me being a one-handed user a lot of the time i just love the feel that the size of the 5s so much more than the six and i'm not sure which one is more important to me yet so ask me again in six months
John:
yeah i think when you uh i mean i still don't have anything six size yet and i would imagine that maybe it will never turn around for you like in terms of the hand holding but it's kind of like now when you pick up like a 3gs and you're just like this the screen is like a postage stamp even though it's not that much shorter than the five it's it's the same width and it's just a little tiny bit shorter but it just feels ridiculous uh i think once you get used to the screen you'll be like well the six still feels too big for however i use my phone but i don't want to go back to looking through that tiny little porthole into
John:
the world of iOS.
Casey:
I think you're right.
Casey:
Now, Marco, did you have your six plus at the time we recorded last week?
Marco:
Uh, yes, but I had only had it for a few hours at that point.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
Are you using it full time by chance or no?
Marco:
Not at the moment.
Marco:
I, uh, for whatever reason, I, I don't know why I decided not to.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
You know what I might do?
Marco:
Maybe next week I'm going to Montreal for the Singleton Conference.
Marco:
Maybe I'll use it like that whole weekend.
Marco:
I'll just bring that one and see how that goes.
Marco:
Because I do want to spend some time using it as my primary phone.
Marco:
That's one of the reasons I got it this way.
Marco:
I just haven't gotten around to it yet.
Marco:
It's been a crazy development week for me.
Marco:
I didn't want to make any changes.
Casey:
That's fair.
Casey:
But initial impressions, anything different since we last spoke?
Marco:
I really haven't had a chance to use it much more than that.
Marco:
I have some opinions on the size classness of it, the way Apple does iPad style width when you hold it in landscape.
Marco:
And it tells the apps basically to use an iPad layout in landscape.
Marco:
I've been battling that all week with developing Overcast for it, and I question whether that's a good idea to have it do that.
Marco:
And actually, for Overcast 1.1, the big update I'm working on to make it all adaptive and universal and everything, for that, I am disabling that behavior so that on the 6 Plus, it's just going to show the iPhone interface bigger in Landscape 2.
John:
I wondered when they were talking about the size classes, you know, WWC, we all knew bigger things were coming.
John:
I just assumed they would add a bunch of new enums or whatever the hell they are for different size classes when the different things came out.
John:
But from what I understand, they just kept the same ones.
John:
It's like, you know, the width in portrait mode of any of their phones is all like compact or whatever, even though the difference in size between the width of a 5S and the width of a 6 Plus is huge, but they're both the same.
John:
They're all the same size class.
John:
So it seems like they could throw in a few more
Marco:
uh size class values in there and solve some of these yeah you know it's it's a tough balance to walk so so the way it is right now so you're right basically there's there's just two values for each of horizontal and vertical regular and compact and of course there might be you know a future large value maybe that's what the ipad pro if that thing is real um will have but right now there's regular and compact and a phone is a regular horizontal and
Marco:
or regular vertical compact horizontal if you rotate it to vertical mode it's compact in both dimensions which kind of doesn't make sense but if you think about it in practice that actually does work very well and then iPads are regular instead of compact in both dimensions no matter what orientation they're in and the weird thing is that the iPhone 6 Plus and only the iPhone 6 Plus is regular horizontal compact vertical when it's in landscape so it's a weird combination that
Marco:
you know the designing for a landscape iphone in general is very hard because you know in most cases if you have like a navigation bar or something you still have the bars taking up a lot of horizontal space and they get smaller but it's still i mean vertical space rather they get smaller but it's still you're you're because you're then rotating the screen and the bar still going across the new top you're wasting a lot more screen real estate on those bars and
John:
Why are you doing a landscape iPhone?
John:
Why are you making it rotatable on phones?
John:
Overcast, I mean.
Marco:
That's a good question.
Marco:
So to date, the app that's in the store now does not rotate.
Marco:
It's always portrait only.
Marco:
Most people, I think, will want to keep it that way.
Marco:
And enough, myself included most of the time, enough people such that I need to probably add a rotation lock setting because having an app accidentally rotate when you don't want it to on your iPhone is annoying.
Marco:
But Apple is clearly pushing us towards universal apps, an app that has to work on any sized iPhone and any sized iPad and be able to transition between those sizes while it's running on the same device.
Marco:
Now, we saw a couple of months ago our friend Stephen Trouton-Smith on Twitter saying,
Marco:
He posted a video.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure it was him.
Marco:
He posted a video.
Marco:
He had hacked the iPhone 8 simulator or iOS 8 simulator while it was running an iPad mode.
Marco:
He had enabled some kind of like undocumented hidden mode that basically had resizable apps.
Marco:
An app would run on the iPad in full screen normally.
Marco:
And then by toggling these modes, it would run at two thirds width and one third width.
Marco:
And at two-thirds width, it just looks like a smaller iPad app.
Marco:
At one-third width, it looked like a tall, skinny iPhone app.
Marco:
It was very clear, you know, Apple had built this functionality in.
Marco:
And whether it will ship this fall, you know, next week or whenever this iPad event will happen, whether this will ship anytime soon, I don't know.
Marco:
But the functionality is there.
Marco:
I have to imagine, you know, if you read the tea leaves, like reading the tea leaves in WWDC sessions and the new APIs in iOS 8, it was very clear that they were going to do different size devices.
Marco:
I think if you read the tea leaves a little bit further, it's very clear that this is the way they plan to go also in the case of resizable apps.
Marco:
Like they're going to do this, I bet.
Marco:
And I don't know if it's going to be this fall, maybe it might get delayed until a later version of iOS, but I'm pretty sure that's one of the things they plan to do to make the iPad cooler, is to have side-by-side apps with either full width, two-thirds, or one-third.
Marco:
I would imagine your customers, if you make an app that runs on the iPad, I would imagine your customers are going to be pretty annoyed if they can side-by-side tile most of their apps, but not your app, because it doesn't support these modes.
Marco:
It's important, I think, for developers to be considering this very strongly right now that if you have an app that runs on the iPad at all, you should probably make your app universal with iPhone and you should probably be doing this adaptive UI migration, using something like a split view to have it automatically collapse or doing your own thing to automatically collapse it.
Marco:
You need to be doing this because it's so obvious that this has a very good chance of coming very soon in iOS.
Marco:
And again, your customers,
Marco:
If most apps do this and yours doesn't, your customers are going to tell you that.
Marco:
Apple does not seem to care about the difference between, you know, your business model.
Marco:
If you have iPhone only and iPad only as two separate paid apps, Apple does not care about that.
Marco:
They've been very clearly pushing for a long time into universal apps.
Marco:
And I think...
Marco:
If you have an app that only runs on the iPad because it just needs the space, for whatever reason, for UI or whatever, then I think you're okay.
Marco:
You can make do.
Marco:
But for many apps that can run on iPhone or iPad and they can resize to any value, anything, I think there's been a lot of pressure from our community, like the Mac nerd community.
Marco:
There's been a lot of pressure in the past to have these perfectly beautifully handcrafted interfaces for each different device that you run on.
Marco:
And I think that's...
Marco:
We've been seeing the writing on the wall for that for a while now.
Marco:
iOS 7's redesign helped a lot.
Marco:
Most of those perfectly handcrafted custom interfaces, most of the design patterns of those looked out of date with iOS 7.
Marco:
So making more flexible layouts already is getting in fashion.
Marco:
But I think we're seeing the combination of a bunch of effects happen to really kill those unique interfaces for iPads.
Marco:
This very likely upcoming resizable apps thing, where if your app does anything beyond one of the basic custom structures, it's going to be a pain.
Marco:
It's going to be hard to maintain.
Marco:
We also have generally sagging iPad sales.
Marco:
The iPad is no longer the powerhouse platform to make money on for developers that it once was, however briefly that was.
Marco:
It is no longer that thing.
Marco:
I think the iPad now is worth supporting, but it might not necessarily be worth a whole bunch of custom development time.
Marco:
And I forget the third thing, but basically...
