You Don’t Know My Pants
Casey:
I'm drinking a little hot chocolate right now, and now I've gone from freezing cold to overheating.
Casey:
What is your hot chocolate of choice?
Casey:
I will answer that question.
Casey:
You don't want me to answer that question.
Casey:
If I had to choose just one, this is me dodging, by the way, it would be the Mud House in Charlottesville, which is a little coffee house in Charlottesville, Virginia.
Casey:
Do they have winter there?
Casey:
Okay, I'm all right.
Casey:
I had to really bottle that one up for a second.
John:
Please take note of who is doing this to you.
Casey:
Not me.
Casey:
But this particular hot chocolate, which I do find to be quite delicious, is a Keurig K-cup and, shoot, for the life of me, I don't remember who makes this hot chocolate.
Marco:
Oh, boy.
Marco:
Well, on one hand, when you said I was not going to like the answer, I never thought it would be that bad.
Marco:
yeah i wouldn't have predicted that either well did you think it was like the swiss miss instant stuff yeah yeah which is probably better that used to be my hot chocolate of choice if you think about like what hot chocolate requires really i mean yeah you can do it the good way with milk in a pot and you slowly heat up and dump it a bunch of powder so much work it really isn't that much work just cleaning the pot but if you think about like what most hot chocolate really is just like you know the packet where you add water and heat and you mix it and that's it
Marco:
A Keurig machine probably does just as good of a job at that as dumping a packet into a mug and stirring it.
Marco:
It probably is not that much worse.
Marco:
It might even be slightly better in some ways.
Marco:
That, I think, is an official Marco-approved usage of a Keurig machine.
Marco:
If you're not going to ever actually make coffee in it...
Marco:
Which I'm kind of curious why you even own one of these machines because you hate coffee.
Marco:
Is it for Aaron?
Casey:
No, actually, the funny thing about it is this machine was given to me by Aaron as a Christmas gift like two years ago because I freaking love the hot chocolates that come out of it in the wintertime.
Casey:
Now, inevitably, what ended up happening is Aaron uses it constantly.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
It was like a bowling ball gift.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Like the stereotypical bowling ball gift.
Marco:
Did the bowling ball say Aaron on it?
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
But no, I asked for it.
Casey:
I was like, no, I really honestly want a Keurig.
Casey:
And then she got it for me.
Casey:
And inevitably, I use it like three months out of the year.
Casey:
You know, the only time that it's winter down in Virginia.
Casey:
And she uses it the entire year.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
You want to do some follow-up?
Marco:
Let's do it.
Casey:
We got a really good email from an anonymous former Apple employee.
Casey:
And John, do you want to talk about this for us?
John:
Sure.
John:
This was about iWork, which we've been kind of...
John:
half-heartedly complaining about for the past two shows uh speculating about uh apple's commitment to the office suite and what what effect its mediocrity might or might not have on the platform and here is a uh supposed report from an anonymous employee from uh what's going on with that work uh
John:
and he or she says, iWork for the iPad basically needed to be a rewrite for various reasons.
John:
For compatibility on the Mac, though, this basically meant we needed to port iWork for the iPad to the Mac, which meant we're re-implementing a 10-year-old office suite.
John:
So that's what we were talking about before.
John:
Marco mentioned as well the strategy tax, the idea that iWork has to be on the iPad and on the web, and that's the strategy, and the tax is...
John:
We have a personally good Mac version, but tough luck.
John:
We have to basically take the iOS one and port it to the Mac, even if it means losing features, even if it means spending a lot of time on it.
John:
And so here's anonymous confirmation of that.
John:
And then the other, I guess this could be considered a tax as well.
John:
The strategy is, well, it's not really a strategy tax, but it is a cost of being a first party piece of software is that when Apple comes out with new features in its OS, whether it's like
John:
Autosave from Lion or Spotlight and Tiger or Quick Look and Leopard or Continuity and Yosemite.
John:
God, I can't keep these names straight.
John:
It's the responsibility of Apple's first party apps to implement those features.
John:
So in the same way, I mean, third party developers feel harried by this stuff as well.
John:
It's like, oh, there's a new version of the OS.
John:
I got to support all this extra stuff.
John:
But Apple is even more pressure internally to say iWork needs to implement all these great new features.
John:
So when they would rather be, you know, working on features that are important to the application, it's like, well, we can't, if we're going to do autosave, we have to have it on our apps because it looks bad if we say, hey, developers, everyone, you should do autosave, but oh, by the way, iWork won't do autosave, or you should implement QuickLook, but our applications don't implement QuickLook.
John:
So this person concludes, yes, I can definitely feel from the outside that iWork is understaffed and not a priority, but the iWork team is actually pretty large for a team in Apple.
John:
In some ways, it's the fact that it is a priority and the consequent strategy taxes that push the team this way and that that results in less obvious future progress for iWork year to year.
John:
So there you go.
John:
One report purportedly from the inside about what the deal is with iWork.
Casey:
Excellent.
Casey:
It makes sense.
Casey:
It's still a bummer, and it's hard.
Casey:
You know, if I wasn't a developer, I think I'd find that very hard to swallow.
Casey:
But, I mean, I get it.
Casey:
It just stinks.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's more or less what we thought.
John:
You could see from the outside the whole unification and how that's going to be a cost, right?
John:
And the pressure to implement the new technologies.
John:
Like I said, third-party developers feel that from the outside as well.
John:
We just like to think that, and this is kind of a silly thing to think, but it's difficult to avoid, that Apple's got so much money, surely they can get enough resources to do a good enough job on this office suite, right?
John:
And money doesn't turn into developers.
John:
And that gets back to the second level meta problem of how does Apple hire and retain good employees?
John:
And do good employees want to stay at a company where what they do is dictated so heavily and constrained so heavily?
John:
Would they rather work at someplace like Google where you're allowed to try 20 different things?
John:
And
John:
It's a difficult problem to have, but we seem like, oh, you know, you're the mighty Apple.
John:
You should be able to do this.
John:
You have all this time and all these resources and all this fame and all this prestige and back in the day, all these potentially valuable stock options to give.
John:
And yet somehow you can't manage to release and maintain a decent insert your favorite application that you think Apple is neglecting here.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But yeah, it's a lot more difficult than it seems from the outside.
John:
Not excusing it, it's just, like you said, it's kind of a bummer all around.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right, so we also, I don't know if it was we or me, but somebody got a handful of tweets from Jonathan Sullinger, who is Scion West on Twitter, regarding Microsoft and .NET.
Casey:
I have not had the time to look into any of this since we spoke about it last week, about the open sourcing of more bits of .NET.
Casey:
But Jonathan said...
Casey:
You can take ASP.NET source and dump it on OS X. It includes, the new .NET stuff includes, an IIS platform agnostic version of the server runtime.
Casey:
You literally run IIS on OS X or Linux.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Yeah, well...
Casey:
weird but uh the new rosalind compiler compiles the source at runtime so if you deploy source to the server and iis compiles and loads it for you um and again this is why a common language runtime or what's the swift equivalent sil is that right something like that no there is no common language runtime equivalent in swift well i thought that it compiled down to some all right whatever well now that you can compile anything to llvm bytecode but that's not really buying you anything
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, fine.
Casey:
Well, here it was.
Casey:
I thought I was smart and I was wrong.
Casey:
Anyway, the new Roslyn compiler, I already talked about that.
Casey:
Deploying ASP.NET source includes cross-platform.NET runtime and IIS runtime.
Casey:
So you can run it on Linux from thumbsticks.
Casey:
So you could actually run Internet Information Server if you so desired, which is what IIS is, which is kind of the...
Casey:
microsoft equivalent of apache if you'll permit me to make a terrible analogy um you could actually run that on os 10 which is either new please email casey please email me i guess um i don't know why you would want to necessarily but you could do it whitby in the chat room says microsoft has released docker images for asp.net i guess this makes sense because i think we should have you know jeff atwood on or something ask him how they uh deploy stack overflow and discourse i think
John:
stack overflow might actually be on windows servers i don't know anyway they do asp.net and i think he's using it for discourse as well and it makes sense they have linux servers and this the most interesting thing about this is something that's i'm sure not new but it's new to me the idea that you deploy the source to the server
John:
as if it's like a scripting language and IS doesn't just, you know, IS will compile it for you.
John:
That seems nice to me.
John:
I don't know why, but I don't like the idea of like building a binary and then pushing a binary up.
John:
It doesn't feel webby, you know, for someone who's spent so many years writing stuff and then it just, you know, it just runs like the JavaScript just runs in the browser or whatever your, you know, PHP or Perl or Python or whatever runs on the server and there's no compilation step.
John:
And so it's neat that they're doing the same thing.
John:
Which, I mean, it's not, you know, an amazing technical fee, but I just think it feels webby to me.
Casey:
Well, and even in Windows, there are a lot of things that get compiled at runtime the first time they're necessary.
Casey:
And in fact, a project I did a few years ago, we were using what is now Microsoft Dynamics, but at the time was called CRM.
Casey:
And
Casey:
What it ended up happening was we were leveraging the CRM API, which is a bunch of soap, of course, because it's Microsoft.
Casey:
And the way CRM works is you can kind of build up entities on the, well, not on the fly, but you direct CRM to build up these entities.
Casey:
So, you know, a customer includes whatever unique fields you want it to include.
Casey:
And you basically build a relational database in the UI.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, what ends up happening is they have strongly typed like classes and everything for all of these different entities that you've built.
Casey:
So in turn, what ended up happening was the WSDL for the particular CRM environment we were trying to hit was something like 40,000 lines of XML.
Casey:
It was enormous.
Casey:
And what we were running into was every time we started IAS on a dev box, on the real box, it didn't matter.
Casey:
One way or another, every time we started IIS, it would pause for literally a minute.
Casey:
And for the life of us, we couldn't figure out what was going on.
Casey:
Well, fast forward a few days of playing with it, and it turns out what we were doing was, since we were using proxy objects that...
Casey:
were strongly typed versions of classes that represented the WSDL.
Casey:
Those were all getting compiled at runtime as IAS started.
Casey:
And so that took a really darn long time since it was a 40,000 line WSDL, or again, whatever the case may be.
Casey:
And so what we ended up having to do was explicitly pre-compile
Casey:
all of those proxy classes and include that DLL in our deployment in order to prevent that heinous runtime.
