The Windows of Siracusa County
Casey:
I was thinking of closing some of my Pro windows that I've had open for five years now.
Casey:
And then I thought better of it.
Casey:
I have upgraded my podcasting setup, but I have not yet posted about it on my site.
John:
Has it really happened then, Casey?
John:
A podcast setup upgrades in the woods, and no one hears about it on your blog.
Casey:
I have spent $10 before tax to upgrade my podcasting setup.
Marco:
Hmm, now what could that be?
Casey:
You will not guess, but I would love to hear you try.
John:
$10 for the Snickers bars.
Marco:
I'm guessing it's either software?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
Or, okay, or I was going to guess like a giant blanket or something, but you still sound a little bit echoey, so it's probably not that.
Casey:
No, the blanket's still on the wall, even though Aaron keeps asking me to take it down.
Casey:
The chat room is getting in on it.
Casey:
It is not a spit filter, although I like that even better than pop filter.
Casey:
The microphone that I'm using now has one built in.
Casey:
No, it is not gold audio cable.
Casey:
No, it is not a heating pad.
Casey:
Yes, $10.
Marco:
You can't get gold audio cable for $10.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
Gold cables start at $30.
Casey:
All right, I will give you one better.
Casey:
I will try to give this away.
Casey:
I purchased this $10 item from Apple.
Marco:
can you purchase anything for ten dollars from apple that's not software yeah how about that yeah i was gonna say a thunderbolt to ethernet adapter is like 19 yeah i mean like you can't go into the apple store and buy anything for less than at least 15 i succeeded in doing exactly that hmm what does apple sell for ten dollars and it was not software you said so it is not software hmm was it was that its actual like regular price or was it they don't really put something on sale at the stores
Marco:
What do they sell at $10?
Marco:
Did you get a SIM removal tool and somehow pay $10 for it?
Marco:
Screen protectors are $15.
Marco:
At least.
Marco:
This is much more entertaining than I thought it was going to be, actually.
Marco:
This has become a topic.
Marco:
It's like, what can you buy in an Apple store for $10?
John:
Wait a second.
John:
Is it a retail Apple store or online?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Retail.
Casey:
And the chat room has figured it out.
John:
MagSafe adapter.
John:
Yep.
John:
$10.
John:
Yep.
John:
Oh, wow.
John:
Wow.
John:
I thought that I thought that would be $19 to just because it'd be like, well, we can't sell something for $10.
Marco:
I thought for sure it must have been like a third party product sold in an Apple store.
John:
So is this so your your laptop won't run out of battery power during the podcast or something?
Casey:
I used to use my work high-res anti-glare 2011 MacBook Pro, 15-inch MacBook Pro, but the fans constantly screamed no matter what I did.
Casey:
No matter what I did, they were always screaming.
Casey:
And Marco was very gentle about basically telling me to shut up and deal and use a different computer.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So eventually I had gotten Erin a brand new MacBook Air.
Casey:
This was a few months ago.
Casey:
I got her a brand new MacBook Air and I started borrowing that in order to record.
Casey:
Well, unbeknownst to Marco and John, I was doing this on battery power on Wi-Fi.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Which, if Dan Benjamin ever heard this, he will probably fly to Richmond and murder me.
Marco:
I'm so happy you never told us that.
Marco:
You're welcome.
Marco:
That was the right call.
Casey:
Now, I'm still on Wi-Fi, but now at least I'm plugged into the wall.
Marco:
No, the Wi-Fi thing I'm less concerned about because I know you're a nerd.
Marco:
I know you're set up, but I know that you are probably right next to your router.
Marco:
I am indeed.
Marco:
And Wi-Fi is not as unreliable as it used to be.
Marco:
Modern Wi-Fi is really not that bad.
Marco:
um if you're if you're anywhere near the near the base station but the running on battery thing that would that would stress me out like crazy yep like even if even if i was 100 like i would always have that stress even if i even if i had a fully charged eight hour battery it would still stress me out
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
And the MacBook Air does last an eternity, but I kid you not, those times that I told you I needed to go because my battery was dying, that was not a lie.
Casey:
That's because the battery was dying.
Casey:
And real-time follow-up from me to me, it was $10.52 with tax.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
That's incredible.
Casey:
I will also say that I walked in with my dad, who happened to be in at the time, and I was all smug and happy with myself because he has a 5S.
Casey:
I have a 6.
Casey:
I was going to go in, use the Apple Store app.
Casey:
I was going to use Apple Pay within the app and walk out and not have to speak to anyone.
John:
Well, that would mean that you could actually find this adapter on a wall display where you could get it and someone didn't have to go into the back or whatever and get it for you.
Casey:
Right.
Casey:
So as it turns out, it was on the floor, although it was on the opposite side of the store from where I expected.
Casey:
It was, if you're looking at any given Apple store, any normal one anyway, and you have the genius bars in the back, I thought it was to the right.
Casey:
It turns out it was to the left.
Casey:
And so I, well, actually a person had,
Casey:
accosted me in a happy way when I walked in because it was surprisingly empty.
Casey:
And they directed me to the thing and I said, okay, I'll just pay for it with the app.
Casey:
In a nice way, you can go away now.
Casey:
Well, then I go to open the Apple Store app and it hangs.
Casey:
And so I think to myself, Self, I'm a smart guy.
Casey:
I know there are iBeacons all over the place in this store.
Casey:
I wonder if having Bluetooth on is somehow confusing it.
Casey:
So I turned Bluetooth off, forced quit, started again.
Casey:
Nothing.
Casey:
Still hangs.
Casey:
Self, maybe it realizes that the Apple Store Wi-Fi is nearby.
Casey:
You should kill the Wi-Fi and that'll do the trick.
Casey:
Well, then does it even work after that?
Casey:
Yeah, because I have AT&T.
Marco:
No, but I'm saying, like, does it even know that you are in the Apple Store if it doesn't have one of those things?
Casey:
Ah, good point, actually.
Casey:
I didn't think about that.
Casey:
That's a very fair point.
Casey:
So I forced to quit the app, turned off the Wi-Fi, started the app again, didn't work.
Casey:
So fine.
Casey:
So eventually I have to go over to someone with my tail between my legs and say, hey, can I play for this, please?
Casey:
Because I kind of can't do it on my iPhone all by myself.
Casey:
And so then...
Casey:
this nice person allows me to pay.
Casey:
And I say to my dad, not thinking really about what I was saying, oh, my Apple Pay moment is ruined.
Casey:
And then the gentleman said, well, no, it's not.
Casey:
You can Apple Pay right here.
Casey:
And then because I had like the thought of iBeacons in my head, I thought, oh, and the thought of using Apple Pay an app, I thought, oh, well,
Casey:
I guess I'm gonna have to like turn Bluetooth on, aren't I?
Casey:
And I say that out loud.
Casey:
And then I realized the absurdity of what I just said, because it's all NFC.
John:
This is like how doctors make the worst patients, you know?
John:
Yeah, seriously.
John:
Tech nerds make the worst Apple Pay customers.
Casey:
So that's the thing is that I said out loud, that was my critical mistake was saying it out loud.
Casey:
Oh, I should probably turn Bluetooth on, shouldn't I?
Casey:
And then I realized the absurdity of what I said, and he just sets his iPod touch on the
Casey:
on the counter.
Casey:
And I realized what he means.
Casey:
And so I put my phone on top of his iPod touch, which sounds awkward, but it wasn't.
Casey:
And sure enough, everything worked, no problem.
Casey:
Well, then it gets better because I start to walk away thinking, oh, he'll send me my receipt, no problem, because they know what my credit card is.
Casey:
And they'll
Casey:
They'll send it automatically.
Marco:
I just had this exact same issue.
Casey:
And they go to walk away.
Casey:
And then the guy says, Oh, do you want your receipt?
Casey:
And I said, Oh yeah, you can email it to me.
Casey:
And you know, whatever the email is on file.
Casey:
And he looks and he's like, Oh, I don't have an email on file.
Casey:
And at that point it occurs to me, the whole freaking point in Apple pay is that I have, you know, the device, whatever, whatever ID.
Casey:
So it's a unique credit card number for the device.
Casey:
Of course they don't have it because I've never used it there before.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So basically, I should not be allowed in an Apple store unsupervised is the summary.
John:
The only way this could have gone worse is maybe if your credit card was declined and then if you left the thing in the store.
Casey:
That's true, actually.
Marco:
Or the payment didn't go through, but you didn't know it.
Marco:
So you started walking out and then you get tackled by security.
Marco:
You're shoplifting a $10 MagSafe adapter.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Anyway, do you want to start with some follow up?
Marco:
We have so much follow-up.
Casey:
We have a lot of follow-up.
Casey:
It's not a lot.
Casey:
Oh, says the king.
Casey:
All right, let's talk about Transmit, the app by panic.
Casey:
What happened with them, John?
John:
So they got their app rejected for, what was it, for like exporting files to iCloud or something, and we complained about it in the past two shows.
John:
And I think towards the end of our last show, bemoaning the state of the app store and the various rejections, I said...
John:
both the worst and the best thing that could happen is that these people who have had their apps rejected get contacted by someone at Apple and they quietly work out their differences and their apps are reinstated.
John:
And I said, that's the best thing that happened because, hey, yay, we get the apps that we wanted.
John:
Those application developers get their apps onto the store just like they wanted.
John:
um and it seems like everybody's happy but it's the worst thing that can happen because this is what happens all the time like there's some there's some problem a bunch of people get their apps rejected or or you know or pulled from the store there's lots of blog posts about it we all complain apple contacts them quietly works it out with them uh and puts them back in and the cycle just repeats itself like you're never going to we don't we never get our chrysitunity right we're never going to get
John:
Uh, it never gets bad enough that something has to be done.
John:
I can't say that's necessarily the case this time, because sometimes the outcome is the app gets pulled.
John:
There's a whole bunch of brass people complain and Apple doesn't change its mind.
John:
Like an example of that from the early days would be like, I don't know, like, uh,
John:
nes emulators or mame type things or all sorts of things that have been on the store briefly and then immediately pulled because you're not allowed to do emulation or run code or stuff like that and apple pretty much hasn't budged on that except for you know scripting engines and games and other little gray areas that i think eventually got written into the guidelines but
John:
It doesn't always turn out positively, but this type of thing where they make dumb decisions, they linger, we have to make a bunch of noise, and then it gets worked out.
John:
That never makes anything get better.
John:
We're not making progress.
John:
If we were making progress, the cycle wouldn't keep repeating itself.
John:
So that best worst thing that was going to happen did happen.
John:
And I just saw someone add to the notes that didn't just happen for transmit, also happened for drafts, which got pulled for its extension.
John:
And of course, we talked about pCalc, which got rejected and then reinstated.
John:
So it's good in that in this case, the apps that we want to see on the store actually did get on the store eventually.
John:
It's bad in that it seems like, you know, it doesn't seem like that Apple is making forward progress on it.
John:
The only hope I have is that
John:
Under this new Apple regime where, you know, it just seems like Tim Cook is less stubborn.
John:
Tim Cook's Apple seems to me to be slightly less stubborn than Steve Jobs' Apple was.
John:
Is it because Tim Cook is less stubborn than Steve Jobs?
John:
Maybe I'm just projecting.
John:
I don't know.
John:
But we already talked about how the engineering organization has...
John:
made progress in doing things that previously they were quote unquote too stubborn to do you know whether that was the you know a corporate directive or whatever but for years there are things we wanted that we didn't think oh they're never going to let you use keyboards uh custom keyboards and ios and they did and extensions and all that other stuff that is good forward progress um and it could be i'm holding out hope maybe that
John:
Maybe someone high up in the organization has sent the word down that the App Store needs to do less of this stuff, and maybe this will be... Maybe the next time this happens, we'll have a better, faster response, or maybe this won't happen again in the same way.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, we'll just have to wait, but...
John:
For some reason, I find myself slightly more optimistic.
John:
Even though the best worst thing did happen, I find myself slightly optimistic that Tim Cook's going to be like, why do we keep seeing all these stories about this stuff?
John:
Why can't we get our acts together on that?
John:
What is it that we're doing that's making us do these things and then reversing ourselves?
John:
Obviously, we're not even happy with our own decisions because it's not like they're reversing, I don't think, because of pressure.
John:
It's like inattention.
John:
The banal evil of inattention where
John:
It's like, is there something going on over there?
John:
Did somebody reject something?
John:
Why don't we take a look at that?
John:
And by the time people take a look at it, they'll be like, oh, this is panic.
John:
They're great.
John:
Why are we rejecting for this?
John:
This thing is just fine.
John:
You know, like they reverse because if the best minds in the company were put on it, they never would have rejected it in the first place.
John:
They're just rejected because of, you know, the whims of some individual reviewer or something.
John:
And that is a structural problem.
John:
The fact that that type of thing can happen and not be resolved without a long time passing.
John:
Anyway, so there you go.
Casey:
Well, and this is a little bit better.
Casey:
A full-on rejection is a little bit better than what some developers go through.
Casey:
Mark Christian wrote me a little while ago, a couple of weeks ago, saying that he's one of the developers of the app Dragon Drop.
Casey:
That's D-R-A-G-O-N-D-R-O-P, which I've mentioned a long time ago on the show.
Casey:
Well, anyway, he wrote in, he said, I have another idea, or excuse me, another app in the store called Time Bar.
Casey:
When I tried to publish an update for Yosemite, App Review decided that the fundamental idea of the app is unacceptable.
Casey:
And I think that's because it kind of paints the menu bar as a progress meter.
Casey:
And the idea of this app, I guess, is to count down until you get up and walk around or maybe the turkey's done or what have you.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
Anyway.
Casey:
So AppReview decided that the fundamental idea of the app is unacceptable.
Casey:
It violates the Mac's menu bar and rejected me.
Casey:
So he's stuck in limbo because it isn't kicked out of the store, but he can't update it.
Casey:
And that's an even worse place to be than a full on rejection as far as I'm concerned.
Casey:
And, you know, get the hell out of here.
Casey:
But, I mean, I guess maybe that's what Panic had to deal with.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
I guess so.
Casey:
Maybe that is the same.
John:
Well, you can always pull your own app, right?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, I just did so.
Marco:
And it is, you know, it's different on the Mac because you don't have to use the Mac App Store.
Marco:
You know, on iOS, if you have that limbo on iOS, like, your product is just dead.
Marco:
Like, you will never be able to do that product again in that way.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
I feel less bad for Mac developers in this regard just because there is another option there and it's not a bad option.
Marco:
Whereas the iOS option is like, well, you can put it on the Cydia store.
Marco:
That's like the iOS equivalent of we can go live in the woods.
Marco:
There's nothing... That is not a business model.
Marco:
Please email Casey if you disagree.
Marco:
I think that it's important when we hear things like
Marco:
transmit and drafts, getting their bad decisions reversed.
Marco:
The reason why we were mad about this is not that we disagreed with the rule.
Marco:
I mean, some of us might have disagreed with the rule, but that's not the main reason why this is so destructive.
Marco:
The main reason why it's so destructive is that we can't tell in advance what the rules will be.
Marco:
and and apple's refusal to to document more of these rules and again part of that is just because they haven't decided it yet and and i recognize that that's an issue but part of it also is like at the very top of their rules document it says this is a living document and it's been pretty dead for a long time like it there's a lot of rules that are that are not on it a lot of newer rules that have that have seemingly no intention of ever getting onto it
Marco:
And it just seems like when Apple does things with many of the rules, it just seems like, well, that makes sense.
Marco:
It's common sense or you can see why they're doing it.
Marco:
That's a sensible rule.
Marco:
You can't really argue too much with it or you at least see their point of view.
Marco:
And you can predict when you're developing an app like Launcher.
Marco:
I totally get that that was going to be rejected because they've had a longstanding rule against these home screen within an app style of apps, launchers like that.
Marco:
They've had a lot of issues with those in the past.
Marco:
So there are certain rules that the developers all know, like, okay, this idea for an app, before I even start building it, this will almost certainly get rejected, so I shouldn't build it.
Marco:
The problem is when the rules start getting really capricious and unpredictable and unjustifiable, then developers start wasting time or actually shipping apps first and then they get rejected later, which hurts their relationship with their customers in addition to wasting all the time of having the app being built.
Marco:
It's pretty bad when developers waste months on something that they're pretty sure is going to get approved.
John:
The worst part is that it's like Apple doesn't speak with one voice on any of these things.
John:
I mean, again, the reversals are not because they changed their mind, but just because the corporation as a whole believes that the panics app should be allowed.
John:
But the people who are tasked with the individuals who are tasked with that decision at that particular time said no.
