I Invented This Anti-Pattern
Marco:
it's been so long since we've talked i know i feel like it's been far far too long i did tear apart my entire beach office and put it back together why i finally got like the setup i wanted in most ways like i i try it one of the ways that i'm different at the beach is that i try to have as minimal of a setup as possible now this is you know still me here so i still have you know
Marco:
speakers and a carplay dev kit and all this you know random i still have a lot of stuff here but uh i try to keep it simpler than what i have in my regular life anyway so yeah took apart the whole thing rewired i finally did like the zip ties in the back and of course as you do instantly upon zip tying a bunch of cables together i would realize oh i want to put one more cable in there
Casey:
Yep, that's the rules.
Marco:
Yep, break that zip tie or just put another one on top of the whole bundle and then you have like four different levels of zip ties simultaneously working with each other.
John:
Oh God, poor Stephen Hackett is getting so stressed.
John:
You got to get the Velcro ones.
John:
Don't use actual zip ties.
John:
It's way over kill for wires.
John:
The Velcro ones is much nicer than you can just un-Velcro and re-Velcro there.
Marco:
I have some of those.
Marco:
The kind I got for the Beech is not a very good one.
Marco:
I just got some Amazon generic one thinking it would be as good as the Monoprice ones I have from a few years back, and it's totally not.
Marco:
The Monoprice ones are way better than whatever the generic one is that I got.
Marco:
I figured they'll be the same, but nope.
Marco:
Anyway, the problem with the Velcro ties, first of all, they collect tons of dust and hair and everything on the Velcro side.
Marco:
Second of all, they are bulkier.
Marco:
And then third of all, they tend to slide down the cables if it's a vertical cable.
Marco:
You can try to do it really tight, and it'll stay a little bit better there, but it will still slide way more than a zip tie will.
John:
I wonder if you're talking about the same product.
John:
The ones I'm talking about are smooth on the outside, are very thin, they thread through themselves, and they do not move.
John:
You should have sent me a link to what you're getting.
Marco:
I wouldn't necessarily describe mine as very thin.
Marco:
And mine come in the multicolor pack.
Marco:
It's like all the primary colors of Velcro.
Marco:
I don't have any colored ones, but that doesn't mean they don't come.
Marco:
Send me like... I've got to find it.
Marco:
Hold on.
Marco:
It's in your order history.
Marco:
You know, I've had terrible luck with my Amazon order history search recently.
Marco:
It seems like the search of your order history has gotten way worse.
Marco:
Like, it won't find stuff based on pretty basic keywords that occur in it.
Marco:
Oh, here we go.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Monoprice 106463.
John:
Those look kind of similar, but mine are not that shape.
John:
I think it's the same concept, but, yeah, I think the quality really varies because these, I mean, you said these are the good ones, but they look wider than the ones I'm talking about, and the slip-through mechanism looks different.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I wouldn't give up on the Velcro.
John:
All the problems you described with them about collecting dust and stuff and not holding, I have not experienced at all.
John:
My whole TV is put together with these things, and they do not move, and there's no undue dust collection, and they're not as fuzzy on the outside as these.
John:
They actually look like they're made of plastic, but it just has the stuff.
John:
Anyway, zip ties, like actual real zip ties, those are, you know, I would never actually use those unless it was something serious and, like, structural.
John:
no it's great because like you know you buy a bag of like 200 of them for nothing and uh and you know yeah the downside is whenever you change your mind you got to cut them and and then you could accidentally cut the cable if you're not being careful and and then they can be squeezing the cables too much if you tightened it up too much it's bad if you're an animal like yeah obviously but like if you use them carefully it's fine it's felt gross i had something gross but anyway by the way the thing i learned when i was a very very small child if you ever want to undo zip ties without cutting them a sewing needle is your best friend
John:
I didn't know that.
John:
The thing you have in the house, I mean, obviously tons of things will work, but a sewing needle will disengage the little ratchety thing and you can just take them right off without cutting them.
Marco:
Oh, that's interesting.
Marco:
You can actually like lift up the little latches inside there and loop it back through?
John:
Yeah, you just shove the sewing needle between the two little thingies because it's really thin at the tip and it's wider as it goes down and it will just open it up enough for you to just take it right off.
John:
And everyone has a sewing needle because if you try to use like a jeweler screwdriver or like the tip of a knife, nothing works, but a needle will do it.
John:
interesting look at that life hack from john syracuse yeah they didn't call them life hacks when i was five and i had to undo zip ties and things and i would undo them by the way for the same reason well not the same reason but i wouldn't have a pack of 100 i might have like one or two zip ties and i'd realize i need to take it off and then then i said there's got to be a way to take these on and off without destroying them and that's what it is sewing needle today i learned be careful with wires because you can still poke the wire with the needle like obviously i wasn't zip tying wires like there is still a danger but it is much less
John:
unfortunately i have way more zip ties than sewing needles so that's i'm probably still gonna keep doing it my way but that's a good hack friend of the show kyle's the gray has things to say about public policy advocacy yeah he just wanted to clarify i listen just listen back to uh quote unquote last week's episode and uh and at one point i made a blanket statement about all these companies give to both political parties yada yada yada and uh
John:
not kyle's the gray but kyle seth gray pointed out uh that uh unlike all the other companies i think apple does this is from apple's own web page quoting now apple does not make political contributions to individual candidates or parties and we do not have a political action committee they do have lobbyists but they don't give directly to candidates and that is not true of most other big companies and most other tech companies so credit where credit is due we will put a link in the show notes to apple's public public policy advocacy web page where you can read about this
John:
I actually didn't know that.
Marco:
That's interesting.
Casey:
Yeah, I didn't know that either.
Casey:
I had assumed as you that they do the sleazy, you know, advocacy and – what's the word I'm looking for?
Casey:
The thing where you send people to – oh, lobby.
Casey:
There it is.
John:
No, they have lobbyists but they don't contribute directly to candidates or parties.
Casey:
Oh, that is a fine line there.
John:
They have fewer lobbyists than other companies.
John:
There was one thing that came up before these –
John:
Before these hearings showing how many lobbyists the various companies have, they have on their below average number of lobbyists among their peers.
John:
But like Google and I think Facebook and a bunch of other companies give directly to candidates.
John:
Like they give the maximum amount you're allowed for corporate donations.
John:
They don't have a political action committee, a PAC, which is another way to get money to people.
John:
So maybe it's a distinction without a difference.
John:
But I think it's significant enough that I shouldn't have lumped them in with everybody else.
Yeah.
Casey:
And then tell me about Big Sur and Catalina and APFS.
John:
I haven't tested this yet, but I've seen multiple reports that macOS 10.15.6, which is the latest Catalina update, now understands Big Sur's new APFS volume format.
John:
So you won't get that message in the finder when you reboot into Catalina that says, I don't understand this format of this weird disk here.
Yeah.
John:
I haven't had my... I have a bunch of stuff running that prevents external drives from mounting.
John:
Back in the old days, I would just not turn on my external drives.
John:
But of course, all my drives are now SSDs and they're bus powered.
John:
So if they're plugged into my computer, they're powered.
John:
But that's the application I talked about a while back, Mountain or whatever.
John:
You can just tell it not to mount them automatically and so they don't appear.
John:
So I never see that message.
John:
But in theory, if I was to mount that drive now, it would be mountable, invisible, and catalytic, which is nice because it's always annoying when
John:
The old operating system can't see something about the new operating system and vice versa.
John:
So assuming this is true, I'm very happy.
Casey:
Yeah, I haven't tried booting Catalina.
Casey:
Oh, no, I did boot Catalina earlier tonight.
Casey:
And I don't remember seeing that message.
Casey:
So I think that's accurate.
Casey:
I don't even know.
Casey:
But that is good.
Casey:
And because that notification, I forget exactly what the verbiage was.
Casey:
We talked about it on the show.
Casey:
But it was alarming to me because I guess I just didn't know what was happening.
Casey:
And once you think about it, it's like, okay, that makes sense.
Casey:
But at the time, I was like, oh, God, what happened here?
Casey:
So, yeah, I'm glad that's fixed, improved, et cetera.
John:
Anytime you get that disk isn't recognized or error or anything like that, it makes you freak out a little bit.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
Because, like, what do you mean disk isn't recognized?
John:
You know, the old macOS would always say, do you want to initialize it?
John:
And you're like, no, wait, no, what are you talking about?
John:
It's a perfectly good disk.
John:
Why are you telling me to?
John:
And if you weren't paying attention and you just clicked the wrong button, macOS used to be a lot more dangerous.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Bombas.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you to Bombas for making amazing socks and helping the world out and sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, so we'll start tonight with Wade Trigaskis, who writes, if there was a legitimate way to distribute iOS apps outside of the App Store, would any of you actually do that?
Casey:
This could allegedly be an Ask ATP, but we already have a full slate of Ask ATP.
Casey:
And I didn't put this here, but I agree.
Casey:
I'm assuming it was John who put this here.
Casey:
It is an interesting thought.
Casey:
So for me, I had recently Sunset Vignette, but Peak of View is still in the App Store.
Casey:
Sunset?
Casey:
Sunset.
Casey:
Sunsat, Sunsat, Big Sur.
Casey:
So anyway, so I still have a peak of view in the store.
Casey:
And in fact, I'm waiting for a view on a very small update now.
Casey:
And I was thinking about this a little.
Casey:
I don't know if I would.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
I'm leaning toward no because...
Casey:
For me, I don't know what it would really get for me other than presumably an improved cut, I guess I should say.
Casey:
I would get more than 70%.
Casey:
But then I would have to manage all the things I don't really want to manage, like payments and so on and so forth.
Casey:
And since it's not like a subscription app like Overcast, I don't necessarily need to have a more direct relationship with my customers.
Casey:
So I don't think I would.
Casey:
But Marco, I have a feeling that you might have a very different answer here.
Marco:
You'd be surprised.
Marco:
There's so much more of a larger discussion here around the 30%, the 15%, all that stuff.
Marco:
Much of which is happening because of the antitrust hearings and everything.
Marco:
The discussion around Apple and potential anti-competitive or antitrust issues with the App Store has focused a lot on the 30%.
Marco:
And many people have suggested, well, what if they just lower the commission?
Marco:
Could that fix things?
Marco:
And would that be good enough?
Marco:
Apple has even focused a lot of their defense or rebuttal that they're not being anti-competitive on the 30%.
Marco:
I think they do that intentionally because they know that if they can reduce the discussion around other angles of it, not only can they control the message, but this is an area where what they have is slightly more defensible because they can point to the other big app stores that all copied them and be like, hey, look, Google charges 30% or whatever.
Marco:
But it's really not about the 30% so much.
Marco:
30% is a ton.
Marco:
Don't get me wrong.
Marco:
It is a very large commission.
Marco:
It is substantial, and I don't think they deliver enough value to have earned 30%.
Marco:
And they would love for everyone to only talk about the percentage.
Marco:
Because if you're only talking about the percentage, you are not talking about all of the other problems that are actually anti-competitive.
Marco:
The percentage...
Marco:
isn't that big of a factor if apple dropped it from 70 30 to like 85 15 across the board for so every app could be 85 15 that still wouldn't make companies like netflix or hey want to have their services in the app store or use an app purchase in the app store
Marco:
The 30% is not the problem.
Marco:
I don't think you would get somebody like Amazon or Netflix, HBO, all these big companies.
Marco:
They wouldn't participate in an app purchase at any price.
Marco:
Even if Apple somehow made it 0%, they still wouldn't do it because there are so many more angles here that are about things like integration with your existing system, things like control.
Marco:
owning the billing relationship like there's so much stuff that you can't do if you're using apple system there's a lot of things that apple system simply can't do or doesn't do well um it's certain you know certain purchase methods or even just like managing what purchases are available and accounting for them there's a lot of things that apple system either doesn't do at all or doesn't do as well as other systems do um any kind of admin control like
Marco:
We have no way as developers to refund people who purchase our stuff.
Marco:
So if I get an email from somebody saying, oh, I purchased Overcast Premium.
Marco:
I thought it would do this.
Marco:
I get an email almost every day from people who say, I purchased Overcast Premium so I could send files to my watch.
Marco:
It doesn't work.
Marco:
I want a refund.
Marco:
That's not what it does.
Marco:
I don't know where they're finding this information.
Marco:
Did I ever charge for that?
Marco:
I don't remember.
Marco:
I don't think I ever made that a premium feature.
Marco:
But regardless, I frequently have a need where I wish I could issue somebody a refund.
Marco:
And instead, I can't do that.
Marco:
All I can do is direct them to Apple's page about how to maybe possibly sometimes get a refund.
Marco:
And that's a terrible customer approach.
Marco:
I wish I could offer refunds.
Marco:
I have no way to tell if someone's charge went through.
Marco:
For our ATP.fm member CMS, we use Stripe.
Marco:
and I'm able with Stripe, there's a whole dashboard I can go into.
Marco:
And it's super easy for me to either use their dashboard or build my own on our admin backend that can do things like see what a customer has been charged.
Marco:
See if their credit card was declined, if the charge actually was issued or not.
Marco:
I can give partial or full refunds for any payment they've made.
Marco:
There's so much control that we have in Stripe that I don't have with Apple's internet purchase system.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
there's a lot of reasons why people would maybe not want to use Apple's in-app purchase system that are not just about whatever percentage they happen to charge.
Marco:
Now, the percentage they charge is high, for sure.
Marco:
Even the 15% that you can get on, you know, years too forward on subscriptions, even 15% is high.
Marco:
I mean, for Skype, we pay something like 3%, and that's pretty typical for most payment processors.
Marco:
The percentage is important, but all this other stuff, all these angles of control...