Casey:
And I bring all this up, or load time, and I bring all this up because my point is IES was doing that compilation or perhaps the .NET framework was doing that compilation based on a request on IES.
John:
Correction from the chat room.
John:
Discourse is Ruby, not ASP.NET.
John:
Stack Overflow is ASP.NET.
Marco:
Well, the chat room is saying Discourse is RUBY in all capitals.
Marco:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
Is that something else?
Marco:
Like R-U-B-Y?
John:
Is that like an initialism for something?
John:
Other people capitalized it correctly.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
um it was responsive design uh your internet works like a champ on every device ios android even blackberry and it will even work on you know iphone 6 plus iphone 6 iphone 5 all the different iphones um i'm guessing once they can make something for the apple watch i bet they will uh they're really good about responsive design making it work on every screen
Marco:
And what's really cool about this, they have all sorts of HTML5 powered features for things like document previews, annotations, things like that, where like there's no flash plugin required for any of that stuff.
Marco:
So you can actually annotate a document with your coworkers right on your phone.
Marco:
And even if your phone has no native device for this kind of thing, you can just do it right there.
Marco:
All your design is carried over between all the devices.
Marco:
If you customize the logo, if you customize colors, all that stuff, you know, all your custom design that you want to do, that carries across every device as well.
Marco:
and uh gartner even likes them so gartner is a company that enterprises pay money to to tell them where to pay money igloo appears for the sixth consecutive year in this magic quadrant alongside tech giants like microsoft ibm google vmware salesforce.com and sap
Marco:
In a report that values the viability of the vendor, Igloo is praised for their responsiveness and customer experience.
Marco:
This is what Gartner wrote about them.
Marco:
Feedback from Igloo's reference customers was consistently positive.
Marco:
They praised the product's quick deployment, configuration, and customization flexibility with self-service options for non-technical users, control over branding, and information organization and ease of use.
Marco:
They also praised the responsiveness of Igloo as an organization.
Marco:
So if your company, chances are, if you work for a company of more than 10 people, you almost certainly know what Gartner is.
Marco:
And you probably need to tell your boss, here, Gartner approved this.
Marco:
Therefore, we can use it.
Casey:
That's basically how it works.
Casey:
Yeah.
Marco:
Like, John, I mean, you work in the enterprise.
Marco:
Would your company use an Internet platform that was not recommended by Gartner?
John:
I don't know what calculus goes into our choice of internet platform, but whatever it is, I don't like the result.
Marco:
Okay, well, if your company is like John's and you don't like the result, which is pretty likely, get them on Igloo.
Marco:
Show them the Gartner Report or have them look it up.
Marco:
Give Igloo a try.
Marco:
Free to use for up to 10 people.
Marco:
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Marco:
Sign up at igloosoftware.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Igloo.
Casey:
So, John, you want to tell me about some of the stuff that the Germans have been doing with bendy iPhones?
John:
Yeah, we got to go entirely based on the feedback here.
John:
This is from Julian, pointing us to a website that's written in German.
John:
I didn't even bother doing the Google Translate thing or whatever, because Julian was nice enough to summarize it for us.
John:
But this is...
John:
More on bending iPhones.
John:
And it gets into something that I mentioned on a couple of our past episodes about we don't know what the environment of the pocket is like on an iPhone.
John:
What kind of forces can be applied in a pocket?
John:
And apparently this website, which is sort of the German equivalent of Consumer Reports, according to Julian, tried to figure this out by putting pants on people and having them sit down on different surfaces and so on and so forth.
John:
So here are the bullet point conclusions.
John:
uh he says it seems impossible to bend a phone when located in your front pocket i i think i think i could get it done i feel like it's just a question of how tight the pants are whatever but you don't know my pants yeah they're testing is that it seems impossible sitting down on your phone in the back pocket results in deformation if you sit on a hard edge
John:
The testing person reported that deformation was painful, so no unconscious bending possible.
John:
Again, I contest this because I think it's possible to be wearing something very large and very tight on a person who is not in good touch with their body or parts of their body have become numb and sit and not notice.
John:
But anyway...
John:
And the iPhones and the Sony Xperia Z2, which I assume is a phone, were the only phones that bent in the wearing test.
John:
So there are some results.
John:
If you can read German, you can figure out whether this summary is accurate or not.
John:
But I'm glad people are continuing to delve into the research here and say, what is it like in a pocket for a phone?
Marco:
Any other follow-up?
Marco:
I don't know if it's a follow-up or not, but forever ago we were talking about the new USB Type-C connector, basically the USB clone of the Lightning connector, where it's reversible and smaller.
Marco:
And today the news came out about the Nokia N1 tablet.
Marco:
which is basically nokia's clone of the ipad mini and uh it includes a clone of the lightning port in the form of the new usb type c connector and i i think this is the first one we've seen is that true i've never seen it i'm sure there was one that shipped on some pc somewhere before that but this is the the highest profile one i've seen anyway
Marco:
So here, you know, you can see on this Verge article, they show this, you know, this whole thing.
Marco:
And it looks pretty much like, it looks exactly like a lightning connector in the picture.
Marco:
We don't have a good picture of like the, of all the angles of the plug on it, I think.
Marco:
Do we, do you have any other ones besides these?
John:
We had when we talked about it before, but not in this particular shot.
John:
Like, I don't think it's fair to call the USB Type-C connector the clone of lightning connector.
John:
I wish it was a clone of lightning connector.
John:
Instead, it's a small, rounded...
John:
usb connector with little pins on the inside instead of the outside which is fine whatever but this tablet is totally fair to call this a clone of the the ipad mini because it's a type of clone where
John:
When you see the places where they deviate, you think to yourself, that deviation is intentional so they can sleep at night.
John:
When they did the holes for the speakers in the bottom, instead of having them be rectangular regions, they put an extra little curve so they look kind of like rounded edge regions.
John:
john gruber's son pointed out a different a different number of row instead of having two rows of dots there's three rows of dots it's it's like you know when they're doing that it's like look you know what you're doing you're cloning the ipad mini and then you're like well we have to do something to be different and so they differ in the smallest tiniest little details so they can feel like they're not copying it this is an extremely shameless hardware design
Marco:
Yeah, it's like looking at this.
Marco:
Do you think honestly, like you said they do this so they can sleep at night.
Marco:
I just think that they have just decided that they are morally bankrupt.
Marco:
Like they just don't even care.
Marco:
And they say, you know what, if we're going to partially clone it, let's just go all the way.
John:
But they didn't though.
John:
The holes for the speakers are like, we're giving our own twist.
John:
right that's that's such a little thing like everything else is so close it's basically like if you copy and paste someone else's source code but you change the names of the variables this is basically the hardware equivalent of that this is like you change the name of one global variable in one file and that was it yeah i mean and here's here's the argument against cloning just take the other side of it because people are going to look at this and there is there is a kernel of truth underlying the bs that i'm about to spew here and it's that
John:
When you have a tablet, it's just basically like a rectangular screen.
John:
There's only so many ways you can slice that.
John:
There's no sense putting a bunch of lumps there that don't need to be there.
John:
Rounded edges, like you're not going to make the edges pointy to say, oh, well, your edges are roundy and ours are pointy.
John:
Pointy edges are dumb.
John:
Like there is very little room for interpretation in a utilitarian device like this.
John:
Uh, that's the argument for like, well, it's not really a clone, but you know, it's gotta be a screen like this or whatever, but that is mostly BS because nevermind that like this thing copies just not just the overall shape of the details, but also it's only obvious because it's been done.
John:
Uh, it could have just as well been obvious to say if the surface came out that every tablet has a kickstand, right?
John:
Uh,
John:
And you would say, well, you know, of course it's going to look like the Surface.
John:
You know, everyone knows tablets have kickstands.
John:
Like if the iPad didn't exist and the Surface was a standard bearer tablet, it could have been very different.
John:
It's only like this is what tablets look like because the iPad established the form.
John:
And so I give people a pass for aping the form.
John:
Like, yeah, it's a big rectangular screen with rounded edges.
John:
I say that's fine.
John:
But even that you have to admit, like that comes from the existence of the iPad.
John:
But this doesn't just copy the form as so many other tablets have before.
John:
it copies down to the minutest little details except for the parts where it consciously deviates in the minute details to try to say see we're not really copying so it is just i almost have more respect for like the iphone clones from china that try to clone it exactly right down to try and say the word iphone on the back but they use an f instead of a p or something at least they know what they're doing they say we're going to copy the iphone exactly appearance wise unless you look really close uh
John:
And that, I think, is almost a more noble endeavor than what Nokia is doing here.
John:
Because Nokia has been like, no, this is a legitimate product.
John:
This is not like a clone.
John:
We're not going to get sued by Apple.
John:
It's ridiculous.
Casey:
Well, but this is Foxconn, apparently.
Casey:
If you look at this Verge article, and now I'm quoting, Nokia is partnering with Foxconn to build the N1, licensing the industrial design, Nokia brand, and Z-Launcher software to the device maker.
Casey:
Well, I guess the industrial design means it was Nokia's design.
Marco:
Well, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, everyone's licensing things to people like Foxconn to have them built.
Casey:
But does that require licensing just to build it?
Casey:
Like is Apple licensing the design to Foxconn to build an iPad?
Marco:
uh i don't know the details of how that works i mean like there there were stories like like with the with the first blackberry and maybe the only blackberry playbook where like they were like i think it was foxconn one of the big manufacturers um had this basically stock tablet design and blackberry you know just said all right make that stick stick our name in the front stick our software in it and and that's the playbook and then remember the first kindle fire was almost the exact same thing it was like the same design by the same people with like
Marco:
slightly different you know they're basically just white labeling it it's like slightly different things on the front and that was the kindle fire i'm pretty sure apple does not do that no apple definitely does not do that they they have occasionally done it with intel where from what i've heard feel free to write it and correct me from what i've heard um oftentimes intel will do a lot of the design work of apple's uh motherboards what are they called logic boards in apple land
Marco:
Uh, and, uh, occasionally I forget and slip into my native tongue.
Marco:
Uh, but, uh, yeah, but I don't, I don't think it extends really much past that.