Marco:
I think it's going to be very important that developers be a little easier on yourself with whether you need to make the decision of going universal or not, just do it.
Marco:
Apple is making that decision for you effectively.
Marco:
You have to be universal.
Marco:
And secondly, I think it is really not worth spending a whole lot of time making an extremely custom iPad interface if something simpler would suffice.
Marco:
But anyway, John, to answer your actual question of why do I need to support rotation on the iPhone?
Marco:
The small reason is that some customers have asked for that.
Marco:
A lot of people say, and there are some good reasons.
Marco:
A lot of people say that they want to put, that they keep their phone in like a mount in their car that keeps it horizontal for some reason.
Marco:
I don't know why a mount would do that.
Marco:
For maps, maybe, you know, you like the little flying through Apple Maps thing.
Marco:
I guess.
Marco:
But think of so many like the phone app doesn't rotate as far as I know.
Marco:
Like there's a lot of other apps on phones that don't rotate.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
A lot of people ask for that.
Marco:
The bigger reason why is because, you know, Apple is clearly pushing in this direction of your apps need to be adaptive.
Marco:
They need to be resizable.
Marco:
They need to be rotatable.
Marco:
They're pushing in this direction.
Marco:
And I think it's just easier if I can have an app that works with any combination of these size classes, with any weird screen size that I might come up with, that the app will look reasonable.
Marco:
The interface won't break.
Marco:
Things will be usable.
Marco:
It might not look amazing, but it will work.
Marco:
And I think supporting every rotation is just one part of that.
Marco:
It's a required part of that, I think.
Marco:
Also, you know, on the iPad, you kind of have to.
Marco:
And so once you build that, it's pretty easy to build the other one.
John:
So you're going to have an in-application rotation lock separate from the system one, though?
Marco:
i i i'm probably going to try launching without one and and see how big of an issue it is because the the whole idea of adding an individual preference in my app so that my app doesn't rotate yeah it could be a lot of bug reports from that yeah it's it's tricky to implement i think in the code i don't know i haven't looked yet on how to do it now because every time apple rewrites rewrites the way apps handle rotation which so far has happened three times um i
Marco:
every time they do that the way you do this changes and and how possible it is to do it without weird bugs and side effects changes so i'll have to see you know if it's like you know some kind of bool callback that i can return no from then that's that's easy but if it's something else then we'll see but
Marco:
I think it's just very clear that if you don't adapt to this world, it's going to be difficult for you.
Marco:
And Brent Simmons talked a few months back about developer efficiency.
Marco:
We've been hearing all these stories about how developers like me, people who make iOS apps and try to sell them on the store are having a harder and harder time making good money from that and harder and harder time justifying further development.
Marco:
The reality is, and we've seen this from many people, the reality is, if you're an independent developer, chances are you're going to need multiple sources of income.
Marco:
And chances are your apps are going to have to be cheaper and easier to develop.
Marco:
You can't afford to be able to spend a year and a half making a custom iPad interface for your app anymore.
Marco:
That's no longer economically responsible for most developers to do if you need to make money from it.
Marco:
If it's a hobby to do on the side, fine, you can do whatever you want.
Marco:
But, you know, if you're trying to make money from an app, you really can't reasonably spend a whole lot of time on custom stuff like that.
Marco:
So, like, one of my design goals for Overcast is not only to have things, you know, work okay and look okay, it's also to use as little code as possible to...
Marco:
In the UI, like as little as few custom UI hacks as I can, because with Instapaper, I got tied up with all sorts of crazy UI hacks to try to try to try to customize things to work exactly as I wanted them to.
Marco:
That was slightly different from the way the system defaults worked or to or to mimic something that other that other Apple apps did that was not exposed publicly in the API.
Marco:
or to do things that weren't possible yet manually.
Marco:
So things like pagination, or when I wrote the grid view before there was a collection view API, stuff like that.
Marco:
And almost every iOS developer has some kind of story where they're like, oh, well, we were having this problem, so we had to rewrite UI navigation controller.
Marco:
It's like, oh, no, you've already lost.
Marco:
If any part of your development story includes, we had to rewrite UI table view controller,
Marco:
UI navigation controller, any of these major iOS things that are really hard to get right if you do it yourself, chances are your priorities can use improvement.
Marco:
I have the luxury of being... By being one person and being both the designer and the developer of this app, I can edit the design if the implementation of it is going to suck for development.
Marco:
I can say, you know what?
Marco:
The reason why...
Marco:
the toolbar is or why the mini player is toolbar size is because it's a toolbar because it's easier to implement that way and I have to do less code the reason why the mini player does not go away when there's nothing to play and it just says something like sync complete is because you can't dynamically hide and show that reliably without weird side effects so it's always there period so like I do things like this because I've seen what happens when you don't
Marco:
So what happened with Instapaper was the code got so big and bloated because I was doing all these crazy hacks with the view hierarchy and custom animations and all this stuff to get things to look and work exactly right.
Marco:
It became not only very brittle, but just extremely cumbersome to maintain and very costly to implement in the first place.
Marco:
It took so much time and effort to do all that stuff that I could have been spending on other features or improvements to the website or whatever else.
Marco:
So one of my main goals for Overcats has been just avoid those big hacks.
Marco:
Like if I can't do something in a good, reliable way with the official APIs, usually I just don't do it.
Marco:
And I'm keeping the code very simple.
Marco:
So any kind of custom handling of do this on this one device or do this when the screen size is less than this value, that all adds a lot of that complexity that I really would rather avoid.
Marco:
And I think overall that will serve me better.
Marco:
And I think overall, if more developers did that, it would serve them better.
John:
do you think that's like a failing of the api and that like there's there's a prescribed way to do things with a set of controllers they sort of pre-made for you with a bunch of callbacks that you can override and things that you can set but if your needs fall outside the bounds of that for example your need to say well if you know i would like to have a thing that's down there that's like a toolbar maybe it won't be exactly the same size and sometimes i want to hide it and it's like well now you you know because that's the whole thing with frameworks like they constrain you to some degree uh in that the
John:
There's a set of things that they're trying to lead you towards.
John:
But as you diverge from them, you would hope that the framework would work with you and not say, well, now you're starting to do something that violates too many assumptions of this little particular piece of code that we've given you here.
John:
And therefore, your only option now is to throw that all away and do it all custom or, like you said, rewrite the thing by subclassing everything.
John:
And then you're basically doing your own thing anyway.
John:
Ideally, a framework would have a smoother path between, I just want to tweak one thing, this thing you've given me does exactly what I want, but I want to tweak things one, two, and three, or all the way down to, at this point, all this behavior is my own, and you want a smooth gradient between them.
John:
You don't want to hit this point where you're like, okay, I can tweak, I can tweak, I can tweak, and then you find out you're just tweaking so much that now you're just creating a monster, and it's unmaintainable, and you can't figure it out, and the next version breaks all your crap.
John:
And it's like...
John:
You would like that slope.
John:
The ideal framework would never paint you into that corner.
John:
You would smoothly move from changing one little property on a canned class to defining all of the behavior yourself.
Marco:
Ideally, yeah.
Marco:
And I really have to give UIKit credit.
Marco:
It has come a long way.
Marco:
Many of those hacks I did with Instapaper would no longer be necessary.
Marco:
I would even say probably most of them.
John:
yeah apple is moving along that path like yeah along the path to i mean tint color and stuff like that things that used to just you know that that's with the next version like oh all those things that you're doing hacks where you don't need and it's just like you keep how long do you continue that do they do they ever get to the point where there actually is a smooth path and there's never that jump over the canyon where oh you've hacked this thing to bits and now you're just you know you are over the line like it seems like you know if you want to use one of our classes and subclass it uh
John:
If you're going to start overriding things forever and ever, eventually you get to the point where you're actually making your life harder.
John:
It wouldn't have been easier if you just started from scratch, because then you would have understood all the pieces.
John:
And you wouldn't be constantly fighting against the behavior you don't want, you know?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, I think...
Marco:
We've seen Apple take huge strides in that regard to prevent people from having to rewrite everything from scratch.
