I’m Not Running a Boarding House Here
Marco:
We can't do it on the 31st, because Casey, you might want to be at a New Year's party.
John:
I'm not going to any parties anymore.
John:
That part of his life is over now.
John:
Notice, I didn't even ask you, John.
John:
That's my birthday.
Marco:
It is?
Casey:
The 31st?
Casey:
It's his 40th birthday, Marco.
Casey:
Get with the program.
Marco:
Oh, man, where have I been?
Marco:
You're the worst.
Marco:
Okay, so we won't record that day.
Marco:
No, we can.
Marco:
No!
Marco:
That's a terrible... No.
John:
Why is it a terrible idea?
John:
I'm not going anywhere.
John:
Oh, that's bullshit.
John:
I'll be in the house.
John:
You should be going somewhere, so we're going to do it.
John:
I should not be.
John:
It's my birthday.
John:
I'm going to do what I want.
John:
What I want to do is stay home.
John:
That's the BS where people think your birthday is about them and what they want to do.
John:
I don't care what you want to do on my birthday.
John:
I care what I want to do.
Casey:
John, I love you so much.
Casey:
Well, I'll talk to Tina and make sure that I understand the schedule.
John:
We're not doing anything.
John:
We never do anything for my birthday.
John:
We're not doing anything for my birthday this year.
Marco:
Is that her gift to you every year is not doing anything?
John:
Yes, that's what I ask for every year.
John:
What do you want for your birthday?
John:
No gifts and no party.
Casey:
Do you want to do some follow up really quickly, starting with batteries?
John:
Sure.
John:
I think we were talking about how on the watch, the components will have to go down in power because the battery is not going to save it because batteries were only increasing, not increasing as fast as the power usage of the internals of the watch might be.
John:
decrease in their power thirst.
John:
And I think I threw a number like 15% year over year or something.
John:
Anthony Fitti wrote in to say that the number is actually much lower than that.
John:
And I talked about this on hypercritical number 74, which is way back.
John:
in when june of 2012 had a similar show and wondered the same thing and probably got feedback probably for the same person i don't even remember but anyway the actual number is more like seven to eight percent year over year for battery increases so if you're looking for battery technology to save the watch that's not going to happen it's going to be just like the phone where the components are just going to have to go down in power usage and it's going to be a long time before batteries are twice as good as they are now four times as good ten times as good
Marco:
Yeah, there's something about a lot of the watch speculation from people has really kind of annoyed me.
Marco:
People keep saying, oh, well, right now the watch is going to have this battery life.
Marco:
It's going to have one day.
Marco:
But in only a few years, it's going to have way better battery life.
Marco:
And I think this is not only related to the feedback, it's not only an overestimation of how quickly batteries get better, but also I think it's ignoring the way things usually tend to happen with computer form factors.
Marco:
Look at the phone, for instance.
Marco:
Look at the iPhone.
Marco:
The very first iPhone battery life was roughly a day of usage.
Marco:
Almost every iPhone since then has been roughly a day of usage.
Marco:
You know, like the 6 Plus, it's, you know, now it's like, you know, maybe two days for some people depending on how you use it.
Marco:
But the battery life in the entire iPhone line in the last, what, seven and a half years has stayed pretty much the same.
Marco:
You know, give and take here and there, but in the same ballpark.
Marco:
We're not talking about orders of magnitude difference here.
Marco:
You know, it's not going from a day to a week or to a month.
Marco:
Because the reality is you're bound by how much mass you have to devote to battery space and generally what kind of power outputs you need.
Marco:
And things like radios, it's hard to make those lower power because you just need a certain amount of transmit power, etc.
Marco:
Screens, you have to emit a certain amount of light.
Marco:
And so even like the watch, I suspect they're going to go to OLED screens, either in the first version or soon afterwards.
Marco:
And that's I suspect that's why everything is designed with black backgrounds, because OLED is as far as I know, actually only use electricity to light up the lit pixels.
Marco:
Is that right?
John:
Yeah, each individual pixel emits light.
John:
So if you have ones that are entirely off, they don't.
Marco:
Right, so if you have an all-black screen with a few thin white lines, that actually doesn't use a whole lot of power for the LED.
Marco:
Anyway, ultimately, I think the watch is always going to be extremely battery-constrained.
Marco:
It's always going to last roughly a day.
Marco:
That's always going to be the target, because what's going to happen when the battery gets 8% more efficient next year?
Marco:
they're going to make the watch 8% thinner or something.
Marco:
That's what they do.
Marco:
They're not going to make it 10 times larger and give you a week of battery life.
Marco:
Typically, if you look at different form factors of technology, look at the same thing in tablets.
Marco:
Tablets have roughly 10 hours of battery life, usually.
Marco:
And that's not a coincidence.
Marco:
It's because everyone just kind of figured, okay, well, the best balance of weight to brightness to...
Marco:
computational power to radios to size uh gives roughly these proportions and it's it's roughly in that ballpark the watch i don't think is ever going to be at the point where it gets you know a month of battery life like like a traditional watch or even longer
Marco:
I think we're always going to be measuring it in small numbers of days for and, you know, well, not always on an infinite timescale, but maybe not on a Syracuse timescale, but for for the foreseeable future.
Marco:
And, you know, I'm talking probably a decade.
Marco:
possibly longer, I think that's the kind of magnitude of battery life we're going to be talking about here.
Marco:
I don't think that's going to change.
John:
For all the battery stuff for these things, you can just think of the battery as constant, even though it's 7% to 8% a year.
John:
Compared to everything else, it's basically constant.
John:
And what...
John:
What Apple in particular has done, even if you just ignore thickness and stuff, which we talk about a lot of if you just made it a little bit thicker, every year they spend the additional resources.
John:
Say they do a process shrink.
John:
Oh, now we have all this extra power overhead because all our stuff takes less power.
John:
We switched to OLED.
John:
We just got...
John:
40, 50% screen power back.
John:
What are we going to do with all that?
John:
What they do with all is they spend it on compute.
John:
They make the CPU faster, they make the GPU faster.
John:
And how much faster do they decide to make it?
John:
How much do they spend on RAM, CPU, GPU?
John:
They spend as much as they possibly can while keeping the thing the same thickness or thinner and keeping the same battery life.
John:
But that's where they spend it all because the CPUs keep getting faster and faster and they keep with the shrinks.
John:
Like when they have the shrink, if they had the shrink and said, let's just keep the CPU the same as it was.
John:
We're not going to go to 64 bit.
John:
We're not going to go to three cores.
John:
We're not going to go to two cores.
John:
We're just going to have one core.
John:
Our battery life can be tremendous now, but they don't.
John:
They always spend it.
John:
I mean, as soon as they get the additional...
John:
power savings from the major components, not the additional battery life, but the additional power savings.
John:
They spend as much as they can to meet their goals, which in Apple's case tends to be thin air if possible and whatever the target battery life is.
John:
Other people could be spending that same windfall.
John:
Again, not a windfall from battery gains, windfall from lower power components.
John:
They could spend it in all sorts of ways.
John:
They could spend it merely by increasing their battery life and just keep it the same.
John:
Then we'd be using a CPU and a GPU that are as powerful as the iPhone 1, but our battery life would be insane.
John:
Uh, nobody wants that.
John:
I don't think.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Probably not.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
We're, we're probably, this is going to be our, um, photo management thing, like from the prompt, isn't it?
Casey:
Where we just continually complained about the fact that Apple's insisting on thin over everything.
John:
I don't complain about it.
John:
I think it's a reasonable thing to do.
John:
It's just that when you diversify the line of products, maybe there's room finally for one that varies in this way.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
Like when there's just one product and then you're constantly making it thinner, it seems like you might be missing out.
John:
But they have such a range, especially with the big giant phone.
John:
It seems like there'd be room in their lineup to make a different compromise in this particular area.
John:
Instead of going across the board, it's always got to be thinner for the target battery life.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Like what if there was an iPhone 6 thick, one millimeter thicker than the 5S with the 6, not the 6 Plus, because that might be a little unwieldy at the 6 Plus size.
Marco:
But with the regular 6, slightly thicker than the 5S instead of being slightly thinner than it, that might give it 40 percent more battery life.
Marco:
And it would be a little heavier as a result.
Marco:
And see, this is the problem with batteries is that they're heavy, too.
Marco:
Like it isn't just about making space for them.
Marco:
It's also about weight.
John:
That's why I said you could go for the iPhone 5 form factor, like if they bring that back and, you know, well, you know what I mean, make a new phone in that size instead of just continuing the 5S and the 5C.
John:
If you made the cheap phone thick, the cheap small phone, make it thick.
John:
Then it's like, well, the top of the line one is super thin and sexy.
John:
if you get the four inch model uh which is you know i guess it's still that the 5s internals like put a thicker battery in that one then then it kind of makes sense in the lineup rather than trying to make the big expensive one thick because like you said heavier feels like hey shouldn't i you know this this feels shouldn't i be getting the the sleek one like the the palm five was the sleek palm and it was because it was so much thinner than the other one palm five was so good
Marco:
go you ever look at one recently i looked at mine recently it's just gigantic it's really yeah it just does not look like you remember it in your mind yeah because i i had the 5x after after my 3x finally died like it took so long for anything else to come out that was as good as the as the uh as the 5x was that 160 by 160 pixel screen i believe so yeah something like that
John:
So that's almost as big as an iOS icon, or is it not even close?
Marco:
Yeah, it is as big as most iOS icons.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Studio Neat once again.
Marco:
The guys at Studio Neat design tools that make the things you have just a little bit better.
Marco:
They started with the Glyph, that's the G-L-I-F, the Glyph, a tripod mount and stand for iPhones.
Marco:
Well, now they have a new version of it that is adjustable.
Marco:
So it adjusts with case size changes of the iPhone.
Marco:
So now when the new iPhones came out, when the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus came out, it was compatible on day one.
Marco:
And it works whether or not you have a case on your phone.
Marco:
They also make the Cosmonaut stylus, which I like a lot.
Marco:
It's my favorite stylus for iPads.
Marco:
And now they've moved on to cocktails and cocktail products.
Marco:
So the Studio Neat guys, Tom and Dan, are on a mission to convince you making awesome cocktails at home isn't that hard.
Marco:
Cocktails are simple.
Marco:
You just need a few readily available ingredients.
Marco:
You have access to everything a fancy cocktail bar does except clear and correctly sized ice.
Marco:
To fix this, Tom and Dan made the Neat Ice Kit.
Marco:
Neat Ice Kit is a set of tools for creating the right ice for your at-home cocktails.
Marco:
Now, Casey, you have a Neat Ice Kit, as do I. Can you describe how it works?
Casey:
Sure.
Casey:
So the neat ice kit has a few components.
Casey:
It is a silicone sleeve, for lack of a better word, and then a foam insulated thing that you put around it.
Marco:
Like a giant cozy.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
By the way, is it cozy or koozie?
Casey:
Because I always thought it was cozy.
Casey:
You're from Ohio.
Casey:
Anyway, this is about the neat ice kit and the neat ice kit is amazing.
Casey:
And, um, we, I made a whole review on my, put a whole post on my blog, a review of this thing, which I never do because I like it so darn much.
Casey:
And what you do is you have the silicone sleeve that you put some water in.
Casey:
I think it's like four inches long.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
Two inches deep and two inches wide.
Casey:
And so you fill it up with water.