Marco:
And even that it probably is not that frequent.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Apple has helped designs like this a little bit though, in that Apple's push for whatever those machines that like, you know, the milling, the computer control milling machines that take a block of aluminum, carve it into a case or whatever, like Apple starting with a MacBook air, Apple has put a lot of money into, uh,
John:
buying more and more of those machines or financing the purchase of those machines for factories that build its stuff.
John:
And now there are a bunch of factories with the ability to, you know, the companies that make those machines made money because they sold more of them and they can make more of them, make them better.
John:
So essentially the manufacturing technology to make something like the products Apple has made,
John:
is now more available than it would have been if apple hadn't pushed for this type of design so there is sort of a global effect on the supply chain of apple selling a lot of devices like this and putting a lot of money into the tooling to make devices like this which means now this manufacturing capacity and this manufacturing know-how and the companies with experience doing this is available to companies other than apple partially because apple did this in the same way apple benefits from
John:
all the semiconductor technology that it takes advantage of in memory and stuff like that because other people are buying a lot of things it's all part of an ecosystem so it's not too strange to see successful materials and manufacturing processes uh that apple may have pioneered now being popular everywhere because hey it's a good idea more people should be doing it but i just feel like at the very least i don't i don't mind you making a rounded rectangle screen thing because that's what a tablet is more or less you know i'll give you that it can it can be very ipad like but
John:
do something with the dls like i kind of like the what was the nexus 6 tablet whichever one had like a rubbery back on it and stuff like that that i think was better than an ipad i wish my ipad had a rubbery back like that because i think it's great you don't you know it makes it grippy and more comfortable and everything like that that's a way to differentiate yourself from apple do something different and better uh don't try to do exactly the same thing right do something apple probably won't ever do
John:
Yeah, even though they probably should.
Marco:
Yeah, because there's a market for some of those things.
Marco:
As I said, things like the rubberized back, things like have a version of the tablet that's half an inch thick and has amazing week-long battery life.
Marco:
Things that Apple would probably never do
Marco:
Many of those things can be markets, and it's perfectly respectable to address those.
Marco:
I feel like if you're going to knock it off, knock it off all the way.
Marco:
Don't knock off 95% of it.
Marco:
Really knock it off, or go your own way and make something that would not be mistaken by many, many casual observers to be this other thing.
Casey:
So I have two thoughts on this.
Casey:
But first, some real-time follow-up from the chat room.
Casey:
It's apparently the Nexus 7 that you were thinking of, or so I'm told.
Casey:
Either way, first question I have is, looking at this Verge article, the hero image at the top, is that Monument Valley on there?
John:
Yep, it's available for Android.
Casey:
Oh, it is?
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
Maybe that's like a 95% clone of Monument Valley.
John:
No, it's the real thing.
John:
I'm pretty sure it's available.
John:
That's definitely the real thing.
Casey:
Okay, I did not realize it was available for Android.
Casey:
And then finally, if you look all the way at the bottom, you can see a close-up of both ends of the reversible USB port.
Casey:
Obviously, the one end looks just like any other USB port.
Casey:
But the one that looks like the lightning connector, I'm pretty sure we knew this, but what with the pins being on the inside, I guess, that just looks weird.
Casey:
Not bad, just it looks so funny because I think to myself, oh, no, that's not a lightning connector.
John:
it's the usb version of this tablet on a quick glance you would definitely think it's a lightning connector and then oh no it's actually not i think it's bigger than the lightning connector like it's wider maybe thicker probably but it's so hard to tell here yes but it is very it is very similar and there that's a place that i wish the usb spec had more closely copied lighting despite the fact that we went through this before everyone telling me that apple's lightning cables uh
John:
are garbage and shred and you know i'm still going through uh never having destroyed any first party apple usb to anything connector so obviously i baby my hardware to a degree that is outside the norm
Casey:
And no one is surprised by that.
Marco:
You know what's actually a little bit funny?
Marco:
I don't know if this is how these things are supposed to work, but if I had to buy an Android tablet for testing something, I would probably buy this one.
Marco:
Because it's least different?
Marco:
It looks like it's most likely to have the hardware not be horrible.
Marco:
like i every time i bought an android test device it's been it's gone very poorly like it's i always get like i got i got a kindle fire i got one of the first nexus 7s and uh and it's and and a barnes and noble nook tablet which was a big mistake they've all been these awful devices like just hideous like just terrible to use awful like you know battery issues and plastic everything about them was horrible
John:
i feel like if i'm gonna buy an android tablet maybe maybe like just get the one that's a complete ripoff and it might be somewhat usable to to what i'm you know compared to what i'm used to not in software obviously but well nokia makes nice hardware so there's this there's a chance that it would actually would be high quality but the the chinese knockoff clone things are always like they look the same from a distance but when you as soon as you press one button you're like oh this is not an iphone
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And see, what worries me is they're talking about their Z launcher thing.
Marco:
So this is going to be crapped up with their software.
Marco:
So it's probably still a good idea to just buy a Google tablet for Android testing.
Marco:
Which is unfortunate because I'm not crazy about their hardware.
Marco:
People in the chat are like saying, oh, the first Nexus 7 was bad?
Marco:
Yeah, why don't you ask any owners of the first Nexus 7 how it's doing these days, and how it was doing even a year after they bought it.
Marco:
Anyway, in better news, things that are not cheap knockoffs that are actually the best in their class, we are also sponsored this week by our friends at Hover, or the cheap knockoff version, Hover.
Yeah.
Marco:
hover is the best way to buy a medic domain names go to hover.com and use offer code casey needs a drink this week to uh to save 10 on your first order hover is really a fantastic domain registrar let's say you have a name for something you want to go register it hover is the place to do that they're well designed they are respectful they are not scammy you get a great value so many things are included at no additional charge
Marco:
their their add-on services that are paid are very reasonably priced and very good things like their email hosting and and some they have google apps for your domain hosting stuff like that hover gives you easy to use powerful tools to manage the names after you've bought them
Marco:
So they have this awesome GUI interface.
Marco:
Did I hear Mike saying it's very Web 2.0?
Casey:
It very well could be.
Marco:
Beautiful designs here.
Marco:
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Marco:
There's not like a billion different checkboxes everywhere trying to trick you into getting add-on services or anything else.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They also have Valley Transfer Service, where if you want to transfer names into Hover, no matter how many, if you're transferring one name, if you're transferring 100 names, if you're transferring names to Hover, they will, if you want them to...
Marco:
They will log into your old registrar and do the transfers for you.
Marco:
So they will move everything over properly, DNS settings, email settings, stuff like that that's kind of tricky to get right and very error-prone.
Marco:
They'll do all that for you if you want them to.
Marco:
If you want to do it yourself, you can.
Marco:
No big deal.
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There's no pressure.
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But if you're willing to give them your login to your old site, they'll do it all for you.
Marco:
And it's really, really great to not have to worry about, oh, did I forget a DNS setting somewhere?
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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John:
I want to get Mac.World and Disney.World now.
Marco:
Oh, that's smart thinking.
Marco:
Those are probably taken and would probably be under squatting trademark problems.
John:
Doesn't Disney...
John:
disney.world sounds like something that would be said on a sitcom in like 1994 when someone's trying to write a line about the internet just go to disney.world and now it's gonna be a real domain name it's gonna actually redirect to disney that's the problem with all these new tlds they all sound like terrible jokes like they
John:
we just need to be able to include backslashes in our urls and we will finally arrive at the i mean os 10 was essentially the movie os like os is to do ridiculous animations that you know they'd show in movies like no real computer works like that and then apple made a computer that actually works like that it's like well there's your movie although it doesn't beep every time letters appear on the screen and now that drives me nuts movie domain names disney.world backslash yeah okay
Casey:
It drives me nuts anytime I watch any television show or movie where everything that the computer does creates a noise or some sort of sound effect.
John:
A window appears on the screen and it makes a noise.
John:
No one has had the guts to do that yet because people would smash their computers to bits and about, you know, in an office space style, you know, printer destruction sequence.
John:
The first day of every window that appeared made a noise.
Marco:
Well, there have been occasional system plug-ins and stuff to do that as jokes based on movies.
Marco:
But I would imagine it's the kind of thing, kind of like if somebody in front of you in line at the grocery store is trying to use currency, I'm guessing if you try to actually use one of those things in an office, you would get your butt handed to you pretty quickly.
John:
In an office, like, that's, yeah, your noise is bothering people.
John:
Even if you're just alone in your house, though, it would drive you insane.
John:
I mean, they need, you know, there's a whole... I think there's an Every Frame a Painting talking about showing text and stuff, which is much more tasteful.
John:
But, yeah, they do it in movies so that you know to look at something.
John:
But it's just, at this point, everyone is so familiar with computers and phones of all kinds that...
John:
i don't think you can get away with that anymore i think you have to come up with another way to draw the viewer's attention because everybody knows what those look like it's not like well most people know what computers work like anyway so we can do whatever we want no you can't everybody knows now even little kids know i'm just disappointed we don't have the uh what was it like a spatial finder or whatever from jurassic park oh god don't get john started a spatial finder come on there goes the
John:
That was a real thing on SGI.
John:
We had that when I was at BU, the little flying through 3D interface thing.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
In the SGI lab, that is actual software that somebody made.
John:
It was useless and stupid, but it was real.
Casey:
I want it.
Casey:
It's a Unix system.
Casey:
I know this.
Casey:
Wow.
Casey:
See, I had that reference.
Casey:
Do I get any points for that?
John:
Sure.
John:
No, that's just you maintain a passing grade in that category.
John:
You're avoiding failing.
John:
You're not achieving victory.
Casey:
High praise from John Syracuse.
Casey:
Yeah, thanks.
Casey:
I feel great now.
Casey:
All right, so let's talk about apparently something big happened today.
Casey:
Big week.
Casey:
You want to talk about WatchKit?
Casey:
I actually did my homework.
Casey:
I watched the video.
Casey:
I am stupefied that you have actually done your homework.
Casey:
And John, did you also do your homework?
John:
I read a lot of stuff and read a lot of tweets and I watched half of the video.
John:
It is now paused halfway through.
Casey:
So you get a C. Yeah, that you are maintaining a passing grade.
John:
I'll watch the rest of it later.
John:
It's like a half an hour long, and it does go kind of slowly.
Marco:
Yeah, it's given at the WBDC video pace, and the problem is WBDC videos, you can open them up in QuickTime, and you can speed them up, play them at 1.4x.
Marco:
This video, though, was only a HTTP live streaming thing, and I...