John:
So what I was thinking of is, you know, well, what if we had, you know, if you have a questionable question,
John:
app or feature idea as part of your dev membership blah blah blah you get two or three of these you know instead of a technical support incident you can say ask Apple I am playing a feature like this and you just describe it before you've written a line of code will this be allowed in the store and have a system whereby if they say yes it will be allowed in the store that you have some reasonable hope that that answer is meaningful in any way well that's hard though barring a rule change
John:
if you were to ask you know like the same type of people who came up with the decision now to say uh transmit is allowed in the store with that feature right when faced with this question hey there's a feature say that that same group of people whoever they are were faced with the same question before panic had written a single line of code and said we're thinking about this feature to transmit it's going to do x y and z uh
John:
is that going to be allowed those same people hopefully could come up with the same answer six months ago like i don't think that much has changed since then and say yeah go ahead build that or you know or just be able to ask them ahead of time but the idea now is like if i can get somebody an app review and ask them depending on who i get an app review the answer means nothing because if i get a different person when my app is reviewed and they don't share information oh yeah i said that guy could do that feature and it's okay or like
John:
Even if the answer is we don't know yet and we have to, like, sort of regroup and have a big meeting and decide whether it's, like, do that beforehand.
John:
Like, ideally, do that before you even write the guidelines and then put it in the guidelines.
John:
But say it's something they never thought of.
John:
Like, hmm, we never considered this because that can happen.
John:
We never even considered doing this in an application.
John:
We'll get back to you.
John:
And then you're kind of in a holding pattern.
John:
But at least you're not, like...
John:
either just guessing or like asking the best sources you do have and then them telling you probably yes no maybe because those mean nothing right the idea that the the company can't decide uh can't speak with one voice on this there is no one voice there is no and i know there's millions of app developers and every single one of them can't be bugging apple and saying can i have this feature but that's why i'm saying like it would have to be a limited resource like technical support incidents because there's a cost associated with it and so on and so forth but
John:
I think this is a system that could work if, again, Apple could get its act together with App Store stuff.
John:
And some of the things like, oh, you know, if it's a situation they didn't think of, some of these things with, like, sending a file to Apple Drive, like, people were baffled because, like, Marco just said, well, it's not because we didn't like the rule.
John:
In this case, what rule?
John:
The rule they were citing didn't even mention iCloud Drive.
John:
And the second thing is everyone said, isn't that the whole point of iCloud Drive?
John:
Maybe we're misunderstanding what the point of iCloud Drive was, but are you supposed to be able to send files?
John:
It doesn't make any sense.
John:
And clearly, the so-called living document hasn't been updated to reflect all these new things we've got.
John:
There's no new clauses or anything in there for all these features that we got on iOS 8.
John:
I'm still going to say that Apple's dealing with server-side software and services is worse than this, but this is probably the App Store, the iOS App Store, and I guess the Mac App Store, too, are their worst externally visible administrative problems in the company, I think.
Marco:
These kind of decisions are usually not like one random reviewer somewhere.
Marco:
Usually it gets escalated at least a couple levels up.
Marco:
From what I understand and from what I'm kind of hearing rumblings of, this is a mid-level fight with an Apple.
Marco:
It's a mid-level conflict between mid-level department
John:
Well, there are always mid-level things, but like when a mid-level thing, like when stories start coming out and when people are writing blog posts, that becomes the message of the day is Apple did something bad and we're angry about it.
John:
Eventually, those mid-level fights start to filter up to the higher levels.
John:
The higher level people go, what's going on down there with you guys?
John:
I saw some stories about this, the other thing.
John:
Like nobody likes bad press.
John:
Nobody likes to, you know, and if it gets up to their level,
John:
Then all of a sudden, you know, whoever it is, a more senior vice president goes down to the mid-level people and says, you know, get your stuff together.
John:
What the hell are you guys doing?
John:
Work it out.
John:
When your internal problems end up, you know, on the pages of, you know, tech news sites, we have a problem.
John:
And if that happens too many times, hopefully somebody really high up will be like, we have a structural problem here and we need to sort this out.
John:
Like it seems like they did sort out and decide to do on the engineering side.
John:
They made massive structural changes that have resulted in what we feel on the outside as positive change, right?
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And you can tell, like, you know, we... Right now, nothing is resolved.
Marco:
You know, with Transmit getting approved, draft getting re-approved, this doesn't actually resolve anything yet.
Marco:
What will resolve this is if we stop hearing about things like this, where it's like, oh, surprise, there's this rule no one could have predicted, and we're going to half enforce it with some apps.
Marco:
Like, that's the problem here.
Marco:
So this...
Marco:
I hope that what that that that that upgrade that happened in engineering that got them to increase collaboration, you know, in Tim Cook's words, I hope they can apply that to this area, too, because clearly this is not like one rogue employee making bad decisions.
Marco:
This is clearly an ongoing conflict within the middle of these organizations that somebody has to resolve.
Marco:
And it's not going to resolve itself at the levels it's at.
Marco:
Obviously, there's some kind of back and forth going on here.
Marco:
That's that's not good.
John:
It was the launcher developer.
John:
Right, that the App Store people said, we rejected your app because it's a high-profile app, and we figured by rejecting your app, a lot of people will notice, and it will get the message out to the rest of the developers that they shouldn't do things like you've done, like they were making an example of you.
John:
Like, that's their... Someone...
John:
supposedly articulated this philosophy of app store of this is how we communicate our policies.
John:
We don't write them into guidelines.
John:
Instead, we pick a high profile app and make an example of it.
John:
So all the other application developers see its head on the, on the pike and, you know, no, not to go there anymore.
John:
No, don't do what this developer did, which is a, it's amazing.
John:
Someone would say that out loud to a developer and B, even if that's your secret strategy, it's a terrible secret strategy too.
John:
Like that is not the correct way to communicate to your application developers.
John:
There are better ways.
Yeah.
Marco:
Yeah, that's what I call disgusting on my blog because it's like that is really, truly disgusting.
Marco:
And yeah, so it was the developer of Launcher.
Marco:
I think his name is Greg something.
Marco:
I'll look it up and put it in the show notes.
Marco:
And yeah, he was paraphrasing the conversation he had with like a reviewer called him in response to some of his inquiries.
Marco:
That's what they do.
Marco:
Like you inquire.
Marco:
And then if you're lucky, you get like a random phone.
Marco:
This is what I said as the Agent Smith phone call.
Marco:
You get a random phone call from somebody who usually you don't get a name or any way to contact them again.
Marco:
This is a one-way, one-time phone call coming from the main Apple switchboard number.
Marco:
There's nothing you can do about it.
Marco:
They're usually very terse.
Marco:
I've gotten a couple of these calls for various questions I've asked or issues I've run into.
Marco:
And usually they're pretty terse because they know that there's a good chance they're going to be quoted and put on a blog somewhere.
Marco:
And so, you know, they conserve words and they're very noncommittal with many of the things they say.
Marco:
And occasionally you'll get somebody who is a little bit more helpful.
Marco:
And he did.
Marco:
And I think they were a little too helpful in explaining, you know, why they're doing some of these things.
Marco:
And
Marco:
If that is true, I mean, we don't have any validation.
Marco:
We will never get any validation from Apple whether this is true or not.
Marco:
I don't think he has any reason to lie about it.
Marco:
And even if he's exaggerating about it, even then it's still pretty terrible.
Marco:
And those people who call, those are mid-level people.
Marco:
That's not the person who spends six minutes with 10,000 apps a day.
Marco:
That is a mid-level manager you're talking to.
Marco:
That's like through the approval review board or whatever they call it.
Marco:
That's where that phone call comes from.
Marco:
um so anything they say usually is pretty credible as the current policy of of app review yeah i know but it's still hearsay because we're going by what the developer says that someone from apple said so i'm just i'm just saying this is not a confirmed thing no but i'm saying i'm sure you know the the nitty-gritty details are probably suspect because you know people have bad memories i don't know if he recorded the call probably not um
Marco:
But the big picture, like the general idea is probably right.
Marco:
And if the person who called him said that, that is not the actions of just one little employee somewhere buried in an apple.
Marco:
That's the actions of a mid-level person, and that's substantial.
Casey:
So I'm all depressed now.
Casey:
So why don't you tell me about something that's really cool?
Marco:
Absolutely.
Marco:
So we have something a little bit special this week, a song sponsor.
Marco:
This is a song instead of me doing a sponsor read.
John:
It's not a fish song, is it?
Marco:
No, it is way better than that.
Marco:
It is a Jonathan Mann song.
Casey:
Oh, that is way better.
Marco:
Yeah, see, we got it.
Marco:
We got a good one this time.
Marco:
This is for Dash at thedash.com.
Marco:
Before I play this, I've got to give you a quick story.
Marco:
So I met Scott O'Reilly from Dash at Singleton this year.
Marco:
He came up to me and said, Hi, I'm the guy from Dash.
Marco:
And for the first 20 or 30 seconds of that conversation, I thought he was the guy who made the developer documentation app Dash, which is a documentation app that runs on the Mac.
Marco:
I was going to guess Mrs. Dash.
Marco:
He was not salty.
Marco:
The first 20 or 30 seconds, I said some things that were like that probably did not make any sense to him at all.
Marco:
Like looking back on it, it was pretty embarrassing.
Marco:
And the truly embarrassing thing is I never corrected it.
Marco:
Like I never said, oh, I'm sorry.
Marco:
I thought you were that other guy.
Marco:
I just kind of once I realized it, I just kind of roll with it.
Marco:
So here I am during his average.
Marco:
I'm first going to apologize to him publicly because I still haven't told him that.
Marco:
So this is my coming out on that.
Marco:
And second of all, he was such a nice guy that even if he thought what I was saying didn't quite make sense, he didn't let on at all.
Marco:
Like he just rolled with it.
Marco:
And as far as I can tell, I was not busted there.
Marco:
So if you knew he was nice enough not to embarrass me.
Marco:
And so anyway, he's a really nice guy.
Marco:
And so here it is, the Jonathan Mann song for Dash at thedash.com.
Marco:
Well, goddamn, it's Dash, where you can easily create real-time dashboards that show information.
Marco:
There are dozens of pre-built widgets for services like AppFigures, Google Analytics, GitHub, and don't forget Twitter.
Marco:
Go to thedash.com.
You don't need no credit card.
Go to thedash.com.
Play with it because it is fun.
Marco:
Well, goddamn, it's Dash.
Marco:
You can also show custom data.
Marco:
It's got a great API to share from Dropbox or the web.
Casey:
Things like line charts, speedometers, tables, or use iframe.
John:
Pricing model is a lot like GitHub.
John:
All the public dashboards for free.
John:
Ten bucks a month unlimited private dashboards could be yours.
John:
So go to thedash.com.
John:
They're currently running a promotion.
John:
If you sign up at thedash.com, private dashboards, you'll be able to get one.
John:
Go to thedash.com.
Marco:
You don't need no credit card.
John:
So thanks a lot to thedash.com.
Marco:
Go there and check out Dash.
Marco:
It's pretty cool.
Marco:
And yeah, the guy who runs it, Scott, is really, really nice.
Marco:
So thanks a lot to Dash.
Marco:
Go to thedash.com.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So the whole of the internet has sent us a link with regard to Crossy Road, which I almost called Crossy Bird.
Casey:
It was built by two Victorians, Andrew Sum, who is 24, and Matthew Hall, who is 39.
Casey:
And among other things, they said that the game has generated enough for them to retire.
Casey:
Quote, seven figures is correct, one of them said.
Casey:
So that answers the question as to whether or not they're making any money on this game.
Casey:
And it sounds like the answer is, uh, yeah.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, to be fair, my original statement when they were positioned at like number five top free app, but number 200 top grossing, my original statement was that basically it was it was probably out of proportion, that they were not really making as much money as they probably should with that level of free downloads.
Marco:
And then, of course, last week, after a couple of updates, changed it and dramatically improved their rank.
Marco:
So, yeah, good job for them.
John:
The most interesting thing in this story is that whoever, who is this developed?
John:
One of the developers was saying, this is a quote, we always wanted to build a popular game, but we didn't think we could build a game that could generate money.
John:
Everyone else in the industry will tell you that you need to squeeze people and you need to do this and that and get some things behind a paywall.
John:
You're told that if you're not making Clash of Clans, a Clash of Clans clone, you're doing it wrong.
John:
I felt very, very strongly that there were other ways of doing this.
John:
So they had the same doubts about, like, can we make a game that isn't annoying, that monetizes in a nice way?
John:
They, you know, they wanted to make a popular game, but they didn't think they could build a popular game that would actually generate money because they didn't want to do all the scummy things that all those other free-to-play games do.
John:
And so this is a feel-good story because they made a great game.
John:
They did it the way they wanted with extremely gentle monetization.
John:
And they made a lot of money.
John:
And, you know, as Marco said, they could have made even more money.
John:
But once you're into enough money to retire, I think they're going to enjoy their retirement a lot more having made a game that they're proud of rather than having even double the money.
John:
uh but just feeling bad about the way they got it because they seem like that kind of people oh and one of the developers said it took him uh what did he say six weeks to get all the characters just by playing the game like not not paying any money and he says other people have done it in two weeks so they made this game and they knew it was both possible and probably pretty darn fun to not pay a cent and play the game and yet they're still ended up making tons of money because this is i mean half of it is make a really good game and the other half is make make a really good game
John:
that happens to get some traction in the market and you kind of need both of those uh but making a really good game helps a lot yeah definitely and like you said it is a happy story and and that really does make me feel good for not having paid anything you know i still haven't paid anything for it because i don't i just play with the black sheep all the time
John:
i want it in the gumball machine nice i should i should give some money for it eventually i don't know i mean and no one in my family has paid for it none of my kids have paid my wife has found out that when you get the uh the trial thing where it shows you hey try out these three characters for a limited time she tells me that when they offer them to you the discounted price
John:
then you can pay for them with the little coins that you get for free.
John:
So you don't have to put any actual money in it and you can still quote unquote buy the characters that are offered to you for trial, which is yet another way that they're not getting money from you.
John:
It's like pick up these fake coins in the game and use the fake coins to buy the characters.
John:
No real money ever passes to us at all.
Casey:
Yeah, it really is surprising, but it shows that it can be done, which is really exciting.
Casey:
Tell us about your PlayStation 4 and DLNA support.
John:
Yeah, I was complaining about how crappy the PS4's media center features are compared to the PS3.
John:
That was kind of part of the fact that the PS4 was like, no, this is a game machine.
John:
It's not a media center like the Xbox One.
John:
It's kind of a differentiator.
John:
It was also probably a prioritization thing where Sony was concentrating on making the best consoles for playing games hardware-wise.
John:
And if that's your priority, you're going to put all the other stuff off.
John:
Alberto Sendra sent a tweet that said, the rumor is...
John:
that DLNA support is coming in early 2015 and that the holdup was it was waiting for a final certification on a new DLNA spec.
John:
So that could have been another reason it was being delayed, but I'm glad to hear that it's coming.
John:
And Ben Wu was the first person to tweet at me the story that Plex is coming to the PS4.
John:
In fact, depending on what country you live in, it may already be out for the PS4.
John:
It's not out yet for the U.S.
John:
because, as Plex says on the link we'll put in the show notes,
John:
uh sony has multiple business units to cover different regions and each of the business units need to approve the app and so the approval processes don't all go in sync and i think sony's probably also preoccupied with things at this point um anyway we're waiting for them to approve the plex app for the us store and once that is available i don't know if it's going to be free or pay or what but anyway plex will be on the ps4 which kind of makes sense since it's an intel processor and plex is available available for a million other things anyway so
John:
multiple media related features are on their way for the ps4 and i am happy about it and we never found a compatible bluetooth remote did we no one sent one i asked and no one has sent me any tweets or anything although a couple people have said their harmony remote works with it if you want to buy a harmony remote well uh didn't world in the chat says uh apologies for recommending the harmony apparently it's limited aka no playback controls
John:
other people have tweeted at me that like there someone said hey i use my harmony with it and i tweeted them which what's the exact model that you have and didn't get a reply uh i mean there are like i said there are ir solutions where you can buy a little you know usb ir dongle or something and shove it in there and then but all those get bad reviews and i don't want that anyway but yeah no no rumors of a media remote yet but uh let's i'll get the media center features first i guess
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
In the last episode, I think it was, or certainly recently, we talked about Twitter ad creepiness.
Casey:
And this was spoken about kind of violently on a recent episode of Connected on RelayFM.
Casey:
And a little birdie told us that they had Twitter in their offices for a few hours in the last couple of weeks.
Casey:
And supposedly Twitter said they had over 20 million devices that opted into that creepy thing where
Casey:
The Twitter app will scan what other apps are on your device.
Casey:
So if you have the latest Twitter app version, you could have opted out of this, apparently.
Casey:
I haven't run the official Twitter app in ages.
Casey:
But the little cancel or X or whatever was so small that everyone literally just missed it.
Casey:
But apparently, according to Twitter, according to this little birdie, that it was done entirely to build up some new ad targeting capability they're rolling out next year.
Casey:
And with regard to what John was saying about, well, maybe Apple's going to do something about this, but either because Twitter's big or maybe they can't because Twitter is big.
Casey:
Well, apparently they're the number five globally ranked iOS app.
Casey:
And so Apple is extremely aware of what Twitter is up to.
Casey:
All that from a little birdie aware.