Casey:
You put that silicone sleeve inside the cozy, cozy, cozy, whatever.
Casey:
The scuzzy.
Casey:
The scuzzy, right.
Casey:
And you put that in the freezer.
Casey:
Wait about a day.
Casey:
And what ends up happening is because of the way ice freezes, you have a four by two by two block of ice that's about half really, really cloudy and half crystal clear.
Casey:
And so what you do is you use the included mallet and chisel.
Casey:
to break the block in half.
Casey:
And you can use the cloudy part for things like martini shakers or something like that, where it's not terribly important that you have clear ice.
Casey:
And then you can use the clear piece for, you know, just having a cocktail on the rocks or in this case on the rock, um,
Casey:
You can you can chisel it even further and use it in like a Tom Collins glass, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
This thing is amazing.
Casey:
It is totally, totally a waste of time by most measures.
Casey:
And oh, my God, I love it so much.
Casey:
I really honestly do.
Casey:
And granted, I'm paid to say that.
Casey:
Like I'm being paid to say I love it.
Casey:
But no, really it.
Casey:
Oh, my God, it's the best.
Casey:
It really, really is the best.
Casey:
And if you at all care about the quality of your cocktails, I cannot suggest enough that you pick one of these up.
Casey:
It's amazing.
Marco:
Each neat ice kit includes the SCSI mold that we were just talking about, a chisel that includes a bottle opener, a club, which also functions as a muddler, and a Lewis bag.
Marco:
So you can use these things to create essentially any ice type you could need for a cocktail.
Marco:
You can make a big, beautiful, clear ice cube for like an old-fashioned or something.
Marco:
You can make smaller ice chunks for Tom Collins.
Marco:
You can make crushed ice for a mint julep.
Marco:
This makes an amazing gift for the holidays.
Marco:
You can give people for wedding gifts and everything.
Marco:
This is one of those things like...
Marco:
I always joke every holiday season about the entire category of gifts that are for other adults that you don't really know what else to get them and maybe they're hard to shop for because they hate everything or they already have everything.
Marco:
This category of gifts is usually full of a bunch of garbage.
Marco:
There's a very small number of things that I would recommend in this category, and this is one of them.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to Studio Neat and the Neat Ice Kit for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Once again, go to studioneat.com and use code ATP to get 10% off anything in the store.
Marco:
Once again, studioneat, N-E-A-T, studioneat.com.
Marco:
Use code ATP for 10% off.
Marco:
Check out the Neat Ice Kit.
Marco:
I also very highly recommend the Glyph and the Cosmonaut.
Casey:
Okay, so we also got some feedback from JP Toto, who corrected, I think mostly me more than anyone else, about IIS or the Microsoft web server on anything other than Windows.
Casey:
And so he or she said,
Casey:
Regarding the IIS on Linux.net business, it won't actually be IIS running on Linux or the Mac.
Casey:
It is a new web server called Kestrel built on LibUV, and it's a lot like the Node web server.
Casey:
I don't know the exact threading model, but you can front-end it with Nginx.
Casey:
How do you pronounce that?
Casey:
Nginx?
John:
Nginx, you got it.
Casey:
Okay, thank you.
Casey:
Or something else.
Casey:
So don't worry, nobody will be running big fat IIS on any Linux machines anytime soon.
Casey:
So that makes a lot more sense than what I think I said on the last episode.
Casey:
So I appreciate the follow-up from JP Toto.
Casey:
Moving on.
Casey:
Can you manufacture that thing like Apple does, John?
John:
You can't.
Marco:
It's kind of insulting.
John:
So this is a story.
John:
We talked a lot about this, about how Apple manufactures things.
John:
Last show, we talked about how Apple deciding that it was going to make essentially its entire product line out of big blocks of aluminum that precision machines into certain shapes affected the rest of the industry and helped the rest of the industry.
John:
have the expertise and have the machinery and the supplies out there to do this for their products as well, like that Nokia Mac Mini clone thing.
John:
And there was a whole article on Medium, I forgot to copy down the author's name here, one of you can look it up, about how you can't manufacture like apples.
John:
And it's short, there's just a couple of throwaway one-liner anecdotes about
John:
things that apple has done like they bought 10 000 cnc milling machines to to make macbook bodies instead of you know just a couple of them to laser drill those holes to let you see the led like that shines through the aluminum like you can't see the holes when the light is off when light is on it's like magically shines through
John:
There was, you know, only one company that made the drills that could make those little holes.
John:
So it bought the company and took all of its existing inventory to do it.
John:
And, you know, they talk about manufacturing a battery to fit in some tiny space.
John:
If no one sells you a battery that fits in there and no one's willing to make you one, you just make one yourself from scratch.
John:
That's usually not an option for most people.
John:
A lot of it just has to go with, you know, it's good to be the king.
John:
It's good to be a big, gigantic company with tons of money.
John:
look as nice as apples or like try to imitate apple apple's products like they'll use aluminum they'll use glass they'll use you know laser cut holes and everything like that if you're going to do exactly the same thing as apple it may be very difficult for you to make something as good or at a similar price or both uh your best bet i would imagine is to make something that feels if you want to make something like it's equally high quality like why isn't why doesn't everything feel like it's made like an apple product
John:
you can make something high quality you just might have to make it out of a material that feels high quality but but is either a more established process or you know it costs less money or it doesn't require any special machinery you can still feel expensive and high quality you don't have to chase apple exactly if you do chase apple exactly you're going to have a very hard time doing exactly what they do for the same cost that they do because they just have massive economies of scales and a huge investment and probably people on their payroll or people who are locked into exclusive contracts
John:
that are the best at doing whatever it is they do.
John:
So you can take a look at that in the show notes of life.
John:
I think I pretty much just summarized the entire article.
Casey:
John, why don't you tell us about how awesome it is to have an empty row on the bottom of your iPhone home screen?
John:
I told you about these people last week when we were talking about leaving the empty row and all that stuff like that.
John:
And I said, some people don't have any rows and they just put everything in a set of folders.
John:
And one of those people sent us a screenshot.
John:
We'll put a link to their tweet in the show notes.
It
John:
it just has four folders in the dock and each of the four folders has what looks like a color-coded set of nine icons or there could be more you can't tell how many pages um and so that's it their screen is just blank it's just a big picture of the of the sun on the top and then you know so i different strokes for different folks i mean i this could just be like an artistic stunt type of thing but like i said if you want everything to be two taps away all the time at least go for it
Marco:
yeah when you said that some people did this you didn't believe me i yeah i thought yeah maybe in theory somebody might be able to do this but there there has to be nobody out there who actually would make everything harder to use on their phone i mean this could be a stump is from the color coding it's like you know maybe this is just like a silly thing they just set out this way to take a screenshot but i've seen people in real life who don't just have the doc like that what they will have is a row of folders at the top and then the doc will have like you know phone and
John:
mail and safari or whatever you know like the doc will just have single icons but then they'll just have four icons at the top of page one all of which are folders
Casey:
whatever i don't know this is not at all what my home screen looks like but i'll go with it i mean this is why uh you have the ability to customize it i suppose so everyone can be their own special snowflake um tell me about instagram completionist john oh yeah this was this yeah this was a complaint email from jonathan another person suffering from my pain i put the whole thing in there because i thought it was it was a nice summary and suffering it it echoes my complaints uh he jonathan says i try hard not to be an instagram completionist that is
John:
Instagram's behavior is maddening.
John:
Not only does it forget where you are, but as soon as a new image is posted, you are returned to the top of your feed to see it.
John:
I've never actually had this happen, like where you're sitting there paging through images and a new image appears, because I don't follow enough people, I guess, but if it scrolled me up to the top, that would drive me mad as well.
John:
You're also returned to the top of your feed if you switch away from the app.
John:
Worse, the feed has a fixed length.
John:
If you get to the end of the feed, you might be missing photos older than the oldest one visible.
John:
This leads me to the crazy behavior of checking my feed twice a day so I don't miss anything.
John:
This is probably exactly what Instagram wants.
John:
I hate them.
Ha ha ha.
Casey:
You know, I have an Instagram completionist as well, and I don't know how many people I follow.
Casey:
I'll run my mouth for a second while I look.
Casey:
But I don't really have this kind of problem.
Casey:
Like, I agree with both you and Jonathan that it is maddening the way their app works for completionists.
Casey:
But I don't run into these same kinds of problems that apparently you guys do.
Casey:
Like, I've never seen it jump to the top while I was browsing Instagram.
Casey:
Like, I don't think it even does that.
John:
Yeah, I don't follow enough people to have it do that.
John:
But just merely the thing of just putting you at the top and you have to scroll back to find what the last picture you saw was.
John:
And, like, Twitter does it intentionally.
John:
Like, Twitter's thing is you're not supposed to care.
John:
You're not supposed to be using police.
John:
And you're supposed to be just like, what's happening now?
John:
What's in the moment?
John:
It's like getting on a CB channel, you know, in the 70s or whatever.
John:
Like, hey.
John:
or ham radio or whatever keep going back in time everyone go on the telegraph anyway uh and what's going on what's going on now you're not supposed to don't worry about the past the past is the past what's going on now which i think is not a great i don't i don't like that philosophy and i certainly don't use twitter that way
John:
But anyway, that's what they're going for.
John:
Is Instagram going for the same thing?
John:
Don't worry about what your people posted yesterday.
John:
Only worry about the pictures that are happening today.
John:
Like, I guess it is, I would wonder, like, what is their ideal, like, volume?
John:
How many photos come from people that you follow per day?
John:
Is it one?
John:
Is it seven?
John:
Is it 100?
John:
Is it 7,000?
John:
Like, I don't know what their number is, but obviously my number is way below it.
John:
And if they think it's very high, if they think, like, I don't know, you're a teenager and
John:
and all your friends are snapping 17 Instagram pictures a day, and you follow 50 people, and it's just every day just hundreds and hundreds of pictures, of course you're not going to be a completionist.
John:
You just want to say, hey, what are people doing now?
John:
Maybe you'll scroll back for one or two pictures, but that's not how I use Instagram.
John:
I'm not an experienced Instagram user, so I can't say that's not what Instagram is or what it started out as.
John:
Certainly, Twitter did not really start out as a completionist medium either, but I don't know.
John:
I would love to ask if there is some person who has a vision for both Instagram and Twitter, why is it that the vision of don't worry about it happened in the past?
John:
What is appealing about that?
John:
Why is that the goal?
John:
Like, I'm not saying it's a bad goal, but it seems weird to me if Instagram is also like this and Twitter is also like this.
John:
Is there no room for anything where you care about, like, especially things where you choose who you're going to follow?
John:
I guess you're just not supposed to care about everything those people ever write.
John:
I mean, Facebook, forget it.
John:
Facebook is gone.
John:
Nobody sees everything of anything anymore.
John:
It's all just...
Marco:
Well, but there it's a monetization strategy.
Marco:
That's very different.
John:
I know, but it's also to hold down noise, and they tied seeing things with friending so you could silence people so they would still be your friends so you didn't hurt their feelings, but you'd never see any of their stuff, and you could see things by friends of friends, and it's...
John:
And you're right, the monetization strategy is in there, too.
John:
But the mental model long ago on Facebook, I feel like, broke down to the point where regular people don't understand the permutations.
John:
And they kept changing the rules anyway.
John:
So now it's just forget it.
John:
But Twitter and Instagram are both so simple.