Marco:
And being able to have your own billing system and being able to own that customer relationship, being able to look up what somebody paid to solve customer support problems, being able to issue refunds yourself to solve other customer support problems.
Marco:
There's so many reasons that Apple system is not good.
Marco:
There are things that Apple system literally can't do.
Marco:
that make certain businesses possible or not possible.
Marco:
Like I was saying in the past about how if I wanted to have some kind of system where you paid Overcast $20 a month and then I split it up between all the podcasts that you listen to, I currently have no way with Apple's system to associate your purchase with how much money I've actually received from you.
Marco:
So I can't split up your money without – I can estimate and get it wrong.
Marco:
I don't really want to do that.
Marco:
I can put myself at risk of actually losing money if that happened, and I wouldn't be incredibly accurate with where people's money was supposed to go because there's no way for me to look up an Apple system.
Marco:
How much money did I actually receive from this user this month?
Marco:
I can't do that.
Marco:
um there's all sorts of other things like that where apple system it's great in certain ways and it's really not great in others and apple wants us to keep talking about 30 to avoid talking about all that other stuff the real problem with the app store being anti-competitive the real thing that's going to make apple like have to get regulated by governments because they clearly won't do it themselves and
Marco:
is going to be the rules about not letting other people use their own purchase systems.
Marco:
That's the key thing here.
Marco:
And Apple doesn't want us talking about that because that would cost them a lot in control.
Marco:
And that would make them fully lose all the big companies that they're already mostly losing, like things like Amazon, Netflix, etc.
Marco:
But ultimately, for the App Store to have significantly reduced antitrust problems,
Marco:
they have to allow apps to use their own purchase systems if they want to.
Marco:
And they can put as many restrictions around that as possible, except what they've done so far to date with the stupid reader app distinction, which is really just we're going to allow the big apps to do it because we have to because they're big, but we're not going to allow new small apps to do it.
Marco:
That's a terrible distinction.
Marco:
They have to get rid of the reader app distinction that says you're allowed to do it, but you're not.
Marco:
They have to allow apps to mention...
Marco:
go to our website to sign up.
Marco:
They don't have to let you link out.
Marco:
They don't have to let you build it into the app.
Marco:
But I think they need to do those two things.
Marco:
Get rid of the rule that lets only some apps do this at all and relax the rule about mentioning it at all and allow apps to mention in text in the app, go to our website to sign up.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
That would solve so many of these antitrust problems.
Marco:
they won't do that unless they're forced apparently but that's like we're not asking for like you know alternative app stores you know side loading all i don't i don't think those things would be very good for the platform i don't i don't think the iphone would benefit from side loading or alternative app stores uh i will eventually answer this question by wade by the way
Marco:
which was about this it was about distributing apps outside of the app store like if you know sideloading or you know something like that became possible i will get there in a second but basically i don't think that would be good for the platform at all having the app store and having forced app review for all apps on ios in particular i wouldn't accept this on mac os but on ios i think it it does make sense and the platform is better off for it
Marco:
However, I also think that rule about external payment systems needs to be relaxed.
Marco:
And I'm not even saying it needs to be relaxed very much.
Marco:
Just a little.
Marco:
Let all apps do the Netflix trick, and let the Netflix trick be slightly nicer for users in that let the app actually say in text, you may sign up on our website.
Marco:
With those changes, again, these problems mostly disappear.
Marco:
Anyway, so going back to the question about whether I would distribute my apps or any apps of mine, I guess, outside of the app store if there was a way to do it.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
At least nothing I've currently written in.
Marco:
Not Overcast, for sure.
Marco:
Apple's payment system does come with some significant benefits.
Marco:
And if they were actually forced to compete more with others, maybe they'd make it even better.
Marco:
I choose to use it willingly, and I'm glad I can use it.
Marco:
Because...
Marco:
Apple's payment system is really, really good for the case of Overcast Premium where I need to know roughly if somebody paid or not, but I don't really need to know how much they paid me.
Marco:
I don't need to know exactly how much I earned from their account after any possible foreign currency conversion.
Marco:
I don't need to know any of that.
Marco:
And if a couple of people get through fraudulently who paid me and then got refunds and kept the account anyway, you know what?
Marco:
That doesn't matter that much to me.
Marco:
I'm not going to lose money over that, really.
Marco:
They could fill their uploads with 10 gigs of files and I would lose, just look at whatever S3 charges, that amount of cents per month.
Marco:
It wouldn't be that big of a loss.
Marco:
Apple's system is good if you don't need all that precision about who exactly bought exactly what and did they get refunds or chargebacks or anything.
Marco:
If you don't need that kind of granularity, it's fine.
Marco:
And then you get the benefit of the incredible ease of use it gives users.
Marco:
The reason why I've always liked Apple's purchase system is that it's super easy.
Marco:
Your billing info is already entered.
Marco:
Even before Apple Pay was a thing on websites, your billing info is already entered.
Marco:
Everything is already ready to go.
Marco:
You just authorize it with a password or touch ID or face ID or whatever, and it's purchased, and that's it.
Marco:
As a user, I love that, and as a developer, I love that because I like having things be really, really easy to purchase in my app, and then
Marco:
All the things that Apple removes from my control, for the most part, is stuff that I don't really need to deal with with this particular app, with this particular offering of a paid thing.
Marco:
I don't need to deal with most of that stuff.
Marco:
So it's totally fine.
Marco:
And I gladly, for this app, I gladly accept the trade-off
Marco:
of, I will accept all of Apple's shortcomings, I accept their 30% forever, and then with, you know, most recently, now that I'm entirely subscription-based on iOS, I accept their, you know, 70, 30 the first year, 85, 15 subsequent years.
Marco:
because I like not having to deal with all that stuff for this particular app, and I like the incredible ease of use that people have for buying it.
Marco:
And that allows me, ultimately, I believe, to make more money from Overcast Premium than I would if I had to have my own payment system and people had to enter their own billing details and everything like that, because I think that would cause more friction and I would lose more sales.
Marco:
So I think, ultimately, I'm making money with this that I probably wouldn't be making
Marco:
doing it, doing a different system.
Marco:
And I'm able to have all that ease of use of all this stuff.
Marco:
I don't have to really deal with that they deal with for me.
Marco:
That being said, this doesn't apply to everything.
Marco:
I also sell ads and I sell ads only on the overcast website, not through the app.
Marco:
I don't have any in-app purchase.
Marco:
I actually do accept Apple pay for them.
Um,
Marco:
all through stripe again because that's like a different thing like that's offering something on the web that is mostly you know from people who are not using their phones at the time of purchase they're like you know people who work for big podcasting companies who are spending a marketing budget from their computer at their office and they're going websites and i need to know then who actually paid and if anybody did get you know chargebacks or refunds i need to know that because it you know it's larger sums of money for a small number of purchases and it matters more that's a different thing though for the actual app
Marco:
I am very happy to be in the App Store and to use the in-app purchase system because it does get me more users and more purchases than the alternative would.
Marco:
But that's only because I have this set of trade-offs and priorities for this particular app and for this particular purchase for Overcast Premium where that makes sense.
Marco:
That doesn't make sense for everybody, and it never will.
Marco:
And they're always going to have antitrust problems until...
Marco:
using alternative payment systems for apps that don't want to use internet purchase become possible.
Marco:
And then Apple can try to actually compete on their merits.
Casey:
Why didn't you put forecast in the Mac app store?
Casey:
I know that's not an apples to apples comparison, but why not put forecast there then?
Marco:
The main reason I didn't put Forecast in the Mac App Store is that Forecast is free, and I don't have any purchase in it.
Marco:
I don't have any way to make money in it.
Marco:
It was just easier on the Mac not to.
Marco:
If I'm dealing with the App Store, I'm dealing with... On the Mac, I have to deal with things like sandboxing and the weird limitations of the Mac App Store apps and everything.
Marco:
I didn't want to deal with any of that, and it didn't make sense for a free app to go through all that trouble.
Marco:
However...
Marco:
If Forecast was a paid app, I would do it through the App Store just so I wouldn't have to deal with any of that stuff.
Casey:
John, I know you don't have iOS apps, but you could have elected to do your own distribution for your stuff.
Casey:
But you ended up in the App Store.
John:
Yeah, I put this question in here and not as an ask ADP, but I think like as Marco has just discussed, it's very relevant to the antitrust stuff.
John:
And in particular, two aspects, one that Marco also kind of touched on, like when and many people have mentioned, like when Apple is asked.
John:
about you know or they offer themselves when describing here's the app store and here's why it's awesome they go through the whole thing and they say used to be you had to pay retailers a huge amount but then they skip right to the app store right which is another silly thing for them to do because they have a good case for explaining the app store without skipping over the multiple decades where people sold software over the internet without the app store right and
John:
There's no reason to skip from retail to the app store.
John:
You can say, yeah, people used to sell, you know, software from their websites, but then they had to do payment processing and they had to do all of themselves.
John:
And it was even harder before Stripe happened and it was harder for users.
John:
And if a user wanted to buy five applications, they had to enter their payment information into five different websites.
John:
Apple has a case that can be made about the App Store.
John:
Apple made this very case when they introduced the App Store.
John:
It's right there in front of us.
John:
And as Marco said, it's easy for people to buy things on the App Store.
John:
It's why users like it and developers like it because there's less friction between people's money and your thing.
John:
Uh, and you know, part of that is the foundation of that is Apple sort of parlayed its success in digital music into the app store because why did they have all those credit card numbers?
John:
Oh, it was your quote unquote iTunes account, right?
John:
You know, and like they, people trusted people, people have been giving Apple money with their credit cards for a long time.
John:
So it wasn't so much of a stretch to say, Hey, you get a new phone.
John:
You can use your Apple ID, enter payment information.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like it's all, it was all, you know, snowballing, right?
Yeah.
John:
uh and they only had to do that once and once they do that any app in the app store they're going to say purchase purchase purchase purchase like it's just you know you don't have to every time you purchase an app you don't have to enter your credit card information in that developer's website right so there's a strong argument to be made for the value that the app store provides without making some completely disingenuous argument about how in the bad old days uh right before the app store you had to pay comp usa to put a cardboard box and you get like one percent of that sale or whatever that was right
John:
uh that's not the predecessor that the app store was competing with it was competing with direct sales through websites now direct sales through websites had the advantages that margot listed before which is like oh you have the customer relationship you can easily issue refunds so on and so forth and obviously the bigger the software company the more important that is because they probably have more sales and more applications and for a
John:
You know, you may probably not just going to buy one Adobe app if you're going to be a big customer for them.
John:
So you give Adobe your payment information once and then you can buy all sorts of Adobe things year after year.
John:
Right.
John:
So it's not so bad.
John:
But for small developers, it makes more sense.
John:
And.
John:
I don't I'm not quite sure why Apple doesn't make that pitch, but I think everybody knows, you know, you know, either the top of their mind or just instinctively.
John:
That's why that's what makes the app store good.
John:
And this question about alternate app stores.
John:
if you think about it for more than a couple of seconds, leads you to some weird scenarios, which is why I wonder how this will work out legally speaking, right?
John:
What would it take to have an alternate app store?
John:
I know there are ones like the jailbreak app stores of like, what is it, Cydia, and there's a whole bunch of like things that...
John:
are out there that do this.
John:
But I think we'd all agree that's a little bit, a little bit sketchy and weird and not a mainstream thing, right?
John:
If there were an alternate app store, it would actually need substantial, you need to be jailbreak, which I think we can set aside and say no one wants to
John:
compromise the security of their phone that much for an app store right you didn't have to compromise the security of your computer that much to buy things from a website so why you know that's just a curiosity but like say there was like a legit ultimate alternate store for your phones right that would basically necessarily need support from ios support from apple for it to reach feature parity with the app store in all the areas that the app store is good
John:
Oh, I want to be able to automatically install applications with a single tap without doing anything weird jailbreaking.
John:
You can't do that on a phone without the privileges that Apple offers to the App Store.
John:
There is no way from a website to install an app onto your phone.
John:
And probably, thankfully...
John:
There is no way to get it.
John:
How would you bootstrap the process?
John:
How do you get the store application?
John:
Like the App Store comes on our phones, right?
John:
But how would you get the alternate store application onto your phone in the first place?
John:
It would probably have to be hosted on the App Store.
John:
Right.
John:
Otherwise, there'd be this convoluted install process.
John:
And then all the things that I'm talking about without sort of support from Apple in the operating system for alternate stores, every alternate store would be at a massive disadvantage because nobody wants to figure out how to sideload or use Xcode to put a thing on or do some weird big page or jailbreak.
John:
Regular people do not want to do that.
John:
So you've just narrowed your customer base to.
John:
this incredibly thin sliver of tech nerds, everyone else would be like, oh, I don't know how to do that.
John:
I'll just go to the app store because it's on my phone to begin with.
John:
So Apple would need to actively support alternate app stores.
John:
And the only way they would ever do that is if the law made them do it.
John:
And laws that make companies do technical things never work because the law doesn't understand the technology, the technology changes too fast, and it just, like...
John:
when i think about alternate app stores i think no one would want to use an alternate app store users wouldn't want to use an alternate app store because it can never be as good as the app store is in all the ways that the app store is beneficial to everybody involved right and that's kind of disappointing but also sort of you know if this is kind of like microsoft and ie you know the argument that it's part of the operating system but also the argument of like look
John:
Well, I don't know.
John:
It's a little bit different because it was easier to put alternate browsers on.
John:
But anyway, alternate app stores would need good support from Apple, and Apple will never provide that unless they're forced to.
John:
And if they're forced to, they'll do it weirdly or badly because the law will not be able to say, and you have to do a good job, and it doesn't really make any sense.
John:
So I feel like the alternate app store thing is a pointless thing to consider.