Marco:
Especially since... When did they introduce... Was it iOS 6 that brought in UI Appearance or was it iOS 5?
Marco:
Either way, the Appearance Proxy stuff has been amazing.
Marco:
iOS 8 makes a lot of it even better with some of the new presentation controller stuff and this new adaptive split view and all this stuff they're doing.
Marco:
They are adding in those hooks.
Marco:
Every iOS release adds more of those new delegate methods that you can override, new customizations you can set.
Marco:
It removes more and more reasons that you previously might have had to subclass or replace something.
Marco:
I think we're at a point now where both the APIs have gotten really good so that the need for massive time-sync projects of, we need to rewrite UI table view, things like that, the need for those has gotten so much lower and lower over time.
Marco:
And at the same time, that the profitability of handcrafted, well-made iOS apps has also gone down dramatically.
Marco:
I think it's time to realize...
Marco:
Yeah, all those times where you said you should like rewrite UI table view controller, probably not.
Marco:
Now, granted, I'm a total hypocrite with this because I rewrote core audio.
Marco:
I mean, like this, like I rewrote AV player, basically.
John:
At least you're getting value out of that.
John:
I always think of like Brent being or, you know, that whole crew over there being somewhat prisoner, somewhat prisoner to their own idiosyncrasies in that a lot of the hacks Brent seemed like he was doing were because they wanted a particular appearance or transition effect.
John:
and they could get the same job done it just wouldn't look the way they want to look exactly and you know probably the number of people who are going to notice the difference between the incredible amount of work they had to do to make some transition just so and the what they considered the unacceptable version that number of people would be very small whereas you at least did your audio stuff because you it's like a headline feature of your application you can put it on a bullet point on the description you can describe it to people and they see value in it whereas if brent tried to explain and again i don't know if these details are right so sorry brent if i'm getting them wrong
John:
If you try to explain, see how this cross fades into that and that doesn't start out as white, but fades in behind it.
John:
That effect was really hard to get.
John:
And here's what I had to do to get it.
John:
And they'd be like, huh, what?
John:
You know, like they don't care.
John:
So you're not really the things that you were serving by doing your custom implementation were things that make sense.
John:
in like a business plan, whereas some people just can't abide by.
John:
I mean, we'll get to this if we get to the if we can ever get to the second item in the follow up.
John:
Some people just can't just can't abide by small aesthetic things that most people don't notice.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, and to be fair,
Marco:
i think that is part of their business plan you know like when when you have an app like vesper you know the the whole selling point is it's basically a note-taking app but they've done it in like this extremely custom way where everything is like extremely well thought out and well designed and well implemented and everything that that kind of that is their selling point to a large degree because there are so many other uh note-taking apps out there you know like
John:
It's a less compelling selling point than what you can list in your bullet points for.
John:
I had to do this core audio stuff because this feature, smart speed, everyone can understand it.
John:
It's a good feature.
John:
You press a button.
John:
Whereas trying to explain to somebody, yeah, it takes notes.
John:
But let me tell you exactly how beautiful and perfect this UI is.
John:
You're right.
John:
That is their value proposition.
John:
I just think it's a more narrow one than yours.
Marco:
Yeah, and I think I would say, too, like, a lot of that works because of who they are and the audience they have.
Marco:
I think one of the problems, like, Jarrett Sinclair with Unread, which actually, I started using it this week because Reader... Oh, neither of them are updated yet, but I started trying Unread this week.
Marco:
And actually, like... I actually like it.
Marco:
It...
Marco:
I'm not quite as fascinated as I was with Reader yet, and I'm not sure if I'll get there.
Marco:
I probably will.
Marco:
I think Unread was a victim of many, many problems and shortcomings that happened to it, but also bad defaults.
Marco:
There were some settings I didn't even know existed, and I went digging, and I've now customized it to be, in my opinion, a much better fit for me.
Marco:
So anyway, if you gave Unread a very quick look before and didn't give it much thought...
Marco:
Poke around in the settings and you might be able to set it up the way you like.
Marco:
Anyway, Unread was a similar kind of thing.
Marco:
It's like a fairly simple UI with lots of custom work to have this highly polished custom look and feel.
Marco:
And it got a lot of good reviews and everything, but it didn't sell that well.
Marco:
And I think that that kind of shows like it is that can be a selling point.
Marco:
And for Vesper, it is.
Marco:
And I don't know how well Vesper sells, but I think it's safe to say it hasn't taken over the world yet.
Marco:
And I think it's, you know, you can look at that as a selling point, that like handcraftedness and design and implementation, like the combination of all those tiny details as a selling point.
Marco:
It's very hard to sell people on that.
Marco:
That's why I'm advising, like, you know, if you have an iPad app, I'm telling you that kind of stuff is probably not worth doing.
Marco:
There are certain areas where that will make sense.
Marco:
The app store three years ago or more, four years ago, that would have made more sense because you could make more money off of that crowd.
Marco:
You can make more money off of that selling feature.
Marco:
These days, it's just so much harder.
Marco:
You have to work so much leaner.
Marco:
I don't think it's a good trade-off for most people.
John:
Well, here's the flip side of that.
John:
The flip side is the easy flip side that you used to hear more years ago than you do now, which is these everyone involved here is to some extent, probably more in the case of Vesper, making the application that they want to make that expresses their values.
John:
They're making, you know, the note taking application that they want to use.
John:
So they're expressing their values through their work the same way when you blog, you're blogging the type of thing that you think you might want to read.
John:
You're making the app that you want to make.
John:
And so it's like I want a note taking app.
John:
It's beautiful in all these ways.
John:
And so this is the app that I'm going to make.
John:
And that business model, you know, the expressing yourself through your work is something I mean, if you want to talk about like Daring Fireball, the website is the same thing.
John:
It's expressing yourself through your work.
John:
And it's satisfying to do that.
John:
And if you're lucky enough that the things you want to express resonate with other people, then you can get an audience for it.
John:
And you, to some degree, are doing that with the audio quality because you, with all your crazy headphones and your amplifiers and everything, care about audio quality.
John:
So even though it also is explainable in a business plan, you care about audio.
John:
And so it makes sense that you express those values by spending all this time.
John:
You started the podcast application as a prototype audio engine.
John:
That's where you began the whole thing.
John:
You're not just going to accept the system.
John:
Yeah, and I can't make a system call and it plays audio.
John:
you know you you dug into that part of it and so i think that is also an expression of yourself you obviously care more about that than you do care about uh i really wish the uh the mini player could be you know seven points higher uh so i'm going to write an entirely custom control for it uh because if otherwise it has to be toolbar height you know
Marco:
I think maybe an important distinction to make here is, you know, I've said before when talking about Overcast, even when talking about Instapaper originally, I've said before that a good recipe for an app is to do one really hard thing and everything else do it the easy way.
Marco:
So like one really hard thing and a bunch of easy things.
Marco:
And with Instant Paper, that really hard thing was probably the text parser or things like that.
Marco:
Do a very small number of very hard things, and then everything else, do it the easy way.
Marco:
And with Overcast, clearly, the audio engine is the hard part.
Marco:
Well, and the downloader.
Marco:
The downloader.
Marco:
I've got to rewrite it again.
Marco:
It's the unexpected hard part.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I hate the downloader so much.
Marco:
No, I actually spent three hours today figuring out how to pop up an action menu when you long tap a link in a web view.
Marco:
And I did it.
Marco:
And I even published the code, and it's in FC Utilities on GitHub.
Marco:
But, oh my god, that was... Anyway.
Marco:
And that might be an example of things not to spend your time on.
Marco:
But what I'm saying is, with Overcast, the hard part that I invested tons of time in was the audio engine.
Marco:
Because that gave me...
Marco:
marketable features that i wouldn't have had otherwise that you know it's easy to advertise it's the kind of feature that people will talk about and that will get more people to download the app it's the kind of feature that will set you apart from competitors for at least a little while and that you know that has clear direct selling value whereas if you do a bunch of those hard things in the ui or even one giant hard thing in the ui
Marco:
you're very unlikely to see that kind of return from it.
