13: Animated Kale
17 May 2013Our theme song, too many to-do apps, Google I/O keynote reactions, localization, Google kicking Apple’s butt in services, Google Play Music All Access Glass Map Hangouts, and Apple’s quietly updated Javascript bridge.
Episode Description:
- Our theme song by Jonathan Mann -- follow his Song A Day on YouTube, and check out his site if you or your company would like a catchy, fun song. Thanks for the ATP theme song, Jonathan!
- Casey and Marco get deluged with to-do app recommendations.
- The difficulty in getting people to change to a new app, but conversely, the potential success for slightly differentiated apps in an otherwise crowded market.
- Google I/O keynote reactions.
- Localizing apps to different languages.
- The sad state of iTunes Connect.
- Staged rollouts, purchase analytics, beta testing, and the different developer attitudes of Apple and Google.
- Why Google is consistently able to kick Apple's butt in services (and engineering?).
- Google Play Music All Access, Hangouts, and the new Google Maps.
- Apple's Objective-C to Javascript bridge.
- The App Store UI.
Sponsored by:
- An Event Apart: The design conference for people who make websites.
- CocoaConf: A conference for iPhone, iPad, and Mac developers. Use coupon code ATP for 20% off any ticket.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is the most interesting podcast ever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well it’s not a podcast yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, unless you keep this in the show, which you better not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do. I might put that in somewhere. Please dear God, no.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I want to start the show with a story about the theme song.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Our theme song by Jonathan Mann, spelled the same way as Merlin Man, but with Jonathan
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in front instead of Merlin. Our theme song, so here’s what happened. When we started
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this show I went to Merlin man because he made the theme song to his
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Back to Work podcast and I went to Merlin and I said look I’m looking for for this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show that we’re doing I’m looking for something that is kind of punchy the way those opening chords
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are to Back to Work.
⏹️ ▶️ John did you mention bleeps and boops to him I did not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just to irritate you so anyway so I went to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Merlin and I said do you have you know could you like whip something up in garage band or something cuz I he likes doing that kind of stuff and he’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good at it so I said you know can you whip something up in garage band or something just to be like a quick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opener and a quick closer to the show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And he said, yeah, okay, I’ll work on it. And then like a week later, Jonathan Mann
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does this song and releases it on YouTube during his Song A Day thing, which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we will link to in the show notes. Jonathan Mann did this awesome theme song that we’ve been using
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in almost every episode since then, if not every episode. It was so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco damn catchy. It came out shortly before Casey and I went on our big Germany
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car trip and we were talking about it on the trip it was in our heads the entire time or it was in our
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wives heads the entire time it was it’s so catchy and we’ve gotten so many responses on Twitter saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the show is stuck or the the theme song is stuck in my head it’s been stuck in my head all day or all week or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and people just love this thing and I love it and we love it except John but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John the rest of us love it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and so so eventually I went to Merlin and I’m like you know I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I think we’re just gonna have to keep this because it’s so good!” And he was like, yeah, I agree. You should definitely keep that.
⏹️ ▶️ John good. Well, when you gave Merlin the assignment for the song, did you make sure it had a budget, a deadline, and
⏹️ ▶️ John resources attached to it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t! Therefore, I guess it wasn’t a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it wasn’t a priority, I think. Priorities… it didn’t have, like, a level 10 priority.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might have only had a level 8 priority, but there’s 19 other level 8 priorities. Something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’m getting this right, right, Merlin mm-hmm anyway so I think that was a Merlin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco impression it’s not that good of one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I don’t have any cards to flat
⏹️ ▶️ John also be lemon grab well no that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s that’s more stressful I can’t do it because I don’t even know what show that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is I guess I’ve heard Merlin do it enough times that I I know what you’re talking about anyway so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so so I went to Jonathan man and I said hey can we just keep using this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like you know can I can I you know can we give you something for it can we keep using because people love it and he
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said all he wants is for us to mention his site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and his business because what his business is so this guy you’ve probably heard his songs before at least one of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the biggest ones is when when Apple did the antenna gate press conference back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in 2010 was it late 2010 whenever that was they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opened the press conference with the song about the Antenna Gate issue and that song was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Jonathan Mann’s songs. I think it was just his song of the day for one of those days or something that he had released it right before
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then and Steve Jobs came out and said,
⏹️ ▶️ John good morning, thanks for joining us here. We
⏹️ ▶️ Marco saw that on YouTube this morning and couldn’t help but want to share it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They opened the conference with that. So Steve Jobs likes his songs. His song gets stuck in your head and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he has a business where he can write a song for your company if you want him to and so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco go to his site It’s Jonathan Mann with two N’s dot net and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we’ll put that in the show notes also and you can also just follow his YouTube channel because you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he posts all these songs every day and they’re really catchy he did a hypercritical song you know back a few months back
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when when that was still going and that was really catchy and so he’s just really good at writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco songs that got stuck in your head and so if you have like a podcast or a company or anything like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you kind of want that because that’s really good for you like One of the reasons I wanted to keep this song for us is because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it gets stuck in your head. That’s good for the show. That’s like promotion for the show and it gives you a good feeling when you hear us every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco week. So thanks a lot to Jonathan Mann for letting us use this song and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco check out his site. I’m willing to in the show notes, Jonathan Mann with two N’s dot net.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I feel compelled to point out that when you say they’re catchy, that’s like the good kind of catchy, not like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the modern pop music annoying catchy where it’s like this thing burrowing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey into your brain. the happy catchy, the one that you kind of giggle about every time you hear somebody humming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it or singing it, as Tiff and all of us did for most of the Germany trip. So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the good kind of catchy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s not like, you know, pop music that you want to drill your brain out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco spoon because you just cannot get it out of your head. I mean, this is like, yeah, you’re right, it’s the good kind. And this guy, obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Jonathan has real talent here because he’s made lots of songs that are that catchy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it’s not like he had one that was really catchy, and that was it, he was done. He seems to be really,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really good at specifically creating good catchy songs.
⏹️ ▶️ John He makes a song every day, doesn’t he? He’s still doing that, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and I believe his reasoning for that was like to keep himself sharp and, you know, and develop these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco skills. And he really, I mean, you could tell this guy, he’s really good at it. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so thank you to Jonathan Mann. That was freaking great to have this theme song. And I love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And well, most of the hosts on this show absolutely love it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Two-thirds of the hosts of ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John and the other one seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ John both versions of the song. I like this one is catchy I like it. I just I’m partial to bleeps and boops
⏹️ ▶️ John And I agree with the people who said that the bleeps and boops the weakest of the bleeps and boops song is that it sounds Like there should be more
⏹️ ▶️ John song and there isn’t whereas the the other one It kind of is a complete thing, you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I should point it also I even adjusted the the EQ in the way I edit things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I adjusted the EQ for starting in last week’s episode just to make the song sound better
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like it needed any help.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was yeah Just well because I was I was killing its audio quality with because I was applying the voice EQ to the global track
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to all Of us including the song track. So now the song track is untouched and so you get to hear it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey And you know at 64
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now that we have two consecutive podcasts about podcasts. Yes A really quick bit of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey follow-up that I just wanted to mention. A lot of people have come out of the woodwork and recommended a million different List apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to me after my complaining about the way that List apps work and how I want something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey super simple. And one of the things I heard a lot of is, dude, why don’t you just use the Reminders app, which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at first I didn’t even realize that you could share lists in that, but apparently you can do it, I think, on the website and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey definitely on OS X, but not on iOS. It’s close to what I want. It’s not really what I want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey worth discussing what I want because it’s really boring and not that exciting, but I just wanted to thank everyone for pointing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these things out, but also say I’ve heard every recommendation under the sun at this point, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if you really want to engage me on Twitter to argue about this kind of minutiae, then you know where to find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me. Just listen to the song. It’s right in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey all I can say.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I also, I was talking about list apps yesterday because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I was going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco grocery shopping and a lot of people brought this up to me also. And I just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, my problem is I like the Clear app. I actually like using that in the store. It’s because it has,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, such a minimal interface and everything is like a big touch target and you can swipe everything. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really easy to use while shopping and I like that as you cross things off, they fall off the list. And so,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the view that you’re looking at gets smaller. It’s actually, it’s really, really very nice when walking around a store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You don’t have to, like, look that closely at the phone. You don’t have to be that precise with your gestures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everything is big and friendly to one-handed use while shopping. I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lamenting problems I was having with it syncing to the Mac client and not being able to multi-line
⏹️ ▶️ Marco paste. Although apparently if you do a shake gesture or something, there was some kind of crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gesture that I would never have guessed to attempt to multi-line paste something. I don’t know. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco didn’t try it since then. I was expressing my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco disdain for shopping list apps, and just like Casey,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got a billion recommendations from everybody about their favorite shopping list app,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or in many cases the shopping list app that they make themselves. It’s so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funny how so many of these apps were like… They only did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a third of what I asked for, which is very… What I asked for is fairly simple. And I didn’t even have the sharing requirement
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Casey had. All I want is to have a sync between the Mac and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS, for the iOS client to be as easy to use as clear when I’m actually shopping,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and if sync for some reason doesn’t work very well, let me at least type the list in the Mac,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco email it to myself, and then copy and paste into the list in a multi-line to multi-item
⏹️ ▶️ Marco action. And so many recommendations couldn’t fit my fairly minimal requirements,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so anyway. It wasn’t, it was a, it was,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the problem that I have when people give me all these recommendations is that it takes time to try these things out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, if I have something that works like 90% of the way or 80% of the way, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco chances that I’m going to take an hour one day and try 14 different other list apps, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just never going to happen. I’m never, it’s like the pain of using the one I’m already using is never going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be great enough to make it worth even looking at the other ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s something else about recommendations, because I get them a lot too. People do recommendations kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of like they’re participating in personal computer gamesmanship on the internet
⏹️ ▶️ John in 1992. Like they do with feature checkboxes. Well, this has X, Y, and Z and Q. Well, this is X, Y, Z, Q, and
⏹️ ▶️ John P. Oh, well, then it wins, right? And especially for iOS apps, I find
⏹️ ▶️ John that a lot of the time, the application that I use, I like for reasons that have nothing
⏹️ ▶️ John to do with the features. Like I acknowledge that this lacks features and has an annoying bug that drives
⏹️ ▶️ John me insane, but I like how it looks better. Or I like where the three buttons that I press most frequently, I
⏹️ ▶️ John like where they are because of the way I hold it with my thumb. Like crap like that. That determines which app I pick.