John:
Vertical timeline, chronologically ordered, with a few variations thrown in, but not many, that haven't changed that much.
John:
And yet they also want you to just apparently be like, in the moment, don't worry about what happened five seconds ago.
John:
Those pictures are dead to you.
John:
Don't look back.
Casey:
Just real-time follow-up, by the way.
Casey:
I follow about 90 people on Instagram.
Casey:
And I would say, based on no fact-checking whatsoever, just gut feeling, I think I see between 10 and 20 pictures in a given day, new photos in a given day.
Casey:
So I don't see that many.
Casey:
Yet, even in that small quantity, this stuff all drives me crazy.
Marco:
I should also point out as a responsible developer and skeptic that the reason why Instagram puts you up to the top whenever you launch the app, whenever there's new stuff, it probably at least started out that way because that's easier.
Marco:
It's just a lot easier to say every time you launch the app, you just load the feed.
Marco:
Whatever is the current feed, you load that up to X items and you show that, period.
John:
Yeah, but that works up until well before your purchase for a billion dollars.
Marco:
you know what i mean that's like version one minimum viable product don't worry about it blah blah blah but then like some at some point you get around to that some point in the multiple years before you're acquired for a billion dollars you get around that if it's something that you want well that's that's not a given at all though because there's a lot of apps out there from very large companies where the apps just suck and where things just are never fixed for example the mac app store
John:
well apple doesn't care about the mac app store that's any right how much does instagram care about the the quality of their app for completionists but but like but it's the quality their app is the main thing like that is instagram they don't they don't want you to use the website the website is like the instagram website used to be it was just like yeah yeah and we have a website whatever it's like the app is instagram that's what was purchased for a billion dollars if they're not adding this feature it's because they don't feel like it's part of the product they want to make and like just like twitter does not want you to
John:
be a completionist they don't want you to look back they don't want you to feel like you have to catch up they don't they want it to be more kind of you just dip in to the stream look at it and dip and come back out but instagram is like i don't know for some reason especially pictures it just seems like they're so much easier to look at and skim and you'd be more likely to be annoyed if you missed one like you miss someone's tweet about what they had for breakfast who cares but if someone posted a baby picture and you missed it like
John:
I don't know.
John:
It's not the same as PhotoStream.
John:
It's not the same as grandparents missing pictures of their grandkids.
John:
It is just kind of like, here's a bunch of photos from people I know and follow.
John:
But I guess I'm just not... There's very few things that I...
John:
that I'm interested in reading or following or doing stuff with, we're just going to dip my toe in and be like, Oh, let's see what's going on.
John:
It's like, it's like not watching TV series.
John:
Like, Oh, I just turn on the TV and whatever's on.
John:
I just watch a middle episode of some show that I haven't watched anything about.
John:
And then I just forget about it.
John:
And the next day, if some other show was on, I watch like never watching whole seasons, never watching shows in sequence, just whatever's going on right now.
John:
And that, that does not appeal to me in, I can't think of any media that appeals to me.
Yeah.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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You also know that other registrars, generally using them is unpleasant at best.
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Marco:
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Marco:
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And that is FISH spelled the correct way with a PH at the beginning instead of an F. So P-H-I-S-H rules.
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Because, of course, they do.
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Thank you very much to Hover for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
I feel compelled to note that despite that ridiculous coupon code, Hover really is fantastic.
Casey:
So don't use that coupon code or don't hold that coupon code against them.
Casey:
They really are amazing.
Marco:
Hey, if you want 10% off this week, you have to use that code.
Marco:
You have to actually type that.
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You're welcome, everybody.
Marco:
Sigh.
Casey:
Anyway, John, I wanted to know what you have on your iPhone's home screen.
Casey:
And this is in part because Betaworks has released an app called, what is it, Home Screen?
Casey:
Is that the name of the app?
Casey:
It's Pound Home Screen.
Casey:
Ah, my bad.
Casey:
It's Pound Home Screen.
So...
Casey:
In any case, this has been flying around on Twitter where everyone is posting their home screens.
Casey:
And I was curious, John, what do you have on your home screen of your iPhone?
John:
I thought we talked about this last week.
John:
I'll get to it in a moment.
John:
But first, I want to talk about this application, which I did download because it was like, you know, everyone was downloading it and saying, oh, you know, this home screen thing.
John:
So I downloaded the home screen app.
John:
I saw Marco complain that he couldn't find it for the search and the app store because he searched for the exact app name and didn't come up with it, which is great.
John:
Um, anyway, I downloaded the app and it, it wants you to take a screenshot of your home screen, which I did.
John:
And it wants you to come back to the app and then it does something.
John:
And then it says, great period.
John:
Your screenshot is shared.
John:
So I feel like I have now used this app for its intended purpose, right?
John:
I've taken a screenshot of my home screen.
John:
I've launched the app.
John:
It told me, it gave me a confirmation message that says my screenshot is shared.
John:
What it shows me on the screen of the app is a tiny picture of my home screen.
John:
Like, yep, that's my home screen.
John:
It is now shared.
John:
Um,
John:
I have no idea what to do from here.
John:
It did put up a little window that said, would you like to tweet about this?
John:
No, I would not like to tweet about it.
John:
And I didn't.
John:
And that's it.
John:
And now people are like, hey, why isn't your home screen on there?
John:
Like, well, I shared it.
John:
Can people not find my home screen unless I tweet about it?
John:
I don't want to tweet about it.
John:
I don't understand this application.
John:
All right.
John:
Do you understand it?
John:
Have you guys shared your home screen?
John:
How how are other people able to see my home screen?
Marco:
So by default, it by the way, I didn't build this app.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
No, it's not.
Marco:
It's not Marco's app.
John:
I have been complaining to him directly.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So when I so Betaworks, it's Betaworks' app.
Marco:
And yes, I sold its paper to Betaworks and I know them.
Marco:
I don't work there.
Marco:
And when I tweeted my screenshot, so by default, it just shares it onto their website, onto the home screen.
Marco:
I think it's homescreen.is, right.
John:
But how can other people see it?
Marco:
So you can go there and there's a URL.
Marco:
If you open up the tweet sheet, you don't have to actually post the tweet.
Marco:
It'll give you the URL.
Marco:
There is a public permalink on that domain where you can view it.
Marco:
The point of this is to tweet it, though.
Marco:
And so...
Marco:
Anyway, to clarify, when I tweeted it, I said in brackets, shameless app self-promotion.
Marco:
And what I was saying was I was basically voting for Overcast and Instapaper because they were on my home screen.
Marco:
And one of the cool things about this site is that you can go to homescreen.is.
Marco:
Is that it?
Marco:
I already forgot the domain.
Marco:
That's what it says, but it's not loading for me.
Marco:
Anyway, you can go to the site and it'll show you it has like it keeps a tally of because what it does is it looks at the picture of your home screen and then it actually uses image recognition to to recognize with pretty good accuracy what apps those actually are.
Marco:
And then it links to them.
Marco:
You can like you can get to their iTunes pages and then it keeps a tally of which apps are most popular.
Marco:
So I was voting for my apps that are on my home screen.
Marco:
And that's why I said shameless app self-promotion.
Marco:
Not that I made the home screen app itself.
Marco:
Anyway, why other people would want to post it, I don't know.
Marco:
It's up to them.
Marco:
I mean, who knows?
Marco:
A lot of people like to know that.
Marco:
A lot of people like to share their home screens.
Marco:
A lot of people ask us or other people they know on Twitter, what is your home screen?
Marco:
There used to be a whole site dedicated to it by somebody.
Marco:
I forget who.
Marco:
I think it was one of our...
Marco:
Apple blogger friends, right?
John:
Yeah, a lot of people do that.
John:
So in the app, there is a share button, and it says tweet, which I don't want to do.
John:
Open in Safari, I suppose that'll take me to the URL.
John:
And confirm app detection, where you can go and confirm that it got your, you know, did the image recognition.
John:
I did all that, but other people can't find my home screen.
John:
People were asking me, when are you going to share your home screen?
John:
I feel like I did.
John:
I feel like it should be easier.
John:
for people to find my home screen not that they care like my screen my home screen is a mess so if you want to know what's actually on it like i said i had to fill in a row of icons before uh i had to rearrange things to be in my thumb i'm not really happy with my home screen this is it's gonna change but it's just the usual stuff like uh i don't know if there's anything exciting on here i've got
John:
The main apps that I use every day, which is Overcast, Twitterific, you know, Safari, Gmail app, which I use for my email.
John:
I've got, you know, on the dock, I've got phone, photos, video, music.
John:
I've got Dropbox on here, the App Store, messages, FaceTime.
John:
google maps and apple maps contacts like it just starts to tail off after that i've got the wwc app and like in a spot that has always been on my front screen i've been doing that for the past few years just for the hell of it wait really why is that there is it to watch the videos no i don't use it but like every year i replace it with the new version of the app like rather than having to rearrange everything it is essentially a placeholder for itself
John:
so so you have an app on your home screen that by definition you don't use for 51 weeks out of every year well i use it on and off but like there's tons of apps in here that i don't use all the time like that's like a prime spot that's like right right in thumb scanning range too well i don't i don't have it i have it i have it far away i have it in a bad spot right it's in the middle row it's far away from my thumb it's like i have to reach anything on that edge you know
John:
I suppose I could swap it with settings or whatever.
John:
Like, a lot of my problem has to do with muscle memory for where things used to be when I could reach the whole screen with my thumb.
John:
I still keep reaching for upper left for Safari, but it's not there anymore because it's too damn far away, but I still reach past where it is, so I have to adjust things.
John:
And the Google Authenticator, I don't use that very often, but I do want it on my home screen, so...
John:
There's just not enough apps that I use frequently enough to be deserving to be on the home screen.
John:
So then it's like maybe I should move these off to find icons that look nicer because I'm really not happy with the way this thing looks.
John:
I really don't like the Instagram icon.
John:
It still looks like iOS 6 and it's kind of mucking up my home screen.
Marco:
This is the most baffling home screen.
John:
It's not.
John:
This home screen is a mess.
John:
Like, this is not the way I want it.
John:
Very few things.
John:
The only things that I'm sure about, more or less, are Twitterific and Overcast, which are really the main two apps I use every day.
John:
Gmail and Safari used to be in totally different places, and I keep reaching for their old positions, and Messages is kind of okay.
John:
I didn't use it as much before I had an iPhone.
John:
I mean, Repost, do you use app.net a lot?
John:
i do still check it oh my god and and the the itunes store like do you are you buying new albums a lot that's on your home screen i want the app store on the main page because i do i do manual updates app store yes but the but the purple itunes store itunes store i'm like it starts to tail off it's like what what else should i have in there so i kind of think like like the official apple stuff you know like the main because i don't you know i don't use a lot of these apps a lot so i just i don't know i have to sort it out
Marco:
This is worse than the camera sound effect.
John:
Well, I mean, I've just moved to a new device.
John:
My iPod touch home screen I was very happy with, but here I'm kind of lost until I figure it out.
John:
And the subsequent screens are even worse.
John:
It's just kind of a mess.
Marco:
You only get one more row.
Marco:
It can't, like, you can't blame that.
John:
No, it's not.
John:
It's the row and the sizing.
John:
The sizing threw off all my all my good positions of everything.
John:
It's like, well, now that is a bad position.
John:
I would never put like calendar in the upper left.
