32: It Doesn't Bother Me
27 Sep 2013Casey’s exclusive new iPhone 5S, John’s review of iOS 7, and Marco’s new podcast app.
Episode Description:
- Casey's exclusive new iPhone 5S.
- Low stock levels of the gold 5S and Apple's potential motivations.
- How good the iPhone 5 (and therefore the 5C) still is today.
- John's review of iOS 7.
- Locking your kitchen.
- Marco's upcoming podcast app, Overcast, as announced at XOXO 2013, and why he preannounced it.
- The parallels between Portland and the Hofbräuhaus.
- John's logarithmic-scrubber idea. (and Marco's logarithmic calendar)
- Dr. Drang on parallax.
- Post-show Neutral: the F80 M3/M4 specs.
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Transcript start
⏹️ ▶️ John We are so over time. You’re
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco going to cut most of this out
⏹️ ▶️ John though. Of course. You’re doing better about cutting the crap at the end of the show. Yeah, thanks.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I should point out that I am still fighting that cold off a little bit because when you get up at five in the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey morning to go get a phone when you’re sick doesn’t really help. So if
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I start hacking up a long, just carry on and we’ll get it in post.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But at least the good news is you got your phone before I did
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you have your phone? Of course I do. God damn it,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Marco. It came today.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I hate you so much. I hate you so much right now. This is my one crowning moment to have something
⏹️ ▶️ Casey fancier than you and you effing ruined it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You had it. You didn’t even have it until the next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the show. I know. All that waiting was for nothing. Oh, look at me. I’m Marco Armin. I’m going to go to Portland and I’m still going
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to get my frigging phone before the next taping.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco I hate you so much.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You make me so angry. Yeah, make me so angry.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, so I can say that if you woke up at 3 a.m. And you know place the order on the moment you could
⏹️ ▶️ Marco place the order and didn’t go to any stores It probably if you got one of the first
⏹️ ▶️ Marco batch it probably arrived today or sometime close to today in the US And I’ve heard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve heard from other people too that it’s really easy to just go to a store Now and just get one like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it seems like the the major supply constraints that everyone was so concerned about about,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it does seem to be applying to the gold one, which is hilarious, but not to the other ones. It seems like you can pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco much go into any Apple store you want to most of these days now and just get one,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John as long as it’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I wanna know how many of each color they made and how many they shipped to the stores, because lots of people were
⏹️ ▶️ John reporting in from Apple stores about which colors sold out first and stuff, but that information is not useful
⏹️ ▶️ John unless you tell us how many proportion-wise of each color did you get.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right, I mean, that was always the trick, like that didn’t Microsoft pull some kind of tricks like that with the Surface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when it launched where like they were bragging about how it sold out but they didn’t tell you how many they made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco or how many they shipped and so it was like oh yeah it’s sold out of all of its inventory but you know we didn’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco make a whole lot of them.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Right, no for what it’s worth at my Apple store which is for
⏹️ ▶️ Casey arguably the middle of nowhere it’s it’s actually a fairly big store and we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they got I guess a handful of golds. I never got a clear answer but I did ask a
⏹️ ▶️ Casey couple people, a couple employees, and the impression I got was that they had roundabouts of five golds
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and that went almost immediately. And so when I went
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I woke up at 5 and was at the store 5.30 which was annoying because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey the local mall said they weren’t opening until 6 and you know Apple and the mall both independently
⏹️ ▶️ Casey told me that on Friday when I was a big enough nerd to ask both of them about this. So anyway, so I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Casey loitering with a friend of mine, Eric, waiting for another friend of mine, Keith, and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is at 5.30 and then a security guard walks by. We were loitering at the edge of the mall and the security guard walks by
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and says, hey, if you guys are waiting to get phones, you better go because they’re lining up. And so the two of us were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like, crap, and ran for it. And so I was 40 or 50 people back, I’d say.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And almost immediately when they started doing the dance with the tickets
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or business cards for lack of a better term. So what happens is they have a business card basically
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for every device they got in stock and they go down the line and they give you a little card and that expedites
⏹️ ▶️ Casey figuring out what’s going to happen when you actually get to the point of buying your phone. Well, they announced
⏹️ ▶️ Casey almost immediately that I think they, as far as I know, they got zero non-space grays
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for Verizon and Sprint and T-Mobile and I never heard any talk
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of any whites or golds for AT&T until later on when I asked what the situation was and they said they
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a handful of golds. So I waited in line from 530 on I got my
⏹️ ▶️ Casey phones both Aaron’s and mine at 8 or 9 ish and I was reveling in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this moment thinking I would be the only one with the fancy new phone for this recording
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And then everything was ruined
⏹️ ▶️ John So based on based on that story and your store anyway It’s not that gold was super
⏹️ ▶️ John popular. It’s that there was like no gold phones
⏹️ ▶️ John because surely there’s gonna be five people in a line of 100 people who want gold and then they’re all sold out It’s like boy is everyone
⏹️ ▶️ John buying gold. No, it seems like they’re not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, I’m not sure Although I did you see the story that somebody posted about the the woman going berserk
⏹️ ▶️ John and that guy that also reported five gold iPhones. Five of any
⏹️ ▶️ John variety of any product seems crazy for an Apple store. No matter how small the Apple store is, there should be more
⏹️ ▶️ John than five of everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, it does seem like the story came out right after the first day of sale. The story came out
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that Apple was apparently ordering more of the gold ones, increasing their orders for gold
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ones from their suppliers. I think it’s probably safe to assume, based on what we’ve heard about stock relative
⏹️ ▶️ Marco levels, that they really did not make a lot of golds. And I think,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know, you can ask yourself whether they thought that they wouldn’t sell very well. I think that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco charitable. I think obviously this was a move that they made
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that everyone would know that the golds were in short supply. And so when, you know, they introduced this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco new color for the first time and it’s hard to get and it’s back-ordered so it makes it more
⏹️ ▶️ Marco prestigious, it makes it more rare. I think it was a brilliant, intentional move.
⏹️ ▶️ John That seems kind of cynical and also, like, I don’t know if… You know, you want to make money.
⏹️ ▶️ John You want to sell them. So if they could have sold more golds, wouldn’t they have made more of them? It just seems…
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they’ve intentionally made fewer of them. Especially since, like, in the
⏹️ ▶️ John introduction video, like, the introduction of the 5S was that, you know, the liquid gold
⏹️ ▶️ John CG thing forming into the phone shape. was their pitch.
⏹️ ▶️ John If you’re going to lead with that, surely you know you’re artificially creating
⏹️ ▶️ John more demand for gold, and then you’re going to intentionally not capitalize
⏹️ ▶️ John that by giving each Apple store five gold phones? Maybe they just couldn’t create
⏹️ ▶️ John that many more phones, or maybe their projections changed and they didn’t have time to ramp up.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it was the iFixit site that, well maybe it was just the CPU, I think it was the iFisket
⏹️ ▶️ John site, they said this something was manufactured in July. I don’t know if they meant the whole phone
⏹️ ▶️ John or just the part of the phone, but the point is they’ve been doing this production ramp for a while now. So
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe in the beginning, they either didn’t have gold at all or didn’t think gold was going to sell
⏹️ ▶️ John very well. And so, you know, those factories are cranking away, churning out phones
⏹️ ▶️ John for weeks and weeks and possibly even months and months before the launch date. And then at some point in there, they either
⏹️ ▶️ John decide to have gold at all or do some market research or something, or see
⏹️ ▶️ John the hype on the internet and figure out, boy, we should make more of these gold than we thought. But it was too late for launch day to do that. So
⏹️ ▶️ John Apple will never tell us how many gold they made. And we’ll never get color breakdowns. And I
⏹️ ▶️ John assume that unless gold is like the old white iPhone, where it’s like they had
⏹️ ▶️ John trouble manufacturing it, I assume the levels of the various colors will stabilize
⏹️ ▶️ John in time for the holidays. And anyone who wants any variety and any color they want will be able to get it by then.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, on the other side of this though, you have to look at a couple of things.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco First of all, before I forget, there is a way to tell in software what the color of the phone is.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s some P-list key on, I believe, what’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an unsupported method on UI device. So it would be hard to get
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an app into the App Store that reads that key, I think. But if for some reason
⏹️ ▶️ Marco their analyzer that scans for private APIs is being called, if it does not catch
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that or if it does not prohibit that, then you could actually have some
⏹️ ▶️ Marco popular app or component maker run profiles and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco measure how many of each are out there. Anyway, so besides that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though, I think you can look at one other thing they did that that was a little bit unusual
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this time to suggest that maybe this was planned to make
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people realize that this is still in high demand. And that is that you could preorder the 5C but not the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5S before its launch. The 5S, if you wanted to get a 5S on the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco first day it was available, you had to go stand online. And this is not the first time they’ve done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this. I believe it was the iPhone 5, I believe, had the same thing where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco if you wanted an iPhone 5 on launch day I believe you had to go get it in person.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The Verizon iPhone 4 I believe kind of slapped them in the face
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in that everyone expected there to be huge lines for the Verizon iPhone 4. Oh no, so it was the 4S, my mistake.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Everyone expected there to be huge lines for the iPhone 4 for Verizon and there weren’t. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a huge thing in the press and in the blogs, like oh my god, there weren’t these huge lines. It was really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of a non-launch because you could just order them online and everyone just did that. So when the 4S
⏹️ ▶️ Marco came around six months later, or however long it was, Apple said, no pre-orders.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey You have to go to the store. No, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey pre-ordered my 4S. Well, our 4S is, yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Maybe I’m thinking of the iPad that came out that time.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey I thought it was an iPad. It must be that. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re right. I think you’re right about the Verizon iPhone 4, that they were expecting these tremendous
⏹️ ▶️ Casey lines and didn’t get them. And then I think the knee-jerk reaction, the cynical answer is that the knee-jerk reaction
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was, for whatever came next, and it was one of the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco iPad. I think it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the iPad 3 that came after that.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey The iPad 3 you could pre-order 2 as well.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco It doesn’t really matter. It was something.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway, yeah. So the point is, the next big thing they released, whether it was an iPad or an iPhone,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we can’t remember, but the next big thing they released after that, there were no pre-orders. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of course then there were big lines. So I think this might be the same kind of thing. You know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is very sensitive to the ongoing media narrative that they’ve lost their cool, they’re going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco down, they can’t innovate, no one wants their stuff anymore, etc. And so by creating
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a big launch day line, big launch day hype, and this new hype around this gold color,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think they’re fighting back against that perception.
⏹️ ▶️ John Not giving pre-orders doesn’t reduce your number of sales. All it does is shift them.
⏹️ ▶️ John You’re not foregoing those sales. You’re just making those people go buy it at a store.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, sure. But then everyone knows. Then everyone knows who hears about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lines in an Apple store or who drives past an Apple store that day and sees the lines or who sees
⏹️ ▶️ Marco people on stupid cable news channels that fly the helicopter near the lines,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and look how big the line is, or they interview people on the line. That all
⏹️ ▶️ Marco adds up. And that all adds up to a perception But Apple is still in demand and hip, and look how many of these phones they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but I was saying that’s why I still don’t think they intentionally made few gold
⏹️ ▶️ John phones because then you do lose sales, right? Versus this strategy of just not providing pre-orders,
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t lose nearly as many sales because you’re just shifting them mostly. I mean, some people just won’t order at all
⏹️ ▶️ John on that first day because they couldn’t pre-order and they couldn’t get to the store fine. But like, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, why? I can’t see these people in a meeting saying, all right, we know
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re going to create hype for the gold. But let’s intentionally not make as many of those as we think they’re going to have.