John:
Sideloading isn't because you can say, look, in special cases for particular kinds of applications, it's great to have an out and a way to install things.
John:
But for the mass market case of like I bought an iPhone, now I want to get a bunch of apps.
John:
We're never going to be in a world where there are a bunch of app stores, all of which are as easy to use, reliable, and trustworthy as the app store because Apple doesn't want that to be the case.
John:
If Apple changed their mind and figured out some way to make more money doing that, yeah, they can definitely do it.
John:
It's not a technical barrier.
John:
It's just sort of a business case barrier.
John:
As for my particular things distributing outside the app store,
John:
The only reason I didn't do it is because I'm not like my two apps are small and, you know, barely hobbies.
John:
Right.
John:
Both of my apps would benefit from not being in the Mac app store because I wouldn't have to sandbox them.
John:
And I wouldn't have a bunch of stupid limitations.
John:
Like, to just give one example from Switchglass, I implemented a feature where you right-click on an icon in the little app switcher, and the bottom item was quit.
John:
Because it's just handy to be able to quit an application from the app switcher, right?
John:
I implemented it, and then it just totally didn't work.
John:
And I was like, oh, yeah, you can't do that with sandbox.
John:
And you cannot tell an arbitrary application to quit.
John:
You can...
John:
I whitelist them and say, I want to be able to send the quit Apple event to these five applications, but you have to ship that with your binary.
John:
And I'm not going to list every application in the world.
John:
Right.
John:
So there's one example of feature I implemented.
John:
Granted, it's like five lines, but I implemented it before I discovered that it can't be implemented.
John:
People ask for it all the time.
John:
I have a fact item on it.
John:
If I wasn't in the Mac app store, it would have that feature.
John:
So there are reasons, especially for my weird utility type applications, that I would love to be outside the Mac App Store.
John:
But because it's just a little tiny hobby and I'm not going to sell a lot of these things, but I do want to sell them, I'm not going to set up a payment processor for the piddling amount of money these things make.
John:
I'm not going to set up my own store and have a customer relationship and blah, blah, blah.
John:
It's just, it's not, I don't have enough sales and I never will have enough sales to justify the effort for me to make
John:
my own sort of software store outside the app store because i'm not a mac app developer who's trying to start a mac app development business um so for me no i wouldn't do it for my mac apps even though i think about it from time to time i'm like like maybe when when like if i go through like six months with zero sales maybe i'll just make it a free app and put it outside the app store and uh make it not sandbox anymore
John:
I also thought maybe like, oh, well, you know, I'll build a non-sandbox version for my own personal use.
John:
In practice, I don't, partially because of the convenience.
John:
I bought my own application, which is another weird thing that you do if you're – anyway, I bought my own application.
John:
And in every Mac that I'm on, I just download it from the Mac App Store.
John:
Again, it's just more convenient than doing it the other way and having a special build.
John:
It's just easier to have just one build.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And for iOS, if I ever made an iOS application, that's even more the case because like I said, there's no way there will ever be another app store that is as friendly to customers as the app store.
John:
So if I want to get any kind of sales or any kind of downloads, I have to be in the app store.
John:
I wouldn't be in the quote unquote alternate app store.
John:
But if I was making some weird, like, you know, the ability to sideload, even like some weird, you know, the ability to load an application, even if it's a long multi-step process, but it's officially supported by Apple, that's what I mean by sideloading.
John:
I would do that if I had a good idea for a strange iOS application that needed to violate some rules or something that...
John:
the app store enforces, but that the OS doesn't.
John:
Because that's another distinction you have to remember.
John:
On iOS, it's not like if you can sideload, suddenly you don't have sandboxing.
John:
But if you can sideload, one thing you don't have to deal with is, I don't like your metadata, I don't like this kind of application, I don't like that you use the private API, all that crap you don't have to deal with if you're outside the app store.
John:
But once you get onto the phone, it's not like you have a free-for-all.
John:
There's a difference between jailbreaking and sideloading.
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, if I was on iOS, unless I had one of those weird type of applications that was techie and just a one-off, like a dev tool or something, I'd be in the App Store.
John:
And, yeah, Wade, I know this is probably maybe not exactly what you were asking about, but I think the heart of it is, you know, would we be in the alternate App Store?
John:
Would anyone, not without massive, extremely unlikely support from Apple, to make the alternate App Store be able to do the basic things that an App Store does?
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Casey:
I have been dabbling with, and I think John has even longer than I, a very recent sponsor, as in two days ago as we record this, but a sponsor from last week, Hey!, which is the new email service from Basecamp and formerly known as 37signals.
Casey:
Is that right?
Casey:
37?
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
I think that's right.
Casey:
And I have thoughts.
Casey:
Let me start by saying everyone started gushing over this new email web app slash iOS app, and obviously this made a big splash when it was released because there was a big kerfuffle that we've covered on this show with Phil Schiller amongst others about whether or not
Casey:
hey has to support an app purchase and so on and so forth um and i don't know all the things i heard at first ago were reinventing email oh okay sure you know the jennifer lawrence uh-huh okay gif um okay guys whatever you say sure you're reinventing email and i didn't try it i didn't sign up i should have signed up and gotten a sweet username but i didn't because i never do and
Casey:
And then a couple of weeks back, I did sign up and I started playing with it and I played with it for a few minutes with no email coming into it except the one that I sent myself.
Casey:
And I was like, oh, okay, I guess this is interesting.
Casey:
And then when they were a sponsor, I wanted to play with it some more.
Casey:
And then I found out we were going to talk about it because I think John had asked us to, or maybe I had asked us to, I don't recall.
Casey:
And so I actually forwarded, um, my, it's not, it's Google apps for my domain, but I'll probably just call it Gmail.
Casey:
I forwarded my, my Gmail account to, to Hey, to really try to live the life of a Hey user and,
Casey:
And I have to say that I really didn't think the hype was justified before I started really improperly using it the way they intended to.
Casey:
Go figure.
Casey:
And I still am not entirely sure the hype is justified, but a lot of it is justified because I actually am really impressed with this.
Casey:
And I think it's really, really clever.
Casey:
And I'm really...
Casey:
I really want to switch my email to use Hay, or at least I do right now.
Casey:
I'm not going to do that until it supports custom domains, which I've said many, many times is coming.
Casey:
But I am very impressed by it.
Casey:
And...
Casey:
Outside of some quibbles here and there, most especially imbox, I-M-B-O-X, which just is so cringy.
Casey:
I have a few other quibbles.
Casey:
By and large, I really like it.
Casey:
Before I go into details about what makes Hay different, would the two of you, perhaps starting with John, since you've had it longer, like to discuss any initial impressions or if you'd rather just dive into the nitty gritty, we can do that.
John:
One thing about initial impressions that I think is important for many services, and I think a lot of services do this, is creating FOMO about getting your username, which is usually a pretty good marketing tool on certain types of people, me being one of those types of people.
John:
Obviously not Casey because –
John:
You have the FOMO, but not enough for you to go get your name.
John:
Right.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So like the general case of this phenomenon is a new service appears.
John:
And even if you have no interest in it whatsoever, if it's free to sign up, you just sign up to reserve your name just in case it turns out to be the next big thing.
John:
So you've got your name.
John:
So many services I've signed up for.
John:
That is the explanation.
John:
The one service that I didn't do that for, I regret massively.
John:
Instagram, I didn't sign up for years and years and years because I thought I would have no use of it.
John:
And when I finally did sign up, like seven years after Instagram existed or whatever the hell it was, like way late, I signed up like no remote normal variation of my name existed.
John:
And I have this horrendous username on Instagram and I regret it.
John:
I should have just signed up to get the name.
John:
I still barely use Instagram, but anyway.
John:
Boy, that was a mistake.
John:
But Basecamp, being a smart company that they are, takes this one step further where, yeah, I was going to sign up for, hey, no matter what.
John:
In fact, I signed up for like that early, you know, they said, hey, if you're interested in our email thing, send us your current email address and we'll let you know when, you know, they have like a thing where they let people in slowly, right?
John:
I was on the waiting list.
John:
I was fairly early on the waiting list to get in this because I wanted to get my name.
John:
And it was, you know, sign up for free, get your name, so on and so forth.
John:
But when they actually came out, they said, okay...
John:
If you sign up, and I think if you pay, if you subscribe, because there's a free 14-day trial or something, and then after that you have to pay.
John:
If you pay for your name, subscribe for a month or a year or whatever you want to subscribe.
John:
I forget what the terms are.
John:
And then later you just stop subscribing.
John:
You say, oh, this isn't for me, and you still pay anymore.
John:
They'll hold your name for you forever.
John:
So once you get your name, you don't have to worry like, oh, if I let the subscription expire, someone else can steal my name.
John:
It's always there waiting for you to come back and start paying again, which is smart on multiple levels, but especially smart for people like me who are like, well, that's it.
John:
I'm going to instantly pay for my name.
John:
And for email services, like Casey mentioned, not wanting to go for it until it's on your domain, which I totally understand, this type of stuff is important because the email is not only the linchpin to many different things, but also it's kind of like...
John:
your address or like for most people who don't have like their own their own like you know web servers or websites or anything like that it represents you online and having to change it is a gigantic pain right so if someone does sign up for hay they'll want to keep using it for a very long time and not you know they won't want to enter that as their email address and something and then just say oh well that was when i was first trying out hay but i decided i didn't like it and i've lost that name forever and can never get it back
John:
So I think that's cool.
John:
And in general, most of their policies, the policies around, hey, and the reason I was so willing to sign up for it, it's based on the company's reputation.
John:
All the stuff that Marco talked about that you can't do on the Apple App Store in terms of customer relations are exactly the things that Basecamp is good at.
John:
Having good customer support, being really easy with refunds, like all that stuff, knowing the customer and their relationship and whether they paid you or not.
John:
And like just all that stuff, you know, it's back to the old world of buying things where when you buy from a brand that you know and trust.
John:
This brand loyalty to the particular maker of the thing that you're buying, whether it's a car manufacturer you really like or a department store or a software maker.
John:
These companies build their reputation on how they treat their customers and how good their products are.
John:
And it also means that if there's some random one-person company that you've never heard of, you don't have that established trust, and it might be more dangerous.
John:
But the flip side of that is when you're buying from a company you know and trust a lot and have experience with their products and like them, you have some assurance that everything will be fine, and that company is empowered to do all the good things that you like them for.
John:
In the App Store, you're paying Apple, and that's it, which is great for the small companies because you're like, well, I don't trust them, but I trust Apple, right, or Apple.
John:
It's mostly great for small companies.
John:
The app can still be a scam.
John:
But on the flip side, the very best companies are forced down to sort of the the level of the level that Apple enforces for everybody.
John:
It's like you can't give amazing customer service because Apple won't let you.
John:
But nobody can give awful customer service because Apple won't let them.
John:
I didn't want to turn this back into the App Store topic.
John:
But anyway, all this is to say I was totally on board with trying out how even though my history with email things is I try them all and I pretty much reject them all.
John:
But I love seeing people do new things with email because every once in a while, you know, one of them hits with me.
John:
marco you seemed a lot less enthusiastic about hey in fact the only reason i think you would have looked at it all is because after the last show i said hey let's look at hey hey you're like you grumbled about it and you're like no i don't want to look at you know because you do not seem like you're constantly looking for new innovations in your email did you sign up and try it i signed up but i haven't really done anything with it yet i haven't afforded any accounts to it or anything because i
Marco:
I'm like the typical worst case scenario for a service like this because I have my workflow, muscle memory for all the built-in mail apps on Mac and iOS.
Marco:
That being said, I've not been incredibly happy with mail.app ever since iOS 13.
Marco:
Mail.app has been
Marco:
very increasingly buggy um it's still even in the 14 betas still has the bug where new messages sometimes stop appearing at the top of the list they appear at the bottom of the list so you don't usually see them um until you go like back out and back into your main inbox so it's kind of amazing i i still can't believe this bug has been there since ios 13 beta 1 and here we are through the ios 14 beta cycle it's still here
Marco:
And then Mail – I don't love Mail.app on Mac that much either.
Marco:
Under the Catalina version, I've had massive performance problems, especially on my laptop.
Marco:
And under the Big Sur version on the laptop, the performance problems remained, and they ruined the whole interface with Big Sur's new stupid toolbar design.
Marco:
So I'm really not incredibly happy with Mail.app.
Marco:
I should be more on board with trying something new, but there's just so much inertia that I feel behind the way I've always done it, and I'm not a person to just play with different tools for the sake of it.
Marco:
I'll do that with certain things like microphones, but for the most part –
Marco:
I don't enjoy doing that for most things.
Marco:
I enjoy really moving into one and settling in for the long haul.
Marco:
I'm like a tool monogamist.
Marco:
I really want to just use the one thing that I find to be great and just stick with it forever for things that I don't really care that much about.
Marco:
And email is one of those things.
Marco:
I am not an email power user.
Marco:
I don't practice any reasonable email philosophy or filing system or getting things done or anything like that.
Marco:
I just use email crappily like everybody else.
Marco:
And I don't care that much about it.
Marco:
Email is not something where I ever want to spend a lot of time to learn a new system or even install, let alone learn new apps everywhere.
Marco:
I've also historically not been a fan of web mail type things, like web-based email.
Marco:
I really love native apps.
Marco:
And while Hay has apps, they are web views.
Marco:
And if anybody can make a good web view, it's Basecamp.
Marco:
They know how to make web views really well.
Marco:
They are amazing with web technology.
Marco:
But I still do love fully native apps way more.
Marco:
I also don't want to move stuff because I have a lot of inertia in the system just in my archive.
Marco:
I mentioned last week, I believe, I mentioned that email search is very important to me.