Marco:
It's so much easier to get that kind of return.
Marco:
If you're going to do one or two hard things and a bunch of easy things, make sure those hard things are things that will result in marketable improvements for your app.
John:
But you do care about audio, though.
John:
Like, I mean, all the things that even just speeding up and slowing down, if you just use whatever a lot of the other podcast apps do, it like skips around and just kind of stutters and it doesn't sound good.
John:
Like you care about audio.
John:
Like it's I don't say that's the main reason.
John:
And you could you could channel that that personal value into, oh, well, also there are these much more rational reasons for doing it.
John:
But it helps that it's something that you care about.
John:
There are plenty of other things that might also be marketable features that you care less about.
John:
or that don't or even just making the app that you want like think about all the people who want like much more sophisticated storage management but that doesn't push your button so that's not the that's not the application you made even though it might be just as marketable as uh you know playback speed yeah that's true and and for a lot of people that is yeah so anyway the expression of your personal values within the application is the sort of this silly like follow your passion whatever type of thing but but that can work and that like the the only the thing you can take home from that is
John:
don't make an application that you don't like that doesn't express any of your values just because you think that's what the public wants.
John:
Because at least if you fail making an application that expresses some of your values and whatever you picked for the hard part, at least then it's like, well, it was like more like a noble endeavor.
John:
Whereas if you make an application that you wouldn't even want to use and nobody buys it, I think that's a worse outcome.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
all right now that we are like 40 minutes in let me give our first sponsor read in case you know no one's heard me talk enough in the last 30 minutes uh our first sponsor this week is our return sponsor it is casper casper is an online retailer of premium mattresses for a fraction of the price now casey you actually have a casper mattress and i got a chance to see this when i was there and i was i was pretty impressed with the quality what what do you think of it
Casey:
It is very nice.
Casey:
We've slept on it once or twice because we got it for a spare bed that really needed a mattress.
Casey:
And it's really, really nice.
Casey:
The thing I like about it is it has like that kind of memory foam foam topper, which I'm sure you'll tell us about in a moment.
Casey:
But I'm not usually a fan of memory foam.
Casey:
And it's kind of like this, I don't want to use the word hybrid, but I can't think of a better one.
Marco:
Well, they use the word hybrid.
Marco:
It is a hybrid mattress that combines premium latex foam with memory foam.
Casey:
See, perfect.
Casey:
I couldn't have planned that better.
Casey:
So as a not memory foam kind of guy, that was the perfect happy medium between just a straight up mattress and having that little bit of extra cushion on top.
Casey:
It's delightful.
Marco:
Yeah, they call it just the right sink and just the right bounce.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
Latex foam and memory foam come together for better nights and brighter days.
Marco:
Yeah, I was really impressed by it.
Marco:
It felt really cool, and I like memory foam, so that actually means a lot that I was impressed by this.
Marco:
I really liked it a lot.
Marco:
Anyway, regularly mattresses can cost well over $1,500.
Marco:
If you've ever bought a mattress as an adult and bought a real good mattress, you're lucky to come out under $1,500.
Marco:
You pretty much can't.
Marco:
Casper is really affordable.
Marco:
It's $500 for a twin, $750 for full, $850 for queen, $950 for king.
Marco:
these prices i mean i would say you know for for the quality they give i would say that's roughly half the price of what you pay with with most other people uh or maybe even less than half it that's a really those are really good prices the cool thing is you buy these mattresses online um and it's it's you you might think it's kind of weird to buy a mattress online i like when they when i was first asked about you know whether we wanted to take this spot i was like are you sure a mattress company online really but you know it turns out they're really good and they ship it to you in this
Casey:
relatively small box kind of like crushed up and then you you open it up and it basically explodes into a mattress is that roughly right yeah it's the trippiest but most awesome thing to witness it is it is extremely cool i guess i'm assuming they like vacuum pack the thing so right
Casey:
They give you a little tool that lets you open the plastic wrapping that it's packed in, and you give it about five or ten minutes, and it just sucks all the air out of the room and into itself and expands.
Casey:
It's very neat.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
This is an obsessively engineered mattress at a shockingly fair price.
Marco:
And the cool thing is – another reason you might be worried about mattress buying online besides delivery challenges –
Marco:
is they have a risk-free trial and return policy.
Marco:
You can try sleeping on a Casper mattress for up to 100 days with free delivery and painless returns.
Marco:
These mattresses are also made in America, which is pretty cool.
Marco:
So definitely check out Casper.
Marco:
Go to casper.com slash ATP.
Marco:
and use coupon code ATP at checkout, and you'll get 50 bucks off.
Marco:
So these prices get even better.
Marco:
I mean, really, you know, regular price, 850 for queen, 950 for king, those are incredible prices.
Marco:
And really, it's a pretty cool mattress, I gotta say.
Marco:
Once again, go to casper.com, C-A-S-P-E-R.com slash ATP, and use coupon code ATP at checkout for 50 bucks off.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Casper for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Once again, it is a really great mattress at a shockingly fair price.
Casey:
So we are 45-ish minutes in and we're through one follow-up item.
John:
And one sponsor.
John:
I totally blame Marco for that derail because he started talking about stuff that was not in the follow-up.
John:
That is totally fair.
John:
It's breaking.
Marco:
I've been holding it.
Marco:
See, the problem is I've been developing, I've been coding like a madman all week.
Marco:
And so I haven't blogged at all.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
So all that should have been a blog post or a few blog posts, actually.
Marco:
But I haven't had time to write it up.
Marco:
And it's just easier to spew it all out at you guys on the show.
Casey:
So accidental build and analyze.
Marco:
Exactly.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Why don't you tell us, John, about whether or not the rest of the world uses NFC?
John:
Yeah, there's enough.
John:
I was going to mostly just absorb this feedback, but enough people have sent it that I think it's worth clarifying in case other people are misunderstanding as well.
John:
We keep talking about Apple Pay contactless payment in the UK, various other countries that have ways that you can pay for things by waving something next to something.
John:
We kept getting feedback saying, you think this is a reason that Apple Pay might not get adopted, but don't you know that all of these things, and they list out whatever their things are, contactless Apple Pay or whatever the brand name for the thing is in their country, they all use NFC.
John:
So the hardware is all there.
John:
And I just wanted to clarify that, yes, we know.
John:
We know that they all use NFC.
John:
If you don't know they all use NFC, look up NFC on Wikipedia and read all about it.
John:
That's the underlying technology of all these wave something near some other thing.
John:
Some of them use RFID, but it's very similar to everything.
John:
So yes, we understand the hardware they install very often is the same in all those cases.
John:
They all work with NFC.
John:
The reason we're talking about Apple Play adoption is having the hardware isn't sufficient.
John:
You also need business deals to connect up the parties involved in NFC.
John:
So would you say that the hardware is necessary, but maybe not sufficient?
John:
Yeah, and that was a question in the beginning because it was like the question was, well, there's a couple of questions about Apple's NFC.
John:
So building NFC in the phone, the first thing we learned is that Apple is, I think, not providing access to third parties to screw with that NFC hardware in the same way as they can on an Android phone, which is fine, I guess, is typical Apple way of doing stuff.
John:
And the second one was, is there anything at all special about the other end of the thing that you have to wave an Apple phone against to use the NFC device?
John:
And I think what we've learned is that there's nothing special about it.
John:
It's all about
John:
uh who's connecting to what on the back end but the actual point of sale hardware if it you know if it's nfc and has that little industry standard logo thing then it's just a matter of getting the deal set up
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Why don't we talk about the iPhone 6 Plus scaling, which has been really grinding some designers gears this week, as I think Marco alluded to earlier.
Casey:
What do we know about this?
John:
This is not substantiated by anything because it was posted.
John:
I hate when people do this on Twitter, but they do it often.
John:
They will post an image of text.
John:
They will link to an image of text rather than linking to the source web page or whatever.
John:
And so this was a tweet with an image of text.
John:
And usually I figure I can do a Google verbatim search and pick out a unique phrase and find the web page with a text.
John:
And I just couldn't find this one.
