Press Agree to Drive
John:
Denied.
John:
Reject this offer immediately.
John:
Furthermore, declare war against that podcast.
Marco:
I think we have some exciting news.
Marco:
We do?
Marco:
I think it's time that we reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue generating internet companies in the world.
John:
Who puts revenue generation in your statement?
John:
That was in the mission statement?
John:
Isn't that like implied?
John:
Like, we also want to make a lot of, not make a lot of money.
John:
We want a lot of money to flow through our corporation.
John:
Hopefully, eventually our costs will be below that amount and we'll realize some profit.
John:
But really, what we mostly want to concentrate on is just throughput, you know, make it up in volume.
John:
Just lots of revenue.
John:
That's in our mission statement.
John:
It's just so, it aims so low.
Marco:
Well, and to be fair, they corrected us.
Marco:
This is not Twitter's new mission statement.
Marco:
This is Twitter's new strategy statement.
Marco:
I'm not entirely sure what the difference is.
Marco:
Maybe this is just because I'm not from this planet and business people apparently are.
Casey:
No, it's the opposite.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
Because something is wacky in business.
Marco:
Whatever they put in most businesses, is there some kind of weird chemical that off-gasses from that that might cause this kind of language to be understood and produced?
Marco:
So maybe it's like the spider phones...
Marco:
or like cubicle walls.
Marco:
I don't know.
John:
It's just meetings.
John:
It's just, you know, you've seen a demotivational poster for meetings.
John:
None of us is as dumb as all of us.
Casey:
No, the thing of it is, I've talked about this in the past, and I'm not being funny right now.
Casey:
I really believe that
Casey:
Most large businesses – and I have seen this firsthand in financial services firms – they're entirely – not literally, of course, but they're entirely middle management.
Casey:
And the problem is that every one of these middle managers realizes deep down inside that they're redundant.
Casey:
And so they all decide to have meetings constantly –
Casey:
And they have these meetings so that at these meetings, all of the middle managers can stick up their peacock tails and say, oh, look at me.
Casey:
I'm so smart.
Casey:
I'm not redundant.
Casey:
It's all you idiots that are the redundant ones.
Casey:
And that's that.
Casey:
This is the same thing that happens with lawyers.
Casey:
They make up these ridiculous reasons to exist.
Casey:
simply so that they can continue to exist.
Casey:
It's completely self-serving and ridiculous.
Casey:
I mean, look at reach the largest daily audience in the world by connecting everyone to their world via our information sharing and distribution platform products and be one of the top revenue generating internet companies in the world.
Casey:
I know you read that before.
Casey:
I'm reading it again and I am miserable.
John:
Why don't you just tell us what it is?
John:
Because we've just been talking about this as if everyone knows and some poor person is going to be listening to this six months from now and have no idea what we're talking about.
Marco:
This is the recently unveiled Twitter strategy statement.
Marco:
At first, everyone thought it was a mission statement.
Marco:
It was later corrected to be a strategy statement.
Marco:
It was unveiled on some kind of investor presentation that they held today.
Marco:
My favorite part is platform products.
John:
Yeah, that's where you stop being able to parse the sentence.
John:
And you're like, is there missing punctuation?
John:
Or is this a typo?
Marco:
I mean, the whole thing is a tremendous run-on sentence that really could benefit from some commas.
Marco:
You can tell they don't even write.
Marco:
They don't write very well.
Marco:
This doesn't even fit in a tweet, as many people pointed out.
Marco:
As either a mission or a strategy statement, it is...
Marco:
I would say weak at best.
John:
And it doesn't finish strong.
John:
It gets worse, especially the bottom.
John:
So revenue I just made fun of.
John:
Putting that in there just seems crass.
John:
And putting revenue instead of product just seems dumb.
John:
But the best part is it's one of the top.
John:
They're not even going to say number one.
John:
They're not going to say biggest.
John:
They're just going to be like...
John:
We just want to be a contender for money moving through our organization, really.
John:
We're not going to say we're going to be number one.
John:
Like, you know, whoever makes fun of Google's don't be evil thing or whatever, but they're whatever.
John:
They're I don't know their mission statement or whatever.
John:
Isn't it like indexing all the world's information or something like that?
John:
And Microsoft was the old, you know, a computer on every desk running Microsoft software like those are simple, easy to understand goals.
John:
They don't like they don't say we really want our share price to be high.
John:
Our goal is to make our CEOs options worth so much that he can retire in five years and buy an island like you might as well just put that in your mission statement.
John:
Jason Snell in the chat room said his company's mission statement at one point included revenue per employee.
John:
Wow.
John:
That's amazing.
John:
You just don't... It's just aiming low.
John:
It's terrible.
John:
It's like... It's almost like... You could say, you can think that, but don't write it down.
John:
But really, you shouldn't even be thinking that.
John:
It's...
John:
When Microsoft and Google both have more noble, more inspirational mission statements than you do, you're not doing well.
Marco:
Well, and what this shows, like, it's obviously, like, this is a sentence designed by so much committee.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
I don't think it's a sentence.
Marco:
There's all the...
Marco:
like there's all these clauses that are bolted on that they don't really need to be there and and they reflect like every like every department had a bolt on or the leadership couldn't decide what to say and so they said everything all of which is funny because that all kind of seems to reflect twitter's you know kind of wacky weak leadership
Marco:
Twitter has always had leadership issues from the founders coming in and out and different CEOs and business people coming in and out.
Marco:
They've always had really seemingly unstable leadership.
Marco:
I mean, Dick Costolo, I think, has been there the longest out of anybody who's been near the top.
Marco:
But it's always been all over the place.
Marco:
And what they have with the sentences is a very clear indicator to the outside world that they still have struggles up at the very top with
Marco:
you know getting you know what the direction of the company might even be or who gets to get recognized or whatever like this it's a little thing this is not like you know a major disaster or anything but it's it's an indicator of the kind of sloppy possibly out of touch possibly uh you know shot in the dark kind of uh leadership that they have
John:
i mean look at like i would reach the largest daily audience in the world you could end it right there and be done it's still a little weird although that even that is like what do you mean reach when you've reached them what have you done like you're not you know i mean like the google thing like they're they're whatever they're doing indexing the world's information like they're
John:
They're taking all the information in the world.
John:
They want to bring it all in and organize it and make it accessible in a way like they're doing a useful thing.
John:
They're saying there's information.
John:
It's hard to do anything with it.
John:
We Google have this massive ambition that all information will take it in and we'll make it so that you can do something useful with it.
John:
Right.
John:
That is a useful thing.
Marco:
And even the next clause is also pretty good.
Marco:
Connect everyone to their world.
Marco:
That alone doesn't say a lot, but it's better than the whole.
Marco:
And then, of course, at the end, be one of the top revenue-generated internet companies in the world.
Marco:
Okay, if that's what you want to be, fine.
Marco:
But if anybody with editing permission got a hold of this...
Marco:
it probably would have been better to just say, connect everyone to their world.
Marco:
Like, that's it.
Marco:
That's all you need to say out of this entire, like, 65-word sentence that's awful.
John:
But even that is just, like, really weak.
John:
Like, it doesn't seem like they know what...
John:
It would have been a more fun meeting to take the same people who came up with this and say, what do you think Twitter is doing now?
John:
What do people use Twitter for?
John:
Twitter is a thing that exists, right?
John:
You guys run the company.
John:
So can you describe what it is that Twitter is right now?
John:
Not what you want it to be, not what you want the company to be, not what your mission is, but right now there is something called Twitter and people use it and try to describe that.
John:
And I don't think they could because I don't think they're Twitter users.
John:
I don't think they understand what value...
John:
that Twitter has, that would have been a more instructive exercise for them.
Marco:
Yeah, I would be shocked if most of Twitter's top leadership really used Twitter very heavily.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't get this.
Casey:
And I keep coming back to what you were saying earlier, Marco, that this is definitely designed by committee.
Casey:
This – not a mission statement.
Casey:
What do we call it?
Casey:
Strategy statement?
Casey:
A strategy statement.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
The strategy statement seems like the –
Casey:
text-based equivalent of like a website's carousel.
Casey:
Do you know what I'm talking about?
Casey:
Where, you know, there are 10 different groups that all are convinced that they should be the hero image on this website.
Casey:
And what ends up happening is nobody wants to make a tough decision.
Casey:
And so they just say, ah, screw it.
Casey:
We'll put it on a rotating carousel and that'll be good enough.
Casey:
This is like the text version of that.
Casey:
Just like you were saying, everyone, you get three words a piece and we'll just mash them together in some way that vaguely resembles English.
Casey:
So bad.
Casey:
So bad.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
You want to do some follow-up?
John:
There was one other thing I was trying to think about with the Twitter thing, and I totally lost my mind.
John:
Maybe it'll come back to me later.
Marco:
Maybe the strategy statement melted your brain.
Marco:
Probably.
John:
It definitely did, although I was proud of myself that I remembered the demotivational poster word for word without looking it up.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let's talk about App Store not allowing purchase of bundles.
John:
yeah i didn't have an example of that last time i still don't have an example but i think the same person colin peckman who sent in the uh original thing sent us a screenshot and the weird thing about the screenshot if you take a look at it is it just gets rid of the purchase button i mean it's not a big screenshot it's cropped so i can't see but basically there's no purchase button he's got a big red arrow saying this is where the purchase button would be and if he didn't include
John:
Another shot showing the purchase button, like that it would be there.
John:
I wouldn't understand what the arrow is pointing to.
John:
So basically, if someone stumbles upon one of these bundles, it's good.
John:
I guess the App Store won't let you buy it for more than it would cost you just to buy the one app you're missing.
John:
But it's kind of weird.
John:
Maybe somewhere else on the page, it tells you why there's no purchase button.
John:
this is like bug fix by display none right exactly it's like you know maybe a button that says here's the problem what would you put in the button uh you can't buy this because it would cost you more than buying the individual app does not does not fit in the button and let try it in german right so it's not it's not gonna work out i don't know bundles are a mess anyway uh but i'd throw that in there we'll put in the show notes
Marco:
I'm still honestly trying to figure out why Apple made bundles.
Marco:
You know, obviously it was not for upgrade price hacks.
Marco:
That's that's obviously not the intent here.
Marco:
Otherwise, it would work better for that.
Marco:
I really wonder like what like it seems to only benefit.
Marco:
Obviously, it only benefits paid apps.
Marco:
I don't think that purchases can contribute in any possible way to this.
Marco:
And Apple usually doesn't do anything to help paid apps because most of the apps that actually get downloaded aren't paid apps.
Marco:
And most of the money in the app store does not come from paid apps anymore.
Marco:
I think the number is something like 10% or something of the money comes from paid apps.
Marco:
It's some kind of very low number by most of the reports that try to measure it.
Marco:
So, I wonder, what was the goal here?
Marco:
Was it some kind of weird, like, you know, serve certain game companies kind of thing?
Marco:
I honestly have no idea.
John:
It's a sales tool.
John:
So, it's yet another thing that Apple can do to make software cheaper, if you think of it in that light, right?
John:
So...
John:
There are some apps that are paid and it's like, well, we can't make those people make their apps free, but maybe we can make it so that the cost of those apps is less by letting people bundle them up so that if people were going to buy these three apps anyway, now you can buy those three apps for less money.
John:
It's basically just lowering the purchase price.