John:
But then it's like, OK, so are they talking?
John:
They're like, you know, they're not going to just be like, well, you know, some some mid-level person is not just going to pull the Twitter app.
John:
It sounds like these are really more higher level negotiations between the companies to discuss what their app is doing and to work out something.
John:
I'm hoping that's happening now.
John:
If it's not, then Apple is dropping the ball because they're just not paying attention.
John:
you know or they see it happening and don't care and figure well if people don't know but i don't i can't fathom the strategy like it's so this whole thing is just so at odds with everything else they do we just talked about the apple pay stuff and how it's you know not sending even the information casey would like to share with the apple star it's just you know complete anonymity
John:
and we don't collect your data, we won't let the NSA look at your messages, all this stuff, but we'll let the Twitter app scan every app on your thing and report back for ad targeting.
John:
That just seems crazy.
Marco:
And it's important to clarify, too, that it isn't just Twitter that does this.
Marco:
There are lots of other... There are ad packages out there, ad analytics packages that many apps integrate that do the same kind of super creepy scanning for all the apps you have installed thing.
Marco:
And that's why I think...
Marco:
Really, I think Apple should care about this problem because, as I said last week, it does violate the perceived walls that exist between apps and iOS.
Marco:
Like, I as a user assume that apps can't creep on each other, like that they can't look around and see everything else on your system.
Marco:
And they can't see your data, but even the list of apps you have installed, that can do things like probably pretty easily uniquely identify you within maybe an IP range.
Marco:
And so all these different things Apple's trying to do to reduce the ways they can uniquely identify you between app installs, those are out the window, or between apps from the same vendor, those are all out the window, all the advertising identifier stuff, like...
Marco:
So Apple has done things in this area before that show that they care about this problem.
Marco:
I would say this is a similar facet to that problem of user privacy expectations and device tracking and uniqueness there.
Marco:
And so I hope Apple is thinking about taking steps in the OS to make this technically impossible or at least substantially more limited than how it is now.
Marco:
Anyway, also related to this, I said last week that in iOS 7 and forward, Mac addresses were returned as all zeros.
Marco:
The best QA engineer I've ever met, Nick Arnot, who knows how to break everything that I write, also broke that statement.
Marco:
Points out that that's close, but it's actually zero two followed by all zeros.
Marco:
So there's mostly zeros, except there's a single two in there.
Marco:
Thank you to Nick Arnott for finding a little bug in something I said once again.
John:
Mostly zeros means slightly non-zero.
Casey:
something like that yeah that's i don't know what that's from it's all right sorry i got nothing i haven't done one of those in a while hey all right uh john why don't you tell us about um the google authenticator app that you are overjoyed with two groups of three
John:
So this is the Google Authenticator app that you run that gives you your little time-based two-factor authentication code.
John:
It's just got a set of a six-digit number that changes every, you know, 30 seconds or whatever the interval is.
John:
And so when you log in with two-factor authentication, you put in your name and your password, and then it gives you a challenge.
John:
It says enter your code.
John:
Then you take your trusted device like your phone or whatever, and
John:
and you read this number off of it.
John:
And it's a six-digit number, and if you read this number off and type it in a lot of boxes, as you tend to do when you first enable it, it's not so bad after that, you'll find it annoying that you have to transcribe a six-digit number under mild time pressure.
John:
Although some iOS apps make it worse, because I just recently used an iOS app where it challenges you with the code,
John:
But if your Google Authenticator is on the same device, of course, then you have to either double tap home if it's in the multitasking switcher or single tap home to go, you know, to go to the Google Authenticator app to get the number.
John:
Look at the number.
John:
Now you have to memorize the number because you have to switch back to the other app.
John:
So you memorize the number.
John:
switch back to the other app and when i would do that with this one app i forget what it was i would resume the other app and it would immediately take me back to the username and password screen away from the and so then i was under time pressure based on how much time was left to enter on the ios keyboard with no autocomplete my username and my password which are pretty darn long and then enter that six digit code but my complaint many many shows ago i don't remember when
John:
was that google authenticator app presents a six digit number and does not present it as two groups of three numbers it just is a six digit number all stuck together which is crazy because you know it's like the usb connector and all these other things it's like if if your job is to make this application and if what this application does is display a six digit number like the what are you even thinking about to say how can i do my job well think for you know
John:
Your only job is to display a number.
John:
Your only job is to make a connector.
John:
Like, what is it that makes a good connector?
John:
What is it that makes it easy to look at and transcribe a three-digit number?
John:
You always break bit-long numbers into groups.
John:
I think credit card numbers are broken up into groups of four.
John:
Like, phone numbers.
John:
Like, you don't just put all the numbers together.
John:
Six is too many.
John:
So anyway.
John:
Alexandre Duhill tweeted at me that the new update to the Google Authenticator app has two groups of three numbers, finally.
John:
And then later in the day, Romain... What is his last name?
John:
Moisescott?
John:
Is that the same as Moises Chuyon?
John:
Anyway...
John:
uh romaine said that when i worked at google last year after listening to one of your podcasts i filed a feature request for breaking out the digits in google authenticator ios app glad to see they finally paid out so whether this was directly in relation to his feature request or not i thank romaine greatly for connecting the dots connecting my complaining to an actual feature request inside google and then many months later now finally i get two groups of three numbers that is fantastic
Casey:
So your life is complete.
Casey:
Everything is right in the world.
John:
Well, let's not go crazy.
John:
I get annoyed about these things all out of proportion because people posting a link to youhadonejob.org.
John:
It's not kind of like you had one job, but just like if you think at all about doing some simple job well, like if you had to put on a big whiteboard, what are the things that contribute to me doing my job well?
John:
like on the connector.
John:
What are the properties of a good connector versus bad?
John:
Just even just think about it for a second, unless like the top five, like a family feud or whatever, you know, it's and for showing numbers, like there's not that many things.
John:
Make sure the numbers are readable.
John:
Like it's just numbers.
John:
You don't have to worry about like, does the O look like a zero or any other?
John:
It's just
John:
All you've got is numbers, and you don't have to pick anything else about it.
John:
It's already six digits.
John:
You know everything about it.
John:
They did stuff like make it flash red when it's about to expire, like all subtle things like that, but nowhere do they think, you know what, six digits shoved all together is kind of hard to transcribe or memorize or read easily.
John:
If we do two groups or three, it'll be a lot easier.
John:
And it's not like people are unfamiliar with grouping.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Anyway, it's done now.
John:
I'm done complaining.
John:
I'm happy.
John:
I will preemptively say once again, everyone who thinks I should not be using Google Authenticator and I should be using whatever their favorite app is, I know about it.
Marco:
We are also sponsored this week by lynda.com, L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash A-T-P.
Marco:
lynda.com is an easy and affordable way to help you learn with high quality, easy to follow video tutorials.
Marco:
Instantly stream thousands of courses created by experts on software, web development, graphic design, and more.
Marco:
Go to lynda.com slash ATP to see for yourself.
Marco:
That's L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
lynda.com has fresh new courses added daily.
Marco:
They work directly with industry experts and software companies to provide timely training, often the same day new versions or releases hit the market.
Marco:
lynda.com offers courses for all experience levels, whether you're a beginner or advanced, and all these courses are produced at the highest quality.
Marco:
These are not like homemade YouTube videos.
Marco:
These are really top quality video courses.
Marco:
I've seen many of them myself.
Marco:
I can really honestly say they are extremely good.
Marco:
I'm always very impressed by the quality, both technical quality, the content quality, the quality of people making them.
Marco:
These are professionals in their fields.
Marco:
um these courses are broken up into bite-sized pieces you can learn at your own pace you can go start to finish you can just watch a couple things in the middle um next to the video as you watch it there's a searchable transcript and it scrolls along with with what they're saying as they say it so you can go through you can jump around you can see oh let me skim through this only let me jump to that part um or you can go back and say oh let me go back to when they said this so so good um you can learn while you're on the go uh with the lynda.com apps for iphone ipad and android
Marco:
In fact, they have a premium subscription, if you want, where you can even download the courses for offline use into their app.
Marco:
So you can, like, load up a bunch for a big plane trip or something like that and just have a whole bunch of offline use.
Marco:
Plus, they have sample project files you can get.
Marco:
You can practice along with the instructor.
Marco:
Anyway, my favorite thing about Lynda.com is their pricing.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
If something is like paid per thing, I will almost certainly never use it.
Marco:
Like John mentioned earlier, developer technical support tickets as a limited resource for the Apple developer program.
Marco:
I have never used a DTS ticket.
Marco:
Because you get, I think it's two a year.
Marco:
Is that right?
Casey:
I think that's right, but I'm not sure.
Marco:
I've been a registered Apple developer since 2008.
Marco:
I've never used a single one of those because I'm always afraid that, oh, I'm burning something that's a very limited resource.
Marco:
So with lynda.com, you don't have to worry about, oh, if I watch this video for X dollars, am I going to get enough value out of it?
Marco:
It's a flat rate.
Marco:
You pay $25 a month, and then you get unlimited access to their entire catalog for as long as you keep paying $25 a month.
Marco:
So it's great.
Marco:
You can just watch whatever you want.
Marco:
You can jump in.
Marco:
You can kind of snack on a few different things.
Marco:
You can do this total course change.
Marco:
If you signed up for web development courses, and then all of a sudden you want to learn how to make a podcast, you can do that.
Marco:
They have all these courses.
Marco:
There's just so much there.
Marco:
They have over 100,000 video tutorials.
Marco:
And again, $25 a month gets you unlimited access to the entire catalog.
Marco:
They have such a big range.
Marco:
They have things like the Adobe Creative Suite apps.
Marco:
Learn how to use those.
Marco:
Learn how to use Final Cut Pro.
Marco:
Learn how to negotiate in business.
Marco:
You can learn how to make web apps, how to make software, how to make native apps.
Marco:
They have different programming language courses.
Marco:
And again, this is a beginner to expert.
Marco:
They have...
Marco:
you know how to program you can get the whole thing right from there all the way down to like what's new in ios 8 things like that they are really in a huge range of courses here uh again beginner to expert very well covered anyway lynda.com is offering a seven-day free trial to access all courses for free go to lynda.com slash atp that's l y n d a.com slash atp and you can cram in as many courses as possible to seven days it might be a good use for this holiday break actually
Marco:
If you're going to have any vacation around the holidays next week, you should definitely consider getting a Linda subscription for the week and just watch as much as you possibly can.
Marco:
Anyway, lynda.com slash ATP for that free seven-day trial.
Marco:
L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to lynda.com for sponsoring once again.
John:
my gear in the chat room reminds me that if i'm doing the uh the authentication code on ios i can just copy and paste the code rather than memorizing it i'm so accustomed to only using the authenticator app to like enter it on you know on my mac or something and yes i know i could use a copy paste synchronization utility i keep meaning to check out one of those because that that frustrates me a lot like when i have something on my on my ios device that i want to transfer to my mac i know there's a million utilities that do that synchronization but i never quite get around to loading one
Marco:
but anyway let me know if you find a good one because i've also i've always intended to set something like that up and just never actually do it well whatever happened to pace spot because that was amazing when it first came out and i don't even think it works anymore well originally the problem they had was that you had to go launch pace spot in order to get it to to copy because like and remember they were the ones i believe yeah who did the silence yeah yeah to try to keep running in the background but now that's not a problem anymore and i assume all the good ones out there just you know do it as a background thing
Marco:
Well, you still can't.
Marco:
No, you still are not running in the background constantly unless you're playing audio.
Marco:
Like I could I could build that into Overcast as a feature.
Marco:
If you happen to be playing a podcast, it'll continuously sync your clipboard to something.
John:
But you can use it as do as an extension.
John:
I was saying you just flick up or go to, you know, like it seems like there's other ways to do it as a Today Center widget and watch Apple reject you.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So let's talk about hockey.
Casey:
And I don't mean the sport.
Casey:
So Microsoft acquired hockey app.
Casey:
And that's weird, but kind of awesome.
Casey:
I really like the Microsoft that Azure has spawned from insofar as they're not the old guard where if it's not Windows and not Office, then get the crap out of here.
Casey:
It's the new we are all things to all people.
Casey:
kind of microsoft and i'm not sure what the play is with regard to hockey app but i like the thinking there i like the idea and i think it's a really good idea that could fit in really well with their existing azure mobile services offerings um so i really dig it in principle but i was curious to hear what the two of you especially marco thought about this
John:
Before Marco chimes in, can you explain it to me?
John:
Because I know hockey app only because I've been on betas that use hockey app to distribute the beta versions of their iOS apps to me.
John:
But I don't understand what Microsoft would do with this.
John:
Do they distribute beta versions of Windows phone apps?
John:
Does hockey already do that?
John:
I don't understand the synergy here at all.
John:
But I confess that I just don't know what hockey app, maybe I just don't know what hockey app does besides what I've used it for, which is install betas on iOS.
Casey:
And to be clear, that's all I've used it for.
Casey:
But the way I'm theorizing this is that Microsoft is kind of quietly, especially with Azure specifically, trying to be kind of a one-stop shop for all the back-end stuff with regard to mobile apps.
Casey:
So mobile services...
Casey:
seems to do a really good job with, you know, hey, we'll give you a decent API to do some basic stuff.
Casey:
Like I think that you can – they give you an API that will make it really easy to do user accounts based off of Twitter or Facebook.
Casey:
They make – there's a bunch of other things that they've got in there.
Casey:
I haven't looked at it in a while.
Casey:
But my guess is they're trying to make it so that if you're writing – like let's say I've thought about –
Casey:
writing a shared grocery list app.
Casey:
And I don't want any more recommendations of what to use.
Casey:
I've got it under control.
Casey:
But in the same way, John doesn't need any more recommendations about two-factor stuff.
Casey:
Well, anyway, I'd like to write that sort of app, but I need to have a way of doing user accounts.
Casey:
I need to have a database backend.
Casey:
I need to have some sort of web-based API.
Casey:
And I would need to distribute beta builds.
Casey:
Well, three of these things...
Casey:
I could do on Azure and the beta builds I'll soon be able to do on Azure if that's what envelops hockey app.
Casey:
So I'm assuming they're trying to be a one-stop shop for anything that isn't on the device that your mobile app would need in order to be successful.
John:
But this is the type of play that Apple doesn't play nice with anymore, which is if you're doing something that is like a platform function, like I want to write a compiler that lets you build iOS apps or I want to write something that lets you manage the assets for your application or build your interfaces or anything having to do with the development stack.
John:
Apple wants to own.
John:
They own the IDE.
John:
They made their own compiler.
John:
They own all the tools.
John:
uh, you know, verification tools, code signing tools, like it's all Apple stuff and beta distribution, Apple bought test flight, you know, and before that, like, it's just not that Apple's going to go out of their way to break hockey app now because they didn't before anyway.
John:
And it's, it's relying on technologies that Apple is making it, but it's,
John:
If you're I would not sign up to try to make a tool that supports the Apple ecosystem for developing applications because I would just know that even if I'm allowed to live my time is limited because either Apple will start making a free competitor to me or they'll do something that breaks my thing without any pity because they'll be like look you should never been making that in the first place not intentionally but it'll just it'll just happen like that is a that is a very dangerous business to be in these days it's exactly
John:
you know i mean i guess it's okay for microsoft because what do they care they have enough revenue to support this type of effort but i mean i guess that's kind of part of the acquisition it's like once apple bought test flight it's like well apple has decided what they're going to do about this because there was a you know there was these third-party utilities that did this thing that apple wasn't doing so apple could have developed their own thing in-house or they could have bought somebody when they buy somebody hockey app had to say well they bought somebody and it wasn't us so now it's time to sell to whoever else wants to buy us and i guess that's microsoft
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, it's important to point out, Hockey does other things beyond just the beta stuff.
Marco:
For instance, they're a crash reporting tool.
Marco:
It aggregates all the crash logs, and it sends it in from the app and everything.
Marco:
And they also have, obviously, the cross-platform stuff.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
There is still some value even if they can't develop betas to Apple anymore or they can't ship betas to Apple devices anymore.
Marco:
It's less value, certainly, and they are never going to be able to match what the new Apple test flight does because the new Apple test flight completely does away with the annoying UD IDs and you just email address people and it lets them install your app on all their devices.
John:
Well, they have the advantage that they'll hopefully be able to be more reliable and responsive than Apple because.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
So right now.
Marco:
So as soon as Apple test flight thing came out, I canceled my hockey plan.
Marco:
And I said, I'm never going to use this again because I don't need it for the crash reporting.
Marco:
Because the other thing is I use Crashlytics for my crash reporting.
Marco:
Crashlytics also has a beta shipping product.
Marco:
They also have analytics and Twitter bought them.
John:
Don't you think crash reporting is in the exact same category?
John:
Like I want, you know, nice symbolic hated crash reports with all sorts of information.
John:
iOS doesn't provide it for me natively.
John:
I'll use Crashlytics, right?
John:
Like that's exactly the type of tool that it's like something that Apple should do.