John:
I tried a couple of different phrases and could not find whatever this thing was referencing.
John:
So who knows?
John:
Maybe it was a secret email to somebody.
John:
So I don't even know if this is true.
John:
But this gets back to my sort of...
John:
Discomfort with the scaling in the iPhone 6 plus which I will once again reemphasize I do not think is a problem for regular people It is only a problem for people who care about these things and we are small in number So anyway for people telling me that it doesn't matter that this happens.
John:
You're right It doesn't matter just matters to me anyway with that out of the way Here's another thing that if true is makes me dislike it even more So the iPhone 6 plus has basically a 1080p resolution like the actual native pixels on the screen and
John:
And you would think, well, that's not great because they're drawing things at 3x, which is much bigger, and they scale it down to 1080, and that's the thing that's bothering me with the hairline shimmering and stuff like that.
John:
But it's actually great if you're watching 1080p video that you might have downloaded onto the device from the iTunes store or something.
John:
Hey, perfect native screen for that.
John:
Not only is it the right aspect ratio, but it is actually exactly the native screen.
John:
resolution of the movie or whatever but this random image attached to a tweet says that if you do a screen capture during video playback you'll see that the video is rendered at 2208 by 1242 so the 1080p video is scaled up to the actual off-screen rendered 3x resolution and then scaled back down to 1080 for display purposes
John:
We're just crazy pants if true, because you'd hope that in this one instance in full screen video playback, they'd say, you know what?
John:
Just decode the video and show it natively on the pixels because everything matches up perfectly.
John:
I'll be sad if this is true and it will make me not like it even more.
Marco:
Oh, it's almost certainly true.
Marco:
You know, the reasons why, what it would take to not do that, like the amount of exceptions and special processing it would take in the hardware and software to...
John:
let the to let the os output different pixel mapping for just the video it just needs to capture it just needs to capture the screen like back and i've complained this is one of my first blog posts ever on the internet complaining about this like if you'd launch a mac game and it wouldn't use the api to i think it was called capturing the screen or whatever
John:
There's an API that you can call and say, look, I'm taking over the screen.
John:
I'm going to screw with the screen.
John:
I don't want any other applications that are currently running to have any idea that I'm screwing with the screen.
John:
So all the notifications they would normally get about like, hey, by the way, did you know that the user just changed the resolution of the screen?
John:
This is on a Mac I'm talking about.
John:
You might want to move your windows around or you might want to adjust something or whatever.
John:
I'm going to call the API that says don't send anybody those things because I'm going to change it to 640 by 480 so I can play Quake or whatever is going on.
John:
I do not want you to hose every single window on the screen.
John:
And, you know, me...
John:
games that didn't do that you'd launch them it would change your screen resolution destroy all your window placements and i would just be incredibly angry because there's no undo for that operation and it's like you just have to call one api so anyway on the phone if they had a cell and this is on os 10 i'm talking about something related to those those apis somewhere in there that you could you know capture the display device essentially change the the output resolution while you're in full screen playback and
John:
and then just do your full screen playback in that way.
John:
Yeah, but then what happens when you tap the screen to show the bars?
John:
It has to uncapture.
John:
It has to do the whole thing.
John:
Same thing would happen if you alt-tabbed on OS X. We have the technology to do this.
John:
You're right.
John:
It's a little bit more of a hassle.
Marco:
And it has always sucked whenever anything has ever done it.
John:
Well, no, you can do it like when the Mac games that did it well, it was fine.
John:
Like you would alt tab and you'd see the alt tab menu at the resolution that the game had changed into.
John:
But then when it switched to the other app, it would go back to the other res and none of the other apps would have any idea that the game was running in different and different resolutions.
John:
Sometimes they'd even show the game in a little window.
John:
The full screen thing would go into a window at whatever the native resolution.
John:
Anyway, this is all probably weird in iOS and it's probably much more straightforward to do it in a straightforward way.
John:
But that's really a shame, don't you think?
John:
Like taking 1080p, scaling it up and shrinking it back down.
John:
You're just losing data and
John:
Again, no one will notice this.
John:
I totally agree that you will never be able to see this with your naked eye.
John:
It's all in my head.
Marco:
That's exactly the thing.
Marco:
Academically, if you think about it as a geek like us, everything that the 6 Plus does is gross and weird with the way it scales the screen.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
It is rendering at not the right size and scaling it down to the right size.
Marco:
And, by the way, the right size is at a weird DPI of 3x.
Marco:
All of that is gross to people like us.
Marco:
The reason why it works is because you don't notice.
Marco:
Yes, I know, as I said last time, if you scroll table view very slowly and look at the borders, you can probably see them shimmering.
Marco:
Yes, that is visible when you're looking for it.
Marco:
No, you don't see it in real life.
Marco:
and i think you know thinking about what this would require to make this exception for 1080p video first of all how many people even watch 1080p video on their phones oh there's isn't that what itunes that's what itunes serves up these days doesn't it well if you're streaming it maybe if you're streaming that over a very good connection in an app that will actually serve that to a phone maybe no i mean if you get if you buy if you buy a movie from itunes don't you get 1080 these days you do but isn't it like four gigs
John:
Oh, yeah, but you download it onto your phone.
John:
I don't know what they send to phones.
John:
They could be sending a down res version of it.
John:
I mean, YouTube plays 1080 for crying out loud on the desktop anyway.
Marco:
I don't know if it still does.
Marco:
iTunes used to, when you buy a 1080 movie, it would download two versions.
Marco:
It would download like a 1080 version and like a lower, I don't know whether it was 720 or something even lower than that, mostly for putting on iPods and iPhones.
Marco:
And anyway, it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
I think the number of people who will watch actual 1080p video files or streaming video on their iPhone is probably pretty low.
Marco:
I think most of the time people watching video on phones are seeing lower resolutions than that.
Marco:
And then secondly, for the people who are seeing 1080p video on their phone, I think that the chances that they would ever notice anything wrong with the scaling, you know, any artifacts from that notice, any extra blurriness or pixelation from that, I think the chances of that are so incredibly low that it is definitely not worth what would probably be some pretty big complexity required to get that feature to work.
John:
See, we don't even know if this is what they're actually doing.
John:
So for all we know, they already are doing the more complex thing.
John:
It's mostly a shame in 1080 because it's such a perfect fit.
John:
But in 720, it might actually be more noticeable, more of a chance of noticing it because it's got to go from 720 all the way up to 2208 by 1242 and then back down to, you know, 1080p.
John:
So it's a strange transition.
Marco:
Good real-time follow-up from the chat from Nathan.
Marco:
How about 1080p video taken with the phone's camera?
John:
There you go.
Marco:
And that's a very good point.
Marco:
That is probably the most common source of 1080p video on the phone is from the camera.
Marco:
That's a very good point.
Marco:
I didn't think of that.
Marco:
I think that it still holds that most people would not notice the difference between these two rendering modes.
Marco:
And therefore, I really don't think...
Marco:
I would question, honestly, whether anybody could tell the difference, like if they could set it up as like a blind test and do it both ways.
John:
The shimmering hairlines you can't see.
John:
And the one the one we kept getting feedback about was like, I can't notice that anywhere except for the battery indicator because the battery indicator is on the screen so much of the time in iOS.
John:
And because people are so familiar with the way it looks in iOS 7 on their other, you know, retina iOS 7 devices.
John:
people regular all right they're not regular but they're slightly closer to regular people can pick it up in the battery indicator regular people still don't care but uh the reason i bring this up again is because i was thinking back to the keynote when they introduced the and i know it's not a keynote we got feedback about that it's only a keynote when you're setting the tone for a week of conferences this was not a keynote this is a pressing but we called a keynote the application is called my goodness we
John:
We will continue to use the idiomatic definition of Keynote when in the context of Apple stuff, we mean a speech where Apple executives introduce products.
John:
Anyway, where they made a specific point of talking about the desktop quality hardware scaler.
John:
And at the time that seemed weird because like why emphasize that?
John:
But it's kind of like, it's not exactly like so.
