25: Thrustmaster Joystick
09 Aug 2013Marco’s new-new-new app and distractions, measuring desktop productivity, Fast Text and Bugshot sales, iOS 7’s UI longevity, Chrome’s plaintext passwords, lakes, and an epic rant on Minecraft mods.
Episode Description:
- Marco's new-new-new app for aligning double-ender podcast tracks.
- Economic considerations and options for releasing an app that's extremely helpful to a very small number of people.
- Why Marco has been procrastinating from the big app by making small apps.
- Good app names as motivation.
- Desktop Twitter distraction and measuring desktop productivity with RescueTime.
- Casey's sales of Fast Text since last week's promotion, Marco's sales of Bugshot, and the potential economic upside of promotion for niche apps.
- The fashion longevity of iOS 7's default UI.
- Chrome's controversial plaintext-password feature and Chrome security leader Justin Schuh's defense of the design.
- Lakes.
- An epic, half-hour Siracusa rant on the state of finding and installing Minecraft mods.
- Kali.
- caseyrumors: Is this the future of Fast Text?
Sponsored by:
- 23andMe: Order your 23andMe DNA kit today for just $99.
- Squarespace: Everything you need to create an exceptional website. Use promo code ATP8 for 10% off.
Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Are we sure we have John?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Mm-hmm. Oh, I almost forgot how to do this. It’s been so long since we recorded last.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. I know. Although this last time was John’s fault.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You’re all recording, right? We’re remembering that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You forgot once for like 10 minutes and you’re never going to live it down.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I know. I know. That’s why we have redundant systems, my friend. That’s why we have redundant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m looking forward to editing this episode. This is going to be the first one that I get to use my automatic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco drift corrector and a liner for triple ender recordings. I’m going to release
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing at some point. I have it to a handful of beta testers right now just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to make sure it works on more than just my computer and more than just our tracks from the three of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco us for this one show.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now when you say release it, do you mean release it like the FaceTime spec or do you mean actually release it like second crack?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s a good question. So, backing up a second,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what this tool is, I guess this is going to become a quick topic, so I’ll try to make it quick because it isn’t that interesting.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of the, so when you record a podcast like this, typically people talk to each other over
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Skype and then the way you can record is you can either have everybody record their own microphone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco input that records just them and then they all send the files to somebody who edits them together and lines them all up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. Or you can have one person just record everybody through
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Skype. And the problem with that is like I’m sure everyone’s heard on other shows where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if somebody’s Skype connection gets a little bit slow for a few minutes then they start either breaking up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or their voice gets noticeably worse quality or problems like that. Now,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the other way of doing it where everyone records their own thing and sends the files to somebody to line up, one
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem is that lining them up kind of sucks. know it’s it’s not a time-consuming thing you know it you might take
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five or ten minutes to line them up it’s annoying and it’s tedious but it’s not that time-consuming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the the bigger problem that a lot of people face is drift and that’s that when you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco somebody’s microphone recording at you know 44,100 Hertz very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very slight inaccuracies or differences and how that’s measured between different hardware
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different sound cards and computers and such, very, very slight inaccuracies will over time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco add up so that over the course of like a 90 minute recording, one person might be aligned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco perfectly at the beginning, but at the end be off by like a second and a half. And that starts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco making the conversation sound weird and just not flow right. And so you can either not correct
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it, which has kind of bad output, or you can try to periodically go through and like, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, every 10, 20 minutes or whatever, go through and realign the tracks, like cut them at a convenient point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then shift somebody over to correct for their drift. It’s not great. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco most people, in fact, Dan Benjamin very famously avoids this kind of workflow for the 5x5 shows
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because he does so many shows, he has to get them out quickly. Like, he can’t afford for him or an
⏹️ ▶️ Marco editor to take an extra 45 minutes editing each show for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what ends up being a difference that a lot of people don’t care about. But I do care about that difference.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so we’ve always done our shows, both neutral and this, with the triple-ender
⏹️ ▶️ Marco method, which is everybody records their end and sends me the files and line them up. And Drift isn’t too bad, because we all have good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco computers. But it’s still like, Casey has the worst, actually. Sorry, Casey.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s all right. I’m not on a fancy-pants Mac Pro like you two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe that’s why you buy the Mac Pro.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not on a computer from 2008.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So anyway, I made a little command line tool basically to solve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this problem for myself. And it just analyzes the sound and not only
⏹️ ▶️ Marco automatically lines the tracks up, but also corrects the drift in a nice, even way throughout the course
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the whole file. So it’s pretty much exactly perfect output of what you want, in theory, of course. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m sure it doesn’t work every time, but we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ John How is it fixing the drift? Is it stretching out the sound? Or is it doing a cut at places where there’s silence
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it is adjusting for silence so it’s like you know if it detects silence and then it adds or removes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco samples as necessary to to get back on track so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyway so this this tool it’s extremely useful to a very small
⏹️ ▶️ Marco number of people and so we’re thinking about like okay I do want to release it obviously
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know I’m not gonna like keep this for myself and have ATP be the only podcast that sounds this good like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and it doesn’t doesn’t get out of sync. That obviously is not that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco productive of a thing to try to do and try to be. And so I could also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give it away for free, which, you know, then I don’t really see much of an upside.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or I can charge money for it. And the problem with that is, like, if you charge
⏹️ ▶️ Marco money for this, I’m sure I could sell this for like 50 bucks, maybe even 100
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bucks to like 40 people. And that’s about it, like at most.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There aren’t that many people who edit shows in this way, and of all the ones that do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what percentage of them would actually ever hear about this and then be willing to buy it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, you know, the audience for this is probably really small. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought about it, and I’m also thinking, okay, so let’s say I sell it for X, and I make X dollars
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at most from it, you know, in theory. What’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco my possible upside here? And it turned out to be I might make a few thousand
⏹️ ▶️ Marco dollars, ever, for the course of the life of this app. And I’m like, if I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having people pay me a good amount of money for this, they’re going to expect some level of support
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on that. And do I really want to get in the business of supporting this little tiny app for 50
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people for not that much money in the grand scheme of things for the next two years years that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re going to expect to be able to use it at least. Sounds like crap, you know, it doesn’t sound like a very good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco idea. So I decided instead,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it’s ready to be released, I’m going to release it for free. I don’t think I’m going to open source it quite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yet, I’ll think about that, that’s a whole other discussion. I’m probably going to release it for free,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but with the condition that if you use it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you have any shows that you edit with it that have sponsorships at all, I would like a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco quick little thanks mention. And I’m going to release it when I release my next product.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so the thanks mention will be for that. So I’ll kind of, this is my, this is all my working theory.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t fully decided on this yet, but I think that’s the best idea because it’s free. So it keeps,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it keeps the expectations on me low and the commitment to my time low.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I still see some upside and potentially a more valuable upside than I would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I tried to like charge 50 bucks for the thing and sell it to 40 people.
⏹️ ▶️ John Sounds like a completely unenforceable system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. Well, yeah, it wouldn’t be like, you know, I’m not gonna let go, threaten to sue people who don’t, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give me a plug in their podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John You’ll never know. You’ll
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never know unless you’re watermarking their files. No, and that’s again, this is like all down
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rabbit hole of like detecting piracy and everything. It’s so not worth it. It’s so, so not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worth it. So anyway, I believe that’s pretty much all I have to say
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about that topic. I don’t know, is there anything more to say about it?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Only that it seems like you’re doing an excellent job of procrastinating from doing what is arguably your actual
⏹️ ▶️ Casey job, which is your next big app.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Yeah, seriously. Between
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Bugshot and ATP and this, you’re doing a very good job of not doing your job.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. Well, the next app is that he just has to write before he can get back to what he was doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, now I’m back to the big app. I mean, and I’ve been on it for like a nice solid week and a half or so, and it’s been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great. But, one of the, and this is, I mean, I don’t know how much you want to make this the Marco Show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, but basically the quick version is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I got discouraged working on the big app for a while. And part of it was just because I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tired and lazy and burnt out from like big coding jobs. Part of it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I just wasn’t really applying myself very well and wasn’t really, my discipline was pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco weak for a lot of the summer. And part of it was that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the name I had chosen for the new big app ended up having a trademark
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem. And I could either figure out licensing of that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or use the trademark and spend a lot of money doing that maybe or pick
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a different name. And so I looked at all my options. I had to call a bunch of lawyers and figure out what to do. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was just, it was very discouraging to have to be dealing with this. And I mentioned this on Twitter, and a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot of people chimed in saying they feel the same way. If I don’t have a good name for something, I generally have a hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco time working on it. Like, to me, it gives it a personality, or it helps motivate me
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see the end goal of the name of product, you know, name of thing out there. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is an app that has a web component, so I had to do things like get SSL certificates for the domain name. I already had the domain name that I wanted
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and everything. So it was like I had all this kind of work and and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and hopes invested in this name and then for the possibility of not have not being able to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use it and then I brainstormed new names and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John I came up with what’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John what’s the name of the audio aligner sidetrack why
⏹️ ▶️ John you didn’t focus group that one huh
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it again it’s it’s gonna be used by like 40 people who cares
⏹️ ▶️ John you know I’m saying And like, if you didn’t have a name for that one, would you, the same type deal, would you have not felt motivated to
⏹️ ▶️ John complete it, just left it as like a, you know, single purpose tool for yourself, but once it has a name, then it can be a thing?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, for most of its development, it was called Audio Align, but I thought that was a stupid name, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so kind of at the last minute, I changed it. For that, it was less important to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have a great name up front, because it’s really like a utility. It’s like, you know, like, I don’t have great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco names. I have a shell script that imports the files off of my AVCHD camcorder,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because AVCHD files are stupid and nothing supports them. So I wrote a shell script forever ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that imports them and converts them into something useful. And that is called
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Import Videos from Sony Camcorder Dutch. So it’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey name. Well, you’re scratching your own itch or you’re solving a problem. And when you’re solving a concrete
⏹️ ▶️ Casey problem, especially a smaller one, and you’re not intending to make money off of it. I don’t see that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as being the same as writing this new big app, which is perhaps solving
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a problem for yourself, but it’s also solving a problem hopefully for many, many, many other people, which totally changes your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. And so that’s why I wanted—and I had such
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a great name, and I was working on it. I looked up the first classes I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco wrote for this new big app. I wrote last October. Like, I’ve been thinking about this for a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco long time. Before I sold Instapaper, shortly after I started the magazine, I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been thinking about doing this for a while. And I made some prototypes of some of the functionality way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco back then. I mean, I’ve been doing this for a long time. And I had this name in mind for most of that time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so, to not be able to use it, or to potentially have a big problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with using it, suddenly, after months of loving it, was very discouraging.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I know it’s a terrible excuse for not working on it very much for like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two months It’s a horrible excuse, but it really did demotivate
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me And I was certainly distracted by you know by bug shot and by sidetrack
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you know they’re like I had other distractions but the main thing was like a combination of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco me being being very lazy this summer and and you just having a hard time getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going on things and and the discouragement from the naming issue. But the good thing is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I now have two names. I have the original name, and I have a new one I can use
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if I need to. And I’m still negotiating the trademark to get the original one that I want. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ll see how those negotiations go. But,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if that falls apart, I have another name that I can use. I’d rather not, but I can.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve forgotten what the original name was. I am it to me. So you can remind me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the original over the second one. I did not care for the second one at all
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, and the poor should really listen. I know this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey painful. This is like trolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco constant inside jokes Oh, man, this is anyway, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I had to make sure I tested it’s the correct chat room
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That would have been funny
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, I basically so yeah, that’s that’s what I’ve been doing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and And recently, I don’t know if this really matters, I did a couple days ago decide to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco delete my desktop Twitter client, an app.net client.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And, because I realized, have I mentioned RescueTime here yet? I mentioned it somewhere recently.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One of my many podcasts, no, I don’t know. I’ve been using RescueTime, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one of the great things I picked up from one of Merlin’s many tools discussions from the last few years
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in which he has discussed every single productivity tool ever released or that could be released or that might be released for the Mac.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I picked up Rescue Time about six months ago. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so what it does, it sits, I think it’s a kernel level thing, it’s some kind of creepy
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deeply integrated thing in your computer. And it also sends all the stuff to a web service,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which makes it even more creepy. And I wish it was just a local app, but it’s not. So what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does is it records how much time you spend in every app. And if you give it permission, it will also
⏹️ ▶️ Marco record what domain names you’re browsing in web browsers. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it basically gives you, every week, it sends you an email saying here
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is how you spent your time. Here’s how many hours you’ve had on the computer. And here’s how
⏹️ ▶️ Marco many hours you spent and what percentage of the time that is on things that are work, things that aren’t work, and you can customize what that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco means. But it has pretty good defaults for you know Xcode is work for most people whereas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know Tweetbot is not work for most people and stuff like that and they can break down by website like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know maybe the New York Times might be work Facebook probably isn’t you know stuff like that so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it showed me over the last few months that you know I was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason I installed this was I was feeling like I wasn’t getting enough work time in every week and I didn’t know why
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it turns out that I was getting enough work time most of the time you know there are some weeks where it was busy,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, family stuff, but you know, for the most part I was getting enough work time. And the biggest problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was that I was just not spending the time well. And I was spending something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like four hours a week out of my like, you know, 36 to 50 work
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hours a week. I was spending about four of those in TweetBot. And that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco scary. I mean, do you
⏹️ ▶️ John guys use desktop Twitter clients? That’s just efficient multitasking though, isn’t it? You’re like Whenever you’re in whenever
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re in IO wait because something is compiling or tests are running or whatever then you want to you know
⏹️ ▶️ John Not leave the CPU cores idle So you can glance and read three tweets and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John in your tests to finish or your code is compiled You finally hit that stupid breakpoint or you know, that’s how I use
⏹️ ▶️ John Twitter all day. So I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think the total amount would bother me Maybe if I saw a graph and it’s all like continuous
⏹️ ▶️ John periods of time where I’m just using Twitter But I think it would be a little tiny slices
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, the problem was that months ago
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I kind of gave up on reading my whole timeline. Like I used to be a completionist
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in how I read both my Twitter timeline and my Tumblr dashboard back when I used Tumblr more. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would read everything. I would have to like quote catch up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I still do that with mentions but I no longer do that for the main timeline. And I haven’t done there for the main timeline in months.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I gave up months ago.
