21: The Transitive Property of Nerdiness
12 Jul 2013iWatch as identity, Bluetooth Low Energy and Siri in a watch, how regular people use iOS devices, iCloud and the Dropbox Datastore API, and targeting nerds.
Episode Description:
- iWatch follow-up.
- Alex Eckermann on Bluetooth Low Energy and iWatch.
- Eric Welander's thoughts on Siri for iWatch.
- iWatch as a means of identity.
- How regular people use iOS devices, as witnessed by John.
- Multitasking-switcher implications in iOS 7.
- iCloud's priority within Apple.
- Dropbox Datastore API, including its JavaScript API.
- Does the Datastore API obviate the need for a web service?
- Nerd-targeted products.
Sponsored by:
- Transporter: Private cloud storage. Use coupon code atp for 10% off.
- Audible: The leading provider of downloadable audiobooks.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This episode is brought to you in part by Audible, the leading provider of downloadable audiobooks.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Go to audiblepodcast.com slash ATP to learn more.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linode, Linode, I hate…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Linux, uh, uh, Linus, oh there’s so many, so many problems.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Are we allowed to do follow-up? Why not?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not? John, have you licensed the term to us?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you haven’t been getting my bills? My rates are very, very reasonable.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Funny, I’ve been getting them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. All right, so this first bit is just somebody posted something on app.net
⏹️ ▶️ John whose username is J-A-S-T-E. But I don’t know if that’s the real name or a handle
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco or whatever. I believe it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John pronounced J-A-S-T. You think so, but who knows? This is about as an iWatch follow up.
⏹️ ▶️ John And he thinks that the iWatch will be Apple’s foray into identity. And this
⏹️ ▶️ John is an aspect of the watch that we didn’t talk about in the last show, and I think it’s worth talking about.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the identity problem in general. The concept is that the
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that you wear on your wrist will somehow identify you to all the other things that you come in contact
⏹️ ▶️ John with, to your television set, I guess to your phone, if you wanted to pay for something. At
⏹️ ▶️ John Starbucks, you wave your wrist by it or something like that. I don’t think there’s anything
⏹️ ▶️ John special about the watch that makes it more possible to be
⏹️ ▶️ John your source of identity than say the phone. We all have phones now and if we were gonna have some sort of device be your source of identity
⏹️ ▶️ John it would have been the phones by now and lots of people have tried to do that in various ways. So
⏹️ ▶️ John this idea is that maybe maybe the phone is too big or too expensive or the battery doesn’t last long enough or
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to dig it out of your pocket or something else so this would be slightly more accessible than it give us another crack at
⏹️ ▶️ John making this magical identity thing where our identification is securely carried around with us by this little
⏹️ ▶️ John physical dongle. And when you sit down at your computer, it detects that you are you, because you’re the one wearing the
⏹️ ▶️ John watch and it automatically unlocks your screen and logs you in. And when you walk into a room, it plays the
⏹️ ▶️ John music that you like. And it puts things on your tab when you swipe it, when you buy things at stores. This is the fantasy scenario.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I think the barriers to that are, you know, not technological,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re business related, where there’s payment processors camped out at every possible
⏹️ ▶️ John place that want to give you money. and maybe standards related where if you want the same
⏹️ ▶️ John little dongle to do all these different functions throughout your house, everything you own has to be created by the same company and purchased recently,
⏹️ ▶️ John because even if Apple rolled this out, it wouldn’t work with all past Apple hardware probably. You’d
⏹️ ▶️ John have to get new stuff, or at the very least you’d need to update software. So I think this scenario will continue
⏹️ ▶️ John to be a fantasy, but while nothing is actually announced, this is the time to indulge
⏹️ ▶️ John in that fantasy, I suppose.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So this person basically just wants to enable the, uh, pictures on the wall from the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey movie antitrust. Did you ever see that abomination?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, you should it’s Ryan. The leap, a Philippi or whatever. And Tim Robbins, uh, Tim
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Robbins basically plays Bill Gates and Ryan Philippi, Philippi, whatever is a crack
⏹️ ▶️ Casey programmer. And so they go into quote unquote Bill Gates house. And as he goes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in between rooms, like the, the, the lights dim to a certain level and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the pictures on the wall which are all like LCD displays show different pictures and I think this was based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on something that Jobs supposedly had in his mansion or excuse me not Jobs, Gates had
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in his mansion but the theory being that this watch could kind of enable that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in other words it’s always on you and just like you said it’s always personalized to you.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it would be like lower power than a phone so I guess it wouldn’t run out of charge as easily. Right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really see this happening in that way with watches I mean it rather I don’t I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t see watches changing anything you know I I think first of all one big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem with this is that I think there’s going to be a lot more phones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and watches out there and you know my theory from last episode
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that the watch would really just be a phone accessory and that it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wouldn’t you know I don’t know if I outright said it but I but my theory here is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t be anything by itself you know it’s it’d be like a Bluetooth headset with no device. It would just be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco communicating over Bluetooth, low energy, and it would just be a peripheral to your iPhone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or maybe iPad. And maybe iPod Touch, which would be interesting. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for all the reasons why we don’t yet have this magical automatic identity thing with these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco devices, I think all those same reasons are going to continue to make it impossible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for us to have that with watches also, or rather impractical for us to have that with watches.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the same reasons apply. You have weird privacy and security issues.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You have a big boil the ocean problem. You have a lot of just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird incompatibilities in reality, because in reality it wouldn’t be one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco company making all these things that all work together. You would have, you know, look what you have now. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have Apple doing pretty well with the iPhone, but then you still have Android. You still have Windows Phone. You still have all these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other things. You have, of all the people who have iPhones, a small portion
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of them have Macs, but a lot more of them have Windows PCs. And some of them have iPads and some of them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t. And so, and people who have Macs sometimes have Android devices. People who have iPads
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sometimes have an Android phone. There’s this giant diverse environment that things would have to work in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco these days. And for something like Identity to work that well and to be that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ubiquitous, I think you’d have to have one company so dominant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the field that it could make everything for almost everybody. And I don’t think we’re going to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that for at least the next decade and hopefully longer because we’re better off not having that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, this segues somewhat well to something you said a moment ago. It segues somewhat well
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to a post that my friend Eric Wielander wrote. the post, which I’m pasting
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the chat, let me kind of take you on a little mental journey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So we talked last episode about, what is the thing that this iWatch is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solving? And also, what’s the challenge of it? And the challenge is that there’s really
⏹️ ▶️ Casey not a lot of input that can go into this, and also not a lot of output that you can get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from it. And so, what already fixes that? And Eric pointed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey out, Well, Siri could be a good answer for that. And I think part of the reason I’m bringing this up is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I’m so excited at the thought of a Dick Tracy watch, which I joked about at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the end of the last episode. But the thought being, hey, Siri could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey solve a lot of these problems about an input-output for an iWatch. And the other thing that occurred to me that Eric didn’t bring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up was Eddie Q, during the keynote at about an hour and 42 minutes, said
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something about how, hey, Siri’s to have a little more control over the things the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phone can do. And the example he used, I think, were things like brightness and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one or two other things, maybe even Bluetooth, which maybe wouldn’t be relevant in terms of an iWatch.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But I thought it was an interesting idea that perhaps some sort of really Siri-based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey integration could work well with a watch. Now on the other side of the coin, to argue with myself and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with Eric, I don’t know if if a Dick Tracy watch as much as I joke and say I want it would be a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really socially acceptable thing. I think that would be a little awkward if we all walked around talking to our wrists.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But then again, we all walk around staring down at our crotches, so I guess it can only be but so bad.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess my problem with so much of this is, you know, basically why don’t we have this now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, what’s stopping us from doing this with phones already? Because really, when
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it comes to things like capturing input and having sensors and everything, The
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone already covers pretty much all of this area. There’s not a whole lot of ground
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that a phone in your pocket or bag or jacket doesn’t really cover. And there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are, you know, certainly there’s some things. There’s things like biometric information, pedometer-style
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things. You know, those are things that the phone either doesn’t reliably have or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just can’t get practically. But unless you, you know, press against your naked leg
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all the time or something, that would be kind of… I’m sure somebody does. There’s a lot of people with iPhones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco For most of these things that we think of as, oh, will the watch allow us to do X, Y, and Z,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all of them you could do with a phone. And we aren’t doing with phones. And I think it’s worth asking why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and looking at it with some healthy skepticism of, well, if this isn’t working with phones, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if we’re not doing this yet with phones, there’s probably a really good reason for that. And it’s probably not going to change
⏹️ ▶️ Marco phone or some sensors or any ink screen or anything else stuck to our wrist instead of in our pockets.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Siri thing is weird though because I don’t see how it could ever provide an experience
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s even as good as it is on the phone because it would have to communicate with the phone to do the Siri thing so it would
⏹️ ▶️ John be like using Siri on your phone which already is not snappy only delayed by one more hop because it’s not like
⏹️ ▶️ John the phone is gonna talk to the Siri service itself it’s not gonna have you know 3G wireless it’s gonna be
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to the phone the phone is gonna be talking to the Siri service and then playing this little game of relay
⏹️ ▶️ John back and forth. And it has all the same problems as Siri. Say something, hopefully
⏹️ ▶️ John wait as you stare at it, and wait to see how it interpreted or misinterpreted what you said, and then wait
⏹️ ▶️ John for an answer. It is not a snappy experience. That’s even ignoring the whole how do you feel about
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to yourself type of thing. I do not see people
⏹️ ▶️ John use Siri as a game when you’re conversing with it, and then use it for very focused tasks rarely.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I don’t see them, maybe they feel like they need to do it in private, but people tell me, oh, I use it to set reminders or I use it to
⏹️ ▶️ John answer text messages when I’m in the car or whatever. Those are all times when they’re not with somebody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All your friends are secretly using Siri when you aren’t around.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah, because they, you know, people feel more comfortable talking to
⏹️ ▶️ John their thing and using speech recognition when no one is in the room. Even when I do speech recognition to like write my articles
⏹️ ▶️ John for a dictation, it’s more comfortable to do that when no one is in the room hearing you say fragments of sentences and
⏹️ ▶️ John issue voice commands, you know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah, I would definitely say also that, you know, whenever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have to use Siri in public I will usually try to use it as quietly as possible and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco often I will do the thing where I pick up the phone and put it to my ear because most people don’t know that also triggers Siri with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the proximity sensor and you can just talk into it like so it looks almost like you’re talking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to somebody on the phone. Like you’re giving a command
⏹️ ▶️ John to your secretary. Yes. In a very stern voice,
⏹️ ▶️ John nearby restaurants.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Remind me to tell my wife I love her when I get home.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, so I mean is there anything really new that we think about the watch now? I mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one thing we got an interesting article also by response I got to put this in the in the notes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I lost it. Somebody basically outlined what Bluetooth Low Energy does