Marco:
And the reason why is because I've been using the same email app forever with the same email account on the same email iMap server forever.
Marco:
And so I know that I can go in and do a search and find some email that I'm trying to look for from 2008 and it's there.
Marco:
if i start switching systems i i lose that history so i i just i don't care enough about tweaking my email workflow to jump through all the hoops to install something new move migrate to a new system learn a new system learn the new apps and also then lose that you know that big history and then have to what search two places or somehow import my entire email archive into hey which i don't even know that's possible and
Marco:
So it's just, I don't know.
Marco:
Should I really be pushing myself to change this, or does that sound reasonable to you?
Casey:
It does sound reasonable, and I mostly agree with you.
Casey:
It's funny because I love my dear friend and co-host of Analog, Mike Hurley, so much.
Casey:
But him spending...
Casey:
just hours upon hours going through different email apps i always thought was the most preposterous thing in the entire world particularly before you could switch a default email app which i think you can do in ios 14 is that right or did i make that up um i think you can do i think it's mail and browser but nothing else right
Casey:
Yeah, right.
Casey:
I thought that's correct.
Casey:
I might have that wrong.
Casey:
But anyways, I always thought it was bananas.
Casey:
And I always thought, not just Mike, of course, but all these people who are living their lives a quarter mile at a time.
Casey:
Living their lives by using snoozing and this and that and all these other super proprietary things and this client that's working with arbitrary IMAP servers in many cases.
Casey:
I never understood it.
Casey:
I never got it.
Casey:
And I still mostly don't.
Casey:
And I agree with you, Marco, that there's a couple of things about Hay that I consider non-starters.
Casey:
Most especially, I want to keep my email address, and I can't right now.
Casey:
I would have to use a hay.com email address.
Casey:
And in general, this is not something that I feel like I need to fix.
Casey:
My email sucks.
Casey:
I get way more than I want.
Casey:
I feel compelled to respond to way too much of it, and I haven't gotten to the point that Marco has where I can just...
Casey:
outright ignore everything i'm getting better with it i'm getting better at ignoring it every passing day but i'm still not great at it um but the other in so many ways this was not a problem i felt like i needed solving but i wanted to try it and i really am surprised by how much i enjoyed it especially since like on the mac on the mac most especially i have no interest on in a web app like
Casey:
Again, my current email is Google Apps for My Domain.
Casey:
I open the web app maybe once a month, maybe.
Casey:
I'm not a John Syracuse who lives in it, and I don't know how you live in it, John, to be honest with you, but I much prefer having native apps.
Casey:
But there are a lot of really, really clever things about, hey, that are really making me think this might be fixing problems that I've always wanted to fix but couldn't find a good way to do it.
Casey:
And I can dig into the specifics, but before I do that, John, any other things you want to say about what Mark or what I just said?
John:
Yeah, I think before we start detailing the specific features of Hey, this is going to sound like it's just a giant ad for Gmail, but I think it's going to explain how I use my email and why Hey – well, I'm not going to say it's not a good fit for me, but it's going to explain the advantages of Hey based on how I use Gmail.
John:
So I –
John:
I used to use native apps for a long time, had a bunch of favorite applications.
John:
And then Gmail came out and Gmail solved a lot of problems I had with the way I worked with mail.
John:
So my way for working with mail is I tried to funnel everything into one big fire hose.
John:
And then I just have a huge amount of rules to file the mail automatically as it comes in.
John:
Back in the day, I was filing into folders, filing into subfolders, doing stuff with the messages, marking as read, marking as unread, forward, filing a duplicate.
John:
My mail is processed, and it's processed by a series of rules, right?
John:
And one of those would be like filing spams, but like actual rules, right?
John:
Very, very, very, very little of my mail ends up in what most people think of as an inbox.
John:
Pretty much all of it gets auto-filed somewhere, categorized and auto-filed.
John:
And this is how I've always used email because I've always had a lot of email.
John:
Back in the day, the reason I had a lot of emails, I'd sign up for like every mailing list.
John:
The Perl community was big on mailing lists.
John:
I was the Unix community.
John:
I just had tons of very high volume mailing lists.
John:
So that got me on the bandwagon.
John:
That sounds awful.
John:
That got me on the bandwagon of like auto filing because there's no way to deal with mail if you're on a mailing list.
John:
Certainly you have to auto file the mailing list.
John:
In fact, some of my favorite email clients had features specifically for a mailing list where you could say, this email is for a mailing list.
John:
Please handle it and able to file it away for you.
John:
But I do that with all my mail.
John:
Right.
John:
And that was a super pain.
John:
First of all, it was a pain back in the day when all email was like pop because you have the problem of like you're on one machine and you start your email client and post the messages and they get sorted.
John:
And then you go on another machine and it hasn't seen those messages yet using pop and it has to get the same messages again.
John:
Right.
John:
And that would mean I had to have the rules that have the same set of rules on every computer.
John:
And there was no cloud sync.
John:
This is the 90s.
John:
There's no cloud syncing of rules.
John:
And these apps didn't even make it easy to bring – there was no even export and import, so I had to reimplement the rules.
John:
This is especially egregious if I wanted to check my personal email at work, which is definitely a thing that I've always wanted to do because you might get an email about something, about somebody in daycare or something like that.
John:
I'd have to re-implement the rules on my work computer, which was another big pain.
John:
Gmail solved that big problem for me because suddenly my email wasn't – it wasn't a native application.
John:
And even with IMAP, trying to apply rules to IMAP, like server-side rules would help, but server-side rules were implemented spottily.
John:
Like Exchange had server-side rules, but people didn't have personal Exchange accounts.
John:
And IMAP could sometimes have some kind of server-side rule, but it really depended, and it depended on the client.
John:
POP didn't have server-side rules at all, so it was all client-side.
John:
But Gmail just solved that.
John:
It's like, okay, look, your rules –
John:
are where everything is it's all in the cloud right it's a web browser you can open any web browser that can load gmail can see your mail it's always going to look exactly the same because the mail is literally not on your machine it's someplace else and if you define a rule in gmail that rule is everywhere you see gmail like no more defining multiple rules no more syncing rules no more nothing um
John:
And all of your mail is available everywhere.
John:
And Gmail had features that sound like they would appeal to Marco.
John:
I'm not sure if he used these when you first got it when Gmail came out.
John:
Gmail would take all of your old mail.
John:
The very first thing when I got Gmail, besides reserving my name, was to upload literally all of my old email that I had at that time.
John:
And like, I'm sure I'm missing some stuff.
John:
I just did search in Gmail.
John:
I can go back to the 90s in my Gmail email, right?
John:
I put like day one, I just said like exported everything from whatever I was using, probably Entourage at that point, exported my entire email history and shoved it into Gmail and Gmail dutifully took it down.
John:
And the other thing that once I did that is like, I'm also big in email searching.
John:
Guess what Google's really good at?
John:
They're really good at search.
John:
The search is fast.
John:
The search is good.
John:
The search is never broken, right?
John:
So I got my rules in one place and I've got really good search and it's the same everywhere.
John:
And the final thing is I have so much email that I don't have like a multi gig archive of email on my local disks anymore.
John:
Right.
John:
So I save disk space on top of it.
John:
And Gmail has a bunch of extensions and features and keyboard shortcuts and other nerdy things.
John:
Right.
John:
So that's why I like Gmail.
John:
Right.
John:
what hay is bringing to the table is and by the way i needless to say i think my way of dealing with email is good like otherwise i wouldn't do it it's efficient it's nice it lowers the the cognitive burden of email for me the fact that everything gets sort of auto filed away i can look at it in different buckets and sub buckets and deal with them when i want to deal with them whereas the stuff that actually is in the inbox is so few that i know they're actually important like i built this system myself hay is telling people
John:
you're not going to do regular people are not going to do what i did they're going to sit there and build up a series of like dozens and dozens of rules over the course of many years and tweak them like people are never going to do that even if you show them how to make a rule and a filter and how nice it is they won't keep up with that process because it's you know they're just that's not their inclination and honestly you know it i'm not saying it's a lot of ongoing work but i did put a lot of work in up front when i was younger to establish all these rules and systems right
John:
Hey is a system that says since most people won't do that and don't want to do that and many can't do that.
John:
Hey has a system already, right?
John:
Hey has a series of rules, a series of buckets and rules that apply to those buckets and interface that applies to them.
John:
And it's already established.
John:
You don't do anything.
John:
You just sign up and it's like you're getting this set of rules.
John:
Now, the reason Mike Hurley and many other people afraid about email applications, they're like, oh, but that's not exactly the set of rules that I want.
John:
That's not the appeal of Hay.
John:
The appeal of Hay is to people who have never had a quote-unquote system for email.
John:
Having a system is way better than having no system.
John:
And Hay system is pretty good, as we'll get into in a little bit.
John:
But I think that is the main appeal.
John:
If you have never had a system for email and have just treated it as this giant avalanche that lands on your head that you just like...
John:
swim your way through like hay is just going to be relieve you of so much stress and pressure and annoyance in your life if on the other hand you have a bespoke hand assembled uh complex system or even if you have a notion of an exact system that you want hay is not going to match that because hay is the system that they made it's not the system that you have in your head and it's certainly not the system that you may have implemented directly um
John:
That said, seeing Hayes' system gave me some interesting ideas for my system, right?
John:
A lot of the ideas I've had for my system I've seen reflected in other things.
John:
I forget what it was.
John:
Maybe it was Inbox or something.
John:
One of the companies, I think Gmail might have even bought them.
John:
A couple of companies in the most recent decade or so who have come out with email things had features that are like, ha...
John:
That is a great feature.
John:
I know because I've been doing that since, you know, 2001, right?
John:
But now we're finally getting to the reverse where I'm seeing email applications that have ideas that I hadn't even thought of and I'm interested in trying out.
John:
So Casey, you want to take a crack at describing what the heck Hay does to your email?
John:
What is the system that you get out of the box with Hay?
Casey:
Yeah, certainly.
Casey:
And both of you, feel free to interrupt me at any time.
Casey:
And just very briefly, I think you're describing me.
Casey:
Like, I don't have a good system.
Casey:
I have some labels in Gmail that I almost never use.
Casey:
I do use native apps connected to Gmail as, you know, faux IMAP servers.
Casey:
And it doesn't work great, but it works.
Casey:
So what is Hay all about?
Casey:
So Hay, most especially and primarily...
Casey:
asks you to do a little bit more work up front with the theory that it will provide oodles of time savings over time.
Casey:
So as you get an email from someone that Hay has never seen before or someone that your email address has never seen before, when that email comes in, Hay will ask you to classify it as one of three different things.
Casey:
And one of them is the inbox, which I'm just going to call inbox because it's silly.
Casey:
One of them is the inbox.
Casey:
And that's stuff like your partner or your kid's school or something like that.
Casey:
These are things you really want to have in your face, right?
Casey:
The next bucket is what they call the feed.
Casey:
And so these are things that maybe you'd be interested in seeing, but you can really do it on your own time.
Casey:
And you can just kind of wade through them, not unlike you would wade through, say, your Twitter feed.
Casey:
And so you can start from most recent and keep going backwards and just kind of see what sorts of things have come in.
Casey:
So these would be newsletters or updates about things that aren't critical, maybe like a shipping notification, for example, or something like that.
Casey:
Things that may not be critical, but you still kind of care about.
Casey:
And then a third bucket is what they call paper trail.
Casey:
And this is for actually a shipping notification might be a great example for this too, but things like receipts.
Casey:
Stuff that you want to be able to refer to at some point, but the likelihood of you actually needing to read it as it's coming in is slim.
Casey:
So you can call it up, but you probably don't need to see it as it's coming into your inbox.
Casey:
So it doesn't need to go in your inbox.
Casey:
It doesn't even need to go in the feed.
Casey:
It can just go straight to the paper trail.
Casey:
So if you want to refer to that Amazon receipt, you certainly can, but you don't necessarily need to see it arrive in your inbox.
Casey:
And then on top of that, they have, you know, the standard, the standard things in 2020 for all email, you know, I want to set this aside and reply to, and, and, and have it for easy reference later.
Casey:
I want to reply to this later, which is slightly different.
Casey:
Um, and if there's a few other things that I'm not thinking of, but the, I, oh, and you can screen, uh, emails out.
Casey:
So that's not really blocking them necessarily.
Casey:
It's, it's slightly different than spam.
Casey:
I'm not entirely clear how it's different, but it's different.
Casey:
Um,
Casey:
And so the idea is that it's a very, I view it anyway, as a fairly low maintenance way to establish a system.
Casey:
And I didn't think of it that way until you described it, John, but I think you hit the nail on the head that this is providing me anyway with a system that I never really had.
Casey:
And to some degree, I could probably replicate this in Gmail, but I do like the way this works.
Casey:
I do like the way the web app works.
Casey:
Like I'm not a huge web app fan, but I do like the way it works.
Casey:
The mobile apps are also very good.
Casey:
And I assume that as I'm filing these senders into these three different buckets, it's certainly even already, even just a couple of days, bringing my inbox such that it's a little bit...
Casey:
It's a little bit less chatty, which is exactly what I want.
Casey:
And I also do not receive an overabundance of email.
Casey:
But, I mean, the three of us from ATP alone probably get 10 to 20 emails a day.
Casey:
And I typically try to read all of them, and I respond to almost none of them.
Casey:
But, you know, that's relatively chatty.
Casey:
I am subscribed to some newsletters, but not a lot.
Casey:
And so that can get chatty.
Casey:
And I just get, I mean, I think everyone, I don't think this is unique to me.
Casey:
Everyone gets more email than you want.
Casey:
And so I guess it's a far cry from when I was like 15 and just begging somebody to send me an email.