⏹️ ▶️ John The one that recently came up was people yelling at me on app.net about why I should use other app.net clients
⏹️ ▶️ John because I’m constantly complaining about netbots, annoying bugs with not marking replies as red
⏹️ ▶️ John and silly things like that. I’ve bought every app.net client that
⏹️ ▶️ John exists, right? So I already have all these apps. And they’re like, this one has it, and this has had that feature forever. And I know
⏹️ ▶️ John I have all of them, but there’s just something about how NetBot looks, or it looks like app.net
⏹️ ▶️ John to me, or I like where the buttons are, the intangibles. And that could be why you end up
⏹️ ▶️ John using an application over another app. It doesn’t always have to be feature checkboxes. And it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy to me that people who are in the Mac community and sort of in our circle, that part
⏹️ ▶️ John of their brain shuts off when, when like comparing applications, oh, you should use this application
⏹️ ▶️ John because it has the feature you want. Well, if it’s ugly, I’m not going to use it. Well, why is it ugly? It’s not really ugly. It’s just not to my taste. Like I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ John not impugning other people’s applications that somehow they do a bad job laying it out. But sometimes you like how
⏹️ ▶️ John one looks better than the other you like, where a button is or what’s a button and what’s a slide and what’s not a slide
⏹️ ▶️ John and people don’t like to hear that. Like, that’s what whenever people ask me about app recommendations, I always
⏹️ ▶️ John have to do this whole song and dance about like, this is the application that I like, But it’s not necessarily the best
⏹️ ▶️ John one for you, because maybe you like different things than I do. You know?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s exactly what I ran into with the recommendations to me, because everyone said, oh, you want something super
⏹️ ▶️ Casey simple. You want it to be shared. What’s wrong with you? Why not use reminders? And there’s several
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reasons why I don’t really want to use reminders, none of which matter, and it’s really not worth going into. But I tried
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to tell people this, and they’re like, but that should work for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’m thinking to myself, well, I just told you it doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John now that you’re a famous person, that’s the thing, is that you want the famous person to use your app, because it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, well, this is used by this person who has this voice to the
⏹️ ▶️ John world, or whatever. But it’s nothing against a lot of these apps. Some of them I acknowledge are better
⏹️ ▶️ John applications than the one I’m choosing to use. But if one is green and one is red, and I really like red, I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the red one, even if the green one is technically a better app. And that’s how people actually are. And I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John we should be excluded from being allowed to be just like people are and just picking the green one because you
⏹️ ▶️ John like green. As long as we’re clear when people ask about recommendations, it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is the app that I like, but there are plenty of other really great apps, too. Try the ones and see what fun—or do what I did and buy
⏹️ ▶️ John every single one of them and then pick the one that you like best, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. And what you said a minute ago, you said you like this button being red and the other app is blue.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve told this story a few times on Build & Analyze, so I’ll be quick. Back when I worked at Vivissimo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Pittsburgh and we made the Clusty search engine, among other things, we would get support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco emails from Clusty saying, I use you over Google because I like the color scheme on the site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or I like your logo. You know, like people like you would think, oh, Google in 2006 or 2005 when we were
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing this, like they were on top of their game, they were dominating the search market, Bing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wasn’t around yet, DuckDuckGo wasn’t around yet, like everything was Google back then and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would think an alternative search engine, there’d be no market for it. But there was, like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there wasn’t another market for a Google-sized company to have their own search engine, but when you had a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one like we did run by only a handful of people, you can pay them with the revenue. You can be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sustainable with a small company having a small product with a small market share because the market is just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so damn big that if you can get half of one percent of it to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prefer your product over the other one, you can support a company on that as long
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as it’s not that big of a company. That applies to so many things. to the app store, that applies to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so many things where you think there’s no more room in the market for your product, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there is. There might not be a whole lot of room for your product, you might not be able to have a ton of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users and make a ton of money, but there is enough space for sustainable living
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be made by one or a handful of people in a lot more markets than you think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can always rely on me to break that awkward silence
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s hard not to think of that that this position by Marco is like a foreshadowing
⏹️ ▶️ John of his future endeavors it’s gonna be a to-do app isn’t it you can just admit it it’s okay
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes that’s it I’m gonna well
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I already posted a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screenshot I posted my preview of the to-do app with filters
⏹️ ▶️ John did you I missed that did you post on your site
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Twitter. Yeah, because you know now I’m thinking there aren’t enough apps in the App
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Store that let you take a photo
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John and apply a filter to it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw that was one of your shopping lists, yes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, and so that market I think is underserved. There just aren’t enough photo filter apps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And as we just discussed, there are many to-do apps, but there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco aren’t really any that we all love. So I’m going to combine the two and maybe throw in a flashlight as well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because those are pretty bad, too. And I was thinking maybe a weather feature
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John because all those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things are dramatically underserved. And so it would be a flashlight weather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shopping list with filters.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco For your shopping list, I
⏹️ ▶️ John have two words for you. Animated kale. Done. Million dollar idea. What?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you should call it. Should that be the name of the app?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it should have animated kale in it. When you write down kale on a list, I want to see kale leaves. I know they want them to be animated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re shaking the water off of them from the fruit sprayers?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all. No, they should blow with in proportion to the wind velocity where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John you’re standing. You can
⏹️ ▶️ John use the accelerometer and the gyroscope, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Run with it, Marco. You can figure it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John out. Call it Insta-List.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was saying too, like I don’t plan to ever reuse the prefix Insta anymore because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ever since Instagram came out and became insanely popular,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s that prefix has been so overused now that if I use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again I will look like I’m copying the trend and not just like copy my
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own previous product that predated most of the insta craze like it’s and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know there’s like there’s nothing I can really do about that you know you just gotta accept that you know that phrase have been ruined
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and move on anyway you want to talk
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about a Google I owe that happened today.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think we probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’m kidding probably should care Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there were some interesting bits I’m just trying to
⏹️ ▶️ John so I didn’t see any of it because I was Working and then you know at dinner and school concert,
⏹️ ▶️ John so I really I saw the tweets about it But I really know nothing so hopefully you guys know more about it than I do and then
⏹️ ▶️ John you can explain it to me who? Doesn’t know Any of the stuff and that will serve to also explain it to
⏹️ ▶️ John the listeners who could not endure three and a half hours of? that keynote, or maybe they have jobs and have to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well to that end, I did not watch the three and a half hour keynote, and after I got home,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I lazy-Twittered for a brief recap, and my good friend
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Larry King definitely called me out and asking basically all of Twitter to do my show prep on my behalf.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So thank you, Twitter.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then Panzer did it for you, so there you go.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But Panzer did it for me because who doesn’t like Panzer? I mean, he’s the man. So anyway. He has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco very tall hair.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has extremely tall hair. I’d be jealous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can’t hide it. I am jealous. My hair cannot get that tall and he can pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it off. Just like Jeff Rock always has. Jeff Rock is a cool enough guy that he can pull
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off any facial hair. Like mutton chops, full beard, partial beard, goatee,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything. He can pull off any facial hair combination. And I’m very jealous of that because I can’t pull off anything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco except clean shaven, which I don’t do very well. I’m sorry, I did not shave for the podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought something felt just a little bit wrong tonight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I’m a little sharp. Anyway, so, Google I.O., go on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you watched it, didn’t you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco No, I didn’t, actually. Oh, I thought you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco did. Instead of watching Google I.O., I took a new allergy medicine this morning
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because my allergies have been crazy and slept all afternoon. So, I was able to tweet a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things in response to some of the live blogs that I was reading before and after the giant nap.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Amazingly, I woke up from the giant nap and it was still going on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, so apparently, so I’m going to recap. So let me try that again from the top.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know almost nothing, but apparently of the three of us, I know the most. So based on Panzer’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey excellent punch list, which I’ll try to find while one of you start talking and put in the chat so we can put
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the show notes, there were a few different things that I kind of grouped
⏹️ ▶️ Casey everything into. And so the general themes that I saw were general stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about Google’s business and Android and Android’s business. Then there
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a bit about DevTools, of course a bunch about cloud services, and then finally some hardware.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey In terms of IOs and Android or Google’s business, they did note that they have 900
⏹️ ▶️ Casey million Android activations, which is quite a bit, and 48 billion apps
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downloaded, which given that Apple just rolled over $50 billion, I thought that was kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting and unsurprising that they had a Me Too moment about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I don’t know if you guys have anything else to add on that before I continue. Doesn’t sound like it. Okay, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey DevTools, they mentioned a few different things. Firstly, apparently there’s a mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by which you can ask for app translation to happen, or maybe not ask for as though it’s free,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but you can request app translation to happen within the Google equivalent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of iTunes Connect, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, I wasn’t clear
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that. Was that human-powered?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know. My impression was you have to—somebody is doing it somehow. So yes, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey human-powered, and I don’t think it’s free, but again, I’m not 100% sure.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s still very good, though, because I’ve always rallied in favor of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco good voiceover support in apps to the point where I think Apple should be testing apps with voiceover on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco during app review and rejecting the ones that are unusable or otherwise terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for voiceover users. And so my reasoning for that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would be to get more apps to do this fairly trivial thing to support accessibility
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better. And I think it would be interesting if somebody were to do the same thing with basic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco localization. The way Google ‑‑ like, now that Google has this infrastructure in place where you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very easily localize your app or at least do the basics right within
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their developer portal. What if Apple did that and made it a basic requirement of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app review? That you have to localize all important strings in your app for strings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are important to use it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That was a question I had about the localization thing because I didn’t watch it I saw like tweets going by about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Is this a service they provide? Like you can you give them some money or something and then people