John:
Please don't send me emails telling me this analogy is not apt because I already know it's not.
John:
But it reminded me of...
John:
the narrative device of hang a lantern on it, where if you've got a plot point in a story that doesn't make any sense, rather than trying to figure out a way to make it make sense, you just have one of the characters in the scene point out the thing that doesn't make sense.
John:
Like, you know, the audience is going to go, hey, that doesn't make any sense.
John:
But if you have a character on screen say, that's impossible, that can't be happening, then that makes it okay.
John:
Well, this is kind of like they knew they had a device that was a weird compromise with the 3X scaled down to fit the screen.
John:
And they're trying to turn a weakness into a strength by explicitly bragging about the thing they have that makes this hack possible, which is their desktop quality scaler, whatever.
John:
And by hanging a lantern on it, by basically having the person on the stage say the thing that the nerds might be thinking, oh, actually, that's something cool about this thing, this scaler.
John:
No one has ever thought of scaler, which is probably just...
John:
you know it's more hardware in the gpu gpu scale things really fast anyway i don't i don't think this is any dedicated hardware people can correct me if i'm wrong but anyway the point the fact that they're pointing it out is kind of an admission that they're not particularly happy with this whole scaling thing either but they're trying to spin it as something good and this all gets back to the mystery that we still have of what's the deal with this did they plan to do a native 3x screen and couldn't do it or did they always plan to do it this way uh
John:
And we don't know the answer to that.
John:
I've got conflicting feedback from two separate, completely unreliable, you know, random sources saying they totally plan to do a native 3x screen and they just couldn't do it because of availability and stuff.
John:
And other feedback saying the exact opposite, that they always plan to do it this way.
John:
And it's not because they couldn't do native 3x.
John:
So I don't know what to think.
John:
All I know is that it bothers me.
John:
And yes, it will probably not bother almost anyone else in the world.
Marco:
our second sponsor this week is our friends at raise labs r-a-i-z l-a-b-s raise labs raise labs helps companies develop exceptional products on iphone ipad and android raise labs has offices in boston and san francisco and they've been crafting great products for over 11 years and they aren't just another just another developer shop you know there's a lot of developer shops out there raise labs pairs product managers designers and development to ensure quality products and
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Marco:
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Marco:
I guess there's no shorter version of that.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So thanks a lot to razelabs, R-A-I-Z-L-A-B-S.com for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
Okay, so we're still talking about iPhones that can bend.
Casey:
That's still a thing?
Casey:
I guess.
John:
Well, there's been more action on the internet about it.
John:
Consumer Reports did a bending test using actual equipment for bending.
John:
Although, I just read the Consumer Reports thing that's linked to there, and I'm glad that they took out the little three-point bending machine and measured the force with a bunch of different phones, because that's more or less what I was asking for.
John:
But...
John:
I didn't see a bunch of tables showing all the results.
John:
What it basically came down to is there are some phones that are stronger than the iPhone 6 Plus.
John:
There are some phones that are weaker.
John:
The 6 Plus, I think, actually did better than the plain old 6.
John:
It was enough to sort of kind of say with more confidence that this is not really much of a story.
John:
Because the six and six plus are not appreciably.
John:
They're not the bottom of the barrel.
John:
They're not weaker than all the other phones that are out there.
John:
They're not stronger than they're kind of in mid pack.
John:
But as usual, Dr. Drang had some more interesting posts in and around this topic.
John:
They got I mean, people just give the phones to him because he can run the tests and give us real results.
John:
They got closer to the heart of the matter because.
John:
force applied to the phones like to break them like what point did the phone break or bend or whatever it's not as important as some other you know more subtler things like how much force do you have to apply before there is measurable permanent deformation because that seems to be happening to a lot of people's phones maybe people care about that it's like okay well we figured out for breaking you know the iphone 6 and 6 plus are kind of mid-pack because they pressed all the phones until they broke right but
John:
But there may be many forces that a plastic phone can tolerate and spring back from right back into its full normal shape that would permanently deform an iPhone because it's made of aluminum.
John:
And the other factor that they could have delved into more was how much force is typically applied to a phone based on the size.
John:
So if you have a really long, skinny phone...
John:
You can get more leverage and apply more force to it.
John:
I don't know how they would measure this one, but this is also a factor like saying that the six plus did better than the six in the force test.
John:
But what are the expected forces in the front pocket of someone's pants of a taller phone versus a shorter phone?
John:
Like, the machines are applying measurable force to each thing, but you don't know, like, when I put this in my pocket, is the 6 Plus going to experience much more force because it's longer and there's more leverage?
John:
And so even though the 6 is technically weaker, it takes much stranger moves with your leg or whatever to apply that force to the thing.
John:
So, anyway, I...
John:
I'm pretty convinced that the 6 and 6 Plus are material-wise not any weaker substantially than any other phones.
John:
But because the 6 Plus is taller, I think the...
John:
the likelihood that forces will be applied to the six plus that are much harder to apply to the shorter phones is high.
John:
And so I think we'll still see lots of, and because aluminum doesn't spring back like plastic does, I still think we'll, we'll see this story ongoing.
John:
And I saw a sweet tweet from somebody whose last name is swearing Jim, which I think is great.
John:
If you are a fan of, uh,
John:
The show whose name escapes me now.
John:
Come on.
John:
You two are useless.
John:
Is it Deadwood?
John:
Yes, there you go.
John:
Deadwood.
John:
Jeremy Swearingen.
John:
How did I know that?
John:
It's a very popular show.
John:
I didn't even watch that show.
John:
It's a good show.
John:
You should.
John:
I got through the first episode and didn't like it, so I stopped.
John:
A lot of cursing.
John:
You should try it.
John:
It gets better.
John:
Then it ends too soon, so it's sad.
John:
So maybe you shouldn't watch it.
John:
It's kind of like Firefly Casey.
John:
Hey, a show you know.
Casey:
I do know that show.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So he said he bent his iPhone 6 and kept it in his back pocket and it never felt tight and posted pictures of it.
John:
these are slight bends i mean if you search you can find tons of pictures of bent iphone 5s and everything as well too which is why i think this is just you know the the media machine making these things more visible is one issue the second issue is that if you make phones out of aluminum and people keep them in their pockets aluminum can accept amounts of force that do not break the phone but then nevertheless the phone does not spring back from and then you have a slightly bent phone
John:
Do you care about that?
John:
Maybe you don't care.
John:
Maybe you don't notice.
John:
Maybe people are running around with slightly bent iPhone 5s now and have no idea until they put it on a table and look at it from the side really carefully and say, you know what, this is a little bit bent.
John:
So anyway, this continues to go on.
John:
I think we can expect to see more stories about it, but I'm much more chill about it now than I was before, except for in the case of the Plus, where I think the outstanding issue is that
John:
It's plenty sturdy, plenty strong.
John:
But because it is a larger phone, there is a potential for higher forces to be applied to it because of the leverage you get between the edges in the middle of the phone.
Casey:
So it's a little odd to me that aluminum was the choice of metal.
Casey:
It is, but it isn't.
Casey:
I mean, aluminum is soft.
Casey:
And I know other harder metals are a lot more expensive.
Casey:
And this is where Dr. Drang is ripping his hair out.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
It just seems like an interesting choice.
Casey:
It's something that it's lightweight, though.
Casey:
Yeah, I know.
Marco:
And that's the obvious answer.
Marco:
But there's also all sorts of other properties, too, that might be desirable, like the way it dents or shatters or doesn't dent or doesn't shatter.
Casey:
Oh, that's a good point.
John:
And it's it's it's plenty strong.
John:
I mean, they make cars out of aluminum, too.
John:
Like you just have to you just have to apply it like this was getting it.
John:
If you made it a little bit bigger, it's not just you could put more battery, but you could put, you know, like the little side impact beams, like strengthening things, make certain parts of it thicker and stuff like that.
John:
I don't think you need to do it with the smaller sizes and maybe even with the bigger one.
John:
It's not an issue.