⏹️ ▶️ John You should just unfollow people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well yeah there’s a lot of people I have to follow like for political reasons stuff like that. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John know that whole deal.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anyone. Well anyway so I haven’t even been following the main timeline reliably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and yet I was still spending the same amount of time on it. I was still spending like four hours. I’m like what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco am I doing? And I think what I was doing was just like clicking around because like you know with the streaming
⏹️ ▶️ Marco API, you can get one at reply and something lights up somewhere. And so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s something new to read. And I have a good amount of followers now, so there’s something new to read almost all the time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I can click around. And so it was a very, very large number
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of context switches, basically. And I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco realized that when I was not running TweetBot, I was getting way more done.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And so I also realized that if I deleted it, because if I like I try just quitting it I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have the self-control to keep it quit it’s it’s like automatic I can I just launch it and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know and I and it’s like passive I don’t even realize I’m doing it and
⏹️ ▶️ John that bother you that you had to delete it instead of just choosing not to launch it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco oh yeah of course I would love to have the kind of self-control where I can just say you know what I can’t do but the reason I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco deleted it was because I had like six accounts configured in there if I ever want to reinstall it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a giant pain in the butt. So I’m probably not going to do it. And so I still have it on my laptop.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I figured, you know, if I need a desktop Twitter experience, like I did
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was announcing that this show was recording live, it’s a big thing where I publish it on both
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app.net and Twitter, and then I retweet it into my main accounts from those services to get more people. So,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, it helps to have a desktop client for that. So I figure I’ll keep it on the laptop, and if I ever really need to do it a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot, I’ll just keep the laptop open on my desk as the second computer, but my main computer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not have that on it, and so most of the time, there is not only is the temptation gone, but the ability
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to even read it is gone, which helps me because I don’t have any self-control. So I have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco found in the last few days, it really has been a dramatic improvement. I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if it’s, you know, it could just be temporary, you know, like, like, you know, when you lose three pounds on the very first day of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a diet, and you think every day is going to be like that. It could just be temporary, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a massive difference so far. I’ve gotten so much done in the last few days on the main big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app because I’m not using Tweetbot on the desktop. This is the first time
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since I’ve started using Twitter at all that I haven’t had a desktop Twitter client open on a regular basis.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have any audible alerts or push notifications on your phone?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, no, of course not. I never have that that I’ve never died I’ve never gotten into that because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I used to run servers and so I would I would like reserve Audible alerts for things that were really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco potentially important. So like I don’t have anything send me push notifications for any reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s just like you know, and so I would sleep back when I ran servers. I would sleep with my phone Very
⏹️ ▶️ Marco close to my head with the speaker turn all the way up So that if something beep in the middle of the night, I would hear it and wake
⏹️ ▶️ Marco up and go deal with it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. I just asked because I didn’t know if perhaps you would hear your phone chirping in the background
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and find yourself reaching over for your phone to figure out what was being talked about. I guess that’s not really possible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for either of you guys because you have a gazillion followers, although I just crossed 3,000. Nice. Who’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey awesome now? No, not really. But anyway, I guess for you guys it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey be hard to have those sorts of things turned on. I have the push notifications on for TweetBot
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on my phone, but I do not have sounds on because I was finding that I am barely popular enough
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that I get enough audible notifications that it That it’s distracting But I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey had visions of you perhaps having these audible notifications on and then reaching over for your phone every five minutes
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then negating the point of not having tweetbot on your Mac at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, it really I mean, I don’t I don’t like using on my phone Honestly, I mean like I would rather I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take out my laptop and I’m like on the couch You’re lying in bed before going to sleep and like which I know is horrible for other reasons but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I’d rather like catch up on Twitter then. Like I’d rather catch up on Twitter occasionally on a laptop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than all day on a phone.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You wanna talk about something that’s awesome?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Let’s do that. Our first sponsor this week is a return sponsor. It’s 23andMe,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco again, because they are that awesome. So they give you the tools to better understand how your
⏹️ ▶️ Marco genes may impact your health. So this could help you or your doctor find health areas to keep an eye
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on, or just tell you some really cool stuff about genealogy and your genetics. So they have over 240 personalized
⏹️ ▶️ Marco health, trait, and ancestry reports. So what they do is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they send you a DNA kit. It’s only $99. You sign up, you get a DNA kit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You give them a saliva sample, so you don’t have to cut a hole in your finger. It’s just saliva.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Give them a saliva sample, send it back to them, and they give you a full report
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on lots of interesting things about your DNA as they profile it. They have over a quarter million members,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which makes them the largest ancestry service in the world for DNA. And so they give you genetic
⏹️ ▶️ Marco information. Here’s the cool thing. You can figure out if you’re related to any celebrities, it’ll tell you that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco If you have that gene that we talked about last time that makes you have smelly asparagus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pee, they can tell you that. Or whether you like cilantro or not, they can tell you that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All sorts of fun stuff you can learn from your DNA. Plus, it can give you things like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how how closely are you related to neanderthals and how quickly do you metabolize coffee
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s all sorts of things they can tell you and it’s meant it’s a fantastic service
⏹️ ▶️ Marco once again 23andme $99 to give you this full DNA analysis
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of interesting characteristics you have interesting ancestors you might have it’s really really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco cool so go to 23andme.com slash ATP
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for our show It’s 23andme.com slash ATP. Thanks a lot to them for sponsoring
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you want to hear a little bit about FastText?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah. So yeah, go on. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So last episode, which was number 24, I believe, we talked a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Casey about my app, FastText, which was never designed to be a money-making enterprise. It was just kind of one
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of those things where I did it to prove to myself that I could. And I think because it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was an app that nobody had heard of, And then we mentioned it, or actually more than just mentioned it, talked about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it on ATP, which is a reasonably well-listened-to podcast.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It has accidentally, ha-ha, become an interesting study in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what publicity does or does not do. So I did a little bit of homework for the Accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Tech podcast before the podcast. And according to,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is it, App Annie? Is that right? I always forget the name of the thing. According to App Annie, which apparently I enabled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on October 24th of 2011, I had 206 downloads between then and July 23rd.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And on July 23rd, which I’m guessing is around the time that we recorded that episode,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I had 11 downloads. And then I had not many,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, 2, 3, 0, 2, 0, 0, 0, 1, which is about an average week and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a half or whatever that is, week of fast text downloads. Then on the day of the release of ATP,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which was either August 1st or August 2nd, somewhere around there, I had 30 downloads, 69 downloads, 31 downloads, 15, 15, and yesterday was 6.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Or maybe it was the day before yesterday. So all told,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey between October 24th of 2011 and July 23rd of this year, I had,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey according to App Annie, 206 downloads. And between July 23rd and tonight,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey which is August 7th, I’ve had 185. So I’ve almost doubled
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the amount of downloads that I’ve had in the entirety of FastText’s existence. And I believe I initially
⏹️ ▶️ Casey put it on the App Store. It was whenever iOS 4 came out, which I think was late-ish 2011.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that said, what was really interesting to me about this was that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey once I get my next check from Apple, if I crunch this math properly,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey FastText will actually be in the green, which is really exciting. So
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even if you consider the three times $99 that I paid for the Apple Developer account, if you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey consider the $40 I paid for Opacity Express, which is a great app that enabled a completely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey non-artistic person to make an icon that’s terrible but a lot better than it otherwise would have been,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey all that’s told, a fast text should be in the black soon. So that’s very exciting. So thank you to everyone who bought it.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And thank you to the people who have sent unsolicited icon updates. There have been only a handful.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey There’s one that I actually really, really liked, and I apologize because I don’t have the gentleman’s name in front of me that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey did it. So I might end up using that for whenever I do an update for iOS 7. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the point I’m driving at is, we’re a podcast that has tens of thousands of listeners.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And even despite that, having a whole segment about
⏹️ ▶️ Casey my app, quote unquote, only led to 200 downloads. And don’t take that as a complaint.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s not a bad thing at all. thankful for all, almost 200 of them. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the point I’m driving at is, it, even that much exposure, which, not to be self-righteous,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but I think that that was a pretty decent set of expos, it was pretty high exposure, it didn’t lead
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to an overwhelming amount of sales. And I don’t know if it’s because the app is kind of silly, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, I, I, I, for whatever the reason, it didn’t lead to a lot, and that’s, I just found that to be
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting, so I don’t know if you guys have any thoughts on that, and if not, we can talk about Minecraft, but just
⏹️ ▶️ John It has to be a product that people want to buy. Like, a lot of the stuff for
⏹️ ▶️ John the fast texting, if people weren’t in the market for a way to send text very quickly, they may have bought it just, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, to make you feel better.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Because that was
⏹️ ▶️ John the gist of the whole conversation, right? So, you know, if, and fast text
⏹️ ▶️ John actually has a reasonable purpose, but you could go even narrower, like, actually even
⏹️ ▶️ John for text, but at this point, people probably have a system of how they send text or whatever. So maybe in the early days of the iPhone, it would
⏹️ ▶️ John have caught on. But if you have some application that has a very narrow possible
⏹️ ▶️ John audience of people who want to do this thing, no amount of publicity is going to make 5%
⏹️ ▶️ John of the people who have iPhones buy it. It’s never going to happen. And so awareness is one thing. Whereas if you
⏹️ ▶️ John have an application that lets you take
⏹️ ▶️ John pictures and put filters on it, that’s a pretty crowded market. But a lot of people could potentially do that. And if they’ve never heard
⏹️ ▶️ John of you, but they’ve heard of Instagram, they’re gonna get Instagram. If they’ve never, you know, if Hipstamatic, if no one had ever heard
⏹️ ▶️ John of it, no one would ever buy it, even though it’s a great application, you know. So you have to get the word out somewhere. So if you have an application
⏹️ ▶️ John with broad appeal, I think publicity is good, but it’s like, look, the only reason people aren’t buying this is because they don’t even know it exists.