⏹️ ▶️ John In fact, let’s give each Apple store like five of them, and then give the each Apple store like 150 all the other colors. And
⏹️ ▶️ John it doesn’t doesn’t seem like something they would do. And they would say, Well, why would we do that? Don’t we want big opening weekend sales?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but with them, all those people who want gold opening weekend, only five people per store are going to be able to get gold and literally
⏹️ ▶️ John only five people per store because we don’t have pre-orders. It just seems like they didn’t have enough gold to go around. I find that the more
⏹️ ▶️ John plausible explanation.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco What if this is actually kind of like an amplification of mania?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like what if there actually were more gold than we all thought, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone bought them because they heard they were running out of golds and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so it like inflated them and you know, like maybe everyone bought all the gold ones to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sell them on eBay or because they thought they wouldn’t be able to get them. And so maybe they were a little bit less, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco because of all the scalpers now trying to gobble them up, maybe that made them even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more – the same way like whenever there’s like a gas shortage, like a big storm
⏹️ ▶️ Marco comes in or something and everyone goes out and fills up with gas because they’re afraid there’s a gas shortage which causes a gas shortage.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Fientist See, but I don’t think that could be the case though because as the people were walking down the line at 5
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or 7 o’clock in the morning, whatever it was on Friday, I can tell you that they had a stack of
⏹️ ▶️ Casey little cards for space gray 5S’s for AT&T. And there were
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just a handful of 64s, so I was very lucky to get one of those. If memory serves, there were a fairly
⏹️ ▶️ Casey decent number by the time it got to me of 32s, which is what Aaron got, and then there were like a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of 16s as well. And then, and so that was one person that was holding, I would
⏹️ ▶️ Casey say, 50 to 100 cards. Meanwhile, there were people walking around with like
⏹️ ▶️ Casey boxfuls of cards of 5Cs. And one thing I wanted to ask was,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey who bought a 5C? Like I’ve seen 5Ss in the wild, mostly from friends who are like, oh, did you get the new phone? I got the new phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey blah, blah, blah. But I have yet to see a 5C in the wild. Well,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the bigger question is, why did somebody line up to buy it?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, who’s going to line up for the 5C? No one’s going to pre-order a 5C. No one’s going to line up
⏹️ ▶️ John to buy the 5C. a lot of people are going to get the 5C when their contracts are up and they’re thinking
⏹️ ▶️ John of buying an iPhone and their choice is the cool colorful one for less money or the fancy one with 64-bit
⏹️ ▶️ John something or other that is a hundred bucks more and they’re not sure they can, you know, afford that one. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I think the 5C will do fine, but it’s not an early adopter product. It’s not going to be the people, the tech
⏹️ ▶️ John nerds, the people who are lining up or the people who are pre-ordering.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for whatever it’s worth, so I was at the XOXO conference this past weekend
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and so there were a whole lot of nerdy type people there and I did see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco two iPhone 5Cs and that’s you know that’s this is only a handful
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of days after they came out.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John What color were they?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco One was white and one was green.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The white one was hard to spot like I looked at it I’m like is that a 5C or is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it just a 5 with a case on it? But I look closer and it was indeed 5C and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the green one was obvious and I I let me hold it and everything. It’s it’s actually it’s really slick like I thought
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that It would be more of a matte finish, but it really is like an enamel like like a hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slippery enamel Yes, I was actually I was pretty impressed by how it felt
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I didn’t get a hold of time with it I was impressed by how it felt like physically, but you know it’s just an iPhone 5 that being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco said though So I have my my iPhone 5s now. I hate you.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I know and I’ve had it I’ve had it for I don’t know, about
⏹️ ▶️ Marco five hours maybe? So not a lot of time yet. I haven’t been using it heavily yet. But
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so far it does seem kind of like it’s a smaller upgrade in day-to-day
⏹️ ▶️ Marco feel. Part of that is because I never used a passcode before. So I’m trying now with Touch ID,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so part of it is like I didn’t get that big speed up of being able to bypass my passcode because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I never really used one. And then part of that is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I haven’t taken pictures yet. But I feel like, you know, the 5,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco since I was using it up until today, and been using it with iOS 7 for a while, the 5 works fantastically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on iOS 7. It really does. And, you know, we’re getting to the point now, yes, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 5S is a nice improvement on paper and in benchmarks and in a few of these cool areas,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but these phones are just so fast that I think we’re gonna feel these improvements
⏹️ ▶️ Marco less and less, even though, yeah, the CPU is like 50% faster or something like that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in a lot of these tests, or 100% faster in some of these tests. So it’s really, really big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco on paper, but what we feel is not that big. In the same way
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, yeah, my Mac Pro is 3.3 gigahertz. If the new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one comes out and it’s twice as much CPU performance as this one, which actually it probably won’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be, unfortunately, but if it’s twice as much CPU, let’s say it’s 50% more, I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not likely to feel that in day-to-day usage. And so eventually you get to these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco points, these barriers where either it takes a while for the software to catch up or the software
⏹️ ▶️ Marco kind of never catches up for certain uses. And I think we’re getting there in phones now where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the reason why the 5C is gonna sell very, very well is not because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s, you know, really cool new plastic design, you know, that’ll help a little bit.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The reason it’s gonna sell really well is because it actually is good enough. It’s actually a really good phone. Like, the iPhone 5
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is a really good phone. And it’s still a really good phone, even with this brand new, radically redesigned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco OS that is presumably heavier to run than iOS 6. It’s still,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like, the 5 is still great. So I would not discount
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sales of the 5C or the kinds of people who might buy them or the reasons they would buy them because I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think you know you can make a pretty good case for the 5C being
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like the new default phone for you know that you tell people you should buy.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So all of that may be true if you’ve upgraded from a 5. Those of us who are
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a little bit less spoiled and upgraded from a 4S,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey this is a a whole new world for me. This is the first time I’ve experienced LTE and it is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey amazing. So when we moved into this house in 2008, we were coming
⏹️ ▶️ Casey from a different town and we knew we were going to get Fios. And Verizon Fios, for those who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe aren’t from the United States or don’t have it nearby, it’s fiber optics directly to the house. And
⏹️ ▶️ Casey at the time in 2008, I was arguably more excited about getting Fios at my new domicile
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than when I was about purchasing my first home. And at that point, we were getting 15
⏹️ ▶️ Casey megabits symmetrical. So 15 megabits upload, 15 megabits download. On my phone,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey five years later, just earlier today, I think I got 40 megabits down and like 10 or 15 up. It’s amazing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That in and of itself is worth upgrading from a 4S. On top of that,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t think that iOS 7 ran poorly on the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 4S, but now that I’ve seen it on the 5S, I was so wrong.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It runs phenomenally well on the 5S, and I didn’t know it until I tried it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it runs like crap on the 4S. And so animations are quicker, they don’t get in the way,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they’re not jittery, everything’s better. The camera is also fantastic. I took,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’ve taken a handful of slow motion videos. I was, by pure dumb luck, we were at
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a UVA football game this past weekend, And I happened to take a slow motion video when
⏹️ ▶️ Casey they were throwing like a 30 or 40 yard bomb pass, which I know
⏹️ ▶️ Casey neither of you probably understand any of this, but suffice to say it was a very impressive play. And I just so happened to choose that
⏹️ ▶️ Casey play to take slow motion video. And it’s really cool. And then last night just goofing around, Aaron took a video
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of me like supermanning into bed. And it’s really funny and I should probably post it somewhere.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey But it’s really impressive, the slow motion camera and very cool.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I’m not saying that you’re wrong about coming from a 5. You’re probably right. But
⏹️ ▶️ Casey let me tell you, from a 4S, it is night and day different. It is a whole new experience. And I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey a much better upgrade than it was to go from the 3GS to the 4S.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, really, this shows quite how big of an upgrade the 5 was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, the 5S is certainly big, but I think people really shat
⏹️ ▶️ Marco all over the 5 when it came out. And it was really good. Like, it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco night and day difference even from the 4S to the 5. It was a massive difference. The combination
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the new thinner, lighter body, the bigger screen, LTE, the way faster A6 CPU.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like, it was a big, big difference. And it really did not get the credit that it deserved by a lot of the press
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at the time. And, you know, the 5S is, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco from what I can tell so far, again, with half a day of usage, the 5S is certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an upgrade. But I don’t think it’s the magnitude of an upgrade that the 5 was.
⏹️ ▶️ John It depends on if you have any apps that you had to wait for on the 5. Like you tap it on the home screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John how long do you have to wait before you can use the app? The 5 was probably fast enough that you didn’t have many
⏹️ ▶️ John apps that took more than like a second, or a second and a half, or two seconds, right? But if you had something
⏹️ ▶️ John like a game that you played frequently that had like a five second load time, and it reduces to a 2.5
⏹️ ▶️ John second load time on the 5S, that would, you would feel that change. So I think part of it depends on,
⏹️ ▶️ John and that has less to do with the CPU probably than the speed of the flash memory or other factors or whatever. But
⏹️ ▶️ John when people run benchmarks on it, they’re like, oh, look at these apps. They launch twice as fast. It
⏹️ ▶️ John doesn’t matter if it launches twice as fast if the majority of the time on the 5 was spent
⏹️ ▶️ John doing the animation in iOS 7. You know what I mean? That starts to become the gating
⏹️ ▶️ John factor where, OK, so the 5S is faster, but there’s a 0.3 second transition
⏹️ ▶️ John from the home screen to the launch screen, right? That’s never going to get any faster no matter how fast your phone gets. Like
⏹️ ▶️ John you may have more frames of animation. It may, on a slower phone, it may take a while before that animation begins.
⏹️ ▶️ John So you got an extra.2,.1 seconds before the animation begins, right? But if you had an infinitely fast phone,
⏹️ ▶️ John someone has programmed the core animation, you know, an animation with a fixed amount of time.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that becomes, once your phone is infinitely fast, the amount of time programmed
⏹️ ▶️ John for all the animations becomes the limiting factor in how fast your phone feels. We’ll probably
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about animations when we talk about iOS 7 a little bit later. But that could be those two things combined. One,
⏹️ ▶️ John that you didn’t run a lot of apps that took a long time anyway. And two, that iOS 7 cranked up
⏹️ ▶️ John all of the transition speeds, and now they become sort of the long stick in the pole of
⏹️ ▶️ John lunchtimes or transitions. That may be why it doesn’t feel faster.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, very well could be. All I can tell you is that I don’t know that I would say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that the 5S feels faster than the 4S because of actual speed, to your point,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey but the animations are so much more fluid. Like the frame rate, based on just my eyeballs,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey with no scientific test or empirical test whatsoever, the frame rate seems so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey much better and it really improves the experience. And I didn’t notice it. I know I said this before, but
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I didn’t notice it in the 4S until I had tried it on the 5S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and then it was just immediately apparent. And it is a world better.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, stuttering is terrible. And like I said, the thing I notice on my iPod Touch is the very,
⏹️ ▶️ John very brief pause before the animation begins, which you will never notice unless you have another device
⏹️ ▶️ John that you also use frequently that doesn’t have that pause. So yeah, there’s the frame rate, and there’s the pause
⏹️ ▶️ John before it begins. Any time the phone is unresponsive, even for a microsecond, it’s just crazy making,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And so that unresponsive time doesn’t count towards time taken
⏹️ ▶️ John to complete the task, because as far as you’re concerned, the action that you wanted to perform hadn’t begun yet,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it makes the phone feel slower. And I have my fourth generation iPod Touch,
⏹️ ▶️ John should not have even upgraded to iOS 6 because it’s all slow and crappy there. And upgrading my iPod Touch to
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 7, it does okay, but I definitely noticed the length of the animations increasing.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So anything else about hardware?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco This episode is sponsored in part by something that’s not hardware. It’s a new sponsor
⏹️ ▶️ Marco though. It is called Ding. That’s right, Ding. It’s ding,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco D-I-N-G, dot I-O slash A-T-P. So what is Ding? Ding is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a time tracking web app and iOS app, time tracking for people who run their own show.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They’ve given us an awesome promo code, ATP, for a 90 day free trial. That’s a lot of days, 90
⏹️ ▶️ Marco days. That way you can really get a feel for what Ding’s about and how it fits for you,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco your company, or yourself and your workflow. So, Ding is built for freelancers and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco small teams. They built it because they want to use this product every day.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It has all the features for managers stripped away. So it focuses just on the hours
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the people who are working on this stuff put in, and the money they make, and what they bill people.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s amazing, it has a beautiful UI. This is a tool that is made to fit into the workflow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of creative people. It is blazingly fast, you can log in with the iPhone app, designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with iOS 7. So, once again, go to ding.io
⏹️ ▶️ Marco slash ATP. Their app, they got kind of the short end of the stick here. Their app was rejected
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for a minor thing last week. They’ve resubmitted it. It’s probably gonna be out by the time this podcast comes out. Just in
⏹️ ▶️ Marco case it’s not, the app is right around the corner, so hang back in there. And, you know, Casey, I mean, you do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey do you have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to track your hours? Oh, yeah. How fun is hour
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tracking for people like you?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is extremely unfun, and the more things, more projects
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you’re on, the less fun it is. So if I’m working a nine hour day and it’s all for one client, that’s not
⏹️ ▶️ Casey too terrible. But if I’m even splitting that day between two clients or God forbid, three or four,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it gets really annoying really quickly.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I mean, it’s and the software to track time, I mean, there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like a million things out there to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, and most of them are terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. I mean, it’s not a great field. So Ding has walked in there,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they sent me the screenshots of their app because you can’t get the app yet at the time of record this, but they sent me the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screenshots of the app and it is beautiful. They have this awesome iOS 7 redesign or design rather.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And you know, we were probably going to talk later. I have seen a lot of pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mediocre iOS 7 redesigns of apps where an app that was just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco default UI kit stuff continues to be default UI kit stuff with no other rethinkings
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of anything and it ends up just looking really terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco They have taken iOS 7 design to heart and they have made apps that I think are better designed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco than many of Apple’s iOS 7 apps. The Ding app is really
⏹️ ▶️ Marco incredible. You can tell these are designers at heart, and it’s just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really fantastic. The capabilities it has are awesome. Signing in is really quick. You can add comments
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to things. You can track your time. It’s really beautiful. So check out Ding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at ding.io. That’s D-I-N-G dot I-O slash A-T-P. And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco use coupon code ATP for a 90-day free trial. Thanks a lot
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to Ding for sponsoring ATP this week. That’s just a cool name, too.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like, ding! In fact, to give you some, just one little quick thing, to give you some idea
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the attention to detail that Ding pays here, in their screenshot, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco earlier today I saw somebody tweet, I forget who, I think it was Vatici, somebody who tweeted that it It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco annoys them whenever they see carrier on somebody’s status bar in an app store screenshot.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Because, you know, when you screenshot the simulator where they normally say AT&T or whatever, it just says the word
⏹️ ▶️ Marco carrier. And that’s really tacky if you leave that in your app store screenshots. Ding! On the screenshots
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’ve sent me to show off their app, it’s made by a company named Tite
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and the carrier string has been replaced with TG.ht for Tite.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s just it’s just it’s like a nice little touch like they thought about that you know And I mean you’d be super you’d be amazed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how many like crappy status bars I see like an app screenshots like really the batteries down to zero
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s in the red and there and it has like some weird long carry name or the word carrier You’re like just crop
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that out. No they they take these things seriously and Really great, so thanks a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco lot to ding for sponsoring all right
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So I was 7 John you seem to have some thoughts about this
⏹️ ▶️ John we’re not gonna talk about overcast well we’re getting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s not a secret anymore oh yeah I talked about that I’ve been trying so
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to not talk about that on this show when I
⏹️ ▶️ John saw that tweet who is it I saw a guy guy English tweeted or somebody tweeted the tweeted the word
⏹️ ▶️ John overcast like oh someone slipped that was supposed to be a DM oh no and then like a scroll
⏹️ ▶️ John up and I’d really like this is like in real time while you were giving your talk probably
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah oh my god that was that was a
⏹️ ▶️ John rush felt bad for for a moment
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just for a brief moment yeah so do we want to talk about ios 7 for a little bit yeah sure
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so John how was your first week with ios 7 yeah so
⏹️ ▶️ John you guys have been using it for a while Marco’s been developing on it and you did you upgrade WWDC
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey immediately no
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I waited I don’t remember what beta it was but it was like maybe three or four I’d say
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco yeah I think I did beta 2
⏹️ ▶️ Casey yeah you were before me for sure by like one or two betas
⏹️ ▶️ Casey so I’ve been running it for maybe a month, maybe two now, I’d say.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, and everybody has talked about it and done it, but I only saw it at WWDC. I only played with it on other
⏹️ ▶️ John people’s phones briefly and then just like said goodbye to it and said, well, I’ll come back to that again
⏹️ ▶️ John when it’s released, I guess, because I know I’d be busy with Mavericks and I didn’t want to distract myself with that stuff. And plus,
⏹️ ▶️ John I figured it would give Apple a lot of time to fix stuff. So by the time I see it, I’ll see like, you know, the good final
⏹️ ▶️ John version. And so now I put it on my iPod Touch the day it was released, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is a little bit of of a challenge because of Apple’s usual server woes. And
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve been using it, and I tweeted sometime earlier this week.