Marco:
I had a half hour to watch it, and I knew it would have taken me about 15 minutes of that to figure out how to get FFmpeg to download all the little segments and join them all together into a file that I could speed up, and I would therefore lose the gains that I would have gotten from speeding it up.
Marco:
But yeah, this is something that could use a little bit of a speed boost.
Marco:
But otherwise, I thought it was really interesting.
Marco:
Did we ever talk about Underscore's article two weeks ago when he was basically predicting what WatchKit would allow us to do based on what Apple had said?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I know exactly what you're talking about.
Casey:
I don't know if we ever spoke of it, but he was more right than wrong, but not 100% right, which is surprising because I thought he had nailed it when I read that article.
Marco:
Yeah, definitely.
Marco:
So our friend underscore David Smith wrote this article.
Marco:
We'll link to it.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure we actually didn't get to it.
Marco:
I think you're right.
Marco:
But anyway, we're going to have full native watch apps allegedly later next year, is what Apple said originally.
Marco:
And this was not announced yet.
Marco:
This was announced when the watch was announced.
Marco:
And so the most likely outcome is that at WWDC next year, they will unveil the native SDK.
Marco:
between now and then uh you don't get native apps you get like you get like limited access to to the watch and everything seems to run basically controlled uh through an extension on your on your phone so it's like so your ios app has a watch kit extension that i don't think any of this is nda right isn't it like it's all public no that main public page that the thing that i have quoted and bolded in the show notes was right off of apple site you don't need to be logged in to get it
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
So your app is basically running as an extension that launches on your phone when the user taps the thing on the watch to launch you.
Marco:
Also, if your app sends push notifications, they'll show up on the watch, but we knew that already.
Marco:
So the phone, this is all from video.
Marco:
It's interesting.
Marco:
I think you should watch it if you're at all interested in this stuff.
Marco:
What we have now is...
Marco:
more than i thought we would have but definitely less than a full native sdk so i thought we would only have what they are calling glances and actionable notifications and actual notifications are exactly what we see in ios 8 where notifications can have a couple of buttons on them so you could like you know get a notification for a podcast and tap a play button which yes i know overcast does not support yet i'm
Marco:
So I figured you can show those on the watch as well and have there be a couple of buttons, and that might be all you get.
Marco:
And then a glance, I figured it would be like a read-only view of some information from your app, and tapping it would do basically nothing.
Marco:
And we have those kind of things.
Marco:
I thought that was going to be all we were going to get until next summer.
Marco:
It turns out that we get a little bit more, and it's pretty interesting.
Marco:
It's pretty limited, but it's all more than I thought we'd get.
Marco:
So what we have in WatchKit so far, with not quite the native apps, but the apps that will run on the watch that interact with your phone, the phone is basically running a very, very limited storyboard runner.
Marco:
You define in your iOS app bundle, you define this extension and you give it like a static storyboard.
Marco:
All the graphics and everything have to be included in that.
Marco:
Some things can be dynamically generated, like table rows obviously can be dynamically generated, but most things are static.
Marco:
Like you define them at compile time.
Marco:
and the watch os basically like plays through this and any interaction that's taken it communicates back to your iphone to the extension running on your iphone to have that do any kind of actual computation uh it's pretty limited and it looks pretty i haven't had time to actually write any code with it yet but it looks pretty limited in things like any kind of dynamic abilities besides table cells and stuff
Marco:
what's also very interesting is the layout system uh you you can't specify an x and a y coordinate for an element that you're putting on screen you basically specify here are the elements i want to be on screen and by default they just flow downwards they're just stacked and and it becomes like a
Marco:
And then you can group things into these groups and groups can be arranged like sub layouts.
Marco:
So you can have a group that itself is arranged with its own little stack or you can have it arranged horizontally in a stack instead of vertically.
John:
finally all those table-based layout skills that you've been left withering from the 90s they'll be relevant again isn't that it's been a long time since i've seen any of this but isn't this a lot like swing remember the original java ui toolkit uh well there's a lot of you i think the first one i've ever seen that did this and we can find a show notes link for it to see if anyone in the chat room remembers is
John:
geos i think geos was a gui with a similar layout paradigm it's like right i think swing did it as well i forget what it's called it's not it's not the packing problem but it's a similar type of thing where you you just take a bunch of boxes and fill in the empty space with i think geos had uh had a little bit of gravity associated with it as well but
John:
But yeah, this is not a new way to lay out GUIs, but it's not a great way to lay out GUIs either for sophisticated things.
John:
But for a very, very tiny screen, when I was looking through all the SDK documentation, it's like they are removing as many options as possible.
John:
Rather than making you lay out your UI the same way you would on a phone or on a Mac, but just in a small screen, they're saying just take away your ability to specify any of this stuff.
John:
And how simple can we make it?
John:
Uh, and this is pretty darn simple.
John:
Bunch of boxes.
John:
They plunk in.
John:
You don't get to, you get to control those that you got, you got settings for like foreground color, background color, margins, and spacing.
John:
Again, it's like table-based layout, you know, uh, cell padding, cell spacing.
John:
Yeah.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, it's a very rudimentary level of control.
Marco:
And it seems as though multitasking is non-existent for these types of apps.
Marco:
I'm sure in the future we'll have better multitasking, and I'm sure the watch system apps can probably multitask to do things like continue playing audio while you're looking at something.
Marco:
But from the description, it sounds like what's most likely to happen here is...
Marco:
is when the user interacts with your apps and when the user launches your app with response to notification the extension on your phone launches it controls the watch session and then as soon as they said in the video that when the user stops interacting with your with your watch kit app uh then your app is terminated so there's basically no multitasking is what it sounds like um
Marco:
And so it's very similar in some ways to the very first iPhone SDK, the iPhone OS 2.0, the very first SDK for the App Store.
Marco:
It has a lot of similar kinds of restrictions.
Marco:
In some ways, it's even more restricted than that.
Marco:
And obviously, they can do a lot of things that you couldn't do back then.
Marco:
But I'd say it's a similar level of permissibility and complexity where you're building pretty simple things.
Marco:
You have pretty basic control over them.
Marco:
There's a lot of guardrails set up.
Marco:
There's a lot of restrictions set up.
Marco:
There's a lot of limitations.
Marco:
And we're not going to see angry birds for the watch in this kind of system.
Marco:
And that's actually a big thing.
Marco:
I think games are going to be pretty much impossible.
Marco:
I also think...
Marco:
We can look at some of the recent Notification Center app rejection drama on iPhone.
Marco:
And looking at both that and some of the hints they're dropping in the WatchKit documentation and video, it seems as though they're going to be more strict about what you can and can't do in a watch app.
Marco:
Like on iPhone, where the frameworks limit you...
Marco:
If you can do something without calling a private API, so if you can do something really crazy, like if let's say there was no OpenGL on the iPhone, if you can just make a buttload of CA layers and do everything you need with that, Apple wouldn't reject you for that.
Marco:
Whereas on the watch, and it seems like kind of the new Apple App Store stuff with some of these new areas that we're allowed to put apps, it seems like they're going to be a little more restricted.
Marco:
Things that you can't do, you actually are not meant to do, and we won't let you do them.
Marco:
And so it would not surprise me to see, like, back when the App Store first launched on iPhone, before it was open, when we had the SDK and we knew the rules, or at least we thought we knew the rules.
Marco:
That changed quickly.
Marco:
But, you know, during those few months where we could build apps but we couldn't launch them yet.
Marco:
One of the rules in the App Store guidelines originally was like, we're going to look at your apps and if they aren't high quality, we might reject them.
Marco:
And I thought, as well as a bunch of other developers, I thought that they would actually be like pretty strict.
Marco:
Like your app would have to be like Apple levels of quality to be approved in the App Store.
Marco:
And of course, that ended up not being the case at all.
Marco:
There's tons of garbage apps in the App Store because that's kind of an unenforceable standard to keep up.
Marco:
It kind of seems like they might be trying to do that with the watch.
Marco:
With the things they've said, with some of the implications they've made, and some of the notification center restrictions we've seen so far, it wouldn't surprise me if they are a lot more strict about what you can do in a watch app and how good it has to be to be approved.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm curious to see how that goes.
Casey:
But no matter what, I am really surprised by the fact that this kind of paired or split apps where the phone is doing pretty much all the heavy lifting.
Casey:
I'm surprised that we're seeing that now.
Casey:
And it's really exciting because that means whenever the Apple Watch does come out next year,
Casey:
there should be hopefully a fairly robust ecosystem of apps available shortly after launch.
Casey:
And that's really awesome.
Casey:
And the only thing that you won't be able to do is run an app where your iPhone isn't nearby.
Casey:
So the most obvious example of that I can think of is like a run keeper or run monster or something like that, where you want to leave your iPhone at home, but go for a jog or something along those lines.
Casey:
Or maybe your third-party podcast app.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so something like that won't be permissible yet or possible yet to your point, Marco, but pretty much everything else that they've announced will be available is available.
Casey:
And that's really exciting.
Casey:
And I'm really looking forward to it.
John:
So when you think about this implementation here with all these restrictions we just described, I can't help but think the entire watch is acting kind of like choose your analogy, either kind of like the push notification service on iOS or kind of like what I had heard.
John:
I'd never actually confirmed that the old or possibly the current Apple TV is where it's just one process that does that sort of loads loadable bundles and that the resources are so constrained.
John:
What they want to have is a single process.
John:
running all the time in memory with its working set with, but they can control the CPU yourself.
John:
And all it does is sort of, you know, receive and load static packages of, uh, simple descriptions of UIs, basically storyboards or whatever, static assets, uh,
John:
And that's all it does.
John:
And display them and relay information over Bluetooth to say, the person clicked this button.
John:
You want me to transfer this bundle thing?
John:
You want me to display this thing?
John:
Okay, I'll display this thing.
John:
I'll wire this stuff up.
John:
When someone presses, I'll tell you which button they press.
John:
And that's it.
John:
And that makes me think, why would they launch different processes for that?
John:
Why wouldn't it just be...
John:
One small process that's always in memory that is responsible for for doing all these types of things, glances, actionable notifications and these, you know, watch kit, whatever they're going to be called, not quite native app type things.
John:
Maybe that's three separate applications instead of one.