Casey:
You know, I was just so waiting for somebody to send me an email.
Casey:
It'll be amazing.
Casey:
And so I do think that Hay is very, very good at giving me slash the Royal U a system to work with.
Casey:
And I think it's very well thought out and very clever.
Casey:
And another example, I don't recall what the feature's name is, but I saw somewhere that you can highlight a specific portion of an email and store that somewhere.
Casey:
I don't even remember how you do that.
Casey:
But I guess in summary, and I'll stop talking, but it's very clear to me that a lot of thought...
Casey:
has been put into how do people use email and how can we meld this service around that?
Casey:
Now, if you're John Syracuse, maybe this isn't a good fit.
Casey:
But if you're me and don't really have a system, like I keep saying, this is a really, really clever and interesting way to do it.
John:
They take advantage of the fact that they write the app.
John:
To be clear, Hay is not an email client.
John:
Hay is an email service like Gmail.
John:
The email is on their server.
John:
And again, you're trusting them because they're a good company to do encryption.
John:
They can't see your email.
John:
It's all encrypted in transit and in rest.
John:
It's all web interface.
John:
You can see the same thing everywhere, yada, yada.
John:
The system has a lot of features, like I said, that I would love to see elsewhere or be able to implement.
John:
Because they control the client, they can do things like when you view the different categories, like when you view the paper trail versus your inbox and stuff, they look different because you consume them differently.
John:
Like the feed looks more like you're looking at an RSS reader, like it expands all the emails and you can just scroll through because that's the nature of the feed, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And the type of features they have are like things that people do with email.
John:
They have a dedicated files view at the top level because so often you're looking for that one file.
John:
And even though you may get a lot of emails, and of course, in an email client, you can search for things with attachments.
John:
Do you remember the syntax in your weird email client to find files that have attachments?
John:
Do you want to sort by attachment by clicking the header thing?
John:
Just go to the files view.
John:
It shows you all your files, right?
John:
Stuff like that is sort of very thoughtful ways to...
John:
Just, you know, if you make a general purpose tool, oh, we have a query syntax or we have customizable sortable column headers like every Microsoft email client.
John:
That's too much of a barrier for most people.
John:
And even me, like I'm no longer copying my rules around everywhere.
John:
but uh every time i set up like my preferred native uh email client i have to rearrange the columns and size them the way i want them because that's not cloud synced everything should be cloud synced people it's modern day but anyway they're not i want my columns to be in this order and this you know this email client decides that that's not the default and sometimes in the worst case in every new folder that i make in my local email client this is mostly for work where i'm not using gmail obviously um
John:
Every new folder that I make has the comms back in the default order, right?
John:
All that you can learn to use an application and you can make a general purpose application that has all the features like, oh, I get whatever you think you can do.
John:
And hey, I can do that, too.
John:
It's like, yeah, but they already did it for me.
John:
They already made a big button with the five most likely things that I'm going to do.
John:
You know, and some things you can't do, like what if I want to have a different view for a particular label or folder in Gmail where I want the emails to be bundled by sender and expanded?
John:
I can't do that in Gmail.
John:
I would love to be able to do that, right?
John:
And like you just said, saving a snippet of one thing from the other.
John:
Gmail has a bunch of sort of respond to this later, save for later type things.
John:
But like, Hey is such a comprehensive worldview, like that if you buy into it, it will take a lot of work off your plate.
John:
And they try to lead you through it by sort of, you just start using the app and you don't know the system because you didn't make the system.
John:
It leads you through understanding what the system is by asking you a series of questions.
John:
And in general, I think part of the appeal is
John:
is that it makes you feel empowered.
John:
I imagine it would make people feel more empowered over their email than they have been in the past because immediately you're asked to make decisions about your email, value judgments about your email.
John:
An email will come in, or at the top of the app it'll be like, you have five unscreened emails.
John:
You're like, huh?
John:
It's time for me to be a screener.
John:
Well, let me just look at my emails and you can thumbs up and thumbs down, just like in Gladiator, you know, like just this email, this email.
John:
Yes.
John:
Right.
John:
And then if you say yes to it, you can say, what kind of email is this?
John:
And it describes examples and says, if it's this kind of email, put it here or there.
John:
That, I think, is one of the weakest part of their system.
John:
Obviously, the system is not going to be perfect for everybody, but they do ask you to make decisions about emails.
John:
And most of the time, it's good and empowering, but occasionally – well, maybe it's just me because I'm so picky about my email.
John:
You'll get an email, and it will say, tell me about this email.
John:
Do you want this email from this or not?
John:
And unlike the powerful case where you're like, no, I never want to see this email.
John:
This is garbage.
John:
You're like, well –
John:
It's email from something related to the parent-teacher organization.
John:
So it's not like I never want to see that email.
John:
But my choice is, it's not a receipt.
John:
I don't want it in my inbox, but do I?
John:
Maybe I do want it in my inbox.
John:
What if it's like an emergency?
John:
It's not a paper trail.
John:
Maybe it's feed.
John:
Even when you know what the systems are, because the system has fairly chunky buckets...
John:
Right.
John:
And it's not a general purpose system for doing this where I can't just write a new set of rules.
John:
And by the way, I looked at Gmail when we were talking about this.
John:
I have approximately 200 rules in Gmail and God knows how many labels and
John:
You kind of get into a situation where you can't decide what bucket it's in, and you just have to pick the next best one.
John:
It's not the end of the world.
John:
You can change your mind later.
John:
Nothing is destructive, but that's something to keep in mind, that you really have to buy into the system.
John:
The system is necessarily simpler than the one you would build exactly for yourself.
John:
But other than that, I think the overall effect of using this, and I think Casey was experiencing this, it suddenly seems like you have less email.
John:
It seems like you get less email.
John:
It seems like you have less email nagging you.
John:
And it's still there.
John:
It's just like in my system, being transparently shuttled away to the correct bins for you to look at at your leisure.
John:
And you've put them in bins based on your own, whether you know it or not, based on your own personal expectations of how you're going to deal with them.
John:
things that are in the paper trail you do not need to look at even to mark as red just to get it off of your little unread to-do list they're auto filed in the paper trail you never see them they're there if you need them you can find them in search but they don't become a to-do item for you don't even need to click on the ones to make them unbold in your email client like it just and then you look at you open hey and it's like oh
John:
no new email and for most people that's a good feeling unlike 15 year old casey you like seeing when there's no new email like i forwarded i have so many freaking email addresses they all go through gmail but i forward one of my lower volume ones to hay but i still kept getting it in the other places and so i can compare what is it like to to read this email address like my old way versus doing it and hey and like at first i thought is everything really getting forwarded
John:
Because every time I look at hey, it says there's nothing.
John:
And even for things like spam, I don't know what they're doing for spam filtering, but I get garbage spam in the quote unquote real email address that I look at with like mail.app or whatever.
John:
I never see that spam in hey.
John:
Maybe they just have better spam filtering too, but it doesn't bother me with it.
John:
It doesn't ask me to do anything about it.
I don't know.
John:
So I hope we've described Hay well enough.
John:
The reason I'm mostly excited about, despite the fact that I'm probably not going to use it because I have my weird system, is that I love seeing people innovate in what seems like a dead space.
John:
I think I would recommend Hay to anyone who I see who looks like they do not have their own system anymore.
John:
for email to try this system.
John:
Because obviously, if you don't have a system for your email by now, you probably are not the type of person who's going to build a system.
John:
And I think the hey system is pretty good.
John:
And it shows what you can do when you control everything.
John:
They control the server side.
John:
They control the client side as much as Apple let them.
John:
And they've made very different choices.
John:
It does not look like a normal email client.
John:
It doesn't behave like a normal email client.
John:
It behaves like, hey, in the same way the Gmail on day one did not behave like any native email client.
John:
Some people didn't like that.
John:
I thought it was great because of what it was.
John:
It was unabashedly a Google web-based server-side thing, and its interface didn't look like Outlook.
John:
It didn't look like Apple Mail at all.
John:
There's no pretense of it being anything like that, and that's refreshing.
John:
Of course, Gmail was like, what, 2004?
John:
A decade and a half ago, and I feel like
John:
With the exception of a few other innovative client-side things like the – what was it?
John:
I don't remember all the names of them.
John:
Mike Early would know.
John:
But there have been a couple of client-side innovations.
John:
But until Gmail, there hasn't been any sort of comprehensive rethink of the entire thing from top to bottom until – hey, so –
John:
I recommend everyone check it out.
John:
It's a free trial thing.
John:
And like I said, if you pay for your name and then just cancel the next month, I think you can do it monthly, I forget.
John:
You keep that name forever.
John:
Everyone should at least check it out because the final thing to say here is like, since email addresses are so important, it's kind of important that hey.com stays around, right?
John:
Because if they decide five years from now, oh, we're not going to do email anymore.
John:
well you know maybe they'll because they're a good company they'd set up forwarding and everything but that's a hassle and that's a disruption so when selecting what your email address is going to be if you're not a geeky person i'm not going to recommend this we're all going to say you should have your own domain and that's absolutely true you should absolutely have your own domain and use your own domain because then you're beholden to no one but even then it's a disruption like marco was saying it's a disruption to change your your back end not because your email address changes but because it's a disruption to deal with
John:
where that name leads and you don't want to miss any emails and you don't want to move stuff around or whatever but there is always the nagging thought in the back of your mind of like if i sign up for this email service and i'm a normal person i don't have my own domain am i going to regret it like is this thing going to go away uh and that's why in general i say sign up for email with companies that you have some faith will continue to be around now 37signals slash base camp has been around for a long time and
John:
hay as far as i can tell from the outside seems really popular and it's a pay service so i think its sustainability is very sensible it's easy to understand how are they going to stay in business with this hay.com thing everybody who uses it pays them except for free trial people right it's a very simple business model people exchange money for goods and services so there's some faith that'll be around gmail one of the other reasons i was gung-ho on gmail is like google seemed like a pretty well-established company in 2004 today even more so i am not
John:
in fear that Google will go away.
John:
Granted, Google cancels services all the time, but I think Gmail is probably too valuable for them to candidate.
John:
This is where you can save this clip for the episode of ATP in 15 years when they sunset Gmail.
John:
And I'm frantically trying to export 75 gigs of email, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it.
Casey:
Was that a hyperbole or do you really have 75 gigs of email?
Casey:
How much email?
John:
Remember that?
John:
There was another big feature of Gmail from day one.
John:
It's like, we'll give you like a gig of email.
John:
People are like, a gig of email for free?
John:
How can they do that?
John:
Is this just my email?
John:
I only have two gigs of email.
John:
That's how much it says.
John:
Percentage of two gigs used.
John:
I'm only using 1.3 gigs out of my two gigs of email.
Casey:
Slow down, slow down.
Casey:
Look at this closely because I'm looking at 861 gigs of 1,039 gigs used.
Casey:
Are you sure you're reading that right?
John:
oh that's not a period okay that's a comma all right oh no that can't be right one well 1385 gigabytes of 2000 you have 1.3 terabytes of email yeah
John:
All right.
John:
Sorry.
Casey:
And apparently I have eight tenths of a terabyte, which is way more than I thought.
John:
Yeah, that's a little more than than half what I have.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Email is big.
John:
But here's the thing with their account.
John:
I think if I was to approach two terabytes, it would just give me more room.
John:
Like, I don't think that's actually a limit.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Maybe we'll find out someday.
John:
But yeah, I don't.
John:
And unlike Marco, I don't delete my email.
John:
Spam gets filed as spam and then gets deleted.
John:
Why would I delete it?
John:
People delete it to get out of their face or to get some kind of emotional satisfaction.
John:
I don't need the emotional satisfaction and it's not in my face.
Marco:
I'll tell you why.
Marco:
It's kind of like a digital clutter management thing.
Marco:
First of all, a lot of the emails I get are notifications from my servers of various things I have to deal with.
Marco:
Or various conditions that thresholds keep crossing.
Marco:
So the load on the server went too high, I'll get an email about it.
Marco:
Granted, I'm probably using email wrong for even sending this to email, but well, don't at me.
Marco:
So a lot of the email I get literally has no value after a few hours because it's some kind of notification for something.
Marco:
Or it's like an Amazon shipment notification.
Marco:
great amazon emails stopped including anything about your orders in the last couple years ever since companies were like scraping data out of them everything um and so amazon emails are useless now if i want any kind of amazon status i have to go to my amazon account so any email from amazon is pretty useless after about five minutes too there's all sorts of stuff like that where like i look at this and you know this this email i don't need this ever i will never ever need to look this up or find this ever again and
Marco:
Even a lot of email that we get from, you know, either like an angry listener, maybe who writes in and tells us how much we suck.
Marco:
Or if I get an email, you know, to Overcast, that's like, you know, just a feature request that I've gotten a hundred times before.
Marco:
Do I really need to save all of those forever?
Marco:
Or can you look at it, make a quick judgment call and think, you know what?
Marco:
Am I ever going to need to look for this ever, ever again?
Marco:
And a lot of times the answer is maybe.
Marco:
And so I'll archive those.
Marco:
But a lot of times the answer is no, I will never need to look at this again.
Marco:
And so I'll just delete them.
Marco:
I'm not deleting everything.
Marco:
I'm archiving a good amount every day, but there's also so much that I can just delete.
Marco:
Then that's less to store.
Marco:
It's less to clutter up search results when I do want to find something.
Marco:
It's less to manage.
Marco:
It's not counting against my storage limit, although I'm way under it for my current host, which is FastMail.
Marco:
It helps keep a little bit of clutter outside of my digital life.