⏹️ ▶️ John What was it? What did I say about that? It was the only video review of iOS 7 that you need to watch.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey only 17 seconds long.
⏹️ ▶️ John And this is a YouTube video that we’ll put in the show notes
⏹️ ▶️ John of a little boy named Jack who looks to be, I don’t know, four, five, three, two.
⏹️ ▶️ John I can’t tell kids’ ages, even though I have kids of my own who have passed through those ages. I still can’t tell kids ages.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in the short video, it shows the boy crying, and the mom, and he’s crying
⏹️ ▶️ John about something, and the mom says, what’s different? The kid is crying about iOS 7. And then Jack says,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. And then the dad says, well, you’re just gonna have to get used to it. And Jack says, no,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t wanna. That’s the whole video. A little boy crying about iOS 7,
⏹️ ▶️ John right? And that’s- So that was you? Well, so that’s what I posted. I said, this is the only video review of iOS 7 you
⏹️ ▶️ John need to watch. It’s only 17 seconds long. Posted the link to Twitter, all right? So there’s multiple possible interpretations
⏹️ ▶️ John of that tweet. And occasionally I do this, sometimes intentionally, sometimes not intentionally. This time was kind
⏹️ ▶️ John of intentionally, where I didn’t offer interpretation. I just
⏹️ ▶️ John wrote that one thing which said, you know, this is the only review you need to watch. And you can’t even tell if that’s sarcastic or sincere.
⏹️ ▶️ John And even if it is sincere, what does it mean? So possible interpretations. The first one is, iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ John is so bad it makes little kids cry. And that interpretation would be like, I hate
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 7. I’m tweeting this link to this video. And so other people would interpret it that way. But they
⏹️ ▶️ John liked it not. And so you get people saying, iOS 7 isn’t bad. You’re a doody head because you think it’s bad. Or
⏹️ ▶️ John people going, yeah, right on. iOS 7 is a piece of crap. So there’s a huge swath of
⏹️ ▶️ John my following public that thought I was posting that video because I thought iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ John was so bad it makes children cry. And the other popular interpretation is that iOS 7
⏹️ ▶️ John is great, and anybody who complains about iOS 7 is a big baby, just like this big baby. And so I got the replies
⏹️ ▶️ John from those people going, I’m not a big baby just because I hate iOS 7. iOS 7 has legitimate problems.
⏹️ ▶️ John Or other people saying, yeah, that’s right. All those people complaining about iOS 7 are just a bunch of whiners, right? So it’s like
⏹️ ▶️ John four distinct reactions to these two possible interpretations in pretty
⏹️ ▶️ John even supply. And very little, very, very little kind of people asking me
⏹️ ▶️ John what I meant by that tweet. Because everyone responding thought they already knew exactly what I meant by that tweet, whether they agree with
⏹️ ▶️ John it or not. So what did I mean when I posted that tweet? Did I mean that it’s so bad it makes kids cry?
⏹️ ▶️ John Or did I mean that people complaining about it are big babies? I meant both. That’s why I said this
⏹️ ▶️ John is the only review you need to watch, because it contains all possible positions. And I think all those positions
⏹️ ▶️ John are valid. And I’m going to get touchy-feely for a moment here,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is the reason I posted and the reason I thought the video was so great. We
⏹️ ▶️ John like to think that as we get older and we mature, that we change into something
⏹️ ▶️ John better. Like, little kids are crappy and stupid and do dumb things. And now we get
⏹️ ▶️ John older, and we’re like, oh, we’re better people than that now. Like, when we drop our ice cream cone on the sidewalk, we don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John cry. We don’t throw tantrums when it’s time for bed at night. When someone
⏹️ ▶️ John tells us that we can’t have something, we don’t fall on the floor and kick our feet and scream.
⏹️ ▶️ John Those are things that little kids do. And we’re grownups. We don’t do that. So obviously, we have changed into a better form,
⏹️ ▶️ John a higher form of life. But that’s the common
⏹️ ▶️ John view of aging and maturing stuff. But another model that I think works equally well, possibly
⏹️ ▶️ John better, is to not think of it as us transforming from this crappy little mewling, screaming, pink thing
⏹️ ▶️ John that poops his pants into some high-minded ideal, but think of it more like Russian nesting
⏹️ ▶️ John dolls. You know what those are? Like the little doll, and then you
⏹️ ▶️ John big doll. Is that what it’s called? I don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I think so. Isn’t that what the video file format is based off
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco of? Is that what it is?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh, that makes sense. Yeah.
⏹️ ▶️ John We’ll put the Wikipedia page in there. I just call them Russian nesting dolls. But so, and in that model,
⏹️ ▶️ John as we get older, all you’re doing is adding layers, increasingly sophisticated layers.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the reason this model is interesting is because the screaming, crying
⏹️ ▶️ John four-year-old is still in the middle as like the smallest doll. Like it doesn’t go away,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s still there, right? And so when something like iOS 7 comes along, all of our inner cranky
⏹️ ▶️ John four-year-olds are crying about it, right? It’s like, it doesn’t matter how old we are, how mature
⏹️ ▶️ John we are, we’re the big nesting doll. And inside every one of us is a little tiny, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, four-year-olds crying in there. And some people’s inner four-year-olds cry louder than others.
⏹️ ▶️ John And in this model of viewing sort of human behavior, The extreme reactions to iOS 7,
⏹️ ▶️ John both the extreme good reactions and the extreme bad reactions, can kind of be seen
⏹️ ▶️ John as reactions to that inner child. So the extreme bad reaction is like, your inner child
⏹️ ▶️ John is cranky about iOS 7. I don’t like it. I don’t want change.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the outer sophisticated layer is like, well, come on. I’m not going to cry and stamp my feet about it. But I will channel that energy into a more sophisticated
⏹️ ▶️ John form of protest, which will be tweeting the words iOS 7 sucks and
⏹️ ▶️ John writing blog posts where you explain at length exactly why I was seven sucks. And the extreme good reaction
⏹️ ▶️ John is that same four-year-old crying going, oh, everything’s different than it was in six. I don’t know what’s going on. Still crying and everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John But the other reaction is say, but wait a second, I’m better than that. I’m not a four-year-old, not a big baby.
⏹️ ▶️ John And then trying to find it, let me look at I was seven. There must be something good about it.
⏹️ ▶️ John That four-year-old is just crying because things have changed. But I’m a much more sophisticated, rational adult.
⏹️ ▶️ John And so you’re reacting against your inner four-year-old and calling yourself a big baby. And then you react
⏹️ ▶️ John most strongly to people who have the same kind of reaction. So when you see someone else whining, you’re like, because
⏹️ ▶️ John you felt that same feeling inside yourself, like, oh my god, everything’s changed. I don’t know where anything is. And it’s kind of ugly and jarring.
⏹️ ▶️ John You fought that feeling back and figured out what the real situation is. And then you see someone else exhibiting it, you’re
⏹️ ▶️ John like, it’s kind of like where you pick on people who have the same weaknesses as you do, like
⏹️ ▶️ John more violently than you would for people who have weaknesses that you don’t have. be some psychological phrase for that or
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever. But I think that’s definitely the case when any piece of software or
⏹️ ▶️ John operating system or thing that tech nerds are like intimately familiar with changes in a big way, whether the change is
⏹️ ▶️ John actually good or actually bad change causes that little four year old to cry. Just like this little boy, Jack
⏹️ ▶️ John in this video cries. And I think understanding why Jack is crying
⏹️ ▶️ John and how our inner Jacks are also crying about this helps us to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John if you’re aware of that, if you’re aware of this thing, if you have this Russian nesting doll model in your mind, then you can sort of figure
⏹️ ▶️ John out what the real situation is and not become a slave to these sort of inner motivations. Because if
⏹️ ▶️ John you don’t think about it, if you don’t like think about these feelings and try to like analyze them
⏹️ ▶️ John rationally, you will not be aware that they’re there at all. You’ll deny their existence, but they
⏹️ ▶️ John will subconsciously sort of affect how you react to things. So that’s why I really like
⏹️ ▶️ John this video of Jack crying, and I definitely experienced all of his feelings with
⏹️ ▶️ John my inner four-year-old when using iOS 7.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that video was 17 seconds. You’ve been talking for 5 or 10 minutes?
⏹️ ▶️ John I thought it was a great video.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey This is not, John, this is why I love you. I just want you to know. And I’m not being funny.
⏹️ ▶️ John I liked how everyone else’s reaction to it was part, it’s like performance
⏹️ ▶️ John art, that one tweet. Everyone else’s reaction to it was like, yes, that’s exactly what I’m talking about, all of you people. And I’m not telling
⏹️ ▶️ John any of them that they’re right or wrong. Like, that’s what’s going on with iOS 7.