John:
I don't use it at all.
John:
That used to be where Safari is.
John:
It's impossible to reach with my thumb.
John:
So I got to, you know, I have to put something that I basically don't launch.
John:
And why is calendar on the front page?
John:
I guess so I can see the date, I guess, because it's the official account.
John:
I don't use Apple's calendar.
John:
I use Google Calendar.
Casey:
See, the thing that drives me nuts about your home screen, which R. Jonesy pointed out to me, is you made the rookie iPhone user mistake of having contacts and phone on the same screen because you can do, to the best of my knowledge anyway, you can do everything that you can do in contacts you can do in the phone app.
Casey:
So having both is just completely wasteful and redundant.
John:
but i don't use either one of those apps i don't use the phone i use contacts this that's the thing like like like mac people make fun of windows people for maximizing all their windows i think iphone people can make fun of former ipod touch people for having the contacts app no like i said the only reason it's there is because it's like an official apple app that can that actually contains some data that i might ever want to look at i understand you get through all the phone but i don't use the phone app i don't use when am i why would i ever go into the contacts app what would i do there
John:
Like, if I'm going to send someone messages, I do it from messages.
John:
If I'm going to call someone, I do it from, you know, like, I'm not, you know, I'm not using, it's just there.
John:
It's there for the same reason Notes is.
John:
Like, what the hell is Notes there?
John:
It's just the official Apple.
John:
I have 50 Notes apps.
John:
Why is Notes on the front page?
John:
Because it's the Apple one.
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
So to address what I think is the most egregious icon taking up space on your home screen, which is the WWDC one, one of the big advantages of having a partially or completely empty bottom row on your home screen is that you can then place temporary use icons in that bottom row.
Marco:
Yep.
Marco:
So whenever I go to a conference or anything, I always put conference-related apps in the bottom row.
Marco:
Whenever I'm going on a trip, if there's travel-related apps for the trip I'm going on, I'll put those in the bottom row.
Marco:
Oh.
Marco:
I don't like that idea.
John:
I'm not running a boarding house here.
John:
I'm going to have temporary room for Rogers to come in.
John:
No, I'm going to eventually get my home screen to the way I like it.
John:
It will settle down.
John:
I had many, many years to hone my... Because the iPod Touch never changed.
John:
I had many years to get that form factor right.
John:
I'll settle it down.
John:
I mean...
John:
I don't know.
John:
Really, at this point, the home screen is so damn big that it just seems like there's just not enough icons that I care about enough to be there.
John:
Like I said, it's really just that little row of three.
John:
I guess Instapaper, Overcast, Twitterific, Letterpress, the one game I still play a lot.
John:
and then i guess instagram like that's and then everything else is just like man i guess safari and i guess and people are asking why i have videos and music in the doc videos occasionally i do watch i have a bunch of little like old tv shows and anime things and movies and stuff in there you know occasionally i do watch things like that or more likely open something for the kids so they can look at or whatever
John:
music i don't use either but why is that there because it's like it's in the dock it's the official like the dock i don't think is a great place i never thought the dock was a great place like people oh put your most important things in the dock that way they'll always be there i don't think it's good for thumb reaching you know what i mean yeah it used to be better for sure
John:
So, I never thought it was good.
John:
I always thought, basically, like, Overcast has essentially got the prime spot here.
John:
Overcast is what I do every day.
John:
I listen to podcasts in the car.
John:
You know, Overcast is the first thing.
John:
You know, I launch Twitterific, I launch Overcast.
John:
So, they are both, like, in the hot spots, right?
Marco:
And then you got Safari, Gmail messages.
Marco:
That's probably good, too.
John:
Right, but I keep missing them.
John:
I keep going to their old spots.
John:
So, I really need to... And, you know, messages, I don't know.
John:
I'll figure it out eventually.
John:
And I don't like how it looks, either.
John:
Aesthetically, it's kind of gross.
John:
It's...
Marco:
It's got problems.
Marco:
When we had your home screen on the topic list, I never imagined we'd get this much enjoyment out of it.
John:
I think my home screen on the topic list was dumb.
John:
And everyone who hates this topic, I agree with you.
Casey:
It's funny because the only reason I even downloaded homescreen.is is because we were talking about it.
Casey:
Like, I thought it was a little bit silly.
Casey:
I mean, it's...
Casey:
mildly intriguing to see what somebody puts on their home screen but i don't know it's it was like one of those silly fads that just flew by twitter and i was you know i was seeing thousands of home screens but i don't know that seeing it how unbelievably bad you are at managing your own home screen does make me feel better about myself a little bit my home screen looks better than both of yours though marcos is a ghost town
John:
it's like just he's got he's got the the dot on instapaper which truncates the name that's just i mean the dot is bad enough but then having the dot actually push the name out like the blue dot does sometimes that and that's in your home screen you got to look at that all day and then the the instagram is screwing up your home screen too because look at all the other nice ios 70 style icons and all of a sudden instagram's there saying hey look at me i'm from ios 6 no good
John:
Casey's looks like an explosion of bad clip art.
John:
Gift wrap is truncated with a red dot.
John:
I don't like the icon.
John:
Baby Connect has the icon, exactly the icon you would think Baby Connect had.
John:
ESPN football one is like, we just took our logo and shrunk it down.
John:
That's an icon, right guys?
John:
money well is not too hot looking fast text does not have feet and he's got three folders on his front page three folders that is three folders but an empty row i need these things to be two taps away at all times but i'm not gonna put anything in the bottom row if i use fantastic i did research does anybody know if uh i tried searching the app store and this was futile i went to read all the stupid descriptions after disclosing them i was looking for a calendar app that would show me my google calendar
John:
Does that not exist?
John:
Does Google not have one?
Casey:
No, no, slow down.
Casey:
If Google, if your Google account is one of the official accounts in your phone.
John:
Is that the only way to do it?
Casey:
I believe that's right.
John:
Because I don't want to, because I don't want to do that.
John:
I was just hoping like, like there's a Gmail app that just says I'm an app and I will just connect you to Gmail.
John:
It's mostly a web view anyway, whatever.
John:
Like I'm not saying it's like native versus web, but I figured I was looking at what, you know, calendars five or fantastic color, many of the other much better calendar apps that maybe I have a fighting chance of actually using.
John:
if they would connect directly to my google calendar without having me add it as a calendar thing and you know in my cloud account someone says sunrise will do it i saw i saw a couple in there the truth is i really don't look at my calendar on my phone so i don't know maybe so why are you looking for an app yes because i figured now maybe like i'll be on the phone with somebody and want to look at a calendar thing at the same time i don't know i'm i'm just trying to figure out how my usage might change
John:
Now that I have a net connection everywhere instead of... Because previously, you know, I would never need to do that because I'd be in my house with Wi-Fi or at work at Wi-Fi.
John:
It usually means I'm near my computer and I can look at Google Calendar and the big, you know, the web version, which is what I use.
Marco:
Oh, this is amazing.
Marco:
See, I think...
Marco:
one of the reasons why like this this does seem stupid i agree a whole service devoted to sharing your home screen that does basically nothing else uh that does sound stupid but it's kind of it's like looking at people's houses it's like you kind of it's kind of interesting you can tell a lot about a person by what they have on their home screen how it's arranged maybe what their background is what you can tell from mine is this person just got an iphone
Marco:
that's true that's very true like i'm intrigued john like you have rotation lock on because you know i imagine you like to be controlled controlling that that factor but your battery is not fully charged and i'm kind of surprised that you let and of course you know your your verizon and wi-fi coverage are both kind of weak and so i'm kind of surprised you let that out no so my battery is plenty charged like a brand new iphone 6 that is a long battery life there um the verizon signal i the cell signal my house is terrible verizon is the best
John:
In terms of signal, some some carriers can't even get a signal inside my house.
John:
This is why I have a Verizon iPhone.
John:
So two bars, I'll take it.
Marco:
Casey, I just noticed on your home screen that the wonderful new fast text icon is not being recognized because that version is not yet in the App Store.
Marco:
You should really fix that problem.
John:
oh i know don't even get me started at least he doesn't have a dot next to it do they really need to truncate for the dot and like that i don't like that with the blue dot too but like yeah you don't think that like there's plenty of room for the full name and the dot it should know it should do a better job of like if there is room like next to day one the gif wrap thing like this room you could show the rest of gif wrap shift that dot over it wouldn't be the end of the world
Marco:
Well, and they also could just put the dot on the corner of the icon the way badges are done.
Marco:
Like maybe put it on the left corner so that it doesn't hide the badge.
John:
I don't understand who that badge is for.
John:
Like for people who have beta apps but don't know they have beta apps?
John:
You forget which one is a beta?
John:
I don't know.
John:
It doesn't make any sense.
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Let me go fix it.
Marco:
uh backblaze i i love it it is unthrottled you can upload as quickly as you can uh i've i've had issues with a few other providers with that and i've never had an issue with backblaze uh it really is simple it really is just five bucks a month unlimited no gimmicks no add-ons
Marco:
Five bucks a month for unlimited disk space.
Marco:
And it's really great.
Marco:
I love Backblaze.
Marco:
Go to backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
I definitely think you should use online backup.
Marco:
And if you're going to use one, I'd say Backblaze is by far the best.
Marco:
And I'd say that even if they weren't paying me to say it.
Marco:
And in fact, before they were paying me to say it, I was saying that.
Marco:
Anyway, thank you very much to Backblaze for sponsoring the show.
Marco:
Go to backblaze.com slash ATP.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I'd like to yell at Marco for a little bit.
Casey:
Gladly.
Casey:
Where's my freaking Overcast Mac app?
John:
Before you yell at him about that, why do you want a Mac Overcast app?
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So the reason I want a Mac Overcast app is because I actually do a lot of my podcast listening at work.
Casey:
And if I'm going to do that, I'd like to do it on my Mac because it seems silly, in my personal opinion, to have your phone or your iPad out just for the purposes of listening to a podcast when I have a perfectly functioning computer right in front of me that that would do the trick.
Casey:
And yes, I am aware that Overcast has a web app.
Casey:
And yes, it is very good.
Casey:
No, it's not.
Casey:
Well, I mean, it's pretty good.
Casey:
No, it's really not.
Casey:
It's pretty terrible.
Casey:
Go ahead.
Casey:
Either way.
Casey:
But now that I've become addicted to smart speed, I must have that in my life.
Casey:
And I can't get that through HTML5 without you going away for 10 years and reinventing half of the internet.
Casey:
So I want to know where my Overcast for Mac app is, please.
Marco:
Okay, so first of all, you know, there's a couple of cases to be made here, a couple of different options to take.
Marco:
Obviously, I should make the web app better.
Marco:
That is point number one.
Marco:
And if the web app is better, it will remove a lot of the reasons why people might want a Mac app.
Marco:
Not all of them, granted, and not some big ones.
Marco:
But it will remove many of the reasons why people would want a Mac app.
Marco:
It would also be a heck of a lot easier in many regards than making a whole Mac app, especially because I've never made a Mac app before.
Marco:
So I don't know anything about all of AppKit's intricacies and weirdnesses and limitations.
Marco:
And so I would have to learn all that almost from scratch.
Marco:
I'm sure some iOS knowledge would carry over, but not a whole lot.
Casey:
I thought you did write a Mac app.
Marco:
Okay, I should clarify.
Marco:
I wrote one Mac app, the Tumblr backup app.