John:
There's a gap.
John:
A third party comes in to fill that gap is able to succeed until and unless Apple either buys them, buys a competitor or does something else that makes it so, you know, so that everybody stops using them and uses whatever Apple has officially blessed.
John:
in theory yes in practice most of the time apple does things like this the apple version sucks that was the case with the crash reporter you're right the apple version often does suck but once the apple version exists at all then there's even greater chance that the way the third parties are doing it will become less supported or break or whatever because apple then has a good story like oh we're sorry we didn't mean to break that or whatever but
John:
It's not really a high priority for us to make sure that Crashlytics keeps working because we do have our own offering and have you checked it out.
John:
And then you can say, yeah, but your thing sucks.
Marco:
But no, but I mean, theoretically, that's been the case for a long time.
Marco:
But in practice, like iTunes Connect has included Crashlogs since before Crashlytics has existed.
Marco:
Since all of these crash loggers that came out, all have come out after Apple has included crash logs in iTunes Connect.
Marco:
Originally, the iTunes Connect crash logs were delayed by like a week, and they were never symbolicated.
Marco:
You had to download them and symbolicate them yourself.
Marco:
And I think some of that has been improved since then, but it's still...
Marco:
Also, they have to abide by the system setting that says, do you want to send diagnostics to Apple and app developers?
Marco:
And if users say no to that, you won't get crash logs from them through iTunes Connect, but your app doesn't know about that setting.
Marco:
It can't read that setting, even if you wanted to.
Marco:
And so your app bypasses that.
Marco:
And any crash logger that you embed in the app, like Crashlytics or Hockey, those will send it regardless.
Marco:
So you're getting more data from more people faster.
John:
You're just hoping with those type of tools that you are below the note.
John:
This feature is below the notice of Apple.
John:
Like Apple has bigger fish to fry.
John:
They're not going to worry about making a much better crash reporting thing because they have something there.
John:
And, you know, like on their priority list, it's really low down.
John:
Eventually, you have to think they will get to it.
John:
And this is the history of Mac software has been some third party makes something cool.
John:
And it seems like Apple will never do something like that or is not interested in something like that.
John:
Sometimes these little things get snapped up relatively quickly.
John:
like uh for the old timers out there the clock in the menu bar was a third-party application and fairly quickly i think it was maybe it was less than a year maybe it was only a couple years but fairly quickly apple said hey clock in the menu bar is a good idea we should build that into the os right so that's the end of
John:
you know well not the end of third-party clocks in the menu bars but for most people at the end of third-party clocks and then you visit people let us use the built-in one right um and other times there'll be something that third parties make that everybody loves that apple just doesn't do for years and years and years either because they they're just like philosophically opposed to it or because it's a frivolous thing that they're not they don't care that much about it they have much higher priorities
John:
the crash reporting it seems to me that eventually they'll get around to making their crash reporting thing better so it's closer to the best third-party ones out there but it hasn't happened in what how many you know how many years have these uh things been out a couple years like six it's been a lot of years so it must be i mean to be fair if you had to make a prioritized list of things that apple has to work on in terms of developing for the mac and ios you
John:
probably wouldn't put crash reporting very high unless either you probably put things like code signing and provisioning and and beta stuff i mean so test flight is obviously uh the better thing to be concentrating on right now but uh it's difficult business the range between
Marco:
Like, what's the best third-party crash reporter that is possible to build, given the structure that we have in iOS, versus what's the best crash reporter Apple can or is likely to ever build?
Marco:
Like, there isn't a whole lot of room for improvement there.
Marco:
The crash reporter is, like, between hockey and crash analytics...
Marco:
I've used them both now.
Marco:
I first used Hockey for Overcast during the beta, and then I switched over to Crashlytics.
Marco:
I'd say they're pretty much the same in the quality of the crashes they report and how they do that role.
Marco:
There's only so much you can do there, realistically speaking, with the way the runtime works and everything.
Marco:
So that's all fine.
Marco:
So getting back to the topic of why Microsoft would want to buy Hagi, I think the fact is simple.
Marco:
This is a multi-tool company.
Marco:
They have multiple tools to support developers.
Marco:
Twitter bought Crashlytics for the same reason.
Marco:
Twitter bought Crashlytics because Twitter wanted to own a developer tools platform.
Marco:
It gives them a lot of useful analytics.
Marco:
It gives them a lot of ins with developers to sell their other SDK services on.
Marco:
Microsoft wants the same thing.
Marco:
That's what they're going for here.
Marco:
They're going for developer tools.
Marco:
And I think it's a good move for that.
Marco:
And, you know, the beta thing is basically it's almost worthless now where the beta thing is nice with hockey.
Marco:
And the reason why I'm about to sign up with them again probably is the Apple test flight beta occasionally requires app review.
Marco:
And that makes it pretty inflexible.
Marco:
And there's a limit of only two betas per day and everything else.
Marco:
There's all these little limits and delays in place because it's Apple.
Marco:
And I've had a build of Overcast sitting there for six days with nothing.
Marco:
It's in review.
Marco:
It isn't even waiting for review.
Marco:
It's been in review for six days.
Marco:
A beta.
Marco:
So I can't cancel it.
Marco:
I can't upload a new version.
Marco:
My testing process has just stopped.
Marco:
It has completely stalled for six days because something is wrong with Apple.
Marco:
And I'm sure it's going to run into the holiday iTunes Connect shutdown in a few days.
Marco:
And I can't ship new versions.
Marco:
I can't even ship versions to testers right now.
Casey:
That's really crummy.
John:
This is not confirmation of, but it's like the worst nightmare for the people who said that Apple's going to buy a test flight and they're going to ruin it.
Marco:
No, I mean, but... So, you know, the Apple version of beta testing is way better than what third parties can do.
Marco:
When it works.
Marco:
Yeah, but what third parties can do is not useless.
Marco:
It's not worthless.
Marco:
It's just not nearly as good in, you know, like, the core function there.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
There is still value.
Marco:
If you're shipping an app on iOS and Android and Windows phone, like, you know, from what we hear, Microsoft is getting into the cross-platform developer tools game.
Marco:
Like, somewhere I read, I don't know if it was a rumor or if it was actual news, somewhere there was a thing that said that early next year Microsoft is going to be, or not, I don't know when, but...
Marco:
sometime soon, Microsoft is going to be releasing new Visual Studio type stuff that will be able to cross-compile the same app onto all three platforms.
Marco:
And that would be really cool.
Marco:
A lot of developers will use that.
Marco:
I mean, there are tools that do cross-platform stuff now, but from what I gather, none of them are particularly good.
Marco:
So if that's the business Microsoft is going into, I think it's a very smart business.
Marco:
And hockey plays right into that because with hockey, then you can have testers on all three platforms.
Marco:
You know, you can have, you know, you can have like, you know,
Marco:
10 people on iOS, 20 people on Android, and you can get the one guy who uses Windows Phone.
Marco:
He's probably also the Opera user.
Marco:
If you're developing them together with this Microsoft stack, it makes sense to be able to test them together and be able to collect crashes from them together and all this stuff.
Marco:
From that point of view, it makes a lot of sense why they would want it.
Casey:
Well, and also consider that they're, you know, open sourcing .NET and really embracing Mono and Xamarin even more than they ever have before.
Casey:
So it certainly, this all seems to indicate to me, just like you said, Marco, that they're kind of going all in on being the developer platform for all people, for all platforms.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
John:
Is that... Do we know?
John:
Is that true?
John:
Aren't we kind of being the developer platform for all people if what you want to make is a kind of mediocre app for all platforms?
John:
Like not mediocre, like kind of middle of the road because they have to vend functionality that is platform agnostic.
John:
And so that means...
John:
I mean, I guess the server side things, it makes sense because it's always platform agnostic.
John:
At least you want it to be.
John:
That's the benefit of Azure is their best bet because it's like, I don't want my backend to be tied to one platform.
John:
It's the whole point of it.
John:
I want it to be accessible from the web, Mac, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But almost everything else, it's like,
John:
uh i don't know it's not right once run anywhere but kind of you really have to buy into the native structures of the individual platforms to make a really great app on the individual platforms and the only exceptions are back-end services and things like games that are like i don't care about your platform i control the whole screen i'm a game
John:
uh and so that's why you have things like you know the middleware for for games and stuff but everything else like i wonder how much of a if that's their strategy say they succeed it's like now we are the biggest and best middleware vendor for mobile applications
John:
Is that a big win?
John:
I still feel like that entire business is kind of in the middle of, I was going to say, in the middle of a bunch of hungry tigers.
John:
We're continuing with animal analogies.
John:
You've got all the actual platform.
John:
It just seems like...
John:
Microsoft would be better off if they were in Samsung's position and Windows Phone was, you know, a big dominant platform.
John:
Then they can make Windows Phone and Windows Phone apps really awesome instead of worrying about creating technologies to help people make their mobile apps on other people's platforms better.
Marco:
Yeah, but if you look at the position Microsoft is in, like in reality, which I think the problem with them in the later part of the Balmer years is that they weren't really looking at their reality or they were creating an even worse reality for themselves.
Marco:
But if you look at the position they're actually in today...
Marco:
I think this is a very smart move.
Marco:
They've already shown that they have built no market share whatsoever realistically in the new world of mobile at all.
Marco:
Even their PC business, it's not going to go away, but...
Marco:
I think the growth is certainly gone.
Marco:
And so there's a problem there.
Marco:
And the whole move to Azure as a company focus, having the guy who ran Azure become the new CEO, this is a sign like Microsoft is recognizing not only like a good business to be in, but probably the best business that they can be in because their attempts at being otherwise have not worked.
Marco:
And there are certain, like, in some ways it's too late.
Marco:
Like, no matter what they do to Windows Phone, it is not going to be significant.
Marco:
Like, Windows Phone has missed its window.
John:
I was going to say it's never too late, not for Windows Phone specifically, but first of all, Windows Phone is not bad.
Marco:
It's always too late for Windows Phone.
John:
Windows Phone is not bad.
John:
Like, the hardware and the software is not bad.
John:
But it's, you know...
John:
Even if you agree that it's better, they're in, like, a Mac-like situation where Apple was making better personal computers with better software for years, but nobody cared because it wasn't better enough or because it was too expensive or whatever other excuses you want to make, right?
John:
But you can't say, like, well, there's no hope because there was hope.
John:
Like, all Microsoft needs to do is make a translucent teal phone and they're all set, right?
John:
You know, there's always hope to turn things around.
John:
It seemed like the Mac couldn't get anywhere and was never going to succeed, but...
John:
It quote unquote succeeded by having the iMac turn things around and be hanging there long enough for everyone else to get destroyed.
John:
And they're left with like the only remaining paying customers for, you know, who pay a lot of money for their computers.
John:
Right.
John:
But then they also did the iPod and the iPhone.
John:
Right.
John:
And those are not the Mac, but they're similar in their own proprietary platforms that Apple made.
John:
You know, and what I'm saying is like Microsoft still has the skill set to make very competitive hardware and software products like, you know, like the PC was and, you know, like all the things that Apple makes.
John:
It just so happens that the Windows phone, their timing was terrible and two big competitors got there before them and now they're kind of stuck.
John:
It's kind of unfair.
John:
You know, their Windows phone is not succeeding in proportion to its quality.
John:
It's succeeding in proportion to its timing, more or less.
John:
But I wouldn't give up on that entirely because it's kind of like Steve Jobs coming back to Apple and saying, well, we lost the PC wars.
John:
So what we really need to do is...
John:
is concentrate on some business that is not like this.
John:
We can't make a hardware software integrated product like we were trying to with the Mac.
John:
We should do something entirely different.
John:
We'll become like a services company or whatever.
John:
And it's weird with Microsoft because Microsoft has so many different skills.
John:
They're good at services.
John:
They're good at hardware.
John:
They're good at software.
John:
They're doing a game console.
John:
They're good at so many different things.
John:
It's harder to know what to focus on.
John:
But when Steve Jobs came back to Apple, he said, no, A, we can make the Mac, like, people take notice of that again with the iMac.
John:
And B, we can think of something new that is very much like the Mac, a hardware and software product, integrated, takes advantage of all the things that, quote unquote, only Apple can do and all that stuff.
John:
And then the iPhone, the iPad, and so on and so forth, like...
John:
Steve Jobs took a company that was failing to get traction with one product and made it get traction with products that are exactly the same, like exactly the same strategy, just just better executed and better timing.
John:
And if Microsoft says, well, I guess we can't be that company that we were.
John:
Now we have to be a services company.
John:
There's some reputation management, you know, resurrecting their reputation as people thinking Microsoft is cool and developers liking it and sort of the, you know, the alpha geeks, as we used to say when OS X was becoming popular, the alpha geeks finally paying attention to Microsoft again.
John:
That's good.
John:
And if that's a good business for them, fine.
John:
But I would not like to see Microsoft give up on doing something else like Windows Phone and having that succeed because they don't wait, you know, five years before they get off their butts and do something good.
John:
so i don't know um it kind of scares me that uh this sort of if microsoft does become a the azure company or the company does that type of stuff plus i guess exchange and sql server and stuff like that that will be a sad end for the company i'd rather see them do more things like windows phone but better
Marco:
Well, I don't think they're going to lose control of their software platforms.
Marco:
I just think they're going to become less and less relevant over time.
Marco:
And they're always going to be there in the same way like IBM, I think, still has a mainframe business.
Marco:
And I don't think it's going to be that bad.
John:
No, but IBM is the worst example.
John:
They're selling everything.
John:
They even sold their x86 server business.
John:
Aren't they doing that now?
John:
They got rid of their PCs, the servers, the mainframes are like all that's left.
John:
And yeah, no, IBM is exactly what I don't want Microsoft to become.
Marco:
Right, but I'm saying, like, there are healthy businesses in the computer world, like printers.
Marco:
You know, like, printers are always going to exist, but they're just going to get increasingly less and less important over time.
Marco:
They're already pretty much completely forgettable and unmentionable.
Marco:
This is probably the first time you've heard about a printer today.
Marco:
And that's, you know, no big deal.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
If that's where Windows and Office and Windows Phone go, that's fine.
Marco:
That's not a huge deal.
Marco:
They can be used every day by millions of people and be completely unmemorable and unimportant to the business.
John:
Microsoft should sell Office and Windows to Samsung to destroy the company, to destroy Samsung as a virus.
John:
Because they'll be like, this is awesome.
John:
We're going to own Microsoft Windows and Office.
John:
Those things are great.
John:
And trying to maintain and work on that code base for products that people don't really like anymore, it will distract and crush Samsung.
John:
And then Microsoft can beat them to market with whatever the next big thing is.
John:
And by the way, with IBM, I think what they sold their PC business, and I'm pretty sure they sold their x86 server business a long time ago.
John:
I think now they're serving their power server business, the Power 7, Power 8 processors.
John:
And maybe they're also selling the mainframe thing, or maybe they're one and the same.
John:
Anyway, Microsoft is the Marco of the corporate world.
John:
They're just selling everything.
John:
No, IBM, you mean.
John:
Yes.
John:
IBM.
John:
My brain said IBM.
John:
My mouth did not.
Casey:
You have no idea how much follow-up I'm going to get from my father over all this.
John:
You can find out what they're actually selling, but I think they're selling everything.
John:
Everything must go.
John:
It's just like Marco.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
What else is cool?
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Thanks a lot.
Marco:
Alright, so our friend Whitby in the chat suggested this topic.
Marco:
It's a Chromium.
Marco:
They wrote a proposal sometime called Marking HTTP as Non-Secure.
Marco:
So they're proposing that browser vendors change their UI paradigm.
Marco:
So instead of showing a lock or some indicator when a site is served over SSL to show that it is secure, to actually mark non-SSL sites as insecure in the browser, to kind of like yell at people into recognizing like, hey...
Marco:
what you're doing here is insecure.
Marco:
They're saying the absence of an icon doesn't really communicate much to people, whereas an active alert saying this is insecure might be more helpful.
Marco:
So they're saying they intend to transition Chrome to this sometime in 2015, and maybe other browser vendors will follow.
Marco:
And
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of stuff going on in browsers these days with SSL and trying to make it a bigger deal.
Marco:
Chrome seems to be leading the way on that, but the other browser vendors tend to follow pretty quickly.
Marco:
What do you guys think about this?
Marco:
I have my own opinions on this.
Marco:
How much do you think this would help and does it matter?
John:
First of all, for dating this, if you look at the screenshots, it's not the current version of Safari.
John:
So I hate webpages without dates in them.
John:
But anyway, this is the potential for this to be old because that is not Safari 8 in the screenshot.
Marco:
But it says they intend to begin a transition plan for Chrome in 2015.
Marco:
So it has to be sometime recent, right?
John:
Yeah, I know.
John:
But who knows?
John:
This could have been written at the beginning of 2014.
John:
Anyway, for this particular idea, my question is always, say you communicate this to people.
John:
You change the wording.
John:
It's a death tax, not a state tax, right?