⏹️ ▶️ John The only other thing I have to say about iOS 7 is, well, I said this in the past show. Everything Marco posted
⏹️ ▶️ John on his post about the animations being longer and annoying him, yes, of course it annoys me. Of course
⏹️ ▶️ John it annoys me that the animations are longer. I would love, the first thing I did was turned on reduce motion
⏹️ ▶️ John because I could not stand that parallax stuff. Lots of people when talking about motion sickness, which I am susceptible to,
⏹️ ▶️ John maybe, like, I did feel a little bit of vertigo even with reduced motion off from the animations, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I found that my normal way of dealing with motion sickness also works
⏹️ ▶️ John in iOS 7. So the normal way in like a moving vehicle is to make sure that what your eyes see agrees with what
⏹️ ▶️ John your inner ear feels. So you want to be looking out some window that lets you know
⏹️ ▶️ John when the car turns you see the scenery turning and so then you know everything matches up and you’re fine. Well
⏹️ ▶️ John things move on the screen in iOS 7 and there’s no way my inner ear is going to agree with that but I can at least
⏹️ ▶️ John help my brain along by once I realize what the animation is going to be looking in that
⏹️ ▶️ John direction. So if I tap the lower right icon and it zooms in to fill the screen, once I know that that’s going to happen
⏹️ ▶️ John I can focus my eyes down that thing and sort of follow the animation through, you
⏹️ ▶️ John know, not like it’s a big conscious thing that you do, but eventually you learn where to look. Right, before I was looking at the center of
⏹️ ▶️ John the screen because iOS 6 would just make everything zoom out of the center, but now when I tap in the lower right, my eyes
⏹️ ▶️ John look in the lower right and follow it as it zooms out into full screen. And that has helped me
⏹️ ▶️ John not feel quite as dizzy when the animations are taking, or just don’t look at the front at all when the animations are going on.
⏹️ ▶️ John But yes, they do take longer. I understand why they’re there, I understand the model they’re providing, I’m willing to
⏹️ ▶️ John give Apple mostly a pass on it, but I would like things to happen faster if I had my choice.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the final bit here is, and And the notes are with the science of usability.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is something that I love from the old world Apple. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t know if it’s missing from the current Apple, but certainly when Steve Jobs came back, he did not like this and he
⏹️ ▶️ John got rid of it as much as he possibly could. The science usability idea is that
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s a way that you can test with science, imagine that, whether something is usable or not. Like that
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s, yes, there’s an art to it, and there’s style, and there’s creativity, and stuff like that. But there’s also things you can actually test.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, like Fitts’ Law is the one everyone knows about. It’s the guy who’s testing how easy it is to acquire and
⏹️ ▶️ John click on targets based on their size and distance from the cursor and all sorts of things like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And that same thing applying to physical things, right? So you could have multiple designs of how do we
⏹️ ▶️ John arrange these things? Where do we put the buttons? How big are the buttons? Do we have buttons at all? Do we have scroll bars? What’s easier to discover? So on
⏹️ ▶️ John and so forth. And you can argue about it all you want, But one of the tools you have in your toolbox to
⏹️ ▶️ John figure out whether something is actually a good interface or not is science.
⏹️ ▶️ John You can have a theory. You can construct an experiment to test that theory. You can test it on actual people.
⏹️ ▶️ John And you can take the results and decide whether it was good or bad and refine and go on and on. Now, that’s not to say
⏹️ ▶️ John that that’s the only approach you should take, because if that’s all you do is actual scientific usability testing, you can
⏹️ ▶️ John end up with an interface that is, quote unquote, usable, but it’s not pleasant to use. It’s not attractive. has other
⏹️ ▶️ John qualities that may actually be at odds with usability but make for a more pleasant overall experience. So when Jobs
⏹️ ▶️ John came back to Apple, it seems like he was not in favor of the old Apple Human Interface
⏹️ ▶️ John group, which did a lot of this research. Because as far as he was concerned, they were doing interesting
⏹️ ▶️ John research, fine, but where were the great products they were making? And he wanted to make great products. And all that sort of academic
⏹️ ▶️ John scientific research was not producing great products, therefore it needed to go, and screw that, I can just use my gut
⏹️ ▶️ John and my artistic taste and then a bunch of smart people to make things that I want, and we’ll go with that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And iOS 7 has brought back a little bit of the science of usability
⏹️ ▶️ John stuff in the criticism of it, because people are like, OK, all these little outline icons, I don’t like them. I
⏹️ ▶️ John don’t like those outline icons. And so someone will pull out, and I put a link in
⏹️ ▶️ John the notes file here. I think those outline icons are harder to recognize. And so someone
⏹️ ▶️ John says, OK, well, let’s sort of kind of use science to test that. Let’s make a bunch of icons, some of them with
⏹️ ▶️ John outlines, some of them with solid things, and see test recognition speed and stuff. And the results were inconclusive
⏹️ ▶️ John in this thing. But the whole idea that when something is not to your taste
⏹️ ▶️ John for some reason, whether it’s because it’s a change or because you just don’t like how it looks,
⏹️ ▶️ John only then people will go, well, I think this is worse, and I’ll try to find a way to prove it, which is kind of the reverse of
⏹️ ▶️ John the way you should be doing. You would hope that Apple would only make these decisions because they found them to be usable in some way, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I think it’s a pretty good bet that Apple just doesn’t do that kind of thing anymore. And they go almost entirely off
⏹️ ▶️ John their gut in artistic creative decisions, and almost none of it is based on actual scientific usability
⏹️ ▶️ John testing, certainly not directly, and maybe not even indirectly. And
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of what I see in iOS 7 is a lot of art, a lot of style, and a lot of things, whether
⏹️ ▶️ John I like them or not, that I have to think are not the result of testing. And
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 6 was the same way. They’re not testing like leather and stitching and stuff like that and maybe doesn’t even make a difference
⏹️ ▶️ John But sort of the underlying philosophy of how things should work. I think they had a philosophy
⏹️ ▶️ John I think they’re less interested in science than they should be and this is not just true of iOS 7 is true of everything It just
⏹️ ▶️ John comes to the front now because iOS 7 is a transition point So now all the things that are different stylistically the people
⏹️ ▶️ John who don’t like them are trying to look for Explanations of why they’re empirically bad And I don’t think
⏹️ ▶️ John there are good explanations of why they’re empirically bad or good, because individual bloggers are not going
⏹️ ▶️ John to do their own scientific experiments. And Apple has very little to support themselves, or at least that they’ve shown to support their
⏹️ ▶️ John decisions, other than this is the way we like it, and we think there’s sort of a metaphor for layering that
⏹️ ▶️ John works. I’ll put another link in the notes to Dr. Drang’s post about the iOS 7 parallax
⏹️ ▶️ John effect, of when you pull up Control Center and tilt the phone, how it doesn’t quite work the way it should, according
⏹️ ▶️ John to their physical model and whether that’s a feature or a bug or whatever. Yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ John that’s basically my thoughts on ISN. Oh, and one more thing. If you were making
⏹️ ▶️ John a magazine design or a road sign or a newspaper
⏹️ ▶️ John or anything that you would want to be laid out with a bunch of information that’s easy to consume
⏹️ ▶️ John and to find, like this important information and there’s secondary information and you want it to be readable and organized in a nice way,
⏹️ ▶️ John Nobody in any of the established mediums for displaying, you know, basically
⏹️ ▶️ John text and images in a rectangular background would use hairlines for
⏹️ ▶️ John everything. I know they’re excited that you can use hairlines and it uses a retina screen. And I understand
⏹️ ▶️ John going to an interface that it recognizes that everyone’s going to be using retina, so we can use these hairlines, except for the
⏹️ ▶️ John iPad Mini, of course. We can use these hairlines and do fancy things, and everything will be retina in the future, so we
⏹️ ▶️ John use them. But overuse of hairlines is just like an epidemic in iOS Both in Apple’s own
⏹️ ▶️ John apps and in other people’s apps. I think it’s fine to use hairlines, but you can’t use them
⏹️ ▶️ John everywhere. Because if you use them everywhere, they lose their effect. You should use them, I don’t know, I mean, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John know, not as highlights so much, but like, this should be used for a reason and in balance
⏹️ ▶️ John with other things. Because if you do everything in hairlines, all you’ve done is just make the entire thing, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John weaker and lighter and dimmer. It’s the same complaint people have about the typography. Hairlines
⏹️ ▶️ John allow the bold things to contrast even more, But if you use hairlines everywhere, you’ve lost that. And I think the same thing is true of the outline
⏹️ ▶️ John icons, which aren’t always hairlines. But they’re kind of like fading off into the distance.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I know that’s kind of what they want, where it fades into the background, and that’s not supposed to be content, and the content
⏹️ ▶️ John comes to the front. But it’s such a fuzzy philosophy. If I had one sort of
⏹️ ▶️ John artistic, again, non-scientific complaint about this is that the hairlines, it seems to be a little bit too much for me.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, really quick to go back a step, I actually want to point out that to me, the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey 5S screen is actually considerably better than the 4S’s. I can’t put my finger on why, other than
⏹️ ▶️ Casey maybe that it’s brighter, and I understand there’s a control for that, blah, blah, blah. But I do think it looks a lot better.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I’m sure on paper it’s not supposed to be, and maybe it’s just the newness of everything.
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s supposed to be. It’s a better
⏹️ ▶️ John than the 4S, yeah. Better color reproduction. I definitely noticed
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it. Although I think it’s the same as the 5 screen this time. I think they didn’t change that component. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco every major redesign, they improve the color gamut, and the brightness, and the contrast, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey everything.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. So John, would you say iOS 7,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey one thumb up, two thumbs up, still to be determined? What do you think, in summary?
⏹️ ▶️ John It doesn’t bother me. I like the new.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Glowing endorsement.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, well, I like the new look of things, because you get kind of tired looking at the old thing. I’ve said ever
⏹️ ▶️ John since Windows Metro appearance came along on the scene however many months or years
⏹️ ▶️ John ago, that you can’t go back to, like, once you see that kind of interface, when you look back,
⏹️ ▶️ John I was saying when I saw the Windows Metro demo, I looked back at my iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John Touch, which was then running iOS 6, I guess, maybe even 5, and it looked like a piece of crap.
⏹️ ▶️ John Because that’s the way, that’s sort of the artistic ebb and flow of like bell bottoms are in, bell bottoms
⏹️ ▶️ John are out, long hair, short hair, long skirts, short skirts. The fashion had gone way in one direction,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now it’s swinging in the other direction. So having iOS 7, which is along those lines of the opposite
⏹️ ▶️ John direction as iOS 6, with less clutter and more
⏹️ ▶️ John sort of matte colors and shades and stuff like that, that’s refreshing.
⏹️ ▶️ John I even like the stupid new shape for the icons, whatever you want to call that thing. I like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And on the right-hand screen.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And they’re slightly bigger now, Marco? You would
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s like three points bigger.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I notice it. Like, it seems I like that. It’s like, yeah, why weren’t they so small before? I
⏹️ ▶️ John think they should be bigger. It’s nice. And I like the little outline. And I like everyone’s doing their redesigns of their apps, which
⏹️ ▶️ John is great. I don’t like the new Instapaper icon, though. You shouldn’t tell them about that. Really?
⏹️ ▶️ John I do. I don’t dislike it,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I like the old one better. Well, the old one would have looked ridiculous on iOS 7. Which I know it did, because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco when I was running the first few betas, before I had the Instapaper beta, I did have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the old icon, and it did look ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, the thing that bugs me about is the images on sort of the pseudo-newspaper behind there,
⏹️ ▶️ John the images look like they’re blurry. And I know they’re not. I know they’re just super low contrast, shrunken
⏹️ ▶️ John versions of the actual shrunken versions of the actual pictures. But they don’t look as crisp.
⏹️ ▶️ John It makes the background look a little bit muddy to me. And the previous version had the same muddiness problem,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it made up for it with the super sharp curling edges, which, again, wouldn’t fit in iOS 7. but it was like enough sharpness
⏹️ ▶️ John there to balance out the muddiness. Anyway, so that’s getting off track, but
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m liking iOS 7. The features are the part that I’m enjoying the most, like being able to swipe
⏹️ ▶️ John up and turn off rotation lock makes such a big difference to me, even though swiping up is sometimes a little bit slower
⏹️ ▶️ John and laggier, just because I hate hitting the home button. I don’t understand why I hate hitting the home button so much, maybe I’m the only person
⏹️ ▶️ John who feels this way, but I hate hitting the home button. You don’t know how much I wish for like three finger squish
⏹️ ▶️ John to get back to home, Because on the iPad, I never touch that Home button if I can help it. Yeah, you just
⏹️ ▶️ Marco let the whole hand pinch out, and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. And I can’t fully articulate why does that
⏹️ ▶️ John incredibly awkward-looking big hand pinch feel so much better to me than pressing that Home button
⏹️ ▶️ John on the iPad. And it’s not because the iPad’s in different orientations and I forget where the Home button is. I just despise double-tapping
⏹️ ▶️ John the Home button for multitasking. I despise hitting it to get back to the Home screen. Because I just feel like a touch
⏹️ ▶️ John device should be all about, you know, my fingers against that glass, and not about pressing a button in
⏹️ ▶️ John and out. So I like being able to get to Control Center and do the rotation lock, which is
⏹️ ▶️ John my most frequently used feature on the thing, even though it’s probably faster for me to do it
⏹️ ▶️ John the other way, just because it means I don’t have to press a button. Wow.