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and what it makes possible and why it’s so much better in the context,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in response to our episode last week, in the context of the iWatch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I hope it’s not called that. The name is already starting to sound stupid in my head.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I agree. All those trademark applications, I thought iPad was stupid too. And MacBook,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco terrible name. So, anyway, I really do hope that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if this exists, it’s either a very small scale thing at first,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the Apple TV now, which is, you know, everyone’s so excited, Apple’s gonna release something for TV, and then they release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Apple TV as we know it today, which is like, okay, it’s nice, but it’s a pretty small scale problem solver.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, you know, if they make a watch, it could be that, right? could just be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing things that are very similar to what the Pebble and the other things like that do now, which is basically showing notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the watch and maybe having some minor sensors like a Fitbit or FuelBand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco equivalent, but not doing a whole lot else. Not having a microphone for Siri,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, maybe they add those things later on, but just starting out with a nice simple problem set they can do really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well with all the existing hardware and have great battery life and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not be this giant bulky thing on your wrist, not look ugly, not look like a nerd convention
⏹️ ▶️ Marco happening on your wrist, and just do that really well. I hope that’s what they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Looking at everything else, all the things they could possibly do that would be all these crazy transformative ideas,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like for a lot of them, they have extremely fatal practical or technological
⏹️ ▶️ Marco restrictions that would really prevent them from being good.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and the more I think about the iWatch, the more I keep coming back to, I feel like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only way it’s going to be really interesting is if it aggregates sensors in a new and clever
⏹️ ▶️ Casey way. Let me give you a couple examples. So in the original iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as opposed to having to hit a button to rotate the screen from portrait to landscape, it added
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an accelerometer in order to do that automatically. In order to prevent
⏹️ ▶️ Casey cheek dialing somebody or cheek hanging up on someone, it had a proximity sensor in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey order to turn off the display and turn off the touch input when the thing is up against
⏹️ ▶️ Casey your head. And maybe that’s not aggregation in the strictest sense, but I feel like taking sensors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that we have today, like a Fitbit or something like it, and taking either new sensors or the existing sensors
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and putting that data together in a new and interesting way, that’s what I feel like an iWatch
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would do that would differentiate it, but how specifically I don’t have the faintest idea.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know what Samsung would do with the iWatch? Copy
⏹️ ▶️ John they would make it so that when you use, you know, the Samsung iPad equivalent, whatever that is, you
⏹️ ▶️ John could wave your hand in front of it without actually contacting the screen to do gestures because it would have an accelerometer
⏹️ ▶️ John on your wrist. They already do things sort of like that with a single device, but once you have two of them
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to sort of start thinking like Nintendo okay well I’ve got a sensor on my wrist and there’s a screen over
⏹️ ▶️ John here and if I wave my hand this is not you know that the sensor can recognize my gestures
⏹️ ▶️ John without me physically interacting with the other device and use it you know that type of thing I
⏹️ ▶️ John assume Apple would pass on most things like that because non contact you eyes are not particularly
⏹️ ▶️ John nice feeling but guaranteed Samsung would do it just because it’s possible they seem to try every
⏹️ ▶️ John anything is technically possible try it out ship it on device see people like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it exactly I mean does it do you know they when they launched what was the most recent one the s3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whatever okay so whatever the most recent one was remember the and it had those you had like the hover feature and had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the tilt scrolling and all those all these crazy things
⏹️ ▶️ John the eyeball tracking to see when you’re looking at the
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco video yes you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John not like you know if we can sort of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco do it ship it does anybody I mean we heard a lot about those when it was launched I haven’t heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a thing about them or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John actually they have to
⏹️ ▶️ John be awful because like if they were if they had any of them had passed the threshold into being
⏹️ ▶️ John so reliable that they’re really useful they were quickly spread elsewhere but the one if you don’t see them everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John else it means that the technology to do that is not quite ready so the eyeball thing like if that was reliable
⏹️ ▶️ John enough and that it felt better than actually hitting a play pause button it would be everywhere but it’s not because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not that reliable yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah well let’s go to things that are reliable talk about our first sponsor today
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco We all use Dropbox. And I mentioned last time that it really takes balls
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco All your data is stored on that drive that’s in your possession. It’s in your physical possession.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All the traffic, if you access it from everywhere else, and you can do that, you can have different transporters, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and your friend can have one, you can do an off-site backup with your friend’s house, or your workplace, or your parent’s house,
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then for life you have access to the service that relays things and tracks it for you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It does some really awesome cloud-like things, sharing and encryption
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s so many things you can do with it. I mentioned offsite backup before, collaboration, a lot of people that I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it to send audio files to each other for podcasts. Obviously, there’s a whole bunch of other things
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco us free Transporters, and it’s awesome. They’re making this new 2.0 software, adding a bunch of features.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Drobo recently acquired them, and in fact it’s founded by ex-Drobo employees,
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco thanks a lot to FileTransporter. Casey, you’ve had one of these things. Indeed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And it is really nice. It really is. It’s pretty much exactly like Dropbox,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but rather, just like you said, rather than being in the cloud, it’s in my possession. So if for some
⏹️ ▶️ Casey reason I ever wanted this stuff not to be on the internet, well, not to say that it’s on the internet, but so to speak,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I ever wanted it to be inaccessible from the internet, even by myself,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remove the Ethernet jack and suddenly there’s nothing anyone can do to get to it. Now, granted, the NSA
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has already read all of it anyway, but in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco principle— HOFFMAN
⏹️ ▶️ Casey CASEY Well, I’m saying before this point, the NSA has read everything, but once I remove the Ethernet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey jack, there’s nothing they can do to read it. Shy of coming to my house. Please don’t come to my house.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco HOFFMAN They’re already in your house, Casey. Come on. CASEY They probably are. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey really is nice. Yeah, it’s a great concept.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a great device. And I’m a big fan of,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as I’ve written about a lot recently, I’m a big fan of owning your own stuff online,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of being in control of everything. And sure, there’s a place for Dropbox,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but there’s a lot of situations where you feel a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco better having your own stuff. Plus, I mean, heck, what would two terabytes on Dropbox cost you? There’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cost advantage here, too. And you know, Transporter, they have software that integrates with Mac OS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that provides a lot of the same conveniences as the Dropbox software. You have the folder integration, the finder integration,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the share links, everything like that. All of that, but with a Drive U control. It really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is fantastic. It’s a great idea for a product, and I’m very, very happy that they made it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. So moving along. Thanks Transporter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco John, you mentioned last week in the after show strange ways that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real people use iOS. I was wondering if you could expand on that a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sure. This is based on my recent vacation to see family.
⏹️ ▶️ John And since the last time I visited, it seems like all of them got iPhones, usually like
⏹️ ▶️ John 4Ss, the less expensive iPhones. I didn’t see any iPhone 5s.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I noticed a little bit of this at WADC, strange ways that other developers use iPhones, but seeing
⏹️ ▶️ John how regular people use them, because they don’t have any circle of people to give them
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of the social norms of how you use an iPhone. And
⏹️ ▶️ John here are the things that I noticed right away. The first thing, and this is the one I noticed at WADC as
⏹️ ▶️ John well, is I didn’t see anybody who filled their screens with
⏹️ ▶️ John icons, the springboard screens. And up until very recently, everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John I saw filled their screens. Because your first screen, you’d fill it with icons. And when you ran out of room, you’d go to your second screen and fill
⏹️ ▶️ John it from top to bottom with icons and so on and so forth. And that is sort of the –
⏹️ ▶️ John correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s more or less the social norm of how you configure your
⏹️ ▶️ John iPhone. And then at WWDC – go ahead, Gazi. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was going to say that’s the norm, although I will use myself as an example of an odd way that people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use their iPhone. whatever reason, and I read this somewhere and I’ve been trying to figure out where
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I read this, but I copied from someone on the internet that on their first
⏹️ ▶️ Casey home screen, only their first home screen,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco was it one of you? It was me. Was it you? Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Okay, so on Marco’s first home screen he leaves the row above the dock blank.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I don’t know why that rang true with me, but I was like, you know what, that’s a really good idea. So on my first and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey only first home screen, I have the bottom row blank,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but on every other screen, of which there are generally a total of three,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I use up every single space.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and that’s the thing I started to see, people intentionally leaving blank rows not on the
⏹️ ▶️ John last page, and even having it on the first page. My question, I guess, for both of you, since you’re doing this, is why
⏹️ ▶️ John do you have a blank row above your dock on the first page?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I have another whole complexity of my system also, which iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco makes awesome actually. But the main reason why I have always done that was that the very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first iPhone with version 1.0 before apps had, I believe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one icon in the bottom row or none. I’ll have to look this up. So it was just kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always what I was used to. It provides a nice kind of neutral swipe area to swipe between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the two screens. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You can, but it’s a reliable area. You know you can swipe there and not accidentally launch
⏹️ ▶️ John never accidentally launch something by swiping.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It will not happen. I bet it has happened. Anyway, so there
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that kind of legacy reason. I also think it looks better. It looks a lot less crowded.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The bottom row is always where my app in progress, which is usually Instapaper, would go.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But first, like in the early versions of the SDK, I think every time you installed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the app on the phone, it would move it to the default next application or something like that, which was always right there, something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. Anyway, there was some reason with development why I would always have Instapaper and back when it used to be Instapaper
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Free in that bottom row by themselves, so the second half of it was clear. The other thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I do that’s weird that I recommend to anybody who wants to try this,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used to, you know, back when the App Store first came out, I would have all these different pages of apps and it just sucked. Once
⏹️ ▶️ Marco folders came out, I decided to do a different system, which I don’t, generally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t like folders. I think they’re very clumsy to enter and leave. And actually on iOS 7, I like them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even less because they hold less per screen. You at least do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have paged folders now, so folders have way more total capacity, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco moved from showing, what was it before, 12? It would show three rows or four rows.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me look. I think you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 6 I believe it showed you 12 or 16 icons in a folder. It is 12.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But you have the short phone though. Why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey do you have to be a jerk like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Anyway. Shut up you guys.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Is that true? Is that really true? Yeah, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get an extra row. God, you’re so spoiled. Isn’t that great? But on iOS 7,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let me double check here. Just to make sure I got this right. I believe you only get 9. This
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is not against the NDA of course. Yes, iOS 7 you only get nine per folder
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen. And you can have multiple screens, as I said, but it ends up that, like, you know, getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco into the folder is already an extra tap. And so to have to like page through a folder, only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco seeing nine at a time is kind of clumsy.