⏹️ ▶️ John localize your app or is this just a way for you to localize your own app?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John impression was that it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a service and somebody in the chat
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is saying that yes it’s human powered and you pay per word and if your name was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pronounceable in the chat I would pronounce it but it’s a series of consonants and so I guess your name is GGG.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But anyway so that they were saying that it’s human powered and pay per word and I agree with you Marco that voiceover support is so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey unbelievably trivial in iOS. It’s really just saying, hey, for this UI element, this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what you should read to a vision-impaired user. And when you got on a kick about this,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jeez, I don’t know, it was like two years ago now. I did that with my really crummy and really simple app in the App
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Store, and it took me about an hour. And I expected it to take forever. So that’s not translation.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a little bit different. But I completely agree that not having voiceover support is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey inexcusable, and shame on you if you don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John This translation thing reminds me of a, you know, highlights. If, if
⏹️ ▶️ John it is, as you described, how is the difference between Apple and Google? Cause I can never imagine Apple offering
⏹️ ▶️ John a service like that, because what Apple would want you to do is to get your own
⏹️ ▶️ John translators and work closely with them to make sure it’s exactly the way you want it, because it’s not,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not that it’s automated translation or machine translation, it’s just that this pool, generic
⏹️ ▶️ John pool of translators, aren’t going to know your particular application to the same degree that someone that you
⏹️ ▶️ John hired personally and worked with would know. It seems like what you’d end up with is
⏹️ ▶️ John more applications that are translated, but the ones that are translated would not be very good translations. It seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like Apple would be like, just don’t even bother translating if you’re not going to sweat the details over the exact precise
⏹️ ▶️ John word in this other language that’s going to be the right word for your application, and you’re going to go back and forth with your guy 50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One thing too, one of the reasons why I never localized Instapaper, which honestly was probably very bad for business.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the reason I didn’t localize the app is because Instapaper is much more than just the app
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and there’s the entire website that would go along with it. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Instapaper app and website and the way they interact, the bookmarklet, installation, procedure,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all that stuff, it’s very text intensive, very language intensive, and the language is very nuanced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of cases. And also there’s the question of, you know, And shouldn’t you also,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you’re selling an app in a language, giving the impression that you support that language,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco should you, do you also need to provide support in that language? Like, that’s another question. So, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there were all these, the task of localizing Instapaper would have been so large
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do it well that I never got around to it as, you know, as my limited time and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco resources permitted. I just never got around to doing it because I knew that it wasn’t just,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, localizing a few button labels in the app, it was much, much more than that. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco localization, even when it is just localizing button labels in an app, that alone is not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trivial. You know, there’s a lot of problems with, again, with nuance,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, not the company, with nuance, the noun, of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, just when you say, you know, accept or okay, or if you say read
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you say read later what does that mean you know in another language like it would if you directly translate that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know is there a better alternative than what you come up with or is is it confusing if you directly translate it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s there’s all these little exceptions that as you said John like it’s not as easy as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here just blindly take the strings file and give me the output and then there’s there’s other issues like you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know do the do the new strings fit on the buttons do they overflow the boundaries of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah, hence hence German and their expensive spaces,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right or like Japanese where you should be using larger font sizes slightly or different fonts like there’s there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all sorts of Differences that you need to consider and and edge cases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all over the place. That’s to the point where they’re not even really edge cases it’s just regular cases of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just localization is is not a trivial thing and just translating the strings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is is is step one, and there’s a lot more to it than that. So I wonder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but at the same time, you could possibly argue, is a badly translated app better
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than an app that is not translated at all?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m not making a value judgment, but I’m just saying Apple’s system of priorities
⏹️ ▶️ John is such that they would prefer that you do a super awesome job or not do it. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ John Google, their philosophy is definitely it’s better to have Make make
⏹️ ▶️ John translation as easy as possible even if the translations aren’t going to be that great Because we think
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s more important to just have you know ten thousand Okay, translated
⏹️ ▶️ John apps out there instead of a hundred ones with great translations.
⏹️ ▶️ John but yeah But the same thing with like with the layouts like and forget about you know you’re when you were doing insta Bear with testing having your 17
⏹️ ▶️ John kindles your 800 ios devices now multiply that by the number of languages and make sure you check every screen in
⏹️ ▶️ John every language because you never know when that label is going to poke out of the button or get truncated is just a nightmare.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, like I remember when we, back in Tumblr, before I even left to do Instapaper,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when Tumblr started localizing, it was just a massive amount of work. And fortunately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t have to do it, but it took a dedicated staff of, I think, two people,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one being—and it’s hard enough to find a good translator, for one thing, because you have to find somebody—generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco speaking, it’s better to find somebody who is a native speaker of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco destination language that you’re translating to. So if you want to translate to Japanese,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you should probably find a Japanese person who has grown up in Japan, who knows enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco English to be able to understand your app and translate it well to Japanese. But then it isn’t just enough to find somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco who speaks the language and knows it well, you have to also find somebody who’s good at writing interface text.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Think about how hard it is to find people in your own language to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s not an easy job and that really can make a very, very big difference in how people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perceive and use your product. You can’t just find anybody. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here’s the worst part, you can’t really judge the quality of somebody for a language you don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very well. You can’t judge how good they are at that. It’s very, very difficult. There’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco issue of how do you find good people to do this even.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, Google’s automated. The tools are actually a problem because I’ve worked in companies where we extensively train
⏹️ ▶️ John localized everything and the tools to give to the people who are doing the localization
⏹️ ▶️ John that is actually an issue because we would hire the best people to do localizations we could but they weren’t necessarily
⏹️ ▶️ John tech savvy so you wanted to give them a really simple way for them to be able to update
⏹️ ▶️ John things quickly that integrated with the rest of your process so this tool that Google is providing
⏹️ ▶️ John provides that piece of the puzzle and I can also imagine a way for them to help with the problem that you were just describing Marco
⏹️ ▶️ John were you like, I hope this guy is doing a good job at these translations because I can’t read them. And, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, you could have a system whereby people rate the quality of the translations of
⏹️ ▶️ John those applications in the store. And I know it’s crazy for us in the iOS ecosystem to talk about adding features
⏹️ ▶️ John to the store or the back end of it, but for Google, that you know, they’d be like, Oh, yeah, we should do that. So then
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who participated in this human powered translation process could be rated
⏹️ ▶️ John by the customers of the applications to say was is this application localized in your language
⏹️ ▶️ John very well or did it read like, you know, when we read those manuals and how to assemble something that are clearly barely
⏹️ ▶️ John translated from, you know, Korean or Chinese or something and you can tell, right? And eventually you
⏹️ ▶️ John would probably start, you know, narrowing the pool of your human power translators
⏹️ ▶️ John or at least marking this guy as like five star for it. Like all the things you can do with
⏹️ ▶️ John the internet and the web could be brought to bear on these aspects of the translation problem.
⏹️ ▶️ John the difficulty of finding tools, finding people who are going to use the tools, and making sure those people, like having
⏹️ ▶️ John some sort of feedback mechanism whereby the people get better or at least you can see how
⏹️ ▶️ John good they are during the translation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think that also brings up an interesting side effect of this, or a side discussion related to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, which is, I think, seeing all the stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Google was adding to their developer portal today really makes iTunes Connect look terrible in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comparison. I mean iTunes Connect, which is what iOS developers use to manage their apps and upload them and everything,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s always been pretty terrible. It has gotten better over the years, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would still not call it anywhere near good. There’s lots and lots of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old cruft there. It’s very clearly made for the music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco industry to upload their stuff to iTunes back forever ago and they just kind of tackled the stuff onto this ancient infrastructure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Skype is just
⏹️ ▶️ John a website, right? Yeah. Because I never upload an iOS app. Like, it’s amazing to me that if you think of how far
⏹️ ▶️ John the tools that Apple’s developers use have come since like Project Builder when it was, well, was it still called Project
⏹️ ▶️ John Builder in Mac OS 10? 10.0? I don’t remember. I wasn’t there for that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John way back when, like, Xcode did not look like it does now. And it was, and as many complaints as
⏹️ ▶️ John people have about Xcode 4, like, it has a, it’s leaps and bounds of
⏹️ ▶️ John where it was when things started. So it’s clear that Apple has invested very heavily, with some bumps
⏹️ ▶️ John in the road, fine, in its native IDE, right? But then if you look at any part
⏹️ ▶️ John of the development process that’s not in a native application, like RadarWeb,
⏹️ ▶️ John or apparently iTunes Connect, which I haven’t used, or even just like the ADC site, which is kind of limped along,
⏹️ ▶️ John those have not made the kind of progress that Xcode has over the same period of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s frustrating for everyone involved. And it doesn’t make sense to me, because In this particular case,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like they don’t prioritize the developer experience. I mean, look at what they’re doing with Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ John They made their own compiler for Cronenlaut, or acquired slash commandeered
⏹️ ▶️ John their own compiler. They’re not afraid to do the hard things when it comes to trying to make great tools for
⏹️ ▶️ John developers. But somehow, the web doesn’t count. And it’s like, oh, we just suffer through this website. And I don’t understand that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and we’re going to get to that if we get this far, since I’m on point one of Google I-O,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and we’ve already run for a few minutes. But we’ll get to that later in that Google announced a lot of cloud services,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that really made me think about the comparison to Apple. But yeah, iTunes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Connect definitely stinks. And in my, what is it, three or four years that I’ve been piddling
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with iOS as a developer, it has always been awful. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I couldn’t agree with you more, Marco, that it’s unsurprising to me that Google, who is so strong in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey web services and cloud computing sort of things, It’s not surprising to me that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re doing so much better or appear to be doing so much better than Apple is at these sorts of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bits. So along the line with DevTools, another thing that they announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is native beta testing. And to be honest, I don’t know specifically what that means. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey assuming it’s a test flight sort of setup, which is interesting because last I heard test flight was just becoming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey available on Android. But that is available now. And the other thing that I thought was very interesting is staged rollouts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you can say, hey, for this new feature, perhaps for this new binary, I’m not, again, I’m not totally clear on how
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it works. You can target or say only 10% of my users can