⏹️ ▶️ John You guys don’t feel that way? I don’t mean, I may be the only one who hates hitting the home button.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny, on the iPad, where I do have the five-finger pinch in to go home, I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey do that pretty much always. On the iPhone, it doesn’t bother me. I don’t know if it’s because the screen is so much bigger
⏹️ ▶️ Casey on the iPad. And so to your point, once I’m committed to being in an app
⏹️ ▶️ Casey or to operating only with the screen, it like breaks the illusion
⏹️ ▶️ Casey if I have to hit a physical button. But on the phone, it doesn’t bother me at all.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s the double tap on the phone that kills me. Like the double click. It’s just not a good button
⏹️ ▶️ John to double up on. The new multitasking in 7 is so much nicer where you
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey can see the thumbnails.
⏹️ ▶️ John I still don’t like how they scroll. I still feel like when I’m trying to flick my way through them, it still feels like
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s getting away from me, like it’s a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although one thing that is really cool is that you can close multiple apps at once just by dragging them all away at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco same time, most of the time. The problem is there’s this bug that’s still in the GM
⏹️ ▶️ Marco where sometimes, well, pretty regularly, if you try to push away a few apps at once,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the screenshot portion of the UI will be flung away, but the icon on the bottom will
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stay and the app will stay running. And so you have to exit the multitasking feature, go back in, and clear away the few that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that happened to, because then their screenshots will reappear when you go back into it.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m still happy to do them just one at a time, because anything that removes a tap and hold from iOS is my
⏹️ ▶️ John friend. Because I can’t stand tap and hold in any context. It drives me nuts. And tapping those tiny little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco X’s always suck, too.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was like, tap and hold, jiggle mode, hit the little X, and now it’s just like flick, flick, flick, so
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Oh, and I will say that the, to go back to the hardware again, the Touch ID is magic.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It is absolutely magic and I love it. I never ran, we talked about this before, I never ran a passcode except when I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey was traveling. Now, like Marco said, I’m running one. And I would say my success rate is
⏹️ ▶️ Casey somewhere in the 90 to 95% range. And it is really fantastic and
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very, very stupefyingly quick. So two thumbs up for that.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I never did a passcode on my things. I never have numerical passcode.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I’d be in Marco’s camp where like, if I was to get something with Touch ID, It would be like I’m increasing my security
⏹️ ▶️ John for hopefully a very small new inconvenience. But for the people who don’t have a passcode,
⏹️ ▶️ John iOS 7’s ability to let you swipe the whole screen to the right is kind of the equivalent of before
⏹️ ▶️ John you had to get your thumb down onto this little narrow thing, which granted I could do with my eyes closed with both hands by this point.
⏹️ ▶️ John But it was still a little bit fidgety. Now knowing that I can swipe to the right anywhere on the entire giant lock screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John I do that now. And I find that I naturally swipe much higher than I did before.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Yeah, same here.
⏹️ ▶️ John Now, like the line of thumb grease is now no longer just along the bottom
⏹️ ▶️ John part of my phone. Now it’s kind of like in an arc across the top, which is much more natural. So thumbs up for
⏹️ ▶️ John those of us without a fingerprint sensor, still getting the benefit of more comfortable opening
⏹️ ▶️ John up of your phone after powering it on.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I will say, so I’ve never used a passcode. When I got the 5S, of course,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this is actually pretty interesting. When you, during like the little activation thing, like the little welcome
⏹️ ▶️ Marco process or how do you log into iCloud and stuff like that. It tells you, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco enter a passcode. Like now it’s time to enter a passcode. And you can skip it, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it presents it as the default that, okay, now you have to set a passcode. And hey, do you want to set up Touch ID while you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at it? So it’s interesting that they’re really pushing people to do this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That being said, I’m not sure I’m gonna keep that on all the time. It’s good enough.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, granted, again, this is a few hours of use, so ask me again next week. but it’s good enough
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that I’m perfectly happy to leave it on if I’m gonna be at a conference or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco traveling, where it would be more likely somebody might steal my phone or pick it up off the table or something like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that, even though my phone’s always in my pocket. But as I’m just sitting at home,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working at home, not going anywhere except the pizza place most days,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t really think it’s worth it, because it is still some friction. There’s still, between
⏹️ ▶️ Marco having a passcode not having a passcode, there still is a few little delays here and there, even with TouchID,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s still a few things you can’t do. One thing I immediately found is that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you can’t launch an app for development from Xcode over the cable while it’s locked.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So you have to go unlock the phone so Xcode can launch the app if the phone was asleep. So there’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco little things like that. I am hitting some friction still. So I’m not entirely sure I’m going
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to keep it, but we’ll see. I will certainly turn it on for conferences and stuff, no question about
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I never understood the people who did the passcodes while they were in their house. It’s kind of like going from room to room in
⏹️ ▶️ John your own house. And each time you go from room to room, you lock the door with the key behind
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco you. Right, exactly. Every time you go
⏹️ ▶️ John into the kitchen, open the kitchen door with the key, go into the kitchen, close the kitchen door with the key, lock it. No, you’re in your own
⏹️ ▶️ John house. I mean, everyone has a different threshold for security and how sensitive the information is in their phone.
⏹️ ▶️ John But even if I got something that was touching me, I would only enable it if ever when I was going out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, and the other thing to consider, though, is that a lot of people have devices either provided
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by their employer or that are by virtue of being connected to their employer’s exchange
⏹️ ▶️ Casey server or email server, they are subject to their employer’s ridiculous passcode
⏹️ ▶️ Casey requirements. And so I haven’t tested this, but to my understanding, even if you have a 39
⏹️ ▶️ Casey character full text passcode, because your employer requires a 39 character full text
⏹️ ▶️ Casey passcode, Touch ID, I believe, will still bypass that. And that has
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got to be just an incredible win. And luckily my company
⏹️ ▶️ Casey is small enough that we don’t have any of those draconian policies, but I got to imagine for people who are members
⏹️ ▶️ Casey of really big companies, that must be fantastic.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Although, how many of those big company IT people are going to have read the various stories
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and say, oh, we found out how to, you know, fake a
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and bypass that, and now they’re going to say, oh, well, by the way, you can’t use that either.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, that’s probably true, but not yet. That FUD hasn’t spread yet. That’s good.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It only takes like one spreading of that, and then like half the people out there can’t use it.
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⏹️ ▶️ Casey Let me tack onto that. We actually got an email from a listener, which was completely unsolicited. And so Ravenda wrote in
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and said, keep it up guys, thank you for introducing Squarespace to your audience. I recently made a Squarespace site
⏹️ ▶️ Casey for my wife, who is a fashion designer and it looks awesome. I probably could not find a website designer who can come close
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to the site design I’m having now. So definitely well-received
⏹️ ▶️ Casey by our listeners. So just like Marco said, ATP9, go check it out.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So do you do anything over the weekend, Marco?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I traveled halfway across the country, and I went to New Product, then traveled back, and made a couple blog posts. What’d you do?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Eh, not much. Went to a football game. That’s good. So tell us about this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, without making this too much of the Marco show,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I announced at the XOXO Festival, which I guess is,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s a lot like a conference, but it’s good. So they want you to call it a festival because there are parts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of it that are more like a festival than a conference But I spoke at the conference portion of the festival.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I believe I have this hierarchy, correct and that’s in Portland and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It was my first time in Portland. And and so first of all from what I saw of Portland
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a Quick little anecdote here, and I hope this doesn’t offend the Germans or the Portlanders
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Portlandians Portlandese Okay, anyway, um, or Landex
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so a couple years ago I went to Munich and it was my first time in Germany
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and my first time in Munich and I was there only for a couple days for another conference
⏹️ ▶️ Marco actually and I had a friend in France who drove in to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take me and Tiff out for the night because he was familiar with Munich and He
⏹️ ▶️ Marco he took us to the Hofbrauhaus Which is famous now. I didn’t know that it was famous
⏹️ ▶️ Marco At the time I had never heard of it. I didn’t know anything about the place or the city or anything like that because I was a stupid
⏹️ ▶️ Marco American. So, and I still am a stupid American now I just know about the Hopper house. Anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so we were in Munich and he takes us to this place and he said, just so you know, the Bavarians
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take their culture very seriously and even though there’s a lot of tourists here,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there’s also a lot of people who just live here who come here and this is like this is not a joke this is not like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a tourist trap this is not over-the-top like this is actually just like normal
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for Bavaria and you go into this place and it’s like every stereotype you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco could possibly imagine hearing about Germans as a stupid American it’s like the giant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco mugs of beer the big guys playing the big accordions and everything like every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone’s happy and there’s this big hall and everyone’s singing beer songs I mean it’s and there’s sausage everywhere
⏹️ ▶️ Marco which by the way is delicious I mean it’s it’s every stereotype you can imagine you would think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that you walked into like a Times Square terrible insensitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like parody of what we think Germans are but that was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco real and according to our friends that’s that is actually like taken
⏹️ ▶️ Marco reasonably seriously like that’s that’s not that’s not like an insensitive
⏹️ ▶️ Marco joke. That’s how Portland was.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Like you see, and granted I was only there for a few days, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you see like that it’s just every
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stereotype you’ve heard about Portland, like everything, and even if you’ve seen
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a few episodes of Portlandia, like I saw a few of them, it’s exactly like that. Like it’s not a joke
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that actually like the people are all like I Don’t know how to describe it very well except that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s as if the entire city is Really nice they will they everyone wants to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like give you a hug figuratively I didn’t get any physical hugs, but figure it well actually no I did get a few
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but most people just want to figuratively and emotionally give you a hug and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everyone’s laid-back nice non-judgmental and and everyone’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco driving crappy cars and going to really cool coffee shops and beer and everywhere has cool coffee and cool beer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and all the coffee is very lightly roasted because that’s the right thing to do and there’s tons of stores
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that just sell gourmet ice cream. I mean it’s like it basically seems
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that the entire city is built by Etsy and Kickstarter.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco there, I’m I’m pretty sure the entire population of Portland
⏹️ ▶️ Marco works on their own project that was either funded by Kickstarter or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is sold on Etsy. Now, some of this obviously is the crowd I was with, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco definitely the entire city had that vibe to it where
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I could not believe that it wasn’t a joke, that it was real, and in all the best possible ways,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But it was very real. So Portland was awesome. Anyway, while
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I was there, I spoke at the conference. And there’s going to be a video posted soon. I don’t know when, but it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco will be soon. And I announced during the video my next new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app project, the big app that I’ve been talking about on the show for a few months, which I announced
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as a podcast app. And it is a podcatcher, as some people would call it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s an app that plays podcasts. does not record podcast or help you produce podcasts.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It is a podcast playing app and it’s called Overcast
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and it’s not out. It’s not even close to being out but I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco probably three to five months away maybe from releasing 1.0 so yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s what I’m doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco announcing? A few things. One was that I I was filing for various like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco trademark things and company creation and stuff like that. So I was, you know, similar to how like Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco announced the original iPhone six months in advance because they were filing all this FCC stuff and they figured it might leak.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So part of it was that I was I was doing a lot of like paperwork stuff that if anybody did any digging,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they’d be able to find. And normally I would not be so arrogant
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as to think that people were like digging through my trash looking for secrets because I’m not that important.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But the possibility that somebody might come across a trademark filing or something
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I thought you know what you know I don’t want to I don’t want to have to like deal with that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I also wanted to talk about it. I’m facing a lot of interesting decisions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and and you know design challenges and technical challenges during a lot of this.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Some of which you’re gonna be interesting to talk about in public. Some of which, like,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I don’t wanna like, have to be worried about if I ask a question on Twitter or Stack Overflow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about some like core audio code, I don’t want everyone to have to try to like guess what I’m making with core audio, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco stuff like that. Like there’s a lot of practical advantages. I’m also trying to open source a lot of this stuff. You
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know, I open sourced the FC model class last week and that went
⏹️ ▶️ Marco well. You know, like I wanna be able to open source some of my utility classes that I’m making. And I guess I don’t want people
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like trying to like connect the dots and figure out what I’m making based on what I’m releasing and the questions