⏹️ ▶️ John have no neutral swipe area inside folders. What do you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a great question. I don’t know. I just launch apps accidentally all the time. But what I do is my very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first page, I keep configured mostly the way the original iPhone always
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was configured with everything in roughly the same spots. If I have like a really awesome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco preferred replacement app, I’ll put it in the same spot that the Apple app used to go. So like for example, I use Solver
⏹️ ▶️ Marco instead of Calculator. And so Solver is the second row right most spot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me because that’s where the calculator was, I believe in the original iPhone. Anyway, And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on the first page there’s no folders. On the second page, that’s where all the folders go. And it can have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco individual icons also. But the second page is where all folders go. And then I only have those two pages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Which is really, honestly, great. I love having switched to a two-page only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco standard. Because you always know where you are. You’re either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on your first page or you’re not. It’s very, very, very easy. and all the things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you want to like bury for occasional use can go in one of those folders in the second page. And with iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now, now that folders can hold so much more in total, you can at least say like, you know, I used
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to have like games, new games, new games to test, like all, like three different folders for games because they wouldn’t all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fit in one, and now I just have one. And you know, I have a folder called like rare and utility,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you know, now I just have like rare, you know, so there’s, anyway, I highly recommend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doing a two screen only setup and using as many folders as you need to on the second screen to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It really is awesome. And on the iPad, I even just do a one-page setup, which is even better. There’s not enough room in the iPhone to do it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you don’t have to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco swipe anywhere. Exactly. And now they, thank God, they moved Spotlight.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I love that change in iOS 7. They moved Spotlight so that you have to pull it down from the top. It’s no longer like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a springboard page to the far left. I think one of the stupidest things in old iOS was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you were on the home screen, If you tap the home button, that would be a shortcut to go over to the spotlight
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen. And that, so many times I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco accidentally did that, and I’ve seen other people do it even more. In fact, John, you can probably tell me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from your regular people experience, how many times do they accidentally go to spotlight by hitting the home button too many times?
⏹️ ▶️ John I see that a lot, but I also think it’s kind of like, people hit the home button when they want to go like
⏹️ ▶️ John back to the beginning and they understand that concept. And if they’re already at the beginning and they hit it again, it probably
⏹️ ▶️ John means that they want to go back backer to the more beginninger and
⏹️ ▶️ John basically like they can’t find what they’re looking for they like no just bring me back to like the beginning beginning and
⏹️ ▶️ John throwing the search field in their face is like oh all right well I guess I can type here because I kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of know what the name of the thing is that I’m looking for so it’s kind of like look this is the last resort you you
⏹️ ▶️ John press this button because obviously you’re not finding what you think you’re supposed to be finding but we’ve already brought you to the place that this button press takes
⏹️ ▶️ John you so by pressing it again you’re saying no I’m still not satisfied here’s the last resort go to search.
⏹️ ▶️ John But you know for me personally it’s just frustrating when I accidentally hit it because I don’t notice I’m on the first screen or something
⏹️ ▶️ John but for other people I have to wonder if it’s not an okay thing and I
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of like the fact that it was to the left of the home screen I especially like the what they did with the
⏹️ ▶️ John little icons at the bottom maybe this is too subtle for most people they the little dot icons right and when you’re on the
⏹️ ▶️ John first page there is one more dot to your left but it’s not a dot it’s a tiny tiny magnifying glass
⏹️ ▶️ John which is adorable So I kind of like that. Go look at your iOS 6 device
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right. And that was a nice touch. But I have personally,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’ve witnessed so many accidentally invocations of Spotlight by that double home button tap thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I have to imagine that’s not worth it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John And I’m very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco glad they got rid of that in 7. For experienced users,
⏹️ ▶️ John good experience. So what I saw for people using the iPhones was
⏹️ ▶️ John not just leaving a row blank, but wiping out
⏹️ ▶️ John every single icon except for one row of four on the top. And what I even saw
⏹️ ▶️ John on one person’s phone was one row of four on the top on the first home screen page,
⏹️ ▶️ John all folders. Everything else basically deleted and wiped out.
⏹️ ▶️ John And but some people had like multiple pages where you go to the next page, one row of four at the top, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John not all folders, maybe all folders and you know only a couple pages maybe three or four pages but only one row of
⏹️ ▶️ John icons at the top and of course the dock on the bottom because I don’t know if they knew how to get things out of there or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know before I spoke to these people I just saw their devices or saw them using them or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John like what what’s going on there why why why would you ever do that doesn’t make any
⏹️ ▶️ John sense like unless they unless they’re following the Marco philosophy I just need a massive safe region
⏹️ ▶️ John to swipe but that wasn’t it These people weren’t looking for a safe. So after speaking to them, the
⏹️ ▶️ John reason they’re doing this, can you guys guess before I reveal it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do they think it saves battery life, or otherwise
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John it’s performance related?
⏹️ ▶️ John Too sophisticated. Casey, nothing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t even have the faintest. Oh, because they want to make sure they have the space for the expanded folder?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco That’s a good one,
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s close, yeah. It’s because they put a picture on their wallpaper, and they want
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco picture of their kids or family
⏹️ ▶️ John picture is like the top part of the picture is just background like trees or whatever Uh, but the faces are in the bottom part
⏹️ ▶️ John and people with pictures people had pictures They were purposely like biased to the lower part So the people’s faces
⏹️ ▶️ John were lower down so they could get two rows of icons because they want to see They want to see the people’s pictures
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John makes that is something
⏹️ ▶️ John like, you know adding what did they add that in ios four or five? They added the ability to have you know
⏹️ ▶️ John wallpapers instead of just a black background that you know, that’s an unforeseen
⏹️ ▶️ John side effect of giving people the ability to put a picture in the background is that they’re going to want to see it and they’re going to clear
⏹️ ▶️ John out because they don’t want some icons sitting on top of their kids head. They’re just going to move those things out of the way and what they’re left with
⏹️ ▶️ John is a screen with nothing on it. And the like four folders at the top is like, well, when you only have one row of icons, you
⏹️ ▶️ John want you still want some minimum amount of stuff to be on page one. So then just shove it all into folders. It’s incredibly inefficient.
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes no sense to me, but this is how they choose to use their phones. And it just goes to show that
⏹️ ▶️ John features have unforeseen side effects. And the way you think people will use your device is very
⏹️ ▶️ John different from the way they’ll use it in real life, because they have very different concerns. So I
⏹️ ▶️ John was fascinated to see this common pattern across all fields. And the other thing of this I could
⏹️ ▶️ John have guessed is that the people who delete everything off the phone, they could possibly delete because they don’t know what it is. Like, this is why it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ John good that you can’t delete the phone app and stuff. Because if you could, they would. And then wonder why they can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John you know what I mean? We’re all annoyed that you can’t delete calculator and stuff like that. And maybe it would be okay to let those go, but people are
⏹️ ▶️ John just like, nope, I know how to use four things on this phone. I’m gonna get everything else out of there. So their solution is just to move them off the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen. That I would have predicted and have seen before.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Don’t tell them about the parental controls.
⏹️ ▶️ John Oh yeah, no, that’s too deep. I don’t know if they knew what the settings app was. They deleted settings.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And these are the same people who like, one person really was
⏹️ ▶️ John annoyed about the weather channel on their new television service. And I said, well, you have
⏹️ ▶️ John an iPhone. There’s eight gazillion weather apps. Find one that you like. But
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco there’s no good ones.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll have the weather forecast.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, you’re right.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’ll have the weather forecast right there. Even something like dark sky or whatever, saying if your whole obsession
⏹️ ▶️ John is when it’s going to rain, there’s apps with real-time radar. We have the technology that’s better than watching the
⏹️ ▶️ John Weather Channel and waiting through commercials and weather reports for areas where you don’t live or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John or having to go into the TV room, turn on the TV. I said, no, I prefer to see it on TV. I want someone talking to me.