John:
All sorts of sale tactics.
John:
Obviously free is magic, but people like lower prices as well.
John:
So the price of digital apps gets driven down.
John:
But this is a tool to say, if you make a suite of applications and
John:
People aren't going to buy them individually for, you know, $2.99 each because that's just too much money.
John:
So put them all into a bundle together for $5.
John:
You know, put four $2.99 apps in a bundle for $5.
John:
And then you basically, once again, found a way to lower the price of software for customers.
John:
They get more software for less money.
John:
That's my guess.
John:
I mean, because that's Apple's big thing is like they want software to be cheap.
John:
And if there are some applications that are not cheap...
John:
They're like, what if we get, and it's good, you know, it's a win-win for the developer too.
John:
They say, you have multiple apps, so you're having trouble selling them individually.
John:
What if we gave you a way to sell them together for a lower price?
John:
That would save the consumer money.
John:
Anyone who was going to buy both of those apps anyway saves money.
John:
And you maybe make a sale where you wouldn't before, because before they, you know, it's perceived as a bargain.
John:
It's the same reason, you know,
Marco:
everything is on sale all the time at the big department stores right but still it just it seems it just seems like apple is doing something pretty redundant here like if they're trying to reduce the price that that paid software sells for they can just do that by inaction like because everything else about the app store encourages prices to go down to free people love bundles though back when i was at the the ebook store place we had many different kinds of bundles uh and
John:
They were a popular thing to have.
John:
We like making them.
John:
People like buying them.
John:
I'm surprised more electronic store.
John:
I mean, I guess they kind of do.
John:
Does the iTunes star do that when you complete this album?
John:
Is it always just straight math or do you get a bargain?
Marco:
I believe it is straight math, but I'm not 100% sure on that.
Marco:
Oh, well.
Marco:
Anyway, bundles is a thing.
Marco:
Free slogan.
Marco:
They can have that.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
How about I work?
John:
Because I work a thing.
John:
I work, speaking of bundles and cheaper software.
John:
So John G., not John Gruber, wrote in to...
John:
comment on what I said about iWork, about how having a mediocre to crappy office type program doesn't make Apple's hardware more valuable.
John:
It doesn't help Apple sell hardware in the way that iLife used to back when iLife was really good.
John:
iWork has never been really good and doesn't really help sell Macs.
John:
If anything, maybe it's just neutral.
John:
And John G says that he thinks they're all defensive strategies to ensure the companies don't get squeezed out.
John:
He says, what if the surface six generation is amazingly caught up to the iPad and comes with office free, Apple might get squeezed out.
John:
So basically by having, having its own office suite, they're not beholden to Microsoft.
John:
Uh, and, uh,
John:
They won't be afraid that whatever their platform is, iPad or whatever, will become less viable if Microsoft suddenly decides they don't want to offer Office for iOS.
John:
Now, first of all, the odds at this point of Microsoft not offering Office for iOS seem very low since Microsoft seems very gung-ho on cross-platform these days.
John:
Second of all, Office wasn't on iOS for a really long time, didn't seem to hurt it.
John:
But the biggest counter-argument to this idea that Apple needs to make an Office suite so they don't get squeezed out by...
John:
someday having office taken away or something is that apple having a mediocre office suite subsidized by hardware profits makes it way harder for third-party developers to make a living selling office type applications like i work as a free thing and i think it's free now right all the time comes comes with new devices anyway you can just download the app automatically right right that makes it really hard for anybody else to try to make office style applications microsoft can because they're subsidized by whatever is making them money and i think they just made
John:
office for ios free or something like that uh but mostly sort of yeah i know it's always confusing with the 365 thing subscriptions and everything yeah it's mostly free yeah but so if apple was really concerned about making its platform not too reliant on office or any other particular type of thing the best thing it could do is foster a
John:
thriving market for office type applications and by making putting tons of money into iWork and then giving away giving it away for free or at the very least as it was before below cost that makes it impossible for you to have a thriving ecosystem of office applications you're basically guaranteeing it's only just you versus office so i i think rather than iWork being neutral uh it's actually in terms of the the fear of being squeezed out it's actually a negative because they're they're making sure that no one else will ever try to make a suite of office applications because
John:
You know, well, Microsoft plus Apple are both making sure that no one else is going to try to do that.
John:
And so we're at the mercy of Microsoft, which so far hasn't been that great.
John:
And iWork, which also has not been that great.
Casey:
How about the RIMAC GPU being throttled?
John:
Is that a thing?
John:
I think it is a thing, at least for people who are interested in playing games in Windows.
John:
A lot of people sent me this link to MacRumor's forum thread about iMac 5K GPU throttling.
John:
And it started where someone was doing some gaming benchmarks in Windows boot camp on iMac 5K.
John:
and saw that the gpu would start throttling way below the temperature is supposed to so like according to this person he thinks that the gpu is supposed to start throttling 105 degrees celsius and instead it started throttling like seconds after it started to be used in windows it would start throttling like 70 degrees celsius uh so that's not good but that could just be bad windows drivers uh and lots of people in the rest of this thread talk about you know well maybe better boot camp drivers will come out and this will be a problem
John:
But then other people later in the thread said, it's not just Windows.
John:
I can run a game on my Mac and it's really easy to get the GPO up to 105 degrees Celsius.
John:
And for people who don't know what Celsius is.
John:
That's really hot.
John:
100 degrees Celsius is the boiling point of water, right?
John:
Yes, yes.
John:
Yeah, as the Americans confidently say, yes, yes, Celsius.
John:
Anyway, the point is that's really hot.
John:
And a lot of people in the thread are concerned that this is near the thermal limits of the GPU.
John:
It's going to shorten the life of the GPU.
John:
Then other people in the thread say, don't you think Apple would have tested this with temperatures?
John:
And other people come back with, well, look at all these historic GPU failures in Apple portable machines.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So at the very least, this is not encouraging.
John:
If you're planning on gaming on an iMac, uh, temperatures aside, uh, if you're not worried about the particular temperatures, or maybe it's the way it measured because it's peak temperature instead of at the edge of the die or whatever.
John:
I think the, the, the more important point is in this other than like the open the show notes is the gaming benchmarks.
John:
So ignore temperatures, ignore temperatures entirely.
John:
Uh,
John:
ignore the longevity of your gpu whatever that may or may not be if you look at gaming benchmarks like this barefeats thing did of the new fanciest 5k iMac versus the lesser gpu in the 5k iMac versus the old non-retina iMac
John:
uh the top of the line iMac you can buy is not even the fastest iMac ever made in depending on your game and and when it does win it doesn't win by a large margin so these benchmarks are kind of depressing from game it's not bad game reforms it's fine but you would expect you know this to be a next generation iMac with an entirely different GPU you would expect it to do better
John:
than the previous generation gpu and for the most part it does but it's not a really convincing win in a couple benchmarks it actually is a little bit slower and so regardless of throttling that's not great either um so it's kind of not a yeah i would say a mixed bag with a lot of unknowns right now for the 5k iMac i don't know much about the temperature stuff i can't really tell if this is crazy or not although
John:
People running similar benchmarks against their old iMacs are getting way lower temperatures.
John:
And you can't tell, like, is that because the sensor is showing the temperature different location?
John:
What is the reasonable temperature for this GPU?
John:
Is it OK for it to be showing a measurement of 105 degrees Celsius all the time?
John:
The throttling in Windows seems like a driver issue.
John:
Like it shouldn't be throttling at 70 degrees Celsius.
John:
And so that's really killing Windows gaming performance there.
John:
So I don't know.
John:
Anyway, depressing thread for anyone who is looking forward to gaming on their iMac 5K.
Marco:
i think you're right john that is disappointing it it doesn't affect me or my priorities at all but that is disappointing for whatever it's worth um i've been running the um the istat menus fan monitor uh just just so i could get an idea of like you know when the fan spins up under what temperatures under what kind of load just so i can have some idea of how this computer behaves um right now it's letting the cpus idle at about 130 fahrenheit uh i don't have this in celsius mode sorry you'll have to do your own translations um
Marco:
But CPUs are idling at about 130.
Marco:
GPUs idle at about 100.
Marco:
When I'm just sitting here doing not much.
Marco:
I noticed that the fan will only spin up on the CPU.
Marco:
Well, it's one fan in the whole system.
Marco:
But the fan will spin up when the CPU temperature reaches about 190 Fahrenheit.
Marco:
So it's getting very close to that 100 Celsius number before the fan even spins up.
Marco:
It doesn't ever cross 200.
Marco:
So it's keeping it right below whatever that is in Celsius, like 95 or whatever.
Marco:
It's keeping the CPUs right below that under full load.
Marco:
But it's not spinning up at all until then, whatever that's worth.
Marco:
Anyway, but yeah, I have found so far in my kind of use...
Marco:
uh i'm actually extremely happy the more i use this machine the happier i am with it it is really really nice i mean it's like even like i mentioned last week the fan noise under full load i i did the one test with the full load fan noise then i then i didn't load it up like that for a few days and like the memory if it got louder in my mind over those few days i
Marco:
And then, like, when I ran a handbrake conversion the other day for a totally legal movie file that a totally legal podcast friend of mine got me for a totally legal BBC car show, when I ran a handbrake transcode of that file to make it on my totally legal Apple TV, I was matching out the CPUs again, and the fan was way quieter than I imagined it in my head, like...
Marco:
It is loud.
Marco:
It is like a laptop fan in that when it spins to full speed, you will hear it.
Marco:
But it is, I would say, I'd say a little quieter than a 15-inch Retina MacBook Pro fan after all.
Marco:
It's similar kind of noise, a little quieter, still noticeable, still audible, still annoying if it's always that loud.
Marco:
Either way, I would say this is a computer that is really great if you're not loading up to full blast every day constantly.
Marco:
If full blast on the CPUs or GPUs is an occasional thing, then that's great and it won't be a problem.
John:
That's the concern about this for gaming.
John:
People who game spend just hours with everything going full tilt.
John:
Right.
John:
And that I would be concerned if you're doing a first person shooter, just just hours and hours a day for months and months on end.
John:
And what people are saying about the old iMac problems and other things is that it doesn't it doesn't kill it right away.
John:
But like by the time your AppleCare runs out, if you bought like a couple extra years of AppleCare, just around that point, just from the constant, constantly running at a very high temperature.
John:
And what they're saying is it shortens the life of the components.
John:
Right.
John:
if the gaming performance was like this where it's like it's mostly faster than the previous top end but not really by much and then a few benchmarks it's a little bit under you'd be like okay if it was like also lower power and cooler and quieter but it's like it seems almost like a downgrade whereas the previous one got similar benchmark numbers running it at a lower indicated temperature according to whatever these sensors are i think so it gives the feeling that what am i what am i doing all this stuff or more more uh what do you call it more vram i guess
Marco:
uh because i don't think the other one had four gigs but it's not uh this doesn't look like a good gpu upgrade from the previous one it's more kind of like a lateral move at best right and and this is i mean i i continue to believe you know like if you if you're looking at the mac lineup with the goal of playing games uh like playing you know high-end games a lot
Marco:
I think you're going to be sad.
Marco:
And there's just not a lot of greatness to that.
Marco:
The best case scenario is you buy a Mac Pro, which is spending a lot of money for a video card that actually isn't very good at gaming.