John:
But like, again,
John:
again like we need someone with i don't know how you do the scientific test of forces that might be applied to a phone in a pocket but that that i think is the open question but anyway this increased awareness is kind of like the medical student's disease where once you know all the things that can go wrong with your body suddenly you think all of them are happening to you right and you become a hypochondriac temporarily well now that everyone knows that bending phones is a thing like everyone should take their their their fives and five s's and put them all on the table and see if they're slightly cupped
Marco:
I'm looking forward to that.
Marco:
I'm going to get right on that.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know what I would do with that.
John:
You joke about it, but I bet you will.
John:
After you use the 6 Plus for a couple weeks, you will find yourself inevitably saying, you know, I wonder if I have added a slight bend.
John:
And you'll look.
John:
You can't help yourself.
John:
You'll look.
John:
Not that you'll care if you see, oh, you know, it is a bend.
John:
Like, whatever.
John:
Like, you'll go back to your life.
John:
But it's impossible not to check if you're into this type of thing.
John:
Just out of curiosity.
John:
if this really does happen to you where you're where you're six or six plus bends i bet if you take it to the genius bar you know unless it looks like your phone was run over by a car i bet they'll you know they'll probably replace it for you well this is like the high pitch noise from my sc30 if you come in with a phone that like looks perfect but you say but but hey watch if you put it on the table and the table is perfectly flat and you shine a light you can see a little light peeking through the middle but the edges like then you'll seem like a crazy person like i did when i said that my power supply made a high pitch wine on my sc30 but it totally did
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Thanks a lot to Squarespace once again for sponsoring.
Marco:
They've been a sponsor of our show for so long and so many other shows for so long.
Marco:
I really have to give them a special thank you here and there because they're just so good.
Marco:
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Casey:
John, tell me about the iPod Touch.
John:
It still exists?
John:
I was just wondering, like, you know, I use an iPod Touch, so a few people do, except for kids, right?
John:
I wonder if the people who want small, you know, who want iPhone 5 size things will become the new iPod Touch people.
John:
Like, there's a group of people who want that, definitely, but that most other people don't and don't understand that desire and don't care about it, and when the small phone people are marginalized, they'll be sad, but everyone else will just be like, well, whatever, and
Casey:
apple and the rest of the industry will move on to big giant phones and you'll complain about the iphone 6 being too big for you the same way i complain about the ipod touch not getting updated um possibly and i'm on the verge of being one of those people i did get a lot of and i think a lot of this came to you guys as well got a lot of feedback about how perhaps the 6 is a little too big and a lot is relative it was a lot more than i expected is i think what i'm trying to say and
Casey:
a lot of people came out of the woodwork to say, you know what?
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
The six is too big and I really miss my five S. And then a couple of people even emailed or tweeted to say, I actually returned my six and bought a five S. Presumably these are people who were on the five previously and they didn't like the size so much that they actually went to a year old product because they felt like it was a better fit for them.
Casey:
So, um,
Casey:
It's certainly possible that you will get an iPhone and then I'll be the idiot that's lamenting the days when we used to have four-inch phones and how much better that was.
Casey:
Just like you lament the days when the – well, no, the iPod Touch has never really been updated, so never mind.
John:
It was the fastest iOS device at one time.
John:
When I got my first iPod Touch, it was faster than the iPhone.
John:
Those were the days, or weeks, or months.
Casey:
You sound like me with my Subaru.
Casey:
When I bought my Subaru Legacy, it was quicker than the WRX at the time, and that lasted like a year.
Casey:
But man, that was a good year.
Casey:
Tell me about wood inlays.
John:
I love that we have follow-up about this.
John:
That was a question I asked the chat room and you guys last time, and we got bad answers.
John:
What is that?
John:
We were talking about the...
John:
What do you call it?
John:
Antenna lines on the back of the six and how the antenna lines are ugly, but they tried to give them some aesthetic interest by making them so beautifully flush with the back of the device.
John:
And I was saying, I hope they stayed that way because that is their...
John:
main and possibly only redeeming aesthetic value is the position which they're made and i said it was like that wood enlay thing where you make these intricate designs by fitting pieces of wood all next to each other looks like one big flat surface and i asked what that was called and nobody knew it's called marquetry steven syrek yeah they gave us that answer we will link to the wikipedia page marquetry it's cool
John:
all right all right and speaking of interesting words yes we want to another word we asked for my this might have gone by in the chat room and i just missed it kleenex and q-tips and all those other things that are actually product names but that have become placeholders for the entire category of device that's called a proprietary eponym so there you go this today is a vocabulary day these will you'll be quizzed on these at the uh end of the year
Casey:
Marco, do you also feel better knowing these pieces of vocabulary that I've already forgotten?
Casey:
I've already forgotten even how many we've learned.
John:
Proprietary eponym, I can say right now, I'm probably going to forget that one.
John:
But marquetry, I'll probably remember.
John:
So the less useful one, I'll remember.
Casey:
All right, so we are in roughly an hour and a quarter into the show.
Casey:
Is there any other follow-up that you'd like to do before we start the show?
Casey:
Please no.
Casey:
Are we going to start the show or are we just going to go straight to the post-show?
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Casper, Squarespace, and Ray's Labs, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Oh, before I forget, our friend Jonathan Mann, who wrote our theme song and who's generally awesome, the Song of Day man.
Marco:
He has a Kickstarter project called the Harry Potter EP, and he asked me to see if we can give it a quick mention on the show because he's running out of time and he really wants to make this.
Marco:
He's only asking for a few thousand dollars.
Marco:
It's a very, very easy ask.
Marco:
He recorded five songs about Harry Potter, and he basically wants to make them into full productions with the rest of the band, like hire a drummer to record for the session and everything else.
Marco:
and make an ep you can get it for just five bucks go to kickstarter.jonathan man with two n's dot net and i'll put a link in the show notes as well so thanks to jonathan and we will see you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental oh it was accidental
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
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.
John:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
In the tradition of continuing follow-up into the after show.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Wait, is that a tradition?
John:
Have we established this?
John:
Oh, we're doing it now, yeah.
John:
The invisible spreadsheet thing.
John:
I got a lot of comments on that.
John:
Didn't I talk about this?
John:
The last show that was in the show when I heard it, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
But I was referring back to a conversation in past shows where this was originally brought up.
Marco:
Well, I believe you were referring back to something you had quickly stated in another one of the aftershows.
Marco:
So it was a callback to an aftershow throwaway line.
Marco:
Did it stay in the edit, though?
Marco:
Did you leave that in?
Marco:
It did.
Marco:
Oh, I would not have taken that out.
John:
people have bad memories because lots of people sending we're sending feedback about the invisible spreadsheet as if the first time i said it was in the past episode but i was referring back to something that i had said in the past anyway right so now we have follow-up on your previous joke about the after show that you had said before that and the other joke case i just called you casey that's fine that's all right i watch i touch yeah yeah casey apple phone anyway it's not a joke oh my god
Casey:
I don't even know what to do right now.
Casey:
I think that's it.
Casey:
We are so done.
Casey:
Holy hell.
Casey:
Oh, oh, oh, oh.
Casey:
I completely forgot.
Casey:
How's the review?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
Because the GM came out.
John:
This is like crunch time, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
I went through it all and had to change some screenshots.
John:
It was good going through it all.
John:
Like, I saved... I'd taken all my screenshots already, so...
John:
After doing this long enough, I'm trying to get a feel for, like, when do I feel like the graphics are locked down and the UI locked down?
John:
And you have to pick something.
John:
So I think I picked the right build to do all my screenshots in.
John:
Things did change.
John:
I took the GM as my chance to go back through all my screenshots and diff them all, essentially, to make sure.
John:
And I found some ones that...
John:
that were really old that actually if i had retaken them for for the build you know i took some screenshots early and then was sad because everything kept changing i stopped and then i took all my screenshots later but didn't retake the ones i'd taken earlier so anyway i had to do some replacement and some fixing and all the other stuff uh i would really like a release date that would be nice don't you think you know it really helps with the whole lead time on getting books into stories and stuff like that but
John:
uh i i'm adding a few tiny little things to you know the end where you just throw in like two sentences on some new little feature and throw in a screenshot or whatever and after that i feel like i'll be done and i can start i mean i've already started the production process of trying to get the ebook stuff in checking to find out that still the ios version of the kindle app doesn't read the kf8 format which just blows my mind but whatever uh
John:
Yeah.