Marco:
These days, when you have infinite storage on everything, disks are so big, it's so easy to just collect everything
Marco:
garbage forever and to never delete anything and then you end up with like overwhelming collections and larger storage needs over time and stuff like that so like i like situations like this where i can look at it and just say you know what i can just delete this i'm i'm never gonna need this again even if it was something nice like like you know in real life i will throw away greeting cards after a while i enjoy them for a little while and then i throw them away
Marco:
That's physical.
John:
We're not talking about physical things.
John:
The beauty of digital things is they don't take up space like that in three dimensions.
John:
It's not in the same way anyway.
Marco:
But still, it's useful to apply the heuristic.
Marco:
When you're looking at an email, when you're deciding whether to archive or delete something, I make a quick decision.
Marco:
And if it's something like a server notification that's already irrelevant by the time I even see half of them, then fine, delete.
Marco:
I'm never going to need this email again.
John:
Yeah, I think I only have one kind of email.
John:
I think this is maybe the first email that I routinely get that I actually do delete.
John:
I don't delete anything.
John:
It doesn't take any space in my hard drive.
John:
It's all Google stuff.
John:
By the way, someone said click on manage at the bottom to get your storage breakdown.
John:
Casey, you should do this too because I don't have 1.3 terabytes of email.
John:
I have 12.22 gigabytes of email.
John:
What am I looking at in here?
John:
After you click manage, it shows a storage breakdown.
Casey:
Oh, I see it.
Casey:
I see it.
Casey:
I see it.
Casey:
15 gigs.
John:
You have more email than I do then.
Casey:
And mine doesn't go back.
Casey:
Mine goes back to 2004.
Casey:
I don't think it goes back older.
John:
Mine goes back to the 90s, but I guess I don't have a lot of attachments.
John:
Maybe that's building up the size.
John:
Anyway, the one email that I routinely delete is I have like a watch on various websites to find my cheese grater.
John:
when they come up for sale wait why wait why do you need more yeah what for what because i told you i was i was dwindling i was down to like two spares right because they break every year or year and a half or whatever i was down to two spares and i couldn't find them anymore like oh the the actual like dairy cheese the actual thing that oh yeah i definitely heard mac pro like from a cow
Marco:
I thought you were talking about your 2008 Mac Pro.
John:
No, the good cheese grater I like for my Parmesan cheese.
John:
The number of those were dwindling, and normally when the number would dwindle, I would just go online and I would search for one and I would buy it.
John:
But the last few times that they broke, I went online to search and I couldn't find any.
John:
So I'm like, I need to set up one of those watch services that just watches for anybody anywhere on the web selling one of these things, right?
John:
And so I do that.
John:
But of course, my search terms are like OXO cheese grater, right?
John:
OXO makes a lot of cheese graters, let me tell you.
John:
So I get sort of a digest report.
John:
I don't know what it is, every week, every few days, or no, every time it gets a hit, essentially.
John:
Every time I get a hit on this, I get a little report of like, here are all the OXO cheese graters I found.
John:
And 99.9% of the time, it's just all not my kind of cheese grater.
John:
Like it's the other kinds because I sell lots of them.
John:
And I delete those emails because I'm never going to see them again, right?
John:
And it's not a lot of them, but that is the only email I think I routinely delete other than obviously spam.
John:
And even spam, I file a spam and then it gets auto-deleted after 30 days, right?
John:
Everything else, I just keep it.
John:
I don't have to make a decision about it.
John:
It's already auto-filed.
John:
It's already out of my face.
John:
It's not taking up a lot of storage.
John:
it you know and and the value of doing that is like i do find myself doing like forensics and trying even it was like amazon notifications with no information about the product i can correlate based on the dates of things or see if i got a notification about shipment while i was on vacation at this place or whatever the paper trail i do a lot of the paper trail stuff in my various systems and categorize them and gmail lets me export them and all that other good stuff um
John:
But anyway, even if your system is I just delete everything, you never know those people who delete everything after they read it and so they have literally no email.
John:
My mom does that.
John:
It's a surprisingly common pattern.
John:
That's like my nightmare, but to each their own.
John:
If you don't have a system for email, I recommend checking out Hey.
John:
And even if you're not going to use it for your email, like Marco's probably not going to use it for his email,
John:
Check it out just to see what a company is doing with an app for a thing that everyone is familiar with.
John:
Everyone knows email and has used it all the time.
John:
It's so different and strange and interesting that I think it's worth just signing up a free trial to see what it's like.
John:
You have to actually send it some email.
John:
If you sign it up for a free trial and never send it an email, it's not interesting.
John:
And you can't just send yourself two emails.
John:
You have to do the thing.
John:
Almost anybody with an iCloud account can do this.
John:
You can forward a copy of your email.
John:
So you're not messing up your email flow or redirecting or whatever.
John:
It's just a second redundant copy of the same email you're getting elsewhere.
John:
So it shouldn't be disruptive to your actual email system, but it will let you get a real flow of email in a day and do that for a week or two and just see how it goes.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
I've really been impressed with it.
Casey:
And, you know, they sponsored, you know, last episode.
Casey:
This was entirely us.
Casey:
They couldn't have paid us to go on for this long about it.
John:
It's been in our show notes for like four weeks as usual.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Eero.
Marco:
These days, your house isn't just your home.
Marco:
It's also your office, your school, your movie theater, your restaurant.
Marco:
It's everything.
Marco:
All these and more put a strain on your Wi-Fi.
Marco:
It's not good enough if your Wi-Fi is only good in like one or two rooms.
Marco:
You need solid Wi-Fi in your entire house.
Marco:
Everyone isn't working like all on top of each other, crowded in like the one good room.
Marco:
You need Eero to help you out here.
Marco:
Eero is an Amazon company now, and they cover your whole home with fast, reliable Wi-Fi inside and out.
Marco:
So if you have rooms with bad-to-know Wi-Fi, dropouts on your back patio maybe, Eero makes every square foot of your house usable by eliminating poor coverage and dead spots.
Marco:
you have a consistently strong signal wherever you need it.
Marco:
So you can be on a work call, the kids can be doing remote learning, and someone else can be streaming videos all at the same time without any weird buffering or dropouts when you have Eero.
Marco:
It's super fast and easy to set up an Eero system.
Marco:
Just plug it in, plug in your modem, and you are just good to go.
Marco:
The app is super simple.
Marco:
You manage it all from their simple app.
Marco:
You can do all sorts of wonderful features from the app too.
Marco:
So you can do things like pause for dinner.
Marco:
So your kids aren't on their phones if they're at dinner.
Marco:
You can get alerts whenever a new device tries to join your network.
Marco:
And for a limited time now, you can get up to 20% off select Eero models.
Marco:
So we ask a lot of our Wi-Fi.
Marco:
Eero can help yours do more.
Marco:
Go to Eero.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Enter code ATP at checkout to get free next day shipping with your order.
Marco:
That's Eero, E-E-R-O dot com slash ATP.
Marco:
Code ATP at checkout to get your Eero delivered with free next day shipping.
Marco:
Eero.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Code ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Eero for fixing our Wi-Fi and for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
uh let's do some ask atp and i am genuinely looking forward to this because we got a question from john allman who writes i find myself switching jobs about every two to three years in the startup tech sector and i know casey and marco don't have traditional jobs but would you all suggest moving data to my new company computer starting fresh if moving what's the best way target dismoke migration assistant etc thanks
Casey:
So I actually really am deeply uninterested in this question because I feel like we've answered it a thousand times.
Casey:
And I have definitely put them in the show notes a handful of times myself.
Casey:
So I am not without guilt here.
Casey:
But I'm starting to get a little frustrated and curious.
Casey:
Why are we getting this question over and over and over again?
Casey:
And John, you apparently have a theory.
Yeah.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, the reason why we answer it at least like once a year is because it's so common and everyone doesn't listen to every episode and yada, yada, yada.
John:
Like, so that's like practically speaking why we might answer it.
John:
But the real question is, why do we keep getting this?
John:
Why is everyone always asking us like this very specific question?
John:
I got a new Mac.
John:
I've got an old Mac.
John:
How do I get my crap off my old Mac onto my new Mac?
John:
And I think it reveals an ongoing problem area with computers, which we've discussed on and off in the show for many years, which I just discussed today in the context of email rules.
John:
My problem back in the 90s and early 2000s was...
John:
I'd get a new computer or, you know, have a computer at work and at home or whatever.
John:
And I wanted some stuff to be the same in both of those places.
John:
And I would have to manually make it the same because there was no cloud sync.
John:
Today, we're like, oh, you don't have that problem.
John:
Everything cloud syncs.
John:
So everything's, you know, it's either all on the server like your Gmail or it syncs through iCloud or CloudKit or everything syncs through Dropbox and your files are the same everywhere.
John:
Syncing is a solved problem.
John:
Cloud syncing is a solved problem.
John:
Yada, yada.
John:
Uh, but the fact that, you know, and we're getting emails about Macs, Apple stuff, but the fact that we keep getting this email about Macs in particular shows that this is not a solved problem in the personal computer space.
John:
Compare this to the phone space.
John:
How many questions have we gotten about, Hey, I got a new iPhone.
John:
Uh,
John:
How do you guys move your stuff from your old iPhone to your new iPhone?
John:
We used to get that question in one very specific context, which was like, do you do encrypted iTunes backups or not?
John:
But even that has gone away with iTunes going away and with encrypted backups going away.
John:
Because basically Apple solved this problem once and for all for normal people and mostly for geeks by making...
John:
Their own system for getting your stuff from your old iPhone to your new iPhone just work.
John:
Like you get a new iPhone, you take it out of the box, it asks you if you want to get stuff from an old iPhone and it does a little thing where it shows a funny image and you show it in the camera and it just sits there for an hour and it just does it.
John:
And we don't get that question.
John:
People aren't constantly asking us, how do I get stuff off my old phone or my new phone?
John:
That's how you can tell its problem has been solved.
John:
Absolutely not solved for the Mac.
John:
Even though Migration Assistant is really good, it's weird.
John:
First of all, it's not Cloud Sync.
John:
Right.
John:
Like or anything having to do with the cloud.
John:
And Macs aren't you can't hold them in your hand and they don't have all have cameras attached to them.
John:
So you can't do like what the phone does.
John:
They don't even have like even though they have Bluetooth, sometimes you can't bring them near each other because they're big and heavy things.
John:
And I think this problem is not solved and it's not likely to be solved anytime soon just because the data volumes are big, the computers are big, and they're weird and different from each other.
John:
And the fact that we keep getting this question is just, you know, reinforcing...
John:
This problem with personal computers and Macs, you know, specifically, it doesn't apply to iPads, doesn't apply to phones, which is part of the reason people love iPads and phones and stuff like that.
John:
And it's something that we've talked about.
John:
The most recent, most relevant example, I think, when we talked about, oh, what the hell was it?
John:
Was it Chromebooks?
John:
Whatever, whenever Google made their initial pitch for, we're going to make a computer for you, but it's not like a computer.
John:
It runs everything on the web.
John:
And part of their little cartoon pitch advertisement for this thing was like, this is why I keep saying chuck it in a lake.
John:
You can chuck this thing in a lake.
John:
Don't worry.
John:
All your stuff is always automatically saved in the cloud.
John:
If you get a new one, you open it up, log into your Google account, all your stuff is there.
John:
Sound familiar?
John:
That's kind of like what we do with our phones now.
John:
The expectation in general, if you do cloud sync and cloud backups, if you get a new phone and you don't even have your old phone, it fell overboard on a boat.
John:
Get a new phone, sign into your Apple ID, tell it to sync all your stuff down from your last iCloud backup.
John:
Your new phone now looks like your old phone did as of whatever the last backup was.
John:
And Google was promising that for their – I think it was Chromebooks, but whatever it was.
John:
And I remember when we talked about that on the program, I was gushing over it saying, yes, yes, this is great.
John:
This is how personal computers and laptops should be.
John:
They should be just like that where –
John:
Or like Casey says, everything is ephemeral.
John:
If I drop this in a lake, I just get another computer and let it churn for a while and it's back to exactly how my old computer was.
John:
And there's no missing stuff and no stuff that didn't transfer and no other limitations like that.
John:
Google's Chromebook or whatever initiative...
John:
I don't think it was fairly successful for a variety of reasons, partly because web-only software is, you know, native software still has significant advantages that people like.
John:
And for a bunch of other less interesting non-technical business reasons, it doesn't seem like it's been hugely successful.
John:
But I think they had the right idea.
John:
At the time, I said, this is how computers should work.
John:
They still don't work that way.
John:
And that was like, you know, five years ago or whatever it was.
John:
And I keep hoping it will.
John:
And we'll know that this problem is solved when we stop getting this question at ATP.
John:
But that day is not today.
Casey:
So are we actually answering it?
John:
No, but you should just use migration.
Casey:
That's probably the right answer.
Casey:
But if you want to be nerdy, I'll put a link to a post I put up about how you can do this with Homebrew if you are willing to suffer through Homebrew and do some preparation.
John:
John's answer is you are not alone.
John:
This is a problem.
John:
You have correctly identified it.
John:
We will answer it at least once a year, but I think we already did it for this year.
Yeah.
John:
uh let's see 383 what episode are we on now 390 seven episodes ago yeah yeah it's like it's way too soon for us to answer it again oh no i'm sorry that was about my new macbook pro maybe i lied maybe it wasn't that episode all right there's there's see if all of our if all our episodes were in gmail i could find it real quick i should email myself the show notes that's another system i have by the way this is a this is an anti-pattern that nobody should do but that i do because i don't know like i i invented this anti-pattern emailing crap to yourself
John:
I email crap to myself all the time because I know my system will file it away and I know it's super easy to search.
John:
Email was my first Instapaper before Marco made Instapaper.
John:
And I still use it for that.