Marco:
It can do it, but you're not getting your money's worth on the video card because that's not really what you're paying for.
Marco:
You're not paying for gaming ability on the Mac Pro's $5,000 purchase price.
Marco:
uh so really i continue to say that the your best choice if you want to play pc games is to either settle for a game console or build a gaming pc because it's console is not an equivalent for pc games people want to play pc games need a keyboard and a mouse
Marco:
right so then build a gaming pc it's it's like you can build a great gaming pc for like 1200 bucks i wouldn't call it great well better if if you wanted to match the current mac pro with its with its best video card option i bet you could build a gaming pc that that has roughly similar gaming performances that for totally off the top of my head i would say 1500 or less
John:
Oh, yeah, but we're not talking about performance.
John:
When you say a great PC, the reason people buy Macs is they're not just interested in what is the frame rate for amount of money.
John:
Obviously, they would just get a gaming PC if you wanted to do that, but what you're looking for from a Mac is the whole package you wanted.
John:
nice and elegant and lots of extraneous stuff and you're sure it'll all work together and you don't have to worry about driver issues and it looks nice and in the case of the mac pro it's quiet and it's cool and interesting and all that stuff you know so the mac pro is still the best gaming mac which is sad because it's got like you said not not a great video card for gaming and you just pay a tremendous amount of money for it
Marco:
Anyway, speaking of better deals than that, we are brought to you this week by our friends at Squarespace.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
This is a big update.
Marco:
Squarespace lets you build a website and they host your website and they let you design the website and edit your website.
Marco:
You can put all sorts of stuff on your website.
Marco:
They give you beautiful designs.
Marco:
Everything is simple and powerful.
Marco:
Everything is drag and drop, customizable, extremely easy to use.
Marco:
If you do need help, they have support, 24-7 email support and live chat.
Marco:
So Squarespace 7 added a whole bunch of new stuff.
Marco:
Editing your page is done live right on the site.
Marco:
Like your site kind of slides over slightly and there's a little sidebar that comes in and you just edit your page literally right there live on your page.
Marco:
It's like what you see is what you get taken to the extreme.
Marco:
And then you can also do things like you can simulate iPhone size, iPad size.
Marco:
You can simulate all these different devices.
Marco:
You can see how your site and how your changes will look on narrow screens, which is really nice.
Marco:
Squarespace 7 also added a really cool partnership with Getty Images.
Marco:
Where now, if you have, let's say you're making a post and you need an image for a blog post, or you need a stock image for the background of your site, for the header, for a special page you're making or whatever, Squarespace worked out this awesome deal where...
Marco:
40 million of Getty's photos are available within Squarespace with this awesome UI, and you just pay $10 one time to use an image.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
You pay the $10 to use the image that you want, and it's up there forever.
Marco:
They also have cover pages in Squarespace 7 where...
Marco:
If you want to put up a temporary or permanent splash page before you enter your site, it can have a whole different design from the rest of your site.
Marco:
It lets you look really cool and trendy.
Marco:
And if you want to promote a special event that you're doing or a sale that you're having or a new thing you just launched or a major announcement, you can do all that with a cover page.
Marco:
And they just look fantastic.
Marco:
I can't possibly over-explain to you how great all this stuff looks.
Marco:
You can also host a store.
Marco:
They have commerce.
Marco:
That's not new, but it's still really cool.
Marco:
Anyway, all this is great.
Marco:
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Marco:
You can start a free trial with no credit card required.
Marco:
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Marco:
When you decide to sign up, make sure to use the offer code ATP to get 10% off your first purchase and to show your support for our show.
Marco:
We thank Squarespace very much.
Marco:
Squarespace, start here, go anywhere.
Casey:
So let's talk about Trim for a second.
Casey:
We brought this up last episode with regard to John's new purchase, and we got some feedback about that, John.
John:
Yes, this is from a former Apple engineer.
John:
This is something we didn't mention in the past show, but it's worth clarifying in case people were wondering.
John:
Why is it that Apple initially only supported Trim on its own drives, and
John:
and to this day still doesn't support it on a lot of third-party drives is it a punitive thing where apple wants you to buy their drives and doesn't want to support trim on third-party drives no not really uh the reason they don't support trim on third-party drives the same reason apple doesn't support a lot of third-party stuff uh is you know they want to they want to decrease their their support burdens they sort of
John:
qualify they whitelist which devices they can send trim commands to you and this this former apple engineer says that uh in the first two years after trim showed up as a thing a lot of the uh flash controllers out there had firmware they would trim the wrong range of blocks so the os would tell it to trim a certain set of blocks and it would do it like off by one or or even worse there is taking logical block numbers and using them as physical block numbers with no mappings
John:
uh and there was other bugs like not invalidating the trim in the queue if a later right was given for the block so lots of basically bugs uh that if apple simply said oh we'll support trim everywhere and we'll send the correct trim commands to any third-party drive you plug in uh that would be bad because apple knew for a fact that there were many buggy drives out there that would either they would do bad things if you send the trim command some of which could result in data loss so what they did is the typical apple thing of
John:
They made sure that their own SSDs that they shipped worked with the trim command and said some of them, the internal flash shipped with firmware that Apple wrote or firmware that they could get in source code form and could modify.
John:
And later on, when some firmware came from vendors that was OK, Apple whitelisted it.
John:
And so basically...
John:
If you connect an SSD to OS X, if it's not one of the ones that Apple is absolutely sure is going to behave correctly, either because they wrote the firmware or they qualified it as an internal drive or they whitelisted it as the third part, exact third party make and model and drive that works correctly, they don't do it.
John:
And that is the most conservative approach and the safest approach.
John:
But I could probably also guess that Apple does not spend a lot of its time buying every single third-party SSD, testing its trim support, and increasing the size of that whitelist.
John:
Which is why the third-party hack, the trim enabler thing, is out there.
John:
If you feel like you have a drive that you're sure responds correctly to trim commands and would benefit from using them, you could use that enabler.
John:
But then in Yosemite, they have the kernel...
John:
extension signing thing.
John:
Listen to the previous show for all the details on that.
John:
If anyone thought that our description last week was implying that Apple was malicious in this case, at worst, you could say they're lazy because they're not buying and qualifying every single drive so they can increase the sizes of their whitelist.
John:
At best, they're just being typical conservative Apple and trying to keep their driver burden low.
John:
I think a couple other people who sent information about
John:
I think we alluded to this last week.
John:
The utility of the trim command may or may not be lessened depending on the little storage computer that's inside of each of your SSDs and how it manages storage.
John:
Again, the drive can't know when blocks are freed up for use, but it can make more intelligent decisions about right leveling and stuff like that.
John:
As I said last week, I am open to the idea that my Samsung 850 Pro that I have will eventually get super slow.
John:
And I'm also open to the idea that if that happens, it's possible that enabling trim using this hack will solve the problem for me.
John:
But until the first problem happens, I am not interested in the experiment of discovering whether the second thing solves the problem or causes more.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
And then do we want to briefly talk about whether or not the 6 Plus is selling well?
John:
Yeah, what was that?
John:
Like last week, that 50-50 number came from the T-Mobile CEO or something.
John:
He was saying, yeah, the 6, 6 Plus seemed to be in about even numbers.
John:
And, you know, who knows what that means from T-Mobile.
John:
Here's another one from this...
John:
localytics company that is some kind of app analytics company and they gave numbers that are closer to my my original prediction from i think right after the the phones were announced that i expected the six to way outsell the six plus and localytics says that the six is outselling six plus six to one and as usual apple says nothing
John:
So we don't know, but we'll put the link in the show notes.
John:
Now we have two extremely widely varying guesses, both from unreliable sources, but I'm still very curious.
John:
I mean, what have you guys seen like out in the wild when you've seen people with iPhone sixes?
John:
What is your ratio of spotting six pluses to sixes?
Marco:
I don't go outside.
John:
We get chicken salad.
John:
Nobody in line at the deli has.
Marco:
I have not seen a single six plus in the deli.
Casey:
Yeah, I've seen a handful of six pluses.
Casey:
Is that true?
Casey:
I think I've seen only one or two and I know a handful of people that have them.
Casey:
And I remember when I was asking around around the time that everyone was making purchases.
Casey:
So I was asking around amongst all of our friends like Mike Hurley and Ben Thompson and Rene Ritchie and all of them.
Casey:
At that point, I would say it was like.
Casey:
Two-third sixes, one-third six pluses, although I do believe some of these people have relented and gone to six from six plus.
Casey:
So I'd say it's not six to one, but certainly a few to not many, if that makes any sense.
John:
First time I saw a six plus in person was this weekend when I went into the Apple store to look at the 5K iMac.
John:
And I've seen lots of sixes in person from, you know, coworkers and people walking around, but I'd never seen a six plus before.
Marco:
There you go.
Marco:
Science from Accidental Tech Podcast.
Marco:
All right.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, so the bottom line, we still have no idea.
John:
And yeah.
John:
And I'm still curious to know.
John:
Maybe Apple will tell us.
John:
Who knows?
John:
Someday.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
and uh they turned this into a crazy good product that outperforms competing services um it's now the largest email as a service platform i see they they didn't advertise or they didn't abbreviate email as a service like i know i've seen like a lot of something aas i guess this would be like yes which wouldn't be very good maybe that's why they didn't abbreviate it
Marco:
Anyway, it's email as a service.
Marco:
It's great.
Marco:
So what Mandrill is, you can send automated one-to-one email, like things like password resets, login messages, welcome messages, as well as marketing emails and customized newsletters.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So thanks a lot to Mandrill.
Marco:
It's a great email infrastructure service from the people at MailChimp.
Casey:
So Marco, you recently released an update to Overcast, and I'd like to hear about that.
Casey:
But most specifically, I'd like to hear about this CarPlay thing that apparently you've added.
Casey:
Yes, I added CarPlay.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
So how did that come to be?
Casey:
Because my understanding of CarPlay is that's not the sort of thing that you can just decide you want to be a part of.
Casey:
So how did that happen?
Casey:
What are you willing to share?
Marco:
Well, I started asking people at Apple, how do I become a CarPlay app?
Marco:
And over time, I eventually got to the right person and got through the process.
Casey:
That was a much less exciting story than I owe.
Marco:
It was a pretty unexciting process, to be honest.
Marco:
I mean, I'm not sure if I can really reveal the details, but they're not that exciting.
Marco:
I asked around for a long time and eventually got in.
Marco:
That's the story.
Marco:
That's it.
John:
So how did you get... You posted a picture of the little...
John:
screen car screen thingy that you have hooked up to a converter so you can feed it 12 volts dc what is that uh why did you buy it was it a recommended thing did it come as part of the program uh all that stuff
Marco:
It is exactly as boring as of a story as you would imagine.
Marco:
I wanted to test on real CarPlay hardware before I released it.
Marco:
So I went to Best Buy and bought the cheapest car radio that supported CarPlay.
Marco:
And I bought a cheap 12 volt power supply on Amazon for 20 bucks.
Marco:
And I brought it home, plugged it in and tested it.
John:
Does your car support CarPlay?
John:
Do any of your cars support it?
Marco:
No.
John:
Oh, so you couldn't actually use the car.
John:
It wasn't just a matter of you didn't want to be sitting in a garage with your car or whatever.
John:
You wanted to have it on your desk, but you don't even have anything we can use.
John:
So this is a feature you're not even going to use yourself.