Marco:
It was terrible.
Marco:
It was very clearly my first Mac app ever written, and I spent maybe two hours on it, and most of the actual work was done in a PHP file that was embedded in the app itself.
Marco:
Are you really serious?
Marco:
I am totally serious.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
You are the worst.
Marco:
Because it was like connecting to the Tumblr API and making a bunch of downloads and making all these directories and everything.
Marco:
And I had actually already written the PHP script just for my own personal use to back up my own Tumblr log.
Marco:
And I asked David one day, hey, can I make a backup app?
Marco:
Because people keep asking me about this.
Marco:
And, you know, let me just make a Mac app.
Marco:
And so I just made like a wrapper that wrapped executing that PHP script.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
Anyway, so I basically have no Mac knowledge.
Marco:
So that's the reason?
Marco:
Well, that's a reason.
Marco:
So another reason is, how do I put this gently?
Marco:
You don't.
Marco:
You just let it rip.
Marco:
Look at other apps that are made by individual developers in the podcast, RSS kind of space and
Marco:
Look at other apps that started out on iPhone, then went to iPad, and then went to Mac.
Marco:
And then, for many of them, development basically stopped.
Marco:
And so I see this in a few apps that I used to use, and it kind of scares me.
Marco:
Because clearly, I mean, I don't know what anyone's story is.
Marco:
I haven't looked into any of these in detail, but...
Marco:
It sure looks like when you go to that third platform, especially because the Mac is so different from iOS, it sure looks like a lot of developers just get stuck because there's just so much to keep up with at that point.
Marco:
Then you have possibly these three different code bases, all this different platforms moving at different times.
Marco:
As the platforms advance, you have to try to keep up with them.
Marco:
And it just seems like the Mac app is like the kiss of death for indie developers who start out on iOS.
Marco:
It's like, oh, I'm going to make a Mac app.
Marco:
And then inevitably, it doesn't seem like they sell very well.
Marco:
I've never heard of anybody saying they made a ton of money off their Mac apps after they came from iOS first.
Marco:
I mean, obviously, if you're making productivity, professional software, that's a different story.
Marco:
But in this kind of space, I haven't heard of great success there.
Marco:
So it just...
Marco:
I'm very scared of it basically bogging me down, weighing me down, and making it very hard for me to keep everything updated.
Marco:
So that's a major point.
Marco:
I also... I don't think Overcast is really making enough money where it makes sense for me to pay somebody else to make it.
Marco:
And I don't think it would...
Marco:
I don't think it would bring in enough money itself really to justify the expense of somebody else making it for me.
Marco:
So I think it's the kind of thing where if it's going to exist, I'm going to have to make it.
Marco:
And so again, that just scares me from just like a total engineering bandwidth perspective.
Marco:
That is scary.
Marco:
um the other thing is like how much of a gain am i getting from the web app as a result so to me the big things are smart speed and offline file saving uh and and those are those are both very big things and there's a few other things like like for instance um i've i have uh i never i don't think i ever said this publicly before but i have a file upload feature
Marco:
and it's only enabled on my account right now and i developed this long time ago it's probably been there for a year and i was initially going to launch with file upload support where you have a special folder it's just like your inbox or your uploads and you upload files to it and then you can play arbitrary files this is useful for me because i record the howard stern show and then i can play the howard stern files in my podcast app which is which is very convenient
Marco:
The whole feature is there.
Marco:
It's built out on S3.
Marco:
And I was a little scared with business concerns and things like piracy concerns and takedown notices.
Marco:
If I don't have to be responsible for these files for both the costs and liabilities of hosting people's uploads, that would certainly be ideal.
Marco:
At WWDC, when iCloud Drive was announced...
Marco:
I thought, you know what?
Marco:
I'm just not going to release that S3 uploads feature that I made.
Marco:
Ideally, I'm going to rebuild this feature using iCloud Drive and very easily also support Dropbox.
Marco:
Like if it's easy to also support anything else that uses the document picker, which it probably is, I could do stuff like that.
Marco:
So that is a way better feature.
Marco:
That being said, that will never work in the web app.
Marco:
so there are certain things like that like handoff i can do from the web a lot of people don't know this you can do handoff from web apps to ios apps and vice versa um so i could do a handoff playback but it isn't as good or as easy from the web and there's a few little gotchas um the web i'm always facing issues of like different browsers being a pain in the butt about something um one of the biggest problems actually
Marco:
And this could end up being really problematic, depending on the direction that web browsers go, is mixed content security.
Marco:
You know, right now it's considered bad for SSL if you have a page that's served over HTTPS that includes any assets that are not served over HTTPS.
Marco:
The problem is Overcast does not host the podcast files because that would be insanely expensive and bring a lot of other problems like lack of control, lack of download stats for the publishers, things like that.
Marco:
So most podcast files are hosted on regular HTTP links that are not HTTPS because who cares?
Marco:
So my web interface is all secure.
Marco:
So almost every Overcast player page has this mixed security problem.
Marco:
and that prevents a lot of things for example it also it prevents me from ever making a twitter card that includes the audio player feature which is really annoying because i would love for overcast twitter links to have like you know a built-in player and a card if anybody uses the card interface i don't know i don't know twitter works but
Marco:
But Twitter cards are required to be all HTTPS, including all the resources they load, including the media they load.
Marco:
So I can't do that unless I proxy all those files, which, again, is very expensive and has a lot of problems associated with it.
Marco:
I'm also completely, like, held at the whims of browser developers, like...
Marco:
Let's say Chrome decides, oh, we think something is bad and we're going to stop supporting it next week because of security or whatever.
Marco:
If that something is like some kind of behavioral detail of the HTML5 audio player or something like that, I'm just screwed.
Marco:
So there's all these problems with the web app approach that...
Marco:
it's not worth killing the web app it's not worth having having overcast on mac be the only way you could play overcast files on a mac but there's a lot of reasons why a web app might not be the or might probably shouldn't be the only way you can play things you know that makes sense like relying on on a web app for for the kind of functionality i do i mean if you're making something else that's a whole different story but
Marco:
But if you're relying on serving mixed security level resources with this cutting-edge HTML5 audio player, and if I would try to build in things like effects and speeds into it, which some of that can be done with some of the new audio APIs, SmartSpeed still can't, which is unfortunate.
Marco:
Although it would have to be written in JavaScript, so that might be horribly slow.
Marco:
Anyway, the point is...
Marco:
I'm relying on a lot of little edge cases and cutting-edge features of web browsers to make this work at all.
Marco:
And that's not a good place to be in because that could change at any time.
Marco:
I also just hate web development.
Marco:
I'm so sick of it from having done so much of it in the last 15 years or whatever.
Marco:
I'm so tired of web development.
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
it does not the idea of making a really amazing javascript player for the web does not interest me very much i will eventually have to make it better and i i should i was actually going to start doing that today but i got sidetracked but uh i haven't really answered your question at all but that should give you some idea of where my head is on this i have not started a mac app and and i still am not sure if i'm going to make one
John:
Why don't you do just like a little player app for the Mac that, you know, handoff or otherwise, you're not going to you're not going to like make a Mac version of the entire Overcast app where you can see all your playlists and edit them or whatever.
John:
Just a simple way to say somehow you will find your way to the thing that you want to play somewhere else.
John:
And you will say plays on my Mac.
John:
And that will let Casey, you know, use his play pause button on his keyboard, too.
John:
you know like just just a playback app and i guess you'd have to either hand off from the web handle from the ios app or something similar but really what you'd be handing off is just the url and then once you're into the mac app it's like play this now and it would i guess have to show a title and get some information and maybe show some artwork but it would save you from having to do with the you know the full ui and it would so clearly just be like a player
Marco:
Yeah, but at that point, like, why half-ass it?
Marco:
Like, if that's all I'm going to do, I mean, I don't know.
Marco:
I mean, I guess anything's better than the current web app.
John:
I mean, what you can do then is on the web app, which you'd be like, well, the web app might work for you, but if it doesn't work for you, click this button and it'll open, you know, whatever, you know...
John:
x overcast whatever url that will launch the overcast app if it's installed and you know with that url then you'll be off you know like i don't know it would solve casey's problem anyway like he doesn't need the full overcast app on his mac he just wants to be able to play without it you know independently
John:
And I guess maybe it would be like, what would it do when it got to the end of the track?
John:
Would you send it to the entire playlist full of URLs and metadata?
John:
Would it, you know, would it be slaved kind of like your Mac is the watch and the phone is running overcast and it would be like slaved out to communicating across a handoff initiated connection to feed it what the next track is?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
Well, but I mean, ultimately, like all of my syncing code
Marco:
that's all mac compatible all of the audio processing code that's all mac compatible all i'm really talking about is i'd have to basically write the entire ui from scratch but the ui doesn't necessarily have to be that complicated on ios it's complicated because i do a lot of customization uh like a lot of appearance customization to give my you know my fonts and my styles and everything on os 10 maybe i don't need to do that uh i don't know i haven't i haven't looked into any of this well you got to do what uh icon factory did and port ui kit to the mac first right
John:
that's a pretty big prerequisite i'm not sure i'm gonna do that they already did it for you it's done i thought they i thought they abandoned it because nobody was interested i know probably because it's just a ridiculous prerequisite to writing a mac app like you think you're gonna save time but it's like what if we sign ourselves up to maintain now
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
So anyway, that's why I don't have one yet.
Marco:
And I might have one in the future.
Marco:
There's a bunch of other stuff I want to do first.
Marco:
And this is the problem too.
Marco:
It's like, do I work on a Mac app, which will probably be a six-month distraction at least,
Marco:
uh or do i spend that six months making the ios app even better do i do you know tackle some big problems like streaming maybe like chapter support if you know things people ask for uh chapter support i'm i'm less keen on because there's just so little demand for it but the people who do demand it are very loud but there's very very little demand for it in reality and very few podcasts even have chapters
Marco:
um so that's that's kind of low on the list but like streaming that's a big deal that's something that i really need to do because that makes that makes some other nice features better and possible so for instance uh let's say you have you're playing something on your phone and i implement handoff and you hand it off to a mac app or vice versa let's say the the app that is receiving the handoff has not yet downloaded that file and
Marco:
If I don't have streaming yet, that sucks because that means that you handed it off and then you have to sit there and wait while that entire file downloads before you can play any of it.
Marco:
That's not very good.
Marco:
And yeah, maybe I could do some kind of weird little Lansing thing where I try to send it quickly, but that's also hacky and not great.
Marco:
Ideally, it would have streaming so that you can click any overcast share link, any handoff link, anything like that, and just start playing the file if you have an internet connection, which if you're receiving handoff stuff and browse on Twitter, you probably do.
Marco:
So just start playing the file.
Marco:
you know just start wherever it started a certain time stamp even like if you start in the middle that's fantastic if i can do that that's very hard to do but uh you know that's that's what i actually want uh and there's so many features that are kind of being held back by streaming that's why i'm streaming is like is the thing i'm tackling next i i kind of wrote some of it and then got sidetracked with other problems and
Marco:
And there's always going to be something like that.
Marco:
Next year when iOS 9 comes out, maybe iOS 9 adds more things I want to do.
Marco:
When am I ever going to have time to make an entire Mac app?
Marco:
This is what worries me.
Marco:
And when I look around and I see the kiss of death of the Mac apps from all these other indie developers, it doesn't look like a good idea to do.