John:
but the whole idea is constrain your resources in the same way there's only one push notification service on ios like that it that process will be running it will be in memory and it will do work on behalf of the applications they need work done rather than every single application this was back before background rather than every single application running in the background there would be one process that runs in the background and it would tell you tell your application when you know basically resource constraints and what's making me think is
John:
What are the resource constraints of this phone?
John:
Is it memory?
John:
Is it CPU?
John:
Is it battery?
John:
I mean, it's all those things to a degree more than iOS.
John:
But what is the key one that would make that type of implementation, assuming it is what they're doing, possible?
John:
And whatever it is, I have to think like...
John:
how are they going to do native apps on this same hardware if they're i mean that's i guess that's a real question like why why don't we have native apps now and i guess one answer is like they're just not ready with the software stack in the same way they weren't ready well they didn't plan on an iphone 1.0 but anyway uh the sdk is not ready for the native apps right but is the other part of it that like native apps um
John:
They have to figure out how to let you run native apps without letting people do something that will destroy the watch's battery in 15 minutes.
John:
Like, I don't know how this is all going to work out, but this seems so incredibly constrained and makes me think the implementation is being so careful with everything, with memory, with CPU, with battery, that I'm having trouble envisioning what the native app interface is going to look like if this is so constrained.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, part of it, I think you're right that the tools are most likely the biggest cause for why we don't have it up front.
Marco:
But there's also side effects to that.
Marco:
I think that's the cause.
Marco:
But there's a couple other fortunate side effects to that being the case that Apple will benefit from.
Marco:
One of the biggest is people are going to be forming their opinions and their evaluations of the watch's battery life before there are these full native apps.
Marco:
So, you know, because people, you can't tell people like, oh, well, you shouldn't run these things or you shouldn't overuse these types of things because that will negatively affect battery life.
Marco:
No, people will do whatever they want to do and then they'll yell at Apple if the battery is not as good as they want it to be.
Marco:
So by restricting what they can do for the first X months of the thing being out, it's forcing people to do things the way Apple wants them to be done and to keep things kind of reasonable during the time when everyone's figuring out what kind of battery life does this thing get?
Marco:
What is this thing used for?
Marco:
And secondarily, having that kind of training wheels period where you can't do everything you want
Marco:
also gives, it kind of forces people to think about, do I really want these things on a watch?
Marco:
Do I really need a native app for whatever function I want?
Marco:
I mean, for Overcast, I'm probably going to have to make a native app to be able to play when the phone's not around, like in the jogging scenario.
Marco:
But for a lot of apps, a WatchKit iPhone hybrid app might be all they need.
Marco:
And so maybe this is also having the fortunate side benefit of Apple kind of forcing developers, if you want to get in early, if you want to be aggressive and get into WatchKit now or get into watch development now, you have to do it the simple way first.
Marco:
And then later on when we unveil this, then you'll be faced with the question of, do I throw that all away and rewrite it with this new system or not?
Marco:
And many developers are going to choose no.
Marco:
And that benefits Apple and it benefits the watch and it benefits users as long as they don't need all those extra functions they would have been getting because then there's less for the watch to do.
Marco:
It gets better battery life, you know, like all these things.
Marco:
So I think like...
Marco:
Apple needs this time to both let people love the watch for its battery life, hopefully, and also to force both customers and developers to not just jump to, oh, I need to port my game to the watch.
Marco:
Or, oh, I need to port everything I ever do to the watch.
Marco:
To force us to kind of give the watch a clean start.
Casey:
Yeah, I think you're right.
Casey:
And it's just a really interesting engineering decision on both software and the hardware sides to limit everything.
Casey:
And this is what John was driving at, you know, to limit everything so severely in order to presumably preserve battery life.
Casey:
But before we talk any more about WatchKit, why don't you tell me about something else that's really cool?
Marco:
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Casey:
All right.
Casey:
John, any other thoughts on WatchKit?
John:
Yeah, on the resource constraints and everything.
John:
The advantage that the iPhone had, and maybe the watch will have too, was like, so there was no SDA in the beginning because we were going to write web apps or whatever.
John:
And then they sort of hastily slapped one together for 2.0.
John:
And it was very immature and didn't do a lot.
John:
And your apps were extremely constrained.
John:
And slowly over time, we got, you know, push notifications.
John:
Then we got real backgrounding.
John:
We got multitasking.
John:
Then we got real backgrounding.
John:
Like all the things that were slowly added to iOS came along with advancements in hardware.
John:
Lower power chips, more CPU power, more RAM.
John:
The batteries probably stayed about the same size, but basically the hardware became more power efficient, did more with that power, and we definitely got more RAM.
John:
So if the watch is going to start off really constrained like this, and we're going to have native apps presumably within the first year of the thing,
John:
Those native apps you would imagine would have to be like at least as constrained, probably more constrained than the very first, what was it, iOS 2.0 was the first SDK?
John:
Yep.
John:
than the very first ios apps so that means no background processing like they already have push notifications so they're already up ahead of of what the ios apps were uh at that time it could be you know even you know even more constrained like these two tweets or one from craig hockenberry saying that you can't even subclass the the watch kit uh classes you know wk interface things you can't even subclass them with with the current paradigm and then pete burtis replied on twitter uh
John:
uh it's not like that would help because there's no draw rect for you to override there aren't views it's just like really constrained way to draw applications it's not like oh hey you can just start drawing whatever you want draw custom controls do you know
John:
I have to imagine this is going to be super constrained and those constraints will only be lifted if and when the watch hardware becomes more capable.
John:
Because it's not like Apple suddenly discovered how to do multitasking in iOS 4.0 or whatever.
John:
It was like, this is what we can do with the hardware available.
John:
And so everything for the original iPhone, including complete lack of third-party apps, was made so, like Marco said, so you could show like...
John:
look how awesome this phone is isn't it amazing like people thought it was fake like you can't make a ui that faster well you can do it if you just have if you control everything and put incredible constraints on everything and have one process running at a time and have the entire phone dedicated to trying to give you that smooth animation right and so the watch is going to follow that same path not because apple doesn't know how to do those things but because the hardware just isn't ready for it yet even more so than the first iphone so
John:
i'm really looking forward to seeing how they can get how how they can hardware themselves out of this situation to eventually get to the point where the watch hardware can start to get some of those things that ios 3.0 and 4.0 and 5.0 had and i think it's going to be a long road because as we said we were talking about power constraints many many shows ago the you know battery technology is
John:
The capacity of batteries for a given mass of battery, how much energy can you get out of it, is getting better slowly.
John:
But I think we had a graph that showed it was like 15% year over year, if you're lucky or something like that.
John:
That's not the way you're going to get any big wins.
John:
The way you get big wins is by making everything on the electronics device use less power.
John:
So the CPU uses less power.
John:
The screen uses less power.
John:
You know, the radios use less power.
John:
That is the only way forward because you can't rely on like, well, next year we'll have double the battery capacity.
John:
No, you won't unless you're going to make the watch twice as thick or, you know, much thicker anyway.
John:
And that finally, this all gets back to the idea that if you buy the very first Apple Watch, will your Apple Watch ever have multitasking?
John:
Probably not.
John:
The first iPhones didn't, right?
John:
You couldn't run iOS 4.0 or whatever it was.
John:
You know, we'll have background processing.
John:
The original iPhone could not do background processing because by the time the OS could do that, it couldn't run on the original iPhone.
John:
And if you're going to buy a piece of hardware, and it's going to be obsolete because it can't have these features that we think are going to be added over the years, how do you deal with your 10K gold version of the watch?
John:
Right.
John:
There we are.
John:
We've come full circle on the Apple Watch again.
Marco:
I mean, I'm honestly, you know, seeing what we get today in WatchKit, and as I mentioned earlier, this is actually more than I expected that we'd be able to do compared to, you know, what we saw earlier.
Marco:
As we see this, and then also knowing that next fall, there's going to be this supposed new SDK with, or, you know, next summer and fall with native apps.
Marco:
I think you're right.
Marco:
Like, unless, you know, unless they're going to make a new watch next fall, which would be really terrible.
Marco:
Like, unless there's going to be like a six-month product cycle there.
Marco:
I'm kind of surprised.
Marco:
That's why I think it almost certainly is because of just tools limitations that it doesn't make sense that if this is all we can do for Apple Watch 1.0 hardware, why next fall can we suddenly do more?
Marco:
That doesn't make a lot of sense.
John:
Yeah, that's, you know, next fall is when you're going to be able to do sort of the, if you could pretend that third party applications were available on iOS 1.0 or iPhone OS, how constrained would they have been?
John:
That's what you're going to get to do even more so maybe.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Igloo, Hover, and Lynda.com, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
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.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental.
Casey:
They didn't know.
Casey:
so john what's going on with your iphone because you've received an iphone but is it activated what's what's happening
John:
I forget when I ordered it.
John:
I ordered it at the beginning of the month, I think.
John:
I mentioned on the show when I had ordered it.
John:
And then it was expected to ship in 7 to 10 days.
John:
And it did.
John:
And it finally arrived.
John:
And it arrived on Monday.
John:
And I stayed over from work to sign for it.
John:
And I was all excited.
John:
Took it out of the box.
John:
And you see that little screen that says hello in several languages.
John:
And you swipe to the right.
John:
And then it makes you pick a language.
John:
And then it makes you pick the country that you're in.
John:
Uh, and then what does it do after that?
John:
Then I think it wants you to connect to either a wifi network or a cellular network.
John:
And I connected it to my wifi and put it in my wifi password.
John:
And then it says activating your phone.
John:
And then it says your phone could not be activated because the activation servers are temporarily unavailable.
John:
This problem persists call, you know, contact apple.com slash support, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Uh, I'm like, all right, well, maybe the server had hiccup there.
John:
I'll try it again.
John:
And I went through, you know,
John:
There's a try again button at the bottom.
John:
That didn't work.
John:
And I said, well, maybe something weird with my Wi-Fi network.
John:
Let me try it over cellular.
John:
So I turned off the Wi-Fi.
John:
I didn't forget this network.
John:
Try it over cellular.
John:
Same message.
John:
Activation servers are temporarily unavailable.
John:
I forget what the exact wording of the message was.
John:
It was something like that.
John:
Basically, the error messages, you know, have no real bearing on what's actually going on.
John:
But that was the error message I got.
John:
And so I put it aside and, you know, continued working for the rest of that day and then try it again later and it was still going.