John:
The only place you're ever going to use it is on your desk in front of this little screen.
Marco:
Correct.
Marco:
I did it because the effort to reward ratio I thought was worth it.
Marco:
It was very low effort.
Marco:
You know, it was a lot of, you know, asking, but that's like, you know, you send an email every few months.
Marco:
I mean, it wasn't that big of a problem.
Marco:
But then the actual implementation of it is very, very simple because CarPlay apps are limited.
Marco:
The APIs that you use as a CarPlay app are public.
Marco:
You can go see them right now.
Marco:
It's the MP Playable Content Manager, I think.
Marco:
That's the CarPlay API for third-party audio apps.
Marco:
And the Apple program simply gets you approved to use that and to be integrated properly with the CarPlay receivers, like to appear on their home screen and everything.
Marco:
the uh the interface that your app has to carplay is very very simple if you look at the mp content or mp playable content manager thing that's it like that is you basically provide a hierarchical menu like the old ipods where you have like items and you click on the item and says all right now you're at this level of the tree and what are the items for this level of the tree and and is this one playable or not or does it pop another menu like and that's
Marco:
that's about it it's very very simple so because of that it's actually very easy to test i don't i don't feel that i need to be using this myself full time to really uh to really make sure it's working properly i think it's the kind of thing i can test only occasionally and it works just fine that's about it and i don't i don't know how many carplay uh compatible vehicles and head units are out there yet i have no idea i'm sure it's not a huge number but it was it was relatively easy to do and for the people who do have it it matters quite a bit
Marco:
um so and i was i was you know one of the reasons why i kept asking um apple about this is because you know i was interested from the beginning but whenever the carplay stuff first started becoming available to customers i think it was like two months ago or three months ago so it was it was fairly recent uh but ever since that point i've had people ask i had people asking me on twitter almost every day hey why don't you support carplay like the the handful of people who have carplay radios
Marco:
apparently a big portion of them used overcast and we're very upset that i wasn't supported properly on there yet uh so again so it it matters a lot to a small number of people and it was very easy to do so that's why i did it so i've forgotten so much about carplay it's it require you to connect with a wire still or can you do a wireless thing
Marco:
I believe it's wired only.
Marco:
I mean, the radio, I honestly, I don't know that much about it.
Marco:
The radio I got, which is the Pioneer App Radio 4, which is not, it's called the App Radio 4 in so many places except the box or any part of the Pioneer website where it's called the SPH-DA120.
Marco:
You know, this is great consumer electronics stuff.
Marco:
people keep asking me if i recommend that one the answer is i have no idea i've literally only used it for this purpose um i find most third-party car radios to be pretty tacky and uh and kind of overly happy with things like blue leds and ugly menus and this is no exception uh so i'm i'm just not a good person to ask about that so i have no idea i cannot i and because i'm not using it in a car i can't tell you about things like the utility of the other functions like
John:
And so does it have a USB connector and you're just connecting an Apple like USB lightning thing in it and that's all there is to it?
John:
That's exactly it.
John:
All right.
John:
And for the CarPlay thing, could you have basically implemented all this functionality before getting approval from Apple?
John:
And like, is the thing you got from Apple simply permission to upload an app to the App Store that they won't reject because it uses the CarPlay APIs?
Yeah.
Marco:
Yes, and I did.
Marco:
In fact, I wrote this code months ago when the CarPlay API... In fact, this code was in Overcast 1.0.
Marco:
It just was inactive.
Marco:
Because at the time, when the AMP Playable Content Manager API first came out, CarPlay wasn't... I don't think it was officially announced or it was announced at the same event, but the documentation of that where it now says this is for CarPlay...
Marco:
didn't didn't explain it it just said this is for like certain types of av components and receivers and everything so i thought i wonder if they're like like a special like made for ipod receiver where like if there's like a home theater receiver that can that can display this hierarchical menu i'm creating so i thought there was going to be something else out there besides carplay that could show this maybe in homes or whatever so i thought maybe i should get in i should get on that and make make sure that i work properly on those things
Marco:
so i wrote all this code months ago and uh had no way to test it because i had no hardware that would actually interact with it and nothing you know i couldn't find any information on it so i just i basically commented it out like i i just didn't instantiate the class that manages this in my code uh in versions 1.0 through 1.04 well okay i really thought there was going to be a lot more drama there that's
John:
You would think that if Apple was really interested in getting... Why would it be this process that takes you months?
John:
Don't you think it would be just as easy to join the CarPlay thing as it is to upload an app to the App Store?
John:
The App Store was successful because, hey, anybody with a couple bucks can sign up as a developer, write an app with our free tools and upload it, and now you're on the App Store, and there you go.
John:
Whereas CarPlay seems like...
Marco:
a much harder system to get into and doesn't make any sense if apple is interested in car playing becoming a thing but maybe maybe they're not maybe this is like the version 1.0 and they're not that interested in getting too many people to fiddle with it i don't know the problem with car stuff is there's major concerns with safety and driver distraction and secondarily there's also a lot of laws and the laws vary in different countries and sometimes even different states the laws vary on like you know what
Marco:
what kind of interaction is legal to provide to a driver while the car is in motion, whether animations, any kind of moving content is permitted or not permitted in certain contexts and certain places.
Marco:
There are so many regulations for and simply just concerns for safety because this is pretty serious stuff.
Marco:
You don't want to have somebody like...
Marco:
simulating angry birds in the dashboard display by like changing the item artwork every half second or whatever like there's like all these like crazy ways that these kind of systems could be abused certainly app review could probably catch a lot of that but i don't know how much app review is testing carplay i can understand if apple wants to be cautious like i can understand why this might not be open to everybody
John:
So it still seems kind of weird to me.
John:
Like, like you said, that's the whole point of app review.
John:
And if they're not, you know, if app review is the bottleneck, like, I mean, what's the point of, you know, if this is a thing that they want to happen, they should be paying more money for more people to review more carefully.
John:
Like.
John:
you know there are medical applications in the app store somehow that seems okay but i don't know i just it's not a formula for success if apple really says like you know if carplay had to make a strategy statement and it was like carplay in every car in the world by you know by 10 years from now or whatever like that's obviously not what they're going for it just seems like they are
John:
It seems like a hobby like Apple TV used to be like, we have a car solution.
John:
It's a thing.
John:
It's in Ferraris, I guess.
John:
And also Hondas, maybe.
John:
But we're not that into it, you know, because there is like there is that sort of adversarial sort of standoffish relationship with the car makers themselves trying to sort out how are we going to arrive at car interiors that aren't terrible?
John:
And as we discussed at length on Neutral.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And also, similar to all the concerns that Apple or app makers should have about liability and safety problems, the car makers have their own concerns too.
Marco:
If you're driving a BMW using Angry Birds simulated in CarPlay artwork and you crash...
Marco:
So many people are upset about that.
Marco:
And it's so many people's problem.
Marco:
Obviously, it's your problem in a lot of ways.
Marco:
Your family might have to deal with things.
Marco:
But it's Apple's problem.
Marco:
It's the app's problem.
Marco:
It's BMW's problem.
Marco:
The bad PR and lawsuits and everything can fly in all those different directions.
Marco:
Everyone has to really cover their own butts here.
Marco:
And I really can't blame anybody in this situation for being overly cautious because it is something that should be taken seriously.
John:
so many of these things are covered over by like the screens that come up when I start my car that are like press okay to agree that you shouldn't look at this screen when you're driving and if you do the screen goes away at its own so you don't actually have to press okay but like the little like one screen EULA type thing where it's just it's meaningless nobody reads it it just becomes a constant annoyance this is actually one of the things that makes one of the many things that makes the electronics in cars annoying like
John:
the ass covering messages that you're just going to see for the entire life of the car.
John:
They will have no effect on how you use the car.
John:
And we'll just, and probably no effect legally speaking, because it's not like it absolves anybody from, you know, anyway, it's stupid.
John:
I don't like it.
Marco:
Uh, yeah.
Marco:
My car shows me a license agreement every time I start it.
John:
That's so bad.
John:
Press it.
John:
Press agree to drive.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Anyway, in better news, uh, we are also sponsored this week.
Marco:
Once again, by our friends at hover,
Marco:
Not Hover.
Marco:
Not Hoover.
Marco:
Not Hover.
Marco:
Hoover.
Marco:
It's our friends at Hover.
Marco:
Hoover is something else.
Marco:
This is Hover.
Marco:
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Marco:
Go to Hover.com and use the offer code KCNeedsANAPP.
Marco:
yes he does so go to hover.com use offer code casey needs a nap for 10 off uh your first purchase at hover hover is a domain registrar that doesn't suck um you have a great idea you want to secure a domain name for it you want something catchy and memorable to represent your project or idea or yourself or your story or your art or your jokes like caseyneeds.coffee whatever the whatever it is hover gives you exactly what you need to get the job done
Marco:
um you can find a perfect domain and then get started on the rest of the idea like i don't know about you guys when i have a new idea for a project if i don't have a name and i don't if i don't have the domain name bought like i can't start working on it like it blocks me from working on it it's i know it sounds stupid but like the name of a project is very important to me and and i always think of that first and i try to get that nailed down first
Marco:
if you are like that hover is your friend if you are not like that hover will be your friend later but regardless hover will be your friend at some point hover is designed by you know developers people like us it's made for people who want no bs but it's also very friendly for people who aren't like us you know they have this amazing support they have telephone support even you can call them up and talk to a real life person immediately there's this awesome no hold no wait no transfer phone support policy
Marco:
um and even you know just the regular stuff they do it extremely well their site is very nicely designed easy to use their pricing is really competitive and extremely fair it comes with a whole bunch of stuff for free like domain privacy there's no extra charge for anything like that um and people you know there's a reason why we all love hover why we all use hover besides the fact that they pay us to say all this they're also just really good
Marco:
Anyway, Hover gives you easy-to-use, powerful tools to manage your domain name.
Marco:
Go to hover.com to learn more about this.
Marco:
If you need a domain name, just go there next.
Marco:
They have great search.
Marco:
They have those word generation algorithms.
Marco:
So if what you search for is not available anywhere, then they'll suggest different rewordings of it or synonyms or modifications that are available.
Marco:
It's pretty good.
Marco:
So, and honestly, I've seen a lot of registrars attempt those kind of word tricks.
Marco:
Hover, I think, does it best.
Marco:
I'm honestly saying, like, I have tried this before on other sites.
Marco:
Hover's weird word trick thing works better than the other ones I've tried.
Marco:
Go to hover.com, H-O-V-E-R.com, in case you are British and don't understand what I'm saying.
Marco:
Hover.com, use offer code, caseyneedsanapp, to get 10% off your first purchase.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Hover for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So today was somewhat unexpectedly, or at least for me, big day in my world because Microsoft has open sourced or is said they're going to open source a considerable portion of .NET and not only open source it, but bring it to be cross platform.
Casey:
And this is to me a pretty darn big deal.
Casey:
And it's probably not going to change my day to day life very much.
Casey:
But it's a very interesting statement from a company that very much didn't believe that there were platforms other than Windows.
Casey:
And so what they did today is they said they're going to open source a few additional components of .NET.
Casey:
And the best write-up I found in the few minutes I had to look at this was...
Casey:
Cleanroom.
Casey:
Cleanroom.
Casey:
Cleanroom.