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m asking. So all of that combined into me deciding, oh and I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was giving this talk in front of this audience that is pretty much the perfect audience to announce something like this
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at. So I figured it was a very good opportunity
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for me to say, you know what, I’m just going to announce this here. And, uh,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yeah, and I did. And it went very well. You know, I’ve done the secrecy until release thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco before. And it certainly has its advantages. There’s a reason why Apple
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost always does that. But, you know, as I said in the talk, it is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco very stressful. And so one of the things is I’m experimenting here. I don’t know if I’ll always do this. I’m experimenting
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and I’m trading the stress of trying to keep it secret For the stress of everybody
⏹️ ▶️ Marco asking me if it’s done yet, and I don’t know if it’s gonna be overall better. We’ll find out
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Did you feel like you needed that pressure that external pressure
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a little bit certainly you know I think I there’s certainly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco been like Diversions like I I discussed I believe I discussed on this show but I at least
⏹️ ▶️ Marco discussed on Twitter how I had an original trademark issue with the name that I had picked and and that name
⏹️ ▶️ Marco was overcast and I ended up working it out and I made a big post on my site, I’m not going to go into
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it now, about how I worked it out and why I worked it out, and how I came up with other names and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco why I didn’t use any of them. But that demotivated me for a while because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was holding things up. It was like, alright, without settling for a name, I can’t yet create the company,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I can’t create my developer account, so I can’t easily test things like push notifications, stuff
⏹️ ▶️ Marco like that. There was all sorts of little things that demotivated me,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in both psychological and roadblock ways. Like, okay, it kind of would help if I had
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this thing first, before I could really work on this part of it. So there was a lot of that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But certainly the extra amount of pressure will help. And yeah, my original goal was to have it out for iOS 7.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Obviously that didn’t happen, and that’s not even close. So we’ll see.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So best guess, do you have a goal for when you want to release?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I would like to have it out this year. In reality that’s probably going to mean
⏹️ ▶️ Marco late December if anything. But we’ll see. I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Marco think there’s a great chance it’s going to be earlier than that. There’s a decent chance it might
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be a couple months after that, maybe January, February, something like that. I really don’t know.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m absolutely terrible at estimating time like this. as most developers are, but I’m even
⏹️ ▶️ Marco worse at it. I really have no idea. The underlying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco data and sync and audio layers are all basically done. I’m basically
⏹️ ▶️ Marco now building the interface. And parts of it are done, parts of it are very much
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not done. There’s still a lot of missing features that I haven’t implemented yet. Basics like adding
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and removing subscriptions, like I haven’t done that yet. Like there’s big, big things that are not done yet
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that would block a 1.0. So there’s still a lot to do.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So it’s very hard for me to estimate how long, when it’s going to be.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now, do you feel like you brought up the interface a second ago, do you feel like you’ve
⏹️ ▶️ Casey got a pretty clear design or idea and you’re
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just kind of filling in the blanks at this point? Or are you still toying with it, messing around,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey trying totally different paradigms? Where do you feel you are with the UI side?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, I said in my post, the most important design
⏹️ ▶️ Marco challenge in a podcast app is the now playing screen. Because you have all these incredibly
⏹️ ▶️ Marco competing pressures. And you can’t satisfy everything. There was this great
⏹️ ▶️ Marco blog post on Joel on software forever ago, but not as forever ago as some of his other posts. I think
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it was in the 2010s decade. And it was
⏹️ ▶️ Marco talking about the design of a city garbage can. And he was saying
⏹️ ▶️ Marco how, OK, it has to be both heavy to stay in place, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco also lightweight so the people can empty it easily. And it has to be easy to throw things in, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco hard to throw certain things in, and hard to get things out and tip things over. And so it had to be
⏹️ ▶️ Marco heavy and light, big and small, easy and hard to use. There’s all these competing pressures.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of that in the design of lots of things in software, and the podcast now playing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco screen is no exception. You look at all the controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that most of these apps try to cram in there, and you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco see why they do it. If you have the big album art, it looks really nice, but
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it also takes up the vast majority of the vertical space. So, you can
⏹️ ▶️ Marco not have the big album art, which is what downcast does. can shrink that away and then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it leaves room so you can show show notes. But you still lose a lot of that virtual space. You can show
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big album art like what everyone else does, but then you have these basically two zones
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to put skinny controls. The top bar and the bottom area. And what most of these
⏹️ ▶️ Marco apps have done is basically clone the iOS 7 music
⏹️ ▶️ Marco app with its arrangement of controls for the most part. but almost
⏹️ ▶️ Marco almost all these major apps have done that. And I don’t think that’s necessarily the best arrangement.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s a lot of that that I’m going to do separately or differently from what they’re doing.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, there’s there’s but like this is not an easy problem at all. A lot of them have also done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco things that I think are a little bit odd. The cool new thing, which a few of them have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco done, is to pull colors from the artwork to use as the interface
⏹️ ▶️ Marco tint color. I’ve had this running in development for a while. I actually turned
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it off a couple weeks ago because it just wasn’t… like the colors it pulls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are not always good for the controls. And it was weird having
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the interface be that inconsistent. Like every time we’d look at it, it would be a different look. And it was a little
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bit jarring. It causes a few other problems like, okay, well, well if the now playing screen has that tint color,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what about the rest of the app? Do you give it to the whole app or do you give it just to that screen? And if you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco give it to the whole app, well then what happens if you’re not playing anything? What color do you use?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Or if you give it to just that screen, then how do you make the transitions between those two screens look okay?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco There’s all sorts of little bothering challenges involved in that,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so that’s annoying. The other thing they also do is most apps, including Apple’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco show the artwork in the list screen as a grid. Like you have just like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big thumbnails of each show as a grid. And it looks really cool. It
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks like you’re scrolling through a grid of LPs, if anybody listening to this actually knows what
⏹️ ▶️ Marco an LP is. And so you’re scrolling through like this grid. I have that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco working in mine too. It’s easy, because it’s a collection view. Collection views make that extremely easy to do,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but I’m pulling it out because it drives me crazy whenever I have to find a show in it. Because
⏹️ ▶️ Marco finding a show in a grid is terrible. When you’re just skimming with your eyes and looking at a screenshot,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it looks good. It looks really good. However, it doesn’t work. Because you have to zigzag
⏹️ ▶️ Marco with your eyes back and forth, and it just does not work well.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco In fact, John, didn’t you always complain about Instapaper’s iPad app in that regard?
⏹️ ▶️ John I did. You showed me the grid at WC 2011 or something. I said I didn’t like it.
⏹️ ▶️ John You kept it anyway.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wasn’t that in the CAF area? Because I believe I was sitting there when this happened and my recollection of it was
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you said, hey John, look at what I’m doing for Instapaper on the iPad and it was, I don’t
⏹️ ▶️ Casey like it. Immediately. There was no hesitation.
⏹️ ▶️ John So I think it was in Presidio when you first showed me the grid. But yeah,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Right. And with Instapaper, it was a little bit better in that I’m not usually scrolling
⏹️ ▶️ Marco through to find something in particular. I’m usually just looking at the top few and saying, oh, give me that one.
⏹️ ▶️ John But I am. And it was killing me because I wouldn’t always read from the top. I’d read
⏹️ ▶️ John the fifth one down on the right. And that would shift everything over. So items that used to be on the left are now on
⏹️ ▶️ John the right. and items that used to be on the right are now on the left because it’s two columns. And so now I couldn’t even use like my spatial
⏹️ ▶️ John memory of where was that article about the whatever. I start skimming the left-hand column not realizing
⏹️ ▶️ John that because I had read something higher up, everything had shifted. And now I have to look in the right-hand column, and then eventually you just
⏹️ ▶️ John go revert to zigzag, because that’s the only, you know, viable hit every point to make sure you’re finding it thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John Whereas when it was just a big linear list, it looked awkward because it seemed like they had too much horizontal room, although I liked seeing all the titles.
⏹️ ▶️ John But then you just look at one spot with your eyes and scroll.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, and it’s also easier if you know they’re going to be sorted in some way, especially if they’re going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco be sorted alphabetically or something like that. It’s really, really easy to then browse that and find what you’re looking
⏹️ ▶️ John Or even time. I just find it more natural to go back in time as a linear list instead of going
⏹️ ▶️ John back in time as left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Exactly. I’m going to be making very different decisions in some areas
⏹️ ▶️ Marco as these other apps because Obviously, as you can tell, if you’ve ever listened to me, ever, anywhere,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have opinions that are pretty strongly held sometimes. And I’m not afraid to look at something and say, you
⏹️ ▶️ Marco know what, everyone else is doing this this way, but I think that’s wrong. Or I think I have a better
⏹️ ▶️ John You want a free feature suggestion?
⏹️ ▶️ John This is one you probably shouldn’t use because kind of like my probably like my annoyance with the home button,
⏹️ ▶️ John it only applies to me. But it definitely applies to me and me and probably like five other people. If you want to sell six
⏹️ ▶️ John copies of this program, this is the feature for you. I listen on my iPod
⏹️ ▶️ John Shuffle, so I’m really not in the audience for your app at all anyway, because I like to have the physical button. I
⏹️ ▶️ John like having the little thing I can clip on to my clothes or whatever. And I like to be able to use it without looking, all of which you
⏹️ ▶️ John pretty much can’t do no matter what you do with it, the now playing screen. So you shouldn’t even bother optimizing for that case. But anyway,
⏹️ ▶️ John when I am using an iPod Touch to listen to podcasts, which I occasionally do, I hook it up to a speaker
⏹️ ▶️ John dock. I don’t have an AirPlay one, but I hook it up to a speaker dock and listen to it in the house and stuff. The challenge
⏹️ ▶️ John for me is going to an episode and then moving the little scrubber thing to find
⏹️ ▶️ John where I left off, because maybe I was listening to it on my iPod Shuffle, which of course doesn’t synchronize the play point with
⏹️ ▶️ John my iPod Touch, doesn’t synchronize with it. It’s all an island, they’re not synchronizing with each other at all, because it’s too many different
⏹️ ▶️ John devices. So I need to find where was that spot where I was listening. And very long podcasts,
⏹️ ▶️ John which I listen to, when you have two hours on the width of an iPhone screen,
⏹️ ▶️ John there’s not enough resolution in moving that little thumb thing to be able to, to, you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John to get to the spot that you want. You can get close, but like, then you’re like, okay, I got to grab that little circle thing
⏹️ ▶️ John with my thumb and I move it one pixel. Oh wait, no, one pixel is actually like a minute and a half and I’m too far. And I’ll go back.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s really, I mean, it’s just not possible. There’s just not enough resolution there. So when
⏹️ ▶️ John I think about how I would like this to be, I think about it like a video game where instead of being
⏹️ ▶️ John the direct manipulation, which you’re totally supposed to do on iOS and on the Mac, where I move my thumb an inch, the little circle moves
⏹️ ▶️ John an inch, it stays right under my thumb. That’s exactly how it works. You have to end up going
⏹️ ▶️ John to a model where you are controlling the little line that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John intersecting the timeline of audio. And you have kind of like a jog, shuttle, whatever thing,
⏹️ ▶️ John where as I push it to the right, that little line goes faster and faster. And as it goes faster and faster,
⏹️ ▶️ John the zoom zooms out to see more of the line. So at maximum speed, I can see the
⏹️ ▶️ John entire two hours of audio. But at slower speeds, I’m actually seeing in the full width of the
⏹️ ▶️ John screen, maybe like a minute of audio or 30 seconds of audio. And so you kind of understand,
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s kind of hard to explain, like where you’re not sliding the thing back and forth. You’re basically doing accelerate to the right
⏹️ ▶️ John or accelerate to the left, depending on how far off center you put that thing. And the key thing is that as your
⏹️ ▶️ John little guy goes faster, you have to zoom out, kind of like in Super Smash Brothers where when you get
⏹️ ▶️ John far, you know, far away from each other on the board, it zooms out so they both stay in view, but when they get closer together, it zooms
⏹️ ▶️ John in. I don’t know if I’m explaining it well, but this is the type of system that would give me enough control
⏹️ ▶️ John to, when I get closer to where I want to go, to fine-tune it. This is true, actually, in any audio editing application,
⏹️ ▶️ John any video editing applications. When I want to fine-tune something, I want, like,
⏹️ ▶️ John that second, that half second, that microsecond to fill the full width of my screen so I can really
⏹️ ▶️ John finally adjust it. But when I want to select an hour and a half, but I want to see the whole thing, right? And you have the
⏹️ ▶️ John little zoom in, zoom out that you can manually do, but I would like it to sort of be automatic based on how fast my little guy is
⏹️ ▶️ John moving to scrub around. That, I don’t know who wants that feature, 30 second back, eight second forward,
⏹️ ▶️ John whatever is perfectly fine for normals. But for me, I would definitely be interested in any
⏹️ ▶️ John audio playback application that let me scrub and find my spot with that kind of precision.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, I totally get what you’re saying. and uh… i have actually
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really thought about doing like some kind of really cool scrubber uh… to to do that kind of to to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco allow that kind of precision like kind of like a logarithmic type of view uh… like
⏹️ ▶️ Marco you know i i’ve talked in the past about how i wish somebody did a logarithmic calendar view uh… same thing applies to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco uh… to gps and directions display where like you know i want
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to see like the next the next block of my direction in great detail but then i
⏹️ ▶️ Marco don’t need to see and then i also want to see like what am i doing doing over the next half hour in far less detail.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Same thing with the calendar. I really need to see today in hour
⏹️ ▶️ Marco by hour detail, but maybe the rest of the week I don’t. And then
⏹️ ▶️ Marco for the next three weeks, I really don’t need to see that at all. So having that kind of
⏹️ ▶️ Marco logarithmic decay of the view scale in some kind of sensible
⏹️ ▶️ Marco way, I’ve always really enjoyed thinking about that and occasionally trying to build it.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think I can apply a similar kind of technique here with the scrubber.