⏹️ ▶️ John They don’t know to search for it. We have a weird name. How can they distinguish it from all the other crap apps in the store that claim to do the same thing?
⏹️ ▶️ John Ours is actually good. You gotta get the word out about it. But if you have an obscure app or an app that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John only of a limited appeal, getting the word out is not going to expand your
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, and I think that Optio, which was a sponsor of ours a couple of weeks back, maybe a month ago now,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was a great example of how advertising does work. Because here was a game that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey as we famously pointed out and was talked about briefly on the last talk show, it didn’t have any in-app purchase, which makes it unique
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and different, and it’s a genuinely good game anyway. So I’ve not heard direct feedback
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from the developer, but I’ve seen some general feedback from him
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that he’s gotten a whole lot of sales from the ad reads that we’ve done and that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey others have done. And so I think you’re right, John, that something that may have a little more universal appeal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey could arguably benefit greatly from being a sponsor or being
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talked about even if they’re not a sponsor. But for me, it was certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a tremendous increase. And I’m extremely grateful for every one of those purchases, even if it was just to make my self-esteem
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit better, as somebody has joked in the chat room. But either way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it wasn’t like I’m about to retire on fast tech sales, unless I go ahead and sell it to Marco.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you got to work on a version 2.0, right? Which better be a free upgrade, because I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco have to pay for this
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey application again, Gazi.
⏹️ ▶️ John 99 cents is all I budgeted for you for the year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Ah, that’s too bad. So anyway, I don’t know. I don’t know if there’s anything else there, but I thought it was just an
⏹️ ▶️ Casey interesting, a little interesting case study.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I think and this actually lines up very well with with my bug shot sales You know like I made the post
⏹️ ▶️ Marco last week or whenever about about how like, you know People assume that because I have an audience
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in some places that any app I release is gonna be some kind of giant hit And that really isn’t the case
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, I I have an advantage certainly by having an established audience. I have I have an advantage mostly up front
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Where like, you know, I’m guaranteed a pretty good launch, but then after that that, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the same boat as everyone else. So bug shot, I posted my sales
⏹️ ▶️ Marco graph from the beginning until whenever that was. I made that post like a week ago.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco When I made that post, my peak day, the launch day, I hit like $3,000 or something in that range.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Then it dropped off significantly after that, of course, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it already reached a lot of people. I got tons of press from bloggers,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from the tech press. I got more press than most people could really hope
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for, including myself for an app that I only spent a week or two making. So it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was the perfect launch, but the fact is, yeah, it peaked and it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco great, but then it fell down. By the time I wrote this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco post, the average was $47 per day for the last five days. Well, the last two
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days, it’s been under $20. I think yesterday was $16, the day before that was $19.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So obviously, this is a long tail effect dropping off very, very, very quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, $20 a day is good, especially for no continued
⏹️ ▶️ Marco effort. That’s good. But it isn’t even staying there. It’s going to keep going down and down and down.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know the fact is, you know Jon, what you said is correct that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no matter what kind of audience you get, the app store is very very crowded. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s just, it’s hard to make good money there. It’s not impossible, but it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard because you’re competing with so many other developers. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know even, you know Casey, your app, Fast Text, which we’re going to plug like crazy because I want the sales to go up
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but you know your your app already has as John said it’s a specialty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco audience it’s like if you have this need to set to quickly send pre-written text messages
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s the app for you that’s already some small segment of the of the user base
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and then within that you have to remove anybody who either decided that they didn’t want to solve that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco problem after all or doesn’t know about your app or knows about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your app but decided not to buy it and you know whether they you know bought someone else’s or what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so or just bought nothing so just getting a bunch of people to even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco look at it isn’t necessarily gonna guarantee success so it’s it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco just I don’t know the I don’t know the answer to this but like I don’t know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how much Apple can really do about it. People complain to Apple that they’re making less money in the App Store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I just don’t… We talked about this last episode. I don’t really know what Apple’s supposed to do about that, exactly. Besides,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they can make a few minor changes here and there. But I don’t think anything’s going to fix the problem
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that there’s hundreds of thousands of developers all trying to make the same
⏹️ ▶️ Marco thousand different kinds of apps with varying levels of success.
⏹️ ▶️ John this. Marketing is not Apple’s problem. And Apple has huge power in marketing. But technically speaking, like that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John really on on the individual developers. You can’t. It’s very difficult to start an app
⏹️ ▶️ John store business and say, OK, now we just got to wait for Apple to feature us. That is not really a viable strategy, even though
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple featuring you is probably going to give you tons of money. You can’t can’t count on that. You can’t control that. You
⏹️ ▶️ John have to just do your own marketing. And if Apple features you, that’s great. But if not, you better have a plan for how
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re going to market your application.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So Apple very rarely features things that are not free and not games.
⏹️ ▶️ John You never know. The Mac App Store is better. The Mac App Store, they will frequently feature big, expensive applications.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Well, they have to because there’s nothing else. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ John cheap things. There’s lots of cheap things in the Mac App Store. Lots of $3 and $5
⏹️ ▶️ John silly utility apps that are not great. But then there’s the big apps that are worth it. It’s like anything else. You’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John got to write a great app first. Is Fast Text a great app? I don’t know. great. That
⏹️ ▶️ John probably cut your sales in half right there.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey That’s true. I doubt the
⏹️ ▶️ John power of that icon. If you had an awesome looking icon, your sales would be double guaranteed.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey With that said, who was the … Let me dig this up. Let me stall for a second.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was Jacob Swiadek. I hope I pronounced that right. I’m so sorry, Jacob, if I didn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who sent the one that I like the most of the three or four or five that I’ve gotten.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey If I end up working out something with him that maybe I can use that for iOS 7, for the iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey version of FastText, then maybe we’ll see. Maybe it will get a whole lot better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And here again, we can use me as a kind of a case study for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somebody who wrote an app that, I mean, I put a lot of effort into it in terms of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey qualitatively, but quantitatively, I wouldn’t say it was that terribly much. Most of the effort I put into it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I was learning Objective-C and Cocoa Touch at the time. If I were to write that app again today,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know, it’d probably take me a week at most. If not, just a few
⏹️ ▶️ John days. What’s on the inside doesn’t matter, Casey. It’s what’s on the outside. This app
⏹️ ▶️ John just needs a makeover.
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 7 comes out, imagine this app comes out from the back with iOS 7, you know, and
⏹️ ▶️ John a totally new icon. All the code underneath is exactly the same, but just looks different on the outside. Everyone’s going to woo and ah,
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you’ll see the real sales numbers, maybe $300. Oh, man. Yeah, no,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I mean, all kidding aside. I know you’re right. And again, I mean, the advantage of iOS seven is that using raw UI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kit. Well, from what I know today, using raw or using raw UI
⏹️ ▶️ Casey kit will actually be a good thing because I’ll look new and modern all fit right in. And, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and maybe I’ll go wild and use like, tint colors or something. Ooh, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey um, but you know, just an icon, a new icon and getting some of the iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stuff for free, I think will make a difference. And so we’ll see what happens. And once iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ Casey comes out, we’ll follow up, and maybe I’ll have two sales a day instead of just one, which would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey have doubled my sales. So we’ll see what happens.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, I do think I’m curious to see how this shakes out with
⏹️ ▶️ Marco iOS 7 and how cool it looks and fashion-wise of apps because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you’re right like iOS 7 right now that just the default if you just use default UI kit stuff and don’t want to fight at all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you look cool and modern because iOS 7 looks cool and modern iOS 1
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looked cool and modern too at the time and eventually that became stale and and didn’t look cool anymore
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I wonder how long it’s gonna take for iOS 7 to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for its default look to start looking like cheap or outdated.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And I wonder also how many apps are going to come out with,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, quote, iOS 7 redesigns this fall that are all going to look exactly the same. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all just going to look like iOS 7 stocks default stuff. Like I really wonder because that’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s going to be interesting to watch. I don’t really know what to say about it in advance except it’s going to be interesting to watch because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a bunch of people are going to be making these big gambles and some of that we’re going to pay off and some of them really aren’t. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s like Prisoner’s Dilemma. Like if everyone makes their apps look just like iOS 7’s default stuff, then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’re all going to look terrible and bland. But if only a few people do it, their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps are going to look really cool and modern, and everyone else’s will look old.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s going to be that backlash kind of effect where if you are one of the
⏹️ ▶️ John few people who has an application that already looks really good and doesn’t look particularly iOS
⏹️ ▶️ John 6-y, like it doesn’t have that kind of heavyweight, kind of
⏹️ ▶️ John played out look. If you just keep your app the same and everyone else either converts to iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ John or copies iOS 7, look, suddenly your branding is even stronger because previously you had some kind of, I
⏹️ ▶️ John think of like the bot applications, TweetBot, CalcBot, I don’t know if they fall into this category, but they have a branding
⏹️ ▶️ John across all their applications. It’s very heavy, but it’s not exactly like iOS 6. I think they may be too close to
⏹️ ▶️ John it for it to work, but think of another application that has like a completely custom UI. It looks nothing like the OS at all. It’s not a game,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s an application, but it did a really nice custom UI. How about Vesper? I think that’s too
⏹️ ▶️ John close to iOS 7 as well. I was thinking like if you were just the other end of the spectrum, but also still don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John look like iOS 6, you may be able to get away with not changing and like carrying your brand and making your brand
⏹️ ▶️ John even stronger as everyone else just goes all white and everything. Like it’s a difficult line to walk.