John:
I'm like, all right, well, it said, like, try again in a few minutes.
John:
And if the problem persists, I'm like, well, no, the problem is persisting.
John:
So I contacted Verizon to try to figure out what the problem was because it was an activation problem.
John:
I said, hey, I've got this new iPhone just came out of the box.
John:
I can't activate it.
John:
And there's a little like on the first screen that says hello, or in several languages, a little I in a circle in the lower right corner.
John:
If you tap that, it gives you all your information about the phone, like the SIM ID and the IME ID and all those different numbers.
John:
So I'm like, all right, I have enough information.
John:
I can call Verizon here.
John:
So I spent a while talking to Verizon, eventually got disconnected, called back again, got disconnected again.
John:
Verizon's phone support, their phone system is not great.
John:
The people who work there seem nice enough.
John:
They more or less knew what they were doing or could transfer me to someone who did, but
John:
This is not good for a phone company.
John:
The audio quality of the phone interface as you're going through the menus is just terrible.
John:
It just sounds all staticky and gross.
John:
You get disconnected a lot.
John:
I get disconnected mid-sentence with people.
John:
They're not disconnecting me.
John:
They're in the middle of talking and then click, boom, you know.
John:
And the worst part is, in whatever call center they're in, you can hear all the conversations going on around them.
John:
Like, I can listen to that.
John:
Like, this is the basic requirement of a call center.
John:
I shouldn't be able to hear other people's conversations.
John:
It's like a privacy concern more than anything else.
John:
It just sounded like they were calling from Grand Central Station.
Marco:
It was just so... Grand Central Station is a post office.
Marco:
You're thinking of Grand Central Terminal.
John:
I was waiting for it.
John:
Thank you, Marco.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
Frankenstein's monster, right?
John:
I know all about it.
John:
Um...
John:
so like i feel for these these people's work environment but anyway uh they looked everything up and they're like okay well they went through this thing like we'll make sure this number is activated figured out what my phone number is because i couldn't since i have a track phone when you buy the iphone online you can't port your number during the online you can only bring it for if it's another verizon number or something you can't like basically if you have a track phone and you want to order an apple phone online you have to let them give you a new number which is fine whatever i just wanted to get activated on the new number so
John:
verizon activated my number told me what it was this is my wife's a verizon account so i had to go through this whole rigmarole every time i call explaining that i'm not the account owner we eventually worked that out so i'm allowed to do this now but they did a lot of calling her to ask for permission for me to do things anyway it was silly um and they said like everything is active you know after going through like five or six people and several calls and several transfers i kept working my way up to people with quieter and quieter offices until i eventually was talking to some
John:
eventually talking to somebody unlike my third call and my seventh transfer who i could not hear anything in the background so this person actually had a nice office and they're like look everything on our end is active your phone number is activated uh we tried every possible remedy up to and including taking the sim out and putting it back in which led me to tweet which i now regret hey these things don't come with sim removal tools anymore and then for i'm for the next month i'll be getting tweets from people telling me whether they did or didn't get a sim removal tool
John:
Bottom line is everybody thinks whatever their experience with phones are with iPhones is the same for everybody.
John:
So some people are like, I always get a SIM removal tool.
John:
And other people are like, I have never gotten one.
John:
And other people will tell me what the Apple store told them about it.
John:
I have no idea.
John:
If there's a SIM removal tool in my case, I have not yet found it.
John:
Yes, I've looked in the paper packet.
John:
No, it's not connected to the cardboard thing with a little semicircle thing that folds out like many people send me screenshots of.
John:
i'm willing to believe that it's still in there somewhere and i haven't found it but anyway it's not obvious uh it doesn't matter i use the paper clip but anyway taking the sim in and out why don't you delete the tweet i mean like it was more i wasn't really asking a question it was just like amusing like do these things not come with or no i think i said what the and eventually later in the story i got in the phone with apple support and they told me i asked about the sim removal tool and the person didn't really know and they're like i think it only comes with unlock phones and then people like
John:
no i've bought unlocked phones and never had one or i bought locked phones and i always have one like every possible combination of answer i've gotten from twitter people yeah i've i've missed i've bought it on i've bought unlocked phones before i bought locked phones before i've never gotten a same removal tool in any of them
John:
yeah people like oh you only get a sim removal tool if your phone doesn't come with the sim basically like if there's no sim inside the phone when you buy it then you get a tool you know i just use a paper clip for for the longest time i thought sim removal tool was a joke yeah no they use liquid they use liquid metal to make it remember the liquid metal thing like oh yeah that's right everyone's always wondering like what they're going to use that for and that's kind of so far that's the only thing that we know they've used it for right
John:
or we think i don't know if it's ever confirmed that they use it for it but it looked kind of liquidy and medley i have no idea anyway uh yeah so they bought a whole company just to replace paperclips as much as they possibly as the best paperclip replacement you could possibly make yeah it's it's seamless it's really true true the material
Casey:
Now, really quickly for the record, I have received definitely one SIM removal tool and it was encircling the little half circle tab, which is, yeah, that's what you were describing earlier.
Casey:
So that was my experience, but we've had, I don't know, something like six or seven iPhones between the two of us over the last few years.
Casey:
And I think I've only gotten maybe one of them.
Casey:
And I did that never really occurred to me until you were talking about it earlier today.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The weird thing is a lot of all the people telling me that like they didn't have the little semicircle thing, but that it was kind of buried in with like the quote unquote manual, the little paper packets they give you, you know, and like that, that slides down in there and it's easy to get lost.
John:
And I can see that happening.
John:
I don't see it in mine yet, but I haven't torn the thing apart because I don't really care anyway.
John:
Uh,
John:
we did all verizon during the various calls all the verizon people have to go through all the remedies most of which i tried already anyway but i was willing to humor them because they were doing things on their end or at least said they were in response to these things turning the phone all the way off and having them do server things turn it back on trying it on on cellular and not doing a restore from itunes where you put it into recovery mode and reinstalling and by the way this is at the same time that the ios 8.1.1 release came out
John:
so people like oh that's what the problem is apple servers are down because of the release but apple servers this is all before i even call to check their service status page like i had exhausted my possibilities before calling verizon believe me and verizon had me redo a lot of the things that i had already done but i'm like well whatever it was nice because i had already downloaded all the software updates so i didn't have to wait for the you know 1.9 gig download of ios 811 or whatever it was
Marco:
Before you leave the Verizon topic, because I assume they did not fix your problem because they never fixed any problems.
Marco:
When I was a Verizon Wireless customer for a few years before the iPhone came out, every time I called Verizon to do anything to my account, they messed it up.
Marco:
Like whether it was adding a data plan, removing services, like changing things, asking a question.
Marco:
Every single time they touched the account, they messed it up in some horrible way that would cause me to get like triple billed or they would like remove the plan for the first half of the month that was there.
Marco:
So then I'd be billed like the per minute rate and like all this crazy stuff they would do.
Marco:
Everything they did screwed something up.
John:
Yeah, I was kind of afraid to ask them about that because like when I, when I did the, I ordered this from the Apple online store, which I had to explain to several Verizon people and they're very confused about this, you know, store, I wanted to say store.apple.com.
John:
Like that's where I went because they thought I was in an Apple retail store and like, oh, they should have activated that for you before you left the store.
John:
I'm like, no, store.apple.com.
Anyway.
John:
When you do that, it asks you, like, are you adding an existing line?
John:
And it wants you to put in the previous number.
John:
And I enter my wife's iPhone line and all of her information.
John:
And it asks you for crazy information about your Verizon account, your username, your billing password, which is different than your regular password.
John:
The last four digits of your social security number.
John:
The Verizon phone thing has you... This is like... I think I've told this story before.
John:
The first time I was on a telephone answering tree type thing.
John:
And I got to a menu that wanted me to say what I wanted to happen.
John:
And I froze because I was like...
John:
what do you mean say could they possibly have a system that you know with a limited vocabulary could they do speech and so my brain is just trying to think of like this is like whatever 1987 or whenever they first came out like trying to think is this technically possible or someone playing a joke on me so anyway this one i think this is the first time this has happened to me they wanted they said please enter the password for your verizon wireless account
John:
And I'm like, I'm calling you on a phone.
John:
It's got a number pad.
John:
Do you want me to enter my pad?
John:
But that would reduce the possibilities by like a factor of, you know, because like I'm trying to do the math in my head of like how many passwords are now hashed to the same bucket because like, you know, the seven keys, three different letters.
John:
I don't know.
John:
And here's the best thing about that.
John:
I got to be an old pro at this because I called them a million times.
John:
Every time it said that, like I sort of figured out their menu system to like hold down the zero key, then speak a certain phrase to get to the voice thing.
John:
And then eventually it will ask you to enter your Verizon password.
John:
uh which you type out on the number pad like just pick whichever number has the letter you want capitals lowercase don't matter and you know if it's anywhere in these group of letters doesn't matter every time i did it the first time it told me the password didn't match i was willing to believe the first two or three times that i had mistyped it the first time but it always worked on the second try it's like the seventh time i was doing it i'm like you know what this never works in the first try maybe the first letter is missed because i'm not i don't know what the problem is anyway
John:
their system is very weird um so i did all that stuff and they basically did everything they could do on their end like i exhausted i tweeted this i exhausted all support possibilities of verizon not because they were not doing what they could but basically they did everything they could they said this number is active it's active in our system here's what it is here's all this you know like your account isn't good standing it's connected to the right account it's like just everything as far as they're concerned is working and i was totally willing to believe that because it
John:
It seemed to me like this software I'm going through, these white screens at the beginning of the iPhone setup, connect to Apple servers to do something.
John:
Apple servers then probably connect to Verizon servers.
John:
But the bottom line is I totally imagined that I was using Apple software on an Apple device that's connecting to an Apple server.
John:
And it's giving me a response that says something.
John:
And I'm getting the, you know, servers unavailable, even though on Apple status page it says the server is available.
John:
So that was the end of Verizon.
John:
And the Verizon helpfully connected me, transferred me directly from Verizon to an Apple support person, to a knowledgeable Apple support person, not just like, you know, so they have like a direct line in on like the good, not the, you know what I mean, like the higher tier support people.
John:
So I didn't have to go through the lower tier of Apple support, but connected to the higher tier support person.
John:
And the Apple support person was, was excellent.