John:
This is now insecure instead of the other one being secure, right?
John:
What do people do about that?
John:
What action... Is there a readily available action that people can take to make them not just ignore this like all the other crazy technical things that their computer yells at them that they don't understand?
John:
Like a big giant red button that says switch to secure?
John:
If we can make that big giant red button, why doesn't the browser just try it all the time anyway?
John:
Why don't we just try HTTPS by default all the time and fall back to it?
John:
That's what you need.
John:
Not so much like communicating...
John:
to the user information that they don't understand what they can do with but rather simply just doing the right thing like making the browser do https by default all the time now i know that's not quite easy i know you can't just try https first and then http and you know
John:
There are technical hurdles to, you know, you break different websites if you try this all the time.
John:
Like maybe it has to be something that people click or whatever, but that's my big question about this.
John:
If you communicate this information, what do I do with this information?
John:
What action do I take?
John:
Casey, what do you think?
Casey:
I understand the idea, but it just seems weird to kind of flip everything on its head like that.
Casey:
But I'm also probably reading too much into it insofar as does anyone and does any regular human really pay attention to whether or not a website they're looking at is secure?
John:
I know people look for, they used to back when, back when web browsers were more stable and there were fewer of them.
John:
And it was just Netscape and Internet Explorer, which, and people usually used one of them.
John:
They knew to look for the little lock icon or whatever, like in their browser Chrome.
John:
And they'd be like, is this secure before?
John:
Like, I just want to look for the little lock.
John:
Yeah.
John:
certain people were kind of trained to look for the little lock but then a little lock started moving all over the prices and browsers got weird and sometimes the lock had a line through it if there was like a certificate error and it just it started to sort of become just more noise that your computer throws at you sometimes it puts up a dialog box and it says allow or disallow and you ask you know you talk to people about computers and they will be they're either the people who just always say allow or the people who just always say disallow and
John:
And you may be thinking that the people who always say allow are, you know, stupid and naive and are doing insecure things.
John:
But if you've ever had to try to help a person who's one of the disallow people or deny people or whatever, I just always say disallow.
John:
I just always say deny.
John:
And then they wonder why nothing works on the web because they refuse to enable JavaScript or something like it's.
John:
neither approach is great and the problem is that regular users shouldn't have to understand all this technical mumbo jumbo just to get the thing they want done done so that's why I'm thinking exposing more of this technical mumbo jumbo to regular people is not really helping matters what I would be more in favor of is
John:
i mean they're kind of doing wasn't the eff doing the thing where like they're giving ssl certificates for free just to encourage more sites to have them make more sites ssl by default makes have the web people run the websites redirect http to https all the time immediately on first hit and just like people don't have to know about that right if they don't care if they don't know where the lock icon is anymore it should just this is a discussion that should take place amongst the people who are making websites less so amongst the people who are using web browsers
John:
Maybe also amongst the people who are making web browsers, but their customers are the individual users, not the websites.
John:
So I feel like this should be more speaking inwards as an industry and less outwards to the users.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I think the main problems with this, number one, I would even question, John, when you said that at the beginning, when we only had very few browsers, people knew to look for the lock icon.
Marco:
I bet nobody even did then.
Marco:
Like, I bet the percentage of internet users who look for the lock icon is about the same as it's always been, which is probably embarrassingly low.
Marco:
I think the problem is, like...
Marco:
So this is trying to address... It'd be the same thing as forming a consortium to figure out how can we make people better read text and error dialogues.
Marco:
You probably can't.
Marco:
You're lucky if they read the button text.
John:
Yeah, there's very little you can do.
John:
Maybe they just recognize the shape of okay and hit it before even reading it.
Marco:
In their head, they're saying, how do I cancel out of this?
Marco:
Just get rid of this.
Marco:
I don't know what to do.
Marco:
It's a very hard problem that is mostly unsolvable.
Marco:
Same thing here.
Marco:
How do you make people pay attention to the level of connection encryption that they have?
Marco:
We can't even make people pay attention to the host they're connected to.
Marco:
That's its own problem.
Marco:
The other problem with this scheme...
Marco:
is that all it does... It's hard to say you are secure or you are insecure.
Marco:
Because what does that mean?
Marco:
If you are reading a blog or the New York Times or something and it's insecure, what does that mean?
Marco:
Does that mean the blog is going to hack you?
Marco:
That's confusing to people at best, if they even look.
Marco:
And it's misleading, certainly.
Marco:
Similarly, if you say you are secure...
Marco:
You are secure, like somebody in the chat said, a secure connection to totally.bankofamerica.lolz.ru is not a good thing.
Marco:
It's like, you can have an SSL certificate to a totally different domain that is still a phishing domain, and you can still be insecure.
Marco:
Yes, you can look into the EV stuff and get the name of your company, Bank of America Incorporated, to show a green button on the bar, but it's like...
Marco:
those can probably also be easily faked with enough effort.
Marco:
And also, no one looks for those either.
Marco:
All the people who don't look for lock icons, they don't look for EV certificates either.
John:
Or even if you're looking for it, it appears so differently, or sometimes not at all, in different browsers.
John:
I've met people who used to look at the lock icon, but once it became more complicated than that, once it became more complicated than a binary thing that was generally represented the same way everywhere...
John:
then people can't be bothered and and speaking of the secure thing that i don't know if anyone's posted in the chat room yet but uh because i'm scrolled up to look at something else but i think eric schmidt had something where he was telling people to use incognito to avoid to avoid the nsa like that's what gets back to what mark was saying what does secure mean or what does insecure mean they don't mean what those what those words
John:
read as to a technically unsavvy user because it's like either i'm safe or i'm not safe that's what they're looking for it's basically all they can handle and even that only conscientious people can handle am i safe or am i not safe and like the real answer is so much more complicated than a binary you're safe and you're not safe right that you can't like even if you could successfully communicate uh that simple information it's misleading and if you could successfully successfully communicate the the more nuanced information which you can't but if you could people would still be left with okay now i understand the exact uh
John:
parameters of the situation i'm in what do i do about it do i not use the web browser anymore and then you just go i said the two strategies are allow everything or deny everything dismiss everything with cancel dismiss everything with okay and i think there are more dismiss every allow allow all i think there are more allowers than deniers because deniers really just can't get anything done and they're they're very frustrating people but they're like no i just deny everything and
John:
I need a long explanation of why I'm supposed to not, you know, and it's just like, you can just keep hitting deny, but you're never going to be able to install any software.
John:
You're never going to be able to watch any videos on the web.
John:
All your websites will be broken, but you're like, I feel safer this way.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
People learn very quickly that if you hit okay to everything, you get overall fewer boxes.
Marco:
Right.
John:
That's basically the strategy.
Marco:
The SSL question, it doesn't assure you that the site is secure.
Marco:
All it ensures you is that you have an encrypted connection to the site, and even that's kind of a questionable validity these days.
John:
And the incognito has nothing to do with anything, but even SSL, we could say at this point, does not protect you from...
Marco:
you know, with Heartbleed and everything, that doesn't protect you really anyway.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Well, and even then, it's like, there's a whole class of security issues that SSL doesn't protect you from.
Marco:
Things like password leaks and hacks.
Marco:
Like, if you see the secure icon, does that mean you can type in the one password you use for everything, including your bank, and use that on this website because it's a secure site and it won't lose your password?
Marco:
Like, no, of course not.
Marco:
But, you know, so again, what does that mean?
Marco:
So I think...
Marco:
This is the move to do HTTPS everywhere that a lot of people are moving towards.
Marco:
I think in many ways that's a good move.
Marco:
And that is probably the way we're going.
John:
But this conversion to SSL reminds me of... I mean, it's amazing that it's taken this long.
John:
It's taken this long because the sort of artificial barrier to this happening earlier was that SSL certificates cost money.
John:
And it's not a lot of money, but they cost money and they're annoying.
John:
And the people who sell them are generally annoying.
John:
Right.
John:
And so EFF trying to reduce that barrier is better.
John:
But it's like what it reminds me of is the transition from the old days of Telnet and FTP to basically SSH.
John:
And SSH was free and open source.
John:
And that's why it spread everywhere.
John:
And nobody's Telnetting into their machines anymore.
John:
And nobody's using FTP with plain text passwords anymore because that would be crazy.
John:
And yet we still continue to...
John:
you know use essentially the web equivalent you know it's totally unencrypted telnet ftp like unencrypted protocols are crazy right but we use http all the time and yeah we hope that when we're typing in a password i mean i know i don't even check do i look up to see it's https i just assume because what kind of crazy website would put up a password prompted not having to be https
Marco:
you know but but you don't so really everyone fish john we should be https everywhere instead of just like where ssh everywhere because nobody uses telnet anymore although i'm glad it's still installed because i still use it to debug web servers the the big problem with with adoption of ssl everywhere of https everywhere rather is that the certificates expire um and i think it used to be you could get a five-year one i think they killed that last year right now can you only get like a three or two-year one
John:
something like that um ssh keys never expire um so you can have the same ssh key for you know 10 years and it'll continue to work but a website is more heavyweight than a server the server that you remotely connect into right because i just feel like the main barrier was that it cost money and that you had to deal with these weird vendors and if they can make it easier and make it simpler to update these things and you know like it
John:
It just has to happen because if you're running a website, like that's a big thing that's worth an investment of like, you know, a couple of minutes every three years.
Marco:
Sure.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
The problem is that it is a very highly technical process that is very error prone, very intimidating and very complicated that you have to do every two or three years.
Marco:
And that's like on a grand scheme of things, like in the grand scheme of the Internet, no one's going to do that.
Marco:
Like, yeah, the big sites will do it, but everything else out there, it's not going to do it.
John:
but people people what's left is not a big site people don't run their own website so much anymore and if they do they're probably tech nerds anyway we just need the big sites to do it you know like facebook you know you know wordpress has to have like idiot proof support for it built in where you just click a button and it connects everything you know like it's it's possible to get this to happen and i think the money making go making it free if this actually works out like if you had like the ssl certificate equivalent of hover
John:
i don't know if hovers sells but like i think they do well there you go but like but they can't do the thing they don't can't do a thing where you set up your own wordpress site and you just press a button and then it says i'm gonna buy and install an ssl certificate for you uh this is how much it costs do you want me to do this and you know it auto renews like every couple years oh and it sends you an email by the way we're gonna update your ssl certificate in a couple of weeks you want us to do that yeah go ahead that's not how it works now you know you have to look at different encryption protocols and uh
John:
include the right ones and create your key with some crazy command line program that asks you a million questions you don't know the answers to that uses vocabulary you're not familiar with even if you are familiar with you forget which thing you're supposed to write there your name or your company name or whatever oh yeah well and then like and the instructions are going to say like these last three things you must skip them don't enter anything in like these these three fields and it's like oh come on like but anyway i still think all that stuff the people who have to deal with that are better equipped to deal with it than users are to deal with
John:
more interface elements telling them something that they don't understand about the the pages they're using i mean my mother still emails me things and says uh i got an email and it wants me to go to this site uh is this site safe and just in my default answer i'm now no i'm the denial i've said no deny deny just do not do anything that email didn't come from who you think it came from
John:
Yeah.
John:
I remember early on in the days of the engine that I demonstrated how you can send email from anybody by, you know, telnetting to port 25 back when that was all unencrypted.
John:
I'm like, you know, president at UnitedStates.com.
John:
Look, you got an email from President of the United States.
John:
See how I did that?
John:
And that didn't take.
John:
And so still to this day, she's like, but the email came from you.
John:
I'm like, it did not come from me.
John:
I know it looks like it came from me, but it didn't.
John:
Did it?
John:
So even that concept, like, it's just...
John:
the mental model of how people think the internet works is so different from how it actually works that it's very difficult to, you know, you can't get the models in sync because the way the internet really works is too complicated for people to know or care about.
John:
And so you really just have to not give them choices and sort of be safe by default and make it so that you don't have to do anything through no action of your own.
John:
You are slightly more protected now than you were before.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Automatic, Lynda.com, and Dash.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Because it was accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him because it was accidental.
Marco:
It was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss.
Casey:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Casey:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They didn't move.
Casey:
I want to address eschatologists' concern that the clock in the menu bar wasn't integrated into the OS quickly.
John:
he says it didn't come until seven system 7.5 and i'm going to say yeah that was quick it was only four years between the time it was introduced and the time it got scooped up that's in a 30-year history of the mac that's relatively quick compared to oh i don't know like theming which almost made it in but then no not at the last minute and we were still waiting for it to come but anyway yep the history of the mac from 1994 until today is that a clock in the menu bar uh that's a pretty long time and for a couple years before that it was a third-party utility
John:
Was window shade third party?
John:
You guys don't know.
John:
Maybe someone in the chat room knows.
Casey:
I remember window shade and I remember getting a crappy knockoff for my PC because I thought it was awesome.
John:
It is awesome.
John:
It was awesome and it is.
John:
Window Shade had to go back to being third party after being integrated to the OS because they took it out in OS X. In practice, you just have all these sticks around your screen, like these window sticks that are left over?
John:
Awesome.
John:
Window Shade was awesome.
Casey:
Yes, Marco.
Casey:
That is basically how it worked.
Casey:
Why would you want that?
John:
This is why Window Shade was awesome.
John:
I have a screen full of sticks.
John:
If you're a person like me who arranges your windows on the screen...
John:
like doesn't maximize everything doesn't tile everything but actually arranges them like you'd arrange items on a desk in front of you so you know where everything is no i i do that i i i always got very mad whenever anybody would move my my like aim window or something all right well they're not just aim window but everything all your terminal windows all your editor windows stuff like that all right being able to uh
John:
essentially minimize them without having them move so when you want them back you go to where they were but they don't they don't take up visual space on your screen anymore you just have the little little stick thing like displace minimization like into the dock or you know hidden also has its place but being able to sort of maintain the spatial state of your windows while having them
John:
minimize themselves having them hide having them curl up and get out of your way until you want them lets you quickly find them again without going to a menu without hovering over a bunch of little identical looking icons because you know exactly where it is because you can visualize where it was and now you just have the top part of it so i miss window shade it wasn't the ultimate thing for windowization all the other all the other tools we currently have now are also good but they took away that one and it's kind of a shame and it's probably just as well because nobody arranges their windows anymore they just do everything full screen or just have no idea where their windows are
Marco:
I can't imagine having like all these sticks all over the place because it seems like... Well, you don't minimize all of them.
John:
It's not like you have a million sticks.
John:
You just minimize the ones you're not using right now.
Marco:
Why is that so much better than hiding?
Marco:
Because hiding gets it all the way gone.
Marco:
How do you get it back then?
Marco:
You hit the icon on the dock or you use the alt-tab thing?
John:
What icon on the dock?
John:
There's seven icons on the dock that are all badged from the same application.
John:
I mean, you don't know which one is the one you want.
John:
You got to do the mystery meat hover and find out which one it is.
John:
Oh, I never minimize.
John:
I only hide.
John:
Well, but if you hide, how do you get it back then?
John:
You have to go back to the application, go to some menu or, yeah, go to the dock.
John:
I kind of pull it up by its name and I hope you remember the name and I hope your application is good about giving titles to the windows that make sense and that, you know, especially if it's a window that has tabs and it doesn't convey the tab title up.
John:
Spatial memory is a lot better for me anyway.
John:
I think for most people.
Marco:
Yeah, I have spatial memory of where things are on the dock.
Yeah.
John:
seriously like like the things are always in the same place in the dock so i know the application icon or the little yeah but you have to the application icon doesn't magically make the window appear you have to look at the list of windows that are minimized under it how many windows do you keep in one app
Marco:
a lot of windows maybe this is our disconnect here like i i generally don't like in each app i usually keep between one and two windows like and i use tabs very heavily and in terminal and the browsers but uh yeah i don't keep a whole lot of windows open i have 11 uh windows in colloquy right now
John:
to give an example oh my god in bb edit in bb edit i frequently have i don't know i think i've pushed up into 100 before maybe 20 or 30 most of the time i don't even know colic we had multiple me neither in terminal in terminal i usually have one two three four five six seven eight eight or nine maybe what's wrong with each of those windows has tabs in it
Casey:
Do you not believe it?
Casey:
Yeah, I was going to say, do you not believe in tabs?
Casey:
Oh my God.
John:
No, the terminal windows have tabs.
John:
No, I love terminal tabs.
John:
Obviously, my browser windows have tabs.
John:
How many browsers?
John:
I don't have a lot of browser windows open now.
John:
Right now, I have...
Marco:
I love that every week we're finding out some crazy computer habit from John that nobody would have expected.
John:
I have 19 Safari windows open right now.
Casey:
Windows?
Casey:
19 Safari windows?
Casey:
Not even tabs?
John:
Tons of tabs in those windows.
Marco:
Each window has a lot of tabs.
Marco:
If only there was a way for you to save things to a reading list or something to read it later.
John:
That's not what this is for.
John:
This is why I need a bigger screen, too.