⏹️ ▶️ Casey see this new feature or new binary or whatever the case may be. And that strikes me as really useful and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relevant for things like, what was the trendy mail app? Was it mailbox? Is that right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t matter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t matter. You got it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. So yeah, so mailbox who famously had or infamously had a queue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey system and I think a couple other apps have done that since. Instead, they have this native mechanism
⏹️ ▶️ Casey wherein you can do a staged rollout, which I thought was really cool
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and interesting. But speaking of support problems, I can only imagine the support
⏹️ ▶️ Casey snafu that that would cause. So I don’t know if this would do more harm than good. And I’m curious, Marco, to hear
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your two cents about this. But it’s certainly, on the surface, it sounds excellent, but as soon as I dig deeper
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mentally into what this would mean, it strikes me as maybe not the best idea in the world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think it’s necessary in the Android ecosystem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more so than it is in the App Store or iOS ecosystem. Because the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android ecosystem is kind of this Wild West, where you can upload a binary at any time. There’s no
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app review. It’s just kind of you do what you want whenever you want to. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so having something like a staged rollout actually makes some sense, because you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, first of all, that long delay between when you ship some code and when people can actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get it. And there’s also not that big step of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app review happening in the middle where there’s someone else trying your app in an isolated environment
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and catching most really obvious major bugs. And therefore preventing you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from submitting that to your customers. So I I think with iOS, if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you had a stage rollout, how would that really benefit you if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t send a new binary up there for another week anyway? The benefit there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is less so than if you just had the Google case,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where you can just upload things whenever you want, and it’s pretty much immediate.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, but that presupposes that an issue is with your binary and not with the backing web service that, in this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phantom app presumably is under your control and presumably you could fix whenever you want.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Did that make sense?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah it did. I mean, yeah I guess if you’re rolling out something that’s gonna like put a lot of strain on your servers
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or you don’t know how it’s gonna be at scale and you know you might have to like re-index some databases or optimize some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things, then I could see some value there. But I think the overhead of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having such a system probably is not worth it in most cases.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t even know how much it’s worth it to Android really. I think what we’re seeing here though is that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, Google has to make all their tools awesome. They have to make all of these all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these things for Android developers great because they have to attract developers. Google needs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco developers to really start taking Android more seriously and they are slowly but, you know, it is slowly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening but Google needs to be attracting developers as hard as they can.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple doesn’t need to do that because all the developers already go to Apple. So Apple, it doesn’t, they don’t need them as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco badly. You know? And so that’s why Apple can sit there with iTunes Connect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being as mediocre as it is, and they can not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco support all of these cool new things that Google is doing, and they can have app review and things like that. They can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do all that because we go to them already. We’re like knocking down the door. We are desperate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to get into the Apple App Store because that’s where the people and the money and the influence all are. And the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Android App Stores have been kind of this mixed game of usually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not simultaneous release with iOS. Things usually debut on iOS first, if they’re going to be cross-platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at all. Certainly, they almost never debut on Android first and then go to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS. Most of the buzz of new apps happening is still happening on iOS.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Google really needs people to go to them first. So they need to be doing all this stuff, whereas Apple really doesn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would agree with that. And the other thing that I forgot to mention in terms of developer
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tools on an iTunes Connect sort of scenario is I heard some rumblings of I guess there’s some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sort of lead tracking or referral information like analytics-ish kind of, analytics
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is a poor choice of words, but some sort of referral information so you can see why somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Casey downloaded your app. And I don’t, again, I don’t know any of the details beyond that, but I heard some rumblings about it. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would be really exciting if you take your presence in the App Store seriously, which I do not, but I know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco, you certainly did. And still do. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I can only imagine how awesome that would be if Apple provided even a rudimentary amount of information
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about where you’ve gotten downloads from.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. I mean, I’ve been yelling about that for years. That it is… And yeah, I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what they said was they’re like later this summer, they’re tying it in with Google Analytics and something like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you could have app analytics and the website and track where they came from and all that stuff. Basically everything iOS people want.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco As an iOS developer it’s very hard to know why people are buying your app. You know, you can look at your rank
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can see how well you’re doing relative to other apps and everything like that. You can see your sales every day. You can see how many you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco selling. And you can attempt to correlate like, okay, well I just did a big ad buy and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then the next day my sales were up, so that might have been because of the ad buy.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or it might have been because a lot of people just bought new iPhones that day. Or I could have been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco featured somewhere in the app store and not even known about it because they don’t tell you when you’re featured. There’s all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these conditions. And you don’t know even did somebody search for your app by name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or did they browse an app store section? And if they were browsing an app store section and it popped up,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what kind of section were they browsing? Was it a feature? Was it a top list? Was it a category list? You know, what ‑‑
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would be great to know where these people are coming from, why they bought your app, how they got there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you run a web campaign, there are things like tap stream that will try to track people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco between things. But even those, they can’t work all the time because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Apple doesn’t have any kind of hooks into their stuff. And so it would be great to know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, my app was downloaded from browsing the top list here. And therefore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I might want to consider staying in the top list and maybe adjusting my price as a result. Or it’d
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be nice to know, well, most people download my app by searching for it by name. Therefore,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t need to rely as much on the top list, and I can concentrate more on advertising my name and branding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all that stuff. Like, it would be great to know that stuff, and you just have no insight into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco any of that with Apple today. You can attempt to get some of it through various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hacks and services that attempt to tie like IPs to purchases
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and things like that. But it’s really, it would be so much better if Apple integrated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that somehow. And they just ignore that completely.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Which is kind of their MO. Which is unfortunate, but it’s certainly true.
⏹️ ▶️ John What if iTunes Connect and all of the stuff having to do with sales tracking and uploading new
⏹️ ▶️ John versions of your application and everything was written as a native application instead of a web app? Does that solve
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem for us? Is that the only way we can make this happen? Because maybe it would start out as the first version
⏹️ ▶️ John of Xcode 4, and be kind of a disaster. And then they were like, oh, this is so much worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John At least the website worked. But maybe over time, they would iterate on that native
⏹️ ▶️ John application, whatever it might be called. Hopefully, it would not be called iTunes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco already have a native app and Xcode integration doing part of the job. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used to be that you would prepare your binary with the special, you’d have to export it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with the distribution signing profile and all this crazy certificate and profile
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff, and then make sure you upload that version of it into the file upload form. And now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first they had this application loader, I think, or I think that was the one that did it. First they had this app that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you would do everything on iTunes Connect to prepare for the upload. You’d enter all the metadata, the screenshots, everything else,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then it would say, ready for upload, and then you’d launch this app and that would do it. And now that’s built into Xcode.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Xcode itself can do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John People were super excited. I think this was last year’s WWDC, when I think someone was discussing this feature of
⏹️ ▶️ John the integration of, and
⏹️ ▶️ John like, oh, do they integrate iTunes Connect into Xcode? And everyone was excited about that. I think
⏹️ ▶️ John mostly because they figured, if we can hook onto the train that actually has iterative improvements
⏹️ ▶️ John year after year, that’ll be a good thing. And then everyone was disappointed
⏹️ ▶️ John an hour or two days later when they realized, oh, they didn’t integrate it entirely. It’s just slightly more stuff happens
⏹️ ▶️ John in Xcode, but still you’re going to be going to that website.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, and the stuff they integrated does work well, and it is better and faster and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way less error prone than the old way of doing it. But it’s still not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the full experience. But I don’t even know if integration would really solve the problems of iTunes Connect. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, because it’s not that web apps are always terrible. There’s lots of great web apps. I don’t think this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco needs to be a native app to do the stuff that iTunes Connect mostly does.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it just needs to be a better web app, And there’s plenty of room for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Are Apple’s web apps always terrible? I don’t think they are. Like, some of the iCloud apps, like the little fake mail application they have,
⏹️ ▶️ John they suffer from trying to look too much like native applications. But other than that,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s competence there to do it. Like, competence that is not reflected in, for example,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco RadarWeb is way worse than iTunes Connect.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right. Because they had, like, I think Apple helped fund slash hired a bunch of the guys from SproutCore.
⏹️ ▶️ John And they had PastryKit, their internal thing that was doing emulated UI
⏹️ ▶️ John kit stuff in JavaScript. There’s little fits and starts of web stuff that goes on. And then, of
⏹️ ▶️ John course, there’s the WebObject guys toiling away, doing whatever it is that they do.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but clearly, Google, the entire company, is focused on web development. And their web
⏹️ ▶️ John apps just, you may not like them aesthetically, and you may not like Google and the things they collect, or whatever, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they know how to make a web app, let me tell you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah, they work great. And they are, you know, even if the visual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco design is often questionable, in fact, I think it has always been questionable, functionally, they work
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the visuals have gotten better. Like, they’re leaps and bounds, you know. When they did that, they redesigned
⏹️ ▶️ John everything to be that kind of more widely spaced, sharp-cornered, Google colors,
⏹️ ▶️ John gray and red and blue, you know. I’m not that big a fan of that design,
⏹️ ▶️ John but applying that coat of paint at least is finally giving them some kind of unified appearance across their product
⏹️ ▶️ John lines. And each new one that comes out, when they redid Google Images, it got a little bit better. And the new
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Maps looks like a little bit more modern, a little bit better. Gmail’s still weird looking. Google+,
⏹️ ▶️ John even in its short life, Google+, has stepped up. So, it’s the old thing we’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John seen said a million different times about a million different companies, but in this case, it’s Google and Apple.