John:
Reverse engineer, clean room, whatever.
Casey:
Thank you, sir.
Casey:
So they were doing a clean room version of .NET.
Casey:
And then over time, as Microsoft has open sourced little bits here and there, they would incorporate those as licensing would permit.
Casey:
Well...
Casey:
We'll put a link to Miguel's post in the show notes.
Casey:
But basically, he breaks it down.
Casey:
And there are three things that are being open source.
Casey:
.NET Framework Libraries, .NET Core Framework Libraries, and the Ryugit, which sounds like Hadouken to me.
Casey:
But anyway, VM.
Casey:
And so the Framework Class Libraries is basically... So if you think of .NET as both a series of languages and then the...
Casey:
the class library that these languages sit on top of, or I guess maybe vice versa, for them to release the .NET Framework classes, that's a really big damn deal.
Casey:
And so if you want to see how all of .NET, all of the foundational stuff in .NET is implemented, you can go and check it out.
Casey:
And so they're open sourcing .NET Framework class libraries, .NET Core, which, as Miguel says, the .NET Core is a redesigned version of .NET that is based on the simplified version of the class libraries, as well as a design that allows for .NET to be incorporated into applications.
Casey:
And this should sound a lot like, and I'm going to get the, is it Clanger LLVM that's leveraged within Xcode, not just for compilation, but for just-in-time stuff.
John:
It's not quite.
John:
I think it's just the underlying libraries that power both the client compiler and Xcode.
John:
I don't know what you call this library.
John:
Someone probably knows.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
The point is you can build, you know, tools that leverage the compiler, like an IDE, for example.
Casey:
So anyway, so all this stuff is going to show up on GitHub.
Casey:
I was poking around GitHub earlier tonight, and not all of it's there yet, but it's certainly going to arrive there.
Casey:
And there's also a good post, the official Microsoft blog post, about all of this.
Casey:
And it talks about, or it's kind of almost an FAQ, you know, why do we open source.net core?
Casey:
Why are we doing it on GitHub?
Casey:
And one of the things they said was, and this is from the blog post, as a principle, we don't want to ask the community to come to where we are.
Casey:
Instead, we want to go to where the community already is.
Casey:
And so they're going to GitHub.
Casey:
All this stuff is going to show up.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
It's funny because on the one side, for my day-to-day, like I said earlier, I don't think it's really going to change a darn thing.
Casey:
Except maybe I could use .NET on OS X without using Mono.
Casey:
But, I mean, whatever.
Casey:
I don't really know why I would want to do that.
Casey:
But I think it indicates a pretty big shift in Microsoft away from the Windows is everything and there's nothing else in the world mentality.
Casey:
And that's what I think I'm most amped up about.
John:
So what does this make possible that wasn't possible before?
John:
Because Mono was already cross-platform.
John:
Sure.
John:
So anything that – if you could say, well, now I can use C Sharp and .NET to write applications that run on platforms other than Windows.
John:
You already kind of could with Mono.
John:
what can i don't quite under other than you know other than for all those things that that mono had to you know xamarin had to clean room reverse engineer and re-implement that now they don't have to anymore they can just take the actual source and incorporate it but does this make anything new possible that wasn't possible before or or feasible like it was possible before but you'd be worried about how supported it was and now microsoft said it's going to be officially supported so
Casey:
I think you hit the nail on the head.
Casey:
It's that it's no longer third party.
Casey:
It's now first party.
Casey:
And to go back to Miguel's blog post, and I'm quoting now, we have a project underway that – actually, let me back up.
Casey:
I'm sorry.
Casey:
Mono will be able to use as much as it wants from this project.
Casey:
We have a project underway that already does this.
Casey:
We are replacing chunks of Mono code that was either incomplete, buggy, or not as fully featured as it should be with Microsoft's code.
Casey:
So it certainly will improve mono's robustness, reliability, decrease in bugs, etc.
Casey:
But on the surface, I agree with you, John, that it doesn't really necessarily enable anything that wasn't there already.
Casey:
The only thing I can think of that might be a bit different is I haven't looked closely at mono or Xamarin in a long time, but...
Casey:
If you wanted to hypothetically run an ASP.NET website on something other than IIS, I would assume that as part of this open sourcing of, among other things, ASP.NET, you could do that on top of like Apache or something like that without necessarily having to leverage Mono.
Casey:
I think Mono has done this at least in part in the past, but certainly it should be easier now or well in the future.
John:
Yeah, that was my next question.
John:
Because like, not included in this, if I'm reading it correctly, is any of the sort of the GUI libraries that you use to make applications for Windows?
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Windows forms, I've not seen any mention of.
Casey:
And so I believe you are correct.
John:
So this is all kind of faceless server-side stuff.
John:
And then for the server-side stuff, it's like, well, sorry.
John:
So I can, you know, ASP.NET is here.
John:
If I can build some, I don't even know what you build for ASP.NET.
John:
But like, and I know what the API looks like, but I don't understand the deployment outside of IIS.
John:
Do you just build like,
John:
A library that gets loaded?
John:
I have no idea.
John:
I've never done anything involving .NET inside Apache.
Casey:
Well, that's the thing, and I'm not sure either.
Casey:
But the theory is that there's nothing stopping you from writing some sort of glue between Apache and the ASP.NET DLLs or whatever output that comes from that.
John:
Yeah, Horatio Boston in the chat room says that one new thing that's possible is that you could use Visual Studio to build something that doesn't run on Windows.
John:
You can build an executable that runs on OS X. And that's the thing with this kind of like, you know,
John:
if you want to use Xcode, you have to use a Mac.
John:
Well, if you want to, I think this is still the case for all these open source components.
John:
Like, can you, can you use anything other than Visual Studio or the Xamarin stuff to build this?
John:
Like, can you just, is there like a Mac command line thing where you could just run like, there's gotta be, I guess, right?
Casey:
Well, I don't think there is, but they're open sourcing.
Casey:
I believe they're open sourcing Roslyn, which is their compiler stack.
John:
They already did that.
John:
But I was wondering if, practically speaking, does that mean that you can get a command prompt and a bunch of files and start compiling source code on your Mac that runs on your Mac?
John:
Basically, do you need Windows?
John:
Do you need Visual Studio?
John:
Because Visual Studio is the IDE and...
John:
That's what you need to compile this stuff.
John:
I don't know how far people have gone and taking the open source compiler and trying to make it like so that you could actually do development of faceless, non-GUI applications on the .NET stack using only a Mac and not having a Windows machine anywhere.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
I understand the question.
Casey:
And as far as I know, the only Mac native compiler binary that exists is Mono's compiler.
Casey:
But I mean, you've got the entire source of Roslyn.
Casey:
So in principle, you could, although it is self-hosted.
Casey:
So yeah, I guess that is a little weird.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know how that would work, but I'm sure someone is or has done it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
But this is interesting.
Casey:
It's certainly an interesting move.
Casey:
It's something that I didn't expect from Microsoft, even though this has sort of been going on for a while now.
Casey:
It took me a little bit by surprise that this much was going to get open source this quickly.
Casey:
And the only...
Casey:
somewhat crummy thing about it which i understand but they said publicly in one of these posts that this isn't about for for a lot of the projects that they're open sourcing this isn't about asking for poll requests and making a true community project it was more just saying hey if you want to fork it here it is but we're going to continue forward in our own way and that's the that's the way it's going to be
John:
I think this is heartening in the same way that Apple's recent sort of opening up and doing things that previously they seemed not interested in doing, even, you know, extensions or third-party keyboards or whatever in iOS.
John:
This is another thing that people have always wanted Microsoft to do, like take the core part of your stack and make it open source for the same reasons that – kind of for the same reasons that Apple has open sourced the core part of its OS and everything, although hopefully with better results.
John:
And that, like –
John:
the lower level stuff there's not much competitive advantage to keeping that close source and there's a lot of advantage to people developing on your platform and to you as a platform maker to make it open source even if you don't get that much benefit of other people it's every little bit helps and it just makes it feel like
John:
It's a more it's a development environment where you can see what's going on.
John:
The fewer black boxes, the better.
John:
Like if you're debugging something, it would be nice to be able to have the source code to all the stuff you're debugging.
John:
Obviously, that's not the case on the Mac.
John:
It never has been.
John:
It's not the case in iOS.
John:
There's some parts of it open source, but then eventually you get into Coco and UIKit and AppKit and all that stuff.
John:
And that's not open source.
John:
And I bet that would be great if that was open source, too.
John:
But like so you have to balance or at least these companies think they have to balance.
John:
What source do we keep closed and what source do we open up?
John:
Because there's no advantage of just keeping it closed.
John:
And Microsoft, I'm not surprised to see this because it seems like Microsoft has long since realized that.
John:
Keeping this stuff like as people stop paying attention to you as you are no longer the big dog in the market and you're not like, oh, Microsoft, they rule the entire PC industry like they don't anymore, like mobile is more important.
John:
Microsoft does not own mobile.
John:
If you continue to act like you are the most important company and you're never going to show your crown jewels, it's making you less and less relevant.
John:
If you want to bring people back to your camp, you have to be more open.
John:
It's not a power play.
John:
It's more of a realization of the new shape of the market.
John:
And I think it's helpful.
John:
Like you're saying, how will this affect your job?
John:
Maybe you'll come across something where you have some bug and you can't figure out what's going on and it'll be useful to be able to step through in the debugger a bunch of bottom-level .NET code stepping through the source.
John:
Maybe you could have already done that anyway because the source was already available, but it wasn't available in a way that was open source that could be integrated.
Casey:
Correct.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Microsoft is just hoping that people will build on this and it will become a foundation for lots of other projects.
John:
I mean, the best thing that could happen to them is someone finally takes this
John:
core stuff and build some great new thing on top of it because they can and they couldn't before like they didn't want to have to deal with that stuff that we need we need a language runtime and we need a good compiler and we want to be able to do our development a nice id and we're going to use that as a jumping off point to build some bigger better thing but i don't know what the odds of that happening are but they're non-zero now i guess
Casey:
So just for grins and giggles, let's say that Swift is not a thing.
Casey:
It's not even in progress.
Casey:
Would Apple have used C-sharp and or .NET to become what is now Swift?
Casey:
I think the answer is absolutely not because they want total control.
Casey:
But let's assume that
John:
They could have total control with this, couldn't they?
Casey:
I think there's going to be pieces that are missing.
Casey:
In the same way that... Shoot, what is it?
Casey:
Is it Darwin is the open source project?
Casey:
Or am I getting that backwards?
Casey:
You know what I'm thinking of where you could build most of OS X?
John:
The closed source drivers and everything.
John:
Things for ATI that has proprietary code.
John:
It's a bunch of legal stuff.
John:
It's not like they're hiding that stuff.
John:
It's just that anything that involves code that is owned by companies other than Apple...
John:
Like, you know, video card makers or even like – there's a bunch of drivers that aren't open source.
John:
You can't build a Yosemite kernel from the open source because it's just stuff that's not included in there.
John:
But for ownership, like, KHDML was not owned by Apple.
John:
But they took it, forked it, and ran with it.
John:
WebKit is owned by Apple.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So they could – but I think that Apple would not adopt this open source or not just because –
John:
Knowing enough about the people involved in the process, this is not what they want.
John:
And so it's not so much that, oh, we would have taken .NET if only it was open source.
John:
Swift is a different direction, right?