⏹️ ▶️ John I wouldn’t count on this as a plan. I would say you should really convert your stuff to look like iOS 7 if you can, but there
⏹️ ▶️ John is going there are going to be survivors who are like we didn’t change our UI to look like iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ John we either stuck to our guns or we came up with an all new look that also doesn’t look like iOS 7 because there is
⏹️ ▶️ John a strength in branding and not looking like all the other applications and since the iOS 6 UI
⏹️ ▶️ John and 5 and 4 looks kind of played out if you go with like the default buttons and everything so many iOS applications
⏹️ ▶️ John that are successful have custom UIs now which is why everyone’s scrambling with the iOS 7 thing right
⏹️ ▶️ John some of those custom UIs could survive. The trick is knowing, am I one of those ones that can survive
⏹️ ▶️ John or if I stick to this, am I just going to look terrible? And I think a lot of them are just going to, because it’s like native
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 4, 5, 6 UI plus a couple of custom controls and that’s going to be a mess.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh yeah. Yeah. I think the closer you look to iOS 6, the more old you’ll look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you don’t change it.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. I think things like Vesper and Twitterific are already iOS 17,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe not enough, maybe maybe Twitter, because they just changed their app to become even more iOS 70, like that they made
⏹️ ▶️ John minor tweaks, like they were already there and Vesper, Vesper, I think has his own look. That’s a little
⏹️ ▶️ John bit like iOS seven, but I’m sure they’re gonna revise to sort of shit, tap it over and realign
⏹️ ▶️ John a little bit, not making it look like iOS seven, but just sort of like, recognizing that it’s living on an iOS seven
⏹️ ▶️ John system. We’ll see how much they they revise that. But those apps are like
⏹️ ▶️ John the lucky few that were already more or less positioned well and don’t have a lot to do probably.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco exactly. All right, our second sponsor this week is Squarespace.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Squarespace is so awesome they support the entire podcast economy. They are the all-in-one platform
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free trial
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and 10% off go to squarespace.com and use offer code ATP… what month is it, eight now?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s eight. Wow. Use offer code ATP8 at Squarespace.com to get 10% off. I got
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to update my text file here. Squarespace is constantly improving their platform with new features,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new designs, and even better support. They have beautiful designs for you to start with and all the style options
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you need to create a unique website for you or your business. It’s incredibly easy to use,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but if you want some help, Squarespace has an amazing support team. They work 24-7. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco starts at just $8 a month and includes a free domain name if you sign up for one year. Every design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is automatically responsive, so the mobile experience matches the overall style of your site.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Your content will look great on every device, every time. You know, you don’t have that stupid… you know, you know how WordPress
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blogs… I don’t mean to pick on WordPress, but you know how they used to have that default
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mobile style that like every WordPress blog by default… I think maybe it was a theme or what,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but like by default it had the same… it was like an iOS 3
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mimicking appearance. It look terrible. Squarespace doesn’t do that. Squarespace has unique
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mobile versions of all of their themes that match the rest of the themes so that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your website looks like the same style. It looks like a smaller version of the same style. It’s great. So
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what’s also amazing is that their code is beautiful too. They take just as much pride in the back-end code as they do the front-end design.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This ensures your site’s content can be crawled by Google, Yahoo, Bing, and all other search engines.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yahoo, they’re changing their logo but they’re keeping exclamation point right
⏹️ ▶️ John we don’t know because the last logo will only be like 30 days from now maybe that one has no exclamation point
⏹️ ▶️ Marco okay so Google Yahoo question mark Bing and all the search engines Squarespace it takes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco care of the hosting so you don’t have to so start you can start a trial today with no credit card required
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a real free trial and you can start building your website if you decide to sign up for Squarespace
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make sure you use the offer code ATP8 for the month of 8. ATP8 to get 10% off
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and to show your support for our show. Thanks a lot to Squarespace for supporting our show. They’re everything you need
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to create an exceptional website.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Alright so do we want to talk about Minecraft because I hear John that you really love Minecraft and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you particularly like installing Minecraft mods.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t do my homework.
⏹️ ▶️ John You guys are slackers. I put a Second topic in there too. That’s actually more tech related.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I miss that. I do have it open
⏹️ ▶️ John the Google Chrome password.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was that was that just the iOS stuff or was that more?
⏹️ ▶️ John No, it’s a desktop Chrome. I didn’t read this yet I’ll give
⏹️ ▶️ John summary because it’s really quick I wonder that I think we’ll get through this password one faster and leave the Minecraft one
⏹️ ▶️ John till the end So the the Chrome thing I didn’t actually read the original story. I
⏹️ ▶️ John just read the hacker news thread, which is sufficient usually Basically, if you have desktop
⏹️ ▶️ John Chrome and you go to preferences, hit click advanced and click like manage passwords and click on a password,
⏹️ ▶️ John it shows the little dots for the password and there’s a little button right next to it that says show. You click the show button, it shows you the password in plain text.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people don’t like that. And this Hacker News thread that I’ve also linked in the
⏹️ ▶️ John little documents you can put in the show notes is one of the, some Google Chrome engineer
⏹️ ▶️ John explaining the reasoning behind that decision. And like any Hacker News thread,
⏹️ ▶️ John which Marco is very familiar with, there’s a lot of nerd on nerd violence going on in
⏹️ ▶️ John these Hacker News threads, right? It’s kind of the worst. The Hacker News brings out the worst in nerds.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like there’s the dark side of being a nerd. And if you get a bunch of them together, like the worst part comes out along
⏹️ ▶️ John with the good part sometimes. And the reasoning, the explanation
⏹️ ▶️ John for why the Chrome team decided to do this is definitely
⏹️ ▶️ John nerd explanation. The explanation is, look, even if we didn’t do that, we’re not increasing security at
⏹️ ▶️ John all. Because once you have access to your computer and you’re logged in, security is pointless, game over.
⏹️ ▶️ John And people are like, why don’t you have a master password like Firefox? And
⏹️ ▶️ John the nerd explanation is, look, that doesn’t actually protect you. If you’re sitting there in front of the computer and you’re logged in, you can get all this
⏹️ ▶️ John information. It’s not possible to hide information from yourself, because you are going
⏹️ ▶️ John to use the information to log into websites. It has to, you know, it’s like, it’s like DRM where they want to give you the content,
⏹️ ▶️ John but somehow prevent you from getting the content like they’re, they’re across purposes. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John the reasoning is if we didn’t, you know, by removing that button that shows you your plain text
⏹️ ▶️ John password, we would be like effectively lying to the user, making them think that it’s more secure
⏹️ ▶️ John than it really is. And then a novice user might somehow think, oh, no one can get my password because it’s just a bunch of
⏹️ ▶️ John dots. There’s no way they can get that. Right. And that is definitely a very nerdy explanation because
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re like, let me just think about it like in the abstract, like it’s not actually any more or less secure.
⏹️ ▶️ John Effectively, the security is the same. So I want to be technically honest and we’re just going to leave the button
⏹️ ▶️ John in. And you know, they get yelled at in the hacker news thread by some people who don’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ John the security issues. Some of them, some people say you just do what Firefox does and don’t understand that doesn’t help either.
⏹️ ▶️ John But also a lot of people who understand that argument and just think it’s a terrible one. And I fall into
⏹️ ▶️ John that camp. And it’s explained very well by the good nerds, showing the good
⏹️ ▶️ John parts of being a nerd. And of course they’re good because I agree with them. In the thread,
⏹️ ▶️ John basically saying, there’s a difference, I think the best analogy was like a safe. Like, no safe
⏹️ ▶️ John is uncrackable. The job of the safe is to make it time-consuming, inconvenient, noisy,
⏹️ ▶️ John difficult to get in. You can always get into a safe. The safe is there to delay you sufficiently
⏹️ ▶️ John long that other issues come in. And I think having plain text passwords
⏹️ ▶️ John visible to anyone who grabs your mouse for five seconds is, without a lot
⏹️ ▶️ John of knowledge, it’s too easy. It’s just too easy. Like, the previous easiest
⏹️ ▶️ John way to do it would be go to a website that you want their password for, let it auto fill, right click, inspect,
⏹️ ▶️ John change the text field to password. Like, that requires much more technical knowledge and takes longer
⏹️ ▶️ John than, you know, command comma, click, click, click, click, click, I’ve seen your password. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just too darn easy, too fast. And that is, you know, that’s what you’re trying to do is draw
⏹️ ▶️ John a line there. No, it’s, you can always get to it. You’re not actually preventing anyone to get it. You’re just trying to make the time limit long enough
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s not, if I turn my back for one second and someone grabs my mouse, they can see my plaintext password.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s literally how it is. Someone who’s fast with a mouse, you could like turn your head, talk to someone, say five words,
⏹️ ▶️ John and they could have seen your plaintext password. No other way to get that password is that fast without like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John malware or some other, you know, actual nerd hack type thing of getting into your computer.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think this is a fairly terrible decision and it just goes to show that security is not a black-and-white type thing. Like by removing
⏹️ ▶️ John that show button, technically speaking, you’re not making it any more secure, but practically speaking there’s a big big
⏹️ ▶️ John difference between just letting someone click through preferences to see your plain text password in three
⏹️ ▶️ John seconds and requiring them to at least know how to use the Web Inspector or type something or
⏹️ ▶️ John put in, you know, do something that’s beyond the realm of just going to settings.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, this this is a weird, I’m, you know, I was reading about this now. It’s just a weird
⏹️ ▶️ Marco attitude to have towards security that this engineer is displaying here. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I assume that the engineer did not have permission to to write this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because if they did, their
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John boss should be fired. You don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John need permission to Google. It’s all one big happy family of engineers working. But like, it’s definitely a nerdy
⏹️ ▶️ John type position because it’s like, you know, I’m not actually increasing security by removing that
⏹️ ▶️ John button. Therefore, I won’t do it because it’s like it’s intellectually dishonest to remove that button and then not understanding
⏹️ ▶️ John the practical issues because they’re like, I know that that’s, you know, it’s like it’s like mathematical
⏹️ ▶️ John or black and white. And they, you know, he’s not like that. I guess they said they would consider these nuances, but
⏹️ ▶️ John didn’t deem them important. There was some sort of, we felt like we were being dishonest or misleading to the user
⏹️ ▶️ John by doing this, but it does just does not hold together. Like, practically speaking, that button
⏹️ ▶️ John is a problem, where it is and how easy it is to get to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it’s kind of like an immature attitude to say, like, well, this isn’t really going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to help security. Although, actually, your points are that it kind of does. But their attitude is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we don’t think this is really going to help security, so we’re just not going to do it, period. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the attitude they’re having here, it kind of sounds like they messed up and they’re having a hard time accepting that or
⏹️ ▶️ John that. They said they’ve debated it and discussed it for years. And if they debated and discussed it for years, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John the people who are on the side of sanity are just tired of arguing with the people who are not, or
⏹️ ▶️ John in control. But it just boggles my mind
⏹️ ▶️ John that it’s not so clear to everybody that this is the wrong decision to make for practical
⏹️ ▶️ John reasons. You should be able to put things into their right columns. No,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not actually making it more secure. but security is more than just like, is it hackable? Yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John no. It’s a continuum. And there’s a certain threshold beyond which
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just too darn easy to see people’s plaintext passwords. And many people were giving examples
⏹️ ▶️ John of why people might do these malicious type things. And there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a threshold. If there was one button you could press on your keyboard that would put all your plaintext passwords
⏹️ ▶️ John up on the screen, you would never enable that button. But the Google attitude that’s expressed here is like, well, They can get all
⏹️ ▶️ John those passwords anyway if they have access to your keyboard. So there’s no harm in leaving a single button that shows them all instantly.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s the obviously extreme thing. But time required matters. Time and skills.