⏹️ ▶️ John Google is becoming better at being like Apple, faster than Apple is becoming better like
⏹️ ▶️ John Google or however you want to phrase it. Google becoming Apple, Apple becoming Google. But it seems like that Google is upping
⏹️ ▶️ John its game in all the areas where Apple is traditionally strong, and Apple is not
⏹️ ▶️ John really upping its game. I mean, I guess kind of. Pulling off Maps at all was kind of a leg up, like
⏹️ ▶️ John now Apple proving that it can kind of do this stuff. But that didn’t come out great, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. Let’s come back to that in a minute. This is a good time to do our first sponsor. Our first sponsor
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⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been to Event Apart, and I highly recommend it. Especially if you’re like a programmer, developer type
⏹️ ▶️ John nerd, and you’ve never been to a non-developer conference. Like, Event
⏹️ ▶️ John Apart is a developer conference, but it’s not like hardcore programming. They’re gonna talk about HTML, CSS,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they’re gonna talk a lot about design issues. It’s great to go to
⏹️ ▶️ John a conference like that, especially a good one outside of your core area
⏹️ ▶️ John of competency, right? Because maybe you’re not a designer, or maybe you’re just a JavaScript programmer. But just
⏹️ ▶️ John to go to a conference where more than half the sessions are about things outside the realm of your
⏹️ ▶️ John little world of programming really helps expand your mind to the fact
⏹️ ▶️ John that your product is more than how nicely factored your classes are.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, yeah. And I went to one as well. I learned a lot there. And it really is a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very good balance of code and design and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco style. And it really is focused a lot on websites. Yeah, highly recommended if
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re a web developer or web designer.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the quality of their speakers tends to be perhaps a notch above, in terms of public speaking skill,
⏹️ ▶️ John the average speaker you’d get at a Python conference or something. Not that I’m impugning programmers,
⏹️ ▶️ John but these people understand that it’s part of their job to be entertaining and engaging, and
⏹️ ▶️ John they are. So highly recommended.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So back to what you said a second ago. I did want to talk a little bit about this, how it does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seem like Google is advancing rapidly. And Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seems to be going at a relatively stable pace that is noticeably slower than Google
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of these areas. And on our previous shows, we discussed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what happened with the WebKit project and how Google just threw a ridiculous amount of engineering talent
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at WebKit and just totally blew past Apple’s contributions pretty quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ John See, I don’t know if it’s so much as them throwing people because that makes it seem like they have taken resources
⏹️ ▶️ John and directed it at a certain thing. I just think they have more bandwidth. Like, they’re a wider machine, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ John They just have more bandwidth for all the types of these types of things. How
⏹️ ▶️ John many people does Apple have to put towards making any kind of web application
⏹️ ▶️ John better, versus how many people does Google have to put towards that? And pick any other thing. How many people
⏹️ ▶️ John does Apple have to put towards their compiler, versus how many people does Google have, right? It just seems to me,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d love to see like the real headcounts here, but it just seems to me like that Google has more bandwidth. They have more people.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have more smart people, you know?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they seem to, you know, through what is often a failure of Google,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which is their relatively hands-off management through most of their history, that always results in them having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a million different like half-finished, half-assed products and services that, and they go into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco betas and they get shut down and then they get ignored. And they’ve always been kind of all over the place,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but as a result of this lack of strict management for so long, you’re right, they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do have a lot of bandwidth. They can just get tons of stuff done because it isn’t all flowing through a narrow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco funnel at the top, or at least it hasn’t been so far. And at Apple, it’s always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been the opposite. At Apple, it’s always been like everything goes through the top, everything is directed from the top,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so things that the top doesn’t care about or doesn’t have time to care about uh… generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get neglected or get on very very slow development cycles like itunes connect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and uh… and and so i think uh… or the mac pro and uh…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so i think you know apple has always operated much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a small company and that has really given a lot of benefits
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and a lot of their products and a lot of their lot of their output but i think in the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of things like web services that just doesn’t work like you just need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more throughput there’s more to do there’s more that needs to be able to be done without
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh… without the ceo having to approve everything or that or the chief director of whatever having to approve everything
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or or be in all the meetings and it’s and you’re right the google is just so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco capable of throwing tons and tons of of of bandwidth as you say at this problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and uh… an apple just has not Seemingly done that I mean it’s hard to know with Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because so few people really talk about what happens inside there You know they’re not really allowed to but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just seems it seems from the outside like Apple has just never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cared that much about things like web services enough to get them as right as Google does
⏹️ ▶️ John You know I have to say something about this every show so this will be my time this show you know that Google seems
⏹️ ▶️ John so much more dedicated to caring about
⏹️ ▶️ John Solving a general purpose problem that will benefit the entire company in a general purpose way rather
⏹️ ▶️ John than having Oh the group that’s working on this little thing will will do whatever it takes
⏹️ ▶️ John to make a great whatever they’re working on So gmail team would like oh, we really need to make storage work great
⏹️ ▶️ John for gmail So we’re gonna do a storage project and like great good job. We love gmail came out great We have people
⏹️ ▶️ John with good taste like the Apple model people with good taste deciding what’s in and what’s out and we really make a great product
⏹️ ▶️ John But what did you do for the rest of the company great? So you made a great product Did you help the rest of the company in any way when you made that?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe some other projects in the company did some way to store stuff in a similar way the gmail needs to store
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff And I get the impression at Apple especially Before they went cross-functional that it
⏹️ ▶️ John was like the team working on iOS does all sorts of crazy things to make the first version of iOS awesome
⏹️ ▶️ John with minimal You know I with a minimal eye towards
⏹️ ▶️ John what are we doing that will help the rest of the company not just today but 10 years from now. And with all
⏹️ ▶️ John their concentration on, we just need to make this the best operating system it could possibly be. And there are pluses and minus to both of those
⏹️ ▶️ John strategies. Because if you spend all your time trying to make infrastructure, you’ll have an awesome infrastructure and crappy products. And
⏹️ ▶️ John you can apply that slam to Google in many past scenarios and present scenarios, right?
⏹️ ▶️ John Because infrastructure is something that nerds love, but great products are something that customers
⏹️ ▶️ John love, right? But there’s a balance. And it seems like Google is
⏹️ ▶️ John starting to get better at concentrating on making great product, not having a million different products, while
⏹️ ▶️ John retaining its religion about we need to make infrastructure. We need to make things better for everyone at the same
⏹️ ▶️ John time. Whereas Apple just seems to be doubling down on the we need to make the most awesome product. But at a certain point, you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John make your products any more awesome if you just don’t have the tools in place for your
⏹️ ▶️ John company to make great web services, to make great cloud computing things, all that stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ John It seems almost like they can’t figure out why aren’t our maps as good as Google’s. why
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t our iCloud service as good as the equivalent one? And soon they’ll be asking themselves why Game Center isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ John as good as this cross-platform web, you know? And maybe it doesn’t matter because
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS will still have better games than Google, more games, games that make people more money. Like, and in the end, that’s all that
⏹️ ▶️ John really matters, right? But I worry about the infrastructure thing, and that’s something that has historically been
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they’re playing strongly to it, like you were saying. So the other section or grouping
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of things that we learned at Google I O that I saw was just kind of cloud services. So you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mentioned Google Play Games. I think that’s what it’s called. I don’t even know. They also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have a cloud messaging thing, which my understanding is it’s not as
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much iMessage as it is a more centralized version of push notifications.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And so the understanding that I got was that if you’re using some application
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that uses this service, say it’s a website within Chrome,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey well, if you get a notification within Chrome, it will only go to that Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ Casey session. But the minute you leave that Chrome session, and I don’t know by what mechanism it determines
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you’ve left, then you’ll start getting these notifications on your phone instead. And so this is the thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that all Apple users beg for, specifically around iMessage, but would be awesome in general.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So if you say use tweetbot, you would only get tweetbot notifications on whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey thing you’re actively using. And again, that would be really awesome for iMessage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the interesting thing that I caught myself thinking was, you know, I bet that’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Casey work really well. Whereas if Apple announced the exact same thing at WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a month, or not even a month, I think my first thought will be, I hope that works.