John:
Swift is not common language runtime.
John:
It is not garbage collection.
John:
It is, you know...
John:
It is so many things that it's not.
John:
So for that reason alone, they wouldn't take it.
John:
But if the current set of people who make these decisions at Apple did not work at Apple, but a different set of people who did, this would have changed the math on can we adopt.net.
John:
Suddenly it would become a lot more viable.
Casey:
yep and okay so i agree with you completely there now what is his name andy rubin is just creating android today android does not exist yet does he still use don't call it java java they picked they picked something that was not owned by them you know that was at that time you know sort of invented by sun and like they're in a legal fight with oracle over the copywriting apis and
John:
even though they're using a different VM that they wrote themselves.
John:
The thing that they did end up picking, Java, they didn't make a clean getaway with that, legally speaking.
John:
So I don't see how .NET is any worse.
Marco:
Their official strategy was, just steal it, we'll worry about it later.
John:
yeah well is it stealing like because it gets into the whole can you copyright an api because they did excuse me just rip it off we'll worry about it later it's not it's kind of like a clean room re-implementation business like we know like there's a spec there's a public spec out there we're gonna make our own vm i'm i'm assuming they didn't use any source code from any of the java virtual machines it is their own thing that does things in a different way it's all just of like oh well you implemented this all yourself and you wrote all your own source code but
John:
The API, the functions, the parameters, the, you know, all that, that's copyrighted.
John:
So they basically did a clean re-implementation of Java.
John:
I don't know what the details are of, like, you can argue about what things got used where, but I don't like the idea of an API being copied, a published API being copyrighted.
John:
So I'm not going to blame Google for doing this, but, you know, practically speaking, though,
John:
I don't see how .NET, the current open-source .NET, could possibly be any worse than the situation they're currently in with Java.
John:
And I think it would be a better choice for them than Java because they would have to do less work.
John:
They could take the virtual machine and everything free and clear.
John:
It's an open-source license.
John:
It's not like they have to re-implement it, right?
John:
Right, right.
John:
And I also like C Sharp better than Java, so there's that.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And that's the thing is that C Sharp...
Casey:
Yeah, I've talked in the past to a handful of people about how C Sharp really is good.
Casey:
And most most worldly developers in the Apple community at least appreciate it, if not agree with me.
Casey:
But there's there's certainly some that are like, oh, God, it's Microsoft.
Casey:
I can't stand it now.
Casey:
And C-sharp really is a really, really great, really robust language.
Casey:
And even though it tries to be in many ways all things to all people, it actually does a pretty darn good job of it all in all.
Casey:
And it's moving forward, but not at a breakneck pace.
Casey:
So it's moving forward in a way that's sustainable.
Casey:
There's not bugs everywhere, at least in any of the things that I touch in my day-to-day life.
Casey:
It's a really robust language.
Casey:
And as much as I don't have that much love for Microsoft, I really do love C Sharp.
Casey:
And if I were to just flip a switch and become a full-time Objective-C or Swift developer tomorrow, there are certainly things about C Sharp that I would miss.
Casey:
And there's a lot that I really think they got right.
Casey:
And so I'm very curious to see, does this change?
Casey:
how C Sharp is treated, not from a like, oh, it's good or oh, it's bad.
Casey:
But like you were saying earlier, John, is someone going to take C Sharp and really run with it in the future?
Casey:
Or I mean, strictly speaking, I guess you could do that with VB as well.
Casey:
I mean, .NET is more than just C Sharp.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I'm curious to see what this brings.
John:
I think it's unlikely because C Sharp is kind of... The reason C Sharp is, I think, nicer than Java is because it got to learn the lessons of Java.
Casey:
Sure.
John:
So someone went first, made a bunch of mistakes.
John:
C Sharp didn't make those same mistakes.
John:
And I think C Sharp has been developed steadily with a little bit more...
John:
A little bit more singular vision, let's say, instead of the sort of committee design of Java, it seems to be lurching forward and not quite as confident in a way.
John:
But at this point, both of those languages are of a vintage that people... I'm not going to say people are more likely to build something in Swift if Swift was suddenly open source, but the kinds of projects that get built, like...
John:
The kind of application that seems like the CLR is most appropriate for is, I would guess, server-side stuff and, like, GUI client-side stuff.
John:
But, like, I can't imagine the next WebKit killer being implemented in C Sharp on top of .NET, right?
John:
But just because it seems like it's still... There's still this thing, and we can't quite get away from it of, like...
John:
you're either going to use C, C++, or one of these new breed of languages like Swift that aims to be as fast as them but gives you these high-level conveniences.
John:
Or as soon as you go up into something with garbage collection, like server-side is totally okay with it, which is weird because server-side is like the performance is so demanding there in terms of, you know, a specific performance profile is demanding there, not quite the same thing as a GUI application.
John:
But I'm thinking of Linux, like the open source people.
John:
I don't see them latching on to C Sharp as their...
John:
I mean, they're the people who are going crazy with QT and everything.
John:
So they still seem to be stuck in sort of a lower level mindset.
John:
So I'm not sure.
John:
Maybe maybe one more generation of people to wake up and say, I'm going to write a new great thing and I'm not going to do it in C++ or C. Why don't I just use C sharp?
John:
It's like we need the infrastructure to be there first.
John:
We need like every Linux distribution to come.
John:
not just with mono but with like a more officially supported like microsoft blessed stack that's in sync with with uh microsoft's code releases to be able to use c sharp as your development language
Casey:
See, I think a lot of the reason that the Linux community hasn't embraced Mono, for example, is because there's such a bunch of neckbeards that love C and C++ so damn much.
Casey:
And granted, I haven't been a participant in the Linux community in seven, eight years, something like that.
Casey:
But at the time, it seemed like it was all about...
Casey:
um, having a barrier of entry.
Casey:
And if you weren't like a God at C or C plus plus, then, then, you know what, you're not good enough to be in our cool kid club.
Casey:
And last I heard that hasn't really changed, but again, I haven't paid attention in almost a decade.
John:
Yeah, I don't know.
John:
Open source is difficult because whenever I think of open source stuff, I don't think of the GUI stuff.
John:
You know, there have been GUI things based on every language you could possibly imagine.
John:
All the way up to it, including like Tickle or whatever.
John:
You know, it's not it's not as if people aren't doing this.
John:
It's just not one unified phase.
John:
Hell, there was a what was the open step port?
John:
What the hell was that called?
Casey:
I don't know.
John:
But anyway, someone ages ago, GNU Step, there you go, ported the OpenStep APIs.
John:
And that's like, what if AppKit was available for Linux?
John:
Boy, that would change things.
John:
Well, AppKit was practically available for Linux for a long time.
John:
But, you know, it wasn't it wasn't officially sanctioned.
John:
It was a small group of people making it.
John:
And it's not like people are clamoring to make apps like that.
John:
So the most important things to come out of sort of the Linux open source community are things like KHTML and, you know, earlier Apache and stuff like that, like faceless applications written written in low level languages.
John:
Those are okay, but as soon as you get into anything gooey, it's like, just don't look to the Linux community for anything.
John:
Or file systems, another example, you know, ZFS coming from Sun, BTRFS.
John:
Those things tend to come out of the open source world.
John:
And so if .NET and C Sharp want to help in that regard, they can give some new tools to that crowd.
John:
But you don't see anything coming out of there that's like anything higher level than that.
John:
Can you think of like an exciting thing that is not faceless that has come out of the open source slash Linux community in the last decade or so that has made an impact on the wider world of computing?
Marco:
hmm wireshark audacity both nerdy tools addium also a nerdy tool someone said git that's not that's faceless yeah it git needs a million front ends on it to make it usable yeah and git should get is it not only uh back end and faceless but it's just gross like even the git commands that you use in the command line are themselves front ends to like five other commands under the hood that are actually doing the thing you want to do
John:
Yeah, Git is not a great example of user interface, even in a faceless application.
Marco:
Git is exactly what you would expect from the creator of Linux making something complicated.
Marco:
Like version control and distributed version control are already very complicated problems.
Marco:
Add to that the creator of Linux making the one that he wants to use, and it is exactly what you'd expect that to be.
John:
Here's an example.
John:
Selenium.
John:
Someone suggested Selenium.
John:
That's still kind of server-related.
John:
Do you want to use Selenium?
John:
I guess there's a lot of tools that are either web-based or have to do with testing things that have to do with the web that probably count, maybe.
John:
I don't know.
John:
PHP BB?
John:
No.
John:
No.
John:
Of course, a lot of regular people have have interacted with that.
John:
I mean, Xamarin has had more of an impact because they let you write iOS apps, right?
John:
Like that whole that whole strategy of you can use this other stack to write things.
John:
There's cross platform, right?
John:
You can you sort of shared core of an application and you deploy on iOS and also on other platforms.
Casey:
Yeah, that's right.
Casey:
I looked at Xamarin back when it was Mono 1, or Mono Touch 1, excuse me.
Casey:
And at the time, anyway, it was exactly what I would have done if I was trying to write a cross-platform setup for iOS, insofar as basically they just wrote glue classes where if you had, I don't know, UI activity view controller, whatever it is,
Casey:
In Objective-C, you're going to have the exact same thing in C Sharp with basically the same API, just things translated to be a little more friendly to the C Sharp world.
Casey:
And the C Sharp classes were just really heavily annotated with attributes and whatnot to describe what is supposed to happen.
Casey:
And so what that meant was, and this is true, I believe, of Monodroid or whatever it's called, Xamarin for Android now.
Casey:
And so basically what that means is,
Casey:
If you're going to write a cross-platform app, you would presumably have the same business logic across both iOS and Android, and those would be the exact same classes, completely shared, etc.
Casey:
But you would be pretty much compelled to have a user interface specific for each platform.
Casey:
This is in contrast to something like a PhoneGap, which is all JavaScript-based, and they try to
Casey:
make the user interface code generic amongst both platforms as well.
Casey:
And PhoneGap does a reasonably good job given what it is.
Casey:
So for example, when you ask for... I think it's... Maybe I'm thinking of Titanium, actually.
Casey:
It doesn't matter.
Casey:
One of the JavaScript ones.
Casey:
When you ask for TabBar, you'll get a UI TabBar in iOS, and it'll be at the bottom.
Casey:
And if you ask for TabBar in Android, you'll get whatever the Android equivalent is, and it'll be on the top.
Casey:
But it's still...
Casey:
trying to be all things to all people, whereas Xamarin, at the time anyway, was not that way.
Casey:
And you would have to definitely write separate user interfaces per platform.
John:
But you would share all your core logic and your business objects and everything like that.
John:
So I think that...
John:
C Sharp already probably has done more to bring, Xamarin and Monotechnals have done more to bring Microsoft's tools to the wider GUI community than probably the accumulated mass of every GUI effort that has come out of the Linux world.
Casey:
Anyway, it's just interesting.
Casey:
I'm very curious to see where it goes.
Casey:
To be honest, like I said, I don't know that it'll affect much unless somebody, like John had said, embraces this to make some wonderful new thing.
Casey:
But I don't know.
Casey:
I was somewhat surprised to see it.
Casey:
And I'm excited to see what comes of it.
Casey:
Now, before we move on, out of curiosity, what do you guys use at work or in retirement for you, Marco?
Casey:
What do you use for version control, if not Git?