Marco:
I am intellectually interested in doing it.
Marco:
I would like to do it, but it doesn't look like I should do it.
Casey:
See, and I think the problem that you're running into is you have Marco myopia or myopia, whatever.
Casey:
Anyway, the point is, because this is not something that you necessarily feel is missing from your world, it's never going to happen.
Casey:
And that's that makes sense.
Casey:
I mean, I don't I don't fault you for that.
Casey:
But like, would the iPad app have happened if you didn't kind of accidentally make it a few weeks ago?
Casey:
Like, what was the genesis of the iPad app?
Casey:
Remind me.
Marco:
There was a bug with using storyboards as launch images that would enable iPad sizing and iPad mode on apps that were not actually iPad apps.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
And do you think you would have still had an iPad app version if it wasn't for that?
Casey:
Probably not yet.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
So that's what I'm kind of driving at is the iPad thing didn't really scratch an itch for you.
Casey:
And so the only reason it exists today is because, well, it kind of accidentally farted its way into existence.
Casey:
And I think the Mac app, again, because it doesn't really scratch an itch for you,
Casey:
It's always going to be a lower priority.
Casey:
That makes sense because if it doesn't really scratch an itch, you're not going to care as much as you would if it was scratching an itch.
John:
I don't think it's so much about what he wants.
John:
He's trying to address a market.
John:
He doesn't feel like there's market demand.
John:
Correct me if I'm wrong, Mark, but it's not just like, oh, well, I wouldn't use it.
John:
If 50% of your users were clamoring for a Mac app, you'd be considering it much more strongly whether you use it or not.
Marco:
Yeah, so it's complicated.
Marco:
So first of all, there is certainly the calculus that goes on about like, okay, well, how many people are likely to even want this and use this?
Marco:
And, you know, is there any money in it?
Marco:
Is there going to be any meaningful user growth as a result of it?
Marco:
And you compare that versus how much time it takes to implement it.
Marco:
The iPad version I don't think is doing much for me long term because I just don't think like I think podcasts, most people who listen to podcasts probably listen on their phone.
Marco:
I'm pretty sure other people have discovered this information already.
Marco:
I don't think this is an outrageous guess.
Marco:
The iPad app was only worth doing because it was relatively easy and is not going to impose a massive ongoing cost of maintenance with things changing.
Marco:
The way I did it was was fairly low effort.
Marco:
I did an adaptive UI with a split view.
Marco:
So I'm doing a lot of like Apple stock UI stuff.
Marco:
It is never going to win me a design award or anything like that.
Marco:
No one is ever going to look at the Overcast iPad app and say, this is an amazing iPad app.
Marco:
This really shows off what the iPad can do.
Marco:
It doesn't.
Marco:
It's not.
Marco:
That's not why I made it.
Marco:
And there isn't enough of a market on the iPad, as far as I know, to justify doing that for this type of app.
Marco:
So I did what made sense because basically it was cheap and easy.
Marco:
The Mac is a totally different story.
Marco:
I'm guessing the size of the possible audience of people who would play podcasts on a Mac with this app is probably about the same size as the iPad audience.
Marco:
But it's way harder to actually get there.
Marco:
It takes way more effort because I have to rewrite the entire UI from scratch.
Marco:
and maintain that over time and deal with, you know, like, it's so nice being able to, like, you know, listen to core intuition and hear Daniel Jaka and Matt and Reese talk about, like, how terrible the Mac App Store is being some week with some terrible signing bug or something like that.
Marco:
It's so nice to listen to that and know that I don't have to worry about that because I don't have anything in the Mac App Store.
Marco:
And the fact is, if I did this, I'd be in the Mac App Store.
Marco:
I'd want to use things like Handoff and iCloud syncing and stuff like that, like for certain things, make things better.
Marco:
So going to the Mac would be a very expensive proposition in time and in ongoing maintenance.
Marco:
And I am very doubtful that enough of a market there exists to make that worth the loss.
Casey:
Yeah, I understand it.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's hard to say because I am, I'm no more convinced that I am right in that, that, and also that you are wrong.
Casey:
You know, I, I know I want a Mac app really badly, but for all I know, I'm the only one.
Casey:
So.
Casey:
So it very well could be that I'm steering you directly into financial ruin, figuratively speaking.
Casey:
But man, I feel like it would be a relatively good differentiator as well because what has a Mac app?
Casey:
Does Downcast have a Mac app?
Marco:
They definitely do.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't know if Instacast does.
Marco:
I'm not sure.
Marco:
Downcast definitely does.
Marco:
I think Instacast might.
Marco:
Yeah, I think Instacast does.
Casey:
And Underscore released a Podwrangler Mac app, I thought, in a beta capacity.
Casey:
And it was very much what you're describing visually.
Casey:
I mean, it was super simple, very stock, nothing too exciting, but it was functional and it got the job done.
Casey:
And I miss having that quite a bit.
Casey:
And I'm not saying I'm the only one, but I may be the only one at the same time.
Casey:
Now, Marco, how do you listen to podcasts as you're listening to Phish as you work?
Casey:
Yeah, I'm listening to music as I work.
Casey:
It's often Phish.
Casey:
When you're in front of the computer, my point is you're not listening to podcasts most of the time.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
I almost never listen to podcasts on my Mac or any Mac, which is one of the reasons why I have not been motivated to either make this or make the web app better.
Casey:
Right, that's exactly my point earlier.
Marco:
Yeah, you're exactly right.
Marco:
I mean, that is probably the biggest reason, honestly.
Marco:
It isn't about market demand.
Marco:
The biggest reason is that I don't care.
Marco:
There are features I would like to enable that would be cool, like I mentioned some of the cool handoff stuff.
Marco:
I would love to do stuff like that in a Mac app, but ultimately I would very rarely use my own Mac app as far as I can predict because I don't listen to podcasts while I work because I can't concentrate on both.
Marco:
And I know a lot of people are like that.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Now, let me ask you honestly, do you have any interest in people tweeting at you or anything like that if they are interested in the Mac app, or is that not going to change your mind?
Marco:
I mean, people have tweeted me about that before.
Marco:
Whenever I bring up the topic, whenever someone else does, I always get people saying, well, I'd buy it.
Marco:
And that is nice to hear.
Marco:
That does help.
Marco:
But it doesn't really indicate to me how much of a market there is.
Marco:
It just says, like, the market is probably greater than zero.
Marco:
But that doesn't really mean like hearing hearing from a handful of people on Twitter does not really tell me I'm you know this will probably bring in you know 50 grand a year or something like it doesn't it doesn't tell me like something I need to know or like this would this might bring in 20,000 new users a year or like it doesn't it doesn't tell me any of that information.
John:
It's got to charge 10 bucks for it.
Marco:
$9.99.
Marco:
Well, that's the other thing.
Marco:
So maybe I could, you know, make more money with it.
John:
It would be... Because it's bigger on the screen and, you know, the bigger it is in square inches, the more money you can charge.
John:
That seems to be the logic that's in people's heads.
Marco:
sure yeah however if i'm going to charge good money for it and i probably wouldn't i probably wouldn't make it if i wasn't going to charge you know another five or ten bucks for the unlock for the things like smart speed and stuff but if i'm gonna charge good money for an app i want it to be really good i don't want to charge money for a terrible app and so like like i'm not again this is going back to the half-ass thing i'm not going to make a terrible mac app that has almost no features with a five dollar an app purchase to unlock it's almost no features like that's
Marco:
That's not a very... I don't want to do that.
Marco:
I would feel bad doing that.
Marco:
But I'm also not going to make one that I don't feel good charging for and just release it for free and have that be it.
Marco:
So if I'm going to do it, I want to do...
Marco:
at least a reasonable job on it.
Marco:
It doesn't have to be amazing.
Marco:
Again, it could be the same approach as the iPad where it's like, I'm going for pure utility value, doesn't need to be fancy with the UI, will never win an Apple Design Award or anything like that.
Marco:
Most people would never even notice or care it's there, would never get any recognition whatsoever.
Marco:
But I would at least want it to be functional and to have the basic features of
Marco:
You know, the iPhone app only has three levels of navigation.
Marco:
I mean, it's not like it's not like it's a very complicated UI.
Marco:
So I don't know.
Marco:
Maybe I could do a basically little three pane kind of thing.
Marco:
I don't know.
Casey:
It makes sense.
Casey:
I just don't want it to make sense.
Casey:
I want you to say, you know what?
Casey:
That's a brilliant idea.
Casey:
I will do it tonight.
Marco:
Honestly, I would like to do it because I'm curious about Mac development.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons why every time there's a new OS X release, I hope for some kind of bringing over of something from UIKit into AppKit or some kind of replacement to AppKit that is more like UIKit.
Marco:
Because there are so many pretty fundamental differences between the two, between the way they work.
Marco:
And I don't know how hard it's going to be yet.
Marco:
I've never tried, really.
Marco:
But I know it's going to be really irritating, and it's going to slow me down a lot as I learn all these flaws and limitations of AppKit and all these little weird behavioral details and differences.
Marco:
And I think it would, you know, not only it would enable some of my laziness, but I think it would serve Apple well to reduce that barrier between the two, to make development for the Mac more like development for iOS.
Marco:
And I'm not saying bring over all of UIKit, because all of UIKit doesn't make sense on the Mac.
Marco:
And there's a lot of things that the Mac does that don't make sense on UIKit.
Marco:
So I'm not saying they have to be unified, but to at least be closer together, to be more similar than they are now, because...
Marco:
Right now, the prospect of developing a Mac app for an iOS developer has all this expense and all this risk I was just talking about.
Marco:
And if Apple can do anything to reduce that barrier, to reduce the expense, to make it...
Marco:
you know, less overall additional time to maintain a Mac app, then there will be more Mac apps and people will be happier with their Macs and Apple will make more money on the Mac app store and all these benefits.
Marco:
So I really hope they're going in that direction sometime soon.
Marco:
So maybe I should start a Mac app so they can then make everything easier a year later.
Marco:
yeah we'll see thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week overcast for mac um no thanks for the three sponsors this week studio neat hover and backblaze and we will see you next week now the show is over they didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental it was accidental
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
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-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M-E-N-T-M
Casey:
Hey, on an extremely random note, you know what I think a little sliver of me kind of wants?
Casey:
An overcast Mac app?
Casey:
Oh, no, that's more than just a little sliver.
Casey:
I kind of am intrigued by the Gulf R.
John:
Oh, the car, the Volkswagen Golf?
John:
I thought he said Golf, too.
John:
We may have found another hover.
John:
Oh, Golf, Golf.
John:
Yeah, I think we did find another hover.
Marco:
That's just how they say it in the South.
Marco:
Up here in winter, we say Golf.
Marco:
Fine.
Marco:
I'm done talking to you two.
John:
So tell me what the Golf R. Maybe you're not Southern anymore.
John:
Maybe you're becoming European because Americans don't like hot hatches.
John:
Oh, I hate hatchbacks.
John:
I absolutely hate hatchbacks.
John:
Well, then why are you into the Golf R?
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
That's the problem.
Casey:
I need an intervention quickly.
John:
No, I don't like hatchbacks.
Casey:
I don't like hatchbacks either, even though on paper they make a ton of sense because, you know, there's just plenty of room.
Casey:
Well, plenty ish of room.
John:
This golf bar looks like it has rubber bands wrapped around its wheels.