John:
like i have a lot of bigger screen this is like giving a hoarder a bigger house like you don't that's not gonna fix your problem no no i'm not i'm not hoarding things i'm not collecting windows they each have a thing that i'm doing in them it kind of sounds like you are john you cannot have 19 windows with multiple tabs per window that you're and i'm using scare quotes doing things i definitely can i sometimes i sort of like sedimentary layers like uh for example the work my work windows because i was doing work earlier today
John:
are you know separate from my other windows i don't use spaces either oh how could you manage all that without space my 19 colloquy windows by the way are precisely arranged in the same place they've been for years the same windows because each one window per channel one window per channel and they are precisely arranged and you you hang out in 19 channels
Casey:
Oh my god.
Casey:
How do you get anything done during the day?
John:
I'm not in, I'm just idling.
John:
Don't you know how IRC works?
John:
You don't have to be there paying attention.
John:
Yeah, they're all in like the little tabs in the side.
John:
They're not, oh my god.
John:
No, no, the windows are open.
Marco:
How would having little minimized window sticks everywhere, how would that help your problems?
John:
For colloquy, when I'm doing a podcast, I don't want to look at any of the windows except for the one I'm doing.
John:
So I have to minimize all of them to the doc except for the one that I'm doing.
John:
If I could option window shade them and they would all shade up and then shade down the one I want, I wouldn't have to do that.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
I know I can option click to make them all and minimize or whatever.
John:
I probably wouldn't use it for colloquy.
John:
I'd probably use it for editing windows more.
John:
I just use it for finder windows, too.
Casey:
I'm stuck on.
Casey:
I cannot maybe I cannot cognitively handle more than a couple of Safari windows.
John:
Because you're window users.
John:
You're used to maximizing everything.
John:
You can only handle one window at a time.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
I can only I can only handle like a sum total of maybe 10 tabs across like two windows.
John:
You should see my work computer.
John:
It has so many windows on it.
John:
Like there is an unbelievable amount of windows.
John:
My home one, sometimes I have to go through and clean up things.
John:
Like I know what's in a lot of these windows.
John:
And sometimes, you know, sometimes these things are from Instapaper.
John:
But a lot of times there are things that I can't view.
John:
I look at Instapaper on my iPad and some video won't play because it's like flash or because the thing is choking on it.
John:
Today on my poor iPad 3, I was reading a blog post.
John:
And it had like text and then like a Google ad next to it.
John:
And I double tap the text to just have the text fill the screen.
John:
And it was some crazy JavaScript on this page.
John:
It was like, no, I will always have to show you the ad.
John:
So the largest you can make this page is where it shows my little pretty blue margin and then my white margin and then a text and then another white margin and then the ad, then a blue margin.
John:
And if you pinch to zoom, all it did was make a text smaller so it could fit the ad in.
John:
And scrolling the page was super slow.
John:
So it's like, I just want to read that.
John:
And I need a 2.8 gigahertz processor to read this frigging blog post apparently because I'm not going to scroll this on my iPad and watch it like,
Casey:
stutter and accidentally make it seem like i click the ad when i'm trying to scroll very frustrating anyway there are reasons that i might have thing in a browser window instead of looking at them in instapaper on my ipad wow i just i don't even know what to say right now like 19 safari windows is did i hear that right 19 yeah how do you tell which one oh no that is the one number 17 is the one i have them i have them arranged
Marco:
it just it just seems like there would be a lot of churning going on here because you can't yes you can't fit 19 windows on screen and you said and you said you don't use virtual desktop it's called it's called oh they overlap it's called tiling you know and so and you have only one physical monitor connected to your machine is that right yeah i'm one monitor person and it's uh what is it a 24 inch class or 30 inch or what
Marco:
Yeah, 1920 by 12-month.
Marco:
Right, so 24-inch size.
Marco:
Okay, so, wow.
Casey:
This is making me hurt.
Casey:
I want to cry just thinking of you trying to manage all this.
John:
It's not managing it.
John:
Like, this is just how I work.
John:
This is like seeing someone's messy decks and saying, how can you do anything done with all those markers and pencils everywhere?
John:
And there's just paper and erasers?
John:
I don't understand how you get anything done.
John:
It's like, no, I'm concentrating on the thing I'm concentrating on, and I know where the things are.
John:
all these paints and and cups and buckets and how do you get anything done you have a stick and an easel and i don't understand how you get anything done how do you know where everything is all right i have 367 sticks on my desktop and i can tell exactly which one is the window i need it's like someone who it's like a mechanic who's got an entire tool chest next to him and everything is in a drawer and every drawer there's a little cubby and everything is there and it's all within arm's reach when he's working on a car
John:
i think that's that's how the mechanic sees it in his head and in real life it's a giant pile of unsorted tools and oh i know i know i can find it i can quit whenever i want anyway the beauty of the computer is things never get dirty and what the beauty of the computer for for window arranging should be i i still want this utility and i don't think anyone's ever going to make it this is something that apple should make is
John:
I want something that lets me arrange Windows with constraints.
Marco:
First of all, I'm pretty sure that many of those exist.
Marco:
Second of all, this is your app, John.
Marco:
This is your great idea.
John:
But it's the type of app I would never make because I would know this is a doom from the start because Apple would have to use private APIs and it can never go in the Mac App Store and there'd be one user of it with me.
John:
the apps you're talking about everyone always every time i mention this people send me the million apps like they're mentioning the chat already here comes boom what's that other one called uh divvy is gonna come up next like i know all these apps right like these apps are made by people who like like the ion window manager they're like for tiling or like even windows does it where like i can make it half my screen or a third of my screen it's like no i'm not subdividing my screen you want all
John:
auto layout for windows you want you want to be like all right this window is always this window has the same center x coordinate as this window from this app but is always 30 pixels to the right of the window edge not that but that's too complicated like there are there is an app that does that there's an app where you can like type in those type of things and have like bind them to keyboard shortcuts and stuff like that i don't think it does auto layout stuff but it does basically springs and struts type thing like you can very precisely but i would never want to do that i would need it to be a gui what i want is something that apps used to do a couple of neat little apps used to do
John:
Like individual apps would do it.
John:
It wasn't a system wide thing.
John:
And, you know, some apps still do it kind of like where you would drag a pallet and it would kind of snap the pallet into the corner of your screen, but it wouldn't be touching in the corner.
John:
It would leave a little margin.
John:
And if you brought one of the other pallets of the application up below it, this is before everyone's pallets were dockable, like, you know, in the Adobe apps today, you bring another pallet below it, it wouldn't stick to the bottom of the other pallet, but it would leave a little margin.
John:
That margin was the same.
John:
What I basically want is, for example, my colloquy windows.
John:
I have arranged in a particular way,
John:
And I have them in groups and the groups I want all to be the same width, and I want them to be vertically aligned with each other.
John:
And if, if they're not overlapping, I want them to be a consistent margin between them above and to the ones to the right.
John:
But if they are overlapping, I just want them to stay within their, their right and left edges.
John:
Like,
John:
basically sort of magnetic sticky smart guide kind of things kind of like what keynote does kind of like what omni grapple uh does with its layout constraints like a combination of those two things it would take some experimentation to get it right and you need modifier keys when you don't want it to snap and stuff like that just a few simple snapping rules oh totally just a few small rules yeah for making things the same width and lined up with each other and stuff like and now i just do it manually and it's it's fine it's not that big of a deal
John:
but you know or tiling just regular tiling windows like there are certain tiling offsets that you don't want to happen i don't make let me tile a window and leave like two pixels visible on the left and right edges because that's not good enough like i want sort of magnetic kind of uh snap too gritty but not really a grid like where i don't care about the screen grid i only care about what your position is relative to other related windows in the same app or something like that
John:
It's complicated.
John:
That's why no one makes this app.
John:
I don't think anyone would actually want it.
John:
But for people who are meticulous window arrangers, all five of us would really like it.
Casey:
You know, John, maybe if you didn't have 19 Safari windows, you wouldn't need to be quite as meticulous with your arranger.
Casey:
No, no.
Casey:
But it wouldn't help.
John:
That's just one application.
John:
Terminal, I get bad in terminal.
John:
Terminal tabs have, like, they're a problem because now every window has, like, a million tabs in it.
Casey:
You know, you could just not have as many windows and tabs.
John:
No, they use them for work.
John:
They have a purpose.
Casey:
You could use a...
Casey:
Well, I'm going to choose not to throw stones on the Perl issue.
Casey:
But, yeah.
John:
That's not what I'm doing with the terminal windows.
John:
All the Perls open in BBEdit.
John:
And how many windows are there?
John:
At home now, I just have one window open in BBEdit, but at work I have many more than one.
John:
Every once in a while, I flush everything out, close all the windows in an application, start over again.
John:
But I do it by checking what I have there and making sure there's nothing I still want to save.
Casey:
Does that happen like annually?
John:
Oh, like BB edit, like when I'm done with the project, usually I will review all of my windows and make sure I'm not keeping anything open that I don't want to and close everything.
John:
And, you know, BB edits, uh, cool.
John:
I like quit is now bound to save all my window positions and state and then quit.
John:
Uh, so I never close anything.
John:
We just quit BB edit.
John:
I relaunched it.
John:
Everything's back where I found it.
John:
That's, that's the way I like the apps to be.
Casey:
I just 19 Safari windows.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
John:
How many Chrome windows do I have open?
John:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
I didn't even think about that.
Marco:
Of course, there's multiple browsers.
Marco:
Of course.
Marco:
12 Chrome windows.
Marco:
Oh, my God.
Marco:
In addition to the 19 Safari.
Marco:
Yeah, I run Safari and Chrome all the time.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
Why on God's green earth do you need more than 30 web browser windows open?
Casey:
Why is that necessary?
Casey:
How many freaking tabs are in all 30 of these web browsers?
John:
I can close some now.
John:
I can close the thing I'm making web browsers secure that we just looked at.
John:
I can close the pages with the dates of the super clock dates in it.
John:
What's the average number of tabs per window, you think?
John:
uh it like so you can still see the titles like usually you know so like eight no that's too many one two three four like five or six like for example when i was looking up i wanted to look up the dates for super clock i had one window dedicated to looking up the date that uh that super clock was uh was released one window looking up the date uh
John:
that uh system 7.5 was released and within those windows i have the google thing and then i have tabs for the google search results that i thought would be likely and then one of the tabs eventually led to the answer that window is done off to the side next window why is it off to the side and why is it not closed so i could refer to it when i just discussed this and did the math in my head about what the dates were
John:
Right.
John:
And why did I not close the tabs behind it?
John:
Because I knew when I would come in at the end of the show, I could close this entire window.
John:
It's like little mini research windows.
John:
That entire window goes.
John:
That entire window goes.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
I had the email that I wanted to talk about in the after show from Grant opening a window here.
John:
I have ADP notes in the other window.
Marco:
John, now you have to be honest with us, please.
Marco:
We're doing this because we're your friends.
Marco:
Do you have any other browsers?
Marco:
Open right now?
Marco:
Do you keep any other browsers?
John:
Keep any other browsers in my application folder or run them?
John:
I don't run any other browsers, but I do have the latest version of, what do you call it?
John:
firefox and maybe i have another version of hopper in there somewhere when's the last how often do you use firefox john never okay you're still you're still saying every once in a while i launch it just to see like i i got in the situation before where when i launched it the in application updater didn't even know about like the newest version of firefox
John:
like the updater wasn't new enough to know that like actually they're on Firefox version like 30 or something and it wanted to download it wanted to go to like version 12 or something and it thought that was the latest so sometimes I don't run it so long that it just goes completely I occasionally I fire it up just to see what it's like I used to maintain Firefox back in the day but Chrome totally replaced it for me so you only use Firefox socially
John:
I used to like when I maintain like to get Firefox to be tolerable back in the day I had a series of themes that I had to apply and the themes would break with new versions so every time the new version came out I would update Firefox and try to find the new version of the cool theme that I liked and then just Firefox went crazy and I said forget it.
Casey:
I'm still bad.
Casey:
So you have 30 web browsers open with roundabouts of six tabs per window?
Casey:
Like, oh, God, what do you need 180 tabs for?
John:
There's stuff in there.
John:
Look at this one.
Casey:
Of course there's stuff in there.
Casey:
There's 180 things of stuff.
John:
This stuff's going to be worth something someday.
John:
I have to keep it.
John:
The UX of mobile settings.
John:
I'm going to read that one eventually.
John:
Things tend to get buried in Instapaper because they fall off the end, but if there's one I really want to read, I can leave it open in a web browser.
Casey:
How are you going to find it?
Casey:
You have 180 tabs to go through.
John:
I'm going to do some cleaning now.
John:
This Swift's blog post, I read already, so I can close that one.
John:
I think I read it at work.
John:
This is hoarders.
John:
This is just... This is hoarders.
John:
Yeah.
John:
This is just like hoarders.
John:
Did you hear the latest rhetoric on where they're going through the levels of hoarding?
John:
I haven't finished it yet.
John:
I'm like halfway.
John:
Well, this is a relevant topic then.
John:
But anyway, this is definitely not.
John:
Because, as you will find out when you listen to the episode, hoarders don't know where their stuff is.
Marco:
So you are just an indexed hoarder.
John:
No, it's not hoarding at all.
John:
It's a key characteristic of the hoarders.
John:
They just don't know where their stuff is.
John:
And I'm not saving the stuff to think it's going to be worth something someday.
Marco:
I bet hoarders, first of all, you are saving it because you think you're going to actually get to it.
John:
I will.
John:
I do get to it.
John:
How do you think things close?
John:
Things close because I've got them.
John:
I don't necessarily get to them on this computer, but I might get to them someplace else.
John:
Oh, see, I can close this one because this is from last night's incomparable.
John:
Boom.
John:
Another window with four tabs gone.
John:
All right.
John:
So why was it open all day?
John:
Well, it wasn't open all day because I just got on my computer.
John:
I've been busy.
John:
I haven't had time to like sit at my computer and do anything except for open more new windows.
John:
Since when?
John:
96?
Marco:
Someday I'll clean it all out when I retire.
John:
No, I opened that window with all those tabs in it for movie information for an incomparable that I did like last night.
John:
And I didn't close all the windows before I left the computer because it's late.
Casey:
Oh my God.
John:
My way of computing is extremely efficient.
John:
people people for me people don't understand that like how can you have all these windows open how can you find anything and i see somebody else when i tell them to open up a new file they they open a terminal window they cd into the directory they type vi the file name they edit the file then they have to open a new file they close that file they cd into another directory they type vi that file name and they edit the file that is inefficient and then all the while they're doing this in one window zoom to their entire gigantic 23 inch screen
John:
Instead, I have different terminal windows open in different locations.
John:
I don't need to walk over to a different directory to do stuff.
John:
I have shortcuts for commands to do things.
John:
It is much more efficient than the people who think, gosh, I need everything clean.
John:
Just one window that covers my entire screen.
John:
I'll do everything there.
John:
It's multitasking versus single tasking.
Marco:
There's a lot of room between those two extremes, John.
John:
I may be towards one end, but it's not like... Towards one end?
Casey:
I think you are the end.
Casey:
You're looking back on the rest of society and saying, geez, I remember what that's like.
John:
I think you'll find...
John:
A lot of old school Mac users work like this with multiple windows and people who didn't grow up managing windows and windows are their enemy.
John:
They just want to get them off the screen.
John:
They can't handle them.
John:
They don't.
John:
It doesn't occur to them to try to arrange or shape them as they would physical objects.
John:
And so they just they just appear randomly and they're at the mercy of their windows.
John:
And so their only solution is to only to have very few windows because it's the only way they can feel like they have any mastery of the computer.
John:
I don't have that problem.
Casey:
John, let me assure you that whether or not you're aware of it, Windows are your enemy as well.
John:
They're not.
Marco:
They're my friend.
Marco:
We need to have like a Windows Zero intervention.
John:
Here's the tip for the two of you who both, I assume, use Terminal at various times.
John:
Have a Terminal window arrangement that you can save in Terminal.
John:
where you dedicate sizes, shapes, and regions for windows dedicated to specific purposes.
John:
For example, here are my remote windows for this type of machine.
John:
This is my log tailing window.
John:
This is my window for root on a local machine.
John:
This is my window for starting and stopping the web server.
John:
And within those windows, you can have tabs for subpurposes, whatever, but dedicate a few major regions to the things that you do.
John:
The things I listed are things I commonly do, but whatever the things are you commonly do,
John:
Have windows, size, shapes, and regions for them.
John:
You will never find yourself command tilting through windows again.
John:
You will never find yourself hunting for a window because everything will be exactly where you need it.
John:
And terminal windows are the type of thing where you can actually have them not overlapping that much because you don't need that many terminal windows, especially with tabs, to cover all of your bases and all of your needs.
John:
And then you never...
John:
need to wonder where to look you never need to rearrange things so you can see a log being tailed or something because everything is always exactly where you want it try that just in one application well i i have that i mean i know where things are i just get by with fewer windows so so how many what are your categories of windows of like you know for the for that type of test describe them
Marco:
What, for terminal?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Okay.