John:
Obviously, I still use Instapaper and other reader later services for that purpose, but I still email myself stuff.
John:
By the way, if anyone wants to make an iOS app to please a single customer who's willing to pay at least, I don't know, I'd pay $30 for this app and no one else would.
John:
mail to self mail to self used to be a cool application that all it did was you had a share sheet and it would mail something to yourself in a single tap I want that application to exist if I ever write an iOS app it would probably be mail to self couldn't you do that with shortcuts no I mean you can do everyone thinks they can do it they're like here look I made a shortcut to do it it's like no but I actually have more specific requirements really like when I do it on a tweet I want it to get the body of the tweet and a link to the tweet and write the subject just so it's more complicated than that right
John:
it's not as simple as just oh something's on the pasteboard and it's a url put it in an email like yeah you can do that i have 50 shortcuts to do that my requirements are actually more complicated than that and the old mail to self thing would do my complicated requirements and using mail using the share thing and saying mail
John:
That does 50% of what I want, but I have to type in my own email address every time.
John:
I just type in the first three letters and it autocompletes, but it's still one extra step.
John:
I don't want to compose.
John:
I just want it to be done in a single tap.
John:
So obviously, just like my other apps, if you have one very specific thing you want done in a specific way, just write the damn app yourself.
John:
Then you can make it do exactly what you want and you'll be the only customer and you'll be fine.
John:
So in keeping with my two other applications that are very, very, very, very tailored to my specific needs, if and when I run an iOS app, it'll probably be this mail-to-sell thing.
Casey:
That might be the quickest scope creep I've ever witnessed.
Casey:
Oh, just want to send an email to myself.
Casey:
Well, if it's Twitter, it needs to do this.
Casey:
If it's this, it needs to do that.
John:
Like, it's mostly Twitter.
John:
That's the thing.
John:
But when it's Twitter, I want the entire text of the tweet to be in there.
John:
And I want a link to the tweet.
John:
And I want the date.
John:
And I want the sender.
John:
And I want the subject to say the, you know, like...
John:
That's useful to me because then I can search for it later in my email.
John:
If you wonder, how is Babby formed?
John:
How is ATP show notes formed?
John:
Boy, this is some old crusty memes we're getting out of here.
John:
I email stuff to myself all week long that gets auto-filed into the, here's what you're going to build the show notes from.
John:
And then I process them in whenever I have time to process them by going through the queue, finding the things that I emailed to myself and not leaving my email because all the text that I need to assess whether this is a thing I want to go into the show notes or not is in the email.
John:
Like, so if I just got the tweet URL, I'll be clicking on tweet URLs all the time to say, what is this tweet about?
John:
What is that tweet about?
John:
What is this thread about?
John:
Right.
John:
And that's sort of my queue of stuff that builds the show notes.
John:
And I just worked my way through that queue.
John:
And that queue is never zero.
John:
There's stuff in the queue right now.
John:
But normally right before a show, I will take one more brief pass of the queue and see if there's anything pressing.
John:
That's my crappy system.
John:
I mean, I know.
John:
I'm sure productivity gurus are now cringing that you should never use email as an inbox and you shouldn't use it as a queue and you shouldn't email yourself stuff.
John:
Quiet.
John:
I have a system.
John:
It works for me.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And John Demko writes, with iOS apps coming to macOS, will iPhone only apps be rotated appropriately for the Macintosh display?
Casey:
Will iPhone only apps finally be rotated appropriately on an iPad in landscape orientation?
Casey:
I don't see that.
Casey:
I mean, maybe it's tough.
Casey:
So it's funny because the fix that I am waiting on review for in Peek of View has to do with rotation lock in the onboarding screens.
Casey:
And in iOS apps, you can say on an application level, you would like this to only be portrait, only be landscape or support, you know, only head up portrait rather than feed up portrait and so on.
Casey:
There's different things you can enable.
Casey:
And so it's not exactly cut and dry, right?
Casey:
Like you could have an app that says, I am locked to portrait.
Casey:
Well, then what do you do?
Casey:
And then there's apps that maybe they're a little bit better in portrait, but they kind of support landscape, which especially in today's phones is like a, like a postage box or like a slit in a door where you would stick a letter.
Casey:
These things are so darn, the aspect ratio is so, so very tall to so not very wide.
Casey:
To directly answer the question, I don't,
Casey:
Maybe they would auto-rotate if the app lets them, but I just don't see that happening.
Casey:
I think they would be assumed to be portrait.
Casey:
What do you think, Marco?
Marco:
I think on the Mac, iPhone-only apps will literally just show up as non-resizable iPhone-shaped rectangles in portrait orientation.
Marco:
And so they're going to be weirdly small windows.
Marco:
I don't know which phone they will simulate.
Marco:
Obviously, iPhones have multiple different screen sizes they could be.
Marco:
I seriously doubt they would be resizable.
Marco:
I think it's going to be a fixed size, and we just don't know which size that's going to be yet.
Marco:
Because the problem is iPhone apps are not written to be resized typically.
Marco:
You can do that.
Marco:
You can write it that way if you have a universal app that's made for iPad multitasking as a universal binary with the iPhone app.
Marco:
You can do that.
Marco:
But Apple can't assume that all apps do that.
Marco:
So for this question, I assume this is about, you know, because John right here says, iPhone-only apps.
Marco:
So typically for an iPhone-only app, you're not writing in resizing support.
Marco:
Rotation is another thing, but rotation, you know...
Marco:
it doesn't really make sense on a Mac to support rotation on iPhone apps because if it's not resizable, what's it going to do?
Marco:
Like offer a diagonal drag handle, but like it just only snaps to the two orientations that it could be in, but it's still like the same size rectangle.
Marco:
Like that's not, that's no good.
Marco:
So I have a feeling it's going to be very, very simple on the Mac.
Marco:
You get non-resizable rectangles that are the size of one of the phones.
Marco:
Um, and then, um,
Marco:
On iPad, that's an interesting question, whether they would finally actually allow the correct version of iPhone apps to be shown with proper rotation and maybe a little bit bigger.
Marco:
Do they still show in the 4-inch screen size or the 3.5-inch screen size or whatever it is?
Marco:
Anyway...
Marco:
I don't know if they would do it there.
Marco:
Because on the iPad, first of all, you're running in a different environment.
Marco:
And it would be a little bit more work, slightly more work, for them to enable UIKit to have an exception where it tricks the app into being able to rotate between portrait and landscape, but only still in this black box in the middle of the screen for these iPhone-only apps.
Marco:
And second of all, on the iPad, I think one of the reasons they've always made the experience pretty bad for phone apps that are not optimized for the iPad, but that you happen to run there anyway, is that they want developers to make iPad apps from their iPhone apps.
Marco:
They want us to make universal apps.
Marco:
Apple would probably make the decision of, not only do we not want to spend additional engineering time to make this nicer, but
Marco:
We specifically don't want to make it nicer to force developers to make iPad apps.
Marco:
Now, you know, that's a thing they've done for a while now, and with some success, some not success, like Instagram is a big one, but that seems to be their position on iPad.
Marco:
But on the Mac, it's a different scenario because you're in a totally different environment, and having a bunch of fixed iPhone-sized little rectangle windows is totally fine on the Mac, so that's what I think they're going to do.
John:
I don't remember if Steve Troughton-Smith or Guy Rambeau or somebody actually started running iPhone apps on the DDK and determined the definitive answer to this question.
John:
I have vague memories of it, but I don't remember specifically.
John:
But anyway, my guess is actually that they will allow rotation of iPhone apps on the Mac and iPad apps.
John:
It won't be by grabbing a drag handle.
John:
I assume it will be a menu command because there's –
John:
iPhone apps on the iPhone don't have a menu bar, but on the Mac they do, and there's all sorts of crap you could put in there.
John:
And one of the things I would imagine they put in there would be rotation.
John:
Just because, you know, you have the flexibility to do it.
John:
The Mac screens are big enough to do it.
John:
iPhone apps support different features in landscape versus portrait, depending on the app.
John:
And so to get access to those features, I think they'll allow you to rotate it with the menu command.
John:
Fingers crossed.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then rounding out the triplet of John's this week, John Larson writes that John Syracuse extols the virtues of having multiple backups of digital treasures.
Casey:
Thus, I wonder what precautions he takes against the loss of physical treasures in his attic.
Casey:
Fire, floods, tornadoes, bugs, mold, etc.
Casey:
How does he protect his analog archive?
Casey:
This is masterfully executed because this is such a trolly question written in such a genuine, kind way.
Casey:
I applaud you, John Larson.
Casey:
This is very well done.
Casey:
John Syracuse, please answer.
John:
It's totally about it.
John:
I mean, this is getting to the heart of why I love computers.
John:
Digital bits can be copied losslessly.
John:
If you have good checksums, you can keep them the same forever.
John:
Things deleted digitally are completely deleted but can be restored.
John:
Going back to the fundamentals of me as a little kid, you can write a word and backspace over it as many times as you want and you will never wear through the paper because there's no paper.
John:
That's the beauty of digital things.
John:
It's why I love computers.
John:
It's why I feel comfortable preserving things in computers, whether they be 12 gigabytes of email or...
John:
over 100 000 photos digital i like digital in the meatspace world everything sucks and there's no way to mitigate and you know against disasters and floods and bugs and mold because i can't easily make a perfect copy of all my physical belongings elsewhere in three other places i i you know that's that's the physical world and unfortunately uh
John:
There are limitations in the physical world where doing anything to have sort of precautions and care and backups and mitigations costs money.
John:
It costs money.
John:
It costs time.
John:
It costs space.
John:
I don't have enough of those things to take any precautions.
John:
So what precautions do I take against loss of my physical charges?
John:
Almost none.
John:
I mean, my house is up to code.
John:
I have smoke detectors.
John:
But the bottom line is...
John:
Almost nothing.
John:
My house isn't air-conditioned, first of all, but my attic where the stuff is is both not air-conditioned and also not heated.
John:
So I don't even have climate control.
John:
No rain gets in.
John:
My house is weathertight, but beyond that...
John:
No.
John:
So all my capacitors are probably blown.
John:
Things probably have molds in them.
John:
Mice, spiders, you name it.
John:
And why don't I do anything else?
John:
Because I can't.
John:
Like, I have a life to lead.
John:
I have limited resources.
John:
I'm doing the best I can.
John:
The physical world meets space sucks.
Casey:
That was sufficiently depressing.
John:
Yeah, that's why we all love computers, because it's a place where you can make a perfect world, where everything is just so, because it's artificial.
John:
So, yay for computers.
John:
Boo for meatspace.
John:
Yeah, the world we make is so perfect.
John:
Well, you know, if it's not, we can always fix it, and you can keep trying to fix it again and again and again, whereas my capacitor is blowing all my Macs and leaks stuff all over the place.
John:
I can't go up there and fix that.
Casey:
John, I wish you the best of luck in your second life.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Bombas, and Eero.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
If you want to join them, you can get access to things like our bootleg feed or an ad-free show.
Marco:
See for yourself at atp.fm slash join.
Marco:
Thank you very much, and we'll talk to you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over They didn't even mean to begin Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental John didn't do any research Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental Oh it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Marco:
They did it in me.
John:
I thought of one mitigation that I make for my physical treasures, specifically about the issue of tornadoes and bugs.
John:
I live in a place... It's not the friendliest place to physical goods.
John:
That would probably be like the high desert somewhere where there's no moisture to.
John:
But I can tell you that if I live someplace swampy or more south, the bug situation could potentially be much more dire because I feel like the warmer you get, the more bugs...
John:
are available the harsh winters here do help tamp things down so even though we have weather and we have snow and tons of rain and all that other stuff in general because the winter is going to come and freeze everything we don't suffer from the massive infestations of life and mold like because again it's going to get dry here in the winter too we have seasonal infestations but no sort of prolonged ones and i suppose the cold weather chases like the uh
John:
various animals to invade our homes perhaps too but anyway one partial mitigation is i guess like not living in florida yeah that's not good look even like if you live somewhere super dry then you have issues with anything made of rubber because it cracks and dries out yeah i suppose i just always i'm always jealous of like you know even when we're in california you look at these cars and from the 90s and they're like they're pristine because they don't have like road salt
John:
Yeah, there's no rust.
John:
Or winter or rust.
John:
They're just beautiful.
John:
I just love being in California and looking at all the old Hondas.
John:
It's like being in a museum.
John:
No Honda in New England looks like that anymore.
John:
A Honda that age just looks like a pile of rust.
Casey:
John, I have a funny bone to pick with you.
Casey:
I don't remember where it was I heard this.
Casey:
I don't remember if it was this show, Rectifs, or something else.
Casey:
But you said that you leave live photos off.
Casey:
And in and of itself, you monster.
Casey:
Why?
Casey:
But beyond that, I know in your defense, there's some slight weird things with the 11 Pro, I think, where like,
Casey:
If live photos are on, you can't use night mode or something along those lines.
Casey:
I forget the details.
Casey:
But up until I think in the last year or two, for the first couple or whatever years that live photos were around, as far as I knew, it was only additive.
Casey:
So why the hell wouldn't you capture a live photo, man?
Casey:
What's wrong with you?
John:
Having live photos on is like leaving key clicks on, which I also thought was uncontroversial until I found these monsters who were like, I leave key clicks on all the time.
John:
It's the same thing.
Casey:
Key clicks are legitimately bad.
Casey:
Key clicks are legitimately inarguably bad.
Casey:
But why would you turn off a live photo?
John:
Well, here's the problem with live photos, and both of you manifest this problem.
John:
Before I get to your problem with live photos, there is, just off to the side, I just want to mention the privacy aspect of live photos.