John:
It was clear.
John:
They were a, you know, again, no voices in the background, very helpful, very professional.
John:
So it was the top tier Verizon person I got to.
John:
So it was a nice, they were nice.
John:
They transferred me over.
John:
I explained the situation.
John:
Uh, they looked at everything on there and he, the Apple guy started by explaining to me how the system works on there, which I've since forgotten, but it's something like what I was saying before, like, uh,
John:
The iPhone connects to an Apple server.
John:
The Apple server tries to authenticate with the Verizon server and wants to get a response back so it can proceed or whatever.
John:
It seemed to me that basically if I could have DNS poisoned the iPhone and spoofed the Verizon server and figured out what the correct response is, I could have gotten past these white screens and that everything was fine.
John:
As far as Verizon is concerned, all I needed to do was get past this software.
John:
There's probably more to it than that.
John:
But anyway, they said they couldn't figure out what the problem was, but they would open a ticket for it and get back to me the next day.
John:
so that was the end of that support thing it was like several hours most of it spent on hold or waiting for things so it wasn't really that bad um the next day came and uh you know the apple people gave me their direct number and told the guy told me he was going to be off today but you know said you can call this number to get anyway someone else called me back uh and they said they they figured out what the problem was and it was some problem with
John:
I forget what they're, it's not provisioning profile.
John:
It's just in my head from all the, the Apple developers I see complaining on Twitter all the time, but like something having to do with the profile for the phone was screwed up in there.
John:
And anyway, the bottom line, it was something that Apple could fix.
John:
And Apple said they did fix it.
John:
And so I tried to activate my phone again, and I got farther, and it said, your phone number is blah, blah, blah.
John:
Is that correct?
John:
I'm like, yep, that's what Verizon told me.
John:
That's supposed to be my phone number.
John:
And I hit the next button.
John:
I still got the error.
John:
So I had to call Apple back again.
John:
And they said, you need to do something special, which I don't want to describe because it's probably some terrible security flaw that they don't want revealed.
John:
But anyway, there was something special I had to do on the phone to get past that process.
John:
I did it.
John:
I got past that process.
John:
My phone was up, and I'm happy.
John:
So it was, what?
John:
maybe 30 hours, 36 hours after I got the phone, plus like maybe three or four hours on hold with various people that I actually did activate my phone.
John:
The next step, of course, is to get my old number ported.
John:
And I began that process with Verizon.
John:
And when my wife got her number ported, it took a couple of days for it to activate.
John:
But at least I have a working iPhone right now with a phone number that will soon go away as soon as my old number gets ported to it.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So has your life been changed thus far?
John:
No, although I had the fun ceremony today where, like, when I got the phone out of the package, I didn't put the leather case on it, but the case that I've had for a week or whatever, I wanted to get the phone set up first before I put the case on it.
John:
And I'm like, this was a good plan because if I have to return this phone because there's something hardware-wise wrong with it, which, by the way, I didn't think there was.
John:
Lots of people were tweeting at me, why don't you go to the Apple store?
John:
Don't you have an Apple retail store?
John:
But my, you know...
John:
And nerd SpideySense was telling me there is nothing wrong with this phone hardware-wise.
John:
Like, I could look at it.
John:
Everything worked.
John:
All its radios seemed to work correctly.
John:
The SIM looked fine.
John:
Like, it did not seem like that I needed my phone to be swapped, although many people tweeted to me that when they had similar problems, they had to get their phone swapped to get it activated.
John:
I felt like this was all happening on the server side, and it actually was all happening on the server side.
John:
uh but anyway i was putting off putting the case on until it was working so i finally got the thing working and you know got to springboard or whatever then finally i could put the case on and now it has become my iphone case and all and uh leather case is pretty nice so far has not changed my life otherwise you've said more about the case than you have about the phone yes seriously well you know i had an iphone 6 before i know we talked at length about all the sizing things the
John:
i haven't decided i think leather case does make it nice like i said i've always had a case on my handheld ios devices so this is not anything new for me in fact it was new for me to use it without a case for a week uh but i think it definitely improves with the case well but this this is the first time that you're really getting to like move into a phone right well i just you know i just started that so like i did that when i was on the phone it just you know i did to set up this new iphone then i finally did a restore from itunes to by the way itunes i hate it so much like
John:
I did a backup of my iPod Touch right before I knew I was going to do this.
John:
And now, OK, now I'm going to plug in the iPhone and I'm going to restore from backup.
John:
And it says, what do you want to restore from?
John:
And I see like seven backups.
John:
Some of them are like iPhone 4G that I know are like old.
John:
Right.
John:
I don't want those.
John:
About 50 percent of them have dates after them.
John:
And then there's three called John's iPod Touch that don't have dates next to it.
John:
Nice.
John:
I'm like, why do some have dates and some don't have dates?
John:
That makes no sense.
John:
But of course, me being a clever longtime computer user immediately knew the solution to this problem.
John:
Can any of you guess?
John:
to look at the files and see their modification dates no because the files are in don't you know what mobile backups directory looks like they're these big giant hash things yeah no i'm honestly kind of surprised because you just moved into an ssd also how are you still keeping all these backups you should only have like the one device you use i have a terabyte ssd i did amazing house cleaning like i moved tons of stuff i moved like all my video and movies to the synology you know and like i have plenty of room with uh but no like the mobile backups directory is all
John:
Like the director user name, big, long hexadecimal strings.
John:
Yeah, they're all like GUIDs.
John:
Right.
John:
No, no.
John:
The solution is, so all I need to do is plug in my iPod Touch, change the name of my iPod Touch to something that doesn't exist in the list, do another backup, then just look for that crazy name I just put in.
John:
oh that is not how i would have done it but cool but that's exactly how you've been working software long enough you learn this is the immediate solution to the problem i don't care what the actual problem is i don't care why some don't have dates just make work now and so i change it to like you know ipod touch this is the one and then did it back up and then plugged in my iphone and said where do you want to restore from i want to restore from ipod touch this is the one which by the way still did not have a date but that was the right one
John:
And then what I learned is for the second handheld iOS device in a row, I'm screwed on my icons because I went from the 3.5-inch iPod Touch to the 4-inch, and I had an extra row of icons.
John:
And now I just went from the 4-inch to the 6, and now I need an extra row of icons again.
John:
So I spent a while tonight...
John:
rearranging my icons to try to figure out how i'm going to fill these out and i'm basically rearranging everything into being within the new thumb sweep so like the top row is dead to me now i got to take all the things that i used to have up there because they were important like safari was upper left as far as not upper left anymore so wait so this is this is even more i think revealing than that you've that you leave the camera shutter sound on you're saying you don't leave any empty rows and that you actually hate empty rows so much that you fill them when they occur
John:
Why would I leave empty rows?
John:
My iOS background has always been complete black.
John:
There is nothing behind my icons.
John:
It's complete black.
John:
But my lock screen is a picture of my dog.
John:
Is it your extended dog?
John:
It is.
John:
It is my extended dog.
John:
I had to use my extended dogs.
John:
I forget who it was, but someone with Photoshop skills extended the background of the dog picture I had.
John:
And finally, I got to use it.
John:
Uh...
John:
So that's my lock screen.
John:
But my home screen is all black.
John:
Why would I leave an empty row?
John:
What would I be getting?
John:
Especially an empty row at the bottom.
John:
That's prime thumb reaching area.
Marco:
Wow.
Marco:
Well, the argument in the past has been both it looks nice and also can give you some forgiving dead swipe zone if you want to flip between pages more easily.
John:
you don't need a swipe zone you grab anywhere and swipe it will i've never accidentally launched an app while swiping home screens never not once you don't you don't need a swipe zone but it helps it's nice it may make you feel better but like have you ever accidentally launched an app by trying to thumb swipe
John:
probably not but i always leave an empty rose the empty rose the only the only purpose for an empty rose what we discussed in the past show is if you have a picture of like your kids or something you want to see or a beautiful background or a sunset or whatever you want to see more of the picture that is the only i think legitimate reason for the empty row swipe area does not strike me as legitimate reason
Casey:
I keep an empty row at the bottom as well.
Casey:
And I believe it was because Marco had said something.
Casey:
And I was like, you know, let me try that.
Casey:
And especially with the new phone, I really think pretty much anything I use on a regular basis is indeed on the first screen with the empty row.
Casey:
But the empty row has to be on the bottom, doesn't it?
John:
You can't get an empty row on the top, right?
Casey:
No, which would be, well, you can if you use underscores.
John:
Oh, the black icons, yeah.
John:
Right.
John:
That should tell you.
John:
Like, the fact that you have to use black icons, like, what are you getting out of that empty row?
John:
Like, it doesn't even make it, like, symmetrical, because you still have the dock at the bottom, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I just feel like it looks cleaner that way.
Casey:
It makes no logical sense, I'll be the first to tell you.
Casey:
But, I don't know, I just, I like it better that way.
Casey:
And like I said, anything that I use on a regular basis is on that first screen, even with the empty row.
John:
You get a bigger phone, but then you don't put on, you leave the row empty.
John:
It's just.
Casey:
Well, no, no.
Casey:
But I added a row.
Casey:
So I have one more row than I used to.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
Because I still have an empty one.
Casey:
You're just always an off by one error.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
Anyway, no, I backfilled.
John:
I had to promote a bunch of new things to the front page.
John:
I have a bunch of apps on the front page that I don't really use that much.
Casey:
So what did you promote?
Casey:
Are you willing to share?
John:
I put Reader on the front page, even though I basically only read that on my iPad.
John:
I put Instagram on my front page.
John:
I guess I do use that a lot.
Casey:
Yeah, have you ever posted a picture to Instagram?
Casey:
If you followed me, you'd know that.
John:
I could swear I follow you, and I do not think... I've posted like a grand total of five pictures to Instagram, but I look at other people's pictures, basically what I'm doing.
John:
What else do I have on the front page?
Marco:
Well, now you have an iPhone.
Marco:
Now you actually can take a picture of your breakfast every morning and put it on Instagram.
John:
That is not going to change.
John:
Having an iPhone will not change my habit of not posting pictures for my life.
John:
that is not not what i do usually you can make an artistic statement and just post a blank black picture every day nope are you syracusa on instagram no i i forget what my instagram name is but like every very i joined so late because i was not you know i didn't have an iphone why am i gonna use instagram by the time i joined instagram which was like two years ago i think every variation of my name was taken so i am some big long crazy thing i'll
John:
I'll send you.