⏹️ ▶️ John Even though it involves watching commercials and watching weather for towns that are not your town.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that’s crazy to me. But old habits die hard, I guess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say dark sky is still one of those things that can blow the mind of any normal person.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. I try to show them, but it’s not impressive. I want a weather person on TV telling me the weather.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I want that human touch.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, all right, do you want to talk about this Dropbox thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, is John done?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Is that all you got?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, I’ll think of more later. But the two big ones were
⏹️ ▶️ John the home screen, so you can see the picture and getting all the applications of the home screen, and then the totally
⏹️ ▶️ John being unimpressed by applications. Not just the weather, but any kind of applications, like things that we all know
⏹️ ▶️ John that you can do with your phone, that you know you can do x, y, z with your phone. Nah, that doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, did you see a lot of people force quitting apps for no good reason?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Because I still
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that constantly. And none of these people know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the really scary part is in 7, I don’t know how much this is public. I’ll tread
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lightly. In iOS 7, there’s actually a really good reason to remove
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps from the multitasking switcher.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, they have it in the movies, yeah. Because you want to get them out of there so they’re not in
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco No, that’s not it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, maybe that’s part of it for some people. but in seven i know what you’re the new uh… backgrounding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff uh… i don’t know i don’t know the public or not well let’s see if anybody cares
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the new backgrounding stuff in seven where your app can be woken up periodically in the background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if your app has been removed from the switcher it does not do that so you can’t get background
⏹️ ▶️ Marco updates which is uh… a change since i was six because with six even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like like the new stand content available things would go through no matter what uh… but in seven
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If your app’s been removed from the switcher, you don’t get any background wake up types of any, you know, you can still get push notifications
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that alert the user, but your app will not run in the background at all if you’ve been removed.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So there actually is a pretty substantial reason to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco manage or not manage the things in that switcher now.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So come to think of it, that means that all these ill-informed people who are constantly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey clearing out what is now their multitasking tray are actually kind of shooting themselves in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey foot because now all of their apps that are not running in the background won’t get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey up while running in the background, so to speak, aren’t getting updates. And they’re actually demonstrable. They
⏹️ ▶️ Casey were already demonstrably, uh, penalizing their own experience, but now it’s even worse.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s even more reason not to do that.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is all just a sliver of, you know, it was like, it’s, it’s, there’s, there’s the people who are tech
⏹️ ▶️ John nerds who know all the details. Then there’s the aspirational tech nerds who know enough to force quit. And then there’s the vast,
⏹️ ▶️ John vast majority of people who have no idea about holding down your finger to get the little red thing, and who will continue to have no idea
⏹️ ▶️ John about swiping up to get rid of those icons. Because there’s nothing there that indicates that that’s possible,
⏹️ ▶️ John just like there’s nothing in there that indicates that you can press and hold on the multitasking switcher. And I have
⏹️ ▶️ John to think that the vast majority of people will never use either one of those features, and the phone will just manage it for them. So it’s just this fringe
⏹️ ▶️ John of the people who know enough to be dangerous that are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problematic. The power users. Power users are the most dangerous users to support, or for anybody.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IT departments, for developers, for themselves, they’re just always like the worst type of user to support because power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco users, they know enough to cause trouble or to cause headaches
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for themselves or others, but usually not enough to really fix things if they break them or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a really great environment. They’re usually the ones that are most susceptible to superstition
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and myths and crazy stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I heard a lot of reports that geniuses, quote unquote geniuses, were telling people
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to force quit everything under the sun because that makes your iPhone run faster, which is just patently wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Even in iOS 6, that’s just wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. Well, and again, geniuses, many of them are this type of person, the power
⏹️ ▶️ Marco user who, like, you know, they know enough to have that job. That doesn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco necessarily mean that they know the intricate details of how iOS works and why that’s a bad idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or why that does or doesn’t do something. Almost any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco IT person that you’re likely to run into in any kind of work IT department or anything like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all of them are this type of user. There’s some really good ones that know a lot more,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but most of the people you’ll run into in this kind of context are the nose-nuts-to-be-dangerous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco power user. That’s one of the reasons why all these crazy myths like defragging, long after that mattered,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all these crazy myths get propagated and live on. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s all these power users saying, oh, well, you need to do this and this and this every day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep your phone clean or whatever. And nothing bad ever happens if you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that. So you just keep propagating it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Your platform has arrived when you get one of those, because the Mac had a long sequence of them. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think the first one I can think of was like rebuilding the desktop, but you had zapping the PRAM,
⏹️ ▶️ John you had all those things. And then like the Mac OS X got repairing permissions. And
⏹️ ▶️ John then iOS, I guess the first one is the first one that I always got was the force quitting apps. That’s the only one I know of. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because that was like one of the first things you could do as kind of like an amateur system administrator
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for your phone. It was like, there’s not much else you can do. There is no iOS defect, although
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are, you know, there have been like crazy scam apps in the App Store that are like, maximize your battery
⏹️ ▶️ Marco life and like stuff like that. And I always wonder how they get approved because, you know, then you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco read the description, you find out like, oh, well, it’s actually just like, it’s a joke app officially, or it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco educational only, or just has like list of tips and tricks that you’re supposed to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But there’s a lot of apps, even like if you look in the top lists, there’s a lot of apps that are selling really well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that are basically scams preying on this kind of mythology of like, oh, that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app can compress your memory on iOS or can speed your phone up or save your battery life.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and somebody in the chat, I shouldn’t share this person’s name
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just to be safe. Again, from working in the Apple Store or at the Apple Store, the company would send out numerous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey memos reminding us that force quitting everything under the sun was wrong. But some of my colleagues would spread
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that lie and practices themselves, which is kind of sad, but…
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the nature of superstition, you know, you can’t be convinced by a presentation
⏹️ ▶️ John of evidence, the whole point of superstition.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you know, those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that spread so easily are the things like, well, if you do them, nothing bad really happens,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and you can’t really tell if anything good happens because it’s too small of a difference if it, quote, works.
⏹️ ▶️ John You don’t need the feather, you just need to believe. I think that’s a Dumbo reference.
⏹️ ▶️ John I haven’t seen the movie in years.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. Yeah, neither have I. So this episode is also sponsored by another
⏹️ ▶️ Marco return sponsor. It’s Audible. Audible is the leading provider of downloadable audio
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⏹️ ▶️ Marco listeners a free audio book with a 30-day trial. Go to audiblepodcast.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP to take advantage of this special offer. So once again, it’s audiblepodcast.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP to get free audio book with a 30-day free trial.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Guys, do you have any audio books to recommend?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I haven’t looked, to be honest, to confirm that this is on Audible, but I bet you it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was asked recently what my favorite movie is, and if you bear with me for a second, My favorite movie, if I had to pick just one, is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey probably The Hunt for Red October. You can judge me on that and I won’t be offended. But it’s actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey based on a Tom Clancy book also, curiously enough, called The Hunt for Red October. And the book,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as with almost every book that’s ever been written that was eventually turned into a movie, is actually considerably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey better than the movie. So I would recommend The Hunt for Red October if you’re into political thrillers based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in the early to mid-1980s when we still hated Russia and Russia still hated us.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Awesome. All right, well, thanks a lot to audible for sponsoring the show member go to audible podcast.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Thanks a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not even ask me if I have a pick.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you have a pick?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, maybe we should save it for the next audible sponsorship. All right, save
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it Be that guy All right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so moving along to is there anything much to talk about this Dropbox thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Actually, I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not, but I thought there was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I’m so tired of platforms. Really? I mean, do we really need another platform?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, I mean, it’s an existing platform, though. It’s in it. Well, as Steve Jobs says, it’s not a platform, it’s a feature. But anyway, Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John and is popular. And the reason we’re interested in their data store, at least I’m interested in their data store, is because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s from Dropbox. People already have Dropbox accounts. Many people already
⏹️ ▶️ John pay for Dropbox. iOS applications already integrate
⏹️ ▶️ John with Dropbox using an existing API for file storage. So that’s an advantage that many many
⏹️ ▶️ John other things that are supposedly going to store your crap do not have. Right? Even you know even
⏹️ ▶️ John Google, mighty Google, come up with an API but it’s like well alright but and how many applications are already integrated
⏹️ ▶️ John with Google data storage like it’s a bigger hurdle to overcome whereas Dropbox, you’re already there, your apps are already
⏹️ ▶️ John talking to it. This is basically the equivalent of instead of just documents
⏹️ ▶️ John in the iCloud storage, it’s like their equivalents kind of sort of not really,
⏹️ ▶️ John of Core Data Sync, where you’re- I hope not. Well, you know what I mean. You’re not just storing files.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re storing something that’s not just a linear stream of bytes in a single named entity,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? That’s basically where the similarity ends, because Core Data is this whole other sort of persistent object store
⏹️ ▶️ John thing. And this is much simpler. This is basically schema-less fields
⏹️ ▶️ John in basically tables. So you have table and has records, the records have an
⏹️ ▶️ John ID, they have name value pairs in them, and you can do one small level of nesting underneath that. And that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John it. I look at these things because I think it’s interesting to see what kind of API are they going to offer. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re definitely not going the core data route where they say, just use your objects in memory and we’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John magically synchronize them with the persistence across all these applications. And you can just, the rest of your application just
⏹️ ▶️ John behaves as if it’s using objects in memory and we make everything work. It’s not quite
⏹️ ▶️ John doing. You can just, you know, sort of speak to a database over a wire
⏹️ ▶️ John and we’ll do updates where it’s like a server resident database. It’s kind of in between. They want you to be able to
⏹️ ▶️ John store records in this thing and get notified when there are changes to these records.
⏹️ ▶️ John And, but they don’t want you to have to implement your own conflict resolution. This is where the rubber
⏹️ ▶️ John meets the road. It’s like, what if I do two different things on two different devices, they’re both offline. they come back on and synchronize
⏹️ ▶️ John the changes. What do I do to sort these things out? And looking at their documentation briefly, it
⏹️ ▶️ John seems like your choices are minimal. All the conflict resolution seems to be automatic. And your choices
⏹️ ▶️ John are like biggest value wins, smallest value wins, sum of value wins, and that’s about it. And it’s like, well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that doesn’t help me if I’m trying to synchronize an address book. None of those policies seem like they would be helpful.
⏹️ ▶️ John Local wins versus remote wins. Like, there didn’t even seem to be any date stamping type things in there where you could tell which
⏹️ ▶️ John one happened at a different time and synchronize based on that and resolve conflicts based on that. So I’m not sure what the
⏹️ ▶️ John target audience for this thing is, but like any kind of service, the real proof is going to
⏹️ ▶️ John be, is it reliable, is it fast, and is it easy to program for in a way that
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t block my application when the changes don’t come in. And in that respect, it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John like it has some advantages over iCloud Core Data the way it existed, in that
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t need to be online. your changes can take effect locally, and remote changes can come in whenever they want.
⏹️ ▶️ John So in theory, you shouldn’t be blocking as long as you can write to your local disk and as long as you can read from your local disk.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I also looked at the API and the documentation, and there were a couple of things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that piqued my interest. Firstly, and this is outside of the documentation, quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey obviously, Dropbox is cross-platform. And let’s suppose for the sake of argument that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even core data in iCloud worked flawlessly, which is a pretty funny thought just to begin with. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s still Apple-centric. And even though I speak for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all three of us in saying we’re all in on Apple platforms, not everyone is like that. We talked about that earlier in this very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey episode. And so Dropbox is cross-platform, which is really nice. So if I was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey psychotic enough to want to write not only an iOS app, but also an Android app, I could presumably
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use this Dropbox data store API in order to get data between them. Additionally,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you mentioned, John, it’s not straight SQL. And while core data, you’ll get,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, smacked on the wrist if you call it a database, it isn’t a database, just
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like you said, it’s a object persistence or object graph persistence mechanism.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Generally speaking, behind the scenes, it’s SQLite or SQLite or whatever crap it’s supposed to be pronounced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as. Whereas this, like you said, John, is a little more flexible than that, which is nice. Obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Casey there’s caveats to that, and that could be bad, But generally speaking, it’s nice. But the other thing that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was really interesting is they have a data store web inspector.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I glanced at it very, very quickly. And it appears that even regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey people, not even necessarily developers, can go in and inspect the data stores
⏹️ ▶️ Casey associated with their Dropbox account. And I think that’s both very good and arguably maybe not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so good because it allows developers to go in and see
⏹️ ▶️ Casey exactly what tables and records and things are stored in their own Dropbox. But that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also gives some amount of visibility for a user. Now it is read-only through this web
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interface, but it’s still more visibility than you may want. Now, to argue
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with myself briefly, maybe that’s a good thing after all, in the sense that if somebody’s storing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a bunch of data that I don’t want them to store, I could go see that and then remove that app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, it just freaks me out for the idea of users seeing exactly how I’m persisting
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, that’s good, because then you could shame people who store plaintext passwords and stuff. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco because regular users can go and see
⏹️ ▶️ John it. And so they can see, hey, you’re storing my whole address book, or hey, there’s my plaintext
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey password for
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever service. But it’s interesting. The reason I put that link in the show notes is that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s interesting that they launch with that. Like, of course, of course it’s going to be web interface to see what’s on the
⏹️ ▶️ John How can you develop an application if you don’t have visibility into what we’re doing in the data store. And their data store
⏹️ ▶️ John is so much simpler. Like, it is just very simple and primitive compared to the amazing
⏹️ ▶️ John thing that Core Data is supposed to be doing for you. Like, it’s up to you to figure it out. No
⏹️ ▶️ John schema, name value pairs, lists. You’re going to get a notification that something changed will give you a list of record IDs.