John:
Because if they're on and you forget that they exist, the camera could be pointing in a direction that you don't want it to be pointing before you take a photo that you then send to somebody and they're able to see something you didn't want them to see.
Casey:
I will begrudgingly allow that.
John:
So that exists, but that you can manage.
John:
If you have it on all the time, you just change your habits, right?
John:
The real problem with live photos, aside from the storage space, is that if you just have them on by default all the time and you share photos, as you two do, and every single freaking one of them is a live photo...
John:
But 99.999% of them, there is no extra information or value in the live photo.
John:
I have to watch all of your live photos to find out, is this the one where there was something cute in the live photo?
John:
And no, it's not.
John:
It's the one where I could see you adjusting your camera from looking at the grass and now looking at your kid.
John:
But I have to force press on my stupid phone every single time to make that determination because every single photo you share is a live photo.
John:
john it's bad i understand your perspective and your point but you are empirically wrong no and here's the second thing that from for me in particular the quality of the live photo video if it was the same quality as the photos i might leave i might leave it on by default but it's so freaking blurry and gross that the only time i would ever do it is if i thought there was going to be additional value as in this photo is cute but really you got to watch the live photo to get some extra value of a cute thing that was
John:
said or done or whatever instead of just being on by default and me seeing you adjust the frame and you know framing your subject in the photo it's just it's terrible so my note to both of you it would be have live photos on all the time fine but then turn it off on all the photos you're going to share where there's nothing of value in the live photo so i don't have to force press on every single one of your pictures
Marco:
That's what I do.
Marco:
I mean, I don't do a lot of shared albums, so it's not much of a problem there for me.
Marco:
But whenever I message a photo to somebody, and Tiff and I have this convention between each other, we've worked it out, and I do it to everybody, whether they know it or not, which is like, I choose whether I send you a live photo or not every single time.
Marco:
And if I send you a live photo, then I think you should watch it.
Marco:
But otherwise, like the vast majority of pictures I send, I turn off the live photo-ness of it when I send it.
Marco:
But I still leave live photos on for pictures that are being captured by the camera app because I still, you know, get some value out of that sometimes and it's very cute.
John:
so who controls the one shared album viewers that i'm on because everything is a freaking live photo uh that would be tiff but look but it's i don't know if we can can you control when you add a picture to a shared album can you make that non-live you can you can just turn here's the thing if you if you take live photos all the time surely for your benefit as well you you only want you're in the same situation as me when you look at these photos a year later
John:
if they all have live photos, you won't know which ones have live photos with value or not.
John:
So you have to do this processing step where you go through all your photos and disable the live photo on the ones that you didn't want to be live photos.
John:
Otherwise, every single photo you have to force press on or otherwise tap and hold on or whatever to see the live photo animation.
John:
And additionally, many of Apple's UIs will autoplay the live photo when the thing comes into view.
John:
So now you're subject to that.
John:
So you have to process them.
John:
You have to say, was this a real live photo or just an incidental real life?
John:
And
John:
If you don't process them, then when you share, you know, you'll just share them all the way they are.
John:
I don't want to sign up for that level of work, especially for the value, for the quality that it adds.
John:
Like I said, if it was full quality either side, maybe I would do it because then I'm thinking like I'm just taking a bunch of miniature movies and it's full quality.
John:
But I don't like the blurry then clear then blurry thing.
John:
And I don't want to process my pictures.
Marco:
So you'd rather have none of this information ever available to you than have it and ignore it all the time?
John:
And have to discard it manually on all the pictures I take?
John:
No, I don't want that.
Marco:
Why do you have to discard it?
John:
I don't think they provide a lot of value because it's so blurry.
John:
You don't have to discard it.
John:
It's so blurry, though.
Casey:
Just leave it.
Casey:
It's not hurting.
John:
It's too short and it's too blurry.
John:
If it was longer and high res, I would probably keep it and they would all be short videos, but it's not.
John:
It's way too short and it's super blurry.
And no.
No.
John:
I've never had it on.
John:
I'm not ready for that feature.
John:
That feature is not ready for me yet.
John:
And honestly, even if it made it max quality, I still would only do it as opt-in, like not by default.
Casey:
It's not hurting you, John.
Casey:
Just leave it alone.
Casey:
It's like a bee flying around you.
Casey:
Just leave it alone.
Casey:
It won't sting you if you just leave it a room.
John:
It is hurting me.
John:
It's taken up my storage space and it's giving me a new job, which is to process 100,000 new pictures I take every year or whatever and decide whether they're live photos or not.
Casey:
You know, I have to confess.
Casey:
Well, first of all, I have to confess that I am correct about your incorrectness about how you're handling this.
Casey:
But beyond that, Marco, you said a minute ago that you turn off the live photo-ness.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
And so I was messing about while you two were bickering.
Casey:
And it turns out, you knew this.
Casey:
I did not know this.
Casey:
You said this.
Marco:
You didn't know that you could do this?
John:
no i honestly didn't because it's not obvious that like it doesn't look like oh what a lot of things in apple's photos interface is like that's true i tap that and do something and you don't know what you find out is by trying it you're like oh it did something what did it do and then you had to figure out what it did exactly so what i did was i went into messages and i clicked the little photos i message app and then i found the most recent photo because it has the live image because why would you not capture it it doesn't hurt anything anyway agreed he says as he sends someone a picture of his balls that's fine go ahead
Marco:
hey man that's a little treat just for you john yes are they frequently out when you're taking pictures hey how i live my life is my business exactly you don't know you don't know you can't you can't have them out because then then you don't you don't know like reflections across the room you can have like a vase that's a you know chrome vase your wife could be walking by in her underwear and accidentally is in the frame like you don't know there's lots of failure modes of live pictures
Casey:
I assure you, if Erin was walking by in her underwear, it would not be an accident if she was in frame.
Casey:
But anyway.
John:
It's a good thing she doesn't listen to the show.
Casey:
Anyway, the point is, so I went into Erin's iMessage conversation.
Casey:
I clicked on or tapped on.
Casey:
I hate it when I say click about touch stuff, but I just did it.
Casey:
I tapped on the iMessage app for photos, selected the most recent photo that has a live component to it.
Casey:
And there's an X in the upper right, which I knew wasn't.
Casey:
you know, all along, that was a tappable target to remove the photo.
Casey:
Turns out, little did I know, that the live photo icon in the upper left, it isn't just like that gray, very thin, if you will, overlay.
Casey:
It's a white circle with the live photo icon on top of that, which is supposed to indicate to Captain Dunst over here that you can tap it and remove the liveness.
Casey:
I had no idea you could do that.
Casey:
And now,
Casey:
I will try to do better about not sending this stuff if it's not useful.
John:
I'm glad I could help.
John:
No, you didn't help me.
Casey:
Marco helped me.
Casey:
Marco said that.
John:
I'm the one I was talking about.
John:
You have to go through and remove the live photerness from the ones where it doesn't have value.
John:
So obviously I'm talking about this feature.
John:
If you remember from the intro, what Apple said was, you know, you take it and the live photos are there and you can turn it off.
John:
And I don't know if this is still true, but this was an intro.
John:
They said, and don't worry, we will, like if you turn off the live folderness and it's been like 30 days and you haven't turned it back on, we will ditch that extra data to save you the disk space, right?
John:
So they will actually clean up the little whatever MP4 or whatever embedded thing
John:
That has the video thing if you turn it off.
John:
So be aware that turning it off is potentially destructive, not immediately destructive.
John:
You can turn it back on.
John:
But after 30 days ago or so go by with it off, you go back to that photo.
John:
I don't remember what it was, 30 days, seven days, whatever it was.
John:
You go back to that photo and you can't turn it back on because the data is really gone.
John:
So if you're super into live photos and you want to preserve every ounce of those blurry one second videos, whatever they are, don't turn it off.
John:
You can turn it off and share it and turn it back on like that'll work fine.
Casey:
I just can't believe how wrong you you're so right about so many things.
Casey:
You are so wrong about this.
John:
You are so you're saying you're going to keep sharing pictures of your kids where I get to see two seconds of a shaky camera before the picture and after because what does it hurt?
Casey:
What does it hurt?
John:
It hurts me because I have to check them all to see if this is the one where something cute happened.
John:
Why don't you just never check any of them?
John:
Yeah, seriously.
John:
Because sometimes there's something cute.
John:
It's random reward, you know?
John:
It's a Skinner box.
John:
Sometimes there's a cute thing that happens before the photo.
Marco:
So you'd rather these things just never even exist than for you to just ignore them?
John:
No, I'm saying if you opted into them, then I know every time I saw a live photo that I was in for a treat.
John:
Instead, now it's just a chore where I have to find the one in 100 treats that's going to be there.
Casey:
I am so sorry for your difficult life, John.
Casey:
The other thing I do like about live photos is, and maybe I misunderstand it and maybe it's not full res, but if you're in the Photos app, you can change the, what do they call it, like the key photo?
Casey:
Do you know what I'm talking about, Marco?
Casey:
So you can go into like a live photo and you can edit it.
John:
That was from iPhoto.
Casey:
Did I just say iPhoto?
Casey:
Whatever.
John:
No, that feature has been around since iPhoto.
Casey:
Oh, sorry.
Casey:
So, yeah, you go into the photo, you edit it, and then there's some way... Now I don't remember how the hell you do it.
John:
Spacebar, I think.
Casey:
Well, no, I'm talking about on the phone, damn it.
Casey:
So you click the little... Spacebar on the phone.
Casey:
God, I said click again.
Casey:
I got to go to bed.
Casey:
You tap on the little live photo icon, and then there's several...
Casey:
key photo options that you can take and maybe if i if i choose a different one and change it maybe i'm making the quality worse but i've never noticed that to be the case so that's another nice thing is if like you capture it and the smile just isn't quite right the way you see it in the photos app on your phone then you can go back and say oh actually the next key photo option was perfect and that's the one i wanted and so now because i had this bonus data that wasn't hurting anyone now i can change it to the even better picture
John:
It's hurting your disk storage, and it's hurting me when you send it to me.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
You can see frames from the movie thing, but those aren't the same res as the photos.
Casey:
Well, that's what I'm not sure about.
Casey:
All kidding aside, I really don't know if I'm losing quality.
John:
I mean, you can take a burst photo.
John:
Like, when you do a burst, then you have a bunch of individual pictures, and you can pick the one that's good or whatever, but...
Casey:
Anyway, you do you, I'll do me.
Casey:
Different strokes for different folks.
Casey:
The problem I have with this is because I'm picking a fight with you, the entire internet, 100% of which always agrees with you about everything, even when you're wrong, like now.
John:
I'm sure there's plenty of live picture lovers out there.
John:
There are key click lovers out there.
John:
We're going to hear from them.
Casey:
Oh, God, no.
Casey:
Oh, please, no.
Casey:
Key click lovers, we all, all three of us agree, you're monsters.
John:
Yeah, they're objectively wrong.
John:
We know them.
John:
We know people.
John:
they're objectively incorrect i mean in fact i can i can say i can name names john gruber on the last episode of the talk show outed himself as a key click lover he had some story about what he why it makes him feel good it's terrible people are monsters you think you know somebody i know right well i mean no we've known this about john for a long time i just you know it's just always fun to see him uh publicly say it because he's just getting himself in to be yelled at yeah so i'm sure they're live picture lovers and they love it everywhere um and we'll hear about them just as much
John:
i do and because it's the default i bet most people have it on right what because the defaults right they most people don't change them so i think everyone does live pictures and i wonder how many people don't know live pictures there or don't know how to like see the live picture when they're sent pictures or wonder what that little circle icon is at the top but bottom line is i think the vast majority of people have live pictures on all the time so i think i'm in the minority here as you should be because you're wrong i said leave it leave it on for yourself all the time all i ask is when you share photos make a conscious choice about the live picture-ness
Casey:
I don't think you can make that choice when you're uploading to an album.
John:
I think you should make the choice for all your pictures, period, because you're getting yourself in the situation.
John:
But anyway, if you're going to share, it's probably not going to be a thousand pictures.
John:
If you're sharing five pictures, just turn off live picture on the ones that shouldn't have it.
John:
Share them and turn it back on for all of them if that's what you want to do.
Casey:
no but that's my point is that i don't think that i have any mechanism for disabling them as disabling the live photoness as it's going into a shared album or at least not from not from ios you would have to like delete the live photoness on those photos before you're right it's not deleting it's just disable it then share them then re-enable it or don't re-enable it because if you disabled it you're showing it has no value so just let the system delete them
John:
Also, this includes you yelling something before a picture.
John:
That's true.
John:
You're sending that to everybody, too, whether you know it or not.
Casey:
F*** it, smile!
Casey:
Exactly.
Marco:
Yeah, that's true.
Casey:
Anything else?
Marco:
I don't think so.
Marco:
Actually, John gave us a better after show than what I was planning, but I was thinking about maybe possibly...
Marco:
buying another Synology.
Marco:
We'll see you later, live listeners.
Marco:
What?
Casey:
Don't do that to me either.
Marco:
And we'll talk to you next week.
Casey:
You want to get another Synology?
Casey:
We've got to save it for the show, but you f***ing bastard.
Casey:
Save it for the show.
John:
We're not talking about it now.
John:
Save it.
John:
Oh, God, you're such a dick.
John:
I'll talk to you about it in like two weeks.
Casey:
Oh, you're such a dick.
Casey:
This is all I'm going to think about for like two weeks now.
John:
By then, he'll have like five synologies and return two of them, so we'll be able to talk about it.
Casey:
I cannot believe you're thinking about another synology.
Casey:
I don't want to talk about it, but I so desperately want to talk about this.
Marco:
That's why it's great to just leave it here.
Marco:
You're such a bastard.
God damn it.