⏹️ ▶️ John They can’t even get iMessage to show up in the right order within a single application on a single device. Like, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey so far in terms
⏹️ ▶️ John of the confidence level from getting this stuff right. Speaking of Google Hangouts, which someone mentioned
⏹️ ▶️ John in the chat room and featured in various ways in this thing. It was integrated with the messaging stuff. Remember when they
⏹️ ▶️ John showed Google Hangouts, like Google Plus came out? And like, and there’s also this Hangout thing. And you’re like, some sort of video
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And I have to install some sort of plug-in for my browser. So now we can
⏹️ ▶️ John do video chat inside a web browser. It seems lame. And like, no big deal, right? Fast forward however
⏹️ ▶️ John long it’s been since Google Plus came out. And at my work, Google Hangout
⏹️ ▶️ John is now the way that we do teleconferencing. We have all these fancy teleconferencing hardware and software, which we do
⏹️ ▶️ John not use. Everyone goes to Google Hangout in their web browser. And that is the way that we can successfully
⏹️ ▶️ John video conference. And they share their screens with each other and have different speakers doing things. And we do all
⏹️ ▶️ John the things that you would see in those 80s futuristic, like in the future you’ll be able to do this. We do it, and we’re doing it all
⏹️ ▶️ John in a web browser in Google Hangouts.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, does that require Google+, or is that its own thing now?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know what people are doing to do it. I think it might require Google+. But the point is,
⏹️ ▶️ John all you need is a web browser. No one has to install any software. Works on a Mac, works on a PC. I don’t even
⏹️ ▶️ John know if everyone’s using Chrome. Maybe they all are. But it’s the one thing that
⏹️ ▶️ John actually works. And it is amazing to me to see these people who have not been evangelized,
⏹️ ▶️ John as far as I know, by anyone from Google. And just a bunch of managers coordinating
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re like non technical people coordinating their own. You know, five person multimedia
⏹️ ▶️ John presentation in three different locations, and it just works in a web browser.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s amazing to me that if you said, you know, maybe Apple will be the one to bring us because you know, I chat video
⏹️ ▶️ John chat was the first video chat that actually worked and people could do it as long as everybody had a Mac and FaceTime works right to if everyone has an
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS device FaceTime just works. So kudos for Apple on that, but it things like hangout
⏹️ ▶️ John that seems stupid and silly to begin with just Google keeps hammering And even just adding the ability to screen
⏹️ ▶️ John share, integrating instant messages, and having file attachments, they’ll just keep integrating that until
⏹️ ▶️ John Hangout becomes this be-all, end-all, multi-person communication thing. And it started
⏹️ ▶️ John out as this weird chat roulette type thing attached to a social network that nobody wanted to join.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and apparently, according to Marcos Carr in the chat room, it still does require a Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Plus account, which I think I have one. But God knows I haven’t looked at it in like two years. But what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting about the way you describe it, John, and I think you’re right, is that it’s been iteratively
⏹️ ▶️ Casey improved upon, which is a very Apple-like approach. And it seems to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey working really well for Google. And I know that I’ve heard regular people talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, oh, let’s just do a Google Hangout real quick. And I look at them like, wait, what? Really?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So obviously, I’m the one that’s crazy
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John because you’re getting the same thing. People can
⏹️ ▶️ John do it. They are successful at doing it. Whereas think about any other way that you would do that. Let’s all get on Skype video
⏹️ ▶️ John chat. Oh, forget it. Skype is a train wreck. And try to get everyone to have it. I don’t have Skype installed. Or install it, or does it see your
⏹️ ▶️ John camera and this and the other thing. FaceTime, FaceTime is pretty good. FaceTime works. The only problem with FaceTime
⏹️ ▶️ John is finding the other person. Like, what name do I put in? What Apple ID are you signed into? And that gets back
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to what you were
⏹️ ▶️ John talking about before, that insanity.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco And it reads in your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPad and not your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John Right, and then eventually, when it finally works, you have to get your parents to turn the thing sideways.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey not so good. So their image fills the screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Apple, if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John listening, Can you have some sort of mode that just, like, you can do that for vertical
⏹️ ▶️ John video shooting on the iPhone. Just force people to put it sideways. Because if you just put the image on the screen sideways, they will turn
⏹️ ▶️ John it sideways so the image is right side up, and we will all thank you for it. So quick, quick. Little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey tip there. Let me channel neutral for a second. When we were going around the Nurburgring and I was driving,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I looked over briefly and saw Erin recording what was going on with her phone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in portrait. And I very, very sternly explained to her that that was just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not going to cut it for a video of me driving around the Nürburgring.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yes, we actually had that discussion while Casey was driving the Nürburgring. We were discussing why you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t want to shoot video in portrait.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s called multitasking. Anyway, no, it’s weird because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think FaceTime does work extremely well, but the problem with FaceTime is it’s one-to-one. And just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you were saying, John, if you want a multi-person thing, that very quickly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey eliminates FaceTime, unless I’m missing something.
⏹️ ▶️ John like even even I chat video thing used to be able to like share a document kind of off to the side in this weird
⏹️ ▶️ John thing like still wouldn’t work for business because in business you want to put the big spreadsheet up so people can see it or you want to share your web
⏹️ ▶️ John browser screen as you can demonstrate a web application while they can still hear your audio like it’s not we’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not asking for the moon but Apple’s conception of this and I I chat video chat was like
⏹️ ▶️ John that little thing where the people would be have a little reflections like they were on this big virtual infinite black mirror finish plane
⏹️ ▶️ John and then when you share a document that would come in and another one of of those little things, but they weren’t expecting you to share a picture of your baby. You
⏹️ ▶️ John can all look at right. It wasn’t like made for business where you want to fill the screen with stuff. It’s just that
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Hangout has lots of features, and they’re complicated and picky or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John people can figure them out. Like they’re not elegant and beautiful or whatever. And at some point, just having those features
⏹️ ▶️ John means something. Why doesn’t have FaceTime have multi person chat by now like was that team? Okay, we’re done with FaceTime.
⏹️ ▶️ John It works fine. Now go off and work on the next great thing. But we’re not gonna improve FaceTime anymore? Are we not going to add multi-person
⏹️ ▶️ John FaceTime? Or maybe it doesn’t work over 3G. Who knows? But it’s kind of depressing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is. It is. And there are a few other things that Google announced.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What else do they do? Well, they have the Google Play games, and then they also
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have Google Play Music All Access, which my friend Brad Lautenbach had tweeted
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that they really need a brand manager help. I forget how he phrased it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than I’m giving him credit for, but they need a way to come up with better names. But there’s Google
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Play Musical Access, which is basically Spotify by Google. That’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s atrocious.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It’s just like we were talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about last week, how Microsoft puts Windows in front of everything, and they used to put
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Live in front of it, like Windows Live, blah, blah, blah. And now Google has put Google Play in front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of all these different product names, and it just sounds ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John Google Play itself is just no good. they came up with like Google
⏹️ ▶️ John Play is going to be our like flagship brand for the way we sell you things for like that
⏹️ ▶️ John that should not have because that you can’t go anywhere from there there’s nothing you can put after play that’s gonna improve it bad
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah so I don’t to me a Spotify like clone
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by Google really I don’t think I care
⏹️ ▶️ John I care because I mean I don’t actually don’t care cuz I don’t use streaming music but if I did use streaming music I I would
⏹️ ▶️ John be more comfortable investing in Google
⏹️ ▶️ John to like, they’ll stream me music, they’ll let me upload all my stuff or whatever, because I would have more faith that Google is going to be around
⏹️ ▶️ John long-term than Spotify. Not that Spotify is a fly-by-night company or whatever, but I just…
⏹️ ▶️ John If something is going to involve mass uploading or mass downloading, I like
⏹️ ▶️ John it to involve a big company that it would take a lot to kill.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco But even somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as fickle as Google who always kills things?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the wild card, but for something where there’s a business model that makes sense, where
⏹️ ▶️ John they charge you money for it on a monthly basis, yeah, maybe the thing could just go away. So that’s a risk
⏹️ ▶️ John with anything. Should I start buying iTunes music the day the iTunes store is open? You try it and you find out. But
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s not like Google Reader where it’s a free service that costs a tremendous amount of money to run that you can’t figure out how to make money. They charge
⏹️ ▶️ John you. They charge you every month, and presumably they charge you enough money to cover their So it’s, you know, it’s same as with Spotify.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, but I, I just, this is one of the, this is one of Google’s strengths and Amazon’s too, for that matter, like Amazon’s
⏹️ ▶️ John streaming service or whatever. They’re always selling you things. They like to sell you digital things. That’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John going away. Amazon’s probably not going away. I feel more comfortable with that than I do with just, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John some company, random company like Spotify. And maybe Spotify becomes as big as Google in 10 years and I’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John trust them as much too. But I think there is something to be said for that type of thing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know, but there’s also something to be said for Spotify. That’s their whole business. Whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google, this is kind of like the side business. It’s brand new and Google often tries things that don’t work and then they shut
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them down. Google doesn’t really need this to succeed. They have other things they could be doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Spotify, this is their entire business. So if you’re going to try to figure out one company of those two that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to invest your time and effort into, I’d still pick Spotify.
⏹️ ▶️ John It also has to do with integration too. The reason we like the Apple thing is if you buy all Apple devices, you’re sure that
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ll be able to listen to your iTunes music if you do iTunes match on all your iTunes devices
⏹️ ▶️ John and your Apple TV and you’re all set. Well, Spotify has to do that as well, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t own any platform. They’re coming from the outside, whereas at least Google can put it on Android
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know they’re going to have an awesome version on the web and then they’re okay about making iOS apps, so they’ve got something covered there. Spotify
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t have any sort of native platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, by that rationale, you shouldn’t use Netflix.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was just about to say the same thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, that’s the thing. If Apple had come up with a Netflix-like service, I would probably be
⏹️ ▶️ John using that instead of Netflix, but they didn’t. You know what I mean? There’s no reason Apple couldn’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John done exactly what Netflix did around the same time Netflix did it, but
⏹️ ▶️ John they didn’t. Netflix was out there on their own, alone making it happen. So that’s why we’re all doing it. And Dropbox is another
⏹️ ▶️ John example. Why aren’t we all using Google Drive? Because Dropbox got there first, earned our trust, and Google Drive
⏹️ ▶️ John came out, and then Google Drive looks like the Me Too, and you’re like, well, you know what? Even though Google might be around longer than Dropbox,
⏹️ ▶️ John Dropbox has proven itself to me, and it’s stable and everything. I also don’t like the Spotify app. I’ve tried it a few
⏹️ ▶️ John times, and it’s a little bit offensive to me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, it’s gotten better too. That’s the sad thing. I agree with you. It’s rough. It’s not intuitive at all, or at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey least not for the way my brain ticks, but it’s actually gotten a lot better since the early versions.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So, I think that’s the majority of the cloud services. The only thing we haven’t really talked
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about, which looks reasonably exciting, and I do not say that sarcastically, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new version of Maps, which seems to be a kind of quasi-mashup
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of Google Maps of today with Google Earth, with just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey generally improved visuals, and everything just gets better. They’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kind of, I can’t believe I just thought about saying this, but I was gonna say they kind of plus one’d everything and now
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I need to shower. But no, I saw a very brief video that Google made of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the new Google Maps and it looks really darn good. It really, really, really does. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really great representation of all the different directions you can take between places.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And if you’re lucky enough to live with somewhere that has public transport, they’ll show that, they’ll show car, they’ll show
⏹️ ▶️ Casey bike, they’ll show walking. It really, really looked good. It apparently uses,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it, WebGL? Yeah. The 3D API, if you will, for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey web browsers. So you can, presumably, it runs really, really quickly. Everything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about it just looks like Google Maps, which almost everyone I know really likes, myself
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very much included, but better. And that’s never a bad thing in my eyes.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Did you guys
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they didn’t plus one it. I think they like plus 100 it. Like, that
⏹️ ▶️ John me as like, that depressing thing that Apple used to do and still kind of does is particularly on hardware,
⏹️ ▶️ John where Apple comes out with an amazing hardware device. And then for a year, the rest of the industry bends over backwards to try to