⏹️ ▶️ John The good thing about the scrubber is you don’t actually, unlike the calendar thing, which is definitely also a good idea, you don’t
⏹️ ▶️ John actually have to see, like you just need to see today in detail when you’re moving slowly.
⏹️ ▶️ John And the only time you need to see more of the outside is when you start to move faster. Right. Because like there’s no, like
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m not saying show the audio waveform, it could just be a horizontal line and like the thickness of the line shows how far zoomed
⏹️ ▶️ John in you are. So when you’re moving super slow, line is super thick and your vertical line intersecting it is just moving along
⏹️ ▶️ John slowly, but when you move fast, like you can tell you’re zooming out because the line gets thinner. You could use the audio waveform, I guess,
⏹️ ▶️ John but it just seems like more work than necessary. And maybe it would help in terms of showing loudness levels or whatever,
⏹️ ▶️ John but this is a type of UI that most people would think that’s stupid eye candy and you’d be just
⏹️ ▶️ John like trying to go for an ADA by making this cool iOS 7 looking zoomable waveform at 60
⏹️ ▶️ John frames per second. It’s like a little OpenGL game embedded in your application. And there is an aspect of that,
⏹️ ▶️ John like it would be neat and cool and a lot of people would see it and be like this seems ridiculous but I think there’s an actual practical benefit
⏹️ ▶️ John for the five people on earth who want precision when trying to find where they left off on their seven other
⏹️ ▶️ John non-internet connected iPod you know podcast playing devices.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey All right so we’re running a little bit long let me ask you a couple quick questions. One how much is it going to cost? Do you want to announce that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nope. All right. And you said you know you were thinking about some UI things
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you were going to make it special that we’re gonna make overcast special is there anything else that you’re willing
⏹️ ▶️ Casey to talk about that would make this special nope all right I just want to make sure we
⏹️ ▶️ Casey establish that lest we get a million questions about
⏹️ ▶️ John I announced the price for him it’s a hundred million dollars right isn’t that what you said on your blog yeah
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that’s for the dot-com
⏹️ ▶️ John just need to sell you just need to sell one copy and you can finally get that calm
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that you’ve always you could finally get the dot-com you’ve always wanted
⏹️ ▶️ John there no wait didn’t he come down to 95
⏹️ ▶️ Marco yes I don’t it’s all he came down by 5 million in his first email that’s
⏹️ ▶️ John right you you you haggled someone down 5 million dollars in price quite
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just like that all right does that mean we’re done
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I think so all right thanks a lot to our two sponsors this week Squarespace and ding and we’ll see you next
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now the show is over, they didn’t even mean to begin Cause
⏹️ ▶️ Casey it was accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey John didn’t do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn’t let him Cause
⏹️ ▶️ John accidental, oh it was accidental
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
⏹️ ▶️ John you’re into Twitter, you can follow
⏹️ ▶️ Marco them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So that’s Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-R-A-Q-U-S-A
⏹️ ▶️ Casey accidental, they didn’t mean to
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Wait, so we have a major issue.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Arcagon in the chat is saying, hey TP guys, I was just in Montreal
⏹️ ▶️ Casey and I tried the bagels and you were wrong. New York bagels are better. When did we ever say New York bagels were not better?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, exactly. I
⏹️ ▶️ Marco never said that. I mean, we’ve, we’re going to, well, most of us are going to be at Singleton in a couple of weeks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in Montreal. I’ve never had the bagels in Montreal. I’ve just heard that I should
⏹️ ▶️ Marco so I’ve gone there over the last two years for Singleton but I still have never
⏹️ ▶️ Marco had ever had the bagels there.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’ve already had the bagels from Montreal so I’ll one up on you guys.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey Mr. Fancy. I
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean they’re a thing.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like Chicago pizza.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like it’s not not what I expect from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco It’s using the same word to describe, but it should be a different food classification.
⏹️ ▶️ John I mean, you could still call it a bagel. It’s a regional bread product shaped in a ring.
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s a Montreal bagel. It’s like, you know, I mean, and granted, mine had endured the,
⏹️ ▶️ John how long did they get to get down from Boston? Because mine were basically purchased and then driven down to Boston, and then I ate them. And
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco long, a couple of times.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Five, six hours, probably.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah. But it’s, I mean, they weren’t super fresh, but they were, you know, made that day.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Chicago pizza, though, that’s not pizza. like pie or cake or something.
⏹️ ▶️ John know, it’s the same type of thing. Like the Montreal bagels are very kind of doughy and they’re a little bit misshapen
⏹️ ▶️ John and differently sized and you know, but it’s fine. It’s
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco like they’re just, they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John just not, they’re just not New York bagels.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, well, look at their Canadians. They’re like a little bit off.
⏹️ ▶️ John They’re more than a little bit off. Like, you know, no one would confuse if you took a New York bagel and that thing next to each other, there would no,
⏹️ ▶️ John no one would be able to, you know, you could tell they’re different. Maybe you wouldn’t know which is which, but you would know these are clearly different.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do they apologize when you bite into them?
⏹️ ▶️ John Maybe. Are you resisting the hairlines and overcast UI?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I have one or two.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m doing most of the UI design myself, but I’m running everything by Louis Mantia.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco He’s kind of like an editor of my insane ideas sometimes. My first pass at the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco play, rewind, fast forward icons, I’m doing as many of the graphics as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I can I’m drawing them procedurally. So I had them all as just a stroke, like the thin
⏹️ ▶️ Marco outline. And Louie’s like, What are you doing? Fill those. And I did, and it looked better. So I’m
⏹️ ▶️ Marco keeping that like I, I really don’t like the most
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of the iOS seven icon designs, like the action or toolbar icons. Them
⏹️ ▶️ Marco being like so thin and hairline, like being outline based rather than being like filled shapes.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’m not crazy about that.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, John Did you see that link
⏹️ ▶️ John I put in the Skype thing about that?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco opened it yet though.
⏹️ ▶️ John like it was someone, I feel the same way. A lot of people I think feel the same way, because we see all of them and like
⏹️ ▶️ John your eyes just rebel. And you start to think that these must be worse in
⏹️ ▶️ John some measurable way because of how much they annoy us. And then like some guy went out to measure it and he was not
⏹️ ▶️ John successfully able to prove that they’re worse. And it doesn’t mean they’re not worse, but he didn’t do it. So but I feel that way
⏹️ ▶️ John too. Like there’s a sameness to them. And it’s not just a sameness to them turning to recognition. There’s a lightness. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John everything in the UI can’t be light. You know? Like, that’s what, feeling them, it’s not so much that they were bad when they
⏹️ ▶️ John were outlines and that you shouldn’t do outlines. It’s just that if everything else on the page is an outline and they’re an outline
⏹️ ▶️ John too, it just becomes this like, it’s like a list programming. It’s like a fingernail clippings and oatmeal.
⏹️ ▶️ John It just becomes a sameness of like, everything
⏹️ ▶️ John is outlines. When everything is outlines, you know, nothing stands out. Whereas you can make some things hairlines
⏹️ ▶️ John And like those are once you fill them, they’re probably the biggest solid color recognizable
⏹️ ▶️ John shapes on the page. And it’s like, oh, yeah, now I see where the play and the pause button are right off the bat. I don’t have to scan 17
⏹️ ▶️ John little things of outlines.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So, yeah, I think I’m still experimenting with a lot of the visuals, like the the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playback screen. I’m I’m pretty well set for the design for
⏹️ ▶️ Marco one point of the playback screen. All the other screens like the navigation, the lists, the
⏹️ ▶️ Marco playlists… Oh my god, I just realized I have playlists. All of those screens
⏹️ ▶️ Marco are pretty much undesigned right now. They all just have placeholder table views and collection views and stuff.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco But I’m working on that.
⏹️ ▶️ John We should do every show from now on I’ll give you a feature suggestion because I already have like two more queued up for the next
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s great, yeah, let’s do it. And you should implement none of them. I’ll just keep suggesting
⏹️ ▶️ John them and explaining why you shouldn’t implement any of them, but why if you did, I would be
⏹️ ▶️ John the one person to use them if I actually used an app like yours, which I don’t.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So what you’re saying is you would pay $95 million if he actually implements all these things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. I still like physical buttons. I listen to podcasts when I’m on the move,
⏹️ ▶️ John and I’m in the car, in places where I can’t look to touch a touchscreen.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco That’s why the now playing screen is so hard to design because you want to have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco everything at easy reach, but for me, I also listen to podcasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a lot while I’m on the move, while I’m walking or in the car or something. And so I can’t, either
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the case of the car where I really can’t look at the screen most of the time, or
⏹️ ▶️ Marco in the case of walking where I can look at the screen, but I’m moving and so I’m not
⏹️ ▶️ Marco going to be that precise with my touches and I’d rather not have to look at the screen for longer than I have to.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You know, there’s all these conditions where having a bunch of tiny controls
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and trying to cram all this functionality into one screen while also making it look good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and, you know, making it hard to hit the wrong thing. It’s very hard
⏹️ ▶️ Marco to find the balance there.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey How’s the review coming, John? Any progress? Any new news? I know it was
⏹️ ▶️ John done. Some new benchmarks. I’ve got to update some more graphs. I’ve spent some time squishing my JPEGs.
⏹️ ▶️ John You know, it’s like just waiting around. I think that the RS people are doing copy editing now. They’re
⏹️ ▶️ John copy editing text that we know is not final.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Nice. How does the most recent beta feel? Does it feel releasable?
⏹️ ▶️ John I guess. I mean, now that everything works,
⏹️ ▶️ John and now that most of the iCloud stuff seems to, because that’s the other part of it. It’s like,
⏹️ ▶️ John are these bits on disk? or not on disk, but are these bits that you’re downloading ready to ship versus
⏹️ ▶️ John are the bits on Apple servers somewhere ready to ship with them? And half of it is the servers,
⏹️ ▶️ John because for the longest time, iCloud stuff was not working. It was crazy wonky. Was
⏹️ ▶️ John it because of the client side stuff? Was it because of the server side stuff? But now when you have the same build, like DPA has been
⏹️ ▶️ John out for a while, and it’s gotten better, I think. And it’s like, well, the bits haven’t
⏹️ ▶️ John changed on disk, so it must be Apple servers getting better. It’s close. Like,
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t think they could say, hey, the DP8 you’ve had the whole time was the GM, because they’re not in a hurry, obviously.
⏹️ ▶️ John, Marco They’re not in
⏹️ ▶️ John a hurry. They’re shipping the IMAX with Mountain Lion, right? Yeah, that’s kind of weird, huh?
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, but they’re just not in a hurry. But that is totally, now it’s thinking, oh, if
⏹️ ▶️ John they’re going to do that, they didn’t mention anything about a free upgrade, so maybe Mavericks is going to be free.
⏹️ ▶️ John I don’t know. If it is, it’d be good to tell me so I could write about that. But they’re
⏹️ ▶️ John close. But if they say the next build is GM, I would not be shocked.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you don’t sound too stressed, which is good.
⏹️ ▶️ John Well, it’s like, what can I do about it at this point? Like, at this point, I don’t even want to look at it anymore. I just want
⏹️ ▶️ John to know the information, update the final text, give it like one last read-through to make sure I’m not crazy,
⏹️ ▶️ John and make a bunch of books and get into like the second phase of it, is just like fighting with the e-book stores
⏹️ ▶️ John and getting everything upright on the website So everything works and
⏹️ ▶️ John fixing broken links and doing all the stuff that you do. I want to move on to that phase
⏹️ ▶️ John to know how spectacularly I’m going to screw up the e-book part of it this year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Do you want to tell us how long it is?
⏹️ ▶️ John It’s like the same length as last one. It’s a little bit shorter, I think. I mean, in terms of words, it’s a little bit shorter.
⏹️ ▶️ John But in terms of size and number of the screenshots, maybe
⏹️ ▶️ John it’s similar. But the screenshots are all retina. So volume
⏹️ ▶️ John wise in terms of megabytes, it’s like twice as big because you know,
⏹️ ▶️ John as well, the sizes. So it’s not that long.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey You know, it’s funny when our splits it across, you know, 39 pages because that’s how long it is.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey That is one of the few times that like an in tech or non-tech or whatever, whatever it’s called. Those
⏹️ ▶️ Casey are like the only times that being split across 100 pages, I do not find annoying.
⏹️ ▶️ John And I split it across the pages. They don’t paginate it. I like when I did my initial run run at paginating, I
⏹️ ▶️ John try to do on logical sections. Like here, I’m talking about this. Yeah, yeah. And now I’m going to talk about that. OK, now I’m going to
⏹️ ▶️ John talk about that. And sometimes you’re talking about something that goes on for a long time, like the energy, about energy saving stuff. Like there’s
⏹️ ▶️ John a lot of energy saving stuff in there, because that’s a lot of what Mavericks is about. Clearly, that section needs to be cut up into sections.