⏹️ ▶️ John And going to the Settings menu and clicking four times is not
⏹️ ▶️ John a very high time or skill barrier. It’s just too easy. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know what’s interesting is everyone’s perception of Google, and mine to some degree included, is that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s a collection of unbelievably bright people that are all working together.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And this strikes me as the argument made by a bright person, like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey an academically bright person, but not a realist. And just like you were saying,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it still is a big security hole, but the PhD, air quote,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey PhD argues correctly that, well, it’s no different than what we’re already doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That’s just, it’s a very short-sighted, you’re hanging your hat on academia when reality
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is very different, and it just seems silly, and it fits well with my very
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uninformed perception of what Google is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, definitely. I mean, honestly, and maybe this is just me being a little bit
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tinfoil-hattie, but to me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I treat Chrome as though it is Google and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything I do in it Google knows or can it can easily get or hours collecting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco even though I know that that what they do collect is more limited than that and I know there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things like chromium like the open source thing that has less of their stuff in it but I still
⏹️ ▶️ Marco generally treat Chrome as though it is a giant Google application
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know it is a giant Google ad basically and every it’s just recording everything I do even though I I know that’s not the case, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, that’s not entirely untrue. Like there’s like some traces of truth to that here and there and various
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things it does. So to me, like Chrome is like my Google and Facebook
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of silo or quarantine, where, you know, I use Safari for my main browsing and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use Chrome for things that I know I’m being spot on, even though I know those companies are matching my IP and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco figuring out that I’m really the same person, even in Safari, but I try. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve noticed that Chrome also, because I have this kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco pessimistic attitude towards Chrome and this defensive attitude,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also, generally when Chrome asks me for keychain access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I say no. And every time you visit any website at all that has a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco password in it, Chrome will prompt a box on Mac saying, hey, Google Chrome wants access
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to your keychain. Always allow, you know? And I click
⏹️ ▶️ Marco no every time. And it’ll keep asking. It’ll ask like six times for a page load to like Twitter.com
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or Facebook or Google or whatever. It’ll ask a lot. Obviously,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chrome for Macs is clearly misusing the keychain API.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Clearly, they, I don’t think it’s that I don’t think it’s that they don’t understand it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think it’s that they don’t respect it. I think Google has this culture of engineering arrogance, which is often earned,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but sometimes not. And Macs have this awesome keychain system that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is pretty secure and certainly better than a lot of these methods. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Chrome basically tries to take it over, take all the value out of it, but yet still have its
⏹️ ▶️ Marco own little system that does its own thing on the side because they
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John think they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John better. They want to be cross-platform. They don’t want to be tied to, you know, I don’t blame Chrome for not having deeper
⏹️ ▶️ John OS X integration, because that’s the value in Chrome. Well, then why access the keychain at all?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, you know, they have their own way to store these things. And they want to integrate a little bit,
⏹️ ▶️ John but they’re certainly not going to say, oh, on the Mac, all we do is use keychain. Because that’s not going to be the case. Like, the value
⏹️ ▶️ John I see in Chrome is that I know that if I go somewhere else, my Chrome
⏹️ ▶️ John environment is there, too, because Chrome is not tied to any OS. Like if I installed Chrome on Windows and signed in with
⏹️ ▶️ John my Google account and synced everything, I’d have all my preferences, all my extensions, all my tabs, all my history, all
⏹️ ▶️ John my passwords, all that stuff on Windows. Like that’s the value in Chrome. That would not be the case in
⏹️ ▶️ John Safari. It wasn’t even the case when there was Safari for Windows. So I think you’re torturing yourself
⏹️ ▶️ John by not letting Chrome do these things. You can use it or don’t use it, but if you’re gonna use it, just let it do what it’s gonna
⏹️ ▶️ John do. I don’t see anything worse about it in terms of being tracked or anything like that. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John really like Chrome as a web browser, especially since WebKit 2 was introduced
⏹️ ▶️ John and Safari started to be flaky. Safari is still my default browser, but Chrome is much more solid
⏹️ ▶️ John for me. And I spend a lot of time in it. And I don’t fight it. I let it do what I want. And I’m happy when I go to another machine, sync
⏹️ ▶️ John everything up in Chrome, and my whole Chrome environment is there. I wish every part of my computing experience was like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So when you say your whole Chrome environment, I treat Chrome the same way Marco does. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey what is synced that makes your experience that much better?
⏹️ ▶️ John I use extensions, Chrome extensions, and I’m annoyed. I can’t use default Chrome at this point. I’m
⏹️ ▶️ John too addicted to the handful of extensions that I use. I like my preferences and what’s displayed and not. I like
⏹️ ▶️ John my bookmarks bar, my bookmark menu, all those little things. Like when you go to a new machine,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’ve got to go wait, especially because Chrome’s preferences are terrible. Chrome’s UI is not nice. It’s not Mac-like, and
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s also not nice. So it’s double whammy against it. And I would not want to go into
⏹️ ▶️ John that UI every time I was on a new machine and configure stuff. Like I don’t want to go in there ever. So it’s great
⏹️ ▶️ John when I could just sign in with my Google ID and get everything synced up. Like that’s the experience I want to have with all my applications,
⏹️ ▶️ John with iCloud. Like that’s the dream of iCloud and all the Apple stuff is just go anywhere, sign in with your
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple ID, all your stuff and awareness of who you are and everything you’ve ever purchased and all your preferences
⏹️ ▶️ John and everything are all just there with you. And that is still not the case on OS X. If I set up a new Mac, it sets up some
⏹️ ▶️ John things for me and they’re getting better about it, But it is not like, you know, my Chromebook fell
⏹️ ▶️ John in the ocean. Give me another Chromebook. Sign in with my Google ID, and it looks just like my previous
⏹️ ▶️ John Chromebook, which is, granted, easier when all your thing is a giant web browser. But, you know, that’s what Apple
⏹️ ▶️ John is working towards.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I don’t go near the ocean, so it isn’t a problem for us. If
⏹️ ▶️ John you drop it in the lake, it’s just as dead. And it’s muddy. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John And filled with broken glass that cuts your feet because there’s no waves to wear
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey down the sea glass.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Although I will say,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John now we’re— What lake
⏹️ ▶️ John have you been to? Lakes are filled with sharp, broken glass.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Everyone knows that. Oh, yes,
⏹️ ▶️ John they are, from beer bottles from lake yokels.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no waves to agitate them enough to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey turn into sea glass.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey are small waves from boats and stuff. Yeah, it takes
⏹️ ▶️ John much longer. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey why you think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it cuts. Although I tell you what, I’m stealing a line from Kevin James right now, but I have never screamed
⏹️ ▶️ Casey louder like more of a little girl than when a piece of seaweed from the bottom of the lake touches
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s not seaweed if it’s in a lake. Well whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey lake weed. Lake weed. Whatever it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That stuff freaks me out so hard. Oh God. Are we in After Dark already? I didn’t even think
⏹️ ▶️ Casey we ended the show. It’s all downhill from here.
⏹️ ▶️ John I could talk about Minecraft mods to finish it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well I have a feeling that’s going to last a while. We want to end it here and then do Minecraft for the next episode.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John It’s up to you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John It could just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco become the topic that we always push off to the next episode. Like that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I’m OK with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That can be a thing. I’m OK with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is there something that Casey and I can do to make it a better topic for us to discuss?
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, like I said, you guys should, you know, adopt a neighborhood kid and have them
⏹️ ▶️ John request that you install Minecraft.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Because like we discussed, that’s not at all creepy.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. So just yeah. So just go install Minecraft. You might have to pay for it, but you know now
⏹️ ▶️ John that Casey’s selling all these copies of fastex he can afford it
⏹️ ▶️ John And pick a mod like pick, you know I can send you I can send you the name of a mod because that’s all
⏹️ ▶️ John you get from a kid like I want the Whatever like the kids discover these mods by watching youtube videos and youtube videos
⏹️ ▶️ John shows someone playing Hey, look at this cool new mod You can do this you can do that kids watch these videos say I want to do that
⏹️ ▶️ John And all you’ve got to go on is the youtube video And usually they just mention the name of the mod. It’s like that’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John video You know, it’s like video podcasts and everything, but on YouTube, a YouTube channel where every week they’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John say, okay, here are these new mods we’re checking out and do some stuff with it. And it’s a show. So
⏹️ ▶️ John not all of them have like show notes links to say if you’re interested in this mod, link to it. In fact, most of them don’t. So you just
⏹️ ▶️ John have a name, like I want the whatever mod. And given those two pieces of information, that Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ John exists, that there’s a YouTube video that shows someone using this mod and a kid wants that mod, go
⏹️ ▶️ John and see how long it takes you to successfully get that mod into Minecraft.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Is this why there’s like infinite Minecraft related spam on the App Store?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know why. I can’t quite understand what has happened to… It could be like a broken
⏹️ ▶️ John windows type thing where Minecraft was very popular and it’s been around for a long time and at a certain point people stopped fixing the
⏹️ ▶️ John windows and so now just like all of them have been knocked out by stones.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, maybe. I don’t know. I mean… Oh look, we’re already talking about this. Might as well get into it now.
⏹️ ▶️ John Alright, I… Yeah, I’ve got time. I’ve got to go to another podcast in half an hour. Busy
⏹️ ▶️ John man. Alright, so… You’re so popular. Yeah. So, Minecraft mods.
⏹️ ▶️ John The problem with Minecraft mods, I complained about it on Twitter a little bit, and I hesitated to complain about it on Twitter because I didn’t actually
⏹️ ▶️ John want anyone to, like, help. And the other thing I didn’t want was, like, people to
⏹️ ▶️ John think that it was a technical issue. technical issue. It is totally not a technology-based
⏹️ ▶️ John issue. It is a social community-based issue. That’s the problem with Minecraft mods. And that
⏹️ ▶️ John is the essential thing to understand about them. That it’s not difficulty in doing something with computers
⏹️ ▶️ John or, like, you know, software that’s buggy or anything like that. It
⏹️ ▶️ John is completely evidence of what happens when either there is just chaos and anarchy
⏹️ ▶️ John in the community, like, you know, the broken windows thing where just you know no one is repairing anything everything’s just in shambles
⏹️ ▶️ John and it also looks a lot like like Lord of the Flies where it’s just a bunch of kids on an island and you just leave
⏹️ ▶️ John for like two months and then you come back and it’s just you know it’s Lord of the Flies like the entire community
⏹️ ▶️ John has been is run by young children I don’t think it really is run by young children
⏹️ ▶️ John I think Minecraft is played by the same kind of demographic that plays all games which is probably like the average of like a 30 year old
⏹️ ▶️ John person or something but it seems like it’s run by kids so here’s the problem if you
⏹️ ▶️ John Got minecraft like you can go to the the minecraft store, you know Mojang calm
⏹️ ▶️ John or whatever it is buy minecraft download it play it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey even hold on hold on hold on Can you explain for those of us who don’t know what minecraft is what minecraft is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Asking for a friend.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, I’m asking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for a friend. That’s whose name might also be Casey
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s actually not important what minecraft is but briefly it’s a I can’t explain about doing jargon. I was
⏹️ ▶️ John gonna say it’s a voxel based game but I don’t know what voxels are. I don’t even know what uses
⏹️ ▶️ John Tiberian Sun? Remember Comanche on the PC, Marco? No. Back
⏹️ ▶️ John in the day. Voxels! Anyway, you can Google it later. You make a bunch of cubes
⏹️ ▶️ John and the cubes come in different materials and the materials have properties
⏹️ ▶️ John and they start you off with like a procedurally generated world with grass and water and mountains and stuff like that
⏹️ ▶️ John and you can hit little cubes to make them disappear or
⏹️ ▶️ John You know use cubes to make more cubes appear So it’s like Legos But all the Legos are cubes and they’re made of different materials and
⏹️ ▶️ John interact with each other’s you can put water on Lava and different things happen stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Okay. So how
⏹️ ▶️ John do you win the appeal of the game? It’s like it’s like a sandbox game like literally like There’s a survival
⏹️ ▶️ John mode where you can go and you have health and like there’s enemies that come out at night and you have to defend Against them and fight them by clicking on them or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John and then there’s other modes where you’re just like you don’t have any health their life, you’re just there like playing in a big bin of Legos.