John:
Like the tires are so low profile.
John:
It's like hurting my butt just looking at the picture.
John:
Oh, that's marvelous.
John:
Maybe that's a concept.
Marco:
You definitely could not drive that in the state of New York.
Marco:
Like our roads are not that good.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I kind of want one.
Casey:
And I really like that blue, actually, that they do all the press shots in.
Marco:
See, the problem that you'd have with this, I think, is that while it would be small and fun, it would most likely be a giant step down in so many interior amenities and interior qualities things that... I'm not so sure.
Marco:
I think you might have ruined yourself with your current car, and it's going to be hard to step down to this.
John:
i mean it looks like the inside of a hatchback a lot of shiny stuff it's a little shinier i will give you that but it doesn't look that dissimilar from what i've got now what's the deal with flat bottom steering wheels is that so like you can have your legs crunched up more i don't know my theory and i don't know if this is correct someone can correct me is that flat bottom steering wheels have their origin in race cars where they cram the driver into some little tiny thing and there's not enough room for a full uh
John:
steering wheel so they had a flat bottom and that wormed its way up into cars where there's plenty of room just because, oh, flat bottom steering wheel equals race car.
John:
That may be entirely wrong, but that's the only theory I can come up with because as far as I can tell, functionally speaking, I don't see what advantage the flat bottom would give you because
John:
You can already tell what orientation the wheel is because the spokes, you know, like if you're, if you're looking for, and the lumps, like there's so many other things that you can tell, like you don't need a flat side to say, I can tell what angle I'm on.
John:
You can always tell, like they're not, it's not a smooth symmetrical wheel.
John:
So I don't understand the flat bottom.
Casey:
So I think I kind of want one.
Casey:
Like, not enough that I would get rid of the 335, but there's something appealing now that I'm a dad to having a little bit more trunk space, because the 335's trunk, not big.
Marco:
You think this would have more trunk space?
Marco:
It's a pretty small car.
John:
You've got one tiny child.
John:
You have plenty of trunk space.
John:
What do you think you're storing?
Casey:
Oh, no, I don't... I don't know, man, but when...
Casey:
When I put the stroller in my trunk, I'm losing – well, without like some seriously creative Marco-level packing, I'm losing a significant amount of trunk just with the damn stroller.
Casey:
And the reason we got the stroller we got was because – strictly because it folded up as small as it does.
Marco:
Well, just wait a year, and then definitely can go in an umbrella-type stroller, which is just so much smaller.
Marco:
They fold up so much smaller.
Marco:
And then they're almost the size of a skinny golf bag, where you can then put it long ways either direction.
Marco:
Well, in your car, you probably can't put it parallel to the car, but you could definitely put it perpendicular to the car.
Marco:
And yeah, it fits great.
Marco:
But yeah, if you're talking about trunk space, this is not going to help you.
Marco:
Hatchbacks,
Marco:
you know yes they have they have wider trunk openings and more vertical space yeah vertical space and if you're willing to fold the seats down you can get you can replace most of the interior with effectively trunk space but if you have a car seat there like you're not folding the seats down or at least not both of them i would almost guarantee that your current car your three series has overall roughly the same amount of space as this or slightly more for cargo area
Marco:
And maybe and what you're really really I mean if you're looking at like larger trunk space you're looking at either a hatchback or GT version of a three series sized car or you're looking at a larger car like a five series or an Accord or something like that like that's I don't think like if you're if you do more trunk space this is not the way to get it.
Casey:
I mean, I don't even know what I need trunk space-wise.
Casey:
I just feel like it will probably become an issue sooner rather than later.
Casey:
Only if you let it.
Casey:
Fair point.
Casey:
The other thing I was curious to hear your two cents on, the both of you, is Erin has no desire for a new car.
Casey:
She has a 2007 Mazda 6, which is...
Casey:
I think as nicely appointed as it came at the time, if memory serves.
Casey:
And she loves that car.
Casey:
And I would probably get murdered if I ever tried to take it away from her.
Casey:
But if we were to get her something different, what would we get her?
Casey:
The obvious answer to me is X5, used X5.
Casey:
The bonus answer, which is a
Casey:
is an SRT8 Grand Cherokee, which is crazy fast and crazy fun.
Casey:
But she would be stopping at a gas station every 10 miles.
John:
What's happening to you that you're considering quote-unquote high-performance SUVs?
John:
Why not?
John:
What's going on?
John:
What do you mean, why not?
John:
It's like either get...
John:
no that's it doesn't make any sense it's like it's like getting an off-road lamborghini which i know they're working on an suv but i mean like you know if you have it doesn't this is mean it's the it's the wrong combination of things if you're going to get some sort of big tall four-wheel drive suv-ish type thing don't get it with like low profile tires and a super fast that like it's you're mixing things that don't work together and
Casey:
Yeah, but that's what makes it so magical.
John:
No, that makes it so ridiculous.
John:
The Lamborghini was my example, but they're making an SUV, so I can't think.
John:
It's as if you had a Porsche SUV, but they make one.
John:
It's as if you had a Ferrari SUV.
John:
I think they've got one in the works, too.
John:
So there's no more examples I can use that are like...
John:
I don't know, maybe like a Lotus.
John:
They're probably going to make SUV to it.
John:
There's no good examples.
John:
But anyway, like it's not it's not a good mix of things.
John:
If you're going to get something that's big and tall and off road, you get something that's big and tall and off road.
John:
Don't try to make it into a performance car because it doesn't make any sense.
Marco:
Well, also, SUVs have a similar problem as what I was saying a minute ago about cargo space being... So a lot of people get these compact SUVs that are based on the Civic size platform.
Marco:
In BMW land, that would be definitely the X1, which is based on the actual 1 Series, and probably even the X3, where it's based on a compact car.
Marco:
Definitely the Lexus RX is one of these.
Marco:
I think it's the best-selling luxury one by a long shot.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So the problem is, again, they have a nice trunk size opening.
Marco:
And if you're willing to lose all the seats temporarily, you can carry large things in it.
Marco:
But if you have one or both of the seats up, you're not getting that much more space.
Marco:
Sometimes you're getting less space compared to just a larger sedan.
Marco:
Or especially if you're willing to go wagon or crossover-style hatchback, you can often get more space than you can in an SUV, or at least comparable space, without actually having to get an SUV and deal with the very different and generally worse handling, the large size, the worse gas mileage, all that stuff.
Marco:
So if what you're looking for is hauling around large pieces of furniture occasionally...
Marco:
yeah suv you know that's that's your best and but but even then like if you're going to get an suv for cargo space reasons don't get a compact one because they're usually not any more space than a reasonable size car you're going to have to go x5 size you're going to have to go like you know full-size sedan base or small truck base to get massive cargo space in an suv
John:
I pasted your answer in the chat room, Casey.
Marco:
What?
Marco:
Oh, the Tesla?
Marco:
That's unaffordable.
Casey:
You were looking at an X5.
Casey:
Suddenly, this is unaffordable.
Casey:
Well, no, I wouldn't buy an X5 new.
Casey:
I couldn't afford it new.
Casey:
It would have to be a few years old.
John:
Well, then you'd have to wait a little bit longer.
John:
But this will have plenty.
John:
This solves your problem because it is SUV-like.
John:
It's going to have pretty good performance and tons of cargo space.
John:
This is no engine.
LAUGHTER
Marco:
we're talking about the tesla model x by the way if you're going tesla you can just do the model s because the model s has tons of it's a very large sedan and it doesn't have the engine in the front so it so it has the model s has more space than my car by by a pretty big margin um because it's just it's like i think it's like four inches longer it's a very long car and it's it's a huge su it's a huge sedan like it is basically as big as a sedan can get without being completely outrageous um in this day and age
Casey:
So I would say if you're going to go Tesla, just get the Model S. I can't believe – I was going to ask you if they're suicide doors because it looked like the door handles in the back are butting up.
Casey:
Yeah, are butting up against the door handles from the front.
Casey:
And then I realized, oh, they're actually not gull wings, John.
Casey:
According to this website, they are falcon wings.
Yeah.
Marco:
What, are they faster?
John:
Do they open faster than the DeLorean doors?
John:
I don't even know.
John:
Is that the idea here?
John:
I didn't even realize they had those kind of doors.
John:
Now I take back the recommendation.
Casey:
Never mind.
Casey:
No, I got to read this to you.
Casey:
Whoa.
Casey:
Falcon wings.
Casey:
Calling them doors would be an understatement.
Casey:
While earning serious style points, they're functional first.
Casey:
Falcon wings open up and out of the way.
Casey:
In even the narrowest of parking spots, you easily step, not climb, into a Model X.
Casey:
That's really stupid.
Casey:
I also don't think this is a particularly good-looking car.
John:
No, it's not.
John:
It's like Catfish.
Casey:
I think that the Teslas are getting progressively less good-looking.
Casey:
Like the Model S, I like it.
Casey:
No, the Model S is a step up from the Roadster.
Casey:
The Roadster was the Lotus.
John:
I know, but it was ugly.
Marco:
Model S, I think, was pretty good in person.
Marco:
In person, it does look large.
Marco:
It does not look like a small car, because it isn't one.
Marco:
But besides how large it is, it looks pretty good.
Casey:
To go back a step, the right answer to my question, which is purely hypothetical of what do you get as a family bombing around car?
Casey:
It is a minivan.
Casey:
Without question, that is the right answer.
John:
For one kid, though, I feel like that's not time for a minivan.
Marco:
I'm just saying, like, hypothetically.
Marco:
For one kid, the largest you're allowed to go is a Subaru Outback.
John:
yeah and i think like especially you have to decide do you want a car do you want a truck like or do you want an suv right because that's the first decision because you go into often totally different directions if you decide i want something that's car like because then maybe you can look at wagons but still you're looking at cars if you want something that's suv like that's a whole different category of things and i feel like that that should rule out any anything with low profile tires anything you're with performance aspirations because you should be going off in a different direction then
Casey:
Right, so the thing is, so I think the right answer is a minivan for, like, if and when we ever have another kid, and then the two kids want to bring their friends along to wherever we're going, et cetera, et cetera.
Casey:
I'm not saying it's required.
John:
You should go and test drive a minivan, and that will dissuade you of them because they're so terrible to drive.
Marco:
By the way, I should also point out that the context of what you're saying is what you'd replace your wife's car with, not your car.
Marco:
Exactly.
Marco:
I think Aaron would kill you if...
John:
Right, yeah.
John:
But I'm just saying, at some point, you may have to drive the minivan, and minivan driving is just not good.
Casey:
No, so here's the thing.
Casey:
Erin and I have spoken about this in very big hypotheticals, and she has said she would probably prefer to have an SUV, but would absolutely entertain the idea of a minivan, but would absolutely vehemently refuse to have a wagon.
John:
That's weird, though.
John:
Yeah, a wagon is just like driving a car.
John:
You should really, really look at the 3GT, just saying.
Casey:
If I wanted a Subaru Outback, I'd drive a Subaru Outback.
Marco:
But it's better.
Casey:
It is, but it's a Subaru Outback.
Marco:
It really isn't.
Marco:
If you see a Subaru Outback, it's... Think of it as an ugly 3 Series, really.
Marco:
An Outback is definitely a wagon.
Marco:
An Outback is unquestionably a wagon.
Marco:
A 3GT does not really look like a wagon in person.