John:
I don't even know if I follow you.
John:
I follow Marco.
John:
Oh, thanks.
John:
Well, I don't know.
John:
I should follow you now that you're going to post something you might be interested in.
Casey:
What, baby or something?
John:
Yeah, baby pictures instead of like constant pictures of your food.
John:
My tolerance for pictures of what people are eating is very low.
John:
no no no if you look at my instagram feed profile whatever it's actually very little food but an extraordinary amount of cars and oh well maybe i should i should do that yeah see maybe i am following let me see where's i can't this app kills me the stupid icons in the bottom little house magnifying glass
John:
circle in a square heart favorite thing people who am i following i'm gonna guess if i hit the people icon is it right hey i got it no wait no that's just me it says yeah in the upper right followers 26 i'm following 26 people do i tap 26 that's actually a button can we have this be a new segment on the show just john does ui review of an app well they are alphabetical it looks like uh what is your are you casey list mm-hmm
John:
Yeah, I'm following you.
Casey:
Oh, and you are, may I share your name or is it a secret?
John:
No, it's not a secret.
John:
You can see all five of his pictures.
John:
John C. Syracuse.
Casey:
Yeah, and I was already following you.
Casey:
And I do recall the beach pictures now that I'm looking at them again.
John:
I posted 10 pictures total.
John:
Lifetime.
John:
now is that like a firm cap are you are you planning on posting any more ever or do you want to keep it at a good round number i don't think i'm doing instagram right because all these pictures were not taken with an ios well that's not true a couple of them were taken with an ios device but most of them were taken with my my canon super zoom camera when i was on vacation and some of them are but the first one is a scan of a picture from 1979 so that wasn't taken with an iphone either
Casey:
I definitely have started cheating and using the Micro Four Thirds camera that we got and posting some of those pictures to Instagram, which I will be the first to tell you is indeed cheating, but I don't really care.
John:
I don't understand why that's cheating.
John:
Like, are you sharing images from your life or is it like a video game where you're trying to use your crappy camera attached to your iOS device to take good pictures?
John:
I'm not interested in the video game.
John:
I'm only interested in the pictures from people's life.
Casey:
And that's why I've started cheating and I am not being repentant about it.
John:
While we're complaining about Instagram, by the way, am I the only person in the entire world that reads Instagram like I read Twitter?
John:
I would think this would be a more common thing.
John:
You know, Twitter...
John:
the Twitter application I use when I launch, it puts me where I last left off and then I can scroll, read, read, read, read, and then, you know, hit the home screen and you know, I'm back.
John:
Right.
John:
And when I launch it again, it's right where I left off.
John:
And obviously if I wait two days, I'm going to be missing stuff and it goes, but you know, within like 15, 20 minutes,
John:
an hour or two hours it it picks up where i left off every time i launch instagram it scrolls me to the top and i have to scroll backwards 75 pictures to find out where like do people think i don't care about the people i follow i'm not interested in seeing their pictures like what's the point of the application i follow these people because i want to see their pictures now i have to scroll backwards until i find the one picture of like
John:
whatever you know tree or something that i like was that the last picture i saw the worst part is because a lot of people tweet the same things they put on instagram it's like oh i've seen that picture already i must be up to that point but no because i just saw that one because it was on twitter yep this is basic functionality for instagram this is a billion dollar company they can't send me back to where i was last time i launched the application or doesn't want to i could not agree more it actually ended up being worth a lot less than a billion because facebook stock tanked well whatever point is they can retain a little bit more state than they are yeah
Casey:
No, that does drive me absolutely nuts, the not holding your position thing.
John:
I've never read a complaint about that either.
John:
I follow a lot of people who are heavy Instagram users.
John:
So apparently other people don't use Instagram the way I do.
Casey:
Oh, I do.
Casey:
You and I are of the same mold, cut from the same mold, whatever the phrase is, and I agree with you.
Casey:
They broke the cloth when they made us, Casey.
Casey:
Yeah, that too, or whatever.
Casey:
I know I'm the worst.
Casey:
I don't really care.
Marco:
We gotta get John using Vine.
John:
Oh, don't get me started on Vine.
Marco:
Because the Vine app is like the Instagram app, but a little bit worse in almost every regard.
Yeah.
John:
don't you remember when vine first came out people would tweet vines and you could tap the vine url and it would launch in safari oh that's right we did a whole thing about on your on your ipad and you couldn't watch the vine yep on i on any like at least certainly on the ipad and i think like sometimes some vines would half play and it was like how long did this go on months a lot longer than it should have
John:
yeah and this was it was what like 2012 or something like it was like the ipad had been out for a while at that point yeah and it was just like i guess that mark is not important we don't want people in ios to be able to watch our vines when someone tweets them
John:
Let's not bother making this thing work in mobile Safari.
John:
It's a minor browser we're not interested in.
John:
And you will never forgive them for it.
Casey:
I go through moments where I'm really enamored with Vine, but those moments last like 45 seconds when I think of something clever to Vine, and then I almost have no use for it outside of that.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It seems like a great idea.
Casey:
Just never really use it.
John:
Yeah, I'm not into it.
John:
I don't see myself ever posting a Vine.
John:
Sometimes you can see ones that are clever, but I just feel like do it on YouTube instead.
Marco:
Well, it's a very different thing.
John:
I know, but at least YouTube has a client ecosystem where I feel confident that I can watch what you produce instead of it being some sort of game where I have to try to get your 30-second movie to play or 3-second or 10-second or whatever the hell it is.
John:
Six.
Six.
Marco:
See, I kind of feel the opposite.
Marco:
I hate watching anything on YouTube because YouTube is such garbage itself.
Marco:
The experience of watching it on YouTube is terrible.
Marco:
It's always covered in all these little rectangles and ads and everything.
Marco:
The apps are terrible.
Marco:
I know there's all this great stuff going on in the YouTube ecosystem.
Marco:
I even have a few things I've subscribed to
Marco:
Because, like, things like... I aspirationally want to watch YouTube frequently.
Marco:
So, I never actually do.
Marco:
But there's, you know, funny stuff like CGP Grey's videos or, like, Dave Wiskus' new video.
Marco:
Like, stuff I want to follow.
Marco:
And I just never go to YouTube to watch it because I just hate... I hate everything on YouTube.
Marco:
I hate everything about YouTube.
John:
They have the YouTube app.
John:
My one complaint with the YouTube app is they did an opposite Instapaper where they...
John:
I want to end up using YouTube like I use Instapaper, which is probably not a healthy way to use it, but it's the way I use it, where everything I look at that I'm interested in, like, I don't have time to read that now, but I will read later.
John:
And I do it like crazy, so much so that my Instapaper queue is gigantic.
John:
And I know I'm never going to get, like, things go by.
John:
Like, I just keep shoving on this queue, and every once in a while I go back through it and read stuff, but there are things I'm never going to get back to.
John:
But the key...
John:
feature of instapaper with regard to this workflow is that when i launch the app the thing at the top of the app is the most recent thing that i added so it gives me a fighting chance youtube on the other hand puts things in the watch later thing at the end so when i launch the youtube application and go to my watch later list i have to scroll and then it says
John:
Click here for more.
John:
Load.
John:
Scroll.
John:
Click here for more.
Casey:
Load.
John:
Scroll.
John:
Click here for more.
John:
Load.
John:
And then I get down to the one I added, and it's just ridiculous.
John:
I think I maybe have 100 and something in my watch later queue, which I think is not unreasonable considering the size of my Instapaper queue, which Marco knew when he was running the thing and probably doesn't want to know now.
John:
It's ridiculous, but...
John:
it that really hampers my ability to go and i still do it because i still go back down there and get stuff and then after i watch them i try to delete them from the watch later queue and then the youtube app tells me there was an error trying to delete them and i try to remind myself to go delete them from the web interface later nice now what i would recommend is because i only follow follow as a poor choice of words but i only subscribe ish
Casey:
to a couple of YouTube channels, CGP Grey being one and Whiskuses, Better Elevation is another.
Casey:
And what I've done is gone to their video page or like their uploads page and then grabbed an RSS feed from there and just stuck that in Feed Wrangler.
Casey:
And I find that that works pretty well because it just is another RSS item.
Casey:
Whereas if I had to go to like the YouTube app in order to check these things out, I would never watch them.
John:
yeah the app isn't great but like i i subscribe to a bunch of channels too like uh some of the ones you mentioned also the vi hearts channel is great and the secret vi heart vi heart channel and uh what is it that that sequelitis one that is infrequently updated there's a whole bunch of good things to subscribe to but like youtube has this problem where it's really good related searches because my children navigate youtube entirely by going to one video that leads to another leads to another like that is their interface and it works amazingly it's like
John:
how do they even find this is just because one thing led to another they click on something interests them and is entirely viable way it's like their version of channel surfing instead of just flipping through the channels or whatever it amazes me the things they find through this you know sort of word association thing without ever typing anything all they do is click so that works great but when i find something that says like you know
John:
how to you know cook some meal part three of seven like show me where the other parts are sometimes they're in related videos like it's amazingly good at showing you here's part four part five part one but you'll be missing part two and you'll be like for crying out loud
John:
The person who put up these videos is trying to give you the metadata.
John:
Like if you put a field that said like maybe this field exists and people just don't use it.
John:
I don't know that said this is a multi-part series and this is part two.
John:
Give me arrow keys to show.
John:
And those are called playlists and they exist or whatever.
John:
But anytime I land on one of those, like it should know if it says part one in the title, I want the other parts.
John:
And if the people didn't enter the metadata and didn't make a playlist, YouTube can do that for me.
John:
There's nothing more frustrating than trying to search for part two.
John:
When you've got all the other parts and you just can't find it because, you know, it's it doesn't come up in the search and it's not related videos.
John:
And it's just, you know, things could be improved greatly.
John:
I understand your frustration with the interface.
John:
But my like I said, my bottom line is, can I watch the video?
John:
And when I watch YouTube video, especially on an iOS device, you just make it full screen.
John:
Everything's black anyway.
John:
So that's I feel like I can see the content if I can somehow find it.
Casey:
So you really love YouTube and Instagram, huh?
John:
I like YouTube more than Vine.
John:
I'll tell you that.