⏹️ ▶️ John And what do you want to do? You want to build things. You want to build structures, big architecture you can dig into the ground and
⏹️ ▶️ John mine for minerals and jewels and make structures underground and do all sorts of very interesting things. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John totally a sandbox game.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you like it because it’s a combination of Legos and GameCube?
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t play it. I’m not into Minecraft. I’ve played it enough to know that it’s not really for me, but kids like it and my son
⏹️ ▶️ John really, really likes it. So that’s the game. The mods
⏹️ ▶️ John alter the behavior of the game. Like there’s a certain amount of things you can put on your
⏹️ ▶️ John person, like different kinds of armor. And there’s a mod that gives you different armor with special abilities, like
⏹️ ▶️ John armor lets you glide or fly or jump higher. And there’s mods that give you larger explosives.
⏹️ ▶️ John They have TNT in the game. But what if you want something that makes an even bigger explosion? Or mods that give you new enemies instead
⏹️ ▶️ John of just the regular zombies and creepers that are going around. You can get different kinds of it. And so mods do what mods do, right?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now are these mods accepted or like an extension or is it the sort of thing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey where you would get like some, hypothetically if you were young and couldn’t afford things,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you would get a patch so that you wouldn’t have to register a game and pay for it?
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Hypothetically. Here’s the thing
⏹️ ▶️ John about the game. Just like I was saying before, just getting the game itself. Like no mods, no nothing,
⏹️ ▶️ John I just want to buy this game and play it on my Mac. Even that was not a great experience until recently
⏹️ ▶️ John and even now it’s not great. first bought the game you get an icon it’s in your application
⏹️ ▶️ John folder you double-click it doesn’t work like that’s not a good experience like just like the game does not launch
⏹️ ▶️ John and it’s like all this permission errors and if you had the older version you had to go in and chmod something or
⏹️ ▶️ John you know it turned out being faster for me to just like run the jar file from the command
⏹️ ▶️ John line using the Java command line thing to get the game started because their wrapper thing didn’t work right so right right off the bat it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John not a great experience just for the game itself because seriously if I buy a game I downloaded it I put a little app icon,
⏹️ ▶️ John I double click it, the game doesn’t launch. You know, game over. And this is not, again, it’s not like version one of a
⏹️ ▶️ John game. Minecraft had been out for years by the time I installed it for the first time, and it just didn’t work.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey And it’s a dollar a mix.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So how did you allow your son to play this if the experience was that bad already? I would have expected you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey would have said, son, I’m sorry, but this just doesn’t cut the mustard.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, you know, for gaming, you put up with a lot. Hell, I put up with Windows to play some games. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, eventually you just want the games to play. And I didn’t, you know, this was years ago. It was like years after the game had come
⏹️ ▶️ John out but years before now and I played around in it
⏹️ ▶️ John Wasn’t that I think I fired it up again So I could see like the 5x5 minecraft server where they did a giant
⏹️ ▶️ John version of my head floating in the sky So I went and flew around in there for a while. Look at that
⏹️ ▶️ John And that was fun, but I don’t actually play it. But so My son’s friends are into
⏹️ ▶️ John it and you know, oh you got it. Can I play minecraft? I’m like, okay Well, I already paid for I have it So here you go, you can play
⏹️ ▶️ John Minecraft and then he starts watching the YouTube videos about mods That’s kind of have like the you know, the armor
⏹️ ▶️ John movement mod, which gives you some armor stuff that lets you You know fly and move and
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff like that And I suck here. What are you talking about? And
⏹️ ▶️ John he says this and shows me a YouTube video and this one actually did have a links It was like, you know our movement blah
⏹️ ▶️ John blah blah. I scroll down in the little, you know the text underneath the video and it has links like
⏹️ ▶️ John download the mod here, you need to have this installed first, and it gives a link to it, and you’re like, this, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John all right, so no problem. So you click on the links and they take you to forums, and that’s a bad sign, number one.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you click on a link or something and you end up in a forum, that’s a bad sign. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John I quickly learned that mods are not a feature of the game. Like a lot of games are built
⏹️ ▶️ John with the intention that you’re going to modify it. Like they support it. They say, okay, if you want a mod, here’s the API you can do, here’s the
⏹️ ▶️ John folder you put it in, put your stuff in there and it will run it. Minecraft is not like that. Which, first of all, that
⏹️ ▶️ John alone boggles my mind. Because it is so clear that mods are something that the community wants to do with this game, that if,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, you would imagine that any other game developer would love the fact that people are modding the game and stuff like that. Like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John support it as an officially supported feature of the game, because clearly that’s what people want to do.
⏹️ ▶️ John But nope, nope, they’re not going to support that. So your very first problem is that you’re trying
⏹️ ▶️ John to mod a game that doesn’t want to be modded. And that is always going to be gross and ugly. And like I said, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a Java game. So the process of modding is usually like this is the technical
⏹️ ▶️ John part of it, and it’s not difficult although You would think it’s the you know the end of the world if you Google around for
⏹️ ▶️ John it Jar files are just zip files, so if you just unzip them you get a bunch of you know
⏹️ ▶️ John dot class files and start other Java crap in there To mod it you take some other
⏹️ ▶️ John jar file and you know open it up take its contents throw it inside the the Minecraft jar
⏹️ ▶️ John and you know zip the thing back up and rename it dot jar. That is the technical process of modding
⏹️ ▶️ John Minecraft and usually what you want to do is make a install mod loader That’s like you do
⏹️ ▶️ John one mod that you shove into the Minecraft jar file that lets you load other mods that you don’t have to shove in there anymore or something
⏹️ ▶️ John like that and So if you google around for how to install the whatever mod
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s a million YouTube videos of these are mostly kids like talking to their built-in mic
⏹️ ▶️ John like showing you a screencast of them in Windows XP, like opening up zip files and dragging
⏹️ ▶️ John files from one place to the other. And there’s a bunch of people doing it on Macs too, showing you how to right click and open, you know, and drag
⏹️ ▶️ John things around and stuff like that. One of the videos of some kid doing it on a Mac, I think it was on Tiger
⏹️ ▶️ John or something, really ancient version of OS X. This
⏹️ ▶️ John is the best part of this video. And this is another thing about how real people interact with technology.
⏹️ ▶️ John He was dragging like from, you know, one column view window into another.
⏹️ ▶️ John And a lot of these mods replace files that come
⏹️ ▶️ John with Minecraft, and so you get the dialog that says, you know, a file by this name already exists, do you want to replace or whatever?
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s got, I forget what the options are, but there’s a checkbox in the corner that says, you know, answer this for the rest of the prompt so you don’t have
⏹️ ▶️ John to keep clicking the button. He says in the video, you can click this checkbox, but I like to click it
⏹️ ▶️ John individually for each one just in case. whole idea that the check the check that the checkbox
⏹️ ▶️ John is not trustworthy that like it is you are taking matters into your own hands and
⏹️ ▶️ John resting control from the evil mysterious computer by clicking the button manual each time versus hitting
⏹️ ▶️ John that checkbox and hitting the button once because in one case like it’s desperation for control
⏹️ ▶️ John to feel like you are in control of the system if I click the button 100 times for these 100 files
⏹️ ▶️ John I am in control if I hit that checkbox and click the button I have no idea what it’s gonna do with those 100 Maybe it
⏹️ ▶️ John will forget to do it for one of them. That’s how right real people relate to computers like I’ve
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco seen that before and
⏹️ ▶️ John this was this is an amazing instance of a granted was a kid But I I don’t think it’s confined to just kids anyway
⏹️ ▶️ John That is the technical process that is the part that I had the least problem with because
⏹️ ▶️ John you know whatever I could do that 800 different ways up the difficult part was everything else
⏹️ ▶️ John finding where to download this thing from successfully
⏹️ ▶️ John downloading the thing. Those two steps are very difficult. Finding where to download, you go to
⏹️ ▶️ John a forum post and maybe it’s like a sticky post and it’s the post at the top constantly updated or it’s the most recent version at the
⏹️ ▶️ John bottom. Right, having to read through the whole thread to figure all that stuff out. Then when you get there,
⏹️ ▶️ John to download it, you click on a link that takes you to one of those like scam download
⏹️ ▶️ John sites that’s like, click, it has like 800 download buttons, free, download, download now, You got to figure out
⏹️ ▶️ John which one is the real download button sometimes It’s like seven layers
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco deep and we have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a survey and three captures
⏹️ ▶️ John card. Yeah, and I would say the majority of those do not eventually lead to an actual download
⏹️ ▶️ John No, right, so you know you’re just angry right and and what I’m thinking during this process is Minecraft is an
⏹️ ▶️ John insanely popular game This is obviously a very popular mod How is there not like a
⏹️ ▶️ John dot org site? How is there not a damn Squarespace site as the official home for the armor movement mod
⏹️ ▶️ John for Minecraft? An official website that would say, here it is. Don’t,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, because if you Google for it, you’ll find a million hits, like, you know, keyword spamming and like, the keywords
⏹️ ▶️ John are like, you know, download Minecraft armor movement mod. Like, people are camped out in that like,
⏹️ ▶️ John crazy, with things that have nothing to do with it, but like, you know, the Google results are useless. And they’re like, you come to realize,
⏹️ ▶️ John there is no official site for these mods. There’s no, like, the people who make these can’t be bothered to put up a single
⏹️ ▶️ John website that has like, here is the mod, here are the, here is the download link, here are the versions. That just
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t exist for the most part. And you would think, okay, well, are there sites that compile these mods together? Like
⏹️ ▶️ John a mod management site? Kind of, sort of, but those suck too. And the next problem is, say you successfully download
⏹️ ▶️ John something, what you really need to know is not just, like, here’s this download link, what are the prerequisites? What do
⏹️ ▶️ John I need to make this mod work? Does it only work with a certain version of Minecraft? Do I need something else to be installed first?
⏹️ ▶️ John What version of that needs to be installed? All these details do not exist because every single person
⏹️ ▶️ John doing these mods There’s apparently a goldfish who forgets things after seven seconds and says like,
⏹️ ▶️ John this is what I had to do to get this to work on this day. I uploaded a video about it and forget it. And you can
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of read the tea leaves and say, when this was posted, according to Wikipedia, the most recent
⏹️ ▶️ John version of Minecraft version was. Oh my god. Therefore, and then you have to guess, did this guy have the installed the most recent
⏹️ ▶️ John version or did he not? Because if you take those files and jam them into the Minecraft jar that’s the wrong version, they just won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John work and the thing will crash on startup or whatever. And they will not tell you this. They will not
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you what you need. And most of them say, you need to install Modloader or Forge.
⏹️ ▶️ John It requires Modloader or Forge. Modloader or Forge are never linked to anything. Let’s assume that everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco reading this
⏹️ ▶️ John knows what Modloader or Forge are, already have them installed, have no problem finding the link. Go ahead and Google for
⏹️ ▶️ John Minecraft Modloader, Minecraft Forge. You’ll find a million hits, a million fake downloads. And again, you don’t know which one those work.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you’re like, OK, this one says I found something. This one says it only works with Minecraft version 1.5.1.