Marco:
Oh, I use Git for the same reason that a lot of people use Git, which is that GitHub is really good.
Marco:
And that if I want to use a lot of open source anything, like if I want to open source a library, if I want to open source something, generally speaking, it is wise if you want to have any contributions or any interaction with other developers, it is wise to use GitHub.
Marco:
And therefore, I use Git.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
There's a lot of areas in my life where I kind of pick the alternative team.
Marco:
And for whatever reason, I didn't do that this time because there's a lot of downsides to that approach a lot of times.
Marco:
Like when I bought the DVD plus RW drive, that was dumb.
Marco:
So many things that I've done this time.
John:
As long as you didn't have DVD RAM, then you're fine.
Marco:
I did not have DVD RAM.
Marco:
I don't know why there's a DVD RAM emoji.
Marco:
DVD RAM was never popular.
Marco:
It's not like it was just outdated.
Marco:
It was never, ever popular among anybody.
Marco:
But regardless, I was tempted to buy a DVD RAM because it's so much better for data integrity.
Marco:
It actually is way better in so many ways for integrity.
Marco:
But I resisted and instead bought DVD plus RW back before there were combo drives, which was very stupid.
Marco:
But anyway, yeah, this time I didn't go for the alternative team.
Marco:
I went for the big team.
Marco:
And I just said, let's root for the Yankees and it'll be easier.
Marco:
And hey, I made a sports metaphor.
John:
I was about to say.
Marco:
Git is not the Yankees, please.
Marco:
Is that up to date or is that outdated information?
John:
No, Git was never the Yankees.
John:
so what do you use at work john oh you know like it's not you have a choice at work i use perforce at work and for for the for the centralized version non-distributed version control system so not material not git not bit like or like the old school style a sort of the cvs subversion style i like perforce better than any of these other centralized ones i've used but yep completely agree it has many things not to recommend it and
John:
it's so wants like so the central the decentralized ones come on the scene and they all work according to a paradigm that is totally foreign to Perforce right and so it can't change it can't change its stripes can't be like now I'm decentralized it's just not it's like everything about it you know it's baked in to the design of Perforce it's never going to be like it or Mercurial or something
John:
But it feels the need to add weird sort of half-hearted marketing features like the P4 shell feature that showed up a few years ago.
John:
And it's like, just don't even try.
John:
Like, that's not... So ProForce does bother me every time I think about how much easier this would be on one of the more modern version control systems.
John:
But if I just go backwards into the old mindset, it's, you know, it's my favorite of an old outdated lot.
Casey:
Yeah, I use Perforce at my very first job.
Casey:
And this was 2004.
Casey:
And at the time, I really liked it.
Casey:
But obviously, the world has moved on, like you said.
Casey:
So what if you were to do a personal project right now, or if work asked you, you know, hey, john, what would you like to use?
Casey:
And the whole company will use that?
Casey:
What would you what would you recommend?
John:
I would use Git, but I would hold my nose the whole time.
John:
One person in the chat room apparently has never heard people say that Git is gross.
John:
Git is totally gross, not in the functionality that it has, but in the user interface.
John:
And yes, command line programs have a user interface.
John:
And Git's user interface, when you design a program, the user interface is sort of, you have to build sort of the user model of how this program works, right?
John:
You've got the model of how the internal guts of the program work, and you have to provide a user model and a set of vocabulary and a series of nouns and verbs that expose the functionality that you've made possible with your application in a friendly way.
John:
And Git totally fails in that.
John:
Just totally fails.
John:
The words they pick for everything, the options they use to represent those words, the whole big structure of the Git subcommands and the flags and how they go to it.
John:
It's just terrible.
John:
I mean, there's a million web pages about it.
John:
It is a total user interface failure.
John:
But, you know, that's the functionality is great and it's free and it's open source and GitHub exists.
John:
So there are many other things to recommend.
John:
And, you know, it comes out ahead in net net.
John:
But that doesn't mean it's not gross.
John:
I mean, yeah.
Casey:
Now, have you played with Mercurial, which I cannot pronounce apparently, because was it was it Daniel Jalkit that was on a tirade about that?
John:
Yeah, Jockett's still rocking the Mercurial, I think.
John:
He made the more elegant choice, but it's just like, you know, it's swimming against the tide, right?
John:
Because everything, so much infrastructure is built around Git, and people just expect you to use it.
John:
And it's like, if Mercurial had won, it's like, you know, if Betamax had won instead of VHS, but bottom line is, you know, VHS won, and so here we are.
John:
That's a better analogy than the Yankees, I think.
Yeah.
Casey:
Here it is, Marco.
Casey:
You tried that one time, and this is what you get for it.
John:
I'll never try again.
John:
In the chat room, someone whose name I'm not going to try to pronounce says that Mercurial is basically Git with fewer features, a better UI, and a slower implementation.
John:
Speed is actually a concern.
John:
Speaking of operations and Git, and someone from the chat room will correct me within 30 seconds as soon as they hear this if I'm wrong, scale linearly with the number of files, which is fine if you have a small repository.
John:
At work, we have a ridiculous...
John:
gigantic repository that is way too big and perforce is actually faster than git for doing common operations uh so i'm not that's not a slam against git that's a slam against how we manage our code uh but
John:
That is something to consider.
John:
And that's another reason, you know, Mercurial is not a clean win over Git.
John:
It may have a nicer interface and a more well thought out sort of way that describes its functionality.
John:
But Git has a lot of developer time behind it and Git has a lot of features and can do a lot of amazing things.
John:
And the tools and the ecosystem built around Git make it more valuable than Mercurial.
Marco:
Cool.
Marco:
On that bombshell.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week.
Marco:
Mandrill, Squarespace, and Hover.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
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.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental, they didn't mean.
Marco:
Because of the agreement that you have with Analog, first of all, how is your baby monitor doing?
John:
What is this agreement?
John:
I'm not caught up in Analog, even though I heard a recent one live.
Marco:
uh basically mike had said mostly jokingly that he is going to um actually i don't think we've released this one yet this might be the one well he's proposing some kind of um agreement between the two shows uh that that that most of the feelings will go on their show because most of the tech is going to go on our show
John:
denied yeah i think i remember here now this is now this is ringing a bell that's total bogus reject this offer immediately furthermore declare war against that podcast
Casey:
Oh, God, that's awesome.
Casey:
No, the baby monitor is good.
Casey:
We basically have the same baby monitor that you have.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
But no, baby's good.
Casey:
Every day is a little different, but in ways I can't describe, which is the oddest thing.
Casey:
He looks a little bit different, kind of acts a little bit different.
Casey:
And again, I wish I could tell you a specific way in which that's the case.
Casey:
But every day, it's just a little bit different when you're that young.
Casey:
I mean, he's two weeks today, actually.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
It's just everything is expected in some ways to be different.
Casey:
Like today we noticed – actually, here's an empirical example or a specific example.
Casey:
We noticed that I think he's starting to be able to cry as in generate tears.
Casey:
Obviously, he wails and moans on occasion, sometimes, often.
Casey:
But I don't think he was able to generate tears until tonight we saw –
Casey:
Yeah, wait, wait, wait.
Casey:
I think that's a I think that's a tear, you know, so that's new.
Casey:
But I mean, all in all, everything's fine.
Casey:
Still sleeping more than expected, less than desired.
Casey:
But, you know, it's all good.
Marco:
So as some general advice, things change quickly.
Marco:
And like like he in in six months, he's going to look completely different.
Marco:
oh yeah um six months after that he he'll look completely different again um and and he'll you know of course he'll act different he'll get more abilities um what i would recommend is you probably already do this but like don't forget to take pictures and don't forget to take video uh i would suggest leaving your camera out like leave it like on the coffee table or somewhere like on on a kitchen counter leave it out so that
Marco:
taking a picture of him doesn't require setup.
Marco:
You can always just grab the camera and take a picture.
Marco:
Make it very casual.
Marco:
Make it an everyday, easy thing to do.
Marco:
And again, don't forget to take videos.
Marco:
Whether it's just iPhone videos or fancy camera videos is fine.
Marco:
It matters less for video with the technical quality of it.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Video really captures time and captures a moment in a way that a lot of photos, they can, but video just captures a whole other dimension of it.
Marco:
So don't go six months without taking a video.
Marco:
Because what you're going to see is you're going to look back in a year and be like, oh my god, I can't believe he used to look like that.
Marco:
Or I don't even remember that time when he was doing that.
Marco:
Because it does change so quickly, especially during this first two years.
Casey:
It's funny you bring that up because a friend of the show, underscore David Smith, actually came down this morning.
Casey:
I had the morning off from work.
Casey:
And so he came down to visit and meet Declan.
Casey:
And I've had our fancy cameras basically sitting on our coffee table just about always.
Casey:
So either Aaron or I can grab it and take a picture.
Casey:
And at one point, he allowed Aaron and I to hold Declan for a moment.
Casey:
And I mean that in a good way, not in a bad way.
Casey:
And so all of a sudden I heard the shutter going in the background because Dave's a nice guy and he picked up the camera and started taking a few pictures of the three of us, which I actually – that reminds me.
Casey:
I haven't gone back to look and I'm sure they're gorgeous because –
Casey:
he's a really good photographer but um it's because it was just sitting there and because he knows that i don't i wouldn't mind him doing that um in fact i appreciated it you know he was able to take a few shots of us and i got to assume that at least one if not several of those are going to be really awesome especially because it's not often that you have all of us all three of us in one shot because usually it's either me or aaron taking the picture so i hear you yeah that was a good move by underscore that's he's the best
John:
Do you have a picture taking?
John:
First of all, are you going to have formal pictures taken on any sort of schedule?
John:
And if so, what is that schedule?
John:
I need to know your schedule.
Casey:
So it depends on how you define formal.
Casey:
We are taking pictures every week.
John:
I mean, like you have a professional photographer take them of all of you, basically.
Casey:
Uh, we haven't really talked about it.
Casey:
We did have, uh, professional shots taken when we were at the hospital, which, um, if you'll permit me to go on a rant, I can go on a rant about, but, um, I don't know about other than that.
Casey:
I was thinking, and I haven't talked to Aaron about this yet.
Casey:
Maybe like every year we might do it, especially in the beginning, um, when he's still changing, you know, all the time.
Casey:
I don't necessarily feel like we need to do that every year forevermore, but I don't know.
Casey:
Remind me of that after I've done this for 18 years straight.
Casey:
So I don't know.
John:
You should ask Aaron about it.
John:
If you haven't had the discussion before, she may have a different plan in mind.
Casey:
Oh, very much so.
Casey:
I mean, who knows?
Casey:
But we'll see.
Casey:
I mean, I'm just happy that we have friends and family around that will take pictures of us with a decent camera and that we have a decent camera.
Casey:
But obviously, there's something to be said for professional shots.
Casey:
And so when we were in the hospital...
Casey:
And this isn't going to make it in the release show because it's stupid, but it pisses me off.
Casey:
When we were in the hospital, you know, the blessed hospital photographer company comes around to say, would you like us to take pictures?
Casey:
And I knew this was coming because a coworker of mine, his wife does it, but for a different company.
Casey:
So, yeah, sure.
Casey:
You know, take some pictures.
Casey:
And so they set up Declan and like basically she took the end of Aaron's hospital bed and which had all white sheets and like did some magic where she fluffed the sheets in such a way that it looked like a freaking like set, like a photography set.