Marco:
I can't believe this is the show.
Marco:
All right, so I have right now four terminal windows, most of which are single tab, except the main... I have, like, one main one on the bottom.
Marco:
That's where I keep, like, six or seven tabs open.
Marco:
And they're always in a similar order.
Marco:
Like, the far left tab is always, like, you know, just, like, somewhere in my home directory...
Marco:
um, whatever I'm currently working on.
Marco:
Like that's the current project terminal window.
Marco:
And then as you go to the right, um, one of them is like the most recent ATP.
Marco:
If I'm working on that, cause I do encoding on the command line and transcoding on the command line.
John:
Do you have a tab titles?
Marco:
no no it just shows the command because i i can tell like in this one says like root at db1 i know what that means like that's like that so i yeah i have a couple of web servers okay again depending on what i'm doing if i'm doing local web development i'll have a mysql window open i'll have a php window open like you know but it's it's always in the same spot like and it i keep the same tabs in the same spots i just get by with a lot fewer of them
John:
No, I do the same thing within tabs.
John:
I have different builds that I'm working in, arranged in tabs by date order.
John:
I always have the release build in the far left tab for the window that I'm doing on the dev machine, which is the window where I'm typing commands into.
John:
Then I have a separate window for a separate project in a different place with a similar arrangement.
John:
And then my log talent windows.
John:
It's in a totally different spot, and it's much wider because of long log lines.
Marco:
Yeah, I got one of those up top, yeah.
Marco:
I mean, I feel like... So, a while ago, I think this was in Bruce Togmazzini's Tog on Interface book from, I don't know, when was that from?
Marco:
Like the late 80s or early 90s, whenever that was from.
Marco:
And he mentioned there was a study that they were doing when they were designing the original Mac UI and stuff like that, that...
Marco:
comparing keyboard shortcuts to doing things with the mouse.
Marco:
And at the time, and this probably is not true anymore, but at the time, they said that they were doing these UI studies, and people would always think the keyboard shortcuts were faster than doing things with the mouse.
Marco:
But then when they actually observed people, they actually measured how fast people were at doing tasks, oftentimes, I think in their study, I think it was the majority of the time, again, I don't think this would hold true today, but...
Marco:
Even though people thought that the keyboard was always going to be faster, in practice, the way people actually worked using the mouse was faster.
Marco:
And they didn't think so.
Marco:
But when you actually measured it by wall clock time, it was faster.
John:
That's the other thing that drives people crazy, especially nerds who are like, the big power nerd thing is, I do everything from the keyboard.
John:
My hands never leave the keyboard.
John:
I'm a touch typist.
John:
My hands never leave the home keys.
John:
Everything is a keyboard shortcut.
John:
I never need to touch the mouse.
John:
If you watch me use the computer, I am constantly bouncing between the mouse and the keyboard, sometimes using them both at once if it's a modifier thing.
John:
And people think that must be incredibly inefficient.
John:
But it's not because there are certain things.
John:
I mean, especially if you're doing especially if you're doing things spatially arranging anything.
John:
The whole point of spatially arranging things is you can grab at it in a moment's notice.
John:
You know exactly where it is.
John:
Right.
John:
Right.
John:
And part of the little game, the gamification of spatially arranging things is, look, you're not going to have room for everything.
John:
Things are going to overlap.
John:
What you need to have is a region that can be some corner of a thing that can be reliably visible.
John:
You're like, oh, well, are you arranging things like a little puzzle so you can find the corner?
John:
But it becomes second nature, where you quickly grab the mouse, snag the corner of the window you're interested in, because it's always in the same place, and you know exactly what's in it.
John:
If you need to change tabs within that window, some people will be like, oh, I can just cycle through them with a keyboard shortcut.
John:
It's faster.
John:
Your hand is already on the mouse.
John:
Click the tab that you know that you want to do, because you want to go to the release build, and it's the far left tab.
John:
You could never have gotten to that prompt faster with a series of keyboard shortcuts.
John:
You just couldn't because you'd have to like, you'd have to like, it's like, you know, it's like iterative versus, I'm going to say iterative versus, uh, you know, declarative, uh, whatever, the, uh, the opposite of, uh, imperative versus declarative, uh,
John:
they're probably not the opposite anyway like you're running a program in your head some people do that some people are good at running programs in their head like in vi down five lines over three words insert character like that's not the way i think though i think it's over there and i just grab it with the mouse and that is second nature to me and i don't have to think about it
Marco:
well okay so two devil's advocate points number one the reason i brought up that whole uh talk on interface study is is like how like you might be thinking what you're doing is faster but it might not be faster i know it's faster because when people see when people see me use my computer they can't follow it like what are you doing i didn't wait i didn't see that wait go they cannot follow what i'm doing
Marco:
Well, I think a person who is an experienced power user for computers, I think that would apply to almost all those people.
Marco:
People who are really fast at working on their computer, regardless of how they're arranging things.
Marco:
So anyway, the second devil's having a point is, the way you arrange things, how you're describing this, the reasons you're citing for doing this, make it sound like what you're trying to avoid is having to pull something back out.
Marco:
of where it lives in offline storage.
Marco:
So having to open up a new window to go to something, having to pull out a file out of a Finder window or open up a new terminal window and CD to the right directory or SSH to the right thing or whatever.
Marco:
But in reality, if that's what you're accustomed to, if somebody with the same level of skill and familiarity with computers and using them and whatever system they've built up over time...
Marco:
If they do it the other way, which I think is closer to what Casey and I do, which is like a smaller number of windows with a higher tolerance of having to go fetch something from disk or whatever.
John:
I can't stand to watch over the shoulder of those people because they're like, oh, I have to go do this thing.
John:
Let me open a new window.
John:
Let me go into the right directory.
John:
It's like, aren't you already there?
John:
You're already there.
John:
And then you end up, and then let me close the window when I'm done.
John:
To clean everything up.
John:
And then we do the same thing five minutes later.
Marco:
But if that was the system that you had chosen to implement, if that was the way that you worked, I would posit that you would be very similarly fast, if not indistinguishably fast.
John:
it's not it's not about fast like it's like it's like i said before it's efficiency and efficiency doesn't just involve speed but also involves cognitive load and this is the type of thing so your cognitive load there is is manageable yeah yes because you don't things that are within reach you don't think about if you find yourself thinking words in your head or thinking little programs or macros or series of steps that is a much higher cognitive load than you're not thinking about it at all in the same way you don't think about it when you pull your phone out your pockets it's always in the same pocket you don't think okay reach down get phone out of pocket
John:
pocket i only have one pocket i don't have a hundred freaking pockets to go searching through i know but you're only you have a working set of things i'm trying to show you that spatial memory is different than having i know where every pocket is like it's the same reason it was getting with marco doesn't name his tabs right how do you know where they are well you know where they are by position you don't need to have custom tab titles on them because if you had custom tab titles that would imply that you're reading the titles of the tabs and once you find yourself reading the titles of the tabs it shows you don't know where the thing is you're looking for
Marco:
Well, they also have labels to help that.
Marco:
They're pretty lightweight, but you know what it looks like.
John:
So my main Chrome window always has Gmail as the far left tab.
John:
I don't even know what the title of the Gmail tab is.
John:
It's always in the same place.
John:
I always know exactly where it is.
John:
I have all my tabs on my main Google window are always in exactly the same order.
John:
It's not just because occasionally I accidentally close that window and lose it in history.
John:
I can recreate it.
John:
I know where everything is by position.
John:
because those are the tabs that i use most frequently and going for something based on where it is or what shape it is or even like the color it is or whatever like recognizing the icon that does not require high level neurocognitive functions it just happens the same way you can find all the light switches in your house and you can recognize what your car looks like in the parking lot without reading the model number off the side of the thing it's just visual recognition and where things are in space and especially as it relates to you reaching for them even if it's virtually with a mouse
John:
It's so much more efficient than ever having to read or count things.
Casey:
John, I always have Terminal open on my computer.
Casey:
It always has no less than three tabs, and they are always showing the same things.
Casey:
I didn't even know it was possible to name a tab because I only have three freaking tabs open at a time.
John:
You just don't do a lot of things at once.
Casey:
I guess.
Casey:
I just, oh my God, it stresses me out so much just thinking about the way you work.
Casey:
I mean, obviously it works for you.
Casey:
I mean, I think you're freaking nuts.
John:
It shouldn't stress you.
John:
It really is just the amount of things you have to do.
John:
And also your tolerance for like, if you can't manage this mess, if you can't sort of like...
John:
deal with this swarm of things if they if they feel like they're overwhelming you rather than you controlling them then that's a problem right but it should you know like these things don't come into existence on their own i make them and i put them in places the thing that bothers me are things that are created that i can't arrange that like any application for example like the messages app where as far as i know well i guess you can pull out a separate conversation but really it really wants you to use a single window for everything and
John:
And I can't stand that because I have no control over what order things are in the left sidebar.
John:
And it's just one window.
John:
And if something happens in some other conversation, I have to go find it and click on it.
John:
I have to go find it and click on it.
John:
Whereas when I use Adium, it remembers window positions on a per person basis.
John:
And I can tell who I'm talking to.
John:
Like how many times do I accidentally type the wrong thing into the wrong to the wrong person in Adium?
John:
Almost never.
John:
How many times I do it in messages?
John:
All the freaking time.
John:
Because it's the same text box for everybody.
John:
If you didn't notice that you didn't change the mode to switch to the conversation you wanted to talk in, you end up typing the wrong thing to the wrong person.
John:
ADM, that doesn't happen, even though every single ADM window is identical, visually speaking, like the colors are the same and everything isn't the same.
John:
the only thing that's different is the size and position of the windows and if i have four conversations going on at the same time i can keep track of which four people i'm talking to not by memorizing okay this person's in the upper right but just their window never moves unless i move it it's tied to the person i'm talking to my wife's window is always in the same spot on the screen and so i never accidentally type something to a qa person that i should be typing to my wife because i would never do that it's totally in a different position i would never grab for that window whereas in messages i have to pay super careful attention to which little thing is scrolled up to the top and which little message i've clicked on it's it's terrible
Marco:
alright so can we do titles before I just weep oh my god my favorite title so far that was actually said during the regular show is something that we can say right now which is nothing is resolved where is the where is the title thing
Marco:
Wait, wait.
John:
You didn't know where it was?
John:
I was expanding the little link thing on the top of my IRC window, and I said, where is the link to the titles?
Casey:
Why don't you already have a window?
John:
Sounds like you just lost it.
John:
You didn't know exactly where it was.
John:
Because I...
John:
Well, let me tell you why, because I expanded the link, not the window.
John:
I didn't have any windows open.
John:
Why didn't I have any windows open with the title thing in it?
John:
Because I closed it when the show was over.
John:
Anyway, I turned on a little thing, and what I was looking for was titles, because the incomparable one is titles.incomparable.com.
John:
And so I didn't read all the texts that's in the topic, recording most Wednesdays, 9 p.m., blah, blah, blah.
John:
I didn't read it.
John:
I was just looking for the word title and didn't see it.
John:
And so I unexpanded it and then re-expanded it.
John:
And then I said, oh, yeah, showbata doesn't say title.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
John:
Titles.inconverworld.com?
John:
Something like that.
John:
Anyway.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
John:
And see, a hoarder would leave the showbot open all the time.
Casey:
Yes!
John:
I do not.
John:
I close it as soon as we're done with titles.
Casey:
You hoard everything under the sun, but you won't hoard my show.
Casey:
No, you don't.
Casey:
I don't.
John:
Oh, God.
John:
That's got to hurt your self-esteem.
Casey:
It does.
Casey:
Oh my God.
John:
What things do you think I keep open that aren't like, I mean, I keep Gmail open because mail is always coming in.
John:
You know, if there's something, if I'm done reading something or if I don't need it now, it gets closed.
John:
And if I don't need it, if I don't want to, like, I have to remember the titles are a thing I have to look at.
John:
No, there's no pending task for titles.
Casey:
I haven't been this upset since the Mac Pro episode.
John:
You think I should keep titles open all the time?
John:
I'm afraid it's going to open a bunch of web sockets and exhaust my file descriptors.
Marco:
I don't think it actually even works if you leave it open all the time.
Marco:
Because it clears itself out, right?
John:
It eventually breaks and then dies, yeah.
Casey:
It eventually times itself out.
Casey:
But, oh, God.
Casey:
I just can't handle this.
Casey:
I just, I literally can't even.
Marco:
Nothing is resolved.
Casey:
This is either the best or worst ending to the show that I've ever heard.
John:
I didn't even get to talk about the follow-up of the PlayStation 4 controller, but I'll save it for next week.
Casey:
We'll need something next week, so that's fine.
John:
That window's always open too, ATP show notes.
John:
It's in a tab in my main window.
John:
So the show notes are open always.
John:
Show notes are always there.
John:
Yeah, because all week I'm finding things and throwing them in the show notes.
John:
Don't need to open a new window for it.
John:
Don't need to go to a bookmark.
Marco:
don't even know what the url is because it's some crazy google docs thing i just never close it so here's a here's a question uh why don't you do that with more things that you keep in tabs do what like why don't you take so many of those tabs that you have open for a month and make a document somewhere with them or save them somewhere so that you can recall them later so you don't have to have all these tabs open that's what instapaper is
John:
Right there.
John:
If they're open in a browser window, it's because they've gone up to another level because it's like, I don't want this to get buried in Instapaper because I'll forget about it.
John:
I actually do want to read it.
John:
So leave it here.
John:
You either want to read it or show it to somebody or it's something that I can only do on my Mac.
John:
So I want to remember.
John:
Oh, yeah.
John:
When I'm on my Mac, there was the one thing that I couldn't look at on my iPad for some reason.
John:
trying to remember to like oh now that i'm on my mac doing something i should look at that one thing that i couldn't a good example which i have open right now is zero punctuation which does this thing of like pay if you want the html5 version so you they intentionally make it so you can't watch it on ios device which is generally when i want to watch these videos so i have the window open to remind me hey you're sitting out at your mac uh and you have some free time to do something zero punctuation is there and you can only watch it when you're here so don't leave the computer until you do and i did watch a bunch of them the other day but i'm not all caught up so i leave the window open
John:
just i can't even concentrate right now i have the the seven rabid window shade fads all right in i like window shade that i don't take issue with i take issue with you having 300 windows open time marco couldn't handle the sticks the sticks no it looks really weird to me like why i i don't think of it as like a phantom window like only like it's like the shadow of the window is there like we
John:
why don't you just leave the window there like the whole point of hiding or minimizing windows is to get them off the screen completely I know but like most of the window is gone it's just the title bar and title bars tend to be near the top anyway so but you can see you can see like where the window was you can visualize it being there and the other thing is like it used to be for like peeking behind a window like you just want to see what's behind it briefly but you don't want to change the focus you just go you know double click or click and zip zip you know like actually shade to peek at the thing that's behind you don't have a good way to do that these days you can you know
John:
If you option click the window behind, you've hidden the one before and you can't get back to it.
John:
If you minimize the dock, you have to go chase it down there to get it to come back out or do a keyboard combo for it.
John:
But if you peek, peek, peek, you would use it if it was there.
John:
Surprisingly useful.
John:
Maybe you wouldn't use it as like all the time or have lots of things minified, but I think, you know, that peaking thing actually comes in handy.
John:
I'm telling you, this is your app.
John:
I know this is an app that I wanted, but I never write an app like that because it's really complicated to make and you have to tie deeply into the Windows server essentially using private undocumented APIs.
Marco:
Who wants to maintain that?
Marco:
Maybe instead of making this be your app...
Marco:
The file system, you know, I think that the file system crusade has been fought as much as you can fight it.
Marco:
And I think it's out of your hands now.
Marco:
Like, there's nothing more... Like, it was ever in my hands?
John:
When was it in my hands?
John:
Tell me about that time.
Marco:
There's nothing more you can do to try to convince Apple to make a new file system.
Marco:
Like, you've done everything you possibly could to do that.
Marco:
I can continue to complain.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Now you could refocus your efforts from that, which I think probably has reached the end of what you can really do with that.
Marco:
Now you can start not making a window shade app, but trying to make Apple add that feature back to the OS.
John:
It was a window shade, but it wasn't a window shade for OS X for a long time, remember?
John:
You guys don't remember that.
John:
It was an Insanity thing.
John:
It was a Haxi.
John:
Oh, okay.
John:
Well, that doesn't count.
John:
Yeah.
John:
But I used it for years.
John:
That was the last one I used.
John:
Eventually, you know, I remitted my system of all those weird system extensions, and that was the last one to go.
John:
but now, you know, it's long gone.
John:
I don't use any of those things anymore.
John:
And, you know, when should I get along without it?
John:
I don't miss it that much.
John:
I don't miss it as much as like a, you know, a working finder that I miss more.
John:
Oh my God.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Can I go to bed and like weep for John?
John:
Don't try to weep for my computing.
John:
If you saw me use my computer, it wouldn't seem that weird to you.