⏹️ ▶️ John You figure it out. I don’t know, whatever. Like, it’s really primitive. And primitive things are
⏹️ ▶️ John kind of annoying. You have to write all your own logic to deal with these updates and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. But it’s easy for developers to understand. And time and again, that’s proved to be much more important
⏹️ ▶️ John than the amazing framework, especially if it doesn’t work right. The amazing framework does awesome things to you versus the simple one that doesn’t do
⏹️ ▶️ John as much for you, but what it does do is easily understandable by any developer. And that gives even a novice
⏹️ ▶️ John or mediocre developer a fighting chance of using your API to do useful work. Because maybe they use it inefficiently,
⏹️ ▶️ John and maybe they have to write a ton of code themselves. But conceptually, the way it works
⏹️ ▶️ John is simple enough that they can wrap their head around it. So they never get themselves into a situation where they have no idea what’s going
⏹️ ▶️ John on. They just perhaps make inefficient code. So this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John again, we’ll have to look at their performance and how reliable their service is and stuff like that. But
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they have a big leg up and everyone else in the biggest, we already all have Dropbox accounts. And I think like the first five
⏹️ ▶️ John megabytes per application that you use does not count towards your Dropbox quota. So if you just want to use this to store like preferences
⏹️ ▶️ John or small amounts of state information, or, you know, five megabytes is actually a lot, as long
⏹️ ▶️ John as you’re using it as your main data storage, that doesn’t count towards your Dropbox quota. And of course, once you go over that, then
⏹️ ▶️ John you just start using the person’s Dropbox quota, which is great for Dropbox, because then eventually if you’re a free user, you hit your limit because you use
⏹️ ▶️ John some application, and you end up being a paid customer, and it’s all a virtuous cycle. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John cautiously optimistic about this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, what are the implications for Apple? Because one could argue that this
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is iCloud, or Core Data iCloud, but not done by Apple, and hopefully actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey functional. So does this light a fire under Apple’s keystore and make them make Core Data
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and iCloud actually work or do you think they don’t care?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, they don’t care. I mean, there are people there who do care, obviously. The people who are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that team obviously do care quite a bit and are working their butts off, I assume. However,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can simply look at what Apple does. Look at the results. You can tell that iCloud is really seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as an accessory in the company and especially the iCloud developer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco APIs, the sync APIs and stuff that Apple themselves barely uses
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for their own apps. You can look at that stuff and you can very much see this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not a very high priority for the company. Again, I’m sure it’s a very high priority for people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working on it, but you can tell that it’s not getting the resources it needs, it’s not getting the priority it needs,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because look at the last year, not much has really changed.
⏹️ ▶️ John in the WWDC keynote, though. Didn’t they have a section of the keynote that we can actually talk about where they said what
⏹️ ▶️ John their policy about iCloud Core Data was going forward? That was not in the keynote?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe it was in the State of the Union, I don’t remember.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they mentioned it in the State of the Union, but which we can’t talk about, but I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s safe to say that they basically said, give us another shot, in as many
⏹️ ▶️ Marco words. But I just don’t see it. I mean, we see this with almost all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple’s online services, especially the ones that Apple themselves
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t really rely on very much. We see that they just don’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco put that much effort into them.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, even ones that are ostensibly flagship features, like messages,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s Apple’s application. It’s an important Apple application. It obviously got attention because it was massively
⏹️ ▶️ John redesigned, yet it still doesn’t perform its basic functions in a reliable manner. So even when Apple is totally using,
⏹️ ▶️ John not that I’m saying that it uses iCloud Core Data, I don’t know what it uses, but the point is, it uses an online service
⏹️ ▶️ John that Apple implements, and it is a flagship application, and it still doesn’t work. So
⏹️ ▶️ John them using it is not a guarantee that their online services work correctly, but it certainly helps.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it just seems like Apple still has a lot of that tunnel vision
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they are infamous for, where something gets a whole lot of attention, but then everything outside
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the immediately obvious first interesting thing that they’re working on
⏹️ ▶️ Marco gets pretty neglected for a while. And it’s still a sign
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of Apple being a smaller company than their success
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and their money and their sales and their presence would indicate.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They still are a very small company with very small teams relative to all the stuff they do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so how they prioritize their resources, it still is very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a zero-sum game with them. They don’t just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add a brand new team to address brand new things they’re doing. They move people around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and de-prioritize other things to prioritize certain things. They don’t just buy more people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of nowhere and they have this giant department all of a sudden. We’ve talked in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco past about how Google is so good at just applying way more brute force engineering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to problems than Apple usually does, especially in the services area. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just don’t see any evidence of Apple changing that anytime soon. Anything like this that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is basically a major online service that’s really tricky to get right and has lots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of substantial design tricks, technical challenges,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and service challenges, and big data challenges. I don’t see Apple ever doing well.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ll say Apple’s making their life harder here by… not Google… Dropbox has chosen to make a simpler
⏹️ ▶️ John API. Like it does less stuff for you. It is just simpler, right? Much simpler
⏹️ ▶️ John than iCloud Cordana. Far, far simpler, right? So that gives them a fighting chance of getting it
⏹️ ▶️ John to work correctly, having a small API that developers can pick up. And that’s like a philosophical difference between the team
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s responsible for doing these kind of services for Apple, philosophically. I mean, part of it’s philosophical, and part of it’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John look, they already had core data. People already have core data applications. What are you going to say to those people? Hey, we want
⏹️ ▶️ John your applications to work with iCloud, but core data doesn’t work with iCloud. So rewrite your thing
⏹️ ▶️ John to use something more like the Dropbox Sync API. Like, that would have been a tough sell back when
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud core data was introduced, which is why everyone’s so excited. Oh, but I have a Core Data application, and they tell
⏹️ ▶️ John me, well, we’re in iCloud. Yeah, I don’t have to rewrite it. Because think if you told them, OK, well, you just have to throw
⏹️ ▶️ John out Core Data and use this new API that is totally unlike Core Data. Much simpler. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John to do a lot more coding to get it to work. But trust us, that’s how online will work. And that’s kind of like online companies.
⏹️ ▶️ John No, your APIs have to be small, simple, and semantically easy to understand.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s the way to do it. If you try to make something big and complicated, your API is going to be big and complicated
⏹️ ▶️ John on the client side, and the server is going to be really hard to implement in an efficient manner and scale and all those other things.
⏹️ ▶️ John So don’t do that. But Apple is, so far, sticking to their guns and saying, they do have Key Value
⏹️ ▶️ John Store. And they could enhance Key Value Store over the course of a year to basically make it match this Dropbox API
⏹️ ▶️ John and remove all their storage limits, because Key Value Store is really just for tiny data. And
⏹️ ▶️ John they would have the equivalent of this. And by all accounts, Key Value Store does work better because it’s simpler. It has to do less stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? But they’re saying, no, we want to make core data work magically
⏹️ ▶️ John over the internet. And it’s a big, complicated API with lots of corner cases, both on the client and the server.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if anything goes wrong, bad things happen, and we need more debugging tools, and it’s a really hard problem. And
⏹️ ▶️ John the size of the team that’s doing the Dropbox data API is probably like 1 10th
⏹️ ▶️ John of the people who are trying to do the core data thing. And yet, they’ll probably be more successful because they chose to do something simpler.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, the only thing that I wonder, and I didn’t see specifically noted in the API
⏹️ ▶️ Casey documentation is, what about sharing? So I keep coming back to my example of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey sharing a grocery list with my wife. And it seems like this Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Datastore API would be perfect for it, except that I didn’t see any mention of sharing. But maybe I missed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it. John, did you happen to notice anything?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think there’s any sharing. I think it’s kind of like it’s just a Datastore for your application.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s shared from that user on multiple devices, but not
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like you. So
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s no server. Well, there is one important part, though.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco There is a JavaScript API as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I haven’t verified this yet, but I would assume that you could use that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco maybe from Node or the other server-side JavaScript interpreters. So you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably run this server-side with their JavaScript API.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, yeah, but you still need to authenticate as you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco to get access
⏹️ ▶️ John to your data store. So if I authenticate as me, I’m not going to see any Casey’s data stores. I guess you could copy it out to
⏹️ ▶️ John some other service and
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco provide a clearinghouse for it. If
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you ran your own web service that used this, I would imagine you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco whip that up. You could just have a few pages that do the bounce through authentication
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for you, and you authenticate your own people, who’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see what. Although if you’re going to go through all that, you might as well just have your own sync service on your server.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I mean, that’s what it boils down to. But since they have sharing for their file API,
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, this is like their version 1, right? So maybe the next version, they add, you know, obviously
⏹️ ▶️ John they know about sharing. They have some means for you to take the same file and share it amongst many people
⏹️ ▶️ John and revoke sharing and all that other stuff. It seems like that would have to come
⏹️ ▶️ John for these data stores. Because they have it chunked out into like, you have a data store, data store have tables, tables have records.