Casey:
And, you know, put Declan in it and, you know, took pictures with Declan on it on his side and on his back.
Casey:
And then we were holding him.
Casey:
And then there was one that's really adorable where that's just his feet with our wedding rings on him.
Casey:
And, um, and so they were, there were only about 10 or 20 shots that we got in the mail because of course we paid for them and blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
And the thing that really bothered me was when the woman was in there, the photographer was in there.
Casey:
She was, um, she was really, really nice and seemed to be very good at what she does.
Casey:
And she was using either a Canon or Nikon DSLR.
Casey:
I don't recall exactly what, um,
Casey:
Well, I get these pictures in the mail, and among other things, I got a CD with the digital files on it.
Casey:
And these pictures that I got in the mail, the file size of each of these pictures that came off a DSLR that mustn't have been more than a year or two old was one and a half megs.
Casey:
what yeah you got you definitely got you know resized jpegs out of something yeah that's anything they're selling you in the hospital is always it's like anything you get inside a theme park yeah exactly oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah it's so true and the doubly annoying thing was just on principle not because it mattered but just on principle not only was the jpeg hyper compressed i think it was like 2500 pixels by 1500 pixels or thereabouts and
Casey:
But, right?
Casey:
I mean, you especially, Marco, should know how funny that is.
Casey:
But not only that, they deliberately stripped all the EXIF data.
Casey:
Do I need that EXIF data?
Casey:
No, of course not.
Casey:
But the fact that some way during their whatever workflow, they stripped out...
Casey:
The EXIF data, that's just insane to me.
Casey:
And so obviously it's been post-processed in some way.
Casey:
And so I wrote an extraordinarily angry yet mildly polite email to them saying, are you freaking kidding me?
Casey:
You should be giving me raw files for the $150 I paid you.
Casey:
But I would just be happy with the uncitty version of the compressed, you know, the JPEGs off the camera.
Casey:
I would really like a copy of those or my money back.
Casey:
And I got an extremely short email back from them saying – Too bad.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
Actually, it said basically we're shipping you something.
Casey:
Don't throw away – or you can feel free to throw away the thing you already have when the new thing arrives.
Casey:
I don't know if that means that they're sending me a new CD with different files, if they're sending me a CD with the same files.
Casey:
I have no idea, but I'm hopeful that perhaps I will eventually be vindicated and they will send me files that are bigger than 1500 by 2500.
Casey:
Good luck with that.
Casey:
Oh, I know.
Casey:
There's no chance.
John:
And if you think $150 is expensive to get the digital versions of professional fixtures you had taken, maybe you should factor that into your schedule you're planning.
Marco:
Yeah, we should have Tiff come in if she's around.
Marco:
Because this is like a big part of the photography business model.
Marco:
And it's very challenging if you are a customer looking for a photographer who will give you
Marco:
The digital files at a reasonable cost, especially like and just and give you the right to print them yourself if you want to and post them to Facebook and everything.
Marco:
That is not common among photographers.
Marco:
It's slowly becoming more common, but it's still very uncommon.
John:
It's common, but they'll charge you a bazillion dollars, charge you so much money that you are deterred from ever doing that.
Casey:
Now, the interesting thing about this, though, was to their credit, they did on the CD that came with these shitty versions of the digital pictures, they actually had a PDF, which was a copyright release for personal use.
Casey:
And that was extremely surprising to me because I remember when...
Casey:
we were interviewing photographers for our wedding, and this was in 2007, the guy we ended up going for very clearly was extremely particular about how we were going to use the digital files he gave us.
Casey:
And he did give us unwatermarked, completely unmolested JPEGs of every picture he took.
Casey:
And in fact, when I asked him if he was going to strip the EXIF data, he looked at me funny and said, wow, I've never had anyone ask me that before or
Casey:
But that being said, he lectured us like 13 different times about how the only way you can use this is to print things for yourself and your family, anything else, and he will basically take us to court.
Casey:
And again, for the hospital pictures, it –
Casey:
It was very nice of them to include a copyright release.
Casey:
I don't know why it would ever be an issue, but nevertheless, if it is an issue, it's right there and I can print it and say, no, no, no, look, I'm just printing it for myself.
Casey:
I'm not trying to sell it.
Casey:
Here's the copyright release.
Casey:
I remember talking to Tiff about this at one point a year or two ago, just out of curiosity, because it struck me weird that he was that into...
Casey:
holding the copyright for these pictures and my understanding is he wanted to be able to resell the pictures he took of us to like wedding magazines and you know bridal magazines and wedding dress magazines well that's not that's not the real reason because you can you can have like co-copyright like you like the photographer can retain the copyright of the pictures that he or she takes but can also grant you the rights to do whatever you want with them
Casey:
And I think that's what basically sort of kind of happened with these hospital pictures.
Casey:
It was not exactly clear what happened with the wedding photographer pictures.
Marco:
Yeah, that's well.
Marco:
And, you know, especially like the older photographers, like photographers who have been working like before digital, even like, you know, old school photographers, they make such a big percentage of their money from the prints and the books and all the crap that you have to buy after the wedding that
Marco:
They make so much money from that that if you ask them for the source, whether it's negatives or digital files, to go do whatever you want with, the reason why they don't want you doing that is because that's going to cut into a lot of their money.
Marco:
And it's a lot better.
Marco:
It's a simpler business model if...
Marco:
you just charge more up front just say all right well you know i if i need to make two thousand dollars from your shoot uh rather than charging a thousand dollars for the shoot and then six hundred dollars for each book that you want to order um and of course you want to get one for your grandparents and one from your parents and one for yourself and one for this aunt like you know instead of doing all that just charge two thousand dollars up front and and then just you know let them buy prints at cost um
Marco:
That's what Tiff does.
Marco:
She should come in here and tell you this.
Marco:
That's Tiff's entire business model for her photo business.
Marco:
That's how she does it.
Marco:
She just charges more up front and gives people digital files because what most people want to do is post them to Facebook and send them to their friends and stuff.
Marco:
No one gets prints anymore.
Marco:
Right, right, exactly.
Marco:
And she's integrated with a big professional printer, and she just offers those prints at some tiny margin above cost to make it worth her sending the files in.
Marco:
She's basically offering them at cost.
Marco:
So people can get professional prints made, but most people don't.
Marco:
And that's what most people want.
Marco:
Most people want that out of their photographer.
Marco:
And the younger photographers are more likely to be willing to do that.
Marco:
But it's still a problem when you get one of the old school ones who still wants to do things the old fashioned way where you spend hundreds of dollars for prints after the fact.
Casey:
And it's funny because just the other day, I don't know why I did, but I went looking up to try to find the photographer or wedding photographers website to see kind of if he was still around or whatever.
Casey:
Definitely not.
Casey:
He's definitely not a wedding photographer anymore.
Casey:
So I'm pretty sure I'm OK on the copyright stuff because apparently he's not really making money from it anyway.
Marco:
Well, 75 years after he dies, you can do whatever you want with them.
Casey:
Hooray!
Marco:
Yay U.S.
Marco:
copyright law.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But yeah, so we'll see what happens.
Casey:
I should be getting this new CD in a week or two.
Casey:
But it also strikes me as extremely peculiar that it is the year 2014 and I'm still waiting on a CD to get digital copies of pictures that were taken two weeks ago.
Marco:
And you probably paid quite a premium for that CD.
Casey:
Oh, hell yeah.
Casey:
It was around $150.
Casey:
And we did get a few prints out of it.
Casey:
But to your point a minute ago, basically it was the CD is $130 or something along those lines.
Casey:
And for $20 more, you could get like 13 prints.
Casey:
Again, I'm making up the details, but something along those lines.
Casey:
And so at that point, it's like, well, shit.
Marco:
why not just get the you know 10 prints or whatever and for the for the 20 dollars and so we got like a humongous picture of declan that's like 15 by 10 inches or something like that but and see and why not just charge 120 for the shoot and have them email you the photos exactly exactly that's that's like they'll make more that way it's actually like they're wasting their money making this stupid printed crap and like and nobody wants it yeah i don't get it
John:
Well, don't forget to actually make prints, though, because you want to have everything digital.
John:
You want the original files.
John:
But if you want the aliens to dig up pictures of your child after human civilization is wiped out, you've got to have paper ones so they'll get compressed with all the rest of the stuff and maybe be preserved in some little bubble and they'll be able to find those.
John:
Because they won't be able to read your digital stuff, even for your things.
John:
Like if you if you have a catastrophic data loss or something, it's good to have like prints of your family and relatives houses.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Yeah, I mean, we'll see.
Casey:
But I'm very anxious to see what happens.
Casey:
And I had somebody in the chat.
Casey:
I think it was Brian Ash.
Casey:
Somebody said something along the lines of what happened with my email was a secretary read it, thought that the CD was damaged.
Casey:
And I'm about to get another copy of the exact same CD that I already have, which is probably true.
John:
We just took formal pictures.
John:
We're on a yearly schedule at this point.
John:
And we just took them yesterday, actually.
John:
And the CD they gave us for the first time was unreadable.
John:
So that was a shame.
Casey:
Can you get like a replacement?
John:
Yeah, we got a replacement.
John:
But it was unreadable in a way that revealed the first set of terrible Yosemite bugs that I've seen.
John:
If you stuck on a readable CD and the finder freezes and eventually everything freezes and I had to hard power down on my Mac, which was sad.
John:
oh that's cool it doesn't even say like this disc is unreadable or like you know it's just it was totally useless so and and does it while spinning the cd at high speed yeah i tried it in both of my optical drives the optical drive on the macbook pro and the optical drive my mac pro at work which didn't freeze the the tool the mac at work and the mac here didn't freeze but my mac pro did anyway it was sad we got uh they put it on a thumb drive for us and gave us a new cd so it was fine
Marco:
Yeah, Tiff actually started, usually for her bigger photo packages, she would always get these beautiful custom CDs printed by the photo printing company with custom booklets and everything.
Marco:
The problem is, who has a CD drive anymore?
Marco:
Those are on their way out for most people's computers.
Marco:
It is very possible if you make a CD for a photo client this year, they might not own a computer that can read it.
Marco:
And so she finally started switching over to thumb drives for the big clients and for the small ones she just sends them a Dropbox link.
Marco:
And that's all most people need.
Marco:
Like all this physical media is so quickly becoming outdated.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Well, when we got the Synology, one of the first things I did was I took our two or three DVDs full of wedding pictures and immediately put them on the Synology, not only because I was scared that eventually we wouldn't have a DVD drive in the house, but even more so, and I think, John, you've talked about this a lot in the past, what if those DVDs eventually rot to the point that I can't read them anymore?
Yeah.
John:
yeah i have tons of optical lists that are probably bad actually i pulled a bunch of old like anime and stuff i had all optical lists and i think most of them are good but that's the thing with no data integrity i have no way of knowing and i put them all in this analogy but until and unless i watch every single one of them through at 1x speed i don't know which one of those have gone corrupt i'll never know
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So yeah, so that's wedding, excuse me, not wedding photography.
Casey:
That's baby photography in the year 2014.
Marco:
See, we talked tech.
Marco:
Mike should be happy with that.
Casey:
Yeah, actually, that did kind of work out, didn't it?
Casey:
I didn't think of it that way.
Casey:
That's pretty funny.