Marco:
Because it's a pretty different shape.
Marco:
Plus, I'm telling you, the giant back seat is amazing for car seats.
Marco:
It has so much back seat room because it's the Chinese platform.
Marco:
So it has the long wheelbase platform.
Marco:
It is so amazing how much rear seat room there is in that car.
Marco:
And for car seats, it's just luxurious.
Marco:
yeah i don't know i mean this is all entirely hypothetical i just thought it'd be an interesting discussion to have that probably everyone will tell us that they hate but um well screw them it's the after show we can do whatever we want but i mean i mean really i think the answer is is that you replace your wife who's taking care of your child full-time you replace her car with whatever she wants
Marco:
Oh, absolutely.
Casey:
That's the right answer to this question.
Casey:
Without question, you are absolutely correct.
Casey:
I was just curious, you know, what would you guys do in this hypothetical where it's probably going to end up being a SUV or a minivan?
John:
i like wagons and i think like it's it's the great it's the greatest the greatest compromise between like you get a whole bunch of extra space but you still get to drive a car like a real life car like it's not there's nothing about it that's not car like it handles that way the weight is usually similar like it's it's
John:
Far fewer compromised.
Casey:
What I would have done if this was like a year or two ago and this was all happening and I needed to have the family car absolutely would have rocked a CTSV wagon, which is hideous.
Marco:
It is like every other CTSV.
Casey:
Yeah, pretty much.
Casey:
It is unbelievably, unbelievably hideous.
Casey:
But God, to just smoke anything, anything I run into, except maybe Marco's car, maybe would be amazing.
Marco:
oh god that'd be fun i mean you can look at like to answer you know what would we do in this scenario you can i had the exact same scenario and i did do something and i got a three gt for for tiff got a three gt um i would you know among for given your priorities given aaron's priorities that i'm mostly just guessing based on her her liking of the mazda six um i would say first of all it's worth looking into the current mazda sixes i do they still make them i don't even know
Casey:
Yeah, and actually, they had several ugly years right after Aaron's, but they've gotten very pretty again.
Marco:
Yeah, so look at that.
Marco:
I would argue that you... So how long is Aaron likely to have this car?
Marco:
Are we talking like a decade, five years, less?
Marco:
What are we talking about?
Casey:
Oh, you mean like a hypothetical new one, you mean?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Oh, well, I mean, her car we bought in 2007, and it's 2014, and she'd probably kill me before she gave up that car.
Marco:
Okay, so we're talking like, you know, pretty long term.
Marco:
So you figure like, you know, you have to ask yourself, like, are you going to have in this interval that you're going to have this car, not forever, but just in the interval that she's going to be likely to own this car.
Marco:
How many kids are you likely to have total and how old will they be?
Marco:
oh yeah fair point and so you so yeah so you have to look at that right so in the next let's say let's say five to ten years in the next seven years whatever it is how many kids like what is your likely need going to be in this time span that should in that that right there because one kid you're fine with anything one kid you're fine with the three series
Marco:
um it is extremely likely that you'd be very fine with any full-size sedan uh you know a cord size uh five series size model s would certainly do it it's kind of overkill but you can do it um you know a full-size sedan would serve you very well aaron currently drives a full-size sedan and so you know chances are she probably likes full-size sedans all right
Marco:
right um so i would start with other full-size sedans um if you want to go upscale consider things like the lexus es which is not our style at all but overall a very nice car and it's not that ridiculous i don't think um it's just mom drove them for years and and i spent a lot of time in them and various family trips with them and it's they they hold a ton they're huge cars they're based on the avalon and uh so they're huge cars they they're
Marco:
You know, they're luxurious inside and they're not sporty at all.
Marco:
That's the problem.
Marco:
But overall, they're pretty good.
Marco:
You know, things like the Accord.
Marco:
I mean, look, John, I mean, you've never you have a family with two kids.
Marco:
You've never had an SUV, right?
Marco:
You have an Accord.
John:
Well, before I went to Accord, what I looked what I would actually buy for myself if I was buying like a bigger car with more space, if I felt like I needed one as I would.
John:
probably look at i would maybe decide against but i would look at volvo wagons because i oh yeah back in the day i still have it in my head that volvo was still the most safety focus company now that they've changed under seven times or whatever who knows that's still true uh but i have good memories of volvo's uh and they make i think they make a four-wheel drive wagon that's actually a wagon and
John:
I would look at them.
John:
Maybe I would just decide that they're way too expensive and that they don't drive as well as a car that costs the amount of money.
John:
I could never bring myself to pull a trigger, but I would look at that because I see lots of people around the neighborhood driving around in Volvo wagons and I like the idea of wagons to have something that's car-like or whatever and it would not be a nice car inside and it would not handle nicely and not drive nicely, but...
John:
I would have a feeling that it was safe, whether that's true or not.
John:
So that's what I would look at.
Casey:
Volvo's used to be very into offering five speeds back in the day, even in like wagons.
Casey:
Is that still true?
John:
Yep.
John:
No, I had.
John:
That's what I learned.
John:
That's what I learned stick on.
John:
I doubt it's still true.
John:
I'm sure.
John:
Not anymore, but...
John:
Yeah, I think Volvo has changed a lot from the Volvo that I knew in my youth.
John:
But that's what I would look at.
John:
And I think if I decided that a wagon was something that I wanted, I would wander over to the Audi.
John:
But in reality, I don't have money for either one of these cars.
John:
So that's why I have a Honda Accord, and that's why I would continue to buy it.
Casey:
Well, and again, the key here is that if in this hypothetical thought exercise, it would almost certainly be like a two- or three-year-old used car because we don't have the money to spend on one of these ridiculous monstrosities.
John:
Yeah, we don't like used cars.
John:
I mean, realistically speaking, if I really needed more room, I would end up with a Honda Odyssey.
John:
That's just what I would end up with.
John:
I would not like it, but that's what I would get because –
John:
There's tons of them around here.
John:
That is the minivan that I can most stomach.
John:
I have driven in one.
John:
I do not like them.
John:
But, you know, you got to do what you got to do.
Marco:
And you can also, you know, the world of full-size sedans and, you know, medium-sized SUVs like the X5 and stuff,
Marco:
If you're looking at the luxury brands, you know, you can do the same thing you do with your car.
Marco:
Get one that's... You got to use one.
Marco:
Get one that's three years old or something.
Marco:
Like, get it, you know, a three-year-old 5 Series or A6, I think, would be a pretty solid car.
Marco:
You know, it's a bit of money for that, but certainly cheaper than a Tesla.
Yeah.
Marco:
I would start with full-size sedans and evaluate your needs based on how many kids you think you're going to have and how old they're going to be during this time span.
Marco:
Because the reality is a full-size sedan can hold enough for two kids.
Marco:
It's like...
Marco:
You can't be the school bus that brings all of the kids on a field trip, but by the time that is likely to happen, that might be like eight years from now, because your kid's going to be older by the time that's actually a thing that happens.
Marco:
So that might be the end of this car's lifespan.
John:
Right, right.
John:
Every time this debate comes up, I always just think about our Volkswagen Rabbit that my parents took the three of us skiing in for a week.
John:
That's insane.
John:
Three kids, Volkswagen Rabbit, skis, ski equipment, boots, no rentals, like bringing everything with us.
John:
One week packing.
Marco:
and then that's the thing like growing up like my family always had corollas and then camry's and that was it and we and there were two kids and that was it like and we we made it work like people you'll make it work no matter what size car you have people make it work all the time people in europe think we're all big fat slobs and we're crazy for buying these giant things because because we are well they are right exactly they are right but like you know
Marco:
Families in Europe deal with much smaller cars and they just make it work.
Marco:
That's what people do.
Marco:
Whatever size car you have, you're going to make it work.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
It might be more or less convenient at certain times.
Marco:
But also, don't choose your vehicle for this imagined scenario of something that you might want to do once or twice while you have it.
Marco:
Like, this is why so many people buy giant SUVs who will never really need a lot of that, you know, space or capability or off-roadness or whatever.
Marco:
Like, well, what if I need to move furniture?
Marco:
Okay, well, how many times in the last three years have you moved furniture that needed an SUV?
Marco:
Like, you know, ask yourself things like that.
Marco:
Rent a van from U-Haul.
Marco:
Yeah.
John:
Be done with it.
Marco:
Or pay the 70 bucks to get it delivered.
Marco:
Because, like, you know, how many times are you going to need to do that?
Marco:
You know?
Marco:
So that's like, you know, look at your priorities like that.
Marco:
You know, just...
Marco:
think about what you would actually need and use most days.
Marco:
And just get something that fits that.
Marco:
Because most of the time, you're not going to be carting around your kid and five of their friends in the next six years.
Marco:
That's very unlikely to happen.
Casey:
You're absolutely right.
Casey:
And on the list of things that I just do not understand, along with people who don't carry cash, is people who buy pickup trucks and use the pickup bed to haul pickuppy things twice a year, just like you're saying.
John:
They do it zero times a year.
John:
They have covers on it.
John:
Nothing is allowed to touch the bed.
John:
You'll scratch it.
John:
I don't have a bed liner.
John:
I do have a bed liner, but you can't scratch the bed liner.
John:
That's why they have four-door pickup trucks.
Marco:
There's a serious problem.
Marco:
There's massive sections of this country where a truck is just what you get.
Marco:
Everybody has trucks.
John:
Ford F-150, the best-selling car in America for many, many years when we were growing up.
John:
I think it has been displaced by the Camry and the Accord now, but it's still always in the top few.
Marco:
Yeah, and it always depends whether you include fleet vehicles or not also.
John:
But you're so right about SUVs.
John:
The old SUV thing used to be like, oh, you're never going to take that off-road.
John:
But no one says that anymore because everyone realizes these are not made for off-road, with the exception of maybe a couple of Range Rover stuff.
John:
So everyone's fine that they're just cars, but then it's like, what is it that you're getting?
John:
And so many SUVs have just...
John:
squeezed in the edges so much that they have so little room for luggage and they only have two rows of seats and the middle seat is not more comfortable and so it's like what you're getting is a really tall bad handling gas guzzling car and that's what people want because i need to be up high like that is the big selling point you know i want to be up high there is some image stuff like of same thing with the image of the pickup truck like some part of your image you know you're buying a car like it's like fashion but
John:
I'm the kind of person who drives a whatever.
John:
Right.
John:
And some people feel like I'm the kind of person who drives a Lexus SUV because, you know, I'm a suburban dad and I want to show that I'm a family man or whatever it is that you're whatever it is that you're as John Roddick would say, repping.
John:
So with your with your vehicle, that's part of the message.
John:
Right.
John:
And it used to be there was like off road stuff that went away so quickly.
John:
So now I feel like for your for the thing that you are presenting to yourself, you are trading a lot with the SUVs because you're no longer getting more, you know, luggage space.
John:
You're never getting anything really off-road-wise.
John:
A lot of them are just front-wheel drive, not even four-wheel drive.
John:
The best-selling models are always the front-wheel drive ones.
John:
Yep.
John:
It's a big sacrifice in terms of cost and mileage and handling and the possibility of tipping over or whatever other things you might be giving up for this image that you're putting out.
John:
In the end, plain old boring cars...
John:
And maybe wagons still offer the best compromise in exchange for having something that says nothing that you want to say about you.
John:
Like, no, what does a Camry say about you?
John:
It says you bought the default car.