John:
Hacking up my terrible Perl scripts that make these ebooks, making them even more disgusting.
Casey:
Is there any other kind of Perl script?
John:
There is.
John:
I'm at the point now, like if this is my last review, I'm just over the line of like, you know, with the sloppy, lazy programming type thing, like, well, this is a throwaway thing.
John:
I got to do it once.
John:
I'll just write a crappy, no big deal.
John:
Right.
John:
But at a certain point, if you use it a certain number of times, you would have your time would have been better spent and making like a real version of it in the beginning.
John:
Right.
John:
I think I'm just crossing that line now of like, OK, now I've used this enough times that if I just written it right the first time, I would have saved time in the long run.
John:
But it's way too late to write it the right way this time.
John:
So I'm just carrying even less and just hacking it up and making it work.
John:
So.
John:
If this is the last time, this will be a sad goodbye to my so-called e-book production system.
John:
And every year there's differences.
John:
It's going to be a slightly different presentation on the ARS website and some slightly different features I have them add to the CMS for my review and blah, blah, blah.
John:
I would like a release date.
John:
I could still get caught on my heels if they release the thing tomorrow or Tuesday or any other.
John:
If they don't give me, you know, several days notice to get this book built and, you know, get the review edited and copy edited, because you can't build the book until everything's edited and copy edited.
John:
Then you build the book.
John:
Then you submit the books to the store.
John:
Then they come out available.
John:
Anyway, it'll probably be OK.
John:
I just want it to be over.
Casey:
So you don't have any little birdies telling you even a theoretical release date?
John:
Nobody tells me anything.
John:
I mean, nobody tells anyone anything.
John:
They probably don't even know what the release date is.
John:
They'll decide when they decide and we'll all find out together.
John:
And I just hope there's some lead time, but they don't care about ebook production when they're picking their release dates.
John:
You can build apps with the Xcode GM seed and submit them to the Mac app store.
John:
So in theory, they could release the thing tomorrow.
Marco:
yeah i i would say i mean we haven't heard anything about like another press event happening for new ipads and maybe some fall imac retina maybe happening and and yosemite like that's all going to be probably announced some kind of press event sometime this month but we haven't even heard of that yet and usually they announce them at least a week ahead of time so there's no reason yosemite has to be tied to that like even if they have even if they have retina imacs being announced the thing you like
John:
you can release the Yosemite order the hell you feel like it like hold it for the event hold it till after the event like because the iMacs aren't going to ship like the next day right it's unlike the and this has been a topic of conversation in various blogs like unlike iOS and OS 10 does not seem to be tied to some gotta ship gotta gotta put it out there make or break the company product like the iPhone where it's like the new iPhones are coming they're going to have iOS 8 when the phones are ready the OS better be ready when the OS is ready
John:
You know, hopefully the phones are ready.
John:
There's no tie like that for Yosemite.
John:
So, you know, that's why it's not out yet.
John:
They're like, well, we'll get around to Yosemite.
John:
And it's good.
John:
Like it gives them more time to work out bugs and all that other stuff.
John:
But it also means that I have no idea when it's coming out.
Casey:
So sitting here now, last time.
John:
Yeah, it feels like it.
Marco:
Yeah, I'm sad to hear.
Marco:
I'm not surprised, but I am sad to hear that.
Marco:
Like, I think when 10.11 or whatever gets released and there's not a Syracuse review to read, it is going to feel like we're missing something big.
Marco:
Yep.
John:
I'll talk if I I mean, I still have a year to make the decision.
John:
So I'm not, you know, I'm not committing to anything now or whatever.
John:
Just I'm saying that's what it feels like now.
John:
But if I do make the decision, I will probably write up something explaining my reasoning.
John:
Certainly we'll explain it on here.
John:
There are plenty of plenty of good reasons to to not do it.
John:
But like, yeah, again, I don't have to decide this until many months from now.
John:
And I probably won't.
John:
So there we go.
Casey:
You know, if the choice is between you continuing to do the review and still whining about the iPod Touch or getting an iPhone and not doing the review, I'm happy for you to continue whining about your iPod Touch.
John:
Independent decisions.
John:
There is no connection between that.
Casey:
I'm just making sure, just in case.
John:
And I'm still thinking that I'm waiting for the October event to see what's happening in the iPod Touches.
John:
And even if there are iPod Touches, I might still get an iPhone.
John:
So iPhone chances are looking pretty good over here.
John:
I still don't have the case issue solved, and I'll have to look at what the iPod Touch is like to make a final decision.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm still not in love with the Apple leather case, but I feel like the thing is too slippery if I don't have a case on it.
Casey:
And I'm too much of a klutz anyway.
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
Yeah, you guys didn't bring that up in the iPhone gripping section.
John:
All the people complaining, oh, you said you'd drop your...
John:
Oh, that's true.
Casey:
I'd forgotten about that.
John:
Yeah, no, but like you're wise not to bring it up because then I drop it.
John:
Well, you can tell me, when do you guys, if you have ever dropped an iOS device, when does that happen?
John:
Does it happen when you're holding it and typing it?
John:
Not for me.
Casey:
No, it's when I'm swinging my arm around like a crazy person, like walking or whatever.
John:
Mine always does it when I'm going into or out of the pocket because if you miss the pocket going in, that's a problem.
John:
And if you're trying to take it out of a pocket in a hurry and like it's a tight pocket and you're trying to grip it, like...
John:
or it's like a loose pocket in your jacket and you're trying to pull it out into an out of pocket or being picked up or put down on some like shelf or some other thing where you don't pay enough attention you don't quite put it all the way on the shelf or you try to take it off and you slide it to the edge but you slide it right off that's where my poor iPod Touch has done many tumbles not when I'm holding it in my hand so the grip and me dropping it or
John:
Not related to each other.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
See, I've run into edge.
Casey:
Like I will hold it in my hand and I am not using it.
Casey:
I'm just holding it for whatever reason.
Casey:
It's not in my pocket.
Casey:
And I'll like be walking and swinging my arms as one normally does when you walk.
Casey:
But apparently I kind of flail or something when I walk in.
Casey:
So a lot of times I'll like clip an edge on a door frame, for example, or something like that.
Casey:
That's brutal.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But I mean, that's why I have a case.
John:
Have either one of you ever broken a screen on an iOS device ever?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I refuse to answer that.
John:
So Casey has.
John:
I haven't.
Casey:
No, I actually – I refuse to answer it because I know as soon as I say no, I haven't, I'm going to break it.
John:
There's some people like – there's people in your – that you know, like there are phone – there are screen breakers and non-screen breakers.
John:
Like it's – because if someone has ever broken the screen on their iPhone –
John:
chances are high that they've done it more than once if they had an iphone for years whereas people who have never done it just have these clean and it's just difference in habits and handling i think because you can't just set up the chance like it feels like people go into two bins there and it's mostly like people who are like obsessively careful with their little things and don't want it to be scratching or babying it or they're more likely not to drop it than the people who just treat it like it's supposed to be treated and every once in a while they break you know
Casey:
I haven't broken one yet.
Casey:
I've put some small dents, but big enough dents that that they're noticeable in both my iPads and my iPhones, although not the six yet.
Casey:
But I've never not yet have I shattered a screen.
Casey:
And I know it's only a matter of time.
John:
I think the worst thing I've done to an iOS device was the first time I brought my iPad 3 to WWDC and I had it in my backpack and I had it in like a little paddy case thing, but my backpack didn't have a lot of padding at the bottom.
John:
So when I put my backpack down like in front of me, you know, sitting down in the seat, I must have bumped the corner of the iPad.
John:
And if you look at it really, really closely, you can see the aluminum is slightly dented in on one of the corners.
John:
Only I would notice this, but that's the worst I've done to an iOS device so far.