⏹️ ▶️ John Where can I get Minecraft version 1.5.1? You think you could go to the main Minecraft site and get it, and you can kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of sort of do that, but not really, because they really hide the old versions down there. And then you’re like, okay, well, this has
⏹️ ▶️ John got to be up on the web somewhere. I should be able to find a Minecraft 1.5.1 or 2 or 3 or whatever download somewhere. And so
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re hunting around just to find the original Minecraft jar, and there are a million files out there that claim to be this that are not this,
⏹️ ▶️ John that when you download them they’re just a bunch of.exes or mislabeled where you find out the jar file is actually
⏹️ ▶️ John 1.6.2, not 1.5.2. That’s another incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ John problematic phenomenon. People keyword spamming for like, armor movement mod for Minecraft 1.6.2, which is a total
⏹️ ▶️ John lie because the thing downloadable from there will not work with 1.6.2, as evidenced if
⏹️ ▶️ John you can dig through like the YouTube comments, people saying, doesn’t work with 1.6, change the comment, this really works with 1.5.
⏹️ ▶️ John Like it is a terrible maze of lies and
⏹️ ▶️ John bad downloads and no help from anyone, and there is no safe haven. no clean well-lit place
⏹️ ▶️ John to explain what these things are. And you would think for like a game as popular as Minecraft, that at this point,
⏹️ ▶️ John you would launch Minecraft and there’d be like it like an app store in the freaking game. It would only show
⏹️ ▶️ John you the mods that you can load. You would click on them and they were automatically installed. Like you would think at this point, that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John how it would have gotten. But years and years of development have just led to this. It’s like.
⏹️ ▶️ John Just giant, chaotic mess of crap, and it has not gotten better. Maybe there was a golden age
⏹️ ▶️ John before the world fell and everything crumbled to dust, but I didn’t experience the time. And now
⏹️ ▶️ John it is just a big, giant mess. And really, everybody involved with this did what they required
⏹️ ▶️ John to get their thing to work on the day they posted it three years ago, and that’s all they care about. And everything else is lost
⏹️ ▶️ John in the sands of time. So I spend most of my time trying to guess where can I get
⏹️ ▶️ John the file to work? First of all, what version of Minecraft does this mod work with? Second of all, can
⏹️ ▶️ John I get that version of Minecraft? Third, putting that version
⏹️ ▶️ John of that mod into that version of Minecraft and running it and seeing if it worked. And of course, there’s no real indication for a lot of these things,
⏹️ ▶️ John like, especially when I was trying to get Modloader or Forge installed. It would
⏹️ ▶️ John seem to work, it wouldn’t crash, but I couldn’t tell if it worked successfully. And like Modloader and Forge, like, okay, I think
⏹️ ▶️ John I successfully installed these things. How do I install a mod? The Modloader and Forge people won’t
⏹️ ▶️ John tell you. You can find instructions like, oh, just after you’ve installed them, just throw the mods inside your Minecraft
⏹️ ▶️ John jar. But other ones are like, oh, there’s a mods folder, put your mods in there. All the instructions reference outdated
⏹️ ▶️ John structures of Minecraft and different… There’s a whole other menagerie of Minecraft launchers, of ways to launch the
⏹️ ▶️ John Minecraft program that are also third-party applications, because apparently the main launcher doesn’t work and they change how the launchers work
⏹️ ▶️ John between 1.5 and 1.6, and there are many, many mods that only work with 1.4 or even earlier versions.
⏹️ ▶️ John It is it’s a problem of community and society and organization
⏹️ ▶️ John uh And it just it shows how how terrible like It makes linux package management
⏹️ ▶️ John look like paradise. That’s that’s probably
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco the best thing to say
⏹️ ▶️ John about this because wow It makes rpms look like the promised land because
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s just it is unbelievably terrible And it bothers my mind that it has not gotten better
⏹️ ▶️ John So this is like a cautionary tale for anyone who wants to have any kind of community involving a game Do
⏹️ ▶️ John not let your game community do not let whatever happened to the Minecraft community happen to your game community
⏹️ ▶️ John because it is it’s I Gotta think of a good analogy for but it’s like it’s like a terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John plague or virus has destroyed that community It’s just filled with this sadness and angry
⏹️ ▶️ John children and frustrated parents
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So so John I have to ask you Do you enjoy installing a new Minecraft mod or do you find
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to be a little bit frustrating?
⏹️ ▶️ John Like, at this point, you build up a certain level of expertise and you kind of know where all the bodies are buried
⏹️ ▶️ John and stuff like that. At this point, I know what all the problems are. My son asked me, I want the Explosives
⏹️ ▶️ John Plus mod. I couldn’t even find the mod he was talking about because the video didn’t have any links. I found lots
⏹️ ▶️ John of mods with the word explosive in them. I picked one that looked like it had a reasonable download link that went through one of those scammy
⏹️ ▶️ John ad sites where I know the seven places you have to click to actually get the download. I did that for two mods.
⏹️ ▶️ John One of them just caused it to crash on launch. I’m not sure if I had the wrong version. Again, I had the version that it said that I needed,
⏹️ ▶️ John but the fact that it said that I needed a version doesn’t mean anything because, like, you know, it said needs one point. What do you mean,
⏹️ ▶️ John it? Is it the official website of this mod? No, of course not. It’s some random scam Google keyword page. No one,
⏹️ ▶️ John a human probably didn’t even write that. Like, there is no canonical source for information about any of these things, right? So it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just all trial and error. So one of them totally didn’t work at all and caused the thing to crash. Another one only worked when I uninstalled
⏹️ ▶️ John another mod. Again, cross-mod compatibility. Forget about that. That’s not even a glimmer in the Minecraft community’s
⏹️ ▶️ John eye. They have no conflict resolution whatsoever. So I uninstalled a bunch of other mods. I have this
⏹️ ▶️ John this thing that lets you make re-instance Minecraft to say here’s an entirely new instance of Minecraft of a particular version
⏹️ ▶️ John and then you can screw with that one. So they have tools that are trying to manage this chaos, but the wrong way. Like they’re just,
⏹️ ▶️ John we will duplicate your entire world so you can start off with it in a known state and screw it up and then
⏹️ ▶️ John throw that away and do another one. So I eventually got one of the explosion mods installed. My son played with it today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, I have two thoughts on this. Firstly, I am genuine, all kidding aside, I’m genuinely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey stunned that you’re so willing to take code from random places
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and drop it on your computer and run it and just go on faith that it’s not going to screw things up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Like, how does that not freak you out?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It doesn’t have local filesystem access.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Right, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ John It could be totally rooting me. Like, it could just be stealing every one of my files and my passwords but like
⏹️ ▶️ John seriously the competence level of the Minecraft community is such that
⏹️ ▶️ John malware could not successfully propagate it would be thwarted by the Byzantine maze of crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John download pages and everything so I’m assuming I’m not being hacked and also I’m installing this on my wife’s computer so.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Then the truth comes
⏹️ ▶️ Marco out. Also it would only have access to your passwords in Chrome.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco access to everything it’s running as
⏹️ ▶️ John me it could recursively delete my wife’s home directory for one. You
⏹️ ▶️ John like it’s it’s totally you’re right. But that’s true of anything. Like if I download any any game like, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John in the pre app storage and even in the post app storage, any application you download, you think, oh, it’s shareware or whatever
⏹️ ▶️ John from some random place and you run it. It could destroy your disk. But in practice, that is extremely rare and
⏹️ ▶️ John has not happened. And that’s what backups are for. And sandboxing
⏹️ ▶️ John sandboxing is not helping in this case, but.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know what this reminds me of? And perhaps this isn’t the best comparison in the world. And John, you won’t understand
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this at all, I don’t believe, because this is a PC thing. But Marco, I don’t know if you remember Kali,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey K-A-L-I, from way back in the day. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we had it. I never had it, though. But I do remember
⏹️ ▶️ John So what this was. I just pulled out Comanche. And now you’re questioning my Windows cred. But go on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Sorry. So anyway, so Kali was this thing that it would take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the internet, and it would make the internet be emulated as an IPX whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey whatever network. I’m a little light on the details because my memory is crummy But the idea was all of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey these old DOS games or perhaps some early Windows games were designed to be multiplayer based
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on IPX networks, which was some style of local network and What
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this what Kali would do was it would fake the internet as an IPX
⏹️ ▶️ Casey network? So basically what this means is Games that were not designed to be played on the internet and descent one was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a great example of this You could then play over the internet and Kali not only would create
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this kind of tunnel for lack of a better word But on top of that it would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey also Let you manage it would let you view servers. It would let you join games So take
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t remember if quake one supported internet play or not, but I believe it did not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well fair enough, well, maybe it was just early quaker.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, maybe it wasn’t quake at all. Maybe was doom
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John to you I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know. Yes. I remember playing Doom 2 over fake IPX.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Because the Mac
⏹️ ▶️ John version of Doom 2 was compatible with the PC version. Like it was a Byzantine,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, they would have to use the IPX and they would have to use Kali. And then the Mac version would do whatever hell of crazy stuff it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John doing. And we both dialed them through modems. And it was not a good experience. But it worked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right. So the point I’m driving at, though, is that here’s a situation where Kali was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a standalone app that was, to the best of my knowledge, not at all supported by any of the many,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey many, many, many games that, that it supported. So Callie was a complete third
⏹️ ▶️ Casey party hack, but it was really well done and you could find servers, you could
⏹️ ▶️ Casey find games, you could find rooms if you will. And it was really awesome. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I remember losing so much of my time playing descent one against people on the internet over
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like crummy 56 K X two connections, or maybe it was even
⏹️ ▶️ Casey before that. Whatever it was, it was terrible. I had a Thrustmaster joystick that I’ll never forget
⏹️ ▶️ Casey used. What it did was you would plug your keyboard into the Thrustmaster, which by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the way had to be the big fat keyboard connection, not the small PS2 connection. Then you would plug the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Thrustmaster into your computer and you could run this app in DOS that would let you configure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the 950 buttons on the Thrustmaster to emulate keyboard keys. So I thought I was hot crap
⏹️ ▶️ Casey because I could play Descent basically all on the joystick without having to hit 350 keyboard keys. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the point I’m driving at is it was really well done and really well orchestrated for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey something that was not at all supported. And so it’s surprising to me that Minecraft isn’t,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey especially in this day and age where self-management is so much easier,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it’s surprising to me that the Minecraft world is such a Wild Wild West.