⏹️ ▶️ John They could do the sharing at probably the data store or table level, and it wouldn’t be
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy. but maybe not for version one, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But all in all, I give this two thumbs up. I think this is definitely, well, a tentative two thumbs up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think this is definitely a good start. If it actually works, I think it’s a very simple, yet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the same time, like you were saying, John, kind of robust way of syncing data.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s a very low cost of entry, both financially and in terms of effort. And so I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really cool. And although I’m not sure I disagree with you guys in that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Apple won’t care about this. It also makes me wonder, especially if adoption is really high.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Marco said that, not me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fair enough. But I hope and I wonder that if adoption of this Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Datastore API is really high, if Apple will start to pay attention and really do something about iCloud
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and Core Data. I should also say that I know that there was a session
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or two about iCloud and Core Data at WWDC, but I’ve not yet watched them. So I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if that was just Apple groveling. I don’t know if perhaps in iOS 7 there’s going to be massive improvements.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I truly, honestly don’t know. But those of you who do have a developer account should go check it out, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should take my own advice on that issue.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve seen those sessions, and there is news to be had there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John One thing we didn’t mention to tie it back to the topics from last week’s show is, what if a news
⏹️ ▶️ John reader decided to use Dropbox Datastore as its sync service? Obviously you can’t
⏹️ ▶️ John use it to get your feeds for you and give you your content, but just keeping track of which things you read and haven’t read seems like
⏹️ ▶️ John a fairly ideal, you know, so you don’t want to make someone sign up for your own service. You want them to use
⏹️ ▶️ John the account that they already have that they pay for. You don’t have to run the servers. You just have to store some state information about last
⏹️ ▶️ John read state and what articles have marked red and favorited or whatever random metadata you want to keep. Like it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John basically, you know, you make up the data story that you want. You still might need a service to fetch
⏹️ ▶️ John all your feeds and do all that other stuff. But this other part of it for synchronizing
⏹️ ▶️ John which things are read and even just having the applications themselves fetch the feeds, I know that’s torturous.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in the old days, that’s what things used to do. And hell, that’s how I’m using that newswire now. It’s possible.
⏹️ ▶️ John This could be a piece of people’s reading API.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even more than that, what if you mix that with this new backgrounding stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where it could be a nice combination? I agree with what I think you’re about to say, Marco, that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know if that’s really sustainable, but it’s a very interesting approach.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, my big thing with it is that if you’re going to be having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed syncing and stuff like that, there’s a lot of advantages to running your own service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to do that. There’s not only things you can do in the background when the app isn’t running,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you can also — one of the biggest things with feeds in particular is parsing them and running into to people’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weird malformed feeds. Like, you know, if you can adjust your parsers on the server side
⏹️ ▶️ Marco immediately and have that apply to everything for everyone immediately instead of having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to like bundle them into an app update and ship the app update or have some kind of weird system where you have like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco server side definitions of what the app will interpret and then you have to add new things it can do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to accommodate some crazy new feed condition. There certainly are a lot of reasons with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco readers in particular to still have a service. Plus, now we have like 15,000 reader services. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s what I was thinking of, is that say you make a reader, right? And you want to let people pick from the umpteen other
⏹️ ▶️ John reader services that are gonna do the feed parsing for you and stuff like that, right? But you also want to add value in your application
⏹️ ▶️ John and you also want, say you have awesome ideas for features, but three out of the four feed
⏹️ ▶️ John things that you support for your, you know, aggregation and everything, don’t support those features. You need some layer on top
⏹️ ▶️ John of that to add your own, you know, enhancements. So like maybe one of them, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John three out of the four don’t support favoriting or something like that. Well, you can store information about your favorites. Where? Do you want to
⏹️ ▶️ John run a whole service? Yeah, you could, but if it’s simple enough, you could just use Dropbox as your back end. You know, Dropbox
⏹️ ▶️ John and iCloud are two possible options for key value storage or whatever, depending on how much data you have, to enhance
⏹️ ▶️ John the back end features, because otherwise you’re forced to do the lowest common denominator of all your
⏹️ ▶️ John services. So if one of them doesn’t support folders or something, you’re like, well, I guess I can’t support folders because where would
⏹️ ▶️ John I keep track of my folders? Well, I could keep track of them locally, but then it doesn’t synchronize. or it just synchronizes on iOS. If I use
⏹️ ▶️ John iCloud, what if I want to have a web version, blah, blah, blah? Well, there’s the Dropbox data store. That’s what I’m thinking, as
⏹️ ▶️ John an enhancement layer, so that your application can be better than the Umptyum services that it supports.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe. But then it also has the problem, I wrote about this with NetNewswire in particular. There’s the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem then of you only get that benefit if you use that application
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on all your devices that you browse feeds from. And so if you only get, like if NetNewswire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adds features that only work in NetNewsWire, then you have to use NetNewsWire
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on Mac and iPhone and iPad if you read feeds on all those places
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John to get those benefits.
⏹️ ▶️ John But if you use Feedbin as your back end, then you can use any iOS reader that supports Feedbin. And yeah, you won’t have those
⏹️ ▶️ John fancy features, but maybe you like a different reader better on the other platforms. And presumably you like it better, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John for whatever reasons. But you’re not tied, you’re not like, you know, we’re saying in the NetNewsWire article, you’re not actually tied to use the same reader everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ John because you’re the basics, the lowest common denominator syncs everywhere because everything uses Feedly or
⏹️ ▶️ John Feedbin or whatever your third party services sync the basics are. But on particular platforms, you have enhancements.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they do a good enough job with their clients, maybe you’ll want to use those enhancements on other platforms. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like basically you’re saying, okay, if I want to use a different readers and different platforms, that means
⏹️ ▶️ John that either the reader isn’t available for the platforms I want, or maybe I have different feature desires from one platform to the other. But
⏹️ ▶️ John if you have different feature desires, then you don’t care that those enhancements that you use on your Mac don’t work elsewhere. But if
⏹️ ▶️ John you do care about these awesome features in the Mac client, what you’ll want to use is the iOS version of that same client. So
⏹️ ▶️ John nothing is going to give you everything you want, which is don’t give
⏹️ ▶️ John me lowest common denominator features. Give me my choice of readers on every single platform and synchronize everything between
⏹️ ▶️ John them. That’s never going to happen because it’s just not. It’s not a solvable problem. So
⏹️ ▶️ John you have to pick and choose. And I think this type of solution where you use a common back end for
⏹️ ▶️ John lowest common denominator functionality, and then individual applications are free to enhance in the front end using some other
⏹️ ▶️ John service, that’s pretty close to ideal. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I guess. It causes weird issues in other ways, though. Like, for instance, let’s say BlackPixel
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ships NetNewswire, and it uses Feedbin or FeedWrangler or any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of these other services. Or it can use them. And then it does what you’re saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where it uses some other back end, whether it’s their own or Dropbox or whatever, to add bigger things
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to it. And then, let’s say Feedbin and FeedWrangler add to their own services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that capability, and then other clients add it. Like, does NetNewsWire then adopt that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because then they’re removing a competitive advantage they have over other feed readers by doing that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cause weird situations like that if people really do
⏹️ ▶️ John Once we get real numbers, though, they’ll be like, look, okay, I added support for these five backends, but in reality, 90%
⏹️ ▶️ John of my users use these two backends. So right away, I can eliminate those other backends from having to support them because it’s kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John a pain to support lots of different back ends. And of the two remaining features, actually some of the stuff I was implementing myself
⏹️ ▶️ John is available in both of them. I think all developers would be happy to say, oh great, well the two remaining ones that I support have this feature
⏹️ ▶️ John so I can shift it off onto them. But there’s always that tension between how much of the value
⏹️ ▶️ John of my application is reliant on the value of a third party service that I don’t control. And it’s great that you
⏹️ ▶️ John can have different clients in the same third party service, but you are just, you know, in some respects
⏹️ ▶️ John at the mercy of that third party service. Like if they take away a feature that you were relying
⏹️ ▶️ John on. So it’s good to have some place to, you know, either if they take away a feature, you can shift it to your backend.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if they add a feature, you can take it out of your backend. If it is now part of the new lowest common
⏹️ ▶️ John denominator that you’re starting to support. This is just an uncomfortable period now because people are just supporting as much as they possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John can. They don’t know how things are going to shake out, but I have to think there’s going to be, instead of seven of them, there’s going to be like
⏹️ ▶️ John two or three popular ones left standing after a year, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think we’re actually already seeing that shakeout happening now. I mean, I published my numbers earlier today
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what I could get. It seems like Feedly is by far the most popular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco alternative, mostly because it’s free. And I believe it’s one of the only ones that’s free.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco News Blur is second. I think News Blur is free, but then has premium features that you can optionally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco buy. But News Blur’s been around forever. It’s been around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way longer. I believe it was four years. It’s been around way longer than these other services have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And then FeedWrangler and Feedbin are basically neck and neck. They’re very similar
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that they’re both paid services run by very small teams. I believe they’re both run by
⏹️ ▶️ Marco single people. Or Feedbin might have two. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very small teams. And then there’s pretty much, after that, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a pretty big drop-off. Besides that handful, literally
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my list is feedly, news blur, net news wire, clients not even using a service,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feed wrangler and feed bin, and everything else is less than half of those. It drops off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pretty quickly. I think we’re already seeing that very few services
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are showing up. Now, that being said, I don’t yet have numbers for dig reader or AOL.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard a lot of people mentioning those. I don’t know how big they are, but we will see.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s probably room for new entrants in this next year as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Oh, sure. Because these are all-
⏹️ ▶️ John People who haven’t come out. These are the guys who scrambled to get something ready because the Google Reader was going away. And in
⏹️ ▶️ John general, they tend to be small people. There’s some bigger, slower moving entity entering this field. Who
⏹️ ▶️ John knows when they could land something that does this. Amazon could do it for all we know. They do crazy things all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I would say Feedly is not likely. Feedly is likely to burn
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out, I think, because they have a very large staff and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re free. And I assume they’re venture funded as a result of all these things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And generally companies that are on that trajectory don’t stay in it for the long haul.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chances are Feedly is going to either shut down or way more likely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco get bought by somebody and possibly dramatically change the service as a result
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a year or two later or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John even immediately. You have
⏹️ ▶️ John to monetize it at some point and any monetization is bound to be annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. So I’m guessing Feedly is going to explode quickly and then burn out. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco News Blur, Feed Wrangler, and Feedbin I think are all in it for the long haul.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And we’ll see what happens with them. And I’m sure it’s always going to be a free option from somebody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that gets popular, whether that’s Feedly or AOL or Digg. I don’t know. I don’t know what it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be like in a year. But I bet the smaller services that are run by individuals and have sustainable business models
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will last a long time, especially NewsBlur has already been around for like four years. So obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s a stable product, right? So we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I was pleased to see though that your subscriber numbers didn’t plummet