⏹️ ▶️ John So like here’s like parts one and two of that section. The next page is parts three and four, or whatever. And I just do
⏹️ ▶️ John my initial logical run through, and I end up with way too many pages. And then I go back
⏹️ ▶️ John and say, OK, well, I start counting how long the pages are in terms of page downs, like how many times can I hit
⏹️ ▶️ John page down before I hit the bottom of this quote-unquote page? And it varies wildly because one could be like four page
⏹️ ▶️ John downs and the other one could be like seven or eight and like one quote-unquote page is twice as
⏹️ ▶️ John long as the other. It’s like, yeah, but I do want to spit it into logical sections. So I play with that up to the last
⏹️ ▶️ John minute, trying to strike a balance between logical breaking points where you can be like, all right,
⏹️ ▶️ John I’m done with page two or page three and then know where you want to come back to. And also not leaving any pages super short
⏹️ ▶️ John or any pages ridiculously long. It’s not easy to do because when I write it, I don’t have that in mind.
⏹️ ▶️ John This is all post-processing stuff. So I ended up initially with way more pages than last year and I’ve been cutting it down
⏹️ ▶️ John slowly to be like same number or fewer pages than last year.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Nice. You know, I think I’ve just figured out when it is that you should stop writing the reviews and that’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when somebody makes like a killer infographic about how many links you had per review and how many
⏹️ ▶️ Casey words and how many occurrences of how many of these particular words and a tag cloud, because
⏹️ ▶️ Casey that’s still trendy, right? And when that mega infographic happens, kind of like the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey person that did the mega research into – maybe it was David Smith, actually, but whoever did the
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mega research into hypercritical show lengths and all that stuff,
⏹️ ▶️ Casey when that moment happens, that’s when you can mic drop and walk away.
⏹️ ▶️ John I think that’s already happened. And if you look at all the trends, it’s like they got longer and longer, they peaked around tiger
⏹️ ▶️ John and now they’re getting shorter and shorter. But again, I don’t measure my things.
⏹️ ▶️ John I’d rather have a fewer number of higher quality words than more
⏹️ ▶️ Casey We have one more important thing to discuss on the air. How about that new M3 slash M4?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Oh man, that looks awesome. Oh, it looks
⏹️ ▶️ John so nice. Send me a link, because you guys have been talking about it, and every time I click on that stupid Beamer whatever forum thing
⏹️ ▶️ John on my iPod Touch, the page is unreadable, because people don’t understand that mobile devices exist.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Well, to be fair, it’s like a it’s like a PHP BB site. So it’s basically stuck
⏹️ ▶️ John look at that page on your phone now. It’s the craziest page I’ve ever seen rendered on a phone in my life.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, there’s no way I’m looking at that on my phone. I like my phone. My phone’s brand new. I’m not going to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco, Casey just put it
⏹️ ▶️ Casey off, Marco. I just put that link in the chat. I think this is the one we were passing
⏹️ ▶️ John Wow. I never would have guessed that this is what it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco looks. Yeah, this is a and this is like a big hack to the form also that they like they always do
⏹️ ▶️ Marco this in this site Where they’ll have like their big info block sections like they’ll have like a thread for each thing
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And yeah, it does look ridiculous on Phones, but you can see
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the big news here is The very powerful engine it’s you know
⏹️ ▶️ Marco So the big news is that it’s a it’s a twin turbo inline six Which which
⏹️ ▶️ Marco we knew it would be an inline six and we knew it would be turbo. Number of turbochargers is new information, although
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it’s pretty obvious. And the biggest news is, you know, we
⏹️ ▶️ Marco knew it would have a little over 400 horsepower, so apparently it’s roughly 430,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and tons of torque. The biggest news, though, is that the thing is really light. It’s, it’s,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the curb weight, they’re saying, is, quote, under under 3,300 pounds, or under 3,306 pounds.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And that’s really good. I mean, for a car to have 430 horsepower
⏹️ ▶️ Marco and be that lightweight is really, really impressive.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah, it’s going to be nice. And the interesting thing to me was that it’s basically my motor with another turbo and much better internals.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And 18 pounds of boost is a huge load of boost. I mean, that is ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And what does your car weigh, just for comparison?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Now I have an xDrive which makes it worse, but I want to say it’s like 36, 3700 pounds, something like that. I don’t remember offhand. Let
⏹️ ▶️ Casey me see if I can find it. E90, whoops. If I can type. 3560 it looks like.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey you type better and faster than I do apparently. Is that an xDrive or not an xDrive?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And you said how much?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco 3560 on this one site. Okay.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So yeah, I mean, and I have what, 300 horsepower or something like that?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, Marco Yeah, exactly.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey So you’re talking about 130 more horsepower and what, 300, 400 pounds less? 500 pounds less? About 250
⏹️ ▶️ Casey mean, that’s going to be ridiculous. It’s going to be absolutely ridiculous.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco And they also, they made some moves to try to push the center of gravity lower. They have
⏹️ ▶️ Marco a carbon fiber roof, if you delete the sunroof, and a few other little tricks
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that they’re pushing the weight lower. So basically, it’s probably going to be a really, really good
⏹️ ▶️ Marco car for enthusiasts.
⏹️ ▶️ John LaFerrari is what, 2,100 pounds? 900 horsepower? Really the center of gravity. Is it really that little?
⏹️ ▶️ Marco believe you can buy probably about 10 M3s for the price of the Ferrari LaFerrari.
⏹️ ▶️ John Then it’ll just weigh even more. Yeah. Now, that was
⏹️ ▶️ John supposed to be the goal for the new M’s, right? Was to actually make them lighter than the non-M variants, which is a change from
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, that was exactly the goal, was try to keep roughly the same horsepower,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco but go to a natural V8 to a turbo I6, and
⏹️ ▶️ Marco save a bunch of weight. That was the goal. And yeah, it looks like they definitely
⏹️ ▶️ Marco have. And of course, to make both of you happy, it still comes with a manual transmission. As
⏹️ ▶️ Marco it should. It has automatic rev flipping. As it should not. No, no, it’s optional.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I thought it wasn’t optional. I thought it was hard-coded.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco No, somewhere I’ve read that the way they do it, oh no, it’s how they do it on the M5, and I’m pretty
⏹️ ▶️ Marco sure it’s gonna be the same here, where in Sport Plus mode, it
⏹️ ▶️ Marco does not rev blip, so that you can still heel-toe if you want to.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Oh, see, as someone who does heel-toe regularly, I can tell you there are few feelings better in the world
⏹️ ▶️ Casey than doing a perfectly rev-matched heel-toe downshift while braking. I mean, it’s
⏹️ ▶️ Casey just fantastic. And so having that taken away from you would really suck.
⏹️ ▶️ John We should take the synchros out of your car too, Casey. It’d be more exciting. How
⏹️ ▶️ Marco about the electric starter? Take
⏹️ ▶️ John that out. Well, it’s your rev matching in a car with synchros.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no matching required. Yes, I understand you want to get the engine up to more RPM. So it serves
⏹️ ▶️ John a purpose, but I wouldn’t call it rev matching.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco The big question mark here, I think, is the electric steering.
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, I was going to say, is this a set
⏹️ ▶️ Marco of hydraulic steering or no? It doesn’t. And it’s a brand new electric steering system that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the M division was not happy with the regular one on the new 3 Series. And I don’t blame them. It’s terrible.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I’ve driven a couple of the new 3 Series cars, and I like them in every other way, except that steering
⏹️ ▶️ Marco really is just totally numb. It feels like Tiff’s Lexus.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I have not noticed that. I have not noticed that. Now, I’ve only driven the new F33 Series a couple times.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey It was always quickly. But I was actually, I had lunch with a friend of mine, Brad, who
⏹️ ▶️ Casey has a F30 328 Sportline. And I didn’t drive his car today, but I have in the past.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey And I’ve never noticed it. But again, I’ve only driven them very briefly. Never really chucked them around
⏹️ ▶️ Casey very much. So I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just saying I never found it to be egregious.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Yeah, it didn’t feel good to
⏹️ ▶️ Marco Anyway. I’ve never driven
⏹️ ▶️ John any of these, but every review I’ve read, every car company’s first generation electrical steering everybody
⏹️ ▶️ John BMW, Honda. And it’s just because it takes a while to figure out how to do it right. And so this is a second crack.
⏹️ ▶️ John And it’s kind of good that they waited for the M car. Because either you go with the hydraulic system that they knew
⏹️ ▶️ John had down pat, but it’s kind of like old tech, and you get worse mileage, and blah, blah, blah. Or go with
⏹️ ▶️ John the new tech, but wait. So you at least get to be the second generation electric steering system.
⏹️ ▶️ Marco I mean, I think what we’re seeing here, and people have talked about this before, there’s the big
⏹️ ▶️ Marco softening of these cars. Like BMW is becoming closer to Lexus. Lexus
⏹️ ▶️ Marco is trying to become more like BMW, but the way, like, the market,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco BMW is a major luxury car maker, and the market demands a soft
⏹️ ▶️ Marco ride, and a soft feel, and easy turning of the wheel, and stuff like that. There’s all these things that the market demands
⏹️ ▶️ Marco that enthusiasts hate, but the fact is, like, if you look around
⏹️ ▶️ Marco at people on the road who you see driving three series and five series cars,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco You see, I would say the vast majority of them would not want firmer,
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more direct feeling steering. And the vast majority of the people I see on the road, I would guess
⏹️ ▶️ Marco they would like the softer, cushier, more disconnected ride. And so now
⏹️ ▶️ Marco what we’re seeing is, in a lot of previous generations, the M cars weren’t that
⏹️ ▶️ Marco different from the regular consumer variants. Now I think this is
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the beginning of them starting to be more different by a lot. That, because the goals are totally different. The enthusiasts
⏹️ ▶️ Marco want a totally different set of things a lot of the time, not all the time, but a lot of the time as
⏹️ ▶️ Marco the rest of the customers. And so we’re seeing the regular three series and five series become
⏹️ ▶️ Marco bigger, heavier, softer. And then now we’re going to see these M variants
⏹️ ▶️ Marco take it to a more extreme enthusiast direction where they’re more expensive, but they’re lighter. There’s
⏹️ ▶️ Marco more carbon fiber. They use like more highly tuned engines And
⏹️ ▶️ Marco then they have more enthusiast-friendly transmission options and firmer
⏹️ ▶️ Marco suspensions and all these crazy new
⏹️ ▶️ Marco steering technology, stuff like that.
⏹️ ▶️ John Chat room is complaining about my rev matching comment on the Syncros. Did you understand what I was saying, Casey?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Well, yeah, because in theory, with synchronized gears, you don’t actually have
⏹️ ▶️ John match. You’re not matching the revs so the gears can mesh together, is the synchro for
⏹️ ▶️ John, Casey that for you.
⏹️ ▶️ John That’s what I would call rev matching. When you’re heel towing, you’re just trying to get the RPM of the engine up so that it’s not like,
⏹️ ▶️ John you know, it takes a while for an engine to go from low RPM to high RPM. So if you want to be braking, but
⏹️ ▶️ John you also want to be getting ready for the downshift that’s coming, so get the engine revs up, you know, like, you’re not matching.
⏹️ ▶️ John There’s no matching type thing. You just want the revs to be higher, because you know you’re going to be changing. I guess you’re kind of matching them, because
⏹️ ▶️ John in the lower gear, the engine RPM will have to be higher at your current speed. And if the engine RPM is lower and you shift into
⏹️ ▶️ John a lower gear, then you get engine braking, blah, blah, blah. That’s what I was getting at. Not saying that you would like
⏹️ ▶️ John to double clutch, although I can imagine Casey is the kind of person who would also double clutch in a car with Syncros just because it’s fun.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey I would. But no, they’re not dog gears. So you’re absolutely
⏹️ ▶️ Casey right. And my friend, Bob Barker, I mean, Keith in the chat also points out it helps to avoid weight
⏹️ ▶️ John Yeah, because it’s engine break. You don’t want, if you’re switching into a lower gear and the engine is going at the appropriate
⏹️ ▶️ John speed for the higher gear that you were in, once you switch into the lower and re-engage everything, you’re going to get engine braking if your
⏹️ ▶️ John revs are not higher. But you’re in the middle of braking in the turn, so you want to get the revs up. So when you do the downshift, then you’ll
⏹️ ▶️ John get, you know. Yep. And the weight transfer is because the car decelerates.
⏹️ ▶️ Casey, John Happy, everybody?
⏹️ ▶️ Casey Yeah. Let’s see. Defending his honor. Mic drop not