⏹️ ▶️ John come up with something that’s even remotely as good. And as soon as they start getting close, Apple like just leapfrogs itself. And they’re like,
⏹️ ▶️ John oh, God, we just barely caught up with whatever the previous iPod model was. And now they have this thing. Like, the iPhone was one
⏹️ ▶️ John of those things. Like, we were just finally trying to get our digital music players to be happy. And now they have this phone thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, you know, everyone is screwed. Apple has not yet caught up with plain old,
⏹️ ▶️ John before this announcement, Google Maps. And Apple’s working hard to make them better, and so on and so forth, and
⏹️ ▶️ John now they do this. And it’s like, what? Oh, God. You guys, if you’d just stay still for a minute, we
⏹️ ▶️ John could catch up with you. But they won’t. They’re driving forward every aspect of this map thing. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John like we just have new data, or we added new features. Like all new UI, all new look, all new vocabulary,
⏹️ ▶️ John all new set of things you can do, all new technology to run the thing. By the way, WebGL still freaks me
⏹️ ▶️ John out a little bit. I’m always afraid that I’m going to accidentally root my phone by, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yeah, security on
⏹️ ▶️ John tricky. I don’t know. Yeah, that bothers me a little
⏹️ ▶️ John you can’t say that Google is just adding tiny incremental improvements to maps. They’re not resting on their laurel. Some
⏹️ ▶️ John team had been working on these maps to vastly improve it, and they already had the best
⏹️ ▶️ John map data. And it’s just going to get better from there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t see Apple catching up to that, honestly. Like, I don’t see, I see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google Maps always being way better than Apple Maps. I just, Apple does not, Apple has never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco shown an ability to catch up with things of this nature at all. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, to even survive at all, let alone to be able to surpass Google. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Google’s so good at services and big data type stuff, and Apple is so bad
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And it just never
⏹️ ▶️ John happens. And leveraging, you know, leveraging the crowd, like the OpenStreetMap initiative. Like, if I was counseling Apple on what
⏹️ ▶️ John their only chance to be competitive in the map space is, you have to go sort of community-based,
⏹️ ▶️ John collaborative, like, find an open project, get the entire world behind it. Because then it can
⏹️ ▶️ John be you and the entire world versus Google. Right. And I’m sure Google is doing the same thing with trying to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, they’ll do it on their own. They’ll integrate feedback from all the people. Like, that whole mechanism of if someone
⏹️ ▶️ John sees something that’s in the wrong place, correcting it. Daniel Jacket was talking about this on Twitter the past week, about how he wishes
⏹️ ▶️ John if like a store was in the wrong place he could correct it on his phone and he would see that change immediately even if everyone else
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t and then by doing that it would eventually filter upstream but it’s like why torture himself
⏹️ ▶️ John with his own phone if he knows the pin is in the wrong spot let him drag it to the right spot and let that change stick local
⏹️ ▶️ John to his phone and then everyone on Twitter told him how that wouldn’t work because what if you share the map with somebody else and people could put in bad
⏹️ ▶️ John information and blah blah those are they’re all correct those are all the hard problems solving those hard problems
⏹️ ▶️ John on a massive scale is how you get better map data you You can’t just do it on your own. You can’t hire 10 people
⏹️ ▶️ John to improve your maps or sort through the backlog of 8 billion requests. You really have to just let the whole world participate.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, I wish the entire world, as I’ve said many times in the past, were all working together to provide
⏹️ ▶️ John the best map. This is only one planet. There’s only one Earth. There’s only one set of roads. Only one set of buildings. Like, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John no reason, other than good old capitalism competition, that we couldn’t all be collaborating to
⏹️ ▶️ John provide the single most accurate unified set of information that individual
⏹️ ▶️ John companies could sort of average out and smooth off the edges and decide how they want to pull from that to make their
⏹️ ▶️ John maps better. But alas, that kind of cooperation, particularly between Apple and Google, seems to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, it worked well with WebKit.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John For a little
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was being sarcastic, actually. So a couple of really quick thoughts, and then we can move on to something different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Firstly, in contrast to all the things that we said about how hideous Google properties tend to be,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I actually think that the new maps looks really, really pretty. And I was very impressed by that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And the other thing on a more global scale in terms of Google I O is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of people joke every year that this year’s, whatever this year may
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be, this year’s Google I O is last year’s WWDC. And to some degree, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey think that’s true, especially let’s look at the Game Center knockoff, whatever you call it thing,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but this year there were a lot of things that as even an amateur Apple developer, I looked at that and said, hey man,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that would be really nice. Or wow, I kind of wish Apple would do that. And I just think it’s interesting that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this year, and this comes back to what you guys were saying about how quickly Google is moving in this space.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s interesting to me that rather than being like, oh, ha, look at these copycats, now we’re saying, man, Apple, you should
⏹️ ▶️ Casey copy some of that because that’s really good. And I don’t know, maybe I’m the only one who thinks that way, but I thought it was very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey different than it was in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, definitely. All right, moving on. Our second sponsor for this episode
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought that was half off.
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s I mean, let’s not shake our fists at 20%. Though. I mean, that’s pretty
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco sponsoring also. You know, I feel like this is like, we have two sponsors on the show that are both conferences, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they don’t really overlap that much at all. An event apart is really web
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps and design of the web apps, and CocoConf is iPhone, iPad, and Mac
⏹️ ▶️ Marco native Coco development. So really I think most people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco listening can identify very well with one of these conferences. You can’t really go wrong with either of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, so next up I wanted to talk about Apple’s new Objective-C
⏹️ ▶️ Casey JavaScript bridge, which actually John, you had tweeted about earlier today, and that was the first I had heard of it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey Firstly, I feel— Wait, are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we talking about bridges with John Syracusa?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We are, and the chat was guessing that we might go here, and I’m already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey getting pestered about the potential for a Syracusa County title, and I should probably tell you that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m—I’d find it unlikely we’ll go there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I find it unlikely that John would let us go there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even if we wanted to, and I’m not sure I do. But I should point out to begin this conversation that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there is a picture of two Golden Gate Bridges beside each other in this article, which I’ll put the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey URL in the chat. And the caption on this article of the picture
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of two Golden Gate Bridges right next to each other is, and I quote, Syracuse County is on the
⏹️ ▶️ John Don’t you recognize that picture, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t, actually.
⏹️ ▶️ John WWC, isn’t it Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John One of their
⏹️ ▶️ John teases was either for WWDC or Oppressor, right? It’s from Apple’s like, you know, they send out like a picture, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John come to whatever… someone in the chat room please tell me. I forget what
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco it was. Maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a metaphor for the forking of a webkit.
⏹️ ▶️ John But anyway, no, no, it was from a past…
⏹️ ▶️ John Pike in the chat room says it’s from the WWDC 2008 invitation. You
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was before my time, so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John wouldn’t know. Me too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Anyway, they didn’t make it up. That’s what it was.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, clearly they did not make up the fact that Syracuse County is on the left. I mean, that is geographically and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey factually fact. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is that there’s a title if I’ve ever heard one. So anyway, so, John, since you brought this up by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way of tweeting it earlier, would you like to give the executive summary and get your first
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, I because I’ve been busy today, I insta paper this article, and I skimmed it, but I have not actually read
⏹️ ▶️ John tweeted it, I skimmed it and insta papered it. That’s, you know, that’s what I do with all links that I run across. But looking at it,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, First of all, this is a feature of WebKit, and I’ve already seen some people say that this is not new,
⏹️ ▶️ John that something similar to this has existed in the past, so I don’t even know how much this is an improvement
⏹️ ▶️ John of an existing feature or an expansion of an existing feature. It’s certainly not a bridge in the sense that the
⏹️ ▶️ John Cocoa JavaScript bridge was, where you’re now writing your native applications in a language other than Objective-C.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s not what this is either. And since it’s specifically related to WebKit, well, the JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John core part of WebKit, It’s not a general purpose thing, but they’ve got
⏹️ ▶️ John the plumbing there where you can write JavaScript code that manipulates
⏹️ ▶️ John Objective-C objects and vice versa. And so just having skimmed this article,
⏹️ ▶️ John people ask me what I think it means. I think what it mostly means is all the developers I’ve seen complaining over the years
⏹️ ▶️ John about how little control you have over WebKit
⏹️ ▶️ John views in your native application. I would like it if I could
⏹️ ▶️ John intercept whenever this happened and make this happen in my Objective-C application, and I would
⏹️ ▶️ John like it if my Objective-C application caused this to happen and manipulate the WebView in this way. This seems
⏹️ ▶️ John like a way where you could sort of arbitrarily connect JavaScript code running in a WebView with
⏹️ ▶️ John the state of your application and its objects and its methods in memory. And that strikes me as
⏹️ ▶️ John a much more powerful way to let people use WebGit views to do things. Now, could that same mechanism be
⏹️ ▶️ John used to let people write code as part of their native application in JavaScript for the hell of it? Perhaps,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the API you have now where you make a JS context and you just pass it strings and stuff, that’s not the same thing as
⏹️ ▶️ John writing your application in JavaScript or whatever. So I don’t even know if you would call, I mean, I guess it is kind of technically
⏹️ ▶️ John a bridge because you’re calling objectivacy from JavaScript and the other way around, but it’s not what
⏹️ ▶️ John people think of when they read the title. Like, oh, now I’m going to write all my Cocoa and UI kit applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I’m going to JavaScript instead because now I don’t have to worry about pointers anymore. That’s not this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, and there already are a lot of cross-platform frameworks that work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that principle of you write things in JavaScript and on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco both iOS and on Android, they have these shell apps that interpret that for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You already can write apps in JavaScript on the mobile platforms. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly nothing stopping you from doing it on the desktop as well if you want to. But I think what’s interesting about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this, there’s two big points I think worth thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about. One is this might not necessarily be how they want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco move forward to say like all apps will be JavaScript coming soon.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It might just be like right now people do tons of hacks with like passing URLs
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back and forth between the web view and the and the Coco code, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco passing URLs and evaluating JavaScript string literals and stuff like that. It’s a it’s just a pile of hacks right now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a web view that you communicate with with your app and going back and forth. So they might just be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trying to improve that certainly it would improve performance and it would it would make things a lot cleaner and a lot less
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bug prone and error prone and everything else.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, this is also like you said that it’s so hacky the way you had to do before this is still kind of hacky where you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like applying the protocol to built-in classes so they can have visibility to the JavaScript world.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Believe me, it’s less hacky.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is. It’s less like you’re not sipping through a straw anymore. You’re not making up, you know, like, I only have three ways to communicate
⏹️ ▶️ John with this web view, so everything must funnel through them. Now you have a new way, and you can really hook up arbitrary stuff. But it’s still
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s still kind of creepy and weird, you know? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not like, it’s not even as good as like the various other, you know, bridges they’ve had, like the Ruby. but
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s the popular Ruby one, where it really is a fairly transparent bridge
⏹️ ▶️ John where things just work and you don’t have to worry about the plumbing. This, the plumbing is visible. You’re manually creating
⏹️ ▶️ John the plumbing, you’re hooking things up, but as you said, the ability to do it at
⏹️ ▶️ John all is what I’ve heard many developers ask for over many years because it’s just so frustrating to have a web
⏹️ ▶️ John view and have just so little control over it. And that seems to be solved, assuming this ships and is
⏹️ ▶️ John made a public API for developers recommend it to everyone at WWDC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, because the other interesting thing about this is that in WebKit, first of all, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was committed like on New Year’s Eve so that nobody would notice, and then a lot of this stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is wrapped in compiler macros to not compile it if it’s not on 10.9. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly looks like this is set to be a feature only of 10.9, and you know, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whether they will do anything more with it outside of the WebKit tree,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if they’ll expose this API on a broader level or make a bigger deal out of it, we don’t know that yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I think that’s really interesting that they seem to make some effort to do
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, the fact that it’s in WebKit is the only reason we’ve seen it at all, because WebKit is open source.