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by virtue of Google Reader going away. And I think we all kind of figured that would be the case,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially for a site like Marco.org.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco didn’t figure.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, I think that there was hope at the very least. And for Marco.org, which caters to nerds,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think you perhaps are seeing a kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of outside of the normal case situation wherein you’ll get
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a lot of subscribers moving to other platforms because we’re all nerds.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m curious to hear for something more mainstream, say like a CNN or something like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey how things change. Because that’s not catering to nerds, that’s catering
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to normal humans who may or may not care about
⏹️ ▶️ John only nerds use RSS.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s true. Well, I mean, that’s not really true. My wife uses RSS in a very odd,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey in a very different way.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John She’s nerdy by
⏹️ ▶️ John a transitive property of nerdiness.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey She is. But I mean, I know regular people that use it, but to your point, it’s very,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very frequently a nerd that even has any idea what RSS is, and it’s not very regular
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to hear a regular person talk about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I don’t know. I mean, these numbers sure are big. You know, I feel like RSS
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is one of those things that I’m sure it’s much more talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and maybe more actively used by nerds. And certainly, of course, there’s a whole class of applications that are powered
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by RSS and that use it in some other way, like Flipboard.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco those tend to do way better than anything that just uses RSS kind of raw the way we use it. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even if it’s just nerds, there’s a lot of nerds. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I learned this with my apps. Like, you know, with the magazine I tried to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be less nerdy. I tried to broaden past nerds. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not only was it harder than I expected, but I think that was actually a fatal mistake. I think think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it would have done a lot better if I would have just really nailed the nerd market.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, nerds are a massive market. And sure, we are the worst customers in the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco world because we’re picky and we’re needy and we are entitled
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we’re generally smart and we think we’re really smart and so we will tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you how stupid you are for your app doing a certain thing or not having a certain thing or breaking in a certain way.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, nerds Nerds are really a terrible market to serve. However, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are already in it by being a nerd, and you are familiar with it, and you can appease the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerd market in some small way, there sure are a lot of them. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve always been served very well by serving the nerd market. And whenever I’ve tried to break
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out of it, that’s when I’ve had trouble. And I’ve done it. Like, Instapaper was not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco used by all nerds. I mean, there were a lot, as my support email would show, there were a lot of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco regular non-nerd type people using Instapaper, and there probably still are. Actually I know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there still are. But you certainly can’t go wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you think something will only appeal to nerds, there’s still a lot of those. And you’re probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrong. It will still, it will probably, you know, one thing that nerds do, which is kind of condescending, and I do it too, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I’ve been guilty of this as well, is that We underestimate regular
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people’s skills or desires or abilities. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco certainly, there’s reasons to sometimes do that. When you’re designing an interface or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when you’re writing the text of a dialog box, you want to write it so that it will work no matter how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco smart or not smart or engaged or not engaged the user is. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you want to really be inclusive there and assume nothing about the user’s skills.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But outside of contexts like that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, we’ve got to give people credit. And a lot of times I’m very pleasantly surprised
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by what non-nerds are able to do, especially with some of the crazy crap that nerds build for themselves,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and we think no one else is going to use it, and then people do use it, and they figure it out. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco always very surprised by that. And so I think we should be careful to not say, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh, this is just for nerds, because a lot of times it isn’t.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Go ahead, John. I
⏹️ ▶️ John going to say, on RSS, it’s not so much that there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John anything inherently about RSS or what it does that is nerd-focused, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think as Marco probably pointed out in one of his things that he wrote about, it’s because it’s an
⏹️ ▶️ John open standard not owned and controlled by a single company that these other companies flee from
⏹️ ▶️ John it because Google wants you to use Google Plus and Facebook wants you to use Facebook. all these companies like, alright, so the web is
⏹️ ▶️ John great, and RSS is great, and all these protocols that no one owns is great. But what if we could do something similar,
⏹️ ▶️ John but in a proprietary manner on servers that we control the locks people into our platform, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, like, they all just want to do all these same things. And so you’ve seen just everything flee from RSS.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s not because people don’t want the services provided by that technology, nor do they even need to know what RSS exists. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you if all companies all embrace this the same way, they’ve essentially been forced to embrace web browsers,
⏹️ ▶️ John and every single device you owned came with a first party built by the vendor essential gotta
⏹️ ▶️ John be awesome news reading application people would love it people love to use it it’s not like they don’t like to
⏹️ ▶️ John read news but it’s because that we didn’t get past that critical threshold like we did with
⏹️ ▶️ John the web we’re like look if you buy device better have a web browser it better be a good web browser and I don’t care that you don’t control
⏹️ ▶️ John the web because we customers demand it right we never got there with RSS we seemed like we were close
⏹️ ▶️ John when Apple’s adding RSS to all of its things but if we had gotten there people would spend all day in news readers because it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a great way to consume content on the web. Like it’s not that the news reading itself
⏹️ ▶️ John is nerdy. It’s that the protocol didn’t break through that barrier. And now we’re kind of, you know, they successfully
⏹️ ▶️ John marginalized it and are trying to bring us all to their stupid proprietary platforms to do all the similar things.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, and the thing I was going to say, also going back a step, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the the interesting thing about nerds is that once you hit about age 25 or so, more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often than not, nerds are willing to spend some money. And they’re willing to spend some money on things that make them happy. Or
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at least that’s the nerds that I interact with, which granted are all typically Apple users
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and stereotypes are true for a reason. Or stereotypes are just stereotypes for a reason. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey most of my friends and family members have come to realize that a $3, $4, $5 app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is the cost of one of Marco’s beloved Starbucks coffees.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And they last a lot longer. So Marco catering to nerds is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey often a lucrative thing, because nerds are willing to spend some money on stuff that makes them happy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And that’s a good thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re likely to be gainfully employed as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John Presumably their nerdiness translates into some kind
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. Exactly. And Sam the Geek in the chat is offended that I said it’s only the over 25
⏹️ ▶️ Casey nerds, but that just a ballpark. Some of the younger nerds can also
⏹️ ▶️ John too. The younger nerds jailbreak and pirate everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Exactly. That’s what I thought. That
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very true. And on that bombshell… Alright, you want to wrap it up? I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we could. Alright, thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week, Audible and Transporter, and I’ll see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you guys next week! Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to begin, cause it was accidental, or it was Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to begin Cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the
⏹️ ▶️ John show notes at atp.fm And if you’re into
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and T. Marco Armin,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It’s accidental. They didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Accidental. Tech podcasts so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey long. Anyway. All right, so what are we doing about titles?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, I haven’t even looked yet. I was saving it. It’s like podcast dessert.
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t get a chance to add my two cents on the nailing the nerd market. The other big factor, which I think you probably talked about at some point
⏹️ ▶️ John and back to work. Building analysts that the reason you’re going to have
⏹️ ▶️ John an easier time being successful in the nerd market is because it’s so much easier to make an application used by people who are like you,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? Oh, definitely. There’s some stuff you can empathize, right? So because you are a nerd and because
⏹️ ▶️ John presumably software developers have nerdy tendencies, yes, it’s much easier to hit the nerd market
⏹️ ▶️ John with nerd applications written by a nerd who understands what nerds like and is a one-man shop, you know what I
⏹️ ▶️ John mean? So that’s also a big factor in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, absolutely. But, you know, a lot of times too, like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco nerds think of solutions to problems that most people don’t even think they have,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but a lot of times they do have that problem, and they appreciate the solution once they see it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s engineering. It’s solving a problem you didn’t know you had in a way that you don’t understand.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, exactly. Exactly. And so I do think there’s some value, and that’s one of the reasons why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot of nerd stuff does jump the gap into regular people because, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I mean some of the stuff like, you know, if you’re making some kind of web sync service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to synchronize your Twitter posts onto the newest social network,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so you know, you cross post between Twitter and app.net, that is a problem that normal people don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have and are unlikely to ever have. And so that is going to be limited really only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to nerds. Look at something like, If This Then That, IFTTT. Great site, great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea, almost definitely going to stay with nerds. It solves a whole
⏹️ ▶️ Marco class of problems and desires that mostly only nerds have.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But things like Twitter itself, that was something that started out pretty nerdy, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it solved a problem that a lot of people had, just at first was only known about by nerds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s the kind of thing that can break out.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s another thing you can do with the Dropbox API. Synchronize my direct message red state so I don’t have to use the Twitter official
⏹️ ▶️ John client, which now I added that feature, but only as my understanding for the official Twitter client, which I don’t want to use. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John if you want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco understand, they didn’t actually make an API for it. They used to add it
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, they just added it to the right. So then it’s like, well, fine. If I use Twitterific on both platforms,
⏹️ ▶️ John if they both talk to the Dropbox thing, they could also use iCloud KliiValue Storage, but that’s not cross-platform and has
⏹️ ▶️ John size limitations. So just use this. It’s really easy to do with the Dropbox data storage.
⏹️ ▶️ John have an identifier for the message you just store a big list of them if it’s fast and efficient you know go to town
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so with regard to titles I don’t think I care but I would recommend something that relates to Dropbox and not something that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey relates to iWatch so I don’t I don’t know what that would be but whatever
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty bored of iWatch already even though we don’t know about it yet even if it’s real
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or anything about like I’m bored of I’m bored of everyone including us speculating about it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just because like it like we just we have we have nothing to work on and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it could be something really cool but that’s really unlikely and the most likely thing is gonna be is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really boring I just like I just I’m so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco burnt out from people talking about it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yeah again that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco includes us and me even like you know I say this with full self-realization that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we just talked about it for like 25 minutes earlier but It’s just so…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t know. We have nothing to work on.
⏹️ ▶️ John be reinvigorated when it’s not a watch but it’s actually a necklace or perhaps an earring. Then we’ll have something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about. I cannot wait to hear the story of Marco getting his ear pierced in order to wear the
⏹️ ▶️ John The apple tongue stud.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh god, that’d be terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ John Think of the sensors they could get in there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, holy crap. I’m uncomfortable. Oh, man. Hey,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so in random other news, since Marco came, Marco and his family came to visit this weekend, I’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Casey his new app. And it is glorious.