⏹️ ▶️ John Minecraft would be better if it was a DOS game, because in a DOS data, it’s like you said, one guy would make some sort
⏹️ ▶️ John of mod loader thing, and it would kind of filter through the community through like BBSs and floppy disk
⏹️ ▶️ John trading, right? And there wouldn’t be a million of them, and you know, they’d have to be careful because it’s not like you can
⏹️ ▶️ John update people, so the version that you got would probably work, and there’d be like three possible versions in circulation,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that would be the one that everybody uses, and there’d be like five or six mods on the BBSs, and they would all work
⏹️ ▶️ John and all be used. You wouldn’t have this problem. Like, the problem is that it’s like the complete irresponsibility
⏹️ ▶️ John of children combined with the complete lawlessness and huge,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, reach of the internet. So it’s just spam, explosion, crappy
⏹️ ▶️ John download sites, kids’ YouTube videos, no official sites for anything, which just boggles my
⏹️ ▶️ John mind. Like, the official page of a lot of these mods seems to be like a forum post where the guy just continually updates the
⏹️ ▶️ John top post in a sticky thread of like, with his latest versions and it’s It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John just, it is really amazing, and especially in the modern age where any real game has like
⏹️ ▶️ John a real supported built-in system for mods, or at the worst case, a folder where you throw a bunch of things and then
⏹️ ▶️ John it just loads them, and just opening up JAR files and putting stuff in and complete versioning compatibility
⏹️ ▶️ John and no system for sorting that out and no conflict resolution is really,
⏹️ ▶️ John really terrible. Shockingly terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what you’re saying is you really like it?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think what you’re saying is this is your next app idea you were you were saying last
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John episode you didn’t have any
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app ideas and now this is clearly a major problem that no one’s adequately
⏹️ ▶️ Marco solving to your standards although I I would bet most
⏹️ ▶️ John are unsolvable to my standards because of the way things are set up and there’s a million applications to try to help
⏹️ ▶️ John you with it and each of those applications is exactly the same problems that they’re trying to solve you don’t know which version of minecraft works
⏹️ ▶️ John with and which mods it works with and and you know where to get it from and what you’re supposed to do once you get
⏹️ ▶️ John it and just a million repetitions of instructions of how to zip and unzip files. It’s like, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ John the problem! Everyone knows how to do that. I found a couple of people
⏹️ ▶️ John on Twitter did send me helpful links for like, here’s a thing that I used to manage and most of them were terrible
⏹️ ▶️ John or I’d already tried but one of them actually did work for one mod that I was doing and another one worked for a different mod. I have
⏹️ ▶️ John like 17 versions of Minecraft all in various states of disrepair just so I have a chance to put like, okay
⏹️ ▶️ John well this mod I’ll try to shove into that one and this one I’ll I use this this thing and this one I use this launcher application
⏹️ ▶️ John and this one I use my clean 1.6 with and yeah Is
⏹️ ▶️ John it is probably the worst gaming experience I’ve ever had and that is including you know Updating any
⏹️ ▶️ John and bat files and making special boot floppy disks on my friend’s PC.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I Just I love that For the last 26 minutes Casey and I have said almost nothing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and this is like one one like saved bottled up rant that you’ve been like we’ve been
⏹️ ▶️ Marco waiting to let this out for months
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve calmed way down about this I was livid like when this first because it’s been weeks since we’ve been this
⏹️ ▶️ John you know first happened and we just saved it and I’ve mellowed out significantly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco would love to stay there that
⏹️ ▶️ John night especially if you got me at the point where I had yet to be successful because I spent several nights with nothing to
⏹️ ▶️ John show for it was just like a series of broken minecraft jars. You know, that’s all I had. And you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John anyone who’s like technical, you’re like, you’re just so pissed. Because the problem is not like, look,
⏹️ ▶️ John I know how to zip files. You can’t give me a damn download link. You can’t tell me what I need. How can
⏹️ ▶️ John I tell whether it’s working? What do I need to do for this? What version does it work with? You know, all that
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff. That’s after you fight through the download pages to get downloads that aren’t like exe files.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is the Mellow version.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would love to see the full bore version. Oh goodness.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then you’re trying to remain calm like Marco when he gets older. You’re trying to remain calm
⏹️ ▶️ John for your kid, right? You don’t want him to see the problem. It’s not his fault that you can’t install this mod, right? But he’s also saying,
⏹️ ▶️ John you can install the mod yet. When are you going to get the mod installed? It’s just the worst in the entire world.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco All right. I think we should probably wrap it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I think we’re done. Well, John, would you like to add anything else?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sitting here waiting. I’m here for you, John. If there’s anything else you’d like to add,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is there anything else you’d like to complain about?
⏹️ ▶️ John Not today. I got another podcast in five minutes. Gotta save it up.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John All right. Thanks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot to our two sponsors this week, 23andMe and Squarespace. And we’ll see you next week.
⏹️ ▶️ John And if you’re into Twitter, you can follow them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 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, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s accidental. They didn’t mean to.
⏹️ ▶️ John Accidental. Tech podcasts so
⏹️ ▶️ John long. Well, no after show, because we have no time for it today.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Oh, come on. That’s boring.
⏹️ ▶️ John That is boring. Five minutes. You have five minutes. And now you’ve already had two
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things you had to beep. Hey, really quickly, how’s your review?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John That’s a great sound bite right there.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like I want it to be done, but there’s more.
⏹️ ▶️ John But there’s more like I don’t. Today was the first build of Mavericks
⏹️ ▶️ John that I believe released that had one of the major applications that they advertised in the keynote. Oh, wow. So
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s the pace we’re at here. And they didn’t even get the release number right in the release notes. I said,
⏹️ ▶️ John keep in mind that in Mavericks developer preview for blah blah blah won’t work. It’s like, oh, that’s great. This is developer five
⏹️ ▶️ John preview notes. I guess you just copied and pasted that from four. When you’re copying and pasted like the known issues from the previous notes,
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re not making progress So I don’t know when this thing will be released, but it makes review writing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Do you think given the given the developer preview state? Do you think its release is imminent?
⏹️ ▶️ John No Besides they said fall fall
⏹️ ▶️ John starts in September 22nd. They reiterated fall earnings call So that you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John I listen to the earning call waiting for here what they said They said fall again, so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because I’m guessing all of the pending computer updates are waiting for this like I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco guessing the Mac Pro and The new MacBook their new retina MacBook Pros and maybe
⏹️ ▶️ Marco other other MacBook Pros Maybe even a Mac Mini probably eventually an iMac. I bet these are all being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco held up by Mavericks
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, it could could be held up by the Haswell things or screens who knows what the limiting factor
⏹️ ▶️ John is but like progress is slow like i just tried i just got to i was gonna write the dictation
⏹️ ▶️ John section today okay now let me try this dictation thing didn’t work at all no did
⏹️ ▶️ John not put my words that i said into the document
⏹️ ▶️ Marco period did it put other
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco document just no
⏹️ ▶️ John words just nothing at all the ui work you see a little microphone see the levels going up and down
⏹️ ▶️ John it makes it slow to write like i want to make progress and yet how can i write anything when things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wow. Alright, well why don’t we hang up on you because friend of the show Jason Snell
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is actually in the chat room being extremely patient, but let’s hang up on John and then
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco I don’t know if you have anything to add, but I don’t mind hanging on for a few if you’d like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey talk about John while he’s gone.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can pick a title.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco Yes. Alright, that’s how we win. That is how we win.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s how you win? We just wait him out so he has to give up and yield to us.
⏹️ ▶️ John Otherwise I dictate the titles. You pick the titles anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Don’t ruin it for everyone.
⏹️ ▶️ John All right now Jason is calling me. All right there you go. That’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. Bye John.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco By the way I love, so for the secret live listeners that are under NDA,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Casey sent me the screenshot of Fast Text under iOS 7. Now I’m not gonna share it with them because that would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a violation of trust however. Because I don’t want to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give away secrets of the much anticipated fast iOS 7 update. But I love…
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is so you, unintentionally, that you are running it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the 3.5 inch iPhone simulator. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey f*** yourself. Is it in… You know, I almost pasted it in the chat, but I didn’t know if it was like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey breaking NDA by even showing that. And so I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco already went on the side of caution. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mean, technically it probably is, but nobody cares.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right, here’s what we’re going to do. So I’m going to put in the chat and chat room, you’re not going to share it anywhere else,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right? We all agree chat room.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This is going to go right on to Casey rumors.com.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right on to Casey rumors.com. All right. Nobody on the chat room is agreeing with me. So maybe I won’t do anything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, they’re on like a five second delay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Whatever, whatever.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey That’s it. There we go. That’s like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco four people. That’s enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right. That’s that. That’s a quorum. All right, everyone, everyone lie to me and tell me how beautiful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it is. Anyway, so so yeah, it does. That’s what I’ve been saying, is that it actually
⏹️ ▶️ Casey looks pretty good. It does, yeah. Because it’s all raw UI kit. So I’m thinking
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe I’ll throw a tint color on it like a badass
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and call it a day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So I’m doing this stage of my app development now where I’m building the basics of the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco UI. I’m way behind development. I’ve been doing the data layer, the sync layer. Now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m doing the basics of the UI, very, very beginnings. I wrote my first view
⏹️ ▶️ Marco controller yesterday for this project. That’s how far along I am.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But looking at all this iOS 7 stuff, I’m like, I don’t really want to do anything different here, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this all looks really good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I just want
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it to look like this. Right. And so on the one side, I’m like, man, I feel like any time you
⏹️ ▶️ Casey use raw UI kit, you’re copping out. But on the other side, not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to toot my own horn, because I really didn’t have much to do with this, But I don’t think it looks bad. It really does look
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, really. And I’m sure in a year or two,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco anything that looks like this will probably have to have some more design work put into it. But I think I’d rather
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And plus, customizing stuff gets easier with every release. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had the UI appearance stuff. And then I think it came in five, and then it got better in six.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And it’s even better by a little bit in seven. and now 7 has all this cool new UIKit stuff. Like customizing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the appearance is getting easier with every OS release. And like this, I think we can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco fly with this for like easily for a year. Yeah. And be awesome.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, not every app is gonna be updated immediately.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You know, in fact,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would say we’re in for a pretty uncomfortably ugly and awkward phase, similar to like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco browsing the web on a Retina MacBook Pro. You know, like you see all the,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey everyone’s like, everyone’s totally crappy graphics.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I don’t know what that’s like, Marco, because I’m using a pedestrian high-res anti-glare MacBook Pro, you big jerk.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and a 3.5-inch iPhone. Oh,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey uh, some—you are such an asshole.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco So, uh, AFWaller— Your phone
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is so heavy and thick.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, f*** off. So AFWaller in the chat said, add in a bunch of UIKit dynamics and no—I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey don’t know, if you’ve used fast text, when you send a text, a little green box pops up that says,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey hey, you know, you’ve gone ahead and sent it successfully. Well, just for grins and giggles on the way back from WWDC,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I definitely changed that from from from going from like one by one pixel in the center
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of the center of the screen to something to the order of 100 by 100. So it zooms in, if you will.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The what what I did on the way home was from from WDC as I changed it to be full size
⏹️ ▶️ Casey drop in. What did I do? It drops in from the top and like bounces on the bottom,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you know, using UI kit dynamics, gravity, and then eventually falls off the bottom. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey really fun to do. And it looks like crap and it takes way too long. But it was a lot of fun
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, we’re going to be in for a rough time, I think, with apps playing a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco too much with that kind of stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, I had no reason to do it, but I was like, oh, this sounds fun, let me try some of that. And it was terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it was fun. Ay yi yi.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey What else we got to talk about? I feel like we should be totally making fun of John or saying terrible
⏹️ ▶️ Casey things about John since he’s not here to defend himself. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he’s a nice guy, we can’t really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey say anything
⏹️ ▶️ Casey him. I know. That’s terrible. Did we? So what are we concluding with titles? Are we going with Thrustmaster Joystick?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey A Thrustmaster. Yeah. I mean, was that not the most ridiculous name for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a company in the world?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why Thrustmaster Joystick has to be our title. It really does. I mean, come on.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Man. So on a completely unrelated note, I know that I have made it in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey world and this link I’m about to post in the chat confirms it. I now have
⏹️ ▶️ Casey My work here is done, this is my last episode of ATP, I’ve accomplished all that there is to accomplish,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m done. And I would drop my RØDE Podcaster if it wasn’t so damn expensive. And mount it on a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco human dismount.