⏹️ ▶️ John they could have still held it back if they wanted to, like they do a lot with a lot of their big WebKit changes, they just hold them and hold them and then push them
⏹️ ▶️ John out. Yeah, like the question of, will this even be a public API
⏹️ ▶️ John to WebKit? Because if it’s not, it doesn’t matter if you’re writing a Mac app, but if you’re a Mac App Store app it matters, and if you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John certainly writing an iOS app, I know the UI is there, I can see the headers, but
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple says they’re private so I can’t use it. So you’d still be stuck if you’re selling things through any of Apple’s
⏹️ ▶️ John app stores, you’d still be stuck using the crazy hacks you had before. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when I see stuff like this, it seems like the kind of thing that Apple would not do for the hell of it. And it also seems like the kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of thing that is not particularly useful to anyone outside Apple because who else uses Objective-C and WebKit
⏹️ ▶️ John at the same time? So it strikes me that it’s probably there to
⏹️ ▶️ John help one or more Apple applications. Maybe they’re finally making the App Store apps better. I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ John What is that company they bought to redo their store with the worst appearance and UI?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It doesn’t matter. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John It was like, start with a CH. Again, chat room can help
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco me out. It’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even worth disparaging them because they did just make everything worse.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but like maybe like you saw if they had if they could do everything with a web view I remember
⏹️ ▶️ John like the iTunes star was done with these crazy XML Descriptions of the data and then they had the iTunes app itself interpret the
⏹️ ▶️ John XML and then I heard they had slowly transitioned to using Webkit views, but then they suffer from
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing of like well You’ve got a nice webkit view but it has to hook into this application and the hooks are very bad and We’re
⏹️ ▶️ John tired of doing these crazy hacks to do hooks and here is now a slightly better system for integrating web views
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff So I would expect that the reason this API exists is because one or more applications on either iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John or the Mac are going to use this API to better integrate web views with the native application that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco surrounds them. That’s very possible. Yeah, it might just be for Apple for their own apps to use.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And maybe if you’re a Mac developer, you’ll be able to use it. But maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they won’t bring it to iOS because there’s no less of a reason or
⏹️ ▶️ John Chomp is the name of the company, says the chat room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was hoping we’d do without it. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John everyone was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco excited when they bought Chomp. this is finally gonna make everything better and I made everything worse. I mean I
⏹️ ▶️ John blame Trump. It was like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco yeah it might not be
⏹️ ▶️ John that. The technology that enables the store may be better than the technology they had before but it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ John the choice of the UI that is not nice.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So the passage of this article that I thought John you would be most fired up about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and where the bridges of Syracuse County come in is and I quote the most interesting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey possibility would be that this is the start of Apple’s evolution away from Objective-C, which by the way, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey linking to Copeland 2010 Revisited, into promoting a higher level language for their platform.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s too early to say at this point, but if JavaScript core is going to one day displace the Objective-C runtime,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this would be a reasonable starting point. And I guess I see their point, but I feel like that’s a really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey big leap. And to your earlier point, John, this isn’t a bridge in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sense that that you’re making JavaScript a first-class citizen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the OS10 or iOS API. It’s just a mechanism by which
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you can call back and forth, which is a very, very, very big difference. And furthermore, JavaScript seems like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a peculiar choice to me of a high-level language to choose in order to replace Objective-C.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not that crazy because it’s so insanely popular now, and so many people are working so hard in making JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco particularly Google, for example. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s a big thing. I don’t like the JavaScript language. So,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that’s a minus. Yeah, but you like
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Perl. Yeah, I know. I like Perl much better than JavaScript.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, that’s the funny thing about JavaScript is that nobody likes JavaScript. But it’s everywhere, so everyone just kind of, you know, learns
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John eventually. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John the thing is, some people I think do like it. If you work with low-level language for a
⏹️ ▶️ John long time, and JavaScript is the first and maybe the only and the primary high-level language used, you’re like, oh my god,
⏹️ ▶️ John high-level languages, it’s amazing. I can concatenate strings with ease and run substitutions
⏹️ ▶️ John and just, you know, It’s just so amazing to not have to worry about all these details of a strongly
⏹️ ▶️ John typed, low-level language like C or C++. It’s like, wow,
⏹️ ▶️ John JavaScript. It’s amazing. I feel so productive. But if you’ve used any other high-level language,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, oh, JavaScript. It has weird warts. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like PHP, but not as bad in that it was not designed by an expert
⏹️ ▶️ John language designer. to be to scratch someone’s itch under tight deadlines and
⏹️ ▶️ John you know progressed from there. Of course PHP sort of metastasized but had JavaScript
⏹️ ▶️ John it was pinned down by the fact that it was implemented in web browsers and it couldn’t advance that fast but it’s a similar
⏹️ ▶️ John type of thing it’s not oh we’ve got the world’s best language designers together and they come up with a language in fact
⏹️ ▶️ John most languages that end up being successful are not that way. C might be an exception because that’s made by some really smart people
⏹️ ▶️ John who really thought about it, and that worked out pretty well. But JavaScript, it was like one guy, right, at Netscape.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Originally, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John Under a tight deadline, came up with this thing. And it has crazy warts that are still there
⏹️ ▶️ John today, because that’s the way it was. And you can’t break backward compatibility either
⏹️ ▶️ John easily when it’s in a million web browsers.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So are you thumbs up or thumbs down to this, John?
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s good for integrating web views better with your native application. I think that’s a worthy advancement.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think it indicates anything one way or the other about Apple’s plans for anything.
⏹️ ▶️ John And we’ve discussed this on past shows, like the path Apple has chosen and continues to walk along is enhancing
⏹️ ▶️ John Objective-C. And it seems like they’ll continue along that path. And last year, at WWC, I was saying that, oh,
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys are going to have type inference next year. While we’re approaching, we’ll see if they have anything like type inference or maybe just C++’s
⏹️ ▶️ John auto keyword brought into Objective-C. I think you can already use an Objective-C++. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John advancing Objective-C by taking range of the compiler and adding features to the language. It seems like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. And with that, I think it’s a good time to wrap up the show. What do you think?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. Thank you very much to our two sponsors of this episode, an event apart, go to an event apart.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP FM. It’s the design conference for people who make websites. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco our second sponsor was Cocoa Conf. Cocoa Conf is a two day multi track conference for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iPhone, iPad and Mac developers. Go to Cocoa Conf.com use coupon code ATP for 20%
⏹️ ▶️ Marco off. Thank you very much guys!
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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 Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A,
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, they did it in me too. Accidental,
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, check my cat so long.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, yeah, I’ve actually considered teaching myself to type the right way, but it seems like work.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Why mess with what works? Plus you have RSI anyway, or whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, exactly. And I should just type all my talk on my code. Open curly base,
⏹️ ▶️ John return. Tab tab, dollar sign foo, space equals space.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Please put that in the show.
⏹️ ▶️ John If that actually worked, do you think that would be fast?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, definitely not. Oh, god.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. Because a lot of the programming keys you have to hold down Shift for. And maybe I could speak it faster,
⏹️ ▶️ John especially if you could abbreviate, like you’d say curly or pick some other word that’s like one syllable long for curlies.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Ruby people would love it. A lot faster to say that than to type it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s our show ending right there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it is. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John have to put that crap in.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Please. Maybe a post roll or something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know about post roll.
⏹️ ▶️ John Did you see the guy
⏹️ ▶️ John All the people say, oh, I love this song, blah, blah. Now, it’s already like two episodes after the song has been like, oh, I can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John take the song anymore. It’s so long. I have to fast forward
⏹️ ▶️ John to see if there’s any post roll. Yeah, yeah. It’s like 30 seconds long. It’s not even.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s a very it’s I think it’s like I think the the full version is like 45 or it’s really a short song
⏹️ ▶️ John And like you don’t have to hear the stupid gag at the end. You just stop listening
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John yeah, but you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, you know as well as I did nobody thinks that way
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I don’t People can’t can’t please anybody
⏹️ ▶️ John for if you put in bleeps and boops, which everyone loves
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey it is one minute and three seconds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh my goodness, you are such a baby It cracks me up. this pod about