⏹️ ▶️ John The new new one or the practice new one?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The practice new one.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey honest, I’m just trolling the chat room right now because they were begging for information about it. I’m not going to give them
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco any. Well, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco underscore David Smith saw it too. Are
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John you releasing
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s fun, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s a waiting approval. It is officially shipped to Apple, but it’s a waiting approval.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s been about eight days, so it’s not totally unreasonable. I can tell
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from my Tapstream analytics, I’m trying Tapstream for the first time here, previous sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of my site, Disclosure, I can tell from their analytics that there have not been any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new launches of the app since I submitted it. So as far as I can tell, it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like hitting some wall that somebody has to ask someone about. It’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting in the queue. So we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey see. That’s interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco should write
⏹️ ▶️ John a Mac app because I keep hearing people getting their Mac apps through in like one day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know, it’s crazy. Well, I mean, but that’s such a roller coaster. Last year, it was like 45 days
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or something. It was ridiculous. So yeah, at
⏹️ ▶️ Marco least iOS is fairly consistent. It’s like, iOS is pretty much always 6-8 days.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s very rarely outside of those bounds, and when it is, not by much.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So we will see. But, yeah, I mean, I’m just waiting for that to be approved, and then I actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just today restarted work on the other big app that’ll be out this fall, I hope.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s funny, I’ve decided that I’m going to require iOS 7 for the new one, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the question is then when do you release that? it’s great to get it out there early, but the earlier
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you get it out there, the fewer people can actually use it. And the more you’re competing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for press attention and Apple features, if you’re trying to get out there the week of iOS 7’s
⏹️ ▶️ John I think you want to be out on launch. You definitely want to be out on launch. I know all the downsides,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the downsides all have nothing to do with the number of sales you’re getting and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John As soon as people get an iOS 7 device, they’re going to want to put applications
⏹️ ▶️ John on it that that show off iOS 7 and that are sort of iOS 7 savvy, to use the old system 7
⏹️ ▶️ John term, and you want yours to be one of those things. Because that’s, I think that’s a big foot
⏹️ ▶️ John in the door. If you think about all the people who are like that on day one on the iPad, or day one on the iPhone app
⏹️ ▶️ John store, I think that’s a huge advantage.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that’s true, that might work. Yeah, I’ll have to see. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a nightmare scramble to do that. Right. And you end up shipping something that is not in the state and perhaps that you would want to ship it,
⏹️ ▶️ John but I still think like, I mean, you’re gonna work on the application, It’s going to improve, even if that first version
⏹️ ▶️ John isn’t. People are just going to go through, like, I just want to buy, like, like, in the iPad launch, I’ve got a new iPad. Which applications
⏹️ ▶️ John are iPad savvy? Put them on here.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I really do wonder also, though, how many people are going to hold off upgrading on 7 because it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so different. And certainly there’s going to be a lot of backlash when it launches from people who want things back the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco old way. And, and so I wonder, like, I don’t think it’s going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to be a big delay for people, but I bet there will be something. I bet we’ll hear it. Every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time there’s a new iPhone or iOS release, but especially a new iPhone release, every time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s some kind of stupid Consumer Reports scandal about some part of it that everyone doesn’t like, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s gonna be iOS 7 this fall. I think that’s gonna be the big Apple scandal, is like, oh my god, nobody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco likes iOS 7 and no one can figure out how to use it, even though it takes a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco minute to get used to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but all the five million people who buy the iPhone 5S or whatever the hell in the holiday season,
⏹️ ▶️ John people are gonna have to be stuck with iOS 7 and they’ll buy your application.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah well I’m probably say this for next show I am curious to talk about Apple’s fall lineup
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah let’s save that for next show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco right. Because there this looks like there’s a lot coming and possibly like all in the same month.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If I were you John I would maybe get your review done for September.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know all about it. I
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey know all about it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey To continue darting around between topics, Ice Vix from a 16-year-old perspective says,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a 16-year-old perspective, most kids seem to like it except for the UI change, the main change,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and there are very few that don’t like it. So what is there that one would like that isn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the UI change? Because no normal 16-year-old has any idea what the hell.
⏹️ ▶️ John But 16-year-olds don’t write articles. It’s grumpy old men who
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey write articles in those stupid magazines
⏹️ ▶️ John that are like, well, my phone changed and everything’s all white. Read the text cuz it’s too thin and there’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John be legitimate some complaints mixed in with the fear of change mixed in with the blah Blah blah, but I don’t know if the back. I
⏹️ ▶️ John think hopefully we’re getting through all the backlash now and By the time it ships
⏹️ ▶️ John like well, we used to it’s alright
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you do you want to pick a title? Oh, you know I one thing I do like which John mentioned very quickly in passing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the transitive property of nerdiness Is that too
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey long? I like it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I do like that as well.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should google that to make sure I use the right word
⏹️ ▶️ John About googling embarrassing questions much better to google the answers Okay, then to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m pretty sure that’s correct.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I’m pretty sure it’s correct too, but this is exactly the type of thing Yeah, I’m almost a hundred percent certain. It’s correct. And yet the
⏹️ ▶️ John Internet is sitting there saying why don’t you just ask me? I’ll have the actual answer Like why not why
⏹️ ▶️ John not double-check that’s why writing this friggin review takes forever because every single thing I write in there I’m like, you know, let me check
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco You find out
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re you’re on a five-minute diversion to check some fact that you were like ninety nine point nine percent sure is Correct, but you have to prove
⏹️ ▶️ John it before you can go on with the sentence
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have you ever been wrong about anything ever?
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what kills me other reviews like I look at you know
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey All I see is the one
⏹️ ▶️ John the one fact that I didn’t check that I got wrong Like that you know the name of this machine
⏹️ ▶️ John they released that date of this thing or the price is off by a dollar Because I didn’t check it because I was just going by memory,
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s just kills me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Here here’s the problem John Here’s the problem you have is that that retina MacBook Pro
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that showed up in geekbench a few days ago was running Mavericks Do you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see why that’s a problem?
⏹️ ▶️ John When they say fall I try to be ready by the first day of fall I got no dummy I know how this
⏹️ ▶️ John thing goes. I don’t assume it’s going to be the middle or end of fall. I assume it’s going to be in the first day of fall, and that’s what I’m still shooting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m thinking we have two big events. We have an iOS event and we have a Mac event.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m thinking those are separate events. The iOS event happens later, more likely November,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because iOS 7 needs a lot of time. iOS 7 is nowhere near done. However, I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the Mac event might happen as early as September and that Mavericks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes out then along with the Mac Pro, new Retina
⏹️ ▶️ Marco MacBook Pros, and maybe an iMac refresh.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’ll delay the Mac Pro because like well the Retina screens aren’t ready so you know the Mac Pro will have
⏹️ ▶️ John more to say about that later in the year because back to the old they can’t resist it’s like you know what screw those
⏹️ ▶️ John Mac Pros, we’ll get out in the fall, December 19th, well you know Because like,
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re holding the Mac Pro, we all hope they’re holding it with some monitors too. So, even if they’re not, they’ll just
⏹️ ▶️ John be like, you know what, screw the Mac Pro. That one’s going to wait. We got to hire all those Americans to build it or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco something. Well, the Mac Pro right now, they can’t release it now because Intel hasn’t released those
⏹️ ▶️ Marco CPUs yet, presumably in volume. Like, you know, the official delivery date of those CPUs is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco September. And it’s the same delivery date for many of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the Haswell parts in volume, I believe. I’m not sure on that part, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know obviously they’re holding back the Retina MacBook Pro for some reason.
⏹️ ▶️ John The Mac Pro also has to wait to Mavericks. All these new Macs have to wait for Mavericks. Like they’re not gonna bother they’re not gonna bother getting
⏹️ ▶️ John them to work correctly with with Mountain Line because there’s no big rush in the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Like people have
⏹️ ▶️ John waited so long already what’s the big deal and you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know. Right, same thing with with the Retinas but that also means there we’re probably not talking November
⏹️ ▶️ Marco here we’re probably talking September.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I know. I’m planning on it. I’m trying to get it done.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, October’s after September, last I checked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John I know, but you never know,
⏹️ ▶️ John because the wild card is maybe it’s such a mad scramble for iOS 7, which is do or
⏹️ ▶️ John die, that they pull everybody off everything and it’s like, everyone just get iOS 7 done and
⏹️ ▶️ John then go back to what you were doing and then Mavericks get delayed just due to sheer neglect, because
⏹️ ▶️ John everyone was pulled off to work on iOS 7, because they they have like that is far from done and they have to get that done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah. Well, honestly, I think they’re just gonna ship whatever the hell they have, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in mid-November or whatever it is, like, they’re just gonna ship it. Period. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John whatever they have at that point, that’s what 7.0.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can do that with iOS 6 and 5 where they just cut off features, but like, they can’t have a disaster where everyone gets
⏹️ ▶️ John their phones on Christmas morning and there’s some fatal bug that like, they just can’t have that. It’s a problem. So they
⏹️ ▶️ John have to, they have to ship what they have, but they also have to make sure that what they have is
⏹️ ▶️ John stable, like does not have any fatal flaws, and that’s really hard to do when you’re making a mad scramble
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like this. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re already almost to that point, though. Like, between betas two, I didn’t use beta one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much, but between beta two and three, there’s already a significant reduction in reboots.
⏹️ ▶️ John Reduction in reboots is not.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, with three, I haven’t seen one. With two, I would see about one a day. With three, I haven’t seen any yet.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I’ve only had it for a few days so
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not burning your battery, it’s not failing to sync something. So many things, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco It’s so much easier when you’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, honestly, most of the bugs that remain in iOS 7 right now are just minor UI
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problems. Like, oh, this label disappears, or the status bar appears rotated
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the wrong way on the screen. It’s minor UI quirks that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, they suck, and they’re definitely bugs, but if they ship with that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it wouldn’t be the end of the world.
⏹️ ▶️ John No data loss, no crashes, no phone reboots, and no failure to
⏹️ ▶️ John do some essential function like convey text messages or synchronize something
⏹️ ▶️ John or get mail or skipping mail messages.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have no doubts that they’ll be able to get something out there that is stable and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco doesn’t have major bugs like that by November. I suspect
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that 7.0 is going to have still some weird little edge case UI bugs, just because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there are so many new UIs and so many of them are not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quite baked yet. But the solid, like, you know, like the kernel is fine. I’m sure like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Springboard will be pretty much fine. You know, like, all the really important stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the common stuff, the underlying stuff, that’ll all I think be fine by November because it’s already
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and plus, I mean, everything I’ve read on Twitter says that Mavericks is good to go
⏹️ ▶️ Casey immediately, you know, that they’re ready. So even if there’s a grant, well, which means John, you’re fine.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t say that. When I come back to my Mavericks laptop, it is after a night, I
⏹️ ▶️ John put it to sleep. I put the Mac laptop to sleep and I go to bed and come back down in the morning and the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John is usually awake, fans on, but totally hard hung. So maybe it’s