Casey:
You have no idea how happy this crystal meth makes me.
Casey:
Just let me keep abusing it.
John:
No, it doesn't do it.
John:
There's no harmful effects.
John:
In fact, the harmful effects seems to be on you, not me.
John:
It does.
Casey:
That's why I want you to stop doing it.
John:
I mean like I said I feel the same way when I see someone using a computer this incredibly powerful computer with a huge screen and they have like two windows open and every time they want something new they open a new window use it and then close it like I never they never sort of arrange their workspace into like a set of things that they're currently working on and you never close a window
John:
Well, like I said, the worst thing is when someone's working, you know, if you're doing programming, you end up editing multiple files.
John:
Even if, you know, like if you have a header file, an implementation file, there's multiple, like programming is necessarily dealing with multiple files.
John:
Web programming even more so because it's just a lot of files and you're working on them all at the same time.
John:
It's not like you're working on one, then you stop and you work on another, then you stop.
John:
I mean, you kind of do, but you're cycling between them so often that if the overhead of going to fetch the other one is too high, you'll kill yourself.
John:
And I see people
John:
They will only have one window.
John:
One, they call it their text editing window.
John:
And it fills the entire screen and whatever their editor is, they work on one document and then they close it.
John:
They open another document, they work on it and they close it.
John:
They open another document, work on it and close it.
John:
And occasionally they'll split the view and open one document in like a single splitter so they can see them both at once.
John:
But this is on, you know, a giant screen, often in portrait orientation.
John:
And that is like...
John:
And then if you want them to do something in the command line, they close all their editing windows because that's also their terminal window and they type a command.
John:
And if that command doesn't return and give them their prompt back, like the frequent phrase I find myself saying to people is, you know, open another terminal window or get me another shell prompt.
John:
It's like they just work with one.
John:
And whatever that one shell prompt, and this is the equivalent of Casey not understanding my millions of windows.
John:
I can't understand if people get anything done with one.
John:
Like they just use one.
John:
No tabs, no multiple windows.
John:
This is such a false dichotomy.
John:
This is the other end of the spectrum.
John:
I understand Casey's frustration in seeing someone use a computer the way they don't think.
John:
But the thing is, he's not even seeing me use a computer.
John:
He's just visualizing it in his mind.
John:
That's the way people feel comfortable.
John:
That's what they can keep track of is one thing at a time.
John:
What you guys can keep track of is your four terminal windows with a couple of tabs.
John:
I can keep track of a lot.
John:
I've been doing this a long time.
Casey:
the thing of it is is if you told me you had like four windows four safari windows open and there's a few tabs in each yeah i would still think you're a little crazy but you know whatever but what did you say 30 windows with something to the order of six tabs a window no human being i don't even you well not every window has six tabs like i mean you know so my uh my bug tracking window has four tabs here my titles window has one you know has no tabs because it's just the bug tracker
John:
Occasionally I consolidate, but I don't like consolidating things that aren't grouped together.
John:
Like I wouldn't stick.
John:
I would never stick the zero punctuation window as a tab in the same window as the titles thing because they're not related.
Casey:
God, I can't handle this.
John:
We still haven't picked the title.
John:
Nothing is resolved.
Casey:
Nothing is resolved, Marco.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
I'm frustrated enough that I looked at CMF saying the windows of Syracuse County and almost thought to myself, you know, maybe we should use that.
Casey:
It doesn't really matter, obviously, but just thinking about it just stresses me out.
Casey:
Let's talk about the Mac Pro some, just to calm me down.
John:
Look, there's another window shade app out there.
John:
I've never heard of this one.
John:
Not that I'm going to install it because I'm assuming it's a crazy system hack, but... WindowMizer.
John:
WindowMizer is an application that lets you see what's behind the front window without minimizing the current window to the dock.
John:
They're pitching it.
John:
That uses the main feature.
Marco:
No, thanks.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Your choices are nothing is resolved or the county one.
Casey:
No, that is not a choice.
Casey:
We'll see.
Casey:
Now I'm tempted to do it just because I know it'll bother you.
Marco:
If there was ever a time to do a Syracuse County title, this is it.
Marco:
I think you're right.
John:
No, we're not doing one.
John:
There is no time.
John:
What are you talking about?
John:
It's not like there's suddenly a time for this.
John:
There's no time.
Casey:
I'm coming around.
Casey:
I'm coming around.
Casey:
Once you give in to the Syracuse County title.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
That's the thing.
Casey:
I can't give CMF her moment.
Marco:
No.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
Nothing is resolved.
Marco:
No, but if there was ever a time.
Casey:
If there was ever a time.
John:
No, there's nothing county about this.
John:
Windows doesn't sound like bridges.
John:
You'd have to go for a bridges angle.
John:
That's where it came from.
John:
It was a show about bridges.
John:
You can't just take like, well, I'm going to take the Syracuse County part.
John:
Like there's nothing geographic.
John:
It doesn't make any sense.
John:
You just take the blank of Syracuse County.
John:
That's the worst of the Syracuse County titles.
John:
This means, you know, you can take anything and stick it there.
Marco:
all you're doing is encouraging us to do it now it'll be your show with this title on it think about it no i i have never in every other suggestion that people have had of some stupid syracuse county title i have never thought it was worth using i agree well how how is this one better how is this noun stuck into the mad libs better than the other one
Marco:
I think this is completely worth it.
Marco:
I think if we use a Syracuse County title once in this entire podcast, in the entire run of however long we end up doing this, I think this is a good candidate for that.
John:
Oh, God, I agree.
John:
So you're committing to only do it once then?
John:
yes yeah i think we only could do it once and i think this is such a good opportunity uh i would do it well feel free and see if you want to do it yes terrible titles and then and enjoy the crazy amount of uh suggestions that you will like that's the thing we are all agreeing ahem cmf ahem that we are never going to recommend this again if this works yeah i'm sure this will work yeah no i'm telling you that's it that's at least we stopped getting that's fine for buddha
Casey:
That was a thing?
John:
I never noticed that.
John:
Yes, it was a holdover from Back to Work that somehow leaked into our titles early on.
Casey:
I can't believe that.
Casey:
Jesus.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Marco:
I thought we had nothing to talk about tonight.
Casey:
Me too.
Marco:
I thought this was going to be a short show.
Marco:
We'd barely get to an hour 20.
Marco:
I have no idea what to talk about because the news isn't that interesting.
Marco:
I thought we'd be scraping around for desperation topics.
John:
I can talk to people all day about how they're not using their computers to their fullest potential.
John:
Like, think of it this way.
John:
When you see somebody else use a computer, do you feel like they could be doing it better or faster?
Casey:
Of course!
John:
Yeah, all the time.
John:
I have that feeling so much.
John:
I cannot look at other people who use computers.
John:
I can't imagine what it's like for you.
John:
Just that they're like, this is the hell of your life.
John:
It's not as bad as having two hands on the mouse slowly bringing the cursor up to the closed box, but that's what it feels like to me.
John:
And I feel better when I see... You ever see the people who do everything in one window, but do everything on keyboard, those touch-type as people?
John:
At least I feel better about those people, because they may not be as efficient as they could be, but it's clear that they have a system.
John:
And so it's like just a flurry of commands, and the screen is splitting and flashing and changing from one thing to the other, and they're probably doing more work than they have to, but things are happening.
John:
Versus the person you see using the computer, and you make a suggestion, it's like, all right, so...
John:
I got to go to that server.
John:
I guess I could get a new window here.
John:
And I could type SSH.
John:
It's like... You go to the server every day.
John:
You know... There's no shortcut.
John:
There's no alias.
John:
There's no keyboard shortcut.
John:
There's no existing open window.
John:
It's like...
John:
A brand new thing every time.
John:
Open a new terminal window.
John:
Type G-O-O-G-L-E dot coms.
John:
I know.
John:
So I can't, you know, that's how I feel when I see anybody using a computer.
John:
And I have a lighter version of that same feeling when I see someone using a computer, a massively powerful computer with a huge screen that has three windows open on it.
Casey:
So would it just drive you insane if I told you I kind of like the full screen mode and whatever came in on Lion?
John:
Full screen is appropriate for certain things, especially if you have an 11-inch MacBook Air or something.
John:
The full screen is not that big anyway, and you just want to get rid of the window chrome and fill it up.
John:
And people use spaces...
John:
I can kind of see what they're doing.
John:
At least something is happening.
John:
I am obsessive about space as they swipe from place to place.
John:
Spaces makes you arrange things like this is my goofing off space and this is my workspace and this is my, you know, console logging space or whatever.
John:
And it makes people sort of arrange things.
John:
I think swiping between them with the animation gets a little tiresome and kind of make me seasick, which is one of the many reasons I don't use it.
John:
And I hate forgetting what space something is in every time I've tried to use it.
John:
I guess I don't have a system, but it is a system.
John:
It is not.
John:
I just have like a window here.
John:
And like when I watch my parents use a computer, I want them to only have one window because they cannot handle overlocking windows at all.
John:
Like once there's one window behind another window, they've lost it.
John:
It's gone.
John:
They don't have object permanence for windows.
John:
Like where did that go?
John:
It's in the same place where it was before unless you moved it.
Marco:
They have the same number of windows as you, but for a completely different reason.
John:
No, they have like two windows.
John:
They have two, maybe three windows.
John:
Like they do not have a lot of windows, but they even two or three because they can't all be on the same because they want the browser window to be really big.
John:
Eventually it hides all the other ones and they lose track of them.
John:
So they have a very different problem.
Casey:
I can't even handle this.
Casey:
We have to go to bed.
Casey:
We do.
John:
And you wondered why I was excited about splitting the screen on the iPad.
Casey:
Oh, no, I don't.
Casey:
How many how many icons do you have on your desktop?
John:
My desktop is pretty neat.
John:
I have a cluster to the left.
John:
how could you when's the last time you've seen your desktop i just see it right now you know how i saw it without even thinking about it how do you think i did it hot corner yes hot corner of course hot corners are awesome i did not have to think about how how am i gonna go to my desktop should i click on the finder and then command option h no it happened before without even thinking look at my desktop boom it's there in front of me i don't know how it happened my hand flicked the cursor into the corner
John:
All right.
John:
On my left side, I've got a couple of folders for the things I'm working on now.
John:
I've got my call recorder recording folder.
John:
I got a folder that my wife keeps on my thing.
John:
I have my Ars Technica folder.
John:
I have my media drive alias.
John:
I hate server aliases.
John:
Do you have server aliases break for you in the finder?
John:
Like you'll make an alias of a server.
Marco:
that you mount and you're like now i'll be able to mount that easily and then every once in a while the icon just goes generic and it doesn't work anymore i don't know what the hell i have never been able to reliably reconnect to a finder network share in any way besides going to the computer in the list and remounting it like every other method has always failed and eventually
John:
Aliases work for me for a while, and I keep recreating because I use it a lot.
John:
And then I've got nothing in the whole middle of the desktop.
John:
And on the right side of the desktop, I have a bunch of files that are kind of like temp scrap files for work.
John:
One of the files is a GarageBand file that I use to check my levels occasionally because it shows the waveform when I talk into it.
John:
I want to make sure I'm not clipping to adjust the gain and stuff like that.
John:
um i've got kate's coloring pages in a folder there she's always having me find pictures for her and print them out so she can color them in uh i've got a couple of podcasts that i wish i could put into overcast but i can't because marco won't let me upload files um
John:
and uh a link to uh what is this a link to a toilet part that i just bought that i need to like file that away somewhere and that's about it so it's maybe like one two three four five six seven eight eight nine icons and then two drive icons
John:
You know how many I have?
John:
One.
John:
Oh, you're not doing a lot of stuff.
John:
You didn't just repair a toilet.
John:
You're not checking your microphone levels.
John:
You don't know that.
Marco:
So I did just repair a toilet three times, actually, because I kept doing it wrong.
Marco:
Did you save links to the place where you got the parts so you can find it next time it breaks?
Marco:
Nope.
Marco:
Because, first of all, who cares?
Marco:
Second of all, I bought them all on Amazon, and Amazon keeps a whole history of everything I've ever bought.
John:
yeah no i always end up getting it from these random plumbing supply companies when i find these now i like i really just need to turn that into a noting your jimbo like for example when i get replacement wiper blades i always forget what sizes they are for the different cars so the first time i buy them i just write them down with links to the things and yeah amazon is good about finding your orders although sometimes when i search their order history i wonder if it's like losing things it's difficult because sometimes i buy through my wife's amazon account sometimes through mine but anyway i keep a pretty neat desktop
John:
I mean, I want to see the pictures there.
John:
That's not a lot of icons for a big screen.
John:
You know what desktops look like of people who don't manage their desktops.
John:
It's just basically covered with icons.
Casey:
Yeah, they look like your browser windows is what they look like.
Marco:
No, everything's managed.
Marco:
I know exactly where everything is.
Marco:
It has a place.
Casey:
Everything has a place.
Marco:
I can just mouse over.
Marco:
It just happens.
Marco:
I don't even know how it gets there.
Marco:
My mouse just guides itself right there.
Casey:
I could close any of these anytime.
Casey:
I just choose not to.
Casey:
That's true.
Casey:
Also, how many icons do you have on your desktop, Margo?
Marco:
I don't want to count.
Marco:
Eyeballing, it's probably about 10 or 12.
John:
See, same as me.
John:
It's just whatever stuff you happen to be working on that's in flight and like the kids coloring page stuff, I just leave in the desktop just because, I mean, I could put it in Quicksilver too if I wanted, but it's just convenient to have it there.
John:
also because i drag things out of safari windows i want to drag them you know once you get to the full-size version of the image it's convenient just to be able to drag it out of a window and drop it into the folder you know i mean and so then the folder if the folder is on the desktop it's easy to do that because just start the drag flick into the corner or since they're on the right edge half the time they're visible anyway
Marco:
Why don't you just leave the window open all the time with the image?
Marco:
You don't have to save it.
John:
Because I print it, and when I print it, it's gone.
John:
It's done.
John:
I'm not leaving things around for no reason.
John:
They all have a purpose, and once the purpose is done, they close.
John:
Yes, unless it's a monitoring type thing that I'm looking at all the time, like Gmail.
Casey:
And the wonderful thing is, John, on an infinite timescale, everything has a purpose.
John:
That's not how the infinite timescale argument works.
John:
on infinite timescale every window closes that's all right we're done we're done we're done i can't take this anymore oh my god the thing the infinite timescale argument we're not done because you guys keep bringing this up like it's a running gag and you don't quite understand it the infinite timescale argument
John:
For the benefit of the chat room and the people and the other two hosts of this program, the infinite times of the argument is for when somebody agrees with you that something will happen, but anytime you try to pin it down with a date, they say, oh, well, no, that won't happen then.
John:
So it's like, you agree this is going to happen.
John:
But the only way I can get you to agree with that is say, well, what about 500 years in the future?
John:
And say, oh, yes, well, of course, that'll happen to 500 years in the future.
John:
What about next week?
John:
Never.
John:
What about next year?
John:
Never.
John:
What about next five years?
John:
Never.
John:
What about 500 years in the future?
John:
OK, I agree.
John:
So if you agree, it's somewhere between 500 years in the future and now where between there is you're trying to get someone to, you know, this is something that you both agree will eventually happen.
John:
But every time you throw out a date in the in the conceivable future, they say no.
John:
So that's what you're doing with an infinite timescale argument is basically getting someone to agree that we both think this is going to happen.
John:
All we're arguing about is when.
John:
And the only way you can get to that is by throwing out a ridiculous date like, well, what about 500 years in the future?
John:
Then we'll have more than 16 gigs of flash memory on iOS devices.
John:
And you say, oh, sure, 500 in the future.
John:
Of course you will.
John:
Right.
John:
And it's like, all right, well, then let's back that up and see where we can get.
John:
It's not let's extrapolate into the future and say that something is going to happen if we just keep advancing time.
John:
It's not quite the same thing as that is saying, you know, everyone has a purpose if you wait long enough.
John:
It's a nuanced thing, but you guys keep using it wrong.
John:
I want you to be able to employ this in your life as well.
John:
I forgot what I originally used it on.
John:
I think it was convincing Marco of some... What was the original timescale argument?
Marco:
I forget.
Marco:
It was something with me, you're right, but I forget.
John:
It was something about a hardware feature coming to Max or something.
Marco:
Oh, you know what I think it was?
Marco:
Was...
Marco:
whether apple needed what ended up being swift like what the the whole uh you know copeland uh 20 whatever yeah it was like i was saying like objective c is fine and it will be fine for a long time and right and i was like okay what does a long time mean and it's like i don't know you know it's like well eventually they're gonna need a language and you know what does eventually mean or whatever turns out eventually needed like six months from then
John:
yeah right but that's the whole point the whole point was not to convince you that if you wait for the heat death of the universe apple will have a new programming language the point was to to get us to both agree that they need a new one and then all we're arguing about is when okay glad we got that resolved and that eventually i win that argument yeah naturally right okay are we really done now